Combining the concept of evaluative frameworks with a socio-institutional account of literary authority, this chapter sketches an alternative history of reading, with a focus on the shifting authority of “spatial reading” (defined as attention to formal and intertextual depth). This chapter uses Charles Taylor’s theory of evaluative frameworks to solve a problem that has challenged literary theory and historiography for some time: how do we square the tension between the private uses and the public authority of reading? Taylor’s notion of strong value brings out literature’s often-overlooked similarities with religious-moral or civil-sacred domains, while his concept of weak value helps us to understand more mundane moods of purpose-rational reading.

However, while they acknowledge aspects of literary theory and academic debate, their orientation towards a mass-market audience and the conventions of their genre may also lead them to side-step the overt political engagement of recent academic debates on the canon. By emphasising the position of a skilled non-academic reader, familiar with the codes and conventions of both “high” literature and genre fiction, crime fiction reworkings offer a non-hierarchical approach to the literary canon, presented as part of a shared cultural property and, above all, a source of enjoyment. Following a detailed analysis of the role of the reader–detective in each text, the article goes on to demonstrate how both texts engage in theoretical debates on canonicity, including questions of authorial genius, aesthetic value, and the pleasure of reading. I argue that both Doumenc and Fforde adapt their chosen genres in order to explore the nature and purpose of their respective national canons. Crime fiction and its subgenres-here, the whodunit and hard-boiled thriller-is a transnational genre which readily adapts itself to local contexts. Taking as its main examples Jasper Fforde’s 2001 novel 'The Eyre Affair' and Philippe Doumenc’s 'Contre-enquête sur la mort d’Emma Bovary' (2009), this article considers what is special about crime-fiction engagements with the literary canon and how they differ from other types of adaptation, in particular in the use of the central detective figure as a proxy for the position of the reader. Since the 1990s, a trend towards adapting, rewriting, or otherwise engaging with the literary canon-especially the nineteenth-century novel-via the popular genre of crime fiction may be observed in both French and English.

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