The Crossroads of Crime Writing: Unseen Structures and Uncertain Spaces

By Rebecca Martin

This volume argues that we must examine the boundaries in fiction and non-fiction crime writing with an awareness of and turn toward the unseen structures and spatial uncertainties that so often lead to and reflect collective fears and anxieties. Drawing upon the insights and expertise of an international array of scholars, the chapters within explore the interplay of the literary, historical, social, and cultural in various modes of crime writing from the 1890s to as recent as 2017. They examine unseen structures and uncertain spaces, and simultaneously provide new insights into the works of iconic authors, such as Christie, and iconic fictional figures, like Holmes, as well as underexplored subjects, including Ukrainian detective fiction of the Soviet period and crime writing by a Bengali police detective at the turn of the twentieth century. The breadth of coverage—of both time and place—is an indicator of a text in which seasoned readers, advanced students, and academics will find new perspectives on crime writing employing theories of cultural memory and deep mapping.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Mar 5, 2024
• ISBN: 9781839991189

Book preview

The cover image for The Crossroads of Crime Writing

The Crossroads of Crime Writing

The Crossroads of Crime Writing

Unseen Structures and Uncertain Spaces

Edited by

Meghan P. Nolan and Rebecca Martin

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2024

by ANTHEM PRESS

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© 2024 Meghan P. Nolan and Rebecca Martin editorial matter and selection;

individual chapters © individual contributors

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2023948355

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ISBN-13: 978-1-83999-117-2 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-83999-117-8 (Hbk)

Cover Credit: Charles Booth’s London, Public Domain

This title is also available as an e-book.

Contents

Introduction

Meghan P. Nolan and Rebecca Martin

Unseen Structures

Uncertain Spaces

Bibliography

Unseen Structures

Bibliography

Chapter 1. Unseen Structures and the Outlaw: Depictions of Violations in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy

Louise Nilsson

Introduction

Nonviolent Crime and Place

The Paperwork of Violence

The Outlaw and Resistance

Notes

Bibliography

Chapter 2. Dark Waters: Eco-Noir in New York 2140

Katrina Younes

Introduction

The Rhizomatic PI

The New Nordic Noir

Science Fiction and Noir

New York 2140 and the Eco-Investigative Novel

Legally Sanctioned Crime and Criminals

The Scene of the Seen Victim

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Chapter 3. Between Lenin and Sherlock Holmes: Soviet Militsiya Procedural in Volodymyr Kashin’s Detective Fiction

Sofiya Filonenko

Detective Fiction from Stalin to Brezhnev

Volodymyr Kashin and the Tradition of Ukrainian Detective Fiction

A Ukrainian Sherlock Holmes on the Ideological Platform of Leninism

Ukrainian Detective Fiction: Escape from Socialist Realism

Conclusion

Bibliography

Chapter 4. Detecting Justice: Black Crime Fiction and the Novels of Attica Locke

Dennis Chester

Introduction

Crime and Justice in Nineteenth-Century Black Writing

Crime Fiction and Black Writing, 1900–1932

Hardboiled Fiction and Black Writing

Black Crime Writing and the Late Twentieth Century

Attica Locke and Twenty-First-Century Black Crime Fiction

Conclusion

Bibliography

Chapter 5. The Police and the Private Eye: The Making of Gendered and Racial Peripheralization in the Crime Fiction of Valerie Wilson Wesley

Joydeep Bhattacharyya

Introduction

Situating Wesley’s Tamara Hayle within American Detective Fiction

A Black Female Cop in Belvington Heights

Tamara Hayle and the Sphere of Private Investigation

Tamara Hayle: A Denigrated Other

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Uncertain Spaces

Bibliography

Chapter 6. Navigating the Carceral City: Calcutta in Late Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Detection

