A generic mystery: Laura Purcell’s The shape of darkness

Laura Purcell’s 2021 novel The shape of darkness, advertised as a Gothic chiller, is set in Victorian Bath and tells two interlaced stories: one of a silhouette artist whose life is marred by a string of mysterious murders of her customers and the other of a young girl who believes she is a spiritual medium and who helps her sister in fraudulent séances. The novel straddles the space between historical fiction and murder mystery, combining elements of neo-Victorian and Gothic traditions. This article investigates the question of the purpose of combining generic components of historical and detective fiction, and explores how such a blend has the transformative potential of shifting the classic detective form into metaphysical space. To this end, the article is divided into three parts: the discussion of the historical novel as an intergeneric hybrid is followed by the section concerned with classic murder mystery rules that The shape of darkness breaks. The final part focuses on the implications of this type of generic blending, especially the shift towards metaphysical detective fiction.