Table Of ContentWATCHING 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
