patrick

Week 5 draft 1

Detective fiction has often been adapted to the big screen, and for good reason. The genre contains action, mystery and suspense, all of which make for entertaining books and movies. However, as good as some detective movies can be, print is a better medium for telling detective stories. Print allows the reader access directly to the protagonist’s mind, to see what he sees, feel what he feels, and experience what he experiences. With its use of first person point of view, fiction allows the reader to be an active participant in the story, as opposed to the observer role the viewer of film must take. Film adaptation of detective fiction is also not as skillful or as well-done as the fiction from which it is adapted.

The strength of detective fiction is the use of the first person narrative. Through the first person point of view, the reader gets to experience the action as the detective experiences it, see what he sees, hear what he thinks. The events of the story play out for the detective and for the reader at the same time, allowing the reader to become immersed in the story and giving him or her a greater degree of investment. In film, access to the main character’s thoughts and experiences would have to come from inner monologue and voice-over, both rather clumsy and immersion-killing techniques. That said, the voice-over in __Double Indemnity__ was done very artfully, with the main character speaking into a dictating machine, but even then there was not a voice-over during every moment of the film.

Stemming from this is the internal narration available in a book. It gives the reader a much better sense of the main character when the reader is privy to his or her thoughts. A voice-over like that in the film version of __Devil in a Blue Dress__ is unwieldy. Even the clever use of the dictation machine in __Double Indemnity__ was contrived; the movie makers had to come up with a way to use a voice-over, because inner monologue is often necessary for detective fiction.

The reliance upon voice-over for inner monologue is not a problem when the written version of the story is told in third person objective perspective as in __The Maltese Falcon__. In third person object point of view, the author describes only what happens and does not delve into any characters’ heads. In fact, such a point of view makes adaptation into film easier, because the camera essentially performs the same function as the author, which is to describe the action.

Adaptation can be another detraction from film detection. The adaptation of __The Maltese Falcon__ was very skillful and true to the book, but that is because of the book’s narration; no inner monologue, so no voice-over necessary. But even in a faithful adaptation such as that of __The Maltese Falcon__, some things had to be left out to appease the censors. While the strip search scene omitted from the film was hardly essential to the plot, the homosexual subtexts of the book but missing from the film added depth and nuance, and provided a backdrop on which Spade’s hypermasculinity was further emphasized.

The film version of __Devil in a Blue Dress__ poses even more problems than the adaptation of __The Maltese Falcon__. The film was entertaining, well-written and well acted, but bore only a superficial resemblance to the book of the same title. In fact, the title itself is misleading; the Daphne character of the film has been altered into more of a damsel in distress than a femme fatale. Mouse, too, has been changed drastically; he is not the trigger-happy enforcer of the book, but rather trigger-happy comic relief. The difference is jarring.

Choice of actors also plays a role in the success in the adaptation, and the class has seen some questionable choices this semester. Mary Astor, who plays Bridget O’Shaughnessy in __The Maltese Falcon__, is not the “knockout” Effie Perine claims she is, but is rather plain-faced and does not have the magnetism most readers would expect from the character. Likewise, DeWitt Albright does not come across as the grinning sociopath from the written text of __Devil in a Blue Dress__ when he threatens the white kids at the boardwalk; the scene is overacted and even cliché.

Detective fiction is strongest when it uses first person point of view, something which is difficult to duplicate in film. The changes necessary to adapt fiction to film also detract from the film. This is not to say that there is no good detective fiction; the films shown in class this semester were all well-done and entertaining movies. But the authors of fiction are not limited by time constraints or censors and are freer to more fully realize their vision, making fiction a more desirable medium for detective stories than film.

Week 4 draft 1

Perhaps the horrors of World War I convinced the writers of detective fiction that things are not as simple as previous writers have made them out to be. In classic detective stories, the truth is like a river; perhaps it took some turns, and maybe it meandered quite a bit, but it started in an easily identifiable place, went in one direction, and one could follow it through to the end. In hard-boiled fiction, however, the truth is more like a delta: vast, spread out, no clear beginning or end, and only navigable by the most knowledgeable of sailors. In classic detective fiction, the truth is what happened. In hard-boiled, the truth is what everyone believes. This difference concerning truth across the two style comes about through their differences in amount of exposition and degree of involvement of the protagonists.

