Crime Fiction in the City

A collection of academic essays by literary critics and writers of crime fiction - including a reflective essay by Ian Rankin on his own work - that explores the relationship between crime fiction and the urban spaces of the capital city.

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.

Introduction Lucy Andrew and Catherine Phelps 1 Edinburgh Ian Rankin 2 'The map that engenders the territory'? Rethinking Ian Rankin's Edinburgh Gill Plain 3 Corralling Crime in Cardiff's Tiger Bay Catherine Phelps 4 Crimes and Contradictions: the Fictional City of Dublin Cormac O Cuilleanain 5 From National Authority to Urban Underbelly: Negotiations of Power in Stockholm Crime Fiction Kerstin Bergman 6 Streets and Squares, Quartiers and Arrondissements: Paris Crime Scenes and the Poetics of Contestation in the Novels of Jean-Francois Vilar Margaret Atack 7 The Mysteries of the Vatican: From Nineteenth-Century Anti-Clerical Propaganda to Dan Brown's Religious Thrillers Maurizio Ascari 8 A Tale of Three Cities: Megalopolitan Mysteries of the Eighteen-Forties Stephen Knight Conclusion Lucy Andrew and Catherine Phelps