This paper was written as a plenary for a crime
fiction conference held at the University of Reading in 1998; at that time I
had been teaching for three years at the University of Wales, Cardiff (as it
was then known), a twelve-week module on crime fiction. I had also taught a
course of that kind at De Montfort University 1992-4. Strange to say, none of
the departments in which I had worked in allegedly egalitarian Australia had
been willing to take on this louche subject, but I and my friends had negotiated
this by consistently teaching crime fiction in the adult education system which
flourished in the large cities there.
I have been teaching crime fiction in some
context of other for over thirty years now. But experience is not much use because
crime fiction keeps changing. As if Chaucer popped up now and then with half a
dozen new Canterbury Tales. Since I started teaching the genre in the 1960s a
range of new sub-genres have appeared. Procedural policing has more or less come
and gone (or hidden in television); the psychothriller has branched out and
crossed over into the `respectable’ novel found on the earlier pages of the review
sections; feminist thrillers have appeared on great numbers and many forms: not
so many, interestingly, in the male gay versions; highly innovative have been Afro-American
thrillers, postmodernist thrillers and, more regrettably from my viewpoint, the
so called `cozy’ mystery, replete with cats and chefs. National variants have
flourished in Germany , France , Italy ,
Catalonia , Canada ,
Australia , Ireland , Scotland
and, almost, Wales
Teaching crime fiction is stalking a moving
object, unless we are content to put it all on the slab as in the old Oxford
The other big improver in crime fiction these
days is creative instruction books and courses about how to write the genre
anyway – often, if a little threateningly – held at country house retreats.
Does everyone survive ? I have no experience of that area being firmly
uncreative (or you could say critical) in my writing. The Stephen Knight who writes
those fine bold poems and perceptive reviews in the British weeklies is someone
else, though also from Wales
and from the same college at Oxford Wales novel of the year prize
got invited by phone to a literary conference in Copenhagen
Anyway, after what the Creative Writing
tutors would call my scene-setting so far, what of the case in hand ? What
indeed might be the Why, What and How of teaching crime fiction ?
The existence of a Why depends on a whole
set of attitudes to literary canons, institutional, political and just
psychotic. There remain people who feel the subjects taught in departments of
English should only be respectable, tasteful, and morally uplifting. Like Titus Andronicus, perhaps. There are not
so many of those people around now in the glass cases in English departments,
but there certainly were when I was an academic lad. I was once advised by a
senior staff member that my career would be severely handicapped if I continued
to teach and even write about `things’ like crime fiction. Well, perhaps my career
has been severely handicapped by the many citations of the still in print 1980 Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction. What
else might I have achieved ?
The narrowness of the traditional canon was
certainly the reason I started teaching crime fiction courses in what was then called Adult Education or, worse from a modern
mercantilist viewpoint, Workers’ Education. I cannot say I notice any
difference between those external sixties course and what I have more recently
done internally in universities, except that people had then read far more than
modern internal students have done or will do. There were, though, always the mature-age
students of both genders in woolly jumpers who appeared to have memorised the entire
works of Dorothy L. Sayers.
One proper response to Why teach crime
fiction is essentially, Why Not ? It is only humanities departments that have, especially
in the past, felt the right to exclude substantial elements of human experience
from their purview, as if medicine faculties only studied the illnesses caught
by posh people. To those of us who think a canon is anything bigger that a .32,
the issue of Why does not seem a real one.
But it would still be true to acknowledge, and perhaps for us to take some
largely unearned credit for, the fact that almost everyone who teaches crime
fiction is in some way aware of their action as counter-canonical. Even if the
course is entirely devoted to musical references in Edmund Crispin, it still
will have some implication of resistance to the traditional literary canon,
even if only a playful one. I notice among my colleagues who teach crime
fiction in Britain, and in North America as well (there are so many of them
over there), a clear sense of enjoying a marginal position and using it as a
location from which to tweak the tail, at least, of those who feel, or like to
feel, or would like to feel, more centralised in the culture industry, better invested
in cultural capital. There are, as we used to say at theorycentric Cardiff
But that identifiable coherence about Why
does not imply any other kind of solidarity among the criminopedgagogues.
