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This paper discusses the research project funded by the Young Adult Library Association’s 2021 Frances Henne Research Grant. It sought to explore whether the reading of mystery fiction novels influenced teens’ online misinformation practices; and if so, how. Data collection involved an international survey of readers of Robin Stevens’ Murder Most Unladylike series (alternate title Wells & Wong Mysteries) and Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. Several themes in teens’ responses were represented in the categories of online misinformation practices and mystery fiction reading for both book series, but there was a divergence in the broader attitudes of respondents between book series. From these findings, a series of original activities to support information literacy education for use in library and school contexts were produced with the support of an accredited librarian consultant. This study contributes to our broader understanding of teens’ online misinformation practices and reading practices through incorporating their voices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents a unique technique of creating awareness of white-collar crime by allowing students to interact with actual criminals via Zoom©. After hearing stories about fraud, students completed a survey and wrote reflection papers. Results show that the interaction with stories from the criminals made students more aware of ethical dilemmas and their anticipated responses. Some students articulated the importance of drawing on their Christian faith to make the right decision in these situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the shifting position of "readers" and "writers" within serialized works by Japanese detective fiction author Edogawa Rampo. The essay focuses on two works published at the end of the 1920s and early 1930s: the novella "Beast in the Shadows" and Edogawa's first long-form serialized novel, The Demon of the Lonely Isle. By examining the kinds of magazines in which Edogawa published, as well as the expected readership of those magazines, we discover several important stylistic shifts in Edogawa's writing as he transitions from being a genre fiction short story writer to an author of popular novels. In Edogawa's short detective fiction for niche magazines, the position of the reader and writer overlap, mirroring the way readers of detective fiction magazines often became writers themselves. Edogawa parodies his simultaneous position as dedicated reader and writer of detective novels. Moving to popular magazines and long-form fiction causes those self-parodies to shift into the background. Edogawa severs the correlative or dual position of writer/reader in favor of a detached "author" and consuming "reader". This paper explores the genesis of this change in relation to the development of magazine media in modern Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research paper examines Seishi Yokomizo's first postwar detective novel, The Honjin Murders (1946), which scrutinizes Japanese culture and society, specifically the rural area. This study engages in a thematic analysis of the novel within the context of Japan's experience with the Meiji Enlightenment, the decline of feudalism, the import of Western detective literature, and Japan's postwar shift to democracy. By placing the murder mystery genre in a feudal milieu as the characters struggle to grapple with changing times, Yokomizo enacts the transition of a traditional society into its progression to a modern one. Looking at honor entwined with the act of hara-kiri or seppuku and the contention between traditional and contemporary values, it is found that tradition itself has broken down with the family structure of the Ichiyanagi family as its symbolic representation. While the head of the family, Kenzo Ichiyanagi, has the appearance of a rational individual, he is wrought with the ambivalence of his rural and urban identities; thus, the only true herald of modernity present within the rural boundary is the detective Kosuke Kindaichi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have been investigating detective stories and crime fiction mostly as literary works reflecting the societies that produced them and the movement from modernism to postmodernism. However, these genres have generally been neglected by literary geographers. In the attempt to fill such an epistemological vacuum, this paper examines and compare the function and importance of geography in both classic and late 20th century detective stories. Arthur Conan Doyle's and Agatha Christie's detective stories are compared to Mediterranean noir books by Manuel Montalbán, Andrea Camilleri and Jean Claude Izzo. While space is shown to be at the center of the investigations in the former two authors, the latter rather focus on place, that is space invested by the authors with meaning and feelings of identity and belonging. From this perspective, the article argues that detective investigations have become a narrative medium allowing the readership to explore the writer's representation/construction of his own territorial context, or place-setting, which functions as a co-protagonist of the novel. In conclusion, the paper suggests that the emerging role of place in some of the later popular crime fiction can be interpreted as the result of writer's sentiment of belonging and, according to Appadurai's theory, as a literary and geographical discourse aimed at the production of locality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the intersections between trauma and literature and crime fiction, more specifically. By looking at the representations of trauma in crime fiction, it is argued here that trauma in crime novels involves a multilayered and complex discourse that generates its own narrative, one that relies on techniques like fragmentation, repetition, puzzle-solving, deliberate vagueness, and obscurity. It is also proposed that the use of trauma as a lens to examine crime narratives is both valuable and problematic, as it brings forth the conflict and the tension in the trauma discourse regarding words and wounds; expression and silence; representation and unspeakability. This paper will highlight that exploring the meeting points between trauma and crime narratives can also function as a as a point of departure from the conventional readings of crime fiction and contemplates a reading of the crime novel as trauma