Mapping Nationality and Criminality in Literature and Other Media

Crime and Nation originated in the conference »Crime & Nation. Political and Cultural Mappings of Nationality and Criminality in Traditional and in New Media«, which took place at Jacobs University Bremen in December 2005. In the introduction to the volume, editors Immacolata Amodeo and Eva Erdmann explain that the conference was intended to bring together scholars from various disciplines and different national and cultural backgrounds to discuss the connection between crime and nation in the context of recent socio-political and cultural transformations. What the volume offers is a collection of articles exploring national and cultural dimensions of crime in different media: the scope and framework of the volume open up not just to literary texts, but also to opera, theatre, TV, photography, and film. Although every contribution to the volume deals with a specific national and cultural context (the volume addresses Africa, American South, Germany, Italy, and Transylvania, to name just a few contexts), the essays identify and explore the interdependencies between specific cultural elements and global patterns. 1

Genre Issues and Empirical Questions

The first section of the volume, entitled »Crime & Nation: Contemporary and Empirical Issues«, begins with essays on the evolution of the genre of the crime novel and the role of popular crime fiction as an alternative to cultural memory, respectively. Jeanne E. Glesener’s article »The Crime Novel: Multiculturalism and its Impact on the Genre’s Conventions« explores the changing nature of crime novels in the context of multiculturalism and provides examples for how the complex relationship between different cultures is examined in the so-called multicultural crime novel. The article offers a brief analysis of Solibo Magnifique (1988), a postcolonial detective novel by the Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau, to show that »in dealing with a different cultural setting, the single Eurocentric vision is rendered meaningless and blind« (S. 23). Other examples include Jakob Arjouni’s novels Happy Birthday, Türke (1985) and Ein Mann, ein Mord (1993). Generally, the thrust of the very brief analyses of these novels involves a reappraisal of how the figure of the multicultural detective (in Arjouni’s novels, it is Kayankaya, a private detective of Turkish origin with a German passport) can become a locus for the minority and migrant discourses on identity construction and formation.

Germany’s problematic history, German national identity, and the problems of communication between generations in the post-WWII German society are the concerns of the second article in this section. In »History as Crime Scene. The Case of the Third Reich in Popular TV-Crime-Stories«, Wolfgang Struck explores several episodes of one of the most successful German TV-programs, Tatort. Struck argues that by using alternative sources, such as visual materials and oral histories, television series, such as Tatort, present »an alternative mode of cultural memory [...], where history is understood as a process of experience rather than one of academic research« (S.  28). Examples are related from Bildersturm, an episode of Tatort, as well as Jerusalem oder die Reise in den Tod, an episode of the series Rosa Roth, both made in 1998, in which photography is used to problematize the relationship between private and public, past and present, individual story and history.

In the third article in this section, »The ›Nation‹ in Crime: Does the Reader Care?«, Margrit Schreier questions the appeal of the foreign setting in international crime fiction by analyzing reviews and reader comments on 352 crime novels from 25 countries on the German Amazon website. Schreier demonstrates that it is not a particular setting that attracts readers’ attention, but it is certain authors who manage to successfully relate specific aspects of the foreign setting to the plot. She presents a multi-faceted analysis, but it seems safe to say that her interest lies also in developing a useful research methodology to examine relevant material more systematically. For example, she suggests that coding, the method employed in this study to analyze the Amazon website, should be supplemented in future studies by additional methods, such as content analysis, reader interviews and group discussions.

Space, Place, and Crime Fiction

The second section of the volume is composed of four very readable and information-rich articles. There is a great deal of productive overlap among them, but, generally speaking, they all examine the importance of space and place in analyzing contemporary crime fiction.

The first article by Marieke Krajenbrink, »Place Matters: Locale in Contemporary International Crime Fiction«, focuses on two significant questions: first, what is the role of location and setting in international crime fiction genre, and, second, how is the use of place related to the discussion about cultural and national identity. Krajenbrink’s analysis shows that the construction of space »is closely connected to representations of identity, which become increasingly multiple and fluid« (S. 64). In the second article in this section, »Women Detectives of the American South«, Evelyne Keitel examines 20th century female crime novels to identify a shift in crime fiction by analyzing women protagonists in detective novels. Noting that the so-called »Golden Age of Detective Fiction« was dominated mostly by British women authors such as Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham, she analyzes texts by the »New Golden Age« writers like Susan Isaac, Anne George, and Carolyne Haines and comes to the conclusion that these authors focus on the American South as the locus for introducing texts in which a female detective plays a prominent role, and in which history, past, and the realities of contemporary Southern society are used to create an imaginary place that no longer exists.

