“Every Crime Has Its Peculiar Odor”

Abstract

Chapter 1 considers how detective fiction has interacted with the history of differential deodorization. Whereas nineteenth-century texts tend to frame the hyperosmic detective as an agent of deodorization who seeks out and expunges deviant odors, the author argues that the form has also developed accounts of “environmental detection” wherein the detective’s body and mind become exposed and transformed through the very process of sniffing out crime. In the cases of black detective fiction, hard-boiled crime fiction, and narratives of multiple chemical sensitivity that mobilize detective tropes, smells are no longer just clues to be read but material agents of violence.