Este estudo parte de uma visão teórica da literatura policial para analisar obras de três escritores latino-americanos: Machado de Assis, Jorge Luis Borges e Roberto Bolaño. O objetivo é fornecer um novo subsídio teórico para a leitura destes autores e, por outro lado, aprofundar a visão sobre o gênero policial no Brasil, ampliando, a partir dele, as discussões relacionadas à teoria literária. A causa secreta é um conto contemporâneo ao marco do nascimento do gênero policial nos Estados Unidos, com Edgar Allan Poe. Neste momento em que a literatura policial ainda não está consolidada, Machado de Assis cria também um personagem apaixonado pela análise dos caracteres humanos, o médico Garcia. Desde o título, como nos livros policiais, o leitor está procurando um segredo, cuja solução depende de sua confiança na autoridade narrativa, mas, em última análise, nunca pode ser realmente liquidado, porque nele reside o enigma fundamental da literatura: a impossibilidade de apropriação do Outro. Em El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, Jorge Luis Borges usa o gênero para travar uma discussão sobre o tempo na narrativa e revolve o relato sobre si mesmo, usando uma autoinserção temporal. Foi considerado, assim, uma subversão na medida em que, pretensamente, destrói as balizas de gênero. Entretanto, segundo Jacques Derrida, um gênero é formado não só de marcas que identificam uma obra com a outra, mas também por alterações dentro da forma, que aumentam os limites genéricos. Desta forma, Borges, do ponto de vista da literatura policial, ajuda a criar um novo subgênero, o policial metafísico. Desde a perspectiva de um novo policial que discute seu próprio estatuto, analisamos o romance do escritor chileno Roberto Bolaño, Los detectives salvajes, em que lemos a história da busca de uma pessoa que, na verdade, está morta e só sabemos de sua morte no final da narrativa. Isso opera uma diferença fundamental: esta obra narra pela lente do luto, enquanto no policial esta dimensão é suplantada pela necessidade da intriga. De outra forma, o percurso dos personagens também responde à sombra do enigma que é a voz do Outro. A literatura policial, assim, é um gênero caracterizado por uma busca incessante, motivada por um enigma que o detetive precisa solucionar. Tradicionalmente, esta demanda é bem sucedida. Entretanto, nunca vemos o personagem, satisfeito por mais um trabalho resolvido, voltar para casa, o que prova que, de alguma forma, nem ele mesmo está convencido da solução do enigma. O segredo, portanto, exige uma dedicação infinita. De alguma forma, o personagem modelar do detetive reflete o trabalho do crítico literário. A busca incessante, o solilóquio que esconde o enigma, a necessidade de autoridade narrativa são questões importantes do nosso trabalho. Qual seria a responsabilidade, portanto, do crítico? Estaria disposto a sacrificar sua autoridade pela verdade? / This research begins with a theoretical vision of crime fiction to analyze works of three Latin-american authors: Machado de Assis, Jorge Luis Borges and Roberto Bolaño. The objective is to offer a new theoretical basis for reading these writers and also to deepen the study of crime fiction in Brazil, widening, thus, the debates regarding literary theory. A causa secreta is a short story contemporary of the birth of crime fiction in the United States, with Edgar Allan Poe. In that moment, when crime fiction wasnt consolidated yet, Machado de Assis also created a character passionate for the analysis of human character, doctor Garcia. From the title, as to the mystery book itself, the reader is looking for a secret, and the solution will only be brought through the readers distrust of the narrative settings. But the enigma, in fact, can never be solved because within it there is the fundamental secret of literature: the impossibility of appropriation of the Other. In El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan Jorge Luis Borges uses the genre to discuss time in fiction and turns the narrative upon itself by creating a temporal auto insertion. It is considered, thus, a subversion as it allegedly destroys the laws of the genre. However, according to Jacques Derrida, a genre is formed not only by the marks that defines it, but also by the alterations within its form, which enlarges its limits. In this way, through the point of view of crime fiction, Borges contributes to create a new subgenre: the metaphysical crime fiction. Through the perspective of a new crime fiction that questions its own statute, we analyzed the novel Los detectives salvajes, by Chilean author Roberto Bolaño, in which we read the story of a search of a person who, actually, is already dead, and we only get to know it in the end of the novel. This operates a structural difference: the book narrates through the lens of mourning, while in crime fiction this sentiment is superseded by the necessity of intrigue. In another way, the course of those characters also responds to the shadows of the enigma that is the voice of the Other. Crime fiction, thus, is a genre based on a relentless quest, motivated by an enigma that the detective has to solve. Traditionally, this demand is well succeeded. But we never see the detective, satisfied after another job well done, going back home, which proves that, in a way, not even he is convinced that the enigma is solved. In a way, the model character of the detective reflects, as some authors suggest, the work of the literary critic. The endless search, the monologue that hides the enigma, the necessity of narrative authority all this elements are important to our work. Then, what is the responsibility of the critic? Is he willing to sacrifice his authority for the truth?

