crime fiction in the caribbean: reframing crime and justice

Crime Fiction in the Caribbean: Reframing Crime and Justice is the first academic book to focus on crime fiction by anglophone Caribbean writers. It explores how contemporary writers experiment with the crime genre in order to convey, contextualize, and comment on crime and justice in Caribbean countries. Lucy Evans reads crime fiction as a versatile mode of writing that can be politically engaged, and that-in a Caribbean context-can expose power structures embedded in the region’s multi-layered history of colonial conquest, genocide of Indigenous populations, plantation agriculture, transatlantic slavery, and indentured labour.

This book covers fiction set in Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Guyana, Barbados, Grenada, and Haiti, discussing novels by Elizabeth Nunez, Jacob Ross, Marlon James, Harischandra Khemraj, Esther Figueroa, Edwidge Danticat, Cherie Jones, and several others. Evans considers how fiction by anglophone Caribbean writers not only reflects upon the social realities of crime and crime control in the Caribbean, but also at times contests or complicates scholarly, popular, and legal perspectives. She argues that through their engagement with the crime genre, these writers raise pressing questions about what constitutes crime and justice in a Caribbean context, and about accountability. Looking beyond the traditional focus of crime fiction and criminology on individual acts of wrongdoing, their fiction highlights systemic social harms rooted in the region’s colonial past. Reading crime fiction through the lens of criminological research, Crime Fiction in the Caribbean brings the study of literary writing into scholarly debate on crime in the Caribbean. At the same time, it extends the global turn in crime fiction studies, focusing on a region that has been sidelined even in studies which examine the genre’s international dimensions.

Lucy Evans, Associate Professor in Postcolonial Literature, University of Leicester

Lucy Evans is Associate Professor in Postcolonial Literature at the University of Leicester specializing in Caribbean literature. Her current research focuses on crime fiction, and she is also working with Caribbean-based researchers and NGOs to develop creative methods for preventing gender-based violence. She is the author of Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories (2014) and co-editor, with Emma Smith and Mark Mcwatt, of The Caribbean Short Story: Critical Perspectives (2011). With Shivanee Ramlochan, she is co-editing Unstitching Silence: Fiction and Poetry by Caribbean Writers on Gender-Based Violence (2024).