Download or read book Detective Fiction and The African Scene written by Linus Asong and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2012-04-24 with total page 71 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its very inception, detective fiction has enjoyed a great popularity among the young and the old, the learned and the not so learned. By some unfortunate stroke of irony, its respect has not kept pace with its enormous popularity. For over half a century now, it has remained the bane of creative writing. In strict intellectual circles, it is very rare to find people talk defensively and interestingly about the genre. Yet Asong has chosen to do just that. He has stoutly defended the weak by putting up a good case for its continued existence. He has also shown how irresistible key elements of the genre are to even the best respected novelists. Finally he has demonstrated for the first time, how the genre has been domesticated by African writers of very great repute such as Ngugi, Sembene and Lessing. That he has been able to prove that these writers have used techniques of detective fiction is a significant broadening of the horizons for appreciating creative writing in Africa.
Download or read book Detective Fiction and The African Scene written by Linus Tongwo Asong and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2012 with total page 71 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its very inception, detective fiction has enjoyed a great popularity among the young and the old, the learned and the not so learned. By some unfortunate stroke of irony, its respect has not kept pace with its enormous popularity. For over half a century now, it has remained the bane of creative writing. In strict intellectual circles, it is very rare to find people talk defensively and interestingly about the genre. Yet Asong has chosen to do just that. He has stoutly defended the weak by putting up a good case for its continued existence. He has also shown how irresistible key elements of the genre are to even the best respected novelists. Finally he has demonstrated for the first time, how the genre has been domesticated by African writers of very great repute such as Ngugi, Sembene and Lessing. That he has been able to prove that these writers have used techniques of detective fiction is a significant broadening of the horizons for appreciating creative writing in Africa.
Download or read book Detective Fiction and the African Scene written by Asong Linus Tongwo and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The purpose of this thesis is twofold: to examine strengths and weaknesses of commentaries which have proved decisive in establishing the present status of the genre of detective fiction; it is further to examine the influence of the genre on African fiction as exemplified in the works of four novelists -- Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Petals of B1ood, Mongo Beti1s Perpetue et 1'habitude du malheur, Doris Lessing's The Grass is Singing, and Ousmane Sembene's Xala. Chapter I is mainly concerned with the state of the genre: the popular misconceptions of the readers, the origins of the errors that are often made in judging the literature, its inherent potentials and possibilities for the future. Chapter II deals principally with the examination of the elements of detective fiction techniques in the four novels, within the framework of structure and characterization. Chapter III is designed to establish the uniqueness of the four works -- how by combining social relevance and entertainment so successfully, and how by substituting the WHYDUNIT for the WHODUNIT, the novelists suggest one means by which the disreputable genre could be reinvigorated.
Download or read book Divine Justice written by Joanne Hichens and published by African Crime Reads. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recovering addict Rae Valentine, a PI in Cape Town struggling with her own demons, finds herself in the violent world of diamond theft, white supremacy, and religious zealots--a world that doesn't want someone like Rae--to solve a case that may be more than she can handle.
Download or read book Anglophone African Detective Fiction 1940 2020 written by Matthew J. Christensen and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2024-03-19 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing a survey of Anglophone African detective fiction, from the late 1940s to the present day, this study traces its history both as a literary form and a mode of critical exploration of the fraught sovereignties of the African state and its citizens. Since the late 1940s, African writers including Cyprian Ekwensi, Arthur Maimane, Adaora Lily Ulasi, Hilary Ng'weno, Unity Dow, Parker Bilal, and Angela Makholwa have published over 200 murder mysteries, police procedurals, spy thrillers, and other fictional narratives of investigation and discovery in English-language newspapers, magazines, and novels. Distributed widely across the continent's diverse cultural and political geographies, these texts share aesthetic characteristics and thematic preoccupations that reflect transnational networks of production, circulation, and influence. Anglophone African Detective Fiction, 1940-2020 surveys this literary history and examines how African writers have repeatedly harnessed the detective story to interrogate postcolonial realities of selfhood and the state. It argues that African writers have turned the detective story into a highly productive, while at the same time suspense-filled and entertaining, mode of social and political critique, first of colonialism and the independence era and latterly of neoliberal governance. Offering an overview of paradigmatic texts, from Ghana to Kenya and Sudan to South Africa, the book traces the contours of the history of Anglophone African detective fiction that is at once a cultural history of a uniquely African assessment of the ongoing problematics of sovereignty and decolonization.