In my study I analyse Reijo Mäki’s four books Pimeyden tango (1997), Pahan suudelma (1998), Keltainen leski (1999) and Black Jack (2003).  I’m interested whether Mäki as a writer belongs to traditional Finnish prose which started from Aleksis Kivi than genre of crime literature. After Kai Laitinen humour, nature and democracy are typical to Finnish literature tradition.  Mäki’s milieu descriptions are closer to the Finnish literary tradition. Through nature the characters mirror their emotions, feelings and events. The environment is not only seen, but it is also smelled, touched and heard. Through the marks of the nature characters give right as well as misleading clues. It is particularly characteristic to the Finnish literary tradition to describe division of life, social status and the freedom and lack of it through weather, which is not typical to the crime literature.  Also Mäki’s characters are democratic and everyday and strongly individualistic and anti-social despite of person’s social standing.  Laitinen’s point of view is that in the Finnish literary tradition equality is only between men. In Mäki’s fiction women characters are narrow and they are only seen how they look. Mäki represents the modern criminal literature in which are characteristics of puzzle, hard-boiled and police novels. Unlike hardboiled detective stories his books are full of verbal descriptions. In conclusion Mäki’s books clearly represent the Finnish literary tradition.

Cette thèse a choisi le roman policier français contemporain comme objet privilégié de recherche. Le genre se veut fondamentalement ludique et on lui reproche aussi souvent de se complaire dans les artifices de l’intrigue. En France, la fiction policière s’est distinguée en prenant en compte de manière singulière, et ce dès son apparition, le réel dans la construction des récits. Très tôt, son chemin a croisé celui du réalisme, nouant avec lui toute une connivence. C’est ce faisceau de relation entre réalisme et fiction policière qu’explore ce travail. Certes, les réalités contemporaines liées à la mondialisation irriguent et nourrissent la fiction policière. Mais elles ne sont pas mises en récit de manière mimétique. C’est bien le paradoxe d’une tendance qui continue à dire le réel, sans pour autant prétendre le dupliquer. Chez Fred Vargas, Marcus Malte, Pascal Garnier et Tanguy Viel, les caractéristiques de nos sociétés sont davantage figurés que décrites et transparaissent à travers le traitement de thèmes comme le sacré, le monde du travail, les constructions identitaires, les relations interindividuelles et la violence. Le monde sensible et matériel est mis en sourdine, les paysages sont insaisissables et cette modalité de la représentation dit à la fois vide et l’absence qui caractérisent nos sociétés. Nous ne parlerons pas pour autant de récits désenchantés ou mélancoliques. L’esthétique mise en oeuvre dans ses romans est en effet à la fois déroutante et réconfortante. Nos fictions grâce à des narrations plurielles et très dynamiques parviennent à susciter chez le lecteur toute une gamme d’émotions productrices de plaisir. L’évasion par les émotions et sens du réel ne sont donc pas incompatibles. / This work has chosen to study modern French crime fictions. Most of the time,detective novels are compared to a cerebral and artificial game. In France the situation is quite particular with what we call le « polar », a school of politicized crime fiction that appears afterthe protests in May 1968. At the core of the polar is the naturalist mode of the American hardboiledcrime story, adapted and used to express the particularly French experience of the twentieth century war, occupation, colonization and decolonization and the possibility of asocial and political revolution. The generation that follows « le polar », with authors such as Tonino Benacquista, Marcus Malte, Pascal Garnier, Fred Vargas shows a resolute willingness to write against the grain and the tradition of realism and political commitment. These qualities have allowed our authors to have a natural predisposition for adventure. There is also an exotic charm that reigns over their novels, and in a way there is no objective reality depicted. Reality is more figured than represented. The individuals are struggling in order to be less anonymous and to find new values and landmarks in a globalized society in which ideology, religion and traditional values continue to fall apart. Nevertheless by inviting the reader to share secrets and crack codes, by creating suspense, surprise and curiosity, the crimestory brings into play the intellect and emotions of its readership and creates a real pleasure of reading.

