From "handsaw" to Holmes: police officers and detectives in late Victorian journalism. Periodical discourse on policing: c. 1850-1875 ; A condemned cell with a view: crime journalism c. 1750-1880 -- Memoirs and sensation. "'Detective' literature, if it may be so called": the police officer and the police memoir ; The romance of the detective: police memoir fiction and sensation fiction -- From scandal to the Strand magazine. ". . . people are naturally distrustful of its future working": the 1877 detective scandal in the Victorian mass media ; From "handsaw" to Holmes: police officers and detectives in late Victorian journalism.
Summary:
This book re-imagines nineteenth-century detective fiction as a literary genre that was connected to, and nurtured by, contemporary periodical journalism. Whilst "detective fiction" is almost universally-accepted to have originated in the nineteenth century, a variety of widely-accepted scholarly narratives of the genre's evolution neglect to connect it with the development of a free press. The volume traces how police officers, detectives, criminals, and the criminal justice system were discussed in the pages of a variety of magazines and journals, and argues that this affected how the wider nineteenth-century society perceived organised law enforcement and detection. This, in turn, helped to shape detective fiction into the genre that we recognise today. The book also explores how periodicals and newspapers contained forgotten, non-canonical examples of "detective fiction", and that these texts can help complicate the narrative of the genre's evolution across the mid- to late nineteenth century.
Series:
Routledge studies in nineteenth-century literature
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.