Mystery, Murder and the Moorland. Devon-Spaces in British Detective Fiction of the 20th and 21st Century

Table of Contents

1 Introduction

2 Spatiality and (Detective) Fiction
2.1 Theories on Space and Place
2.2 The Setting: Geographical and Physical Context

3 Literary Representation of Devon in Detective Fiction
3.1 Devon in Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902)
3.1.1 Open Spaces: The Supernatural Moorland as Ostensible Reality
3.1.2 Enclosed Spaces: The Dwelling as Locus of Truth
3.2 Devon in Christie’s The Sittaford Mystery (1931)
3.2.1 Open Spaces: External Circumstances as Initiator of the Crime
3.2.2 Enclosed Spaces: The Locked Room as Place of Discovery
3.3 Devon in Beckett’s The Calling of the Grave (2010)
3.3.1 Open Spaces: Dartmoor as Danger and Hiding Place
3.3.2 Enclosed Spaces: The Home as Place of ‘False Security’
3.4 Comparative Analysis: Devon-Spaces in Detective Literature and the Importance of the Prison

4 Medial Representation of Doyle’s Devon
4.1 Film Adaptation: The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939)
4.2 Television Adaptation: BBC Series Sherlock, Episode “The Hounds of Baskerville” (2011)

5 Conclusion

Works Cited

1 Introduction

Devon, even up to the coming of the railways, was a county of isolated communities, secret and remote. […] For even though ravishing panoramas and areas of spectacular wildness are common enough, the popular Devon as a county of steeply banked lanes, hidden villages and embosomed farms, is not far from truth.¹

In his guide In Praise of Devon, John Lane accurately characterises the British south- western county Devon and focuses on the aspects of loneliness and isolation which seem to be so particular in this region of England. Reasons for this kind of characterisation are easy to find, namely Devon’s geographical position and unique landscape. Besides the towns of Exeter and Plymouth, it is remarkable that Devon is still predominantly rural and little populated in comparison to other parts of the country. Furthermore, it is best-known for its area of moorland Dartmoor, a place in the ‘middle of nowhere’, situated in the largest open space in England. In the last few centuries access to this county has been eased by motorways, presently giving Devon the status as popular tourist destination.²

However, even if Devon changed from isolation to popularity or even ‘popular isolation’, what remains unchanged is in particular the aura of the desolate moorland which is often associated with inexplicable and enigmatic happenings. This mixture of this distinctive, silent landscape in combination with its inaccessibility is the reason why authors of literary fiction used it as main setting of their novels in the past and today. Different locations in the county of Devon can be found in various literary genres from different periods but what is highly striking is that especially in the twentieth and twenty-first century Devon is seen as the perfect place for a special literary genre that revolves around murder, investigation and mystery: detective fiction.

Detective fiction is maybe “the most popular sub-genre of the literary form [crime fiction]”³ that can be defined as follows: “A type of fiction centred around the investigation of a crime that focuses attention on the method of detection by structuring the methods. For this reason it is also known by mystery fiction.”⁴ This definition concentrates on the main characteristics of this sub-genre, but it is crucial to keep in mind the development this genre made in the course of time. Edgar Allan Poe is acknowledged to be the ‘inventor’ of the modern detective story at the end of the nineteenth century⁵, a “narrative form that focuses on a crime and its solution […] [making] the reader a witness who look[s] over the detective’s shoulder”⁶. In Britain the first detective stories appeared at the end of the nineteenth century as well and established this sub-genre as an own literary form in the twentieth century.⁷ Even if detective fiction was disdained in the early days as too popular (also literally speaking) and considered mere entertainment and not ‘serious literature’⁸, it was in particular Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation of Sherlock Holmes which finally made indubitable the detective genre an accepted one.⁹ The great time of detective novels came afterwards, from the 1920s and 1930s on, in the so-called ‘Golden Age’, a time epitomised by texts of Agatha Christie.¹⁰

