Several weeks ago, a question popped up in my mind following my renewed interest in British crime series on TV (eg, Father Brown, Midsomer Murders, Shakespeare & Hathaway): is there a relationship between countries and crime novels?
I wondered about this relationship because British, Dutch, German, Scandinavian and U.S. crime stories differ a lot. My mother and son wondered whether any such link even existed, but the question kept lingering in my mind.
An article by Greek crime novelist Petros Markaris (b. 1937) was very helpful in understanding its connection (see article below).
My diagram reveals an unexpected connection with my concept of the 7 Belief systems and the triangle of Love, Knowledge & Power (my blogs):
I thoroughly recommend reading the article below.
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The Crime Novel: between Society and Deduction
Written by: Petros Markaris
Published: 2014
“It is common knowledge that the modern crime novel starts with Arthur Conan Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes. This may be true for the crime novel as a literary genre but the initial crime story goes back to the ancient Greek tragedy. It is Sophocles’ King Oedipus. In the play King Oedipus is investigating the murder of Laios, his father. At the end he finds out that he is the murderer.
This is the perfect crime plot. As far as I know, there is no modern crime novel, in which the detective finds out at the end of his investigation, that he is the culprit.
The 19th century novel is also related closely to the modern crime novel. Charles Dickens shows an interest in the crime story as early as in the fifties of the 19th century. His novels Bleak House, Hunted Down and The Mystery of Edwin Drood are very close to crime novels in the modern sense. The same goes for Dostojewskij’s Crime and Punishment and Brothers Karamazov. Germinal and Therese Raquin by Emile Zola are based on crime stories too. In Victor Hugo’s The Miserables a policeman is chasing a fugitive throughout the 2’500 pages of the novel.
What is the difference between the 19th century novel and the modern crime novel ?
For one, it is the permanent detective hero of the crime novel, who is moving from one novel into the other. This transition establishes the main character of the crime novel as a lonely knight, closer to Robin Hood, or to Walter Scot’s Ivanhoe or to Cervantes’ Don Quixote than to the protagonists of the 19thy century novel.
However, the big difference between the 19th century novel and the crime or detective novel is in the reading habits. The crime novel has been considered for decades some sort of « digestive or, to put it more politely, as bedtime reading.
This is a misunderstanding. The 19th century novel had a high entertainment potential. The success of the novels depended on the interest and the suspense they created for the reader. This applies not only to the novels of Alexandre Dumas but also to those of Charles Dickens, Balzac and Emile Zola. Many of these novels were published initially in weekly issues and people cued up to buy each issue. In my library I still have Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers and Germinal by Zola, bound into a book from the weekly issues. I bought them in the eighties of the last century in the Marché aux Puces, in Paris.
Black Mask followed the same pattern when it was published in 1920 by H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. All great American detective novelists, from Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler to Georgette Heyer and Erle Stanley Gardner were regular contributors to Black Mask.
Historically, two types of crime novel put their mark on the genre: the English and the American crime novel.
The English crime novel is the typical whodunit as it is based on deduction. It is constructed on successive traps set by the author for the reader. The traps are the main source of suspense. These traps are neutralized at the end of the novel with a series of deductions made by a brilliant detective. The most famous of these detectives are undoubtedly Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot.
I have to admit that I am not a big fan of the English crime novel. Perhaps because I have read too many of these novels and I am done with them. What I dislike most is the brilliant protagonist of the crime story. I keep asking myself why if he is so clever he did not find a job more suited to his genius. Policemen and private detectives are no geniuses. They are mostly very ordinary people.
What makes it worse is that some of those brilliant private detectives need a naive sidekick in order to prove their intelligence. Every time I read the famous exclamation of Sherlock Holmes: « Elementary, my dear Watson! » I keep asking myself if what Holmes means implicitly is: « You are so stupid that you cannot even grasp the elementary. »
The same applies to the relationship between Hercule Poirot and Colonel Hastings. I prefer Miss Marple to Hercule Poirot. The explanation is very simple in the case of Hercule Poirot. He is an eccentric (with his long moustache and his patent leather shoes), so he solves mysteries. With Miss Marple you keep asking yourself how such an old spinster is capable of solving mysteries. That is the reason why I find Miss Marple a more real and fascinating character.
The American detective novel follows a completely different path. Its stories are mostly based on money and corruption, combined with a complete social background. This social background makes the descriptions of New York by Dashiell Hammet and of the Californian Bay area in the novels of Raymond Chandler two of the best examples in American Literature.
The detectives of the American crime novel are quite different too. They are all ordinary people with an average intelligence running through the city, asking questions and trying to find out what happened. Most of them are loners. They have neither friends nor family. Dahsiell Hammetts’s Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe belong to this category but also detectives of younger crime novelists, such as Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer or Vic Warshawski, the female detective of Sara Paretsky.
