Killing Carmens

"Killing Carmens" is the first book on women's crime writing from Spain and offers a new approach to Spanish crime fiction, combining literary criticism with sociological and criminological theory. This multidisciplinary study analyses how female authors use crime and detective genres to analyse the role and position of their countrywomen. The volume demonstrates how female Spanish writers subvert aspects of various crime sub-genres to examine key topics of interest to them as women. The author shows how the figure of the female detective has been used at different times to articulate a feminist ideology or to reflect on the contemporary post-feminist environment. With reference to Spanish and international gendered criminology, she also discusses how writers use the crime novel to investigate the very high number of women murdered or subjected to other violence in Spain each year. A final section shows how in Catalonia female authors have used this type of literature to consider crimes against women and crimes perpetrated against Catalan culture and political autonomy. The detective genre, or novela negra, is one of Spain's most popular types of fiction: books by many female writers have achieved best selling status and have been translated into several languages. "Killing Carmens" considers them as gendered social commentary, rather than just as literary texts.