Serial Crime Fiction

Dying for More

Carolina Miranda, Jean Anderson, Barbara Pezzotti, Carolina Miranda, Jean Anderson, Barbara Pezzotti

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137483683
• eBook ISBN: 9781137483690
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Letteratura generale

Serial Crime Fiction is the first book to focus explicitly on the complexities of crime fiction seriality. Covering definitions and development of the serial form, implications of the setting, and marketing of the series, it studies authors such as Doyle, Sayers, Paretsky, Ellroy, Marklund, Camilleri, Borges, across print, film and television.

Part I

The Sum of its Parts: What Makes a Series?

1

Stephen Burroughs, Serial Offender: Formula and Fraud in Early US Crime Literature

Jon Blandford

Much of the criticism on crime fiction – and on serial crime fiction in particular – faults its heavy reliance on formula and convention. To cite two (in)famous examples, Wilson ([1945] 2007) compares readers of detective stories to drug addicts and alcoholics, eager to get their next fix and unconcerned with the quality of the product they consume; and Eco describes Fleming’s spy novels as a narrative machine that ‘produces redundancy’ ([1966] 1983, 113).¹ Crime fiction, then, is either a narcotic or an elaborate yet cheap carnival ride, offering thrills and distraction but little else. This indictment of crime fiction as subliterary is often accompanied by a second charge – that its formulae are ideologically conservative, and that thus, like a drug, crime fiction’s repetitive pleasures may have pernicious effects. Along these lines, Porter (1981) argues that crime fiction’s apparent redundancy serves the ideological purpose of reassuring readers, managing our anxieties about crime by containing its threat to social order within familiar and predictable structures.² Although more sympathetic to the potential virtues of what he calls ‘formula stories’, Cawelti (1976) likewise concludes that the cultural work popular crime fiction performs is essentially reactionary.³

If formula and convention are to blame for the genre’s crimes against good taste and good politics, then seriality would seem to be a willing accomplice, heightening the repetition and reassurance that are crime fiction’s defining aesthetic and ideological features. The following discussion argues instead that crime literature’s seemingly endless recycling of characters and tropes can have unpredictable and potentially even disruptive effects. Eschewing the line-up of usual suspects – Doyle and Holmes, Christie and Poirot, Chandler and Marlowe, Fleming and Bond – this essay looks to complicate our understanding of the relationship between form and ideology by offering a prehistory of serial crime fiction, one that traces its origins to the popular literary milieu of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century US. Although most of the texts about criminals and their crimes written during this period purport to be true accounts, they anticipate in striking ways the serial storytelling of the pulp fictions, detective novels and thrillers that comprise the more familiar popular crime fiction of the twentieth century. They also introduce a tension between repetition and innovation that is characteristic of serial crime literature more generally, spotlighting the ways in which seriality can undercut crime fiction’s orderly ideological script.

Crime literature in America begins with the Puritan execution sermon. These sermons, which were written by members of the clergy and which dominated American crime literature through the middle of the eighteenth century, fit the body of the condemned into rigid discursive scaffolding: each typically begins with a passage from scripture, which is then applied both to the life of the criminal about to be executed and to the spiritual welfare of the community as a whole. The sermon itself is often followed by a record of the supposed last words of the condemned. In most cases likely written by the clergy as well, these last words echo the sermon’s moral and theological message, aligning the criminal’s own interpretation of his or her crime and punishment with the interpretation voiced by the representatives of law and order. As Halttunen has shown, these sermons tend to de-emphasize or omit altogether the details of the particular crimes for which criminals had been sentenced to death, and instead portray each criminal as an ‘exemplary sinner’, ‘a moral representative of all of sinful humanity’ (1998, 9).⁴ This is repetition at its most reassuring, with each new reiteration serving to reinforce the authority of the law and of the church.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, however, the clergy lost its monopoly on the published representation of crime, a shift driven in part by new developments in technology that made print cheaper and more widely available than ever before.⁵ Crime literature became the business of enterprising printers, publishers and booksellers who sought to capitalize on the public’s fascination with criminals and their misdeeds by issuing a variety of texts and creating new forms. It is also during this period that US crime literature first began to be serialized. The inaugural issue of the luridly titled American Bloody Register, for example, concludes by informing readers that its accounts of the pirate Alexander White and of highway robbers John Sullivan and Richard Barrick will be continued in a forthcoming second instalment. The magazine’s publisher, printer Ezekiel Russell, protests that he would have ‘readily gratified our Readers with [more] interesting particulars [about these three criminals], but it was out of our power, as the copy was handed to us but a few hours before this Publication’; and then promises to make up for this omission, ‘pending suitable encouragement to this infant Work’, by ‘furnish[ing] Number II with an elegant copperplate engraving, executed by an ingenious Artist’ ([1784] 1993, 243). While Elisha Brewer, William Billings and Isaac Bradish – the three amanuenses credited with transcribing the narratives in this early sensational magazine – may have, as Williams asserts, ‘acted as agents of social control’ (1993, 41), the division of the criminals’ stories into serial instalments allows White, Barrick and Sullivan to elude, however temporarily, representational capture in print, suspending the final sentences of their stories ‘pending suitable encouragement’ from readers willing to pay to spend more time in their company.

