The Fantasy of Deduction: Detective Fiction and its ties to the Fantastic, and, The Aleera Mysteries

Abstract

Outwardly, detective fiction is a genre rooted in material logic; one that has no room for the supernatural. Of course there is no shortage of detective stories that delve into Gothic terror – or of detectives or detective-like figures in fantasy and other speculative fiction, where contending with the supernatural calls for an expert specialist. However the association runs much deeper than that. The very origins of the genre are rooted in the Victorian Gothic, and in the tension between Victorian spiritualism and the emergence of what is now thought of as proper scientific rigour. The argument emerges that detective fiction was, and continues to be, definitively shaped by the Gothic sensation that is central to supernatural terror. The detective, a larger-than-life, often superhuman figure, grapples with unknown, disruptive terrors to restore a sense of narrative order. In this thesis I will trace the co-evolution of detective fiction and the fantastic into the twentieth century and argue that, when detective fiction treads into the fantastic, it simply externalises the underlying tension that is central to the genre. The detective is a supernatural figure in the guise of a rationalist one. The 45,000-word thesis will be accompanied by 45,000 words of fiction formed of three novelettes. These fantasy-detective stories are shaped by my research into the relationship between detective fiction and the supernatural, just as the critical element is shaped by the creative. In these stories I attempt to create fast-paced, satisfying Sherlock Holmes-style mysteries in a magic setting, and also to see how this can affect the distinctive moral and intellectual authority of the fictional detective. When the supernatural force is the detective rather than a source of criminal disruption, how does this shape the detective’s relationship to that terror?