The Language of Suspense in Crime Fiction by Reshmi Dutta-Flanders

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Language of Suspense in Crime Fiction by Reshmi Dutta-Flanders Jia Xiaoqing (bio) Reshmi Dutta-Flanders. The Language of Suspense in Crime Fiction. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. xvii + 500 pp. The Language of Suspense in Crime Fiction is a comprehensive formal analysis of the devices by which suspense is created in crime fiction. Although the subtitle is “a linguistic stylistic approach,” the analysis in the book is actually “interdisciplinary” which the author acknowledges in Chapter 1 (3), and which is the trend of stylistic study in recent years. Although the multidisciplinary sources are listed by the author as “recent advances and interest in crime studies in literature, forensic linguistics and social sciences” (3), this reviewer finds that the author resorts to narratology at least as often as stylistics in her book-length analysis. Therefore, it is the combination of narratology and stylistics that explains the mechanism of suspense in crime fiction. After a brief introduction to the features of crime fiction in Chapter 1, particularly suspense, Chapter 2 centers on two key concepts: “manipulated context” and “frame.” Manipulated context (MC) is a context constructed by the offender narrator by using devices such as retrospection and prospection to disturb the coherence of the narrative. Frame refers to both the physical episodes in the novel and readers’ cognitive scenario. The cognitive scenario enables readers to spot the perpetrator’s purposeful distortion of event sequences, and the resultant lack of “episodic link” and “causality.” This chapter starts with the comparison between story and discourse levels, a narratological distinction which the author relates to stylistic features by saying that “MC constructed in the narrative frame is based on the bidirectional function of the DR (discourse referent) as the risky point in the plot form” (14). The DRs are pronouns such as “it, that, anything” and noun phrases such as “the girl” (26, 52). The referents of these uncertain pronouns are unavailable in the immediate contexts, but the narrator’s repeated, recalled, and withheld frames of certain episodes mislead readers [End Page 508] into regarding some character as the referent of the uncertain pronoun and build the scenarios in which that character is the suspect. These devices fulfill the perpetrator’s intention to conceal the real crime and create suspense in the novel. Besides these uncertain pronouns and nouns, the author also analyzes the linguistic features introducing frames, like “remember, inform,” which introduce mental frames and suspend the actuality of the frame contents (41). In the case studies that follow, the author lists the main frames in the three chosen crime stories, and contrasts them with readers’ cognitive frames so as to reveal the distortion of the event sequences. In addition, the ensuing analysis of uncertain DRs such as “it,” as well as the linguistic features such as the obligation adverbial “must” and deictic pronoun “that,” exposes the perpetrator’s motives and criminal acts. Using Genette’s three-level division of narratives—story, narrating, narrative—the author explains that Chapter 2 focuses on the narrative as a finished product, whereas Chapter 3 is “concerned with the issue of narrating in the narrative” and aims to reveal how suspense is created in crime fiction through the study of language (139), complex and multilevel narrative situations. Starting with the narratological terms indicating narrating and focalizing agents, such as “narrator, focalizer, focalized, diegesis, interdiegesis,” this chapter focuses on the distinctions of narrative levels like narrator, narrated, and character. The author employs Polanyi’s “discourse-shifters” such as stylistic features “deictics, demonstratives, and pronouns” to distinguish the vantage points in story worlds (148). For example, tense alternation, including both undifferentiated temporal deictics and abrupt tense shifts, accounts for the realignment (i.e., homodiegeticization [154]), content gap, shifts in point of view that take place at the microlevel (clausal level) in the embedded story worlds (subworlds). These story worlds are built by the devices like mental processes (151), which are analyzed in the light of the transitivity analysis of Functional-Stylistics or speech and thought presentation studied by stylisticians like Short. In the case studies of three crime novels, the author mainly approaches them from temporal alternation (time orientation markers like “tense, modality, and adverbials” [158]), and...