Crime Fiction and Holocaust Memory

In The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi considers the complications of human memory, a ‘marvellous but fallacious instrument’ (13), in relation to the Holocaust. In a wide-ranging discussion, he identifies three key issues. First, in the case of the Holocaust, ‘all or almost all of the factors that can obliterate the mnemonic records are at work’ for both victims and perpetrators (14). Second, the ‘entire brief history of the “millennial Reich” can be reread as a war against memory’ (21). Third, all memory, but especially memories of traumatic events, tend to ‘mist over, to lose their contours’ over time (22). At the social level, one response to this dilemma, Levi indicates, is the tendency to ‘reduce the knowable to a schema’, thereby simplifying history into a comprehensible, and memorable, picture that ignores ‘half-tints and complexities’ (25-26). The Holocaust can thus be seen as a crisis not just of ethics, but of memory.
In this paper, I examine the way a single form of cultural production, the detective novel, can be seen as addressing the problems of memory raised by Levi. This is a form of fiction, after all, structurally dedicated to the exhumation and re-creation of a forgotten past. In doing do, the paper will address a substantial gap in the critical literature, for while Holocaust fiction is a major focus of literary study, genre fiction’s engagement with Nazi-era atrocities has been largely neglected. This is particularly true of crime and detective fiction, despite the fact that the genre offers a powerful example of a sustained, international fictional engagement with the Holocaust in both clearly-marked genre texts, and in literary fiction that uses some of its signature techniques.