REFLECTION OF 19TH CENTURY VICTORIAN AGE THROUGH SIR CONAN DOYLE’S LITERARY PROLIFICACY - A LEGEND WAS BORN

Introduction Crime fiction is one of the world’s most popular genres. Indeed, it has been estimated that as many as one in every three new novels, published in English, is classified within the crime fiction category (Knight xi). These new entrants to the market are forced to jostle for space on bookstore and library shelves with reprints of classic crime novels; such works placed in, often fierce, competition against their contemporaries as well as many of their predecessors. Raymond Chandler, in his well-known essay The Simple Art of Murder, noted Ernest Hemingway’s observation that “the good writer competes only with the dead. The good detective story writer […] competes not only with all the unburied dead but with all the hosts of the living as well” (3). In fact, there are so many examples of crime fiction works that, as early as the 1920s, one of the original ‘Queens of Crime’, Dorothy L. Sayers, complained: It is impossible to keep track of all the detective-stories produced to-day [sic]. Book upon book, magazine upon magazine pour out from the Press, crammed with murders, thefts, arsons, frauds, conspiracies, problems, puzzles, mysteries, thrills, maniacs, crooks, poisoners, forgers, garrotters, police, spies, secret-service men, detectives, until it seems that half the world must be engaged in setting riddles for the other half to solve (95). Twenty years after Sayers wrote on the matter of the vast quantities of crime fiction available, W.H. Auden wrote one of the more famous essays on the genre: The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict. Auden is, perhaps, better known as a poet but his connection to the crime fiction genre is undisputed. As well as his poetic works that reference crime fiction and commentaries on crime fiction, one of Auden’s fellow poets, Cecil Day-Lewis, wrote a series of crime fiction novels under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake: the central protagonist of these novels, Nigel Strangeways, was modelled upon Auden (Scaggs 27). Interestingly, some writers whose names are now synonymous with the genre, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Raymond Chandler, established the link between poetry and crime fiction many years before the publication of The Guilty Vicarage. Edmund Wilson suggested that “reading detective stories is simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between crossword puzzles and smoking” (395). In the first line of The Guilty Vicarage, Auden supports Wilson’s claim and confesses that: “For me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol” (406). This indicates that the genre is at best a trivial pursuit, at worst a pursuit that is bad for your health and is, increasingly, socially unacceptable, while Auden’s ideas around taste—high and low—are made clear when he declares that “detective stories have nothing to do with works of art” (406). The debates that surround genre and taste are many and varied. The mid-1920s was a point in time which had witnessed crime fiction writers produce some of the finest examples of fiction to ever be published and when readers and publishers were watching, with anticipation, as a new generation of crime fiction writers were readying themselves to enter what would become known as the genre’s Golden Age. At this time, R. Austin Freeman wrote that: By the critic and the professedly literary person the detective story is apt to be dismissed contemptuously as outside the pale of literature, to be conceived of as a type of work produced by half-educated and wholly incompetent writers for consumption by office boys, factory girls, and other persons devoid of culture and literary taste (7). This article responds to Auden’s essay and explores how crime fiction appeals to many different tastes: tastes that are acquired, change over time, are embraced, or kept as guilty secrets. In addition, this article will challenge Auden’s very narrow definition of crime fiction and suggest how Auden’s religious imagery, deployed to explain why many people choose to read crime fiction, can be incorporated into a broader popular discourse on punishment. This latter argument demonstrates that a taste for crime fiction and a taste for justice are inextricably intertwined. Crime Fiction: A Type For Every Taste Cathy Cole has observed that “crime novels are housed in their own section in many bookshops, separated from literary novels much as you’d keep a child with measles away from the rest of the class” (116). Times have changed. So too, have our tastes. Crime fiction, once sequestered in corners, now demands vast tracts of prime real estate in bookstores allowing readers to “make their way to the appropriate shelves, and begin to browse […] sorting through a wide variety of very different types of novels” (Malmgren 115). This is a result of the sheer size of the genre, noted above, as well as the genre’s expanding scope. Indeed, those who worked to re-invent crime fiction in the 1800s could not have envisaged the “taxonomic exuberance” (Derrida 206) of the writers who have defined crime fiction sub-genres, as well as how readers would respond by not only wanting to read crime fiction but also wanting to read many different types of crime fiction tailored to their particular tastes. To understand the demand for this diversity, it is important to reflect upon some of the appeal factors of crime fiction for readers. Many rules have been promulgated for the writers of crime fiction to follow. Ronald Knox produced a set of 10 rules in 1928. These included Rule 3 “Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable”, and Rule 10 “Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them” (194–6). In the same year, S.S. Van Dine produced another list of 20 rules, which included Rule 3 “There must be no love interest: The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar”, and Rule 7 “There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better” (189–93). Some of these directives have been deliberately ignored or have become out-of-date over time while others continue to be followed in contemporary crime writing practice. In sharp contrast, there are no rules for reading this genre. Individuals are, generally, free to choose what, where, when, why, and how they read crime fiction. There are, however, different appeal factors for readers. The most common of these appeal factors, often described as doorways, are story, setting, character, and language. As the following passage explains: The story doorway beckons those who enjoy reading to find out what happens next. The setting doorway opens widest for readers who enjoy being immersed in an evocation of place or time. The doorway of character is for readers who enjoy looking at the world through others’ eyes. Readers who most appreciate skilful writing enter through the doorway of language (Wyatt online). These doorways draw readers to the crime fiction genre. There are stories that allow us to easily predict what will come next or make us hold our breath until the very last page, the books that we will cheerfully lend to a family member or a friend and those that we keep close to hand to re-read again and again. There are settings as diverse as country manors, exotic locations, and familiar city streets, places we have been and others that we might want to explore. There are characters such as the accidental sleuth, the hardboiled detective, and the refined police officer, amongst many others, the men and women—complete with idiosyncrasies and flaws—who we have grown to admire and trust. There is also the language that all writers, regardless of genre, depend upon to tell their tales. In crime fiction, even the most basic task of describing where the murder victim was found can range from words that convey the genteel—“The room of the tragedy” (Christie 62)—to the absurd: “There it was, jammed between a pallet load of best export boneless beef and half a tonne of spring lamb” (Maloney 1). These appeal factors indicate why readers might choose crime fiction over another genre, or choose one type of crime fiction over another. Yet such factors fail to explain what crime fiction is or adequately answer why the genre is devoured in such vast quantities. Firstly, crime fiction stories are those in which there is the committing of a crime, or at least the suspicion of a crime (Cole), and the story that unfolds revolves around the efforts of an amateur or professional detective to solve that crime (Scaggs). Secondly, crime fiction offers the reassurance of resolution, a guarantee that from “previous experience and from certain cultural conventions associated with this genre that ultimately the mystery will be fully explained” (Zunshine 122). For Auden, the definition of the crime novel was quite specific, and he argued that referring to the genre by “the vulgar definition, ‘a Whodunit’ is correct” (407). Auden went on to offer a basic formula stating that: “a murder occurs; many are suspected; all but one suspect, who is the murderer, are eliminated; the murderer is arrested or dies” (407). The idea of a formula is certainly a useful one, particularly when production demands—in terms of both quality and quantity—are so high, because the formula facilitates creators in the “rapid and efficient production of new works” (Cawelti 9). For contemporary crime fiction readers, the doorways to reading, discussed briefly above, have been cast wide open. Stories relying upon the basic crime fiction formula as a foundation can be gothic tales, clue puzzles, forensic procedurals, spy thrillers, hardboiled narratives, or violent crime narratives, amongst many others. The settings can be quiet villages or busy metropolises, landscapes that readers actually inhabit or that provide a form

