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Abstract
A mystery story which focuses on a crime and the investigation of that crime is commonly
understood as a crime fiction narrative. Its ability to excite the readers, challenge their rational
abilities and involve them in the gradual unravelling of the mystery is what makes crime fiction a
huge success. With innumerable critical works, scholarly study and continued relevance, crime
fiction has entered the canon of literature. A genre that closely reflects the socio-political, historical
and cultural aspects of the society, it has gradually acquired a significant role both in critiquing the
social order and at the same time for documenting history through its gradual evolution and
development. This paper attempts to map the evolution of crime fiction from the eighteenth
century to the contemporary times. In doing so, the paper aims to study how social changes impact
literary traditions. This study also aims to establish the relevance of crime fiction as a literary genre
as it evolves into multiple sub-genres, structures itself into specific rules and regulations and
metamorphosises into extra-literary forms.
1. Introduction
Be it films, television series, novels or short stories, the genre of crime fiction has certainly been
widely consumed by the masses across the years. From the written narratives of Doyle, Christie or
Fleming, to their multiple adaptions in the cinematic space, crime fiction, has also expanded into
OTT platforms and various web series in the internet era. True crime documentaries such as
Forensic Files (1996-1999) are revived through media streaming on internet platforms. The genre is
thus both current and relevant. However, although popular, has it been recognised as a serious
genre? Does crime fiction qualify to be a part of the literary canon?
© AesthetixMS 2020. This Open Access article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0
International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use,
distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For citation use the DOI. For
commercial re-use, please contact editor@rupkatha.com.
2 Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 12, No. 6, 2020
Bradford’s “Can Crime Fiction be taken Seriously?” observes that crime fiction has the ability
to find order in a society that is usually chaotic. He quotes Margorie Nicholson’s The Professor and
the Detective (1929): “this form of writing provides refuge from the ongoing modernist fashion for
instability and anarchy” (Bradford, 2015, p.117). The ingenious unravelling of crime by a detective, a
gripping investigation by a police officer in a procedural, or the thrill of fast-paced action in spy
fiction, are elements that have established the ‘mass’ appeal of this genre. Moreover, as an exuberant
genre with multiple sub-genres, crime fiction is worthy of scholarly study that categorises its form,
structure, technique and rules. Contemporary scholars such as Scaggs, Bradford and Knight
investigate the origins of the genre. They assert that crime fiction has its origins from traditional
mystery and puzzle stories such as the One Thousand and One Nights or from stories of Biblical
times. However, one can observe that it is difficult to ascertain a definite point of origin. Bradford
(2015) argues that while “Oedipus might be regarded as a precursor to the modern detective” (p.1),
the genre in a broad sense developed within British and European space through the prison
narratives, significantly, the experiences at Newgate Prison situated in the City of London. J.C.
Kinkley (1993), on the other hand, asserts that detective fiction appeared in Chinese literature
“nearly a millennium before Edgar Allan Poe” (p.51). However, “[d]espite ancient and modern
detective story traditions, the genre was banned during the Mao years (1949 to 1976)” (Kinkley, 1993,
p.51). But why was the genre banned in the Chinese tradition? Contrary to Nicholson, it indicates
that crime fiction perhaps is not a “refuge” but is instead a reflection of the distorted functioning of
society and the errors in the social structure and administration. Hausladen (1996) quotes Ernest
Mandell’s Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story (1984) to observe that “the crime
story is “intertwined with the history of bourgeois society itself . . . perhaps because bourgeois
society is, when all is said and done, a criminal society?” (135)” (p.49). Therefore, one wonders, does
the act of gruesome violence, bloodshed, gory details, psychological aberrations, and the violations
on the human body, commonly observed in crime fiction narrative, contribute to such censorship?
Is this censorship the reason why most writers of crime fiction have used pseudonyms? Frederick
Dannay and Manfred Lee use the name Ellery Queen, Williard Huntington Wright is well-known
as S. S. Van Dine, C. D. Lewis writes as Nicholas Blake, Ruth Rendell as Barbara Vine, and Hirai
Taro writes as Edogawa Ranpo (mimicking Edgar Allan Poe). The above examples, out of many such
more, gives us an insight into the complexity and mysteriousness of crime fiction itself, thereby
rendering it challenging to trace the origins and evolution of the genre. This paper aims to
understand and discuss how crime fiction has been structured as a genre, consisting of multiple
sub-genres (such as detective fiction, hard-boiled fiction, police procedurals, spy thrillers, forensic
and legal drama, and so on), and how it continues to evolve mirroring the socio-political and
cultural circumstances.
