The Gentrification Plot

For decades, crime novelists have set their stories in New York City, a place long famed for decay, danger, and intrigue. What happens when the mean streets of the city are no longer quite so mean? In the wake of an unprecedented drop in crime in the 1990s and the real-estate development boom in the early 2000s, a new suspect is on the scene: gentrification. 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 neighborhoodsthe Lower East Side, Chinatown, Red Hook, Harlem, and Bedford-Stuyvesantthat 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 Quionez, 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 fictions contradictory and ambivalent portrayals of the postindustrial citys dizzying metamorphoses while underscoring the material conditions of the genre. A timely and powerful book, The Gentrification Plot reveals how todays crime writers narrate the deathor murderof a place and a way of life.