Watching the Detectives: Crime on the Page and Screen

Module code: HA3489

It is not only through the formal channels of legislation and jurisprudence that crime is processed. Stories also play an important if unofficial role in interpreting offences and those that commit them: crime narratives provide a vital means of making sense of these disruptive and violently traumatic events. This is especially true in late-capitalist societies which, as Marx noted in his Theories of Surplus Value (1863), often show a queasy fascination with crime, treating it as an economic and imaginative stimulus even as its actors are ruthlessly prosecuted and demonised. Indeed, the growth of mass entertainment has allowed crime narrative to grow into a large-scale industry in its own right, one which has proven capable of serving several publics and stretching across multiple media. By the 1940s, Orwell could write satirically about ‘the murders which have given the greatest amount of pleasure to the British public’ in both novels and the popular press; even in the silent era cinema saw the commercial potential in crimes both fantastic and factual, from the real-life death of Maria Marten in Dick Winslow’s Murder in the Red Barn (1902), to the career of the master-criminal Fantomas in Louis Feuillade’s 1913-14 film-cycle.

This interdisciplinary module will examine this curious appetite for crime-stories. It will consider some of the major literary and cinematic genres that have developed around crime across the twentieth century, and the complex ways in which they relate to one another and to their subject-matter. It will lead students through some of the most important frameworks for representing crime in both literature and film, from the detective novel to the police procedural, from the whodunnit to the giallo, and from hardboiled fiction to film noir. Throughout it will ask students to think about the sociological and ethical dimensions of crime in these works, and their strange vacillation between conservativism and subversion. After all, for every narrative that depicts the triumphant defeat of a threat to the social order there is another that confronts the reader or viewer with disturbing questions about their own complicity or prurient interest in violence and illicit activity.