The Reader and World Crime Fiction

This chapter reflects on the tension between national-focused and more worldly readings of crime fiction. It treats crime fiction as a form of world literature and examines new ways of conceiving relationships between crime writers, readers and texts that eschew the common categorization of a universal British-American tradition, on the one hand, and, on the other, localized national traditions. Following Jorge Luis Borges, the chapter argues that the transnationality of the crime genre does not reside exclusively within the text, but rather emerges through the interaction of the reader and the text. What emerges is a transnational and trans-historical reading practice that respects the local but also allows for innovative connections and new paradigms to be forged when texts are read beyond the national context.

Brain Attics and Mind Weapons

This chapter on the crime fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle, Satyajit Ray and Cheng Xiaoqing examines the central role of adaptation in the international development of the crime fiction genre in order to present a more complex understanding of the genre’s international connections and mobility. The chapter questions the distinction between original and reproduction that has typically informed critical studies on the genre’s international spread through an analysis of the works of these three writers from Britain, India (Bengal) and China. In demonstrating the ways in which Ray and Cheng adapt what is typically considered an archetypically British genre to their local settings, the chapter deconstructs the preeminent position granted to Holmes as the originator and, instead, draws attention to how Doyle himself adapted the genre in a transnational dialogue with his literary forebears.

Foggy Muddle

This chapter on Dashiell Hammett’s The Dain Curse takes a narratively unmotivated car accident as the starting point for a discussion of genre negation as a force of innovation in Hammett’s writing. As a violent interruption of preestablished modes of operation, the accident embodies the way in which the novel relates to the conventions of popular fiction only to wreck and overturn them. Thus, the linearity of the investigative process is replaced with a circular structure; the purity of genre is replaced with references to a catalogue of popular fiction templates, none of which are fully executed; narrative closure is replaced with ambiguity and contingency; and the classic figure of the ‘sidekick’ is literarily blown to pieces in what Gulddal reads as another emblematic representation of the principle of genre mobility.

Secrecy and Transparency in Hideo Yokoyama’s Six Four

This chapter analyses Hideo Yokoyama’s Six Four (2012), drawing on Clare Birchall’s theory of transparency and secrecy to complicate the classic understanding of crime fiction in terms of a progressive uncovering of the truth. For Pepper, Yokoyama’s novel evokes instead a world where transparency is only ever partial, where secrecy is used tactically or as a mode of resistance within bureaucratic units as they engage in territorial struggles against other units, and where the investigation inevitably leaves a residue of what is ‘unknowable’. If these manoeuvres challenge the value placed on transparency in liberal democracies, they also trouble, and mobilize, some of the epistemological certainties on which the detective novel is often taken to rely.

Burma’s Bagnoles

This chapter on Léo Malet draws a connection between automobility and genre mobility. Through the lens of the automobile revolution in postwar France, Goulet discusses four novels in Malet’s Les Noveaux mysterès de Paris cycle (1954-59), demonstrating how cars and transportation infrastructure inform the unfolding of the plot while also defining a prose rhythm of alternating stasis and mobility. More broadly, the motif of the car in Malet’s novels facilitates an ambivalent experience of Paris as torn between nostalgia for the past and commitment to urban modernity.

Moving Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab and Breaking the Frame of Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’

This chapter discusses Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, which is famous as one of Australia’s first bestsellers, its first crime novel and a celebration of Melbourne society at the end of the nineteenth century. It demonstrates how the novel’s physical mobility, on which much of its fame is predicated, and the readability of the modern city, of which it is often considered exemplary, are in fact surprisingly lacking. In their place, and around the focal points of their absence, not least of which is the eponymous cab itself, rich veins of metaphorical mobility are seen to spread out, leading to an alternative mapping of the novel’s signs, including the potential for an alternative solution in line with the detective criticism of French scholar Pierre Bayard.

Behind the Locked Door

This chapter deals with the social anxieties of the Belle Époque and the way in which they emerged in French crime fiction. To this end, it challenges prevailing assumptions about the pioneering crime fiction of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century France, revealing that the novels of Maurice Leblanc and Gaston Leroux depict the golden age that preceded the First World War while also critiquing the dominant paradigm of the day. The chapter shows how these authors comment on society using the tropes of the crime novel, while also giving greater complexity to the crime novel by introducing the social networks and genealogies of ambiguous, damaged protagonists. These novels are also shown to have embraced psychoanalysis, which was still in its infancy.

Reading Affects in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

This chapter challenges the idea that stock genres evoke stock emotions. In the case of crime fiction, the anticipated movement is from the uncertainty of an unsolved crime towards the certainty of resolution. In the case of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, however, Marlowe’s change of mood invites readers to notice that while they are immersed in the suspense of the text, and thus rushed along on the roller-coaster of end-orientation, they also process the characters’ feelings, which do not necessarily move in the same direction or at the same pace. The emotions displayed in The Big Sleep suggest that crime fiction has a far broader emotional range. The chapter draws on these reading affects to challenge the authority of the novel’s solution.

Criminal Minds

This chapter provides an archaeology of the ‘psycho-thriller’, which emerged as a named, self-identifying genre in the postwar period and was popularized by the films of Alfred Hitchcock, most notably Psycho (1960). Scholars have pointed out links back to American noir of the 1930s and 1940s, but Ascari goes further by presenting a full prehistory of the genre, arguing that it has roots in late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theories of the conflicted, often irrational mind. Beginning with William Godwin’s psychological philosophy, including its application in the novel Caleb Williams (1794), and ending with novels and films inspired by Freudian psychoanalysis, Ascari not only uncovers an alternative history of the genre that crosses boundaries between genres and media, but also articulates a theory of genre predicated on hybridization and mobility rather than outlived notions of origin, stasis and purity.

From Vidocq to the Locked Room

This chapter provides an in-depth history of the international development of the crime genre prior to the twentieth century. The chapter traces the emergence of a transnational genre from the 1700s through legal narratives and Romantic preoccupations and aesthetics in France, Germany, England, the United States, the Scandinavian countries and Australia. While crime fiction scholars have traditionally maintained that the genre emerged in Britain and America, this chapter places doubt on the supposed centrality of the genre’s British and American genealogy. By examining the genre’s early transnational mobility, the chapter challenges the dominant perception that the genre’s transnationality is a consequence of twentieth- and twenty-first-century globalization and, as such, that it is largely a contemporary phenomenon.