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Crime Fiction in the City: Capital Crimes
 9780708325865, 9780708325872

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
Edinburgh
‘The map that engenders the territory’? Rethinking Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh
Corralling Crime in Cardiff’s Tiger Bay
Crimes and Contradictions: the Fictional City of Dublin
From National Authority to Urban Underbelly: Negotiations of Power in Stockholm Crime Fiction
Streets and Squares, Quartiers and Arrondissements: Paris Crime Scenesand the Poetics of Contestation in the Novels of Jean-François Vilar
The Mysteries of the Vatican: from Nineteenth-century Anti-clerical Propaganda to Dan Brown’s Religious Thrillers
A Tale of Three Cities: Megalopolitan Mysteries of the 1840s
Conclusion
Index

Citation preview

European Crime Fictions

Crime Fiction in the City

CAPITAL CRIMES

Edited by

Lucy Andrew and Catherine Phelps

University of Wales Press

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Crime Fiction in the city

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Series Editors Claire Gorrara (Cardiff University) Shelley Godsland (University of Birmingham) Giuliana Pieri (Royal Holloway, London) Editorial Board Margaret Atack (University of Leeds) George Demko (Dartmouth College) John Foot (University College London) Stephen Knight (University of Melbourne) Nickianne Moody (Liverpool John Moores University) Elfriede Müller (Berlin) Anne White (University of Bradford)

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EUROPEAN CRIME FICTIONS

CRIME FICTION IN THE CITY CAPITAL CRIMES

Edited by

Lucy Andrew and Catherine Phelps

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS CARDIFF 2013

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© The Contributors, 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff, CF10 4UP. www.uwp.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-0-7083-2586-5 e-ISBN 978-0-7083-2587-2

The right of the Contributors to be identified as authors of their contributions has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Typeset in Wales by Eira Fenn Gaunt, Cardiff Printed in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire

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Contents

Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors

vii ix

1 Introduction Lucy Andrew and Catherine Phelps1 2 Edinburgh Ian Rankin6 3 ‘The map that engenders the territory’? Rethinking Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh Gill Plain16 4 Corralling Crime in Cardiff’s Tiger Bay Catherine Phelps29 5 Crimes and Contradictions: the Fictional City of Dublin Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin47 6 From National Authority to Urban Underbelly: Negotiations of Power in Stockholm Crime Fiction Kerstin Bergman65 7 Streets and Squares, Quartiers and Arrondissements: Paris Crime Scenes and the Poetics of Contestation in the Novels of Jean-François Vilar Margaret Atack85 8 The Mysteries of the Vatican: from Nineteenth-century Anti-clerical Propaganda to Dan Brown’s Religious Thrillers Maurizio Ascari107 9 A Tale of Three Cities: Megalopolitan Mysteries of the 1840s Stephen Knight126

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Contents

Conclusion Lucy Andrew and Catherine Phelps138 Index143

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Acknowledgements

This collection had its origins in the 2009 Crime Narratives in Context Colloquium at Cardiff University, entitled ‘Capital crimes: reading and writing crime and cities’, supported by The British Academy. We would like to thank Dr Heather Worthington and Professor Claire Gorrara for offering us invaluable advice and endless support throughout the process of editing this collection. Special thanks also go to Sarah Lewis, commissioning editor of University of Wales Press, for her constant guidance with, and commitment to, this project. ‘Edinburgh’ from Rebus’s Scotland by Ian Rankin © John Rebus Limited 2005 Reproduced by kind permission of the author and The Orion Publishing Group Ltd. Quotations from the novels of Ian Rankin by kind permission of the Orion Publishing Group Ltd. Quotations from ‘Dublin Made Me’ by Donagh MacDonagh are included by kind permission of Barbara Cashin and Niall MacDonagh. Quotations from Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown published by Corgi Books, reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited. Reprinted with the permission of Atria, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., from Angels and Demons by Dan Brown. Copyright © 2000 by Dan Brown. All rights reserved.

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Notes on Contributors

Lucy Andrew is a Ph.D. student and postgraduate tutor at Cardiff University where she is researching the origins of juvenile detective fiction in Britain. Her research interests include crime fiction for both children and adults, and children’s popular fiction in Britain and America from the Victorian period to the present day. Her publications are ‘“Away with dark shadders!” Juvenile detection versus juvenile crime in The Boy Detective; or, The Crimes of London. A Romance of Modern Times’, Clues: A Journal of Detection, 30/1 (spring 2012), 18–29, and six entries for the forthcoming publication 100 British Crime Writers. Maurizio Ascari is Reader in English literature at the University of Bologna. His main areas of interest are late nineteenth-century British and American literature, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century crime fiction, the Grand Tour and the issues concerning the formation and ‘deconstruction’ of the literary canon. His publi­ cations include In the Palatial Chamber of the Mind: Comparative Essays on Henry James (Pescara, Italy: Edizioni Tracce, 1997), A Counter-history of Crime Fiction: Supernatural, Gothic, Sensational (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and Two Centuries of Detective Fiction: A New Comparative Approach (editor; Bologna: COTEPRA, 2000). Margaret Atack is Professor of French at the University of Leeds. Her research lies primarily in the areas of the literature, thought, film and culture of France in the twentieth century, and particularly the Occupation and Second World War in French fiction and film, women’s writing, crime fiction and May 68. Her publications on crime fiction include Crime and Punishment: Narratives of Order and Disorder, special issue (editor), French Cultural Studies, 12/3 (October 2001). She is currently working on publications from the major AHRC-funded project: ‘Narratives of the Second World War in France 1939 to the present’, including War and Occupation 1940–1944: Other Stories, Stories of Otherness, special issue (editor), French Cultural Studies (August 2011), Framing Narratives of the Second World War in France: New Readings (co-edited with Christopher Lloyd) (2012), and Literature and the Second World War: Remapping the Landscape (with Christopher Lloyd, in preparation).

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Notes on Contributors

Kerstin Bergman is Senior Research Fellow in comparative literature at Lund University, specializing in contemporary Swedish and international crime fiction, and is currently working on a research project on the function of science in crime fiction today. Among her recent publications are Kriminallitteratur: Utveckling, genrer, perspektiv (Crime fiction: history, genres, perspectives; Lund: Student­ litteratur, 2011, with S. Kärrholm), ‘Paradoxes of understanding the other: Mankell explores the “African darkness’”, Scandinavian Studies, 82/3 (2010), 337–54, ‘The well-adjusted cops of the new millennium: neo-Romantic tendencies in the Swedish police procedural’, in Andrew Nestingen and Paula Arvas (eds), Scandinavian Crime Fiction (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011), pp. 34–45, and ‘Fictional death and scientific truth: the truth-value of science in contemporary forensic crime fiction’, Clues: A Journal of Detection, 30/1 (spring 2012), 88–98. Stephen Knight is Professor of English literature at the University of Melbourne. His main research interests are crime fiction, medieval cultural studies and Welsh fiction in English. He has published widely on crime fiction, notably Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1980), Continent of Mystery: A Thematic History of Australian Crime Fiction (Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 1997), Crime Fiction 1800–2000 (London: Macmillan, 2003) and The Mysteries of the Cities: Urban Crime Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (Jefferson, NC: Macfarland, 2012). He has also written widely on Welsh fiction in English, including A Hundred Years of Fiction: Writing Wales in English (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004). In 2001 he was awarded the Ned Kelly Lifetime Achievement Award for services to Australian crime fiction. Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin is Professor of Italian at Trinity College Dublin. His research interests include translation studies, Dante and Boccaccio studies, and creative writing. His publications include ‘Christ stopped at Eboli: fortunes of an American translation’, in Joseph Farrell (ed.), The Voices of Carlo Levi (Oxford, Bern, New York: Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 175–208, Patterns in Dante: Nine Literary Essays (co-editor; Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005) and Translation and Censorship: Patterns of Communication and Interference (co-editor; Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2009). As Cormac Millar, he is the author of two crime novels published by Penguin, and is currently working on a third. Catherine Phelps is a Ph.D. student and postgraduate tutor at Cardiff University where she is currently researching Welsh crime fiction written in English. Her research interests are crime fiction, postcolonialism and Welsh writing in English. Her publications are ‘Re-shaping crime fiction in Alison Taylor’s Simeon’s Bride’, Assuming Gender, 1/1 (2010), ‘Minstrelsy in Malcolm Pryce’s Aberystwyth Mon Amour’, in Almanac: Yearbook of Welsh Writing in English (Cardigan: Parthian Books, 2011), pp. 47–69, and five entries for the forthcoming publication 100 British Crime Writers.

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Notes on Contributors

Gill Plain is Professor of English literature and popular culture at the University of St Andrews, where she is director of the MLitt in women, writing and gender. Her research interests are twentieth-century war writing, crime fiction, theories of gender and sexuality and popular British cinema. Her published work includes Twentieth-century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), Ian Rankin’s Black and Blue: A Reader’s Guide (New York and London: Continuum, 2002) and John Mills and British Cinema: Masculinity, Identity and Nation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006). She is currently working on a literary history of the 1940s. Ian Rankin is the author of over thirty crime novels to date, notably the Inspector Rebus series. His many awards include the British Book Awards Crime Thriller of the Year (2005, 2007), and the Grand Prix du Roman Policier (2005). In 2005, he was given the lifetime achievement award from Crime Writers’ Association Cartier Diamond Dagger.

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1 Introduction LUCY ANDREW AND CATHERINE PHELPS

The growth of the metropolis in the early nineteenth century has been the subject of much commentary by contemporaneous thinkers. Charles Baudelaire and, later, Georg Simmel, both noted the alienation felt by city-dwellers, fuelled in part by the anonymity of the urban space. In his seminal essay, ‘The metropolis and mental life’, Simmel also expanded on the individual’s freedom to develop outside a closed rural community or small town. As many were drawn to the city in search of work, so they left the watchful eye of a familiar and secure community.1 No wonder, then, that the city became such a popular setting for a relatively new genre: crime fiction. The sprawling urban streets provided a multiplicity of settings from Dickens’s rookeries to the decayed yet aristocratic Fauborg Saint-Germain, home to Poe’s creation, Auguste Dupin. Anonymous and alone amongst a transient population, a criminal could go undetected, even hide behind new identities. This was also true of the urban detective. The Parisian police-chief Eugène-François Vidocq, often referred to as ‘the first detective’, was one who confidently slipped between criminality and legality.2 Sherlock Holmes, too, became famous for his disguises, allowing him to move undetected on the city streets. This brings us to an aspect of the urban space that crime fiction utilizes so well: the duality inherent in this city space, one where boundaries are crossed, even blurred. A city can provide a centre of authority alongside a ‘seedy underbelly’. Criminals and police rub shoulders while corruption spreads its malign influence to those in authority, exemplified in the twentieth-century crime novels of Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy, both of whom use Los Angeles as a setting. Still, unlike their rural counterparts, cities are in a constant state of flux through decay and regeneration and many crime writers find themselves acting as literary cartographers of an authentic but rapidly changing urban space. However, this collection considers an aspect of the metropolis that has been neglected: the city as capital. From the mid-nineteenth century, when crime fiction began to emerge as a distinct genre, London, Paris and Rome were established as common settings for European city mysteries. Though later forms, such as the British country house mystery, moved the action to a rural location, in the last few decades there has been a resurgence of city-based crime fiction, particularly of narratives based in capital cities. Etymologically, ‘capital’ reminds us that these cities are the head of the body politic, placed above the other cities of the state, even speaking for the nation in its entirety. Usually centres of state governance

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and authority, capital cities may encourage us to draw semantic parallels with the term ‘capital punishment’. Recently, the action has moved beyond the trad­ itional European centres of culture – London, Paris and Rome – to less familiar, unglamorous, potentially marginalized capital cities such as Edinburgh, Cardiff, Dublin and Stockholm. In the wake of the recent proliferation of capital crime narratives, this collection of essays considers the significance of using specific urban spaces as locations for crime fiction. Most obviously, these urban spaces lend authenticity to crime narratives by providing a factual basis for fictional accounts. The capital crime narrative’s authenticity, however, arises not only from its foundation in a real location but also from the manifold opportunities for crime which the urban space creates. These manifold opportunities in one urban space are often built upon closely bound opposites and dualities: rich and poor live in close proximity, the apparatus of the state co-exists with a criminal underworld. Its inherent contradictions and internal divisions present a source of rich material for the crime writer. Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin casts a practitioner’s eye over capital city crime fiction and argues that these divisions, the metaphorical fissures in the city walls, as well as providing inspiration for the writer can also contribute to a city’s identity. He goes on to explore how a city like Dublin defines and maps itself in contrast to both its rural hinterland and to other rival towns. Nevertheless, Ó Cuilleanáin proposes that it is the crossings through boundaries, social structures, between country and city, that are the most fruitful. It is the opportunity to break through these contradictions that, as Ó Cuilleanáin argues, places the capital city in a unique, creative position. The setting of urban crime fiction is replete with tensions, contradictions and dualities; foremost of these frictions is the juxtaposition of the capital city’s public façade with its murkier, non-tourist persona, which suggests that the city’s dark underside is never far from the surface. Capital crime narratives, then, illuminate the connections between the shady and respectable faces of the city and, con­ sequently, point to the disturbing duality of the urban space. The duplicitous city becomes part of the conundrum which the text poses for the detective protagonist and/or the reader to solve. The city’s secrets must be exposed through the mapping of the urban space if the crime narrative is to fulfil its truth-seeking agenda. In her analysis of Jean-François Vilar’s romans noirs, Margaret Atack explores the role of the detective-flâneur, Victor Blainville, in unveiling the hidden city through a process of urban cartography designed to make Paris knowable to the reader. This mapping of the city, she argues, does not make safe the urban space, but points to its constant evolution and consequent destruction. The detective not only exposes the city’s secrets but uncovers its mythic past and, in his role of photo­ grapher and rag-picker, attempts to preserve this past, offering a reconstruction of Paris and its crime scenes. Like Vilar’s Paris-set romans noirs, Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh-based Rebus series engages with and responds to the rapid evolution of the urban space. Rankin’s evaluation of his depiction of Edinburgh explores the difficulties faced by the writer in attempting to map the progress and to produce an authentic representation of

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Introduction

the constantly developing capital city, particularly with regards to the blending of fact with fiction, and the relationship between Edinburgh’s mythic past and its present reality. Gill Plain observes in her analysis of the Rebus series that, as Edinburgh evolves in reality, there is a change, too, in the way that the city is mapped within Rankin’s work. There is a notable transition from the Edinburgh of Knots & Crosses (1987), the first Rebus novel – vaguely mapped, steeped in literary allusion and preoccupied with the city’s mythic past – to the representation of the city in the novel The Naming of the Dead (2006), with its carto­graphical precision, engagement with popular culture and grounding in present reality. This promotion of Edinburgh’s present reality over its mythic past, Plain argues, allows for a re-inscription of the city’s identity beyond the national and towards the global. Crime narratives, therefore, are not only concerned with the authentic represen­ tation of the city and the exposure of its secrets but also with the possibility of reconstructing, remapping and, hence, recreating the city. One of the most obvious ways in which this re-creation occurs is in the physical remapping of the urban space through the process of cultural tourism. The capital city, in particular, with its thriving tourist industry and its sizeable and culturally diverse population becomes a breeding ground for crime as it provides the criminal with money, anonymity, easy prey and a vast network of accomplices and adversaries. By bringing to the fore the unpalatable, non-public aspects of the city’s identity, crime fiction transforms urban criminality into a tourist attraction. Privileged in literature, fictional crime is reabsorbed into the mythic identity of the urban space. Both Rankin and Plain point to the construction of Rebus’s Edinburgh as a site for tourism which has achieved a physical presence within the real city. Beyond the obvious examples of cultural tourism, such as walking tours of Rebus’s Edin­ burgh, the reader’s voyeuristic gaze at the city’s ‘mean streets’ could also be inter­ preted as a form of tourism. Looking through the detective’s eyes, armchair flânerie if you will, the reader can safely walk streets that normally they may fear to tread. The dangerous underbelly is safely caught between crime fiction’s pages. Catherine Phelps explains how this process has contained the multicultural community of Cardiff’s Tiger Bay. Tourists view capital cities as representative of national identity. However, national identity can be threatened by those considered ‘other’ within their midst. As globalization expands, crime fiction increasingly explores anxieties around immigration and national identity. However, Cardiff’s multicultural com­ munity is an unusual one, having settled in the area several generations ago and subsequently intermarried with the local Welsh community. Phelps explores how spaces are made in capital city crime fiction in order to place those who upset traditional notions of national identity and who are subsequently exoticized and mythologized. Like the Tiger Bay crime fiction discussed in Phelps’s essay, the Vatican City mysteries examined by Maurizio Ascari use a specific setting within the capital city in order to engage with political issues on a wider scale. Similarly to Rankin’s Rebus series, Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons (2000), a key text in Ascari’s analysis,

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engages with cultural tourism through the creation of an official tour inspired by the book and its film adaptation. The remapping of the capital city in the Vatican mysteries, however, moves beyond its alteration as a cultural construction for the tourist to a drastic revisioning of the city’s history as the texts challenge the foundations of the Catholic Church. Ascari emphasizes how the mid-nineteenthcentury Vatican City mysteries by authors such as Del Vecchio and Mistrali and, later, Brown’s Angels and Demons, use the specific urban setting of the Vatican to help authenticate a political point and to fuel a global debate. Thus, the implications of the revisioning of the capital city in crime fiction are not simply local and geo­ graphical but, more crucially, global and political. The politicization of the capital crime novel is nowhere more evident than in Scandinavian crime fiction. Kerstin Bergman’s timely examination of Scandinavian crime focuses on Stockholm, Sweden’s capital and one of northern Europe’s more remote urban metropoli. Stockholm-based crime fiction maps the depictions of a transforming urban space and, in common with writers like Ian Rankin, the Swedish crime writer becomes a literary urban cartographer. Still, these Scandi­ navian depictions are overtly politicized. As in other capital crime fictions, Stock­ holm is a locus of power for Swedish crime writers. Bergman’s survey tracks these transformations of the city and the subsequent shifts in power from Stieg Trenter’s idyllic representations of the city and Stockholm’s emergence as a character in crime fiction, to Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s police procedurals in which the city becomes criminogenic, that is, the deteriorating urban space is seen to breed crime, through Liza Marklund’s feminist revision of the city as a patriarchal power base, and finally Jens Lapidus’s contemporary crime fiction which, like much modern-day Scandinavian crime fiction, examines the effects of globalization and multiculturalism in Stockholm. In common with much capital crime fiction, Stockholm becomes a trope in the urban space’s transformation from being a localized signifier of national identity to a more transnational space. The collection ends with an essay that returns to those capital cities considered the birthplace of crime fiction: Paris and London. Expanding upon Maurizio Ascari’s observations on the role that the early City Mysteries played in providing a starting point for the crime fiction genre, Stephen Knight presents a more detailed examination of their importance and influence upon later crime fiction. Like Ascari, Knight considers the political implications of the City Mystery. Still, Knight goes on to propose that the City Mysteries offer a more authentic experi­ ence of the urban space and suggests that the later figure of the detective blurred the realism of narratives exploring anxieties inherent in the new metropolis. Unlike Poe or Holmes who investigate and operate within a bourgeois enclave, the authors of City Mysteries portray complex cross-class negotiations. G. W. M. Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London (1846), in particular, provides a detailed urban carto­ graphy of a variety of city spaces, which, coupled with a rich diversity of characters, offer a multifarious reading of the city. The City Mysteries, though sometimes conservative by modern-day standards, can offer a surprisingly liberal perspective and may have more in common with later crime fiction. Knight points to their

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revisioning of marginalized groups within these texts: from plucky women to sympathetic bands of gypsies. State authority is questioned and corruption un­ covered. Despite their conservatism and subsequent placement within the crime fiction canon, the City Mysteries appear to have more in common with more contemporary, ‘grittier’ texts that explore the urban space. This collection hopes to introduce the reader to some critical and cultural in­ sights into crime fiction and capital cities. Needless to say, this is an introduction rather than an exhaustive list as this collection considers European capital cities through a European perspective. Still, this collection does not present European crime fiction as a homogeneous entity. Despite the seemingly narrow remit, a sur­prisingly wide array of themes and a variety of cultural identities come under discussion. Each capital city has its own literary and political history, and authors choose to engage with this history in a number of different ways. Yet, there are connections, too, between the manner in which the texts present capital cities and in the difficulties that they face in doing so. Despite their differing natures, capital cities share similar concerns as they act as representations of national identity, contain symbols of state authority, law courts and prisons, for instance, and are magnets for cultural tourism. As a result, capital crime fiction comes with its own set of considerations and complexities, considerations that distinguish it from urban crime fiction generally, creating a unique genre. Notes Georg Simmel, ‘The metropolis and mental life’, in David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (eds), Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings (London: Sage, 1997), pp. 174–86 (pp. 180–1).  2 For more on the life of Vidocq, see James Morton, The First Detective: The Life and Revolutionary Times of Vidocq (London: Ebury Press, 2004).  1

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2 Edinburgh IAN RANKIN

Living in Cardenden as a teenager, I’d written about the place to try to make sense of it. I was asking: how do I fit into the scheme of things? I was also making my home town seem more exciting and romantic than it really was. And I was playing God, controlling the world of my fictional creations in a way that was impossible in reality. Moving to Edinburgh in October 1978, it was natural that I would start writing about this strange, complicated city – though to term Edinburgh a ‘city’ can sometimes seem an exaggeration. With a population of around half a million, it is overshadowed by many conurbations south of the border, and even by its close neighbour Glasgow. Robert Louis Stevenson described his birthplace as ‘not so much a small city as the largest of small towns’. I describe it in my books as ‘a city the size of a town that thinks like a village’. It’s true that Edinburgh can seem claustrophobic at times. Walking through the Cowgate can feel like being at the bottom of a narrow canyon. Live in the place long enough, and it’s hard to venture out without bumping into friends and acquaintances. Yet at the same time the city can appear cold and unwelcoming. Visitors note that strangers don’t chat at bus stops the way they do in Glasgow or Belfast. Privacy is guarded at all times: There were those who said that Edinburgh was an invisible city, hiding its true feelings and intentions, its citizens outwardly respectable, its streets appearing frozen in time. You could visit the place and come away with little sense of having understood what drove it. This was the city of Deacon Brodie, where bridled passions were given free play only at night. The city of John Knox, his rectitude stern and indomitable. You might need half a million pounds to buy one of the better houses, yet outward show was frowned upon: a city of Saabs and Volvos rather than Bentleys and Ferraris. Glaswegians – who considered themselves more passionate, more Celtic – thought Edinburgh staid and conventional to the point of prissiness. Hidden city. The historical proof: when invading armies advanced, the populace made themselves scarce in the caves and tunnels below the Old Town. Their homes might be ransacked, but the soldiers would leave eventually – it was hard to enjoy victory without evidence of the vanquished – and the locals would come back into the light to begin the work of rebuilding. Out of the darkness and into the light. The Presbyterian ethos swept idolatry from the churches, but left them strangely empty and echoing, filling them with congregations who’d been told that from birth

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Edinburgh they were doomed. All of this filtering down through the consciousness of the years. The citizens of Edinburgh made good bankers and lawyers perhaps precisely because they held their emotions in check, and were good at keeping secrets. (Set in Darkness)

Not that this is always a good thing in Rebus’s eyes: Still nobody had come to investigate, to see what all the noise and the fuss were. Like Edinburghers of old, they could become invisible to trouble. In olden times, they’d hidden in the catacombs below the Castle and the High Street. Now they just shut their windows and turned up the TV. They were Rebus’s employers, whose taxes paid his salary. They were the people he was paid to protect. He felt like telling them all to go to hell. (Mortal Causes)

In my early books especially I was keen to point out parallels between my work and predecessors such as Jekyll and Hyde and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. I was an English literature postgraduate after all, teaching classes of Ulysses in my spare time and dreaming of future professorship – I wanted to be taken seriously as a writer. Living as I had done in a succession of dreary flats, motels and highrise blocks, yet researching towards my Ph.D. each day in the grand surroundings of the National Library and Central Library, Edinburgh really did seem a divided city. In Knots & Crosses, the appearance in the city of a serial killer has reporters dusting off stories about Deacon Brodie (gentleman by day, scoundrel by night), Burke and Hare (who murdered their victims then sold them on to surgeons in the guise of the recently grave-robbed) and hauntings (Edinburgh is said to be one of the most haunted cities in Europe). For Rebus, in that first adventure, Lothian Road is typical of the divided city: He was watching from his window as the city’s late-night drunks rolled their way up and down the obstacle-strewn hazard of Lothian Road, seeking alcohol, women, happiness. It was a never-ending search for some of them, staggering in and out of clubs and pubs and take-aways, gnawing on the packaged bones of existence. Lothian Road was Edinburgh’s dustbin. It was also home to the Sheraton Hotel and the Usher Hall. Rebus had visited the Usher hall once, sitting with Rhona and the other smug souls listening to Mozart’s Requiem Mass. It was typical of Edinburgh to have a crumb of culture sited amidst the fast-food shops. A requiem mass and a bag of chips.

This reflects one of the perennial problems I’ve had with Mr John Rebus. He is a professional misanthrope, made cynical by the job he does. Every day of his life he moves through an extraordinary city, but dealing only with its victims and miscreants. By the time of the second Rebus novel, Hide & Seek, he acknowledges as much: ‘He was living in the most beautiful, most civilised city in Northern Europe, yet everyday had to deal with its flipside.’ Many books later, in The Falls, when the museum curator Jean Burchill stops to gaze out across the city, Rebus

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disingenuously nods his agreement at her assessment of its beauty. To him, ‘it wasn’t a view at all. It was a crime scene waiting to happen.’ Between times, Rebus has had to visit most areas of Edinburgh. In the early books, many of these were fictional. You won’t, for example, find a ‘Great London Road’ (site of Rebus’s first police station), though you can go to London Road and guess that I probably meant the station to sit somewhere around there. But right from the start, Rebus lived in a real street – Arden Street. This was the street I was living in when I got the idea for the first book. It’s in Marchmont, an area infamous for its students, who seem to irk some of their neighbours by playing music and not taking proper care of the tenements’ communal stairwells. Edinburgh, despite its elegant housing stock and the Georgian splendour of the New Town, remains a city of tenements. People who have never visited the place sometimes think these must be dilapidated affairs (mistaking them, perhaps, for the slum tenements of Glasgow, knocked down in the 1960s). But many of Edinburgh’s tenements are clean, well-lit and well-tended, with spacious, high-ceilinged flats commanding six-figure sums. In some ways, they are a throwback to Old Edinburgh and the towering, teeming buildings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the city tried copying some of the housing-stock of Paris. One theory has it that the Old Town was a democratic living-space, in that rich and poor lived in the same tall structures, with the poorest in the eaves and the wealthy nearer ground-level, and that this democracy crumbled with the move of the bourgeoisie to the New Town at the end of the eighteenth century. In his historical overview Edinburgh, author Charles McKean says that the New Town ‘brought to the surface Edinburgh’s latent class-consciousness’ and he goes on to quote the views of an American journalist, who visited in 1834: ‘A more striking contrast than exists between these two parts of the same city could hardly be imagined . . . Paris is not more unlike Constantinople than one side of Edinburgh is unlike the other. Nature has properly placed a great gulf between them.’ This great gulf being the Nor Loch, which was eventually drained to create Princes Street Gardens. This sense of Edinburgh’s inequalities features in most of the literature to emerge from the city, including, most famously, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. The scene in which Brodie takes her young elite for a walk through the Grassmarket, there to pass by the city’s great unwashed, could still be repeated today – not in the touristified Grassmarket itself, but on the adjoining Cowgate, between the site of the Edinburgh gallows and the present-day mortuary. This mortuary has given me my share of problems over the course of the series. To help with the writing of Strip Jack, I asked an Edinburgh pathologist if I could put some questions to him. He agreed, and some time after our first meeting gave me a tour of the mortuary. By this time, I was priding myself on the realism in my books, but I wasn’t sure my readers would believe a mortuary where tomatoes were grown on window-sills and a mannequin in coat and hat sat at a desk. The mortuary of my books remains a less lively place (if you’ll pardon the expression) than its real-life counterpart. And when the mortuary closed for a time to facilitate the introduction

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of a new ventilation system, my fictional equivalent did the same. Maybe only a few dozen people in the city would have noticed, but it was important to me that they did. I’ve made other changes to the city, too. I’m not overly keen on writing about real-life housing estates, especially when I’m using them in my stories as a base for terrorists or drug dealers. Edinburgh is ringed with ‘problem’ estates which remain unvisited by most, and unseen by tourists. This is one reason they remain a problem: out of sight, out of mind. Progress, however, is ongoing, and instead of denigrating these real communities I would rather invent housing-schemes of my own, such as the Garibaldi Estate (from Mortal Causes), Greenfield (Dead Souls), and Knoxland (Fleshmarket Close). Rebus himself is able eventually to acknowledge that Edinburgh’s real-life estates are not all bad: Danny Simpson lived at home with his mother in a terraced house in Wester Hailes. This bleak housing-scheme, designed by sadists who’d never had to live anywhere near it, had a heart which had shrivelled but refused to stop pumping. Rebus had a lot of respect for the place. Tommy Smith had grown up here, practising with socks stuffed into his sax, so as not to disturb the neighbours through the thin walls of the high-rise. Tommy Smith was one of the best sax players Rebus had ever heard. (The Hanging Garden)

In this case, I named the real housing-scheme because it was going to play no further role in the drama, and because I wasn’t being nasty about it. The story about Tommy Smith is true, and everyone in Edinburgh who knows his work also knows where he grew up – so why tinker with the facts? Rebus’s city, however, comes alive at night. This is when Jekyll most conspicu­ ously becomes Hyde: He walked up the Bridges, stopped at some railings so he could look down on to the Cowgate. There were clubs still open down there, teenagers spilling on to the road. The police had names for the Cowgate when it got like this: Little Saigon; the blood bank; hell on earth. Even the patrol cars went in twos. Whoops and yells: a couple of girls in short dresses. One lad was down on his knees in the road, begging to be noticed.   Pretty Things: ‘Cries from the Midnight Circus’. (Dead Souls)

And here is Robert Louis Stevenson over a hundred years before: ‘To look over the South Bridge and see the Cowgate below full of crying hawkers, is to view one rank of society from another in the twinkling of an eye.’ Same scene, and similar feelings, but with the peddlers replaced by drunks. The cultural commen­tator Stuart Cosgrove complained recently that too many of Scotland’s creative artists concentrate on the downbeat and the negative in Scottish life, producing essentially glum, introspective and backward-looking works. He may be right. My own defence is that a detective would not deal on an everyday basis with happy shiny people.

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Crime fiction can be uplifting, but it deals in the main with human suffering – and suffering has always been of interest both to the artist and to his or her audience. I’m reminded of Virginia Woolf’s comment on James Joyce’s Ulysses that it was the work of ‘a queasy undergraduate squeezing his pimples’. Many a pimple has been squeezed recently by Scottish writers, sometimes, I’d guess, in reaction to earlier novels such as The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie which seemed to deal with a class these new writers knew nothing of, or found redundant and exhausted. Edinburgh, however, can contain multitudes. There is room both for the city of Trainspotting’s Begbie and the city of Alexander McCall Smith’s Sunday Phil­ osophy Club. There are also multiple crime writers at work today, their collective body-count outnumbering by far the body-count of the real city. Edinburgh doesn’t seem to mind. In the early days, reviewers wrote of my work that it was unlikely to be recommended by the local tourist board. Yet there’s now a successful walking tour of Rebus’s Edinburgh, mixing scenes from the books with snippets of local history and lore. Sometimes I get things wrong, of course, and people are quick to correct me, such as when I misnamed the city’s ‘setts’ as ‘cobbles’ or placed a foot-rail along the front of the bar in the Oxford Bar. Other times, I have to revise my estimation of an area. For example, Morningside is described in Mortal Causes as being ‘that genteel backwater, where old ladies in white face-powder, like something out of a Restoration play, sat in tea shops’. Having moved to Morningside a couple of years back, I admit I’ve yet to see anything like this. There are cafes, but serving espresso to a mixed clientele, usually with trance music on the hi-fi and no sign of a doilie-draped cake-stand. I can always make the excuse that the error was Rebus’s rather than mine, but on this occasion I’m willing to take the rap. Edinburgh keeps evolving as a city, which means that some of the early novels already have a ‘historical’ feel to them. The near-uninhabitable tenements of Niddrie and Craigmillar, as described at the start of Black & Blue, have almost disappeared entirely to be replaced with hospitable housing. The waterfronts of Leith and Granton have been gentrified – or are at the planning stage. Infamous gap-sites such as the ones behind the Usher Hall and on the eastern side of Leith Street have been replaced with modern developments, and a stretch of Lothian Road has been transformed into the ‘financial district’, complete with Sheraton Hotel and Spa (as mentioned in Set in Darkness). Joyce once said of Ulysses that if Dublin were blown to kingdom come, it could be rebuilt using his book as the blueprint. Yet after fifteen full-length novels, I’m not sure the same can be said for my version of Edinburgh. In some ways (and ironically, given their alleged mutual antipathy), we have Glasgow to thank for this. When the ‘second city of the Empire’ was elected European City of Culture and began its ‘Glasgow’s Miles Better’ campaign, it began a radical programme of regeneration. Edinburgh was slow to follow, but follow it did. How far a UNESCO World Heritage Site can move with the times is a moot point. I’ve no doubt that Rebus would see modern architecture (and art . . . and music . . .) as a series of carbuncles, and he would be in good company.

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In fact I’ve often hidden behind Rebus when offering criticism. For example, in Strip Jack Rebus investigates a case at the university, and sees some of the buildings around George Square through his creator’s eyes: On one side of Buccleuch Place sat a row of neat tenements, owned by the uni­versity and used by various departments. The Professor called it Botany Bay. And across the road uglier shapes reared up, the modern stone mausoleums of the main university complex. If this side of the road was Botany Bay, Rebus was all for transportation.

It was actually an eccentric tutor of mine, Mac Emslie, who used the ‘Botany Bay’ phrase, meaning by it that those staff members consigned to Buccleuch Place were kept distant from the hub of their departments. My own complaint against the ghastly 1960s buildings was that they seemed to produce a wind-tunnel effect whenever a strong breeze arose. You would have to fight your way up steps or around corners, exhausted by the effort. A lecturer was once blown over by the wind, as was my Aunt Jenny on one of her pilgrimages to Jenners department store. There have probably been dissertations written on the extent to which climate influences communities. Robert Louis Stevenson, who was eventually to settle in Samoa, didn’t think much of Edinburgh’s climate: ‘Edinburgh pays cruelly for her high seat in one of the vilest climates under heaven . . . The weather is raw and boisterous in winter, shifty and ungenial in summer, and a downright meteoro­ logical purgatory in the spring.’ Which translates in the Rebus series as: Springtime in Edinburgh. A freezing wind, and near-horizontal rain. Ah, the Edinburgh wind, that joke of a wind, that black farce of a wind. Making everyone walk like mime artists, making eyes water and then drying the tears to a crust on red-nipped cheeks. (Strip Jack) Some people said the weather made the Scots: long drear periods punctuated by short bursts of enlightenment and cheer. There was almost certainly something to the theory. It was hard to believe this winter would end, yet he knew it would: knew, but almost didn’t believe. (Let It Bleed )

Considering that I was living in south-west France when I wrote these passages, they show the effect Edinburgh’s weather had on me, the memories fresh and painful. During all my time as a student, I never lived closer to the university than Marchmont, a fifteen-minute walk which, in winter’s blasts, could feel like an eternity. I had two stints in the New Town, and would walk from there, too, a steep uphill climb and a half-hour tramp to lectures and tutorials. When I write about the Edinburgh weather, I write from experience. There is something in Rebus, however, that relishes these challenges, seeing them as another test sent from a cranky God:

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In another book, Siobhan comments that the weather on that one day has com­ bined elements from four different seasons, to which Rebus responds that at least you get your money’s worth in the Scottish climate. So have millennia of Caledon­ ian weather made us what we are? It’s true that the long winters can exacerbate feelings of depression. We stay indoors, drinking and watching TV. In ages past, it was said that one reason for the educatedness of the average Scot was down to long dark nights spent beside the fire with a good book. Not so true these days, and politicians agonize over our rates of literacy. At the same time, men living in Glasgow will die on average a good ten years before their counterparts in south-west England. There appears to be a self-destruct gene in the Scottish lineage. We know how to change our diet, know that smoking, binge-drinking and lack of exercise doom us to this early grave, yet we resist change. Maybe it’s the influence of Calvinism again: aware of our mortality, we choose to enjoy life in our own way. We’re addicted to that which destroys us. At one point in the series, Rebus sees alcohol, sugar and fat as the unholy trinity of the Scottish diet. Siobhan points up something similar: The Scots had an unenviable record for heart disease and tooth decay, both the result of the national diet: saturated fats, salt and sugar. She’d wondered what it was that made Scottish people reach for the comfort foods, the chocolate, chips and fizzy drinks: was it the climate? Or could the answer lie deeper, within the nation’s character? (The Falls)

Will the projected smoking ban in bars and restaurants presage a slow but telling change in our attitudes? I hope so, though the fatalism inherent in many Scots will take generations to fade. If the climate of Edinburgh has an effect on its denizens, what of the city’s structural character? Can architecture also affect those who live with it? Charles McKean certainly thinks so: ‘Embedded in its people’s character are the contrasts of its very landscape: barely suppressed savagery beneath ordered respectability’ (Edinburgh). It may be difficult to believe in ‘suppressed savagery’ among the takers of tea in Jenner’s cafe, but Miss Jean Brodie showed just such emotions simmering always beneath the surface. Edwin Muir saw other emotions being repressed in the 1930s: ‘This yearning again is drenched in unsatisfied sex. Nowhere that I have been is one so bathed and steeped and rolled about in floating sexual desire as in certain streets of Glasgow and Edinburgh’ (Scottish Journey). Charles McKean, who says of post-Enlightenment Edinburgh that ‘respectability had not obliterated bawdy . . . merely tidied it away’, would almost certainly agree with Muir. Sexual dysfunction might well lead to the ‘suppressed savagery’ of

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Jean Brodie and her ilk, but class and status have something to do with it, too. The building of the New Town’s grid and circuses imposed upon Edinburgh a sense of decorum and order. It remains a city where one is supposed to know one’s place. I was once invited to a meeting at the New Club, and was shown up to the meeting room by one of the staff. A club member – the New Club, with its discreet entrance on Princes Street, is the meeting place for the Edinburgh establishment – stopped us on the stairs and commented on my lack of a necktie. At no time did he attempt eye-contact with me; his words were aimed at the staff member. When I started to explain that I’d brought a tie with me for just such an emergency, he ignored me completely and kept berating the poor lackey. Such moments are telling. On more than one occasion, a dentist’s opening gambit, once I’m in the chair, has been to ask which school I went to. Edinburgh is a Scottish anomaly in the number of fee-paying schools it sustains (a quarter of all high school pupils is educated privately). My novel A Question of Blood was written in order to explore what this says about the city (even though I chose to place my school outside the city, so as not to invite comparisons with any real-life institution). The incidence of these schools, with their imputed elitism, strengthens the sense of Edinburgh as a divided city: haves and have-nots; the Protestant, Hearts-supporting west end, versus the Catholic, Hibernian-loving east end; New Town versus Old Town. For such a small place, Edinburgh can appear endlessly complex, which explains why I keep finding new things to say about it in my books. Here’s museum curator Jean Burchill’s take on the city: Reticence was an Edinburgh tradition. You kept your feelings hidden and your business your own. Some people put it down to the influence of the Church and figures like John Knox – she’d heard the city called ‘Fort Knox’ by outsiders. But to Jean, it was more to do with Edinburgh’s geography, its louring rock-faces and dark skies, the wind whipping in from the North Sea, hurtling through the canyon-like streets. At every turn you felt overwhelmed and pummelled by your surroundings. Just travelling into town from Portobello, she felt it: the bruising and bruised nature of the place. (The Falls)

Recently, the Edinburgh Evening News produced a facsimile of an edition from VE Day – Tuesday, 8 May 1945. A headline on page seven reads: ‘Edinburgh rejoices’, but is hastily followed by a sub-heading: ‘Restrained note in city’s response’. We’re back to bridled Edinburgh, hidden Edinburgh, the aspects of the city I’ve tried to explore in my fiction. Luckily for me, Edinburgh has hidden structures and a secret history which can be used as metaphors for my journey. For example, when someone at the Museum of Scotland alerted me to a display of tiny coffins, I had the starting-point for The Falls. The process of discovery is ongoing. It was reported in March 2005 that one of the historic closes on the Royal Mile was about to be reopened after years of neglect. Byers’ Close sits opposite St Giles’ Cathedral, in the most visited part of the Old Town. I’d probably walked past it a few thousand times without being

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aware of it, hidden as it is behind a padlocked wooden door. It’s extraordinary to think that something so public can also be so unknown, but that’s Edinburgh for you, revealing itself only by the most reluctant of degrees. But how then to explain the riotous assembly of the annual Festival and Fringe? Rebus, of course, hates those few weeks in August: The Edinburgh Festival was the bane of Rebus’s life. He’d spent years confronting it, trying to avoid it, cursing it, being caught up in it. There were those who said it was somehow atypical of Edinburgh, a city which for most of the year seemed sleepy, moderate, bridled. But that was nonsense; Edinburgh’s history was full of licence and riotous behaviour . . . The High Street was packed with people, most of them just browsing. Young people bobbed up and down trying to instil enthusiasm for the Fringe productions they were supporting. Supporting them? They were probably the leads in them. They busily thrust flyers into hands already full of similar sheets . . . There were jugglers and people with painted faces, and a cacophony of musical dis­ harmonies. Where else in the world would bagpipes, banjos and kazoos meet to join in a busking battle from hell? (Mortal Causes)

For years it was said that the denizens of Edinburgh actually packed up and left in August, renting their homes out to performers for astronomical sums. But with the advent of computerized bookings for shows, it has now been proved that over half the tickets for the Festival as a whole go to local postcodes. Again, this is all too typical of Edinburgh: we don’t want anyone to think we’re enjoying ourselves or taking pleasure in our own city. When I was asked to write about the Festival for a book called British Greats, this was my conclusion: Edinburgh is a small city with large ambitions. For many years, it seemed insular and inward-looking, saddened by opportunities squandered and a parliament lost to London. In recent years, however, it has begun to feel a new confidence, a new and more vibrant sense of itself. At last, Edinburgh feels that it deserves the Festival. The word ‘international’ has seldom rung so sweetly in the city’s ears.

A good deal of this new-found confidence, of course, is down to the parliament. Once amorphous, it now has its permanent HQ, nestling below Salisbury Crags, sandwiched between the Dumbiedykes housing-scheme and the Palace of Holy­ rood. That the character of Edinburgh is inherent in its landscape is validated by the lengthy arguments of a few years back concerning just where the parliament should be built. One potential site was dismissed by the ruling Labour Party as ‘Nationalist shibboleth’. Another was not central enough. The bickering and pointscoring stopped when a brewery stepped in to offer a parcel of its land – the perfect solution. My favourite story concerning town planning happened, however, around the time of the construction of the New Town. A shopkeeper noted that the rubble from the building work might usefully be dumped in a mound which would link

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New Town to Old. This eventually happened, the resulting conduit named to this day The Mound. Unfortunately for the shopkeeper, however, the routing of The Mound entailed the demolition of his own premises . . . In one book I call Edinburgh a ‘conservation village’ of half a million inhabit­ ants. This sums up for me the difficulties faced by my home city in the twenty-first century. Edinburgh is thriving, and needs to thrive to survive. But if expansion means change, will the city’s unique character be lost? It’s a question I may yet tackle in the series, with Rebus once more my mouthpiece and explorer. The Edinburgh Rebus patrols is mazey indeed, and treacherous with it. He sees the place as a series of connections: there are never many degrees of separation between the city of the dispossessed and that of the establishment. Beggars ply their trade outside the New Club, while city gents slip into the lap-dancing emporia of the ‘pubic triangle’ behind Lothian Road. Rebus, meantime, visits the dentist, and stares at an aerial photograph of the city on the ceiling above his head, map­ ping scenes from previous adventures: There’s Calton Hill, where Davey Soutar ended up. There’s St Leonard’s . . . and Great London Road. Hyde’s Club was just down there. Ooyah! There’s Stenhouse, where Willie and Dixie lived. You could see Saughton Jail quite clearly. And Warrender School, where McAnally blew his head off. He had a sense of the way the streets interconnected, and with them the lives of the people who lived and died there. Willie and Dixie had known Kirstie Kennedy, whose father was Lord Provost. McAnally had sought out a councillor as witness to his act of self-destruction. The city might cover a fair old area, its population might be half a million, but you couldn’t deny how it all twisted together, all the criss-crossed lines which gave the structure its solidity . . . (Let it Bleed)

This then is Rebus’s Edinburgh.

