Classic Detective Fiction Research Articles

Criminal Bodies in Popular Victorian and Modernist Detective Fiction

This paper will examine the representation of the criminal body in detective fiction from the popular Victorian story magazine The Strand in its relationship to modernist experimental fiction which draws on the detective genre. Offering a broad survey of the Sherlock Holmes and other detective stories published in the first fourteen years of The Strand (1891-1904), the paper will argue that the period’s theories of criminal anthropology and hereditary criminality are consistently called into question in the popular magazine, suggesting that late-Victorian detective fiction was ambivalent toward theories of biologically determined criminality and was alive to problems of racial and class prejudice, corruption, and misidentification in criminal detection. Moving from the popular press to the canon, the paper will then make a claim for reading literary texts like G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare and Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale alongside the classic detective fiction of the popular press. To understand these novels in their engagements with classic detective fiction is to reconceptualize the notion of a neat divide between the period’s genres of fiction and to reach for a broader frame of literary responses to early criminology.

Editors' Introduction

Editors' Introduction

The Comfort of Crime: The Appeal of Formulaic Fiction during the Pandemic

2020 was taxing, and one of the comforting ways of dealing with the uncertainty the COVID-19 pandemic has brought was reading. It seems hardly surprising that the British turned to crime fiction, which they not only avidly consume but also successfully produce. Moreover, 2020 marked the centenary of the publication of The Mysterious Affair at Styles, a novel that introduced Agatha Christie and her first detective, Hercule Poirot. The anniversary partly accounts for the resurgence of interest in classic detective fiction. Over the last one hundred years the genre has undergone various developments and diversifications, but this article offers a look back at its past. Acknowledging Jesper Gulddal and Stewart King’s objections to defining crime fiction as formulaic (2020), it draws on John G. Cawelti’s classic work on the mystery and detective story formulas (1976) to addresses the popularity of crime fiction during the pandemic. It contends that while the immense appeal of the crime genre stems from its adaptability, it is the oft-criticised basic mystery formula that offers the greatest comfort during such challenging times.

«Se hace lo que se puede y con lo que se tiene a mano»: autoficción y parodia policial en Caballeriza de Rodrigo Rey Rosa

This article examines the novel Caballeriza (2006) by Rodrigo Rey Rosa from the point of view of the Latin American detective crime fiction and more specifically of the Central American one. In the first instance, it reviews the way in which the novel admits a conscious distancing from the historical subgenres of the classic detective fiction. Later deepens the deconstruction that makes the novel of this genre from aesthetic procedures that do not belongs to the dogmatism of the classic genre, such as: 1) self-fiction and 2) detective fiction parody. It concludes that the novel provides new elements for the study of the post-war Central American novel.

Something a Bit Queer: Hunches, Hauntings, and Hangovers in Leonardo Padura's La neblina del ayer

As numerous scholars have noted, late nineteenth and early twentieth-century crime fiction is predominantly produced in those countries that putatively enjoy stable political structures and rule of law. The crime fiction produced by major Latin American authors—perhaps not surprisingly—does not share this underlying faith in the capacity of the state to produce justice; instead, it often questions the close relationship between evidence-based investigation and the discovery of culpability that drives classic detective fiction (e.g., Arthur Conan Doyle; Agatha Christie). In this essay, I examine the work of Cuban author Leonardo Padura Fuentes, a highly popular and acclaimed writer of contemporary crime fiction. I analyze how Padura both faithfully produces yet also fundamentally interrogates the genre. I will argue that Padura's work proves fundamentally queer as it calls into question the heteronormative, patriarchal, and imperial assumptions that essentially undergird detective fiction.

‘When ‘tis Night, Death is Green’: Vegetal Time in Nineteenth-Century Econoir

ABSTRACTThe inscrutability of plant life has made it an intriguing player in detective fiction, particularly in that which rubs against the speculative. Botanicals began figuring as de facto killers in crime fiction of the long nineteenth century, herein called econoir. While classic detective fiction undergirds traditional sociocultural power, reinforcing normativity, econoir texts decenter this nexus, in particular by confronting human time with vegetal time. In doing so, such texts destabilise the very equilibrium crime fiction narratives typically fight so hard to achieve, juxtaposing the rational world of the text with alternative, ecological logic. This reconfiguration suggests alternative ways of narrativising, knowing, and being in the world.

Traducir el policial. Aproximaciones al género en La traducción (1998), de Pablo De Santis

The scattered and limited studies on the work of Pablo De Santis tend to consider that his texts are crossed by the detective genre, but at the same time there are no productions justifying this claim. Therefore, in this paper I focus on La traduccion (originally published in 1998 and finalist of the Premio Planeta in 1997), with the intention of analyzing the ways in which this novel uses and works with different aspects of the detective genre. First, I analyze the double spatial delimitation and the presence of a foreign language as elements that allow us to associate La traduccion with the classic detective fiction. Then I focus on the problem of the nationalization of detective fiction and the figure of the superintendent, two factors that allow us to associate the novel with the local tradition of detective fiction. I also analyze the history of sea lions, parallel to the main plot, in which I find ways to set a link with the hard-boiled fiction. Finally, based on the various issues identified, I finish the paper with a reflection on the possible uses of the concept of genre. With the sum of these elements, I see that La traduccion expresses a deep knowledge and precise work of De Santis with the detective genre, even though the author denies its character of detective fiction.

Detecting Winnifred Eaton

In her recent introduction to Winnifred Eaton’s Marion: The Story of an Artist’s Model (1916), Karen E. H. Skinazi explores the relationship between racial ambiguity—that of both the anonymous author and the heroines in Marion and its predecessor, Me: A Book of Remembrance (1915)—and the audience’s ability to detect racial coding. “Me’s success,” Skinazi states, “has been predicated on a mystery that allowed each reader the chance to become a literary Sherlock Holmes, cracking the codes of its vault of shocking secrets” (xvii). Later, Skinazi writes that a New York Times reviewer, playing detective, solves Eaton’s racial passing utilizing the science of detection a la Edgar Allan Poe (xxi-xxii). 1 Skinazi’s allusions to the art of detection, although brief, are astute, leading to this essay’s rereading of Eaton’s legacy through the lens of detection and the anxieties produced by its failures, especially the threat of racial passing. It is no coincidence that Eaton published her fiction at a time when both classic detective fiction and African American passing tales were at the peak of their popularity. Few critics have examined Eaton’s role in the detective genre. 2 This essay responds to this oversight by arguing that Eaton’s reliance on a trope of racial and ethnic passing, both in her choice of pseudonym and in her Japanese romances, cannot be fully appreciated without situating her within the context of the panic about detecting passing that swept America during the first quarter of the twentieth century. The unique lens of detective fiction allows us further to conceptualize Eaton’s role as a founding figure of Asian American fiction. This essay also highlights Eaton’s familiarity with rules of genre, particularly detective fiction and African American passing narratives, and her participation in the construction of racial epistemologies that were then being codified by law and perpetuated by scientific racism. Finally, Eaton’s practice and promotion of undetection, the tension between detection and revelation and knowing and telling, reveals her participation in and resistance to the detective genre itself. This reading re-envisions Eaton’s legacy to Asian American Studies via Xiaojing Zhou’s call for resistance to and transformation of traditional hegemonic

Middlebrow feminism in classic British detective fiction: the female gentleman

Middlebrow feminism in classic British detective fiction: the female gentleman

The Relevant Clues: Information Behaviour and Assessment in Classic Detective Fiction

The paper presents the first of two research project phases. It examines narrative analysis of fiction as an appropriate research methodology for studying information behaviour, using detective novels published 1920 - 1950. An information behaviour model has been generated, to be tested in Phase II against established models and other research.Cette communication présente la première de deux phases d’un projet de recherche. Il s’agit d’une analyse narrative d’œuvres de fiction comme méthodologie de recherche appropriée pour l’étude des comportements informationnels dans les romans policiers publiés entre 1920 et 1950. Le modèle de comportement informationnel qui s’en dégage sera testé lors de la seconde phase et sera comparé aux modèles et aux travaux de recherche existants.

Detective Fiction and “The Original Crime”: Baudrillard, Calle, Poe

Baudrillard appeared uninterested in the detective story and his work barely features in studies of the genre. This essay argues, however, that analyzing detective fiction from a Baudrillardian perspective – concentrating in particular on how the genre is structured around a tension between the forms Baudrillard termed “production” and “seduction” – can nonetheless illuminate how it works and enable us to reassess how far classic nineteenth-century detective fiction adhered to the principles of scientific logic, panopticism, and positivism. The essay begins by exploring detective fiction generally in relation to Baudrillardian approaches to the object and seduction before looking at two very different examples of detective fiction, but which turn out to explore the opposition between production and seduction in similar ways: the parodic detective dramas of the contemporary conceptual artist Sophie Calle, and Edgar Allan Poe's classic detective story, “The Purloined Letter.”

Piecing Together the Past

Writers and filmmakers in Taiwan have sought to use the narrative techniques of classic detective fiction to recover events of the Nationalist government–imposed White Terror of the early 1950s to bring the once-concealed past to light. Fiction writer Chen Yingzhen (Ch’en Ying-chen) pioneered this technique in short fiction written in 1983 to bring before the public the events of the White Terror and to consider how guilt for the atrocities should be affixed. Wan Jen’s (Wan Ren) 1995 feature film Super Citizen Ko explores possibilities for memorialization and the notion of victimhood in its recovery of the Nationalist repression of progressive political movements and its impact on a former political prisoner and his family. Finally, Tseng Wen-Chen (Zeng Wenzhen) in her documentary Spring: The Story of Xu Jinyu offers a portrait of a woman White Terror survivor turned political activist living in an era when the White Terror has been commemorated but remains poorly understood by the younger generation.

El policial palimpséstico en “Marta Odera, monja” de Marisa Grinstein

This article investigates the emergence of detective fiction and film from 1994 to the present. The corpus appears during the government of Carlos Menem and its intent to insert Argentina into a globalized economy. Poverty, insecurity, and violence prevail in Argentine society, and many detective novels, based on real-life murders, appear in 1994. Moreover, this type of literature continues to proliferate in the twenty-first century. In this essay, I explore one of the many stories written by Marisa Grinstein. I begin with the newspaper article and trace its transformation into short fiction and television series. The articles about the homicide follow the tendencies of the sensationalist yellow press. The author and the film director of “Marta Odera, monja,” however, transform the events, following and also subverting the characteristics of the classic detective fiction and the hard-boiled. In doing so, these recreations of this particular murder case denounce the domestic violence that exists in Argentine society.

Coherent Labyrinths

This essay compares the presentation of evidence in classic detective fiction and in the author's forthcoming interactive digital ethnography. The basis of comparison is the graph, a concept familiar in the study of topology and artificial intelligence that can be used to model explorations of labyrinths and mazes of linked ideas. In the present study of a Perry Mason novel, the essay distinguishes three kinds of research explorations. These have close parallels to the way that users can conduct virtual fieldwork as they investigate audiovisual evidence in the multimedia ethnography, Maasai Interactive. In addition to discussing patterns in the ethnographic data, that application is designed in a way that facilitates users' discoveries of new and unanticipated ideas. [detective fiction, experimental ethnography, hypermedia, interactive media, Maasai, research methodology]

Cherchez les Femmes: Someone's in the Kitchen with Charlotte: Classic Detective Fiction, Victorian Womanhood, and the Private Sphere in Anne Perry's Charlotte Pitt Series

Cherchez les Femmes: Someone's in the Kitchen with Charlotte: Classic Detective Fiction, Victorian Womanhood, and the Private Sphere in Anne Perry's Charlotte Pitt Series

What's In a Name? A Seventeenth-Century Book, Detective Fiction, and Calvino's Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore

This essay examines Italo Calvino's novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveler as the author's experiment with the conventions of the classic detective fiction formula. Calvino launches two parallel investigations: the epistemological one carried out by his protagonist, the Reader, and the ontological one carried out by us, the readers. The two investigations, the essay argues, come together at the moment of the novel's denouement, but where in traditional detective fiction this occurs at the end of the narrative, in Calvino's it is hidden in the center. Numerous clues interspersed throughout the novel (as are many red herrings as well) lead to some of the keys to Calvino's game of cloak and dagger, the most significant being in the names of the protagonists. Chief among these is that of Ermes Marana, whose connection to a homonymous writer of the seventeenth-century brings to light issues of authenticity and authorship.

Detective Fiction in the Archives: Court Records and the Uses of Law in Late Medieval England

archives, but the process of building a case and of making logical inferences from scattered clues is sometimes remarkably similar. Historians, however, are no longer permitted the certainty that marked the conclusions of classic detective fiction: we are rarely, if ever, sure any more about who dunnit (whatever 'it' might be) or why. This constant epistemic doubt can be disorienting. On the one hand, many archival detectives, myself included, have, like our progenitor Jules Michelet, an essentially romantic sense that we can virtually see the dead through the dust of the document. The piece of parchment or paper, in some cases actually held by the hand of the person whom we are investigating, seems to create a literally tangible connection.2 On the other hand, both theory and the practical problems of research warn us continually that this vision of the dead is a mirage, or at least a highly refracted image: each new clue can throw all previous evidence into completely new light, effectively changing the direction of the narrative running inside our heads. My goal in this article is to explore two issues. The first is a problem in legal and social history: how did late medieval Londoners use the legal and archival powers of governing authorities in order to negotiate their lives? The second is a problem in historical methodology: how can thinking about the archives as historical agents rather than as inert repositories of evidence refine the way we use historical documents? Over the last several years, while working on the legal history of late medieval London, I have become interested in considering medieval legal history from the vantage point of the 'archival turn', an approach to working with archival sources influenced especially by Arlette Farge's Gout de I 'archive and Jacques Derrida's Archive Fever.3 Briefly stated, taking the archival turn demands that historians be more self-conscious not only about the meaning of the documents they study, but also about how the documents came to be archived in the first place, in whose interest they have been officially preserved, and how the

