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

Abstract

"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."