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3 ‘The map that engenders the territory’? Rethinking Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh GILL PLAIN

Hypocrisy: The practice of falsely presenting an appearance of virtue or falsely professing a belief to which one’s own character or conduct does not conform; dissimulation, pretence; and instance of this.1 Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the con­ cept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra – it is the map that engenders the territory . . .2

Baudrillard begins his influential work Simulacra and simulations with the alle­ gory of ‘a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory’ of the empire it represents. As the empire declines, the map crumbles to dust. This image is then inverted to make Baudrillard’s point that, in a world of simulation, this difference between the real and representation evaporates. ‘The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it’, he writes: ‘Henceforth, it is the map that pre­ cedes the territory – precession of simulacra – it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map.’3 This is a powerful image, and while it is not my intention to argue that the shreds of Edinburgh are rotting beneath the simulations of crime fiction, nor that it is no longer possible to distinguish the ‘real’ Edinburgh from its fictional others, I do think that the image of the map that engenders the territory speaks significantly to the symbiotic relationship between Ian Rankin’s fiction and the city in which it is set. My purpose, then, is to examine how Edinburgh has been represented in Rankin’s Rebus novels, and in particular to consider whether, over the course of the series, there has been a transition from the cartographer’s map to a more generative project in which traditional, or stereo­ typical, understandings of the city – and by extension the nation – are replaced by something less certain, but potentially more diverse and outward-looking. One of the most striking transitions in Rankin’s seventeen-novel series is a gradual departure from conventional representations of the city and a movement towards an almost obsessive naming process, as Rankin’s detectives traverse a

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city described in ever-increasing detail. This is not to suggest, though, that the Edinburgh of Rankin’s later novels bears no resemblance to that of his early ones. There are continuities, and by comparing Knots & Crosses (1987), the first novel to feature Rankin’s serial detective John Rebus, to The Naming of the Dead (2006), the sixteenth and penultimate novel in the series, it is possible to discern both the constant features of Edinburgh as a literary city, and to suggest some of the possibilities inherent in Rankin’s attempt to re-inscribe the familiar territory of Scotland’s capital. At the end of Knots & Crosses, the journalist Jim Stevens reflects upon the investigation: The London press came in search of their own versions of the truth . . . This seemed to Stevens to be part of some larger malaise. It wasn’t just that the media could create reality and then tamper with that creation whenever they liked. There was something beneath the surface of it all, something different to the usual dirt and squalor and mess, something much more ambiguous. He didn’t like it at all, and he didn’t like what it had done to him . . . Edinburgh had shown itself to Jim Stevens as never before, cowering beneath the shadow of the Castle Rock in hiding from something. All the tourists saw were shadows from history, while the city itself was something else entirely. He didn’t like it.4

In the beginning, then, Rankin depicts a pathologized city. Stevens’s reverie slips discretely from disquiet at the tawdry implications of London cheque-book jour­ nal­ism, to the perception that the source of this cultural malaise is Edinburgh itself.5 Stevens escapes, heading south to the London papers, but – with the notable exception of the London-set Tooth and Nail (1992) – Rebus, and Rankin’s reader­ ship, remain trapped in the strange and shadowy particularities of Scotland’s capital city.6 And here we are presented with a physical manifestation of duplicity: the city is built on double standards and dark secrets, the deceits of its citizens somehow permeating the very fabric of the place. Edinburgh, the Rebus novels will go on to assert, is not just the capital of Scotland, but the capital of hypocrisy. This characterization of the city is not confined to Rankin’s novels. In their gothic studies of duality, James Hogg and Robert Louis Stevenson established a template for the Scottish character that has become metonymically attached to the nation’s capital city. I have written elsewhere about the pervasive influence of the Jekyll and Hyde paradigm in Scottish crime fiction,7 but it is worth reiterating that from at least the nineteenth century onwards the city has been assumed to have a bifurcated subjectivity, a split personality. Contemporary crime fiction has thrived on this landscape of dissimulation. Paul Johnston’s Body Politic (1997) imagined a future Edinburgh in which the historic centre has been turned into a theme park for wealthy tourists, relegating the impoverished citizens to a bleak existence in marginalized soviet-style housing. The city is run by the Guardians of the Enlightenment Party, neo-Platonic idealists who keep the city functioning after the breaking up of the United Kingdom, but whose much-vaunted morality

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not surprisingly turns out to hide a darker reality. Alan Guthrie’s Two-way Split (2005) is a more direct appropriation of Jekyll and Hyde, providing, as the title suggests, two criminals in one body. Even Rankin’s cheery antithesis, Alexander McCall Smith, agrees with this characterization, suggesting in 44 Scotland Street that ‘Edinburgh’s full of double standards, isn’t it? Hypocrisy is built into the stonework here.’8 The pathology of Edinburgh, however, goes beyond the profession of false virtue. As Peter Clandfield has noted, the ‘connection between dysfunctional social systems and menacing urban environments is a foundational convention of crime fiction’ dating back to Raymond Chandler and noir writers of interwar America.9 In this mode of fiction, the city is an active agent in a struggle between social control and its loss, a space in which the detective can no longer operate as a detached observer, but must instead risk contamination through engagement with forces beyond individual apprehension. The mass of the city – in both concrete and human terms – ensures that crime fiction operates at the level of policing rather than resolution. The urban becomes a microcosm of wider socio-political anxieties in which crime is depicted as both individual and systemic. While the detective may be able to combat individual eruptions of criminality, he or she cannot resolve the problems emerging from the urban environment. Rankin is thus part of a generic tradition that makes the city central: the city creates crime. Clandfield goes further still, arguing that in Rankin’s Fleshmarket Close (2004), ‘Architectural folly is fingered as a key accessory to more direct kinds of crime.’10 Yet, while this is undoubtedly true of Fleshmarket Close, what is perhaps most notable about Rankin’s fiction is that the most invidious and heinous of crimes emerge not from the architectural follies of 1960s urban planning, but from the central civic monuments of the city. The New Town, Queensbury House, the Castle: the smarter the façade, the greater the depths of iniquity.11 In terms of ‘capital crime’, then, Edinburgh is special because it puts a better front on its urban malaise. Or, to use a phrase that occurs in a number of Rankin’s novels, the city is all ‘Fur coat and nae knickers’.12 Hypocrisy and the hostility of the urban environment are key features of the capital as it appears in Rankin’s fiction. These are features that owe a debt both to the generic traditions of crime fiction and to the characteristic preoccupations of Scottish literature and culture, and together they have contributed to Rankin’s critical reception as a ‘national’ writer. I have described Black & Blue, the pivotal eighth book in the series, as a ‘state of the nation’ novel, in which the detective’s odyssey around Scotland complicates the reader’s sense of Scotland as a coherent national unit,13 while Duncan Petrie has observed that the widening of perspective evident in the mid-series novels has ‘reconfirmed Edinburgh’s place within a wider national and international network of political, economic and social forces’.14 The growing perception of a national dimension within Rankin’s work has had an impact on the reception of later novels. Since the success of Black & Blue, each new Rebus novel has been scrutinized by press and critics not only for its quality as a detective novel, but also for its commentary on Scotland, its capital city and

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its politicians. Yet, a close examination of the novels reveals that the character­ ization of city and nation is not constant, and a consideration of Rankin’s rewriting of the city in his later novels raises a number of significant issues. Having argued that the representation of the city is central to a certain mode of crime writing, a correlative question emerges: if you change the way in which the city is narrated, will there be a consonant shift in what crime fiction can achieve? Implicit in this question are two further considerations. Can the re-mapping of the city, in par­ ticular, the capital city, prompt a rethinking of the boundaries of self and other that permeate national fictions? And, perhaps more frivolously, can Edinburgh ever hope to be ‘known’ beyond its dominant representation as the chilly antithesis of warm, welcoming, somehow lovably criminal Glasgow? This final question is not entirely flippant. The characterization of Scotland’s major urban centres as incompatible neighbours is obviously superficial, but this reductive opposition nonetheless continues to permeate understandings and repre­ sen­tations of the two cities. Duncan Petrie argues that the distinction as popularly conceived and deployed is between: ‘Glasgow as essentially proletarian, tough, masculine, gregarious and open, Edinburgh as bourgeois, genteel, feminine, refined and closed. Or, put another way, between the embodiment of authentic urban Scottish identity on the one hand, and of Anglocentric collusion and compromise, on the other.’15 Such stereotypes obliterate the complexities of both cities, denying the wealth of Glasgow’s imperial past and the poverty of Edinburgh’s ‘schemes’, while also ignoring the dynamic potential inherent within both cities as participants within a global economy served by a shifting demographic of migrant workers from within the UK, Europe and beyond. The cultural habit of binary opposition also has the effect of freezing Edinburgh within a pseudo-historical stasis: seem­ ingly detached from the substance of industrial labour, the capital becomes deceptively picturesque; an insubstantial feminized façade behind which ‘authentic’ Scotland goes about its ‘real’ business. Ironically, such a characterization has benefits for the adaptive crime writer. Rankin, in adopting Edinburgh as the shaping force for his serial fictions, is able to draw not only on a hard-boiled tradition of urban crime, but also on the conventions of classical ‘clue-puzzle’ fiction. Rebus’s Edinburgh owes a debt to the polite deceptions and contained suspects of Mayhem Parva, as well as to the urban malaise of noir tradition.16 The Rebus series is, then, a hybrid form in which genre conventions are adapted to suit the demands of politics and plot. The novels span twenty years of Scottish history, detailing the movement towards and transition through devolution, and they cannot be fitted into a fixed, repetitive paradigm. In the years leading up to the 1997 referendum, Rebus gradually develops into a classic example of the maverick, malfunctioning detective. A divorced outsider, on the verge of alcohol­ ism, his work is his life and he grows ever more obsessed with his self-appointed role as defender of the dead. After emerging from a series of crises in the late 1990s, Rebus as a character reaches a point of relative stability, but the novels continue to evolve. In the years since devolution, Siobhan Clarke has developed from unremarkable sidekick to natural inheritor – a surrogate daughter, bonded

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to the father, but wary of his legacy – while the narrative has shifted away from the almost complete concentration on Rebus and his obsessions that characterized the mid-series novels to a more diffuse multifocal approach.17 As readers now, we follow a range of minor characters alongside the central pairing of Rebus and Clarke. In a story arc of this magnitude, it is not surprising that much has changed, but there are also continuities. In terms of Rankin’s thematic preoccupations, it is notable that Members of the Scottish Parliament have proven every bit as un­ reliable as their London counterparts: power corrupts, whether it is located in Holyrood, Westminster or the local council ward. In narrative terms, meanwhile, a notable survivor is the mythical ‘tourist’ who, from the outset of the series, is established as an unseeing, gullible other who lends authenticity to this textual Edinburgh, and in comparison with whom, the reader becomes the privileged recipient of insider knowledge. Tourists, we are told in Knots & Crosses, ‘were never interested in the housing-estates around this central husk. They never ventured into Pilton or Niddrie or Oxgangs to make an arrest in a piss-drenched tenement.’18 While this is obviously an unlikely outing for any self-respecting tourist, the point is made, here and elsewhere in the novel, that Edinburgh actively trades on its ‘picture-postcard’ image.19 It has a reputation to uphold. Unlike Glasgow, which is self-evidently ‘urban’ (with all the implications that term might carry), Edinburgh is an historic and respectable city, and does not like to air its dirty laundry in public. The reader of a Rebus novel thus gains access to an Edinburgh normally only open to the initiated: they get to drink in ‘bars the tourists never sees’.20 In this sense, the uncovering of a secret in Rankin’s fiction goes beyond the matter of whodunnit: it also becomes a narrative that exposes a place. It tells the reader a secret, not just about a series of fictional characters, but about a ‘real’ place that they can visit – not as a tourist, but as someone in the know. The revelation of insider knowledge remains a constant of the series, but, in other respects, the role and representation of the city undergoes a radical change between 1987 and 2006. Indeed, over the course of just under twenty years, Rankin’s Edinburgh mutates from a predominantly literary capital, the gothic half-imagined city of darkness and shadowy perceptions with which this chapter opened, to a postmodern metropolis, shaped less by its literary heritage than by the A to Z. Read in conjunction, the contrast is striking. Knots & Crosses is a very literary novel. Rebus, who has not yet moved to his iconic chair by the window, sleeps on a mattress surrounded by books, some of which he even reads. He also reads the Bible, finding affirmation in the Book of Job for his belief that it ‘was an Old Testament land that he found himself in, a land of barbarity and retribution’.21 The text is replete with literary and historical allusions, from Jekyll and Hyde to Deacon Brodie,22 by way of Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare,23 but the novel also depends on the literary for its plot and denouement. At the level of serendipity, the chance intervention of a professor of literature draws attention to the word play built into the killer’s puzzle: he is selecting his victims to make an acrostic of Rebus’s daughter’s name. More powerfully, in Rebus’s hypnotism-induced flashback to his traumatic SAS experience, he emerges as a curious version of Scheherazade,

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telling stories to save not his own life but the sanity of his fellow soldier, Gordon Reeve. Appropriately, Crime and Punishment has the greatest impact on the dis­ integrating Reeve. This section of the novel reveals Rankin using literary allusion in the same way that he will later use music: a soundtrack for those in the know that amplifies the symbolic resonance of his text. As Rebus recounts how Reeve begged him to cross the line between homosocial brotherhood and homosexual desire, Rankin turns to Othello: ‘there were tears in his eyes, because he too could see that everything had gone haywire in an instant . . . But that didn’t stop him from edging his way behind me, making the two-backed beast. (Shakespeare. Let it go.)’24 Even after these revelations, the literary continues to dominate. The denoue­ ment takes place behind the ‘gothic façade’ of Edinburgh’s city library, which – appropriately – is built over the remains of the old Sheriff Court. This palimpsestic layering of the city is a conceit to which Rankin will return in later novels, but here it simply works to reinforce the central irony of a mass-murdering children’s librarian.25 And here, amongst the stacks, we get the final encounter between detective and criminal: books become weapons and ‘a small snub-nosed revolver’ is plucked from the ‘hollowed-out interior’ of, inevitably, Crime and Punishment. That Rankin in this novel is more concerned with the evocation of a Scottish past than an Edinburgh present is evident in his lack of concern with the detail of the city. Rebus inhabits the ‘fading grandeur’ of the fictional Great London Road police station, while his ex-wife lives on an unspecified ‘bright-as-a-pin’ housing estate.26 And, having not yet become a regular at the Oxford Bar, Rebus is obliged to drink at a range of generic, unnamed establishments on Leith Walk – which, as one of the few regularly specified streets in the novel, is working overtime as shorthand for the seedy side of the city.27 In some sense, the book might be read as an introduction to the city as much as to the characters, its features explained in a manner that will disappear as the series progresses: From his flat in Marchmont to the library could be a delightful walk, showing the strengths of Edinburgh as a city. He passed through a verdant open area called The Meadows, and on the skyline before him stood the great grey Castle, a flag blowing in the fine rain over its ramparts. He passed the Royal Infirmary, home of discoveries and famous names, part of the University, Greyfriars Kirkyard and the tiny statue of Greyfriars Bobby.28

Rebus is en route to meet his nemesis, Gordon Reeve, but Rankin could almost be writing for the tourist board. Move forward twenty years, and a great deal has changed. The Naming of the Dead is a less self-consciously literary novel than Knots & Crosses, not least because in the mid-1990s, Rankin abandoned books in favour of vinyl as his allusive mode of choice. Confronted with a crisis, Rebus reaches now not for Crime and Punishment, but for The Who, The Stones or even Elton John.29 The writing of the city too has changed. In Knots & Crosses, Jim Stevens sums up the two sides of the city by comparing the ‘sprawling housing-schemes

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and after-hours drinking holes’ to the ‘glittery discotheques and chintzy rooms of the New Town’.30 As suggested above, the description is generic, pointing to the contrast rather than the specificities. In The Naming of the Dead, when the ‘glittery discotheques’ are evoked, their manifestation is very different: Rebus knew Starr’s routine because Starr himself shared it with all and sundry each Monday morning: couple of drinks at the Hallion Club, then maybe home for a shower and change of clothes before coming back into town; back to the Hallion if it was lively, but always heading to George Street afterwards – Opal Lounge; Candy Bar; Living Room. Nightcap at Indigo Yard if he hadn’t ‘struck lucky’ before then.31

Rankin is, of course, now working on a larger canvas, but there is also, I think, something more going on here. The manner in which the city is recorded and revealed to the reader has undergone a significant shift. In this late fiction, the city is known not through the evocation of the past, but through a remorseless iteration of the present. The city is known through lists: the naming not of the dead but of the transient signs of commodity culture – bars, restaurants, shops; bands, politicians and brands. This feature is perhaps particularly evident in The Naming of the Dead because of the novel’s insistence on its place in space and time. It opens with a date, Friday, 1 July 2005, and the plot revolves around the very real political events of that week: the G8 summit at Gleneagles; the Make Poverty History march and associated concerts; the bid for the London Olympics; the Open Golf Championship at Loch Lomond and the 7/7 bombings. This final event reverberates throughout the last third of the novel, decentring the political trajectory of the narrative, and disrupting the debate implicit in the depiction of protestors and politicians. The novel is, in some senses, ostentatiously spectacular. An MP is killed falling from the ramparts of Edinburgh Castle, while our heroes Rebus and Siobhan Clarke somehow manage, Zelig-like, to be present at such epochal events as George Bush falling off his bicycle. But the text asks a significant question: does one death matter in the face of seismic world-political events? Can you look for a murderer when the global spotlight is on the city? Perhaps only the Edinburgh of hypocritical reputation would think that there is a conflict of interests here, but nonetheless Rebus and Clarke are told to curtail their investigations into both the death of the MP and what appears to be the serial killing of men convicted of rape. Naturally, and to the customary annoyance of their superiors, they do no such thing. Along­ side this public responsibility to the ‘truth’, they also pursue private agendas, most notably Siobhan’s obsessive pursuit of the person who attacked her mother during the Princes Street riots. As this very cursory summary suggests, the personal and the political, the local and the global are complexly interwoven within the text – and as part of this process, the novel also foregrounds the role of the media in both the commission and the investigation of crime. The meaning of the city as a locus of crime fiction cannot remain the same in a world where television images turn the local and familiar into global entertainment, and the internet enables

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the easy disruption of national boundaries. This permeability has an impact on policing: the supposed serial killer disguises their intentions by using a website to select random victims from across the north of Britain, ensuring that three different police forces are involved in the investigation. For those at the centre of events, however, mediation seems almost to render reality fictional. As the G8 protesters converge on Auchterarder, Siobhan finds herself watching an uncanny metanarrative of the invasion: Siobhan, having spent the night in her car, was getting by on watery coffee from a local baker’s. The other customers had been more interested in the events unfolding on the wall-mounted TV set behind the counter. ‘That’s Bannockburn,’ one of them had said. ‘And there’s Springkerse. They’re everywhere!’ ‘Circle the wagons,’ her friend had advised, to a few smiles.32

For the watchers, the strange proximity of world events prompts reference to frontier narratives – but the attack they encounter is a simulation, with television giving panoptical cohesion to fragmented and dispersed events. Earlier in the novel, Rebus’s journalist friend Mairie Henderson suggests that the only purpose actually served by the G8 meeting is the business of ‘Putting Scotland on the map.’33 Her observation is heavily laced with irony, not least because the next section of the book opens with the statement ‘According to the TV news, central Edinburgh was a war zone.’34 Yet, in terms of the novel as a whole, the concept of mapping is peculiarly appropriate. The G8 does not just put Scotland on the map, it brings the whole world to Edinburgh and its environs. The city is invaded not just by protesters, personalities and politicians, but also by police from across Britain, drafted in to help maintain order. The distinction between police officer and tourist evaporates in a comic inversion that undermines one of crime fiction’s key generic tropes – the intimate relationship between detective and environment – while also foregrounding questions of belonging, territory, authority and power. In a recent book on the cosmopolitan novel, Berthold Schoene discusses the challenges of representing the ‘rift between the world of globalised business, market­ ing and political decision-making, on the one hand’ and the ‘countless sub-worlds of powerless, disenfranchised daily living, on the other’.35 Writers, he suggests, might turn to juxtaposition, producing composite fictions, ‘episodic yet cohesive’, that forge ‘narrative assemblage out of a seemingly desultory dispersion of plot and characterisation’.36 While the crime novel is seldom desultory, in other respects this could be a vision of the contemporary detective novel’s ‘episodic yet cohesive’ investigation of multiple crimes and their wider repercussions. Rankin’s plots have long been alert to the complex interrelatedness of the global and the local. In Fleshmarket Close (2004), American capital underpins the Whitemire detention centre in Fife, which regenerates the local economy through the business of in­ carcer­ating refugees and, in Exit Music (2007), it is new Russian money that threatens to corrupt the bankers and politicians of Edinburgh. In these instances, then, the

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city functions not as a microcosm of a wider national malaise, but as the focal point of an international, indeed global, reconfiguration of power. Schoene goes on to suggest that ‘[c]entral to the cosmopolitan novel is its representation of world­wide human living and global community’, and that cosmopolitan identities in turn depend upon the capacity to step out of ‘narrow, self-incarcerating trad­ itions of belonging’.37 This seems an unlikely achievement for the cynical Rebus, who spends most of The Naming of the Dead pouring cold water on the hopes and aspirations of all around him, protesters and politicians alike. But, as the narrative transitions of the series make clear, the detective’s identity is not the sum total of Rankin’s later novels, and Rebus’s cynicism can be read less as a negation of community than as a counterpoint to it.38 In other words, the novel as a whole can achieve things beyond the ‘narrow, self-incarcerating traditions of belonging’ that characterize its central protagonist. This, then, is why the changing depiction of the city matters in Rankin’s fiction. There is an effort here to do something different with Edinburgh, and in so doing to take Scottish crime fiction out of its preoccupation with the past and into a more constructive – and perhaps cosmopolitan – engagement with the present. This is an optimistic, even utopian claim, and in some respects it burdens The Naming of the Dead with an ethical purpose it cannot fulfil. The problem is not that Rankin shifts to a descriptive mode based on a detailed topography of the city – from the schemes of Niddrie to the shifting demographics of Fountain­bridge,39 from the communal space of the meadows to the exclusivity of the Preston­field House Hotel – nor that he commits a significant amount of the novel to vivid summaries of the wider political picture, before zooming back into focus on his characters.40 Rather, my reservations concern what Rankin chooses to name, again and again, in order to make his novel ‘contemporary’: Bush, Bono, Blair, Bob Geldof, Bianca Jagger, Midge Ure, Claudia Schiffer, Annie Lennox, New Order, The Proclaimers, Eddie Izzard, Gael García Bernal, Texas, Snow Patrol, Colin Montgomerie, Starbucks. The novel is permeated with celebrity, the names of real people and bands used without discrimination and in danger of becoming little more than an agglomeration of ephemeral signifiers. In this, the novel’s re­ counting of the present feels less like a transition in the mapping of the nation, and more like a magazine that will rapidly date.41 The Naming of the Dead makes an heroic effort to depict a contemporary Edinburgh less in thrall to the icons of the past, but in doing so it veers dangerously close to over-reliance on the transient icons of the present. But this should not detract from what the book, and the later Rebus novels in general, achieve. I started with an image of mapping, and there is no doubt that Rankin’s fiction has reshaped Edinburgh. Indeed, in a development that must be rather peculiar for a living author, the city has been gifted to Rankin. Now the visitor is welcomed not just to ‘Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh’, a construction of the writer, but to ‘Rebus’s Edinburgh’, the hyperreal property of a fictional character. This is Edinburgh as a commodity, sold to tourists (and to readers) who get to relish both a gothic literary historical past of buried streets and celebrated corpses, and the knowledge

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of another, thrillingly proximate Edinburgh of drug abuse, HIV infection, prostitu­ tion, domestic violence, venality and corruption. This is yet another dualism, but on one side at least it is both infinitely expandable and usefully contemporary. This is not to suggest that Rankin somehow brings us closer to the ‘real’ Edinburgh – this, like any ‘real’ city, is impossibly atomized, a fragmented and uninterpretable conglomeration of lives and localities – rather, it offers the possibility of reinvention. Representation is all that makes both capital and nation coherent, and in this sense Edinburgh is the sum of its fictions. It is the capital of hypocrisy because two hundred years of literary endeavour tells us so and, consequently, it is literature that has a duty to avoid the lazy clichés of dissimulation. In a post-devolution, post-millennium, post-9/11 world, Edinburgh has nothing to lose and everything to gain from Rankin’s revisionary mapping. The more complex that the textual city becomes, the harder it is to determine who belongs and who is other, and as each new Rankin novel recreates the city through its lists and juxtapositions, the capital of hypocrisy – protestant, repressed and respectable – becomes instead the capital of compositeness: a site of conflicted identities, changing landscapes and global possibilities. And, if the capital maintains at least a partially metonymic relationship with the nation, here also lies the potential for a wider re-inscription. If the city can no longer cohere as the repository of a mythic Scottish national identity, then perhaps, ultimately, the nation itself will find its boundaries under erasure, being replaced by a more diverse and open sense of community? Wishful thinking, possibly, but infinitely preferable to another hundred years of hypocrisy. Notes The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 1296. Jean Baudrillard, ‘Simulacra and simulations’, in Julian Wolfreys (ed.), Literary Theories: A Reader and Guide (1983; Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp. 381–94. Emphasis in the original. I am grateful to Annie Kelly for reminding me of this resonant image of the inverted relationship between map and territory.  3 Ibid., p. 381.  4 Ian Rankin, Knots & Crosses (1987; London: Orion, 1998), pp. 225–6.  5 In another example, the city and its climate are credited with the powers of a malign and vindictive god: ‘Edinburgh rain was like a judgement. It soaked into the bones, into the structures of the buildings, into the memories of the tourists. It lingered for days, splashing up from puddles by the roadside, breaking up marriages, chilling, killing, omnipresent’ (ibid., p. 135).  6 Ian Rankin, Tooth and Nail (London: Orion, 2008).  7 See Gill Plain, ‘Concepts of corruption: crime fiction and the Scottish “State”’, in Berthold Schoene (ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), pp. 132–40.  8 Alexander McCall Smith, 44 Scotland Street (London: Abacus, 2005), p. 10.  9 Peter Clandfield, ‘Denise Mina, Ian Rankin, Paul Johnston, and the architectural crime novel’, Clues, 26/2 (2008), 79–91 (80). The city as a generative locus for crime has been central to critical writing on crime fiction, from John G. Cawelti’s Adventure, Mystery  1  2

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Gill Plain and Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976) to Ralph Willett’s The Naked City (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996). However, the predominant focus has been the American urban environment, and Clandfield’s essay is useful in the attention it pays to the link between ‘the form of contemporary Scottish crime fiction’ and ‘the specific recent history of urban Scotland’ (Clandfield, ‘Architectural crime novel’, 81). 10 Ibid., 86. 11 Set in Darkness (London: Orion, 2000) provides one of the best examples of this, with a long-entombed body disrupting building for the parliament, and a prominent family hiding secrets behind the facades of their substantial Edinburgh properties. However, it is not until the penultimate novel, The Naming of the Dead (London: Orion, 2006), that Rankin finally pushes a character off the castle ramparts. 12 Rankin, Knots, p. 193; Rankin, Black & Blue (1997; London: Orion, 1998), p. 93. 13 Gill Plain, Ian Rankin’s Black and Blue: A Reader’s Guide (New York: Continuum, 2002), pp. 26–7. 14 Duncan Petrie, Contemporary Scottish Fictions: Film, Television and the Novel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), pp. 150–1. 15 Ibid., p. 140. 16 ‘Mayhem Parva’ is Colin Watson’s term for the world inhabited by Agatha Christie’s interwar detectives: ‘There would dwell in Mayhem Parva a number of well-to-do people, some in professional practice of various kinds, some retired, some just plain rich and for ever messing about with their wills. The rest of the population would be working folk, static in habit and thought’ (Watson, Snobbery with Violence: English Crime Stories and their Audience (1971; London: Methuen, 1987), p. 170). In Christie’s world, these well-to-do people committed murder without a second thought. Much the same could be said of Rankin’s professional classes, ensconced in their privileged enclaves and seem­ ingly answerable to no one. 17 In this respect, the later books develop the approach originally used in Knots & Crosses. 18 Rankin, Knots, p. 80. 19 Ibid., p. 101. 20 Ibid., p. 48. 21 Ibid., p. 25. 22 Ibid., pp. 28, 51, 101–2. 23 Ibid., pp. 39, 167, 216. 24 Ibid., p. 167. The reference is to the opening of Othello, where Iago tells Desdemona’s father that his daughter and the Moor ‘are making the beast with two backs’. Othello, I.i.117–119, in Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (eds), William Shakespeare: The Complete Works (2nd edn; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005). 25 Mortal Causes (London: Orion, 1994) leaves a body in Mary King Close, a street buried below the Royal Mile. Guided tours of this strangely preserved space are now available, suggesting that – after a sufficient passage of time – even the spaces of the working class can be recuperated and commodified. 26 Rankin, Knots, pp. 15, 139. 27 The Sutherland Bar, visited by Jim Stevens, is the Ox in embryo (ibid., p. 19). 28 Ibid., p. 208. 29 Ian Rankin, The Naming of the Dead (London: Orion, 2006), p. 107. 30 Rankin, Knots, p. 30. 31 Rankin, Naming, p. 32. All the places listed are, or have been, ‘real’ Edinburgh bars and restaurants. Notably, the Hallion Club, an exclusive private members club, closed down shortly after the publication of the novel.

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36 37 38

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Ibid., p. 228. Ibid., p. 136. Ibid., p. 137. Berthold Schoene, The Cosmopolitan Novel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), p. 14. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 17, 21. In spite of representing a new generation, Siobhan is not exempt from her mentor’s cynicism. Although generally sympathetic to the marchers, she nonetheless finds herself thinking, in the middle of the demonstration, ‘I’d kill for a Starbucks latte’ (Naming, p. 231). The description of Fountainbridge provides a succinct demonstration of Rankin’s palimp­ sestic evocation of place: ‘Once an area of breweries and factories, where Sean Connery had spent his early years, Fountainbridge was changing. The old industries had all but vanished. The city’s financial district was encroaching. Style bars were opening. One of Rebus’s favourite old watering-holes had already been demolished, and he reckoned the bingo hall next door – the Palais de Danse as was – would soon follow. The canal, not much more than an open sewer at one time, had been cleaned up. Families would go there for bike rides or to feed the swans’ (Naming, p. 94). Ibid., pp. 163, 227, 307. A good example of this celebrity saturation is provided by Siobhan’s backstage access at the Edinburgh ‘Final Push’ concert (ibid., pp. 256–8).

Select bibliography Baudrillard, Jean, ‘Simulacra and simulations’, in Julian Wolfreys (ed.), Literary Theories: A Reader and Guide (1983; Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp. 381–94. Cawelti, John G., Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). Clandfield, Peter, ‘Denise Mina, Ian Rankin, Paul Johnston, and the architectural crime novel’, Clues, 26/2 (2008), 79–91. Guthrie, Alan, Two-way Split (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2005). Johnston, Paul, Body Politic (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1997). McCall Smith, Alexander, 44 Scotland Street (London: Abacus, 2005). Petrie, Duncan, Contemporary Scottish Fictions: Film, Television and the Novel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004). Plain, Gill, Ian Rankin’s Black and Blue: A Reader’s Guide (New York: Continuum, 2002). ––––,‘Concepts of corruption: crime fiction and the Scottish “State”’, in Berthold Schoene (ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature (Edin­ burgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), pp. 132–40. Rankin, Ian, Knots & Crosses (1987; London: Orion, 1998). ——, Mortal Causes (London: Orion, 1994). ——, Black & Blue (1997; London: Orion, 1998). ——, Set in Darkness (London: Orion, 2000). ——, Fleshmarket Close (London: Orion, 2004).

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Gill Plain ––––, The Naming of the Dead (London: Orion, 2006). ––––, Exit Music (London: Orion, 2007). Schoene, Berthold, The Cosmopolitan Novel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009). Watson, Colin, Snobbery with Violence: English Crime Stories and their Audience (1971; London: Methuen, 1987). Willett, Ralph, The Naked City: Urban Crime Fiction in the USA (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996).

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4 Corralling Crime in Cardiff’s Tiger Bay CATHERINE PHELPS

In a conversational piece for the New Welsh Review in 2003, writers Leonora Brito and Charlotte Williams talked about the difficulties of locating black people in Welsh literature. Cardiff-born Brito suggested that, ‘for the white imagination, which shapes as well as reflects public perception, black people invariably inhabit a sort of psychic corral called “Tiger Bay”. They can comfortably “place” us there, or nowhere.’1 Tiger Bay, since demolished in the slum clearances of the 1950s and 1960s, once was in the heart of Cardiff’s docklands and was home to one of Britain’s earliest multicultural communities. In its place now stands an inner-city council estate. Nevertheless, the Tiger Bay of the early to mid-twentieth century still exists in local memory and myth; this mythical status is shown at its sharpest in the literature set in Tiger Bay. For instance, my initial research for this piece included a search of Cardiff’s municipal library catalogue. While not a particularly academic start to research, it was revelatory. The use of the key term ‘Tiger Bay’ brought up several pages listing fiction with this term in the title. The works in question generally fell into two genre types: historical romances or crime fiction. These are genres that respectively signpost Tiger Bay as a romanticized place, albeit within the safe confines of the past or, alternatively, as a dangerous space. Romantic fiction and crime fiction both operate within strict generic conventions: enclosing the exotic and dangerous, traits of the ‘other’, within their strict demar­ cations constructs a ‘psychic corral’ in order to contain and make safe. Hence, the ‘other’ is made palatable to readers. Crime fiction especially acts as a space in which to ‘corral’ danger for its readership. Contemporary fears are performed, resolved and therefore contained within the strict confines of the genre. Placing crime fiction in Tiger Bay allows writers to express fears associated with the area and to bring them to a satisfactory resolution, all the while providing the reader with a safe, vicarious thrill. To comprehend how Tiger Bay came to be imagined as an ‘other’ place, one has to have some understanding of the history and geography of the area. Cardiff as a metropolitan city is a relatively new phenomenon. Although there has been some form of settlement since Roman occupation, Cardiff was little more than a hamlet until the second marquess of Bute, a wealthy landowner whose estates incorporated much of Cardiff and some south Wales coalfields, recognized the profits to be made from exporting the fruits of those coalfields. A decision was made to build a new dock on the existing small port of Cardiff and the Bute West

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Dock was officially opened in 1839, an event celebrated by a workers’ procession from the docks to Cardiff Castle.2 Rapid expansion followed, especially the area surrounding the dockland. Between 1840 and 1870, Cardiff saw a ‘massive popu­ lation growth, averaging . . . 79% per decade’ to 82,761 in 1881;3 much of this growth was due to the arrival of incomers from rural Wales, Ireland and the west of England. In 1905, Cardiff was granted city status; fifty years later it became the Welsh capital. In just over a century, it had grown from an unremarkable small town to a metropolitan capital. Many Welsh writers have subsequently used anglicized, urban Cardiff as a literary trope for vice and danger, especially when placed in contrast to a rural and religious Wales. Rhys Davies, for instance, uses this opposition in at least two of his novels, The Withered Root (1927) and Count Your Blessings (1932).4 Both feature girls who go to work in the city, only to be tempted into prostitution. In the latter novel, Curly, on a visit home to her native valley, shows off her new riches: ‘“Such clothes and things I’ve got. Everywhere. Look at these.” And she pulled up the swishing folds of her satin gown and showed Blodwen her stockings and her garters and drawers of a heavy yellow silk frilled with delicate lace.’5 For Welsh writers, Cardiff is often associated with a sensual excess, where, away from the influence of the chapel and a close community, women are doomed to fall into a life of vice, tempted by ill-gotten riches. Nevertheless, while Cardiff is still occasionally depicted as depraved and sinful, its docklands area, as I will go on to explain, rapidly became a place in which all writers, Welsh or otherwise, could imagine no other scenario. Butetown, the area surrounding Cardiff’s docks and which is named after the marquess, still contains some of its imposing Victorian and Edwardian architecture, symbols of industrial wealth and expansion. However, much is in sad decline, despite the recent regeneration of the area. Originally, this was also a residential area for a rising middle class. Merchants, captains, ship-owners made their homes here but later moved further out as the docks expanded and industry increased. One can also conjecture that, as they prospered, there was a desire to distance them­ selves from the industrial source of their wealth. The movement of the prosperous middle classes away from the docklands increased its growing sense of isolation from the rest of Cardiff, an isolation further intensified by a geographical quirk, for the docklands are situated on an isthmus south of the current city centre and which is reached by passing under one of two railway bridges. As the crime writer John Williams, whose work is the later focus of this chapter, explains in his intro­ duction to Bloody Valentine: A Killing in Cardiff (1995), ‘from the beginning the arrangement of railway lines, Bristol Channel and river was such that there was a natural division between Butetown and the rest of Cardiff’.6 During its early beginnings, Butetown had its own emergent ‘sailortown’. As the middle classes left the area, so the sailortown expanded and it is this for which Butetown became infamous. In common with other docklands, London and Liverpool for example, these sailortowns contained many cafes and boarding houses that catered for visiting seamen but which also became synonymous with vice. In his Reminiscences

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and Historical Notes, published in 1918, Alderman W. J. Trounce describes this sailortown: In the year 1858 there were many low-class dancing rooms in Bute-street, frequented largely by foreign seamen and individuals whose characters were not always above suspicion. Many disturbances occurred at these places, giving much trouble to the police and bringing an unenviable notoriety to the town.7

Notably, it is the arrival of the ‘foreign’ visitor that marks the change from a middleclass residential area to a ‘town’ of notoriety. As Cardiff grew in size and respect­ ability, there appears to be a focus on the docklands as a site of dis­appro­bation. Butetown’s sailortown eventually became known as Tiger Bay, a name shared with other dockland sailortowns from London to Buenos Aires.8 Like other dock­ land areas, this quickly became an area that boasted an unusually high ethnic mix as visiting seamen married local women and settled in the area. By 1911, fifty-seven different nationalities were recorded as living in Tiger Bay and this brings me to the crux of the matter: race.9 Writing for the Glamorgan Historian in 1971, W. R. Owen reminisced about a Tiger Bay between the wars and how ‘when night fell, Cardiff became a divided city of two civilisations – the white and the dark. Each civilisation kept itself to itself and the dividing line was at Hayes Bridge.’10 Divided through place, by the end of the First World War, Tiger Bay is further divided through binary opposition from Cardiff, the dark to its white, and is created as an ‘other’ place onto which anxieties can be projected. Viewed nostalgically by past residents as a progressive and tolerant area, none­ theless, Tiger Bay and its residents attracted virulently racist discourses, most often through contemporary newspaper reports but later through fictional represen­ tations. The area was swiftly exoticized and vilified in equal measure. Irrespective of the later decline of the docks and its sailortown, and that many of Tiger Bay’s residents led respectable lives, the area continued to be depicted, as Ross Cameron puts it in ‘Images of Tiger Bay’, as a ‘modern frontier land’.11 He argues that these representations of Tiger Bay ‘link the foreignness of [Butetown] to the vice of its [sailortown]’.12 Despite the pride expressed by Cardiffians in their city’s early model of multiculturalism, Tiger Bay is imagined as different and dangerous. Colin Watson’s wry examination of crime fiction, Snobbery with Violence, points out how, in early twentieth-century imperialist texts by the like of Sax Rohmer, crime writers tapped into ‘an innate fear or dislike of foreigners’ and, subsequently, the nature of the villain changed. Initially, the Chinese were villainized to be shortly followed by anyone of foreign extraction.13 W. Townend’s Once to Tiger Bay (1929) is a typical thriller of its time. Its hero, Pen, epitomizes the qualities of the imperial male: healthy, pure, quick with his fists and devoted to his mother. He sees foreign­ ness as a threat to civilized society: as he declares, ‘English will take one anywhere. Encourage the study of foreign languages and what happens? First thing you know, you’ll have all these dago people and squareheads giving up learning our language and expecting us to learn theirs!’14 Cardiff’s Tiger Bay only provides a

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temporary setting within this thriller but its treatment speaks volumes about imperial attitudes to non-British subjects. The novel has a preface that conflates Tiger Bay with sex and violence. In addition, this preface replicates the storytelling frame narrative of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) as the tale appears to be related on board ship. Once to Tiger Bay opens with the following dialogue: ‘Give ’em blood,’ said the second engineer. ‘Give ’em sex,’ said the mate. ‘Why not tell ’em that yarn about Mother Jubilee, of Bute Street,’ said the chief, ‘and the beachcomber.’15

For Townend, like many writers, Tiger Bay is the dark heart of Wales, an un­ civilized, exotic place. The title of the text, with its echo of ‘once upon a time’, immediately alerts the reader to the mythical status of the area. Once onshore, Pen travels into Butetown: ‘Cardiff was Wales, of course: Cardiff, Bute Street, with its little, queer, ugly shops, sailortown, Tiger Bay, pubs, loneliness, pawn­ brokers, harlots, out-of-work seamen, shuffling Asiatics, half-caste children.’16 In what becomes a recurrent pattern for fiction writers, Townend’s Tiger Bay is popu­ lated by the stereotypes found in the local press and memoirs. And its women are immediately reduced to the single role of prostitute by dint of residency. As Neil Evans points out in ‘Regulating the reserve army’, though the ‘need and a lack of alternative jobs or business activity drew people into prostitution and procuring’, there is no evidence of widespread involvement: On the contrary the evidence points to [the residents’] respectability.’17 Despite this, Tiger Bay women are deemed to be immoral and dangerous. Still, while sex and violence play their part, the Tiger Bay stereotypes of Once to Tiger Bay inhabit the margins for the majority of its narrative. The central characters here are an educated English middle class while those native to Tiger Bay merely provide local colour. Clearly, the immigrant population did attract much fascinated interest and was soon deemed exotic and different. However, this alone does not account for the particular focus on sex and deviance when considering the residents of Tiger Bay. On further consideration, it seems that it is not race per se that was problematic in Cardiff’s docklands. Rather, it is the subsequent interracial relationships forged in Tiger Bay that are a source of anxiety. In 1919, many British docklands erupted in race riots as demobbed white men demanded work that had been covered in their absence by the immigrant community. Cardiff was not immune. In fact, these were not the first riots experienced in the city as there had been previous clashes between immigrant workers and the Welsh, but the 1919 riots were said to be sparked by the sight of a charabanc of black men and white women returning from a day trip. While conflict between the native Welsh and Cardiff’s immigrant population was fuelled by economic and racial anxieties, the 1919 riots also contained an element of sexual anxiety about interracial relationships. Early immigration to Cardiff was for economic reasons and was therefore almost ex­ clusively male. Visiting seamen settled in the area and married local women and,

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naturally enough, raised children together. As Alan Llwyd suggests in Cymru Ddu/Black Wales: A History, the Cardiff riots were also motivated by a degree of ‘sexual jealousy’.18 The contemporary reports in the local newspapers certainly support this assertion. The Western Mail had this to say of visiting seamen and their trips ashore: ‘he would next to proceed to spend money freely in arraying himself in the “swankiest” garb he could obtain’.19 This manages to insinuate that foreign seamen were deliberately luring women away from their poorer white counterparts whilst displaying a deviant and un-British masculinity in such a peacock display. Commenting on the white women whose relationships with black men had caused such ire, the Western Mail editorial asserted that, ‘[s]uch consorting is an ill-assorting; it exhibits either a state of depravity or a squalid infatuation; it is repugnant to all our finer instincts’.20 Fictional black men have frequently been associated with an animal virility, from Caliban to the eponymous Mandingo (1957). In the contemporaneous Welsh media, the women who formed relationships with immigrant men were also considered to possess a dangerous and deviant sexuality by association. The depiction of Welsh women as sexually promiscuous and slatternly has its roots in the mid-nineteenth century. Jane Aaron points to the now infamous Blue Books or, to give it its official title, Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales, as the initial source for designating Welsh women as sexually transgressive. The visiting English commissioners interpreted the social deprivation and mean housing of much of the Welsh as symptomatic of an essen­ tial Welsh inferiority rather than as a result of poverty. Information was often garnered from the English-speaking Anglican clergy, as the commissioners could not speak Welsh and Wales was virtually monoglot at this period. No doubt preju­ dice inflected the commissioners’ accounts of a promiscuous Welsh, fuelled by their attendance at the rival Nonconformist chapels. Aaron draws our attention to how the blame was firmly placed on women with the inclusion of the report’s assertion that in Wales, there is a ‘want of chastity in women . . . [which] is sufficient to account for all other immoralities, for each generation will derive its moral tone in a great degree from the influences imparted by the mothers who reared them’.21 The ideology of the sexualized Welsh woman was quickly perpetuated by English novelists such as Elizabeth Gaskell who, Jane Aaron says, ‘seems in­capable of intro­ ducing a Welsh woman into her short stories without making her libidinous, if sub­sequently contrite’.22 Aaron goes on to argue that many Welsh writers countered this negative representation with depictions of virtuous Welsh womanhood.23 Never­ theless, those setting their work in Tiger Bay then and now revert to the stock stereotype of the wild, wanton Welshwoman. In Tiger Bay crime fiction, as in Townend’s thriller, this is taken to its extreme as the women depicted in its pages exchange sex for money or the chance of a higher status. Welsh women who choose immigrant men as partners are deemed so depraved, as the Western Mail suggests, that they are doubly fallen, through ‘squalid infatuation’ and the desire for money. It was not just interracial relationships that roused anxiety in the general popu­ lace. Ten years after the 1919 race riots, the chief constable of Cardiff, James

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Wilson, called for anti-miscegenation legislation which would have criminalized sexual relations between black men and white women. Wilson’s concern was not necessarily the marriages between immigrant men and Welsh women but the problem or, Wilson’s word, the ‘evil’ of their children. His argument was that: The coloured seamen who live in our midst observe our laws for the good rule and government of the community. They are not, however, imbued with our moral code, and have not assimilated our conventions. They come into contact with the female sex of the white race, and their progeny are half-caste, with the vicious hereditary taint of their parents.24

Fiction set in Tiger Bay makes interracial relationships a key concern in their texts throughout the twentieth century. These fictions generally contain stock figures drawn from the media and other contemporaneous discourses: the black man, the deviant woman and the possibility of their half-caste child – the result of James Wilson’s ‘ill-assorting’. In Tiger Bay-set fiction, these interracial relation­ ships are often shown to contain the potential for danger. The explanations offered for the origins of the naming of the area are indicative of these fears. Butetown resident and writer, Neil M. C. Sinclair, has suggested that the Cardiff Tiger Bay derives its name either from a sea shanty which was adapted to include references to Butetown, or from Portuguese seamen who described the rough water of the Bristol Channel as a ‘bay of tigers’.25 Tellingly, most fiction writers prefer a more squalid alternative. Tiger Bay (1946), by Welsh writer David Martin, tells the tale of Hakif, a Somali sailor and fugitive from the law. Unlike the majority of fiction set in this area, Martin’s novella is sympathetic to Tiger Bay’s community and, in contrast to Townend, he places the community centre stage. Nevertheless, despite its positive depiction of a black immigrant seaman, the text does retain some of the old prejudices. The preface prefers this explanation for the source of its name: In the days of fast sailing ships, when Cardiff was growing rapidly from a fishing creek in the Bristol Channel into the world’s largest coalport, the dock area was infested with thugs and harpies and prostitutes of the vicious type who operated as thieves’ decoys. These women fought like tigers.26

This portrayal of the docklands’ women betrays an anxiety about those who associ­ ate with the foreign other; the use of the word ‘infested’ is particularly telling. Sexual and aggressive, these female tigers are animalized through alliances with black men. In Tiger Bay, Josepha aborts Hakif’s child in order to make a more financially secure alliance with a Welshman. Josepha explains that, once outside the safety of Tiger Bay, ‘[e]verybody would have pointed at me. She has a black bastard.’27 While Tiger Bay and, later in the novel, the socialist mining valley to which Hakif flees are tolerant safe places, the black man and his offspring are unwelcome in the Welsh capital.

