“Luc Boltanski is, himself, a slightly mysterious figure, at least to American readers. A star pupil of Pierre Bourdieu’s in the late 1970s, he has since established himself internationally as a powerful social theorist in his own right. His idiosyncratic body of work on subjects including class formation, love, theology, decision-making, capitalism, trade unions, philosophy, the left after May ’68, TV news, comic strips, and abortion has been gradually appearing in En-glish translation over the course of the past two decades.”
“Mysteries & Conspiracies is yet another surprise in an endlessly surprising oeuvre: it is, at least in part, a work of literary criticism. In it Boltanski deals with endlessly rich source material — the canon of French and English detective and spy fiction from roughly 1880 to 1970 — and draws knowledgeably on scholarly predecessors like Siegfried Kracauer, Umberto Eco, and Carlo Ginzburg.”
“Yet despite its three-hundred-page length, Mysteries & Conspiracies feels sketchy and occasionally dilettantish. Like many sociologists, Boltanski is a schematic thinker who likes to craft neat conceptual categories and then slot works of art into them, and he is not much concerned with interesting anomalies or border cases.”
“Though he discusses dozens of books by authors as various as Conan Doyle, G. K. Chesterton, John Buchan, Agatha Christie, Jack London, Maugham, le Carré, and Orwell, many of them are merely glanced at or summarized. For a book about suspicion, there’s precious little close reading here.”