The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction

Janice Allan, Jesper Gulddal, Stewart King, Andrew Pepper, Janice Allan, Jesper Gulddal, Stewart King, Andrew Pepper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781032570525
• eBook ISBN: 9780429842429
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction is a comprehensive introduction to crime fiction and crime fiction scholarship today. Across 45 original chapters, specialists in the field offer innovative approaches to the classics of the genre as well as ground-breaking mappings of emerging themes and trends.

The volume is divided into three parts. Part I, Approaches, rearticulates the key theoretical questions posed by the crime genre. Part II, Devices, examines the textual characteristics of crime fiction. Part III, Interfaces investigates the complex ways in which crime fiction engages with the defining issues of its context – from policing and forensic science through war, migration and narcotics to digital media and the environment.

Rigorously argued and engagingly written, the volume is indispensable both to students and scholars of crime fiction.

Part I

Approaches

1

Genre

Jesper Gulddal and Stewart King

Genre is an ambiguous term in crime fiction studies – one that has undeniable descriptive value and serves to guide both authors and readers, yet also one that is often used too cavalierly in ways that homogenise rather than highlight the multiplicity of the field. Crime fiction authors are often self-consciously writing within (or against) the crime genre, appropriating its conventions and drawing on the work of both classic and contemporary writers in this genre for models and inspiration. Genre is also a crucial factor when publishers assess manuscripts and position individual titles within commercial frameworks such as book series or sections in online or physical bookstores. More generally, genre impacts on how crime titles are designed, marketed, reviewed and finally purchased by readers who may read crime novels exclusively, and whose expectations are guided by their deep familiarity with the tropes of the genre. However, the concept of genre can also be limiting. The term “genre fiction” has a derogatory ring to it, suggesting that the individual books that make up the genre, in this case crime fiction, are defined substantially by their adherence to established devices and narrative patterns. It also implies that these books are intended for entertainment only and have little need of the careful readerly attention that is lavished upon Literature with a capital L. Here, the concept of genre suggests that crime fiction is easy reading, a product of the cultural industry and therefore lacking textual complexity as well as broader critical agendas.

In this chapter we present some of the classic accounts of the crime fiction genre and proceed from there to identify two contemporary shifts in how the genre is conceived. If the older criticism emphasised the stability and prescriptiveness of genre norms, the first shift involves a redescription of crime fiction as a motley and spacious genre defined by hybridity and mobility rather than adherence to rules. The second shift is occurring as a result of the internationalisation of the crime fiction universe, which results in new amalgamations of established (Western) crime fiction tropes and literary traditions outside the traditional focal points of crime fiction in the UK, the US and France. Our case study text, Antti Tuomainen’s apocalyptic crime novel Parantaja (2010) [The Healer, 2013], has been selected to illustrate both these shifts and the new conception of the crime genre that they have produced.

The aim of the chapter is not to define the crime genre. As will become immediately apparent, we see crime fiction as a field, characterised internally by a multiplicity of formats, styles and themes, and externally by porous borders to the wider field of literature, especially the realm of (elite) Literature. As such, any attempt at a definition would be provisional and run counter to the mobile understanding of genre that we develop here. Based on this understanding, the concluding section offers a reflection on the crime genre as a fluid agglomeration of texts united by certain resemblances yet allowing for all kinds of uniqueness.

Classic definitions

When used simply to label narratives focusing on crime and investigation, the term “crime fiction” seems uncomplicated to the point of being self-explanatory. However, when we reflect critically on this genre designation, significant problems start to appear, above all because of the vast and diverse range of books, written over a long period, that the concept is meant to encapsulate. When and where did the genre originate? How can it meaningfully be subdivided into distinctive formats and types? Should certain murder mysteries be excluded due to their literary or philosophical aspirations (think of Hamlet or Crime and Punishment)? At which point does genre-bending or hybridisation lead authors across the border into new generic territory? And is violent crime – pre-eminently murder – the only acceptable topic, or might crime fiction equally focus on financial, environmental or digital transgressions?

Because of these complexities the definition of crime fiction has been a long-standing preoccupation of crime fiction studies and continues to inform critical discussions of the genre. As is to be expected, the question “what is crime fiction?” is asked routinely and explicitly in introductions to the genre (e.g. Rzepka 2010; Symons 1992) and often elicits sophisticated answers that acknowledge the tension between the conventionality and innovation inherent in crime fiction. However, instead of surveying these contemporary attempts at a definition, we want to examine the definitional desire itself – the desire to impose order and stability on the field – by highlighting three classic and paradigmatic ways of understanding the crime genre.

