Dead in the long room

Abstract

This thesis comprises a crime novel, Dead in the Long Room, and an accompanying extended critical essay. Dead in the Long Room is a novel written in homage to the Golden Age of crime and the many writers that genre represents. It embodies Gulddal & Rolls’ (2016) notion of the creative-critical nexus - the idea that literary texts do not exist as distinct from critical endeavour, but are in themselves exercises in critical response. Dead in the Long Room is therefore to be conceived as what I have termed elsewhere (Green 2021) ‘enacted criticism’. The critical essay that follows the novel offers an extended critical commentary on and engagement with my processes as a writer in the production of the novel. Drawing on critical resources derived from inter alia Bruner, Barthes, Bakhtin and Todorov, it engages in sustained critical fashion with the genre of Golden Age detective fiction - a form that is eminently self-reflexive and that is frequently marked by a deep awareness of its own ‘constructedness’ - and the ways in which textual interaction is conceived. Taken together, the novel and the critical essay are considered as examples of the kinds of ‘poetics’ envisioned by Lasky (2013).