scholarly journals "In a Dry Season" - A Police Procedural Novel by Peter Robinson

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 24
Author(s):  
Sanmati Vijay Dhanawade
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Dry Season ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Cultural Issues ◽  
Genre Fiction ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Police Procedural ◽  
Mystery Fiction ◽  
Fiction Writer

Genre fiction, also recognized as popular fiction is an umbrella term as it comprises various categories, varieties, and sub-types. On occasion, innovative writers have practiced in mingling these methods and generating an entirely dissimilar variety of categories. In general, genre fiction inclines to place plentiful significance on entertainment and, as a consequence, it leans towards to be more widespread with mass audiences. But currently, writers are lettering beyond mere meager amusement and they are commenting on various socio-cultural issues, resulting in their writing more realistic. Furthermore, various life real things and norms implied in their writing are constructing the entire genre form and all its types more noteworthy and vital. As accredited by literary jurisdiction following are some of the leading classifications as they are used in contemporary publication: Fantasy, Horror, Science fiction, Crime and Mystery Fiction etc.  The kind Crime and Mystery Fiction also has various categories for example, Cozy, Hardboiled, The Inverted Detective Story, Police Procedural, etc. In the present paper, Canadian crime fiction writer Peter Robinson’s novel In a Dry Season is studied in the light of this police procedural type of novel writing. The paper aspires to discover various police procedural features employed by the writer.

Popular Fiction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roslyn Weaver
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
History Of

This chapter discusses the history of popular fiction in Australia. The question of place has always been central to Australian fiction, not only as a thematic element but also as a critical or political preoccupation. In part, this is because popular fiction writers, wanting to attract broad audiences, either exploited their Australian content to appeal to international readers or have excised the local to produce a generic and thus more readily accessible setting for outsiders. The chapter considers works by popular fiction writers who adopt a range of positions in relation to their focus on place, but often tackle many different aspects of Australian social and historical change. These novels cover various genres such as crime fiction, historical fiction and romance, science fiction and fantasy, and include Fergus Hume's The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886), Nevil Shute's On the Beach (1957), Damien Broderick's The Dreaming Dragons (1980), and Cecilia Dart-Thornton's The Ill-Made Mute (2001).

Popular Fiction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeannette Sloniowski ◽  
Marilyn Rose
Keyword(s):  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Genre Fiction ◽  
Significant Component ◽  
Popular Imagination ◽  
Popular Narrative ◽  
Canadian Experience ◽  
Anne Of Green Gables ◽  
National Imaginary ◽  
History Of

This chapter examines the history of popular fiction in Canada. In Canada, popular culture reflects not only Canadian experience but also cultural anxieties as they have permeated and shaped the national imaginary since the days of settlement. The most significant component of that national imaginary in relation to popular narrative is probably what might be called an evolving Gothic sensibility. Gothicism refers to the portrayal of strange or frightening experiences in mysterious and daunting places and spaces. The chapter considers a number of earlier Canadian novels that stand out in the Canadian popular imagination, including L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables (1908), Margaret Laurence's The Diviners (1974). It also discusses genre fiction in the modern and contemporary periods, such as Harlequin Enterprises (founded Winnipeg 1949) and women's romances, crime fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction, notably William Gibson's cyberpunk novel Neuromancer (1984).

Irish Crime Fiction

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Serial Killer ◽  
Focal Points ◽  
Genre Fiction ◽  
Celtic Tiger ◽  
Irish Studies ◽  
Private Eye ◽  
Economic Boom ◽  
Work Abroad

Irish crime fiction is still an emerging field of study. Much of the scholarship concerns Northern Ireland, though that often pays little attention to popular fiction, as is true of Irish Studies more generally. Among the studies most directly concerned with genre fiction, two further focal points are clear. The first is the work of Tana French, among the most prominent Irish crime writers. The second is more general: crime novels read as reflecting on the Celtic Tiger (Ireland’s economic boom in the late 20th and early 21st centuries), on the crash that ensued, and on the cultural complexes arising from and contributing to that boom. Across these focal points, several thematic patterns are clear but not yet fully addressed by scholars: corruption on all sides of the law; a narrative resistance to closure and resolution; Gothic influences; adaptations of domestic noir; and the systemic abuse of women and children by the church, the state, and institutions like the Magdalen Laundries. Indeed, if one category of crime is a defining marker of Irish crime fiction, it is likely to be corruption in all its forms, literal and figurative alike, from Gothic allegories to ripped-from-the-headlines realist narratives. Little attention, however, has been paid to most crime writers predating this contemporary proliferation: even writers who were just barely ahead of the curve—such as Julie Parsons, Vincent Banville, Eugene McEldowney, and Gemma O’Connor—are not regularly addressed at length in scholarly accounts. While Irish contexts and settings distinguish Irish crime fiction from its international counterparts—including the English, Scottish, and American work to which it is most often compared—its particularity is further signaled by several patterns. One is an insistent avoidance of the closure popularly associated with the genre, as in Alan Glynn’s conspiracy thrillers, where uncertainty is an inescapable baseline. Elsewhere, this avoidance reflects Irish literary inheritances like the supernatural, pronounced in the novels of French and John Connolly, and less overt but still clear across their contemporaries’ writings. A third pattern is discernible in the varied means by which Irish writers have adapted familiar subgenres—the police procedural, the private eye, the serial killer—to Irish contexts, which have proven inhospitable to some of these subgenres, a challenge some writers have addressed by setting their work abroad. A final hallmark of Irish crime fiction is a generic instability, a promiscuous mingling of genre elements, including folklore, the supernatural, and romance.