2. Methodology:
This paper begins with Cesare Beccaria’s “An Essay on Crime and Punishment” (1764) and Jeremy
Bentham’s “Cases Unmeet for Punishment” (1789) that question the legal norms in the society and
moves on to critical works on crime fiction and its subgenres. The critical works cited in this paper
include Tzvetan Todorov’s “The Typology of Detective Fiction” (1966), Julian Symons’ Bloody
Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History (1972), George N. Dove’s The Police
Procedural (1982), and a series of works published consecutively, starting with Martin Priestman
edited The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction (2003), Stephen Knight’s Crime Fiction, 1800-
2000: Detection, Death, Diversity (2004), John Scaggs’ Crime Fiction: A New Critical Idiom (2005),
and Richard Bradford’s Crime Fiction: A Very Short Introduction published in 2015. The selection of
3 Mapping the Evolution of Crime Fiction as a Genre: Eighteenth Century to the Contemporary
Times
these secondary works represents their significance owing to their thorough and elaborate study
around the genre. For the ease of understanding, this paper is divided into three time zones: the
Reform period, the period of the two wars and the interim: 1914-1945, and finally, the Postwar
period. This paper culminates with police procedurals, a sub-genre of crime fiction paving way for
forensic thrillers, legal thrillers and so on.
significant proponents advocating reform included the Fielding brother, Cesare Beccaria and
Jeremy Bentham.
i. Fieldings
John and Henry Fielding identified a lack of a proper system that identified and caught criminals.
Knight (2004) explains:
The reforms brought about by the Fieldings and their colleagues had two main foci. One
was the exchange of information: they realised that magistrates and constables would be
in a much better position to arrest criminals if they knew who they were, so they arranged
for facts and descriptions to be circulated (Emsley, 1996:221). The Fieldings’ other major
reform was to have specialists in criminal-catching – and lack of central concern with
murder at this time was revealed in calling them ‘thief-takers’. Established in 1749, they
became known as ‘Bow Street Runners’ because they were mobile police attached to Bow
Street court in central London. . . (p.9-10)
The Bow Street Runners was a progressive step towards a structured system that
emphasised on a rationalised process of investigation before identifying a criminal. However, the
Bow Street Runners were easily susceptible to corruption and hence they soon disintegrated. In the
immediate future we learn how Vidocq brought about a revolution in criminal and forensic
investigation and, moreover, how the Peelers stepped into the law enforcement as agents of
surveillance. But all these developments are foregrounded by important philosophical and legal
concerns. For example, who is a criminal? On what grounds can a person be called a criminal? If
and when identified and caught, what kind of punishment should be inflicted upon him or her, and
to what degree. These relevant questions were highlighted in the writings of Beccaria and Bentham.
ii. Beccaria
The Italian scholar Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794) observed the incongruous nature of crime and
punishment. He says, “there ought to be a fixed proportion between crimes and punishment”
(Beccaria, 1764, p.527). Crime ascends from the “smallest possible injustice done to a private
member” to the “dissolution of society” (Beccaria, 1764, p.527). He advocates, “the relations between
man and man are relations of equality” (Beccaria, 1764, p.528) and therefore, without proper trial
and conviction, an individual should not be condemned. In “An Essay on Crime and Punishment”
(1764) he writes:
A cruelty consecrated among most nations by customs is the torture of the accused during
his trial, on the pretext of compelling him to confess his crime. . . . A man cannot be called
guilty before sentence has been passed on him by a judge, nor can a society deprive him
of its protection till it has been decided that he has broken the condition on which it was
granted. (Beccaria, p. 530)
Once an individual is convicted of a crime, Beccaria (1764) questions, “Is death penalty really useful
and necessary for the security and good for the society?” and “Are torture and torments just, and
do they attain the end which the law aims at?” (p.526). The fact that these questions continue to be
asked in contemporary society shows the universality and relevance of such concerns. In the Indian
context, the death penalty given to the accused in ‘Mukesh and another versus State’ - or commonly
known as the December 16th, 2012, Nirbhaya case - is a significant example of recent amendments
in the Indian legal system. This case is also reflective of how a criminal act is considered against the
“State” or “society” as a whole rather than solely against a “private member” (Beccaria, 1764, p.527).