streets were dark with something more than night. (Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder 13) Black narrative writing in America often employs a detective-like protagonist struggling against an evil society - as Theodore O. Mason, Jr., points out (182) - yet, curiously, detective fiction itself is a genre that has attracted few writers (most notably, in decades past, Rudolph Fisher and Chester Himes). In Mosley's four L.A. detective novels, he joins small cohort of detective fiction writers, apparently as part of a radical project to enter mostly white, male, and conservative populist terrain of American detective fiction. At same time, however, Mosley's often uncritical use of traditional hard-boiled detective formula seems to work against this project by employing a detective narrator in a previously invisible textual location - Los Angeles. Indeed, there is a tension between Mosley's subject and his method, and this tension prompts my basic question about Mosley's L.A. novels: Are they - with use of a narrator, characters, and locations - authentically transgressive texts, or are they discursively subsumed under detective story formula (and especially L.A. detective fiction paradigm, as constructed by Chandler) and do they come, thus, to represent at best nostalgic traces of hardboiled tradition? In other words, are novels merely exotic versions of American detective story, as opposed to subversive texts? My answer to these questions is an Ellisonian yes and no. In terms of use of characters and locations - and also in terms of generic violations of hardboiled detective story - Mosley's novels indeed function as texts of difference. Yet when they deploy Chandlerian hardboiled detective and ultimately embrace essentially conservative thematics of L.A. detective story, Mosley's novels mute subversiveness and reinforce reassuring quality of formulaic detective fiction. In this light, I will read Mosley's novels as metacritical allegories that reflect a fundamental ambivalence about his own intervention into white (detective) discourse. Two recent essays on detective fiction decisively argue in favor of a discursive difference in texts like Mosley's L.A. novels. In Chandler Comes to Harlem: Racial Politics in Thrillers of Chester Himes, Peter J. Rabinowitz argues that Himes could not just imitate hardboiled novels and, as Himes claims, simply make the face black in his detective novels. Instead, Rabinowitz insists, Chandlerian notion of a self-contained integrity and noir heroism is unavailable to Himes's detectives inasmuch as their situation . . . is inextricably tied up in racial politics (22).(1) In another essay, Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins: Detective and Afro-American Fiction, Theodore O. Mason, Jr., similarly argues that, despite his use of detective genre, Mosley breaks with traditional white detective story through oppositional use of subject matter. Even more, Mason contends that Easy Rawlins discovers inadequacy of assumed cultural knowledge - especially about race and sexuality - in construction of self in a racist and sexist society, and thus joins other protagonists (like Milkman in Morrison's Song of Solomon and Papa LaBas in Reed's Mumbo Jumbo) who similarly recognize constructed nature of identity in a racist society. Although Rabinowitz and Mason offer strong arguments in favor of a transgressive detective fiction, both ultimately tell only part of story, for they ignore way in which story and detective in Himes's and Mosley's novels reflect traditional hardboiled detective fiction. Despite Mosley's counter-discursive deployment of a protagonist, his L.A. detective novels reinforce conservative values of traditional American detective fiction. While (as in Chandler) Mosley's Rawlins moves through a world in which white politicians, businessmen, and cops - as well as community leaders - are all corrupt, his novels never put the law itself . …

