Dial M for Murder: A History and Breakdown of Murder Fiction in Literature
The genre of murder fiction has evolved and grown over the past one-hundred and eighty years since its inception with Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1841. Murder fiction, and why it is still a popular form of storytelling, relies on its unique treatment of fabula, or story, and suiet, or plot. These stories blend fiction and reality and provide different forms of readerly investment in the form of its narrative. The three basic forms of murder fiction are mystery, detective, and crime, with each area having some overlap but specific factors that make each one of them unique. Murder mystery fiction, under which the musical Curtains lives, is the formal style of murder fiction, perfected in the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes) and Agatha Christie. Detective fiction mixes up the formula by featuring a hard-boiled detective story, based more in an unstable world and focuses more on the individual doing the detective work than the motive of the crimes being committed. Finally, crime fiction unfolds from the criminal’s perspective, using first-person narrative to encourage the reader to identify with said criminal. Before diving into the history of these themes, it is important to fully explain the nuisances between them to make it easier to identify these troupes in the literary world.
Mystery Fiction
The world of mystery fiction is very much grounded, an essentially static world where anything outside the world of the story is immaterial. The narrative in these stories is driven by motivation, too. These crimes are transparently motivated and feature one of the four L’s of murder: Love, lust, loathing, or lucre. Clues are often spread throughout the story, and in an attempt to sustain interest, “a mystery novel must obscure the relation between signifier and signified and postpone the attachment of signifieds to signifiers.”1 With this idea in mind, the conclusion and explanation of who committed the murder is the highest point of interest. Because the action of the story is contained and isolated, the events that unfold will be met with very few disruptions from the outside world, heightening the stakes at hand. Mystery fiction first asks WHO committed the crime, then asks WHY the crime was committed. Tsvetan Todorov, a well-known Bulgarian French structuralist literary critic, calls the moment of the murder zero-time, or the terminus ab quo of the narrative. The story of mystery fiction unfolds in two parts: the action or plot before the murder occurs and the action or plot of solving the murder. The main driving factor is curiosity, with the desire to see the mystery solved and return to the zero-time mark with a sense of restoration or equilibrium. The two main goals of mystery fiction, by revealing the truth, is to solve the case and resolve the conflicts caused by said case. Many popular forms of mystery fiction were created and expanded upon by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes), Agatha Christie (Hercule Piorot and Miss Marple), and Edward Stratemeyer (Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys).
Detective Fiction
In the world of detective fiction, a “real” world is presented, a de-centered world that is very much rooted in discourse while still grounded in its narration. Through this lens, “gangsters wield political power, people are not what they pretend to be, justice is frequently not served, and ordinary citizens keep silent from fear of being permanently silenced.”2 In terms of storytelling, the actual murder is more incidental than mystery fiction, usually a product of contingent events and committed with the means at hand. In addition, the murder and motive are not always connected, with a culprit quick to murder again and again until they are stopped. This fails to reveal the “whole truth” of the matter and forgoes the “a-ha” moments that are typically found in mystery fiction. The individual takes center stage in detective fiction, very much mirroring the strongly-held American views on justice that depend more on the individual than on society. The reader is interested in the life of the main protagonist, their life, and their ultimate fate, as the detective narratives his own adventure. The investigator or detective is the hero in their own story, someone with a mission. Overall, detective fiction is the story of the investigation, not the story of the crime. The murderer is important to the story, but the act of investigation takes precedence. When compared, “curiosity drives the mystery story, and suspense propels the detective story.”3 Many famous forms of detective fiction include Detective Comics, known for introducing the world’s greatest detective, Batman, Dick Tracey (created by Chester Gould) and Philip Marlowe (created by Raymond Chandler).
Crime Fiction
The most unique out of the three forms is crime fiction, with its emphasis on the criminal, usually narrated in the first-person. This form does not ground the self, instead calling into question their own integrity, honesty, or stability. The narrative also shifts from themes of truth to those of justice, as the reader wants to know if, when, or how the criminal protagonist will implicate themselves and get caught. In a break from mystery and detective fiction, the world of the story can be either grounded or ungrounded, depending on the narrative being told. The protagonist also becomes problematic, often unreliable and untrustworthy. Stories of crime fiction are often disturbing, disquieting, and even disorienting. In addition, “there is no return to normality at the end, a fact which serves to accentuate the final disorder of the world, its unruliness.”4 This form has become increasing popular with audiences and readers alike over the years, with highlights including American Psycho (1991 novel), Dexter (TV show), and the Hannibal Lecter franchise.
1841-1920 – Part 1: Sowing the Seeds (of Murder)
Despite murder fiction having many branches, in an attempt at narrowing my research, the focus of this history will specifically cover “whodunit” novels, those originated by Edgar Allen Poe in 1841 and expanded upon by the likes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, among others. As stated before, the “whodunit” stories revolved around WHO committed the crime and WHY they did it. It is important to note that none of these stories could have come into being before the early 1800’s creation of a social formation, one that required the role of the police, more specifically detectives, to solve crimes. This is not to say that mystery story telling was invented by Poe, though. One of the earliest stories to utilize mystery is Sophocles’s Oedipus the King, though what separates this from detective fiction (as in those stories who utilize a detective) is the use of repeatability, with audiences at the time knowing the story of Oedipus prior to watching the play. There is a time-honored tradition to “not give away the ending,” which is even sung at the end of Curtains, but the problem with discussing and analyzing murder fiction is that the texts cannot be discussed fully without revealing the ending. The most important part of a murder mystery, as stated above, is the final reveal and explanation, a return to zero-time. A literary analyzer (or dramaturg!) can find it very difficult to discuss the finer points of a mystery novel to those who do not want it spoiled. This historical timeline will drop a lot of titles of stories and novels that the reader should enjoy on their own time to experience the mystery organically.
