Victorian Crime Fiction in the Twenty-First Century: A Review Essay, 2015–2024

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

This thesis examines the crime fiction of Mary Helena Fortune (c.18331910). My analysis concentrates on Fortune’s series, “The Detective’s Album”, more than four hundred self-contained crime stories published over forty years that are framed as the “casebook” of a colonial detective, Mark Sinclair. Although this series remains nominally the reminiscences of Sinclair, the stories within the casebook increasingly employ private and amateur detectives, and Sinclair himself transforms from a member of the colonial police force into a private inquiry agent. I characterise this move as constituting a shift from Fortune’s detecting heroes acting essentially as “public avengers” to becoming instead predominantly “private defenders”. Accompanying the evolution of the detective are other structural changes in Fortune’s crime fiction, so that by the 1880s an increasingly private model of detective was more often resolving a domestic mystery in a suburban setting than investigating a violent crime on the mean streets. The central aim of this thesis is to demonstrate the ways in which these transformations relate to the differentiated social and historical conditions within colonial Australia. Through the close analysis of Fortune’s crime texts and examination of the cultural and historical context in which they were produced, the thesis offers perspectives on broad cultural patterns. This thesis draws predominantly on a lineage of critics who have analysed crime fiction using Marxist, Foucauldian and Postcolonialist strategies. I utilise in particular the central paradigm of D. A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police (1988): – his assertion that in the nineteenth-century novel the “move to discard the role of the detective is at the same time a move to disperse the function of detection”. The appearance of private and amateur detectives in Fortune’s crime fiction indicates respectively the professionalisation and privatisation of the mechanism of detection, evolutions that reflect a broad embourgeoisment within her crime corpus. Such a social transformation of nineteenth-century crime fiction occurred across the industrialised world. In British crime fiction, for instance, the ordinary workaday policeman of the 1850s had given way by the 1890s to such independent and professional detectives as Sherlock Holmes. But while the embourgeoisment of crime fiction was an international phenomenon, I argue that in Australian crime fiction the emergence of private and surrogate detectives also performed a second, crucial function: to distance the agent of detection, and demotic crime fiction itself, from the enforcement of imperial order in the colonial landscape. The movement from simple criminal apprehensions to financial and reputation protection also increasingly distances Fortune’s crime fiction from the kind of direct social control necessary to enforce imperial order. v This thesis contains four analytical chapters, each of which is devoted to exploring mechanisms by which Fortune’s crime fiction dispersed the function of detection and concealed the conservative disciplinary order that underpins the fiction. The first three chapters examine familiar forms of fictional detectives: the official police detective; the private and the amateur detective; and the female detective, both official and unofficial. The final analytical chapter examines the way in which the criminal also worked as part of the dispersed function of detection. One of the key ways in which Fortune’s crime fiction works to reinforce disciplinary order is, paradoxically, to make the detectives often fail to solve the crime, so that order is restored only by the collective efforts of several individuals or through the mechanism of fate or an avenging land, or even as a consequence of the criminals’ own actions. Thus Fortune’s crime fiction is not a celebration of virtuoso individualism, as is found in the stories of Sherlock Holmes, but instead of an ethically logical and just world in which order is the product of collective efforts on the part of a largely cohesive community, and in which the apprehension of criminals and restoration of order are presented as inevitable outcomes. Stephen Knight has described Fortune as “internationally the most significant woman writing about crime in the mid-nineteenth century” (Continent of Mystery 4), and yet her impressive corpus of crime fiction has never received extended scholarly attention. This thesis addresses this omission, but more importantly, the conclusions I offer about Mary Fortune’s crime fiction contribute to an understanding of a much larger question about how Australians began to imagine and adopt a national identity in the nineteenth century. It is certainly clear from Fortune’s crime corpus that well before the nationalist-democratic cultural insurrection of the 1890s, Australian fiction already offered versions of the key paradigms that still inflect the national imagination into the twenty-first century.

The Re-imagining Inherent in Crime Fiction Translation

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Although I am aware that the right expression should be ‘minority ethnic’, the established critical convention is to speak of ‘ethnic detective(s)’ or ‘ethnic crime fiction’. 2. Some relevant academic titles in this respect are: Out of the Woodpile: Black Characters in Crime and Detective Fiction (1991) by Frankie Y Bailey; The Ethnic Detective: Chester Himes, Harry Kemelman, Tony Hillerman (1992) by Peter Freese; The Contemporary American Crime Novel: Race, Ethnicity, Class (2001) by Andrew Pepper; Traces, Codes, and Clues: Reading Race in Crime Fiction by Maureen T Reddy (2002); Sleuthing Ethnicity: The Detective in Multiethnic Crime Fiction (2003 Fisher-Hornung , Dorothea and Monika Mueller Sleuthing Ethnicity. The Detective in Multiethnic Crime Fiction . London : Associated Presses , 2003 . [Google Scholar]) edited by Dorothea Fisher-Hornung and Monika Mueller; Crime Fiction 1800–2000: Detection, Death, Diversity (2004 Gilroy, Paul. 2004. After Empire. Melancholia or Convivial Culture?, London: Routledge. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) by Stephen Thomas Knight; and Chicano Detective Fiction: A Critical Study Of Five Novelists (2005) by Susan Baker Sotelo. 3. Jean-Christophe Grangé, Jakob Arjouni and Francisco Zamora have created ‘ethnic’ detectives, an Arab, a Turk and a Guinean respectively, but they only appear in one novel each. 4. There is also Alexander McCall Smith and his series on Ma Ramotswe, the Botswana lady detective, but I would not include her among the order of ‘ethnic’ detectives, because all her adventures take place in her native Botswana, where she would not qualify as ‘minority ethnic’. 5. Phillips's two other crime novels, The Dancing Face (1997 Hall , Stuart . ‘ Old and New Ethnicities, Old and New Identities ’. Culture, Globalization and the World System. Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity . Anthony King . Minneapolis : U of Minnesota P , 1997 . 41 – 68 . [Google Scholar]) and A Shadow of Myself (2001), do not feature Sam Dean as the protagonist. 6. The analysis of this novel offered by Dave Gunning is exemplary in his juxtaposition of Phillips's political views and his literary practice. 7. These are some of the features that the editors of Sleuthing Ethnicity underline as characteristic of the ‘ethnic’ detective. Peter Freese defines the ‘ethnic’ detective as an investigator belonging ‘to a community whose history, values and way of life differ from those of the so-called mainstream’ and whose cases turn into ‘an illustration of ethnic friction and cultural confrontation and thus into a comment on the challenges of everyday life in a “multicultural” society’ (quoted in Matzke and Mühleisen 6). 8. The number of mixed couples who appear in the Sam Dean novels should be noted; Dean has been married to a white woman and he has several affairs with white women throughout all the novels. His sexual prowess is clearly an aspect in which Dean never fails to comply with the expectations of his white lovers. In fact, I find an element of self-conscious humour and irony in the way Phillips portrays Dean's masculinity, but do not have the space to go into this theme here. Patricia Plummer also argues that Dean's ‘way with the ladies’ is ‘exaggerated to the point that it becomes a parody of male fantasies’ (Plummer 261). In any case, love and sex seem to be privileged and informal spaces of conviviality for Phillips's characters and particularly for Dean himself. 9. Some outstanding examples in this respect are Le Carré's The Constant Gardener (2001 Phillips Mike . A Shadow of Myself . London : Harper Collins , 2001 . [Google Scholar]), Leon's Blood from a Stone (2009), Mankell's The Man from Beiging (2011) and Lozano's El caso Sankara (2006).

Crime fiction, also known as detective fiction, is a major genre of twentieth‐century world fiction in terms of number of titles, sales, and variety, though some critics view it as a poor cousin of general fiction. However, during the last 30 or 40 years a large body of critical literature has grown up around crime fiction, and it has begun to acquire an academic imprimatur. Perhaps because of sales, critical interest, and forays into the genre by some writers of “literary” fiction, the boundaries between crime and general fiction have become blurred. In some cases, such blurring might be better described as a transcending of boundaries as crime fiction writers consider things social and cultural as well as criminal. Crime fiction may also transcend traditional national and cultural boundaries, as, for example, in A Shadow of Myself (2001) by the black British novelist Mike Phillips, in which English, German, and African cultures each play their part in a multigenerational narrative. Defining crime fiction is therefore no easy matter. Add to this the problems of defining “postcolonial” – the predominant rubric under which world fiction is now studied – and the difficulties multiply.

