Mysteries and Conspiracies Detective Stories, Spy Novels and the Making of Modern Societies

"An ambitious investigation of crime fiction and its relation to modern society"
Times Higher Education
Most of us take for granted the idea that the social world has a front stage made of rules and norms and a backstage of "intrigues," "invisible plots," and "hidden intentions." When did that sense of a reality behind the reality of things develop? In this enigmatic book, Boltanski tracks down this new construction of a paranoid reality through a highly original reading of detective and spy novels, in which he detects the emergence of a sense that a sense that the real reality of things is concealed and malevolent. This book is both singular and provocative and resembles no other work of sociology I have read. It is a mixture of sociology of literature, of meta-sociological theory, sociology of institutions, and, perhaps mostly, sociology of modernity. It will be a needed complement to the classic The Social Construction of Reality.
Eva Illouz, Hebrew University of Jerusalem