War-on-Crime Fiction

This essay tells the story of how the War on Crime helped remake American crime fiction in the 1960s and 1970s. Amid starkly racialized public anxieties about rising crime rates and urban uprisings, Lyndon B. Johnson officially launched the War on Crime in 1965. The cultural logic of Johnson's crime war infiltrated various kinds of crime writing in the ensuing decade. Tracking the crime war's influence on the police procedurals of Joseph Wambaugh; the Black radical novels of Sam Greenlee, John A. Williams, and John Edgar Wideman; and the vigilante fiction of Donald Goines and Brian Garfield, I argue that crime fiction in the War-on-Crime era emerged as a key cultural site for managing divergent political responses to a regime of social control that worked by criminalizing both race and revolt. By studying how novelists responded to the formative years of the War on Crime, we can begin to understand the complex role that literature played in alternately contesting and abetting the postwar transformation of the United States into a carceral state.