Book review: Devin Fromm. 2025. Detective Fiction on the Case of Community: The Mystery at the Heart of the Modern. Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory. New York: Routledge, 174 pp., € 175.00

Devin Fromm’s Detective Fiction on the Case of Community: The Mystery at the Heart of the Modern sets out to rethink the detective story not as an entertainment premised on puzzle‑solving but as an inquiry into how modern societies might recover the experience of community in the strong, Aristotelian sense of collective speech and action. This necessarily entails listening carefully and paying attention to the actions and words of others, which is where detective fiction comes in. Detection is not valuable chiefly because it exposes corruption or reveals a hidden truth; it matters because it models how to arrange partial views into a constellation, how to attend to the surface of appearances long enough for relations to cohere, and how to convert that coherence into shared meaning. Fromm’s argument for the progressive potential of detective fiction contrasts in many ways with some of the most influential critical perspectives on the genre. Franco Moretti, for example, argues that detective fiction works against making social complexity legible by (mis)representing conflict as a solvable puzzle with one guilty individual, while D. A. Miller suggests that the detective story provides an entertaining alibi for the intrusive disciplinary surveillance that permeates the social fabric. Fromm neither dismisses nor repeats these perspectives but instead shifts the emphasis from narrative form to the habits of attention through which the texture of communal life can be reconstituted. For Fromm, clues are social relations to be assembled, while authoritarian discipline becomes the very danger that detection can resist by distributing attention to detail rather than monopolising it.