ABSTRACT
To begin with an impossible beginning, and in a way that pervades this chapter, after fi nding that ‘a focus on crime, but sometimes only its investigation’ is all that distinguishes the genre, John Scaggs (2005, p. 1) decides that his engaging critical foray will ‘employ the term “crime fi ction” to classify an otherwise unclassifi able genre’ (p. 1). And soon the crowded contraction of Scaggs’ instances attests to the genre’s ‘fl exibility and porosity’ (p. 2). Not all prominent authors of fi ction dealing with crime are accommodated (Kafka for one is not there), and with its diversity and immensity the ‘otherwise unclassifi able genre’ remains uncertain and unbound. Yet in Scaggs’ account and generally, the genre is readily recognised. That is our initiating mystery.
