Key Concepts in Crime Fiction

Heather Worthington

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781350310322
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

An insight into a popular yet complex genre that has developed over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The volume explores the contemporary anxieties to which crime fiction responds, along with society's changing conceptions of crime and criminality. The book covers texts, contexts and criticism in an accessible and user-friendly format.

1 Contexts: History, Politics, Culture

Introduction

Crime fiction is a popular genre, produced and consumed quickly. Consequently, it can be and often is very responsive to the context in which it appears, affording important insights into its cultural, political and historical moment. But equally, both its status as popular fiction and its responsiveness create problems when it comes to locating crime fiction in particular contexts; popularity does not necessarily ensure literary longevity, meaning that the texts which survive the test of time are not always fully culturally, historically or politically representative, and the events to which criminography responds often lose their relevance once a particular moment has passed. As the General Introduction suggests, this text discusses crime narratives produced from circa 1700 to the present day, a period of over 300 years in which there have been enormous changes in society, particularly in terms of the growth of population, urbanisation, industrialisation; there have been unimaginable technological advances and scientific discoveries which have contributed to globalisation and the creation of a diverse and multi-cultural world. These changes have taken place against a historical backdrop of colonialism, revolution, national and international politics, two World Wars, the Cold War and in a concomitant rapidly evolving cultural context.

While crime fiction may not directly represent these major and cataclysmic contextual developments, it has been and is shaped and influenced by them. The following section will, then, take a broad approach to the contexts in which crime fiction is produced between the eighteenth and the twenty-first century, considering major cultural, historical and political changes in the period. The massive growth of cities and consequent urbanisation of populations; the perceptions and constructions of gender; changing attitudes to sexuality; the implications of a culturally and racially diverse world; conceptions of what constitutes criminality; all these have an effect on how societies perceive and construct crime and the criminal, and this is visible in their literary representations. These topics afford a general context in which I locate more specific issues that circulate around, contribute to the construction of and are consequent upon crime: the context of the law; of evidence; of police and policing; and of detectives and detection.

The section is not intended to be encyclopaedic in its contents but to give the reader a contextual framework for and a sense of the historical background to and development of crime fiction. For those readers who wish to place major or canonical crime fiction texts in their historical moment, a Chronology is appended to this volume. The Contexts entries are intended to enable the reader to learn about and understand the origins and development of and the events that shaped crime and its fictional representation, and to encourage further exploration of the subject and the genre. To this end, each entry is supplemented by a ‘See Also’ sub-section, which directs the reader to other entries in the volume that are related to or which build upon the contextual material. A second sub-section, ‘Further Reading’, suggests sources for those wishing to take their research beyond this volume. Both sub-sections are aimed at encouraging readers of the text to enrich their understanding as well as their knowledge of crime fiction and to read critically and theoretically across the genre. The ‘Further Reading’ gives the reader access to the rich, varied and ever-expanding mass of critical and cultural material on crime, its literature and its response to and representation of the world in and by which it is produced.

Cities and urbanisation

Real-life crime has generally been considered to be a product of the city, a consequence of urbanisation and the concomitant proximity of rich and poor within the confines of urban spaces. The physicality of the city, the very denseness of the mass of buildings, the miles of roads and streets, the urban sprawl, the huge populations and the anonymity conferred on the individual by the crowd, all lend themselves to the construction of the criminal and the creation of crime. While to say that crime is solely to be found in the city is clearly a gross oversimplification, as crimes are also committed in the country, in villages and small towns and in the rural community, the perception of crime as an urban problem is still prevalent in many societies. Crime reportage in the West seems to confirm this concept, as does the statistically proven incidence of crime within cities like London or Glasgow, Los Angeles or New York. But this is not a twentieth or twenty-first-century perception: history shows that the increase in crime and the growth of the city have always been inextricably linked.

