EXPERIMENTATION

CONVERSATION
VIOLENCE

TEACHING
STYLISTICS
POLICE PROCEDURAL

CRIME FICTION
TEACHING THE NEW ENGLISH SERIES

NOIR

Edited by CHARLOTTE BEYER

CRITIQUE
POPULAR
DETECTIVE
CRIMINALITY
PLOT
THEORY
CLUES
GENDER
ECOLOGICAL CRIME
HARD-BOILED
POSTCOLONIALISM
FILM
THEORY
TRANSGRESSION
Teaching the New English

Series Editor
Ben Knights
Teesside University
Middlesbrough, UK
Teaching the New English is an innovative series primarily concerned with
the teaching of the English degree in the context of the modern university.
The series is simultaneously concerned with addressing exciting new areas
that have developed in the curriculum in recent years and those more
traditional areas that have reformed in new contexts. It is grounded in an
intellectual or theoretical concept of the curriculum, yet is largely
concerned with the practicalities of the curriculum’s manifestation in the
classroom. Volumes will be invaluable for new and more experienced
teachers alike.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14458
 Charlotte Beyer
Editor

Teaching Crime
Fiction
Editor
Charlotte Beyer
University of Gloucestershire
Cheltenham, UK

Teaching the New English

ISBN 978-3-319-90607-2    ISBN 978-3-319-90608-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90608-9

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 Series Preface

One of the many exciting achievements of the early years of the UK

English Subject Centre was the agreement with Palgrave Macmillan to
initiate the series ‘Teaching the New English’. The intention of Philip
Martin, the then Centre Director, was to create a series of short and acces-
sible books which would focus on curriculum fields (or themes) and
develop the connections between scholarly knowledge and the demands
of teaching.
Since its inception as a university subject, ‘English’ has been committed
to what is now known by the portmanteau phrase ‘learning and teaching’.
The subject grew up in a dialogue between scholars, critics, and their stu-
dents inside and outside the university. Yet university teachers of English
often struggle to make their own tacit pedagogic knowledge conscious, or
to bring it up to a level where it might be shared, developed, or critiqued.
In the experience of the English Subject Centre, colleagues found it rela-
tively easy to talk about curriculum, but far harder to talk about the suc-
cess or failure of seminars, how to vary modes of assessment, or to make
imaginative use of virtual learning environments or web tools. Too often,
this reticence meant falling back on received assumptions about how stu-
dents learn, about how to teach or create assessment tasks. At the same
time, we found, colleagues were generally suspicious of the insights and
methods arising from generic educational research. The challenge for the
extended group of English disciplines has been to articulate ways in which
our own subject knowledge and forms of enquiry might themselves refresh
debates about pedagogy. The need becomes all the more pressing in the
era of rising fees, student loans, the National Student Survey, and the

v
vi SERIES PREFACE

characterization of the student as a demanding consumer of an educa-

tional product. The implicit invitation of the present series is to take fields
of knowledge and survey them through a pedagogic lens.
‘Teachers’, people used to say, ‘are born, not made’. There may be
some tenuous truth in this. There may perhaps be generosities of spirit
(or, alternatively, drives for didactic control) laid down in early childhood.
But the implication that you cannot train or develop teachers is dubious.
Why should we assume that even ‘born’ teachers should not need to learn
or review the skills of their trade? Amateurishness about teaching has far
more to do with the mystique of university status than with evidence
about how people learn. This series of books is dedicated to the develop-
ment of the craft of teaching within university English Studies.

Teesside University
Ben Knights
Middlesbrough, UK
UCL Institute of Education
London, UK
 Acknowledgements

Thank you to the Series Editor, Professor Ben Knights, for his encourage-
ment and invaluable guidance, and to Benjamin Doyle, Camille Davies,
and Tomas Rene at Palgrave for their helpful assistance and advice
throughout the process of the production of this book.
Enormous thanks go to all the contributors to this volume for sharing
your fascinating insights and experiences. Your work and commitment
have made this book. Thank you also to all my colleagues in the wider
crime fiction criticism community.
I would also like to acknowledge the inspiration and enthusiasm which
I have received from all the students I have taught crime fiction over the
years, and whose dissertations and theses I have supervised and
examined.
Finally, thank you to my husband Stuart and daughter Sif for their
unstinting love and support.

vii
 Contents

1 Introduction: Crime Fiction   1

Charlotte Beyer

2 Designing Crime Fiction Modules: The Literature

Classroom and Interdisciplinary Approaches  17
Rebecca Martin

3 Plots and Devices  35

Malcah Effron

4 Teaching Crime Fiction and Gender  49

Maureen T. Reddy

5 Teaching American Detective Fiction in the Contemporary

Classroom  63
Nicole Kenley

6 Teaching Postcolonial Crime Fiction  83

Sam Naidu

7 Cut a Long Story Short: Teaching the Crime Short Story  99

Charlotte Beyer

ix
x Contents

8 Studies in Green: Teaching Ecological Crime Fiction 115

Samantha Walton

9 Teaching Crime Fiction and Film 131

Sian Harris

10 Crime Writing: Language and Stylistics 147

Christiana Gregoriou

11 The Crime Novelist as Educator: Towards a Fuller

Understanding of Crime Fiction 163
Paul Johnston

12 Teaching Crime Fiction Criticism 179

Rosemary Erickson Johnsen

13 Teaching Contemporary US Crime Fiction Through the

‘War on Drugs’: A Postgraduate Case Study 195
Andrew Pepper

Index 211
 Notes on Contributors

Charlotte Beyer is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at the University of

Gloucestershire, where she teaches crime fiction, postcolonial writ-
ing, and modern/contemporary literature. She has published widely
on crime fiction, and her forthcoming monograph from McFarland
examines the crime short story. Her edited volume Mothers Without
Their Children (with Andrea Lea Robertson) will be published in
2019 by Demeter Press. Charlotte is on the Steering Committee for
the Crime Studies Network and on the Editorial Boards for the jour-
nals Feminist Encounters, The New Americanist, and American, British
and Canadian Studies.
Malcah Effron is a Lecturer in Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional
Communication in the Department of Comparative Media Studies at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She holds a Ph.D. in English
Literature from Newcastle University, England and has published articles
in The Journal of Narrative Theory, Narrative, and Women & Language.
She also edited Function of Evil across Disciplines (Lexington Books, 2017)
and The Millennial Detective (McFarland, 2011) and has contributed
chapters to it as well as to History of American Crime Fiction (Cambridge,
2017). She is also the co-founder of the international Crime Studies
Network (CSN).
Christiana Gregoriou is an Associate Professor in English Language at
Leeds University. She is a crime fiction stylistics specialist and ran the
2016–17 AHRC/ESRC-funded project on the representation of trans-
national human trafficking in news media, true crime, and fiction.

xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Most ­ notable are her three monographs (Crime Fiction Migration:

Crossing Languages, Cultures, Media. 2017; Language, Ideology and
Identity in Serial Killer Narratives. 2011; Deviance in Contemporary
Crime Fiction. 2007), and her edited collections (Constructing Crime:
Discourse and Cultural Representations of Crime and ‘Deviance’. 2012;
Language and Literature, ‘Investigating Contemporary Crime Writing’
special edition 21(3) 2012.
Sian Harris is the Director of Teaching and Digital Learning in English
at the University of Bristol. She was previously in post as an Education &
Scholarship Lecturer at the University of Exeter, where she designed
and delivered a specialist survey course ‘From the Rue Morgue to the
Millennium’, as well as supervising numerous undergraduate and
postgraduate dissertations on detective fiction. Siân’s research inter-
ests are driven by the dynamic between gender and genre in contem-
porary fiction, and she has previously published work on A.S. Byatt,
Marina Warner, J.K. Rowling, and Ian Rankin.
Rosemary Erickson Johnsen is Professor of English at Governors State
University, near Chicago, USA, where she teaches courses in literature and
popular culture. Her publications include Contemporary Feminist
Historical Crime Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan) and articles on crime fic-
tion, Irish literature, and public scholarship. Her current book project
focuses on contemporary Irish and Scandinavian crime fiction; other
research interests include Patrick Hamilton and the British inter-war
period. She received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant in
2017, and serves on the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Popular
Culture. More information is available at rosemaryj.com.
Paul Johnston is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Liverpool Hope
University. He has degrees from Oxford, Edinburgh, and St Andrews uni-
versities. He is the author of nineteen critically acclaimed crime novels,
two of them award-winners, numerous short stories, and a poetry pam-
phlet. His novels have been published around the world and translated
into many languages. His current work-in-progress is No Man, a recasting
of Homer’s Odyssey and Joyce’s Ulysses as crime fiction. An early ver-
sion, ‘Ulysses of Embra’, appeared in American, British and Canadian
Studies, number 1, 2017.
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
   xiii

Nicole Kenley is an Assistant Professor of English at Simpson University

in Redding, CA. She received her B.A. from the University of California,
Berkeley, her M.A. from New York University, and her Ph.D. from the
University of California, Davis. She is currently at work on her first book
project, Detecting Globalization, which examines American detective fic-
tion’s shift from a national literature to a global one post-1970. In addi-
tion to detective fiction, her fields of interest include contemporary
American fiction, gender studies, and the literature of globalization. Her
scholarship has been published in Mississippi Quarterly and Clues.
Rebecca Martin teaches at Pace University in New York in the areas of
crime writing, detective fiction, the gothic novel and female gothic, and
film studies. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the Graduate Center of the
City University of New York. Her published research is in detective fic-
tion, the eighteenth-century gothic novel, and film studies. Recent publi-
cations include two edited collections of essays with Salem Press: Critical
Insights: Crime and Detective Fiction (2013) and Critical Insights: Film:
Bonnie and Clyde (2016).
Sam Naidu is an Associate Professor in the Department of English,
Rhodes University, South Africa. Her main research and teaching interests
are transnational literature, crime and detective fiction, and the oral-­
written interface in the colonial Eastern Cape. Recent publications are
Sherlock Holmes in Context, Palgrave Macmillan (2017) and A Survey of
South African Crime Fiction: Critical Analysis and Publishing History
(2017). She has also guest edited a special issue of Current Writing on
South African crime fiction (2013) and of The Journal of Commonwealth
and Postcolonial Studies (2017) on postcolonial and transnational crime
fiction.
Andrew Pepper is Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature at
Queen’s University Belfast where he has taught crime fiction at under-
graduate and M.A. levels for sixteen years. He is the author of Unwilling
Executioner: Crime Fiction and the State (Oxford 2016) and The
Contemporary American Crime Novel: Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Class
(Edinburgh 2000) and co-editor of Globalization and the State in
Cotemporary Crime Fiction. He has also written a series of detective
novels set in nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland including The
Last Days of Newgate (2006) and Bloody Winter (2011), all published by
Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Maureen T. Reddy is Professor of English at Rhode Island College in

Providence, RI (USA), and has been teaching and writing about crime
fiction for thirty years. Her publications on crime fiction include two
books, Sisters in Crime: Feminism and the Crime Novel and Traces, Codes,
and Clues: Reading Race in Crime Fiction, and many articles, including a
fairly recent piece in Clues on Tana French and one in New Hibernia
on the rise of the Irish hardboiled. Reddy won the Popular Culture
Association’s Dove Award in 2013 for contributions to the serious study
of crime fiction.
Samantha Walton is Reader in Modern Literature at Bath Spa University.
Her research concerns the intersection of mental health and ecology in
modern and contemporary literature, with particular focus on Scottish
literature and popular fiction. Her first book, Guilty But Insane: Mind and
Law in Golden Age Detective Fiction, was published by Oxford University
Press in 2015.
 A Chronology of Significant
Critical Works

1976 John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula

Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
1980 Stephen Knight, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction. London:
Macmillan Press.
1987 LeRoy Panek, An Introduction to the Detective Story. Bowling
Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.
1988 Brian Docherty, American Crime Fiction: Studies in the Genre.
Houndmills: Macmillan Press.
1988 Maureen T. Reddy, Sisters in Crime: Feminism and the Crime
Novel. New York: Continuum.
1990 Martin Priestman, Figure on the Carpet: Detective Fiction and
Literature. Houndmills: Macmillan Press.
1993 Stephen Knight, Continent of Mystery: A Thematic History of
Australian Crime Fiction. Melbourne: University of Melbourne
Press.
1994 Sally Munt, Murder by the Book? Feminism and the Crime Novel.
London: Routledge.
1994 William Reynolds and Elizabeth A. Trembley, eds. It’s a Print!:
Detective Fiction from Page to Screen. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling
Green State University Press.
1995 Kathleen Klein, The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre.
University of Illinois Press.
1997 Jerome Delamater and Ruth Prigozy, eds. Theory and Practice of
Classic Detective Fiction. Westport: Greenwood Press.

xv
xvi A Chronology of Significant Critical Works

1999 Priscilla L. Walton and Manina Jones, Detective Agency: Women

Rewriting the Hard-boiled Tradition. Berkeley and L.A.: University
of California Press.
1999 Catherine Nickerson, The Web of Iniquity: Early Detective Fiction
by American Women. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
1999 Woody Haut, Neon Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction.
London: Serpent’s Tail.
1999 Heta Pyrhönen, Mayhem and Murder: Narrative and Moral Issues
in the Detective Story. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
2000 Susan Rowland, From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British
Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction. Houndmills:
Palgrave.
2000 Sean McCann, Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and
the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
2001 Gill Plain, Twentieth-century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and
the Body. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
2001 Adrienne E. Gavin, and Christopher Routledge, eds. Mystery in
Children’s Literature: From the Rational to the Supernatural.
Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.
2003 Maureen T. Reddy, Traces, Codes and Clues: Reading Race in
Crime Fiction. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
2003 Martin Priestman, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2004 Stephen Knight, Crime Fiction Since 1800: Detection, Death,
Diversity. Houndmills: Palgrave.
2004 John Cawelti. Mystery, Violence, and Cultural Studies: Essays.
Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, Popular
Press.
2005 John Scaggs, Crime Fiction. London: Routledge.
2005 Lee Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
2005 Charles Rzepka, Detective Fiction. Cambridge: Polity.
2005 David Schmid, Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American
Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
2006 Christine Matzke and Susanne Mühleisen, eds. Postcolonial
Postmortems: Crime Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective.
Amsterdam: Rodopi.
 A Chronology of Significant Critical Works 
   xvii

2006 Rosemary Erickson Johnsen, Contemporary Feminist Historical

Crime Fiction. New York: Palgrave.
2006 Merja Makinen, Agatha Christie: Investigating Femininity.
Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
2007 Maurizio Ascari, A Counter-History of Crime Fiction: Supernatural,
Gothic, Sensational. Houndmills: Palgrave.
2008 David Geherin. Scene of the Crime: The Importance of Place in
Crime and Mystery Fiction. Jefferson: McFarland.
2008 Leonard Cassuto, Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of
American Crime Stories. New York: Columbia University Press.
2008 Jean Murley, The Rise of True Crime: 20th-Century Murder and
American Popular Culture. Westport, Conn.: Praeger.
2009 Christiana Gregoriou, Deviance in Contemporary Crime Fiction.
Houndmills: Palgrave.
2009 Mary Evans, The Imagination of Evil: Detective Fiction and the
Modern World, London: Continuum.
2009 Claire Gorrara, ed. French Crime Fiction. Cardiff: University of
Wales Press.
2011 Giulana Pieri, ed. Italian Crime Fiction. Cardiff: University of
Wales Press.
2011 Andrew Nestingen and Paula Arvas, eds. Scandinavian Crime
Fiction. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
2011 Malcah Effron, ed. The Millennial Detective: Essays on Trends in
Crime Fiction, Film and Television, 1990–2010. Jefferson:
McFarland.
2011 Heather Worthington, Key Concepts in Crime Fiction. Houndmills:
Palgrave.
2011 Marc Singer and Nels Pearson, eds. Detective Fiction in a
Postcolonial and Transnational World. Farnham: Ashgate.
2012 Lynnette Porter, ed. Sherlock Holmes for the 21st Century: Essays on
New Adaptations. Jefferson: McFarland.
2013 Sabine Vanacker and Catherine Wynne, eds. Sherlock Holmes and
Conan Doyle: Multi-Media Afterlives. Houndmills: Palgrave.
2014 Jeanne Slonoiwski and Marilyn Rose, eds. Detecting Canada:
Essays on Canadian Crime Fiction, Television, and Film. Waterloo,
Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
2015 Len Wanner, Tartan Noir: The Definitive Guide to Scottish Crime
Fiction. Glasgow: Freight Books.
xviii A Chronology of Significant Critical Works

2015 Jean Anderson, Carolina Miranda, Barbara Pezzotti, eds. Serial

Crime Fiction: Dying for More. Houndmills: Palgrave.
2015 Robert E. Crafton, The African American Experience in Crime
Fiction: A Critical Study. Jefferson: McFarland.
2016 Andrew Pepper and David Schmid, eds. Globalization and the
State in Contemporary Crime Fiction: A World of Crime.
Houndmills: Palgrave.
2016 Katharina Hall, ed. Crime Fiction in German: Der Krimi. Cardiff:
University of Wales Press.
2016 Mitzi M. Brunsdale, Encyclopedia of Nordic Crime Fiction: Works
and Authors of Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden Since 1967.
Jefferson: McFarland.
2016 Margaret Kinsman, Sara Paretsky: A Companion to the Mystery
Fiction. Jefferson: McFarland.
2017 Sam Naidu and Elizabeth le Roux, A Survey of South African
Crime Fiction: Critical Analysis and Publishing History.
Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.
2017 Heather Duerre Humann, Gender Bending Detective Fiction: A
Critical Analysis of Selected Works. Jefferson: McFarland.
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Crime Fiction

Charlotte Beyer

Teaching Crime Fiction

The theme of crime has dominated fictional and cultural representations
for centuries. However, it has never been more popular than at the present
time. From the reimagining of Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective figure
Sherlock Holmes in the BBC’s Sherlock series featuring Benedict
Cumberbatch, to the debates surrounding violence against women
prompted by Nordic Noir author Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, and
the explosion of the true crime subgenre, contemporary crime culture is
enjoying increasing popularity. The rise of crime fiction as a literary genre
has made an enormous impact on university degree programmes in English
Literature and English Studies; yet, it has also been the source of ardent
and partisan debates in the academic community, over matters such as
value, quality and relevance. Views persist within some parts of the acad-
emy, of crime fiction as a sort of guilty pleasure, a frivolous pastime com-
pared with what is considered serious, canonical literature. This
predicament is hinted at in a 2016 article by Girgulis,1 entitled “Popularity
of detective fiction course no mystery”, about a course on detective fiction
taught at University of Calgary in Canada.2 In the article, McGillivray, a

C. Beyer (*)
University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham, UK
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2018 1

C. Beyer (ed.), Teaching Crime Fiction, Teaching the New English,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90608-9_1
2 C. BEYER

Professor in Medieval Literature, discusses his positive experience of teach-

ing crime fiction and the way in which his course harnesses students’ crime
fiction enthusiasms. The article also alludes to wider debates in the aca-
deme familiar to crime fiction critics and academics. These scholarly
debates have often focused on what was perceived as popular culture’s lack
of seriousness and substance, accompanied by the concern that students of
crime fiction would not learn analytical skills such as scansion, traditionally
considered central to an English Literature degree. Some academics and
students maintain that crime fiction lacks literary merit, and that studying
a crime fiction course (or other popular fiction material) is an easy way out
from more supposedly rigorous or demanding material. Such assumptions
are, of course, questionable,3 but reflect the compelling observation made
by Knight in his lecture, “Motive, Means and Opportunity: Teaching
Crime Fiction”, that: “it would still be true to acknowledge, and perhaps
for us to take some largely unearned credit for, the fact that almost every-
one who teaches crime fiction is in some way aware of their action as
counter-canonical”.
Teaching Crime Fiction sets out to demonstrate why crime fiction has
perhaps been an under-estimated genre in the academe, by presenting a
series of compelling essays on the many fascinating dimensions of crime
fiction in teaching and learning. These essays showcase the rich and
growing body of crime fiction criticism and explore the strategies and
rewards of teaching this material. However, what this book will not do is
further rehearse already dated critical discussions and disagreements over
the merits (or perceived lack of them) of crime fiction versus literary fic-
tion respectively. Rather, the starting-point of Teaching Crime Fiction is
the confident assumption that teaching the new English demands ques-
tioning traditional perceptions of literary merit, reordering cultural hier-
archies, embracing the field’s diversity and recognising that the genre of
crime fiction is central to this endeavour.4 Presenting incisive chapters on
crime fiction criticism and the employment of specific teaching and learn-
ing pedagogies, the contributors to this book offer their research as well
as their practical experience of undergraduate and postgraduate teaching
in the academe, in order to promote ways in which this most diverse of
literary genres may be taught in the contemporary classroom. Their
essays highlight the essential critical abilities and reflective skills which
crime fiction students develop through their intellectual engagement
with this material.
 INTRODUCTION: CRIME FICTION 3

Developments in Crime Fiction Criticism

Crime fiction has had a complex relationship to mainstream culture: on
the one hand frequently deemed too popular or mass culture to be taken
seriously; yet on the other hand, due to its focus on criminality, able to
explore and expose crime on micro- and macro-levels. The scholarly
debates that have shaped crime fiction teaching in the academy in recent
decades centre on examining crime and its representation— terms which
have been “the foundation for an entire genre of fiction for over one hun-
dred and fifty years”.5 Some of these debates have also highlighted the
controversies of crime fiction, such as perceived gratuitous use of violence,
or sexual crime against females.
However, Rzepka argues that definitions of crime are not straightfor-
ward, and that literary treatment of crime themes is not enough to make
a text a crime fiction.6 Marcus furthermore comments on the distinctions
often still drawn by some between literary fiction and crime fiction.7
These debates raise necessary questions for the characterisation of the
genre and the fixity of its definition, but are equally central to our consid-
eration of teaching English in the twenty-first-century university, and the
changing perceptions and definitions we are working with in teaching and
learning contexts. As we teach students how to become crime fiction
scholars and critics through active and reflective engagement with the
material ­individually and collectively, the evolution of the genre and its
attending critical modes take on heightened significance. Knight makes a
crucial observation, in his Foreword to Malcah Effron’s volume, The
Millennial Detective: Essays on Trends in Crime Fiction, Film and
Television, 1990–2010. Commenting on the myths constructed by critics
in their attempt to define crime fiction as a lesser genre, Knight states
that, “wide as those gulfs between myth and reality might be, the largest
and most disabling myth in crime fiction has been that it is not the same
as literary studies”.8 Knight further observes that because of its marginali-
sation in the academy, crime fiction criticism has, until recent decades,
lacked input from the most recent and challenging developments in liter-
ary criticism.9 Teaching Crime Fiction seeks to counter this absence by
demonstrating the breadth and scope of present-day crime fiction criti-
cism and its employment in teaching and learning. Featuring essays on
postcolonial crime fiction, crime and stylistics, gender, the crime short
story, crime fiction and film, and teaching crime fiction at postgraduate
4 C. BEYER

level, and more, this book reflects contemporary critical approaches to

crime fiction, and is representative of the riches and diversities of these
critical and theoretical perspectives.
One of the considerations academics face when devising a crime fiction
course is to what extent the syllabus should be driven by a requirement to
represent the genre’s canonical texts and historical evolution. The narra-
tive of crime fiction’s evolution is traditionally conceived of as starting with
the Dupin short stories by American author Edgar Allan Poe, who passed
the baton to British writer Wilkie Collins.10 Priestman further emphasises
the significance of Arthur Conan Doyle and his invention of the detective
character of Sherlock Holmes, followed by American hard-­boiled crime
writers such as Raymond Chandler and British Golden Age crime fiction
by authors such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, who led crime fic-
tion’s ever-expanding repertoire and style.11 These authors all feature cen-
trally in the crime fiction canon and can regularly be found as staple
ingredients on undergraduate crime fiction modules, as Pepper notes in
Chap. 13 in this book. Critics have argued for the importance of teaching
this canon and the history of crime fiction and its growth as a genre, in
order to offer students an understanding of the evolution of crime fiction,
generically, thematically and stylistically. Scaggs has it that: “Like any liter-
ary text, individual works of crime fiction are built from the devices, codes,
and conventions established by previous works of crime fiction, and they
are therefore crucial to our understanding of these texts in the present”.12
Teaching crime fiction in depth at university requires that specific attention
is paid to the mechanisms and dynamics of the genre, and that fundamen-
tal questions are investigated and scrutinised, both with regard to its capac-
ity to critique and inform, and concerning the aesthetic and stylistic
features of the genre. Thereby students are equipped with the skills and
knowledge to critically evaluate crime and its representations, through
their investigation of the role and function of crime fiction and its many
subgenres in our society and reading culture. The importance of studying
and critically evaluating contemporary genres and texts reflect the ethos of
teaching the new English and crime fiction’s place within it.
More than most other literary forms, the reading and study of crime
fiction is driven by readers’ enthusiasms.13 For, as Franks states, “A crime
fiction text may be printed on cheap paper and feature a gaudy cover but
the pages within can document and discuss the entire continuum of
human activity and emotion.”14 The reader enthusiasm dimension can be
usefully harnessed to learning outcomes when teaching crime fiction.
 INTRODUCTION: CRIME FICTION 5

Investigating how readers’ enthusiasms can be connected with, harnessed

and utilised as drivers in teaching and learning is part of this book’s proj-
ect. This connection between literary material and the individual reader is
important, Franks argues. In her article, “Motive for Murder: Reading
Crime Fiction”, Franks offers her personal and professional reflections on
the significance of readers’ enthusiasm in the study and research of crime
fiction. She provides a useful explanation of the attraction or fascination
which crime fiction holds—an analysis which is also key to the success
crime fiction as a subject is enjoying in the academy. Franks enquires,

What inspires a reader to pick up a piece of crime fiction over a novel or

short story in one of the many other genres that are available? Why do ordi-
nary, generally law-abiding citizens feel such a strong sense of attraction to
stories that are dominated by death and other violent crimes?15

Franks refers to her teen-age viewing of Howard Hawks’ iconic 1946

adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep as a formative experience
that stimulated her interest in and enthusiasm for crime fiction. Enthusiasm
for the genre drives students and academics alike, in their pursuit of the
genre, its classic canonical works as well as the most recent works from
around the globe. At the same time, readers, students and academics also
rightly remain sceptical of what they perceive as flawed or problematic
crime fiction texts.
Teaching crime fiction on contemporary undergraduate and postgradu-
ate degree courses has evolved enormously. Since Knight first gave his
paper, “Motive, Means and Opportunity: Teaching Crime Fiction”, in
1998,16 much has changed. Critiquing the canon-formation within crime
fiction which he observed at the time, Knight deplored the absence from
crime fiction courses of feminist crime writers such as Val McDermid and
Sara Paretsky, and the emphasis on the literary fiction dimension of detec-
tive writing.17 Drawing briefly on personal anecdote here, my own first
attempt, around the year 2001, at constructing an undergraduate crime
fiction course (as opposed to merely adding a crime text to a module with
an overall different focus) was a six-week option that focused exclusively
on contemporary women’s detective fiction, with a feminist perspective.
The option was part of a contemporary fiction and poetry module which
offered options as an acknowledgement of what was seen as the impossi-
bility of presenting coverage in the face of the diversity of contemporary
writing. My women’s crime fiction option then included texts by
6 C. BEYER

P.D. James, Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendell), Val McDermid, Sara Paretsky
and Stella Duffy, and was specifically informed by feminist literary criticism
and popular culture criticism, leading me to investigate genre writing as a
site for feminist experimentation and resistance. This early venture into
teaching crime fiction at undergraduate level suggests that, although
Knight’s astute assessment of the relative conservativism with which crime
fiction was then perceived and taught in the academy was spot-on, gender
and genre were on the agenda for change. Feminist interventions in the
genre have been immensely significant in radically questioning and alter-
ing the conventional narrative patterns, themes and positions of crime
fiction. Further vital critical interventions have impacted with equal sig-
nificance on the teaching of crime fiction in the academy, such as postco-
lonialism, race theory, ecological concerns, queer theory, language and
stylistics, theorising creative writing, and more.
Graff argues that teaching traditionally has not received the attention
or been valued by universities in the way that it should be and deserves to
be.18 However, this book’s focus on pedagogical scholarship both reflects
and confirms Prosser’s assertion that “Interest in the scholarship of teach-
ing and learning, pedagogic research in higher education and evidence
based practice is growing”.19 The intensifying of interest in teaching and
learning is mirrored by the enormous growth of crime fiction courses on
undergraduate (and, more recently, also postgraduate) degrees.
Commenting on recent teaching and learning scholarship pertaining to
romance studies, another popular genre, Fletcher pinpoints the signifi-
cance of sharing teaching and learning tools and experiences. She high-
lights “the open exchange of ideas, research findings, and tools for
enriching the experience of teachers and, most importantly, students in
courses”.20 Following and extending Fletcher’s argument, this book dem-
onstrates the validity of crime fiction as a literary genre illustrative of “the
new English”, and foregrounds the rigour and inventiveness brought to
bear on this diverse material by university academics teaching crime fic-
tion. The chapters in Teaching Crime Fiction explore the possibilities gen-
erated by the diverse and ever-growing body of crime fiction in higher
education teaching and learning. We examine the critical enquiries
afforded to students enabled by research-led teaching in the field, and
evaluate different strategies for involving students in the stimulating expe-
rience of creating and applying new knowledge. The essays in this book
­demonstrate the value of research-led teaching, evaluating various meth-
ods and strategies by which research can successfully be brought to the
 INTRODUCTION: CRIME FICTION 7

classroom, and explaining and demonstrating the positive impact on stu-

dent engagement and learning which research-led teaching engenders.
Research-led teaching and the scholarship of teaching and learning are not
separate endeavours; rather, the two modes go together in the emergent
and innovative vision of teaching the new English. The authors here all
express an appetite for experimentation and inventive thinking in their
pedagogies and teaching practices, looking to enhance innovation in con-
tent, assessment and teaching philosophies stimulated by the diversity and
scope of crime fiction itself.

Dimensions of Teaching Crime Fiction

Teaching Crime Fiction offers a series of essays authored by prominent
crime fiction authors and academics at the forefront of their discipline,
presenting compelling accounts of questions and issues encountered in
teaching crime fiction, the strategies they utilise in the classroom, and the
pedagogical principles that underpin these endeavours. The chapters are
broadly devised by theme as this structure provides the most expansive
range of exploration possible, as opposed to following a strictly historical
approach. In contrast, these essays facilitate discussions of a wide range of
crime fiction texts, some canonical, some not, from global contexts. Rather
than following a strictly chronological and linear method or approach, the
book is structured around specific subgenres, critical approaches, topics
(such as gender, sexuality, postcolonialism, history and ecology), under-
graduate and postgraduate teaching, and so on. This book offers examina-
tions of what Prosser, citing Boyer, terms “the scholarship of
teaching”—namely, “evidence based critical reflection on practice to
improve practice”.21 The reflections reported in the chapters here on
teaching and learning crime fiction as an important aspect of the new
English are informed by personal scholarly research as well as pedagogical
research. The latter is especially significant in a higher education context
which evaluates our teaching efforts in a variety of ways.
In her chapter on the pedagogy of devising crime fiction modules, enti-
tled “Designing Crime Fiction Modules: The Literature Classroom and
Interdisciplinary Approaches”, Rebecca Martin examines the priorities
and choices which face the lecturer devising a crime fiction module for
undergraduate university students. Exploring a number of possibilities for
setting course texts ranging from across the crime and detective genre,
Martin’s chapter comments on the degree of specialisation required by
8 C. BEYER

students, and the considerations that this poses on the part of the aca-
demic delivering the course in setting the syllabus. Martin furthermore
discusses the challenges and opportunities offered by teaching material
such as black American crime fiction and true crime, topics and authors
that are less frequently encountered on conventional undergraduate crime
fiction courses. Martin’s pedagogical strategies acknowledge the signifi-
cance of diversity in the classroom, demonstrating how this dimension is
incorporated into the crime fiction modules she devises.
“Plots and Devices”, Malcah Effron’s chapter on the structuring of
crime narratives, examines the mechanics and textual tactics of crime and
detective fiction, with a particular emphasis on exploring strategies for
teaching students about the significance of the plots and narrative tech-
niques used in crime fiction. Narrative theory is important, Effron argues,
since it, “provides a productive avenue for attending to crime fiction plots
and genre devices in ways that enrich the reading experience, especially as
it is one of the first literary theories to embrace detective fiction as an
object of productive study”. The theorisation and analysis of narrative ele-
ments in crime fiction provides students with important insight into the
workings of crime fiction, giving them the vocabulary and the tools to
interrogate the writing. Thus, Effron’s analysis demonstrates how theo-
retical concepts and debates in relation to narrative are used as an integral
aspect of crime fiction teaching and learning.
Maureen T. Reddy’s essay, “Teaching Crime Fiction and Gender”,
offers an examination of a subject central to crime fiction and teaching
crime fiction: namely gender. Taking her starting-point in Judith Butler’s
argument that gender is performative, Reddy links these ideas to hard-­
boiled crime fiction and its representation of masculinity and femininity.
She examines gender as a central dimension of crime fiction, exploring
literary texts which are useful and informative in enabling further ques-
tions to be explored. Reddy discusses the theoretical and critical material
employed to illuminate these questions in class, thereby providing stu-
dents with a fuller and more complex context for their investigations of
gender in crime fiction. Reddy’s chapter thus demonstrates highly e­ ffective
and innovative ways in which this material can be taught in the university
classroom through a textual and critical focus on gender.
In her chapter, “Teaching American Detective Fiction in the
Contemporary Classroom”, Nicole Kenley tackles the question of how to
devise a module, set the syllabus and teach a particular national crime
 INTRODUCTION: CRIME FICTION 9

fiction oeuvre. American crime fiction has proved immensely influential,

particularly stylistically, but also through its compelling depiction of
characters such as the maverick private eye detective. But to what extent
is a course on American crime fiction able to go beyond teaching stu-
dents a superficial sense of familiarity with American-specific styles,
themes and tropes? Kenley examines the issue of national specificity in
crime fiction, interrogating the construction and representation of
national identity. Her essay further demonstrates that the evolution of
American crime fiction reflects other literary and cultural developments
nationally and internationally, such as modernism and multiculturalism,
as well as illustrating enduring themes and concerns.
Sam Naidu’s chapter, “Teaching Postcolonial Crime Fiction”, offers
readers a compelling examination of the specific pedagogical and ethical
issues involved in teaching crime fiction derived from a complex postcolo-
nial context, and using postcolonial perspectives. Naidu’s analysis focuses
specifically on South African crime writing, exploring the questions raised
by this body of literature when taught in a South African higher education
context. She argues that postcolonial political and cultural contexts force
a reconsideration of crime and its linguistic representation, in light of the
all-encompassing systemic crimes that the country’s fiction reflects. Naidu
explores the implications and consequences for teaching and learning
resulting from this recognition of the complex and often controversial
dimensions of criminality in postcolonial crime fiction.
My chapter, “Cut a Long Story Short: Teaching the Crime Short
Story”, examines strategies for teaching the crime short story on crime
fiction courses, exploring differing facets of this somewhat neglected but
now vital and growing subgenre. Taking my starting-point in my own
teaching practice and use of a variety of crime short stories on my crime
fiction module syllabus, I argue that the crime short story is an evolving
fictional form which has the capacity to unveil new and diverse dimensions
of the crime genre to students, thereby enhancing their learning.
Examining the crime short story’s portrayal of gender, location and rei-
magined detective characters from the canon such as Sherlock Holmes,
my chapter demonstrates the variety of approach and thematic content
engendered by the crime short story.
In her chapter, “Studies in Green: Teaching Ecological Crime Fiction”,
Samantha Walton provides a compelling case for the importance of teach-
ing eco crime fiction. She argues that the inclusion of this material on
10 C. BEYER

crime fiction modules enable, or perhaps forces, a profound change of

approach and focus, both in the selection of primary texts for courses, and
in terms of the critical and theoretical modes utilised in the interpretation
of the texts. Through a series of examples taken from global crime fiction,
ranging from Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles to contempo-
rary literary works, Walton’s discussion demonstrates the compelling
nature and content of ecological crime fiction and the critical and theoreti-
cal considerations employed in her readings of these works.
Teaching crime fiction in conjunction with film is a popular subject in
teaching and learning contexts related to this specific genre. In her chap-
ter, “Teaching Crime Fiction and Film”, Siân Harris discusses the ways in
which she has utilised film and other visual enrichments as a crucial part of
the crime fiction syllabus she offers on her module. The thematic and dis-
cursive connections between fiction and film offer a rich subject for explo-
ration and lend themselves eminently to undergraduate teaching of crime
fiction. Harris furthermore offers interesting and stimulating examples for
learning enrichment, demonstrating how crime fiction teaching may draw
on local history as presented by, for example, museums, as well as filmic
representations in order to stimulate students’ critical enquiry.
Christiana Gregoriou’s chapter on crime writing, language and stylistics
applies analytical tools for close reading of crime texts which concentrate
on vocabulary, uses of language and other textual nuances. Through an
intensive and detailed focus on stylistics, Gregoriou’s “Crime Writing:
Language and Stylistics” demonstrates the capacity of linguistics to engage
with the layers of textuality in crime fiction, thereby opening for new
dimensions of textual analysis of crime discourses. These techniques are
shown to be particularly relevant to students investigating the workings
and mechanisms of crime texts as texts. Employing Emmott’s frame the-
ory to examine the way in which crime fiction constructs red herrings and
other attempts to mislead and trick readers, and Ryan’s possible world
theory in order to look at the narrative structures that characterise crime
fiction, Gregoriou demonstrates the central role of stylistic analysis in
teaching students about how crime fiction works discursively.
In his chapter, “The Crime Novelist as Educator: Towards a Fuller
Understanding of Crime Fiction”, Paul Johnston explores the specific per-
spectives brought to teaching and learning by the crime novelist as teacher.
Using his own experience as a successful crime fiction author as starting-­
point, Johnston argues that writer/practitioners have the capacity to bring
unique and vital perspectives on the crime fiction genre to teaching and
 INTRODUCTION: CRIME FICTION 11

learning. The crime fiction writer/practitioner’s creative insight into the

workings of the genre and the publishing industry enables them to pro-
vide wider and more inclusive contexts which students appreciate and ben-
efit from. Providing a range of examples from his teaching experience and
writing practice, Johnston gives fresh insight into the unique contribution
made to teaching the new English by writer/practitioners.
Teaching students how to read crime fiction, and specifically how to
become crime fiction critics is the subject of Rosemary Erickson Johnsen’s
chapter. In “Teaching Crime Fiction Criticism”, Johnsen specifically
focuses on the teaching of crime fiction criticism, as a diverse body of criti-
cal approaches applicable specifically to detective and crime fiction.
Existing critical and theoretical approaches have been profoundly impacted
upon and transformed by the particular themes, styles and structures of
crime fiction. Johnsen explores strategies for teaching crime in ways which
are critically informed and theoretically underpinned. Her chapter also
discusses ways in which to encourage an integral research element in
taught crime fiction courses, empowering students to see themselves as
researchers engaging with critical theory and using secondary sources for
modelling this critical reading and research process. She concludes her
chapter with an informative and useful exploration of teaching crime fic-
tion at M.A. level, thereby contributing to this book’s debates around
teaching and learning strategies at postgraduate level.
The discussion in Johnsen’s chapter, of teaching crime fiction criticism
at postgraduate level, links well with the book’s closing chapter by Andrew
Pepper. His “Teaching Contemporary US Crime Fiction Through the
‘War on Drugs’: A Postgraduate Case Study” offers strategies and reflec-
tions pertaining to teaching crime fiction at postgraduate level—an
increasingly important dimension of teaching the new English. Using a
specific body of work within contemporary American crime fiction as his
case study, namely novels depicting the American “war on drugs”, Pepper’s
in-depth investigation of the themes and questions presented by these
texts demonstrates how crime fiction in the academy may provide a com-
pelling subject for postgraduate investigation. Pepper demonstrates how a
course focusing on the connections between the real-life ongoing “war on
drugs”, true crime and fiction affords postgraduate students insight into
contemporary American crime fiction beyond America, examining trans-
national crime and the crime writing which portrays it.
12 C. BEYER

Conclusion: Fostering Diversity

and Critical Inquiry

The chapters in this volume have been explicitly devised in order to address
specific topics and areas of interest central to teaching and learning about
crime fiction. These topics are regarded as part of an innovative, diverse,
forward-looking English subject area teaching diverse undergraduate and
postgraduate student groups.22 The work done in the UK by HEA (Higher
Education Academy) and its Subject Centres has been invaluable in explor-
ing the application of teaching and learning pedagogies in universities, as
well as contributing to and encouraging pedagogical scholarship.23 The
“Teaching the New English” series, of which this book is a part, reflects
and builds on this collective endeavour. Fletcher argues that “engaging in
the scholarship of teaching and learning is an opportunity to reflect in a
sustained way on one of the most challenging and most rewarding aspects
of an academic career – finding ways to help our students learn”.24 To that
effect, the essays in this book propose a variety of teaching and learning
strategies, ranging from classroom discussions and small-group activities,
to inspirational field trips making use of museums and other public facili-
ties, innovative and enquiring assessment forms, the development of
online learning communities in virtual environments for the purposes of
sharing resources and information, and one-to-one tutorials.25 Prosser
states that scholarship of teaching and learning is practice-based and is car-
ried out “collegially”.26 The acknowledgement of the collegial spirit that
drives teaching and learning scholarship is reflected in the vibrant and
compelling discussions in this book, as well as more widely at literature
festivals, true crime re-enactments and creative writing groups, all of which
are evidence of the ever-increasing popularity and appeal of crime fiction
for readers, students, scholars and authors.

Notes
1. See also my discussion of this piece in “In Praise of Crime Fiction”, Dr Beyer’s
Page, 25 January 2016. http://beyerpage.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/in-
praise-of-crime-fiction.html Accessed 27 December 2017.
2. Jill Girgulis. “Popularity of detective fiction course no mystery”. The
Gauntlet. 19 January 2016. http://www.thegauntlet.ca/popularity-of-
detective-fiction-course-no-mystery/ Accessed 27 December 2017.
 INTRODUCTION: CRIME FICTION 13

3. Richard Bradford, “The criminal neglect of detective fiction”. Times

Higher Education, 4 June 2015. https://www.timeshighereducation.
com/content/the-criminal-neglect-of-detective-fiction Accessed 3
January 2018.
4. Katy Shaw, “Introduction”. In Teaching 21st Century Genres, edited by
Katy Shaw. Houndmills: Palgrave, xiv.
5. John Scaggs, Crime Fiction. Abingdon, Routledge, 2005. 1.
6. Charles J. Rzepka, ‘What is Crime Fiction?” In A Companion to Crime
Fiction, edited by Charles J. Rzepka and Lee Horsley. Chichester, Blackwell,
2010.1–10. 1.
7. Laura Marcus, “Detection and Literary Fiction”. In The Cambridge
Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Martin Priestman. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003. 245.
8. Stephen Knight, “Foreword”. In The Millennial Detective: Essays on Trends
in Crime Fiction, Film and Television, 1990–2010, edited by Malcah Effron.
Jefferson: McFarland, 2011. 1.
9. Knight (2011), 2.
10. Martin Priestman, “Introduction: Crime Fiction and Detective Fiction,”
In The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Martin
Priestman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 2.
11. Priestman, 2.
12. Scaggs, 3.
13. See also Girguilis.
14. Rachel Franks, “Motive for Murder: Reading Crime Fiction”. The
Australian Library and Information Association Biennial Conference.
Sydney: Jul. 2012. 8.
15. Franks, 1.
16. Stephen Knight. “Motive, Means and Opportunity: Teaching Crime
Fiction”. Professor Stephen Knight. 29 August 2012 https://web.archive.
org/web/20170313064908/http:/www.profstephenknight.com/
search/label/teaching Accessed 27 December 2017.
17. Knight.
18. Gerald Graff. Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the
Mind. Yale University Press, 2003. 5.
19. Michael Prosser. “The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: What is it? A
Personal View”. International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and
Learning, Vol. 2, No. 2 (2008) 2. See also Patricia Cartney. “Researching
Pedagogy in a Contested Space”. British Journal of Social Work, 45 (2015).
1137–1154.
20. Fletcher, 1.
14 C. BEYER

21. Prosser, 1. Cites Boyer, E. L. (1990) Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of

the professoriate. Princeton, NJ: The Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of University Teaching.
22. See also Northedge, Andrew. “Rethinking Teaching in the Context of
Diversity”, Teaching in Higher Education, 8: 1, 2003. 17–32.
23. Prosser, 3. See also Beyer.
24. Fletcher, 3.
25. See also Shaw’s listing of strategies for teaching and learning, xvi–xvii.
26. Prosser, 4.

Works Cited
Beyer, Charlotte. “In Praise of Crime Fiction.” Dr Beyer’s Page, 25 January 2016.
http://beyerpage.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/in-praise-of-crime-fiction.html
Accessed 27 December 2017.
Bradford, Richard. “The Criminal Neglect of Detective Fiction.” Times Higher
Education, 4 June 2015. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/content/
the-criminal-neglect-of-detective-fiction Accessed 3 January 2018.
Cartney, Patricia. “Researching Pedagogy in a Contested Space.” British Journal
of Social Work, 45, 2015, 1137–1154.
Fletcher, Lisa. “The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Popular Romance
Studies: What Was It, and Why Does It Matter?” Journal of Popular Romance
Studies, 3.2, 2013, 1–5.
Franks, Rachel. “Motive for Murder: Reading Crime Fiction.” The Australian
Library and Information Association Biennial Conference. Sydney: July 2012.
1–9. http://www.academia.edu/2277952/Motive_for_Murder_reading_crime_
fiction Accessed 21 May 2018.
Girgulis, Jill. “Popularity of Detective Fiction Course No Mystery.” The Gauntlet,
19 January 2016. http://www.thegauntlet.ca/popularity-of-detective-fiction-
course-no-mystery/ Accessed 27 December 2017.
Graff, Gerald. Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.
Knight, Stephen. “Foreword.” In The Millennial Detective: Essays on Trends in
Crime Fiction, Film and Television, 1990–2010, edited by Malcah Effron, 1–4.
Jefferson: McFarland, 2011.
Knight, Stephen. “Motive, Means and Opportunity: Teaching Crime Fiction.”
Professor Stephen Knight, 29 August 2012. https://web.archive.org/
web/20170313064908/http:/www.profstephenknight.com/search/label/
teaching Accessed 27 December 2017.
Marcus, Laura. “Detection and Literary Fiction.” c 245–268. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003.
 INTRODUCTION: CRIME FICTION 15

Northedge, Andrew. “Rethinking Teaching in the Context of Diversity.” Teaching

in Higher Education, 8.1, 2003, 17–32
Priestman, Martin. “Introduction: Crime Fiction and Detective Fiction.” In The
Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Martin Priestman, 1–6.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Prosser, Michael. “The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: What Is It? A
Personal View.” International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and
Learning, 2.2, July 2008, 1–4.
Rzepka, Charles J. “What Is Crime Fiction?” In A Companion to Crime Fiction,
edited by Charles J. Rzepka and Lee Horsley, 1–10. Chichester: Blackwell,
2010.
Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction. Abingdon: Routledge, 2005.
Shaw, Katy. “Introduction.” In Teaching 21st Century Genres, edited by Katy
Shaw, xiii–xx. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
 CHAPTER 2

Designing Crime Fiction Modules:

The Literature Classroom
and Interdisciplinary Approaches

Rebecca Martin

Introduction
In the litigious culture of the United States, faculty are frequently reminded
that the course syllabus is a contract, a legally binding agreement, between
the institution and the student. In that sense, one steps into the classroom
already aware of an invisible web of obligations and expectations sur-
rounding the presentation of material and conduct of the class. The word
“syllabus” itself has a legal usage linked to a brief abstract of cases relevant
in particular fields. The syllabus is shaped by the context for which it is
devised; all faculty attend to questions of audience (first-year students,
advanced undergraduates, graduate students), discipline (the literature
classroom, the law classroom, film studies, Indigenous Peoples studies,
etc.), or sub-disciplines/subgenres (hardboiled crime fiction, property
law, film noir, the Navajo in fiction of the American West, and so on).
While crime fiction would seem to be most suited to the literature class-
room, it readily overlaps with countless disciplines outside departments of

R. Martin (*)
Pace University, Pleasantville, NY, USA
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2018 17

C. Beyer (ed.), Teaching Crime Fiction, Teaching the New English,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90608-9_2
18 R. MARTIN

English, situating crime writing in a web of interdisciplinary possibilities

that offer a very wide range of substantive, relevant connections. These
many points of contact make crime fiction a rich basis for classroom col-
laborations, use as a teaching tool in non-literature classrooms, as well as
for the study of literature at every stage from first-year English majors and
non-majors to the graduate level and professional schools. While this
chapter will focus primarily on approaches to developing crime fiction
modules for the undergraduate literature classroom, it will also touch
upon ways in which crime fiction is ideally suited to integration with stud-
ies well outside the literature classroom, to collaboration in teaching, and
to interdisciplinary approaches.
As other chapters in this collection discuss, crime fiction is a relative
newcomer to the literature classroom because of the struggle to prove the
value of popular fiction in the classroom. Though the argument about
mass-market publications and literary fiction continues in the world of
critics, peace on that subject prevails in most classrooms where the strug-
gle now takes place around the issue of how to get students to read any
books at all. Though not all student-readers are or will be fans of crime
fiction, this writing is “popular” in the best sense. It is engaging because it
is usually set in a recognizable reality and it provokes curiosity by design.
Students may be lured in thinking that popular fiction is an easy read and
then will find themselves confronting fiction that keeps their attention,
challenges their assumptions about popular fiction and perhaps about lit-
erature itself. As they continue to read they build skills and hone talents
that are literary in their application but have significance outside the litera-
ture class. The study of characterization, narrative and thematic develop-
ment, narrative voice, point of view, tone, syntax, and word choice sharpen
critical and analytical skills and, when writing in the classroom is empha-
sized, the written communication skills so widely desired upon gradua-
tion. Beyond these fundamentally desirable qualities, students will be
challenged to make connections and give considered attention to issues
outside the classroom, questions about the laws, their social function and
their application, and social justice, for example. Questions regarding the
law as an ideal and the law as it is often less than perfectly applied, ques-
tions about where authority is drawn from and acquires its force, ques-
tions about legitimate and illegitimate authority, indeed, about the idea of
authority itself, questions about guilt and innocence and the gray areas in
between, about punishment, retribution, restoration and redemption,
 DESIGNING CRIME FICTION MODULES: THE LITERATURE CLASSROOM… 19

questions about what justice is, whether and how it can be served, all of
these can be studied in crime fiction, often by analyzing the figure of the
detective and the values that accumulate around that character.

