by Esterino Adami From booming Netflix series to popular novels, crime narrative continues to represent an attractive arena, whose boundaries are often porous and tend to mix with other genres. But when we approach a crime story, how does the text precisely manage to balance its parts so as to draw and maintain our attention until its final coup de theatre when the murderer is revealed? What are the linguistic and stylistic strategies that permit us to access the killer's mode of thought? Is it possible to delineate some specific traits of the genre and its ability to construct and develop suspense? These are some of the research questions that Reshmi Dutta-Flanders aims to address in her original, complex and informed monograph, in which she meticulously applies various tools and frameworks to a wealth of crime stories, with the purpose to illuminate the essence and structure of suspense. This may be defined as "an emotional process unlike mystery (the gradual revelation of criminous information), which is an intellectual process, as in a whodunit" (2, emphasis in original). The main focus of the volume is on three literary works: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie (1926), Cover her Face by D. James (1962) and The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915), although other materials too are subjected to analysis. The structural intricacy of these three texts is the result of different techniques and is achieved especially thanks to the presence of a "hybrid voice, which is defined by
There is a great deal of research on the structure of narrative and its mode, and on the narrative positioning and counter positioning of the actor in legal and social contexts. In offender narratives, personal experiences are embedded for observation and analysis of particular realities that contextualize a disposition of the perpetrator being 'an undergoer' rather than an 'effector' of actions. This is evaluated in the shift from a narrated action to a speaker utterance in prospection and also in anticipation of the criminal act. Using 'grammatical logic', it is also possible to demonstrate how the crucial event (the crime) is not a cause, but an effect of a personal theme that encapsulates pattern of circumstances when the narrative outcome in criminal narrative becomes the product of its discursive practices. This is the 'story of intentionality' (my term) in crime narratives, characteristically embedded within the 1st the story of crime, the 2nd is the story of investigation [14,20]. Using techniques from functional grammar and critical stylistics for discourse analysis, I intend to show an effective approach for the search of offender theme that underlies an act of crime. These disciplines provide the analyst with the linguistic material to analyse intersentential cohesion in a chain of semantically linked sentences (in written or spoken discourse) that explore the ways in which things are 'made to look' in the structure and functions of the English language. As a case study, I am using an offender narrative from Tony Parker's book Life After Life: Interviews with Twelve Murderers (1990) showing an effective approach for the search of personal themes underlying the act of crime. Offender theme analyses are also valuable for evaluating the changing nature or development of offender characteristics pre or post crime.& Reshmi Dutta-Flanders R. Dutta-Flanders@kent.ac.uk; reshmidf@gmail.com;
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