The introduction of seriality, then, frustrates the ideological closure offered by early US crime literature’s established formulae. For a readership that increasingly turned to popular literature for sensational stories, the execution of the criminal for his or her crimes was less important than the ingenious execution of the ‘Artist’ able to transform the spectacle of the scaffold into mass entertainment. To stand out from the rogues’ gallery of other published enemies, the criminals of this new popular crime literature had to be more individuated than the interchangeable sinners of the Puritan execution sermon. Publishers, faced with an increasingly crowded marketplace, attempted to outdo each other with hyperbolic claims about the content of their texts, ‘replacing an earlier, sympathetic view of the condemned criminal as moral exemplum with a view of the murderer as moral alien’, and ‘play[ing] up [the] monstrosity [of each individual criminal] for the benefit of his reading public’ (Halttunen 1998, 57). Thus, the second issue of The American Bloody Register is prefaced by a preview of even bloodier stories that will appear in future issues, including a ‘most surprising and shocking Account of the horrid Massacre of more than Twelve Hundred Men, Women and Children in Twenty-Five Years’, and ‘THE Confession of the barbarous MARGARET STILLWELL, executed in New-York for the Murder of a Child’ ([1784] 1993, 243). And yet, in spite of all of this emphasis on novelty, the criminals in these texts also had to fulfil readers’ generic expectations by being recognizably part of the same series, to be legible not just as criminals, but as certain types of criminals (murderers, highway robbers, confidence men, pirates and so on) whose stories fitted into pre-existing narrative schemas. In sum, from its very beginning, serial crime literature in the US was animated by a dual and contradictory imperative to create something at once new and familiar, and these competing impulses caused criminals and their stories to mutate in ways that could undermine or even collapse long-standing ideological structures.

The remainder of this essay develops this argument through an investigation of The Memoirs of Stephen Burroughs, one of the earliest and most widely read works of autobiography published in the US. A confidence man and counterfeiter, Burroughs was run out of one town early in his criminal career for impersonating a preacher and passing off as his own sermons he stole from his father, and was later sentenced to jail – the first of many incarcerations – for attempting to pass off fake coins as legal tender. Among his other disguises, he posed as the shipboard doctor on a privateer and as a cosmopolitan gentleman forced to flee London because of pro-Irish sympathies, changing his name, adapting his appearance and reinventing his past whenever word of his former crimes caught up with him and forced him to move on to a new community. Like the shape-shifting titular character of Melville’s The Confidence-Man ([1857] 1991), Burroughs treated identity as he did money, as a productively empty signifier that makes meaning only in and through networks of contingent relations held together by shared beliefs he could manipulate to his advantage. Unlike Melville’s novel, however, Burroughs’s supposedly true-to-life account of his various fictive selves was a hit with readers, its first volume, appearing in 1798, proving so successful that its author followed with a second volume’s worth of adventures in 1804.

On its surface, Burroughs’s narrative has two principal purposes. First, like any work of autobiography, his Memoirs vouch that they will tell the truth about how their narrator came to be who he is by offering a coherent, unified record of his experiences, re-collecting and re-presenting the significant events of his life in an orderly sequence. Thus, while Burroughs, in the opening paragraph of his text, expresses regret that he did not keep detailed ‘minutes of the occurrences of [his] life, [...] when they were fresh in [his] memory, and alive to [his] feelings’, he nonetheless assures us that he will ‘give as simple an account of them as [he is] able, without any coloring or darkening of circumstances’ ([1798] 1988, 3). In the context of criminal recollections in particular, a memoir’s promise to provide a full account of an individual life doubles as a promise to account for how that individual came to lead a life of crime. As Fabian argues, the countless life stories authored by criminals during this period ‘had epistemological value for people learning to place trust in printed words’, a value that went above and beyond other types of autobiographical texts:

the convicts who appeared in print had been convicted: their crimes had been proved at trial. With jury verdicts registered, facts in criminal cases were rarely in dispute, and readers could turn to accounts of crime with confidence that, at least on some level, what they read was true. (2000, 50)

