Life Imitates Art Imitates Life Life Imitates Art Imitates Life Imitates Art

"All fine art is just faux of nature," or so Seneca observes in, Moral Letters to Lucilius.

But Oscar Wilde flips Seneca'due south view in his essay, "The Decay of Lying," holding that, "life imitates art far more than art imitates life."

Information technology's a craven and egg thing, really.

And if you mix in the matter of art imitating art and take the discussion into ideas, inspiration, influence and homage in criminal offense fiction, things become interesting. Many authors have drawn on previous works, which in some cases, accept been inspired by other previous works, or by life. Information technology's a subject I love exploring or kicking effectually with others as some contempo examples – and there are many – come to heed.

There's Confessions on the vii:45 , by Lisa Unger, which opens with commuter Selena Potato, her earth imploding, heading home on the train when she meets and talks with Martha, a cute stranger, with troubles of her own. The two women reveal their innermost issues, thus setting the stage for a brilliantly crafted thriller.

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Unger was intrigued with the notion of strangers "meeting in a liminal space." She suggested that in that moment in time yous are not the person you were before, and yous are non the same person afterwards. "There's like an free energy to it, a friction and that was one of the things I wanted to explore," she said in an interview with The Volume Report Network. "The book is sort of loosely based on the idea of Strangers on a Train , the Patricia Highsmith novel."

Of course, in that location is much more than at work in Unger's story, as there is in Highsmith's archetype. Her biographers, Richard Bradford, (Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires, The Life of Patricia Highsmith), and Joan Schenkar, (The Talented Miss Highsmith, The Secret Art and Serious Fine art of Patricia Highsmith), and others, suggest she was in part influenced past Dostoevsky and Poe. Highsmith's idea for her novel may have arisen after a walk with her parents in Hastings-on-the-Hudson, New York. "The germ of the plot for Strangers on a Train was: "Two people agree to murder each other's enemy, thus permitting the perfect alibi to be established," Highsmith wrote in Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction.

In her wonderfully written, The Plow of the Fundamental , Ruth Ware makes no surreptitious of her homage to the Henry James tale, The Turn of the Screw . "While The Plough of the Cardinal isn't a rewrite of The Turn of the Screw, it definitely shares a few common themes," Ware said in an interview with Waterstones.

In both books there is a central character, a nanny-governess, a too-adept-to-be-true position looking after two children in a beautiful, somewhat isolated, business firm with many secrets at work. Ware does a superb job offering a compelling story while updating aspects of The Turn of the Screw.

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Much has been written on the seed of inspiration Henry James used for his archetype work, fifty-fifty by James himself. As most aficionados know, James has said that he got the idea from a tale told to him, concerning, "A couple of small-scale children in an out-of-the-way place to whom the spirits of certain bad servants dead in the utilize of the house were believed to have appeared with the design of getting concord of them." James has written that he got the "fragment" almost the children from Edward White Benson, the Archbishop of Canterbury. But Benson's descendants have no recollection of the telling, according to Francis X. Roellinger Jr, in his essay, "Psychical Research and 'The Turn of the Screw,'" leaving usa with something of a haunting mystery near its origin.

Turning to Linwood Barclay's gripping thriller, Trust Your Eyes , nosotros see a schizophrenic obsessed with maps. His bedchamber has become something of a fortress of solitude. He but leaves information technology almost. Employing a computer program he travels the streets of the cities of the world, while never stepping from his room. He also studies the people frozen in fourth dimension on his screen. "I wrote a kind of updated Rear Window about someone who thought he'd seen a murder in a tenement window on a site like to Google Street View," Barclay said in a post about the book and the picture show he regards as ane of his favorites.

Rear Window, equally many know, is the acclaimed 1954 film, starring James Stewart and Grace Kelly, directed past Alfred Hitchcock. The cardinal character is a photographer, leap to a wheelchair afterwards breaking his leg. From his apartment in New York Urban center, he spends much of his time observing his neighbors in the building across the courtyard and begins suspecting i of the tenants has committed murder.

The film is adapted from the 1942 short story, "It Had to Be Murder," by Cornell Woolrich who was inspired by another short story: "Through a Window," by H.G. Wells. The Wells story concerns a homo with broken legs who passes time watching the goings on forth the river when he witnesses a fierce offense. A caution, written in 1890s, the Wells story contains offensive fabric.

