Crime narrative topology

Opening words

13 or 14 years ago I started writing The Killers, a novel in which violent action prevailed. I wanted it to be a first-rate literary novel that reflected the nature of the Colombian criminal. At the end of 2021, after many versions, the novel was published by a prestigious publisher. As happens during the elaboration of creative works, during those almost 14 years of work I was not fully aware of what I had written. After I had finished the text, my editor asked what genre it fit into. I questioned several people knowledgeable about literary things who had read my manuscript – my writing does not seek to be inscribed in some thematic genre – and no one knew with certainty what to answer. The only certainty is that it was not a detective novel. I told my editor that, by commercial offer, I would list it in the black genre template. But I was clear that The Killers was not twinned with the classic works of American or European hardboiled or in any of the subgenres, which abound. I couldn’t locate it anywhere.

Investigating what has been produced in my country about the black and police genre, I found that there was very little information, yes many studies on foreign authors, and only one book on the black genre in Colombia. This is La novela policiaca en Colombia, by the well-known German critic Hubert Pöppel, published in 2001 by the University of Antioquia, when he taught there. Getting the complete book was quite difficult (on the Web there are only a few chapters) since the University of Antioquia did not publish it again and the author left the country. I finally made contact with Dr Pöppel at the Universität Regensburg in Bavaria, at the end of 2021. After my assurances that the use of his book would be for essay purposes, he very kindly sent me the rough draft of his book, chapter by chapter.

So I have it in full pdf. Pöppel’s work tracking the origin, reception and development of this genre in Colombia is of enormous value, and is virtually unknown. It is an essential guide for those who wish to expand their field of study of the noir and detective genre, so precarious and fragmentarily studied in our country.

On the other hand, after listening to some interviews with well-known Colombian authors in Spain in 2019, who were questioned in some of those conversations about the state of the crime novel in our country, I realised that they were not clear about what the thing was about, or who had written significant books. They were more lost than I was, to the point of giving the idea that the police-detective genre and the hardboiled are one and the same. Does the crime novel exist in Colombia? At the time I write these words, April 2023, no satisfactory answer has been given to this question, nor is it clear whether there is a ‘development and consolidation of the novel genre’ in our country, which henceforth I shall call “novelistic”. Or if rather, as I propose in this work, what there has been is a certain specific and general continuity in the elaboration of a criminal story, which goes beyond the detective and the noir, which have had, since the second half of the nineteenth century, small developments. However, as A. Carpentier pointed out in 1964, “A great novel can be produced in an epoch, in a country. This does not mean that at that time, in that country, the novel really exists. To talk about the novel it is necessary that there be a novelistic”¹ (italics of the author).

Before continuing, I must make it clear that this is not a work that pretends to do some archaeology, development or state of the detective – police – noir genres in Colombia; far from it. It is focused on giving some historiographical response to a creative act that, over time, extended to one of my concerns when writing any of my books: what is the origin of violence in Colombia, and by and why are we so violent? As these are excessively broad questions, the answers to which are multifactorial, in the long run they became tutelary guides that were connected, in a very strange way, with the literary/narrative creative act. Not in poetic art, which is governed by a different statute even though the narrative comes from the universe of poetry.

In this literary exploration of narrative creativity, I have tried to understand, from classical and contemporary thought, what is the act of writing; what is literature; what is language; what is the story; what the detective – police – noir genres, and what is criminal, not only from my experience (confronting the other, otherness) and my experience as a narrator (entering the other, to be part of that other)², but by turning to philosophy as an autonomous act of knowledge, to its history and its context in the Western world. Trying to understand some complexities such as those mentioned above, in my case, in this book, moves definitively away from maieutics and peripatētikós and the dialectic of Aristotelian lineage that ponders on a par with the master. Very little of what is elaborated in this work has been discussed with the experts in these topics orally. My writing is my way of organising and shaping the shapeless mass of the kháos and leaving the text as clean as possible.

