Crime Literature in the Context of Otherness: Interdisciplinary Approaches to a (Foreign?) Popular Genre

If we understand crime literature – including, in the broadest sense, crime culture – as a distinct aesthetic form of testing certain (and still valid) experimental arrangements, as proposed for example by Stefan Neuhaus (2021: 310), then the genre as a whole, with its tendency toward variability, can be seen as a genre in constant flux. It would thus be defined by the diversity of possible (scholarly) approaches and by internal genre-specific differentiation practices. From the very beginning, since E.A. Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1840), crime fiction has been ridiculed as a foreign body in the literary world, accused of relying on schematic and repetitive narrative conventions. In this way, the genre’s internal potential and its ability to continuously reinvent itself – within a possible rule-bound framework – was overlooked or unrecognized. Stigmatized as the “problem child” of literary studies, crime literature was long unable to gain a foothold in academic discourse.

The paradigm of otherness is therefore not… foreign to the crime genre. It is only since the 1970s that we can speak of a growing interest in crime novels, which is more or less the result of a scientific shift influenced by structuralism. In recent decades, the genre has undergone a rehabilitation or even a “re-trivialization” (Re-Trivialisierung, Wörtche 2008: 81); this new crime fiction turn has manifested globally in the explosion of (often colorful) edited volumes, studies, and articles that approach the theme of crime from literary, cultural, or media studies perspectives. This "crime boom" (Krimi-Boom, Ostaszewski 2021), observable not only in Germany, Poland, or England, has on the one hand significantly contributed to a renaissance of the crime genre across various cultural fields. On the other hand, it has arguably led to a renewed trivialization of the genre. One gets the impression that the sheer volume of newly published crime novels makes it increasingly difficult to maintain an overview of the market. The bloated crime fiction market, so to speak, begins to consume itself. Trying to separate the wheat from the chaff – to identify the crime fiction gem among the many similar epigones – proves to be a challenging endeavor with no guarantee of safety or success.

To get out of this dead end, a narrowing of perspective rather than an expansion may be helpful. That is to say: one approaches the genre—in this case, crime fiction—deliberately and views it from a specific, “restricted” angle by highlighting various thematic, narrative, or socially relevant factors and placing them in a broader context. One such research criterion could be the concept of otherness already mentioned, which could refer, on the one hand, to national, cultural, ethnic, or religious difference, and on the other hand, to a genre-specific strangeness. In the wake of postcolonial studies, crime literature has already been examined multiple times in terms of race, nationality, identity, gender, and (post)migration. However, what is still lacking are focused analyses of the tensions between crime fiction and true crime—on an international scale—and figures of otherness who may not only appear in a foreign (“non-our,” unknown) cultural disguise but also address otherness within otherness. This quasi-internal otherness could also be applied to the crime genre itself, for example by asking about the genre’s exclusionary and inclusionary models in relation to world literature and its (non-)canonization.

In this way, the aim is to define a narrowly (or broadly) conceived thematic field and to position crime fiction as both a disruptor and/or stabilizer of systems, a commentator on reality and/or denier of reality, and so on—using external reality as a vivid backdrop for a literary, criminal “inner reality.” It fictionalizes the various facets of otherness, not with the aim of uprooting reality, but—and this is the crux—of feeding it back into reality. By pointing to the strangeness within the genre’s own framework, the crime novel, crime (television) film, or crime audio drama renders this strangeness itself alien. It is, so to speak, a form of self-purification that takes place both in terms of thematic selection and narrative execution.

We would like to explore the following (selected) questions:

1.     Otherness as an analytical-epistemological category
(Cultural and national otherness; representations of otherness in literature, media, societal and legal discourses)

2.     Otherness as a figure of identification
(Social exclusion based on race, gender, origin; its literary representations)

3.     The detective as a liminal figure
(Reality vs. fiction; cultural and professional representations of detective and investigator figures)

4.     Canonization of crime fiction
(Genre and subgenre boundaries, genre popularity, the influence of crime literature on popular culture)

5.     International reception of crime literature
(Tensions between criminology, the justice system, and cultural perspectives)

6.     Crime fiction & true crime
(Shifts within genre boundaries, the interplay of documentary and fictional elements in cultural texts, and the stereotyping of narrative patterns)

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