Crime Fiction and the City

The “unquestionably central place” of urban spaces in crime writing may thus seem inevitable, given the demands of the literary form and the conditions that prevail in the urban environment. The link between crime fiction and the city is not ineluctable, but historically contingent. The various strands of nineteenth-century urban crime fiction are apparent in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. The pattern set by Holmes was tremendously influential: Crimes carried out in, and enabled by, urban settings, and unravelled by the detective’s logical prowess became almost ubiquitous in crime fiction. Perhaps most importantly, the Mumbai of Sacred Games is a fragmented, chaotic city in which great wealth exists side-by-side with horrendous poverty, and the site of an interconnecting network of corruption and obligation. The smaller struggle against crime in the city, against pickpockets, thieves, blackmailers and murderers is dwarfed by the struggle against total destruction.