Gregoriou: On the Poetics of Crime Fiction
IASLonline

On the Poetics of Crime Fiction

  • John Scaggs: Crime Fiction. Abingdon, Oxfordshire, New York: Routledge 2005. 184 S. Hardback. GBP 50,00.
    ISBN: 9780415318259.
  • Heather Worthington: Rise of the Detective in Early Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction. (Crime Files) New York: Houndmills Palgrave Macmillan 2005. 216 S. Hardback. GBP 45,00.
    ISBN: 1-4039-4108-4.
[1] 

John Scaggs’ historical account
of Crime Fiction

[2] 

According to the back cover blurb, Scagg’s (2005) Crime Fiction is meant to provide a lively introduction to this hugely popular genre, using examples from fiction, film and TV. Through this, Scaggs aims to present a history of the genre, whilst exploring its key sub-genres, locating texts and their recurring themes and motifs in a wider social and historical context, and outlining the various critical concepts that are central to the genre’s study. The book overall purports to be an accessible, clear and comprehensive overview to those with an interest in crime fiction, and concludes with a look to the future of the genre in the 21st century.

[3] 

In his introduction, Scaggs claims that he does not intend to seek or uncover a fundamental definition of the term ›crime fiction‹, but rather to examine how and why the genre has come to take this current state, how and why it has developed and appropriated in the ways it has.

[4] 

The generically-oriented chapters of this study (1. A Chronology of Crime, 2. Mystery and Detective Fiction, 3. The Hard-Boiled Mode, 4. The Police-Procedural, 5. The Crime Thriller and 6. Historical Crime Fiction), Scaggs quite rightly notes, represent broad categories and are not meant to be viewed as mutually distinct. As Roth 1 put it, »[a]nyone who writes about mystery and detective fiction inherits a history of subdivisions that are expected to have a prescriptive force.« Those who have been attracted to the genre have, in other words, come to face a variety of classifications, most of which have been limiting and confusing rather than helpful, while the definitions adopted were often of a rather overlapping nature. As a result, they have all come to acknowledge different sets of general categories of detective fiction, often failing to both clearly define the differences that keep one category distinct from others, and to explain how their chosen categorisation relates to that of others. Besides, as Scaggs notes (p. 2), one of the defining characteristics of crime fiction is its generic (and sub-generic) flexibility and porosity.

[5] 

Borrowing Todorov’s 2 distinction between the story of the crime to the story of the investigation, Scaggs argues that his book also contains two stories, the first of these being the story of the development of a genre (or the story of the crime in Todorov’s analysis), and the second story being that of the investigative, critical and theoretical engagement with the genre (or the story of the investigation in Todorov’s analysis). Continuing with his ›the literary critic is a detective‹ analogy, Scaggs aims to trace the chronological chain of cause and effect in order to make sense of the present of the genre and the literary texts that it produces, much like a detective tries to trace the past through the state of the present (corpse).

[6] 

Scaggs notes that the book can be read conventionally from beginning to end so as to form a picture of the broader social and historical context before exploring sub-genres in fine detail, though he also notes that readers may instead focus on those specific chapters, the sub-genres of which stimulate their interests. These reading approaches, Scaggs says, reflect the book’s readership; though the book is primarily designed for undergraduate students of the genre (note that there is a short but useful glossary at the end), its most advanced avenues and extensive bibliography will be useful for those sharing a good working knowledge of the genre, and who seek to refine and advance this knowledge.

[7] 

A Chronology of Crime

[8] 

Theorists disagree as to the genre’s origins and, as Porter 3 put it, historians of detective literature may be differentiated according to whether they take the long or the short view of their subject:

[9] 
Those taking the long view claim that the detective is as old as Oedipus and serendipity or at least eighteenth-century China. Those maintaining the short view assume that detective fiction did not appear before the nineteenth century and the creation of the new police in Paris and London, that its inventor, in the 1840s, was Edgar Allan Poe, and that it reached its golden age in the opening decades of the twentieth century with the non-violent problem novel.
[10] 

In chapter one, »A Chronology of Crime«, Scaggs adopts the long view of the genre, and draws on a number of central characteristics and formal elements of the detective story in doing so. These elements include puzzles, the emphasis on punishment and right conduct, transgression as a means of establishing the boundaries of acceptable social behaviour, a mystery surrounding a murder, revenge and ›wild‹ justice, and so on. He uncovers these elements through an analysis of various novels and myths ranging from as far back as the story of Oedipus, covering the birth of the modern policeman such as Doyle’s Holmes and Christie’s Poirot, and beyond the genre’s Golden Age (the era between the two wars) and up to the present.

