Crime Fiction
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Crime Fiction

John Scaggs

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eBook - ePub

Crime Fiction

John Scaggs

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About This Book

Crime Fiction provides a lively introduction to what is both a wide-ranging and hugely popular literary genre. Using examples from a variety of novels, short stories, films and televisions series, John Scaggs:

  • presents a concise history of crime fiction - from biblical narratives to James Ellroy - broadening the genre to include revenge tragedy and the gothic novel
  • explores the key sub-genres of crime fiction, such as 'Rational Criminal Investigation', The Hard-Boiled Mode', 'The Police Procedural' and 'Historical Crime Fiction'
  • locates texts and their recurring themes and motifs in a wider social and historical context
  • outlines the various critical concepts that are central to the study of crime fiction, including gender, narrative theory and film theory
  • considers contemporary television series like C.S.I.: Crime Scene Investigation alongside the 'classic' whodunnits of Agatha Christie.

Accessible and clear, this comprehensive overview is the essential guide for all those studying crime fiction and concludes with a look at future directions for the genre in the twentieth-first century.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2005
ISBN
9781134368235
Edition
1

1
A CHRONOLOGY OF CRIME

Both the detective-story proper and the pure tale of horror are very ancient in origin. All native folk-lore has its ghost tales, while the first four detective-stories [. . .] hail respectively from the Jewish Apocrypha, Herodotus, and the Æneid. But, whereas the tale of horror has flourished in practically every age and country, the detective-story has had a spasmodic history, appearing here and there in faint, tentative sketches and episodes.
(Sayers 1992: 72)

