Over a century ago, in his examination of “The Sensational in Modern English Prose Fiction” (1919), Walter Clarke Phillips declared, “Whatever sources of appeal may come or go, there is one which from the very structure of modern democratic society seldom bids for applause unheeded—that is, the appeal to fear” (2). It is to this appeal that we owe the abundance of crime writing at our disposal—a trove of mystery that undoubtedly fascinates in its ability to entertain while safely reflecting the ugliest truths about ourselves and the societies in which we live. In this vein, crime fiction persists as one of the most popular genres of literature across the globe, a fact that is further evinced by the inundation of onscreen adaptations of crime narratives, dramas, capers, and comic books which now, more than ever, reflect our common anxieties about the perceived failures of modern social institutions. That is because, as Catherine Nickerson asserts in “Murder as Social Criticism,” crime fiction “is deeply enmeshed with most of the thornier problems of the Victorian, modern, and postmodern eras, including gender roles and privileges, racial prejudice and the formation of racial consciousness, the significance and morality of wealth and capital, and the conflicting demands of privacy and social control” (1997, 744). Thus, crime fiction would appear to be the perfect vehicle for examining the origins and endurance of those societal fears which are firmly grounded in such conceptions and the perceived boundaries that perpetuate them, but this volume argues that we must examine those boundaries in fiction and nonfiction crime writing with an awareness of and turn toward the unseen structures that produce the spatial uncertainties that so often lead to such collective anxieties.

This collection makes a unique contribution to current scholarship on crime writing by gathering in one place texts that take multifaceted approaches to how these boundaries are drawn and how they respond to changes—sudden and forced or unseen and gradual—in relation to social and/or political power.

Weekly Miscellany, No. XXVII (27). Saturday, June 16, 1733

I hope I shall be excus’d for postponing several excellent Letters, while I entertain my Readers with a pleasant one from a young Lady. As it is the first which have received from the Sex, I could do no less than give it a Preference, tho’ some may be of Opinion that I should have consulted my own Credit better by not publishing it at all. If the Lady intended it only as a private Admonition, she should have given me some Intimation of her Meaning, but as it came without any Injunction of Secrecy, I thought myself at Liberty to make my own Use of it. The Ingenuity of it, I dare say, will make it agreeable to the Publick; and the good Humour of it cannot fail of making it inoffensive to the old Lady and the Curate who, next to myself, are most affected by the seeming Severity of her Banter. I shall give it exactly as it came to me.

To Richard Hooker, Esq;

SIR,

I cannot say that I am ever a Reader, or often an Admirer, but it is my Misfortune that I am always a Hearer, of your Miscellany. I live with an old Maiden Aunt, who mightily likes the Piety of your Design, and the Gravity of your Performances. She longs for the coming in of the Post with as much Impatience as I should expect a Letter from my Lover. As soon as the Letter-Carrier knocks at the Door (which is generally in the Evening) the Candles, the Curate, and Miss are call’d for in great haste. When the good old Gentlewoman has properly placed a little Instrument to her Ear, and the Reverend Gentleman has fixed another upon his Nose, your dry Discourse is bawled out with a Voice as loud as would reach the largest Church in your City, and in a Tone as canting as any that was in Fashion in the Times of old Noll.1 If any Part be duller; I ask your Pardon, good Sir, I mean graver, than ordinary, it is sure to strike their Want of Fancy, and we must needs have it over again.

Detective Fiction from Stalin to Brezhnev

In the Stalinist era in the USSR, detective fiction was actually a taboo genre. It was distinctly associated with so-called bourgeois, hostile values and was seen as a means of corrupting the petty-bourgeois strata of society. The figure of the public security officer in the literature was overshadowed with the figure of a brave Chekist (a Soviet political security officer), who waged a ruthless struggle against class enemies and other antagonistic elements, both external and internal. Instead of a policeman, there was a spy or counterintelligence officer in the arena. It is clear that such texts were propagandistic rather than literary. It was only after the death of Stalin and the fall of the regime of Lavrentiy Beria, in the mid-1950s, that the question of creating a new image of law enforcement arose. During the Khrushchev Thaw, the Soviet govern-ment tried to make this image more humane, closer to the citizens, to bridge the gap between the state and society: the police (militsiya) protects ordinary workers and peasants and does not persecute and punish them. Therefore, the authorities welcomed the first attempts to present a new hero in literature: a police officer.

