How Do We Connect

Post 1970s detective fiction offers up novel insights about the form of enquiry best suited to identifying and explicating social harm. These novels provide clues as to how we might connect with the problems of contemporary social life. This is an epistemological matter, as much as anything else. If so much knowledge is withheld or fabricated in post-1970s detective fiction—specifically, official accounts of events and people—this body of literature offers up alternative bases for knowing what’s really going on.