But as society developed, detective fiction advanced as well. While Doyle’s narrative revolves around the detection itself¹¹, the ‘Golden Age’ locates the murder at the centre and uses the ‘clue-puzzle’ mystery as prevalent form.¹² Nowadays, due to the rise of forensic science, “sensational elements - connected with the materiality of the body and its fluids, the brutality of violence, the cogency of physical pain - are part and parcel of post-modern culture”¹³ and therefore used for detective novels that are consequently closely connected to crime thrillers. However, even if characteristics of this genre have partly changed, the importance of space remained as “there is often an intimate connection between crime and its milieu, which thus come to play a prominent thematic role in such novels”¹⁴. This statement fits in particular to the county of Devon, which, in contrast to urban spaces, hardly changed in the last decade and has kept the same significant characteristics.

But why exactly does Devon seem to be a perfect location for detective novels in the past and today? What kind of spaces can be found as settings and why? How are the characters connected to, influenced by and move in these spaces? These are only some questions that will be answered in this thesis to finally highlight that not only Devon has shaped detective fiction but especially vice versa, that the view we have of Devon has been shaped by the way it was presented in detective fiction to the public in the twentieth and twenty-first century. As time seems to stand still in this region, this limited and nearly unchanged representation of Devon as an uncanny space creates a vital reality for the reader which makes it sometimes difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction.

This thesis will start with some general assumptions on spatiality in literature and outline its importance for (detective) fiction. The focus will be on the concepts of space and place by de Certeau, Lefebvre and Lotman. Afterwards, in the subchapter on the geographical and physical context, crucial dichotomies of space which have an influence on detective novels will be examined, especially the distinction between open and enclosed spaces. The chapter that follows will deal with three concrete novels of different eras to explore the representation of Devon with regard to the specific dichotomy mentioned above. Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) and Agatha Christie’s novel The Sittaford Mystery (1931) both depict Devon in the early and middle twentieth century while Simon Beckett’s The Calling of the Grave (2010) shows a contemporary idea of how this region is perceived. A comparative analysis of these three novels will follow in order to point out the similarities and differences of Devon-spaces, as well as to underline how they together create its overall image. In this way, this chapter shows that new inventions have only changed this location and its perception at the surface but not in its core.

Since there are many adaptations of Doyle’s novel, the fourth chapter will take a closer look at two medial representations of Devon and compare the literary with the medial space. The popular film adaptation by Lanfield from 1939 and an episode of the BBC Series Sherlock, a reimagining, contemporary update of Doyle’s classic, will serve as examples. Although many aspects of the adaptations could be compared to the novel, the interest will primarily be in the cinematographic realisation of spaces. Furthermore, the question of how far these spaces coincide with the image of Devon created by literature will be discussed. Subsequently, the conclusion will finally summarise the findings of this thesis and suggest possibilities to expand the topic of British detective fiction and Devon-spaces.

2 Spatiality and (Detective) Fiction

In his essay Des espaces des autres, written in 1964 and published twenty years later, Michel Foucault declares that “the present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space”¹⁵. His assumption on space in the twentieth century obtained high approval by scholars and is said to still be valid today. While the nineteenth century seems to have been obsessed with discourses on time and history¹⁶ the twentieth and twenty- first century are more concentrated on spatiality. After the omnipresent spatial turn, cultural studies, anthropology and sociology, above others, have become increasingly spatial in their orientation¹⁷ ; literary studies were also strongly influenced by this development.

This chapter on spatiality as cultural topic and concept will therefore outline basic assumptions on space and place with regard to production, performance and mobility. For this reason, seminal ideas on this topic by de Certeau, Lefebvre and Lotman will be expounded and combined with the detective genre. Then, the importance of setting will be explained from the general to the specific, i.e. that the focus will be in particular on the dichotomy of open and enclosed spaces.

