From the Locked Room to the Globe: Space in Crime Fiction

Abstract

In his foreword to Kristin Ross’ The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune, Terry Eagleton comments that space “has proved of far less glamorous appeal to radical theorists than the apparently more dynamic, exhilarating notions of narrative and history” (Eagleton 2008: xii). This observation also applies to much criticism of crime fiction, which has tended to treat the genre primarily in terms of narrative structure and temporality, rather than in terms of spatiality, mostly because of the teleological bent given to that criticism by its emphasis on the solution to the crime. Exemplary in this respect is Tzvetan Todorov’s chapter in The Poetics of Prose entitled “The Typology of Detective Fiction”, in which he argues that crime fiction narratives are structured by a double temporality: the reconstruction of events leading up to the murder and the progress of the detective’s investigation, with both narratives eventually converging at the point of the crime’s solution. There is no doubt that crime fiction is centrally concerned with time; reconstructing not only who did what but when they did it is a crucial part of the detective’s job. This chapter will argue that crime fiction is a profoundly spatial as well as temporal genre because, as Geoffrey Hartman points out, “to solve a crime in detective stories means to give it an exact location: to pinpoint not merely the murderer and his motives but also the very place, the room, the ingenious or brutal circumstances” (Hartman 1999: 212).