Abstract
Those critics who take an encyclopaedic approach to crime fiction customarily cite among the sources of the genre two episodes from Genesis in the first book of the Bible, which can be read as the religious foundation myth of Western society. It is because of a crime — although in religious terms it is the ‘original sin’ — that Adam and Eve abandon the condition of perfection they enjoyed in the Garden of Eden in order to enter the time of history. Stealing the fruit from the tree of knowledge triggers an inevitable detection, and the same occurs when, in another episode, Cain is marked and exiled to the East of Eden for having killed his brother. The more crimes the first humans commit, the more punishment they receive and the further they spread across the face of the earth. Incidentally, this cyclic plot has an uncanny analogy with the mechanism of retribution which led to the creation of distant European colonies through the transportation of criminals. What I find particularly meaningful in these ancient stories, however, is the fact that evildoers are doomed right from the beginning since the primal detective and judge is God himself. In other words the construction of Western morals pivots on the idea of omniscience and the certainty of punishment.
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Notes
Quoted in Barry Cunliffe, Roman Bath Discovered (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Tempus, 2000), p. 64.
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, a verse translation with an introduction and notes by David Wright (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 208.
Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, ed. Richard W. Van Fossen (London: Edward Arnold, 1965), pp. 8–9.
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Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller, in An Anthology of Elizabethan Prose Fiction, ed. Paul Salzman(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 303.
John Reynolds, The Triumphs of Gods Revenege, Book I (London: Felix Kyngston, 1621), p. 1
Albert Borowitz, An International Guide to Fact-based Crime Literature, Note by Jacques Barzun, Foreword by Jonathan Goodman (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2002), p. 5.
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John Reynolds, ‘Historie XII’, in The Triumphs of Gods Revenege, Book III (London: Felix Kyngston, 1623), p. 108.
See F.W. Chandler, The Literature of Roguery, 2 vols (New York: Burt Franklin, 1907), Vol. I, p. 4.
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See Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: a Mythical Biography (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003).
See also Christopher Hibbert, Highwaymen (New York: Delacorte Press, 1967).
Captain Alexander Smith, ‘Whitney, A Highwayman’, in A Complete History of the Lives and Robberies of the Most Notorious Highwaymen, Footpads, Shoplifts and Cheats of Both Sexes, ed. Arthur L. Hayward (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 42.
Knight, Crime Fiction 1800–2000: Detection, Death, Diversity (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, p. 8.
William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976).
Pierre-Simon Laplace, Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, ed. Andrew I. Dale (New York and Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1995), p. 78.
Heather Worthington, The Rise of the Detective in Early Nineteenth-century Popular Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 46.
Thomas De Quincey, On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, in The Complete Works, 13 vols, Vol. IV (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1862), p. 5.
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© 2007 Maurizio Ascari
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Ascari, M. (2007). Detection before Detection. In: A Counter-History of Crime Fiction. Crime Files Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234536_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234536_2
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