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Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences.
Crime and mystery writing as a genre have deep American roots, most notably with American Edgar Allen Poe’s (1841) Murders in the Rue Morgue, considered the original detective story and Anna Katharine Green’s (1878) The Leavenworth Case, considered the first American detective novel. In the last decades of the century American crime fiction has focused on realism, character development and psychological dimensions of action. Amateur and professional detectives, once urban males, have gained regional attributes and everyday problems, and increasingly include persons of color and women, as well as responses to social issues. They are also increasingly packaged as series, named by author, major characters or setting (Egyptian, Hollywood, etc.) in order to market to avid readers.
The most prominent category of American crime fiction and mystery is the murder mystery but detective stories, courtroom sagas, spy novels and stories of theft and assault are also popular. Although British authors have been popular (Agatha Christie, Ruth Rendell, etc.), most popular authors are American. However, settings may vary widely over time and place. Mystery series are also popular in children’s and teenage fiction.
Police investigators appear in mysteries set around the United States. On the West Coast one may find John Ball’s Virgil Tibbs, an African American detective from Pasadena or Susan Dunlap’s Detective Jill Smith from Berkeley On the East Coast one finds Lillian O’Dennel’s Norah Mulcahany or Archer Mayor’s Lieutenant Joe Gunther from Brattleboro, Vermont.
Private detectives and ex-cops, humorous amateurs and lawyers all make for popular lead characters in crime fiction. Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason series has given way to bestsellers Scott Torow, John Grisham and Steve Martini, who have created legal thrillers that weave together law, courtroom scenes and intricate problem-solving that often rescues the featured lawyer/sleuth from danger. Private investigators—consummate antiheroes—include classic pre-war works by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, as well as noirish series by Mickey Spillane and John T. MacDonald. Recent investigators also include journalists such as Sampson Dean, the African American reporter created by Mike Phillips.
Yet amateur sleuths, citizens caught up in events, are equally important in American crime fiction. Members of the clergy make detecting innocence and guilt take on special significance. These include Father Dowling, a Roman Catholic priest from the Chicago, IL area created by Ralph McInerny, Rabbi David Small, a creation of Harry Kemelman, or Sister Mary Ursula of the Order of the Sisters of Martha of Bethany, Los Angeles, CA created by H.H. Holmes. Husband-and-wife teams such as the Orthodox Jewish housewife Rina Lazarus and Los Angeles Police Department Detective Peter Decker, created by Fay Kellerman, mingle professional and amateur investigation.
The stewpot of American culture is reflected in the increasing diversity of detective characters. Such diversity is reflected by women such as Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone, private investigator, Patricia Cornwell’s Virginia coroner Kay Scarpetta or Jean Hager’s Molly Bearpaw, an investigator for the Native American Advocacy League. Tony Hillerman has received an anthropological award for his depictions of Navaho and Hopi life and detection. Gay and lesbian figures move Joseph Hansen’s Dave Brandsetter novels and Michael Nava’s novels featuring Henry Rios.
Food plays a prominent role in detective fiction, as seen in Tamar Myers’ Too Many Cooks Spoil the Broth (1994), Nancy Packard’s 27 Ingredient Chili con Carne Murders (1993) and the older, epicurean Nero Wolfe mysteries. Pets also appear in Lilian Jackson Braun’s The Cat Who…series and Susan J. Conant’s The Dog Lover series.
Other crime fiction subgenres include psychopathic killers, hospital settings, detective writers, academic settings and the underworld. Other authors of significance include Robert Campbell, Jane Langton and Mary Higgins Clark.
These bestselling books, generally seen as relaxation or beach reading, raise interesting questions about American attitudes towards crime and violence, worrisome in society and often attacked in mass-media representations. Mysteries have generally escaped this scrutiny to flourish as a major genre with strong Hollywood connections.
Industry:Culture
Criminal offenses committed by someone because of the actual or perceived group characteristics of another person such as race or ethnicity. Over the past two decades, these crimes of discrimination have become the focus of increased media, legislative and law-enforcement attention in the US. Over forty states and the federal government have some form of hate-crime law. The most frequently protected categories (in descending order) are race, religion, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and disability Many state hate-crime laws have penalties that are too light or coverage that is incomplete. For instance, most states leave gays and lesbians outside of their protections.
