Since he joined the UC Irvine faculty in 2016, English Professor Theodore Martin has been teaching a course on the history of detective fiction. The syllabus starts in the 19th century with Edgar Allan Poe and ends with contemporary authors such as Walter Mosley.
While teaching these crime novels, Martin began pondering their connections to the American criminal justice system. Over the course of the 20th century, he knew, the system had undergone seismic change. During the same period, crime fiction and detective fiction were hugely popular genres. He began to wonder: “How do novels about crime intersect with the actual policies and discourses around crime happening in culture?”
The result is Martin’s incisive new book, American Literature’s War on Crime: Novels and the Hidden History of Mass Incarceration (Columbia University Press, 2026).
From the second great migration to mass incarceration
The book offers a chronological account, beginning in the 1940s and 1950s with the social upheavals of the Second Great Migration and the Civil Rights movement. “Those upheavals locked in a set of enduring ideas about the link between race and crime,” Martin writes.
In novels by Patricia Highsmith, for example, a recurring theme was the unsettling notion that a killer, such as the infamous villain Tom Ripley, might not look like a killer – he was a “hidden white criminal,” as Martin puts it. By contrast, novelists such as Chester Himes wrote about the inverse phenomenon: Black characters who were falsely assumed to be culprits.
In the search for criminals, the dominant ideology “rendered Blackness uniquely visible and whiteness conveniently invisible,” Martin writes.
The book goes on to explore other eras and their hot-button issues: the riots of the late ‘60s; domestic violence in the ‘70s; serial killers and the War on Drugs in the ‘80s. It culminates in the rise of mass incarceration in the ‘90s.
Mapping out a conversation
To research the book, Martin read scores of novels from each period. “What I wanted to do in the book,” he explains, “was map out a conversation that’s happening among a set of novels that come from different places in the hierarchy of prestige.” In one chapter, for example, he discusses the acclaimed works Native Son, by Richard Wright, and Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison, alongside pulp paperbacks that were new at the time. As he analyzed them, Martin asked: “How do we see them writing about and grappling with the same sets of issues around crime?”
“That was an exciting aspect of the book, to be able to see those connections,” he reflects.
Also key to his inquiry was learning about the history of criminal justice in the U.S. He researched the development of policing in Northern cities from the late ‘40s up to the Civil Rights movement, and the new policies that launched the War on Crime in the ‘60s. As he read the nonfiction and the novels in parallel, he asked: “How do we start to see different aspects of those changes appear in the fiction that’s being written contemporaneously?”
In total, the book ends up discussing about 70 novels. Unsurprisingly, Martin found a range of perspectives among the authors. In feminist crime fiction in the ‘70s, for example, female novelists such as Sue Grafton began to take on the subject of domestic violence. Martin noticed that they were “grappling in uncertain ways” with the best approach to the problem and the extent to which the criminal justice system should be involved. “Can we rely on the police? Will the courts do something if it gets to the courts? And then is there the risk that the courts will be too punitive, or punish the victims as well as the perpetrators?”
In all of the eras, Martin found that the relationship between the fiction and the reality it portrayed to be complex. Some novels resisted dominant myths; others reinforced them.
“It would be more satisfying to say, literature carries its share of blame, or literature tried to rescue us from this terrible path of mass incarceration,” Martin says. But, he adds, “I just don’t think it’s possible to generalize in that way.”
A passion for pedagogy
In addition to his scholarship, Martin teaches courses in 20th and 21st-century fiction. His classes include the one on detective fiction that inspired his book, as well as a survey of modernist and postmodernist literature. He also teaches a course on literature and climate change, which he has adapted into lectures for the Humanities Core program.
For the last three years, he has also served as director of a program called UTeach, run out of the Division of Graduate Education. The program offers undergraduates the opportunity to develop and teach their own classes.
Students spend the fall quarter researching their class. The topics range widely; recent examples include ethics in the emergency room and athletes’ safety. For the winter quarter, the students take a seminar on pedagogy with Martin, in which they discuss teaching methods and classroom management. Finally, in the spring quarter, they teach their own classes. “Students who come through the program are really committed,” says Martin. “The classes always go well. It’s really fun to see.”
Describing the real world
Looking ahead, Martin intends to pursue several offshoots of his book, such as rural crime fiction and “crooked cop” stories. He is intrigued by the prevalence of the latter. “It strikes me as really interesting that this is a story that American culture has been telling itself for almost a century,” he explains, “in a society that is otherwise so committed to the police, and so committed to having such an invasive and militarized police.”
A critique of the American status quo is one point he hopes to get across in his book. He notes that for a time earlier this century, there was bipartisan agreement that the system was untenable. “This scale of imprisonment and punishment is inhumane and ethically indefensible, and it’s also fiscally absurd, the amount of money that our society pumps into state and federal prisons,” he argues. “So I’d like to think that readers of the book might come away with some sense that there are things worth questioning about the current status of the criminal justice system.”
A broader takeaway concerns the role of literature. He cites the notion that literature and art should be “this special realm” apart from politics. “And I just don’t agree with that.” His goal is to “put literature in conversation with social issues,” he explains. “I find it really invigorating and really thrilling to understand that our writers and artists are writing about and describing the real world that they live in.”
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