2.1 Theories on Space and Place

Dealing with space and place the question of defining those two terms already caused difficulties among scholars.¹⁸ Jeff Malpas and Henri Lefebvre can be named as exemplary scholars who came to the conclusion that a proper definition is hard to find. Malpas claims that there is neither an agreement on the definition of the two concepts, nor possible to really differentiate between space and place¹⁹ and Lefebvre alludes to this problem by stating that the word ‘space’ is frequently employed even if it is not properly defined.²⁰ He more generally holds the view that spatial representations “always entail practical consequences for the ways in which people interact with their changing environments”²¹.

Michel de Certeau, however, tries to distinguish between the two and deduces that “space is practiced place”²². One the one hand dynamics and movement are the key factors in order to classify the term ‘space’; on the other hand ‘place’ has the characteristic of being static and inertial. Yet, of course, there are also completely different approaches, such as the ones by Massey and Schröder who follow a similar line of argument. Both are of the opinion that ‘places’ are not static and not “points or areas on a map, but […] integrations of space and time”²³. They are dynamic processes.²⁴ It is therefore difficult to come to an agreement upon this topic so that scholars mostly use these terms synonymously. This assumption additionally fits to what Brown/Irwin argue about how space and place are perceived by the reader. For the reader, the representations of space is foremost an “act of appropriation”²⁵, while descriptions of places exist for the sake of “enabling the reader to compare imitation with reality”²⁶. Again, the term ‘place’ is used in a more concrete sense - it has the effect that the reader draws connections between new and old knowledge. ‘Space’ simply allows the reader to orientate and refers to a broader context.²⁷

Yet, how are space and place used in literature? In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau examines production and performance with the regard to space and place. In his work, he tries to fathom the character and significance of everyday practices, hence to find out “the ways in which users […] operate”²⁸. The consumer in such practices is not passive but takes an active role. Simultaneously, this assumption signifies that the user can make something else out of the product than what the manufacturer had originally intended.²⁹ Connecting this idea with space and detective fiction, one can argue that especially in this genre, the ‘product’ or rather ‘space’ is used differently by its users - as space of crime, investigation or hiding-place. Place thus “influences the development of character just as much places are given character by people who inhabit them”³⁰.

De Certeau is furthermore known for two other concepts related to place, space and practices: strategies and tactics - the two contrasting ways of operating he juxtaposes. Strategy, in this context, means striving for control of time and space. “It postulates a place that can be delimited as its own and serves as the base from which relations with an exteriority composed of target or threats [...] can be managed.”³¹ Opposed to strategy is tactic which is a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus. […] The space of a tactic is the space of the other. [….] It is a maneuver […] within enemy territory. It does not, therefore, have the options of planning general strategy […] and operates in isolated actions. […] This nowhere gives a tactic mobility […] but a mobility that must accept the chance offerings of the moment, and seize on the wing the possibilities that offer themselves at any given moment.³²

This means that tactics are behavioural patterns that develop in order to undermine and manipulate prevalent power structures. It provides the individual with opportunities to cope actively with its environment.³³ According to de Certeau, many everyday practices are tactics³⁴, e.g. frequenting, walking in or dwelling in a place. Through walking, and thus through footsteps, space is performed and created³⁵, connecting the “here and there”³⁶.

Concluding, de Certeau’s chapter Walking in the City explores the idea that, by walking, people do not only create space but also transform it through selection. We can decide where to go and where not to go and shape space when preferring to choose a certain route instead of taking others. Even obstacles and prohibitions can be ignored or avoided. Through these unexpected paths, space is transformed and connections between space and walker can be drawn.³⁷ Hallet/Neumann summarise this theory by saying: “Räume in der Literatur, das sind menschlich erlebte Räume, in denen räumliche Gegebenheiten, kulturelle Bedeutungszuschreibungen und individuelle Erfahrungsweisen zusammenwirken.”³⁸

When rethinking the concept of ‘walking’ and ‘movement’ and putting it into context to literary fiction, one can now resume that “Räume in literarischen Texten […] immer in einer Beziehung zu sich darin bewegende oder zu wahrnehmende Individuen stehen.”³⁹ There is always a reason why characters move in space and especially in detective fiction moving through maybe unknown spaces is of a high significance. The main characters need “a place or places where the crime was committed, discovered and solved”⁴⁰ which lead to the consequence that the detective, for instance, has to explore new spaces which are unknown to him but are already known and were ‘walked’ by the criminal before. He, the detective, is therefore the typical character using tactics, as he has to cope with the space presented to him. The criminal, in contrast, captures or has already captured the important space, moves, manages and is able to partly control it to his advantage.

