Aims
This course aims to:
• consider crime writing seriously, not as mere entertainment
• explore crime writing as social and other history
• situate British crime writing of the last century within its historical contexts
Content
Crime writing has evolved at tremendous speed over the last century-plus. The Holmes stories (1886–1927) epitomise a ‘Golden Age’, centred on the short story and more interested in the supersleuth hero than in policing or sociology. That bias extended into a ‘second Golden Age’, centred on the novel and the ‘Queens of Crime’, Christie, Sayers, Marsh, and Allingham, but while Christie largely stuck to formula, the others struck out in new directions.
Sayers shifted focus from episodic crime to the inner life of the investigator. Some find Wimsey annoying, but in the books featuring Harriet Vane, culminating in Gaudy Night (1935) and Busman’s Honeymoon (1937), Sayers developed the criminal novel of manners and laid the basis for most later series. We will look at Gaudy Night, as concerned with women’s education as with crime, and studded with Renaissance epigraphs signalling a new literary self-consciousness for the genre.
Allingham’s breakthrough came later. Her investigator, Campion, began as a parody of Wimsey, and in her earlier novels crimes and settings are Golden Age, but The Tiger in the Smoke (1952) is the first great British novel of urban crime and psychopathic violence. Allingham’s departure reflects hard-boiled, Chandleresque developments in the genre, and anticipated the current generic norm of overstretched policing in a grim cityscape.
Hill’s Dalziel and Pascoe books form the finest, funniest series of recent decades. The second novel, An Advancement of Learning (1971), revisioning Gaudy Night, reconsiders education in a new university rather than hallowed Oxford, with murder and a police investigation in foreground focus. But Sayers’s concern with inner life remains, and her habit of resonant allusions, underpinning exciting mystery with a concern strongly extending to society and culture.
Rankin is among the most popular living crime writers, primarily for his series featuring DI Rebus. His breakthrough came with Black and Blue (1997), combining current problems and an old, real case, the Bible John murders of 1968–9. The title, from the Rolling Stones, refers to colours of bruising, oil, and policing, and the novel is a Tartan noir state-of-the-nation assessment of Scotland on the verge of devolution.
Running through all are shifting attitudes to policing, women, sex, violence, and corpses that allow crime fiction to chart social history more closely than any other genre.
Presentation of the course
Each session will begin with a mini-lecture and PowerPoint presentation, lasting 45–60 mins, and will then be open to question and answer, and contributions by all.
Course sessions
1. Conan Doyle and the sage of Baker Street – Sherlock Holmes was perhaps the first fictional celebrity, but his exceptional powers of observation and deduction are framed against a caricature of policing.
2. Sayers and the detective novel of manners – In Gaudy Night there are two investigators, not one supersleuth, and their partnership and conversation are vital to one of the very few crime novels lacking a murder.
3. Allingham and urban grit – Set in a post-war London filled with ruins, haunted by the demobbed and traumatised, and choking on smog, The Tiger in the Smoke circles round one of the great portraits of psychopathy.
4. Hill and the police novel of manners – An Advancement of Learning bends the police procedural into the novel of manners, casting beady eyes on new education.
5. Rankin and the state-of-the-nation novel – Rankin started writing primarily of Edinburgh, but in Black and Blue extended to a much wider portrait of Scotland, from Glasgow to Aberdeen and Shetland.
Learning outcomes
You are expected to gain from this series of classroom sessions a greater understanding of the subject and of the core issues and arguments central to the course.
The learning outcomes for this course are:
• an understanding of the changing nature of crime fiction since 1890
• an appreciation of how such changes reflect wider social attitudes
• an understanding of the changing representation of police officers and their work
• an appreciation of the ambition’s crime writers have shown in the social dimensions of their art
Required reading
Allingham, Margery, The Tiger in the Smoke (London & New York: Vintage, 1952, 2005) available on Kindle, ISBN 0099477734
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, The Complete Sherlock Holmes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2009) available on Kindle, ISBN 0141040289
This edition is strongly recommended; scores of others, often cheaper editions are available, but many are either not complete – there should be 56 short stories, as well as the four novels – or contain unauthorised alterations to the texts.
Hill, Reginald, An Advancement of Learning (London & New York: HarperCollins 1971, 2009) ISBN 0007313039
Rankin, Ian, Black and Blue (London: Orion, 1997, 2008)
available on Kindle, ISBN 0752883607
Sayers, Dorothy L, Gaudy Night (London: Hodder, 1935, 1987)
available on Kindle, ISBN 0450021548