Moving along to consider What, when I look at the course plans so helpfully
collected a while ago by B. J. Rahn,[1]
I am constantly struck by their variety. It is not total. There is a residual
core of writers on most lists. The old lags are Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie
and, somewhat to my surprise, Raymond Chandler – I would have thought more
purists might have used Hammett as the archetype of the `tough guy’ story. Poe
does not appear on all the courses, presumably because not all of them go back
that far –more on the topic of scope shortly. Something that did surprise me
was that Dorothy Sayers appeared on so many. Equally disconcerting was that
many did not include Sara Paretsky, or indeed any representative of the
feminist thriller school, and only a few came bang (or scream) up to date, with
1990s Gothic texts like Thomas Harris’s The
Silence of the Lambs or Val McDermid’s The
Mermaids Singing or their successors Patricia Cornwell and James Patterson..
That authorial variety and vacancy was
supplemented by sub-generic inconsistency. While clue-puzzle and private eye
were always there, quite rare were the police procedural, the psychothriller
(whether of the victim- or criminal-focused kind) and – a sign of the time no
doubt – the spy story. It wouldn’t have happened twenty years ago when Le Carré
was the Chandler
In the presence of this data, what patterns
can be induced (to use the correct term for this method, not deduced, as Conan
Doyle fallaciously had it). The core authors, Doyle, Christie and Chandler, are
very notable, and not only for being from the same part of the alphabet (a very
prolific one if you think of Chesterton, Cheyney, Crofts, Dickson Carr and
surely other literal congeners), but also for being mainstream literary
person’s authors. Chandler
The underlying tendency of quite a lot of
syllabi towards a sort of idealist aestheticism – let’s have literary fun – is
something to note and, I would humourlessly suggest, to try to avoid as a waste
of effort. I see that approach as being itself a part of a process of education
as cultural capital, as an echo of the canon. In the literary-oriented crime
fiction course the student is being invited to share the teacher’s seven per
cent bookish solution, rather than learn the skills of decent induction.
The relatively frequent absence of Poe, and
indeed of Harris and McDermid, points to another pattern that I find troubling.
Not many of the courses I have seen operate on a historical principle. Now I am
sure the dismissive phrase `grand narrative’ will be poised on many sensitive
lips: I know there are dangers in thinking – and so creating – history. But I
also believe there are many advantages in encouraging people to understand how,
over times and places, cultural forms have changed and developed, and so to be
able to see our own culture against a matrix of possible alternative meaning.
However, this historicocriminography is
hard to operate, and for several reasons. One is that some forms crucial in the
development of the crime fiction genre seem to have exhausted their appeal
except in the most museum-like manner. I used to set Ed McBain’s Cop Hater out of a perhaps misplaced
historicity-questing purism, and talk about the growing development in the late
1950s of a focus on types of proceduralism in novel and television. I noticed
that very few students were interested in writing on McBain, but I soldiered on
until the year Cop Hater went out of
print, I think 1997 – but it may well be that the work of McBain and his
avatars was so forcefully done that proceduralism is now always a given, at
least in film and television. This subliminal excision of material seems also true
of the psychothriller – the classic texts by Margaret Millar and Patricia
Highsmith seem to be of very little interest to modern students, and when in
1995 I tried to teach King Solomon’s Carpet
by `Barbara Vine’, feeling it would speak to students from the Thatcher years,
only two students out of 85 could be bothered to write on it and I believe both
were mature age. Maybe it was too veridical, says the historian. It is also
true, I self-convincingly think, that modern crime fiction has internalised
many psychothriller elements, from The
Silence of the Lambs onwards.
A commitment to history itself brings questions.
The constraints of space in a course and in student attention means there will
be historical gaps, and there is also the question of which history do you
follow ? The history of crime fiction we usually have tends to be simplistic.
