The Art of Detective Fiction

256 Pages·2000·24.12 MB·English

by  Warren Chernaik

The Art of Detective Fiction
Also by Warren Chernaik
THE POETRY Of LIMITATION: A Study of Edmund Waller
THE POET'S TIME: Politics and Religion in the Work of Andrew Marvell
SEXUAL FREEDOM IN RESTORATION LITERATURE
* MODERNIST WRITERS AND THE MARKET PLACE (co-editor)
* MARVELL AND LIBERTY (co-editor)
TEXTUAL MONOPOLIES: Literary Copyright and the Public Domain (co-editor)
Also by Martin Swales
ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
THE GERMAN NOVELLE
THE GERMAN BILDUNGSROMAN
THOMAS MANN
GOETHE'S "WERTfIER"
EPOCHENBUCH REALISMUS
Also by Robert Vi/a in
HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL AND fRENCH SYMBOLIST POETRY
(forthcoming)
YVAN GOLL - CLAIRE GOLL: Texts and Contexts (co-editor witiz
Eric Robertson)
* From the same publisilers
The Art of Detective
Fiction
Edited by
Warren Chernaik
Martin Swales
and
Robert Vilain
palgrave
macmillan
* Selection and editorial matter © Warren Chernaik, Martin Swales and Robert Vilain 2000
Introduction © Martin Swales 2000
Chapters 1-16 © the various contributors 2000
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2000 978-0-312-22989-4
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ISBN 978-0-333-74601-1
ISBN 978-1-349-62770-7 ISBN 978-1-349-62768-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-62768-4
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Transferred to digital printing 2002
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Notes on the Contributors viii
Introduction xi
Martin Swales
1 Poe and the Beautiful Segar Girl 1
Josef Skvorecky
2 Body Language: a Study of Death and Gender
in Crime Fiction 10
Sarah Dzmant
3 Fascination and Nausea: Finding Out the
Hard-Boiled Way 21
David Trotter
4 The Writers Who Knew Too Much: Populism and
Paradox in Detective Fiction's Golden Age 36
David Glover
5 Sherlock's Children: the Birth of the Series 50
Martin Priestman
6 Making the Dead Speak: Spiritualism and
Detective Fiction 60
Chris Willis
7 The Locus of Disruption: Serial Murder and
Generic Conventions in Detective Fiction 75
David Schmid
8 The Detective as Clown: a Taxonomy 90
Audrey Laski
9 Mean Streets and English Gardens 104
Warren Chernaik
10 Authority, Social Anxiety and the Body in Crime
Fiction: Patricia Cornwell's Unnatural Exposure 124
Peter Messent
v
vi Contents
11 Desires and Devices: On Women Detectives in Fiction 138
Birgitta Berglund
12 A Band of Sisters 153
Margaret Kinsman
13 An Urban Myth: Fantomas and the Surrealists 170
Robert Vilain
14 Bleeding the Thriller: Alain Robbe-Grillet's
Intertextual Crimes 188
Jonathan c. Brown
15 Oedipus Express: Trains, Trauma and
Detective Fiction 201
Laura MarClls
16 Open Letter to Detectives and Psychoanalysts:
Analysis and Reading 222
Patrick {french
Index 2::11
Acknowledgements
The editors would like to thank the British Academy, Pro Helvetia
and the School of Advanced Study, University of London, for grants
in support of the international conference 'Murder in Bloomsbury'.
The conference was held in June 1996 under the auspices of the School
of Advanced Study, and with the collaboration of the University of
London Institutes of English Studies, Germanic Studies and Romance
Studies. We should also like to thank the many scholars from Australia,
Austria, Canada, Denmark, India, Italy, Germany, Spain, Sweden,
Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States of America
who gave papers at the conference, especially John Bayley, Robert
Barnard, Renate Bbschenstein, Karl Guthke, Stephen Knight, Klaus
Liiderssen and Morag Shiach. We should like to thank the novelist Liza
Cody for her spirited and illuminating public interview with B.]. Rahn,
one of the highspots of the conference, and Larry Beinhart for his mas
terful inaugural lecture. We are indebted also to Professor B.]. Rahn,
Professor John Flood and Professor Annette Lavers for their advice and
assistance, and to Rebecca Dawson, Karin Hellmer and Jane Lewin for
their help in organizing the 1996 conference. Special thanks are due
also to Charmian Hearne at Macmillan for her support and assistance
in producing this volume of essays.
We are grateful to Capra Press for permission to include extracts
from two books by Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar), Of Crime Writing
and Self-Portrait: Ceaselessly into the Past; to The Armchair Detective for
material from interviews published in that journal; and to Chatto
and Windus for permission to include an excerpt from Philip Kerr,
A Philosophical Investigation.
vii
Notes on the Contributors
