Introduction. David Malcolm

Transcription

1

2

3 Introduction David Malcolm The criminal turn, le moment policier, seems upon us. Crime fiction, in one shape or another, is everywhere. It is surely one of the most successful genres of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, and one of the most expansive. (If in what follows I concentrate on British texts, that is because that is what I know best. Many other examples could surely be generated in the contexts of many other national literatures.) First, success. The crime novel sections in bookstores are well-stocked and well-patronized. Crime novels are reviewed intelligently and respectfully. Substantial scholarly attention is given to crime fiction. (This volume of essays is evidence of that.) For sure, crime fiction is to a degree kept within the fences of its own literary reservation, and crime writers do not win major (but by whose definition major?) literary prizes. Their own, however, are worth winning, and bring prestige and cash. Indeed, a picture of the recent fiction of the UK would be incomplete without reference to work by P.D. James, John le Carré (his crime fiction, not just his espionage novels; we should not forget that his first novel, A Murder o f Quality, is - as it sounds - a murder mystery), Iain Rankin, and David Peace. Crime fiction is, of course, an international genre (as the essays in this collection demonstrate), and recent US fiction, for example, cannot be discussed without referring to Stanley Ellin, Walter Mosley, James Ellroy, Cormac McCarthy, and Dennis LeHane. The essays in this volume make clear how widespread crime fiction is throughout the world. Second, expansion. Crime fiction is, indeed, an aggrandizing genre. Its morphology is impressive. Women detectives are there from the start (see Leonard Merrick s Mr Bazalgette s Agent from 1888), although they come into their own and take on complex and very subversive qualities in the later twentieth century (Sara Gran s Clare DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway [2012], with a heroine wild even by San Francisco standards, is a case in point). The geographical scope of crime fiction is almost unparalleled. Unlike many genres, it seems unbound in space. Southern Africa, Scandinavia, India, late Soviet Moscow, even Aberdeen (Stuart MacBride s novels) have joined the classic crime fiction locales - the mean streets of LA and a pre-clean Air Act London. Indeed, one can imagine a situation in which no provincial European town will one day not have its own existentially troubled detective, randomly but regularly strewn corpses, and fat cat corruption. Nor is crime fiction bound in time. Historical crime fiction is one of the genre s staples, and in some cases, for example, Anthony Horowitz s Foyle s War series of TV films (made and released from 2002) and Len Deighton s SS/GB

4 10 David Malcolm (1978) has produced work of some distinction. (Deighton s novel points to crime fiction s territorial ambitions, for SS/GB is, strictly, allohistorical, rather than historical, fiction.) Crime fiction has also showed itself able, and willing, to take on topics of the utmost seriousness - beyond the trivialities of homicide, crime passionel, chicanery, and defalcation. James Ellroy s Underworld USA Trilogy, for example the marvellous and disturbing The Cold Six Thousand (2001), addresses the corruption of an entire nation, a topic that in another context is more modestly, but nonetheless bitterly, addressed by Philip Kerr s recent Bertie Gunther novel Prague Fatale (2011). As if that were not enough, the comic potential of crime fiction is exploited in Kyril Bonfiglioli s fine trilogy of novels centred on the crooked art dealer Charlie Mortdecai, for example D on t point that thing at me (1972). It is also another remarkable sign of crime fiction s expansiveness that mainstream writers, not primarily or solely known as dedicated crime fiction writers, have taken on the genre. John Banville s alter ego Benjamin Black is one. But Ian McEwan s The Comfort o f Strangers (1981) and his hugely successful Atonement (2001) certainly bear the marks of the genre. So, too, does Graham Swift s The Light o f Day (2003), with its reworking of Raymond Chandler s hard-boiled detective in the leafy suburbs and shabby main streets of South London. Peter Ackroyd s most successful novel, Hawksmoor (1985), is a murder mystery and deviant police procedural, as well as a frightening trip into the depths of London s history. It is not surprising that some of Britain s most eminent recent novelists have tackled crime fiction. David Peace s work in the genre is well known. But he also writes fiction that is not crime fiction, although even in it there are crime s genre markers. See the monumental GB84 (2005), for example. China Miéville s The City and the City (2009) is political allegory, metaphysical speculation, and crime novel, starting with the classic topos of the detective s inspecting a victim s body. Keith Ridgway s enigmatic Hawthorn & Child (2012) is a collection of crime stories, as well as an examination of the limits of knowledge, of the power and the pretensions of story, and of places of spiritual and physical desolation. Once again, many other examples, in many other contexts, could be generated. Of course, all this interest in crime might give us pause. Why are murderers and crooks everywhere in our literature (and on TV screens, and those in cinemas)? Why this fascination with something that most of us will never do, and most of us will never (one hopes) experience? Answers to such questions are beyond the remit and above the pay-scale of a humble student of literature, but one can speculate. Romantic and post-romantic psychopathology and interest in the sociopathic? (After all, crime fiction does coincide with Romanticism - James Hogg s The Private Memoirs and Confessions o f a Justified Sinner

5 Introduction 11 (1824) has, at more than one level, more than just a hint of the detective story; Edgar Allan Poe s crime stories date from the 1830s and the 1840s, and is not the great The Man of the Crowd (1840) the story of a tail?) A deep sense that there s something deeply rotten in the social fabric, which crime fiction can well expose? A terror of the existential borders that we might cross if we re unlucky or careless? A desire to know - after all, the detective either understands the mystery and unravels it, or doesn t, in which case he or she is just like us anyway, and we can sympathize? And does the detective in the crime novel - that most urban of genres - not traverse the great city, or the smaller, bringing the pieces together, just as he or she brings together the most disparate of social groups? After all, crime in fiction often draws the whole society into the frame, an ambition that many nineteenth-century novelists had, but which many later writers have ducked out on. Or do we just want to be taken out of the drabness of our quotidian subfusc into the glamour, however raw, however scary, of those dodgy streets in LA? The essays in this volume attest to the geographical scope of crime fiction (both in terms of setting and place of production), the thematic range, and the seemingly endless resource of the genre to make and remake itself. It is to be welcomed for its breadth of perspective and for the close analyses of texts that it contains. Of course, much work remains to be done. It is to be hoped that this is not the end of the editors investigations.