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In the article, the author discusses terminal naturalism and the depiction of Victorian noir in literature by analyzing the novel "Waltz into Darkness" by American pulp writer Cornell Woolrich. Also cited are a comparison of the novel with Woolrich's other works like "The Bride Wore Black" and "I Married a Dead Man," and the novels' topics like human desires, murder, and cosmic determinism.

The paper attempts to critically examine Allan Moore's Watchmen in terms of its elements that could be utilised for critical power thinking and the critique of fanatic and/or apolitical self-proclaimed saviours of society. The first part of the paper attempts to read Rorschach through the prism of critical criminology, as he represents the novel's most distinct expression of revenge and retribution, which, eventually, is linked to fascist-like practices. The second part of the paper is dedicated to the reading of Veidt's macabre plan and his set of advice for self-care in terms of a twofold biopolitical strategy that entails both the thanatopolitical effect of killing millions for the sake of life itself and preaching the need for the latter's optimisation to achieve individual and collective happiness. In the end, Watchmen is a 'superhero neo-noir' critique to both worldviews, since its point of departure is the critique of superheroes overall, as 'nothing works' and therefore 'nothing ever ends' if the structural reasons behind unfairness and oppression remain untouched. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the novel Bioy (2012) by Diego Trelles Paz (Lima, 1977), considering its links with the traditional detective story and the American hardboiled novel. It explores the effects of violence in bodies and subjectivities of masculine and female characters employing the three dimensions of violence proposed by Johan Galtung. In addition, the article identifies a break with some of the hardboiled novel´s elements, particularly those related with the system of characters, as well as the use of multiple voices and narrative perspectives, all this considering the ability of a genre whose history has been typified by a principle of obsolescence (a concept proposed by Jacques Dubois) suitable for a narrative that portrays a society in crisis and exposed to violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quadrupling the number of unreliable narrators employed in her worldwide bestseller The Girl on the Train (2015), Paula Hawkins's second novel titled Into the Water (2017) continues her exploration of the convoluted geographies of memory associated with women's mystery-shrouded deaths. A Slow Fire Burning (2021) extends this domestic-noir theme while connecting it intratextually to an experimental crime novel written by one of the male characters. In both of these recent works employing narratological montage, Hawkins cunningly draws attention to what might be called the mnemonics of fiction—that is, of the stories we tell ourselves and others. Her post-postmodernist tales, however, take the idea of truth seriously, even if it is one shorn of the premise of logocentrism and ultimacy. In the process she seems devoted to plumbing the intricacies of William Faulkner's conundrum in Light in August (1932): "Memory believes before knowing remembers". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an interdisciplinary study of Gérard Delteil's Les Écœurés, a 2019 novel that was marketed as a "le premier polar en Gilet Jaune." In this essay, we explore the generic tensions that arise when murder mystery intersects with socioeconomic criticism in our age of advanced capitalism. We argue that Les Écœurés functions differently when read through a sociological prism than it does as a noir or polar. We demonstrate that analysis of social media data shows that Delteil captures quite well and to a large extent reproduces the concerns of the Gilets Jaunes movement, while at the same time showcasing the dispiriting durability of a corrupt establishment. Second, on the level of character, we maintain that in presenting a drably failed bildungsroman, the novel undercuts the importance of any individual agency or élan. And third, we argue that on the level of genre, the text—by sidelining its own murder mystery—raises questions about the force and relevance of crime fiction as a potential agent of social change. Ultimately, we maintain that the very failures in and of Les Écœurés point metatextually to the novel's position as an artifact of the period and as embodiment of the Gilets Jaunes movement's likely fate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares two works picked by celebrity book clubs in the summer of 2018 for their dissection of mainstream America's ongoing obsession with the violence inflicted on beautiful young bodies of those who identify as female: Alice Bolin's essay collection Dead Girls and Maria Hummel's mystery Still Lives. In reading them together with Melanie Pullen's High Fashion Crime Scenes (2003–2017), a series of monumental, five-feet-by-six-feet photographs in which