The inaugural volume in a new series on global crime fiction from Bloomsbury Academic, Criminal Women in Contemporary French Crime Fiction offers new paradigms for assessing the fictional representation of female criminality in diverse forms of crime fiction. Exploring how stereotypes of female criminality – which are as social in origin as they are literary – are both invoked and disrupted, this monograph covers Pierre Lemaitre’s Alex, Fred Vargas’s Quand Sort la Recluse (This Poison Will Remain), Leïla Slimani’s Chanson Douce (Lullaby) and Hannelore Cayre’s La Daronne (The Godmother) in their original French and their English translations.

Addressing the gap of scholarly interest in legal and cultural representations of female violence in French crime fiction, Ciara Gorman evaluates the subversive ways in which archetypes of female criminality – ranging from the femme fatale to the witch, and from the mère fatale to the ‘bitch’ – are deployed not as reductive shorthands about femininity, but as motors of innovation and resistance. The form and plot of each text is examined for its potential as a polar féministe, Gorman’s label for a crime novel which incorporates the concerns of feminism – be that the prevalence of sexual and sexist violence in society, or the legacy of misogynist representations of women in the crime genre as a whole. Criminal Women considers the female criminal character as a figure of opportunity, the point at which readers and writers alike may reassess their assumptions about female criminality, and about the feminist potential of crime fiction itself.