Scènes de crimes
(Crime Scenes: Studies on Contemporary Crime Novels)
Norbert Spehner
Introduction
Corpus delictiThe idea behind this book was to gather my articles about crime fiction and my reviews of detective novels published in La Presse, Alibis, Entre les Lignes and other publications where I had been wreaking havoc as a specialized critic for many years. Hence the initial title, Chroniques policières (Crime Chronicles) (since in French "chronique" can mean a newspaper column as well as a "chronicle"). But when I began working on it, I soon realized that stringing together dozens of disparate texts was not enough to make a coherent book. The idea therefore evolved, as well as the approach. The title was changed, the initial structure was revised and you are now holding the final result. It is still based on my previous essays, but they have been rewritten, rearranged and gathered into chapters with specific themes, with the addition of significant amounts of new material.
Crime Scenes (An Investigation of the Contemporary Crime Novel) is the first part of what might eventually become a series, the goal of which will be to provide a descriptive, analytical and critical panorama of the crime novel as we enter the 21st century. Both a reading guide and a critical and thematic analysis, this book is composed of eight chapters that successively explore various facets of the genre, various "crime scenes": essential components or sub-genres (police procedural, thriller, mystery, suspense), Canadian geography (the Quebec crime novel and the English Canadian crime novel), and thematic aspects (crime novels written by women, crime novels and war, the crime novel and westerns). An introductory chapter attempts to clarify the standard terminology of crime novels, describe their numerous variations and map their development as completely as possible as we begin the third millennium.
Each chapter is supplemented by a list of reading suggestions for those who wish to delve deeper into the subject. The book ends with another bibliography that lists international studies (literature, authors, characters, movies, television) that have been published since the beginning of the century.
The book is not, however, intended to be an academic work. Although it is well documented, Crime Scenes is intended for the general public of crime novel readers as well as recognized experts. It is a subjective, very personal tour through the ins and outs of a popular genre that has become considerably more complex in the last thirty years and that more and more often represents many of the bestsellers in bookstores. In recent years, it has supplanted science fiction and historical novels, taking the place of the great sagas à la Michener and company, and is a serious threat to romance fiction, a field it has even begun to invade in the guise of romantic thrillers, a sweet-and-sour hybrid that I don't much care for!
While, obviously, there is abundant and wide-ranging production, with new authors regularly coming to the fore throughout the western world, it is also true that a significant proportion of the published books is of poor quality, repetitious, with themes that are difficult to keep fresh (serial killers, damsels in distress, Dan Brown imitators, romance dressed in black, and so on).
As a reviewer, I've always given precedence to crime novels that are really worth reading. Given the astounding number of titles published each year, why should anyone waste their time on books of little value, when it is physically impossible to do justice to all the quality books? Sometimes, however, you feel obliged to warn the readers about certain works, especially when they are written by authors who are considered to be "safe bets" or when they benefit from so much publicity overkill that it seems impossible that the book could be bad or second-rate. And yet... Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code may well have sold in the millions, it is still a second-rate novel, a shoddy thriller with many shortcomings. Henning Mankell, Michael Connelly and Ian Rankin are among my favourite writers, but they also sometimes publish novels that are clearly not as good as their other works. The reviewer's responsibility is to show the flaws, to separate the wheat from the chaff and to warn the readers who trust him that such and such a book is not very good. Of course, this same critic's opinion is always highly subjective, even though it may be based on a long reading experience, an unquestionable familiarity with the genre and a knowledge that is hopefully trustworthy. It is always in the end just one very personal point of view among others. He must therefore be given the benefit of the doubt as well as the right to err, even though he is always sure he is right (which is probably not the case...). For, as Joe E. Brown tells Jack Lemmon in the memorable ending of Some Like It Hot: "Nobody's perfect!"
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Corpus delicti, p. 1
- Crime Scene 1
- Crime novel? You said crime novel? p. 5
- Crime Scene 2
- About the true "crime novel": The police procedural, p. 23
- Crime Scene 3
- Thrillers, suspense novels and mysteries, p. 53
- Crime Scene 4
- Crime novels written by women, p. 89
- Crime Scene 5
- War crimes, p. 125
- Crime Scene 6
- Westerns and crime novels, p. 163
- Crime Scene 7
- The case of the Quebec crime novel, p. 179
- Crime Scene 8
- Crimes in English Canada, p. 223
- The Academy of Crime, p. 251
- Index of names, p. 273
© 2007 Éditions Alire & Norbert Spehner
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