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Still, the novella has much sympathy for Hakif. During a conversation with Nest, a Welsh prostitute, she tells him, ‘I don’t mind you being black. When my father comes home from work he is just as black as you. Even blacker.’28 Clumsy though this intended compliment is, it echoes the sentiment expressed in The Proud Valley (1940), the film that starred Paul Robeson working in a south Wales coal­mine, of ‘Dammit, man, aren’t we all black down that pit?’29 Hakif’s relation­ ship with the socialist Valley Welsh may well be drawing parallels between his character and Paul Robeson, who visited Tiger Bay between the wars to visit an uncle who was resident there. Robeson aligned himself to Welsh socialist causes and sang with Welsh choirs. The ending of Tiger Bay makes overt reference to the Welsh folk tale, the Lady of Llyn y Fan Fach in which a young man marries a girl from the underworld who walks out of the lake. She returns to the underworld by walking back into the lake after he has struck her three times, despite his promise to her. Tiger Bay replicates this fate as Hakif also walks into a lake. Despite the ‘othering’ implicit in this rewriting of the myth, like the lady of the lake, Hakif is ‘otherworldly’, inhuman almost; he too is portrayed as the victim of an injustice. Hakif’s act also means that he eludes capture by the authorities. And the allusion to the Lady of Llyn y Fan Fach is an inclusive act, one which writes Hakif, a black immigrant, into Welsh culture and legend. The Australian writer J. M. Walsh published a series of crime novels set in the area throughout the 1940s and 1950s. The first of these is Once in Tiger Bay (1947), a title that echoes with Townend’s novel and continues the myth-making about and exoticizing of the area. Walsh’s novel follows Detective Inspector Bill Felin as he goes undercover to trap the local gangster and drug-smuggler, Louis Farina. As Colin Watson has pointed out, ‘[d]rugs were credited with near magical powers . . . It was believed that they transformed the taker, more or less immediately, from a harmless and respected member of society into a monster of guile, violence and depravity.’30 Coupled with the fact that, without fail, it was foreigners who were depicted as drug smugglers, it seems that the foreigner of mid-twentiethcentury crime fiction was seen as a danger to the nation’s health, wealth and purity. Unlike other non-Welsh writers, Walsh appears to have a working knowledge of Cardiff’s geography and makes some acknowledgement of its Welsh identity. Once in Tiger Bay follows the actual streets of Tiger Bay as they once were. Walsh’s knowledge of the city centre arcades and covered market also suggest a visit to the city rather than remote research. As his hero’s name, Felin, and that of his love interest, Catherine Rhyd, suggest, both are Welsh, although these are not common Welsh surnames but are more usually found in place-names.31 Still, the question asked during a police interrogation, ‘would you prefer it in Welsh or some other language? We’re a multi-lingual community here’ nods towards the specific identity of Cardiff and Tiger Bay.32 Unfortunately, when Walsh turns to the in­ habit­ants of Tiger Bay, he quickly reverts to stereotypes. Orientals are impassive, negroes are only visible in the gloom because of ‘rolling eyes and the polished ivory of gleaming teeth’, while women switch sexual allegiances between men when it is financially expedient.33 The ‘dark-complexioned’34 Farina’s racial ethnicity is

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never explicitly identified but his name and Mediterranean colouring hint that he may be a member of Tiger Bay’s Maltese community. Nevertheless, he is described as walking in ‘a sort of lithe yet crabwise motion’, slipping into rooms ‘like some kind of shadow’.35 The foreigner here is depicted as barely human, but rather is linguistically portrayed as both animalistic and vampiric. Lawful order is restored when Felin sheds his undercover persona as criminal to arrest Farina. Revealing himself as detective inspector, the Welsh Felin distances himself from the residents of Tiger Bay and reinforces his authority over them. Likewise, placing the stock literary figures, the foreigner and his consort, within the imagined corral of Tiger Bay and the constraints of crime fiction, removes them from Welsh culture, re­ inforcing what Glenn Jordan and Chris Weedon refer to as ‘the hegemonic versions of Welshness which define it as intrinsically white’.36 The interwar decline of the south Wales coalfields eventually took its toll on the Cardiff docklands. In the 1960s, Tiger Bay was demolished by well-meaning city planners and many of its residents were temporarily re-housed in the outlying Cardiff suburbs.37 In its place appeared the Butetown housing estate which, despite its near vicinity to the city centre, has become a place of deprivation and high unemployment. During this period, Tiger Bay starts to fade from crime fiction. This is not a complete disappearance, however; Tiger Bay sometimes appears under another guise. Archbishop David Mathew’s The Prince of Wales’s Feathers (1953) is one of the first novels in which this happens.38 Not a crime novel as such, The Prince of Wales’s Feathers uses a crime to drive the narrative. Set in ‘Port Caer­leon’, Tiger Bay appears as the thinly disguised ‘Leopard Bay’.39 There is no doubt that Port Caerleon is Cardiff: Leopard Bay is the home to many cultures, including those from the south Wales valleys and coalfields, while genuine Cardiff street and pub names appear in the text. Like his fellow Welsh writer, David Martin, Mathew’s portrayal of Mr Hearn, an immigrant seaman, is a sympathetic one: Mr Hearn is a gentle, sober, family man, unlike his wife, a Cardiff woman of mixed race and a lazy drunkard with little maternal feeling. Mathew too follows the pattern of representing women who form relationships with immigrant men as being avaricious, willing to change partners for financial gain. However, the narrative ends with Mr Hearn leaving Leopard Bay with his children for his native home, Lagos. He prepares his children by telling them tales about the Yoruba but ‘never spoke about the slave trade or slavery; they would learn about that soon enough’.40 Port Caerleon is a hostile place for immigrants, even within the supposedly safe corral of Leopard/Tiger Bay. This is further evident in a conversation between two Arab seamen, one of whom asks for a local mosque only to be told, ‘[w]e seamen are poor and the unbelievers would not wish for a mosque in this town’.41 Leopard Bay is portrayed as intolerant of people of differ­ ent race and faith. This contradicts the historical reality, as Cardiff has housed Muslim places of worship since the first influx of Somali and Yemini sailors in the 1860s. Cardiff’s first especially constructed mosque was completed in 1947, but the city has housed ‘zawiyas (centres of religious activity)’ since the late nineteenth century.42 While sympathetic to those coming to Wales, The Prince of Wales’s

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Feathers also depicts a Tiger/Leopard Bay that is hostile to immigrants and their offspring. David Martin resolves this in Tiger Bay through the death of Hakif and his unborn child; Mathew takes a more enlightened approach. Mr Hearn’s Yoruba culture is passed onto his children to prepare them for their return to his homeland. Nevertheless, little mention is made of his children’s Welsh heritage. I suggest that this reveals uncertainty amongst Welsh writers about Cardiff’s place in Wales. As Rhys Davies had explored anxieties about the anglicization of the Welsh capital, so Welsh writers expel hybrid racial identities from Welsh culture. For most white writers, the heart of darkness is Leopard/Tiger Bay and for Mathew, Africa, in contrast, is a place of safety and education. Another Welsh crime writer to record the decline of Tiger Bay was Bernard Knight, better known for his later medieval mysteries. Tiger at Bay (1970), written under the pseudonym Bernard Picton, is the earliest instance of a Welsh private investigator that my research has so far unearthed. Nevertheless, like the streets he walks in search of clues, Knight’s PI lacks the glamour attributed to his pre­ decessors. Iago Price is an unprepossessing figure, a ‘thin, weedy young man with a slight stoop. His head was too big for his neck and was topped by thin hair that matched his feeble moustache.’43 Iago is a suitable PI to investigate a murder in the decayed and partly demolished Tiger Bay depicted by Knight. However, while the dockland streets that he walks are drab and dusty, Knight still cannot resist the romance of the exotic and these streets are still lined with the stock figures of ‘lascars and negroes [who] lounged outside seedy shops and cafés; children of all shades chased around the uneven pavements’.44 The villain here is one Lawrence Trefor Ismail, or Tiger, whose name suggests his dual national heritage. Tiger’s ‘striking appearance, high intelligence and complete lack of moral sense made a dangerous combination that bordered on the psychopathic’.45 The mixed race Ismail/Tiger embodies the conflicting sensibilities of white Welsh writers in which sympathy for the immigrant community clashes with internalized stereotypes of black men. Tiger is not the usual eye-rolling negro used to provide local colour. His intelligence places him at the centre of the narrative while his name hints at the unique hybrid identity of the Bay residents. But, the fear of the mixed-race child, or as James Wilson called them ‘the evil’ resulting from interracial relation­ ships, implies that this is an intelligence that lacks any moral compass. After its demolition in the 1960s, Tiger Bay also disappeared from crime fiction for the next two decades. Bill James draws on his native Cardiff in his Harpur and Iles series (1985 to the present day) but the city is never named. The first of these, You’d Better Believe It (1985), goes as far as to describe its anonymous setting as ‘an artistically null English town’, placing the text outside Wales.46 However, as with Mathew’s Prince of Wales’s Feathers, there are clues to the town’s inspiration underneath its ‘anytown’ setting. Much of the action in You’d Better Believe It takes place in the town’s run-down and neglected docklands. James grew up near Tiger Bay and, as a child, attended the Bethel Baptist Chapel in Butetown; this features in the text as a black evangelical church.47 The main street of these fic­ tional docklands, The Esplanade, hints at Cardiff’s own seafront street, Windsor

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Esplanade, which had seen better days when You’d Better Believe It was published. Again, James, like other Welsh writers, is more sympathetic to the black community than his English counterparts. Specific aspects of Tiger Bay culture are portrayed, such as the funeral marches accompanied by a jazz band, ‘like Harpur had seen of New Orleans long ago’.48 The treatment of black characters is much more evenhanded, reflecting the more progressive attitudes to race of the 1980s. It seems that by making the area anonymous, James is able to avoid the preconceptions and exoticism of literary Tiger Bay. Initially, James seems to follow the pattern of past writers in that the sole white female resident of the old (unnamed) Tiger Bay is a prostitute, Michelle-Ann. But she is different, smelling ‘of something quite refined, her clothes pretty’, her place ‘nice, books on the shelves’.49 The only Welsh character to appear in You’d Better Believe It, Michelle-Ann simultaneously conforms to and rejects the stereotype of the Tiger Bay prostitute. No depraved sexual deviant, prostitution is merely an occupation for Michelle-Ann. Like the more liberal racial attitudes, this too is a reflection of women’s greater sexual freedom in this decade, albeit a male misinterpretation of the feminists’ cry for a woman’s right to choose. Nevertheless, while Cardiff’s docklands are clearly visible to the informed reader, their anonymity responds to the disappearance of Tiger Bay two decades ago to be replaced by the Butetown housing estate. It appeared that by the 1980s, Tiger Bay had finally been laid to rest, in crime fiction at least, along with its stock characters and stereotypes. However, two events occurred that brought the old Bay back into the public consciousness and, as a result, back into crime fiction. In 1987, Cardiff Bay Development Corporation was set up to redevelop the Cardiff docklands into an attractive waterside develop­ ment.50 Butetown, the site of the old Tiger Bay, was excluded from these plans. Redevelopment has strengthened the corral surrounding the housing estate and its inhabitants as luxury apartments, restaurants and bars circled Butetown’s innercity poverty and marginalization. Furthermore, the corporation billboards that sprung up around the area and which showed a utopian ideal of the leisured classes enjoying the proposed marina depicted a generically white population. Butetown’s inhabitants were now enclosed, corralled and made invisible. Never­ theless, this did not exclude the area from fiction. Rather, as Bill James has said of the regeneration, ‘I thought once the Bay got going, with the huge sums of money involved, then organised crime became a possibility.’51 James went on to revitalize an old pseudonym to publish a series of crime novels set in the re-named Cardiff Bay, the first of which was The Tattooed Detective (1998).52 These focused on the developed Cardiff Bay, sited on the old dockyards, rather than on the old Tiger Bay site of Butetown. It was another event that revitalized Cardiff crime fiction, proving that the ghost of Tiger Bay still had an influence on crime writers, especially Welsh authors. A year after the development corporation came into being, a violent murder disrupted the homogenized perception of the newly named Cardiff Bay, and placed it centre stage in the media. On the 14 February 1988, Lynette White, a 20-year-old prostitute, was brutally murdered in a flat in James Street, Butetown.

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Sub­sequently, five men, all black, all from Butetown, were charged with her murder. (Fiction writers now generally refer to Tiger Bay by its current name of Bute­town, a practice that I will now follow.) Two were acquitted, while the remainder, Yusef Abdullahi (who has since died), Stephen Miller and Tony Parris, became known as the ‘Cardiff Three’ as they and their families fought against a wrong­ful con­ viction. Their conviction was eventually overturned as the police use of oppressive questioning meant that the so-called confession by one of the accused was ‘un­ acceptable and inadmissible’ as evidence.53 This crime and its consequences are explored in two contemporary crime fiction novels by Welsh authors, John Williams’s Bloody Valentine (1995) and Sean Burke’s Deadwater (2002). It was not until 2003, after the publication of Bloody Valentine and Deadwater, that Lynette’s true murderer was discovered and tried. Later, in 2011, ten people, in­ cluding serving and retired police officers, went on trial for perjury in connection with the original case, which subsequently collapsed because of missing evidence. Both texts seek to retell the story of the murder of Lynette White and to readdress the discourses of past Tiger Bay fictions. Bloody Valentine is John Williams’s true crime account of the events lead­ing up to the Cardiff Three’s release at the Appeal Court. The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing tells us that ‘true crime offers a mirror of society’s values and shifting public attitudes toward crime and criminals’, an assertion that also holds true for its fictional sibling.54 At the original trial in Swansea, which Williams describes as a ‘more identifiably Welsh city than Cardiff’ and which is ‘the repository of the principality’s traditional values, a non-conformist chapel town’, he goes on to suggest that while ‘[i]t would be unfair to say that they were found guilty before the trial started . . . the racial and geographical origins of the accused cannot have exactly helped their chances’.55 Williams reports how the newspapers conferred on how ‘[f]ive very bad guys, black gang­sters and pimps, had gathered together, no doubt under the influence of drugs, and brutally murdered a white woman, a common prostitute, who presumably must have ripped one of them off’.56 Butetown men are again metaphoric­ally corralled through race and place and placed outside traditional Welsh identity. In following and recording their fight for justice, Williams gives a voice to the Cardiff Three. His novel also opens on a revisionist history of Tiger Bay, fore­ ground­ing Butetown men and women who have contributed to Welsh culture. Never­theless, Williams unwittingly perpetuates the old discourses. Many of the people he met and interviewed found their way into his fictional Cardiff crime novels. Tony Parris shares many traits with Mikey the shoplifter in Five Pubs, Two Bars and a Nightclub (1999) for instance.57 In an interview with the Independent, Williams described his fiction as ‘lowlife novels’ which aim to show the ordinariness of his characters.58 His research for Bloody Valentine gave him privileged access to a community and he explains that, [w]hat I got from that is just how much people’s lives are the same. The fact that someone is a drug dealer or a prostitute doesn’t mean that they don’t watch the same kind of daytime TV and buy their nappies in the same place as you do.59

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Admirable though this may seem, it is Williams’s insistence on continuing to cast the people of Butetown only in roles like the drug dealer, pimp and prostitute, roles already set for them by previous literary representations, that continues to disseminate the old myths. Sean Burke’s Deadwater follows Jack Farissey, Butetown-born but of Irish heri­ tage, as he attempts to piece together the events on the night a young prostitute, Christina, is murdered. The novel draws heavily on the Lynette White murder, particu­ larly John Williams’s account. This is not unprecedented in crime fiction: James Ellroy’s Black Dahlia (1987) was famously inspired by the true crime account of the Elizabeth Short murder in America.60 In Deadwater, many of the people in the original investigation appear, thinly disguised. Leanne Vilday, in whose flat Lynette was murdered, is renamed Lida Varaillon, and the Actie cousins, the two men acquitted at the first trial, reappear as the Baja brothers. Prose and dialogue share striking similarities in both texts. Contrast Williams’s description of Lynette’s cloth­ ing, possibly taken from police photographs and forensic reports: ‘She had two t-shirts on, a grey one over a black one. They were cut and cut and cut until they were lace-like and set stiff and brittle, soaked through with blood that was mostly dry by the time they found her’, to Burke’s version spoken by Lida: ‘There was two T-shirts she had on, still on her, but they was covered with blood and shredded sort of like lace.’61 These similarities exemplify how these texts inform each other but have themselves been informed by police statements and press releases. Like Bloody Valentine, Deadwater also seeks to reclaim and re-present the story of Butetown. Farrissey’s role as detective figure as he tries to discover Christina’s murderer repositions the Butetown-born from the margins to the centre. The Cardiff Three disappear from the text entirely, not to silence their voice but to remove them from the scene of the crime. In this novel, the murderer is a white ‘sexual psychopath’ rather than the ‘five very bad guys, black gangsters’ of public imagination.62 The text acknowledges how those outside the area condemn a com­ munity through their assumptions. The official investigating police officer, DI Hargest, issues a press release which repeats verbatim the prosecutor’s summingup statement at the Swansea trial: ‘Butetown is an upside-down society . . . [i]t is a place where violent crime and open drug-taking are commonplace, where people routinely wear knives as part of their clothing, and where small fortunes are made by pimps and drug-dealers.’63 Burke’s text attempts to redress this notion: Carl Baja, on passing Llanwern steelworks, ‘once the great engine of industrial South Wales’, is reminded how his father worked there and how that work went towards building the Severn Bridge. His father takes pride in the part he played in the construction of such an iconic Welsh landmark and Carl reminisces how he ‘[u]sed to take me to look at the millions of cars going over it’.64 Despite this, the text occasionally lapses into the hegemonic discourses which weave themselves throughout Tiger Bay fictions. The Inited Idren, Butetown’s Rastafarian brother­ hood who campaigned on behalf of the Cardiff Three, becomes a front for black gangsters in Deadwater. Other black characters are criminalized or demonized. Farissey suggests to the investigating police that Carl Baja has ‘a sensitivity, a

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sort of compassion’ and describes how he once saw him in an ‘otherwise empty church like a stilled beast, his hands clasped in seemingly rapt prayer’.65 Farissey’s effort to portray the combination of spirituality and physical power of Carl Baja falls back into the animalistic discourses, the ‘stilled beast’, which inform racist ideologies; earlier exemplified by the prosecution witness, reported in Williams’s novel, who described the accused men as ‘monkeys’.66 Both Bloody Valentine and Deadwater commence their narratives with Lynette/ Christina’s last hours and, in a relatively uncommon move for crime fiction, the texts attempt to provide an inner voice for the victim. As Williams explains, his imagined Lynette ‘was not “just a prostitute”, she was a smart girl who’d had a hard upbringing and had started hustling’.67 In an interview with the newspaper the Wales on Sunday, Lynette’s mother spoke of how the many references in the press to her daughter as a ‘Cardiff prostitute’ was ‘offensive to my daughter’s memory’.68 Media depictions of Butetown women are shown to have little changed from the Western Mail’s description of them as depraved and squalid. Past Tiger Bay fictions saw Butetown women as both exotic and repellent; they were often seen as a threat to white masculine purity, especially amongst the earlier imperial­ istic texts such as Townend’s Once to Tiger Bay. Nevertheless, it is not just their sexuality that arouses such disgust but that in having relationships and children with black men, women’s bodies are no longer solely the property of white men. Bloody Valentine explores this anxiety when he points to a possible motivation for the frenzied killing of Lynette. Describing the appalling wounds inflicted on her, which centred on her upper torso. Williams suggests that the killer was trying to ‘de-mother’ her.69 Not only must the harlot be removed but also the possibility of her reproducing with black men. Deadwater similarly shares these anxieties about women and reproduction. Not­withstanding the statement that, ‘motherhood and murder-there’s two things that don’t go together’, the text returns again and again to the figure of the murdered, dead or absent mother.70 Farissey asks Jess, his childhood friend and a womanizer, ‘[h]ow could a soul put so much energy, so much of itself into these conquests, these ugly little colonisations?’ Jess’s affair with Farissey’s wife, Victoria, leaves him untouched yet it is not until she falls pregnant by Jess that Farissey feels ‘betrayed, alone in a way that had nothing to do with solitude’.71 Women’s repro­ duction and male paternity are key concerns of Deadwater but there is a further underlying anxiety about the fitness of the women of Butetown for reproduction. When Victoria suffers from depression, she complains of ‘something inside her rotting, sporing, tumorous, living, in motion, colonising’.72 The womb is a site of corruption and decay. The text resolves these issues as both Christina, later dis­ covered at autopsy to be in the early stages of pregnancy, and Victoria are murdered by Jess. Killing the mother ends the possibility of miscegenation and resolves anxieties surrounding paternity. In the first days of the investigation into Lynette’s murder, the police displayed posters appealing for information. The many languages on the posters destined to be displayed in Butetown included Welsh, official recognition of the hybridity

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of this section of the Welsh community. Unfortunately, as the following investi­ gation showed, this inclusion into Welsh identity was not sustained as police and press vilified Butetown and discursively divided it from the rest of Wales. John Williams has described the police’s interpretation of the murder as sounding ‘like a plot from a penny dreadful’.73 The old stories about Tiger Bay reach up until the present day to inform contemporary attitudes and for the white imagination still construct Brito’s psychic corral for the residents of Butetown. Conclusion As attitudes towards race and sex have changed, becoming more liberal over the decades, so crime fiction has responded. The eye-rolling negro and the deviant white woman are no longer seen within their pages. However, old ideologies die hard and many contemporary white writers, often against their avowed intentions, replicate old stereotypes, albeit in a subtler form than their earlier counterparts. Nevertheless, there has been little fiction from the residents themselves. Glenn Jordan and Chris Weedon, who have worked extensively in collating folk memories from Butetown, describe how the multicultural community counter negative rep­ resen­tations of Tiger Bay through folk memories or, as Jordan and Weedon call them, ‘insider narratives’ in which ‘narrative tropes of diversity and tolerance are paramount, but also by a restatement of being part of a community that was and still is subject to social exclusion but that will fight back’.74 Notably, while a few Butetown or Tiger Bay residents have gone on also to write themselves out of the corral, none so far have used crime fiction to do so. Leonora Brito, whose comments opened this chapter, wrote a collection of short stories, Dat’s Love (1995), which attempted to readdress the exotic stereotypes of Tiger Bay.75 Unsurprisingly, she does not use the conservative genre of crime fiction to do so. However, in 2011, the National Theatre of Wales presented ‘Soul Exchange’ by local writer, Anthony Brito.76 This is not a crime drama as such, but a play that includes an element of detection as the narrator searches for his estranged father ‘Tiger’, a search that is an allegory for a lost Tiger Bay and its residents. What was so remarkable about this production was that this was community theatre in which local residents took part, interacting with the audience, who became part of the performance by play­ ing funeral guests. The play took place over several Butetown venues and the lines between actor/audience, resident/visitor were increasingly blurred. In this way, the National Theatre’s production intended to smash down the corral constructed by white crime writers in order to enclose Cardiff’s dark ‘other’. No longer are the residents of Butetown attempting to write themselves from the margins to the centre but are now actively centre stage and on equal terms with their audience.

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Notes Charlotte Williams in conversation with Leonora Brito, ‘From Llandudno to Llan­ rumney: inscribing the nation’, New Welsh Review, 62 (2003), 27–34 (31).  2 Dennis Morgan, The Cardiff Story: A History of the City from its Earliest Times to the Present (Cowbridge: D. Brown & Sons Ltd., 1991), p. 137.  3 ‘Cardiff’, in John Davies, Nigel Jenkins, Menna Baines and Peredur Lynch (eds), The Welsh Academy Encyclopaedia of Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008), pp. 114–22 (p. 117); ‘Population and demography’, in ibid., pp. 695–6 (p. 696).  4 Rhys Davies, The Withered Root (1927; Cardigan: Parthian, 2007).  5 Idem, Count Your Blessings (London: Putnam, 1932), p. 100.  6 John Williams, Bloody Valentine: A Killing in Cardiff (London: HarperCollins, 1995), p. 15. The city centre is also situated on a slight incline above the docks which probably accounts for the reason that Butetown is referred to as ‘the bottom’ by some of its residents, though this is an apt metaphor for its relation to the rest of the city.  7 Alderman W. J. Trounce, ‘Cardiff in the Fifties’: The Reminiscences and Historical Notes of Alderman W. J. Trounce, JP. 1850–1860 (Cardiff: Western Mail, 1918).  8 Stan Hugill, Sailortown (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1967), p. 89.  9 ‘Cardiff’, in The Welsh Academy Encyclopaedia of Wales, p. 117. 10 W. R. (Bodwyn) Owen, ‘“Tiger Bay”: the street of the sleeping cats’, in Stewart Williams (ed.), Glamorgan Historian Vol. Seven (Cowbridge: D. Brown and Sons Ltd., 1971), pp. 72–86 (p. 72). 11 Ross Cameron, ‘“The most colourful extravaganza in the world”: images of Tiger Bay, 1845–1970’, Patterns of Prejudice, 3/12 (1997), 59–90 (62). 12 Ibid., 68. 13 Colin Watson, Snobbery with Violence: English Crime Stories and their Audience (1971; London: Eyre Methuen, 1979), p. 117. 14 W. Townend, Once to Tiger Bay (London: Herbert Jenkins, Ltd, 1929), p. 121. 15 Ibid., p. 7. 16 Ibid., p. 32. 17 Neil Evans, ‘Regulating the reserve army: Arabs, blacks and the local state in Cardiff, 1919–45’, in Kenneth Lunn (ed.), Race and Labour in Twentieth-century Britain (London: Frank Cass and Co., 1985), pp. 68–115 (pp. 72–3). 18 Alan Llwyd, Cymru Ddu/Black Wales: A History (Caerdydd: Hughes a’i Fab, 2005), p. 93. 19 ‘Colour riots renewed’, Western Mail, 13 June 1919, 6. Incidentally, this has similarities with Matthew Arnold’s description of the Welsh in The Study of Celtic Literature (1867; London: Smith, Elder, and Co, 1905) as one who ‘loves bright colours, he easily becomes audacious, overcrowing, full of fanfaronade’ (p. 85). Yet, the irony seems to be lost on the author of this particular Western Mail editorial. 20 ‘Racial riots’, Western Mail, 14 June 1919, 4. Emphasis in the original. 21 Jane Aaron, Nineteenth-century Women’s Writing in Wales: Nation, Gender and Identity (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007), p. 75. 22 Ibid., p. 104. 23 Aaron lists several examples of mid- to late nineteenth-century Welsh women writers who countered the perceptions of libidinous Welsh hoydens with portrayals of devout, virtuous Welsh womanhood. But these carried on well into the next century with the stock image of the Welsh mam: house-proud, pious and a devoted mother, frequently  1

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occurring in male-authored industrial fiction such as those written by Jack Jones or the much reviled Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley (London: Michael Joseph, 1939). ‘Coloured pests’, Western Mail, 23 January 1929, 9. Neil M. C. Sinclair, The Tiger Bay Story (Cardiff: Butetown History and Arts Project, 1993), pp. 2–3. David Martin, Tiger Bay (London: Martin & Reid Ltd, 1946), p. 1. Ibid., p. 52. Ibid., p. 1. The Proud Valley, dir. Pen Tennyson (Ealing Studios, 1940). Watson, Snobbery with Violence, p. 125. There is Rhydfelin, a large village that forms part of Pontypridd, not far from Cardiff, further suggesting that Walsh was familiar with south Wales. The village’s name could translate as Millford (rhyd, meaning ford, while melin is Welsh for mill). J. M. Walsh, Once in Tiger Bay (London: Collins, 1947), p. 153. Ibid., p. 73. Ibid., p. 132. Ibid., p. 9. Glenn Jordan and Chris Weedon, ‘When the subalterns speak, what do they say? Radical cultural politics in Cardiff Docklands’, in Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Grossberg and Angela McRobbie (eds), Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 165–80 (p. 174). The J. Lee Thompson directed Tiger Bay (1959) captures the last days of the docklands prior to its demolition. My thanks must go to Harri Pritchard-Jones for bringing this novel to my attention. David Mathew, The Prince of Wales’s Feathers (London: Collins, 1953), pp. 9, 11. Ibid., p. 23. Ibid., p. 30. Humayan Ansari, Muslims in Britain since 1800 (London: Hurst and Company, 2004), p. 135. Zawiyas have been situated in various converted sites, and still are to this day in Cardiff but the 1947 mosque was the first to be built to order. After the demolition of the mosque in the 1960s to make way for a new building, the Muslim community found itself temporarily without a place of worship. During this period, Mr and Mrs Salaman allowed local Muslims to use the backroom of their cafe, the Cairo Café, as a temporary mosque. Typical of many Bay relationships, Mr Salaman hailed from Yemen while she originated from the Welsh valleys. Olive Salaman, unlike her fictional counterparts, was a hard-working wife and mother who embraced her husband’s faith and culture. She was filmed for a 1968 BBC Wales production, ‘Tamed and Shabby Tiger’, where she is seen speaking Arabic to her husband and his compatriots. Bernard Picton, Tiger at Bay (London: Robert Hale & Co., 1970), p. 1. Ibid., p. 24. Ibid., p. 28. Bill James, You’d Better Believe It (London: Constable and Robinson, 1985), p. 77. James’s childhood place of worship also appears in John Williams’s later Cardiff Dead (London: Bloomsbury, 2000). However, Williams depicts it in its later incarnation, as a nightclub. James, You’d Better Believe It, p. 129. Ibid., pp. 49, 50.

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The initial corporation documents cited Baltimore as an inspiration. This ambition now seems ironic as Baltimore is more currently known for the TV crime series, The Wire (2002–8), which is hardly a ringing endorsement for the Baltimore tourist industry. Anthony Brockway, ‘An interview with Bill James’, http://homepage.ntlworld.com/ elizabeth.ercocklly/bill.htm (accessed 2 June 2010). David Craig, The Tattooed Detective (London: Constable, 1998). Williams, Bloody Valentine, p. 173. Patricia Anderson-Boerger, ‘True crime’, in Rosemary Herbert (ed.), The Oxford Com­ panion to Crime and Mystery Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), www. oxfordreference.com (accessed 2 June 2010). Williams, Bloody Valentine, p. 105. Ibid., p. 107. John Williams, Five Pubs, Two Bars and a Nightclub (London: Bloomsbury, 1999). William Leith, ‘Spare a thought for the Tiger Bay pimp’, Independent on Sunday, 1 June 2003, 18. Ibid. James Ellroy’s Black Dahlia (1987; London: Mysterious Press, 1988). Williams, Bloody Valentine, p. 75; Sean Burke, Deadwater (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2002), p. 38. Williams, Bloody Valentine, p. 189. Ibid., p. 50. Burke, Deadwater, p. 152. Ibid., p. 31. Williams, Bloody Valentine, p. 105. Ibid., p. 188. Greg Lewis, ‘Now will police say sorry? Lynette’s mum speaks out for first time in fifteen years’, Wales on Sunday, 6 July 2003, 14. Williams, Bloody Valentine, p. 77. Burke, Deadwater, p. 95. Ibid., pp. 18–19. Ibid., p. 22. Williams, Bloody Valentine, p. 186. Glenn Jordan and Chris Weedon, ‘The construction and negotiation of racialized borders in Cardiff’s docklands’, in Jane Aaron, Henrice Altinck and Chris Weedon (eds), Gender­ ing Border Studies (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2010), pp. 222–40 (p. 239). Leonora Brito, Dat’s Love (Bridgend: Seren, 1995). Brito is a common Butetown surname. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find out if Leonora and Anthony are related. I would like to think so.

Select bibliography Anderson-Boerger, Patricia, ‘True crime’, in Rosemary Herbert (ed.), The Oxford Com­ panion to Crime and Mystery Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), www. oxfordreference.com (accessed 2 June 2010). Burke, Sean, Deadwater (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2002). James, Bill, You’d Better Believe It (London: Constable and Robinson, 1985).

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Catherine Phelps Martin, David, Tiger Bay (London: Martin & Reid Ltd, 1946). Mathew, David, The Prince of Wales’s Feathers (London: Collins, 1953). Picton, Bernard, Tiger at Bay (London: Robert Hale & Co., 1970). Townend, W., Once to Tiger Bay (London: Herbert Jenkins, Ltd, 1929). Walsh, J. M., Once in Tiger Bay (London: Collins, 1947). Williams, John, Bloody Valentine: A Killing in Cardiff (London: HarperCollins, 1995). ––––, Cardiff Dead (London: Bloomsbury, 2000).

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5 Crimes and Contradictions: the Fictional City of Dublin CORMAC Ó CUILLEANÁIN

In this contribution I wish to provide, from a practitioner’s standpoint, some observations on cities in general, and Dublin in particular, as natural locations for crime fiction. A big city’s identity in opposition to the outside world, com­ pounded by its internal divisions, offers a range of fissures, of fault lines in social reality, inviting the sort of complex exploration of difference that makes crime and transgression appear almost inevitable. The city is the cradle of such develop­ ments, and is also the place that calls for faults to be rectified through the enactment of some kind of symbolic justice. Details of Dublin city life and history will only play a minor part as I set out to capture some archetypal and symbolic rather than purely documentary elements. Beyond the specific details of transgression and retribution, crime fiction has a metaphorical power to reveal the interconnectedness of our social existence. Crime can reach everywhere, which is bad for its victims but good for the writer. Rather than seeing crime as a containable menace, to be circumscribed and excluded from respectable society, I see it as a pervasive condition, something that implicates all of us to some degree. That perception may have political overtones: in Ireland, ruling-class corruption, middle-class aspiration and pseudo-political brutality have done immeasurably greater harm than even the nastiest instances of lowlife crime, or so it seems to me, as a middle-class writer. Of course I may be wrong – minor authors are not infallible – but the more interesting point for present purposes has to do with literary genre: a view of crime as pervasive rather than containable is generically linked to open-ended, complexified fictions, which can be enjoyed on a metaphorical level even by people who might not share, in real life, the social attitudes struck by the author. Culture, among other things, com­ pensates for our fragmentary identities by allowing us to be something other than we are. Contrast, contradiction, paradox all seem to be inevitable components of a living culture. Crime fiction provides striking examples of inner tensions; in exploring some possible reasons for their existence, this chapter will touch on contrasting pairs (sometimes between things that might appear to be intimately bound together): capital versus nation, city versus country, urban versus rural, rich versus poor. More important than social, political, historical even cultural contradictions are

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the contradictions of imagination: life versus art, or fact versus fiction – the way that representation necessarily diverges from what it represents, offering a meta­ phorical rather than a descriptive equivalence to reality. Just as a city’s vitality comes largely from its contradictions, cultural categories tend to evoke their oppos­ ites, and a culture typically projects images that are at odds with the tedium of literal fact. This is partly because the artist does not wish merely to repeat reality; divergence from bare description may be attributable to the creative power of metaphor. A songwriter can memorably define London as ‘this city desert’ precisely because London is patently not a desert. A poet can envision the reduction of the same city to its opposite, wild nature. A film-maker can give us Dante’s voice lamenting his condition as a wanderer in a wild wood, while showing us not a wood but a great metropolis with skyscrapers and the sounds of traffic: a forest metamorphosed into Times Square.1 The contemporary city – that safest and most civilized of places – can serve as an image of savage chaos. Contradiction is a mainspring of narrative invention. Much of fiction’s truth is contained in its lies. Metaphorical evocations of opposites and negatives may ultimately be predi­ cated on our fear of death, the negation of life, and danger, the negation of security. Dealing as it does with danger and death, crime fiction is well placed to offer a negative image of civilization, safety and, particularly, the city which, in Western and Christian culture, has long been perceived with suspicion: a place of connection and therefore an occasion of sin, ‘a cauldron of unholy loves’.2 The heavenly city to which we aspire may be the new Jerusalem; the dystopian one we live in may be more like Sodom or Gomorrah. Even Jerusalem can fall from grace.3 Prophets tend to take a hostile view of cities, while tall buildings, from the Tower of Babel to the World Trade Center, may awaken fundamentalist feelings; they both symbol­ ize and negate the city.4 Connectedness is central to the city’s nature. In Ignazio Silone’s rural epic Fonta­ mara (1933), ‘simple’ Italian peasants ironically marvel at the fact that in the big city, at least one thing happens every day.5 The speed and complexity of city life is a long-established trope; Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century Decameron (II.5) showed how many things might have happened to you during a single night in medieval Naples: you meet your ‘long-lost sister’ (really a prostitute with a violent pimp), you’re dumped into a sewer, doused in a well, chased by the police and finally forced to steal the ring of a dead archbishop – a natural-born crime-writer’s take on the multifarious connections that can occur when one goes to town. But Irish storytellers of a hundred years ago appropriated the same tale to show what can happen to you when you leave your tiny village in County Kerry and venture to the ‘big’ country town of Tralee. With city jungles, size is not absolute but relative.6 And yet, absolute size opens layers of possibility that would be difficult to sustain over a full-length novel set in a smaller centre. A fine example of the advantages of scale is Richard Price’s marvellous crime novel Lush Life (2008), which presents the multicultural metropolis of New York as the most influential element in its plot.7

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Crime stories, especially realistic ones, often have an identifiable city setting.8 The chosen location may already have an established popular image as a ‘proper’ crime story setting before the story starts, and the choice of setting may signal what the reader can expect (although this may not in fact be delivered): Venice, Oxford, Paris, Los Angeles, Belfast. Or the author may decide to colour an existing city in noir, or even to set a story in an emblematic urban space. A pulp example of this latter strategy occurs in Don’t Hang Me Too High (1954), where the Irish author J. B. O’Sullivan creates an American city with a downtown area, some seedy hotels, a few bars, a police station, some apartments inhabited by dames of dubious morals and a suburban mansion suitable for murdered tycoons, con­ venient to a beach.9 The place is never named, and remains a well-controlled abstraction, an urban alternative to the big house on the moors, cut off by fog, which we find in Tom Stoppard’s play The Real Inspector Hound (1968) or in the François Ozon film Huit Femmes (2002) – settings that reflect and parody the closed worlds of Golden Age detective fiction.10 The city, then, is a locus of connection and contradiction, danger and protection, power and vulnerability. The more civilized it is, the more it has to lose. It presents different faces, in quick succession or even simultaneously. As everybody keeps reusing the same space, it seems almost scandalous that the same street houses the rich man and the beggar, the honest citizen and the scam artist. This is made particularly clear by films and TV: a city like New York can engineer the casual intersection of Joe Buck from Texas and Mr ‘Ratso’ Rizzo; without that meeting of apparent opposites, the intermittently criminal Midnight Cowboy story could never have happened.11 I will be suggesting later on that such mixtures of deviant social identity, within the matrix of a great city, point to the democratic ethos that characterizes much of modern crime fiction. Security is another central issue in city life. Ideally, the city-dweller’s safety should be guaranteed – city walls should protect rather than constrain – which makes the absence of security all the more challenging. This paradox arises natur­ ally in the sort of crime writing that takes the city beyond the status of a mere backdrop, or excuse for travelogue, establishing it instead as an instance, and a metaphorical image, of the endless branches and interconnections of disparate individual lives. Such interconnections can be threatening as well as sustaining. City life raises the question of security in an especially poignant way. We huddle together for safety, we need institutions to keep our enemies at bay and yet we cannot know and trust every fellow-citizen, and the concentration of our needs and aspirations renders us more vulnerable than if we were strung out defencelessly across the countryside. This dilemma seems to me to be beautifully summed up in Rembrandt’s great picture The Night Watch, a metaphorical image of our con­ temporary world as well as of seventeenth-century Amsterdam. In my own first crime novel, An Irish Solution (2004), a tale of drugs, gangsters and corrupt police­ men, I dispatched one of my principal characters from Dublin to the Dutch capital, to stand in front of this picture in the Rijksmuseum, and later cited the thoughts of a fictional art historian:

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Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin In the estimation of Professor Serebryakov, Rembrandt’s masterpiece represented, more powerfully than any other civic painting, man’s pride and fragility, his hopes of security and his justified apprehension of self-inflicted damage. Notice how the weapons slice diagonally through the canvas, menacing the group that they claim to defend, notice the expression of domineering incompetence on the face of the group’s official commander, Frans Banning Cocq. In modern civic culture we know how empty are our leaders’ pretensions to heroism – yet we continue to require leaders and to impose those same pretensions upon them.12

The question of a city’s security leads us into some paradoxes of politics and the state; these paradoxes may be harmful to society but they open up interesting gaps and contradictions for the novelist. As citizens, we depend on our leaders but we cannot trust them. In fact, we do not even wish to trust them, which may be why we frequently elect obvious fakes and frauds. The election of incompetent leaders is not unknown in Ireland, but has impinged on the nation’s financial rather than its physical security. More relevant examples come from post-9/11 America: electors preferred incompetent ‘pretensions to heroism’ (George W. Bush) over an actual record of military achievement (John Kerry), and candidates who have had the bad taste to be injured in wars (John McCain, or Bob Dole in the pre-9/11 decade) may even become less electable thereby. Such strange prefer­ ences among the public might suggest that folly rules the world and that, in the words of Samuel Beckett’s Estragon, ‘people are bloody ignorant apes’.13 But it might be more complex than that. There is, after all, a contradiction at the heart of democracy, which claims to be a system of government but is essentially a system against government. Power is a one-way system that can only be exercised by the few on the many; elections are periodic festivals when the many are allowed to humiliate the few, but must still live under the yoke of power once the election is past. Thus, the degeneration of representative democracy into representational democracy may be a truthful reaction to an inherent contradiction that borders on the absurd. How is this relevant to our topic? We seem to have wandered from questions of city life into questions of the state. But the move is a short one in the case of a capital city. If issues of freedom versus authority, power versus fragility, are central to the state, capital cities are well placed to put those dilemmas symbolically into play. The presence of the state, with its panoply of authority, adds another layer to the city’s identity. Capitals are often seen as standing in opposition to the rest of the country. Protestations of patriotism do not always favour the capital: in British and American populist discourse ‘Whitehall’ and ‘Washington’ often function as terms of abuse. As we will see in the case of Dublin, many of the issues that define the city are national rather than municipal; the fact of being the capital makes the city’s internal divisions emerge all the more sharply. What is Dublin like, from a crime writer’s point of view? Being a capital city, it has some fine old buildings (left behind by the ousted British) housing the insti­ tutions of state, including the headquarters of the national police. It has deep

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pockets of poverty and deprivation. Dublin has traditionally done a brisk trade in the import and export of drugs. There is a semi-illegal sex trade, allegedly fuelled by people-trafficking (though media coverage of this phenomenon is possibly exaggerated by prurience and by fear of immigration). The city has some organized criminal gangs, now with access to firearms (partly as a spill-over from decades of sectarian terrorism in the neighbouring state of Northern Ireland). Ireland has been through a great economic boom, ending in a tragicomic crash. There is a culture of heavy drinking which leads every week to semi-suicidal car crashes and pointless murders, too boring to be included in any self-respecting work of fiction, least of all a crime novel. Some of Ireland’s leading businessmen, a few politicians and the occasional judge are slightly corrupt, sometimes at a subconscious, almost innocent level. Irish senior bankers and some civil servants have proved sadly deficient. The Catholic Church has been largely discredited owing to the bishops’ shameful record on the protection of paedophilia. To the crime writer, these nega­ tives are positives. Most of the problems just described are not confined to Dublin, but are shared with many places across the world. So is Dublin an ideal location for crime fiction? What do Ireland’s urban centres contribute to the country’s crime worthiness? Fintan O’Toole recently argued that ‘crime fiction is a function of something Ireland didn’t have until recently – large-scale cities’. O’Toole was right to note the slow emergence of a certain type of crime fiction, connected with large cities. And yet Dublin has been relatively large for centuries; its population had climbed from 47,000 to 180,000 between 1695 and 1798, reaching 290,000 by 1901 (or more, if one counts the suburbs). A city big enough for Ulysses should have been able to support a decent crime novel.14 Dublin, as we shall see, embodies some of the fissures, fault lines, divisions and contradictions mentioned in my opening paragraph. Like all capitals, it has its own distinctive local features. It is a proud and, in patches, a beautiful place, with a distinctive history and ethos setting it apart from the rest of Ireland. The pride of the capital was nicely caught in a poem by the twentieth-century playwright, poet and judge Donagh MacDonagh, which begins: Dublin made me and no little town With the country closing in on its streets The cattle walking proudly on its pavements The jobbers, the gombeenmen and the cheats15

The greatness of Dublin is mostly established by contrast, as the poem reviews various provincial places and their inhabitants, concluding with a positive flourish: I disclaim all fertile meadows, all tilled land The evil that grows from it and the good, But the Dublin of old statutes, this arrogant city Stirs proudly and secretly in my blood.

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This poem’s stated pride in Dublin, cast almost as a dramatic monologue, reflects a sense of local allegiance that is shared by many respectable citizens of the capital, a pride that may even be mirrored, perversely, among members of the gangster class, in their own distinctive fashion. One of Ireland’s leading writers of realistic crime, Gene Kerrigan, describes a sickening torture routine used by a Limerick gangster who battered his victim after placing some razor blades in his mouth and taping his lips shut. Then, growing tired of it, he shot the victim, ‘[d]umped the body and when the pathologist peeled the tape off the stiff’s mouth one bloody blade slid out. Pity about the nice firm fingerprint the Limerick wanker left on the tape, which is the kind of thing that Limerick wankers do’.16 Capital cities need to define themselves at all levels by reference to their competitors, and criminals too can share in, and contribute to, their city’s prestige. Dublin, with its ‘old statutes’ and ancient pedigree, is a pleasant place to visit, even within the covers of a book. Its history and geography are often relevant, in practical or symbolic ways, to the stories that are set there. The city first grew up in the area still occupied by Dublin Castle, near the banks of the Liffey, and the river still defines and divides the capital. Generally speaking, living on the south side is ‘nicer’ than the north side, though the north side contains pockets of niceness including Clontarf, Howth, Malahide. There were once some fine Georgian streets and squares on the north side of the inner city, but they fell into disrepair and have only recently been partially restored. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the city expanded towards the mouth of the river, and gained some fine parks and squares such as St Stephen’s Green and Merrion Square.17 Dublin’s elegant Georgian terraces still retain a certain seedy charm, and up until recently quite a number of the tall houses were divided into flats where ordinary middle-class people could live. The first detective story by my mother, Eilís Dillon, Death at Crane’s Court (1953), introduced her pro­ tagonist George Arrow, a comfortably off Dublin bachelor who resides on Merrion Square; George is taken ill in a bookshop and advised to see a doctor: George knew no doctors, though he supposed that most of the Joycean medical students whom he remembered at the university had now become respectable, striped-trousered gentlemen with brass plates and motorcars. Especially he remembered Mick Moore, whose wondering admiration had flattered George’s expositions on trends in modern philosophy. Back in his Merrion Square flat, his head swimming, he looked up the Moores in the telephone directory, and found that Mick was established across the Square. Without further deliberation, he arranged an appointment for the next afternoon.18

He calls on Dr Moore and is duly misdiagnosed, thereby precipitating a story that moves to a convalescent hotel in County Galway, saturated in rural charm and mayhem. The book thus starts with an escape from Dublin into a more trad­ itional part of Ireland. Something similar happens in her second detective story, Sent to His Account (1954), in which a shabby-genteel bookkeeper, living in straitened

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circumstances in a Dublin boarding-house is summoned to a solicitor’s office on St Stephen’s Green and informed that he has inherited an ample country estate. This is where the plot subsequently unfolds. Although the country surroundings prove to be riven by tensions leading to homicide, there is a feeling that even this is preferable to the cramped life of Dublin.19 The opposite point of view – pride in Dublin, disdain for the countryside – was adopted by the late John M. Kelly (1931–91), Ireland’s leading constitutional lawyer of the twentieth century, in his very fine crime novel, The Polling of the Dead, posthumously published in 1993, which embroidered on his own experience as a politician. The plot concerns the unpleasant historical fact that a number of Nazi sympathizers and collaborators found a congenial home in Ireland after the Second World War, and were seemingly well accepted in some establish­ment circles. In Kelly’s novel, set in 1960s Dublin, a former Nazi resorts to murder to cover up an earlier crime. The book contains a good deal of hard drinking and an edgy love story, and is also notable for its attractive descriptions of Dublin streetscapes. Here is the opening paragraph: At dawn the seagulls came up Leeson Street, shrieking. I got out of bed, drew the curtains and looked out at them. Six or seven were standing in the wet, empty street, their heads pointing towards Donnybrook; then a car approached from the direction of the city, and they rose in the air, wheeling, crying, feet trailing, making for Ringsend and the estuary.20

The former elegance of the Georgian city is giving way to pretentious squalor, as we learn at the start of the second chapter: ‘I drove to the Four Courts via the party headquarters in Harcourt Street; a tall Georgian house in a graceful, curving terrace, mostly given over to deadly-looking private hotels with no liquor licences and names like Montparnasse and Berenice.’21 Even in seedy decline, Harcourt Street still retains something of its original grace. The protagonist continues his drive, down, past St. Patrick’s Cathedral, under the arch of Christ Church to the Liffey and the Four Courts. The lobby outside the Law Library was congested with solicitors and insurance company claim managers, with counsel, litigants and witnesses. The whole place smelled of unclean lino, stale cigarette smoke, and old, shiny suits.22

We have now entered the author’s own professional territory, the law courts, where lawyers bargain and barter. The atmosphere is described in cynical tones, but the book’s local readers may also be expected to remember that the Four Courts still constitute an exceptionally beautiful building. It would take a lot of ‘unclean lino, stale cigarette smoke, and old, shiny suits’ to undermine that. Later in the book, the investigation takes us into the depths of County Kildare, where we catch a glimpse of the squalor of daily life in those parts. An essential piece of evi­dence is retrieved from a retired photographer whose landlady, whom he addresses

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variously as ‘y’ould bitch’ and ‘ye ould hoor’, is said to live on ‘mice-droppings’.23 Life in Dublin, even a degraded contemporary Dublin, is surely preferable to the rural alternative. We are dealing now with what might be called symbolic geography, within the city, and between the city and the country. One way of assessing the urban/ rural divide might be to consider crime novels that switch between the two settings and try to discover where their heart lies. As already mentioned, Dillon’s Sent to His Account presents the rural experience in a more positive light, as it moves from squalor in Dublin to splendour in the countryside, and the book’s villains, it later transpires, are connected with the capital city. A more ambiguous case is Sheila Pim’s Common or Garden Crime (1945), an interesting work located in a liminal space, between capital and country. This novel straddles the urban/rural boundary, being set in a sort of suburbia, close to Dublin but not fully identified with it. It also stands at the spiritual margins of the Irish Free State, where the officially preferred identity involved being Roman Catholic and remaining studiedly neutral regarding the British war against Nazism. The cast of characters featured in Com­mon or Garden Crime consists of strong-minded independent members of a Protestant community that had continued to nurture strong emotional and practical links with Great Britain, two decades after Irish independence. Common or Garden Crime was originally written to amuse the author’s father during the Second World War (known in Ireland as ‘The Emergency’); shortages at the time apparently included supplies of new detective stories. A recent paper­ back reissue markets the book as ‘an Irish village gardening mystery’, but the garden turns out to be a microcosm of a wider world.24 The book’s opening sen­ tences show how the geographical setting will be deployed ironically to convey the national position of the characters within Irish society: Various authorities have spoken highly of gardening as an occupation. Bacon calls it ‘the purest of human pleasures’, and Voltaire recommends people to cultivate their gardens instead of worrying about the war. Most of the inhabitants of Clonmeen took Voltaire’s advice. Clonmeen is a village on the hem of the outskirts of Dublin, not yet counted as a suburb by the Local Government authorities, and certainly not by the inhabitants. Most of these live in roomy old-fashioned houses with large gardens, where the basement is a problem (owing to the fuel shortage) but the vegetables are a great stand by. There is always plenty to do, planting, propagating, pruning, pickling and preserving, and coping with seasonal gluts of country produce. As this takes up a good deal of time, and it is hard to get about with no cars, the place is quiet, not to say dull. But not too quiet for crime. We are also told that evil began in a garden.25

Clonmeen residents are self-sufficient to the point of being capable of growing their own deadly poisons when required. But they are also instinctively law-abiding, and anxious to fit in with the civil authorities, even of an Irish Free State that is not entirely welcoming to them. A major thread in the book is how the protagonist, Lucy Bex, overcomes her initial diffidence and cooperates actively with the Irish

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police force to solve the case. This process is dramatically represented in spatial terms when Lucy calls on Detective Inspector Lancey at Dublin Castle to present her ideas to him. The castle, once at the heart of medieval Dublin, has powerful resonances in Irish history and political mythology. It was a social as well as a military and administrative centre under British rule. Lucy is venturing into what would once have been the symbol of her people’s place in Ireland, but is now in the hands of the political dispensation that overthrew British rule in the south of the country: There are still those for whom Dublin Castle has associations with the balls and stylishness of the old Ascendancy days. Lucy was not old enough for that, and on this, her first visit, she found the old museum-cum-dungeon as intimidating as its original builders could have hoped . . . So here she was, after an hour in the packed bus, a little faint, very hot and shiny, and still wincing from walking across some cobblestones, trying to shape her idea into a coherent form in which to get it across to Inspector Lancey.26

Fortunately, she finds the inspector courteous and receptive, reinforcing her hopeful belief that ‘nearly everybody was human if you got to know them’.27 The under­ current of social and cultural reconciliation, symbolized by the bridging of the gap between outskirts and centre, is as important in this novel as solving the murder mystery. The historical role of Dublin Castle (which still houses the Garda Síochána’s traffic unit, museum and national drugs unit) prompts some reflections on how the institutions of a capital city can mesh with the elements of a crime story.28 The equation involves elements of power, transgression and retribution. The socalled revolution in Ireland in fact did extremely little to upset any of the relation­ ships within the established order that the new regime took over. The postboxes were painted green, but procedures and values largely remained unaltered. Even today, Victorian jails are still run in degrading Victorian conditions. The Irish prime minister’s office, the High Court and Supreme Court, several government departments and other revered Irish institutions are seated, without embarrass­ ment, amid the relics of former pomp. Various smoothing processes, not all of them dishonourable, have helped to achieve substantial continuity with a British past, combined with gratifying protestations of revolutionary difference. To read a capital crime story can be to read a country but also to map a city, to inhabit it, to know it from the inside, to feel its presence as an organic whole. Even the external reader with no prior knowledge of the place becomes oriented by the discourse of the book, gaining a sense of the values embodied in different places within the main setting. And the image of the body, of the city as body, is the final idea with which the end of this chapter will be concerned. Having made that claim of embodiment, I should immediately row back, conceding that not all books take on this view of the city. Not all of us – whether readers or writers – have such a highly developed sense of place. Some of us may feel, as the poet

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Philip Larkin felt about his native Coventry, that the events we read about are something that ‘happens anywhere’.29 Few writers can match the passionate local­ ism of James Lee Burke, or the tragic sense of place that William McIlvanney so brilliantly evoked in his Glasgow novel, Laidlaw. In Laidlaw, the city is racked with pain, its sadness inscribed in the shape of the ground, the names of its districts: The Court confronts Glasgow Green like a warning. The Green itself is gated and railinged now, the city’s commemorative window-box of a once wilder place. From that green root the miles of stone have spread, north to Drumchapel, Maryhill, Spring­burn, Balornock and Easterhouse, south across the river to Pollok, Castle­ milk, Rutherglen and Cambuslang, still part of the same confrontation between nature and law, the Green and the Court.30

