Fear in Detective Stories: The representation of crime as threatening or nonthreatening in A Study in Scarlet and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Abstract

This thesis explores the representation of crime and fear in detective stories. I will particularly look at this in Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Three main concepts will be used to analyze these texts: the detective novel as a genre, the presence of an unreliable police force, and the elements of a sensation novel. These two novels were released only one year apart, during a time when the police force and the detective department at Scotland Yard were only a few decades old and were still trying to gain the trust of the public. They were also released just a few years after the ‘beginning’ of the modern-day detective novel, and right after the peak of the sensation novel. These elements are therefore all relatively new concepts at the time of the novels’ publishing. Through this analysis of the creation or reduction of fearful elements, I intend to show that although these authors use the same elements in their novels, they are able to create very different relationships to crime. The main aim of this thesis is then to show that where Doyle uses the detective genre, the unreliable police force, and the sensation novel, in order to draw the attention away from crime, Stevenson uses these same elements in order to achieve the opposite.