Animals in Detective Fiction

Ruth Hawthorn is Senior Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Lincoln. She is currently completing a monograph on American detective fiction for the BAAS Paperbacks series with Edinburgh University Press. Her research interests include crime fiction, the literature of LA, and ecocriticism. John Miller is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Sheffield, President of ASLE-UKI (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, UK and Ireland), and co-editor of Palgrave Studies in Animals in Literature. His books include Empire and the Animal Body (Anthem, 2014) and The Heart of the Forest (British Library Publishing, 2022).

• Origins and Evolutions: The Brutal History of Detective Fiction.- Ontologies.- Tigers, Criminals, Rogues: Animality in Dickens’ Detective Fiction.- Quantum Entanglements in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles.- Wolverines, Werewolves and Demon Dogs: Animality, Criminality and Classification in James Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet.- Ethics.- 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.- Ecology, Capability and Companion Species: Conflicting Ethics in Nevada Barr’s Blood Lure.- Laboratory Tech-Noir: Genre, Narrative Form, and the Literary Model Organism in Jay Hosking’s Three Years with the Rat.- Reptiles, Buddhism, and Detection in John Burdett’s Bangkok 8.- Politics.- Animals, Biopolitics, and Sensation Fiction: M. E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret.- “The Motto of the Mollusc”: Patricia Highsmith and the Semiotics ofSnails.- “Before the white man came, when animals still talked”: Colonial Creatures in Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer and Adrian C. Louis’s Skins.- Forms.- Aping the Classics: Terry Pratchett’s Satirical Animals and Detective Fiction.- Animal Image and Human Logos in Graphic Detective Fiction.- “As easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket”: Animetaphor in Raymond Chandler and Jonathan Lethem.

“The collection’s major findings and offer suggestions for future research, but the arguments presented by all 13 essays, plus the introduction, are enlightening and clearly presented, whether readers are new to the study of animal ethics or already familiar with research in this and related disciplines. Ultimately, the grounding of these animal- related issues within the detective fiction genre makes important and innovative contributions to both areas of study.” (Rachel Schaffer, Clues, Vol. 42 (2), 2024)“A corrective volume that successfully sets the record straight, Animals and Detective Fiction is the starting point for further literary scholarship on genre fiction and animal studies.”  (Dominic O’Key, The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, May 8, 2023)