Hence, spaces give the reader the opportunity to better understand a figure’s identity and the processes that lead to this identity. The characters’ movement within a space is an indicator for both their relation to that space and to other people around them.⁴¹ They can be identified through their behaviour in the space, how they explore, bend and transgress boundaries, if they stay mobile or immobile.⁴² Thinking of border transgression it is indispensable to include Jurij Lotman’s theory on this topic. He is convinced that literary texts are spatially organised and that action is triggered when a character transgresses boundaries because it is this step that creates instability and thus initiates the plot.⁴³ Lotman argues that the most important topological characteristic is “die Grenze ”⁴⁴:

Sie teilt den Raum in zwei disjunkte Teilräume. Ihre wichtigste Eigenschaft ist ihre Unüberschreitbarkeit. Die Art, wie ein Text durch eine solche Grenze aufgeteilt wird, ist eines seiner wesentlichsten Charakteristika. Ob es sich dabei um eine Aufteilung von Freunde und Feinde, Lebende und Tote, […] oder andere handelt, ist an sich gleich. Wichtig ist etwas anderes: die Grenze, die den Raum teilt, muß unüberwindlich sein und die innere Struktur der beiden Teile verschieden.⁴⁵

These different sides of the border are therefore impermeable for nearly every character, except the hero. Although different types of contrasting spaces can be found, namely topographic, topologic and semantic ones⁴⁶, the relationship between characters and space is the same: while static characters are used to define and classify one specific space, the hero as dynamic character is able to overcome these boundaries thanks to extraordinary abilities and thus, through this transgression, creates events.⁴⁷ Hence, through this movement, literary space stops being something fixed or static, but, quite the contrary, becomes dynamic, processual and develops constantly.

In detective fiction, different types of space mentioned by Lotman can be found and will be outlined in the next subchapter. The detectives move back and forth between these spaces even if they normally do not have any relationship to the concrete places or landscapes in which they investigate.⁴⁸ They are forced to do so in order to find clues for the solution of the case but, at the same time, the detectives as heroes also need a zeitweiligem räumlichen Abstand […]. [D]iese Figuren […] vermeiden, für die Zeit der Fallaufklärung direkt an den Tatort zu ziehen; sie bevorzugen eine Art moderate Nähe zum Verbrechensschauplatz, die es ihm ermöglicht, diesen flexibel aufzusuchen und wieder zu verlassen (oftmals Gasthaus oder Pension oder nächstgelegene Stadt).⁴⁹

What this quote suggests is that in fiction, the semantic space is the most important and the opposition ‘good’ vs. ‘bad’ the most obvious one. Detectives then often prefer the relocation to a safer place they have chosen by themselves and where they hope to be safe instead of being exposed to a place where they may apprehend danger.

2.2 The Setting: Geographical and Physical Context

The literary framework of a narrative or, in other words, the environment or surrounding in which a character is put, is called setting.⁵⁰ It is important for fiction as it establishes a geographical and physical location which influences the reader’s interpretation of the story’s events and characters.⁵¹ As every human event happens somewhere the reader automatically wants to know what that ‘somewhere’ is like.⁵² The author fills the reader’s knowledge gap but, at the same time, puts him where he intends him to be mentally.⁵³ The author therefore constructs both a geographical and physical context for the plot, which in some novels only serve as “ornamental purpose [or] decorative background to the action”⁵⁴. However, this is not the case in the type of novels that will be analysed in this thesis as “the two main ingredients in detective story [are] the problem and the setting”⁵⁵. Detective novels subsist from the setting in which the figures actively move, commit crimes, cover suspicious tracks, pursue or flee from each other. It is no coincidence that they are often shown in situations in which they try to become acquainted with new places by studying city maps or socialising with inhabitants to gain inside information.⁵⁶ This genre therefore represents an ideal opportunity to show how the setting can be used in fiction, as realism is fundamental to its subject matters: crime and consequences.⁵⁷

