Abstract
The article focuses on the various forms of crime narratives found in selected works of Peter Ackroyd which are concerned with the city of London. Its aim is to show their function in the context of the author’s narrative strategy and thematic composition, specifically discursive pluralisation, intertextuality, and the conception of the city as a text.
It also shows how the subversion of these narrative principles induces the hybridisation and consequent invigoration of the historical novel genre. In order to illustrate the ways in which Ackroyd incorporates elements of crime narratives in both his fiction and non-fiction works this paper focuses on Hawksmoor (1985) and Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994) in conjunction with the ‘biography’ of Dickens (1990), and London: The Biography (2000).