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

Conclusion

55 Conclusion Despite the prolificity of detective fiction writers, and despite the phenomenal popularity of their works and their consequent financial successes, the highbrow circles of the intellectual world have not readily admitted such fiction into the fold of respectable literature. African writers, particularly those included here, seem to have achieved something that is immensely vital in the face of the general academic opinion of the genre as a tired and dying sub-art form. The novelists seem to be suggesting by the styles and structures they have adopted with such effectiveness, that one possible hope for detective fiction lies in choosing its most exciting elements and weaving them into the fabric of social, political or psychological novels. It must be pointed out that although none of these writers has come out to propound any theory for combining the sublime with the ridiculous, their achievements in these works cannot be regarded as unconscious and fortuitous. Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood, to say nothing of other books, stands out as the strongest argument in the defence of this view. Any writer who is capable of beginning a novel with the sensations provoked by the first few pages of Petals of Blood, and who is capable of creating Inspector Godfrey for whom crime is like a jigsaw-puzzle, can certainly not be said to be unaware f some of the great writers of a now geriatric school: Agatha Christie, Georges Simenon and Erle Stanley Gardner. And any writer who is aware of these authors cannot fail to be aware and envious of their financial success, and so strive for it by emulating them faithfully. But if such a writer forgoes the financial attractions that go with constructing a novel mainly on sensational episodes the concatenation and deciphering of clues, and chooses to pad and crowd his work with psychological analysis of motives, historical, political, sociological and geographical data, it cannot be said that he is not consciously dealing out a lesson in technique to other writers. 56 Dostoevsky was after the same effect in Crime and Punishment, a novel filled with the paraphernalia of detective fiction, yet nobody who likes to be taken seriously has ever called the work detective fiction. The closest that a commentator has gone in associating it with “sub-literature” is Richard Peace’s description of its as “a psychological thriller.” Even in this single case, he redeems it when he defines his terms by saying that he means a thriller in which suspense is created not through the attempts to detect the culprit, but through the culprit’s own wayward efforts to resist detection. We could also describe these novels as psychological thrillers in which the suspense is created y a systematic but complicated exploration of motives (Petals of Blood). The impact of the crime on the investigator (Perpétue), the disintegration of the will to live (The Grass is Singing), and the will survive a physical deprivation (Xala). This may explain why when a critic like Bernth Lindfors describes Inspector Godfrey as An African Sherlock Holmes, it should be taken as a compliment o the range of technical devices employed by Ngugi rather than a derogatory remark. ...