The geographical context indicates where the story is set and therefore the consequences that result for the characters. Language and customs might be unfamiliar to the reader but may account for the characters’ motivation and plot developments. Equally, the choice of location - city or country - is of importance as these contrasting landscapes trigger out different associations.⁵⁸ The city is mostly referred to as “the capital, the large town, a distinctive form of civilisation, […] the achieved centre of learning, communication [and] light [as well as] a place of noise, worldliness and ambition”⁵⁹. The country, in contrast, is said to be “of peace, innocence, and simple virtue [on the one hand and] a place of backwardness, ignorance [and] limitation”⁶⁰ on the other hand.

These apparent stereotypical attributes, which are seen as common knowledge, are often employed by authors of fiction - but with restrictions as it is noticeable that especially in detective fiction the focus is mostly on the ‘negative’ attributes. Crimes are culturally, socially and, in particular, geographically specific⁶¹ and since its beginnings considered to be a product of the city, a consequence of urbanization and the concomitant proximity of rich and poor within the confines of urban spaces. The physicality, the mass of buildings, the miles of roads and streets, the urban sprawl, the huge population and the anonymity conferred on the individual by the crowd, all lend themselves to the construction of the criminal and the creation of crime.⁶²

In addition, the majority of the population lives in cities so that the city as setting provides the readers with “a point of entry and a feeling of familiarity”⁶³ making the fiction more realistic and imaginable. For British detective fiction, this genre is mostly suited to and thus associated with the capital London as its “labyrinthine streets [and] recognisable coordinates”⁶⁴ promote the image of London as a puzzle, a maze that must be unravelled. Thus, cities in general remain the preferred location for many crime and detective novels in Britain but, from the 1920s and 1930s, at the latest, a tendency to locate crimes in smallish cities either rural or yet separated from the city can be ascertained.⁶⁵

The countryside as setting was and is chosen by authors for two reasons which are based on two stereotyped ideas that focus on the inhabitants and the social order of these villages: “[Sie] lösen beim englischen Leser nostalgische Reminiszenzen, beim ausländischen den Reiz des Exotischen aus, den die Welt des Inselstaats für viele Nichtengländer besitzt.”⁶⁶ While bigger towns or cities are often already known in some ways to the reader, the rural villages provide the audience with something unknown, something they can explore for the first time. These archetypal characteristics of silence, remoteness, small communities and idyllic, untouched nature make this pastoral setting Eden-like and thus stand in sharp contrast with crime and murder.⁶⁷ This idealised place, partly isolated from the preoccupations of the day and indifferent to what happens in the bigger cities, is not the setting in which people would expect crimes so that it becomes a very seductive place for authors of detective fiction - the incongruity almost automatically builds up suspense and therefore makes it a perfect place for their plot.⁶⁸ Moreover, “murder can only be committed within [the] small circle of characters”⁶⁹ living there which enhances the participation of the reader in the solving of the case.

