This article argues that Agatha Christie’s use of “otherness” inside a cozy village of a Miss Marple novel, A Murder is Announced (1950), serves as a valuable literary contribution to World War II and postwar discussions of feminism, sexism, queerness, and xenophobia. A lingering criticism of Christie – and crime novels in general – remains that the focus is the puzzle, not the character. This article challenges that premise, arguing that Christie created poignant characters to suit her plotting and to provide social and political commentary about an altered post-war England. These communities are often assumed exclusionary and inhospitable to anything other than a white middle-class identity; this, however, is not Christie’s approach. Christie boldly provides her vast readership with sympathetic and visible depictions of queer farmers (Miss Hincliffe and Amy Murgatroyd), surplus women (Dora Bunner and Miss Marple), and a displaced holocaust survivor (Mitzi). With respect to Miss Hincliffe and Amy Murgatroyd, while Christie was not the first author to present a loving lesbian couple, it is notable that A Murder is Announced predates Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt by two years. That novel – a full-length treatment of a lesbian relationship with a positive ending – was risqué enough at the time that the emerging author published it under a pseudonym. Christie, with the agency of a beloved popular novelist, published under her own name.

In My Sister, the Serial Killer (2018), Oyinkan Braithwaite presents a subversive take on the crime fiction genre by reinventing the figure of the femme fatale. The femme fatale is one of the oldest and most recognisable literary archetypes. She may be defined as a mysterious woman who lures men into danger through her seductive charms. Though this archetype permeates literary and visual arts across cultures, it rose to prominence in the hardboiled detective fiction, and the Hollywood film noir of the 1940s and ‘50s. The prominent emergence of the trope at these specific periods of history might signify patriarchal anxieties about the growing shift in gender roles following the two World Wars, as women increasingly began to work in male-dominated jobs and attain sexual liberties. However, anxieties surrounding the femme fatale relate also to cultural assumptions about women. Women are believed to be naturally passive. While criminal men may provoke revulsion, their actions are seen as conforming to established patterns of masculinity. Criminal women, on the other hand, transgress not only legal law but also the social law of acceptable 'feminine' behaviour. Consequently, the femme fatales of detective fiction are duly punished or killed for their transgressions. This paper discusses how Braithwaite’s novel not only subverts the expectations associated with crime fiction but also radically challenges the usual discourses around women and crime.

Detective fiction centres upon the explication of a mystery by a genius and often disabled detective, who works from a liminal space, utilising it to his benefit. The two most celebrated mystery writers, Arthur Conan Doyle’s and Agatha Christie’s iconic detective creations – Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple respectively, best illustrate the liminality of a detective and their individual disabilities lending to their genius status. Sherlock Holmes possesses unparallelled observational and deductive skills, mixed with eccentricity and emotional detachment. Holmes possibly exhibits the Savant syndrome and other neurological disability spectrums like bipolarity and antisocial tendencies. Christie’s Miss Marple is an old rheumatic grandmother, relying on her inductive understanding of human behaviour and psyche, and covert observational powers to uncover mysteries through experience. Being an old woman, she holds a unique ‘liminal’ position in society – constantly overlooked as harmless, underestimated as senile, which she uses to her advantage. Disability here is not explicitly of the body, but from socio-cultural rules and expectations of the times. The detectives are deviant of conventional ‘normality’ by being an asexual, sociopathic savant in the case of Holmes (queerness being associated with disability), and Marple by being a powerless aged spinster who manages to trump professional detectives with her feminine insight. In this research paper thus, disability studies and feminist theories shall be used to investigate how the detectives are disabled geniuses and the gendered, socio-historical difference in Holmes and Marple’s conditions and approach to detective work.

In this article, gendered death is explored through two crime thrillers: Ankush Saikia’s 2018 novel More Bodies Will Fall (2018, referred as MBWF) and Kulpreet Yadav’s Murder in Paharganj (2017, referred as MIP). The essay shows that the representation of dead girls within these novels is intricately tied to the Indian nation. Fiction and films have explored nation and nationalism(s) before and have produced narratives deconstructing and restrengthening India’s national image. Indian novel acted as an “imaginative vehicle” (Gopal 5) in producing multiple ideas of Indian nation and Bollywood too “has been central to the creation of India’s national myth (Taseer, “Can Bollywood Survive Modi?”). Additionally, a postcolonial national Indian identity in fiction has been often constructed through male protagonists while figures of women have been utilized for articulation of a homogenous nation, and national uniqueness have been “constituted through the medium of the sexual binary, using the figure of the woman as a primary vehicle” (Boehmer 5). The essay argues that MIP’s Israeli dead girl Sherry Bing consolidates India’s national image as a global defense force while MBWF’s Amenla Longkumer’s plot dives into the ethnic conflicts of India’s North-East, turning it into a more interiorized and complex introspection of ethno-national issues. For the purposes of argumentation, the memorization of the dead girls as represented in both texts are analyzed to comment on the roles these memorizations play in thrillers dealing with national/global and national/local issues.

