利用者:英語一列/sandbox

『犯罪小説』とは、犯罪、犯罪の発覚、犯罪者、そしてその動機を小説化する文学のジャンルのひとつである。犯罪小説は、主に、歴史小説やSFといった主流の小説やその他のジャンルとは区別されるが、その境界は明確ではない。犯罪小説には、（ミステリなどの）推理小説や裁判劇、ハードボイル派の小説、そして法廷ものを含む、下位ジャンルが複数存在する。 1930年代以降は通常、犯罪小説の表紙が黄色であるため、イタリアでは探偵や犯罪についての物語は一般に『ジャッロ』（英語では黄色と表される）と呼ばれる。

犯罪小説の歴史[編集]

詳細は「History of crime fiction」を参照

最も古い犯罪諸説として知られるのは、1829年に出版された、デンマーク人作家のSteen Steensen BlicherによるThe Rector of Veilbyeである。より有名なものとしては、エドガー・アラン・ポーの作品の中では比較的知名度の低い初期作品（"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), "The Mystery of Marie Roget" (1842), そして "The Purloined Letter" (1844)）が挙げられる。ウィルキー・コリンズの手紙形式の小説、白衣の女は1860年に出版されたが、月長石(1868)が彼の最高傑作であると考えられることが多い。フランス人作家、Eマイル・ガブリオのMonsieur Lecoq(1868)は、系統的で、科学的に考える探偵の下地をつくった。密室ものミステリの発展は、犯罪小説史における画期的な出来事の一つであった。アーサー・コナン・ドイルのシャーロック・ホームズシリーズは、この犯罪小説というジャンルに多大な人気を生んできた立役者であると言われる。先駆者としてはポール・フェバールがおり、彼の連続作品であるLes Habits Noirs (1862–67) はスコットランドヤードにおける探偵や陰謀犯罪を描いている。19世紀に最も売れた犯罪小説は、オーストラリアのメルンボルンで誕生した、ファーガス・ヒュームの二輪馬車の秘密(1886)である。

19世紀後半の英国やアメリカにおける大衆向けの印刷媒体の発達は、犯罪小説やその関連ジャンルの大衆化な決定的な役割を果たした。StrandやMcClure’s、そしてHarper’sなどの様々な文学雑誌はすぐに、社会での大衆小説の全体的な構造や機能の中心となり、読み捨てることができる安価で挿絵の入った出版物を提供する、大量生産された印刷媒体として働いた。

アーサー・コナン・ドイルのシャーロック・ホームズシリーズは、それぞれの時代における他の重要作品—ウィルキー・コリンズやチャールズ・ディケンズなど—と同様に、英国の月間雑誌、Strandで連載形式としてまず掲載された。同シリーズはすぐに大西洋両岸で幅広く熱狂的な人気を博し、ドイルが最後の事件の中でホームズを死亡させた際には、大衆の抗議があまりにも凄まじく、また、さらなるホームズの物語への出版要望があまりにも無視できないものであったため、彼は嫌々ホームズを復活せざるをえなくなった。

後になり、様々な趣向に応えるため、一連の定型形式が現れ始めた。

犯罪小説のカテゴリー[編集]

犯罪小説は以下のように分けられる:

探偵小説[編集]

詳細は「Detective fiction」を参照

コージー・ミステリ: 不敬、性、暴力が控えめに、またはユーモラスに扱われる探偵小説の下位ジャンル。
密室ものミステリ: 侵入者が入ったり出て行ったりできたはずのない鍵のかかった部屋のように、一見不可能と思われる状況下で犯罪が行われる、特殊なミステリの種類。
ミステリ: 探偵小説の最も普及した形式。本の最後で答えが明かされる前に事件の犯人の正体を推測できるような手がかりが読み手に与えられる、複雑で筋の練られた物語を描く。

Later and contemporary contributions to the whodunit[編集]

