Historical Crime Fiction: Creating the Illusion of Reality

Readers love historical crime fiction. There is nothing like a murder mystery set in a time and place far, far away to keep us reading way past our bedtime. But what is "historical crime fiction"? There must be a crime to be solved, of course. But how far back can the setting go-last year, last decade, last century, first-century Rome? Is that even the right question to ask? Traditionally, history has been viewed as a collection of facts. Detectives uncover, assemble, and draw conclusions from the facts. Historical crime fiction, then, places a crime within a true-to-the-period setting and introduces a true-to-the-period detective to uncover the facts and solve the mystery. Right? Well, sort of. This course explores the techniques and themes of historical crime fiction through an examination of novels by C. J. Sansom, Anne Perry, Elizabeth Peters, Laurie King, and Cheryl Head. Students should read Sansom's Dissolution for the first class.