Crime Fiction in the City

Capital Crimes

By Lucy Andrew, Catherine Phelps

University of Wales Press

Copyright © 2013 The Contributors
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7083-2586-5

Contents

Acknowledgements,
Notes on Contributors,
1 Introduction Lucy Andrew and Catherine Phelps,
2 Edinburgh Ian Rankin,
3 ‘The map that engenders the territory’? Rethinking Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh Gill Plain,
4 Corralling Crime in Cardiff’s Tiger Bay Catherine Phelps,
5 Crimes and Contradictions: the Fictional City of Dublin Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin,
6 From National Authority to Urban Underbelly: Negotiations of Power in Stockholm Crime Fiction Kerstin Bergman,
7 Streets and Squares, Quartiers and Arrondissements: Paris Crime Scenes and the Poetics of Contestation in the Novels of Jean-François Vilar Margaret Atack,
8 The Mysteries of the Vatican: from Nineteenth-century Anti-clerical Propaganda to Dan Brown’s Religious Thrillers Maurizio Ascari,
9 A Tale of Three Cities: Megalopolitan Mysteries of the 1840s Stephen Knight,
Conclusion Lucy Andrew and Catherine Phelps,

CHAPTER 1

Introduction:

LUCY ANDREW AND CATHERINE PHELPS

The growth of the metropolis in the early nineteenth century has been the subject of much commentary by contemporaneous thinkers. Charles Baudelaire and, later, Georg Simmel, both noted the alienation felt by city-dwellers, fuelled in part by the anonymity of the urban space. In his seminal essay, ‘The metropolis and mental life’, Simmel also expanded on the individual’s freedom to develop outside a closed rural community or small town. As many were drawn to the city in search of work, so they left the watchful eye of a familiar and secure community. No wonder, then, that the city became such a popular setting for a relatively new genre: crime fiction. The sprawling urban streets provided a multiplicity of settings from Dickens’s rookeries to the decayed yet aristocratic Fauborg Saint-Germain, home to Poe’s creation, Auguste Dupin. Anonymous and alone amongst a transient population, a criminal could go undetected, even hide behind new identities. This was also true of the urban detective. The Parisian police-chief Eugène-François Vidocq, often referred to as ‘the first detective’, was one who confidently slipped between criminality and legality. Sherlock Holmes, too, became famous for his disguises, allowing him to move undetected on the city streets. This brings us to an aspect of the urban space that crime fiction utilizes so well: the duality inherent in this city space, one where boundaries are crossed, even blurred. A city can provide a centre of authority alongside a ‘seedy underbelly’. Criminals and police rub shoulders while corruption spreads its malign influence to those in authority, exemplified in the twentieth-century crime novels of Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy, both of whom use Los Angeles as a setting. Still, unlike their rural counterparts, cities are in a constant state of flux through decay and regeneration and many crime writers find themselves acting as literary cartographers of an authentic but rapidly changing urban space.

However, this collection considers an aspect of the metropolis that has been neglected: the city as capital. From the mid-nineteenth century, when crime fiction began to emerge as a distinct genre, London, Paris and Rome were established as common settings for European city mysteries. Though later forms, such as the British country house mystery, moved the action to a rural location, in the last few decades there has been a r