English 2255: Crime (Diversity in Detective Fiction) Fall 2018

T/H: 10:45 a.m.-12:05 p.m. LNCO 3870

Professor [Robert] Stephen Tatum Office: LNCO 3413 stephen.tatum@utah.edu

About this Course:

There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our
duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.
--Sherlock Holmes, Study in Scarlet

Crime literature featuring an amateur or private investigator or police detectives

speculating on both the modus operandi and motives of criminals emerged in the 19thC
with stories by Edgar Allan Poe. The genre was further developed with the contributions of
such authors as Arthur Conan Doyle and then, in the so-called Golden Age of crime
writing before World War II, in the works of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and
others. So-called “tough-guy” or “hard-boiled detective or “noir” crime writing emerged in the U.S.
during the 1920s and 1930s, a development critically regarded as an oppositional response to the
“locked room” mysteries in the British tradition (e.g., “Murder on the Orient Express”. In the works
of James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Hughes, and Dashiell Hammett, such fiction
sometimes adopted the perspective of the criminal, featured distinctive dialogue based on street argot,
and foregrounded the more graphic representations of sexual desire and violence. Whether told from
the perspective of the detective or the criminal perpetrator, the "mystery" of crime (not only "who"
did it but "why"), produces writerly experiments in narrative structure and style, tests the limits of the
rational and of forensic science, and indexes class, gender, and ethnoracial politics and anxieties of
specific historical moments that define industrial modernity and postmodernity.

In this class we will discuss the crime genre’s main conventions and its evolution, as well as how--
through its plots and settings--crime literature provides us with an index to social issues and human
psychology as well as larger economic transformations. We will begin with some traditional examples
of both the British fiction of detection and the American “hard-boiled” tradition before turning to an
exploration of diversity and the art of detection in more contemporary writings set in the U.S. West.

Probable Primary Texts:

Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

Walter Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress
Sherman Alexie, Indian Killer
Linda Hogan, Mean Spirit
Michael Nava, Goldenboy
Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

Plus: selected short stories (Arthur Conan Doyle; Hemingway;

Writing assignments will focus on biweekly critical essays on the primary texts. Some reading quizzes
to motivate students to keep up with the reading in order to come to class prepared for discussion.