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

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (39) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucyna Krawczyk-Żywko
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Classic Work ◽  
Look Back ◽  
Agatha Christie

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.

scholarly journals The Flavour of Murder: Food and Crime in the Novels of Agatha Christie

2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Silvia Baučeková
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Food Studies ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
The Other ◽  
Hunter Gatherers ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Crime Narratives ◽  
Detective Novels ◽  
Agatha Christie ◽  
New Perspective

Abstract Food and murder have had a paradoxical relationship ever since the first prehistoric hunter-gatherers put the first morsels of meat into their mouths. On one hand, eating means life: food is absolutely necessary to sustain life. On the other hand, eating means killing. Whether it is the obvious killing of an animal for meat, or the less obvious termination of a plant’s life, one must destroy life in order to eat. It is assumed that this inherent tension between eating/living and eating/dying often informs and shapes crime narratives, not only in the recently invented genre of culinary mystery, produced most famously by Diane Mott Davidson and Joanne Fluke, but also, even if to a lesser extent, in classic detective novels of the 20th century. This article focuses on how the contradictory nature of eating is manifested in the work of Agatha Christie. By combining a traditional structuralist approach to crime fiction as a formula, as advocated by John G. Cawelti, with the methods of the emerging field of food studies, the paper aims to observe a classic, i.e., the classic detective story, from a new perspective

Contradicting the Golden Age Reading Agatha Christie in the Twenty-First Century

2020 ◽  
pp. 77-92
Author(s):  
Merja Makinen
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
World Politics ◽  
First Century ◽  
Genre Criticism ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Agatha Christie ◽  
Age Reading

This chapter argues that it is precisely because Agatha Christie is synonymous with the Golden Age of detective fiction that her novels have long been neglected by literary criticism. A critical shift, in the form of “millennial criticism”, is described, which is now breaking down this monolithic view of Christie’s work and challenging the limitations of “genre criticism”, whose focus was typically on antecedents, influences and developments. Crime fiction is in turn opened up to a multiplicity of readings. Christie’s work is shown to be far more than the sum of its plots, however ingenious; instead, it offers the literary range and textual pleasures of Modernism and genuine social interventionism, including a surprising focus on world politics.

The Many Pasts of Detective Fiction

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-172
Author(s):  
Thomas Leitch
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Public History ◽  
Detective Novel ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Detective Novels ◽  
The Many

Building on Tzvetan Todorov's observation that the detective novel ‘contains not one but two stories: the story of the crime and the story of the investigation’, this essay argues that detective novels display a remarkably wide range of attitudes toward the several pasts they represent: the pasts of the crime, the community, the criminal, the detective, and public history. It traces a series of defining shifts in these attitudes through the evolution of five distinct subgenres of detective fiction: exploits of a Great Detective like Sherlock Holmes, Golden Age whodunits that pose as intellectual puzzles to be solved, hardboiled stories that invoke a distant past that the present both breaks with and echoes, police procedurals that unfold in an indefinitely extended present, and historical mysteries that nostalgically fetishize the past. It concludes with a brief consideration of genre readers’ own ambivalent phenomenological investment in the past, present, and future each detective story projects.

Unreliable Narration in Law and Fiction

2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 311-338
Author(s):  
Daniel Del Gobbo
Keyword(s):  
Crime Fiction ◽  
High Court ◽  
Law System ◽  
Crime Novel ◽  
Objective Interpretation ◽  
Essential Quality ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
The Common ◽  
Agatha Christie ◽  
Unreliable Narration

This article revisits long-standing debates about objective interpretation in the common law system by focusing on a crime novel by Agatha Christie and judicial opinion by the Ontario High Court. Conventions of the crime fiction and judicial opinion genres inform readers’ assumption that the two texts are objectively interpretable. This article challenges this assumption by demonstrating that unreliable narration is often, if not always, a feature of written communication. Judges, like crime fiction writers, are storytellers. While these authors might intend for their stories to be read in certain ways, the potential for interpretive disconnect between unreliable narrators and readers means there can be no essential quality that marks a literary or legal text’s meaning as objective. Taken to heart, this demands that judges try to narrate their decisions more reliably so that readers are able to interpret the texts correctly when it matters most.

scholarly journals Literatura policial y policía: reflexiones a partir de dos intervenciones críticas (José Pablo Feinmann y Carlos Gamerro)

2022 ◽  
Vol 9 (17) ◽  
pp. 197-225
Author(s):  
Hernán Maltz
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
The Political ◽  
Specific Interest ◽  
Four Dimensions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Novela Negra ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship

I propose a close reading on two critical interventions about crime fiction in Argentina: “Estado policial y novela negra argentina” (1991) by José Pablo Feinmann and “Para una reformulación del género policial argentino” (2006) by Carlos Gamerro. Beyond the time difference between the two, I observe aspects in common. Both texts elaborate a corpus of writers and fictions; propose an interpretative guide between the literary and the political-social series; maintain a specific interest in the relationship between crime fiction and police; and elaborate figures of enunciators who serve both as theorists of the genre and as writers of fiction. Among these four dimensions, the one that particularly interests me here is the third, since it allows me to investigate the link that is assumed between “detective fiction” and “police institution”. My conclusion is twofold: on the one hand, in both essays predominates a reductionist vision of the genre, since a kind of necessity is emphasized in the representation of the social order; on the other, its main objective seems to lie in intervening directly on the definitions of the detective fiction in Argentina (and, on this point, both texts acquire an undoubtedly prescriptive nuance).

