Dead Flowers: A Dr Sian Love Mystery
- Submitting institution
-
De Montfort University
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 27050
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Verve Books
- ISBN
- 978-0857308023
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- December
- Year of publication
- 2019
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- 'Dead Flowers' continues my interests in inhabiting genre borderlines (the thriller, crime, classic noir, modern domestic noir and police procedural/forensics) to examine political concerns. The novel explores working class identity, trauma and the broken state of neoliberal life. It sits within contemporary formulations of a ‘neoliberal gothic’ that suggest the work of fiction is to alert readers “…to the impossibility of escaping the internalized gothic so long as social arrangements remain the same.” (Johansen, 2016, p.54). 'Dead Flowers' uses both Crime and Gothic tropes to interrogate the crimes of contemporary capitalism. It uses two timelines to do so: one in the present day and another back in the late 60’s/early 70’s. This structural device allows the novel to examine the causal relationships between eras; and how the nascent Thatcherite policies of the 70s have shaped the neoliberal present. The dual narratives explore the same story; the origins of the main character, Sian and the discovery of the identities of her real parents. But the story also politicises ideas of fate, psychic predictions and the supernatural. The ‘occult’ forces that govern individual lives are seen to be the no less mysterious and merciless forces of brutal economic policies. Whilst this is not a ghost story, there is the sense of the past haunting the present throughout in the novel’s interest in the same locations and their repurposing for gentrification. Choosing a DNA scientist as a character having an identity crisis gave me the chance to explore the imagery and science around the chemical codes that form us, and its ramifications for free will. 'Dead Flowers' is a thriller that asks probing questions about who we are, what family means, and how the past is deeply linked and influential to our present and future lives.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -