American detective dramas are a common and familiar fixture on televisions everywhere - from Dragnet to CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, from Columbo to Twin Peaks. This book explores the genre and its rich history from 1950s television onwards, focusing on the question of how detectives access and attain 'truth'. In this, American TV Detective Dramas takes the reader through the rich history of the genre, its narrative structures, its position in changing industrial and aesthetic contexts and its function in a broader political and social field. Detective dramas and methods of detection are, thus, not just viewed as a genre convention, but as representatives of ideological tendencies.