NE of the few unsolved mysteries in the Yale Catalogue of ~aJ Gertrude Stein's writings concerns the existence of an item possibly written in I933 and titled Story. Whether the piece actually exists as more than a title is in doubt. What is not in doubt is that Stein spent much of her life thinking about writing just such a story and reading detective written by others. In Everybody's Autobiography, Stein declares that detective are the only puzzles that interest her, explaining that her concern really lies in somebody being dead and how it moves along.1 are what I can read, she grandly announced, and read them she did, often several in a week.2 Stein even bemoaned their scarcity, noting that you want to read one a day well not one a day but one every other day, say three a week and if you are willing to read over and over a lot of them even then there are not enough to go around. . . Whether or not Stein ever wrote Story, she did write a short play, Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters, a curious 8o-page short novel, Blood On the Dining-Room Floor, an impenetrable thirty-page piece enigmatically titled Subject Cases: The Background of a Detective Story, and several other short works with detective themes or subjects. Her thoughts about detective fiction or crime stories appear in each of her explanatory works, and Everybody's Autobiography and The Geographical History of America seem almost obsessively concerned with detective stories. Stein scholars have acknowledged this interest of hers, but have

The Simple Art of Murder Criticism Christopher T. Raczkowski (bio) Christopher Breu. Hard-Boiled Masculinities. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005. 245 pp. Lee Horsley. Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction. New York: Oxford UP, 2005. xii + 313 pp. Charles J. Rzepka. Detective Fiction. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. 273 pp. Lee Horsley's Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction begins with a characteristically trenchant epigraph from Raymond Chandler on the subject of detective genre fiction and its criticism. "The academicians have never got their dead hands on it. It is still fluid, still too various for easy classification, still putting out shoots in all directions" (1). Identifying the problems and dangers of genre criticism (and striking an uncannily poststructuralist note while doing so), Chandler frets about the procrustean effects of institutionalized criticism on a genre that he describes as a rhizomatic "putting out [of] shoots." And yet, if the academicians had failed to get their dead hands on it by the midcentury when Chandler made this observation, it was not for lack of trying. In his landmark 1946 anthology, The Art of the Mystery Story, Howard Haycraft documents how the new criticism of English departments in the interwar period had already produced a large body of critical writing on detective and mystery fiction.1 [End Page 876] Surveying this criticism at the midcentury, Haycraft observed four main categories of academic criticism: "the-viewers-with-alarm" who perceive the genre as a type of low cultural threat to the taste and morals of the nation; "the-seekers-after-truth," who are "primarily concerned with the still unanswered 'why?' of crime fiction"; "the fundamentalists" who "would restrict the form forever to the narrow confines of 'pure' detective story"; and "the non-fencers-in" whose interest in the genre is premised upon its "unlimited room" for variation and hybridity (541). Although a general move toward historicism is everywhere detectable in the scholarship of the last decades, the three new studies under review here attest to the shrewdness of Howard Haycraft's metacritical overview. His classifications remain relevant because they identify fundamental tensions and questions that must animate any criticism that takes a genuinely—perhaps, disconcertingly—popular genre literature as its object: what is genre and why is it popular? Of these three new studies, Horsley's Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction is by design the most comprehensive, analyzing over forty-seven wide ranging Anglo-American novels and short stories. (Indeed, it is the most comprehensive study of this literature that I am aware of.) Horsley's close readings of many of these fictions are complemented by discussions of major trends in crime fiction criticism from 1920s Black Mask editor Joseph Shaw, G. K. Chesterton, and Raymond Chandler to the more properly theoretical analyses of Northrop Frye, Pierre Bayrd, and Mark Seltzer. Certainly, the scholarly project undertaken by Horsley is encyclopedic, and for that reason alone it should become a valuable resource to students of crime fiction. Despite its thoroughness as a scholarly survey, the book manages to avoid the reductive formalism about which Chandler complains in its epigraph. While Horsley utilizes some common crime subgenres, they are used as indicators of overlapping structural or thematic emphases rather than as static containers. This approach—more venn diagram than taxonomic scheme—allows Horsley to trace generally overlooked but salutary connections between, for example, the transgressor centered crime fiction of Jim Thompson and Patricia Highsmith, and the detective novels of Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler. Focusing on the developmental energies and heterogeneity of crime fiction, rather than its generic indexing, Horsley's contribution to the field falls within the category of Haycraft's "non-fencers-in." For Horsley, the awesome success of crime fiction is a product of its remarkable adaptability and seemingly endless variation in new feminist, environmentalist, gay and lesbian, black, and postcolonial iterations. Consequently, the general narrative organizing Horsley's literary history is one of progress toward an increasingly sophisticated [End Page 877] liberal or left political critique: "Individual writers create transgressive meanings that respond to critical dissections of the ideological content of crime fiction. They may . . . . create detective figures who embody the oppositional values articulated in existing genre criticism or who challenge the assumptions about race and gender...

