SOURCE: Reitz, Caroline. “Bad Cop/Good Cop: Godwin, Mill and the Imperial Origins of the English Detective.” Novel 33, no. 2 (spring 2000): 175-95.

In the following essay, Reitz asserts that the detective genre, as exemplified by William Godwin's novel Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), which is generally regarded as the earliest detective novel, reflects the crisis of Britain's imperialist culture.

Our understanding of detective fiction as a strictly domestic genre takes its cue from the standard line of histories of the English police: English police embody, from their beginning, such national values as mild justice and local autonomy and are, in this respect, opposed to the centralized authority of foreign models of policing. T. A. Critchley, a twentieth-century historian of the police, provides an exemplary description of such a position: the “character” of England's “mild system of police … owe[s] everything to native manners, nothing...