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

Second Part

Origins

2. From Dime Novels to Pulp

The first dime novel or Ten cent novel was Malaeska. The Indian Wife of the White Hunter,¹⁵⁵ of 128 pages, put on sale in 1860. It is an adventure story with Indians in North America.¹⁵⁶ The western literary or ‘novel of the West’, had its origin in costumbrista novels such as The Last of the Mohicans (1826), by F. Cooper, in The Westerns Journals (1832), by W. Irving, who served as a model for numerous writers throughout the 19th century and up to the middle of the 20th. On the other hand the western film began in 1903 with Assault and Robbery of a Train, a film by E.S. Porter.

The enormous success of Malaeska gave rise, in the following 60 years, to the publication of 321 editions (not necessarily new titles) and reprints of various works, which lasted until the end of the 1920s.¹⁵⁷ Many of these novels were rehashes, re-releases of old hits that printers like Beadle & Adams and Frank Starr passed off as novelties. The aforementioned Malaeska, the first dime novel which gave the series its name, by Ann S. Stephens (who wrote nearly 30 serialized short novels) was no exception. It had already been published in 1839, and was reprinted numerous times. The idea of these editors was simply to entertain boys and adults, as well as the workers, the proletariat of the new neighborhoods that were growing in the cities. The aim was also to sell large quantities (65,000 copies, e.g.) at very low prices (from 5 to 15¢), with various formats, cover colors, even types of paper, and this encouraged competition, which filled the kiosks with a very varied offer.

These dime novels became daily entertainment thanks, first, to the literacy that took place after the Civil War (1861 ‒ 1865). Second, to the intense colonisation (white expansion) of the indigenous territories by the whites of the ‘wild west’ or the far west, by ‘the gold rush’, and by the development of the railway with the Union Pacific story; the colonisation of lands that inspired the Ranch story, the Revenge story, Outlaw story of outlaws, and other collections of stories, such as the Calvalry and Indian story. Third, due to the great diversity of the avid population for stories, poems, religious and educational stories, and entertainment in general. And, what is more important, for the emergence of a new mass of readers of all ages, even outside of that type of literature considered ordinary, of poor quality, vulgar, obscene, in bad taste, for the lower class. Books that, when they were read alone, people did so by moving their lips. They did so, not only because reading was a form of prayer, a way of appropriating the universe of the text, but also because, unconsciously, it returned the written story to orality (heard text) which the public still wanted.

Thus, the public began to read immediate reality, to reinterpret it, as well as with the ear to which it was accustomed, with its sight. They did it over and over again. These brochures could even be stored, passed from hand to hand, going from one place to another; from one city to another. Oral accounts no longer predominated (oral culture). Slowly the printed paper prevailed (print culture). As these stories come mostly from the factory worker, from the peasantry that was beginning to become more technical thanks to European industrialisation. A common populace that didn’t pick up the legacy of European enlightenment. The population was empowered by stories (culture) that didn’t arise from the official account, mediated, managed, imposed, originated in and by high culture, based on a vertical structure. Given these conditions, there began to be a ‘democratisation’ of culture, especially of the circulation of the printed letter, and of ideas. The price that the workers paid for the print was negligible, and the material acquired, due to its format, was easily transferable, storable at home. Construction of major public libraries in the United States only began in the late nineteenth century; only that of Congress dates from 1800. The wide and dynamic traffic in this type of novel was what finished shaping crime literature in the United States. To put it in Plato’s words, this meant changes in paradigms, in models of thought, in living in society; changes in the transmission, dissemination and consolidation of culture. This literary sedimentation prepared the ground for what would come later: the development of a national literature that definitively broke its literary dependence on the United Kingdom.¹⁵⁸ It goes without saying that, without these origins and popular developments of the story, the detective novel would never have taken place. The birth of Pulp fiction for adults took place in 1896 with the magazine Argosy, which emerged as a children’s magazine in 1882, with the title The golden Argosy, which was not commercially successful. When changing the target audience, he also changed his name: Argosy All ‒ Story Weekly, which survived until 1978.¹⁵⁹ ¹⁶⁰ Those who usually do a review of the history of the detective genre ‒ black, speak in general of the “pulp magazines” (pulp, ordinary paper pulp, low cost), and give it little or relatively minor importance. As relative importance has been given to the fact that, in these distant origins (in reality, morbid, ordinary, poorly narrated, sensationalist, vulgar literature), the genres of popular literature, crime fiction, science fiction, horror fiction, action, romance, fantasy and violence for purposes of commercial, underground, unofficial exploitation, they were fused, recast. As I pointed out above, the themes in these magazines were well differentiated according to trades, according to human activities. Genres where evil was raised, such as the Revenge story, Outlaw story, Marshal story, Ranch story are all guided by the genre ‘adventures’, ‘colonising expansion’, ‘domination of a territory’, they were alloyed, merged, chemically mixed homogeneously. A heterogeneous mixture can be separated relatively easily, since the structure of its components is not compromised. The heterogeneous mixtures, in literature, serve to elaborate entertainment material, not to write literary works. In literary works, as we have already seen, their constituent elements, two or more, have reacted chemically, like carbon and iron to form steel; like tin, copper and antimony to form pewter. The Pulp magazines¹⁶¹ boomed in the 1920s and 1930s, and waned in the late 1950s.¹⁶² The magazine Black Mask, founded in 1920, also published adventure novels, romance, detectives, occultism and spiritism, sports and many aviator stories (inherited from the First Great War), is a classic example of Pulp magazines. It disappeared from the market in 1951.