It goes Poe, Doyle, Christie, Chandler Gardner
I resolved the history question to my
satisfaction after a few years at Cardiff
But even if a syllabus does aspire to a
traditional flow, there will still be evident insertions: I hold that you can judge
any crime fiction course pretty accurately by focusing on the one oddball that
each course will contain. This is the real clue to the whole, this is the
shifted armchair or the unwatered potplant that speaks all to the specialist. A
learned, witty feminist might include Gladys Mitchell; someone of anorakish sentimentality
could select Freeman Wills Crofts; for a recidivist soizante-huitard, the scrap
of torn apron will be Sjöwall and Wahlöö. For me, the revealing presence was
the collection of almost unknown nineteenth-century periodical stories, Enter the Detective as I called it –
I’ve never even bothered to find a publisher, it was made in the office and
costed for photocopying, about two pounds. It showed that even Poe, the great
originator, had predecessors in his combination of Gothic frisson and Enlightenment
elucidation, including in the American Gentleman’s
Magazine that he would edit. It suggests, or I tried to make it suggest,
that what Poe, Collins, Doyle, etc did was to appropriate and institutionalise
forms and forces and work in the depths of popular culture and, not unlike my
own career, across the globe.
In the same speculatively historicist way I
have consistently tried to make students look at what is going on now in
fiction (and by extension in film), by asking them to consider whether there is
a new sub-genre, the thriller of violence, where the key element is to have
gouts of blood and gobbets of flesh swilling about –a motif based sub-genre,
rather than a character- or plot-based sub-generic definition, as has been more
usual in the genre. Such discussions of what is contemporarily innovative in
itself must bring up by contrast what survives of the traditional genres in the
ultramodern. And so historicism marches on.
This discussion has as you will notice
moved into the area of How – methodology – and that is in basis where there
exist the widest disparities in teaching crime fiction. I think, as I have
already implied, that quit a few of the courses I have encountered are
essentially exercises in connoisseurism in which a teacher simply shares (and
so validates) no more than interest in and enthusiasm for the form. I have no
objection to connoisseurism in itself, it can produce elegant books and
tasteful book collections: it is just that without some other methodology in
support it can be quite without any analytic force, it generates no
intellectual agency in the reader – or the student.
Connoisseurism aside, there are other
patterns that run through approaches to crime fiction both in writing it or in
the construction of courses about it. One that is surprisingly current is a
religious approach. It is not hard to set up a course which stresses the
quasi-divine role of the detective and sees the sub-genres as sadly headshaking
parabiblical read-out of our world. There are examples of such courses around
the world. Auden is the big critic here, asserting the prevalence of guilt
through the whole genre, and also the whole creation;[2]
the card-carrying Christians Chesterton and Sayers figure largely of course.
The singleton giveaway tends to be not Harry Kemelman’s rather mundial Rabbi,
but one of the fruiter Oxbridge pseudonyms such as Edmund Crispin or Michael
Innes, trailing clouds of secular glory which appear to mime religious
certainties.
There is another dubious methodology I have
discerned, which is best called masculinism. Here the singleton clue will be
either John Buchan or `Sapper’ (H.C.McNeile) with Bulldog Drummond – sometimes
both. Public school nostalgia and imperialist moonshine, plus some derring-do
with a large revolver, illuminate this methodology and there will almost
certainly be Ian Fleming to come or least another public school chap in Le
Carré -- and conceivably, if we are in the brainy end of this section, Graham
Greene. There are American versions of masculinism that will include Cornell
Woolrich, Jim Thompson and George V. Higgins, and will canonise figures like
Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiassen, who seem to me both fluent and thin.
Masculinist as Paretsky may be in the view
of some readers (V.I. is a bit tough at times), she did not appear in either of
these programmes. She does of course on a feminist-oriented course, which may
well also use some past classics by women such as the American doyenne Anna
Katharine Green or the much under-noticed Londoner Celia Fremlin, perhaps even
the elusive Americans who in reality were a stimulus to Agatha Christie like
Carolyn Wells and Mary Roberts Rinehart. There should also be the modern
heavyweights Barbara Wilson and Katharine V. Forrest, perhaps even the
US-published Claire McNab with her glamorous lesbian detective to match Sydney Harbour
Away from all this gender and politics – as
they would hopefully like to think – there are forms of formalism. One kind was
produced by Jacques Barzun, pinning stories to the velvet of his discriminations.[3]
More productive, I think, are the types of formalism that plunge more deeply
into, and through, the texts. Structuralism in Tzetvan Todorov’s work had
interesting things to say about crime fiction, especially the double structure
by which the author patiently reversed the obfuscating narrative which the
murderer had tried to construct, and John G. Cawelti’s influential book was a
primer of structuralist formations in the genre. Umberto Eco’s own interest was
a semiotic version of the same thrust before he turned creative, and Martin Priestman’s
more measured account, the only British formalism to speak of, operated basically
on that mode. A lucid account has been given by the American scholar Tony
Hilfer.[4]
At a less immediately accessible level a number of critical theorists have used
crime fiction to focus some elusive thought or other. For Lacan it’s Poe; for
Belsey, Doyle; for Žizek, Doyle and Chandler ;
for Jameson, Chandler
A more demotic and less elevated version of
that mode of thought is the increasingly common cultural studies approach to crime
fiction. This tends to take a series of texts selected for their relation to major
issues in cultural studies and read them through appropriate secondary sources.
