Questions of Identity in Detective Fiction [1 ed.] 9781443809078, 9781847183439

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Questions of Identity in Detective Fiction

Questions of Identity in Detective Fiction

Edited by

Linda Martz and Anita Higgie

CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PUBLISHING

Questions of Identity in Detective Fiction, edited by Linda Martz and Anita Higgie This book first published 2007 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2007 by Linda Martz and Anita Higgie and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN 1-84718-343-3; ISBN 13: 9781847183439

This book is dedicated to the memory of Kathryn Martz, a life-long lover of detective fiction who passed away before this manuscript was completed.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Part I: Personal Identities Chapter One................................................................................................. 7 No Justice: The Crime Novels of John Morgan Wilson Sharon Wheeler Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 19 Mother Sleuth and the Queer Kid: Decoding Sexual Identities in Martha Gronau’s Detective Novels Faye Stewart Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 37 A Victim in Need is a Victim In Deed: The Ritual Consumer and Self-Fashioning in Himes’ Run Man Run Alice Mikal Craven Part II: Religious Identities Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 59 Halakhah and the Jewish Detective’s Obligations Kitty Millet Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 77 A New Generation of Anglican Crime Writers Suzanne Bray Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 95 Mythology as Memory in Tony Hillerman’s Novels Marc Michaud

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Part III: National Identities Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 105 When the Gangs Came to London: Hard-boiled Writing and Fantasies of Decline in England Between the Wars Benoît Tadié Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 119 From “Free Trade Fiction” to “Free Trade Noir”: Touristic Landscapes and Canadian Identities in Two Recent Crime Novels Harry Vandervlist Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 129 French Noir Fiction, A Blurred Identity Natacha Levet Part IV: Historical Identities Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 141 Science, Reason and the Social Control of Women in Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg’s “La bolsa de huesos” Marcie D. Rinka Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 153 Suffragette Fictions: The Reconstruction of Militant Identity in the Novels of Gillian Linscott Linda Martz Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 163 Exhuming the Past: Lucha Corpi’s Chicano Movement Mysteries Pablo Ramirez Part V: Doubled Identities Chapter Thirteen...................................................................................... 175 Duality: the Human Nature of Detective Fiction Kathryn Oliver Mills Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 183 The Play of Identity and Difference in Poe’s Tales of Ratiocination Ilana Shiloh

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Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 191 Assumed Identity: Agatha Christie’s Novels Adapted for the Stage Beatrix Hesse Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 203 Uncanny Identities in Abe Kǀbǀ’s The Ruined Map Bruce Willard Esplin and Gregory Therel Esplin Contributors............................................................................................. 211 Index........................................................................................................ 215

INTRODUCTION

This book grew out of a conference on detective fiction that was held at the Catholic University of Paris in the spring of 2004. What was originally planned as a small, intimate affair in the Department of English Studies quickly grew into three-day event with 53 papers on a significant number of national literatures, by scholars in a variety of disciplines from institutions across Europe and North America. The attraction of a conference in Paris in the springtime might have had something to do with that success, but what also emerged in conversations with participants was their satisfaction in having such a forum: while some participants, particularly younger scholars, had detective fiction firmly at the centre of their research agendas, many others viewed their work on the genre as something of a guilty pleasure, reflecting the ambiguous position of genre studies in many scholarly contexts–an ambiguity that we hope this volume will contribute in some small way to dispelling. The only limit that the call for papers set was that of dealing with detective fiction, but the notion of identity quickly emerged as a dominant theme, albeit one treated in a variety of ways. In our selection of papers from among those submitted for consideration for this volume, we have tried to reflect the breadth of that collective body of research. The sections into which we have grouped chapters in this volume are, however, the outcome of editorial decision. The section on Personal Identities looks at the constructs of gender, sexuality and ethnicity. Sharon Wheeler examines the Justice novels of John Morgan Wilson, situating the series within the context of American gay detective fiction and arguing that Wilson’s HIV+ anti-hero detective carries on a radical, politicised tradition being lost in the subgenre. Faye Stewart looks at the interplay of gendered and sexual identities in her analysis of works by contemporary German writer Maria Gronau, for whose detective the decoding of sexual identities is intertwined with the activity of detection. Alice Craven’s study of Chester Himes’ novel Run Man Run incorporates analysis of Himes’ autobiographical writing. Craven posits that, for both writer and fictional detective facing racial prejudice in mid 20th-century America, if ritual consumption consoled and contributed to fashioning an African-American identity, it also entrapped.

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As the seeking of justice implicit in the activity of detecting means a search for balance in some sort of moral order, it is not surprising to see that some writers have used religious identity and belonging to shape the moral universes of their detectives. Kitty Millet looks at three different contemporary Jewish detective fiction authors writing in different national/cultural contexts and concludes that their commonality lies in the detectives’ response to crime as a personal obligation to challenge victimisation, an obligation which in turn challenges conceptions of Jewish identity as they are confronted with secular or non-Jewish values. Susan Bray’s text analyses a very large body of contemporary Anglican crime fiction as “source documents of ecclesiastical history,” and concludes that there are significant distinctions in how the Anglican (British) Church is depicted as compared to the Episcopal (American) Church. Marc Michaud examines the Navajo spirituality presented in the writings of Tony Hillerman, arguing that the novels themselves are a form of textual sand painting that not only convey a particular moral universe but also follow the structure of Navajo creation stories. Some of our authors have interrogated the relationship between detective fiction and aspects of national identity or of the identity of detective literature within a national literature. Benoît Tadié, for instance, charts the stages of development of a hard-boiled tradition of British crime writing, positing this evolution as a “projection of local anxieties into a borrowed narrative form” which permitted a greater expression of uncertainty and discontent in a society in the midst of significant social change. Harry Vandervlist counters the argument that contemporary Canadian fiction is avoiding current issues and anxieties: detective fiction, in particular recent novels by Natalee Caple and Mark Sinnet, take up the ambiguities of the NAFTA era and engage directly the complexities of trans-border relationships with Canada’s neighbour to the south. Natacha Levet studied a large sample of French novels to assess what, if any, could be considered the defining characteristics of the French noir crime novel, a task complicated by the increasing hybridity of the genre and the questionable status of genre literature in France. Historical Identities covers a variety of interactions between past and present. Marcie Rinka’s text deals with a short story from turn-of-the-19thcentury Argentina, a “cautionary tale” about women’s emancipation written to glorify Republican motherhood and presenting “the first murderess of Argentina’s detective fiction.” Linda Martz asks how Gillian Linscott’s “suffragette sleuth” series contributes to the larger question of the function of historical fiction, and especially to the construction of a contested contemporary identity of a real historical movement. As Pablo

INTRODUCTION

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Ramirez discusses, Lucha Corpi’s use of a psychic detective allows a fluid transition between past and present, with cases evoking the present consequences of past events at the time of the Chicano rights movement in America. We cannot move forward, Corpi’s novels warn, until we understand what the past is telling us about who we are. As the doppelgänger is one of the oldest conventions of detective fiction, it is not surprising that notions of double identity emerged as a theme in these chapters, and are grouped here under Doubled Identities. Kathryn Mills uses critical writings by Baudelaire as a basis for discussion of the fundamental duality of detective fiction, the opposition of the reasoning head and the intuitive heart. Ilana Shiloh looks at some of the foundational texts of detective fiction, Poe’s Tales of Ratiocination, in an analysis of identity based on the differences within doubled elements. Beatrix Hesse examines to what extent perceptions of identity and even authorship are illusory in the process of adapting Agatha Christie’s work, and by extension other works of detective fiction, for the stage. Bruce Willard Esplin and Gregory Therel Esplin use Abe Kǀbǀ’s The Ruined Map as a case study of the dual origins of Japanese detective fiction, and then apply a variety of critical approaches to examine the dual identity of the protagonist. The original conference that gave rise to this volume would not have been possible without the contributions of quite a number of people, most from the Catholic University of Paris. First and foremost is Delphine Cingal, who initially proposed the idea for the conference and organized the attendance of a number of key speakers. Claudine Leclère looked after the logistics and the general comfort of conference participants, guaranteeing a flow of coffee to all comers as soon as the doors opened. Clark Taylor’s technological support was indispensable during the preparation of the manuscript. Thanks are due to Madame le Doyen Nathalie Nabert of the Faculté des Lettres for her gracious support. Thanks are also due to current Rector Professor Pierre Cahné for the University’s on-going support of the Department of English Studies and for the sabbatical granted to Anita Higgie, which greatly facilitated the preparation of this manuscript. Linda Martz, American University of Paris Anita Higgie, Catholic University of Paris

PART I PERSONAL IDENTITIES

CHAPTER ONE NO JUSTICE: THE CRIME NOVELS OF JOHN MORGAN WILSON SHARON WHEELER

Gay crime writers have become a significant presence in shaping, changing and challenging the genre over the past 20 years. The American writer John Morgan Wilson has taken the idea of the gay hero as outsider to extremes with his creation of the HIV+ disgraced journalist Benjamin Justice. I shall discuss how Justice breaks the boundaries of gay crime fiction heroes with a lead character verging on the anti-hero. I shall put the Justice series in a historical context and argue that without Morgan Wilson’s adventurous and pioneering series, the present day writers are in danger of being subsumed into cosies (lightweight crime fiction where bloodshed happens off-stage and the investigator is generally an amateur) and pastiche, and undoing all the trailblazing work by the likes of Joseph Hansen, Michael Nava and Richard Stevenson that has gone before. In the late 1980s and early 1990s I completed an MPhil on feminist and gay and lesbian crime fiction. In that time I read several hundred novels–many outstanding, but a number toe-curlingly awful. A fair number of the latter came from small presses where the single criterion for publication appeared to be the leading character’s gender or sexual preferences. It wasn’t until 2000 when, on a flight home from Los Angeles, I read three novels back-to-back by crime writer John Morgan Wilson which restored my faith in the radical side of the genre. Wilson writes the darkest of noir crime fiction with a severely flawed gay hero and plots that come from the front pages of newspapers. One of the most welcome and radical progressions in the crime-writing field over the past 20 years has been the growth of gay and lesbian writing. In the 1980s crime fiction was a tired and stale-looking genre. Feminist women writers then moved into the genre and gave it new vitality and dimension with books focussing on both the political and on

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sexual politics. A number of these writers, such as Katherine V. Forrest, Barbara Wilson, Mary Wings and Val McDermid were also lesbians. I would argue that the appearance of radical women’s crime fiction was the single most important factor in the explosion of the genre. Gay male writers were able to pick up on this and to move into the genre for themselves. While writers such as Nathan Aldyne and George Baxt had been writing gay crime fiction before the 1980s, their books were pretty much curiosities. But then Joseph Hansen (whose work spans several decades), Michael Nava, Richard Stevenson and Mark Richard Zubro all introduced high-profile gay characters. They certainly paved the way for the likes of Wilson to move into the noir end of the genre–a place where few, if any, gay writers have ventured. What I shall explore, though, is the premise that the award-winning Wilson is now out there on his own–and has taken gay writing out of the gay ghetto and into mainstream publishing. Hansen died in 2004; Nava has said farewell to his Henry Rios series, and Zubro’s writing has become, sadly, crime fiction by numbers with Tom and millionaire basketball hero boyfriend Scott plodding through formulaic investigations in the gay community. The only writer in the same ballpark as Wilson is the Scottish writer Jack Dickson, the author of a trilogy set in Glasgow–FreeForm, Banged Up and Some Kind of Love. But Dickson’s books were published by the tiny UK publisher Gay Men’s Press (and all but one appears to be out of print) and are thus some way from mainstream reading. Wilson, though, pushes the boundaries with angry, innovative crime fiction. He is the author of, to date, seven books in the Benjamin Justice series–Simple Justice,1 Revision of Justice,2 Justice at Risk,3 Limits of Justice,4 Blind Eye,5 Moth and Flame,6 and Rhapsody in Blood.7 In many ways Justice is the archetypal loner with a drink problem and a highly unsuitable lovelife. But there the resemblance to the crime fiction favourite ends. Wilson’s hero is a disgraced journalist who has hit rockbottom. Unlike a large amount of crime fiction, the Justice series is firmly issue-driven and character-driven. The plotting is of a high standard, but Wilson’s focus is on his central character and how a man who has lost everything can survive.

Gaying the genre What sets much gay crime fiction apart from what has gone before it in the genre is that it is derived from gay fiction as much as from crime fiction itself. It is often, too, heavily politicised, particularly from the

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lesbian side. Sally Munt’s comment about lesbian crime fiction in The Inverstigators (sic) can equally be applied to many male gay writers: While in the crime novel, the enemy is named and destroyed, in the lesbian crime novel the terms are often effectively inverted so that the state becomes the site of (paranoidal?) fears and the sleuth the representative of the ‘other’, and usually, the victor. The resolution is achieved in two stages; firstly through self-determination (a process of individuation essential to the thriller mode), and secondly through integration and communality, features shared by most lesbian novels. The first phase is often represented by ‘coming out’, the second by finding a lover (romance), or the lesbian community (politicisation). The protagonists deal with fear and paranoia through action, but becoming active agents of their own destiny. The formation of identity happens through the solution of a crime. The central narrative device and locus of readerly pleasure is discovery.8

So, a great deal of gay crime fiction falls into the political camp, be it personal or public politics. Katherine V. Forrest, Laurie R. King and Australian Claire McNab have their lesbian police officers confronting day to day issues of which their sexuality is only one part. But the gay men have generally kept their heroes confined to their own communities. Adam Mars-Jones says in “Gay Fiction and the Reading Public”: Gay men living in urban ghettos distance themselves still further than other Americans from the privilege enjoyed by more settled communities, of being killed by people they know.9

Gay writers Richard Stevenson, Michael Nava and Mark Richard Zubro keep their heroes subscribed by the ghetto, Wilson’s hero Justice moves between the two worlds, whereas Joseph Hansen’s Dave Brandstetter is literally and metaphorically of another time and place. Dave Brandstetter, an insurance investigator, is the hero of a dozen books by the late Joseph Hansen. “My joke was to take the true hardboiled character in an American fiction tradition and make him homosexual. He was going to be a nice man, a good man, and he was going to do his job well.”10 Brandstetter is soberly dressed, respectable and conservative in his lifestyle. His age is never made clear, but the assumption by the end of the last mystery A Country of Old Men (1992), is that he is into his late 60s and in virtual retirement. Brandstetter, then, can “pass” in straight society. Justice can and does, but is uncomfortable in both the ghetto and the straight world. Wilson

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shows him mixing in Hollywood society and dining at smart restaurants with the wealthy and privileged Alexandra Templeton, his unofficial protégé. She frequently bankrolls him–something he clearly resents, but does little to change. In their own ways, the other gay writers I have mentioned apart from Wilson (with the possible exception of Stevenson, who takes the private investigator tradition in America’s gay community) are all surprisingly close to the traditional structure of crime fiction and largely ignore the wider political issues which exercised lesbian writers such as Val McDermid, Mary Wings and Barbara Wilson. The men operate within the closed society so favoured by crime fiction’s Golden Age. Stevenson’s PI Don Strachey, Nava’s attorney Henry Rios and Zubro’s schoolteacher Tom Mason are called in for their influence in and knowledge of the gay scene as much as for their professional expertise. In Stevenson’s Third Man Out, Strachey is asked to investigate attacks on a Queer Nation activist who is outing gays in high places. He is not impressed to find his own partner, Timothy Callahan, in the activist John Rutka’s files. Rutka retorts: There’s nothing in that file except that one fucking call. What was I gonna do with it, anyway? I can’t out somebody who’s already out, can I? You two are the most famous queer couple in Albany. In the paper they refer to you as ‘the Albany private investigator and acknowledged homosexual’,’ and Callahan is almost as notorious as you.11

Justice, meanwhile, operates in the shadows of his own making between the two worlds. His public disgrace stems from fabricating a newspaper feature (his personal disgrace is more a matter of not having been there for his dying partner), not from being gay–unlike Jack Dickson’s policeman hero Jas Anderson whose downfall is in part due to his sexual predilections. Justice has passed, if you will, into the straight world of the media, but knows the rules of the gay ghetto. He’s a journalist working in a city–Los Angeles–with a sizeable gay population. But there are ghettos within ghettos–and Boys Town, the gay section of the city, appears far less closeted and secretive than those elsewhere. Wilson’s Los Angeles is a significant backdrop to the books with the glitz (real people flit in and out at trendy restaurants) interspersed with the West Hollywood hustlers and the barely-concealed sexual energy of Boys Town. The urban setting becomes significant for many gay and lesbian characters across the genre as it brings with it the idea of anonymity and marginalisation. A woman–and particularly a lesbian–can be an ignored

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outsider in the city who can watch or ask questions without being perceived. This gives a new slant to the flaneur theory of a shadowy figure who can sit on the sidelines and observe ‘straight’ society, but may feel obliged to investigate within the marginalised gay community. Zubro’s work is the classic example here, with its idea of keeping your own doorstep clean. Justice, though, has no wish to be that shadowy observer or the public-spirited gay crusader–he is in self-imposed exile in a tiny apartment above a garage, although he drifts in and out of Boys Town as a conscious outsider throughout the books.

Looking for Justice Most mainstream crime fiction–even that ostensibly within the noir category–is remarkably formulaic. Even though the hero may undergo all manner of tests and traumas, right triumphs in the end and there is almost always a neat resolution. Wilson’s Benjamin Justice character may on the surface fit the role of dysfunctional investigator, with his liking for the bottle and his taste in unsuitable bedmates, but there the resemblance ends. On the face of it, he is a hard man to like–an alcoholic, anti-social liar who sleeps around and has a talent for selecting unsuitable young men. One of the starkest moments of the series is when Justice, by now HIV+ after being violently raped by an out-of-control former policeman, has unprotected sex with a deeply disturbed young man in Blind Eye. Wilson is not only an outstanding writer; he’s also a unique one within his market. His hero is most certainly not a hero, and the books never have neat resolutions. But what is so significant about Justice–signalled, too, by his surname (one he chose himself, significantly) and the titles of the books–is his commitment to the truth. One of the most telling incidents in the books is when in Blind Eye he turns down the Catholic Church’s million dollar bribe to keep quiet about the fact he was abused as a child by a priest– despite the fact he is living on or below the poverty line. During the course of the books, Justice’s everyday existence barely improves. Small amounts of money pass through his hands and in fact, even though he remains in his one-bedroomed apartment above a garage, owned by friends Maurice and Fred, we find him in a far worse state in Blind Eye and Moth and Flame than we did in Simple Justice. The drink and drugs problem may be in the background, but he is now HIV+, blinded in one eye after a horrifying attack by a hitman, and suffering from depression which threatens his ability to find work. In Blind Eye, he

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says to a tempting young priest who is clearly struggling with his own sexuality: When I was twelve, a priest seduced me, then tossed me aside like yesterday’s garbage. At seventeen, I caught my father molesting my little sister and shot him dead. I lost my lover to AIDS, back in ’90, then destroyed my career with scandal. Now I’m HIV-positive and blind in one eye. Other than that, Father, things are just swell.12

Much crime fiction is firmly plot-driven, with one-dimensional characters who bounce back after a beating from a villain. The rape of Justice in Justice at Risk is one of the most horrifying moments in crime fiction, and the rapist, Charlie Gitt, a truly terrifying creation. The subsequent books in the series show Justice slowly coming to terms, but not necessarily coping, with what has happened to him. There is a significant arc of character development within the books, and it is equally significant that the least noir of the books, Moth and Flame, has Justice on anti-depressants that subdue his creative abilities. Even within crime fiction’s noir field, few writers, gay or straight, have developed such a deeply painful and pessimistic series as Wilson has done. One of the few is Irish writer Ken Bruen and his Galway PI Jack Taylor. Jack was thrown out of the gardai for thumping a politician, and bumps along, barely existing, and riddled with drink and drugs. The five books to date in that series–The Guards, The Killing of the Tinkers, The Magdalen Martyrs, The Dramatist and Priest–also appear to be a test of how low a man can go. Justice, too, frequently acknowledges his self-destructive behaviour. In Blind Eye, he finds himself caught up in a huge carnival procession that’s wending its way through the streets of Boys Town. He looks behind him to find the Grim Reaper following him. Justice says: But Death was still there, keeping a steadfast distance, as if he might be following, as if he might be interested. I angled across Santa Monica Boulevard, wondering who he might be, what he might want–or if he was even following me at all. An old friend, maybe, wanting to say hello. But except for Maurice and Fred, I had no old friends now, not after the plague had taken away so many and my self-destructive behavior had chased away the rest.13

Ultimately, Justice is not being tested by the world, but by himself. And he admits he is found wanting in Blind Eye after the murder of Alexandra

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Templeton’s fiancé Joe Soto when he leaves the answerphone on to intercept her calls and cannot be there for her when she needs him. The enemy, therefore, is neither outside nor winnable. For many gay crime writers, AIDS is an ever-present shadow in the background; Wilson drags that nightmare to centre stage. In the early books, Justice is trying to erase the memory of his late partner, Jacques, who died from an AIDS-related illness. He cannot bring himself to join Fred and Maurice in doing voluntary work. In Revision of Justice, he takes Danny, a young AIDS patient, into the desert where he can commit suicide. Justice says: Neither Maurice nor Fred knew what Danny and I had planned. Danny wanted it that way, to keep them clear of possible legal complications and his good-byes to a minimum. I would tell them after it was over. They’d been through it themselves, several times, as they eased the passing of dying friends. They knew the rules and would understand.14

So whilst Justice is, in most ways, an anti-social outsider with an abiding wish to keep people away from him, he also knows and can operate within the rules of the gay community. Only when he encounters an HIV+ young Mexican hustler in Limits of Justice, though, can he confront his own illness. Wilson writes with a searing passion and anger on the issue of HIV and AIDS treatment in the US, where very often only the rich can afford treatment.

The journalist as outsider At the most basic level, the Justice books can be broken down into ‘themes’–race, sexuality and family conflict in Simple Justice, the film industry, ageism and AIDS in Revision of Justice, police corruption and the TV industry in Justice at Risk, illegal immigrants and paedophilia in Limits of Justice, the Catholic Church and child abuse in Blind Eye, and corporate corruption in Moth and Flame. What Wilson does is to take headlines from the front pages of our newspapers and turn them into passionate and convincing crime fiction. One of the criticisms noir readers often make of cosies and non police procedurals is the hoops writers must jump through to ensure there is a convincing reason for the hero to be investigating a murder. Journalists, however, can go almost anywhere and ask questions that would not be acceptable from the person in the street. Val McDermid, best known now for her mainstream success with The Wire in the Blood, began her crime

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writing career in the 1980s with the far more radical and immensely more interesting Lindsey Gordon series featuring a lesbian journalist. Politically they are very much of their time, with much focus on trade unions and Greenham Common–but again, like Wilson, the stories are from the headlines of the day. And, like Wilson, very often the endings are unresolved and not entirely positive. McDermid has gone straight, so to speak, in recent years because she acknowledges she couldn’t make a living writing lesbian crime fiction (Hadley 2002, 77).15 The Justice series, too, shows the decline of the print industry. Justice and Harry Brofsky’s decline from the LA Times to the beleaguered LA Sun are symptomatic of an industry where investigative journalism is pushed to the side at the expense of lightweight entertainment “news.” Despite Justice committing the journalist’s cardinal sin of fabricating a story, you could train a young journalist based on his research and tenacity–and, ultimately, his refusal to take the tempting million-dollar bribe from the Catholic Church in Blind Eye. Even after Harry’s death offstage between books three and four, Justice can hear his mentor exhorting him to “get the names” and “follow the money.” Justice’s infamy comes from winning the Pulitzer Prize, but having to hand it back when it is discovered the story was fabricated. The story, though, is not as cut and dried as it may seem … The story of a man caring for his partner dying of an AIDS-related illness was Justice’s realisation of what he could and should have done for his dying partner Jacques. Only, he changed the names. His subsequent commitment to truth in the books, then, is informed by this action which has changed his whole life. By making Justice a journalist–and one who has significantly changed his surname to put his traumatic childhood behind him–Wilson has created a maverick who can gatecrash anything from a swanky Hollywood party to an immigrant family’s home to ask questions. As someone who has chosen to cut himself off from society, but who still follows the professional path, albeit reluctantly, he is a somewhat distant narrator, viewing events with a cool, dispassionate eye.

Reaching the mainstream Gay crime writers in the 1980s found themselves generally being published by small independents such as Naiad, Gay Men’s Press, Silver Moon and Women’s Press. While there are now Harrington Park Press and Alyson in the US and Diva in the UK, most of the other small presses have disappeared. Activity in the gay market is split between a handful of writers in the mainstream and those in the 21st century version of small

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presses–self-publication and print on demand (PoD). This means Wilson is still unique in a difficult market. Significantly, Wilson’s first four books were published in the US by Doubleday and Bantam, offshoots of the Random House empire. The latest two have been published by St Martin’s Minotaur, a US publisher with a long history of publishing gay and, more recently, straight mysteries. Even more significantly for reaching the mainstream, Simple Justice won Wilson the prestigious Edgar award for best first novel. It is an encouraging sign that US mainstream publishers are embracing gay crime fiction–Katherine V. Forrest is now published by Berkley (part of Penguin). As with TV soap operas, where no self-respecting show can be without its token gay character, the gay best friend and/or sidekick is prevalent in crime fiction. These include Joe R. Lansdale’s Leonard, Jonathan Kellerman’s Milo Sturgis and Reginald Hill’s Edgar Wield. Both Kellerman and Hill began their careers before many of the gay writers I’ve mentioned broke into the genre. Problematically, though, both characters are portrayed to a large extent as freaks–both cumbersome, ugly men. And Irish writer John Connolly, who sets his dark PI series in the deep south of the US, has provided his hero Parker with two gay and psychologically damaged criminal sidekicks in the shape of Angel and Louis. On the edges of the genre romance/suspense writer Suzanne Brockmann has introduced gay FBI agent Jules Cassidy, a far more intriguing creation than the macho and dull SEALs who surround him. Jules, though, seems to have a talent for choosing unsuitable men, whereas “true love” can be guaranteed for his straight colleagues. As noted earlier, Val McDermid has “gone straight,” but her books include gay characters in the supporting cast which smack ever so slightly of tokenism. And Victoria Blake, creator of Oxford PI Sam Falconer and published by Orion in the UK, has her heroine backed up by two gay characters–her ex-cop business partner and her Oxford don brother. And I do wonder if I’m the only reader who thinks ‘closet case’ when reading about Sam, who has been saddled with a one-dimensional and rather too convenient policeman ex-boyfriend! The most likely answer here, though, is that while straight writers can gain kudos by including gay characters, gay writers are finding it as difficult–probably more so–to find a mainstream publisher in a cut-throat market. It may be significant that Wilson moved from the big Random House empire to the smaller St Martin’s Minotaur. And those gay authors who are published in the mainstream seem to have moved towards unthreatening heroes.

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The gay writers go cosy It might be argued that shows such as Queer Eye for the Straight Guy have a lot to answer for. While there are positive angles to portraying the unthreatening gay man next door, it runs the risk of reducing them to comedy levels. And so it is in crime fiction. The political radicalism and issue-driven books of the likes of Stevenson and Nava, and the searing conscience of Wilson have been elbowed to one side by the birth of the gay cosy. Writers such as Jon P. Bloch, Rick Copp, Dean James and David Stukas have produced books with flighty, cute, gym bunnies; paranoid actors; gossip columnists and vampires as the heroes! This alarming marginalisation of harder gay crime fiction may have been one of the reasons for Wilson’s move to another publisher–and why his latest two books, Moth and Flame and Rhapsody in Blood are less hard-edged than their bleak predecessors. With the exception of James, who is almost in a category of his own, and whose witty books featuring a gay American vampire in a small English village are a mix of cosy and pastiche, the world of these writers very much reflects the light entertainment world we see on TV, as opposed to the stark news headlines of Wilson. The buffed, handsome gym addict heroes of the cosies are flamboyantly and openly gay with either hunky or cute boyfriends to hand. It’s interesting to contrast this with Justice’s description of himself at the beginning of Simple Justice: With my thinning blond hair and ex-wrestler’s body going paunchy and slack, and a fashion sense that ran to old jeans and sweatshirts, I didn’t fit in too neatly myself. But there was still some muscle on my six-foot frame, and my blue eyes remained alert to the sight of an attractive face or body, marginal indications in Boys Town that I might be a practicing homosexual.16

But predicting patterns in the over-crowded crime fiction market is not easy. As editor of a reviewing website which receives large numbers of books for review and uploads 20 new reviews weekly, I would say that the emphasis at the moment across the whole genre is very much on historicals and cosies, with the ever-faithful serial killer angle not so far behind. It would seem that the gay side of the market is therefore mirroring to some extent what is happening elsewhere–with the exception of mavericks such as John Morgan Wilson.

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With grateful thanks to Professors Wayne Gunn and Peter Childs for their input and advice.

1

John Morgan Wilson, Simple Justice (New York: Bantam Books, 1997). John Morgan Wilson, Revision of Justice (New York; Bantam Books, 1999). 3 John Morgan Wilson, Justice at Risk (New York: Bantam Books, 2000). 4 John Morgan Wilson, Limits of Justice (New York: Doubleday, 2000). 5 John Morgan Wilson, Blind Eye (New York: St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2003). 6 John Morgan Wilson, Moth and Flame (New York: St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2004). 7 John Morgan Wilson, Rhapsody in Blood (New York: St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2006). 8 Sally Munt, “The Inverstigators,” in Susan Radstone, ed, Sexuality and Popular Writing (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1987) 99-100. 9 Adam Mars-Jones, “Gay Fiction and the Reading Public,” in Adam Mars-Jones, ed., Mae West is Dead: Recent Lesbian and Gay Fiction, (London: Faber and Faber, 1987) 17. 10 Cited in The Guardian, 9 December 2004. 11 Richard Stevenson, Third Man Out (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992) 57. 12 Blind Eye 228. 13 Blind Eye 145. 14 Revision of Justice 374-375. 15 Mary Hadley, British Women Mystery Writers: Six Authors of Detective Fiction with Female Sleuths (Jefferson NC: McFarland, 2002) 77. 16 Simple Justice 4. 2

CHAPTER TWO MOTHER SLEUTH AND THE QUEER KID: DECODING SEXUAL IDENTITIES IN MARIA GRONAU’S DETECTIVE NOVELS FAYE STEWART

Why should we study lesbian detective novels? Their storylines are, in many respects, much like those of other detective narratives: set in motion by a serious crime, often involving a corpse, the plots follow the investigation of the crime and conclude with the identification and capture of the criminal. However, lesbian detective fiction differs from its more conventional counterparts in several significant ways. Queer women, doubly marginalized by their gender and their sexuality in a genre traditionally dominated by heterosexual males, have typically embodied criminal characters rather than heroic ones in canonical literary production. Narratives focusing on gay female gumshoes raise new questions about the representation of investigators and their work, create new perspectives on the processes of identification and interpretation, and formulate new answers about what is at stake in the ever-popular genre of detective fiction and its conventions. Moreover, detective fiction that thematizes gender and sexuality also emphasizes the detection of identities on multiple levels, and thus highlights the similarities and tensions between the parallel tasks of investigating crime and decoding sexualities. My research begins with the following question: to what extent is queer detective fiction shaped and complicated by the structural similarity between detecting crime and decoding sexuality? Both processes involve gathering and interpreting information in order to arrive at a coherent solution, and both of these tasks focus on identity, albeit in different ways. On the one hand, professional and private investigators must work to gather and analyze evidence relating to a crime in order to reconstruct the story of the crime and identify the criminals and their motives. On the other hand, the tool colloquially referred to as gaydar entails the work of reading visual and behavioral codes to ascertain the sexual identities of

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individuals whose desires and practices are not clearly or explicitly articulated. Similarly, the clues, statements, and facts used as evidence in crime cases require interpretive work in order to become meaningful. Thus sleuthing for traces of criminals and their crimes and using gaydar to find out if individuals are gay, straight, or in between both require the identification and interpretation of clues in situations where meanings are multivalent and contingent upon a wide range of factors, such as who does the interpreting and in what temporal, spatial, and cultural context these activities take place. Crime and sexuality both exhibit varying degrees of coherence and incoherence and are both encoded as potentially solvable riddles. The lesbian investigator takes on the tasks of decoding both: her personal and professional survival depends on the gathering, deciphering, and communication of codes that reference, on the one hand, the identities of criminals, and on the other, the sexual desires, practices, and identities of the people she encounters. It is important to study lesbian detective stories because of what they can tell us about how identities are culturally constructed and because of what they can show us about how literary conventions are negotiated. I shall begin this analysis by describing in greater detail the tool I refer to above as gaydar and the reading of sexual identity as a process similar to detective work. I then briefly discuss German lesbian detective literature and the ways in which investigating crime and decoding sexuality typically come together. Finally, I undertake a close reading of the intersections between these elements in two recent novels by German author Maria Gronau.1

Gaydar: Reading Sexual Identities Neither in a heteronormative society nor in a lesbian-coded narrative is sexual identity a given; reading sexuality is therefore not a straightforward task. It can, in fact, become a challenging undertaking in situations where an individual’s appearance and behavior cannot be easily or exclusively assigned to one category of sexual identity. As Donald F. Reuter puts it in Gaydar: The Ultimate Insider Guide to the Gay Sixth Sense, a parodic manual on how to cultivate and use gaydar to identify homosexuals, it would be inaccurate to claim that “anyone[’s] actions, behavior, or experiences can be unequivocally construed as being ‘gay’ or ‘straight.’”2 Reuter further explains, “Meanings for ‘straight,’ ‘gay,’ ‘masculine,’ and ‘feminine’ are changing, merging, even disappearing.”3 The codes for sexuality are inherently ambiguous because they are not only shifting but also culturally contingent: what may be interpreted as a clear sign of

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homosexuality in one context might not be perceived as such in another. This is evidenced by online guessing games where viewers, presented with a series of photos, must answer the questions, “Lesbian or German Lady?”4 and “Gay or Eurotrash?”5 Because the correct answers are “based on distinct clues in attire, and body language,” finding a label for ambiguously sexualized individuals requires interpretive work much like the task of detecting.6 Although Reuter evokes gaydar as a sixth sense in the subtitle to his book, he clarifies in the text that he does not conceive of gaydar as inborn or infallible. Rather, he concedes that it is a learned hermeneutical labor that necessitates the deciphering of signs and signals with multiple meanings. In his discussion of reading codes for queer desires, Reuter explicitly evokes detective fiction and compares gaydar with forensic science: Whoa, Sherlock! . . . [S]leuthing about for gay men using gaydar may not be as easy as dusting for fingerprints on a bottle of lubricant.7

If Reuter is correct in claiming, even in this very different context, that detective work is more straightforward than decoding sexuality, it follows that lesbian detective literature may privilege the closure of crime narratives over the success of gaydar and the clear articulation of sexual identities. Although, as I explain in the following section, this is not the case in many lesbian detective stories, there is a small number of texts in which the reading of sexual identities presents a greater challenge to the lesbian detective than the cracking of complicated crime cases and the identification of the criminals. And, as I shall further demonstrate in my analysis of two recent works by Maria Gronau, the tension between closure of the crime investigation and the failure of gaydar is one of the ways in which lesbian detective narratives lay bare what is at stake in their constructions of sexual identity.

