Crimelights

Scotland's literary and cultural heritage is infused with narratives of crime. Both real and imagined criminals have shaped the image of Scotland's supposed dual soul. The tension between good and evil, salvation and redemption as well as beauty and repulsiveness lies at the heart of the Scottish Tartan Noir tradition, which has been thriving ever since Robert Louis Stevenson published his novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Critics have frequently used Gregory Smith's term “Caledonian antisyzygy” in order to express what has been perceived as the duality of the Scottish character, yet up to this day neither the production nor the reception of Scotland's alleged split soul has been properly analyzed or understood.

This volume seeks to explore the wide field of Scottish crime narratives from a variety of perspectives and with a focus on a variety of themes. Crimes in Scottish history and their treatment in literature and film are discussed in the collected papers, as are questions of spatiality and gender and genre in Scottish crime writing. The book also features a special section on Ian Rankin's Rebus novels and two ""Crimelight"" articles that yield insight into both the historical and the current literary scene of Scottish crime writers.