Relevant authors related to this essay:

Germán Gaviria Álvarez

Juanita
Juanito

Index

Opening words

Part One. Genre, intention, fusion

1. Genre

2. Discussion: gender, form, creativity

3. Intention of realistic criminal, police, hardboiled, etc. story: merged

4. Intentions

4.1 Zero intent

4.2 First intention

4.3 Second intention

4.4 Third intention

4.5 Fourth Intention

5. Fusion

Part Two. Origins

1. Almost a starting point

2. From Dime novels to Pulp

3. From Pulp to Noir (Criminal)

Part Third. Understanding the Criminal

1. Thinking the act of writing

2. From Dime Novels to Pulp

3. From Pulp to the noir (criminal) genre

4. Coda

References

Primary sources

Secondary sources

Part One

Genre, intention, fusion

4.2 First intention

Write a story whose backbone is evil expressed through crime using narrative material drawn from immediate reality; narrative material taken, in part or in its entirety, from daily life that the artist knows first-hand, either because he lived them, or because they were referred to him first hand. Also, because he investigated them thoroughly (microhistory) with the intention of writing a criminal story, the artist analyses, interprets and judges reality.¹⁰⁰ Generally, using a Manichean morality according to which, evil does not require to be destroyed, but relegated, confined to the kingdom of darkness, to the religious or theistic abyss (prison, social exclusion or banishment, death) to which it belongs.¹⁰¹ Given that evil can be sent back to its kingdom means that society doesn’t live with it, since it has been outlawed, and that it lives in a world without evil; that is to say, a world where the good prevails and cannot touch the good people, because the ho ánomos ‘man who acts in the absence of the law’ (Agamben, 2018, p. 36) has been thrown into the abyss; a world where man is not a beast to mankind; where man is flat, without nuances, devoid of animality.

Good, per se. No pettiness, no low passions that can be redeemed within the confessional religion. This world is not necessarily idealistic, since the idea of a good nature is based on a moral and intellectual principle, not an emotional one; not on the plane of ideas nor on the aesthetic in the Platonic sense. For emotions are controlled, subdued, according to social principles, according to Durkheimian anomie. This way of reasoning has imposed a model according to which doubt, anger, ‘irrational’, ‘predatory (animal)’ behaviour, coarseness, ignorance and poverty are bad manners, ‘as well as the absence of social law’. That is to say, the crime, the delinquent (from simple robbery to murder), is not part of human nature. It is an evil that is in the economic base, not in the apex, let’s say it with this word, of the social pyramid. Deviations must and can be corrected. Or better, relegated to the kingdom of darkness. Like in The Hound of the Baskervilles, in Moonstone, in the story cycle of Father Brown, or in the novels and short stories of Agatha Christie. It is the common key to the English detective story. De Quincey said in 1827, fifty years before the above authors:

If one begins by indulging in murder, soon one doesn’t give importance to stealing; one goes from stealing to drinking, non-observance of the Lord’s day, and ends up accepting bad behaviour and leaving things for the next day. Once you start sliding downhill you don’t know where you’ll stop (my italics). (Op. cit.,p. 44)

Let the story be realist ‒in ancient times this word was only used in philosophical terms, not mundane‒. It also means that it is opposed to all idealism, to romanticism; that is, to Sturm und drang, to the storm, to the momentum, to the pure emotion: feeling, emotion, which does not measure and is not interested in measuring any consequence of its actions. Unstoppable outburst. After the reading of Clarissa’s funeral, the protagonist of Clarissa, or the story of a young lady (1748), Diderot writes to Sophie Volland about his shock:

Again my eyes filled with tears; I can no longer read; I wake up and begin to lament, to apostrophise my brother, sister, father, mother, and uncles, and to shout, to the great surprise of Damilaville, who understood nothing of my outburst or my speeches, and who wondered what had happened to me […]¹⁰²

It was also the pure, irrepressible, impetuous emotion ‒perhaps snobbishness‒ the one that led Kleist to take the life of Adolphine Vogel, his lover, with a pistol, and to commit suicide himself; the one that pushed many, many young women to a wave of suicides after reading Werther. One of the principles of German Romanticism was to recover its oral and written culture, a culture that came from the legendary, mythical story, from popular culture, as well as finding the infinite, the transcendent, the exclusive and refined in ordinary forms. In his diary, C. D. Friedrich writes: “To want to be liked in general is to be liked by ordinary people; only the ordinary has a general character” (Wolf, N., p. 85). In romanticism, it is a fight to the death between the good: a social order based on vindictive, procedural justice; and the bad: understood as separated from the social norm, from education, from established morality, as well as from what is criminal. This arrangement identifies the evil in the detective story as a social anomaly, not as something that is part of the human and social fabric. This led to the affirmation, since the conquest of America, that evil came from savagery (those without souls; savages were considered and treated as animals). Then this concept, in the following centuries, spread, thanks to the rise of the middle class, poverty, ignorance, the lower class, lack of style, vices and bad manners. These conceptions, all of European origin, were transferred to literature, especially the English and French realist/detective novel. Hence, Chandler has said, regarding the English police officer, that “Hammett extracted the crime from the Venetian vase and deposited it in an alley” (p.7).

