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

4.3 Second intention

Semantically stretch, extend, unfold the language, the words chosen that will make up the story, the story that begins to be told.

If language is the house of being, ¹¹³verbal deployment is the universe of the writer. But not an expanding, uncontainable, limitless universe. It is the universe whose limits are given by the tension between the intention and the creative flow or verbal display of the writer.

Any story is, above all, a verbal display of great proportions. It doesn’t matter if you are going to write a story with seven words, a comma and a full stop. Nine syntactic elements. Such is the story of Monterroso. The dinosaur in this story is full of hundreds of thousands of words that can be imagined, fictional, purely textual. From there, a novel could be composed. Nor does it matter if you plan to write a story of 500 or 3,000 pages. We already said that neither the genre nor the size of the text matter. What matters is how one thinks that text. What artistic, human, linguistic, social, semantic, semiotic scope, etc., will its content have. “You have to fix your eyes on the universal and the eternal every time that, in our things, our endearing things, we find a reflection ‒however weak it may be‒ of the universal and the eternal,”¹¹⁴ says Carpentier in an interview in 1958. It is in the universal, eternal mentality of the writer, where such an unfolding takes place. Such a display enters the scene by making extensive use of the language, exhausting their expressive powers. Inventing words, locutions, if necessary, of the inner music of the artist; of the musicality of the time; of the topos where the narrated events take place. Well, each territory corresponds to its own music. Jazz, blues, spirituals, etc., are also inserted in some of the texts mentioned here, sometimes for the purpose of fixing an environment, sometimes to enhance the dramatic charge of an event that seems bland, or to account for a social, human state of things. While in Red Harvest there is no time even to enjoy a song of the epoch. The black man condemned to death in Sanctuary listens every night behind the bars of his cell, awaiting his execution:

He would lean in the window in the evening and sing. After supper a few negroes gathered along the fence below‒natty, shoddy suits and sweat‒stained overalls shoulder to shoulder‒and in chorus with the murderer, they sang spirituals while white people slowed and stopped in the leafed darkness that was almost summer, to listen to those who were sure to die and him who was already dead singing about heaven and being tired […]¹¹⁵

Shakespeare used more than 31,000 different words in his work. In Ulysses, Joyce used over 30,000; Cervantes, in Don Quixote, just over 23,000. The so-called ‘streams of subjective consciousness’,¹¹⁶ have been par excellence in Literature; they are not an invention attributed to Joyce, nor of the critics of the moment. They are subjective flows, not unconscious (extracted from dreams, from the non‒calculated, from the non‒rationalised). Full consciousness is needed to find, first the language and then the words. Words are chosen for writing. Well, writing depends on the story that is going to be told. Not the other way around. It is the story that imposes the choice of words. It seems that whoever writes is a simple scribe, a clerk to whom the text is dictated by a muse. A humble secretary. Hence the theory of the stream of subjective consciousness studied by H. James, by Joyce, by Proust. And hence, the better intellectually, linguistically and lexicographically equipped the writer is, the better he will be able to choose the words ‒an arsenal of words‒, to narrate any story with greater precision, with better syntax. The linguistic and lexicographical richness of the text depends on the linguistic and lexicographical wealth of the writer. But such a verbal display cannot be uncontained, like a universe running amok. The delimitation of the lexicon is decisive. Whoever writes, uses his physical, mental strength, his interiority; all his experiential wealth in order to bring forth what he cannot express in any other way. It is the only path he is capable of following. It is the only way that exists. Those who have the adequate perception of synesthesia have a strong sensation of smelling, seeing, touching and tasting words. Not only to give life in a broad, precise way, to fictional characters. Not just to flaunt authority over a language. In their time, writers like A. Carpentier, J. Cortázar, Borges, C. Infante, G. Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, O. Paz needed to demonstrate their intellectual stature to the first world. To raise themselves artistically to a higher level. Hence linguistic intellectualism. Thematic. Literary. Extensive use of language is not made, in any case, to make reading more difficult, but richer. The writing must always appear simple, translucent. With authority (autoritas derived from autor (author): ‘creator’, ‘author’, ‘historical source’: Corominas) narrative, which is the perfect handling of the intricacies of history, and its moral content. That is, the author is the source of a story, from the story he tells. Hence the good sense, the moral authority. The sensitivity, the moral authority, which the artist must appropriate so that, when elaborating the story, he gains, word by word, the narrative authority (Cf. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year p.165). Horace says in his Poetic Art: “Sensitivity is the principle and source of good writing” (p. 402, § 310). If there is no perfect handling of these elements, the story falls apart. Whoever writes lives it intensely, obsessively, at the moment of composing. The text is a semantic composition riddled with signs, without being a mere sign, since the mere play of signs may lack content. As are mere syllabic switching games. As were the vast majority of the “exquisite corpses” of the surrealists. As ‘creative’ computational commutations have been since the early 1960s. Text is a syntactic composition with a narrative, the synthesis of a complex mental process. With its own logic, with linear, crossed internal logics. unique. With pieces, parts. With the totality of the world of whoever writes. Hence all creative writing, without any exception, is autobiographical. Either because whoever writes, out of obligation, gives a little piece of himself, a third, half, three quarters. Or everything. It depends on the creative intention of the artist. Hence, a closed world is created, the sense of which is to show something of the human essence. If the writer does not have a world within himself, it is better that he not write. If the musician, if the interpreter, lacks musical imagination, it is better that they dedicate themselves to something else. If the composer is incapable of inventing sounds, it’s better not to start composing. If a painter does not carry within himself a landscape, it is better that he not paint. Artistic universes do not come out of nowhere. Hence it is impossible to teach how to write. You can suggest some readings, discuss ideas (not necessarily literary; indeed, it is almost preferable to talk about other things), teach some techniques. True technique becomes a solid structure if and only if the writer has developed a technique of his own. This is the same as saying that you have to master the techniques, that is, understand them fully, to leave the inherited techniques forgotten along the way.

