Abstract
Published in 2018, 2019, and 2022 respectively, Hope Never Dies and Hope Rides Again, subtitled An Obama Biden Mystery, and Feel the Bern: A Bernie Sanders Mystery by Andrew Shaffer offer crime stories that feature the former President and Vice-President and, analogously, Senator Bernie Sanders as amateur investigators. Described as ‘[e]vocative of noir thrillers and bromantic buddy-cop movies’ on Penguin Random House’s website, the novels rest on a premise that, this paper argues, is carried not only by a liberal nostalgia for the Obama presidency and, in the case of Feel the Bern, small town life, but also by certain stereotypes about gender and race (‘Obama Biden Mysteries Series’). Thus, this paper asks how nostalgia, masculinity, and especially a certain kind of liberal white masculinity, and race interact with the depiction of crime in this series. Furthermore, it traces how all of these aspects are influenced by and contingent on the conventions of the (sub-)genre of real person fiction.
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