Crime Fiction in Literary Studies

More than a decade ago at my institution, I designed a course in American
Detective Fiction to be offered to undergraduates, most but not all of
whom were English majors. I have since taught the course numerous
times both in the physical classroom and online. The “detective” in each
work of fiction may be a professional, such as a private detective or police
detective, or a naïve or skilled amateur who investigates a crime for per-
sonal reasons. The approach is chronological and, thus, somewhat devel-
opmental, moving from Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) and
“The Purloined Letter” (1844) through the popular country house and
domestic mysteries of Mary Roberts Rinehart, the successful but margin-
alized work of Rudolph Fisher during the Harlem Renaissance, the hard-
boiled tradition represented by Hammett and Chandler, the noir fiction of
Dorothy B. Hughes, and the fatalistic, fantastic works of Chester Himes
from the 1950s and 1960s. Generally, the course ends with Silence of the
Lambs (1988), which introduces a female detective figure, who has the
force of the FBI behind her, but whose status as a woman, not only in a
traditional man’s job but in a world of men, is exploited in creative and
provocative ways by Thomas Harris.
The course focuses on the detective figure in each text, analyzing that
individual’s relationship to and attitude toward the law and the authority
behind it and what values the figure seems to stand for, based on the
dynamics at play between the detective and official law enforcement dur-
ing the investigation, as well as the outcome of the case and the actions
and reactions of the detective to his or her findings. Those dynamics and
readers’ interpretation of the implied social commentary will be different
depending upon whether it is Rinehart’s middle-aged, well-to-do “spin-
ster” (as she calls herself), Rachel Innes, confronting a local police detec-
tive during her summer vacation, Chandler’s Marlowe confronting
corruption in city hall, or Himes’s Coffin Ed Johnson and Grace Digger
Jones, negotiating their own positions as African American police detec-
tives charged by their white NYPD bosses with keeping peace in the
Harlem community. While the characterization and role of the detective
20 R. MARTIN

figure is emphasized in studying each text, those texts are chosen so that
looking at them from different angles also reveals issues of class, gender,
and race. The study of the development of detective fiction thus becomes
the study of changing attitudes toward women, changing ideas about
men’s roles, and assumptions about class, race, and ethnicity. In some
cases, for instance in Himes’s A Rage in Harlem (1957) or Cotton Comes
to Harlem (1965), issues of race and gender are woven throughout in
character and narrative; in other cases, social class inflects the portrayal of
gender, as in Rinehart’s Circular Staircase (1908) and in Silence of the
Lambs (1988). Finally, students can gain a multilayered awareness of
changing ideas about what skills and traits or personality are necessary or
desirable for criminal investigation, though this is not so much develop-
mental as a case of rounding out a picture that started with the disinter-
ested rationality of Poe’s M. Dupin, added the fearlessness and sense of
justice imbuing both Hammett’s Continental Op and Chandler’s Marlowe,
and adopted the emotional intelligence of Harris’s Clarice Starling. At any
point, the addition of new and different texts can alter this balance and can
be used to highlight certain points more than others or to introduce new
developments in narrative structure, character, or theme. For example,
adding Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972) introduces the role of the
metaphysical detective and extends the examination of African American
novelists’ depiction of law and justice. Reed’s metaphysical detective, PaPa
LaBas, does not depend on rationality or material forensics, but rather his
understanding of human beings and his ability to analyze the world’s spiri-
tual equilibrium and bring individuals back into harmony. The metaphysi-
cal detective takes the long view and does not let himself be too distracted
by the foibles and shenanigans of reckless people around him here and
now. A module featuring Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 (1965) adds
a note of the metaphysical but more significantly introduces the anti-­
detective novel. In this text the solution to the mystery (and the question
of whether there is, in fact, a mystery) seems to recede as one cryptic layer
after another is uncovered. The novel overflows with clues that may or
may not have meaning and that drive both the detective figure, Oedipa
Maas, and the reader on, while perhaps moving the truth farther away and,
indeed, undermining the very idea of truth. The revelation seemingly
promised at the novel’s conclusion may introduce yet another mystery.
Finally, the course includes some short fiction but is constructed primarily
of novels, so genre is not addressed in any detail, but that particular line of
inquiry is enriched by adding a contemporary graphic novel, such as Jules
 DESIGNING CRIME FICTION MODULES: THE LITERATURE CLASSROOM… 21

Feiffer’s Kill My Mother (2014), that invites students to consider authorial

choices that structure a different kind of narrative and challenges them to
apply different reading and interpretive skills, taking into account both
words and images.
A course such as the one outlined above has a focus on the develop-
ment of a type of literature, the function of literary devices, and the kind
of specificity that assumes in students some level of familiarity with literary
analysis and with the culture and history of the nation. However, courses
about popular genres also may be of interest to non-majors and to stu-
dents who approach the study of crime fiction with less preparation in lit-
erary study. For those students, the introduction of a greater variety of
narratives, some of them closely linked to familiar and contemporary crime
stories, can be intriguing and can help them approach what they thought
they already knew, but with different eyes. A course such as my Literature
of Crime and Criminality, developed for the general student population,
introduces students to several genres and emphasizes attention to narra-
tive voice, point of view, and tone in an effort to teach students to approach
such narratives with, if not skepticism, at least awareness of the power of
narrative assumptions and writers’ choice of vocabulary to influence read-
ers’ attitude toward actors and events. To that end, the course emphasizes
fiction less than crime writing that has some particular claim on truth, such
as documentary theater experienced in filmed performance and on the
page, the non-fiction novel, and crime reports from a local newspaper, as
well as crime fiction in the form of a one-act play, a short story, and one or
two novels. The course begins with short works to introduce students to
basic tools and concepts for literary analysis, such as characterization, nar-
rative structure, and tone. Students also examine the portrayal of law and
those who enforce it, the portrayal of private and amateur detectives and
their association with the law and law enforcement, and the investigation
of crimes, as well as how the narratives construct the reading and analysis
process. Differences among the genres as to the structuring of narratives,
the assumption of factuality, the overt or covert presence of the author,
and the use of particular structural techniques and word choices to influ-
ence readers’ responses to narratives are all examined. A selection of
Sherlock Holmes stories, chosen based on their relevance to analysis of
later texts in the class, and the one-act play, Trifles (1916), by Susan
Glaspell are the introductory texts. The first familiarizes students with an
icon and influential model of the detective and detection while the play
provides an intense, concentrated look at how gendered assumptions
22 R. MARTIN

about crime can undermine and taint detection and the discovery of truth.
The choice of novel varies depending on what kind of emphasis or t­ hematic
development seems most desirable. Hammett’s Maltese Falcon (1929) and
private eye Sam Spade provide a counterweight to Sherlock Holmes and
spark discussion of the cultural context in which hardboiled detective fic-
tion developed, but Silence of the Lambs is useful for asserting the continu-
ing relevance of close analysis of the role gender plays in crime, its
investigation and its depiction. It connects back very usefully to Trifles and
to the influence of gender on what is seen and how it is interpreted in an
investigation. Jonathan Lethem’s novel Motherless Brooklyn (1999) and
Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003)
introduce fascinating questions about point of view and the perspective
that is revealed by an investigator who sees the world in an unusual way.
Lethem’s Lionel Essrog displays the symptoms of Tourette Syndrome, a
frequently disruptive verbal tic, and some compulsive behaviors. Both cre-
ate difficulties in his detective work, but the Tourette’s in particular
enhances the novel’s rich attention to language and makes Essrog himself
uniquely sensitive to language. Haddon’s teenage investigator, Christopher
Boone, has symptoms of what has been interpreted by critics and readers
as Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of autism, though Haddon does not iden-
tify it as such. Christopher avoids social interactions, is unable to read
behavioral signs in others, and does not understand lies. The special appeal
of Christopher as a detective, however, is that he focuses on minutiæ that
others overlook and asks questions that others would not think to ask. The
detective’s job is to bring order to a world into which crime has brought
chaos. Essrog and Christopher bring readers close to minds that seek to
order the world in ways different from more conventional detectives.
These characters offer readers new perspectives on genre conventions and
significant insights into different kinds of intelligence and observation
applied to detection.
Later texts in the course more directly address the relationship between
the true and how it is filtered through the writer’s consciousness. Truman
Capote’s non-fiction novel, In Cold Blood (1966) and one of Ann Rule’s
true crime texts, either Small Sacrifices (1987) or the Stranger Beside Me
(1980), challenge students to detect traces of the author’s hand in depic-
tion of representatives of law enforcement, the selection of incident, the
ordering of events, and in the choice of words to represent the “true”
that the designations “non-fiction” and “true crime” signal. It is instruc-
tive to ask students to choose from a local newspaper an article about a
 DESIGNING CRIME FICTION MODULES: THE LITERATURE CLASSROOM… 23

crime and to analyze the prose, the structure of the narrative, and how
the report that is presumed to be “just the facts” differs from other fact-
based. Comparing accounts of the same crime from different news sources
can also be very instructive. In addition, students explore one of the most
recently-developed of the fact-based crime subgenres, that is, the docu-
mentary drama or documentary theater. Jacqueline O’Connor, writing in
“Performing the Law in Contemporary Documentary Theater” describes
it thus: “Documentary theater reconfigures historical events through
texts and performances that are partially or completely composed of court
transcripts, interviews, newspaper reports, and other documents, and
they frequently dramatize excerpts from trial records verbatim.”1 This
grounding in documents lends veracity to the account and a sense of his-
torical accuracy. Court transcripts and interviews may provide an imme-
diacy that rivals direct, first-person address in its impact. O’Connor
continues, saying “In doing so, these plays transform legal texts into liter-
ary texts and legal proceedings into theatrical performance. They demon-
strate the ways that art can be constructed from previously existing
nonartistic materials, and they highlight the performance aspects of the
law.”2 The notion of law as performance, of a trial as an enactment, goes
some way to revealing right and wrong, truths and untruths as very much
contingent and performative.
This subgenre is particularly exciting to explore with students. They are
attracted to the timely nature of the issues dramatized compellingly in
plays such as Zoot Suit (1978) by Luis Valdez, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992
(1993) or Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and Other Identities
(1992) by Anna Deavere Smith, and the Laramie Project (2000) by Moisés
Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Project. These texts may be explored
in print and in filmed versions. All of them open up historical social issues
still relevant today. Zoot Suit explores the conflict between law enforce-
ment and ethnic expression as exhibited in a 1942 murder trial involving
young Los Angeles Mexican American men, and the so-called “Zoot Suit
riots.” Deavere Smith in Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 uses interviews and
performance to engage with race, ethnicity, and the slippage between the
law and enactment of justice as revealed in the Los Angeles urban uprising
of 1992, after the controversial verdict in the trial of Los Angeles police
officers in the beating of African American motorist, Rodney King. The
Laramie Project delves into rural American social attitudes toward homo-
sexuality that underlie discrimination and violence by using community
members’ statements about the death of gay college student Matthew
24 R. MARTIN

Shepard in Wyoming and the trial of two local men for his beating and
death. The documentary dramas draw students to original reports of the
events, allow them to absorb the questions and issues they raise, to con-
sider how the conflicts are enacted, and to investigate the relationship
between a truth seemingly based on factual documents and the reenacting
of those events as creative works restructured and designed to appeal to a
theatrical or television audience.3 Finally, the advent and high popularity
of investigative journalism series, such as Serial (2014–), presented as a
serialized podcast narrative, and Making a Murderer (2015–), produced as
an original online documentary film series through Netflix, have offered
even newer forms of crime narrative that raise questions about truth and
fiction and about the public’s interaction with media and ideas about law
enforcement and crime in society. Taken as a whole, the many genres
introduced in Literature of Crime and Criminality encourage the explora-
tion of the differing writing practices and reader expectations of the genres
and, in the broadest sense, the ideas of law and of justice as concepts that
are socially-constructed and, far from being timeless and unchanging, are
interpreted and contested by each new generation. The performance of
the law and its social, historical context, whether in short stories featuring
Sherlock Holmes’s conflicts with Inspector Lestrade or in the filmed reac-
tions of Los Angeles citizens of color to a legal verdict that signaled the
opposite of “Black Lives Matter,” exposes fault lines in the social fabric
and encourages thoughtful reexamination of not only the issues and events
that are dramatized but of the constructed nature of the texts that present
them to an audience. The narratives are creations directed to particular
audiences; they are created by an authoring hand, whether that of a play-
wright, a novelist, an investigative journalist, or a judge in a courtroom
crafting a decision, each of whom puts carefully chosen words on a page in
a certain order designed to tell a story to particular effect.
Crime writing-as-literary-construct can be traced, of course, much far-
ther back in history. Depending upon the educational context, modules
may gain from this deeper sense of history, or from giving this writing
practice greater weight by demonstrating its presence in significant histori-
cal documents not specifically associated with crime or law, or they may
gain from creating a more global context for studying crime fiction. To
these ends, instructors may wish to assign texts such as the Oedipus Rex or
Antigone of Sophocles, the Book of Daniel with the story of Susanna and
the Elders found in some versions of the Christian Old Testament, The
Merchant of Venice or another Shakespeare play, or early (thirteenth- or
 DESIGNING CRIME FICTION MODULES: THE LITERATURE CLASSROOM… 25

fourteenth-century) or modern versions of the Judge Bao tales from

traditional Chinese literature. Many other centuries and cultures provide
likely texts and each of them opens up discussion of new cultural contexts
and the many variations of law and its enforcement, crime and its investi-
gation, and what is taken to constitute justice or a desirable close to the
criminal act. As these examples demonstrate, the cross-cultural study of
crime fiction is a rich area of inquiry. Such study might take a comparative,
historical approach or might focus on breadth of coverage and explore
contemporary crime fiction from all over the world. This comparative
study will often discover that the structure of crime fiction does not change
very much between cultures but the themes and issues that are highlighted
are often very culturally-specific, and certainly the many cultural variations
of assumptions about crime, investigation, evidence, and punishment
prove particularly fascinating and surprising.4

Interdisciplinary Prospects
The examples outlined so far are just a few of the possibilities for course
design appropriate to the literature classroom. Numerous other approaches
provide rich opportunities for learning, particularly with students who are
at more advanced levels in their study of literature. Crime fiction provides
provocative texts for the application and study of literary theory, for
instance. Much can be learned by analyzing crime fiction through a wide
range of theoretical approaches, including psychoanalysis, reader-response,
feminist theory, and others. Genre formation and genre theory can be
tested in studies of crime fiction texts and their context; such an examina-
tion might be particularly fertile because of the long association of the
writing of crime fiction with non-fiction sources such as the Newgate
Calendar or the real-life exploits of Jonathan Wild in the eighteenth cen-
tury that provided material for Daniel Defoe’s A True & Genuine Account
of the Life and Actions of the late Jonathan Wild (1725) and Henry
Fielding’s novel, the Life and Death of Jonathan Wild, the Great (1743).
Additionally, the gradual separation of detective fiction from the Gothic
novel can be a source of insights in the study of the formation of genres
and of genre theory, as might the fracturing of crime fiction into multiple
subgenres: detective fiction, with its own sub-subgenres, such as cozies,
country house mysteries, young adult fiction, and police procedurals, is
one; others include the spy novel, courtroom dramas, psychological thrill-
ers, legal thrillers, and more. Studying the historically-grounded link
26 R. MARTIN

between journalistic practices of crime reporting and the growth of lending

libraries in Britain can lead to significant revelations about education, the
growth of literacy, the daily lives of women, and audience formation in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The analysis of the anti-detective
novel in the context of modernist and postmodern fiction is founded in
hybrid texts through which students can examine not only definitions and
re-definitions of genre and genre’s blurred boundaries, but larger ques-
tions of identity formation, even the existence of the individual self, and
the existence of truth. In Robbe-Grillet’s The Erasers (1953), Borges’s
short story “Death and the Compass” (1942), Pynchon’s Crying of Lot
49, Auster’s City of Glass (1985), Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor (1985), and
many others in which the detective figure dissolves or disappears, cause-­
and-­effect are irrelevant, beginnings, middles, and endings may not be
discernable, and solutions may never appear. The reading process itself is a
search for clues that allow readers to assemble a narrative and follow it to
its conclusion. These novels employ the tropes of crime and detective fic-
tion, but frustrate the search for meaning and closure, treating the reader
like a detective whose clues seem to make no sense, if they are clues at all,
and whose search for a solution and closure is denied, their significance,
and existence discounted. Finally, crime fiction affords an ideal vehicle
through which to explore narratology, the theory drawn from structural-
ism and semiotics that analyzes the structure of narrative and identifies
points of commonality and divergence in forms of discourse. The basis of
crime fiction is the existence of a crime and its investigation, a process that
generally ends in a solution. As so many examples above have already
shown, though, one of the fascinations of this literature is in its nearly
infinite variations. Texts may have many elements in common (for instance
a crime, a detective figure, and an investigation), but the arrangement of
those elements, the sequencing of events in the plot, the repurposing of
tropes and images, offer a unique field of play, a mix of tradition and a
space of innovation, that attracts and challenges writers and readers alike
and reveals much about the human need for stories. Through narratologi-
cal study, narrative structures are opened to view, but readers can be exam-
ined as well, in their readerly expectations and their degree of tolerance for
variation in familiar story elements and narrative patterns.
The many approaches to crime fiction in the literature classroom are
matched by the diverse connections that have grown in dozens of other
disciplines. Some, such as criminal justice and law, have obvious ties. The
use of crime fiction to ground theoretical and field-based teaching about
 DESIGNING CRIME FICTION MODULES: THE LITERATURE CLASSROOM… 27

the criminal justice system, law enforcement, and criminology using fic-
tional narratives featuring complex social interactions is longstanding.5 In
criminal justice classrooms, fiction may be introduced with a number of
different goals in mind, from studying the gap between popular under-
standing of law and the realities of law enforcement, for instance, to ana-
lyzing popular media versions of famous cases and trials. Skills in
problem-solving and critical thinking modeled in crime fiction readily
transfer to other studies at the undergraduate level. In law schools, the
value of creative storytelling to the study of the principles and application
of law gradually has been recognized, resulting in a range of approaches,
such as creating stories to reinforce students’ understanding of principles
of evidence, to different ways to engage students in learning and helping
them grasp concepts at a level beyond memorization, to increasing stu-
dents’ awareness of the cultural sensitivities that must inform law enforce-
ment as well as the interpretation and application of legal principles. Peter
Brooks, long an influential voice in law and literary analysis, says,

Our primary interest is to set the study of law in a broad cultural and critical
context …. We want to step outside of the law where we can look at it and
make students more aware of some of its problematic issues in interpretation
and storytelling. You can look at court cases not just for their doctrine, but
also for what they’re doing to you, for their rhetoric and narrative structure
(Couch).6

The existence of other interdisciplinary matches, such as linking the prac-

tices of multiple media—literature with television, cinema or, now,
internet-­based entertainment including games and video series produced
for the online audience—are well-known sources of insights into adapta-
tion, media studies, audience reception studies, and comparative narratol-
ogy. It is now possible to read and watch contemporary news accounts of
the pursuit, arrest and criminal investigation of O.J. Simpson, study the
transcript of the trial, read several books such as legal journalist Jeffrey
Toobin’s The Run of His Life (1997), prosecuting attorney Marcia Clark’s
Without a Doubt (1997) or Simpson’s own, I Want to Tell You (1995) or
If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer (2007). Beyond these written accounts,
more recently the FX Network’s 2016 “true crime anthology” mini-series,
The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, and the nearly
simultaneously-­released ESPN documentary, O.J.: Made in America have
been aired. These many texts give very diverse perspectives on the trial and
28 R. MARTIN

issues of guilt and innocence, and students may profitably analyze the
media-mediated spectacle and its textual aftermaths in the classroom.
Questions about law, truth, and justice and the narratives that shape pub-
lic attitudes toward them can be exhaustively studied in this accumulation
of texts in various media and genres. This many disputed versions of the
truth can result in provocative and enlightening discussions of the bound-
aries between fiction and non-fiction and the relationship between the
goals of the system of laws and competing public ideas about justice. The
vast textual coverage of the O.J. Simpson case is but one example of the
uses of detective fiction, and crime fiction more generally, to explore top-
ics both broad and deep. This and other cases, whether fiction or non-­
fiction, open up questions of what constitutes justice: the purpose of laws;
the elusiveness of “truth” in crime investigation, in law enforcement, and
in the courtroom; the status of documentary evidence; and the question
of objectivity. Finally, students may grapple with the fraught issues around
whose interest is served by the enactment and enforcement of laws in a
system that is, ideally, gender-, race-, ethnicity-, and class-blind.
Looking beyond fields based in traditional narratives, one finds a great
deal of interest in and evidence of the successful integration of crime fic-
tion into the study of subjects as diverse as anthropology, architecture,
forensic science, gender studies, geography, online game design, and social
work.7 Space does not permit the detailed development of most of these
subjects, but two will be singled out for elaboration. To begin, one need
look no further than this description of the bachelor of science degree in
Game Design offered by Full Sail University of Winter Park, Florida:

Some people view the world through a narrative lens. They see not just
people but players, not just interactions but building blocks of broader sto-
ries. If you’ve ever dreamed of becoming a game designer, and are as pas-
sionate about the craft as you are about the end creation—you’re not alone.
[In] the Game Design bachelor of science program … you’ll cover key
industry concepts ranging from aesthetics and immersion to usability and
game economics—in addition to foundational topics like storytelling and
character development.8

When the game goes to market, the result may be something like the
action-filled criminal virtual world created in Grand Theft Auto, in which
the gamer takes the role of a criminal, or in L.A. Noire, in which the gamer
takes the role of a Los Angeles Police Department detective in the 1940s.
 DESIGNING CRIME FICTION MODULES: THE LITERATURE CLASSROOM… 29

A collection of short stories written by well-known crime story authors

may be purchased as an accessory with the latter game and this, with the
addition of a few noir and neo-noir films, opens up intriguing possibilities
for multimedia study. Finally, there is the relationship between crime fic-
tion and forensic science, which might be explored with a cross-­disciplinary
contemporary focus. The exploration might consider the prominence of
forensic crime shows on television, online, and in cinema, and a similar
growth in popularity of forensic-based crime fiction series, such as those
written by Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs, which feature a medical
examiner and forensic anthropologist, respectively. Neither the television
dramas nor the crime fiction offer consumers the realities of forensic sci-
ence; the process by which the so-called “CSI Effect” has infiltrated mod-
ern life is, as Lindsay Steenberg has demonstrated in fascinating detail, a
“mediated version of forensic science” that has spread across the culture
but equates to only a very shallow understanding by the public.9 The surge
in applications to university forensic science programs in the United States
in the last decade, referenced by Steenberg,10 demonstrates one very real
effect of this phenomenon and may indicate that modules introducing
crime fiction to prospective forensic scientists at the college level or even
at earlier levels of education have a strong appeal. Indeed, “Using Detective
Fiction to Reinforce Problem Solving Strategies and the Scientific
Method”11 has been designed for middle-school science students in North
Carolina, while an integrated curriculum combining law, forensic investi-
gation, biology, and mathematics has been offered to high school students
in California.12 A team-taught course combining chemistry and literature,
that is, Introductory Forensic Chemistry joined with American and British
Detective Fiction, was recently offered at John Carroll University in
Ohio.13 In a less formal educational context, the Explore Forensics website
allows participants to reinvestigate famous criminal cases, as in “The
Murder of Leeann Tiernan,”14 learn forensic principles and techniques
from a “skilled team of expert authors,” and to cooperate or compete with
other participants in an interactive, shared-learning environment.15 While
these are very specific examples, they provide a great deal of insight into
the many ways crime fiction and crime narratives have become an unques-
tioned and unavoidable cultural touchstone and the many ways in which
they provide an engaging means of learning for students, opportunities for
collaborative learning, and stimulating opportunities for interdisciplinary
work among faculty.
30 R. MARTIN

Conclusion
Lindsay Steenberg begins her study of forensic science and popular culture
by saying, “Contemporary popular culture is experiencing a forensic
turn,”16 while Michael Hviid Jacobsen in his Poetics of Crime identifies in
the current era the “rise of the ‘criminological society.’”17 The contempo-
rary interest in crime fiction and narratives of crime spans all educational
boundaries, both in the individuals drawn to it and in its growing integra-
tion across disciplines. Steenberg and Jacobsen are both correct in their
assessment that modern life provides an immersive experience in texts
about crime, from minute-by-minute reports in traditional and electronic
journalistic venues, to breaking news of crimes and Amber Alerts received
as texts on private cellphones, to the continued success of police and
detective shows on television, computers and other electronic devices, and
cinema screens. The widespread yet superficial knowledge of forensic
techniques and law enforcement they enable in their consumers, the
obsession with serial killers, and the pervasive anxiety fueled by fears of
generalized violence, sexual assault, war, and global terrorism point to a
world that is perceived to be filled with danger and disorder and may be
ultimately beyond the knowing, not to mention the control, of the indi-
vidual. Even those students who do not choose to read or watch texts
about crime cannot escape this atmosphere. They may be drawn to courses
on crime writing because the subject is popular and is one in which many
may feel they are already experts or because they have the feeling that
knowing more about narratives of crime will give them more understand-
ing of the world in which they live. Maybe the class simply fits their sched-
ule. Maybe it sounds like a relatively undemanding subject because of its
popularity and familiarity. If they come to the study of crime fiction with
preconceptions about its familiarity, its narrowness of subject and interest,
its dull, restrictive traditions, or the quality of the writing in the genre,
such a course will test those preconceptions. In any or all of these cases,
though, there is a prospective course module for those students that will
engage their intellects and emotions, stimulate their curiosity, tap into
issues as relevant as the day’s breaking news, help them build their abilities
to think theoretically and entertain abstract ideas, and encourage them to
practice problem-solving and textual analysis. For students with some lit-
erary background, the broad array of texts can introduce them to genre
theory and will educate them in the conventions of detective fiction and
crime writing, as well as surprise them with the creative space that exists
 DESIGNING CRIME FICTION MODULES: THE LITERATURE CLASSROOM… 31

within a single genre. A further benefit is that while participating in a

media-rich curriculum that is open to interdisciplinarity, students may
engage in learning and enjoyment simultaneously on multiple levels and
may achieve a certain amount of new knowledge and useful insights about
the world they live in.

Notes
1. Jacqueline O’Connor, “Performing the Law in Contemporary
Documentary Theater,” in Teaching Law and Literature, ed. Austin Sarat,
Cathrine O. Frank, and Matthew Anderson (New York: Modern Language
Association, 2011), 407.
2. Ibid., 407–408.
3. The juxtaposition of filmed versions of Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los
Angeles, 1992 (2001) and The Laramie Project (2002) creates particularly
exciting discussion. Both are based on interviews, but Deavere Smith per-
forms all of the characters as part of a filmed one-woman play and The
Laramie Project is performed by professional actors, some famous, as an
HBO television movie. Discussion of performance style and the shaping of
the documentary material can be very rich.
4. Readers interested in exploring these options in more depth should consult
Rebecca Martin, ed., Critical Insights: Crime and Detective Fiction
(Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2013) or Edward J. Rielly, ed., Murder 101:
Essays on the Teaching of Detective Fiction (Jefferson, NC: McFarland,
2009).
5. For further discussion of these possibilities, it is suggested that readers
consult Michael Hviid Jacobsen, ed., Poetics of Crime: Understanding and
Researching Crime and Deviance through Creative Sources (Burlington,
VT: Ashgate, 2014) and Angela M. Nickoli et al., “Pop Culture Crime and
Pedagogy,” Journal of Criminal Justice Education 14, no. 1 (Spring 2003).
While the latter deals with the use of mainstream films in the criminal jus-
tice classroom, many of the suggestions are applicable to the introduction
of others kinds of crime texts.
6. Readers are referred to the discussions in Beryl Blaustone, “Teaching
Evidence: Storytelling in the Classroom,” University Law Review 41, no. 2
(1992); Kate Nace Day, “Stories and the Language of Law,” in The Future
of Scholarly Writing: Critical Writings, edited by Angelika Bammer and
Ruth-Ellen Boetcher (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Julie Stone
Peters, “Law, Literature, and the Vanishing Real: On the Future of an
Interdisciplinary Illusion,” PMLA 120, no. 2 (March 2005); Robert
C. Power, “‘Just the Facts’: Detective Fiction in the Law School
32 R. MARTIN

Curriculum,” in Murder 101: Essays on the Teaching of Detective Fiction,

edited by Edward J. Rielly (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009); and Julie
M. Spanbauer, “Using a Cultural Lens in the Law School Classroom to
Stimulate Self-Assessment,” Gonzaga Law Review 48, no. 2 (2013), John
Marshall Law School Institutional Repository, Faculty Scholarship, accessed
June 29, 2017, http://repository.jmls.edu/facpubs/335/, for additional
information.
7. For more ideas, consult Rielly, ed., Murder 101, and Lindsay Steenberg,
Forensic Science in Contemporary Popular American Culture: Gender,
Crime and Science (New York: Routledge, 2013).
8. “Game Design: Bachelor of Science,” Full Sail University, accessed June
29, 2017, https://www.fullsail.edu/degrees/game-design-bachelor.
9. Steenberg, Forensic Science in Contemporary Popular American Culture, 1.
10. Ibid., 1–2.
11. See Ella Boyd, “Using Detective Fiction to Reinforce Problem Solving
Strategies and the Scientific Method,” Yale National Initiative, accessed
June 29, 2017, http://teachers.yale.edu/curriculum/viewer/initiative_
07.02.03_u.
12. See ConnectEd: The California Center for College and Career, Crime
Scene Investigation: Integrated Curriculum Unit on Forensics (Berkeley,
CA: ConnectEd, 2010), accessed June 29, 2017, http://www.connected-
california.org/files/LJCrimeSceneInvestigation_FullUnit.pdf.
13. See Chrystal Bruce and John McBratney, Detective Fiction and Forensic
Science: A Proposal, accessed June 29, 2017, http://webmedia.jcu.edu/
cas/files/2015/04/ENW.Detective-Fiction-and-Forensic-Science1.pdf.
14. See Suzanne Elvidge, “Forensic Cases: The Murder of Leeann Tiernan,”
Explore Forensics, last modified December 20, 2016, http://www.explore-
forensics.co.uk/forensic-cases-murder-leanne-tiernan.html.
15. See “Forensic Science for Beginners,” Explore Forensics, accessed June 29,
2017, http://www.exploreforensics.co.uk/.
16. Steenberg, Forensic Science in Contemporary Popular American Culture, 1.
17. Jacobsen, “Introduction: Towards the Poetics of Crime: Contours of a
Cultural, Critical and Creative Criminology,” in Poetics of Crime, 4.

Works Cited
Blaustone, Beryl. “Teaching Evidence: Storytelling in the Classroom.” American
University Law Review 41, no. 2 (1992): 453–484.
Boyd, Ella. “Using Detective Fiction to Reinforce Problem Solving Strategies and
the Scientific Method.” Yale National Initiative. Accessed June 29, 2017.
http://teachers.yale.edu/curriculum/viewer/initiative_07.02.03_u.
 DESIGNING CRIME FICTION MODULES: THE LITERATURE CLASSROOM… 33

Bruce, Chrystal and John McBratney. Detective Fiction and Forensic Science: A
Proposal. Accessed June 29, 2017. http://webmedia.jcu.edu/cas/
files/2015/04/ ENW.Detective-Fiction-and-Forensic-Science1.pdf.
ConnectEd: The California Center for College and Career. Crime Scene
Investigation: Integrated Curriculum Unit on Forensics. Berkeley, CA:
ConnectEd, 2010. Accessed June 29, 2017. http://www.connectedcalifornia.
org/files/LJCrimeSceneInvestigation_FullUnit.pdf.
Couch, Cullen. “Teaching the Narrative Power of Law: Program in Law and
Humanities Sets Legal Study in Broad Context.” UVA Lawyer (Fall 2005).
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lawyer/f05/humanities.htm.
Day, Kate Nace. “Stories and the Language of Law.” In The Future of Scholarly
Writing: Critical Interventions, edited by Angelika Bammer and Ruth-Ellen
Boetcher Joeres, 137–145. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Elvidge, Suzanne. “Forensic Cases: The Murder of Leeann Tiernan.” Explore
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co.uk/forensic-cases-murder-leanne-tiernan.html.
“Forensic Science for Beginners.” Explore Forensics. Accessed June 29, 2017.
http://www.exploreforensics.co.uk/.
“Game Design: Bachelor of Science.” Full Sail University. Accessed June 29,
2017. https://www.fullsail.edu/degrees/game-design-bachelor.
Grand Theft Auto. Accessed June 29, 2017. http://www.rockstargames.com/
grandtheftauto/.
Jacobsen, Michael Hviid. “Introduction: Towards the Poetics of Crime: Contours
of a Cultural, Critical and Creative Criminology.” In Poetics of Crime:
Understanding and Researching Crime and Deviance Through Creative Sources,
edited by Michael Hviid Jacobsen, 1–25. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014.
Kaufman, Moisés. The Laramie Project. New York, NY: HBO Home Video, 2002,
DVD.
L.A. Noire. Accessed June 29, 2017. http://www.rockstargames.com/lanoire/.
Martin, Rebecca, ed. Critical Insights: Crime and Detective Fiction. Ipswich, MA:
Salem Press, 2013.
Nickoli, Angela M., Cindy Hendricks, James E. Hendricks, and Emily Osgood.
“Pop Culture, Crime and Pedagogy.” Journal of Criminal Justice Education
14, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 149–162.
O’Connor, Jacqueline. “Performing the Law in Contemporary Documentary
Theater.” In Teaching Law and Literature, edited by Austin Sarat, Cathrine
O. Frank, and Matthew Anderson, 407–414. New York: Modern Language
Association, 2011.
Peters, Julie Stone. “Law, Literature, and the Vanishing Real: On the Future of an
Interdisciplinary Illusion.” PMLA 120, no. 2 (March 2005): 442–453.
34 R. MARTIN

Power, Robert C. “‘Just the Facts’: Detective Fiction in the Law School
Curriculum.” In Murder 101: Essays on the Teaching of Detective Fiction, edited
by Edward J. Rielly, 178–186. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009.
Rielly, Edward J., ed. Murder 101: Essays on the Teaching of Detective Fiction.
Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009.
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http://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/twilight-los-angeles-full-episode/3972/.
Spanbauer, Julie M. “Using a Cultural Lens in the Law School Classroom to
Stimulate Self-Assessment.” Gonzaga Law Review 48, no. 2 (2013): 365. John
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29, 2017. http://repository.jmls.edu/facpubs/335/.
Steenberg, Lindsay. Forensic Science in Contemporary American Popular Culture:
Gender, Crime, and Science. New York: Routledge, 2013.
 CHAPTER 3

Plots and Devices

Malcah Effron

Agatha Christie’s detective novelist character Ariadne Oliver describes her

approach to plotting as follows:

What really matters is plenty of bodies! If the thing’s getting a little dull,
some more blood cheers it up. Somebody is going to tell something—and
then they’re killed first! That always goes down well. It comes in all my
books—camouflaged in different ways of course.1

Christie’s fictional surrogate here offers one means that crime writers in a
variety of subgenres have actively pursued, or ignored, as works for their
plots. However, what Oliver’s strategy highlights is that the intrigue of
crime fiction is particularly placed in the exposure of a crime, its mecha-
nism of execution, and its perpetrator. The genre is less frequently associ-
ated with character, theme, or message than with plot. As such, crime
fiction is known as the plot-driven genre par excellence, so plot must be
included in any crime fiction pedagogy.
This designation, however, has often excluded crime fiction from a
place on the academic curriculum. As Peter Brooks notices, plot-level

M. Effron (*)
Department of Comparative Media Studies, Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2018 35

C. Beyer (ed.), Teaching Crime Fiction, Teaching the New English,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90608-9_3
36 M. EFFRON

considerations are often considered superficial because the focus seems to

be exclusively on answering the question “what happened?”2 Detective
writers and readers have long perceived this question as central to crime
fiction forms, leading High Modernists such as W. H. Auden to condemn
it as disposable fiction.3 Nevertheless, Brooks reclaims attention to plot,
arguing that it is not as simple as discovering “what happened.” So, atten-
tion to plot in a class on crime fiction needs to attend to more than figur-
ing out the solution to the mystery.
Narrative theory provides a productive avenue for attending to crime
fiction plots and genre devices in ways that enrich the reading experience,
especially as it is one of the first literary theories to embrace detective fiction
as an object of productive study. Embracing plot-driven texts—here defined
exclusively in terms of those that prioritize solving a mystery—narrative
theory reveled in the opportunity, explicitly identified by Tzvetan Todorov,
to provide clear illustrations of its claims obscured by more convoluted nar-
rative structures.4 Consequently, not only does narrative theory enrich the
study of crime fiction plots and devices, but the study of crime fiction plots
and devices can be used to enrich the study of narrative in general. Applying
core concepts from narrative theory to crime fiction, this chapter suggests
literary terms to enrich class discussions of crime fiction plots and offers
some activities to demonstrate their value to literary studies.
Plot, while seemingly a straightforward term, is actually as complex as
its potential structures. Brooks notes that plot can mean “[a] ground plan,
as for a building; chart; diagram.”5 This form best maps onto the notion
of crime fiction as plot-driven, highlighting how the story assembles dis-
crete points (clues) into an analysis of their relationships (the narrative of
the crime). This notion of plot, however, does not dominate textual analy-
sis. In literary studies, at its base level, plot accounts for the events of the
narrative, as is indicated by the use of plot summary to mean an overview
of the story. Yet, plot is not used simply to identify that which is s­ ummarized
in a plot summary. Tautological definitions aside, determining how to
define what aspects contribute to the plot becomes a necessary first step in
considering how to study it.
In Narrative Form (2003), Suzanne Keen introduces her chapter on
plot with multiple definitions, noting that each approach to its definition
nuances certain elements. These elements include, and tend to focus on,
“narrative’s complicated relations with time (chronology), order (and dis-
order), and generic conventions.”6 In his attempts to reclaim plot’s rele-
vance to the academy, Brooks adds to this notion that plot is “an embracing
 PLOTS AND DEVICES 37

concept for the design and intention, a structure for those meanings that
are developed […] through succession and time.”7 As both Keen and
Brooks highlight, discussions of plot center on how storytellers (on any
textual level) order events in relation to each other to construct a causal
narrative. This definition reasonably explains crime fiction as a plot-driven
narrative: the text ends by narrating the crime in an Aristotelian structure
with a clear beginning, middle, and end.
For this reason, Tzvetan Todorov identifies a two-tiered plot construc-
tion in most crime fiction narratives: the story of the crime and the story of
the investigation.8 For Todorov, the story of the crime maps onto the
events as they happened (fable in Formalist terms; story in narratological
terms) whereas the story of the investigation maps onto how those events
are presented to the reader (subject and discourse, respectively). Todorov
uses this correlation to make his claims about narrative theory and the
poetics of prose; however, it stops a step too short for a full study of plot
in crime fiction. Both the story of the crime and the story of the investiga-
tion narrate the causal links, but they operate on two different timelines,
distinguishing the two-tiered plot structure of crime fiction from a simple
story-discourse divide.
While crime fiction scholarship typically follows Todorov’s correlation
of “the story of the crime” with story/fable and “the story of the investiga-
tion” with discourse/subject, the story of the investigation can be analyzed
in terms of its story and discourse, as well. Typically, the story of the inves-
tigation is discussed in terms of form—not content—highlighting the
need to disclose all clues that lead the detective to the solution without
revealing the conclusion too early in the narrative. Eyal Segal summarizes
Golden Age detective writers’ (1920s–1940s) attitudes toward this task,
noting that these writers have created “elaborate system[s] of disguises
and misdirections,”9 constituting the discourse-level analysis of the story
of the investigation plotline.
In outlining the variety of ways that crime fiction writers delay the read-
ers’ discovery of the solution, Segal predominantly discusses focalization
shifts to leave readers outside the detective’s mental processes. This can be
done through description, the use of an investigative companion, or the
observations of any of the other characters in the texts. Since the rise of an
investigative police force and the development of the police procedural,
crime fiction incorporates descriptions of professionalized criminal investi-
gations. This involves piecemeal revelations as clues are discovered, rather
than through instantaneous conclusions followed by the disappearance of
38 M. EFFRON

the detective for the duration of the narrative (cf. Doyle’s The Hound of the
Baskervilles [1901–02]). Though Segal does not mention this mode,
another facet that the professionalization of the investigator allows for is
team collaboration, splitting up the knowledge between sections of the
group. For instance, since the 1990s, P. D. James has focalized different
chapters through different members of Dalgliesh’s, the detective protago-
nist’s, investigative team. Mimetically, these different focalizations dem-
onstrate how investigators can maximize their efficiency by dividing and
conquering; structurally it allows the reader the opportunity to piece the
puzzle together before the investigators themselves. Such practice ulti-
mately leads to shifting focalization, leading the readers to see through
multiple perspectives and asking them to bring together the pieces of the
plot rather than leading the readers along a simple explanation of “what
happened.”
Though these approaches all highlight differing commitments to the
detective as primary focalizer, a detective-focalized story of the investiga-
tion describes only one primary approach to discourse-level studies of the
story of the investigation. Some authors choose to focalize the story of the
investigation through the suspects rather than the detectives, allowing the
reader to perceive the information as the detective does. Perhaps Wilkie
Collins deserves credit for originating this method of focalization in crime
fiction in his (self-proclaimed) novel approach to novels in The Woman in
White (1859). The introduction informs the reader that the story will be
told through multiple narrators, calling attention to the narrator-focalizer
as witness:

No circumstance of importance […] shall be related on hearsay evidence

[…] When [the narrator’s] experience fails, he will retire from the position
of narrator, and his task will be continued […] by other persons who can
speak to the circumstances […] from their own knowledge.10

Collins here shifts narrators to shift focalization. While not all have used
Collins’s approach, other novelists prioritize witness testimony as a narra-
tive device. For instance, Ngaio Marsh similarly moves between the testi-
monies of witnesses and suspects as a means of introducing clues without
necessarily indicating a clear path to the solution. These narratives come
sometimes narrated by the witnesses themselves,11 and sometimes nar-
rated through Chief Inspector Alleyn’s notes.12 Such moments complicate
the story by offering differing accounts of one event, the murder of the
 PLOTS AND DEVICES 39

primary victim. Focusing on characters as narrators, discussions of charac-

ter in crime fiction can thus support discussions of plot, and vice versa.
Because crime fiction plots foreground clue-gathering, whether
through witness testimony, as in Collins and Marsh, or through forensic
analysis, as in Patricia Cornwell or Kathy Reichs, scholars like Todorov
claim the story of the crime must take place in the narrative past.13 Yet,
crime fiction narratives do not always limit the narrative present to the
story of the investigation. For example, Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon nar-
rates the simultaneous progress of FBI agent Will Graham and serial killer
Francis Dolarhyde.14 The Dolarhyde narratives create a version of dra-
matic irony, as the reader has information about the murderer’s actions
and motives before the detective and can understand the importance of
certain clues before or even better than the detective. Yet, this insight only
allows the reader to know how, but not who, still requiring the detective’s
resources to discover the specific individual who committed the crimes. As
the who and the why is presented to the readers throughout the e­ xperience,
the plot in such texts develop intrigue around how the criminal will be
caught.
Though a traditional history of the crime fiction genre might introduce
plot structures like Harris’s as postmodern innovations or responses, the
criminal’s perspective is not a recent addition to the crime fiction plot.
Perhaps the most continually popular version of this is Columbo, the tele-
vision series starring Peter Falk, but some of the earliest versions appear
during the Golden Age of detective fiction. For instance, R. Austin
Freeman’s Dr. Thorndyke uses an “inverted” detective story plot,15 which
switches the story from a whodunit to a howdunit. By eliminating the
question of “who,” these plot structures need the audience to care about
how the detective will unravel the threads that will lead directly back to
the killer. Howdunits must fully engage the reader in the investigative
process, keeping the reader turning pages because of interest in the pro-
cess rather than curiosity about the culprit.
Both whodunit and howdunit plot structures privilege (devote more
space to) the story of the investigation of the crime after its commission,
rather than the story of the commission of the crime in the text’s narrative
present. Todorov has suggested that thrillers collapse the story of the
crime and the story of the investigation into the same plot: “[w]e are no
longer told about a crime anterior to the moment of the narrative; the
narrative coincides with the action.”16 This description works for novels
such as Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear (1943), in which most of
40 M. EFFRON

the criminal intrigue happens during the timeline of the narrative.17 It

works less well for John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), a text
often cited as one of the first thrillers,18 in which the protagonist’s esca-
pades are driven by a need to figure out what has happened.19 Todorov’s
description of thrillers lends itself nicely to crime fiction narratives about
the criminal rather than the detective, as in the case of Patricia Highsmith’s
Mr. Ripley novels. Yet, the moments of the definition’s failure create
opportunities to think about the robustness of the crime genre’s plot
structures, as the form can accommodate so many variations without
needing a completely new genre.
As can be seen from this breadth of two-tiered plot structures, a course
syllabus could easily be designed around variations of the story of the
crime and the story of the investigation. Such a course structure would
allow the instructor to break away from the traditional crime fiction
pseudo-historical approach that moves from the Golden Age to Hard-­
Boiled to Police Procedural to Beyond, moving back and forth across the
Atlantic. As can be seen even in the brief examples offered above, these
forms are not limited to one historical era, national model, or cultural
perspective. Additionally, the two-tiered approach would allow an instruc-
tor to delve deeply into the narrative difference between the chronological
path of events and the order in which the author chooses to disclose them.
In particular, it could be productive to include a text more often consid-
ered “literature” than “crime fiction,” such as William Faulkner’s A Rose
for Emily (1930), which, after all, ends up a crime story. As an
a-­chronological narrative, Faulkner’s text privileges discourse over story
and easily demonstrates ways the narrative structure can withhold plot
points, both in the story of the crime and the story of the investigation.
Aside from this two-tiered approach, crime fiction can productively be
considered in terms of its approach to narrative closure, or how the plot
ends. Segal offers a neat definition for closure based on dynamism rather
than stasis: “the ending of a narrative text […] would produce an effect of
closure when it brings to a halt the operation of all kinds of narrative inter-
est by filling in all of the significant informational gaps about the repre-
sented world that have arisen during the textual sequence.”20 Certainly, as
Segal argues, this definition describes the classic detective fiction plot,
whose denouement offers an unraveling of all the knots in the investiga-
tion by providing a complete narrative of the crime and explaining away all
tangents. Typically, “all of the significant informational gaps about the
represented world” are filled in through the detective’s monologue.
 PLOTS AND DEVICES 41

Additionally, in the classic Golden Age form, the crime’s solution enables
the marriage of two key characters, bringing the text’s subplots to a come-
dic resolution.
Classic detective fiction’s strong closure leads scholars to speak of crime
fiction as a conservative genre. Scholars argue that for a crime and punish-
ment narrative to have strong closure, it must support the current social
order, “restor[ing] to the Garden of Eden.”21 Even crime narratives that
begin in a post-lapsarian environment, such as that Raymond Chandler
claims for the hard-boiled genre,22 the criminal is discovered and generally
is removed from society. Protagonists operating within hegemonic systems
such as the police, the court, or the military understandably are trapped in
the ideological systems these infrastructures support. Yet, even activist pri-
vate investigators, such as Sara Paretsky’s feminist detective V. I.
Warshawski, rarely conclude by completely overhauling the social system
in which the crime occurs. More to the point, even when the protagonist
is a criminal, such as E. W. Hornung’s Raffles and Elmore Leonard’s Chili
Palmer, the rule-breaker is redeemed and is reincorporated into the exist-
ing social systems.
Despite these kinds of failures, there are some crime fiction forms that
push against strong closure conventions. Some police-based novels allow
the criminals to escape punishment at the end. For instance, some of Ian
Rankin’s novels end with the mob boss, “Big Ger” Cafferty still at large
(cf. The Black Book). Yet, even Cafferty seeks to maintain a current social
order, as he helps Rebus with cases as a means of coping with the evolu-
tion of gang behavior in Scotland (cf. Mortal Causes). Perhaps the most
productive work can be seen in texts that actually confront their social
systems, especially those that are not known internationally as having ethi-
cal institutional practices. As an example, Sam Naidu and Karlien van der
Wielen show how Deon Meyer’s South African police detectives grapple
with defining justice in South African crime fiction, as nationally there is
no inherent assumption that what is legal or what is enforced is also what
is good.23 Nevertheless, as Naidu and van der Wielen’s work reiterates,
even these texts return, at least locally, to some definition of right and
wrong through which order might be (re)constructed.
Potentially offering a simultaneous account for why the genre is ideo-
logically conservative, Todorov identifies the inherent structural conserva-
tivism of crime fiction: “[d]etective fiction has its norms, to ‘develop’
them is also to disappoint them: to ‘improve upon’ detective fiction is to
write ‘literature.’”24 Though Todorov’s value judgments are outdated, his
42 M. EFFRON

narratological claims explain the strong resilience of the detective plot

form. Those that truly shatter its conventions—such as Gertrude Stein’s
Blood on the Dining-Room Floor (1948) or Paul Auster’s City of Glass
(1985)—are not filed in the crime fiction sections of libraries and book-
stores; nor are they generally considered part of the genre, except under
Todorov’s archaic value system. Nevertheless, the form is flexible enough
to admit crime novels that flirt with the boundaries like those Stefano Tani
and Patricia Merivale and Susan Sweeney use to categorize anti-detective
or metaphysical crime fiction. For instance, while Thomas Pynchon’s The
Crying of Lot 49 (1965) is held up as an exemplar of the anti-detective
form because it does not offer a conclusion of the case, John Sallis’s The
Long-Legged Fly similarly withholds strong closure, yet the rest of the plot
structure follows closely enough that it is still considered part of the crime
fiction genre. Similarly, as many scholars have noted, Anthony Berkeley’s
The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929) offers multiple conclusions, and not
only is it considered crime fiction, but it is taken as an exemplar of the
Golden Age novel.
Despite these innovations, crime fiction, as a genre is best known for
arriving at a denouement in which all is revealed and explained. For this
reason, whether speaking of the investigator within the text or the reader
outside the text, as Keen describes in relation to Wilkie Collins’s The
Moonstone (1868), “the plot of the novel can be assembled in full only
after each deposition has been read and combined in the mind of the
reader.”25 This aspect of closure leads Auden to decry the form as both an
addictive drug and entirely disposable: “once I begin, I [Auden] cannot
work or sleep till I have finished it [but] I forget the story as soon as I have
finished it, and have no wish to read it again” (15). In this approach,
Auden holds by the common notion of the plot’s primary function as a
puzzle which once solved—once the trick has been discovered—no longer
holds any narrative excitement or interest. Such perspectives, especially by
crime fiction authors such as S. S. Van Dine, has long kept the general
public from thinking of crime fiction as literature, initially keeping it out
of the academy. This attitude persisted because early crime fiction studies
refused to reveal endings (cf. Ray B. Browne, John G. Cawelti, and George
Grella), making it difficult for scholars to argue compellingly about a
whole text. Such prioritization of the conclusion means that, when teach-
ing crime fiction, it is important to decide whether or not students may
reveal plot elements that students at different stages of the reading process
might not yet have encountered.
 PLOTS AND DEVICES 43

One easy solution to this problem is to assign students to read novels as

a whole rather than in sections. This approach allows the students to deter-
mine for themselves the significant moments in the text rather than the
instructor’s sectioning overriding the individual reading experiences. This
will also allow the students to have more individual reactions to the denoue-
ments, as their expectations will be preconditioned by neither instructor
guidance nor class discussion. If one is teaching a course in a literature cur-
riculum, this might be an acceptable solution, as many curricula anticipate
that students will read an entire work before class discussion. It might even
be easier to make this demand if one’s students are comprised of Auden-
esque readers. Yet, there have been many clever assignments that have
engaged productively with reading serial narratives on the original publica-
tion timeline (not to mention a number of institutions that balk at large
weekly reading requirements), so this solution is not a catch-all.
At this point, best practice is largely contingent on the instructor’s own
reading and analytic goals for the class. For instance, the students could
decide at the start of the term that they may only discuss as much content
as had been assigned prior to a given class session. This is a practical guide-
line, as much as it is in the context of any literature classroom. Consider
teaching a three-volume novel: should students be limited to only discuss-
ing one volume at a time? If yes, then it seems reasonable to extend this
practice to a discussion of crime fiction plots. In fact, such limitations can
create productive conversations about how the plot develops, forcing stu-
dents to revisit their understanding of the events in the story at each class
session. However, if one prefers to spend more time discussing the full
intricacies of the plot, it is helpful to allow students to address the com-
plete structure from the initial conversation. Crime fiction scholarship no
longer believes it has any obligation to withhold the ending any more than
any other area of literary studies. (Some, like Pierre Bayard, don’t even feel
obligated to accept the novel’s published conclusion.26) Despite this, when
privileging the incremental unfolding of the plot, students can employ a
“spoiler alert” system. Of course, accepting this tactic privileges the per-
spective that once the solution is found and the trick is revealed, the nar-
rative is “spoiled.”
Regardless of the method chosen, the class can pay attention to flexibil-
ity of crime fiction plots by thinking about the nature of genre require-
ments. In this kind of a conversation, ask students to think not only of, but
also against the generic codes that have been devised for the genre. When
taking an historical approach to genre development, these rules offer a
44 M. EFFRON

nice place to think about how cultural context affects the function of plot
devices. For instance, after reading Ronald Knox’s and S. S. Van Dine’s
rules for writing detective stories, ask students why these limitations were
put on the detective genre. Historically, these conventions arose in
response to publishing practices, highlighting a social demand for increas-
ing originality in plots. Knox bans “Chinamen” because of their overuse
as the criminals in the genre.27 This can begin a conversation about the
cultural biases that led early-twentieth-century writers, such as Sax
Rohmer, to gravitate toward a Chinese figure as its villain character. To
bring this conversation back to the plot structures that inform crime fic-
tion, call the students’ attention to the difference between banning
“Chinamen,”—a prohibition ignored in texts like the Hardy Boys
Footprints under the Window (1937)—and banning stereotyped characters
that are overwritten with negative connotations in a contemporary envi-
ronment. While a ban on “Chinamen” might no longer be appropriate, is
it narratively acceptable for crime fiction plots to rely on stereotypes to
establish criminality? For instance, compare the use of race in Ngaio
Marsh’s Black as He’s Painted (1974) or Henning Mankell’s Faceless
Killers (1990/1997). Such questions bring students back to thinking
about the intersections of plot and how these devices can transcend the
historical contexts of their specific implementations.
In addition to these rules, used more predominantly now in scholarship
than in trade publication, give students some samples of contemporary
guides to writing crime fiction. For instance, Carolyn Wheat identifies
several plot structures to use when producing crime fiction. Whereas the
Golden Age generic guidelines focus predominantly on what not to do,
these structures are written in a positive, directive fashion. For instance,
regarding the denouement, Wheat outlines several kinds of endings w ­ riters
could use, including “the non-action ending,” the “two-layered ending,”
and “the action ending.”28 Coming under the section title “Endings Are
Hard,” these examples offer positive approaches to how to resolve a crime
fiction narrative. Using Wheat as a sample model for identifying good
crime plot structures and the Golden Age authors as another, ask the stu-
dents to outline a skeleton plot structure for what must happen in order
for a text to be part of the crime fiction genre. This activity can work well
as a capstone to the semester, allowing them to call on the experience of
reading different novels throughout the semester.
Genre-based approaches to plot such as these ask students to focus on
what is essential and what is accidental. Use this as an opportunity to pro-
 PLOTS AND DEVICES 45

mote knowledge transfer from the use of genre when reading to when
writing. Comparing the way genres function can help students realize that
narrative and argument rest on the same basic process, namely taking
readers through an assessment of the causal relations between the parts of
the whole. In this process, writers of all genres make individual data
points—clues in crime fiction plot—feel meaningfully connected as
opposed to coincidentally adjacent. The excitement of discovering “who-
dunit” derives from the journey as much as, if not more than, the destina-
tion (cf. John Dickson Carr’s rant in The Three Coffins [1935]), and
attention to this journey teaches observation, analysis, and reasoning skills
that are necessary for all forms of problem-solving. These are also skills
that instructors can have students develop when dealing with a single
crime fiction novel in a larger, non-crime fiction curriculum. The points
about plot construction transfer not only to the other texts they will read
in the class (detective plotting is a good example of hermeneutic analysis),
and the papers they will write (the denouement uses evidence to support
its argument), but also the basic notion that care and attention can predict
and affect outcomes. In a course dedicated to crime fiction, the students
can attend to the correlation of plot construction and conventions, using
these details to develop a core structure from which to notice variance
across the texts in the course. In this capacity, the way detective fiction
obscures the presentation of “what happened” can remind the students
that, even when one reads for the plot, a story is never as straightforward
as it seems.

Notes
1. Agatha Christie, Cards on the Table. (New York.: Berkley Books, 1937.;
repr., 1984). 57.
2. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984).
3. W. H. Auden, “The Guilty Vicarage,” in Detective Fiction: A Collection of
Critical Essays, ed. Robin W. Winks (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall,
Inc., 1980).
4. Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1977). 43.
5. Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative.
6. Suzanne Keen, Narrative Form (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
7. Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative.
8. Todorov, The Poetics of Prose.
46 M. EFFRON

9. Eyal Segal, “Closure in Detective Fiction,” Poetics Today 31, no. 2 (2010).
180.
10. Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1998).
11. Ngaio Marsh, Death and the Dancing Footman (London: Published for the
Crime Club by Collins, 1942).
12. Death in Ecstacy (London: HarperCollins, 2001).
13. Todorov, The Poetics of Prose.
14. Thomas Harris, Red Dragon (New York: Putnam, 1981).
15. Segal, “Closure in Detective Fiction.” 185.
16. Todorov, The Poetics of Prose.
17. Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear: An Entertainment (London:
Penguin Books, 1973).
18. Christian. House, “How the Thirty-Nine Steps Invented the Modern
Thriller,” The Telegraph, October 11, 2015.
19. John Buchan and Christopher Harvie, The Thirty-Nine Steps, World’s
Classics (Oxford England; New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
20. Segal, “Closure in Detective Fiction.” 162.
21. Auden, “The Guilty Vicarage.” 24.
22. Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder (New York: Vintage, 1988).
23. Sam Naidu and Karlien van der Wielen, “Poison and Antidote: Evil and the
Hero-Villain Binary in Deon Meyer’s Post-Apartheid Crime Thriller,
Devil’s Peak,” in The Functions of Evil across Disciplinary Contexts, ed.
Malcah Effron and Brian Johson (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017).
24. Todorov, The Poetics of Prose.
25. Keen, Narrative Form.
26. Pierre Bayard and Carol Cosman, Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?: The Mystery
Behind the Agatha Christie Mystery (New York: New Press, 2000).
27. Ronald A. Knox, “Detective Story Decalogue,” in The Art of the Mystery
Story, ed. Howard Haycraft (New York,: Simon and Schuster, 1946).
28. Carolyn Wheat, How to Write Killer Fiction: The Funhouse of Mystery & the
Rollercoaster of Suspense (Palo Alto: Perseverance Press, 2003).