well-known actresses and models dressed in haute couture were staged as murder victims in elaborately designed settings mostly in and around Los Angeles; Rosi Braidotti's accounting of the two competing notions of life, bios and zoe, and how they coincide on gendered human bodies; and W.J.T. Mitchell's understanding of images' uncanny ability to live on and to animate bodies, my analyses consider the way different forms of artistic representation emerging in Los Angeles work for and against the biopolitical control of objectified, gendered life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes that Charles Williams's mid-twentieth-century noir fiction reshapes post-war representations of gender roles and paves the way for various renditions and developments of noir. Williams's works are narratives of transgression meeting domesticity, crime meeting docility, and cunning meeting conformity; they portray a deadly recipe that comprises different, even conflicting ingredients of a fusion between domesticity, crime, and suspense. By examining the recurring figure of the criminal housewife in his work, especially Hell Hath No Fury (1953), this article argues that Williams brings forth a complex and subversive gender schema to trouble both the creed of domesticity popular in the 1950s and the stereotyping of the lethal seductress prevalent in noir fiction. By so doing, Williams's noir not only brings the transgression of women to the fore but also displays a compelling picture of post-war gender roles in the US under McCarthyism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the representation of female assassins in Spanish crime fiction written by women, situating it in the context of the recent resurgence of domestic noir. After briefly commenting on the contemporary domestic noir phenomenon, this article analyses in detail two short stories, published in the collection Noves dames del crim (2015, edited by Anna Maria Villalonga): Gemma Pasqual i Escrivà's 'La carnissera' and Rosa Ribas's 'Els noms dels animals'. The aim is to demonstrate that the figure of a housewife who kills her husband because of the abuses she has suffered suggests a degree of female disenchantment with post-feminism and with the recent recession-era retreat to domesticity, and points to a (re)turn to 'older' versions of feminism to address the newly visible, but always existent, social inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a literary criticism of the books "Ride the Pink Horse" and "The Expendable Man," by Dorothy B. Hughes. The author explores these works within the literary genre of noir American crime fiction, discusses their critique of cultural charms in American society, and examines the traditional masculinity within such fiction.

In this study, S.T.A.L.K.E.R video game is analyzed in the perspective of game form, by comparing it to the source material: Roadside Picnic novel and Stalker movie. Roadside Picnic combines science fiction and noir genres in a story set in the near future and presents human relations in their mundane reality. By replacing science fiction with paranormal, Tarkovsky's Stalker focuses on themes like hope, life and faith. S.T.A.L.K.E.R's theme is much closer to the book by including science fiction elements and leaving the player around other characters, which have their own needs and search in a destructed environment. Like any other medium with its own language and tools, games also have their own expressive capabilities. Game formalism (ludology) as an approach is followed by Aarseth, Juul, Frasca and others in game studies literature. Comparative video-game analysis is suggested by Bogost for cases similar to this study. Game formalist and comparative analysis of S.T.A.L.K.E.R reveals how games convey their subjects, set the atmosphere, which tools they use and how they produce different meanings. Game mechanics, gameplay and game world are important elements for game narratives. In the study, the differences and similarities between the book, the game and the movie has been determined. In current climate where games are associated with violence and addiction, in-depth study of S.T.A.L.K.E.R shows that much deeper meanings and possibilities lie in video games. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a literary criticism of the noir crime fiction novels "The Killer Inside Me," "Savage Night," and "A Hell of a Woman," all by Jim Thompson. The author explores how each work presents entropic disintegration, examines their fostering of a postwar paranoia of otherness, and discusses the relation to the onslaught of serial killers of the 1970s.

The auto reflects on the progress of the Women in Crime organisation since its launch in 1991 in Melbourne, Victoria and the reasons behind women writer's turn to crime novels over the past three decades. Topics discussed are origins of Sisters in Crime Australia and its partnership with various literary events and institutions, the popularity of women domestic noir in Australia, and crime fiction as a genre that allows writers to explore issues from different time periods.