Lesbian Detective Fiction: Reading the Genre While German lesbian detective literature is a wide field, two major traits seem to be shared across the genre. First, the narratives encourage an identificatory reader position, in part through the multiple allusions to linguistic, geographical, and cultural references likely to resonate with the experiences of lesbian readers.8 For instance, they mention terms commonly used in gay subcultures of a certain time and place, such as the “LKS,” a short haircut popular with German lesbians of the late 1980s and early 90s.9 Or, to give another example, lesbian detective plots unfold in

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queer spaces that include vacation destinations and events popular with lesbians such as the Greek Isle of Lesbos or the Sydney Gay Games and metropolitan settings such as the historically gay neighborhoods of Berlin and Cologne, where the fictional characters fall in love in real womenonly cafes or well-known gay-friendly locales.10 Second, and this follows from the first point about the identificatory quality of this literature, lesbian detective narratives almost without exception incorporate a romantic or erotic subplot. Indicative of this trend is the growing number of such novels that are explicitly labeled as hybrid genres, from “criminal love story” to “erotic crime novel.”11 Typically, the hybridity between the crime and romance genres plays out in the lesbian detective story through the structural parallel between the two types of detecting that I mention above. The lesbian investigator uses her superior skills of deduction at once to solve a crime and to determine whether another character in the novel is also homosexual. The character in question is usually a woman, and the detective’s gaydar serves to assess her potential as a lover. Often, her gaydar reading correctly identifies the mysterious other woman as lesbian, or at the very least bisexual, and this decoding of her sexuality is confirmed when the two women become involved in an affair whose outcome is inevitably intertwined with the resolution of the crime plot. Sexuality and crime, both riddles to be solved by the queer gumshoe, are neatly resolved in a dramatic finale that affirms the investigator’s effectiveness at deciphering codes, detecting identities, and deducing hidden truths. Thus the issue of properly decoding sexual identity is crucial to the narrative intrigue and its closure for the lesbian detective, whose success depends as much on bedding the gay girl as it does on catching the bad guy. However, these are precisely the types of narratives that I will not discuss here. Rather, my work focuses on lesbian detective stories that narrate failed attempts to read sexual identity and in which the investigator’s gaydar is directed primarily at characters who are not potential love interests. Above all, I am interested in how the reading or misreading of a character’s sexuality complicates the crime investigation or challenges the lesbian heroine’s perception of her own identity. In the following pages, I examine two popular works that portray one lesbian investigator’s attempts to decode sexual identity first as a failure, and later as a success, both of which are portrayed in ambivalent ways. I shall discuss Weibersommer (Women’s Summer, 1998) and Weiberschläue (Women’s Shrewdness, 2003), the last two in a series of four novels by Maria Gronau.12

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Like Mother, Like Son? The Case of the Queer Kid Weibersommer is Gronau’s third detective story featuring lesbian police commissioner Lena Wertebach, head of the homicide division in a Berlin police department. The narrative setting in Weibersommer, as in the other novels in Gronau’s series, alternates between public and private spaces in which Lena emphasizes, in the former, the performance of her professional identity as a police officer, and in the latter, her gendered and sexual identities as a mother and a lesbian. On the job, the commissioner is tough, demanding, and uncompromising; however, at home, she tender, vulnerable, and fallible, especially when it comes to her precocious teenage son, Jim. The characterization of Lena as a doting mother raised eyebrows in the German lesbian scene of the mid-1990s with the conclusion of the first novel in which she appears, Weiberwirtschaft (Henhouse, 1995), which was thought to privilege her gendered role as an affectionate mother over her sexual identity as a lesbian.13 Lena’s relationship to her son receives heavy focus throughout the series and is of special interest in the context of my study because Gronau’s texts cultivate an ongoing intrigue through Lena’s attempts to decode Jim’s ambiguous sexual identity. Weibersommer is set largely in Paris, the summer vacation destination for Lena and her alternative family, composed of her Norwegian lover Margrete, her thirteen-year-old son Jim, and his best friend Rudi. Margrete, Lena’s multilingual graduate student girlfriend, is a marginalized figure and appears primarily in scenes in which Lena requires an interpreter in order to communicate with French-speaking interlocutors. By contrast, the narrative structurally and thematically highlights Jim and Rudi’s relationship to one another and to Lena, emphasizing Lena’s role as mother to the one and surrogate parent to the other. In fact, the crime plot begins when Lena fails to keep a close watch on the teenagers; as a consequence, Rudi is kidnapped by Corsican nationalist terrorists who believe him to be a witness to another crime. Thus Lena must compensate for her shortcoming as a parent by relying on her detective skills in order to rescue her young charge. The rest of the novel focuses on the search for Rudi and his captors, which takes the Wertebach family from their Paris vacation spot to a high-speed pursuit in Corsica. The motherly detective figure of Lena Wertebach resonates with the trope of the female investigator who relies upon her traditionally feminine and maternal characteristics to solve a crime. Classic examples of this figure include E.T.A. Hoffmann’s maternal Mademoiselle de Scudery14

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and Agatha Christie’s elderly Miss Marple.15 Yet while Wertebach’s figure is evocative of this trend, she also diverges from it insofar as she usually experiences these public and private personas as separate from one another, and her maternal instincts do not usually play a significant role in her successes and failures as a police commissioner and crime investigator. In this respect, however, Weibersommer differs from the other novels in Gronau’s Weiber- series in that Lena’s professional duties take over aspects of her private identity when she must locate her kidnapped surrogate son while on a family vacation. Lena’s private and professional identities are additionally aligned because Jim and Rudi appear to have an especially intimate relationship, and her attempts to decode sexual identity are directed at the same objects as are her motherly affections and her detective work. When Rudi is kidnapped on the first day of the Wertebachs’ stay in Paris, the French police investigating the case immediately point a finger at Corsican nationalists who planted a car bomb in front of the Palace of Versailles. Frustrated with the slow pace at which the local gendarmes are working to solve the kidnapping and terrorism case, Lena takes matters into her own hands and travels to Corsica in search of Rudi. The German police commissioner is entirely out of her element–not only does she have no jurisdiction outside of her own country, but she hardly speaks French, much less the Corsican language, and she knows nothing about Corsican politics–but she nonetheless quickly sees through a series of intentionally placed red herrings and deduces that Rudi’s kidnapping is a ploy to distract attention from the real nationalist terrorists, one of whom is the commissioner heading the investigation. However, while the heroine successfully identifies the Corsican terrorists and saves Rudi by locating the kidnappers, she ostensibly fails at reading the other code she attempts to break in this novel: that of her own son’s sexuality. The intrigue regarding Jim and Rudi’s potential queerness functions as a frame for the crime story. The question of their sexuality is raised early in the narrative, before the crime plot begins to unfold, on the Wertebachs’ first night in Paris. Lena is unable to sleep soundly and gets up several times in the early morning hours to go the restroom. On one of these trips, as she passes the door to the room shared by Jim and Rudi, Lena overhears sounds whose connotation she reads as unmistakably sexual. Although she does not deliberately eavesdrop, Lena pauses when she makes out whispers and sighs against the background of a creaking bed. These are followed by moans in her son’s voice that escalate into what sounds like an orgasm:

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Bitte, hatte mein Sohn immer wieder gesagt, bitte, bitte, bitte. Er hatte seinen Orgasmus regelrecht herbeigebetet. . . . (30)16 Please, my son had said over and over, please, please, please. He had literally prayed his orgasm into being. . . .

While Lena is embarrassed by her sense that she has intruded, albeit unintentionally, into her son’s private life, she is far from surprised by what she has heard. She admits, “Ich hatte es immer geahnt” (“I had always suspected it,” 31). After all, Jim has never expressed an interest in the fairer sex, and Lena has believed for quite some time that there is a queer quality to the intensity of his attachment to Rudi. Although she imagined that the teenage boys harbored deep feelings for one another, never before has she suspected that they might engage in sexual activities with one another. In the aftermath of this first night in Paris, the mother reads all indications of Jim’s distress over his kidnapped friend within the context of a presumed romantic and sexual relationship. Lena’s concern for the missing Rudi and her grieving son is accompanied by a growing obsession with their sexual identity, and her thoughts on this subject are often accompanied by confusion and emotional turmoil. The combination of emotions evoked by her initial reaction–her face is a bright red and she feels “[v]erwirrt und stolz und verängstigt” (“[c]onfused and proud and scared”; 31)–suggests that Lena immediately associates her son’s supposed homosexuality with her own experiences as a lesbian. 17 Thus, while Lena’s assumption that Jim is gay is based on a logical interpretation of multiple codes for homosexuality, it is also constructed as the fulfillment of an identificatory fantasy projected from mother to son. Although Lena’s initial response is imbued with pride, an affirmative stance, and confusion and fear, which are more distancing and skeptical, her subsequent ruminations on the subject reveal that confusion and fear play more powerful roles in dictating her reactions: Ich hatte mir gesagt, dass ich nichts dagegen haben durfte. Dass gerade eine lesbische Mutter Verständnis für das Schwulsein ihres Sprösslings haben müsse, hatte ich mir eingeredet. Aber jetzt, da ich sicher war, wusste ich nicht mehr, wie ich mich verhalten sollte. Vielleicht war ich deshalb so streng. (31) I had told myself that I was not allowed to have anything against it. I had persuaded myself that especially a lesbian mother should have some understanding for the homosexuality of her offspring. But now that I was sure, I no longer knew how I should act. Perhaps this is why I was so strict.

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Even as Lena asserts that being a gay parent should entail a sympathetic outlook on the queerness of one’s own child, her use of a subjunctive verb form indicates that she does not, in fact, understand it, nor is she inclined to tolerate it. Lena’s uncertainty about how to act, coupled with the increasing strictness that accompanies her growing certainty about Jim’s homosexuality, hints at the possibility that her feelings are marked by an internalized homophobia. And, perhaps even more importantly in the context of my project, Lena’s confusion and compensatory gestures point to the destabilizing effect that the hermeneutical work of interpreting sexual identity can have on the very person who is doing the interpreting. While Lena may claim that she is now certain that her son is gay, the meanings of signs denoting sexuality can be assigned in multiple ways, and Lena’s insecurity betrays a subconscious acknowledgement that she cannot be entirely sure that her reading is the one and only correct interpretation. The text therefore affirms that the reading of sexual identities, which themselves can shift in time and space, is based on the interpretation of codes that are ambiguous, unstable and contingent. It is not until after the mystery of Rudi’s kidnapping receives complete closure that Lena obtains an answer to her questions about the boys and their night-time activities. After the successful conclusion of the crime investigation, the final two chapters of the novel highlight the reading of Jim’s sexuality. The chain of events culminating in an awkward discussion between mother and son is set off when, upon Rudi’s safe return to the family, Jim is pressured by another boy to reveal that he has gotten a tattoo of Rudi’s name on his shoulder. Rudi is impressed and moved: he responds approvingly, “Geil” (“Cool,” 247), and pulls his friend closer so that he can lay his head on the tattoo. Jim, fearing that his best friend might have been lost forever, has literally written his affection for Rudi into his flesh. He stutters, “Jetzt … bist du … immer … bei mir” (“Now … you are … always … with me,” 247). Jim’s embarrassment in this moment of exposure appears to indicate an emotional excess, which Lena reads as a confirmation of her conviction that the teenagers are lovers. Watching Rudi as his face comes into physical contact with Jim’s corporeal text, the boys’ mothers are unsure how to interpret or react to these events. Lena comments: Um diesem Rührstück ein Ende zu setzen, hätte ich die Automatik gebraucht. Ein paar Schüsse in die Decke, und alle wären in Deckung gegangen. (247)

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In order to bring this moving drama to an end, I would have needed the automatic [pistol]. A couple of shots into the ceiling and everyone would have taken cover.

Her reaction juxtaposes a fantasized act entailing the threat of violence—the shooting of a gun—with the mention of two types of cover—Decke (meaning both ceiling and blanket) and Deckung (meaning cover or coverage). This combination evokes multiple literal and figurative associations with notions of danger, fear, concealing, and safety, all of which resonate with the tropes of the metaphorical closet, a euphemism for homosexuals who do not want their sexual identities to be known. The fact that, for Lena, these associations come up here, at a moment when Jim and Rudi are putting their affections on display rather than concealing them, suggests that she is unsettled by their queer spectacle and would be more comfortable if the boys were to keep their feelings out of the public eye. In addition, her desire to end this spectacle with an act that implies violence once again raises the spectres of gay shame and homophobia. On the plane back to Berlin, Lena ponders the two questions that remain open after the closing of Rudi’s kidnapping case. One of these questions pertains to the crime–it regards the identity of a woman who assisted the kidnappers–and the other is more personal. While Lena acknowledges that, despite her desire to understand all of the details of the case, she does not need to know the answer to the first question, she feels compelled to answer the second question: Es genügte eigentlich, wenn es ihm [Gabriel Guéro, dem französischen Kommissar] bekannt war, nur mein bürokratischer Komplettierungswahn verlangte nach einer Antwort. Die zweite Frage betraf Jim und Rudi. Die Antwort ging nur mich und meinen Sohn etwas an. (254) It actually sufficed if [Gabriel Guéro, the French commissar] knew, it was just that my bureaucratic obsession with closure demanded an answer. The second question pertained to Jim and Rudi. The answer concerned only my son and me.

In pairing these unresolved mysteries with one another, the text constructs a parallel between the identification of criminals and the decoding of sexuality. However, the decoding of sexuality appears to be privileged by the very fact that Lena tolerates a lack of closure with respect to the criminal but not with respect to the question of sexual identity. And so Lena pulls Jim aside for a mother-son talk. As the detective tells her son that she admires the depth of his feelings for his best friend,

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her embarrassment and profuse perspiration betray the lack of confidence and certainty of an otherwise secure figure. The destabilization of Lena’s usual poise at the very moment at which she attempts to communicate about and unequivocally ascertain sexuality points once again to the emotional effect that decoding and articulating sexuality can have on interpreters who are always potentially fallible because they read multivalent codes that are vulnerable to misinterpretation. Lena has trouble finding the right words to address the issue with Jim, and attempts to reformulate and complete her opening sentence several times. Yet Jim interrupts his mother to explain that, knowing that she was outside their bedroom door on that first night in Paris, the boys had intentionally misled her: Wir haben nur so getan. . . . Bisschen rumgestöhnt und so. Damit du dir ‘nen Kopp machst. [sic] (255) We just pretended. . . . Moaned a little and all. To make you worry.

Lena’s follow-up inquiry, “Ihr habt nicht … miteinander …?” (“You didn’t … with each other …?”) is cut off by Jim’s curt “Nö” (“Nope,” 255), an abrupt response that raises a new question: what exactly is Jim denying? Lena’s query remains incompletely articulated because she has trouble choosing her words and Jim replies before she can finish her sentence. Perhaps due to her embarrassment at being caught eavesdropping and at misreading the boys’ red herring, Lena fails to perceive the indeterminacy of this exchange: the act referenced by Jim’s denial is unclear, and although Jim appears to deny having slept with Rudi on that particular night, he does not claim that it has never happened. While Jim ostensibly answers his mother’s question, both the question and the answer call for interpretation on behalf of both parties–and on behalf of the reader as well–and thus remain shrouded in ambiguity. In this passage, a mother is faced with the choice between two narratives about her son’s sexual identity, each telling a different story. Is Jim’s night-time moaning the red herring, or is the red herring rather his casual dismissal of his mother’s concerns? We should also note that, even if Jim’s statement here is read as a reliable representation of his intentions and actions on the night in question, it still leaves open the possibility that he and Rudi have been sexually intimate at other times in the past. Lena, however, does not appear to notice this ambiguity. Within the boundaries of this text, Lena concludes that her gaydar has failed her and that she has misread her own son’s sexual identity. This misreading is juxtaposed with the commissioner’s honed detective instincts, which have enabled her to

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catch the criminals and liberate Rudi from captivity, solving a mystery that the local and national authorities were unable to unravel. On the surface, then, as a tool for detecting, gaydar collapses into an unfulfilled fantasy of identificatory code-reading, while the professional work of interpreting clues and cracking the crime case is privileged. Although the Weibersommer narrative ends there, thus answering the question of Jim’s sexuality in a manner that leaves room for negotiation and ambiguity, the next novel in the Lena Wertebach series revisits this issue. Despite Jim’s seemingly unequivocal denial of an intimate relationship with Rudi at the conclusion of Weibersommer, its sequel, Weiberschläue, picks up at a point three years later when Lena harbors misgivings about her son’s sincerity. Even at the age of sixteen, Jim shows no interest in girls, and this lack of heterosexual signifiers is the main reason for his mother’s suspicion. In addition, Jim still manifests a highly emotional and codependent attachment to Rudi, with whom he spends endless hours behind closed doors in his bedroom. Once again, Lena’s perception of their potential homosexuality begins as a suspicion but progressively develops into a firm belief. This sexual fantasy projection from mother to son–a homophilia of sorts–is the ultimate streamlining of Lena’s gendered identity as an intuitive mother with her sexual identity as a lesbian. Lena’s identificatory fantasies also affect, in a minor scene in the novel, her professional interaction with a female colleague. Making a phone call to another department in the police precinct to inquire about a possible lead in a murder investigation, Lena finds herself speaking with Frau Bethke, who follows up the business-related part of their call with a commentary on sexism in police departments, current events, and international police culture. The combination of Frau Bethke’s professional agency with her cultural literacy and ideological approach to gender inequality piques Lena’s curiosity: Im Rauschgiftreferat gab es eine Frau, die nicht nur wie ich auch ein paar Männer kommandieren durfte, sondern die in der Lage war, The Times zu lesen. . . . Ich musste diese Frau unbedingt kennen lernen. (100-1) In the controlled substances department there was a woman who was not only, like me, in command of a couple of men, but who was also capable of reading The Times. . . . I absolutely had to meet this woman.

Lena’s sudden desire to meet her colleague suggests that Frau Bethke has set off her gaydar and that Lena is responding with interest. However, it remains unclear whether this interest is sexual in nature or whether it is

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merely a desire to make the acquaintance of a potential professional ally or friend. Lena’s inquiry about the possibility of meeting in person–”mit einer Stimme, die nach Süßholz duftete” (“in a voice that smelled of sweet talk”; 101)–reads as an attempt at seduction. Frau Bethke declines in a demonstration of professionalism that evokes multiple gender stereotypes and references markers of heterosexuality, not the least of which is that she is married to a man. Disappointed, Lena gives up: So war das also. Ich gestattete mir, das Gespräch zu beenden, denn plötzlich fühlte ich mich an der falschen Adresse. Natürlich war ich freundlich, aber as Bedürfnis, die Bethke zu treffen, hatte mich verlassen. (101) So that’s how it was. I allowed myself to end the conversation because I suddenly felt that I was knocking on the wrong door. Of course I was friendly, but the need to meet Bethke had left me.

She ends the conversation in a “friendly” manner, but it appears that she would have preferred another type of ending altogether, one that would open up other possibilities. Although this scene is a minor one and neither the character of Frau Bethke nor her phone conversation with Lena is referenced again in the novel, it is significant to my analysis because it portrays a situation in which Lena attempts to use her gaydar in a professional context, and thus conflates the work of a police detective with the reading of sexual identity. However, Lena’s gaydar malfunctions here, and her concession that she has misread her colleague’s signals emphasizes her potential fallibility as an investigator. On the other hand, Weiberschläue confirms Lena’s gaydar reading of her son’s queer sexuality. Two thirds of the way through the novel, Jim comes out to his mother, a development that suggests that Lena’s gaydar might not be in need of a tune-up after all. On a drug-induced high, Jim confesses that he has been sexually involved with another boy named Marcin, but Lena, comprehending that what is really at stake is Jim’s love for his best friend, guides the conversation to the topic of Rudi. Lena makes the most of this moment, using it to give Jim compassionate motherly advice on how to communicate with Rudi about their differences of opinion regarding their evolving relationship. At the same time, she relies on her skills as a professional interrogator, evidenced elsewhere in the crime investigation, to find out more about Jim and Rudi’s sexual past. She discovers that the two have been sleeping together since the age of twelve, a disclosure that reveals that Jim’s denial in Weibersommer–he was thirteen at the time–was indeed a red herring, or at best, an incomplete

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truth. The narrative thus asserts that Lena’s suspicions were correct all along. Moreover, Lena demonstrates her ability to read other codes that Jim creates in his attempts to deceive her in her capacity as a detective: when Jim goes missing at school and the police force is called in, Lena is the only officer capable of correctly interpreting the clues that he intentionally leaves behind, and she immediately locates his hiding place. Thus, in opposition to the way in which Weibersommer ends, Weiberschläue concludes with an alignment of the policewoman’s detective skills with her gaydar and with her parental sensitivities.

Conclusion: What’s at Stake? In the vast majority of lesbian detective novels, gaydar functions perfectly, and so there are no surprises in the detection of queer identities. Although sexuality might initially be articulated as a riddle, codes for queer desires and practices match up seamlessly with homosexual identities, and sexuality is ultimately constructed as having stable and predictable contours. In such narratives, the flawless function of gaydar is usually streamlined with successfully executed detective work. However, in the texts I discuss here, the playful approach to a detective’s use of gaydar and the emphasis on its readings and misreadings push the very construction of sexuality and its codes to the fore. What Maria Gronau’s Weibersommer and Weiberschläue have in common with a small number of other German lesbian crime stories of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is that they demonstrate the failure of a queer mediator’s gaydar to function within the context of a crime narrative because she takes the information she receives regarding sexuality at face value. Lena wishfully believes in her son’s and her colleague’s homosexuality for lack of evidence to the contrary. The detective is misled by signs of homosexuality that she does not see as codes, and therefore does not attempt to deconstruct. While the ending of Weiberschläue, with its revelation of Jim and Rudi’s long-standing intimacy, would appear to confirm the accuracy of Lena’s gaydar, thereby constructing a direct relationship between codes for homosexuality and queer identities, other aspects of this text and its prequel do not permit such a seamless reading of this hermeneutical relationship. Even if Lena’s gaydar is well-tuned when it comes to her son Jim, it is still off the mark when directed at her colleague, Frau Bethke. We must therefore concede that, while the crime mysteries are solved, codes for queer sexual identity are at least partially destabilized and exposed as inherently ambiguous.

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Reuter’s joking remark that it may be easier to find traces of a criminal than to use gaydar to identify homosexuals aptly describes what can happen in lesbian detective stories. In Weibersommer, the crime narrative finds closure while the question of sexuality remains equivocal. Similarly, in Weiberschläue, accurate readings of sexual identity are juxtaposed with unsuccessful ones, while questions raised in the crime investigation are neatly tied up and answered in the end. Unlike criminality, which is anchored in an act, sexuality is incoherent, changeable, and not fixed in action alone. Moreover, codes referencing sexual identities are themselves unstable, unreliable, and multivalent. The failures of gaydar in Gronau’s novels highlight the incoherences between signifiers of homosexuality and queer desires, practices and identities. In negotiating these ambiguities, lesbian detective fiction engages, and at the same time critically investigates, desires for identification. 1

Maria Gronau is a pseudonym. Donald F. Reuter, Gaydar: The Ultimate Insider Guide to the Gay Sixth Sense (New York: Crown, 2002) 10. 3 Reuter, 11. 4 “lesbian or german lady?” blair magazine #4, 2007, 2 February 2007, . 5 “Gay or Eurotrash? the ultimate gaydar game!” blair magazine #3, 2006, 2 February 2007, . 6 “Gay or Eurotrash? the ultimate gaydar game!” 7 Reuter, 18. 8 I should clarify that lesbian detective literature is not unique in setting a narrative stage that encourages an identificatory reader position; this is, in fact, an oft-cited characteristic of all detective fiction. Numerous critics have noted that detective stories encourage reader identification with the investigator figure because the audience also becomes engaged in unraveling the mystery of the crime; thus, reader and detective undergo parallel mental processes in attempting to unravel the hermeneutical riddles that the investigation presents. However, I claim that the lesbian subgenre brings new dimensions to this convention in thematizing desires, relationships, and communities that tend to be either marginalized or absent in mainstream cultural texts. As Phyllis M. Betz notes in the first extensive survey of Anglo-American lesbian detective novels, such texts supplement existing detective traditions with a sexually-inflected narrative that resonates with the experiences of a lesbian audience: “Besides fulfilling the genre’s requirements, lesbian mysteries also present another story, one that, because the situations and characters have been specifically recast as lesbian and lesbian centered, may have a greater impact for its particular readers.” In Lesbian Detective Fiction: Woman as Author, Subject, and Reader (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2006) 18. This occurs, for instance, in the mention of cultural references, geographical locations, 2

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and linguistic practices coded as lesbian, gay, or queer, and therefore likely to strike a chord in readers conversant with queer subcultures. My gratitude goes to Lisa Kuppler for a helpful discussion of this aspect of the genre. 9 The “LKS,” and acronym for Lesbenkurzschnitt (“lesbian short [hair] cut”), is mentioned multiple times in Gabriele Gelien’s Eine Lesbe macht noch keinen Sommer (One Lesbian Does Not Make a Summer; Hamburg: Argument, 1993). The acronym, which is often evoked as a measure of the extent to which various characters can be described as lesbian, is never explained in the text, and only readers who are already conversant with the term and its abbreviation will comprehend its role in Gelien’s parodic take on lesbian subcultures. I would like to thank Claudia Breger for explaining this previously unfamiliar reference to me. 10 Several examples of such locales that appear in German texts are situated in former West Berlin’s Schöneberg district, the city’s historical gay cultural center, still noteworthy today for its queer-friendly street festivals and nightlife. Schöneberg bars that appear in queer crime literature include the Pour Elle, a women-only pick-up spot that sets the stage for a lesbian romance in Hedi Hummel’s Pluto über Berlin (Pluto over Berlin; Weissach im Tal: Alkyon, 2004); this bar with a two-word French name appears to be intentionally evoked by the fictional women-only club called La Belle in Martina-Marie Liertz’s Die Geheimnisse der Frauen (The Secrets of Women; München: Goldmann, 1999). Tom’s Bar, a staple of the Schöneberg gay scene, is a men-only cruising bar and darkroom featured in the finale of Thea Dorn’s Berliner Aufklärung (Berlin Enlightenment; Hamburg: Rotbuch, 1994). Another scene in Dorn’s novel unfolds at a gay and lesbian dance party in the Moskau, an “ehemalige[ ] Stasi-LuxusSchenke” (“former luxury taproom for the East German secret service”; 118), which is undoubtedly a reference to the real-life Café Moskau, a gay-friendly East Berlin bar and dance club renowned for its extravagant theme parties and communist architecture. 11 Two recent examples are a novel by Nanni Wachs titled Tanz der Leidenschaften, which carries the subtitle Ein erotischer Kriminalroman (The Dance of Passions: An Erotic Crime Novel; Pfalzfeld: Kontrast, 2002), and Hedi Hummel’s aforementioned Pluto über Berlin, described as on its cover as Eine kriminelle Liebesgeschichte (A Criminal Love Story). Both narratives foreground a web of romantic and sexual intrigues to such an extent that the crime investigation tends to recede into the background, playing more of a structural role than a thematic one. 12 All translations from Maria Gronau’s texts, including their titles, are my own. To date, none of the four existing novels in her series has been translated into English. Each of the titles is a word compound beginning with Weiber, the plural form of Weib, an antiquated term literally meaning wife but that has commonly been used to refer more generally to any member of the female sex. In contemporary usage, however, Weiber typically has connotations that range from dismissive and pejorative to sexually-inflected and misogynist. For this reason, although I have chosen here to translate the term as women, I believe that its full range of meaning might be more accurately conveyed by the English broads. It

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should be noted that none of Gronau’s compound word titles translates neatly into English, as each one is a playful composition with multiple sarcastic associations. Gronau’s series begins in 1995 with the publication of Weiberwirtschaft, a title that translates loosely as Henhouse and is often used, like the related term Frauenwirtschaft, to denote a household composed exclusively of women; however, with the replacement of Frauen with Weiber, it becomes a derogatory way of referencing a sloppy household whose shortcomings are attributed to the absence of male authority figures (Berlin: Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, 1995). Since the late twentieth century, the term has been reappropriated by feminists; one example is the women’s residential and commercial collective in Berlin by the same name, which is translated on its English webpage as women’s business (“Weiberwirtschaft: ‘Women’s Business’ in the heart of unified Berlin,” 2007, 24 May 2007, ). Gronau’s first novel was followed in the same year by Weiberlust, a term translatable as either Women’s Desire or as Women’s Pleasure (also Berlin: Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, 1995). The third in the series, Weibersommer, or Women’s Summer, is the only of Gronau’s titles that translates easily (originally Berlin: Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, 1998). The series currently concludes with Weiberschläue, which can be conveyed as Women’s Shrewdness or, with more pejorative connotations, as Women’s Slyness, and which, in alluding to the expression Bauernschläue, or farmers’ shrewdness, mockingly suggests that, in the same way that farmers are sometimes considered extremely knowledgeable about their profession but lacking in outright intelligence, women are more prone to demonstrate cleverness, cunning or slyness than intellectual brainpower (Leipzig: Militzke, 2003). This fourth text ends in such a manner that it leaves open the possibility of a sequel, although none has been announced to date. 13 Although Weiberwirtschaft ends with the tragic death of Lena’s lover, Susanna, the narrative’s concluding passage makes reference to Lena’s affection for her twelve-year-old son, Jim. This finale has been interpreted by some as a validation of Lena’s relationship to her son over both her sexual identity as a lesbian and her love for her deceased female partner. I would like to thank Katrin Sieg for a helpful discussion of the reception of the novel. 14 Long before Edgar Alan Poe’s creation of detective Auguste Dupin in 1841 (when he first appeared in The Murders in the Rue Morgue), E.T.A. Hoffmann invented this motherly investigative mediator, although the title character in his 1819 novella Das Fräulein von Scuderi (Mademoiselle De Scudery) is not a detective by profession. Serving as a mediator between legal institutions on the one hand and witnesses, victims, and perpetrator of the crimes on the other hand, she solves the riddle behind a mysterious series of murders in Paris. Scudery does so by relying on her compassionate motherly nature and ability to communicate sensitively, which appeal to a distressed young motherless woman and her lover, that latter of whom eventually confesses to Scudery that he knows the murderer. 15 Jane Marple, usually referred to as Miss Marple, is the elderly woman featured in twelve novels by Agatha Christie published between 1930 and 1976. The first of these was The Murder at the Vicarage. Like Mademoiselle de Scudery, Miss

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Marple is not a professional detective, although she is able to solve multiple mysteries that the authorities are unable to close thanks to her curiosity, shrewdness, and unfailing memory. She is often portrayed engaging in traditionally feminine activities such as knitting and gossiping with the townspeople. 16 All quotes from Weibersommer are taken not from the original edition mentioned above, but rather from the 2001 Fischer edition (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2001). 17 In mentioning both pride and fear, this passage evokes two activist movements associated with queer identity politics, Gay Pride and Gay Shame. The first is a celebration that seeks to increase the visibility of homosexuality and promote equal rights, while the second is a countermovement that interrogates desires for gay assimilation and equality, foregrounding the connections between power and various identity categories.

CHAPTER THREE A VICTIM IN NEED IS A VICTIM IN DEED: THE RITUAL CONSUMER AND SELFFASHIONING IN HIMES’ RUN MAN RUN ALICE MIKAL CRAVEN

“Charge the mother-raper! One part of his insensate mind urged. Get his gun and beat his brains to a pulp! But the other part of his mind screamed the warning, RUN MAN RUN!”