EARLY CRIME NARRATIVES

The general critical consensus is that the detective story begins with Edgar Allan Poe, the ‘father’ of the detective genre. Crime fiction, however, of which Poe’s detective stories form a subset, has a much earlier provenance, and in order to understand contemporary attitudes to crime, and to narratives of crime, it is necessary to outline the origins of the genre. Dorothy L. Sayers, author of a series of novels featuring the much-imitated, and frequently parodied, Lord Peter Wimsey, in her 1928 introduction to Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, and Horror, published in 1929 in the United States as the first Omnibus of Crime, identifies four stories as early ancestors of the genre: two Old Testament stories, dating from the fourth to the first century BC, from the book of Daniel, one story from Herodotus, dating from the fifth century BC, and one story drawn from the Hercules myths.
In the story of Hercules and Cacus the thief, Cacus is one of the first criminals to falsify evidence by forging footprints in order to mislead his pursuer. Herodotus’s story of King Rhampsinitus and the thief is often identified as the first ‘locked-room mystery’, in which a crime (usually a murder) is committed in a room which it seems is physically impossible for the criminal to have either entered or exited. In Herodotus’s story, as in the story of Hercules and Cacus, the thief also tampers with the evidence of the crime to evade capture.
In the biblical story of Susanna and the Elders, in which Susanna has been falsely accused of adultery by two corrupt and lecherous judges, Daniel, in his cross-examination of the two men, exposes their perjury and exonerates the innocent Susanna. What most accounts of this story fail to include, however, is that under the laws of Moses the two men are subject to the same penalty that they had plotted to impose on Susanna, and are put to death. The story of Daniel and the Priests of Bel, like the story of Rhampsinitus and the thief, is an early prototype of the ‘locked-room mystery’, in which the priests of Bel claim that the statue of the Dragon of Bel eats and drinks the offerings that are made to him, while, in fact, they enter the temple by a secret entrance and, along with their wives and children, consume the offerings themselves. Daniel scatters ashes on the floor of the temple before it is locked and sealed, and the footprints left by the priests prove their guilt. As is the case with the story of Susanna and the Elders, accounts of the story of Daniel and the priests of Bel often omit the fact that the priests, their wives, and their children are all put to death as punishment for their crime.
Julian Symons, the British mystery author and critic, in reference to Sayers and other early twentieth-century commentators on crime fiction such as E.M. Wrong and Willard Huntington Wright, argues that ‘those who search for fragments of detection in the Bible and Herodotus are looking only for puzzles’, and that while puzzles are an essential element of the detective story, they are not detective stories in themselves (Symons 1993: 19). What sets the stories from the Book of Daniel apart from Herodotus or the Hercules myths, however, is the emphasis on punishment, more than on any true element of detection. The Book of Daniel, in particular the added episodes of Susanna and of the priests of Bel that are found only in the Greek version, is didactic in nature and emphasises right conduct, unlike the Herodotus story, for example, in which Rhampsinitus rewards the thief for his cunning and boldness by giving him his daughter’s hand in marriage, implying that crime, at least in this case, really does pay.
The emphasis on right conduct, reinforced by the harsh punishments meted out in the stories from the Book of Daniel, is characteristic of most narratives of crime up until the mid-nineteenth century, including the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. The story of Cain and Abel can be read, in this way, as an example of how crime fiction, according to Stephen Knight, ‘create[s] an idea (or a hope, or a dream) about controlling crime’ (Knight 1980: 2). Cain murders his brother Abel out of jealousy, and is punished by God in two ways: he becomes an outcast, and he is marked by God so that all may recognise him for who he is, and, more significantly, for what he is – a criminal. This ‘Mark of Cain’ is a reassurance to all those who abide by the law, as it suggests that the criminal is always identifiable as ‘other’ than themselves. Furthermore, the identification of crime as a transgression of socially imposed boundaries has a dual purpose. In addition to identifying those who lie beyond the pale by marking them in some way, as evident in the biblical story of Cain, but also, for example, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), the notion of crime as transgression also serves to establish the boundaries of acceptable social behaviour. Such boundaries are eventually codified in law, and in this way the social order is maintained, and a particular view of the world, or ideology, is further validated and disseminated.
The story of Oedipus the King, as set down by Sophocles and first performed in about 430 BC, draws together all of the central characteristics and formal elements of the detective story, including a mystery surrounding a murder, a closed circle of suspects, and the gradual uncovering of a hidden past. The city of Thebes has been stricken by plague, and the citizens turn to the king, Oedipus, who ended a previous plague and became king by answering the riddle of the Sphinx, to end the current plague and save them. He has sent his brother Creon to the Oracle at Delphi, and Creon returns with a message that the plague will end once the murderer of the former king, Laius, has been captured and banished from the city. Furthermore, the message states that the murderer is in the city of Thebes. Martin Priestman identifies the plague as ‘a powerful image for [the] pollution of an entire society’ (Priestman 1990: 23), and it is significant that this contamination can only be lifted by the banishment of the criminal, who, whether by virtue of his criminality, or otherwise, is identified as ‘other’, an outsider.
Oedipus, who as king of Thebes is an embodiment of the state and of authority, and who correctly answered the riddle of the Sphinx, employs the power of authority and his puzzle-solving ability to find Laius’s murderer. When he asks Tiresias the seer about the murder, Tiresias answers that it was Oedipus himself who killed Laius, and when he hears a description of Laius’s murder from his widow, and now his wife, Jocasta, he begins to suspect that Tiresias’s claim is true. These suspicions are confirmed when a shepherd who witnessed Laius’s death reveals that Oedipus is not a native of Corinth, but that he was delivered there as an orphan. Oedipus questions him to uncover his origins, and the shepherd reveals that Jocasta, reacting to a prophecy that her son would one day murder his father and marry his mother, ordered him to be put to death. The shepherd was charged with the task, but taking pity on the baby Oedipus, he brought him to Corinth as an orphan. In this way the truth of the prophecy and Oedipus’s identity as the murderer are revealed.