The growth of cities was consequent, in the Western world, on the rise of industry and the increase in trans-national mercantilism, particularly from the 1800s and onwards. Factories, ports and mills required large numbers of employees and so were located where possible in areas of high population, while the employment they offered attracted more people to those areas. This migration of the population from rural to urban was a secondary effect of industrialisation and the growth of cities contributed to the erosion of rural communities whose small size meant that individuals were known to each other. In small villages or parishes within towns criminality was visible; the criminal was either literally observed in the act of crime or his/her criminality was evident in unusual behaviour or strange demeanour. In contrast, the city environment made individuals strangers to each other and thus crime and criminality became more difficult to detect.

This contrast between the rural and the urban is apparent in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), where the country may contain thieves but there is nonetheless a sense of moral values, while the city is the site of corruption rather than the repository of civic values. Fielding, a magistrate, was deeply interested in questions of crime, and in 1749 recruited what came to be known as the Bow Street Runners, initially just seven men. They were based at Bow Street Magistrate’s Office in London, and they functioned as a quasi-detective force in the metropolis. The continued association of crime with the city, in fact as well as in fiction, meant that Britain’s first official State-funded uniformed police force, inaugurated in 1829 eighty years after Fielding’s privately funded Bow Street force, operated in London. The Metropolitan Police, as they were called, drawing attention to their location in the city, were intended to prevent, rather than detect, crime; an official detective force followed in 1842.

Apparently increasing rates of crime meant that by the mid-nineteenth century there was a perception of an actual criminal class, a perception fostered by the sprawling slums, or rookeries, as they were known, in cities such as London. From 1850–3, Charles Dickens wrote a series of articles based on his journalistic collaboration with the Metropolitan Police Detectives. In ‘On Duty with Inspector Field’ (1851), Dickens recounts a visit to the criminal underworld of London, to the rookery of St Giles with its ‘Rats’ Castle’, the haunt of known thieves, and a visit to the ‘Thieves’ Kitchen and Seminary’ of Holborn Hill and Rotten Gray’s Inn Lane. In the earlier Oliver Twist (1838), Fagin teaches young boys and girls the art of thieving in just such a ‘Seminary’. That the rookeries of the city were in part inhabited by criminals there is no doubt, but many of those living in the rookeries were condemned to the slums by poverty and unemployment, circumstances that led to them being classified as actually or potentially criminal. In reality, it was probably less an actual increase in crime in this period than an increase in the number and kind of activities that became classed as criminal so constructing the individual as criminal, as Clive Emsley observes in Crime and Society in England 1750–1900.

Fiction, including crime fiction, has always taken its inspiration and content from the lived reality in which it is produced, responding to cultural and social patterns, changes, anxieties. The reality of and problems inherent in and consequent upon city living discussed above thus find their way into literature. Fiction by nineteenth-century socially aware/reformist authors such as Dickens (many of Dickens’s novels feature city life, poverty and crime in some form or another), or Disraeli (Coningsby [1844], Sybil [1845]) and Elizabeth Gaskell (Mary Barton [1848], North and South [1855]), while not necessarily directly concerned with crime, drew on the reality of life in the urban slums and demonstrated how easily, for the poor, the line between honesty and criminality could be crossed. City living, then, did not just provide the location and opportunity for crime but was perceived actively to foster criminality.

With social reform in Britain and elsewhere came the clearing of the rookeries and attempts to obliterate city slums, but new building programmes contributed to urban sprawl, and new housing or high-rise living afforded no real solution to poverty and deprivation or the crime with which they are associated. Patterns of crime in the cities of the twentieth century changed from those in the 1800s; petty crime consequent upon poor social circumstances remained, but there was also organised crime, often focused around drugs and prostitution. In Britain the infamous Kray Brothers (1950s and 60s) epitomised this new, city-bred criminality, while in the United States the early twentieth century saw a proliferation of gangsters in the wake of the Great Depression of the 1930s, Prohibition and the establishment and rise of the Mafia.