"A la pinche modernidad"Literary Form and the End of History in Roberto Bolaño's Los detectives salvajes Emilio Sauri Click for larger view View full resolution Roberto Bolaño, Los detectives salvajes "Soñábamos con utopía y nos despertamos gritando." Roberto Bolaño, "Déjenlo todo, nuevamente" I. The Aesthetic Event In a lecture entitled "El cuento policial" ["The Detective Story" (1978)], Jorge Luis Borges observes that, "The detective novel has created a special type of reader," and adds, "If Poe created the detective story, he subsequently created the reader of detective fiction" (492). Borges's interest in this particular genre, of course, inspired a good deal of his own fictions, though what his remarks will point to here is a more generalizable concept of literature that entails a certain notion of the relationship between reader and text. For Borges, this "special type of reader" confronts literature with such "incredulity and suspicions" that he or she might turn any narrative into a detective story; if "told [End Page 406] that Don Quixote is a detective novel," this reader, he contends, will invariably conclude that, "Cervantes was the murderer, the guilty party" (492). Yet, what Borges describes is neither a reader who is liable to a misinterpretation of Cervantes's novel, nor simply some understanding of detective fiction in the sense of literary history or genres. Rather, his account draws our attention to what appears to be an insight into the general ontology of literature that detective fiction provides. For what literature is, according to Borges, is "an aesthetic event" that "requires the conjunction of reader and text" (491); and what the detective story highlights, he suggests, is the way in which the reader—any reader—forms the conditions of possibility for this "aesthetic event." Arguing that, "It is absurd to suppose that a book is much more than a book. It begins to exist when a reader opens it," Borges imagines that the participation of this reader is neither extrinsic nor secondary to but constitutive of the literary text. Thus, to the extent that the distinction between detective fiction and other kinds of fiction is afforded by "the way texts are read" (491)—rather than, say, a set of formal elements found within the work itself—the conceptualization of literary form implicit in this account ultimately requires an insistence on the primacy of this reader. Absent the "aesthetic event"—that is, this encounter between reader and text—the literary itself remains indefinable and indescribable. Borges subsequently maintains that the aesthetic "event" or "phenomenon" "can be similar to the moment when the book was created" (492); as such, the participation of the reader is assimilated to the role of the writer to suggest that both are equally constitutive of the text. For this reason, however, we might say that what is involved in the example of the reader who approaches Cervantes's seventeenth-century text as a detective novel is not so much a form of méconnaissance as it is a kind of rewriting of that same text. No doubt the somewhat paradoxical conclusions drawn from Borges's remarks are familiar to his own readers and critics alike. Nevertheless, what appears to be as a typical Borgesian anomaly finds a number of ready equivalents in Latin American literature since the 1960s, not least in Roberto Bolaño's Los detectives salvajes [The Savage Detectives (1998)]. That this novel and Bolaño's work more generally engage the conventional elements of detective fiction certainly offers a means toward explicating this continuity, although a more meaningful set of connections between these and other authors is made available by a shared understanding of what literature is. Indeed, it is the exhaustion of this same conception of the literary that is dramatized, [End Page 407] this essay argues, in Los detectives salvajes, a novel in which both the story of a fictional band of poets known as the visceral realists and the history of literary modernism ends in the Sonora Desert in 1976. And as we will see, this exhaustion was precipitated by a continuing crisis in the production of global wealth that has not only had the profoundest consequences for...

A Vision of Complex Symmetry

Reviewed by: Formal Investigations: Aesthetic Style in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Detective Fiction Heather Worthington (bio) Formal Investigations: Aesthetic Style in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Detective Fiction edited by Paul Fox and Koray Melikoglu; pp. 239. Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2007. $42.20 paper. It is not often that the words "detective fiction" and "aesthetics" are coupled; certainly there is an aesthetic pleasure to be found in the perfection of the puzzle epitomized in the work of Agatha Christie, but detective fiction's popular success has tended to locate it as lowbrow literature and hence inappropriate for aesthetic consideration. Early critical work on detective fiction, perhaps most notably by Dorothy L. Sayers and Howard Haycraft, sought to relocate this popular form as artistic and aesthetic, as a genre of fiction that imposed order on chaos and that in its conformity, methodology, and satisfying closure could be argued to improve on nature. In similar spirit, Formal Investigations deliberately considers fin-de-siècle detective fiction in terms of aesthetic style. Paul Fox's masterly introduction analyzes an 1888 Punch cartoon depicting the transgressive pleasures of reading about murder in order to demonstrate how art imposes order in the representation of crime whether visually or textually, through aesthetic form. He suggests that "the detective's craft is the personification of aesthetic ordering within crime fiction" (ix). As Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes represents the apotheosis of the detective, the collection appropriately commences with Holmes, analyzing both the Victorian and Edwardian periods, before culminating with an analysis of E.C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case (1913). While Holmes is a recurring figure, the delight of Formal Investigations resides in the contributors' selection of eclectic literature, a selection that brings to the reader's attention detective fiction that has previously attracted little criminographic criticism while simultaneously offering new insights into canonical crime narratives. Most closely engaged with aesthetics are Paul Fox's "Devolved Forms: Aesthetic Solutions to the Contentious Style of Arthur Machen's 'The Great God Pan'" and Elizabeth Anderman's "Interpreting the Work of Art and Reading Clues: Aesthetics and Detection in Wilkie Collins's The Law and the Lady." Both [End Page 267] use the concept of art ordering chaos, and Fox argues convincingly that in Machen's "detective story," a chaos of seemingly fragmented and multi-generic narratives represents "the chaotic nature of existence" (62). Anderman considers the plenitude of visual imagery in The Law and the Lady, focusing on the physically deformed Miserrimus Dexter and his paintings. She suggests that, as in Pater's theorization of aesthetic artistic appreciation, visual clues in Collins's detective fiction must be read at a sensory as well as a literal level in order to see and appreciate—to comprehend—the whole picture. Lucy Sussex's "The Art of Murder and Fine Furniture: The Aesthetic Projects of Anna Katharine Green and Charles Rohlfs" makes a direct link between the crafts of furniture making and of writing detective fiction, demonstrating the couple's "shared aesthetic project in terms of Arts and Crafts ideals [...] that the fine art of fictional murder can be paralleled with the creation of fine furniture" (159) and its representation in their work and lives. The essay adds an American dimension to the collection and introduces the theme of domesticity, which is also the focus of Rudolph Glitz's "Horrifying Ho(l)mes: Conan Doyle's Bachelor Detective and the Aesthetics of Domestic Realism." Glitz suggests that, while Holmes's detection makes commonplace the apparently exotic crimes with which the detective engages, providing aesthetically pleasing closure and a superficial restoration of order, in their location of crime in the domestic sphere and in the context of interfamilial relationships, the narratives also criticize contemporary social reality. The domestic is again foregrounded in Alison Jacquet's "Domesticating the Art of Detection: Ellen Wood's Johnny Ludlow Series." Jacquet contends that "the domestic is the operating aesthetic" (181) in Wood's short detective fictions and that the domestic sphere proves to be a site of struggle, the female-authored stories demonstrating a discursive complexity absent from contemporaneous masculine detective narratives. The proliferation of the female detective in the 1890s is explored in Therie Hendrey...

