The Language of Suspense in Crime Fiction

Abstract

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

Offender Theme Analyses in a Crime Narrative: An Applied Approach

“…While remain ignorant or in denial of his aggressor triggers (like the anger problem or his impatience when being hassled), as pointed out at St Andrews correction centre. In this way Lifer Danny (who was released on parole) establishes for himself an additional discourse slot, an inter diegesis space (my term) [7] in his narrative account, for an identity that makes his perpetrator role distinct from himself as a person.…”

“…Hence, 7 Participant Medium is not the doer nor the causer but a nodal participant critically involved in some way or other with the process. (Halliday 1994: 165).…”

Book Review: Joanna Fowler and Allan Ingram (eds), Voice and Context in Eighteenth-Century Verse: Order in Variety

“…I am aware of works such as Simpson’s (2003) On the Discourse of Satire: Towards a Stylistic Model of Satirical Humor , which looks at a particular mode of literature and, of course, the numerous works on narratology. Also, there are books which investigate particular genres such as Bray’s (2004) The Epistolary Novel: Representations of Consciousness , Montoro’s (2012) Chick Lit: The Stylistics of Cappuccino Fiction and Dutta-Flanders (2017) The Language of Suspense in Crime Fiction: A Linguistic Stylistic Approach . Nevertheless, and particularly with the growth of a more historically-informed stylistics, it would be interesting to have a collection of essays rather like the one under review, which focus on a particular period or author and investigate the works from a mixture of different and complementary viewpoints.…”