Wittgenstein sees it this way:

The grammar of the word ‘know’ is obviously closely related to the grammar of the words ‘can’, ‘be able’, but also closely related to that of the word “understand.” (‘Master’ a technique.) ¹¹⁷ Every front-line writer, consciously or unconsciously (the latter, the most common), develops a technique. He resembles Kafka’s Olympic champion:

“The great swimmer! The great swimmer! the people shouted. I had just come from the X Olympic Games, where I had broken a world swimming record […] A girl, whose cheek I caressed briefly, with her great skill hung a sash on me that said OLYMPIC CHAMPION in a foreign language.

[…]

Dear guests! I admit to having broken a world record, but if you asked me how I did it, I couldn’t give you a satisfactory answer. In fact, to be honest with you, I don’t know how to swim. I always wanted to learn, but the opportunity never presented itself.”¹¹⁸

In creative terms, perhaps nothing is more difficult for the writer than to choose the language with which you are going to tell a story. The writers of detective crime novels ‒ recognized the apparent spontaneity with which the stories were written: dime novels, the western, the weak detective stories of the Pulp, as well as their direct experiences in the streets. And they raised language to a level of transcendent significance. Brutally poetic. The elliptical phrases, the allusion, the circumlocution, the periphrasis, the simile, the ingenious metaphor, the tautology, the euphemism, the hyperbole, the litotes, characteristic rhetorics of the speech of the North Americans of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, are transferred to the paper. These rhetorics that they abused, and continue to abuse to the point of discouragement, imitators from all latitudes degrading the genre more and more. Imitators have made them commonplace since the 1930s; mere coins of paltry value. Such is the diegetic effectiveness of the general structure of the genre, that it is all too easy to imitate. Imitators number in the hundreds of thousands.

Raymond Chandler had a notebook full of collected expressions, idioms, clichés¹¹⁹ (which are sometimes repeated novel after novel, despite what Mac Shane defends¹²⁰). “The American slang was to him like a foreign language.”¹²¹ The abuse of these resources, especially adjectives, hyperbole, gratuitous metaphor, litotes and personification, is detrimental to the good plot, to the limping architecture of Chandler’s novels.¹²² No Chandler work is a masterpiece. A masterpiece is a classic. A classic work creates a breakthrough, and is capable of continuing to make others. It is also capable of producing, in the reader, an unexpected intimate shudder after the second, after the third, after any number of readings. As is the case, for example, with No Country for Old Men (2005), by C. McCarthy, which makes the genre evolve, in every way, taking it one step further.

