New Contexts for Confession: Brian O’Nolan, Golden Age Crime Fiction, & Theodor Reik

Abstract

In this article I will be primarily concerned with the influence of a psychoanalytic criminological context on written first-person confessions of murder in Brian O’Nolan, with a specific focus on The Third Policeman (written 1939–40, published 1967). Responding to Keith Hopper’s use of a theorisation of the detective fiction genre in order to assess O’Nolan’s postmodernism, as well as work by Jennika Baines and Maebh Long, I will place O’Nolan within a historicist framework of Golden Age crime writing. Recent wider modernist criticism has shown an interest in exploring connections between modernism and Golden Age writing, including Matthew Levay’s recent Violent Minds: Modernism and the Criminal (2019) and I will connect O’Nolan’s work into this developing field through my own emphasis on the psychoanalytic thought of Theodor Reik. The first section of this article will address O’Nolan in relation to the genre of crime writing and outline the deep influence on him of the inverted detective novel form; the second section will address Reik’s criminological writing about confession, in order to build up a historical context for O’Nolan’s portrayal of criminal psychology; the final section will apply Reik’s ideas directly to The Third Policeman as well as to Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), which I will show to be similar in their dual engagement with psychoanalysis and with crime fiction beyond the ‘clue puzzle’ form.

Keywords

• confession
• genre
• detective fiction
• law and literature
• psychoanalysis