Economic Investigations in Twentieth-Century Detective Fiction

In his study of Golden Age and hard-boiled detective fiction, Yan Zi-Ling argues that these two subgenres can be distinguished not only by theme and style, but by the way they structure knowledge, value, and productive labour. He analyzes texts by Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Dorothy Sayers and Mickey Spillane, among others, to demonstrate that the detective’s truth-generating function is crucial to the institutional and class-based interests that he or she serves.