Guest editor’s bio: Rebecca E. Martin has published widely on crime writing and detective
fiction, as well as on the Gothic novel. She holds a PhD (English) from City University of New
York Graduate Center where her specialization was the 18th-c English Gothic novel; she also
completed requirements for the graduate certificate in Film Studies from that institution. She is
professor of literature and film studies at Pace University on its Pleasantville, NY, campus. In
2014 she edited a volume of essays on crime writing and detective fiction in the Critical Insights
series published by Salem Press. Currently, she is editing a book of essays on American director
Arthur Penn’s important and controversial 1967 film, Bonnie and Clyde.
Keywords: genre conventions, true crime, detective fiction, trauma, femininity, social critique,
criminality, crime writing
Introduction to Special Issue on Crime Writing
An interesting and revealing narrative about the lives we live today and about the popularity of
crime writing may be implied by the tracing of a handful of themes in this collection of essays.
The collection begins with Sam Naidu’s study of Sherlock Holmes, in many ways an exemplar of
postmodern man. As he has developed, Holmes as a character is untroubled by his lack of a
fixed identity and open to using masquerade as a professional tool and strategy, but that lack is
also a trait that opens him to diverse textual communities, from those of fandom to academe.
The collection ends with a study of the child detective and detective fiction for children. In
exploring the subject, RuthAnne Thompson and Jean Fitzgerald reveal the development of a
genre that reflects the many social changes through the twentieth century but that is also a
measure of each generation’s attempts to balance ideas about children’s innocence with the
testing of the boundaries of the imagination and of the self and its power in which maturity lies.
Along the way, all of these essays taken together form a narrative that reveals why the
discourse of crime and detection continues to be so attractive to writers and irresistible to
readers. The possibilities of good storytelling are there, yes, because of the suspense, discovery
and surprises conventional in this type of story. But, the boundaries of the genre are extremely
expansive, roomy and flexible enough for the most serious social critique, revelations of human
depravity, and stories fit for eight-year-olds.
While Holmes’s standing as a (fictional) celebrity has made him a cultural icon, as Naidu says,
celebrity, as the quintessential modern media status, contains an inherent tension between the
author’s social prominence and the subsuming of authorial personality in the writing of the
“true” crime text. As Siobhan Lyons points out in her essay, an ethical tension exists between
journalism and celebrity culture in which the writing of and identification of “truth” may
become particularly fraught. Such questions of truth are especially slippery and perilous in a
century that began with the 9/11 attacks and the seemingly endless (and amorphous) “war on
terror” that manifests a different identity, a different “truth,” depending on which facet we
focus on and where we stand to look. As Christopher Davies explores in his essay on Michael
Connelly’s City of Bones, mass cultural trauma can infect a society at all levels. Only by
recognizing and relinquishing the voice of state ideology can individuals find their own way out
of trauma and into reason.
Shifting genre boundaries, the shivery line between observer and the observed, and breached
boundaries between states are all figures, on a sliding scale, of the boundaries and limens that
exist in the narrative moments analyzed by İ. Murat Öner in Roald Dahl’s short story, “The Way
Up to Heaven.” Highlighted here is how characters’ movements among narrative spaces—and
their hesitations on thresholds and boundaries—are invested with transgressive significance.
The model that Öner applies connects the apparently simple story of a crime to greater acts of
resistance to state ideology; this move links back to the question of resistance to narratives in
which states invest themselves while it also opens up interdisciplinary connections, another
breach of boundaries. Productive tensions between genres and among narrative spaces are
explored as well in Merja Makinen’s analysis of Ahmed Umit’s A Memento for Istanbul,
identifying in the genres-at-cross-purposes present in the novel a challenge to readers’
expectations and even to the idea of crime fiction itself, a dynamic which joins the novel,
knowingly or otherwise, to the postmodern.
Consideration by Walter Raubicheck of John P. Marquand’s Mr. Moto returns us to questions of
identity, as Raubicheck explores this espionage figure’s resistance to the narrative role of either
protagonist or antagonist in Marquand’s texts. His role as a spy never undermines Moto’s
personal identity and self-assurance as a skilled professional and a Japanese patriot. This
depiction of his character makes it possible to explore in the other characters in circulation
around him questions of motivation of great significance in the period just prior to World War II
and, in the final book, during the 1950s when America and Japan were allied in anti-Communist
sympathies. Turning to contemporary Japan, the low birthrate is a social issue and cultural
phenomenon that has entered detective fiction in a way that surprises and instructs. As
Amanda Seaman explains in her essay covering three relatively recent novels, the introduction
of the subject also challenges the conventions and capaciousness of the detective fiction form,
though it may be seen to continue the genre’s tradition of social critique. Issues of life, from
conception and birth to death, as well as considerations of femininity and the reality (and
fantasies) of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood, are, as Seaman says, “mysteries in and of
themselves.” While Charlotte Beyer’s essay deals with childbirth, motherhood and children,
too, the literature examined in her essay in many ways is the antithesis of Seaman’s. Rather
than focusing on the careful, even obsessive, tending to conception, pregnancy and childbirth,
Beyer’s essay deals with the 19th-c practice of “baby farming” and the infanticide that
sometimes accompanied it. This is especially true in the case of murderer Amelia Dyer, whose
depiction in a wide range of true crime texts provides the focus of Beyer’s critique of the
gendered language, of the ideas about femininity, female sexuality and motherhood, and of the
association of the female with evil that are drawn upon in these true crime texts.
Beyer cites the tensions between genre conventions and social critique so often evident in true
crime, though, as these essays also demonstrate, many of the texts examined here can be said
to test the limits of crime writing conventions in ways that make it very apparent that one of
the most profound appeals of crime writing for both writers and readers is its ability to contain
so much and to put so many issues into productive tension. Though the ghostly boundaries and
limits of crime writing can hardly be identified, we can be certain they are present since the
creative energies of the texts examined here—and of the essays themselves—could not exist
without being contained in a textual environment that provides constant pressures and
productive frictions.