Blood on the Table : Essays on Food in International Crime Fiction

This is the first book to focus explicitly on the semiotics of food in crime fiction. Tackling the subject from a multicultural and interdisciplinary perspective, it includes approaches from cultural studies, food studies, media studies and crime fiction studies. Thus the present collection investigates how the representation of food's convivial aspects and of eating rituals can also point to complex discourses about cultural belonging, regional, and national and supranational identities. The chapters cover a range of issues, such as the provision of intra-, per- or paratextual recipes, the aesthetics and ethics of food, and its place in true crime writing as well as in crime fiction proper. They also survey eating disorders and eating habits as a mark of "otherness," the use of food as an indicator of personal and national identity, or as an indicator of syncretism and hybridity. The collection offers readings, across a range of media, of twentieth- and twenty-first-century crime fiction from Australia, Cuba, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Sweden, the UK, and the US. Authors studied include Anthony Bourdain, Arthur Upfield, Sara Paretsky, Andrea Camilleri, Fred Vargas, Ruth Rendell, Stieg Larsson, Leonardo Padura, Georges Simenon, Paco Ignacio Talbo II, and Donna Leon. Television productions analyzed here include the Inspector Montalbano series (1999-ongoing), the Danish-Swedish Bron/Broen (2011[The Bridge]), and its remakes The Tunnel (2013, France/UK) and The Bridge (2013, USA).