The Language of Suspense in Crime Fiction (original) (raw)
Related papers
Concealment and Revelation: an interdisciplinary approach to reader suspense’
Style, 2014
The “deliberate act of omission in detective discourse” is examined in the double function (DF) of linguistic features. It is the hypothesis that in DF there is replaying or re-experiencing of a narrative event in prospective reading in the form of rectification or omission of narrative information. DF is analyzed in linguistic elements like the participant role in transitivity analysis and in circumstantial elements. By using this functional approach, I examine how information flow is withheld in a participant shift in manipulated contexts of crime fiction. In her article in the journal Language and Style, “Time in Agatha Christie Novel,’’ Carol De Dobey Rijelij discusses these contexts as cluster of analepsis around certain times in the story, a defining characteristic of Christie novels (218). A manipulated context (forthcoming) is not a flashback; it is here that the process of filling in a gap or rectification takes place in an episode (a cluster of events that constitute an episode). The crime fiction used for this is Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1993) (Ackroyd). The framework used for analysis is the transitivity function for participant shift, the minor process in circumstantial elements and the ergative perspective in clauses. This is an interdisciplinary approach, where narrative discourse is analyzed in functional linguistics to investigate the grammar of the language of crime, and provide a further level of reader involvement in the narratology of ‘whodunit’ detective stories.
Crime Writing: Language and Stylistics
2018
Gregoriou proposes a stylistic approach to the teaching of crime fiction. She starts with an exploration of the plot and discourse distinction through which students could begin to explore crime fictional story structure, before then delving into Emmott’s frame theory which can shed light on the ways in which crime texts (mis)direct readers. She then turns to consider the importance of narrative style and viewpoint choice in relation to characterisation and reader sympathy. Ryan’s possible world theory is subsequently introduced, the ways in which it can also shed light on crime narrative structure discussed. In doing so, she discusses the typical crime fiction effect of suspense, before lastly focusing on linguistic tools with which such suspense can also be generated.
Motive for Murder: reading crime fiction
Peer Reviewed Proceedings of the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) Biennial Conference, 2012
This paper will reveal a personal journey to reading crime fiction in addition to exploring some of the different reasons that people are drawn to what is now the world’s most popular genre. The doorways to reading of character, setting, story and language will often dictate the different types of crime fiction that people prefer to read. These doorways open onto hardboiled detectives and gentle sleuths, exotic locations and country manors, puzzles that allow us to predict what will come next and make us hold our breath until the last page as well as use words to transport us into surroundings and situations that we would never encounter in our daily, possibly routine, lives. There are, however, deeper motives for murder. What inspires a reader to pick up a piece of crime fiction over a novel or short story in one of the many other genres that are available? Why do ordinary, generally law-abiding citizens feel such a strong sense of attraction to stories that are dominated by death and other violent crimes? These questions will be answered in the context of proposing another doorway to reading: the doorway of ending and how readers have developed a set of expectations around crime fiction that justice, be it legal, natural or social, will usually be done. Crime fiction, despite its subject matter, offers a type of comfort rarely found with any consistency in other types of fiction. This comfort is the knowledge that crime stories will see punishment meted out to the ‘bad characters’ that have broken society’s moral or legal laws. The ‘good characters’ may experience hardships and they may suffer but they generally prevail often in another novel. Crime fiction does not necessarily provide a happy ending but does, traditionally, offer a just ending: this paper will argue these types of endings have significantly contributed to the genre’s success.
AWEJ, 2020
This study is intended to examine the deceptive strategies utilized in the well-renown Agatha Christie's (1926/2002) detective fiction The Murder of Roger Ackroyd to fill a gap in the literature by conducting a pragma-stylistic analysis of the novel. To do so, the researchers have set two objectives which are phrased as follows: firstly, examining the pragma-stylistic choices that are used to surface the deceptive strategies on the character-character level in the pre-dénouement stage and secondly, investigating the pragma-stylistic choices that are used to surface the deceptive strategies on the narrator-reader level in the pre-dénouement stage. The stylistic idiosyncrasies of Christie's Dr. Sheppard are carried out through an eclectic pragma-stylistic approach to expose his deceptive strategies for the fulfillment of his selfish ends. Therefore, the study at issue follows an eclectic conceptual framework which comprises Merzah and Abbas's deceptive principle (2020) and Chen's (2001) self-politeness, along with the stylistic effects achieved via the manipulation of such linguistic tools, to explore the two levels of discourse, namely, character-character level and narrator-reader level proposed by Black (2006). The qualitative analysis of the novel has exhibited that Dr. Sheppard is an expert deceiver who principally relies on indirect strategies, as he is cognizant of the power of what is insinuated but left unsaid.
