A companion to crime fiction
Lee Horsley lancaster.academia.edu
A companion to crime fiction
Following Jennifer Hayward’s idea that “serialized novels, comic strips, and soap operas all appeared at or near the inception of their respective medium, and all were used explicitly to increase its consumption” (2), this thesis aims to demonstrate how detective fiction’s entanglement with serialization has historically served this same purpose and continues to do so even in the most recent television portals landscape. By developing a genealogy since the first print instalments of the Victorian period in the Nineteenth century, to the post-network era of television, this research looks towards three main objectives: firstly, to study the origins of modern serialization practices from an historical perspective that takes into account the technological, industrial and social causes that led to its birth. Secondly, to trace how detective fiction has been related to serialization from its early days up to recently released television detective series. Thirdly and finally, to relate serialization practices from the past with current trends as a way to understand the current industrial, economic and aesthetic practices that surround television serialization through a historical lens.

The present project explores the large and heterogeneous literary genre of the American crime fiction and its status of ‘undefined genre’. Thereby, the main goal to be achieved in this project is the incapability of establishing common patterns in the creation of such literary text. Thus, this project starts with the birth of crime fiction, based on Poe’s first criminal text, going on with the great change in its structure, on the part of Hemingway, Chandler and Hammett, and ending up with the uncommon and innovative crime fiction of Thomas Harris’s. This thesis traces a line of different patterns to create crime fiction and how this wide genre cannot be categorized by means of fixed patterns since each crime fiction subtype possesses its own features and style of narration. To conclude, this final degree thesis displays a literary fiction that is usually considered as a minor genre but, indeed, should be considered as one of the most attractive and fruitful genres on account of its magnificent and valuable literary structure.

The following essay considers some of the consequences of Sebeok and Eco’s The Sign of Three (1983) for the broad history of the thriller, for the theory of genre, and in terms of an investigation of the relations between genre and subjectivity. It is not a fully worked-out history of the thriller and fictional detection in light of the scholarship concerned with abduction. Rather, it is a mere sketch of how such a history might look. It attempts to cast some light on the process of generic canon-building. It also poses a relation between the growth of ‘social paranoia’ in the history and cultural growth of the thriller and the general phenomenon of ‘anxiety’ which is pivotal to the biosemiotic foundations of what has been called by Sebeok (1979) and others (e.g. Wiley 1994) the ‘semiotic self’.

In an attempt to develop new constellations of world literature, this article places the writers of South Africa’s Drum generation within the orbit of the American hardboiled genre. For a brief period in the 1950 s, Drum was home to a team of gifted writers who cut their literary teeth in the fast-paced, hard-drinking, crime-riddled streets of Sophiatown, Johannesburg’s last remaining black township. Their unique style was a blend of quick-witted Hollywood dialogue, a private detective’s street sense, and the hard-boiled aesthetic of writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Writing in English in the era of the Bantu Education Act (1953), Drum writers challenged attempts to retribalize the African natives with the counter discourse of an educated, urbanized, modern African. This article (dis)orients conventional treatments of both Drum writers and the hard-boiled tradition by tracing alternative lines of flight between seemingly disparate fields of study.