Detective Fiction and The African Scene: From The Whodunit? To The Whydunit?

Introduction

v Introduction With only a few dissenting voices, it has now become an incontestable fact of literary history that the detective novel in all its ramifications … Thrillers, Spy, Crime and Mystery Novels… belongs to an inferior class of literature. Arthur G. Kennedy and Donald B. Sands (1960:61), to mention only one of several common cases, classify it under the section “Types and Sub literary Species,” in their work: A Concise Bibliography for Students of English. As R. Austin Freeman (1946:13-14), aptly summarises “it is dismissed contemptuously as outside the pale of literature…, a type of work produced by half-educated and wholly incompetent writers for the consumption by office boys, factory girls, and other persons devoid of culture and literary taste.” Edmund Wilson (1950: 234), one of the most uncompromising critics of the genre had practically the same disdain for every work that came under the label of detective fiction, the reputation of the writer in other literary circles notwithstanding. He declares (rather vehemently, perhaps) that: you cannot read such a book, you run through it to see the problem worked out; and you cannot become interested in the characters because they never can be allowed an existence of their own even in a flat two dimensions but have always to be contrived so that they can seem either reliable or sinister, depending on which quarter, at the moment, is to be baited for the reader’s suspicion. He is convinced that as a department of imaginative writing, the genre is completely dead. vi ...