Unwilling Executioner: Crime Fiction and the State by Andrew Pepper (review)

In this study, Andrew Pepper offers a compelling analysis of the development of crime fiction and its ambivalent relationship with the state and modern capitalism. Ranging from populist crime writings of the early eighteenth century to twenty-first century ‘capitalist noir’ (p. 228), Pepper plots an alternative genealogy of radical crime fiction in dialogue with liberal and Marxist accounts of the state and power. This is a remapping of crime writing that highlights the transnationality of crime fiction and its capacity, as a genre, to probe the contradictions that emerge when the state is held accountable for law and justice. Pepper begins by exploring crime writing of the early eighteenth century, focusing on the accounts of infamous figures, such as Louis Dominique Cartouche in Paris, who represent period anxieties about the justice system and the reach of state power. In the second chapter, Pepper centres his analysis on novels that confront the tensions between individual freedom and the demands of the law. In this chapter, the Mémoires de Vidocq (Paris: Tenon libraire-éditeur, 1828) loom large as a textual projection of the collusion between policing and criminality as the bureaucratic state and its attendant juridical processes and infrastructure begin to take shape in France and Britain. Chapter 3 shifts to the late nineteenth century and the supposed regulation of the boundaries between private and public spheres. Émile Gaboriau’s L’Affaire Lerouge (Paris: Dentu, 1866) is one of a cluster of French, British, and American novels chosen to discuss the crime novel’s preoccupation with the intersections of public power and private enterprise. This attention to the close imbrication of politics, commerce, and crime is deftly tackled in the fourth chapter, which scrutinizes the private investigator à la Rouletabille as an embodiment of bourgeois self-interest in (and anxiety about) self-regulation and the free market. In an inspired Chapter 5, Pepper moves into the inter-war period, comparing Dashiell Hammett, Bertolt Brecht, and Georges Simenon as authors alert to coercive operations and to the human costs of the symbiotic links between big business and the state. Chapter 6 is anchored in the radical politics of the late 1960s and 1970s and in the groundbreaking novels of Jean-Patrick Manchette, Chester Himes, and Swedish duo Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöo. Here the ‘political absurd’ (p. 187) of late capitalism erupts in graphic form in narratives that confront the failure of revolutionary aspirations. In his final chapter, Pepper investigates crime fiction in a globalized era and the boundless capacity of crime to exceed the rule and law of the sovereign state, expanding his European and American corpus to include novels from South Africa and Japan. Throughout his study, Pepper is sensitive both to the specific social and political circumstances of each text but also to the value of a truly comparative and transnational approach to popular fiction. This is an exceptional study and one that will reframe how we read, understand, and critique crime fiction within and beyond French studies.