Crime Files Series General Editor: Clive Bloom Since its invention in the nineteenth century, detective fiction has never been more popular. In novels, short stories, films, radio, television and now in com- puter games, private detectives and psychopaths, prim poisoners and over- worked cops, tommy gun gangsters and cocaine criminals are the very stuff of modern imagination, and their creators one mainstay of popular consciousness. Crime Files is a ground-breaking series offering scholars, students and discern- ing readers a comprehensive set of guides to the world of crime and detective fiction. Every aspect of crime writing, detective fiction, gangster movie, true- crime exposé, police procedural and post-colonial investigation is explored through clear and informative texts offering comprehensive coverage and theoretical sophistication. Published titles include: Hans Bertens and Theo D’haen CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CRIME FICTION Anita Biressi CRIME, FEAR AND THE LAW IN TRUE CRIME STORIES Ed Christian (editor) THE POST-COLONIAL DETECTIVE Paul Cobley THE AMERICAN THRILLER Generic Innovation and Social Change in the 1970s Christiana Gregoriou DEVIANCE IN CONTEMPORARY CRIME FICTION Lee Horsley THE NOIR THRILLER Merja Makinen AGATHA CHRISTIE Investigating Femininity Fran Mason AMERICAN GANGSTER CINEMA From Little Caesar to Pulp Fiction Linden Peach MASQUERADE, CRIME AND FICTION Criminal Deceptions Susan Rowland FROM AGATHA CHRISTIE TO RUTH RENDELL British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction Adrian Schober POSSESSED CHILD NARRATIVES IN LITERATURE AND FILM Contrary States Heather Worthington THE RISE OF THE DETECTIVE IN EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY POPULAR FICTION Crime Files Series Standing Order ISBN 978-0–333–71471–3 (hardback) 978-0–333–93064–9 (paperback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England Deviance in Contemporary Crime Fiction Christiana Gregoriou © Christiana Gregoriou 2007 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2007 978- 0- 230- 00339- 2 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-0-230-59463-0 ISBN 978-0-230-20721-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-0-230-20721-9 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10987654321 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 to mum and dad This page intentionally left blank Contents Preface ix Acknowledgements xi 1 Introduction: Narratology and Deviance 1 Aims, material and method 1 Narratology and deviance 4 The structure of narratives 4 Crime fiction as genre and as popular literature 12 Deviance 18 Outline of remaining contents 34 2 Contemporary Crime Fiction: Constraints and Development 36 Introduction 36 Crime fiction: origins and development 37 Rules, regularities and constraints 39 Defining the crime fiction genre 39 Rules and constraints 41 Formulaic regularities 44 What sort of an attraction does crime literature hold for its readers? 48 Crime fiction reading as pleasure 49 Crime fiction reading as an addiction 51 Crime fiction and the notion of realism 52 The genre as a mirror to society 52 Challenging the masculinity, whiteness and straightness of the genre 54 From private eye novel to police procedural 55 Character in detective fiction 58 The detective as the criminal’s double 58 Writers focusing on the murderer 60 The future of crime fiction 61 vii viii Contents 3 Linguistic Deviance: The Stylistics of Criminal Justification 62 Introduction 62 The stylistics of justification in contemporary crime fiction 63 Contextualising the crime fiction extracts 63 Stylistic analysis of the extracts 67 The study’s conclusions 75 A further investigation into the portrayal of the criminal mind in Patterson 78 Contextualising the criminally-focalised extracts 78 The poetics of the criminal mind 79 The study’s conclusions 90 4 Social Deviance in Contemporary Crime Fiction 91 Defining ‘abnormal behaviour’: the Connelly series 91 The carnivalesque as social deviation in the genre 94 Carnivals 94 Carnivalesque 98 The carnival of crime fiction 100 Jungian archetypes 107 Criminal archetypes 111 5 Generic Deviance in Contemporary Crime Fiction 123 On defining genre 123 Wittgenstein’s family resemblance theory 124 The prototype approach to sense 127 Defamiliarisation and genre 129 The crime fiction genre 132 Cornwell’s generic form: a subgenre or a new genre? 140 What constitutes generic deviance? 150 6 Conclusion 151 Book review 151 Metafunctions of deviance 153 Investigating deviance 155 Writers on their work 160 References 166 Index 175 Preface Like most people, Quinn knew almost nothing about crime. He had never murdered anyone, had never stolen anything, and he did not know anyone who had. He had never been inside a police station, had never met a private detective, had never spoken to a criminal. Whatever he knew about these things, he had learned from books, films, and newspapers. He did not, however, consider this to be a handicap. What inter- ested him about the stories he wrote was not their relation to the world but their relation to other stories. Even before he became William Wilson, Quinn had been a devoted reader of mystery novels. He knew that most of them were poorly written, that most could not stand up to even the vaguest sort of examination, but still, it was the form that appealed to him, and it was the rare, unspeakable bad mystery that he would refuse to read. Whereas his taste in other books was rigorous, demanding to the point of narrow-mindedness, with these books he showed almost no discrimination whatsoever. When he was in the right mood, he had little trouble reading ten or twelve of them in a row. It was a kind of hunger that took hold of him, a craving for a special food, and he would not stop until he had eaten his fill. Auster (1988: 7–8) This excerpt, taken from ‘City of Glass’, a story from Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy (1988), expresses a view of detective literature that is shared by many devoted crime readers, including myself. Auster’s char- acter Quinn is a writer as well as a reader of the genre, who finds himself fascinated with the form to such an extent that there is little crime literature which he would find unappealing. What emerges in Auster’s story is in fact an investigation into the art of story telling, as well as an examination into the essence of language itself. Similarly, this book is a study of the format of the genre and an exploration of the language employed in selected extracts. Unlike Quinn, I addition- ally examine the form in relation to the world we live in, that is, in a social context. ix x Preface Detective stories have dominated paperback publishing since the twentieth-century revolution of the mass-market industry began. Though the term ‘detective story’ is long standing (as early as 1924, the term was ‘the unprepossessing name by which this class of fiction is now universally known’, Freeman, 1946: 7), in the USA the term ‘mystery’ is also used. I, however, favour the term crime fiction or crime literature in reference to the category, since I find that though the works I analyse certainly involve detection, it is quite often someone other than the detective doing the ‘detecting’. Christiana Gregoriou December 2005 Acknowledgements I take this opportunity to thank my PhD supervisor, Professor Peter Stockwell, for his professional guidance and advice while researching and writing an earlier version of this text as a doctoral thesis. His tremendous enthusiasm for stylistics and his thoroughness and insight will continue to influence me throughout my career as a stylistician and crime fiction analyst. I would also like to thank my friends and colleagues for their encour- agement over so many years. Last but by no means least, I would like to thank my parents for their love and invaluable support. This book is dedicated to them. xi 1 Introduction: Narratology and Deviance Aims, material and method I aim to explore the poetics of deviance in the context of contemporary crime fiction. I use the term poetics, since it etymologically suggests a study concerned with the art or theory of ‘making’. Though, as Wales (2001: 305) argues, the term since classical times has been linked with the art of poetry, its etymological definition suggests that it is con- cerned with the art of any genre, hence Aristotle’s Poetics (1996), which discusses the art of drama and epic, but not specifically poetry.