Literature, Fiction

In Bloody Murder (1983), scholar Julian Symons observes that if crime fiction is defined as any story that has “the faintest connection with crime” (16), then fairy tales such as “Little Red Riding Hood” (which includes an attempted murder) and almost all of Shakespeare's plays (certainly both Macbeth and Hamlet) would be included in this category. In fact, much of literature, past and present, does involve themes of crime and punishment. What separates general or mainstream fiction dealing with issues of crime and punishment from genre crime fiction is sometimes an arbitrary dividing line based on perception of the writer's intent, how the book is marketed, or where it appears on bookstore shelves. For example, a novel such as E. L. Doctorow's (b. 1931) Billy Bathgate (1989), about a fictional young man's apprenticeship with real-life Prohibition-era gangster Dutch Schultz, is regarded as mainstream fiction. Best-selling writer Stephen King (b. 1947) has two novels, Dolores Claiborne (1993) and Misery (1990), that include murder and other crimes (child sexual abuse and holding hostage), but these books are not classified as crime fiction. The same is true of the classic novel by Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881), Crime and Punishment (1866), which focuses on the student Raskolnikov's act of murder and the aftermath of his crime, including his imprisonment. Like Native Son (1940) by African American author Richard Wright [Page 1013](1908–1960), Dostoyevsky's novel is considered a psychological study of the protagonist and the society in which he lives, a work with goals assumed to be more sweeping than those of genre crime fiction.

However, writers of general literature have often used elements of crime fiction in their works to tell a more compelling story. The distinction between what is categorized as crime fiction and what is not is related to the evolution of crime fiction first as a hybrid of general literature and then as a unique category of literature with its own conventions. In discussing crime and punishment in literature, it is important to examine the changes that occur over time. The literary treatment of crime and punishment both reflects and augments the evolving perception of crime as a social problem and the debate about its causes, its consequences, and the appropriate responses to the problem. At the same time, the history of crime in literature reflects the growing hunger of an increasingly literate reading public for fiction as entertainment and escapism. Directly related to this are the technological developments that made possible the creation and distribution of cheap literary works such as “dime novels,” “pulp fiction,” and later paperback novels to a mass audience.

As it evolved as a separate category of literature, crime fiction developed not only unique conventions but also subgenres, each with distinctive approaches to the handling of story elements such as the choice of protagonist, the amount of onstage violence, and the setting in which the crime occurs. The variety of these approaches reflects the responses of writers to both the social and the literary environments in which they worked.

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