The Crime Fiction Handbook E-Book

Peter Messent

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Blackwell Literature Handbooks
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 562

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

The Crime Fiction Handbook presents a comprehensive introduction to the origins, development, and cultural significance of the crime fiction genre, focusing mainly on American British, and Scandinavian texts.

• Provides an accessible and well-written introduction to the genre of crime fiction
• Moves with ease between a general overview of the genre and useful theoretical approaches
• Includes a close analysis of the key texts in the crime fiction tradition
• Identifies what makes crime fiction of such cultural importance and illuminates the social and political anxieties at its heart.
• Shows the similarities and differences between British, American, and Scandinavian crime fiction traditions

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Blackwell Literature Handbooks

Title Page

Copyright

Acknowledgments

Introductory Note

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2: The Politics, Main Forms, and Key Concerns of Crime Fiction

The Politics of Crime Fiction

The Types of Crime Fiction

Classical Detective Fiction

Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction

The Police Novel

Transgressor Narratives

Vision, Supervision, and the City

Crime and the Body

Gender Matters

Representations of Race

Part 3: Some Key Works in Crime Fiction

Edgar Allan Poe: “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841)

Arthur Conan Doyle: The Sign of Four (1890)

Agatha Christie: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)

Dashiell Hammett: The Maltese Falcon (1930)

Raymond Chandler: The Big Sleep (1939)

James M. Cain: Double Indemnity (1936)

Patricia Highsmith: The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955)

Chester Himes: Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965)

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö: The Laughing Policeman (1968)

James Ellroy: The Black Dahlia (1987)

Thomas Harris: The Silence of the Lambs (1988)

Patricia Cornwell: Unnatural Exposure (1997)

Ian Rankin: The Naming of the Dead (2006)

Stieg Larsson: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005)

End Note

References

Index

Blackwell Literature Handbooks

This new series offers the student thorough and lively introductions to literary periods, movements, and, in some instances, authors and genres, from Anglo-Saxon to the Postmodern. Each volume is written by a leading specialist to be invitingly accessible and informative. Chapters are devoted to the coverage of cultural context, the provision of brief but detailed biographical essays on the authors concerned, critical coverage of key works, and surveys of themes and topics, together with bibliographies of selected further reading. Students new to a period of study or to a period genre will discover all they need to know to orientate and ground themselves in their studies, in volumes that are as stimulating to read as they are convenient to use.

Published

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M. Keith Booker and Anne-Marie Thomas

The Seventeenth-Century Literature Handbook

Marshall Grossman

The Twentieth-Century American Fiction Handbook

Christopher MacGowan

The British and Irish Short Story Handbook

David Malcolm

The Crime Fiction Handbook

Peter Messent

This edition first published 2013

© 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Messent, Peter B.

The crime fiction handbook / Peter Messent.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-470-65703-4 (cloth) – ISBN 978-0-470-65704-1 (pbk.)

1. Detective and mystery stories – History and criticism. 2. Detective and mystery stories, English–History and criticism. 3. Detective and mystery stories, American–History and criticism. 4. Detective and mystery stories, Swedish–History and criticism. I. Title.

PN3448.D4M435 2011

809.3′872–dc23

2012008956

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image © UpperCut Images / Getty

Cover design by www.simonlevyassociates.co.uk

Part opener image © optimarc / Shutterstock

Acknowledgments

Thanks, first of all, to David Schmid and Chris Routledge, both of whom took time out of their busy schedules to read major sections of this work. Their comments make this a much better book than it would otherwise have been, and their encouragement was much appreciated. Thanks too to others who read individual sequences in the book: Charlotte Fallenius (who kept a close eye on my generalizations about Swedish culture), John Harvey, and Andy Pepper. Again, their critical input was greatly appreciated. Any mistakes or stupidities left are mine alone. Dave Murray, as so often in past cases, said things about the subject as we casually talked that opened my eyes to new angles on it and new ways of thinking about it. Thanks, too, to the students who have taken my crime fiction module in the American and Canadian Studies Department at my home university (Nottingham) over the last decade. It is that teaching, and the ideas that came from those classes and in essay work, that have enabled me to get a much better grasp on these materials than I would otherwise have. Thanks to my son and daughter, William and Alice, and step-daughters, Ella and Leah, for their interest and support. And thanks as always, and love, to my wife, Carin, for her encouragement – even though I have never quite been able to persuade her that crime fiction is a good thing.

Some of the material in this book is based on earlier work. My section on “The Police Novel,” in particular, is a re-working of the essay with that same name in Charles J. Rzepka and Lee Horsley's A Companion to Crime Fiction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). I have also drawn on my other previous publications in the field, but – in all cases – considerably updated and revised them. These include the introduction to my own edited book, Criminal Proceedings (Pluto, 1997); two essays on Patricia Cornwell, one in Warren Chernaik et al. (eds.), The Art of Detective Fiction (Macmillan, 2000) and the other in Clues: A Journal of Detection (Winter 2000); an essay on Thomas Harris that first appeared in Philip Sutton (ed.), Betwixt-and-Between: Essays in Liminal Geography (The Gateway Press, 2002) but that has been published several times since in updated forms; and two pieces on Cornwell and Harris in Michael D. Sharp's edited collection, Popular Contemporary Writers (Marshall Cavendish, 2006).

I could not have asked for a better copy-editor than Hazel Harris as we worked to prepare the book for publication. I recognize all the hard work she put into this task, and appreciate it greatly. Again, my thanks.

I dedicate this book to the memory of Phil Melling, who died of cancer just as I was completing it. He was a very good friend from our university days onward, a fine academic (and much more), and a man of many passions. I will miss him greatly.

