Theorizing Gender, Crime Fiction, and the State: The Case of Dorothy B. Hughes’s The Blackbirder

Abstract: Andrew Pepper’s 2016 Unwilling Executioner: Crime Fiction and the State places relationships among the individual, capital, and the state at the center of crime fiction’s concerns. My goal here is to rethink Pepper’s compelling counterhistory of the crime novel by placing gender at its center. Specifically, I am concerned with how American women’s crime fiction of the 1940s engaged contemporary debates over women’s citizenship. I examine Dorothy B. Hughes’s 1943 crime/espionage novel, The Blackbirder , as a feminist critique of the patriarchal state, a deconstruction of the public/private binary, and an allegory about gendered models of citizenship.