Abstract
Many of the most popular English stage plays of the last century were concerned with crime, most frequently murder, and its detection. The present study will examine these plays, which in some ways are so like detective fiction and in other respects are very different. The title phrase of this chapter, “the body in the library and the body on stage” plays on the contrast between the popular image of a dead body found in the midst of “fossilized,” dead, written language and theatrical performance in which living bodies utter living, spoken language. Twentieth-century English detective fiction created a massive output of stories revolving around the discovery of a dead body and the reconstruction of how that body came to be a dead body. Since drama is concerned with the actions of living bodies one might assume that no comparable genre has evolved in the theatre. This is far from the case.
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Notes
See Michael Jefferson, Criminal Law (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2001), 10.
The selection of theatres that may be said to belong to the London West End largely follows J. P. Wearing’s useful compendium The London Stage — A Calendar of Plays and Players (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1976–1993), which lists the performances in all West End theatres between 1890 and 1959.
See John Russell Taylor, The Rise and Fall of the Well-Made Play (London: Methuen, 1967), 101.
Stanley Richards (ed.), Best Mystery and Suspense Plays of the Modern Theatre (New York: Dodd, 1971) and 10 Classic Mystery and Suspense Plays of the Modern Theatre (New York: Dodd, 1973).
Charles LaBorde, Form and Formula in Detective Drama (PhD dissertation: Ohio State, 1976).
In: Robin W. Winks (ed.), Detective Fiction — A Collection of Critical Essays (Woodstock: Foul Play Press, 1988), 25–34.
Marvin Carlson, Deathtraps: The Postmodern Comedy Thriller (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993), 2.
Ibid. The term “guarantor of meaning” was originally coined by Slavoj Žižek in Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 58.
John Stokes, “Body Parts: The Success of the Thriller in the Inter-War Years,” in: Clive Barker and Maggie B. Gale (eds), British Theatre between the Wars, 1918–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 38–62, 46.
Frank Rahill, The World of Melodrama, (University Park and London: Pennsylvania State UP, 1967), 291.
James L. Smith, Melodrama (The Critical Idiom 28, London: Methuen, 1973), 46.
Amnon Kabatchnik, Blood on the Stage, 1900–1925, Blood on the Stage, 1925–1950; Blood on the Stage, 1950–1975; Blood on the Stage, 1975–2000 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2008–2012).
See Martin Priestman, Detective Fiction and Literature: The Figure on the Carpet (London: Macmillan, 1990).
Ulrich Suerbaum, Krimi: Eine Analyse der Gattung (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984), 16–29.
Geraldine Pederson-Krag, “Detective Fiction and the Primal Scene,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 18 (1949), 207–214.
Jacques Lacan, “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’,” Yale French Studies 48 (1973), 39–72; originally published in Écrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966).
George Orwell, “Raffles and Miss Blandish,” in: The Collected Essays (London: Secker and Warburg, 1961), 249–263; first published in 1944.
William Aydelotte, “The Detective Story as a Historical Source,” in: Larry N. Landrum, Pat Browne and Ray B. Browne (eds), Dimensions of Detective Fiction (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1976), 68–82, first published in Yale Review 39 (1949/50).
For instance Umberto Eco, “Narrative Structures in Fleming,” in: The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington and London: Indiana UP, 1979), 144–163; first published in Il caso Bond, 1965;
Tzvetan Todorov, “The Typology of Detective Fiction,” in: The Poetics of Prose (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), 42–52;
Peter Hühn, “The Detective as Reader: Narrativity and Reading Concepts in Detective Fiction,” Modern Fiction Studies 33:3 (Autumn 1987), 451–466.
For instance Patricia Merivale, “The Flaunting of Artifice in Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis Borges,” in: L. S. Dembo (ed.), Nabokov: The Man and His Work (Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), 209–224;
Stefano Tani, The Doomed Detective: The Contribution of the Detective Novel to Postmodern American and Italian Fiction (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP), 1984; Martin Priestman (1990).
For instance John P. Muller and William J. Richardson (eds), The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida and Psychoanalytic Reading (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988) and Slavoj Žižek’s Looking Awry.
See William W. Stowe, “From Semiotics to Hermeneutics: Modes of Detection in Doyle and Chandler,” in: Glenn W. Most and William W. Stowe, The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory (San Diego, New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 366–383;
Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok (eds), The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1983).
E.g. Kathleen Gregory Klein, The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988),
and Maureen Reddy, Sisters in Crime: Feminism and the Crime Novel (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1988).
Peter Rabinowitz, “Chandler Comes to Harlem: Racial Politics in the Thriller of Chester Himes,” in: Barbara A. Rader and Howard G. Zettler (eds), The Sleuth and the Scholar: Origins, Evolutions, and Current Trends in Detective Fiction (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988, 19–29).
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© 2015 Beatrix Hesse
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Hesse, B. (2015). The Body in the Library and the Body on Stage. In: The English Crime Play in the Twentieth Century. Crime Files Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137463043_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137463043_1
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