Female Corpses in Crime Fiction

Table of Contents

1. Frontmatter

2. Chapter 1. Introduction

   Glen S. Close

   Abstract

   Chapter 1 addresses modern crime fiction’s reliance on the presentation of corpses, theorizing that the genre has thrived internationally as a cultural device for managing the “great modern fear of death” (Philippe Ariès). Crime fiction posits an inaugural and compulsively repeated confrontation with the corpse, an emblem of the epistemological enigma of death and the abject (Julia Kristeva). In the hard-boiled mode, violently traumatized cadavers gained prominence, and female corpses were distinctively sexualized. Confronting them, male detectives erected themselves as models of autonomous, armored and invulnerable masculine subjectivity. Corpse-centric crime fiction is related to the rise of corpse imagery in other contemporary literary and audiovisual media. Parallels are drawn between mainstream crime fiction and the rhetoric of popular crime journalism including the Spanish American nota roja.

3. Chapter 2. Necropornography in Modern Crime Fiction

   Glen S. Close

   Abstract

   Chapter 2 examines the history of necropornography in modern crime fiction. It proposes that a fascination with the sexualized cadavers of women pervaded the detective genre beginning with Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) and “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1842). It situates Poe with respect to a narrative tradition of “sexual tales of murder” (Karen Halttunen) centrally concerned with the sexuality of female victims. The chapter examines eroticized cadavers and dissection scenes in George Lippard’s The Quaker City (1845), La huella del crimen (1877) by Raúl Waleis (Luis V. Varela), Jonathan Latimer’s The Lady in the Morgue (1936), Michael Storme’s Hot Dames on Cold Slabs (1952), and So Nude, So Dead (1952) and Widows (1991), both by Ed McBain.

4. Chapter 3. The Hispanic Hard-Boiled

   Glen S. Close

   Abstract

   Chapter 3 traces manifestations of necropornography in twentieth-century Hispanic crime fiction and one Lusophone text. It begins with Mexican writer Juan Miguel de Mora’s Desnudarse y morir (1957) and Spaniard Félix Llaugé Dausá’s Depósito de cadáveres (1960), before tracing a lineage of more recent Spanish and Latin American works of hard-boiled neopoliciaca (neo-detective) and police procedural fiction: Paco Ignacio Taibo II’s La vida misma (1987), Andreu Martín’s Si es, no es (1983), Lorenzo Silva’s El lejano país de los estanques (1983), Poli Délano’s “Muerte de una ninfómana” (1996), Jô Soares’s O xangô de Baker Street (1995), Federico Andahazi’s El anatomista (1997) and Jorge Volpi’s La paz de los sepulcros (1995). Nearly all pose violent deaths of women as moral retribution for sexual transgression.

5. Chapter 4. Femicide and Snuff

   Glen S. Close

   Abstract

   Chapter 4 examines “snuff literature” (Paul Virilio) or novels that fantasize killing women and recording their deaths photographically or on video. It contrasts Roberto Bolaño’s monumental 2666 (2004) with novels that exploit the topics of femicide and snuff for cruel pleasure: Federico Andahazi’s El libro de los placeres prohibidos (2012), Andreu Martín’s Por amor al arte (1982), Rolo Diez’s Mato y voy (1992), Javier Valdés’s Asesino en serio (2000) and Juan Hernández Luna’s Cadáver de ciudad (2006). A coda addresses the treatment of snuff in novels inspired by the same Ciudad Juárez femicides cataloged in 2666. These include feminist texts by Maude Tabachnik and Alicia Gaspar de Alba, as well as sensational, misogynistic and necropornographic ones by Gonzalo Martré, Gregorio León and Ricardo Clark.

6. Chapter 5. Conclusion

   Glen S. Close

   Abstract

   Chapter 5 considers the recent and massive global success of literary and televisual fictions centering on autopsy. Although best-selling novel series by Kathy Reichs and Patricia Cornwell challenge the traditional gendering of the forensic pathologist as male, conservative gender ideology persists in television dramas that perpetuate the distinctive sexualization of the cadavers of young white female victims for commercial purposes. Examples of forensic-science-themed television series include CBS’s CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, which was for several years the world’s most popular scripted television drama, and the BBC’s Ripper Street, both of which have presented plotlines centering on snuff film. This chapter relates such heavily capitalized and marketed mainstream entertainments to marginal and more extreme necropornographic products such as “shockumentary” video compilations of female corpse images.

7. Backmatter