Abstract
Crime fiction is known as the plot-driven genre, par excellence, which has often excluded crime fiction from a place on the academic curriculum because the question “what happened?” is considered only a superficial reading of a text (Milhorn, 2006, Writing Genre Fiction: A Guide to the Craft). As a methodology invested in explicating ways of communicating “what happened,” narrative theory provides a productive avenue for attending to crime fiction plots and genre devices. Using core concepts applied to crime fiction by narrative theory, “Plots and Devices” offers strategies to enrich class discussions of crime fiction plots, demonstrating their complexity in the genre and their value to literary studies generally.
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Notes
- 1.
Agatha Christie, Cards on the Table. (New York.: Berkley Books, 1937.; repr., 1984). 57.
- 2.
Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984).
- 3.
W. H. Auden, “The Guilty Vicarage,” in Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robin W. Winks (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1980).
- 4.
Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977). 43.
- 5.
Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative.
- 6.
Suzanne Keen, Narrative Form (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
- 7.
Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative.
- 8.
Todorov, The Poetics of Prose.
- 9.
Eyal Segal, “Closure in Detective Fiction,” Poetics Today 31, no. 2 (2010). 180.
- 10.
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
- 11.
Ngaio Marsh, Death and the Dancing Footman (London: Published for the Crime Club by Collins, 1942).
- 12.
Death in Ecstacy (London: HarperCollins, 2001).
- 13.
Todorov, The Poetics of Prose.
- 14.
Thomas Harris, Red Dragon (New York: Putnam, 1981).
- 15.
Segal, “Closure in Detective Fiction.” 185.
- 16.
Todorov, The Poetics of Prose.
- 17.
Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear: An Entertainment (London: Penguin Books, 1973).
- 18.
Christian. House, “How the Thirty-Nine Steps Invented the Modern Thriller,” The Telegraph, October 11, 2015.
- 19.
John Buchan and Christopher Harvie, The Thirty-Nine Steps, World’s Classics (Oxford England; New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
- 20.
Segal, “Closure in Detective Fiction.” 162.
- 21.
Auden, “The Guilty Vicarage.” 24.
- 22.
Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder (New York: Vintage, 1988).
- 23.
Sam Naidu and Karlien van der Wielen, “Poison and Antidote: Evil and the Hero-Villain Binary in Deon Meyer’s Post-Apartheid Crime Thriller, Devil’s Peak,” in The Functions of Evil across Disciplinary Contexts, ed. Malcah Effron and Brian Johson (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017).
- 24.
Todorov, The Poetics of Prose.
- 25.
Keen, Narrative Form.
- 26.
Pierre Bayard and Carol Cosman, Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?: The Mystery Behind the Agatha Christie Mystery (New York: New Press, 2000).
- 27.
Ronald A. Knox, “Detective Story Decalogue,” in The Art of the Mystery Story, ed. Howard Haycraft (New York,: Simon and Schuster, 1946).
- 28.
Carolyn Wheat, How to Write Killer Fiction: The Funhouse of Mystery & the Rollercoaster of Suspense (Palo Alto: Perseverance Press, 2003).
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Effron, M. (2018). Plots and Devices. In: Beyer, C. (eds) Teaching Crime Fiction. Teaching the New English. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90608-9_3
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