Critical Theory of Crime Fiction

Thomas Wörtche: The Murderous with Life Alongside

Companion to the world of crime writing

Publisher    Libelle Verlag.

The Murderous with Life Alongside consists of thirteen essays by critic and crime fiction publisher Thomas Wörtche.  Essays which can also be read as pointers to the different phases of his life and work.

They open a window on to the myriad ways of reading and critiquing crime fiction... A few of the essays have already appeared elsewhere, a few were written for this collection, others again were given as talks or lectures. They cover the period of 1995 to the present day.

The combination of theory and crime writing is still relatively new and more likely to be found within cultural studies, Wörtche’s collection of essays corresponds to a French theoretical tradition and teaches how to differentiate through the act of reading. He approaches his theme with the use of superlatives - how, for example, crime fiction is the most widely read literature internationally - and designates the 20^th Century as the century of crime writing.  There is nevertheless a need to find one’s way through the forests of new publications (about 100 coming out every month), to distinguish good from bad, critical from affirmatory literature. To understand why Henning Mankell and Donna Leon write bad novels which have nothing to do with the real world, and why supposedly harmless entertainment also produces a bad aesthetic.

Wörtche differs from Europolar in that he does not look at countries individually but rather sees the world in general as the setting for the crime novel. He tries to develop value criteria for novels, which he does then exemplify by linking them to individual texts (his 100 best) but these do vary and can be applied to all crime writing.  His basic contention is that “violence and crime are an inherent component of human society”; an assertion with a whiff of the anthropological, strengthened by reference to Jan-Philipp Reemtsma and Wolfgang Sofsky.  Yet in all his thirteen essays Wortche asserts that it is not the individual himself, but society that generates violence and crime.

Whether it is an advantage that crime fiction is not subsidised, as Wörtsche writes, I would doubt. In France where not the literature itself but the whole culture surrounding it can only function through subsidy, there exists some of the best crime writing today. The discussions and debates at numerous festivals also have a part to play. The market does not normally provide much of a steer and rarely a good one.

Five essays are devoted to particular authors, alternatively characters in a novel. The essay Booby-trap, Eric Ambler and the Poetics of Pragamatism

portrays an anti-authoritarian Ambler and reveals how much crime fiction owes to this author. In the essay Wörtche develops the theory that fiction is just as valid a method as science to deal with reality and to describe it. And that literature does not open up another world, but sharpens our view of the world we live in. The failure of categories. On George Simenon approaches the author from the perspective of literary criticism rather than content. The essay is chiefly concerned with Simenon’s “wrong” reception in the German speaking world. Simenon, who represents the French crime novel of the Fifties, distinguished himself in all his novels by a marked social determinism, which recalls Zola’s Naturalism.  He ascribes particular biological and cultural characteristics to the different social classes, characteristics which cannot be discarded via social mobility. Simenon understood social conditions as second nature which one could not escape though this does not mean that he wrote bad novels.

The ‘absurd’ novels of Chester Himes and Patricia Highsmith’s hero Ripley are introduced and set in their social context. The Refusal of Explicitness. The Argentinian cartoon artist Alberto Breccia and his contribution to the Aesthetics of the 20^th Century describes the work of this conceptual artist who illustrated texts by Garcia Márquez and Ernesto Sábato.  A considerable draughtsman, who succeeded in illustrating the colonisation of Latin America in eight pages, and in other comics dealt with current political issues such as the Falklands War, the legacy of the tango or the new French Right.

Crime fiction worldwide elucidates the mechanisms behind the choice and depiction of the crime locus, and defines Thriller and Crime Novel as two different genres. “The ‘thriller’ creates for itself a setting of its own fancy.” The crime novel, however, is an analysis of society and a way of communicating something about that society. Wörtche detects in book publishing a tendency to cut loose from the fundaments of realism, finds nevertheless sufficient authors and titles who want nothing to do with this.

The making of metro is a personal report on 155 titles from the Swiss publisher Unionsverlag and an analysis of the authors and books selected. Under the banner of “no subgenres off-limits” the crime fiction metro series introduces crime writing from all over the world. Aiding the selection was the year long evaluation process of sorting the wheat from the chaff and looking at literature as social process.

Thrillers and crime fiction further emphasizes the differentiation, and states laconically that 80 per cent of crime writing is trash. All the more important is the 10 per cent of good literature, which can shed light on the state of the world and show how evil grows out of the prevailing societal conditions. Wörtche also sees a secure future for crime fiction, since “crime is an integral part of reality” and therefore not threatened with extinction.

Desaster (Disaster?) as usual. Science-Fiction and crime writing, a closer relationship than we realised. The analysis here is that the most interesting Science Fiction draws its images of the future from the reservoir of the past and present. Overall Wörtche indicates a hybridisation and a shift in crime fiction towards the chiller, horror and fantasy genres.

Violence in the realm of sounds. An uncomfortable radio drama series with music gives an insight into the author’s versatility and into the relationship between violence or force and music, the historical and social linkages being exemplified in Beethoven, the Marseillaise, Duke Ellington, Piazzolla and others.

The Murderous and the Comic describes the indisputable link between crime fiction and comedy and is soon to be published on our website.

A perusal of Wörtche’s collection of essays makes the reading of crime novels more interesting and strengthens the critical faculty in relation to all and any literature.