Leonard Cassuto, Professor, Fordham University, NY, US

Sympathy and Serial Killers

Why are serial killers such a staple of popular entertainment these days?  What’s so fascinating about Hannibal Lecter that he has become an American cultural icon?  I’ll offer some answers in this talk through a careful look at the way that serial killers work and how they’ve evolved, and I’ll conclude with some thoughts about where imaginary serial killers come from, and why their proliferation matters not just to readers of crime fiction, but to everyone.

Gunhild Agger, Professor, University of Aalborg, DK

Emotions, Gender and Investigation

The prevalent investigators – men as well as women – in modern TV crime fiction are in some ways less one-dimensional than they used to be. Many series tend to highlight the fact that they are engaged in their professional carriers as well as their private lives. How does that fact relate to the representation of gender? How do carrier-men and women mirror each other? To which extent does the investigator’s gender influence the plot, and how do female investigators relate to victims – are they more or less emotional? And not least: how does the crime thriller genre react to these tendencies? As others have pointed out, the immediate reaction has often been ‘melodrama’, but a combination with other genres such as the political drama has been another option.

I will take the Danish serial 'The Killing' (DR 2007/2009) as my main example in which I will point out what I consider some interesting tendencies in a Scandinavian context and relating them to the international development elsewhere.

Torben Grodal, Professor, University of Copenhagen, DK

High on Crime: the Psychology of Crime Fiction Consumption

The lecture will first describe how detection fiction is moulded by the seeking emotions; these are centrally supported by the dopamine system in the brains of mammals. Dopamine is known from the effects caused by the intake of dopamine-enhancers such as cocaine, Ritalin and amphetamine. I will describe how this system is developed to enhance the seeking up of resources and how dopaminergic seeking became central in those impersonal intellectual processes that are central in the classical detective fiction and how such processes were related to social developments of the 19^th century, especially metropolitan life and institutionalization of social life in non-personalized forms. This provided the background for the callous, impersonal approach to crimes such as murder. I will further describe the relation between dopaminergic seeking and the emotional hypercharge of traces and clues and show the link between seeking and obsessive-compulsive behavior is typical of serial killers as well as many obsessed detectives, and how seeking powers social intelligence-based fictions such as those made by Agatha Christie. I will then describe how seeking emotions interact with other emotions. The hardboiled crime story or film combines features from seeking with central mammalian emotions such as anger, erotic and non-erotic bonding and fear that are the prominent elements in action, adventure, and romance; the hardboiled films centrally use HTOFF-scenarios for arousal (Hiding, Tracking, Observing, Fleeing and Fighting) central for animal survival, and interpersonal relations that are not as impersonal as those in classical detective stories.

I will finally describe how crime fictions increasingly have been supported by moral emotions, especially moral disgust and moral contempt. Moral contempt is a 3. person witness emotion that accords well with the metropolitan life in late 20^th century and early 21th century and fits well with themes of body violations of different kinds. Moral contempt is centrally an emotion aimed at people that violate the norms of social hierarchies, like corrupt cops. As crime fictions increasingly have been the prime genre for depicting work and workplace on TV, they have also been central for portraying the ideal work ethos, with workaholics that signal the detective-police-person’s heroic commitment to pro-social values by suffering the abuse of criminals and by being unable to maintain a normal private life; conversely, corrupt officers become the central targets of contempt by betraying social value systems. In such fictions the classical callousness have been partly replaced by moralism, as it is especially evident in the moral vigilante fictions such as the millennium trilogy.