DESPERATE TIMES CALL is a collection of short stories and a novella about people whose lives intersect with violence. The young girl in Of Course She Would is forced to leave her home after finding her meth-addicted father dead of a heart attack. Tomas Mangual, the main character of She Said Two, sets off on a blind date to discover his counterpart has recently been the victim of a disturbing hate crime. The featured novella, Diablo Corrido, raises the question: How far would someone chase their ambition to see a life-long dream come true? Using the intimate perspectives of first-person and close third-person points of view, DESPERATE TIMES CALL offers glimpses of characters chasing dreams of success, romance, wealth, even normalcy, but coming up empty-handed.

Magister Artium - MA / Bettina Wyngaard se misdaadfiksie-trilogie, bestaande uit die romans Vuilspel (2013), Slaafs (2016) en Jagter (2019) het ’n vernuwende uitwerking in die Afrikaanse literatuur gehad. Dit kan hoofsaaklik teruggevoer word na die skrywer se gebruik van ’n (swart) lesbiese protagonis. Wyngaard is ook die eerste swart Afrikaanse vroue-outeur wat haar tot hierdie genre gewend het. Haar misdaadtrilogie toon ’n sentrale bemoeienis met die vroulike subjek se ondergeskikte posisie as deurgaans onderdruk weens verskeie identiteitsaspekte (waaronder ras, gender, klas, seksualiteit, kultuur en nasionaliteit tel). Die simbiotiese verhouding tussen identiteit en mag is dus ’n prominente tematiek in die trilogie. Hierdie bemiddeling tussen identiteit en mag toon raakpunte met die interseksionaliteitsteorie soos voorgestel deur Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989). Sy voer aan dat subjekte onderdruk word deur die tussenspel van identiteitsmerkers en sisteme van onderdrukking wat inherent is daaraan. In hierdie verhandeling word die representasie van die vroulike subjek in Wyngaard se misdaadtrilogie uit ’n interseksionele invalshoek in oënskou geneem. Vanweë die gebruik van literatuur as subjek van analise in hierdie verhandeling, word swart feministiese denkskole oor die letterkunde ingereken as ontledingsinstrumente om Wyngaard se trilogie binne die ruim trajek van swart feministiese fiksie te posisioneer. Terselfdertyd word Wyngaard se subjektiwiteit as swart vroue-outeur krities bekyk omdat sy deur middel van haar tekste verantwoordelik is vir beeldskepping en voorstellings van vroulike subjekte. Aangesien Wyngaard se fiksie dikwels identiteitsaspekte ondervang wat verband hou met haar eie subjektiewe identiteit, sal die wyse bekyk word waarop selfdefiniëring en selfaktualisering in haar trilogie tot stand gebring word.Soos reeds genoem, het Wyngaard grense in die Afrikaanse letterkunde versit deur haar tot misdaadfiksie as genre te wend. As deel van populêre fiksie, staan misdaadfiksie tradisioneel bekend as ’n behoudende genre met ’n resepmatige onderbou wat, só beskou, nie gebruik word om progressiewe argumente in te voer nie. Hierdie aspek van die genre staan dus oënskynlik in kontras met die feministiese aard van Wyngaard se misdaadfiksie-trilogie. In hierdie verhandeling word gevolglik ook die funksionaliteit van genre en die impak daarvan op die beeldskepping van die vroulike subjek bekyk. Maniere waarop Wyngaard gevestigde genrekonvensies oorskry in ’n poging om feministiese benaderings te berde te bring, word in die besonder bestudeer. / South Africa

<p>In this master’s thesis, I write about different representations of crime and criminal literature in the German-speaking world of the 19th century, a genre that was mainly attributed to an entertainment function at the time, but which nevertheless, as I shall show, allows insights into social ills and problematic characters in context. Here, there are interesting developments from late Romanticism or Biedermeier to Realism or even to the roots of Expressionism. Guilt and punishment are regarded as primary moments for this genre. In my master’s thesis, I would like to try to show that not enough attention has been paid to this genre by literary studies, but also by law. I will look into the question of where the tension of this genre lies in the aforementioned environment, and I will point out why this was the case and what this literature has lacked in detail.