Books published in 2018 were judged by a team of readers based on three continents. Judges received books from Palgrave Macmillan, Palgrave Pivot, Pegasus Books, Routledge, Legenda: Modern Humanities Research Association Press, and Cambridge Scholars Publishing, and we thank these presses for their generosity and their support of crime fiction scholarship.
The following books were generously provided to the judges of the First Annual International Crime Fiction Association Book Prize for non-fiction books on crime fiction published in 2018, listed in alphabetical order by author/editor. The range and creativity of the volumes attest to the deep interest in crime fiction scholarship and its truly international reach. Please consider ordering some for yourself or your libraries!
All books reviewed were worthy entries in the contest. Books were judged in relation to the contribution they make to current debates in the field, as well in terms of their ability to reach both scholarly audiences and a wider readership.
The prize recognizes ingenuity, innovation, and scholarship in the academic study of crime fiction and crime writing in its widest sense. In response to these criteria, the judges first made a short list, followed by a determination of the winner. The short list included the following works:
1. Close, Glen S. Female Corpses in Crime Fiction. A Transatlantic Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan.
This book re-visits a pressing and timely subject. Elizabeth Bronfen began the conversation in her important book: Over Her Dead Body: Death Femininity and the Aesthetic in 1992 and the subject of dead women has been continued from here. This book focusses the debate on crime fiction in a transatlantic context, encountering the emotive, sensitive and ever-present subject of female corpses. The first line of the introduction reads: ‘This is a book about male fantasies of killing women and ogling their dead, naked bodies’. This provocative statement leads to a sensitive and open discussion of how crime fiction employs the figure of the dead woman.
2. Dechêne, Antoine. Detective Fiction and the Problem of Knowledge. Perspectives on the Metacognitive Mystery Tale. Palgrave Macmillan.
Dechêne’s monograph offers the first sustained examination of the traditions, patterns, and implications of what he metacognitive (otherwise known as metaphysical) detective fiction since Merivale and Sweeney’s landmark Detecting Texts. It is extremely well-written, carefully reasoned, refreshingly international in scope, and makes a vital contribution to the scholarship of detective fiction.
3. Evans, Mary, Sarah Moore, and Hazel Johnstone, Detecting the Social. Order and Disorder in Post-1970s Detective Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan.
This timely text uses detective fiction published after 1970 (necessarily concentrating on Europe/UK in order to avoid becoming unwieldy) to explain and reflect upon the social world and the changes within it during the past fifty years. The authors use very pertinent, perceptive and well-chosen examples to consider both recent detective fiction and its roots in earlier aspects if the genre, including authors such as Agatha Christie.
The book considers questions of modernity, globalisation, gender and gender relations, neo-liberalism, blame and authority, using those to discuss how texts such as Larsson’s The Millennium Trilogy, introduce ‘different’ villains and criminals, thus demanding a different kind of detective. A very stimulating read and a worthy winner.
4. Joyce, Laura and Henry Sutton, eds. Domestic Noir. The New Face of 21st Century Crime Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan.
With a preface by Julia Crouch, fourteen essays by fourteen authors and an afterword by Megan Abbott, Domestic Noir focuses on the female experience, whether as victim or perpetrator. After an Introduction by Laura Joyce, general categories include The Origins of Domestic Noir, The Influences of Gillian Flynn´s Gone Girl, Gendered, Sexual, and Intimate Violence in Domestic Noir, Home as a Site of Violence, and Geographies of Domestic Noir. Highly recommended.
Detecting the Social by Mary Evans, Sarah Moore, and Hazel Johnstone, published by Palgrave Macmillan, was chosen as the winner of the First Annual International Crime Fiction Association Book Prize.
Congratulations to all the authors on their outstanding scholarship.
University of Scranton
Scranton, Pennsylvania, United States
Otto-Friedrich Universität
Bamberg, Germany
Falmouth University
Falmouth, England