Kjetil Sandvik, Associate Professor, University of Copenhagen, DK

Playing the Plot: Agency and Embodiment in Reading, Watching and Playing Crime Fictions

This paper investigates how we experience crime fiction and puts forward the assumption that we read to uncover and reveal the plot in a more radical way than is described by Peter Brooks in his Reading for the Plot: When it comes to crime fictions a part from  the joy and excitement in reading (watching, playing) our attempts to  reveal and solve the crime (the core of the crime fiction’s plot) are being carried out along side and in ‘competition’ with the with the  protagonist (the detective, the investigator). So we do not just read for the plot on the level of the story, we also do it on the level of the characters of the story and thus we engaged ourselves in playing the plot, so to speak. A well-working crime fiction facilitates this double plot-reading by enabling a certain form of agency and embodiment: by putting out traces and clues and leaving possibilities for interpretations and solutions open to us, the structure of the crime fiction grants us the possibility of carrying out the tasks of investigation side by side the detective or investigator. The crime fiction creates a structure and space for actions into which we not just project ourselves in the act of reading but in which we also may participate actively. The paper investigates how this agency, embodiment and spatial experience works in crime fiction as a genre as such and in different media formats: the novel, the movie, the tv-series, and various hybrid formats which make use of cross-mediatic strategies, and the paper especially focuses on the introduction of a physical, tactile dimension when crime fiction migrates  into the realm of games (whether they are  situated in physical space, mediated through computers or using a mixed-reality format). In these last examples it becomes clear that crime fictions not just invite us to read for the plot, but incorporate the reader’s body and agency in the experience of playing the plot.

Maurizio Ascari, Senior Lecturer, University of Bologna, Italy

From Enigmas to Emotions: the Twentieth Century Canonization of Crime Fiction

My talk will offer a general overview of the twentieth century relationship between 'crime culture' and 'crime criticism', starting from the beginning of the century, when labels such as detective story or mystery story began to circulate as critical terms that defined a precise literary genre. I will compare the British and American approaches, focussing on the contrast between the clue puzzle and the hardboiled traditions, in order to analyse our current phase of syncretism, always with the aim of relating what is being produced in terms of creative writing to the development of new critical perspectives.
I will attempt to show how this genre is now regarded as being marked by complexity both in terms of recent creative production and of the critical representation of its past. On the one hand the current development of crime culture is characterised by a wide spectrum of literary subgenres (ranging from the psycho-thriller and the police procedural to the anti-detective novel), by the phenomenon of remediation, by the dissemination of detective and crime formulas in a variety of literatures and cultures, and also by the emphasis on the identity of professional/amateur detectives (in terms of gender, sexual preferences, ethnicity, etc.). On the other, also the currently prevailing accounts of the formation of this genre are marked by complexity. The monogenetic theory that identified the origin of detective/mystery fiction – as it was then labelled – as coinciding with the Dupin trilogy (1841-45) has subsequently given way to polygenetic approaches that take into account and emphasise the various cultural forms and extra-cultural factors which provided a basis for this process of genre formation.
Briefly, our approach is descriptive rather than normative, and we have partly renounced the reassuringly rational – but actually partly simplistic – efforts at taxonomy that characterised the past. This does not entail the sacrifice of analysis, but a new effort to ‘comprehend’ and render a network of relations, ultimately acknowledging the gradual – almost organic – blending of literary forms and genres into one another.

Karen Klitgaard Povlsen, Associate Professor, Aarhus University, DK

Crime Audiences: Reflections on Genre and Gender

The popularity of crime fiction i.e. detective novels, crime serials on TV and crime films has been growing during the last ten years. Especially Scandinavian series like Henning Mankell’s novels and Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy have had many readers and many viewers inside and outside of Scandinavia. Living in a Western context, where crime rates seem to be decreasing in almost all countries, one can wonder why? What is it about the genre and the situated reception of the single works that is so appealing to vast audiences? Especially female, adult audiences buy books and are loyal television viewers when crime fiction is programmed. I shall present an overview of Danish, Norwegian and Swedish television programming from the 1990s until 2009 that clearly demonstrate an enormous growth in broadcasted crime fiction whether we talk about Anglo American or Scandinavian productions.

Since the 1990s we have seen a growing number of female detectives and police officers in fiction – and somewhat delayed - also in reality. It seems that serial crime fictions with strong female characters – or with female and male characters experimenting with not so traditional gender roles, are especially popular in books and on screens. My contribution to this conference is a presentation of a rather ambitious audience study. During three years I have with the help from research assistants interviews app. 70 Danes in the ages from 20 to 83 have been interviewed alone or in pairs or groups of three to six persons. Slightly more women than men were interviewed and all of them presented themselves as readers or viewers of one or several crime fictions. My paper shall sketch the main results of the interviews in relation to especially genre in a cross media perspective, and in relation to gender as my interviews suggest that the female audience is especially fond of crime fiction wherever they find it: in print, on television, in the movies or on the internet.  

