‘Other’ Detectives: the Emergence of Ethnic Crime Writing

Abstract

Popular literature often addresses hopes and fears affecting large sections of a nation’s population, especially when in the throes of social, political, and economic change or upheaval. In the case of the detective this is very clear. The genre originated in early and mid-nineteenth-century France and England, closely upon the creation of the first modern and professional police services. This development itself marked the middle-classes’s determination to safeguard its own only recently won hegemony vis-à-vis both the arrogant arbitrariness of aristocratic rule and the growing ‘greed’ of the have-nots (see, for instance, Knight 1980; Mandel 1984; Porter 1981).