Why intersectionality and decolonisation, and why contemporary British crime fiction?

I have a longstanding research interest in the politics of representation and the ways literature can challenge the status quo and promote change. My book establishes two terms in crime fiction scholarship, which I argue are crucial to the critical evaluation of contemporary British crime writing: namely, intersectionality and decolonisation. In this book, I specifically wanted to explore literary representations of intersectionality and decolonisation in contemporary British crime fiction, a body of literature that has often been considered in terms of certain stereotypes of Britishness as reflected in the works of writers like Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. I wanted to challenge readers’ perception of British crime fiction, by highlighting the complexity of this body of work, and exploring the relevance of its thematic investigations of race, class, sexuality, and gender.

There is a persistent tendency to associate British crime fiction with traditional, early 20^th century crime fiction and its detectives, settings, and crimes that perpetuate structures of inequality rather than challenge the social and political roots of crime. Compelling though those detective stories undoubtedly are, they ultimately seek to preserve the social status quo and, through that, uphold certain ideas about Britishness, race, gender, sexuality, and class in relation to criminality and matters of justice. I wanted to explore how contemporary British crime fiction is moving away from those assumptions and the inequality they reflect, instead challenging privilege based on gender, sexuality, race, and class. I decided to focus my investigation around two key contemporary preoccupations that are central to rising academic and cultural debates: namely, intersectionality and decolonisation. It gave me the opportunity to draw important connections between thematic representations, experimentations in popular genre, as well as wider literary, cultural, social, and political developments and changes, in ways I found meaningful and that I hope will chime with the book’s readers.

Which contemporary British crime fiction novels do you explore in the book?

My book undertakes a detailed analysis of four contemporary British crime novels published in the period 1996-2018: John Harvey’s Easy Meat (1996), Stella Duffy’s Mouths of Babes (2005), M.Y. Alam’s Annie Potts Is Dead (1998), and Dorothy Koomson’s The Brighton Mermaid (2018). The examination of these four novels is presented in two distinct, interconnected parts – Part One focusing specifically on intersectionality, and Part Two focusing specifically on decolonisation. These issues are highly significant in terms of how crime and identity are represented in British crime fiction, particularly around issues such as sexuality, race, and class. Through this structure, my book affords a detailed investigation into thematic and stylistic developments in contemporary British crime fiction within those two explicit areas of concern. I selected these particular novels as case studies in the book because they each crystallise and exemplify key questions and debates within British culture and society. Historically, the novels cover the period from the mid-1990s, beginning with the then Conservative government through to the Labour governments of the 1990s and 2000s, up until and including the Conservative government of the 2010s. The changes in social and cultural attitudes and discourses around issues of race, gender, sexuality, and class during this specific era in British society – both in terms of progressive developments and reactionary backlashes – are traced in my exploration of these crime fiction novels.

In my book, I contend that contemporary British crime fiction constitutes a vibrant and constantly evolving body of literature, which is often diverse and experimental, but also explicitly and implicitly political. Instead of examining canonical authors and works that are already heavily attended to by scholars and critics, I wanted to demonstrate how contemporary British crime authors break new ground. My book argues that critics investigating certain subgenres within crime fiction, such as domestic noir, have tended to overlook authors of colour such as Dorothy Koomson, and concluded that domestic noir is a white-centric genre. I argue that this oversight may be based on a failure to consider authors like Koomson who portray domestic noir as part of genre-blending crime narratives that focus explicitly on the experiences and perspectives of women of colour. In examining the representation of LGBTQ+ perspectives in contemporary British crime fiction, my book furthermore focuses on the political crime writing of Stella Duffy. My book argues that Duffy uses the crime genre as a site for exploring themes such as non-normative families, sexuality, and homophobic bullying in schools, and mental health problems caused by repressive social and political measures. As an ally, it is important to me to foreground crime writers and novels that examine forms of oppression and marginalisation experienced by LGBTQ+ individuals and communities and people of colour, and that use the genre’s conventions to promote positive representations and change. These authors’ crime fictions have generally not received the scholarly attention they warrant; however, my book seeks to redress this gap in crime fiction scholarship.

Elaborate on the research methodology you used in the book?

