Chapter 5 examines how mysteries in the final decades of the nineteenth century use both marvelous acts of detection and astonishing detective blunders to infect other characters, and readers, with “detective fever” – a phrase coined by Wilkie Collins in The Moonstone (1868). Less a disease than a sign of a fight for (social) health, detective fever can propel characters from more marginalized social positions into feats of creative agency and greater narrative prominence and authority. Just as a bodily fever helps fight illness, detective fever helps the mystery corpus continue to work to combat maladies in the social body, particularly the harms caused by systemic social inequities and the stereotypes that help maintain them. Detective fiction works to foster skills in reading words in ways that can help us to read, and understand, other people. As the mystery genre becomes dominated by the detective story and mystery moves into the late nineteenth century and beyond, its ability to generate detective fever the in characters and in readers both proves fundamental to its continuing popularity and helps to maintain the mystery genre’s general challenge to the social order, stimulating inquiry into and detection of larger social narratives about class, gender, race, and ability.

The mystery’s radical social politics, Chapter 2 argues, lies less in its melodramatic attempts to spur social action than in its attention to the trope of the misleading clue. The urban Mysteries purport to offer readers a “social kaleidoscope,” the name of a magical x-ray apparatus the demon Asmodeus gives the narrator in George Thompson’s Revelations of Asmodeus (1849) so that he can see “all things in two aspects – as they seem, and as they really are.” However, the mystery’s relish in disguise and delight in turning clues of social identity on their heads make its “social kaleidoscope” work like an actual kaleidoscope, utterly shaking up confidence in visible identity. The mystery showcases a kind of kaleidoscopic seeing that fragments and collapses divisions between people, fostering recognition of human commonality and new forms of social trust. The Mysteries’ interest in social marginality as a potential source of social power aligns them with radical, transatlantic political movements such as socialism, republicanism, abolition, and early feminism. These elements also importantly shape the literary detective, who incubates in the Mysteries as an often-marginal figure who gains power by exploiting indeterminacy and by masterfully reading and manipulating signs

Scholars have long puzzled over Edgar Allan Poe’s seemingly isolated invention of the detective character in the 1840s, decades before the popular establishment of detective fiction. However, if we recognize how Poe’s three tales of ratiocination featuring master perceiver Chevalier Auguste Dupin offer a neatly distilled version of an urban mysteries serial, we can see how Dupin is neither fully original nor before his time. Poe’s great innovation in mystery fiction was not to invent the literary detective but rather to redirect the mystery’s focus on the reading of tricky visual clues into a deliberation on decoding, reading words on a page. By aligning Dupin’s exceptional visual skills with his clever, explicitly readerly discernment, Poe develops a model of detective seeing-as-reading that is rooted in a kaleidoscopic, empathetic ability to read words so as to mind read others

This chapter traces how the sensation fiction of Dickens, Collins, and Braddon reveals a central mechanism by which the mystery genre moves from the unruly urban Mysteries narrative to the tighter, more single-stranded detective story. Each of these writers personify the Mysteries ¬in master-plotting characters who are then sensationally killed off. In Dickens’s Mr. Tulkinghorn, Collins’s Count Fosco, and Braddon’s Jabez North we can see caricatures of what, by the 1850s, would have been easily recognized as the urban mysteries’ excesses. These writers’ allegorical murdering of the urban Mysteries, however, allows for the rise of initially-minor detecting characters Mr. Bucket, Marian Halcombe, and Joseph Peters and provides new ways to think about mystery’s radical politics. As fictional mysteries begin to focus more on singular, heroic detectives, the genre’s social kaleidoscope moves inward to refocus on the words on the page in ways that encourage readers to exercise their close reading skills so as to better mind read characters. Also, as specific, unique detective characters triumph – despite their often initially-marginal textual and social positions – they too become powerfully allegorical.

This chapter follows the Shanghai Municipal Police and the SIS as they conducted a global investigation into Rudnik and Moiseenko, trying to determine who they were and where they came from. They were unable to discover their real identities, but the papers they found provided incontrovertible evidence that the couple was involved in a Soviet-funded network aimed at aiding the Chinese and other colonial communist parties. In bad news for Rudnik and Moiseenko, the networks of the SIS disproved the validity of every single one of their passports, which meant they were not allowed to claim the status of extraterritoriality in Shanghai and could therefore be turned over to the violently anti-communist Chinese Guomindang authorities.