Works Cited
Auden, W. H. “The Guilty Vicarage.” In Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical
Essays, edited by Robin W. Winks, 15–24. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall,
Inc., 1980.
Auster, Paul. City of Glass. New York: Penguin Books, 1985.
Bayard, Pierre, and Carol Cosman. Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?: The Mystery Behind
the Agatha Christie Mystery. New York: New Press, 2000.
Berkeley, Anthony. The Poisoned Chocolates Case. New York: Felony & Mayhem
Press, 2010. 1929.
 PLOTS AND DEVICES 47

Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1984.
Browne, Ray B. Heroes and Humanities : Detective Fiction and Culture. Bowling
Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1986.
Buchan, John, and Christopher Harvie. The Thirty-Nine Steps. World’s Classics.
Oxford, England; New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and
Popular Culture. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976.
Chandler, Raymond. The Simple Art of Murder. New York: Vintage, 1988.
Christie, Agatha. Cards on the Table. New York: Berkley Books, 1937. 1984.
Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. Mattituck, New York: Amereon House.
———. The Woman in White. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. 1859.
Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Hound of the Baskervilles. Mineola: Dover Thrift
Editions, 1994. 1901–02.
Faulkner, William. A Rose for Emily. New York: HarperCollins, 2013. 1930.
Greene, Graham. The Ministry of Fear: An Entertainment. London: Penguin
Books, 1973. 1943.
Grella, George. “The Formal Detective Novel.” In Detective Fiction: A Collection
of Critical Essays, edited by Robin W. Winks, 84–102. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall, 1980.
———. “The Hard-Boiled Detective Novel.” In Detective Fiction : A Collection of
Critical Essays, edited by Robin W. Winks, 103–20. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall, 1980.
Harris, Thomas. Red Dragon. New York: Putnam, 1981.
House, Christian. “How the Thirty-Nine Steps Invented the Modern Thriller.” The
Telegraph, 11 October 2015.
Keen, Suzanne. Narrative Form. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Knox, Ronald A. “Detective Story Decalogue.” In The Art of the Mystery Story,
edited by Howard Haycraft, 194–96. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946.
Marsh, Ngaio. Death and the Dancing Footman. London: Published for the Crime
Club by Collins, 1942.
———. Death in Ecstacy. London: HarperCollins, 2001.
Merivale, Patricia, and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney. Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical
Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism. Philadelphia, PA: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1999.
Milhorn, H. Thomas. Writing Genre Fiction: A Guide to the Craft. Boca Raton:
Universal Publishers, 2006.
Naidu, Sam, and Karlien van der Wielen. “Poison and Antidote: Evil and the
Hero-Villain Binary in Deon Meyer’s Post-Apartheid Crime Thriller, Devil’s
Peak.” In The Functions of Evil Across Disciplinary Contexts, edited by Malcah
Effron and Brian Johson, forthcoming. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017.
Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. Perennial Classics. 1st Perennial Classics
ed. New York: HarperPerennial, 1999.
48 M. EFFRON

Rankin, Ian. Mortal Causes. New York: St. Martin’s Paperbacks, 1994.
———. The Black Book. New York: St. Martin’s Paperbacks, 1993.
Sallis, John. The Long-Legged Fly. New York: Walker Publishing Company, Inc.,
1992.
Segal, Eyal. “Closure in Detective Fiction.” Poetics Today 31, no. 2 (2010):
153–215.
Stein, Gertrude, and John Herbert Gill. Blood on the Dining-Room Floor. Berkeley,
CA: Creative Arts Book Co., 1982.
Tani, Stefano. The Doomed Detective: The Contribution of the Detective Novel to
Postmodern American and Italian Fiction. Literary Structures. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1984.
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Poetics of Prose. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977.
Wheat, Carolyn. How to Write Killer Fiction: The Funhouse of Mystery & the
Rollercoaster of Suspense. Palo Alto: Perseverance Press, 2003.
 CHAPTER 4

Teaching Crime Fiction and Gender

Maureen T. Reddy

Much early hardboiled detective fiction vividly illustrates Judith Butler’s

theory that gender is entirely performative, with no existence apart from
that performance.1 The original American hardboiled detectives—those
detached, cool, solitary men created by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond
Chandler in the 1920s and 1930s—repeatedly perform their masculinity
(and whiteness and heterosexuality) in opposition to various others in the
narratives in which they feature. Indeed, those gender/race performances
are arguably the whole point of the hardboiled, whose plots are often far
less compelling than are descriptions of the detectives’ performative proof
of their (white) masculinity. When Sam Spade compliments Effie in The
Maltese Falcon by saying, “you’re a good man, sister,” he implies both that
masculinity can be performed by those who are not biologically male and
that successfully performing masculinity is a worthy goal in itself.2 The vil-
lains of the traditional hardboiled are either men who fail at performing
(white, heterosexual) masculinity or women who perform one type of fem-
ininity all too well. Think, for instance, of Raymond Chandler’s The Big
Sleep, in which the murdered pornographer is described as “the fag”; in
which the gangster who kills Harry and is determined to kill Marlowe,

M. T. Reddy (*)
Rhode Island College, Providence, RI, USA
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2018 49

C. Beyer (ed.), Teaching Crime Fiction, Teaching the New English,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90608-9_4
50 M. T. REDDY

Lash Canino, is not-quite-white; and in which the hyper-feminine Carmen

presents a murderous threat to men who resist her attempts at seduction.3
There is no being greater, or rarer, than “a good man”—that man who is
“not himself mean”4—in the world of Hammett’s and Chandler’s fiction,
with only the detectives fully measuring up to the demands of that particu-
lar gender performance.5 Thinking about the hardboiled in terms of per-
forming gender helps to illuminate why the rise of feminist crime fiction in
the U.S. in the last quarter of the twentieth century tended not to follow
hardboiled patterns, with even those series that focused on tough private
eyes significantly modifying rather than merely adopting the conventions
of the hardboiled. That is, performing femininity is at odds with the
requirements of the detective role, while a woman detective performing
masculinity raises still other problems. Instead, feminist authors of crime
fiction featuring female detectives critique the requirements of both roles—
femininity and detection—in constructing their characters and plots.6
The foregoing may seem entirely obvious to those familiar with Judith
Butler’s work as well as either the American hardboiled or its feminist revi-
sions, but these ideas are far from obvious to my undergraduate students,
many of whom have never encountered either Butler or crime fiction
before entering my classroom. For almost a decade, I have been teaching
a course called “women, crime, and representation” at Rhode Island
College (RIC). The course, which I try to offer once annually, is aimed at
undergraduates at the sophomore level or above and is part of my col-
lege’s general education program in a category we call “connections.”
Connections courses “emphasize comparative perspectives, such as across
disciplines, across time, and across cultures,” to quote RIC’s website, and
are meant to help students further develop their abilities in several core
student learning outcomes first introduced at the freshman level. These
courses cannot be included in the requirements for any student’s major
program of study and have few prerequisites; mine, for example, requires
only that students have completed at least forty-five credits, including
introductory writing and literature courses. I cannot assume, then, that
my students have any gender studies background at all or that they have
read any crime fiction, although in fact some students are drawn to my
course specifically because they are interested in gender studies and/or
crime fiction. In the rest of this essay, I discuss how one might use gender
theory to analyze crime fiction and crime fiction to illustrate gender the-
ory in the classroom, using this course as one possible example.
 TEACHING CRIME FICTION AND GENDER 51

My most recent syllabus describes the course this way:

This connections course examines representations—in fiction, non-fiction,

film, and television—of women as criminals, as crime victims, and as detec-
tives. We will consider texts of various national origins and time periods,
paying close attention to the similarities as well as differences in their por-
trayals of women. We will draw on research and analyses done by scholars
from a variety of fields, including film and media studies, gender and wom-
en’s studies, sociology, history, and literature, to help us make sense of these
representations and what they might tell us about our society and ourselves.
Most of our work in this course could be considered under the broad rubric
of cultural studies, the interdisciplinary field begun in the middle part of the
twentieth century and focused on the myriad, complex forces through and
within which people lead and understand our own lives. We focus for the
most part on materials from popular culture, beginning with the
1930s–1940s, but spending the bulk of our time on works created between
1980 and the present.

The course, which is not strictly about crime fiction but includes more
crime fiction than any other genre, is divided into four units, beginning
with “Dead(ly) Women” and ending with “Female Detectives.” The two
middle units—“Women Strike Back” and “Political ‘Crime’”—focus on a
number of non-crime fictional and nonfictional texts, including Thelma
and Louise and Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero, that are outside
the scope of this book and that I will therefore not discuss here.
During our first class meeting, I briefly explain the underlying premise
of the course: that popular culture profoundly influences how we see each
other and ourselves. Popular culture is never simple, but instead is often
both complex and contradictory, especially when it comes to gender roles,
which we often see both reinforced and undermined within the same text,
whether film or fiction. Further, “reality” is shaped by popular culture;
that is, what we believe to be true quite often comes not from our analysis
of the world around us but instead from popular culture. When I first
began teaching this course, I had to assume that most students would
resist these fundamental claims about the importance of fictional represen-
tations, but my current students tend to be quite savvy about the influence
of popular culture on our perceptions of self and others, in part because of
public attention to eating disorders among young people and the connec-
tion between girls’ self-images and dominant social images of beauty. The
52 M. T. REDDY

students arrive with the assumption that popular culture matters; however,
they frequently have a simplistic idea of exactly how it matters, one that
this course complicates.
At that first class meeting, we spend some time laying out the course’s
central terms and concepts after I assert that none of the three main words
in the course title—“women,” “crime,” “representation”—is simple or
transparent but instead needs some unpacking and discussion. I ask stu-
dents to participate in trying to construct a shared definition of each of
those words with which we can begin the work of the course, while also
stressing that we will probably need to revisit and revise those definitions
at several points during the term. Invariably, there are several students
who quickly insist that defining “women” is easy and who agree on some-
thing like “a female over the age of 18,” although the numbers of such
students have shrunk as awareness of transgender people has increased. I
can now count on at least one student challenging the “easy” definition by
asking if we are limiting the discussion to ciswomen or if transwomen are
included in it. Regardless of other students’ responses, this question allows
me to steer the discussion toward the vexed role of biological sex in our
attempts to define “women” and to ask the class to think about Simone de
Beauvoir’s famous claim that “one is not born, but rather becomes,
woman.”7 My strategy is to leave the definition of “women” open, having
shown that we don’t in fact share an “easy” definition, and to shift the
discussion to the other two terms. This part of the discussion used to be
much more difficult, as until recently I was usually the only person in the
room to raise the issue of gender identity as a spectrum, not a binary; the
rise of public attention to trans issues in the U.S. in the past several years
has made teaching gender issues much easier, as fewer students arrive in
my class convinced that there are just two sexes. “Crime” turns out to be
almost as fraught as “women”: students always begin with some version of
“an act that is against the law” but other students complicate that—some-
times with my prodding—by asking about unjust laws and, sometimes,
unjust regimes. The examples that come up most often in questioning the
“against the law” definition of crime are Civil Rights demonstrators against
Jim Crow laws in the U.S. and—probably because most students have
read The Diary of Anne Frank in middle school—people who hid Jews
from the Nazis during the Holocaust. If “the law” is not always the final
arbiter of crime, what is? I ask students to think about that problem and
we move on to our final term, representation. By this point, naturally,
students hesitate to go with their first responses, having witnessed first
 TEACHING CRIME FICTION AND GENDER 53

responses to the first two terms being challenged. In an electronic class-

room, I pull up the Oxford English Dictionary online and show the defini-
tion of “representation,” noting that our course is using the second of the
three main definitions, which goes like this:

2. The description or portrayal of someone or something in a particular way

‘the representation of women in newspapers’
2.1 The depiction of someone or something in a work of art.
‘Picasso is striving for some absolute representation of reality’
2.2 [count noun] A picture, model, or other depiction of someone or
something.
‘a striking representation of a vase of flowers’ 8

If not in an electronic classroom, I simply read this definition aloud.

Students sometimes express relief at this point—finally, a word that isn’t
tricky to define and on which we can all agree!—but I try to trouble that
relief a bit by noting that because we can’t agree yet on the first two course
terms, we are likely to run into trouble discussing “the description or por-
trayal” of them (women, crime) in course texts.
For logistical reasons, the first text we examine is John Huston’s film
adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1941). My course
meets twice weekly for two hours each meeting; I cannot ask students to
complete an entire novel between the first and second classes, nor do I
want to spend more than half of one class period on introductory material.
This film works well to get students immediately applying the concepts
and terms of the course. I end our discussion of those terms by saying that
we will frequently circle back to these issues and then ask students to take
careful notes on the film we will begin watching together. In particular, I
ask them to think about the course’s terms as we watch the first 30 min-
utes or so of The Maltese Falcon together. Exactly how much of the film I
show during that first class meeting depends on how much time we have
left in the class period after covering the introductory material, as I want
to make sure that we have at least ten minutes left after our viewing to
begin talking about what we have seen. Even the first 15–20 minutes of
Maltese offers plenty of material with which to begin that discussion. We
finish watching the film during the second class meeting and discuss it in
relation both to our course terms and to the title of our first unit, “dead(ly)
women.” I ask students to comment on the three women in the film—
Effie, Brigid, and Iva—in terms of representations of women. How does
54 M. T. REDDY

this film position viewers in relation to these women? Why is it that both
Iva and Brigid are dangerous to Sam (Iva calls the police on him, for
instance), but that only Brigid’s threat must be contained and punished
(suggested both by Sam’s comments on capital punishment and on the
final image of Brigid behind the bars of the elevator)? How do we know
Effie is a good girl? What are the qualities that make her “good” (this is
where “you’re a good man, sister” comes in)? How do we square her
“goodness” with her seeming lack of sexual attraction? Brigid and the
male criminals have exactly the same motive—greed—but the film strongly
suggests that Brigid is worse than the men—why? How do we know Sam
is superior to all the other men in the film? In what specific ways does each
other man fail to measure up to him?
Responding to these questions, which attempt to get at constructions
of gender in the film, students frequently mention the distance between
our own historical moment and the moment of the film. Many of their
comments, particularly about representations of women, begin with
some version of “in those days.” In those days, women were supposed to
do what men said (Effie), women were not supposed to use sex to get
what they wanted (Brigid), women were supposed to be loyal to their
husbands (Iva), and so on. How do you know that, I ask them, and do
you have to know that before seeing the film to understand what is going
on in terms of how we are led to make judgments about the characters?
If they can get beyond repeating that “everybody knows” how things
were in 1941, some students find that they are caught in a logical circle:
we know how things were in 1941 from the film itself and we judge char-
acters in the film by measuring them against what the film tells us about
gender requirements through representing gender in specific ways. This
is the moment at which I introduce Judith Butler’s ideas about gender as
performative. If gender were in any way essential, I point out, then there
would be no need to acknowledge the decades that intervene between
Huston’s film and our viewing of it. Judith Butler’s idea that the perfor-
mance of gender constructs gender, versus its “expressing” some essence,
can help us to understand what is going on in the film and why we under-
stand it without having to read up on women’s and men’s relative posi-
tions in 1941. I usually just summarize those parts of Butler’s theory
most relevant to our course, but also make available to students her entire
essay, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in
Phenomenology and Feminist Theory”
 TEACHING CRIME FICTION AND GENDER 55

The reading assignment to follow up on The Maltese Falcon is Janey

Place’s important article, “Women in Film Noir.”9 Along with the article
itself, I give students some reading questions to help us have a focused
discussion during the next class period. The questions are quite broad, and
encourage students to keep thinking about The Maltese Falcon:

(1) The options for women in film noir are limited, according to Janey
Place, and basically come down to the good girl or the spiderwoman. Please
identify some of the main characteristics of each category and also that cat-
egory’s typical iconography. How do these categories play out in The Maltese
Falcon? Does this article help you to understand that film better than you
did when we watched it in class?
(2) Place asserts that popular culture functions as myth. She sketches out
how myth works and then makes a case about film noir. How does film noir
work as myth, according to Place? What audience fantasy does it indulge?
Apply this idea of myth to The Maltese Falcon, describing how this film oper-
ates as myth. What are its most important mythic elements?

Our third class meeting is devoted to discussing Place’s article, focusing

closely on these two questions but also considering her other arguments,
including points she makes about a resurgence in film noir in the 1970s,
which I ask students to update to the present moment, when many films
and television programs have noir elements. What are the social conditions
in our time that might correspond to those of the 1930s–1940s that Place
limns as what the film noir movement responded to?
Those three class meetings—the introductory one on terms, one spent
viewing and discussing The Maltese Falcon, and one analyzing the film in
relation to Janey Place’s argument about film noir—move us to discussion
of our first novel, which is also the final text in the “dead(ly) women” unit:
Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, which I suggest on the first day that
students begin reading right away so that they have it completed by the
second week of class. The reading questions that I give students on the
novel again focus on gender; my instructions ask them only to think about
the questions and to note relevant page numbers, not to write out responses:

(1) The Big Sleep (1939) predates the film we viewed together but is a fairly
late hardboiled detective novel (Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon came out
about a decade earlier). Consider the novel’s female characters in relation to
Janey Place’s “Women in Film Noir.” Are Place’s observations about film
noir useful in analyzing this novel? Explain why/why not.
56 M. T. REDDY

(2) In an introduction to a collection of his short stories first published

in 1950, Chandler remarks that hardboiled fiction, unlike other murder
mysteries, “does not believe that murder will out and justice will be done—
unless some very determined individual makes it his business to see that
justice is done. The stories [that he, Hammett, and others wrote] were
about the men who made that happen. They were apt to be hard men, and
what they did, whether they were called police officers, private detectives, or
newspaper men, was hard, dangerous work. It was work they could always
get. There was plenty of it lying around.” In the same essay, Chandler says
of these detectives’ urban locales, “Down these mean streets a man must go
who is not himself mean” Does Marlowe fit his creator’s description? In
what specific ways does he fit it/fail to fit it?
(3) Janey Place notes that film noir serves a conservative (she calls it
“regressive”) “ideological function on a strictly narrative level” but stresses
that the visual style “often overwhelms (or at least acts upon) the narrative
so compellingly” that the bad girl/spiderwoman’s dangerous activity is fas-
cinating and exciting. Obviously, novels do not have a visual element that
might work against the narrative level. Is there anything in The Big Sleep that
seems to undermine the “regressive ideological function” of its plot?

On the first of the two days we spend on this novel, I organize what
Jennifer Gonzalez calls a “snowball” discussion. As Gonzalez explains,

Students begin in pairs, responding to a discussion question only with a

single partner. After each person has had a chance to share their ideas, the
pair joins another pair, creating a group of four. Pairs share their ideas with
the pair they just joined. Next, groups of four join together to form groups
of eight, and so on.10

I split the class in half, assigning one half to the first reading question and
the other to the second, and then follow Gonzalez’s model, starting with
a 15-minute discussion for the first pair and then 10–15 minutes for each
addition. The larger groups sometimes need less time than the first pair
does because after that first discussion, they are sharing ideas that often
overlap. Once each half of the class has gathered into one group, I ask each
group to explain to the other group its collective response to the assigned
question. After the first group summarizes its response, the other group
comments, asks questions, and so on, and then we switch to the second
group. I do more planning for this discussion than Gonzalez suggests
because I want to make sure that the initial pairs bring together students
 TEACHING CRIME FICTION AND GENDER 57

who have seemed not to be in agreement in our first three classes in the
hope that the students who have found the idea of gender as performance
useful will persuade their classmates to think about gender in these terms
when talking about The Big Sleep. The second day of discussion of the
novel builds on students’ responses to the third question. We also spend
some time looking closely at a few striking passages, including the scene in
which Marlowe finds Carmen in his bed and rejects her sexual advances,
which leads to her hissing and behaving as an animal instead of a human,
and which ends with Marlowe destroying the bed in which Carmen has
lain once he gets her out of his apartment. Students find these scenes to be
excruciatingly belabored in their positioning of women and men as
extreme opposites. To conclude this first unit of the course, I ask students
to think back to our first class meeting and to summarize where we have
been thus far. Can we refine our definitions of the three key terms in our
course’s title? At this point, most students are willing at least to consider
seriously the idea that gender exists only in and through performance,
generally feel more confident about what is meant by representation, but
often have not altered their definitions of crime
At the end of the first two weeks of the course, we shift away from
crime fiction for two units—a total of seven weeks—centered on texts that
do not fit the crime fiction genre but that include women in the roles of
criminal and criminalized activist, but we continue to focus on and develop
the ideas introduced in the first two weeks. I have thought about redesign-
ing the course so that it is all crime fiction, film, and television, and can
imagine versions of the course that use only crime fiction to examine the
same issues regarding women, crime, and representation, but have not yet
tried that out. For the last five weeks of the course—ten class meetings—
we turn to texts in which women feature as detectives, but also as crime
victims and/or as criminals in several texts. In addition, students work
together in groups of four to prepare class presentations on texts that we
do not consider as a full class. Although I have changed the specific texts
used in this section of the course, each iteration has included at least one
text by a woman of color featuring a woman of color as detective, at least
one text in which the female detective is a private eye, at least one in which
the woman detective is a police officer, and at least one in which the crimi-
nal turns out to be a woman. So, for instance, one recent version of the
syllabus included Sara Paretsky’s Blacklist (2003), Paula Woods’s Inner
City Blues (1999), Tana French’s The Secret Place (2014), and episodes of
58 M. T. REDDY

Cagney & Lacey (1983), Prime Suspect (1991), and Happy Valley (2016).
I choose the texts for this unit with an eye toward including diverse repre-
sentations of women and girls and emphases on ideas of both race and
gender.
Having experimented with different ways of organizing this unit, I find
that beginning with a Paretsky novel—or one of the other feminist-­
authored series begun in the early 1980s—tends to work best. That choice
allows me to set up the historical situation of feminist crime fiction and the
shift in the crime text’s central consciousness that began during the last
quarter of the twentieth century as the framework for the last part of our
course. Students are always struck by the awareness of gender expressed by
these detectives, and the central role that gender plays in the plots. In
Blacklist, for example, Paretsky’s narrator/protagonist, V.I., comments
directly at numerous points on her own and other characters’ perfor-
mances of gender, whether remarking on her own deliberate failure to
conform to gender norms, noting the specifics of an upper-class woman’s
self-presentation as a refined lady, or describing one female sheriff’s depu-
ty’s sense of female solidarity with V.I. when her boss, the sheriff, tries to
demean V.I. in a gender-specific way. I ask students to think about
­representations of both women and men in Paretsky’s novel. Are we see-
ing a straightforward reversal of the tropes of the hardboiled, with femi-
ninity valued over masculinity, or is Blacklist doing something else with
gender, even perhaps undoing the male/female binary in the gender per-
formances of its characters?
Most students do not think that Blacklist goes quite that far, but they
do note differences between the texts with which we began and Paretsky’s
novel that are not attributable mainly to changes between the 1930s and
the 2000s. Students tend to be especially interested in this novel’s use of
larger social issues in its plot, including racism, Islamophobia, the
Communist witch hunts of the House of Un-American Activities
Committee (HUAC) era and the post-9/11 Patriot Act, and to see that
interest as a major shift from the hardboiled texts with which we began the
course. Indeed, many of the feminist-authored series featuring female
detectives from the 1980s to the present connect the specific crime inves-
tigated in a novel with a broad social issue, a shared feature that makes
these series part of a counter-tradition, as I argue in Sisters in Crime:
Feminism and the Crime Novel. Students also observe that the obstacles
Spade and Marlowe face in their investigations are not related to their
gender, whereas V.I. faces deliberate obstruction from men who object to
 TEACHING CRIME FICTION AND GENDER 59

a female detective. Similarly, although a sole operator, V.I. is not a loner in

the extreme way that Spade and Marlowe are: she has close friends and a
number of people who assist in the investigation and not merely in the
general dogsbody way we see with Effie Perrine. One of these helpers is a
Black woman, the sister of the murder victim whose body V.I. finds at the
start of the novel. The centrality of race and racism in this novel lead us to
consider the ways in which V.I. performs white womanhood while remain-
ing aware that her whiteness affords her privileges denied to Black men
and women, which is a long way from the unspoken assumption in the
Hammett and Chandler texts that whiteness is simply superior to every
other racial possibility, just as men are superior to women.
The attention to race in Blacklist makes it a good choice to pair with a
novel by a woman of color featuring a female detective of color. The novel
with which I have had the most success is Paula L. Woods’s Inner City
Blues, which takes place a decade before Paretsky’s Blacklist, in the midst
of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising after an all-white jury acquitted the
police officers who were seen on videotape beating Rodney King. More
than two decades after the events amid which Woods’s novel is set, many
of my students don’t know who Rodney King is or even that the uprising
happened, but two years after the murder of Michael Brown by a white
police officer in Ferguson, MO, and the protests that followed, galvaniz-
ing the Black Lives Matter movement, my students are well aware of police
bias and brutality against Black people. Charlotte Justice, Woods’s narra-
tor/protagonist, is a police detective whose family objects to her job and
whose co-workers and supervisors object to her being in the job, albeit for
different reasons: her family believes she is wasting her education, while
many cops believe that cops are by definition white and male, and Charlotte
is neither. This novel works well in my course for many reasons, chief
among them the narrative’s explicit interest in the problematics of racial
and gender performance. Charlotte frequently thinks about her own per-
formance of Black femaleness and the hostility anything but a carefully
controlled, entirely professional, unemotional, and self-deprecating per-
formance will garner—and even that perfectly controlled performance is
often not enough to deflect that hostility. Inner City Blues gets at the
forces within and through which each of our gender performances is con-
structed and the complex intersections of gender and race that, along with
the weight of history, make policing and Black womanhood a vexed com-
bination. In fact, the villains in this novel are two male police officers;
unlike what we observed in the hardboiled, these villains are not marked
60 M. T. REDDY

by their failure to perform a specific version of white masculinity—indeed,

students often point out that the villains (one of whom is Black) perform
a mainstream version of white masculinity all too well. Some students find
the novel’s ending disappointing because Charlotte does not solve the
central crime and is rescued by her anti-cop brother. However, other stu-
dents can be relied upon to challenge this view and to argue instead that
the novel is much more interesting than a traditional mystery precisely
because Charlotte “fails,” which they see as forcing readers to think about
why and how Black femaleness and detecting/policing are ultimately
incompatible in Inner City Blues.
In this final unit of the course, I ask students to write an essay that
requires them to reflect on some of our last few texts in relation to the
ones with which we began. The writing prompt tends to be something like
this:

During the last part of the course, we read three texts and watch three oth-
ers in which women are in the position of detective, following an historical
shift that happened beginning around 1982, when a ‘boom’ began in
female-authored crime fiction featuring female detectives. That shift raised
the interesting question of whether gender matters in detective fiction. That
is, are these texts substantially different from earlier detective fiction (think
of The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep as models) or do female detectives
merely fill the shoes of the earlier male ones? Focusing particularly on repre-
sentations of women—not only the detectives, but also other women char-
acters—consider how gender matters in at least two of the texts from the last
unit of our course.

Most students see significant differences in the two sets of texts, and
most discuss those differences in terms of constructions of gender and
race. Some, however, take an even more interesting approach and examine
what they consider to be failures of imagination in one or more of the texts
we consider in this unit—these students often write about the police-­
detective television programs we view together; failures that they some-
times attribute to a writer or director’s inadequate understanding of how
gender and/or race operate. Whatever their arguments, though, by the
end of the course students find thinking of gender and race as performa-
tive rather than essential useful. The language of performativity gives them
the tools to think about differences between the early hardboiled and its
feminist revisions in nuanced and complex ways, as well as to rethink their
own conceptions of both “crime” and “representation” in popular culture
 TEACHING CRIME FICTION AND GENDER 61

and why popular culture matters. The fourteen weeks of this course cover
a lot of ground, illustrating Judith Butler’s theory of performativity in
multiple ways. By the end of the course, most students have a new vocabu-
lary for talking about both gender and crime fiction, one that will certainly
continue to be useful to them in their academic careers and in their lives
beyond academe.
My experience teaching this course multiple times across the past
decade have varied considerably, with my current students far more sophis-
ticated in their understanding of the impacts of popular culture on its
consumers as well as more aware of the complexities of gender than were
the students in the first years of the course. However, one constant has
been the efficacy of using a performative understanding of gender to ana-
lyze crime fiction, as well as crime fiction to illustrate that theory of gender
as performative. In recent years, fewer students enter the class with much
experience of reading detective novels, although most have seen numer-
ous detective films and television programs. On the other hand, more
begin the course with at least a rudimentary understanding of gender as
not “natural.” Bringing gender theory and crime fiction together in the
way that this course does deepens students’ understanding of both.

Notes
1. Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in
Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal, 40, no. 4 (1988),
519–531.
2. Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (New York: Random House, 1992),
160.
3. Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (New York: Vintage Crime/Black
Lizard, 1988), 100.
4. Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder,” Trouble is My Business
(New York: Random House, 1992), vii.
5. See chapter one of Maureen T. Reddy, Traces, Codes, and Clues: Reading
Race in Crime Fiction (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
2003), 6–40, for a more nuanced and detailed argument on this point.
6. See the “Loners and Hardboiled Women” chapter of Maureen T. Reddy,
Sisters in Crime: Feminism and the Crime Novel (New York: Continuum,
1988).
7. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949), trans. Constance Borde (New
York: Vintage, 2011), 439.
8. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v “Representation.” Accessed May 6, 2017.
62 M. T. REDDY

9. Janey Place, “Women in Film Noir,” in Women in Film Noir, ed. E. Ann
Kaplan (London: British Film Institute, 1978), 47–68.
10. Jennifer Gonzalez, “The Big List of Class Discussion Strategies,” Cult
of Pedagogy, October 15, 2015, http://www.cultofpedagogy.com/
speaking-listening-techniques/.

Works Cited
Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in
Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal, 40, no. 4 (1988):
519–531.
Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep. New York: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 1988.
———. “The Simple Art of Murder.” In Trouble Is My Business. New York:
Random House, 1992.
de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Trans. Constance Borde. New York: Vintage,
2011.
Gonzalez, Jennifer. “The Big List of Class Discussion Strategies.” Cult of Pedagogy.
October 15, 2015. http://www.cultofpedagogy.com/speaking-listening-
techniques/.
Hammett, Dashiell. The Maltese Falcon. New York: Random House, 1992.
Place, Janey. “Women in Film Noir.” In Women in Film Noir, edited by E. Ann
Kaplan, 47–68. London: British Film Institute, 1978.
Reddy, Maureen T. Sisters in Crime: Feminism and the Crime Novel. New York:
Continuum, 1988.
———. Traces, Codes, and Clues: Reading Race in Crime Fiction. New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003.
 CHAPTER 5

Teaching American Detective Fiction

in the Contemporary Classroom

Nicole Kenley

Introduction
Detective fiction’s drive to identify and contain threats makes it a fertile
ground for examining the changing concerns of American literature and
culture more broadly. Because of this drive, detective fiction directly
engages the challenges of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary and
social movements. The course outlined here utilizes two teaching foci,
one based on content and the other on genre. The content focus considers
what Andrew Pepper frames as the four overarching preoccupations of
contemporary American crime fiction: race, ethnicity, gender, and class.1
Tracking these concepts across the entirety of the course suggests that the
genre’s obsession is what makes American detective fiction so very
American. The second focus, based on genre, examines the generic drive
to adapt, subvert, and reinvent previous exemplars of the form. Put
together, these approaches allow students to apply the lens of American
detective fiction to social and literary movements ranging from feminism
to Postmodernism to globalization. Included in this chapter are discussions

N. Kenley (*)
Simpson University, Redding, CA, USA
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2018 63

C. Beyer (ed.), Teaching Crime Fiction, Teaching the New English,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90608-9_5
64 N. KENLEY

of teaching methods for the primary subgenres of American detective fic-

tion, including the hardboiled, the forensic, and the Postmodern, along
with the challenges and larger questions these subgenres pose to students.
The chapter also presents student feedback informally solicited one year
after the conclusion of their course, in order to determine which concepts
students found the most useful in working through the course texts.
Overall, this chapter presents one template for a thoroughgoing engage-
ment with the genre of American detective fiction across a semester in the
hopes that other educators might successfully adapt these method to their
own courses.

Framework
While the bulk of the syllabus deals with texts from the hardboiled era of
the 1920s–1940s and after, in order to track the growth of the general
form into a specifically American one, the course nevertheless begins with
a discussion of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter.”2 Although this
text is useful for discussing the foundational conventions which subse-
quent texts will adapt, subvert, and reinvent, introducing these generic
parameters is not the primary objective in starting with Poe. (Nor is it to
establish Poe as the originator of the genre, which Steven Knight calls one
of the many “myths [that] abound in crime fiction studies.”3) Rather,
beginning this way establishes several core components for understanding
the genre as an object of study. While scholars of detective fiction are
doubtless all too ready to move beyond this debate, it bears outlining at
the course’s beginning to manage students’ expectations of the genre.
First, starting with Poe frames detective fiction’s literary bona fides. Poe,
as a recognized and recognizable member of the canon, imparts to the
genre his imprimatur and situates the course texts squarely in the realm of
standard American literary curriculum. Next, using “The Purloined
Letter” opens the door to bring in analytical examples that establish the
rigor with which students can think about detective fiction and the kinds
of theoretical concepts that such study can introduce—Jacques Lacan’s
“Seminar on the Purloined Letter” is an obvious case in point.4 While
presenting the entirety of Lacan’s argument (or Jacques Derrida’s and
Barbara Johnson’s responses to it) would doubtless overwhelm students,
it is useful to introduce Lacan’s idea of the letter as a pure signifier with
the ability to orient subjects around it as it shifts. Taking this approach
accomplishes three main goals. To begin, this strategy gives the students a
 TEACHING AMERICAN DETECTIVE FICTION IN THE CONTEMPORARY… 65

handle on a concept that they can use productively throughout the semes-
ter. The idea of the Lacanian signifier helps to structure students’ thoughts
about the genre as a whole, particularly with Dashiell Hammett’s The
Maltese Falcon coming up quickly on the reading list.5 Further, thanks to
encountering Lacan so early on, students understand that not only are
they going to be engaging the material with a great deal of rigor, which is
not what students may expect from a course dealing with popular texts,
but also that preeminent theorists have engaged detective fiction in just
this way, underscoring the point about the genre serving as a worthy
object of study. Finally, this approach provides a benefit both for students
who have yet to take critical theory and for those who have. For students
who have encountered theory, Lacan works as a touchstone, a point of
familiarity while they encounter a new genre. For students new to theory,
learning about the signifier here softens up the ground a bit. Starting with
Poe and Lacan sets the stage for the students in terms of the genre’s cre-
dentials as well as the kind of thinking it can be used to do.
One final framing component for the course from Poe is the relation-
ship between detective fiction, gender, and chivalry. Of the course’s four
driving thematic elements, gender is the most clearly articulated in the
story, and chivalry provides the means for that expression. Poe’s Dupin is
a chevalier, endowed with an honorific which literally means knight.
Further, his devotion to his queen and her secrets drives the entire story’s
plot, and the strategic placement of the letter around the apartment evokes
tactical moves by the knight to protect the queen. This chivalric act also
serves to highlight the foundational concept of containment for the genre.
In this story, authority is threatened, and that threat is then contained by
the detective’s actions. “The Purloined Letter,” then, establishes contain-
ment and chivalry as foundational components in the generic framework.
Each of these elements will be adapted by later texts and, in the case of
gender, reinvention, and subversion will appear first in the hardboiled and
next in the reinventions of the hardboiled.
Further, Lacan’s reading of “The Purloined Letter” potentially carries
a gendered component as well, as John Muller and William Richardson
usefully point out in their analysis of his seminar. In Lacan’s reading, the
purloined letter itself is the signifier, and it structures three different
glances around it. These glances represent positions of knowing, from
complete ignorance to partial ignorance to knowledge and opportunity.
As more becomes known throughout the course of the story, different
characters occupy different subject positions. Muller and Richardson read
66 N. KENLEY

these shifting subject positions as inherently gendered because the first

initially belongs to the impotent King, the second to the feminized and
promiscuous Queen, and the third to the powerful Minister.6 Since these
positions shift from character to character as they orient around the signi-
fier, degrees of knowledge also become gendered in the text, such that
when the Minister shifts to the second subject position, he “is obliged to
don the role of the Queen, and even the attributes of femininity.”7
Rehearsing these critical moves with the students at the outset of the
course establishes the ways in which, for detective fiction, a discussion of
gender dynamics is intrinsic. Overall, positing these fundamentals as the
framework for American detective fiction, creates a touchstone against
which students can compare subsequent texts to determine the extent to
which they adhere to, subvert, and reinvent the genre.

The Hardboiled
From Poe, the syllabus moves quickly to the hardboiled, a subgenre that
for many students is synonymous with American detective fiction. While
jumping from the mid-1840s to the late 1920s does skip a segment of
American detective fiction, it does so to highlight the innovation of what
Leonard Cassuto calls “the most important contribution to crime and
detective fiction since Poe devised the formula: the invention of the hard-­
boiled.”8 When presented with the works of Dashiell Hammett and
Raymond Chandler, students can see Cassuto’s point that “ratiocination
in the tradition of Poe … remains the trunkline for the main development
of American crime and detective fiction: everything else hangs off it, and
the main branches don’t appear until one travels a certain distance from
the roots.”9 In the case of the hardboiled, the “distance from the roots”
comes in particularly through the new version of American masculinity
that Hammett and Chandler help popularize.
Several critical studies offer differing explanations for the genesis of
the quintessentially American characteristics of the hardboiled, citing
possibilities from a reaction against the more sentimental mode of
nineteenth-­century American masculinity,10 to a rejection of American
materialism,11 to a passionate response to the New Deal’s potential to
provide justice for diverse groups of outsiders.12 While these accounts dif-
fer, students will be able to recognize the differences that the hardboiled
presents from Poe’s genteel Dupin in numerous regards, including
 TEACHING AMERICAN DETECTIVE FICTION IN THE CONTEMPORARY… 67

setting, style, and characterization. The mean streets of San Francisco and
Los Angeles, the tough talk and one-liners, the gritty detective and
femme fatale—these images will likely ring familiar to students based on
their place in the American cultural landscape via film noir. What students
may not realize is the extent to which these ideas originate not from film
but from pulp magazines. To this end, it can be useful to start with cover
images from dime magazines like Black Mask, Dime Detective, Weird
Stories, and Spicy Detective to offer a visual representation of hardboiled
origins, particularly with regard to gender; students typically do not real-
ize the extent to which the hardboiled invests itself in a narrative of
hypermasculinity. Cassuto sees this as a twentieth-century American phe-
nomenon, with “gender roles be[coming] severely proscribed after new
masculine paragons like Theodore Roosevelt excoriated ‘feminized’ men
as threats to American civilization. These warnings reflected a new con-
text – and new anxieties – attached to being a man.”13 Framing the hard-
boiled navigation of gender in terms of anxieties helps students to better
understand the stakes of the subgenre that so much of subsequent
American detective fiction will adhere to, subvert, and reinvent.
Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon makes a useful first reading because it
takes up multiple threads from “The Purloined Letter”: it adheres to the
generic framework in terms of the Lacanian signifier, diverges from that
framework in its chivalry, and introduces new elements of style and char-
acterization. Again, one of the aims in teaching a survey course focused on
genre is to introduce students to the generic pleasures of adherence, sub-
version, and reinvention; they enjoy thinking about the ways in which The
Maltese Falcon slots into these categories.
The strong emphasis on masculinity and femininity in The Maltese
Falcon also provides a useful standard for the rest of the semester. Posing
Hammett’s use of gender as archetypal for the genre allows students to
consider the traits those archetypes possess based on the characters of Sam
Spade, Brigid O’Shaughnessy, Effie Perine, and Joel Cairo (as well as the
ways these characters themselves draw from those lurid pulp images from
Black Mask). Establishing these uses of gender as generic tropes allows the
students to see those same movements of adherence, subversion, and
invention with regard to gender as the course moves forward.
Focusing on the hardboiled continues the investigation of gender roles
from Poe, and it also allows for a continuation of the debate surrounding
high literature and popular culture. Chandler in particular is useful for
68 N. KENLEY

helping students consider questions both of art and masculinity in

hardboiled fiction thanks to his famous investigation of both in his 1944
essay “The Simple Art of Murder,”14 which serves as a thematic bridge
between Hammett’s and Chandler’s novels. Chandler writes, in his cri-
tique of the claim that Hammett (and by association, he himself) are prac-
titioners of a lowbrow form, “There are no vital and significant forms of
art; there is only art, and precious little of that.”15 This statement about
the nature of art is used as a vehicle to consider how, if at all, detective fic-
tion relates to American literary Modernism, a relatively contemporaneous
and far more highbrow movement. Introducing students to Brian
McHale’s idea of the epistemological dominant of Modernism allows
them to see the parallels between American detective fiction and literary
Modernism. For McHale, who is working from Roman Jakobson, while
Modernism interrogates many issues, its dominant is epistemological, as
he demonstrates with what he poses as the Modernist question set:

How can I interpret this world of which I am a part? And what am I in it?
… What is there to be known?; Who knows it?; How do they know it, and
with what degree of certainty?; How is knowledge transmitted from one
knower to another, and with what degree of reliability?; How does the
object of knowledge change as it passes from knower to knower?; What are
the limits of the knowable? And so on.16

Presenting this question set encourages students not necessarily to think

of the hardboiled as Modernist, but rather to consider detective fiction’s
function in relationship to Modernism. While in many ways detective fic-
tion, with its formulaic structures and pulp background, runs counter to
the Modernist project, the Modernist question set can also double as the
driving question set for this period of detective fiction while exposing its
lack of diversity. Initiating this discussion with students helps them more
usefully conceptualize the parameters of both genre fiction and high
Modernism. Further, introducing Modernism at this early juncture helps
to prepare students for the Postmodernist turn in detective fiction. In
preparation for this moment, it can be useful to stress to students how
little these Modernist questions involve the American themes that emerge
as central to the texts that appear in the latter half of the twentieth cen-
tury: race, ethnicity, gender, and class. This point underscores the scope of
the generic revision process that takes place and the extent to which the
Postmodernist turn enables those revisions.
 TEACHING AMERICAN DETECTIVE FICTION IN THE CONTEMPORARY… 69

Continuing with Chandler, “The Simple Art” extends the conversation

about masculinity started by “The Purloined Letter” and The Maltese
Falcon. Chandler writes,

down these mean streets a man must go …. The detective in this kind of
story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a
complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. … a man of
honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly with-
out saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man
for any world.17

This oft-cited passage displays Chandler’s version of hardboiled chivalry, a

“hero” who earns his knighthood despite being “common,” whose mas-
culinity is either so inviolable or so anxiety-inducing that the word “man”
is used to describe him seven times in just over a hundred words. The Big
Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely both work well as a novel for this section of
the course, as each presents a slightly different focal point.18 The Big Sleep
foregrounds the chivalric aspect, while Farewell, My Lovely more directly
invites questions about different modes of masculinity, including the
homoerotic.
Catherine Ross Nickerson writes that “what Chandler opened up was a
new way of looking at crime narratives, or rather looking through them, as
lenses on the culture and history of the United States.”19 For the first
essay, students investigate the substance of Nickerson’s claim through
writing on the topic of Chandler’s chivalric formula for masculinity, inter-
rogating what it really stipulates, whether or not even Chandler’s own
Philip Marlowe meets its specifications, its creation of a specifically
American mythos, and most importantly the relationship between mascu-
linity and American detective fiction. To this point, of the four thematic
hallmarks of American detective fiction, only gender has been truly ines-
capable in the course texts, and it bears examining at length in writing
before the students encounter the next iteration of the hardboiled, one
which considers race, ethnicity, and class alongside gender. To fully pre-
pare students for the subsequent unit, it is useful to invite their critiques of
Chandler’s model. Eliciting the limits and problematics of “The Simple
Art” and its constitutive characteristics is not intended to chastise Chandler,
but rather to help students see the necessity of the next round of generic
adherence, subversion, and reinvention.
70 N. KENLEY

Hardboiled Reworkings
The next section of the course presents challenges to and reworkings of
the hardboiled style. Pepper writes that, particularly in America, “detec-
tion is a means of social control as well as social revolution. The detective
is opposed to dominant values and yet part of the machinery through
which those values are affirmed. He or she undercuts but also reinscribes
relations of domination and subordination.”20 This unit deals with novels
that use race, ethnicity, gender, and class to perform those revisions while
maintaining the hardboiled framework. These novels perform crucial work
of their own and also prefigure the next two modules of the course, the
forensic and the Postmodernist. American authors like Sue Grafton, with
her rough-and-tumble protagonist Kinsey Millhone, pave the way for
other American female forensic detectives such as Patricia Cornwell and
Kathy Reichs, and teaching E is for Evidence also foregrounds the interplay
of physical and digital evidence that will figure so prominently in the
forensics unit of the course.21 Further, Grafton and Walter Mosely, creator
of the Easy Rawlins series, each help to establish the ontological questions
that will be crucial for the Postmodern iterations of the genre. Grafton
and Mosely work well together in discussing the extent to which the hard-
boiled formula can be stretched. Pairing these authors presents the hard-
boiled as an enduring subgenre, with its own tropes to be utilized, adapted,
or subverted. The students appreciate the formulaic and serial nature of
these texts, with one student joking that despite Grafton’s title, in fact, “E
is for Exposition.” Grafton and Mosely, thanks to the ways in which they
adhere to, subvert, and reinvent the conventions of the subgenre, work
when positioned for students as a stepping stone between the hardboiled
and the forensic.
Though chronologically his work appears later, Mosely appears first on
the syllabus in order to compare his Devil in a Blue Dress to The Maltese
Falcon and Farewell, My Lovely to engage questions of race, masculinity,
and class.22 The extent to which Mosely adheres to, subverts, or reinvents
Chandler in particular is a debatable question; students can engage it by
considering Lee Horsley’s assertion that Devil in a Blue Dress produces a
“highly politicized rewriting of ” Farewell, My Lovely, “asking readers to
return with an altered sensibility to their conception of the original.”23 As
an African-American in the 1940s, Easy Rawlins is not just a different race
but also a different social class than Philip Marlowe, and the intersection
of his race and class works as asset and liability in Rawlins’ detecting,
 TEACHING AMERICAN DETECTIVE FICTION IN THE CONTEMPORARY… 71

allowing him entrance into some spaces while precluding that entry in
others, while also reflecting backward on Chandler as Horsley suggests.
Andrew Pepper, writing about crime fiction, believes that “the question of
whether America is better conceived of and understood in terms of its
enabling diversity or its crippling divisions has, in turn, fed into and ener-
gised debates about the nature and depth of racial, ethnic, class and gen-
der differences.”24 The “altered sensibility” that Horsley notes comes
from Mosely’s engagement with Pepper’s claim. Through reading Devil in
a Blue Dress, students come to realize that Mosely’s novel inserts race and
class into an American literary subgenre that relegated these questions to
the margins; Mosley’s revisions put a novel that recognizes diversity into
conversation with a novel that encourages divisions. These questions of
race and detection recur when reading Henry Chang’s Chinatown Beat.25
Mosely also plays with modes of hardboiled masculinity, helping students
think through whether Easy Rawlins fits more in Sam Spade or Philip
Marlowe’s mode of masculinity. Tension between Easy’s masculinity and
those of the white hardboiled detectives allows students to engage the
concept of intersectionality at an early juncture in the course. These ques-
tions prepare students for the transition to Sue Grafton’s treatment of
hardboiled femininity.
The booming American market for female-authored, female-starring
detective fiction in the late 1970s through mid-1990s serves as a useful
introduction for Sue Grafton’s work. As Priscilla Walton and Manina Jones
point out in their seminal study Detective Agency, from 1975 to 1980,
there were 166 female-authored American crime novels, only 13 of which
had female detectives. By contrast, from 1981 to 1985, when Sue Grafton,
Sara Paretsky, and Marcia Muller began to gain popularity, 299 American
crime novels were written by women, with 45 female detectives. After this
boom period, the number of novels written by women and the ratio of
female detectives kept increasing, reaching 1252 American crime novels
written by women with 366 of them featuring female detectives, from
1991 to 1995. The market changes so dramatically that within 20 years,
roughly one third of all American detective novels published feature female
protagonists.26 Framing this popularity at the outset engages the question
of whether or not hardboiled American detective fiction as a genre can
actually accommodate female detectives. Clearly, the market swell indi-
cates a desire in the readership for these new detective figures. Students
are surprised to learn, then, about the critical debate surrounding what
Kathleen Gregory Klein terms the “struggle between gender and genre.”27
72 N. KENLEY

Students read Klein’s assertion that “the conventional private eye formula
inevitably achieves primacy over feminist ideology: the predictable formula
of detective fiction is based on a world whose sex-gender valuations rein-
force male hegemony”28 and then consider, based on what they have read,
they believe it is true that “either feminism or the formula is at risk.”29
This question, not surprisingly, can produce lively classroom conversation,
which has the potential to demonstrate the relevance of detective fiction
to contemporary social debates. To conclude this unit, students reflect on
the extent to which either E is for Evidence or Devil in a Blue Dress adheres
to, subverts, or reinvents the hardboiled formula present in either The
Maltese Falcon or Farewell, My Lovely. Further, they speculate on the future
of the genre based on these texts as a way to position the upcoming
changes forensic detective fiction will present.

The Forensic
The final two sections of the class are framed to work together as a unit
based on forensic detective fiction’s relationship to globalization and
Postmodernism. Both globalization and Postmodernism begin to impact
American detective fiction around the same time as the contemporary
forensic trend, yet they are often thought of as working at cross purposes.
Yet while globalization and Postmodernism each suggest that crimes sim-
ply may not be resolvable, the rise of forensic detective fiction points yet
again to detective fiction’s foundational drive toward containment. In an
America increasingly beset by threats of terror as well as the changes
wrought by a rapidly expanding tech industry, forensic detective fiction
enters to transform these unfamiliar elements into strategies of contain-
ment and control. Or does this narrative belie an insuperable current of
uncertainty? The novels for this section of the course suggest that forensic
authors vary widely in terms of their relationship to threats and their desire
to contain them. These texts exist on a continuum of containment, with
Patricia Cornwell at one end representing the idea that forensics offer a
genuine strategy for effecting control of threats, and Kathy Reichs at the
other end, expressing extreme doubt about the possibility of forensic sci-
ence to genuinely contain or control crime. Jeffrey Deaver offers a mid-
point along this continuum. Presenting students with the idea of the
continuum of containment for forensic detective fiction provides not only
a framework for thinking through a potent and popular subgenre but also
a bridge to Postmodernist and global detective fiction, which will engage
the concept of crimes as unsolvable and uncontainable.
 TEACHING AMERICAN DETECTIVE FICTION IN THE CONTEMPORARY… 73

Of particular use in explaining and exploring these concepts is the rela-

tionship between forensic detective fiction and technology. Beginning
with Cornwell’s The Body Farm,30 students investigate the methods of
detection used and the ways in which they differ from both the ratiocina-
tive strategy of Dupin and the pavement-pounding of the hardboiled
gumshoes. In shifting the detective’s profession from private investigator
to forensic pathologist, Cornwell creates a new emphasis on the function
of evidence and the detective’s relationship to it. Scarpetta’s savvy use of
forensic techniques and technologies seems to provide a ready answer to
the challenge of physical crime, with traces of criminal activity, no matter
how minute, always inscribed on the world in which those crimes were
committed. In teaching, The Body Farm illustrates this nicely, with the
solution to its grisly crime hinging on a physical imprint left on a corpse,
but many Cornwell novels prove this point effectively. Beginning with
Cornwell and this comfortable model of forensics allows for a reversal of
students’ expectations with the transition to Deaver and Reichs. These
next two authors show students that, as with the other subgenres they
have read, forensic detective fiction is more complicated than they may
have assumed based on understanding of it gleaned from the American
cultural consciousness.
Jeffrey Deaver, particularly in his newer novels, focuses less on physical
and more on digital evidence. His texts call attention to the dangers of
computer technology and the misleading qualities of seemingly reliable
data, while still maintaining faith in the ability of the detective (rather than
merely the technology he or she wields). The Broken Window illustrates
this simultaneous trust in and undermining of new digital technologies
through its focus on data mining and the difficulties of containing digital
crime, though again other Deaver novels could also achieve this purpose.31
In The Broken Window, Deaver’s quadriplegic detective Lincoln Rhyme
demonstrates the powers and the limits of digital technology, arguing that
the success of these technologies remain contingent on the skillful detec-
tive. One student wrote, one year after the class ended, that her favorite
novel was “Jeffery Deaver’s The Broken Window because it dealt with the
limitations of technology’s data and metadata; it pushed back against …
the current idea that modern technology is all encompassing of every
aspect of humanity.” In this way Deaver serves as a midpoint between
Cornwell’s firm belief in the power of technology and Reichs’ doubt that
crime can be effectively contained.
74 N. KENLEY

For Kathy Reichs, the same forensic technologies used in Cornwell and
Deaver point instead to the incredible difficulty of turning information
into answers—the more the technologies reveal, the more questions they
create. Spider Bones emphasizes this particular point because of its sharp
contrast with what students expect from the forensic in general and what
they read in Cornwell in particular.32 Initially, Reichs’ work seems like a
close copy of Cornwell’s, down to the remarkable set of similarities
between their protagonists Temperance Brennan and Kay Scarpetta (simi-
larities which can be productively scrutinized in class). However, with
careful reading, students can realize that the ways in which the two writers
use forensic technologies are in fact dissimilar. Scarpetta places deep trust
in forensics, while Brennan does not immediately accept forensic results as
gospel. In Spider Bones, the gold standard of DNA evidence itself is ques-
tioned and ultimately shown to be imperfect. In portraying this fallibility,
Reichs situates her texts on the far end of the continuum of containment,
suggesting that, despite the aid of a savvy detective, forensic technologies
can guarantee neither answers nor, by implication, security. For their sec-
ond essay, students consider, broadly, some of the differences in the ways
that these forensic novels think about their technologies and the ways in
which those differences matter, ultimately coming up with their own
models for conceptualizing these technologies. Asking students to create
their own models for how forensic detective fiction works pushes them to
go beyond that common American cultural notion that forensics resolves
all problems. Breaking through this misconception empowers students: at
this point in the course, they know enough about American detective fic-
tion and its history to challenge modes of understanding it.

Postmodernism and Globalization

Introducing students to concepts such as epistemological question sets
and the potential impossibility of solution before arriving at the final unit
of the course prepares them for thinking about America’s relationship to
Postmodernism and global crime, both of which run counter to the kinds
of moves they are by now expecting detective fiction to make. Paul Auster’s
deeply allusive meditation on the urban detective, The New York Trilogy,33
affords the students an opportunity to think about what would happen if
suddenly, instead of caring about solutions and containment, the genre
instead decided that the very notion of solution proves to be an absurdity
and the quest for that solution guarantees nothing except the detective’s
 TEACHING AMERICAN DETECTIVE FICTION IN THE CONTEMPORARY… 75

gradual descent into madness. Here students encounter the corollary to

McHale’s Modernist epistemological question set: his Postmodernist
ontological question set. McHale thinks that the dominant of
Postmodernism is ontological, and that it prompts questions such as:

Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?

… What is a world?; What kinds of worlds are there, how are they consti-
tuted, and how do they differ?; What happens when different kinds of
worlds are placed in confrontation, or when boundaries between worlds are
violated?34

Auster’s text places all of these questions in play, and the students seem
to enjoy using a challenging concept to deal with such an abstruse, meta-
fictional, wholly unexpected version of detective fiction. Further, these
questions allow for a greater interrogation of the questions of race, eth-
nicity, gender, and class that shape contemporary American detective
fiction; “which of my selves is to do it?” points to the intersectionality
of these four components and their creation of different lived realities.
The students seemed to find this way of thinking through Modernism
and Postmodernism useful. One student wrote that, for her, “the con-
cepts of epistemological and ontological dominants of Modernism and
Postmodernism” remained with her after the course concluded. Again,
using American detective fiction to explore important movements in con-
temporary literature more broadly both better prepares students for addi-
tional coursework and helps them to realize the genre’s flexibility.
To conclude the course, students read two texts that demonstrate both
the complex relationship between Postmodernism and globalization and
additional ways in which the genre begins to think about global crime.
These seemingly disparate texts are Henry Chang’s Chinatown Beat and
Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.35 Despite the fact that
one text is set in a post-9/11 New York City (in, of course, Chinatown)
and the other is set in a fictional Jewish state established in Alaska post-­
World War II, the texts raise a surprising number of similar concerns rel-
evant to globalization and global crime. Each text thinks in great detail
about race, ethnicity, and class. Each text thinks about national borders,
their permeability, their constructedness, and their limits. Each text thinks
about ethnicity, intersectionality, cultural practice, religious practice, and
the impact these factors have on a detective’s ability to pursue solutions
in distinct communities. Each text thinks about global crimes such as
76 N. KENLEY

trafficking and border crossing, as well as strategies to contain these crimes.

