Abstract
From the start of the AIDS epidemic in 1981, American crime fiction began to make use of the epidemic's prevalent imagery of sex and death, semen and blood, pleasure and pain, transgression and punishment. The epidemic proved a useful atmospheric effect in crime writers' representations of the mean streets of contemporary urban life. Moreover, early characterization of HIV as a stealthy and purposive 'killer virus' was a perfect fit with one of the crime writers' favourite villains, the serial sexual murderer. Treated both nostalgically and apocalyptically, the social and sexual changes wrought by the epidemic have emerged among the key signs in the struggle against decay and disorder in portrayals of an irretrievably post-modern republic.
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