In crime fiction, representations of this kind of criminality can be seen in the sub-genre known variously as the crime novel, the thriller, the noir thriller (after Marcel Duhamel’s ‘série noir’ books, which were translations of the thrillers of American and British writers such as Chandler or Cheyney as well as original French texts in the same style); texts in which the focus is on the criminal and his/her actions and motives rather than on the detection of the crime. Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock (1938) offers an early introduction into the world of the British gangster; Ted Lewis’s Jack’s Return Home (1970) introduced the reader to the London criminal underworld and to Jack Carter, played by Michael Caine in the 1971 film version of the novel, Get Carter (Dir. Mike Hodges). Victor Headley’s Yardie (1992) looks at the Jamaican infiltration into drug-smuggling in London; Karline Smith’s 1990s Moss Side series examines gang warfare in Manchester and Jake Arnott has explored the gangster theme in The Long Firm (1999) and its sequels. In America, the first ‘crime novel’ or gangster story is generally considered to be William Riley Burnett’s Little Caesar (1929); Dashiell Hammett’s protagonist ‘Continental Op’ and Raymond Chandler’s private detective Philip Marlowe both come into contact with gangsters of various kinds; and of course Mario Puzo’s The Godfather (1969) epitomises the Mafia novel.

Crime also flourished in post-war Europe and crime and the city continued to be closely linked, but as the century progressed the stakes were higher and there was an escalation in violence as the financial rewards of crime increased. The rebuilding of European cities after World War II and the rapid growth of cities in America resulting from economic expansion and high levels of immigration created opportunities for corruption in the building and associated trades; cities are the preferred location for financial and fiscal institutions and the opportunities they afford for fraud; political corruption is often associated with the cities where the game of politics is played out. In the twentieth century criminality is no longer seen to be the province of the poor and deprived, but increasingly a cross-class concern.

Crime and violence have always been partners, but this is increasingly so in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and the city is still the site of the most extreme violence, from muggings to gang wars to terrorism. Where the threat of crime had in the nineteenth century more ordinarily been to property, with violence as an unfortunate occasional accompaniment to robbery, in the twentieth century the threat is perceived to be to the individual and particularly focused on the body. Perhaps the greatest criminal threat to the individual that the city engendered is what we now call the serial killer. The anonymity of city living means that it is impossible to know the people who fill the crowded streets: the criminal is not marked in any way. When a killer strikes in the city, not once but a number of times, the whole population feels vulnerable to the stranger who attacks for no comprehensible reason. While the term ‘serial killer’ was coined only in the 1970s, there have been multiple murderers in the past.

In 1811, two entire families and their servants were massacred with no apparent motive in what became known as the ‘Ratcliffe Highway Murders’ after their London location; again in London in 1888 the murderer known only as ‘Jack the Ripper’ savagely slaughtered at least five women in the Whitechapel area; in the twentieth century there have been many more serial killings and killers, in Britain and America and Europe. While not all these serial killers operate in the city, it is a peculiarly urban phenomena fostered by the paradoxical proximity and alienation that city living enforces. In twenty-first century, the threat of terrorist attack, again a crime focused on the city, is to some extent displacing the fear of the serial killer, at least in real life, and crime fiction is beginning to incorporate the terrorist theme into its texts. Sara Paretsky’s Black List (2003) questions the United States’ political stance and attitude to the terrorist threat in the wake of 9-11; Val McDermid’s Beneath the Bleeding (2007) incorporates a supposed terrorist attack into its serial-killer plot.

As crime fiction developed as a genre it represented the perceived realities of crime and its connection with city living: Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories featuring the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin (1841–5) are set in Paris; Dickens’s detective police anecdotes (1850–3) and the novels Oliver Twist (1838) and Bleak House (1853) are set mainly in London; James McLevy’s Curiosities of Crime in Edinburgh (1861) openly states its location in the title; Sherlock Holmes’s adventures often take place in London. In America, the city was, and is, the preferred territory of the professional detective, or private eye, from Anna Katharine Green’s Ebenezer Gryce in her 1878 novel The Leavenworth Case (New York), to Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled investigator Philip Marlowe and Walter Mosely’s unwilling amateur detective Easy Rawlings (Los Angeles), or Sara Paretsky’s feminist detective V. I. Warshawski (Chicago). Serial killers operate in cities fictional and real on both sides of the Atlantic and elsewhere but, with the exception of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter (Red Dragon (1981), The Silence of the Lambs (1989), Hannibal (1999) and Hannibal Rising (2006)), are rarely the central protagonist of a series. Rather, serial detectives deal with a series of serial killers, as in Patricia Cornwell’s novels featuring forensic detective-heroine Kay Scarpetta, located in Richmond, Virginia, US; or in Britain Val Mc Dermid’s detective team of Tony Hill and Carol Jordan who operate mainly in and around the imagined northern city of Bradfield.