[11] 

Scaggs delves into various rules and formulaic regularities that characterise the twentieth century crime novel, including a rule that supposedly governs the analytic or puzzle-solving branch of the crime fiction genre, the »Fair-Play Rule«, 4 which basically means that the reader must, at any point, have as much information relevant to the solution of the crime as the fictional detective has. Scaggs also raises the challenged masculinity of the genre in the later part of the twentieth century, in the introduction of the female private-eye novel and, later, gay detective fiction. He also touches on the police procedural as a sub-genre of detective fiction where a team of professionals work together to solve crimes, alongside the introduction of the black detective, inviting a range of racial and ethnic issues into the mix.

[12] 

Mystery and Detective Fiction

[13] 

Scaggs opens Chapter 2, »Mystery and Detective Fiction«, with an outline of the Edgar Allan Poe stories marking the birth of »clue puzzles« 5 or ›whodunits‹. These novels are much like games, actively involving and engaging the reader as a consumer who merely affirms the solution set down by the author. The detectives attached to this form are referred to as »amateurs« (p. 39), in that they do not rely on their detective skills to financially support themselves, and as »reasoning and observing machines« (p. 42), much like the scientifically knowledgeable detectives featuring in contemporary TV crime investigation series.

[14] 

Unlike the earlier crime stories such as those featuring Holmes, the inter-war period novels start to feature murder as the central crime, with bloodless corpses merely appearing as a repository of clues, and an absence of the description of the perpetrator’s punishment. Scaggs ends this chapter by noting that the various settings and locations of mystery and detective fiction helped create various sub-genres, the most frequently visited of these being the locked-room mystery (p. 51), which he convincingly argues currently features in both contemporary fiction and TV.

[15] 

The Hard-Boiled Mode

[16] 

»The Hard-Boiled Mode« is the subject of Scagg’s chapter 3. Such (distinctly American) novels feature tough or ›pig-headed‹ private investigators situated in a modern and hostile, yet realistic, urban setting. Scaggs recounts such detectives who are most often presented to exude a kind of tragic aura, actually work for a living, and take a rather passive approach to detection, stirring things up and waiting for the truth to surface. As Scaggs (p. 64) puts it, »it is the naivety that Chandler’s Marlowe and Hammett’s detectives have in common, and it is the figure of the tough loner on a crusade against social corruption, above all else, that characterised the hard-boiled mode«. He also notes that film adaptations of such fiction, particularly popular in the 1940s, are responsible for the continuing vitality of this mode, highlighting the power of cinematic flashback and voice-over techniques in doing so.

[17] 

The police procedural

[18] 

Scaggs (p. 84) finally draws on Priestman’s 6 distinction between the two strands of hard-boiled writing, namely the »crime-thriller« and the »police-procedural«, the second of which is the subject of chapter 4. Not only does Priestman claim that the crimes presented in procedurals tend to be multiple rather than single »for the investigators, several major investigations are on the go concurrently« but also the adopted »win some, lose some« formula this enables does in fact allow a welcome new level of realism into the genre. 7 In other words, since police procedurals feature cases that are not always solved, they maintain a better illusion (realism) or impression (verisimilitude) of reality than private-eye novels. Such fiction places emphasis on ›actual‹ methods of collective police work, coupled with rule-bending and investigative guess-work.

