The Gentrification Plot: New York and the Postindustrial Crime Novel

Thomas Heise identifies and investigates the emerging "gentrification plot" in contemporary crime fiction. He considers recent novels that depict the sweeping transformations of five iconic neighborhoods--the Lower East Side, Chinatown, Red Hook, Harlem, and Bedford-Stuyvesant--that have been central to African American, Latinx, immigrant, and blue-collar life in the city. Heise reads works by Richard Price, Henry Chang, Gabriel Cohen, Reggie Nadelson, Ivy Pochoda, Grace Edwards, Ernesto Qui隳nez, Wil Medearis, and Brian Platzer, tracking their representations of "broken-windows" policing, cultural erasure, racial conflict, class grievance, and displacement. Placing their novels in conversation with oral histories, urban planning, and policing theory, he explores crime fiction's contradictory and ambivalent portrayals of the postindustrial city's dizzying metamorphoses while underscoring the material conditions of the genre. A timely and powerful book, The Gentrification Plot reveals how today's crime writers narrate the death--or murder--of a place and a way of life.