The possibilities of the police procedural in 21st-century Bengal have been effectively re-informed by the emergence of Supratim Sarkar’s Lalbazar narratives, featuring accounts of true criminal investigations carried out by the Detective Department of the Kolkata Police, compiled for the first time by a real-life police officer on active duty with the approval of the Lalbazar top brass. These accounts, presented on public demand through popular narrative techniques, report cases which are significant as regards public fascination as well as the institutional excellence and efficiency of the Detective Department. The colonially-rooted activities of the Department are acknowledged and separated from its roles as an investigating authority post-Independence through two separate series, namely Achena/Adekha Lalbazar and Goyendapith Lalbazar. At the same time, Sarkar critically distinguishes between real-life criminal investigations and fictional ones while incorporating those attributes which characterize postcolonial vernacular popular crime writing. The significance of the Lalbazar narratives in the context of this paper lies in its reflection of these postcolonial deliberations in the attempts at recontextualizing the history of the Department, reinstating the ‘reality’ of criminal investigation as well as catering to the popular cultural ethos. Initiating the case with an overview of ‘glocal’ trends in South Asian crime writing, this article will examine the cultural relocation of the Bengali police procedural in the 21st century with regard to Sarkar’s narratives. By examining Sarkar’s role as an omniscient narrator, this paper will attempt to culturally re-situate the Detective Department as regards its two opposite histories. Finally, this paper will examine the narrative techniques, genre-bending attributes and cultural intertexts in the Lalbazar narratives which render them a popular mode of crime writing associated with the dynamics of history, thrill and instruction vis-à-vis present-day readership and popular culture.

Aidan Tynan's work ventures beyond traditional approaches to explore the multifaceted symbolism of deserts and wastelands in Western literature and philosophy. The book explores cross-disciplinary domains such as psychology, psychoanalysis, modern literature, myths and philosophy. It takes readers on an unconventional journey exploring deserts and wastelands. While the book is not strictly an ecocritical work, it shares similarities with ecocriticism that seeks to overcome biases in traditional approaches. Tynan challenges the trends in ecocriticism and the perception of deserts as mere physical landscapes, presenting them as rich metaphors for existential contemplation and enlightenment. He examines the desert's portrayal in Western literary and philosophical traditions, drawing parallels with the works of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and postmodern thinkers like Deleuze and Guattari. He explores how writers from various eras, including T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, and William S. Burroughs, employ the desert motif to criticise the modern society. Tynan emphasises the transformative power of art in reimagining our planet and confronting existential and environmental crises. Tynan's narrative structure integrates themes of existentialism, ecology, aesthetics and cultural identity, inviting readers to explore the desert's rich symbolism from diverse viewpoints. Ultimately, the book offers a thought-provoking journey into the depths of human experience, challenging readers to reconsider their perceptions of deserts and wastelands.

At the end of Donald Trump’s presidentship, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) which was published almost 70 years back suddenly became one of the best-selling novels in the U.S. One could postulate that Trump’s various repressive racial policies, totalitarian mindset, shared cultural insecurity of the Americans and Orwell’s broad minacious dystopian vision were the reason behind this hasty popularity. This is the process, I think, by which a book becomes canon by rediscovering its significance in every new ‘turn’ of history. Dorothy M. Figueira’s Aryans, Jews, Brahmins: Theorizing Authority through Myths of Identity although was first published in 2002, the book is in similar fashion more relevant at present than ever before especially in the context of India. Why? I would provide an answer to this statement at the end of my discussion.

This book brings a continuous evolution and preservation of refugee community identities, transformation of cultural values and Politicization of linguistic nationalism in Assam and Tripura in postcolonial India. By using primary resources such as central and state government archives, official records, census data, extensive field survey, along with contemporary literature author aims to portray the resistance of refugees for collective community identity and official recognition as a citizen of India. Author tried to question the categorization of refugees' as a fragmented cultural and ethnic identities and present a biased and discriminatory politics of state towards Bengali refugees' in Assam and Tripura during refugee rehabilitation programme. She also highlighted interlinkage of refugee issue also with the identity politics, dispute on boundary demarcations, land resource management and allocation along with preservation of tribal ethnicity and collective community identity values.

The book for review is comprised of eight chapters. Each reverberates around the existence of the Rajbanshi community with their own history, socio-cultural behaviour, and moreover, folktales and folksongs – an oral literature associated with them. As the book is titled the “Rajbanshi Folk Tales and Folk Songs”, the focus is much on that subject matter only rather than on the history of the Rajbanshi community. But unless one gets acquainted with the history of the Rajbanshi community and its own separate socio-cultural identity, one cannot understand the essence of these folk tales and songs associated with this community. So, the author has wisely included a few chapters related to history, location, identity, and language of the Rajbanshi community at the end section of the book.

In Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Donna J. Haraway addresses deeply situated feminist explorations and varied epistemologies and ecologies. It contains figurative criticism of the current environmental crises that forms the emergency of the Anthropocene. Haraway traverses alternative ways of knowing how the subject’s experiences of the past, present, future, gender, culture, race all dissolve into each other and need continuous interrogations to arrive at the evolving notions of subjecthood and environment. The book investigates thematerial semiotics, political histories of different surfaces, mythologies, species, and stories and forces us to establish contact with other existents in search of harmonious ways of survival. In our age when global politics and global capital are operating by destruction and distortion of natural resources, the book emerges as an inevitable counter by product of staying with the trouble.