M. D. Mahasweta

Introduction

The Texts

Disciplining an Unruly City

Discipline and Detection

Disciplinary Space and Its Other(s): Theorizing Carceral Space

Producing Carceral Space: Polyvalence

Activating Carceral Networks

The Detective: The Flâneur and Bricoleur of the Carceral City

Notes

Bibliography

Chapter 7. Traversing the Borders of Poverty and Morality: The Intersection of Maps and Upper-Class Ethics in Anne Perry’s Neo-Victorian Series

Meghan P. Nolan

Introduction

The Perils of Prostitution from Buckingham Palace to Bluegate Fields

Freeing Females of the Gentry from Bloomsbury to Seven Dials

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Chapter 8. Facts and Fictions: The Liminal Space Between True Crime and Crime Fiction

Rachel Franks

Introduction

A Shared Subject Matter

The Updating of a Tested Formula

Labeling and the Liminal Space

The Violence (and the Victims) Around Us

Crime Narratives, the Evil Other, and Borrowing from the Gothic

The Commercialization of the Uncertain Space

Notes

Bibliography

Chapter 9. The Success(Ion) and Corruption of Crime Genres in Jo Nesbø’s Macbeth (2018)

Sandro Eich

Introduction

National, Cultural, and Generic Blurring

Adapting Macbeth: History and Issues of Succession from Premodern Scotland to Twenty-First-Century Britain

Corrupting the Rules of Genre: Succession and Space

Conclusion: Success(ion)?

Notes

Bibliography

Chapter 10.  The Golden Age Meets the Age of Aquarius: Agatha Christie in the 1960s

Walter Raubicheck

Introduction

The Swinging Sixties

Christie Observes

Third Girl

Passenger to Frankfurt

Conclusion: The Final Works

Notes

Bibliography

Notes on Editors and Contributors

Editors

Contributors

Permissions

Index

Introduction

Meghan P. Nolan and Rebecca Martin

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. In order to do this, the chapters of this volume explore ideas of mapping not only in the topographical sense (e.g., the delineation of the grid in cityscapes), but they also examine and in some ways partake in the act of a deep mapping of the layers that create a sense of place—whether real, imagined, or both—including the history and memory that are so central to writing about crime itself. This function of mapping is extremely important as it is the very substance from which crime writing is created and crimes themselves are and can be reimagined. So, while there are other texts that discuss borders in relation to crime fiction—Transnational Crime Fiction: Mobility, Borders and Detection (2020), for example, which focuses on geopolitical border crossing within the framework of mobilities research (e.g., the works of Noel B. Salazar)—this collection instead applies a rich array of techniques from the emerging field of Spatial Humanities, which focuses on space and place in relation to markers of time and temporality (Roberts 2016b). Specifically, the chapters herein speak more to the delineation or designation of spaces by material means (walls and fences, maps on paper, etc.), invisible machinations of interested and empowered bodies (the law, corporate interests and marketing strategies, political redistricting, etc.), or discursive designations (definitions of genre: true crime, domestic suspense, detective fiction, creative nonfiction, investigative journalism, and more) as they relate to history and cultural memory. And, while each chapter’s approach differs from the others, taken as a whole, they offer a sense of the attractions and vitality of considering literature from the perspective of space, in conjunction with pressing deeper toward the power structures that operate in/on a specified place over time. A character may stand on the coast of Scotland, in the yard of a house in Houston, or may tread the streets of colonial Calcutta, but each place exists within layers and is in essence many places at once because temporal forces are always operating on it, as are other unseen powers and destabilizing forces. But, to fully understand this approach, it is necessary to first consider the many ways in which the features of crime fiction itself have been molded over time.

