Whodunnit?

A Brief History of Crime Fiction

Who’s your favourite? Morse, Marple, Maigret? Holmes, Poirot, Dupin? This four-week course investigates the enduring appeal of the literary sleuth, a lonely misanthropist who understands the criminal mind only because he has one himself. We will, in addition, unlock the minds of the writers who created these iconic figures. Beginning with the birth of the detective story in nineteenth century Philadelphia, we will enter the strange terrain of Sherlock Holmes, delve into the Golden Age of Murder between the wars, and end in the 1950s with darkest duo of them all, Patricia Highsmith and her psychopathic avatar, Tom Ripley.

Week 1

Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ and ‘The Purloined Letter’.

The theme of these three tales, Edgar Allan Poe explained, was not murder ‘but the exercise of ingenuity in detecting the murderer.’ Between 1841- 1844 the modern detective emerged in the figure of a young French eccentric named C. Auguste Dupin, whose process of analytic reasoning he called ‘ratiocination’. Dupin’s literary descendent Hercule Poirot will describe the same method as using his ‘little grey cells.’ Did Poe ever defeat his demons, and what effect did Dupin have on popular culture?

Week 2

Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Final Problem’

Tired of the way in which Sherlock Holmes had taken over his life, Arthur Conan Doyle, in The Final Solution, killed his creation by throwing him down the Reichenbach Falls. He then brought him back to life again when Londoners put on mourning coats and black armbands, and the magazines in which the Holmes stories were published went broke. What brought Conan Doyle to this point, and why did he believe in fairies?

Week 3

Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles

The first of the Agatha Christie’s sixty-six books describes the end of an era. Written in 1916, Poirot is adjusting to life as Belgium refugee in a village in the south of England when his friend Mrs Inglethorpe, who had helped him settle into his new home, is murdered. Belgian refugees were as common in the Great War as Ukrainian refugees are now, and it was a sign of Christie’s genius that she incorporated one of these mysterious figures into her fiction. Why was she so obsessed with murder, why did she despite Hercule Poirot, and what really happened in those nine days when her disappearance resulted in a national manhunt?

Week 4

Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr Ripley

Highsmith wrote detective fiction without the detective. Instead, she takes us inside the mind of the killer. The psychopathic Tom Ripley, who stalks his victims and steals their identities, is Highsmith’s most brilliant creation and the character she most identified with. ‘I am Ripley’, she wrote in her diaries. Where did Ripley come from, and why did Highsmith feel that he wrote the novels for her?

Frances Wilson is a biographer and critic. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, her books include The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, How to Survive the Titanic: Or, the Sinking of J Bruce Ismay, and Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey. Her most recent book, Burning Man: The Ascent of D.H. Lawrence was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize, longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and picked as 'Book of the Year' by The Times, Guardian, Spectator, The Daily Telegraph, New Statesman, Mail on Sunday and The TLS. She was a judge for the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction, 2019, and was chair of the judges for the Goldsmiths Prize, 2020.