While the city remains the preferred location for much crime fiction, especially in America, in Britain, from the 1920s and 30s on, there has been a tendency to locate crime in small communities, either rural or within yet separated from the city (in early twentieth-century America, Carolyn Wells and Mary Roberts Rinehart also located their crime narratives away from the city and the modern-day primarily US-authored ‘cozies’ often follow that pattern). This trend is especially apparent during what has come to be known as the ‘Golden Age’ of the genre which had its heyday between the two World Wars. The removal of the crime narrative from the city was perhaps in part the result of the physical effect of the war on the fabric of cities and society; the economic depression or ‘Great Slump’ which affected the United Kingdom in the 1930s, and attributable also to the escapist aspects of fiction. In America, while the global war had little or no physical effect, the Great Depression saw a migration of rural workers to the cities, where poverty and desperation made crime seem an attractive alternative lifestyle choice. The city, then, in America in fact and fiction, continued to be the location for crime and criminality.

The city, further, lends itself to certain kinds of crime narrative. The private detective, or ‘private eye’, especially the hard-boiled version typified by Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, is very much the product of the city, modelled on the nineteenth-century French construction, the flâneur, that is, the leisurely and keenly observant wanderer through city streets. Walter Benjamin makes a direct link between the flâneur and the detective in Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (1983), and indeed, the very words ‘private eye’ or ‘PI’, that is, the private investigator, allude specifically to the powers of observation essential to detective work. The city is considered to be the breeding ground of criminals and the site of crimes; consequently the private detective finds most of his—or increasingly her—employment there. The city, then, not only creates the criminal in fiction and fact but also provides the solution to the problem of crime, at least in fiction, in the figure of the detective.

And it is not just the private detective that the city encourages. Where crime is rife, and costing the State money, a State-funded police force will, sooner or later, begin to operate. In London this was in 1829 with the introduction of the Metropolitan Police, while other cities gradually drew on this as an example and instituted their own forces in turn; France had a policing system much earlier with a sovereign-controlled policing force created by Louis XIV in 1667, which was replaced in the wake of the French Revolution by the State-controlled Prefecture of Police in 1800; in America the process was made complex by the autonomous State system, but State-funded police forces were introduced in individual cities and states in the years between 1838 and 1854, again drawing on the British model. In crime fiction the relationship of the police detective and the city came into sharp focus in the police procedural, in which teams of detectives worked together, usually in a city, to track down criminals.

The first police procedurals in the modern sense came out in America in the 1940s and 50s and quickly spread to Britain and Europe: Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series is perhaps the longest-running and best-known example. While the somewhat plodding nature of the genre limited its popularity and did not lend itself to longevity, there are still city-based procedurals appearing; Jim Tucker, writing as ‘David Craig’, has a police team working in Cardiff in Bay City (2000). Interestingly, perhaps following in the steps of the novels by Georges Simenon featuring his police chief Maigret, many of which are set in and around Paris, there are many police detective narratives set in European cities: Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s Martin Beck series is set in Stockholm; Henning Mankell’s Inspector Wallander works in the Swedish city of Ystad; Arnaldur Indridason’s Detective Erlunder operates in Reykjavik; Fred Vargas’s per...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• General Editor’s Preface
• General Introduction
• 1 Contexts: History, Politics, Culture
• 2 Texts: Themes, Issues, Concepts
• 3 Criticism: Approaches, Theory, Practice
• Chronology
• Index