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  • Chapter 8 - Crime Fiction

  • from Part II - The Politics of Genre and Form
  • Edited by Bryan M. Santin, Concordia University Irvine
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Novel and Politics
    Published online:
    07 October 2023
    Print publication:
    12 October 2023, pp 127-141

  • Summary

    This chapter examines the role that the crime novel played in exposing and, conversely, smoothing out the ill effects of capitalism, and of drawing attention to the intersections between crime, business, and the law. It argues that crime fiction’s ability to expose violent wrongdoing speaks to a wafer-thin ethical code in twentieth-century American society whereby the appearance of sanction and punishment trumps substantive claims to rightness and justice. The chapter also explores gendered and racial noir fiction, particularly in the works of the African American novelist Chester Himes. Ultimately, the chapter reveals the ambivalent politics of much American crime fiction: between, on the one hand, the desire for community and for a workable notion of the public and, on the other, the incorporation of this notion of the public by private enterprise and the allure of greed, profit, and gain.