歴史ミステリ: これもまた、歴史小説の下位ジャンル。物語や犯罪の設定が歴史的な重要性を持つ。
The inverted detective story: also known as "howcatchem", the commission of the crime and the identity of the perpetrator is revealed to the reader first, then the rest of the story describes the detective's attempt to solve the mystery.
The American hardboiled school: distinguished by the unsentimental portrayal of sex and violence; the sleuth usually also confronts danger and engages in violence.
The police procedural: the detective is a member of the police, and thus the activities of a police force are usually convin
法廷もの: 主要な登場人物は弁護士やその従業員であり、弁護の証明に奮闘していく。
スパイ小説: 主要な登場人物はスパイであり、主に情報機関のために活躍する。
The caper story and the criminal novel: the stories are told from the point of view of the criminals.
The psychological thriller or psychological suspense: this specific subgenre of the thriller genre also incorporates elements from detective fiction, as the protagonist must solve the mystery of the psychological conflict presented in these types of stories.
パロディー、もしくは戯文

犯罪小説と主流小説[編集]

When trying to pigeon-hole fiction, it is extraordinarily difficult to tell where crime fiction starts and where it ends. This is largely attributed to the fact that love, danger and death are central motifs in fiction.^[要出典] A less obvious reason is that the classification of a work may very well be related to the author's reputation.^[要出典]

For example, William Somerset Maugham's (1874–1966) novella Up at the Villa (1941) could very well be classified as crime fiction. This short novel revolves around a woman having a one-night stand with a total stranger who suddenly and unexpectedly commits suicide in her bedroom and the woman's attempts at disposing of the body so as not to cause a scandal about herself or be suspected of killing the man. As Maugham is not usually rated as a writer of crime novels, Up at the Villa is hardly ever considered to be a crime novel and accordingly can be found in bookshops among his other, "mainstream" novels.^[要出典]

A more recent example is Bret Easton Ellis' seminal novel American Psycho (1991) about the double life of Patrick Bateman, a Wall Street yuppie and serial killer in New York City in the 1980s. Even though in American Psycho the most heinous crimes are depicted in minute detail, the novel has never been labelled a "crime novel", maybe because it is never explicitly mentioned whether Bateman actually commits the crimes or rather just fantasizes about them.^[要出典]

On the other hand, U.S. author James M. Cain is normally seen as a writer belonging to the "hard-boiled" school of crime fiction. However, his novel Mildred Pierce (1941) is really about the rise to success of an ordinary housewife developing her entrepreneurial skills and—legally—outsmarting her business rivals, and the domestic trouble caused by her success, with, in turn, her husband, her daughter and her lover turning against her. Although no crime is committed anywhere in the book, the novel was reprinted in 1989 by Random House, alongside Cain's thriller The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), under the heading "Vintage Crime".^[要出典]

When film director Michael Curtiz adapted Mildred Pierce for the big screen in 1945, he lived up to the cinemagoers' and the producers' expectations by adding a murder that is not in the novel. As potential cinemagoers had been associating Cain with hard-boiled crime fiction only, this trick—exploited in advertisements and trailers—in combination with the casting of then Hollywood star Joan Crawford in the title role made sure that the film was going to be a box office hit even before it was released.^[要出典]

Seen from a practical point of view, one could argue that a crime novel is simply a novel that can be found in a bookshop on shelves labelled "Crime". (This suggestion has actually been made about science fiction,^[要出典] but it can be applied here as well.^[要出典] Penguin Books has had a long-standing tradition of publishing crime novels in paperback editions with green covers and spines (as opposed to the orange spines of mainstream literature), thus attracting the eyes of potential buyers when they enter the shop. However, this clever marketing strategy does not tell casual browsers what they are really in for when they buy a particular book.^[要出典]

"High art" versus "popular art"[編集]

The discrepancy between taste and acclaim[編集]

Up to the 1960s or so, reading the paperback edition of a crime novel was usually considered a cheap thrill—with the word "cheap" used in both meanings: "inexpensive" and "of minor quality". The educated and civilized world was often interested, at least ostensibly, in the "high art" categorised by classical music, paintings by renowned artists, famous literature and plays like those of William Shakespeare. The term "popular art" referred to folk music, jazz, or rock 'n' roll, photography, the design of everyday objects, comics, science fiction, detective stories or erotic fiction (the latter circulating in private prints only to beat the censor), to quote a few examples. The idea of a "main stream" of literary output suggested that any book deviating, in either content or form or both, from the established norm of "high art" was "cheap", and anyone interested in popular culture was uneducated and unsophisticated and most probably originated in a lower socio-economic division of the contextual society. The universities and the other institutions of higher learning also looked down on artists producing "popular art" and categorically refused to critically assess it.