Introductory Note

In this book, I refer to crime fiction across the U. S. and European spectrum. But I recognize my limitations. This is not a handbook of global crime fiction and, even within Europe and the Americas, I leave many traditions (Canadian, French, Italian, South American, Spanish, and others) unexamined. My own teaching experience is mainly in the field of U. S. crime fiction, and I rely on this area for a good many of my examples. I am relatively happy to do so because of both the importance and the popularity of that writing. I write in the belief that what I say here will be useful to those interested in authors and countries that either I do not mention or to whom/which I give short shrift. The critical approaches I take will, I hope, transfer across – to some degree at least – to that other material, though I recognize the importance of cultural and historical context; the impossibility, too, of giving blanket rules for the reading of all instances of the genre. My chronological reach in this study is also limited. I am well aware of a fuller history than that I give, which can be traced in the work of such critics as Stephen Knight and Charles J. Rzepka. But I focus here on the best-known examples of the genre, particularly in a twentieth- and twenty-first-century context but with some attention to its nineteenth-century pre-history. My decision to start with Edgar Allan Poe and Sherlock Holmes follows that logic. I thought long and hard about the fourteen texts on which I focus in Part 3 of this book but fully recognize the arbitrary nature of my choices. There are many other texts that cried out for the same kind of attention. Those I have chosen, however, do allow me to refer back to the earlier parts of the book, exemplifying a good number of the different approaches I lay out there. Crime fiction is one of those areas that either fosters compulsive readers or deters those who find the genre shallow and of little or no interest. While I recognize that is it the former who will have the most interest in this book, I am hoping that some of the latter may read it too, and even alter their opinion of the genre as a result. Its enormous present-day popularity is a measure of its cultural importance and influence.

Part 1

Introduction

...[W]ith an expression of interest, [Sherlock Holmes] laid down his cigarette, and, carrying the cane to the window, he looked over it again with a convex lens.

“Interesting, though elementary,” said he as he returned to his favourite corner of the settee. “There are certainly one or two indications upon the stick. It gives us the basis for several deductions.”

Doyle (2003: 6)

This short passage from Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) immediately inspires sparks of recognition for many readers. We assume almost without question that Holmes is talking here to his slightly obtuse companion and chronicler, Dr. Watson. And we automatically recall the phrase “Elementary, my dear Watson” – in fact absent from the original written texts but present in their film versions – that traditionally accompanies Holmes' detections and explanations and has passed as a commonplace saying into the (English) language. We recognize Holmes' “deductions,” too, as the sign of his genius: the logical and analytic skills that enable him to coolly link cause to effect; that “marvellous faculty” (Doyle 2001: 12) that enables him, for instance, to trace the history of a watch and give detailed characteristics of its former owner, even despite its recent cleaning, in the opening chapter (“The Science of Deduction”) of The Sign of Four (1890). The “convex lens” is, of course, part of what has become in consequent representations a magnifying glass, one of Holmes' most valued tools and the very icon of detective fiction – as instantly recognizable in his case as the deerstalker hat that has come to be synonymous with his professional attire and role. The cigarette, too, hints at a certain leisure-class loucheness, or bohemianism as Watson calls it, confirmed elsewhere by Holmes' use of morphine and cocaine – drugs he praises as “transcendently stimulating and clarifying to the mind” (Doyle 2001: 6).

Detective fiction has a long history and, in its modern form, is usually traced to a handful of stories by Edgar Allan Poe: “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Mystery of Marie Roget” (1842–1843), and “The Purloined Letter” (1845). All three feature Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin, the French detective whose deductive intelligence provides the model for Conan Doyle's protagonist. But it is Doyle's creation of Sherlock Holmes that first gave detective fiction its enormous popular currency and began to make it such a resonant part of our cultural consciousness. Following, in one way or another, in his footsteps are writers such as Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Georges Simenon, Patricia Highsmith, Henning Mankell, and Stieg Larsson (to name a significant few) – with Larsson being the first writer to sell over a million copies of his books in Amazon's Kindle electronic bookstore. This type of sales figure, and the popularity (and often quality) of the various film and television spin-offs that have followed on the heels of the publication of such authors' books, signifies the massive cultural appetite for, and importance of, crime fiction (the larger generic category to which detective fiction belongs) in the Western world from the late nineteenth century to the present.

The question immediately raised is why crime fiction should have had such a massive impact and be so popular? And why, for instance, should we “enjoy” such best-selling novels as Thomas Harris' The Silence of the Lambs (1988), with its scenes that include Hannibal Lecter's savage removal of a policeman's face (he uses it to mask his own as he escapes imprisonment) and references to his cannibalism and shocking violence – his biting off (or so the implication is), for instance, of the tongue of a nurse who gets too close to him? In the punning relationship between Lecter's name and the French word for “reader” (lecteur), as well as in Lecter's own distinctive mix of refined sensitivity and predatory blood-letting, Harris may be suggesting that the line that divides the apparently “civilized” audience that consumes his books from its (normally firmly repressed) primal and savage instincts and tastes is thinner and more permeable than we think.

But there are other explanations available, too, for such readerly interest in crime and its often bloody and violently macabre manifestations – some of which complement the one just given, others quite different. Critic David Stewart (1997) writes about non-fiction crime writing in a much earlier period, examining the reportage of urban crime in mid-nineteenth-century America. But his focus on urban life and a rapidly expanding capitalist economy offers a helpful prompt for thinking about crime fiction too, and the nature of its appeal, both in the nineteenth century and later. Stewart sees the “relish” (681) with which the crime literature of that period was consumed in terms of an ambivalence about criminality and its relation to the dominant social order. The popular appeal of such writing, he suggest, lies in the way it “eroticized urban experience” (684) – that is, provided a necessary and thrilling release from the disciplinary procedures of capitalism, the “laws and behavioral practices” (689) sustaining an increasingly regimented social order. The “exhilaration” (688) associated with criminal danger and the darker underbelly of life in the city consequently stood as a direct and exciting contrast to a daily experience “that was, for the vast majority of city-dwellers, constraining, confining, and mind-numbingly dull” (684).