Chester Himes’ novel, Run Man Run, the only one of Himes’ detective novels which did not feature his well-known detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, reveals a darker side of Himes’ reflections on life, though he mentions it only occasionally in his autobiographies.1 In this novel, Himes goes inside the mind of a white police detective turned psychopathic killer while simultaneously developing the thought patterns of Jimmy, the black “victim” of the policeman, Detective Walker. Jimmy’s victimization consists of being stalked by Walker throughout the novel in contrast to the victimization of the first two black men the policeman encounters, who are killed outright. Despite the novel’s relatively minor success, it remains one of the central keys to deciphering Himes’ conscious and unconscious attitudes towards his “literary” work vs. his popular detective fiction. In writing the novel, Himes revealed that just as an individual consumer’s identification with a marketed product could strongly affect his or her sense of self, Himes was himself devastatingly influenced both by the financial success of his popular novels and his equal resentment of the racist marketing which created that financial success and which determined how his books would be marketed throughout his career. The marketing strategies that worked for the sale of the first novel in his Harlem detective series took advantage of a selfimage that Chester Himes sought to deny. His struggle with the difficulties of marketing himself forms an important base for the construction of Run Man Run. It is almost as if the stalking that Run Man Run’s protagonist

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Jimmy faces throughout the novel is a figurative expression of the “stalking” that Himes endured from his financial success based on racist marketing strategies. In his later years, Himes would find solace from such stalking by embracing the life of material well-being. Similarly, Jimmy, the protagonist of Run Man Run, finds solace against the threats of racial fear and hatred in the consumer ritual, as will be traced through an analysis of his character, particularly with respect to the ritual of buying a gun, to which Jimmy resorts in Chapter 18. As a constructed character, Jimmy functions as both a conscious and unconscious acting out of Himes’ desire to buy himself out of misery. At the time of writing the novel, however, Himes seemed to believe he could still write his way out of the racist stereotypes that controlled his identity. In constructing Jimmy’s character, Himes resisted the easy image of the victimized young black male we find in his previous novel, the highly acclaimed A Rage in Harlem. 2 This resistance was conveniently overlooked as the marketing of Run Man Run piggy-backed onto the marketing success of A Rage in Harlem, much to Himes’ dismay. His attitudes towards his role as an Afro-American novelist at this early point in his European career are reflected in the character of Jimmy. Himes wants Jimmy to triumph over the pre-conceived notions a racist reader might bring to his or her interpretation of the character in reading the novel. Jimmy himself fights against being a victim of racism. The struggle against being defined by racist labels is an understandable and powerful battle, but the central revelation of the novel concerns the difficulties experienced by both author and protagonist when realizing that they can’t even buy their way out of racial identities. Like Himes, Jimmy proves to be incapable of overcoming the lure of consumer desire and will find himself victimized by it time and again in his struggle to escape the stalking policeman. Jimmy’s girlfriend, Linda Lou, will also give into the powerful ally of consumer desire, the tyrannical trap of advertising, but with respect to sex rather than violence. When Jimmy buys a gun, the ritual of consumption betrays his desire for violence which he cannot overcome. The same could be said of Linda Lou, in that she knows she can use her sexuality to buy her way through life, and she convinces herself that her sudden attraction to the psychopathic killer is really motivated by her need to use her sex appeal to save her Jimmy. In Run Man Run Himes creates a female character whose belief in herself leads her to risk falling into the trap of the white man and the aura of his romantic white world, a world forever appealing but beyond her reality. In the marketing of the novel, her

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behavior is characterized as just such a fall. In this article, I trace how Chester Himes articulates the complicity between marketing and racist profiling as he parallels them to the central tenets of the detective fiction genre, the complicities of love and money. Jackson pursues both love and money in A Rage in Harlem in ways that are faithful to the genre. Chester Himes’ transformation of Jackson’s pursuits into Jimmy’s ventures pushes the complicity of love and money beyond the pale of generic conventions.

From Jackson to Jimmy: The make-over of a victim Jimmy’s character in Run Man Run transforms Jackson, a victimized “nigger” and protagonist of the novel A Rage in Harlem. Just as Himes continually re-fashioned himself, so he equally re-fashioned his work in ways that could be taken as signs of cure or escape. The transition from A Rage in Harlem to Run Man Run is a prime example of such refashioning. In particular, the eventual title for Run Man Run is paradigmatic. In moving from A Rage in Harlem to Run Man Run, Himes takes Jackson from the absurd and surreal world of his trademark Harlem, into a more real and horribly uncanny “white man’s” Manhattan. Jimmy and Jackson live in different worlds: Manhattan as distinguished from Harlem, the white man’s versus the black man’s territory. Run Man Run’s urban landscape is not comic, absurd or surreal, it is frightening.3 A crucial contrast in Himes’ re-working of the Jackson character is that though the protagonists in both novels are slaves to consumer culture, Jackson is an undignified and ignorant “nigger”, whereas Jimmy has become a man, as my analysis of Himes’ choice of title for the second novel will show.4 Writing Run Man Run gave structure to Himes’ desire to free Jackson from his absurd generic enslavement, but in transforming him into Jimmy, a black man with a sense of dignity, Himes traded away the marketability of his novel, which had proven so successful with A Rage in Harlem. Articulating the connection between the two characters requires analysis of how the title of Run Man Run is generated. It is instructive to examine how Himes’ repressed cultural baggage emerges in his writing and the title of Run Man Run is central to this concern. In A Rage in Harlem, Jackson’s own repressed cultural baggage is introduced for the first time when he is unable to get a certain Negro folk song out of his mind, a song entitled Run Nigger Run. As Himes puts it in A Rage in Harlem (105): Jackson churned his knees in a froth of panic, trying to get greater speed from his short black legs. He was trying to get to the other side of the old brick warehouse that had been converted into Heaven but it seemed as far

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CHAPTER THREE off as the resurrection of the dead. Behind him, three more shots blasted the enclosing din, inspiring him like a burning rag on a dog’s tail. He couldn’t think of anything but an old folk song he had learned in his youth: run nigger run, de pateroller catch you; run nigger run; and try to get away…. 5

Just as Himes tried to run from his life in the United States, Jackson tries to escape from the forces that oppress him, forces that trigger the manifestation of his repressed baggage, the menacing folk songs of his youth. As Himes wrote this first detective novel in his new European world, he creates a character, Jackson, whose mind is constantly riveted back to the music which circumscribed Himes himself as a victim of racial hatred and discrimination. These snatches of lyric emerge unexpectedly from Himes as he writes. 6 Himes discovers fragments of his life of compromise coming back to him in the writing he does, but it is precisely this culture of compromise and victimization he resists. In A Rage in Harlem, the words of the song plague an admittedly ignorant and absurd character, Jackson. It’s understandable that excessive violence and prejudice might be visited upon a caricatured figure like Jackson. His role as victim assures that this will be the case. In Run Man Run, written just after A Rage in Harlem and published in America twelve years later, the absurd humor is subdued but the threat of succumbing to the role of victim is replayed. The lyrics of the Negro spiritual Run nigger run are transposed in the title. Run nigger run becomes Run Man Run and Jimmy is specifically described as someone who “just wants to be treated like a man, that’s all” (28). Jimmy, who bears the same name as the protagonist of Himes’ autobiographical novel Yesterday will Make you Cry (Cast the First Stone), is still innocent like Jackson, but is still scared, still running, and not particularly inclined to entertain the idle white reader. 7 The ghosts haunting Himes are still very much in evidence in the writing of this novel, but Himes works diligently to transform his absurd victim by eradicating the concept of “nigger” from his innate identity. Despite his sensitivity and intelligence Jimmy will be submitted to the same fate as Jackson, but this will be done from within a more realistic setting, and with a greater commentary on how Himes’ characterizations are serving as keys to his own search for identity. Run Man Run reads like a corrective to the caricature and ridicule of a character like Jackson. The Negro folk song may not save Jackson, but erasing the word “nigger” from the lyrics of the song in his title Run Man Run may save Jimmy and Chester Himes in turn.

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But even though such a change may save Jimmy and Himes from being seen as victims of racial hatred, it does nothing to guarantee salvation from victimization through consumer desire, as the ritual of buying a gun in the late portions of the novel forces Jimmy to realize. And if transforming the lyrics cannot ensure control over consumer desire, then lapsing back into the role of “nigger” is a constant but repressed threat once we posit the subtle complicity between marketing strategies and racial discrimination. To put it most bluntly, no matter how successful his novels or fervent his desires to write, Chester Himes was still haunted by a fear of his own inadequacy and his inability not simply to rise above the racist critiques of the black American he was, but more importantly, to rise above his undisciplined consumer desires. The single most controlling force in this novel is the force of consumer desire, from which no one escapes. In this novel, it nabs the protagonist, his girlfriend, and by extension, Chester Himes.8 In short, it’s not the “pateroller who will get you, it’s the corporation and the irresistible products it sells, that will get you in the end!

Jimmy: Just a working stiff? Run Man Run opens with the exploits of the drunken white detective Matthew Walker, introduced earlier and modelled on Himes’ memory of his last day of work at a diner in midtown Manhattan in 1955. Walker is every black man’s nightmare—a white man capable of killing without remorse, wandering around midtown Manhattan in a drunken stupor. He operates on the surface, unlike the return of the repressed, which seeps up just when you thought you were safe. As Freud would suggest, the scariest threat is one where the deepest symbol of safety and security, the policeman, becomes the source of threat, the psychopathic killer.9 As mentioned earlier, two black men will be killed in the opening pages of the novel. Jimmy would have been killed in turn if he had not possessed the wherewithal to escape. He distinguishes himself through his instinct to run. Fat Sam, the first of Walker’s murder victims, tries to reduce the threat of the white detective by converting him into a safer stereotype, the morally upstanding white detective type, Sherlock Holmes: This white man looked dangerous. Not like those other white drunks who were just chicken shit-meddlers. He looked like he’d shoot a colored man just for fun “ [ This is what Fat Sam is thinking when he decides to make his specific reference to Walker as Sherlock Holmes]: “Here you is, a detective like Sherlock Holmes, pride of the New York police force, and

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The real danger is the racism of the cop who has been upset because his car is indeed missing but it is not clear whether or not the car has been stolen. It is equally conceivable that Walker is too drunk to remember where he parked the car. His racism controls his response as he accuses the first black man he sees of stealing the car because he does not want to admit his own drunken and incompetent state. The fact that Walker’s anger is triggered not simply by a moment of racial hatred, but also by a loss of property keeps the balance between consumerism and racial discrimination alive. Additionally, for the white detective a lost car is necessarily a stolen car and according to his logic, only a black man could have stolen it. Walker blames his own incompetence on the black man’s duplicitous and criminal mentality, a mentality which he considers to be a natural fact. As is suggested in Cornel West’s Learning to Talk of Race, the “solution” to most community or social problems in the U.S. is to make the black man the cause, a misguided but nonetheless ubiquitous reflex if we take the reactive analysis of the L.A. riots and the Rodney King trials as a case in point.11 The reader is introduced to Jimmy as he is singing a Negro spiritual (“I looked over Jordan and what did I see…comin’ for to carry me home…”) shortly after the murders of Fat Sam and Luke (27). The killing of Fat Sam was not a cold-blooded murder, but rather, an accidental killing by a drunken man, yet another act of incompetence on the part of Walker. The second killing, this time of the busboy Luke, was “necessary” in order to cover up the first. When Walker encounters Jimmy, he is thinking along the same lines. This third “nigger” must also be sacrificed in order to cover up the first two killings. Rather than seeing himself as the third in a series of black men who must be killed to make a white policeman’s life more convenient, Jimmy is busy musing about how much more refined he is than other black busboys with whom he works, when he runs across Walker (28).12 Jimmy feels safe because he feels educated and intelligent. Nonetheless, as the novel progresses he begins to fear that there is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide in a world where the irrational rage of the white policeman has replaced any semblance of rational and legal order. It has equally replaced any intellectual superiority Jimmy can ever claim since he is confronting such an irrational force. No matter how smart a black man may become, it is of no value against the irrational and violent rage

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of the white man. Jimmy’s mistake will be to buy into that chaos by purchasing a gun. For each of the protagonists and for Chester Himes as author, money or consumer power is the ultimate salvation. For Jimmy, money represents his means for acquiring a gun. Being motivated by money is largely inevitable in the detective genre, but while Jackson will reach for the comforts of religion and chance in his efforts to survive, praying and gambling in order to raise the money he needs to be back with his woman (or to regain his wedding shoe, according to the lyrics of the folk song to which I alluded earlier, where the “nigger” runs from the pateroller and loses his wedding shoe in the process), Jimmy shrugs off the figures of repression alluded to in the folk song when he decides to stop running by buying a gun. This is his only possibility for overcoming his need to “run man run”, for the rest of his mother-raping life. In essence, Himes posits that at the heart of the American mentality we have only violence, and the gun is the only solution. He explicitly cites this as a futile solution, as is clearly illustrated in the civil rights struggles of the U.S. 1960s, and as we see on today’s world stage. Chester Himes’ sense of futility is expressed in an absurd way in A Rage in Harlem, but leads him to strike a despondent tone in Run Man Run. The ritual of consumption represented by the purchase of the gun is shot through with despondency and with the multiple layers of menace confronting the young protagonist Jimmy. But it is equally structured by instruments of illusory empowerment, notably, the exhilarating effects of consumer power, which allow for the successful purchase of a gun, symbolizing safety from the racial rage Walker wants to unleash upon him. The gun can’t ultimately be construed as a solution to Jimmy’s problem which is equally Chester Himes’ problem: how can one retain one’s dignity as a black man in a white man’s world without resorting to violence? Characterizing the problem in this way makes the ritual of buying the gun an even richer display of how difficult it was for Chester Himes to maintain control over his definition of self. As soon as the only solution is to buy the very weapons sold by the enemies, the battle is lost.

Where can I buy a gun? From Jackson to Jimmy to The Man The first condition for analyzing a ritual of consumption is to recognize that it reveals more about who we want to be than about who we are. When Jimmy goes through the process of buying a gun, he re-creates himself, and the apparent need for his dissembling reveals a lot about

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Jimmy’s desires. When Jimmy goes to the barman who will give him directions on how and where to buy a gun, he lies about his background, claiming that he has recently arrived in Harlem, up from Durham, North Carolina. He presents himself to others as out of place in the harsh world embodied by Harlem and also less intelligent, which would be a stereotypical assumption about the differences between a southern vs. a Harlem black man. While waiting for his appointment to buy the gun he gets his hair straightened and also lies to a shoeshine boy about having been to Europe. This assimilating make-over shows his unconscious desire to belong to the world of the white man, his desire not only to be treated as a man but also his aspirations to become The Man.13 Such a make-over will allow him to compete with the image of Walker, the psychopathic killer who is out to kill him, but who is a white man and thus, not guilty, according to the rules of the white man’s world. Jimmy’s ostensible mission is to buy a gun so he can protect himself from the psychopath and also assert his own innocence. Nonetheless, he is aware that his girlfriend has become mysteriously attracted to Walker and this information has an unmistakable influence on his consumer habits. He shows his weakness in the face of consumer desire through his belief that the purchase of a straight head of hair will allow him to buy back his control over her sexual desires. His willingness to go through all of these ritual acts of consumption reveals that his desire is actually two-fold: 1) he wants to become the equal of the white man as an object of his woman’s desire (to regain his wedding shoe–as suggested by the lyrics of the spiritual rolling around in Jackson’s head: “the nigger run, the nigger flew, the nigger lost his wedding shoe”); and 2) he wants to be the equal of the white man, by having the means to kill, by being able to purchase the gun. Straightening his hair puts him in a position to compete with the attractions the white detective holds for Linda Lou. He uses the ritual of consumption to eradicate his own identity in the name of shaping himself in the image of the white man, object of Linda Lou’s desire. He lulls himself into the illusion that consumer power is a vital power and guarantees freedom from victimization. According to Jimmy if it can work with a woman, it can also work with a gun, which guarantees freedom from the stalking policeman. In the opening phases of his shopping spree, we see Jimmy being lulled into a sense of security about his victimization, but this time as an effect of his window shopping: He went out and stopped next door to read the titles of books by colored authors in the showcase of the hotel bookstore. Black No More, by

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George Schuyler, he read; Black Thunder by Arna Bontemps; …Not Without Laughter by Langston Hughes. Suddenly he felt safe. There, in the heart of the Negro community, he was lulled into a sense of absolute security. He was surrounded by black people who talked his language and thought his thoughts…he was presented with the literature of black people. (152)14

Chester Himes’ sense of security is captured through Jimmy’s own. The novel of the black man is the novel Himes is able to write. Jimmy’s sense of security in this instance is Himes’ salvation. But even though Jimmy feels this security, it does not ultimately keep him from buying the gun. Jimmy has the dignity to respect the black writers’ accomplishments, but does not believe that dignity can save him from being killed. Jimmy sees himself as being in control of his destiny, as he looks through the display window because he knows he is on his way to buy a gun, not a book. Himes’ desire to be a writer, along with his fear of not succeeding, lurk behind the persona of Jimmy and the hesitation between writing and violence is palpable. Even Jimmy’s sense of security is shaky if we consider how he spends his money while waiting to buy a gun. His interest in books written by black people is comforting but transitory, it’s only window-shopping. After the comfort wears off, he goes on to make a series of circumstantial purchases which are telling. His visit to the barbershop is one of the central ones but there are others as well.15 In each case, he experiences the tension between being considered as a man of dignity in a white man’s world by asserting himself as a black man versus buying the accoutrements which will allow him to assimilate himself into the white man’s world. His desire to keep Linda Lou at all costs is a central element of his consumer ritual and continues to underscore how Himes both adheres to and reshapes the generic expectations of detective fiction. Looking back again at the Negro folk song which guides Jackson’s journey in A Rage in Harlem, we see that loss is defined as the loss of the wedding shoe, a.k.a. the loss of the woman one loves. Both Jackson and Jimmy are controlled by a fear of losing their women. Jimmy must be able to regain the love of Linda Lou, to regain his wedding shoe, in order to exercise control over his identity and retain his dignity. If not, he has been defeated by the white man and Linda Lou is relegated to the generic category of the femme fatale. Within the detective fiction genre the femme fatale embodies the protagonist’s lack or sense of need. As long as the protagonist believes he can recover from his loss by pursuing the femme fatale, he can lull himself into the belief that his pursuit is rational and under his control. Within the

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genre of hard-boiled detective fiction, the protagonist is expected to fail in this attempt. It is ironic therefore that the gun salesman Jimmy eventually meets will speak in code about the gun, the product which is up for sale. He explicitly refers to it as a woman. “You the man that want to buy a woman?” he says when asking Jimmy if it is he who has requested a gun salesman (Himes, 1997, 157). If only the loss of the wedding shoe could be easily patched up by buying a new one! Unfortunately, it will take more than money for Jimmy to recapture Linda Lou. He has two options, both of which are self-defeating in the end: 1) he can buy his way into the white man’s image, thus placating the man and relegating himself to the category of victim of the white man’s marketing techniques, but allowing himself to be in competition for Linda Lou’s affections; or 2) he can stand up to the white man and buy a gun, resorting to the senseless violence which “niggers” notoriously embrace according to the racist scripts of the U.S. 1950s. Buying a gun, his ticket to senseless violence, is much simpler, and he goes for it out of frustration, even though it blows his chance to retain the dignity he had earlier earned through education and through his sense of his own intelligence. His circumstantial purchases, as he waits for the moment to buy the gun, nonetheless reveal his unconscious belief that there might be alternative ways of buying dignity. Unfortunately, all of those ways are ultimately revealed as “sell-outs” to the white man’s world. Jimmy’s visit to the shoeshine boy is a particularly telling circumstantial purchase, designed to conserve his self-image as an educated and dignified man. It allows Jimmy to parade himself as a distinctive Negro, a Negro who has “been to Europe” and who knows how to speak French. In fact, Jimmy has not actually been to Europe but he buys the services of the shoeshine boy as an audience. This hired audience allows Jimmy to pretend he has been to Europe, a deceptive performance he plays before a gullible audience. When Jimmy speaks to the shoeshine boy in French, the shoeshine boy’s “dark face flowered in a sudden white smile.”16 Jimmy buys respect for a mere 15 cents. Jackson, the model from which Jimmy emerges, does not have such luck. When he says to the boy who shines his shoes in A Rage in Harlem, “Man, you know one thing, I feel good” the shoeshine boy replies “A good feeling is a sign of death, daddy-o.”17 Jimmy can bask in the shoeshine boy’s respect even though he knows he had to pay for it. Jackson lives in a world where he shouldn’t even bother. Jimmy’s world is the transformed world of generic detective fiction forged by Himes. Jackson’s world still belongs to the generic conventions forged by white writers up to the time when Himes begins to put his imprint on the genre.

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The Customer is always White: Linda Lou as Wannabe White Linda Lou is also a victim of consumer desire and in that victimization equally falls prey to racial discrimination as the marketing strategy for the Dell publication of Run Man Run proved, despite the fact that a careful generic reading of the novel makes it clear that Linda Lou is not ultimately a femme fatale. Descriptions of Walker, the psychopathic killer, are re-written by Linda Lou when she finds herself attracted to him and she becomes the ritualistic female consumer, shopping around for a new man, and assuming that her buying power is equal to her sexual power and that she can buy safety for Jimmy through her ability to separate her own sexual appetite from her role as a sexual object for others.18 The fact that she is interpreted and marketed as femme fatale even though this was not how Himes intended her to be interpreted shows the thin line between victimization through racial discrimination and through consumer desire. Who or what is to blame, Linda Lou’s “natural” racial tendency to prostitute herself or her inability to resist a desire to consume the white man’s world, as it has been advertised? The target market for the novel, the reader who brings a racist stereotype of her character to their reading, anticipates her fall back into the role of “nigger” as she follows her consumer desires. The cover of the novel put out by Dell publishers in 1969 suggests that the tactics of marketing the novel written by a black man had inscribed within them a tendency to discriminate. The copy for the 1969 cover described the female protagonist, Linda Lou, as someone who had a “racket” as a singer, but “men were her trade. She never discriminated!” Of this tactic Himes wrote, “Who are they talking about? I wrote a book about a psychopathic white detective killing two brothers and trying to kill a third. And here they go putting down this shit about some black sister out of her mind (Margolies and Fabre 149).”19 Whether they were targeting black or white readers, those readers had to accept certain racist assumptions in order to read the book as it was being marketed. One of those assumptions was that the white detective could not be the ultimate source of chaos. Only a black character could play that role. In this case, the culprit was the “loose” woman, Linda Lou. Indeed prior to Jimmy’s decision to buy a gun, Linda Lou sought to be the one who would speak to the stalking policeman, not, as marketers would have it, in order to seduce him, but rather, to save her Jimmy. She did not realize that she would become like a “bird charmed by a snake” and would re-write the image of Walker from a man whose “snap-brim hat

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hung precariously on the back of his head and his yellow hair flung low over his forehead” to a man who “looked so fresh and boyish in that atmosphere of crime and sex. He smelled out of doors. She visualized him with a sweetheart somewhere. She’d rumple his shiny blonde hair and caress him (127).” Linda Lou sees herself engaged in a tactic of survival in the harsh world in which she lives, and firmly believes she is the only one who can speak to the irrational menace posed by Walker. The end result is that she is seduced by a force over which she has no control, the force of advertising, through which she transforms the white policeman from a menacing force into an object of desire, suitable primarily for a black woman who is really a wannabe white girl. Initially unaware of her own limitations, Linda Lou tries to convince Jimmy that by giving into his desire to buy a gun, he has failed to overcome the debilitating effects racial hatred can have on his life. She accuses him of being incapable of retaining his black dignity because he has been crushed by the white man’s world and his desire to be part of it. Jimmy tries to convince her in turn that her attraction for the white detective has caused her to become a victim of racial discrimination and a desire to buy her way into the white man’s world as well. It’s easy to criticize other people’s consumer desires but one is always blind to vulnerabilities of their own. Dell publishers put the nail in the coffin when they designed the cover marketing her as a loose woman. Himes becomes angry with the racially motivated marketing techniques and the complicity between racial discrimination and control over consumers has come full circle. Jimmy and Linda Lou ultimately recognize that they have both rushed into total victimization because of their desires to consume. The tension between consuming and living in dignity is never present in A Rage in Harlem. In Run Man Run, it is crucial. In the final analysis, Immabelle from A Rage in Harlem is the woman described on the cover of the Dell edition of Run Man Run. She is the loose woman of detective fiction who never discriminates in her desire…not just for men, but for capital gain. Chester Himes realizes this but he has drawn her as a stereotype of his life in the U.S. which he hopes to have put behind him by the time he writes Run Man Run. Alas, sex with men is Immabelle’s buying power and Chester Himes’ resistance to that type of generic characterization when he creates Linda Lou doesn’t succeed, which is why his reaction to the Dell publishers’ decision to reduce Linda Lou to the prototypical femme fatale was so pronounced. His attachment to this novel is rooted in its value as a moment when he thought he could overcome the stereotyping effects of the marketing

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strategies used to sell his novels in the U.S. The marketing and reception of it reminded him that his racial identity enslaved him.

Marketing 101: Discriminating Consumers/Readers are made not born A Rage in Harlem is a commercial and public success precisely because the racial stereotypes employed by Himes in his characterization are highly entertaining and appealing to a readership unaware of the extent to which they have been raised with and conditioned by racism. Hence, the ritual act of consumption is paraded as a way to be a man, in Jimmy’s own estimation in Run Man Run, only to be revealed as an unconscious desire to be “The Man”, that is, to eradicate or repress one’s sense of being the victim of racial hatred by mimicking the ritual consumption of the white man. In this sense, Jimmy’s first circumstantial purchase while waiting to buy a gun is the most telling. He walks into a Harlem bar and says flat out that he wants to buy a gun. The bartender “frowns with dignity” (my italics) and reprimands Jimmy by claiming that his bar is not a hardware store and that the only thing he sells is alcoholic beverages. When the barman goes on to ask Jimmy what he wants to drink, Jimmy says “I’ll have a Coke”. The bartender looked shocked all over again (my italics). “Is you coming into my bar looking for trouble, man?” he asked challengingly. “What you so mad about? What’s wrong with drinking Coke?” Jimmy asked (148). The disapproval of Jimmy’s beverage choice in this black man’s bar continues for a couple of pages, with the bartender reminding Jimmy that it is better for one’s health to drink gin in the morning than Coke. The exchange clearly underscores Jimmy’s lack of wisdom when it comes to avoiding the snares of the white man’s control over the black man’s consumer power. The fact that the marketing strategy of targeting blacks for the purchase and consumption of Coca Cola was relatively new when this novel was first conceived, lends credence to the idea that drinking Coca Cola would be seen as an act of betrayal of one’s own black roots in a Harlem bar. Royal Crown Cola and Nehi were the soft drinks for the black man up until the mid 1950s in the U.S. Just as Jimmy will later tell Linda Lou that she is no longer talking or acting like a colored woman, the bartender will suggest to Jimmy that when you give into the consumer desire planted in you by the white man, you cease to be a black man with dignity. To buy a Coke in a black man’s bar is to fall prey to the new advertising which lures the black man, enticing him to give up his RC Cola in order to buy a coke and pretend to be white. Harlem, the symbol

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of the black man’s world, has been infiltrated by the corporate sponsor Coca Cola–a sponsor incarnated in the stalking white policemen Walker. These throwaway lines about the dangers of drinking Coca Cola are no doubt lost on all but the most discerning of southern U.S. readers. They nonetheless mimic the European scenario concerning race and a perceived need to manipulate races in the post WWII period. The spectre of racial violence in Europe is one that Himes had just recently experienced and it is brought into play through Himes’ structuring of Walker’s inner monologue. Indeed Walker’s understanding of the black man’s victimization is highlighted through this monologue: These poor colored people, they had a hard life, he thought. They’d be better off dead, if they only knew it. Hitler had the right idea….they weren’t dead, he thought and that was a fact.20 The urban space of Run Man Run reveals itself in this monologue as one where the order being imposed upon chaos is sinister, a carefully constructed “solution” based on desires of eradication. The logical extension of this line of thought is, if they are not dead and we can’t kill them, we need to control them through other means–why not marketing? By contrast, the desires and survival tactics being evoked in the earlier A Rage in Harlem are linked to money, and the violence perpetrated is in response to an equal scramble for money on the part of all characters. Jackson’s world is one where everyone is greedy, where all characters are human beings in a humane and fictional world. Repression of basic fears evoked by struggle, such as we see when Jackson hears the Negro folk song running though his head as he runs from what is threatening him, has its place in this comic world. But in Jimmy’s world, inability to face the threat posed by Walker–an authoritative, seductive figure with the shining blonde hair and the serpent’s ability to charm a bird–is deadly. In this case, as in the case of Himes’ later sentiments about a black revolution, only a gun will do, but even that will yield nothing but unending and disorganized violence. The novel straddles the stylistic fences between Himes’ autobiographical novels, his popular detective series and the autobiographies he would write later on in life, once his reputation had been established. Run Man Run epitomizes the dichotomous nature of Himes’ thought: his firm belief that the mass readership wanted to see the 20th century black man depicted as a victim, incapable of overcoming his obstacles, and his equal and compelling desire to avoid giving in to this generic expectation in his writing.21 In this novel, where Himes’ reflections on his writing and on his identity as a black man are highlighted, Himes used the black man as a figure of the ritual consumer

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and thus anticipates the value certain types of marketing strategy will have for the perpetuation of racial hatred and discrimination during the civil rights era in the United States. The compromised identity of the black man and its value for the marketing strategies adopted in targeting the black consumer continued to haunt Himes and were his particular demons even in the complacent later years of his life. Despite his fame and relative creature comfort, he still ends the second volume of his autobiography, My Life of Absurdity, with the line “For all its inconsistencies, its contradictions, its humiliations, its triumphs, its failures, its tragedies, its hurts, its ecstasies and its absurdities; that’s my life—the third generation out of slavery” (Himes, 1976, 391). What the later sections of that autobiography will suggest, a suggestion compounded by a careful analysis of the character depictions in Run Man Run, is that while a black man only three generations out of slavery can easily realize that he is still a victim of racial discrimination, it may take him a lifetime to realize just how powerful an ally the advent of consumer culture is to the institutions perpetuating such racial discrimination. If the expectations of the mass readership are the province of consumer culture as well as the province of racial hatred, then Himes need only place his self-fashioning process within the context of both to draw the necessary conclusions about their complicity.22 Run Man Run seems to have been instrumental in bringing Himes into his last phase of selffashioning which he asserted in the late sections of his autobiography when he says–“I wasn’t made to be a writer, I liked luxury too much.”23 Placed in context, Himes judged his writing in the latter portions of his life as the means by which he would perpetuate his desire to consume. Whether true or not, Himes claimed that his writing was a way for him to make a living in order to consume, rather than a means for social expression. He recognized that his novels could serve both purposes, but he believed there was less at stake with respect to his dignity if he privileged the former over the latter. In doing so, he failed to control the complicity between racial hatred and consumer desire and the power that this complicity exercised over his human dignity.24 Himes recognizes his own inability to overcome the lure of consumer desire in the latter portions of his life, though one wonders to what extent he was aware of it while writing Run Man Run. Since he claimed that the happiest time of his life was when he was writing Run Man Run, it does seem to be the pivotal novel for his reconciliation of his two selves, each of which are represented by the schism between his earlier autobiographical novels and his famous Harlem detective series–the self

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who only cares about being able to consume more, and the self who wants to make a social statement about the victimization of the black man.25 Run Man Run, albeit marginal and most revealing about Himes himself, is a remarkably subtle critique of the complicity of racial discrimination and consumer culture in the self-fashioning of young black male identities in the United States post-war and civil rights context. Himes recognized that the demons shaping his identity were dogging most of the black men around him and that those demons were eating away the identity fabric of those men, particularly the black busboys with whom he had recently worked when the idea for Run Man Run occurred to him. In short, Jimmy should have bought that book in the window written by a black man and gone home to read in bed, but he is swayed by fear and desire into buying a gun, because violence is alluring. The precise relations between the market’s manipulation of black men’s fears and desires, and the chaotic violence of Harlem in the 1960s is delivered neatly on a platter in Run Man Run and Himes develops a black protagonist who is finally capable of thinking his way out of the manipulation of the markets, unlike the protagonist of A Rage in Harlem. Alas, one market conspiracy is exposed, only to be swept under the rug by another one, according to Himes: the publishing industry and its own carefully orchestrated appeal to the racist assumptions of its readerships, who will choose the victimized Jackson over the dignified but naïve Jimmy for their reading pleasure. In 1973, Himes paid a visit to his brother Edward. During their visit, his brother told him that he liked his novels, especially Run Man Run. This was perhaps one of the greatest gifts his brother could have given him, a clear appreciation of a work to which Himes himself felt bound. If I too belabor the value of this marginal text in Himes’ oeuvre, it is to deliver a similar homage. Placed in context, Run Man Run represents a particularly clarifying moment in Himes’ life of absurdity. Just as no one believed Jimmy when he claimed a white psychopath was out to kill him, no one wanted to believe Himes when he claimed that he couldn’t sell his books without dancing a minstrel in the shop window to advertise them. 1

In the course of this article, I refer to passages in Chester Himes’ unpublished letters and unpublished autobiographical fragments where he expands on his motivations for writing the novel under examination, Chester Himes, Run Man Run (New York: Alison and Busby, 1997). These passages make explicit how important the writing of this novel was to his sense of self, a fact which is obscured in the published autobiographies: Chester Himes, The Quality of Hurt: The Early Years (Garden City: Doubleday and Company, 1972); Chester Himes,

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My Life of Absurdity: The Later Years (New York: Paragon House, 1976). The main source for the unpublished archives is The Several Lives of Chester Himes, Eds., Edward Margolies and Michel Fabre (Jackson, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1997). The main sources for this collection are the Himes’ letters in the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University and the Himes-Williams letters, archived in the University of Rochester Library, Rochester, New York. 2 Chester Himes, A Rage in Harlem (Edinburgh: Canongate Crime, 2000). I refer to this title for the novel throughout though it is crucial to keep in mind that the title of the novel evolved and was published under different titles, notably, For the Love of Immabelle. 3 As Angus Calder will say “I think that Run Man Run is perhaps the most fully convincing fictional treatment of violence which I have ever read” in “Chester Himes and the Art of Fiction,” The Critical Response to Chester Himes, Charles L.P. Silett, ed. (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press,1999) 101-116: 110. 4 I use the word “nigger” as it is specific to the use Himes makes of it in the novel, though it is admittedly a derogative term for an African American. I equally use “Negro” or “Black man” or “colored person” instead of the term “African American” in order to remain consistent with Himes’ terminology in the writing of the novels under examination. 5 Lyrics to the song “Run nigger Run” The John Quincy Folklore Collection, Batesville Arkansas: Lyon College, 2002, 12 December 2005, http://www.lyon.edu/wolfcollection/songs/vaughanrun1252.html . Most important are the lines “run nigger run, the pateroller catch you” and “the nigger run, the nigger flew, the nigger lost his wedding shoe” which is to underscore the fact that for both Jackson and Jimmy, the fear is not only of authority, they also fear the loss of their women. 6 One of the ways in which Himes describes his writing experience gives us a glimpse of the importance of music as a key to the unlocking of his unconscious instincts when writing: “I would be going along in a narrative form and listening to jazz and then a trumpet solo, say, would take my mind off it for a second, and I would follow it and write about it, and that would become part of the narrative.” John A. Williams’ “My Man Himes: An Interview with Chester Himes” Conversations with Chester Himes, Eds. Michel Fabre and Robert E. Skinner, (Jackson: University of Missouri, 1995) 29-82: 67. 7 To understand the vast differences between the versions of Himes’ novels as he wished them to be published and his lack of control over final editing, it is instructive to look at Chester Himes, Yesterday Will Make You Cry (New York: Norton, 1999) a corrective to the 1953 publication of Himes’ Cast the First Stone. In particular, the introduction by Melvin Van Peebles traces some of Himes’ difficulties in control over the editing of his texts. 8 Commenting on the first autobiographical moment which shapes the novel, the check forging shopping spree, Himes says “I could have run. I should have run. But unfortunately, I never did run. Maybe that was my inspiration for my book Run Man Run written 32 years later.” (Margolies and Fabre 46).