There are many factors that must be considered when doing so, as Mikhail Bakhtin notes, [l]iterary genres have been studied more than anything else. But from antiquity to the present, they have been studied in terms of their specific literary and artistic features (1999, 61). Common examinations of adaptation in the literary sphere, for instance, tend to focus on narrative and/or characters. The number of variations regarding the latter is surprisingly substantial within crime fiction considering the relatively short lifespan of one of its most popular subgenres, the detective novel. Detective fiction was literally birthed out of appropriation—Sherlock Holmes, arguably the most ubiquitous of all literary detectives, is after all himself derivative of Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin, and since his inception, there have been countless Holmesian iterations, which have been studied almost incessantly. Interestingly though, despite Bakhtin’s observations, there has been little discussion about the mutability of the (sub)genres themselves. This is a particularly important distinction, because the fluidity of these categorizations and/or a (sub)genre’s boundaries tend to fluctuate in relation to cultural memory, or those processes of a biological, medial, or social nature which relate past and present (and future) in socio-cultural contexts within literature (Erll 2012, 238). Truthfully, all literary texts contribute toward the ways in which these kinds of memories are stored and shared, because they naturally arise in [and from] more complex and comparatively highly developed and organized cultural communication […] that is scientific, sociopolitical, and so on (Bakhtin 1999, 62). Their role in memory construction is amplified, as Astrid Erll reminds us that Stories appear, disappear, and reappear. Literary works are read, reread, and rewritten across decades and centuries. In the process, they are constantly transformed and put to ever-new uses (2012, 238). And this practice is further problematized because the process of assimilating real historical time and space in literature has a complicated and erratic history, as does the articulation of actual historical persons in such time and space (Bakhtin 1999, 84). Temporal constructions in crime writing are indeed deeply complex—they can exist in a framework dating back from the contemporary to a land wrested with violence from Indigenous inhabitants or take place in a here-and-now among characters with no past that provides looked-for motives and no future that satisfies justice. In either case, it is often the crime that lacks cause and has only the most immediate effects (death, injury, etc.) that inspires more fear than the narrative that shapes criminality in comforting linear terms (i.e., cause and effect/crime and justice). This is particularly true of crime fiction where each iteration offers its author’s own view of the cultural and temporal context of crime. And so, it is necessary to study such works in relation to their time of creation as well and approach them in terms of the branded decade, or those periods in which they were written that are characterized by well-known qualities that have persisted for an extended length of time—for instance, novels of the Great Depression, or the Roaring Twenties, or the Golden Age of crime fiction, or, in the case of two of the scholarly contributors to this volume, the Swinging Sixties and the coinciding Khrushchev Thaw.

Surveying crime fiction in this way, through the prism of a particular period, is extremely valuable, as we can begin to understand how an author’s works are shaped under pressure—whether social, political, legal, or otherwise—and evaluate in what ways (if any) the author has changed perspective (in practice, style or the moral judgment therein) in relation to altered realities, while simultaneously observing the genre itself in the very process of creation. It is well to remember, then, that the temporal markers in literature (past, future, cause-and-effect) in relation to those major events that seem to fracture time or are assumed to as they usher in new ideologies and ways of being (elections, wars, pandemics, etc.), bodies (alive and dead) that are either tied to the past or are future focused, and even the implications of the choice of narrative structure (linearity or non-linearity) are not simply devices on which to hang a plot, but they are noteworthy carriers of values and assumptions (cf. Houdek and Phillips 2020). And, when analyzing such structures, we should heed Latour’s warning that we cannot (and should not) be critical of times past, because there has never been a yesteryear that we have somehow moved beyond (1993, 47). Hence, examining an author’s later works in relation to earlier practice in this context is meant solely to illuminate both the author’s own development and the role played by a new temporal reality in shaping both the writing itself and readers’ responses to it, as well as displaying the power of a particular (sub)genre to accommodate these altered perspectives and circumstances.

With this in mind, Nickerson’s assertion that crime fiction highlights specific social problems is just as true of gothic and Victorian sensation novels which generally expose social anxieties in relation to cultural, institutional, and individual identities as it is of the ever-growing contemporary genre of true crime which typically concentrates upon certain events and figures as kinds of cultural flashpoints and also has a long history from colonial true crime narratives to early twentieth-century pulp fiction (Smith 2008, 17–18). So, in order to properly consider textual implications—historical, social, and cultural—there is a need to go beyond the realm of fiction alone, because crime writing as a whole plays a significant role in memory-related intertextuality, as it documents social standards (in relation to crimes, investigations, era-specific advancements and techniques), and in turn the resultant cultural memory forms the underpinnings of the genre and its subgenres, thus producing a flexible fabric that shifts along with changing mores. Therefore, this collection presents examinations of true crime, historical contextualization, and at times correlated visual media alongside literary analysis in order to highlight the major ways in which crime writing as a whole both accurately reflects and pushes the boundaries of seen and unseen structures of various fields (or spatial principles) through sociocultural constructions and fears in several ways.

