Abstract
Chapter 1 addresses modern crime fiction’s reliance on the presentation of corpses, theorizing that the genre has thrived internationally as a cultural device for managing the “great modern fear of death” (Philippe Ariès). Crime fiction posits an inaugural and compulsively repeated confrontation with the corpse, an emblem of the epistemological enigma of death and the abject (Julia Kristeva). In the hard-boiled mode, violently traumatized cadavers gained prominence, and female corpses were distinctively sexualized. Confronting them, male detectives erected themselves as models of autonomous, armored and invulnerable masculine subjectivity. Corpse-centric crime fiction is related to the rise of corpse imagery in other contemporary literary and audiovisual media. Parallels are drawn between mainstream crime fiction and the rhetoric of popular crime journalism including the Spanish American nota roja.
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Notes
- 1.
And indeed, the Ripper episode of Kolchak may well have borrowed a narrative formula (that of the serial killing of beautiful, sexually adventurous women) from earlier giallo films in which the murderer was identified, as in the Kolchak episode, by his black leather gloves while his face remained concealed from the viewer. Beginning in the mid-1960s, “the fascination with murdering beautiful women” emerged as “one of the most important traits of these Italian thrillers” (Bondanella 390). Although certain giallo directors such as Dario Argento are commonly associated with horror film, Leon Hunt suggests that the giallo genre “might usefully be seen between as the missing link between the protoserial killer narratives of [US hard-boiled novelists] Frederic Brown and Cornell Woolrich and the American slasher film of the late 1970s/early 1980s” (71).
- 2.
Except where published English translations are cited in my bibliography, all translations from Spanish in this book are my own.
- 3.
Here I follow the ideas of Philippe Ariès regarding the transition from a premodern model of “tame death” to the modern “death of the self.” These ideas are developed respectively in parts I and II of The Hour of Our Death.
- 4.
For an interpretation of the therapeutic function of the classical “golden-age” detective novel’s “compulsion to repeat” in relation to the trauma suffered by the British public during World War I, see Plain (40–2, 53).
- 5.
This image of Carter Brown’s Slightly Dead was kindly provided by the Rare Books Collection of Monash University Library.
- 6.
El Nuevo Alarma! had suspended print publication and editor Miguel Ángel Rodríguez Vázquez was reportedly anticipating closure of its website by its owners when his sudden death accelerated the publication’s disappearance. Its final issue appeared online in February 2014.
- 7.
Among copycat publications, Cuauhtémoc Medina cites the following: “Peligro! Realidades y Verdades; Custodia! Únicamente la verdad; Enlace! Policiaco; and Alerta!” (23).
- 8.
A reproduction of this Alarma! cover appears in an online article by Santiago Stelley, “El Nuevo Alarma! Is Mexico’s Best Crime Tabloid,” cited in my bibliography. Although the exact date and issue number are illegible in the reproduction, the issue appears to be from mid-August 1985, when the murder was also reported in the US press.
- 9.
“Necropornography” is a term that has been used occasionally in scholarship on representation of the Holocaust. In a dissertation on the use of Holocaust films in US secondary school education, for example, Mark R. Gudgel defines it as “film or footage containing images of nude or mostly nude dying or dead” (14). Caryn S. Aviv and David Shneer denounce a specific documentary film on the history of genocide at Los Angeles’s Museum of Tolerance as necropornography, defining the term broadly as “using images of violence and death to fascinate” (86). The term has also been used by journalists in various contexts. Writing in the New York Times in 2005, Frank Rich used “necro-porn” and “deathotainment” (n.p.) to characterize not only “TV’s top entertainment franchise” CSI, but also simultaneous “saturation coverage” on US television of the deaths of Pope John Paul II and Terri Schiavo, a severely brain-damaged Florida woman who died after a protracted and highly politicized legal battle over her family’s right to remove her feeding tube. In the same year, British journalists Mary Riddell described a coroner’s inquest into the death of Princess Diana as “the most ghoulish and expensive peepshow in legal history” and the courtroom screening of CCTV images of her in the moments before her death as “necro-pornography” (n.p.).
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Close, G.S. (2018). Introduction. In: Female Corpses in Crime Fiction. Crime Files. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99013-2_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99013-2_1
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