ABSTRACT
This chapter examines contemporary crime fiction’s creation of innovative textual strategies such as shifts from individual crime to entangled webs of sociopolitical crimes, and from a local or national focus to a transnational one, in quest for social justice. Crime fiction reflects, at times, the racism of its specific milieu, as well as evolving, reformist views and debates about race and ethnicity. Context-driven, textual encoding of race and ethnicity through dominant imagery persisted in the British cosy whodunits of the early twentieth century. Examples of that resistance and questioning of dominant racial and ethnic ideologies are found in the works of African American author, Chester Himes. At the end of twentieth century, scholars and critics took note of the emergence of a range of authors, detective figures and voices in crime fiction. The postcolonial are characterised by hybridity, especially the postcolonial detectives who blend “western police methods and indigenous cultural knowledge”, thus rendering them more effective in their respective settings.