‘From that green root the miles of stone have spread’ – after that line of iambic pentameter, the non-Glaswegian reader is immediately lost in a list of place-names whose associations we can only guess, but we sense the weight of history that the litany may embody. At this level of symbolic geography, the whole city is a kind of diseased body. ‘Every city’s got cancer’ is one of Jack Laidlaw’s sayings and, in the passage just quoted, the spread of stone is a history of metastasis. Dublin, too, can be read through its different parts and in relation to its hinter­ land: Meath, Balbriggan, Wicklow. Within greater Dublin there are places of depriv­ ation and of privilege: local elements that can be imbued with international values of the crime-writing genre. To take an example less weighty than McIlvanney’s Laidlaw, Vincent Banville’s Death By Design (1993) designates the fishing village of Howth, which doubles as one of Dublin’s most salubrious suburbs, as a locus of wealth and privilege. There is undoubtedly an element of parody when his rough-and-ready private eye sets out to meet an embittered old lady who lives in ‘The Cottage’, a castellated mansion at Howth Summit, close to death and fretting about the bad behaviour of the younger generation in her family. General Stern­ wood, of The Big Sleep (1939), springs to mind, not unintentionally.31 The book rushes forward exuberantly through a slapstick version of private eye routines.32 Banville’s younger brother, John, the artist occasionally known as Benjamin Black, has taken a different approach, opting for a less contemporary setting and a less professional hero. Black’s 1950s pathologist, Quirke, has his own stamping ground and his own social world. Rather than places, Black seems more concerned to capture the social structures of Dublin during the reign of the Catholic Bishops. The varying cover designs of his books show us that they can be marketed either as stories imbued with the physical spaces of Dublin or as more abstract and universal novels. It seems to me that both readings work. Certainly one gains more pleasure from these books if one knows some of the locations. Mount Street, where the pathologist Quirke has a flat, was also where the author himself lived at one time; much of the atmosphere of 1950s Dublin is well captured in Quirke’s adventures. Clearly influenced by John Banville, Benjamin Black makes Joycean wordplay with the name of Upper Mount Street, where at the weekends even the

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oldest prostitutes find willing clients. His protagonist, Quirke, is an appealing creation precisely because he fits well into the presuppositions of the time but also stands outside them. Having an American side to his family adds a welcome dimension of believable fantasy. Black’s first two novels move through the great and little streets of Dublin. In Christine Falls (2006), an old woman gets killed in Stoneybatter, north of the river Liffey, for knowing too much. Black’s second book, The Silver Swan (2007), ventures as far south as Dalkey Island and as far north as Clontarf. Local readers will be able to gauge, with reasonable accuracy, the social reson­ ances of each of the areas mentioned as the book moves through locations that include Grafton Street, Stoneybatter, St Vincent’s Hospital, Dalkey Island, Sandycove, ‘Lourdes Mansions’, Adelaide Road, Baggot Street, Upper Mount Street, Rathgar, St Stephen’s Green, Pearse Street, Phoenix Park, Harcourt Street, O’Connell Street, Clontarf, the Shelbourne Hotel, Glasnevin Cemetery, Percy Place, Howth, the Gaiety Theatre, Clarendon Street Church and Bewleys Café on Westmoreland Street. The Silver Swan makes an insignificant mistake with the location of St Vincent’s Hospital, which at the time of the narrative was located not in the sub­urbs but at St Stephen’s Green. There are some an­ achronisms: the drinking and smoking are just about right, though the sex seems a little on the generous side. The novel occasionally sets its characters strolling over unfeasibly long distances within too short a span of time, and allocates remarkably high scores in a football match. These slips take nothing away from its atmospheric coverage of Dublin locations and characters; the book offers symbolic rather than literal geography. Amid all of its wanderings the book has a small number of epicentres: Adelaide Road where a fake guru keeps his rooms, Harcourt Street where Quirke’s daughter has an affair with an unsuitable English­ man, and especially Clontarf where seduction and murder tend to occur. Names can also be redolent of places and history: one character, the genial abortionist Nurse Mamie Haddon, echoes Haddon Road in Clontarf, but also evokes a historic abortionist, Nurse Mamie Cadden, who in 1956 was sentenced to be hanged for causing the death of one of her clients – though the sentence was later commuted.33 Having glanced at some general notions of the city, and at certain aspects of Dublin, we may be ready to address some broad social and symbolic – even poetic – aspects of what crime fiction can do for the city, more specifically, for a capital city. The genre is particularly well adapted to intersections and transpositions; its hidden connections can cover a wide social range. According to an interview in Publishers Weekly, the Indian novelist Vikram Chandra’s take on the crime novel, especially the noir novel, is that as the detective follows the crime, he moves through society, from high to low, and uncovers things that explain the culture.34 The rapidity of such transmigrations is enhanced by the concentrated layout of a city, facilitating multiple layers of identity and relationships. And it can be represented in a visual image drawn directly from reality, as in the opening pages of Gene Kerrigan’s Dark Times in the City (2009):

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Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin From up here in the Dublin Mountains, the lights of the city glowed like countless grains of luminous sand strewn carelessly in a shallow bowl . . . A lot of lights, a lot of people. Half a million in the city itself, another half-million in the surrounding area . . . Every one of them wanting things, needing things. Some of what they wanted couldn’t be bought legally – other stuff, they’d rather not pay retail prices . . . In that shallow, glittering bowl there were one million opportunities.35

Kerrigan’s two criminals are celebrating Dublin’s business potential, but the image can equally well be taken as a celebration of the narrative possibilities open to the writer, as the interaction of individuals with groups creates a potential for crime. The sense of a narrative actualizing the potential of a city’s complex inter­ connections, and thereby bringing that city to life, was explored more poetically in Ross Macdonald’s The Instant Enemy (1968), using a similar image of city lights: I said good night to the Sebastians and headed back toward Santa Monica. The traffic on the freeway was still heavy but it was flowing freely now. The head­ lights poured down Sepulveda in a brilliant cataract . . . I lived for nights like these, moving across the city’s great broken body, making connections among its millions of cells. I had a crazy wish or fantasy that some day before I died, if I made all the right neural connections, the city would come all the way alive. Like the Bride of Frankenstein.36

Here, the city has explicitly become a body, though a somewhat alarming one, hovering somewhere between death and life. The whole city feels the loss suffered by victims. Not just the individual but the body politic has been wounded. An even stronger identification between city and crime fiction comes in Michael Connelly’s ‘interview’ with his detective hero, Harry Bosch, in which the very existence of a city, as a real city, seems to be predicated on the basic equality of all its citizens, living and dead – perhaps especially the dead: Connelly: Tell me about the [Open-Unsolved] unit. Bosch: We’re the closers. We close the cases nobody has been able to. The police chief and the guy who runs the unit think it’s the most important place to be in the department. Because it’s the place where we don’t forget. A city that forgets its victims isn’t a city anymore. It’s a place that’s lost.37

A commitment to vindicating the virtual rights of former citizens who, having been murdered, are no longer alive to exercise actual rights could be seen as the ultimate test, or perhaps the vanishing point, of shared citizenship. Society, in order to vindicate its own continuing existence, is honour bound to repair what by definition is irreparable.38

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We have seen that the values explored by a well-made mystery plot can be – arguably must be – to some extent civic as well as literary. Implicit in the detective’s quest is a commitment to post-mortem democratic values, which is to say that whereas we may not all be equal in life, we are certainly equal in death (the leveller), and that the quest of the detective, shuttling between the worlds of the living and the dead, projects something of the equality of death back onto the living. This could be one reason why social justice is a legitimate concern of the crime writer. I will end with a notable example of democratic crime writing set in Dublin. Gene Kerrigan has long exposed abuses and inequalities in his journalism and non-fiction books, and now uses crime fiction to show how the city can exclude its own citizens – a process embodied in the city’s layout and architecture. Take the Financial Services Centre, near the mouth of the River Liffey, which during the Celtic Tiger years brought visions of wealth and sophisticated living to Ireland’s capital – but these visions were not for everyone. In Kerrigan’s The Midnight Choir (2007), Dixie Peyton, a pathetically unsuccessful hold-up artist, armed with a syringe full of ketchup, has been arrested, and is soon to be murdered. Meanwhile, she has been released on bail and is walking home through a partly unfamiliar landscape. She feels ‘as though she’d wandered across an invisible border into a foreign country’.39 Dixie’s journey home takes her past ‘apartment towers, and bars that looked like upmarket staff canteens, where expensively dressed young office workers with assisted tans made connections’. Clearly, such connections are beyond her reach. When Dixie reaches South Crescent, a curving network of one- and two-storey houses, where she has lived for the past three years, the author intervenes to tell us that these houses were built for the employees of the docks and the factories and mills that had grown up around them more than a hundred years before. Now some working-class families remained, but increasing numbers of the little houses had been bought up by the young executives working in the glass monuments to prosperity that dominated the area. 40

At this point, we are not hearing the voice or thoughts of Dixie Peyton, but re­ ceiv­ing an editorial commentary from the author. In Kerrigan’s work, the damage done by overtly criminal acts (disastrous though these often prove to be) seems less oppressive than the damage caused by social injustice. And Dublin itself embodies this damage. But the city is not the only negative element: the countryside too bears re­ sponsibility. In The Midnight Choir, the incident that led to Dixie Peyton’s anti­ social behaviour was the death of her young husband, leaving her with an unborn baby. This death took place in a rural setting north of the city, ‘on a narrow twisting road beyond Balbriggan’.41 In such remote places our fate can be sealed. And the opening incident in this same Dublin-centred book occurs on the edges of the city of Galway, far away in the west of Ireland, where a young policeman saves a psychotic man from suicide. The knock-on effects of a seemingly un­ connected event, in a seemingly unconnected provincial place, determine the lives

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and deaths of people in the capital city, and bring about the ruin of a potentially good but fatally corrupt policeman who could possibly have done something to save the situation. Such are the ironies of metropolitan life: we cannot do without the hinterland, the raw and hungry hills are always there; the country can close in on city streets, even those of the capital. Civilization is a fragile thing; the city is threatened from within and without. We are surrounded by hidden tension and contradictions. Our city walls, whether individual or collective, are fissured all over. Crime fiction lives in the cracks. Notes See Gerry Rafferty, ‘Baker Street’ (single from the album City to City, London, United Artists Records, UAS 30104, 1978). In The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Stephen F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 103, Michel De Certeau writes that ‘the city . . . is transformed for many people into a“desert” in which the meaningless, indeed the terrifying, no longer takes the form of shadows but becomes . . . an implacable light that produces this urban text without obscurities’. See Thomas Gray, ‘On Lord Holland’s Seat Near Margate, Kent’ (1768) in which the enemy’s wishes for London are summed up: ‘Purged by the sword, and purified by fire, / Then had we seen proud London’s hated walls; / Owls would have hooted in St. Peter’s choir, / And foxes stunk and littered in St Paul’s’: see David Wright (ed.), The Penguin Book of English Romantic Verse (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 13. See Peter Greenaway’s unfinished film of Dante’s Inferno, ‘A TV Dante’, Canto 1.  2 Augustine, Confessions, 3.1.1, trans. Edward B. Pusey (1910), vol. VII, part 1, The Harvard Classics (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1909–14), www.bartleby.com.  3 Some Old Testament examples: Sodom and Gomorrah, destroyed with fire and brimstone for their sinfulness (Genesis 19, King James version); Nineveh, a city with a population of ‘sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand’ (Jonah 1:2, 3:4, 4:11). In the New Testament, Jesus addressed ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets’ (Matthew 23:37, King James version). Modern culture continues this religious image of the destructive city: see ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’ from The Joshua Tree, by U2 (London: Island Records, 1987).  4 According to De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, pp. 92–3, the World Trade Center is ‘the most monumental figure of Western urban development’. But it is also, in some ways, the negation of the living city for which it stands: ‘to be lifted to the summit of the World Trade Center is to be lifted out of the city’s grasp . . . His elevation transfigures him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance . . . The voyeur-god created by this fiction, who . . . knows only cadavers, must disentangle himself from the murky intertwining daily behaviours and make himself alien to them.’ And again, in a passage that reads strangely today: ‘Must one finally fall back into the dark space where crowds move back and forth, crowds that, though visible from on high, are themselves unable to see down below? An Icarian fall.’  5 Ignazio Silone, Fontamara, in Romanzi e saggi (Milan: Mondadori, 1998; original edn, Zürich, 1933 (in German)), vol. 1, p. 28.  6 See James Stewart, Boccaccio in the Blaskets (Galway: Officina Typographica, 1988); Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron: A New English Version by Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, Based  1

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Crimes and Contradictions: the Fictional City of Dublin on John Payne’s 1886 Translation (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2004), pp. xlviii–liii, 100–12. The ‘urban’ population of Tralee was recorded as 4,852 in the 2011 census. See www.cso.ie/en/media/csoie/census/documents/Prelim_complete.pdf (accessed 11 September 2011). Do complex crime stories need to be set in a great metropolis? Ystad (population 17,286) serves well enough as the epicentre of Henning Mankell’s Wallander series.  7 Richard Price, Lush Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).  8 See the ‘Urban milieu’ entry by Frankie Y. Bailey in Rosemary Herbert (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 474–5: ‘the anonymity and peril of the city are attractive to writers who concentrate on the reality of crime. While cozy settings of country houses and the cathedral close abound in stylized versions . . . the fluid environment of the city’s social conflicts, economic activities, and movement of people in spaces is integral to crime’. And in Twentiethcentury Crime Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 71, Lee Horsley notes: ‘Whether closer to reality or symbol, the cityscape itself is generally taken to be one of the defining features of the hard-boiled novel.’ As for the word ‘realistic’, I am using it in the sense defined by the late Quentin Crisp: ‘I now know that if you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.’ See The Naked Civil Servant (London: Fontana/Collins, 1977; original edn, London: Jonathan Cape, 1968), p. 182. The crime writer falls naturally into the second of these categories.  9 J. B. O’Sullivan, Don’t Hang Me Too High (New York: M.S. Mill Co., 1954). 10 All generalizations are vulnerable to counter-examples: the parishes of Louisiana in James Lee Burke’s crime fiction are as compelling as any city location, and in any case contain powerful depictions of New Orleans, a city that some right-wing Christians felt had been divinely punished (through Hurricane Katrina) for its sexual permissiveness, not unlike Sodom and Gomorrah. See James Lee Burke, The Tin Roof Blowdown: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007). See also www.guardian. co.uk/world/2009/feb/01/gerhard-wagner-hurricane-katrina and http://mediamatters.org/ research/200509130004 (accessed 24 September 2011). 11 Stanley Corkin, ‘Sex and the city in decline: Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Klute (1971)’, Journal of Urban History, 36/5 (2010), 617–33, explains some historical factors of urban decay underlying these two films shot in New York City and makes a number of inter­ esting observations about how the shapes of the city visually convey these social realities, pointing out that ‘neither film resolves its plot in New York: each ends with its couple leaving New York . . . The world beyond is depicted elliptically, but the viewer is led to believe that it is a land of the possible’ (629). A city in an archetypal story can be a place of testing and danger from which the hero will one day return. The archetypal big-city crime story may be Sea of Love (1989), a film written by Richard Price, exploring the loneliness and anonymous desire inherent in big-city life, where satisfaction is close but infinitely dangerous. This could not so easily have happened anywhere. 12 The somewhat uncharismatic Professor Serebryakov had been created by Chekhov for Uncle Vanya; I borrowed his name and profession. See Cormac Millar, An Irish Solution (Dublin: Penguin Ireland, 2004), pp. 94–5. 13 Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts (London: Faber and Faber, 1956), p. 13. 14 Fintan O’Toole, ‘From Chandler and the “Playboy” to the contemporary crime wave’, in Declan Burke (ed.), Down These Green Streets: Irish Crime Writing in the 21st Century

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(Dublin: Liberties Press, 2011), pp. 358–61 (p. 359); Patrick Fagan, ‘The population of Dublin in the eighteenth century with particular reference to the proportions of Protestants and Catholics’, Eighteenth-century Ireland/Iris an dá chultúr, 6 (1991), 121–56 (148); Christine Casey, Dublin: The City Within the Grand and Royal Canals and the Circular Road, with the Phoenix Park (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 64. See ‘Dublin Made Me’, in Donagh MacDonagh and Lennox Robinson (eds), The Oxford Book of Irish Verse, XVIIth Century–XXth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), p. 318. It continues: ‘Dublin made me, not the secret poteen still / The raw and hungry hills of the West / The lean road flung over profitless bog / Where only a snipe could nest.’ Oddly enough, the effect of the rural scenes described in the poem, though ostensibly hostile, is in the end a positive and appreciative one. Like all good poems, ‘Dublin Made Me’ contains meanings richer and more complex than what it says on the surface. Gene Kerrigan, Little Criminals (London: Vintage, 2005), p. 185. Maurice Craig, Dublin 1660–1860 (Dublin: Allen Figgis, 1952), pp. 18–21, 190–1. Eilís Dillon, Death at Crane’s Court (Lyons, Colorado: Rue Morgue Press, 2009), pp. 13–14. The original edition was London: Faber, 1953. Eadem, Sent to His Account, with an introduction by Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin (Lyons, Colorado: Rue Morgue Press, 2009). The original edition was London: Faber, 1954. John Kelly, The Polling of the Dead (Dublin: Moytura Press, 1993), p. 1. The maritime atmosphere will later prove to have been thematically appropriate. Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 7. Ibid., chapter 23; the three quotations occur respectively on p. 119 (‘y’ould bitch’), p. 121 (‘ye ould hoor’) and again on p. 119 (‘mice-droppings’). Sheila Pim, Common or Garden Crime: An Irish Gardening Mystery (new edn; Boulder, Colorado: Rue Morgue Press, 2001). Eadem, Common or Garden Crime: A Detective Story (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1945), p. 7. Ibid., p. 162. Ibid. Another detective story from the same years as Common or Garden Crime, Gerald Lee’s Murder and Music (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1943), also features the detective branch in Dublin Castle, where the serenely confident Inspector Crowley investigates the murder of a blackmailing musician, Luke Bloggs. The killers of Bloggs stand no chance against the omniscient paternalism of The Crow, who embodies the combined complacency and vigilance of the new Catholic supremacy. (This book is discussed in Cormac Millar, ‘The dead generations’, in Declan Burke (ed.), Down These Green Streets: Irish Crime Writing in the 21st Century (Dublin: Liberties Press, 2011), pp. 106–16.) ‘I Remember, I Remember’, in Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, edited with an introduction by Anthony Thwaite (London: The Marvell Press and Faber and Faber, 1988), pp. 81–2. William McIlvanney, Laidlaw (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1977), p. 35. Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1939). Vincent Banville, Death by Design (Harpenden: No Exit Press, 1993). Benjamin Black, Christine Falls (London: Picador, 2006); The Silver Swan (London: Picador, 2007). See Louisa Ermelino, ‘Wiseguys of Mumbai: Vikram Chandra’s Indian “Godfather”’, Publishers Weekly, 253/42 (23 October 2006), available online at www.publishersweekly.

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com/pw/print/20061023/3868-wiseguys-of-mumbai-.html. In a lecture at the University of Michigan in 1954, Ross Macdonald outlined the process: ‘Dickens learned from Collins, and demonstrates to us, how wide the dragnet of the mystery form can be flung. Like the picaresque novel of previous centuries, it has vast social range and mobility. A criminal mystery brings together, in fiction and in truth, representatives of every social class and moral category. It places these characters in situations of tension where every word and gesture become, or can be made to seem, revealing. It gives the novelist an opportunity and excuse to return and return again to the problem of evil that obsesses him. It lends itself to the juxtaposition and conflict of classes which are one of the social novelist’s main interests, and to the sudden reversals and revelations which Aristotle recommended in tragedy.’ Ross Macdonald, ‘The scene of the crime’, in Ross Macdonald, Inward Journey, ed. Ralph B. Sipper (Santa Barbara: Cordelia editions, 1984), pp. 26–7. Gene Kerrigan, Dark Times in the City (London: Harvill Secker, 2009), pp. 1–2. Ross Macdonald, The Instant Enemy (New York: Knopf, 1968), chapter 19, pp. 121–2. The disturbing conjunction of headlights and cataracts suggests eye disease; blindness is a frequent metaphor in Macdonald’s novels. The final reference to The Bride of Frankenstein, a horror movie of the 1930s, undercuts the fine rhetoric of the passage. This undercutting too is a feature of urban discourse, ‘a language suited to the fast, aggressive modern world of the city’, as analysed by Ralph Willett in The Naked City: Urban Crime Fiction in the USA (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 7: ‘Conventional hardboiled language is terse, laconic, acerbic and witty. One of its enduring techniques . . . is the wisecrack, a stylised demonstration of knowledge which expresses an irreverence towards authority and institutional power.’ Even the narrator’s own voice is not allowed to get above its democratic self. Reflecting on his genre, Ross Macdonald took an am­ bitious view of the place of crime fiction in the cultural representation of the city: ‘I once made a case for the theory (and Anthony Boucher didn’t disagree) that much of the modern development of the detective story stems from Baudelaire, his “dandyism” and his vision of the city as inferno. Conan Doyle’s London, which influenced Eliot’s “Wasteland”, has something of this quality.’ See ‘The writer as detective hero’, collected in Ross Macdonald, Self-portrait: Ceaselessly into the Past, ed. Ralph B. Sipper (San Bernardino, California: Brownstone Books, 1995), pp. 113–22 (pp. 115–16). ‘Michael Connelly “Interviews” Harry Bosch’ (2005), available at www.michaelconnelly. com/novels/theclosers/boschinterview/ (accessed 24 September 2011) and reprinted in the mass-market Orion paperback of Michael Connelly, The Overlook (London: Orion Books, 2008), pp. 294–308 (p. 303). The same principle of equality extends across all categories of the living; noir fiction tends to be a democratic genre. As W. H. Auden explained, ‘murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest’: W. H. Auden, ‘The guilty vicarage’, in The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (London: Faber, 1963), pp. 146–58 (p. 149). Gene Kerrigan, The Midnight Choir (London: Vintage Books, 2007), p. 142. Ibid., pp. 142–3. Ibid., p. 102.

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Select bibliography Auden, W. H., ‘The guilty vicarage’, in The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (London: Faber, 1963). Augustine, Confessions, trans. Edward B. Pusey (1910), vol. VII, part 1, The Harvard Classics (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1909–14), www.bartleby.com. Banville, Vincent, Death by Design (Harpenden: No Exit Press, 1993). Black, Benjamin, Christine Falls (London: Picador, 2006). ——, The Silver Swan (London: Picador, 2007). Boccaccio, Giovanni, Decameron: A New English Version by Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, Based on John Payne’s 1886 Translation (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2004). Burke, Declan (ed.), Down These Green Streets: Irish Crime Writing in the 21st Century (Dublin: Liberties Press, 2011). Connelly, Michael, The Overlook (London: Orion Books, 2008). Craig, Maurice, Dublin 1660–1860 (Dublin: Allen Figgis, 1952). De Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Stephen F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Dillon, Eilís, Death at Crane’s Court (Lyons, Colorado: Rue Morgue Press, 2009; London: Faber, 1953). ——, Sent to His Account, with an introduction by Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin (Lyons, Colorado: Rue Morgue Press, 2009; London: Faber, 1954). Ermelino, Louisa, ‘Wiseguys of Mumbai: Vikram Chandra’s Indian “Godfather”’, Publishers Weekly, 253/42 (23 October 2006), available online at www.publishersweekly.com/pw/ print/20061023/3868-wiseguys-of-mumbai-.html (accessed 24 September 2011). Kelly, John, The Polling of the Dead (Dublin: Moytura Press, 1993). Kerrigan, Gene, Little Criminals (London: Vintage, 2005). ——, The Midnight Choir (London: Vintage Books, 2007). ——, Dark Times in the City (London: Harvill Secker, 2009). MacDonagh, Donagh and Lennox Robinson (eds), The Oxford Book of Irish Verse, XVIIth Century–XXth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958). Macdonald, Ross [pseudonym of Kenneth Millar], The Instant Enemy (New York: Knopf, 1968). Millar, Cormac [pseudonym of Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin], An Irish Solution (Dublin: Penguin Ireland, 2004). ——, ‘The dead generations’, in Declan Burke (ed.), Down These Green Streets: Irish Crime Writing in the 21st Century (Dublin: Liberties Press, 2011), pp. 106–16. O’Sullivan, J. B., Don’t Hang Me Too High (New York: M.S. Mill Co., 1954). Pim, Sheila, Common or Garden Crime: A Detective Story (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1945). ——, Common or Garden Crime: An Irish Gardening Mystery (new edn; Boulder, Colorado: Rue Morgue Press, 2001). Price, Richard, Lush Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). Silone, Ignazio, Fontamara, collected in the Meridiani series, Romanzi e saggi (Milan: Mondadori, 1998; original edn, Zürich: Obrecht & Helbling, 1933 (in German)), vol. 1, pp. 5–196.

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6 From National Authority to Urban Underbelly: Negotiations of Power in Stockholm Crime Fiction KERSTIN BERGMAN

Often acknowledged to be the first Swedish crime novel, Stockholms-detektiven (‘The Stockholm detective’; 1893) by the author Prins Pierre (Fredrik Lindholm) does not take place in the Swedish capital.1 Instead, it is set in the small town of Eskilstuna, situated to the south-west of Stockholm, with the plot centring on a mysterious blaze in a factory. A detective from the capital is lured to Eskil­ stuna by a similarly mysterious letter, whereupon he eventually succeeds in solving the crime and subsequently returns to Stockholm. Stockholm as a centre of power can thus be traced back to the very beginnings of Swedish crime fiction: the capital is where the necessary expertise is to be found concerning legal matters and elimin­ating threats to Swedish society.2 During the 120 years that have passed since the publication of Stockholms-detektiven, Stockholm has continued to be an important place and site of power in Swedish crime fiction. Even though rural settings have become increasingly common in the last decade, urban novels, and novels set in Stockholm in particular, have traditionally dominated the genre in Sweden.3 Some of the many crime writers who have favoured the Stock­ holm setting in recent years are Arne Dahl (Jan Arnald), Carin Gerhardsen, Camilla Grebe and Åsa Träff, Michael Hjort and Hans Rosenfeldt, Lars Kepler (Alexander Ahndoril and Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril), Jens Lapidus, Stieg Larsson, Liza Marklund, Kristina Ohlsson, and Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström. Sense of place is essential to most fiction but, perhaps, especially to crime fiction. In the introduction to Following the Detectives: Real Locations in Crime Fiction (2010), Maxim Jakubowski argues that crime and mystery fiction offers the perfect blend of storytelling and sense of place, insofar as so many of us identify to a strong extent with the narrator and heroes, and these memorable characters are often intimately at one with the environ­ ment they function in.4

Gary J. Hausladen further elaborates on the concept of ‘sense of place’ in Places for Dead Bodies (2000), and suggests that it constitutes the answer to the question ‘what is it like?’

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Kerstin Bergman And the answer to that question includes all of the physical and human character­ istics of the place – the physical and human landscapes, the ways in which people inter­act, the formal and informal institutions that structure the society, including family, church, and political and economic institutions. The focus here is that even in an increasingly integrated world, places are different and unique and that ‘sense of place’ is about these differences, the inherently unique character of different locations in the world.5

Stockholm crime fiction thus presents a particular relationship between the power structures and the urban space. Through tracing the history of the Swedish crime fiction tradition, with particular emphasis on recent decades, this article examines images of the city of Stockholm as well as its representatives of power and author­ ity. The aim of the article is to shed light on how the capital (in this case, Stockholm) represents power – and, perhaps more importantly, how power is represented in the capital – in modern Swedish crime fiction. While attempting to make some general observations, more in-depth discussions will concern three ‘milestone’ novels in particular: Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s Terroristerna (The Terrorists; 1975), Liza Marklund’s Sprängaren (The Bomber; 1998) and Jens Lapidus’s Snabba cash (Easy Money; 2006).6 Emergence of Stockholm crime fiction In looking retrospectively at the history of Swedish crime fiction, one can observe the beginnings of a new and modern era that started with the author Stieg Trenter in the 1940s. The period from 1945 to 1965 is described as the golden age, a time dominated by classic whodunnits with the occasional influence from the American hard-boiled tradition. Trenter was one of the key figures of the golden age, and he was the first Swedish crime writer to successfully use Stockholm as the setting for crime fiction.7 He is also renowned for his idyllic depictions of Stockholm.8 Bo Lundin has stressed that an emphasis on setting is one of the main character­ istics of Swedish crime fiction in general, and he suggests that this should even be referred to as ‘the “Trenter Syndrome” for its foremost proponent’.9 For Trenter, the ‘atmosphere surrounding the scene of the crime would be as important an element in the story as the logical reasoning around the mystery itself’.10 In the first part of the 1960s, moreover, it even seemed that the setting was more important than the actual mysteries in Trenter’s novels. During this period, his protagonist, the photographer Harry Friberg, was ‘put in dangerous as well as picturesque situ­ ations’.11 Carl Olov Sommar has even suggested that perhaps Stockholm ‘is the true protagonist in [Trenter’s] novels, rather than the detectives, victims, and murderers’, and Karl G. Fredriksson notes that many of Trenter’s scenic descriptions have no function in the plot, but are primarily there to give a ‘homelike feel to the city’.12 Trenter portrayed Stockholm through the photographer’s lens, a city filled with details and marked by an intricate interplay of light and shadows.13 Sommar

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attributes Trenter’s skills in depicting Stockholm to three main reasons: his thorough on-site research (including photographs) into Stockholm; a close bond with the Swedish literary tradition of portraying the capital (including famous authors such as Carl Michael Bellman, August Strindberg and Hjalmar Söderberg); a strong interest in Stockholm history.14 Trenter also brought the locales of his crimes closer to his readers by evoking well-known Stockholm locations, something that lent his novels a more realistic touch, and which also contributed to making them immensely popular among the Swedish reading public.15 Trenter often combines descriptions of exteriors and interiors with views from a window of the building in question, thus creating a multidimensional image of the location, and many of his descriptions of journeys through the cityscape evoke a sightseeing tour.16 Ulf Carlsson suggests that what makes Trenter’s depiction of Stockholm unique is his ambition to uphold the sense of a small and limited space required by the conventions of the whodunnit genre, while simultaneously furnish­ing his novels with ‘a modern, metropolitan atmosphere’.17 Trenter shows an en­thusi­asm for the modern welfare state rather than criticizing it, and although his novels depict the urban metropolis of Stockholm, he still portrays the city as an idyllic environment.18 Most of Trenter’s novels are set in the summertime, and they are filled with descriptions of the sun shining over the waters and green hills of the Swedish capital. In the Stockholm of Trenter’s novels, ‘people are witty and friendly, the atmosphere is agreeable and every-day life a continuous and pleasant miracle’.19 Lundin calls this the ‘Trenter ambience’.20 This ambience was not only attractive to readers of his novels, but it also inspired other Swedish crime writers in the decades to come.21 Urban Stockholm and the disintegrating welfare state What firmly established Stockholm as the setting par préférence in Swedish crime fiction, however, was Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s popularization of the police procedural. From 1965 to 1975, the writing duo published their popular ten-novel series Roman om ett brott (The Story of a Crime).22 The urban setting was an essential prerequisite to Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s novels, with Stockholm being their city of choice. Alison Young has suggested that in some crime fiction, ‘the city is criminogenic’, meaning that the urban environment in itself generates criminality.23 Whether this is the case in Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s novels depends on how the con­ cept is defined, but it is clear that they used the urban space in order to illustrate what they viewed as society’s ills. In writing about Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s Stockholm in Scene of the Crime: The Importance of Place in Crime and Mystery Fiction (2008), David Geherin notes that their urban setting is ‘a construct of a political system they vigorously denounce’.24 Although Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s relationship with the political system of the Swedish welfare state is somewhat more complicated than a straightforward denouncement, Geherin’s point is nonetheless accurate, and perhaps this could be considered Stockholm’s specific ‘criminogenity’. The

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urban spaces of Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s novels represent the disintegrating Swedish welfare state, and the changes that the city is going through, physical reconstruction as well as social degradation, are presented as the result of capitalism, corruption and greed. Geherin further suggests that the cause of Stockholm’s depravation in Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s novels is political rather than the ‘economic conditions’ as such.25 However, as the economy is in the foreground of their depiction of the collapse of the welfare state, seen to be caused by the imposition of a capitalist system, it is not viable to distinguish between the two. Change always implies a before and after, and in Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s de­ nounce­ment of the changes the country is undergoing, it is clear that the authors’ senti­ments lie firmly with the Sweden of old. Sweden is portrayed as having once been a functioning welfare state, but as the series progresses, it is made clear that this system is in decline, and in the final novel Terroristerna, all hope of ever recovering the ‘paradise lost’ has evaporated. Lundin suggests that Sjöwall and Wahlöö ‘achieve some of their most significant effects’ by alluding to the favourably portrayed Stockholm of Trenter’s novels, while simultaneously ‘show­ ing the old settings in a totally different light’.26 Lars Wendelius notes that many of Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s depictions of Stockholm are characterized by a flâneur mentality ( flanörmentalitet), as the police protagonist, Martin Beck, ‘strolls through his city, observes its particularities, and reflects upon their meaning’.27 Wendelius interprets Beck’s impressions of the cityscape in terms of nostalgia for ‘a lost childhood paradise’, in a time where the city is primarily characterized by ‘commercialization, vulgarization, and ugliness’.28 In Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s novels, the changes that the physical manifestations of the capital have undergone are thus contrasted with ‘Trenter’s Stockholm’ in order to illustrate the decay of the welfare state. Geherin emphasizes how the novels show the city’s physical changes to be a negative con­sequence of a faulty government, as ‘[i]rreplaceable old apartment buildings give way to sterile office monstrosities; lively neighbor­ hoods are reduced to rubble’, and the new ‘city’s hard naked surfaces of metal, glass, and concrete embod[y] the dehumanization that inevitably accompanies the changes’.29 Young describes the city in terms of a ‘legible space’, as ‘it provides a textual elucidation of the subliminal anxieties associated with urban life. The city becomes the space of signs, commodities, appearances. The detective is the one who can interpret the signs of crime in the city (and the city as a sign of crime).’30 However, in Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s novels, Stockholm’s ‘signs’ generally tend to be very ex­ plicit, and are often left to be interpreted by the reader, rather than being explained by the detectives. Accordingly, they leave at least some of the detective work to their readers. Their depictions of Stockholm tell a story that is parallel to the crime mysteries at hand, and the political message is thereby further stressed as it is repeated in different ways throughout the text. Young suggests that the ‘detective should be understood as reading the scene of the crime against the city’.31 In the case of Sjöwall and Wahlöö, it is thus often the reader who is primarily invited to make the connections between the crimes and the city backdrop, even if the

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novels’ police detectives also occasionally reflect upon the changing cityscape and how its criminality is growing all the more violent and gratuitous. Young further suggests that the setting in crime fiction is ‘the scene of the inter­ pretation of hierarchies of social groups’.32 In Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s Stockholm novels, this becomes specifically clear, as they invite their readers to take part in and share their interpretations of the Swedish class society. Different areas of the capital are repeatedly referred to in order to illustrate and underline the class differences. In Terroristerna, the district of Djursholm is most clearly associated with the upper class, while the worn-down buildings in Södermalm represent the underprivileged inhabitants of the city. Not only areas, but specific homes are also associated with social class and/or political allegiance. Beck’s girlfriend runs and lives in a housing co-operative, which serves to illustrate her socialist ideas. An evil porn producer lives in a modern house with huge glass windows and a flat roof, and his wife explains to Beck: ‘When we bought the property six years ago, there was a dreadful old place here, but we had it demolished and built this house instead’, but Beck was sure the old place had been pleasanter to live in. What he had seen of the house so far seemed bare and inhospitable, and the ultramodern and certainly extremely costly décor seemed designed more for show than for comfort and warmth.33

Meanwhile, the murderer of the porn producer and a girl who shoots the prime minister – both portrayed as victims of society and essentially good – live in old buildings and are associated with environmental consciousness, green living and gardening. The former is a gardener by profession, and the latter has a small vegetable patch: ‘She had learned a lot about biodynamic gardening and macro­ biotic food, and she was happy to be able to grow and harvest most of the food that she and her child needed.’34 In Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s novels, the modern buildings are almost ‘blamed’ as responsible for the tearing down and replacing of the older buildings, the glass and steel constructions of the former being commonly associated with evil – as in the case of the porn producer’s house. In contrast, old buildings tend to give rise to associations of virtue and familiarity – the good old days when Stockholm was a more ‘idyllic’ place. Even the evil terrorist in Terroristerna regards the Old Town (where Beck lives) as the only nice part of Stockholm, ‘the only part of Stockholm he liked’.35 Beck’s apartment also gives the authors an opportunity to reflect upon police corruption, as they note how Beck ‘had been in luck when he found the place, and the most extraordinary thing was that he didn’t get it through cheating or bribery and corruption – in other words, the way police officers generally acquired privileges’.36 Sjöwall and Wahlöö thus criticize the Swedish police by noting how unusual it is that a police officer has acquired such a fine apartment by legal means. While observing the disintegrating welfare state, Sjöwall and Wahlöö convey strong criticism of the authorities for having contributed to its ruin. The police in particular are singled out as being culpable. Although responsibility for this lies

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clearly in the hands of political decision makers at a higher level, as the most visible and immediate body of power in the urban space, and being at the centre of Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s genre of choice, the police are a particularly convenient authority to blame for the breakdown of the Swedish welfare state. The image of the police changes drastically throughout the series. In Roseanna (1965), Beck himself is the primary representative of the police, and through the depiction of his work the police are portrayed as decent and hardworking, albeit a little slow. Beck also concludes that the gun he was supposed to use in his work ‘was useless in most situations, and he was a pretty poor shot anyway’.37 This description of Beck’s gun and his relation to it, inserted early in the novel, also contributes to the establishment of an image of the police as somewhat old-fashioned, having outdated equipment not really fit for purpose, and with officers who do not really have the skills for the job. However, attitudes towards the police change, and Wendelius notes how in Det slutna rummet (The Locked Room; 1972) the new police headquarters under construction in the district of Kungsholmen adopts a symbolic function as the centre of bureaucracy and police power, which even takes on an almost military connotation.38 When the series ends in Terroristerna, the police are portrayed as a bunch of unintelligent, corrupt brutes, incapable of doing anything right. They are said to serve and protect only ‘the government and certain privileged classes and groups’, and are described as an organization that terrorize ‘socialists and people who couldn’t make it in our class society’.39 Additionally, it is stressed how the police are turning into an increasingly ‘para­ military, centrally controlled force with frightening technical resources’.40 In Terroristerna, the police are thus portrayed as an inhuman, militarized and unfair institution, and Beck’s team is depicted as a last outpost of sanity in an organ­i zation gone mad. This is also illustrated by how the different offices of the police represent old/new and good/evil dualisms. Beck and his team have their offices in an old, worn-down building which overlooks the huge new police headquarters still under construction in Kungsholmen. In the old building, the spaces were ‘decrepit, the walls were peeling, and the building itself appeared to be in the process of collapsing from the pressure of the ostentatious new police headquarters growing up outside the windows’.41 The latter is described as an ‘almost deranged building designed to show off’, thus further stressing how the Swedish police are moving in a direction that Sjöwall and Wahlöö per­ ceive as completely wrong.42 In Terroristerna, the urban space also literally becomes the space of political rep­ resentation. In this novel, the Swedish government invites an unpopular American senator to visit Stockholm. As he travels in a cortege through the city centre, 30,000 activists hold a protest rally and a terrorist group attempts to assassinate him. Whereas they also dislike the senator and find his political track record distasteful, Beck and his team are assigned to protect him from the terrorists – which they succeed in doing, in spite of the failings of other sections of the police force due to stupidity and incompetence. Through the ‘ceremonies’ of the cortege and homage to the late king (the senator insists on presenting a wreath to the

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latter), and by the actions and decisions of the Stockholm politicians in relation to these ceremonies, the idiocy of the politicians is illustrated and the public arena as political space is shown to be a site for meaningless gestures.43 Sjöwall and Wahlöö thus primarily use the portrayal of Stockholm in order to illustrate the state of society: the disintegration of the welfare state. In particular they contrast old with new and past with present in order to highlight the class differences and the moral status of the cityscape’s inhabitants – criminals and ordinary people as well as representatives of the police. Young notes that certain cities generate certain types of criminality, and she illustrates this by claiming that crimes in Chicago are often somehow related to property, while in Los Angeles they are typically the result of the desire for success and fame.44 Following the novels of Sjöwall and Wahlöö, Stockholm can similarly be identified as a city inspiring crime stemming from the capitalist corruption of the welfare state. Many Swedish crime writers have continued in the latter’s wake by writing long serial instalments of crime novels, which are often set in Stockholm and contain social criticism. Although most of these authors are not as poignant in their social and political criticism as their pre­ decessors, they still tend to evoke the critical tradition of Sjöwall and Wahlöö. Some of the more well-known crime writers to use the setting of Stockholm in their police novels (dating from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s) are Olof Svedelid, Leif G. W. Persson, Åsa Nilsonne and Hans Holmér. Svedelid and Persson are particularly interesting when it comes to their depiction of Stockholm (their novels are worthy of more detailed attention not possible in this short chapter). Lundin notes how Svedelid in particular, in his best novels, ‘demonstrates a low-key, eloquent rage towards the corrupt city of Stockholm, ridden by violence and controlled by gangsters’.45 Like Trenter, Svedelid was exceptionally thorough in his research, and in his long series about police detective Roland Hassel he thus portrays Stockholm in an extremely detailed and realistic way. Persson is rather interesting for the way in which his descriptions of the capital diverge from Trenter’s more idyllic ‘tourist’ view. In thus doing, Persson displays the rougher side of Stockholm, which is not always presented in a very good light. Other, similarly famous authors from the same period who have used the set­ ting of Stockholm to good effect in different crime fiction sub-genres include thriller writer Jan Guillou and the writer of whodunnits Jan Mårtenson. While Mårtenson abstains from political criticism in favour of cultural history, Guillou follows Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s example in this sense. Wendelius notes that while Sjöwall and Wahlöö look at the city and society from below, Guillou employs an ‘eagle perspective’ (örnperspektiv), whereby his protagonist is from the upper social classes and moves among Stockholm’s more privileged and powerful echelons.46 Although the methods and perspectives have varied, the Sjöwall and Wahlöö tradition have thus continued to be a strong presence in Swedish crime fiction throughout the last decades of the twentieth century.

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Patriarchal power structures in the urban space Traditionally, the big city has often been associated with danger and decadence, and in crime fiction in particular, it has been ‘regularly portrayed as a place of darkness and evil’.47 The urban metropolis has commonly been described as a huge organism that swallows innocent people – women in particular – who move in from the countryside, dreaming of freedom, modernity and a better life. The opposition between city and modernity on the one hand, and countryside and trad­ition on the other, is well established in modern, Western literature.48 In Sweden, one of the most well-known fictional women detectives in recent years is Liza Marklund’s crime journalist Annika Bengtzon. Furthermore, Marklund’s first crime novel, Sprängaren, in which the character of Bengtzon is introduced, is often regarded as the novel that heralded the contemporary Swedish wave of women crime writers.49 Bengtzon represents one of these women from the country­ side who has settled in Stockholm, and who is now trying to cope with and make a career within the (patriarchal) power structures of the city. While struggling with being in charge of the crime desk of a big Stockholm tabloid, Bengtzon follows the story of a bombing at the new Olympic arena under construction, in which the woman responsible for the Olympic preparations has been killed. At the time Marklund was writing her novel, Stockholm was – unsuccessfully as it turned out – applying to host the 2004 Summer Olympics; the games were instead awarded to Athens in the autumn of 1997. In August of the same year, a bomb exploded at Stockholm Stadium, and a man was subsequently arrested for this and several other attacks on sports arenas in Sweden.50 Marklund’s story is inspired by these real events, but depicts what could have happened if Stockholm had been elected as the host city. She sets her novel in 2003 during the final stages of preparation for the Olympics. While the rest of Stockholm warrants only pass­ ing mention as Bengtzon travels through the city in the novel Sprängaren, the (fictional) Olympic arena under construction – as well as a number of real arenas undergoing renovation – occupies a central position in the events of the novel.51 The choice of a big international sporting event in Stockholm as the focus of the plot has many connotations. In Sweden, the sport movement is closely tied to the development of the modern welfare state.52 The dream of hosting the Olympics thus represents a dream of reviving the Swedish welfare state by bringing it into the future as part of a globalized world. The existing sports halls and the con­ struction of the new arena similarly represent modernity and the dream of a great future. In particular, the new arena becomes a symbol of the power that Stockholm could have had if it had held the Olympics. However, as Marklund foregrounds the construction and restoration of these buildings, she also makes the construction business, a traditionally male-dominated trade, central to her story. Two of the women in charge of Olympic preparations and construction projects are portrayed to the reader as having faced a constant struggle to be respected both by their superiors and by the men under their com­ mand. As it turns out, one of the women is blown to pieces in an attack on her

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(in the new arena), while the other has fallen from grace and has been demoted to managing one of the smaller restoration projects, where she also fails to escape the continual harassment of the male workers. In fact, a life of fighting against patriarchal structures in order to reach the positions they are in has turned these women into ruthless monsters.53 The parallels to Bengtzon’s own struggles at the tabloid where she works are obvious. However, her case differs in that she has a supportive (male) editor-in-chief, and also perhaps because of the closeness to her family, which makes her different from the two women mentioned above and which prevents her from turning into a ‘monster’ as well.54 The connection between power and the urban space of the capital is further stressed by the murderer’s close and personal relationship with buildings and architecture. The murderer explains: ‘Why did I choose to work with buildings? I love buildings! They speak to you in such an immediate, clear way. I love travelling, just to communicate with the buildings in new places, their shapes, their windows, their colours . . . their radiance.’55 Some buildings are, however, more significant to the murderer than others: ‘My home is very important to me, the house I live and breathe in. We speak to each other every day, my house and me. Exchanging experiences and wisdom.’56 The murderer thus actually claims to have conversations with buildings and, furthermore, describes the Stockholm City Hall as: one of my best friends . . . I often climb the tower, going up all those stairs, letting the stone walls dance beneath my hands, feeling the draught from the little openings in the walls. Then I stand and catch my breath at the top, and we share the view and the breeze together.57

The murderer has an intimate relationship with the city hall, as with many other Stockholm buildings, and these buildings seem to represent an inner voice that appears to have a calming effect. Towards the end of the novel, the murderer even apologizes for having harmed the arena building when killing the woman in charge of the Olympic preparations, telling Bengtzon: ‘That wasn’t my intention, you understand. I didn’t want to damage the stadium. Whatever had happened there wasn’t the building’s fault.’58 Consequently, in Marklund’s novel the physical representations of the capital have benevolent associations, and the city in itself is not depicted as ‘a place of darkness and evil’: it is not the city that is criminogenic, in Young’s sense of the term.59 Instead, it is the people with power over the urban spaces who are repeatedly made out to be villains. This is a different use of the Stockholm setting, one that diverges from Trenter’s city as an idyllic backdrop, and Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s use of the urban space as a visualization of the evils of the capitalist system. Marklund’s Stockholm is in the hands of patriarchal rather than capitalist power structures, and in Sprängaren the urban space is used primarily to discuss gender-related issues. Like Sjöwall and Wahlöö before her, Marklund has explicitly claimed to use the crime novel in order to convey social and political criticism. In a recent

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interview, she stressed that ‘I am absolutely a political writer. I use my novels to get a message across.’60 There is also a shift in physical location in Marklund’s novel from the upper tiers of the arena – from which the woman in charge exercises her power, and where she is later killed – to the secret corridors under the arena where the novel’s final confrontation takes place. While the former, ‘the huge stands reach­ ing for the sky’ and ‘the perforated steel arch of the roof’, is depicted in terms of light and surface, the latter is a dark place where the truth about what happened can be revealed.61 Gillian Mary Hanson suggests that in crime fiction, public places are often contrasted with secluded places . . . to represent the conflict between truth and deceit. In the public place, characters are viewed as they would be seen, whereas in the private place, hidden facets of the characters, often psychological, are presented to the reader.62

Although the dark basement in Marklund’s novel is associated with the murderer’s deceit, it is also a safe place where the murderer can finally explain the experiences of abuse that have led up to the murders; a place where the ‘hidden facets’ can be presented. Bengtzon is actually kidnapped by the murderer, who locks her in the stadium basement and forces her to write down the tragic story preceding the murders in order to ‘get to the truth at last’.63 The basement thus takes on a double meaning in that it is not the urban space and its buildings that embody evil per se, but that it is rather a question of how the space is claimed and by whom. Marklund’s novels and the detective character of Bengtzon can be placed in the tradition of feminist adaptations of the hard-boiled crime genre, an urban genre where ‘offenses in which the patriarchal power structure of contemporary society itself is potentially incriminated’.64 Many of the strong and independent women in crime fiction belong in this tradition, another recent Swedish example being the computer hacker Lisbeth Salander of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy (2005–7). Like Bengtzon, Salander challenges Stockholm’s patriarchal power structures and eventually manages to defeat them. Her success confirms that no matter how corrupt and misogynistic the power structures might be, the tough woman hero can still triumph in the urban space of crime fiction today. However, although women characters – protagonists as well as supporting characters – are a well-established part of contemporary Swedish crime fiction, a majority of them have no feminist agendas, embody old-fashioned gender stereotypes and do not belong in the hard-boiled tradition.65 When it comes to victims of crime, moreover, the young woman from the countryside who moves to the capital only to be swallowed by its evil forces is still a common figure. In Jens Lapidus’s novel Snabba cash discussed below, the sister of one of the pro­ tagonists clearly exemplifies this type of female victim.