Nordic noir is a popular crime genre associated with a region (Scandinavia), a narrative style (unpretentious/socially critical) and a particular aesthetic look (dark/foreboding). Renowned for its psychologically complex characterization and gloomy Mise-en-scène, and spanning best-selling crime fiction, film, and globally successful television drama, Nordic noir has mushroomed from regional niche market to international phenomenon in little more than a decade. A review of both popular and academic accounts of the genre suggest that much of Nordic noir's appeal comes from its supposed 'gritty' or 'realist' account of Scandinavian society. This paper, however, adopts a different perspective. Drawing on cultural criminology, ultra-realism and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, we argue that, rather than accurately reflecting the complex social and political problems currently confronting late modern Scandinavian welfare societies, Nordic noir has lost its grip on realism and any meaningful association with actual/established Scandinavian values. Instead, Nordic noir is now functioning as a displacement narrative, a form of cultural expression that allows artists, producers and their audiences to push the region's social problems outside the realm even of the Imaginary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including Darwinian insights, prosocial aspects of human evolution, and social dysfunction.

Taking Moronga (2018), by Salvadorian author Horacio Castellanos Moya, as a point of departure, this article focuses on the reinterpretation of mainstream crime fiction in Latin American terms. This new approach is made from both formal and thematic perspectives. Moronga is structurally fragmented; the traditional detective figure has disappeared, and the plot does not revolve around a single crime but denounces a society at large which is characterized by paranoid surveillance. The reinterpretation of the crime fiction genre in Latin American terms has opened up two different strands of noir: firstly, the so-called 'post-neopolicial' where crime is a mere backdrop to formal experimentation, and secondly, what Ricardo Piglia refers to as 'ficción paranoica' [paranoiac fiction]. Moronga is a good example of both these strands, making it an appropriate case study to analyse the ways in which Hispanic literature deviates from classic Anglophone crime fiction (particularly the North American hardboiled tradition). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Giles Blunt's Cardinal police-procedural novels and their recent television adaptations evidence the noir genre's sombre aesthetic, focus on a morally tainted hero, are preoccupied with seemingly irrational violence, and fixate on unresolved past injustices. In doing so, they reflect Canada's aesthetic and ethical relationship to questions of national and transnational culture, colonial territoriality, and the moral principles at stake in the representation of violence. This Canadian 're-branding' of noir features is haunted by deep-seated historical dissension and the present-day repercussions that are at the heart of the country's national identity. Focusing on the first season of Cardinal (2017) and the novel from which it was adapted, Forty Words for Sorrow (2002), this essay examines the series' stylish – if conflicted – reworking of noir's roots in American crime fiction and film, and its use of contemporary Nordic influences, which work to salvage a form of Canadian cultural authenticity from the cultural dominance of US television and film crime dramas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, which focuses on African noir as a variety of neo-noir literature, begins by outlining the intertextual and intercultural relationships between classic noir and African noir. Thereafter, the postcolonial, postmodernist and transnational elements of African noir are described utilizing Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ's novel Black Star Nairobi (2013) and Leye Adenle's When Trouble Sleeps (2018) as exemplars. Arguing that African noir draws on various genres and discourses, the article demonstrates how issues of socio-political justice, ontological and existential dilemmas, aesthetic concerns and the epistemological quest are rendered as ambiguous and murky. Based on a close reading of Black Star Nairobi and When Trouble Sleeps , the article concludes that the predominant chiaroscuro effect of African noir is not so much a 'dark' sensibility as one of abstruseness and poignant Afro-pessimism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The region of Lorraine is often seen as paradigmatic of the social problems arising from deindustrialization in France. Noir novels set in the region offer rich re-imaginings of the landscapes of deindustrialization, both geographical and social. This article examines what noir aesthetics do to these landscapes, studying a corpus of novels from four writers. In the first section, the article looks at how the novels engage with deindustrialization through ruins and natural environments. In the second section, the article examines how Dominique Manotti's Lorraine Connection critiques the policies of reindustrialization implemented in the region since the late 1980s. The article concludes with an analysis of how noir genre conventions allow the novels to critique the cruel optimism of reindustrialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is generally agreed that Galician crime fiction began in 1984, when