Each text seems to suggest that, in order to succeed at all in a global land-
scape, the detective must be a hybrid entity, able to gain access to a variety
of different communities, and a Postmodern subject capable of entertain-
ing the notion of a multiplicity of contingent, perhaps mutually contradic-
tory, solutions to any given crime.
Chinatown Beat follows nicely on the heels of The New York Trilogy
because it reveals a completely different version of contemporary New York
detection. An oft-quoted passage from the beginning of The New York
Trilogy begins “New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of end-
less steps, and no matter how far he walked, no matter how well he came
to know its neighborhoods and streets, it always left him with the feeling
of being lost.”36 Henry Chang’s police detective Jack Yu, in contrast, suc-
cessfully solves crime largely thanks to his depth of knowledge about and
connection to its Chinatown. Because he was raised in Chinatown (and is
himself ethnically Chinese and bilingual), Yu has access to sources of infor-
mation that are virtually inaccessible to his colleagues in the New York
Police Department. He talks to everyone from street vendors to street
hustlers, and these information sources allow him to tap into the Triads,
the gangs/international smuggling networks that control crime. At the
same time as he takes advantage of his diversity, Yu also encounters divi-
sion, isolated from his white colleagues because of his race and ethnicity
and from his Chinese community because of his class and his employer.
For students, Yu compares usefully to Mosely’s Easy Rawlins because of
his access to multiple communities, but he also eclipses Rawlins as a node
in an international network. Students find it productive to discuss the issue
of whether or not Chang’s detective can be categorized in a new way, as a
global detective rather than an American one, despite his physical ground-
ing in New York City.
Concluding the course with Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s
Union brings things to a neat end. The text ties strongly back to the hard-
boiled model, brings forward examples of the kinds of Postmodernist
questions McHale asks, dwells on issues of race, class, gender, and ethnic-
ity, and stretches the boundaries of the genre—the question of which
world this is, in particular, resonates with the text’s additional genre of
speculative fiction. Chabon creates a fictional Jewish state in Sitka, Alaska,
and populates it with Jewish and Native Alaskan detectives. At this point
in the course, students can take the lead in identifying the ways in which
Chabon’s novel adheres to, subverts, and reinvents the genre, and they
 TEACHING AMERICAN DETECTIVE FICTION IN THE CONTEMPORARY… 77

tend to succeed in this task. One student recollects, “My favorite book
from detective fiction was The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. The way the
novel wrestled with intersectionality, gender, borders and the conse-
quences of crossing them, war, and finding a sense of belonging/identity
put it at the top of my list. … It also paid homage to the classic hard-­
boiled detective in a way that was both classic and more complex than
solving crimes with fists.” Responses of this nature demonstrate engage-
ment with concepts from both Postmodernism and globalization.
As a final writing task, in their third essay students consider two ques-
tions: the ways in which Chabon’s, Chang’s, and Auster’s texts fit into
McHale’s model of Postmodernism, and the extent to which these novels
can be considered American. Encouraging students to think about adher-
ence, subversion, and reinvention throughout the semester yielded posi-
tive results here. One student writes, “For me, the concept that has stuck
with me the most is the idea that books don’t always fit so perfectly into
the box of a single genre. For example, we discussed The Yiddish Policemen’s
Union as a Postmodern detective novel. However, I was able to argue in
an essay that perhaps it was less Postmodern than it tried to claim. I have
used this same concept for various other classes.” That a class on genre
and categorization can produce an enduring concept of slippage and
counter-readings attests to the flexibility and utility of genre in general and
detective fiction in particular.

Conclusion
Ultimately, a survey course in American detective fiction provides students
with more than a semester-long look into a niche genre. Instead, the stu-
dents encounter many of the concerns of twentieth- and twenty-first-­
century American fiction more broadly, thinking through gender, race,
class, ethnicity, technology, intersectionality, high culture v. popular cul-
ture, Modernism, Postmodernism, and globalization, as well as the generic
drive to adapt, subvert, and reinvent.
When asked about the benefits of the course after one year, the stu-
dents’ responses represented both the benefits of thinking about a topic in
depth, and a breadth of thinking that one might not expect from so
focused a course. Reflecting on the benefits of an in-depth study for her
understanding of genre, one student writes, “While having an American
Literature survey course helps with the general understanding of American
Literature, Detective Fiction allowed me to take a deeper look at specific
78 N. KENLEY

aspects of different genres and all the subgenres within the detective fic-
tion realm. It was really great to have the opportunity to compare and
contrast individual aspects of different novels and to understand what
allowed them to remain detective fiction while still moving between sub-
genres.” Another student expanded upon the utility of the course for
thinking broadly about American literature. He writes, “Taking American
Detective Fiction broadened my understanding of Modernism versus
Postmodernism in a general way, contributing to my ability to read and
understand texts from both literary movements and especially from 20th
and 21st century American literature. As a 21st century American, this
awareness has also given me a greater understanding of the impact of my
own time and culture on the way I read and understand texts.” Given
these results, it is reasonable to believe that future iterations of the course,
perhaps incorporating even more current examples of how detective fic-
tion makes sense of the ever-changing world, will help students to process
the complexities of the American literary and cultural landscape.

Notes
1. Andrew Pepper, The Contemporary American Crime Novel: Race, Ethnicity,
Gender, Class (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000).
2. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Purloined Letter” (First Page Classics, 2017),
Kindle edition.
3. Steven Knight, “Introduction” in The Millennial Detective: Essays on Trends
in Crime Fiction, Film, and Television, 1990–2010, ed. Malcah Effron
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2011), 1.
4. Jacques Lacan, “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’” in The Purloined Poe:
Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading, ed. John P. Muller and
William Richardson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987),
28–54.
5. Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon, in The Complete Works (New York:
Library of America, 1999), 387–586.
6. John P. Muller and William Richardson, “Lacan’s Seminar on ‘The
Purloined Letter’: Overview,” in The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and
Psychoanalytic Reading, ed. John P. Muller and William Richardson
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 63.
7. Muller and Richardson 65.
8. Leonard Cassuto, “The American Novel of Mystery, Crime, and
Detection,” in A Companion to the American Novel, ed. Alfred Bendixen
(Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2012).
 TEACHING AMERICAN DETECTIVE FICTION IN THE CONTEMPORARY… 79

9. Ibid., 292.
10. Leonard Cassuto, Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of
American Crime Stories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).
11. Larry Landrum, American Mystery and Detective Fiction: A Reference
Guide (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1999).
12. Sean McCann, Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise
and Fall of New Deal Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2000).
13. Cassuto 2012 297.
14. Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder,” in Later Novels and
Other Writings (New York: Library of America, 1995), 977–992.
15. Ibid., 978.
16. Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1987), 9.
17. Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder,” in Later Novels and
Other Writings, (New York: Library of America, 1995), 991.
18. Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, in Stories and Early Novels, (New York:
Library of America, 1995), 587–764; Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My
Lovely, in Stories and Early Novels, (New York: Library of America, 1995),
765–984.
19. Catherine Ross Nickerson, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion
to American Crime Fiction, ed. Catherine Ross Nickerson (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), 2.
20. Pepper 7.
21. Sue Grafton, E is for Evidence (London: Pan Macmillan, 2008).
22. Walter Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress (New York: Washington Square Press,
2002).
23. Lee Horsley, Twentieth-century Crime Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005).
24. Pepper 2.
25. Henry Chang, Chinatown Beat (New York: Soho Press, 2007).
26. Priscilla Walton and Manina Jones, Detective Agency (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1999), 28–29.
27. Kathleen Gregory Klein, Women Times Three: Writers, Detectives, Readers
(Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1995),
88.
28. Ibid., 89.
29. Ibid., 98.
30. Patricia Cornwell, The Body Farm (New York: Berkley Publishing Group,
1994).
31. Jeffrey Deaver, The Broken Window (New York: Simon and Schuster,
2008).
80 N. KENLEY

32. Kathy Reichs, Spider Bones (New York: Pocket Books, 2010).
33. Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy (New York: Penguin, 1990).
34. McHale 10.
35. Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (New York: HarperCollins,
2007).
36. Auster 4.

Works Cited
Auster, Paul. The New York Trilogy. New York: Penguin, 1990.
Cassuto, Leonard. “The American Novel of Mystery, Crime, and Detection.” In
A Companion to the American Novel, edited by Alfred Bendixen, 291–308.
Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2012.
Chabon, Michael. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. New York: HarperCollins,
2007.
Chandler, Raymond. “Farewell, My Lovely.” In Stories and Early Novels, 765–984.
New York: Library of America, 1995.
———. “The Big Sleep.” In Stories and Early Novels, 587–764. New York: Library
of America, 1995.
———. “The Simple Art of Murder.” In Later Novels and Other Writings,
977–992. New York: Library of America, 1995.
Chang, Henry. Chinatown Beat. New York: Soho Press, 2007.
Cornwell, Patricia. The Body Farm. New York: Berkley Publishing Group, 1994.
Deaver, Jeffrey. The Broken Window. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008.
Grafton, Sue. “E” Is for Evidence. London: Pan Macmillan, 2008.
Horsley, Lee. Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005.
Klein, Kathleen Gregory. Women Times Three: Writers, Detectives, Readers. Bowling
Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.
Knight, Steven. “Introduction.” In The Millennial Detective: Essays on Trends in
Crime Fiction, Film, and Television, 1990–2010, edited by Malcah Effron, 1–4.
Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2011.
Lacan, Jacques. “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’.” In The Purloined Poe:
Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading, edited by John P. Muller and
William Richardson, 28–54. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.
Landrum, Larry. American Mystery and Detective Fiction: A Reference Guide.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1999.
McCann, Sean. Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and
Fall of New Deal Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.
McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1987.
Mosley, Walter. Devil in a Blue Dress. New York: Washington Square Press, 2002.
 TEACHING AMERICAN DETECTIVE FICTION IN THE CONTEMPORARY… 81

Muller, John P., and William Richardson. “Lacan’s Seminar on ‘The Purloined
Letter’: Overview.” In The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic
Reading, edited by John P. Muller and William Richardson, 55–76. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.
Nickerson, Catherine Ross. “Introduction.” In The Cambridge Companion to
American Crime Fiction, edited by Catherine Ross Nickerson, 1–4. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Pepper, Andrew. The Contemporary American Crime Novel: Race, Ethnicity,
Gender, Class. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000.
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Purloined Letter. First Page Classics, 2017. Kindle Edition.
Reichs, Kathy. Spider Bones. New York: Pocket Books, 2010.
Walton, Priscilla, and Manina Jones. Detective Agency. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999.
 CHAPTER 6

Teaching Postcolonial Crime Fiction

Sam Naidu

Postcolonial Crime Fiction, Context and Pedagogy

Definition of Postcolonial Crime Fiction

Postcolonial crime fiction can roughly be defined as crime fiction which
explores the crimes of colonialism and neo-colonialism, and which
includes the perspectives and values of previously colonised subjects,
whilst utilising a literary aesthetic and epistemology which are modified
by the specific postcolonial context. Whilst postcolonial crime fiction is
clearly evolving from a long-established tradition of crime and detective
fiction, it has established itself as a robust sub-genre which reacts to but
is not limited by the rise of detective fiction in the ‘west’. This rise in the
nineteenth century, with its emphasis on reason and epistemology, evinces
an Enlightenment notion of the inviolability of rationality and its links to
‘western’ concepts of civilisation. A character such as Sherlock Holmes
thus comes to function as the arch-symbol or emissary of an imperial
project which aims to maintain ‘the idea’ and suppress ‘the horror’ by

S. Naidu (*)
Department of Literary Studies in English, Rhodes University,
Grahamstown, South Africa
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2018 83

C. Beyer (ed.), Teaching Crime Fiction, Teaching the New English,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90608-9_6
84 S. NAIDU

­ ncovering ‘the truth’.1 The creation of nineteenth-century crime fiction

u
in the metropole was in part a reaction to colonialist concerns about the
threats of barbarism and dissolution embodied by the colonised subject.
Combining the emerging discourses of science in the nineteenth century
with a hermeneutic strategy based on the laws of reason and logic, classic
detectives such has Holmes arrived at the ‘truth’. In these fictional worlds
of the colonial era, rationality triumphs in the face of threats and anxiety
symbolised by crime, and through the canny use of narrative, civilisation
and order are restored. But what happens when authors start to question
this celebration of reason, and its attendant images of racial, class, gender
and sexual normativity? The answer is the birth of postcolonial crime fic-
tion, which more often than not questions and subverts notions of colo-
nial order, civilisation and ‘truth’ by portraying a world in which crime is
only ever provisionally solved.
The genetic/generic links between classic crime fiction and postcolo-
nial crime fiction are obvious. As Pearson and Singer acknowledge, post-
colonial crime fiction “interrogate[s] the imperial histories and racial
ideologies that helped spur their own generic development”.2 Despite of
or because of its genealogy, postcolonial crime fiction performs a clear
social and political function, as Yumna Siddiqi’s description contends:

a recent spate of postcolonial novels that use the format of the mystery or
detective story but tweak it or turn it inside out in what becomes a narrative
of “social detection”, to borrow a phrase from Frederic Jameson, a “vehicle
for judgments on society and revelations of its hidden nature”.3

Siddiqi identifies, with the help of Jameson, the shift here as being from
the detection of a single crime to social analysis and another ontological
focus: “the hidden nature” of society. In addition, postcolonial crime fic-
tion not only engages overtly and critically with socio-political issues, it
also aims to revision the forms of classic crime fiction to better address the
concerns of a postcolonial context. Wendy Knepper describes the
­mechanics of the postcolonial detective genre as a “manipulation or sub-
version of generic conventions as a purposeful, political activity”.4 Just as
the content shifts focus to ontological questions, postcolonial crime fic-
tion manipulates the formal conventions of ‘classic’ detective fiction to
reflect the exigencies of the postcolony. As a result, settings rife with dis-
order and political instability, denouements which are open-ended, detec-
tives who fail to detect, and perpetual quests for social justice are
characteristic of postcolonial crime fiction.
 TEACHING POSTCOLONIAL CRIME FICTION 85

In their seminal text, Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime Fiction from a

Transcultural Perspective, Matzke and Mühleisen ask “[W]hat, then, does
the ‘postcolonial’ bring to the genre of crime fiction apart from well-­
known discourses of ‘resistance’, ‘subversion’ and ‘ethnicity’, all of which
are undoubtedly valid and form an important part of the debate?”5 Their
book goes a long way towards answering this question, as the essays con-
tained in it examine how postcolonial crime fiction

[suggests] that power and authority can be investigated through the magni-
fying glass of other knowledges, against the local or global mainstream, past
and present, or against potential projections of a dominant group and a
(neo)imperial West. Many authors have thus broadened the theme of inves-
tigation to address issues of community, beliefs and identity constructions
across geographic and national boundaries, including gender and race rela-
tions. Others have broadened the genre by inventing recognizable sub-­
categories which relate to the social, political and historical formations of
their specific postcolonies.6

In other words, by focusing on present crimes whilst uncovering their

historical dimensions, and by zooming out from individual crimes to
investigate socio-political ones, postcolonial crime fiction in general has
the potential to resist dominant ideologies and epistemologies, to ques-
tion narrow cultural or geographic affiliations, to continue the struggle
against ‘western’, white hegemonic discourses, and to inscribe new,
empowered subject positions for the previously marginalised and
oppressed. In postcolonial Africa it is evident that, as Andersson argues,
crime fiction authors use “their sleuths to make statements about the
political past of their particular country, and to criticize the way in which
the colonizers’ interests were absorbed by, and are often reproduced by,
the colonized”.7 Corrupt postcolonial governments, failed attempts to
mimic or jettison the colonial ethos, unstable economies and dysfunc-
tional infra-structures are ubiquitous themes in African postcolonial crime
fiction, as are hybrid subjectivities and syncretic detecting methods.
Matzke and Mühleisen include South African crime fiction in their des-
ignated category— crime fiction from a transcultural perspective—because
of its power for postcolonial intervention, specifically its interrogation of
neo-colonial racial and cultural relations. Contemporary South African
crime fiction indisputably evinces this interventionist function. Not only
has South African crime fiction almost always engaged with the country’s
86 S. NAIDU

race relationships, inequities and politics, more recently it has developed

further to include ethnic, class, gender and transnational inflections. In
particular, its content and form demonstrate that here, ratiocination, cen-
tral to classic crime fiction, can play only a minor role in the interpretation
of real-life crime or even the solving of fictional crime. This is mainly
because the social order, which in classic crime fiction depicting social set-
tings of long-standing stable democracies is reinstated after the process of
logical reasoning is complete and the individual crime is solved, does not
exist here and never has. Of great concern, as reflected in the literature, is
that, more than two decades after the inception of a formal democracy, the
country continues to be destabilised by crime, unemployment, economic
vulnerability, poor infrastructure and varying forms of social injustice.
Currently, postcolonial crime fiction in general, and South African postco-
lonial crime fiction in particular, demonstrates a rising diversity and experi-
mentation as it proliferates in wide-ranging geo-cultural locations and
mutates into a transnational literary phenomenon, exhibiting a postmod-
ernist questioning, of reason, together with a postcolonial questioning of
reason’s relationship to authority, social order and notions of justice.

South Africa: A Postcolonial Context?

The region of Southern Africa, occupied by a number of indigenous peo-
ples such as the Khoi and San, and also by the Bantu people who s­ upposedly
migrated to the area from the north was, since the sixteenth century, colo-
nised by the Portuguese, the Dutch and then the British. During the for-
mal colonial era, which lasted more than three hundred years, numerous
wars were fought between the European colonisers and the indigenous
peoples, slavery was established and widescale appropriation of land
occurred. Accompanying the brutal physical colonisation was the ‘civilis-
ing mission’ of the Christian missionaries and various other discursive,
epistemic colonising efforts which resulted in the subjugation of a huge,
diverse population of black African people by a small white minority. In
the twentieth century, the white minority government made up mainly of
descendants of Dutch colonisers (the Afrikaans people or Boers), and the
descendants of British colonisers, institutionalised a complex legal, eco-
nomic and social system of segregation known as apartheid. For most of
the twentieth century, apartheid was harshly and inhumanely enforced,
but after years of violent anti-apartheid struggle and tense negotiations, a
new, much-celebrated constitution was formulated and South Africa
 TEACHING POSTCOLONIAL CRIME FICTION 87

became a democracy in 1994, with Nelson Mandela as its first black, dem-
ocratically elected president. Formally, South Africa is a postcolonial
nation, and moreover it is also referred to as a post-apartheid state, with
the two systems of oppression, colonialism and apartheid, being deeply
imbricated. Teaching crime fiction in such a context necessitates engaging
with these historical, systemic crimes, which feature as key themes in the
literature.
The legacies of colonialism and apartheid are, however, painfully mani-
fest in the current racial, economic and cultural differences which belea-
guer South Africa. The bulk of the country’s wealth still resides with the
minority white population and the current government, with its ill-­
equipped and often unscrupulous members, has proven deeply incompe-
tent and corrupt resulting in disaffection and cynicism. One of the most
keenly felt neo-colonial ills is that of endemic poverty and unemployment,
resulting in a pandemic of crime and corruption. Currently, the country’s
universities are wracked by protests calling for free education and the
‘decolonisation’ of the higher education system. General consensus, from
scholars,8 the media, political commentators and the populace, is that
South Africa is still haunted by its past of gross injustices and heinous
­race-­based crimes and abuses. So, with this current climate of deep-seated
dissatisfaction, turbulence and violent eruption of protests, the term post-
colonial appears both inaccurate and unseemly. Used, however, to denote
that very condition of the postcolony—its haunted state of neo-­colonial
oppressions and power imbalances, the continued abjection of a group of
peoples who were previously colonised, the historical relationships between
colonial crimes and current crimes—the term postcolonial is not entirely
inapposite. If the term postcolonial, when applied to South Africa, means
a region which was once colonised and which continues to suffer the social
injustices which are born of systemic oppression and marginalisation,
despite ostensible or official liberation, then it is applicable.
Crime fiction, as defined in the previous section, written and taught in
this context, therefore becomes a valuable hermeneutic and pedagogic
tool with which to make sense of this often bewildering context, and per-
haps transform it. Teaching South African postcolonial crime fiction in the
South African postcolonial context is about interrogating, with students
who have inherited this legacy and who live this reality, crimes of the colo-
nial and apartheid eras, and how those past crimes impinge on the present.
What becomes apparent is that South African crime fiction, in terms of
socio-historical context and narrative imperative, is uniquely positioned.
88 S. NAIDU

There is no retrospective social order to be metonymically restored

through deductive reasoning, but there are the aspirations of justice,
safety, security and stability to imaginatively project, and a new ethical and
moral topography to be mooted.

Towards a Postcolonial Pedagogy

To teach postcolonial crime fiction in a postcolonial context such as South
Africa a distinctively tailored postcolonial pedagogy is required. For a
teacher of English literature, this entails, first and foremost, recognising
that, as Slemon puts it, “colonialist literary learning is at the primal scene
of colonialist cultural control, and that a pedagogy of the book plays a
necessary and material role in the strategic production of willing subjects
of Empire”.9 Slemon argues that acknowledging the complicity of English
literature and of the English language in colonialism is a starting point,
opening up within

English Studies itself – the place of colonial management – a cognitive space

in which the subject-to-be-educated reads the effects of ideology in both
personal and political dimensions, and finds within that space […] some-
thing that functions as a “room for manoeuvre”.10

This “room for manoeuvre” is required equally for teacher and learner.
Thereafter, this quandary, resulting often in a healthy ambivalence which
perpetually re-defines the discipline and attendant teaching philosophies
and practices, gives rise to an approach which is highly critical and cogni-
zant of colonial and apartheid history, whilst also aiming to foster genera-
tive skills and knowledge based on the principle of hope.
In conceiving of a postcolonial pedagogy which does justice to both
the literature which is the object of enquiry and the context of teaching,
bell hooks’ concept of “engaged pedagogy” has been highly influential
and informative.11 “Engaged pedagogy” is made up of the following
components: re-conceptualisation of knowledge; linking of theory and
practice; student empowerment; multiculturalism; and incorporation of
passion. According to hooks, this approach is aimed at addressing issues
of race, gender and class biases, and it is offered as a counter-strategy to
the “transfer-­of-knowledge” pedagogy which “socializes students into
existing power relations while undermining creativity and a reflective
stance”.12 Underpinning this pedagogy is the general charge to challenge
 TEACHING POSTCOLONIAL CRIME FICTION 89

old hegemonies, deconstruct old epistemologies, recognise cultural diver-

sity, respect the social reality of students, and to foster non-hierarchical,
non-­authoritarian ways of interacting in the classroom. An engaged peda-
gogy “addresses student alienation resulting from a monocentric –
Eurocentric – curriculum and pedagogical orientations”.13 In addition,
students’ lived realities, emotional responses and idiosyncratic knowl-
edge-making capacities are incorporated into the teaching-learning pro-
cess. A postcolonial pedagogy arising out of this thinking has, therefore,
to acknowledge racial, class, gender, sexual, ethnic, linguistic and various
other differences, and whereas difference was previously deployed in
colonial discourse to ‘other’ and thereby subjugate, now in the postcolo-
nial context, difference needs to be positively re-articulated, understood
and validated.
Teaching in a postcolonial context as riven by social hierarchies as South
Africa is, one has to actively engage in questioning the ideological basis of
knowledge and knowledge production, the relationship between abstract
theories and lived realities, the agency of the students, the diversity of the
student body, and the need for an empathetic and holistic classroom strat-
egy. In short, one is involved in a project which is focused on “the decenter-
ing of the west globally, embracing multiculturalism, [which] compels
educators to focus attention on the issue of voice. Who speaks? Who listens?
And why?”14 Awareness of one’s own relative position of authority, of the
power dynamics and of often disconcerting differences in the classroom
inform a postcolonial pedagogy. Moreover, appreciating that the epistemol-
ogies which prevail originate in the ‘west’, but which, in an era of globalisa-
tion can no longer be described reductively or simplistically as ‘western’,
and resisting the reification of one type of (academic or abstract) knowledge
is described by Gerry Turcotte as militating against a neo-­colonial “totaliz-
ing educational system” through the “interrogative function of a postcolo-
nial pedagogy”.15 Turcotte advocates understanding the “belonging and
alienation that marks the colonial condition”, and the use of literary texts to
engage with this simultaneous belonging and alienation and hybridity of
one’s students.16 Like hooks, Turcotte, writing about the Australian postco-
lonial context, also aims to “unsettle/dismantle the entrenched institution-
alized hierarchies of power that are marked by the academy [and] tug at the
boundaries that separate the academy from the community”.17 Thus the
aim of a postcolonial pedagogy is an inclusive, democratic classroom in
which belonging is promoted without sacrificing the unsettling knowledge
which results from encountering difference and the unfamiliar, be it in the
social space or in the literature.
90 S. NAIDU

Using a postcolonial pedagogy to teach postcolonial crime fiction in a

postcolonial context means adopting a cognizant stance from which to
critique the past, question the present, trouble generic, disciplinary
boundaries, disrupt conventional roles of teacher and learner, breach the
divide between academia and community, desacralise the concept of
knowledge, and empathetically develop independent critical thinkers of
the future. Through reading, analysing, researching, writing about, dis-
cussing and orally presenting on postcolonial crime fiction, students are
guided through a reparative process which helps them understand the past
and its relationship to the present, and which instils in them a desire to
‘detect’ their worlds and pursue social justice.

Case Study: Sleuthing the State: South African

Crime and Detective Fiction
Course Description
What follows is a description of a course taught at third-year level in the
Department of Literary Studies in English Literature, Rhodes University,
South Africa. The principles of a postcolonial pedagogy described in the
previous section are highlighted where necessary. In 2011 the course,
described as focusing on the significance of South African crime fiction in
cultural and literary terms, was conceived, planned and incepted. Students
were told that this literature seeks to address weighty themes such as the
trauma of a society in transition, which has been fractured by violent crime,
whilst engaging fans of crime fiction with compelling and inventive rendi-
tions of the genre. In addition, it was explained that the purpose of the
course is to examine how historically and globally, crime fiction has been
lauded for its interpretive function, but taken together with its origins in
the metropole and its commercial success, this praise raises questions about
credibility, necessitating an examination of crime fiction’s ambiguous ideo-
logical position. Students were encouraged to take the course so that they
can engage with debates about English literary studies as a place of colonial
management, and about the artistic merit of popular literature. The selec-
tion of primary texts was based on two sub-genres identified as widely
written and read in South Africa: literary detective fiction and crime thriller
fiction. It was explained that both sub-genres would be historicised (going
back to nineteenth-century British and American antecedents), and then
formally analysed. Also, texts were chosen (Devil’s Peak Deon Meyer 2007,
 TEACHING POSTCOLONIAL CRIME FICTION 91

Daddy’s Girl Margie Orford 2009, Cold Sleep Lullaby Andrew Brown 2005
and Lost Ground Michiel Heyns 2011) due to their level of engagement
with the South African postcolonial context, popularity and critical acclaim.
Students were alerted that, of particular interest, are the perspectives these
texts offer on evolving and ambivalent attitudes to ‘truth’ and justice, the
relationship amongst power, authority and self, and the correlations
between literary form and the potential for socio-political comment.
With this description and statement of purpose, students were made
aware that they would be engaged in a formal, literary analysis of the nov-
els, as well as in a socio-political study of postcolonial South Africa. They
were also encouraged to question, from the outset, the efficacy and appro-
priateness of crime fiction as a hermeneutic tool. In terms of credit weight-
ing, this course is a substantial proportion of their total English 3 mark
(25%) and involves considerable commitment (two notional hours per
week for one thirteen-week semester). To enrol for this course, students
need to have ‘learning in place’ or display the ‘requirements of prior learn-
ing’. In this case this means they need to have completed English 2 in
order to have the requisite knowledge about the historical periods of lit-
erature, aesthetic movements, genres and elements of prose narratives. In
English 1, they would have done Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures
and would therefore have a basic understanding of postcolonial literary
studies, which this course aims to develop further.

Assessment for the Course

The assessment for the course is mainly of a formative nature comprised of
a three-step process which I call: Foundation; Developing a Voice; and
Becoming a Research Scholar. By ‘Foundation’, what I mean is that they
are given practical information which operates as a basis for their learning
experience. Students are given a comprehensive handout with all relevant
information including dates of seminars, topics for each seminar, guide-
lines for presentations, and descriptions of assessment tasks. They are also
provided with a primary and secondary reading list and a detailed ‘time-­
line’ depicting the development of crime and detective fiction. On this
time-line postcolonial crime fiction is clearly marked. The Initial Writing
Assignment is designed to give them an opportunity to create the founda-
tional knowledge they need to complete the rest of the course. The
‘Foundation’ dimension of the learning process is aimed at empowering
students with basic skills and knowledge.
92 S. NAIDU

‘Developing a Voice’ is probably the most significant aspect of this spe-

cific example of engaged pedagogy. Students do two oral presentations for
this course. The purpose is to develop each student’s confidence to articu-
late an argument, and to promote conversations and debate in the class-
room. For their presentations, students write a proposal on a topic of their
choice related to the texts being studied, present to their peers (they are
encouraged to use visual aids and props creatively), then they receive feed-
back from their peers and me. Both presentations are meant to build
towards a research essay, so students are also guided on how to synthesise
information and develop their presentations into a complex, research
essay. With this pedagogical approach, the conventional hierarchy of the
classroom is disrupted. I sit back whilst students present and then discuss
afterwards. I complete a presentation assessment form which the student
receives, but during the presentations and ensuing discussions the stu-
dents take centre stage. The opportunity to be an active participant in the
cognitive space, the focus on voice, the call for passionate engagement, the
recognition of different types of self-produced knowledge, which consti-
tute the ‘Developing a Voice’ dimension, are crucial to creating an inclu-
sive, democratic classroom.
At the end of the course, students submit a research essay based on the
foundational knowledge acquired through the Initial Writing Assignment,
the autonomous ideas and independent research they conducted for their
presentations, and the critical feedback they received from peers and me.
The thinking here is that, having developed a voice, students are equipped,
in the short-term to become research scholars, and in the long-term to
become critical, articulate members of a thriving democracy. They prepare
detailed research proposals which I discuss with them at length, which
teaches them to collate their research material in order to produce a sus-
tained and comprehensive essay. The essays produced in this manner are
noticeably more competent and complex than the assignments they pro-
duce without this scaffolded and empowering process.
For this engaged pedagogy to work, a system of appropriate assessment
tasks needs to be satisfactorily completed. Students are asked to complete
an Initial Writing Assignment [20%], to do two oral presentations [15%
each], and the final research essay [50%]. For each of these assessment tasks
they are given detailed guidelines and a set of assessment criteria. Feedback
sheets with constructive comments from me, as well as collated comments
from the members of the group, are presented to students after a presenta-
tion so that they can receive affirmation, reflect and address weak areas.
 TEACHING POSTCOLONIAL CRIME FICTION 93

Student Evaluations
For the purposes of critical self-reflection, student evaluation is carried out
at the end of every course. Students are given a questionnaire to anony-
mously fill out in their own time. The questionnaire contains the follow-
ing questions: What did you most enjoy/benefit from in the Sleuthing the
State course?; What were the challenges/problems you encountered in
this course?; Do you consider contemporary South Africa to be a postco-
lonial context? Elaborate; How did this course help you understand this
context?; Does this course adequately engage with our context?; What is
your view on HOW this course engages with its context? Comment on
how SN has conceived of the course, how it is structured and how it is
taught?; What can be done to improve the course?; What specific skills and
knowledge have you gained from this course?;What do you think SN’s
constraints are when TEACHING such a course?; Any other comments?
In terms of the content of the course, the student evaluations are over-
whelmingly positive. Students are grateful for their exposure to this kind of
literature, which forces them to confront painful and controversial aspects
of their socio-political context. They are critical of the background and
lineage of the genre, yet are able to appreciate the particular value of post-
colonial crime fiction. Some students expressed their delight in discovering
that ‘local’ literature has so much to offer. They view the course as perti-
nent, not just to postcolonial South Africa, but to a wider social context.
Significant is their appreciation of postcolonial crime fiction’s tendency to
interrogate the historical crimes which are often the root cause of present-
day crimes, and many students comment on how the literature highlights
that the inequities of the colonial and apartheid eras persist. Many students
mention how the course allows them to engage creatively and critically
with such social ills as poverty and sexual violence.
As for the method of teaching, most students respond favourably to
being given a clear foundation, and to the challenge of developing their
own voices. As one student put it:

Sam creates an environment which strongly encourages her students to criti-

cally engage with her topic matter, reverting to asking specific individuals to
speak if a pause has continued for too long a stretch. This method allows
people to form their own voices within the discussions, and, I feel, increases
the confidence of her students. […] The use of presentations made for an
interesting shift from the typical essay submission structure of the English
undergrad course, and allowed for students to develop skills not only in
94 S. NAIDU

presenting, but also in debate and critical conversation. Engaging with the
content within her class always proved an enjoyable and enlightening experi-
ence due to the rapport created between her and her students.18

Here there is evidence that engaged pedagogy is appreciated by students

who feel nurtured and supported in a learning environment which does
not alienate them or discredit their individual input. Alternative forms of
knowledge production, a focus on voice, empathy, pleasure and passion
seem to have been achieved through the adoption of an engaged
pedagogy.
However, the most difficult and challenging aspect of the course, based
on some student responses, is the oral presentations. A number of stu-
dents find this assessment task too “direct” or “immediate” and they are
“intimidated” by performing in front of their peers. Some also express an
emotional affect when dealing with traumatic subject matter, which makes
formal oral presentations even more daunting. As one of the key outcomes
of the course is to develop students’ voices, this response raises a crucial
challenge. In future, methods of support and encouragement need to be
devised so that the classroom is a safe space of belonging, where the power
dynamics encourage individual participation however diverse student abil-
ities may be, and where different knowledges and forms of expression
thereof are constantly validated.
On the whole, teaching postcolonial crime fiction has been a tough but
rewarding experience. In the words of one student

the method of instruction included challenging lines of questioning regard-

ing the state of South Africa in current day, as well as facilitated self-­reflexivity
of the students. Because of this, there was not only an abstract academic
discussion surrounding our context, but also an exploration of the individu-
al’s responsibility to the community, including that of the individuals within
the course.

This realisation on the part of the student that the course is aimed at
developing both the personal and political dimensions of students as
autonomous, critical thinkers, is particularly encouraging. The shift away
from abstract learning to an appreciation of personal agency and
­accountability expressed here is ratifying and heartening. There is a clear
sense that what is learned in this course is, in some form or another, put
into practice. Student evaluations have been germane to the evolution of
this course and often, the learners articulate most cogently what the
 TEACHING POSTCOLONIAL CRIME FICTION 95

teacher plans, implements and hopes will be the outcomes of the course.
Sometimes, the learners perceive the unsettling nature of learning and the
dangers inherent in the process:

As a lecturer, mentor and teacher she provides scholars with a space for
errors, for growth and above all, respect. Without respect for one another
Sam Naidu would not be able to teach this course. This course has many
traps in which to offend an individual, for example, socio-political commen-
tary can become rigid, and those speaking could feel anxious about offend-
ing people in a post-1994 demographic which means that respect between
one another is very important.

This student captures, in her own voice, the main aim of an engaged
pedagogy—a classroom which has room for manoeuvrability, and which is
characterised by respect for all its members.

Response to Student Evaluation and Conclusion

Although students are candid about finding the course challenging at
times, they emphasise that the texts and the pedagogy allowed them to
meaningfully and critically engage with South African postcolonial crime
fiction and with South Africa as a postcolonial context. They also highlight
the values of specific disciplinary skills such as being able to identify genres
and aspects of form. Most affirming is their appreciation of the space cre-
ated for them to speak, develop their own voices and share knowledge.
I am particularly pleased that some have independently made the connec-
tion between “abstract academic discussion [and] an exploration of the
individual’s responsibility to the community”. Ultimately, the aim was to
develop a dynamic teaching/learning experience informed by bell hooks’s
“engaged pedagogy”, an experience which calls on “everyone to become
more engaged, to become active participants in learning”,19 and, based on
student evaluations over the years and the continued popularity of the
course, this has been achieved.
One of the challenges to consider is negotiating between facilitating the
creation of knowledge whilst providing enough of the basic tools to enable
students to do this. As some students point out, the foundational knowl-
edge aspect of the course can be improved to provide clearer explanations
of aspects of literary form. Another consideration, not arising out of the
student evaluation, but from my own reflection on the course is the choice
of texts. Christian warns in the introduction to The Post-Colonial Detective
96 S. NAIDU

that “these novels, though set in post-colonial countries, are written by

white males, have male detectives, and have detectives who are members
of a police force”.20 Although the current texts are varied in their represen-
tations of race and gender, the authors are all white, middle-class and
educated. In the future, the list of primary texts will be modified to reflect
greater cultural and generic diversity as crime fiction continues to flourish
in South Africa.
Finally, in the current climate of disruption, disaffection and uncer-
tainty in higher education in South Africa, it is particularly important to
retain some of the ideals of a postcolonial pedagogy, to remind myself that
education is about mutuality and partnership, about passion and commu-
nity, that it is about “the practice of freedom, [which] enables us to con-
front feelings of loss and restore our sense of connection”.21 Bearing in
mind that there is still profound loss and instability plaguing South Africa,
education—if the higher educational infrastructure survives this current
epoch of violent protests—is one way to connect and heal. Although the
future is uncertain and not particularly bright, through teaching postcolo-
nial crime fiction in a postcolonial context using a postcolonial pedagogy,
we, the students and I, have managed to create a space that is “life-­
sustaining and mind-expanding”22 that denounces oppression and abuse,
and, to echo Paulo Freire, cultivates hope.23

Acknowledgements I wish to thank Dr Sue Southwood of the Rhodes University

Centre for Higher Education Research Teaching and Learning for her kind assis-
tance with the writing of this chapter. And I am always grateful to my students,
who make teaching a constantly exciting learning experience.

Notes
1. See Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for a detailed thesis on the relation-
ship amongst ‘The Idea’, (Imperialism), ‘The Horror’ (embodied in the
character of Kurtz), and ‘The Lie’ (the lie told to preserve ‘the Idea’).
2. Nels Pearson and Marc Singer, eds., Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and
Transnational World (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 8.
3. Yumna Siddiqi, “Police and Postcolonial Rationality in Amitav Ghosh’s
The Circle of Reason”, Cultural Critique 50 (2002): 176.
4. Wendy Knepper, “Confession, Autopsy and the Postcolonial Postmortems
of Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost”, in Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime
Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective, ed. Christine Matzke and Susanne
Mühleisen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 36.
 TEACHING POSTCOLONIAL CRIME FICTION 97

5. Christine Matzke and Susanne Mühleisen, eds. Postcolonial Postmortems:

Crime Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2006), 8.
6. Matzke and Mühleisen, Postmortems, 5.
7. Muff Andersson, “Watching the Detectives”, Social Dynamics 30.2 (2004):
149.
8. For an example, see S.J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni and W. Chambati, “The Idea of
South Africa and Pan-South African Nationalism”, in Coloniality of Power
in Postcolonial Africa: Myths of Decolonization (Oxford: African Books
Collective, 2013).
9. Stephen Slemon, “Teaching at the End of Empire”, College Literature
20.1 (1993): 153.
10. Slemon, “Teaching”, 159.
11. bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom
(New York: Routledge, 1994).
12. N. Florence, bell hooks’ Engaged Pedagogy: A Transgressive Education for
Critical Consciousness (Westport: Bergin and Garvey, 1998), 9.
13. Florence, Transgressive Education, 130.
14. hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 40.
15. Gerry Turcotte, “Compr(om)ising Postcolonialisms: Postcolonial
Pedagogy and the Uncanny Space of Possibility”, in Home-Work:
Postcolonialism, Pedagogy and Canadian Literature, ed. C. Sugars (Ottawa:
University of Ottawa Press, 2004), 2.
16. Turcotte, “Compr(om)ising Postcolonialisms”, 155.
17. Turcotte, “Compr(om)ising Postcolonialisms”, 158.
18. Students quoted in this chapter have given written permission for their
comments to be used anonymously for the purpose of an academic study.
19. hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 11.
20. Ed Christian, ed. The Post-Colonial Detective (Basingstoke and New York:
Palgrave, 2001), 4.
21. bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (New York:
Routledge, 2003), xv.
22. hooks, Teaching Community, xv.
23. See Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppresssed. Translated by Myra Bergman
Ramos (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970).

Works Cited
Andersson, Muff. “Watching the Detectives.” Social Dynamics 30.2, 2004.
141–153.
Christian, Ed, ed. The Post-Colonial Detective. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2001.
98 S. NAIDU

Florence, Namulundah. Bell Hooks’ Engaged Pedagogy: A Transgressive Education

for Critical Consciousness. Westport: Bergin and Garvey, 1998.
hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York:
Routledge, 1994.
———. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Knepper, Wendy. “Confession, Autopsy and the Postcolonial Postmortems of
Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost.” In Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime Fiction
from a Transcultural Perspective, edited by Matzke, Christine and Susanne
Mühleisen, 35–58. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006.
Matzke, Christine and Mühleisen, Susanne eds. Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime
Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006.
Pearson, Nels and Singer, Marc, eds. Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and
Transnational World. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009.
Slemon, Stephen. “Teaching at the End of Empire.” College Literature 20.1,
1993. 152–161.
Siddiqi, Yumna. “Police and Postcolonial Rationality in Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle
of Reason.” Cultural Critique 50, 2002. 175–211.
Turcotte, Gerry. “Compr(om)ising Postcolonialisms: Postcolonial Pedagogy and
the Uncanny Space of Possibility.” In Home-Work: Postcolonialism, Pedagogy
and Canadian Literature, edited by Cynthia Sugars, 151–166. Ottawa:
University of Ottawa Press, 2004.
 CHAPTER 7

Cut a Long Story Short: Teaching

the Crime Short Story

Charlotte Beyer

Introduction: The Crime Short Story

The crime short story is a diverse literary form which provides a unique
textual space for thematic and formal innovations.1 With postmodernist
challenges to generic boundaries,2 and the subsequent re-evaluation of the
division between high and popular culture,3 the genre-busting qualities
associated with short fiction have found new momentum in the specific
genre of the crime short story. The upswing in interest in the crime short
story genre has also been noted by critics and the media.4 This chapter
explores the rich learning opportunities provided for students by thor-
ough study of the crime short story, arguing in favour of the canon-­
expanding propensities of this particular literary form being given fuller
treatment in the designing and teaching of crime fiction courses.
In my own experience of teaching a second-year crime fiction course
containing a mixture of novels and short stories, and assessed by course-
work, I have found that teaching crime short stories provides a welcome
opportunity to explore the cultural and thematic diversity, linguistic

C. Beyer (*)
University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham, UK
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2018 99

C. Beyer (ed.), Teaching Crime Fiction, Teaching the New English,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90608-9_7
100 C. BEYER

experimentation and stylistic multiplicity of crime writing. Instead of

merely presenting the established crime fiction canon of more or less pre-
dictable crime novels and their attending critical perspectives, a crime fic-
tion course making more extensive use of crime short stories can help
introduce students to a plurality of themes and crime fiction authors from
various national and cultural contexts, as well as provide an opportunity
for research-led teaching. The crime short story poses interesting chal-
lenges for the ways in which the crime fiction genre is conventionally con-
ceived of and taught on university literature courses. Commenting on the
pedagogical dimensions afforded by the short story in teaching and learn-
ing contexts, Ailsa Cox states, “As a self-contained form, the short story
lends itself particularly well to close reading and seminar discussion.
Questions of style, imagery, structure and narrative strategy can be
addressed through a single text”—pedagogical aspects which I shall also
discuss in this chapter.5 Nevertheless, in crime fiction teaching and learn-
ing contexts, the crime short story as a specific subgenre has often been
overlooked, apart perhaps from token exceptions such as Poe’s Dupin sto-
ries, and this marginalisation is mirrored in what Myszor terms a “critical
neglect” of short stories more generally.6 This chapter seeks to redress this
imbalance, by focusing explicitly on the crime short story and its function
in teaching and learning, examining the thematic and formal questions it
poses and the pedagogic and practical reflections it gives rise to. Through
this approach, my discussion demonstrates the richness and complexity of
the crime short story, exploring how it can be successfully harnessed to
extend and enrich the study of crime fiction at undergraduate level.

Theorising and Teaching the Crime Short Story

Scholarly research into the crime short story as a genre has focused on
identifying specific literary traits, calling for further examination of this
diverse and intriguing genre.7 My teaching of the crime short story is
informed by short story scholars such as Cox, Liggins et al., and Priestman,
as well as feminist genre criticism and crime fiction criticism more gener-
ally. This part of the chapter offers some reflections on what this specific
subgenre contributes to my crime fiction course, and how teaching the
crime short story expands students’ knowledge of crime writing. I employ
a range of teaching strategies in mediating this material, such as informa-
tive lectures, small group work, individual tutorials, online learning com-
munities, showing supplementary film, documentary material and
interviews with authors, and devising coursework assessments which allow
 CUT A LONG STORY SHORT: TEACHING THE CRIME SHORT STORY 101

for student reflection and encourage individual and independent research.

Through these various strategies, students are encouraged to develop their
own critical and reflective positions as crime fiction critics, to articulate
sophisticated critiques of the material, and to identify their specific per-
sonal and scholarly interests within the field of crime fiction.
The crime short story has undergone constant evolution since its incep-
tion. Priestman traces the rise of crime fiction back to the rise of the short
story genre in the period from the 1840s to 1920.8 Myszor’s parameters
of definition similarly encompass the period from circa 1840 to the pres-
ent day.9 Cox points out that many critics have attempted to define the
short story in formal as well as historical terms,10 an approach reflected by
Liggins et al., who also open their monograph on the British short story
with a discussion of the genre’s definition. Hunter states that, up until the
modernist period, short fiction had been conceived of “as a condensed
novel, and the art of writing it lay in the skill with which the author could
squeeze the machinery of plot and character into the reduced frame of a
few thousand words”.11 He concludes that “The short story was a doll’s
house, a fully realized world in miniature”.12 However, modernist writers
began to reimagine the short story, transforming its function and form
into something quite distinct from the novel-length narrative, removed
from the “doll’s house” model. According to Myszor, fin-de-siècle social
and cultural developments were closely linked to these shifts in the short
story genre. He states that: “There was less need for stories ‘to be worthy
of telling’ […] or to be attached to a moral, as they often had been in the
past. The short story was now ready to stand alone as a ‘slice of life’”.13
The examples examined here reflect these important changes. Modernist
authors began to view the brevity of the short story as key to its “great
richness and complexity” and experimental potential,14 thus contributing
in important ways to the evolution of the crime short story.
The rising popularity of the crime short story in recent decades, seen for
example in the Akashic Noir series and a number of other themed crime
short story collections to be treated in this chapter, has no doubt been
enabled by the plurality of writers and perspectives it encompasses.15 This
openness to diversity is highlighted by Randolph Cox, who states, in his
evaluation of the crime short story and its functions, that “the key to the
detective short fiction market lies in the scores of recent minority and
women writers who in the last two decades, especially, have reshaped the
classic hard-boiled detective into a different breed”.16 The contemporary
crime short story affords a means by which issues of difference and identity
102 C. BEYER

can be explored and problematised in the classroom. Weber argues that the
teaching of social theory is facilitated more effectively when t­heoretical
concepts and ideas are illustrated through literature,17 making the class-
room into what Fletcher calls a “‘site of inquiry’ for students and teach-
ers”.18 The crime short story is well-suited to these pedagogical purposes,
since, as well as illustrating various stylistic and aesthetic approaches, it can
also be used in teaching to inform and debate, using representations of
race/ethnicity, class, gender, location, textual experimentation and more.
The classroom analysis and discussion of a crime short story opens up for a
more general debate about the specifics of the short story genre, its textual
workings and dynamics, and how these might compare with novel-length
works studied on the course. Students are able to compare and contrast the
workings of the textual dynamics in those two textual forms, as crime short
stories lend themselves uniquely to student engagement with location and
form, in ways that are often different from crime fictions of novel length in
terms of plot, character, generation of suspense, and resolution. The crime
short fiction format helps to maintain a concentrated focus, by helping
students to pay attention to specific ideas, concepts, aesthetic strategies,
stylistic traits, moments, tropes and so on. Rather than getting bogged
down in narrative details and complexities, the crime short story facilitates
a closer focus centred on brevity and specificity.
In the following, I present a series of case studies taken from my crime
fiction course; firstly, teaching the canon through Poe and “Golden Age”
crime short stories; and secondly, crime short stories exploring place and
reimaginings of iconic detective figure Sherlock Holmes through contem-
porary crime short stories. Many of the works used in these course sessions
I have also published on. These scholarly publications are added to the
course syllabus and inform my teaching of the material as well as my dis-
cussions here. In other words, my teaching is research-led; however, it
would be equally true to say that my research is teaching-led. What this
means, among other things, is that I identify gaps in scholarship in relation
to the texts I teach, and, where feasible, I strive to produce publications on
those texts. This helps students in identifying secondary sources for their
assessment as well as for further study, but also demonstrates to them what
research-led teaching might mean in practice.19 Thereby, I hope to dem-
onstrate to students on the course that we are all researchers, and that the
processes of learning, exchanging information and debating are ongoing
and in process—for me, as well as for them. These practices and reflections
form part of my pedagogy in “teaching for diversity” and “sharing mean-
ing” with students.20
 CUT A LONG STORY SHORT: TEACHING THE CRIME SHORT STORY 103

Teaching the Canon

The undergraduate crime fiction course I currently teach follows a roughly
chronologically organised outline, illustrating to students how the crime
short story has evolved alongside, and responded to, novel-length crime
fiction. Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin stories from the 1840s are frequently
taught on crime fiction course syllabi, because of the stories’ focus on cen-
tral crime topics such as ratiocination and criminal psychology. Commenting
on the importance and influence of Poe on crime fiction, Leitch states that
“Poe is universally regarded as the father of the detective story, and his
place as a pioneer of the short story is scarcely less secure”.21 Through its
crime plot, Poe’s 1841 crime short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”
calls attention to problematic themes at the heart of crime fiction, namely
violence and victimisation of marginalised and disenfranchised characters.
Teaching this crime short story helps in highlighting the gender-political
dimensions of the genre. As Harrowitz states, “The story presents the con-
flict between our view of different civilizations and our desire to identify
scapegoats”,22 leading in this case to the story’s preference for the gro-
tesque plot twist of a murderous orangutan rather than confronting the
problem of patriarchal violence against women. The graphic depiction of
violence in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” has become one of the
staple elements of much crime fiction, as Franks also argues.23 These aspects
of Poe’s crime short stories serve an important didactic purpose, highlight-
ing the idea of patriarchal society as a crime scene, and drawing attention
to the use of the female body as a site for exploitation. Poe’s Dupin stories
illustrate to students the evolution of detective figures in crime fiction,
including in the crime short story, while at the same time calling attention
to some of the genre’s enduring problematics and thorny questions, such
as the representation of violence against women. Classroom debates of
important gender-political questions such as violence against women and
cultural difference help to develop students’ critical vocabulary, and serve
to demonstrate how crime fiction, far from being merely escapism, engages
with social and cultural concerns.
Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Mr. Quin (1930) short stories from the
Golden Age period have been identified by Priestman as significant in the
evolution of the crime short story.24 Specific Mr. Quin stories which I have
taught include “The Coming of Mr. Quin”, “The Bird with the Broken
Wing”, “The World’s End”, and “The Face of Helen”.25 As I discuss else-
where, the Mr. Quin stories offer compelling insight into British social and
104 C. BEYER

cultural values in the 1920s–1930s, presenting male and female characters

which problematise, challenge and disrupt gender norms.26 These investi-
gations are used to prompt students, to help them recognise that Golden
Age crime writing, far from being merely “cosy” or predictable, features
moments of disruption and transgression. The Mr. Quin stories introduce
students to another, less familiar but no less compelling, part of Christie’s
oeuvre. In a teaching context, including these stories helps to address the
problem of replicating works and repeating syllabi used on other crime fic-
tion courses currently taught in universities. Contextually, Christie’s short
stories help students to situate crime writing within the wider modernist
period, illustrating how themes and stylistic traits from that period’s “high
art” may recur or echo in the crime fiction of the period.27 Through teach-
ing Christie’s Mr. Quin stories, I encourage students to further explore
themes such as the representation of gender and its subversion, the country
house mystery, the problematisation of female artistic creativity, class struc-
tures and their implications for crime, and cultural difference, within a short
story setting.28 The engagement with these Christie stories, which are dif-
ferent in tone from standard clue puzzle mysteries and the conventional
plot-centred whodunits of the period, challenges students to reconsider
their assumptions regarding Agatha Christie and the Golden Age. Following
their previous study of Poe’s crime short stories on the course, students are
eager to investigate the Mr. Quin short fictions, and are quick to point out
perceived limitations of the stories in terms of length, plot, and character
development as well as their strengths. Students are often particularly inter-
ested in the amateur detective character of Mr. Satterthwaite and his com-
plicated relationship to the elusive harlequin figure Mr. Quin, whose
character challenges the boundaries of realistic representation in crime fic-
tion, as Priestman notes,

Christie’s engagement with the short story’s particular qualities emerges

most clearly with a detective duo specifically designed for the form: the
observant Mr Satterthwaite and his elusive, half-unreal alter ego Harley
Quin, in the stories collected as The Mysterious Mr Quin.29

Our examination of Christie’s Mr. Quin stories helps us to interrogate the

construction and depiction of gender in crime fiction, promoting debate
and reflection regarding its centrality to the genre. In the seminars, stu-
dents explore representations of gender in the Mr. Quin short stories,
analysing the differing positions characters adopt in response to patriar-
 CUT A LONG STORY SHORT: TEACHING THE CRIME SHORT STORY 105

chal, social and class pressures, and how these are linked to the theme of
crime.30 Furthermore, the Mr. Quin stories are introduced in order to
demonstrate contrasts between different generic modes. Students are fas-
cinated by the contrasts between Golden Age crime fiction, its stylistic
dimensions, settings, and thematic preoccupations, and the American
hard-boiled crime fiction novels which they also study on my course. In
classroom discussions, we reflect on these apparent contrasts and contra-
dictions in representations of masculinity, the detective role, and the
development of distinctive stylistic traits in the two crime fiction modes.
Through their reflective engagement with Christie’s Mr. Quin stories, stu-
dents examine the blurring of boundaries between literary fiction and
popular writing and the representation of gender, power and agency in
early twentieth-century class-ridden, gender-restricted Britain. Students
are thus further equipped to assess the capacity of various crime fictions to
act as a site of critique, acknowledging that this capacity, far from being
exclusive to contemporary crime fiction, is a vital element of the crime
fiction genre that has historical precedent and significance.