To the extent that Fabian is correct, even the words of a serial liar like Burroughs would have been given the benefit of the doubt once they appeared in print, interpreted by readers as crime fact rather than crime fiction. What is more, Burroughs’s Memoirs are, among other things, a confession, and, as such, share in that genre’s privileged status in legal and theological discourse as the ‘queen of proofs’.⁶

A second and related purpose of Burroughs’s Memoirs is to set the record straight, to wrest control of its author’s representation in print from conflicting accounts that were circulating at the time. Burroughs was, to hear him tell it, the victim of numerous and erroneous reports about his life authored by others. He is especially galled, for example, by what he contends is a libellous claim that he stole a watch from a clergyman while he was himself posing as a preacher, an accusation that first appeared in a newspaper in Springfield while Burroughs was in jail awaiting trial for counterfeiting money and that resurfaced whenever he was suspected of some new offence. Burroughs’s notoriety as a master criminal, it would seem, eventually took on a proverbial life of its own, becoming a public persona – or, to put it more precisely, a series of public personae – over which Burroughs himself had little to no authorial control: ‘I do believe,’ he laments,

if I had set out with warmth, to prove to the world that I was a man, and not a woman, that a great number, from that circumstance, would have been able at once to look through the deception which I was endeavoring to lay them under, and known for certainty that I was, in reality, a woman. ([1798] 1988, 94)

To counter these misrepresentations, Burroughs positioned his text as the only reliable and complete version of his life story.

His attempts to account for his crimes and to corral and control his unruly representation in print, however, are thwarted by his seriality and multiplicity. Rather than a linear record of a unified self, the Burroughs who appears in the Memoirs is plural, disintegrated and radically inconsistent, a serial offender who cannot be contained within the bounds of any one text. As a confidence man, he saw identity as superficial, relational and subject to perpetual transformations, not fixed, internal and discretely individuated. He has been called ‘a model of the performing self amidst the slippery circumstances of the revolutionary age’ (Gross 1993, 315) and the embodiment of ‘a uniquely American relativism of self’ (Williams 1990, 98). His popularity has been attributed to his cultural moment’s anxious fascination with ‘the ease with which persons could be separated from property in a mobile society in which traditional guides to an individual’s worth were unavailable [and] self-representation had to be accepted as the self’ (Ziff 1991, 56). As Ruttenberg observes, whereas this epistemological uncertainty created a crisis of representation for many of Burroughs’s political and literary contemporaries, his text ‘celebrates his own radical mutability, his progressive slide into a series of characters fully released from any governing authorial principle, as his emancipation from social and cultural forms that have no inherent legitimacy’ (1998, 271). For the purposes of this essay, what is most significant about Burroughs’s inexhaustible capacity for self-reinvention is that he is a ‘series of characters’, with each new change of costume carefully tailored to meet the needs and expectations of the different communities among which he plies his trade. Upon first arriving in Pelham, Massachusetts – the community in which he poses as a preacher for several weeks – Burroughs gathers the intelligence he needs to transform himself into a credible ‘Pelhamite’. Like a census-taker, he ‘gain[s] a pretty thorough knowledge of the people whom I was amongst’, and he uses that knowledge to integrate himself into the community, ‘endeavor[ing] to adapt my conduct to their genius as far as I was capable’ ([1798] 1988, 53). Burroughs is always both himself and not himself, and the serial nature of his confidence schemes anticipates the repetition with a difference that is the defining feature of serial crime fiction.

The seriality of Burroughs’s identities is paralleled by the episodic, (re)cyclical narrative structure of his text. Just as his various assumed identities are all permutations of one another, so too are his stories. Early on in his Memoirs, he repeatedly leaves his father’s home: in the space of just the first five chapters he joins the army, boards with a tutor, attends Dartmouth College and sets sail aboard a ship where he works as the crew’s physician. Each time, Burroughs is expelled and forced to return home in disgrace, a recursive movement that anticipates the misadventures of his adult life, which, time and time again, end badly: in Pelham, he is chased out of town by an angry mob, and in Bridghampton, New York, where he becomes enmeshed in a controversy over the founding of a library, his political adversaries manufacture a charge of rape against him and bring him to trial. And yet, time and time again, Burroughs effects a daring, sometimes hair’s-breadth escape. To read ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I The Sum of its Parts: What Makes a Series?
• Part II As Time Goes By: Progressing the Series
• Part III Transposition, Imitation, Innovation
• Bibliography
• Index