By definition, a classic, while worthy of imitation, should not be imitated. The artist does not imitate anyone. You should not even imitate, plagiarise yourself. This is the case of the vast majority of crime novel writers, from Chandler to James Ellroy who even denies the supremacy of Hammett, the father;¹²³ from W. Collins, Dorothy Sayers to Josephine Tey, in England. The artist elevates what has already been done to another level. What Chandler does is to imitate Hammett in a mediocre way. He doesn’t elevate anything. Their plots are simply long-winded, breath blown by The Maltese Falcon. One would say that every Chandler book has at least a third or a half of the narrated material left over. Chandler’s books lack good syntax. Perhaps he was too concerned with ‘making good literature’, in order to transcend. He believed that he was writing first-rate literature. Chandler admits it, in his mediocre, bland writing, “The Simple Art of Killing” (1950). This piece of writing, moreover, doesn’t talk about the art of killing as such. According to him North American crime literature must always be indebted to English crime literature. Chandler forgets Poe, forgets the literary tradition of his country. He forgets about the western, the dime novels, the Pulp which he despises¹²⁴ For his part, De Quincey, in Of Murder Considered One of the Fine Arts (1827), develops the first poetics of crime in literature. In the Post Scriptum of 1854, with the narrations (they are in full order) of the crimes of Williams and the brothers Alexander and Michael M’Keand,¹²⁵ De Quincey lays the foundations of the literary chronicle of crime in English culture. In Latin America, the criminal chronicle begins with works as diverse and far removed from each other as The Ram, by Juan R. Freile (1636–1638), Doctor Temis, by J. Ma. Ángel Gaitán (1851) ,Reminiscences. Santa Fe and Bogotá, by J. Ma. Cordovez Moure (1891); Operation Massacre, by R. Walsh (1956). Knowing that they hadn’t met each other, one falls into the temptation of thinking that the crime novel, by making use of the genre cause celebre,¹²⁶ tends to go beyond journalistic limits (Cordovez Moure’s literary technique is the same as De Quincey’s), to graze on the ever-greening fields of fiction; that is, from Literature, since both recreate criminal acts from judicial literature and from their own memory. Note that in both cases, Cordovez Moure and De Quincey, the chronicles were written decades after the events took place.

The expression “son of a bitch” (mother fucker), commonplace in novels of the crime genre, comes from the slums. It’s visceral. Many times there is no better expression to define someone, with just those words. It is as good as ‘hijueputa’, in Colombia: a word with a strong, semantic connotation. As in Colombia with ‘hijueputa’, the upper classes in the US appropriated ‘son of a bitch’ because they exhausted the color of textbook language. The expressiveness; linguistic freedom. That is why they never sound authentic to them; they are fake. This expression is further enhanced when it is written for a malevolent, harmful context. Where it prowls, or where it creeps, where evil reigns . It is an expression impossible to find in any novel or story by W. Collins, Conan Doyle, Chesterton, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, or Josephine Tey. The malicious, harmful, injurious, perverse, lewd, offensive environment does not exist in the traditional English detective story. There, everything is reminiscent of what is designed on purpose, of elitist decoration or molding plaster ‒of the non-spontaneous‒, with what is painted in the style of bricolage country, in pastel colors. In the English detective novel, evil is expressed through complacent language, uncritical for middle, upper middle or high social classes. Not so for the lower classes. The diegetic matter is a mind game that is seasoned through the elaboration of witty phrases, with fine humour, with scathing, ironic commentary. Almost picaresque. A language that is incapable of narrating what happens in a London, Scottish, Irish neighborhood. It’s too rigid for that. In The daughter of time by Josephine Tey, the tearoom tone dominates:

“When I showed you the portrait,” Grant said, “before you knew who he was, did he look like a villain to you?”

“No,” answered the doctor, “he seemed sick to me.”

