CRIMINAL PROCEEDINGS

The 1990s have seen significant and radical additions to American crime fiction, as the genre has mutated from Chandleresque traditions to a postmodernist fiction, marked especially by the collapse of the "safe" and distinct categories of criminal, detective and reader. This volume takes this collapse as a starting point and looks at how detective fiction in the US now operates from many different cultural and regional perspectives. The contributors examine the proliferation of subgenres, such as police and court procedures, and consider how this kind of writing taps into contemporary concerns on question of race, justice, oppression and gender.