Detective fiction has long served as a rich source of examples for illustrating myriad ways of disordering narrative time. But while theorists have routinely made detective stories their go-to genre for discussing temporal inversions such as flashbacks, flashforwards, and delayed exposition, none of them has done a full study of narrative order for any specific detective story. We have developed a method for tracking narrative order throughout complete narratives with simple graphs displaying the relation between story order (fabula) and text order (syuzhet). Our present purpose is to utilize a series of such “time maps” for the detective stories most often cited by critics in order to test and refine the theoretical claims commonly made about time in detective fiction. We close by applying our observations about detective fiction to a brief examination of order in Jane Austen's Emma and William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, both frequently compared to detective fiction.

Edgar Allan Poe and His Nineteenth-Century American Counterparts

Reviewed by: British Detective Fiction 1891–1901: The Successors to Sherlock Holmes by Clare Clarke Caroline Reitz (bio) British Detective Fiction 1891–1901: The Successors to Sherlock Holmes, by Clare Clarke; pp. xi + 166. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, $74.99, $59.99 ebook. Clare Clarke’s British Detective Fiction 1891–1901: The Successors to Sherlock Holmes begins like any good detective story: with a missing person. That person is Sherlock Holmes, who died tumbling over Reichenbach Falls with archnemesis Professor Moriarity in “The Final Problem” (1893). Clarke examines six different authors who published detective fiction during “The Great Hiatus,” the decade between Holmes’s fall and Arthur Conan Doyle’s revival of the Great Detective in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901–2). Focusing on this decade allows Clarke to explore the colorful characters who stepped through the Sherlock-shaped hole. More importantly, the book adds to an ongoing critical correction. Scholarly work on the genre has been theorized disproportionately around the Sherlock Holmes canon. Clarke persuasively and engagingly makes the case that stories that “enjoyed widespread circulation . . . but . . . did not conform to later-decided rules of the genre” allow us to see “what the post-Sherlock fin-de-siècle detective narrative could be and do” (7–8). While some of these stories and series are derivative of Holmes (from archnemeses, to vulnerable female clients, to twelve story collections), and while Holmes is frequently invoked in reviews and marketing as both yardstick and lure, some of these stories represent a real departure in character and tone, including a female Romany pawnbroker, a ghost detective fighting man-eating plants on the “blurry boundaries” of the detective story, and an amoral detective-cum-murderer (150). These innovations challenge some sacred ideas about the genre, such as the immunity of detectives, the American origin of hardboiled detective fiction, and the conservative cultural work that the whodunnit allegedly provides. This book is a sequel of sorts to Clarke’s earlier and excellent Late Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of Sherlock (2014); like that text, it balances close readings of significant overlooked figures with a broad overview of historical and publication contexts. Indeed, if recovery anthologies have been organized around gender or nationality (for example, Nick Rennison’s Sherlock’s Sisters: Stories from the Golden Age of the Female Detective [2020] or LeRoy Lad Panek and Mary M. Bendel-Simso’s Early American Detective Stories: An Anthology [2014]), Clarke is “particularly eager to uncover the lesser-known places and the publications in which late-Victorian British readers consumed detective fiction” (154). Clarke’s attention to the original publication (and republication) of these stories in regional weekly and daily newspapers is a tremendously useful addition to our [End Page 689] understanding of the popular fiction of this period. As Clarke writes, we are familiar with the “well-known account of white-collar London middle-class male workers on their commuter trains reading sixpenny or shilling monthlies, like the Strand,” the home of Sherlock (154). But regional newspapers outnumbered and outsold London publications from the mid-nineteenth century until the 1950s. An eager cadre of writers emerged (think George Gissing’s 1891 New Grub Street) to meet a newly literate reading public and drew their topics from a late-nineteenth-century culture anxious about scientific discoveries, shifting gender roles, imperial expansion, urban poverty, and religious crises. Noting that she “simply [wrote] to order,” L. T. Meade’s complicated female criminals replaced Holmes in the Strand (1891–1950) and ticked several of those boxes (qtd. in Clarke 16). While Madame Koluchy and Madame Sara are perhaps the most well-known of Clarke’s subjects, her chapter on Meade goes beyond showing the ways in which femme fatales are brought to heel by the middle-class masculine professional competence of scientists, lawyers, and police. These stories, Clarke notes, feature strong secondary female characters, including a New Woman journalist, a bacteriologist’s assistant, and a woman brought in to assist Scotland Yard who is like a “bloodhound when she scents the prey” (32). Popular fiction at the end of the century is a fertile ground for female characters. C. L. Pirkis’s Loveday Brooke, frequently compared to Sherlock...

