Traces, Codes and Clues: Reading Race in Crime Fiction - Softcover

Among the first scholarly texts to concentrate on race and detective fiction, Reddy's book is a welcome addition to the field. Traces, Codes, and Clues sheds light on a vast array of novels, and is rendered in an easily accessible style that will appeal to specialists and general readers alike. - Priscilla L. Walton, coauthor of Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition

Since 1975, many white women and people of colour have written works of crime fiction. Readers worldwide clamour for adventures featuring detectives of colour, such as Barbara Neely's ""Blanche White"" and Walter Mosley's ""Easy Rawlins"". Mysteries, considered ""light reading"" also hold important cultural and social ""clues"". Much contemporary scholarly work has demonstrated that race is both a cultural fiction - not a biological reality - and a central organizing principle of experience. Popular writers are likely to reflect the conventions of their own historical situations. In this text, the author explores the ways in which crime fiction manipulates cultural constructions such as race and gender to inscribe dominant cultural discourses. She notes that even those writers who appear to set out with the goal of revising conventions repeatedly produce some of the genre's most conservative elements.