Chester B. Himes: A Biography

本論文主要從臺灣小說類型論的角度出發，全文研究目的，其一是對學界與一般愛好者介紹過去鮮為人知的日治時期臺灣犯罪小說的存在及其意義，其二是將此時期的犯罪小說發展脈絡梳理清楚，以利後續臺灣通俗小說史的建構與討論。而本論文的主要貢獻包括：（一）釐清日治時期臺灣犯罪小說的分期發展狀態；（二）找出日治時期部份犯罪小說的敘事來源；（三）嘗試提出臺灣犯罪小說最終所以發展挫敗的原因。 論文計分五章，第一章緒論旨於說明研究材料來源與小說文本選擇的判定、「犯罪小說」一詞的使用及其義界，以及對先行研究的回顧與對話。第二章勾勒犯罪小說的生成場域與跨國發展脈絡，並以歐美、日本與中國犯罪小說創作情形做為論述參照，而後指出臺灣本地之現象。第三章綜述臺灣漢語犯罪小說的寫作進程與敘事實踐情況，文中以明治、大正、昭和三個年代做為分期，並列舉重要作家或具代表性意義之作品加以討論，進而指出三階段之創作變化狀況，及其與跨國文本之間的關連性。第四章針對犯罪小說的文學創作義涵提出探討，包括跨國文本之間的翻譯問題、偵探形象的變遷與犯罪小說中所展現的有關科技、女性、兒童與現代性書寫間的關係等，最後總歸於臺灣犯罪小說史若干創作美學問題的剖析。大抵，在比較歐美、日本、中國之創作現象後，可看到臺灣犯罪小說的書寫，隱然有著一條軌跡線，大致上是循著「混雜類型－偏向解謎趣味的嚴謹推理－偏向社會寫實的犯罪書寫」這樣的路線前進著。 而透過如上的觀察，並參酌世界犯罪小說發展史，本論文認為日治時期臺灣犯罪小說的表現，應是處於由前偵探小說過渡到偵探小說的期間。無論新文人或舊文人，臺灣作家對小說中現代啟蒙性的探索興趣仍舊超過對文類本身，加上1937年後戰爭的發生，導致創作環境之不利，以及戰後政權轉移等因素，遂使臺灣犯罪小說的轉型與深化愈加艱困，也就無法出現一個如同愛倫坡或江戶川亂步般，能夠成功確立臺灣偵探小說形式的奠基者，於是最終更形成了當代本地愛好者對國外作家、作品知之甚深，卻毫不知悉日治時期臺灣曾有犯罪小說的怪異結果。

narrative is not trivial, Nickianne Moody writes, forms part of discursive practices that support inequality, influence medical and social decisions and determine interaction between non-able-bodied and non-disabled experience and identity (Methodological Agendas, 39). The narratives circulating in popular culture play a significant role in shaping wider understandings of disability and impairment. Within broader category of popular narrative this special issue of JLCDS focuses on popular genre forms, with authors considering genres from melodrama to gothic to contemporary crime fiction. The analysis of disability representation in these popular genre texts produces insights that can illuminate all kinds of texts, whether canonical or contemporary, privileged or disparaged. In one way or another, all articles in this special issue challenge, problematize, or expand upon existing scholarly work on disability and representation, advancing our understanding not only of specific texts or genre forms that they analyse, but also of disability representation itself. Building upon Disability and Popular Fiction: Reading Representations, a one-day conference held at Liverpool John Moores University in 2009, and a panel on disability in romance fiction at Present Difference: The Cultural Production of Disability conference at Manchester Metropolitan University in 2010, this special issue showcases a range of work on disability in popular genre texts. Such a project is undoubtedly needed: in work on contemporary popular genres such science fiction, romance, and crime fiction, there is little engagement with disability. In well-developed body of scholarly work on crime, detective, and mystery fiction, for example, there are books on race and ethnicity in but none on disability. Even works whose titles would suggest necessity of a engagement with disability-such Gill Plain's Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and Body or Christiana Gregoriou's Deviance in Contemporary Crime Fiction-show little evidence of a disability-informed perspective. In similarly expansive field of science fiction scholarship, a groundbreaking 2008 collection, Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction, places queer-theoretical approaches to genre centre stage, and there has been a plethora of recent works on race, ethnicity, and postcoloniality in science fiction. However, despite Michael Berube's speculation that genre is as obsessed with disability it is with space travel and alien contact (568), there has been little engagement with disability in work.1 The same can be said for rapidly expanding field of romance studies, though a recent article on disability in vampire romance by Kathleen Miller (one of contributors to this special issue), well numerous discussions of this topic on fan sites are encouraging signs. The general lack of engagement with disability in fields that it could so obviously enrich is a familiar story. Indeed, sort of summary given in previous paragraph is so well rehearsed in cultural disability studies to be conventional. For popular genre forms, however, there is a further lack of engagement within cultural disability studies. What David Bolt terms critical avoidance works on many levels (Social Encounters). That is not to say that scholars in cultural disability studies have not engaged with popular genre texts; such an assertion is patently untrue. As early 1987, no less a figure than Irving Zola analysed representation of disability in the crime-mystery genre, suggesting that both popularity and structure and content of crime-mystery writing justify such scrutiny (486). Also worth highlighting are more recent works by Johnson Cheu and Jeffrey Weinstock (both on science fiction), Jane Stemp (young adult science fiction and fantasy), and Andrew Jakubowicz and Helen Meekosha (detective fiction), well discussions of genre by Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell (in Cultural Locations of Disability), and Stuart Murray (in Representing Autism). …

