This text explores the ways in which crime fiction manipulates cultural constructions such as race and gender to inscribe dominant cultural discourses. It notes that even those writers who set out to revise conventions repeatedly produce some of the genre's most conservative elements.

Since 1975, many white women and people of colour have written works of crime fiction. Readers worldwide clamour for adventures featuring detectives of colour, such as Barbara Neely's "Blanche White" and Walter Mosley's "Easy Rawlins". Mysteries, considered "light reading" also hold important cultural and social "clues". Much contemporary scholarly work has demonstrated that race is both a cultural fiction - not a biological reality - and a central organizing principle of experience. Popular writers are likely to reflect the conventions of their own historical situations. In this text, the author explores the ways in which crime fiction manipulates cultural constructions such as race and gender to inscribe dominant cultural discourses. She notes that even those writers who appear to set out with the goal of revising conventions repeatedly produce some of the genre's most conservative elements.