Twentieth-century crime fiction

1. CLASSIC DETECTIVE FICTION The turn of the century: Sherlock Holmes and his contemporaries Classic detection in the interwar years Transforming the tradition in the 1950s and 1960s 2. HARD-BOILED DETECTIVE FICTION The Black Mask boys The mid-century paperback revolution Contemporary investigations 3. TRANSGRESSION AND PATHOLOGY The Prohibition-era gangsters The killers inside us Serial killers, pathologists, and police procedurals 4. CRIME FICTION AS SOCIO-POLITICAL CRITIQUE Despairing of the Depression Despoiling Florida The politics of self-enrichment 5. BLACK APPROPRIATIONS 'A Harlem of my mind' Writing the other Los Angeles Diasporic identities in contemporary Britain Detectives, mammies, bitches, and whores 6. REGENDERING THE GENRE Mothering feminist crime fiction in the 1970s Butch vs. femme in the Reganite '80s Unsolved crimes of the '90s Into the twenty-first century

Iain Sinclair's Unsound Detectives

The heroes of detective fiction are revered for the intellectual brilliance that allows them to unravel mysteries that appear insoluble to ordinary mortals. Yet the stature of figures like Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot is continually compromised by the relatively low status of the literary genre in which they perform their dazzling feats of reason. John T. Irwin asks a simple but essential question about detective stories: “How does one write analytic detective fiction as high art when the genre's basic structure, its central narrative mechanism, seems to discourage the unlimited rereading associated with serious writing?” (1168). Irwin quotes one of Jorge Luis Borges's characters who, “steeped in detective stories, thought that the solution of a mystery is always less impressive than the mystery itself (1169). How can a writer capture, and sustain throughout a whole story, the fascinating atmosphere of uncertainty that exists in classic detective fiction prior to the “always less impressive“ solution of the case? An attempt to do this can be found in works that have come to be known as metaphysical detective stories1 (Haycraft 78; Holquist 154).

Theory and practice of classic detective fiction

Preface Theoretical Approaches to the Genre Canonization, Modern Literature, and the Detective Story by John G. Cawelti Shamus-a-um: Having the Quality of a Classical Detective by Timothy W. Boyd and Carolyn Higbie Ideal Helpmate: Detective Character as (Fictional) Object and Ideal Imago by Timothy R. Prchal Politics of Secrecy and Publicity: Functions of Hidden Stories in Some Recent British Mystery Fiction by Peter Huhn Not so Much Whodunnit as Whoizzit: Margaret Millar's Command of a Metonymic Sub-Genre by Ann Thompson and John O. Thompson Parody and Detective Fiction by Janice Mant The Game's Afoot: Predecessors and Pursuits of a Postmodern Detective, by Kathleen Belin Owen Agatha Christie Novels and British Detective Fiction Christie's Narrative Games by Robert Merrill It Was the Mark of Cain: Agatha Christie and the Murder of the Mystery by Robin Woods Impossible Murderers: Agatha Christie and the Community of Readers by Ina Rae Hark The Daughters of His Manhood: Christie and the Golden Age of Detective Fiction by Mary Anne Ackershoek I Am Duchess of Malfi Still: Identity-Death Nexus in Duchess of Malfi and Skull Beneath the Skin by Carolyn F. Scott An Unsuitable for Anyone: Filthy Trade in P. D. James by Marnie Jones and Barbara Barker Between Men: How Ruth Rendell Reads for Gender by Martha Stoddard Holmes Class, Gender, and the Possibilities of Detection in Anne Perry's Victorian Reconstructions by Iska S. Alter A Suitable Job for a Woman: Sexuality, Motherhood, and Professionalism in Gaudy Night by Jasmine Y. Hall Bureaucrat as Reader: Detective Novel in the Context of Middle-Class Culture by James E. Bartell Index