Native Narratives, Mystery Writing, and the Osage Oil Murders: Examining Mean Spirit and The Osage Rose

2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 137-154
Author(s):  
Mary Stoecklein
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Indigenous History ◽  
Private Eye ◽  
Mystery Fiction ◽  
Mystery Genre

Through analysis of two debut novels, Linda Hogan's Pulitzer-Prize-nominated murdermystery Mean Spirit 1990 and Tom Holm's private eye detective story The Osage Rose 2008, this article considers what Native-authored mystery fiction has to offer in terms of self-representation of Indigenous history and culture. Paying particular attention to detective fiction genre elements—such as the novels' openings, the detectives, the forms of detection, and the resolution—shows how Hogan and Holm employ the mystery genre to present Native narratives about the Osage oil murders, and, given their ability to reach wide audiences, how such narratives ultimately provide broader understandings of Indigenous history and culture.

The Many Pasts of Detective Fiction

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-172
Author(s):  
Thomas Leitch
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Public History ◽  
Detective Novel ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Detective Novels ◽  
The Many

Building on Tzvetan Todorov's observation that the detective novel ‘contains not one but two stories: the story of the crime and the story of the investigation’, this essay argues that detective novels display a remarkably wide range of attitudes toward the several pasts they represent: the pasts of the crime, the community, the criminal, the detective, and public history. It traces a series of defining shifts in these attitudes through the evolution of five distinct subgenres of detective fiction: exploits of a Great Detective like Sherlock Holmes, Golden Age whodunits that pose as intellectual puzzles to be solved, hardboiled stories that invoke a distant past that the present both breaks with and echoes, police procedurals that unfold in an indefinitely extended present, and historical mysteries that nostalgically fetishize the past. It concludes with a brief consideration of genre readers’ own ambivalent phenomenological investment in the past, present, and future each detective story projects.

scholarly journals The Labyrinth and the Non-Solution: Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase and the Metaphysical Detective

MANUSYA ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-89
Author(s):  
Rhys William Tyers
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Search For Meaning ◽  
Detective Novel ◽  
Raymond Chandler ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Guiding Principle ◽  
Wild Sheep ◽  
Detective Stories ◽  
Definition Of

Many of Murakami’s novels demonstrate his appropriation of the terminology, imagery and metaphor that are found in hardboiled detective fiction. The question of Haruki Murakami’s use of the tropes from hardboiled detective stories has been discussed by scholars such as Hantke (2007), Stretcher (2002) and Suter (2008), who argue that the writer uses these features as a way to organize his narratives and to pay homage to one of his literary heroes, Raymond Chandler. However, these arguments have not adequately addressed the fact that many of Murakami’s novels fit into the definition of the metaphysical detective story, which is “a text that parodies or subverts traditional detective-story conventions” (Merivale & Sweeney 1999:2). Using this definition as a guiding principle, this paper addresses the issue of the metaphysical detective features apparent in Murakami’s third novel, A Wild Sheep Chase, and, more specifically, looks at his use of the non-solution and labyrinth as narrative devices. The main argument, then, is that Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase fits in with the metaphysical detective novel and uses the familiar tropes of the labyrinth and the non-solution to highlight our impossible search for meaning.

scholarly journals The Comfort of Crime: The Appeal of Formulaic Fiction during the Pandemic

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (39) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucyna Krawczyk-Żywko
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Classic Work ◽  
Look Back ◽  
Agatha Christie

2020 was taxing, and one of the comforting ways of dealing with the uncertainty the COVID-19 pandemic has brought was reading. It seems hardly surprising that the British turned to crime fiction, which they not only avidly consume but also successfully produce. Moreover, 2020 marked the centenary of the publication of The Mysterious Affair at Styles, a novel that introduced Agatha Christie and her first detective, Hercule Poirot. The anniversary partly accounts for the resurgence of interest in classic detective fiction. Over the last one hundred years the genre has undergone various developments and diversifications, but this article offers a look back at its past. Acknowledging Jesper Gulddal and Stewart King’s objections to defining crime fiction as formulaic (2020), it draws on John G. Cawelti’s classic work on the mystery and detective story formulas (1976) to addresses the popularity of crime fiction during the pandemic. It contends that while the immense appeal of the crime genre stems from its adaptability, it is the oft-criticised basic mystery formula that offers the greatest comfort during such challenging times.