This approach is necessary now more than ever because of the multifaceted nature of crime writing as an interconnected network or web that extends naturally beyond the borders of a single (sub)genre or even the written word. The rhetorical framework of crime writing opens itself to greater examination in these terms, because, as previously mentioned, each of its subgenres inherently represents worldviews or ideologies specific to a given timeframe—a concept defined by Bakhtin as the chronotope (literally, ‘time space’) or the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature and other genres of communication (2011, 84–85). For example, Lili Pâquet argues that In narratives of a dynamic genre such as true crime broadcasts—which fluctuate with changes to context, audience feedback and evidence—plots and structures are not necessarily set units as they are in stories and mapping ‘rhetorical spaces’ in the texts creates fixed memory and turns emotional narrative into rational evidence (2018, 72). This is also true of subgenres like noir, which are inherently rife with contradictions that are founded upon moral ambiguities and can be considered less of a genre than a mode because of their portability across genres. And, so, it is important to remember that while prior to the twentieth century, information about crimes and criminology was publicly consumed via a variety of media (broadsheets, pamphlets, ballads, the Newgate novel, telegraphy, etc.), we are now able to (and habitually do) track information on an endless array of subjects across a wider range of seemingly ever-expanding platforms, resulting in perspectives that differ greatly from one reader or consumer to another based on when and where someone drops in on a particular mode. This is complicated even further by the fluctuating levels of veracity within these spheres, as true crime, for example, in its multitude of deliveries (podcasts, docuseries, blogs, etc.) by and large applies what Pâquet refers to as forensic rhetoric, which regularly employs techniques like arguing for one side of the argument (accusation or defense) rather than keeping journalistic impartiality, siding with an imagined audience against institutional gatekeepers, and persuading audiences to rational assent through the use of maps and timelines which provide a rhetorical space for the narratives (2018, 92). Yet, the examination of cultural correlation using maps and public records (via news clippings, legal documents, era-specific periodicals, etc.) can be useful when applied to the larger body of crime writing in order to gain a better understanding of these inherent biases.

While geography, for instance, is more commonly thought of as the study of physical landscapes or topographies separate from the writing that covers such structures—over time the term topography, whose Greek origins meant quite literally description in words of a place (n.b. topos, place and graphein, to write), has slipped away from this connection to words and the act of writing (Miller 1995, 3)—there is perhaps a more natural relationship than at first perceived and some scholars are attempting to restore the association. And, this approach falls well within the evolving field of Spatial Humanities, which, as Les Roberts notes, foreground[s] issues of space and place, [as] questions of time and temporality equally underpin theoretical and practical interventions that are advancing research in this area (2016b). And, because there is a more fluid and seamless interplay between the textuality of the writing and that of other media, whether these be photographic or moving images, digital maps, audio sound files, digital (and digitized) art works, locative media, hypertext data, other publications, and so on (Roberts 2016a, 4), within crime writing there is also a need for the practice of what Roberts and others refer to as deep mapping or the accumulation and layering of different kinds of geo-locatable media […] in order to facilitate investigations of the material, discursive, and imaginative geographies that inform our conception of a location’s topography and sense of place (2016a). In his book, Topographies, J. Hillis Miller explores how […] topographical descriptions or terms function in novels, poems, and philosophical texts (1995, 4), and this is an exemplification of what has become known as the practice of deep mapping, which according to Roberts, "speaks to a rich profusion of perspectives that are, in some shape or form, engaged with the mapping or tapping of a layered and multifaceted sense of place, narrative, history, and memory" (2016b). Such is the richness of this methodology that it furnishes the overarching theme for an entire issue of the journal Humanities, and it can be extremely useful in crime writing as well where so much depends on the ways in which narratives are woven together through a combination of actual locations and fictitious settings, because as Helen Couclelis notes, [w]here something is in geographical space is still the quintessential geographical question, though both the question and its possible answers are usually less simple than might appear at first sight (2005, 29–30). In crime writing, geographical space undoubtedly affects the construction and reinforcement of variable cultural standards.

