The Routledge Introduction to Canadian Crime Fiction

Pamela Bedore is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, where she teaches courses in American Literature and Popular Culture. She holds BA and BEd degrees from Queen’s University, an MA in English from Simon Fraser University, and a PhD in American Literature from the University of Rochester. She has published widely on detective fiction and speculative fiction, including the monograph Dime Novels and the Roots of American Detective Fiction (2013) and the lecture series Great Utopian and Dystopian Works of Literature (The Great Courses, 2017). Pam was the book review editor for Clues: A Journal of Detection for ten years and was recently a visiting scholar at an NEH Summer Institute on Climate Futurism.

Chapter 1. Negotiations of National Identity in Canadian Crime Fiction

Part 1: Historical Confrontations

Chapter 2. John McFetridge and the Legacy of French/English Tensions

Chapter 3. Giles Blunt and the Canadian North

Chapter 4. Thomas King and the Liminal Indigenous Detective

Chapter 5. Ausma Zehanat Khan and Multiculturalism in Canada

Chapter 6: Linwood Barclay and the American Dream

Part 2: Canadian Genre Play

Chapter 7. The Police Procedural: Registering Change with Peter Robinson’s DCI Banks

Chapter 8. The Amateur Detective: Gail Bowen’s Joanne Kilbourn as Canadian Revisionist

Chapter 9. The Gay Private Eye: Anthony Bidulka’s Russell Quant

Chapter 10. The Legal Thriller: Trauma and Resilience in Pamela Callow’s Kate Lange

Chapter 11. The Postmodern Detective: Literary Detection in Timothy Findley and Carol Shields

Part 3: Futuristic Explorations

Chapter 12. Louise Penny’s Cozy Exploration of Trauma and Temporality in the Anthropocene

Chapter 13. Storytelling, Guilt, and Games in Margaret Atwood’s Postapocalyptic Crime Fiction

Chapter 14. Interpretive Mysteries and Impossible Crimes in Emily St. John Mandel’s Speculative Fiction