Interrogating the idea of national detective fictions, or French detective fiction: what other type is there?

This book has its origins in a conference held at the University of Newcastle in July 2007. The conference was designed to bring together Australian academics working, within French Studies, on French detective fiction with French academics working, in France, on Australian detective fiction; it was also conceived within the organizational framework of the annual Australian Society for French Studies conference, whose theme in 2007 was La France au pluriel which was co-hosted by the University of Newcastle and the University of Technology, Sydney. Ultimately, the concept of plurality intersected with the detective-fiction theme in at least two obvious ways: speakers were looking either at French detective fiction, which seems inevitably to entail - either explicitly or implicitly - an interrogation of what French detective fiction may be considered to be, or at instances of Frenchness or French motifs in Australian detective fiction.