Global Crime, Forensic Detective Fiction, and the Continuum of Containment

Forensic novels seem to be at odds with the bulk of contemporary Western detective fiction. The former, which apply forensic techniques to criminal investigations, ostensibly carry on detective fiction’s generic directive to find solutions and thereby reassure readers. The latter is undergoing a renaissance due, at least in part, to the twinned influences of globalization and literary postmodernism. These forces trouble detective fiction’s mandate to solve crimes, bring criminals to justice, and assure readers of their stability. However, the degree to which forensic novels align with and deviate from Western detective fiction’s current trajectory reveals how a particular genre uses one particular element, the clue, to adapt itself to the challenges of globalization.¹

In his seminal essay “The Slaughterhouse of Literature,” Franco Moretti tracks the invention of the clue and its evolution into a central component of detective fiction. In explaining why “the majority of books disappear forever” (207), Moretti suggests that the genre’s ever-adapting treatment of clues in the nineteenth century represents the literary marketplace selecting the formal traits it prefers (211). So, too, does forensic detective fiction’s recent massive popularity emphasize its readership’s fascination with its dominant formal feature: the interpretation of forensic evidence. Forensic detective fiction presumably works to reinstantiate detective fiction’s traditional function of reassurance and containment in the face of destabilizing elements such as postmodernism and globalization.² The subgenre’s modus operandi appears to be delimiting the field of potential solutions through ever-more-minute investigative techniques, ruling all extraneous potential impossible as the only true solution emerges thanks to the wonders of forensic science. As Moretti makes clear, though, clues do not function uniformly throughout detective fiction, even in a subgenre with an almost hyperbolic relationship to the clue. Three current American authors, Patricia Cornwell, Jeffery Deaver, and Kathy Reichs, write forensic detective novels that respond to global crime by aligning their treatment of clues along a continuum of threat containment. Cornwell’s novels take up the genre’s traditional project vigorously, using forensics as a technique to refute the uncertainties of globalizing forces, while Reichs establishes forensics as a tool that often raises questions without answering them and permits a multiplicity of meanings. Deaver falls in between the two, acknowledging the limits of technology to interpret data while expressing hope that forensics can provide some measure of security. Together, these authors allow for an examination of the degree to which forensic detective fiction reacts to the forces of globalization that affect the genre at large as they attempt to mediate the new challenges of twenty-first-century global crime. The forensics laboratory in these texts provides a space for investigation not only of evidence but of the status of evidence in a global context.

The notion of global crime is a relatively new one for detective fiction,³ which until the late 1970s portrayed crime as something to be solved and ultimately attributed to an individual. Moretti reinforces this point in Signs Taken for Wonders when he argues that “innocence is conformity; individuality, guilt” (135). For Moretti, detectives function because crimes are ultimately unique and traceable to distinct individuals. Economic globalization, however, brought changes such as the decentralization of authority and an attendant lack of responsibility for actions and crimes. International corporations fall under the jurisdiction of no one government, and as such can rarely be prosecuted for far-reaching crimes. Criminal actions have escalated in scale and scope, to have a global reach that moves authors to view national identity as affected by forces outside the nation. Detective fiction demonstrates to its readers that they can grapple with the new landscape of global crime by altering the way crimes function in fiction and establishing the new criminality as the problematic the detective investigates.

Due to the expanding reach of global transgressions, Moretti worries about a “featureless, deindividualized crime that anyone could have committed because at this point everyone is the same” (Signs 135), but globalization instead presents crimes that are deindividualized not because of uniformity but because, strictly speaking, corporate crimes require multiple criminal entities and cannot...