Crime fiction


Crime fiction, detective story, murder mystery, crime novel, mystery novel, and police novel are terms used to describe narratives or fiction that centre on criminal acts and especially on the investigation, either by an amateur or a professional detective, of a crime, often a murder. Most crime drama focuses on criminal investigation and does not feature the courtroom. Suspense and mystery are key elements that are nearly ubiquitous to the genre.
It is usually distinguished from mainstream fiction and other genres such as historical fiction and science fiction, but the boundaries are indistinct. Crime fiction has several subgenres, including detective fiction, courtroom drama, hard-boiled fiction, and legal thrillers.

History

Proto-science and crime fictions have been composed across history, and in this category can be placed texts as varied as the Epic of Gilgamesh from Mesopotamia, the Book of Tobit, Urashima Tarō from ancient Japan, the One Thousand and One Nights, and more. One example of a story of this genre is the medieval Arabic tale of "The Three Apples", one of the tales narrated by Scheherazade in the Arabian Nights. In this tale, a fisherman discovers a heavy locked chest along the Tigris River, and he sells it to the Abbasid Caliph, Harun al-Rashid, who then has the chest broken open, only to find inside it the dead body of a young woman who was cut into pieces. Harun orders his vizier, Ja'far ibn Yahya, to solve the crime and find the murderer within three days, or be executed if he fails his assignment. The story has been described as a "whodunit" murder mystery with multiple plot twists. The story has detective fiction elements.
Two other Arabian Nights stories, "The Merchant and the Thief" and "Ali Khwaja", contain two of the earliest fictional detectives, who uncover clues and present evidence to catch or convict a criminal, with the story unfolding in normal chronology and the criminal already being known to the audience. The latter involves a climax where titular detective protagonist Ali Khwaja presents evidence from expert witnesses in a court. "The Hunchback's Tale" is another early courtroom drama, presented as a suspenseful comedy.
The earliest known modern crime fiction is E. T. A. Hoffmann's 1819 novella "Mademoiselle de Scudéri". Also, Thomas Skinner Surr's anonymous Richmond is from 1827; another early full-length short story in the genre is The Rector of Veilbye by Danish author Steen Steensen Blicher, published in 1829. A further example of crime detection can be found in Letitia Elizabeth Landon's story The Knife, published in 1832, although here the truth remains in doubt at the end.
Better known are the earlier dark works of Edgar Allan Poe. His brilliant and eccentric detective C. Auguste Dupin, a forerunner of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, appeared in works such as "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt", and "The Purloined Letter". With his Dupin stories, Poe provided the framework for the classic detective story. The detective's unnamed companion is the narrator of the stories and a prototype for the character of Dr. Watson in later Sherlock Holmes stories.
Wilkie Collins' epistolary novel The Woman in White was published in 1860, while The Moonstone is often thought to be his masterpiece. French author Émile Gaboriau's Monsieur Lecoq laid the groundwork for the methodical, scientifically minded detective.
The evolution of locked-room mysteries was one of the landmarks in the history of crime fiction. The Sherlock Holmes mysteries of Doyle's are said to have been singularly responsible for the huge popularity of this genre. A precursor was Paul Féval, whose series Les Habits Noirs features Scotland Yard detectives and criminal conspiracies. The best-selling crime novel of the 19th century was Fergus Hume's The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, set in Melbourne, Australia.
The evolution of the print mass media in the United Kingdom and the United States in the latter half of the 19th century was crucial in popularising crime fiction and related genres. Literary 'variety' magazines, such as Strand, McClure's, and Harper's, quickly became central to the overall structure and function of popular fiction in society, providing a mass-produced medium that offered cheap, illustrated publications that were essentially disposable.
Like the works of many other important fiction writers of his day—e.g. Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens—Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories first appeared in serial form in the monthly Strand in the United Kingdom. The series quickly attracted a wide and passionate following on both sides of the Atlantic, and when Doyle killed off Holmes in "The Final Problem", the public outcry was so great, and the publishing offers for more stories so attractive, that he was reluctantly forced to resurrect him.
In Italy, early translations of English and American stories and local works were published in cheap yellow covers, thus the genre was baptized with the term libri gialli or yellow books. The genre was outlawed by the Fascists during WWII, but exploded in popularity after the war, especially influenced by the American hard-boiled school of crime fiction. A group of mainstream Italian writers emerged, who used the detective format to create an antidetective or postmodern novel in which the detectives are imperfect, the crimes are usually unsolved, and clues are left for the reader to decipher. Famous writers include Leonardo Sciascia, Umberto Eco, and Carlo Emilio Gadda.
In Spain, The Nail and Other Tales of Mystery and Crime was published by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón in 1853. Crime fiction in Spain took on some special characteristics that reflected the culture of the country. The Spanish writers emphasized the corruption and ineptitude of the police, and depicted the authorities and the wealthy in very negative terms.
In China, crime fiction is a major literary tradition, with works dating to the Song, Ming and Qing dynasties. Modern Chinese crime fiction emerged from the 1890s, and was also influenced by translations of foreign works. Cheng Xiaoqing, considered the "Grand Master" of 20th-century Chinese detective fiction, translated Sherlock Holmes into classical and vernacular Chinese. In the late 1910s, Cheng began writing his own detective fiction series, Sherlock in Shanghai, mimicking Conan Doyle's style, but relating better to a Chinese audience. During the Mao era, crime fiction was suppressed and mainly Soviet-styled and anticapitalist. In the post-Mao era, crime fiction in China focused on corruption and harsh living conditions during the Mao era.

