Crime fiction began in 1841: the year that Edgar Allan Poe published the first of his detective stories, featuring the cooly logical policeman C. Auguste Dupin. Poe’s stories teased a line of logic out of the How and Who questions that led directly to Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. Among crime writers, this genre is sometimes described as ‘The Cozies’, a not-so-affectionate term that refers to the villages and country estates where so many whodunnits take place. Standing in opposition to these ‘cozies’ is the ‘noir’ tradition, in which lone detectives confront a dangerous, urban world: the ‘mean streets’, in Raymond Chandler’s famous phrase.
The strange thing is that Poe is the least cozy of writers: he was a troubled man who wrote disturbing stories. Though he was an American, and wrote his Dupin stories in America, he set his Dupin mysteries in Paris – which is rather mysterious in itself. His Paris is a city paralysed by political intrigues, none of which can be settled openly. All that holds Paris together are shifting alliances between constitutional monarchists, ultra-montaignes, the church and sinister political advisors. A man of action, a true American, would tear the city apart. Dupin’s subtlety finds a home in Paris when it would be out of place almost anywhere else, and certainly in Poe’s mid-19th-century America.
After Poe, the entire history of crime fiction can be told as a conversation between France and America, but an odd kind of conversation – the kind when no one actually listens to what the other is saying. The word ‘noir’ was created by French critics to describe an essentially American genre. It comes from the name of an American pulp magazine, ‘Black Mask’, which published the first stories of the Private Eyes and criminals of America’s great new metropolises. In its translation into French, Pulp Fiction became High Art. Here is one example of this strange elevation: there is a kind of literary parlour game among French critics, in which they provide a reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s story , each interpretation becoming more and more sophisticated until the original story all but disappears.
As an English novelist who has played around with crime fiction, without ever straying far from its basic principles, I find this transatlantic conversation fascinating and inspiring. It seems to me that, only in the UK, can one see how much the French and the Americans misunderstand each other. At French book festivals, I am always asked the ‘political’ question: how can an essentially left-wing genre like crime fiction continue to challenge and change society? And to the consternation of the audience, I admit that crime fiction might be political, but it is only the French who think it is necessarily left-wing. Mickey Spillane is an arch-conservative, the films of Dirty Harry celebrate a cop who has become judge and executioner. In France, crime fiction is intimately tied to the upheavals of 1968. Though France had produced their own versions of American-style films since the 1930s, such as and , crime became radicalised in the 1960s with New Wave films like ,, and . The leading lights of French crime fiction are still capable of causing huge political upheavals – the writer Didier Daeninckx, for instance, wrote a novel () that changed French law and led to the prosecution of a Vichy official as a war criminal. But in America, crime fiction is as likely to champion radical conservative issues as left-wing causes.
British writers are caught in the middle of a transatlantic conversation that began in 1841, but we also have our own dates: 1868, , in which Wilkie Collins invents the police procedural; 1887, , the first Sherlock Holmes story; 1920, , Agatha Christie’s first novel and the introduction of Hercule Poirot; 1939, , Eric Ambler’s international thriller described by John Le Carre as ‘the source on which we all draw’. The division into cozies and noir is difficult to sustain when one contemplates the extraordinary variety of crime fiction produced in Britain. Indeed, the variety is so great, one might ask whether British crime writing constitutes a single genre. I believe it does, for a reason that is so subtle, so near-Jesuitical, that it would put Poe’s Detective Dupin, to shame. I would argue that it is only because of the fluid nature of crime writing in the UK, that there is a single genre at all: British crime fiction is so amorphous, that one can always find strange connections between different writers. How else can one place Raymond Chandler and Agatha Christie side by side (except, I concede, alphabetically)? British crime writing, in all its strange variety, is the mortar that holds the world of crime fiction together.
One definition of crime fiction, albeit a negative one, is that all the great crime writers are un-literary, at least as far as the word ‘literary’ is understood in an academic context. This makes crime writers sound rather like outlaws, bucking conventions – and many see their work in this way (as I did, for a long while). Others are more resentful, asking why their work never appears on the Booker Prize list. But at least one of the functions of literature, as Martin Amis has argued, is to fight a ‘war against cliche’. It is true that, at any single moment, literary fiction can seem extraordinarily cliche-ridden, as aspiring literary authors imitate each other. But across the grand sweep of literary history, the landscape is composed of singularities: oddities that have changed our notion of fine writing. Literary fiction is essentially odd, and the best is so odd that the writing styles constitute a kind of personal signature. Crime fiction is never quite so odd. And it can never afford to abandon cliches entirely: a murder has to have a murderer, a bad guy has to be bad, a good guy has to have some redeeming features. Even at the level of prose, cliches are necessary: crime fiction is a dramatic rather than a poetic form, and by placing cliches in a character’s mouth, or conjuring a scene through a recognisable epithet, the reader gets a shiver of pleasure as they suddenly anticpate what may happen next. Above all, the best crime writers have tried to write the same novel over-and-over again. Since the turn of the 20th Century, at least, no literary writer would dream of going back over old ground.
Here is the cunning part of my argument. It is crime fiction, above all other genres, that provides examples of traditions and canons: detective fiction, thrillers, police procedurals, spy novels. Notions such as ‘tradition’ and ‘canon’ are essential for appreciating and teaching literary fiction, but they are not apparent in the literary classics themselves. Literary classics stand alone. It is only in plot-driven and reader-orientated fiction that one can find the continuing trends and on-going series that make for historical traditions and hierarchical canons. And among all popular books, it is crime fiction that has produced the widest variety of archetypes and the most inventive improvisations on plot or character. It is not simply that British crime fiction draws all kinds of crime fiction together to make a single universal genre. British crime fiction also makes the world of literature possible. True, all those who aspire to write literature might be tempted to denigrate or repress crime fiction. Crime writers ought to know better: we are the rock upon which literature stands. Or, at least, the shifting sands. It makes one proud to be British.
Nicholas Blincoe is a novelist and critic and lives in London.
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