ABSTRACT
Murder occupies a special place in discussions of crime fiction. Despite its special visibility as a constituent part of crime fiction, murder routinely steps aside in favour of petty thefts, disappearances, frauds, bank robberies and kidnappings, along with contemporary forms of criminality, like cybercrime and eco-crime. The status of murder as preferred crime is generally regarded as incidental or so obvious as to not require a particularly deep answer. Early crime fiction criticism, often undertaken by authors of crime fiction or enthusiastic editors, aimed to provide a history and general formula for genre which emphasised the role of murder as a device for gaining readerly attention. The prevalence and versatility of murder highlights the importance of recent efforts to read crime fiction as a world literature. A succinct way to understand the device of murder in crime fiction is that it makes commentary terminally legible, i.e. it conclusively ends series of events which must be made to produce readable meaning.
