Popular Texts and Intertexts: Detective, Crime, and Mystery
Popular Texts and Intertexts – Detective, Crime and Mystery
• Dorothy L Sayers – “Death in particular seems to provide the minds of Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of innocent amusement than any other single subject”.
• Detective Fiction emerges in other genres all the time.
Temporal ordering
The plot aims at establishing a linear chronological sequence of events that will eventually explain its own baffling starting point. – Heta Pyrhonen.
The story is explaining the mystery – the mystery is solved – resolution.
• The treatment of crime and detection is grounded in a relationship of complicity between authors and readers that resembles a game played to a set of rules.
PD James – The detective story deals with the most dramatic and tragic manifestations of man’s nature and the ultimate disruption of murder, yet the form itself is orderly, controlled, formulaic, providing a secure structure within which the imaginations of writers and readers alike can conform to formula.
Jane Austen – Emma = a mystery that is solved at the end – without the murder
==> A novel but structured like a detective story.
Matthew Arnold – 1880 = Detective stories were “cheap hideous, and ignoble of aspect”.
Dorothy says that it can be the best selling book because it is predictable.
Jean Luc Goddard
We know from the comfort of our homes that its not blood its red.
Fictional Murder
Fictional Murder is usually both more complicated and ingenious than murder in real life, it hardly provides a reliable model since the murderer is always found out.
Classic Detectives
Male
Alone
• Dorothy L Sayers – “Death in particular seems to provide the minds of Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of innocent amusement than any other single subject”.
• Detective Fiction emerges in other genres all the time.
Temporal ordering
The plot aims at establishing a linear chronological sequence of events that will eventually explain its own baffling starting point. – Heta Pyrhonen.
The story is explaining the mystery – the mystery is solved – resolution.
• The treatment of crime and detection is grounded in a relationship of complicity between authors and readers that resembles a game played to a set of rules.
PD James – The detective story deals with the most dramatic and tragic manifestations of man’s nature and the ultimate disruption of murder, yet the form itself is orderly, controlled, formulaic, providing a secure structure within which the imaginations of writers and readers alike can conform to formula.
Jane Austen – Emma = a mystery that is solved at the end – without the murder
==> A novel but structured like a detective story.
Matthew Arnold – 1880 = Detective stories were “cheap hideous, and ignoble of aspect”.
Dorothy says that it can be the best selling book because it is predictable.
Jean Luc Goddard
We know from the comfort of our homes that its not blood its red.
Fictional Murder
Fictional Murder is usually both more complicated and ingenious than murder in real life, it hardly provides a reliable model since the murderer is always found out.
Classic Detectives
Male
Alone