This essay argues that William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition (the first volume of his Blue Ant Trilogy) borrows from Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 as regards plot, character, narration, ...structure, imagery, and theme, even as it transforms these elements to reflect a post-9/11 world. The essay particularly focuses, however, on the fear and anxiety experienced by the protagonists, Pynchon’s Oedipa Maas and Gibson’s Cayce Pollard, who are among the very few female sleuths to appear in postmodernist metaphysical detective stories. It argues that Pynchon and Gibson modeled their narratives on female gothic novels in which a heroine discovers evidence of a conspiracy against her but cannot determine whether it exists or whether she imagined it. The essay thus offers a new context in which to read Pynchon’s novel, in terms of both genre and gender, as well as extensive evidence of its impact on Gibson. At the same time, the essay argues, using the examples of Pynchon’s and Gibson’s novels, that the female gothic genre has been an important influence on the metaphysical detective story, especially its depiction of investigators who project their own interpretations onto insoluble mysteries.
This creative thesis is a novel that attempts to tell a character-focused mystery through a feminist perspective. By fusing two sub-genres, the cozy mystery and the Gothic romance, the novel subverts ...genre tropes to create a complex female protagonist who subsequently subverts social expectations of women in society. As well, the protagonist’s actions challenge toxic masculinity, and in the role of an “accidental sleuth,” represents a pursuit of attainable justice, when many individuals historically and in today’s world often find themselves victims of unchecked and unacknowledged injustice. Further, this work explores the impact trauma and loss has on an individual, how it shapes one’s life and how it never fully goes away. With these goals, the novel works to be a meditation on human behavior and feminism, attempting as well to challenge past genre stereotypes of female protagonists in both the sub-genres this thesis explores.
Leitch discusses the fallacies regarding the study of moving images as an adaptation of literary works. Among the many fallacies mentioned is the premise that literary texts are verbal, while films ...are visual. It's fallacious, according to Leitch, for reason that movies are presented to the audience not strictly limited in its visual form, but may be presented in an audio-visual presentation.
Let’s start with what we have before us. This is not a novel. It is the unravelled and unfinished pieces of a novel, not unlike the unraveled and as yet un-narrativized pieces of a fresh crime scene. ...This is to say, this thesis should not be read like a novel. It should be examined like a unexplained corpse for the clues of who it might once have been and could be again. The solution of a crime, in literature, is always a reconstruction, a kind of resurrection of order and meaning where before all such things had been lost, scattered. The first crime is always a breaking apart.What you actually have before you is two halves. The first 125 pages of this thesis is taken from the third draft of this novel project. It represents the furthest point I was able to reach in my own writing in this program. The second one hundred pages is taken from the second draft. There are obvious discrepancies between these drafts, and I will go more into what these drafts represent later on, but together, like an on the scene suspect sketch done dirty in the buzzing streetlight, these drafts do roughly represent the complete form of the novel, as well as the form of my process, which I developed during my time in the program. My process, it turns out, looks a lot like the form of mystery.The form of mystery, or crime, or detective stories, in literature, came out of a long tradition of mystery, many pieces of which I’ve attempted to draw on in my thesis, like donor organs. The carefully designed, and often absurd, puzzles came from the origins of the detective genre with Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and they saw further refinement in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock stories. These puzzles carried over smoothly into the neatly ordered rows of suspects in the British golden age in books like Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. The question of the crime became not only how, but who. From there, American hardboiled novels introduced moral ambiguity. Concepts like “justice” or “crime” were investigated and complexified like crimes themselves within the context of corrupt societies and legal systems. Books like Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon and Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep asked not just for the solution of the crime, the conviction or death of the criminal, but for the relationships between crime, criminal, society, and morality to be made clear. Criminality itself became the subject of investigation.This trend, an investigation into the relationship between crime, criminal, society, and morality, intensified further in the neo noir. Books like Derek Raymond’s He Died with His Eyes Open or James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential did away with amoral societies and characters in favor of explicitly immoral ones, especially within police forces and under highly unequal societies stratified by race, class, history. These novels tell us that a crime is committed by an individual, but criminality is committed by society. Like good soil, society encourages the growth of, and indeed births, its crimes. The postmodern detective movement specifically rejected the possibility of certainty, of ordered meaning, of the remaking of order which was at the center of the mystery genre. Authors like Paul Auster in The New York Trilogy, Robert Coover in Noir, or Jedediah Berry in The Manual of Detection asked, in a world where certainty cannot exist, what is crime? What is investigation? What is the pursuit of moral balance without the certainty always pursued in traditional mystery genre? Investigative method was put under investigation, and the world was found to exist beyond order.All these books built on and borrowed from each other, yes. But all that said, once you’ve read enough of them, all mystery novels start to look the same. They have a form. It develops in stages. This is not criticism, but one of the organizing and meaning making tools of the genre.All mysteries start with an alibi. A slant view of the crime and criminal. A story of what this book would like you to believe it is. This alibi includes not only the suspect’s whereabouts during the crime, their guilt or innocence, but how they look, smell, gesture, appear on the page in totality. The alibi is the story the character tells about who they