The story depends formally, like much detective fiction, on uncovering the identity of Laius’s killer. As in much crime fiction, until what is identified as the Golden Age between the two world wars, the criminal is an outsider. In the Oedipus myth, Oedipus is literally an outsider in that he is not from, or at least not believed to be from, Thebes, and therefore seems to have no conceivable connection to the crime. Significantly, after blinding himself on his discovery of the truth, he banishes himself, emphasising his status as an outsider by becoming an outcast as well, but in so doing, lifting the plague from the city and restoring the order that his ‘unnatural’ marriage to his mother, Jocasta, has disrupted. Oedipus’s position as both the criminal and the force of law and authority is significant, and this doubling of functions reappears in later crime fiction, in particular in revenge tragedy and in hard-boiled detective fiction. Oedipus’s appeal to Tiresias the seer is also significant. As a seer, Tiresias is somebody who sees the truth, and the structure of Oedipus foregrounds the search for truth that the figure of the seer embodies. Despite a plot which foregrounds a hidden secret at its core, and which is structured around the enquiries that uncover this secret at the end, Oedipus’s enquiry is based on supernatural, pre-rational methods that are evident in most narratives of crime until the development of Enlightenment thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The revenge tragedy of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period, at the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, is situated at the cusp of the Enlightenment, and is structured by the overriding imperative of restoring the social order, as embodied in the act of revenge. The revenge pattern of injury and retribution creates a narrative in which the unity of justice and order prevails: the guilty suffer and are punished, and the crimes committed against the innocent are visited upon those who have committed those crimes. ‘Revenge’, however, as Catherine Belsey notes, ‘is not justice’ (Belsey 1985: 112). Ironically, it is in the absence of justice that the revenger pursues a course of action that is itself unjust, in an attempt to restore the unity and social order that justice promises. Furthermore, the tragedies of revenge are often structured around the fact that criminality has invaded the centres of justice. In The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), the duke is a murderer, just as the king is a killer in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1601), and it is this corruption at the heart of the structures of power and justice that signals to the revenger the overriding necessity of what Francis Bacon refers to, at the time of the first developments of revenge tragedy, as ‘a kind of wild justice’ (Bacon 1999: 11).
Ga āmini Salga ādo, a twentieth-century literary historian and critic with a special interest in early-modern criminal activity, outlines a five-part structure for revenge tragedy, based on the model laid down by the Roman scholar and playwright Seneca in the first century. Seneca’s tragedies are bloody accounts of the downfall of royal families, and, significantly, the five-part structure of Senecan tragedy neatly parallels the narrative structure of much crime fiction, from the novels of Agatha Christie in the 1930s and 1940s in particular, to the present. The first part of the structure identified by Salga ādo is the exposition of events leading up to the situation requiring vengeance, in revenge tragedy, or investigation, in the crime novel. The second part of the structure is anticipation as the revenger plans his revenge, or the detective investigates the crime. The third step is the confrontation between revenger and victim, followed by the partial execution of the revenger’s plan, or, as is often the case with the detective’s investigation in the crime novel, the villain’s temporary thwarting of it. The final part is the completion of the act of vengeance, or, in the case of crime fiction, the detective’s final success in bringing the villain to justice (Salgaādo 1969: 17). Salga ādo’s model is a remapping and refinement of the structure of tragedy outlined by Aristotle in his Poetics. In Aristotle’s outline, tragedy is governed by a unity of plot in which the narrative advances from beginning to end in an ordered sequence of cause and effect. While a unifying conclusion should tie up any loose ends, it can do so, in Aristotle’s view, through the use of peripeteia, or ironic reversal, and anagnorisis, which translates as ‘recognition’ or ‘discovery’, and describes the moment when the hero passes from ignorance to knowledge. Such a movement from ignorance to knowledge is crucial to the narrative success of both revenge tragedy and crime fiction.
In Hamlet, a murder has been committed before the narrative begins, and just as the corpse is the starting point for much twentieth-century crime fiction, here, the ghost of the murdered king is the impetus for the action. The ghost of King Hamlet calls on his son, the Prince, to revenge his murder at the hands of his brother, Claudius, who is now king. Hamlet accepts his filial obligation, but before killing Claudius he takes the precaution of first proving his uncle’s guilt, and his investigations, which correspond with the ‘anticipation’ in Salga ādo’s model above, constitute more than half the play. The primary means by which Hamlet establishes Claudius’s guilt is his staging of ‘The Mousetrap’, a re-enactment of King Hamlet’s murder. Claudius’s reaction as his act of murder is acted out in front of him convinces Hamlet that he is guilty, and frees him to take his revenge. However, Hamlet’s plans are thwarted when he inadvertently kills Polonius, the king’s counsellor, in a case of mistaken identity that finds a parallel in the theme of personal reinvention that is central to much twentieth-century hard-boiled fiction. Hamlet is quickly dispatched to England with secret orders from Claudius to the English king to execute him upon his arrival.
Hamlet’s accidental murder of Polonius is significant in two related formal aspects. By killing Polonius, and creating another revenger in Polonius’s son Laertes, the same doubling of functions that characterises Oedipus also characterises Hamlet. He is both an agent of revenge, and therefore an agent of authority, and an object of revenge, and in this way he also mirrors Claudius’s position in the play. Claudius, as king, embodies the forces of order and authority in the world of the play. However, he is also the villain, and it is this situation, in which those in power abuse it for their own villainous ends, which explains those narratives of crime in which the criminal is the hero, as long, that is, as it is clear that any crimes committed are committed against the villainous elite. Robin Hood is an example of the criminal as hero, but it is clear from narratives about criminals such as Robert Greene’s ‘cony-catching’ pamphlets in the late sixteenth century, in which criminal con-men trick innocent ‘conies’, that in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period sympathy for the criminal was beginning to wane. As Knight points out, with increasing frequency these early-modern criminals are inevitably depicted as coming to a bad end (Knight 1980: 8–9). The ambiguous position of the revenger in the plays of William Shakespeare, Thomas Kyd, John Webster, Cyril Tourneur, Thomas Middleton, and William Rowley, and his inevitable death at the end of the play, seem to bear this out. By taking the law into their own hands, the revengers disrupt the very social order that they are trying to restore, and the response of the sovereign representative of order and authority, in the early-modern period of public execution that is the background to these plays, is swift and final. ‘Besides its immediate victim’, according to Michel Foucault, ‘the crime attacks the sovereign: it attacks him personally, since the law represents the will of the sovereign’ (Foucault 1991: 47), and it is for this reason that crime, in the period in which revenge tragedy flourished, ‘requires that the king take revenge for an affront to his very person’ (Foucault 1991: 48).