For its part, the Manichaeism of the American black-detective story searches to destroy evil, not relegate it, confronting him by any means, generally fighting evil with evil, as is the case with Red Harvest, The Maltese Falcon, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Blood Pact. It is one of many common keys (already very hackneyed) of the American black-detective story. Chandler says, not focusing on manners, as in the English system mentioned by De Quincey (the evil can be sent back to hell, or better, to the darkest part of society), but in the criminal act (evil can and should be destroyed by any means):

The boys with their feet up on their desks know that the easiest murder case to solve is one in which someone has tried to get smart. What really worries them is the murder that someone came up with two minutes before carrying it out. (Hammett, On. cit.,pp. 100-1 7 ‒ 8) (italics are mine)

If the idea of murdering occurs to someone two minutes before carrying it out, it means that the murderer does not necessarily have a criminal record. The murderer committed it, without further ado, letting himself be carried away by a ‘burning desire’, by an animal, predatory impulse; by the violent impulse to kill. There is no premeditation, there is no obvious reason. The murderer can be any person (rich, poor, educated or not, stylish or not stylish, male, female of indeterminate age) who walks down the street. It means that evil cannot be contained by traditional means (educational, social class): it is unpredictable. It can explode at any time. It is, neither more nor less, a new understanding of the murderer. Evil can nest inside, in the complex inner world (‘abnormal’, ‘animal’), of any person. The trigger can be anything; something that violently alters a person’s deep psyche. Here the mind, the interiority ‒ intimate, is a closed box, closed and dark. Whoever committed the crime is unable to be educated from the point of view of morality. It also means that evil cannot be thrown, returned, to the darkness of the slums. Here evil is part of the social fabric. It can be in any individual.

The word ‘realism’ in literature was first used in 1826, in the Mercury of France (Valles Calatrava, Alamo Felices, p.526). During the 19th century, realism developed various description techniques that sought to be pure, exact. It was just a perfected form of mimesis of the world that surrounded the artist of the time, and from worlds to which he transferred his models of reality.¹⁰³ The 19th century artists no longer had the princely, bookish education of the Age of Enlightenment. They were no longer aristocrats who wrote ‘serious books’ and treatises in learned Latin. Or like Voltaire, Goethe or H. Walpole, they saw the world through their aseptic carriage rides, their daily walks, or from a desk; with the exception of Ann Radcliffe, a merchant’s daughter; of Daniel Defoe, son of a butcher; of E. Brontë, the daughter of an Anglican parson, who worked as a governess and after her mother’s death managed the family household.

The realist writer of the 19th century acts, examines, dissects reality based on direct experience. He lives that experience, suffers it, seeks to turn that experience into a living experience. He breathes it day by day. He is part of it. By the 19th century, the writer has definitively abandoned empiricism. He enters fully (apart from Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, De Quincey, Schwob, E. Brontë), almost like a new religion (Zola), full of hope, trusting in positive scientism. There, the mimesis operates in accordance with the aesthetic and positivist conception of the artist, according to the mentality of the time. Zola took the descriptive technique of reality, with his cycle of 20 novels of Les Rougon ‒ Macquart until the last‒exasperating‒ consequences, without contributing much to the advancement of novels. Flaubert made an effort, in his novel Madame Bovary, to make the medical scenes accurate, well documented; strongly extracted from reality. The agricultural fair, as he describes it, is just as it was in Rouen in the mid-1850s. He did not intend to fictionalise anything ‘real’ or technical that could not be verified. The novel in Flaubert is rigorously subjected to the rules of observation. “He seems not to want to owe anything to his imagination” (Zola, p. 13). According to Flaubert, he did not use mimesis, ‘built’ (Calatrava Valleys, Happy Poplar, p. 529). But, as is well known, it is one thing for artists to try to theorise about a subject in Literature, and another is the result of a creative work in which the artist doesn’t apply (or does not believe in applying) such theories.¹⁰⁴ However, it is enough to read any of his works to see Flaubert’s great stature as a writer of fiction and as an artist.