iii. Bentham
5 Mapping the Evolution of Crime Fiction as a Genre: Eighteenth Century to the Contemporary
Times
whose attention to details provide evidences that help catch the criminal. An expert in physical
disguises, chemistry and mathematics, Holmes, in A Study in Scarlet (1887) calculates the “height
of a man” using “length of his stride” (Doyle, p.26). In the “Red Headed League” (1891), Holmes
upholds evidence over conjecture and assumption. He tells Watson, “I shall keep on piling fact
upon fact on you until your reason breaks down under them and acknowledges me to be right”
(Doyle, 1981, p.20). Reason, logic and rationality took precedence and thus, readers were attracted
to mystery narratives that engaged their minds. This engagement with the narrative helped the
genre flourish - the readers often tried to solve the crime, identifying themselves with the detective,
as they read along the narrative. As it flourished and was taken seriously, the genre also attracted
critical interest from scholars. The critics now advocated that the genre required a structure, and
that the writers should follow codified rules and regulations.
4. 1914 - 1945
Detective Fiction and Other Sub-genres
Van Dine, Ronald Knox, Anthony Berkley and Perez Revertez played a crucial role in imparting a
formal structure for narratives of detective fiction. Van Dine’s “Twenty Rules of Writing Detective
Stories” (1928) and Knox’s “Detective Story Decalogue” (1929) established specific basic rules. These
rules instructed that detective stories must not have supernatural elements, “the criminal must be
someone mentioned in the early part of the story”, “the detective must not himself commit the
crime” and so on (Scaggs, 2005, p.36-37). Similarly, Berkley emphasised “fair play” in detective
fiction writing wherein he advised that “the reader should at least in theory be able to solve the
crime at the heart of a story of detection, and for this reason should have access to the same
information as the fictional detective” (Scaggs, 2005, p.27). Revertez’s “retrograde analysis”
advocated “taking a certain position on the board as your starting point and then reconstructing
the game backwards in order to work out how it got to that position. A sort of chess in reverse. . .
It’s all done by induction. You begin with the end result and work backward to the causes” (Scaggs,
2005, p.33). According to George Burton, “all detective fiction is based on two murders of which the
first, committed by the murderer, is merely the occasion for the second, in which he is the victim
of the pure and unpunishable murderer, the detective,” and that “the narrative… superimposes two
temporal series: the days of investigation, which begin with the crime, and the days of the drama
which lead up to it” (Todorov, 1966, p.44).
From the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, both detective fiction and
critical works on crime fiction flourished. With the onset of the First World War, however, one
observes an ideological and narrative shift in the nature of crime. Writers of crime fiction were now
inclined towards depicting violent crimes such as murder instead of “sanitised and bloodless”
(Scaggs, 2005, p. 43) crimes such as theft or forgery. Many women writers too emerged successfully
as authors of detective fiction. One pertinent example is Agatha Christie who names the title of her
Hercule Poirot mystery as “Murder on the Orient Express” (1934) emphasising a heinous crime. At
this juncture, blood becomes a crucial trope in crime fiction narratives and hence detectives, with
the emerging field of forensic sciences, started using blood and fingerprints as evidence to catch
the criminals. In the US, a new sub-genre called the Hard-Boiled mode emerged and started to be
known for its extreme crudeness, bloodbaths, gangsterism, gambling and violence. It was a direct
reflection post- Prohibition (1919-1933) society and the Great Depression (1929). A few examples of
Hard-Boiled fiction with popular private eye detectives include Dashiell Hammett’s Maltese Falcon
(1930), Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939) and Mickey Spillane’s I, the Jury (1947). Although
such works of fiction remained popular among the readers, one finds a significant dip in critca
7 Mapping the Evolution of Crime Fiction as a Genre: Eighteenth Century to the Contemporary
Times
interest and publication of critical works in crime fiction between the two wars (1918-1939). Perhaps
a consequence of the tense socio-political situations that curbed voices under stringent surveillance
and dictatorial rule, the critical works re-emerged post World War II. The three significant works
of the twentieth century discussed in this paper include Tzvetan Todorov’s “The Typology of
Detective Fiction” (1966), Julian Symons’ Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime
Novel: A History (1972) and George N. Dove’s The Police Procedural (1982).