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I refer to a “cultural” uncanny throughout the article, the specific definition of which can be found in Sigmund Freud, “On the Uncanny” Collected Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, Eds. Angela Richards and Albert Dickson, (London, New York: Penguin, 1985) 335-376. 10 Run Man Run, 15. 11 Reading Rodney King, Robert Gooding-Williams, ed. (London: Routledge, 1993) 255-260. 12 The reason Jimmy sees himself as more refined is because he, unlike other busboys, knows how to ask intelligent questions about his paycheck and to demand fairness in his employment conditions. He is not a victim or dupe of the capitalistic system and this specific aspect of his characterization is crucial to my purpose in looking at the links between race and class. 13 To be The Man is, of course, to become white in this context. An interesting exchange during the sale of the gun emphasizes the importance of plays on differing uses of the word “man” in the novel: Spoken by the gun salesman–”You the man?” he asked in a husky whisper. “Yeah,” Jimmy replied in a whisper. “I’m the man.” He spoke so authoritatively the young man stiffened, thinking for a moment he might really be The Man.” (Run Man Run 152). 14 This passage reveals Himes’ anxiety when it came to the marketing and titling of his novels. The fact that A Rage in Harlem had 5 different titles belies his need to anticipate the ways in which the marketing of novels becomes a threat, with respect to their real messages. His awareness of how the marketing of black people’s novels functioned is an echo throughout Run Man Run. 15 As Jimmy says, “If I don’t get a haircut soon, I’ll look like the original Uncle Tom” (Run Man Run 153). 16 Run Man Run 151. 17 A Rage in Harlem 27. 18 As Jimmy himself puts it, “She always thought she could solve all of life’s problems in bed.” (Run Man Run 151). 19 For an early but definitive treatment of Chester Himes’ attitudes towards the people who would become his publishers, cf., his speech “The Dilemma of Negro Authors in the U.S.” Beyond the Angry Black, ed. John A. Williams, (New York: Cooper Square publishers, 1966) 53-58. Run Man Run was originally published as Dare Dare in 1959 as a translation in French by Pierre Varrier (Série Noir 492, Paris Noir, Paris: Gallimard, 1959). The American publications came out in 1966 with G.P. Putnam then with Dell Publishing in 1966. 20 Run Man Run, 112. 21 He insisted in his unpublished letters to John Williams that the book is not “about black vulnerability but about the futility of unorganized violence.” Himes to Williams 6 February 1969, (University of Rochester archives). 22 My primary influence in considering this issue is Kracauer’s seminal work in film theory From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of German Film, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1947) where Kracauer argues powerfully for a parallel between Hitler’s rise to power and consumer need as

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reflected in the parallels in filmmaking tendencies and consumer demand in Germany after World War I. 23 My Life of Absurdity 327. 24 Run Man Run comes across as a subtle critique of the world which has grown up around Himes. It’s what one would expect from an angry expatriate writer. Yet, contrary to expectations, Himes claims he felt quite distanced from the U.S. during the politically complex times in which the novel was written. As he puts it, in considering a letter from a friend speculating on the effects Martin Luther King’s death would have on the future of the United States, “Believe it or not, except for the sale of my books, I had divorced the United States from my mind.” (My Life of Absurdity 355). 25 “The writing went quickly, perhaps because the plot had been hatching in his mind since his last stay in New York–the easy flow of writing relieved Himes of his usual tensions” Described in an unpublished autobiographical fragment from the Amistad Research Center (Margolies and Fabre 108).

PART II RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES

CHAPTER FOUR HALAKHAH AND THE JEWISH DETECTIVE’S OBLIGATIONS 1

KITTY MILLET

As diverse as the modern mystery novel is, U.S. scholars and critics often analyze the Jewish mystery according to a set of templates that range from Jerome Charyn’s Isaac Sidel2 to Harry Kemelman’s Rabbi David Small series3; in other words, these templates set the tone for the reception of the Jewish detective novel by offering readers recognizable contexts that require and legitimate a Jewish detective’s unique response. Even though the above examples derive from the United States, they suggest that amid the diversity of Jewish detective novels, one key component remains: the need to mark an ethical obligation that only a Jewish detective can bear. Consequently, I’ve chosen three disparate examples of Jewish detective fiction from the United States, Argentina, and Canada in order to explore how the detective’s Jewish identity informs the detective’s secular investigation. These three examples imply that a key component to Jewish detective fiction remains the concept of the mitzvah or obligation, even when the Jewish detective shows no signs of overt religious motivation. In other words, these examples highlight Jewish detectives who see their lives circumscribed by ethically-binding obligations, obligations that derive from their identities as Jews, even if they remain unobservant of Judaism as a religion. This circumscription connotes that Jewish identity maintains an ethical dimension even when the character doesn’t acknowledge a preexisting link to a Judaic practice. Moreover, this ethical obligation, at least from the perspective of the Jewish writers referenced above, appears to be residual, the residue of observance. Ironically, the Jewish detective feels charged with recovering this residual obligation in order “to mend the world,” but that repair can be social, political, or cultural. The burden of repair causes the Jewish detective to re-evaluate unilaterally Jewish Tradition in order to perform the mitzvah of tikkun 4 in

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two distinct ways: recovery for the victim and recovery of obligation as a necessary act. For example, Faye Kellerman’s California-based, Jewish investigators, Peter Decker and his wife, Rina Lazarus, demonstrate that recovery for the victim is contingent on their orthodox practice; they recognize their obligations to a victim because they are orthodox. Ricardo Feierstein’s Argentinean character, David Schnaidermann, discovers that his Jewish identity is underwritten by the unspoken demand that he recover a victim’s story; until he can recover the story of what happened to his neighbor, Sheila Abud, he cannot remember who he is. Schnaidermann remains an amnesiac until he can fulfill the mitzvah of bearing witness for Abud. Finally, Robert Majzels’ Canadian sleuth suggests that cognizance of one’s religious obligation is insufficient; the Jewish detective must sacrifice “his own benefit” and his own safety in order to recover a victim’s story. As a result, each Jewish detective reshapes Jewish Tradition in relation to a surrounding non-Jewish or Gentile culture. In the interplay between the Jewish tradition and Gentile culture, the Jewish detective comes to a crossroads in which he or she has to determine which type of obligation or mitzvah governs each investigation. The detective’s re-imagination of Jewish Tradition freights the notion of obligation, the mitzvah, with the added dimension of a redemptive strategy: the Jew’s obligation to fulfill the Law must also contribute to saving the world, i.e. it must be messianic in its perspective. The detective’s obligation to solve the crime must also contribute to a recovery for the victim; however, recovery for the victim is not immediately reducible to the crime’s solution. At this point, the above examples of Kellerman, Feierstein, and Majzels, suggest that the mitzvah contributes to a recovery for the victim at a more abstract level: the mitzvah contributes to tikkun olam, the mending of the world, so that resolution has more to do with repairing the world for the future and this realization puts an extreme burden on the Jewish detective. Thus Faye Kellerman introduces readers to the Jewish couple, Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus, in the novel, Ritual Bath.5 Often held up as the model husband of intermarriage,6 homicide detective Peter Decker, initially meets Rina Lazarus when he is assigned to the investigation of a rape at a mikvah, or ritual bath located in an Orthodox community outside Los Angeles. An orthodox widow and single mother of two boys, Lazarus operates the mikvah, even after the rape has occurred. Although the rape has terrified the women of the orthodox community, the women are still compelled by their orthodoxy to take further risks in order to fulfill their obligations of purity. As a result, Decker calls on Lazarus not only to

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explain the community’s orthodox perspective for him, but also to mediate for him between the community and the police force. The case becomes a backdrop for their romance; they identify the criminals and end up a couple. At the end of the novel, Decker confesses that he has discovered he is ethnically Jewish although raised a Baptist. Rina explains that he must have an orthodox conversion before they can marry; his ethnicity remains incomplete without this conversion. In Kellerman’s later novels, an even more startling implication emerges. Decker’s ability to investigate crime is incomplete without his full commitment to orthodox Judaism. He can’t fully serve the public good without it. In subsequent novels, Decker and Lazarus solve cases, usually by exploring how Jews must maintain their obligations when they interact with non-Jews. In this way, Decker and Lazarus coalesce an American belief in family values with the mitzvah of tikkun olam so that they perceive themselves as both saving their own families from becoming victims of violent crimes and of bettering the world because of their fulfillment of the mitzvah.7 Enabling them to imagine that their families are at risk with every violent crime, this coalescence becomes acute in Kellerman’s Stone Kiss.8 In that novel, Decker receives a long distance call from his stepbrother, Jonathan, a rabbi, in New York. The rabbi is shaken up by a murder in his in-laws’ family: an uncle, sober for two years, has been found dead and naked in a hotel room. Since he was last seen with his niece and she’s missing, the family presumes that she has been kidnapped or even worse, murdered. While “not wanting to be a burden on his police lieutenant stepbrother in L.A.,” the rabbi begs Decker to intervene with the NYPD because “the Police aren’t saying much. They claim that they’re just gathering information at this point, but we all know what they’re thinking” (9). For Decker, the ethical issue is startling here because his stepbrother suggests that only Peter, as a family member, a Jew, and a police officer, can actually look out for the family. In other words, Decker’s family and his ethnicity make him the only acceptable choice to investigate the crime; Decker can traverse between Jewish and Gentile societies as well as report back to his family any information the non-Jewish police force might have regarding the case. After several phone calls between brother and brother, Jonathan finally blurts out “I know this is dreadfully wrong to ask–Akiva. But it would really help us out if you could maybe...” By using his brother’s Hebrew name, Akiva, Jonathan signals that Decker should perform his duty as a Jew by investigating the case. Consequently, when Decker finishes his

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brother’s thought with “come out for the weekend?” the reader knows that not only will Decker go to New York to solve the case, but also that his obligation as an observant Jew is at stake. It is his duty, a mitzvah, to cross every boundary in order to save his family; his redemptive mission, tikkun olam, requires such personally-determined mitzvot or obligations. Likewise, Rina Lazarus, Decker’s orthodox wife, recognizes her duties within these parameters. As Decker heads to New York City to investigate his stepbrother’s case, Rina decides to join him in New York under the auspices of visiting her parents as well as her sons at Columbia and Johns Hopkins. But Lazarus’ decision places her in danger: she ends up confronting her husband’s enemy, a transplanted sociopath from Los Angeles in New York. The sociopath, a hit man identified as C.D. or Chris Donatti, has had extensive experience with Decker so that Decker and Lazarus often refer to him as Chris, a familiarity that implies an estranged filial relationship between the parties. This familiarity compels Lazarus to respond to Chris in a manner akin to family. Although he has threatened her husband, he has also saved her life, by taking the bullet meant for her. While Lazarus cleans and dresses Chris’ gunshot wound, Chris recounts the story of his abuse and molestation as a child: .

“My old man was an Irish two-fisted drunk. Used to pummel me all the time. Just beat the crap out of me. When I was seven, he got drunk and repeatedly kicked me between the legs. I lost a testicle... .It wasn’t pretty, especially because I didn’t get surgery right away. I used to hide underneath the towel at gym.” His laugh was bitter. “Guys used to think it was because I was a big guy with a small you know what ... .” “I can’t fathom how someone could repeatedly beat up on a child.” Rina’s voice broke, “You poor thing.” “S’right.” Donatti was touched by her empathy. “I survived. And I obviously don’t have a hormone problem. . . . Eventually I got cosmetic surgery. You couldn’t tell anything from just looking.” A grin. “Wanna see?” “You must be feeling better,” Rina commented. “You’re making lewd remarks.” “Just some harmless flirting.” His smile turned to a stony expression. “I don’t remember the last time I just flirted. I’m so used to using sex as a weapon. Comes from being molested, you know ... Joey Donatti, my adoptive father–he used me as his bitch.” (312-314).

Kellerman suggests that even Chris the sociopath can be redeemed through Rina’s actions on his behalf. He can imagine himself as part of her family, substituting her empathy and her values for the abuse he has suffered. In other words, part of Rina’s redemptive mission is to elicit Chris’ identification with her values and morals. When she comes to

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Chris’ loft in the middle of the night, and demands details about the shooting, she does so because she is obligated to Chris the victim. Chris Donatti, the sociopath and threat to Decker and her family, has been effectively contained because of this obligation. Rina’s obligation motivates her instead to listen to, to empathize with, and to care about Chris even though he has threatened her husband and her family. Thus the Deckers’ trip to New York is not only about saving family, but also about saving non-Jews too by incorporating them into that family. Jewish values can redeem criminals. The helpless and needy, the hardened felon, the religiously deserving and undeserving, all of these individuals are acceptable recipients of the Deckers’ help. As a result, Kellerman’s Jewish detective can go anywhere and can be engaged by anyone to save anybody whether or not he or she merits it. The upshot of the Deckers’ aid, however, is not the obvious solution to the crime. In fact, in Stone Kiss, even though some criminals are arrested and some are killed, the real answers to the case remain buried with the victims. Each case the Deckers solve becomes secondary, then, to the performance of tikkun olam. This performance must take place and ironically it isn’t tied to or bound by the solving of the crime. The crime’s solution is secondary to the investigator’s ethical actions. Thus the Deckers’ individual actions mend individual lives; each case contributes incrementally to the messianic mission of saving their families. In this way, the Jewish detective signals a messianism, imbricated in a personal form of social altruism. While messianism is part of Ricardo Feierstein’s Mestizo, his narrator, David Schnaidermann, imagines mending the world or tikkun through the communal efforts of Jews and non-Jews partnered together.9 This realization comes to him though only after he witnesses the murder of Sheila Abud, a Palestinian neighbor. The witnessing of her murder leaves him with neither memory nor identity: he literally does not know who he is and what he has seen. His amnesia opens up a void around which he stumbles daily; he believes that if he discovers what he saw, he will discover who he is. Thus he parses together accounts from newspapers, police blotters, case reports, and the scripts of his sessions with a criminal psychiatrist, to determine the case’s facts. When these documented forms of his history fail him, he begins his own investigation by insisting that others must know his history. Do you understand me? I am still a nobody. In Buenos Aires, words and smiles don’t count, only the facts. I can’t verify my name, what I have done in my life, what stitches of guilt and innocence embroider the story of my life.

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CHAPTER FOUR I don’t have a history. I don’t remember anything ... . And I need to know who I am. Overcome the resistance of memory. You can find me again. I am lost. The rest is anecdotal. There is a story, possibly sordid, of adultery. There is a woman in that store on the corner across from where I’m lying after my fall. My head hurts, I can’t see well. There is a man, shouts, loud discussion. Everything happens in an instant. There is a revolver, several shots, blood that splatters the yellow wall of the building, the sidewalk, my hands, my face. There is also it seems to me a knife, the adolescent who leaves running from the same house and rushes the man with the revolver. There is a slippery spot, and I fall again, a blow to my forehead, confusion. (8-9).

As he rehearses the small amounts of information he can remember, his need for others to add to the story becomes critical: “You can find me again. I am lost.” His interviews with friends, family, and acquaintances do give him partial knowledge. He does remember bits or fragments of his experiences. Nonetheless, even with his suspicions that he has witnessed Abud’s murder, Schnaidermann still cannot determine definitively what has happened to her. He can imagine her murder, but he can’t know it. This lapse in capacity leaves him not only without a complete memory, but also without a complete identity. This intersection between Schnaidermann’s partial memory and his fragmented identity suggests that Schnaidermann’s identity is no longer only bound up with his own memories and experiences. Schnaidermann no longer has the luxury of believing in an identity whose boundaries are statically fixed according to ethnicity and family. Consequently, he must re-imagine his relationship to Judaism and to Argentina in order to rethink how he must live with the knowledge of a crime that he can neither solve nor fully remember. In this way, he lives with a crime where the criminals cannot be identified, the bodies of their victims can’t be discovered, and the crimes can only be imagined from putting together pieces of disparate documents. The effect of Schnaidermann’s “living with the crime” leaves him with a desire to know, but no knowledge, a memory circumscribed by documents, but an inability to recall experience. His desire to know, coupled with his erased memory, inflects his identity as well because it tampers with his history and his ability to imagine himself in that history. This realization pushes him to articulate an Argentinean Jewish identity, “filled with hope and white kerchiefs that, like a new and definitive hymn to joy, unites memories and portraits in the trees built by our heart ... the memory of the identity (Jewish and Latin American blossom, plural and yearning) found in us, recovered for all times” (335). Feierstein’s mix of

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signifiers is telling: today in Argentina, it is not enough to only mark one’s own witnessing of trauma; rather one must link foundationally one’s own traumatic experience to those who are missing, those who are strangers. For David Schnaidermann, Sheila Abud’s unsolved murder implies an identity in a community of witnesses, in which Schnaidermann the witness fills in the empty spaces of memory and identity with the signifiers of “hope and white kerchiefs” so that the mystery of the crime, the absence of personal memory, exists now as an ethical burden. He must “hope” and adopt “the white kerchief,” a signifier of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who wear the white kerchiefs daily in the plaza, as a sign of his Jewish identity too. Feierstein’s allusion to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo implies a bond between Schnaidermann and a symbolic community comprised of all of Argentina’s victims. His memory, identity, and even body, have been scarred because he has witnessed a crime so traumatic that it has erased constitutive parts of him. Thus a national experience of victimization must become his tefillin.10 To mend his world, David must forge a new partnership between Jews and non-Jews, predicated on the realization of a collective experience of victimization, one that David can’t actually remember because he can’t recover the experience of it. Since David must remember the victims even though he doesn’t know all the facts about them, David must use his imagination to fulfill his obligation. This preoccupation with an unsolvable crime against unknown victims plagues Robert Majzels’ Jewish detective too. In Apikoros Sleuth,11 the sleuth parses together disparate accounts of several different murders in order to get at his obligation to the murdered victims. In other words, he doesn’t just discover the facts of the crime, but he also determines his own duties and responsibilities to the victims. Drawing on a reference from Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah,12 the sleuth sees himself as an apikoros, literally a heretic, a Jew who violates the Law by causing irreparable damage to it. This violation is carried out because the apikoros feels an ethical constraint to read talmudically both Jewish and non-Jewish texts to get at his obligation to victims of violent crimes. As Majzels points out, Talmud requires the observant Jew to reorient himself around “the philosophical possibility” of an ethics of reading and this obligation sets up a dichotomy between the Jew who derives an ethics from multiple sources and a “Greek” approach that casts the world in strict binarisms: I wanted to pursue the idea of the Jew/Greek dichotomy at the heart of Western thinking. ... That’s what drew me to the Talmud, the philosophical

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Figure 4.1

Thus Majzels’ apikoros narrator recuperates all of Jewish and non-Jewish thought, writing, and experience, to examine a crime in which the body count keeps rising because the apikoros cannot settle for a halakhic map strictly guiding his actions and informing his duties. In fact, the map he must follow conflates both halakhic and non-halakhic standards. When Majzels opens the text with “Halakhah for the Messiah,” a revision of Tractate Sanhedrin14 in the Babylonian Talmud,15 he uses halakhic reasoning in conjunction with Beckett, Borges, Heidegger, and

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Kant (Figure 4.1), arguments that violate halakhah. These secular sources are at best irrelevant to and at worst violate halakhah. However, the “Halakhah for the Messiah” performs one more crucial aspect of Majzels’ aesthetic project: it reconfigures the sightlines of the western reader to conform to a literacy model unfamiliar to those limited to reading in one language, one direction, one mode of thought. Even more intriguing, Majzels’ revision of Sanhedrin suggests that readers must utilize a form of halakhic reasoning rather than rely simply on a story’s contents (Fig. 4.1). Consequently, Majzels presents the first page of the “Halakhah of the Messiah” in the traditional format of a folio page of Talmud. A Talmudic page’s main focus is the central quadrant in the page, its mishnah.16 Overall, the Mishnah is a summary of legal opinions and findings from the first generations of tannaitic rabbis.17 The typical mishnah is often cryptic and abbreviated. Majzels’ mishnah follows this model, but substitutes a theoretical problem regarding fiction for the expected legal ruling. Usually, the column beneath the mishnah is the Gemara.18 Traditionally, the Gemara section reflects the perspectives of amoraim19 living between the first and third centuries common era and it is meant to address the cryptic elements of the Mishnah by filling in its missing contexts. Thus when Majzels begins with a mishnah focused on the interrogation of fiction, the reader searches the attending Gemara for more details about the context of the mishnah: Story? Who would tell it? There are some who say a story is a fiction, a mistake. We add and subtract and expound. We say it thus and we say it thus. When we take the first part, we take the end as well. This is in and this is in. But this only resembles this. We cast one man or woman against another. The heart in conflict with itself. When? A story teaches an exaggeration. It is possible to refute. If there is a difficulty, this is the difficulty. Better to be silent (1b).

Majzels’s mishnah begins by describing the ways one tells a story. The diagetics of this mishnah constantly refer, however, to an unarticulated narrative happening beyond the margins of the page. Majzels uses this unarticulated narrative to focus the reader on events beyond what the narrator tells. This mode of reading pushes the reader to recognize gaps in his or her own understanding of the text. Moreover, it also demands that the reader address the difficulty of filling in these gaps so that “[I]f there is difficulty, this is the difficulty.” While this strategy of alluding to other known, but unrepresented texts, is a favorite of Talmudic writers, the reader still has to recognize that the form itself creates a tension for the apikoros. If a word is used biblically

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and talmudically, the talmudist is authorized then to read the narratives together to get at the full meaning. This reading together has the effect of doubling the weight of the burden of reading so that the apikoros might decide it is “[B]etter to be silent.” The narrator implies that a narrative beyond the margins adds a layer to the apikoros’ meditation by indicating a relationship between him silence and personal benefit. Majzels suggests that the story the apikoros tells is one in which he constantly struggles against a self-imposed silence, a story whose complexity is so extreme that the narrator is tempted to muteness. By continuing to go forward with his story, the apikoros presents the narrative as a transgressive fiction. In the dialogue, then, between reader and apikoros, the reader must ask what is specifically transgressive of halakhah in fiction and why that transgression authorizes Majzels’ “Halakhah of the Messiah?” As Majzels works through the page, another theme emerges in the section of Gemara. Suddenly, the narrator jumps from the transgressive fiction of the Mishnah to rehearsing the condition that could invalidate his story. Majzels’ narrator answers rhetorically as though the reader has already begun to inquisite the apikoros. And if you say: but what then? A house is not a home, some (too many) say. Still one resides there, in a room and a half of turpitude. . .But perhaps you are thinking: how does he eat, pay the rent, move through time toward death? This itself is not difficult. He ate rarely. Paid no rent. Let time move him. He lay on the cot of desolation in a room and a half (1b).

The effect of this pericope unsettles because it shifts the reader from a theoretical discussion of fiction to the sketching of the narrator’s living conditions. Majzels takes up the cliché, “a house is not a home,” only to imply that a place in which one squats temporarily, a meager “room and a half of turpitude” qualifies as his home. By outlining the bare elements of his “turpitude,”—“[H]e ate rarely. Paid no rent. Let time move him. He lay on the cot of desolation in a room and a half.”—the narrator hones in on how he spends his time. But the Gemara’s intervention is not enough to characterize the full condition that applies to the apikoros’ experience. The reader requires more information and begins to scour the page trying to ascertain the significance of the Mishnah/Gemara units. The problem becomes more complicated though when the reader realizes that even the page itself is incomplete; where a column should be on the right hand side of the page, there is only empty space. This absence shifts the reader’s eyesight to a column of commentary on the left of the page. For readers of Talmud, the left quadrant normally

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reflects the commentaries of the tosafot.20 Traditionally, this column would offer further explanations of the mishnah/Gemara units. Majzels uses it to discuss the tenement. In this way, he encourages the reader to move to a more concrete analysis of how the apikoros lives: What constitutes a tenement? At what point? A highrise ensconced among other highrises, crosses its own threshold of dilapidation. To become. Tenement. When? When fewer than half the apartments are occupied? A third? A fifth? . . . . Those of us who have stuck it out. When that always already absent landlord stops collecting rent (1b).

Through this shifted sightline, the reader moves from the mishnah’s discussion of fiction and the story of someone reduced to living in “a room and a half” to the narrator’s conjecture over “what constitutes a tenement.” At the intersection between Gemara, mishnah, and commentary, the reader infers that the subject of the Mishnah and Gemara must have some intimate relationship to the tenement. Majzels forces then the reader to return to the central column of Gemara. Did he regret abandoning a struggle? Or those sins committed in the name of the struggle? What remained in the wake of failure? The body, the thing itself. This is ours and this is theirs. What is this? ... .Now that we have come to this. The question, the difficulty, returned to its place. And are we still at it? . . . . How should we act? Wondering if I could. Writing here and writing there. Continue in this way. But if so, what then? Just the knowledge that, in one’s solitude, the length of which and were it not for, one might write one’s solitude.

From the discussion of the house, Majzels’ narrator shifts to discussing his own ethical obligations. In the form of halakhic reasoning, the apikoros suggests an intimate relationship between his “abandonment of a struggle” to his confinement to “a room and a half.” He lays on the “cot of desolation” because he has abandoned a struggle. The question that moves him, “how should we act,” is one that he simply ponders, turning it over and over again. As the scene begins to take shape, the reader realizes that the narrator’s isolation, the reduction of life to “a room and a half,” takes place in a tenement. Tethered to the “cot of desolation,” his body, “the thing itself,” lies prone and inactive. We know from the Mishnah that there is a story, a transgressive one. We know that the apikoros’ reference to “continue in this way” encourages the reader to link the “writing here” in this column to another “writing there.” If the body is tethered to the cot, then, the “writing here”

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points diegetically to writing on his body, then, and the “writing there,” to a story beyond the page. How has writing come to cover the body on the cot? As the apikoros tells the story, we discover him to “be wrapped in newspapers” (2b) Covering himself with newspapers to keep warm on his “cot of desolation,” he reads the newsprint columns as though they were a Talmud stretched over his body. Much like a pious Jew wearing tefillin, the apikoros in the tenement wears the narrative of the murders across his body (Fig. 4.2). By piecing together one narrative about Antonio Piggafetta, a murdered dentist, the apikoros exegetically uncovers several “unrelated clues” about other open murder investigations. Suddenly, as more corpses are discovered in his tenement—the clues lead to more murders—the narrating sleuth begins to doubt his own innocence in the crime. –“How should we act?” he asks. How has he contributed to these crimes? But if he is implicated in their deaths, he doesn’t know why. When the sleuth returns to the newspaper Talmud that warms him, he ponders his obligation to the victims. His investigation articulates, then, an ethics of the witness, or more properly an ethics of remembering victims; however, he must violate his Talmud in order to arrive at his ethical obligation. This ethics changes, furthermore, the duties of the Jewish sleuth since the apikoros now carries a burden encompassing more than just the simple determination of the facts of a crime and the identities of its victims. In fact, Majzels’ apikoros suggests that his Talmud makes him liable for the victim. To that end, the apikoros sleuth reads the crime talmudically so that the newspaper covering him suggests columns of gemara, journalists become tannaim, and philosophers tosafot. In this way, the apikoros transforms the linear narrative of the crime into one portion of a Talmudic page so that the full resources of Talmud and the West join in solving the crime. Moreover, by inserting the narrative into the Talmud’s folio page, the apikoros ruptures Talmud at the same time that he attempts to identify his duty to the victim. His act forces Talmud to contain the narrative of the victim at the same time that it paradoxically reveals a new mitzvah: Majzels suggests that the apikoros must annul his Talmud in order to know the victim’s story, to violate and transgress in order to save. In this way, the apikoros’ heresy emerges as an integral part of a redemptive mission in which the apostate detective’s effort saves the world instead of condemning it.

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Figure 4.2

Since the traditional role of the apikoros has been an avowal of heresy, Majzels concludes that the sleuth must create an ethics from “both Jews and Greeks,” i.e. heresy. Furthermore, this necessary coupling of Jew to Greek underscores the incomparable loss the Jewish detective attempts to address: both Jew and Greek have experienced a crime in which both have been fundamentally scarred; they must learn, therefore, a different way to read if they are to address this crime. This scar demands that the edifice of Western thought be reworked as a way of addressing the trauma, the injury. Formerly a sign of irreparable damage and apostasy, the apikoros has become an ethical signifier.

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By accepting this transformation as an ethical burden, the apikoros finds himself having to create a new halakhah of Jewish and “Greek” thought from a blood-stained page of Talmud. While the apikoros doesn’t identify whose blood occupies the Mishnah’s quadrant, the reader must read the absence of mishnah through the anonymous blood itself. Whether the Mishnah has been erased by the victim’s blood or simply doesn’t address the victimization, the blood still occupies a central place on the page. It has taken mishnah’s place (Figure 4.3). By occupying the most important quadrant of the Talmudic page, the portion reserved for Mishnah, the victim’s blood now organizes the sleuth’s investigations and thinking. In fact, Majzels’ substitution implies that the victim’s blood is equatable to Mishnah. To an observant Jew, Mishnah is every bit as sacred as Torah or Hebrew Bible because it reflects the revelation and tradition of the Jewish people after the loss of the Temple and the experience of exile in Babylon. When the victim’s blood strikes the page, then, we see that the blood has blotted out a key aspect to revelation, the record of Jewish experience after the destruction of the Second Temple. Where mishnah should be, Majzels inserts two things, blood at the top of the space and the phrase, “Now that we have come to this. Having come to this. Let it rest” at the bottom (See Figure 4.3). Now that we have a victim’s blood in place of Mishnah, now that we have come to the victim’s blood, “let it rest.” Majzels suggests that victims now stand in for the revelation of Mishnah. A revelation grounded in exile and displacement has been reconstructed around an even more visceral experience of human victimization. In this way, the apikoros sleuth valorizes life. While he might not solve the crime, he can still remember that there are victims. His memory fulfills tikkun olam because the apikoros realizes recovery for the victim requires him to reshape Jewish Tradition so that it embraces the entire category of victim; this embrace drives the apikoros to see himself as a messianic figure. This same messianic turn enables Kellerman’s Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus to see their investigations as socially-altruistic missions, opportunities for the performance of the mitzvah, tikkun olam. Tikkun olam becomes, in Kellerman’s penning, a license for crossing social boundaries. In fact, the mitzvah commands the Deckers to traverse across socio-economic, ethnic, religious, and regional boundaries in order to save both Jews and Gentiles. In this way, tikkun olam authorizes the Jewish couple to redeem.

