The book brings together three strains of detective fiction: British, American, and Bengal. The essays explore varied aspects of detective fiction, offering new avenues of critical thought from a Postcolonial perspective.

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.

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