Todorov
Pierre Boileau (1906-1989) and Thomas Narcejac (1908-1998), proficient in locked-room mysteries,
argue that “[d]etective fiction cannot be subdivided into kind. It merely offers historically different
forms” (Todorov, 1966, p.42). Todorov, however, refutes their argument and contradictorily gives
“The Typology of Detective Fiction” (1966). He believes that new genres of literature are created
under either of the two conditions: the first is when a work of literature “transgresses” (Todorov,
1966:43) set norms. The second is a case when the uniqueness of a particular work facilitates the
creation of a new genre. In his work, Todorov categorises detective fiction as: “Whodunit”, “Thriller”
or “Série Noir” and “Suspense”.
The Whodunit follows a “geometric structure” (Todorov, 1966:4) consisting of two narrative
parts. The first part of the narrative focusses on the crime, the second on the investigation. Usually,
in the Whodunit, there are two main characters wherein the first is the detective who investigates
the crime and the second is the detective’s friend who records the events by documenting them in
his book. A familiar example is Doyle’s Dr Watson who pens his experiences with Sherlock Holmes.
Another interesting feature of a Whodunit is how the figure of the detective is always immune. One
is reminded of the popular incident when Doyle had to revive Holmes under the pressure of his
readers, after the Reichenbach Falls episode in “The Final Problem” (1893). Holmes thus returns in
The Hound of Baskervilles (1901-1902).
The Thriller and the Suspense are quite similar to each other in terms of their narrative
structure. However, unlike the Whodunit, the detective in a Thriller or Suspense is not immune to
threat and harm. Here again, there are two parts to the story wherein one part of the story is
responsible for instigating “curiosity” among the readers, and hence moves from effect to cause. For
example, the corpse provides evidence that leads the detective to the culprit. The other part of the
story ensures that the readers are engrossed in the narrative and thus works from cause to effect,
creating the “suspense” or “What will happen next?” (Todorov, 1966, p.47-48). While the Thriller
consists of violence, murder, threat and often gangsterism and heists, the Suspense fiction
emphasises on a “personal” struggle (Todorov, 1966, p.51). The protagonist in a Suspense, could be
a criminal, who is a victim since he has been falsely accused of a crime, and thus must assume the
role of a detective trying to prove his innocence. Todorov thus presents the possibility of multiple
subgenres under the broader category of crime fiction (or according to him, Detective Fiction)
through his typology. However, he also agrees that it is challenging to chronologically trace the
evolution of these sub-genres since there are evidences that some of them may have come into
existence “simultaneously” (Todorov, 1966 p.52).
8 Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 12, No. 6, 2020
procedural” (Dove, 1982, p.2). He excludes those stories where a police officer is a part of the
narrative but is not the one who solves the crime. Dove (1982) defines a “procedural” as,
methods of detection employed, the procedures followed by policemen in real life. Where
the classic detective solves mysteries through the use of his powers of observation and
logical analysis, and the private investigator through his energy and his tough tenacity, the
detective in the procedural story does those things ordinarily expected of policemen, like
using informants, tailing suspects, and availing himself of the resources of the police
laboratory. This qualification almost automatically suggests another one: the policemen in
the procedurals almost always works in teams, sharing, the responsibilities and the dangers,
and also the credit, of the investigation, with the result that the resolution of the mystery is
usually the product of the work of a number of people instead of the achievement of a single
protagonist as in the classical formal-problem tale and the hard boiled private eye story. The
conventions of popular fiction demand that there be a main-character detective in the
procedural, but he or she does not solve the crime without the collaborative efforts of other
police. (p.2)
The police procedural adopts elements of realism. The policeman is not a “genius detective” like
Sherlock Holmes and therefore, cannot handle the investigation “single-handed(ly)” (Dove, 1982,
p.3). The police officer needs aid and assistance from ‘his’ team and experts from other departments.
The police officer is not a flawless character; he is susceptible to making mistakes and is under
constant scrutiny by the masses. Moreover, the officer is a public figure and not the private eye/I.