Golden Age

The Golden Age, which spanned from the 1920s to 1954, was a period of time featuring the creation of renowned works by several authors. Many of these authors were British. Agatha Christie wrote The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and The Murder at the Vicarage. These novels commonly prioritized the allure of exploring mysteries in the plot over in-depth character development. Dorothy L. Sayers contributed the Wimsey novels. Her work focused on the spectacle of crime deduction. She also displayed an exaggerated form of aristocratic society, straying from a more realistic story. Other novelists tapped into this setting, such as Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh; Allingham, Christie, Marsh and Sayers are known as the Queens of Crime.
Other British authors are G. K. Chesterton with the Father Brown short stories, and Henry Christopher Bailey.
The Golden Age also had roots in the US. As used by S. S. Van Dine, fictional character Philo Vance also took advantage of an inflated personality and a high-class background in a plethora of novels. In 1929, Father Ronald Knox wrote the ‘Detective Story Decalogue,’ mentioning some conditions of the era. Early foreshadowing and functioning roles for characters were discussed, as well as other items. Ellery Queen was featured in several novels written by Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee, serving as both a character and pen name. In such novels, clues may be analyzed by the protagonist in tandem with the viewer, generating the possibility of understanding the narrative before it is revealed in the book.

Hard-Boiled Age

Past the Golden Age, events such as the Great Depression and the transition between World Wars ushered in a change in American crime fiction. There was a shift into hard-boiled novels and their depictions of realism. Dashiell Hammett and his work, including Red Harvest, offered a more realistic social perspective to crime fiction, referencing events such as the Great Depression. James M. Cain contributed The Postman Always Rings Twice. This novel includes a married woman trying to murder her own husband with the assistance of a potential suitor. This theme extends to another of his works, Double Indemnity. Such elements of both books are references to the Gray and Snyder trial. Raymond Chandler was a significant author who managed to see some works made into films. In 1944, he argued for the genre to be seen critically in his essay "The Simple Art of Murder".

Psychology

Crime fiction provides unique psychological impacts on readers and enables them to become mediated witnesses through identifying with eyewitnesses of a crime. Readers speak of crime fiction as a mode of escapism to cope with other aspects of their lives. Crime fiction provides distraction from readers' personal lives through a strong narrative at a comfortable distance. Forensic crime novels have been referred to as "distraction therapy", proposing that crime fiction can improve mental health and be considered as a form of treatment to prevent depression.

Categories

  • Detective fiction is a subgenre of crime fiction and mystery fiction in which an investigator or a detective—either professional, amateur, or retired—investigates a crime, often murder.
  • The cozy mystery is a subgenre of detective fiction in which profanity, sex, and violence are downplayed or treated humorously.
  • The whodunit, the most common form of detective fiction, features a complex, plot-driven story in which the reader is provided with clues from which the identity of the perpetrator of the crime may be deduced before the solution is revealed at the end of the book.
  • The historical whodunit is also a subgenre of historical fiction. The setting of the story and the crime have some historical significance.
  • The locked-room mystery is a specialized kind of a whodunit in which the crime is committed under apparently impossible circumstances, such as a locked room, which no intruder could have entered or left.
  • The American hardboiled school is distinguished by the unsentimental portrayal of violence and sex; the sleuth usually also confronts danger and engages in violence.
  • The police procedural is a story in which the detective is a member of the police, thus the activities of a police force are usually convincingly depicted.
  • Forensic crime fiction is similar to the police procedural. The investigator whom the reader follows is usually a medical examiner or pathologist; they must use the forensic evidence left on the body and at the crime scene to catch the killer. This subgenre was first introduced by Patricia Cornwell.
  • In a legal thriller, the major characters are lawyers and their employees, and they become involved in proving their cases.
  • In spy novels, the major characters are spies, usually working for an intelligence agency.
  • The caper story and the criminal novel are stories told from the point of view of the criminals.
  • The psychological thriller or psychological suspense, a specific subgenre of the thriller, also incorporates elements from detective fiction, as the protagonist must solve the mystery of the psychological conflict presented in these stories.
  • The parody or spoof uses humor or sarcasm.
  • The crime thriller has the central characters involved in crime, either in its investigation, as the perpetrator, or less commonly, a victim.
  • The “nocturnal picaresque” explores the secrets obscured in a city at nighttime.
  • The city mystery showcases the investigation of nefarious circumstances within a city.
  • The gothic mystery incorporates paranormal activity into the story, including other beings such as ghosts and vampires.
  • In the gallows subgenre, the story revolves around the hanging of potential criminals at hand.
  • In the criminal confession subgenre, character motives and admittance are discussed.