Detective Fiction & "High" Literature

ELT : VOLUME 35:2 1992 In May, 1910, however, Conrad did join such writers and social reformers as Laurence Housman in signing a "memorial" urging the Prime Minister to support the Women's Suffrage Bill. On the whole, however, Conrad did not share the optimism of many reformers; and in 1908 Arthur Symons sent Conrad a draft of a complimentary article that would not appear until 1915: "Like a spider in his web, he throws out tentacles into the darkness.... At the centre of his web sits an elemental sarcasm discussing human affairs with a calm and cynical ferocity. . . . Behind that sarcasm crouches some ghastly influence, outside humanity some powerful devil, invisible, poisonous, irresistible, spawning evil for his delight." An admittedly surprised Conrad responded to Symons that he did not know that he had "a lieart of darkness' and an 'unlawful soul'." Conrad continues: "I did not know that I delighted in cruelty and that the shedding of blood was my obsession. The fact is that I am really a much simpler person. Death is a fact, and violent death is a fact too. In the simplicity of my heart, I tried to realize these facts when they came in." The extent to which Symons's comments—or Conrad's reply—are more accurate is perhaps a fitting question to have in mind when you read Letters JV. Ray Stevens _________________________ Western Maryland College Detective Fiction & "High" Literature Martin Priestman. Detective Fiction and Literature: The Figure on the Carpet. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991. xiii + 217 pp. $35.00 TREADING where others have walked before, but with his own innate purpose, Martin Priestman sets out in quest of the "missing link" between "high" literature and "low" detective fiction, thereby implying that such a link exists and that it is worth one's while to make the search. He does this in part through a direct comparison of the detective text with the so-called literary one, in part by exploring themes and contexts common to both forms, but mainly by taking detective fiction seriously enough to treat it "as if' it were literature. His hope is that he may bridge the gap between the different ways critics speak about the two forms of writing. He comes far closer to a true analytical discussion of the genre than many other critics who devote time to the descriptive approach. He begins by rapidly surveying the genre in its use of crime as a "source of scandal and shock, relating this to changing social conditions and to some other literature." From this he makes the somewhat 240 BOOK REVIEWS incredible leap to an exploration of structural and psychological issues in Oedipus the King and Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone. His chapter on Poe is very good as he examines Poe's literary theory and demonstrates how it was applied to his writing of short stories, specifically "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Black Cat," "The Man of the Crowd," and the three detective stories about C. Auguste Dupin. He views the Dupin trilogy as continuing the Gothic tales with their "doppelgänger" theme while making their own contribution to the creation of the single-hero series: "that endless re-enactment of the same situation by the same central cast that has become through Doyle and then through television the staple narrative form of the twentieth century." If for no other reason, Priestman is to be commended for producing one of the handful of studies that devotes a significant amount of space to Emile Gaboriau (1833-1873), the creator of the detective novel. Unlike far too many other critics, Priestman has really read (and with care) Gaboriau's works and suggests how he anticipated much of what is really significant (Priestman uses the word "interesting") in later crime writing from Wilkie Collins's narrative view to those "self-doubting confrontations with money and power" that form so much a part of the hard-boiled school. He even suggests that the "Lecoq" who appears so briefly in L'Affaire Lerouge (1865) is not the same character who figures in Gaboriau's later novels, thus explaining the great difference in their ages and...