This often did not correlate with the immense popularity of popular art on both sides of the Atlantic, sometimes due to sensationalism. For example, the British had been fascinated by Edgar Wallace's (1875–1932) crime novels ever since the author set up a competition offering a reward to any reader who could figure out and describe just how the murder in his first book, The Four Just Men (1906), was committed.

A reassessment of critical ideals[編集]

In the long run, the vast output of popular fiction could no longer be ignored, and literary critics—gradually, carefully and tentatively—started questioning and assessing the complete notion of the perceived gap between "high art" (or "serious literature") and "popular art" (in America often referred to as "pulp fiction", often verging on "smut and filth"). One of the first scholars to do so was American critic Leslie Fiedler. In his book Cross the Border—Close the Gap (1972), he advocates a thorough re-assessment of science fiction, the western, pornographic literature and all the other subgenres that previously had not been considered as "high art", and their inclusion in the literary canon:

The notion of one art for the 'cultural,' i.e., the favored few in any given society and of another subart for the 'uncultured,' i.e., an excluded majority as deficient in Gutenberg skills as they are untutored in 'taste,' in fact represents the last survival in mass industrial societies (capitalist, socialist, communist—it makes no difference in this regard) of an invidious distinction proper only to a class-structured community. Precisely because it carries on, as it has carried on ever since the middle of the eighteenth century, a war against that anachronistic survival, Pop Art is, whatever its overt politics, subversive: a threat to all hierarchies insofar as it is hostile to order and ordering in its own realm. What the final intrusion of Pop into the citadels of High Art provides, therefore, for the critic is the exhilarating new possibility of making judgments about the 'goodness' and 'badness' of art quite separated from distinctions between 'high' and 'low' with their concealed class bias.

In other words, it was now up to the literary critics to devise criteria with which they would then be able to assess any new literature along the lines of "good" or "bad" rather than "high" versus "popular".

Accordingly,

A conventionally written and dull novel about, say, a "fallen woman" could be ranked lower than a terrifying vision of the future full of action and suspense.
A story about industrial relations in the United Kingdom in the early 20th century—a novel about shocking working conditions, trade unionists, strikers and scabs—need not be more acceptable subject-matter per se than a well-crafted and fast-paced thriller about modern life.

But, according to Fiedler, it was also up to the critics to reassess already existing literature. In the case of U.S. crime fiction, writers that so far had been regarded as the authors of nothing but "pulp fiction"—Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and others—were gradually seen in a new light. Today, Chandler's creation, private eye Philip Marlowe—who appears, for example, in his novels The Big Sleep (1939) and Farewell, My Lovely (1940)—has achieved cult status and has also been made the topic of literary seminars at universities round the world, whereas on first publication Chandler's novels were seen as little more than cheap entertainment for the uneducated masses.

Nonetheless, "murder stories" such as Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment or Shakespeare's Macbeth are not dependent on their honorary membership in this genre for their acclaim.

Pseudonymous authors[編集]

As far as the history of crime fiction is concerned, some authors have been reluctant to publish their crime novels under their real names. More currently, some publish pseudonymously because of the belief that since the large booksellers are aware of their historical sales figures, and command a certain degree of influence over publishers, the only way to "break out" of their current advance numbers is to publish as someone with no track record.

