Crime fiction is intimately bound up with the claims of justice, even if the genre is typically critical of the state’s official justice system, to the point that ‘it affirms an alternative sense of justice, an alternative vision of the law represented by a figure outside the state-established channels’ (Collins). ‘Justice is what I bother about – not rank,’ the nameless detective in Derek Raymond’s ‘Factory’ novels says, alluding to this distinction and the difficulties of realising justice through institutional and procedural mechanisms. So justice, typically understood as part of a state’s democratic mandate, remains a slippery term both as a political category and as an end of crime fiction. What kind of justice is sought by the genre – social, economic, criminal, environmental, personal – and what happens to our understanding of crime fiction as genre when any kind of justice is unrealised and unrealisable? These challenges intensify when the genre is understood as a global one where jurisdictional complications often stymy efforts to contain crime. What do we mean by justice in the context of global crime fiction where no single authority exists to police it and where the concerns and priorities of particular places (e.g. the US, the West) are consistently privileged over others (e.g. the Global South)? Whose justice is upheld and whose is denied? In the context of police violence, the climate emergency, and other institutional failures, and on a wider set of social exclusions based on race, class, gender, and sexuality, should we focus instead on how examples of crime fiction examine the problems of injustice? 

We are looking for contributions to our seminar that tackle the problem of justice and/or injustice in crime fiction, either in specific places/ jurisdictions or as a global phenomenon. We are keen to explore how individual examples of crime fiction thematise and interrogate the complications that accrue when justice is both highly prized and unachievable. We are especially keen to encourage contributions that pay attention to what happens to the genre when injustice, understood in terms of race, gender, class, sexuality, geopolitics or environment, rather than justice predominates, i.e. whether crime fiction is still able to function as crime fiction. This seminar series, in various forms, has run at ACLA almost every year since 2015 and we are keen both to welcome back longstanding contributors and to bring in new voices.