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Chapter One: Introduction: Macherey, Poe, and the Detective Fiction Genre
Though his [Poe’s] streams of influence flowed largely underground for several decades, they fed not only Doyle’s work but that of countless later writers.
Charles J. Rzepka, Introduction, A Companion to Crime Fiction, 5.
I’ll never tell…any of you!
Don’t Say A Word (2001)
I. About Poe and the Detective Fiction Genre
Edgar Allan Poe has long been reputed to be “the father of detection” in consequence of his three short detective stories featuring a detective figure, Auguste Dupin, : “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1842), and “The Purloined Letter” (1845)
(Symons, Dashiell, Hammett, 35). Dupin, clearly modeled after the well-known French police detective, Eugène François Vidocq (1775-1857), demonstrates “how rational analysis combined with imagination can solve mysteries” (Worthington, “From The Newgate Calendar to Sherlock Holmes,” 22). If we want to view the three detective stories as the origin of the detective fiction genre (, which I shall prove in Chapter II), we must note that this genre is akin to some other genres, such as crime fiction. (The two terms will be carefully differentiated in Chapter II.) Above all, all of these genres were created in a complex context, where there are a lot of interrelated factors, such as the Romantic movement, and the Gothic novel, which may be viewed “as a direct source for crime fiction” (Knight, Crime Fiction since 1800, 19).F1F Another factor that can be specifically singled out and seen as a major forerunner of Poe’s detective stories is The Newgate Calendar, collections of criminal biographies of London’s Newgate Prison during the 18th and 19th centuries (Worthington, 130). From The Newgate Calendar derived the so-called “Newgate Fiction,” a derogatory term for criminal novels published in the 1830’s and 1840’s (Hollingsworth, The Newgate Novel 1830-47, 14).F2F Both The Newgate Calendar and Newgate fiction are highly moralistic, “shaped by the need
1 In addition, Larry Landrum Jr. notes that 70 Gothic novels created between 1794 and 1854 use the word ‘mystery’ in their titles, which is a code-word that will later belong to crime fiction (3). And in Chapter II, the connections between
‘the mystery’ and ‘detective fiction’ will be investigated. See Larry Landrum Jr., American Mystery and Detective Novels: A Reference Guide (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999), 3.
2 Worthington points out, “Newgate novels were accused of glorifying criminality and making it attractive. The best-known authors at the center of the controversy caused by glamorizing criminality were Edward Bulwer-Lytton,
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to avoid accusations of degeneracy and of posing a threat to its readers and (by extension) society”
(Pittard, “From Sensation to the Strand,” 115).F3F Above all, they introduced crimes and criminal investigations into the middle and upper classes. It was against such background that Poe created his three detective stories. Following the model set up by Poe, plenty of top-notch writers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean made their attempts to create detective fiction, ushering this inchoate genre into its golden or classical period. Then in the 1920’s, while classical detective fiction remained predominant in Britain, the so-called “hard-boiled” detective fiction emerged in the U.S.
In a way, it is “an acknowledgement of big business corruption” and its “unpatronizing portrayal of working class experience.” It is “a vehicle for radical criticism” (Worpole, Dockers and Detectives, 31, 41). At this phase, detective fiction began to turn towards realism and thus serve the function of social criticism. Later in 1940’s emerged the so-called “postmodern” or “metaphysical” detective fiction. Patricia Merivale regards postmodern detective fiction as “a crooked derivative” of detective fiction genre because it aims “to question, subvert, and parody” the conventions of detective stories (“Postmodern and Metaphysical Detection,” 308). Basically, it has “the intention, or at least the effect of….transcend(ing) the mere machinations of the mystery plot” (Merivale and Sweeney, “The Game’s Afoot,” 2, italics mine).
To sum up, all of these subsequent subgenres of detective fiction developed directly under the influence of Poe (Just as Rzepka has stated, it is fair to say that every detective story writer in the world is influenced by Poe.).And with these subgenres, there is no denying that the detective fiction genre has already been a fully-fledged literary genre. First of all, it has captured the attention of many modern writers. For instance, William Faulkner must have learned the technique of “the double plot” from detective fiction and employed it in some of his most important works, such as
The Sound and Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, and Light in August (Cawelti, “Canonization, Modern
William Harrison Ainsworth and Charles Dickens.” Lyn Pykett notes that Dickens’ Oliver Twist was often criticized as a piece of Newgate fiction because there is indeed certain narrative resemblance between them both. See Worthington, 19.
Lyn Pykett, “The Newgate Novel and Sensation Fiction, 1830-1868,” The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. Ed.
by Martin Priestman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 27.
3 In 1907, Florence Bell conducted an investigation of popular culture in industrial society. She then stated that Newgate fiction was “the counterpart, in a cruder form, of the detective stories reveled in by readers of more education and a wider field of choice…” See Florence Eveleen Eleanor Bell, At the Works: A Study of a Manufacturing Town {1907} (New York: Augustus M. Kelly, 1969), 146.
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Literature, and Detective Story,” 11). In addition, it has transcended the generic boundaries; that is, besides fiction it may take many other forms, such as cinema, the TV show (eg, Murder, She Wrote or Columbo), or a stage performance (eg, Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap), the comic book or the cartoon (eg. the recent animated film, Zootopia (2016), or the Japanese franchise of Detective
Conan, which comes in both the cartoon and the comic books, has created such a huge sensation in
both Japan and Taiwan.), etc. Or it may overlap many other genres, such as sci-fi fiction (eg. Nora Roberts’ well-known In Death series, where Detective Eve Dallas looks into a series of cases in the mid-21st century New York City.), history novels (Dan Brown’s best-seller, The Da Vinci Code is a fine example. Another perfect instance would be Josephine Tey’s 1951 detective/history novel, TheDaughter of Time, where a hospitalized Scotland Yard inspector Alan Grant attempts to find out
whether Richard III (1452-1485) really murdered his two nephews. In 1990, this novel was voted No. 1 on The Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time list by the U.K. Crime Writers’ Association. ), pastiche, (The 2000 movie Scary Movies is a perfect example), even Chinese martial arts cinema (Here are two prominent examples: Peter Chan’s (Ke Xin, Chen) 2011 movie, Wu Xia, where a county constable investigates two robbers’ deaths. Hark Tsui’s (Ke, Xu) 2010 movie Detective Deeand the Mystery of the Phantom Flame, where Detective Dee of the Tang Dynasty takes the
empress’ order to investigate several mysterious fires), and so on. Therefore, in this dissertation, I will try to ‘cast my net wide;’ that is, the instances I give will range from orthodox detective novels to detective stories taking non-novelistic forms or merging into other genres.As a matter of fact, the detective fiction genre doesn’t merely have its own developmental history or formal complexities; most of all, it “has become a genre in which writers explore new social values and definitions,” such as sexism or racism. That is, the “creation of representative detective heroes has become an important social ritual for minority groups who would claim a meaningful place in the larger social context” (Cawelti, 8). Here, Cawelti highlights the sociality of detective fiction. As mentioned previously, hard-boiled detective fiction serves the purpose of social criticism. Above all, Cawelti also reminds us that detective novels composed in different cultures will mirror different social values and have different detective heroes. That is, as the recent
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development of detective fiction “indicates its global promise” (Rzepka, 9), the genre is manifestly characterized by “its regional diversity,” as Cawelti observes (8). In other words, detective fiction today isn’t merely “internationalized;”F4F it has gone “glocalized,” a term Roland Robertson uses to refer to “a global outlook adapted to local conditions” (“Glocalization,” 28).F.5F Therefore, in this dissertation, I will try to treat the detective fiction genre both globally and locally.