Police literature and the sociology of crime

Sammendrag

I propose an interpretation of the police genre as a discursive matrix that, although it contains a critical potential, cannot be claimed as a sociological critique of the transgressions and punishments of the social order. In the tension between its critical power and its character as a product of the cultural industry, we consider that the tendency (on the part of critics and writers) to value the critical aspect of genre relegates the fact that, at the same time, it constitutes a good culture of ordinary consumption in the daily life of the capitalist social order.