03 | June | 2015 | International Crime Fiction Research Group

CFP sent by Jean Anderson, Carolina Miranda, and Barbara Pezzotti

Following our recent projects The Foreign in International Crime Fiction: Transcultural Representations (Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2012; see information available at www.continuumbooks.com/books/detail.aspx?BookId=167802&SubjectId=997&Subject2Id=927) and Serial Crime Fiction: Dying for More (forthcoming 2015, Palgrave McMillan; see http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/serial-crime-fiction-jean-anderson/?K=9781137483683), we invite interested scholars and specialists to contribute to a planned volume on crime fiction and food. We envisage including studies of print, television, and film series and are keen to consider a wide range of authors, countries and time periods. The category ‘crime fiction’ is here understood in the broad sense i.e. detective, spy, mystery and thriller.

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Any project dealing with a large corpus, even big data, needs to construct its object of research. This often means defining it according to precise and telling criteria. Quantitative research also means careful selection. Sampling is the key. But how is one to sample within a canonical corpus such as that of the novels of “the Queen of Crime”? There are obviously some numeric indexes: sales figures, number of editions, number of translations. But what else? An interesting ranking of the 78 novels by Agatha Christie can be found at https://agathachristiereader.wordpress.com/christie-index/; Similarly a Goodreads ranking, based on readers votes can be accessed at http://www.goodreads.com/list/show/2126.Best_Agatha_Christie_Book. And there is yet another, more subjective one, below. Continue reading →