Who are the most important Canadian crime and detective writers? How do they help represent Canada as a nation? How do they distinguish Canada’s approach to questions of crime, detection, and social justice from those of other countries? The Routledge Introduction to Canadian Crime Fiction provides a much-needed investigation into how crime and detection have been, are, and will be represented within Canada’s national literature, with an attention to contemporary popular and literary texts. The book draws together a representative set of established Canadian authors who would appear in most courses on Canadian crime and detective fiction, while also introducing a few authors less established in the field. Ultimately, the book argues that crime fiction is a space of enormously productive hybridity that offers fresh new approaches to considering questions of national identity, gender, race, sexuality, and even genre.
Chapter 1. Negotiations of National Identity in Canadian Crime Fiction
Part 1: Historical Confrontations
Chapter 2. John McFetridge and the Legacy of French/English Tensions
Chapter 3. Giles Blunt and the Canadian North
Chapter 4. Thomas King and the Liminal Indigenous Detective
Chapter 5. Ausma Zehanat Khan and Multiculturalism in Canada
Chapter 6: Canada and the American Dream: Linwood Barclay's Promise Falls Series
Part 2: Canadian Genre Play
Chapter 7. The Police Procedural: Registering Change with Peter Robinson’s DCI Banks
Chapter 8. The Amateur Detective: Gail Bowen’s Joanne Kilbourn as Canadian Revisionist
Chapter 9. The Gay Private Eye: Anthony Bidulka’s Hardboiled Romantic, Russell Quant
Chapter 10. The Legal Thriller: Trauma and Resilience in Pamela Callow’s Kate Lange Series
Chapter 11. The Postmodern Detective: Literary Detection in Timothy Findley and Carol Shields
Part 3: Futuristic Explorations
Chapter 12. Louise Penny’s Cozy Exploration of Trauma and Temporality in the Anthropocene
Chapter 13. Storytelling, Guilt, and Games in Margaret Atwood’s Post-apocalyptic Crime Fiction
Chapter 14. Interpretive Mysteries and Impossible Crimes in Emily St. John Mandel’s Speculative Fiction
Biography
Pamela Bedore is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, where she teaches courses in American Literature and Popular Culture. She holds BA and BEd degrees from Queen’s University, an MA in English from Simon Fraser University, and a PhD in American Literature from the University of Rochester. She has published widely on detective fiction and speculative fiction, including the monograph Dime Novels and the Roots of American Detective Fiction (2013) and the lecture series Great Utopian and Dystopian Works of Literature (The Great Courses, 2017). Pam was the book review editor for Clues: A Journal of Detection for ten years and was recently a visiting scholar at an NEH Summer Institute on Climate Futurism.