Barthes says, speaking of French 19th century realism, in “The Effect of Reality”:¹⁰⁵ In Madame Bovary, the description of Rouen (a real point of reference like few others) is subject to the tyrannical demands of what we should call aesthetic credibility, as witnessed by the corrections made to this fragment in the course of six successive redactions (my italics).¹⁰⁶ The narrative technique of the crime novel ‒ after the First Great War, like all the arts, was also influenced by the increase in the efficiency of technological devices: the plane, the automobile, the ocean liners, the lethal gases, the new personal and industrial machines, factories, the increase in the size of cities, banks, offices. Literature has always been part of the world of the artist.¹⁰⁷ There was also a significant increase in the relative acceleration in writing texts (improvement of typewriters, which had been invented in the first half of the 19th century), while ways of thinking accelerated.¹⁰⁸ The Great War and its effects (hyperinflation, radicalisation of nationalist ideas) generated a change in mentality, in the ways of being, of living. Its influence on the development of literary techniques was evident, as a constitutive part of the logos. It is now thought of in terms of pure action, not contemplative.¹⁰⁹ The morose nineteenth-century depiction in the style of Zola, of the Goncourt brothers, of Proust, has been decapitated. As an example, see Hemingway’s 1927 short story, “The Assassins”, or “The Big Blow” by Hammett, from the same year. The places for the pictorial, photographic, aesthetic enjoyment of the reader are no longer described. If the notion of aesthetic enjoyment has been changing since the end of the 19th century, and during the post-World War I period, so have the creative principles, and, of course, the ways of understanding art.

As black ‒ detective literature is created from violent elements, from an aesthetic of brutality, the first impact upon the reader, is as if getting a slap; a slap that, generally, they are willing to bear. And they accept it defiantly, with curiosity. It is no longer the reading of a reality mediated by refined language, by a refined syntax as in the art of Poe, W. Collins, Chesterton, or Conan Doyle: writers who reached the highest ends of naturalism. Noir ‒ detective literature exposes the naked reality of crime. Crime is now thrown into a dirty and dangerous dark alley. It is the same principle of aesthetic creation of the Fauvists (wild animals) from the beginning of the 20th century with the treatment of pure colours; or the surrealists, who denied all rationalist creation to try to go beyond reality, and the rationalism of the time, from a creation born from positive science, from dreams, according to the famous book that became a best-seller from Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, and with the predominance of the image, in the imaginary, since beauty only exists in what is not real (Breton).

In detective crime novels, it is described in a functional, practical way, with the intention of placing the reader in front of a diegesis without mediations or intermediaries. An exception is Faulkner’s Sanctuary, which differentiates the meaning of events as if it were ‘the hidden fact’, a technique widely used by Hemingway,¹¹⁰ and because in his novel Faulkner uses similes, elaborate metaphors; complex narrative blocks. The writers of this genre copy from reality an aesthetic of dirt, of crime without many adjectives; of the rugged, of the abject. Their vision is also Manichean. They unceremoniously expose that reality from an aesthetic of ugliness. Crime is ugly, it’s shameful, it’s disgusting. We are facing an aesthetic extracted from daily life associated with evil based on prejudices, not on a rationalisation, whatever. It is narrated in active terms, not passive ones; not missional. Hence the vertical treatment of crime, sexuality, social and interpersonal relationships; the treatment between people is characterized by being harsh, distrustful.

While in the realism of the 19th century the description occupies a central place (mimesis), towards the end of the 1920s, this type of mimesis was decimated. It is as if Homer’s example had been taken up when describing Achilles’ shield: he narrates what he sees, the technical principle is the same. Now is the mimesis of the modern world of the time. Physical, character traits are described in a few words. The almost technical psychologicalism of the previous century is left aside. One hardly knows the detective’s past or exactly what kind of character he is. It is understood that this hard boiled genre comes from the underworld. It is the ánomos, ‘the lawless’, the one who imposes his own code, which is another form of situational morality. He’s the guy who’s come out of some slum. Hence, he speaks the same language as criminals. Hence, he moves freely, confidently through the suburbs, through the brothels, through the low-class bars. “I was raised in a water‒front saloon,” says the unnamed detective from Red Harvest. Everything is designed to generate verisimilitude. Realism. The scenarios are not precisely described. The design of the city is in accordance with the circumstances. It is generic, obscure, typical of the industrialized world, purposely designed for action, not for reflection to take place. Criminals do not reflect, they act. The scenes, sequences and narrated blocks, generally short, are made up of facts. There is no room for digressions; when there are digressions, they are as tedious as they are unnecessary. Detectives must be shrewd, they must know how to use not super intelligence, but common sense, as Hammett claimed. The architecture is functional. Simple. Dirt is the same in any archetypal city. The thugs, in addition to being bad people, seem to be intelligent. But they are stupid, idiots most of the time: abject, with little thought. Their intelligence is never above morality, except for the detective in Red Harvest. He is the first detective who doesn’t try to ‘think’ like a criminal, much less does he try to do desktop psychology trying to understand the mind of the offender, his mentality. No. This detective allows his own common sense to unfold; his figmentum malum; his criminal side. Why describe a brothel, a garbage dump, a gambling den if readers already know them? And they know them, because this literature is not aimed at the upper classes. Nor is it made to ‘sensitise’ the upper classes; it does so to denounce. It shows how evil comes from all strata of society, and occupies a place that is not only violent but vast in the fabric of the city.

