Death & the humanities, or what we can learn from crime fiction

“The arrest of Colonel Moran” depicts Sherlock Holmes confronting Colonel Moran, who is then arrested by two police officers. The scene first appeared in “The Adventure of the Empty House” (1903). Illustration by Sidney Paget, in The Strand Magazine. Original caption: “Colonel Moran sprang forward, with a snarl of rage.”

There has long been a stigma around reading crime fiction. In an infamous literary putdown published in The New Yorker in 1945, Edmund Wilson described fans of crime fiction as “habitually on the defensive, and all their talk about ‘well-written’ mysteries is simply an excuse for their vice, like the reasons that the alcoholic can always pro­duce for a drink”.[1]

For its critics, the crime genre is derivative, sensationalist, lacking in literary merit and escapist—a form for readers who want cheap thrills. Moreover, the end-orientation, where the detective gathers the main players together and explains the clues to identify whodunit, howdunit and whydunit, seemingly does the interpretative work for the lazy reader. Such a literary form, then, doesn’t seem appropriate subject matter for humanities scholarship … or … is it, TV’s Inspector Columbo might ask?

Clues & detection

In some ways, detectives are like humanities scholars. Both try to make sense of what has happened in the world. A central feature of crime stories are clues – those traces left by the criminal that help the detective make sense of, and resolve, the mystery. While clues serve in the first instance to make sense of the crime scene, they also speak to a belief in a world that can be detected – from the Latin detegere, meaning to expose, uncover, reveal something that had been previously hidden – through interpretation. It is this latter understanding of clues that is of great interest to writers, readers and scholars alike.

The case of the missing last chapter

More than anyone else, the great American crime writer Raymond Chandler promoted the idea that crime fiction offers more than the resolution to a crime.

He argued that the “ideal mystery was one you would read even if the end was missing”.[2]

Riffing off Chandler, literary scholar Scott McCracken maintains that in crime stories “more questions are raised in the narrative than are answered by formal closure” and he argues that readers are more interested in exploring these unresolved questions than they are in knowing whodunit.[3]

Crime & policing, justice & injustice

So, what are these questions? In The Cambridge Companion to World Crime Fiction, Jesper Gulddal and I argue that what crime fiction around the world has in common is “its shared imaginings of society from the point of view of crime and policing, justice and injustice”.[4] Crime stories everywhere – from tenth century Chinese court-case stories to contemporary eco-noir – engage with these issues and, in doing so, sometimes expand our understanding of what constitutes a crime.

As Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s Barcelona-based protagonist Pepe Carvalho states, detectives act as barometers of what is acceptable or unacceptable in a particular society at any given time. Rather than just reinforcing the law, many crime novels question the imperfect application of the law or seek to expand our understanding of what constitutes a crime and justice in an attempt to shift attitudes. A case in point is feminist crime fiction, from Sara Paretsky’s Tunnel Vision (1994) to Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train (2015), which drew readers’ attention to behaviours like coercive control and financial abuse long before they were legislated as criminal acts.

World crime fiction

A new research project, led by researchers at Monash and Newcastle universities and funded by the Australian Research Council, seeks to understand the capacity of crime fiction from around the world to explore the complex relationship between crime, law and justice in various settings.

To do so, we have begun a major international survey of experts and fans alike to create an interactive, publicly available map on the genre’s global development and the specific criminal and social challenges that writers explore in their local settings. The project also aims to show how crime fiction from around the world addresses and is shaped by five global challenges: the crisis of democracy, the climate emergency, the struggle for gender and sexual rights, the problem of rising social and economic inequality, and the global legacies of colonialism.

Crimate fiction

Yun Ko-eun’s The Disaster Tourist.

To take the example of the climate emergency, we can see how authors – Australian Julie Janson (Madukka the River Serpent), Catalan Jordi de Manuel (L’olor de la pluja – The Smell of Rain), Finn Antti Tuomainen (The Healer), Korean Yun Ko-eun (The Disaster Tourist) and American Jon Raymond (Denial) produce what I call crimate fictions.[5]

These fictions make visible the violence that accompanies climate change, a violence that Rob Nixon argues “occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all”.[6]

They also raise difficult questions for readers about the potential criminality of not just climate change deniers, but also the everyday practices of those who prioritise their immediate economic and social concerns over measures that minimise the impact of global warming. Who’s the criminal in crimate fiction? Pretty much everyone!

The dead hands of academicians

Raymond Chandler once celebrated that “academicians have never got their dead hands” on the crime genre.[7] However, there are lots of reasons why humanities scholars should get their hands on it.

Stories of crime and detection are some of the most popular and powerful forms of storytelling on the planet. They speak to a desire not just to know whodunit, but also to explore and make sense of the world in which we live.

Further reading

• Gulddal, Jesper, Stewart King and Alistair Rolls. The Cambridge Companion to World Crime Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
• King, Stewart. “Crimate Fiction and the Environmental Imagination of Place.” Journal of Popular Culture 53.6 (2021): 1235-1253.

Footnotes [1] Wilson, Edmund. “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” The New Yorker, 20 January 1945: 59-66. [2] Chandler, Raymond. “Introduction to the Simple Art of Murder.” Later Novels and Other Writings (Library of America, 1995), 1016-1019. [3] Scott McCracken. Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction (Manchester University Press, 1998), 50. [4] Gulddal, Jesper and Stewart King. “What is World Crime Fiction?” The Cambridge Companion to World Crime Fiction, edited by Jesper Gulddal, Stewart King and Alistair Rolls (Cambridge University Press, 2022), 20. [5] King, Stewart. “Crimate Fiction and the Environmental Imagination of Place.” Journal of Popular Culture 53.6 (2021): 1235-1253. [6] Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard University Press, 2011), 2, 3. [7] Chandler, Raymond. Raymond Chandler Speaking, edited by Dorothy Gardiner and Katherine Sorley Walker (Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 70.

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