THE GUILTY VICARAGE. Auden loved detective stories and wrote a famous analysis of detective stories to explain what he acknowledged was an addiction. The title of the article, “The Guilty Vicarage”, suggests the religious view that Auden has of the detective story. Thus, one of his requirements for a detective story is that the setting must be “an innocent society in a state of grace.” Auden would understand the view that it is the peacefulness of Scandinavia that makes it a good place to set a detective story. Auden also sees a detective story as being about “the phantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden, to a state of innocence….” Based on the view that Swedish crime novels have a “relentlessly bleak view of the world”, I imagine that they do not wind up with a state of innocence being restored.
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Correct. There’s almost always ambivalence, never the restoration of innocence. But there’s an almost constant emphasis on the environmental conditions that created the serial killer, child molester, etc. The villain was not just depraved, but a product of circumstances beyond his/her control. Society shoulders some of the blame. And the detective is usually tortured by self doubt and by a sense of having missed key clues that would have saved later victims.