Crime Fiction: Archetypes and Iterations

crime fiction, full of genre conventions, well-worked formulas, and clichéd characters, rarely takes itself seriously. Why, then, should we as literature scholars take it seriously? Robert A. Rushing provides one answer in his 2007 study Resisting Arrest: Detective Fiction and Popular Culture when he enters into a scholarly dialogue with critic John Irwin, who had considered the possible incompatibility of crime fiction and high art; and had called into question the simple structure of the crime novel and the formulas it repeatedly employs. He suggests that readers’ expectations of the genre could discourage the rereading that he deems an essential part of serious literary criticism. Rushing argues, however, that the genre’s basic structures, or what he calls the “central mechanism of detective fiction,” are precisely those characteristics that encourage the reader, and we would argue the literary critic, to return to crime texts again and again in search of satisfying solutions. Given the once persistent, even now seemingly unyielding differentiation in Germany between high and low art—or in this case, Literatur and Schundliteratur—the interrogation that Rushing offers of Irwin’s critique holds particular relevance for a volume on German-language crime fiction. Recent trends in scholarship confirm that academics have increasingly joined this search for solutions, which refers less to the one-time discovery of whodunnit and more to the careful rereading and analysis of how and why the author has led the reader to that point. Attending just one panel on crime fiction at an academic conference quickly leads to the discovery that crime fiction is a “guilty pleasure” for many scholars who otherwise spend their time with ostensibly higher-minded literature. And we as scholars of the genre are in good company: Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Bloch, and many other towering intellectual figures of the past century have been avid readers of crime fiction.

As the prominent German literary scholar Jochen Vogt has pointed out, the traditional philosophical split between high literature and crime fiction, the latter labeled as “primitives Lesefutter” and “Verbrauchsliteratur” (2; primitive reading material and literature for the average consumer) has also traditionally extended into the scholarship of German crime fiction.