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Alternative power structures ruling the capital On account of its northerly, peripheral location, Stockholm has long been por­ trayed as a relatively isolated city – by global standards – in modern Swedish crime fiction. Accordingly, most crime writers have depicted the Swedish capital as a city of primarily national interest. With increasing immigration and other effects of globalization, however, this is now changing, with the Swedish capital becoming more international in many senses. Since the turn of the new millennium, Stockholm crime fiction has, to an increasing extent, dealt with the threat posed by organized crime; this is often not depicted as originating in Sweden, but rather in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics and/or former Yugoslavia. As one of the crime bosses in Jens Lapidus’s Snabba cash explains: New times. New people. New ways of working . . . Today, there are a lot more players on the Swedish field than there were when we began twenty years ago. Back then, it was just us and a couple of old bank robbers, Svartenbrandt and Clark Olofsson. But Sweden is different now. The MC gangs are here to stay. The youth and prison gangs are well organized; the EU dissolves the borders. Biggest change is that nowadays we’re also competing with the Albanians, the Russian Mafia, a ton of nasty types from Estonia, just to name a few. It’s not just Western Europe that’s gotten smaller. The East is here. Globalization, yada yada.66

Additionally, in Swedish crime fiction as in reality, the internet has served to increase the potency of and connections among international criminal organ­ izations. Examples of this are found in recent novels by Stieg Larsson, Liza Mark­ lund, Arne Dahl and Leif G.W. Persson, among others. This new Stockholm, and its new criminality, represents the latest phase in the process of urban change depicted by modern Swedish crime fiction. In his popular survey of modern Scandinavian crime fiction, Barry Forshaw notes that the Stockholm of Swedish crime writer Jens Lapidus’s novels offers ‘a more cosmopolitan canvas than those of the other writers’.67 Swedish crime writers still often aim to inscribe their novels in the tradition of Sjöwall and Wahlöö, and even if the late Stieg Larsson has more recently inspired a higher degree of variation and genre hybridization, still only a few authors have moved beyond the national perspective.68 Lapidus, however, presents a new take on the depiction of Swedish society. The James Ellroy-inspired novels of his Stockholm Noir trilogy – Snabba cash, Aldrig fucka upp (Never fuck up; 2008) and Livet deluxe (Life deluxe; 2011) – are still national in the sense that they are predominantly centred on Stockholm. Nevertheless, Lapidus adopts perspectives that are new in Swedish crime fiction, as he depicts organized criminality in the capital from the inside, using criminal protagonists, several of whom have their biological roots outside Sweden. Lapidus’s Stockholm is cosmopolitan in the sense that it is a multicultural city, but its inhabitants, portrayed through Lapidus’s main characters, are by no means global citizens: they tend to have only a limited knowledge about the world

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outside the Swedish capital. Geherin stresses that the city in crime fiction ‘is often depicted as a center of corruption and decay, a place where crime, pollution, and general degradation of life are concentrated’.69 Nowhere is this truer than in Lapidus’s novels. While previous authors – from Sjöwall and Wahlöö to Stieg Larsson – have used ‘regular’ Swedes as normative for the perspective from which society is examined, Lapidus by contrast employs the perspective of Stockholm’s criminal underbelly. In his novels, Swedish society is viewed predominantly through the eyes of criminals, and to them the regular Swedes are first and foremost a source of income: people to swindle and use. The official power structures, the police and politicians, are primarily considered an annoyance, to be avoided, and if this is not possible, to be manipulated and controlled, and, if this also fails, criminal hierarchies and power networks are established in prison. In Snabba cash, the Stockholm police implement a new initiative designed to come to terms with organized crime, but the criminal organizations ‘beat’ the programme by becoming even more organized, as they obliterate all competition by dividing up areas and criminal trades amongst themselves. The distribution of power is thus very different in the novels of Lapidus in comparison with other Swedish crime fiction. Even if power in his novels – just like in Marklund’s – is almost exclusively patriarchal, this is never questioned. That power rests in the hands of men is a given in Lapidus’s novels – and apart from his third novel, Livet deluxe, all the women in his novels are either prostitutes or girlfriends and family members of the male protagonists and their associates.70 In this sense, Lapidus’s novels express the recent feminist backlash in Swedish society. As power in Lapidus’s novels is not in the hands of the Stockholm police or politicians, but lies completely with the organized, criminal networks, it is the unofficial power networks that are important and run the city. Additionally, a certain amount of power is also ascribed to Stockholm’s privileged brats and yuppies who rule the exclusive bars and clubs in the area around Stureplan. The criminal and ‘high society’ networks have a lot in common; in particular they share a focus on money, status and hierarchies. Geographically, Lapidus’s Stockholm is both smaller and bigger than the Stock­ holm of his fellow Swedish crime writers.71 In Snabba cash in particular, the geo­ graphical centre of the novel focuses on a few city blocks in the Stureplan area located in the middle of the city – an area characterized by its nightlife, brat culture and designer shops. The limited extension of the area is stressed as Jorge Salinas Barrio, one of the criminal protagonists, spies on one of the ‘rulers’ of Stureplan, a club host called ‘Jet Set Carl’: Jet Set Carl didn’t venture far. Kept to his own pissed-in territory. Slipped into Café Tures in Sturegallerian, the exclusive indoor mall by Stureplan. Around 750 yards from where he lived. The geography within the golden rectangle was simple: KarlavägenSturegatan-Riddargatan-Narvavägen. The area practically had a velvet rope around it.72

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This is the area where the younger protagonists want to be seen and accepted, while the older criminals are attracted by the area’s affluent cocaine market. While Stureplan is the point around which everything else revolves, Lapidus also extends his capital to include several suburbs in which most of the main characters grew up and also live. These suburbs range from poor high-rise blocks dominated by immigrants, to affluent villa areas. The poor suburbs play a more important part in the Stockholm of Lapidus than in any other Swedish crime fiction. Social and racial segregation is a theme that runs through his trilogy, with readers encounter­ ing all levels of urban class society, from the nobility to the homeless. The unwritten rules of segregation are clear as Jorge Salinas Barrio thinks about his Stureplan experiences: Jorge’d partied at the bars around there tons of times. Champagne-chinga’d chicas. Palmed some bills and the bouncer’d let him glide past the line. Bought some prime rib at the meat market. But still, something was missing. He saw the Swedish guys. No matter how much money he spent, he’d never be at their level. Jorge could feel it. Every blatte in the city could feel it. No matter how hard they tried, waxed their hair, bought the right clothes, kept their honor intact, and drove slick rides, they didn’t belong with Them. Humiliation was always around the corner. You could see it in the bouncers’ gazes, the bitches’ grimaces, the bartenders’ gestures. The message clearer than the city of Stockholm’s segregation politics: In the end, you’re always just a blatte.73

Although not fully accepted everywhere – primarily because of racism – the crim­ inals negotiate the social ladder easily with money opening all doors. It is, therefore, still money that ultimately rules the world of Lapidus’s capital, and while most likely being a relatively realistic depiction of Swedish society today, his portrayal of the city simultaneously represents a Sweden corrupted by capitalism and greed, one that Sjöwall and Wahlöö had warned against as early as the 1960s and 1970s. In the intervening decades, power has shifted from the official to unofficial author­ ities, but the governing principles remain the same as money and greed are still the primary motivators. While the Stockholm underground in both Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s and Mark­ lund’s novels were often a literal underground – for example the tunnels and underground gas lines where the terrorists place their bombs in Terroristerna, and the basement tunnels of the Olympic arena where the final encounter takes place in Sprängaren – Lapidus’s underground is metaphorical and represented by the criminal networks that have infiltrated all parts and levels of the capital: they operate just below the ‘surface’ of the capital and are thus largely invisible to the casual observer. Sjöwall and Wahlöö and Marklund, meanwhile, represent the Stockholm surface through buildings that reflect the state of society, but with Lapidus the surface is instead in the superficiality embodied by the import­ ance of status and power symbols – everything from cars and weapons to exclusive parties and clothes.

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From national authority to urban underbelly In the novels discussed above, the capital is used to emphasize the problems at stake: from Trenter’s idyllic cityscape that enhances the harshness of the crimes, to Lapidus’s superficial city built on social differences and run by criminal networks. Through the transformations of the portrayal of the urban space, the image of Sweden is also changing – from a homogeneous and well-functioning welfare nation to an individualistic and multifaceted Sweden that is part of a globalized world. Furthermore, a transition can be traced from police detectives (Trenter’s photog­rapher works closely with the police) as the primary readers of the legible city, to a focus on investigative journalists (Marklund, Larsson) contributing to writing the map of the city in combination with private citizens (Marklund, Larsson, Lapidus) trying to navigate it. The official, authoritative perspective of the police is transformed into an underdog perspective in the later examples. The ultimate power over the capital is likewise transferred from capitalism in Sjöwall and Wahlöö to patriarchy in Marklund and, finally, in Lapidus, to the criminal organizations representing both capitalism and patriarchy. Despite these changes over time, urban Stockholm has been used as the primary site for negotiations of power throughout the history of modern Swedish crime fiction. While the images provided by Sjöwall and Wahlöö gave little room for hope of a better society, with Marklund, at least, Bengtzon provides some grounds for optimism as she, in contrast to the other career women of the novel, has not been crushed by the patriarchal power structures of society. With Lapidus, however, hope seems to fade again, and he leaves the reader with a sense of dread in a society run by criminal organizations.74 Once more, social class is a crucial concept and, as social segregation increases in Stockholm, the utopian welfare state of Trenter’s novels seems increasingly distant. In modern apocalyptic writing, the devas­ tation of a city is a common way to illustrate ‘the fall of civilization’.75 Through­ out Swedish crime fiction, the destruction of Stockholm through the demolition of old buildings, terrorist attacks and increasing violence is used to illustrate the demise of the Swedish welfare state. Physical, moral and ethical demolition of the capital is depicted in the shape of corruption, greed and egocentrism. Although Stockholm is still a centre of power in Swedish crime fiction, it is a very different centre with very different power structures from when Prins Pierre’s Stockholm detective represented the Swedish capital as a centre of ‘repository knowledge’ safeguarding the country from threats.76 Notes  1  2

Prins Pierre, Stockholms-detektiven (Stockholm: Askerberg, 1893). The capital is described by criminologist Alison Young as containing a ‘repository of knowledge to which the detective might repair for assistance in the task of solving the crime’: Alison Young, Imagining Crime: Textual Outlaws and Criminal Conversations (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 1996), p. 85.

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Negotiations of Power in Stockholm Crime Fiction In 1981, Bo Lundin concluded that following the novels of Stieg Trenter in the 1940s to 1960s, Stockholm had continued to be the preferred setting among Swedish crime writers, ‘as sales figures show poorer results if the plot is placed elsewhere’: Bo Lundin, The Swedish Crime Story/Svenska Deckare, trans. A. L. Ringarp, R. A. Wilson and B. Lundin (Bromma: Jury, 1981), p. 9. Three decades later, however, rural settings and novels set in other big Swedish cities are increasingly common. See Kerstin Bergman, ‘The well-adjusted cops of the new millennium: neo-romantic tendencies in the Swedish police procedural’, in A. Nestingen and P. Arvas (eds), Scandinavian Crime Fiction (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011), pp. 34–45 (p. 44). Crime novels set outside the capital are also very popular today, which is reflected by their buoyant sales (cf. the Swedish best-seller lists from 2004 to the present in ‘Topplistor’, Svensk Bokhandel, www.svb.se/ bokfakta/svenskatopplistor (accessed 11 January 2012)). Crucial for this development is Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell and his Inspector Wallander novels (1991– 2009), set in the small town of Ystad on the south coast of Sweden. See Kerstin Bergman, ‘Beyond Stieg Larsson: contemporary trends and traditions in Swedish crime fiction’, Forum for World Literature Studies, 4.2 (2012), 291–306 (292–3).  4 Maxim Jakubowski, ‘Introduction: a sense of place’, in M. Jakubowski (ed.), Following the Detectives: Real Locations in Crime Fiction (London: New Holland, 2010), pp. 12–13 (p. 12). David Geherin also concludes that the genre’s preference for serial writing makes place specifically important in crime fiction. David Geherin, Scene of the Crime: The Importance of Place in Crime and Mystery Fiction (Jefferson: McFarland, 2008), p. 8.  5 Gary J. Hausladen, Places for Dead Bodies (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), p. 23.  6 For other ‘milestone’ novels in modern Swedish crime fiction, see Bergman, ‘Beyond Stieg Larsson’, 303.  7 Carl Olov Sommar, ‘Stieg Trenter som stockholmsskildrare’, in B. Hallerstedt (ed.), Sankt Eriks Årsbok 1984 (Stockholm: Samfundet S:t Erik, 1984), pp. 173–86 (p. 173).  8 Lundin, The Swedish Crime Story, p. 21.  9 Ibid., p. 8. 10 Ibid., p. 9. 11 Ibid., p. 23. 12 Sommar, ‘Stieg Trenter som stockholmsskildrare’, p. 175; Karl G. Fredriksson, ‘Stieg Trenters miljöer’, in B. R. Widerberg et al., En bok om Stieg Trenter (Bromma: Jury, 1982), pp. 64–80 (p. 70). All translations in this chapter are my own, unless otherwise noted. 13 Bo Lundin, ‘Harry Friberg, vår vän världsmannen’, in B. R. Widerberg (ed.), Stieg Trenters Stockholm (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1987), pp. 9–17 (p. 15). 14 Sommar, ‘Stieg Trenter som stockholmsskildrare’, pp. 182–6. 15 Lundin, The Swedish Crime Story, p. 21. 16 Fredriksson, ‘Stieg Trenters miljöer’, pp. 67–8. 17 Ulf Carlsson, ‘Stieg Trenter’s 40-tal: Medelklassens hopp och ängslan’, in Karin Nykvist et al. (eds), Möten: Festskrift till Anders Palm (Lund: Anacapri förlag, 2007), pp. 385– 94 (pp. 388–9). 18 Sara Kärrholm, Konsten att lägga pussel: Deckaren och besvärjandet av ondskan i folk­ hemmet (Stockholm and Stehag: Symposion, 2005), p. 278. Fredriksson also notes this in ‘Stieg Trenters miljöer’, p. 75. 19 Lundin, The Swedish Crime Story, p. 20. 20 Ibid.  3

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One of them, Vic Suneson [Sune Lundquist], often referred to as the ‘father of the Swedish police novel’, also uses familiar Stockholm settings for his mysteries. His Stockholm is, however, ‘a much more run-down city, inhabited by humble hard-working people, and his look at the city is one of warm compassion rather than a sharp-eyed reporter’s curiosity’, as in Trenter’s case. Suneson also had a proclivity for depicting less affluent suburbs and characters from the lower social classes (ibid., p. 26). Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s police novels are primarily inspired by the American version of the procedural genre, and they are often compared with Ed McBain. See George N. Dove, The Police Procedural (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1982), pp. 217–18; Lars Wendelius, Rationalitet och kaos: Nedslag i svensk kriminalfiktion efter 1965 (Hedemora: Gidlunds förlag, 1999), pp. 105–6; Geherin, Scene of the Crime, p. 162. Young, Imagining Crime, p. 85. Geherin, Scene of the Crime, p. 161. Ibid., pp. 163–4. Lundin, The Swedish Crime Story, p. 21. Lundin also mentions another Swedish crime writer, Olof Svedelid, who uses Trenter’s more idyllic descriptions of Stockholm for contrast as well (ibid.). Hausladen stresses that part of what makes crime fiction attractive is ‘a tension that necessarily arises in writing about places between what is familiar and what is not. The reader is exposed to images, sounds, smells, behaviors, and cultures that are new and unfamiliar, all the while being fed situations and circumstances that are recognizable and familiar, providing the basis for empathy and personal association’ (Hausladen, Places for Dead Bodies, p. 4). Fredriksson has suggested instead that the primary tension characterizing the crime fiction genre is between the ‘good’ city and the ‘evil’ city, and the ‘different states of mind’ represented by these city types. Karl G. Fredriksson, ‘Den goda och den onda staden: Ett försök till en kriminalromanens psykologi’, 90-tal, 4 (1991), 32–7 (34). Wendelius, Rationalitet och kaos, p. 75. Ibid. Hausladen similarly notes how Stockholm has changed ‘from some indeterminate idyllic past’ (Hausladen, Places for Dead Bodies, p. 106). Geherin, Scene of the Crime, p. 164. Young, Imagining Crime, p. 85. The city as readable space has also been discussed by, for example, David Frisby, Cityscapes and Modernity: Critical Explorations (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), p. 54; Dana Brand, ‘From the flâneur to the detective: interpreting the city of Poe’, in T. Bennett (ed.), Popular Fiction: Technology, Ideology Production, Reading (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 220–37. Young, Imagining Crime, p. 86. Ibid., p. 90. Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, The Terrorists, trans. J. Tate (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), p. 75. Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, Terroristerna (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1975), p. 177 (the quotation is missing from Tate’s translation, as are the quotations in the following notes when the Swedish original is referenced). Sjöwall and Wahlöö, The Terrorists, p. 127. Ibid., p. 44. Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, Roseanna, trans. L. Roth (London: Fourth Estate, 2011), p. 11. Wendelius, Rationalitet och kaos, p. 71; Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, Det slutna rummet (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1972).

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Sjöwall and Wahlöö, Terroristerna, p. 77; Sjöwall and Wahlöö, The Terrorists, p. 144. Sjöwall and Wahlöö, Terroristerna, p. 242. Sjöwall and Wahlöö, The Terrorists, p. 131. Sjöwall and Wahlöö, Terroristerna, p. 198. The king referred to, Gustaf VI Adolf, uncle of the current King Carl Gustaf XVI, died in 1973. Young, Imagining Crime, p. 85. Lundin, The Swedish Crime Story, p. 48. Wendelius, Rationalitet och kaos, pp. 107–8. Geherin, Scene of the Crime, p. 163. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Hogarth, 1985), p. 239. For the dream of the city as a place where the individual could become successful and part of something new, modern and fashionable, see also Mary Evans, The Imagination of Evil: Detective Fiction and the Modern World (London and New York: Continuum, 2009), pp. 43, 77–8. Bergman, ‘Beyond Stieg Larsson’; Sara Kärrholm, ‘Swedish queens of crime: the art of self-promotion and the notion of feminine agency – Liza Marklund and Camilla Läckberg’, in A. Nestingen and P. Arvas (eds), Scandinavian Crime Fiction (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011), pp. 131–47 (p. 133). Marklund’s series about Bengtzon includes nine novels to date, the latest being Du gamla, du fria (Thou ancient, thou free (also the title of the Swedish national anthem), 2011). Horisont, D. von Horn (ed.) (Malmö: Bertmarks förlag, 1997), p. 205. The English edition of Marklund’s novel contains a map of central Stockholm where all the important locations of the novel are marked. See Liza Marklund, The Bomber, trans. N. Smith (London: Corgi Books, 2011), p. 6. The original Swedish novel contains no such map, as the Swedish readers are assumed to be familiar with the layout of the capital. Similarly, Stockholm maps have been added also to some of the English editions of Stieg Larsson’s novels. Johan R. Norberg, Idrottens väg till folkhemmet: Studier i statlig idrottspolitik 1913–1970 (Stockholm: SISU Idroattsböcker, 2004), pp. 82–5. Maureen T. Reddy notes that in crime fiction with feminist ambitions, it is common that when the villain is a woman, she is ‘trying to end or avenge her own victimisation’: Maureen T. Reddy, ‘Women detectives’, in M. Priestman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 191–207 (p. 198). In the later novels, however, Bengtzon’s relationships, both with her family and in the workplace, get increasingly complicated. Nevertheless, despite becoming increasingly lonely and eccentric, Bengtzon has remained an important feminist presence in Swedish crime fiction. Marklund, The Bomber, p. 454. Ibid., p. 455. Ibid., p. 469. Ibid., p. 475. Geherin, Scene of the Crime, p. 163; Young, Imagining Crime, p. 85. Quoted in Barry Forshaw, Death in a Cold Climate: A Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 90. Sjöwall and Wahlöö have explained how they wanted to use the crime genre in order to explore and expose the shortcomings of the Swedish welfare state (Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, ‘Kriminalromanens förnyelse’, Jury, 1/1 (1972), 9–11 (9–10).

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Marklund, The Bomber, p. 459. Gillian Mary Hanson, City and Shore: The Function of Setting in the British Mystery (Jefferson and London: McFarland, 2004), pp. 5–6. Marklund, The Bomber, p. 447. Priscilla L. Walton and Manina Jones, Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hardboiled Tradition (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1999), p. 4. Bergman, ‘The well-adjusted cops’, pp. 38–9. Also see Kerstin Bergman, ‘Lisbeth Salander and her Swedish crime fiction “sisters”: Stieg Larsson’s hero in a genre context’, in D. King and C. L. Smith (eds), Men Who Hate Women and Women Who Kick Their Asses: Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy in Feminist Perspective (Nashville: Vanderbilt Uni­versity Press, 2012), pp. 135–44. Jens Lapidus, Easy Money, trans. A. von Arbin Ahlander (London: Macmillan, 2012), p. 318. Lars-Inge Svartenbrandt and Clark Olofsson are two of Sweden’s most notorious criminals. Svartenbrandt began robbing banks in the early 1960s, and is still active when not in prison – he has spent more than forty years in Swedish prisons. See ‘Lars-Inge Svartenbrandt’, Nationalencyklopedin, http://www.ne.se/lars-inge-svartenbrandt (accessed 14 March 2012). Olofsson was charged in 1966 with the murder of a police officer, and has since been sentenced to more than fifty years in prison for different violent crimes. See ‘Clark Olofsson’, Nationalencyklopedin, http://www.ne.se/clark-olofsson (accessed 14 March 2012). Forshaw, Death in a Cold Climate, p. 5. Bergman, ‘Beyond Stieg Larsson’, passim. Geherin, Scene of the Crime, p. 161. In Livet deluxe, the main crime boss is killed, and eventually his daughter takes over and runs the business. Most writers setting their crime novels in Stockholm spread their plots throughout the city. There are also authors who have chosen specific districts as their ‘territories’, for example Carin Gerhardsen with her Hammarby series (2008–), or Lars Bill Lundholm who places each novel of his series in a different area of Stockholm, something that is also reflected in the titles of his novels: Östermalmsmorden (‘The Östermalm murders’; 2002), Södermalmsmorden (‘The Södermalm murders’; 2003), Kungsholmsmorden (‘The Kungsholmen murders’; 2005) and Gamla Stan-morden (‘The old city murders’; 2009). Lundholm follows Trenter’s example with the setting of Stockholm occupying a promin­ ent place in his novels. Lapidus, Easy Money, p. 394. Ibid., p. 321. Lapidus’s novels have actually proved to be very popular among criminals, as shown by lending statistics from Swedish prison libraries, and he has been criticized for perhaps inspiring rather than discouraging criminal activities. See Stephan Mendel-Enk, ‘Jens Lapidus: Med uppenbar känsla för makt’, Vi läser, 3 (2011), 14–22 (22). Leonard Lutwack, The Role of Place in Literature (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1984), p. 234. Young, Imagining Crime, p. 85.

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Select bibliography Bergman, Kerstin, ‘The well-adjusted cops of the new millennium: neo-romantic tendencies in the Swedish police procedural’, in A. Nestingen and P. Arvas (eds), Scandinavian Crime Fiction (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011), pp. 34–45. ——, ‘Beyond Stieg Larsson: contemporary trends and traditions in Swedish crime fiction’, Forum for World Literature Studies, 4.2 (2012), 291–306. ——, ‘Lisbeth Salander and her Swedish crime fiction “sisters”: Stieg Larsson’s hero in a genre context’, in D. King and C. L. Smith (eds), Men Who Hate Women and Women Who Kick Their Asses: Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy in Feminist Perspective (Nash­ ville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2012), pp. 135–44. Brand, Dana, ‘From the flâneur to the detective: interpreting the city of Poe’, in T. Bennett (ed.), Popular Fiction: Technology, Ideology Production, Reading (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 220–37. Carlsson, Ulf, ‘Stieg Trenter’s 40-tal: Medelklassens hopp och ängslan’, in Karin Nykvist et al. (eds), Möten: Festskrift till Anders Palm (Lund: Anacapri förlag, 2007), pp. 385– 94. Dove, George N., The Police Procedural (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1982). Evans, Mary, The Imagination of Evil: Detective Fiction and the Modern World (London and New York: Continuum, 2009). Forshaw, Barry, Death in a Cold Climate: A Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction (Basing­ stoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Fredriksson, Karl G., ‘Stieg Trenters miljöer’, in B. R. Widerberg et al., En bok om Stieg Trenter (Bromma: Jury, 1982), pp. 64–80. ——, ‘Den goda och den onda staden: Ett försök till en kriminalromanens psykologi’, 90-tal, 4 (1991), 32–7. Frisby, David, Cityscapes and Modernity: Critical Explorations (Cambridge: Polity, 2001). Geherin, David, Scene of the Crime: The Importance of Place in Crime and Mystery Fiction (Jefferson: McFarland, 2008). Hanson, Gillian Mary, City and Shore: The Function of Setting in the British Mystery (Jefferson and London: McFarland, 2004). Hausladen, Gary J., Places for Dead Bodies (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000). Horisont, D. von Horn (ed.) (Malmö: Bertmarks förlag, 1997). Jakubowski, Maxim, ‘Introduction: a sense of place’, in M. Jakubowski (ed.), Following the Detectives: Real Locations in Crime Fiction (London: New Holland, 2010), pp. 12–13. Kärrholm, Sara, Konsten att lägga pussel: Deckaren och besvärjandet av ondskan i folkhemmet (Stockholm and Stehag: Symposion, 2005). ——, ‘Swedish queens of crime: the art of self-promotion and the notion of feminine agency – Liza Marklund and Camilla Läckberg’, in A. Nestingen and P. Arvas (eds), Scandinavian Crime Fiction (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011), pp. 131–47. Lapidus, Jens, Snabba cash (Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 2006). ——, Aldrig fucka upp (Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 2008). ——, Livet deluxe (Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 2011). ––––, Easy Money, trans. A. von Arbin Ahlander (London: Macmillan, 2012). Lundin, Bo, The Swedish Crime Story/Svenska Deckare, trans. A. L. Ringarp, R. A. Wilson and B. Lundin (Bromma: Jury, 1981).

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Kerstin Bergman ——, ‘Harry Friberg, vår vän världsmannen’, in B. R. Widerberg (ed.), Stieg Trenters Stockholm (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1987), pp. 9–17. Lutwack, Leonard, The Role of Place in Literature (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1984). Marklund, Liza, Sprängaren (Stockholm: Piratförtlaget, 1998). ——, The Bomber, trans. N. Smith (London: Corgi Books, 2011). Mendel-Enk, Stephan, ‘Jens Lapidus: Med uppenbar känsla för makt’, Vi läser, 3 (2011), 14–22. Norberg, Johan R., Idrottens väg till folkhemmet: Studier i statlig idrottspolitik 1913–1970 (Stockholm: SISU Idrottsböcker, 2004). Reddy, Maureen T., ‘Women detectives’, in M. Priestman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 191–207. Sjöwall, Maj, and Per Wahlöö,‘Kriminalromanens förnyelse’, Jury, 1/1 (1972), 9–11. ——, Terroristerna (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1975). ——, The Terrorists, trans. J. Tate (New York: Vintage Books, 2010). ——, Roseanna, trans. L. Roth (London: Fourth Estate, 2011). Sommar, Carl Olov, ‘Stieg Trenter som stockholmsskildrare’, in B. Hallerstedt (ed.), Sankt Eriks Årsbok 1984 (Stockholm: Samfundet S:t Erik, 1984), pp. 173–86. Walton, Priscilla L. and Manina Jones, Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-boiled Tradition (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1999). Wendelius, Lars, Rationalitet och kaos: Nedslag i svensk kriminalfiktion efter 1965 (Hedemora: Gidlunds förlag, 1999). Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City (London: Hogarth, 1985). Young, Alison, Imagining Crime: Textual Outlaws and Criminal Conversations (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 1996).

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7 Streets and Squares, Quartiers and Arrondissements: Paris Crime Scenes and the Poetics of Contestation in the Novels of Jean-François Vilar 1

MARGARET ATACK

The epigraph to Jean-François Vilar’s second novel, Passage des singes (1984), is Walter Benjamin’s famous comment on the photographs of Eugène Atget: It is no accident that Atget’s photographs have been likened to those of a crime scene. But isn’t every square inch of our cities a crime scene? Every passer-by a culprit? Isn’t the task of the photographer – descendant of the augurs and haruspices – to reveal guilt and point out the guilty in his pictures?2

Victor Blainville, the reluctant investigator of Vilar’s romans noirs, is a com­ pulsive photographer of Paris who paces its arcades and circulates interminably through its streets and squares on his bike. A former Trotskyist with a Benjaminlike under­standing of the theatricality and performance of history and politics in the image, his encyclopaedic knowledge of Paris’s political and cultural history is fundamental to these novels, which, through Victor’s persona, through the plot­ ting, through the mobilization of history, politics and art, are governed by con­ testation as aesthetic and theme. Vilar weaves some of the key tropes of writing on Paris into his narra­tives and has produced a powerful body of work that illuminates the way Paris can be an integral part of the complex hermeneutic code of the roman noir. Paris is par excellence the city of contestation, of protest, revolt and revolution, with a veritable roll call of dates of violent protest and violent repression: the fall of the Bastille and the Terror in 1789 and 1793; the revolutionary protests of 1830 and 1848; the Commune and its bloody aftermath in the Semaine Sanglante in 1871; the barricades of the liberation in 1944; the demonstrations and mass move­ments of 1934, of the Popular Front, of the Algerian War and May 68. This is a city of a very specific political theatricality being played out in its streets.3 The intel­lectual resonance of these political flashpoints has meant that Paris has become the focal point of philosophical and critical enquiry which has variously encoded Paris as the capital of the nineteenth century, the capital of universal

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human rights, the capital of civilization, the capital of the world and the capital of modernity.4 It has been argued that Paris and crime writing are themselves interdependent. The first detective story, Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Murders in the rue Morgue’ (1841), translated into French by Baudelaire, not only established an important framework of rational investigation and detection with its key values of evidence, visibility and perception,5 it also laid down a marker for the importance of cartographic precision and, quite pleasingly, for those who enjoy the opacity of fiction, to a fictional street connoting France and cadaverousness. The location of the crime scene is structurally important to any crime novel; that the first detective story is set in a fictional street demonstrates the interpenetration of the referential and the symbolic in the genre in which reality is indexed through narrative conventions in order to support a metanarrative of historical or social authenticity. Poe’s story reminds us that function is more important than the referent, a fact exploited with glee by generations of crime writers. Roger Caillois gave a structural role to detective fiction in the forging of the myth of Paris, arguing that Paris took on the mantle of the cities of the ancient world, developing a mythic identity in its own right. In the nineteenth century the city became the urban counterpart of the forests of Fenimore Cooper, alive with potential dangers and obstacles, and a source of potential assistance. Detect­ ive fiction not only brought into focus the mysterious hidden Paris beneath the appar­ent one, it also brought into being the all-conquering hero to unify and master this multifaceted and threatening environment.6 David Platten traced a different history of the judicial, institutional, social, scientific and literary developments that formed the conditions for the emergence of detective fiction in France: The crucial piece of the jigsaw that saw the crime novel emerge from the hybrid form of le roman judiciaire is located in the fast-changing urban environment of the Second Empire. Paris, resculpted by Haussmann and adorned with arcades and emporia, had become a spectacle, a glittering phenomenon that demanded to be interpreted and understood. In this period, the journalist, seen as an essential guide through the labyrinth of this new world, and his cousin the flâneur, the semi-detached observer of city life and aesthetic inspiration to Baudelaire, set about decoding the city. They are joined by a third figure that looms out of the shadows: the detective. All three belong to a new call of knowledge-seekers, interpreters of the new, industrialized, metropolitan world of modernity.7

Streets, therefore, anchor detective stories from their earliest incarnation in the reality of Paris, in its material space. As detective fiction turned towards different models of crime writing, it drew on American hard-boiled, the (English-inspired) Gothic novel, and surrealism’s celebration of the transgressions of insolent crime to produce first le polar, a much more irreverent and violent kind of writing for

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which it is not difficult to produce politicized readings, and then the néo-polar, the overtly political use of crime writing to bring crimes of state and class sharply into focus. But, throughout, the importance of the material realities of location, and of the palimpsestic model of those material realities, layer upon layer to be read and interpreted by the figure of the investigator, never diminishes.8 The investigator has an epistemological as well as a hermeneutic role: Paris is a hieroglyph, and he is in a position of god-like knowledge over it, a street-reader revealing hidden, secret, invisible realities from the visible signs all around. His is a world of traces and of clues to interpret, precisely because they are not appar­ ent to all, precisely because explaining the nature of the environment has to be part of the answers he provides. The large number of early works on the flâneur all stress that he could only belong to Paris.9 Part-investigator, part-witness, drawn to the spectacle of Paris and knowledgeable about its history, Victor Blainville is placed at the intersection of these complex discourses, articulated through an interplay of similarity and difference with the other investigators, such as the news­ paper editor Marc, or the detectives Villon and, later, Laurent. He is a composite figure, a flâneur who extols his passion for la flânerie, but also a badaud, the other legendary Parisian street personage, who stands and stares, in a small group or a large group, at people working, at something happening, at incidents large and small. He is an arpenteur. Arpenteur is to pace, to walk through and to survey. In a no doubt intentional reference to Kafka, Vilar once described his aim as being ‘l’arpenteur de l’état des lieux’ – the surveyor of the state of the premises.10 He is barely an investigator, rather someone who is embarked by force of (narrative) circumstance on a search for an answer; he is a photographer who records every­ thing he sees, but is himself frequently recorded or an object of investigation. And he is a chiffonnier, a rag-picker, in his accumulation of bits and pieces of Paris: shop signs, cafe signs, a Paris bench and other objects bearing the meaning of the ‘piece of disappeared Paris’. He takes them back to his studio, forming a col­ lection of signifying fragments, meaningful pieces of signs that metonymically stand for the greater part they have been torn from, and which in turn represent the coherent Paris of political history of which they are the material traces. Victor’s Trotskyist past and the continuing engagement with politics in the present means his lineage is clearly that of the thematics of protest and revolt that were so central to the renewal of French crime writing after 1968.11 While rural crime fiction has always had a small but real presence,12 in France as elsewhere, crime fiction is primarily a genre of the city, with a particular emphasis in the néo-polar on the harsh setting of the banlieue (housing estates on the periphery of the city).13 Vilar’s texts are, however, grounded firmly within Paris itself and testimony to the extent to which crime writing on Paris is in its own right a signifi­ cant vector of symbolic and imaginary Paris, as can be seen in the large number of noir an­thologies devoted to Paris,14 as well as the mobilization of noir authors to produce photo-texts on Paris such as Vilar’s Paris la nuit (1982), Frédéric Fajardie’s Paris: Rouge et noir (2007) and the series Tourisme et polar to which Vilar contributed a text on the Palais de Chaillot.15

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Paris will never be Paris The extraordinary amount of crime fiction set in Paris does not exist in a vacuum, but is part of an even larger body of literary work devoted to the capital, on which it is grafted, on which it draws and which it reworks. Balzac, Hugo, Sue and Baudelaire are all major stepping stones in the cultural history of representations of Paris, as later are the surrealists.16 And however much the legendary figure of the flâneur anticipates shapes and can be mapped onto the figure of the detective, the detective does not exhaust the potentialities and the transformations of the poets and walkers who have recorded their literary analyses of Paris, such as Le Piéton de Paris by Léon-Paul Fargue (1939) or Aragon’s Paysan de Paris (1926). More recently, the poet and novelist Philippe Delerm produced the photo-text Paris l’instant (2004), combining short pieces of prose and photographs by Martine Delerm. The last piece, entitled ‘En abyme’,17 opens with the words, ‘Paris se regarde’ (Paris is looking at itself), and closes with, ‘Paris ne sera jamais Paris’ (Paris will never be Paris).18 It is devoted to the postcards on the stands which reflect Paris back to itself, which seek to capture the soul, the essence of Paris, but which never do, never can, because for Delerm Paris is a living thing that can never coincide with its representation – it can never ‘be’. There are, however, other ways of reading this gap between sign and its referent. Representation is by definition the realm of what is not, of the unreal. The notion of the immediacy of life escaping the clutches of the photographer’s art iterates a well-established binary, but begs the question: is there such a thing as the immediacy of Paris? As Delerm’s fragments make clear, the city is in fact lived and experienced as an imaginary and symbolic space. There is an analogy here with Deleuze’s comments on the Série noire, a series whose very specific angles of vision, he argues, and whose attitude of derision highlight not the truth of what is being written about, but, for the reader, the absence of truth, the falsity at its core.19 These postcards, tiny fragments of Paris reproducing it in miniature in such proliferation, highlight an absence rather than a reality; photography is a melancholy pursuit inseparable from a sense of loss as the character Dennis Locke in Passage des singes, replicating what he describes as Atget’s obsession to fix and see everything, is well aware.20 Such reflexive awareness, such self-consciousness of those moving through the streets thinking about the spectacle all around them, is often presented as one of the defining characteristics of Paris.21 The 1989 celebration of the bicentenary of the French Revolution also saw the inauguration of the Arche de la Défense, a modern, knowing rejoinder to the Arc de Triomphe, set in a near perfect line (near perfect because the awesome symmetry is only apparent from an ‘off-line’), from the Arc de Triomphe, Place de la Concorde and the Louvre. An earlier com­ petition in 1972 won by Emile Aillaud had proposed the construction of two huge curved buildings each fronted by a single mirror reflecting Paris back to itself: ‘Ville-miroir’ indeed.22

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Le plan de Paris The point of departure for this chapter was the insistent and very detailed use of street names and social geography in Paris crime writing, denoting a particular role for the map of Paris, the plan de Paris. We are so often given a running com­ mentary on the progress of the detective street by street, and Vilar is no exception. The philosopher André Lalande once wrote that there are as many spaces as we have muscles;23 social space is not abstract, timeless and immutable, but forged by use and by movement; space is appropriated in the sense of coming into being through contact with others. Paris is a richly symbolic space, but the multiple, conflicting and diverse trajectories through it are structural to its constitution, and the referential network of street, square, boulevard and passage, is doing more than just setting the scene of the crime. First, one street implies all streets. The use of any street summons up the totality of the mapped space. It is not those streets, it is this street. The very city itself, namely the idea of the city, the knowledge of the city as entity, is interpellated by the naming of the street. So while Jean-Noël Blanc argues, with strong evidence, that the city is effaced in crime writing, having become ‘an uncertain place of uncertainties’, and that the city/town of the polar does not exist as a city: ‘there is no longer a totality . . . just scattered bits’.24 In fact, the omnipresent plan de Paris suggests that this is not the case for Paris. Similarly, the empty desolate spaces he quite rightly identifies as being part of the metaphysical vision of the criminal city, spaces that have no history, are indeed very different from the places and spaces of Paris, steeped in the names of history. In other words the details of route of the investigator or indeed the criminal through Paris is a key part of the creation of Paris as an entity, as a coherent whole. It also has the important function of positioning the implied reader, and interpellating the actual reader, as equally knowing, and as recognizing Paris as knowable. Louis Marin has given some attention to questions of the map and the represen­ tations of the city. Writing about Matthaüs Merian’s plan de la ville (1615), where key Parisian monuments are represented as large three-dimensional buildings on the flat diagrammatic mapped space, he argues that it combines both scientific knowledge and political power: the cartographical representation of Paris affords an abstract overview of the city based on knowledge, while the three-dimensional depiction creates a monumentality grounding the king’s political power.25 The view from above offers the image of the totality, whereas when we look up at the monu­ments, we are positioned at street level, as well as being able to imagine the bird’s-eye view from their top. Using this analogy suggests that the trajectory of the detective/criminal turns the one-dimensionality of the map into the threedimensional materiality of lived space, or rather lived spaces. The classic investigator of crime fiction embodies rationality;26 the maps of Paris connote the rationality of ordered society and institutional process: Paris is one, Paris is knowable. In crime writing, the fixed view of the cartographer is articulated with the street-reader who takes us beyond this abstract uniformity,

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into history and into politics, and indeed into what one might consider the fourth dimension of time; that is to say, the work and traces of time, of wear and renewal, of inscription and marks, leaving the traces of, and creating the representation of, history, through witting and unwitting vectors of memory. The idea of Paris, imaginary Paris, is at the heart of any writing on Paris, but the idea of Paris is also giving it order. This sense of controlling Paris from above, this dominance from above, can be placed at the service of a corrupt criminality in the figure of Fantômas looking down, the master criminal who changes shape and shifts between police and perpetrator, forever uncatchable. There is a similar dominance by the all-powerful police, the forces of (negative) order, who are such a feature of the post-68 crime writing – powerful, cruel, capricious and all pervasive. The ordering of Paris is structural to the narratives. En voie de disparition However much the space of Paris is almost obsessively mapped out and inven­ toried, this does not create a sense of safety or security. Quite the opposite. For analysts of Paris and crime-fiction novelists alike, Paris is being recorded in the face of and against processes of destruction and constant change. It is a city under threat of extinction, and although it is now associated with American­ ization and modernization, this trope has a long history. Baudelaire’s ‘Le Cygne’ is often quoted: ‘Old Paris is no more. The form of a city changes more quickly, alas, than the heart of a mortal.’27 The historian Michelet lamented that‘Paris is no longer Paris’.28 Léon-Paul Fargue’s final section of Le Piéton de Paris, written in 1939, offers a succinct and typical example: ‘Here I am at the end of my senti­ mental journey in a Paris that is no more, in a Paris whose continuations are already reaching us only as memories that are each day more pale.’29 More recently, Léo Malet’s Les Nouveaux Mystères de Paris (1954–9), written arrondissement by arrondissement, are appreciated as records of a Paris that is no more, as Malet himself wrote in his preface to Paris Noir, describing them as ‘archeological novels’, witnesses to the destruction of Paris by the planners.30 Death, destruction and the ruin of Paris are homologous with the murderousness of death and destruction at the heart of urban crime fiction: disappearance, dis­ parition, is one of the terms used for death in French. In the process of demolition and renewal, there is little stress in these texts upon renewal. The city bears traces of the past, or future traces of the past it will become. Paris is lived as loss; we have just the traces of what has gone, or of the violence that has been done, in the name of progress, consumerism, mechanization or Americanization. The landscape of loss and destruction; the order and rationality of geometric, scientific space; the walking trajectory: these are intrinsic features of Parisian crime scenes.

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Jean-François Vilar Jean-François Vilar made a powerful impact as a crime writer in 1982 with C’est toujours les autres qui meurent (Prix Télérama 1982), followed by Passage des singes (Prix du festival policier de Reims 1984). Marie-Claire Bancquart discusses his multilayered Bastille-tango (1986) and Les Exagérés (1989) in her ‘Paris palimp­sestes’ chapter.31 Bastille-tango focuses on a group of Argentinian exiles living near the Bastille who seem to be targeted by a death squad aim­ ing to prevent them from returning to Buenos Aires to testify at the imminent trial of the generals. In Les Exagérés, representations of the Revolution in the wax museums of the Musée Grévin and Madame Tussaud’s and in the remake of a film about the Princesse de Lamballe are the context for disappearances of heads and models from the Musée Grévin, and murderous attacks on the cast of the film. Les Fous de Chaillot (1997), Vilar’s study of the Palais de Chaillot, has been described on a library site as ‘digressions psycho-géographiques’, and psycho­geography forms an integral part of the substance of his playful, intensely political and, towards the end of the sequence, heartbreakingly melancholic novels.32 In the course of a relatively brief writing career, he published seven novels,33 short stories and several Paris and noir-related works until 1997, when he stopped. Given the importance of Marcel Duchamp in his work, it is hard to escape the suspicion that this is a planned enactment of an inachèvement définitif (de­ finitive incompletion), a final joke to share with the informed reader rather than anything more contingent. It is certainly intriguing. Through a website devoted to him and interviews,34 we know that he was a member of the Trotskyist Ligue Com­muniste Révolutionnaire and a journalist at its newpaper Rouge until 1981 when he turned to writing. In January 2010, he posted a message of condolence at the death of Daniel Bensaïd.35 Paris is the frame and the foundation of his crime novels, which are witty, self-reflexive explorations of the genre, combining strong storytelling with reflections on the nature of investigation, and the role of knowledge and per­c eption, applying as much to Paris itself as they do to char­ acters and narrative events. Victor Blainville is Vilar’s investigator, a former extreme-left militant who now earns a living through photography and occasional journalism; he is passionate about his cats (Zinoviev and Kamenev, both female, and the recently arrived Radek, a little male black cat36) and about Paris; has various sexual encounters; keeps very odd hours; seems to drink most of the time, starting with Chablis at breakfast. He is intellectual, disillusioned and cynical about politics but still capable of ethical judgements and actions, still on the left, aware of the marginal and eccentric nature of the life he leads, but usually outflanked in terms of eccentricity by at least one other character in each novel.

