Detective Fiction

BOOK REVIEWS the two color photographs of the Galway Races ("At Galway Races") seem a waste of the more expensive medium. But in main Le Garsmeur has done a superb job of evoking the Ireland of Yeats's time. The photographs begin with Sligo and progress to Coole Park, Thoor Ballylee, "Land of Heart's Desire" ("significant places in his rural Ireland"), and Dublin, though of course the book ends with the obligatory views of the grave and tombstone, the latter with its miscapitalized epitaph from "Under Ben Bulben." A twelve-page introduction by Bernard McCabe passes over the "Land of Heart's Desire" but offers a solid commentary on Yeats's interaction with the other venues. There is some de rigueur chastisement of Yeats for his attitude towards the Big House, McCabe arguing that "It is hard to accept now, this vision of underpaid servants and labourers being contentedly bird-like and tree-like"; and there are a few slips both here and in the two-page chronology. For instance, Yeats did not meet Lady Gregory "in literary Dublin in 1897" but rather in London, earlier (perhaps as early as 1894); and the Cuala Press would never have published a work with such a barbaric title as Essays 1931-6. But on balance Seamus Heaney's dust-jacket endorsement seems appropriate: "Bernard McCabe's introduction is an affectionate and skilful illumination of the space between the visionary Ireland of Yeats's poems and the Ireland visible in Alain Le Garsmeur's photographs." W. B. Yeats: Images of Ireland is thus a valuable addition to the collection of any Yeatsian, reminding those who have visited Ireland of the concreteness of Yeats's vision and enticing those who have not made the crossing to book passage. Richard J. Finneran University of Tennessee, Knoxville Detective Fiction Ronald G. Walker and June M. Frazer, eds. The Cunning Craft. An Essays in Literature Book. Macomb: Western Illinois University, 1990. vii + 203 pp. Paper $12.00 IN AN ESSAY ENTITLED "The Professor and the Detective," published in the Atlantic Monthly in April 1929, and reprinted in Howard Haycraft's The Art of the Mystery Story (1946), Marjorie Nicolson wrote, "Yes, the detective story does constitute escape; but it is escape not from life but from literature." The authors of these essays, like many other critics since Nicolson, beg to differ. For them, "the detective story" serves 537 ELT : VOLUME 35:4 1992 as a literary paradigm, a privileged site for the observation and analysis of such essential features of the literary event as narrativity (Sweeney), genre (Lovitt, Scheick, WaId, Hall), the dynamics of the reading process (Dove), textual instability (Creswell, Farrell), intertextuality and literary history (Birns and Birns, Christianson, Dettmar, Ewert), the social content of literary creation (Woods), and the question of gendered writing (Reddy). These scholar-critics are members of what I would call, bending chronology in a few cases, the third generation of commentators on detective fiction. Unlike the polemicists of the early part of the century (Chesterton, Sayers, Wilson, Auden, et al.), they have little interest in attacking or defending the genre. Unlike the work of such writers as Cawelti, Porter, Holquist, Heilbrun, Jameson, and D. A. Miller, who not only accepted the genre's importance, but demonstrated for the first time its responsiveness to sustained critical attention, their efforts lack the excitement of a truly original endeavor. Rather than breaking new ground, the writers in this volume perform the important work of consolidating established positions, elaborating on their implications, and demonstrating their relevance to individual texts and bodies of work. These writers are for the most part literary rather than cultural critics, and most of their essays are based on one of two essentially literary (and undoubtedly correct) assumptions: that the texts with which they concern themselves are in some way self-reflexive, commenting on their own status as a certain kind of discourse; or that they are part of one or more generic or historical classifications, whether modernist (Birns and Birns), or postmodern (Ewert), formal detective novel (Lovitt), ethical romance (Schneick), or anti-romance (Hall). Of the essays based on literary self-reflexivity, S. E. Sweeney's discussion of the...