The digressions in crime novel ‒ crime is a legitimisation, and a devaluation of the genre of Raymond Chandler (1939 ‒ 1959), who claimed to be indebted to Hammett. “He was the ace of the group”,¹¹¹ he stated, without having taken note of its diegetic economy, of its capacity for synthesis. Hammett is the true ‘ace’, the ace of short paragraphs, of dry sentences, like in Red Harvest, The Maltese Falcon, The Crystal Key, but not in The Slender Man, for example, one of his latest novels. In Hammett, there are complex situations in which the action is tensely psychological, without trying to do any psychology. This is the case with Sanctuary. Always stepping into the future, Faulkner uses narrative art like a ticking clock.¹¹² In this novel, the sexual tension is first psychological. Then, that tension is analeptic, retroactive. The sexual discharge is deferred, suggested, and which raises the sexual tension that has to become violent, perverse, harmful, offensive. Such is the power of storytelling, that we wish for this, and hope that the tension is relieved violently, as well as wanting to see the way in which evil will manifest itself; what mask will be snatched away; which life will end in disgrace. It is what, at every moment, we the readers want. The criminals, the evil ones, are the backbone, full of sensitive, nervous ramifications, present in every word of the narrative, in used techniques which, in their own right, are a development of Faulkner. An innovation, a novelty.

Footnotes

Opening words footnotes

Carpentier, Alejo. “Problemática actual de la novela latinoamericana”, en: Tientos y diferencias. Barcelona: Plaza y Janés, [1964] 1987, p. 7. ↑
Han, Byung ̶ Chul. Topología de la violencia. Barcelona: Herder, 2016, p. 49. ↑

