Female corpses in crime fiction: a transatlantic perspective

This text examines the central significance of sexualized female corpses in modern and contemporary Hispanic and Anglophone crime fiction.

Beginning with the foundational detective fictions of the nineteenth century, it draws from diverse subgenres to describe a transatlantic tradition of necropornography characterized by lascivious interest in female cadavers, dissection, morgues, femicide, and snuff movies.

Hard-boiled and police procedural classics from the US and the UK are juxtaposed with texts by established Spanish and Spanish American genre masters and with obscure works that prefigure the contemporary transmedial boom in corpse-centred fictions.

The rhetoric and aesthetics of necropornographic crime fiction are related to those of popular crime journalism and forensic-science television dramas.