</p> <p>In the first chapter, I start with the beginnings and their historical development, covering a period from the beginning to almost the end of the 19th century and divide its differentiations into phases. My observations are based on Jorg Schönert’s “historical sketch” (ca. 1770 – 1920) (Schönert, “Zur Ausdifferzierung des Genres Kriminalgeschichten“, 97). In addition, I mention various important crime stories that preceded my selection. The selected works are arranged in each of the relevant literary epochs (Romanticism/Biedermeier and Poetic Realism), with which I attempt to highlight their specific characteristics and their detective elements. Due to the moral and psychological embodiment, as well as the social circumstances, the crimes are in some phases of the history of the genres more and in others less emphasized, and I attempt to analyze in each exemplary work by comparing these texts and according to certain criteria.</p> <p>The second chapter deals with theoretical approaches, in particular with hermeneutics or how to “read” facts. I also investigate the literary sociological question of which prototype of perpetrators the authors create in their works and examine them for their psychological features. My text, which is classified in the context of the genre, examines the developments of the crime novel and clarifies the changing criminological aspects, as well as analyzes the positions of different research approaches to the criminal justice system, which can be identified or explored from different angles of these literary examples.</p> <p>The third chapter begins with a brief overview of the six books in question. The main characters are then discussed further, which I have divided into criminals, victims, and accomplices. Because of this centrality in the books, most emphasis is placed on the criminals, with a close look at their motives, the way they plan and carry out the crime, how they endure the investigation, and finally, whether and to what extent they feel remorse for their actions. “<i>Die Judenbuche</i>” is treated separately here because of the much stronger social component and the environment, as well as the open-ended description of the crimes and the perpetrators. Victims and accomplices tend to be marginalized in the books studied here, with women being the only accomplices whose consciences suffer because of their role. Finally, the moral compass and guilt of the perpetrators are examined in relation to their social and material situation, their family, and their religion.</p> The final chapter focuses on the differences between the modern crime stories and their precursors, which have been studied here. I try to define and carefully delineate the main components of a successful and appealing crime story through the lens of several internationally known examples of world literature. There are parallels to the older German authors treated in this thesis, who also have implications for the artistic elements of the books in comparison to simple entertainment. My main focus is on the plot, the length of the books, the investigations and the detectives, and their methods of solving the crime. These German authors tended to write short works, short stories or novellas that allowed little space for complex stories or lengthy novels. They must be unraveled even more powerfully or efficiently by brilliant detectives and very attentive readers due to the brevity of the works. As the texts are structured stringently, the actions are simple and rather uncomplicated. The detectives practically do not exist as a kind of institution, but rather on the periphery. Crimes that are always solved seem to serve both legal and moral justice and ultimately satisfy the expectations of readers. Finally, I discuss the stylistic characteristics of those early crime novels compared to what readers are used to seeing or expecting today.

