Adopting and Adapting Crime Fiction

Abstract

If measured by degree of detail with which concerns of everyday life, at public as well as private levels, are reflected in literature, generic fiction, notably crime fiction in its many varieties, stands out with a reflection dynamic resembling naturalism at its most penetrating. With its tradition of reflecting all the potentially significant elements of a banal and trivial everyday world for the solution of crimes, it records stirrings in the body politic like a seismograph. Although the bulk of crime fiction titles follow formulas established and virtually unchanged for decades, it is an essential characteristic of the formulas that they rely on and therefore accommodate an ever updated actuality. Just as the audience of crime fiction expects certain patterns to be honoured, they also expect a fictional universe recognisably their own. Allowing for the great variety of writing in the last decades of the twentieth century in Britain, and for the constant generic hybridisation taking place in general, it is safe to say that to get a true-to-life rendering of the social and political situation one can profitably turn to crime fiction.

The Moonstone provides an interesting insight into many aspects of its age, particularly through the truth and variety of its characterization, and this reflection of social mores and social habits was to become one of the most important virtues of the well-written detective story. … The detective story, because clue-making demands an interest in the minutiae of everyday life, frequently tells us more about the age in which it was written than does more pretentious literature. … If we want to know what it was like to work in a commercial office in the city when £4 a week was a wage on which a copy-writer could live in comfort and even make some show of tagging along with the bright young things, we should read Murder Must Advertise. Similarly in our own age we could learn more about South Africa from the novels of James McClure than from many books on apartheid.

(James, 1993:5, 8–9)