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Reviewed by:
  • Crime Fictions
  • Victoria Best
Crime Fictions. Edited by Andrea Goulet and Susanna Lee. (Yale French Studies, 108). New Haven, Yale University Press, 2005. 191 pp. Pb $22.00.

The possibilities inherent in exploring the complex crossover genre of crime fiction opened up an exciting area of literary criticism that has now been going strong for several decades. This edited volume shows both the advantages and constraints of what is now a rich but well-covered area of analytical interest. In their Introduction, Goulet and Lee suggest that the diverse collection of essays can be united by means of a common concern with the underlying political agenda of crime fiction, or as they elegantly state it: 'the identification of crime fiction as a crucial locus of psychosocial drama, as a forum for examining ethical dilemmas, and as a shifting index of contemporary politics'. Whilst this is most probably the case, the initial impression given to the reader by the essays emphasizes instead a series of related concerns that crop up repeatedly: a fascination with the effects and possibilities occasioned by train travel, the power and the limitations of visuality, the paradoxical imbrication of cold, bloodless reason and murderous passion that fuels not just the narrative of the crime but the very work of analysis itself. As ever with a [End Page 410] collected edition, the quality of the contributions varies, but there are some particularly accomplished chapters: Robert Rushing uses to excellent effect Žižek's claim that detective stories 'realize' our antisocial impulses whilst carefully projecting them onto someone else. The outcome of this dynamic is bound up in the final 'arrest', in which the spreading stain of guilt is temporarily boundaried, and the literal arrest in the text is echoed by a libidinal quiescence or stasis in the identifying reader. Equally rewarding is Claire Gorrara's exploration of Todorov's categories of memory in relation to Holocaust-influenced texts by Didier Daeninckx and Thierry Jonquet. Other chapters work to extend the limits of the field of enquiry, notably Pam Higginson's informative exploration of francophone African crime fiction, and Susanna Lee's entirely persuasive comparison of the roman noir to punk music. There are, however, some pitfalls emerging from the very maturity of the critical genre. The notion of crime as an 'untellable tale' seems to have passed into a kind of unreflexive shorthand. In Uri Eisenzweig's ambitious and intriguing comparison of the duel with the terrorist act, the 'untellable' nature of the tale seems to refer to an excessive adherence to literary codes, as well as the subversion of those codes, and the radical disjunction of the 'actual' event from the later narration. Overall, crime fiction is confusingly represented in this volume as at once formulaic and utterly subversive, open and resistant to powerful tropes, and indefinably diverse; and it can be too easy for literary critics, much like fictional detectives, to become caught up in either the detail or the overview at the expense of what might prove to be illuminatingly significant. However, these are small quibbles and do not detract from the fundamental value and interest of this wide-ranging volume. [End Page 411]

Victoria Best
St John'S College, Cambridge
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