Detective Fiction Research Articles

하드보일드 추리소설의 인종적 변용—월터 모즐리의 이지 롤린스 연작을 중심으로

This paper aims to closely examine the racial transformation of the traditional hard-boiled detective fiction in Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins Series. Although Mosley’s Easy Rawlins Series makes use of genre conventions of hard-boiled detective novels (such as displaying a pessimistic view of the world or introducing independent detectives), it establishes a new paradigm of race and criminality that goes against the tradition. While the ruling class is represented as the root of social evil in hard-boiled detective fiction, racism is the cause of social oppression and political corruption in the Easy Rawlins Series. When the hard-boiled detective is able to maintain absolute independence, Mosley's detective has to compromise with governmental authority due to his racial position. Whereas the hard-boiled detective novels define blackness as criminality, whiteness embodies criminality in the Easy Rawlins Series. This paper concludes that, unlike the traditional hard-boiled detective fiction which reaffirms racial hierarchies, Mosley’s Easy Rawlins Series presents a radically different type of hard-boiled detective novel which challenges the dominant structural ideologies of race.

A Comparative Study of Santosh Wagh and Inspector Gowda: Exploring Detective Archetypes

This paper presents a comparative analysis of Santosh Wagh from Private India by Ashwin Sanghi and James Patterson and Inspector Gowda from Anita Nair’s Chain of Custody. By examining their character traits, investigative methods, personal struggles, societal contexts, and how they align with classic detective archetypes, this study highlights the distinct ways these characters embody the evolution of Indian detective fiction. This analysis seeks to underscore how the blending of personal conflict and broader social critique contributes to the richness of the genre.

Policing the Catastrophe: History and Conspiracy in David Peace's Tokyo Trilogy

Abstract This essay focuses on the police protagonists in David Peace's Tokyo Trilogy and the historical mediations they perform in the worlds of the novels. It argues that these mediations are generated by the way Peace subverts the conventional narrative structure of historical detective fiction: rather than moving toward resolution—solving a crime—the object of detection is continually displaced to conspiracies with historical and political implications, thereby constituting different temporalities that do not move forward but rather repeat, circulate, or are perpetually delayed. Underlying these repetitions, transmissions, and premonitions are historical-political legacies of Japanese empire, war, and American anti-communist conspiracies, which open toward a critical-conspiratorial understanding of postwar Japan.

The influence of 'Golden Age' authors of detective fiction, in particular, D. L. Sayers, on the public opinion of dentists and dentistry.

With her wide readership and sympathetic and intelligent handling of dentists and dentistry in her detective novels and short stories, it is probable that Dorothy Leigh Sayers(1893-1957) influenced the public perception of dentists favourably, as being true professionals, particularly after the 1921 Act made it a fully closed specialty. Her encounter with a dental automaton seen when she was very young is acknowledged by her as a formative influence.

A gothic Taoism and its dual facets: possible worlds in The Haunted Monastery

Recent scholarship has argued for a Western basis for the Judge Dee Mysteries, a detective fiction series by Sinologist Robert van Gulik (1910–1967) set in Tang China. But these studies primarily focus on how Chinese elements are recreated to cater to Anglophone readers’ tastes, neglecting to discuss their actual Western origins in any detail. This paper will make the attempt by focusing on one of the novels, The Haunted Monastery, to investigate how Gothic Taoism is projected through the internal organization of the semantic universe (characters, settings, and conflicts) in the multiple worlds of this detective fiction. It observes how van Gulik recreates anti-religious conventions in the traditional Western Gothic novel and in Chinese courtroom fiction. This artistic innovation highlights the dual facets of Taoism in the story, as it navigates between the realms of crime and faith. On the one hand, it faces the purely divine world, while on the other, it faces the secular world dominated by limitless desire.

Indices of the Esoteric: Crime, Forensic Science, and Oral Culture

ABSTRACT: This essay explores the relationship between geography, epistemology, and genre in Nii Ayikwei Parkes's Tail of the Blue Bird (2009). More specifically, I will be discussing the perspectival modulation that both the novel and its protagonist undergo as a consequence of a simple journey into the Ghanaian provinces. Kayo Odamtten, a forensic pathologist, has been sent to investigate a suspected murder in the remote village of Sonokrom. Although he relies on standard forensic procedures when he first arrives in the village, Kayo is eventually forced to utilize other perspectives, other epistemologies, in order to solve the mystery. And as we shall see, this reorientation of the story also influences the novel at the level of discourse and genre, transforming a conventional work of detective fiction into something else altogether—something far more equivocal and difficult to categorize.

