Let the Dead Speak: Examining the Depiction of the Victim in Detective Fiction

As per the University of Wollongong's doctoral practices, creative work I am presenting as part of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy - Creative Arts is not connected in theme or execution with my dissertation. This dissertation of approximately 30,000 words examines the role of the victim in detective fiction narratives, via close readings of four major works in the genre spanning from 1945 to 2008. The overall purpose of the thesis is to discuss whether one criticism of detective fiction novels—that they by their very nature and purpose exploit or ignore the fictional victim for the gratification of the reader—is true. Let the Dead Speak incorporates for the most part four major texts of the crime fiction genre over four different time periods: Agatha Christie's Five Little Pigs, Ruth Rendell's From Doon with Death, Minette Walters's The Scold's Bridle and Tana French's The Likeness. Through a close textual analysis of how these four authors depict and display the fictional victim at the heart of these four novels, using various literary techniques to keep a character who is dead at the outset of the novel 'alive' in the story nonetheless, this thesis will challenge whether it is necessary or true that detective fiction novels ignore or exploit the fictional victim for the entertainment of ghoulish readers, and posit that S. S. Van Dine's 'the deader the better' victim was part of a specific trend in crime fiction which is not and never has been representative of the genre. Rather, it argues that compassionate and complex characterisation of the victim has never been seriously discouraged in ultimately makes for a more satisfying novel. Most notably, I will discuss how, in my four case studies, the detective's (and therefore, the reader's) getting to know the victim is key to discovering who killed them, making this concern for the fictional victim integral to these novels.