“Deftly juxtaposing the history of epistemological thought, the evolution of the detective genre, and Trump's presidency, David Watson shows how recent detective stories hint at ways that we can build upon shared assumptions about reality—even in a contemporary American culture rife with "alternative facts, " "fake news," conspiracy theories, and cynical distortions of the truth.”

—Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, Distinguished Professor of Arts and Humanities, College of the Holy Cross

“This lively and engaging book traces the networks of thought about what is real and what is not from the Vietnam War through the end of the Cold War and the rise of the “post-truth” moment of our present day. Watson finds the figure of the detective useful in thinking through how we understand our relation to knowledge and draws on Poe, Borges, Delillo, and Mieville, and The Wire. With its brilliant connections, this book leads us to the profound insight that investigation, as we know it from the world of detective narrative, has been replaced with production—the spinning of tenuous “truths” in the conspiracy theories and the political rhetoric of the Trump administration. With its original and incisive framing, it offers us a hopeful concept of a cosmopolitanism rooted in an allegiance to the concept of a unified reality, one that can be plumbed for truths about the world and the greater truth of shared communal experience.”

—Catherine Ross Nickerson edited The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction and is the author of The Web of Iniquity: Early Detective Fiction by American Women