The Crime Genre

At the centre of modern crime fiction stands an investigating agent – an amateur detective, a professional but private investigator, a single lone policeman, a police force acting together.

(Knight 1980: 8)

Stephen Knight's definition is certainly correct about the main characters, but in the genesis of the crime genre, crime itself was not a given. Many of the Sherlock Holmes The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), were about mysteries rather than crimes per se. 'Mystery story' was the preferred genre label in Arthur Conan Doyle's time, defined in Encyclopaedia Britannica as 'an ages-old popular genre of tales dealing with the unknown', and with roots back to the Gothic novel and divided into 'tales of the supernatural and riddle stories'. Mary Beth Haralovich (1979: 53) suggests that mystery was synonymous with the crime genre in general, but Mark Jancovich (2005: 35) claims that mystery and other genre labels are not solidified conventions, but constantly changing.

In his classic study Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, John G. Cawelti uses 'mystery' for narratives about 'the investigation of hidden secrets' ending in 'a desirable and rational solution', thus becoming a 'moral fantasy' (Cawelti 1977: 42–44) He also includes supernatural stories without a rational solution: i.e., the Gothic novel. Viktor Shklovsky ([1925] 1995: 193) wrote that the crime riddle that the detective solved explained the supernatural; however, there is no problem of taxonomy until the twentieth century. Many Gothic and mystery stories actually have a kind of detective, such as Abraham Van Helsing in the novel Dracula (Stoker 1897).

The crime genre was born in the inter-war years when mystery sprouted new genres: the film company Universal established the genre concept of horror with Frankenstein (Whale 1931) and Dracula (Browning 1931), pulp magazines such as Amazing Stories introduced the concept of science fiction, and realism became a prominent feature in hard-boiled crime stories (Kinnard 1995: 1; Newman 1996: 12–13; Skal 1990: 110–51; 1993: 144). During the Cold War years, spy narratives with professional intelligence agents separated and became a genre of its own; and then there were the metagenres and subgenres.

With Alfred Hitchcock's films as his prime example, Martin Rubin (1999: 6) defines the thriller as a metagenre of suspense not unlike Tom Gunning's concept of the silent film era's 'cinema of attractions' (Gunning, 1986: 63–70). However, in Crime Movies, Carlos Clarens ([1980] 1997: 12–13) wants a clear delineation between the thriller and crime films. He regards the thriller as a genre taking place in a closed, private world of esoteric crimes, revenge and vigilante justice, with characters (the killers and their victims) that only represent themselves and their own interests. In crime films proper about detectives and police officers, the main characters are professionals that symbolically come to represent the philosophical clash of crime and the law. Making a claim for the police procedural as a separate genre, George N. Dove (1982: 51) elaborates on Clarens' definition when arguing that the police have a privileged authority to enter people's homes, make arrests, interrogate suspects and access confidential documents: that makes them even better suited to represent society and the law.

Then again, Thomas Leitch (2002: 1–17) asks in his introductory chapter to Crime Films, is it meaningful to discuss whether the crime genre is unified or divided into many subgenres? Considering that Julian Symons ([1974] 1975), Stephen Knight (2004) and John Scaggs (2005) equate the crime genre with stories about detectives and police officers, leaving out significant crime narratives involving gangsters or courtroom dramas, we need to know what we are talking about. On the one hand, looking at the gangster narrative for example, it marginalizes the force of the law to the gangster's physical battles against rivals, and moral battles against conscientious relatives, priests and childhood friends. On the other hand, the courtroom drama is all about a moral and ideological conflict between the crime and the law, but the dramaturgy and iconography clearly distinguish it as a genre in its own right.

Leitch wants the crime genres to be one, but his taxonomy does not make a good case for 'a coherent larger project' (2002: 11). Rather, a flourishing diversity with some interconnections comes to mind. It would be more rewarding, then, to map the genre historically, and see how the various branches become separate. In that respect, there is a clear continuity between the detective and police narratives in their dramaturgy about crime, investigation and solution, and their literal and symbolic confrontation between crime and the law. As the guardians of civilization, they originate at the same time as the Western genre and action adventures with colonial heroes. While the heroes of the Western and colonial adventures fight barbarism at the outer frontiers, the detective and the police fights it from within.

Origins

Like John Scaggs (2005: 7–13), you could trace the roots of the crime genre back to Sophocles and Oedipus Rex, or to texts in the Bible or Shakespeare's Hamlet, but none of them originated a narrative tradition that make up a genre. A better case could be made for the popular true crime stories of The Newgate Calendar (Anon 1750–1850), and, as an influence on Edgar Allan Poe, William Goodwin's novel Caleb Williams (1794 [1998]) is mentioned often as an early example of the genre. The latter even has an amateur detective working for justice against all odds, but yet again, they did not inspire any followers.

The best candidate for the trendsetter that launched the crime genre seems to be the first chief of the French secret police, La Sûreté Nationale, Eugène François Vidocq and his Les Vrai Mémoirs de Vidocq/The True Memoirs of Vidocq (1828–29) (Knight 2004: 23–24; Morton 2005; Scaggs 2005: 17). In 1812 Vidocq developed the investigation techniques of Napoleon Bonaparte's groundbreaking police organization, and in 1833 he founded an equally innovative private detective bureau. Not only did Vidocq's partly true and partly tall tales influence Poe's short stories written in 1841–45 about Paris detective C. Auguste Dupin, but his detective bureau sparked the imagination of an even more famous detective: Allen Pinkerton. When this Scottish immigrant to the United States opened his Pinkerton National Detective Agency in 1850, the organization, surveillance and investigation techniques, and even the aggressive spinning of Pinkerton's legend, owed...