Critical Essays on English and Bengali Detective Fiction brings together three strains of detective fiction: British, American, and Bengal. The import of detective fiction from Britain has influenced generations of writers of Bengali detective fiction. In this anthology of critical essays by scholars on detective fiction, we have divided the contents into three groups. First, there are essays on classic British detective fiction, with essays on Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, P.D.James, Kate Atkinson, and Margery Allingham. The second section is on American hard-boiled fiction with essays on Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. The third section is on Bengali detective fiction with essays on Hemendra Kumar Roy, Saradindu Bandyopadhay and Satyajit Ray. Together, these essays bring three strains of detective fiction into conversation to show the gradual postcolonial attempt of Bengali detective fiction to outgrow colonial influences and create an original and organic tradition of regional and vernacular detective fiction.
Debayan Deb Barman is assistant professor at THLH Mahavidyalay University of Burdwan.
Foreword by Phil Fitzsimmons Acknowledgements Introduction, Debayan Deb Barman Part 1: BRITISH DETECTIVE FICTION Chapter 1: From Secrecy to Knowledge: Detection and Literary Detectives in Dickens, Kyamalia Bairagya Chapter 2: Heroine as Detective: Wilkie Collins's The Dead Secret, Madhumita Biswas Chapter 3: Women as Victims of Abuse in Crime Fiction: Representations of Misogyny in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles and A Study in Scarlet, Karabi Barman Chapter 4: Detection and Drawings: Sidney Paget's Illustrations from Doyle's Return of Sherlock Holmes, Deepali Yadav Chapter 5: Feminization of the Science of Detection: Agatha Christie's Unusual Detective-Partners, Amy Lee Chapter 6: Locating The Murder of Roger Ackroyd in the tradition of Detective Fictions, Sourav Banerjee Chapter 7: A Place for Campion, Campion in his Place: Reading Margery Allingham's Novels, Jonathan Wilkins Chapter 8: Following Cordelia Gray: Gender 'Suitability' and Detective Fiction, Medha Bhadra Chowdhury Chapter 9: Time Past and Time Present: Reading Kate Atkinson's Novels, Purnima Chakraborti Chapter 10: P. D. James: Narratives Bubbling to the Surface, Anne K. B. Erickson Chapter 11: Interrogating the Agency of the 'Partner in Crime': The Sidekick as the Reader in Crime Fiction, Barnali Saha Part 2: AMERICAN HARD-BOILED FICTION Chapter 12: Dashiell Hammett: A Pinkerton Detective's Fictional Sleuths, Robert McParland Chapter 13: Conflict, Desire and the City: Exploring Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, Neepa Sarkar Part 3: BENGALI DETECTIVE FICTION Chapter 14: Assertive Heroes and Male Heterotopia: Revisiting Select Detective Fiction of Hemendra Kumar Roy, Stella Chitralekha Biswas Chapter 15: Nativizing Holmesian Tradition of Detective: A Reading of Select Stories of Byomkesh Bakshi and Feluda, Abhinaba Chatterjee Chapter 16: The Purloined Artefacts: Tracing Repetition Automatism in Satyajit Ray's "Joy Baba Felunath" and "Jahangirer Swarnamudra", Ipsita Chakrabarty and Soham Roy Chapter 17: Detectives and father figures: A study of the metamorphosis of the Indian father figure with Ray's 'Feluda', Gouri Parvathy V Chapter 18: The Glocalization of Detective Fiction by Satyajit Ray, Ananya Chatterjee and Nisarga Bhattacharjee Part 4: DETECTIVE FILMS Chapter 19: Byomkesh Breaks Bad: Unravelling the Hidden Desires in Dibakar Banerjee's Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!, Kaustav Mukherjee Chapter 20: Serial Detectives and Reverse Forensics: Cases of Literary and Filmic Red Dragon, Sheng-mei Ma