This, in and of itself, reflects the zeitgeist that has perhaps generated the need to reevaluate the capacities of written communiqués within the Arts and Humanities as a whole, where there has been a deliberate turn toward spatial analyses in an attempt to better understand the digital phenomenon that Marshall, et.al., refer to as intercommunication and/or mediatization as well. Moreover, Bruno Latour’s theories suggest that the hybridization of several disciplines in this way is and has always been necessary to effectively tackle compound entanglements of the sociological (1993, 41). This kind of interdisciplinarity is inherently prefigured into the composite structure of the digital age, but it also acts as the common bedrock for several written genres, as is the case with true crime and crime fiction where the boundaries between truth and fantasy, the seen and unseen are fluid and often permeable.

That is to say, when evaluating how crime factors into communal understandings of ourselves and the institutions with which we abide, limiting the scope of analysis to crime fiction alone would be problematic primarily because its terminology and perimeters give a false impression of an enclosed genre space that does not in fact adhere to the dynamic reality of such conceptions, nor does it demonstrate how historical perspectives have affected the production of the works and/or helped to shape the overall landscape of the genre within specified time periods and the continued propagation of that which we fear. For example, although the disciplines of Law and Literature are undoubtedly intertwined, they are rarely evaluated using a rhetorical perspective, and the disciplines’ shared dependence on narrative is also overlooked (Pâquet 2018, 72). There are of course works that broach the subject, like Peter Brooks’s Troubling Confessions (2000), which incorporates real-life and fictional cases to explore concepts of truth and suspicion through an in-depth examination of the confession as a construct, and the Modern Language Association’s volume, Teaching Law and Literature (2011), demonstrates how legal realities directly influence a wide range of literary works and cultural objects. But, there is more work to be done, and the larger spectrum of crime writing, which includes the legalese of true crime as well as nonfiction ephemera, such as manuals, transcripts, charts, maps, timelines (e.g., Figure 4.3), and so on, is inherently open to these questions, as there is a flexibility that informs and relays the ways in which we create identities and social constructions in and through writing both real and fictional. Crime writing also gives us the opportunity to evaluate the full range of those characteristics that differentiate the genre, particularly in its ability to allow us to begin to pick apart social constructions in relation to its own composition, and the chapters to follow each utilize theories of cultural memory and/or deep mapping in order to facilitate this process through the examination of unseen structures and uncertain spaces.

