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Introduction
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xi INTRODUCTION Jeannette Sloniowski Marilyn Rose In assembling this first collection of critical essays in this field it seems appropriate to provide both some context for and a rapid overview of the rich and varied array of crime fiction that exists at this point in Canadian history. To undertake such a quick sweep is a daunting task. David SkeneMelvin ’s historical survey, which appears in our collection, ends with the third quarter of the twentieth century. Since that time, the production of crime fiction in Canada—in the form of novels, short stories, films, and television series—has burgeoned, and practitioners are now literally too many, and the landscape changing too rapidly, to do the field justice in a preface such as this one. Surprisingly, however, given its strength, resilience, and popularity as a genre, there has been no full-length book published to date on Canadian crime fiction. Worldwide, detective fiction is the most published form of popular narrative, and increasingly Canadian writers have taken their place alongside the rich and famous in international crime fiction. And here at home, writers such as Peter Robinson, Giles Blunt, Alan Bradley, Louise Penny, and Linwood Barclay, for example, are award-winning authors both in Canada and abroad. Our book is a first step in addressing this gap. We do not claim to set out the parameters of a distinctive “Canadian School” of crime writing. To begin with, it seems premature to make such grand claims given the amount INTRODUCTION xii of critical work that remains to be done—especially given the lack of availability of much early Canadian crime writing in the past and hence a lack of close scholarly attention to pre-modern works in this genre to date. However , this book represents, we hope, the beginning of more concentrated scholarly engagement with this particular field in Canadian popular narrative . The time seems right, especially given the potentialities of the increasingly rich electronic “archives” that characterize the Internet at present. Not only are books, television, and film increasingly available through online vendors such as chapters.indigo.ca and amazon.ca, but scholarly sleuths— many of them graduate students in our flourishing programs in popular culture in Canada—are now able to access a great deal of early Canadian crime writing directly online. Secondly, and perhaps more significantly, any attempt to create a homogeneous category or even a sense of a dominant aesthetic in Canadian crime fiction is bound to falter given the heterogeneous nature of Canada as a nation and consequently the complexity of its “national imaginary.” Manfred B. Steger defines social imaginaries as “deep-seated modes of understanding that provide the most general parameters within which people imagine their communal existence.” He notes that this concept draws upon Benedict Anderson’s notion of the nation as an imagined community, and goes on to say that “the social imaginary offers explanations of how ‘we’— the members of a particular community—fit together, how things go on between us, the expectations we have of each other, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie those expectations” (12–13). Canada, however , in Rosemary Coombe’s words, is marked by a “remarkable cultural pluralism,” and may be best understood as a “multinational democracy” that continuously “negotiates and embraces (or contains) relations between founding nations, first nations, diasporic nations, an ethos of multiculturalism and various forms of transnationalism under neo-colonial and postcolonial conditions.” To Coombe’s list might be added regionalism and class divisions that also characterize this sprawling and diverse nation in which a plurality of social imaginaries circulates and intersects. This is not to say that there are no commonalities as we survey the range of types and approaches evident in Canadian crime writing. David Morley, in “Broadcasting and the Construction of the National Family,” emphasizes the role of mass media and popular culture in general in the creation of national imaginaries, and cites the work of Lauren Berlant in arguing that “through the accident of birth within a particular set of geographical and political boundaries, the individual is transformed into the subject of [44.201.64.238] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:59 GMT) INTRODUCTION xiii a collectively held history and learns to value a particular set of symbols as intrinsic to the nation and its terrain” (420). Berlant contends that “in this process the nation’s traditional icons, its metaphors, its heroes, its rituals and narratives provide an alphabet for collective consciousness and national subjectivity” (20). Because...