1. Crime and Fiction Session One: Introduction

2. Agenda The programme The conventions of crime fiction are common knowledge Crime fiction is the narrative of narratives

3. The Programme  Primary literature: –Graham Greene, Brighton Rock –Tom Stoppard, The Real Inspector Hound –Tibor Fischer, The Thought Gang –Martin Amis, Night Train  Realism, Modernism, Postmodernism, Now  Fiction with narrative traits

4. Graham Greene, Brighton Rock  Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him. With his inky fingers and his bitten nails, his manner cynical an dnervous, anybody could tell he didn’t belong – belong to the early summer sun, the cool Whitsun wind off the sea, the holiday crowd. They came by train from Victoria every five minutes, rocked down Queens Road standing on the tops of the little local trams, stepped off in bewildered multitudes into the fresh and glittering air:… (3)

5. Tom Stoppard, The Real Inspector Hound

6. Tibor Fischer, The Thought Gang  The only advice I can offer, should you wake up vertiginously in a strange flat, with a thoroughly installed hangover, without any of your clothing, without any recollection of how you got there, with the police sledgehammering down the door to the accompaniment of excited dogs, while you are surrounded by bales of lavishly-produced magazines featuring children in adult acts, the only advice I can offer is to try be good-humoured and polite. (1)

7. Martin Amis, Night Train  I am a police. That may sound like an unusual statement – or an unusual construction. But it’s a parlance we have. Among ourselves, we would never say I am a policeman or I am a policewoman or I am a police officer. We would just say I am a police. I am a police. I am a police and my name is Detective Mike Hoolihan. And I am a woman, also. (1)

8. Common knowledge Crime fiction is everywhere: books, television, movies, computer games Examples of crime fiction from each of the above media? Transmedial similarities and differences. What do the stories, movies, tv-series, computer games have in common? What varies?

10.  TUSCALOOSA, Ala. Feb 15, 2005 — A lawsuit claims the video game "Grand Theft Auto" led a teenager to shoot two police officers and a dispatcher to death in 2003, mirroring violent acts depicted in the popular game.

12. Literary Fiction and Crime  Susan Glaspell, Trifles  LeRoi Jones, Dutchman  Harold Pinter, The Dumb Waiter  Salman Rushdie, ”The Prophet’s Hair”

13. Literary Fiction and Crime  Gothic fiction  Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations.  Edgar Allen Poe,  Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose  Brett Easton Ellis, American Psycho  Ian McEwan, Atonement, Saturday  Martin Amis, London Fields  Paul Auster, The New York Trillogy  Peter Carey, The True History of the Kelly Gang.

14. Crime-free Fiction?  Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice  Thomas Hardy, ”On the Western Circuit”  Jack London, ”The Law of Life”  Stephen Crane, ”The Open Boat”  Virginia Woolf, ”The Mark on the Wall”

15. Crime fiction as narrative paradigm  There’s another sense in which crime fiction is everywhere.  The literature of detection is “paradigmatic of literary narrative itself” (Marcus 2003: 245), it forms “the narrative of naratives” (Brooks 1984: 25)

16. Crime fiction as narrative paradigm  Inquest: the present work of detection that we read about in order to learn about the past story of the  Crime  Sjuzet, plot, discourse:  Fabula, story

17. Literary Narrative and the Paradigm og Detection  Story and plot (progression, regression, digression)  Attitudes to the paradigm:  Acceptance: realism.  Rejection: Virginia Woolf and the modernists.  Ambiguity, ambivalence. Postmodernism and after