Littoral Detective Fiction

Question 1

Why is the seaside/the beach/the shore a good setting for crime fiction?

Answer 1

• Remoteness
• Multitude and anonymity
• Readability of the (sandy) beach
• Mutability and erasure
• Nonhuman agency: tides, silting, erosion; elements

Question 2

Material agency (Karen Barad)

Answer 2

In agential realism’s reconceptualization of materiality, matter is agentive and intra-active. Matter is a dynamic intra-active becoming that never sits still – an ongoing reconfiguring that exceeds any linear conception of dynamics in which effect follows cause end-on-end, and in which the global is a straightforward emanation outward of the local. Matter’s dynamism is generative not merely in the sense of bringing new things into the world but in the sense of bringing forth new worlds, of engaging in an ongoing reconfiguring of the world.

Question 3

Vibrant matter ( Jane Bennett)

Answer 3

Each human is a heterogeneous compound of wonderfully vibrant, dangerously vibrant, matter. If matter itself is lively, then not only is the difference between subjects and objects minimized, but the status of the shared materiality of all things is elevated. All bodies become more than mere objects, as the thing-powers of resistance and protean agency are brought into sharper relief. Vital materialism would thus set up a kind of safety net for those humans who are now, in a world where Kantian morality is the standard, routinely made to suffer because they do not conform to a particular (Euro-American, bourgeois, theocentric, or other) model of personhood. The ethical aim becomes to distribute value more generously, to bodies as such.

Question 4

Tenets (principles) of New Materialism

Answer 4

• Matter is generative and relational (‘intra-active’)
• Agency is separated from intentionality
• Agency is not exclusively human: all material things are agential
• There is no Cartesian division between mind and matter: the mind is material, matter is alive (‘vibrant’)
• New Materialism exposes the assumption that humans control nature, that they are ‘masters’, as a fallacy (=mistaken belief)

Question 5

C.S. Forester, “The Turning of the Tide”

Answer 5

• First published in 1936 in The Story- Teller (1907-37)
• Pulp fiction magazine that published, however, modernist authors such as Katherine Mansfield, Rudyard Kipling, and H.G. Wells
• Slade murders Spalding but then drowns when rigor mortis sets in and he gets dragged down into the sea

Question 6

Spring Tide

Answer 6

• During full or new moons—which occur when the Earth, sun, and moon are nearly in alignment—average tidal ranges are slightly larger. This occurs twice each month. The moon appears new (dark) when it is directly between the Earth and the sun. The moon appears full when the Earth is between the moon and the sun. In both cases, the gravitational pull of the sun is “added” to the gravitational pull of the moon on Earth, causing the oceans to bulge a bit more than usual. This means that high tides are a little higher and low tides are a little lower than average.
• These are called spring tides, a common historical term that has nothing to do with the season of spring. Rather, the term is derived from the concept of the tide “springing forth.” Spring tides occur twice each lunar month all year long, without regard to the season.

Question 7

Dorothy Sayers, “Have His Carcase” (1932)

Answer 7

• Locked-room mystery (like Christie’s And Then There Were None)
• During a walking holiday, detective novelist Harriet Vane finds a dead body lying on an exposed rock
• Before the police arrive, the corpse is covered by the incoming tide
• The investigation depends on evidence gathered by Harriet: the man died of
  a cut throat, the body was still running from the wound when she arrived
• Apart from the body, the beach was empty
• With the help of Sayers’s master detective Lord Peter Wimsey, solves the crime after a thorough reading of the beach

Question 8

Epistemological consciousness of detective fiction: discussions about

Answer 8

• the nature of evidence
• forensic methodology
• points of view and (national and gender) prejudice
• the literary tradition
• intuition, common sense, artistic sense

Question 9

Conclusions about “Have His Carcase” and “The Turning of the Tide”

Answer 9

1. The beach is marked by material qualities and social conditions that make it an ideal crime scene, as well as an ideal site for detection.
2. The Crimes in “The Turning of the Tide” and Have His Carcase are predicated on these material qualities; i.e. the perpetrators make use of the properties of the tidal beach to commit a ‘perfect crime’.
3. However, they err in believing that they can control matter. Both the victims’ bodies (rigor mortis, haemophilia) and the beach and sea are agential, and ultimately foil the murder plot.
4. The detection plot in Have His Carcase focuses on making matter speak (forensic evidence, autopsy, reading clues on beach), but also foregrounds the literary tradition, i.e. imagination and artistic sense.