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Figure 4.3

This same messianism motivates Feierstein’s David Schnaidermann to investigate his own trauma as a crime in which his identity is articulated as both victim and witness. Thus he brackets his duty to himself between the need to reclaim his identity through the history of the victim and his own testimony as a witness. He regains his identity when he tries to restore the testimony of what has happened to Sheila Abud. Consequently, Schnaidermann’s investigation is also a redemptive act; however, unlike the Deckers’ personally-derived sense of tikkun olam, Schnaidermann recognizes that his victimization is tied to other victimized groups in

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Argentina. All Argentine victims must act as witnesses for each other if they will redeem Argentina. Finally, this same messianism compels Majzels to entrust an apikoros, the apostate or heretic of halakhah, with the redemption of all the world’s victims. As an apikoros, the unnamed sleuth must violate Jewish law as it is signified by Talmud, in order to solve the crime. To some degree, this sleuth comes into being because victimization has destroyed elemental aspects of Jewish revelation. To get at then Jewish obligation for the victims of murder, Majzels’ apikoros determines an ethics for all victims, one that possesses the form of Talmud as well as the contents of western aesthetic and philosophical traditions. Furthermore, since the apikoros emerges because of victimization, the victims’ blood becomes the basis for the apikoros’s revelation. This new revelation mandates the apikoros’ strategy in which tradition is violated and a new ethics appears. Therefore, through these three examples, we glimpse not only the ethical obligations burdening the modern Jewish detective, but also a particular dilemma of modern Jewish existence: how to bear witness to a crime whose dimensions we cannot fully know, where all the bodies have yet to be discovered, and whose very act has erased, in its violence, constitutive elements of Jewish revelation, halakhah, thereby demanding a new imagination of tikkun olam. How should the modern Jewish detective reimagine his or her mitzvot in relation to the world? Are we as readers bound to others’ victimization as much as we are bound to our own interests? What we see in these three different types of Jewish Detectives are characters who rethink tikkun olam, to mend the world, either as an individual opportunity to help, a communal activism that warrants identification between Jew and Gentile, or an ethical gesture for a victim that obligates the detective to rethink halakhah itself. Under these circumstances, the detective’s Jewish values are diversely reinterpreted around crimes that cannot be solved. In fact, this is the reality of the Jewish detective today: to uncover crimes whose criminals either can’t be apprehended or whose facts can’t be fully known. These disparate novels return to one key element in Jewish tradition, the need to redeem their worlds and this redemptive gesture freights the Jewish detective with a messianic burden as a means for getting at what the detective can reasonably take on, reasonably solve. Thus the underpinnings of the detective’s Jewish identity are always bound up with its articulation of a response to the victim. In that articulation, then, the Jewish detective rethinks the stakes of Jewish identity in a non-Jewish world by focusing on non-Jewish/secular values

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and the ways these values burden a legacy and tradition of halakhah. For the United States writer, Faye Kellerman, that nuanced re-imagination emphasizes an American cultural belief in family: Peter Decker’s family obligates him to intervene by crossing social, ethnic, and religious boundaries, in order to save both Jewish and non-Jewish victims. For Ricardo Feierstein, it encourages David Schnaidermann to embrace both Jewish and non-Jewish victims as the basis for re-imagined community. For Robert Majzels, it demands that Jewish and non-Jewish thought as well as Jewish and non-Jewish experience articulate a duty, an obligation to see the world through the blood of its victims because the spilling of such blood has erased significant portions of human entitlements. Thus the Jewish detective must obligate himself to recovery for the victim in order to restore that erased entitlement. 1

Refers to Jewish Law. Jerome Charyn, The Isaac Quartet (New York: Four Walls, Eight Windows Press, 1974). 3 Harry Kemelman’s Rabbi Small series spans from 1964 to 2002. 4 Tikkun olam means “to mend the world” and is often associated by Jewish writers with different programs of redemption. For example, Jewish mystics in the early modern period considered mystical practice as a form of it that mended the cosmological rift produced in the Garden of Eden. In the United States, as Silvia Barack Fishman has pointed out, tikkun olam is almost always associated with social justice among Reform and Secular Jews (2000). 5 Faye Kellerman, Ritual Bath (New York: Avon, 1986). 6 Laurence Roth, Inspecting Jews (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Pr., 2004). 7 Silvia Barack Fishman, Jewish Life and American Culture (New York: SUNY Pr., 2000). 8 Faye Kellerman, Stone Kiss (New York: Warner Pub, 2003). 9 Ricardo Feierstein, Mestizo (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Pr, 2000). 10 Tefillin are the leather boxes and straps that orthodox Jews wear around their foreheads and arms. The boxes are filled with Torah verses. 11 Robert Majzels, Apikoros Sleuth (Montreal: Mercury Press, 2004). 12 Moses Maimonides, Mishneh Toreh (New Haven: Yale University Press) 1949. 13 Moore, Nathaniel. “Interview with Robert Majzels.” The Danforth Review 14, 2005. http://www.danforthreview.com/features/interviews/robert_majzels.htm 14 Talmud is organized according to its tractates. 15 The Babylonian Talmud comprises the Mishnah, the Gemara, as well as commentaries by Rashi and by his students. For Judaism, Talmud is understood as Oral Torah, i.e. it has equal footing with the written Torah, or Hebrew Bible. 2

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When capitalized, the Mishnah refers both to the entire Oral Torah or Talmud; when written in lower case, mishnah refers exclusively to the discreet summaries of rulings on individual folio pages. 17 Tannaim are the compilers of the Mishnah. 18 The Gemara is found in the center of a Talmud page. It is appended to a mishnah and is written in Aramaic. 19 The generations of Aramaic-speaking rabbinic writers who compiled the Gemara. They compiled Gemara between the third and fifth centuries common era. 20 The Tosafot are rabbinic commentators, known as students of Rashi. Their supplements or commentaries are added to the outer margin of the Talmudic page. They wrote between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

CHAPTER FIVE A NEW GENERATION OF ANGLICAN CRIME WRITERS SUZANNE BRAY

Ever since the Father Brown stories, where G. K. Chesterton, to quote Dorothy Sayers, “succeeded … in bringing the name of God into a detective novel without making it sound like a blasphemy”1, the Christian religion and crime fiction have been closely connected. Every keen reader of detective novels can think of murders in the vicarage, in churches, abbeys and cathedrals. Clergymen and their wives, historical and modern monks and nuns have murdered and been murdered, have detected and witnessed crimes, found clues, provided insight and even, occasionally, buried the dead and comforted the bereaved. An incomplete2 list compiled by Kate Charles in 19983, identified twelve clerical detectives, twentythree clerical victims and sixty-one corpses found in or next to churches or cathedrals. During the golden age, the Church of England and its official representatives were often portrayed in detective fiction and were almost always presented in a favourable light. Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Patricia Wentworth, to name but three of the better known Anglican authors of the period, created an impressive collection of learned, amiable, generous and discreetly pious vicars, often with admirable wives, who provided most attractive publicity for the established church of their day. These golden age clergy are not all perfect: one curate pilfers small sums of money from the collection4 and, in a slightly unconvincing plot, one vicar’s wife kills her very objectionable first husband in a fit of unpremeditated rage and despair5, but these are minor flaws next to the saintly, compassionate intelligence of such appealing clerical couples as the Rev. & Mrs. George Peck6, the Reverend & Mrs. Theodore Venables7 and the Rev. & Mrs. Caleb Dane Calthrop8. Of the Anglican golden age writers, only Dorothy L. Sayers joined G. K. Chesterton9 in evoking important doctrinal, social and ecclesiastical

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questions in her detective fiction. Whether she is discussing how to “work the scientific-theological interest solidly into the plot”10 of The Documents in the Case, “symbolically opposing two cardboard worlds–that of the advertiser and the drug-taker,”11 in Murder Must Advertise, or nostalgically presenting the church of Fenchurch St. Paul as the heart of a harmonious community and an ark of salvation from the flood for Anglican, Methodist and unbeliever alike, none can doubt that Sayers knew and cared about the big theological and social issues facing the Church in the twenties and thirties. During the last twenty years, an increasing number of Anglican detective novels have been published on both sides of the Atlantic, the vast majority written by committed Anglican authors. Many of these claim to have been inspired by Sayers, or have had others make that claim on their behalf12. Although references to Chesterton from the authors themselves are much less frequent, the Boston Magazine’s reference to Michelle Blake’s detective, the Reverend Lily Connor, as “like Chesterton’s Father Brown … a pretty good priest for a detective”13 is typical of many similar reviews each time a new clerical sleuth appears on the scene. In this paper, we shall examine those detective novels with a contemporary setting, written by Anglican authors between 1984 and 2004, and set in the Anglican Church, having at least one member of the clergy among the principal characters. Two main questions will be considered. First of all, using the novels as source documents of ecclesiastical history, what can we conclude about the vital issues facing the Anglican communion during this period and, secondly, can any differences be noted between the questions perceived as important for the Church of England and those that preoccupy the American Episcopal Church? In order to address these questions we shall refer to works by four British authors: Kate Charles’s14 Book of Psalms series15 and some one-off ecclesiastical mysteries,16 D. M. Greenwood’s Theodora Braithwaite series,17 Phil Rickman’s Merrily Watkins series18 and P. D. James’s Death in Holy Orders,19 described by the author as “a novel about the state of the Church of England.”20 For the American side of the Atlantic, there is much more material available and our presentation will be based on the following works: Julia Spencer-Fleming’s Clare Fergusson novels,21 Michelle Blake’s Lily Connor novels,22 the late Charles Meyer’s Lucas Holt series,23 the late Isabelle Holland’s Claire Aldington series,24 Kate Gallison’s Mother Lavinia Grey books,25 Cristina Sumners’ Kathryn Koerney novels26 and Pamela Cranston’s The Madonna Murders.27

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All the novels based in Britain portray Anglicans who are concerned by falling congregations and the steep decline in church attendance over the last few decades. This is generally accompanied by criticism of the ecclesiastical hierarchy whose preoccupation with infighting, status and minor issues can be likened to playing the organ while Canterbury burns. They are all much more critical of the Church than the golden age writers. Nick Squires, a 19-year-old gap year student in D. M. Greenwood’s Idol Bones, loves the Church but prophesizes that “it won’t last my time out if they don’t reform.”28 In the same way Phil Rickman’s Merrily Watkins notes that “congregations were crashing”29 and “in free fall,”30 while the murderer in the same novel angrily refers to the Church of England as “the only organisation with ratings falling faster than anything on the box”31–a statement which, in fact, wasn’t true at the time he was supposed to be saying it, as church attendance figures in the Church of England actually went up by about one per cent in 200332 for the first time in several years. P. D. James’s characters share this pessimistic outlook. The unbelieving Sir Alred Treeves predicts that “the C of E will be defunct in twenty years.”33 Her Christian characters are, in general, equally negative. The evangelical Archdeacon Crampton preaches that “unless the Church adapts itself to meet the needs of the twenty-first century, it will die,”34 while the more traditionalist Father Sebastian feels that if it does adapt in the way some people seem to want it to and become a “Church for Cool Britannia,”35 the result will be hardly worth saving. D. M. Greenwood, who has worked as an ecclesiastical civil servant for the Diocese of Rochester, claims that her series was “initially triggered by anger”36 and takes as one of her themes the “tension between what the clergy say and what they actually do.”37 Deacon Theodora Braithwaite, Greenwood’s amateur detective, and her adventures exist partly to amuse people and partly to further her creator’s goal: “Let’s change the Church of England.”38 This reforming zeal is combined with a deep attachment both to the Christian faith and to the Church she criticizes and is probably comparable to that of her character, Ian Caretaker–all Greenwood’s names are significant–in Clerical Errors: I have no reservations at all about Christianity. It’s all there is to keep the devil at bay. It’s complete and true … But about Anglicanism, how can one not be ambivalent? I love it dearly and you must know how near that can come to hate. Its tolerance can so easily become self-indulgence and complacency. Its kindness can turn into patronage and its easy relations with the political and social stage so quickly degenerate into worldliness and power-seeking.39

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The problems in the church, according to Greenwood and her sympathetic characters, come at least in part from its hierarchy and career system. The Church of England, Theodora Braithwaite laments, “is not a Guardian-reading democracy of rational equals. It is a hierarchy … where the criteria for advancement are decorously unpublished,”40 and depend far more on who you know than on what you know. One aspect of this can be found in the patronage system which allowed41 “the spiritual leadership of three villages” to be given to “a man about whom you knew nothing, who appeared to have received minimum training, whose fitness no one seemed to have established, whose career wasn’t even recorded”42 and was a chronic alcoholic into the bargain, just because he happened to be acquainted with the patron, who owed him a favour. In addition, once in place, the incumbent has a form of tenure and it is extremely difficult to get rid of him. In Greenwood’s novel, in spite of the fact that the offending cleric, the Reverend Marr, is perpetually drunk, has caused his wife to run away from him, has emptied the church of its previously fairly numerous congregation and often “disappears from the parish for a week at a time,”43 the bishop can only moan “it’s a pity he isn’t a lecher … mere drunkenness gets us nowhere,”44 having no means of giving him the sack. Shortly afterwards, Geoffrey, a vicar the reader is expected to approve of, comments ironically on the intellectual calibre of the clergy, saying that: … a stranger might be forgiven for supposing that the Church of England in south London was staffed by middle-aged ex-lorry drivers recruited via the Southwark Ordination Course45, plus a sprinkling of young men who had found their accountancy exams too arduous.46

In addition, in Greenwood’s novels, even some of the more admirable clergy are hopelessly naïve. For example, Bishop Henry in Idol Bones is popular, a man of prayer. He knows himself to be “respected, even loved.”47 He is humble and has “no trace of vanity or pomposity.”48 However, he is out of touch with the modern world in his insistence on the supreme importance of good will and good manners, and his overoptimistic conviction that “there was no problem which could not be solved by recourse to one or both of these.”49 To Theodora Braithwaite, the Church has lost its way and, as a result, no longer has the right priorities. When the appalling vicar mentioned above is found murdered, the higher clergy are more concerned with finding “how they could save the Church from scandal.”50 than with “discovering the truth or helping Amy,”51 the murdered man’s wife. Theodora also feels that the cathedral staff in Idol Bones have “lost confidence in their original function” of “bringing people into God’s

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presence by the regular, prayerful celebration of a liturgy, praying in public.”52 In her opinion, the reason for this is that the clergy no longer have the self-discipline “to work at private prayer,” which requires “enormous effort” if one is going to “pray in public convincingly.”53 All this does not mean that Christianity is dying, but Theodora feels that “the real Church has gone underground.”54 She, and almost certainly D.M. Greenwood too, knows “whole networks of families”55 and brotherhoods of clergy in both the evangelical and catholic traditions who are living genuine Christian lives; however, these do not seem to be part of the visible face of the Church any longer. Like Greenwood and her agreeable characters, Kate Charles claims to love the Church of England with a “by no means … uncritical love.”56 She refers to it as “so often a muddle-headed institution” and says that “there are times when I fear it’s lost its way.”57 Her characters are also often disillusioned when “what the Church says and what the Church does are two different things.”58 For Sophie in Cruel Habitations, this made the church just like the Government, “an institution that was made up of fallible human beings.”59 With the Church, however, this is more disturbing as the “hypocrisy seemed to be magnified through the lens of its ostensible holiness.”60 Like Greenwood, Kate Charles also shows up the inadequacies of the way the clergy are appointed. For instance, in Appointed to Die, Dean Latimer got his prestigious job for wholly political reasons: Deans are always appointed by the Crown, which means, of course, the Prime Minister. Mrs Latimer’s father had been angling for a Cabinet post after the last General Election, but didn’t get one, and according to the archbishop, this was his consolation prize from the PM–a Deanship for his son-in-law.61

For Charles’s Bishop George, and probably his creator, the most disgraceful aspect of the system is that the “Prime Minister isn’t answerable to anyone for the appointment–it can’t even be raised in Parliament, either before or after the event,”62 which means that even if the candidate is completely unsuitable, there is nothing the Church can do about it. While Phil Rickman has little to say in his own person about the problem of political appointments, his character Lew Jeavons, a black priest, is offered a bishopric because, as he says “purple and black go so nice together in New Labour Britain.”63 The Bishop of Hereford explains what happened:

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Rickman’s characters also express opinions as to why the Church is losing ground. For Merrily Watkins, part of the problem comes from the fact that the clergy are into “helping people develop an inner life”, while most people have no desire for one and “just want a good outer life.”65 For Jane, the vicar’s daughter, however, the Church has lost its sense of mystery; an opinion she bluntly expresses: “if you don’t bring back the mystery, you’re stuffed, Mum.”66 Although Rickman’s Jane Watkins and P. D. James’s Father Sebastian Morrell have very little else in common, they share the conviction that the Church of England needs to maintain, or even recapture, its sense of mystery. Morrell hates the thought of a modernized, secularised Church and asks if Archdeacon Crampton really wants: … A church without mystery, stripped of that learning, tolerance and dignity that were the virtues of Anglicanism? A Church without humility in the face of the ineffable mystery and love of Almighty God? Services with banal hymns, a debased liturgy and the Eucharist conducted as if it were a parish beanfeast?67

Throughout the novel, Morrell and Crampton represent two different ways of understanding the Church’s dilemma in the modern world and two very different solutions. Their debates are seen in the context of a crumbling civilisation, increasingly without God, as represented by the unbelieving murderer. For Morrell, peace, mystery, beauty in worship, academic excellence, unity, humility and reverence before God are primary considerations, while for Crampton Morrell’s vision of the Church is no more than “outworn conventions, an archaic liturgy, and a Church that is seen as pretentious, boring, middle-class–racist even,”68 which merely satisfies the wealthy classes’ “craving for beauty, order, nostalgia and the illusion of spirituality”69 and has no chance of serving “the needs of a violent, troubled and increasingly unbelieving century”. This sometimes violent disagreement takes place in the context of a fallen world, represented by the murderer, who believes that “the Church they serve is dying,”70 because the twenty-first century has its own resources, like the Internet, “for staving off those two horrors of human life, boredom and the knowledge that we die.”71 In his opinion, western civilisation with its Judaeo-Christian tradition is on the verge of extinction and all anyone can do is decide to make futile attempts to arrest the decline, “find solace

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in our own consolations” or “join the barbarians and take our share of the spoils.”72 James herself seems, like her Father Sebastian, and despite her pessimism about the immediate future of the Church, to consider this attitude as a result of satanic pride and to hold a position similar to T. S. Eliot’s in 1931 when he advocated “redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilisation, and save the World from suicide.”73 Although, for all the British-based authors except Rickman, the issue appears to have a lower priority, each of them does consider the controversial question of women’s ministry. Theodora Braithwaite is “a female deacon with an aversion to being priested.”74 In spite of her decision to remain in deacon’s orders, Theodora is not averse to wearing “a clerical collar, lest the Bishop should need reminding.”75 Greenwood also ironically describes a procession of “six female deacons in blue suits” who “carried handbags to show they were women and wore dog collars to indicate the other thing.”76 Kate Charles is more clearly in favour of women priests, insisting in an interview with Julia Spencer-Fleming that her high church opinions are those of the liberal “Affirming Catholicism” and definitely not those favoured by the more hardline “Forward in Faith.”77 Her attractive portrait of the pleasant and competent Archdeacon Margaret Phillips in Unruly Passions78 not only shows how a woman can admirably and sensitively fulfil an archdeacon’s duties, liberating the role from what P. D. James’s Piers Tarrant thinks of as its traditional rottweiler image,79 but also reveals the tensions and conflicting loyalties between her job and her family faced by any married woman priest in a position of responsibility. Charles adopts a more controversial approach in A Dead Man Out of Mind (1995), written just at the time that women were first being ordained as priests in the Church of England, which portrays the conflicts and violent emotions which result from the appointment of a woman curate in a parish where the wife of one of the church wardens is the national leader of the caricatural organisation “Ladies Opposed to Women Priests.”80 For P. D. James’s Father Sebastian Morrell, who probably opposes the ordination of women, although this is not explicitly stated, the main issue is unity. It is not that women are unwanted in his theological college–he has appointed and appreciates a woman lecturer–but rather that, in a Church called to witness to God’s eternal and universal love, he refuses to “preside over a Christian institution in which some members refuse to take the sacrament at the hands of others.”81 Only Phil Rickman among the British authors is particularly preoccupied by the question of women priests; not whether they should be

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ordained or not–he takes it for granted that they should–but by their lives and difficulties. He had originally created Merrily Watkins as a minor character but, he says, “became interested in women clergy and the unique problems they face.”82 For his character Lew Jeavons, Merrily Watkins is an exceptional woman priest because, unlike most of the female clergy he knows who are “very proud of what they’ve achieved for their sex after all these centuries”83 and want to show it, she rarely wears her dog collar or clerical shirt. Jane, Merrily’s daughter, who Rickman refers to as his own favourite character,84 has a more cynical interpretation of the situation. In her opinion, being a woman priest is “the crappiest job there is and it’s getting worse all the time.”85 Although women tend to think that “getting ordained was some huge coup for the sex,” Jane considers that it was actually “a subtle conspiracy by the male clergy desperately searching for fall guys as everything around them collapses.” This brings us back to the real dilemma from the British Anglican’s perspective, the Church’s decline. Women’s ministry and the homosexuality debate, as well as other traditionalist versus liberal conflicts, are most often seen in the context of the Church’s continued survival as a united, thriving institution. On the other side of the Atlantic, where church attendance has not declined as rapidly over the last half century as it has in Europe,86 the predominant concern appears to be the tensions between traditionalist and liberal Episcopalians. For Charles Meyer, the Episcopal Church in Austin, Texas, covered “the psychological and theological spectrum from charismatic fundamentalists to social justice liberals and all the perversions in between,”87 while Isabelle Holland’s New York clergy speak ironically of the conflict between “the Dear Old Prayer Book” and “the Horrid New Rite”88 or “the advocates of Holding the Line against the liberal hordes bringing the new prayer book, folk masses and the ordination of women.”89 However, all the detecting clergy in the works studied appear to be, to a greater or lesser extent, on the liberal side of the divide, although they are often counterbalanced by a friendly, but more conservative, police officer90 who is in favour of capital punishment. These liberal clergy are also, more often than not, obliged to work with a more conservative, cautious and eminently respectable vestry.91 Charles Meyer’s Rev. Lucas Holt, perhaps the most militantly liberal of all, whose “theological and social outspokenness” are “an embarrassment to the diocese”,92 even tells his conservative bishop that he doesn’t appreciate his “right-wing, nationalistic, mealy-mouthed, pietistic religion.”93 Michelle Blake’s Lily Connor enables us to define this Episcopalian liberalism more exactly. Lily herself, who works part-time at a women’s centre facilitating “race, gender and class groups,”94 refers to her

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predecessor in the parish as “a straight-backed, tight-lipped conservative– that is, the enemy.”95 She deplores the books in his library by such wellknown, dead, European theologians as “Abelard, Bonhoeffer, Buber, Bultman and the rest,”96 but approves of a box of books by recent, mainly American, theologians and church historians like “Daly,97 Spong,98 Ruether,99 Guttierrez,100 Atkinson,”101 who, Lily claims, “had helped to shape her own faith and practice.”102 On the other hand, although Lily sees herself as “battling the Church’s conservatism … and everyone’s biases,”103 she claims to “hold Scripture sacred”104 and would not feel comfortable with Cristina Sumner’s Rev. Kathryn Koerney’s statement that “the first thing you need to know about the Bible is that there’s a lot of crap in it.”105 The other detecting seminary professor, Pamela Cranston’s Andrea West, also deplores traditionalists, includes “introducing the Goddess into the Creed”106 as part of her second semester programme and claims that “only those willing to brave the mysteries of the unknown and darker currents of doubting reason had a chance of retrieving the Pearl of Great Price,”107 which sounds, if not vaguely gnostic, at least unlikely to have met with St Paul’s unqualified approval. The battle for women’s ministry in the American Episcopal Church appears to have been won, as no one expresses disapproval of women priests, although non-churchgoers and Catholics sometimes don’t know how to react to them. The homosexuality debate, on the other hand, is present in several of the novels. Julia Spencer-Fleming’s Clare Fergusson, who is quite conservative on some other issues, agrees to celebrate the union of a homosexual couple, while admitting that “the Church is in conflict about these issues”108 and that her own bishop, the Bishop of Albany, is opposed to such ceremonies. Spencer-Fleming, who based this part of her novel on the current Bishop of Albany’s actual views, says that she “thought it would be important for Clare to have to pay the piper because she is part of a hierarchy.”109 The homosexual question is also very present in the Lily Connor series. Lily’s best friend, Charlie, is a homosexual Anglican monk and also a member of the diocesan committee on human sexuality, where he gets irritated by all the “paranoid, homophobic drivel”110 he hears. In Charlie’s opinion the main problem is that the committee is supposed to be spending time discerning the will of God on “the twin questions of the ordination of gay and lesbian priests and the blessing of gay and lesbian unions,” but in reality “there’s no discernment going on … We all knew what we thought when we arrived.”111 In the other novels, homosexuality, when it is referred to at all, is merely taken for granted. Kathryn Koerney,

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for example, regards “a person’s sexual orientation as a very minor piece of information, not worth mentioning in most circumstances.”112 On other questions of sexual morality, the American Episcopalian consensus remains liberal. While in Britain, as Kate Charles’s Jeremy reminds the readers of Cruel Habitations: “the Church of England may have eased up a bit, but divorce among the clergy is still a no-no,”113 her sister church across the Atlantic no longer seems particularly bothered by the question. The Rev. Norbert Shearer in Isabelle Holland’s A Death at St Anselm’s does irritate some of his congregation by “undergoing a second divorce after his induction as rector,”114 but this does not lead to his dismissal. Both Kathryn Koerney and Andrea West are divorced and open to the possibility of remarriage. Together with priests Lucas Holt, Lily Connor, Claire Aldington and Mother Lavinia, they are surprisingly115 happy to have sex outside marriage. Although Lily acknowledges that she “couldn’t work as an interim priest if she lived with [Tom] unmarried,”116 they solve this problem by moving into two flats in the same block, so that they can share their lives and beds without actually having the same address. Only Julia Spencer-Fleming’s Clare Fergusson upholds the more traditional viewpoint. She knows that for her to “overnight in New York with a handsome single man”117 would cause a problem for her congregation and so organises separate accommodation. She also considers that divorce should be “a very last resort” and likens it to “an animal gnawing off its leg to escape a trap before it dies.”118 In spite of these different emphases between British and American Anglicans in detective fiction, we can notice a common attachment to the liturgy and the hymns of the Church. All the authors studied quote from them extensively and the Christian characters in their novels remember and refer to them in times of stress. Holland’s Claire Aldington seems to speak for the others when she claims that: Celebrating the liturgy had always calmed me when I was upset, or exhilarated me when I was depressed or tired. Some magic in the ancient words seemed there, regardless of my mood.119

In the same way, P. D. James represents all the other authors in her affirmation that “the words of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer have both been central to my life and to my craft as a novelist.”120 Among the novels studied for this paper we can count five that take their titles from hymns, two from the liturgy, four from the liturgical psalms and four from the Bible. Julia Spencer-Fleming’s In the Bleak

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Midwinter follows the liturgy for advent, while her Out of the Deep I Cry starts on Ash Wednesday and finishes on Easter Day, quoting at length from the Lent services on the way. Rickman’s The Prayer of the Night Shepherd contains excerpts from a deliverance rite and baptism, while Greenwood’s novels always end with a sermon in the context of a vibrant and joyous liturgy. Another common point between the British and the American authors, which also roots them in the tradition started by Chesterton in the first Father Brown stories, is their emphasis on confession and absolution. Chesterton claimed that the Christian Church was like “an enormous private detective,”121 the only organisation “to pursue and discover crimes, not in order to avenge, but in order to forgive them.”122 Chesterton’s own priestly detective, Father Brown, illustrates this by demasking the great French criminal Flambeau and bringing him to confession and conversion.123 Julia Spencer-Fleming agrees with this, claiming that her Clare Fergusson was a detective “whose primary motivation wasn’t nailing the bad guy or clearing her name, but … was driven by her faith to pursue justice and healing.”124 Clare’s work as a priest was also convenient because “you’ve got to give the person a good reason for poking around in murders,” and for priests “part of their job is getting involved with people’s intimate lives and problems and helping them.”125 Nearly all the clerical sleuths have to hear at least one murderer’s confession and pronounce absolution which, as Mother Lavinia Grey points out, “they hadn’t taught her … in seminary and it didn’t come naturally.”126 Sometimes they find their own emotions in conflict with their sacramental vocation. Lucas Holt, for example, tells a man who ordered the murder of his pregnant daughter and then repented: “As a priest I have to tell you that God forgives you, even if I don’t. I hope your fat ass fries in hell.”127 These moments of repentance, confession and absolution are often important parts both of the plot and the wider message of the books. In P. D. James’s Death in Holy Orders, the detection is not affected by the fact that Archdeacon Cranston repented and found “the promise of forgiveness and peace”128 before he was murdered, but it does help establish the atmosphere of holiness at the theological college, obliging even unwilling believers to face up to their lies and misdeeds. It also makes it practically certain that the murderer will not be found among the Christian characters. It is therefore possible to state that British Anglicans are preoccupied by the survival of their church and the problem of shrinking congregations, while American Anglicans, in a country with “far higher residual church attendance,”129 worry more about the conflicts between

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liberals and traditionalists. Nevertheless, in spite of the differences of emphasis, the mystery writer-s on both sides of the Atlantic are ultimately concerned, to quote Michelle Blake, with the ways in which “we fall away from what we know to be right–and what it takes to get back on course.”130 For the writers of Anglican detective fiction, as for the theologians, confession is “the first step toward absolution, forgiveness and correction” and the possibility of a new start–which makes them bringers of hope as well as constructive critics of the Anglican Church in their generation. As an afterthought, we may wonder why all these Anglican clerical sleuths are either anglo-catholics or liberals, when the Church of England has a majority of evangelical clergy. Geoffrey Kirk, vicar of St Stephen’s, Lewisham, asked in 1996: “Will there ever … be an earnest, evangelical detective?”131 So far, the answer is no. Could there be a profound ideological reason for this or will some enterprising author one day surprise us? 1

Dorothy L. Sayers, ed., Great Tales of Detection (London: Dent, 1984), viii. Among other omissions, for some reason only one of Peter Tremayne’s Sister Fidelma novels is cited and the Irish nun is absent from the list of clerical detectives. 3 Kate Charles, (April 2005). 4 Agatha Christie, The Murder at the Vicarage (London: Collins, 1930). 5 Georgette Heyer, The Unfinished Clue (London: Heinemann, 1934). 6 Josephine Tey, Brat Farrar (London: Peter Davies, 1949). 7 Dorothy L. Sayers, The Nine Tailors (London: Victor Gollancz, 1934). 8 Agatha Christie, The Moving Finger (London: Collins, 1943) and The Pale Horse (London: Collins, 1961). 9 It is interesting to note that Chesterton was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1922 and so was Anglican at the time of writing nearly all the Father Brown stories. 10 Letter to Dr Eustace Barton in Barbara Reynolds, ed., The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers 1899-1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1995), 283. 11 Dorothy L. Sayers, “Gaudy Night” in Howard Haycraft, ed., The Art of the Mystery Story (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992) 209/210. 12 P. D. James is a member of the Dorothy L. Sayers Society. The former Bishop of New Jersey, the Right Reverend Joe Morris Doss, has referred to Kate Gallison as being “in the best tradition of Dorothy L Sayers” ( ). Michelle Blake quotes Sayers in the Author`s Note to her first novel, The Tentmaker, and places herself “in the Conan Doyle – Sayers – Heilbrun tradition” (interview by Julia Spencer-Fleming – 2

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). Cristina Sumners’ clerical detective, Kathryn Koerney, accuses another priest of “reading Dorothy Sayers” and in return is suspected of “doing a Lord Peter” (Crooked Heart, 203/204). 13 Quoted in the review pages at the front of Michelle Blake, Earth Has No Sorrow (New York: Berkley, 2002). 14 Although she was born in the United States, Kate Charles has acquired British nationality and has lived in England for nearly twenty years. 15 This series of five novels started with A Drink of Deadly Wine (1991) and features the amateur detective and solicitor David Middleton-Brown and his vicar’s daughter girlfriend Lucy Kingsley. 16 Mainly Cruel Habitations (London: Warner Books, 2000), and Unruly Passions (1998). It is interesting to note that Kate Charles will be launching a new British clergywoman into the world of detective fiction in 2005. Her novel Evil Intent features the Rev. Callie Anson, curate at All Saint’s Church, Paddington, in London. 17 A series of nine books from Clerical Errors (London: Headline, 1991), to Foolish Ways (1999). Theodora is a deacon in the Church of England. 18 The Rev. Merrily Watkins, who first appeared in The Wine of Angels (1999), is the Diocesan Deliverance Consultant for the Diocese of Hereford in the border country between England and Wales. She has appeared in six novels. Unlike nearly all the other authors quoted, Phil Rickman does not claim any personal involvement in the Anglican faith. He was brought up in the Church of England and educated at a church school. Rickman says that the Merrily Watson series “has had considerable input from working ministers” and the deliverance scenes are run “past one particular exorcist.” 19 P. D. James, Death in Holy Orders (London: Faber & Faber, 2001). 20 Robert McCrum, “We Regard Murder with Fascination”, The Observer, 4 April, 2001. 21 There are three novels so far, although two more are in the pipeline: In the Bleak Midwinter (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2002), A Fountain Filled With Blood (2003) and Out of the Deep I Cry (2004). Clare Fergusson is a priest in upstate New York. 22 There are three books to date: The Tentmaker (New York: Putnam 1999), Earth Has No Sorrow (2001) and The Book of Light (2003). Lily Connor is an unorthodox and politically active priest, working in Boston but born and raised in Texas. 23 There are regrettably only three books in the series on account of Meyer’s untimely death in a car accident in November 2000: The Saints of God Murders (New York: Berley, 1995), Blessed are the Merciless (1996) and Beside the Still Waters (1997). Lucas Holt is a priest working in Austin, Texas, and a former prison chaplain. 24 The Reverend Claire Aldington has the distinction of being the first female Episcopal priest to appear as the protagonist in detective fiction. There are five

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novels in the series, starting with A Death at St Anselm’s (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1984). 25 Mother Lavinia first appeared in Bury the Bishop (New York: Dell, 1995) and has so far featured in five novels. She works as a parish priest in New Jersey. 26 There are only two of these so far: Crooked Heart (New York: Dell, 2002) and Thieves Break In (2004). Kathryn is a priest working in a seminary in Harton, New Jersey – which strongly resembles Princeton. 27 The Madonna Murders (Oakland: St Hubert’s Press, 2003). The detective, Andrea West, is a lecturer at an Episcopal seminary in California. 28 D.M. Greenwood, Idol Bones (London: Headline, 1993), 216. 29 Phil Rickman, The Prayer of the Night Shepherd (London: Pan, 2004), 53. 30 Rickman 17. 31 Rickman 565. 32 “C of E attendance up”, Christianity, March 2005, 10. 33 P.D. James, Death in Holy Orders (London: Faber & Faber, 2001), 18. 34 James Death 127. 35 James Death 128. 36 Janine Volkmar, “Saintly Sleuths”, Episcopal Life, November 2002, (April 2005). 37 Volkmar. 38 Volkmar. 39 D. M. Greenwood, Clerical Errors, (London: Headline, 1991), 27. 40 Greenwood, Idol Bones, 60. 41 I use the past tense here as many experienced clerics in the Church of England have assured me that recent reforms mean that this could, in theory, no longer occur. 42 D.M. Greenwood, Unholy Ghosts (London: Headline, 1991), 86. 43 Greenwood Unholy Ghosts 2. 44 Greenwood Unholy Ghosts 1. 45 A “night school for priests”, founded in 1960, giving men, who could not afford to give up their jobs to go to theological college, an opportunity to train for the ministry. See (April 2005). 46 Greenwood, Unholy Ghosts 93. 47 Greenwood, Idol Bones 134. 48 Greenwood, Idol Bones. 49 Greenwood, Idol Bones. 50 Greenwood, Unholy Ghosts 74. 51 Greenwood, Unholy Ghosts. 52 Greenwood, Idol Bones 116. 53 Greenwood, Idol Bones. 54 Greenwood, Unholy Ghosts 149. 55 Greenwood, Unholy Ghosts. 56 Interview with Julia Spencer-Fleming: (April 2005).

