Killing Carmens

An innovative and best-selling addition to contemporary peninsular literature, crime fiction by Spanish women re-writes the norms for this particular genre as established by male authors inside Spain, and revises and re-fashions paradigms for the detective novel produced by female Anglophone writers. In the first of three chapters, the author shows how the figure of the female sleuth has been deployed by novelists to articulate a feminist ideology or to reflect on the contemporary Spanish post-feminist environment. With reference to gendered criminology, she then moves on to discuss how writers use crime fiction to investigate the problem of gendered violence, and women's responses to it. A final section shows how, in Catalonia, female authors have used both the thriller and the 'cosy' enigma-style detective text to foreground and interrogate the parallel exploitation of women and the Catalan nation.