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Crime Fiction – Sub-Genres

Crime Fiction

General Definition of Genre

The crime fiction genre deals with crimes. Beyond that simple definition, it deals with detection of
crimes, criminals, and their motives.

Basic Structure

A crime fiction story has a crime (usually a murder), an investigation of the crime, and ends with the
outcome of the investigation. Most often the outcome ends with the criminal’s arrest or death.

Sub-Genres of Crime Fiction

Amateur Detective: A mystery solved by an amateur, who generally has some profession or affiliation
that provides ready access to information about the crime. Writers: Alan Bradley, Ellery Adams,
Diane Mott Davidson, Terri L. Austin, Diane Vallere, Larissa Reinhart, Kendel Lynn, and Anna Celeste
Burke.

Classic Whodunit: A crime that is solved by a detective, from the detective’s point of view, with all
clues available to the reader. The stories feature a mysterious death, a closed circle of suspects who
all have motives and reasonable opportunity to commit the crime. Writers: Agatha Christie, Arthur
Conan Doyle, Patricia Wentworth, and John Dickson Carr.

Comic: A mystery played for laughs, featuring a bumbling detective who is grossly unskilled, but
solves the crime anyway. Writers: Jane Jeffry, Mark Schweizer, Alesia Holliday, Joyce Lavene, Dorothy
Gilman, and Eric Shepherd.

Courtroom drama: A mystery that takes place through the justice system, often the efforts of a
defense attorney to prove the innocence of his client by finding the real culprit. Writers: Kenneth
Eade, John Grisham, Michael Connelly, William Landay, Jodi Picoult, David Guterson, and John Scalzi.
Cozy: A mystery usually set in a middle-class environment in a small town where all the suspects are
present and familiar with one another. The murder is solved by friendly police, an often eccentric
private detective and a dopey side-kick, or an amateur sleuth. There is no graphic description of the
crime or gruesome details of the murder. Writers: Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Elizabeth
Daly.

Forensic: A mystery solved through the forensics lab, featuring much detail and scientific procedure.
The lead character is usually a woman who is a scientist or pathologist. Writers: Jeffery Deaver,
Patricia Cornwell, and Kathy Reichs.

Hard-boiled: A mystery that contains graphic and gruesome details of the crimes committed, which
are often violent or sexual in their nature. These stories often feature psychopaths and serial kills and
have detectives with deeply flawed characters. Writers: Raymond Chandler, John D. MacDonald, Sue
Grafton, and Bill Pronzini.

Heists and Capers: A sub-genre which focuses on the planning and execution of a crime, told from
the criminal’s perspective.

Legal thriller: A thriller in which a lawyer confronts enemies outside as well as inside the courtroom,
generally putting his own life at risk. Writers: Michael Fredrickson, Steve Martini, John Grisham, and
Harper Lee.

Medical thriller: A thriller featuring medical personnel, whether battling a legitimate medical threat
such as a world-wide virus, or the illegal or immoral use of medical technology. Writers: Robin Cooke,
Michael Crichton, and Tess Gerritsen.

Police procedural: A thriller that has the detective doing things police officers do as they work their
way through a case. Writers: Ed McBain, P.D. James, and Bartholomew Gill.

Private Eye: A mystery focused on the independent snoop-for-hire. These have evolved from tough-
guy “hard-boiled” detectives to the more professional operators of today. These stories feature more
psychology and less action. Writers: Ross Macdonald, Walter Mosley, Sara Paretsky, and Robert B.
Parker.

Psychological suspense: A mystery focused on the intricacies of the crime and what motivated the
perpetrator to commit them. Writers: Dennis Lehane, Joy Fielding, S. J. Watson, Thomas Harris,
Gillian Flynn, Daphne DuMaurier, Lois Duncan, William Landay, Harlan Coben, and Scott Smith.
Tartan noir: A sub-genre with a Scottish heritage. The stories are hard-boiled with main characters
that are not very likeable, often deeply flawed and world weary. They usually suffer from personal
crises during the course of the story and the crises form a major part of the story. Writers: Lin
Anderson, Christopher Brookmyre, Alex Gray, Allan Guthrie, Alanna Knight, Stuart MacBride, Val
McDermid, Denise Mina, Ian Rankin, and Manda Scott.

