History of crime fiction

Crime fiction in history

It was only after 1900, that novels and stories depicting crime and its consequences came to be recognised as a distinct literary genre, and spawned specialist writers. The earlier novels and stories were typically devoid of systematic attempts at detection: There was no private detective, whether amateur or professional, trying to figure out how and by whom a particular crime was committed; there were no police trying to solve a case; neither was there any discussion of motives, , or the modus operandi, or any of the other elements which make up the crime novels of subsequent ages.

Description of crimes and detectives

There were of course forerunners of today's crime fiction, most notably the ghost story, the horror story, and the revenge story. An example of the latter is American poet and short story writer Edgar Allan Poe's (1809 - 1849) seven-page tale The Cask of Amontillado written in (1846).
But Poe was also one of the first writers to actually choose a detective (a word unknown at the time) as the central character of some of his short stories (which he called "tales of ratiocination"). In the words of William L. De Andrea (Encyclopedia Mysteriosa, 1994), he
:was the first to create a character whose interest for the reader lay primarily (even solely) on his ability to find hidden truths.
:[...] Poe seems to have anticipated virtually every important development to follow in the genre, from the idea of a Watson (in Sherlock Holmes) to the concept of an armchair detective to the prototype of the secret service story".

In other words, he suggests that this is where crime fiction proper begins.

The "Locked Room" mysteries

One of the early developments started by Poe was the so-called locked room mystery, in which the reader is presented with a puzzle and encouraged to solve it before finishing the story and being told the solution.

Typically, A "locked room" in this narrow meaning of the word -- also referred to as a "hermetically sealed chamber" -- is a room in which a murder is committed. There are a limited number of suspects, some of them possibly even without a . But on closer inspection, it turns out that no one could possibly have done it because at the time the murder was committed there was definitely no way of entering and/or leaving the room unseen or without leaving a trace. One of the most famous locked room mysteries was The Hollow Man.

For a detailed explication of the sub-genre see Locked room mystery

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson mysteries

In 1887, Scotsman Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 - 1930) gave fresh impetus to the emerging form of the detective story by creating Sherlock Holmes, resident at 221B Baker Street, London -- probably the most famous of fictional detectives and the first one to have clients, to be hired to solve a case. Holmes's art of detection consists in logical deduction based on minute details which escape everyone else's notice, and the careful and systematic elimination of all clues that in the course of his investigation turn out to lead nowhere. Conan Doyle also introduced Dr.John H. Watson, a physician who acts as Holmes's assistant and who also shares Holmes's flat in Baker Street with him. In the words of William L De Andrea,

Watson also serves the important function of catalyst for Holmes's mental processes. [...] From the writer's point of view, Conan Doyle knew the importance of having someone to whom the detective can make enigmatic remarks, a consciousness that's privy to facts in the case without being in on the conclusions drawn from them until the proper time. Any character who performs these functions in a mystery story has come to be known as a "Watson".

(See also Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson for further explication.)

The Golden Age - Development by later writers

The 1920s and 30s are commonly known as the "Golden Age" of detective fiction. Most of its authors were British – Agatha Christie (1890 - 1976), Dorothy L. Sayers (1893 - 1957), Josephine Tey (1896 - 1952), Anthony Berkeley (aka Francis Iles) (1893 - 1971), and many more; some of them – John Dickson Carr, for example – American, but with a very British touch. By that time certain conventions and clichés had been established which limited any surprises on the part of the reader to the twists and turns within the plot and of course to the identity of the murderer. The majority of novels of that era were whodunnits, and several authors excelled, after successfully leading their readers on the wrong track, in convincingly revealing to them the least likely suspect as the real villain of the story. What is more, they had a predilection for certain casts of characters and certain settings, with the secluded English country-house at the top of the list.

A typical plot of the Golden Age mystery followed these lines:

• A body, preferably that of a stranger, is found in the library by a maid who has just come in to dust the furniture.
• As it happens, a few guests have just arrived for a weekend in the country – people who may or may not know each other. They typically include such stock characters as a handsome young gentleman and his beautiful and rich fiancée, an actress with past glory and an alcoholic husband, a clumsy aspiring young author, a retired colonel, a quiet middle-aged man no one knows anything about who is supposedly the host's old friend, but behaves suspsiciously and a famous detective.
• The police are either unavailable or incompetent to lead the investigation for the time being.