Recent Reimaginings
Experimentations with the crime short story form, and the focus on
themes such as gender roles and investigation of artistic practice signalled
in Christie’s Mr. Quin stories, evolve in the contemporary crime short
stories examined towards the end of the course. As we progress towards
contemporary material, students consider a range of recent crime short
stories. This section discusses two different examples of teaching the
twenty-first-century crime short story, one focusing on place, setting and
literary locus, the other on the detective figure of Sherlock Holmes. This
contemporary material invites students to consider crime short stories by
various authors which reflect present-day urban settings or connect with
popular culture.
Concerning the representation of place in crime fiction, Geherin argues
that crime texts provide “ideal opportunity” for analysing the meanings of
setting, particularly because, he states, “in realistic crime fiction, there is
often an intimate connection between crime and its milieu, which thus
comes to play a prominent thematic role”.31 These considerations form
the starting-point for the course’s exploration of the Edinburgh setting
depicted in stories from the 2009 anthology Crimespotting: An Edinburgh
Crime Collection, which provide students with an insight into Scottish
106 C. BEYER

crime fiction, also known as “Tartan Noir”. Published in support of the

charity OneCity Trust, the anthology signposts its social engagement,
demonstrating, as I state elsewhere, how crime fiction affords a textual
space for articulating social and cultural critique, through use of a specific
setting and geographical location.32 In seminar work focused on close
readings, students investigate the geography of crime and the stylistics
employed by different Tartan Noir crime fiction authors in their represen-
tations of crime settings. I now want to turn to two of the stories I have
taught from the Crimespotting anthology, in order to more closely exam-
ine important dimensions of the crime short story illustrated by these
texts; namely gender-political uses of subgenre and controversial thematic
content of contemporary relevance. One of the Crimespotting short sto-
ries we have studied on the course is Kate Atkinson’s “Affairs of the
Heart”. This story perfectly illustrates the emerging awareness of the
genre of Domestic Noir, with its emphasis on gender politics, the family
and the private sphere.33 Domestic Noir is a relatively recently-coined crit-
ical term, joining the ever-growing number of subgenres emerging within
crime fiction, and has been defined by the crime writer Julia Crouch:

Domestic Noir takes place primarily in homes and workplaces, concerns

itself largely (but not exclusively) with the female experience, is based
around relationships and takes as its base a broadly feminist view that the
domestic sphere is a challenging and sometimes dangerous prospect for its
inhabitants.34

Atkinson’s crime short story employs the Domestic Noir subgenre to

explore and expose patriarchal dynamics within the traditional family,
using humorous subversion to portray the drastic violent action taken by
the mother and her daughters in the story to avenge themselves on a
tyrannical and domineering husband and father.35 In class, we examine
how Atkinson’s story alludes to fairy-tale motifs such as Bluebeard,36 and
uses stereotypical motifs from crime fiction, such as the murder in the
library and the femme fatale, but playfully transforming these motifs into
feminist mimicry and pastiche through the use of humorous subversion.
Atkinson’s text thus illustrates how the crime short story through its
experimentation can alter the dynamics of the conventional Domestic
Noir. Denise Mina’s short story “Chris Takes the Bus” is another
Crimespotting story which is effective in a crime fiction teaching and learn-
ing context, due to its thematic focus on the controversial issue of male
 CUT A LONG STORY SHORT: TEACHING THE CRIME SHORT STORY 107

rape.37 Sexual crime against women is a frequent theme in crime fiction, as

Heather Worthington explains38; however, Mina importantly tackles the
culturally silenced subject of sexual crimes against males. The brief, frag-
mented text describes a young man’s attempt to escape by bus to London
from Edinburgh, after having recently been raped. In class, we examine
how Mina’s “Chris Takes the Bus” employs textual experimentation
though its innovative use of the short story form, combined with chal-
lenging thematic crime content. As I discuss elsewhere, the story’s unre-
solved ending leaves many of the questions usually posed in crime novels
unanswered, by refusing closure and withholding description of the crime
itself from the narrative.39 The textual technique of withholding informa-
tion is an important aspect for crime fiction students to explore as part of
their actively engaged study of the text. Key to the plot, yet absent from
the crime narrative itself, withheld information serves to engage student
readers in asking questions and reading actively. Students reflect on the
wider implications of an alienating and divisive urban environment, sexual
crimes going unpunished and the open-endedness of Mina’s story.
The second example of teaching the contemporary crime short story is
a recent addition on my crime fiction course. This case study centres on
teaching twenty-first-century crime short stories which explore or recast
the character of Sherlock Holmes, an iconic detective figure within the
genre. Teaching these contemporary recastings of Sherlock Holmes serves
to foreground literary and cultural links between the established crime fic-
tion canon and our early-semester reading on the course of Conan Doyle’s
Hound of the Baskervilles and contemporary reconfiguring of the detective
figure, and to assess the textual, cultural and political realignments that
drive these innovations.40 The stories furthermore demonstrate to s­ tudents
the multiplicity of literary style and thematic content employed by various
writers in their depictions of Holmes’ character, including uses of intertex-
tuality and textual echoes, gender-political and international dimensions.
For this purpose, selected crime short stories from Laurie R. King and
Leslie S. Klinger’s edited work, A Study in Sherlock: Stories Inspired by the
Holmes Canon (2011), are employed. Two of the texts I have taught from
the King and Klinger anthology are Lee Child’s hard-­boiled crime short
story “The Bone-Headed League”41 and Margaret Maron’s crime short
story “The Adventure of the Concert Pianist”.42 In class, we discuss Child’s
story as an illustration of textual echoes and intertextuality, and the
title’s allusion to Conan Doyle’s “The Red-Headed League”.43 Students
108 C. BEYER

investigate how Child’s crime short story exposes the creation of cultural
clichés through crime fiction, in its depiction of iconic London settings
associated with Holmes and its humorous references to Cockney rhyming
slang. Linking to our previous study of Chandler on the course, we study
how, through its use of postmodernist intertextual allusions, Child’s story
illustrates the evolution of a maverick detective character who “rank[s]
high on insubordination”.44 Students respond to Child’s story and its
parodic constructions of Britishness and the character of Holmes, by eval-
uating the ironic twist of the story’s ending, while considering the ques-
tions it raises regarding the reader’s expectation of crime fiction and
closure.45 In contrast, Maron’s story “The Adventure of the Concert
Pianist” specifically puts gender on the agenda. Set in the late nineteenth
century, the text reflects contemporary neo-Victorian literary trends.46
Maron’s crime short story explores the implications of removing the main
focus of the narrative, the iconic male detective Sherlock Holmes, leaving
instead the landlady Mrs. Hudson, a perceived minor character, an older
woman, in the role of detective.47 The study of Maron’s story paves the
way for an examination of the gender-political dimensions of Sherlock
Holmes, such as the fresh insight the story provides into the otherwise
overlooked character of Mrs. Hudson who turns out to be capable of solv-
ing crime using her emotional intelligence, employing methods which are
different from Holmes’, but equal in substance.48 Classroom discussions
focus on ways in which Maron’s story challenges conventional literary con-
structions of the detective figure, specifically in relation to Sherlock
Holmes. These texts facilitate a discussion with students of the manifold
reasons behind the continued popularity of Sherlock Holmes, and the
aspects of his character that intrigue readers and audiences across the
world, as well as our own individual responses to this canonical figure.
Such reflections and more form the basis of students’ ongoing engage-
ment with detective figures and the politics of their representation and
evolution in the contemporary crime short story.

Conclusion: Challenging Conventions

The crime short story deserves a central place in the literary crime land-
scape which we teach, and there is much scope for extending student
learning and furthering critical enquiry through extended use of this sub-
genre. May argues that “In the early twenty-first century, as multicultural
 CUT A LONG STORY SHORT: TEACHING THE CRIME SHORT STORY 109

studies and postcolonial theories privilege the socially conscious novel,

teaching the short story – a poetic form that has never been amenable to
sociological or political criticism – becomes a difficult and thankless
task”.49 However, this has not been my experience; I have found the form
useful for exploring social and political dimensions in crime fiction. Peach
notes that “The comparative lack of attention that the literary short story
receives on degree courses in the UK reflects its low status in the larger
publishing world”.50 However, particularly since the publication of Peach’s
essay in Cox’ 2011 volume in this series on teaching the short story, there
is a sense that this situation has changed, and that the textual landscape
charted on degree courses is more varied than his assessment suggests.
Rather, the examples employed in this chapter, of crime short stories and
their application in teaching and learning contexts, reflect the point made
by Liggins et al. that,

the short-story form has offered liberation from the formal restrictions of
the novel, inviting experimentation and subversion of the norms of the
mainstream. The fluidity of the form has rendered it an effective outlet for
the exploration and negotiation of gender, race, class, and sexual identity.51

As we have seen, classroom study of the crime short story opens up new
dimensions of the crime fiction genre. The examination of subgenres and
forms thus plays a crucial role in teaching crime fiction, contributing to
greater understanding of the genre and the means by which its conven-
tions and patterns may be challenged and reassessed. Teaching the crime
short story is much more than merely “cutting a long story short”.

Notes
1. Rebeca Hernández, “Short Narrations in a Letter Frame: Cases of Genre
Hybridity in Postcolonial Literature in Portuguese”, In Short Story Theories:
A Twenty-First-Century Perspective, edited by Viorica Patea. Amsterdam,
Rodopi, 2012. 154.
2. Iftekharruddin states: “Postmodernism is a complex entity that encom-
passes a wide range of philosophical, social, linguistic, and literary interests
and attracts a variety of practitioners including social theorists, poststruc-
turalists and psychoanalysts.” Farhat Iftekharuddin. “Fictional Nonfiction
and Nonfictional Fiction”. In The Postmodern Short Story: Forms and Issues,
edited by Farhat Iftekharuddin; Joseph Boyden, Mary Rohrberger, Jaie
Claudet. No. 124. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003. 4.
110 C. BEYER

3. Raymond Williams, “On High and Popular Culture”. New Republic, 22

November 1974. https://newrepublic.com/article/79269/high-and-
popular-culture Accessed 16 July 2017.
4. See Tom Nolan, “Short Stories, Hard Covers: New Partners in Crime
Fiction”. The Wall Street Journal, 9 May 2007. https://www.wsj.com/
articles/SB117867237969196688 Accessed 26 December 2017.
5. Ailsa Cox, “Introduction”, In Teaching the Short Story, edited by Ailsa
Cox. Houndmills, Palgrave, 2011. 1.
6. Frank Myszor, The Modern Short Story, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 2001. 7.
7. Martin Priestman, Part III, Chapter 11. In The Cambridge Companion to
the English Short Story, edited by Ann-Marie Einhaus, 159–171. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2016. Kindle. See also Charlotte Beyer, ‘Bags
Stuffed with the Offal of Their Own History’: Crime Fiction and the Short
Story in Crimespotting: An Edinburgh Crime Collection’. Short Fiction in
Theory and Practice, Vol. 3 No. 1. 37–52.
8. Priestman, 159.
9. Myszor, 8.
10. Ailsa Cox, “Introduction”, Writing Short Stories: A Routledge Writer’s
Guide, Abingdon, Routledge, 2005; 2016. Kindle.
11. Adrian Hunter, The Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 1.
12. Hunter, p. 1.
13. Myszor 26.
14. Hunter, p. 1.
15. Iftekharuddin, 5.
16. Randolph J. Cox. “Detective Short Fiction”, in The Facts on File:
Companion to the American Short Story, edited by Abby Werlock and James
Werlock. New York: Infobase Publishing, Cox, 2010. 185.
17. Weber, Christina D., Literary Fiction as a Tool for Teaching Social Theory
and Critical Consciousness”. Teaching Sociology, Vol. 38 No. 4, 2010, 351.
18. Lisa Fletcher, “The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Popular
Romance Studies: What is It, and Why Does It Matter? Journal of Popular
Romance Studies, 2013, 3.2.1–5. 4.
19. I have cited those of my publications here that apply to this discussion,
specifically in relation to teaching the crime short story.
20. See Northedge, Andrew. “Rethinking Teaching in the Context of
Diversity”, Teaching in Higher Education, 8: 1, 2003. 17–32. Northedge
uses these terms as part of his discussion of pedagogy.
21. Thomas Leitch, “On the Margins of Mystery: The Detective in Poe and
After”. In Contemporary Debates on the Short Story, edited by José R. Ibáñez
Ibáñez, José Francisco Fernández, Carmen M. Bretones. Bern: Peter Lang,
2007. 25. See also Myszor, 15; Leitch, 34.
 CUT A LONG STORY SHORT: TEACHING THE CRIME SHORT STORY 111

22. Nancy A. Harrowitz, “Criminality and Poe’s Orangutang”. In Agonistics:

Arenas of Creative Contest edited by Janet Lungstrum, Elizabeth Sauer.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. 188.
23. Rachel Franks, “Hardboiled Detectives and the Roman Noir Tradition”.
In Violence in American Popular Culture, Volume 2, edited by David
Schmid, Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2015. 97.
24. Priestman, 166.
25. All in Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Mr. Quin, London: HarperCollins,
2003.
26. Charlotte Beyer, “‘With Practised Eyes’: Feminine Identity in The
Mysterious Mr. Quin”. In The Ageless Agatha Christie: Essays on the Mysteries
and the Legacy, edited by Jamie Bernthal. Jefferson: McFarland, 2016.
61–80.
27. Beyer, “Practised”. See also Merja Makinen, Agatha Christie: Investigating
Femininity. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2006.
28. I also refer to these themes in Beyer “Practised”, 62.
29. Priestman, 166.
30. Beyer “Practised”, 76.
31. David Geherin, Scene of the Crime: The Importance of Place in Crime and
Mystery Fiction, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008. 8.
32. See my article on the anthology: Charlotte Beyer, “‘Bags Stuffed with the
Offal of Their Own History’: Crime Fiction and the Short Story in
Crimespotting: An Edinburgh Crime Collection”. Short Fiction in Theory
and Practice, Vol. 3 No. 1. 39.
33. Kate Atkinson. “Affairs of the Heart”. In Crimespotting: An Edinburgh
Crime Collection, edited by Kate Atkinson et al. Edinburgh: Polygon,
2009. 13–34.
34. Julia Crouch, “Genre Bender”. Blog, http://juliacrouch.co.uk/blog/
genre-bender. Accessed 6 January 2018.
35. Beyer, “Bags”, 40–41.
36. Beyer, “Bags”, 40.
37. Denise Mina, “Chris Takes the Bus”. in Crimespotting: An Edinburgh
Crime Collection, edited by Denise Mina et al., Edinburgh: Polygon, 2009.
195–200.
38. Heather Worthington, Key Concepts in Crime Fiction. Houndmills:
Palgrave, 2011. 50.
39. Beyer, “Bags”, 48.
40. These issues are also explored in Vanacker and Wynne.
41. See my article, in which I discuss this story; Charlotte Beyer, “Sherlock
Holmes Reimagined: An Exploration of Selected Short Stories from A
Study in Sherlock: Stories Inspired by the Holmes Canon”. Oscholars (Special
issue on Conan Doyle). https://oscholars-oscholars.com/doyle/.
112 C. BEYER

42. I also discuss this story in my chapter: “‘I, Too, Mourn The Loss’: Mrs
Hudson and the Absence of Sherlock Holmes”. In Sherlock Holmes in
Context edited by Sam Naidu. Houndmills: Palgrave. 61–82.
43. Beyer, “Reimagined”, 7.
44. Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep. London: Penguin, 2011. 9. I also make
the connection to the hard-boiled detective anti-hero in Beyer
“Reimagined”, 8.
45. Beyer, “Reimagined”, 8.
46. Louisa Hadley, Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative: The
Victorians and Us. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2010. 5.
47. Beyer, “I, Too”, 62.
48. Beyer, “I, Too”, 74.
49. Charles May, “Teaching the Short Story Today”. In Teaching the Short
Story, edited by Ailsa Cox. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2011. 149.
50. Linden Peach, “Women Writers”. In Teaching the Short Story, edited by
Ailsa Cox. Houndmills, Palgrave, 2011. 61.
51. Andrew Maunder, Emma Liggins, Ruth Robbins, The British Short Story.
Houndmills: Palgrave. 16.

Works Cited
Atkinson, Kate. “Affairs of the Heart.” In Crimespotting: An Edinburgh Crime
Collection, edited by Kate Atkinson et al., 13–34. Edinburgh: Polygon, 2009.
Beyer, Charlotte. “‘Bags Stuffed with the Offal of Their Own History’: Crime
Fiction and the Short Story in Crimespotting: An Edinburgh Crime Collection.”
Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, 2013, Vol. 3, No. 1, 37–52.
———. “Sherlock Holmes Reimagined: An Exploration of Selected Short Stories
from A Study in Sherlock: Stories Inspired by the Holmes Canon.” Oscholars,
2015. https://oscholars-oscholars.com/doyle/
———. “‘With Practised Eyes’: Feminine Identity in the Mysterious Mr. Quin.”
In The Ageless Agatha Christie: Essays on the Mysteries and the Legacy, edited by
Jamie Bernthal, 61–80. Jefferson: McFarland, 2016.
———. “‘I, Too, Mourn The Loss’: Mrs Hudson and the Absence of Sherlock
Holmes.” In Sherlock Holmes in Context, edited by Sam Naidu, 61–82.
Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep. London: Penguin, 2011.
Child, Lee. “The Bone-Headed League.” In A Study in Sherlock: Stories Inspired
by the Holmes Canon, edited by Leslie S. Klinger and Laurie R. King, 87–94.
New York: Bantam Books, London: Titan Books, 2011.
Christie, Agatha. “The Coming of Mr. Quin” (1930). In The Mysterious Mr. Quin,
1–23. London: HarperCollins, 2003.
 CUT A LONG STORY SHORT: TEACHING THE CRIME SHORT STORY 113

———. “The Face of Helen” (1930). In The Mysterious Mr. Quin, 229–257.
London: HarperCollins, 2003.
———. “The Bird with the Broken Wing” (1930). In The Mysterious Mr. Quin,
297–328. London: HarperCollins, 2003.
———. “The World’s End” (1930). In The Mysterious Mr. Quin, 329–359.
London: HarperCollins, 2003.
Cox, Ailsa. “Introduction.” In Teaching the Short Story, edited by Ailsa Cox, 1–12.
Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Cox, Randolph J. “Detective Short Fiction.” In The Facts on File: Companion to
the American Short Story, edited by Abby Werlock and James Werlock, 182–185.
New York: Infobase Publishing, 2010.
Fletcher, Lisa. “The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Popular Romance
Studies: What Is It, and Why Does It Matter?” Journal of Popular Romance
Studies, 2013, Vol. 3, No. 2, 1–5.
Franks, Rachel. “Hardboiled Detectives and the Roman Noir Tradition.” In
Violence in American Popular Culture, Volume 2, edited by David Schmid,
95–117. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2015.
Geherin, David. Scene of the Crime: The Importance of Place in Crime and Mystery
Fiction. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008.
Graff, Gerald. Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind.
Yale University Press, 2003.
Hadley, Louisa. Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative: The Victorians
and Us. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Harrowitz, Nancy A. “Criminality and Poe’s Orangutang.” In Agonistics: Arenas
of Creative Contest, edited by Janet Lungstrum and Elizabeth Sauer, 177–196.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997.
Hernández, Rebeca. “Short Narrations in a Letter Frame: Cases of Genre
Hybridity in Postcolonial Literature in Portuguese.” In Short Story Theories: A
Twenty-First-Century Perspective, edited by Viorica Patea, 155–172.
Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012.
Hunter, Adrian. The Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Iftekharuddin, Farhat. “Fictional Nonfiction and Nonfictional Fiction.” In The
Postmodern Short Story: Forms and Issues, edited by Farhat Iftekharuddin,
Joseph Boyden, Mary Rohrberger and Jaie Claudet. No. 124, 1–22. Greenwood
Publishing Group, 2003.
Leitch, Thomas. “On the Margins of Mystery: The Detective in Poe and After.” In
Contemporary Debates on the Short Story, edited by José R. Ibáñez, José Francisco
Fernández and Carmen M. Bretones, 25–48. Bern: Peter Lang, 2007.
Makinen, Merja. Agatha Christie: Investigating Femininity. Houndmills: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2006.
114 C. BEYER

Maron, Margaret. “The Adventure of the Concert Pianist.” In A Study in Sherlock:

Stories Inspired by the Holmes Canon, edited by Leslie S. Klinger and Laurie
R. King, 230–249. New York: Bantam Books, 2011.
Maunder, Andrew, Liggins, Emma and Robbins, Ruth. The British Short Story.
Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
May, Charles. “Teaching the Short Story Today.” In Teaching the Short Story,
edited by Ailsa Cox, 147–160. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Mina, Denise. “Chris Takes the Bus.” In Crimespotting: An Edinburgh Crime
Collection, edited by Denise Mina et al., 195–200. Edinburgh: Polygon, 2009.
Myszor, Frank. The Modern Short Story. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001.
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in Higher Education, 2003, Vol. 8, No. 1, 17–32.
Nolan, Tom. “Short Stories, Hard Covers: New Partners in Crime Fiction.”
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SB117867237969196688 Accessed 26 December 2017.
Peach, Linden. “Women Writers.” In Teaching the Short Story, edited by Ailsa Cox,
60–75. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841). Poestories.com. nd.
https://poestories.com/text.php?file=murders Accessed 4 January 2018.
Priestman, Martin. “The Detective Short Story”, Part III, Chapter 11. In The
Cambridge Companion to the English Short Story, edited by Ann-Marie Einhaus.
159–171. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Kindle edition.
Vanacker, Sabine and Wynne, Catherine eds. Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle:
Multi-Media Afterlives. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Weber, Christina D., “Literary Fiction as a Tool for Teaching Social Theory and
Critical Consciousness.” Teaching Sociology, 2010, Vol. 38, No. 4, 350–361.
Williams, Raymond. “On High and Popular Culture.” New Republic, 22
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culture Accessed 16 July 2017.
Winspear, Jacqueline. “A Spot of Detection.” In A Study in Sherlock: Stories
Inspired by the Holmes Canon, edited by Leslie S. Klinger and Laurie R. King,
359–383. New York: Bantam Books, London: Titan Books, 2011.
Worthington, Heather. Key Concepts in Crime Fiction. Houndmills: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011.
 CHAPTER 8

Studies in Green: Teaching Ecological

Crime Fiction

Samantha Walton

Reading ecological crime fiction and reading crime fiction ecologically

demand a shifting of focus to features of a text often dismissed as back-
drops to human activity: rivers, forests, landscapes, climate or the planetary
ecosystem. It provokes an adjustment of temporalities, urging scholars to
situate human activity in seasonal, anthropological, evolutionary and deep
timescales. Crime and detective fictions are inherently concerned with the
ways in which ambiance, location, history and place-memory may be fac-
tors in crime and provide clues towards a mystery’s solution. Every crime
novel is set somewhere, and investigation of that somewhere is a good place
to start introducing students to wider questions posed by ecological read-
ing. What forms of knowledge are best suited to excavating obscured his-
tories of a landscape, and how are past transgressions built into the fabric
of a place? Is the environment passive, or active, in the unravelling of the
crime, and what kinds of relationships do characters and other agencies
form with the world in which crimes are commissioned, investigated and
solved? With these questions as starting points, students can be encouraged

S. Walton (*)
Bath Spa University, Bath, UK
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2018 115

C. Beyer (ed.), Teaching Crime Fiction, Teaching the New English,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90608-9_8
116 S. WALTON

to think beyond the immediate and engaging human dramas of crime fic-
tion, and to begin to explore the roles that other-than-human factors and
agencies play in criminal transgressions and the process of detection.

Ecocriticism
In order to support students through this process of refocusing attention
on environmental and ecological themes, the forms of reading practised in
crime fiction studies need to be brought into dialogue with the field of
ecocriticism. An ecocritical reading, in the most general sense, approaches
texts in two ways. Firstly, it reads any literary text with attention to the
representation of the non-human world, including landscape, weather,
flora, fauna and any other features commonly referred to as ‘nature’.
Secondly, any text that explicitly engages with environmental and conser-
vation issues—for example, a work of nature writing focused on species
decline—may be open to, or insist on, an ecocritical reading. Current
trends in ecocriticism offer many specialised ways of approaching texts: for
example, through attention to interspecies relationships, ecological inter-
connectedness or the vital materiality of the living world. At the root of
these reading practices is the question of whether, by deepening under-
standing of culture–nature interrelations and contributing to behavioural
change, literature may contribute to efforts to improve and mediate the
real-world conditions of environmental crisis. Ecocriticism has its roots in
environmentalism, and continues to engage with the ethics and politics of
literary representation, asking challenging questions about culture’s effi-
cacy as a political tool or barometer of change. To this extent, it is a world-­
facing critical practice, and its methods and concerns are comparable to,
and often compatible with, approaches adopted in feminism, critical race
theory and queer studies.
The study and teaching of crime fiction has, historically, moved through
distinct stages which coordinate with major trends in literary criticism. A
teacher of crime fiction will find it easy to introduce students to approaches
inherited from narrative theory, new historicism and psychoanalysis, and
to urge students to attend to representations of gender, sexuality, race and
class within a text. In each case, they will be able to draw from a wealth of
literary scholarship. Bringing environmental criticism into dialogue with
crime studies is a fruitful exercise, and a timely one, given the current con-
ditions of environmental crisis and the specific anxieties young people have
 STUDIES IN GREEN: TEACHING ECOLOGICAL CRIME FICTION 117

about the state of the planet. However, there are at present limited books
and articles to refer students to as models of ecocritical analysis of crime
fiction.1
In its earliest days, ecocriticism was concerned with theories of nature
and reactions to industrialisation found in Romantic poetry and American
Transcendentalism. As the field grew, its focus diversified. Scholarship has
built up around ‘popular’ genres including science fiction, horror, com-
puter games, and the emerging genre of climate change fiction or ‘cli-fi’,
which engages with climate change effects such as sea-level rise, food
shortages and mass extinction.2 Teaching ecological crime fiction may
involve extrapolating from this wealth of adjacent material. For example,
cli-fi novels may incorporate tropes and formulas associated with crime
fictions, such as the psychological thriller (as in The Rapture (2009) by Liz
Jenson) and corporate conspiracy (see Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) by
Nathaniel Rich). The intertextuality and genre-borrowing of cli-fi sug-
gests ways of introducing environmental themes into the teaching of crime
fiction, for example, through exploring how established formulas have
been adapted to address new cultural understandings of climate change
and current political responses to the scientific consensus.
Beyond this, I would like to suggest two possible themes for develop-
ment in teaching of ecological crime and detective fiction: firstly, the con-
struction of nature as ‘other’ in classic crime narratives; and the challenge
environmentalism poses to the genre’s traditional commitment to uphold-
ing law and assigning responsibility. There are, of course, many other
approaches that could be explored, and in the conclusion I suggest ways
of situating ecological concerns within the long tradition of detective
narratives.

Nature in ‘Classic’ Detective Fiction

It is rarely noted that the rise of detective fiction coincided pretty exactly
with the development of conservation and environmental movements,
including: late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Romanticism, the
American wilderness preservation debates of the 1890s, the British refor-
estation movement of the 1920s, and the emergence of ecological con-
sciousness and anxieties about toxicity and pollution from the 1960s
onwards. In spite of this, it would seem that ‘classic’ crime and detective
fiction of the nineteenth century and Golden Age has been notably quiet
on the subject of environmental degradation and the human exploitation
of the living world.
118 S. WALTON

When writers have paid attention to nature, it has often meant using
the countryside, natural formations and non-human animals as plot
devices which pose an imminent threat or an obstacle to safety. This ten-
dency does not mean that the novels are of no interest to ecocritics:
instead, it will be useful for students to address negative or highly styl-
ised representations of nature in crime fiction. In doing so, they can be
asked to consider the role that literature might have played in shaping, or
challenging, dominant cultural understandings of nature during an era of
unprecedented destruction of natural habitats and species extinction.
For example, in numerous Golden Age detective novels, forests, oceans,
deserts and rivers provide a blockade which keep law enforcement out and
return the entrapped cast to an anxious, Hobbesian state of nature: Agatha
Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (1934) and Death on the Nile (1937)
prove cases in point. What influence might such representation have on
readers, and what attitudes to wild places might it encourage? Students can
draw from their own culturally, socially and geographically distinct experi-
ences of the texts under consideration, and of the kinds of places represented
in crime fiction, in order to explore these questions. Though most students
are unlikely to have firsthand experience of living in an isolated country
mansion, many may have grown up or stayed in rural places or, if their back-
ground is firmly urban, have acquired a stock of perceptions about secluded
dwellings and small rural communities from a range of literary and non-lit-
erary sources. To what extent have they absorbed tropes concerning the
danger of wild and peri-urban places, and if they do fear these places, where
do those fears come from? The discussion could be expanded to address the
many popular regional detective series which make use of idyllic heritage
landscapes such as North Wales, Shetland, the Calder Valley and the Dorset
coast as backdrops for organised crime, sexual violence and murder.3
Psychologist Laurel Watson contends that “a sociocultural context that
objectifies women and their bodies is related to their sense of safety and
security in the world”.4 How might a slew of detection narratives connect-
ing natural landscapes with murder and rape influence women’s perceptions
of their safety and security in National Parks, conservation areas and rural
places? While environmental organisations such as the Woodland Trust and
The Wildlife Trusts try to inspire engagement in conservation through
appealing to people’s love of nature and wild places, crime fictions frequently
equate these places with lawlessness, depravity, transgression and danger.
A module focused on the othering of nature in crime fiction would do
well to address Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902),
located between the dark streets of London and the wilds of Dartmoor.
 STUDIES IN GREEN: TEACHING ECOLOGICAL CRIME FICTION 119

The arrival of the horrific hound in this landscape of standing stones, mists
and mire is a gothic revenge narrative par excellence, and the role of the
detective is to see past the aura of mystery in order to force the irrational
into the natural order of cause and effect. But does nature simply provide
atmosphere? Is it a force to be tamed, or is something more complex
going on? Ecocriticism has long debated the role of hierarchical binaries in
the cultural construction of nature: reason, civilisation, masculinity and
the urban have been extensively contrasted with the supernatural, wild-
ness, femininity and nature.5 In an ecocritical reading of The Hound of the
Baskervilles, students can be encouraged to isolate and examine the use of
reinforcing binaries: for example, Holmes is depicted as paragon of reason,
masculinity and civilised urbanity, versus nature as ‘other’: the hound can
be read as an avenger of male violence and a threat to the patrilineal trans-
fer of property; and the moor itself is depicted as an abject and inherently
threatening environment, which not only provides a backdrop to human
activity, but shapes and alters it.
Doyle’s novel also debates different ways of perceiving and instrumental-
ising non-human nature. Starting with the obvious—the abuse of the
hound—students can be asked to find examples of the ways in which nature
is exploited to further human ends. The question of what it means to
‘exploit’ nature is sure to come up. What about the extensive representation
of the moors as terrifying and desolate? What possible effects could such
artistic licence have on the real moors and wetlands of Britain? Dr. Watson,
never one to miss an opportunity for vivid scene-setting, describes the
moors as a “barren waste” emitting “decay and miasmatic vapour”. He
even suggests that the moor’s depopulation is connected to microclimate,
rather than changes in the economics of tin-mining: the long-gone miners
were “driven away, no doubt, by the foul reek of the surrounding swamp”.6
Ecocritic Rob Giblett has argued that the “pejorative Christian view
of wetlands is largely responsible for the destruction of wetlands in the
west for the past millennium”.7 Wetlands have been framed as a kind of
abject and watery hell, inherently threatening to human health and
social order. Not unrelatedly, fens and wetlands have been drained and
reclaimed as part of city-expansion projects from the early modern
period onwards. With this in mind, students can consider the impact that
literary tropes have had, and might in future have, on wider cultural per-
ceptions of places, particularly threatened ecosystems such as wetlands.
Does Doyle’s novel simply reproduce such negative tropes, or does it
challenge them?
120 S. WALTON

One of the few characters to understand the ecological value of the mire
is Jack Stapleton. As amateur naturalist and proto-cultural geographer, he is
the novel’s unlikely ecocritical hero; unlikely, because he is also the keeper of
the hound and the killer. Through Stapleton, students can debate the value,
and the danger, of scientific knowledge. While many ecocritics have asserted
the importance of working with the sciences to share knowledge and bring
about holistic behavioural change, others have rejected science as a practice
bound up with forms of mastery and d ­ omination inherent to patriarchy,
colonialism and capitalism.8 Stapleton is the epitome of the fanatical scien-
tist, exploiting women, nature and non-­human animals to achieve domin-
ion. But what about Holmes? He is also a scientific genius, and has the role
of disillusioning characters, forcing them to see nature clearly and scientifi-
cally, not in the gothic light with which Watson has painted it. The novel’s
key moment of natural disenchantment is the realisation that the hound is a
starved pup rather than a hellish avenger, but the moor is a more complex
entity, resistent to Holmes’ disenchanting lens. Holmes manages to survive
there secretly during investigations, and plans an ambush to catch Stapleton
in the act of releasing the hound. However, a white wall of fog advances,
leaving the hound running free and giving Stapleton the chance to slip away
unchecked. Stapleton escapes into the mire and most likely drowns, mean-
ing he is bought to natural, but not human justice. The mire acts as a kind
of avenger, though remains a mysterious and sinister agency, abject, other,
and beyond human ken: walking across it, it is “as if some malignant hand
was tugging us down into those obscene depths”.9
Long-established tropes are connected to the writing of landscapes.
Alongside Doyle’s representation of fens, students may be introduced to
broader terminology such as the pastoral and anti-pastoral, the wilderness
and the sublime, eco-gothic and the littoral.10 Each of these approaches
offers rich avenues for analysis of crime fiction’s representations of threat-
ened and threatening landscapes, and consideration of what impact such a
popular genre might have on environmental consciousness of its readership.

Environmentalism, Law and Responsibility

In an introduction to ecocritical methodology, Patrick Murphy urges schol-
ars to study “nature-oriented mystery novels—with or without detectives,
and perhaps even without murders—in order to understand the degree to
which environmental consciousness and nature awareness has permeated
popular and commercial fiction”.11 In the face of newer crime fictions which
explicitly engage with environmental themes, Murphy’s characterisation of
 STUDIES IN GREEN: TEACHING ECOLOGICAL CRIME FICTION 121

crime fiction as a passive benchmark of a discourse’s spread seems some-

what superficial. In teaching ecological crime fiction, students may be
encouraged to consider the extent to which writers engage critically with
the issues their investigations raise, in particular concerning the legality and
ethics of protest, the attribution of responsibility, and the capacity of inves-
tigation and denouement to prompt social and political change.
A valuable text for introducing these issues is Ruth Rendell’s Road
Rage (1997), which fictionalises a protest against a major road-building
project in the heart of Sussex. The setting will be recognisable to anyone
who followed the Newbury Bypass and Twyford Rising campaigns in the
1990s, spurred by Margaret Thatcher’s massive Roads for Prosperity
building programme. In Road Rage, activists live in trees and tunnels
while Chief Inspector Wexford and his wife Dora join respectable middle-­
class sympathisers committed to peaceful campaigning and rousing local
interest. Not content with such legal measures, radical environmental
activists team up with a family of wealthy property owners and stage a
kidnapping, stating the bypass’s cancellation as their demand. Road Rage
offers an instructive insight into middle-class outrage at government pol-
icy, revealing how environmentalism has come to appeal to politically
diverse groups: local conservatives concerned about preserving wildlife
habitats as well as England’s pastoral splendour; radical environmentalists
who espouse a deep ecological philosophy; and the corruptible rich who
will go to any lengths to protect house prices.
Although Rendell eulogises pastoral England and expresses commit-
ment to protecting heritage landscapes through peaceful protest and legal
wrangling, Road Rage reproduces reactionary stereotypes of environmen-
tal activists as Luddites, fanatics, hypocrites and terrorists. She models her
protesters on the much-decried Animal Liberation Front, who were par-
ticularly active between 1996 and 2002.12 Students will have no trouble
determining the book’s ideological commitments. The perspective of the
police—sympathetic, but averse to disruption and civil disobedience—is
framed as neutral and common-sense, while observation and penetration
of activist groups is all in a day’s work for coppers who see no ethical prob-
lems with such comprehensive surveillance. Given that between 1987 and
2010, male police spies infiltrated environmental and animal rights groups,
forming inappropriate sexual relationships with women activists, students
could be prompted to consider how the novel contributes to a wider social
discourse which normalises the heavy-handed and intrusive policing of
campaigners.13 The relationship between local issues and wider systemic
122 S. WALTON

change is also raised by the novel: while the activists support an overhaul
of economic and political order, the legitimate campaigners might be
accused of adopting a ‘Nimbyist’ (‘Not In My Back Yard’) attitude to local
conservation. The differences between objectors’ positions and values will
be worth thrashing out with students, ideally underpinned with reading in
ecological philosophy such as Timothy Morton’s The Ecological Thought
or Ursula Heise’s Sense of Place and Sense of Planet. Both of these texts, in
distinctive ways, address how we are all enmeshed—materially and ethi-
cally—in interconnected world ecology, so that no issue or danger is ever
only local or global.
Teaching could also address comparable texts which explore the legal
and ethical challenges that direct action poses in ways more sympathetic to
environmental activists. Although not a mystery novel, The Monkey Wrench
Gang by Edward Abbey can be read as crime fiction from the ‘criminal’
perspective. Published in 1975, it proved hugely influential on the nascent
environmental movement, inspiring the formation of radical groups com-
mitted to direct action. Abbey’s novel follows an eclectic gang of anti-hero
eco-activists engaged in sabotage against the logging industry in the
American West. Their targets are not just machinery, but the legal frame-
works, land-investments and profit incentives of modern capitalism. Crime
fiction has often been characterised as a genre committed to upholding
the rule of law and bourgeois status quo.14 Reading The Monkey Wrench
Gang as crime fiction poses a challenge to this formula, as criminal damage
to machinery and other misconduct is perpetrated as a protest against a
greater offence: that being committed by industries destroying the wilder-
ness for profit.
The Monkey Wrench Gang’s commitment to illegal activity for the sake of
the greater good could open up challenging discussions with students about
the relationship between law and ethics, social order and environmental jus-
tice in crime narratives. This is all the more relevant given that environmental
activists engaging in direct action have begun to turn the terminology of the
legal system to their ends when prosecuted for direct action. In a landmark
English case of 2008, Greenpeace successfully used the ‘lawful excuse’ defence
to answer charges of criminal damage. Its protesters had climbed a chimney
to protest Kingsnorth Coal Power Station’s carbon emissions (amounting to
200,000 tons a day). In defence, they claimed that they had acted to protect
property around the world, which will be more significantly impacted by cli-
mate change that the power station was by their minor transgression.15 The
jury found them not guilty, demonstrating that English law could be stretched
 STUDIES IN GREEN: TEACHING ECOLOGICAL CRIME FICTION 123

to accommodate cases in which indirect and long-term risks are seen as justi-
fication to act in ways that damage property in the small scale. More recently,
pleas of necessary action have been entered by defendants involved in direct
actions which aim to draw attention to corporate responsibility for climate
change.16 As climate activist Claire Whitney states: “Taking action is not an
issue of moral righteousness but an act of self-defence”.17
Introducing students to Rob Nixon’s term ‘slow violence’ will help
make sense of the different scales of impact, responsibility, risk and justice
involved in these discussions. Slow violence is “a violence that occurs
gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction … incremen-
tal and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of
temporal scales”.18 An ‘act’ of slow violence might be deforesting a hillside
or allowing dangerous chemicals to seep into groundwater. Unlike the
individual acts of violence traditionally prioritised in crime narratives, slow
violence might be attributable to decision-makers acting on behalf of a
company—as, for example, in cases of corporate manslaughter—or come
under the self-regulating models of corporate social responsibility prac-
tised (often in superficial ways) in business. Looking to fiction, students
may be asked: how can the narrative structures of the crime genre—
mystery, investigation, denouement—and its ways of theorising knowl-
edge, agency and responsibility be extended to consider questions of slow
violence in a global context? How can justice be conceived and enacted
when antagonistic actors and agencies may no longer be the ‘evil geniuses’
of classic detective fiction, but corporations, governments, communities,
or even systemic dynamics that have no clear personal or institutional form
or locus of legal and moral responsibility?
Many crime and detection novels, TV dramas and films are highly
sophisticated in their excavation of the systemic dynamics of oppression:
for example, Jane Campion’s treatment of misogyny and sexual violence as
underpinning intergenerational power dynamics in the television series
Top of the Lake, series 1 and 2 (2013–present) or Maj Sjöwall’s and Per
Wahlöö’s magisterial critique of capitalism and the failings of the Swedish
welfare state in the Martin Beck series (1967–1975). However, novels and
series which address environmental issues have had mixed success in tack-
ling the interconnected economic and legal systems, public and political
apathy, and ideological and cultural factors contributing to climate change
and environmental crisis.
On the one hand, crime novels are inherently able to handle analysis of
clues and forensic evidence without seeming to dump information on
124 S. WALTON

readers. These features can be seen in a number of recent novels, including

the gargantuan Requiem by Clare Francis (1991), which takes on a
Monsanto-esque agrochemical pollutor from the perspective of
environmentalist-­cum-detective and investigator Daisy Field; and Antti
Tuomainen’s The Mine (2015), which uncovers corruption and environ-
mental pollution in Northern Finland from a journalist’s perspective. Each
novel succeeds in conveying considerable information about environmen-
tal degradation through the collection and analysis of soil samples, testing
of water, analysis of atmospheric data, compilation of evidence from envi-
ronmental reports and so on, which might seem extraneous and tedious in
a realist novel without mystery elements. Indeed, the realist novel has
been the subject of considerable criticism because of its lack of ­engagement
with environmental themes.19 Unlike most realist literary novels, which
generally remain focused on localised interpersonal dramas, crime novels
are able to plunge into an investigation of international corruption and
concealed industrial hazards, and “see the invisible” damage of industrial
pollution.20
However, the legacy of the Golden Age formula—the corpse and crime
scene—hangs heavily over environmental crime fiction. When a murder is
at the centre of a text, critiques of societal injustices and toxic discourses
still tend to be connected to instances of individual moral failing. As
Richard Kerridge states, “Detective stories usually start with simple ‘who-
dunnit’ questions which grow into intricate threads of connection” but
“at the denouement these stories tend to collapse that intricacy back into
a simple confrontation”.21 According to this criticism, Francis’s Requiem
deserves particular praise for enquiring into the multiple, complex, entan-
gled interests which create the context for industrial malpractice and eco-
logical pollution in a comparable way to the television series The Wire’s
excavation of the USA’s drug trade and its law enforcement’s war on
drugs. At over 800 pages, Requiem might prove a challenge for teaching.
Nonetheless, Francis’s capacity to handle interlocking and international
narratives addressing politics, environmentalism, farming, conservation,
environmentalism, global poverty, charity, medicine and law produces a
more intricate narrative than most. Furthermore, the connections the
book makes between ecological and human health could be used to guide
students through discussion of the merits and weaknesses of strongly eco-
centric or anthropocentric approaches to storytelling. While crime fictions
can often be accused of being purely human-centered in their approach to
transgression and justice, Francis’s novel prompts consideration of the
 STUDIES IN GREEN: TEACHING ECOLOGICAL CRIME FICTION 125

interdependence of social and environmental justice, without forsaking

suspense, danger and other kinds of human interest.
Published two years later, John Grisham’s The Pelican Brief (1993), has
been influential in establishing the key tropes of many modern environ-
mental crime thrillers: a clash of interests between powerful oil executives
(or other polluting industries) and environmentalists leads to a murder,
blackmail and further transgression, with the involvement of government
and law enforcement in cover-up and conspiracy. In both Requiem and
The Mine, investigators are threatened while whistle-blowers and activists
are attacked or found dead in mysterious circumstances. These novels’
exposure of corporate indifference, greed and malpractice may seem melo-
dramatic were it not for the real-world dangers faced by environmental
defenders. Global Witness reports that 200 environmental activists were
killed in twenty-four countries in 2016, with the most fatalities in Brazil,
Columbia and the Philippines.22 The upsurge of environmental conspiracy
novels may be a sign that writers, publishers and readers are becoming
alert to the risk of protesting environmental harm and corporate interest;
however, this new subgenre’s tendency to focus on Western nations also
evades the reality that such danger is almost exclusively and disproportion-
ately experienced by indigenous people and communities in the Global
South. In teaching environmental crime dramas, it is essential to draw
students’ attention to the wider geopolitical realities of environmental cri-
sis and activism, and to the places and communities devastated by resource
extraction.
Bringing postcolonial ecocritical practices to bear on texts will help stu-
dents to uncover the interconnected and mutually-reinforcing crimes—
both historical and on-going—which underpin and produce environmental
injustice.23 Teaching Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2010) could prompt
discussion of the ways in which numerous factors contribute to the com-
mission of a crime. Although not strictly a crime novel, it portrays the
kidnapping of a British oil executive’s wife through the eyes of a journalist,
Rufus, who uncovers the interlocking interests which support the devas-
tating oil industry in the Niger Delta. Remote multinational corporations
participate in the destruction of indigenous communities, water pollution,
civil war and the undermining of Nigerian democracy. The novel’s messy
ending gestures to the vastness and complexity of these crimes and injus-
tices, which the novel is unable to fully understand, manage or contain.
Imre Szeman has written of the defining features of the new genre of
‘petrofictions’ (novels focused on the global oil industry such as Oil on
126 S. WALTON

Water) as follows: “The very best petrofictions being produced today

understand oil not as a problem to be (somehow, miraculously) amelio-
rated, but as a core element of our societies”.24 While classic crime and
detective plots can be seen, possibly simplistically, as offering both denoue-
ment and closure with the discovery of the killer and the restoration of the
status quo, crime fictions which engage with the oil industry might only
ever be able to offer detection plots without a meaningful form of resolu-
tion: that is, until global societies and economies have ceased to be depen-
dent on oil. In teaching novels by Francis, Tuomainen and Habila, students
can be encouraged to meditate upon the unresolvability of crimes con-
nected with massive, systemic injustice, and these texts’ refusals to offer
easy conclusions. Do students find these non-resolutions satisfying, and
what kinds of behavioural change at the individual and collective level do
these novels advocate?

Conclusion
In The Ecological Thought, Morton outlines his theory of ecological enmesh-
ment, in which the human is connected to and co-constituted with non-
human nature; living, dead and synthetic matter; environmental processes;
and each other. According to Morton, understanding this complete enmesh-
ment involves adopting the perspective of a noir detective: “The noir narra-
tor begins investigating a supposedly external situation, from a supposedly
neutral point of view, only to discover that she or he is implicated in it”.25
Reading environmental crime fictions as ‘econoir’, and bringing the sensi-
bilities of noir fiction to bear on environmental issues, entails collapsing
nature/culture binaries and realising that we can never look on at ‘nature’ or
‘the environment’ from an outsider perspective. Reading crime fiction eco-
logically may also involve adopting a radically different perspective on the
genre’s defining tropes and features, and its possible future developments.
How will the detective sift through connected and disconnected material to
determine a clear chain of effect and responsibility when ecological entangle-
ment proves that we are all enmeshed? Will we witness a shift from police
and journalist investigators to scientists and environmentalists as “the subject
supposed to know” finds themselves measuring groundwater pollution or
handling climate data?26 Might non-human agencies, corporations and
‘assemblages’—orderings of heterogeneous elements including bodies, ener-
gies, acts and intentions—come to take the place of the traditional criminal
genius?27 In the age of Anthropocene, in which human activity is affecting
 STUDIES IN GREEN: TEACHING ECOLOGICAL CRIME FICTION 127

the geological record and altering earth conditions for unimaginable futures,
will individual crimes still matter, or will writers and readers of crime fiction
come to experience the ‘derangement of scale’ that Timothy Clark associates
inevitably with the opening up of such vast geographical and temporal
vistas?28
Bringing the study of crime fiction into dialogue with ecocriticism, eco-
logical philosophy and the current conditions of our environment crisis
tests the capacities of the genre as a form dedicated to examining trans-
gression, knowledge, justice and the possibility of a different future. It will
be challenging, but it will ultimately engage students in some of the most
demanding ethical, aesthetic and political questions of our time.

Notes
1. See Sam Naidu. “Crimes against Nature: Ecocritical Discourse in South
African Crime Fiction”, Scrutiny2 19, no. 2 October 2014: 59–70;
Martindale, Kym “Murder in Arcadia: Towards a Pastoral of Responsibility
in Phil Rickman’s Merrily Watkins Murder Mystery Series”, Frame 26, no.
2 November 2013: 23–36; Walton, Jo Lindsay and Samantha Walton eds.
“Crime Fiction and Ecology”. Special Edition of Green Letters: Studies in
Ecocriticism 22, no.1 (February 2018).
2. See Richard Kerridge. “Ecothrillers: Environmental Cliffhangers”. In
Laurence Coupe ed. The Green Studies Reader. Oxford and New York:
Routledge, 2000: 242–249; Trexler, Adam. Anthropocene Fictions: The
Novel in a Time of Climate Change. Charlottesville, VA: University of
Virginia Press, 2015.
3. See Hinterland. Produced by Ed Thomas. SC4, 2013-present; Shetland.
Produced by Christopher Aird, Elaine Collins and Kate Bartlett. BBC
Scotland. 2013-present; Happy Valley. Produced by Nicola Shindler, Sally
Wainwright and Matthew Read. BBC One. 2014-present; Broadchurch.
Produced by Jane Featherstone and Chris Chibnall. ITV. 2013–2017.
4. See Laurel B. Watson et al. “Understanding the Relationships Among
White and African American Women’s Sexual Objectification Experiences,
Physical Safety Anxiety, and Psychological Distress”. Sex Roles February
72, no. 3–4, February 2015: 91–104.
5. Countless texts take up this theme. Students could be directed to Soper
and Haraway for a more detailed discussion.
6. Arthur Conan Doyle. The Hound of the Baskervilles. London: Penguin,
2001; 56, 153, 154.
7. Rod Giblett. “Theology of wetlands: Tolkien and Beowulf on Marshes and
their Monsters”, Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 19, no. 2 March
2012: 132–143; p.143.
128 S. WALTON

8. See Ursula Heise “Science and Ecocriticism”, The American Book Review
18 no. 5 July–August 1997: 4.
9. Doyle, 144, 156, 153.
10. See Terry Gifford. Pastoral. Abingdon. Routledge, 1999; and William and
Andrew Smith eds. EcoGothic. Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2013.
11. Patrick Murphy. Ecocritical Explorations in Literary and Cultural Studies.
Plymouth: Lexington, 2009, 143.
12. See Stefan H. Leader and Peter Probst. The Earth Liberation Front and
Environmental Terrorism; Terrorism and Political Violence Vol. 15, Iss. 4,
2003.
13. This story and subsequent trials and investigations have been extensively
reported upon in The Guardian. For example see: Rob Evans and Paul
Lewis, “Undercover police officer unlawfully spied on climate activists,
judges rule”, The Guardian Wednesday 20 July 2011: Web. https://www.
theguardian.com/environment/2011/jul/20/police-spy-on-climate-
activists-unlawful [Accessed 9 October 2017].
14. See Stephen Knight. Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction. London:
Palgrave, 1980.
15. John Vidal, “Not guilty: the Greenpeace activists who used climate change
as a legal defence”, The Guardian. Thursday 11 September 2008 https://
www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/sep/11/activists.kings-
northclimatecamp [Accessed 9 October 2017].
16. See Rebecca Nathanson “Climate Change Activists Consider the Necessity
Defence”, The New Yorker. 11 April 2015. https://www.newyorker.com/
news/news-desk/climate-change-activists-consider-the-necessity-defense
[Accessed 9 October 2017].
17. See Tom Levitt “Climate Activists Face Jail Over Ratcliffe Coal Plot”, The
Ecologist. 14 December 2010 http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_
round_up/694507/climate_activists_face_jail_over_ratcliffe_coal_plot.
html [Accessed 9 October 2017].
18. Rob Nixon. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge
MA: Harvard University Press, 2011, 2.
19. See Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2016.
20. Barbara Adam. Timescapes of Modernity: The Environment and Invisible
Hazards. London: Routledge, 1998, 19.
21. Kerridge, 247.
22. See “Defenders of the Earth”, Global Witness. (13 July 2017) https://www.
globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/environmental-activists/defenders-
earth/ [Accessed 09.10.17].
23. See Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism. Abingdon:
Routledge, 2015.
 STUDIES IN GREEN: TEACHING ECOLOGICAL CRIME FICTION 129

24. Imre Szeman. “Introduction” to Petrofictions Special Issue. American

Book Review 33, no. 3 March–April 2012: 3.
25. Timothy Morton. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge: Harvard, 2010,
16–17.
26. Slavoj Zizek. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Lacan Through Popular
Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992, 57.
27. See Jane Bennett. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham
and London: Duke University Press, 2010.
28. See Timothy Clark. Ecocriticism on the Edge. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.

Works Cited
Abbey, Edward. The Monkey Wrench Gang. London: Harper Collins, 2006.
Adam, Barbara. Timescapes of Modernity: The Environment and Invisible Hazards.
London: Routledge, 1998.
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 2010.
Clark, Timothy. Ecocriticism on the Edge. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.
Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Hound of the Baskervilles. London: Penguin, 2001.
Francis, Clare. Requiem. London: Pan, 2013.
Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism 2nd Edition. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011.
Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2016.
Giblett, Rod. “Theology of Wetlands: Tolkien and Beowulf on Marshes and Their
Monsters.” Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 19, no. 2 March 2012:
132–143.
Gifford, Terry. Pastoral. Abingdon. Routledge, 1999.
Grisham, John. The Pelican Brief. London: Arrow, 2010.
Habila, Helon. Oil on Water. London: Penguin, 2011.
Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature.
New York: Routledge, 1991.
Heise, Ursula. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008.
——— “Science and Ecocriticism.” The American Book Review 18 no. 5 July–
August 1997: 4.
Hughes, William and Andrew Smith eds. EcoGothic. Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2013.
Huggan, Graham and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism. Abingdon:
Routledge, 2015.
Kerridge, Richard. “Ecothrillers: Environmental Cliffhangers.” In The Green
Studies Reader, edited by Laurence Coupe, 242–249. Oxford and New York:
Routledge, 2000.
130 S. WALTON

Knight, Stephen. Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction. London: Palgrave Macmillan,
1980.
Martindale, Kym. “Murder in Arcadia: Towards a Pastoral of Responsibility in Phil
Rickman’s Merrily Watkins Murder Mystery Series.” Frame 26, no. 2 November
2013: 23–36.
Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge: Harvard, 2010.
Murphy, Patrick. Ecocritical Explorations in Literary and Cultural Studies.
Plymouth: Lexington, 2009.
Naidu, Sam. “Crimes Against Nature: Ecocritical Discourse in South African
Crime Fiction.” Scrutiny2 19, no. 2 October 2014: 59–70.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2011.
Rankin, Ian. Black and Blue. London: Orion, 1997.
Rendell, Ruth. Road Rage. London: Arrow Books, 1997.
Soper, Kate. What Is Nature: Culture, Politics and the Non-Human. Oxford:
Blackwell, 2000.
Szeman, Imre. “‘Introduction’ to Petrofictions Special Issue.” American Book
Review 33, no. 3 March–April 2012: 3.
Trexler, Adam. Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change.
Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2015.
Tuomainen, Antti. The Mine. London: Orenda Books, 2016.
Walton, Jo Lindsay and Samantha Walton eds. “Crime Fiction and Ecology.”
Special Edition of Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 22, no.1 February
2018.
Zizek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Lacan Through Popular Culture.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992.
 CHAPTER 9

Teaching Crime Fiction and Film

Sian Harris

The images flicker as the scene opens on a masked thief, who stands behind
a drawing-room table, loading valuable objects into a large sack. A man in
a dressing-gown then enters the room and interrupts the robbery, but the
thief vanishes into thin air. The man sits down to smoke a cigar, and the
thief promptly reappears. The man draws a gun from the pocket of his
dressing-gown, shoots at the thief (who instantly disappears again), and
retrieves his property. However, his victory is short lived. The thief returns,
the sack vanishes from the man’s grasp, and thief and sack disappear for a
final time. The man in the dressing-gown is left alone, and clearly baffled.
This short, silent sequence—lasting little more than thirty seconds—
was produced in 1900 for the Mutoscope, an early viewing device that was
a popular feature in piers and arcades. The title of the film was simple:
Sherlock Holmes Baffled.1 While not the most auspicious of beginnings for
the great detective’s on-screen career, it signalled the start of an endur-
ingly productive, complex and mutually beneficial relationship between
crime fiction and film. This chapter sets out to explore how studying crime
fiction alongside film and television can inform and illuminate the reading,
and provide a more complex appreciation of genre convention and
narrative code. Based on my experience of course design and delivery,

S. Harris (*)
University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2018 131

C. Beyer (ed.), Teaching Crime Fiction, Teaching the New English,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90608-9_9
132 S. HARRIS

it considers three core texts as ‘case studies’ that each promote a distinct
set of learning objectives, and offer alternative pathways to discussion and
analysis. The texts are drawn directly from the syllabus of “Crime and
Punishment: Detective Fiction from the Rue Morgue to the Millennium”,
a module offered to final year students in the English department at the
University of Exeter (UK) between 2012 and 2017.
Following on from Sherlock Holmes Baffled, the first case study consid-
ers the benefits of teaching contemporary television alongside classic fic-
tion, through encouraging students to rethink the adaptive relationship
between Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) and the
BBC’s Sherlock episode ‘The Hounds of Baskerville’ (2012). The empha-
sis is on finding ways to disrupt what Ariane Hudelet has labelled “the
traditional ‘compare and contrast’ technique that often leads to a descrip-
tive tendency and a return to traditional hierarchies between the source
text and the adaptation copy”,2 and to work towards a more sophisticated
understanding of the intertextual dynamic. The second section focuses on
the ways in which Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep (1946) can offer not
only a counterpart to Raymond Chandler’s 1939 novel, but also provides
an extended insight into the period, and highlights questions of stardom
and celebrity through a focus on paratextual culture. This includes an
account of how teaching might be informed by archive material. The third
case study considers teaching texts in translation, drawing on Stieg
Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005) and Niels Arden Oplev’s
2009 adaptation. Finally, the chapter will briefly outline how the module’s
inclusion of film has been received by students, and explore how their
comments and contributions have helped to improve the experience.
While the chapter is primarily concerned with teaching crime fiction in
adaptation, this is not intended to negate the merit and interest value of
original crime drama, and it is worth pausing for a moment to consider
this. Original film and television texts have had a striking impact in shap-
ing popular understandings of crime, criminality, and investigative meth-
ods. This might be epitomised by the so-called ‘CSI effect’, described by
Schweitzer and Saks as the process through which the Crime Scene
Investigation series has “raised the public’s expectations for the kind of
forensic-science evidence that could and should be offered at trials to such
heights that jurors are disappointed by the real evidence with which they
are presented”.3 Original crime drama also provides ample material for
aesthetic and intellectual as well as sociological analysis, as in the case of
David Fincher’s neo-noir Se7en (1995), or Jane Campion’s haunting
 TEACHING CRIME FICTION AND FILM 133

Top of the Lake (2013). However, while the merits of these stand-alone
texts afford a tempting digression, in my experience the practical demands
of teaching in an English department will often mean that adaptations
offer the most immediately productive lines of enquiry, and this is reflected
in the choice of texts ahead.

