“Marlon James’s ‘Dangerous’ A Brief History of Seven Killings”

Abstract

Jamaican writer Marlon James’s third novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, for which he won the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2015, is a crime novel which looks beyond the surface to explore and unearth suppressed histories. The genre itself, crime fiction, has proven to be prosperous ground to undertake such explorations. In Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, Lee Horsley asserts that simply “the act of looking at what has been hidden is in itself fraught with meaning” (2005: 203) and he further specifies that the detective or crime story is “an ideal form of exploration of suppressed realities. The investigative structure provides a ready-made instrument for unearthing the previously invisible crimes against people” (id.). In fact, James himself has described his novel as the act of the pulling off a stitch that might “disrupt the whole fabric” (James 2015).