Submitted by Verena Bastos (verena@uefs.br) on 2015-07-21T00:40:51Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Disserta??o.pdf: 930316 bytes, checksum: c7081dbe78b85faae39c3ac523607f58 (MD5) / Submitted by Verena Bastos (verena@uefs.br) on 2015-07-21T00:40:51Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Disserta??o.pdf: 930316 bytes, checksum: c7081dbe78b85faae39c3ac523607f58 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-07-21T00:40:51Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Disserta??o.pdf: 930316 bytes, checksum: c7081dbe78b85faae39c3ac523607f58 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-08-28 / Made available in DSpace on 2015-07-21T00:40:51Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Disserta??o.pdf: 930316 bytes, checksum: c7081dbe78b85faae39c3ac523607f58 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-08-28 / In this dissertation, we analyze the short crime stories by Mayrant Gallo ? one of the most productive writers from Bahia presently ? trying to demonstrate the theme of crime as a metaphor of the world we live in, which is often violent and corrupt. In the work of the author in question ? as well as in the work of many others crime fiction writers ?, we show clearly that the representation of the criminal universe is a method or a means of making the reader reflect on things more widely than the simple ?who killed? questioning. We aim to demystify the ideia very widespread among literary critics that crime fiction is a ?minor genre?. In this regard, we discuss the characteristics, similarities and differences between its types: detective fiction, noir and ?action? fiction. This last type, although practiced by writers like Edgar Allan Poe e Jorge Luis Borges, for example, had its terminology coined only in 2005, by Mayrant Gallo, who is also a teacher and a crime fiction theorist, a genre which has been insufficiently researched in the academy. / Neste trabalho, analisamos os contos policiais do escritor Mayrant Gallo ? um dos mais fecundos autores da Bahia na contemporaneidade ? tentando demonstrar a tem?tica do crime como uma met?fora, uma meton?mia do mundo em que vivemos, muitas vezes violento e corrupto. Na obra do autor em foco ? assim como na de tantos outros escritores de hist?rias policiais ? evidenciamos a representa??o do universo criminal como um m?todo, um meio de levar o leitor a reflex?es bem mais amplas do que ao mero questionamento do ?quem matou?. Objetivamos desmitificar a ideia, que ainda perdura entre os cr?ticos liter?rios, de que a narrativa policial ? um ?g?nero menor?. Para tanto, discutimos as caracter?sticas, semelhan?as e diferen?as dos tipos da modalidade estudada: de enigma, noir e ?de a??o?. Este ?ltimo, apesar de ter sido praticado por escritores como Edgar Allan Poe e Jorge Luis Borges, por exemplo, teve a sua terminologia cunhada apenas em 2005, por Mayrant Gallo, que, al?m de escritor, ? professor e te?rico da literatura policial, pouco divulgada no ?mbito universit?rio.

Aujourd'hui, bien que la mafia russe soit officiellement démantelée, elle continue à influencer et à transformer l’identité de son «fidèle» spectateur par la voie cinématographique. Dans ce cas comme dans sans doute beaucoup d’autres, comme le rappelle à juste titre Valérie Pozner, « le cinéma doit être replacé au sein d’un vaste réseau de pratiques spectaculaires et de stratégies éducatives, politiques et informatives hétérogènes ».1Cette thèse revient en premier lieu sur les participants et les engagements de cette coopération entre la mafia et le cinéma. Avant de retracer les principaux traits de ce mariage ciné-mafia-politique, nous allons aborder les formes nouvelles qui apparaissent dans ce nouveau style de cinéma criminel très populaire et répandu dans la société russe. Pour cela faire, dans un premier temps, la recherche donnera certaines détaillées nécessaires pour illustrer les principaux acteurs et principaux événements de la véritable guerre sanglante des groupement criminelles pendant la Grande Révolution Criminelle Russe de 1988-1994. Dans un deuxième temps, nous analyserons les mécanismes de propagande, véhiculés par le cinéma du genre mafieux et criminel russe dont une partie appartient à l’héritage soviétique. Ces mécanismes de propagande, explicites ou masqués, mais surtout ayant un rôle de promotion pour la toute-puissance Russie, accompagnent cette brutalité d’un style de vie que les occidentaux étudient, afin de le comprendre, depuis des siècles. Un Etat « à part » ainsi que son cinéma, que l'on peut aimer ou détester, mais face auquel on ne peut rester indiffèrent !Ce travail de doctorat s'appuiera sur trois hypothèses :Hypothèse 1 : L'arrivée de la Mafia russe dans les circuits de financement du cinéma est aussi une médiation, une communication entre la vie de l'Organisation et le grand public. Elle s'exprime notamment par la mise en place de ce que nous pourrions appeler une « esthétique mafieuse ».Hypothèse 2 : Les attributs de cette esthétique mafieuse profitent des attributs de l'esthétique à laquelle elle succède : l’esthétique soviétique, le socialisme. La question de la conscientisation de ces transformations est une question cruciale.Hypothèse 3 : Cette esthétique mafieuse, cinématographique opère une communication publique et, donc, une évolution des représentations sociales des spectateurs. Nous allons faire l'évaluation de ces valeurs par le public. / Today, although the Russian mafia and organized crime community is officially defeated, it continues to influence, transform the identity of his « faithful » viewers through by the way of cinema. It's necessary to understand the exchanges between the cinema said « criminal fiction » and its influence on the public reality. On the one hand the Russian mafia identity of cinema was built across the international market and international audiovisual film.The originality of Russian fictional crime genre, in particular, that it was in some cases produced, directed and performed by former criminals, who also faced historical changes, and were influenced by Hollywood mafia movies lived a period of transformation in « cinema professionals », as also the professionals in the field of other arts such as literature, publication, music, television. Such was the case of Vitaly Demochka 1, the former criminal, who became director, producer, actor and writer. The particularity of his case, that he directed and performed his own « life story » on the screen, as well the members of his former criminal team became the fictional heroes of his film « Spets ».In parallel, our work is focused on the study of “communicating objects”, such as a music, behavior, language, dress code, tattoos. Which have become representative as the 'weapon' of mafia propaganda, projected in the cinema and widely recycled in reality, and vice versa. It operates not only the mythification of public communication but therefore, the evolution of the social representations and even transformation of the spectators.

