Crime Fiction and the Holocaust

This book explores a wide range of twentieth and twenty-first century international fiction that engages with the Holocaust and its historical legacy. It examines the use of tropes of crime and detection in the representation of historical atrocity in both explicit crime fiction and in literary fiction that relies on some of crime fiction’s signature techniques. Crime Fiction and the Holocaust asks why patterns of detection have become a favoured method of fictional engagement with the Holocaust, considers the ethical and textual problematics of fictional encounters with real-world suffering, and delineates crime fiction’s formal and thematic contributions to the broader project of Holocaust fiction.

Eric Sandberg is Associate Professor at City University of Hong Kong, and also holds a Docentship at the University of Oulu, Finland. His research interests range from modernism to the contemporary novel, with a particular interest in the borderlands between literary and popular fiction. He previously authored Virginia Woolf: Experiments in Character (2014), co-edited Adaptation, Awards Culture, and the Value of Prestige (2017) with Colleen Kennedy-Karpat, and edited 100 Greatest Literary Detectives (2018). He published a companion to the work of Dorothy L. Sayers in 2021, and Studying Crime in Fiction in 2024. His essays have appeared in many edited collections, and in leading international journals including Adaptation, Ariel, The Cambridge Quarterly, Critique, the Journal of Modern Literature, Neohelicon, Partial Answers, and Textual Practice.