For the purposes of the detailed literary analysis I undertook in this book of selected crime fiction novels, and their structures, representations, and contexts, I devised a methodology based on “intersectional narratology”: an approach variously described by critics Robyn Warhol and Susan S. Lanser, and Suzanne Keen, in their respective scholarly works. The dimensions of intersectionality and decolonisation are imbedded in my methodology, and have informed the selection of those themes, cultural contexts, and narrative features that my textual and narrative analysis identified and investigated. My text selection prioritised novels that offered extensive and complex representations of race, sexuality, gender, and class in their crime plots – themes I have identified as conveying, reflecting, and promoting intersectionality and decolonisation. Thus, my literary analysis was interpretive, analytical, and reflective in its approach, and built on qualitative data I analysed through contextualised close textual study.

The nature of my research in this book meant that I devised my methodology with the specific purpose of producing an in-depth examination of a small number of novels, rather than a perhaps somewhat superficial overview of a larger range of texts. In terms of coverage, because depth and detail of textual analysis formed a key part of my rationale, I had to prioritise my overall focus on decolonisation and intersectionality in a small number of specific novels over complete coverage of crime fiction from all the regions and nations of the UK. In devising my methodology and making my text selections, I was aware that either decision would bring its own challenges and opportunities. As my specific purpose with this book was to investigate how intersectionality and decolonisation inform one another in contemporary British crime fiction and its themes, this methodology worked well and produced the detailed yet wide-ranging discussions I had intended. Crucially, this approach provided me with the scope to establish and widen critical profiles for overlooked or marginalised contemporary British crime writers, providing new ways of reading these authors’ work, and highlighting the innovative, challenging, and politically and culturally significant content of their crime fiction.

What will readers learn about in your book?

My aim with this book is to give readers fresh insight into and new understanding of contemporary British crime fiction and two key issues: namely, intersectionality and decolonisation. The crime fiction genre has been dominated by white privileged masculine detectives for a long time, and British crime fiction has been dominated by its own canon of works and detective figures, such as Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, and Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot. Intersectionality and decolonisation are two major progressive contemporary ideas that promote equality, diversity, and inclusion. In my book, readers can explore how contemporary British crime fiction, far from being stuck in the past or beholden to the tradition and its representations, presents a challenging and increasingly diverse body of literature that foregrounds compelling and timely topics of interest to wide readerships.

Contemporary British crime fiction not only registers but actively comments on political and historical developments, such as the abolishment of Section 28 legislation, debates around adultification and police violence against people of colour, current feminist debates around rape culture, and the need for inclusion and celebration of non-normative families. My book shows readers how these contemporary British crime novels by Harvey, Duffy, Alam, and Koomson reject the faux nostalgia of the Golden Age of British crime fiction and its representations of a British society and culture from a bygone era. Instead, their novels remind readers that progressive social and cultural developments cannot be taken for granted, and that conversative and reactionary forces are constantly pushing back. Therefore, my book argues, scholars and readers need to pay attention to how contemporary British crime fiction continues to challenge boundaries and promote progress and change in its portrayals of crime and the relationship between the individual and society.

My study of contemporary British crime fiction gives readers a means of exploring how authors decolonise the genre, by, as Dorothy Koomson says, featuring women of colour as the protagonists of their stories. The analyses presented in the book furthermore demonstrate to readers the complexities of intersectionality and its portrayal in crime fiction. Readers learn about the application of intersectionality and decolonisation as key analytical and descriptive terms in crime fiction scholarship. Thus, my book provides an in-depth reflection on the implications for methodology of intersectionality and decolonisation, their critical and practical uses as analytical categories, giving detailed examples of how their application in literary and cultural analysis may yield fresh insight by accentuating key themes, ideas, and techniques of textual innovation. There is a tendency among certain critics and academics, still, to dismiss crime fiction as escapism and mere entertainment; however, my book demonstrates that contemporary British crime fiction is a vehicle for contestation and change.

Dr Charlotte Beyer is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at the University of Gloucestershire, UK. She has published widely on crime fiction and contemporary literature. She is the author of the books Murder in a Few Words: Gender, Genre and Location in the Crime Short Story (2020) and Contemporary Children’s and Young Adult Literature: Writing Back to History and Oppression (2021), and the editor of six volumes, including Teaching Crime Fiction (2018) and Decolonising the Literature Curriculum (2022).

Intersectionality and Decolonisation in Contemporary British Crime Fiction is available now at a 25% discount. Enter code PROMO25 to redeem.

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