The Art of Detective Fiction

Description

In the hands of many of the great writers, the unravelling of mystery is only one strand within a complex project. Other things get unravelled, too - the belief in a rationally explicable world, in the beneficent, ordering force of culture and civilization. Constantly the detective story delights in muddying the waters, in acknowledging the omnipresent possibilities of anarchy and carnage. As a genre, it is supremely able to combine popular appeal with the ability to disturb, provoke and challenge the reader. The essays in this volume all pay tribute to, and seek to account for, the astonishing durability of the detective story as a narrative genre. They range generously, taking a variety of theoretical approaches and including detective fiction in languages other than English, but particular attention is paid to the 'Golden Age' of English detective story-writing and to the 'hard-boiled' American version of the genre. This is a collection that will appeal to the scholar and to the devotee alike; to all those, in fact, who cannot resist the lure of finding out whodunit. Front Matter....Pages i-xv Poe and the Beautiful Segar Girl....Pages 1-9 Body Language: a Study of Death and Gender in Crime Fiction....Pages 10-20 Fascination and Nausea: Finding Out the Hard-Boiled Way....Pages 21-35 The Writers Who Knew Too Much: Populism and Paradox in Detective Fiction’s Golden Age....Pages 36-49 Sherlock’s Children: the Birth of the Series....Pages 50-59 Making the Dead Speak: Spiritualism and Detective Fiction....Pages 60-74 The Locus of Disruption: Serial Murder and Generic Conventions in Detective Fiction....Pages 75-89 The Detective as Clown: a Taxonomy....Pages 90-103 Mean Streets and English Gardens....Pages 104-123 Authority, Social Anxiety and the Body in Crime Fiction: Patricia Cornwell’s Unnatural Exposure....Pages 124-137 Desires and Devices: On Women Detectives in Fiction....Pages 138-152 A Band of Sisters....Pages 153-169 An Urban Myth: Fantômas and the Surrealists....Pages 170-187 Bleeding the Thriller: Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Intertextual Crimes....Pages 188-200 Oedipus Express: Trains, Trauma and Detective Fiction....Pages 201-221 Open Letter to Detectives and Psychoanalysts: Analysis and Reading....Pages 222-232 Back Matter....Pages 233-240