Regardless of whether the city or countryside is chosen, in every case authors tend to use both real and imaginary geographical toponyms because “die in […] Texten erkennbaren Mischungsverhältnisse von Realem und Fiktivem […] offensichtlich Gegebenes und Hinzugedachtes in eine Beziehung [bringen]”⁷⁰. Martínez/Scheffel assert the following with reference to this topic:

Im erzählten Raum lassen sich die explizit thematisierten Schaupl ä tze als Vordergrund der Handlung von einem mehr oder weniger unbestimmt gegebenen Hintergrundsraum unterscheiden. Häufig bleiben die Schauplätze namenlos oder erhalten fiktive Ortsnamen, während der Hintergrundsraum durch reale Ortsnamen festgelegt wird.⁷¹

This signifies that through fiction real places become imagined ones as invented characters exist and imagined happenings occur. Equally, purely imaged spaces are transformed into realistic places for the reader as their concrete embedding in real geography and the detailed descriptions convey the impression of a real place.⁷² For detective fiction this interpretation of places is of prime interest - the mentioned real places are used as framework to actualise the perfect setting while the crime takes place at the imagined place. In this way, no real city, town or village is burdened with a possible negative reputation.

Besides the geographical context, it is in particular the physical context which is important for the subgenre discussed in this thesis. In general, “a work’s physical context includes such factors as the time of day, whether a story unfolds primarily inside or out-of-doors, what the weather is like and the story’s general atmosphere.”⁷³ For detective fiction the time of day is significant as it might reveal information about the type of crime and about the victim’s and the criminal’s character. It is in human nature that one expects fellow men to be sleeping at night and to be active at day. Was the crime therefore committed in the anonymity and darkness of the night where “attacks are more likely to occur”⁷⁴ ? Or was it carried out at daytime when people might be incautious because they do not expect a crime to happen if known or unknown people are around? Both are possible options and employed in detective novels.

Connected to the time of day is the question if the story is set inside (enclosed spaces) or out-of-doors (open spaces) and which consequences result of this dichotomous structure. An enclosed space such as a house or dwelling, as Smyth and Croft put it, “is an absolutely fundamental part of our lives”⁷⁵ which provides us with feelings of safety and protection and is separated from the ‘outside’ through some sort of threshold.⁷⁶ Public interior public spaces, such as hotels or bars, are similarly perceived as less intimidating and dangerous.⁷⁷ The exterior, in contrast, can also positively suggest freedom or appreciation of nature⁷⁸ but is more often associated with the opposite, namely with “‘fremd’, ‘feindlich’ [und] ‘kalt’”⁷⁹. A possible reason for this popular belief is the impact of the weather. In his opus with the title Der Held und sein Wetter, F.C. Delius explains the relationship between the weather and the plot of a fictional work:

Erst das extreme Wetter schafft eine extreme Situation, die den letzten Schritt zum äußerlichen Höhepunkt der Handlung […] ermöglicht […]. Ermöglicht - weil nicht die gesellschaftlichen Konventionen, sondern erst die ungewöhnliche Gelegenheit den spontanen Entschluß zum kurzfristigen Ausbruch aus der Gesellschaft weckte; [.]⁸⁰

The weather, especially bad weather is therefore not only employed as a background part of setting but actively used to underline and support the plot. Although the explanations Delius offers refer to a novel of the bourgeois realism era in Germany, his main idea can be easily transferred to detective fiction: weather phenomena such as rain or fog influence the outdoor space by making people blind or washing away traces so that the criminal is given the opportunity, in the first place, to commit the crimes in secret without being watched. For the detective, this circumstance signifies a challenge because it is more demanding to find clues and solve the case in these conditions. As a result the suspense clearly enhances. But the weather can also have an impact on inside spaces, for instance if the setting is the countryside. Here, the bad weather “bringt die […] Gesellschaft noch näher zusammen, die ohnehin schon exklusiv und nur mit sich selbst beschäftigt ist”⁸¹. This fact, again, triggers the suspense needed in detective fiction since nearly everyone in this community inevitably belongs to the pool of suspects.

Hence, authors of detective fiction use both possibilities of this dichotomy for their plot, either in the clichéd way described above but also sometimes inversely as surprise effect, for example “in the country-house mystery and the locked-room mystery, in which various ingenious methods of committing murder in a hermetically sealed environment [form] the core.”⁸² Here, the hermetic setting, which seems to be idyllic and safe, changes radically and becomes a life-threatening place as its walls hinder the victim from leaving in time. Wigbers thus sums up that in some detective novels there are “keine Räumlichkeiten, die vor dem Verbrechen schützen”⁸³.