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Fleming. Kate Charles, Cruel Habitations (London: Warner Books, 2000), 163. 59 Charles Cruel Habitations 164. 60 Charles Cruel Habitations. 61 Kate Charles, Appointed to Die (London: Headline, 1993), 140. 62 Charles, Appointed to Die. 63 Rickman, The Prayer of the Night Shepherd, 102. 64 Rickman Prayer 52. 65 Rickman Prayer 72. 66 Rickman Prayer 17. 67 James, Death in Holy Orders 128. 68 James Death 127. 69 James Death 149. 70 James Death 254. 71 James Death. 72 James Death 380. 73 T.S. Eliot, “Thoughts After Lambeth,” Selected Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1932), 387. 74 Geoffrey Kirk, “The Way We Live Now: You’re all Booked,” Trushare, 16 September, 1996. 75 Greenwood, Unholy Ghosts 72. 76 Greenwood, Idol Bones 3. 77 Julia Spencer-Fleming, “Interview with Kate Charles”, (April 2005). 78 Kate Charles, Unruly Passions (London: Warner Books, 1998). 79 “A kind of rottweiller of the Church … the spiritual equivalent of HM Inspector of Constabulary”, Death in Holy Orders, 200. 80 This less than attractive organisation is probably a caricature of WAOW (Women Against the Ordination of Women), founded in 1986 by Margaret Hewitt and two other members of the Church of England General Synod. By 1991 the movement had 5,500 members, more than the rival Movement For the Ordination of Women. 81 James, Death in Holy Orders 127. 82 (April 2005). 83 Rickman, The Prayer of the Night Shepherd 99. 84 (April 2005). 85 Rickman Prayer 186. 86 For example, in 1993, 10% of English adults were in church on an average Sunday, while in the USA over 30% could be found there. There is approximately the same number of Anglicans in the UK as in the USA. Source: Patrick Johnstone, Operation World (OM Publishing, 1993). 87 Charles Meyer, The Saints of God Murders (New York: Berkley, 1995) 6. 88 Isabelle Holland, A Death at St Anselm’s (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1984) 39. 89 Holland St Anselm’s 9. 58

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The Rev. Clare Fergusson works with police chief Russ Van Alstyne, who is firmly in favour of capital punishment and has little patience with the feckless poor. Police photographer Tom Casey works with Blake’s Lily Connor, police chief Tom Holder with Kathryn Koerney, Detective O’Neill with Claire Aldington, Detective David Dogg with Mother Lavinia and Lieutenant Susan Granger with Lucas Holt. For some reason, most of the police officers are in love with their clergy friends. 91 The American ‘vestry’ corresponds to the English’PCC’ or Parochial Church Council. 92 Charles Meyer, Blessed are the Merciless (New York: Berkley, 1996) 7. 93 Meyer, The Saints of God Murders 13. 94 Michelle Blake, The Tentmaker (New York: Putnam, 1999) 29. 95 Blake 3. 96 Blake. 97 Mary Daly, militant feminist theologian, best known for her groundbreaking work The Church & the Second Sex (1968). More recently Daly has attracted attention by her refusal to accept male students in her classes at Boston College. 98 John Shelby Spong, very liberal retired bishop, known for his refusal to accept any but the most metaphorical understanding of the resurrection, the incarnation or the virgin birth. His controversial writings include Living in Sin? A Bishop Rethinks Human Sexuality (1988). 99 Rosemary Radford Ruether, contemporary feminist theologian. Works include Towards a Feminist Theology (1983). 100 Gustavo Guttierrez, Peruvian exponent of liberation theology. Best-known work: A Theology of Liberation (1971). 101 Despite consulting several erudite American Episcopalians, we have so far been unable to identify Atkinson. The best-known contemporary Anglican theologian of that name, David Atkinson, is British and too evangelical to appeal to Lily Connor. 102 Blake, The Tentmaker, 59. 103 Michelle Blake, The Book of Light (New York: Berkley, 2004) 4. 104 Blake The Book of Light 59. 105 Cristina Sumners, Crooked Heart (New York: Dell, 2002) 148. 106 Pamela Cranston, The Madonna Murders (Oakland: St Hubert’s Press, 2003) 8. 107 Cranston 9. 108 Julia Spencer-Fleming, A Fountain Filled With Blood, (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2003) 364. 109 Interview with Kay Brundige, Publishers Weekly, 3 August, 2004. 110 Blake, The Tentmaker 28. 111 Blake. 112 Cristina Sumners, Thieves Break In (New York: Bantam Books, 2004) 234. 113 Charles, Cruel Habitations 194/195. 114 Holland, A Death at St Anselm’s 7. 115 Several American Episcopalians consulted stated that such behaviour from the clergy, if known, would still be unacceptable to the majority of parishes. 116 Michelle Blake, Earth Has No Sorrow (New York: Berkley, 2001) 41.

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Julia Spencer-Fleming, Out of the Deep I Cry (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2004) 269. 118 Spencer-Fleming, A Fountain Filled With Blood 226. 119 Holland, A Death at St Anselm’s 221. 120 P.D. James, Time to Be in Earnest (London: Faber & Faber, 1999) 89. 121 G.K. Chesterton, “The Divine Detective”, A Miscellany of Men (Scholarly Press, 1972) 235. 122 Chesterton 236. 123 The final step in this spiritual pilgrimage occurs in “The Flying Stars”, The Innocence of Father Brown (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987). 124 Julia Spencer-Fleming, “On the Road to Damascus, or, Me, a Christian Writer?” , (March 2005). 125 “Interview with Julia Spencer-Fleming”, Maine Bar Journal, 2002. 126 Kate Gallison, Devil’s Workshop (New York: Dell, 1996) 259. 127 Meyer, Blessed are the Merciless 149. 128 James, Death in Holy Orders 162. 129 Bob Hopkins & George Lings, “Mission-shaped Church: The Inside and Outside View”, Encounters on the Edge , No.22 (London: The Church Army, 2004) 9. 130 Julia Spencer-Fleming interviews Michelle Blake: , (April 2005). 131 Geoffrey Kirk, “The Way We Live Now: You’re all Booked”, Trushare, 16 September, 1996.

CHAPTER SIX MYTHOLOGY AS MEMORY IN TONY HILLERMAN’S NOVELS MARC MICHAUD

In a sense, Tony Hillerman has initiated a second revolution in the detective novel genre–or at least an evolution, the first one being carried out by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, who brought crime back where it belonged: to the streets. From that moment on, the mystery novel was invariably associated with the landscape of the city. Then came Hillerman, who, forty years after Arthur Upfield, succeeded in immersing it into rurality, ethnology, and first and foremost mythology. Although he is not of Native American descent, he spent his youth among the Seminole and Potawatomi Indians in a small community in Sacred Heart, Oklahoma, and developed an interest for Amerindian civilisations, which comes out in his novels set in the deserts of the Southwest, sparsely populated by the people of the Navajo Nation. However, the desert is far from being a mere landscape in Hillerman’s fiction since it plays a key role in the narration itself and is intimately connected with the culture of the main characters, policemen Chee and Leaphorn, and their quest of identity. Firstly, the desert, the Navajo reservation, (the same surface area as that of New England), is directly linked with the notion of time. As Hillerman puts it, The desert seems to resist the idea of time. Its leafless, spiny, sword-blade life ignores the cycle of seasons. […] On the reservation, this desert illusion of timelessness is intensified. On a windless winter afternoon here, the very planet seems dead.1

Hillerman thus constructs a vision of Navajo time which is different from the traditional Western vision and is modelled on the desert: the Navajo do not live in a world with a linear vision of time, with a past, a present and a future, but with a cyclical vision of time, where the sense of space prevails

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and opens the door to their Sacred Time, that is to say their mythology. According to Edward Abbey, “God is there and man is not.”2 Thus, for Hillerman, just as for the Navajo, the landscape is a temporal palimpsest, peopled by spirits and magic. In depicting a people for whom the distinction between the natural and the supernatural is blurred, Hillerman succeeds in conveying the supernatural aspect of the landscapes, although by definition description functions to anchor down the narration in the concrete. Timelessness seems to shroud the narration in mythology. Thus, his plots constantly evolve in a sort of twilight zone where mythology and reality are closely entwined, and the reader discovers that time has taken the shape of space. Hillerman describes places the way we suppose a Navajo would: he adds a mythological dimension to conventional description. What the western eye sees as a landscape is actually the emerged part of the temporal iceberg of the Navajo culture. Native American writer Vine Deloria Jr states that Indian tribes combine history and geography so that they have a sacred geography: every location has a multitude of stories that cumulatively produce the tribe in its current condition.3

Descriptions thus initiate a temporal journey through time, back to the Navajo mythology: very often, descriptions cut into a dialogue, go back to the mythology, and progressively come back to human time, the time of the police enquiry; they are temporal bubbles of sorts in which other temporal bubbles tell stories with other temporal bubbles; thanks to the sense of place and to the complex temporal structure of the descriptions, the reader too, travels through time: this is obviously a clear example of a mythological layering, with chapters that unfold themselves like nests of dolls.4 It can be added that the narration follows a path laid down by the mythological pattern from the very first chapter of each of Hillerman’s novels. Indeed, many of his novels start in the evening, and the author repeatedly insists on the omnipresence of the colour red. Red, the colour of blood, is the obvious symbol of danger and of evil. For the Navajo, this colour is directly linked to their mythology, for it symbolizes the First World of their myth of the origin; this world was “red, small, and barren;”5 “in the first World, the surface was red in colour.”6 Therefore, it should come as no surprise that Hillerman’s novels often begin at sundown, because the crime committed sets the plot in the first world of the narration, which then becomes the fabric of what we could call a mythological mystery novel.

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In Native American literature, the sense of place is central to the quest of identity of the characters.7 In Hillerman’s fiction, just as landscape can be apprehended at a mythological level, the same can be said of his characters and, once again, the author develops a double-sided narration with a double set of values. For the Navajo, the sense of place is closely linked to the sense of the family, of the tribe. When a traditional Navajo meets another Navajo, he does not introduce himself simply by saying his name, but also by telling the story of his family. Hillerman tells us that the worst Navajo swear word translates as “he acts as if he had no family.” Thus, it is no wonder that the criminals who act in Hillerman’s novels have no real identity. Colton Wolfe, the killer in People of Darkness,8 lives alone in his trailer, has no relatives and uses several aliases: he is a sort of human tumbleweed with no roots, and lives outside the society he is supposed to belong to; his quest to try to find his mother is doomed, for it is set in a civilization based on the individual. In Talking God,9 the killer tries to take care of his mother, who is kicked out of all the old people’s homes because she cannot adapt to their micro-society; and in The Ghostway,10 Vaggan, the ruthless killer, is the offspring of an extremist father for whom the only law is the law of the jungle. Among these criminals who lack cultural anchors are relocated Navajo, taken away from their reservation and acculturated into American society. For Hillerman, they are but the products of a failed experiment, corrupted by society and an easy prey for criminals, like Amos Raven, in The Blessing Way, Hillerman’s first novel, or John Tull in Listening Woman. Hillerman tells us that they are referred to pejoratively as “apples”: their skin is red, but deep down inside they are white. However, paradoxically, the most typical criminals in Hillerman’s novels are the anthropologists, invariably white, burning with ambition and prepared to sacrifice anything for the sake of their careers (one of them is symbolically named Isaacs). They are the real criminals because they are institutional criminals, and hence the most dangerous ones. For Hillerman’s Navajo, they rape the sacred Mother Earth and Native culture, history and roots: as Hillerman points out, they are thieves of time. In other words, what they undertake is a modern version of the conquest of the West more than a century before: the white man stole the surface and now is stealing what lies beneath; he stole what was the present and now is stealing the past. Needless to say, the death of archaeologists at the end of several investigations is highly symbolic, all the more so since they are not killed by Chee and Leaphorn, the two investigators, but by what can be interpreted as divine interventions: in Dance Hall of the Dead,11 Reynolds

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is killed by a Zuni god (being personified by a Zuni Indian); in A Thief of Time,12 Elliot is killed by an arrow coming directly from the past (shot by a boy who has become a hermit, living alone, away from civilisation); finally, in Coyote Waits,13 Redd is bitten by a snake while trying to get hold of a bag full of money hidden in a Navajo sacred place: what can be seen as an accident draws directly on Navajo mythology, which says that this place is guarded by Big Snake, one of their gods. Deus ex machina takes on its full meaning. Thus, the mythological aspect of Hillerman’s fiction also finds its roots in the very characters. We have seen that the criminals play a part in the mythological narration. The two policemen Chee and Leaphorn also exist at this mythical level; they play the part of the Hero Twins in Navajo mythology. Therefore, their stories take on a magical, mythological dimension as well. Their story is not only that of policemen scouting for the Whites, but also a quest symbolic of that of a whole people: the purpose of this quest is to (re)discover their identity as Navajo Indians by re-living mythological stories of their people. This initiatory topos is present in the mystery genre as well as in Native American literature, and superimposes two levels of knowledge which are progressively revealed to the hero. This hero must see beyond the concrete existence of the world and put things in a moral perspective. For him, this is the price to pay to reach the sacred, i.e. to achieve his quest and anchor his identity. This process is reached by means of a test by ordeal, the basis of the mystery genre and above all of Indian myths: says Paula Gunn Allen, “the warrior path requires that a man look at death and face it down.”14 Obviously, there is no better way for Hillerman’s detectives to carry out their duty as policemen. In this way, the hunting ceremony takes on its full-fledged mythological meaning: beyond the search for the criminal lies the possibility for the two Navajo to conjure up the pride of their people and to immerse themselves in their Sacred Time. One character who plays a significant role in this construction of memory and mythology is Leaphorn’s wife, Emma. Although her part in the narration is at first glance limited, all the more so in that she dies in A Thief of Time, Hillerman’s tenth novel, she nonetheless takes on a strong symbolical significance. First, she is a traditional Navajo, living in the ways of the ancestors. As such, she is Leaphorn’s living memory and enables him to escape from the white man’s world and find his roots. Unlike Chee, who is a young and tradition-oriented Navajo, Leaphorn has taken some distance from his culture, and needs Emma to remind him of his roots. But she suffers from a serious medical condition: she is losing

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her memory, to the point that Leaphorn thinks that she has Alzheimer’s disease. When he inquires about the symptoms of this disease, here is the information he receives, which I compare here to what Hillerman depicts as the present situation of the Navajo: EMMA (Alzheimer’s disease) forgetfulness impairment of judgment inability to handle routine tasks lack of spontaneity lessening of initiative disorientation of time and place depression and terror disturbance of language episodic confusional states

THE NAVAJO PEOPLE the Navajo are forgetting their traditions they cannot tell the evil side of the white man’s world they cannot re-enact ancestral ceremonies they have to abide by a culture which is foreign to them they are no longer the masters of their destiny they have to live both in the past (their culture) and in the present. they are depressed at seeing what the Whites have made of their land, and fear their violence they have to speak English to survive in the white man’s world they are disoriented when faced with all these problems and the violence related to them

It is obvious that what is happening to Emma is happening to the whole Navajo culture, i.e. both are fading away into oblivion. Through the characters of Chee and Leaphorn such traditions are maintained: they are central to the mythological episodes that underpin the novels’ plots. Throughout their investigations, Chee and Leaphorn’s struggle aims at the affirmation and preservation of Navajo identity, which is on the verge of being swallowed up. This puts Hillerman’s fiction in line with that of Native American Writers, for whom, as Louis Owens writes: The recovering or rearticulation of an identity, a process dependent upon a rediscovered sense of place as well as community, is at the center of American Indian fiction.15

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In conclusion, two elements can be underscored. First, the quest of Chee and Leaphorn must then lead to their return to the great Navajo family; both of them are mavericks but they are at the same time locked in a mythological progress. The enigma they must crack is but an initiatory trial that enables them to belong to the great Navajo nation. Therefore, they try to find their past to build the present: Chee immerses himself in the mythology of his people, whereas Leaphorn goes further, and decides to go to China to find the ethnographic origins of the Navajo people. The temptation of the ease of American life is, however, always there. The episode that most clearly illustrates the dilemma posed by their confrontation with that other society appears in People of Darkness, when Chee considers applying for a post with the FBI. The job means more money, but also being cut off from his people. He must give an answer before December 11. Then, in the course of duty, he visits a rich man, and discovers the tombstone of an Indian just in front of his house, on which is written: He Didn’t Remember When He Was Born Died December 11, 1953 A Good Indian16

This epitaph obviously brings to Chee’s mind Colonel Sheridan’s dictum that “a good Indian is a dead Indian,” but above all symbolises Chee’s spiritual death: the date of the death of the Indian corresponds to the deadline for applications to be sent to the FBI. So a good Indian is an Indian who has forgotten his past, even his birth date. Chee finally decides not to apply, despite pressure from his white fiancée, but belongs to his own FBI: he is a Full Blooded Indian. Secondly, the setting of the novels is of prime importance in the mythological path followed by the characters, and one further point is worth adding to what has already been said: in Navajo ceremonial, sand paintings recreate a myth of the Navajo cosmogony, the gods depicted serving to recall the healing harmony of the mythic past in the texture and colours of the natural landscape and form the physical base on which the ceremonial is carried out. When we look deeper into Hillerman’s descriptions of landscapes, we realize that all the usual colours are there but green (a colour absent in Navajo mythology). Therefore, Hillerman’s descriptions can be seen as written sand paintings, and his novels re-creations drawn from Navajo mythology: they are ceremonials.17

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Tony Hillerman, “New Mexico,” in New Mexico, Rio Grande and Other Essays (Portland, Oregon: Graphic Arts Center Publishing, 1992) 35. 2 Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (New York: Ballantine, 1991) (first edition 1968) 208. 3 Vine Deloria Jr, God Is Red (Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Publishing, 1994) 122. 4 In this respect, the first chapter of A Thief of Time is an impressive example. 5 Gladys A. Reichard, Navaho Religion: A Study of Symbolism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) 568. 6 Raymond Friday Locke, The Book of the Navajo (Los Angeles: Mankind, 1989) 58. 7 Scott Momaday, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for House Made of Dawn, claims this in numerous interviews. The opening description of the landscape in this novel clearly sets the narration at a mythological level. 8 Tony Hillerman, People of Darkness (New York: Harper and Row, 1980). 9 Tony Hillerman, Talking God (New York: Harper and Row, 1989). 10 Tony Hillerman, The Ghostway (New York: Harper and Row, 1984). 11 Tony Hillerman, Dance Hall of the Dead (New York: Harper and Row, 1973). 12 Tony Hillerman, A Thief of Time (New York: Harper and Row, 1988). 13 Tony Hillerman, Coyote Waits (New York: Harper and Row, 1990). 14 Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992) (first edition 1986), 86. 15 Louis Owens, Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994 (first edition 1992), 5. 16 People of Darkness, 5.

PART III NATIONAL IDENTITIES

CHAPTER SEVEN WHEN THE GANGS CAME TO LONDON: HARD-BOILED WRITING AND FANTASIES OF DECLINE IN ENGLAND BETWEEN THE WARS BENOÎT TADIÉ

It is only recently that the existence of an important British tradition of hard-boiled crime novels, alongside the dominant “cozy” or “Golden Age” one, has begun to be recognized. This alternative and subterranean current of detective fiction surfaced in Britain at various times: notably around World War II, when the shortage of imported American fiction led to the production of local substitutes both in hard-back editions (with authors like Peter Cheyney and James Hadley Chase) and cheap paperback ones (featuring lesser-known names such as Frank Dubrez Fawcett or Hank Janson)1; in the sixties and seventies, with the appearance of authors like Robin Cook/Derek Raymond and Ted Lewis; and again in the late eighties, which saw the rise of a new generation of popular noir writers such as Michael Dibdin, Philip Kerr, and Ian Rankin, among others.2 But the first major–and now largely forgotten–breakthrough occurred in the late twenties and early thirties, when the British public was first exposed to American stories of violence, mostly in the guise of gangster movies and pulp magazines. Soon, under their influence, British writers and magazine editors also began to offer home-grown pseudo-American stories of their own. These were popular as they offered a faster, tougher, more violent and less class-conscious type of story than the average traditional English mystery of the time. But their success may also have been due, in a less obvious way, to the fact that they provided a narrative framework in which an indigenous feeling of anomie, of loss of bearings and loss of values, could be articulated. Thus, this tradition has fulfilled two functions: while it has capitalized on the success of American novels by satisfying the growing demand of the public for violent action, at

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another, more complex, level, it has also been used by certain writers with a critical mind to embody a pessimistic vision of English society in a context of cultural change, economic uncertainty and political decline. It is thanks to this projection of local anxieties into a borrowed narrative form that American and Americanized fiction was successfully domesticated in England, eventually giving rise to a domestic tradition of authentic hardboiled writing. I would like to chart a few stages in the development of this tradition, by paying attention to three early types of English hard-boiled stories, all of which were conceived between the wars under the influence of American models: a) the pseudo-American hard-boiled story, i.e. a story written by an English author but entirely set in America; b) the transatlantic or dialogical hard-boiled story, in which English heroes are pitted against American villains; and c) the domestic hard-boiled story, in which settings and characters are now wholly Anglicized, the American influence being relocated at the level of language and ideological outlook. Although this latter type is the only one of real literary value, it constitutes, as I shall try to argue, a reelaboration of ideological concerns which had already developed in the two earlier types, reflecting the growing fears and fantasies of decline which pervaded the pessimistic moral climate of Britain in the thirties.

The American Invasion American hard-boiled fiction arrived in Britain in the late twenties, in the guise of pulp magazines (Black Mask, Action Stories and the like) which, as George Orwell has recounted, were used as ballast in ships bound from America and sold in F. W. Woolworth chain stores, under the name of “Yank Mags,” at two pence halfpenny or threepence.3 At the same time, thanks to an already well-integrated transatlantic publishing system, there also appeared British editions of American crime novels, with publishers such as Hodder, Hutchinson, Constable, Arthur Barker, Chatto and Windus, John Long or Cassell issuing the works of pioneering hard-boiled writers like Carroll John Daly, Dashiell Hammett, Donald Henderson Clarke, W.R. Burnett, Don Tracy or Paul Cain.4 These were, in turn, soon imitated by British authors who produced ersatz American fiction in order to meet the reading public’s increasing demand for American settings and violent action. Among the first was Edgar Wallace, who briefly visited Chicago in 1929 in order to collect information about Al Capone and American gangsters. The result of this visit, as well as of his reading of American fiction, were the two plays On the Spot and

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Smoky Cell, written in 1930. Wallace’s novelization of On the Spot,5 published in 1931, was a best-seller and its success, as Steve Holland has suggested, probably accounts for the English reissue of the novel which had largely inspired it, namely W. R. Burnett’s Little Caesar.6 The importance of Wallace’s On the Spot is twofold: economically, it played a part in fuelling popular demand for genuine American hardboiled fiction; stylistically, it can be seen as the first major instance of a pseudo-American hard-boiled novel produced by a British author. As such, it represents the starting point of a sub-genre of British gangster fiction, later illustrated by Peter Cheyney (who began writing about Lemmy Caution, his G-Man hero, in 1936) and James Hadley Chase (whose No Orchids for Miss Blandish, a partial rewriting of Faulkner’s Sanctuary, was published in 1939). Somewhere in between Cheyney and Chase lies Richard Hallas’s You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up (1938),7 probably the best of English pseudo-American novels, a successful reworking of James Cain’s and Horace McCoy’s Californian novels featuring a jinxed hobo who falls into the clutches of a corrupt Hollywood crowd and whose attempt to murder his wife misfires dramatically. Interestingly, Richard Hallas was a pen-name used by the British writer Eric Knight, better known as the author of Lassie Come Home, whose mastery of the James Cain-like story and style testifies both to a mild form of narrative and linguistic schizophrenia and, as Edmund Wilson has pointed out, to the increasing standardization of hard-boiled writing in post-Depression America–a standardization which made it possible “for a visiting Englishman to tell this story in the HemingwayCain vernacular almost without a slip.”8 However, apart from a few notable exceptions, this kind of ersatz literature was usually of limited interest, being hardly able to match American fiction in terms of social realism or linguistic inventiveness. Alongside this mostly derivative trend, another, more interesting, branch of British hard-boiled fiction also developed in the crime magazines that emerged in Britain under the influence of American models like Black Mask. The best-known of these magazines were Detective Weekly and The Thriller,9 Most of their stories were based on a kind of cultural cross-breeding, pitting local heroes (whether detectives or rogues) against villains (gangsters) and evils (mob rule, corruption and the rackets) imported from America. A quick sampling of titles appearing in The Thriller is enough to give an idea of these stories’ hybrid nature: Steve Holland’s directory for the years 1929 and 1930 includes such titles as Hugh Clevely’s “Lynch Law” and “The Fifty Gun Gang,” John G.

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Brandon’s “Gang War” and “The Gunman,” L.C. Douthwaite’s “The Man from Chicago,” Fenton Robins’ “The Gang Smasher.” Even Sexton Blake, the ultra-British heir of Sherlock Holmes, whose adventures were published in the Union Jack, seems to have suffered from a bout of American hard-boiled fever around 1930, as suggested by titles like “Gangster’s Gold,” “Gang Justice,” “Sexton Blake-Gangster,” “Say It With Guns,” “Sexton Blake Cleans Up Chicago,” etc.10 As opposed to purely imitative fiction like On the Spot, most of these magazine stories, based on forms of transatlantic conflict, were dialogical in nature. In spite of their often simplistic plots, their real interest lies in their symbolic staging of the increasingly bitter cultural competition between England and America after World War I and, more specifically, of the threat which a powerful and aggressive American mass culture seemed to pose to traditional English values. Thus, the dialogical hardboiled story is a good barometer of the changes in the English moral climate of the time, registering a dramatic alteration from the selfconfidence of the Edwardian age to the uncertainty of the thirties.

When the Gunmen Came Before the arrival of American pulp stories, in the prehistorical, preWar days, British gangster fiction seems to have originated in a playful, if sometimes a trifle patronizing, attempt to satirize American culture, and especially what was seen as the typically American disregard for the law, by opposing it to the strong code of the Edwardian gentleman. One of the first authors to develop this kind of opposition in a criminous setting was, strangely enough, P. G. Wodehouse. Although he is often regarded as the symbol of an idyllic and changeless Edwardian society, Wodehouse’s imagination was also stimulated, at an early stage in his career, by the depiction of American gangs or crooks. In Psmith Journalist (a novel first serialized in 1909 in a British boys’ magazine,11 The Captain, which also featured writers like John Buchan), his protagonist, the eponymous Psmith (the P is silent, as in ptarmigan), a young Englishman enjoying a vacation in New York, takes the lead in a campaign to reform the insalubrious tenement buildings of New York’s Lower East Side. In so doing he comes under fire from the crooked politicians of Tammany Hall and the Bowery gangs who are linked to them. The novel is surprisingly well documented on the subject of New York’s criminal organizations, with several of its main characters inspired by real gang leaders who, like the legendary Monk Eastman, were still active at the time. And Psmith is possibly the first character in British fiction to earn the distinction of being “taken for a

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ride” in a car driven by New York gangsters (though he luckily manages to escape). In his 1913 novel The Little Nugget,12 Wodehouse reworked a similar plot, based on the confrontation between English gentlemen and American crooks, in an English setting. The novel’s protagonist/narrator, now a mild-mannered Englishman named Burns, thwarts the sinister plans of American criminals who are trying to kidnap a millionnaire’s son from a public school. The humour, in both novels, is based on a confrontation between American and English idioms, as Psmith’s and Burns’ publicschool English sets off their opponents’ American slang, and vice-versa. In the following passage from The Little Nugget, Burns is addressed by the American crook Buck McGinnis, who suspects him of having abducted the millionnaire’s son: “You can’t fool me. I’m com’ t’roo dis joint wit a fine-tooth comb till I find him.” “By all means,” I said. “Don’t let me stop you.” “You? You’re coming wit me.” “If you wish it. I shall be delighted.” “An’ cut out dat dam’ sissy way of talking, you rummy,” bellowed Buck, with a sudden lapse into ferocity. “Spiel like a regular guy! Standin’ dere, pullin’ dat dude stuff on me! Cut it out!” (107)

The opposition between England and America is marked not only in the dialogue but also in the narration, which describes American violence in a voluntarily affected English style. At one point, after having been hit in the stomach by one of the gangsters in the story, Burns comments: “Of all cures for melancholy introspection a violent blow in the solar plexus is the most immediate.” (LN 75) Transatlantic tensions are epitomized, in The Little Nugget, by another American crook, Smooth Sam Fisher, who, under the name of White, masquerades as an English butler. One night, Burns hears gunshots in the park near the school and is surprised to see White, the pseudo-English butler, wielding a revolver. This prompts him to reflect: How did White happen to have a revolver at all? I have met many butlers who behaved unexpectedly in their spare time. One I knew played the fiddle; another preached Socialism in Hyde Park. But I had never yet come across a butler who fired pistols. (70)

Wodehouse’s comedy is based on a contrast between a refined sort of public-school Englishness and, on the other hand, a series of violent (though never too violent) American actions. The butler shooting his gun in the park can be seen as the paradoxical synthesis of an English signifier

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and an American signified, or, to put it more simply, of an archetypally English character (the butler) and an archetypically American behaviour (firing a pistol). Traces of this transatlantic schizophrenia will, I believe, later be found again in Wodehouse’s most celebrated comic creation, the butler Jeeves, whom one can see as an inverted reincarnation of White/Smooth Sam Fisher (a real English butler who engages in American-like activities bordering on the criminal). In such pre-1914 novels, American crime, as presented from a central, monological and self-assured English perspective, is essentially seen as peripheral and picturesque. But later, when we come to the more troubled post-World War I period, its representation grows increasingly ominous: Wodehouse’s innocent play on antagonistic but well-insulated linguistic and cultural codes is replaced by more aggressive conflicts between British and American patterns of conduct. In these post-war stories, the lone American bandit who rather absurdly used to prey on the British public school typically gives way to the fully-fledged gang arriving in London and planning to turn the British capital into another Chicago by terrorizing its defenceless citizens. However, most of the early novels and stories in this vein, like John Hunter’s When the Gunmen Came (1930),13 optimistically suggest that England is able to resist the American onslaught thanks to her esprit de corps and incorruptible officials. Thus, at the end of Hunter’s novel, the American gang leader concedes defeat and declares: “When I came over here I omitted to calculate accurately one important factor in British life–the fact that practically everyone of England’s public men cannot be bought.” (8414) But not all English writers of the period were as sanguine as John Hunter in their portrayal of British authorities. Edgar Wallace’s When the Gangs Came to London (1932),15 which retells essentially the same story as Hunter’s novel, is both more cynical and more skeptical in this respect. The hero is an American police captain, Jiggs Allerman, who cooperates with Scotland Yard in trying to dismantle two rival Chicago gangs which are spreading panic in London’s West End. Unlike John Hunter’s gangsters, Wallace’s hoodlums are at least partly successful in corrupting Scotland Yard policemen, thus breaking, perhaps for the first time, an important taboo in English crime fiction. Also, and more significantly, they are finally defeated only thanks to Jiggs’ highly unorthodox methods, which include blackmail and the third degree. At one point, Jiggs explains to the British Home Secretary how to fight organized crime: “I suggest you scrap every rule you’ve laid down for Scotland Yard: that you suspend the Habeas Corpus Act, and give us an indemnity in advance for any illegal act–that is to say, for any act which is outside your

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law–that may be committed in the course of that month. If you’ll do this, I’ll put these two gangs just where they belong.” “In prison?” Jiggs shook his head. “In hell,” he said. It was perhaps unfortunate that he used this extravagant illustration. The Home Secretary was a very earnest Nonconformist, who took his religion seriously. “That of course, is...” He paused. “Fantastical,” suggested Jiggs. “I’m getting quite used to the word. It’s the one you pull when any hard-sense suggestion is made to you.”16

Jiggs’ hard-boiled, “hard-sense” plea in favor of an illegal act– involving presumably torture and the shooting of suspects–and his suggestion to scrap the Habeas Corpus Act are in keeping with his American nationality. Like Peter Cheyney a few years later, Wallace resorts to an American detective in order to have him behave in a tough way which would have been unacceptable in a British hero at the time. This can be seen as a way of having one’s cake and eating it: of answering the public’s taste for violence while at the same time bypassing a powerful English taboo regarding its use by the hero. In this respect, it comes as no surprise that George Orwell should have accused Wallace of showing “a fearful intellectual sadism” and of destroying the moral values of British crime fiction.17 For, in Wallace’s world, as opposed to John Hunter’s, these values are no longer strong enough to take care of themselves.

