Crime Fiction
Crime fiction is a genre of literature that revolves around the investigation and solving of crimes. It typically features a detective or investigator as the central character and often involves elements of mystery, suspense, and psychological tension. Crime fiction is known for its focus on the criminal act, the motives behind it, and the process of uncovering the truth.
3 Key excerpts on "Crime Fiction"
eBook - ePubMasterclass: Writing Crime Fiction
How to create compelling plots, dramatic characters and nail biting twists in crime and detective fiction
- Rosemary Rowe(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Teach Yourself(Publisher)
...1 Exploring the genre What is Crime Fiction? As we shall discover in this chapter, there is a no single answer and even the classic types of this richly diverse genre – from whodunnit to howdunnit to whydunnit – can be broken down into subdivisions or their boundaries blurred. What matters, though, is that we should care about the characters involved and that there is real jeopardy – which means that there must be violence, usually murder, at the heart of the story. What is a Crime Fiction novel? This may seem self-evident but it is worth defining in our terms. A Crime Fiction novel is: • a novel – which means a full-length book. You should aim at somewhere between 60,000 and 90,000 words. Any shorter and it becomes more of a novella or long short story, which are different markets. Any longer and it will be very difficult to sell. (However, even as I write, a crime story of over twice that length has just won the Booker Prize. In this game there are no absolutes.) But 60,000 or so words will give your book the greatest chance. When (and if) you find a publisher, your editor will guide you as to cuts – or even which parts of your story to expand. • fiction – which means you’re going to make it up. There is an entirely different market for non-fiction crime. Of course you may use real-life events, or even characters, as inspiration; everybody does. But as inspiration only. The final story comes out of your head – not out of research and newspapers. And since you have possibly never seen a corpse, much less a murder, you are simply going to have to imagine it. Key idea General advice to aspiring novelists is to ‘write about what you know’. Unless you are a murderer, police officer, advocate or judge, this won’t apply to the central incident in crime novels. This is the first of the ‘general rules’ that we are going to break. Even so, there are no absolutes...
eBook - ePubLiterature and Understanding
The Value of a Close Reading of Literary Texts
- Jon Phelan(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...For example, Lamarque says the following: Not all works of the imagination are deemed to be “literature” … and much popular fiction or drama or light verse would not be so classified. Publishers have even come to recognise a particular genre of fiction as “literary fiction”, in contrast to other genres, crime, fantasy, horror, war, science fiction, which are rarely classed as “literature”. What these other genres are thought to lack, as well as “fine writing”, is a kind of moral seriousness which is taken as a further essential mark of “imaginative literature”. (Lamarque 2013: 521) This categorisation requires refinement in light of what has been argued earlier. Literary fiction cannot be an equivalent sub-genre to Crime Fiction given that Crime Fiction can be either of a literary or non-literary nature. So a distinction must be recognised between ‘literary Crime Fiction’ and ‘non-literary Crime Fiction’. The distinction between ‘literary’ and ‘non-literary’ applies to all sub-genres of fiction such as: works of eighteenth century fiction, fictional works by A.S. Byatt, romantic fiction or science fiction. Awarding the status of ‘literary’ to a fiction refines the categorisation of that fiction. Over recent years, the works of Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard and Kurt Vonnegut have been re-categorised as literary fiction from science fiction; these works are literary science fictions. Of course, in practice ‘literary fiction’ may occupy a separate section in a library or bookshop, variously called: ‘literary fiction’, ‘literature’ or ‘classics’, which makes the category appear an equivalent sub-division to ‘Crime Fiction’ and the like. Instead, the term ‘literary fiction’ refers to a set of texts taken from various sub-genres of fiction which exhibit the standard features of literature and lack the contra-standard features of literature...
eBook - ePub- Josef Hoffmann, Carolyn Kelly, Nadia Majid, Johanna da Rocha Abreu(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- No Exit Press(Publisher)
...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...
