This came out last November. It's a collection of academic essays on postcolonial and transnational detectives--detectives who operate in formerly colonial nations or whose work crosses national, racial, or ethnic boundaries. Assembling this book was a distinct (if prolonged) pleasure; I edited it with an old friend and former colleague, and most of the major stages in its development were hatched over some happy hour or another in Fredericksburg or Nashville.
It was also a pleasure meeting and coming to know our contributors (if only through their work in many cases) and learning from them--they steered the project in directions we could never have foreseen, all for the better. The original plan, an anthology about the traces of imperialism in the classic modernist detective story, survives only as a few pages in our introduction; the rest of the book is now much farther-reaching, from Sri Lanka to Martinique to New York City, from Vikram Chandra to Walter Mosley.
The publisher's page for the book includes previews of the table of contents, introduction, and index. The Amazon page seems to hint at the possibility of a second printing in February, which is pretty outstanding given the high cost of academic publications. (If you're interested in reading this, you may want to ask your local university library to order a copy.) It's also for sale as an e-book available on Kindle.
I have a book on Amazon and Kindle. Somehow that's weirder than the copies of the actual book sitting in my library.
You ought to read China Miéville's recent mystery THE CITY & THE CITY if you haven't already. Fits right into this theme -- a detective working cross-border, where the borders arise out of the fantasy element in the work (a fabulous if ultimately to my mind not quite convincing world).
Posted by: Stephen Frug | February 01, 2010 at 09:04 PM