According to Dove, the first police procedural was American author Lawrence Treat’s V as in Victim
(1945). The sub-genre was made popular with the radio series Dragnet (1951) which later got
televised. Many American authors were engaged with this genre. Well known examples include Ed
McBain’s 87th Precinct series, Hillary Waugh’s Last Seen Wearing (1952), Dorothy Uhnak’s Christie
Opara series and so on. However, it was in Britain that police procedurals flourished, while the
American writers favoured the Hard-Boiled mode. Significant British examples include Maurice
Procter, J.J. Marric (John Creasy)’s Gideon series (1955-1976), Michael Gilbert and Nicholas Freeling
(known for their Van der Valk series) and so on. Dove also mentions police procedurals such as
Scottish writer Bill Knox’s Deadline for a Dream (1957) set in Glasglow, novels by Swedish writers
Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, and Poul Ørum’s Danish police procedurals.
Dove, in his critical work, observes a transition in the representation of the figure of the
cop. Once considered as a “foil” (Dove, 1982, p.44) to the detective, merely “a part of the scenery”
(Dove, 1982, p.26), corrupt, and having an “inferior level of education” (Dove, 1982, p.35), the cops
have now transformed to become intellectuals such as P.D. James’ Adam Dalgliesh who is a
“published poet” (Dove, 1982, p.37) and is a “servant and guardian to the public” (Dove, 1982, p.54).
“He is the servant of the community that pays him, judges him, and ultimately controls his success
or failure as a law officer” (Dove, 1982, p.68). In his chapter titled “The Cop and the System: The
Police Sub-Culture I”, Dove elaborates on the humane aspects of a police officer who are
overburdened with work while often having to fulfil familial roles of being a spouse and a parent,
such as Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Wexford. Dove writes, “The universal complaint of the procedural
is unrelenting overwork, which exacerbates the tedium danger, stress, alienation, anxiety and the
rest of the manifestations of the policemen’s occupational disease. Unlike private detectives, the
police are never off duty. . .” (Dove, 1982, p.90). In his latter chapters, Dove explains the techniques
used by police officers - such as interrogation and use of informants - in order to solve cases. The
procedurals also show the relationship between the officers and the masses, and the challenges and
10 Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 12, No. 6, 2020
pressures of a police officer who is constantly running against time, usually juggling multiple cases
at a time.
Dove observes that the sub-genre is gradually evolving with the change in socio-cultural
circumstances. A genre that once portrayed only male police officers as detectives started
highlighting women officers in significant roles. Earlier when women first entered the police force,
Dove (1982) says, they were often assigned duties such as that of “baby-sitting” (monitoring women
and small children) and “matron duty” (accessing places where men were not allowed), and were
used as “female bait” (to catch criminals like rapists and sex offenders) (p. 156-157). Later, however,
women officers were assigned more significant roles. He says, “The first policewoman to be featured
in a procedural series was Christie Opara, the central character in the three novels by Dorothy
Uhnak”: The Bait (1968), The Witness (1969) and The Ledger (1970) (Dove, 1982, p.151). Other
examples include Lillian O’ Donnell’s Norah Mulcahaney in No Business Being a Cop (1978), Nelson
De Mille’s Pamela York and Ed McBain’s Eileen Burke. Dove also observes that the police procedural
no longer represented the “while male” protagonist as the norm. The procedurals have transcended
not only gender binaries but also ethnicities through works such as John Ball’s In the Heat of the
Night (1965) which featured Virgil Tibbs, “the only black police detective to have the leading role
in procedural series” (Dove, 1982, p.158), or Jewish police officers such as Collin Wilcox’s Pete
Friedman, or a Hispanic police officer Luis Mendoza created by Dell Shannon.
Police procedurals, therefore, reflected the changing social structure in the post-war society,
and they blurred geographical and cultural boundaries to depict cityscapes that were
demographically heterogeneous. Commenting on the genre’s focus potpourri of multicultural
identities in urban centres, Dove (1982) writes, “The main advantage of the urban environment is
that it gives the writer infinite opportunity for developing themes involving the anxieties, tensions
and frustrations we associate with the city, as well as an almost unlimited choice of characters and
situations” (p.238). This possibility of realism within a fictional narrative enables the police
procedural to give its readers an authentic portrayal of a society in a certain time. The sub-genre,
therefore, has the ability to survive and flourish in contemporary literature, as it evolves and
changes along with its social environment.