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Narrative puzzles The puzzle structure that is key to crime writing is reproduced at every level of Vilar’s fictions: puzzles about crimes, about identity, about Paris, about history and about puzzles. His first novel, C’est toujours les autres qui meurent, is a ludic néo-polar, deeply embedded in the genre and in knowledge of and writing on Paris. Perec’s caveat about jigsaws at the beginning of Life A User’s Manual (1978), a metacommentary on the novel itself, seems very apt: Every move the puzzler makes, the puzzle-maker has made before; every piece the puzzler picks up and picks up again, and studies and strokes, combination he tries and tries a second time, every blunder and every insight, each hope and each dis­ couragement have all been designed, calculated and decided by the other.37

For, in addition to the proliferation of explicit references, the reader is constantly being ambushed by further, more obscure, ones. The figure of the author as arch manipulator always seems to be lying in wait. As with Perec, there are hints too of a more serious story being threaded through the enigmatic games. Puzzles, like crime novels, operate in both space and time, as captured in Léo Malet’s 1943 poem: ‘Roman policier’. A surrealist before he started writing detect­ ive fiction, he appears in Nous cheminons (1993) as Léon Malet (his real name); ‘Roman policier’ is one of his Poèmes surréalistes: A final word is a bird flying black and the devil always at the Y of the pathways where the isolated house with the Z of its green shutters constitutes the X of the human problem.38

Life A User’s Manual famously closes with Bartlebooth holding the final piece of the jigsaw in his dead hand, a W shape poised over an X shape. A neat Agatha Christie-like solution, where crime and criminal fit together like a glove, is not to be found in Vilar either. C’est toujours les autres qui meurent problematizes the crime and the criminal through its fascination with dummies and simulacra and the deployment of Duchamp’s writings and creations which themselves put into question the nature of art. This is echoed through the narrative: Malet’s ‘l‘Y des chemins’ is a signpost to the importance of trajectory to fiction itself. Vilar plays constantly with the tension between narrative order and logic on the one hand, and chance, coincidence, ‘cut-ups’ and fragments, on the other; not least in the acting out of Duchamp’s scenarios. The title is taken from the epitaph Marcel Duchamp wrote for his gravestone: ‘Besides, it’s always other people who die.’39 The importance of Duchamp’s work as generator of the text of the novel is thus set out from the beginning. Duchamp’s mastery of an aesthetic of contestation, through his ready-mades such as ‘Fontaine’

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(the urinal) signed Richard Mutt, his complex wordgames, his paintings and in­ stallations, is legendary. He placed disruption and subversion of normality and convention at the heart of his work, in punning games on the forms and meanings of words, in the adoption of a female alter ego Rrose Sélavy (‘c’est la vie’/that’s life), in dismantling the structures of artistic perception and observation only to rebuild them in complex installations such as The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even and Etant donnés 1. Le Gaz d’éclairage 2 La Chute d’eau (Given: 1 Illuminating Gas 2 Waterfall).40 The novel opens with Victor in the Passage du caire, intrigued by a female shop dummy displayed in very provocative fashion, lying on its back, legs splayed, head hidden under a mass of hair; he has to scratch at the dirty shop window to try and see it properly and reassure himself that it is really a dummy. The dummy is holding a gas light, and behind is landscape and a waterfall. Etant donnés was itself very difficult to make out, as the viewer had to peer through a small hole in a door;41 both the installation and this opening scene are enacting the voyeurism of the spectator and detective/reader. Victor realizes quickly what the reference is, and that he is peering at a corpse, as does his counterpart, the cultivated detective Villon who carries the wearisome burden of being the improbable figure of a flic de gauche (a left-wing cop). It turns out to be the corpse of Yvonne Enamelered42 and Victor is drawn into the world of the bookshop seller Rose (surname, Sélavy, who is always wearing her felt hat) and Yvonne’s brother Francis, who runs a small theatre company and who also turns up dead (hanged, dressed as a woman).43 Rose is The Bride, the first of Vilar’s femmes fatales, mad women who at times explicitly recall Breton’s Nadja. Rose is surrounded by her Bachelors, a group of men who in Duchamp’s notes are described as moules mâlic (malic/male moulds), ‘a cemetery of empty uniforms’ and inflated by laughing gas. They also have a mission, and the novel ends with a confrontation between the police, led by Villon, and the Bachelors at Beaubourg, the Musée d’art moderne, where, having taken all the paintings hostage, they demand that the outside escalator be converted to a waterfall, that all the urinals in all national museums be replaced by the model signed Richard Mutt, and that a moustache and goatee beard be drawn ‘définitivement et une fois pour toutes’ (definitively and once and for all) onto Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. In this novel, the use of pseudonyms is inevitably read in the context of Duchamp’s enjoyment of word games and multiple identities, though in fact this continues, vertiginously, throughout Vilar’s work. Victor and Francis know each other from their militant years as Samuel and Walter respectively: Victor thus shares a militant past with Vilar. However, Vilar is not his real name either, but his political alias in his militant years, which explains no doubt the reference to him in the Temps modernes issue on the noir as ‘answering to the name of JeanFrançois Vilar’.44 Vilar was apparently chosen in homage to the cultural and theatre director Jean Vilar.45 ‘Blainville’ is taken from the birthplace of Duchamp in Normandy; Henri-Pierre Roché wrote an unfinished novel about Duchamp, call­ ing his hero ‘Victor’;46 the policeman Villon obviously recalls François Villon, the sixteenth-century poet (and criminal, the veracity of whose surname is also in

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doubt), but Duchamp’s brother Gaston, also a painter, took the name Jacques Villon in homage to the poet. In Djemila (1988), the only novel where Victor does not appear, the anti-hero (shabby male intellectual chic) is François Sinclair, a famous university lecturer in his sixties, who fought in the Resistance and in Algeria during the War of Independence. Sinclair has kept his Resistance pseudonym: le com­mand­ ant Sinclair was the writer and activist Maurice Clavel’s name in the Resistance. In Vilar’s last novel, Nous cheminons entourés de fantômes aux fronts troués, the title is a quotation from Trotsky’s wife Natalia (referring to Stalin’s trials and executions): ‘We wandered about in our little tropical garden in Coyoacan, sur­ rounded by distant ghosts, each with a hole in his forehead.’47 Victor has been freed after three years being held as a hostage with Alex Katz, who dies or is murdered, run down by a car soon after their release. While being caught up in this, Victor is also reading the diary written by Alex’s father Alfred, a Trotskyist and surrealist, who recounts details of the 1938 Surrealist exhibition and the com­plex murderous confrontations between Trotskyists and Stalinists in Paris, including his dealings with Jacques Mornard aka Ramon Mercader, Trotsky’s assassin. The Holocaust, and Jewish experiences in Prague, where the novel ends, are major elements of the plot. Alfred Katz seems to be a fictional name one can take at face value (with an internal play on ‘cats’), but the mother of Alfred Dreyfus was called Rachel Katz. Is this a reference? In the same novel, the police­ man Laurent keeps referring to Victor as ‘monsieur Victor’; Grémillon’s film, L’Etrange monsieur Victor, appeared in 1938. Is this another clue to pursue? In other words, there is no stability to the naming process in these novels, and no feeling of ever ‘touching bottom’ or ‘terra firma’, where the play of signifiers would stop. Everything is suspect. Unsure whether these references are coincidental or planned, the reader turned indefatigable investigator is led into reproducing a central enigma of the texts: accident or design? The same phenomenon of proliferating and saturating meanings is to be found at the level of the narrative processes themselves. The tension between narrative order and logic and the random and contingent is fundamental to Duchamp, explored across literature – Borges, the Sartre of la Nausée, and the Oulipians Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec immediately spring to mind – and one that is constantly foregrounded here. The multiple movements of the figure of the flâneur are both random and orientated at the same time; the term dérives recurs often, meaning aimless, unguided movements or swerves, but they cannot escape being narrative pathways, ‘l’Y des chemins’. The scriptwriter of the film (itself a remake) in Les Exagérés pins five different endings to the studio wall; Victor describes his pleasures at creating different pathways through the Musée Grévin and its tableaux. The narrative interplay between literal and diegetic pathways is another ludic route to be exploited: in Bastille-tango, the chapter headings – Cour de janvier, Cour de février and so on – are references to the inner courtyards of the Passage du Cheval-blanc just off the place de la Bastille where the action is in part taking place; the months of the action in 1984 are of course the same as the courtyard

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names, the coincidences and patterning of dates and almanachs being as much a feature of these narratives as the multiple histories of individual spaces. Victor also discusses with his friend Stan the layout of the different tableaux in the Musée Grévin’s Revolution Room in Les Exagérés to try to identify a way of under­ standing what is going on around him. He draws a plan of the room, explaining: ‘Everything was coming from the museum, from this room, the matrix: first the dis­ appearance of the head. Totally inexplicable, rather poetic. It was galivanting around Paris, that’s its destiny. But what logically happens next?’ ‘Does there absolutely have to be a logic?’ asked Stan.48

In function of the tableaux and the various lodgings and homes of the cast and crew (one runs the café Mirabeau in a road Mirabeau used to frequent, another lives where Danton did), Victor maps out a sequence, from the Chaussée d’Antin to the rue des Cordeliers (Marat’s flat). ‘Is it convincing?’ Stan asks. ‘It might be’, replies Victor. Indeed it might, given that this is the sequence of the chapter head­ ings of the novel itself, up to the final one: ‘Cut’! The shuffling of the material, like a deck of cards, to produce a logic, operates in Bastille-tango with Victor being given a range of fragments by Jessica to tell her story in the newspaper, which by implication is the story we are reading, and Stevenson, his grandmother’s now elderly friend who worked in the Musée Grévin, bequeathing to Victor a box of his grandmother’s affairs, suggesting the order Victor will put them in will make more sense than any he could have come up with.49 Majastre points out that Duchamp’s ready-made is the model for Vilar’s use of Duchamp’s art and sayings which operate in their turn as ready-mades for his narrative.50 There is obvious enjoyment in the ‘cut’ of the cinematic process in both Les Exagérés and Etat d’urgence (1985) (where film director Adrien Leck is in Venice making a documentary about the disappearing city) and the play of con­ tinuity and discontinuity it allows, complemented by the references to Burroughs’s ‘cut-up’ methodology in Nous cheminons. Narrative is a kind of puzzle or game, as with French children’s board game le jeu de l’oie (the goose game), progressing through squares on the throw of the dice; Victor frequently feels he is back on the case départ (square one). Andrea Goulet has analysed the narrative and spatial trajectories deployed by Butor in L’emploi du temps (1956),51 and Vilar is doing something similar not only with Paris, but with multiple other kinds of narrative material, as on the wall of his dark room, or later of his studio, his ‘puzzle mural’52 where he pins his photos and other bits and pieces generated by and relevant to the situation, operating as archive and matrix of the story. Paris puzzles Vilar’s fictions deploy many of the tropes typical of writing on Paris, such as topographical precision, the destruction of Paris and the ‘villages’ of Paris,

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integrating them dynamically into the diegesis. He lives in the quai des Jemmapes in the XIe, where the canal St Martin resurfaces, near the Place de la République and the Place de la Bastille, in the heart of revolutionary Paris. This is his ‘pays parisien’, his village53 and the reader becomes very familiar with his quartier and its features: the canal, the statues (of Frédérick Lemaître, the former actor, and ‘La Grisette’, the young working-class girl featuring in so many nineteenth-century novels, on either side of the rue Faubourg du Temple), the cafes; it is an area steeped in popular and political history.54 For example, Lemaître was a famous actor in the ‘Boulevard du Crime’, as the road of theatres, the Boulevard du Temple, was known (most of which was demolished in Haussman’s reimagining of Paris and the extension of the Place de la République). Frédérick was his stage, not his real name, and he was one of the major characters in the recreation of the area in Marcel Carné’s Enfants du paradis (1945). Deploying map, reference books, history books and google to explore the references and hidden codes of the narrative, the fascination with Paris and narrative of both Perec and Queneau seems very near as the reader chases Victor – who himself is frequently researching in libraries – and the encyclopaedic knowledge of the elusive and anonymous author figure behind the scenes. ‘Victor loved urban games’, comments Adrien Leck.55 Queneau and Perec are both known for their erudite but popular games involving Paris. For nearly two years in the 1930s Queneau wrote ‘Connaissezvous Paris?’, a daily column setting three questions about the history or politics of Paris and its streets and squares.56 Perec’s weekly Paris game for Telerama57 included all kinds of word games on the names of streets, as well as questions about Paris, Paris crossword puzzles, and invited answers on all sorts of arcane but logical links between streets, such as which itinerary will take you from one named street to another, involving at least six streets starting with the same letter? Or, twenty-nine Paris streets are named after someone called Jules; what is the profession of the fifteen Jules listed below? Victor is not always obliging with his information – when Laurent, the policeman in Nous Cheminons, produces a list of streets that he is investigating as possibly sinister, related to the possible killing of Victor’s fellow hostage, and expounds in great detail and with great Parisian erudition as to which streets these coded names, such as ‘la rue de la Transfusiondu-sang’ could refer to, Victor inwardly mocks him. These are the streets of the ‘ville surréaliste’ of the 1938 exhibition. Victor does not enlighten him for some considerable time. Word games and an enjoyment of language are part of the stock-in-trade of French detective fiction. Titles in particular have a special resonance and it is impossible not to smile at Malet’s Micmac moche au boul’mich (1957) (shabby carry-on in the Boulevard St Michel), for example. Paris as capital city and capital, etymologically related to head, are also producers of narrative games: one of Victor’s favourite local cafes, until it closes, is ‘La Capitale’. To the body with the head that could not be seen in C’est toujours les autres can be added a long cortege of bodies without heads or heads without bodies, including the models of the (missing) guillotined heads in Les Exagérés and the decapitated corpse of the

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Trotskyist Rudolf Klement fished out of the Seine in Nous cheminons. A jeu de massacre, the fate of the Bachelors at the hands of the police, is metaphorically a massacre, but literally a kind of coconut shy where heads are knocked off their perches. As with his use of Duchamp, Vilar deploys his complex knowledge of Paris as a mise en scène, a theatrical production, most particularly in Les Exagérés where Paris is both the historical reality and the film set, with a concomitant exploration of the contradictions between art, artifice and referentiality. Victor’s erudition, his ability to reveal the previous incarnations of streets and buildings and display their multiple identities in time, reveals a Paris that is as much pseud­ onymous as it is palimpsestic. The puzzle games extend also to the totality of the city itself in a variety of ways. Marti in Bastille-tango is an artist creating maps of imaginary towns, culmin­ ating in one that merges Paris and Buenos Aires laid over a female body.58 Villon, on leave from the police after some disgrace, spends most of Bastille-tango pursuing his way through a labyrinthine city on a computer game. Etat d’urgence is a tale of the Venice Carnaval and the terrorism of the Red Brigades. Adrien Leck, the narrator, is fascinated by the maquette of Venice made by Dr Soto59 which is reproducing every mark and shadow, yet is more perfect than the city itself; ten years in the making, the city has been deteriorating around it: ‘This unfinished model is reproducing a city which already no longer exists, which will never exist again.’60 Soto is in some respects another Victor (and certainly another Duchamp in his method), in his palimpsestic accumulations to reinvent the city; on the un­ finished parts of his model, the plywood is: ‘covered with annotations, and numbers referring to other inscriptions, to other numbers listing city maps, drawings, photo­ graphs, documents of all kinds which on the walls of the attic. All Venice was there, or would be some day or other.’61 Soto has pulled off a magical triumph of erudition and spectacle – unsurprisingly, thoughts of Victor are not far from Leck’s mind: ‘I remembered a story that Victor had told me one day about another archivist, Eugène Atget, a photographer. He had also wanted, for the Paris of the turn of the century, to reproduce everything, to fix everything. Before the destruction.’62 Neither the maquette nor its maker survive this story of murders and terrorist attacks. Victor, who visits during the filming, is in his element with all the stray cats, and Venice functions perfectly as another city of terror and death with the spectactor/director trying to puzzle out yet again the differences between simulation and reality in the Carnaval’s theatrical displays of murder and horror. Paris crime scenes Paris operates as the crime scene par excellence at many levels: this is a city steeped in a history of massacres and blood63 which were horrifying at the time and which remain ever-present, for Victor at least, as he recalls scenes of the Revolution and the Commune, and places of execution such as the site of the gibbet of Montfaucon

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near the canal. Paris is not only a scene of violent death, but also a space of burial and remembrance, with the city of the dead in the Père Lachaise, or the bodies of communards under the Bastille statue, and past conflicts and massacres being recalled in the names of streets, in the buildings, in the monuments. The canal Saint-Martin was once known as the Bief des Trépassés64 and reference is made to drownings of Algerians there in 1961. On the Boulevard Raspail, Victor also thinks to salute the memory of Michel Poiccard, who died there ‘à bout de souffle’ (breathless).65 Paris streets themselves are also dangerous in the present. Victor has a visceral dislike of cars, going everywhere by bicycle or on foot, and the car seems to be the weapon of choice for eliminating people in accidents that time and again turn out to be ‘accidents’. If the motif of disappearance is the central organizing motif of death, murder and crime in Vilar novels, then Paris is clearly a victim of assassination too. In his discussion of ‘murderers of the city’,66 Jean-Noël Blanc suggests that Bastilletango is built upon the nostalgia of the Paris that is dying.67 It certainly is a brutal death: the bulldozers are machines of death,68 particularly so in Bastille-tango as they tear down the old gare de la Bastille and the Paramount cinema to make way for the new opera house. Marie-Claire Bancquart argues that revolutionary Paris is a transparency in Vilar’s novels, a foreign, wounded capital that is laid over our own,69 an image that is especially pertinent to Les Exagérés and its reenactment of the remake of history in the film about the Princesse de Lamballe in 1793, attacked and killed on the street by the crowd, where Victor himself has the part of the revolutionary journalist Hébert, le père Duchesne. One of the political threads of disappearance running through the novels relates to the disappearances of Jews from Paris during the Occupation. The trauma of deportation has often been invoked through a motif of disappearance: Perec’s La Disparition (1969) with its excised ‘e’, or Modiano’s Dora Bruder (1997), where the disappearances of the young runaway Dora culminate in her deportation to Auschwitz. Hélène Berr’s diary, published in 2008, expresses with vehemence the scandal for her at the time of the invisibility of the disappearance of Jews from the streets of Paris.70 There are many references to political ‘disappearances’ in these novels: the ‘disappeared’ of Buenos Aires, and the ‘disappeared’ of Paris, such as Ben Barka in 1965. Through scattered details, a picture slowly builds that deportation and the Holocaust are part of the personal history of many of the characters: after banter between Villon and Victor about his name, Victor reflects: ‘For the rest, it’s my business, and mine alone, how the Blumfelds became the Blain­ villes in the middle of the 1940s.’71 In a different novel, a character, Ruth, gives a very detailed description of her family’s life in Germany at the time of attacks on Jews and their flight. She asks Victor if he understands. If only she knew, is his reaction.72 In Bastille-tango, the disappearances are those of the Argentinians, but Victor is not surprised by them, commenting that he’s always known that people disappear in towns.73 Villon is the same: ‘You believe, to the very last moment, that you can escape the round-up. That’s how people disappear in towns.’74 We learn about the experiences of Villon’s mother during the Occupation: ‘The neighbour

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who hid her, in July 1942, was a good woman who told her she was surprised by the reactions of most people. They were arresting the Jews and no one saw any­ thing. They disappeared and it was as if they had never existed.’75 Alex Katz’s mother dies in deportation.76 We never learn anything about Victor’s mother, and the only mention of his father is being taken by him to the Charonne demonstration in 1962.77 Stories about his grandmother, however, feature prominently in Les Exagérés, including the fact that she came to Paris in the 1930s, and married, but her husband was deported to the camps. Etat d’urgence is set in Venice, where, we are told, the word ‘ghetto’ was coined and Kafka stayed for a short time. The frequent references here to the Holocaust include a terrorist-orchestrated and truly terrifying enactment of a journey to Auschwitz ending in murder for one of the carnaval-goers. The past disappears, people disappear, Paris disappears, and it is the function of Victor to work against this, with his art and his knowledge. ‘“Everything is dis­ appearing. You have to hurry if you want to see anything.” Paul Cézanne quoted by Wim Wenders’ is the epigraph to Etat d’urgence.78 Wenders’s fuller statement is pertinent: Balazs talks about the ability (and the responsibility) of cinema ‘to show things as they are’. And he says cinema can ‘rescue the existence of things’. That’s precisely it. I have another quote, from Cézanne, where he says: ‘Things are disappearing. If you want to see anything, you have to hurry.’ So back to the awful question: why do I make films? Well, because . . . Something happens, you see it happening, you film it as it happens, the camera sees it and records it, and you can look at it again, after­wards. The thing itself may no longer be there, but you can still see it, the fact of its existence hasn’t been lost. The act of filming is a heroic act (not always, not often, but some­ times). For a moment, the gradual destruction of the world of appearances is held up. The camera is a weapon against the tragedy of things, against their disappearing.79

Rescuing the existence of things applies well to Victor: to photograph is to ‘tenir les minutes de la destruction’ (make a record of the destruction) of the Bastille station.80 The process of rescuing often entails a repetition, a performance, such as the exact duplication of Atget’s shots.81 Throughout the novels, the remakes of history such as wax models in museum, the filming on the streets themselves are articulated with the performance of criminality and the theatricality of the crime scene and violence. The original wax heads of Tussaud were cast from guillotined heads of the dead. Life and death are in a constant macabre dance of art and artifice, of trompe l’œil and illusion, as are murders and accidents. Crimes are ontologically and epistemologically put into question because they are continually being erased. Alex Katz is run over: accident or murder? Victor witnessed it: I don’t know if it was a murder or a banal accident. There are no traces left. There are only the witness statements, all more or less contradictory. In a few months, in a

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In Les Exagérés, Victor had reflected that: ‘Images are always a crime and a mourning at the same time.’83 Rejecting the view that ‘crime scenes know how to make us forget them’,84 he believes that: ‘If you hang around them, you can feel that it was there. Just near. It takes hardly anything for the scene to be reconsti­ tuted. A few signs are enough.’85 He is, then, driven by fixing the crime scene: repetition and reconstitution can be a kind of connection; Victor hails the famous bougé (blurring) in Atget’s photos, the traces of people moving too fast for them to be clearly seen, as the most moving part. In the rue de Lacretelle, he experi­ ences ‘that intoxicating, powerful feeling, in spite of how few tangible signs there were, that “something has happened here”’.86 Soto’s maquette has the same effect on Adrien Leck: the meticulous recreation of Venice, with every worn mark of the passage of time inscribed, makes him feel that he only had to lift the roofs of the houses to discover ‘flats, rooms, furniture, and the very tiniest dead traces of all these absent lives’.87 In re-creation can be felt the emotional charge of connection, as the traces of absence and the reality of loss become tangible. Contestation: c’est la vie Didier Daeninckx’s contribution to Paris: rive glauque (1998), ‘Passage d’enfer’, reads like a rather barbed response to Vilar: it is May 1998, and a group of soixantehuitards gather in the Passage d’enfer to celebrate the anniversary. The character Victor is a ghostwriter, much exercised by the fact that his latest ghosted work is not only having a huge success, but is claimed as her own by the ‘author’. These old politicos, now all well established and successful, nearly cause a riot by their drunken night-time singing of the Internationale outside in the passage waking up all and sundry who react with violence. So much for politics. The sting in the tail is the discovery by the hostess the next morning of a hanged corpse in her bathroom, who she recognizes after a moment as ‘the guy who was too quiet and about whom she knew nothing, not even his name. Victor had dragged him behind him all evening, like a ball and chain.’88 The ghostwriter has his own anonymous ghost, with more than a hint that he was too concerned with his own language games to notice the real pain beside him. If the suggestion is that Vilar’s novels have substituted style for substance, and language games for politics, then it is missing the point. Certainly, revolution­ ary politics is in the past in these novels, yet contestation and violence in the present is what constitutes life. Victor describes the city where he will be taken hostage as a city in the middle of a civil war as a living city.89 In an article on Malet, Vilar agrees Paris has become disfigured, but this is also the city of Malet’s delinquents and pickpockets: ‘At least it’s alive, it’s moving, it’s quivering.’90

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Moreover, reconstruction is not pale imitation or superficial simulacrum, but a real means of grappling with the pain of irreparable, violent loss. Vilar’s con­tri­ bution to crime writing is to harness a genre, its codes and constraints, to hitch it to the codes and constraints of the writing on France’s capital city, and to take it on the journey of the thematic, performative and, indeed, jubilant disruption involved in bringing to life our silent companions, the ever-present ghosts of the crime scenes of Paris.

Notes I am grateful to my colleague Russell Goulbourne for his most helpful comments on an early draft of this chapter.  2 Walter Benjamin, ‘Little history of photography’, in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings et al., vol. 2, 1927–34 (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 527. (Published translations are formally acknowledged; all other translations are my own.)  3 See Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Paris as Revolution: Writing the Nineteenth-century City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).  4 See, for example, W. Benjamin, ‘Paris capital of the 19th century’, Reflections Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. E. Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), pp. 146–62; Patrice Higonnet, Paris Capital of the World, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2002).  5 See Andrea Goulet, Optiques: The Science of the Eye and the Birth of Modern French Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).  6 Roger Caillois, ‘Paris, mythe moderne’, in Le Mythe et l’homme (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), pp. 150–71.  7 David Platten, ‘The emergence of detective fiction in France’, in Claire Gorrara (ed.), French Crime Fiction (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), pp. 19–20.  8 See Karl Stierle, ‘Le Détective dans la jungle des signes urbains’, in La Capitale des signes: Paris et ses discours, trans. Marianne Rocher-Jacquin (Paris: Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2001), pp. 341–62.  9 See, for example, Richard D. E. Burton, The Flâneur and his City: Patterns of Daily Life in Paris 1815–1851 (Durham: University of Durham, 1994). 10 In ‘L’Effet de réel’, directed by Pierre-André Sauvageot, extract available at: http:// pa.sauvageot.free.fr/ (accessed 22 May 2012). The land surveyor in Kafka’s The Castle is translated as ‘L’arpenteur’. 11 See also Margaret Atack, ‘Le néo-polar: behind enemy lines’, in May 68 in French Fiction and Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), chapter 7; Le Polar: entre critique social et désenchantement, Mouvement social, 15/16, mai-août 2001; Anne Collovald and Eric Neveu, ‘Le néo-polar: du gauchisme politique au gauchisme littéraire’, Sociétés et représentations, 11 (2001), 77–93; Kristin Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 40–2 and 195–9, on Vilar and ’68, and particularly her ‘Parisian noir’, Literary History 41/1 (winter 2010), 95–109, where she discusses the figure of Victor and Bastille-tango in the context of the political and historiographical dynamics of le néo-polar; Suzanne Lee, ‘May 68, radical politics and the néo-polar’, in Gorrara (ed.), French Crime Fiction, pp. 71–85; Claire Gorrara, The  1

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Roman Noir in Post-war French Culture: Dark Fictions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Anissa Belhadjin, ‘From politics to the roman noir’, South Central Review, special issue edited by James Golsan and Richard J. Golsan, Hard-boiled, 27, 1/2 (spring and summer, 2010), 61–81. See, for example, Claude Aveline, Le Jet d’eau (Paris: Emile-Paul frères, 1947), and the now considerable oeuvre of Pierre Magnan, set in Provence. For a comprehensive study, see Jean-Noël Blanc, Polarville: images de la ville dans le roman policier (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1991). Gang [Alain Dugrand and Hervé Prudon] (eds), Paris noir: recueil de nouvelles policières (Paris: Le Dernier Terrain Vague, 1980), and, in the ‘Littératures/Romans d’une ville’ collection published by Autrement, Paris, rive noire (1996), Paris, rive glauque (1998) and Paris, rive chaude (2000) devoted to women writers. In Black Exit to 68 (Montreuil: PEC/ La Brèche, 1988), most are centred on May 68 in Paris, including a contribution by Vilar, ‘Karl R. est de retour’ (Karl R. [Radek] is back). Maxim Jakubowski edited an Englishlanguage collection, Paris Noir: Capital Crime Fiction (London: Serpents Tail, 2007). Marc Gantier and Frédéric H. Fajardie, Paris: Rouge et noir (Paris: Editions Edite, 2007); Vilar, Les Fous de Chaillot (Paris: Editions Baleine, 1997). See, for example, Jean-Pierre A. Bernard, Les Deux Paris : les représentations de Paris dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2004); Marie-Claire Bancquart, Paris des surréalistes (Paris: Editions de la Différence, 2004). From ‘mise en abyme’, meaning reproduction in miniature of a motif. Philippe Delerm, Paris l’instant (livre de poche edn; Paris: Fayard, 2002), pp. 153–4. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Philosophie de la série noire’, Poétique du polar, Roman, 24 (1988), 43–7. Jean-François Vilar, Passage des singes (Paris: Presses de la Renaissance, 1984), pp. 244–5. See, for example, Evelyne Cohen, ‘Paris narcisse’, Paris dans l’imaginaire national de l’entre-deux-guerres (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1999), pp. 194–213; and Christophe Prochasson, Paris 1900: Essai d’histoire culturelle (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1999), chapter 1: ‘Un Narcissisme capital’. ‘Paris is the city of mirrors’: Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 924. André Lalande, La Raison et les normes (Paris: Hachette, 1948), p. 36. Blanc, Polarville, p. 59. See Louis Marin, ‘La Ville dans sa carte et son portrait’, De La Représentation (Paris: Gallimard/Le Seuil, 1994), pp. 204–18; Frédéric Pousin, ‘La Ville représentée: objet historique et sémiologique’, in F. Pousin and S. Robin (eds), Signes, histoire, fictions: autour de Louis Marin (Paris: Editions Arguments, 2004), pp. 85–99. See Siegfried Kracauer, Le Roman policier (Paris: Petite Bibliothèque Payot, 2001). ‘Le vieux Paris n’est plus. La forme d’une ville / change plus vite, hélas, que le cœur d’un mortel.’ The vieux Paris refers to the small-scale Paris of little streets, which is so often set in opposition to the monumental, official Paris, and not just from the left. Vieux Paris is championed by the right as an authentically pre-republican city, while on the left, it is the city of the people, the working people or peuple de Paris, or hot bed of revolution, informing also of the tensions between the west, the districts of the bourgeoisie and the popular districts of the east. See Bernard, Les Deux Paris. Quoted in Giovanni Macchia, Paris en ruines, trans. Paul Bédarida (Paris: Flammarion, 1985), p. 376.

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‘Me voici au terme de mon voyage sentimental et pittoresque dans un Paris qui n’est plus, dans un Paris dont les prolongements ne nous parviennent déjà plus que sous forme de souvenirs chaque jour plus pâles’: Léon-Paul Fargue, Le Piéton de Paris suivi de D’après Paris (1939; Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 185. Léo Malet, ‘et si la liberté incendiait le front de Seine?’: Gang, Paris Noir: recueil de nouvelles policières, pp. 6–7. Laurent Bourdelas discusses this theme more generally in Malet’s work in Le Paris de Nestor Burma: l’occupation et les « Trente glorieuses » de Léo Malet (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007). See also Gantier et Fajardie, Rouge et noir, pp. 122 and 124. Marie-Claire Bancquart, Paris dans la littérature française après 1945 (Paris: La Différence, 2006). http://pmb.biblio.free.fr/opac_css/index.php?lvl=coll_see&id=477 (accessed 14 July 2011). C’est toujours les autres qui meurent (CT) (Paris: Fayard, 1982), page references here to J’ai Lu edition, Passage des singes (PS), Etat d’urgence (EU) (Paris: Presses de la Renaissance, 1985), page references J’ai Lu edition, Djemila (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1988), Bastille-tango (BT) (Paris: Presses de la Renaissance, 1986), page references Actes Sud edition, Les Exagérés (LE) (Paris: Seuil Points, 1989), Nous cheminons entourés de fantômes aux fronts troués (NC) (Paris: Seuil, 1993). See Passage Jean-François Vilar, http://passagejfv.eklablog.com (accessed 1 July 2011); Christine Brouillet, ‘J.-F. Vilar de la nuit: entrevue de Jean-François Vilar’, Nuit blanche, le magazine du livre, 26 (1986–7), 56–8, http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/20641ac (accessed 14 July 2011). See also biographical details in Black Exit to 68, p. 206. Posted 12 January 2010 on the Bella Ciao site to ‘Cher Daniel, cher Jebracq’, the latter being the pseudonym Bensaïd wrote under: http://bellaciao.org/fr/spip.php?article96808 (accessed 8 June 2011). All names of Bolshevik revolutionaries, all pseudonyms. Georges Perec, La Vie mode d’emploi (livre de poche edn; Paris: Hachette, 1978), p. 18; idem, Life A User’s Manual, trans. David Bellos (London: Collins Harvill, 1987), xvii. ‘Un dernier mot / c’est un oiseau volant noir / et le diable toujours à l’Y des chemins / où la maison isolée avec le Z de ses volets verts / constitue l’X du problème humain’: Léo Malet, Poèmes surréalistes 1930–1945 (Lausanne: Alfred Eibel, 1975), p. 67. ‘D’ailleurs, c’est toujours les autres qui meurent.’ A very helpful presentation of The Bride Stripped Bare and Duchamp’s notes can be found at the beginning of the article by Jennifer Mundy, ‘An unpublished drawing by Duchamp: hell in Philadelphia’ at http://www.scribd.com/doc/37173471/DuchampLitanies-the-Bride-Stripped (accessed 7 July 2011). See illustration 8.2: ‘Etant donnés door, with spectator’, Thierry de Duve (ed.), The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge, Mass. and London: The Mit Press, 1991), p. 318. Illustrations of Etant donnés the door, and Etant donnés the peep show, can be found on pp. 12 and 13. See illustration of ‘Apolinère Enamelered’, in Marcel Duchamp, Duchamp du signe: écrits (Paris: Flammarion, 1975), between pp. 190 and 191, and p. 53 ‘Erratum musical’ for the line voiced by Yvonne. This is one of the books Victor consults (CT, p. 175). Duchamp du signe, ‘Pendu femelle’ (the female hanged man), pp. 69–72. Robert Deleuse, ‘Petite histoire du roman noir français’, Pas d’orchidées pour les T.M., Temps modernes, special issue, 595 (1997), 80. Jean-Olivier Majastre points out the homonym: Vi-lar Vie L’Art, ‘Jean-François Vilar, la vie, l’art’, in Approche anthropologique de la représentation: entre corps et signe (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999), pp. 103–27.

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Henri-Pierre Roché, Victor, novel [written in 1957, unfinished], text edited by Danielle Régnier-Bohler, preface and notes by Jean Clair (Paris : Centre Georges Pompidou, 1977). Quoted at http://www.fifthinternational.org/content/chapter-10-life-beautiful (accessed 7 July 2011). There are a striking number of murders and deaths across the novels caused by shots to the forehead. LE, p. 148. Ibid., p. 343. Majastre, Approche anthropologique, p. 120. Madeleine Frédéric makes the same point in the course of her very interesting discussion of Vilar and Duchamp in La Stylistique française en mutation? (Brussels: Académie Royale de Belgique, 1997), p. 114. Andrea Goulet, ‘Malet’s maps and Butor’s Bleston: city-space and formal play in the roman policier, Esprit Créateur’, 48/2 (2008), 46–59. Ross makes a similar point in ‘Parisian noir’, pp. 99–100. NC, p. 129. CT, p. 77. See Keith Reader, La Place de la Bastille (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010); Claude Dubois, La Bastoche [Parisian slang for La Bastille] (new edn; Paris: Perrin, 2011). EU, p. 145. Raymond Queneau, Connaissez-vous Paris? (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, 2011). Georges Perec, Perec/rinations (Cadeilhan: Zulma, 1997). Both a surrealist and a situationist motif. Bancquart, Paris dans la littérature française après 1945, p. 197. For the latter, see Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (Cambridge, Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 1998), p. 81. Doctor De Soto is a book by William Steig featuring a mouse-dentist who successfully tricks and renders harmless a fox he is treating who he believes is bent on eating him and his wife. Sold in France as La Surprenante Histoire du Dr De Soto (Paris: Gallimard Jeune, 1992). EU, p. 122. Ibid., p. 121. ‘Je me souvins d’une histoire que m’avait un jour racontée Victor sur un autre archiviste, Eugène Atget, un photographe. Lui aussi, pour le Paris du début du siècle, avait voulu tout reproduire, tout fixer. Avant la destruction’: ibid. See, for example, Alain Corbin, ‘Le Sang de Paris, réflexions sur la généalogie d’une image de la capitale’, in Ecrire Paris (Paris: Editions Seesam/Fondation Singer-Polignac, 1990), pp. 65–73; Richard D. E. Burton, Blood in the City: Violence and Revelation in Paris, 1789–1945 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001); Michael Marrinan, ‘The city as witness and battlefield’, Romantic Paris: Histories of a Cultural Landscape 1800–1850 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), chapter 2). Bief is a section of a canal; trépassés: dead, the departed. PS, p. 81. Blanc, Polarville, p. 267. Ibid., p. 271. EU, p. 197. Bancquart, Paris dans la littérature française après 1945, pp. 191, 201. Perec, La Disparition (Paris: Gallimard, 1969); Modiano, Dora Bruder (Paris: Gallimard, 1997). Berr, Journal (Paris: Tallandier, 2008).

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‘Pour le reste, . . . il m’appartient, et à moi seul, de savoir comment les Blumfeld sont devenus Blainville, au milieu des années 40’: CT, p. 32. PS, p. 143. BT, p. 25. ‘On croit jusqu’au bout pouvoir échapper à la rafle . . . C’est comme ça qu’on disparaît dans les villes’: ibid., p. 250. ‘La voisine qui l’a cachée, en juillet 1942, lui a raconté, brave femme, à quel point elle était surprise de la réaction de la plupart des gens. On arrêtait les Juifs, personne ne voyait rien. Ils disparaissaient, et c’était comme s’ils n’avaient jamais existé’: ibid., p. 114. NC, p. 76. BT, p. 112. Coincidentally, Frédéric Fajardie tells the same anecdote about his father, see the biography on www.fajardie.net (accessed 1 July 2011). ‘“Tout est en train de disparaître. Il faut se précipiter si on veut voir encore des choses.” Paul Cézanne, cité par Wim Wenders.’ Quoted by Roland-François Lack on the Autopsies Research Group site, http://www. autopsiesgroup.com/1/post/2009/08/post-title-click-and-type-to-edit1.html (accessed 23 June 2011). BT, p. 152. Ibid., pp. 207–8. ‘J’ignore s’il s’est agi d’un assassinat ou d’un banal accident. Il n’y a plus aucune trace. Ne restent que des témoignages, plus ou moins contradictoires. Dans quelques mois, dans quelques années, j’aurai des doutes sur l’endroit précis. La chaussée aura été réaménagée. Des immeubles auront été détruits, reconstruits. Il ne restera plus le moindre point de repère’: NC, p. 239. ‘Les images sont toujours en même temps un crime et un deuil’: LE, p. 347. ‘les lieux du crime savent se faire oublier’: NC, p. 239. ‘A bien fréquenter leurs abords, on sent que c’était là. Tout près. Il suffit d’un rien pour que la scène se reconstitue. Peu d’indices suffisent’: ibid. ‘ce sentiment grisant, puissant, malgré le peu d’indices tangibles, que “quelque chose s’est passé là”’: ibid., p. 214. Ross refers to this as ‘the unconscious of the event, the insurrectional moment as trace’: ‘Parisian noir’, p. 99. ‘des appartements, des chambres, des meubles, les plus infimes traces mortes de toutes ces vies absentes’: EU, p. 123. Emphasis added. ‘le type trop silencieux dont elle ignorait jusqu’au nom, et que Victor avait traîné toute la soirée derrière lui, comme un boulet’: Didier Daeninckx, ‘Passage d’enfer’, in Paris, rive glauque, p. 64. NC, p. 25. ‘Au moins cela vit, bouge, frémit’: Vilar, ‘Les Pas perdus de Nestor Burma’, Le Monde, 1 August 1986, 12.

Select bibliography Bancquart, Marie-Claire, Paris dans la littérature française après 1945 (Paris: La Différence, 2006). Blanc, Jean-Noël, Polarville: images de la ville dans le roman policier (Lyon: Presses uni­ versitaires de Lyon, 1991).

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Margaret Atack Burton, Richard D. E., The Flâneur and his City: Patterns of Daily Life in Paris 1815–1851 (Durham: University of Durham, 1994). Fajardie, Frederic H., Black Exit to 68 (Montreuil: PEC/La Brèche, 1988). Gorrara, Claire, The Roman Noir in Post-war French Culture: Dark Fictions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). ––– (ed.), French Crime Fiction (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009). Higonnet, Patrice L., Paris Capitale du monde: des Lumières au surréalisme (Paris: Tallandier, 2005) ——, Paris: Capital of the World, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2005). Jakubowski, Maxim, Paris Noir: Capital Crime Fiction (London: Serpents Tail, 2007). Passage Jean-François Vilar, http://passagejfv.eklablog.com (accessed 13 May 2011). Vilar, Jean-François, C’est toujours les autres qui meurent (Paris: Fayard, 1982). ——, Passage des singes (Paris: Presses de la Renaissance, 1984). ——, Etat d’urgence (Paris: Presses de la Renaissance, 1985). ——, Bastille-tango (Paris: Presses de la Renaissance, 1986). ——, Djemila (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1988). ——, Les Exagérés (Paris: Seuil Points, 1989). ––––, Nous cheminons entourés de fantômes aux fronts troués (Paris: Seuil, 1993).

Further secondary reading Eburne, Jonathan P., Surrealism and the Art of Crime (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008). Goulet, Andrea and Susanna Lee (eds), Crime Fictions, Yale French Studies, 108 (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 2005). Hazan, Eric, L’Invention de Paris: il n’y a pas de pas perdus (Paris: Seuil, 2002); The Invention of Paris: A History in Footsteps, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2011). Platten, David, The Pleasures of Crime: Reading Modern French Crime Fiction (Amsterdam/ New York: Rodopi, 2011).

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8 The Mysteries of the Vatican: from Nineteenthcentury Anti-clerical Propaganda to Dan Brown’s Religious Thrillers MAURIZIO ASCARI

Contemporary crime fiction has fostered new forms of cultural tourism. Crime fiction fans flock to Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh and to the Swedish town of Ystad, where Henning Mankell’s Wallander series is set. Italy features prominently with­ in this global cartography of crime. Tourists visit Venice through the literary lens of Donna Leon and rent flats in the Sicilian seaside resorts where Andrea Camilleri’s novels (and the ensuing television series) are set. The Sicilian town of Corleone is another popular destination, as The Guardian reported in 2008: In the public imagination, nowhere is most associated with the mafia than Corleone. It once had the highest murder rate in the world – 153 violent deaths between 1944 and 1948 – inspiring American novelist Mario Puzo to borrow the town’s name for his fictional crime family in The Godfather.1

Although local businesses profit from this world-wide notoriety, ‘Mafia tours are considered distasteful in Corleone’2 and the town’s people are ready to point out that the film version of The Godfather was actually shot in other locations. Undoubtedly, verbal and visual narratives influence our perception of places, engendering or enforcing stereotypes and ultimately contributing to fashion reality.3 This phenomenon can be studied by focusing either on the role that the entertain­ ment industry plays in the ‘cultural construction’ of places or, alternatively, on its ‘political’ import. Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah (2006), a ‘true crime’ account of Camorra activities in Naples, invites such reading.4 Due to his public denunci­ ation of the powerful Camorra racket, Saviano has been threatened with death and is still obliged to live under police escort. Gomorrah has a special significance for Italians and Saviano has become a national hero whose courage and personal sacrifice stand as a symbol of hope for a city that is suffering under the yoke of organized crime. Briefly, crime narratives are not only often set in real cities, on whose ontological existence and local colour they capitalize, but they can also change them, either by promoting tourism or by calling the attention of the public to specific issues.

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In this chapter I will analyse a set of novels that straddle the border between entertainment and politics, or even propaganda, with the aim to explore the con­ nection between the urban setting, mystery, clues and conspiracy theories. The case study I have chosen to investigate is the capital city of the Vatican. Unlike other sovereign city-states – such as Monaco or Singapore – Vatican City is para­ doxically a capital within another capital, since it is an enclave of Rome. Moreover, it has the unique status of a theocratic state whose ruler is the chief of a major world religion. If we also take into consideration its importance as a site of both religious and cultural pilgrimage, due to the art treasures it hosts, we can easily grasp the attraction that Vatican City has as a crime story setting. The sensational and the political are inextricably linked when we deal with crime and conspiracy stories that are set within the Vatican walls. The hierarchical structure and secretive attitude of the Church of Rome, taken in association with its extreme wealth and power, its stern moral stance and its global dissemination are in themselves highly sensational elements, which can also be utilized to instil readers with suspicion concerning the actual activities and goals of this timehonoured institution. A number of crime narratives focusing on the Vatican have been published in recent years, ranging from Dan Brown’s literary thrillers – Angels and Demons (2000) and The Da Vinci Code (2003) – to a recent bunch of purportedly ‘true crime’ investigations. Thomas M. Eccardt’s Secrets of the Seven Smallest States of Europe: Andorra, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, San Marino, and Vatican City (2005), Cyrus Shahrad’s The Secrets of the Vatican (2007), David Yallop’s The Power and the Glory: Inside the Dark Heart of John Paul II’s Vatican (2007), Claudio Rendina’s Vita segreta dei Papi (The Secret Life of Popes; 2008), I peccati del Vaticano: superbia, avarizia, lussuria, pedofilia (The Sins of the Vatican: Pride, Avarice, Lechery, Paedophilia; 2009), La santa casta della chiesa (The Saintly Caste of the Church; 2009) and 101 misteri e segreti del Vaticano (101 Mysteries and Secrets of the Vatican; 2011), Brenda Ralph Lewis’s Dark History of the Popes: Vice, Murder and Corruption in the Vatican (2009), Gianluigi Nuzzi’s Vaticano S.p.A. (Vatican Ltd; 2009), H. Paul Jeffers’s Dark Mysteries of the Vatican (2010), Corrado Augias’s I segreti del Vaticano: storie, luoghi, personaggi di un potere millenario (The Secrets of the Vatican: Stories, Sites, Figures from a Centuries-long History of Power; 2010) offer a sensational account of Vatican history, notably in its recent stages. This list – which has been purposefully restricted to texts published in English and in Italian, also avoid­ ing translations from other languages – suffices to give an idea of the amplitude of this phenomenon. The recurrence of terms such as ‘secrets’, ‘mysteries’ and ‘dark’ in the titles of these wide-ranging works shows that they can be related to the nineteenth-century traditions of urban mysteries and feuilleton,5 with the Opus Dei adepts playing the role of villains instead of the Jesuits. The new mysteries probe into the hidden side of things present and things past, with a penchant for crime and conspiracy, therefore proving both entertaining and subversive.

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Other texts can be mentioned as proofs of the special place the Vatican has recently acquired in the public imagination as a site of crime. John Follain’s City of Secrets: The Startling Truth behind the Vatican Murders (2004) investigates a triple death that took place in 1988, when the bodies of the commander of the Swiss Guard, of his wife and of a young soldier were found in the Vatican. Lucien Gregoire’s Murder in the Vatican (2008) tackles an even more delicate issue – the death of John Paul I. In addition to these instances of ‘true crime’, openly fictional texts have also appeared, such as Arun Pereira’s Papal Reich: A New Pope. A New Superpower. A New World Order (2002) and Ann Margaret Lewis’s Sherlock Holmes pastiche Murder in the Vatican: The Church Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes (2010). To explore the contemporary fortune of crime narratives focusing on the Vatican, with their complex cultural and political implications, I will travel back in time, to what I believe to be the root of the present phenomenon. My critical itinerary will therefore start with a group of late nineteenth-century feuilletons that were written both before and after the unification of Italy and in which the Vatican plays a prominent role, usually in association with crime and conspiracies. It is my contention that interesting comparisons can be made between these narra­ tives – exploiting the lure of the ‘urban mysteries’ genre to convey anti-clerical propaganda – and the recent body of works representing the Vatican as a site of both real and fictional crime. Rome and the Vatican in nineteenth-century urban mysteries It was only in 1929 – when the Lateranensi Pacts were signed – that Rome and the Vatican achieved mutual recognition as distinct political entities. Prior to that date the relationship between the Vatican and the Italian government was not easy, both before and after Rome was invaded by the Italian army on 20 September 1870, and annexed to the new Italian state, of which it became capital in February 1871.6 As a result, Pope Pius IX, who had reigned since 1846, declared himself prisoner of the Italian state and actually forbade Catholics from taking part in the political life of the new state, whose legitimacy the church did not acknowledge.7 The decades that led to these events saw the publication of several Italian urban mysteries. Bernardo Del Vecchio’s I misteri di Roma contemporanea: racconto storico politico (The Mysteries of Contemporary Rome: a Historical and Political Story) was published in Turin in 1851–3, while a second edition – revised and expanded by G.D. – was printed, again in Turin, in 1861–3. Unsurprisingly, Nuovi misteri di Roma contemporanea: racconto storico-politico, dell’avvocato G. D. (New Mysteries of Contemporary Rome: a Historical-political Novel by Lawyer G. D.; 1856) also appeared in Turin, while Franco Mistrali’s8 I misteri del Vaticano o la Roma dei Papi (The Mysteries of the Vatican or the Rome of the Popes; 1861) was published in Milan. As we can see, these books came to light in northern Italian cities, under the expanding kingdom of Sardinia, which eventually became the kingdom of Italy in 1861.

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The production of ‘mysteries’ focusing on Rome and the Vatican continued in the following years, as is shown by I nuovi misteri della corte di Roma, scritti da un ex gesuita e pubblicati dall’abate (The New Mysteries of the Court of Rome, Written by an ex-Jesuit and Published by Abbott; 1868), I misteri del Vaticano: intrighi, amori, delitti (The Mysteries of the Vatican: Intrigues, Loves and Murders; 1870) and Francesco Paolo De Dominicis’s I misteri del chiostro romano e la presa di Roma (The Mysteries of the Roman Cloister and the Seizure of Rome; 1873). Even Giuseppe Garibaldi published a historical-political novel whose main setting is Rome. Its intended title was Clelia ovvero il governo dei preti (Clelia or the Rule of the Priests; 1870), but the book was originally published in English as The Rule of the Monk; or, Rome in the Nineteenth Century, either due to a linguistic misunderstanding or in an attempt to exploit the anti-Catholic appeal of M. G. Lewis’s The Monk (1796). Consequently, the novel appeared in Italy in 1870 under this rather enigmatic title: Clelia – Il governo del monaco (Roma nel secolo XIX). Of course, a political dimension was implicit in the literary subgenre of ‘mysteries’ right from its inception in France, thanks to the publication of Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris (The Mysteries of Paris; 1842–3). This dimension was even more overt in Sue’s subsequent Les Mystères du Peuple (The Mysteries of the People; 1849–57), whose plot covers the centuries between 57 bc and 1851. By focusing on a family of Celts, who become enslaved to the Romans and subse­ quently live in a state of servitude, Sue devised a new way to narrate social history. The author’s radical views are proved by this oft-quoted statement he prefixed to the book: ‘There is no religious, political or social reform that our fathers were not obliged to conquer one century after another at the cost of their blood, by means of insurrection.’9 Sue showed the church as complicit in this mechanism of social oppression, and often depicted it in a gothic light. Already in the first chapter of the book, a young girl is exhorted to beware of men by means of an ancient song telling the story of Katelik and the three red monks, that is, Templars. After abducting and abusing the poor girl for nine months, the knights decide to get rid of her and of the child she has begotten and to this end they bury them both alive under the main altar of the church. In the 1840s, Sue gave free vent to his criticism of the church also in Le Juif errant (The Wandering Jew; 1844–5), where the Jesuits are his main target. In the same decade, Maurice de La Châtre published Histoire des Papes: Mystères d’iniquités de la cour de Rome (History of the Popes: Mysteries of Iniquity of the Court of Rome; 1842–3). Interestingly, it was La Châtre who – in the role of publisher – made possible the publication of Sue’s Les Mystères du Peuple. Further­ more, when a French tribunal condemned this book in September 1857 – just one month after the death of the author – due to a long series of accusations including that of outraging the Catholic religion, it was La Châtre who was sentenced to spend one year in jail and to pay a fine of 6,000 francs.