But Stewart also argues that crime writing engaged quite opposite emotions too, feeding on a popular fear of crime and the threat to the reader's own security contained in such “narratives of violation” (682). Thus, to modify one of his remarks, “[g]ore defacing [urban and textual] space [is] still gore, and potentially the reader's own.” Fears of “real urban danger” (697), then, inhabit these texts alongside the other emotions they trigger: the reader's desire for transgressive excitement balanced by her or his need for security and safety. In identifying such ambivalences, Stewart offers, perhaps, a larger lesson: that the appeal of (usually) violent crime – in both non-fiction and fiction – has a multitude of (sometimes common but often contradictory) causes. In the second part of this book, in which I offer a brief overview of the politics of crime fiction and of some of its main forms and key concerns, I extend this argument to indicate the wide range of reasons for the popularity of this type of fiction, and the complexity of their mix.

I return, though, to the violent and bloody episodes in Harris' novel and the pre-history to them implied in Stewart's essay. For Stewart also identifies in his ante-bellum subject matter another crucial, and related, tension – the way in which the qualities of rational control and logical explanation that crime reportage then, and (as I draw my own analogies) crime fiction now, associates with law-bringers – be they detectives or police – are undermined and contrasted with the descriptions of the spilling of blood, of sexual abuse, and of physical suffering that excessively inhabit many examples of such writing. He identifies a curious connective logic to this relationship as he looks at one particular newspaper story, “Horrible and Mysterious Murder in Broadway,” published in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper on August 2, 1856. Focusing on the detailed description of the corpse in this case, “the victim of bodily opening and exposure,” which extends right down to the exact measurements of the deep razor slashes made on it, Stewart asks:

What, if any, of the information [the descriptions of bodily disfiguration] is in fact evidence? ... And more disturbing: Why is it important to differentiate among drops, clots, and pools [of blood]? What is the depth of a razor slash evidence of? ... Prurient excess would seem to undermine the strict task of productive looking. More to the point, productive looking seems to lead all too irresistibly to prurient excess. (695)

How, then, are we to understand these – in Stewart's words – “nonproductive desires associated with violence” (694) and the attraction, but also the abhorrence, of readers to them? Why is so much textual time spent giving those excessively bloody details that are irrelevant to the scientific business of detection? Do such excesses again signify (for the reader) some psychological compensation for a “behavioural regime” (696) that restricts human behavior, in terms of day-to-day social practice, into its most productive channels?

There are no easy answers to these questions, and any explanation of the popularity of crime writing – and of crime fiction in particular – will be complicated, multi-faceted, and sometimes paradoxical, and will take in various types of historical, sociological, and psychological circumstance. My intention in this book is to indicate some of the elements responsible for such a popularity, but in the knowledge that there is no simple or straightforward key to be found. Stewart's focus on New York in the 1850s and the conditions and pressures of its everyday life is, though, suggestive in indicating the importance to crime writing both of the rise of the city and of the living and working conditions of those situated within a fast-modernizing Western capitalist system. This is not, however, to say that all such writing must be urban-based (for that is patently wrong) nor that a modernized Western economy is a necessary condition for its production. But it is to suggest that city life – its institutional structures, its economic life, and its policing – are vital factors in the development and importance of the genre.

Crime fiction writer Austin S. Camacho (2008) points out on the “Criminal Minds at Work” website (run by a group of crime novelists) that the present enormous popularity of the crime fiction genre is a relatively recent phenomenon: “Did you know,” he asks,

that crime novels account for somewhere between 20 and 25 percent of the fiction sold around the world? At least what's published in English. It makes you wonder why books about murder and other evils that men do are so popular.... The popularity of crime fiction is a fairly recent phenomenon. 20 or 30 years ago, you didn't see crime novels on the bestseller list. Today they regularly account for half of it. But what accounts for this love of mystery fiction?

We are reminded here that the appeal of popular fictional genres changes in response to particular historical circumstances. This is true both of novels and films, with – in that latter case – Hollywood centrally involved in such a process. Thus, the western, for example, was at the peak of its popularity from the late 1940s to the early 1960s – a period in which the belief that it had been white America's historical destiny to spread westward across the continent, with a continued mission (both home and abroad) to defend and protect liberty, family, and democracy against whatever outside threat might appear, still (mostly) retained its currency. In turn, horror fiction, and particularly film, saw a period of ascendancy in the 1970s and 1980s, a period when the promise of American society was undermined by a whole series of cultural and political tensions, and when the sanctity and importance of the family (taken for granted in the western), its patriarchal assumptions, and its role in maintaining the status quo were subject to searing critique. Clearly the relationship between social and political realities on a transnational (as well as purely North American) scale and the changing popularity of generic tastes in fiction and film is a complex business and, in considerable part, beyond the scope of this book. The present popularity of crime fiction cannot, however, be divorced from such factors.

If I were to start to identify some of the reasons for such an upsurge, I would point to a whole range of factors concerning our (as readers) contemporary sense of identity and social agency; our understanding of gender, both masculinity and femininity, and the roles we attribute to each; our fears and vulnerabilities as far as our physical bodies are concerned; our larger sense of the social networks that position us, and the relationship accordingly played out between individual autonomy and the power of the state; our attitudes to lawlessness and the law, and the relationships of both to the greater social compact and our awareness of the tensions and injustices that exist there; and our anxieties about the power of officialdom and its supervisory authority. What I basically suggest here is that crime fiction confronts the problems of the everyday world in which we live as directly as any form of writing can. It allows its readers – though sometimes indirectly and obliquely – to engage with their deepest social concerns, their most fundamental anxieties about themselves and their surrounding world. This engagement, though, can vary in intensity, and vary too in any explicit recognition by the reader of its presence.

