ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the function of Otherness in crime fiction through various figures: The criminal Other, the victim Other, detective Others and the use of othered places, with a particular focus on the ways in which James Lee Burke’s Robicheaux novels both perpetuate and undermine paradigms of Otherness. Physical descriptions of characters also play an important role in crime fiction. European-based crime fiction, in print and visual forms, provides a testing ground for confronting Otherness at a time when migratory pressures are increasing opportunities for the assimilation or rejection of incomers locked into racial stereotypes. The chapter discusses humour can also be an important narrative choice in facilitating the reader’s identification with problematised detective or criminal characters, and that verbal and situational humour, the shared joke, as it were, play a major role not only in creating this affective link but also in distancing violence.
