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This essay describes the design of an assessment task, in which third-year university students employ their discipline-specific linguistic and cultural knowledge to produce a map that foregrounds the genre's inherent transnationality.

By the late 1700s, half the free population of Saint Domingue was black. The French Caribbean colony offered a high degree of social, economic, and physical mobility to free people of color. Covering the period 1776-1791, this study offers the most comprehensive portrait to date of Saint Domingue's free black elites on the eve of the colony's transformation into the republic of Haiti. Stewart R. King identifies two distinctive groups that shared Saint Domingue's free black upper stratum, one consisting of planters and merchants and the other of members of the army and police forces. With the aid of individual and family case studies, King documents how the two groups used different strategies to pursue the common goal of economic and social advancement. Among other aspects, King looks at the rural or urban bases of these groups' networks, their relationships with whites and free blacks of lesser means, and their attitudes toward the acquisition, use, and sale of land, slaves, and other property. King's main source is the notarial archives of Saint Domingue, whose holdings offer an especially rich glimpse of free black elite life. Because elites were keenly aware of how a bureaucratic paper trail could help cement their status, the archives divulge a wealth of details on personal and public matters. Blue Coat or Powdered Wig is a vivid portrayal of race relations far from the European centers of colonial power, where the interactions of free blacks and whites were governed as much by practicalities and shared concerns as by the law.