Carlos G. Reigosa's Crime en Compostela was published. Since then, different authors have explored the genre with varying success. One of the best-known writers of Galician crime fiction is Diego Ameixeiras, who published eleven novels between 2004 (Baixo mínimos) and 2018 (A crueldade de abril). This paper will focus on Ameixeiras's works, in particular Baixo mínimos and A noite enriba (2015). The distance between their dates of publication will allow us to highlight through their differences in structure and style the clear evolution in Ameixeiras's narrative production from parody to social critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine noir representations of Bradford, that important West Yorkshire city which, as one British-Punjabi character's mispronunciation suggests, has been transformed by South Asian Muslim migration. I examine a trilogy: M. Y. Alam's Bradford noir novels Annie Potts is Dead , Kilo and Red Laal (1998−2012), and a tetralogy: A. A. Dhand's Streets of Darkness , Girl Zero , City of Sinners and One Way Out (2016−2019). These novels explore the biradari or kinship system evoked by Atia Hosain's character in her neologism 'Biradforrd'. They also focus, among other matters, on Bradford's predominantly Mirpuri community from the Azad Kashmir region of northeast Pakistan. I argue that despite their different religious backgrounds, Alam and Dhand are both from the 'myth of return' class and generation, and portray from the inside Bradfordians' ghettoized deprivation, drugs problem and vulnerability to racist and Islamophobic abuse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the use of noir genres to represent the journey of Central American migrants traversing Mexico in the chronicles in Los migrantes que no importan: en el camino con los centroamericanos indocumentados by Óscar Martínez, written after he traveled the migrant trails investigating violence against migrants for El Faro, the groundbreaking Salvadoran digital newspaper. He set out to understand the migrant journey and, particularly, the many dangers migrants face en route. He frames his role in the journey as that of detective, engaging in inquiries and recounting crimes to be solved. His crónicas negras utilize conventions from popular crime genres, like nota roja crime reporting and novela negra fictions, namely, a fearful affective charge associated with the distinct geographic spaces Martínez traverses, where migrants confront various forms of violence. The journalist-detective thus investigates, narrates, and exposes the crimes against these migrants, locating individual stories and testimonials within a larger sociopolitical and economic critique and mapping them out on Mexican territory. These texts combine three salient Latin American literary traditions: the chronicle, novela negra, and testimonio. By linking violence, place, and migrant testimony, Martínez's writing surpasses the sociopolitical superficiality of certain popular crime genres. He concocts a suspenseful narrative that denounces the State and criminal groups responsible for exploiting migrants. In this way, the noir chronicles in Los migrantes que no importan contribute to a deeper understanding of transnational migrations in Central American, Mexican, and US spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I show how a vision for the Nordic region exists as a banal Nordism, based on years of content exchange, Nordic co-production models, and public funding opportunities. I document how new commercial players have been able to gain a very large market share in only a few years, significantly disrupting the reach of public service broadcasters in the Nordic region. The three largest contemporary commercial players on the Nordic market - Viaplay, HBO, and Netflix - have been able to, in very different ways, tap into the ideology of banal Nordism and the geopolitical unity of the Nordic region, and they have done so by producing and acquiring content that has deep associations with one of the Nordic region's main international brands: Scandinavian crime fiction and Nordic Noir. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bonnie Jo Campbell's work, much of it taking place in rural Michigan, has been labeled "country (or rural) noir," a subcategory of noir fiction. Two stories from Mothers, Tell Your Daughters, "Playhouse" and "To You, as a Woman," reframe the noir genre not only through their focus on country noir themes but through their concentration on female noir characters. While both stories seem to incorporate the noir motif of the protagonist doomed by his or her making as well as that of the femme fatale, Campbell places her protagonists' choices within the larger context of a warped culture that limits the power of lower class female protagonists. Campbell depicts a culture different from that of conventional noir in which there is rampant tolerance of violent crime. In the culture Campbell portrays, by contrast, sexual violence against women is not even considered a crime. In these stories, the protagonists begin to come to an incipient awareness of their culture's crimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses green aesthetic thought or ecological awareness and the dark fictional domain called noir. Topics discussed include the emergence of ecological awareness as a pervasive traumatic or pretraumatic imaginary, narrrativization of traumatic ecological awareness by crime fiction or violent popular fiction, and the articulation of the green and the black.

