“Perplexing Plots”: Crime fiction, modernism, and the air of rigor

I just finished this book, Perplexing Plots, by David Bordwell. It’s excellent. I don’t know that most of you would like it, but it was right in my sweet spot. The book came out in 2023, and I was sorry to learn that the author has recently died. He was already retired, and none of us live forever, but it still made me sad. Reading the book made me want to have a conversation with him.

Another way of looking at it, though, is that it’s wonderful that Bordwell managed to finish this book before he exhausted his allotted time on Earth. Also, he and his wife, Kristin Thompson, had a blog. Which I’ve added to the “Not currently active” section of our link page. Which I guess is where all blogs will eventually end up.

Experimentation

Regarding the book itself: Bordwell treats crime fiction and noir film in parallel, not comparing the two so much as considering them as a single entity (along with the now-minor field of crime/mystery stage drama). He draws connections between these popular forms (generally considered “lowbrow” or “middlebrow”) and “highbrow” modernist fiction.

One connection is the idea of experimentation. Modernist fiction is famously experimental. Bordwell argues that popular crime fiction and film have been able to get away with a lot of experimentation too, in part by working within familiar forms–he gives many examples, including the heist movies The Killing (Kubrick) and Pulp Fiction (Tarantino).

Rigor

Another connection between crime fiction and modernism, which I don’t recall explicitly mentioned by Bordwell, is the air of rigor. Modernist fiction, poetry, art, and architecture are associated with following strict, often unnatural-seeming rules, and there’s a sense that, to appreciate them, you need to give into their constraints. To say that you don’t like a modernist story because it makes no sense, or that you don’t like a modernist chair because it’s uncomfortable, that would be missing the point, as a key aspect of modernism is the rejection of traditional expectations and comforts.

Detective stories, and crime fiction more generally, have their own areas of rigor, from the “fair play” rules of the so-called golden age, to later expectations regarding characterization, point of view, and suspense. As with modernism, constraints can facilitate experimentation.