Haunted by the Present: Sarah Waters's Fingersmith and the Queer Historical Thriller

This article explores the figuration of revelation in historical thrillers centred on queer characters. It argues that the turn of the current century saw, in the works of writers like Sarah Waters, the emergence of a distinctive sub-genre: the “queer historical thriller”. Queerness, history, the thriller, and the crimes that drive these thrillers, all have an elemental relationship to questions of concealment and disclosure. As such, in these novels, queer, historical and narrative conceptions of revelation work with and against one another to subvert the idea of truth and its relationship to queer identities. These ideas are explored in a close reading of Waters's Fingersmith (2002), which, it is argued, is an exemplary queer historical thriller, as both the best example and originator of broader tendencies in a genre Waters helped define.