[19] 

The Crime Thriller and
Historical Crime Fiction

[20] 

»The Crime Thriller« is the subject of Scagg’s chapter 5, »the main focus of which is the crime and the criminal committing it« (p. 105); here, the detectives take a secondary role, if they feature at all. Scaggs thereafter concentrates on the noir thriller form which, according to Priestman, features a protagonist who »consciously exceeds the law«, and later the anti-conspiracy thriller, where the protagonist is pitched against a powerful conspiracy without resource to the forces of law and order. Chapter 6 focuses on »Historical Crime Fiction«. Here, Scaggs (p. 125) draws on a distinction between that fiction clearly set within a particular historical period, yet not written during that period, and that featuring contemporary detectives investigating incidents of the remote past. The final sub-section concentrates on the post-modern anti-detective novelistic form, which raises questions about narrative, interpretation, subjectivity and reality.

[21] 

Overall, though probably most useful to undergraduate students of literature, Scagg’s Crime Fiction would prove a useful textbook for anyone in search of an introduction to the genre and its general themes and motifs. Scaggs seems to prefer to form a literary review of many of those who have been attracted to crime fiction, whilst drawing on various crime books, films and TV series to illustrate his points. He does not, however, add to the debate, with his own ideas and/or models. Admittedly though, he does not pretend that he wishes to do so either.

[22] 

Heather Worthington’s discussion
of the popular roots of the detective

[23] 

Worthington’s book is meant to challenge the traditional account that finds detection before Poe and Doyle only in Gothic and Newgate novels, and the occasional police memoirs. She argues that the popular press is where the fictional detective and investigative case-structure developed, in line with changes in the crime fighting discipline. The book, derived from extensive archival research, is theoretically informed by Foucault’s account of disciplinary power, and explores both factual and fictional popular texts that have rarely been reprinted or discussed, as the sources of inspiration for early nineteenth century crime writing. The author concentrates on patterns found in criminographic materials such as the Accounts of the Ordinary of Newgate, later known as the Newgate Calendars, 8 which were produced for profit, materials which »explored and exploited the already textualised criminal and his or her crime« (p. 2).

[24] 

According to the front flap, the book is meant to be comprehensively written, and would prove essential reading for students and researchers fascinated by the genre of crime fiction. It is overall meant to »challenge the usual evolutionary theory of genre history« (p. 1) and, by devoting scholarly attention to the relevant nineteen century popular materials, »to fill in a gap in the traditional account of the development of crime fiction« (p. 3). More particularly, Worthington considers the form and function of the single-sheet broadsides and their connections with and differences from the periodical accounts of crime. She contends that the detecting prototype was first seen in the pages of the popular periodicals between 1820 and 1850. Reference is also made to the inauguration of the New Metropolitan Police in 1829, along with »an analysis of their role and the reception accorded to their presence on the London streets« (p. 4).

[25] 

Worthington argues that, as the plot of crime fiction is convoluted, so is the temporal structure of this book, the first section considering material from 1800 to mid-century, the second covering approximately the period 1830–1850, and the last section roughly the same period but with a more theoretically informed focus into representations of crime and detection in the popular press in particular.

[26] 

Textualising Crime

[27] 

Worthington tells us that broadsides, functioning as an early form of factional as well as fictional journalism, had been in print since the sixteenth century. By the nineteenth, those broadsides concerned with criminality in particular were meant to entertain by including as much graphic detail of violent crime and equally violent punishment as possible; they »made their appeal to the voyeuristic interests of the masses, exploring the gory and sometimes salacious details of the crimes and making public what had been private« (p. 7), somewhat echoing Bakhtin’s carnivalesque element. Criminality was constructed as a commodity, and sold to the masses for profit, having an appeal that found no boundaries of age, sex or class.

[28] 

From a linguistic perspective, Worthington notes that the Newgate Calendars were written in an emotive yet simple register, employing the use of illustration and verse to make the content vivid and memorable, though she does not offer any actual systematic linguistic analysis to justify this argument. She also notes that the criminal is not only denied a voice but, even more so, is »objectified in the textual representation« and is »functioning merely as the signifier of crime and punishment« (p. 9). She then draws on the broadsides’ theatricality, illustrated with a number of narratives referred to as ›cocks‹ (»accounts which may have had their origins in fact, but which over time and with repeated publication came to be regarded as fictional«, p. 12), whilst commenting on the nature and function of the visual images accompanying these texts. (Allowing the readers to view the actual illustrations discussed could have helped substantiate as well strengthen Worthington’s argument, though I am unsure as to the copyright difficulties arising in reprinting such materials.)

