“ Could I connect the two, write about love and hate?” : The generic affordances of romance and crime fiction in Elizabeth Chakrabarty’s Lessons in Love and Other Crimes

In her autobiographically-inspired novel Lessons in Love and Other Crimes (2021), British author Elizabeth Chakrabarty raises important self-reflexive questions about the conventions of romance and crime fiction and the socio-critical affordances of (genre) fiction. Set in contemporary Britain, the romance-cum-crime novel intertwines a professor’s transracial queer love story with her investigation into the anonymous racial hate crimes she experiences at work. Although Tesya’s romance challenges the genre’s historical whiteness and heteronormativity, it primarily serves as the conduit for an unusual whodunit, in which the traumatized focalizing protagonist’s perceptions alternate with the racist culprit’s consciousness and the victim is forced into a sleuthing role. Even so, the novel does not focus on Tesya’s search for the culprit and only at the end returns to the body announced at its opening. Instead, the lengthy autobiographical and metafictional reflections that bookend and intersperse Tesya’s story, combined with the unexpected joint resolution of the romance and crime plots, highlight the therapeutic and socio-critical value of Chakrabarty’s generically hybrid autofiction. In the final pages, when poetic justice is served and a happily-ever-after unexpectedly found, Chakrabarty offers her fictional alter ego the closure that she herself has been denied in real life.