Firstly, some of the early attempts to define crime fiction – and particularly the detective format – promote what may be called a ludic, or game-based, understanding of the genre, conceptualising the detective novel as an intellectual rather than aesthetic pursuit akin to crossword puzzles, parlour-room games or sport. American crime writer S.S. Van Dine, in his much-quoted “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories” (1928), explicitly defines detective fiction as a “game” (1928: 189). Rather than engaging in “literary furbelows and style and beautiful descriptions and the projection of mood”, detective novels should “state a problem, analyse it, and bring it to a successful conclusion”. In doing so, it must adhere to certain rules, for example, that the murder mystery must be solved by means of “logical deductions” (#5), that supernatural explanations must be avoided (#8) and, most importantly, that the reader must have the same access to relevant information as the detective (#1, #2, #15). These rules ensure “fair play”, a key value of Golden Age detective fiction. Needless to say, this notion is fraught with difficulties; in fact, as Pierre Bayard and others have shown, the classic detective story often goes to extreme lengths to conceal the truth from the reader (Bayard 2000: 19–30). However, in spite of its inbuilt problems, the ludic conception of crime fiction has value as an early example of a contract theory of genre and as such highlights how genre is crucial as a means of establishing a shared frame of reference for authors and readers (Jameson 1975).

Secondly, the crime genre has been defined as formula fiction. Based on a long-standing preconception of crime fiction as a standardised form of literature, this understanding developed in the 1970s and represents an early attempt to take the genre seriously as an object of academic study. The most nuanced account of the formulaic nature of crime fiction can be found in John G. Cawelti’s Adventure, Mystery and Romance (1976). For Cawelti, the concept of a literary formula spans two meanings. On the one hand, a formula is an archetypical plot structure that is rooted in human psychology and therefore occurs across cultures and historical periods (e.g. stories of revenge, betrayal or forbidden love). On the other hand, the concept refers to a conventional way of representing something or someone that is specific to a particular cultural setting (e.g. the hardnosed private investigator and the femme fatale). On the basis of this distinction, Cawelti defines formula fiction as “embodiments of archetypical story forms in terms of specific cultural materials” (1976: 6). In the context of crime fiction, this definition opens up a line of enquiry focusing on how crime novels use standard narratives of murder and investigation, or of revenge, treachery, jealousy, etc., as a means of exploring the conflicts and tensions of specific social and cultural settings. While this definition potentially enables sophisticated inquiries into the relationship between the crime text and its social and cultural context, the notion of literary formulas often leads to more reductionist forms of analysis that strip away the specificity of the individual crime story so as to foreground its formulaic core. Tzvetan Todorov’s “The Typology of Detective Fiction” is a characteristic, albeit unusually astute, example. In this seminal essay, Todorov argues that while the masterpieces of “literary fiction” are characterised by flouting established conventions and creating a genre of their own, those of detective fiction strive to embody those conventions as perfectly as possible: “The whodunit par excellence is not the one which transgresses the rules of the genre, but the one that conforms to them. No Orchids for Miss Blandish is an incarnation of its genre, not a transcendence” (1977: 43). Based on these assumptions, and drawing further on structuralist narratology, Todorov proposes that the genre encompasses just three different types: the whodunit, the thriller and the suspense novel.

The third account of the genre regards crime fiction as an interface that links specific narrative forms to particular sociocultural questions and concerns. This understanding has rarely been articulated theoretically, yet it is often implied in critical practice and provides the basis for the third part (“Interfaces”) of the present book. In this view, crime fiction is not just a form of popular entertainment, characterised by its constant recycling of commercially successful conventions. Rather, it is a narrative vector for exploring a range of wider social, political, cultural or philosophical issues that do not necessarily have anything to do with crime in themselves, yet are significantly implicated and framed by the criminal/investigative plot. The key question here concerns neither text nor context, but what ties them together – how the crime narrative is shaped and informed by the world it represents while also providing a unique means of analysing it. Key topics include the modern city, migration, global capital, the environment and narcotics (see Part III).

