The Rise of Pop Psychology

As Laura has already pointed out, internal monologue drives a lot of the exposition in Crime and SuspenStories. In some cases, it takes the place previously occupied by the omniscient narrator or caption box and becomes instead a first-person running commentary. In other cases, the representations of internal thought become pictoral or symbolic and take over the panel. The story Poison! contains a number of examples, particularly on p.85 as the protagonist begins to succumb to poison and paranoia. The dominance of the internal monologue is overwhelming; only three stories are narrated by a third person. (Interestingly, the third-person narrators are usually chosen from a 'stable' of characters, like the Old Witch from the Haunt of Fear.) It seems to me that the preponderance of character monologues might stem from the post- WWII rise of applied psychology and its incorporation into the mainstream.

Since the reader of Crime and SuspenStories almost always has a privileged view into the mind of the narrator/character, traces of psychological theory are unavoidable. The stories reflect a broad understanding of psychological forces without necessarily attributing any specific theory to the motivations of the characters. What we receive as readers is a vague echo of an increased scrutiny of internal states of mind. I find it interesting that most of these stories can be reduced to formulas that are repeated across authors and plots. That seems to suggest that, despite highly unique and individual variations, the authors were recognizing or capitalizing on the recognition of patterns of thought and behavior to which early psychological theory was applied. Across Crime and SuspenStories as an anthology, it becomes possible to link characters by their mental states, as evidenced by their monologues and also by their actions. We can 'type' characters by the presentation of their psychology as well as by their archetypal role within the story. For example, the devious women plotting to kill their husbands in Death's Double-Cross, A Toast...To Death! and Out of My Mind! Psychology, or the derivation of psychology that circulated in the mainstream, becomes not only an accessible character motivation viz the monologues, but it also serves as an extension of literary archetypes since it gives the reader a new way of understanding the role of a character in a story and across stories of the same type.