Mystery/Detective/Crime Fiction

Abstract

Crime fiction in the twentieth century underwent dramatic shifts in generic structure, thematic foci, and critical reception. In many ways a young genre as the century began, it matured into a form capable of exploring significant social issues; what has sometimes been critiqued as crime fiction's unreflective replication of dominant social groups and cultural norms altered almost beyond recognition by the century's end to a genre that privileges minority groups of all kinds and critical, even subversive, ideologies. The genre has been remarkably fluid, yet it has also retained some of the key elements that appeal to readers. Early twentieth‐century crime writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers remain popular with twenty‐first‐century readers and have achieved a new life through television and film adaptations. Critical approaches to the genre have kept pace with developments within crime fiction but, unsurprisingly, also reflect scholarly trends; theoretical approaches of particular prominence in the last quarter century have been structuralist (especially narrative theory), psychoanalytic, and feminist. During the twentieth century, there was considerable interplay between English writers and those from other national traditions, especially writers of American crime fiction, but it is possible to delineate the main developments in British crime fiction over the course of the century.