“It’s weird, isn’t it? I didn’t think about his evil nature either. And now that I know who he is, now that I’ve read the name on the back, I can only see him as an evil person.” “I suppose that evil, like beauty, is in the eyes of the beholder.” (Tey, p. 7)

Evil is judged, punished, within the rigid moral code inherited from the Victorian period of the previous century. There, good and evil battle in terms of Durkheimian anomie. Behind the backs of the lower social classes. Behind the backs of the social majority, of social reality. In the novels of the British authors mentioned, the moral balance is restored at the end of each story. Evil is thrown back into the darkness where it is supposed to belong. In general, evil is fought with intelligence, with the social norm. With the sense of composure, of class. In an elegant, mannered way. With education. Thus, evil, as a thing of bad taste, is defeated by good, with good manners. The endings are happy. The bad guys are punished. Severe punishment prevails (hanging, from the fifth century to 1998, although it was totally abolished in 1969). The law applies. Evil, like beauty, is in the eyes of the beholder. It is a matter of relativistic aesthetics typical of the time. Evil is not seen as a problem of the immanence of evil that must be faced as something that constitutes the complexity of the person. Social complexity.

A piece of literature written outside the moral codes, outside the rules of genres; of desktop grammar; of moral rigor. It requires merging the interiority that struggles to express itself. To recognize with the outside world. The artist does not consider whether a behaviour is moral or not. Simply such a situation, such a way of acting of the characters takes place. Full stop. The artist does not judge. He is not a judge of anything or anyone. That is why the choice of language is decisive. Faulkner doesn’t judge Popeye. The main narrator of Red Harvest does not prosecute any member of the criminal gangs. Simply he knows who are bad people. Sam Spade, looks at evil, ruminates and is silent. The language that is delimited is distinctive. It goes from nominative to neuter. From the neuter it goes to the accusative. Then to the conclusion. These protean forms of language embedded in syntax are capable of expressing what happens at the heart of a chain of events. In each link. This language is an emanated darkness, expelled from the inside of the writer who is only partially illuminated on the written page. These are glimpses of the epiphanies that Joyce spoke of, for on the written page there is also darkness. A darkness that makes you shudder. It is, as they say, between the lines. It is when the writer is being carried by the terrible, by the beautiful wings of the muses, that the verbal display of which I speak happens. In no other way is it possible to create literature.

In the end, weighing the manichaeisms of one side and the other, we must not lose sight of the fact that the justice that is done, both in the English crime novel and in the traditional black ‒ North American crime novel, is retributive. The justice of the similar that tends to the similar; that is, the good to the good and the bad to the bad. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. One reacts to the evil caused by the crime with the penalty of punishment.¹²⁸ It does not matter which it is.

4.4 Third intention

During the written verbal display that takes place, instinct, impulse, inspiration, madness,¹²⁹ the Heideggerian illumination, the Joycean epiphany if you will, if such power is found in the writer to go to the heart of the subject matter.

But more than inspiration, extracting oneself, inspiratio, the supernatural breath breathed by God or some muse into the artist’s soul is will, a compelling need. However, none of this is possible if the person who writes a narrative, of whatever length, whatever the genre, a literary essay ‒different from what happens in poetry‒, is not in possession of all his faculties, of all his lucidity, all his mental clarity.¹³⁰ During the 19th century in Europe, many writers used psychoactive substances, including absinthe. Only a handful of them achieved first-rate artistic results. During the first half of the 20th century, in Europe and the United States, tobacco and alcohol very often went together down the artist’s throat. The list of drunk or drug addicted artists or consumers of both substances is long. My work under the influence of alcohol was shameful, unpresentable. Hence those writings have gone to the trash. It’s just not possible to write quality narrative under the influence of alcohol; or from an opium trip, for example; or marijuana. De Quincey wrote his Memoirs of an English Opium Eater(1822) when the effects of laudanum had passed, of which he consumed large quantities. Huxley wrote The Doors of Perception (1954) and Heaven and Hell (1956), as descriptions of experiences with mescaline, LSD or psilocybin when he was completely lucid, since he had to intellectualise them. He had to give an account (very English) of what he had done accompanied by a small medical team. Nora, Joyce’s wife, strongly reproached him for his alcoholism because it prevented him from focusing on his books. You also don’t write the best sex scene having sex at the same time, nor the best fighting or shooting scene being in the middle, with a gun in the other hand; nor a dream sequence while asleep. It is simply impossible. The writer must be at the top of his physical strength. In the duo ‘inspiration/epiphany’, inspiration/’self-feeding of the soul’,¹³¹ ‘Heideggerian illumination/relentless desire to write’, ‘simple need to write/lucidity of mind’, is literary creativity. It is in these supreme moments that the artist becomes a colossal being, invincible before the insipid, before the coarseness, before the pain, before the stupidity of the world. Once he has put down the pen or the computer keyboard, the artist is no more than a common being, just like any other, completely emptied, maybe smaller. Hence that breastplate of superiority when finishing a work. But it’s a shell, it’s trivial, the illumination of which Heidegger speaks, the inspiration, the rapture, the sublimation happens if the writer is perfectly focused on himself. And more than in himself, in his writing, In what he longs to narrate. Therefore, it is a solitary job.

