The Crime Novel: A Deviant Genre by Tony Hilfer (review)

82Rocky Mountain Review The book is furthermore plagued by the very worst kinds ofpseudo-scientific jeirgon: instantiates, valorizedprescience, self-conscious metacommentary, selfish exchangers, social exchangers, responsible exchangers, provisionality, narrative ratios, andpolysemy. This eind the precious repetition ofoeuvre, as well as some amusing implications ("Mormons who eire polygynous," for example), tend to divert the reader's attention from whatever the authors eire trying to say. Literature is often most rewarding to teach and to study when it pleases our aesthetic sense and is concerned with the human comedy, when it has, as Graham Greene suggests, a moral dimension. But it has now become for many critics just an exercise in intellectual agility, like compulsive figures in ice skating: the result is little more than shaved ice which soon turns to tepid water. And for the readers of this kind of criticism, as in this book, the task of reading has become, to put a twist on a popular advertising slogan, not an adventure but a job. ROBERT C. STEENSMA University of Utah TONY HDLFER. TAe Crime Novel A Deviant Genre. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. 180 p. Previous studies of the crime novel have often been limited to brief considerations of the elements which set apart crime fiction from detective fiction. Tony Hilfer at last gives appropriate recognition to the genre ofcrime fiction and his approach is, as he puts it, "synchronic," in that he discusses the genre in terms ofits "thematic possibilities" (xii). Through close readings ofnumerous novels, Hilfer provides us with a grasp ofthe nature ofthe devieince of the genre from the detective novel. He does not, however, stop there; his discussions of character and setting reveal the vast implications of this deviance. The book begins with ein exploration of not only the differences between the crime novel eind the detective novel, but also the suggestion that the former subverts the themes and characterization ofthe latter. Hilfer writes that "the central and defining feature of the crime novel is that in it self and world, guilt and innocence eire problematic" (2). He identifies four protagonist types: the murderer, a guilty bystander, a falsely suspected individual, eind the victim. Each type "leads to a variation on the theme ofguilt that thoroughly subverts the reassurance of the detective story" (3). The first chapter concludes with an examination of two works, Colin McCabe's TAe Face on the Cutting Room Floor (1937) and Dennis Porter's TAe SingingDetective (1986), for the purpose of indicating national differences in crime fiction and how such differences are often played upon in the works. In chapter two, Hilfer discusses the motifs of doubling, repetition, and revenge, claiming that "an appalling otherness" emerges in crime novels, "ein otherness that is a dangerous potential for the self, its criminal mirror image" Book Reviews83 (14). One psychiatric concept often recognized in the crime novel is the substitution motif. Horace McCoy's Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1948) is a case in point, with a son substituting for a mother; a mother substituting for a son occurs in Margaret Millar's Beyond This Point Are Monsters (1970). The protagonist's projection ofsuch imagos on appropriate targets originates within the character, resulting in, according to Hilfer, a splitting of the protagonist into two selves: "the apparent self of social roles and the actual self of murderous compulsiveness" (22). Chapter three examines time and space as they relate to the identity of the protagonist in American crime novels. Hilfer invokes W. H. Auden's characterization ofthe setting ofthe American detective novel as "The Great Wrong Place," adding that this points to a uniquely Americein type ofescapism "into a dream ofthe last just man whose integrity is his alienation" (31). This, says Hilfer, "is a Heaven compared to the Hell ofthe American crime novel" (33). The world ofthe American crime novel is an "ontologically pathological" one in which the normative structures of perception are inverted (34). The protagonist's enclosure as a result of his or her impaired perceptions results in displacement. To illustrate the compulsion ofthe protagonist and the sense of urgency which torments him or her, Hilfer discusses works by Cornell Woolrich, Kenneth Fearing, and Ann Chamberlain. In the next chapter, entitled...