On the Hybridity of the Classic Occult Detective Story

Abstract: This paper reads fin-de-siècle and Edwardian British occult detective fiction as a form of proto-science fiction, suggesting that the epistemological focus on the occult typical of these texts can be usefully envisioned as formally and functionally equivalent to the focus of modern science fiction on orthodox science. Drawing from Stephen Halliwell's studies on mimesis and recent developments in the field of unnatural narratology, the paper thus shows how the subgenre of occult detective fiction anticipates and participates in the systematic rationalization of the impossible that distinguishes the discourse of modern science fiction.

The paradoxes of Roland Barthes’s fait-divers murders and Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Things external to the game’

ABSTRACT Characters in works of detective fiction often declare that the events in which they are caught up are more like detective fiction than reality. As a result, detective fiction is tensely present and absent in itself. In other words, this genre whose meaning corresponds so exactly with its detective solution is simultaneously one that strains against the textual parameters of that same solution. This paradox is here mapped onto Roland Barthes’s description of the structure of the fait divers, an unclassifiable event that always intends towards classification, and thus towards its own disappearance. Barthes’s analysis focuses on the way in which the fait divers loses its identity when external, taxonomical explanations are brought to bear on it. The same interplay of inside and outside is exposed in Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’. By revealing how that famous text both coincides with and lies outside its story of detection, this article will debunk Poe’s orangutan solution and demonstrate the way in which, through its own failure, Dupin’s investigation inoculates the entire genre that follows it, ensuring that no fictional solution can ever be definitive and no text with a crime ever neatly and comprehensively classified as ‘detective fiction’.

Detective literature - a panoramic approach

This paper is divided into two parts: in part I we address the origins and characteristics of the detective fiction literature and in part II we address detective fiction literature written by Brazilians. In each of these parts, there are three subdivisions organized as follows: Edgar Allan Poe and the birth of the detective genre; Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot; On the detective fiction noir (part I); Around the Brazilian detective; Brazil: on crime and guilt; The expansion of Brazilian detective fiction literature in the XXIst century (part II).

Val McDermid's Lindsay Gordon: A Revolutionary Portrait in Tartan- Noir

Considered as one of the most influential crime fiction writers of our time, Val McDermid combines her works with Scotland’s city and town culture. Having the opportunity to closely observe the problems faced by the working class in the town of Fife where she spent her childhood, McDermid enriches her fiction with these narratives. These experiences led her to be the voice of the forgotten, oppressed, and marginalised segments of society in her later writing life. Also challenging the male-dominated structure of traditional crime fiction, McDermid brings a new atmosphere to crime fiction by creating fictional characters such as Lindsay Gordon. Classic crime fiction, which spent its golden age under the hegemony of British writers in the 1930s, presents the reader with stories in which typical male detectives are the protagonists. By the 1970s, Scottish crime fiction, or Tartan-Noir writers, produced essential works in this field. McDermid, who took the title of the Queen of crime fiction, puts women at the centre of her narrative, and in this way, she differs from male Tartan-Noir writers. In this study, McDermid, who deconstructed the male-dominated structure in traditional detective fiction and placed strong female detectives such as Lindsay Gordon into fiction, will be examined. Additionally, McDermid’s criticisms of the Margaret Thatcher period will be explained to readers with examples from her novels.

Christie'nin Ölümle Randevu ve Ölüm Adası Eserlerinde Doğulu Odaklanılanın Karşılaştırmalı Anlatıbilimsel Analizi

The implications of Agatha Christie’s works are multifarious; however, her texts are understudied when compared to those of her contemporaries. Much has been written about the generic qualities of her detective fiction, and the representation of women and class hierarchies in her works. However, her texts are rarely subjected to narratological analysis. Her works of detective fiction Appointment with Death (1938) and A Caribbean Mystery (1964) are set in former colonies of Britain, and through Western narrators and focal characters, Christie presents an Orientalist perspective. While the onlookers and the tellers are Westerners in these novels, the objects of their narration are oriental landscapes and people. As the image of the objects of focalization presented to readers in a literary text is constructed by the focalizers, the narrative abounds with their subjective views. By closely reading a text, a reader can gain insight into the focalizer and its relationship to the focalized. In these novels, the hegemony of the West over the East, and the Westerners’ biased perceptions are made apparent. Through a comparative narratological analysis of the focalized objects in these novels, this study aims to shed new light on how Christie’s novels lay bare the biased attitudes of Westerners towards the Oriental focalized.

