What Are The Conventions In The Skull Beneath The Skin

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In some aspects, crime fiction is all essentially the same because of the basic overriding conventions, but it is the way these conventions are dealt with changes the nature of the individual text.

The Skull Beneath the Skin’ by P. D. James is a hybrid text as it blends contemporary work with classic scaffolding. Skull has a big focus on character development and analysis. This is because P. D. James is asking us to question what it means to be human.

The characters in The Skull Beneath the Skin are very deliberately drawn with detail. Unlike many other classic texts, James’ characters are not stereotypes, We see the characters as real human beings, each of whom comes alive for us. P.D. James has crafted an appealing and vulnerable

detective. Cordelia Grey is the inexperienced private detective and her innocence and strong sense of justice and integrity mark her as an outsider in a corrupt and tainted world. Cordelia has an uneasy past and she lacks the intellectual capacity of the traditional classic detective.

Much like Cordelia, Jeff in “rear window” subverts crime fiction conventions.

Rear Window follows an everyday man who inadvertently observes a crime and attempts to bring about justice, completely subverted the crime fiction of its 1950’s context, departing from the hard-boiled and film noir sub-genre. Alfred Hitchcock has made a movie that both encourages voyeurism and shames it. Jeff is not your conventional sleuth or a loner by choice. Instead he is a photographer who has become a voyeur who addresses the boredom of being confined to a wheelchair because of a broken leg, by spying on his neighbours through his rear window. Like many hard boiled detectives he fears commitment and intimacy. Jeff harnesses his voyeuristic tendencies to attempt to piece the crime together and reveal the

truth.
Hitchcock subverts the ways in which a crime is solved in order to conform to contextual changes. Hitchcock employs new, and slightly unorthodox, methods of detection as an integral aspect of his crime film. Close-up camera angles of Thorwald’s apartment, from Jeff’s perspective, reveal the suspicious actions of Thorwald, and lead Jeff to discover where and what the evidence is that will prove Thorwald’s guilt. In a subversion of the normal crime conventions, Hitchcock does not display a standard detective character, however Hitchcock blurs the line of morality, and makes the audience question their ability to do the same. Jeff, the sleuth, uses voyeurism to solve the crime. While Jeff sits in a dark room and observes the actions of others, the audience is doing the same.

The atmosphere maintains a semblance of the noir style in a film which, although American, employs some conventions of the British classic crimes as the film’s setting does not extend beyond Jeff’s apartment, and is therefore a closed setting crime film. This film differs from the previous ‘whodunit,’ mysteries, as, in this film, the criminal is known from the beginning, however, the criminal, traditional of crime conventions is a male, as is the primary sleuth

In Skull beneath the skin, the crime is also a murder.

The initial murder is followed by a number of other murders. The original murder of Clarissa graphic and violent which is a convention of Contemporary pieces. The method of murder is very symbolic. Clarissa has her face mutilated, the only thing worth remembering of her. This outcome has allowed James to lace a moral message within her novel, and scorn society’s infatuation with appearance.

Two murders are depicted, with the victims being Clarissa Lisle and Simon Lessing. Clarissa is despised by the majority of the ‘closed circle’ on Courcy Island as she is perceived to have individually wronged each of them and hence provided them with motive. Clarissa is murdered by Simon Lessing, who in turn is murdered by Ambrose. As the perpetrator of the Clarissa’s death, Simon should conventionally be portrayed as evil. However, we sympathises with the tragic story of Simon, an innocent child whose values were perverted by an unjust world. In this way, the text challenges the thematic convention of good and evil, while simultaneously conforming to the convention of the weak human condition. The Skull Beneath the Skin challenges the thematic convention of justice. Lawful justice is seemingly not achieved, since Ambrose and Simon elude prosecution for their crimes. However, natural justice is achieved, personified through the heroine Cordelia -“The police would have to make their own decisions. She had already made hers…She would

tell the truth, and she would survive”.

The text conforms to most of the stylistic conventions of the genre. The novel uses a conventional tightly constructed linear narrative. James develops characterisation by devoting chapters to each of the suspects, and through descriptive settings which also delineate character, such as the implications of the morbid history of Courcy Island for its amoral owner Ambrose Gorringe. James also juxtaposes descriptive imagery of setting with the brutal imagery of murder to create an atmosphere of tension.