Alessandro Silj’s article »The Crime Factor in Italian Society« discusses the political and cultural implications of crime by analyzing Italian academic and political literature, as well as fiction, television, cinema, and theatre. After a very brief introduction to the characteristics of crimes in post-1945 Italy, he focuses on the phenomenon of mafia and organized crime in literary and cultural texts to show how the Italian public, although aware of the corruption and crimes of the political establishment, is struggling to make changes to such a disgraceful state of affairs. Silj’s article also makes an interesting argument by identifying prejudice and xenophobia towards the new immigrants from such countries as Albania and Romania as the new challenges for Italy and other European countries: the ever growing attempts to put the blame for every crime on the newcomers may in the future have even more devastating results »for the social fabric of the country than mafia has ever been« (S. 90).

In the fourth article of the section, Sélom Komlan Gbanou brings in yet another view of the importance of place in crime fiction. His analysis focuses on Africa as the geographical context to examine how political, social, psychological, and other forms of violence, prevalent in African societies, create possibilities for authors to test the limits of language and imagination. His analysis is based on work of Kossi Efoui, especially his novel La Fabrique de cérémonie (2001), and on texts such as Sony Labou Tansi’s play La Parenthése de sang (1981), and shows how African writers brake traditional genres, styles, and linguistic models to speak of the violence, power abuse, and the possibilities of resistance: from this perspective, the narrative of a literary text becomes a meeting point for victims and perpetrators, »the nation and the citizens« (S. 94).

Representations of Crime in Diverse Media

The five articles in the final section of the volume, »Crime & Nation: Historical Issues«, deal with the history of the representation of crime in different media. The first two articles analyze narrative elements such as »victim«, »culprit«, and »criminal offense« in opera and music theatre as well as in drama. In »Crimes and Cultures in Opera and Music Theatre«, Sieghart Döhring writes about how these narrative elements work in different epochs and cultures and how in opera crime itself actually becomes the structural element of the medium. In the second article, Konrad Schoell examines Voltaire’s tragedies Mahomet (1741), Zaïre (1732), and Alzire (1736) from the aspect of crime and nation to illustrate the complexity of the relationship between »culprit« and »victim«: in Voltaire’s tragedies, the persons opposed as »culprit« and »victim« most often belong to culturally, politically and racially contrasting social groups, and the »conflict and the tragic outcome mostly arise from this contrast between national and religious opposition and a friendly private relation [...] or at least the possibility of reconciliation« (S. 125).

In his article »The Nation Writes Back: Sherlock Holmes, Crime, and the Empire«, K. Ludwig Pfeiffer uses Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories as a good example for the exploration of the influences and complexities of colonialism, patriotism and nationalism in crime fiction. Günter Berger then shows how writers of detective fiction, especially ones who want to parody the genre, have experimented with it in a playful way. His analysis is based on Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana, serialized in 1946 and first published in a book-format in 1957, »a highly polyphonic novel« (S. 141), in which fragmentary, incoherent Italian language, with the addition of technical jargon, made-ups and foreign words, dialects of the Molise, Naples and Venice, and wordplay, is used as a revolt against fascism. On a different topical note, Holt Meyer reads five passages from Bram Stoker’ Dracula (1897), asking whether the activities of vampires in general and Stoker’s Dracula in particular can be understood as criminal acts, considering the nation as a »source of law-giving which produces one of the possible legal paradigms« (S. 143). He argues that the violation of national criminal law, presented in Dracula, is closely related to the representational system of this text and invites the reader to view the text as a »unique[ly] modern negotiation of the relations of crime with all that is linked to and which is administrated by national institutions, structures and ideologies« (S. 161).

Conclusion

Generally, the volume represents a useful resource offering a wealth of information for scholars as well as for the interested general public. While many of the submissions are excellent in their scope and depth, there is an uneven quality to the volume as a whole. Several of the contributions offer a very brief analysis of the texts in question and lack the comprehensiveness of an academic publication. The introduction would have also benefited from a firmer editorial hand, as it does not reflect the overall structure of the volume. That said, Crime and Nation is an important contribution to the growing body of work on national and cultural aspects of crime in different media, and will certainly inspire new research in this area of study.