At its most basic level, crime fiction works as a highly accessible fictional form and one that functions best in the grip it holds on its reader in terms of basic narrative structure. Who is the criminal and how will he or she get caught? Will the victim – where a living victim is involved – escape the criminal's clutches? How will the detective or police team solve the mystery established in the text? For many readers any further social or cultural resonance a text may have will remain below their conscious radar and unexplored – and none the worse for that. As a critic, however, my intention is to explore those further levels, (hopefully) to assist those who read this book to see something more of the cultural value and importance of the genre.

Part 2

The Politics, Main Forms, and Key Concerns of Crime Fiction

The Politics of Crime Fiction

The door was invented by the bourgeoisie to protect the individual; now it becomes a threat; one is advised never to turn the key....This is the totalitarian aspiration towards a transparent society: “My dear fellow,” says Holmes to Watson, “if we could fly out that great window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on...” (“Case of Identity”). Holmes exists because Peter Pan does not: it is not yet possible to fly through keyholes.

Franco Moretti, “Clues” (1983: 136)

There are many ways of approaching crime fiction. Here, I focus on an issue of central importance to the way crime fiction works and the cultural issues it engages. While I refer to a number of critics working in the field (and to the work of Franco Moretti in particular), my intention is not to weigh down my argument with too much theoretical matter, nor to give a comprehensive overview of the critical writing on this subject. I rather highlight ways of thinking about the politics of crime fiction that I have found useful, in the hope that this will start to open up the area in productive ways for others, too. I return in more detail to some of the topics raised in this chapter as the book continues.

Franco Moretti's chapter “Clues” in his book Signs Taken for Wonders (1983) provides a good starting point for thinking about crime fiction and its social and political implications. For one of the most productive ways of thinking about the genre is its relationship to the dominant social system: to the hierarchies, norms, and assumptions of the particular area, country, and historical period it represents, and to the power and authority of the state that ultimately upholds that system. To say this is immediately to recognize here a certain slippage. For, on the one hand I am referring to the internalization of a general set of social norms and values that condition day-to-day lives in any given culture: its generally accepted rights and wrongs, its patterns of social organization, and the relationships between the individual, the family, and the larger community. On the other, any allusion to the power of the state is a reminder of the coercive powers – the police, the secret service, the justice system, and law – used by a dominant ruling class to discipline the larger social group and to keep anti-social and/or anti-establishment tendencies in check. To recognize this move between accepted social norms and the machinery of the law, and the varying and often tricky nature of that relationship, is crucial to an understanding of all that now follows.

I see crime fiction as a genre that can be used for conservative ends, to protect and sustain the dominant social order, but that can also (often, paradoxically, at one and the same time) work in a more radical and challenging way. I agree with Catherine Nickerson (1997) that crime fiction is a genre that can release “explosive cultural material” (756); that it is:

deeply enmeshed with most of the thornier problems of the Victorian, modern, and postmodern eras, including gender roles and privileges, racial prejudice and the formation of racial consciousness, the significance and morality of wealth and capital, and the conflicting demands of privacy and social control.

I would, accordingly, echo her words – that the genre “represent[s] in a generally realistic style the most anxiety-producing issues and narratives of a culture” (744–745).

There may be tendency at this point to say, so what? Isn't this, after all, what we expect from any novel to a lesser or greater extent? This may be true, but what makes the crime fiction genre so distinctive is its direct relationship to the law, and to the fracturing of the social system that it supports and protects. The crucial business of detective fiction (specifically) consists of the solving of crime and the restoration of normality and the rule of law: so, accordingly, Dennis Porter argues that “[i]n a detective story...the law itself is never put on trial” (1981: 122). As I later show, this statement is not always true. But, where it is the case, how then does the form release its “explosive cultural materials,” and can such a release be any more than temporary and provisional before the final containment of the disruptive forces that have been released? There are no hard-and-fast answers to these questions, but it is in the putting and exploring of them that the fascination and the power of crime fiction can be most clearly seen.

Franco Moretti has been praised by John Sutherland (2006: n.p.) for

tak[ing] English studies by the scruff of the neck, refusing to observe the distinctions between high and low literature, between academic and common-reader approaches. He can talk (at machine-gun speed) about Sherlock Holmes and Joyce's Ulysses in the same breath.

I use Moretti's written, not his spoken, work here but one of the reasons I do so is because of that same (refreshing) breakdown of literary categories, one that is at the heart of my own critical enterprise too. This does not mean, however, that Moretti is particularly easy to read and understand. An Italian Marxist by origin, he looks to position crime fiction in its socio-political and historical context. And, in “Clues,” he focuses primarily on Sherlock Holmes to show how we can read this master detective as a defender of the status quo, “interested only in perpetuating the existing order” (140). “Detective fiction,” Moretti writes, “is a hymn to culture's coercive abilities” (143). As this last sentence indicates, his argument may focus on a particular type of crime fiction (he directly mentions Agatha Christie as well as Holmes) but claims a wider application. And he provides (to my mind) a good starting point from which we can move to consider the genre's more radical possibilities – its ideological tensions, its ability to challenge established conventions and norms and to ask questions about the larger condition of the society, its values and systems of authority.

Moretti calls Sherlock Holmes “the great doctor of the late Victorians, who convinces them that society is still a great organism: a unitary and knowable body.” Holmes' “science,” he continues, “is none other than the ideology of this organism” (145). The authoritative knowledge of this doctoring figure, then, comes about due to the “unproblematic” (144) nature of the relationship between [this] “science” and the larger social order – unproblematic (in Moretti's eyes) because of Holmes' total (“ideological”) commitment to that order and to the status quo. Holmes, then, is the controlling figure who, whatever his personal eccentricities, represents established values and can (relatively) easily and clearly solve any crime or “mystery” (145) he faces, because of its exceptional or aberrant quality – its existence as a highly visible sign of discord and disturbance in an otherwise settled and holistic social world.