fiction. By so doing, this paper stresses the configurations of trauma in crime fiction beyond the medical framework and addresses the aspects and techniques in which trauma is centrally positioned in crime narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Satō Haruo's "Okāsan" ("Mother") is a story that was published in Josei (Woman) magazine in October 1926. The plot follows "I" as he listens to the words of the parrot he bought from the pet store and deduces and fantasizes freely about her previous home. In this paper, I spotlight the fact that the home that "I" envisions through the voice of the parrot, Laura, corresponds to the family image that was being presented concurrently in Josei magazine and showcased that the ideal family was simply nothing more than an ideal. In relativizing Josei's familial discourse, and in this relationship between the published magazine and the story, I argue for the latter's importance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminist discourses on the "New Indian Woman" focus on the woman's body as a surface upon which modernity is inscribed. Sexual transgression has been the only lens through which the New Woman has been usually studied and analyzed until now, thus offering a superficial definition of modernity by women being defined only by the corporeal. This is problematic not only because it offers a reductionist view of modernity but also "constructs a boundary around the notion of modern womanhood that excludes woman whose bodily autonomy has been compromised, for example through sexual assault" (Daya, "Embodying Modernity" 97). This paper will study two novels, Kishwar Desai's Witness the Night (2010) and Kalpana Swaminathan's I Never Knew It Was You (2012), closely analyzing the women sleuths as portrayed in these texts: Simran Singh in the former, Lalli and Sita in the latter. The paper will move beyond the existing discourses on the New Indian woman and demonstrate how the New Woman in these narratives of detection is transgressive in contesting dominant ideals of femininity. The aim will be to understand how these women detectives contest and challenge patriarchal hegemonies through their behavior and how their acts of detection also are essential acts of rebellion against a largely misogynistic system. Swaminathan's Lalli and Sita and Desai's Simran can be seen as a reflection of the uninhibited, independent, professional, twenty-first century Indian woman. The paper seeks to reconstruct the figure of the New Indian woman through the representations of these women fighting crimes against women in modern-day India, enacting their autonomy and rebellion in the process by deftly taking on the role of a detective, traditionally a profession for men. The aim will also be to discuss how these works provide a space for creating new roles for women, while also illustrating a wide spectrum of women's experiences. Lastly, the paper will explore these works in the context of India's economic growth and how they affect and are affected by India's publishing industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crime novel is considered one of the most important innovations of the twentieth century in the field of fiction. Together with cinema, television and "elite" literature which often take over some of its features (themes and plots), it plays a significant role in creating the representation of reality proposed to the readers. The investigation described in the novels is set in a context which refers to the real world, in its social, political or historical aspects. The realistic dimension of the crime story makes it a kind of "social document", which attracts the attention of researchers, including non-literary scholars. Reading crime novels allows them to acquire strictly literary information, but also some knowledge about communities, which leads them to an interpretation of relationships between literature and society. In this paper, the translated crime novel is seen as a special means of enriching the reader's knowledge of the source culture. The realistic character of the work, which is supposed to fulfil a primarily ludic function, implies a certain tension in the work of the translator, who is led to ask himself: "shall I entertain or shall I entertain and teach"? If realism becomes a constitutive feature of crime fiction, if, as stated by Maryse Petit and Gilles Menegaldo, "under the pretext of attracting a crime novel client, the intention is to give him a history lesson or to make him think about a certain state of society", the translator may be bound to include in the translation some elements that supplement the "encyclopaedic" knowledge of the target reader. The analysis is based on two novels by Marek Krajewski - his first novel, Death in Breslau (1999), set in the inter-war period, featuring the German policeman Eberhard Mock, and The Minotaur s Head, published a decade later, which action takes Mock to Lwów in the time when it was a Polish city and makes him befriend a Polish commissioner, Popielski. A comparison of some of their translations (eight for the first book, three for the second) shows differences in the treatment of the historical component of the novels, both in the treatment of selected text elements, as a result of the translator's project, and in the peritexts, which, however, usually do not depend on the translator, but on the publisher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The phrase "femme fatale" is a well-known figure in the literary and cultural representations of women. Associated with evil temptation, the femme fatale is an iconic figure that has been appropriated into folklore, literature, and mythology. In the twentieth century, the figure finds space in literary and cinematic endeavours, particularly in crime fiction and noir thrillers. The progenitors of the hard-boiled genre of detective fiction popularised the figure of a sexually seductive and promiscuous woman who betrays men for material gain. Walter Mosley, an African American detective fiction writer, adapted the hard-boiled formula popularised by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, but altered it to address socio-political issues concerning the condition of African Americans in the post-World War II era. Mosley followed Chandler's lead in weaving a quest narrative around femme fatale Daphne Monet in his first novel, Devil in a Blue Dress (1990). The purpose of this paper is to look at Mosley's treatment of the femme