Who, Why and How
Collecting material for a book about detective fiction is a project somewhat akin to counting the grains of sand on a beach. This genre of fiction is so extensive and so widely read that anyone who has ever ventured to speak or write about it has always been instantly reminded that they have excluded and overlooked yet another author. Everyone has a favourite writer of detective fiction. Careful readers (indeed those who have already acquired skills in detection) will have noticed that we are already speaking of detective, rather than crime fiction. The term is often used inter-changeably but here the term will be that of detective fiction. The reasons for this are twofold: first that crime does not necessarily involve the death of individual human beings. Indeed, what might be defined as crime in the early decades of the twenty-first century is often entirely conducted at a distance from any form of human inter-action: cyber-crime, identity theft, criminal forms of the exchange and transfer of money can all be conducted from any location and directed towards untold others. The human consequences of this form of crime are often dramatic: pensioners, for example, mightâand indeed sometimes doâlose their hopes of financial support and security in old age, but they are not literally killed. To many people this might suggest a somewhat artificial or meaningless distinction, but this study will maintain the consistent tradition of detective fiction which has always involved the actual loss of human life, through a determined human action. This does not mean that the guilty have always been either apprehended or punished; detection is, as De Quincey pointed out at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a very fine art but not always one with entirely predictable outcomes. 1
The second reason for maintaining the term detective, rather than crime, fiction is that in using this term we make explicit that process of detecting which we regard as central to this study. As one of the characters says in Anthony Horowitzâs The Word is Murder :
Theyâre not called murder victim stories. Theyâre not called Criminal stories. Theyâre called detective stories. 2
How to detect, what to look for, what to regard as reliable or unreliable evidence are all part not just of detection in fiction but of every form of research, be it in the social sciences, the humanities or the natural sciences. We cannot find out anything that we need to know unless we have some certainty about how we will proceed. And what detective fiction has done, from its very earliest years is to offer some diverse possibilities about how to find out what is going on in the world. Detective fiction, certainly at its best, encourages us to think and more particularly to think about what is going on in the world around us. Again, at its best, it asks us to pose questions about why individuals are behaving in the way that they do and to engage in the work of moral arbitration rather than moral judgement. Perhaps most of all it does not ask us to judge others, often a conventional expectation of much mainstream fiction. Read the notes for reading groups provided at the back of many of novels and readers will find questions to ask about what s/he âshouldâ have done. The long arm of the literary critic F. R. Leavis continues to stretch across swathes of fiction; surrounding readers (and writers) with the endless expectation of the acceptance of moral certainty. Detectives, be they Sherlock Holmes , Lord Peter Wimsey , Miss Jane Marple or their later incarnations in the form of Lisbeth Salander and Harry Hole , do not, however, accept the world as it is put before them. Nor, and this is very much part of the appeal of detective fiction, do they accept the given social order as a source of moral virtue and behaviour. It is not that this form of often quiet and overlooked radicalism is an attribute only of detective fictionâsome canonical British fiction shares aspects of this characteristicâbut it is a rejection of the normative acceptance that many societies expect of their citizens. Not the least of this expectation is what can be described as the âaspirational coercionâ that has accompanied the normalisation of neo-liberalism : the idea that we all have the same social âwantsâ and are prepared, and expected, to work in highly individualised ways to secure these ends. So, dissent, marginality and often explicit disagreement are often part and parcel of the make-up of the very best detectives. Holmes and his later colleagues do not naturally accept authority or the given normative order; they may live what can be labelled as conventional lives, but these chosen ways of individual life should not be assumed to indicate a wholesale acceptance of the boundaries and judgments of the given social order .
