Fascination and nausea

finding out the hard-boiled way

David Trotter

pp. 21-35

in: Warren Chernaik, Martin Swales, Robert Vilain (eds), The art of detective fiction, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000

Abstract

In crime fiction, Auden said, the corpse must shock "not only because it is a corpse but because, even for a corpse, it is shockingly out of place, as when a dog makes a mess on a drawing-room carpet."¹ The really bad thing about murder, from one point of view, is that it makes a mess in a clean place. And yet that messiness, in Auden's view so crucial to stories about murder, so productive, rarely features in the explanations put forward for the broad and enduring appeal of crime fiction. Why?