In the late 1930s and 40s, British County Court judge Arthur Alexander Gordon Clark (1900–1958) published a number of detective novels under the alias Cyril Hare in which he made use of his profoundly extensive knowledge of the English legal system. In Tragedy at Law (1942). Scottish journalist Leopold Horace Ognall (1908–1979) authored over ninety novels as Hartley Howard and Harry Carmichael. When he was still young and unknown, award-winning British novelist Julian Barnes (born 1946) published some crime novels under the alias Dan Kavanagh. Other authors take delight in cherishing their alter egos: Ruth Rendell (born 1930) writes one sort of crime novels as Ruth Rendell and another type as Barbara Vine; John Dickson Carr also used the pseudonym Carter Dickson. The author Evan Hunter (which itself was a pseudonym) wrote his crime fiction under the name of Ed McBain.

Film and literature: The case of crime fiction[編集]

Crime fiction and the motion picture industry have complemented each other well over the years. Both cater to the need of the average audience to escape into an idealist world, where the good reaps the rewards, and the bad incur their punishment.^[要出典] Adaptations of crime fiction into films have been hugely successful.^[要出典]

For a detailed explication of the history of the relationship between crime fiction and the film industry, see the main articles crime film and mystery film.

Videogames[編集]

Crime fiction has also expanded to the world of videogames, an example being the Rockstar Games title L.A. Noire (2011), in which player assumes the role of Los Angeles Police Department Officer, and later Detective, Cole Phelps. The player resolves murders and crimes through investigation and interrogation of suspects and witnesses, and finally the capture of culprits.

Availability of crime novels[編集]

Quality and availability[編集]

As with any other entity, quality of a crime fiction book is not in any meaningful proportion to its availability. Some of the crime novels generally regarded as the finest, including those regularly chosen by experts as belonging to the best 100 crime novels ever written (see bibliography), have been out of print ever since their first publication, which often dates back to the 1920s or 30s. The bulk of books that can be found today on the shelves labelled "Crime" consists of recent first publications usually no older than a few years.

Classics and bestsellers[編集]

Furthermore, only a select few authors have achieved the status of "classics" for their published works. A classic is any text that can be received and accepted universally, because they transcend context. A popular, well known example is Agatha Christie, whose texts, originally published between 1920 and her death in 1976, are available in UK and US editions in all English speaking nations. Christie's works, particularly featuring detectives Hercule Poirot or Miss Jane Marple, have given her the title the 'Queen of Crime' and made her one of the most important and innovative writers in the development of the genre. Her most famous novels include Murder on the Orient Express (1934), Death on the Nile (1937), and the world's best-selling mystery And Then There Were None (1939).^[1]

Other less successful, contemporary authors who are still writing have seen reprints of their earlier works, due to current overwhelming popularity of crime fiction texts among audiences (One only has to look at the amount of crime related television series to observe the astonishing popularity). One example is Val McDermid, whose first book appeared as far back as 1987; another is Florida-based author Carl Hiaasen, who has been publishing books since 1981, all of which are readily available.

Forgotten classics[編集]

On the other hand, English crime writer Edgar Wallace, who was immensely popular with the English readership during the early decades of the 20th century (and who achieved fame in German-speaking countries due to the many B movies made in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s that were based on his novels), had almost been forgotten in his home country until House of Stratus eventually started republishing many of his 170 books around the turn of the millennium. Similarly, the books by the equally successful American author Erle Stanley Gardner (1889–1970), creator of the lawyer Perry Mason, which have frequently been adapted for film, radio, and TV, were only recently republished in the United Kingdom—books such as The Case of the Stuttering Bishop (1937), The Case of the Green-Eyed Sister (1953), etc.

Even television adaptations are not enough to save some authors. Gladys Mitchell rivalled Agatha Christie for UK sales in the 1930s and 1940s but only one of her 66 novels remains in print despite a BBC television series of the The Mrs Bradley Mysteries in 1999.

