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Murder in Moscow

1995; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 85; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/215556

1931-0846

Gary Hausladen,

Crime, Deviance, and Social Control

The sense of place found in an ever-larger number of murder mysteries is more than simply backdrop or setting for the plot. In a subgenre called the cultural murder-mystery novel, site is such an essential element in the novel that without a sense of place the plot is needlessly enigmatic. The cultural murder-mystery novel originated in the police-procedural variety that emerged in the late 1940s and 1950s. This type of novel begins with the basic ingredients of a police-procedural type but deals with character and place in defiantly creative ways. Character development becomes far more detailed, and place becomes an essential element of plot that takes on importance far beyond a simple setting for crime. Place is essential to the commission, investigation, and solution of a mystery. To date most critics of mystery fiction lump cultural murder mysteries with the police-procedural corpus and dismiss place as an intriguing gimmick to keep the attention of readers or to promote other agendas such as ecological or ethnic sensitivities. Although social agendas are often promoted, this interpretation misses the point that sense of place is crucial to plot development, not simply a crowd pleaser or a vehicle for an authorial agenda. Without place, the story line makes no sense, and the crime would be agonizingly trivial. The cultural murder-mystery novel continues to use realistic characters in literary depictions of actual places (Symons 1992, 306-307). A case might be made that a smattering of the earlier private-eye novels serve as a bridge between the police-procedural and cultural murder-mystery types. The mysteries of Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald parade distinctive images of Los Angeles, and the 87th Precinct of Ed McBain is tantamount to New York City. For most mysteries, however, the plot could be transferred to other locales and remain just as effective. This assessment does not suggest that the novels of Chandler, MacDonald, or McBain are primarily cultural murder mysteries; it does suggest that the stylistic blueprint for this variation exists in the hard-boiled detective yarn, if not in the idylls of Holmesian villages, moors, and London streets. This stylistic blueprint can also be found in numerous nonmystery novels (Shortridge 1991, 280). Recent works of several authors can be classified as major contributors to the new cultural type of mystery novel. Places that are essential to the plots of these mysteries include the Australia of Arthur William Upfield's Napoleon Bonaparte, the Hong Kong of William Marshall's Harry Feiffer, the Rome and Venice of Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen, and the American Southwest of Tony Hillerman's many Native Americans. To the list of authors who embody the spirit of this genre add the names of Martin Cruz Smith, Stuart Kaminsky, and William Holland. These authors bring a distinctive skill to the mystery novel: detailed knowledge of police procedures used in Moscow, which places the setting in the context of Soviet society. Their novels are more than stylish police procedurals. Context, which is Moscow in the late Soviet period, is basic to the plot. Without the context of place the plot withers. Endemic to Moscow, these mysteries cannot take place anywhere else, although the site of a specific scene may shift. The content of Soviet life, made credible in description and dialogue, elicits an emotional and pervasive sense of place and provides an essential catalyst for the plot. BEYOND PLACES FOR MURDER Descriptions of place as settings for the commission, discovery, and solution of mysteries have been the primary focus of geographical studies of the murder-mystery genre. Both Douglas McManis (1978) and Yi-Fu Tuan (1985) explored the value of the mystery novel as an important, if underutilized, source for literary geography. McManis's examination of why geographers ignored mysteries in their studies of literary landscapes echoes concern about the seriousness of mystery fiction and attributes its neglect to what the arbiters of literary standards have decreed to be popular entertainment or escapist reading. …