Irony and Justice in Patricia Highsmith

Abstract

It is the crime writer’s peculiar vocation to dwell on guilt and misery; to invent, articulate and linger over acts of violence, hatred and sudden unnatural death. And it is the crime reader’s peculiar pleasure to participate vicariously in these inventions. Look around any train compartment or waiting-room, and you will see the most mild-looking people engrossed in the most lurid titles. What kind of pleasure does crime fiction offer? We may feel comfortably superior to those eighteenth-century voyeurs who enjoyed regular visits to Bedlam to be amused by the antics of those confined, but perhaps the satisfaction of the detective novel is a vestigial performance of the triumph of sanity over deviance. For the conventional crime novel not only dwells on guilt and misery, it isolates and seeks to dispel the guilty and the miserable. Crime fiction does more than simply display its deviants. It presents a world in which crime is identifiable, soluble and explicable. Crime may not be preventable, but the damage it causes can be limited. The world is thus packaged into the two exclusive bundles of the normal innocents and the deviant guilty, and readers can be reassured about their own status and safety.

Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery

Jane Austen