• As the detective soon finds out, the household staff consists of an old and faithful butler, known to the employer from childhood; a well-nourished female cook who, for some reason or other, knows all about posions and food poisoning in general; a not-so-bright gardener who stumbles upon some mischief done to his plants and equipment; an ex-convict chauffeur, and one or two maids secretly in love with someone and possibly pregnant.
• Finally, there is the host, who has been busy welcoming his guests and tending to his presumptious young wife. The detective may also find that nobody has yet seen his wife.
• While the detective is pondering the facts, wild things happen. One of the maids almost faints when she sees the young author for the first time, but she quickly regains her composure.
• The Colonel complains that several pages have been torn from his diary while he was having a bath or dressing for dinner.
• The ageing actress is seen near the garden shed, gesticulating in an exaggerated manner while arguing with the seemingly imbecile gardener, and a slip of paper with some cryptic message is found.
• Some time later, just as the guests are having supper, the lights go out. There is commotion in the darkened room. When the blown fuse has been mended and the lights come up again, it is only to find the beautiful young heiress stabbed in the back with a pair of pruning shears, her face in the bowl of soup in front of her, her eyes wide open.
• Now it suddenly occurs to all the people present, that the murderer is still in the house: he (or she) is one of them. People now start talking behind each other's backs, suspecting, fearing and denouncing each other.
• As the noose around the murderer's neck tightens, he (or she) is prepared to bump off anyone who has found out his (or her) guilty secret. A third and fourth murder may be committed anytime.

• Just before the worst comes to the worst, the detective, having made use of his "little grey cells" (as Poirot calls it), assembles the whole party in the library and minutely reconstructs the real chain of events from beginning to end.
• At first, what he says sounds absolutely incredible. Of course everyone accused vehemently objects to all the allegations. At the end of his closing statement, the detective zooms in on the only person – very often the least likely suspect – whose actions cannot be accounted for.
• Often the detective admits having no evidence of any kind to prove his theory; sometimes he bluffs the murderer by pretending he does. Eventually, the murderer is trapped, and has just three options left: be arrested without further resistance, try to escape, or commit suicide on the spot.

1. The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.
   :#All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
   :#Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
   :#No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
   :#No Chinaman must figure in the story.
   :#No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
   :#The detective himself must not commit the crime.
   :#The detective is bound to declare any clues upon which he may happen to light.
   :#The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal from the reader any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
   :#Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

"was a long time a-dying. Indeed, one could argue that it still is not dead, since its mannerisms have proved stubbornly persistent in writers one might have expected to abandon them altogether as dated, or worse. Yet the Second World War marked a significant close, just as the First World War had marked a significant beginning. Only during the inter-war years, and particularly in the 1920s, did Golden Age fiction have the happy innocence, the purity and confidence of purpose, which was its true hallmark.

:Even by the 1930s its assumptions were being challenged. [...] Where it had once been commonplace to view the Golden Age as a high watermark of achievement, it became equally the fashion to denounce it. It had, so the indictment ran, followed rules which trivialized its subject. It had preferred settings which expressed a narrow, if not deliberately elitist, vision of society. And for heroes it had created detectives at best two-dimensional, at worst tiresome."

Hard boiled American crime fiction writing

This created whole new stereotypes of crime fiction writing. The typical American investigator in these novels, was modelled thus:

• He is a private investigator working alone. He is between 35 and 45 years or so, and both a loner and a tough guy.
• Displaying numerous macho attributes, he is certainly no family man and he does not associate with lots of friends either. Alone at home, his usual diet consists of fried eggs, black coffee and cigarettes.
• He meets his casual acquaintances at his favourite haunts, which are shady all-night bars where he turns out to be hard-drinking without ever getting too drunk to realize what is going on around him or being able to defend himself when attacked.
• He always "wears" a gun and does not mind shooting criminals if the necessity arises, or being beaten up if it helps him solve a case. He certainly has a penchant for attractive "dames", especially the gorgeous blonde clients, many a femme fatale among them, who come to his shabby little office on one of the upper floors of a downtown highrise to have their unfaithful husbands shadowed by a private eye.
• He is always short of cash and invariably asks for a down payment. Cases that at first seem easy and straightforward, often turn out to be quite complicated, forcing him to embark on an odyssey through the urban landscape which often involves having to deal with organized crime ("rackets") and low life of all sorts crowding the "mean streets" of urban America, preferably Los Angeles, New York, or Chicago. This is how he acquires his reputation as a troublemaker.
• A hard-boiled private eye has an ambivalent attitude towards the police. On the one hand, he realizes that both the "cops" and he himself are fighting on the same side. On the other hand, especially where police corruption and foul play are involved, it is his ambition to save America and rid it of its mean elements all by himself.