This review article revisits Raymond Chandlers essay \"The Simple Art of Murder\" and examines its ongoing relevance for crime fiction studies. It asks to what extent does Chandler s iconic essay help us to understand and explain the crime genre, both historically and today. You would be hard pressed to find a more well-known or influential essay on the crime novel than Raymond Chandler s \"The Simple Art of Murder.\" First published in The Atlantic magazine in its December 1944 issue,1 \"The Simple Art of Murder\" has been reprinted so many times that even Chandler was \"sick of hearing about it\" (qtd. in Durham 45). It may also be the most cited crime fiction essay, even if Google Scholar does not help to confirm this, since its algorithms divide the citations across the different published versions of the essay, from 1944 to today. Google Scholar can perhaps be forgiven for not consolidating the different versions into a single entry because, as Chandler scholar Miranda B. Hickman has demonstrated in a fascinating act of textual history, there are, in fact, two versions of the essay, published in 1944 and 1946 respectively. Anthologized in Howard Haycrafts The Art of the Mystery Story, the 1946 version \"is three paragraphs longer than the 1944 version,\" and it is the version that is most often reproduced (Hickman 293, 292), including in the Library of America hardback edition, from which I will be citing here. The essay 's influence is not just limited to American or anglophone crime fiction. It has inspired writers and scholars from around the globe. My first encounter with \"The Simple Art of Murder\" was through references to it by several Spanish/Catalan writers whose crime fiction formed a minor part of my doctoral dissertation. These writers, such as Manuel Vazquez Montalbán and Jaume Fuster, treated Chandler's reflections as gospel, praising the hard-boiled variant over the classic detective story for its realistic settings and for exposing the hypocrisy and corruption of political and legal institutions. As my research and teaching has focused more and more on crime fiction, I have returned repeatedly to the essay, teaching it in various crime fiction and introductory literature courses, and writing about it in the context of classic detective fiction and world crime fiction respectively. With each re-reading, I've become more questioning of its main claims and its ongoing relevance for the genre today, particularly in light of more recent scholarship, but I have also discovered that the essay offers insight into new areas of crime fiction scholarship. Analyses of the ongoing relevance of Chandler's literary project arc not new. In an introduction to a special issue on Chandler's cultural and literary impact for Studies in the Novel (November 2003), Miranda B. Hickman advises that we not \"take for granted what we know about this landmark essay\" and instead encourages us to \"revisit it [. . . and] reconsider its implications\" (298). Whereas Hickman's aim is to reevaluate Chandler's legacy, this review essay explores its contemporary implications for the broader field of crime fiction studies. Does it still help us to understand and explain the crime genre, both historically and today? To what extent? How has recent scholarship on the genre activated less obvious readings of the essay? To attempt answers for the questions, this review essay will shine a critical light on three main themes that have emerged from my research and teaching practice: (1) Chandler's characterization of both the classic detective story and hard-boiled fiction, (2) the masculinist ideology that permeates the essay and looms large over the hard-boiled genre, and (3) the essay's significance for understanding the genre's worldwide development. Chandler's central aim in \"The Simple Art of Murder\" is to celebrate the hard-boiled style of Dashiell Hammett (and by extension, of his own writing). To do so, he first must make a case for rejecting the \"English formula\" practiced by Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers, among others, which dominated \"the trade\" by \"two-thirds to three-quarters\" (978, 980). Chandler's rejection of his predecessors is a rhetorical move common to many crime fiction works. In \"The Murders in the Rue Morgue\" (1841), Poe's protagonist C. Auguste Dupin disses Eugene Vidocq, the real-life criminal-cum-chief of the Parisian police whose highly fictionalized memoirs are considered early examples of crime fiction. Likewise in Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet (1887), Sherlock Holmes dismisses both Poe's Dupin and French writer Émile Gaboriau's Monsieur Lecoq. Such metafictional and critical moves represent what Hickman calls \"a Bloomian anxiety of influence\" that, in the case of Chandler, paved \"the way for his own ascent\" (291). The case made by Chandler for rejecting the classic detective formula rests on the issue of realism. \"Fiction in any form has always intended to be realistic,\" he claims in the first line of the 1946 version (977). For Chandler, the problem of the classic detective story is that it is not about real things and that, furthermore, the demands of the plot make the characters do unreal things, which in turn makes them little more than \"puppets and cardboard lovers and papier mâché villains and detectives of exquisite and impossible gentility\" (987). In Chandler's witty characterization of classic detective stories, although minor differences can be noted, they tend to consist of \"the same careful grouping of suspects, the same utterly incomprehensible trick of how somebody stabbed Mrs. Pottington Postlethwaite III with the solid platinum poignard just as she flatted on the top note of the Bell Song from Lakmé in the presence of fifteen ill-sorted guests\" (985). As this quote demonstrates, Chandler s criticisms are all the more engaging for the humor he deploys to underscore the ridiculousness he attributed to the English formula. His humor is particularly mordant when he targets the works of his literary forebears and contemporaries. Holmes, for example, is \"mostly an attitude and a few dozen lines of unforgettable dialogue\" (980), whereas Christies Murder on the Orient Express (1934) offers so convoluted a plotline that only \"a halfwit could guess it\" (984). Chandler s critique of the classic detective story for its lack of realism is hardly original. His central argument is, to a large degree, rehearsed in a study cited in the essay itself: Robert Graves and Alan Hodges The Long Week-End: A Social History of Great Britain 19181939, published in 1940. Chandler touches on this work to highlight its recognition of Hammett as \"the only one first-class writer\" to produce detective fiction between the wars (988).2 Prior to praising Hammett, however, Graves and Hodge note that classic detective stories fail \"as realistic accounts of crime\" because they contain little knowledge of the \"police organization, the coroners court, finger-prints, firearms, poison, the laws of evidence\" that in their opinion should constitute a story concerned with the resolution of a crime (301). Similarly, Chandler provides a list of seven key elements that readers must ignore for A. A. Milne 's The Red House Mystery (1922) to work as a crime story, including the following: the failure of the coroner and the police to do the basics of their job (nos. 1, 3, 4, 6, and 7); evidence presented that is uncorroborated (no. 2); and-in the fingerprint realm-the delicate hands of the cadaver that bear no resemblance to those of the alleged victim, who had led a rough life in Australia (no. 5) (982-83). Even Chandler's \"characteristic\" humor loses some of its originality when read in conjunction with Graves and Hodge's account. For example, the British authors describe a convoluted murder in a fictitious story, \"The Scented Bath Crime,\" that could only be committed by \"someone with a knowledge of Chinese, in desperate need of money, who could persuade a left-handed negro dwarf to train a monkey to climb up a ventilator pipe and squirt a rare South American poison into the victim's hot bath-with a syringe through the keyhole-at the one moment when the French maid's back was turned\" (302). Although there are similarities between the two texts, this does not mean that Chandler plagiarized Graves and Hodge's work. Instead, it shows that Chandler's argument was more widely held than an exclusive reading of \"The Simple Art of Murder\" suggests. To be fair to Chandler, he-unlike Graves and Hodge-did his homework to detail the substantial inconsistencies, gaps in logic, and unrealistic scenarios of widely celebrated crime novels. In contrast to the artificiality that he and others attributed to the classic detective story, Chandler argues that the hard-boiled-as practiced by its chief exponent, Hammett-took murder out of the drawing room \"and dropped it into the alley\" (988). In so doing, it became part and parcel of the world. In one of the most cited paragraphs of the essay, Chandler characterizes the world depicted in Hammett's fiction as one in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities, in which hotels and apartment houses and celebrated restaurants are owned by rich men who made their money out of brothels, in which a screen star can be the finger man for a mob, and the nice man down the hall is a boss of the numbers racket; a world where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket, where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of money (991). For Chandler, the importance of depicting this world is to allow writers to engage with the \"good deal of sociological implication\" that he sees as lying at the heart of murder (977). Murder is committed \"for reasons, not just to provide a corpse\" (989). Hammetts achievement, Chandler suggests, is to connect the explanation of murder to a world that is recognizable to readers and for read

