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Crime Fiction

Crime Fiction. Session Three: Tom Stoppard, The Real Inspector Hound. Agenda. The country house murder mystery Tom Stoppard, The Real Inspector Hound. The Country House Murder Mystery. The Whodunit. Puzzle Clues The locked room mystery. Agatha Christie, The Mousetrap.

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Crime Fiction

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  1. Crime Fiction Session Three: Tom Stoppard, The Real Inspector Hound

  2. Agenda • The country house murder mystery • Tom Stoppard, The Real Inspector Hound

  3. The Country House Murder Mystery

  4. The Whodunit • Puzzle • Clues • The locked room mystery

  5. Agatha Christie, The Mousetrap • https://www.the-mousetrap.co.uk/online/default.asp

  6. Monty Python, Agatha Christie sketch

  7. Tom Stoppard, The Real Inspector Hound • The play • The play within the play

  8. The play, ”reality,” the audience / critics Birdboot Moon Higs Puckeridge The-play-within-the-play: ”fiction,” the country house murder mystery characters Inspector Hound Cynthia Simon Magnus Felicity The characters

  9. Higgs - dead body • Moon - Inspector Hound • Birdboot - Simon • Puckeridge - Magnus / Albert / the real inspector Houn • - Cynthia • - Felicity

  10. Crime fiction is paradigmatic of narrative (structuralism) • Crime fiction dramatises the power of reason (Holquist 1971) • Crime fiction is the analogue of scientific possitivism and determinism (Spanos 1972)

  11. Modernism Myth and depth psychology Against Kitsch (popular art, culture) Joyce, Mann, Woolf Post-Modernism (high art, the avant garde) Kitsch (popular art, culture) Robbe-Grillet, Nabokov, Borges Holquist (1971)

  12. Post-Modernism and the palimpsest (152) • Post-Modernism and the erasure of the traces of the detective story (153) • Post-Modernism and defeat of the expectations of the reader (155)

  13. ”[…] Post-Modernism exploits detective stories by expanding and changing certain possibilities in them, just as Modernism had modified the potentialities of myth.”

  14. ”[…] Post-Modernists play with the conventions of the detective story, mining the genre for plots and surprises. […] [They] depend on the audiences familiarity with the conventions of the detective story to provide the subtext they may then play with by defeating expectations.” (155)

  15. William Spanos, ”The Detective and the Boundary:…” (1972) • Modernism as rupture (”anti-Westernism” and ”anti-Aristotelianism”) and as continuation (”spatial form”) • The postmodern imagination as a complete rupture or break with totalising explanationsn exitential imagination (148) • The concept of Angst

  16. Spanos 1972 • The analogy between crime fiction and scientific possitivism and determinism: • For just as the form of the detective story has its source in the comforting certainty that en acute ”eye,” private or otherwise, can resolve the crime with resounding finality by inferring causal relationships between clues which point to it (they are ”leads,” suggesting the primacy of rigid linear narrative sequence), so the ”form” of the well-made positivistic universe is grounded in the equally comforting certainty that the scientist and / or psychoanalyst can solve the immediate problem by the inductive method, a process involving the inferrence of relationships between discontinuous ”facts” that point to or lead straight to the explanation of the ”mystery,” the ”crime” of contingent existence. (150)

  17. Spanos 1972 • It is, therefore, no accident that the paradigmatic archetype of the postmodern literary imagination is the anti-detective story (and its anti-psychological analogue), the formal purpose of which is to evoke the impulse to ”detect” and or psychoanalyse in order to violently frustrate it by refusing to solve the crime (or find the cause of the neurosis) (154)

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