ABSTRACT
By adopting the formula but changing this one significant element, authors
undercut their protagonists to reinforce a social standard of female inequality and, in so doing, undermine the genre.
She calls it ‘imitation without reconsideration’.1 Klein rightly criticizes the implementation of shallow, excessively feminine stereotypes by many male authors, appealing instead for realism, pleading for ‘plausible women… portraying authentic, lived experience’.2 She suggests ways for the writer to evade the supposed masculinist norms and values of the conventional crime novel, and so disrupt the textual structure. Klein criticizes unenlightened male authors for ‘undermining’ the genre, whilst inciting others (feminists) to ‘rethink it, reformulate it, re-vision it’.3 This paradox illustrates the parameters of this book: despite commonsensical attempts to gender the detective novel as masculine, it could also be argued that whilst the form undoubtably can foreground masculine and misogynistic structures, there is also an argument for the form being fundamentally friendly to feminists. Whether this compatibility constitutes breaking the form depends on one’s initial starting point as to what constitutes the genre in the first place. Whereas Klein advocates realism as the preferred mode for feminist crime fiction, consigning parody to being an inane repetition of a male form, I think the formal characteristics of the genre are more ambiguous, needing further exploration. In this concluding chapter, therefore, I shall attempt to draw out some of the structural implications for the detective genre, coming out of the preceding chapters’ close textual analysis, by now considering the form itself.