Thriller: A mystery with a basic set of structural components: threats to the social order, heroes and
villains, and deduction and resolution. Writers: Robert Ludlum, Lee Child, Gillian Flynn, and Dennis
Lehane.

SOURCES:

Genres of Mystery and Crime Fiction: http://libguides.enc.edu/mysteryfiction/genres

Nine Examples of Sub-Genres in Crime Fiction: http://writerswrite.co.za/nine-examples-of-sub-

The Tartan Noir webpage: http://tartannoir.com/

Precursors to Crime Fiction

Fifth Century BCE- “Oedipus Rex” by Sophocles

This play is often thought to be the first detective story in all of literature as Oedipus uses evidence to
try to uncover the murderer, which is ultimately revealed to be himself.

Crime fiction, detective story, murder mystery, mystery novel, and police novel are terms used to
describe narratives that centre on criminal acts and especially on the investigation, either by an
amateur or a professional detective, of a crime, often a murder.[1] It is usually distinguished from
mainstream fiction and other genres such as historical fiction or science fiction, but the boundaries
are indistinct. Crime fiction has multiple subgenres,[2] including detective fiction (such as the
whodunit), courtroom drama, hard-boiled fiction, and legal thrillers. Most crime drama focuses on
crime investigation and does not feature the courtroom. Suspense and mystery are key elements
that are nearly ubiquitous to the genre. The One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights) contains
the earliest known examples of crime fiction.[3] One example of a story of this genre is the medieval
Arabic tale of "The Three Apples", one of the tales narrated by Scheherazade in the Arabian Nights. In
this tale, a fisherman discovers a heavy locked chest along the Tigris River, and he sells it to the
Abbasid Caliph, Harun al-Rashid, who then has the chest broken open, only to find inside it the dead
body of a young woman who was cut into pieces. Harun orders his vizier, Ja'far ibn Yahya, to solve
the crime and find the murderer within three days, or be executed if he fails his assignment.[4] The
story has been described as a "whodunit" murder mystery[5] with multiple plot twists.[6] The story
has detective fiction elements.[7]

Two other Arabian Nights stories, "The Merchant and the Thief" and "Ali Khwaja", contain two of the
earliest fictional detectives, who uncover clues and present evidence to catch or convict a criminal,
with the story unfolding in normal chronology and the criminal already being known to the audience.
The latter involves a climax where titular detective protagonist Ali Khwaja presents evidence from
expert witnesses in a court.[8] "The Hunchback's Tale" is another early courtroom drama, presented
as a suspenseful comedy.[3]

The earliest known modern crime fiction is E. T. A. Hoffmann's 1819 novella "Mademoiselle de
Scudéri". Also, Thomas Skinner Sturr's anonymous Richmond, or stories in the life of a Bow Street
Officer is from 1827; another early full-length short story in the genre is The Rector of Veilbye by
Danish author Steen Steensen Blicher, published in 1829. A further example of crime detection can
be found in Letitia Elizabeth Landon's story The Knife, published in 1832, although here the truth
remains in doubt at the end.

Better known are the earlier dark works of Edgar Allan Poe.[9] His brilliant and eccentric detective C.
Auguste Dupin, a forerunner of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, appeared in works such as
"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" (1842), and "The Purloined
Letter" (1844). With his Dupin stories, Poe provided the framework for the classic detective story.
The detective's unnamed companion is the narrator of the stories and a prototype for the character
of Dr. Watson in later Sherlock Holmes stories.[10]

Wilkie Collins' epistolary novel The Woman in White was published in 1860, while The Moonstone
(1868) is often thought to be his masterpiece. French author Émile Gaboriau's Monsieur Lecoq (1868)
laid the groundwork for the methodical, scientifically minded detective.

Cover art for 'The mystery of a hansom cab', written by Fergus W. Hume.

The evolution of locked-room mysteries was one of the landmarks in the history of crime fiction. The
Sherlock Holmes mysteries of Doyle's are said to have been singularly responsible for the huge
popularity of this genre. A precursor was Paul Féval, whose series Les Habits Noirs (1862–67)
features Scotland Yard detectives and criminal conspiracies. The best-selling crime novel of the 19th
century was Fergus Hume's The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886), set in Melbourne, Australia.
The evolution of the print mass media in the United Kingdom and the United States in the latter half
of the 19th century was crucial in popularising crime fiction and related genres. Literary 'variety'
magazines, such as Strand, McClure's, and Harper's, quickly became central to the overall structure
and function of popular fiction in society, providing a mass-produced medium that offered cheap,
illustrated publications that were essentially disposable.