6. Conclusion
From a thorough study of selected seminal narratives including reformative documents and critical
and fictional works, it can be concluded that these narratives are a symbolic reflection of society
where crime and criminality have always existed in one form or the other, transcending temporal
boundaries. From the Biblical stories to twenty-first-century Netflix TV-series such as Sacred Games
(2018-), Amazon Prime Video series such as Paatal Lok (2020), or Asur (2020) on Voot, crime fiction
has had a long history and continues to remain a popular genre across geographies and cultures. As
the genre has a universal quality and a long trajectory of evolution, it becomes challenging to trace
its origins. Moreover, the genre falls prey to a tendency on the part of the critics to associate its
origins with a Eurocentric point of view. Critical works, thus, assert that crime fiction narratives
take shape from the accounts of lives and experiences of the Newgate prisoners. These narratives
give rise to the Newgate Novels, often glorifying criminals while critiquing governance and social
hierarchy.
The reformation period, which include the works of the Fieldings, Beccaria and Bentham,
saw a paradigmatic shift in the understanding of crime and punishment. The gaols were no longer
meant to be a space for torture, but instead seen as a space for rehabilitation and reformation. From
11 Mapping the Evolution of Crime Fiction as a Genre: Eighteenth Century to the Contemporary
Times
instilling fear into the masses, the new propaganda was to develop a sense of consciousness.
However, there was a need to establish a more scientific and reliable method of criminal
investigation and a legal and justice system that was capable of measuring and analysing crime and
allocating punishment appropriate to the intensity of crime. The figure of the “genius detective”
instigated a scientific bend of mind that gradually paved the way for forensic methods and authentic
criminal identification. The introduction of the police, be it Fielding’s Bow Street Runners (1749) in
England or Vidocq’s Sûreté (1811) in France, led to a change in social order that reflected in the
narratives of those times. Todorov argues that the onset of the First World War and the Great
Depression in America lead to the Hard-Boiled mode of writing that mirrored a life of gangsterism
and violence. Symons observes an escalation from petty crimes like theft and forgery to gruesome
crimes such as rape and murder, resulting in narratives that often sketched gory scenes. The
interwar period and the Second World War saw a decline in crime fiction writings and critical works
on such narratives. Post-war, in 1945, with Lawrence Treat’s V as in Victim, Dove saw the emergence
of the police procedural as a genre wherein the police figure was brought into the limelight. Police
procedurals, he explains, was a deviation from the popular mystery stories that depicted the
fantastic abilities of the detective, exotic locations and tricky investigative techniques. Police
procedurals brought the readers back to the real modern world: the slow, the tiresome, the
mundane and the chaotic. Unlike the infallible spy-figure, the humane police figure is vulnerable
and makes mistakes, and is susceptible to injury and death.
By the turn of the century, contemporary writers such as Priestman, Knight, Scaggs and
Bradford attempt to categorise crime fiction and its sub-genres. However, they are unable to make
clear delineations. Although their work enables students of crime fiction literature to understand
the genre, they also leave multiple questions unanswered such as, the chronology of crime fiction
and development of its sub-genres wherein one observes partial overlapping of features. The police
procedural, for example, heavily borrows from the narrative characteristics of detective fiction. This
inspires further enquiry into the origins of these narrative forms. Does crime fiction descend from
gothic fiction? Is Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein unravelling the crimes by the “creature” a prototype
of the detective figure? Or has crime fiction evolved from mystery puzzle and Biblical stories? Is
Oedipus or Caleb Williams the first detective? Which is the first police procedural, Wilkie Collins’
Moonstone (1868) or Treat’s V as in Victim (1945)? Such questions regarding works on crime and
crime fiction from the eighteenth century to the present highlights the diversity in the evolution of
crime fiction. It also depicts how it has grown exponentially from textual narratives to multimedia
expressions, and hence in thr process undergone a metamorphosis into legal thrillers, forensic
procedurals, psychological profiling and so on. Thus, such enquiries cannot ignore the fact that
there are no definite answers. In order to solve this mystery, we must assume the figure of the
detective ourselves as we explore and study the development of this genre in the national literary
traditions of Africa, Middle East, South Asia and the Far East. Then, perhaps, we may move closer
to finding the origins of crime fiction within those numerous untranslated works, local scripts and
even oral narratives.
12 Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 12, No. 6, 2020
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