| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Web of Iniquity: Early Detective Fiction by American Women. By Catherine Ross Nickerson. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. xx, 275 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8223-2251-X. Paper, $17.95, ISBN 0-8223-2271-4.)

Offering "tales about American crimes and punishments," Catherine Ross Nickerson brilliantly presents "a corrective history of detective fiction" with her new book, The Web of Iniquity, and stresses that her study examines that fictional tradition "in relation to the history of women's writing and social criticism . . . as part of the development of mass culture in the United States." Specifically, she is concerned with the lived experiences of middle- and upper-class culture in the decades around the turn of the century and their relation to the detective fiction whose plot generally revolves around murders committed in middle- and upper-class homes and the policing and the transgressing of gender norms in these same classes. Historically, there was supposedly no fiction of substance produced between that of Edgar Allan Poe and that of Dashiell Hammett; Nickerson's extremely readable, highly researched, and challenging study puts the lie to such pejorative and faulty conclusions, and it discounts the persistent theory of the two divergent national sides of detective fiction: the soothingly intellectualized British strain and the satisfyingly violent American one. . . .

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