Bertolt Brecht, the German playwright and poet, was a great admirer of the English crime novel. What he found fascinating was the plot, which he used to call a « mathematical construction ». He had no sympathy for the American crime novel, which to him was just a thriller. He was totally convinced that the crime novel would follow the course of the English crime novel.
Well he was wrong. The crime novel followed the American path and moved gradually from a crime novel with a social background to a social novel with a crime plot. In this respect it moved backwards and came closer to the novel of the 19th century, which was in part also a social novel with a crime plot.
There are two historical events, which eventually initiated this backward movement in the crime novel in Europe.
The first was the assassination of the Swedish Prime Minister, Olof Palme in 1986, which gave birth to the contemporary Swedish crime novel. Some novelists realized that the ideal Swedish society, in which they believed to live, was an illusion and that murder and violence were part of their society too.
The Swedish crime novelist Hakan Nesser published his first novel two years after the assassination of Olof Palme, in 1988. The first novel of Henning Mankell appeared in 1990.
The turning point in the Central European crime novel was the year 1989, i.e. the year of the fall of the socialist regimes in the Soviet Union, the Balkans and in Central Europe. Two hundred years after the French Revolution, Europe was witnessing another revolution, which shook its postwar foundations.
However, the fall of the socialist regimes was not only a revolution. The fall of the Berlin Wall gave birth to mafia structures and to organized crime, which spread out in Europe. These became even worse with the civil war in ex Yugoslavia and the war in Kosovo.
The British journalist Misha Glenny, who was a BBC correspondent in Belgrade during the war in ex Yugoslavia, puts forward in his book Mc Mafia : Crime without Frontiers the theory that the civil war and the Kosovo war in ex Yugoslavia created a silk road of the globalized crime, which starts in the Balkans, crosses the Caucasus, and former Asian socialist republics of the ex Soviet Union and ends in the Far East.
The second consequence was that the globalization of economy went along with the globalization of crime. As the economy became global, crime became global too.
Some figures may help to understand the impact of this new reality. The annual turnover of the organized crime is approximately 2 trillion dollars. According to the figures of Europol some four thousand gangs of organized crime are operating in the European Union. As a result the border between legally invested money and laundered money is very obscure. The majority of the money earned through organized crime is legally invested.
This new reality had a great impact not only on society but also created a new implication between money and banks and money and politics. In this context the new crime novel went a step further and became for many crime writers, especially for those with a leftist political background, a political novel.
This trend appeared earlier and is more established in Southern Europe. It is known today as the Mediterranean Crime Novel. The first author who started to investigate the implications between mafia, society and politics in Sicily was the Italian Leonardo Sciascia. Sciascia recognized as early as in 1961, in his first novel Il Giorno della civetta the disastrous effects that the connection of mafia to local politics had on the Sicilian society. He exercised a great influence on other authors like Andrea Camilleri and the younger Massimo Carlotto.
Another aspect of the Mediterranean Crime Novel is the effect that dictatorships had on the evolution of societies. The Spanish writer Manuel Vasquez Montalban is the most outstanding example of this type of a crime novel directly involved with politics.
There are two other characteristics of the Mediterranean Crime Novel, which are unique in a sense. The first of them is the city where the novel is located. The city in the Mediterranean Crime Novel is not just a background as in the American crime novel. It is one of its protagonists. The city is part of the story. It is impossible to separate the novels of Montalban from Barcelona. The same applies to a French noir novelist, Jean Claude Izzo and Marseillle. The only other crime novelist, who is not Mediterranean whose city is part of the story is Ian Rankin and his use of Edinburgh.
The other characteristic of the Mediterranean Crime Novel is the food. Food and eating are very special to the novels of Montalban. His detective Pepe Carvalho is a great cook. But also in the novels of Andrea Camilleri and Jean-Claude Izzo food plays a very important part.
This characteristic has a social explanation. The generation of these writers grew up in homes where the mother was still a housewife, so good and tasteful food was part of their everyday life. In Central and Northern Europe the emancipation of women came much earlier so the women left home and went to work. This was good for the women but bad for good cooking. In Southern Europe the emancipation of women came much later. This was bad for the women but a blessing for good cooking. That is the reason why in the novels of Central and Northern European writers the only food you get is sandwiches, pizzas and beer.
There is an author though who dealt with both characteristics much earlier. This is Georges Simenon. In Simenon’s novels Paris is a protagonist. You can discover Paris by following his main character, commissaire Maigret, from the centre of Paris to its suburbs. The wife of commissaire Maigret is an excellent cook too.
The success of the crime novel in Europe, during the last twenty years has to do with the fact that the crime novelists were the first to understand and to follow the changes in the societies and in the politics of their countries. The contemporary crime novel is perhaps not the only social and political novel but it is, beyond doubt, the most consequent one.”
Source: https://www.cairn.info/revue-a-contrario-2014-1-page-161.htm
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