Detecting the South in Fiction, Film, and Television

Far beyond the noir shadows of Intruder in the Dust and True Detective, the South has had long intimacy with mystery. This book reminds us just how rich and expansive that history is, and how enduring the impulse to detect the South has remained across the generations. ~Robert Jackson, author of Fade In, Crossroads: A History of the Southern Cinema

Detecting the South in Fiction, Film, and Television persuasively makes the case for the centrality of the southern detective narrative to American literature and culture, illuminating the role of region in shaping hard-boiled stories about national identity, justice, and concepts of criminality. Linking work by creative writers and critics, the collection smartly sifts through complex cultural narratives to offer new clues about the working of place, power, and knowledge. ~Lisa Hinrichsen, coeditor of Small-Screen Souths: Region, Identity, and the Cultural Politics of Television

From Welty to Atkins, the plantation to the French Quarter, and Sheriff Andy Taylor to Rust Cohle, this is a truly fascinating dive into the underworlds of myriad Souths. Featuring a strong and diverse cast of scholars and novelists, Detecting the South in Fiction, Film, and Television provides new insights into southern geography, race, inequality, sexuality, class, and environment—and ultimately the nature of southernness itself—by way of the grit and violence that has always lurked inside our most cherished novels, films, and TV shows. ~Matthew Christopher Hulbert, author of The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory: How Civil War Bushwhackers Became Gunslingers in the American West