ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book argues that the ideological work of advertisement demonstrates the connections between discourses about the criminal and a state of purity. On 1 December 1888, the London newspaper the Graphic published a full-page advertisement for Hudson's Soap. The book considers the phenomenal popular success of Fergus Hume's 1886 novel The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, first published in United Kingdom in 1887. It develops the concept of textual purity to include the reader, and introduces the periodical short story as the predominant medium for detective fiction of the fin de sicle. George Newnes's Strand Magazine was launched in 1891 with the intention of providing the middle class with wholesome light entertainment. As Simon Joyce has convincingly argued, Foucault's move from a model of torture and confession to cerebral investigation is ultimately reductive, since the confession was still present in late Victorian detective fiction.