Download or read book Lightseekers written by Femi Kayode and published by Mulholland Books. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Nigerian psychologist travels to a remote southern border town to uncover the truth about the murder of three university students in this "original and fast-paced thriller" (Lauren Wilkinson, author of American Spy). When Dr. Philip Taiwo is called on by a powerful Nigerian politician to investigate the public torture and murder of three university students in remote Port Harcourt, he has no idea that he’s about to be enveloped by a perilous case that is far from cold. Philip is not a detective. He’s an investigative psychologist, an academic more interested in figuring out the why of a crime than actually solving it. But when he steps off the plane and into the dizzying frenzy of the provincial airport, he soon realizes that the murder of the Okriki Three isn’t as straightforward as he thought. With the help of his loyal and streetwise personal driver, Chika, Philip must work against those actively conspiring against him to parse together the truth of what happened to these students. A thrilling and atmospheric mystery, and an unforgettable portrait of the contemporary Nigerian sociopolitical landscape, Lightseekers is a wrenching novel tackling the porousness between the first and third worlds, the enduring strength of tribalism and homeland identity, and the human need for connection in the face of isolation.
Download or read book Polar noir Reading African American Detective Fiction written by Collectif and published by Presses universitaires François-Rabelais. This book was released on 2017-06-20 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Curiosity and the desire to grasp the specificity of an abundantly read African American genre born as the 20th century was beginning are the research intentions that inspire this volume. Indeed, only recently has African-American detective fiction drawn the attention of scholars in spite of its very diverse blossoming since the 1960s. Diverse, because it has moved out of its birth place, East coast cities, and because female novelists have contributed their own production. At the heart of this popular genre, as novelists BarbaraNeely, Paula Woods and Gar Haywood tell us, is black existence: black memory, black living places and the human environments that build the individual - hence a détour to the French Caribbean.
Download or read book The Girl who Fell from the Sky written by Heidi W. Durrow and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After a family tragedy orphans her, Rachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and a black G.I., moves into her grandmother's mostly black community in the 1980s, where she must swallow her grief and confront her identity as a biracial woman in a world that wants to see her as either black or white. A first novel. Reprint.
Download or read book A Beautiful Place to Die written by Malla Nunn and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-01-06 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Screenwriter Nunn draws on her true-life experience growing up in Africa to create this darkly romantic crime novel set in 1950s apartheid South Africa. Detective Emmanuel Cooper is caught up in a time and place where racial tensions and the raw hunger for power make for dangerous times.
Download or read book All Come to Dust written by Bryony Rheam and published by Parthian Books. This book was released on 2021-09-10 with total page 559 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marcia Pullman has been found dead at home in the leafy suburbs of Bulawayo. Chief Inspector Edmund Dube is onto the case at once, but it becomes increasingly clear that there are those, including the dead woman's husband, who do not want him asking questions. The case drags Edmund back into his childhood to when his mother's employers disappeared one day and were never heard from again, an incident that has shadowed his life. As his investigation into the death progresses, Edmund realises the two mysteries are inextricably linked and that unravelling the past is a dangerous undertaking threatening his very sense of self.
Download or read book The Noir Atlantic written by Pim Higginson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Noir Atlantic follows the influence of African American author Chester Himes on Francophone African crime fiction. In 1953, Himes emigrated to Paris; he struggled there, just as he had in the United States. In 1957, his luck changed: the famous French Série noire brought out the first installment of his "Harlem crime series, La reine des pommes. Suddenly, he was a household name in France. Later, he would also have a significant influence on Francophone African writers; for them, Himes's blend of absurdist humor and violence offered an alternative to a high literary paradigm implanted during the colonial era. Likewise, his heterogeneous identity as American, black, and a writer of "French" bestsellers modeled an escape from the centripetal pull of the Métropole. Starting with Abasse Ndione's depictions of Senegal's marijuana-smoking subculture in La Vie en spirale (1982) and ending with Mongo Beti's 2001 Branle-bas en noir et blanc, set in Yaoundé, Cameroon, Francophone African crime fiction rejected French criteria of literary success; it embraced a new postcolonial aesthetic that emphasized entertaining the reader while making a living. The Noir Atlantic demonstrates why turning to what this study calls a "frivolous literary" mode represented a profound shift in perspective that anticipated more recent developments such as littérature monde.
