- Title
- Moving Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab and Breaking the Frame of Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’
- Creator
- Rolls, Alistair
- Relation
- Criminal Moves Modes of Mobility in Crime Fiction p. 45-59
- Relation
- Liverpool English Texts and Studies
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2019
- Description
- In 2015 Australian crime fiction scholarship witnessed a double event. Two books, Stephen Knight’s Secrets of Crime Fiction Classics and Lucy Sussex’s Blockbuster! Fergus Hume and the Mystery of a Hansom Cab, were published with a common double motive: both wanted to give new voice to lesser-known, almost forgotten and, in some cases, underrated crime novels; and as a secondary aim, both aspired to harness this multiplicity of under-heard textual voices in order to drown out, or at least to Babelize, the dominant discourse of crime fiction’s nineteenth-century origins, according to which the genre emerged in its recognizably modern form directly out of Edgar Allan Poe’s self-styled tales of ratiocination, beginning with ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’. Knight (2015: 4) is at pains to relegate Poe to a place among the later pioneers and, to this end, privileges the important early roles of both French and American authors, including Eugène Vidocq, William Godwin and Charles Brockden Brown; for her part, Lucy Sussex, in a passage redolent of Maurizio Ascari’s ‘refusal of any monogenetic account of the origin of literary genres’ (2007: 8), cites individual pioneers but places her emphasis on a rich literary mix.
- Subject
- Australian crime fiction; nineteenth-century; short stories; myths and crimes
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1460317
- Identifier
- uon:45932
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781789620580
- Language
- eng
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