Andrew Pepper's 2000 monograph The Contemporary American Crime Novel remains one of the most popular and well-used studies of a genre whose popularity continues to grow. At the heart of that wide-ranging study of diversity in American crime fiction lay an argument that is further expanded in this book: that the crime novel needs to be “rescued” from its champions as well as from its detractors. Pepper is clearly enthusiastic about the genre, but this does not blind him to the ideological challenges that it presents when we examine its attitudes to crime and punishment. In his Introduction, he notes that crime fiction in many ways reasserts the authority of the state by sanctioning, through its plot resolutions, the workings of the law and the justice system. At the same time, he argues, the genre is unafraid to point up the corruption, inadequacies, and failings of those systems. In order fully to understand this duality, or even the seeming incompatibility of the two views, Pepper extends his inquiry in two directions: he goes back in time, and he stretches across national and linguistic borders.

One of the book's greatest strengths is its impressive range and scope. Pepper has little time for what he calls “the critical orthodoxies that have calcified around the genre” (viii) and he begins by demolishing the myth that Edgar Allan Poe “invented” the detective story in 1841 with the publication of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (7). Though it is easy to agree that no genre emerges from a vacuum, and that precursors can always be found, no previous attempt to trace the origins of the genre before Poe has been as thorough, or systematic, or indeed convincing, as this one. Pepper's “modest central proposition” (1) is that crime fiction developed alongside the consolidation of the modern state. Therefore, he argues that the early eighteenth century rather than mid-nineteenth is the place to start tracing the roots of the genre. He discusses criminal biographies and gallows confessions alongside French accounts of arrêts criminels and mémoires judiciaires (the latter unfortunately misspelt more than once in one of the book's few lapses) and finds in them a startling revelation: that the overall picture they paint is one where the state both produces the conditions for crime and seeks to punish it as if it were primarily a moral aberration. From here, the book continues in chronological order, though the author is keen to point out that he is not writing a history of the genre.

One of the ways in which this study departs from the argument of chronological development is through its rare and brave insistence that a “narrow Anglo-American frame” (6) is insufficient. Pepper argues convincingly for the importance of an expanded frame, both linguistically and, as we have seen, historically. The rationale for choosing or excluding books is fully laid out in the Introduction, but this is also where one of the author's weaknesses emerges: being keen always to consider the counterargument, always to preempt potential objections, he risks, in a couple of places, coming across as less authoritative. The reader appreciates his generous consideration of other points of view, but at times we are left wishing for a more assertive style.

The book is dedicated to the translators, “the unacknowledged heroes of the global book trade,” and perhaps its most valuable contribution to scholarship lies in its focus on non-English-speaking authors. It is refreshing to see such emphasis on non-anglophone literature: the analysis ranges from Eugène François Vidocq's Memoirs (1828) to Scandi-noir queen and king Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, and from Georges Simenon to Natsuo Kirino. More to the point, of course, this is not simply a championing of international crime fiction. Each book has been chosen for the many and varied ways in which it helps us to understand the complex political and ideological underpinnings of the genre. To achieve this, an author needs painstaking, wide-ranging research of a kind that may soon be under threat. In his acknowledgements, the author thanks his institution, Queen's University Belfast, for granting him a period of research leave, “the single most important means of gaining the time and space to attempt large-scale academic projects” (viii–ix). If ever other institutions are tempted to sacrifice this scheme in an effort to save money, books such as this one should serve as reminders that there is such a thing as false economy.