A note to point out, because she is too modest to do it herself, that Esme Miskimmin has an excellent piece called ‘Crossing the “Shadow Frontier”’: The Criminal Underworld in Detective Fiction from the Victorians to the Golden Age in the current issue (Volume 5, Number 2) of the online academic journal Literary London. From the introduction:
Popular conceptions of a criminal underworld, a separate fraternity of villains with its own rules and hierarchy, have existed for some time and have recently caught the public’s imagination once more with the emergence in the late 90s of films such as Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Between the opposing worlds –- that of the detective and the society he is protecting, and that of the criminal — there are boundaries, both literal and metaphorical. In terms of geographical space this often involves a network of alleyways, staircases, cellars and darkened doorways, beyond or beneath the everyday spaces of London. In more abstract, cultural, terms this involves a popular conceptualisation of this world and its inhabitants as markedly different, morally and occasionally physiologically, which helps us to draw the lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’, easily distinguishing between two worlds and their citizens. This paper seeks to explore the representations of the criminal underworld in early detective fiction, and the changing nature of both the underworld and the boundary as the genre reaches its ‘Golden Age’ in the interwar years.
Here’s the link again.
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