Revival of past classics[編集]

From time to time publishing houses decide, for commercial purposes, to revive long-forgotten authors and reprint one or two of their more commercially successful novels. Apart from Penguin Books, who for this purpose have resorted to their old green cover and dug out some of their vintage authors, Pan started a series in 1999 entitled "Pan Classic Crime," which includes a handful of novels by Eric Ambler, but also American Hillary Waugh's Last Seen Wearing .... In 2000, Edinburgh-based Canongate Books started a series called "Canongate Crime Classics," in which they published John Franklin Bardin's The Deadly Percheron (1946)—both a whodunnit and a roman noir about amnesia and insanity—and other novels. However, books brought out by smaller publishers like Canongate Books are usually not stocked by the larger bookshops and overseas booksellers.

Sometimes older crime novels are revived by screenwriters and directors rather than publishing houses. In many such cases, publishers then follow suit and release a so-called "film tie-in" edition showing a still from the movie on the front cover and the film credits on the back cover of the book—yet another marketing strategy aimed at those cinemagoers who may want to do both: first read the book and then watch the film (or vice versa). Recent examples include Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley (originally published in 1955), Ira Levin's Sliver (1991), with the cover photograph depicting a steamy sex scene between Sharon Stone and William Baldwin straight from the 1993 movie, and, again, Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho (1991). Bloomsbury Publishing PLC on the other hand have launched what they call "Bloomsbury Film Classics"—a series of original novels on which feature films were based. This series includes, for example, Ethel Lina White's novel The Wheel Spins (1936), which Alfred Hitchcock—before he went to Hollywood—turned into a much-loved movie entitled The Lady Vanishes (1938), and Ira Levin's (born 1929) science fiction thriller The Boys from Brazil (1976), which was filmed in 1978.

Older novels can often be retrieved from the ever-growing Project Gutenberg database.

References[編集]

^ Davies, Helen; Marjorie Dorfman, Mary Fons, Deborah Hawkins, Martin Hintz, Linnea Lundgren, David Priess, Julia Clark Robinson, Paul Seaburn, Heidi Stevens, and Steve Theunissen (2007年9月14日). “21 Best-Selling Books of All Time”. Editors of Publications International, Ltd.. 2009年3月25日閲覧。

Binyon, T J: "Murder Will Out". The Detective in Fiction (Oxford, 1990, ISBN 0-19-282730-8)
The Crown Crime Companion. The Top 100 Mystery Novels of All Time Selected by the Mystery Writers of America, annotated by Otto Penzler, compiled by Mickey Friedman (New York, 1995, ISBN 0-517-88115-2)
De Andrea, William L: Encyclopedia Mysteriosa. A Comprehensive Guide to the Art of Detection in Print, Film, Radio, and Television (New York, 1994, ISBN 0-02-861678-2)
Duncan, Paul: Film Noir. Films of Trust and Betrayal (Harpenden, 2000, ISBN 1-903047-08-0)
The Hatchards Crime Companion. 100 Top Crime Novels Selected by the Crime Writers' Association, ed. Susan Moody (London, 1990, ISBN 0-904030-02-4)
Hitt, Jim: Words and Shadows. Literature on the Screen (New York, 1992, ISBN 0-8065-1340-3)
Mann, Jessica: Deadlier Than the Male (David & Charles, 1981. Macmillan,N.Y, 1981)
McLeish, Kenneth and McLeish, Valerie: Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide to Murder. Crime Fiction and Thrillers (London, 1990, ISBN 0-13-359092-5)
Ousby, Ian: The Crime and Mystery Book. A Reader's Companion (London, 1997).
Symons, Julian: Bloody Murder. From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History (Harmondsworth, 1974).
Waterstone's Guide to Crime Fiction, ed. Nick Rennison and Richard Shephard (Brentford, 1997).
Willett, Ralph: The Naked City. Urban Crime Fiction in the USA (Manchester, 1996).

External links[編集]

Template:Fiction writing Template:Crime fiction

[1] Davies, Helen; Marjorie Dorfman, Mary Fons, Deborah Hawkins, Martin Hintz, Linnea Lundgren, David Priess, Julia Clark Robinson, Paul Seaburn, Heidi Stevens, and Steve Theunissen (2007年9月14日). “21 Best-Selling Books of All Time”. Editors of Publications International, Ltd.. 2009年3月25日閲覧。

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