fatale figure in this novel. The methodology employed is a close analysis of the text, as well as an analysis of the figure of the femme fatale in its function as catalyst for men's behaviour. The purpose of this study is to examine how the femme fatale was created, specifically what elements contributed to Daphne Monet's transformation into a femme fatale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The paper reports the results of a quantitative and qualitative study concerning the pragmatic functions of proper names used anaphorically in a corpus of six British crime stories by three different authors. It evokes previous studies claiming that person references in conversation may do more than referring, and it relies on previous works on marked/overspecified anaphoric expressions in narrative texts. The analysis attempts to pin down the pragmatically-derived meanings resulting from anaphoric name forms occurring within paragraphs, that is, at paragraph starts and in the remaining paragraph sentences, and across paragraphs, that is, in contiguous paragraphs as well as in all the paragraphs of a story. Even though anaphoric name forms generally are still underexplored, they turn out to be the second category of anaphoric expressions being used after third-person pronouns. The results disconfirm that paragraphs preserve continued pronominalization. Various shifts, e.g. of topic, viewpoint, and utterer shifts can occur within paragraphs just as at paragraph starts. Selected passages show in detail which form suggests which shift in which context. Moreover, repetitions of the same name form within paragraphs and throughout stories suggest further implied meanings dealing with the relationships between characters and the authors' manipulations of person references. • Anaphoric name forms alone do not foster explanations about their functions; the co-text is essential. • Anaphoric name forms imply different kinds of shifts across as well as within paragraphs. • Continued pronominalization is not preserved within paragraphs. • Anaphoric name forms may be used to mislead or warn readers about suspects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social science research argues that differences in individuals' literary and cultural tastes originate in social environments. Yet, it might be that these differences are partly associated with genetic differences between individuals. To address this possibility, we use nation-scale registry data on library borrowing among Danish twins (N = 67,900) to assess the heritability of literary tastes. We measure literary tastes via borrowing of books of different genres (e.g., crime and biographical novels) and formats (physical, digital, and audio) and decompose the total variance in literary tastes into components attributable to shared genes (heritability), shared environments (social environment shared by siblings), and unique environments (social environments not shared by siblings). We find that genetic differences account for 45–70 percent of the total variance in literary tastes, shared environments account for almost none of the variance, and unique environments account for a moderate share. These results suggest that literary tastes are approximately as heritable as other human phenotypes (e.g., physical traits, cognition, and health). Moreover, heritability is higher for socioeconomically disadvantaged groups than for advantaged groups. Overall, our results suggest that research should consider the role of genetic differences in accounting for individual differences in literary and broader cultural tastes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This qualitative narrative study presents three stories told by older community-dwelling partners to spouses moving into long-term care facilities because of cognitive decline. Applying Alvesson and Kärreman's mystery method to these stories reveals that when spouses' caring needs increase, care partners must take on increasing loads of practical work and responsibilities. These partners become lost in the transitions between care work, extended family, and attending to their couplehood. When their spouses move into long-term care, living apart presents new challenges of care and couplehood, each day presenting new and unforeseen tasks to manage. Our findings suggest that if couplehood is to be maintained, well-established habits and work division between the spousal partners are both drivers and barriers. It necessitates agency, creativity from the community-dwelling partner, as well as a supportive extended family and sufficient economic resources. More knowledge is required regarding the interdependent expectations between the next-of-kin, long-term care residents, and caregiving staff members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the strange eco-cosmopolitan detective attributes of Ivon, the protagonist in Alicia Gaspar de Alba's 2005 novel Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders. Through this willful, queer, and feminist mestiza character, who continually trespasses and transgresses cultural borders, Gaspar de Alba challenges the standards of crime fiction in numerous ways, as argued in this paper. Moreover, she also manages to expose the transnational dimension of the exploitation, mistreatment, and even murder of women in Ciudad Juárez. Simultaneously, Ivon's eco-cosmopolitanism acknowledges how the expendability thinking of free trade that partly sanctions the murder of women, also results in the environmental degradation of, and the free flow of toxins and pollution in the border. Ultimately, Ivon's strange, eco-cosmopolitan investigative traits, serve as the tools to break the silence and start confronting the feminicides in Ciudad Juárez as well as the socio-environmental exploitation of the US-Mexico border region, fostering a positive socio-environmental change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research paper "Structural and Narratological Analysis of a Commercial plot: The Heist Artist By Vish Dhamija" does a structural narratological analysis of the commercial crime fiction The heist artist using the LOCK System, a method for analysis devised by James Scott Bell. It highlights the difference between different types of plot and narrative techniques used. The use of suspense, surprise, and mystery has also been looked into. The field of psychological analysis of this book has also been looked into. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]