Abstract
This thesis presents extracts from a crime novel entitled The Otago Society of
Gentleman Amateurs, with explanatory interludes and accompanying
exegesis.
The novel centres on the exploits of a young postgraduate member of the
eponymous Society, who discovers that one of the international student members
has been murdered in exceptionally horrible circumstances, and volunteers to go
to the victim’s home country of Myanmar in search of information. In what
appears an unrelated incident, a body from precolonial times is discovered in a
cave north of Dunedin on the same morning: the day after the Jewish files at the
Hocken archive receive an unexpected nocturnal visitor. These events are
interwoven with the story of a young mathematician’s trip to Nazi Germany in
the 1930s. All these strands interweave to form a novel that considers the
relationship between genocides of different eras and the inherent artificialities in
the project of writing crime fiction. The text draws thematically on the basic
concept of fractal systems as well as Buddhist and other theologies of hell.
The exegesis examines some aspects of the relationship between fiction and
authorial experience, and the problematics for Westerners of writing fiction set in
Asia in the postcolonial era. It also examines some aspects of gender and sexual
politics, and the philosophical diversity of cosmological perspectives depicted in