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The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, ed. Martin Priestman (Cambridge University Press, 2003), ISBN: 0-521-00871-9, pp. xvii, 287, £16.00 pb.
Producing a Cambridge Companion to crime fiction cannot have been an easy task. In a genre as extensive, and with boundaries as blurred, as that of crime (or detection, or mystery) fiction, the issues of what to include, where to start and how to end must have seemed daunting indeed. Given the size of the subject, convincing cases could have been made for separate Cambridge Companions to nineteenth- and twentieth-century crime, or for companion volumes on British, European and American crime fiction.Martin Priestman's edition, however, has only fourteen essays in which to cover this massive territory - and inevitably readers familiar with the genre are going to be frustrated by seeming omissions in the coverage. But in a volume such as this, the question of what is included is perhaps less important than how the subject is presented. Priestman's introduction is alert to this distinction and stresses that the volume seeks more to complicate than to catalogue the genre. The aim of the Companion, he argues, 'is to provide a sense of the genre's history as multilayered rather than unidirectional, and of its criticism as in process rather than univocal'. This is a laudable and necessary aim, and one which the book goes a long way towards fulfilling. The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction provides an accessible introduction to a daunting range of materials and will undoubtedly be an asset to students and teachers of the genre.
But what appeal might the volume hold for the Gothicist, or for students of Gothic fiction? The subject of the Gothic exists, perhaps appropriately, as a sort of spectral presence within the volume: present as an acknowledged precursor and influence, but never fully embodied. Given that the Gothic novel has a Cambridge Companion all of its own, this is perhaps inevitable, but there is no doubt that an essay on Gothic influences would have made a fascinating accompaniment to Ian A. Bell and Lyn Pykett's excellent opening essays. The volume begins with Bell's essay on 'Eighteenth-century crime writing', in which he succinctly describes the radically different conceptions of crime and justice that predated the emergence of 'detective' fiction...