4.5 Fourth intention

During the progress of the drafting of the report (relātus, knowledge that is given of a fact, Drae), the writer knows that he will tell one or more stories that will impose their own rules; rules that pass through him.

One of these rules, perhaps the most important, is to impose limits of all kinds: from the use of syntactic forms such as rhetorical figures, logical connectors, to the use of punctuation marks, to strict limits to the characters, to the settings, to the action itself. Even when the story seeks to go down intricate paths, whoever writes must pave the way, focus it, straighten the course. It is like a god who controls not only the ship at sea, but the sea itself; storms, winds, natural elements. This, so that the story does not falter, so that it does not go under. Murakami’s novels, for example, are ships on the edge of the abyss. The writer (Murakami) does not stop his narrator, he does not know when to stop, when to correct course and head to the port. When he does, it seems to be from sheer exhaustion. In Murakami, the verbosity is such that it overflows the typographic text box. It overwhelms the patience of the readers. This verbosity is not extensive, it is diegetic devastation, since it is not nourished by the aesthetic and moral responsibility of all language (Heidegger, 2006, p. 19), it falls unrestrainedly outside of its narrative meaning. The same goes for super prolific crime or romance writers, all of second, third or much lower order. Their books are mere entertainment. They are writers who continually plagiarise themselves. Like Hadley Chase (91 novels), Chesterton (80 books, 200 stories), A. Christie (67 novels, 150 stories), G. Simenon (222 novels, more than 500 articles), Corín Tellado, 4,000 novels…¹³²

What one finds in Hammett’s early noir stories – detective stories of some importance,¹³³ is the notion of limit. In general, they are short, well-structured, forceful stories, to the point of being harsh. In this synthesis of what the story should be, the fusion of two or more genders; of two or more narrative techniques, of two or more languages, two or more themes. All this is extracted from a wealth of previous knowledge. Without previous knowledge, it is not possible to elaborate a narrative. Any narrative. How the writer carries out two or more of these mergers depends on how he is equipped intellectually, mentally, investigatively, and emotionally. It depends on his physical state too: if he feels cold, or hot, if he is hungry, if he is poorly hydrated. If he suffers from any disease, the quality of writing is affected. Although, as always, there are exceptions. For example, Kafka wrote The Castle when for more than a year he had been certain that his tuberculosis¹³⁴ was irreversible. He did not have much time to live and the disease forced him to stay in bed. Hammett, another tuberculosis patient, wrote Red Harvest in similar circumstances.

Following the internal logic of the five previous intentions, then, there is a great possibility ‒because they are not a guarantee of it either‒, that the writer writes a first-rate work. In addition to such conditions, or better still, intentions, what else is necessary for the writer to achieve this? His honesty, his humility with the story, allowing the simple to rule and be fused with the complex in its multiple dimensions. Paraphrasing Heidegger, writing only leads to the unspoken language of the writer (Heidegger, 2006, p. 87).

The elaborated story is preserved in writing, which is memory, Mnēmosúne.

