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In her 2016 book Legacies of the Rue Morgue: Science, Space and Crime Fiction in France, Andrea Goulet explores shifting extradiegetic scientific and philosophical paradigms through an extensive corpus of French crime literature ranging from mid-nineteenth century romans-feuilletons to late twentieth-century postmodern fiction. Throughout the pages of this profoundly erudite scholarly work, Goulet demonstrates the ways in which the vast body of literature she analyzes conditions the tension between the rational, deductive processes of the crime novel detective and the ultimately ambiguous nature of the violent crime. She weaves an intricate, deeply researched web of connections that spans over 150 years of modern French crime fiction and pinpoints the inaugural text of this genre's primary tropes in Edgar Alan Poe's short crime story The Murder in the Rue Morgue (1841). However, what is innovative in Goulet's usage of Poe's story as foundational is her refusal to situate it as a normative text. She considers it rather as one that is "as non-normative—that is, as counter-rational, gruesome and conflicted—as any of the sensational murder narratives that were excised from the most purified accounts of the roman policier" (7). According to Goulet, French crime fiction inherited from Poe's story "two irresolvable tensions: between abstract intellection and bodily violence, and between (inter-) national politics and domestic privacy" (11). And indeed, as Goulet successfully illustrates, these tensions will continue to haunt French detective novels up through the most modern text she incorporates in her study—Dantec's cyberpunk novel Babylon Babies (1999). As she walks her reader across centuries and territories, Goulet extends her network of connections in two directions. On a "vertical" axis, she takes her reader deep below street-level Paris in an exploration of subterranean crime novels. On a "horizontal" axis Goulet emerges from the depths of Parisian catacombs to portray the cartographic dimensions of crime fiction, underlining the topographical aspect of detective investigation.
Goulet's book is divided into three sections: "Archaeologies," "Intersections" and "Cartographies." In "Archaeologies" Goulet delves below ground level and explores catacomb crime gangs who subvert the apparent political structure existing in the above-ground city. She argues that Cuvier's geological discoveries caused a shift in the comprehension and representations of time and space in nineteenth-century crime fiction. With close readings of Berthet's Paris avant...