Historical and Imagined GIS Borderlandscapes of the American West: Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove Tetralogy and LA Noirscapes

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 134-153
Author(s):  
Charles Travis
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
American West ◽  
Field Work ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Gis Analysis ◽  
The West ◽  
Cultural Perceptions ◽  
Euclidian Space ◽  
Fiction Writers

Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize winning counter-western Lonesome Dove (part of a tetralogy, set between 1840 and 1900) and the works of LA Noir detective fiction writers (from the 1940s to 1997) represent the American west and urban southwest of Los Angeles as a dynamic mosaic of human and environmental borderlandscapes. McMurtry's perspective provides an Anglo-European eye, influenced by Cervantean Iberian literary tropes on the transformation of the West from indigenous and Spanish trails to American rail-road tracks. The LA Noirscapes map phenomenologically illustrates how the location of novel settings cluster in contiguous and convergent places on a street grid palimpsest of Los Angeles between 1949 and 1997. Employing HumGIS methods, this essay considers the marriage of empirical cartography and impressionistic topography; the former concerned with latitude, longitude and space, the latter with plotting literary, historical and cultural perceptions and experiences of place. By engaging the concept of Euclidian space with the phenomenology of place, geographers can contextualize field work, and other methods with literary, cartographical and GIS analysis to uncover the means to craft new avenues to study the dynamic and symbiotic formations of historical landscapes, identities, senses of place and location.

scholarly journals The Case of Mór Jókai and the Detective Story

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 133-144
Author(s):  
Péter Hajdu
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Love Story ◽  
History Of ◽  
Detective Stories ◽  
Exclusive Focus

While from the viewpoint of typology it is often stated that the genre of detective fiction originated with the work of Edgar Allan Poe, this statement can be challenged from the standpoint of literary or reception history. Several recent histories of detective fiction emphasize the importance of employing a wider generic view, yet they hardly expand their perspective beyond English literary traditions. This paper examines how the usual, theorized requirement for detective fiction concerning the work’s exclusive focus on the crime committed and its detection was not characteristic of nineteenth-century detective stories written in Central Europe. Even though the detective story pattern is recognizable in Mór Jókai’s short story, “A három királyok csillaga” [‘The Star of the Magi’], it does not dominate the entire depiction, but rather represents one strand woven into a tragic love story as well as the history of national resistance, aspects bearing equal significance in this very sophisticated work.

scholarly journals Names and Identities in the Italian Detective Story

2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Giovanna Arcamone
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Proper Names ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Teenth Century ◽  
The Real ◽  
Carlo Emilio Gadda ◽  
French And English ◽  
Detective Stories ◽  
Over Time

Detective stories were established in Italy at the end of the nine- teenth century in imitation of the 'noir' and the French and English serial novels. The Italian detective story over time has grown also with some of our better writers and it is to stories written by Carlo Emilio Gadda, Leonardo Sciascia, Carlo Fruttero/Franco Lucentini, Carlo Fruttero and Andrea Vitali that this paper is dedicated to investigating. In addition, all these authors reveal with linguistic reflections that they appreciate the inherent power of Proper Names. The de- tective novel is especially appropriate on the relation between proper names and identity. Indeed, normally at the beginning of events both in the real world and in detective fiction the personalities present in the good and bad texture of events have not yet been identified. These authors of Italian detective stories look for an ally in the nominatio to help them define the identity of their characters and the backdrop of their story.

scholarly journals Locuras detectivescas en La detective miope de Rosa Ribás

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 157
Author(s):  
Marina Bettaglio
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Full Circle ◽  
Private Investigator ◽  
Siglo Xix ◽  
Private Eye ◽  
Mental Institution

Resumen: En La detective miope la escritora española Rosa Ribás lleva a cabo una inversión paródica de las normas de la literatura detectivesca al crear una investigadora privada recién salida de una institución psiquiátrica. A diferencia de los métodos deductivos empleados por eminentes detectives del siglo XIX, Irene Ricart subvierte las leyes de la lógica al resolver el enigma del brutal asesinato del que fueron víctimas su esposo y su hija. Mientras su vista se va deteriorando progresivamente, esta detective tan peculiar logra desenmascarar a los culpables del doble asesinato y acabar con los asesinos en una trama circular marcada por la locura. Questioning Rationality in Rosa Ribas’ La detective miope Abstract: In La detective miope, Spanish writer Rosa Ribás carries out a parodic inversion of the norms of detective fiction by giving voice to a private investigator, who has been recently released from a mental institution. Contrary to the deductive methods employed by eminent 19th century detectives, Ribás nearsighted private eye Irene Ricart subverts every law of logic to solve the enigma of her daughter and husband’s brutal killing. As her eyesight deteriorates, this unconventional detective unmasks a network of criminal activities, kills the killers and ends full circle in the same clinic where she originally was at the beginning of the novel.

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