Dementia and detectives: Alzheimer's disease in crime fiction

Fictional representations of dementia have burgeoned in recent years, and scholars have amply explored their double-edged capacity to promote tragic perspectives or normalising images of ‘living well’ with the condition. Yet to date, there has been only sparse consideration of the treatment afforded dementia within the genre of crime fiction. Focusing on two novels, Emma Healey’s Elizabeth is Missing and Alice LaPlante’s Turn of Mind, this article considers what it means in relation to the ethics of representation that these authors choose to cast as their amateur detective narrators women who have dementia. Analysing how their narrative portrayals frame the experience of living with dementia, it becomes apparent that features of the crime genre inflect the meanings conveyed. While aspects of the novels may reinforce problem-based discourses around dementia, in other respects they may spur meaningful reflection about it among the large readership of this genre

‘Writing Now’

This chapter considers the themes and forms that characterise women’s writing in the new millennium. Post-9/11, self-representation has become a particularly urgent task for Muslim writers such as Monica Ali and Leila Aboulela. A concern with refugees, asylum seekers, and modern forms of slavery becomes increasingly prominent, not only in fiction – for example, Fadia Faqir’s My Name is Salma (2007) and Monica Ali’s In the Kitchen (2009) – but also in the theatre: Kay Adshead’s The Bogus Woman (2000), Sonja Linden’s Crocodile Seeking Refuge (2005), Christine Bacon’s Rendition Monologues (2008), Rukhsana Ahmad and Oladipo Agboluaje’s Footprints in the Sand (2008), Natasha Walter's Motherland (2008), and Gbemisola Ikumelo’s Next Door (2010). The impact of global capitalism, consumerism, and branding are explored in novels such as Scarlett Thomas’ Popco (2004), Ali Smith’s Girl Meets Boy (2007), and Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007). Ageing is another major theme. Long a pre-occupation of Doris Lessing, it features also in Liz Jensen’s War Crimes for the Home (2002) and Alison Fell’s Tricks of the Light (2003). Anxieties about climate change and environmental apocalypse are addressed through dystopia in Maggie Gee’s The Ice People (1998) and The Flood (2004), Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007), Sarah Hall’s The Carhullen Army (2007), and Liz Jensen’s The Rapture (2009). Following Suniti Namjoshi’s pioneeringly collaborative Building Babel (1996), the use of multimedia in Maya Chowdhry’s digital poetry, Kate Pullinger’s ‘networked’ wikinovel Flight Paths (2005-), and the ‘visual novel’ (an interactive fiction game), gives literature an entirely new shape