[29] 

In these texts, the silenced criminals had their speech rewritten, while they involuntarily take part in a melodrama of crime and punishment, featuring both explicit sex and violence, and apparently generating no necessity for a detecting figure at all. The reader was not invited to question the perpetrator’s guilt, analyse the story’s content or question the broadside’s authority. Instead, they were invited to engage in the commodified spectacle themselves, and pay money not only to the publishers and broadside sellers, but for the train faire needed to attend the execution of the relevant murderer, as well.

[30] 

Worthington goes on to argue that these broadsides contained an element of disciplinary power in their demonstration of control over the individual, portrayed no less with the event of execution itself, which exemplified the reality of the state’s vengeance on the criminal, and allowed no space for individuality in the system of signification. Readers of such material experienced the sensational and vicarious thrill of the criminal narrative, which functioned as a covert warning against following the criminal example.

[31] 

Worthington argues that Thomas De Quincey’s On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts (1827) exemplified »the intellectual appropriation of the sensational crime of the broadsides by the literary establishment« (p. 24). She contends that De Quincey places readers of murder as spectators to the event, making them complicit to the act itself. As I claim in my forthcoming book, 9 in this sense, the reading of the irrational and incomprehensible (whether it is thought of as a celebration of crime or not) could be seen as a manifestation of Bakhtin’s notion of carnival. Devoted readers of such material, often accused of ›enjoying‹ the crimes in a way that is not socially acceptable, are in fact ›allowed‹ to be socially deviant themselves for the duration of the reading, just like carnival participants were in the course of Renaissance carnivalesque festivals. Even more so, Worthington asserts that De Quincey produced »an intellectual legitimisation of the sensational appeal of murder« (p. 27) and this interest »situates him as an authorial proto-detective«:

[32] 
His inquiry into the mechanics of murder and the attempt to analyse the psychology of the perpetrator and the emotions of the victim, while prompted by a possibly unhealthy fascination with violence, locate him as an investigative agent. (p. 27)
[33] 

Blackwood’s stories, following the broadsides, not only purport to be true accounts, but also shift in focus from the crime to the criminal. These stories also brought rise to the knowing professional who was empowered with knowledge to help him deal with crime and criminality (a detective, that is), whilst events were sensationalised, their effect reinforced particularly through allowing access to the criminal perspective.

[34] 

The Professionals

[35] 

Worthington contends that in the years after 1830 Samuel Warren established the ›professional anecdote‹ fiction sub-genre, which features early detectives, or rather, investigative figures, at its centre. Such fiction is concerned with psychological evaluations of character and murder, drawing on connections between medicine and law. Immorality and crime are here associated with disease, all being subject to a potential cure. Here, Worthington convincingly argues, the physician, much like a detective, uncovers the truth, turns the unknown into the known, and ascribes guilt. In an analysis of narratives, it becomes clear that female sexuality is contained within a patriarchal domestic context, while »masculine desire requires to be constrained in secure domesticity« (p. 60).

[36] 

A number of narratives are here discussed, as is the presumed effect they have on the individual reader. Nevertheless, there seems to be a lack of stylistic appreciation. Few extracts are given in the original, and the analysis is neither systematically linguistic nor close. Also, the author could have benefited from some cognitive poetic insight into the narratives (see, for example, Stockwell 10), insight which can help enhance our understanding of the reading process (including the role played by personal and cultural knowledge, metaphor, the ways in which texts direct attention and focus, and the creation and experience of literary ›text worlds‹ to name a few).

[37] 

According to Worthington, Warren was also instrumental in the development of yet another new literary sub-genre, the factual legal writing, writing which purported to be both authentic and sensational, and which featured a private legal figure (i.e. a barrister and / or an attorney) that used professional skills to support individuals caught up in the legal process. Flaws in the legal system (such as the unreliability of circumstantial evidence) are identified, especially where these potentially result in miscarriages of justice, while it is the possession of property that provides the motive for the crimes committed. Women are victimised, family values are distorted, while a necessary similarity between the detective figure (to be later developed in the crime fiction genre) and the criminal comes to be highlighted.

