Crime Fiction
Crime fiction is the literary genre that fictionalises crimes, their detection, criminals, action and their motives. It is usually distinguished from mainstream fiction and other genres such as historical fiction or science fiction, but the boundaries are indistinct. This is the basis of what crime thrillers are.
Crime thriller: This particular genre is a hybrid type of both crime films and thrillers that offers a suspenseful account of a successful or failed crime or crimes. These films often focus on the criminal(s) rather than a policeman. Central topics of these films include serial killers/murders, robberies, chases, shootouts, heists and double-crosses.
Fun Fact - did you know that in Italy people commonly call a story about detectives or crimes giallo which translates to yellow, because books of crime fiction have usually had a yellow cover since the 1930s.
The crime thriller genre which includes movies such as The Girl on the Train, Momento, Memories of Murder and Vertigo came to life in the 1800's with the earliest known crime fiction being Thomas Skinner Sturr's anonymous Richmond, or Stories in the life of a Bow Street Officer back in 1827.
However this wasn't a full length crime fiction novel, the first full length crime fiction novel was Steen Steensen Blicher's The Reactor of Veilbye which was published in 1829. It is said the the Sherlock Holmes mysteries written by Arthur Conan Doyle have been singularly responsible fore the huge popularity in this genre.
It is difficult to tell where crime fiction starts and where it ends, this being largely attributed to the fact that love, danger and death are central motifs in fiction and a less obvious reason is that the classification of a work may very well be related to the author's reputation.
The Crime Fiction has it's own subgenres, one being the Detective fiction subgenre with various forms of it being shown in a movie;
- The cozy mystery: a subgenre of detective fiction in which profanity, sex, and violence are downplayed or treated humorously.
- The locked room mystery: a specialised kind of a whodunit in which the crime is committed under apparently impossible circumstances, such as a locked room which no intruder could have entered or left.
- The whodunit: the most common form of detective fiction. It features a complex, plot-driven story in which the reader is provided with clues from which the identity of the perpetrator of the crime may be deduced before the solution is revealed at the end of the book.
- The Inverted detective story: Popularly called a "howcatchem," this is a genre of detective fiction where the reader is already aware of who the criminal is and the plot revolves around the detective discovering what the reader or audience already knows. The howcatchem was popularized by television shows such as Columbo and Barnaby Jones.
Seen from a practical point of view, one could argue that a crime novel is simply a novel that can be found in a bookshop on shelves labelled "Crime". (This suggestion has actually been made about science fiction, but it can be applied here as well. Penguin Books has had a long-standing tradition of publishing crime novels in paperback editions with green covers and spines (as opposed to the orange spines of mainstream literature), thus attracting the eyes of potential buyers when they enter the shop. However, this clever marketing strategy does not tell casual browsers what they are really in for when they buy a particular book.