The application of federal civil-rights law to hate crime is also substantially limited by very narrow enumerated requirements. Attempts in 1997 and 1998 to broaden federal law failed in congressional committees.
Hate crimes may also go unreported and are often misclassified by law enforcement when reported. Only a small fraction of hate crimes are actually prosecuted under hatecrime statutes. There are two main types of hate-crime statutes—stand-alone civil-rights statutes and penaltyenhancement statutes. Stand-alone civil-rights laws generally punish discriminatory crimes that violate a victim’s civil rights on the basis of a protectedstatus category like race. Penalty-enhancement laws increase the punishment for an underlying crime, such as an assault, when it is committed by an offender with a discriminatory motivation against a protected group category.
The United States Supreme Court unanimously upheld the constitutionality of hatecrime penalty-enhancement statutes in the 1993 case of Wisconsin v. Mitchell. In a case the previous year, RAV v. St. Paul, however, the Supreme Court invalidated a poorly drafted municipal ordinance that punished the use of threatening symbols based on the ideology conveyed. Cross burning and other types of threats could be criminalized, the court held, but the law must not target the offender’s underlying belief. That court decision also had the effect of invalidating “hate-speech” codes at public colleges that punished students for expressing bigoted ideas about others.
The FBI, which has been keeping statistics since 1991, reported 8,734 hate-crime incidents in 1996. Race accounted for 61.6 percent of attacks, followed by religiousbased attacks (15.9 percent), sexual-orientation-based attacks (11.6 percent) and ethnicity-based attacks (10.7 percent). African Americans were targeted for 42 percent of all hate crimes, while Jews were also targeted (13 percent). Some cities and states, particularly in rural or southern areas, did not meaningfully participate in the FBI’s datacollection effort.
Over 90 percent of hate crimes are not committed by hate-group members or hard-core hate mongers; about half are committed by young people under the age of twenty-one.
Many who commit these crimes do so for excitement as part of a group activity with friends. Offenders usually rely on false or exaggerated stereotypes of a victim’s group to justify the attack.
Unlike crimes in general, hate crimes are disproportionately directed against individuals as opposed to property. These victimizations are much more likely to involve injury serial attacks, groups of offenders and subsequent civil disorder than non-hate crimes.
Industry:Culture
Cuban Santería (the way of the saints) is a complex religion which combines the rituals and beliefs of the Yoruba people from Nigeria with corresponding Roman Catholic saints, which slaves were forced to worship. An initiate in Santería leads a rigorously disciplined life dedicated to the cult of a particular oricha (deity) for life. The eclectic pantheon of divinities must be frequently gratified and appeased through festive ceremonies that include veneration, offerings and drumming. The ritual offering of slaughtered animals has created conflicts between practitioners and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
Industry:Culture
Debates among Republican presidential hopefuls in the 2000 campaign again highlighted the presence of organized conservative Christians as both lobbyists and voters in American governance. The generally white male leadership of militant organizations like Ralph Reed, Jerry Falwell (founder of the Moral Majority), Pat Robertson (founder of the Christian Coalition) and Gary Bauer (founder of the Campaign for Working Families) have an impact not only through churches and followers, but also through Christian media, education and money; Robertson and Bauer have sought the presidential nomination in their own right. The popular base of these leaders and platforms, which have become contested votes in elections for decades, are more paradoxical. In a nation whose citizens generally define themselves as believers and whose everyday culture is permeated by Christian traditions, some also identify themselves as members of a beleaguered cultural minority while others vary with regard to the public agenda of the Christian right.
As a political force, the Christian right has defined Christianity around sometimes exclusive beliefs and practices. While these groups may coincide with Roman Catholics on specific issues like abortion, for example, there are serious differences on other issues, including capital punishment and social welfare, as well as rhetoric that identifies the Christian right with Protestant fundamentalism. While women constitute primary agents in family values and the Christian household, spokespeople tend to be male and public positions often insist on a subservient helpmate and domestic femininity And, while the traditions of African American churches are deeply rooted, social experiences and social agendas have also created a critical stance vis-à-vis the Christian right as a cultural and political movement among this and other minority populations.