A general version of this was my own 1980 Form
and Ideology in Crime Fiction, but later accounts have been more single
issue in focus. The stations of the hermeneutic cross early on included
feminism: Munt’s British study had a brisk approach, but Walton and Jones is surely the best; post-colonialism has
yet produced little of much weight, but Ed Christian made a start and two
German scholars, Christine Matzke and Susanne Mühleisen, went further; gay
studies has thrived in fiction, especially extending the feminist response --Walton
and Jones are good on this too – but as Drewey Gunn shows, dealing much less
with male figures, so presumably showing differing approaches to the macho
detective; the body and violence is another strong development in the fiction
but little noted or cared about by the critics, though I have tried to identity
the thriller of violence as a new sub-genre in the second edition of my recent
survey.[6]
Recently there has been a tendency to see more material on the non-Anglophone
mystery, which is a welcome event, notably Marieke Krajenbrink and Kate Quinn’s
Investigating Identities. There has also
appeared a series of somewhat plodding studies on the nineteenth century, the
best on both detail and analysis being Ronald Thomas on science and Heather
Worthington on the early years.[7]
I have not yet said anything about
assessment. Perhaps this is because I first drafted this talk while having very
recently withdrawn from the piles of scarcely
decipherable exam scripts which the half-baked Cardiff rules at that time
imposed on me: half-baked because third year had essays, second year exams.
After a bit we just ignored this piece of meaningless meta-management. I was
also at that time also serving a whole set of terms as an external examiner or,
as my revealingly erroneous typing would have it, eternal examiner. Having in
second year won my way from the dawn shoot-out with pen and paper to the
literate liberty of the essay, I have used an assessment system that I believe
has worked pretty well for all involved. I require students to undertake comparative
work, not write on one text – and remain astonished that such a narrow range remains possible in university
assessment at all. I will however let them write on one text if, making it
harder than mere comparatism, they match the text with a theoretical method
that enlightens it, or present an illuminating historical context or, very
rarely selected, a text not on the course but which would be an interesting
interpretative partner if it were.
This alternative to two-book study seems to
work rather well and produces some interesting and original essays, especially
from joint honours students or those specialising in critical theory. There is an
opposite end: all courses in popular culture will always have a few students
who think this is going to be really easy stuff and produce poor, even incomplete
essays. And there are always a few who complain because there is too much reading,
definitely not expected at the popular end of things. I expect to cover at least
a book a week, while my canonical colleagues proceed with a much more measured
tread. But year on year the patterns of student choice have varied radically –
in 1997-8 for example Paretsky was much more in than Doyle, and the reverse had
been previously true. The Woman in White
stays well cliented – though one year they had to be warned to write on the
book, not the recent television series. Strange to say, among the self-selected
texts I have not yet found Chesterton or Sayers.
In the third year nineteenth-century course
assessment has been stiffer, being a `double module’ with an accordingly longer
essay. I have still made two texts the basis, though students quite often here embrace
more, especially if they use some of the anthologised short stories. These more
mature and confident students are more likely to take the contextual or
theoretical approach, though often dealing with more than one text in that mode
– and other texts, sometimes Gothic, sometimes other novels especially by
Collins or Braddon, appear rather more regularly.
Others may well assess in different ways –
university practices vary enormously and the transatlantic quiz is something to
the bottom of which I have never got. While I have probably made my own comparatist
and contextualist concerns clear enough, I would always also want to be open to
formalist and especially theoretical approaches and have seen excellent work in
those modes, sometimes leading on to postgraduate study. Selection among the
assessment approaches I have described, and no doubt some I have not even considered,
will necessarily depend on who is teaching a course, what kinds of students
attend, what the department breeds, or will tolerate, as attitudes and especially what kind of
secondary materials are available. While there have been more books on crime
fiction in recent years, they tend either to be surveys or collections of
disparate and often jejeune essays, not in general solid examples of an
approach across a range of texts (I think both the scholars and the publishers
are naïve in this respect). Particularly a problem, at least for senior
students, is the shortage and limitation of material in journals. Clues, now started up again, and basically
the only focused medium, tends to be special-interest oriented and to offer
very little on the mainstream authors.
