Crime fiction

Crime fiction is a genre of fiction that deals with crimes, their detection, criminals, and their motives. It is usually distinguished from mainstream fiction and other genres such as science fiction or historical fiction, but boundaries can be, and indeed are, blurred. It has several sub-genres, including detective fiction (including the whodunnit), legal thriller, courtroom drama, and hard-boiled fiction.

Categories of crime fiction

Crime fiction can be divided into the following branches:

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• Detective fiction
• The whodunnit
• Locked room mystery
• The Golden Age whodunnit
• Later and contemporary contributions to the whodunnit
• The historical whodunnit
• Spoofs and parodies
• The American hard-boiled school
• The police procedural
• The legal thriller
• The caper story
• The spy novel
• The psychological suspense novel
• The criminal novel (Novels told from the point of view of criminals such as The Godfather )

Crime fiction and mainstream fiction

When trying to pigeonhole fiction, it is extraordinarily difficult to tell where crime fiction starts and where it ends. This is largely attributed to the fact that love, danger and death are central motifs in fiction. A less obvious reason is that the classification of a work may very well be related to the author's reputation.

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For example, William Somerset Maugham's (1874–1966) novella Up at the Villa (1941) could very well be classified as crime fiction. This short novel revolves around a woman having a one-night stand with a total stranger who suddenly and unexpectedly commits suicide in her bedroom, and the woman's attempts at disposing of the body so as not to cause a scandal about herself or be suspected of killing the man. As Maugham is not usually rated as a writer of crime novels, Up at the Villa is hardly ever considered to be a crime novel and accordingly can be found in bookshops among his other, "mainstream" novels.

Related Topics:
William Somerset Maugham - 1874 - 1966 - Novella - Up at the Villa - 1941 - Suicide

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A more recent example is Bret Easton Ellis's (born 1964) seminal novel American Psycho (1991) about the double life of Patrick Bateman, a Wall Street yuppie and serial killer in the New York of the 1980s. Even though in American Psycho the most heinous crimes are depicted in minute detail, the novel has never been labelled a "crime novel", maybe due to the fact that the police are conspicuously absent and Bateman is never tracked down and brought to justice.

Related Topics:
Bret Easton Ellis - 1964 - American Psycho - 1991 - Wall Street - Yuppie - New York - 1980s

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On the other hand, U.S. author James M. Cain is normally seen as a writer belonging to the "hard-boiled" school of crime fiction. However, his novel Mildred Pierce (1941) is really about the rise to success of an ordinary housewife developing her entrepreneurial skills and — legally — outsmarting her business rivals, and the domestic trouble caused by her success, with, in turn, her husband, her daughter and her lover turning against her. Although no crime is committed anywhere in the book, the novel was reprinted in 1989 by Random House, alongside Cain's thriller The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), under the heading "Vintage Crime".

Related Topics:
Mildred Pierce - 1941 - 1989 - The Postman Always Rings Twice - 1934

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When film director Michael Curtiz adapted Mildred Pierce for the big screen in 1945, he lived up to the cinemagoers' and the producers' expectations by adding a murder which is absent from the novel. As potential cinemagoers had been associating Cain with hard-boiled crime fiction only, this trick — exploited in advertisements and trailers —, in combination with the casting of then Hollywood star Joan Crawford in the title role, made sure that the film was going to be a box office hit even before it was released.

Related Topics:
Michael Curtiz - Hollywood - Joan Crawford

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Seen from a practical point of view, one could argue that a crime novel is simply a novel that can be found in a bookshop on the shelf or shelves labelled "Crime". (This suggestion has actually been made about science fiction, but it can be applied here as well.) Penguin Books have had a long-standing tradition of publishing crime novels in cheap paperbacks with green covers and spines (as opposed to the orange spines of mainstream literature), thus attracting the eyes of potential buyers already when they enter the shop.

Related Topics:
Science fiction - Penguin Books

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But again, this clever marketing strategy does not tell the casual browser what they are really in for when they buy a particular book.

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