CRIME STORIES AS CAUTIONARY TALES

The violent and bloody spectacle of public execution, as a form of revenge in which the sovereign restores order and stability, also served as a warning, and similar warnings were an integral part of the broadsheet accounts of the crimes and punishments of major criminals which were common throughout the eighteenth century. The Newgate Calendar stories were the most common of these, and although the title was frequently used, drawing on the image of Newgate prison in the popular imagination, the first large collection of these cautionary tales gathered together under the title appeared in 1773. These stories, and stories like them, were cautionary tales in which the perpetrator of a criminal deed is captured, tried, and punished. Such collections were a response to the popular demand for bloody and shocking accounts of violent crime that spawned the tragedies of revenge in the seventeenth century, and they paralleled a similar demand in France, and elsewhere (Mandel 1984: 6). Like the tragedies of revenge, in which the revenger was executed, or anticipated their inevitable fate by committing suicide, the execution of the villain was an integral part of the popular accounts of the eighteenth century. As Knight observes, the warnings these stories provided were intended as a way of maintaining social order and personal security under threat from rising crime rates (Knight 1980: 10–13), but what is significant, as Knight further observes, is the reliance on pure chance to apprehend the criminal in these stories, rather than on detection and organised police work.
The same element of chance and coincidence that characterises the apprehension of the criminal in the Newgate Calendar stories is also evident in what is often identified as one of the most significant precursors to the detective novel: William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, published in 1794. Caleb Williams, a promising lower-class youth, is taken under the wing of the aristocratic Falkland, and becomes his secretary. Subsequently, Falkland is publicly beaten by Tyrrel, another local squire whom Falkland accuses of ignoring the responsibilities that his position entails. Immediately after Falkland’s public humiliation, and as a result of the importance he attaches to social standing and personal honour, he murders Tyrrel in secret, although in a plotting manoeuvre typical of detective fiction the novel does not immediately reveal he is the killer. Caleb, in an early example of investigation and deductive reasoning, establishes the facts of the murder and identifies Falkland as the killer. Falkland, however, realising that Caleb knows the truth, uses his position and influence to imprison Caleb, and, eventually, to discredit and humiliate him. At the close of the novel, Caleb eventually confronts his former master, and in the revised ending of the novel, which Godwin redrafted to replace the original ending in which Falkland once more outmanoeuvres Caleb, the confrontation kills Falkland.
After Falkland’s death Caleb acknowledges his own complicity in his unjust persecution of Falkland as the result of his failure to accept his own social position as his master’s servant. In this way, it is clear that Falkland embodies the ideology of a dying semi-feudal order in the importance he places on honour and social standing, while Caleb, by crossing the boundaries of class demarcated by such an order, embodies the concept of individual freedom that characterises Enlightenment thought and which led inexorably to the French Revolution in 1789, with its ideals of liberty, fraternity, and justice. Godwin’s novel, in this way, is characterised by its essential conflict between Enlightenment ideas prevalent at the time he was writing, and evident in its radical questioning of political justice and its faith in rationality, and a semi-feudal, Christian ideology and Old Testament faith that wrong-doing will always be punished by God, regardless of individual action. The plot of the novel advertises its transitional nature in its depiction of crime in high places and the related notion of personal honour that is typical of Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedy, and in its contrasting consideration of the power of the subjective, individual intellect to challenge such a system. The ending of the novel, however, mirrors the dilemma of revenge tragedy, and as Martin Priestman observes, ‘the exposure of crime in high places must remain an act of rebellion which society cannot condone without fundamental disruption’ (Priestman 1990: 12–13).
It is this ultimate rejection of the possibility of restoring the social order through the one-to-one conflicts between men that is structurally fundamental to much detective fiction. This makes Godwin’s novel a problematic example of the form, despite his technique of working backwards to bring the narrative to its climax – a technique that crime fiction was later to adopt as its own (Knight 1980: 22). However, as a transitional text between pre- and post-Enlightenment narratives conce...

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