NTNU ENGLISH SUMMER CAMP 2024

Professor Goodwin

Crime Fiction
History of Crime Fiction

“The Gothic novel has been identified as the

prototype for and the forerunner to the modern
mystery novel.”
“The trappings of the Gothic novel are familiar to many
readers. The ruined castle – an imposing, isolated,
haunted, ancient, and decaying structure – is its most
recognizable feature. This crumbling edifice contains
stock features such as trap doors, deserted wings,
labyrinthine passages, dark staircases, eerie galleries,
lofty turrets, gloomy vaults, subterranean corridors,
decrepit dungeons, tolling bells, and secret rooms.
Gothic Architecture
Gothic Covers on Romances
Classic Gothic Novels
Gothic Secrets

Mystery novels are often organized around

dark secrets, usually family secrets that are
connected with the past. This is also a key
element in Gothic literature.
E A Poe, Father of Detective Fiction

The American
Edgar Allan Poe,
1809-1849, is
recognized as one
of the foremost
progenitors of
modern literature,
both in its popular forms, such as horror and detective
fiction, and in its more complex and self-conscious
forms, which represent the essential artistic manner of
the 20th century.
Poe and the Development of Genre

 Edgar Allan Poe is credited with introducing the idea of

the detective hero when he wrote such stories as Murders
on the Rue Morgue (1841) and The Purloined Letter (1845).
Poe’s brilliant amateur detective Dupin was the first
model for what has proven to be an extremely popular
type. Poe also established many of the conventions of
the detective novel, including a story narrated by a close
associate of the detective, a bumbling police force, the
eccentric detective, the locked room mystery, and the
idea of clues leading to the exposing of the murderer.
 (https://books.openedition.org/pufr/5776?lang=en)
Poe’s MURDER tale

Edgar Allen Poe’s story,

The Murders in the Rue
Morgue, first appears in
1841. Considered the first
detective story,
it describes the extraordinary
“analytical power” used by
Poe’s detective C. Auguste
Dupin to solve a series of
murders in Paris. Like the later Sherlock Holmes stories,
the tale is narrated by the detective’s roommate.
Wilkie Collins
The Moonstone

Following the publication

of Poe’s story, detective stories
began to grow into novels and
English novelist Wilkie Collins
published a detective novel,
The Moonstone, in 1868.
The methodical Sergeant Cuff
searches for the criminal who
stole a sacred Indian
moonstone
Arthur Conan Doyle
Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes

 A Study in Scarlet (1887) was the first

appearance of the detective Sherlock Holmes
and his friend Dr Watson, the creations of Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), a British
writer and physician. Conan Doyle went on to
write four novels and 56 short stories
featuring the detectives.
 https://youtu.be/gGqWqGOSTGQ
Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street

 Even though the detective formula was invented

in the 1840s there were few literary detectives
until the rise of pipe-smoking Sherlock Holmes of
Baker Street, flanked by his unauthorized
chronicler, the good-but-not-so-bright Dr.
Watson, late in the 19th century. In America in the
1920s Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler
created a new variation of the detective featuring
a hardboiled hero who narrates his own story in
the first person.
A Study in Scarlet
Dame Agatha Christie
Dame Agatha Christie, Lady
Mallowan (1890-1976), was
an English writer even more
prolific than Conan Doyle –
she wrote 66 detective
novels and 14 short story
collections, many involving
her most famous detectives,
the Belgian Hercule Poirot
and the English Miss Marple
https://
youtu.be/Mq4m3yAoW8E
Classic Christie Mysteries
Hard-boiled Crime Fiction
 Hard-boiled fiction is considered a tough,
unsentimental style of American crime writing that
brought a new tone of earthy realism or naturalism
to the field of detective fiction. Hard-boiled fiction
used graphic sex and violence, vivid but often sordid
urban backgrounds, and fast-paced, slangy dialogue
(definition by Encyclopedia Britannica). Among the
most famous writers of hard-boiled crime fiction
were Raymond Chandler (1888 –1959), Dashiell
Hammett (1894-1961) and James M Cain (1892-1977).
Hard-boiled Novels
Police Procedurals
 “In terms of solving a crime, the most realistic approach is offered in
stories in which the police are the dominant figures. When a murder
occurs in real life, you’d probably prefer the police to come on the
scene than the local vicar, or a bookseller.