The assumption underlying the detective stories featuring Holmes and Christie's Hercule Poirot – and, by extension, many other detective protagonists – is that the social body, representing the existing, and desired, good, is always the “innocent” victim (144) of the individual criminal act. And innocence and guilt here are measured, crucially, in terms of the contrast between stereotypical normality (all who live under the umbrella of the dominant value system) and individualism (the sign of danger and of difference, of the failure to conform). Thus, “[i]nnocence is conformity; individuality, guilt....Detective fiction...exists expressly to dispel the doubt that guilt might be impersonal, and therefore collective and social” (135).

Society, in such a view, is never guilty. “Because the crime is presented in the form of a mystery [and focusing on the interaction between the criminal and the victim], society is absolved from the start: the solution of the mystery proves its innocence” (145). The two quotes I have just used may sound puzzling, but this is a product of Moretti's rather epigrammatic style. In fact, what he is saying is quite simple: I explain, accordingly, as I go on. Social science has long seen the functioning of society as a complex business, with an “infinity of causal factors [conditioning] the occurrence of [any one] individual ‘event’” (sociologist Max Weber, qtd. in Moretti 1983: 144). Detective fiction, rather, “aims to keep the relationship between science and society unproblematic” (144), to reduce complexity to simplicity. The criminal and the crime he or she commits become, within the framework of genre, as Moretti portrays it, the only relevant cause of social upset. There is little interest in what may cause criminality, nor in the energies released in a fast-modernizing social world that might affect that world's (“organic”) unity and settled hierarchies – and that in reality make any type of full and proper social control problematic, even “impossible” (143). So, for instance:

Money is always the motive of crime in detective fiction, yet the genre is wholly silent about production: that unequal exchange between labour-power and wages which is the true source of social wealth....The indignation about what is rotten and immoral in the economy must concentrate on...phenomena [such as]...thefts, con-jobs, frauds, false pretences, and so on....As for the factory – it is innocent, and thus free to carry on. (139)

The rightness, justice, and value of the everyday social world – the world of stereotype, conformity, fitting-in, de-individualization – is taken for granted here. The possibility that there may exist exactly in that world a site for enquiry into warping injustice, and even forms of violence, is occluded by the genre's focus on the wholly exceptional individual act. So, Moretti asks us to think about Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair at Styles (published in 1921 but written in 1916), claiming that in the detective novel anything “repeatable and obvious” cannot, of its very nature, “be criminal” or worth investigating. So, accordingly, “Agatha Christie's first book is set at the same time as the massacres of the Great War, yet the only murder of interest occurs on the second floor of Styles Court” (135). Flaws and failures in the Western (capitalist) socio-political order are ignored, in other words, in favor of single individual acts that threaten the status quo and, most especially, the lives, money, and property of the privileged classes.

There is an obvious Marxist thrust to this analysis (the “innocent” factory), and also a Foucaultian one. (Fuller discussion of Foucault will wait until my chapter on “Vision, Supervision, and the City.”) All I need to say in terms of the latter here is that Moretti associates Sherlock Holmes, even despite his unofficial status, with the notion of the policing and the supervision of society (my emphasis). A major issue at stake is that of privacy – directly related to the already-mentioned subject of individualism. Liberal ideology believes in the right and benefit of a certain individual “‘freedom from’...the interference of society” (136). This assumption is challenged and reversed (so Moretti argues) in detective fiction, where the locked door – a favored traditional motif in the genre – no longer signifies that protective barrier behind which the citizen can exercise this freedom and his or her individual difference. Rather, the genre “treats every element of individual behavior that desires secrecy as an offence” (135–136). Such secrecy is seen as a threat to the controlling authority of the doctoring state and its representatives – an evasion of conformity and full social belonging (Moretti argues that Holmes' own individualism is suppressed in the service of his detective work). Such secrecy, too, is posited as the unwelcome opponent of society's need for transparency and the benefits of that supervisory authority that the detective represents. This is why, in the introductory quote to this chapter, Moretti alludes to Holmes as a Peter Pan figure, able to keep a controlling eye on the whole panorama of urban space and seemingly able even to peer into locked private rooms. This, too, is why he describes detective fiction as that hymn to a culture's “coercive abilities,” and the detective himself as “the figure of the state in the guise of ‘night watchman,’” whose limited role lies in “assuring respect for laws” (154–155).

I have spent some time on Moretti because he offers the type of sociological perspective on crime fiction rarely encountered elsewhere, and one that is powerful and provocative in its implications. Moretti also discusses the narrative structure of the type of detective fictions on which he focuses, seeing this structure as confirming the conservative nature of the form. I use Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair at Styles to provide my own textual example as prelude and bolster to Moretti's more abstract arguments. The murder of Mrs. Inglethorp, the crime that drives Christie's novel, occurs early on – in chapter three – of the novel. The rest of the book is dedicated to the investigation and solution of this mystery. In essence, then, the whole unfolding textual process focuses around, and takes us back to, this early narrative point as Poirot works out who committed this crime and why, and explores the time before, and leading up to, the murder to uncover the sequence of events that caused it. Ultimately, his detective work restores the social order as it existed before that crime occurred, with everything once more in its former proper place – though, of course, with victim and criminal now removed. In fact, not only does Poirot do this, he also manages to repair certain fissures previously affecting this “orderly and hierarchical world,” returning “the Inglethorp fortune to its rightful owners, [and]...restor[ing] conjugal happiness to the marriage of John and Mary Cavendish” (Malgrem 2010: 154–155).

