History of crime fiction  

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Crime fiction is a typically 19th and 20th century genre, dominated by British and American writers. This article explores its historical development as a genre.

Crime fiction in history

It was only from the 19th century 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, alibis, or the modus operandi, or any of the other elements which make up the crime novels of subsequent ages.

Early Arabic crime stories

The earliest known example of a crime story was "The Three Apples", one of the tales narrated by Scheherazade in the One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights). In this tale, a fisherman discovers a heavy locked chest along the Tigris river and he sells it to the Abbasid Caliph, Harun al-Rashid, who then has the chest broken open only to find inside it the dead body of a young woman who was cut into pieces. Harun orders his vizier, Ja'far ibn Yahya, to solve the crime and find the murdererer within three days, or be executed if he fails his assignment. Suspense is generated through multiple plot twists that occur as the story progesses. This may thus be considered an archetype for detective fiction.

The main difference between Ja'far in "The Three Apples" and later fictional detectives such as Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, however, is that Ja'far has no actual desire to solve the case. The whodunit mystery is solved by the murderer himself confessing his crime, which in turn leads to another assignment in which Ja'far has to find the culprit who instigated the murder within three days or else be executed. Ja'far again fails to find the culprit before the deadline, but due to his chance discovery of a key item, he eventually manages to solve the case through reasoning, in order to prevent his own execution.

Early Chinese crime stories

Other early crime stories include the Ming Dynasty Chinese detective fiction such as Bao Gong An (Chinese:包公案) and the 18th century novel Di Gong An (Chinese:狄公案). The latter was translated into English as Dee Goong An (Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee) by Dutch sinologist Robert Van Gulik, who then used the style and characters to write an original Judge Dee series.

The hero of these novels is typically a traditional judge or similar official based on historical personages such as Judge Bao (Bao Qingtian) or Judge Dee (Di Renjie). Although the historical characters may have lived in an earlier period (such as the Song or Tang dynasty) the novels are often set in the later Ming or Manchu period.

These novels differ from the Western tradition in several points as described by van Gulik:

• the detective is the local magistrate who is usually involved in several unrelated cases simultaneously;
• the criminal is introduced at the very start of the story and his crime and reasons are carefully explained, thus constituting an inverted detective story rather than a "puzzle";
• the stories have a supernatural element with ghosts telling people about their death and even accusing the criminal;
• the stories were filled with digressions into philosophy, the complete texts of official documents, and much more, making for very long books;
• the novels tended to have a huge cast of characters, typically in the hundreds, all described as to their relation to the various main actors in the story;
• little time is spent on the details of how the crime was committed but a great deal on the torture and execution of the criminals, even including their further torments in one of the various hells for the damned.

Van Gulik chose Di Gong An to translate because it was in his view closer to the Western tradition and more likely to appeal to non-Chinese readers.

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. Early examples of crime stories includes Steen Steensen Blichers The Rector of Veilbye (1829), Philip Meadows Taylor's Confessions of a Thug (1839) and Maurits Christopher Hansen's Mordet paa Maskinbygger Roolfsen (1839).

An example of an early crime/revenge story is the American poet and short story writer Edgar Allan Poe's (1809-1849) tale "The Cask of Amontillado", published in 1846. (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 lesser side-kick to the detective as narrator (later epitomised in the Dr. Watson of the Sherlock Holmes stories) 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 "The Murders in the Rue Morgue". Here, the reader is presented with a puzzle and encouraged to solve it before finishing the story and being told the solution.

These stories are so-called because they involve a crime — normally a murder — which takes place in a "locked room." In the simplest case this is literally a hermetically sealed chamber which, to all appearances, no one could have entered or left at the time of the crime. More generally, it is any crime situation where — again, to all appearances — someone must have entered or left the scene of the crime, yet it was not possible for anyone to have done so. (For example, one such Agatha Christie mystery (And Then There Were None) takes place on a small island during a storm; another on a train stalled in the mountains and surrounded by new-fallen, unmarked snow.) One of the most famous locked room mysteries was The Hollow Man. The resolution of such a story might involve showing how the room was not really "locked"; or that it was not necessary for anyone else to have come or gone; that the murderer is still hiding in the room; or that the person to "discover" the murder when the room was unlocked in fact committed it just then.

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".

Many of the great fictional detectives have their Watson: Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot, for example, is accompanied by Captain Arthur Hastings. Hastings does not appear in all Hercule Poirot mysteries though; he does, for instance, in Three Act Tragedy (1934).