Alibis of the Police D. A. Miller M URDER GETS PRIORITY,’’says a criminologist in a novel by P. D. James,1and indeed, whatever might be implied in the name of the genre, the so-called detective story (or, in French, “roman policier”) gives structural precedence not to the police (by which I mean here either official agents or the private detectives who often take their place), but to the crime whose violent yet mysterious commission authorizes their appearance. The activities of the police, however much in evidence, are strictly secondary, derived from the first, original fact of crime. The structure of detective fiction—act one, the crime; act two, the police—thus provides the police with a justification: that they “go after” a criminal most importantly signifies that they come afterwards, in response to an already demonstrated need for them. And if crime is the first fact in the structure of detective fiction, it is also in a sense the last. For it is with the full predication of crime, with all that is encompassed in the “apprehension” of its agent, that the detective story —along with, of course, the activities of the detective—comes to conclu­ sion. Having called for the police, crime as it were remains on hand to supervise their activities, orienting and limiting their intervention to a specific task that lasts only so long as its object goes unmet. Capable of conferring on the police their raison d’être, crime also grants them a raison de ne plus être, bringing them forth no more magically than it eventually arranges for them to disappear. A theory of detective fiction that is content to respect this structure finds no trouble in confirming both the priority of crime and the conse­ quent secondariness of the police. To take a single, but prominent exam­ ple, Tzvetan Todorov locates the structure of detective fiction in the asymmetrical interplay of two stories: “l’histoire du crime,” which is primary and essential, but unhappily missing or lacunary; and “l’histoire de l’enquête,” which is secondary and inessential, but fully in evidence.2 1. P. D. James, Death of an Expert Witness (New York: Fawcett Popular Library, 1977), p. 29. 2. Tzvetan Todorov, “Typologie du roman policier,” in Poétique de la Prose (Paris: Seuil, 1971), pp. 57-59. Vol.XXVI, No. 2 37 L ’E sprit C réateur The “plot” of the narrative (“l’histoire de l’enquête”) would consist in the pursuit of its own “story” (“l’histoire du crime”). Theoretically, too, the police are thus reduced to a mere instrumentality, what Propp would call a donor or Henry James a ficelle, whose function is exhausted in securing the full articulation of crime. In what follows, it will not be a question of denying the priority of crime in detective fiction, but rather of seeing this incontestable structural effect in terms of its strategic func­ tioning, as the keystone of a popular mythology, within the modern organization of social power. “Murder gets priority,” says the crim­ inologist in P. D. James; to which someone replies with relief, “Thank God something does.” It has always been a paradox that a genre con­ cerned with violent crime speaks so convincingly a rhetoric of reassur­ ance that few things in life are felt to be as comforting as settling down with “a good murder mystery.” From the perspective of the “strategic” reading of the genre undertaken here, this comfort will not be derived (as is usual) from the triumph of rationality, but instead from the successful occultation of power. And if comfort always also implies an anxiety that it allays, then the anxiety inspiring the genre will have its source less in the discrete moments of crime than in the continuous filiations of a general social discipline. To elaborate these issues, we take them up where detective fiction best raises them; in its notoriously, suspiciously secondary theme of the police. Regularly, of course, the theme of the police comes announced in detective fiction as the scandal of the police, their violent, violating presence there where they are not ordinarily supposed to be. “The police in the house!” The maids scream...

Dorothy L. Sayers’s address, ‘Aristotle on Detective Fiction’, given at Oxford in 1935 and later published in her volume of critical essays, Unpopular Opinions (1946) is a clever, light-hearted argument for Aristotle’s appreciation of a good murder-mystery and his apparent anticipation of an entire genre. It also serves as a useful introduction to this discussion, establishing a link between two potentially disparate subgenres, crime fiction and Renaissance tragedy, and highlighting some of the issues raised in the process of examining one in the light of the other. The application of Aristotelian theory to Renaissance drama is not a new subject for discussion, but in exploring Aristotle’s arguments with reference to the genre of detective fiction, Sayers’s essay encourages us to reflect on the uses that some twentieth-century crime-writers make of the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. It also potentially invites another reapplication of some genre-based narrative theory, a reconsideration of Todorov and Auden’s seminal essays on detective fiction with a view to exploring drama.2 Using these three essays as a framework, this chapter will consider how we might identify some examples of the ‘pre-genre’ detective story in Renaissance tragedy as well as address the ways in which Sayers and other writers of the British ‘classic’ or ‘traditional’ detective story utilize Renaissance drama in their prose.

