Animals in Detective Fiction

311 Pages·2022·5.458 MB·English

by  Ruth Hawthorn, John Miller

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN ANIMALS AND LITERATURE
Animals in
Detective Fiction
Edited by
Ruth Hawthorn · John Miller
Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature
Series Editors
Susan McHugh
Department of English
University of New England
Auburn, ME, USA
Robert McKay
School of English
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK
John Miller
School of English
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK
Various academic disciplines can now be found in the process of executing
an ‘animal turn’, questioning the ethical and philosophical grounds of
human exceptionalism by taking seriously the non-human animal presences
that haunt the margins of history, anthropology, philosophy, sociology
and literary studies. Such work is characterised by a series of broad, cross-
disciplinary questions. How might we rethink and problematise the sepa-
ration of the human from other animals? What are the ethical and political
stakes of our relationships with other species? How might we locate and
understand the agency of animals in human cultures?
This series publishes work that looks, specifically, at the implications of
the ‘animal turn’ for the field of English Studies. Language is often
thought of as the key marker of humanity’s difference from other species;
animals may have codes, calls or songs, but humans have a mode of com-
munication of a wholly other order. The primary motivation is to muddy
this assumption and to animalise the canons of English Literature by
rethinking representations of animals and interspecies encounter. Whereas
animals are conventionally read as objects of fable, allegory or metaphor
(and as signs of specifically human concerns), this series significantly
extends the new insights of interdisciplinary animal studies by tracing the
engagement of such figuration with the material lives of animals. It exam-
ines textual cultures as variously embodying a debt to or an intimacy with
animals and advances understanding of how the aesthetic engagements of
literary arts have always done more than simply illustrate natural history.
We publish studies of the representation of animals in literary texts from
the Middle Ages to the present and with reference to the discipline’s key
thematic concerns, genres and critical methods. The series focuses on lit-
erary prose and poetry, while also accommodating related discussion of
the full range of materials and texts and contexts (from theatre and film to
fine art, journalism, the law, popular writing and other cultural ephemera)
with which English studies now engages.
Series Board: Karl Steel (Brooklyn College); Erica Fudge (Strathclyde);
Kevin Hutchings (UNBC); Philip Armstrong (Canterbury); Carrie
Rohman (Lafayette); Wendy Woodward (Western Cape)
Ruth Hawthorn • John Miller
Editors
Animals in Detective
Fiction
Editors
Ruth Hawthorn John Miller
University of Lincoln University of Sheffield
Lincoln, UK Sheffield, UK
ISSN 2634-6338 ISSN 2634-6346 (electronic)
Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature
ISBN 978-3-031-09240-4 ISBN 978-3-031-09241-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09241-1
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2022
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A
cknowledgements
This book has been a long time coming. We would like to thank the out-
standing roster of contributors for their diligence, expertise, kindness and
patience in bringing this volume to fruition. Allie Troyanos and Rachel
Jacobe have been models of professionalism throughout. We are grateful
to the series co-editors of Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature,
Susan McHugh and Bob McKay for their support for the project. As
always we owe a great debt to colleagues and students at the University of
Lincoln and the University of Sheffield for making the book possible in so
many ways. Particular thanks are due to Emily Thew and Sarah Bezan,
who played important roles in shaping and realising the project.
v
c
ontents
Origins and Evolutions: The Brutal History of Detective Fiction 1
Ruth Hawthorn and John Miller
Ontologies 25
Tigers, Criminals, Rogues: Animality in Dickens’ Detective
Fiction 27
Giles Whiteley
Quantum Entanglements in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound
of the Baskervilles 47
Adrian Tait
Wolverines, Werewolves and Demon Dogs: Animality,
Criminality and Classification in James Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet 65
Nathan Ashman
Ethics 83
The Psittacine Witness: Parrot Talk and Animal Ethics in Earl
Derr Biggers’ The Chinese Parrot and Earl Stanley Gardner’s
The Case of the Perjured Parrot 85
John Miller
vii
viii CoNTENTS
Ecology, Capability and Companion Species: Conflicting
Ethics in Nevada Barr’s Blood Lure 105
Karin Molander Danielsson
Laboratory Tech-Noir: Genre, Narrative Form, and the
Literary Model Organism in Jay Hosking’s Three Years with
the Rat 127
Jordan Sheridan
Reptiles, Buddhism, and Detection in John Burdett’s
Bangkok 8 147
Nicole Kenley
Politics 169
Animals, Biopolitics, and Sensation Fiction: M. E. Braddon’s
Lady Audley’s Secret 171
Michael Parrish Lee
“The Motto of the Mollusc”: Patricia Highsmith and the
Semiotics of Snails 191
Sally West
“Before the white man came, when animals still talked”:
Colonial Creatures in Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer and
Adrian C. Louis’s Skins 211
Alexandra Hauke
Forms 233
Aping the Classics: Terry Pratchett’s Satirical Animals and
Detective Fiction 235
Briony Frost
CoNTENTS ix
Animal Image and Human Logos in Graphic Detective Fiction 259
Joseph Anderton
“As easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket”:
Animetaphor in Raymond Chandler and Jonathan Lethem 281
Ruth Hawthorn
Index 301
n c
otes on ontributors
Joseph Anderton is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Birmingham City
University. He is the author of the monograph, Beckett’s Creatures: Art of
Failure after the Holocaust (Bloomsbury, 2016) and the journal article
“Vegetating Life and the Spirit of Modernism” in Modernism/modernity (John
Hopkins, 2019). He has published several journal articles and book chapters on
literary animal studies and the non-h uman, in relation to Samuel Beckett, Franz
Kafka, J.M. Coetzee and Paul Auster, including in Beyond the Human-Animal
Divide (Palgrave, 2017), Twentieth-Century Literature (Hofstra University,
2016), Screening the Nonhuman (Lexington, 2016), Performance Research
(Routledge, 2015), and Beckett and Animals (CUP, 2013).
Nathan Ashman is Lecturer in Crime Writing at the University of East
Anglia and the author of James Ellroy and Voyeur Fiction (2018). His
research spans the fields of crime fiction, contemporary American fiction,
and ecocriticism, with a particular specialism in the works of James Ellroy.
Karin Molander Danielsson holds a PhD in English from Uppsala
University, Sweden. Her thesis investigated special interests and seriality in
contemporary detective fiction. She has been Senior Lecturer in English at
Mälardalen University, Västerås, Sweden since 2006, and a member of the
research group Ecocritical forum since 2008. Her research interests are
animal studies, ecocriticism, detective fiction, American literary natural-
ism, and narrative studies. Publications include “Unreadable Nonhumans,
Ambiguity and Alterity in Eric Linklater’s Short Fiction” (Green Letters,
2022) and “‘And in that Moment I Leapt upon his Shoulder.’ Non-human
Intradiegetic Narrators in The Wind on the Moon” (Humanities, 2017). 
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