The Typology of the Traditional Detective Fiction in Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet and the chronotopic variation that accounts for the generation of new genres: Twain’s A Double Barrelled Detective Story and Chandler’s Killer in the Rain.

Abstract

Bakhtin (1981) desarrolló la noción de ‘cronotopo’ para referirse a la “conexión de relaciones temporales y espaciales que se expresan artísticamente en la literatura” (p.84). Considerando este concepto, esta tesis aborda el interrogante de como un cambio en el espacio y tiempo de una historia detectivesca provoca, a su vez, un cambio en las acciones y conductas del detective, dando paso a un nuevo género. En primer lugar, nos centramos en la estructura de la novela policiaca tradicional, o whodunit, propuesta por Todorov en la Tipología de la Novela Policial (1977). En segundo lugar, comparamos y contrastamos la historia de Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet (1887), con otras dos historias: la sátira de Twain: A Double Barrelled Detective Story (1902) y el policial negro de Chandler: Killer in the Rain (1935) para descubrir sus variaciones cronotópicas. Finalmente, reflexionamos sobre el contexto histórico de las historias y recurrimos a los conceptos de parodia y sátira propuestos por Linda Hutcheon en A Theory of Parody – The teaching of the 20th century Art Forms (1985), y a los aportes sobre el policial negro, o Hard-Bolied, propuesto por John Cawelti en Adventure, Mystery and Romance Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (1976). En nuestra investigación, nos enfocamos en los cambios presentes en dos categorías de análisis: el momento histórico y los métodos de investigación de los detectives, lo cual nos ha permitido evidenciar las variaciones cronotópicas y así dar cuenta de los cambios de género en las historias ya mencionadas.

Bakhtin (1981) developed the notion of ‘chronotope’ to refer to the “connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (p. 84). Taking this into consideration, this thesis addresses the question of how a change in the space and time in a detective story causes a change in the actions and behaviour of the detective, giving way to a new genre. First, we studied the structure of the traditional whodunit proposed by Todorov in “The Typology of Detective Fiction”(1977) which has allowed us to recognise that Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (1887) follows many of these traditional charcteristics. Secondly, we compared and contrasted A Study in Scarlet with the other two detective stories: Twain’s satire A Double Barrelled Detective Story (1902) and Chandler’s Hard-Boiled fiction Killer in the Rain (1935) to see the variations the authors designed for the chronotope of their stories. With this in mind, we reflected upon the historical context of these three stories and resorted to Linda Hutcheon’s contribution about parody and satire posed in A Theory of Parody – The teaching of the 20th century Art Forms (1985) and to John Cawelti’s theoretical outline about Hard-Boiled fiction in Adventure, Mystery and Romance. Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (1976). In this work, we focused on changes in two categories: the story settings and the detective’s methods of investigation, which has enabled us to provide evidence for the chronotopic variations in the stories above mentioned so as to account for generic changes.