Classic fiction has great swaths of exposition, pages upon pages of information dump, explaining to the reader minutiae of either backstory and situation, or resolution. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is almost entirely exposition. From the bottom of page 8 to the top of page 14 is entirely the newspaper account of the crimes, and between pages 15 and 25 is Dupin’s explanation as to how he has observed the facts and solved the crimes. Finally, page 27 to the end of the story on page 29 is the narrator describing what the sailor told them about what actually happened. On page 17, there are only three indentations on the page, with the second full paragraph taking up almost the entire page. That is an inordinately large block of text, used not for action, description or dialogue, but for explanation.

This description is necessary because the main characters in classic stories are geniuses. They need to do very little real investigation; rather, they simply look at the facts and draw the correct conclusion, which they have to explain to mere mortals like their narrators and, by extension, the reader. And because so much explanation is required and given, there is nothing left to speculation. The events in “Murders in the Rue Morgue” could ONLY have been perpetrated by an orangutan because every detail was explained, and explained in such a way that the conclusion put forth was the only one supported by the facts. In classic detective fiction, the truth is what happened.

In hard-boiled fiction, everything is much murkier. The protagonists of hard-boiled fiction are mortal men as opposed to gods of ratiocination. Therefore, they cannot simply observe a few facts and decipher the mystery. These characters are not solving crimes from ivory towers, they are pounding the pavement, running down leads, and unraveling conspiracies, not to mention putting themselves in harm’s way. Because of this, hard-boiled fiction’s emphases fall on dialogue and action, not exposition. The protagonists in hard-boiled fiction don’t explain everything because they don’t know everything, hence the decided lack of lengthy blocks of exposition.

The truth is more nebulous in hard-boiled fiction, and the reader gets the impression that truth is based on consensus. At the end of __Devil in a Blue Dress__, Easy explains to the police and deputy mayor that “Joppy did most of the killing. He did it out of greed. (259)” He left out most of Carter’s involvement, and all mention of Daphne/Ruby and Mouse. Officially, Easy’s version of events is what happened, the case is closed, and everyone is satisfied, even though what Easy told the police bears only a superficial resemblance to what actually happened. Likewise, Marlowe gives General Sternwood a heavily edited version of events at the end of __The Big Sleep__. Dashiell Hammet leaves his audience unsure of whether the real Maltese Falcon even exists at all.

The varying emphases on exposition, action and involvement serve to differentiate classic and hard-boiled fiction. As to which is more effective, there is a reason that the classic works are almost exclusively short-form: too much exposition becomes boring and no one wants to read 100,000 words worth of explanation. However, barring any truly ridiculous outcomes such as that of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” classic fiction might be more satisfying to those who wish for nice, tidy endings. For those that see the real world as violent and uncertain, the nebulousness of the resolutions in hard-boiled fiction probably ring true.

Week 3 draft 2 REVISION

Many a stand-up comedian would be out of work if there were no differences between men and women. Comedic potential aside, these differences extend into the realm of detection and problem-solving. Men and women solve problems and crimes in different ways. The notable male detective characters Dupin and Sherlock Holmes are more like computers than people; brilliant but coldly rational, they use their vast powers of reason alone to solve crimes. Female detectives such as Violet Strange and Miss Marple use reason as well, but they also rely on empathy, intuition and emotion. This methodological demarcation is significant from a literary standpoint because it makes the female detectives more easily identified with, sympathetic, believable and well-rounded as fictional characters.

C. Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes are reasoning machines, using ratiocination to solve crimes. They notice things normal men do not, such as when Holmes notes to Watson on page 2 of “A Scandal in Bohemia” that although he has climbed the apartment steps “some hundreds of times” by his own estimation, Watson has never observed how many steps there are. “You see but do not observe,” says Holmes to Watson of the same incident (pg. 2).

Likewise, Dupin gives the narrator quite a shock on pages 6 and 7 of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” when he seemingly reads the narrator’s mind. Dupin is merely following a train of logic, beginning with horses, to the fruiterer, to pavement, to Epicurus, and finally to the actor. Dupin is only using logic and knowledge to arrive at the correct conclusion, and does the same when confronted with the seemingly impossible events of the story.