It was at that time, in the 1960s, that the rise of the militsiya detective novel, the genre that became an analogue of the Western police procedural in the Soviet Union, took place. This genre, rich in documentary elements and close to an essay, was a variant of an occupational (labor-related) novel. At the same time, the Soviet militsiya novel reveals typological similarities with the Western police procedural: both depict a collective hero and, instead of a brilliant lone detective, there is an ordinary employee, part of the law enforcement system. The first book of this genre was Ivan Lazutin's novel Militsiya Sergeant (1959). Later works by Arkady Adamov, Nikolay Leonov, and Julian Semenov formed a genre pattern of the militsiya procedural story. As early as in the 1970s, such stories widely circulated and acquired their plot stereotypes, so against their background stood out the most striking examples of the genre: the novels of Arkady and Georgiy Vayner A Vertical Race (1971), A Visit to the Minotaur (1972), A Cure for Fear (1978), and The Era of Mercy (1976).

During the first two decades of his printing career, Richardson was associated with seven journals: The True Briton (1723–1724), The Plain Dealer (1724–1725), The Daily Journal (1721–1737), The Prompter (1734–1736), The Daily Gazetteer (1735–1746), The Weekly Miscellany (1733–36), and The Citizen (1739). Years before the appearance of his first work of fiction, he was already known among his fellow printers for being a gifted writer. In the January 1736 issue of the Gentleman's Magazine (p. 51), Edward Cave, the editor, observed that Richardson had “often agreeably entertain’d with Elegant Disquisitions in Prose.” Among these anonymous works were likely pieces contributed to some of these journals as well as such pamphlets as The Infidel Convicted (1731), The Oxford Methodists (1733), The Apprentice's Vade Mecum (1734), and the Seasonable Examination of the Pleas and Pretensions of the Proprietors of, and Subscribers to, Play-Houses, Erected in Defiance of the Royal License (1735).

Since anonymous publication in this period was a closely guarded secret between writers and printers, the inquisitive reader today has few opportunities to establish authorship beyond a reasonable doubt. The only recorded attribution by early commentators to identify Richardson's anonymous contributions, one to the True Briton, is found in John Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, where in a footnote he states that “it seems highly probable that the sixth [No. 6 (June 21, 1723)] was written by himself as it is much in his manner.” Although earlier Richardson scholars have dismissed this attribution, after a more thorough examination of this journal, I found grounds for suspecting that this and at least 11 other issues owe something to this printer. In any case, the political themes in letters signed A.B. in True Briton No. 9 (July 1, 1713); No. 19 (August 19, 1723); No. 24 (August 23, 1723); and No. 25 (August 26, 1723) are closely connected and appear to be written by the same person. As I will argue, the five letters in this journal signed with women's names also appear to be written by the same person, and most likely Richardson.

Introduction

In many ways, the detective novel is about what desperation drives people to do, and this conception is amplified in and through areas where adversity abounds. As a result,

It is the very insistence upon the concreteness of neighborhood borders that fuels both the narratives and character development in (Neo-)Victorian crime writing, as they directly reflect the bourgeoisie's growing anxiety over uncertain spaces and “the ‘invisibility’ of the poor” by engineering the “socio-spatial visibility” of London's social castes in and through writing (Harputlu 2016, 41). And, in order to do this, they must build upon the actual sociopolitical cartographic efforts of the mid to late nineteenth century.

Charles Booth's Poverty Map (1889) printed as twelve sheets in the Map Descriptive of London Poverty in 1898–1899 (Figs. 1 and 3) provides the most important visual reference for the socioeconomic breakdown of Victorian

London's various districts. As Zeynep Harputlu notes in “Mapping Poverty in Late-Victorian Fiction”:

Booth's meticulous detailing of the city based on economic activity further marginalizes the poor (even though that was not his aim) and thus provides a convenient backdrop for (Neo-)Victorian literature, which undoubtedly thrives at the intersection of the perceived borders of poverty and the unseen deeds of those crossing between said boundaries.