The Fear of Americanization From a cultural or symbolic point of view, the ominous arrival of American gangsters in British fiction can be read as a metaphor for the fears of cultural change, moral erosion and political decline which pervaded English society after World War I, partly as a result of the huge impact of American popular culture on the public. Such fears were often directly expressed in the political and intellectual debates of the twenties and thirties. Here, for example, is Wyndham Lewis’s view of the matter: The aristocratic caste is nothing but a shadow of itself, the cinema has brought the American scene and the American dialect nightly into the heart of England, and the “Americanizing” process is far advanced. “Done gone,” “good guys,” and “buddies” sprout upon the lips of cockney children as readily as upon those to the manor born, of New York or Chicago: and there is no politically-powerful literate class any longer now, in our British “Bankers’ Olympus,” to confer prestige upon an exact and

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Whereas right-wing intellectuals like Wyndham Lewis equated Americanization with “proletarianization,” left-wing thinkers rather tended to see it as a sign of incipient fascism. Thus George Orwell, who was dismayed by James Hadley Chase’s use of American slang in No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1939), as well as by the huge sales of the book, commented: The career of Mr Chase shows how deep the American influence has already gone. Not only is he himself living a continuous fantasy-life in the Chicago underworld, but he can count on hundreds of thousands of readers who know what is meant by a ‘clipshop’ or the ‘hotsquat,’ do not have to do mental arithmetic when confronted by ‘fifty grand,’ and understand at sight a sentence like ‘Johnnie was a rummy and only two jumps ahead of the nut-factory.’ Evidently there are great numbers of English people who are partly americanized in language and, one ought to add, in moral outlook.19

Orwell was shocked both by the language and the violence of Chase’s novel, which for him constituted two correlated signs of the same evil, transatlantic influence. He regarded the novel as the symbol of an age harbouring sadistic impulses and a fascist will to power: [No Orchids] has the same relation to Fascism as, say, Trollope’s novels have to nineteenth-century capitalism. It is a day-dream appropriate to a totalitarian age. In his imagined world of gangsters Chase is presenting, as it were, a distilled version of the modern political scene, in which such things as mass bombing of civilians, the use of hostages, torture to obtain confessions, secret prisons, execution without trial, floggings with rubber truncheons, drownings in cesspools, systematic falsification of records and statistics, treachery, bribery and quislingism are normal and morally neutral, even admirable when they are done in a large and bold way. [...] People worship power in the form in which they are able to understand it.20

For Orwell as for Lewis, the importation of American mass culture and its allegedly nefarious influence on the English language thus appeared both as the seed and the symptom of Britain’s growing political immorality and cultural decline. From our point of view, it is interesting to note that this influence was reflected not only by British gangster stories but also in them. For example, in Hunter’s When the Gunmen Came, a London telephone operator who is eavesdropping on a conversation between American gangsters is able to understand it thanks to his

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knowledge of imported movies. For all its naiveté, the following passage testifies to the very real impact of pulp magazines and early Hollywood talkies on the public (and, also, to the fact that this influence was still a very novel phenomenon): That was a funny conversation he had just heard. But for the invasion of American films and journals he would largely not have understood it. “...some frail that Danny Brill was bringing along...” Frail... girl. He knew that all right. [...] “A bull told me himself, before I got him.” A bull. The film-endowed education of the operator served him in good stead once more. He knew that a bull was a police officer. “Got him” was now almost part of the English language proper. The operator straightened himself with a jerk. If his ears had not deceived him, if he had not dreamt this thing, he had listened to a conversation wherein a man had deliberately claimed to have killed a policeman! (20)

Other authors carried their depiction of the American influence a step further, suggesting not only how it increased the general public’s knowledge of slang and the American underworld but also how, in some cases, it was apt to erode English moral standards. Leslie Charteris’ “The Man from St. Louis,”21 published in The Thriller in November 1932, is a case in point. In the story, Simon Templar, alias the Saint, rids England of a dangerous American gangster, Tex Goldman, who is trying to set up a protection racket in London with the help of a Soho pimp and a few cockney hoodlums, who style themselves the Green Cross boys and whom he has duly equipped with “pineapples” and “Tommy guns.” The story interestingly reflects the tensions at play in English society regarding American popular culture. On the one hand, it responds to the popular taste for violent action and, to a certain extent, glamorizes the American gangster who remains a real “tough guy” to the end, even though he is finally defeated by Simon Templar. On the other hand, the conflict between Goldman and Templar also articulates, within the context of a crime story, the opposition between English and American patterns of criminal behaviour. English crime, as represented by the amiable and wellbehaved rogue Simon Templar, a distant heir of Raffles, is both more moral and more traditional. Templar does not use pineapples and tommy guns and speaks with the sophisticated tone of a Wodehouse character. He is linguistically a gentleman, whereas Goldman uses an overAmericanized kind of slang which is a sure sign of his lack of moral values. But, despite (or, perhaps, because of) all this, Goldman also emerges as the more modern of the two characters, and Templar as a sort of relic from a previous age.

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However, the real novelty of the story lies in the portrait of the Green Cross Boys’ leader, Ted Orping, an early type of Americanized London criminal: He was one of the first examples of a type of crook that was still new and strange in England, a type that founded itself on the American hoodlum, educated in movie theatres and polished on the raw underworld fiction imported by F.W. Woolworth–a type that was breaking into the placid and gentlemanly paths of Old World crime as surely and ruthlessly as Fate. In a few years more Ted’s type was no longer to seem strange and foreign; but in those days he was an innovation, respected and feared by his satellites. He had learned to imitate the transatlantic callousness and pugnacity so well that he was no longer conscious of playing a part. He had a bullying swagger, a taste for ostentatious clothes, the desire for power; and he said “Oh, yeah?” with exactly the right shade of contempt and belligerence. (62-3)

Charteris’ new type of crook represents a Darwinian adaptation of the traditional London hooligan to a criminal culture in transition. His description of Orping suggests that English thieves were no longer immune to the more perverse forms of American influence. American crime here no longer appears as radically alien, as was the case in Wodehouse’s pre-War novels (in which no blending of American and English characters was possible): on the contrary it is now shown to contaminate the English scene and represents, to a certain extent, a premonition of its future. Thus, ten years before Orwell’s article on the “Decline of the English Murder,” Charteris clearly represents the degeneration of British crime–a degeneration which may be seen as an index to the general collapse of Edwardian cultural values.

The Domestication of American Crime In his story, Charteris clearly anticipates the metaphorical structure of both Lewis’s and Orwell’s arguments. Americanization is indeed the central metaphor which enables these three authors to formulate a sense of cultural, social and political deterioration. And, as I would now like to suggest, this ideological metaphor is fully realized in the works of a handful of writers who represent the coming of age of English hard-boiled fiction in the late thirties: namely Graham Greene and the lesser-known, but equally interesting, James Curtis, Gerald Kersh, and Gerald Butler. In Wodehouse and Hunter, immorality was defined and segregated as a distinctly American trait; in Wallace and Charteris, it began to rub off on

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to British policemen and criminals; but with writers like Curtis or Gerald Kersh, crime and evil are no longer directly linked to a foreign invasion, but produced at home, the result of an indigenous process of decay. With these writers, the American influence no longer shows in the characters’ nationality but, more subtly and realistically, in the plot structures (which link crime to its social and economic environment), in the language (which often relies on a Hemingway-like simplified diction), and in the protagonists’ intellectual make-up, which, like Ted Orping’s, tends to be partly derived from American popular culture. More importantly, their stories are now told mostly, if not exclusively, from the point of view of these English criminals–usually second-rate crooks, thugs or (in the case of Greene’s A Gun for Sale) hired gunmen–who are no longer opposed, in any significant way, to master detectives, efficient policemen or amiable rogues. Their warped and alienated mental perspective is therefore no longer marginal nor picturesque; it becomes the prism through which an economically and morally bankrupt environment is perceived by the lector in fabula. Such is, for example, the case with Harry Fabian, the protagonist of Gerald Kersh’s powerful novel Night and the City (1937).22 Fabian is a Soho ponce (pimp), wrestling promoter and petty crook, whose fantasies unfold like an American movie projected onto his London surroundings: Nurtured on the gangster pictures of the era before the G-men; suckled on the legends of Capone, Torrio, and Dillinger; weaned on American Detective and Black Mask; the queer little brain of Fabian floated in pleasant conjecture.... He was riding in his bulletproof car, with four hard-faced men armed with machine-guns. All his enemies lined the road. “Okey-doke, boys; give ‘em the business!” Tatatatatat—Tatatatatatatatat! went the Tommy guns, roaring like pneumatic drills. Ejected shells fell in shining showers; people dropped like skittles, one after the other, in a line. Whoosh!–the great car took a hairpin bend at eighty miles an hour, with a thundering of exhaust– A sharp little voice, filed jagged by years of shouting in open air, slit this pleasant screen of dreams from top to bottom: “Lo, ’Arry!” It was Bert, the costermonger, passing with a barrowload of bananas. The machine gun in Fabian’s imagination gave a last, vicious stutter: Bert completed the pile of the dead. (240)

Fabian’s dreams of Capone-like power, though ironically deflated by Bert’s cockney interruption, are not, however, totally disconnected from his surroundings. Although they show him “living a continuous fantasylife in the Chicago underworld” (like James Hadley Chase according to

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Orwell), they also fit in with the economic and moral degradation of the Soho he moves in: a Soho riddled with poverty, white slavery and the petty rackets which replace honest work, now hardly accessible to an impoverished working class. Indeed, Kersh’s Soho, like Greene’s Nottwich in A Gun for Sale or his Brighton in Brighton Rock, functions as a small-scale model of the decaying world of post-depression Britain. And, adumbrating Orwell’s argument by a few years, Kersh also clearly represents the Americanization of his crook as a metaphor of fascist impulses emerging at the heart of British society–which explains why Fabian carries a small metal swastika in his pocket, as a lucky charm. As opposed to Kersh’s protofascist hooligan, James Curtis deals, in his first novel The Gilt Kid (1936),23 with a protocommunist London thief. Although he is the ideological antithesis of Fabian, the Gilt Kid (so called because of his yellow hair) originates in the same social milieu and his criminal activities are also clearly rooted in the economic degradation and political unrest of the depression years. On the first page of the novel, his inaugural gesture symbolically consists in letting Marx’s Capital fall to the floor: He let the book slip out of his fingers on to the strip of carpet which lay beside the bed like an island in the surrounding sea of oilcloth. The dim evening light tried his eyes and it was hard work reading Marx. He wanted to be a good Communist but it seemed to him that all his theorizing was rot. He would far prefer to go on with the job. The previous day, while watching an anti-war demonstration in Hyde Park, he had heard the school children in council dust-carts calling out “We want milk, not machineguns!” Turning to the Communist with whom he had been talking, he had said: “That’s just where you’re wrong, mate. You’d be far better off with a few machine-guns. Your mob’s too milky as it is.” (8)

By showing his character’s failure to become a “good communist” and his embarking instead on a life of crime (one in which, forgetting all notions of class solidarity he may have previously entertained, he systematically double-crosses his accomplices), Curtis suggests that crime is the outcome of the working class’s disintegration and constitutes the desperate individual’s only likely response to the combined forces of social and economic injustice. Indeed, the protagonist can only survive as an individual insofar as he betrays the class he belongs to. His nihilistic outlook, like that of his grim, violent counterparts in other British hardboiled novels of the time (especially Greene’s A Gun for Sale24 and Brighton Rock25, and Gerald Butler’s Kiss the Blood off My Hands26), does

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away with the optimistic values of the John Hunter kind of story, suggesting the exhaustion of a positive vision of individualism, which had been part and parcel of the English novel ever since Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. These new hard-boiled novels mark a significant departure from earlier British gangster stories, which used the conflict between English heroes and American criminals as a way of dramatizing the pressure of an exogenous mass culture on an indigenous class culture. Contrary to them, writers like Greene, Kersh, Butler and Curtis, reflecting the ideological pessimism of the thirties, express the autonomous dislocation of English society and of its values, a degenerative process over which the Soho (or Brighton) criminal presides. This figure no longer represents an outside threat to an indigenous norm but the decadence of the norm itself, the formerly optimistic and enterprising rogue of old having turned hoodlum or hired gun in a social environment which no longer offers him any honest source of livelihood. His adoption of a grim, Americanized, “noir” stance is now no longer the cause but merely the sign of his moral corruption. With this important change of perspective, American crime fiction thus became fully domesticated in the late thirties, its outlook and narrative techniques now expressing local anxieties, paving the way for the rise of a genuine hard-boiled tradition in England. 1

For a general survey of these cheap paperback productions, see Steve Holland’s works, particularly The Mushroom Jungle (Westbury: Zeon Books, 1993) and The Trials of Hank Janson (Tolworth: Telos Publishing Ltd, 2004). I am greatly indebted to Steve Holland for providing me with valuable bibliographical and theoretical insights into British hard-boiled fiction. 2 Cf. Mike Ripley and Maxim Jakubowski, “Fresh Blood: British Neo-Noir”, in Ed Gorman, Lee Server & Martin H. Greenberg, ed., The Big Book of Noir (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1998). 3 George Orwell, “Boys Weeklies” (1939) 79 and “Raffles and Miss Blandish” 263 in Essays, Bernard Crick, ed. (Harmsworth: Penguin, 1994). 4 In some cases (e.g. Horace McCoy’s No Pockets in a Shroud, published in 1936 by Arthur Barker, after the manuscript was rejected by American publishers for fear of its supposedly communist leanings), the English publication actually preceded the American one by several years. 5 Edgar Wallace, On the Spot (London: John Long, 1931). 6 After its initial publication by Jonathan Cape in 1929, Little Caesar went through two cheap reissues in England in 1931 and 1932 7 Richard Hallas, You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up (New York: McBride, 1938). 8 Edmund Wilson, The Boys in the Back Room: Notes on California Novelists (San Francisco: Colt Press, 1942), 12.

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The Thriller was remarkably long-lived for a magazine of its type (589 issues from 1929 to 1940) and can be considered as the closest British equivalent to Black Mask or Dime Detective. As opposed to traditional adventure weeklies, like the Skipper or the Champion, which catered for the adolescent market, these new magazines also sought an adult reading public. 10 Cf. Steve Holland’s web database, “British Juvenile Story Papers and Pocket Libraries Index” (http://contento.best.vwh.net/paper/0start.htm). 11 P.G. Wodehouse, Psmith Journalist (London: Newnes, 1909), in The Captain, A Magazine for Boys and Old Boys 22, October-March 1910. 12 P.G. Wodehouse, The Little Nugget (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959). 13 John Hunter, When the Gunmen Came (London: Cherry Tree, 1944). 14 Incidentally, one may note that American novels of the period also supported the myth of British honesty, as opposed to the notorious corruptibility of American officials. In W. R. Burnett’s High Sierra (1940), the gangster Roy Earle tells the story of a Chicago gangster who went to England but “couldn’t get no place because the British are honest. Not like the Americans. [...] In this country nobody’s straight. There ain’t one official out of a hundred that ain’t got his hand out. Coppers are so crooked they can’t lay straight in bed.” (W.R. Burnett, Four Novels (London: Zomba, 1984). 15 Wallace, Edgar,When the Gangs Came to London (1934) (London: John Long, 1935). 16 When the Gangs Came to London, 200. 17 “Raffles and Miss Blandish” 265. 18 Lewis, Wyndham, Men Without Art (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1987) (first published 1934) 30. 19 “Raffles and Miss Blandish” 263. 20 “Raffles and Miss Blandish” 267. 21 Leslie Charteris, “The Man from St. Louis” in The Saint and Mr. Teal (New York: Avon, 1955). 22 Gerald Kersh, Night and the City (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1946). 23 James Curtis The Gilt Kid (London: Penguin, 1947). 24 Graham Greene, A Gun for Sale (London: Heineman, 1936). 25 Graham Greene, Brighton Rock (London: Heineman, 1938). 26 Gerald Butler, Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (London: Nicholson & Watson, 1940).

CHAPTER EIGHT FROM “FREE TRADE FICTION” TO “FREE TRADE NOIR”: TOURISTIC LANDSCAPES AND CANADIAN IDENTITIES IN TWO RECENT CRIME NOVELS HARRY VANDERVLIST

Since the 1990s, the popularity in Canadian fiction of historical novels, often set in distant places and times, has raised some debate about whether contemporary Canadian novelists have turned away from addressing current national issues and anxieties in their work. Two recent works of crime fiction by Natalee Caple and Mark Sinnet suggest that this particular genre offers ways to express and explore, rather than evade, these highly topical concerns. Caple’s novel Mackerel Sky,1 along with Sinnet’s The Border Guards,2 present divergent responses to Canadian fears about threats to tight-knit communities from an “outside” that is explicitly American, commercial, and criminal. Both novelists choose well-known touristic areas for their settings. Caple sets her novel in Quebec’s Laurentian mountains and Sinnet places his in the Thousand Islands area of the St. Lawrence River: both areas are known for their natural beauty, and are also home to “tourist traps,” businesses designed to separate American visitors, in particular, from their dollars. Such tourist traps aim to sell, yet also retain control over, the very essence of a stereotypical Canadian identity: natural landscapes, a distinct yet not too foreign society, an unspoiled yet comfortable or unthreatening environment. Both novelists are dealing, then, with situations of compromise and negotiation. When does a knowing compromise become helpless complicity, and when does negotiation decline into coercion? These are burning questions, both in Canada’s current political relationship with its powerful neighbour, and in local worlds created in these novels. The view that Canadian fiction in the 1990s began to shun such contemporary issues received its most explicit formulation in a 1997 essay

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by the Canadian critic Stephen Henighan. In “Free Trade Fiction: The Victory of Metaphor Over History,”3 Henighan argues that two of the most prominent and successful Canadian novels of the 1990s-Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992) and Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces (1999) exemplified such a literary failure to engage with Canada’s historical position at the time. The defining element of that position, for Henighan and for many others, was the worldwide phenomenon of globalization. Henighan writes that for Canadians, “globalization means Americanization.”4 In particular, the November, 1993 signing of NAFTA, or the North American Free Trade Act–after a long and energetic public debate–signaled that a new era in Canadian and North American history had begun. In the face of such a historical crossroads, novelists Ondaatje and Michaels “set the tone,” argues Henighan, of novelistic flight from the here and now towards fanciful and historically questionable evocations of the “then and there.” Because The English Patient had shared the 1992 Booker Prize, and because both it and Fugitive Pieces enjoyed such commercial success, they “channeled much literary debate” according to Henighan: “In their strivings for high art, their settings remote in time and place from the Canadian present, they came to be seen as salient indicators of where the Canadian novel was going.”5 Henighan’s coinage “Free Trade Fiction” was meant to suggest that literature and its institutions were participating in the selling-out of Canada by de-emphasizing national concerns and distinctiveness in a way that served the ongoing process of Americanization. Ten years later, the crime novels The Border Guards by Mark Sinnet and Mackerel Sky by Natalee Caple suggest that some Canadian novels, at least, have not in fact gone where Henighan complained Canadian fiction was going. Caple and Sinnet engage directly and indirectly with the Canadian–American relationship, with economic globalization and its effects, and with the transfer of various types of value across the border between Canada and the U.S.A. Both writers aim for artistic merit while also providing novels packed with incident, local colour and plausible yet unusual characters. In other words, they do nothing to discourage a large readership, although so far neither novel has excited the same extraordinary level of public discussion or sold as well as the two earlier books did. Both authors have made deliberate artistic and professional choices to adopt a popular style and genre, since, like Ondaatje and Michaels, both Caple and Sinnet first established themselves as poets. Henighan uses their poetic careers as circumstantial support for his case against Ondaatje and Michaels, calling poetry an art which, unlike fiction,

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“can flourish at a hermetic remove from history.”6 This, he says, is just what the novel must avoid as Stendhal’s famous image of a “mirror dawdling along a road” suggests. One can argue whether Henighan’s view of the novel is excessively restrictive, excluding for example some types of experimental fiction. In any case, neither Caple nor Sinnet, despite solid poetic careers, allow their fiction to remain at anything like “a hermetic remove from history.” Indeed the author Andrew Pyper’s dust-jacket blurb calls The Border Guards an example of a new sub-genre, “Free Trade noir,” an epithet meant to show that this particular popular novel takes part in, rather than fleeing from, the dominating issues of its time. Of the two novels Mark Sinnet’s The Border Guards does display the most obvious connections to globalization and cross-border politics. It unfolds in the small city of Kingston Ontario and the nearby region of the St. Lawrence Seaway known as The Thousand Islands. As the novel explains, “at last count there were 1,149 islands scattered in the Seaway” and that they are actually “the tips of ancient hills.”7 This is a highly touristic area dotted with private cottages and mansions, threaded by narrow, confusing and sometimes treacherous waterways. As a police officer laments in the novel, There have been smuggling operations in those islands for hundreds of years. ... It’s a maze of islands and channels, deep passages and impassable swamp. The good guys haven’t stood much chance against an old-timer with a head full of knowledge. It’s even worse when that old-timer gets his hands on a speedboat. The border’s just a crooked line running through the middle of a thousand islands.8

The passages and swamps described here also freeze unevenly in winter, creating an even more hazardous labyrinth of solid ice and open water. The novel opens and closes with perilous chase scenes in just such conditions, in which the protagonist Tim Hollins and his girlfriend are threatened by both American border police and Russian mobsters. Tim Hollins is a local restaurateur whose father Michael has recently died in an apparently innocuous car accident. However Tim discovers among his father’s possessions not only a puzzling file but also a stash of diamonds. When police both American and Canadian start asking Tim questions, and when his restaurant begins to receive unsought attention from Russians Tim has never heard of, he starts to ask questions of his own about his father’s past. In its larger patterns, The Border Guards contains fascinating implications for the situation of its young protagonist—and by implication, for a contemporary globalized Canada. The events following

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his father’s death force Tim Hollins to confront several aspects of his own identity. He learns he is heir to a much more complex set of relationships than he knew. As occasional smugglers his “old timer’ neighbours have secret activities and form unguessed-at networks previously hidden from him. He discovers that his restaurant, his patrimony, is partly owned by international criminals, making him their unwitting partner. Cross-border ties with the U.S. and globalized crime networks are at the heart of all of this. What is interesting, and what offers a contrast to Caple’s novel, is that when Sinnet finally resolves both Tim’s immediate problems, and his larger sense of unease, he does so in a way that largely affirms existing authority structures. Although the police in this novel are meddlesome, dangerous, and hard to distinguish from the bad guys, in the end they do their jobs, and the crooks are either killed or put away. The most interesting justified homicide takes place when Tim tricks a Russian thug into running across thin ice. Of course he breaks through and his struggles are ultimately futile–here we experience an example of the classic Canadian scene of death by landscape. Both The Border Guards and Mackerel Sky identify and centre upon some form of embodied value, some hope for the future. If we read Tim’s father’s restaurant, named Granite, as an emblem of all that holds value and future potential at the novel’s end, it is interesting to see that this value has such a complex and impure provenance. It is especially interesting that Tim, in a gesture that makes sentimental sense for many Canadians, attaches the restaurant’s value to place, to the natural setting of the thousand islands. Tim’s human relationships and the love interest with his girlfriend Rebecca also capture the novel’s sense of what is valuable. All of this is summed up when, in the final pages, he displays to Rebecca and his friends the one diamond which he has secretly withheld from the police and kept for himself: “the diamond . . . rests in his palm like a tiny bird’s egg. It seems fragile, insignificant. It is the root of everything that has happened, and yet it is dull in the moonlight.”9 No sooner has he displayed the diamond than Tim “shakes his head and draws his arm back. He fires the stone out over the Seaway.”10 With this dramatic gesture, Tim has re-embedded power and value in the landscape, so to speak. He has reclaimed a certain kind of power for himself–the kind of power that the diamonds represent–and then rejected it, as if to demonstrate that it is now possible for him to step outside of the web of intrigue, the international network of greed and power, that created the novel’s action. Now, he imagines, he can re-inhabit his small community in its idyllic setting. This small social gathering at the novel’s end seems to establish that it will be

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possible for this little group of Canadians to sever their ties to the international webs of intrigue in which they were shocked to find themselves temporarily implicated. In Natalee Caple’s Mackerel Sky, there is a similar interest in crossborder networks, and a similar impulse to withdraw from being implicated in their violence. Nevertheless, Caple’s novel differs significantly in many ways. It is more self-consciously literary and allusive, for one thing. The author offers the following synopsis of her book’s main elements: Influenced by the writing of Julio Cortazar and films from the French New Wave, it’s a novel about a mother/daughter counterfeiting team in the Upper Laurentians. The four main characters are Guy, Martine, Isabelle and Harry. When Guy was seventeen and Martine was twenty-six, she seduced him and became pregnant. He ran away and now he has returned twenty-years later to meet his daughter, Isabelle, for the first time. He instantly falls back in love with Martine but she is a sexual libertine with a young lover (Harry) in the house. Martine is the best thing in the lives of the other three, but she is also their biggest problem. Manic depressive, highly intelligent, and incredibly difficult, she heads the counterfeiting operation. She thinks that her philosophy about counterfeiting renders her actions appropriate but when things go wrong she must confront the real criminals that run the other half of the operation.11

Like The Border Guards, then, Mackerel Sky depicts a criminal operation set in a tourist hot spot, in this case Quebec’s Laurentian mountains. Caple seizes upon the cinematic and even surreal elements of her setting to a greater degree than Sinnet, placing key scenes in a butterfly garden and in a forest park whose clearings are full of wrecked aircraft–a deliberately bizarre environment created as a place for Montreal corporate executives to engage in team-building exercises by playing “l’enlevement du Président” together. It is important to note that Guy has not been living in Quebec, but just across the border in Boston, where he is a discouraged social worker. This means that his first act in reclaiming the daughter he has never met is to re-enter the country of his birth. Like Tim in The Border Guards, Guy in this novel becomes a reluctant investigator into his own family’s criminal connections. One key difference however is gender politics: Mackerel Sky depicts a strongly matriarchal world. Caple has pointed out that since: …the loner, the leader in crime novels is often a very attractive, experienced man with few attachments and a dark side, I thought what would be different, what would be interesting about making the lead a woman? I also object to the standard sexlessness of older women in those

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In keeping with this aim, Caple makes Guy tentative, where conventional crime novel protagonists are capable and confident. He is a true klutz whose first act upon meeting Martine is to abandon all his resolutions to the contrary and succumb once again to Martine’s undiminished sexual power, just as when he was seventeen years old. Next, he injures himself by falling out of the tree where Martine has lured him for their second sexual encounter. While recovering, he meets Martine’s lover Harry, who inquires “did you have sex with Martine? I only ask because it’s not uncommon for men to come home with injuries after having sex with Martine.”13 Harry then narrates his own initiation, which took place against a tree near an archery range, and was interrupted when he took an arrow in the back. “Very mythological,” as he puts it.14 Martine has inherited from her mother, Sally, the tools and the wellestablished criminal connections that allow the family to live as selfemployed rural artisans whose craft products just happen to be phony U.S. currency. There is more than a hint, in Caple’s portrayal of Martine, of both the witch and what Ernest Mandel calls the “good bandit,” the hero of those popular forms which Mandel places at the origin of contemporary detective stories.15 As Guy learns through getting to know his twenty-year old daughter Isabelle, the family has created for itself a mythology of their own “off-the-grid” idyll in a quiet corner of the much-visited Laurentian mountains. Isabelle’s grandmother Sally “helped people,” especially local women in difficulty. This Robin Hood past enables the family to pay their bills while avoiding dangerous interactions with the official world. At first the women keep their real business secret from Guy. Martine tells him that she spends time in the basement working on “a project about time and the accumulation of meaning.”16 Elsewhere she claims to be writing a detective novel. It is Isabelle who, in the name of father-daughter bonding, gives Guy a tour-guide introduction to the counterfeiting facilities downstairs. While Guy is shocked and frightened to learn of this, Isabelle explains her version of the theory behind their practice. “Mom always says that you have to destroy the economy, that you can’t participate in the economy as if it’s money that makes people equal. It’s money that makes people unequal,” says Isabelle.17 When Guy asks whether “the people you are involved with” might be dangerous, Isabelle replies: “we only deal with them once a year. They knew your dad and Mom’s dad,” to which Guy responds by enumerating the reasons for his horror: “Our fathers were

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smugglers. They had friends who were thieves and killers.”18 Later Guy reiterates his shock, saying ‘‘you told me that my whole family were criminals and that my daughter is a felon, but you didn’t do anything wrong. Fine, great, wonderful news.” Isabelle replies: “we don’t really say felon in Canada. Relax.”19 The split in attitudes between Martine, Isabelle and their accomplice Harry, versus the outsider Guy, perhaps manifests what the early theorist of the detective novel Siegfried Kracauer calls “radical divisions between inside and out–between the immediacy of communal space and a dangerous immanence beyond.”20 Kracauer saw detective fiction as a genre which tracks “the migration of coercive forces between inner and outer realms.” Certainly Caple’s novel does this with regard to the inner realm of Martine’s carefully constructed, and now threatened communal space of folkoric mutual-aid connections between oppressed Quebec women, and the dangerous world of the men who buy her phony bills. Reading Caple’s novel along these lines also allows us to see how it engages with the communal space of a Canada compelled to traffic with its violent and dangerous neighbour, and understandably interested in creating self-protective myths about its own separation from that world. Whether or not such an allegorical reading persuades us, clearly Isabelle and Martine have chosen to deny the criminal aspect of their operation, as they shred old paper, boil pulp and print U.S. bills in tranquillity, with only the annual “buy” in the nearby town of St. Famille to remind them that they are doing anything different from baking homemade pies or making candles. As the one character who has grown up entirely within this self-created world, Isabelle exhibits all the fearlessness of one who believes herself entirely at home in her universe, and thereby demonstrates the vulnerability that accompanies such beliefs. From Guy’s vantage point she is dangerously naive. Readers see this at work when she encounters a bear during their father-daughter camping trip and lures it back to their campsite with food, whereupon: The bear draws his body up to a semi-stand. He sniffs the air and growls. His voice vibrates in the air. Isabelle keeps her hand extended but sways on her feet, in unison with the bear. “Look, we’re dancing,” she whispers.21

When the bear charges a second later Guy’s fears are justified, and he performs his most competent action in diverting it, torero-style, with a tarpaulin. The next day Isabelle makes a naked swim to a distant island, from which she is too weak to swim back. When she must be rescued by Guy and two other campers, one of the campers asks “how do you track a

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mermaid in the forest?”22 to which Guy replies that she is not a mermaid, but rather a pain in the ass. Although apparently unconnected to the crime plot these scenes are in fact crucial. They show how far Isabelle believes she inhabits a safe and self-sufficient world. These scenes show the attractions of that world, while Guy’s viewpoint allows readers to detect the various forms of denial required to enjoy it. These scenes also advance Guy’s development from klutz to potential rescuer, so that when everything falls apart in a closing sequence of incompetent violence worthy of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, he can flee back across the border with everything that, in this novel, represents value and hope for the future–in this case, Isabelle. By this point I hope it is clear that in these two examples of Canadian crime fiction at least, we see writers who have chosen not settings that are not just Canadian, but iconically Canadian: we have bears, water, rocks and trees, the St. Lawrence river and the associated Laurentian mountains a bit further east. Not only this, but both authors make use of these settings in order to explore, indirectly, acutely relevant historical concerns and anxieties including the dangerous and useful ambiguity of literal national borders, as in The Border Guards Thousand Island location, along with anxieties about the control of value and its movement over these borders, and how far it’s possible to retain what is valued on the Canadian side of the line. In Mackerel Sky we see the creation of a kind of independent community, outside of “official histories,” based on both mutual aid and theoretically justified criminal activity–a real counter-economy, in a sense. Caple’s novel ends more ambivalently than Sinnet’s does, however. By her novel’s end the communal “inside” world that Isabelle inhabited has been destroyed. The “dangerous immanence beyond” has penetrated the communal interior. Isabelle, the embodiment of value and hope for both Martine and for Guy, finds herself transported by Guy back across the U.S. border toward Boston, a place Guy has already characterized as entirely hostile to family life (that is why he’s a discouraged social worker). It may be the case that in Canada, as in Mexico, Canada’s southernmost partner in the trade agreement, it is true that, as Pamela Smorkaloff has said about Mexican novels of the 1990s: In Mexican literature it is perhaps the detective genre that has captured the evolving transfrontier region with the greatest immediacy, reflecting the potential impact of NAFTA, the shifting or redefining of borders, and a greater degree of integration.23

So perhaps in the NAFTA era Canadian literature has not turned away from current issues at all, but rather has simply pursued its contemporary

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cross-border identity, fears, and anxieties in crime fiction, a genre whose fascination with “the migration of coercive forces between inner and outer realms” renders it perfectly suited to this task. 1

Caple, Natalee, Mackerel Sk y (Toronto: Thomas Allen, 2004). Sinnet, Mark, The Border Guards (Toronto: Harper Collins, 2004). 3 Henighan, Stephen, “Free Trade Fiction: The Victory of Metaphor Over History, ”When Words Deny the World: The Reshaping of Canadian Writing, (Erin, Ontario, Canada: The Porcupine’s Quill, 200), 133-157. 4 Henighan 134. 5 Henighan 138. 6 Henighan 135. 7 Sinnet 5. 8 Sinnet 84. 9 Sinnet 287. 10 Sinnet 287. 11 Snyders, Tom, “Mackerel Sky, by Natalee Caple”. September 1, 2004 http://www.stmartins.comlArchive/meetourauthors2004.htm. 12 Snyders. 13 Caple 53. 14 Caple 54. 15 Mandel, Ernest. “Excerpts from Ernest Mandel’s Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story,” 1984. http://www.marxsite.comldelightful%20murder.htm. 16 Caple 76. 17 Caple 93. 18 Caple 94. 19 Caple 92. 20 Kracauer, Siegfried, Der Detektivroman, Schriften I, quoted in Calhoon, Kenneth S. 1995, “The Detective and the Witch: Local Knowledge and the Aesthetic Pre-History of Detection,” Comparative Literature 47, 308. 21 Caple 101. 22 Caple 109. 23 Smorkaloff, Pamela Maria, “Shifting Borders, Free Trade and Frontier Narratives: US, Canada and Mexico, American Literary History 6 (1994), 97. 2

CHAPTER NINE FRENCH NOIR FICTION, A BLURRED IDENTITY NATACHA LEVET

The notion of genre has been, according to François Dumont and Richard Saint Gelais, “omnipresent in literary studies”1 over these last few years. However, this notion is one of the most difficult to define, and each discipline takes up the challenge with its own methods. In fact, this is a complex question, especially when applied to French noir fiction. Beyond the geographical and the historical, crime fiction has been hard to define. Comparing various typologies of crime novel or different definitions of noir fiction is an impossible task and leads to a dead end. At most, French noir fiction can be defined by a set of features, actualized or not, and this to varying degrees. In the 1990s in France, this generic identity was coupled with a new mobility of writers in terms of their publishing houses. There is in fact a complete distinction between crime fiction and general novels. As a consequence, some noir novels are published in general collections, and are no longer perceived as noir fiction, although they are! Does noir fiction even exist? Does it have a poetic and generic identity? Two other factors became more prominent between 1990 and 2000, and contribute to the blurring of this identity: generic hybridity with other genres, and generic dissemination, implying both a loss of generic features and also a dispersal throughout general literature.