Reviewed by: Chemical Crimes: Science and Poison in Victorian Crime Fiction by Cheryl Blake Price Clare Clarke (bio) Chemical Crimes: Science and Poison in Victorian Crime Fiction, by Cheryl Blake Price; pp. xii– 195. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2019, $69.95. Cheryl Blake Price's Chemical Crimes: Science and Poison in Victorian Crime Fiction focuses on criminal poisoners, and examines how and why fictional poisonings transitioned into what Price terms "chemical crimes" over the course of the nineteenth century. For Price, chemical crimes and criminals are distinct from mere poisoners; they are instead "a rarefied group of criminals who drew from scientific knowledge and methodology to perpetrate domestic crime" (2). The terms "chemical criminal" and "chemical crime" are invoked frequently in this monograph (2), although never very satisfyingly defined beyond the broad claim that "chemical criminals" may be "professionally trained chemists and doctors and just people who employ scientific methodology in the commission of their crimes" (3). This definition seems to be so all-encompassing as to lose usefulness. The book's second aim is to "investigate the interesting correlation between chemical crime and innovations in genre development." For Price, "chemical crime is present in almost every significant moment in the development of Victorian crime fiction," with the chemical criminal appearing "at the origins of sensation, detective, and science fictions—and when the boundaries of genres like the Newgate novel expand and anticipate later genre developments" (3). Price argues that this book's "focus on the criminal applications of science offers a corrective to the current way of understanding the development of Victorian crime fiction by moving the critical focus back onto the criminal and away from the detective" (13). The focus upon the criminal is certainly worthwhile; however, this thesis overstates the originality of this project, as demonstrated by the introduction's almost entirely absent review of recent scholarship in the field. In a project devoted to exploring the development of crime and detective fiction, with particular attention to the porosity of generic boundaries, I would have expected detailed reference to the groundbreaking work carried out by Joseph A. Kestner, Maurizio Ascari, Lee Horsley, Caroline Reitz, Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Christopher Pittard, Lucy Sussex, Srdjan Smajić, Michael Cook, and my own work. These scholars offer early and/or alternative, and much fuller, accounts of Victorian crime fiction, yet their voices do not contribute much or at all to Price's discussion. Chapter 1 examines Letitia Elizabeth Landon's silver fork novel Ethel Churchill, set in the 1720s and published in 1837, where the female protagonist murders her husband and her lover by poisoning. Price argues that Ethel Churchill strongly influenced Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Lucretia, a Newgate novel published in 1846. The two authors were indeed good friends, although Price admits that there is "no direct evidence that Bulwer had Ethel Churchill in mind when he began writing Lucretia" (49). The chapter attempts to chart the influence of the silver fork novel on the Newgate novel by arguing that the first has erroneously been left out of scholarly accounts of crime fiction's development. Landon's novel is a fascinating examination of female madness and criminality, but this does not automatically mean that we can term it crime fiction. The work of Stephen Knight, Tzvetan Todorov, or John Cawelti would have been useful here in helping to define the terminology. Furthermore, the employment of one silver fork [End Page 306] novel to argue for the significance of the entire genre on crime writing is problematic, especially given Price's admission that both novels are somewhat unrepresentative of their larger genres: Ethel Churchill "does not strictly adhere to the silver fork formula" and "is also unusual because it features a crime (other than the crime of adultery) perpetrated by a female character" (36); Lucretia "seems in many ways an awkward fit for Newgate fiction" (66). The book finds firmer ground in discussions of sensation fiction. Chapter 2 examines gothic medicine and the figure of the poisoning doctor in the fiction of Ellen Wood, connecting this to the lengthy discussion of Wilkie Collins's Count Fosco in the book's introduction. Building upon work by Tabatha Sparks, Andrew Mangham, and...

