What gives crime fiction its distinctive shape and form? What makes it such a compelling vehicle of social and political critique? Unwilling Executioner argues that the answer lies in the emerging genre's complex and intimate relationship with the bureaucratic state and modern capitalism, and the contradictions that ensue once the state assumes control of the criminal justice system. This study offers a dramatic new interpretation of the genre's emergence and evolution over a three hundred year period and as a genuinely transnational phenomenon. From its roots in the tales of criminality circulated widely in Paris and London in the early eighteenth century, this book examines the extraordinary richness, diversity and complexity of the genre's subsequent thematizations of crime and policing--moving from France and Britain and from continental Europe and the United States to other parts of the globe. In doing so it offers new ways of reading established crime novelists like Gaboriau, Doyle, Hammett, and Simenon, beyond their national contexts and an impulse to characterize their work as either straightforwardly 'radical' or 'conservative'. It also argues for the centrality of writers like Defoe, Gay, Godwin, Vidocq, Morrison, and more recently Manchette, Himes, and Sjoewall and Wahloeoe to a project where crime and policing are rooted, and shown to be rooted, in the social and economic conditions of their time. These are all deeply political writers even if their novels exhibit no interest in directly promoting political causes or parties. The result is an agile, layered, and far-reaching account of the crime story's ambivalent relationship to the justice system and its move to complicate our understanding of what crime is and how society is policed and for whose benefit.

About the Author
Andrew Pepper is Senior Lecturer in English and American literature at Queen's University Belfast. He has written extensively about crime fiction over a twenty year period and is the author of The Contemporary American Crime Novel: Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Class (Edinburgh University Press, 2000) and co-editor, with David Schmid, of Globalization and the State in Contemporary Crime Fiction (Palgrave, 2016). He is also the author of five detective novels set in nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland, all published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, including The Last Days of Newgate (2006), The Detective Branch (2010) and Bloody Winter (2011).

Reviews
Pepper offers nothing less than a long history of the crime novel as world literature, its roots in England but its branches universal. * Len Gutkin, Times Literary Supplement *



Book Information
ISBN 9780198716181
Author Andrew Pepper
Format Hardback
Page Count 282
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 558g
Dimensions(mm) 234mm * 162mm * 20mm