ABSTRACT
The corpse’s shocking presence breaks the seamless flow of time and throws into relief the world around it. Mapping in the detective genre is a methodological procedure for decoding the underlying “truth” of space. While the distinctions between genteel mysteries and hardboiled fiction are overdrawn, their different conceptualisations of space are noteworthy. Rather than a stationary eye peering through a keyhole, hardboiled novels deploy a roving eye – usually embodied in a first-person narrational perspective – looking into myriad public and private social spaces. Concretised in one architectural image is Chinatown’s position and role within the global economy. An older closed economy governed by ethnic traditionalism shares space with the marketing and commodification of Chinese culture as cheap consumer goods to outsiders, which shares space with a multinational financial entity through which foreign and local capital passes into and out of the neighbourhood.