Moreover, the political agenda of the Christian right focuses on key issues that define an interesting theological and political network within the broader possibilities of Christian belief and practice. In addition to protection of the family and the unborn, other recurrent themes include defending marriage against gay and lesbian claims, school prayer, tax reform, national defense, a moral and patriotic foreign policy and educational reform. The sexual scandals of the Clinton White House have provided vocal contrasts with regard to public morals and personal behavior, although critics in all these areas have harped upon the Christian need for tolerance and forgiveness and underscored the foibles of highly personalized leaders. While the focus of debate, moreover, often centers on national politics, grass-roots organizations have had a strong impact at the local level (school boards) and in states of the Bible belt.
Conservative Christians themselves prove more varied. Some will embrace cultural issues but remain independent in areas of foreign policy or social welfare. Others adopt more culturally separatist positions, rejecting the messages of sexuality consumption and the glamour of mass media—in extreme cases, they have created white supremacist/separatist factions. Still others separate religious beliefs and political action.
Yet others seek to impose their beliefs, especially at a local level, through insertion of Christian teachings into school curricula, whether by posting the Ten Commandments in classrooms or by fighting against the teaching of evolution (see scientific creationism).
Attacks on the Christian right, from various political perspectives, respond to all these points—the actions and intolerance of individual leaders, the connections and contradictions among agenda issues (why protect the unborn and yet kill criminals?) and, especially the place of sectarian values in a pluralistic society based on the separation of church and state. In an era where both Republican and Democratic presidential candidates are born-again Christians, this crosscutting debate over religious culture, political strategy and “American values” proves both heated and divisive.
Industry:Culture
Decades of accumulation in many American households have outstripped social channels of disposal—giving away, handing down and throwing away. Life cycles—growing up, moving out, divorce, or the move to retirement housing—also convert clothes, toys, appliances, furniture and memories into surplus. Yard sales (also known as tag or rummage sales) offer one outlet with a limited commercial reward. Throughout America every weekend, signs sprout in yards and on telephone poles; ads appear in supermarkets and flyers. Families and neighbors tackle both separation and market evaluation of life experience—how much is a trophy, crib or wedding dress worth to strangers? Can we really get rid of this? On Saturday, suburban lawns, garages and patios explode with tables and mounds of goods. Consumers, sometimes connoisseurs of these “opportunities,” still move within similar social and geographic spaces: commodity recycling becomes a chain disposal system as once-cherished items converted to cash eventually end up in someone else’s trash—or their sale. At the end of the day, moreover, goods that remain may still be given to charities or hauled away as rubbish.
Flea markets, by contrast, bring together multiple sales, including both one-time sellers and professionals offering used goods and newer arts and crafts. These may become highly professional and stratified events, and act as alternative commercial spaces in marginal neighborhoods like Los Angeles’ Watts section, or in appealing to particular ethnic niches. At times, the flea market name only implies potential bargains in a commercial mall. Antique flea markets, for example, emphasize the quest for a bargain rather than informal pricing, ownership or inventory.
Thrift and consignment shops offer other more regular store outlets, usually associated with charitable organizations. Consignment shops offer space and take commission on sales of items that may well include expensive furs, jewelry, clothes and furniture. Thrift shops sell goods already donated to charities, encompassing a wider range of rehabilitated materials and bringing together bargain-seekers and those who must rely on used goods for their everyday lives. Inner-city thrift stores may become critical resources for poor neighborhoods, while shops associated with elite neighborhoods or associations (symphonies, suburban hospitals) often establish reputations which may lead to inclusion in regional directories or other media reports. Goods, even when discarded, reaffirm boundaries of class, space and knowledge for both donor and those who acquire them.
Industry:Culture
Deindustrialization refers to the long-term economic and political shift whereby the United States has been steadily transformed from a manufacturing economy into a service economy Where once manufacturing made up over a quarter of all employment in the nation, by the mid-1990s it made up just over 15 percent. In the place of these jobs, once the bedrock of a unionized, middleclass workforce, there has emerged a massive increase in the “service sector” (approximately three-quarters of the workforce today), whose jobs tend to be non-union, low-paid and unstable.
While deindustrialization has been almost wholly naturalized in the mainstream press and media, an inevitable product of an equally “natural” globalization, in fact it has been the product of political decisions as well as workings of economic markets. The resurgence of Europe and Asia—in part funded by the United States—after the Second World War ultimately created competitors to America’s industrial dominance.
Technology also made labor-intensive industries such as steel—a foundry of America’s industrial might—more “efficient” with the use of automated machinery and computers.