Arabic Adventurers and American Investigators:Cultural Values in Adolescent Detective Fiction Sylvia Patterson Iskander (bio) The international smuggler Kent was able to slip through the hands of the police in many countries. Suddenly Inspector Sami received a message stating that this dangerous smuggler had arrived in Egypt. . . . The five adventurers appeared in the heart of the chase. Were they able to reach John Kent? Were they able to succeed where police from all over the world had failed? [International Smuggler, preface] With this opening Mahmoud Salem hooks his adolescent readers into one of the Five Adventurers series; other contemporary series in Arabic—the Three Adventurers and the Four Adventurers—begin in similar fashion.1 These contemporary Arabic Adventurers series, set in Egypt, invite comparison with the American Three Investigators series, particularly the earlier volumes by Robert Arthur.2 Arabic series of detective fiction, a fairly recent development, have become popular among Middle Eastern children, who have not had their own children's literature until this century (Ghurayyib 17), much later than European and American children.3 John Cawelti's description of "the world of a formula . . . as an archetypal story pattern embodied in the images, symbols, themes, and myths of a particular culture" (16) and Dennis Porter's belief that Western detective fiction is a "valuable barometer of [a] society's ideological norms" (1), although written about detective fiction for adults, are both valid concepts for adolescent fiction whether Eastern or Western.4 The formula for detective fiction largely remains constant, but cultural differences clearly distinguish the Eastern Adventurers series from the Western Investigators; furthermore, techniques for creating suspense subsequently produce a slower pace in the Arabic stories.5 Stories from both cultures generally adopt the viewpoint of the youthful detective, never that of the criminal. Because romanticizing [End Page 118] crime or criminals is not acceptable in Middle Eastern culture, the Arabic stories do not focus on the criminal;6 Western stories for children also do not romanticize the criminal, though some adult American stories may. The attitude toward crime, however, can be significantly different in Eastern and Western detective fiction. The attitudes that crime is a social problem and that criminal acts are "not evil deeds but the result of defective social arrangements or heredity" (Cawelti 57) do not coincide with Islamic law, which, rather than faulting society, generally punishes the individual doer of the act. In spite of their different attitudes toward criminals, both Eastern and Western youths with prior experience in reading detective fiction enjoy the contrast between the "safely familiar" and the "tantalizingly new and different" (Billman 37), the rarity of the crime, the clever solution to a common crime, the development of suspense, and the arousal of the reader's emotions (Porter 236). As Anne Scott MacLeod has written, "The real protagonist of [formula fiction] is the reader; the real plot is a satisfying vicarious experience that also—and not incidentally—conveys messages the reader wants and is able to hear" (129). Both Eastern and Western tales affirm their readers' beliefs; indeed, "the persistence of certain recognizable national cultural traditions within the large corpus of detective fiction" is, according to Porter, "remarkable" (127). Although Porter speaks of fiction for adults, his remarks prove valid for children's fiction in which cultural differences permeate the characterization, action, and setting, as well as the methods for creating suspense and the resulting pace of the story. All detective stories obviously require a victim, a criminal, a detective, and others who, though involved with the crime, are incapable of solving it. The victim must not be so prominent as to overshadow the detective's role, but the reader must know enough about the victim to care about the crime's solution (Cawelti 91). In some Arabic stories, such as The Bride of Sinai, the reader knows almost nothing about the bride but can sympathize with her having been kidnaped from her wedding without knowing her more intimately. Rules exist for the creation of the criminal as well; his or her motives must not be probed too deeply, the goal of the detective story being to establish clearly the criminal's guilt (Cawelti 92). In the Arabic and American...

Victims or Villains: Jewish Images in Classic English Detective Fiction, by Malcolm J. Turnbull. Bowling Green, OH: The Popular Press, 1999. 200 pp. $22.00. At the turn of the twentieth century literature changed. Hitherto chiefly the province of the upper-middle class, the introduction of universal education along with the invention of the rotary press, linotype, half-tone engraving, advertising, incandescent illumination, and the vacation combined to make reading a form of entertainment for the first time. Beginning with Doyle's Scandal in Bohemia (1891), the detective story became the most prominent form of popular fiction in England. Conventionally viewed, the history of the detective story proceeds from Doyle, through a number of turn-of-thecentury imitators, to its Golden Age: the period between the wars when all of the big names - Christie, Sayers, Marsh, Cox, Allingham, et al. - began to write. And Malcolm Turnbull has read them all. He has read them, moreover, with an eye toward the ways in which detective stories from about the turn of the century through about the end of World War II treat Jewish characters. They mostly treat them badly. Scarcely a surprise. Turnbull chronologically pursues the ways in the English detective writers use and describe Jewish characters. His chapters cover the periods of 1887 to 1918, 1919 to 1939, 1939 to 1945, and 1945 to the present. In the middle of the book he also takes a look at the ways in which three writers - Christie, Sayers, and Cox - treat Jews. In this survey Turnbull follows the rise and fall of stereotypes imposed on Jewish characters. These begin with the image of influential wealthholder and cunning immigrant pauper inherited from older English fiction and proceed after World War I to the Jew as parvenu, as revolutionary, and as war-profiteer. Throughout each of the periods persists the stereotype of the Jew as alien, as someone whose appearance (swarthy complexion, hooked nose, thick lips, dark hair), dress (rags or exhibitionistic clothes), speech (lisping), morals (sexually aggressive), and mannerisms differ from those of the other characters in the world of the fiction. Turnbull touches on events which coincide with the creation and adoption of antisemitic images from the Dreyfus case, to the emigration of Russian Jews in the 1 890s, to the publication of The Protocols of the Elders ofZion, to the role of two Jewish M.P.s in the Marconi and Indian Silver Scandals, as well as the association of several Jewish activists with the causes of communism and the Russian Revolution. Turnbull, however, shows both that in each period some detective story writers express philosemitic attitudes and that after 1933 antisemitism largely disappears from British detective fiction. In 1 899, for instance, while E. M. Hornung presented Reuben Rosenthall in The Amateur Cracksman as the most astonishing brute to look at, well over six feet, with a chest like a barrel and a great hook-nose, and the reddest hair and whiskers you ever saw. ... He boasted of his race, he bragged of his riches, and he blackguarded society for taking him up for his money and dropping him out of sheer pique and jealousy because he had so much[,] his brother-in-law, Arthur Conan Doyle, can and should be seen as philosemitic in his writing and private life. While Doyle was ready enough to express religious prejudice (consider Mormons in A Study in Scarlet), and generally creates villains who are either foreign or have been tainted by otiier cultures, Turnbull finds no evidence in the Holmes canon of prejudice against Jews and mentions Doyle's campaign to free the wrongly accused Oscar Slater in 1927. …