Sherlock and Teaching Multiplicity

In May 2012, Guinness World Records declared that Sherlock Holmes
was “the most portrayed literary human character in film and TV”, with
the character inspiring 254 on-screen versions, including portrayals by
John Barrymore, Basil Rathbone, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee,
Charlton Heston, Robert Downey Jr. and Jonny Lee Miller.4 Furthermore,
while this collection of Holmeses is already extensive, it is merely partial,
excluding as it does the myriad additional versions of the character that
have appeared in cartoons, video games, musical and theatrical produc-
tions, advertising campaigns and radio plays. It is perhaps universally inevi-
table that students will have encountered the image and iconography of
Conan Doyle’s detective protagonist long before they have had the chance
to read the text. Indeed, when first impressions have already been formed
by such a range of adaptations—from television series to Halloween cos-
tumes—reactions to the actual text can be striking. Some students have
reported a sense of anti-climax; while others have been deeply impressed
by the capacity for a story they assumed they knew to prove surprising.
The scale of the character’s visibility and adaptability can thus seem
daunting, especially on a survey course that attempts to cover the develop-
ment of crime fiction from the mid-nineteenth to the early twenty-first
century. The challenge of distilling a complex literary subject into a man-
ageable yet comprehensive syllabus is nothing new—as Albert Schinz
wryly complained in a 1926 edition of The Modern Language Journal,
“you cannot put an elephant in a rabbit hole”5—but the diverse range of
potential Holmeses can also present the opportunity for a refined under-
standing of adaptation in practice. After all, scholars working in adaptation
studies have long cautioned against the kind of study that:

“assumed an awareness of the original on the part of the audiences, assumed

the superiority of the original, cast the new text solely in its relationship to
the original” and espoused an “overarching concern with the notion of
‘fidelity’ to the original … [that] thus also ignored larger cultural and eco-
nomic realities”.6
134 S. HARRIS

Assigning ‘The Hounds of Baskerville’ alongside The Hound of the

Baskervilles immediately exposes the limitations of that approach. While,
as noted, one can assume the audience (the students) will be aware of the
character, they are far more likely to know the BBC version, and its idio-
syncratic, lateral approach to the source material provides a disruptive take
on the concept of “fidelity”.
The Sherlock series, created by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, first
aired in 2010, and relocates Conan Doyle’s characters to twenty-first-
century London. The Guardian designated this as a “re-imagining”,7
while The Telegraph described it as “a loose riff”,8 and The Washington
Post suggested that the characters are “such a part of the cultural currency
that we are secure that they can survive a re-minting’”.9 While a more
classic version, such as the Granada Television production The Adventures
of Sherlock Holmes (1984–1994), might risk incurring a reductive focus
on the fidelity of the plot and the dialogue, Sherlock’s abrupt departure
from tradition helps to channel discussion towards the evolution of inves-
tigative methods, or the portrayal of the detective’s psyche. Indeed, Neil
McCaw has suggested that The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’s purported
accuracy is itself “inherently and cripplingly subjective” as the series is
“haunted by a ghoul of its own making, striving for the impossible dream
of definitive, Conan Doylean episodes”.10 Sherlock’s rejection of this
‘ghoul’ is most evident in the ‘memory palace’ scene, in which Sherlock’s
(Benedict Cumberbatch’s) thought-process is made manifest through
graphics and imagery. Described by one reviewer as a “Minority Report
routine”,11 the scene provides a visual account of the detective’s mental
process that can be seen both as a demonstration and a contradiction of
his rational intellect. The precision and speed with which Sherlock rejects
‘dead end’ answers and arrives at his realisation speaks to a phenomenal
capacity for deduction. However, while the destination proves correct,
the apparently random and arbitrary nature of the journey—that detours
via scraps of music, history, and breeds of canine—can be read as under-
mining his ultimate authority over the information. The scene also
exposes the limits of the insight permitted to the reader, whose access to
Holmes’s mind is always mediated by Watson’s narrative. The distinction
has fuelled especially rewarding discussions of narrative perspective, par-
ticularly as the course progresses and students can draw comparisons
between Conan Doyle’s “narrated” detective and, for example, the wry
intimacy of Raymond Chandler’s first person prose.
 TEACHING CRIME FICTION AND FILM 135

Sherlock then rejects a linear relationship to the original, and instead

embodies the process as envisaged by Linda Hutcheon when noting that
“adaptation has run amok”.12 In the spirit of this, the module has also
asked students to engage with less official acts of adaptation or re-imagin-
ing, and identify examples of Sherlock fan fiction that can be included in
the seminar debates. Writing in The Baker Street Journal, Betsy Rosenblatt
has suggested that “fan fiction seems to flow inevitably from the Canon”,13
but I posit that this ‘flow’ can also be better understood through rhizom-
atic rather than linear models. In seminar discussions, it has, for example,
often been the case that considering the treatment of sexuality in fan fic-
tion has provided the foundation for a far more nuanced reading of the
Holmes/Watson relationship in both the series and the original stories.
The series itself appears astute to this dynamic, as highlighted by Tom
Steward:

[Sherlock] suggests ambivalence towards the eroticization of the characters

that is simultaneously sceptical of and respectful towards the slash conven-
tions of fan fiction. The resultant ambiguity […] nods to and plays with fan
discourses of a homosexual subtext in fiction’s central partnership.14

This central ambivalence as to the status of the “canon” underlines the

sense of co-dependency between narrative forms, as the television series
plays up to fan mythology while also relying on it to ensure the “game” is
recognised, in a pattern that echoes the parallel relationship between the
series and the books.
To summarise then, the key objectives in teaching Sherlock on ‘Crime
and Punishment’ have been to disrupt possible common assumptions
about the privileging of original texts, chart the complexity and diversity
of the text’s variations, and encourage readings that take account of fan-
dom and cultural capital as well as literary precedent. However, far from
diminishing the role played by the original text, this focus on multiplicity
refreshes its significance, and ultimately facilitates a more active critical
approach.

The Big Sleep and Teaching Paratexts

This second case study turns the spotlight onto the 1946 Howard Hawks
adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s 1939 novel The Big Sleep, starring
Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Whereas the approach to teaching
136 S. HARRIS

Sherlock set out to disrupt an overly simplistic ‘compare and contrast’

analysis, here, the emphasis shifts again, and uses the film as a means to
consider historical contexts and consumerism. The Big Sleep has been
referred to as the “fullest, richest, most resonant” private eye film,15 and its
enduring reputation as a Hollywood classic makes it the perfect vehicle for
dissecting studio-era Hollywood culture. This section sets out the teach-
ing opportunities afforded by a focus on how the crime film can be read in
terms of both stardom and marketing, a methodology best articulated by
Deborah Cartmell:

Rather than simply comparing the film to the book, it can be more revealing
for students to read the paratexts as well, to compare the film to its promo-
tional materials, how these exploit or undermine literary pedigree, how they
translate the characters into ‘stars’, how they tease us with the promise of
our favourite film genres, such as romance, comedy and adventure, how
they speak to the tastes of a contemporary audience, and how they locate
themselves within a particular consumer culture.16

Here, my own teaching practice has benefitted immeasurably from the

resources at Exeter’s Bill Douglas Cinema Museum. The museum holds a
collection of over 75,000 items relating to film and the moving image,
from examples of early ‘Magic Lantern’ technology to contemporary pub-
licity material and press packs. Students on the “Crime and Punishment”
module have been able to spend a seminar in the archives, viewing items
such as a photocopy of the shooting script for The Big Sleep (including a
very different ending), or a ‘War Bond’ postcard of Bogart, at home with
a spaniel. While some items have an obvious relevance or value, others
seem more ephemeral, as explained by Lisa Stead:

Entering this kind of archive involves embarking on an investigation that

takes the researcher beyond a fixed notion of a singular ‘text’ to be researched
or discovered in film historiography, and into the material culture that both
surrounds and constitutes cinema history.17

The museum’s collection of movie magazines has provided a valuable

gateway into charting the impact of The Big Sleep. In a 1946 edition of
Picturegoer, an article ponders the rise of the “tough” heroine, announc-
ing that “the era when movie heroines had to be sweeter than a chocolate
sundae and wind up in the hero’s arms appears to have run its course”. The
Big Sleep is one of several examples of films in which “a star was given a
 TEACHING CRIME FICTION AND FILM 137

part of a pretty, bold and ruthless woman”.18 The contrast between this
‘ruthless woman’ and her ice-cream sweet predecessor is pronounced, and
as Helen Hanson has pointed out, the comparison comes out in favour of
the former: “Picturegoer, addressed to a predominately female fan com-
munity, confidently assumes the tough heroine has an exciting appeal to
women”.19 Beyond the articles that feature the film directly, the magazines
also include a wealth of features and advertisements that provide further
context in regard to 1940s’ beauty ideals, aspirations and commercialism.
The bookshop scene in The Big Sleep, which features beautiful Dorothy
Malone removing her dowdy glasses and releasing her tied-back hair
before enjoying a dalliance with Marlowe, acquires a curious dimension of
pathos when viewed alongside countless advertisements that promise the
perfect complexion/figure/smile. However, while these museum
resources are limited to local users, other forms of paratext could be more
universally incorporated into teaching the crime film.
Most obviously, The Big Sleep was marketed on the strength of Bogart
and Bacall’s on- and off-screen connection. They had starred together for
the first time in To Have and Have Not (Hawks 1944), and The Big Sleep
was intended to replicate that chemistry. This can be demonstrated in
seminars through a consideration of the publicity material. The original
film poster has the tagline “The picture they were born for!” and the
names ‘Bogart and Bacall’ are printed in block capitals, twice the height of
the lettering used for the film’s title. This is reiterated by the trailer, which
follows a clip of the couple kissing with an insistently enthusiastic caption
sequence “They’re together again! That man Bogart! And that woman
Bacall! Are that way again!” Studying these promotional paratexts helps to
contextualise the actors’ star profile as a couple, as well as explaining the
creation of new scenes, written to showcase their talent for flirtatious rep-
artee. The film trailer also strategically evokes intertextual connections.
Bogart starred as Sam Spade in the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon,
cornering the market in depictions of the hardboiled private eye, so that
the characters of Marlowe and Spade have arguably been “customarily
regarded as congeneric expressions of the homogenius screen presence we
have come to think of simply as ‘Bogie’”.20 This close association would
culminate in the 1980 parody The Man With Bogart’s Face, in which
Robert Sacchi plays “Sam Marlowe”. The trailer for The Big Sleep actually
pre-empts this hybridisation, beginning in the ‘Hollywood Public Library’
as Bogart explains to an attractive librarian that he is “looking for a good
mystery, something off the beaten track, like The Maltese Falcon”. She
138 S. HARRIS

presents a copy of The Big Sleep and promises it “has everything The Falcon
had and more”. The scene knowingly plays up the close affinity between
the texts, culminating with Bogart opening the book and drifting into a
voiceover: “Sometimes I wonder what strange fate brought me out of the
storm to that house that stood alone in the shadows”. The lines are not
taken from Chandler’s book, and voiceover is notably absent in the actual
film. Notable because, although the film is often labelled as ‘noir’ it lacks
many of the formal devices that define the genre: “the influence of German
expressionism is absent, there’s no hard-boiled narration, no angst-ridden
hero, no distorted camera angles, no nightmares, no ominous shadows,
no flashbacks”.21 Given this technical departure, the use of voiceover in
the trailer echoes Cartmell’s description of advertising that “tease[s] us
with the promise of our favourite film genres”, and takes on an arch qual-
ity that cuts through the banality of the dialogue.
In highlighting the value and teaching applications of paratextual mate-
rial and archive resources, this case study of The Big Sleep has identified
ways in which the discussion of crime film and fiction can be productively
opened out to include questions of stardom and cinema-going culture.
This allows for a better understanding of the audience as well as the film,
and calls attention to the strategies and emotions that direct the bond
between them.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Teaching

in Translation

Here, the chapter moves on to the burgeoning field of crime fiction and
film in translation. According to research commissioned by the
International Man Booker Prize in 2016, the total number of books in
translation purchased in the UK increased by 96 percent between 2001
and 2015, with the rising popularity of Scandinavian crime fiction widely
credited as a key factor in that rise. Waterstones fiction buyer Chris White
said that authors like Stieg Larsson and Jo Nesbo had “helped to break
down any psychological barriers or pre-conceptions which readers may
have had about translated fiction”.22 However, this focus on accessibility
risks neglecting the elements that can be lost in translation, as evidenced
in this final study of Stieg Larsson’s ‘breakout’ novel The Girl with the
Dragon Tattoo (published 2005, translated into English 2008) and its
Swedish adaptation, directed by Niels Arden Oplev in 2009.
 TEACHING CRIME FICTION AND FILM 139

Already, setting out the chronology of translation and adaptation sug-

gests that Barry Forshaw was right to identify the film as playing a key role
in the success of the English-language novel: “the Swedish trilogy of films
made from the novels of Stieg Larsson were an essential part of a battering
ram that pushed the author’s astonishing posthumous fame to such giddy
heights”.23 English readers who encountered the book in 2008 had only a
year to wait to see the characters on-screen, while those who watched the
film first were immediately able to access the novel. The timing was
undoubtedly mutually beneficial— the novel was listed by Nielsen as the
best-selling book of 2010, while the film was nominated for three BAFTAs
(winning ‘Best Film Not in the English Language’) and returned a global
gross worth of almost $105,000,000. The film also provides a way to cen-
tre the text’s Swedish identity. When reading the novel, it is perhaps more
possible to ‘switch off’ from the awareness that this is a text in translation,
but watching (and more importantly, listening to) the subtitled film pro-
vides a running reminder. Karen Seago has written persuasively of the ways
in which crime fiction in translation can be a site of instability, as “cross-
border movements, translations, interpretations and cross-fertilisations of
detective stories are particularly interesting and offer access to intercul-
tural and intracultural anxieties, cultural and social shifts and the emergent
construction of a popular literary form”.24 Including the film is then a way
of fostering instability, and troubling the imposition of complete transla-
tion. On a more pragmatic note, Swedish itself can sound wonderfully
strange to an audience of students who have (in my teaching experience)
never studied or spoken the language—this would be far less likely with a
film in French or German.
However, one does not need to be fluent to recognise that, almost
immediately, the process of translation has been editorial. The opening
credits culminate with the film’s title(s) displayed on the screen—“Män
som hatar kvinnor” / The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The film’s Swedish
title is that of the original book: “Men who hate women”. The rationale
for the name change has been widely critiqued. The Economist suggests it
was “considered too scary for foreign audiences”,25 while The New York
Times offers the more cutting explanation that it was too redolent of the
books’ issues with convincing characterisation, “a label that just about
captures the subtlety of the novel’s sexual politics […] nearly every man in
the book under age 70 is a violent misogynist”.26 Meanwhile, the visual
impact of the two titles together at the start of the film has attracted less
attention, although it delivers a jarring series of juxtapositions with
140 S. HARRIS

Swedish/English, Adulthood (‘Men’ and ‘Women’) / Infantilisation

(‘Girl’), and Brutality/Fantasy. These tensions and contrasts are more apt
to the text than they may appear. Forshaw has identified a central duality
to British perceptions of Scandinavian crime fiction, that pits the cliché of
“the unspoilt vastness of the fjords, gambolling reindeer and modern,
well-designed towns inhabited by blonde-haired, healthy types” against its
darker parallel of “long nights that […] present the perfect stage for sim-
mering familial resentments and violent dispatch’”.27 The gap between the
title and subtitle echoes this duality and helps deliver a sense of the uncanny
at work in each version of the text.
Despite the noted shortcomings of the English-language title, it does
direct the reader/viewer’s attention successfully towards Lisbeth Salander,
and the combination of Larsson’s character via Noomi Rapace’s critically
acclaimed performance has also provided plenty of teaching material. If
the art of Humphrey Bogart lies in convincing the viewer that Philip
Marlowe (and indeed Sam Spade) just happens to look exactly like
Humphrey Bogart, Rapace’s talent lies in the opposite direction, as the
actress disappears behind the character’s exaggerated image. Extending
the comparison to Benedict Cumberbatch’s socially detached interpreta-
tion of Sherlock offers further discussion material, for as the module pro-
gresses the actors increasingly emerge as another form of ‘text’ for analysis.
The placement of the three films in the syllabus—in weeks three, seven
and ten—also means that comparative discussions are ideally placed to
punctuate the module and provide the chance to check in on developing
ideas, as well as helping to disrupt the illusion of chronological progress.
After all, ‘The Hounds of Baskerville’ first aired three years later than the
film of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
The initial objectives in teaching The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo as fic-
tion and film were geared towards the value of translation, encouraging
students to look beyond British and American crime writing, and high-
lighting how an individual text can become (sometimes problematically)
emblematic of industry trends—be it a vogue for ‘Scandi-noir’ or for
books with the word “Girl” on the cover. In practice though, what has
also emerged as an equally valuable line of discussion has been the oppor-
tunity this affords for comparative analysis with other film texts. So while
the chapter has treated the crime film texts as separate ‘case studies’ in
order to clarify the different questions and objectives that they explore, in
the final analysis it is worth balancing this against the myriad ways in which
the texts can also complement and illuminate each other.
 TEACHING CRIME FICTION AND FILM 141

Student Responses
Over the course of the ‘Crime and Punishment’ module I worked with
around 190 students—some of whom were hardcore crime fiction devo-
tees, others who opted for the course on a more passing whim—and all of
whom informed the ongoing development of the option. In recognition
of their hard work and valued feedback, this chapter will conclude by
briefly flagging up some of the key points that they raised over the years.
The general response has been wonderfully positive, but there has been
room for improvement along the way. It was my first cohort of students
who really taught me to appreciate that they started the course with very
mixed levels of experience in film analysis. Some had already taken first and
second year options that introduced them to sequence analysis and techni-
cal vocabulary, and a sizeable number had also benefitted from a specialist
option in adaptation itself. Meanwhile, others had never analysed a film
before, and were understandably concerned that this could put them at a
disadvantage. Trying to balance their needs and interests particularly
shaped my approach to teaching Sherlock. The compact structure and dis-
tinctive style of the episode made it an accessible introduction to cinematic
close reading—the overt flourishes of the “memory palace” sequence
ensure that film novices can see the techniques in action, while expanding
the discussion out towards less official narrative strands provided a new
challenge for the confident. When the first crime film text on a syllabus
could also be the first film text that a student has ever encountered, it
needs to afford some flexibility. The question of resources when working
on contemporary popular culture was also an issue in the earlier years of
the course’s development. When the module launched, it was a particular
challenge to source scholarship on Sherlock and The Girl with the Dragon
Tattoo. The passage of time and the labour of fellow academics has changed
this situation dramatically, but the earlier demands of taking a more lateral
approach to research was in many ways a worthwhile learning experi-
ence,28 and proved beneficial to those students who went on to analyse
similarly contemporary texts in their final dissertations.
With that in mind, perhaps the best feedback to the presence of film on
the module has come in the form of the dozens of students who have
opted to build on this interest, and draw film and television texts from
outside the syllabus into their final research essays.29 This has included
examples of adaptation and original drama, as well as some particularly
strong work on alternative texts, such as graphic novels and video games.
142 S. HARRIS

This range of original material has in turn exposed further questions about
the borders of form and genre. I have enjoyed thought-provoking essays
on the construction of masculinity in Luther (2012–), on the politics of
appetite and consumption in Hannibal (2013–15), and on the ways in
which Rooney Mara’s wardrobe from the American remake of The Girl
with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) influenced high street fashion collections.
Teaching crime fiction and film has thus not only afforded me the chance
to draw research interests more directly into teaching, but to see that
become a process of dialogue as students take the teaching as the basis to
develop their own research interests. For the students, this has been an
opportunity to rethink their own experience as cultural consumers, and (as
noted) in many cases it has led on to shape their dissertation research, or
drive an interest in postgraduate study. For myself, it has been a chance to
not only continue expanding my reading list, but to hone research inter-
ests in new media. To end on a note of reflection, I do feel that the genu-
ine reciprocity the course delivered was directly facilitated through the
inclusion of film texts—that they made it simultaneously more accessible
and more complex—and that the value of this added dimension cannot be
underestimated when considering strategies and syllabuses for future
teaching in the genre.

Notes
1. Sherlock Holmes Baffled was directed by Arthur Marvin, but the names of
the two actors are not known, and for many years the film was believed
lost, until a copy was rediscovered in 1968.
2. Ariane Hudelet, “Avoiding ‘Compare and Contrast’: Applied Theory as a
Way to Circumvent the ‘Fidelity Issue”. Teaching Adaptations, eds.
Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan, (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014), p. 42.
3. N.J. Schweitzer and Michael J. Saks, “The CSI Effect: Popular fiction
about forensic science affects the public’s expectations about real forensic
science”, Jurimetrics, 47.3 (2007) 357–364.
4. Anon, “Sherlock Holmes awarded title for most portrayed literary human
character in film & TV”, Guinness World Records, 14 May 2012, http://
www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2012/5/sherlock-holmes-
awarded-title-for-most-por trayed-literar y-human-character-in-
film-tv-41743. Accessed 5 August 2016.
5. Albert Schinz “The Problem of the One-Year Literature Survey Course
Again”, The Modern Language Journal, 10.1 (1926) 345–348.
 TEACHING CRIME FICTION AND FILM 143

6. Kevin J. Wetmore Jr., “Adaptation: Review”, Theatre Journal, 66.4 (2014)

625–634.
7. Vanessa Thorpe, “Sherlock Holmes is back… sending texts and using nico-
tine patches”, The Guardian, 18 July 2010, https://www.theguardian.
com/tv-and-radio/2010/jul/18/sherlock-holmes-is-back-bbc. Accessed
5 August 2016.
8. Serena Davies, “Sherlock, BBC One, Review”, The Telegraph, 23 July 2010,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/7907566/
Sherlock-BBC-One-review.html. Accessed 5 August 2016.
9. Anne Midgette, “The Art of the Update”, The Washington Post, 10
September 2010 http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-classical-
beat/2010/09/the_art_of_the_update.html. Accessed 5 August 2016.
10. Neil McCraw, Adapting Detective Fiction: Crime, Englishness, and the TV
Detectives, (London: Continuum, 2011) p39.
11. John Teti, “Sherlock: ‘The Hounds of Baskerville’”, The AV Club, 13 May
2012, http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/sherlock-the-hounds-of-basker-
ville-73734. Accessed 5 August 2016.
12. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, (New York: Routledge, 2006) xi.
13. Betsy Rosenblatt, “Sherlock Holmes Fan Fiction”, The Baker Street
Journal, 62.4 (2012) 33–43.
14. Tom Steward, “Holmes in the Small Screen: The Television Contexts of
Sherlock”, Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom: Essays on the BBC Series, eds.
Louisa Ellen Stein and Kristina Busse (Jefferson: McFarland, 2012) p141.
15. James Monaco, “Notes on The Big Sleep, Thirty Years After”, Sight and
Sound 44.1 (1974) 34–38.
16. Deborah Cartmell, “Teaching Adaptation Through Marketing: Adaptations
and the Language of Advertising in the 1930s”, Teaching Adaptations,
eds. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan, (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014) p165.
17. Lisa Stead, “Letter Writing, Cinemagoing and Archive Ephemera”, The
Boundaries of the Literary Archive: Reclamation and Representation, eds.
Lisa Stead and Carrie Smith, (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013) p. 140.
18. Anon, “Will the Goody-Goody Heroine Survive?” Picturegoer, October
1946. The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum.
19. Helen Hanson, “The Big Seduction: Feminist Film Criticism and the
Femme Fatale”, The Femme Fatale: Images, Histories, Contexts, eds. Helen
Hanson and Catherine O’Rawe, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2010) p. 241.
20. Virginia Wright Wexman, “Kinesics and Film Acting: Humphrey Bogart in
The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon”, Journal of Popular Film and
Television, 7.1 (1978) 42–55.
144 S. HARRIS

21. Philip French, “The Big Sleep – Review”, The Guardian, 2 January 2011,
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/jan/02/the-big-sleep-
review. Accessed 5 August 2016.
22. Chris White qtd. in Alison Flood, “Translated fiction sells better in the UK
than English fiction, research finds”, The Guardian, 9 May 2016, https://
www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/09/translated-fiction-sells-
better-uk-english-fiction-elena-ferrante-haruki-murakami. Accessed 5
August 2016.
23. Barry Forshaw, Death in a Cold Climate: A Guide to Scandinavian Crime
Fiction, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 186.
24. Karen Seago, “Crime (fiction) in translation”, The Journal of Specialised
Translation, 22.1 (2014) 2–14.
25. T.W. “Translating film titles: It wasn’t the dragon tattoo”, The
Economist, 18 August 2010, http://www.economist.com/blogs/
johnson/2010/08/translating_film_titles. Accessed 5 August 2016.
26. Alex Berenson, “Vanished”, The New York Times, 14 September 2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/books/review/Berenson-t.
html. Accessed 5 August 2016.
27. Barry Forshaw, p9.
28. For more on this topic, see Rachel Carroll, “Coming Soon… Teaching the
Contemporaneous Adaptation”, Teaching Adaptations, eds. Deborah
Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
29. The course is assessed by a 2000-word critical analysis of a protagonist not
studied on the course, a 20-minute group presentation, and a 3000-word
final essay. The rubric for the presentation and the final essay asks that
students consider at least two texts, at least one of which must be from
the syllabus.

Works Cited
Anon. “Sherlock Holmes Awarded Title for Most Portrayed Literary Human
Character in Film & TV.” Guinness World Records, 14 May 2012, http://
www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2012/5/sherlock-holmes-awarded-
title-for-most-portrayed-literary-human-character-in-film-tv-41743. Accessed
5 August 2016.
Anon. “Will the Goody-Goody Heroine Survive?” Picturegoer, October 1946.
The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, Exeter.
Berenson, Alex. “Vanished.” The New York Times, 14 September 2008, http://
www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/books/review/Berenson-t.html. Accessed
5 August 2016.
 TEACHING CRIME FICTION AND FILM 145

Cartmell, Deborah. “Teaching Adaptation Through Marketing: Adaptations and

the Language of Advertising in the 1930s.” In Teaching Adaptations, edited by
Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan, 157–170. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014.
Davies, Serena. “Sherlock, BBC One, Review.” The Telegraph, 23 July 2010,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/7907566/Sherlock-
BBC-One-review.html. Accessed 5 August 2016.
Flood, Alison. “Translated Fiction Sells Better in the UK than English Fiction,
Research Finds.” The Guardian, 9 May 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/
books/2016/may/09/translated-fiction-sells-better-uk-english-fiction-elena-
ferrante-haruki-murakami. Accessed 5 August 2016.
Forshaw, Barry. Death in a Cold Climate: A Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
French, Philip. “The Big Sleep – Review.” The Guardian, 2 January 2011, https://
www.theguardian.com/film/2011/jan/02/the-big-sleep-review. Accessed 5
August 2016.
Hanson, Helen. “The Big Seduction: Feminist Film Criticism and the Femme
Fatale.” In The Femme Fatale: Images, Histories, Contexts, edited by Helen
Hanson and Catherine O’Rawe, 214–228. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2010.
Hudelet, Ariane. “Avoiding ‘Compare and Contrast’: Applied Theory as a Way to
Circumvent the ‘Fidelity Issue’.” In Teaching Adaptations, edited by Deborah
Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan, 41–55. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006.
McCraw, Neil. Adapting Detective Fiction: Crime, Englishness, and the TV
Detectives. London: Continuum, 2011.
Midgette, Anne. “The Art of the Update.” The Washington Post, 10 September
2010, http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-classical-beat/2010/09/the_
art_of_the_update.html. Accessed 5 August 2016.
Monaco, James. “Notes on The Big Sleep, Thirty Years After.” Sight and Sound,
44.1 (1974) 34–38.
Rosenblatt, Betsy. “Sherlock Holmes Fan Fiction.” The Baker Street Journal, 62.4
(2012) 33–43.
Schinz, Albert. “The Problem of the One-Year Literature Survey Course Again.”
The Modern Language Journal, 10.1 (1926) 345–348.
Schweitzer, N.J. and Michael J. Saks. “The CSI Effect: Popular Fiction About
Forensic Science Affects the Public’s Expectations About Real Forensic
Science.” Jurimetrics, 47.3 (2007) 357–364.
Seago, Karen. “Crime (Fiction) in Translation.” The Journal of Specialised
Translation, 22.1 (2014) 2–14.
Stead, Lisa. “Letter Writing, Cinemagoing and Archive Ephemera.” In The
Boundaries of the Literary Archive: Reclamation and Representation, edited by
Lisa Stead and Carrie Smith, 139–156. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013.
146 S. HARRIS

Steward, Tom. “Holmes in the Small Screen: The Television Contexts of Sherlock.”
In Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom: Essays on the BBC Series, edited by Louisa
Ellen Stein and Kristina Busse, 133–148. Jefferson: McFarland, 2012.
Teti, John. “Sherlock: ‘The Hounds of Baskerville’.” The AV Club, 13 May 2012,
http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/sherlock-the-hounds-of-baskerville-73734.
Accessed 5 August 2016.
Thorpe, Vanessa. “Sherlock Holmes Is Back… Sending Texts and Using
Nicotine Patches.” The Guardian, 18 July 2010, https://www.theguardian.
com/tv-and-radio/2010/jul/18/sherlock-holmes-is-back-bbc. Accessed 5
August 2016.
T.W. “Translating Film Titles: It Wasn’t the Dragon Tattoo.” The Economist,
18 August 2010, http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2010/08/
translating_film_titles. Accessed 5 August 2016.
Wetmore, Kevin J. “Adaptation: Review.” Theatre Journal, 66.4 (2014) 625–634.
Wexman, Virginia Wright. “Kinesics and Film Acting: Humphrey Bogart in The
Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon.” Journal of Popular Film and Television,
7.1 (1978) 42–55.
 CHAPTER 10

Crime Writing: Language and Stylistics

Christiana Gregoriou

Introduction
Crime fiction is undoubtedly a persistently thriving and popular genre.
Mirroring this interest, English language and literature students remain
keen to explore this genre and its continuing popularity, whether coming
to the genre as reading fans, as aspiring crime fiction writers in their own
right, or as eager analysts of its generic form and structure. This chapter
proposes a stylistic approach to crime fiction, stylistics being “the practice
of using linguistics for the study of literature”,1 and one that requires
knowledge of the workings of language alongside an interest in literary
genres and their effects and conventions. Stylistic methodology and the-
ory prove particularly suitable when it comes to unpacking this genre’s
techniques, hence offering students an insight into the mechanisms con-
tributing to crime fiction remaining a genre with popular appeal. This
chapter starts with an exploration of the plot and discourse distinction
through which students could begin to explore crime fictional story struc-
ture, before then delving into Emmott’s frame theory,2 which can shed
light on the ways in which crime texts (mis)direct readers. It then turns to
considering the importance of narrative style and viewpoint choice in rela-
tion to characterisation and reader sympathy. Ryan’s possible world theory

C. Gregoriou (*)
Leeds University, Leeds, UK
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2018 147

C. Beyer (ed.), Teaching Crime Fiction, Teaching the New English,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90608-9_10
148 C. GREGORIOU

is subsequently introduced,3 the ways in which it can also shed light on

crime fiction narrative structure discussed. In doing so, I discuss the typi-
cal crime fiction effect of suspense, before lastly focusing on linguistic
tools with which such suspense can also be generated. It is whilst practis-
ing using such crime fiction-related stylistic techniques, that students’
understanding of this genre’s very workings can be deepened.

Plot and Discourse

The term ‘plot’ is generally understood to refer to the sequence of
chronologically-­ ordered events which generate a narrative, with ‘dis-
course’ encompassing the manner or order through which the plot is nar-
rated, the latter often disrupting the basic chronology of a story.4 In short,
plot is the logical ordering possible of events, with discourse being the
order in which the events are actually narrated by the story teller. In simple
story-telling, such as children’s literature, the two tend to coincide.
However, as argued in Gregoriou,5

the ‘plot’ of crime stories usually does not coincide with the ‘discourse’, and
the effect of this generic convention is important. The pleasure of reading
prototypical crime fiction (where the actual discourse starts post-death)
depends on being unfamiliar with the actual plot throughout; knowing all
of what has happened in chronological order would eliminate the element
of surprise. This pleasure of delayed recognition at the end is in fact where
the largest attraction of the genre lies.

Here are the bare bones of a three-character short story that can be used
to illustrate this, and one inspired by the Turkish crime film Once Upon a
Time in Anatolia (directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan in 2011). For ease of
reference, the story events are numbered as well as given in chronological
order. To enable student engagement, copies of the story could be printed,
and cut up into ten strip-events. Students could work in groups of two or
three, each group being given a single story copy, and hence a single ten-­
strip set to play with:

Event 1: In 1998, Walter marries Jessica.

Event 2: In June 2001, Jessica starts an affair with Walter’s friend, Ben.
Event 3: In late 2001, Jessica gets pregnant.
Event 4: In 2002, Jessica gives birth to a baby boy.
 CRIME WRITING: LANGUAGE AND STYLISTICS 149

Event 5: On 4 March 2004 (8:50 pm), Ben admits the affair and
claims the boy is his.
Event 6: On 4 March 2004 (9 pm), the men fight and Ben fatally
injures Walter.
Event 7: On 5 March 2004, Walter dies from injuries.
Event 8: On 6 March 2004, Jessica reports Walter missing.
Event 9: On 7 March 2004, the police discover Walter’s body.
Event 10: On 8 March 2004, the police start investigating Walter’s
murder.

As crime fictional stories go, one could argue that this story is not terribly
engaging, particularly if one arranges, and reads, the story-strip in plot
(i.e. ‘chronological’) order. If one puts events in this logical sequence,
they get to miss any sort of revelation at the story’s end—it is all too pre-
dictable. In short, it is no good knowing what happened in the order in
which it happened, not less being given the crime fictional story motive at
the narrative’s start, and there is no whodunit to offer an answer for.
Students could here be asked to consider what sort of discourse (i.e. ‘nar-
rative design’) would instead work best, the paper pieces rearranged
accordingly to experiment with. Leaving out the reference to the affair
(event 2), or Ben’s admitting of the affair (event 5), and his injuring Walter
(event 6), until the story’s end would be more whodunit crime
fiction-appropriate:

Event 1: In 1998, Walter marries Jessica.

Event 3: In late 2001, Jessica gets pregnant.
Event 4: In 2002, Jessica gives birth to a baby boy.
Event 7: On 5 March 2004, Walter dies from injuries.
Event 8: On 6 March 2004, Jessica reports Walter missing.
Event 9: On 7 March 2004, the police discover Walter’s body.
Event 10: On 8 March 2004, the police start investigating Walter’s
murder.

And then, readers discover:

Event 2: In June 2001, Jessica starts an affair with Walter’s friend, Ben.
Event 5: On 4 March 2004 (8:50 pm), Ben admits the affair and
claims the boy is his.
Event 6: On 4 March 2004 (9 pm), the men fight and Ben fatally
injures Walter.
150 C. GREGORIOU

Following this revised event-ordering, the reader comes to interpret the

reference to the boy differently. Assuming a stereotypical child-bearing
context, where Jess has a baby with someone readers assume, or are aware,
she was having sex with, the reader would now assume that the boy was
Walter’s son rather than either of the two men’s, and references to the boy
could be read as clues to the solving of the narrative whodunit. Students
could be asked to explore the order in which story events could potentially
be related to the reader, suggesting possible strip reorderings, and hence
asked to ponder the extent to which suspense-generation, surprise and
misreading are related to each strip reordering. It is crime fiction whodun-
its not being written in chronological order that enables plot twists, story-­
rethinking and retrospective identification of story clues. The next section
also explores misreadings, but this time through a theory revolving around
what are known as story ‘frames’.

Frames
Emmott distinguishes between two sorts of information that story readers
absorb about characters and scenes: ‘episodic’, information she argues is
likely to change in the course of the narrative, with ‘non-episodic’ being
the information that remains unchanged.6 Borrowing and yet adapting
these terms for a crime fictional context, I instead define ‘episodic’ as that
information which proves immediately relevant to a crime fictional story-
line, with ‘non-episodic’ being that information which does not to prove
so, regardless of whether the information in question is true elsewhere, or
indeed throughout the text.
Background information to do with one having children, for instance,
might not initially be thought of as hugely relevant to the solving of the
crime fictional narrative storyline above, and hence classified in this sense
as non-episodic. Misclassifying information into the episodic and non-­
episodic categories is where much of the effectiveness of crime fiction lies.
Red-herrings lead readers to classify non-episodic information episodi-
cally, as here defined. In other words, red-herrings lead readers to read
something unimportant to the crime problem solving as if it were indeed
important. Classifying episodic information non-episodically, on the other
hand, is also an effective mechanism. Here, readers are misled into
­considering important information relating to certain characters as initially
non-­pertinent to the crime, only to later find out that this indeed func-
tioned as a clue which was meant to be altogether left unnoticed at the
 CRIME WRITING: LANGUAGE AND STYLISTICS 151

start. Return to the reordering 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 2, 5 and 6. Leaving out

the reference to Jessica and Ben’s affair (event 2), or Ben’s admitting of
the affair (event 5), and his injuring Walter (event 6) until the story’s end
could force the reader to reclassify their original understanding of Walter’s
child as potentially Ben’s instead, which would also show that the refer-
ence to Jessica having a son needed classifying as episodic, i.e. crime-per-
tinent, after all. Emmott uses the term ‘frame repair’ to refer to instances
where “a reader becomes aware that they have misread the text either
through lack of attention or because the text itself is potentially ambigu-
ous”.7 What the reader faces in this reordering is what Emmott refers to as
‘miscuing’ of the signals needed in order to understand the episodic infor-
mation offered, with repairs forcing readers to not only replace the ‘erro-
neous’ frame when they discover the problem, but to also reread or
reinterpret the text with the ‘correct’ frame from the point at which the
switch should have taken place.8 In short, this reordering forces readers to
reinterpret the reference to Jessica’s child when they are made aware of her
affair. Repairs over a whole stretch of text, and those indeed across the
whole of the text, can be thought of as frame ‘replacements’ instead; the
frames require such large-scale fixing, that the reader might as well reread/
replace them from scratch. Students could engage with crime fictional
storyline analysis, considering the misclassification of information that
particular readings enable alongside the kinds of repairs/replacements to
the relevant frames needed. (On the use of character under-specification
for manipulative rhetorical purposes, writer garden path strategising,
reader assumption-making in relation to character plot status, and the stra-
tegic backgrounding of characters in relation to scenario-dependent roles,
see Alexander9; Emmott and Alexander10; Emmott, Sanford and
Alexander11; and see also Emmott and Sanford.12) Crime fiction frame
analysis allows students to track their narrative comprehension, appreciate
the crime fiction formula and gain insights into generic effects. The next
section considers the generation of suspense, which can also relate to
misreadings.

Narration and Viewpoint

There are important narrative choices authors make when telling a crime
fictional story, over and beyond the order in which events are reader-­
related, and the information misclassification or misreadings that such a
choice can generate. Going back to the narrative given above, a writer
152 C. GREGORIOU

could opt to give it in the first person, with a character-narrator telling

their own story, perhaps even unreliably so. Alternatively, the story could
be told in the third person, and at a little distance, with the narrator being
distinguishable from the character whose story is being shared. With this
latter choice, a further distinction that needs to be made is that between
the events being narrated either internally or externally: “Internal narra-
tive is mediated through the subjective viewpoint of a particular charac-
ter’s consciousness, whilst in an external narrative events are described
outside the consciousness of any participating character”.13 Where events
are narrated internally, readers have access to one or more characters’
viewpoint. Among other things, linguistic indicators of point of view
include evaluative lexis, that is, as to something being ‘awful’, any expres-
sions of certainty/uncertainty, with verbs used such as ‘must’ and ‘might’
and adverbs such as ‘probably’, and indicators of characters’ thoughts and
perceptions. Such viewpoint can be spatio-temporal, that is, as to some-
thing being ‘here’ or ‘there’, perceptual, with verbs used such as ‘saw’ or
ideological, such as the earlier reference to something being ‘awful’.
Short’s viewpoint stylistic toolkit offers a list of such linguistic features
which can be checked against any single text, enabling students to pin-
point whose viewpoint a text portrays and whether any viewpoint shifts
occur.14 Whereas first person narration is, by definition, internal, and
allows access to the consciousness of the character-narrator to which it is
limited, third person narration can be either internal or external. Third
person external narration denies readers such access to character minds,
access that would allow readers to sympathise with the characters in ques-
tion. Students could be asked to ponder over these choices. If one was to
realise the above story in whichever event order via the prose fiction
medium, what would the effect be if events were narrated from one char-
acter perspective as opposed to another, or indeed several such perspec-
tives? Would Ben’s version of events be read differently from Jessica’s, for
instance? And what kind of effect does access to character consciousness
and viewpoint allow? Would giving the story from Ben’s point of view
perhaps allow him to redeem himself as to Walter’s residual death?
Through such examination, students can begin to appreciate the ways in
which choice of narrative style tends to influence the reader’s reaction and
judgement over the events described. Viewpoint access also affects charac-
terisation. Access to character consciousness can add to characterisation
impression, and related reader assumptions, not less affect where reader
sympathy lies. Students could be asked to return to crime fictional narra-
 CRIME WRITING: LANGUAGE AND STYLISTICS 153

tives and explore their narrative style, and viewpoint-related choices, even
engaging in the rewriting of certain extracts from alternative character
perspectives before commenting on the revised story’s effect. In so doing,
students gain insights as to the ways in which the type of narration an
author employs (first as opposed to third, internal as opposed to external,
from one participating character’s perspective as opposed to that of
another character or several other characters) affects their sympathy
towards the story characters.

Possible Worlds
I next turn to explore ‘possible worlds’ theory, associated with the work of
narratologist Marie-Laure Ryan. Possible worlds, though originally associ-
ated with the disciplines of philosophy and logic, have come to find their
way to the literary and even linguistic analyses of fictional text. Possible
worlds are here defined metaphorically as ‘conceivable states of affairs’,
and the actual or real world, in which the reader is presently reading this
text about theory and crime writing, is only one of a multitude of possible
ones. Fictional worlds are worlds within the universe projected by the
text’s storyline. When it comes to fiction, possible worlds include what is
called the fiction’s actual world (what actually takes place/what happens
in the stories we read), but also various ‘versions’ of this fictional world,
many of which are private to characters/character-specific. Ryan describes
fictional possible worlds as different versions of the fictional world,
otherwise known as the ‘Text actual world’ or TAW.15 The TAW may
or may not correspond to what characters believe to be true, known as
‘Knowledge worlds’, what characters speculate, anticipate or hypothesise
about, known as ‘Prospective Extensions of Knowledge worlds’, charac-
ters’ plans/‘Intention worlds’, moral commitments/‘Obligation worlds’,
wishes/‘Wish worlds’, and fantasies/‘Fantasy Universes’. The below is the
opening from Hawkins’ crime novel The Girl on the Train16:

RACHEL
Friday, 5 July 2013
Morning
There is a pile of clothing on the side of the train tracks. Light-blue
cloth – a shirt, perhaps, jumbled up with something dirty white. It’s prob-
ably rubbish, part of a load fly-tipped into the scrubby little wood up the
154 C. GREGORIOU

bank. It could have been left behind by the engineers who work this part of
the track, they’re here often enough. Or it could be something else. My
mother used to tell me that I had an overactive imagination; Tom said that
too. I can’t help it, I catch sight of these discarded scraps, a dirty T-shirt or
a lonesome shoe, and all I can think of is the other shoe, and the feet that
fitted into them.

The extract takes the form of first person narration, with the events medi-
ated through character Rachel’s consciousness, which allows readers access
to what she is looking at and presuming about in a rather privileged way.
In possible theory terms though, the scene could be described in terms of
Rachel formulating speculation/‘Prospective Extensions of Knowledge’
worlds in relation to the TAW’s pile of clothes that take focus; in short, she
forms a number of hypotheses as to where the clothes have come from. As
Ryan argues,17 for there to be symmetry, balance or stability, there needs
to be perfect correspondence between the TAW and all possible worlds in
the fictional universe. In other words, if, for instance, everyone is content,
with knowledge shared and wishes fulfilled, the characters are all in a state
of bliss. Having said that, Ryan argues that a conflict between these sorts
of worlds is necessary to get a plot started. Conflicts could take many
forms. We could have the TAW clash with a character’s private world, or
clashes between different characters’ private worlds, or internal conflict
across one character’s private worlds. Without such conflicts, there would
be no need for action. And without any need for action, we would have no
plot. It is for this reason that readers often encounter narrative plots where
characters want who or what they have not got, a conflict between the
TAW and their wish world, or face moral dilemmas in their course of
actions, a conflict between their obligation world and their intention
world perhaps, or where different characters’ expectations/‘speculative
extensions’ clash, or where individual character knowledge and plans dif-
fer in some way. Readers can encounter several such conflicts taking place
simultaneously, all of which are created and resolved at different times.
Even more so, various fantasy novels, science fiction narratives and fairy
tales are surrounded by phenomena that oppose our natural laws and
therefore the TAW by definition is in conflict with the real world the read-
ers inhabit. To return to the Walter and Jessica crime fictional story above,
there is a conflict between the TAW and Jessica’s obligation world; in hav-
ing an affair, she is doing what she is not supposed to. Also, for the vast
majority of that story, there is also a conflict between the TAW in which
 CRIME WRITING: LANGUAGE AND STYLISTICS 155

Jessica is having the affair, and Walter’s knowledge world in which he

remains unaware of the affair. This conflict does not get resolved until
event 5 (the story’s 4 March 2004 8:50 pm), when Ben admits the affair
and claims that Jessica’s boy is, in fact, his. Assuming that Jessica is indeed
unaware of Walter’s whereabouts until 6 March, which is why she reports
him missing then (event 8), there is yet one more conflict between the
TAW, in which Walter is dead, and Jessica’s knowledge world, where she
lacks this knowledge. It is not until the police discover Walter’s body
(event 9) that this conflict is resolved. The start of the police’s investiga-
tion into Walter’s murder (event 10) marks the start of yet another con-
flict. The police are unaware as to who killed Walter, there being a conflict
between the knowledge world of, say, Ben, who is aware of the fight that
took place, and the police’s knowledge world, as they are not aware of this
altercation. Presumably the story would come to a close once all knowl-
edge is shared, with everyone knowing all there is to know.
Whodunit crime novels very often offer such conflicts between detec-
tives’ wish world or obligation/intention world with respect to finding
out who the killer is, and the TAW within which the identity of the killer
is yet unknown by most characters, apart from most often just the killer
him/herself. A lot of hypotheses and speculations are drawn from various
members of the investigative team which conflict with the TAW until one
of those speculations about someone’s possible guilty status comes to
match it, and at which point the whodunit problem is resolved. Crime
fictional storylines also tend to feature conflicts between the killer’s knowl-
edge world and the investigative team’s different knowledge world/s,
until the two sets of worlds come to match; only then is knowledge shared.
Again, students could engage with crime fictional storyline analysis,
inspecting what possible world conflicts crime writers are creating and
resolving at various points, and considering the extent to which given
story endings leave any such conflicts unresolved. In Hawkins’ The Girl on
the Train, for instance, Rachel’s questions over the clothes pile remain
unanswered by the novel’s end, hence the episodic classification of the
clothes at first read later needing rethinking along non-episodic, unim-
portant terms. Rachel’s later questions regarding who killed the character
of Megan indeed come to be answered, though. As she suffered a black-­
out the night Megan disappeared, Rachel hypothesises whether she herself
killed Megan in an alcoholic rage, a hypothesis that turns out to not coin-
cide with the TAW as she proves innocent of murder. Major unresolved
possible world conflicts tend to generate open ended rather than closed
156 C. GREGORIOU

narratives; after all, possible world conflicts generate suspense. Students

engaging in possible world theory analysis can come to appreciate how
various world conflicts generate reader expectations, drive plots and affect
their reactions to the unfolding storyline.
Consider the opening of Bill Robertson’s crime flash fiction “Tomorrow
has been cancelled” below,18 featuring two men about to come together in
a violent confrontation because of their presumably illegal dealings. I
numbered its sentences for ease of reference:

(1) The rain pelted down, plastering the streets in furious torrents. (2)
Nicolson could feel the cold water soaking through his socks as he tried to
walk faster. (3) He could see Jarrett just ahead. (4) The man was walking
stooped over, collar turned up against the downpour oblivious to the fact
that he was being followed. (5) Nicolson increased his pace to draw closer
and reached inside his jacket to pull out his gun.

These five sentences relate the events in the third person, and all from
Nicolson’s viewpoint; readers encounter references to him feeling things
(i.e. the cold water), and seeing things (i.e. Jarrett). Though Jarrett seems
oblivious to the fact that he is being followed, this could well be read as an
assumption on Nicolson’s part. There is hence a possible world theory
conflict in terms of Nicolson’s expectation world, that is, his speculation
of Jarrett being oblivious to his presence, and Jarrett’s knowledge world,
where he might not be so. If readers understand Jarrett to be oblivious to
the fact that he is being followed, then the sentences also reveal a conflict
between Jarrett’s knowledge world, in which he is walking in the streets
alone, and the TAW, in which he is followed. Also, in readers being made
aware of Nicolson pulling out a gun, there appears to be another conflict:
between Nicolson’s intention world, where he appears to be wanting to
threaten, harm or get something from Jarrett, and the TAW where he is
yet to do so. Readers read on to discover whether Jarrett is made aware of
Nicolson following him, and of the latter’s intention world, but also
whether Nicolson’s intention in relation to Jarrett is realised. Readers as
yet do not have access to enough knowledge with which to fully interpret
the scene, and it is through engaging in possible world theory analysis that
they can begin to explain this scene’s ambiguity. Though the narrative
gives readers access to Nicolson’s perspective, these opening lines are sus-
penseful; readers are as yet unaware as to whether the two men know each
other—though the reference to ‘Jarrett’ by name suggests that Nicolson
 CRIME WRITING: LANGUAGE AND STYLISTICS 157

knows him—and what exactly it is that Nicolson wants. This chapter’s last
section lists further effective tools for such suspense, this time with a closer
focus on language.

Language and Suspense

Unlike anaphoric references, which are explained by going back to what
was said earlier in the text, cataphoric references make the reader wait for
an explanation of references still to come, hence these, too, generating
suspense. It is for this reason that cataphora’s forward-pointing helps
shape the viewers’ scope of expectation.19 Let us return to the flash fiction
opening, this time reordering the piece’s sentences as such:

(1) The rain pelted down, plastering the streets in furious torrents. (4) The
man was walking stooped over, collar turned up against the downpour
oblivious to the fact that he was being followed. (5) Nicolson increased his
pace to draw closer and reached inside his jacket to pull out his gun. (2)
Nicolson could feel the cold water soaking through his socks as he tried to
walk faster. (3) He could see Jarrett just ahead.

Compared to the original piece’s opening, which reveals Jarrett’s identity

on sentence 3, the above reordered sequencing generates an air of sus-
pense regarding who Nicolson is following. Besides, Jarrett’s name is not
given until in the sentence here ordered last. According to this alternative
sequencing, the 4th sentence’s ‘the man’ and ‘he’, here ordered 2nd, are
cataphoric: these pose a question (i.e. who is being followed?), the answer
to which is delayed.
Grammatical structures can also be revealing in terms of what is known
as transitivity. As Mayr notes,20 “[t]he idea behind analysing Transitivity is
to explore what social, cultural, ideological and political factors determine
what Process type (verb) is chosen in a particular type of discourse”. She
adds that “[r]elations of power may be implicitly inscribed by the relation-
ship between Actor and Goal”. To exemplify, active material processes (of
the ‘X stabbed Y’ kind) can be reformulated into passive voice structures
(of the ‘Y was stabbed [by X]’ kind), the suppletion of agentless passives
by intransitive clauses (of the ‘Y died’ kind), and nominalisations—the
turning of verb processes into noun phrases which background the process
to its product (of the ‘The stabbing proved fatal’ kind). To return to the
above sentence reordering, further to this sequencing’s ‘the man’
158 C. GREGORIOU

cataphorically making the reader wait for a later disclosure of who ‘the
man’ that is being followed actually is, the agentless passive (‘he was being
followed’—the clause is in the passive voice with the agent deleted) simi-
larly disguises for the duration of the sentence who, and indeed how many,
are doing the following, not to mention whether the follower knows ‘the
man’ or not (which, given the access to Nicolson’s viewpoint later on
would have been revealed with reference to the other as ‘Jarrett’). Lastly,
the extract’s rain is itself interpretable. Further to being detrimental to
both men’s vision, and hence adding drama, references to it are ripe with
metaphor. The rain ‘pelt[s] down’ with ‘furious torrent’ which draws on
pathetic fallacy, metaphorically alluding to Nicolson’s fury and pending
violence, whilst references to the water as ‘cold’ also suggest the man’s
own coldness/ruthlessness. A close understanding and analysis of lan-
guage, and in this case grammar, would allow students to not only inves-
tigate the text’s suspenseful effect but, importantly, inspect the precise
mechanism behind it. Literary linguistic insight allows students to begin
to appreciate the workings of such ever fascinating crime fiction texts,
illuminating not only students’ understanding of these texts, but offering
students creative writing ideas whilst deepening their genre appreciation.

Conclusion
Much like crime fiction itself, the discipline of stylistics continues to thrive.
In transforming crime fictional texts into accounts of their experience, into
events that happen, and which the readers actively participate in, stylistics
offers genre students an invaluable toolkit. Whether exploring event-­
ordering, textual frame- and world-construction, viewpoint or suspense-­
generating linguistic choices, the techniques on offer would allow students
to access, observe and respond to these literary experiences, hence enrich-
ing understanding of the mechanisms of a much loved, but also now
newly-understood, genre.

