AustLit

'Crime fiction recreates itself incessantly and, in doing so, expands and redraws the lines of its market, partly in response to its condition as a globalized, popular textual commodity. Its emergence—and especially its re-emergence —in Australia and New Zealand strikingly, but problematically, exemplifies this rule. An inevitable question when one turns to antipodean crime fiction, then, is how new the New Zealand crime story is, or the Australian, considering that the attraction of this literature is likely to be registered in bestseller lists and as a global phenomenon. Despite the ever-ramifying conservatism of the larger tradition of crime writing, a nonlocal course in Australasian crime writing necessarily deals in novelty and differ-ence, in its forms as well as in the cultural investigations it carries out in the guise of its fictions. The corollary of this claim is that, for all its difference, Australasian crime is intelligible first as an instantiation of a textual tradition that has its origins elsewhere. I argue, then, for the kind of course that draws crime writing from the Australasian region into a study of the global field of crime fiction. ' (Introduction)