Elke Weissmann, Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, UK

The Crime Scene as Quality TV The emphasis on forensic detail in crime dramas such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation or Prime Suspect has led to the more elaborate staging of the crime scene. The camera more fully captures these scenes in a variety of shot lengths, ranging from long shot to extreme close-up. These shots are often framed in elaborate ways, emphasising the craftsmanship that is needed to both display and capture the scene in such a way. Like the crime scene in horror films, then, the scenes become ‘artistic displays’ (Tietchen 1998: 98) which showcase how the destruction of one body is an act of creation for the criminal, the investigators and – foremost – the production team involved in the creation of the drama. The paper will focus on the example of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and discuss how the series, in its display of ‘the horror of the damaged, distressed, suffering body’ (Dyer 1999: 59) at the crime scene develops artistic displays that draw on the discourses of ‘quality’ in film and television. In particular, it will investigate discourses of authorship of its aesthetic qualities that are closely connected to ideas of auteurism, and its tendency to over-stylisation as a means to signal both its heritage from earlier quality crime dramas and its innovation. Elke Weissmann is lecturer in film and television at Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, near Liverpool. She is the vice-chair of the Television Studies Section of the European Communications Research and Education Association (ECREA) and has published on CSI and transnational television.  

Stijn Reijnders, Associate Professor of Cultural Heritage Erasmus University Rotterdam, NL

  Watching the detectives. Inside the guilty landscapes of Inspector Morse, Baantjer and Wallander Visiting the settings of popular media products has become a growing niche within the tourist market. This paper provides a content-based explanation for the popularity of one specific example: the TV detective tour. Three popular TV series from different linguistic regions of Europe were analysed, each of which has led to substantial tourist numbers: Inspector Morse (Oxford), Wallander (Ystad), and Baantjer (Amsterdam). The results show that the tourist attraction of the TV detective programme is due in part to its topophilic character. First, ‘couleur locale’ is extremely important to the narrative setting of the detective programmes; the narratives elaborate on existing tourist gazes. Secondly, the narrative development is characterised by a process of investigation and tracking. By taking the tour, viewers can walk in the detective’s footsteps and relive the storylines. Finally, the TV detective genre promises the viewer/tourist an acquaintance with the thrilling, ‘guilty’ landscapes of the TV detective.  

Anne Marit Waade, Associate Professor, Aarhus University, DK

Wallanderland: Crime, Place and Affect Crime scene is a mediated and augmented place constituted by a combination of plot and place. It is an encoded place with forensic races of blood, nails, hair that constitute (DNA) codes and can be decrypted and deciphered as well as traces of gun powder, bullet holes or physical damage that are signs to be read and interpreted. The crime scene is also an encoded place with specific emotional modes and affective engagement.
In Ystad, Sweden, an innovative and ambitious film production environment has been created through the adaption of crime novel writer Henning Mankell’s bestseller about inspector Wallander. During the last few years Yellow Bird has produced 26 Swedish Wallander films as well as 6 films for the  BBC. The series is both produced in the region and is (re-) presenting the region on screen. People from Ystad are involved in the production as e.g. extras, volunteers and investors and the municipality has taken advantage of the film with its comprehensive corporate brand strategy that encompasses citizens, local authorities, culture entrepreneurs, investors and visitors. The series are conceptualising Ystad and the region Skåne as film location, and film locations has become commodity. The British production manager proclaimed: “Welcome to Wallanderland!”.
In my presentation I will use the affective and spatial aspects of crime scenes as a starting point and describe Wallanderland as case to reflect the close relationship between the crime series, the place and the affective engagement and mood management. The examples will be both crime scenes in the series as well as how crime scenes are used to promote and brand the city.