ABSTRACT

Crime fiction’s depiction of social formations relies, instead, on reference to broadly familiar institutions, objects, events and relationships. Yet, the relation of realism and crime fiction cannot be contained by the short definition alone. If “realism” can be condensed into one general problem of representation, within that problem there are nevertheless a number of overdetermined relations for crime fiction. The implementation of psychological realism and what might be called “object realism”, as in the preceding discussion in which institutions, objects, events and relationships are presented in more or less detail as familiar, has been central to crime fiction. Psychological realism in crime fiction usually requires a delicate balance of the functional qualities required for characters to perform their roles in the genre and the kind of motivation that is customary to indicate psychological consistency in narrative fiction. In fact, in the history of crime fiction, the reorganisation in standards of realism discussed is somewhat emblematic.