A final point – and a serous one, though
not one I seem to be able to get anyone to consider much – is that we are not
well served by the potential titles of our courses. `Teaching Crime Fiction’
is deeply banal, underselling both the
form and the activity, and that doesn’t improve at all with synonymic variation
like the detective novel, the thriller and so on. These title all, for many
students, and indeed colleagues, seem inherently belittling and make it harder
to get going properly. Maybe something generic like `The Tradition of Poe’
might be less troublesome, or to take the conceptual high road, `Fiction of
Aberrance’ -- less grandly, Murder and Melodrama’. Or just a simple map, `From Godwin to Doyle’, `From Christie to
Cornwell’.
Or even something historical: I feel
`Nineteenth-Century Crime Fiction’ has a bracingly demanding challenge to it.
And it has another advantage. While I realise that for most students these days
(i.e. in our own history), history is a nightmare which they hope to sleep
through and never remember, I would still urge always historicise as the master method. The genre is so
omnipresent and omnipopular that it seems to resist historicisation in a constant
flow of the vertiginously present, but in fact the variations are very detailed
because they are so specifically tied to their contexts. The genre can be an
ideal place to start to fulfil the motive to learn about such changes; we are
steadily building up a set of means for fulfilling that process and with so much
material, you could hardly deny there is a rich, indeed almost overwhelming opportunity
to make a good, developmental and reproducible process of learning about the
social meanings, the communal communications, of crime fiction.
[1] In Murder is Academic: A
Collection of Crime Fiction Course Syllabi, New York ,
English Department, Hunter College , 1993 and Murder
is Academic: A Second Collection of Crime Fiction Course Syllabi, New York , English Department, Hunter College
[2] W. H. Auden, `The Guilty
Vicarage’, in The Dyer’s Hand and Other
Essays, London
[3] The Delights of Detection,
New York
[4] Tzetvan Todorov, `The Typology of Crime Fiction’, in The Poetics of Prose, trans, R. Howard,
Oxford, Blackwell, 1977; John G. Cawelti, Adventure,
Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture, University
of Chicago Press, 1976; Umberto Eco, The
Role of the Reader, London, Hutchinson, 1976; Martin Priestman, Crime Fiction: from Poe to the Present,
Plymouth, Northcote House, 1997; Tony Hilfer, The Crime Novel: A Deviant Genre, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1990.
[5] Jacques Lacan, `The Seminar on the Purloined letter’, Yale French Studies, 48 (1972), 39-72;
Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice, London, Routledge, 1982, pp. 109-17; Slavoj
Žizek, `Two Ways to Avoid the Real of Desire’, Chap. 3 of Looking Awry, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1992, pp. 48-66; Fredric
Jameson, `On Raymond Chandler’, Southern
Review, 6 (1970), 624-50.
[6] Sally R. Munt, Murder by the
Book ? Feminism and the Crime Novel,
London , Routledge, 1994; Priscilla L. Walton and Manina Jones, Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the
Hard-Boiled Tradition, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1999; Ed
Christian, ed., The Post-Colonial Detective,
London, Palgrave, 2001; Christine Matzke and Susanne Mühleisen, eds, Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime Fiction from
a Transcultural Perspective, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2006; Drewey Wayne Gunn, The Gay Male Sleuth in Print and Film,
Lanham MD, Scarecrow, 2005; Stephen
Knight, Crime Fiction Since 1800:
Detection, Death, Diversity, second edition, London, Palgrave Macmillan,
2010, pp. 208-09.
[7] Marieke Krajenbrink and Kate
M. Quinn, eds., Investigating Identities:
Questions of Identity and Contemporary International Crime Fiction,
Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2009; Ronald R. Thomas, Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science, Cambridge
University Press, 1999; Heather
Worthington, The Rise of the Detective in
Early Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction, London, Palgrave, 2005.