Download or read book Accra Noir Akashic Noir written by Nana-Ama Danquah and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2020-12-01 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Accra joins Lagos, Nairobi, Marrakech, and Addis Ababa in representing the African continent in the Noir Series arena. “Superb . . . Each story reaffirms how fundamental ‘place’ is to the noir genre and how the locale shapes the story as much as the characters themselves . . . Strongly recommended.” —Library Journal “There’s good writing as well as a strong sense of place and culture, and the reader will absorb a side of Accra that doesn’t make it into the tourist brochures.” —New York Journal of Books Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each book comprises all new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city. Brand-new stories by: Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond, Kwame Dawes, Adjoa Twum, Kofi Blankson Ocansey, Billie McTernan, Ernest Kwame Nkrumah Addo, Patrick Smith, Anne Sackey, Gbontwi Anyetei, Nana-Ama Danquah, Ayesha Harruna Attah, Eibhlín Ní Chléirigh, and Anna Bossman.
Download or read book Return to the Scene of the Crime written by Kamil Naicker and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-12-01 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A crime novel, at once disturbing and perversely comforting, factually has been known to curtail social anxieties through the ‘open and shut case’ of its narrative form. But what happens to that form in a world where guilt and innocence are not easily assigned? Return to the Scene of the Crime takes place on the trope of an investigator returning to the post-colony on a quest for knowledge. In tandem with solving the case, they must also grapple with the complexities of their origins. Kamil Naicker shows how five authors defy generic expectations to illustrate the complexities of personal identity, transitional justice, and civil violence in the post-colonial world. Congregating novels set in South Africa, China, Guatemala, Sri Lanka and Somalia, this book intervenes in literary studies by bringing the trend of the returnee figure and exploring the possibilities of world-making through the explosion of a familiar form. Print edition not for sale in Sub Saharan Africa.
Download or read book The Conjure man Dies a Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem written by and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An African king with a degree from Harvard who set himself up as a "conjure-man", a fortune teller, is murdered in 1930s Harlem. This is the first known mystery novel written by an African American.
Download or read book Young Blood written by Sifiso Mzobe and published by Catalyst Press. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Umlazi Township in Durban, South Africa, seventeen-year-old Sipho discovers the thrills and consequences of a car theft life. Winner of the 2011 Herman Charles Bosman Award, the Sunday Times Fiction Prize, and the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa.
Download or read book Scene of the Crime written by David Geherin and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2008-03-10 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering analysis of the fiction of 15 authors for whom the setting greatly contributes to their overall literary style, this book focuses on the many ways that "place" figures in modern crime and mystery novels. The authors (and their settings) are: Georges Simenon (Paris), Donna Leon (Venice), Tony Hillerman (American Southwest), Walter Mosley (South Central Los Angeles), George P. Pelecanos (Washington, D.C.), Sara Paretsky (Chicago), James Lee Burke (Southern Louisiana), Carl Hiaasen (South Florida), Ian Rankin (Edinburgh), Alexander McCall Smith (Botswana), James McClure (South Africa), Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo (Stockholm), Paco Ignacio Taibo II (Mexico City), Leonardo Sciascia (Sicily) and Lindsey Davis (Ancient Rome).
Download or read book Mysteries of Africa written by Eugene Schleh and published by Popular Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Using the highly popular genre of detective/mystery fiction, this volume explores the insights available in African centered stories. The sample of writings used ranges from the colonial era to the present and covers the work of both Africans and outside observers from Europe and North America".--BOOKJACKET.