This article discusses genre and aesthetics in the "Sin City" series of graphic novels by Frank Miller. The article focuses on the fourth volume in the series "That Yellow Bastard." The author states that the volume is strongly connected to the realm of noir and to 20th-century traditions of visual art both inside and outside the realm of comics. Miller has expressed interest in exploring moral corruption and the violence he believes is necessary to combat it. The article also discusses the noir hero, the influence of author Raymond Chandler, and genre as a necessary component of interpretation.

If the dozens of titles in the noir series of Akashic Books is an indicator of popularity, then crime and noir fiction are having a renaissance. Once shunned as a lower form of literature, this genre now garners increased attention from literary scholars. Crime novels set in cities of the Global South, such as Mumbai and Dakar, have piqued literary critics' interest; postcolonial tensions add an extra layer to the mysteries at hand. In this article, I situate contemporary urban Haitian literature in the postcolonial noir space. I argue for the creation of a new term: the Haitian noir aesthetic. By analyzing three novels set in contemporary Port-au-Prince, I demonstrate how urban Haitian fiction can be read as a Haiti-specific noir genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the book “La ciudad ausente” by Ricardo Piglia is presented. opics discussed include information on the literary experience of the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger and author, Ricardo Piglia; discussions on the Noir detective fiction book, "Respiración artificial" by the Ricardo Piglia; and the information on the seminal work of Martin Heidegger in his book, "Being and Time" reposition the whole of western philosophy away from the central consideration of thought.

The global popularity of Nordic Noir, such as the Danish/Swedish production Broen, The Danish production Forbrydelsen, its U.S. and U.K. remakes, the Danish/Swedish production The Millennium Trilogy seems to depend on its insistent interest in a set of maladjusted female detectives. The by now seven seasons of the U.S production Homeland have a similar focus. In this essay, we argue that the struggle these female protagonists endure between extreme potency on the one hand and shameful psychic problems on the other is linked to how these female detectives represent the female position in film in general. Turning to traditional and ongoing discussions in feminist film theory, and combining queer studies and sociological and psychoanalytic perspectives with recognition theory (Felski/Coplan), we ask how we as spectators relate to these women in terms of recognition. In line with that, we ask whether these female detectives should be considered feminist icons who challenge traditional gendered poses on film, or whether, due to their dysfunctionalities, they came to represent some kind of otherness that we sympathize with but also fail to identify with. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Ricardo Piglia's use of the noir tradition in his short novella Nombre Falso in order to map the interdependence of the abstract and the material. Piglia's concept of literary crime allows us to triangulate the convergence of thought, literature or exchange value on one hand, with corporeality or material production on the other. Whether we are talking about textual burglary, stolen identities, or the fiction of capital, literary crime engenders a material, bodily experience. While plenty of scholarship surrounding Piglia's work has zeroed in on his engagement with the literary tradition, I try to show how literature becomes a mode of being and of existing. Piglia's characters take on false identities and claim foreign texts as their own, and thus find themselves out of place within their immediate storyline. The fact that they position themselves against their symbolic environment cues a sort of bodily tension, which, I argue, is a key part of Piglia's notion of literary experience and crime. The author takes all of the literary subterfuge so common to the noir genre through the stolen identities, the impostors and the lies in order to posit a sense of material experience. In a second step, I show how money and capitalist ideology also unchain a similarly tangible engagement with the material world. The seductive properties of exchange value beget a kind of material desire that is key for understanding Piglia's view of crime within capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay questions what relevance the genre of noir might play in the representation of