The reactionary art of murder: Contemporary crime fiction, criticism and verisimilitude

Abstract

One way in which specific crime fiction texts achieve prominence is through critical discourses which promote those texts’ ‘superior’ realism, valorizing the texts and setting them apart from neighbouring generic narratives. This article goes back to the 1921 analysis by Roman Jakobson which identifies a small number of strategies by which arguments about realism proceed. Particularly important for crime fiction criticism is that approach to realism, described by Jakobson, which focuses on contiguous details in narrative. In contrast to the claims of realism is the analytic concept of verisimilitude, based on the ‘rules of the genre’ and ‘public opinion’ or doxa. Verisimilitude, it is argued, has the capacity to address the important issue of generic stagnation, an example of which in crime fiction is the increasing reliance on murder (serial, single or repeated) to propel a narrative. Amidst the conformity in the genre, the article identifies complicity in the promotion of realism and the catalytic occurrence of murder as the key constituents of crime fiction. It also points to some exceptions to this tendency.