Philosophies of Crime Fiction

Josef Hoffmann, Carolyn Kelly, Nadia Majid, Johanna da Rocha Abreu

• Publisher: No Exit Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781843441403
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

Philosophies of Crime Fiction provides a considered analysis of the philosophical ideas to be found in crime literature - both hidden and explicit. Josef Hoffmann ranges expertly across influences and inspirations in crime writing with a stellar cast including Conan Doyle, G K Chesterton, Dashiell Hammett, Albert Camus, Borges, Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler and Ted Lewis. Hoffmann examines why crime literature may provide stronger consolation for readers than philosophy. In so doing, he demonstrates the truth of Wittgenstein's claim that more wisdom is contained in the best crime fiction than in philosophical essays. Josef Hoffmann's combination of knowledge, academic acuity and enthusiasm makes this a must-have book for any crime fiction aficionado - with or without a philosophical nature.

1

Crime Fiction and Philosophy:
Introduction and Overview

Crime fiction and philosophy – how might they be related? Firstly, we can analyse the influence of philosophy on writers of crime fiction and their oeuvre. Secondly, crime fiction may have influenced philosophers and their writings. There is a third possibility, the philosophy-thriller, composed of philosophical texts and narrative strategies commonly found in crime fiction. I am thinking here of books such as Markus Thiele’s HirnStröme and Tibor Fischer’s The Thought Gang. However, I shall not address such hybrids here since they appear to me to be of little significance and even less appeal. This leaves only the first two possibilities. The mutual influence of philosophy and crime fiction is manifold and can be made explicit by way of a quotation or implied more subtly in the structure of the text. Further, it may include ways of thinking or argumentation, themes, narrative styles or aesthetic reflections regarding the literary form. However, when we examine the interrelationship between crime fiction and philosophy, we encounter a fundamental problem. Globally, the sheer volume of crime fiction is so large that no one can claim to have read even just a tenth of it. The number of philosophical texts is equally overwhelming, which makes it necessary to confine oneself to selected texts.

I have restricted myself, firstly, to works and writers of the western tradition and, secondly, to the so-called classics. Even this would normally be too large an area to cover, which is why the third restriction is a completely subjective one. I include crime writers whom I have enjoyed reading during at least some stage of my life. A further restriction results from the choice of topics: crime fiction rather than philosophy is of primary interest here. An expert in philosophy will hardly come across anything new here, while I hope that readers of crime fiction will gain deeper insight into their favourite books.

a) The philosophical thoughts of crime writers and crime fiction

The title of this book deliberately reads Philosophies of Crime Fiction instead of The Philosophy of Crime Fiction. In view of historical changes and the diversity of crime fiction and philosophical writings, one must resist the temptation to model the philosophy of the crime narrative. Umberto Eco – the crime writer, philosopher, cultural theorist and more, whose historical detective novel The Name of the Rose is enriched with philosophical and theological allusions, ideas and explanations, – already succumbed to this temptation. In his postscript to The Name of the Rose he adds a chapter entitled ‘The Metaphysics of the Crime and Detective Story (romanzo poliziesco)’. In it, Eco explains that the pleasure of reading crime fiction is due neither to a fascination for murder and manslaughter nor to the re-establishment of order after the crime, but rather to the fact that the crime novel represents the purest form of conjecture. The reader is attracted by the adventure of speculating and testing those speculations step by step. The investigating detective seeks to answer the same questions as a metaphysician does. ‘Ultimately, the fundamental question of all philosophies is the same basic question asked by the detective novel: who is to blame? To know the answer, one must assume that all facts underlie a formal logic, the logic that the culprit has put upon them.’ According to Eco, a story substantiated in such a manner leads to an abstract model of conjecture, to the labyrinth. Eco adopts the labyrinth metaphor from the introduction to the Encyclopaedia by the philosophers of the French Enlightenment, and it represents the manifold connections between the production, collection and localisation of knowledge. The detective – like the reader – finds himself confronted by a tangle of traces, clues and statements. He must find his way through this labyrinth, this time and space, by arranging particles and sequences of knowledge. At the centre of the labyrinth is the monster, the crime (or the criminal), which the detective must conquer. The detective is the hero in a narrative about a journey to the centre and back, the archetypal hero on a quest. In crime fiction, however, the detective – as opposed to the mythical hero Theseus – does not have Ariadne’s thread at his disposal to bring him back to safety once he has accomplished his quest in the social labyrinth in which the criminal is to be found and punished. The detective must patch together his own Ariadne’s thread bit by bit with the help of observation, interrogation, discussions, violent acts and collaborators so as not to lose himself in this criminal labyrinth, but instead to reach the exit. In this regard he is a true philosophos in the ancient Greek sense of the word. Accordingly, a philosopher is not someone who loves wisdom, but rather someone who appropriates knowledge, who actively pursues it. Socrates saw himself as the progeny of the genius inventor Daidalos, who devised both the labyrinth and Ariadne’s thread, a magical ball of yarn. The thoughts and conversations in Socrates’ dialogues reflect a search within the labyrinth of imagination, opinion and concepts of truth, whereby ‘logos’, reasonable consideration, is meant to guide us as a kind of Ariadne’s thread that, nonetheless, does not guarantee certain knowledge. Rationality, or reason, is also an important tool in a detective’s work, though by no means the only one.

