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2021 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel

2. Closed Worlds and Cold Detectives

verfasst von : David Riddle Watson

Erschienen in: Truth to Post-Truth in American Detective Fiction

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

Beginning with Edgar Allan Poe’s invention of the detective story and moving through the hard-boiled works of Hammett and Chandler, we see the beginning of a trajectory, moving from Poe’s rationalism, through Sherlock Holmes’s empiricism, and into the existential world of Spade and Marlowe. In this chapter, we begin with a world where certainty and closure are achievable. At the end of both Poe’s and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s works, there is no more mystery. The reader’s doubt has left; the moral order restored. Detectives Phillip Marlowe and Sam Spade move out among the criminal class, introducing the reader to a darker world, a morally ambiguous world. While we do get consensus at the end of the works, closure seems harder to obtain in a world that has lived through World War I and World War II, casting doubt on transcendental sources of certainty.

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Vorheriges Kapitel Introduction: From Clear Speaking to Misunderstanding

Nächstes Kapitel Cold Wars and Porous Borders

Critic John Irwin names the genre Poe invented “Analytic detective fiction” (27). Martin Priestman similarly claims, “The detective story was invented in 1841 by Edgar Allen Poe” (2). In the essay, “The Games Afoot,” critics Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney point out, “Indeed, Poe may well have invented not only classical detective fiction and its offshoot, the metaphysical detective story but also the kind of playfully self-reflexive storytelling that we now call ‘postmodernist’” (6).

It should be noted that Poe’s principle of identification is a variation of Adam Smith’s concept of sympathy as developed in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Smith defines sympathy as the effect that is produced when we imagine that another person’s circumstances are our own circumstances.

In later chapters, I will discuss the ways a functioning “public,” in the sense of both Kierkegaard and Habermas, which was sustained with the press is complicated by the rise of television and later the Internet. For this chapter, what is important is that the newspaper is useful in Poe and Doyle because there is the assumption of one coherent world, where everyone reads a newspaper, there are only a handful, and thus a worldview is sustained.

Even in the modernist fictions covered in this chapter, the world may be absurd, but there must be a rational explanation for murder. In The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep plans can go wrong, but there is an idea that all action is planned. Murders are for reasons; murders cannot in and of themselves be absurd in the sense of being completely random and having no meaning.

Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. Vintage, 2018.

Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep. Knopf, 1966.

———. The Simple Art of Murder. Vintage Crime, 1988.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. A Study in Scarlet. Penguin Classics, 2001.

Hammett, Dashiell. The Maltese Falcon. Knopf, 1957.

Irwin, John T. “Mysteries We Reread, Mysteries of Rereading: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story” Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story From Poe to Postmodernism. Ed. Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney University Press, 1999, pp. 27–54.

Kayman, Martin A. “The Short Story from Poe to Chesterton.” The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. Ed. Martin Priestman. Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 41–58.

McCann, Sean. “The Hard-Boiled Novel.” The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction. Ed. Catherine Ross Nickerson. Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 42–48.

Merivale, Patricia and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney. “The Game’s Afoot: On the Trail of the Metaphysical Detective Story.” Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story From Poe to Postmodernism. Ed. Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999, pp. 1–24.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Portable Nietzsche. Trans. Kaufmann. New York: Penguin, 1977.

Pierce, Charles. “The Fixation of Belief.” Pragmatism: A Reader. Ed. Menand. Vintage, 1997, pp. 7–25.

Poe, Edgar Allen. Complete Tales and Poems. Castle Books, 2003.

Porter, Dennis. “The Private Eye.” The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. Ed. Martin Priestman. Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 95–113.

Rachman, Stephen. “Poe and the Origins of Detective Fiction” The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction. Ed. Martin Priestman. Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 17–28.

Titel: Closed Worlds and Cold Detectives
verfasst von: David Riddle Watson
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Buch: Truth to Post-Truth in American Detective Fiction
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-87073-7

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-87074-4

Copyright-Jahr: 2021
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87074-4_2