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Building on Tzvetan Todorov's observation that the detective novel ‘contains not one but two stories: the story of the crime and the story of the investigation’, this essay argues that detective novels display a remarkably wide range of attitudes toward the several pasts they represent: the pasts of the crime, the community, the criminal, the detective, and public history. It traces a series of defining shifts in these attitudes through the evolution of five distinct subgenres of detective fiction: exploits of a Great Detective like Sherlock Holmes, Golden Age whodunits that pose as intellectual puzzles to be solved, hardboiled stories that invoke a distant past that the present both breaks with and echoes, police procedurals that unfold in an indefinitely extended present, and historical mysteries that nostalgically fetishize the past. It concludes with a brief consideration of genre readers’ own ambivalent phenomenological investment in the past, present, and future each detective story projects.
This study approaches Sue Grafton's ‘Alphabet Series’ with attention to the concept of trauma and the repetition it entails. Trauma is linked to the past but the symptoms manifest themselves, repeatedly, in the present. The focus here is on the effects of this dynamic link between past and present for the detective, Kinsey Millhone, and selected characters, including serial killer Ned Lowe, the series’ final villain. At a novel's end, a reader closes the book, but endings and closure are not the same thing. Repetition is a powerful force pressing for continuation, moving to overcome closure, which takes two key, interwoven forms in Grafton's novels: seriality and trauma. Seriality features in the sequence of twenty-five Kinsey Millhone novels produced over time, as well as in the actions of a serial killer who bridges the gap between the series’ two final novels. Trauma is an expression of past pain or injury that manifests in the present, repeating the past experience in ways that unconsciously recreate the pain. Trauma is a deep-seated facet of Millhone's sense of identity, as well as a sign of the influence of crime and tragedy in the lives of many characters. This essay explores how seriality and trauma in the novels combine to create a rich sense of a past that is both always present and always under construction.
This article discusses Billy Wilder's 1970 film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, which, though not enthusiastically received by audiences at the time, has subsequently become a work highly valued by critics and cineastes. Radically cut from its original four-part structure by the studio, it has come to be perceived as a film about loss. This relates both to its themes – suppressed love, the vanished world of Holmes and Watson – and to the history of the film itself, whose missing episodes exist only in fragmentary form. The first part of the essay looks at the ways in which the film constructs an image of Sherlock Holmes (played by Robert Stephen), with a focus on the question of his sexuality, while the second part turns to the ways in which the film became an ‘obsession’ for one writer in particular, the novelist Jonathan Coe.
Due to the current history boom in the UK, which manifests itself in the conspicuous popularity of historical novels, costume dramas, and in rising visitor numbers to museums, the study of popular historiography has become a growing and vibrant field. Popular historiography formats such as costume dramas, historical romances, and re-enactments have been recognised as a key influence on the public's knowledge of the past. Consumed informally and voluntarily, entertaining and easily accessible, popular histories are often more significant for the public's perception of ‘historical fact’ than ‘academic’ forms of historiography.This article examines historical crime fiction as a genre of popular historiography with a special focus on recent novels set in the late seventeenth century, a period that has lately been the focus of a number of exciting crime series. As a genre mostly written to a formula, concentrating on a narrow theme (i.e. crime and violence), and typically showing the life of ‘the mean streets’, crime fiction has a genre-specific view of the past. Due to its focus on the everyday, it shows aspects of history which are particularly popular with a wider public. Additionally, as it is frequently preoccupied with history's dark secrets, crime fiction is especially suited to re-writing established images of the past.
The second volume in James Ellroy's ‘Second LA Quartet’, This Storm (2019), offers a complex miscellany of war profiteering, fifth column sabotage, and institutional corruption, all of which is starkly projected against the sobering backdrop of the internment of Japanese-Americans. Whilst presenting Ellroy's most diverse assemblage of characters to date, the narrative is, nonetheless, principally centred on the intersecting bonds between men. Although the prevalence of destructive masculine authority in Ellroy's works has been widely discussed, what has often been overlooked are the specifically ‘homosocial’ dimensions of these relationships. Whilst these homosocial bonds are frequently energised and solidified by homophobic violence (both physical and rhetorical), this paper will argue that they are simultaneously wrought by ‘homosexual panic’; the anxiety deriving for the indeterminate boundaries between homosocial and homosexual desire. This panic is expressed most profoundly in This Storm in the form of corrupt policeman Dudley Smith. Haunted by a repressed homosexual encounter, Smith's paranoid behaviour and increasingly punitive violence derives from his inability to establish clear boundaries between his intense homosocial bonds and latent homosexual desires. Thus, whilst Ellroy's ‘nostalgic masculinity’ attempts to circumscribe the dimensions and inviolability of male identity, the paranoia and violence that underscores the various machinations of Ellroy's crooked cops ultimately exposes the fragility of such constructions.
The Golden Age is back with a vengeance: reprints, re-boots, and adaptations of interwar detective fiction and its off-shoots have proliferated in the twenty-first century, as have works more loosely, but nonetheless substantially, inspired by the clue-puzzle format developed and perfected by authors like Agatha Christie. This resurgence of the ‘whodunnit’ mystery is something of mystery itself, as the centre of gravity of crime writing has long shifted away from this ostensibly dated and aesthetically limited form. This paper explores this unexpected development, looking in particular at the role of nostalgia in relation to new Golden Age mysteries. While nostalgia is frequently, and quite justly, viewed in negative terms as a personally and politically regressive phenomenon, in some cases, as in Rian Johnson’s murder mystery Knives Out (2019), examined here, it can be used not simply as a dubious marketing or aesthetic strategy, but as part of a broader social critique in which one form of nostalgia is used to critique another.
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