This chapter discusses a wide range of late nineteenth- and early and mid-twentieth-century critical texts written by multiple agents (criminologists, sociologists, jurists, literary critics, translators, and publishers) that explore the relationship between crime, literature, and society. These texts help us to understand how and why, both in the liberal and fascist periods, crime fiction was perceived as a threat to political and social order, as well as bringing to light the major role that the form played in embodying and calling attention to the conflict between critical and popular reading audiences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By analysing how scientists and intellectuals re-fashioned crime writing and how they discussed the practices and discourses that constituted the literature of crime as an object of scientific inquiry and site of social danger, this chapter calls into question accepted views on the relationship between popular culture and the state—that is, popular culture unquestionably seen as a crucial part of mechanisms of propaganda—thus revealing how crime literature was manipulated in order to consolidate discursive hegemony and assert the purview of the medical gaze over all segments of society.