Essay on the development of the crime fiction genre

Since its birth in the 1800s, crime fiction has become a dominant and permanent genre, in almost all different types of literature and related medias. The genre has through out the time undergone a variety of makeovers and reshapements, from the early pioneers such as Edgar Allan Poe and Agatha Christie, to the hard boiled “noir” fiction writers, has the genre shape shifted and adopted to the times and the change of readers; and this constant everlasting adaptation does not seem to stop. Sarah Hughes is a journalist that examines and analyzes this fairly resent change in the genre and has recently released an article concerning this topic. Her article is from the 3 July 2016 called “After Agatha Christie… female crime writers delve deep into women worst fears”. In her article Hughes argues and that the genre in the recent past has changed from a genre dominated by masculinity into becoming a genre lead by women writing stories that are more focused on the psychological and the feelings of the protagonist, than the oldschool "whodunit".


Sarah Hughes argues for her view, and tries to engage the reader in different ways. To persuade and convince the reader of her credibility she uses the different modes of appeal logos, ethos and pathos. For instance she appeals to the readers sense of logic by engaging the readers logos. She does this on line 39 “Roughly 21 billion crime books are sold a year and 80% of those are bought by women.” She thereby uses statistics to seem more credible since her statements of women being more dominant genre, is now supported by numbers. 

She also uses pathos in her article to make the text more relatable and interesting to the reader by appealing to their feelings. She uses pathos on line 85 where it says“…women think about crime in a very personal way. They know what it’s like to walk down a street at night and have to make a snap judgment: am I safe? Thinking about crime is very personal for women because they know what it’s like to be prey.” As Hughes states in her text most readers of crime fiction stories are women, and therefore most of the readers of this article would naturally be women due to this topic being something of interest. Hughes thereby appeals to the women reading this article by using an example they would be able to relate to, and we as humans are more likely to agree on something we can relate to. 

Hughes also appeals to the readers ethos by citing a lot of different sources to build on her argument. She refers to other writers such as Sabine Durrant, Megan Abbot amongst others. This is done by Hughes to argue better for her case, but it obtains the opposite of the wanted effect, due to the shear amount to sources she refers to. This makes it confusing, and it is hard to keep track of who said what, distracting the reader from the article. 


Sarah Hughes main intention with her article is to inform the reader that the genre of crime fiction is undergoing a change, and that female writers take a different approach to helping evolve these types of stories/genre. She states in her article the following on line 12 “Crime fiction, it seems, is increasingly a woman’s game”. She thereby from one of the very first lines, distances the past from what the genre has recently evolved to making it clear from the start, that the article will focus on this change.  

This change is from the hard boiled old crime fiction to the new soft and psychology based focused crime novels. And there seems to something about it. Another article brought in the paper Independent seems to back up Hughes claim. In the article “How Crime fiction has moved on”^1 by Rebecca Armstrong cites Baroness James of Holland Park saying that the reader wants “fewer secret rooms, then, and a lot more psychology are the hallmarks of the modern whodunit” which is in concordance with Hughe´s statement that women tend to focus more on the psyche than men does. So if the average reader wants more about a specific topic and women create this, naturally it will result in more feminine crime fiction writers. 


In conclusion Sarah Hughes article “After Agatha Christie… female crime writers delve deep into women worst fears” is a article that analyzes the resent change in the genre of crime fiction and how it has developed from being a genre ruled by mainly manly writers into becoming controlled by women. Hughes shows this change by citing loads of different "experts" on the topic. This is also one of the ways she persuades the reader and convinces the reader that she is on to something in her discussions of this topic; and she might be. Other sources also suggest that there is an ongoing change in the world of crime fiction tales; but who knows where its headed? We might have some qualified guesses but only the future will be able to tell us who the text Edgar Allan Poe or Agatha Christie will be. 

1* http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/how-crime-fiction-has-moved-on-8500257.html

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