Beyond Law and Order: Detecting State Violence and the Search for Justice in Roberto Bolaño's Distant Star

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-47
Author(s):  
Andrew Yallop
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Social Stability ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Distant Star ◽  
Political Unrest ◽  
Work Functions ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Dominant Narratives

Violent political unrest and militarised regime change was endemic to Latin America in the 1960s and 70s. As a result, writers working within the genre of detective fiction produced work influenced by the socially critical and cynical attitude of American hardboiled fiction. Known as neopoliciaco fiction, this work responded to circumstances where violence was perpetrated and authorised by governments against their own citizens in the name of political and social stability. Bolaño's unique adaption of crime fiction in Distant Star combines neopoliciaco crime writing with the testimonio, a genre which resists dominant narratives of history that downplay and even actively deny the criminality of state actors. In Distant Star, Bolaño explores how detective work functions within a paradigm beyond that of law and order, and the implications this has for the pursuit of reconciliation and justice in post-regime Chile.

scholarly journals The Labyrinth and the Non-Solution: Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase and the Metaphysical Detective

MANUSYA ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-89
Author(s):  
Rhys William Tyers
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Search For Meaning ◽  
Detective Novel ◽  
Raymond Chandler ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Guiding Principle ◽  
Wild Sheep ◽  
Detective Stories ◽  
Definition Of

Many of Murakami’s novels demonstrate his appropriation of the terminology, imagery and metaphor that are found in hardboiled detective fiction. The question of Haruki Murakami’s use of the tropes from hardboiled detective stories has been discussed by scholars such as Hantke (2007), Stretcher (2002) and Suter (2008), who argue that the writer uses these features as a way to organize his narratives and to pay homage to one of his literary heroes, Raymond Chandler. However, these arguments have not adequately addressed the fact that many of Murakami’s novels fit into the definition of the metaphysical detective story, which is “a text that parodies or subverts traditional detective-story conventions” (Merivale & Sweeney 1999:2). Using this definition as a guiding principle, this paper addresses the issue of the metaphysical detective features apparent in Murakami’s third novel, A Wild Sheep Chase, and, more specifically, looks at his use of the non-solution and labyrinth as narrative devices. The main argument, then, is that Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase fits in with the metaphysical detective novel and uses the familiar tropes of the labyrinth and the non-solution to highlight our impossible search for meaning.

scholarly journals ‘Tale Engineering’: Agatha Christie and the Aftermath of the Second World War

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-199
Author(s):  
Gill Plain
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
World War ◽  
Atomic Age ◽  
Genre Fiction ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Agatha Christie ◽  
Second World

The ‘golden age’ of clue-puzzle detective fiction is usually considered to end in 1939 with the outbreak of the Second World War. Yet Agatha Christie, the most high-profile and successful exponent of the form, continued to produce bestselling novels until her death in 1976. This essay examines three novels from the immediate postwar period to consider how she adapted her writing to negotiate a changing world and evolving fashions in genre fiction. Engaging with grief, demobilisation, gender, citizenship and the new fears of the atomic age, Christie proves unexpectedly attentive to the anxieties of a new modernity.

Detective Fiction, Nostalgia and Rian Johnson's Knives Out: Making the Golden Age Great Again

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-253
Author(s):  
Eric Sandberg
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
First Century ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Centre Of Gravity ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Agatha Christie

The Golden Age is back with a vengeance: reprints, re-boots, and adaptations of interwar detective fiction and its off-shoots have proliferated in the twenty-first century, as have works more loosely, but nonetheless substantially, inspired by the clue-puzzle format developed and perfected by authors like Agatha Christie. This resurgence of the ‘whodunnit’ mystery is something of mystery itself, as the centre of gravity of crime writing has long shifted away from this ostensibly dated and aesthetically limited form. This paper explores this unexpected development, looking in particular at the role of nostalgia in relation to new Golden Age mysteries. While nostalgia is frequently, and quite justly, viewed in negative terms as a personally and politically regressive phenomenon, in some cases, as in Rian Johnson’s murder mystery Knives Out (2019), examined here, it can be used not simply as a dubious marketing or aesthetic strategy, but as part of a broader social critique in which one form of nostalgia is used to critique another.

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