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.

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 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.

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.