ABSTRACT
Western crime fiction, whether it belongs to the classic, Golden Age, hard-boiled, police procedural or feminist variants, has tended to revolve around a quest for truth. As Gary Day writes:
Day points out that the detective novel is a rationalist form that rests on the premise that it is possible to know “facts” about the world. Critics have discussed the ideological implications of the classic crime novel in particular, noting that the genre germinated within Western societies that, as Foucault has shown, were becoming increasingly geared towards surveillance and discipline (Porter 123-4). The genre affirms values of scientific reason, logic, and teleology, and the Enlightenment idea that society is progressing towards a perfectible point. They tend to suggest that everything can be known through empirical deduction; thus most crime novels have conclusive endings in which the villain is unmasked.1