Birgitta Berglund is Lecturer in English at Lund University, Sweden. She
is the author of Woman's Whole Existence: the HOllse as an Image in the
Novels of Ann Radcliffe, Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen (1993). She is
a member of the Swedish Detective Fiction Society and has lectured
widely on women writers and the role of women in detective fiction.
Jonathan C. Brown is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow affiliated
to the French Department at University College London. He did his
first degree at Cambridge and went on to do a PhD at UCL. He is cur
rently working on a book entitled The French Writer-Filmmakers: from
Intervention to Interplay.
Warren Chernaik is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of
London, Visiting Professor at the University of Southampton, and
Senior Research Fellow, Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced
Studies, University of London. His publications include The Poetry
of Limitation: a Study of Edmund Waller (1968), The Poet's Time: Politics
and Religion in the Work of Andrew Marvell (1983), and Sexual Freedom
in Restoration Literature (1995). He is co-editor of two other volumes
of essays published by Macmillan in association with the Institute of
English Studies, Modernist Writers and the Marketplace (1996) and Marvell
and Liberty (1999), and of Textual Monopolies: Literary Copyright and the
Public Domain (1997).
Sarah Dunant is a novelist, cultural commentator and broadcaster. She
was written eight crime thriller novels, including Fatlands (1993), Under
my Skin (1995), Transgressions (1997), and the recent Mapping the Edge
(1999), and has edited two books of essays, The War of the Words
(1994), on the political correctness debate and (with Roy Porter) The
Age of Anxiety (1995), on Millennia! anxieties.
Patrick ffrench is Lecturer in French at University College London.
He is the author of The Time of Thcory: a History of 'Tel Quel' (1996) and
of The Cut: Reading GeO/ge Bataille's 'His to ire de l'rei/' (1999), and the
editor, with Roland-Fran<;:ois Lack, of The 'Tel Quel' Rcader. He is also
the author of a number of articles on critical theory and on French
literature.
viii
Notes all the Contributors ix
David Glover is Lecturer in English at the University of Southampton.
His most recent book is Vampires, Mummies and Liberals: Bram Stoker
and the Politics of Popular Fiction (1996), and he has published widely
on popular culture and cultural theory. He is Editor of the journal New
Formations.
Margaret Kinsman is Senior Lecturer in English at South Bank
University. She is the author of articles on crime fiction and mystery
writer profiles in the St James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers, Women
Times Three, Mystery and Suspense Writers in the Scribners Writers Series,
and the forthcoming Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writers and
Diversity and Detective Fiction. She is a member of the Popular Crime
Association's crime and mystery fiction caucus and the British Crime
Writer's Association. A longer work on Sara Paretsky is in progress.
Audrey Laski is retired from running the Education Department at the
Central School of Speech and Drama. She has published six novels,
none of them a detective story, and is working on a book about serial
detectives.
Laura Marcus is Reader in English at the University of Sussex. Her pub
lications include Auto/biographical Discourses (1994) and Virginia Woolf
(1997). She has also edited Twelve Women Detective Stories (1997) and
Marie Belloc Lowndes, The Lodger (1996). She is currently working on
The Tenth Muse: Cinema and Modernism.
Peter Messent is Reader in Modern American Literature at the University
of Nottingham. He is the author of New Readings in the American Novel
(1990, 1998) and Mark Twain (1997), and editor of Criminal Proceedings:
the Contempormy American Crime Novel (1997). He is working on a study
of the short fiction of Mark Twain.
Martin Priestman is Reader in English at Roehampton Institute
London. He was educated at the Universities of Cambridge and Sheffield,
and his publications include Cowper's 'Task': Structure and Influence
(1983), Detective Fiction and Literature: the Figure on the Carpet (1990), and
Crime Fiction from Poe to the Present (1998). He has a book forthcoming,
Romantic Atheism: PoetlY and Freeti1ougilt, 1780-1830, and has been
commissioned to edit The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction.
David Schmid is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at
the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he teaches classes in