Notes
1. Paul Simpson. Language, Ideology and Point of View (London: Routledge,
1993), 3.
2. Catherine Emmott. Narrative Comprehension: A Discourse Perspective.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
 CRIME WRITING: LANGUAGE AND STYLISTICS 159

3. Marie Laure Ryan. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative

Theory. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991a);
Marie Laure Ryan. “Possible Worlds and Accessibility relations: a seman-
tics typology of fiction”, Poetics Today 12 (3) (1991b): 553–76; and
Marie Laure Ryan. “The Text as World Versus the Text as Game: Possible
Worlds Semantics and Postmodern Theory”, Journal of Literary Semantics
27 (3) (1998): 137–63.
4. Paul Simpson and Martin Montgomery. “Language, Literature and Film”,
In Twentieth Century Fiction: from Text to Context, edited by Peter Verdonk
and Jean Jacques Weber, 138–64. (London: Routledge, 1995), 141;
William Labov, “Uncovering the event structure of narrative”, In
Georgetown University Round Table on languages and Linguistics 2001,
edited by Deborah Tannen and James E. Alatis, 63–83, (Washington DC:
Georgetown University Press, 2001).
5. Christiana Gregoriou. English Literary Stylistics. (Basingstoke: Palgrave,
2009), 99.
6. Emmott, Narrative Comprehension, 122.
7. Emmott, Narrative Comprehension, 225.
8. Emmott, Narrative Comprehension, 160.
9. Marc Alexander. “The Lobster and the Maid: Scenario-dependence and
reader manipulation in Agatha Christie”, Online Proceedings of the Annual
Conference of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA), 2008,
accessed April 24, 2017, http://www.pala.ac.uk/uploads/2/5/1/0/
25105678/alexander2008.pdf.
10. Catherine Emmott and Marc Alexander. 2010. “Detective Fiction, Plot
Construction, and Reader Manipulation: Rhetorical Control and Cognitive
Misdirection in Agatha Christie’s Sparkling Cyanide”, In Language and
Style: In Honour of Mick Short, edited by Dan McIntyre and Beatrix Busse,
328–46. (Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
11. Catherine Emmott, Anthony J. Sanford and Marc Alexander. “Scenarios,
Characters’ Roles and Plot Status: Readers’ Assumptions and Writers’
Manipulations of Assumptions in Narrative Texts”, In Characters in
Fictional Worlds: Understanding Imaginary Beings in Literature, Film and
Other Media, edited by Jens Eder, Fotis Jannidis, and Ralf Schneider, 377–
99. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010).
12. Catherine Emmott and Anthony J. Sanford. Mind, Brain and Narrative.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
13. Paul Simpson. Language, Ideology and Point of View. (London: Routledge,
1993), 39.
14. Mick Short. Exploring the language of Poems, Plays and Prose. (London:
Longman, 1996).
15. Ryan (1991a, 87).
160 C. GREGORIOU

16. Paula Hawkins. The Girl on the Train. (London: Random House, 2015).
17. Ryan. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory, 20.
18. Bill Robertson, “Tomorrow has been cancelled”, Black and White World,
8 September 2012, accessed 24 April 2017, https://billrobertson55.
wordpress.com/2012/09/08/tomorrow-has-been-cancelled/.
19. Hans J. Wulff, “Suspense and the influence of Cataphora on Viewers’
Expectations”, In Suspense: Conceptualisations, Theoretical Analyses and
Empirical Explorations, edited by Peter Vorderer, Hans J. Wulff and Mike
Friedrichsen, 1–18, (New York: Routledge, 2009), 2.
20. Andrea Mayr, Language and Power: an introduction to institutional dis-
course. (London: Continuum, 2008), 18.

Works Cited
Alexander, Marc. “The Lobster and the Maid: Scenario-Dependence and Reader
Manipulation in Agatha Christie.” In Online Proceedings of the Annual
Conference of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA), 2008, Accessed
24 April 2017, http://www.pala.ac.uk/uploads/2/5/1/0/25105678/
alexander2008.pdf.
Emmott, Catherine. Narrative Comprehension: A Discourse Perspective. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1997.
Emmott, Catherine and Alexander, Marc. “Detective Fiction, Plot Construction,
and Reader Manipulation: Rhetorical Control and Cognitive Misdirection in
Agatha Christie’s Sparkling Cyanide.” In Language and Style: In Honour of
Mick Short, edited by Dan McIntyre and Beatrix Busse, 328–46. Houndmills:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Emmott, Catherine, Sanford, Anthony J. and Alexander, Marc. “Scenarios,
Characters’ Roles and Plot Status: Readers’ Assumptions and Writers’
Manipulations of Assumptions in Narrative Texts.” In Characters in Fictional
Worlds: Understanding Imaginary Beings in Literature, Film and Other Media,
edited by Jens Eder, Fotis Jannidis, and Ralf Schneider, 377–99. Berlin: Walter
de Gruyter, 2010.
Emmott, Catherine and Sanford, Anthony J. Mind, Brain and Narrative.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Gregoriou, Christiana. English Literary Stylistics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2009.
Hawkins, Paula. The Girl on the Train. London: Random House, 2015.
Labov, William.“Uncovering the Event Structure of Narrative.” In Georgetown
University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 2001, edited by Deborah
Tannen and James E. Alatis, 63–83. Washington, DC: Georgetown University
Press, 2001.
 CRIME WRITING: LANGUAGE AND STYLISTICS 161

Mayr, Andrea. Language and Power: An Introduction to Institutional Discourse.

London: Continuum, 2008.
Robertson, Bill. “Tomorrow Has Been Cancelled.” Black and White World,
September 8, 2012, Accessed 24 April 2017, https://billrobertson55.word-
press.com/2012/09/08/tomorrow-has-been-cancelled/.
Ryan, Marie Laure. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory.
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991a.
Ryan, Marie Laure. “Possible Worlds and Accessibility Relations: A Semantics
Typology of Fiction.” Poetics Today 12 (3) (1991b): 553–76.
Ryan, Marie Laure. “The Text as World Versus the Text as Game: Possible Worlds
Semantics and Postmodern Theory.” Journal of Literary Semantics 27 (3)
(1998): 137–63.
Short, Mick. Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose. London: Longman,
1996.
Simpson, Paul. Language, Ideology and Point of View. London: Routledge, 1993.
Simpson, Paul and Montgomery, Martin. “Language, Literature and Film.” In
Twentieth Century Fiction: From Text to Context, edited by Peter Verdonk and
Jean Jacques Weber, 138–64. London: Routledge, 1995.
Wulff, Hans J. “Suspense and the Influence of Cataphora on Viewers’ Expectations.”
In Suspense: Conceptualisations, Theoretical Analyses and Empirical Explorations,
edited by Peter Vorderer, Hans J. Wulff and Mike Friedrichsen, 1–18.
New York: Routledge, 2009.
 CHAPTER 11

The Crime Novelist as Educator: Towards

a Fuller Understanding of Crime Fiction

Paul Johnston

The popularity of both crime fiction and creative writing as subjects stud-
ied in higher education has led to crime writers being appointed to teach
the writing of crime fiction.1 However, crime fiction as the subject of aca-
demic study is still mainly taught by academics who specialize in litera-
ture.2 Crime writers—the term is commonly used to refer to crime novelists
rather than writers of true crime—often have degrees, undergraduate and
postgraduate, but gain their knowledge of crime fiction from private read-
ing rather than academic study. They can bring much to the university-­
level study of the genre in which they write, including insights into the
process of writing, the importance of reading widely across the genre, the
influence of the marketplace, and the interplay between crime fiction and
film/ TV. This chapter discusses these issues and suggests potential learn-
ing outcomes.
Much depends on practitioner-educators’ knowledge of the genre; on
their capacity to impart that knowledge to students; and on their ability to
step back from personal creative practice and cast a critical eye on the

P. Johnston (*)
Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool, UK
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2018 163

C. Beyer (ed.), Teaching Crime Fiction, Teaching the New English,
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164 P. JOHNSTON

oeuvres of their predecessors and peers. I have recently become a full-time

academic, in creative writing rather than crime fiction, having published
nineteen crime novels. I studied classics and Modern Greek literature as
an undergraduate, and then completed Masters degrees in the theory and
practice of criticism and comparative literature, and in applied linguistics
(for which I wrote a paper on Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Dancing
Men”). Finally, I gained a PhD in creative writing, half of which consisted
of an extract from a crime novel that was subsequently published (Carnal
Acts, published under the pseudonym Sam Alexander); and the other half
a critical analysis of that work that included reflection on my own practice.
However, my first two degrees were completed several years before I
started to write fiction, meaning that although I suspect my reading of
Aristotle, Plato, Barthes and Derrida and others informed my novels, I
have a limited understanding of exactly how.
My case is that crime writers can gain insights into the genre that differ
from those accessible to literary academics. Differ, I stress; such insights
are not better or more significant but potentially complementary, leading
to the fuller understanding of my title. In an ideal world, every English or
Media department would accommodate both literary critics and
practitioner-­educators because the arts of literary criticism and creation
are in effect two sides of the same coin. Creative writers create texts within
the genre, using innate ability and knowledge gained from reading, work-
ing in marketplaces that vary from country to country, and seeing their
work become films or TV series. Critics come to the texts when they are
completed and necessarily have different points of view.
There are two theoretical obstacles to writers using their experience as
a pedagogical method. The first is the Intentional Fallacy, according to
which the author’s intention is irretrievable and irrelevant.3 In response to
Wimsatt and Beardsley, who directed attention solely to the text, I would
say that the author’s intention can be retrieved by the author her/himself,
at least to some degree, and that it has relevance as a means of explicating
the text, even if only as a mark of failure to achieve objectives. The second
is the Death of the Author, which is said to be necessary in order for the
reader to be born.4 Barthes’s chief concerns were the complex codes
according to which the text was woven and can potentially be unwoven. I
would contend that the author can assist with that process from outside
the text; this in no way reduces the role of the reader in the creation of
meaning.
 THE CRIME NOVELIST AS EDUCATOR: TOWARDS A FULLER… 165

Stephen Knight has identified three areas of importance: “the Why,

What and How of teaching crime fiction”.5 Professor Knight also writes,
“Perhaps those touchy-feely Creative Writing courses should be called
Uncritical Writing courses”, which suggests there is some way to go before
practitioner-educators, the purveyors of such courses, are accepted by the
literary critical old guard. I will bring my hybrid skills, such as they are, to
bear on each field, always with the provisos that creative writers often have
little conscious understanding of their practice and that reflecting on it can
bear strange fruit.

Why Teach Crime Fiction?

First, students want to learn about crime fiction and other manifestations
of popular literature that in the past were deemed unworthy of academic
study. It is now widely accepted in the academy that crime fiction is signifi-
cant in psychological, social, political and other ways. Second, crime fic-
tion has literary value, though defining such value inevitably runs up
against perceived genre limitations and the personal taste and judgement
of individual readers. I do not intend to rehearse the tedious arguments
concerning highbrow and lowbrow writing. A single example will suffice:
Man Booker Prize winner John Banville has for several years been writing
crime novels under the pseudonym Benjamin Black. As mentioned, I have
used a pseudonym myself, but that was a brazen attempt at reinventing
myself as a different kind of crime writer, with minimal success. This raises
important issues to address with students about why literary authors and
others use pseudonyms—they may provide greater artistic freedom, wider
critical and public access or different authorial personae.
One of the specific approaches that creative writers provide to crime
fiction education is a heightened awareness of and deeper familiarity with
the market. The strategies and activities of publishers, agents, reviewers,
bookshop chains, bookshop assistants and book-buyers, as well as of other
authors, are part of writers’ professional lives. Crime writers offer more
insights because there are more of us—according to data from Nielsen
Book Research, crime, thrillers and adventure (cognate though admittedly
quite disparate genres) were top in hardback, e-book and audio sales and
close behind general fiction in the composite paperback bestseller list.6
The market defines much in genre writing and has traditionally been paid
insufficient attention in literary studies. A published crime writer can
inform students about the various markets for novels, how they operate,
166 P. JOHNSTON

how they influence genre conventions, what editors want (and how they
persuade sales teams that the book will sell), what book-chains want and
what readers want. The last, I suggest, are the most important judges.
While literature scholars have begun to pay attention to how markets
operated in the time of Austen, Dickens and so on, the only people in
direct contact with their readers are authors, who disregard feedback at
their peril. Such interaction between creator and consumer is not unique
to crime fiction, but because of the plethora of bookshop events and crime
writing festivals, it takes on wider and deeper dimensions than both
literary—that is, non-generic fiction—and other genres. So, too, crime
writing has been commodified for over two centuries, an early example
being The Newgate Calendar, which, according to Worthington, used
“sensational crime and criminal lives to make maximum profits”.7 Although
it was purportedly true crime, much of the material was presented in
frame-­narratives and made use of sensation, as in contemporary Gothic
fiction, directing itself towards readers who developed the ability to pro-
cess an amalgam of the factional and the fictional.
What is the interface between crime writer and reader, and why is it
worthy of mention? In terms of the market, readers tell authors—often
pulling no punches—what they think of their books, series, protagonists,
themes, settings and so on. This input can change how the author writes
in future, as well as strengthening the grip of genre conventions—it is rare
for crime readers to demand more outré approaches to character, plot or
language; rather, they are interested in the well-being of beloved protago-
nists and sidekicks, and the continuation of favourite series.8 Of course,
authors pay attention to reviewers’ comments too, but “ordinary” readers
are often more direct in their approval and disapproval. In any case, review-
ers are readers too. Authors should consider giving readers what they
want. In order to do so, they must find out the object of their desires—
and then decide whether to fulfil them or not.
Dove has argued that detective and crime fiction demand specific
readerly skills and experience, with the reader entering into a “dyadic
relationship” with the author.9 In particular, the reader acts as detective,
following clues, discounting red herrings and weighing up who is poten-
tially guilty, as well as responding to the genre’s conventions. This ties in
with the commercial nature of crime fiction: “because of the economics
of the popular market, it is the reader who determines success or failure
and who therefore exerts a decisive influence on the evolution of the
genre itself”.10 According to Iser, reading is not “a one-way process, and
 THE CRIME NOVELIST AS EDUCATOR: TOWARDS A FULLER… 167

our concern will be to find means of describing the reading process as a

dynamic interaction between text and reader”.11 This is particularly the
case in crime fiction because questions are posed to the reader by the text
more than in much other fiction. A practitioner-educator can bring out
the importance of understanding how readers function, enabling stu-
dents to appreciate individual texts, sub-genres and the overarching
genre, as well as their interaction.
Consideration of why we teach crime fiction also raises philosophical
questions. It is generally accepted that literature enhances the lives of
readers by improving their understanding of self and world, stimulating
the imagination, and increasing empathy. All these suggest that teaching it
is a worthwhile activity, even if “the pleasures of reading indeed are selfish
rather than social”.12 But is teaching crime fiction a beneficial activity? A
convincing argument can be made on ethical grounds that rape, murder
and robbery are not suitable subjects for writing consumed by millions of
readers. However, an opposing argument can be made on psychological
grounds, that the same millions benefit by understanding how the con-
scious and subconscious minds of humankind work, even when presented
via fictional characters. In any case, the broadening of definitions of cul-
ture and the greater attention paid to popular modes of expression has
changed attitudes. Chandler’s declaration that “The academicians have
never got their hands in it [the detective or mystery novel]” no longer
stands.13 Over the past century, crime novels have been seen as relaxation
(but then, so are romances, with rather less blood spilled), play or puzzles
(the so-called Golden Age), examinations of police work (were there ever
“bulls” like those in James Ellroy’s work?), purveyors of the return to the
Garden of Eden (W. H. Auden), studies of psychology and psychopathy
(Patricia Highsmith and, with less subtlety, Thomas Harris), and many
other things. As a practitioner-educator, I encourage students to consider
why authors have chosen to write specific pieces of crime fiction, as well as
why they work in the crime genre more generally. Such speculation can be
valuable as a precursor to informed critical judgements. Some novelists
may be in it mainly for the money. Others may be trying to find out about
themselves. For some the puzzle element is sufficient motivation to write.
Others are interested in social, ethical, political or philosophical issues.
Writers consider such questions with varying degrees of profundity
before, during and after the creation of crime fiction. In advance of writ-
ing my dystopian novels set in an independent city state of Edinburgh in
the 2020s, I spent time researching Plato’s ideas about the ideal society in
168 P. JOHNSTON

The Republic and George Orwell’s about a less-than-ideal one in Nineteen

Eighty-Four.14 I informed myself about the technical aspects of such world-­
building, but also considered the ethical questions raised in the story. It is
at least theoretically possible for a totalitarian regime to work for the ben-
efit of citizens. It is possible to eradicate serious crime, at least in a thought
experiment. The rights of the individual can be set against the needs of the
state in a balanced way—or can they? Literary scholars can produce answers
to these questions, but they are unlikely to be always the same as the
practitioner-educator’s.
The metaphor of state and citizen bodies in my novel Body Politic has
been noted by critics, but my conception of the multiple roles and presen-
tations of the body, pre- and post-mortem, in my fiction and that of others
is more nuanced than literary scholars have so far detected.15 My use of
philosophical ideas is in line with developments in the genre: “The mutual
influence of philosophy and crime fiction is manifold”.16 An ideas-driven
crime novel that influenced my own is Philip Kerr’s A Philosophical
Investigation, a highly original work that refers to Wittgenstein and other
major thinkers.17 Writers, then, are able to point students directly towards
influences while literary critics have to rely on textual and, if they regard it
as valid, extra-textual evidence.
Crime fiction undoubtedly has literary qualities: Edgar Allan Poe’s
genre-defining grotesquery, Arthur Conan Doyle’s strange combination
of fin-de-siècle ennui and extreme rationality, Agatha Christie’s complex
plotting, Dashiell Hammett’s hardboiled language and social commen-
tary, Raymond Chandler’s romantic melancholy and so on. There has
been much scholarly work on these and other writers.18 While some critics
find the aesthetic standards of crime fiction to be negligible, the prevailing
view is that the best writing is worth teaching because of its relevance to
readers, its reference to contemporary issues, its technical subtlety and the
light it casts on the depths of the human soul. Again, the practitioner-­
educator is in a good position to supplement the judgements of literary
scholars with insights gained from the creative process and from applica-
tions of theories of creativity. Everyone has a Muse, a mentor and a major
motivation; as well as writers they react against violently: personal experi-
ences can provide students with detailed insights.
Crime fiction’s political and ideological dimensions as presented by
novelists can also be meaningful to students. Crime writing, I suggest, is
primarily about the abuse of power, initially as carried out on the living
body as a totality (e.g. physical and mental abuse, grievous bodily harm,
 THE CRIME NOVELIST AS EDUCATOR: TOWARDS A FULLER… 169

slavery) and often leading to the death of that body. The metaphor of the
ideologically conditioned ‘body politic’ in my Edinburgh series is reiter-
ated by titles that refer to physical attributes or constituent substances:
bone, water, blood, dust, heads and hearts, and skeleton.19 Descriptions of
quotidian life in a supposedly benevolent dictatorship invite readers to
make comparisons with their own life experience and, if so inclined, to
consider how power is exerted on them and by whom/what. The writer,
having considered these questions in depth during the creative process is
well placed to stimulate debate.
Order is often restored by the end of crime novels, leading to the main-
tenance of the prevailing status quo, especially in Golden Age fiction after
the First World War: Agatha Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at
Styles, written and set during the First World War, succeeds in side-lining
the conflict as Poirot solves a family murder.20 Hardboiled writers tend to
create more open-ended fiction. The battered survivors in Dashiell
Hammett’s The Glass Key have few illusions that social and political condi-
tions will improve.21 Thus, although many crime novels are conservative,
even those whose authors might think otherwise, it is wrong to assume
that the genre as a whole espouses traditional values and virtues. Porter
observes that crime fiction “is a genre committed to an act of recovery,
moving forward to move back”.22 This is hard to apply to the novels of
Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, Ted Lewis or Derek Raymond—or to mine,
as I point out to readers and students.

Which Crime Fiction Should We Teach?

A simple but not simplistic answer would be “anything you like”, consid-
ering the importance of readers’ directed but personal responses to texts.
However, it is impossible to avoid recognizing the existence of a canon, or
rather multiple canons, of important works—although defining “impor-
tant” is potentially divisive. Critical acclaim comes first for some readers,
even if such acclaim comes many years after publication. Others use the
bestseller lists as sources of future reading. And for many the identity of
the author (perhaps a moonlighting fantasy novelist such as J. K. Rowling,
a.k.a. Robert Galbraith) is paramount.
It is also the case that each country will have its own canon—even
countries such as the UK and the USA that nominally speak, write and
read the same language. Since the rise of gender, queer and postcolonial
studies, account should be taken of crime fiction writers, countries and
170 P. JOHNSTON

characters that were ignored, dismissed or abused in the past. Anyone

drawing up a reading list or curriculum must beware of their own assump-
tions and unconsidered biases. This is another area where the practitioner-­
educator can supplement the pedagogical process—reflection on the
position of their own writing in the various canons can be informative, as
well as salutary. As every novelist is only—to a greater or lesser extent—an
expert on their own oeuvre, I will give examples from my Quint Dalrymple
series.
An observant reader, or one familiar with the works of Plato and Orwell,
will consume my texts in a different way to other readers. The reason I
chose to write in the crime genre, and in the specific hardboiled tradition
using a wisecracking first-person narrator, was to engage readers who were
familiar with the conventions and tropes of both genre and sub-genre.23
Intertextuality—defined as “the range of processes by which a text invokes
another, but also the way texts are constituted by their relationships with
other texts”24—is a particular feature of crime fiction. Conan Doyle refers
and responds to Poe, Christie to Doyle, many—perhaps too many writers
in the twenty-first century—to Christie and so on. In my case, Body Politic
and its sequels are full of references to Doyle, Hammett, Chandler, Kerr
and others. It surprised me that few readers pick up on this, which goes to
show that the author may retain the keys to the kingdom of her/his imagi-
nation but should not keep the doors permanently locked. Unless a scholar
writes a concordance to my novels, such intertextual links “will be lost in
time, like tears in rain”.25 Which would not necessarily be a bad thing.
Popular fiction may now be “immortal” because of digital technology, but
much of it will soon cease to have relevance to the readers at whom it was
directed (the contemporary market). Still, while they are still alive,
practitioner-­educators can provide detailed information about their cre-
ative practice.
A canon—whether broadly agreed in the academy, based on sub-genres,
or even on individual writers’ preferences—suggests a historical perspec-
tive. I have mentioned Poe, Doyle and others, most of whom would be
members of a ‘great canon’ of crime fiction. But do we need to teach
crime fiction of the past, given that it remains alive in the intertextuality of
modern works? I would argue that it is not essential to teach the history of
the genre, though I can see the relevance of doing so in the academy. My
experience of creative writing pedagogy is that students read very little and
are often reluctant to tackle texts written in non-contemporary language.
It may even be better to start by teaching modern crime fiction and
 THE CRIME NOVELIST AS EDUCATOR: TOWARDS A FULLER… 171

subsequently go backwards in time; but how to define ‘modern’? The

criterion is not only language accessibility, although most students would
find Christie easier to cope with than Sayers in terms of style. Also impor-
tant are themes. In the UK, writers such as P. D. James and Ruth Rendell,
who started in the 1960s, paid more attention to social issues than earlier
crime writers, as have many since (e.g. Minette Walters and Ian Rankin:
the latter’s state-of-the-nation novel Black and Blue is taught in Scottish
schools).26 Crime fiction in general has become overtly more engaged
with contemporary life and issues—I say ‘overtly’ because many novels
still offer the reader limited narrative experimentation and firm closure
remains a requirement, particularly for bestsellers. Students can be led by
the practitioner-educator to understand these matters with special refer-
ence to writers, styles or sub-genres that interest them.
Another learning approach is to concentrate on the presentation of the
body and crime fiction. Modern culture in general puts great emphasis on
bodies and issues of gender and sexuality. Crime fiction education can
direct students’ attention to the various ways bodies are made manifest in
different sub-genres—for example, in Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the
Lambs, Patricia Cornwell’s Postmortem, Raymond’s I Was Dora Suarez,
Minette Walters’s The Sculptress, Val McDermid’s The Mermaids Singing,
my own Body Politic and John Connolly’s Every Dead Thing.27 Useful
comparison can be made between the very different attitudes towards the
body—and, of course, the mind as the creation of the body’s neurological
structure—in the above novels with those prevalent in the works of
Christie and her successors. In the ideal seminar room, authors will be
present to provide insights into their novels.

How Should We Teach Crime Fiction?

My experience of educating creative writers—I use the word “educate” in
the sense of drawing out what is already within early writers, rather than
the more top-down “teach”—is that lectures are insufficiently interactive.
In literature courses with large numbers of students it may be impossible
to use only seminars and/or workshops, in which case lectures should
allow for questions and feedback throughout. This strategy increases both
attention and the retention of material, as will “breaks, or changes of
approach, about every 15 minutes”.28 Ways of checking that students have
read set texts can be devised—quizzes, short written tests, or work to be
handed in, perhaps in response to a question or questions that cannot
172 P. JOHNSTON

easily be found on the Internet. Seminars should be as informal as possi-

ble, with chairs arranged in a circle and the ‘leader’ having no greater role
or authority than any other group member. The practitioner-educator may
have a certain status in students’ eyes that other academics do not: it is
important that emphasis is placed on ways of writing fiction rather than
the writer’s standing. This should be done as informally as possible in
order to channel creativity.
The subject matter of seminars held by practitioner-educators may vary
from that of other academics. I will concentrate on beginners, as subse-
quent years can be seen as further storeys built on. Judging that students
have a basic understanding of crime fiction tropes gained as much from
films, TV series (including extrapolations from fiction such as the BBC’s
Sherlock), computer games, and comics as from novels, I initially encour-
age them to come up with a list of the genre’s salient features. Students
then modify the list during subsequent sessions, responding to specific
experiences of writing raised by the practitioner-educator. I include at least
some sessions that investigate the multimedia nature of the genre. For
instance, students read a Conan Doyle story and watch the ‘equivalent’
TV version, such as “A Scandal in Bohemia” and “A Scandal in Belgravia”.
The similarities and differences between the different presentations of the
story point to the ubiquity of some crime fiction tropes. I encourage stu-
dents to consider why Conan Doyle wrote the story the way he did—with
reference to market conditions of the time—and what roles are available to
the reader. Similarly, the ways in which the TV episode was written and
presented and its intertextual references to the original story and other
crime works are identified. Writers whose books have been televised are
able to contextualize these by reference to their own experience and
authorial strategies.
Regarding curriculum design, the primary distinctions are: (1) a his-
torical overview; (2) an examination of themes and tropes; and (3) critical
analyses of selected texts and/or authors. Clearly there is shared ground
between these, and my method of teaching crime fiction unabashedly
cherry-picks—thus, both using and subverting the great and other can-
ons. I would discuss (not necessarily in chronological order) Edgar Allan
Poe (“The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, 1841), Arthur Conan Doyle
(“The Dancing Men”, 1903), Agatha Christie (And Then There Were
None, 1939, and the 2015 TV series), Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep,
1939, and the 1946 film), Patricia Highsmith (Strangers on a Train,1950,
and the 1951 film), Chinatown, 1974, (the film as a summing-up of and
 THE CRIME NOVELIST AS EDUCATOR: TOWARDS A FULLER… 173

commentary on the hardboiled tradition), Mario Puzo (The Godfather,

1969, and the 1972 film), James Ellroy (L.A. Confidential, 1990, and the
1997 film), P. D. James (Death of an Expert Witness, 1977, and the 1983
TV series), and Ian Rankin (Black and Blue, 1997, and the 2000 TV epi-
sode). I refer students throughout to my own novel Body Politic, which
contains intertextual references to all the above, as well as to other con-
temporary British and American writers in the genre (e.g. Mark Billingham,
Val McDermid, John Connolly and James Sallis, all of whom have differ-
ent experiences of sub-genres). I also invite agents and editors of contem-
porary crime fiction to explain in person what makes for them a successful
novel.
Although historical, critical and thematic dimensions may be included,
the creative process is to the fore. Students are required to consider why
and how crime fiction is written, and for which market(s). They are
encouraged to write creative responses to the texts, choosing whatever
form suits them, whether an academic essay on specific texts or themes, a
pastiche in prose or poetry, a reflective piece or a relevant piece of their
own creative writing. Flexibility of exercises reflects the blank page with-
out questions or prompts that every fiction writer faces. This may sound
‘touchy-feely’ and ‘uncritical’, but I argue the opposite—opening stu-
dents’ minds to the imagination, techniques and responses, both in terms
of readers and markets, leads them to perform creative acts that bring
them closer to the creative writers they are studying. Living authors such
as Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, Mark Billingham, Laura Wilson and John
Connolly may be invited to attend sessions to provide insights, and stu-
dents attend bookshop or library events at which there are always question
and answer sessions. Finally, authorial experience of the editing, copyedit-
ing and proofreading phases of the publishing process, as well as of public-
ity, marketing (including author websites) and social media use, are
discussed, enabling students to work on their own texts in a more informed
way, as well as to consider where they might publish their writing. Blogs,
interactive stories, screenplays and plays, and the use of social and other
forms of new media make this easier than in the past.
I believe that all literature students should write at least some creative
texts of their own. Fiction, especially the broad and multifaceted genre of
crime, offers boundless opportunities. Students who have studied with
practitioner-educators as well as literary scholars gain a fuller understand-
ing of fictional criminal practices, taking in the views and experiences of
the author on the page and in the marketplace. This should enable them
174 P. JOHNSTON

to find their own writing ‘voices’, inside and outside the academy, as well
increase their awareness of themselves as readers and creators of meaning.
Some may even become competent writers of crime fiction.

Notes
1. Examples are the successful novelists Claire McGowan, senior lecturer on
the MA in Creative Writing (Crime Novels) at City, University of London,
and Henry Sutton, senior lecturer in creative writing and director of the
MA in Creative Writing (Crime Fiction) at the University of East Anglia.
2. An exception is Dr Andrew Pepper, senior lecturer in English at Queen’s
University Belfast, who is also the author of five crime novels.
3. See William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Intentional
Fallacy”, in The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington:
University of Kentucky Press, 1947), 3–18.
4. See Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author”, in ed. Séan Burke,
Authorship: from Plato to Postmodernism, A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1995), 125–130. [Originally published in French in
1967.]
5. “Motive, Means and Opportunity: Teaching Crime Fiction”, Stephen
Knight, accessed 27 June 2017. http://www.profstephenknight.
com/2012/08/motive-means-and-opportunity-teaching.html.
6. Format Share of Top 20 Genres (Volume), UK 2015, 41, https://quantum.
londonbookfair.co.uk/RXUK/RXUK_PDMC/documents/9928_Nielsen_
Book_Research_In_Review_2015_The_London_Book_Fair_Quantum_
Conference_2016_DIGITAL_FINAL.pdf?v=635995987941118341,
accessed 27 June 2017.
7. Heather Worthington, “From The Newgate Calendar to Sherlock
Holmes”, in A Companion to Crime Fiction, eds. Charles J. Rzepka and
Lee Horsley (Chichester: John Wiley, 2010), 15.
8. The series is a major feature of crime fiction. I have written three, one of
which I returned to after seven years (Alex Mavros) and another after four-
teen years (Quint Dalrymple). Many readers regarded their original ends as
premature and demanded their return—which hardened my resolve to write
different books until publishers stepped in on the readers’ behalf. The other
series featured crime novelist turned hard man investigator Matt Wells. He
has not yet returned, though there have been requests that he do so.
9. Dove, The Reader and the Detective Story (Bowling Green: Bowling Green
State University Popular Press, 1997), 156.
10. Dove, The Reader…, 37. Dove equates detective and crime fiction because
“the differences are negligible” (The Reader…, 1), a highly questionable
statement, but one that can be discussed elsewhere.
 THE CRIME NOVELIST AS EDUCATOR: TOWARDS A FULLER… 175

11. Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 107.
12. Harold Bloom, How To Read and Why (London: Fourth Estate, 2001),
22.
13. Raymond Chandler, Raymond Chandler Speaking, eds. Dorothy Gardiner
and Kathrine Sorley Walker (London: Allison and Busby, 1984), 70.
14. I am grateful that my work on Plato was recognised in an academic chap-
ter: Carla Sassi, “‘Quis custodiet Athenas Boreales?’ Paul Johnston’s
Platonic Dystopia”, in Why Plato? Platonism and Twentieth Century
Literature, ed. Daniela Carpi (Heidelberg: Winter, 2005), 199–209.
15. Paul Johnston, Body Politic (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1997).
16. Joseph Hoffmann, Philosophies of Crime Fiction (Harpenden: No Exit
Press, 2013), 11.
17. Philip Kerr, A Philosophical Investigation (London: Chatto and Windus,
1992). See my essay on the novel in Books To Die For, eds. Declan Burke
and John Connolly (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2012), 392–395.
18. See, for example, Gill Plain, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender,
Sexuality and the Body (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001);
Lee Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005) and Peter Messent, The Crime Fiction Handbook (Chichester:
John Wiley, 2013).
19. Paul Johnston, The Bone Yard (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1998);
Water of Death (London: Hodder and Stoughton: 1999); The Blood Tree
(London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2000); The House of Dust (London,
Hodder and Stoughton, 2001); Heads or Hearts (Sutton: Severn House,
2015); and Skeleton Blues (Sutton: Severn House, 2016).
20. Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (London: John Lane,
1920).
21. Dashiell Hammett, The Glass Key (New York: Knopf, 1931).
22. Derek Porter, The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 29.
23. I originally wrote Body Politic in the third person and found the tone was
too dry. Rewriting in the first-person was a more arduous process than I
anticipated, a point about editorial work that I often make to students.
24. John Frow, Genre (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 48.
25. From Rutger Hauer’s final speech as the “replicant” Roy Batty in Ridley
Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). The House of Dust, the fifth novel in the
Dalrymple series, is an extended homage to Scott’s film.
26. Ian Rankin, Black and Blue (London: Orion, 1997).
27. Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs (New York: St Martin’s Press,
1988); Patricia Cornwell, Postmortem (New York: Scribner’s, 1990);
Derek Raymond, I Was Dora Suarez (London: Melville House, 1990);
176 P. JOHNSTON

Minette Walters, The Sculptress (London: Pan, 1993); Val McDermid, The
Mermaids Singing (London: HarperCollins, 1995); Paul Johnston Body
Politic (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1997); John Connolly, Every
Dead Thing (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1999).
28. Elaine Showalter, Teaching Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 49.

Works Cited
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Postmodernism, edited by Séan Burke, 125–130. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
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Bloom, Harold, How to Read and Why. London: Fourth Estate, 2001.
Chandler, Raymond, The Big Sleep. New York: Knopf, 1939.
Chandler, Raymond, Raymond Chandler Speaking, edited by Dorothy Gardiner
and Kathrine Sorely Walker. London: Allison and Busby, 1984.
Christie, Agatha, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. London: John Lane, 1920.
Christie, Agatha, And Then There Were None. London: HarperCollins, 2007 [orig-
inally published as Ten Little Niggers, 1939].
Connolly, John, Every Dead Thing. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1999.
Coppola, Francis Ford (dir.), The Godfather. Paramount, 1972.
Cornwell, Patricia, Postmortem. New York: Scribner’s, 1990.
Dove, George N., The Reader and the Detective Story. Bowling Green: Bowling
Green State University Popular Press, 1997.
Doyle, Arthur Conan, “A Scandal in Bohemia.” In The Adventures of Sherlock
Holmes. London: George Newnes, 1892.
Doyle, Arthur Conan, “The Dancing Men.” In The Return of Sherlock Holmes.
London: George Newnes, 1905.
Ellroy, James, L.A. Confidential. New York: The Mysterious Press, 1990.
Frow, John, Genre. Abingdon: Routledge, 2006.
Friend, Martyn (dir.), Rebus: Black and Blue. STV, first broadcast 26 April 2000.
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Hitchcock, Alfred (dir.), Strangers on a Train. Warner Bros, 1951.
Hoffmann, Joseph, Philosophies of Crime Fiction. Harpenden: No Exit Press, 2013.
Horsley, Lee, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005.
James, P.D., Death of An Expert Witness. London: Faber and Faber, 1977.
Johnston, Paul, Body Politic. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1997.
 THE CRIME NOVELIST AS EDUCATOR: TOWARDS A FULLER… 177

Johnston, Paul, The Bone Yard. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1998.
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Johnston, Paul, The Blood Tree. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2000.
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Johnston, Paul, “Philip Kerr’s A Philosophical Investigation.” In Books to Die For,
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Stoughton, 2012.
Kerr, Philip, A Philosophical Investigation. London: Chatto and Windus, 1992.
Knight, Stephen. “Motive, Means and Opportunity: Teaching Crime Fiction.”
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opportunity-teaching.html
McDermid, Val, The Mermaids Singing. London: HarperCollins, 1995.
McGuigan, Paul (dir.), “A Scandal in Belgravia.” Sherlock, series 1 (BBC, first
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Messent, Peter, The Crime Fiction Handbook. Chichester: John Wiley, 2013.
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Usher and Other Writings. London: Penguin, 2003 [1841].
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Haven: Yale University Press, 1981.
Puzo, Mario, The Godfather. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1969.
Rankin, Ian, Black and Blue. London: Orion, 1997.
Raymond, Derek, I Was Dora Suarez. London: Melville House, 1990.
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Dystopia.” In Why Plato? Platonism and Twentieth-Century Literature, edited
by Daniela Carpi, 199–209. Heidelberg: Winter, 2005.
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Showalter, Elaine, Teaching Literature. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.
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28 December 2015.
Walters, Minette, The Sculptress. London: Pan, 1993.
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Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry, 3–18. Lexington: University of
Kentucky Press, 1947.
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May 1983.
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Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Charles J. Rzepka and Lee Horsley,
13–27. Chichester: John Wiley, 2010.
 CHAPTER 12

Teaching Crime Fiction Criticism

Rosemary Erickson Johnsen

Introduction
Over twenty years ago, crime-fiction scholar Heta Pyrhönen observed that
being able to follow “the critical discussions evolving around the genre
demands a working knowledge of the main currents of literary criticism on
the part of the reader.”1 While this remains true to some degree, crime
fiction criticism has matured sufficiently to achieve a degree of indepen-
dence in its contribution to overarching critical conversations. Pyrhönen’s
1994 study, with the deceptively modest title of Murder from an Academic
Angle: An Introduction to the Study of the Detective Narrative, is invaluable
to anyone teaching crime-fiction criticism. Grouped into sections on nar-
rative form, thematic concerns, and cultural contexts, the book covers
crime-fiction criticism from its emergence among fans and practitioners
right up to the early 1990s’ “metaphysical detective narrative.” Its
chronologically-­ordered bibliography illustrates key moments and unex-
pected overlaps in the development of crime-fiction criticism.
That crime-fiction criticism has matured in the twenty-first century can
be seen in the ways work by canonical figures is being supplemented
through processes of recovery and re-argumentation, and how earlier

R. E. Johnsen (*)
Governors State University, University Park, IL, USA
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2018 179

C. Beyer (ed.), Teaching Crime Fiction, Teaching the New English,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90608-9_12
180 R. E. JOHNSEN

interpretations and emphases are refuted or re-contextualized. Crime fic-

tion has experienced powerful growth in recent decades, particularly as an
international phenomenon, and there has been a corresponding complex-
ity in the critical enterprise. Growth encompasses production, popularity,
and movement across national and linguistic borders, and success in these
areas has been paralleled by an altering relationship with literary fiction.
Internationalization encompasses not only subjects of study but also the
scholarly conversation. It is impossible to overlook the increasing avail-
ability of English-language translations, which now go well beyond the
few safe names (e.g., Georges Simenon’s Maigret and Maj Sjöwall and Per
Wahlöö’s Martin Beck series) that used to constitute the market, and the
past decade’s scramble for another Nordic noir hit has brought into
English translation some mid-list titles. Internationalization also applies to
the scholars who are participating in the conversation; work in crime-­
fiction scholarship often transcends traditional boundaries of national lit-
eratures, and conferences and publications attest to the international
communities at work. One drawback to all of this growth, however, has
been an occasional lack of scholarly rigor. Precisely because crime fiction is
a popular genre, people may feel enabled to jump into the conversation
without having the requisite background in the field or, in the case of
translated texts, in the original language and/or culture. This tendency, in
combination with the imperative to engage crime fiction from other
national traditions (particularly Nordic noir) can lead to distortions, awk-
ward errors, or a lack of usefulness to crime fiction scholars and students.
Teaching crime fiction criticism in the current climate, then, it is crucial to
frame that criticism for students in ways that inform them, and enable
them to formulate the right questions for assessment of the criticism.
I regularly teach a dedicated crime fiction course, a course I revised out
of an old-fashioned literary genre course that had not been offered in
years; my revisions included converting the course to fully-online delivery.
The course is cross-listed at both advanced undergraduate and M.A. lev-
els, and the contents change as much or as little as I like from offering to
offering. At my graduate institution, I taught a lower-division course on
“genre and theme” as a course in crime fiction. An entire course in crime
fiction, under a heading that points to popular genre, creates a distinct set
of expectations for use of crime fiction criticism. In addition, I have used
crime-fiction syllabi in rotating-topics courses at the undergraduate and
M.A. level: these course titles include Major English Authors and Seminars
in American Literature and World Literature. I have taught Contemporary
 TEACHING CRIME FICTION CRITICISM 181

Literature under the subtitle “Detecting Spirits,” bringing together liter-

ary fiction, crime fiction, and poetry that played with multi-faceted notions
of “spirit” and “detection.” Finally, I have incorporated individual crime
novels in courses dedicated to more traditional subjects or non-popular
culture objectives. For example, I have used one of Sharan Newman’s
well-researched historical crime novels in a British Literature 1 survey
course to help students engage the medieval period; I usually incorporate
one crime novel whenever I teach a course in women’s literature; and I
have included crime fiction in rotating-topics courses focusing on litera-
ture of the First World War, the 1930s, and a postgraduate seminar on
technology in mid-twentieth-century literature.
I have found that teaching crime fiction in different course contexts
impacts my own understanding of an individual work. Even though text
selection is informed by the specific goals of the class, the process of teach-
ing the text and interacting with students around it, can change one’s
valuation of a text. As the emphasis and perspective shift, books that are
less satisfactory specifically as crime fiction are revealed to have other mer-
its. For example, as reader I found Agatha Christie’s Death in the Clouds
(1935) to be an implausible, over-plotted outing. When I included it in
the seminar on technology in mid-twentieth-century literature because it
was one of the objects of study in David Trotter’s Literature in the First
Media Age: Britain between the Wars (2013), another book was revealed.
So much period detail about airline travel! So many connections between
the conventional clue-puzzle transit mystery and the kinds of social his-
tory to be gleaned from more literary fiction! This observation has impli-
cations for the teaching of crime-fiction scholarship in terms not only of
how, but also how much and what kinds of criticism students are asked to
engage. Teaching crime fiction criticism requires deliberate attention to
framing techniques, specific assignments to promote productive engage-
ment, and the underlying rationales for these.

Students, Courses, and Sources

Teaching crime fiction criticism often requires greater attention to goals
and context than is the case with more traditional subjects of literary
study; it can also require a more explicit rationale for the assignment(s).
Our students expect to be asked to use literary criticism in literature
courses, but they need to see why we are using it with a popular genre like
crime fiction. They know how to locate appropriate critical sources for
182 R. E. JOHNSEN

canonical literary texts, too, but they may need more help from us to
locate quality crime fiction criticism. They may also need to expand their
understanding of the range of criticism available, from readers’ responses
to scholarly studies, and to practice evaluating sources. A student seeking
a required number of sources for an assignment on the work of Virginia
Woolf, for example, knows where to look and may need guidance primar-
ily in narrowing the results. In contrast, with crime fiction, students often
need useful tools to expand their search as they locate, evaluate, and
incorporate criticism.
Dedicated crime fiction classes warrant an up-close, directly focused
engagement with criticism, in addition to its supporting role in research
projects. For advanced students in a traditional classroom setting, I assign
a monograph review-essay, which requires them to negotiate a full-length
study and then share their knowledge with the class. For the online class,
I ask students to perform similar work with one scholarly article or,
depending on course material, with a major review, suggesting places
where they should look for substantial reviews. When the subjects of study
range from older works such as the Sherlock Holmes stories to contempo-
rary titles in translation such as Henning Mankell or Anne Holt, I offer
general suggestions for searching through the campus library and online,
and I require pre-approval of their selection. I have used this assignment
variously as the focus of one week’s online discussion forum (with settings
making the other postings visible only after the student has posted his/her
own), as part of an exam, and as a free-standing assignment.
Models for using critical sources are also useful in this context. Students
who are accustomed to a direct match between the criticism and their
topic need encouragement to cast a wider net, but they also benefit from
seeing how general sources may be put to use productively, how to extract
illuminating material from books or article focusing on other primary
texts. This is one aspect of teaching crime fiction criticism that calls for a
more direct engagement with parts of the process that are taken for
granted, or occur behind the scenes. Understanding the functions of peer
review, and awareness of the different layers of editorial shaping repre-
sented by (for example) blogging, fan-oriented sites, and publication in
the London Review of Books, helps students select among the results of
their broader searches. It is also helpful to build on the kind of assignment
described in the previous paragraph: once a student has located a source,
analyzed it, and captured its main points, he/she is ready to consider what
applications that source might have. Are there other writers mentioned in
 TEACHING CRIME FICTION CRITICISM 183

the discussion? Even a brief treatment as an aside offers material. Are there
qualities—formal or thematic—or contexts presented that could be
brought to bear on the works of other writers or on other topics? Slowing
down to ask these questions, and making room for shared information and
discussion of research strategies, is beneficial. (And these benefits carry
forward, I have noticed, improving students’ research in later classes. They
learn more about how research works, and have benefited from practicing
these skills directly.) I also use my own published work as a model. I share
an article with the class not so much as a source itself, though it is that, but
as a model of using other sources. Pointing to items in the bibliography
and highlighting how they are used in the article demonstrates how to
draw and adapt material from secondary sources whose application may
not be apparent at first glance.
While in many classes more taxonomical works may not merit student
engagement, earlier critical works on crime-fiction classification and defi-
nition are often worthwhile. These can benefit students directly as they
begin to learn more about subgenres in popular forms and the genealogy
of crime fiction, and also indirectly as they see for themselves important
shifts in both critical practice and academic values. As works move from
basic classification to more sophisticated analyses of subgenre and cross-­
pollination, students encounter foundational bases for the critical enter-
prise writ large. They also discern how apparently neutral terms can be
laden with value judgments, and observe how scholars engage in conversa-
tion over those terms, corroborating, contesting, redefining, or advancing
them. Noting and discussing such terms as “golden age,” “clue puzzle,”
and “whodunit,” for example, not only encourages deeper understanding
of the crime fiction genre, it provides a model for how humanities scholar-
ship goes about its business.
The so-called golden age writers provide another kind of glimpse into
broader cultural patterns. These writers and the high modernists they
co-­existed with are revealed to have engaged in simultaneous production
of texts—whether those be detective novels or modernist poetry—and of
critical standards by which to understand and evaluate those texts. Crime
fiction criticism and modernist theories of culture both flourished in the
inter-war period, offering genre-shaping criticism in apparently “low”
and “high” modes. In the previous century, Edgar Allan Poe was deeply
­committed to shaping critical standards concerning ratiocination, horror,
and the inter-connections between true and fictional crime even as he
was producing texts exemplifying those standards. Poe’s statements
184 R. E. JOHNSEN

about shaping a national literature are also illuminating not just for crime
fiction—and his ideas on this matter have a new currency in the twenty-
first century as crime fiction in translation is booming—but for literary
and cultural study more broadly.2
What about classes where crime fiction is only part of a broader theme
or period focus? Is it okay if a student taking the class does not engage any
crime fiction criticism? My practice there has been to ensure students are
exposed to it, though they may not be directly engaging it in their own
research and writing. Furthermore, there are opportunities to bridge gaps
between crime fiction criticism and scholarship on more canonical literary
texts. Reading Sayers’ Strong Poison (1930) as part of a class on the 1930s,
for example, it is not difficult to show how some aspects of the scholarship
addressing Sayers’ work as crime fiction speaks in concert with criticism of
(for example) Orwell’s inter-war fiction and essays. There are articles
offering comparative analysis of crime fiction and “highbrow” literature,
such as my “Dorothy L. Sayers and Virginia Woolf: Perspectives on the
Woman Intellectual in the late 1930s” (Virginia Woolf Miscellany 2015),
and students can be shown how crime fiction features in broad-ranging
cultural studies, such as Allison Light’s Forever England: Literature,
Femininity and Conservatism between the Wars (Routledge, 1991) and
David Trotter’s Literature in the First Media Age: Britain between the Wars
(Harvard, 2013). Studies such as these show students how crime fiction
can contribute to literary and cultural study alongside more traditionally
prestigious work; they also affirm the value of crime fiction criticism as
such, as these scholars are well-versed in the genre and can articulate its
contributions.
It is striking that Pyrhönen’s study dates the concern with crime fic-
tion’s shift from periphery to center as early as 1981. Unlike the meta-
physical detective narrative, valorized by high theory but not transforming
the genre as anticipated, this issue has continued to grow in importance as
we have moved into the twenty-first century. Discussions of the cross-­
currents between crime fiction, literary fiction, and best-selling fiction
recur in criticism and popular reviews; Magnus Persson’s 2011 article,
“High Crime in Contemporary Scandinavian Literature: the Case of Peter
Høeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow,” is a useful case study. Students can
readily identify examples of the increasingly fluid boundaries between
crime fiction and other modes, as these abound in contemporary culture:
not just literature, but film, television, even journalism and news coverage,
reflect the mainstreaming of crime stories for a variety of purposes. Some
 TEACHING CRIME FICTION CRITICISM 185

of these stories are click bait, or an old-fashioned titillation of prurient

curiosity that sits queasily alongside celebrity stalking, but a considerable
portion is doing interesting cultural work. Crossovers between true crime
and literature have a long history, but students can readily engage a con-
stellation of material such as Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996),
Susanna Moodie’s Life in the Clearings Versus the Bush (1853), Atwood’s
In Search of Alias Grace: On Writing Canadian Historical Fiction (1997),
and criticism specifically about Atwood’s works. Adding crime fiction criti-
cism, such as that on historical crime fiction and literary adaptations of
true-crime cases, offers students terms, approaches, and a different kind of
context for Alias Grace. As of this writing, Alias Grace is being filmed in
Canada, adding yet another mode for consideration; delightfully, Atwood
herself has a cameo as Disapproving Woman.
I have found it particularly valuable to include crime fiction in classes
about women’s literature, whether those have been specifically entitled
“women writers” or the broader “women and literature.” Feminist schol-
arship shows how women’s success in a genre often leads to its de-valuing
by the male critical establishment, and crime fiction provides both an
example and a counter-argument to this tendency. Using crime fiction by
both women and men in concert with crime-fiction criticism allows stu-
dents to better understand this dynamic. Supplementing crime fiction by
Sayers, Christie, Hammett, and Chandler with short critical pieces such as
Edmund Wilson’s “Why do People Read Detective Stories?” (1944) and
“Who Cares who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” (1945) plus Raymond
Chandler’s “The Simple Art of Murder” (1950) makes visible the gen-
dered critical/artistic nexus. Author biographies, with the publishing his-
tory they provide, can offer invaluable framing for dismissal of best-selling
authors such as Christie and Mary Roberts Rinehart, sneeringly dismissed
by the “Had I But Known” tag. Historical crime fiction has provided my
women’s literature students with the fruits of research, suggestions for
how to continue that research independently, and (literally) clues to
understanding women’s place in social history. The junior-level class I
taught at a large R1 institution was one of a handful of courses that could
be selected to meet a required diversity option; crime fiction succeeded in
engaging some of the more reluctant students who were resistant to Edith
Wharton and Virginia Woolf. Learning about the importance of genre fic-
tion for women in the marketplace added another layer to course
objectives.
186 R. E. JOHNSEN

Crime Fiction Criticism in the Wild

The ever-increasing number of book-length studies of crime fiction, arti-
cles in journals oriented toward popular culture, and substantial reviews of
both primary and secondary sources: these are all central to teaching crime
fiction criticism. Additionally, as students engage crime-fiction criticism,
part of learning how to evaluate it is learning what is behind it, what
informs it. My experience has been that crime-fiction criticism is a natural
location for drawing back the curtain on the publication process, and fos-
tering awareness of how much range there is in pre-production selection
and evaluation. The basics of peer review, and of alternative review pro-
cesses for public scholarship and commercial publication, can be presented
in as much depth as seems appropriate for any particular set of students. In
teaching crime fiction criticism, we begin with our own working knowl-
edge of the field and are well able to assist students in their research pro-
cess. Recent developments in the field are reflected in increasing outlets
for quality work, however, and I would like to offer some thoughts and
suggestions for finding relevant secondary material.
There are scholarly journals whose missions provide platforms for
crime-fiction criticism, such as the USA-based journals Clues and the
Journal of Popular Culture. Fan and reader-oriented outlets run a broad
range, and some blogs offer substantive material beyond friendly reviews
and event promotion. By their nature, internet sources are changeable;
blogs that have been useful to my students may change or disappear while
new ones will materialize. While I am hesitant to name many specific inter-
net sources, two long-standing ones that offer accurate and up to date
material are http://www.eurocrime.co.uk (run by Karen Meek for more
than ten years) and http://crimealwayspays.blogspot.com (run by Declan
Burke since 2007). Major literary reviews such as the Times Literary
Supplement, the London Review of Books, and the New York Times Book
Review include regular attention to crime fiction (although students
sometimes need guidance in evaluating their biases and/or knowledge
base), and the Los Angeles Review of Books features reviews, review-essays,
and author interviews (http://www.lareviewofbooks.org).
Full-length studies and collections of essays on crime fiction subjects
find their way onto the lists of many academic presses; the current state of
the field suggests that there is not one particular press to whose catalog
students would turn to discover new work. The Crime Files series, based
in the UK office of Palgrave Macmillan, has been going since the turn of
 TEACHING CRIME FICTION CRITICISM 187

the century under the general editorship of Clive Bloom. The titles of that
series offer a snapshot of the kinds of topics that fit under the umbrella of
crime-fiction studies, including books on major authors, connections with
other genres (gothic, film), feminist readings, historically-situated analy-
ses, and even some books that are more readers’ guides than scholarly
studies (suggesting the close links between critical modes). Crime Files
titles include both monographs and essay collections, and its offerings
continue to grow in concert with developments in the field.
It is also useful to encourage students to look beyond obvious venues,
showing them crime fiction criticism appearing in journals such as Modern
Fiction Studies (USA) and Mosaic (Canada). Crime fiction makes its way
into broader period studies and in theoretical explorations such as Franco
Moretti’s model of distant reading.3 The presence of crime fiction in such
outlets illustrates the connections between the genre and broader con-
cerns of humanities scholarship. Sometimes these non-crime-fiction out-
lets are essential for teaching crime fiction. In my seminar on contemporary
Scandinavian crime fiction, for example, articles on crime fiction in
Scandinavian Studies were essential. Sometimes negotiations with library
staff are required in order to provide access to necessary material. Even
with shrinking budgets, libraries are receptive to requests that will benefit
students.
Archival material can be valuable as well, depending on the readings
being studied and access to library and/or archival holdings. As more
material becomes available online, students can be directed to good
resources, and the researcher’s own material can be drawn on. For exam-
ple, students can be directed to the UK National Archives (http://www.
nationalarchives.gov.uk) for material such as images of maps or the online
available records for “crime, prisons and punishment 1770–1935.” From
my own research, I have shared data from the Mass-Observation Archive
(University of Sussex, UK) relating to reading and to attitudes toward
capital punishment; material from unpublished letters in the Sherlock
Holmes Collections (University of Minnesota, USA); and information
about “pulp” editions housed in the Russell B. Nye Popular Culture
Collection (Michigan State University, USA). We want our students to
learn in our classes—new material, new ways of thinking, new questions to
ask—and we want them to leave ready to learn more. Sharing aspects of
research that go beyond processing already processed products like jour-
nal articles can contribute, by providing tools and the motivation to use
them.
188 R. E. JOHNSEN

Conclusion: M.A. Seminar in American Crime Fiction

I would like to use my M.A. seminar as a closing case study, as it pulls
together the practices presented in this chapter and demonstrates some of
their implications. Let me begin by quoting part of the course rationale, as
it indicates my priorities in teaching crime fiction and reflects my under-
standing of its importance to literary and cultural study:

Crime fiction is a popular genre known for its strong narrative arc and mate-
rial specificity. The genre’s detailed presentation of society, from its material
circumstances to its values, makes it ideal for the study of context-rich liter-
ary history. It has also been the basis for important theoretical work in liter-
ary study, such as 1970s and 80s structuralism and Franco Moretti’s
twenty-first century hypotheses about “distant reading.” Crime fiction has
been an international literary phenomenon from its inception, and American
writers have played an influential role in its development. This semester’s
crime novels reward study, and they represent authors who have contributed
to genre developments in the US and internationally.