Thick as Thieves: Mothers, Gypsies, & Criminals in Enola Holmes’ Victorian England

In her 2006 Young Adult novel, The Case of the Missing Marquess, Nancy Springer narrativises Enola Holmes as Sherlock Holmes’ intrepid and extraordinarily intelligent sister, a young woman with the ability to challenge even that great detective's iconic deductive abilities. I suggest that this overtly feminist impulse in rewriting the Victorian world of Conan Doyle is supplemented in Springer's novel with a nod toward the politics of intersectionality which attends to the ways in which gendered, class-based, and racialised identities become relational in an axiomatics of capitalist-colonialism. Particularly in conversation with Conan Doyle's 1892 short story, ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’, Springer's narrative takes a meta-critical neo-Victorian stance in encouraging its young audience to do three important things: first, mine the subtext of Conan Doyle's detective fiction for the broad anxieties it points to in imperial Victorian culture; second, probe the conditions of colonial commerce under which identities based in gender, race, and class differentials intersect with one another; and third, ask how to develop a decolonial praxis that in exposing such intersections, can avoid isolationist critical proclivities, and embrace instead a transnational and comparative sensibility of reading that is alive to at once specific and interrelated disempowerments.

Jane Custance Baker. Fear and Clothing. Dress in English Detective Fiction Between the First and Second World Wars

Jane Custance Baker. <i>Fear and Clothing. Dress in English Detective Fiction Between the First and Second World Wars</i>

‘The bloody fingers … bear witness’: Sign Language and the Mute Detective in Susan Hopley and The Trail of the Serpent

In her examination of signing characters in works of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, Jennifer Esmail highlights deaf characters’ absence in Victorian fiction. Mutism is more common, for example, in the character of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's working-class, fingerspelling Detective Peters (70, 10n24). Even so, sign language – seen as ‘primitive’ and ‘lacking [in] intellectual […] rigor’ – was rarely represented (Esmail 3). Dickens, Collins and Braddon, proto-detective novelists themselves, were preceded by Catherine Crowe, whose 1841 novel Susan Hopley features Julie le Moine, a female, cross-dressing sleuth whose mutism does not prevent her from testifying using ‘signs’ and ‘the finger alphabet’ (III.100, 125). Julie's undercover work not only crosses class, gender, and genre boundaries, but her non-verbal evidence challenges women's exclusion from ‘“masculine” systems of representation’ symbolised by legal parlance (Irigaray 85). When detective fiction pits the private eye against traditional jurisprudential structures, the courtroom becomes a space where classed and gendered hierarchies inform testimonial evidence, reinforcing exclusionary principles that disenfranchise the ‘Other’. The sign language, fingerspelling and lip-reading of Julie le Moine, Joseph Peters and Richard Marsh's Judith Lee expose ableist and sexist barriers that seek to expunge the detectives from the legal record by excluding them from public speech.

Science, Folklore, and Ecology of Knowledges in Aoyama’s Detective Conan Anime

During the Anthropocene, science and folklore have been efficient explanatory models of the world. However, numerous studies suggest a convergence of both perspectives in contemporary mass media productions, being Japanese animation a clear example. The aim of the research presented here was to analyse how science and folklore are integrated and opposed in Aoyama’s Detective Conan, an anime where cases often happen in rural Japan and where folk references confront Conan’s detective reasoning. To reach this objective, a comprehensive qualitative and quantitative study of the presence of folklore in this work—through aspects such as characterisation or narratives—was conducted in 75 cases and over 155 episodes which include references to folklore in their background, plot, or characters. The analysis revealed that, when folklore and science interact, rational thinking is usually preferred over folk beliefs; characters are stereotyped according to their genre or origins; and, more importantly, supernatural beliefs can be included in detective fiction without being ridiculed by the most rational characters.

A Socially Realistic Study of Crime and Corruption in P.D. James’ Works

P.D. James is a well - known author of both crime and mysteries who is recognized with enlarging the mystery subgenre. Even though she uses aspects of traditional detective fiction, James is particularly concerned in establishing the psychological motivations of her characters. James is renowned for her sophisticated written style, which is accentuated by literary allusions and quotations, as well as for the vivid, realistic characters and locations she creates. Writing detective fiction is one of James's passions and she strives to use the techniques that make "serious fiction" gratifying while still adhering to the genre's rules. She was interested in realism as early as her writings show. Her literary style is distinct from the classic "country house mystery" of conventional British detective fiction, in which static characters exist solely to further the plot of the mystery. Despite being constructed in the traditional "whodunnit" way, these novels rely on developed, convincing characterizations.