ABSTRACTFocussing on a group of recent novels set against the background of Italy’s colonies in East Africa during the Fascist period, this essay aims at investigating a fundamental tension within the tradition of Italian crime fiction, and, more specifically, of historical crime fiction. On the one hand, by shedding light into the darker and less explored corners of Italy’s past, the genre aims at serving as a sort of ‘new social novel’, to paraphrase the title of a 2004 book by Marco Sangiorgi and Luca Telò. On the other, the conventions and generic requirements of crime and detective fiction – in particular, its frequent recourse to stereotyped situations and characters – can hamper the reconstruction of complex experiences such as that of Italian colonialism. A detailed discussion of Giorgio Ballario’s novels featuring the Major of the Carabinieri Aldo Morosini (2008–2012), Davide Longo’s Un mattino a Irgalem (2001), Luciano Marrocu’s Debrà Libanòs (2002), and Andrea Camilleri’s La presa di Macallé (2003) will show how for contemporary Italian writers, as for many authors of late 19th- and 20th-century colonial novels, Africa often continues to be an empty space upon which to project European fantasies, regardless of whether the author’s intention is a critique or a celebration of empire. Only Camilleri manages to provide a more complex account of Italian imperialism by shifting his attention from the colonies themselves to the impact of colonialism upon the ‘motherland’, thus bringing into relief the constitutive function of colonialism in the formation of Fascist ideology.

This chapter is a survey of teaching crime fiction in postcolonial South Africa. After offering a definition and historicisation of postcolonial crime fiction in general, the survey focuses on my third-year undergraduate course, ‘Sleuthing the State: South African Crime and Detective Fiction’. The survey includes a description of the curriculum content, teaching methods, forms of assessment and student evaluation. The chapter also contains theoretical discussion about the practical and ethical implications of teaching crime fiction in a turbulent and transitional socio-political context. To end, the chapter comments on the high points of this teaching experience and on some of the challenges encountered.

