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Full Description
Mystery fiction as a genre renders moral judgments not only about detectives and criminals but also concerning the cultural structures within which these mysteries unfold.
In contrast to other volumes which examine morality in crime fiction through the lenses of personal guilt and personal justice, Certainty and Ambiguity in Global Mystery Fiction analyzes the effect of moral imagination on the moral structures implicit in the genre. In recent years, public awareness has attended to the relationship between social structures and justice, and this collection centers on how personal ethics and social ethics are bound together amidst the shifting moral landscapes of mystery fiction.
Contributors discuss the interplay between personal guilt and social guilt - considering morality and justice on an individual level and at a societal level - using frameworks of certainty and ambiguity. They show how individual characters in works by Agatha Christie, Gabriel García Márquez, Natsuo Kirino, F.H. Batacan, and Stephen King, among others, may view their moral standing with certainty but clash with the established mores of their culture.
Featuring essays on Japanese, Filipino, Indian, and Colombian mystery fiction, as well as American and British fiction, this volume analyzes social guilt and justice across cultures, showing how individuals grapple with the certainty, and, at times, the moral ambiguity, of their respective cultures.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
John J. Han, C. Clark Triplett, and Matthew Bardowell, Missouri Baptist University, USA
Part I. Narrative Structure and Moral Imagination
1. A Memoir Without Conscience: Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Timothy Ruppert, Slippery Rock University, USA
2. A Not-So-Certain Morality: Adaptations in Murder on the Orient Express
Annette Wren, McMurry University, USA
3. The Colorado Kid, Joyland, and Later: Genre Hybridity and the Moral Imagination in Stephen King's Hard Case Crime Novels
Alissa Burger, Culver-Stockton College, USA
4. "They've already killed him": Moral Ambiguity in Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Andrea Tinnemeyer, College Preparatory School, Oakland, CA, USA
5. "What's luck got to do with it?": Privilege, Morality, and the Victim in Tana French's Wych Elm
Deirdre Flynn, University of Limerick, Ireland
6. Beyond "Puzzles and Bugaboos": A Family Systems Interpretation of Dorothy L. Sayers's "Monster," Gaudy Night
Beth McFarland-Wilson, Northern Illinois University, USA
Part II. World Literature and Moral Ambiguity
7. Opaque Feminine Ethics in Kirino's Out
Aya Kubota, Bunka Gakuen University, Japan, and John J. Han, Missouri Baptist University, USA
8. Moral Certainty or Ambiguity in the Clerical Detective Novels: Discovering a Middle Way in F. H. Batacan's Smaller and Smaller Circles
C. Clark Triplett, Missouri Baptist University, USA
9. "Life's messy complexity": Moral Ambiguity, Compromise, and Vigilante Justice in Kishwar Desai's Simran Singh Trilogy
Nikita Gloria Pinto, Independent Scholar, U.A.E.
10. Mystery Pierced with Social Evil: Reading Caste and Class Issues in The Quills of the Porcupine
Debaditya Mukhopadhyay, Manikchak College, India
Part III. Faith, Certainty, and Doubt in Mystery Fiction
11. Between Faith and Nihilism: Greene's Moral Imagination in The Third Man
John J. Han, Missouri Baptist University, USA
12. Brother Cadfael, Social Justice, and the Medieval Mystery Fiction of Ellis Peters
Jane Beal, University of La Verne, USA
13. A Vocation of Truth: The Pursuit of Moral Certainty in the Detective Fiction of Dorothy L. Sayers
Andrew J. Spencer, Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics, USA
14. "What if a war was what he was waiting for?": Graham Greene, Patrick Hamilton, and the Writing of Crime Between the Wars
Michael Hallam, University of Brighton, UK
15. The Restorative Vision of Justice in G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown
Matthew Bardowell, Missouri Baptist University, USA
About the Contributors
Index