Detective Fiction in Victorian England

This paper explores the origins and evolution of detective fiction, debunking the myth surrounding SherlockHolmes’ famous quote and highlighting his enduring popularity. It traces the genre’s inception back to Edgar Allan Poe’sThe Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1841 and underscores the societal and political changes in 18th and 19th centuryEngland that paved the way for its rise. With the growth of the middle class and the demand for accessible entertainment,periodicals emerged as a key medium for short stories, with detective fiction becoming a prominent genre. This paper alsoemphasizes how Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories achieved commercial success and influenced a generationof writers, while the public’s passionate response to his character’s temporary demise underscores the genre’s profoundimpact on readers and its enduring popularity.

Exploring the Psychological Depths: the Role of Psychology in Writing Detective Fiction and Crime Detection

This research paper delves into the profound role of psychology in both crafting captivating detective fiction and aiding in the detection of crimes, as depicted in the works of Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, featuring their iconic detectives Sherlock Holmes and Miss Jane Marple. Focusing on "Murder at the Vicarage," "Sleeping Murder," "The Sign of Four," "A Study in Scarlet," and "The Hound of the Baskervilles," this paper investigates the intricate interplay between psychology, character development, crime-solving techniques, and the exploration of the conscious and unconscious mind. By incorporating Sigmund Freud's theory of the conscious and unconscious mind, this research highlights the nuanced psychological depths of the characters, the influence of psychological elements on the plot, and the application of psychological insights in detecting crimes. The research paper begins by emphasizing the significance of psychology in writing detective fiction, noting its power in crafting multi-dimensional characters. It explores the role of psychological depth in character development, enabling authors to create complex individuals with intricate motivations and behaviors. Additionally, it discusses the importance of psychological motivations and complexities in plot development, as these elements contribute to building suspense and psychological tension, captivating readers throughout the narrative. In the realm of crime detection, the paper examines Sherlock Holmes' approach, renowned for his deductive reasoning. It analyzes his methodology, focusing on his ability to uncover psychological clues, motivations, and the interplay between the conscious and unconscious mind. Furthermore, the research delves into Miss Jane Marple's investigative style, characterized by her inductive insights. It explores her talent for unveiling psychological patterns, behaviors, and the influence of the conscious and unconscious mind on her problem-solving abilities. The comparative analysis section contrasts the approaches of Holmes and Marple, highlighting their different thinking styles and the significance of Freudian concepts in understanding motivations and behaviour. It emphasizes the interplay between the conscious and unconscious mind in detective work, showcasing how these elements contribute to a holistic understanding of the characters and their investigative processes. Moreover, the research paper discusses the real-world implications of employing psychology in crime detection. It explores the practical application of psychological insights in detecting and understanding criminal behavior. Lessons are drawn from Holmes and Marple's methods, emphasizing the importance of psychological profiling and ethical considerations in utilizing psychological insights in investigative processes. In conclusion, this research paper provides a comprehensive understanding of the role of psychology in writing detective fiction and its application in crime detection. By incorporating Sigmund Freud's theory of the conscious and unconscious mind, it uncovers the psychological depths of characters, explores the impact of psychological elements on the plot, and highlights the practical application of psychological insights in detecting crimes. The findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the complexities of the human mind, enhancing the appreciation of psychology's role in both literature and real-life crime detection.

Mindscapes of Mystery: Comparative Approaches in the Works of Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie

Mystery fiction, also known as detective fiction or crime fiction, is a literary genre that revolves around solving a puzzle or mystery often related to the criminal events. It typically features a central mystery, such as murder, theft, or other mysterious circumstances, that serves as the driving force of the narrative. This research delves into the comparative approaches adopted by two celebrated mystery writers, Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, in their literary works. With a specific focus on their iconic detectives, Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple, respectively, the study thoroughly analyzes various aspects of their storytelling techniques. By closely examining their works, the research sheds light on the distinct writing styles, plot structures, characterizations, and thematic elements employed by each author. This exploration provides valuable insights into the individual contributions of Doyle and Christie to the mystery fiction genre. Furthermore, the study explores the influence of historical context on the development of their characters and intricately woven mysteries. It unravels how societal and cultural factors impacted their narratives, adding depth to the characters and their adventures. The findings of this comparative analysis not only offer a deeper appreciation of the enduring appeal of Holmes and Miss Marple as fictional detectives but also demonstrate the broader impact of Doyle and Christie on the landscape of detective literature.

Detective Fiction: Birth and Rise

Detective fiction, nowadays, is considered to be a subject of academic research. Detective Fiction has always maintained immense popularity among the readers. Despite its popular status, the genre never encouraged academic research during the eighteenth and nineteenth century. This paper tries to attempt a study on the birth of detective fiction ; its growth and rise.