'Tell me about yourself, Mr Marlowe. I suppose I have a right to ask?'

:'Sure, but there's very little to tell. I'm thirty-three years old, went to college once and can still speak English if there's any demand for it. There isn't much in my trade. I worked for Mr Wilde, the District Attorney, as an investigator once. [...] I'm unmarried because I don't like policemen's wives.'

:'And a little bit of a cynic,' the old man smiled. 'You didn't like working for Wilde?'

:'I was fired. For insubordination. I test very high on insubordination, General.'

"Hard-boiled fiction would have happened anyway, even if Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers [...] had not written the way they did or Knox had not formulated his rules. The impetus came from the conditions of American life and the opportunities available to the American writer in the 1920s. The economic boom following the First World War combined with the introduction of Prohibition in 1920 to encourage the rise of the gangster. The familiar issues of law and lawlessness in a society determined to judge itself by the most ideal standards took on a new urgency. At the same time, the pulp magazines were already exploiting a ready market for adventure stories -- what Ronald Knox would have called 'shockers'-- which made heroes of cowboys, soldiers, explorers and masked avengers. It took no great leap of imagination for them to tackle modern crime and detection, fresh from the newspaper headlines of the day, and create heroes with the same vigour [...].

It is only natural that all this should be reflected in the fiction of the day. As early as the turn of the century -- almost a century before the BSE crisis hit Europe --, Upton Sinclair attacked the U.S. meat-packing industry in his muckraking novel The Jungle (1906). In this powerful exposé‚ Sinclair depicts the capitalist entrepreneurs who own the slaughterhouses and meat-processing plants of Chicago. The novel depicted criminals forming giant trusts and syndicates and exploiting virtually everyone who works for them, whether office clerk, foreman, farmer, simple labourer, or animal. It is the big bosses who are responsible for the lack of safety measures, which results in frequent accidents among their employees who operate machinery, with able workers turning into useless invalids within seconds. The lack of hygiene in the stockyards, causes innumerable cases of food poisoning and death all over the country. The Chicago of The Jungle -- this is the Chicago before the days of arch-villain Al Capone (1899 - 1947) -- is a city certainly beyond control and almost beyond hope: The unemployed, the sick, the homeless, the evicted, many of them immigrants, crowd the dirty streets of the slum districts; con men, thieves, robbers, rapists, quacks performing illegal abortions; loan sharks, greedy landlords, illegal prostitutes, and corrupt policemen and government inspectors are everywhere, but are never brought to justice. It seems to the onlooker that everyone has their price, everyone can be bought, everyone who is in a position of power "takes graft", including the judges and the local politicians. (As Sinclair sees it, the only solution to all these problems is socialism, which he advocates as an undercurrent theme.)

Literature and journalism authored by muckrakers informed the U.S. public about the plight and the grievances of certain sections of the population. At the same time, they set the stage for the writers of the hard-boiled school. It was city life of the sort described in The Jungle which formed the background to many a novel to be published in the years to come. When one leaves the big city, however, and travels into the country, the idyllic picture expected vanishes when he becomes aware of all the misery that can be found there as well. Very soon on the trip he encounters the tramp, or hobo, who roams the country, carrying all his worldly possessions with him, a man willing to work wherever he is needed -- for a meal, a bed, or a few cents. John Steinbeck (1902 - 1968), a U.S. author of mainstream fiction, described two itinerant farm workers in his novel Of Mice and Men (1937), and James M. Cain (1892 - 1977) made use of the hobo tradition in his classic novel The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934): A tramp comes across a small service station situated somewhere along a lonely country road and gets a job there from the owner. The proprietor, a middle-aged Greek, is either too stupid, or too drunk, or both, to realize that his beautiful young wife, bored stiff by the life she is forced to lead in the middle of nowhere, very soon is more than just on friendly terms with the tramp. Together, the two lovers start planning the Greek's murder. Unforeseen events intervene, and they have to start scheming against her husband all over again.

