| Description |
Heightened emotion is a key element at the root of the crimes in most mystery novels. Despite this, not much literature exists examining the part emotion plays in the structure of classic detective fiction. Network analysis provides a new avenue for exploring the role of emotion between characters in murder mystery novels. Software, like the program Gephi, takes advantage of graph theory to visualize the connections between individual points of data in a network. By graphing the hundreds of small interactions in a novel, larger patterns emerge, allowing interpretations about the broader role of emotion through the novel. In this paper I aim to track character interactions based on emotion to draw wider conclusions about the structure of the novels and writing styles of their authors. I primarily examine five books written by Agatha Christie, the "Queen of Crime." I selected books by publication date to provide a survey of her 50+ year writing career. To provide contrast, as well as insight into how the genre has since changed, books from Louise Penny's Armand Gamache series were also analyzed. In the course of my analysis, I show that Christie and Penny use emotion for fundamentally different purposes: Christie uses emotion as a tool to advance her plot, and Penny uses her plot as a means for exploring emotion. This paper opens an avenue for future use of network theory in the analysis of detective fiction. |