Those who are even slightly familiar with crime fiction and philosophy will consider Eco’s bold claim regarding the connection between the two subjects to be a highly subjective opinion without general validity. Frederic Jameson believes even a typical detective story to be a literary form without explicit political, social or philosophical meaning, though this does not exclude a subtle, hidden meaning. In crime fiction, the fundamental question regarding the perpetrator is reserved solely for the classic whodunit. Other subgenres of crime fiction, such as the psycho thriller, the gangster thriller and the police procedural, often make do without the search for the perpetrator because he or she is presented to the reader from the outset. This is even the case in some detective novels. Nor does the fundamental question have a monopoly in philosophy. An alternative fundamental question might be, for example, ‘What can we know?’ This need not have anything to do with the action of a guilty party. The multiple approaches of philosophical thought as well as crime fiction prohibit a single philosophy of the crime fiction. All that remains is to analyse texts by various writers in both fields and create a joint discourse.

There are classic writers of crime fiction whose work includes philosophical references. And there are also several significant philosophers who regularly read crime fiction, traces of which can be found in their own work. Furthermore, some crime writers have composed philosophical texts. The primary example of this is Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Eureka’, a natural philosophical essay. G. K. Chesterton published several philosophical monographs and a biography of Thomas Aquinas, one of the greatest philosophers and theologians. Dashiell Hammett composed a shorter philosophical essay, published posthumously, entitled ‘The Boundaries of Science and Philosophy’. On 5 March 1935 Dorothy Sayers gave a talk in Oxford on ‘Aristotle on Detective Fiction’, while Jorge Luis Borges’ narratives and essays overflow with philosophical thoughts. The same is true of Eco.

W. H. Auden and Umberto Eco later both referred to Aristotle’s poetics to analyse the aesthetics of detective fiction. They did so without recognising or even mentioning Sayers’ famous talk. At the beginning of her lecture she makes the bold claim that Aristotle, for historical reasons, sets out his poetic criteria based on Greek theatre, but that he actually desired a good detective story. To prove her assertion, she quotes several passages from Aristotle’s Poetics and compares them to texts of detective fiction. Thus Aristotle finds that we take pleasure in the realistic illustration of things, such as dead bodies and repugnant animals, which we would only watch with unease in reality. He appreciates a myth (fable) in which the sequence of single episodes is probable and necessary and which contains the essential component of recognition, in other words a transformation from ignorance to knowledge. This can take the form of discovering whether or not someone has committed a crime. Aristotle demands of the tragedy, which Sayers considers to be the ancient Greek version of the detective story, the presentation of a serious and completed plot. Both requirements also apply to the detective story because murder is a serious plot element and the construction of a detective story should conclude with all questions answered. Like a tragedy, it should lead to catharsis, a cleansing through the stimulation of pity and fear. To accomplish this, it is important that the detective represents virtue and that the novel sublimates potential vices through emotional and intellectual beauty.

As with the tragedy, plot and characterisation are the essential elements of the detective story. The plot must have beginning, middle and ending. A detective story usually begins with a murder. The middle consists of the investigation of the crime and the resulting peripeteia, or vicissitudes of fate. The ending features the perpetrator’s unmasking and execution. In order to remain in the reader’s memory, the plot should be of appropriate length. This is especially important in crime fiction, where the reader must remember clues from the first to the last chapter in order to appreciate and fully enjoy the final revelation. The plot should be long enough to represent the switch from happiness to unhappiness or unhappiness to happiness. Yet the plot should not depict everything. The parts of the plot should be connected in such a manner that the whole is changed if only a small section of it is removed or rearranged. In a detective story this is especially true of those parts that contain a clue for the solution. In choosing the plot – and equally in creating the characterisation – the impossible but probable must take preference over the possible but improbable. It may well be that the criminal investigative proof is impossible according to the latest scientific knowledge, but it will not bother the uninformed reader to whom such proof seems plausible. However, the reader distrusts a protagonist with a particular character and social status if he does something that might indeed be possible, but utterly unlikely. All parts of the narrative must be comprehensible.

