Nicole Sparling Barco (Central Michigan University)
Abstract
The contents of this special issue emerge from a larger conversation about crime and detective fiction in the Americas that began at the American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting (New York University, 2014), during a seminar that Dawn Taylor and I co-organized. As scholars of comparative literature interested in crime and detective fiction in the Americas, we thought that the multivalence of the title “Capital Crimes” enabled a flexible interpretation that encompassed the urban, deadly, and economic nature of the crimes present in the texts and films analyzed here.