Settings for a crime scene

(Click to enlarge)

Rufus King, Holiday Homicide (Dell 22)

Dell books paperback comprised different populargenres, from the Western to the adventure and the sentimental novel. But half or more of them were crime fiction. The maps on their backs merges visually all these genres. After all, the four of them can, to an extent, rely diegetically, figuratively or at least metaphorically on sketches and raw drawings (Treasure island map, carte du tendre, maps of a crime scene or croquis for a heist). More than 250 Dell Books Mapbacks were actually Crime scenes. Crime Scenes without crime, without traces of violence, and almost always without people. A pure material and geographical world. Put all together, they display a great sense of continuity, attributable to the unity of style and colours in the work of artist Ruth Belew (who, according to Gary Lovisi, drew more than 150 of them). The wild, unruly, imaginary space of Crime Fiction looks here tamed, domesticated. Pleasant, harmonious, and perfectly defined squares look like the parts of a puzzle. A puzzle reassuring both in its nature as a game, and for its apparent completeness (although it would be interesting to inspect the spaces, states, counties and countries which are not represented).

Pieces in a grid which can suggest control beyond the disturbance of crime (so euphemised here as to be totally unrepresented), the Dell maps can help establishing of typology of Crime Fiction topography. They show different types of represented spaces, from the urban map, to the map of a region, province, or to a simple house, or an apartment. They also show different types of representation, from the abstraction (see Dell 363, below) , to the minute drawing of details of a place, to the multiple views of a same space (for example various representations of Manhattan, see below). The maps, selecting salient traits of the narrative, help to read the works. They reduce some of their complexity, but in doing so create an enigma on their own. They open a new way to look at the story. And they add a new layer of possible meaning to the texts.

Many of the Dell books were republications of books which, in their original version were published without a map : the Dell’s mapbacks created a map where there had been none. Such Dell’s editions are hence augmented version of the original. Such is the case of Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera (Dell 24), where the mapback translates the textual depths of the Palais Garnier (the Opéra de Paris) by projecting them on the flat surface of the cover. The maps design is itself an interpretation of the novel. Two hermeneutic regimes are in concurrence, that of the text and that of the map.

The following post, consisting of an ordered choice of Mapbacks, invites to distant- read 30 novels, or more exactly to gain an orientation through them, based solely on the maps which cover them. Further, turning upside down the function of the maps (which, from an editorial point of view, is to reinforce the commodification of the texts, and to facilitate their commercialization) this posts proposes to use them to rediscover a jouissance (Roland Barthes) in the text they support. In other words, it invites the reader to take delight in using the accompanying maps for reinventing these texts, for actively (rather than passively) (re) contrust meaning(s), free from preestablished narratives. To write the novels differently (or not) chosing to adhere or not to the cultural or ideological codes the maps (merely seem to) indicate. The maps are texts not only to be read but to be written ; they map not only a reading, but a multiplicity of new, substantially differerent writing horizons.