There is, to put this another way, little interest in character development here. What we have instead – and this takes us back to my earlier point – is a world of stereotypes: a cast of “innocent” characters marked out as such by their social and cultural conformity. These stereotypes, for Moretti, only “come alive” (137), take on visibility and importance, when the crime that ruptures the smooth pattern of this social world is committed. The whole thrust of the detective novel, then, is “to restore an earlier state of things” (Freud, qtd. in Moretti: 137), to “[r]einstate a previous situation, return to the beginning” – in Christie's case to a relatively unchanging, privileged, and upper-class English country-house existence. The movement of the narrative of detection is regressive, “from crime to prelude” (Moretti 1983: 137). There is no growth to this story: “In detective fiction, as in law, history assumes importance only as violation and as such, must be ultimately repressed....[T]he ideal is for nothing to happen” (138–139).

Moretti's description of the way in which Doyle's and Christie's detective fiction supports and endorses the status quo, and how the backward-looking structure of the genre endorses this political and social vision, is generally convincing. It makes one of the strongest cases for the reactionary nature of the form, and stands as one pole in any exploration of the way the genre works. But Moretti ignores hard-boiled crime fiction in his essay. And, in the conventional critical view, it is here that the other pole to his way of seeing detective fiction is to be found – where anxieties about the existing social order are much more apparent, and where such anxieties are reflected, too, in its different narrative structure. I show how this argument works before then suggesting that, if the opposition constructed here between two types of crime writing – one at the conservative end of the spectrum, the other challenging the social status quo – contains a general truth, we should be wary of simplification, of falling into an overly reductive way of thinking. To categorize in this way does not do full justice to what is a much more complicated and diverse generic panorama.

I return at this point to Nickerson's comment on the genre's ability to express “explosive cultural material.” Holmes may be seen as protecting the health of the Victorian social organism, reinforcing its conventional patterns and practices through his detective work. But, by the 1920s, and in the United States, his role as a “consulting detective” (Doyle 1981a: 23), working out of intellectual interest rather than material need, had been replaced by that of the professional private eye or detective, working to make a living: in the case of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, “twenty-five dollars a day and expenses” (Chandler 1979: 94). And the detective's relation to the dominant social order had taken a different turn: serving as an individual example of (by and large) honesty and integrity in a modernized urban world generally associated with greed, chicanery, and political corruption. The notion of the social system as a healthy organism was by now, and in this modern American environment, nothing but a bad joke. The crime novel became, instead, a tool to dissect society's flaws and failures, and to expose the wrong turns that a capitalist economy, and the political structures to which it was allied, had taken. The strained relationship between the protagonist and his surrounding social world took on a highly critical – and sometimes radical – edge here, as “the significance and morality of wealth and capital” was held up for serious, and usually damning, review.

I illustrate my meaning here through a reading of Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest (1929), a novel that set the benchmark for such hard-boiled crime fiction. I am aware of the mismatch in setting my earlier summary of a particular critical approach against a text-based analysis. But I see this as the best way to make an argument that persists, in a variety of ways, throughout this book. The tone of Red Harvest is set by the laconic and cynical wit of its narrator, whose only identity, the Continental Op, is determined, significantly, by his professional role as an employee of the Continental Detective Agency. Entering the city of Personville (or Poisonville, as it has come to be known), the Op describes what he sees:

an ugly city of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining. Spread over this was a grimy sky that looked as if it had come out of the smelters' stacks.

The first policeman I saw needed a shave. The second had a couple of buttons off his shabby uniform. The third stood...directing traffic, with a cigar in one corner of his mouth. After that I stopped checking them up. (9)

Physical description quickly takes on a metaphorical cast here, as the urban landscape and its industry are associated with pollution, a spreading stain affecting every feature of the natural environment that frames it. And the swift move from the city to its law enforcers and their casual and slapdash turnout and behavior immediately prepares us for a civic world in which things are very much awry. The fact that the narrator is a stranger to the town where he is now to be employed, and describes it from that perspective, implies the absence of any strong commitment to its norms and values on his part, and suggests, instead, a certain self-protective wariness of the world he is about to enter.

The first thing that happens to the Op in Personville is that Donald Willsson, the liberal and reformist local newspaper publisher who has paid for his services (but whom he has not yet met) is murdered. The Op quickly finds out that Personville is a city riddled with corruption, violence, and criminality. This situation had its original cause in a labor dispute between the local miners, supported by the IWW (International Workers of the World) and Elihu Willsson, Donald's father, “the man who had owned Personville, heart, soul, skin and guts...president of...the Personville Mining Corporation, ditto of the First National Bank, owner of the... city's only newspapers” (13). Political, industrial, and financial power and a press monopoly are, then, figured in this one man. In order to break the resulting strike, Elihu had “hired gunman, strike-breakers, national guardsmen and even parts of the regular army.” But, in defeating the miners and the “wobblies” (the slang name for the radical IWW) supporting them, Elihu “lost his hold on the city and the state. To beat the miners he had to let his hired thugs run wild. When the fight was over he couldn't get rid of them....[T]hey took [Personville] over” (14). Donald had been unwittingly set up by his father to start a reform campaign in the town, and thus potentially to drive out its power-sharing criminal element. With his death, the Op takes up Elihu's challenge to “clean this pig-sty of a Poisonville for me, to smoke out the rats,” but on his own less melodramatic terms: “If you've got a fairly honest piece of work to be done in my line, and you want to pay a decent price, maybe I'll take it on....But I'm not playing politics for you....[Y]ou're going to get a complete job or nothing” (38, 40).

There are already a number of things to be said here. Hammett gives us an exaggerated parable of the U. S. industrial and political complex (as he saw it) in the representation of Personville. Everyday normality and social life is conspicuous by its absence as he focuses almost solely on issues of politics, power, and criminality. The hostility of capitalism to labor is endorsed by the larger state apparatus – Elihu's use of the national guard and army to break the strike. The final impotence of labor against such institutional odds, and in the violence of the conflict that occurs, is accordingly pretty much inevitable, whatever the justice of its case and strength of its campaign: “When the last skull had been cracked...organized labor in Personville was a used firecracker” (14). Elihu's reliance (in part) on state power, as well as the knowledge that he “owned a United States senator, a couple of representatives, the governor, the mayor, and most of the state legislature” (13), make it clear that the civic issues Hammett engages extend well beyond Personville's city limits.