DECONSTRUCTING THE “DESERT OF FACTS” : DETECTION AND ANTIDETECTION IN COMING THROUGH SLAUGHTER NANCY E. BJERRING F a n sh aw e C olleg e IVIichael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter is one of m' ny postmod­ ern texts that parody the world-view and narrative devices oi the detective story. In an early and important article entitled “The Detective and the Boundary: Some Notes on the Postmodern Literary Imagination,” William V. Spanos offers a convincing explanation for the appeal of the detective story genre for contemporary writers. Deriving much of his argument from Sartre and other existentialist theorists, he hypothesizes that postmodern writers subvert the “post-Renaissance humanistic structure of conscious­ ness” (170) in order to contest the authority of prescriptive systems of val­ idation, whether they be religious, aesthetic, or scientific. The scientific world-view comes in for particular scrutiny, since popularized versions of the values of science, such as the centrality of objectivity, rational analy­ sis, inductive reasoning, and so on, inform virtually all classical detective stories. In contrast, Spanos argues, the postmodern literary imagination at large insists on the m y s tery — the ominous and threatening uncanniness that resists naming — and that the paradigmatic literary archetype it has discovered is the an'' active story (and its antipsychoanalytical analogue), the formal purpc hich is to evoke the impulse to “detect” and/or to psychoanalyze i aer to violently frustrate it by refusing to solve the crime (or find th' ause of the neurosis). (171) In addition, Spanos points out, postmodernism also rejects “the rigidly causal plot of the well-made work of the humanistic tradition” (171) in order to deny the reader the comfort of “the eternal simultaneity of essen­ tial art” (177) or the “iconic poetic of transcendence” (181). Postmoderns, therefore, refuse to substitute what might be called the truth-claims of art for the truth-claims of science. Linda Hutcheon also acknowledges the importance to postmodern fiction of the structures of the detective story. Her Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox identifies this form as one of the “paradigms” of self­ reflexive metafiction, since postmodern texts often employ, for the purposes English Stu d ies in Ca n a d a , x v i, 3 , September 19 9 0 of parody, the sort of decoding intelligence detective fiction always em­ ploys, which weighs evidence in order to “discover meaning, unravel plots” (32). The parody emerges when the postmodern antidetective, emulating the classical detective in his or her analyses of causes and crimes, typi­ cally encounters frustration, self-delusion, and self-reproach, but ends up proliferating rather than conquering such confusion. Whereas the classical detective “solves” the mysteries of being, the postmodern antidetective bogs down, even wallows in the mystery. On the other hand, classical detective fiction itself frequently includes an analysis of the processes and pitfalls involved in the elucidation of some truth about a crime and its perpetrator. Many detective stories contain a running commentary on the action, usually provided by the extremely self-conscious detective him/herself— the poet/detective Dalgliesh, for ex­ ample, in the series of novels by P.D. James. A device that is even more relevant as an illustration of Hutcheon’s thesis about narcissistic narratives is the self-reflexive commentary provided by a fictional author of detective stories who is also a character in the detective novel — Harriet Vane, for in­ stance, in the Peter Wimsey novels of Dorothy L. Sayers. A character such as Harriet provides an apt model for emulation by the puzzled writer-sleuths or antidetectives in texts such as Pale Fire, Les faux monnayeurs, and Com­ ing Through Slaughter. In Gaudy Night, for example, Harriet considers the possibility of recharacterizing her fictional hero, Wilfrid, but fears that if she gives him “violent and lifelike feelings, he’ll throw the whole book out of bal­ ance” (291). Harriet is, of course, coming to grips with the same narrative problem as is her creator, whose own essay, also entitled “Gaudy Night,” ex­ amines Sayers’s qualms about humanizing her fictional hero, Lord Peter.1 Typically, the postmodern narrator-sleuth of Coming Through Slaughter conflates his fictional, biographical, and autobiographical impulses, includ­ ing with his creation and recreation...