Storytellers in fallen worlds: the metaphysical longings of crime fiction detectives

In doing so, I offer a slightly subversive reading of Beckett’s Molloy, in which the more intellectual and literary form is used as a means to interpret the thematic possibilities of the generic form. I argue that the apparently cliched conventions of the crime fiction genre are important sources of meaning in their own right and their deployment often enhances literary creativity rather than limits it. One of my principal conclusions is that the conventions of the genre are not a repetitive framework or a bland supporting structure for end-orientated stories.

Instead, they are conventions capable of high art, to paraphrase E M Forster, and profound philosophical enquiry. I go on to emphasise the importance of radical innovation in crime fiction, placing subversion within the core genealogy of the genre rather than at its margins.<br><br>In the spirit of these findings, my aim in the creative component - the novel Turncoat - was not to try to transcend the crime fiction genre but to play purposefully with the possibilities inherent within its conventions and create a framework by which I might tell a meaningful story of the society in which I grew up.

Turncoat is a novel about the Troubles that incorporates metaphysical elements and self-reflexively comments upon the nature of justice and truth as experienced in a particular society, but it is also written to provide the reading pleasure of a traditional crime novel. In other words, I have tried to hunt with the hounds of metaphysical detective fiction, while running with the foxes of traditional crime fiction, balancing conventionality with subversion, order with disorder, and fixed structures and familiar elements with the type of daunting voids inhabited by Beckett’s metaphysical narrators.<br><br>The thesis contains a critical component and a creative component.