This thesis examines the crime fiction of Mary Helena Fortune (c.18331910). My analysis concentrates on Fortune’s series, “The Detective’s Album”, more than four hundred self-contained crime stories published over forty years that are framed as the “casebook” of a colonial detective, Mark Sinclair. Although this series remains nominally the reminiscences of Sinclair, the stories within the casebook increasingly employ private and amateur detectives, and Sinclair himself transforms from a member of the colonial police force into a private inquiry agent. I characterise this move as constituting a shift from Fortune’s detecting heroes acting essentially as “public avengers” to becoming instead predominantly “private defenders”. Accompanying the evolution of the detective are other structural changes in Fortune’s crime fiction, so that by the 1880s an increasingly private model of detective was more often resolving a domestic mystery in a suburban setting than investigating a violent crime on the mean streets. The central aim of this thesis is to demonstrate the ways in which these transformations relate to the differentiated social and historical conditions within colonial Australia. Through the close analysis of Fortune’s crime texts and examination of the cultural and historical context in which they were produced, the thesis offers perspectives on broad cultural patterns. This thesis draws predominantly on a lineage of critics who have analysed crime fiction using Marxist, Foucauldian and Postcolonialist strategies. I utilise in particular the central paradigm of D. A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police (1988): – his assertion that in the nineteenth-century novel the “move to discard the role of the detective is at the same time a move to disperse the function of detection”. The appearance of private and amateur detectives in Fortune’s crime fiction indicates respectively the professionalisation and privatisation of the mechanism of detection, evolutions that reflect a broad embourgeoisment within her crime corpus. Such a social transformation of nineteenth-century crime fiction occurred across the industrialised world. In British crime fiction, for instance, the ordinary workaday policeman of the 1850s had given way by the 1890s to such independent and professional detectives as Sherlock Holmes. But while the embourgeoisment of crime fiction was an international phenomenon, I argue that in Australian crime fiction the emergence of private and surrogate detectives also performed a second, crucial function: to distance the agent of detection, and demotic crime fiction itself, from the enforcement of imperial order in the colonial landscape. The movement from simple criminal apprehensions to financial and reputation protection also increasingly distances Fortune’s crime fiction from the kind of direct social control necessary to enforce imperial order. v This thesis contains four analytical chapters, each of which is devoted to exploring mechanisms by which Fortune’s crime fiction dispersed the function of detection and concealed the conservative disciplinary order that underpins the fiction. The first three chapters examine familiar forms of fictional detectives: the official police detective; the private and the amateur detective; and the female detective, both official and unofficial. The final analytical chapter examines the way in which the criminal also worked as part of the dispersed function of detection. One of the key ways in which Fortune’s crime fiction works to reinforce disciplinary order is, paradoxically, to make the detectives often fail to solve the crime, so that order is restored only by the collective efforts of several individuals or through the mechanism of fate or an avenging land, or even as a consequence of the criminals’ own actions. Thus Fortune’s crime fiction is not a celebration of virtuoso individualism, as is found in the stories of Sherlock Holmes, but instead of an ethically logical and just world in which order is the product of collective efforts on the part of a largely cohesive community, and in which the apprehension of criminals and restoration of order are presented as inevitable outcomes. Stephen Knight has described Fortune as “internationally the most significant woman writing about crime in the mid-nineteenth century” (Continent of Mystery 4), and yet her impressive corpus of crime fiction has never received extended scholarly attention. This thesis addresses this omission, but more importantly, the conclusions I offer about Mary Fortune’s crime fiction contribute to an understanding of a much larger question about how Australians began to imagine and adopt a national identity in the nineteenth century. It is certainly clear from Fortune’s crime corpus that well before the nationalist-democratic cultural insurrection of the 1890s, Australian fiction already offered versions of the key paradigms that still inflect the national imagination into the twenty-first century.

