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Helle Michelsen
reviews
Cast a Long Shadow: Welsh Women Writing Crime
Eds. Katherine Stansfield and Caroline Oakley

In their excellent introduction to this anthology of short stories, the editors tell us that just now ‘crime fiction is outselling all other fiction genres’. That does not mean such books sell in huge numbers of course – publishing is not what it was, and many genres sell rather poorly. It’s nevertheless an interesting fact which Stansfield and Oakley attribute at least in part to ‘the great variety of the contemporary crime-fiction market’ with its proliferation of sub-genres such as historical crime, spy narratives, and noir. This in its turn I think reflects a tendency for contemporary so-called ‘literary fiction’ to provide studies of individuals set in the emotional haze of private space.

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