Description
"What did it mean to read fiction about cops and criminals in an era defined by "tough-on-crime" attitudes that mercilessly punished Black communities? How did popular fiction's portraits of criminality either confirm or contest the criminal stereotypes circulating in American society? In American Literature's War on Crime, Theodore Martin argues that postwar American crime fiction was bound up with the policies and ideologies of the "war on crime." Likewise, he claims that crime fiction helped mediate a social world increasingly organized around the criminalization of poverty and race. Martin isolates key moments in the evolution of the "War on Crime" from how Black criminal visibility shaped pulp and prestige fiction in the 1940s and 1950s to how women crime writers in the 1970s and 1980s responded to the gendered discourses of racial pathology that emerged after the 1965 Moynihan Report to the rise of books about serial killers in the last two decades of the twentieth century. In the final chapter, Martin surveys how crime fiction's predominant geography of race and class shifted from urban to rural at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Across these five chapters, Martin looks at the works of Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Joseph Wambaugh, Mary Higgins Clark, Walter Mosley, Sue Grafton, and others to detail the aesthetic and generic transformations that American crime fiction underwent as it responded to the growth of prisons and policing in the second half of the twentieth century"-- Provided by publisher.
