Crime and Fiction

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Crime and Fiction

• Session One
• Introduction

2
Agenda

• The programme
• The conventions of crime fiction are common
  knowledge
• Crime fiction is the narrative of narratives

3
The Programme

• Primary literature
• Graham Greene, Brighton Rock
• Tom Stoppard, The Real Inspector Hound
• Tibor Fischer, The Thought Gang
• Martin Amis, Night Train
• Realism, Modernism, Postmodernism, Now
• Fiction with narrative traits

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Graham Greene, Brighton Rock

• Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three
  hours, that they meant to murder him. With his
  inky fingers and his bitten nails, his manner
  cynical an dnervous, anybody could tell he didnt
  belong belong to the early summer sun, the cool
  Whitsun wind off the sea, the holiday crowd. They
  came by train from Victoria every five minutes,
  rocked down Queens Road standing on the tops of
  the little local trams, stepped off in bewildered
  multitudes into the fresh and glittering air (3)

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Tom Stoppard, The Real Inspector Hound
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Tibor Fischer, The Thought Gang

• The only advice I can offer, should you wake up
  vertiginously in a strange flat, with a
  thoroughly installed hangover, without any of
  your clothing, without any recollection of how
  you got there, with the police sledgehammering
  down the door to the accompaniment of excited
  dogs, while you are surrounded by bales of
  lavishly-produced magazines featuring children in
  adult acts, the only advice I can offer is to try
  be good-humoured and polite. (1)

7
Martin Amis, Night Train

• I am a police. That may sound like an unusual
  statement or an unusual construction. But its
  a parlance we have. Among ourselves, we would
  never say I am a policeman or I am a policewoman
  or I am a police officer. We would just say I am
  a police. I am a police. I am a police and my
  name is Detective Mike Hoolihan. And I am a
  woman, also. (1)

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Common knowledge

• Crime fiction is everywhere books, television,
  movies, computer games
• Examples of crime fiction from each of the above
  media?
• Transmedial similarities and differences. What do
  the stories, movies, tv-series, computer games
  have in common? What varies?

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• TUSCALOOSA, Ala. Feb 15, 2005  A lawsuit claims
  the video game "Grand Theft Auto" led a teenager
  to shoot two police officers and a dispatcher to
  death in 2003, mirroring violent acts depicted in
  the popular game.

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Literary Fiction and Crime

• Susan Glaspell, Trifles
• LeRoi Jones, Dutchman
• Harold Pinter, The Dumb Waiter
• Salman Rushdie, The Prophets Hair

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Literary Fiction and Crime

• Gothic fiction
• Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, Great
  Expectations.
• Edgar Allen Poe,
• Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
• Brett Easton Ellis, American Psycho
• Ian McEwan, Atonement, Saturday
• Martin Amis, London Fields
• Paul Auster, The New York Trillogy
• Peter Carey, The True History of the Kelly Gang.

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Crime-free Fiction?

• Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
• Thomas Hardy, On the Western Circuit
• Jack London, The Law of Life
• Stephen Crane, The Open Boat
• Virginia Woolf, The Mark on the Wall

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Crime fiction as narrative paradigm

• Theres another sense in which crime fiction is
  everywhere.
• The literature of detection is paradigmatic of
  literary narrative itself (Marcus 2003 245), it
  forms the narrative of naratives (Brooks 1984
  25)

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Crime fiction as narrative paradigm

• Inquest the present work of detection that we
  read about in order to learn about the past story
  of the
• Crime

• Sjuzet, plot, discourse
• Fabula, story

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Literary Narrative and the Paradigm og Detection

• Story and plot (progression, regression,
  digression)
• Attitudes to the paradigm
• Acceptance realism.
• Rejection Virginia Woolf and the modernists.
• Ambiguity, ambivalence. Postmodernism and after