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

Heidegger, M. Op. cit..,2006, p. 87. ↑
Lopez Lemus, Virgil (ed.),Op. Cit., p.52. There is no reference to the interviewer. Paraphrasing Foucault, we would say that the ‘eternal’ is not beyond the present moment, nor after it, but in it (Foucault, 1983). ↑
Sanctuary, Op. cit., p. 83. ↑
Subjective stream of consciousness’ was the characterisation given by W. James (Henry James’s brother) to the great variety of thoughts of which (a character, the writer) someone can be aware. See: James, William. Principles of Psychology. Mexico. FCE, 1989 [1890], p.390. ↑
Op. cit., p. 285, § 150. ↑
Kafka, F. The Silence of the Sirens. Posthumous writings and fragments. Bogotá: Mondadori, 2012, p.191 ‒ 192. ↑
Giardinelli, p.103. ↑
Mac Shane, Frank. The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler and English Summer: A Gothic Romance: New York: The Ecco Press, 1976. ↑
Lemaître, 2022, p.79. ↑
During the filming of Eternal Sleep, H. Hawks wired Chandler to ask who killed Owen Taylor, and Chandler replied, “No idea.” cf. Op. cit.,Lemaître, p.79. ↑
Ellroy, speaking of himself, says: “[…] I am a master of fiction. I am also the greatest noir novelist that ever lived. I am for the black novel what Tolstoy is for the Russian novel and what Beethoven is for music.” Recovered [26. 04. 2022] from: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Ellroy. Ellroy’s novels follow Chandler’s path in trying to imitate Hammett, without surpassing Chandler in any of his qualities (it’s undeniable that Chandler has them). He only surpasses them in his megalomaniacal egomania. Ellroy confuses success in the sales of his books with writing Literature, with making art. ↑
Chandler published his first short stories in Black Mask, a Pulp magazine. ↑
De Quincey used, for these chronicles, Chronicles of Crime; or The new Newgate Calendar, vols. 1 and 2, a compilation of famous causes). The revised edition was printed in London by T. Miles & Co., 1891. There are the journalistic chronicles of the crimes that De Quincey rewrites in 1854. The first chronicle, that of Williams, dates from 1812. The second, by M ‘Keand, in 1826. ↑
The cause celebre (judicial case of social importance) is a genre of judicial literature that borrowed the phrase from the 37th edition of the New Causes Celebres,of 1763. The 37 volumes were published at the initiative of the jurist François Gayot de Pitaval in 1734 with the title Famous and interesting causes with the judgments which decided them.This genre also spread as a journalistic form (very controversial, to generate debate and political control, mother of today’s red chronicle) and public self-defense. A clear example of this in our country are the public defenses of Raimundo Russi in 1851 and the famous chronicles of Cordovez Moure in 1891. On the importance of the famous causes in literature, I will return later. ↑
Just as “[…] writing a story brings the most beautiful rewards […]”, “That descent towards the dark powers, that liberation of spirits bound by nature, suspicious hugs, and everything that can happen down there, and of what that above you have no idea when you write stories in the light of the sun ”. Cf. Kafka, F.Letters to Max Brod (1904 – 1924).Madrid: Mondadori, 1992, pp.224 ‒ 258. ↑
Kelsen, Hans. What is justice? Medellin: UDEA, 2015. ↑
“Well, more than once I have heard – and they say that Democritus and Plato left it in their works – that no good poet can be without fire inside and without a certain breath of madness.” Cicero, cited in: Horace. Poetic art. Madrid: Gredos, 2008, p 401. ↑
In the cited book by Peter Haining, El Club del Hashish, there are enough examples of poetic, narrative and essay creation to strongly doubt the relevance of using chemical inducers if you want to write something of quality. Rather, the constant in the vast majority of first-rate storytellers, when creating, is lucidity. Hence, they prefer the first hours of the morning to work. Says Faulkner, making a further exception: “My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.” See Stein, op. cit. I dare say that Hammett would say almost the same words. ↑
Cf Agamben, G. Idea of Prose Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo, 215, p.57. ↑
About Richardson (supra), not to confuse the novel ‒ River, which is the cited case of Clarissa ‒which has some 970,000 words‒, with the novels that use the same narrative structure, the same language, the same characters with different names over and over, and over, and over, and over again, without exhausting the mold. Or better, until the writer is exhausted from doing the same. ↑
“The Way Back Home”, “The Big Heist”, “$106,00, Blood Money”. ↑
This disease in Kafka manifested itself on Saturday August 11, 1917 at 4 in the morning. (Cf. Stach, p.1717). That is to say, for four years, except that Kafka until 1921, believed that a cure was possible. ↑

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Ensayo

Crime narrative topology – Chapter 4 – Part 3

Opening words