Crime Fiction

We have recently finished a topic in our English class called “crime fiction”. This topic was rather interesting, I think. I grew up watching Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes. And while I, as a child, found these episodes of different crime stories rather boring and old-fashioned, I have since changed my mind. I now actually quite enjoy the quizzical puzzle that Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot are – it gets the mind going and I always appreciate that.

Actually, it was during the course with crime fiction that I changed my mind about this whole “theme” – if you could call it that. Before whenever my sister insisted that we watch Sherlock Holmes, I would impose my veto – that will not be the case anymore. I really enjoyed watching the Sherlock Holmes movie in class – the one with Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law – fun story: My old Math teacher had a crush on Jude Law; he was her screen saver.

But what I found most interesting about this course was the way the genre has evolved through time.

First off was of course the beginning; crime fiction as we know it appears for the first time in the works of Edgar Allan Poe. The beginning finds an omniscient detective and his friend, who is the narrator of the story and a great admirer of the detective, as is the case with Sherlock Holmes. Holmes is a product of his time and we can relate to him. He involves himself more in reality – which is where Doyle (the author) separates himself from Poe.

However, where I really stumbled, was during the Golden Age, where a consensus about form and content is established. Crime stories are considered a game to be played and various rules are introduced. One key word is fair play. The author is supposed to present the relevant clues in the text so the reader has a chance to solve the mystery. The focus is therefore on the puzzle and its logical detection. It is entertainment and functions as such. And that is what is fascinating to me. We had to write an assignment about one particular Hercule Poirot-story, “The Tragedy at Marsden Manor” and the way Poirot sorts the mystery is quite outstanding. There is a time, when Poirot is speaking with a certain Captain Black and to solve the mystery of a supposed suicide, they play a rapid-fire round, I guess you could call it that.  And the way that Poirot connects the different words is very mesmerising to me – I think that is what changed my mind about crime fiction altogether.

But then during the 1920s American society changed rapidly and drastically, a change that was to affect the crime story. The lawlessness of Prohibition America made the gentleman detective seem outdated. The Golden Age crime story had become too remote from the reality of American society. The pulp magazine and the film contributed to the development of a more realistic American crime story. The market for cheap crime stories was enormous among American blue-collar workers. This demand was met by pulp magazines like “Black Mask”, whose reader were not prejudiced by the British tradition, but who were worried about crime in their cities. The detective is now a hard-boiled detective. The hard-boiled detective is a modern version of the western hero who is up against desperadoes who are terrorizing the once peaceful, law-abiding and God-fearing town. He has no assistant or chronicler. He is a loner and is lonely in a hostile and corrupt society.

After the Second World War, the picture of the crime story gets more blurred. It is no longer possible to put the crime stories of a particular period under one label. There are certain trends that have characterized the post-war period.

And now there are new trends such as psychological crime stories. It is truly amazing to me how much a genre can change through time – all because of what happens in the world.