Conversely, the female detectives’ greatest tool is not reason but empathy. Violet Strange has a rather odd episode in which she attempts to get into the mind of Mr. Spielhagen. “Forgetting myself,” she says on page 107, “I try to assume the individuality of the person that has worked the mystery.” Putting oneself in place of another is the very definition of empathy. She then goes on to sit where Spielhagen sat, drink what he drank, doze when he dozed, and thereby solves the mystery. Similarly, Miss Marple used her own experience as a nurse to solve the murder of Mrs. Pritchard. Even the characters in “A Jury of Her Peers,” not detectives by profession, are able to figure out what happened by sympathizing with Mrs. Wright. “I know what stillness is…” says Mrs. Peters on page 172, identifying, commiserating, and understanding Mrs. Wright, her situation, and what possibly drove her to murder her husband.

This empathy and intuition makes the female characters more dynamic and interesting. Male characters often seem like mere plot devices. For all his vaunted storytelling ability, Poe does not delve too deeply into the realm of character development; Dupin lacks depth, and the reader never gets a good sense of who he is as a person. The reader might conclude Dupin is a misanthrope from his desire for isolation (“Murders,” 5). The only other speck of personality the reader gets is odd and rather repugnant; the pair of grisly killings in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” should have elicited horror and sympathy for the victims from Dupin, but he merely exhibits a detached and academic fascination with the crimes.

Sherlock Holmes is similarly afflicted by this lack of empathy and human contact. He shuts himself in his home for months on end, “alternating… from cocaine to ambition” and “deeply attracted by the study of crime” (1). Whereas Watson has a burning desire to see his friend, Holmes cares only for something with which to occupy his mind. Watson notes in “A Scandal in Bohemia” that “[Holmes] was…the most perfect reasoning and observing machine the world has ever seen” and that “all emotion, and [love] in particular were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind (1).” To love and to feel is to be human; Holmes is more of a flesh-and-blood robot, a “machine” as Watson puts it.

Conversely, the female detectives have feeling in abundance. It is those feelings, the quibbles and hang-ups, that give the characters the extra touch of realism. Violet Strange, for example, is afraid of the dark, which makes it easier later on to identify with the child Van Broeklyn. She is also interested in history for history’s sake, evidenced by her excitement at finding “the great historic door! (107).” Miss Marple has a history and some personality quirks; she used to be a nurse, which helps her to solve the crime in question, and has rarely left St. Mary Mead, which serves both to round out the character and to make her crime-solving ability more remarkable. Martha Hale has her own opinions and regrets never visiting her erstwhile friend Mrs. Wright, and Mrs. Peters has suffered the tragedy of losing a child; these complex depictions help them to recognize Mrs. Wright’s motivation for murder and color their decision not to tell the men about the dead bird.

Female detectives’ balance of logical and empathetic crime-solving, as well as their authors’ emphases on their histories and personalities, serves to make the female characters far more interesting and complete than the male detectives. By using intuition and empathy, the women can relate to the victims of crimes and more easily get into the mind of a criminal. The male characters, in contrast, come across as autistic, sociopathic, or merely poorly-written cardboard cutouts. The women have foibles that distinguish them as real people, whereas the men are one dimensional plot devices. In short, female detectives are just as effective as male detectives at solving crimes, and are much easier to care about.

Week 3 draft 1

Many a stand-up comedian would be out of work if there were no differences between men and women. Comedic potential aside, these differences extend into the realm of detection and problem-solving. Men and women solve problems and crimes in different ways. The notable male detective characters Dupin and Sherlock Holmes are more like computers than people; brilliant but coldly rational, they use their vast powers of reason alone to solve crimes. Female detectives such as Violet Strange and Miss Marple use reason as well, but they also rely on empathy, intuition and emotion. This demarcation is significant from a literary standpoint because it makes the female detectives more easily identified with, sympathetic, believable and well-rounded as fictional characters.

C. Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes are reasoning machines, using their superior powers of observation and interpretation to solve crimes. They notice things normal men do not, such as on when Holmes points out to Watson on page 2 of “A Scandal in Bohemia” that although he has climbed the apartment steps “some hundreds of times” by his own estimation, Watson has never observed how many steps there are. “You see but do not observe,” says Holmes to Watson of the same incident (pg. 2).

Likewise, Dupin gives the narrator quite a shock on pages 6 and 7 of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” when he seemingly reads the narrator’s mind. Dupin is merely following a train of logic, beginning with horses, to the fruiterer, to pavement, to Epicurus, and finally to the actor. Dupin is only using cold logic and sterile knowledge to arrive at the correct conclusion, and does the same when confronted with the seemingly impossible events of the story.