We are therefore proposing here, first, that detective fiction has a complex and important relationship to both the social and the epistemological order of contemporary western societies. Second, we shall argue that the appeal and the importance of detective fiction (and the reason for its considerable popularity) is that it is concerned with the life, and the problems of that life, that people living in the west encounter, either as fact or in terms of worries, concerns and fantasies about that world. These sentences make explicit the geographical and historical location of the literature that we have chosen to investigate; the detective fiction of Europe in the period after 1970. In this period, much of Europe has experienced considerable legal and social change; sometimes widely welcomed but increasinglyâin the second decade of the twenty-first centuryâleading to politics that have revived supposedly extinct forms of nationalism. The citizens of this new Europe read more detective fiction than other form of fiction. Anyone who reads detective fiction will be aware that detective fiction is now not only the most widely read genre of literature on the planet but is also a global form, written by citizens of diverse countries and cultures and situated within similarly widely different contexts, both chronological and geographical. Detection and detectives have been situated, for example, in fourteenth century England , Nazi Germany, pre-revolutionary Russia and most decades of the twentieth century. Amongst these books are those whichâfor example the novels of Boris Akunin set in late nineteenth century Moscowâilluminate much about those societies. Thus, Akunin paints a picture of pre-revolutionary Moscow as a sophisticated city with a functioning and competent bureaucracy . 3 Detectives have also come in a range of genders and races, with many (albeit largely white) women becoming iconic figures in the genre. To a certain extent the entry of considerable numbers of women into detection in the second half of the twentieth century has been much encouraged by the opening of employment for women in the police forces of various countries in the second half of the twentieth century. But before this, the tradition of the amateur detective had allowed the iconic figure of Miss Jane Marple to emerge in the works of Agatha Christie . This apparently quiet and conservative figure interrupted (and continues to interrupt) all expectations of that heavily defended persona, in both emotional and literal terms, of the male detective. Nor was she alone. At the same time as Christie was letting loose the quietly subversive intelligence of Miss Jane Marple her contemporary Gladys Mitchell was demonstrating, through her central figure Mrs Bradley, the possibilities of psychoanalysis in understanding those aspects of human action and motivation which resulted in murder ; a very different account of the motives for murder which led Mitchell to write parodies of Christie. 4 Detective fiction, in the hands of these women, was not about maintaining the political and intellectual orthodoxies of the first decades of the twentieth century. In the latter decades of the twentieth century various âgirls with gunsâ took their places in detective fiction but even these figures, the creations of, for example, Sue Grafton and Sarah Paretsky , owed a considerable amount to Miss Marple and other women writers of the so-called âGolden Ageâ of British detective fiction. Grafton and Paretsky are both writing about the United States but what they contribute to is an aspect of âGolden Ageâ fictionâthat of the amateur female detectiveâwhich has been less present in the latter years of the twentieth century in the UK and Europe . 5 Yet the legacy of the âGolden Ageâ is to be found in the validation of intuition, the âreadingâ of body language and the refusal to accept with unquestioning obedience the words of powerful men.
Thus, the gender of detective fiction has shown itself to be, certainly in the twentieth century, an open space for both male and female writers and male and female protagonists. But two things have changed very little. The first is that the race of the detective, and certainly in the detective fiction of Europe since 1970 which is considered here, has changed little over the decades. It remains the case that the great majority of detectives, of whatever gender , are white. What we might make of this is an issue to be explored later in this book; here it is sufficient to comment that this singularity of racial identity in detection encourages us to recognise that to a very significant extent western societies are not just ruled by white men but are also policed by them. The idea that detection might cross racial linesâthat the socially rather than the individually marginal person might investigate the powerfulâstill remains to be explored in detective fiction. The second aspect of the identity of the detective that has remained stable is that of their sexual identity; largely, although not exclusively heterosexual. What has changed, and certainly since the days of Lord Peter Wimsey and Miss Marple , is the form of sexual relationships in which detectives are involved: heterosexual monogamy is no longer an assumed basis for sexual relations. The aspiration persists amongst some contemporary characters, the realisation is rather more infrequent.
These changes, and lack of changes, demonstrate the way in which detective fiction has implicitly recorded much of the reality of both social change and its absence in Europe in the past fifty years. In terms of significant change, the 1970s, across Europe, were years in which much of that continent tore up its legal framework about the intimate lives of its citizens. It was not that the final decades of the twentieth century invented new forms of sexuality but what did emerge was a new public discussion of human diversity. On matters of divorce, the decriminalisation of homosexuality, reproductive rights, the legal autonomy of women and laws about the organisation of marriage, nation states changed the legal framework of the personal lives of their citizens. All of these changes are reflected in detective fiction. But what did not change, and thus the emphasis above of the race and the sexuality of detectives, was what can be described as the âhiddenâ face of power in most European societies. Across these countries, despite the new liberality and apparent inclusiveness of statute, white, heterosexual men dominated posit...