This thesis examines the crime fiction of Mary Helena Fortune (c.18331910). My analysis concentrates on Fortune’s series, “The Detective’s Album”, more than four hundred self-contained crime stories published over forty years that are framed as the “casebook” of a colonial detective, Mark Sinclair. Although this series remains nominally the reminiscences of Sinclair, the stories within the casebook increasingly employ private and amateur detectives, and Sinclair himself transforms from a member of the colonial police force into a private inquiry agent. I characterise this move as constituting a shift from Fortune’s detecting heroes acting essentially as “public avengers” to becoming instead predominantly “private defenders”. Accompanying the evolution of the detective are other structural changes in Fortune’s crime fiction, so that by the 1880s an increasingly private model of detective was more often resolving a domestic mystery in a suburban setting than investigating a violent crime on the mean streets. The central aim of this thesis is to demonstrate the ways in which these transformations relate to the differentiated social and historical conditions within colonial Australia. Through the close analysis of Fortune’s crime texts and examination of the cultural and historical context in which they were produced, the thesis offers perspectives on broad cultural patterns. This thesis draws predominantly on a lineage of critics who have analysed crime fiction using Marxist, Foucauldian and Postcolonialist strategies. I utilise in particular the central paradigm of D. A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police (1988): – his assertion that in the nineteenth-century novel the “move to discard the role of the detective is at the same time a move to disperse the function of detection”. The appearance of private and amateur detectives in Fortune’s crime fiction indicates respectively the professionalisation and privatisation of the mechanism of detection, evolutions that reflect a broad embourgeoisment within her crime corpus. Such a social transformation of nineteenth-century crime fiction occurred across the industrialised world. In British crime fiction, for instance, the ordinary workaday policeman of the 1850s had given way by the 1890s to such independent and professional detectives as Sherlock Holmes. But while the embourgeoisment of crime fiction was an international phenomenon, I argue that in Australian crime fiction the emergence of private and surrogate detectives also performed a second, crucial function: to distance the agent of detection, and demotic crime fiction itself, from the enforcement of imperial order in the colonial landscape. The movement from simple criminal apprehensions to financial and reputation protection also increasingly distances Fortune’s crime fiction from the kind of direct social control necessary to enforce imperial order. v This thesis contains four analytical chapters, each of which is devoted to exploring mechanisms by which Fortune’s crime fiction dispersed the function of detection and concealed the conservative disciplinary order that underpins the fiction. The first three chapters examine familiar forms of fictional detectives: the official police detective; the private and the amateur detective; and the female detective, both official and unofficial. The final analytical chapter examines the way in which the criminal also worked as part of the dispersed function of detection. One of the key ways in which Fortune’s crime fiction works to reinforce disciplinary order is, paradoxically, to make the detectives often fail to solve the crime, so that order is restored only by the collective efforts of several individuals or through the mechanism of fate or an avenging land, or even as a consequence of the criminals’ own actions. Thus Fortune’s crime fiction is not a celebration of virtuoso individualism, as is found in the stories of Sherlock Holmes, but instead of an ethically logical and just world in which order is the product of collective efforts on the part of a largely cohesive community, and in which the apprehension of criminals and restoration of order are presented as inevitable outcomes. Stephen Knight has described Fortune as “internationally the most significant woman writing about crime in the mid-nineteenth century” (Continent of Mystery 4), and yet her impressive corpus of crime fiction has never received extended scholarly attention. This thesis addresses this omission, but more importantly, the conclusions I offer about Mary Fortune’s crime fiction contribute to an understanding of a much larger question about how Australians began to imagine and adopt a national identity in the nineteenth century. It is certainly clear from Fortune’s crime corpus that well before the nationalist-democratic cultural insurrection of the 1890s, Australian fiction already offered versions of the key paradigms that still inflect the national imagination into the twenty-first century.