Another author who enjoyed writing about the sleazy side of life in the U.S.A. is Jonathan Latimer. In his novel Solomon's Vineyard (1941), private eye Karl Craven aims to rescue a young heiress from the clutches of a weird cult. Apart from being an action-packed thriller, the novel contains open references to the detective's sex drive and, worse still, allusions to, and a brief description of, kinky sexual practices. The novel was considered "too hot" for Latimer's American publishers and was not published until 1950, and then in a heavily Bowdlerized version. (The unexpurgated novel came out in Britain during the Second World War though.) From an early 21st century point of view, the reasons for declining publication of Solomon's Vineyard seem absurd. For example, these are the opening lines of the novel, with Karl Craven, the narrator, describing his first encounter with a young woman called Carmel:

From the way her buttocks looked under the black silk dress, I knew she'd be good in bed. The silk was tight and under it the muscles worked slow and easy. I saw weight there, and control, and, brother, those are things I like in a woman. I put down my bags and went after her along the station platform.

:She walked towards the waiting-room. She had gold-blonde hair, and curves, and breasts the size of Cuban pineapples. [...]

'I like big men,' she said.

:Her voice was raspy, like she had a cold. She came up to me and grabbed my arm. Her fingers hurt the muscles. I could smell her perfume. She came close to me. I thought I knew what she wanted. I tried to kiss her. She jerked away.

:'No.'

:'I'm sorry.'

:She slapped me. She was strong; my cheek stung. She moved in, swinging both arms. Now she had her fists closed. She hit my arms and my chest. I tried to hold her.

:'Hit me!' she said.

:It was goddam queer. I held her arms, but she got loose. She struck my chest.

:She said: 'Hit me.'

:[...]

:I ripped the shirt off her, she fighting all the time and liking it. I ripped at her clothes, not caring how much I hurt her. She squirmed on the dirty floor, panting. There was blood on her mouth. I don't know if it was mine or hers. It tasted sweet. Suddenly she stopped moving.

:'Now,' she said. 'Now, goddam you. Now!'

:Later we lay on the floor.

The other author is Kenneth Fearing (1902 - 1961), not necessarily a hard-boiled writer, whose novel The Big Clock (1947) exemplifies the individualism prevalent in American society around the middle of the 20th century. In addition, The Big Clock is remarkable in regard to the narrative technique employed by Fearing: A multiple first-person narration, the novel presents the same events seen from various perspectives and angles.

Modern crime writing

A shift from plot-driven themes to character analysis

Over the decades, the detective story metamorphosed into the crime novel (see also the title of Julian Symons's history of the genre). Starting with writers like Francis Iles, who has been described as "the father of the psychological suspense novel as we know it today", more and more authors laid the emphasis on character rather than plot. Up to the present, lots of authors have tried their hand at writing novels where the identity of the criminal is known to the reader right from the start. The suspense is created by the author having the reader share the perpetrator's thoughts -- up to a point, that is -- and having them guess what is going to happen next (for example, another murder, or a potential victim making a fatal mistake), and if the criminal will be brought to justice in the end. To name two randomly chosen examples, Simon Brett's A Shock to the System (1984) and Stephen Dobyns's Boy in the Water (1999) both are thrilling to read although they reveal the murderer's identity quite early in the narrative. A Shock to the System is about a hitherto law-abiding business manager's revenge which is triggered by his being passed over for promotion, and the intricate plan he thinks up to get back at his rivals. Boy in the Water is the psychological study of a man who, severely abused as a child, is trying to get back at the world at large now that he has the physical and mental abilities to do so. As a consequence of his childhood trauma, the killer randomly picks out his victims, first terrifying them and eventually murdering them. But Boy in the Water also traces the mental states of a group of people who happen to get in touch with the lunatic, and their reactions to him.

Crime fiction in specific themes

Apart from the emergence of the psychological thriller and the continuation of older traditions such as the whodunnit and the private eye novel, several new trends can be recognised. One of the first masters of the spy novel was Eric Ambler, whose unsuspecting and innocent protagonists are often caught in a network of espionage, betrayal and violence and whose only wish is to get home safely as soon as possible. Spy thrillers have continued fascinating the readers even if the Cold War period is over now. Another development is the courtroom novel which, as opposed to courtroom drama, also includes many scenes which are not set in the courtroom itself but which basically revolves around the trial of the protagonist, who claims to be innocent but cannot (yet) prove it. Quite a number of U.S. lawyers have given up their jobs and started writing novels full-time, among them Scott Turow, who began his career with the publication of Presumed Innocent (1987) (the phrase in the title having been taken from the age-old legal principle that any defendant must be considered as not guilty until they are finally convicted). But there are also authors who specialise in historical mysteries -- novels which are set in the days of the Roman Empire, in medieval England, the U.S.A. of the 1930s and 40s, or whenever (see historical whodunnit) -- and even in mysteries set in the future. A remarkable example of the latter is U.S. writer James L. Halperin's science fiction thriller The Truth Machine (1996), in which the construction of a 100 per cent accurate, easy-to-handle lie detector changes the face of the world, making crime -- but, alas, not all crime -- a thing of the past.

