Foul and Fair Play: Reading Genre in Classic Detective Fiction by Marty Roth (review)

212 Canadian Review of American Studies Revue canad1enne d'etudes amencames Marty Roth. Foul and Fair Play: Reading Genre in Classic Detective Fiction. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press. Pp. xv + 284 including bibliography. The academic study of genre fiction is very much on the rise these days, as students of literature find themselves fruitfully investigating and crossing the uncertain boundary separating literature from its other-the popular fictions enjoyed by large numbers of readers both within and without academic or intellectual circles. Foul and Fair Play: Reading Genre in Classic Detective Fiction is essentially a descriptive work rather than an analytical one, though, tracing the boundaries and characteristics of the genre underlying and informing works that might be identified as mysteries, detective novels, and spy thrillers (Roth wisely eschews the more elaborate categories outlined by Julian Symons in favour of this less cumbersome trio). Early chapters explore some of the connections between detective fiction and other popular genres; from there Roth moves on to treatments of various conventions of the detective genre itself: the detective figure and the investigation; the crime, the criminal, and the community; the solution; the myth of the criminal underworld, and so on. Roth describes his aim, in part, as involving an "attempt to reread detective fiction in such a way as to avoid valorizing individual works and declaring them minor masterpieces of popular fiction and yet still find the genre full of the resonance, shadow, and play that I would prefer not to pack into any particular text" (xi). The large number of primary works are studied not for themselves but for what they disclose about the "self-contained system" (xiii), the genre in which they are seen to have a place. This emphasis upon the whole rather than its parts has implications both positive and negative for Roth's study. On the plus side, Roth's approach draws upon a very wide range of "classic" (mostly pre-1960) mysteries, spy novels, and detective novels, and by doing so illuminates some of the ritual elements of the genre, the recurring motifs that contribute to its definition. He clearly knows this territory well and the book benefits from his encyclopedic knowledge. As a reader who enjoys and values genre fiction, I found myself coming away from Foul and Fair Play with a fuller sense of the genre and generous supply of primary and secondary materials for future perusal. However, the downside to Roth's strong emphasis upon genre at the expense of particular texts is that it results in an unsatisfactory blending and flattening of similar but distinct works into one generic pancake. "I have Book Reviews 213 tried to read my 138 fictions as if they were indeed a single story," says Roth in his preface, "as if no individual telling mattered that much 11 (xii). Herein lies a problem. That writers observe generic conventions, however scrupulously, does not necessarily mean that they are speaking with one voice, but the levelling approach taken here often suggests just that. Texts by writers as widely divergent in their circumstances and interests as Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Sayers, G. K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie, and Rex Stout sing in chorus where they might at the very least be expected to produce the odd moment of cacophony. Of course, a study of genre that surveys such a range of works cannot afford to stop and smell every rose along its path, but there is more to this slighting of particular authors and texts than the simple demands of necessity . Underlying the implication of uniformity among these writers lies a distinction between popular and literary writing suggested by Poe and cited with approval by Roth: that popular fiction leads us after reading to think solely of the book (or, in Roth's case, the genre-that "single story" comprising all of the works he treats), while art fiction reminds us of its author, the artist presiding over its creation. This given distinction between art fiction and popular fiction (or highbrow and lowbrow, literature and genre fiction, and so on)-the implicit assumption that one can identify a work as always and everywhere belonging to one...