What all the aspects of the physical context therefore amount to is the overall atmosphere or mood of a novel. They highlight the theme, help to explain the character’s state of mind, impend or advance the action. In the next chapter, three detective novels which play in a rural area will be described and analysed from this angle.

[...]

---

¹ John Lane, In Praise of Devon: A Guide to Its People, Places and Character (Cambridge: Green Books, 1998) 14.

² cf. Bridget Cherry/Nikolaus Pevsner, Devon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991) 11.

³ Heather Worthington, Key Concepts in Crime Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) 16.

⁴ John Scaggs, Crime Fiction (Oxon: Routledge, 2005) 145.

⁵ cf. Martin Priestman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 2.

⁶ Dawn B. Sova, Critical Companion to Edgar Allan Poe: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work (New York City, NY: Infobase Publishing, 2007) 321.

⁷ cf. Julian Symons, The Detective Story in Britain (London: Green & Co.,1962) 7.

⁸ cf. John G. Cawelti, “Canonization, Modern Literature, and the Detective Story” Theory and

Practice of Classic Detective Fiction, eds. Jerome Delamater/Ruth Prigozy (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997) 6.

⁹ cf. Priestman 4.

¹⁰ cf. Worthington 13.

¹¹ cf. Worthington xvi.

¹² cf. Worthington 13.

¹³ Maurizio Ascari, A Counter-History of Crime Fiction: Supernatural, Gothic, Sensational (New York City, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) 11.

¹⁴ David Geherin, Scene of the Crime (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008) 8.

¹⁵ Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias” Architecture, Mouvement, Continuit é, trans. Jay Miskowiec. 5 (1984): 46.

¹⁶ cf. Foucault 46.

¹⁷ cf. Robert Tally, Spatiality (Oxon: Routledge, 2013) 119.

¹⁸ cf. Phil Hubbard/Rob Kitchin (eds.), Key Thinkers on Space and Place (London: SAGE

Publications, 2010) 3.

¹⁹ cf. Jeff Malpas, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 19.

²⁰ cf. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2005) 1.

²¹ David James, Contemporary British Fiction and the Artistry of Space: Style, Landscape, Perception (London: Continuum, 2008) 2.

²² Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988) 117.

²³ Doreen Massey, For Space (London: SAGE Publications, 2005) 39.

²⁴ cf. Nicole Schröder, Spaces and Places in Motion: Spatial Concepts in Contemporary American Literature (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2006) 47.

²⁵ Peter Brown/Michael Irwin (eds.), Literature & Place 1800-2000 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2006) 20.

²⁶ Brown/Irwin 20.

²⁷ In the next sections I will follow suit but take into account the slight distinction Schröder suggests: the term ‘place’ should be used when one refers to a location that the characters are familiar with while ‘space’ is used more generally. It alludes to a larger location only little known by the characters. Both are understood as ‘lived’, e.g. inhabited and created by its inhabitants (cf. Schröder 47).

²⁸ de Certeau xi.

²⁹ cf. de Certeau 31.

³⁰ Worthington 21.

³¹ de Certeau 35-6.

³² de Certeau 37.

³³ cf. Schröder 37-8.

³⁴ cf. de Certeau xix.

³⁵ cf. Schröder 38.

³⁶ de Certeau 98.

³⁷ cf. de Certeau 98.

³⁸ Wolfgang Hallet/Birgit Neumann (eds.), Raum und Bewegung in der Literatur: Die

Literaturwissenschaften und der Spatial Turn (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009) 11.

³⁹ Hallet/Neumann 20.

⁴⁰ Douglas R. McManis, “Places for Mysteries” Geographical Review, Vol.68, No.3 (1978): 320.