Like the works of many other important fiction writers of his day—e.g. Wilkie Collins and Charles
Dickens—Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories first appeared in serial form in the monthly
Strand in the United Kingdom. The series quickly attracted a wide and passionate following on both
sides of the Atlantic, and when Doyle killed off Holmes in "The Final Problem", the public outcry was
so great, and the publishing offers for more stories so attractive, that he was reluctantly forced to
resurrect him.

In Italy, early translations of English and American stories and local works were published in cheap
yellow covers, thus the genre was baptized with the term libri gialli or yellow books. The genre was
outlawed by the Fascists during WWII, but exploded in popularity after the war, especially influenced
by the American hard-boiled school of crime fiction. A group of mainstream Italian writers emerged,
who used the detective format to create an antidetective or postmodern novel in which the
detectives are imperfect, the crimes are usually unsolved, and clues are left for the reader to
decipher. Famous writers include Leonardo Sciascia, Umberto Eco, and Carlo Emilio Gadda.[11]

In Spain, The Nail and Other Tales of Mystery and Crime was published by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón
in 1853. Crime fiction in Spain (also curtailed in Francoist Spain) took on some special characteristics
that reflected the culture of the country. The Spanish writers emphasized the corruption and
ineptitude of the police, and depicted the authorities and the wealthy in very negative terms.[11]

In China, modern crime fiction was first developed from translations of foreign works from the 1890s.
[12] Cheng Xiaoqing, considered the "Grand Master" of 20th-century Chinese detective fiction,
translated Sherlock Holmes into classical and vernacular Chinese. In the late 1910s, Cheng began
writing his own detective fiction series, Sherlock in Shanghai, mimicking Conan Doyle's style, but
relating better to a Chinese audience.[13] During the Mao era, crime fiction was suppressed and
mainly Soviet-styled and anticapitalist. In the post-Mao era, crime fiction in China focused on
corruption and harsh living conditions during the Mao era (such as the Cultural Revolution).[11]

Psychology

Crime fiction provides unique psychological impacts on readers and enables them to become
mediated witnesses through identifying with eyewitnesses of a crime. Readers speak of crime fiction
as a mode of escapism to cope with other aspects of their lives.[14] Crime fiction provides distraction
from readers’ personal lives through a strong narrative at a comfortable distance.[14] Forensic crime
novels have been referred to as "distraction therapy", proposing that crime fiction can improve
mental health and be considered as a form of treatment to prevent depression.[14]
Categories

Detective fiction is a subgenre of crime fiction and mystery fiction in which an investigator or a
detective—either professional, amateur, or retired—investigates a crime, often murder.

The cozy mystery is a subgenre of detective fiction in which profanity, sex, and violence are
downplayed or treated humorously.

The whodunit, the most common form of detective fiction, features a complex, plot-driven story in
which the reader is provided with clues from which the identity of the perpetrator of the crime may
be deduced before the solution is revealed at the end of the book.

The historical whodunit is also a subgenre of historical fiction. The setting of the story and the crime
have some historical significance.

The locked-room mystery is a specialized kind of a whodunit in which the crime is committed under
apparently impossible circumstances, such as a locked room, which no intruder could have entered
or left.

The American hardboiled school is distinguished by the unsentimental portrayal of sex and violence;
the sleuth usually also confronts danger and engages in violence.

The police procedural is a story in which the detective is a member of the police, thus the activities of
a police force are usually convincingly depicted.

Forensic crime fiction is similar to the police procedural. The investigator whom the reader follows is
usually a medical examiner or pathologist; they must use the forensic evidence left on the body and
at the crime scene to catch the killer. This subgenre was first introduced by Patricia Cornwell.

In a legal thriller, the major characters are lawyers and their employees, and they become involved in
proving their cases.

In spy novels, the major characters are spies, usually working for an intelligence agency.

The caper story and the criminal novel are stories told from the point of view of the criminals.

The psychological thriller or psychological suspense, a specific subgenre of the thriller, also
incorporates elements from detective fiction, as the protagonist must solve the mystery of the
psychological conflict presented in these stories.

The parody or spoof uses humor or sarcasm.

The crime thriller has the central characters involved in crime, either in its investigation, as the
perpetrator, or less commonly, a victim.