The view of “the kind of capitalist state personified by Elihu Willsson's Personville/Poisonville” (Pepper 2010a: 145), then, is a bleak one. Willsson is the untrustworthy father figure (for the personal, when it does briefly appear, endorses the political), one who wishes once more to have complete authority as “Czar” (15) over his city, as well as over the son he uses “for his monkey” (14). Labor and the rights of common working men have been rendered irrelevant in this America, where they are judged merely a hindrance to the larger operations of the economic and institutional system. As the Op enters the scene and begins “stirring things up” (70), we are shown a city in which the police are open to bribery (“Buy us a get-away, Jerry....A uniformed copper held the back gate open,” 48) and where the police chief, Noonan, is hand in glove with gangsters involved in a variety of illicit activities – Pete the Finn (illegal liquor), Max Thaler (gambling), and Lew Yard (stolen goods). And these are the three men who, alongside Willsson and Noonan, both run the town and “own the courts” (95). As Noonan tells the Op, explaining the nature of the resulting alliances, “I got to play with them that play with me. See what I mean?” (81).

In this poisonous atmosphere, the Op himself – as he looks to open the town up “from Adam's apple to ankles” (55) as a way of cleaning it up – is himself metaphorically “poisoned” (123). Playing a game of deceit and double-cross, he gets caught up in the mayhem around him, becomes party to the killings involved, and even finds himself “getting a rear out of planning deaths” (123), going “blood simple like the natives” (121). He is also implicated in the death of Dinah Brand, the one person for whom he has a genuine emotional attachment. Indeed, initially, he fears that it is he himself who has buried the “six-inch needle-sharp blade” of the ice-pick she owns (128) in her breast. Hammett is representing a world here in which decent intent, and the actions that follow from it, are swiftly and inevitably compromised. He also shows that – in a situation where the normal checks and balances (the press, labor organizations) have failed, and where law is bought and sold (attorney-at-law, Charles Proctor Dawn, is “the guy that the joke was wrote about: ‘Is he a criminal lawyer?’ ‘Yes, very,’” 144) – it is only the Op's pragmatic individualism, however morally suspect it then becomes, that can have any effect in addressing the general corruption. The irony is, of course – and here we come to the rub of so much crime fiction – that all the Op can finally do is to restore the previous, and highly unsatisfactory, status quo as the national guard are once more called in, and the Op finally gives Personville back into Elihu Willsson's hands, “all nice and clean and ready to go to the dogs again” (157). But Willsson himself is implicated in the general criminality – the material his son had obtained just before his death “would have put his old man in jail with the rest of them” (35). He has, too, it seems, both initially obtained and held on to his autocratic power in this town by similar illegal and/or immoral methods. When the Op calls him an “old pirate,” he replies, “Son, if I hadn't been a pirate I'd still be working for the Anaconda [the Anaconda Copper Mining Company] for wages, and there'd be no Personville Mining Corporation” (119).

What we then see in Hammett's brilliant novel is a clear illustration of the deep anxieties about capitalism and political and economic power, and their relation to corruption and violent criminality, in late 1920s America. And, if the Continental Op finds his own sense of moral integrity highly compromised in his attempt to bring some kind of order to the “damned burg” (121) in which he works, that does not affect his distaste for both its original, and its final, governance. Nor does it affect his final re-establishment of his day-to-day professional role at a clear remove from the extreme actions and personal compromises to which it has led him in this particular case. Andrew Pepper, one of the most perceptive critics of Hammett's work, sees the writer's “dark vision” here as anticipating such writers as Chester Himes and James Ellroy, and suggests two possible readings of the book's final message:

[I]nsofar as [Hammett's] own politics would take a more radical turn in the decade following the publication of Red Harvest, it might be possible to read the anger that lies behind the Op's rhetoric [at the end of the novel] not simply as an expression of nihilistic despair but also as a spur to action on the part of his readers. That said, given the expanded nature and reach of state power in the novel, one could just as well see and read [it] as a harbinger of the kind of even more repressive constellations of political and economic power characteristic of the post-Second World War era.

(Pepper 2010b: 349)

We see here, then, a gap between the role of the individual detective and his values and the socio-political status quo that is very different to the complementary relationship Moretti establishes in Doyle's and Christie's case. Moreover, here, and in hard-boiled detective fiction generally, we see a very different formal structure employed. The classical detective story, as previously discussed, is backward-looking, with the detective engaged in solving a crime (usually) committed either before or soon after the chronological start of the text – and with much of its focus on his or her analytic skills in recovering and recreating the backstory of that crime and the motives of the criminal(s) involved. Knight refers to it aptly as “the death-detection-explanation model” (2004: 136). The hard-boiled crime novel is progressive rather than regressive, tracing an ongoing chain of violent criminal action, the way it proliferates, and its relationship to a contaminated larger social body, rather than foregrounding the exceptional and relatively discrete nature of the (often) single criminal act as in the classical case. To some degree at least, then, and certainly in Hammett's case, the way the hard-boiled works reflects its different political positioning. There is much more emphasis, too, on the detective protagonist's involvement in the ongoing and violent action at the text's center, rather than on his ability to stand separately, at one analytic remove from that world. I will return to this in my next chapter.