Chapter 4 footnotes

That the writers of the 19th century judge the society that emerged from the Industrial Age that began to transform reality, is thanks to the new positive science, which began its rise at the end of the 18th century with the Enlightenment, German Romanticism, empiricism and English transformism. As we will see later, this new interpretation of the world (positive realism) not only took place with the literature that emerged from it, but also with the development of journalism and serials that circulated widely in and since that period. The invention around 1800 (by a French ex-soldier) of the continuous paper roll gave rise to the rotary press, cheaper and more widely circulated, which led to the publication of the first story leaflets, serials and novels, late 1820s. ↑
A characteristic of realism in ‘noir’ novels is moral Manichaeism and family, clan, group and social behaviour: the fight between good and evil. The social, the class struggle, is a leitmotif of the realist novel of the 19th century. During German Romanticism and French Social Romanticism, the battle between good and evil took place in the arenas of moral philosophy and religion. The destruction of this Manichean principle takes place in Faulkner’s novels and in the early ‘noir’ novels, such as Red Harvest, The Maltese Falcon, The Blood of the Dain, Red harvest and Sanctuary They are from the same period, which coincides with the Great Depression and Prohibition (from 1920 to 1933). Red Harvest was published by the magazine Black Mask in four installments between 1927 and 1928. It came out in book form on February 1, 1929. Sanctuary was written in 1929, but only edited, after many revisions and cuts due to the violence it narrated, in 1931. From the early 1900s, the problem of good and evil ceased to be a Manichaean issue to become (a fashionable theory at the time) relativistic. In Literature, it is a break with positive science. ↑
Quoted by R. Chartier. The book and its powers. Medellin: UDEA, 2009, p. 27. ↑
Examples are the work of M. Schwob, The Venus of Furs ,de Sacher ‒ Masoch, the work of the Marquis de Sade, The Garden of Torture, by Octave Mirbeau. Confessions of an English Opium Eater De Quincey, etc. ↑
For, having been a professor of literature at Harvard, Wellesley College, and Cornell Universities, Nabokov had a very poor, very confused, very naive idea of literary creativity. He didn’t understand anything about the creative process. He writes about it to his wife Véra: “A new theory of literary creation (my italics) I developed on the spot for him [referring to Lovat Dickinson, a very rich American known to Nabokov in 1939, whom he hopes to get money from] (by the way, he had already sort of thought about it: we don’t look at a picture from left to right, but we appreciate everything at once; on this principle the novel must be built, but due to the peculiarities of the book (pages, lines, etc.) it is necessary to read it twice, and the second time is the true reading). I had dinner with the…”Cf.: Letters to Vera,p. 460. ↑
Barthes, Op. cit.., p. 182. ↑
Albalat, A.Style work.Paris: Armand Colin, 1903, p. 72 et seq. The six successive versions that Barthes cites are clearly studied by Albalat in what has to do with the meticulous, mimetic, rather than ‘constructive’ realism that Flaubert speaks of. This work can be consulted at: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k255743n, Retrieved: 03.31.2022. ↑
“[…] when I supported my faith and my hopes in the twentieth century, when I said that our great scientific and social movement should end in a flowering of humanity, [Flaubert] looked at me very fixedly with those big blue eyes, and then shrugged.” (Zola, p. 74). ↑
Observe the incredible production and artistic variety (painting, music, literature, architecture, design) between the wars in Europe. ↑
The exceptions are the United Kingdom and France where the detective novel continued the path indicated by positive science. for rationalism. Detective story causalism has a golden age of at least 4 decades after the First Great War. From the point of view of the evolution of the genre, the English story remained stuck in the same structures (macro, micro), in the themes and in its vision of good and evil, while the French, already around the time of the noir series (1945), was a breakthrough. See, for example ,I will spit on your grave (1946) by B. Vian, or films based on Albert Simonin’s film scripts since 1953. However, what predominated were translations of American novels such as those by Peter Cheney, Poison Ivy (1937) and This man is dangerous (1935), which led to a rediscovery of this literature in the postwar period. Around 1955, the noir series had already sold 10 million copies, with more than 200 titles, and had in its catalogue all the important North American crime novel writers. Such was the success that it became Gallimard’s financial lifeline. To expand on the unforgivable editorial sins of the noir series and its contribution to the discredit of the genre see: Lemaitre, Op. cit., p. 418 y ss. ↑
“The task of making narrative techniques evolve is incumbent on the writer, just as it is incumbent on the composer to make composition techniques evolve.” See: López Lemus, Virgilio (compilation, selection and notes) interviews. Alejo Carpentier. Havana: Cuban Letters, 1985, p.50. There is no reference to the interviewer. More than ‘incumbent on him’, as Carpentier soberingly puts it, he has to make the narrative technique evolve. The technique is an essential part of literary creation. The technique is not only related to the macrostructure of the story, but especially to the linguistic and syntactic microstructures. ↑
Chandler, R. Op. cit., pp. 9 ‒ 12. Chandler does not clarify which ‘group’ he is referring to. Maybe on the payroll of Black Mask, or to the generality of the ‘good’ writers of the decades from 1930 to 1950, especially the founders of the genre, where it is included. Chandler and Hammett did not know each other more than a brief chat in 1936, during some writers’ meeting convened by the magazine. There is a photo of a meeting (Ward, 2019, p. 200). In reality, there was no ‘group’, since a crime novel literary movement was not formed as such, as Chandler affirms in his writing. (It is not an essay). Far from it, there was a leader. What did exist was an enormous number of imitators who found an easy and lucrative way of subsistence in the genre. Crime literature, not being a movement, developed as a genre (see, supra, the discussion about gender and subgender), which rarely happens. In artistic movements there is a minimum of aesthetic principles. In the creation of a genre, like noir ‒ detective, there are programmatic principles, rules that must be followed, like those of van Dinne (1927), like those of Chandler himself (1951), and many more. There is a good variety of decalogues. A detective story movement was not founded in England either. Clubs were created, which the English like so much, such as the Detection Club in London in 1930, which brought together the writers of the genre. Later, in 1953, The Crime Writers’ Association was founded, and CWA’s, also in London, which in 2020 had about 800 members. On the other hand, the Mystery Writers of America was founded in 1945, and has awarded the Edgar Prize since 1955. Any person over 18 years of age interested in the genre can belong to this association. You do not have to be a writer to participate in their activities. ↑
Phrase attributed by G. Janouch to Kafka. There is no proof that Kafka said it, but it has become famous. When Kafka mentions Januoch a few times in his letters, never in his diaries, he does it as if he were talking about an emotionally and mentally disturbed person.Op. cit..,Stach, vol. 2, p. 1835. ↑

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Crime narrative topology – Chapter 4 – Part 2

Opening words