Abstract
The thriller is usually regarded as so innately conservative a form that to speak of radical thrillers might seem an unlikely prospect, a project condemned to dabble in some corner of a genre. But that is not the case. There are various sorts of radicality in the thriller — taking ‘thriller’ as a general description for all types of crime fiction, and leaving the definition of ‘radical’ to emerge from the variety of described radicalities. In some respects the crime novel was born as a radically new construction; further, its process over two centuries has included many moments of radicalness. Some of them are elements of internal strain foreclosed by a simplistic conclusion, others are deliberate rejections of the usual conservative thrust of the mainstream thriller. There have also (increasingly in recent years) been consciously radical thrillers that set out to construct a left hegemony within a form that most have assumed to be inherently complicit with bourgeois culture.
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© 1990 Stephen Knight
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Knight, S. (1990). Radical Thrillers. In: Bell, I.A., Daldry, G. (eds) Watching the Detectives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10591-5_11
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