This chapter examines the role that the crime novel played in exposing and, conversely, smoothing out the ill effects of capitalism, and of drawing attention to the intersections between crime, business, and the law. It argues that crime fiction’s ability to expose violent wrongdoing speaks to a wafer-thin ethical code in twentieth-century American society whereby the appearance of sanction and punishment trumps substantive claims to rightness and justice. The chapter also explores gendered and racial noir fiction, particularly in the works of the African American novelist Chester Himes. Ultimately, the chapter reveals the ambivalent politics of much American crime fiction: between, on the one hand, the desire for community and for a workable notion of the public and, on the other, the incorporation of this notion of the public by private enterprise and the allure of greed, profit, and gain.

Each generation has its version of the death-wish city. This chapter examines how representations of crime and violence evolved through various media cultures over thetwentieth century, from hard-boiled novel to feature film and prestige television. It is particularly interested in verisimilitude as it relates to representations of crime and violence, and, with a few notable exceptions, explores texts that promoted the purported realism of their narratives and similarly set those stories in real urban locales, e.g. Dirty Harry’s San Francisco, Boyz n the Hood’s Los Angeles, and The Wire’s Baltimore. Contextualizing these sources within a dynamic period of urban history and a shifting media landscape, the chapter argues that literary representations of violence served as commentaries on the causes of, and solutions to, the social problem of crime; fed off and informed the era’s political culture; and conjured masculine fantasies of the white vigilante. As the urban crime problem evolved coinciding fictional narratives probed the human condition, exploring the sources of persistent violence and exposing the limits of such political responses as the wars on crime and drugs.