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Gone Genre: How the Academy Came Running and Discovered Nothing Was As It Seemed

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Domestic Noir

Part of the book series: Crime Files ((CF))

Abstract

What has been the impact of literary critical techniques on the narrative strategies of ‘crime’ novelists and their thinking particularly around context (or employment of metafictional strategies)? While this question is implicitly posed in many of the studies mentioned in this essay, it has rarely been the explicit starting point for an analysis. Asking the question from this way round yields some different lines of enquiry. In other words, how knowing are certain crime writers? Rita Felski discusses the concept of ‘interpretation-as-narrative’, stating that it is ‘the means by which a critical sensibility spins out storylines that connect understanding to explaining. What are the guiding affinities between suspicion and storytelling?’

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Tzvetan Todorov and Jonathan Culler, The Poetics of Prose, trans. by Richard Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977).

  2. 2.

    Gertrude Stein, Blood on the Dining-Room Floor: A Murder Mystery (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications Inc., 2008).

  3. 3.

    W.H. Auden, “The Guilty Vicarage”, Harper’s Magazine, May 1948. http://harpers.org/archive/1948/05/the-guilty-vicarage/ [accessed 20 April 2017].

  4. 4.

    Jorge Luis Borges, Everything and Nothing (New York: New Directions, 1999).

  5. 5.

    Maurice J. Bennett, “The Detective Fiction of Poe and Borges”, Comparative Literature, 35.3 (1983), 262–75. https://doi.org/10.2307/1770621.

  6. 6.

    Samantha Walton, Guilty But Insane: Mind and Law in Golden Age Detective Fiction, Oxford Textual Perspectives (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

  7. 7.

    Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015). See, in particular, chapter 3, “An Inspector Calls”, pp. 85–116.

  8. 8.

    Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015). See, in particular, chapter 3, “An Inspector Calls”, p. 86.

  9. 9.

    Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2012).

  10. 10.

    Len Wanner, The Crime Interviews: Volume One: Bestselling Authors Talk About Writing Crime Fiction (Blasted Heath Ltd., 2013).

  11. 11.

    These quotations come from the inside pages of the UK paperback edition of Gone Girl, including one from me, writing in the Daily Mirror: “This is Flynn’s third novel and she’s more than found her voice, creating taut, thrilling, deeply intense narratives about characters very much on the edge.”

  12. 12.

    Tzvetan Todorov and Jonathan Culler, The Poetics of Prose, trans. by Richard Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977).

  13. 13.

    Lee Horsley, The Noir Thriller (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

  14. 14.

    Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (London: Smith, Elder, 1870).

  15. 15.

    Stephenie Meyer, Twilight (New York: Little, Brown, 2007).

  16. 16.

    “Paris Review—James M. Cain, The Art of Fiction No. 69”. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3474/james-m-cain-the-art-of-fiction-no-69-james-m-cain [accessed 16 June 2017].

  17. 17.

    Megan Abbott, The End of Everything, 1st edn (New York: Reagan Arthur Books, 2011).

  18. 18.

    Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2010).

  19. 19.

    “Turning to Crime”, Henry Sutton. http://henrysutton.co.uk/blog/turning-to-crime [accessed 16 June 2017].

  20. 20.

    Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder” (1950). http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/26048/the-simple-art-of-murder-by-raymond-chandler/9780394757650.

  21. 21.

    Dorothy L. Sayers, The Omnibus of Crime (New York: Garden City Pub. Co., 1929).

  22. 22.

    W.H. Auden, “The Guilty Vicarage”, Harper’s Magazine, May 1948. http://harpers.org/archive/1948/05/the-guilty-vicarage/

  23. 23.

    Martin Amis, Night Train (London: Random House, 1998).

  24. 24.

    Albert Camus, The Stranger, trans. by Matthew Ward (New York: Vintage Books, 1989).

  25. 25.

    James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2010).

  26. 26.

    Paul Auster, New York Trilogy: City of Glass/Ghosts/The Locked Room (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1995).

  27. 27.

    Tim Parks, “Quite a Show”, London Review of Books, 9 October 2014, 23–6.

  28. 28.

    E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, new edn (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1993).

  29. 29.

    Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008).

  30. 30.

    Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express, Masterpiece edn (London: Harper, 2010).

  31. 31.

    Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me, new edn (London: Orion, 2006).

  32. 32.

    Christine Berberich, The Bloomsbury Introduction to Popular Fiction (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015), 214.

  33. 33.

    Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2010).

  34. 34.

    Clive Bloom, Bestsellers: Popular Fiction Since 1900, 2nd edn (Houndmills, Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).

  35. 35.

    Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2012), p. 459.

  36. 36.

    Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2012), p. 461.

  37. 37.

    Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2012), p. 463.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

    Henry Sutton

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  1. Henry Sutton
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom

    Laura Joyce

  2. University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom

    Henry Sutton

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Sutton, H. (2018). Gone Genre: How the Academy Came Running and Discovered Nothing Was As It Seemed. In: Joyce, L., Sutton, H. (eds) Domestic Noir. Crime Files. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69338-5_4

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