A curious habit of euphemism governs our way of talking about that genre of novel which has mainly to do with killing people. Mystery and crime: So libraries and bookstores advertise the relevant section of their shelves. But life abounds with mysteries; very few of them have to do with the true authorship of gruesome murders. Detective fiction supplies another common designation for novels and short stories about homicide, but, again, detectives also have plenty of other crimes to investigate—not to mention that cops and private dicks haven’t been the automatic protagonists of such fiction for 75 years or so. The main character of Dorothy B. Hughes’s great study of misogyny, In a Lonely Place, from 1947, is the self-justifying serial killer himself; and The Expendable Man, a 1963 novel by the same pioneering writer, focuses on a young Black doctor wrongly suspected of tossing the body of a white teenager into a canal.
Suspense fiction was Patricia Highsmith’s term for her own novels of guilty or innocent men, in which detectives merely figure as foils, if at all. Highsmith explained that she used the term suspense fiction “in the way the book trade uses it,” to refer to “stories with a threat of violent physical action and danger.” Despite this evasive phrasing—notable in a writer otherwise unafraid to shock or outrage readers—in Highsmith’s work, too, we are dealing not really with novels of all-purpose suspense or multifarious detection, of generic mystery or overall crime, but with what might more honestly be called murder fiction, given that these books, like others in the same department of the library or bookstore, are obsessively concerned with one specific and terrible kind of violence, namely the killing of one person by another.
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