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Following in the footsteps of these French works, the nineteenth-century Italian ‘mysteries’ present the church as a corrupt central power whose contamination filters from the top downward into every layer of society, according to the mech­ anism that William Godwin described in Caleb Williams (1794). In other words, authors such as Del Vecchio and Mistrali – whose works will form the focus of my attention – appropriated the formula of the urban mysteries as a propaganda tool to convey a pro-unification and pro-liberal political message. After offering a brief analysis of these highly sensational and ideologically charged anti-clerical narratives, I will then compare them with Dan Brown’s recent religious thrillers. I misteri di Roma contemporanea: racconto storico-politico The digressive plot of Del Vecchio’s imposing feuilleton entwines a variety of narrative threads, often switching register from the pathetic to the sublime, from the descriptive to the polemical. The main characters’ adventures enable the author to describe the various layers of Roman society and to investigate the abuses of the papal government, even though the writer’s scathing criticism is not levelled at the church as a whole. Benevolent figures, such as the widely esteemed Frate Lorenzo, are thus contrasted with corrupt clerics, whose ambition, lust, greed, hypocrisy, revengefulness and downright cruelty are depicted with anti-clerical fervour. Although this novel, which freely blends facts and fiction, is undoubtedly a piece of propaganda, it has an enticing narrative power, as this brief analysis of its themes and techniques will hopefully show. The conflict between secret societies such as the Carbonari, who are in favour of an Italian state, and the Sanfedisti, who strive to maintain the status quo, is at the heart of the novel, which opens in 1836. While the Carbonari are depicted in a heroic light, the Sanfedisti are portrayed as ignorant, superstitious and fanat­ ical. Several pages are devoted to illustrating the pledges Sanfedisti have to take and to underline their association with the Jesuits. Moreover, the church itself is shown as divided in the book, where the perfidious plots of the Jesuits are often contrasted with the truly charitable Cappuccini friars. This order represents the healthy section of the church, those who are close to the people and indifferent to power as such. Another major theme of the book is that of class conflicts and prejudices, which is apparent in the love story between Luigia, the daughter of a poor man, and Count Adolfo, an enthusiast of the Carbonari movement. The count’s family, how­ever, is far from willing to consent to this mésalliance, despite Frate Lorenzo’s intercession. Only thanks to the cholera epidemics, during which the old count dies, predictably assisted by Luigia and the friar, is this obstacle to the union of the two youths removed. I misteri di Roma contemporanea can be regarded as a pseudo-anthropological study of Roman society. In order to show how the corruption of the centurieslong papal government penetrates into every layer of society, the author often

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investigates the customs of the Romans, contrasting them with those of other peoples and/or times. In a scene whose ideological significance is proved precisely by its insignificance as regards the development of the plot, two friends are walk­ ing in a Roman street when they discover a corpse that has just fallen off a hearse (vol. I, chapter IV). This is presented as a common occurrence in Rome, for the grave-diggers are often drunk and therefore unable to perform their duties properly.10 Immediately after seeing the corpse our two heroes proceed to the Roman forum, where a secret meeting of the Carbonari conspirators is taking place in an underground cell. The two youths’ walk across the forum to reach this meeting place enables the author to expand on the virtues of the ancients, implicitly contrasting them with the present decay of Italy. This is not the only instance when dead bodies are shown as desecrated in the book, as is evident, for example, in the long description of the cholera epidemic that ravages Rome (vol. I, chapters XXI–XXIII). Moreover, graveyards themselves are desecrated in another episode, where a night procession to the cemetery of San Lorenzo turns into an orgy, with people mating on the tombs, while others chant their prayers for the dead (vol. I, chapter XVI). In his proto-anthropological study La Scienza Nuova (The New Science; 1725–44), the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico argued that all societies rested on three basic principles – religion, marriages and the burial of the dead. Del Vecchio’s insistence on the abject treat­ ment the dead receive in contemporary Rome seemingly hints at the dangerous state of corruption of the city, which has regressed into an uncivilized condition. The fact that this graveyard scene takes place under the unbelieving eyes of a British traveller, who subsequently relates it, enables me to mention a technique that the author repeatedly utilized to create estrangement in the Italian readers, the adoption of a foreign point of view. In another section of the book (vol. I, chapter VIII), the same English character is attracted by a strange procession and follows this crowd of people until they reach the Oratorio del Caravita, where he bears witness to a surprising ritual. After listening to the homily of a Jesuit priest, almost all the candles are blown out and in this semi-obscurity people start scourging themselves.11 While doing so, they often, more or less incidentally, end by scourging their neighbours and the poor Englishman unwillingly suffers the fate of these pious Romans, or rather of these fanatics, as the impersonal narrator of the book presents them. The account of this ritual is actually based on reality and in 1832 the Roman poet Matteo Belli described it in two sonnets where he underlined the erotic undertones the event acquired, since the obscurity and the general commotion created promiscuity and stimulated licentious behaviour.12 I misteri del Vaticano o la Roma dei papi Mistrali’s work differs from Del Vecchio’s in so far as it substitutes the openly factional mood of the political feuilleton with a purportedly historical attitude. While Del Vecchio depicted the mid-nineteenth-century fight between the church

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and the Risorgimento movement, Mistrali chose to highlight the abuses the clergy had committed over the course of the centuries. In this respect, the ‘allegorical vignette’ and the ‘allegorical frontispiece’ that open the text are particularly revealing. Interestingly, church iconography is used here as a propaganda tool against the church itself. The vignette shows Italy in the act of trampling on a serpent that symbolizes the church. One can obviously draw a parallel between this image and the many paintings or images d’épinal depicting the Virgin Mary in the act of crushing the Devil beneath her feet. The allegorical attributes of Italy include not only a sword and a flag, but also a cross, to signify that God looks favourably upon the unification of the country. The frontispiece is based on the traditional pattern of virtues chasing vices. Here, the effigy of the king of Italy stands on a pillar at the top of the scene, surrounded by the theological virtues – faith, hope and charity – while the sky at their back is enlightened by the star of the Risorgimento. At a lower level, one can see the ‘obscene triad’13 of tyranny, vice and superstition. In the introductory epistle ‘To Italy’, Rome is described as ‘the new Babylon’14 and the geography of the Eternal City acquires a symbolic meaning, for the Capitol is contrasted – as the emblem of mundane power and civic liberties – with the Vatican, which is regarded as no more than the seat of the bishop of Rome. The conflation of spiritual and temporal power in the hands of the pope is con­ sidered the source of endless evils. The Gospel itself is called upon to testify against the tyranny of the church, since its maxims ‘are the most open and splendid condemnation of the temporal power of the popes’.15 After recounting the whole history of the Church of Rome, in order to shed light on its dark side, Mistrali arrived at the present, devoting the last chapter of his book to the pontificate of Pius IX. The pope is presented as a frivolous aristo­ crat of a sensual nature, who converted to Catholicism due to a sentimental dis­ appointment and to the impossibility of pursuing a military career because he suffered from epilepsy. We should not forget that it was precisely in the 1860s that the Italian criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso would develop his theory of epilepsy as the root of criminal behaviour. In the light of Lombroso’s budding theories, Mistrali’s biography of Pius IX acquires a strong political meaning, implying that at the time the church was run by a person who was unfit for that role. Further mysteries and secrets This anti-clerical literary output resulted from the specific political situation of Italy, but similar books appeared at the time in other countries also. Originally written in German, Theodor Griesinger’s The Mysteries of the Vatican: Or, Crimes of the Papacy was translated into English in 1864, while The Jesuits: A Complete History of their Open and Secret Proceedings from the Foundation of the Order to the Present Time, Told to the German People was published in English in 1883.16

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In 1907, travel writer Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen authored The Secrets of the Vatican. The book is divided into two parts, which focus respectively on time and space. While the first traces the history of the church, the second is intended as a guide-book to ‘the parts of the Vatican not generally shown to the public’.17 As Sladen explains, this book originated from a contemporary event, the political crisis between the Vatican and France, and even includes an essay by the archbishop of Westminster on that subject. Despite its ambivalent title, The Secrets of the Vatican was actually intended as an act of external support of the Catholic Church at a time of hardship, due to the ‘anti-Christian spirit’18 of the French Republic. Yet, this did not prevent the Anglican writer from expanding on sensational aspects of the Vatican such as ‘The Propaganda Fide, the Holy Office (of the Inquisition)’ and ‘the Index Expurgatorius of Books’.19 A few years later, British novelist Annie Hector Alexander published The Crumpled Leaf: A Vatican Mystery (1911), while in Italy young Benito Mussolini – who was then a socialist activist – took part in the turn-of-the-century anticlerical campaign with a novel entitled L’amante del cardinale: Claudia Particella (The Cardinal’s Mistress), which was serialized in 1910.20 Although this book is set mainly in Trent, it is worth mentioning not only because of its author, but also due to its factional status as a historical novel – based on the seventeenthcentury love affair between Carlo Emanuele Madruzzo, prince-bishop of Trent, and a courtesan – and lastly to its highly sensational subject matter, including murder and villainous priests. Once again the feuilleton was chosen as a means to criticize the church in the public arena. Shrewdly combining historical data and a narrative rendering of the corrupt behaviour of the clergy, Mussolini produced a strong emotional impact on the public. What my research has shown is that in the following decades the Vatican lost its topicality as a site of mystery.21 This may be partly explained by the fact that with the signing of the 1929 Lateranensi Pact – a major success for the Fascist regime – a truce took place between the political power of Italy and the church. As a consequence, Mussolini promptly recanted the ideas he had expressed in his anti-clerical novel, which had, however, been translated into English in 1928. Although scattered books were published on the secret archives of the Vatican, on the proceedings of Vatican diplomacy and on the scandals that occasionally came to light, it was only after the publication of Dan Brown’s best-selling novels that a resurgence of the late nineteenth-century literary phenomenon took place.22 It was The Da Vinci Code that first achieved international recognition, thus ensur­ ing the belated success of Angels and Demons, which had appeared three years earlier. The Da Vinci Code attracted the attention of readers and media alike due to a conspiracy plot that actually rewrote the entire history of the church, de­ nouncing its patriarchal bias. Already in 1982 Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln had created a postmodernist variant of the Grail myth in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. Expanding on the pseudo-historical claims that these researchers had made under the form of an essay, Brown created a powerful narrative, criticizing the church’s thirst for power and control of humanity along

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lines that may remind one of the apologue of the Grand Inquisitor in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1879–80). In Dostoyevsky’s parable, Christ comes back to earth only to be arrested by the Inquisition. Far from looking up to Christ as a source of flawless wisdom and love, the Grand Inquisitor questions Christ’s negative response to the Devil’s temptation, arguing that he should have taken the opposite course, as the church had subsequently done. What the Inquisitor argues is that human beings do not need freedom, but external control. They need to be fed and to be manipulated by miracles. They need to be taught what to believe and how to behave. As the Inquisitor states, an apparatus of power that ensures orthodoxy is preferable to a message of love that ultimately fosters anarchy. Interestingly, a few years later Lombroso described the Catholic Church as ‘a great disciplinary institution and almost an army that is founded on obedience and subordination, in which every man has his place, his line of conduct, his ideas, which have already been fixed by very strong laws’.23 Instead of voicing the conflict between orthodoxy and freedom or theocracy and democracy, Brown focused on the gender issues that marked late twentieth-century culture, embracing an anti-patriarchal message that was central in ensuring the success of his novel. The idea that Christ may have been married and may have even generated an off­ spring is conducive to the idea of priests marrying. The idea that Mary Magdalene may have been the disciple he loved is conducive to a reappraisal of the role of women within the church – that is, the issue of female priesthood. The novel is a time bomb and due to its extreme topicality, to its ability to capture powerful social energies, it is far from surprising that it has triggered such a huge global debate. To acknowledge the full impact of Brown’s novels we should remember that a thin line separates fiction from fact. Studying the reception of The Da Vinci Code, Christian apologists Kenneth Boa and John A. Turner remind us that in 2005 Time magazine included Dan Brown in the list of the 100 most influential people in the world. The two critics analyse the ambivalent relation between the fictional status of his books and the ‘moral influence’ that they have exerted on the public.24 This comment is extremely useful. Narratives – myths – have an intrinsic power to model the readers’ moral world view and ethos independently of their factual accuracy. What I intend to explore is the importance of setting within the creation of such powerful fictional worlds. To do so, however, I will not focus on The Da Vinci Code, whose plot is set mostly in France and the UK, but on Angels and Demons, at the core of which is Vatican City. Although this novel is less ideologically explo­ sive than Brown’s subsequent thriller, and although no account of its reception can avoid taking into consideration the ground-breaking effect of The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons is a perfect case study to assess the importance of setting within a fictional construct. This is proved already by the ‘Author’s note’ which opens the book, toning down its artificially hectic and at times openly un­ realistic character: ‘References to all works of art, tombs, tunnels, and architecture

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in Rome are entirely factual (as are their exact locations). They can still be seen today. The brotherhood of the Illuminati is also factual.’25As this statement indi­ cates, the novel’s setting is the main basis on which its claim to mimic reality rests and therefore helps enhance the narrative’s power to engage its readers in a lifelike experience. The factual setting of an ambivalent novel Angels and Demons pivots on the conflict between religion and science in the contemporary world, dramatizing the danger of having a ‘murderer’ elected as pope. Although in the end it is the healthier part of the church that prevails over the insider fanatics who threaten to corrupt it, this book – like The Da Vinci Code – has been opposed by the Catholic Church, which needs to reassert the sanctity of its mission, minimizing the danger that its ruling elite may go astray. Angels and Demons is central to our overview of the changing literary represen­ tations of Rome and the Vatican as sites of mystery. The novel interestingly opens with two maps, one of Rome and the other of the Vatican City. This editorial choice foregrounds the key role the setting plays in this text, whose central char­ acters move from one stage of their adventure to the next following clues that the hero, Harvard professor Robert Langdon, interprets thanks to his mastery of erudite and esoteric knowledge. Most contemporary ‘literary thrillers’, ranging from Brown’s books to J. L. Carrell’s The Shakespeare Secret (2008), are in fact marked by a similar treasure-hunt formula. In these novels places are depicted as repositories of cultural memories whose correct understanding is vital to eradicate present evil, which is either rooted in the past or utilizes the past to create a smoke screen. Unlike other literary thrillers, however, Brown’s novels are at the core of a complex phenomenon of reception. Due to its ability to reactivate forgotten lore and tackle important ideological issues – notably the relation between science and religion – Angels and Demons is the object of several book companions, such as Simon Cox’s Illuminating Angels and Demons: Behind the Fiction (2004), Dan Burstein and Arne De Keijzer’s Inside Angels & Demons: The Unauthorized Guide to the Bestselling Novel (2009; originally published as Secrets of Angels and Demons in 2004) or Stephen Kellmeyer’s Debunking Angels and Demons (2009), which embraces an openly Christian perspective.26 Unsurprisingly, setting plays a major role within these critical inquiries. Burstein and De Keijzer discuss the author’s strategies and inaccuracies concerning his depiction of the Vatican Palace or Bernini’s relationship with Galileo and the Illuminati. The novel is measured against the architectures, artefacts and historical events it evokes and the author’s willingness to manipulate and distort ‘facts of history, geography, building, and works of art to move his story along’ is revealed.27 Far from simply inviting forms of armchair travelling, Angels and Demons has fostered new forms of cultural tourism, as is shown by Angela K. Nickerson’s

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Angels & Demons’ Rome: The Insider’s Guide to the Locations Featured in the Book and Movie (2009). As Nickerson wrote, ‘It’s no wonder that the book was turned into a blockbuster movie. Part of the appeal lies in the setting. As Langdon and Vittoria dash around Rome they face a fictional villain in real places.’28 Due to Brown’s ability to combine a familiar setting with uncanny mysteries and con­ spiracies, the book invites its readers to explore further its cultural referents and to visit or re-visit Rome and the Vatican with different eyes. This ‘sensationalization’ of Rome and the Vatican has also resulted in various ‘Angels and Demons tours’, which cover the sites where the novel is set, from St Maria del Popolo to St Peter’s Square, St Maria della Vittoria, Piazza Navona, Castel Sant’Angelo and ‘Il Passetto’.29 The organizers of one of these tours felt the need to clarify that after the release of the film they have ‘included in the tour references to the differences between the film and the book, especially in con­ sideration of the fact that many will have seen the film but not read the novel’.30 When it comes to cultural tourism, the issue of remediation is of course central, but what is even more central is the relation between fact and fiction. It suffices to talk with a few of Brown’s many readers to realize that the core of their criticism or appreciation is not his ability to weave a good story but rather the truth-value of what he has written. Likewise, in an online interview, one of the guides who lead Brown fans around Rome remarks that most of Angels and Demons is but ‘poetic licence’ and claims that ‘only 15% of the books is fact’, adding: ‘It’s kind of sad. Even the locations of the places are wrong.’31 To understand how Brown utilized the Roman setting I first need to clarify a few points. As a ‘symbolist’, Langdon is able to look beyond appearances, to decrypt artworks in order to read the hidden messages that they contain. This focus on symbols means that to understand reality one has to perform acts of interpretation that can potentially reverse our first perceptions. Briefly, the para­ digm that presides over Brown’s novels is that of conspiracy theories. Secret societies are evoked right from the beginning of Angels and Demons, where a CERN researcher, Vetra, is killed in Geneva by a man who brands his victim’s chest with an ambigram of the word Illuminati. Ambigrams, however, work as a sort of red herring within the interpretative frame­work of the novel. When you look at an ambigram, its appearance and mean­ ing does not change despite the fact that you reverse your point of view. However, what the novel describes is a deeply unstable world which changes radically every time you see things from a different perspective. The presiding divinity of the novel is Janus, the two-face Roman god who is evoked in its first pages, since this is the name the mysterious leader of the Illuminati has adopted to communicate with the killer he has hired to wreak havoc in the Vatican. Ancient Romans regarded Janus as the god of change, looking at the same time into the past and into the future, but they also associated him with circularity, for Janus embodied opposite principles such as the sun and the moon and also unified the four elements in himself.32 Ambivalence is central to this novel,33 which thematizes the complementary character of opposites. Brown’s plot pivots on the opposition between matter and

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anti-matter, half a gram of which has been stolen from the CERN laboratory, apparently in order to blow up the Vatican, since when anti-matter comes into contact with matter it triggers an explosion comparable to that of an atomic bomb. Vetra’s discovery of anti-matter actually takes place during an experiment he performed to replicate the act of creation described in Genesis: ‘It seemed his Creation experiment, exactly as your Bible predicts, produced everything in pairs. Opposites. Light and dark. Vetra found himself, in addition to creating matter, creating antimatter.’34 Jeff Dunn and Craig Bubeck explain the novel’s underlying structure as an attempt to overcome the good versus evil binary that is characteristic of the JudeoChristian tradition: ‘In Brown’s world the battle can’t be understood in terms of good triumphing over evil, or vice versa; rather, salvation is to be found in the balance of yin and yang, the two opposite but complementary elements in the universe.’35 As the two scholars claim, Brown’s philosophy of symmetry explains his use of ambigrams and ultimately reconciles the conflict inherent in duality, framing it within a monist perspective, since ‘all opposite forces are interdependent and bound together into a unified whole’.36 Following this underlying scheme, the urban space of Rome is likewise inhabited both by the church and by its opponents, the Illuminati, and moreover these two antithetic entities actually share the same buildings and symbols. The ‘path of light’ that the sect utilized as a ritual of initiation to attract the right sort of adepts, showing them the way to the ‘church of Illumination’, where the society’s meetings took place, involves a pilgrimage through four Roman churches, where Bernini’s masterpieces acquire an alternative meaning as symbols of the four elements. The ‘church of Illumination’ itself is housed in Castel Sant’Angelo, a Catholic fortress that is linked to the Vatican by means of a private passage, the so-called Passetto. As regards time structure, although the fast-paced action of Angels and Demons takes place within a single day, this text also expands on the centuries-old conflicts between the church and scientists. While the urban mysteries often convey radical political messages, highlighting the evils of ‘things as they are’, Brown’s book ultimately offers a conciliatory view. The CERN scientist who is killed at the beginning of the novel – Leonardo Vetra – is actually a Catholic priest,37 and we subsequently discover that the late pope, whose death has deprived the church of its guide, was able to fulfil his dream of fathering a son without breaking his vow of chastity thanks to in vitro fertilization.38 Conversely, the criminal master­ mind behind the evil plot Langdon defuses is a religious fanatic,39 for the head of the Illuminati – Janus – is none other than the camerlengo, one of the top church authorities. The murders of the pope and of four cardinals as well as the threat of a terrorist attack on the Vatican are acts that the camerlengo conceived to strengthen the appeal of the church, which has been tarnished by the advance of rationalism and materialism. When the young priest discovers that the pope he murdered was actually his father, his mind is suddenly crossed by this thought: ‘He had poisoned

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the man he called “Holy Father”, the man who addressed him as “my son.” The camerlengo had always believed the words “father” and “son” were religious trad­ itions, but now he knew the diabolical truth – the words had been literal.’40 Matter and anti-matter explode only when they come into contact, and the whole plot of this highly melodramatic novel can be regarded as an explosion that takes place because the symbolic and the literal have come to coincide. Before and after Brown’s religious thrillers What kind of connection can be traced between the conspiracy plot of Angels and Demons and the urban mysteries that I mentioned above? These texts have in common features such as the centrality of the urban space, the emphasis on mystery and ambivalence, as well as the freedom in combining historical facts with fiction. Yet, while Del Vecchio and Mistrali exploited a popular narrative formula to exert an overt anti-clerical political action, Dan Brown’s message is more nuanced, albeit no less unsettling. What, at the turn of the millennium, his novel aims to show is that angels and demons actually coexist within a timehonoured institution such as the Catholic Church and that, without the light of reason and science, religion runs the risk of falling prey to darkness. Moreover, although Brown’s texts do not convey a precise political agenda, they capture some fundamental aspects of our postmodern times, and their huge success is a symptom of the growing distance between the church and society. By showing the church as infiltrated by agents of evil, Brown has crystallized a critical gaze that common people identify with, dealing a blow to the autocratic tradition of the church, which legitimizes itself through its privileged role as sole interpreter of Divine revelation. Brown’s works have thus revitalized a pre-existing kind of journalism, which had been already investigating on mundane issues such as the financial scandals in which the Vatican Institute for Works of Religion was involved in the 1980s. Brown’s novels have also paved the way for other religious thrillers. Simon Toyne’s Sanctus (2011) is probably no less engaging than The Da Vinci Code in terms of suspense, its basic message is similar – since Toyne also attacks the church’s patri­ archal distrust of the female principle – and moreover its plot similarly rests on a far-reaching conspiracy, as Toyne himself has clarified during an interview: If you could summarise ‘Sanctus’ in a short paragraph how would it look? In the beginning was the word. It says so, right there in the Bible. But somebody wrote those words, and we all know that the victors write the history books. But there is another story, a forbidden story, waiting to be told. It is the story of the vanquished and the wronged. It is the story of Sanctus.41

As these words show, Toyne has somehow directed his anti-patriarchal fictional attack against the Bible itself, whose nature as the result of divine revelation is

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called into question. Yet, I have a feeling that Sanctus is destined to be much less influential than Brown’s novels, not only because they came first but also due to the fact that its setting – the Turkish city of Ruin, and the prodigious monastic citadel that stands at its core – is entirely fictional. While you read the book, you know right from the beginning that you are in the realm of the imagination. Your mind processes the story in a different way since the setting is a textual construct and not part of your previous experience of the world – be it direct or mediated by culture. Toyne’s choice to set his thriller in an imaginary Turkish city prepares a different kind of reception. It also sets the ground for a metaphorical interpretation of his story, since we can also choose to regard the crumbling citadel of God, with its imposing artworks, state-of-the-art technology, absolute secrecy and vertical powerstructure as a figuration of the Vatican itself. In this respect, the fictional name Toyne has chosen for his setting – Ruin – sounds uncannily close to Rome. Ruin also evokes former splendour. Was Toyne using this word as a metaphor for the Church of Rome itself ? As far as I know, the author has not made any claims in that respect, but he has clarified that he was inspired to write the novel while visiting the French city of Rouen: As we drove into the city I saw the outline of the cathedral against the pre-dawn sky and a quote I’ve always loved just popped into my head. ‘A man is a god in ruins.’ We got a room, fell asleep and four hours later we were on the road again. I thought about Rouen and the quote the whole way down. By the time we arrived at our new home I had the central idea for ‘Sanctus’.42

As Stevenson claimed in ‘A gossip on romance’, ‘One thing in life calls for another; there is a fitness in events and places.’43 Indeed, places have a mythopoetic quality of their own and play a major role in the working of our imagination. In conclusion, what this itinerary has shown is the circular quality of the process which links places to stories, since places are reservoirs of stories that, in turn, change our perception of places themselves. No wonder, since we live our life on the threshold between external reality and our inner mind. Human experience is no less and no more than our attempt to interface these two dimensions. Stories are a fundamental tool in our quest for meaning. They simultaneously express and shape our attitude to the world we inhabit. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that fiction and religion continue to intertwine today as they did at the time of Greek myths. Like all experiments, stories can entail an element of danger, but without new stories the world would just stay the same, for stories are a funda­mental component of our ability to see things ‘as they are not’, the engine of progress and change.

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Notes Stephanie Rafanelli, ‘De-mob happy’, The Guardian, 17 May 2008, http://www.guardian. co.uk/travel/2008/may/17/sicily.italy (accessed 11 July 2011).  2 Ibid.  3 Kjetil Sandvik and Anne Marit Waade use the concept of augmented reality to explain these ‘processes of mediatization that broaden and enhance spatial experiences’: Kjetil Sandvik and Anne Marit Waade, ‘Crime scene as augmented reality on screen, online and offline’, http://www.krimiforsk.aau.dk/awpaper/KSAWcrimesceneas.w5.pdf (accessed 16 February 2011).  4 Roberto Saviano, Gomorrah (2006; London: Macmillan, 2008).  5 The same words recur in the titles of books that explore specific aspects of Vatican history, such as John Cornwell’s Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (New York: Viking Press, 1999) or David I. Kertzer’s Prisoner of the Vatican: The Popes’ Secret Plot to Capture Rome from the New Italian State (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 2004).  6 On 2 October 1870, a plebiscite was held to decide the annexation to the Italian state. On 3 February 1871, a law was approved to move the capital from Florence (which had been the capital of Italy since 1864) to Rome.  7 Only in 1919 was this rift partly overcome, when Benedict XV abrogated the papal injunction not to take part in Italian politics and Don Luigi Sturzo’s Partito Popolare was born.  8 Mistrali (1833–80) was involved in the Risorgimento movement, visited Garibaldi on the island of Caprera and also translated into Italian Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jésus (Vita di Gesù, 1863).  9 ‘Il n’est pas une réforme religieuse, politique ou sociale, que nos pères n’aient été forcés de conquérir de siècle en siècle, au prix de leur sang par l’insurrection’: Eugène Sue, Les Mystères du Peuple, ou, Histoire d’une famille de prolétaires a travers les âges (Paris: Administration de librairie, 1849–57), 16 vols, vol. 1, title page, http://www.gallica.bnf. fr (accessed 16 February 2011). 10 In the illustration that accompanies this passage, the corpse is portrayed as that of an ancient Roman to contrast the present state of degradation of the city with the dignity of its past. 11 It would be easy to draw a parallel between this scene and the passage in The Da Vinci Code where the Opus Dei albino ‘monk’ Silas flogs himself. After all, the ingredients of popular literature have not changed much in the course of the last century and a half. Interestingly, the same association between Catholicism and morbid rituals of selfmortification features already in ‘A fair penitent’, a short story William Wilkie Collins published in Household Words on 18 July 1857. Collins’s sensational treatment of the convent life of a Carmelite nun – who also happens to be an ex-actress, to spice up the account of her conversion – evokes the darkly erotic appeal of cat-o’-nine-tails and unconditional obedience. This piece of anti-Catholic propaganda can be also related to Collins’s subsequent anti-Jesuit novel The Black Robe (1881). 12 See Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, ‘L’ingeggno dell’Omo’ and ‘Li fratelli Mantelloni’ (I sonetti romaneschi (Milan: Mondadori, 1975)), respectively written on 18 and 19 December 1832. 13 ‘triade oscena’: Franco Mistrali, I misteri del Vaticano o la Roma dei Papi (Milano: Francesco Sanvito, 1861), 4 vols, vol. 1, allegorical frontispiece.  1

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‘nuova Babilonia’: ibid., vol. 1, p. 3. ‘la condanna più aperta e più splendida del potere temporale dei papi’: ibid., vol. 1, p. 8. Theodor Griesinger, The Mysteries of the Vatican: Or, Crimes of the Papacy, trans. E.S. (London: Allen & Co., 1864), 2 vols; idem, The Jesuits: A Complete History of Their Open and Secret Proceedings from the Foundation of the Order to the Present Time, Told to the German People, trans. A. J. Scott (London: G. P. Putnam’s sons, 1883). Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen, The Secrets of the Vatican (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1907), p. xxii, http://www.archive.org/details/secretsofthevati017566mbp (accessed 26 June 2011). Ibid., p. 176. Ibid., p. v. Benito Mussolini, L’amante del cardinale: Claudia Particella, ed. Santi Corvaja (Trento: Reverdito, 1986). This is the conclusion I came to after consulting various catalogues (such as the British COPAC, the Italian SBN, google scholar and google books) by entering combinations of title words such as ‘Vatican’ + ‘secret/s’ – ‘mystery/ies’ – ‘dark’, both in English and in Italian. Far from claiming that no books including such title words were published in the twentieth century, I have assessed that their number is small. One could also relate this renewed criticism of the church to contemporary criticism of Christian doctrine, due to the many books that have been recently published both in defence of atheism and to advocate a naturalistic view of religion, notably within the framework of neuroscience, cognitive science and evolutionary theories. I am refer­ ring to the work of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Pascal Boyer, Dennis Dennett and Stephen Hawking, among others. Some of these scholars, interest­ ingly, are grouped under the label of ‘brights’ in 2003 as if to underline their connection with the Enlightenment, but conspiracy theorists might find it irresistible to trace a connection between these neo-apologists of secularism and the former Illuminati. ‘La chiesa cattolica è una grande istituzione disciplinare e quasi un esercito fondato sulla obbedienza e subordinazione; in cui ogni uomo ha il suo posto, la sua linea di condotta, le sue idee già fissate da leggi fortissime’: from L’uomo delinquente (1897), in Cesare Lombroso, Delitto Genio Follia: Scritti scelti, ed. Delia Frigessi, Ferruccio Giacanelli, Luisa Mangoni (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1995), p. 497. Kenneth Boa and John Alan Turner, The Gospel according to The Da Vinci Code: The Truth Behind the Writings of Dan Brown (Nashville, Tenn.: Broadman and Holman, 2006), p. 1. Dan Brown, Angels and Demons (2000; London: Corgi, 2009), p. 11. The Da Vinci Code is likewise introduced by a section entitled ‘Fact’, including a few details concerning the Priory of Sion and the Opus Dei, as well as the following paragraph: ‘All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate’: idem, The Da Vinci Code: A Novel (2003; New York and London: Doubleday, 2004), p. 1. Simon Cox, Illuminating Angels and Demons: Behind the Fiction (London: Michael O’Mara Books, 2004); Dan Burstein and Arne De Keijzer, Inside Angels & Demons: The Unauthorized Guide to the Bestselling Novel (New York: Vanguard Press, 2009; previously published by Dan Burstein as Secrets of Angels and Demons (New York: CDS Books, 2004)); Stephen Kellmeyer, Debunking Angels and Demons (Peoria, Ill.: Bridegroom Press, 2009).

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‘“Bernini and his angels”: an interview with Mark S. Weil’, in Burstein and Keijzer, Inside Angels & Demons, p. 299. Angela K. Nickerson, Angels & Demons’ Rome: The Insider’s Guide to the Locations Featured in the Book and Movie (Berkeley, Calif.: Roaring Forties Press, 2009). These are just a few of the many websites that advertise Angels and Demons tours: http://www.angelsanddemons.it/default.aspx; http://www.walksinsiderome.com/index. php?id=17; http://www.fsegwayrome.com/angels-and-demons-rome-segway-tour/; http:// www.romanlife-romeitaly.com/rome-bus-tours.html#angels-rome (accessed 11 July 2011). http://www.angelsanddemons.it/the_movie.aspx (accessed 11 July 2011). http://www.romanlife-romeitaly.com/rome-bus-tours.html#angels-rome. See Jane Chance, Medieval Mythography: From Roman North-Africa to the School of Chartres, AD 433–1177 (Gainesville, Fla.: UP of Florida, 1994), p. 76. The image that was utilized to advertise both the film version (2009) and some subsequent editions of the novel again emphasizes duality. It shows the rear view of a statue over­ looking the Vatican square. What strikes the viewer at first is probably the contrast between sun and clouds in the background sky, but one can hardly fail to notice that the two wings of the statue are different, thus revealing the statue’s ambivalent identity – part angel, part demon. Brown, Angels and Demons, p. 573. Emphasis in the original. Jeff Dunn and Craig Bubeck, The Gospel according to Dan Brown (Colorado Springs, Colo.: Victor, 2006), p. 136. Ibid., p. 138. Brown, Angels and Demons, pp. 62–3. Ibid., pp. 590–5. Likewise, the assassin who helps Janus execute his plans is a fanatic of Middle-Eastern origin who wishes to punish the church because of its role in the Crusades. See ibid., p. 31. Ibid., p. 599. Pip Elwood, ‘Interview: Simon Toyne – “Sanctus”’, 17 March 2011, http://www.entertain­ ment-focus.com/book-article/interview-simon-toyne-sanctus (accessed 26 June 2011); Simon Toyne, Sanctus (London: HarperCollins, 2011). Elwood, ‘Interview’. Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘A gossip on romance’ (1882), http://www.online-literature.com/ stevenson/essays-of-stevenson/5/ (accessed 26 June 2011).

Select bibliography Boa, Kenneth and John Alan Turner, The Gospel according to The Da Vinci Code: The Truth behind the Writings of Dan Brown (Nashville, Tenn.: Broadman and Holman, 2006). Brown, Dan, Angels and Demons (2000; London: Corgi, 2009). ––––, The Da Vinci Code: A Novel (2003; New York and London: Doubleday, 2004). Burstein, Dan and Arne De Keijzer, Inside Angels & Demons: The Unauthorized Guide to the Bestselling Novel (New York: Vanguard Press, 2009; previously published by Dan Burstein as Secrets of Angels and Demons (New York: CDS Books, 2004)). Chance, Jane, Medieval Mythography: from Roman North-Africa to the School of Chartres, AD 433–1177 (Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida, 1994).

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Maurizio Ascari Cox, Simon, Illuminating Angels and Demons: Behind the Fiction (London: Michael O’Mara Books, 2004). De Dominicis, Francesco Paolo, I misteri del chiostro romano e la presa di Roma (Firenze: Salani, 1873). De la Châtre, Maurice, Histoires des Papes: mystères d’iniquités de la Cour de Rome: crimes, meurtres, empoisonnements, parricides, adultères, incestes, débauches et turpitudes des pontifes romains depuis Saint Pierre jusqu’à nos jours: crimes des rois, des reines et des empereurs (1842, 10 vols; Paris: Administration de l’entreprise, 1854), 5 tomes. Del Vecchio, Bernardo, I misteri di Roma contemporanea: racconto storico-politico, illustrato con disegni originali incisi in rame, seconda edizione, riveduta, ampliata e condotta fino ai nostri giorni da G.S. (Torino: Augusto F. Negro, 1861–3), 4 vols. Dunn, Jeff and Craig Bubeck, The Gospel According to Dan Brown (Colorado Springs, Colo.: Victor, 2006). Elwood, Pip, ‘Interview: Simon Toyne – “Sanctus”’, 17 March 2011, http://www.entertain­ ment-focus.com/book-article/interview-simon-toyne-sanctus (accessed 26 June 2011). Garibaldi, Giuseppe, Clelia – Il governo del monaco (Roma nel secolo XIX) (Milano: F.lli. Rechedei, 1870). ––––,The Rule of the Monk; or, Rome in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1870). Griesinger, Theodor, The Mysteries of the Vatican: Or, Crimes of the Papacy, trans. E.S. (London: Allen & Co., 1864), 2 vols. ––––, The Jesuits: A Complete History of their Open and Secret Proceedings from the Foundation of the Order to the Present Time, Told to the German People, trans. A. J. Scott (London: G. P. Putnam’s sons, 1883). Humphreys, Anne and Louis James (eds), G. W. M. Reynolds: Nineteenth-century Fiction, Politics, and the Press (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). Kellmeyer, Stephen, Debunking Angels and Demons (Peoria, Ill.: Bridegroom Press, 2009). Lombroso, Cesare, Delitto Genio Follia: Scritti scelti, ed. Delia Frigessi, Ferruccio Giacanelli, Luisa Mangoni (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1995). I misteri del Vaticano: intrighi, amori, delitti (Milano: Minerva, 1870). Mistrali, Franco, I misteri del Vaticano o la Roma dei Papi (Milano: Francesco Sanvito, 1861), 4 vols. Moloney, Brian and Gillian Ania, ‘“Analoghi vituperî”: la bibliografia del romanzo dei misteri in Italia’, La Bibliofilia, 106/2 (2004), 173–213. Mussolini, Benito, The Cardinal’s Mistress, trans. Hiram Motherwell (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1928). ––––, L’amante del cardinale: Claudia Particella, ed. Santi Corvaja (Trento: Reverdito, 1986). Nelson, Victoria, ‘Faux Catholic: a gothic subgenre from Monk Lewis to Dan Brown’, boundary 2, 34/3 (2007), 87–107. Nickerson, Angela K., Angels & Demons’ Rome: The Insider’s Guide to the Locations Featured in the Book and Movie (Berkeley, Calif.: Roaring Forties Press, 2009). I nuovi misteri della corte di Roma, scritti da un ex gesuita e pubblicati dall’abate (Milano: Francesco Barbini – Napoli: Francesco Parrucchetti, 1868). Nuovi misteri di Roma contemporanea: racconto storico-politico, dell’avvocato G. D. (Torino: Giovanni Fantini e Comp., 1856). Reynolds, G. W. M., The Mysteries of London, ed. Trefor Thomas (1846–50, 6 vols; Keele, Staffordshire: Keele University Press, 1996).

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The Mysteries of the Vatican Sandvik, Kjetil and Anne Marit Waade, ‘Crime scene as augmented reality on screen, online and offline’, http://www.krimiforsk.aau.dk/awpaper/KSAWcrimesceneas. w5.pdf (accessed 16 February 2011). Sladen, Douglas Brooke Wheelton, The Secrets of the Vatican (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1907), http://www.archive.org/details/secretsofthevati017566mbp (accessed 26 June 2011). Stevenson, Robert Louis, ‘A gossip on romance’ (1882), http://www.online-literature.com/ stevenson/essays-of-stevenson/5/ (accessed 26 June 2011). Sue, Eugène, Les Mystères de Paris (1842–3, 10 vols), http://gallica.bnf.fr (accessed 16 February 2011). ––––, Le Juif errant, édition illustré par Gavarni (Paris: Paulin, 1844–5), 10 vols, http:// gallica.bnf.fr (accessed 16 February 2011). ––––, Les Mystères du Peuple, ou, Histoire d’une famille de prolétaires a travers les âges (Paris: Administration de librairie, 1849–57), 16 vols, http://gallica.bnf.fr (accessed 16 February 2011). Vismara, Antonio, Monti e Tognetti, o I misteri della corte papale: romanzo storico dell’avvocato Antonio Vismara (Milano: Cesare Cioffi, 1870).

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9 A Tale of Three Cities: Megalopolitan Mysteries of the 1840s STEPHEN KNIGHT

It is often assumed that detective crime fiction is an urban phenomenon, devel­ oping in the early–mid-nineteenth century as identity and menace both become elusive and threatening in the massification of the modern cities: ahead lie Sherlock Holmes and Philip Marlowe. Yet, emergent disciplinary detection in the city in the hands of the anonymous author of Richmond in 1827, Samuel Warren in the 1830s and Edgar Allan Poe around 1840 lacked any focused ex­ pression of urban forces.1 However, they appear strongly in the Mysteries of the Cities, a potent but detective-free genre that swept around the world in a few years from 1842.2 The first detectives and the first cities have their own powers of socio-literary realization, but are not in harmony, or even interaction. Indeed it does not seem that firm-minded detection and real accounts of urban crisis were to combine genuinely until the late twentieth-century urban-collapse narratives of Ellroy, Pelecanos and Rankin, a veridical intervention which itself seems to be already fading in impact. Holmes’s London was very selective, a map of bourgeois error not underclass threat; Marlowe’s LA experience might masquerade with gangsters, but it was personal, especially gendered, threats that bore the deadly weight. The detectives might in fact have been anodyne obscurantists of the real forces of the cities. Crime fiction might urgently be a fiction about crime and too much factuality might prove a problem for readers. But those detection-free Mysteries of the Cities that started in the 1840s came in major instances as close as they could to telling a true narrative about the seething pressures of new megalopolitan life. They were immensely popular, and they deserve a thoughtful analysis for what they can reveal both about the cities and about the power of popular art to interpret the dismays, disillusions and the never quite disappearing aspirations of what was in the 1840s already modern life. In 1842, Eugène Sue consciously turned to a narrative about the real city, and away from his maritime heroics and romantic adventures – the French called them ‘Cooperism’ – with some sense of a socially revealing purpose. Beforehand, his title keyword ‘mysteries’ collocates with religious wonders than with the gothic, which may help to explain the moral, even demi-god-like, role of Sue’s Prince Rodolphe of Gerolstein as the observer and rectifier of human error. New genres,

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the Russian formalists tell us, always parody what they both reject and also borrow to create their new structures.3 In April 1842, Les Mystères de Paris was not only of the streets, but also on the streets. It appeared as a newspaper serial in the moderately serious Le Journal des Débats, and was published in novel form in 1843.4 Sue received both massive sales and a busy correspondence offering approval and advice. This audienceinvolvement has, along with the inherently liberal thrust of the text and its mass appeal, led to the notion, including in the period, that the Mystères played an edu­cational role in the lead-up to the revolutionary events of 1848.5 Another notion is offered by critics led by Louis Chevalier, supported by Christopher Prender­ gast,6 who feel that the text’s developing emphasis on the deserving poor and the redeemed criminal was actually invoked by the intervention of worker readers. In fact, the text is markedly moralizing and paternalistic in its treatment of the poor, and their augmented representation in the second half only emphasizes this. That did not escape another analyst: as Sue was publishing, he was being read in Paris by Karl Marx who, in The Holy Family, which he co-published with Engels in 1844, saw the Mystères as idealist, paternalist, hostile to the people.7 Sue’s kind of wavering between reformist critique and inherent conservatism can also be traced in Reynolds’s Mysteries of London (1846): both might well be explained in Machereyan terms as two writers pushing against the boundaries of what could be expressed at their time and in their world view. Like almost all the Mysteries around the world, Sue’s text is long – about half a million words – but is unique among them in having remained in public use, with several films and rewritten versions, unlike the almost totally forgotten other Mysteries, including that produced by Reynolds. This may relate to the fact that the political stance of the Mystères is neither simple nor advanced. Though it engages, especially at the beginning and towards the end, with the criminal classes and the deserving poor – they can overlap – its structure and much of its action is concerned with the aristocracy. Rodolphe is a prince and will finally be grandduke of an imaginary German state; there are also a number of French aristocrats wavering from eccentric through foolish to weak and disgraced. That sounds like a Balzacian take on les aristos, but Rodolphe’s role is to rescue princedom from the French mire. There is also, unlike in Balzac, only one bourgeois villain, the greedy and corrupt lawyer and banker Ferrand, who is punished for his crimes, mostly against aristocrats, by being destroyed by sexual obsession: more a gothic resolution than a political quid pro quo. Rodolphe arranges this as an unappointed legislator, just as he personally redeems the violent Chourineur by good example. Less admirable, you might think, is Rodolphe’s judgement on the villainous schoolmaster: he has him blinded; the chapter is confidently titled ‘La punition’ – ‘The punishment’. A less hyperbolic approach to crime is developed in the second half of the long story, and this might, in part at least, be under public epistolary encouragement. Here, Sue deals with the way jails can be crime academies, but also places where true moral examples can work. So the ferocious La Louve repents, rescues the

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heroine from murder by drowning, and she and her lover Martial end up, at Rodolphe’s expense, emigrants to Algeria: we last hear of him fighting well against the Arabs. Morality and empire do not work for all: the rest of the Martial family are unregenerate villains, headed for the guillotine, two of the women arriving there at the end of the story. Like them is the Skeleton, the off-stage mastercriminal who finally appears at the execution of les dames Martial, leads the mob uproar and tries to stab Rodolphe. This ending of the Mystères might seem a statement of chaos, with criminality uncontrolled. Not quite: the guards arrive in time for public policing, and in private terms Chourineur has given his life to save Rodolphe. The criminals scatter, but their chaotic power is not destroyed: that they are still at large is a form of aporia that meshes with the urban reality element of the Mystères. But that realism fits inside an overarching story straight from romance, even a parody of it – a genre-forming parody. The frame story is that Rodolphe years ago fell for and had a child with Countess Sarah Macgregor. They separated because Rodolphe realized that she was a very bad person, and she proved it by claiming their daughter Fleur-de-Marie had died and then lodging her with the worst of criminals. The child grows up to be oppressed, exploited and finally, though the text is reticent about this, a prostitute. Rodolphe meets the now teenage child in the opening scene where he is on a charitable mission inspecting the slums and the morality of their residents. Sarah believes she can win Rodolphe back and so become in time a grand duchess. It may not have gone unnoticed that this most treacherous of the villains is not French: indeed she is what Sue calls English. Sarah is so bad that perhaps the Scots will not mind being overlooked. This entanglement is the core of the story. Rodolphe pities Fleur-de-Marie, known to him and readers as La Goualeuse (‘Street-singer’), and has her moved to a pastoral farm run by Mme Georges, herself noble, who has lost a son to the criminals (and, parallel to Rodolphe, will rediscover him eventually). Fleur-deMarie thinks Rodolphe is a nice artisan, wearing workers’ velvet and a cap, as did Sue did on research visits to the bars of central Paris. Eventually, Rodolphe finds out who she is, massively helped and also physically protected by another ‘English’ noble named Sir Walter Murphy (known in the French, for no clear reason, as ‘Murph’). Sarah is stabbed by the criminal to whom she entrusted the child; Rodolphe marries her on her death bed to legitimize Fleur-de-Marie. Everything else has been sorted out, a range of deserving poor given money and respectability by Rodolphe and the story heads home to Gerolstein. Rodolphe acknowledges his feelings for the Comtesse de Harville, a beauty who is herself less than perfect. But though they marry, Fleur-de-Marie cannot follow suit and accept the handsome Prince Heinrich: she feels her past – and here the text comes close to being explicit – is too shameful for her to live the princessly life. She becomes a nun, and straightway an abbess (princely blood counts for something), but she dies the same day, and that is the end of the story. While Sue’s firmness in avoiding a ludicrous happy ending deserves respect, much else in the story is conservative, keeping authority, moral and political,

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firmly in Rodolphe’s princely hands, and never seeing any sign of institutional change or radical organization towards it. Reformed criminals and prostitutes die nobly or become imperial cannon-fodder. There is some criticism of the jails, but the problems are relieved by one-off conversions brought about by genteel volunteers, who offer little but advice. There is a sense that the prison system is brutal, but no alternative is provided, beyond moral improvement by criminals. Liberalism surfaces in the fact that Rodolphe’s doctor and confidant is a Caribbean native, but this is trumped by the fact that his ex-wife Cecily, of mixed race, is sex-crazed (but at least that is useful to entrap the vicious bourgeois lawyer). It would be fair to say that such moralization and conservatism, interwoven with sexism and racism, was the normal cerebral baggage of the period and that Sue does well to have so much about the poor and the criminal and an open, threatbearing conclusion. While Hugo uses the past in Notre Dame de Paris (1831) and an individualist focus in Les Misérables (1862) to simplify and euphemize his displaced political statements about modernity, Sue does, as he promised in his preface, at least take on the contemporary city and its dramas. Especially in the first volume, Paris is read quite closely, from the dives of the inner area, now almost all Haussmannized out of existence, to the barrières around the portes, open spaces where cross-class negotiations can take place in something like power-neutral territory, including the final execution riot. Locations are recur­ rently understood in terms of social meaning: Rodolphe has both a workaday house on what is now the Avenue Montaigne, just north of the river in the Eighth, and a real mansion beyond the ant-hill city, south of the Invalides. A particularly strong sequence, in the middle of the long story, uses a house right in the centre, Rue du Temple, to chart social variations and trace the inter­ ference of both the villainous lawyer and also general criminal mischief into the lives of the would-be industrious. At other times, the story moves around Paris, and out into the country – Fleur-de-Marie’s pastoral idyll and other benign events take place along the Oise, but while the river of Paris is often represented, it seems always in some way malignant. This may be a roman fleuve, but the river is a place of stress, danger, betrayal and humiliation, especially for the poor: the pattern will survive in all these texts, and on into Dickens: this ‘hostile-river’ theme deserves more study, even a meandering book. Les Mystères de Paris is innovative both in talking of a city itself, and in de­ ploying the most up-to-date medium of that city, the cheap daily newspaper, for its voice. It also, being a new genre, carries with it in parodic form some of its formative features, especially those deriving in aristocratic romance, from lost heirs to princely control. Texts that innovate genres, from Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain to Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), are often both backwardlooking thematically and innovative technically, and that is where Sue and his text stand. In spite of what his successors promise, especially in a more fully founded reformism, they rarely go far beyond Sue and often fall below his overall rather impressive standards of moderate liberalism and sympathetic respect for his characters.

