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Bradley J. Kelley
Ms. Jennifer Enoch
ENC1145
25 February 2015
The Crime & The Detective: Detective Fictions Most Salient
Conventions
The genre of detective fiction is a well-established and deeply
appreciated form of literature that has been present for many years.
Since its inception, people have participated in the maturation of
detective fiction by writing it, reading it, and discussing about it
through a myriad of forums. With each evolution of the genre over the
years, its definition has continually adapted until it reached its most
current form today. Many of those who have contributed to the
development of detective fiction have tried to definitively lay out its
constitution, but only two conventions are truly inextricable from its
form: the crime and the detective. Several different aspects,
properties, and facets have been used in attempts to accurately
designate what is to be considered detective fiction, but any work
without the presence of a crime or a detective cannot adequately
stand as such.
In trying to anatomize the core of detective fiction as a genre, it
would be most beneficial for my efforts if I first analyze what genre
itself actually is. The term genre is quite an expansive concept that is

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often times too broad and abstract to fit into a neat definition, but
author Kerry Dirk does so with relative ease in Navigating Genres,
when she writes that knowing what a genre is used for can help
people to accomplish goals (253) and that genres also help us to
make more efficient decisions when writing, as we can see how people
have approached similar situations. Creating a new genre each time
that writing was required would make the writing process much longer,
as we would not have past responses to help us with present ones
(259). Basically, Dirk is writing that genre is a way to affirmatively
execute a desired goal and that it can prevents us from needing to
invent totally new ways to approach situations every time someone
writes. Author Charles Brownson shared similar ideals in The Theory of
the Detective, as he wrote that When it becomes possible for an
author to count on readers' expectations and to shape a commodity
(stories) into a repeatable pattern, that pattern constitutes the rules of
the genre (12). Brownsons statements on the concept of genre work
as a setup for Dirks own definition, in that the observable repeated
pattern is what informs writers with what they need to know in order to
achieve their goal. These claims hold so much weight when theyre
being applied to detective fiction as a genre. If a person desired to
write a detective novel in its truest form, they could simply read
previous detective stories, observe how crime and the detective are

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being used, and then implement those conventions in a likewise
manner into the foundation of their writing.