(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), and many more; some of them were American, but with a 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.

Hard boiled American crime fiction writing

A U.S. reaction to the cosy conventionality of British murder mysteries was the American hard-boiled school of crime writing (certain works in the field are also referred to as noir fiction). Writers like Dashiell Hammett (1894 - 1961), Raymond Chandler (1888 - 1959), Jonathan Latimer (1906 - 1983), Mickey Spillane (1918 - 2006), and many others decided on an altogether different, innovative approach to crime fiction.

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 a heavy drinker without ever getting too drunk to be unaware of his surroundings or unable 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.

Also, as Raymond Chandler's protagonist Philip Marlowe -- immortalized by actor Humphrey Bogart in the movie adaptation (1946) of the novel The Big Sleep (1939) -- admits to his client, General Sternwood, he finds it rather tiresome, as an individualist, to fit into the extensive set of rules and regulations for police detectives:

'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.'

As can be deduced from the above paragraph, hard-boiled crime fiction just uses a different set of clichés and stereotypes. Generally, it does include a murder mystery, and there is no reason why the readers, while they are reading along, should not try to have guesses at who the murderer is. However, the atmosphere created by hard-boiled writers and the settings they chose for their novels are diametrically opposed to those of, say, English country-house murders or mysteries surrounding rich old ladies elegantly bumped off on a cruise ship, with a detective happening to be on board. Ian Ousby writes -

"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 [...].

Ever since its independence from Britain, the U.S.A. had been proud of its image as a land of freedom and opportunity, as a "free country" to all intents and purposes. Among many other things, this kind of all-inclusive freedom includes the right to own, carry, and use firearms, the relatively unbureaucratic procedure people have to undergo if they want to set up their own business, the habit of moving away without leaving a forwarding address, but also about the lack of a national health system and a social safety net in general. As opposed to the "closed" society experienced in Britain - the village of St Mary Mead, where Miss Marple lives; the small island off the coast of England which becomes the scene of a capital crime; the Orient Express or any other train travelling through Europe; even London's West End, including Soho -- America stands for an "open" society (not in the Popperian sense), consisting of rootless and uprooted people coming and going, with no boundaries to keep them in check, a society characterised by shifting loyalties and radical individualism. America either stands for wide open spaces -- as presented in countless westerns and, at a later point, road movies -- or the anonymous big city with all its dangers lurking round each and every corner. The works resounded with messages that seemingly said "Careful, young man, it's a jungle out there!"

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. [...]

Later, when Craven and Carmel are already on more intimate terms, they find themselves alone in some shack, and the following scene unfolds:

'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 goddamn 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, goddamn you. Now!'

Later we lay on the floor.

At least two more authors are worth mentioning here. One is Mickey Spillane, who is often seen as an epigone, as a mere imitator of the hard-boiled style of writing. It cannot be denied, however, that Spillane has made a genuine contribution to the development of American crime fiction. His novel I, the Jury (1947), for example, combines action, a wisecracking private eye, a murder mystery and a lot more.

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.

The military veteran as hardboiled protaganist

Several hardboiled heroes have been war veterans. H. C. McNeile (Sapper)'s Bulldog Drummond from World War I, Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer and many others from World War II, and John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee from the Korean War. In Bulldog Drummond's first appearance he is a bored ex-serviceman seeking adventure, Spillane's Mike Hammer avenges an old buddy who saved his life on Guadalcanal. The frequent exposure to death and hardship often leads to a cynical and callous attitude as well as a character trait known today as post-traumatic stress characterises many hardboiled protagonists.

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' 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' 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 s/he is 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 United States of the 1930s and 40s, or whenever (see historical whodunnit) -- and even in mysteries set in the future. Remarkable examples can be found in any number of Philip K. Dick's stories or novels.

Feminist and lesbian 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, some 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 an amateur sleuth. In Full Stop (1995), she stops over at New York and is quickly devoured by the city.

Police investigation themes

By far the richest field of activity though has been the police novel. U.S. (male) writer Hillary Waugh's (born 1920) police procedural Last Seen Wearing ... (1952) is an 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 readers created through their being able to witness each and every step the police take in order to solve the crime.

Another example is American writer Faye Kellerman (born 1952), who wrote a series of novels featuring Peter Decker and his daughter by his first marriage, Cindy, who both work for the Los Angeles Police Department. 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 a stalker, who repeatedly frightens her and also tries 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.