Approaching a crime extract:
Organise body paragraphs chronologically: 1st paragraph on opening, 2nd on middle section and 3rd on
ending. No conclusion is needed.
You will be given the year of publication, but even if the date is post-2000, the text may not be postmodern
as it can be a revisionist text that is rewritten with a focus on a previously marginalised voice, such as
offering a feminist slant on a Victorian murder.
- A postmodern text may also parody or pastiche a crime subgenre.
Speculate the subgenre the extract belongs to using the phrase “It could be…” or “[Author] could be
writing in the style of [subgenre] / could have revised [subgenre] into [subgenre] to [message].”
Try to contextualise the extract in the wider plot by speculating whether a scene is from near the opening,
the detection, or the denouement (i.e. ending).
Comment on the significance of suspense.
- If the detective is the narrator, how are clues processed without compromising suspense?
- If the text is not a ‘whodunit’ like ‘Brighton Rock’ in which the perpetrator is already known, is
suspense therefore less relevant?
Consider the value system in the text.
- With whom do the reader sympathise and why?
- What values are affirmed or called into question?
Consider if the clue is a red herring.
Identify the following narrative incidents:
Introduction of the detective / Introduction or discovery of the victim / Type of crime / Detective
idiosyncrasy / Murder scene / Cleanup of the murder scene / Pursuit / Interrogation of suspect /
Interaction between the detective and police / Fake alibi / Witness intimidation / Red herring / Detective-
sidekick interaction / Discovery of a subsequent victim / Drawing together of suspects / Revelation of the
perpetrator / Arrest / Trial / Punishment - judicial or extrajudicial
Comment on literary devices, such as alliteration, sibilance, personification, repetition, anaphora,
onomatopoeia, simile, metaphor, pathetic fallacy, hyperbole, allusion, analogy, oxymoron, juxtaposition,
imagery, rhetorical questions, irony, etc.
Comment on narrative voice.
- 1st or 3rd person narrative?
- Focalised or omniscient narrator?
- Intradiegetic (exists within the story) or extradiegetic (does not exist within the story) narrator?
- Tense?
- The story of investigation typically occurs in the present tense as the rising action while the
story of the crime occurs in past tense as the conclusive findings of the detective take the
reader back to the past.
- Management of time?
Restrict context-digressions to 3 sentences max.
,Narrative theory - One of longacre, Todorov or Fretag?
Longacre
Aperture (opening) → exposition (description)→ inciting moment (sets the main character or
characters on the journey that will occupy them throughout the narrative)→ developing
conflict → climax → denouement → final suspense →conclusion
Todorov
Equilibrium → disturbance → restoration of equilibrium.
The restoration of equilibrium does not mean the situation at the end has to be the same as at the start,
but rather the action must have completely settled .
- The reader is not left with the sense that anything is unresolved.
Freytag
Exposition → rising action → climax → falling action → denouement
Before the crime genre was codified
Roots of crime fiction
- Romanticism
- Stresses on evil and villainy as a counter to Good and Progress.
- Invokes the apriori idea of Good and Bad upon which crime fiction reflects.
- The action of the story ‘punishes’ or at least exposes the negative characteristics.
- Crimes against nature.
- Features supernatural forces.
- The Gothic notion of dark forces, secrets, curses and historical injustices, which are often exposed
by a proto-detective character.
- Early gothic texts focus on ancestral crimes, secrets and hauntings.
- Unlike crime texts, early gothic texts and texts during the Gothic revival period in the
second half of the 18th century and the 19th century tend to be pro-aristocratic, anti-
rationalism and anti-progress.
- The mass urban panics about murderers on the loose after the end of the feudal system and mass
urbanisation of the industrial revolution
- People were living in a new society which was at first lawless and needed to be regulated,
and were thus paranoid and desperate for information.
- This led to the emergence of crime fiction.
- The rise of the middle and working-class people’s voice in the media and literature after the 1760s
- Before the 1760s, literature considered ordinary people’s lives as worthless.
- After the 1760s, novels depict middle and working-class characters and environments
where there is crime whilst making the point that exploitation is itself a crime.
- E.g. Dickens’ ‘Oliver Twist’ portrays children as both criminals and victims of an
unequal society.
Although there was no genre of crime literature before the mid 19th century, there are still texts that
portray crime in which the criminality of the act is not the main focus and hence neither are the
conventions of detective investigation, justice and punishment and the legal system.
- The legal system existed to protect the interests of the monarch and the elite and was not
concerned with disputes amongst the ordinary people.
- In the 1700s, highwaymen were punished most harshly as victims were often elites whose
wealth affected the developing economy and commerce was a key part of life.
