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RACE AND RELIGION IN THE POSTCOLONIAL BRITISH DETECTIVE STORY
by Julie H. Kim, editor
McFarland and Co, June 2005
252 pages
$35.00
ISBN: 0786421754


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

This could well be a case of interesting book, shame about the title. I don't know how American scholars define the word postcolonial, but it certainly isn't the same as British academics, based on this showing.

It's a while since I studied what used to be called Commonwealth literature. So I phoned a friendly neighbourhood English Literature professor who teaches postcolonial writing, and he confirmed my suspicions -- the term is applied to writers from the old British Empire. And that's nowhere near how it's used in this collection of essays on crime fiction. Sadly the introduction -- presumably written by editor Julie H Kim -- isn't a lot of help on this score.

There's some odd use of terminology elsewhere. Marta Vizcaya Echano's essay, entitled Gender and Ethnic Otherness, has a particularly puzzling use of the words ethnic and multicultural. She applies them to the female detectives of Ann Granger, Cath Staincliffe and Alma Fritchley -- two of whom are straight white women and one of whom is a white lesbian.

What it boils down to is that the contributors are looking -- as part of the title suggests -- at race and religion in the modern British detective novel. Quite why that isn't reflected more accurately in the book's title I couldn't say. But it does mean that several of the essays end up being shoe-horned into corners where they probably shouldn't have gone.

I found myself a little uncomfortable on that score with Peter Clandfield's chapter which is entitled Putting the Black into "Tartan Noir." His study of books by Ian Rankin, Christopher Brookmyre and Denise Mina is more about what the books aren't than what they are. So instead of concentrating on the very valid issue of Scottish identity, he gets caught up in the relative lack of black characters in the books. And using the UK journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown as almost your sole theoretical background isn't terribly rigourous or representative scholarship.

In stark contrast to Clandfield's chapter is a very intelligent and well-argued essay from Brian Diemert on Ian Rankin, entitled Ian Rankin and the God of the Scots, which explores the links between the Rebus books and Gothic literature and discusses the Calvinist influences on the main character.

Neil McCaw contributes Those Other Villagers: Policing Englishness in Caroline Graham's The Killings at Badger's Drift, an accessible and readable comparison between the books and the popular Midsomer Murders TV series. Apparently that nice Sgt Troy is a racist and homophobe in the books!

There are some intriguing, if not always clear-cut, texts up for discussion. American writer Lucha Corpi, who features alongside Elizabeth George in Tim Libretti's ponderous and inaccessible Detecting Empire From Inside-Out and Outside-In was certainly new to me. And Philip Kerr's excellent Berlin Noir series, set during the second world war, isn't a logical case study for this particular collection.

So RACE AND RELIGION IN THE POSTCOLONIAL BRITISH DETECTIVE STORY is a mixed bag. The title isn't helpful, and there are some odd choices for texts within. But a handful of strong essays will make it an invaluable addition to the bookshelves of universities and for those interested in critical studies of the genre.

Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, March 2006

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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