Moving on, Poe’s introduction to the genre of mystery fiction came with the short story The Murders in the Rue Morgue. These detective stories, which he called “tales of ratiocination,” also invented the single-hero-series form which would become popularized by Doyle with Sherlock Holmes. Poe’s detective was named C. Auguste Dupin, with each of his stories designed to be read in a single sitting, which made them extremely popular during the time of writing. Many historians and literary analyzers point to Napoleon’s establishment of the French criminal investigation department, or Sûreté, in 1812 as the inciting incident that propelled murder fiction into the human consciousness. This is why Poe’s stories of Dupin take place in France. A few decades later, authors from around the world were trying their hand at murder fiction, including Charles Dickens in the 1850s and 60s (Bleak House and The Mystery of Edwin Drood), American Anna K. Green, the first woman “whodunit” writer (The Leavenworth Case - 1878), and Australian Fergus Hume (Mystery of a Hansom Cab – 1886).
It was not until 1887 with Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet that the world was introduced to Sherlock Holmes, one of the most iconic fictional detectives ever created. After this initial novel and The Sign of Four, Holmes was transferred to a short-story series in the magazine Strand in 1891, in which he appeared monthly and quickly became a sensation. The specific characterization of Holmes changed over the years, specifically with his jump from long-form novel to short story. The overall plot of each story remained pretty consistent, usually featuring “a foreign secret society, engaged in a battle to the death with an absconding ex-member who is usually its victim but sometimes a scourge avenging its previous victims.”5 Holmes is typically seen working closely with his partner Dr. Watson, someone who matches Holmes’s intelligence but lacks his deductive skills. In the official Holmes canon, he has featured in four full-length novels and fifty-six short stories, all created by Doyle. The rise of Holmes’s popularity also came with it the “Age of Spoofery,” where most authors were trying their hand at detective/mystery fiction. Gaston Leroux’s Le Mystére de la Chambre Jaune (1907) is of particular note, as it directly influenced Agatha Christie, featuring dry humor and a commitment to the minutiae of its country-house setting.
1920-2022 – Part 2: Murder with a Side of Marple & Poirot
The aftermath of World War I saw the creation of The Mysterious Affair at Styles, the first mystery novel written by Agatha Christie in 1920. Christie’s main style of mystery writing revolved around freezing its action and dramatis personae in time and place, allowing the social group in crisis to develop slowly and with satisfying completeness. The main detective, Hercule Poirot, is a deviation from Sherlock Holmes, as “his character is less crucial to the overall effect than the pattern of shifting suspicion by which the case is unraveled.”6 Poirot searches for clues, interrogates the suspects, separates fact from fiction, and eventually solves the case. With this, Christie needed every character to have something to hide, even introducing a “double-buff,” with the most likely character written off early on by the reader, but by the end is revealed to be the culprit. As she played with the original formula, Christie experimented with an unreliable narrator in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), a first for the genre of murder fiction (see Crime Fiction above). Most of her stories take place in a country house or upper-middle-class village. In an attempt to mix up the formula again, Christie introduced the character of Miss Marple in The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930 (which is referenced in Curtains). Marple is different from Poirot and Holmes in that she is just an average upper-middle-class English citizen, not a member of the police or a private eye investigator. She took over the mantle in storytelling after Poirot, who featured in forty-seven full-length novels and short stories, and was featured in twelve full-length stories and at least six short-story collections.
It was not until 1950 with A Murder is Announced where Christie would begin to change her worldviews, moving away from the thought that the English village is a microcosm of society at large. This was largely in part due to the lasting effects of World War II. In a post-World War II society, many other authors attempted to legitimize the murder fiction genre, wanting to aim it at a more intellectual audience. The lead detectives in these stories are more established “insider” figures, instead of the outsiders Poirot and Miss Marple. Meanwhile in America, mystery fiction was being eclipsed by hard-boiled thrillers and private-eye detectives. This shift is a result of American ideals, especially with the use of teamwork (i.e., US police force) to drive towards a successful conclusion. Breaking away from the English themes of mystery fiction, the murder fiction genre began leaning towards a strong vigilante-style of action, drawing closer to noir fiction or hero thrillers. Christie’s last novel to feature Poirot, entitled Curtain, was written in 1975. This novel features callbacks to Christie’s first novel, Styles, as well as sees the death of Poirot, an ending that parallels Christie’s own life as she passed away a year later at the age of 85. The genre of murder mystery fiction is alive and well today but has evolved into many different forms and styles. While the differences may be subtle, the history of how each genre was created is fascinating to examine and explains why some forms are more successful than others. With the explosion of TV and the internet, most readers/viewers cannot get enough of murder fiction, from true crime podcasts to serial killer biopics. This obsession stems from the idea of intrigue, a sense of wondering what will happen next. There is no better story than one that keeps you guessing every step of the way, paired with a satisfying and rewarding ending.
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1 – Carl Darryl Malmgren, Anatomy of Murder: Mystery, Detective, and Crime Fiction, (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2001), 120.
2 - Malmgren, Anatomy, 123.
3 - Malmgren, Anatomy, 126.
4 - Malmgren, Anatomy, 130.
5 – Martin Priestman, “1: The Detective Whodunnit from Poe to the First World War.” In Crime Fiction: From Poe to the Present, (Devon, United Kingdom: Northcote; British Council, 2013), 16.
6 – Martin Priestman, “2: The Detective Whodunnit from Christie to the Present.” In Crime Fiction: From Poe to the Present, (Devon, United Kingdom: Northcote; British Council, 2013), 20.