Chapter 6 argues that in the Mediterranean crime novel, women are scrutinised by the male gaze, their body parts being vivisected and objectified by the male detective. Focusing the investigation on the male detective and on male teams, these series fail to acknowledge societal changes in terms of female participation in work and society at large. Violence against women is frequent in these narratives, but is never framed in terms of gender violence but of racial and political (or state) violence, if not diminished into an individual crime caused by greed or deviance. The female writers analysed in this monograph also fail to address gender issues convincingly. Both Giménez Bartlett and Aykol centre their series around a female character. Yet these characters simply replicate the male gaze and objectify male characters. They are also constructed as postfeminist women who are commercially motivated and mistake consumerism for liberty. These series also fail to address gender violence, replacing the female as a victim of patriarchally engineered socio-political inequalities with the representation of villainous mother figures capable of emotional manipulation, violence and murder.

This chapter argues that, in spite of inevitable differences, Mediterranean detectives are liminal characters who belong to minority cultures and often need to negotiate their sense of belonging with the hegemonic culture. All the identity variations present in Mediterranean crime fiction are symbolic of the complex network of cultures, identities and influences that characterise the Mediterranean area. The liminality of the detective speaks of a rich and diverse cultural and literary arena in which a national hegemonic culture is often – but unsuccessfully – politically superimposed. It also speaks of a desire to unsettle the populist rhetoric that sees ‘fortress Europe’ at the centre and northern African and eastern Mediterranean countries as periphery. Chapter 1 also highlights how Mediterranean detectives are ‘intellectual’ detectives who refer to Mediterranean history, culture and myths. This characteristic has a double function: on the one hand, it emphasises transculturality as a key feature of the Mediterranean basin; on the otherhand, it promotes a discourse on the dignity of crime fiction.

All three of the prime suspects in the Dongo investigation have previous experience with serious accusations. They show their understanding of the justice system with different levels of sophistication and with their aggressive or evasive responses to Emparan’s questions. Finally, faced with bloodstains on each of their belongings and the pressure of face-to-face confrontations, Quintero, Blanco, and Aldama can no longer avoid the truth. They admit that they all killed on the night of October 23, 1789, but not before Emparan’s court collects more evidence and the judge calls them in for several sessions of questioning.

The popular genre of the Mediterranean noir responds to the reorganization of global politics and economies. Situated in fallen empires and ineffective modern states, noir novels in French, Spanish, Greek, Turkish, Croatian, English, and Arabic presents a grim, horrified view of the global system. Their sensual detectives investigates criminal activities deriving from an internationally mobile capital—a phenomenon often figured as contemporary gangsterism. The detective affiliates himself with dispossessed migrants and nomads while also valuing local knowledge and cultural particularity. The brilliant lighting and shadowy dangers the Mediterranean noir thus present in an exaggerated form some of the geopolitical and ecological dilemmas facing the region. Despite the pervasive cynicism of the genre, glimmers of utopian optimism appear in the figure of the sea.

Chapter 3 examines Grant Allen’s fictions of criminal deceit, contending that they were shaped by his ideas about adaptive appearance. As a science populariser, Allen wrote repeatedly about the evolutionary dynamics of animal crypsis and advertisement. His crime tales often echo these dynamics as criminals’ deceptions compete with others’ detecting capacities. It is argued that, in tales such as ‘The Curate of Churnside’, Allen’s Darwinian view of deception clashes with the conventions of the sensation genre he was writing in. The genre tended to affirm a balance of cosmic justice in which criminals were usually exposed, if not punished. Conversely, Allen’s criminals often elude detection, having adapted perfectly to their environments. Allen did not present humans as simply equivalent to animals, though. He nurtured the hope that humanity would one day transcend nature’s primitive economy of deception. His novel An African Millionaire depicts criminal deception as a product of dysfunctional capitalism to be superseded by science and socialism. This political utopianism was offset for Allen, however, by a social Darwinist pessimism that caused him to doubt humans’ ability to overcome egoistic deceit. Indeed, Allen sometimes regarded his work as a professional writer as part of capitalism’s recapitulation of nature’s deceptions.