⁴¹ cf. Anna Beck, “Subjective Spaces - Spatial Subjectivities” Perspectives on Mobility, eds. Ingo Berensmeyer/Christoph Ehland (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013) 110-1.

⁴² cf. Hallet/Neumann 25.

⁴³ cf. Hallet/Neumann 17.

⁴⁴ Jurij M. Lotman, Die Struktur literarischer Texte, trans. Rolf-Dietrich Keil (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1993) 327.

⁴⁵ Lotman 327.

⁴⁶ cf. Matías Martínez/Michael Scheffel, Einf ü hrung in die Erz ä hltheorie (München: C.H. Beck, 2012) 158.

⁴⁷ Lotman 332.

⁴⁸ cf. Melanie Wigbers, Krimi-Orte im Wandel: Gestaltung und Funktionen der Handlungsschaupl ä tze in Kriminalerz ä hlungen von der Romantik bis in die Gegenwart (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006) 91.

⁴⁹ Wigbers 91.

⁵⁰ cf. “Setting”, Def. 6b. OED Online. 4 Feb 2014.

⁵¹ cf. Laurie G. Kirszner/Stephen R. Mandell, Fiction: Reading, Reacting, Writing (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1993) 17.

⁵² cf. William Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction (New York City, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 2006) 117.

⁵³ cf. Milford A. Jeremiah, “The Use of Place in Writing and Literature” Language Arts Journal of Michigan, Vol.16 (2000): 25.

⁵⁴ Geherin 3.

⁵⁵ Henry Douglas Thomson, Masters of Mystery: A Study of the Detective Story (Philadelphia, PA: R. West, 1978) 151.

⁵⁶ cf. Wigbers 12.

⁵⁷ cf. Gillian Mary Hanson, City and Shore: The Function of Setting in the British Mystery (Jefferson, CN: McFarland) 8.

⁵⁸ cf. Kirszner/Mandell 139.

⁵⁹ Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press) 1.

⁶⁰ Williams 1.

⁶¹ cf. Worthington 9.

⁶² Worthington 2-3.

⁶³ Worthington 8.

⁶⁴ Merlin Coverley, London Writing (Harpenden: Oldcastle Books Ltd.) 1852.

⁶⁵ cf. Worthington 6.

⁶⁶ Eberhard Späth, Der britische Kriminalroman 1960-1975: Ein Beitrag zur Untersuchung der nicht so hohen Literatur (Giessen: Hoffmann-Verlag, 1983) 6-7.

⁶⁷ cf. Scaggs 50.

⁶⁸ cf. Neil McCaw, Adapting Detective Fiction: Crime, Englishness and the TV Detectives (London: Continuum, 2011) 44.

⁶⁹ Sandra Engelhardt, The Investigation of Crime in Literature (Marburg: Tectum Verlag, 2011) 23.

⁷⁰ Wolfgang Iser, Das Fiktive und das Imagin ä re: Perspektiven literarischer Anthropologie (Frankfurt am Main: Surkamp Verlag, 1993) 18-9.

⁷¹ Martínez/Scheffel 152.

⁷² cf. Martínez/Scheffel 152.

⁷³ Kirszner/Mandell 140.

⁷⁴ David Levinson, Encyclopedia of Crime and Punishment, Vol.1 (London: SAGE Publications, 2011) 681.

⁷⁵ Gerry Smyth/Jo Croft, Introduction: Culture and Domestic Space, Our House: The Representation of Domestic Space in Modern Culture (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006) 12.

⁷⁶ cf. Smyth/Croft 12.

⁷⁷ cf. Levinson 681.

⁷⁸ cf. Robert Beardwood, Literature for Senior Students (Cheltenham: Insight Publications, 2009) 143.

⁷⁹ Lotman 327.

⁸⁰ F.C. Delius, Der Held und sein Wetter (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1971) 68.

⁸¹ Delius 67.

⁸² Scaggs 51.

⁸³ Wigbers 89.