- Unofficial folk culture, such as ‘Robin Hood’, might offer a counterpoint to the
criticism of highwaymen by glorifying them as characters who resist the oppression
of the state instead.
, - Much of the focus was on the moral crime instead of a legal crime as sin threatens the stability of
the state and not individuals who did not have a voice.
- Criminals could not gain notoriety apart from being publicly punished as printing after its invention
was expensive and there were no newspapers until the early 1800s.
The Church served as a tool to establish the idea of right and wrong and according to Marxist theory,
disseminate messages designed to reinforce the dominant ideology.
- Most people either gained information from the Church or word of mouth at markets.
- The bible contains injunctions against sin that Marxists believe are spread to maintain the status
quo.
- Conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism and the various battles for royal
succession or influence in royal courts led to many being accused of the crime of treachery,
which carried the most serious punishments as it threatened the stability of the state.
As writing was largely done by aristocrats or the educated upper middle class, there was little interest in
the lives of the proletariat.
Since Magna Carta in 1215 which stated that the king and his government was not above the law, the
monarch was increasingly subject to the rule of law.
There was no police force until the early 1800s. Before its creation , a city may have had a ‘watch’ who
were typically local volunteers or soldiers responsible for maintaining civil order and imposing curfews,
- In rural communities, the landowner is responsible for maintaining order, investigating
disturbances, imprisonment, sentencing and punishment.
19th century rationalism
Sidekicks are often narrators, following Watson.
The detective is more insightful than the police who realises the case is not as simple as it seems and
seeks the help of the detective.
The mourning people are suspects.
The detective is the epitome of rationalism which is due to the Victorian notion that science can solve all
human problems.
- Focus on rationalism is heavily influenced by Victorian scientific discovery, particularly in the fields
of forensics and evolution.
E.g. Conan Doyle’s ‘Sherlock Holmes’
The stories typically open with Watson being invited to make a deduction by Holmes that turns out to be
wrong, causing Holmes to laugh and Watson to be angry. Holmes then explains how he deduced the
truth.
Elements of characters’ backstory are revealed by degrees through the stories.
Most of the stories are set in London and feature a clear dichotomy between the West and East ends with
the East end being full of opium dens, rough bars, workhouses and dingy alleys where law and order had
a tenuous hold.
- It was fashionable for the Victorian upper middle class to run social projects in the East end.
Criminals in the Sherlock Holmes series lack a clear motive and commit crime for the sake of committing
crime. The reader can deduce that they are criminals from their appearance
- Idea of humans being able to devolve from the prevalent eugenics during the Victorian era ->
Conon Doyle tends to make criminals ape-like.
, Conon Doyle does not portray the upper class as capable of having criminal tendencies as he is not
interested in what causes disorder, but the restoration of it.
The detective works with a less intelligent sidekick, who is also the intradiegetic narrator.
- This allows the solution to be withheld from the reader and for the reader to share admiration at
the detective’s working methods.
Holmes is a genius amateur who knows all branches of forensic science, is well-paid and can sometimes
take cases pro bono.
The detective possesses idiosyncrasies, e.g. Holmes’s avant-grant violin playing, pipe, cocaine use and
boxing.
Crime is always ultimately resolved. -> Holmes disperses mystery into something that is comforting.
19th century socially-engaged realism (started in ~1820)
E.g. Dickens who writes about ordinary people’s experience with the urban environment and criminals
being the product of society, e.g. urban poverty, making them sympathetic characters.
Focus on real social issues, presenting middle and working-class characters as victims of a brutal system
of exploitation of inequality.
19th century sensationalism
E.g. Penny Dreadfuls
Simply stress the violent, sexual or otherwise graphic aspects of crime.
Devoid of any coda or moral purpose, allowing the reader to process their fears by proxy.
1920s-30s Golden Age
E.g. Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot novels which also utilise rationalism as their foundation.
Ronald Knox’s 10 Commandments of Detective Fiction:
1. The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone
whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.
2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
3. No more than one secret room or passage is allied.
4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used.
5. No Chinaman must figure in the story.
6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition that
proves to be right.
7. The detective must not himself commit the crime.
8. The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the
reader.
9. The stupid friend of the detective, the sidekick or the narrator, must not conceal any thought which
passes through his mind. His intelligence must be slightly below that of the average reader.
10. Twin brothers and doubles must not appear unless the reader has been duly prepared for them.
According to Knox, a detective story must have the unravelling of mystery whose elements are clearly
presented to the reader at an early stage as its main interest and the mystery’s nature is to arouse a
curiosity that is gratified at the end.
