David Schmid

From the Locked Room to the Globe: Space in Crime Fiction

In his foreword to Kristin Ross’ The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune, Terry Eagleton comments that space “has proved of far less glamorous appeal to radical theorists than the apparently more dynamic, exhilarating notions of narrative and history” (Eagleton 2008: xii). This observation also applies to much criticism of crime fiction, which has tended to treat the genre primarily in terms of narrative structure and temporality, rather than in terms of spatiality, mostly because of the teleological bent given to that criticism by its emphasis on the solution to the crime. Exemplary in this respect is Tzvetan Todorov’s chapter in The Poetics of Prose entitled “The Typology of Detective Fiction”, in which he argues that crime fiction narratives are structured by a double temporality: the reconstruction of events leading up to the murder and the progress of the detective’s investigation, with both narratives eventually converging at the point of the crime’s solution. There is no doubt that crime fiction is centrally concerned with time; reconstructing not only who did what but when they did it is a crucial part of the detective’s job. This chapter will argue that crime fiction is a profoundly spatial as well as temporal genre because, as Geoffrey Hartman points out, “to solve a crime in detective stories means to give it an exact location: to pinpoint not merely the murderer and his motives but also the very place, the room, the ingenious or brutal circumstances” (Hartman 1999: 212).

The Bad and the Evil: Justice in the Novels of Pago Ignacio Taibo II

This chapter discusses how the work of Taibo is capable of extremely creative approaches to the forms of criminality specific to neoliberal globalization, despite the fact that his work contains many features that are quite traditional. Taibo’s main protagonist, Hector Belascoaran Shayne, is, in many ways, a prototypical private eye; his novels are usually set entirely in Mexico City, and his villains are usually individuals who may, or may not, be held accountable for their actions. Nevertheless, as Schmid explains, Taibo consistently identifies the (Mexican) state as a criminal actor and his individual criminals are always complexly overdetermined synecdoches of state criminality who either work in concert with members of the police, army, and government, or are actual members of those organizations. The crimes investigated in Taibo’s novels frequently extend far beyond the confines of both Mexico City and Mexico itself in that the criminal activities Taibo focuses on are often transnational in scope, such as drug smuggling, gun running, and the subversion of democratic governments in other countries. Despite the traditional nature of his setting, protagonist, and antagonists, Taibo is ultimately concerned with what he regards as the most serious form of contemporary crime: global neoliberalism.

Introduction: Globalization and the State in Contemporary Crime Fiction

In the introduction, the editors look at the internationalization of crime fiction as a recent and historical phenomenon and consider what is at stake for writers who want to use crime fiction to critically reflect upon the changing nature of crime and policing in our contemporary world. We argue that the globalization of crime fiction should not be understood and celebrated as a one-way process whereby the genre moves to populate the globe. Rather, the global implications of the crime and policing practices being depicted, require new forms and strategies of representation to do justice to a rapidly changing world. As such, we pay attention to the ways in which contemporary crime novels thematize the actions of police detectives and their proxies in particular local and national settings across the world, as they grapple with complex crimes and investigations that cross state borders. But we also think about how the globalization of crime and policing is producing new hybrid forms of writing capable, not just of describing these transformations, but also subjecting them to scrutiny and critique.

A Vocation/Avocation

This essay takes the contrarian point of view that graduate study in the humanities should be thought of as an avocation rather than as a vocation. While we have a responsibility to professionalize our graduate students, it is also incumbent on us to continue to redefine what we mean by professionalization so that it both refers to a variety of employment outcomes and addresses that most old-fashioned of subjects: the pleasures of intellectual labor.