Detecting Canada: Essays on Canadian Crime Fiction, Television, and Film
290
Detecting Canada: Essays on Canadian Crime Fiction, Television, and Film
290Paperback
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Overview
Genres examined range from the well-loved police procedural and the amateur sleuth to those less well known, such as anti-detection and contemporary noir novels. The book looks critically at the esteemed sixties’ television show Wojeck, as well as the more recent series Da Vinci’s Inquest, Da Vinci’s City Hall, and Intelligence, and the controversial Durham County, a critically acclaimed but violent television series that ran successfully in both Canada and the United States.
The essays in Detecting Canada look at texts from a variety of perspectives, including postcolonial studies, gender and queer studies, feminist studies, Indigenous studies, and critical race and class studies. Crime fiction, enjoyed by so many around the world, speaks to all of us about justice, citizenship, and important social issues in an uncertain world.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781554589265 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wilfrid Laurier University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/18/2014 |
| Series: | Film and Media Studies , #16 |
| Pages: | 290 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Marilyn Rose is a professor in the Department of English at Brock University. She specializes in modern and contemporary short fiction and poetry as well as detective fiction. She has published articles and book chapters in these areas and, with Jeannette Sloniowski, created and maintains CrimeFictionCanada, a scholarly database dedicated to the study of detective fiction in English around the world.
Read an Excerpt
Excerpt from Detecting Canada: Essays on Canadian Crime Fiction, Television, and Film edited by Jeannette Sloniowski and Marilyn Rose
From the Introduction
[T]his book represents, we hope, the beginning of more concentrated scholarly engagement with this particular field in Canadian popular narrative. The time seems right, especially given the potentialities of the increasingly rich electronic “archives” that characterize the Internet at present. Not only are books, television, and film increasingly available through online vendors such as chapters. indigo. ca and amazon. ca, but scholarly sleuths—many of them graduate students in our flourishing programs in popular culture in Canada—are now able to access a great deal of early Canadian crime writing directly online. .. .
Because crime writing is part of Canadian mass culture, then, it is to be expected that its iterations in the form of novels, films, and television will reflect certain overarching aspects of a Canadian national imaginary that reinforce national themes and stereotypes that permeate the popular media. The first of these is undoubtedly a preoccupation with law and order, which reflects the long- standing notion that Canada was founded on an ethic of “peace, order, and good government. ”. ..
All of this having been said—and in light of our opening comments about the size of the body of Canadian crime fiction that now exists and the fact that a single collection cannot possibly address its fullness and potential—Detecting Canada seeks to make available a body of critical commentary on a Canadian genre that, while vital and recognized in terms of sales and by book awards, has had little attention paid to its history and its accomplishments as a popular genre. .. .
Together this collection of essays presents a wide range of topics and approaches to Canadian crime fiction and seeks as a collection to shed light on this under-investigated Canadian genre in its various guises and modes. Our goal has been to start the ball rolling and to encourage others to attend critically to the development of this capacious and flexible genre as a way of expressing—and at times contending with—the complex national imaginary within which we continue to construe and negotiate our communal existence.
From Chapter 1 Coca-Colonials Write Back: Localizing the Global in Canadian Crime Fiction by Beryl Langer
Canadian crime fiction is particularly rich in strategic potential given its “realist” codes and the importance of “law and order” in the discursive formation of Canadian difference—remember we are in the realm of myth here, not the actual social formation that has its share of crime, violence, and killers whose bizarre acts of creative sadism equal any in the world. .. .
The popularity of crime fiction in the 1980s and 1990s, and the emergence of regional, feminist, and national variants on the American hard-boiled genre, is in that sense not surprising. For Canadian nationalists, this general sense of fin-de-siècle risk is compounded by anxiety about national survival, generated by separatist pressure from within and the permeability of the U. S. —Canadian border—a mere line on the map, which offers no protection against “pollution” from the south, which, whether in the form of acid rain or crime and violence, will gradually obliterate Canadian difference altogether.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction Jeannette Sloniowski Marilyn Rose xi
History and Theory
1 Coca-Colonials Write Back: Localizing the Global in Canadian Crime Fiction Beryl hanger 3
2 Canadian Crime Writing in English David Skene-Melvin 19
Essays on Fiction
3 Canadian Psycho: Genre, Nation, and Colonial Violence in Michael Slade's Gothic RCMP Procedural Brian Johnson 55
4 Northern Procedures: Policing the Nation in Giles Blunts The Delicate Storm Manina Jones 83
5 Revisioning the Dick: Reading Thomas King's Thumps DreadfulWater Mysteries Jennifer Andrews Priscilla L. Walton 101
6 Generic Play and Gender Trouble in Peter Robinson's In a Dry Season Jeannette Sloniowski 123
7 A Colder Kind of Gender Politics: Intersections of Feminism and Detection in Gail Bowen's Joanne Kilbourn Series Pamela Bedore 151
8 Queer Eye for the Private Eye: Homonationalism and the Regulation of Queer Difference in Anthony Bidulka's Russell Quant Mystery Series Péter Balogh 179
9 Under/Cover: Strategies of Detection and Evasion in Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace Marilyn Rose 205
Essays on Television
10 Televising Toronto in the 1960s: Wojeck and the Urban Crime Drama Sarah A. Matheson 229
11 North of Quality? "Quality" Television and the Suburban Crimeworld of Durham County Lindsay Steenberg Yvonne Tasker 257
12 Mounties and Metaphysics in Canadian Film and Television Patricia Gruben 275
Contributors 297
Index 301