Conversely, the female detectives’ greatest tool is not reason but empathy. Violet Strange has a rather odd episode in which she attempts to get into the mind of Mr. Spielhagen. “Forgetting myself,” she says on page 107, “I try to assume the individuality of the person that has worked the mystery.” Putting oneself in place of another is the very definition of empathy. She then goes on to sit where Spielhagen sat, drink what he drank, dozed when he dozed, and thereby solved the mystery. Similarly, Miss Marple used her own experience as a nurse to solve the murder of Mrs. Pritchard. Even the characters in “A Jury of Her Peers,” not detectives by profession, are able to figure out what happened by sympathizing with Mrs. Wright. “I know what stillness is…” says Mrs. Peters on page 172, identifying, commiserating, and understanding Mrs. Wright, her situation, and what possibly drove her to murdering her husband.

This empathy and intuition makes the female characters more dynamic and interesting. Male characters often seem like mere plot devices. For all his vaunted storytelling ability, Poe does not delve too deeply into the realm of character development; Dupin lacks depth, and the reader never gets a good sense of who he is as a person. The reader might conclude Dupin is a misanthrope from his desire for isolation (“Murders,” pg 5). The only other speck of personality the reader gets is rather odd and odious; the pair of grisly killings in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” should have evinced horror and sympathy for the victims in Dupin, but he merely exhibits a detached and academic fascination with the crimes.

Sherlock Holmes is similarly afflicted, existing only to solve crimes, “alternating… from cocaine to ambition” and “deeply attracted by the study of crime” (pg 1). Watson notes in “A Scandal in Bohemia” that “[Holmes] was…the most perfect reasoning and observing machine the world has ever seen” and that “all emotion, and [love] in particular were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. (pg 1).” To love and to feel is to be human; Holmes is more of a flesh-and-blood robot, a “machine” as Watson puts it.

Conversely, the female detectives have feeling in abundance. It is those feelings, the quibbles and hang-ups, that give the characters the extra touch of realism. Violet Strange, for example, is afraid of the dark, which makes it easier later on to identify with the child Van Broeklyn. She is also interested in history for history’s sake, evidenced by her excitement at finding “the great historic door! (pg 107).” Miss Marple has a history and some personality quirks to flesh out her character; she used to be a nurse, and has rarely left St. Mary Mead. Martha Hale has her own opinions and regrets never visiting her erstwhile friend Mrs. Wright, and Mrs. Peters has suffered the tragedy of losing a child.

All of these serve to make the female characters far more interesting and complete than the male detectives. By using intuition and empathy, the women can relate to the victims of crimes and more easily get into the mind of a criminal. The male characters, in contrast, come across as autistic, sociopathic, or merely poorly-written cardboard cutouts. The women have foibles that distinguish them as real people, whereas the men are one dimensional plot devices. In short, female detectives are just as effective as male detectives at solving crimes, and are much easier to care about.

Week 2 draft 2- REVISION

Not having read any detective fiction, I did not have many preconceived notions coming into this class. Nevertheless, I did have a few expectations as to what I would find this semester. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” addressed each expectation differently, but on the whole the story did not correspond to my preconceived notions of detective fiction. I do not mind being wrong, and I love to be challenged, but at the end of the story I felt tricked and cheated instead of entertained and satisfied.

I expected murder, or at least a body count, and “Murders” delivered on this point. However, I believed that because Poe was writing in the mid 1800’s, he would shy away from graphic description, which he certainly did not. The descriptions of the crimes are ghastly and disturbing, such as on page 13: “The corpse of the mother was horribly mutilated. All the bones of the right leg and arm were more or less shattered. The left //tibia// much splintered, as well as all the ribs of the left side. Whole body dreadfully bruised and discolored.”

I thought that most, if not all detective stories were the archetypal “whodunits.” “Murders” is a whodunit, but I had not realized that Poe invented, among other subtypes of detective fiction, the locked room mystery. The locked room mystery is seemingly impossible to solve until a brilliant rational mind swoops in and reduces the seemingly impossible to the merely improbable. On page 20, Dupin describes the ingress and egress of the perpetrator by way of the window with the broken nail, which had given the impression of being locked like all other portals in the room.