Hybridity and mobility

Like all popular genres, and perhaps all literature, crime fiction is based on the dual principles of iteration and variation; on the one hand, crime narratives always draw to some extent on the history and conventions of the genre, even if only in the sense of having a primary focus on crime and investigation; on the other hand, every crime narrative inhabits the genre in an individual way, positioning itself somewhere on a scale that ranges from subtle appropriation to aggressively rewriting the rulebook. In this sense, crime fiction is shaped by a dialectics of “genre performance” and “genre negation” (Gulddal 2016: 55). Older scholarship, particularly the ludic and formula-based understandings discussed in the previous section, tended to emphasise the iterative aspect, possibly overestimating crime fiction’s difference from “Literature” by reading it from the point of view of its rule-bound sameness rather than its rule-bending difference. If more recent scholarship has given greater weight to the variability of crime fiction, it reflects a broader shift in our understanding of genre, epitomised by Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive questioning of the “law of the genre” as a delimiting and norm-setting principle (1980). Crime fiction tends to be seen today as a field in flux where mutation, contamination and innovation take precedence over the purity of canonical forms.

While this shift was related to the rise of new forms of crime writing, particularly postmodern formats that blurred the boundaries between popular and literary fiction, it is important to stress that historical forms of crime fiction are much less “pure” than is often assumed. In fact, as Martin Kayman (1992) and Maurizio Ascari (2007) have shown in a number of “counterhistorical” studies of the genre, the history of the genre has often been written in light of later developments, that is, by privileging texts that seem to be steps on the way towards the main line of crime fiction; conversely, texts that do not point towards this canon have typically been marginalised. This view challenges the traditional account of crime fiction as a limited vocabulary of subgenres, each precisely defined and associated with canonical authors who are seen as genre founders and as prescriptive models for subsequent writers to follow. Against such monocausal and linear historiography, Ascari’s detailed historical analyses highlight how crime fiction as we have come to know it originated in a nineteenth-century field of competing popular genres – adventure novels, Gothic fiction, sensationalist literature, true crime, urban mysteries – traces of which are still present in the supposedly pure acts of genre-foundation in the stories of Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle.

Yet, even if the origin of crime fiction lies in the happy amalgamation of multiple types of literature, the critical identification of the genre was followed by a certain homogenisation, and it was only in the post-war period that authors, reacting to the prescriptiveness of genre, started in earnest to play with conventions and violate generic borders. Previously an exception, hybridity has become a central norm of crime fiction and has seen the crime novel meld with a range of other genres, for example, historical fiction in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1980, trans. 1983), fantasy in China Miéville’s The City & The City (2009), science fiction in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), the spy thriller in James Sallis’s Death Will Have Your Eyes (1997) and climate fiction in Antti Tuomainen’s The Healer, which we discuss in detail below.

There are several reasons why hybridisation has become such a widespread narrative strategy. One factor is commercial. The marketplace for crime fiction – and genre fiction more broadly – has traditionally been seen as a homogenising force, creating conventional and standardised products. However, as the market for crime novels reaches a point of saturation, authors are increasingly incentivised towards differentiation, and hybrid forms represent an attractive way of standing out in a crowded field. Further, as Heather Humann argues in Chapter 6 of this book, hybridisation is also an effect of a postmodern playfulness in the use and combination of genres that have traditionally been kept separate. This playfulness can be a way to gain standing in the field of literature. While popular genres in themselves are typically perceived to be simple, entertaining and intended for mass consumption, combining them shows a metafictional awareness of genre history and is often perceived as sophisticated and smart; in this sense, hybridisation enables authors with literary ambitions to draw on crime fiction plot models while nevertheless avoiding the stigma of writing genre fiction.

Hybridisation also has a wider functionality. In its purer forms, crime fiction offers a narrative model particularly suited to exploring interpersonal relations and social structures, and by virtue of its formal characteristics alone it tends, with numerous exceptions, towards certain accounts of human nature, society and politics. Hybridisation is a way of complicating this model, thereby creating a bi- or multifocal lens that can be used to explore a range of other issues. Hybrid narratives expand and change the constituent forms, increasing their capacity to represent the complexities of human society. Miéville’s The City & The City is a case in point. In this novel, the police procedural plot, focusing on the murder of an American student, becomes a vehicle for the exploration of the surreal setting – the overlapping yet rigorously segregated cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma, where the people have learned to “unsee” and “unhear” the other place, even though the border runs through the streets and houses where they live. The result is a crime narrative that throws a sideways glance at the contemporary anxieties that attach to the border as a safeguard of established collective identities, as a means of upholding inequalities and as a medium of transnational mobility and exchange.

Building on the new conception of the ge...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: New directions in crime fiction scholarship
• Part I Approaches
• Part II Devices
• Part III Interfaces
• Index