There are three main types of cop novels:

(1) A policeman is called in to solve a crime and sets about doing it. He
acts alone and functions pretty much the way an amateur sleuth or a
private investigator would.
(2) The second type of police procedural is one in which an entire squad
cooperates to find the killer.
(3) The third type is a novel that looks at the lives of the cops involved in
investigations with their motives, strengths, and weaknesses.
 https://youtu.be/Tc4FDG9Kbxg
Famous Police Procedurals
Legal Thrillers

 The legal thriller genre is a type of crime

fiction genre that focuses on the
investigation of a crime, with emphasis on
lawyers, judges and defendants in courtroom
proceedings. Famous legal thriller authors
include John Grisham, Scott Turow, James
Patterson and Michael Connelly. https://
youtu.be/701GQjY6PaI
Legal Thrillers
Psychopathic Killers

For American audiences at least, psychopaths and serial killers

seem to be the most haunting, fascinating criminals of all.
Hundreds of books have been devoted to the exploration of
both fictional and nonfictional killing sprees, in addition to a
plethora films, TV shows, podcasts and other forms of media.

Why are we so intrigued by such horrible people? Whatever the

reason, this type of criminal thrills and repulses readers in equal
measure. There are two elements necessary for any successful
serial killer narrative: a twisted yet driven murderer, and an
investigator who, no matter how flawed or troubled, will stop at
nothing to see justice done. https://youtu.be/6iB21hsprAQ
Psychopathic Killers
Diversity among detectives
“Ten Commandments” of the detective story:
Ronald Knox (1929)

According to Knox, a detective story "must have as its main interest the
unravelling of a mystery; a mystery whose elements are clearly
presented to the reader at an early stage in the proceedings, and whose
nature is such as to arouse curiosity, a curiosity which is gratified at the
end."Knox's "Ten Commandments" (or "Decalogue") are as follows:

1. The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must
not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to know.
2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of
course.
3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance
which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
5. No Chinaman must figure in the story.
“Ten Commandments”
6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an
unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
7. The detective himself must not commit the crime.
8. The detective is bound to declare any clues which he may discover.
9. The "sidekick" of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal from the
reader any thoughts which pass through his mind: his intelligence
must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
10. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we
have been duly prepared for them.

 From the Introduction to The Best Detective Stories of 1928-29.

Reprinted in Haycraft, Howard, Murder for Pleasure: The Life and
Times of the Detective Story, Revised edition, New York: Biblio and
Tannen, 1976.
SS Van Dine’s
“20 Rules for Writing Detective Stories”

S.S. Van Dine (1888-1939, real name Willard Huntington Wright) was one of the most popular American mystery writers of the
twenties and thirties, and his wealthy amateur sleuth Philo Vance remains one of the great fictional detectives, if not also
one of the most insufferable, and his very existence perhaps helped spur the demand for a tougher, more "realistic"
American kind of detective.
Excerpts from the following essay which originally appeared in the September 1928 edition of The American Magazine.
“ The detective story is a game. It is more--it is a sporting event. And the author must play fair with the reader. He can no more
resort to trickeries and deceptions and still retain his honesty than if he cheated in a bridge game. He must outwit the
reader, and hold the reader's interest, through sheer ingenuity. “
1.The reader must have equal opportunity with the detective for solving the mystery. All clues must be plainly stated and
described.
2.No wilful tricks or deceptions may be played on the reader other than those played legitimately by the criminal on the
detective himself.
3.There must be no love interest in the story. To introduce amour is to clutter up a purely intellectual experience with irrelevant
sentiment. The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal
altar.
4.The detective himself, or one of the official investigators, should never turn out to be the culprit. This is bald trickery, on a par
with offering some one a bright penny for a five-dollar gold piece. It's false pretenses.
5.The culprit must be determined by logical deductions--not by accident or coincidence or unmotivated confession. To solve a
criminal problem in this latter fashion is like sending the reader on a deliberate wild-goose chase, and then telling him,
after he has failed, that you had the object of his search up your sleeve all the time. Such an author is no better than a
practical joker.
 SOURCE: http://www.thrillingdetective.com/trivia/triv288.html
Sources

 http://
www.history.com/this-day-in-history/first-
detective-story-is-published
 https://crimereads.com/what-is-a-police-proc
edural
/
 https://mysterytribune.com/top-10-great-seri
al-killer-novels/
 Handouts: mystery games