are, how they fit into the world of the novel, the world of the crime. The alibi is the disguise. It exists only to be torn away. An expectation to be reversed.There is a certain character type who moves through this genre, the detective. The detective is addicted to everything. The detective has a moral code, which is quite different from a legal one, and to which he is addicted. Even Sherlock Holmes was addicted to cocaine. Addictive substances run rampant through the pages of mystery novels just as they do through the bodies of their detectives. These substances come from the world of the story, and they reflect the moral nature of that world, of the crime, and of the character. Because the detective, too, is a product of their world, they too are criminals at heart. The detective’s nature is to pursue the criminal. The detective’s nature is to reject the alibi, to keep looking. This applies externally in their journey to solve the crime, and internally in their investigation of themselves and the moral resonance of their actions within mostly immoral worlds of crime and addiction. The external crime is parallel to, a reflection of or a direct extension of, the internal crime of who the character is. The struggle of the detective is to define moral justice, then take moral action, in an immoral universe, internally and externally. The detective looks at their world, struggles to know what can be known, to make what meaning can be made from the pieces of an already commited crime, and asks, “What should I do now?”Moral codes are not written down. Moral codes are lived. Mystery stories have always been about immoral, or at best amoral, detectives struggling to define and live by moral codes within the immoral world of their story's universe. Why take up this kind of story? I cannot speak for others, but as for myself, as a white, American, hetero, cis male in a certain degretated time, I do not think I can ever claim even moral neutrality, let alone positive impact. Too many crimes have been committed on my behalf and to my direct benefit. True, they were, and are, mostly committed without my consent and without my knowledge, beyond my ability to effect, but this was never in question. While I am more than capable of committing acts of good, I should not ever mistake this for being a good person. Detective fiction has always spoken to this sensibility. The detectives do not claim to be good, to be above the crimes they investigate, quite the opposite. Yet they struggle forward nonetheless and even try to enact morality within the limitations of their person and their world. They wear morality on top of their immoral cores like extreme weather gear. Moral codes are developed and struggled toward and lived by the detective, and those codes are then pitted against the amoral and immoral universe of the social and physical world of the story, concentrated in the crime. Out of this process emerges the philosophical argument of a character’s life. Crime stories are, at their cores, always moral stories. They argue for a certain moral view of right or wrong. They offer a certain definition of crime.This is the form of mystery novels as well as the form of the thesis project before you. I do not mean to say that I have successfully synthesized all these elements into a cohesive book, but rather that, as I wrote this thesis, the form of my process began to reflect the form of the content.I used to write stories differently. I would have the feeling of a story, and I would use a series of images to convey that feeling on the page. This is an oversimplification of my earlier writing, but it is also true. To me, stories were never about plots, or even characters. They were about feelings, which were sparked by sensory details, objects. I wrote in a sprint, into a feeling and an image. If you’ve got decent sensory images, I found, you can get away with a lot, especially in a short story, which I have always conceived of as an arc of emotion. Now I feel this was an ill conception, or at least, highly incomplete for me. I found that this approach does not work for the novel, in which more must develop than a vague feeling and a hinted epiphany. Nor does this work, I found, if I actually wanted to say something other than “this is how I feel.” The most challenging aspect of this thesis project, for me, was the development of my own writing process. Yes, perhaps it became a kind of addiction.I wrote the first draft of this thesis project in a rush, like all my previous stories. It was roughly 250 pages. I thought it was pretty good. It looked good to me. This is the whole point of alibis. They look good until you start to investigate them and discover, there’s nothing underneath. I did not know who the characters really were. I did not know what the world was really like. I did not know why the crime had been committed or what it meant. I was merely chasing a feeling. In all fiction, but especially speculative fiction, the world and the characters must be built up concurrently. In detective fiction, the nature of the crime dictates the nature of the world, and the nature of the character is in relation to the crime. They are all part of, expressions of, each other, as well as separate forces which act on and change each other, contextualize each other. The character cannot exist without the world, nor does the world have any purpose without the character. The alibi draft had its strong points, but it had no purpose or depth.In the second draft, like witnesses, I started to interrogate the characters, the world, the crime. I was investigating the alibi. Under this investigation, the first draft fell apart quickly. At a slim 14
Hammett's formative role in establishing the conventions of the hard-boiled detective formula is widely acknowledged, but the formative influence of his masterpiece, The Maltese Falcon, on specific ...texts by subsequent innovators has remained largely unexplored territory. Both Sara Paretsky and Chester Himes have paid tribute to Hammett's influence, with particular reference to The Maltese Falcon. An examination of Indemnity Only and For the Love of Imabelle in relation to The Maltese Falcon offers a unique perspective on Paretsky's and Himes's stylistic choices and the social perspectives these articulated. It also helps to explain the critical reception of their work. Paretsky, writing within the grain of a type of social realism associated with both protest literature and hard-boiled detective fiction, achieved early recognition. Himes, writing against the grain, did not. Those of his detective novels most closely allied to his protest writing have received the most critical attention, but in For the Love of Imabelle, Himes used techniques allied to surrealism. These effectively disrupted and destabilized important, socially privileged discourses – and discomforted audiences and wrong-footed critics.
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