But this process has also been encouraged in recent years as politicians on both the Left and Right have embraced free trade as the answer to America’s declining economic dominance. In the 1980s and 1990s, NAFTA—the North American Free Trade Agreement—galvanized both those who saw free trade as a way to spur American exports and those—led by the AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor/Congress of Industrial Organization)—who saw the legislation as paving the way for further flight of industry to cheap-labor countries. While America remains the leading industrial power, jobs in traditional manufacturing bases continue to flee to Asia and to Central and South America.
The results of deindustrialization transformed the social and cultural landscape of urban America in the last quarter of the twentieth century. One could stand on Broad Street in the midst of North Philadelphia, PA, to take just one example, turn around 360 degrees, and see where 100,000 wellpaid, and unionized, jobs had once been. Empty shells are all that remain. The economic power and associated political power have fled downtown to the financial and legal enterprises housed in skyscrapers and to the suburbs and exurbs, where those who could fled.
Artists and writers of all types have necessarily responded to a powerful new landscape. Where once the bustling factory complexes and unworldly machinery was a staple of American art—in, for example, the paintings of Ford’s River Rouge plant in Detroit, MI by Charles Scheeler—now the empty factory and its declining neighborhood define the urban views of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The wonder at America’s industrial might has been replaced by the more troubled views of urban America in a state of apparently steady decline. The works of writers such as Nelson Algren and Claude Brown, and later, John Edgar Wideman, to name just a few, take as their setting and theme the declining fate of the industrial American city. Perhaps the most powerful recent portrait of deindustrialization was Michael Moore’s tragicomedy of the decline of Flint, Michigan, once a bastion of General Motors. Roger and Me (1989) portrays the social upheaval and physical collapse—from eviction to demolition of factories to the return of grass and trees—of a once-thriving industrial city.
Industry:Culture
Democratic splinter party in the South during the 1948 elections. Disgruntled by President Truman’s civil-rights initiatives and fearing loss of local control, 6,000 Southerners met in Birmingham and nominated Strom Thurmondof South Carolina for president and Fielding Wright of Mississippi for vice-president. Less a visionary party than one of conservative backlash, the ticket captured 1.2 million votes and four states— Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and South Carolina. Yet, it was unable to throw elections in the House of Representatives or stop Truman. This movement foreshadowed the emergence of a conservative Republican South of the 1980s and 1990s.
Industry:Culture
Denver (1998 metropolitan population estimate 2,365,345), capital of Colorado, emerged in the mid-nineteenth century as a center for gold, railroads, ranching and exchange for the plains and Rocky Mountain states. Remaining relatively small, it boomed after the Second World War as a federal center, including the Mint, multiple regional offices and military and aerospace interests. In the 1970s and 1980s, Denver underwent a further renaissance as a center for energy interests, including coal, oil, gas and oil shale, which transformed the skyline and underpinned the narrative of the night-time soap opera Dynasty (ABC, 1981–9). The city also emerged as a center for Sunbelt development of the mountainous West around winter sports, environmentalism and natural landscapes.
The “Mile-High City” boasts professional franchises in football (Broncos), basketball (Nuggets) and baseball (Rockies), whose names evoke the history and images of the city dramatically echoed in the peaks of it.
Industry:Culture
Derogatory term typically meaning ignorant, white and Southern. Although derived from reference to rural, laboring whites whose necks turned red in the sun, the term is now used for any lower-class white population taken to be racist and reactionary including others in the interior US and Australia. “Redneck,” along with “hillbilly,” “cracker,” “trailer-park trash” and “white trash,” glosses a racial and class position taken to be synonymous with anti-government and racist sentiments combined with Bible belt religion. These are the last “socially approved” racist epithets.
Industry:Culture
Descendants of French settlers expelled by the British from Canada in the eighteenth century these Acadians have developed a distinctive Creole society under subsequent regimes in southern Lousiana. Cajuns are especially characterized by close family and community ties, Catholicism, their French dialect and rural livelihoods along rivers and bayous that have fostered geographical isolation. While sometimes confused with Creoles of white or black French colonial ancestry Cajuns became known in the twentieth century for spicy food (Paul Prudhomme, Emeril Lagosse), lively music with accordions, strings and vocals (Neville Brothers, Buckwheat Zydeco) and vivid media images as epitomized in films like The Big Easy (1986). This reviving cultural distinctiveness, nonetheless, has come under assault through the extension of education, media and government into the bayous.
Industry:Culture