today's degraded environments. I argue that Nunn's novels offer readers an important and startling alternative model of California to that suggested by the mythology of the Golden State--an idyllic paradise that provides its inhabitants with daily doses of sunshine, ocean breezes and avocado. In Nunn's surf novels, California is a violent and unpleasant space, in which even the most isolated and exurban natural environments are fallen worlds marred by unlimited development. I argue that noir--a genre that has not yet played a large role in ecocritical analysis--is a useful lens with which to read Nunn's storyworlds. I also read Nunn's noir novels refractively, exploring the new directions they suggest that this classic genre may take in its representation of today's "dark" nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lo que nosotras sabíamos by María Inés Krimer portrays life in a cement-producing village in Argentina during the dictatorship. The narrative voice—nosotras— is that of wives of company managers who are reconstructing their memories and in the process seek the reasons behind the suicide of a woman in the village. There are references to ominous occurrences related to the dictatorship, and we discover that behind the appearance of normality lurks the sordid reality of a society complicit with the abuses of power. This study will consider how Lo que nosotras sabíamos fuses elements of the género negro with a memory narrative to reproduce a discourse of social actors who—through their prejudices, their alliance with power, and veil of secrecy—served to legitimize State terror. Recent work by memory theorists helps us understand how memory discourses function to enable individuals to come to terms with painful experiences and denounce human rights violations. However, in the case of the narrators, who repress the truth out of their interest in defending the regime, they are unable to give a unifying meaning to the past and find closure. Thus the reader becomes the ultimate detective who pieces together the clues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his 1997 novel Máscaras, Leonardo Padura uses the detective fiction genre to represent the repressed "other" in Cuban society, in its sexual, ideological, religious and artistic aspects. This inquiry beneath the surface and behind the masks runs counter to the structures of the Cuban State, which demands that Cubanismo be imagined / represented as a socialist paradise. This essay analyzes Padura's novel as a realization of Lezama Lima's notion that Cubanismo could only be articulated via "poetic transfiguration". But symbols are dangerous because they are poly-vocal and cannot be controlled by the authority; hence, we are confronted to the repression of the imaginary in a post-revolutionary Cuba. Through the uncovering of the masked truth about this intrafamilial murder, Padura effects a symbolic integration of Cuba's repressed otherness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we show how polyphonic linguistic argumentation helps to reflect the identity and social image of noir novels through advertisements from the publishers promoting them. That's a very effective persuasive linguistic resource. We have studied the different types of textual polyphony in order to observe how in this context it is a powerful argumentative mechanism which manages to incentivize purchases at the same time that it reflects the characteristics and peculiarities of this literary genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on utilization of Noir as nonfiction by several authors. Topics discussed include discussion about book "The Lifespan of a Fact" by Jim Fingal and John D'Agata, variance in genre of the book as fiction or nonfiction, controversy related to poetry license, association of noir with political and cultural disclosures, usage of transformational grammar in several works by different authors and influence of noir as nonfiction practices consist sensibility.

This paper considers how literary and cinematic constructions of Essex noir expose the darker, chaotic sides to working-class embourgeoisement: initially via post-War suburbanisation and later, via Margaret Thatcher's attempt to encourage competitive individualism and entrepreneurship. Noir angles a 'dark mirror' to suburban Essex and develops a distinctive aesthetics of social and cultural change, while also puncturing myths of social mobility and suburban security. The paper points to both affinities and breaks between noir's bleak pessimism and Walter Benjamin's understanding of history as overcoming the concept of progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]