Crime in postmodernist fiction

Abstract

“The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter, eh?” Sam Spade remarks in The Maltese Falcon . “Gaudy” describes something excessively garish or showy, and “gaudier,” of course, even more so; although “patter” connotes the smooth, practiced speech used by hucksters to attract customers or by magicians to distract audiences, its primary meaning, according to the Oxford English Dictionary , is “thieves' lingo.” This word choice suggests that Spade - a modernist private eye attuned to social facades - thinks of being a crook as a performance, even a crudely exaggerated one. For postmodernist novelists, too, crime is largely a matter of appearances. Indeed, the generic elements linked to solving the mystery in a detective story - observing ambiguous signs and constructing a possible narrative from them - characterize postmodernist fiction in general. Some novels emphasize these hermeneutic and epistemological aspects so markedly that they have been labeled “anti-detective fiction,” “postmodern mysteries,” “deconstructive mysteries,” or “metaphysical detective stories.” Investigation is so overdetermined, one might say, that in some instances - like William Hjortsberg's novel Falling Angel or Christopher Nolan's film Memento - the private eye himself turns out to be the criminal he pursues.