The Crossroads of Crime Writing: Unseen Structures and Uncertain Spaces
The Crossroads of Crime Writing: Unseen Structures and Uncertain Spaces, 2024
This volume argues that we must examine the boundaries in fiction and non-fiction crime writing with an awareness of and turn toward the unseen structures and spatial uncertainties that so often lead to collective anxieties. The chapters within utilize theories of cultural memory and/or deep mapping in order to explore the interplay of the literary, historical, social, and cultural in various modes of crime writing through the examination of unseen structures and uncertain spaces and provide new insights into the works of iconic authors, such as Agatha Christie, and iconic fictional figures, such as Sherlock Holmes, as well as into underexplored subjects, such as Ukrainian detective fiction of the Soviet period and crime writing by a Bengali police detective at the turn of the twentieth century. This volume features authors and subjects that are global in scope with original, innovative work on crime writing from the 1890s to as recent as 2017. The breadth of coverage—of both time and place—is an indicator of a text in which seasoned readers, advanced students, and academics will find specialized explorations of individual works and authors, while the critical and theoretical approaches and the topical coherence of the collection offer to a wide audience a scholarly overview of crime writing, as a still-growing area of popular interest and a still-evolving field of intellectual exploration.
A Taste for Murder: the curious case of crime fiction (Feature Article)
M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 17(1): online. ISSN: 1441-2616, 2014
There is a dead body to suit every reader’s taste. Indeed, crime fiction is one of the world’s most popular genres. Yet W.H. Auden quipped, when writing for Harper’s Magazine in 1948, that: “For me, as for many others, the reading of detective fiction is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol.” This article will respond to Auden’s statement and explore how crime fiction appeals to an incredibly broad range of tastes. In particular this article will look at how our tastes in crime fiction have changed over time while the many sub-genres of crime fiction continue to cater to the preferences of a variety of readers with stories of: accidental sleuths, hardboiled detectives and refined police officers; murders in country manors, exotic locations and familiar city streets; and puzzles that allow us to predict what will come next or make us hold our breath until the last page. Shared sets of tastes in crime fiction see some of these stories produced, published, sold and quickly disappear into obscurity while other stories enjoy critical and popular acclaim, multiple reprints and are readily accepted into the crime fiction canon. Moreover, this article will challenge Auden’s assertion that crime fiction is a predominantly Protestant taste and argue, using the religious connotations superimposed on these stories by Auden, that the genre appeals to a much broader church.
Constructing the monstrous criminal in a crime fiction novel and a newspaper report: A comparison
2014
I noticed when reading crime fiction novels and newspaper articles reporting on criminals that often the linguistic construction of a fictional criminal character in the former shows many parallels with that of a supposed real perpetrator in the latter. This impression accords with Gregoriou (2011:164) who states in relation to serial killers that she has not found much linguistic variation in their construction across the genres she analysed including newspapers and novels. This article contributes towards validating this observation for other criminals through textual analysis. The reason for the resemblance in their construction appears to be that the text worlds (Gavins 2007) of some crime fiction novels and all newspaper articles reporting on real crime overlap with our discourse world so that the same rules, norms and underlying ideologies apply in both. Both the fictional criminal character in a novel and the factual one in a newspaper article are enactors in a text world wit...
The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction
2020
The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction is a comprehensive introduction to crime fiction and crime fiction scholarship today. Across forty-five original chapters, specialists in the field offer innovative approaches to the classics of the genre as well as groundbreaking mappings of emerging themes and trends. The volume is divided into three parts. Part I , Approaches , rearticulates the key theoretical questions posed by the crime genre. Part II , Devices , examines the textual characteristics of the genre. Part III , Interfaces , investigates the complex ways in which crime fiction engages with the defining issues of its context – from policing and forensic science through war, migration and narcotics to digital media and the environment. Engagingly written and drawing on examples from around the world, this volume is indispensable to both students and scholars of crime fi ction.