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/lp/edinburgh-university-press/the-many-pasts-of-detective-fiction-LXSg1UMjM5
- Publisher
- Edinburgh University Press
- Copyright
- Copyright © Edinburgh University Press
- ISSN
- 2517-7982
- eISSN
- 2517-7990
- DOI
- 10.3366/cfs.2020.0018
- Publisher site
- See Article on Publisher Site
Abstract
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.
Journal
Crime Fiction Studies – Edinburgh University Press
Published: Sep 1, 2020