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. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025.