Hammett's novel, though, can tell us more about how the formal differences between the two types of detective fiction work. In Red Harvest, the initial case, the murder of Donald Willsson, is in fact relatively swiftly solved – as a crime of passion. Albury, an assistant cashier at the First National Bank, has misunderstood the nature of the check Willsson has taken to Dinah Brand (whom Albury himself is “cuckoo over,” 51) as a sign of romantic involvement between the two, in accordance with Dinah's reputation as a “strictly pay-as-you-enter” (28) woman. In fact, the money is a pay-off for information given on the criminal corruption in the town. But, by the time this one case is solved and the murderer revealed, we have started to move on to that latter and larger intrigue, with the Op already hired by Elihu for his clean-up job. And it is as he acts to fulfill this contract that he gets caught up in the city's violence and deceit, foments and manipulates more of it for his own final ends (to cleanse the town), and causes the body count to escalate accordingly. The Op is right in the middle of the action here, making sense of what happens as best he can – and at times losing the ability to do so – on a pragmatic moment-by-moment basis. The brevity of Hammett's action-packed chapters entirely suit this process (and would provide a highly influential model for future crime fictions).

As I have said, the one person with whom the Op has a personal relationship of any intimacy, Dinah Brand, is caught up in the chain of violence he instigates and is herself murdered. Chapter twenty-one, in which her death occurs, is titled “The Seventeenth Murder,” reducing her to just another statistic as the town is “bust[ed]...open” (118). And more deaths are to follow. This sense of rapidly developing, and often confusing, ongoing action, and the denial of the reflective calm and lack of personal involvement so common in its classical form, make up a large part of hard-boiled crime fiction's distinctive difference.

We can then arrive at some general conclusions. Hard-boiled crime fiction is more likely to release “explosive cultural materials” – those that raise direct and challenging questions about the values of the dominant social order and our status both as individuals and community members within it – than its classical equivalent. The very forms of the two types of fiction, what is more, facilitate these different effects. This general political difference between the classical and hard-boiled variants of detective fiction stands as a foundation point for much of the discussion that follows, and mirrors the basic chronological development of the genre. In the remainder of this chapter, though, I add a series of necessary qualifications to the rather black-and-white reading of the genre, and the concentration on – and separation of – its two main variants I have thus far given, even as I remain committed to the general truth above.

The first thing to say here is that simply to oppose the politics of classical and hard-boiled detective fiction in the way I have so far done is far too simple. We have learned in a post-structuralist age to distrust stark oppositions – binary readings of the world – and crime fiction is no exception to this rule. Hard-and-fast rules about the politics of crime fiction are extremely difficult to make. Texts following a hard-boiled model may, as I have argued, have more obvious potential for radical social commentary than those in the classical tradition. But, as Lee Horsley comments, and writing about all forms of the crime novel:

The genre itself is neither inherently conservative nor radical: rather, it is a form that can be co-opted for a variety of purposes. There has always been within it a capacity for socio-political comment, and using it in this way is facilitated by the very nature of crime fiction....[T]he genre itself contains characteristics that lend themselves to political and oppositional purposes. (2005: 158–159)

I agree with this, even as I distinguish between the different political potential of the classical and hard-boiled forms.

It is at this point that I recall Pepper's comments on the ending of Red Harvest and the two possible responses to it: that it might act as a spur to individual political action to oppose political and economic corruption; or that it might simply serve to confirm the way things are – the repressive nature of state power in the modern age, and our general inability to do much about it. In other words, while there is much about the novel we can read as “oppositional,” there is nonetheless a counter-movement that is more accommodating to the status quo. This contradiction is a repeated characteristic of crime fiction novels of all types. So even here – in a novel written by a writer with known left-wing sympathies and that depicts a particularly morally and politically dysfunctional urban reality – the detective ends up restoring the prior social order more or less as it existed before the crimes that he investigates were committed, with only a very qualified possibility for social change (dependant, if we follow Pepper, on the political response of the individual reader). Classical and hard-boiled crime fiction, then, share a final underlying formal similarity. While differences may exist in terms of the explicit recognition on the part of any one or other writer of the problematic nature of the social reality he or she depicts, and in her or his commitment to (or disaffiliation from) the existing socio-political order, this generally has little influence on the final narrative results, as the status quo, however unsatisfactory, is restored. Criminal and anti-social activity occurs only (normally) for the immediate problem(s) to be resolved, with little or nothing having been done to alter the dominant social reality and whatever the faults there evident. This pattern is present in almost all variants of the crime fiction genre and tends consequently to mute some of the political differences between them.

Indeed, simply to contrast a hard-boiled crime writing (generally American) that challenges the existing social order with a classical detective tradition (generally British) whose conservative politics finds a mirror in the formal strategies it uses is, again, too reductive. Hard-boiled American fiction can certainly work to conservative ends, as any number of examples illustrate (Ed McBain and Joseph Wambaugh jump to mind). Similarly, it is difficult to imagine any type of detective novel – classical or hard-boiled, American or British – that does not explore the cultural anxieties of its time and place, and in a way that challenges (though to varying degrees) the existing social order. So, Doyle's Sherlock Holmes is not just the figure Moretti makes him, totally committed to the ideologies and social structures of his Victorian period, but also himself contains “almost uncontainable contradictions” and self-divisions (Horsley 2005: 31) that reflect back accordingly, and in a critical way, on the society in which he lives. And, in twinning him with his arch-enemy Moriarty and in giving both men similar characteristics, Doyle anticipates other such doublings across the crime fiction spectrum (as that of Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter in Thomas Harris' 1981 novel, Red Dragon) that undermine the clarity of the boundaries between a social virus and its doctoring vaccine.

That nostalgically conservative glow, too, that is so often associated with Agatha Christie's fiction is not without its complications: that glow is unsettled, at least in part, in its gentle challenge (in the Miss Marple stories) to fixed and conventional gender roles; unsettled, too, in “the...frisson of anxiety” that comes from

the deadly potential embedded in even the most mundane domestic situation. Parents, children, spouses all prove to be lethal family members, while apparent bastions of society – doctors, politicians, wealthy manufacturers...– could also be dangerous. Christie's texts assume that anyone can be a murderer, no one is exempt, no one totally to be trusted.

(Makinen 2010: 417)