“Wit in a Context of Cruelty”: On Dark Humor in Crime Fiction

Abstract: This article proposes to give clearer account of both the centrality of dark humor in the history of French crime fiction and the apparent decline in humorous styles in crime fiction of the twenty-first century. After laying out the case that French crime fiction’s dominant tones have become more serious since the end of the genre’s slightly belated Trente Glorieuses (roughly 1950s-1980s), this article offers some examples of how humorous writing has migrated toward high-literary crime fiction, as well as toward adjacent cultural spheres. Paying particular attention to the prevalence of dark humor in canonical crime fictions that play a decisive role in defining the archetypes of the genre, I argue both that humor deserves a more prominent place in histories of crime fiction, and that crime fiction deserves a larger consideration in histories of the vernacular turn in the modern novel. In the process, I give a preliminary account of the progressive redefinition of the styles of crime fiction found in both literary collections and specialized genre imprints in France.