Murder Most Fair: The Appeal of Mystery Fiction by Michael Cohen (review)

Abstract

928 Reviews imagined, is underpinned by a thoughtful and interesting account of Wilfred Bion's psychoanalytic work on the caesura, on the spatial and the formal properties of poetic language. Armstrong's project is important and resonates interestingly with a series of recent writings from within feminism and parts of the late twentieth-century Left. Her ambition and her theoretical breadth both make this a challenging book, but the integrity of her central argument makes it both compelling and persuasive. Queen Mary, University of London Morag Shiach Murder Most Fair: The Appeal of Mystery Fiction. By Michael Cohen. Cranbury , NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2000. 207 pp. ?35.00. 'Mystery fiction' is a term used to denote the genre of detective and crime fiction considered as separable from what Michael Cohen in Murder Most Fair: The Appeal of Mystery Fiction calls 'mainstream literature'. The boundaries of mystery fiction are both conventionally assumed and frequently contested. For example, nineteenthcentury sensation novelists such as Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, and notably in modern times Umberto Eco, have all made so-called 'literary' excursions into the genre. Indeed, Cohen traces the key features of the two main detective strands, which he calls the 'classical' and the 'hardboiled', back to William Godwin's Caleb Williams of 1794. It is one of the distinctive arguments of Murder Most Fair that literary conventions and, by extension, the borders of mystery fiction are always open to challenge. Cohen disputes the linear model ofliteraryhistory.Literary conventions, he points out, are not objects of belief. They are shared assumptions that are questioned from the very beginning of the form. Such challenges are intrinsic to the aesthetic structure. Murder Most Fair is an aesthetic analysis of mystery (here detective fiction). In focusing on aesthetics and 'appeal', Cohen is able to isolate his subject from other critical models such as form as ideology, or the insights of psychoanalysis, deconstruction , and gender studies?although a substantial appendix provides a useful survey of mystery criticism taking note of these approaches. To explore the 'appeal', the book is divided into three sections: on conventions, forms, and origins; on what Cohen identifies as five key narrative strategies; and thirdly,on the relation to mainstream literature. The first chapter centres upon a reading of Caleb Williams in order to examine the dimensions of the two key strands. The hardboiled and the classical forms have both evolved to deal with differentepistemological crises. For hardboiled detection, the danger is that money and power will overcome truth. Therefore the hardboiled detective emerges as a loner whose solutions attempt to keep the horrors of this world under control. By contrast, the classical view is one in which people are mostly lawabiding and the world is interpretable: clues will prove to be signifiers pointing to underlying truths. The classical detective is an attempt to counter an even deeper pessimism than that secreted in the hardboiled, that the world may not be knowable or fathomable. Cohen's five narrative strategies of appeal consist of: the rescue of innocence; the ways detectives and readers are enabled to identify with the murderer; combining realism with fantasy; the role of the 'other', particularly as racism and xenophobia; and the way mysteries externalize processes of inference. The third chapter develops the argument ofthe first,that mysteryconventions are not ideologicalbut aesthetic? thus enabling more complex and literary interventions in the genre from the start. Concluding with a detailed analysis of The Name of the Rose, Cohen contests Eco's Murder Most Fair: The Appeal of Mystery Fiction. By Michael Cohen. Cranbury , NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2000. 207 pp. ?35.00. 'Mystery fiction' is a term used to denote the genre of detective and crime fiction considered as separable from what Michael Cohen in Murder Most Fair: The Appeal of Mystery Fiction calls 'mainstream literature'. The boundaries of mystery fiction are both conventionally assumed and frequently contested. For example, nineteenthcentury sensation novelists such as Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, and notably in modern times Umberto Eco, have all made so-called 'literary' excursions into the genre. Indeed, Cohen traces the key features of the two main detective strands, which...