Can female-authored French and German crime novels be read as part of an international phenomenon of feminist revisions of the crime genre? This book examines the status of female crime writers and their female investigators in France and Germany, focusing on four novels of the 1990s and their reception. In Germany the rise of the Frauenkrimi has been accompanied by fears of ghettoization on the part of women writers, and hostile reactions from critics to perceived feminist ideology, while in France the encroachment of women on the masculine terrain of the roman noir has given rise to retrenchments and defensive redefinitions. Far from being a simple source of pleasure, female-authored crime novels in France and Germany are a site of conflict; this study exposes the terms of this conflict and demonstrates the continued centrality of gender issues in literary studies.

A dictionary of over 117 women mystery authors giving details on their lives and their writing habits.

A marriage of mystery fiction and queer concerns, queer crime literature celebrates the pairing of the political and the sexual. Queer crime fiction is a subgenre in which sex, gender and sexuality are among the mysteries to be solved. Its writers use boundary-crossing identities and desires to express social critique, inviting readers to interpret queer narratives as literary incursions into cultural traditions. From androgynous investigators and serial killer housewives to closeted lesbians and transgendered lovers, the characters in queer mysteries are metaphors for changing social and political relations. This book reads German-language crime stories as allegories about 20th- and 21st-century upheavals, raising questions about human behavior and justice, the horrors of extremism, the changing shape of the nation, and the possibilities of democracy. Anchored in the historical contexts of protest cultures and countercultures of the last three decades, this study examines novels by popular feminist writers Pieke Biermann, Edith Kneifl and Ingrid Noll, and unexplored works by Susanne Billig, Gabriele Gelien, Corinna Kawaters, Katrin Kremmler, Christine Lehmann and Martina-Marie Liertz. An analysis of recent debates through the lens of genre fiction serves as the foundation for telling the cultural history of contemporary Germany, Austria and Europe as a whole from a new perspective.