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G. W. M. Reynolds had lived in Paris in the 1830s and as an aspiring radical and writer he obviously read Sue’s Mystères early – French and English books were routinely published in each other’s capital then. Always a lively imitator (he annoyed Dickens with Pickwick Abroad (1839)), he set himself to follow Sue’s path. The Mysteries of London first appeared in autumn 1844 in penny-weekly form and the first complete sequence was published in 1846 in two volumes with over a million words.8 After another pair, in 1848, Reynolds fell out with the publisher and did not write the further Mysteries of London but switched to the equally successful The Mysteries of the Court of London (1853), more in the past and more hostile to royalty, with the prince regent as an enormous villain in many senses.9 Surprising though it may seem to English people, it was Sue’s model that was followed around the world, notably in the USA, where Reynolds was not very successful or influential. The Mysteries of London is, even in its first two volumes, at a million words twice the length of Les Mystères de Paris. It also had more, and much more lurid, illustrations: there was a good deal less control of the press in Britain and the popular press was more confident, with a wealth of productions both quasi-serious like the Police Gazette, and simply shocking – both the blood-stained penny dread­ fuls and near-pornography, including from Reynolds’s publisher, George Vickers. There was, however, a link between radicalism and pornography in the near past, as McCalman has shown.10 Reynolds was personally more radical than Sue, being closely involved with the Chartists, and his Mysteries strike many popular notes, from politics to royalty-gazing, with satire, low-life comedy and something dis­ tinctly lubricious now and then. The city is charted with considerable power: only Dickens, with Sketches by Boz (1836) and Bill Sykes’s cross-London walk in Oliver Twist (1838), approaches Reynolds at this time in urban cartography mode. Out of town is not as pastoral as in Sue: Lower Clapton and Willesden are both sites of comfortable residences riven by elevated criminality and Reynolds distinguishes between the elite, and sometimes corrupt, world of Mayfair, the dubious professionals north of Oxford Street, and the layabouts of Bloomsbury. Famous criminal rookeries (like Sue’s inner-city dives, also soon to be gone) are explored in some detail: St Giles, Globe Town and Bethnal Green in the east and, in the second volume, ‘The Mint’ in Southwark. More criminals appear than in Sue and we hear more of their lives. Even the worst of them, the Resurrection Man, is given a narrative that largely explains his present brutality; others such as Cranky Jem become, like the Chourineur, reformed. Also, as in Sue, the criminals are a recurrent repertory cast, turning up to cause trouble in varied circumstances, sometimes on behalf of the crooked gentry. This narrowing-down of personnel is a way of making the mass threat of urban crime manageable in narrative terms, and in moral ones as well. The idea of an unmanageable, anonymous range of real threats is something that narrative fictions still might not handle well today, even if they had the old-style length. A mix of engagement with and resolution of urban anxiety is basic to Reynolds’s whole structure, even if the engagement is usually more direct and politically

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realistic than in Sue. The overall shape here is different, though with a not dissimilar outcome. Two brothers focus and organize the whole plot: Richard and Eugene Markham, born to an upper-middle-class family just outside London, in Lower Holloway (today fallen in status, one of London’s bleaker areas). They part – serious debts and his father’s hostility blight Eugene (the name is presumably a joke against Sue) – and agree to meet again in twelve years’ time, spring 1843, the year of publication: the Mysteries of the Cities are always right up to date, unlike most novels. The story at first relates how young Richard, now also in poverty, but not through his own fault, makes his way as tutor, playwright, man about town. He falls in with corrupt minor aristocrats, gamesters and shysters; he ends up in court for uttering forged banknotes, with merely circumstantial evidence against him. He is saved not by a princely Rodolphe but a radical philanthropist, a mix of Robert Owen and Tom Paine, among Reynolds’s heroes. Things improve for Richard, especially after he meets Isabella, daughter of an Italian count, who is in exile because his state of Castelcicala is run by a tyrannical grand duke. Events become even more amazing. Richard joins the resistance to the unjust tyrant, goes to Italy and assumes leadership of the count’s party, commanding the insurgents in a final battle to take the capital. The count becomes the grand duke, Richard marries Isabella and so becomes a prince. Not a foreign prince like Rodolphe, nor a monster like the prince regent, but a true-born Englishman-cumprince, royal through his own sterling efforts, admired by all, especially foreigners. The Italy manoeuvre – this is pre-Garibaldi – is perhaps the only real whisper of imperialism in the text, of a displaced fantasy kind. So Richard becomes royal, and in the last quarter is massively philanthropic just like Rodolphe: he will move to Italy, and eventually rule there, after he finally meets Eugene. This name does not appear in the story, but soon enough trained crime readers will find him. There is a very successful businessman called Mortimer Greenwood – a modern outlaw? He is involved in almost everything, including nearly ruining the noble Italian count; he becomes an MP, permitting Reynolds to mock the system that the Chartists disliked so much; he is close to senior Tories and aristocrats. The world of dubious loans, bill-broking and crooked stockdealing is explored at some length in the first volume, and Reynolds is the first writer to attack the operating methods and values of city capitalism. Marx, now in London, thought it was fake politics, calling Reynolds ‘a rich and very good speculator’, though he did admit that Reynolds’s Newspaper of the early 1850s gave a voice to the working class.11 Mortimer is only revealed as Eugene very late in the story, and he dies for his sins in an event that seems unusually coincidental and melodramatic even for Reynolds – but as the fatal accident is caused by a former valet, whom Eugene has, like several other people in the story, corrupted by his own evil, there is a moral core to the melodrama. He has always sought to avoid harming Richard (a clue), but has often deployed the forces of professional criminality in London, notably the horrible Resurrection Man, who operates, like his cohorts, for personal

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profit as robbers, murderers and even body-snatchers, but at times also assist the malfeasance of businessmen and corrupt aristocrats. The last are a sorry bunch: Sir Rupert Harborough, gambler and ladies’ man; Colonel Cholmondely, seducer and dueller; the marquis of Holmesford, who has his own harem in the West End. The aristos can be benign, if only just: the unpleasant-seeming earl of Warrington turns out to be noble, if condescending, and Lord Dunstable does finally repent his mistreatment of women. But Sir Cherry Bounce and the Hon. Smilax Dapper remain corrupt idiots to the end. More telling than this class-war coconut-shy is the way the story shows middle-class men becoming involved with the crooked gentry: rich shopkeepers are fleeced, weak artisans and white-collar folk, would-be gentry all, join the corrupt world. This is a much wider range and variety of upper-class malice than Sue offered, and in keeping, Reynolds’s treatment of women is a good deal more varied and positive. Though there are hideous old women in the gin shops, there is no one as brutal as Sue’s Chouette or Mme Martial; even the unnamed ‘Old Hag’ of Drury Lane, who is a major manipulator, especially of young women, has a credible history and a few better feelings. Only Lady Cecily Harborough is really bad, sharing the name and the excitements of Sue’s mixed-race sex-fiend. She betrays her worthless husband by seducing the Reverend Tracy of Tavistock Square, and brings him to death in jail and herself to suicide – from the top of the Monument, at that. Less simplistic are, first, Eliza Sydney, who goes from impersonating a man to gain an inheritance for someone else to being grand duchess of Castelcicala; when her tyrant husband is dead, she acts with virtue and courage to help others back in England. Then Ellen Monroe, even more beautiful, is led by poverty and her father’s ruin into artists’ modelling and acting, then sells herself to Greenwood – who ruined her father. He deserts her, a child is born, but she soldiers on with the help of Markham, a friend of her father’s. Finally, through gaining evidence against Greenwood, she makes him marry her for the child’s name, and she too ends up a capable adviser to others. Less admirable vigour is given to schoolteacher Lucy Hutchinson: having been led into seduction by a girl pupil, then abandoned by Lord Dunstable, she returns from total poverty to plan bitter revenge on her student, now Lady Ravensworth. It ends in Lucy’s murder, arranged by the lady, which leads to her own death too: but the sequence envisages a type of female agency much more potent, if also more gothic, than Sue’s prison visitors. Some of this material, notably the illustrations of Ellen as a model, the account of the Old Hag’s very young street girls or the seduction of Lucy Hutchinson, move close to semi-pornography. In the epilogue, Reynolds rebuts a ‘fugitive report’ that ‘the blush of shame [will be] excited on the cheek oftener than the tear of sympathy will be drawn from the eye’.12 Not very convincing; the jury might also want to remain out for a while on the criminal scenes, which can display a real relish in their brutality. But to counter those exploitative features Reynolds does, unlike Sue, offer a firm critique of the police and the courts as corrupt and in­ efficient, of prisons as dehumanizing, especially the treadmill, and of executions

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as un-Christian. This extends to an attack on the processes of transportation to Australia, handled with some expertise. Reynolds’s satiric range is wide: a power­ ful sequence shows the ‘Black Office’ where mail is intercepted and the home secretary smiles on this as a practice appropriate to maintaining democracy and liberty; other targets are West End gaming-houses, army commissions gained by class standing, the vileness of past royalty and in several fine sequences, with an absolutely modern feel to them, the vulgarity and manipulations of the press are exposed. Reynolds is also notable for his positive position on race. The only Jewish char­ acter in the whole story is a capable, genial woman shopkeeper. He calls some of the Holywell Street booksellers nothing worse than ‘Israelites’ – and he exposes city business as corrupt without any anti-Semitism at all. He highly respects the people in that time widely dismissed, or patronized, as ‘gypsies’: both their St Giles headquarters and their communal values are represented positively, and Morcar, heir to the king of the British Roma, helps save Richard in Italy and provides as his first troops 400 brave and skilled Zingari. At times Reynolds, like Sue, seems to extend a sequence beyond need and go in for padding – the details of the tricks gamesters use could certainly be abbreviated. But at his best he creates an arresting, interrelated and potently symbolic narrative, working with a more interrogative and less ultimately conservative style than Sue. The opening scene has the ever-game Eliza Sydney dressed as a young man swagger­ ing through West Smithfield. She is kidnapped by criminals, taken to a safe house in this mini-rookery, overhears a plan to rob the Markham house, then is dumped into the Fleet River – which is also the main sewer (as in Hugo, the sewers are the real underworld). With courage and skill she survives and escapes to warn Richard, and so begins one part of the interwoven plot that will lead to his fatherin-law succeeding her husband as grand duke. Not all is so multi-stranded or memorable, and by making Richard a prince Reynolds both eludes discussing how you institutionalize reform and also returns his text, in its different mode, to the social conservatism of Les Mystères de Paris. But the two remain different, because the cities were. London was much further down the track in both mercantile and capitalist development and that provides much of Reynolds’s content. The Thames is a river of stealable world-wide goods, not like the Seine, just for drowning innocent women – all the Martials, ‘river pirates’ though they may be, can manage to achieve in the story. London also did not suffer from the post-revolutionary tensions of France and so the story can combine accepting royalty with desiring reform, especially via Prince Albert, and also Prince Richard. Reynolds had the privilege of criticizing privilege without the threat of revolution that was projected from Sue’s lesser critique. So Paris and London could explore their mysteries with both separation and similarity. But they could also merge, and in a most surprising and even entertaining way. There have been many French responses to Sue’s work, from Zola’s Mystères de Marseilles (1867) to Léo Malet’s post-war Les Nouveaux Mystères de Paris (1954–9) starring Nestor Burma, the French Sam Spade, but the first major one

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was Paul Féval’s smart idea to produce in early 1844, before Reynolds, Les Mystères de Londres – under the fine pseudonym ‘Sir Francis Trolopp’, a re-gendered free­ hand spelling of Frances Trollope, a novelist popular in London and Paris, and mother of Anthony.13 Shorter than Sue’s Mystères, this is still a full and interwoven multiple narrative. It starts with a vigorous scene of smuggling and receiving stolen goods on the Thames (again the river is a site of threat), and we are introduced to a substantial group of London villains – Reynolds might have picked this up, but nothing else. Soon, though, the story goes into high society and basically stays there, with inter­ mittent returns to the criminals, who are in any case locked into the main plot. This focuses on a single figure, first known as the marquis of Rio-Santo. Amazingly handsome and confident, he turns out to be a precise reflex of Rodolphe. To spoil the story, he is in fact Fergus O’Brian, brought up in Scotland. In revenge for English mistreatment of his family, and Ireland in general, he builds up steadily a massive plot to overthrow English rule. Monarch, Parliament, Bank of England – they will all be destroyed, with international support especially from Brazil, where his title comes from, and the czar of Russia, as well as 10,000 Irish nationalist soldiers advancing on London. The marquis is astonishing. He has contacts everywhere and a huge income: when he escaped from transportation to Australia (not as well detailed as by Reynolds), he built up a world-wide pirate fleet. He personally controls all the criminals of London – Féval generously estimates them at 100,000 – so the criminal realism of the opening river-crime and the robust tavern scenes is elided into a huge conspiracy. There is a splendid multiform assistant villain who, after surviving hanging as a Jewish criminal, becomes for varied purposes both a (pretend) blind baronet and a vicious London thug. There are English aristocrats – a very unstable one called the earl of White Manor and his noble, if rash, brother, called with equal inaccuracy Brian de Lancaster. The Scots are crucial: Fergus’s old friend Angus MacFarlane is both central to the marquis’s plans and also the agent who finally causes the failure of the plot, but there are also two simpler Scotsmen who love the girls the marquis is interfering with, and they come through with the police at the end. The women are astonishingly lovely, neither as troubled as in Sue nor as gutsy as in Reynolds: the very beauteous Susannah who also plays a princess, is deeply improbable, and there is plenty of abducting, drugging, sighing and sobbing, and as relief, at least one sexually active, jealous, but also rather amiable, lady plotter. The text is not very good on British detail – Diana Stewart is an im­ probable name for ‘a Welsh girl’ – and the London setting is very limited, even touristic. One story has it that Féval visited London for the first time halfway through and was pleased with his version.14 There is irritation with English institutions for being both mercantile and also aristocratic, and though the narrator speaks of himself as one of ‘we English’, the French animus comes through, especially when Fergus visits Napoleon on St Helena and is inspired to renew his efforts against the enemy.

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Féval’s London is a third imagined base of the Mysteries of the Cities, Londres, not London, a Parisian projection. In structure as in time it stands between the big two, and with some status. While Féval vigorously reverses Sue’s superherocentred plot, his critique of English institutions, notably business corruption and aristocratic slackness, can be telling, and can match Reynolds; his capacity to have ordinary people triumphing finally against massive conspiratorial forces could be seen as in a naive way more genuinely liberal than either of the other Mystery-meisters. Paul Féval would go on to write many successful serials, vengeance-conspiracy stories of adventure and conservatism: Le Bossu (1857) is a classic of what the French call an adventure of ‘cape and sword’, with the avenging hero disguised as a hunchback, and it has remained a favourite, especially with film-makers; Les Habits Noirs (1863–75) became a multi-novel series about and against villainous conspiracies (including in its later stages a version of Les Mystères de Londres) and Jean-Diable (1862–3) is with some credibility regarded as the first formal detective novel. Yet, somewhere within the crazy conspiracy of Féval’s Les Mystères de Londres is real crime writing. Bob Lantern is a nastier, tougher, funnier villain than will recur until Dashiell Hammett, and Féval’s brave girls and decent lads also look forward to later forms, such as the breathless amateurs of 1860s British sensational fiction and Agatha Christie. But there was also a direct succession. As he grew famous, Féval employed as secretary, editor and probably ghost-writer, Émile Gaboriau, master creator of heroic police detection in Monsieur Lecoq, and the condenser of disciplinary detection with something like the real forces of the modern city. While he took the detective from other writers, combining Vidocq and Poe on the model of the 1860s London yellowbacks, it seems that he learnt something about urban atmosphere, ordinary people’s persistence and also con­ tempt for aristocrats in Féval’s weird and rather wonderful Franco-English con­ densation that was the third and most exotic of the dynamic locations that began the powerful, exotic and richly varied genre of the Mysteries of the Cities. Notes For a discussion of these authors, see Heather Worthington, The Rise of the Detective in Early Nineteenth-century Popular Fiction (London: Palgrave, 2005).  2 For a discussion of this genre, see Stephen Knight, The Mysteries of the Cities: Urban Crime Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011).  3 For the formalists’ view on productive parody, see Viktor Šklovskij, ‘The mystery novel: Dickens’s Little Dorrit’, trans. Guy Carter, in Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (eds), Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), pp. 220–6; a more general argument is offered in Jurij Tynjanov’s, ‘On literary evolution’, trans. C. A. Luplow, ibid., pp. 66–78. Victor Erlich discusses ‘parody and stylization as catalysts of literary change’ in Russian Formalism: History – Directions (‘S-Gravenhage: Mouton, 1955), p. 72; a useful commentary on the topic  1

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Stephen Knight is in Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 34–6 and 69–83.  4 Eugène Sue, Les Mystères de Paris, 4 vols (Paris: Gosselin, 1843); as The Mysteries of Paris, vol. 1 and The Miseries of Paris, vol. 2, trans. Henry Llewellyn Williams (New York: Lupton, 1892).  5 On Sue’s relations with the 1848 revolution, see Pierre Chaunu, Eugène Sue et la Seconde République (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948).  6 See Louis Chevalier, Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses à Paris pendant la première moitié du XIXe siècle (Paris: Plon, 1958); as Labouring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Frank Jellinek (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973); Christopher Prendergast, For the People by the People? Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris: A Hypothesis in the Sociology of Literature (Oxford: Legenda, 2003).  7 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Holy Family: A Critique of Critical Critique, in Collected Works, vol. 4, trans. R. Dixon (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975); the whole text is a criticism of the German neo-Hegelians led by Bruno Bauer; Marx himself contributes the two chapters, 5 and 8, which pick on the favourable review of Sue’s Les Mystères by ‘Szeliga’ as a typical piece of neo-Hegelian idealist fantasy, and the analysis involves a number of specific criticisms of the novel as being conservative in many ways.  8 G. W. M. Reynolds, The Mysteries of London, 2 vols (London: Vickers, 1846).  9 Idem, The Mysteries of the Court of London, 8 vols (London: Dicks, 1849–56). 10 Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries, and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). 11 Karl Marx, letter to Engels, 8 October 1858, see Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 40, Marx and Engels 1856–59 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1983), p. 345. 12 Reynolds, The Mysteries of London, vol. 2, p. 424. 13 ‘Sir Francis Trolopp’ (Paul Féval), Les Mystères de Londres (Paris: Au Comptoir des Imprimeurs-Unis, 1844); idem,The Mysteries of London, trans. Henry Champion Deming (New York: Judd and Taylor, 1845). 14 Jean-Pierre Galvan, Paul Féval: Parcours d’une Oeuvre (Paris: Encrage, 2000), p. 104.

Select bibliography Chaunu, Pierre, Eugène Sue et la Seconde République (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948). Chevalier, Louis, Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses à Paris pendant la première moitié du XIXe siècle (Paris: Plon, 1958). ––––, Labouring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris during the First Half of the Nine­ teenth Century, trans. Frank Jellinek (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973). Erlich, Victor, Russian Formalism: History – Directions (‘S-Gravenhage: Mouton, 1955). Féval, Paul, Le Bossu (Paris: Voisvenel, 1857). ––––, Jean-Diable (Paris: Dentu, 1862–3). ––––, Les Habits Noirs (Paris: Dentu, 1863–75). ––––, John Devil, trans. Brian Stapleford (Encina, Calif.: Black Coat Press, 2004). Hutcheon, Linda, A Theory of Parody (London: Methuen, 1985).

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Megalopolitan Mysteries of the 1840s Galvan, Jean-Pierre, Paul Féval: Parcours d’une Oeuvre (Paris: Encrage, 2000). Knight, Stephen, The Mysteries of the Cities: Urban Crime Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012). McCalman, Iain, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries, and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). Marx, Karl, letter to Engels, 8 October 1858, see Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 40, Marx and Engels 1856–59 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1983). ––– and Friedrich Engels, The Holy Family: A Critique of Critical Critique, in Collected Works, vol. 4, trans. R. Dixon (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975). Prendergast, Christopher, For the People by the People? Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris: A Hypothesis in the Sociology of Literature (Oxford: Legenda, 2003). Reynolds, G. W. M., The Mysteries of London, 2 vols (London: Vickers, 1846). ––––, The Mysteries of the Court of London, 8 vols (London: Dicks, 1849–56). Šklovskij, Viktor, ‘The mystery novel: Dickens’s Little Dorrit’, trans. Guy Carter, in Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (eds), Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), pp. 220–6. Sue, Eugène, Les Mystères de Paris, 4 vols (Paris: Gosselin, 1843). ––––, The Mysteries of Paris, vol. 1 and The Miseries of Paris, vol. 2, trans. Henry Llewellyn Williams (New York: Lupton, 1892). Trolopp, Sir Francis (Paul Féval), Les Mystères de Londres (Paris: Au Comptoir des Imprimeurs-Unis, 1844); ––––, The Mysteries of London, trans. Henry Champion Deming (New York: Judd and Taylor, 1845). Tynjanov, Jurij, ‘On literary evolution’, trans. C. A. Luplow, in Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (eds), Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), pp. 66–78. Worthington, Heather, The Rise of the Detective in Early Nineteenth-century Popular Fiction (London: Palgrave, 2005).

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Conclusion LUCY ANDREW AND CATHERINE PHELPS

Rural crime fiction – especially the country house mystery – traditionally ends with a sense of resolution and, hence, reassurance as the sole corrupting influence – usually the murderer – is exposed and contained. The urban setting, in contrast, affords prospects for a more realistic and complex engagement with criminality and other societal problems. Unlike its rural equivalent, in urban crime fiction, although the individual crime can be solved and the villain captured, crime itself cannot be contained. The war to police the capital city is never won because as soon as the criminal is dispatched another arises to take his place. The capital city, in particular, is vast and enigmatic – the realm of the foreigner, the tourist, the stranger – providing endless opportunities for crime and concealing a multitude of sins. The struggle in capital crime novels is to contain not only crime and criminals but also the city. The capital city stars as the ultimate opponent – a cartographer’s nightmare, full of complexities and contradictions, duplicitous, constantly evolving and impossible to pin down. For the detective and the reader, the capital city poses the ultimate challenge: the conundrum that cannot be solved. This representation of the city as an immense, irresolvable force helps to articu­ late growing complications inherent in our responses to crime in the modern world. Outside the realm of fiction, crime is becoming increasingly difficult to detect in light of the breakdown of communities and the consequent escalation of the threat of the stranger. Moreover, the onset of mass communication – most notably via the internet – increases the ease with which global criminal networks can be forged. Coupled with the increasing invisibility and elusiveness of the criminal is the increase in the volume of criminal activity or, at least, our awareness of it through considerable media coverage. A further complication to resolvable crime has arisen in the form of our growing perception of the moral and psychological complexity of criminality. Advances in science and technology pose new moral dilemmas and opportunities for crime while also providing us with the tools to investigate the inner workings of the criminal mind. In an increasingly secular society, the divide between good and evil, between the model citizen and the de­ generate outlaw, is not always obvious. Criminal psychologists search for the root cause of deviant behaviour while, in popular culture, there is a growing focus on the perpetrators above the detectors of crime. In the twenty-first century we are unwilling simply to condemn and contain criminality. There is, instead, a desire to understand the motivations of crime and to cure the injustices and inequalities

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Conclusion

that lead to criminality. Placing the enigmatic capital city at its heart helps crime fiction to articulate both the magnitude and the complexity of criminality: mysteries can no longer be solved; crime can no longer be contained. The city defies the resolution of the classic detective novel and, instead of eradicating the criminal threat, forces the reader to confront it. Thus, urban crime fiction, much more so than its rural counterpart, becomes a genre of protest rather than reassurance. It addresses problems that cannot be solved within the realm of fiction. The use of the capital city here provides a plat­ form for global political debate. While the issues explored in capital crime novels often relate to specific geographical areas and communities, ostensibly local con­ cerns such as the corralling of Tiger Bay or the corruption of the Vatican inevitably escalate to global proportions. Just as the city cannot be mapped and contained, so the transgressions, conflicts and disturbances explored within specific urban environments are not confined to these areas. Grounding capital crime narratives in reality emphasizes that the crimes explored in these texts are real problems that need to be addressed rather than fictional phenomena. Placed within a capital city setting, these problems are amplified, as a distinct contrast can be drawn between the respectable tourist face and the shady criminal underside of the city. The capital city’s status as a tourist hotspot, a representative of the nation, and a polit­ical and economic centre of power ensures that, in the capital crime novel, crime, corruption, social injustice and inequality are scrutinized under a global spotlight. The movement in capital crime fiction from the local and contained to the global and unrestrained ensures that it becomes a site for political protest with global implications. By exploring and campaigning against inequalities and injustices in the areas of race, gender, class, religion, economics and politics, such novels aim to eradicate the causes of crime rather than the inevitable perpetrators of criminality. While many conventional crime novels encourage complacency and perpetuate political apathy through their sense of containment and resolution, capital crime narratives instead advocate action, as the introduction of the urban conundrum stimulates crime fiction’s social conscience. The city may create crime but also has the potential to cure it. This radical move by capital crime fiction has been seized upon by another popu­lar culture medium: television. Capital city crime has attracted mass audi­ ences when adapted for television. Serials such as Engrenages (Spiral; 2005–present day) and Forbrydelsen (The Killing; 2007–12), set in Paris and Copenhagen respect­ ively, use a seemingly unrelated murder to reveal political corruption, the inequalities and injustices of globalization, while exposing hitherto hidden facets of a capital city usually kept from the tourist gaze. It is true that non-capital city crime fiction has also achieved popularity through television serialization. However, while the likes of Henning Mankell’s Wallander and Andrea Camilleri’s Montalbano have been popular when translated to television, they have not attracted similar viewing figures. Often this popularity reaches across cultures. Both serials were shown outside their own countries and Forbrydelsen was recently remade for American

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television. Perhaps placing corruption and crime within a city that resembles the viewer’s own yet is still culturally different provides the necessary dislocation needed to contemplate safely the possibility of corruption and inequality within one’s own society. Moreover, television’s capital crime fiction has achieved a level of acceptance for the genre, signposted in Britain by their placement on BBC4, a channel dedicated to so-called intelligent television. Juxtaposing murder with the far-reaching issues of political corruption and globalization appears to have paved the way for capital crime fiction’s recognition as a serious genre. Nevertheless, recent global recession has shaken the stability of the Old World. While the fall of the Iron Curtain brought about new European capitals and new hybrid identities, economic uncertainty now threatens to fracture European unity. The growth of economic superpowers in the East and in previous Third World territories, many once colonized by Europe, is creating fresh anxieties. Capital crime fiction has yet to form a response to this new crisis, possibly as we cannot yet imagine a resolution to the current phenomenon. However, it could be argued that the current growth in historical crime fiction may be the beginnings of crime fiction’s examination of a failing economic power. Historical crime fiction, particu­ larly medieval crime, is already a well-established genre. New capital crime fiction looks to historical Rome, Edinburgh and Paris. In Britain, at least, crime writers are now returning to a Victorian or Edwardian London. This could be a nostalgic return to the days of empire and European expansion. True, many are clearly written with an eye to the market: Jack the Ripper and new Sherlock Holmes cases are both popular topics. However, a number of Victorian historical crime novels not only revisit the past but also engage in a re-visioning of that past. When the future is unforeseeable, current crises force us to rewrite the past and redress the inequalities and injustices of the past. Many crime writers engage in a lively re-imagining of the historic capital city and its inhabitants. Sarah Waters, who created a paradigm for future neo-Victorians, re-positioned ostracized figures from the margins to the centre. Waters’s primary concern in Tipping the Velvet (1998) and Fingersmith (2002) is a previously invisible gay underclass. This histor­ ical re-visioning of disenfranchised segments of the capital city’s populace is not limited to adult crime fiction. In historical crime literature for younger readers, bedraggled London street urchins are transformed into savvy detectives in series such as Anthony Read’s Baker Street Boys (2005–12) and Tim Pigott-Smith’s Baker Street Mysteries (2008–9), where Holmes’s Baker Street Irregulars eclipse the great detective himself. Notably, in The Case of the Disappearing Detective (2005), the first book in Read’s series, the Baker Street Boys – some of whom are, in fact, girls – are called upon to rescue Holmes from the clutches of his nemesis, Moriarty, and, more crucially, to foil an assassination attempt against Queen Victoria. Former victims of the capital city become empowered as its protectors. Historical crime fiction has the potential to re-shape and re-imagine not only the city’s inhabitants but, perhaps more significantly, the city itself. In Sara Stock­ bridge’s debut novel, The Fortunes of Grace Hammer (2010), the East End is visited, this time not as a site for vice and crime but as a haven amongst a close community.

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Others, such as Mark Hodder’s The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack (2010), playfully re-imagine London through re-imagining genre. Using steampunk, a generic hybrid of science fiction, historical fiction and mystery writing, Hodder writes a city that co-exists both in the present and in the past. This re-imagining of the capital city is taken to extremes in another hybrid crime text, Robin Price’s experimental children’s book London Deep (2010) – part prose, part graphic novel – which constructs neither a past nor a present London but, rather, a future version of the city. Price’s London is a flooded, post-apocalyptic ruin, regulated con­ currently by rival adult and child police forces which have jurisdiction over their respective age groups. Here, the capital city becomes a warning of what could be – the epicentre of a political debate with which we must engage in order to avoid a second Flood. ‘You have no rights, so remain silent’ is the maxim of the police of Price’s London. Thankfully, capital crime fiction defies this command, breaking the silence to reassert the rights of both the crime genre and the capital city as sites of global revolution.

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Index

9/11 25, 50 Aaron, Jane 33 Aillaud, Emile 88 Alexander, Annie Hector Crumpled Leaf, The 114 ambigram 117, 118 Amsterdam 49 Aragon, Louis Paysan de Paris 88 Arnold, Matthew 43n. Ascari, Maurizio 3–4 Atack, Margaret 2 Atget, Eugène 85, 88, 99, 100 Auden, W. H. 63n. Augias, Corrado I segreti del Vaticano 108 Auschwitz 98, 99 authenticity 1, 2, 3, 4, 19, 20, 86 Baigent, Michael 114 Balzac, Honoré de 88, 127 Bancquart, Marie-Claire 91, 98 Banville, John (Benjamin Black) 56–7 Christine Falls 57 Silver Swan, The 57 Banville, Vincent Death By Design 56 Barka, Ben 98 Baudelaire, Charles 1, 63n., 86, 88 ‘Le Cynge’ 90 Baudrillard Simulacra and Simulations 16 Beckett, Samuel Waiting for Godot 50 Belfast 6, 49 Belli, Matteo 112 Bellman, Carl Michael 67 Benjamin, Walter 85 Bensaïd, Daniel 91, 103n. Bergman, Kerstin 4, 79n.

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Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 116, 118 Berr, Hélène 98 Bible, the 20, 119 Genesis 60n., 118 Job 20 Jonah 60n. Matthew 60n. Blanc, Jean-Noël 89, 98, 102n. Boa, Kenneth and John Alan Turner 115 Boccaccio, Giovanni Decameron 48 Borges, Jorge Luis 94 Bourdelas, Laurent 103n. Breton, André 93 Bride of Frankenstein, The 63n. Bristol Channel 34 Brito, Anthony ‘Soul Exchange’ 42 Brito, Leonora 29, 42 Dat’s Love 42 Brockway, Anthony 45n. Brown, Dan 111, 119, 120 Angels and Demons 3–4, 108, 114, 115–9, 123n. Da Vinci Code, The 108, 114, 115, 116, 119, 121n., 122n. Bubeck, Craig and Jeff Dunn Gospel According to Dan Brown, The 118 Buenos Aires 31, 91, 97, 98 Burke and Hare 7 Burke, James Lee 56, 61n. Burke, Sean Deadwater 39, 40 Burstein, Dan and Arne DeKeijzer Inside Angels & Demons 116 Butetown 30–1, 32, 34, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43n., 45n. Butor, Michel L’emploi du temps 95

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Index Caillois, Roger 86 Cameron, Ross ‘Images of Tiger Bay’ 31 Camilleri, Andrea 107, 139 Camorra 107 capital city 2, 3, 4, 5, 17, 18, 19, 50, 54, 55, 57, 60, 96, 101, 108, 138, 139, 140, 141 capital punishment 2 Capitol, the 113 Carbonari 111, 112 Cardiff 2, 3, 29–46 ‘Cardiff Three’ 39, 40 Carlsson, Ulf 67 Carné, Marcel Enfants du paradis 96 Carrell, J. L. Shakespeare Secret, The 116 cartography 1, 2, 3, 4, 16, 86, 89, 107, 130, 138 Catholic Church 4, 51, 114, 115, 116, 119 Cawelti, John G. 25n. Chandler, Raymond 1, 18 Big Sleep, The 56 Marlowe, Philip 126 Chandra, Vikram 57 Chartists 130, 131 Chekhov 61n. Chevalier, Louis 127 Chicago 71 Christie, Agatha 26n., 92, 135 Church of Rome 108, 113, 120 City Mysteries 1, 4–5, 126, 131, 135 Clandfield, Peter 18, 25n.–26n. Clavel, Maurice 94 clue-puzzle fiction 19 Collins, William Wilkie 121n. Connelly, Michael 58 Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness 32 Copenhagen 139 Corkin, Stanley 61n. Corleone 107 Cornwell, John 121n. Cosgrove, Stuart 9 County Galway 52 County Kerry 48 County Kildare 53 country house mystery 1, 138 Cox, Simon Illuminating Angels and Demons 116

Craig, David Tattooed Detective, The 38 crime narratives 2, 3, 107, 108, 109, 139 crime scenes 2, 86, 90, 97, 99, 100, 101 Crisp, Quentin 61n. cultural tourism 3, 4, 5, 107, 116, 117 Daeninckx, Didier ‘Passage d’enfer’ 100 Dahl, Arne (Jan Arnald) 65, 75 Dante 48 Davies, Rhys 37 Count Your Blessings 30 Withered Root, The 30 da Vinci, Leonardo, Mona Lisa 93 Deacon Brodie 7, 20 De Certeau, Michel 60n. De Dominicis, Francesco Paulo I misteri del chiostro romano e la presa di Roma 110 De Keijzer, Arne see Dan Burstein De la Châtre, Maurice Histoire des Papes 110 De Troyes, Chrétien Yvain 129 Del Vecchio, Bernardo 4, 111, 112, 119 I misteri di Roma contemporanea 109, 111 Delerm, Martine 88 Delerm, Philippe Paris l’instant 88 Deleuze, Gilles 88 devolution 19, 25 Dickens, Charles 1, 129, 130 Oliver Twist 130 Sketches by Boz 130 Dillon, Eilís Death at Crane’s Court 52 Sent to His Account 52, 54 docklands 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 36, 37, 38, 44n. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 20 Brothers Karamazov, The 115 Crime and Punishment 21 Doyle, Arthur Conan 63n. Holmes, Sherlock 1, 4, 109, 126, 140 duality 1, 2, 17, 25, 70, 118, 123n. Dublin 2, 10, 47–64 Dublin Castle 52, 55, 62n. Dubois, Claude 104n.

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Index Duchamp, Gaston 94 Duchamp, Marcel 91, 92–3, 94, 95, 97, 103n., 104n. Dunn, Jeff see Craig Bubeck

Garibaldi, Giuseppe 121n., 131 Clelia – Il governo del monaco (The Rule of the Monk) 110 Gaskell, Elizabeth 33 G. D. Nuovi misteri di Roma contemporanea 109 Geherin, David Scene of the Crime 67–8, 76, 79n. Gerhardsen, Carin 65, 82n. Glamorgan Historian 31, 43n. Glasgow 6, 8, 10, 12, 19, 20, 56 global 3, 4, 19, 22, 23, 24, 25, 75, 107, 108, 115,138, 139, 140, 141 globalization 3, 4, 72, 75, 78, 139, 140 Godfather, The 107 Godwin, William Caleb Williams 111 Golden Age British 49 Swedish 66 gothic 17, 20, 24, 86, 110, 126, 127, 132 Goulet, Andrea 95, 101n. Gray, Thomas 60n. Grebe, Camilla 65 Gregoire, Lucien Murder in the Vatican 109 Grémillon, Jean L’Etrange monsieur Victor 94 Griesinger, Theodor Jesuits, The 13 Mysteries of the Vatican, The 113 ‘Grisette, La’ 96 Guardian, The 107 Guillou, Jan 71 Guthrie, Alan Two-way Split 18

Eccardt, Thomas M. Secrets of the Seven Smallest States of Europe 108 Edinburgh 2, 3, 6–15, 16–28, 107, 140 Edinburgh Evening News 13 Edinburgh Festival 14 Ellroy, James 1, 75, 126 Black Dahlia, The 40 Engels, Freidrich and Karl Marx Holy Family, The 127, 136n. Engrenages 139 Erlich, Victor 135n. Evans, Neil ‘Regulating the reserve army’ 32 Fajardie, Frédéric 105n. Fajardie, Frédéric and Marc Gantier Paris: Rouge et noir 87 Fargue, Léon-Paul Piéton de Paris, Le 88, 90 Fascism 114 Fenimore Cooper, James 86 feuilleton 108, 109, 111, 112, 114 Féval, Paul (Sir Francis Trolopp) Bossu, Le 135 Habits Noirs, Les 135 Jean-Diable 135 Mystères de Londres, Les 134–5 flâneur 2, 68, 87, 88, 94 flânerie, la 3, 87 Follain, John City of Secrets 109 Forbrydelsen 139 Forshaw, Barry 75, 82n. Frédéric, Madeleine 104n. Fredriksson, Karl G. 66, 79n., 80n. French Revolution 88 Frisby, David 80n. G8 summit 22, 23 Gaboriau, Émile 135 Galileo 116 Galway 59 Gang (Alain Dugrand and Hervé Prudon) 102n., 103n. Gantier, Marc see Frédéric Fajardie

Hammett, Dashiell 135 Hanson, Gillian Mary 74 hard-boiled tradition 19, 66, 74, 86 Hausladen, Gary J. Places for Dead Bodies 65, 80n. Haussmann, Georges-Eugène 96, 129 Hellström, Börge 65 hinterland 2, 56, 60 Hjort, Michael 65 Hodder, Mark Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack, The 141 Hogg, James 17

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Index Confessions of a Justified Sinner 7 Holmér, Hans 71 Holmes, Sherlock see Arthur Conan Doyle Holocaust, the 94, 98, 99 Horsley, Lee 61n. Hugo, Victor 88, 133 Misérables, Les 129 Notre Dame de Paris 129

Mysteries of the Cities, The 135n.

Illuminati, the 116, 117, 118, 122n. I misteri del Vaticano 110 immigration 3, 32, 51, 75 immigrant 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 77 Independent, The 39 I nuovi misteri della corte di Roma, scritti da un ex gesuita e pubblicati dall’abate 110 Jack the Ripper 140 Jakubowski, Maxim Following the Detectives 65 James, Bill You’d Better Believe It 37–8 Jeffers, H. Paul Dark Mysteries of the Vatican 108 Jesuits 108, 110, 111, 112 John Paul I 109 Johnston, Paul Body Politic 17 Jones, Jack 44n. Jordan, Glenn and Chris Weedon 36, 42 Journal des Débats, Le 127 Joyce, James 56 Ulysses 7, 10, 51 Kafka, Franz 87, 99, 101n. Kärrholm, Sara 79n., 81n. Kellmeyer, Stephen Debunking Angels and Demons 116 Kelly, John M. Polling of the Dead, The 53, 62n. Kepler, Lars (Alexander Ahndoril and Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril) 65 Kerrigan, Gene 52 Dark Times in the City 57–8 Midnight Choir, The 59 Kertzer, David I. 121n. Knight, Bernard (Bernard Picton) 37 Tiger at Bay 37 Knight, Stephen 4–5

Lady of Llyn y Fan Fach, the 35 Lalande, André 89 Lapidus, Jens 4, 65, 75–7, 78, 82n. Aldrig fucka upp 75 Livet deluxe 75, 76, 82n. Snabba cash (Easy Money) 66, 74, 75, 76 Larkin, Philip 56 Larsson, Stieg 65, 74, 75, 76, 78, 81n. Salander, Lisbeth 74 Lateranensi Pacts 109, 114 Lee, Gerald 62n. Leigh, Richard and Henry Lincoln Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, The 114 Lemaître, Frédérick 96 Lewis, Ann Margaret Murder in the Vatican 109 Lewis, Brenda Ralph Dark History of the Popes 108 Lewis, Matthew G. Monk, The 110 Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire 91 Limerick 52 Lincoln, Henry see Richard Leigh Lindholm, Fredrik (Prins Pierre) 78 Stockholms-detektiven 65 Llewellyn, Richard 44n. Llwyd, Alan Cymru Ddu/Black Wales: A History 33 Lombroso, Cesare 113, 115 London 1, 2, 4, 17, 20, 22, 30, 31, 48, 60n., 63n., 126, 130–5, 140, 141 Los Angeles 1, 49, 71 Lundholm, Lars Bill 82n. Lundin, Bo 66, 67, 68, 71, 79n., 80n. Lundquist, Sune (Vic Suneson) 80n. MacDonagh, Donagh ‘Dublin Made Me’ 51, 62n. Macdonald, Ross, 63n. Instant Enemy, The 58, 63n. Madruzzo, Carlo Emanuele 114 Mafia 107 Majastre, Jean-Olivier 95, 103n. Malet, Léo (Léon Malet) 100, 103n. Micmac moche au boul’mich 96 Nouveaux Mystères de Paris, Les 90, 133 Paris Noir 90

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Index Poèmes surrealistes 92 Mankell, Henning Wallander series 61n., 79n., 107, 139 mapping 2, 3, 4, 15, 16, 19, 23, 24, 25, 25n., 55, 78, 81n., 88, 89, 90, 95, 96, 97, 116, 126, 139 Marin, Louis 89 Marklund, Liza 4, 65, 75, 76, 77, 78, 81n. Sprängaren (The Bomber) 66, 72–4, 77, 81n. Marlowe, Philip see Raymond Chandler Mårtenson, Jan 71 Martin, David 36 Tiger Bay 34, 37 Marx Karl 127, 131, 136n. Mathew, David Prince of Wales’s Feathers, The 36–7 McBain, Ed 80n. McCall Smith, Alexander 44 Scotland Street 18 Sunday Philosophy Club 10 McCalman, Iain 130 McIlvanney, William Laidlaw 56 McKean, Charles Edinburgh 8, 12 Merian, Matthaüs plan de la ville 89 metropolis 1, 4, 20, 48, 61n., 67, 72 Michelet, Jules 90 Midnight Cowboy 49 Mistrali, Franco 4, 111, 112–3, 119, 121n. I misteri del Vaticano o la Roma dei Papi 109 modernity 72, 86, 129 Modiano, Patrick Dora Bruder 98 Mornard, Jacques (Ramon Mercader) 94 Muir, Edwin Scottish Journey 12 multiculturalism 3, 4, 29, 31, 42, 48, 75 Mundy, Jennifer 103n. Mussolini, Benito L’amante del cardinale (The Cardinal’s Mistress) 114 Naples 48, 107 néo-polar 87, 92, 101n. New Welsh Review 29 Nickerson, Angela K. Angels & Demons’ Rome 117

Nilsonne, Åsa 71 noir 18, 19, 49, 57, 63n., 75, 87, 91, 93; see also roman noir and Série noire Ó Cuilleanáin, Cormac (Cormac Millar) 2 An Irish Solution 49, 61n. Ohlsson, Kristina 65 Olympics 72-3 Opus Dei 108, 121n., 122n. O’Sullivan, J. B. Don’t Hang Me Too High 49 O’Toole, Fintan 51 Owen, W. R. (Bodwyn) ‘Tiger Bay’ 31 Ozon, François Huit Femmes 49 Paris 1, 2, 4, 8, 49, 85–106, 127, 128, 129, 130, 133, 134, 139, 140 Paris: rive glauque 100 Pelecanos, George 126 Perec, Georges 92, 94, 96 Disparition, La 98 Life A User’s Manual 92 Pereira, Arun Papal Reich 109 Persson, Leif G. W. 71, 75 Petrie, Duncan 18, 19 Phelps, Catherine 3 Piggot-Smith, Tim Baker Street Mysteries, The 140 Pim, Sheila Common or Garden Crime 54–5 Plain, Gill 3 Platten, David 86 Poe, Edgar Allan 1, 4, 126, 135 ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ 86 polar 86, 89 Police Gazette 130 police procedural 4, 67, 80n. Prendergast, Christopher 127 Price, Richard 61n. Lush Life 48 Price, Robin London Deep 141 Proud Valley, The 35 Publishers Weekly 57 Queneau, Raymond 94, 96 Rankin, Ian 2–3, 4, 16–28 107, 126

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Index Black & Blue 10, 18 Dead Souls 9 Exit Music 23 Falls, The 7–8, 12, 13 Fleshmarket Close 9, 18, 23 Hanging Garden, The 9 Hide & Seek 7 Knots & Crosses 3, 7, 17, 18, 20, 21–22, 25n., 26n. Let it Bleed 11, 12, 15 Mortal Causes 7, 9, 10, 14, 26n. Naming of the Dead, The 3, 17, 21–4, 26n., 27n. Question of Blood, A 13 Set in Darkness 6–7, 10, 26n. Strip Jack 8, 11 Tooth and Nail 17 Read, Anthony Baker Street Boys, The 140 Case of the Disappearing Detective, The 140 Reddy, Maureen T. 81n. Rembrandt Night Watch, The 49 Rendina, Claudio 101 misteri e segreti del Vaticano 108 I peccati del Vaticano 108 santa casta della chiesa, La 108 Vita segreta dei Papi 108 Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales 33 Reynolds, G. W. M. 127, 130, 134, 135 Mysteries of London, The 4, 127, 130 Mysteries of the Court of London, The 130–3, 134 Reynolds’s Newspaper 131 Richmond 126 Robeson, Paul 35 Roché, Henri-Pierre 93 roman fleuve 129 roman noir 2, 85 Rome 1, 2, 107–125, 140 Rosenfeldt, Hans 65 Roslund, Anders 65 Ross, Kristin 101n. sailortown 30-1 Salander, Lisbeth see Stieg Larsson Sandvik, Kjetil and Anne Marit Waade 121n.

Saviano, Roberto Gomorrah 107 Schoene, Berthold 23, 24 Série noire 88 Shahrad, Cyrus Secrets of the Vatican, The 108 Shakespeare, William 20 Othello 21, 26n. Silone, Ignazio Fontamara 48 Simmel, Georg 1 ‘metropolis and mental life, The’ 1 Sinclair, Neil M. C. 34 Sjöwall, Maj and Per Wahlöö 4, 66-71, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80n., 81n. slutna rummet, Det (The Locked Room) 70 Roman om ett brott 67 Terroristerna (The Terrorists) 66–71, 77, 80n. Sladen, Douglas Brooke Wheelton Secrets of the Vatican, The 114 Söderberg, Hjalmar 67 Sommar, Carl Olov 66-7 Spark, Muriel Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The 8, 10, 12–3 Steig, William Doctor de Soto 104n. Stevenson, Robert Louis 6, 9, 11, 17 ‘A gossip on romance’ 120 Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 7, 17, 18, 20 Stockbridge, Sara Fortunes of Grace Hammer, The 140 Stockholm 2, 4, 65–84 Stoppard, Tom Real Inspector Hound, The 49 Strindberg, August 67 Sue, Eugène 88, 126–35, 136n. Juif Errant, Le (The Wandering Jew) 110 Mystères de Paris, Les (The Mysteries of Paris) 110, 127–9, 130,133, 134 Mystères du Peuple, Les (The Mysteries of the People) 110 surrealism 86, 88, 92, 94, 96, 104n. Svedelid, Olof 71, 80n. Swansea 39, 40 Tamed and Shabby Tiger 44n.

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Index tourism 3, 71, 107; see also cultural tourism Tourisme et polar 87 Townend, W. Once to Tiger Bay 31–2, 41 Toyne, Simon Sanctus 119–20 Träff, Åsa, 65 Trainspotting 10 Trenter, Stieg 4, 66–7, 68, 71, 73, 78, 79n., 80n., 82n. Trounce, Alderman W. J. Cardiff in the Fifties 30-1 true crime 39, 40, 107, 108, 109 Turner, John Alan see Kenneth Boa urban 1, 3, 4, 18, 19, 20, 26n., 30, 47, 49, 51, 54, 61n., 63n., 67, 68, 72, 74, 75, 77, 78, 86,126, 128, 130, 135, 138, 139 urban crime fiction 2, 5, 90, 138, 139 ‘urban mysteries’ 108, 109–11, 118, 119 urban novels 65 urban space 2, 3, 4, 5, 49, 66, 67-8, 70, 73–4, 78, 108, 118, 119, 139 Vatican City 3–4, 107–25, 139 Vico, Giambattista Scienza Nuova, La (The New Science) 112 Vidocq, Eugène-François 1, 5n., 135 Vilar, Jean-François 85–106 Bastille-tango 91, 94, 95, 97, 98, 101n. C’est toujours les autres qui meurent 91, 92, 96 Djemila 94 Etat d’urgence 95, 97, 99 Exagérés, Les 91, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100

Fous de Chaillot, Les 91 Nous cheminons 92, 94, 95, 96–7 Paris la nuit 87 Passage des singes 85, 88, 91 Waade, Anne Marit see Kjetil Sandvik Wahlöö, Per see Maj Sjöwall Wales on Sunday 41 Walpole, Horace Castle of Otranto 129 Walsh, J. M. 35, 44n. Once in Tiger Bay 35-6 Warren, Samuel 126 Waters, Sarah 140 Fingersmith 140 Tipping the Velvet 140 Watson, Colin 31 Snobbery with Violence 26n., 31, 35 Weedon, Chris see Glenn Jordan Wendelius, Lars 68, 70, 71 Western Mail 33, 41, 43n. White, Lynette 38, 39, 40 Willett, Ralph Naked City, The 26n., 63n. Williams, John 30, 44n. Bloody Valentine: A Killing in Cardiff 30, 39–42 Five Pubs, Two Bars and a Nightclub 39 Wire, The 45n. Woolf, Virginia 10 Yallop, David Power and the Glory, The 108 Young, Alison 67, 68, 69, 71, 73, 78, 78n. Ystad 61n., 79, 107 zawiya 36, 44n. Zola, Émile Mystères de Marseilles 133

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