Though an avid reader of Poe, I did not think his detective stories would involve elements of the gothic. I’ve always associated gothic with the horror genre, which Poe also helped pioneer, and thought he might have kept his horror fiction and detective fiction separate. But Poe inserts the gothic into “Murders.” He plays up mental and social (though not physical) isolation; both Dupin and the narrator, and the two murdered women, lived in a sort of voluntary exile from the rest of the city. The narrator says of the living arrangements of himself and Dupin that “[o]ur seclusion was perfect. We admitted no visitors…We existed within ourselves alone (5).” The women, too kept themselves to themselves. According to the newspaper report on page 10, “[t]he two [women] lived an exceedingly retired life…” and “[n]o one was spoken of as frequenting the house.”

A final expectation, and the most jarring when it was not fulfilled, was that of anticipating being able to solve the crime right along with Dupin. As the professor stated in class, Poe does not “play fair” with the audience. Poe uses the newspaper report between pages 8 and 13 as an information dump, and lets the reader erroneously assume that he [Poe] has embedded necessary clues within. But it is only when Dupin completes his explanation that the reader realizes the ruse, that none of the salient clues had been provided, and the reader could not have solved the mystery on his or her own. Even the title, with the word “Murder”, leads the reader to the assumption that there will be a human assailant with malicious intent. This is not the case; rather, the reader finds an animal almost accidentally perpetrating the crime.

“Murders in the Rue Morgue” defied my expectations of what a detective story could be, but the surprise ending left me feeling tricked, not satisfied. Defying expectations is good, but leaving the reader feeling tricked is not. But there is no denying that “Murders” is, at its core, the first detective story. The plot centers around a mystery that needs to be solved, and an intelligent, rational expert to solve it. Any story written after 1841 that include either or both of these incredibly broad elements stands on the shoulders of “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and any writer weaving such stories owes a debt to Edgar Allan Poe.

Week 2 draft 1

Not having read any detective fiction, I did not have many preconceived notions coming into this class. Nevertheless, I did have a few expectations as to what I would find this semester. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” addressed each expectation differently, but on the whole the story did not correspond to my preconceived notions of detective fiction.

I expected murder, or at least a body count, and “Murders” delivered on this point. However, I believed that because Poe was writing in the mid 1800’s, he would shy away from graphic description, which he certainly did not. The descriptions of the crimes are ghastly and disturbing, such as on page 13: “The corpse of the mother was horribly mutilated. All the bones of the right leg and arm were more or less shattered. The left //tibia// [sic] much splintered, as well as all the ribs of the left side. Whole body dreadfully bruised and discolored.”

I thought that most, if not all detective stories were the archetypal “whodunits.” “Murders” is a whodunit, but I had not realized that Poe invented, among other subtypes of detective fiction, the locked room mystery. The locked room mystery is seemingly impossible and unable to be solved until a brilliant rational mind swoops in and reduces the seemingly impossible to the merely improbable. On page 20, Dupin describes the ingress and egress of the perpetrator by way of the window with the broken nail, which had given the impression of being locked like all other portals in the room.

Though an avid reader of Poe, I did not think his detective stories would involve elements of the gothic. I’ve always associated gothic with the horror genre, which Poe also helped pioneer, and thought he might have kept his horror fiction and detective fiction separate. But Poe inserts the gothic into “Murders.” He plays up mental and social (though not physical) isolation; both Dupin and the narrator, and the two murdered women, lived in a sort of voluntary exile from the rest of the city. The narrator says of the living arrangements of himself and Dupin that “[o]ur seclusion was perfect. We admitted no visitors…We existed within ourselves alone (5).” The women, too kept themselves to themselves. According to the newspaper report on page 10, “[t]he two [women] lived an exceedingly retired life…” and “[n]o one was spoken of as frequenting the house.”

A final expectation, and the most jarring when it was not fulfilled, was that of anticipating being able to solve the crime right along with Dupin. As the professor stated in class, Poe does not “play fair” with the audience. Poe uses the newspaper report between pages 8 and 13 as an information dump, and lets the reader erroneously assume that he [Poe] has embedded necessary clues within. But it is only when Dupin completes his explanation that the reader realizes the ruse, that none of the salient clues had been provided, and the reader could not have solved the mystery on his or her own. Even the title, with the word “Murder”, leads the reader to the prejudice that there will be a human assailant with malicious intent, and not an animal almost accidentally perpetrating the crime. All of the above notwithstanding, “Murders in the Rue Morgue” is, at its core, the first detective story. The plot centers around a mystery that needs to be solved, and an intelligent, rational expert to solve it. Any story written after 1841 that include either or both of these incredibly broad elements stands on the shoulders of “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and any writer weaving such stories owes a debt to Edgar Allan Poe.