Today is Friday, which means it's time for another edition of the Patti Abbott-orchestrated "Forgotten Books Friday." Although too recent (2005) to be forgotten, per se, Charles J. Rzepka's Detective Fiction (Cultural History of Literature) is an interesting read, and not just for its quasi-intended audience, college students.
Author Rzepka teaches English at Boston University, but one of his specialties is also detective fiction. In addition to this book, he's published several articles on subjects from Elmore Leonard to Charlie Chan, and most of his works-in-progress are related to detective fiction, including a biographical essay on Earl Derr Biggers (creator of Charlie Chan); an essay on the theme of "nostos" in Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories; another on the detective fiction of Todd Downing (part-Choctaw writer, editor, and translator; and two book length studies: of the coterminous rise of formal detective fiction and the development of the lyric from Romanticism to Modernism (working title Lyrical Forensics), and the origins of ethnic and multicultural detective literature in the interwar period, 1920-1940, titled Two-Faced.
Yes, this is more of a scholarly look at the history of detective fiction—focusing primarily on the UK and America up to the latter part of the 20th century—but it's also entertaining. Thomas Paul (Modernism/Modernity) even went so far as to call it "cool, savvy, and utterly compelling." What is most interesting to me is the premise, i.e., he cultural context in which Rzepka places both authors and readers as the genre and society evolve together. As Rzepka points out, it's not surprising that the publication in 1841 of what is considered the first modern detective story, Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morge" coincided with the growing tension between religion and the physical sciences, where pathbreaking discoveries were giving rise ultimately to modern forensics.
Another cause-and-effect in the genre's history took place in England where English sympathizers with the American Revolution were beginning to agitate for reforms in the "old corruption" of rule and law enforcement by the landed classes. One such sympathizer, William Godwin (1756-1836) went on to write the book Caleb Williams (1794, a Forgotten Book in its own right), considered one of the first English detective novels, which featured a murder, cover-up, and framing and execution of two innocent people by a wealthy landowner. Rzepka adds, "Godwin intended to show how, given the current political situation, absolute power corrupts turning the former into outright bullies or conscience-tormented hypocrites and the latter into obsequious toadies or celebrity-obsessed curiosity-seekers." (Sound familiar? Some things never change.) Caleb Williams was a portent of things to come in other ways: "the terror and mystery of crime; the obsessive nature of suspicion; the paranoid thrills of flight, pursuit, arrest, and escape; and the daring use of incognito and disguise."
Rzepka has studies on Holmes, the Golden Age of Detection, and the rise of hard-boiled fiction in America, all tighly woven into the fabric of their particular time and place in history. The book isn't exactly "light" reading, but having read it once, I look forward to revisiting it again in the not-too-distant future and hopefully absorb more of the details I missed the first time around. Such nonfiction books are often quite neglected in general (although personally I enjoy them), but this particular nonfiction title is definitely recommended.
Looks to be quite a nice reference book to have on my shelves.
Posted by: Patti Abbott | July 03, 2009 at 08:04 AM
Oh, this one looks good. Thanks.
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Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
Posted by: Peter | July 05, 2009 at 11:58 AM
I love historical reference works that place a subject (like crime fiction) in context, as opposed to a mere chronology. It will be interesting to see how a future writer places the current crop of detective fiction authors within the context of our own era.
Posted by: BV Lawson | July 05, 2009 at 05:23 PM