Introduction

When Hexter from Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140 talks about a novel he has written, he describes it as “mostly a detective novel, I guess you’d say, or an adventure novel where it's just one damn thing after another” (Robinson 2017, 392). One of the pitfalls in emulating traditional action-packed noir and hardboiled narratives, both subgenres of crime fiction, is that one can run into the problem of reducing the work to a pure thriller. Consequently, a pure thriller narrative, which can include psychological, action, and crime thrillers, might make it difficult to effectively address societal, political, and other issues. Rather than writing another pure dystopic, science fiction thriller, Robinson is more interested in coupling noir/hardboiled1 and cli-fi genres to comment on environmental degradation because, as he argues in the afterword of Green Planets, “it's only when you shrink the novel to the thriller that you run into problems in representing ordinary realities” (Canavan and Robinson 2014, 245).

In this chapter, I examine the relationship of New York 2140 with traditional hardboiled noir texts of the 1920s–1940s by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Specifically, I examine the relationship between the hardboiled and Anglo-hypermasculine noir narratives of early twentieth-century America and the rhizomatic dystopian and utopian ecology of New York 2140. Although noir has an uncanny capacity to draw the reader's attention to the scenic and the setting of our environment, it does so in limited ways. While the landscape in classic noir texts remains secondary to the plot and action, New York 2140 places the landscape at the heart of the narrative in order to raise awareness of climate change. In short, New York 2140 reenvisions conventions of violence, crime/criminals, and victims found in noir narratives to elicit action from readers against environmental degradation.

In New York 2140, Robinson depicts a near future of the planet suffering from sea level rise due to a warming climate. Unique to this novel is the fusion of dystopian and optimist outlooks on our future. In this novel, New York City is the new Venice, canals replace streets and we read about how people adapt to these changes.

Introduction

With When Death Comes Stealing, African American writer Valerie Wilson Wesley introduced her protagonist Tamara Hayle in 1994 and has since penned eight novels featuring the character. A single mother, Hayle is a Black woman, who used to work as a cop with the Belvington Heights police department,1 a space dominated by White men, but owing to her teenage son Jamal's racial victimization by her coworkers, she resigns from her job and during the course of the novels runs a private investigation firm, Hayle Investigative Services, Inc. Primarily set in Newark (except for her third novel, Where Evil Sleeps (1996), which is set in Jamaica), the novels are narrated in the first person, and are written from the perspective of a Black woman2 (Soitos 1996, 234), and Hayle examines the lives of African Americans in Newark, New Jersey, in the way Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins examines African American lives in Los Angeles. As such, Wesley's novels provide readers with what Astrid Erll refers to as “both a first- and a second-order observation” which gives “us the illusion of glimpsing [a] past” (in this case experiential), while simultaneously reflecting upon the “very processes of representation” (2008, 391). This is evident, as Hayle is proud of her city and its cultural heritage and, as critic John Gruesser has argued, both Hayle and the city of Newark are “overlooked and underestimated” by the dominant White males, and yet they survive. Hence, Hayle can be viewed as a symbol for the city (Gruesser 2005a, 89). Additionally, the novels contribute to the cultural memory of a traumatic past (c.f. Erll 2012, 239) as they capture the aftermath of the racial riots of 1967, which shaped the current sociopolitical reality of the city of Newark, and primarily deal with Hayle's lived experience as she tries to professionally confront the world of crime while forging a decent life for herself and her son.

Secondary readings reveal a little more about Wesley and her literary creation. For instance, about the characterization of Hayle, in an interview with John Gruesser, Wesley herself states, “I wanted to create a character who was a very empowered, very smart, savvy professional private detective” (Gruesser 2005b, 171).

Introduction

William Shakespeare is one of the few authors in the world who have gained the privilege of beginning their work by means of a question when this is too often considered a testament to bad style. His tragedy Macbeth (c. 1606) opens with the first witch asking, “When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lighting, or in rain?” instigating a play which continuously poses new questions, rather than presenting a clear-cut moral compass that leads its audience to the road of individual redemption. This opening question symbolizes the omnipresence of paradoxes which infiltrate the entirety of the play, in this case, that neither of the tempestuous phenomena to which the witch alludes here would normally appear in complete isolation. Right from the outset, Shakespeare denies any certainties in the dramatic world of Macbeth. Elena Ciobanu notably writes that