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But on the subject of fine art imitating art, and life imitating fine art, nosotros find something of a tragedy in Woolrich, an unsung writer of the pulp era. He had an unhappy, tortured life and lived "in a series of seedy hotels, rooms, and apartments," according to Eddie Duggan's essay, "Writing in the darkness: the world of Cornell Woolrich." Near the end of Woolrich'due south life, a human foot infection led to the amputation of a leg. With his health in turn down, Woolrich became a recluse at a New York hotel.

"Some of the staff at that place would have Woolrich downward to the lobby so he could look out on the passing traffic, thus making the wizened and wheelchair-spring Woolrich into a kind of darker self-loathing version of the character played by James Stewart in Hitchcock's Rear Window," Duggan wrote.

In launching his acclaimed John Rebus serial, Ian Rankin nodded to another Scottish writer, Robert Louis Stevenson.

"My own kickoff offense novel, Knots and Crosses , was (in part) an try to update the themes of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," Rankin, said in his wonderful essay for Britannica, "Edinburgh every bit literary metaphor." Rankin observes how, "the mazy, dark, and nefarious Old Boondocks—gave rise to literary metaphors for the human status and provided Stevenson with his major inspiration for The Foreign Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ."

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In Knots and Crosses, Rebus pursues a killer the papers call, "The Edinburgh Strangler." The novel explores the duality of human being, the double, and the masks people wearable in public and individual. Similar themes are found in Stevenson'due south classic, as they are in other works past other writers. But Stevenson also drew upon the foreign and true case of William Brodie, also known by his championship as Deacon Brodie. He was a well-respected cabinet maker by day, who, by night, used his skills with locks, to break into homes. Stevenson'south biographers, Philip Callow, (Louis, A Life of Robert Louis Stevenson), and Frank McLynn, (Robert Louis Stevenson, A Biography), and others, suggest the Stevenson family unit-owned furniture made past Brodie and Stevenson was familiar with his infamy, even co-writing a play about the instance before he wrote Jekyll and Hyde.

Some other example of art imitating fine art, which imitated life, can be plant in The Stranger past Albert Camus, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. The Stranger, published in 1942, concerns the trial of a clerk in Algiers for murder, just he is judged considering he appears defective in the emotion and reactions society expects.

It has been noted that in creating The Stranger, Camus was influenced past James K. Cain'due south, The Postman Always Rings Twice , a noir archetype published in 1934. In Cain's story, a drifter falls for a seductive married woman of a diner possessor, and they plot to murder her hubby. Apparently, Camus liked Cain'southward volume for its structure, how the story, "is told both in the moment, like a diary, and from a mysterious future beyond the grave," Alice Kaplan writes in her outstanding volume, Looking For The Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic.

Some have observed that Cain may have looked to Emile Zola's 1868 novel, Thérèse Raquin , which concerns a pair of lovers who need to get a husband out of the way. "I know – you're thinking: James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice? Or one of its many imitators?" Barry Forshaw wrote in The Independent and Criminal offense Time.

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There are also suggestions Cain's Postman was inspired by two true-offense cases; the infamous New York case from the tardily 1920s dealing with the trial and executions of Ruth Snyder and her lover Judd Gray for the murder of her husband, Albert. And a second true-life case in California, well-nigh a young couple running a gas station Cain knew. "I day I read in the paper where a woman who runs a filling station knocks off her husband." Roy Hoopes, quotes Cain as saying, in his ballsy, Cain: The Biography of James Chiliad. Cain.

A wonderful report of art imitating life is found in Kevin Birmingham's superb analysis of how Fyodor Dostoevsky crafted Offense and Penalisation by taking a cue from the true case of Pierre François Lacenaire, a murderer who became infamous for his charm and was guillotined for his crimes in Paris in the 1830s.

"Dostoevsky routinely borrowed ideas from existent life, though he never simply transposed them into fiction," Birmingham writes in, The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece. Dostoevsky drew from Lacenaire's case to explore several themes and techniques, one of them existence the novel's point of view. It came to Dostoevsky while he wandered the streets of Wiesbaden, Frg, sick, destitute and drastic. "He would write a murderer's story from the murderer's perspective."

Birmingham'due south volume is highly recommended for it reads similar a thriller as he examines all the forces Dostoevsky contended with and considered every bit he forged Crime and Punishment.

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And so many more examples tin be found to debate the theme of art imitating life, or life imitating fine art, or art imitating fine art, from James Joyce'south Ulysses to Theodor Dreiser's, An American Tragedy, to John Steinbeck's, East of Eden.

And then it goes.

Featured epitome: Toulouse-Lautrec,
photographed by Maurice Guibert

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Source: https://crimereads.com/art-imitating-life-imitating-art/

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