Crime Fiction in the City

Capital Crimes

Lucy Andrew, Catherine Phelps

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780708325865
• eBook ISBN: 9780708325872
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Crime Fiction in the City: Capital Crimes expands upon previous studies of the urban space and crime by reflecting on the treatment of the capital city, a repository of authority, national identity and culture, within crime fiction. This wide-ranging collection looks at capital cities across Europe, from the more traditional centres of power - Paris, Rome and London - to Europe's most northern capital, Stockholm, and also considers the newly devolved capitals, Dublin, Edinburgh and Cardiff. The texts under consideration span the nineteenth-century city mysteries to contemporary populist crime fiction. The collection opens with a reflective essay by Ian Rankin and aims to inaugurate a dialogue between Anglophone and European crime writing; to explore the marginalised works of Irish and Welsh writers alongside established European crime writers and to interrogate the relationship between fact and fiction, creativity and criticism, within the crime genre.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Edinburgh
• ‘The map that engenders the territory’? Rethinking Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh
• Corralling Crime in Cardiff’s Tiger Bay
• Crimes and Contradictions: the Fictional City of Dublin
• From National Authority to Urban Underbelly: Negotiations of Power in Stockholm Crime Fiction
• Streets and Squares, Quartiers and Arrondissements: Paris Crime Scenesand the Poetics of Contestation in the Novels of Jean-François Vilar
• The Mysteries of the Vatican: from Nineteenth-century Anti-clerical Propaganda to Dan Brown’s Religious Thrillers
• A Tale of Three Cities: Megalopolitan Mysteries of the 1840s
• Conclusion
• Index