Feminist crime fiction

Feminism has also left its mark on the genre of crime fiction. Numerous private eyes -- professionals as well as amateurs -- are now women, many of them lesbians. Tally McGinnis, for example, is the young gay heroine of a series of novels by U.S. author Nancy Sanra (born 1944). Sanra's Tally McGinnis mysteries such as No Escape (1998), which is set in San Francisco, are quite traditional in other respects. Other female novelists include Sara Paretsky (born 1947), whose private detective V.I. Warshawski roams the streets of Chicago linking crimes to their perpetrators, who always seem to want to kill her for her efforts. In Britain, Scottish-born Val McDermid created lesbian journalist-cum-sleuth Lindsay Gordon, and Joan Smith (born 1953) has gained popularity as the author of a series of Loretta Lawson novels. Lawson is a university teacher and a real amateur as far as crime is concerned, but there is nothing she can do when, as it happens ever so often, she stumbles across a corpse, is there? In Full Stop (1995), she stops over at New York and is quickly devoured by the anonymous big city. And of course there are many more feminist authors who have succumbed to the temptation of writing crime fiction and, by doing so, infiltrate society and advocate their feminist ideas.

Police investigation themes

By far the richest field of activity though has been the police novel. By general consent, U.S. (male) writer Hillary Waugh's (born 1920) police procedural Last Seen Wearing (1952) is the best early example of this type of crime fiction. As opposed to hard-boiled crime writing, which is set in the mean streets of a big city, Last Seen Wearing ... carefully and minutely chronicles the work of the police, including all the boring but necessary legwork, in a small American college town where, in the dead of winter, an attractive student goes missing. In contrast to armchair detectives such as Dr. Gideon Fell or Hercule Poirot, Chief of Police Frank W. Ford and his men never hold back information from the reader. By way of elimination, they exclude all the suspects who could not possibly have committed the crime and eventually arrive at the correct conclusion, a solution which comes as a surprise to most of them but which, due to their painstaking research, is infallible. The novel certainly is a whodunnit, but all the conventions of the cosy British variety are abandoned. A lot of reasoning has to be done by the police though, including the careful examination and re-examination of all the evidence available. Waugh's police novel lacks "action" in the form of dangerous situations from which the characters can only make a narrow escape, but the book is nonetheless a page-turner of a novel, with all the suspense for the reader created through their being able to witness each and every step the police take in order to solve the crime.

The enormous output of police novels today makes it exceedingly difficult to pick out a couple of more recent examples, let alone recommend a good read. Any mention of a contemporary author of police novels can only be a random choice, and such a random choice would be Donna Leon's novels featuring a Venetian police detective, Commissario Guido Brunetti. Leon, an American who has been living in Venice, Italy for quite some time, is particularly good at capturing the atmosphere of that decadent city. Her plots, however, for example that of her eighth Brunetti novel, Fatal Remedies (1999), are seen by many as contrived, her solutions far-fetched, and the overall impression therefore unconvincing. Fatal Remedies is neither a whodunnit nor a police procedural (as one might think, with Commissario Brunetti as the hero); there are no twists and turns anywhere; Brunetti is not even once in danger. The language is simple; there is nothing really thought-provoking about the book. Nevertheless Donna Leon is enormously popular, especially in German-speaking countries.

A more interesting choice than Leon might be American writer Faye Kellerman (born 1952), who has written a series of novels featuring Peter Decker and his daughter by his first marriage, Cindy, who both work for the Los Angeles Police Department. A lot of local colour is provided by the author, especially through Peter Decker's Jewish background. In Stalker (2000), 25 year-old Cindy herself becomes the victim of an unidentified baddy -- a stalker --, repeatedly frightening her and also trying to do her bodily harm. Apart from her personal predicament, Cindy is assigned to clear up a series of murders that have been committed in the Los Angeles area. Again, the work of the police is chronicled in detail, but it would not be fiction if outrageous things did not intervene.