Unseen Structures

As Tim Morton suggests, Western conceptions of location in literature—that is, those modes of spatiality in narratives peripheral to setting as a literary device—tend to have a fairly narrow focus, because in order to ensure reader identification, location must be local: it must feel like home, we must recognize and think of it in terms of here and now, not the there and then (2012, 27). And, this is exceptionally important in crime fiction because as Nilsson says in her chapter to follow, "place holds a key position as it connects the narratives to claims of national belonging" (4), and it also perpetuates common fears linked to forms of violence and othering in relation to such locality. A great deal of sociological research suggests that the attributes of one’s immediate surroundings contribute to perceptions of safety and personal development. Thus, location-based fear—generated from the unknown outside of the perceived safety net of a locality, or as a direct result of the kinds of violence that can either penetrate a familiar area or are perpetuated within a given sphere—is extremely important in crime writing as they very much reflect the patterns of criminality and victimization in relation to conceptions of locality in the real world. For instance, the abandonment and abduction of Amanda McCready from her home in a low-income neighborhood in Boston in Dennis Lehane’s novel, Gone, Baby, Gone (2007) works so well because sociological research has shown that the victimization of young people in similar situations is inherently tied to local settings as it occurs mostly in schools, at home, or on neighborhood streets (cf. Dangerous People, Dangerous Places). This sociological perspective is just as important in historical crime fiction as it is in stories taking place in contemporary settings, as Meghan P. Nolan’s chapter shows that Anne Perry’s two main series—the Thomas and Charlotte Pitt novels (1979–2016) and the William and Hester Monk novels (1990–2018)—equally rely upon socioeconomic disparity in Victorian London for the basis of the crimes therein, and proposes that in so doing, Perry explicitly expresses the readership’s moral outrage of the plight of the poor and the upper class’s willingness to exploit them for personal gain. As a result, even commonplace conventions in crime writing—crime scenes, courtrooms, or even traffic stops (as is noted by Joydeep Bhattacharyya in his evaluation of the works of Valerie Wilson Wesley)—are rife with the invisible connections that tie place to socioeconomic and political systems that perpetuate violence, surveillance, and other forms of oppression.

As philosopher Slavoj Žižek reminds us in Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (2008), One expression of objective violence is language and its forms, for example, the state apparatus, and this symbolic violence co-exists with the democratic, lawful state (7). Thus, Louise Nilsson applies the concept of place to those unseen structures of power that come into play within the local neighborhood and its orientations toward social spaces beyond physical locality in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy. More specifically, Nilsson explores what happens when crime novels that are rooted in particular local settings end up demonstrating how these places are embedded in the unseen social, political, and economic structures of the global. Nilsson examines not only the incarceration sites of the protagonists, but their sites of resistance within online and print communities as well (Salander’s The Hacker Republic and Blomkvist’s magazine, Millennium, respectively) to ultimately argue that the language within these discourse communities (Gee 2012, 3) is used for violating individuals within the larger democratic society in Larsson’s texts. Moreover, Nilsson discusses the narratives’ depictions of violence within the bureaucratic structures of these specified communities and their merging with sociopolitical structures through her examination of the protagonist as an Outlaw who resists these unseen structures from within the system itself.

However, through crime writing we also see that the invisible structures that perpetuate such violence extend well beyond the local community, as locations themselves can be victimized, particularly when we consider how environmental changes can have far-reaching effects across countries and continents. This is precisely why Katrina Younes explores conventions of violence in noir through her examination of Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, a climate fiction (cli-fi) text that also demonstrates the plasticity of the genre itself through its evaluation of ecological spaces. In The Green and the Black: Ecological Awareness and the Darkness of Noir, Lucas Hollister writes of the importance of noir beyond its national gendered and racialized confines by rethinking the genre and corpus of crime fiction and encouraging us to consider them in a different/greener context and looking outside of the traditional narrative logic to better understand climate change and our environment (2019, 1020). Therefore, Younes examines the relationship between the hardboiled, hypermasculine noir of 1930s America and the dystopian ecology of New York 2140 and highlights noir’s uncanny capacity to draw the reader’s attention to the scenic, the seen and the unseen (Jameson, 2007) or toward what Tim Morton describes as the hyperobjectivity of an environment, particularly as it relates to the rhizomatic eco-noir narrative which is nonlinear and made up of several distinct voices. In so doing, it also raises questions about how the pressures of political systems influence what constitutes crime, how characters are formed, and, in some cases, what is even allowed to be published.

Accordingly, Sofiya Filonenko follows with a rare look into the Soviet police (militsiya) detective story, analogous to the American and European subgenres of the police procedural. As Filonenko explains, Ukrainian detective fiction as a genre hardly developed during the Stalinist period, as pre-revolutionary Russian and foreign detectives were proclaimed bourgeois and harmful to citizens. The revival of detective fiction in the USSR began with the period of the Khrushchev Thaw, in the 1960s, and Filonenko assesses the writing of Volodymyr Kashin (1917–1992), a World War II veteran and the most prominent representative of the Ukrainian version of