ABSTRACT
While crime fiction is closely linked with modernity, this chapter offers a history that includes texts outside the strict boundaries of the genre. It then explores the connections between crime fiction and the development of modern judicial systems in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, before moving on to look at classic detective fiction’s links to positivist ideology. The genre flourished in the twentieth century with the rationalist paradigm of the Golden Age mystery, the violence of the hardboiled private eye novel, and the institutional focus of the police procedural. Finally, the chapter examines the globalization of contemporary crime fiction.