scholarly journals ‘The most dangerous thing in England’? Detection, deviance and disability in Richard Marsh’s Judith Lee stories

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Minna Vuohelainen
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Communication Skills ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Communications Technology ◽  
Psychical Research ◽  
Female Detective

This essay examines the adventures of Richard Marsh’s female detective and lip-reader Judith Lee (1911–16). The short-story series offers a powerful example of the cross-fertilisation of the genres of detective, Gothic, New-Woman and science fiction through Marsh’s ambivalent construction of his protagonist as a potentially progenerate being with seemingly supernatural communication skills. Lee is a liminal heroine who is simultaneously resistant to and complicit with the normalising taxonomies of gender, sexuality, ethnicity and class commonly associated with detective fiction. However, while the stories’ conformist position as scientifically minded crime fiction is complicated by their apparent tolerance of deviance, Lee’s expertise as a teacher of the deaf undermines counter-hegemonic readings because her profession aims to ‘cure’ a disability, deafness. Lee’s adventures show how popular fiction synthesised disparate discursive frameworks drawing on criminology, eugenics, science, communications technology and psychical research.

Genre Fiction since 1950

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Lawn
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Domestic Fiction ◽  
Genre Fiction ◽  
History Of

This chapter discusses the history of genre fiction in New Zealand since 1950. Crime writers such as Vanda Symon and Paul Cleave exploit the phenomenon of ‘glocalization’ by locating an international genre in distinctively local settings. Others, like Nalini Singh and Phillip Mann, embrace the alternative worlds of science fiction and fantasy without any sense that a local referent is necessary or desirable. The chapter first considers how New Zealand crime writers add distinctively Kiwi twists to their work before turning to crime thrillers by Paul Thomas and others. It also examines fiction featuring female detectives, including those written by Vanda Symon, as well as genre hybrids such as historical crime and domestic fiction. Finally, it analyses examples of literary noir by Charlotte Grimshaw, Carl Nixon, and Chad Taylor and political dystopias from C. K. Stead to Bernard Beckett.

Art, Forward Slash, Science

PMLA ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 119 (3) ◽  
pp. 526-529
Author(s):  
Gwyneth Jones
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Iconic Memory ◽  
National Gallery ◽  
Horse Manure ◽  
Difficult Position ◽  
Internal Stimulus ◽  
First Time ◽  
Fiction Writer

Synesthesia … one day in 1997 (soon after the national gallery acquired the picture), i walked up the familiar marble stairs, crossed the rotunda, and was confronted, for the first time, by George Stubbs's Whistlejacket, the stunning, naked portrait—no groom or rider, no landscape—of a chestnut Arabian stallion. I smelled the stable, horse manure, and leather, and I had the thrill of knowing what was happening inside my skull. How the attention response had sent a cloud of fire leaping through my brain, tugging on associated traces, map on map of firing and partially firing neurons springing back into existence (never the same twice, yet continuous with my earliest childhood and the millions of years before that). Surprise and the power of the artist were making me read internal stimulus as external: recall had become once again perception (McCrone 194-217). This is an iconic memory for me. It holds, packed down and ready to unfold, both the direction my work has taken through my career and the context of that work: my own life and times; the history that made me; the Next Big Thing in science; and my privileged, difficult position as a science fiction writer, an arts graduate, and a woman.

scholarly journals Cartographies génériques, spatiales et identitaires en Afrique du Sud : Margie Orford, Lauren Beukes, Henrietta Rose-Innes

2015 ◽  
pp. 69-82
Author(s):  
Mélanie Joseph-Vilain
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
South African ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Afrique Du Sud ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
African Context ◽  
Respective Contribution ◽  
Feminine Body ◽  
The City

This article examines how three South African novelists, Margie Orford, Lauren Beukes and Henrietta Rose-Innes, use crime fiction to write their country. After a brief survey of the rapid development of crime fiction in South Africa and of the critical response it received, the article proposes a reading of Like Clockwork, Zoo City and Nineveh, whereby their respective contribution to crime fiction displays three major features : first, Orford’s novel chimes in with generic conventions ; second, Beukes’s novel combines features borrowed from both crime fiction and science fiction ; and last, Rose-Innes’s novel displaces the detective story narrative into a context where « murder » is invested with a symbolic meaning. By handling the investigation theme in a variety of ways, the three novelists adapt it to the South African context and besides show that the feminine body fits in more or less problematically within the space of the city and of the nation.

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Cremins
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Origin Story ◽  
Fiction Writer

The epilogue returns to Captain Marvel’s first appearance and studies the debt it owes to James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon. This section also examines the hero’s impact on science fiction writer Harlan Ellison, whose story “Paladin of the Lost Hour” offers a variation on both Lost Horizon and Billy Batson’s origin story.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document