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Donald Westlake’s Ordo: Not Euro, not Noir, but Euro-Noir?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 July 2020

Jan Baetens ,
Ana Schultze  and
Fred Truyen
Jan Baetens
Affiliation:
KU Leuven, Faculty of Arts, 21 Blijde Inkomststraat, PB 3311, 3000Leuven, Belgium. Email: jan.baetens@kuleuven.be
Ana Schultze
Affiliation:
CEMPER, Zoutwerf 5, 2800Mechelen, Belgium
Fred Truyen
Affiliation:
KU Leuven, Faculty of Arts, 21 Blijde Inkomststraat, PB 3311, 3000Leuven, Belgium. Email: jan.baetens@kuleuven.be
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Abstract

Noir is a genre label with a long and complex history. The success of certain European home-grown forms of the genre (the French polar, the Scandinavian noir, etc.) invite us to reflect on the range but also the limits of the label in today’s European culture. The seemingly paradoxical example of Donald Westlake’s Ordo, an American noir novel that is perhaps neither ‘truly American’ nor ‘noir’ (and perhaps not even a ‘novel’) will serve here as a test case for some reflections on the actual use and function of the noir label in European literary culture.

Type
Focus: Crime Fiction as a Mirror of Europe’s Changing Identities
Information
European Review , Volume 29 , Issue 5 , October 2021 , pp. 651 - 659
Copyright
© 2020 Academia Europaea

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