This seminar is one of the required courses for my university’s M.A. degree
in English, and its course number is for American Literature. Although all
of the literature we read is American, I emphasize the international nature
of the genre. Even in the earlier days, the Anglo-American cross-currents
were vital to genre developments; in the twenty-first century, broader
internationalization is shaping the genre. The rationale’s dual emphases
on material culture and theoretical models play out through discussion
and research.
One means of getting students deeper into these two emphases is a
monograph review-essay and presentation, an assignment I use in a variety
of upper-division and postgraduate courses. Because the development of
the genre and its critical history are important for a full understanding of
American crime fiction, each student chooses a work from a list of schol-
arly studies, writes a review-essay of 4–6 pages, and prepares an informa-
tive 10–12-minute presentation for the class. The essays present key
features of the book and indicate connections to course readings we’ve
done, while the presentations pool our knowledge. I remind students that
the audience for these two components is slightly different; while the
audience for the review-essay is familiar with the subject text, the presenta-
tion is bringing the news to the rest of the class. Students are encouraged
to provide a handout or submit material to be posted on Blackboard.
 TEACHING CRIME FICTION CRITICISM 189

This assignment fulfills several objectives. First, it gets the students to

come to terms with one full-length study of crime fiction. I place the
assignment about two-thirds of the way into the semester, effectively
launching the research for the final seminar essay with a thoughtful
engagement of a monograph while also pooling student knowledge of
these professor-selected works. Through the content-rich presentations,
students receive grounding in the wealth of approaches that scholars have
taken to crime fiction; in some cases, they also find specific scholars and
texts that will inform their own research. Through in-class interaction
among students whose reviews cluster around similar topics, everyone
advances their discernment of utility and value. In the cluster of texts on
the hardboiled subgenre, for example, students began to see differences in
approach (varying degrees of reliance on theory, cultural history, and/or
archival material) and in subject matter (books only, related ephemera,
and/or film). Guided discussion of these findings enables students to
practice evaluating crime fiction criticism—what kinds of judgments are
rendered on what aspects of the criticism?—and to begin shaping their
own approaches. They begin the research for their seminar essays from this
foundation, and it provides a platform on which the professor can build
through examples of scholarly articles, essay collections, and mainstream
or popular reviews. While this is an assignment I use in other classes, for
crime fiction I provide a list of possible monographs and I place greater
emphasis on the sharing of basic knowledge via the presentation. The list
of monographs provided ensures breadth of engagement; while I always
include more options than there are students in the class, there are never
so many that an important category goes unrepresented. Furthermore,
the list includes both important “classics” in the field and more recent
studies, helping students gain a sense of how crime fiction scholarship has
developed since the early academic work of scholars such as John Cawelti,
George Dove, and Kathleen Gregory Klein. My selection is broken into
subcategories of “literary history,” “theory and criticism,” and “subgenres
and topics.” When I distribute the list, I briefly describe the books, placing
them in an overall context of crime fiction criticism and identifying the
primary objects of study (course authors, well-known films, etc.). As much
as possible, I avoid signaling my own take on these works or directing
students toward or away from individual titles; they all meet standards of
significance for inclusion on the list, and the presentations and discussion
will illuminate their contributions and limitations.
190 R. E. JOHNSEN

The essay at semester’s end offers students the opportunity to pursue

independent research and contribute to ongoing critical conversations
around crime fiction. Topic selection is open, as long as the primary focus is
on crime fiction, and students make choices in line with their commitments.
Some students have pursued additional historical and cultural research; oth-
ers work comparatively and include other crime fiction (sometimes works
they have encountered in classes taken with me previously); still others pur-
sue a theoretically-grounded reading such as feminist readings of texts with
the grain, or against it; some interrogate (sub)genre definitions and bound-
aries. A common student response at the end of crime-fiction courses is that
crime fiction did not seem like something to be studied before they took the
course, but they discovered that it rewarded their study by providing cul-
tural insight, offered valuable opportunities to sharpen their critical tools,
and was enjoyable. These rewards are shared by the professor, too.
Crime fiction criticism, like crime fiction itself, continues to evolve. The
Pyrhönen study, excellent as it is, cannot predict new directions, and we
do not ask it to do so. On top of the clear, rich presentation of the critical
heritage it provides, it also shows how criticism is time-bound. Just as the
periods traced in the study, the “moment” of 1994 is characteristic of its
time. We also see how quickly subfields can develop. For example, within
twenty years of the ground-breaking book-length feminist study of crime
fiction by Kathleen Gregory Klein, The Woman Detective: Gender and
Genre (1988), publishers’ lists include specialized books that marry femi-
nism with subgenre (Johnsen, Contemporary Feminist Historical Crime
Fiction, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) or theme and period (Godfrey,
Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society:
From Dagger-Fans to Suffragettes, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). The big
movements right now are the international awareness and increasingly
multi-directional traffic among authors and scholars, crime fiction’s clear
relevance for what is being called “the new realism,” and the rapid pro-
gression of crime fiction’s mainstreaming. The broadening of the term
“noir” is one symptom of this shift, as those discovering crime fiction
adopt a term that used to have a sharply-defined meaning; while “noir”
can begin to seem like all things to all people, it also reflects the high value
being placed on the genre and, after all, it is only the latest iteration of the
perpetual quest to name the genre: detective fiction, mystery, whodunit,
crime fiction, noir. So let us teach crime fiction criticism as being rooted
firmly in its time, and trust that some of our students will make the next
generation of criticism significant and relevant.
 TEACHING CRIME FICTION CRITICISM 191

Notes
1. Heta Pyrhönen, Mayhem and Murder: Narrative and Moral Problems in the
Detective Story (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 8.
2. See, for example, “American Literary Independence” and “National
Literature and Imagination” in The Portable Edgar Allan Poe, edited by
J. G. Kennedy (NY: Penguin, 2006), 582–84 and 594–95.
3. Moretti argues that “both synchronically and diachronically … the novel is
the system of its genres” (Graphs, Maps, Trees [London: Verso, 2005], 30)
and he uses the Sherlock Holmes stories as one of his central experimental
examples.

Works Cited
Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grace. 1996. New York: Anchor, 1997.
———. In Search of Alias Grace: On Writing Canadian Historical Fiction. Ottawa:
University of Ottawa Press, 1997.
Bertens, Hans, and Theo D’haen. Contemporary American Crime Fiction.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.
Burke, Declan, ed. Down These Green Streets: Irish Crime Writing in the 21st
Century. Dublin: Liberties, 2011.
Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and
Popular Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.
Chandler, Raymond. “The Simple Art of Murder” (Preface). The Simple Art of
Murder. 1950. New York: Vintage, 1988
Christie, Agatha. Death in the Clouds. 1935. New York: Harper Collins, 2001.
Clarke, Clare. Late Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of Sherlock. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Dove, George N. The Police Procedural. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green
State University Popular Press, 1982.
Dussere, Erik. America Is Elsewhere: The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer
Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Godfrey, Emelyne. Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and
Society: From Dagger-Fans to Suffragettes. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2012.
Horsley, Lee. Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005.
Johnsen, Rosemary Erickson. Contemporary Feminist Historical Crime Fiction.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
———. “Dorothy L. Sayers and Virginia Woolf: Perspectives on the Woman
Intellectual in the Late 1930s.” Virginia Woolf Miscellany, no. 87 (2015):
23–26.
192 R. E. JOHNSEN

Klein, Kathleen Gregory. The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre. Champaign:
University of Illinois Press, 1988.
Knight, Stephen. Crime Fiction 1800–2000: Detection, Death, Diversity. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
———. Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1980.
Light, Alison. Forever England: Literature, Femininity and Conservatism Between
the Wars. London: Routledge, 1991.
McCann, Sean. Gumshoe America: Hard Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and
Fall of New Deal Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.
Merivale, Patricia, and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, eds. Detecting Texts: The
Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism. Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1998.
Moodie, Susanna. Life in the Clearings Versus the Bush. London: R. Bentley, 1853.
Moretti, Franco. Distant Reading. London: Verso, 2013.
———. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History. London: Verso,
2005.
Mullen, Anne, and Emer O’Beirne, eds. Crime Scenes: Detective Narratives in
European Culture Since 1945. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000.
Nestingen, Andrew. Crime and Fantasy in Scandinavia: Fiction, Film, and Social
Change. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008.
Nickerson, Catherine Ross. The Web of Iniquity: Early Detective Fiction by American
Women. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998.
Persson, Magnus. “High Crime in Contemporary Scandinavian Literature – The
Case of Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow.” In Scandinavian Crime
Fiction, edited by Andrew Nestingen and Paula Arvas, 148–58. Cardiff:
University of Wales Press, 2011.
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Portable Edgar Allan Poe, edited by J. Gerald Kennedy.
New York, NY: Penguin, 2006.
Pyrhönen, Heta. Mayhem and Murder: Narrative and Moral Problems in the
Detective Story. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.
———. Murder from an Academic Angle: An Introduction to the Study of the
Detective Narrative. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1994.
Reddy, Maureen. Sisters in Crime: Feminism and the Crime Novel. New York:
Continuum, 1988.
———. Traces, Codes, and Clues: Reading Race in Crime Fiction. New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003.
Sayers, Dorothy L. Strong Poison. 1930. New York: Bourbon Street Books, 2012.
Thompson, Jon. Fiction, Crime, and Empire: Clues to Modernity and Postmodernity.
Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1993.
 TEACHING CRIME FICTION CRITICISM 193

Trotter, David. Literature in the First Media Age: Britain Between the Wars.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.
Walton, Priscilla L., and Manina Jones. Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the
Hard-Boiled Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Wilson, Edmund. “On Crime Fiction.” Accessed October 1, 2016.
 CHAPTER 13

Teaching Contemporary US Crime Fiction

Through the ‘War on Drugs’: A Postgraduate
Case Study

Andrew Pepper

There is a familiar look to the syllabi of most introductory ‘crime fiction’

courses at undergraduate level: a few weeks at the start on the ‘classics’
(e.g. Poe, Collins, Doyle, and at a push Anna Katharine Green), followed
by a section on the American ‘hardboiled’ novelists (e.g. Hammett and
Chandler) and/or the English ‘Golden Age’ writers (e.g. Christie and
Sayers) and a few weeks at the end examining more recent female/feminist
and non-white appropriations (e.g. Paretsky, Vine, Mosley). There is nec-
essarily nothing wrong with such an approach and it gives students a good
introduction to some of the genre’s canonical novelists but it closes off
opportunities to explore other manifestations of crime fiction. For exam-
ple, the move from the English Golden Age to the US hardboiled tends
to produce its own account of the genre’s developments that overlooks
emerging crime fiction cultures elsewhere or crime writers that are per-
haps harder to classify (e.g. Josephine Tey or Patricia Highsmith).
Furthermore, such an approach produces a set of narrow assumptions

A. Pepper (*)
Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2018 195

C. Beyer (ed.), Teaching Crime Fiction, Teaching the New English,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90608-9_13
196 A. PEPPER

about the genre’s emergence and development: that this can be under-
stood as a straightforward passage from ‘classical’ crime fiction which is
figured as ­‘conservative’ to hardboiled crime fiction which is characterised
as ‘radical’, and that the genre becomes synonymous with a set of Anglo-
American writers, thereby excluding whole swathes and traditions of fic-
tion set and/or written outside this critical lens. This essay concerns my
efforts to teach contemporary US fiction at postgraduate level in ways
that push against some of the more ossified assumptions about what the
genre is and how it functions politically—and to challenge postgraduate
students to think critically about their own understandings of the genre
and its complex discursive formations and to read crime fiction through a
set of conceptual frameworks.
Specifically, my essay focuses on the challenges and potential benefits of
teaching contemporary US crime fiction through the ‘war on drugs’ and
vice versa: how we can use the ‘real’ context of the contemporary drug
wars afflicting the Americas and beyond to, firstly, ask far-reaching ques-
tions about the complex relationship between the true crime and crime
fiction; secondly, consider what crime fiction can say about this ‘real’ con-
text, or how crime fiction can make interventions, that other modes of
discourse and other disciplinary perspectives cannot; and thirdly, examine
the complex formal and political implications at stake in these interven-
tions. There are other advantages of beginning a course entitled
‘Contemporary US Crime Fiction’ with a section focusing on the ‘war on
drugs’ or the ‘drug wars’: it immediately places us on the margins of, or
outside, the geographical confines of the US insofar as the related issues of
policing and trafficking require us to consider the US’s relationship with
Mexico especially and the rest of the Americas. To teach US crime fiction
in ways that decentre rather than reinscribe the exceptional status of the
United States of America is to make an important political statement. But
to teach US crime fiction through the lens of the ‘war on drugs’ also
demands that we pay attention to current affairs and the contemporary
news agenda and to reflect upon their own practices and views of the
world in terms of their reading. This is of course something that we ask of
undergraduate students too, but the onus on postgraduate students to
critically reflect upon their understandings of the relationship between fic-
tion, theory and the(ir) world is especially pronounced.
Reading fiction of any kind can sometimes seem, to students, like an
activity wholly divorced from their own lives and experiences, and the
tendency of much crime fiction towards resolution (whether clear-cut or
 TEACHING CONTEMPORARY US CRIME FICTION THROUGH THE ‘WAR… 197

otherwise) often reinforces a gap between their reading habits and the
typically messy open-endedness of their lives. As such, they often
­comment on the ‘realism’ of ‘war on drugs’ fictions which cannot offer
such assurances and do not usually bring their narratives to straightfor-
ward resolutions, not least because the ‘war on drugs’ itself is unwinna-
ble and hence limps on ad infinitum. Moreover, while few of my students
have any direct experience of life in Mexico or the US-Mexico border-
lands, many have read about the violence afflicting Mexico (e.g. the kid-
napping and presumed murder of forty-three students in Guerrero in
2015, or perhaps Sean Penn’s unwitting role in the capture of Mexican
drug-lord, Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera, aka ‘El Chapo’, in 2016).
This, in turn, gives them some sense that crime fiction focusing on the
contemporary drug wars is urgently speaking to and about our world,
not least because the question of ‘our’ complicity as potential purchasers
of illegal drugs is directly raised in the works themselves. For the pur-
poses of this essay, the set texts I’ll refer to are Sicario and Cartel Land,
a mainstream Hollywood movie and a high-profile documentary both
released in 2015, and Don Winslow’s epic crime novel, The Cartel—
sequel to The Power of the Dog (2005)—also first published in 2015. This
mixture of film and fiction allows us to consider how the ‘drug wars’
currently playing out in Mexico, the US and elsewhere are depicted in
different forms and media and the implications of these differences for
our consideration of the genre’s politicisations. My examination of strat-
egies for teaching crime fiction here are based on my experiences at
Queen’s University Belfast teaching these materials on a final-year under-
graduate module called Contemporary US Crime Fiction and an MA
module called The Thriller in an Age of Global Insecurity—and as such
I would like to thank my students for their unwitting assistance in help-
ing me formulate my thoughts on this subject.

True Crime and Crime Fiction

There are advantages and disadvantages of focusing on ‘real’ events or
circumstances and using these to somehow assess the crime fiction that
emerges out of them. For a start, the notion that the fiction may be ‘based
on real events’, or in the case of the documentary Cartel Land (this film
juxtaposes the story of the Autodefensas movement in Michoacán, Mexico,
a citizen-group established to oppose drug cartel violence, and a vigilante
group in Arizona, USA, patrolling the US-Mexico border), may try to
198 A. PEPPER

capture this reality, gives the material additional charge or relevance for
students. One of the dangers of course is that students will assume the
facts to be inviolate and will use these to assess the purported accuracy of
the (crime) fiction. This in turn runs the risk of calcifying rather than
unsettling the rather more slippery distinction between the reality and
artifice. Yet the contemporary drug wars—for the designation ‘war’ is by
no mean an overstatement—is useful here because its appalling, bloody
excesses allow or require us to think carefully about ‘the fact/fiction thing’
as outlined by Mark Seltzer:

No doubt true crime puts in doubt from the start the line between fact and
fiction. The very notion of true crime, I have suggested, proceeds as if
‘crime’ itself were assumed to be a fictional thing, such that the word ‘true’
must be added to bend it toward fact; the line between crime fact and crime
fiction is in play from the start.1

In other words, and insofar as it may not be possible to properly distin-

guish between crime fact and fiction, the drug wars that flared with par-
ticular brutality from 2006 to 2012 (un-coincidentally the years of the
Calderon presidency in Mexico) presents us with a compelling case of this
semantic degradation.2 Students perhaps already know about the scale and
extent of the bloodshed, but when they are told that 100,000 or more
people have been killed by cartel and government violence between
September 2006 and September 2012, it puts this violence into sobering
context.3 To really make the point, and having given the students due
warning, I also show a small selection of images of the violence—bodies
hanging from bridges, headless corpses—to underscore the idea of excess
as well as the issues raised by a new development in Mexican journalism
colloquially known as the ‘noja roja’ whereby graphic images of cartel
violence are posted in the internet for vicarious consumption.4 This, in
turn, requires us to think about, from the point of view of novelist or film-
maker, how to make sense of a ‘reality’ that seems so grotesque, so exces-
sive, so overdetermined, that it does not in some perverse sense seem ‘real’
and about the ethical implications of looking at images of violated
corpses—what a character in The Cartel calls ‘violence porn’.5 In classes I
am aware of the need to handle these issues and demands sensitively and
give students prior ‘warnings’ about any potentially offensive images that
I might show but I have found that students are keen to interrogate their
 TEACHING CONTEMPORARY US CRIME FICTION THROUGH THE ‘WAR… 199

own responses to these images and to reflect upon the differences and
proximities between images and ‘the real’.
In practice, students responded more favourably to Cartel Land—a
documentary that explores populist vigilante efforts to oppose the grow-
ing influence of the cartels in Arizona, US, and Michoacán, Mexico—than
to Sicario, which they seemed more able or willing to dismiss as ‘artifice’,
even if the Hollywood movie offers useful insights into the militarisation
of policing and ‘the merger of the war on drugs and the war on terror’.6
‘The pleasure and appeal of documentary film’, according to Bill Nichols,
‘lies in its ability to make us see timely issues in need of attention …. The
linkage between documentary and the historical world is the most distinc-
tive feature of this tradition’.7
In this sense, the students were responding not merely to the timeliness
of the issues raised (such as the legitimacy of state policing vs. populist
interventions) but also to the documentary’s affective dimension. This
latter aspect was starkly presented in an interview with the widow of a man
brutally killed by cartel violence, described by director Matthew Heineman
as the film’s most disturbing scene:

She witnessed her spouse being chopped into piece and burned to death. To
sit in the room and talk to this woman whose body was there, but whose
entire soul had been sucked out of her; to look into her eyes and to see the
hollowness there; to hear her describe the horrors of what she had wit-
nessed; and to think we are the same species of human beings that would do
that to other people. That stuck with me.8

But the documentary’s truth-claims also allowed us to consider its status

as representation and the problems of identifying with what we see on the
screen as ‘real’—hence Michael Renov’s question posed against nonfiction
film in general: ‘Is the referent a piece of the world, drawn from the world
of lived experience, or, instead, do the people and objects placed before
the camera yield to the demands of a creative vision?’9 This, in turn,
enabled us to think about the implications of ‘creative intervention’ and
utilising ‘fictive’ elements (e.g. narrative arcs, characterisations, camera
angles, sound) to organise ‘a presumably objective representation of the
world’,10 and as a result, how crime fiction and true crime are more
entwined than we might first think.
200 A. PEPPER

Crime Fiction as Narcoculture

At stake is the larger question of the effects of particular creative decisions
and how we might read the resulting representations politically. Rather
than trying to determine how well or accurately crime fiction and nonfic-
tion responds to the complexities of the drug wars, we should focus on
what they tell us, as representations, about the discourses that act or
impinge upon their constructed-ness. In other words, we accept that these
texts do not show us the ‘real’, however seductive this idea might be, and
instead we think about how the formal and thematic decisions taken (what
to film, how to film, what kind of story to tell etc.) have particular effects,
intended or otherwise. In the context of the contemporary drug wars, this
is in effect what Miguel Cabañas calls ‘narcoculture’ or ‘the complex net-
work of cultural practices and representations, ambiguous and sometimes
contradictory, that has become our “truth” about that world’.11 A docu-
mentary like Cartel Land might in one sense show us the ‘real’; for exam-
ple, what it is like to be caught up in a shoot-out. However, we also need
to think about its political meaning and implications, and as such we talked
in class a lot about whether its determination not to offer a commentary or
position on the violence or to give us a larger framework or context to
understand this violence means that its politics are, in the end, confused
and confusing. As such we wondered whether the ‘reality effect’—this
need to document rather than to comment—meant that Cartel Land was
not able to offer a successful, fully realised critique of the violence and its
multiple causes. I’m aware here that this last point may have been my read-
ing of the documentary rather than my students’, but they were willing to
entertain the idea, especially retrospectively after we’d read The Cartel,
which offers us a more sophisticated contextualisation of the violence.
If part of what we tried to do in class was to explore the slippery
nature of the distinction between fiction and nonfiction (crime fiction
and true crime) we also thought about whether the fictional could give
us insights into the ‘real’ that are somehow beyond straightforward
modes of objective reporting. To put this another way, why might it be
the case that ‘it is through the “fictionalized” narratives that one learns
most about the world of drugs’?12 Mexican novelist Yuri Herrera has an
answer: ‘What art can do is offer an alternative discourse that accounts
for the complexity of the phenomenon, of its long history, its many
complicities, and the need to reflect again on each individual’s responsi-
 TEACHING CONTEMPORARY US CRIME FICTION THROUGH THE ‘WAR… 201

bilities. Good literature … surpasses all Manichaeisms’.’13 Herrera’s

remarks of course implicitly resurrect well-worn arguments about what
constitutes ‘good’ literature, as opposed to ‘bad’ genre fiction but part
of my argument here is that crime fiction is able to surpass or
indeed unravel these Manichaeisms just as effectively as Herrera’s ‘good
literature’. This was the jumping-off point for our in-depth consider-
ation of Winslow’s The Cartel—an epic account of the failures of the
US-led war against drug trafficking and the drug cartels, and one that
places an emphasis on complexity, history and indeed complicity in the
manner that Herrera indicates. At stake is not simply the question of
what fiction can do that other forms of reportage cannot, but rather
what kinds of fictional forms are best able to critically interrogate these
kinds of complexities?
One particularly gruesome incident of cartel violence occurred in
Morelia, Michoacán, on 6 September 2006 and is described by Saviano:
‘twenty men dressed in black, their faces covered in ski masks, burst into
the discotheque … opened black plastic trash bags, and rolled five decapi-
tated heads across the dance floor’ (97). On its own the act is symptom-
atic of a generalised savagery, or as Saviano puts it the perception of
Mexico as ‘a place of unending and incomprehensible violence’ (59) but
we decided that what Winslow does so well is introduce us to one of the
perpetrators—Jesús ‘Chuy’ Barajos—thirty pages prior to the act itself.
As such we thought about the act as part of a more complicated story that
cannot be reduced to the actions of a single bad or defective person.
Rather we see how Chuy is sequestered into the brutal and brutalising
environment of the cartels, how he is trained and indoctrinated and how
this context drives him to do what he does. As such we talked about how
what we do, especially in contexts as fraught, complex and violent as
Chuy’s, is never simply the result of individual pathologies; rather the way
we act in the world is shaped by the systems we are a part of. This shift
from individual action to systemic context is arguably best served not by
a single narrative that follows one character and line of enquiry but a
series of multiple, overlapping stories that develop in complex ways across
time and space. Or as Zavala puts it, referring to Winslow in particular,
‘only a particular narrative trend of fiction and non-fiction published in
the United States has been able to articulate a necessary, critical, and sub-
versive view of the official discourse on drug trafficking and its related
organizations in both countries’.14
202 A. PEPPER

Crime Fiction: Systems Versus Individuals

In my own work on crime fiction I am very keen to explore how ‘indi-
vidual action is always socially and economically situated’ and how the
‘systemic is always privileged over the subjective’ so that ‘what keeps us
reading, typically opens out to interrogate the nature of society itself, and
of the systems – of state power and capitalism – which simultaneously
envelop and govern us, and those in the stories, as subjects’.15 I do not ask
students to read my work because such an approach tends to produce
stilted exchanges in which students are typically embarrassed about quot-
ing my words back at me but rather try to engage them with the attendant
ideas—in this case, that crime is best understood in a systemic rather than
individual context. In the case of The Cartel, and indeed of cartel violence
in general, this shift of emphasis from individuals to systems allows us to
think through two related propositions: first, that the violence afflicting
parts of Mexico and also the US should be seen as a consequence of capi-
talism (rather than as something capitalism can cure or make better); and
second, that drug cartels are not readily distinguishable from state struc-
tures and activities to the point where it is hard to tell where the licit realm
of politics, business and law ends and the illicit realm of organised crimi-
nality begins. Summarising both positions, Saviano puts it as follows: ‘it is
not the mafia that has transformed itself into a modern capitalist enter-
prise, it is capitalism that has transformed itself into a mafia. The rules of
drug trafficking … are also the rules of capitalism’.16 This, then, is the
starting point for our consideration in classes of the wider implications of
the cartel-related violence: what it tells us is not just about contemporary
Mexico (and the US) but also about the world we live in more generally.
Here in our class we returned to some of the images of mutilated bodies
and hanging corpses we had considered at an earlier moment and asked
how the embodied violence might perhaps speak to or about Saviano’s
formulation of organised crime and capitalism. The best answer we could
come up with related to the use of violence as a form of advertising and
brand differentiation and to the logic of deregulation and expansion—and
the acquisition of new markets—which in The Cartel becomes the driving
force behind every violent act. If Ed Vulliamy gives us the most succinct
account of this developing logic whereby ‘the greed for violence reflects
the greed for brands, and becomes a brand in itself’ so that ‘Mexico’s war’
is ‘the inevitable war of capitalism gone mad’,17 the best conceptual frame-
work is offered by Slavoj Žižek’s distinction between ‘subjective violence’
 TEACHING CONTEMPORARY US CRIME FICTION THROUGH THE ‘WAR… 203

(‘violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent’) and systemic violence

understood as ‘the catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning
of our economic and political system’.18
Some students struggled with this notion of violence not as aberrant
but rather as the product of ‘the smooth functioning of our economic and
political system’. However, we considered the role of the state and state
institutions in The Cartel, either as well-meaning players in the battle to
quell cartel violence or as bodies or entities that are centrally implicated in
the escalation and intensification of the violence. Here almost everyone in
the class agreed that it was the latter rather than the former and hence, as
Zavala puts it, ‘that drug trafficking exists within the community and is
not a criminal force attacking the community from the outside’. Rather, ‘it
is a social construct always inside the state, with organized structures that
also fulfil the roles of the state when needed. Narcos are not invading
criminals; they occupy the top strata of power and civil society’.19 In the
novel, Winslow gives us numerous examples of corrupt policemen and
politicians, but this dense supersaturation of graft has become de rigeur for
the crime narratives that deal with the contemporary drug wars. As such
we considered what makes The Cartel’s treatment or thematisation of the
relationship between the state and criminality different. Here we focused
on the structural aspects of these connections or as Dawn Pavey puts it, in
her book Drug War Capitalism (2014), how the violence of the cartels
‘interacts with capitalism, state power and resource extraction’.20 Winslow
suggests, for example, that particular cartels, such as the Zetas, cross a line
not when they massacre entire villages or torture innocent people but
rather when they threaten the interests and activities of multinational oil
companies—at which point these interests, in consort with elements in the
Mexican and US state, are prepared to act with rival cartels using extra-­
legal violence and methods to do so. Hence we paid a lot of attention to
what Art Keller, a DEA agent in the novel, describes as the ‘psychological
leak from the war on terror into the war on drugs’. He states that:

The battle against Al Qaeda has redefined what’s thinkable, permissible, and
doable. Just as the war on terror has turned the functions of intelligence
agencies into military action, the war on drugs has similarly militarized the
police. CIA is running a drone and assassination program in South Asia;
DEA is assisting the Mexican military in targeting top narcos for ‘arrests’
that are often executions. (392)
204 A. PEPPER

Holloway argues that thriller fiction tends to function conservatively or

even neo-imperially to legitimise ‘human rights abuses by the West, par-
ticularly state sanctioned torture, by depicting the West, rhetorically, as
the virtuous bringer of rights’.21 But in class we agreed that a novel like
The Cartel offers a more critical perspective on US and western complicity
and does so by suggesting that Keller and others belong ‘to a wider net-
work of systemic violence, of which the international drug trade is a part’.22
The Cartel also suggests that the ‘war on drugs’ is not ultimately a war
against the product itself or even a war against the cartels but rather a
vicious, bloody asymmetrical conflict where ‘the pain, fear, and suffering
resulting from militarization and paramilitarization are experienced in
large parts by poor and working people and migrants’.23 But this, in turn,
raised the question of what the crime novel can do in the face of these
discriminations and brutalities. What kind of resistance can a novel like
The Cartel enact in the face of such concentrations of power and violence?
What hope can it offer ‘ordinary’ poor and working people caught up in
the violence? And how does Winslow, a US citizen, write a novel that
doesn’t simply lay bare US complicity in and with the escalating violence
but pays proper attention to the involvement of individuals and groups in
Mexico in the struggles against the cartels? These are difficult, far-reaching
questions and while I wouldn’t expect my MA students to come up with
fully-developed answers in class, my hope would be to encourage further
reading and exploration in preparation for essay-writing exercises.
One of the bigger issues I try to encourage students to think about in
my classes is how far we can expect crime fiction to further progressive
politics or indeed whether the genre, which is typically orientated towards
the logic of explanation and resolution, inevitably supports a more conser-
vative politics. In my own work, I try to emphasise the tensions and ambi-
guities produced as a result of the genre’s complicated relations with the
state and capitalism:

If there is a populist scepticism in crime fiction from its earliest incarnations

towards traditional modes and figures of authority, any overt political radi-
calism is contained by the accommodations crime stories must make towards
the articulation of law and the restitution of order. In the same way, this
conservative impulse is itself undermined by the crime story’s typical refusal
to turn a blind eye to institutional failure and corruption.24
 TEACHING CONTEMPORARY US CRIME FICTION THROUGH THE ‘WAR… 205

In classes we tried to think about how this same dynamic is identifiable in

the crime narratives produced by, and in relation to, the contemporary
drug wars. In the first class, where we discussed Cartel Land, we consid-
ered how the legitimacy of the vigilante actions established in Michoacán
by Dr José Mirales and the Autodefensa group, is gradually eroded as
members of the group are sequestered into the cartels and thereby become
complicit with the very thing they were set up to oppose. This led to a
discussion of the film’s final scene where the meth cookers we saw at the
start are revealed to be part of the local police force and their spokesperson
(concealed by a ski-mask) suggests that the cartels can’t be stopped
because everyone is complicit in their activities. In doing so, texts like
Cartel Land and The Cartel challenge the typical logic-resolution impera-
tive of much crime fiction or at least show students that not all crime has
to conform to this pattern. The larger political point is made eloquently by
an online blogger, the Wild Child, in The Cartel who extends this idea of
complicity even further (to include those who consume the drugs and
those who profit from the laundering of cartel profits) while at the same
time identifying those most in danger from the ongoing violence and in
doing so reconstitutes the ‘war on drugs’ as a ‘war on poverty’:

I speak for the ones who cannot speak, for the voiceless. I raise my voice and
wave my arms and shout for the ones you do not see, perhaps cannot see, for
the invisible. For the poor, the powerless, the disenfranchised; for the vic-
tims of this so-called ‘war on drugs’, for the eighty thousand murdered by
the narcos, by the police, by the military, by the government, by the pur-
chasers of drugs and the sellers of guns, by the investors in gleaming towers
who have parlayed their ‘new money’ into hotels, resorts, shopping malls,
and suburban developments …. This is not a war on drugs. This is a war on
the poor’. (582)

The notion that the ‘war on drugs’ is really a war against the poor really
underscores the political dimension of Winslow’s novel and demonstrates,
more eloquently than I am able to, that crime fiction does not have to be
an escapist, politically conservative form but rather can engage in anti-­
capitalist thinking without being ‘preachy’. The blog-post is moving rather
than propagandist because Wild Child’s brave opposition to the power of
the cartels ends up costing him his life. If this is part of Winslow’s response
to the thorny and fraught question of resistance and the capacity of the
genre to stand in opposition to conglomerations of power and violence
206 A. PEPPER

understood as systemic rather than subjective, to use Žižek’s terms, we

also discussed the time and space that Winslow devotes to thematising this
resistance and to exploring the potential for collective action. Here then
we returned full circle to the issue or question that I raised at the outset:
what can fiction, and specifically crime fiction, do that other forms of fact-­
based reportage cannot? Certainly The Cartel brilliantly illuminates and
interrogates the complex alliances between states, drug cartels and busi-
nesses and in doing so allows us to see what would otherwise be invisible.
But in the end what we thought the novel does best is to give us insight
into the everyday lives and experiences of those caught up in the violence
and either succumb to the coercions and temptations offered to them or
try, often in vain, to stand up to the aggressors. As such, in the final part
of our class, we considered characters living in Mexico, especially in the
Juárez valley, such as Marisol, Jimena, Erika and the other ‘women of
Juárez’, who demonstrate considerable bravery and pay a heavy price for
it. Winslow doesn’t suggest that their interventions will necessarily pro-
duce ‘good’ results—and there is no naïve faith in the capacity of individ-
ual protagonists, even vigilantes, to deliver justice—but implies that the
world would be a bleaker, less hospitable place without their efforts.
Perhaps this is the only realistic hope that crime fiction about the contem-
porary drug wars can offer us.

Conclusion
This was the first year that I have taught these texts and that I have organ-
ised the first half of the module specifically around the ‘war on drugs’ in
crime fiction, and hence it remains to be seen just how students respond
to the issues raised both in their assessments and in end-of-semester ques-
tionnaires. On the evidence of their enthusiastic response to the texts,
even to a 600-page novel like The Cartel, and the attendant and related
issues of state power, capitalism and violence, I am encouraged that they
are keen to make connections between the crime fiction we examine in
classes and the world that we are all a part of. To this end, as well as requir-
ing students to write an academic essay on a subject or topic of their own
choosing, I am asking them to produce a digital map (e.g. either a mind
or geographical map) that thematises or indeed visualises a particular
aspect of a crime narrative or a series of crime narratives in order to find
new ways of further demonstrating the genre’s capacity for engaging with
and intervening in the world that produces it. Certainly there is much for
 TEACHING CONTEMPORARY US CRIME FICTION THROUGH THE ‘WAR… 207

the students to ponder in terms of what the violence means, how it is rep-
resented and to what end—and in turn to think about how or how far the
scale and scope of the violence, the further opening up of social divisions
and inequalities, and the thematisation of the changing relationship
between state and capital puts pressure on our preconceptions about the
formal and political properties of crime fiction as a genre. For example,
what are the implications for the genre of the sheer scale and extent of the
violence—especially if there is no chance of bringing the attendant crises
to some kind of order? And if the complicity between drug cartels and
state actors and between the licit and illicit realms runs so deep, what hap-
pens to the possibility or hope for justice, even a flawed justice, that is so
central to the genre?
But this is only part of what I want my postgraduate students to do or
only part of what I want them to reflect on. The richness of the ‘war on
drugs’ as a case study is evidenced by the proliferation of new crime fiction
that addresses it as a subject but also by the scholarly materials produced
about it, much of it coming from disciplines outside literary studies,
for example Sociology, Criminology, Security Studies, International
Relations. Indeed this move beyond or outside the ‘safe’ domain of liter-
ary criticism—whereby students are asked to make connections between
literary and visual narratives and critical work and theoretical perspec-
tives from other disciplines—is one of the key attributes of successful
postgraduate work, not least because it requires students to think about
how the resulting exchange of ideas asks far-reaching questions both of
crime fiction and of these other disciplinary perspectives. For example,
crime fiction can explore the human consequences of the violence and
exploitation discussed in sociology or the difficulties that individuals face
when trying to manoeuvre within larger institutions. Looking ahead to
the ways in which the study of crime fiction at postgraduate level might
develop in future years, I would point to two related aspects: firstly, as
the ‘drug war fictions’ demonstrate and even enact, we will be thinking
about the global proliferation of crime and policing and of the increasing
difficulties of distinguishing legal and illegal domains and even of being
able to ‘see’ how power is wielded, by whom and for what ends. And
secondly, as crime fiction becomes one of the key vehicles for staging and
critiquing these manoeuvres, we will be in a better place to think about
the complex relationships between theory and practice (and fiction and
the ‘real’) and the ways in which interdisciplinary studies can help inter-
rogate these relationships.
208 A. PEPPER

Notes
1. Mark Seltzer, True Crime: Observations on Modernity and Violence (London
and New York: 2016), 38.
2. See Persephone Braham, ‘True-Crime, Crime Fiction, and Journalism in
Mexico’, in Andrew Pepper and David Schmid, eds., Globalization and the
State in Contemporary Crime Fiction: A World of Crime (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2016), 119–140.
3. Roberto Saviano, ZeroZeroZero, trans. Virginia Jewiss (London: Penguin,
2013), 105.
4. See Braham, ‘True-Crime’, 120–121.
5. Don Winslow, The Cartel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), 312. All further
citations refer to this edition.
6. Emma Björnehed, ‘Narco-Terrorism: The Merger of the War on Drugs
and the War on Terror’, Global Crime 6:3–4 (2004), 305–324.
7. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), ix.
8. See Corrine Gaston, ‘Inside the Drug Wars: A Conversation with “Cartel
Land” Maker Matthew Heineman’, International Documentary
Association (3 February 2016). http://www.documentary.org/feature/
inside-drug-wars-conversation-cartel-land-maker-matthew-heineman
(accessed 22 November 2016).
9. Michael Renov, ‘Introduction’ in Renov, ed., Theorizing Documentary
(London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 2.
10. Renov, ‘Introduction’, 2.
11. Miguel Cabañas, ‘Narcoculture and the Politics of Representation’. Latin
American Perspectives, 41: 2 (2014), 7.
12. Luis Astorga qtd. in Cabañas, ‘Narcoculture’, 8.
13. Yuri Herrara qtd. in Oswaldo Zavala, ‘Imagining the U.S.-Mexico Drug
War: The Critical Limits of Narconarratives’, Comparative Literature, 66:3
(2014), 345.
14. Zavala, ‘Imagining’, 342.
15. Andrew Pepper, Unwilling Executioner: Crime Fiction and the State
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 3, 12.
16. Roberto Saviano, ‘Foreword’, Anabel Hernández, Narcoland: The Mexican
Drug Lords and their Godfathers, trans. Iain Bruce and Lorna Scott Fox
(London: Verso, 2014), x.
17. Ed Vulliamy qtd. in Rebecca Birron, ‘It’s a Living: Hit Men in the Mexican
Narco War’, PMLA, 127:4 (2012), 822.
18. Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (London: Profile, 2008), 1.
19. Zavala, ‘Imagining’, 349–350.
 TEACHING CONTEMPORARY US CRIME FICTION THROUGH THE ‘WAR… 209

20. Dawn Pavey, Drug War Capitalism (Edinburgh and Oakland: AK Press,
2014), 26.
21. David Holloway, ‘The War on Terror Espionage Thriller, and the
Imperialism of Human Rights’, Comparative Literature Studies, 46:1
(2008), 20.
22. Zavala, ‘Imagining’, 354.
23. Pavey, Drug War Capitalism, 35.
24. Pepper, Unwilling, 2.

Works Cited
Birron, Rebecca E. “It’s a Living: Hit Men in the Mexican Narco War.” PMLA,
2012, 127:4, 820–834.
Björnehed, Emma. “Narco-Terrorism: The Merger of the War on Drugs and the
War on Terror.” Global Crime, 2004, 6:3–4, 305–324.
Braham, Persephone. “True-Crime, Crime Fiction, and Journalism in Mexico.” In
Globalization and the State in Contemporary Crime Fiction, edited by Andrew
Pepper and David Schmid, 119–140. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Print.
Cabañas, Miguel. “Narcoculture and the Politics of Representation.” Latin
American Perspectives, 2014, 41:2, 3–17.
Gaston, Corrine. “Inside the Drug Wars: A Conversation with ‘Cartel Land’
Maker Matthew Heineman.” International Documentary Association, 2016,
(3 February). http://www.documentary.org/feature/inside-drug-wars-conver-
sation-cartel-land-maker-matthew-heineman (accessed 22 November 2016).
Hernández, Anabel. Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers.
Trans. Iain Bruce and Lorna Scott Fox. London: Verso, 2014.
Kraska, Peter B. “Militarization and Policing – Its Relevance to 21st Century
Policing.” Policing, 2007, 1:4, 501–513.
Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary.
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991.
Pavey, Dawn. Drug War Capitalism. Edinburgh and Oakland: AK Press, 2014.
Pepper, Andrew. Unwilling Executioner: Crime Fiction and the State. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2016.
Renov, Michael, ed. Theorizing Documentary. London and New York: Routledge,
1993.
Saviano, Roberto. ZeroZeroZero. Trans. Virginia Jewiss. London: Penguin, 2013.
Seltzer, Mark. True Crime: Observations on Modernity and Violence. London and
New York: Routledge, 2016.
Winslow, Don. The Cartel. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.
210 A. PEPPER

Zavala, Oswaldo. “Imagining the U.S.-Mexico Drug War: The Critical Limits of
Narconarratives.” Comparative Literature, 2014, 66:3, 340–360.
Žižek, Slavoj. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile, 2008.

Filmography
Cartel Land. 2015. Director: Matthew Heineman.
Sicario. 2015. Director: Denis Villeneuve.
 Index1

A 84, 85, 96, 100, 101, 105, 106,

Active, 3, 35, 89, 92, 95, 107, 115, 138, 139, 151, 153, 164–167,
121, 135, 157, 158 169–173, 185–190
Activity, 4, 12, 36, 44, 56, 73, 84, Autonomous, 92, 94
115, 119, 122, 126, 165, 167,
196, 202, 203, 205
Adaptation, 5, 27, 53, 132, 133, 135, B
138, 139, 141, 185 Black Lives Matter, 24, 59
Aesthetic, 4, 28, 83, 91, 102, 127, Blogs, 173, 186
132, 168 Body, 2, 6, 9, 11, 59, 89, 103, 149,
Alienation, 89, 107 155, 168, 169, 171, 199
Ambiguity, 90, 135, 151, 156,
200, 204
Anthropocene, 126 C
Apartheid, 86–88, 93 Canon, 4, 9, 64, 100, 102–105, 107,
Archive, 132, 136, 138, 187 135, 169, 170
Assessment, 6, 7, 12, 30, 45, 91–92, Case study, 11, 90–96, 107, 132, 135,
94, 100, 102, 109, 180, 206 138, 184, 188, 195–207
Audience, 17, 24, 26, 27, 39, 55, 108, Celebrity, 132, 185
133, 134, 136, 138, 139, 188 Characterisation, 3, 120, 139, 147,
Author, 1, 4, 7, 8, 10, 12, 21, 22, 29, 152, 199
38, 40, 42, 44, 50, 70, 72, 73, Civilisation, 83, 84, 119

1
Notes: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

© The Author(s) 2018 211

C. Beyer (ed.), Teaching Crime Fiction, Teaching the New English,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90608-9
212 INDEX

Class Criminal, 20, 25–29, 31n5, 37,

social, 20, 63, 68–71, 75–77, 84, 39–41, 57, 73, 103, 122, 126,
86, 88, 89, 102, 104, 105, 166, 173, 203
109, 116 Criminality, 3, 9, 21, 24, 44, 132,
teaching and learning, 8, 17, 18, 21, 202, 203
30, 36, 43, 45, 51–53, 55–57, Criminology, 27,
61, 72, 73, 77, 94, 106–109, 30, 207
116, 181–183, 188, 189, 204 Critical theory, 11, 65
Classroom, 2, 7, 8, 12, 17–31, 43, 50, CSI effect, 29, 132
53, 63–78, 182 Curriculum, 29, 31, 35, 43, 45, 64,
Close reading, 10, 100, 106, 141 89, 170, 172
Closure, 26, 40–42, 107, 108,
126, 171
Clue puzzle, 104, 181, 183 D
Cognitive, 88, 92 Democracy, 86, 87, 92, 125
Colonial, 84–91, 93 Denouement, 40, 42, 43, 45, 84, 121,
Commercial, 90, 120, 166, 186 123, 124, 126
Competence, 92, 174 Description, 28, 37, 39, 40, 49, 53,
Complexity, 3, 8, 9, 27, 36, 51, 56, 84, 90–91, 107,
59–61, 75, 77, 78, 86, 92, 138, 169
100–102, 109n2, 119, 124, 125, Design, 17–31, 37, 40, 91, 99,
131, 133, 135, 142, 164, 168, 131, 172
180, 196, 200, 201, 206, 207 Discourse, 10, 26, 37, 40, 84, 85, 89,
Concept, 8, 21, 24, 27, 28, 36, 37, 121, 124, 135, 147–150, 157,
52, 53, 63–65, 71–75, 77, 83, 196, 200, 201
88, 90, 102, 134 Discussion, 2, 7, 10–12, 22, 25, 28,
Construction, 3, 5, 9, 10, 20, 21, 23, 31n3, 31n5, 31n6, 36, 37, 39,
24, 37, 45, 50, 52, 54, 59, 60, 43, 52, 53, 55–57, 63, 64, 66,
85, 104, 108, 117, 119, 139, 68, 70, 90, 92–95, 100–102,
142, 203 105, 108, 118, 122–125, 127n5,
Control, 30, 59, 70, 72, 76, 88 132, 134, 135, 138, 140, 141,
Controversial, 9, 23, 93, 106 179, 182–184, 188, 189, 205
Conversation, 43, 44, 69, 71, 72, 92, Disorder, 30, 36, 51, 84
94, 179, 180, 183, 190 Dissertation, 141, 142
Corruption, 19, 87, 124, 204 Diversity, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 12, 68, 71, 76,
Coursework, 75, 99, 100 86, 89, 96, 99, 101, 102,
Creative writing, 6, 12, 158, 163–165, 135, 185
170, 173 Documentary, 21, 23, 24, 27, 28,
Creativity, 88, 104, 168, 172 31n3, 100, 197, 199, 200
Crime fiction criticism, 2, 7–11, 100, Domestic noir, 106
179–190 Drama, 23–25, 29, 116, 123–125,
Crime flash fiction, 156 132, 141, 158
 INDEX
   213

E Gender, 6–9, 20, 22, 28, 49–61, 63,

Ecocriticism, 116–117, 65–71, 75–77, 84–86, 88, 89, 96,
119, 127 102, 104–106, 108, 109, 116,
Econoir, 126 169, 171
Enlightenment, 83 Genre theory, 25, 30
Environment, 12, 29, 41, 44, 93, 94, Globalization, 63, 72, 74–77, 89
107, 115–127, 201 Golden Age, 4, 37, 39–42, 44,
Episodic, 150, 151, 155 103–105, 117, 118, 124, 167,
Epistemology, 68, 74, 75, 83, 85, 89 169, 183, 195
Essay, 2, 3, 6–9, 12, 50, 54, 56, 60, Group work, 100
68, 69, 74, 77, 85, 92, 93, 109,
141, 142, 173, 184, 186–190,
196, 197, 206 H
Ethics, 116, 121, 122 Hard-boiled, 4, 8, 40, 41, 66, 77,
Ethnicity, 20, 23, 28, 63, 68–70, 101, 105, 107
75–77, 85, 102 Harlem Renaissance, 19
Evaluation, 4, 6, 7, 93–96, 101, 108, Hegemony, 41, 72, 85, 89
182, 183, 186, 189 Hermeneutics, 45, 84, 87, 91
Experimentation, 6, 7, 86, 100, 102, Heterosexual, 49
105–107, 109, 171 Hierarchy, 2, 89, 92, 119, 132
Higher Education Academy
(HEA), 12
F Historical, 4, 7, 23–25, 40, 43, 44,
Facilitate, 7, 94, 102, 108, 135, 142 54, 58, 60, 85, 87, 90, 91, 93,
Fan fiction, 135 101, 105, 116, 125, 136, 170,
Feedback, 64, 92, 141, 166, 171 172, 173, 181, 185, 190, 199
Femininity, 8, 49, 50, 58, 66, 67, 71, Hollywood, 136, 197, 199
119, 184, 190 Holocaust, the, 52
Feminist, 5, 6, 25, 41, 50, 58, 60, 72, Howdunit, 39
100, 106, 185, 187, 190, 195 Hybrid, 26, 76, 85, 165
Femme fatale, 67, 106
Film, 3, 10, 17, 24, 51, 53–55, 57,
67, 100, 131–142, 148, 163, I
172, 173, 184, 187, 189, 197, Identity, 9, 26, 52, 77, 85, 101, 109,
199, 200 139, 155, 157, 169
Focalizer, 38 Inquiry, 12, 20, 25, 102
Forensic science, 28–30, 72, 132, Instability, 84, 96, 139
142n3 Intentional fallacy, 164
Interaction, 22, 24, 27, 28, 89, 166,
167, 181, 189
G Interdisciplinary, 17–31, 51, 207
Gaming, 27–29, 117, 133, 135, Interpretation, 10, 19, 27, 86, 139,
141, 172 140, 180
214 INDEX

Intertextuality, 107, 117, 170 Module, 4, 5, 7–10, 17–31, 70, 118,

Investigator, 22, 38, 41, 42, 73, 132, 135, 136, 140, 141,
124–126 197, 206
Multiculturalism, 9, 88, 89
Multimedia, 29, 172
J
Journalism, 24, 184, 198
Justice, 18–20, 23–28, 31n5, 41, 56, N
59, 66, 84, 86, 88, 90, 91, 120, Narcoculture, 200–201
122–125, 127, 206, 207 Narratology, 26, 27
Narrator, 38, 39, 58, 59, 126,
152, 170
K Nature, 10, 23, 24, 43, 68, 70, 71,
Knowledge, 4, 6, 30, 31, 38, 45, 65, 77, 84, 91, 95, 116–120, 126,
66, 68, 76, 88–92, 94, 95, 100, 134, 166, 172, 186, 188,
115, 120, 123, 127, 147, 200, 202
153–156, 163, 164, 179, 182, Noir, 1, 17, 19, 29, 55, 56, 67, 106,
186, 188, 189 126, 138, 180, 190
Normativity, 84

L
Law, 17–30, 52, 84, 117, 118, O
120–126, 202, 204 Objective (learning), 132
Lecture, 2, 7, 95, 100, 171 Online
Linguistics, 9, 10, 89, 99, 109n2, 147, online audience, 27
148, 152, 153, 158, 164, 180 online class, 182
Listening, 139 online learning communities,
Literary fiction, 2, 3, 5, 18, 105, 180, 12, 100
181, 184 Ontological, 70, 75, 84
Logic, 84, 153, 202, 204 Oppression, 87, 96, 123
Oral presentation, 92, 94
Organised crime, 118, 202
M
Marketing, 136, 173
Marketplace, 163, 164, 173, 185 P
Masculinity, 8, 49, 50, 58, 60, 66–71, Paratext, 132, 135–138
105, 119, 142 Pastiche, 106, 173
Media, 24, 27, 28, 51, 87, 99, 142, Pedagogy
164, 173, 197 engaged pedagogy, 88, 89, 92,
Metaphor, 158, 168, 169 94, 95
Metaphysical, 20, 42, 179, 184 postcolonial pedagogy, 88–90, 96
Modernism, 9, 68, 75, 77, 78 Peer, 92, 94, 164, 182, 186
 INDEX
   215

Performance, 21, 23, 24, 49, 50, 54, R

57–59, 140 Race, 6, 20, 23, 44, 49, 58–60, 63,
Perspective, 4, 5, 9, 10, 22, 27, 68–71, 75–77, 85, 86, 88, 96,
38–40, 42, 43, 50, 83, 85, 91, 102, 109, 116
100, 101, 121, 122, 124, 126, Racism, 58, 59
134, 152, 153, 156, 170, 181, Ratiocination, 66, 86, 103, 183
196, 204, 207 Rationality, 20, 83, 84, 168
Petrofiction, 126 Reader, 4, 5, 9, 10, 12, 19–22, 24, 26,
Plot, 8, 26, 35–45, 49, 50, 56, 58, 65, 36–39, 42, 43, 45, 60, 70, 107,
101–104, 107, 118, 126, 134, 108, 118, 124, 125, 127, 134,
147–151, 154, 156, 166 138–140, 147, 149–154,
Podcast, 24 156–158, 164–174, 179, 181,
Police procedural, 25, 37, 40 182, 187
Political, 9, 84, 85, 87, 88, 94, 107, Reason, 19, 37, 42, 53, 59, 83, 84,
109, 116, 117, 121–123, 127, 86, 108, 119, 154, 157, 170
157, 165, 167–169, 196, 200, Reflective, 2, 3, 88, 101, 105, 173
203–205, 207 Research essay, 92, 141
Popular culture, 2, 6, 30, 51, Research proposal, 92
52, 55, 60, 61, 67, 77, 105, Research-led, 6, 7, 100, 102
141, 186 Resistance, 6, 85, 204–206
Postcolonial, 3, 9, 83–96, 109, Revision, 50, 60, 68, 70, 71, 84, 180
125, 169
Postgraduate, 2, 3, 5–7, 11, 12, 142,
163, 181, 195–207 S
Postmodernism, 63, 72, 74–78, Scandi-noir, 140
109n2 Scholarship, 6, 7, 12, 37, 43, 44, 102,
Power, 21, 73, 85, 87–89, 91, 94, 116, 117, 141, 180, 181,
105, 123, 157, 168, 169, 183–187, 189
202–207 Science, 28, 29, 84, 117, 120, 154
Practice, 6, 7, 9, 11, 24, 26, 27, 30, Seminar, 64, 65, 91, 100, 104, 106,
38, 41, 43, 44, 75, 88, 94, 96, 135–137, 171, 172, 180, 181,
102, 105, 116, 120, 125, 133, 187–189
136, 140, 147, 163–165, 170, Sexual crime, 3, 107
173, 182–184, 188, 189, 196, Sexuality
199, 200, 207 heterosexuality, 49
Practitioner-educator, 163–165, 167, homosexuality, 23, 135
168, 170–173 Sharing, 6, 12, 56, 102, 187, 189
Problem-solving, 27, 30, 45, 150 Skills, 2, 4, 18, 20, 21, 27, 45, 88, 91,
Project, 5, 68, 83, 88, 89, 119, 93, 95, 101, 165, 166, 183
121, 182 Stylistics, 3, 4, 6, 10, 100, 102,
Psychoanalysis, 25, 116 104–106, 157–158
216 INDEX

Subgenre, 1, 4, 7, 9, 23, 25, 35, 64, Trauma, 90

66, 67, 70–73, 78, 100, 106, True crime, 1, 8, 11, 12, 22, 27, 163,
108, 109, 125, 173, 183, 166, 185, 196–200
189, 190 Truth, 20–24, 26, 28, 84,
Subgenres, 183 91, 200
Survey course, 67, 77, 133, 181 Tutorial, 12, 100
Suspense, 102, 125, 148, 151,
156–158
Syllabus, 4, 8–10, 17, 40, 51, 57, 64, U
66, 70, 102, 132, 133, 140–142, Undergraduate, 2, 4–8, 10, 12,
144n29 17–19, 27, 50, 100, 103, 163,
System, 27, 28, 37, 41–43, 86, 87, 89, 164, 180, 195–197
92, 122, 123, 201–206 University, 1, 3, 4, 6–8, 12, 29, 87,
100, 104, 188

T
Television, 24, 27, 29, 30, 31n3, 39, V
51, 55, 57, 60, 61, 123, 124, Victim, 39, 51, 57, 59, 205
131–133, 135, 141, 184 Victorian, 108
Terrorism, 30 Villain, 44, 49, 59, 60
Textual analysis, 10, 30, 36 Violence
Textuality, 10 sexual violence, 93, 118, 123
Theory slow violence, 123
feminist theory, 54 Virtual, 12, 28
frame theory, 10, 147
narrative theory, 8, 36, 37, 116
possible world theory, 10, 147, 156 W
queer theory, 6 War on drugs, 11, 124, 195–207
Transgression, 104, 115, 116, 118, Western, 83, 85, 89, 125, 204
124, 125, 127 Whodunit, 39, 45, 104, 149, 150,
Translation, 132, 138–140, 180, 155, 183, 190
182, 184 Workshop, 171