This study, charting the construction of a Catalan identity from the nineteenth-century cultural renaissance until the present day, explores the interaction of language, culture and identity in contemporary Catalonia. Drawing on postcolonial and multicultural literary theories, it argues that Castilian- and Catalan-language narratives are expressions of the same culture. Through detailed analyses of texts by Terenci Moix, Francisco Candel, Ignasi Riera, Montserrat Roig, Juan Marsé, Ramon Pallicé, and Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, among others, the author demonstrates that such writers share similar preoccupations and points of view and also engage in a complex literary and cultural dialogue that cuts across the established linguistic divisions that characterise cultural politics in Catalonia. The Catalan literary establishment's exclusion of Castilian as a language capable of expressing 'Catalan-ness' is challenged and the author proposes redefining traditional understandings of Catalan literature to take into account texts produced by all members of Catalan society. Stewart King is a lecturer in Hispanic Studies at Monash University, Australia.

By the late 1700s, half the free population of Saint Domingue was black. The French Caribbean colony offered a high degree of social, economic, and physical mobility to free people of color. Covering the period 1776-1791, this study offers the most comprehensive portrait to date of Saint Domingue's free black elites on the eve of the colony's transformation into the republic of Haiti. Stewart R. King identifies two distinctive groups that shared Saint Domingue's free black upper stratum, one consisting of planters and merchants and the other of members of the army and police forces. With the aid of individual and family case studies, King documents how the two groups used different strategies to pursue the common goal of economic and social advancement. Among other aspects, King looks at the rural or urban bases of these groups' networks, their relationships with whites and free blacks of lesser means, and their attitudes toward the acquisition, use, and sale of land, slaves, and other property. King's main source is the notarial archives of Saint Domingue, whose holdings offer an especially rich glimpse of free black elite life. Because elites were keenly aware of how a bureaucratic paper trail could help cement their status, the archives divulge a wealth of details on personal and public matters. Blue Coat or Powdered Wig is a vivid portrayal of race relations far from the European centers of colonial power, where the interactions of free blacks and whites were governed as much by practicalities and shared concerns as by the law.

This article questions both the Englishness and generic stasis ascribed to Agatha Christie and argues that her Murder on the Orient Express (1933) displays an inherent transnationalism that questions the strict taxonomies supposedly separating the English clue- puzzle from the American hard-boiled novel.

This article explores crime fiction within a world-literature framework. It argues that the study of national traditions can blind us to the dialogue across borders and languages between texts and authors. It proposes a reading practice that aims to develop a more nuanced understanding of this truly global genre.