“Holes Swarming with Human Beings”: Racing the Urban Underclass in the Antebellum City Mystery Novel

City mystery novels, a popular literary genre of the mid-nineteenth century whose commercially most successful authors include George Lippard, George Thompson, and Ned Buntline, reveled in sensational depictions of the squalid living conditions and moral degradation of the poorest of the poor. Creating horrifying fictions about a new phenomenon in the US metropolis - the emergence of an urban underclass in slums located in the middle of the city - these authors imagined the multiracial poor as alien others and as members of an unredeemable, disease-carrying, and essentially subhuman species. To do so, their novels utilized discourses of contagion, racial otherness, and the alien within to rhetorically guard white urbanites (including their readers) against the inevitable increase in ethnic diversification. Focusing on the ways in which Lippard, Thompson, and Buntline dramatized the abject living conditions and the cultural attractions of New York's most notorious nineteenth-century slum, the Five Points, this chapter explores a pervasive discourse that spans the gamut from newspaper reportage and travel guides to the popular serial fictions of the city mystery novel.