The Postcolonial Detective

What happens to detective fiction when the detective is 'post-colonial', a marginalized native or settler in a country recovering from colonialism? Post-colonial detection is an exciting hybrid of western-influenced police methods and plot conventions and indigenous cultural insights and wisdom in exotic settings. An introduction to the peculiarities of the post-colonial detective and to post-colonial theory establishes a context in which to view more than a dozen notable detectives and authors from around the world.

• detective fiction
• fiction
• novel

ED CHRISTIAN is an Assistant Professor of English at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. He has been teaching detective fiction for a decade, featuring post-colonial detectives whenever possible. He has written or spoken on the detective writers Dorothy L. Sayers, Chester Himes, and Ellis Peters, among many others, and published the book Joyce Cary's Creative Imagination. Outside his native country, he has taught English to graduate students in Beijing, served as a surgical supervisor of a hospital in Rwanda, and been a Fullbright Scholar at Oxford. In addition to teaching detective fiction, he teaches three popular courses in biblical literature and another in apocalyptic fiction.

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