Murder or Accident?: Condé's Postcolonial Detective Novels

Postcolonial detective fiction has been the object of a growing body of criticism since Ed Christian's 2001 publication on the topic. According to Christian, "the interrogation of suspects" typical of crime fiction becomes, in postcolonial contexts, an "interrogation of society" that can only be solved by a postcolonial detective inhabiting both "western colonial law and local culture" (2). Although diverse, and certainly adding new content to the detective fiction genre, postcolonial crime fiction ultimately leaves the genre's structural paradigm intact by preserving the existence of a murder, a detective, and a murderer.

Three novels by Maryse Condé upset this paradigm and offer a different message about murders in various postcolonial contexts. Traversée de la mangrove (1989), La Belle Créole (2001), and La Femme cannibale (2003) all open with a dead body and look at first like a standard "whodunit." But unlike the stories studied by critics of the genre, Condé's postcolonial detective fiction doesn't solve the crime traditionally. In fact, Condé's detective fiction revamps the gerne of the detective story by either getting rid of the detective, or getting rid of the murder, or both. Most importantly perhaps, Condé's subversion of detective fiction undermines postcolonial theory by refusing to see these apparent crimes as postcolonial crimes, thus freeing her postcolonial subjects from postcolonial theoretical determinism.