The silent woman: the representation of sex trafficking in the contemporary British detective novel

Abstract

The British detective novel has moved from a smug middle-class parochialism to an engagement with the global narrative of human trafficking, particularly sex trafficking. The genre has been claimed as the literary form best suited to offer a narrative of migration to counter the simplifications and xenophobia of the popular media. The global ‘turn’ is, however, illusory as its structures are fatally constrained by generic expectations. The narrative produced erases the complexities of migration and offers little moral challenge to the reader.