The Expectations of Genre

Dennis Porter's new study of detective fiction is one of the finest critical and theoretical works on popular literature we are likely to have. Porter blends provocative theoretical speculations with shrewd practical analysis, as he treats the genre of detective fiction from multiple perspectives, including structuralism, formal analysis, psychoanalysis, socioculturel analysis, and reader-response criticism. He sets detective fiction against other popular genres—science fiction and romance—and also against mainstream fiction, to clarify, its distinctive features, limitations, and attractions.

Porter accounts lucidly and convincingly for the popularity of detective fiction, seeing the popular genres in general and detective fiction in particular as a "barometer of the society's ideological norms. . .that can provide important clues to the anxieties, aspirations, and constraints experienced by the mass audience." The constant concern of the book is to ascertain and explain how a popular literary genre caters to and generates reader pleasure, and how detective fiction, in particular, gives readers what they know, what they like, and what they want.

While detective fiction shares many of the characteristics of other fiction, including narrative summary, scenic description, representation of character, dialogue, and dramatic action, the genre follows a strict formula in the specific manner in which certain elements appear: discovery of a crime, arrival of the detective, an investigation with various false leads, an identification, an escape, a pursuit, an unmasking, and an arrest, followed by a final explanation of how the detective resolved the crime. Porter notes, interestingly, that readers gain a sense of a book's genre even before they read a page. Seeing the name "Agatha Christie" or "Ian Fleming," or seeing a cover's color and design, is often enough to set up expectations as to what kinds of pleasures the work promises. Porter argues that such efficiency and immediacy in establishing the generic contract (between author and reader, between publisher and reader) is an essential feature of detective fiction generally. Something similar happens of course, with other popular genres also. To take just one example, the formalized openings and endings of many children's series books, as well as their formalized covers and blurbs, efficiently establish such a contract.

According to Porter, the best writers in the detective genre sustain their readers' interest by delaying gratification, heightening suspense, eliciting fantasies, and manipulating emotions. He describes the art of narrative as an art of timing—of witholding, concealing, and misleading—of what he calls a "tactical retreat before an advancing reader." The writer's task is to advance the story, but not too quickly—to preserve the delicate balance between revelation and concealment. Description and dialogue, Porter argues, delay the resolution of the plot as they move that plot along. They retard the action as they advance it, creating suspense as they suspend the action. Description and dialogue serve, thus, more than a representational or mimetic function: they are also rhetorical strategies that work to conceal and reveal information as well as to orient the reader's feelings.

Porter argues that the reader-centered approach he employs shows how detective fiction engages readers because it is interested in what happens as they read, not in what occurs after they have finished. Porter sees detective stories as "throwaway" literature, as self-consuming artifacts that disappear as they are read, as works one avoids rereading because one already knows what has happened and why. Even though the genre offers the attractions of the vindication of reason and the affirmation of moral order, its primary appeal is to hedonism, to a pleasurable arousal of its readers' emotions.

But Porter also recognizes other attributes and attractions of the genre. He suggests, for example, that part of its popularity derives from the way it exploits the patterns of myth, folk-tale, and fairy tale, particularly by relying on fundamental universal oppositions: innocence-evil, wealth-poverty, beauty-ugliness, youth-age, ignorance-wisdom, cunning-gullibility, familiarity-strangeness. He suggests that the heroes of detective fiction are cultural stereotypes embodying attributes and attitudes valued by readers of a particular...