Tattoos in Crime and Detective Narratives

Kate Watson is a Teacher of English and an Independent ScholarKatharine Cox is a Principal Lecturer in English at Sheffield Hallam University

Tattoos in crime and detective narratives: Marking and remarking examines representations of the tattoo and tattooing in literature, television and film from two periods of tattoo renaissance (1851-1914, and c. 1955 to present). The book aids our understanding of the crime and detective genre and the ways in which tattoos act as a mimetic device that marks and remarks these narratives in complex ways. Tattooing is focused on as a bodily narrative, incorporating the critical perspectives of posthumanism, spatiality, postcolonialism, embodiment and gender studies.The importance of the tattoo is explored through analysis of the writings of early genre exponents of detective fiction including Louisa May Alcott, Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the contemporary rebirth of the tattoo through the writings of Stieg Larsson, Sarah Hall, Alan Kent, Caryl Férey, Jeffery Deaver, Peter Robinson and China Miéville, amongst others. The volume includes a separate section on children's literature, examining the work of J. K. Rowling and Lemony Snicket in particular. Sections on film and television focus on Christopher Nolan's Memento, adaptations of the Bounty mutiny, and the television series Supernatural, Dark angel, Criminal minds, CSI: NY, and Law and order.The collection will have a broad appeal, and will be of interest to all literature and media scholars, but in particular those with an interest in crime and detective narratives, and skin studies.

Introduction Katharine Cox and Kate WatsonPart I: Psychoanalysis, patternings, and the medical imagination1 A knot of bodies: The tattoo as navel in Louisa May Alcott's 'V.V.: Or, plots and counterplots' - Alexander N. Howe2 Making Manhattan: Urban hieroglyphics, patternings and tattoos in Edgar Allan Poe's 'The tell-tale heart' and Herman Melville's Moby Dick; Or, the Whale - Spencer Jordan3 Medical men: Speculations of morality and spirituality in Arthur Conan Doyle's writings - David BeckPart II: Practitioners, place, and contemporary identities4 From naïve artists to integrated professionals: The portrayal of tattoos in Sarah Hall's The Electric Michelangelo and Alan Kent's Voodoo Pilchard - Hywel Dix5 Mis-reading moko: Cross-cultural tattooing in Caryl Férey's crime fiction - Ellen Carter6 Transforming tattoos of the girl with the dragon tattoo - Kerstin BergmanPart III: Urban textualities, humans and other animals7 The killing floor and crime narratives: Marking women and nonhuman animals - Kate Watson and Rebekah Humphreys8 The tattoo wakes: Sentient ink, curatorship and writing the new weird in China Miéville's Kraken: An Anatomy - Katharine CoxPart IV: Children's literature: Dark marks, scars, and secret societies9 Dark marks, curse scars and corporal punishment: Crime and the function of bodily marks in the Harry Potter series - Lucy Andrew10 'Since the schism': Reading the tattoo in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events - Caroline Jones and Katharine CoxPart V: Film: Adaptation, memory, and constructions of self11 The ink of the real: Memory and identity in Christopher Nolan's Memento - Peter Figler12 The Bounty mutiny and its adaptations: Tattooing, primitivism, class and criminality - Matt OchesPart VI: Television: Branding, tech-noir, and fan culture13 Hunting for the branded body in Supernatural: Tattoos, the Mark of Cain and fan culture - Karin Beeler14 Generic branding: Tattoos, transgenics, and tech-noir in James Cameron's Dark Angel - Will Slocombe15 Tattoos, deviance and consumer culture in North American television: Criminal Minds, CSI: NY and Law and Order - Ruth Hawthorn and John MillerIndex