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. ↑

Part 2. Chapter 2 footnotes

Consulted [13.12.2021] at:https://www.gutenberg.org/files/46160/46160 ̶h/46160 ̶h.htm. This short novel can be read at: https://dimenovels.lib.niu.edu/islandora/object/dimenovels%3A185#page/2/mode/1up ↑
The typical characters of the western are the pioneer, the sheriff, the cowboys, the bandit or outlaw gunman, the gambler, the Mexicans, the sheep or cattle rancher, the Indians, the southern or northern military, the gold prospectors, the preachers, the happy girls of the saloon, bailiffs and, bounty hunters. The Marshal story. ↑
Denning, Michael. Mechanic accents: Dime novels and working ‒ class culture in America. New York: Verso, 1998 [1987], pp. 17 ‒26. ↑
To begin with, R. Chandler is the best example of the literary non-rupture with the United Kingdom. Henry James did not want to break the umbilical cord with England either, despite the fact that W. Whitman had already done so, who distanced himself from the figure of the hero and spoke in his work of common people as early as 1855, in Leaves of Grass. Faulkner not only introduced new techniques and new literary resources, new characters, a new aesthetic, but his great themes are black culture and the poor whites of the southern United States, as well as crime. In Sanctuary (1931): “[…] delinquency had become a widespread social habit […]” “How beneficial a lawless society is for the writer.” See: Pritchett, V.S. The Literary Journey Mexico: Economic Culture Fund, 2011, pp. 237 ‒ 243. Note that one of the many themes of Sanctuary In addition to violence, it is the Prohibition Law (which began in 1920 and lasted until December 1933). Faulkner wrote Sanctuary in 1929, the same year that Hammett published Red Harvest. These works definitively break the umbilical cord ‒as far as detective novels are concerned‒ with England. ↑
The United States Library of Congress has about 40,000 titles of dime novels. The Hess Collection at the University of Minnesota has more than 65,000 specimens. The previous data give an idea of the volume of production of these publications, and of the wide circulation. It must also be considered that the population in the cities grew at great speeds: from having the United States an approximate census in 1880 of 50 million, it went up in 1900 to about 76 million. For the decades of 1920 ‒ 1930, on average about 110 million, and about 1 million copies were sold per edition. ↑
Argosy was edited again in the period 1990 ‒ 1994, with five numbers published. Between 2004 and 2005, it was quarterly, and it fell. Then, it returned in 2006. Since 2013, it has been available in digital format. Fountain:https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argosy. There is a bookstore Argosy in New York of rare and old books. ↑
There is no genre Pulp fiction. Pulp refers to coarse wood pulp paper, and a crude, violent, shoddy literary (entertainment) story. ↑
Simmons, Julian. Police story history. Barcelona: Bruguera, 1982. ↑

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Crime narrative topology – Part 2. Chapter 2

Opening words