Plot in crime fiction contains three essential elements: pathos, peripeteia (change in the plot), discovery. Pathos consists of an act that leads to destruction or agony such as death, injury and the like. Pathos should be used to serve the consequences of the criminal act, and not to create a thrill or disguise a weakness in the plot. Peripeteia may affect a single protagonist or all of them: a rich person can be turned into a corpse by murder, or a wrongfully accused person may be saved from death row as a result of exonerating evidence. Such plot twists make for an action-filled story and evoke emotions such as fear and pity in the reader. Ideally, fateful incidents should result from a mistake by the person concerned rather than by chance. For example, a detective might himself create problems due to an erroneous observation or hastily drawn conclusions. Or an innocent suspect brings himself into a precarious situation because he has suppressed evidence, and so on. Discoveries lead to the solving of the crime and generally relate to the perpetrator’s identity or the sequence of events. Discoveries made by the author himself are particularly questionable in detective stories and are only considered when the perpetrator is known. Often, the discovery is made based on clues. It is also common for discoveries to be made based on memories; for instance, when the detective remembers a previous technical process similar to the one used to commit this particular murder. The most common method is the discovery by conclusion, where, based on crime scene evidence and the time of the crime, only one person fitting all criteria could possibly be the murderer. Aristotle is also aware of the discovery by misconception, which Sayers interprets as a discovery by bluff. A bluffing detective may, for instance, declare a random weapon to be the murder weapon in order to lead the murderer to incriminate himself.

The entire art of the detective novel is characterised by Aristotle with the term paralogism, false conclusion. Thus the reader of a story with two actions easily succumbs to the false conclusion that, if one of them is true, then the second, related one must also be true, even though it never happened. A crime writer must master the art of deception. The reader must be led to believe that the criminal is innocent and an honourable character guilty; that a false alibi is true and a living person is dead, etc. The correct way to tell a detective story is to present the truth in such a way that the intelligent reader is led to create his own mesh of lies. It is unfair and therefore unacceptable for the author to lie to his readers.

Sayers also demands a certain degree of realism when it comes to characterisation. She follows Aristotle only to a certain extent in his demand that the protagonists must be noble. Sayers believes they must display a ‘measure of human dignity’ for the reader to take them seriously. Even the worst criminals must not be portrayed as pure monsters or caricatures of evil. According to Aristotle, characters must be reasonable, which Sayers interprets as meaning that they should act in a believable and not entirely improbable manner. According to some translators, Aristotle furthermore demands that characters are in line with their tradition. This, says Sayers, does not mean that they resemble traditional stereotypes, but that they are realistic. Thus protagonists in crime stories should resemble in language and actions the men and women we are familiar with in our own time. For this reason, the plot should not be concerned with the discovery of a monstrously evil perpetrator, but rather an honourable but flawed person. The more average-seeming the criminal, the more the reader will feel pity and fear when faced with his deed and the greater the surprise when he is revealed. Generally, the same applies to innocent suspects and the police; they should be characterised realistically. The most difficult Aristotelian rule to follow is that which deems that characters must be uniform from beginning to end. Even though the perpetrator’s identity should surprise the reader, it should still be plausible. His identity must correspond to the traits and actions described beforehand. Any flaws in his characterisation would destroy the plot’s plausibility and break the fair play rule.

Sayers concludes that Aristotle’s Poetics contains fundamental truths for all forms of literary art and that it is the best guidebook for any up and coming crime writer. Every ambitious author of detective fiction should write in a way Aristotle would approve of.

In a similar vein to Sayers, Auden compares classic detective stories with Greek tragedies based on Aristotle’s poetics. The detective story also includes ignorance, discovery and peripeteia. Innocents appear guilty while the guilty appear innocent until the truth is revealed. There is a double twist in such a story – on the one hand, the twist from supposed guilt to innocence and, on the other, from supposed innocence to guilt. Once wrongly localised guilt is replaced by the establishment of true guilt, this leads, according to Auden, to catharsis. Additionally, there is another similarity between Greek tragedy and classic detective story that differentiates...