[38] 

Inaugurating the State Police

[39] 

Though the inauguration of the New Metropolitan Police took place in 1829, it was not until 1850 that the police centrally featured in both factual and fictional accounts in print. In chapter 3 of her book, Worthington analyses the »reversal of public opinion from opprobrium to approbation of the police with reference to the popular literature of [this] time« (p. 103).

[40] 

The police forebears, the Bow Street Runners, who »functioned in the grey area between criminality and legality« (p. 105), featured in Richmond: Scenes in the life of a Bow Street runner, drawn up from his private memoranda (1827), an anonymously authored nineteenth century text, which Worthington argues, can be classified as an early prototype of detective fiction. Through a literary reading of this three-volumed book, Worthington argues that there is evidence of »those features that will become standard in later works of detention«, such as a promising case structure, an investigating companion, the permeation of the criminal world, and the use of varying detecting techniques, even though we here find little evidence of forensic methodology, motive analysis or ›deductive‹ thought (p. 115). However prototypical of the detective fiction genre, Richmond proved, nevertheless, unpopular, and it was the New Metropolitan Police which proved instrumental in constructing a social and literary framework which would indeed achieve popularity.

[41] 

Worthington recounts the initial resistance to the New Police voiced in the press, and then examines the »strategies and techniques that led to the public acceptance of, even affection for, what came to be known as ›the British Bobby‹« (p. 117). Initial reports of the police’s actions were reported in the press, and implied sensationalism as well as respectability, hence softening and changing people’s attitude toward them. Dickens made reference to policemen in his early writing, stressing their necessary and accepted part in London life, not to mention their part in illustrating London’s changing face. Slowly, the detective department came into existence, and detectives became textualised in the press, and later fictional accounts of crime and detection, such as in Recollections of a Detective Police Officer (1856), an account that proved much more popular than Richmond. Worthington identified various generic features of crime fiction in her analysis of Recollections, such as the construction of the police as a »protective servant of the public rather than an oppressive agent of the state« (p. 156). She also analyses Dicken’s Household Words, a periodical first published in 1850, which was much like its Recollections predecessor. This, however, featured professional detectives who, though apparently superhuman, in fact employed ordinary methods in their pursuit of criminals, a quality that »prevented them from being seen as heroes in literary terms« (p. 169). Here, public and private detection are separated. It was not until later in the century that the detective genre was popularised in Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, a figure that made its appearance in periodicals also.

[42] 

Overall, Worthington succeeds in convincing the reader that there are indeed materials, which directly and logically link to the rise of the detective in early nineteenth century fiction. However, her argument would, I feel, have benefited from more direct analysis of textual extracts, not to mention stylistic and cognitive insight into these texts’ linguistic make up.



Anmerkungen

Marty Roth: Foul and Fair Play: Reading Genre in Classic Detective Fiction. London: University of Georgia Press 1995, p. xi.   zurück
Tzvetan Todorov: The Poetics of Prose [Orig.: La poétique de la prose, 1971]. Translated from the French by Richard Howard. With a Foreword by Jonathan Culler. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1977, pp 42–52.   zurück
Dennis Porter: The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press 1981, p. 11.   zurück
Dorothy Leigh Sayers: Unpopular Opinions. New York: Harcourt, Brace 1947, p. 225.   zurück
Stephen Knight: Crime Fiction 1800–2000: Detection, Death and Diversity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2004, p. 81.   zurück
Martin Priestman: Detective Fiction and Literature: The Figure on the Carpet. London: Macmillan 1990.   zurück
Martin Priestman: Crime Fiction: from Poe to the Present. Plymouth: Northcote House Publishers Ltd 1998, p. 30.   zurück
The Complete Newgate Calendar. London: Navarre Society Ltd. 1926 is available via URL http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/completenewgate.htm (11.09.2006).   zurück
Christiana Gregoriou: Deviance in Contemporary Crime Fiction. Palgrave Crime Files Series. Forthcoming 2007.   zurück
10 
Peter Stockwell: Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction. London: Routledge 2002.   zurück