Foul and Fair Play: Reading Genre in Classic Detective Fiction

College Literature, Oct 1996 by Reddy, Maureen T

Marty Roth. Foul and Fair Play: Reading Genre in Classic Detective Fiction. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1995. $45 hc. 284 pp.

The conventions of writing about crime fiction are nearly as codified as those of the genre itself. One powerful convention of such criticism involves drawing evershifting boundaries between subgenres, with spy thrillers, hard-boiled detective stories, and "cozies," for example, thought to occupy distinct cultural spaces and to attract different readers in search of dissimilar pleasures. Another is to argue either that there is no meaningful distinction between "art" literature and popular fiction, including crime fiction, or that, while there are indeed important differences between crime fiction and literature, some writers of crime fiction transcend the limits of their genre and rank with "serious" writers (I think of this as the Hammett Hypothesis). Marty Roth's Foul and Fair Play violates these and other conventions of criticism of crime fiction, arguing from the outset that what attracts readers of crime fiction of any variety is genre itself; that is, readers read not discrete texts but genre. Roth shows that apparently distinct varieties of crime fiction illuminate each other and the genre as a whole, with, for example, "the woman Peter Wimsey saves from execution in Strong Poison. . . the same woman Philip Marlowe condemns to death in Farewell, My Lovely"(xii).

Foul and Fair Play begins with an intriguing chapter called "Preliminaries," in which Roth reads the generic conventions of both apologetics and denunciations of detective fiction, noting their similarities and challenging the equations in which conventional=bad and "addictive"=shameful. In his highly original study, Roth examines 138 short stories and novels, from Edgar Allen Poe's Dupin stories of the 1840s to traditional detective novels written in the 1960s, using these texts to show detective fiction's operation as a self-contained system. Most of Roth's authors and their detectives are male, but he also discusses fiction by Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Dorothy Sayers, and other women writers. However, Roth argues that in the period he considers, the genre was extremely conservative and intensely masculine. "My controlling assumption," he states, "is that in detective fiction gender is genre and genre is male; Jane Marple and Modesty Blaise are feminine notations that perform a masculine function" (xiv).

Following Tvetzan Todorov's work on detective fiction, Roth departs from that model in order to offer interpretations as well as descriptions of structures. He deliberately undercuts his own project-of generic reading-by including generous quotes from the 138 fictions in order to give readers a sense of the individuality of particular works. Reading generically, Roth's focus is on not simply identifying, but also understanding the meanings of the conventions that define the genre.

Chapters 2-8 of Foul and Fair Play each examine one broad category of conventions; within each chapter, Roth analyzes permutations of a particular convention. So, for example, chapter 5, "The Pleasures of Being Merely Male," identifies exhibitionism as a controlling characteristic of detectives' behavior in crime fiction, and analyzes the relationships among the forms that exhibitionism takes in these texts. Roth argues that the masochism of thrillers and hard-boiled crime novels and the sadism of analytic detective fiction are "caught up in a quick exchange," always "capable...of inverting their cover" (94); he links this exhibitionism with other erotic fantasies underlying crime fiction, showing how the conventions of the detective's "alibi" for involvement in a case and of the detective's "Watson" structurally reinforce one another. Other chapters in this section consider the place of women in detective fiction, the detective's subjectivity, crimes, criminals, and communities, and the conventions governing solutions (which, as Roth points out, is the structural equivalent of the crime that occasions the narrative).

The last three chapters of the book are devoted to the peculiar epistemology of detective fiction and map the mythic spaces of detective fiction-the underworld and the frontier-in order to establish the relations between these worlds and the "ordinary" world (or surface reality) of the genre. The most intriguing sections of Foul and Fair Play are chapters 9 and 10, which explore the centrality in detective fiction of signs generally ignored elsewhere (dirt, for instance, about which Roth is very funny) and the significance of coincidence and convolution as controlling actions and relationships in this genre. No other critic has fully articulated, as Roth does here, detective fiction's reliance on what Roth calls "the paradox of the obvious," which governs not only crimes and criminals, but also narrative itself. This convention, Roth says, has the force of law in detective fiction, and "stipulates that anything that is obviously true or significant must, for that reason, be insignificant or false" (179): clear evidence will be either false or misleading, the obviously guilty party will prove innocent, the narrative we read will turn out to be deceptive. The corollary to this paradox is that whatever is not obvious or seems insignificant leads to the truth. Hence the distinction between "evidence" and "clues," with the former untrustworthy and the latterwhich Christie's Poirot calls the "little curious fact," and which Roth links to Freud's idea of the uncanny -readable only by the detective.