Fatale Revisited: Reflections on the “Radical” in Radical Crime Fiction Lucas Hollister (bio) Je me flatte de penser que mon travail (très imparfaitement mené à bien dans Fatale, d’ailleurs) contribue à la suppression du polar. —Jean-Patrick Manchette1 Anyone studying crime fiction in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries eventually must confront a basic question of terminology and critical methodology: what allows us to qualify crime fiction as “radical”? This question, like many of its sort, has both simple and complex answers. The simplest answers rely on what Theodor W. Adorno (6) critiqued, helpfully if perhaps too categorically, when he wrote of aesthetic politics understood as “the insertion of objective elements.” The radical, in this sense, would name those moments where crime fiction comes into contact with and represents historical movements, ideas, or groups dubbed radical. From this perspective, Dashiell Hammett would be a radical crime writer because he was for a time a communist and because he transposed the “objective elements” of his experience working with the Pinkertons into the [End Page 888] adventures of his Continental Op (Knight 135–36). This conception of literary politics, characteristic of influential scholarship on French crime fiction (Gorrara, Lee, Platten) and of widely read contemporary crime writers (Didier Daeninckx, Dominique Manotti), has helped solidify the polar’s reputation as a politically engaged genre.2 As necessary as this work is in a cultural environment where representational content and authorial biography remain the most significant vectors for determining the political valence of a text, from the perspective of literary studies politicality must also be considered in relation to stickier questions of genre, form, and style. Adorno (6), again helpfully though again too categorically, wrote that the “relation of art to society” was defined not by political content (i.e. “objective elements”) but by “immanent problems of form” that reflect the “unresolved antagonisms of reality.” How might such a suggestion lead us to imagine a broader, less contextually narrow political history of crime fiction as a form or genre? What subversive strategies, meta-discursive tactics, thematic reorientations, and critical lenses would such a history highlight? Beyond disseminating and reinforcing politicized perspectives and worldviews, there are other important ways that popular genres regulate politicality. First, genres define who and what is recognizable in a positive or negative sense as a political subject. When marginalized subjects try to appropriate genres from which they have historically been excluded, they risk having their concerns dismissed as excessively political (“preachy,” “radical”) or, conversely, as insufficiently political (reformist, mere identity politics, “not truly radical”). Second, and relatedly, genres exclude some forms of radicality (Jean Genet, undeniably a crime writer and undeniably not a writer of crime fiction, is emblematic of the genre’s tacit exclusions) while celebrating others (straight white-male marginality and regenerative violence).3 Third, genres recuperate and tame the radical through commoditization. [End Page 889] Politicized market pressures channel cultural expressions toward different kinds of conformity, and the price of entry into a popular genre is that one’s work becomes symbolically industrialized and hence differently legible. We might add that the inscription of popular genres in transnational cultural economies means that these fictions, while certainly informed by contextual factors, work at scales that are often unacknowledged in histories of crime fiction focused on a single national or linguistic space and its imputed “politics.” As Theodore Martin (88) has suggested, contexts that are centuries and continents apart are in fact “bridged by something that measures historical time on a different scale—something like a style, a category, or a genre.” Such issues pertaining to genre remain underexamined by scholarship on French crime fiction. For this reason, much work remains to be done both to describe the formal innovations (or lack thereof) that have accompanied thematically radical crime fiction and to develop critical lenses that will allow us to read across from popular crime fiction to the politicized violent writing of authors who are generally considered above or to the side of the genre: Rachilde, François Mauriac, Genet, or Virginie Despentes to take but a few salient examples from French literature. The fact that the aforementioned writers might appear out of place in a discussion of...

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...

Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction aims to enhance understanding of one of the most popular forms of genre fiction by examining a wide variety of the detective and crime fiction produced in Britain and America during the twentieth century. It will be of interest to anyone who enjoys reading crime fiction but is specifically designed with the needs of students in mind. It introduces different theoretical approaches to crime fiction (e.g., formalist, historicist, psychoanalytic, postcolonial, feminist) and will be a useful supplement to a range of crime fiction courses, whether they focus on historical contexts, ideological shifts, the emergence of sub-genres, or the application of critical theories. Forty-seven widely available stories and novels are chosen for detailed discussion. In seeking to illuminate the relationship between different phases of generic development Lee Horsley employs an overlapping historical framework, with sections doubling back chronologically in order to explore the extent to which successive transformations have their roots within the earlier phases of crime writing, as well as responding in complex ways to the preoccupations and anxieties of their own eras. The first part of the study considers the nature and evolution of the main sub-genres of crime fiction: the classic and hard-boiled strands of detective fiction, the non-investigative crime novel (centred on transgressors or victims), and the 'mixed' form of the police procedural. The second half of the study examines the ways in which writers have used crime fiction as a vehicle for socio-political critique. These chapters consider the evolution of committed, oppositional strategies, tracing the development of politicized detective and crime fiction, from Depression-era protests against economic injustice to more recent decades which have seen writers launching protests against ecological crimes, rampant consumerism, Reaganomics, racism, and sexism.

Abstract: This article proposes to give clearer account of both the centrality of dark humor in the history of French crime fiction and the apparent decline in humorous styles in crime fiction of the twenty-first century. After laying out the case that French crime fiction’s dominant tones have become more serious since the end of the genre’s slightly belated Trente Glorieuses (roughly 1950s-1980s), this article offers some examples of how humorous writing has migrated toward high-literary crime fiction, as well as toward adjacent cultural spheres. Paying particular attention to the prevalence of dark humor in canonical crime fictions that play a decisive role in defining the archetypes of the genre, I argue both that humor deserves a more prominent place in histories of crime fiction, and that crime fiction deserves a larger consideration in histories of the vernacular turn in the modern novel. In the process, I give a preliminary account of the progressive redefinition of the styles of crime fiction found in both literary collections and specialized genre imprints in France.