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The rationale for scholarly interest in the detective novel has shifted considerably in recent years. Since the 1970s, academics have often regarded detective fiction, like other popular genre fiction, as a set of conventions and formulas that reaffirm a culture’s dominant ideology, “confirming existing definitions of the world” and attempting to resolve their tensions or contradictions (Cawelti 35). This approach, which retains some critical currency today, views detective fiction as a paradigm and an implement of the hegemonic processes of the Western nation-state, tantalizing readers with aberrant, irrational criminality while assuring them that society ultimately coheres through a shared commitment to reason and law. For scholars such as Franco Moretti, the detective genre “resolves the deep anxiety of an expanding society” and reassures readers “that society is still a great organism: a unitary and knowable body” (143, 145; his emphasis). For more narratologicallyminded critics like Peter Brooks, the crime-and-inquest structure of detective fiction typologizes or lays bare “the structure of all narrative” (25).1 In both of these approaches, the detective novel is reduced to a formulaic, forensically deducible cultural product whose structural conventions reflect knowledge production either in the abstract or as a dominant (white, Western, capitalist, and nation-statist) cultural practice. Both the sociological and the narratological approaches consider the form and content of the detective novel to be an open and shut case: a matter of how the genre both creates and resolves epistemological and ideological tensions.
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