Pseudonymous authors

In the history of crime fiction, some authors have been reluctant to publish their novels under their
real names. More recently, some publish pseudonymously because of the belief that since the large
booksellers are aware of their historical sales figures, and command a certain degree of influence
over publishers, the only way to "break out" of their current advance numbers is to publish as
someone with no track record.
In the late 1930s and 1940s, British County Court Judge Arthur Alexander Gordon Clark (1900–1958)
published a number of detective novels under the alias Cyril Hare, in which he made use of his
profoundly extensive knowledge of the English legal system. When he was still young and unknown,
award-winning British novelist Julian Barnes (born 1946) published some crime novels under the alias
Dan Kavanagh. Other authors take delight in cherishing their alter egos; Ruth Rendell (1930–2015)
writes one sort of crime novels as Ruth Rendell and another type as Barbara Vine; John Dickson Carr
also used the pseudonym Carter Dickson. Author Evan Hunter (which itself was a pseudonym) wrote
his crime fiction under the name of Ed McBain.

Availability

Quality

As with any other entity, quality of a crime fiction book is not in any meaningful proportion to its
availability. Some of the crime novels generally regarded as the finest, including those regularly
chosen by experts as belonging to the best 100 crime novels ever written (see bibliography), have
been out of print since their first publication, which often dates back to the 1920s or '30s. The bulk of
books that can be found today on the shelves labelled "Crime" consists of recent first publications
usually no older than a few years.

Classics and bestsellers

Furthermore, only a select few authors have achieved the status of "classics" for their published
works. A classic is any text that can be received and accepted universally, because they transcend
context. A popular, well-known example is Agatha Christie, whose texts, originally published between
1920 and her death in 1976, are available in UK and US editions in all English-speaking nations.
Christie's works, particularly featuring detectives Hercule Poirot or Miss Jane Marple, have given her
the title the Queen of Crime, and made her one of the most important and innovative writers in the
development of the genre. Her most famous novels include Murder on the Orient Express (1934),
Death on the Nile (1937), and the world's best-selling mystery And Then There Were None (1939).
[15]

Other less successful, contemporary authors who are still writing have seen reprints of their earlier
works, due to current overwhelming popularity of crime fiction texts among audiences. One example
is Val McDermid, whose first book appeared as far back as 1987; another is Florida-based author Carl
Hiaasen, who has been publishing books since 1981, all of which are readily available.

Revivals

From time to time, publishing houses decide, for commercial purposes, to revive long-forgotten
authors, and reprint one or two of their more commercially successful novels. Apart from Penguin
Books, which for this purpose have resorted to their old green cover and dug out some of their
vintage authors. Pan started a series in 1999 entitled "Pan Classic Crime", which includes a handful of
novels by Eric Ambler, but also American Hillary Waugh's Last Seen Wearing .... In 2000, Edinburgh-
based Canongate Books started a series called "Canongate Crime Classics" —both whodunnits and
roman noir about amnesia and insanity—and other novels. However, books brought out by smaller
publishers such as Canongate Books are usually not stocked by the larger bookshops and overseas
booksellers. The British Library has also (since 2012) starting republishing "lost" crime classics, with
the collection referred to on their website as "British Library Crime Classics series".

Sometimes, older crime novels are revived by screenwriters and directors rather than publishing
houses. In many such cases, publishers then follow suit and release a so-called "film tie-in" edition
showing a still from the movie on the front cover and the film credits on the back cover of the book—
yet another marketing strategy aimed at those cinemagoers who may want to do both: first read the
book and then watch the film (or vice versa). Recent examples include Patricia Highsmith's The
Talented Mr. Ripley (originally published in 1955), Ira Levin's Sliver (1991), with the cover photograph
depicting a steamy sex scene between Sharon Stone and William Baldwin straight from the 1993
movie, and again, Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho (1991). Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, though,
have launched what they call "Bloomsbury Film Classics"—a series of original novels on which feature
films were based. This series includes, for example, Ethel Lina White's novel The Wheel Spins (1936),
which Alfred Hitchcock—before he went to Hollywood—turned into a much-loved movie entitled
The Lady Vanishes (1938), and Ira Levin's (born 1929) science-fiction thriller The Boys from Brazil
(1976), which was filmed in 1978.

Older novels can often be retrieved from the ever-growing Project Gutenberg database.