Watching the Detectives: Essays on Crime Fiction PDF
Preview Watching the Detectives: Essays on Crime Fiction
WATCHING THE DETECTIVES Also by Ian A. Bell DEFOE'S FICTION Also by Graham Daldry CHARLES DICKENS AND THE FORM OF THE NOVEL Watching the Detectives Essays on Crime Fiction Edited by IAN A. BELL Lecturer in English The University College of Wales, Aberystwyth and GRAHAM DALDRY Copywriter McCormick Publicis (Advertising), Manchester M MACMILLAN Editorial matter and Selection ©Ian A. Bell and Graham Dalay 1990; Chapter 1 © Ian A. Bell 1990; Chapter 2 ©Simon Dentith 1990; Chapter 3 ©Graham Daldry 1990; Chapter 4 ©Lyn Pykett 1990; Chapter 5 ©Richard W. Ireland 1990; Chapter 6 ©John Simons 1990; Chapter 7 ©Ffrangcon C. Lewis 1990; Chapter 8© Maldwyn Mills 1990; Chapter 9 ©Anna-Marie Taylor 1990; Chapter 10 ©Tony Barley 1990; Chapter 11 ©Stephen Knight 1990. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1990 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1990 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world Typeset by Vine & Gorfin Ltd, Exmouth, England British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Watching the detectives: essays on crime fiction 1. Crime fiction in English, 1837-1981 - Critical studies I. Bell, Ian A. (Ian Arthur), 1952- II. Daldry, Graham 823'.0872 ISBN 978-1-349-10593-9 ISBN 978-1-349-10591-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-10591-5 To the memory of Raymond Williams, 1921-88 Contents Preface ix Acknowledgements xiii Notes on the Contributors xiv 1 Irony and Justice in Patricia Highsmith Ian A. Bell 1 2 'This Shitty Urban Machine Humanised': The Urban Crime Novel and the Novels of William Mcllvanney Simon Dentith 18 3 The Voices of George V. Higgins Graham Daldry 37 4 Investigating Women: The Female Sleuth after Feminism Lyn Pykett 48 5 The Phantom at the Limits of Criminology Richard W. Ireland 68 6 Real Detectives and Fictional Criminals John Simons 84 7 Unravelling a Web: Writer versus Reader in Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of Detection Ffrangcon C. Lewis 97 8 Chandler's Cannibalism Maldwyn Mills 117 9 Home is Where the Hearth Is: The Englishness of Agatha Christie's Marple Novels Anna-Marie Taylor 134 vii viii Contents 10 'Loving and Lying': Multiple Identity in John le Carre's A Perfect Spy Tony Barley 152 11 Radical Thrillers Stephen Knight 172 Index 189 Preface Crime fiction in all its various forms is one of the most visible and popular kinds of literature today. According to recent market research, crime titles account for at least 10 per cent of all paperbacks sold in Britain, and their share of the market is growing. Although part of this can be attributed to the popularity of individual authors, specifically P. D. James, Ruth Rendell and Ellis Peters, it bespeaks a more generalised interest in the literature of crime in all its aspects. Some publishers have sought to exploit this interest by offering specialised imprints for crime, such as Arrow's Mysterious Press or Collins Classic Crime, whereas other publishers have signalled the allegiances by conventionalising their covers, from the donnish sobriety of the old green Penguins to the more lurid iconography of death, sex and guns on recent books. Bookshops almost invariably set aside separate sections for crime, prominently displaying titles by currently popular authors or works recently adapted for tele vision or film. For the reading public, it seems, crime fiction is identifiable and attractive. The immediate problem for anyone wishing to offer commentary on this form is that its apparent homogeneity and recognisability begins to disappear once examined. On these separate 'Crime' shelves, you will find James Hadley Chase alongside G. K. Chesterton, Deighton next to Doyle, Simenon flanked by Sayers and Spillane. If you actually get beyond the miscellaneous titles to the covers, you will find an extraordinary range of styles and forms all comfortably inhabiting the same area. Whodunits and pro cedurals and psychological thrillers and memoirs of pathologists and all sorts of things get lumped together under the general category. In terms of meaning and ideology too, the range is immense, from the classic, conservative validation of the legal process to feminist reappraisals of violence to radical deconstruc tions of authority. And all of these are offered to while away the time. ... Only a few literary critics have thought this immensely popular form worth serious attention, and the work done so far has been extremely selective. Most of it relies heavily on the notion of'g enre', a way of intervening between the general category of literature and the specificity of individual texts. Whereas most traditional literary ix X Preface criticism concentrates on those features that individuate a work, that make it unique, genre criticism concentrates upon representa tive features. 'Genre' then becomes a kind of grid through which individual works are seen and appraised. Inevitably such criticism covertly devalues the works it articulates, turning them into versions of some recurrent ideal, and leaving the critic with little to do other than to survey the range of variations available. Such surveys of crime fiction do exist, from the entertainingly anecdotal Julian Symons with Bloody Murder (1972) to the instructive H. R. F. Keating and Writing Crime Fiction (1986) to Ernest Mandel's tendentious and purposeful Delightful Murder (1984). There are also more abstract typological works, such as John G. Cawelti's Adventure, Mystery and Romance (1976) or Tzvetan Todorov's im portant essay 'The Typology of Detective Fiction' (1962), which try to detect the basic formulae that are variously combined in crime fiction. These efforts are interesting, but seem to present the works simply as exercises in reformulation, in rule-following. They rely in part on the notion that the fundamental elements of crime fiction can be identified- as they were by S. S. Van Dine in 1928 in his twenty rules for detective writing-and that their combinations can be articulated. This is a seductive idea, but it leaves out far too much. The important thing about so much crime writing, like similar science fiction work, is the way it responds to, parodies and explores its own conventions. Crime fiction does not simply reiterate its previous forms. Rather, it regroups them, explores their congruities and incongruities and refers allusively to parallel texts. An obvious example of this would be Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose (1984), where the central investigating figure is defined in terms of Sherlock Holmes, and the whole process of detection is used to examine the conflict between rationality and faith. Eco's novel is highly artful and 'literary', and might be thought to transcend generic conventions. In fact, however, it is to be read as a crime novel amongst other crime novels, drawing on and examining its own conventions. The reader who arrives at Eco's book through Conan Doyle and, say, Ellis Peters, is more ably equipped to assimilate it than the reader ignorant of patterns of such fiction. So some kind of generic competence is required for readers of crime fiction, some recognition, however subliminal, of the rules of the game. Typological studies and general surveys may provide this, but what they are less able to do is yield the meanings of such
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