However, rather than framing this ambiguity as logical waste, it also carries with it its own counterpart, namely a productive understanding of early modern mentalities and the move from the Middle Ages to the early modern age (cf. Gaskill 2000). Following Malcom Gaskill's argument that one should refrain from capturing the ideas of the early modern mind statically, as if ideas and mentalities were inactive, and his alternative is turning toward investigating “interactions between discourses and historical actors participating in them” (2000, 16), this chapter explores how the conceptual flexibility of the early modern mentalities is used by Jo Nesbø's 2018 adaptation Macbeth to rewrite Shakespeare's tragedy into a twenty-first-century tale of crime, drugs, and corruption. The notion of “cultural memory,” as used by Astrid Erll, offers itself here well to identify the historical and conceptual contexts which are subsequently referred to by the novel, that is national, temporal, or genre boundaries, since cultural memory studies as a field of research defines itself “by the transcending of boundaries” (Erll 2008, 4).

Introduction

Images of Black people have always been integral parts of the American popular imagination. Literature, song, drama, and other media from the eighteenth century and into the present have widely reproduced and distrib-uted an American popular image of Black identity. This image exists in a world of popular culture, an uncertain space that cultural theorist Stuart Hall describes as a “contradictory space […] of strategic contestation” where group and individual identities are shaped and disputed (Hall 1996, 470). In a similar fashion, Astrid Erll describes how contested popular spaces are influenced by a broad “media of cultural memory” that can “generate and mold images of the past which will be retained by whole generations” (2008, 389). For both of these theorists, popular culture and media are not transparent conveyors of meaning but are instead makers of meaning that shape our perceptions of individuals and communities; the image of Blackness created in American popular culture is both an indicator and influencer of real lived Black experiences. In texts that engage with the unseen structures associated with popular concepts of Black identity, crime imagery often brings this contest of meaning to the surface; in many popular American texts from the slave era through the present, there is a persistent association of Blackness with images of crime and criminality, an association often used to justify the enslavement, incarceration, and impoverishment of Black communities (Fig. 4.1). The development of Black crime fiction as a literary genre in the United States is of note, therefore, because of the long history and influence of explicitly anti-Black popular culture texts that associated images of Black people with images of criminality. How can crime fiction narratives by Black authors that depend upon and emphasize the retelling of criminal acts add to or transform this Black popular image? How can crime fiction narratives that rely upon generic similarity, simultaneously resist generic tendencies toward stereotype?

The recent work of crime novelist Attica Locke provides some compelling answers to these questions. Two of her novels, Black Water Rising (2009) and Pleasantville (2015), both enliven and develop a contemporary discourse on crime writing and Black experience that begins at the start of the twentieth century.

Introduction

As the capital of the British Empire in India, Calcutta (Figure 6.1) in the nineteenth century was a bustling metropolis that housed important administrative, commercial, and cultural centers of the colonial government. However, all was not well in this “city of palaces.” Contemporary accounts in both English and Bengali testify to the ubiquity of crime and illegal activities in the city. Criminals negotiated the space of the city and its infrastructure in novel ways, giving rise to heterogeneities that challenged the logic of the per-fectly organized, disciplined city that the colonial administration wanted to approximate. There was an insidious battle for the space of the colonial city, and the stakeholders—the victims, the criminals, the police, and the detectives—were all implicated.

In the history of Calcutta, the year 1868 would be noteworthy for a few reasons. It was the year when the colonial government brought into force the Contagious Diseases Act (CDA). Under this law, sex workers were expected to get registered with the colonial government on the one hand and undergo compulsory checkups for venereal diseases on the other. The same year saw the inauguration of the detective department of the Calcutta Police. These two interventions on the part of the colonial government exemplified a con-solidation of the stranglehold of colonial discipline over urban space. As such, they facilitated greater surveillance and control over the subject population. Though the CDA was repealed in 1888 after protracted opposition from several social groups, the detective department continued to flourish. Simultaneously, the late nineteenth century witnessed the inception of detective fiction in Bengali. These were anticipated by semi-autobiographical accounts penned by both European and Indian employees of the police. A close analysis of some of these texts reveals fascinating intersections and interactions between urban space, colonial discipline, and the act of detection.

This chapter attempts a spatial analysis of some of these texts, more specifically, the semi-autobiographical accounts penned by two employees of the detective department of Calcutta Police. Its focus lies in the production of what Henri Lefebvre calls social space and its production through various social processes.