Authority, social anxiety and the body in crime fiction

Patricia Cornwell's unnatural exposure

Peter Messent

pp. 124-137

in: Warren Chernaik, Martin Swales, Robert Vilain (eds), The art of detective fiction, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000

Abstract

How do we explain the attraction crime literature holds for its readers? Any answer to this question is going to be necessarily tentative and speculative given the problems both in identifying different readerly communities and the responses (both individual and shared) that compose them; given, too, the different social and historical circumstances in which such texts have been produced and received. Contemporary American crime fiction, traced back via Chandler and Hammett, has predominantly urban roots. The subject of David Stewart's recent article in American Literary History is an even earlier period, pre-Civil War urban crime literature and spectator journalism in particular.¹ Nonetheless, his explanatory model and his observations on the related economies of production, pleasure and desire offer a helpful prompt for thinking about contemporary crime fiction and exploring the nature of its appeal.

Cited authors

Stewart David