An impossible definition A study of twenty-five definitions (three tables will follow these remarks), from various essays and articles on crime fiction and noir fiction, leads to the conclusion that there is no unique definition of this genre. The definitions were extracted from different sorts of works: dictionaries, essays, studies, theses, and anthologies, for the most part. Their authors are academics, researchers, writers, and journalists. In addition to these differences, the definitions lack comparable breadth.

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Some come from studies focusing on crime fiction in general; there, noir fiction is defined in relation (and in opposition) to the thriller and the whodunit. Some others are extracted from essays dedicated to noir fiction only, in all periods and countries, from the United States to Europe. Some of them are more precise, historically or culturally. Noir fiction here is defined through its original features from the 1930s, which contribute to define French production. Claude Mesplède, Alain Lacombe, and Robert Louit define the American hard-boiled novel, but they also consider it as the source of the whole genre, with permanent features. Other definitions (such as those of Gilles Deleuze and Anne-Lise Bacle) have been applied to noir fiction since 1945. Despite my variety of sources (a complete list of which follow in an appendix), the following comparison reveals some interesting parallels. Table 1: Functions and Structure Source

Functions Testify Denounce Describe Militate

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

X X X X X

X X X X X

Investigation with action X

X X

Flexibility

X

X

X

X X X

X

X X X X X

X X X X X X

X X X X X X

Structure ProspecNo tive investiaction gation

X X X X

X

X

X X

X

X X X X

X

X X X X X

FRENCH NOIR FICTION, A BLURRED IDENTITY

Table 2: Themes Action Emotion

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Mystery

X X

X X X X X X

X X X

X X X X X X X X X

X

X X X X X X X

Crime Offence Violence

X X X X X X

Minorities

City

X

X X

X

X X X X

X

X X

X X X X

X

X

X X

X

X

X X

X X X X X

Power Corruption

X

X

X

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Table 3: Characters

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Investigator Private eye

Criminal

X X

X X

X

X

X X X X X X X X X X

X X X X X X X X X X X X

X

First of all, most of these definitions put forward a thematic feature. The most frequent themes are crime, offence, and violence. Corruption and abuse of power also feature. Half of the definitions explicitly refuse to propose a structural definition. Most of the time, when the structural feature is accepted, it actually allows an opposition to the whodunit and its retrospective structure. Some critics allow for great flexibility, while others perceive two different structures: the story is linked to the investigation; or it is linked to the crime (its realization, sometimes its conceiving), and the criminal. Tzvetan Todorov is alone in proposing the prospective structure as an absolute rule. According to him, there is no

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retrospection, and the reader cannot know or guess the end of the story at the beginning (will the character stay alive?). Such a postulate is a mistake, considering for instance some novels by Horace McCoy (one of the founders of noir fiction). In They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1935), the reader knows from the first pages that the narrator killed a woman and is being tried for murder. It is actually a retrospective story, and yet it belongs to noir fiction. Moreover, many definitions accentuate the societal aspect of noir fiction: a function of testimony, a realistic representation of society, a denunciation indeed. More surprising is this observation: although noir fiction is generally considered as urban fiction, this feature is barely mentioned as a typical one. Some critics try to define noir fiction by its characters, but there is no homogeneity in their conclusions: the investigator (in particular the private eye) is often proposed as a typical and necessary character, but some definitions prefer the criminal. Finally, some propose both characters as typical. This observation emerges: thematic characteristics dominate, but there are many differences among these definitions. None of them can aspire to include the range of noir production, despite the fact that most of them claim to furnish a general definition. There are too many variations within the genre itself, and each of these definitions actually excludes an important portion of noir fiction. The identity of the genre appears as unspecified and indeterminable. Noir fiction varies through decades and countries, but perhaps its main feature is its generic identity and flexibility.

A few words about generic hybridity In France, noir fiction encompasses fantasy literature (Stephanie Benson, Virginie Brac) and spy novels (Yves Buin). Maurice G. Dantec and Paul Borrelli provide good examples of this hybridity. Both Dantec and Borrelli admit to being influenced by science fiction writers like Philip K. Dick. In addition, their first literary attempts belong to science fiction, although these attempts were in vain. Borrelli wrote two sciencefiction novels that remain unpublished. At the same period, Dantec submitted a manuscript to Patrick Raynal, editor of the famous Série Noire. Patrick Raynal refused to publish it: it was too lengthy, and it belonged to science fiction, not really to noir fiction. However he suggested that Dantec write “a real Série Noire,” which was published as La Sirène rouge2 and identified as a noir novel.

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As a consequence, Borrelli and Dantec published their first novels, identifying them as belonging to a precise genre: noir fiction. This identification seems obvious for La Sirène rouge, but science fiction left its mark upon L’Ombre du chat3. Paul Borrelli claims that it belongs to noir genre, and maintains that science fiction, as a background, reinforces the noir component. What exactly is the hybrid nature of these novels? Paul Borrelli, for example, uses science fiction as a background: Marseille in 2030, an apocalyptic city built on eighteen subterranean levels, a crepuscular atmosphere because of a world war which had terrible consequences such as acid rain, pollution, extinction of vegetation and animal species; a world filled with technology, robots, and so on. But the structure, the pattern, the characters, clearly belongs to noir fiction. There is an investigation, a crime, and detectives. Dantec’s novels are more complex. La Sirène rouge is a noir novel; Babylon babies4 is in most part a science fiction novel (belonging to cyber-punk), although it keeps noir patterns. Les Racines du Mal5 is marked by hybridity. The action takes places in the beginning of the 21st century, but the novel was published in 1995. Dantec evokes a near future, imminent chaos. He plays with strange machines, which he uses as investigation tools. Science fiction disturbs the noir dominant characteristic, but it doesn’t challenge it: the novel is based upon a psycho-killer story. An Internet search reveals that both Borrelli and Dantec are registered on websites dedicated to crime fiction, but they are also on websites dedicated to science fiction. The reception is blurred. One of the reasons is editorial strategy. Borrelli has been published both in a collection called “Roman noir” and in another one, dedicated to science fiction. Babylon babies by Maurice G. Dantec, was first published in “La Noire” (Gallimard), but was transferred towards “Folio SF,” dedicated to science fiction, a paperback collection. In addition, these writers use science fiction to express their point of view. Borrelli uses it as a way to display his imaginary world in complete freedom, but the genre is subordinate to noir fiction. Dantec has a different position: through science fiction, he can speak as a prophet, a prophet of doom, but also a literary prophet, announcing the death of genres, of literature. Actually, generic hybridity corresponds to a literary plan, based upon a split in genres.

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What is generic dissemination? First, dissemination can mean a loss of generic features. In French noir fiction of the 1990s, structural and thematic features blended. The ordinary man takes the place of professional murderer and investigator, and is trapped into a tragic chain of events. Of course, this was a traditional trend, but this trend strengthened. The family is a social group marked by death and madness; the great, deadly, corrupting city (for which Burnett’s Asphalt Jungle offers the prototype) gives precedence to an ordinary urban area. Sometimes, these novels manage without crimes (murders or violent facts): Sarah, by Hélène Couturier and Dans la tourbe, by Claude Amoz, do not for instance include any violent deaths. They do play with generic expectations. Narrative polyphony, reported speech, and variations of focus blur generic features and deceive the reader’s expectations. Parcours fléché by Jean-Pierre Bastid refuses any conclusion, any solution: the end of the novel is open. Similarly, Pascale Fonteneau’s Otto and Luc Baranger’s Visas antérieurs, although published in La Noire, contains no criminal action. Pascal Dessaint qualifies some of his novels as « bluesy » ones; in La Vie n’est pas une punition, there is no violent death, no mystery, but rather a dark and disenchanted vision of life. In Les Paupières de Lou6, his first novel, the murder occurs at the end of the story, and there is no conclusion. Dissemination can also be dispersion through general literature: there is an editorial blurring, at two levels. First, noir fiction permeates general literature, through the most experimental side of the contemporary novel. In the 1960s, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor, and some other “nouveaux romanciers” borrowed whodunit features. In the 1980s and the 1990s, legitimate novels borrowed some features of the discredited and marginal genre. Jean Echenoz and François Bon, for example, use noir patterns, characters, and also behaviourist writing, dear to Hammett and other glorious founders, or glorious French sons, like Jean-Patrick Manchette. Of course, literary plans are very different, but these links contribute to a blurring of distinctions between noir fiction and general literature. Noir fiction has gone in the opposite direction. Although noir novels are generally published in specialized collections dedicated to crime fiction, some writers leave the crime collections to be published in general ones. In the 1990s, Virginie Despentes published Les Jolies Choses with Grasset, a generalist publishing house, although this novel is noir in its themes and structure. Jean Vautrin turned back to noir fiction with Le Roi des Ordures, but this novel was published in a general collection. Jean-

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Claude Izzo wrote two novels, Les Marins perdus and Le Soleil des mourants7, obviously noir novels although published in general collections. Finally, generic dissemination proves the evolution of a genre, noir fiction, which reinvents itself, by standing aloof from its fundamental characteristics, for the most part. As Patrick Raynal said, noir fiction is not a codified genre, but a point of view, a visual angle upon the world8. Hybridity and dissemination are interesting phenomena attesting to the evolution of noir fiction and revealing the general movement towards its recognition. Since Romanticism, literary value in France has been constructed against the notion of genre. To make a worthwhile literary creation, a writer must offer a novel that cannot be categorized. This is also true, to some extent, for noir fiction. The highest critical acclaim is: “this novel is much more than a simple noir novel”! Writers must abandon the notion of genre: this is the condition they must accept to obtain some recognition. In refusing the opposition between noir fiction and the novel, they propose another opposition, the one between bad and good novels. They claim they are writers, nothing more and nothing less. And the more they claim it, the more they blend the usual characteristics of noir fiction, or mix different genres together. The evolution of noir fiction is linked to the symbolic stakes of the genre as a notion. And this is why, probably, French noir fiction is still alive.

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Appendix: list of definition sources 1. Gilles Deleuze. “Philosophie de la Série Noire.” Arts, January 26, 1966. 2. Tzvetan Todorov. “Typologie du roman policier.” Poétique de la prose. Paris: Seuil, Points, 1980 [1971]. 3. Roger Caillois. Approches de l’imaginaire. Paris: Gallimard, 1974. 4. Alain Lacombe. Le Roman noir américain. Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1975. 5. Jean-Pierre Schweighaeuser. Le Roman noir français. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1984. 6. Jean-Claude Vareille. L’Homme masqué, le justicier et le détective. Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1989. 7. Jacques Dubois. Le Roman policier ou la modernité. Nathan, 1992 (chapter “L’émergence du moderne”). 8. Marc Lits. Introduction au roman policier. Liège: Editions du CEFAL, 1999 (chapter 2). 9. André Vanoncini. Le Roman policier. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002 (1993). 10. Franck Evrard. Lire le roman policier. Paris: Dunod, 1996. 11. Yves Reuter. Le Roman policier. Paris: Nathan, 1997. 12. Anne-Lise Bacle. Le Polar français ou les marges du roman (1970-1985). Doctoral dissertation, Littérature et civilisation françaises, under the direction of Marc Dambre, Université Paris III, Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2000. 13.Boileau-Narcejac [Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac], Le roman policier. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994 (1975) [Introduction and chapter V]. 14. Jorge Luis Borges. “Le Roman policier.” Paris: Conférences Gallimard, 1985. 15. Stefano Benvenuti, Gianni Rizzoni and Michel Lebrun. Le Roman criminel, Histoire, auteurs, personnages. Nantes: Editions de l’Atalante, 1982. 16. Michel Lebrun. “Polar? Mais encore?”Revue des deux mondes, January 1995. 17. Jacques Goimard. Critique des genres. Paris: Pocket, 2004. 18. Stéphanie Dulout. Le Roman policier. Toulouse: Editions Milan,1995. 19. Robert Deleuse. “Introduction aux romans policier et noir français”, “Quelques auteurs dans l’azimut. Le Polar français. Paris: Ministère des Affaires étrangères, 1995. 20. Jean Bourdier. Histoire du roman policier. Paris:Editions de Fallois, 1996. 21. Jacques Baudou and Jean-Jacques Schleret. Le Polar. Paris: Larousse, 2001. 22. Claude Aziza and Anne Rey. La littérature policière, Les Guides Pocket Classiques. Paris: Editions Pocket, 2003. 23. Claude Mesplède, ed. Dictionnaire des Littératures Policières. Nantes: Joseph K., 2003. 24. Robert Louit. “Le roman noir américain.” Magazine littéraire 20, August 1968. 25. Raphaël Pividal. “Un roman mal policé.” Roman 24, 1988.

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François Dumont and Richard Saint Gelais, “Mouvances du genre,” Nouvelles Tendances en théorie des genres, Eds, Richard Saint Gelais (Québec: Nota Bene Université, Nuit Blanche Editeur, 1998), 7. 2 Maurice G. Dantec, La Sirène rouge (Paris, Gallimard, Série Noire, 1993). 3 Paul Borrelli, L’Ombre du chat (Nantes, L’Atalante, 1994). 4 Maurice G. Dantec, Babylon babies (Paris, Gallimard, La Noire, 1999). 5 Maurice G. Dantec, Les Racines du Mal (Paris, Gallimard, Série Noire, 1995). 6 Hélène Couturier, Sarah (Paris, Rivages, Rivages/Thriller, 1997); Claude Amoz, Dans la tourbe (Paris, Hors commerce, Hors noir, 1998); Jean-Pierre Bastid, Parcours fléché (Paris, Gallimard, Série Noire, 1995); Pascale Fonteneau, Otto (Paris, Gallimard, Série Noire, 1997); Luc Baranger, Visas antérieurs (Paris, Gallimard, La Noire, 1996); Pascal Dessaint, La Vie n’est pas une punition (Paris, Rivages, Rivages Noir, 1995); Pascal Dessaint, Les Paupières de Lou (Paris, Rivages, Rivages Noir, 2004, first published in 1992, reprinted in 2004). 7 Virginie Despentes, Les Jolies Choses (Paris, Grasset, 1998); Jean Vautrin, Le Roi des ordures (Paris, Fayard, 1997); Jean-Claude Izzo, Les Marins perdus (Paris, Flammarion, 1997); Jean-Claude Izzo, Le Soleil des mourants (Paris, Flammarion, 1999). 8 Patrick Raynal, “Le Roman noir et l’avenir de la fiction,” Les Temps modernes, 595 (août-septembre-octobre1997), 88-99.

PART IV HISTORICAL IDENTITIES

CHAPTER TEN SCIENCE, REASON, AND THE SOCIAL CONTROL OF WOMEN IN EDUARDO LADISLAO HOLMBERG’S “LA BOLSA DE HUESOS” MARCIE D. RINKA

During the early part of the nineteenth century, Spain and its American territories entered a period of radical political transformation. As the Spanish monarchy collapsed and lost its ability to maintain its sovereignty, colonial Latin America began to split into multiple parts. Wars and revolutions followed as new political regimes attempted to establish a Republican form of government based on the principles of the French Enlightenment. Central to the nation building process in these new nationstates were the definition of political citizenship and the formation of an actual citizenry. In other words, the identity and constitution of the nation became key aspects of the nation-building process triggered after Independence in Latin America1. The literary representation of women played an important symbolic role in the construction of the nation. As Francine Masiello argues in her book, Between Civilization and Barbarism: Women, Nation, and Literary Culture in Modern Argentina, the female body was used to communicate political and social ideologies throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Argentina. From the Independence period until the early twentieth century, the literary representation of women was not univocal but changed according to the programs of the state. “Women were brought into the political imagination of men to represent the virtues of nationhood and to challenge social inequities”2 during the years following Independence, “but post-colonial literature showed conflicting styles of representing the feminine and surrendered to an alternative register of images identifying women with chaos and disorder”3. The two examples that Masiello offers to support this claim include the image of the Republican mother and the representation of women as adulteresses, prostitutes and madwomen at the turn-of-the century. The dramatic shift in

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the representation of women can be explained in part by the misogyny of the increased scientism of the age. “In the chartering of national destiny the female body became a metaphorical map upon which Argentine men, in a scientific mode, traced the ills of the past and offered a prognosis for the nation’s future. By focusing on female reproductive capacities or diseases of the feminine psyche, these pseudo-scientific explorations reinforced a sense of the sexual inferiority of women, always casting the female as a malfunctioning subcategory of man”4. During the nineteenth century, the discourse on mental illness and the discourse on femininity intersected. From the Independence period on, the role of women in the construction of the nation was a widely debated theme. Both male and female writers discussed the merits of and the appropriate type of female education, women’s proper role within society and the social and economic rights of women, including the right to vote. At the same time that the general public debated the role of women in the construction of the nation, the medical profession developed a newfound interest in the female body. The nineteenth century witnessed the birth of the field of gynaecology and major medical journals, textbooks and manuals published numerous articles about women’s physical and mental disorders. Mental illness became the explicit theme of numerous medical texts including doctoral theses and medical journals. The 1918 catalogue published by the library of the Facultad de Medicina de Buenos Aires lists more than 140 theses that specifically deal with mental illness. Common themes include epilepsy, alcoholism, hysteria, mania, melancholy, general paralysis and moral madness5. The medicalization of Latin American society also influenced both the form and content of late nineteenth century literature. Literary movements such as Naturalism and Realism became popular toward the turn of the century thanks to an increased interest in science and medicine. Novels and short stories influenced by Naturalism were generally set in large cities and the principal protagonists were characters driven by heredity, passion and instinct. Realism’s focus on objects, actions and social conditions depicted without idealization prompted a change in the content of the novel in Latin America and authors frequently depicted social problems caused by modernization such as poverty, prostitution, corruption and crime. The detailed descriptions and the psychological, hereditary or ideological motivations behind the actions and reactions of human beings in literature found great fodder in 19th century Latin America. Given this social and literary milieu, it is not surprising that early prototypes of the detective fiction genre appeared in Latin America shortly

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after Edgar Allan Poe published what is generally regarded as the first detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841). Just a few short decades later, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, writers Luis V. Varela, Carlos Olivera, who translated Poe into Spanish, Carlos Monsalve, Paul Groussac and Eduardo Lasislao Holmberg authored detective stories6. The classic detective fiction model usually traced back to Poe was a particularly appropriate genre to deal with the fundamental social and political issues related to identity which were central to the nation building processes in late nineteenth century Latin America. The classic detective model begins with an unsolved crime and moves toward the elucidation of a mystery. The action centers on the detective’s investigation and his solution of a crime. His investigation leads him to the ultimate identification and capture of a criminal. Interestingly, the detective fiction model’s preoccupation with issues of identity coincides with the way in which the developing nations of nineteenth century Latin America strove to define their citizenries and identities; both focus on establishing a clear, fixed identity. Thus, the classical formula of the detective fiction genre can be read as an allegorical representation of the desire for stability and continuity with the socio-political ideology of the new nations of Latin America. Published in Argentina at a time when women were demanding more social, political and economic rights, Eduardo Holmberg’s “La bolsa de huesos” (1896) is a cautionary tale that argues against women’s right to a post-secondary education as well as their active participation in certain sectors of the workforce, specifically the medical profession. Told from the point of a view of a first person male narrator, “La bolsa de huesos” is the story of the narrator’s investigation of three mysterious murders and his pursuit of the beguiling murderess Clara, a young, single mother who dresses as a man in order to study medicine and then uses her knowledge to avenger her honour and kill the men that betrayed her. As the “first murderess of Argentine detective fiction”7, Clara is considered dangerous not only because she has committed murder, but because she has transgressed the boundaries of appropriate feminine behaviour. By retelling Clara’s story, the narrator sets out to prove his intellectual prowess and exert his control over what he describes as a vicious and cunning woman who has clearly overstepped her boundaries. By examining the role of the narrator in the pursuit and capture of the deviant female, I will demonstrate how scientific discourse and elements of the detective genre are used by Holmberg’s narrator to argue for the social control of women through medical law in late nineteenth century Argentinean society.

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Although “La bolsa de huesos” contains Clara’s confession of three brutal murders, her story is retold by the narrator after her death as he is “awaiting trail for having carried out his investigation independent of the authorities”8. Holmberg’s story clearly challenges conventional approaches to criminal investigation and prosecution, and by implication, undermines some of the conventions which had begun to be established in detective fiction. Holmberg’s departure from Poe’s model of “ratiocination” can be explained by his desire to write an autochthonous version of what up until then had been considered an almost exclusively imported genre. By setting his tale in a native Argentine setting and expressing an ideological point of view through the defiance of law, Holmberg’s tale anticipates the approach to the genre which characterizes much of Argentine detective fiction, that is, as a form for exploring intellectual, social, literary and ethical ideas9. “La bolsa de huesos” becomes the story of the narrator’s discovery and pursuit of Clara, a tale that the narrator recounts to prove the usefulness and the validity of the scientific method. By retelling Clara’s story, the narrator sets out to control what he describes as a vicious and cunning woman. As he explains, his methodology … se trata de la aplicación de los principios generales de la medicina legal, que es una ciencia, y de demostrar que la ciencia puede conquistar todos los terrenos, porque ella es la llave maestra de la inteligencia. La ciencia conquistará al hombre, que no han conquistado aún la religión ni la política ... consists in applying the general principles of forensic medicine, which is a science, and demonstrating that science can conquer all other fields, because it is the master key of intelligence. Science will conquer man, who has been unconquered be either religion or politics.10

Although the narrator describes science as a useful modus operandi which has enabled him pursue and capture a criminal, he emphasizes its usefulness as modus vivendi for modern man. In addition to attesting to the supremacy of science and reason, the narrator argues for the social control of women through medical law. According to the narrator, Clara was “una mujer de belleza irresistible, una pobre enferma, una infeliz neurótica (a woman of irresistible beauty, a poor sickly woman, an unhappy neurotic)” who was incited to commit murder by “ los extravíos de un amor impaciente (the misconduct of an impatient love)”11. By presenting a hypothesis about the origin of her illness and by pathologizing Clara’s behavior, the narrator suggests that Clara is sick and potentially sickening to men. When the narrator sees

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Clara dressed as a woman for the first time, he suffers from what appears to be a bout of neurosis. The narrator resists Clara’s feminine wiles and suggests an antidote for his disease–logic and reason: Para poder contemplar esa belleza, necesario es que se apodere de ella el abandono de la confianza, y el que quiera arrancar de esa arpa una nota que llegue al fondo, no debe apretar mucho las clavijas To be able to contemplate that beauty, it is necessary that the abandonment of familiarity take control of it, and the one who wishes to coax a note from that harp, should not tighten the tuning pegs too much.12

By maintaining a certain detachment, the narrator demonstrates that science can be used to control women. Although Clara is intelligent and cunning, she is unable to get away with her crime. Thanks to his scientific knowledge and his ability to use deductive reasoning, the narrator is able to capture and confront Clara. The narrator not only controls Clara during the interview, but her ultimate fate rests in his hands. Although he could hand her over to the police, the narrator takes the law into his own hands when he suggests that Clara commit suicide in order to escape criminal prosecution. Using the same venom she used to poison her victims, Clara kills herself. With Clara’s death, the narrator ensures that Clara’s voice is silenced and he becomes the voice of reason and authority. Clara is an interesting literary figure given the history of medicine in the nineteenth century. Although women have worked as informal healers or curanderas for centuries in Latin America, few women ever received formal medical training let alone recognition by the male-dominated medical profession. At the turn of the century, as attitudes toward women began to change, women started to enter the workforce, even the traditionally male dominated professional fields, such as medicine. For example, Cecilia Grierson entered the Facultad de Medicina in Buenos Aires in 1884, the Peruvian Laura Rodríguez Dulanto graduated from the Escuela de Medicina in Lima in 190013, and Uruguayan suffragist, Paulina Luisi (1865-1949) received her medical degree in 1908. Although attitudes toward women were changing, the women who strove to enter the medical profession often encountered resistance and discrimination and their careers were fraught with difficulties. Some women went to great lengths to pursue their career and even disguised their sex in order to study medicine. One such example is Cuba’s first female doctor, Enriqueta Faber. In order to have access to the knowledge and training largely denied women during the nineteenth century, Clara, like Faber, dresses as a man.

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Her use of masculine attire is particularly interesting because it reveals the gender inequalities that existed between the sexes during the nineteenth century and demonstrates the way in which social and cultural notions of masculinity and femininity not only delimited gender roles, but contained specific assumptions about the mental abilities of the sexes. When Clara is dressed as a man, her colleagues, Mariano and Saturino treat her as an equal and the relationship between them is based on the open exchange of ideas. As Clara explains: Me trataron como a un hombre, y cuando menos lo pensaron, porque utilizaban mis conocimientos de medicina, ajenos a los de ellos, lo que generó la confianza y la amistad, apareció de pronto la mujer. They treated me like a man, and because their use of my superior knowledge of medicine inspired faith and confidence, when they least expected it, a woman suddenly appeared.14

When Clara reveals her true identity to Mariano and Saturino, her colleagues undervalue her intellectual ability, her knowledge, and her medical skills and treat her like an object, focusing only on her physical appearance. According to Clara, Mariano and Saturino ... se aturdieron, se marearon y vivieron en mi atmósfera como esclavos, sin voluntad y sin ideas. –Eres una Circe, Clara – me decía Mariano con frecuencia. La única voluntad fue la mía, y las promesas de un amor eterno se me prodigaron entonces hasta el exceso; y cuando pensaron que mi corazón se ablandaba, que era sensible, les demostré que se equivocaban…y murieron. El hombre enamorado, y como lo estaban ellos, parece un cretino. Mujer, pasé también, por lo mismo, y ahora, víctima de un amor excesivo, mi fin puede estar más o menos próximo; pero no distante. ... became dazed and confused and they lived in my atmosphere like slaves, devoid of will and ideas. -You are a Circe, Clara- Mariano used to tell me frequently. The only will was mine and they lavished promises of love on me; and when they thought that my heart had softened, and was receptive, I showed them that they were wrong and they died. Men in love, as they were, are cretins. As a woman, I went through the same thing, and now, as a victim of excessive love, my end can be more or less near, but not that far off.15

Clara’s conversation with the narrator reveals her dissatisfaction with the double standard that existed in nineteenth century Argentina and her complaints can be read as a protest against the unequal treatment of

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women. Clara clearly demonstrates that women are capable of studying medicine and her success can be read as an argument in favour of women’s right to an advanced education. However, Clara’s medical knowledge and skill clearly threaten the narrator and he considers Clara’s participation in the medical profession a transgression of appropriate feminine behaviour. Although Clara is a criminal, the narrator insinuates that Clara’s pursuit of a medical education is an even more heinous crime than the murders she has committed. During the nineteenth century, feminine education was limited to home economics and domestic science; women learned all aspects of domestic economy, including cooking, needlework, music, childhood instruction and discipline and religious instruction. The narrator considers Clara deviant because she has aspired to have access to an advanced education and scientific knowledge, fields reserved for men during the majority of the nineteenth century. The narrator’s misogyny is evident when he confronts Clara about her criminal behaviour. When the narrator unveils and captures his suspect, Clara is dressed in masculine attire. The narrator, however, orders her to change her clothes. By unmasking Clara, the narrator will reveal her true gendered identity, and thus, restore the hierarchy of power and resume his privileged position of authority and power. By forcing her to abandon her masculine attire, the narrator relegates Clara to her inferior feminine role. In “La bolsa de huesos”, Clara is described as a femme fatale for her transgressing boundaries, but she is also considered dangerous for her expression of a profound and deep skepticism of some aspects of medical science, phrenology, in particular. The narrator, a Darwinian naturalist and a great proponent of the ‘new’ scientific theories, uses phrenology to discover the identity and the personality of Clara’s victims. By using the phrenological data derived from his examination of the victims’ craniums, the narrator also theorizes about Clara’s motivation for the killings. The narrator’s examination of Nicanor’s cranium reveals Nicanor’s propensity to infidelity, which leads the narrator to assume that Nicanor’s unfaithfulness motivated Clara to commit murder. Although Clara confirms that Nicanor seduced her and abandoned her after the birth of their child, Clara rebukes the narrator’s allegations because she does not believe that phrenology is capable of proving such a claim. Clara’s negative comments about phrenology are perceived as a critique of the narrator’s authority and the narrator goes to great lengths to prove the preeminence of science and reason. The narrator rebukes Clara for doubting phrenology and criticizes her own desire for knowledge. Although the autopsy of cadavers to study human biology was a common practice

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during the nineteenth century, the narrator accuses Clara of being calculating and nefarious and he insinuates that Clara’s motivation for studying medicine is accompanied by a deep disregard of human life. Usted sabe matar y transformar los cadáveres en objetos indiferentes de estudio; pero usted no sabe frenología y la prueba de que ésta puede llegar a tanto, es que usted ha comprobado en su enojo, que alguien la había desdeñado. You know how to kill and transform the cadavers into indifferent objects of study; but you don’t know phrenology, and the proof that phrenology can arrive at such an end, is that you have proven with your anger, that someone has scorned you.16

The narrator criticizes Clara for dissecting the corpses of her victims; after murdering Nicanor, Mariano and Saturino, Clara removed each of her victims’ fourth rib. The narrator attacks Clara for abusing her medical knowledge and for violating the Hippocratic oath, which requires that medical practitioners use their knowledge and skill solely for the benefit of the patient. Likewise, it asks that physicians abstain from willingly and knowingly doing harm to a patient. Clara’s surgical removal of her victims’ ribs is clearly a transgression of this promise and an implicit criticism of Clara’s desire for knowledge and power belies the narrator’s comments. Clara’s actions must also be read in conjunction with the Biblical creation story in the book of Genesis. For centuries, the patriarchies of Western cultures have used the Creation myth to justify female subordination. The fact that Clara removes the fourth rib of her victims is interesting because her actions can be read as a desire to claim the power and authority that she does not enjoy on a social or cultural level; that is, Clara aspires to be god-like. By excising the rib of her victims, Clara places herself in the role of God. In the Biblical creation story, it is God, not man, who creates both human beings. By imitating God, Clara enjoys tremendous freedom and creative power and the surgical removal of her victims’ ribs can be interpreted as a re-enactment of the creation story. Betrayed by her lover, Nicanor, and underestimated by her colleagues, Mariano and Saturino, Clara is disillusioned with the way in which she is treated because she is a woman. Clara’s excision of the fourth rib of her victims can also be considered a creative act which simultaneously registers a protest against and a critique of nineteenth century men and their attitudes toward women. By re-enacting her version of the creation story, Clara symbolically represents her desire to find a suitable helpmate

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and the surgery that she performs can be read as an effort to create a more perfect version of man. Clara’s knowledge of medicine also intimidates the narrator. The venom that Clara used to poison her victims was derived from a Peruvian plant previously unknown to the established medical community, including the narrator, a well-traveled Darwinian naturalist who has made numerous expeditions throughout his native Argentina to collect flora and fauna. The narrator claims that the plant’s discovery is one of the most important scientific accomplishments of the age and he characterizes the plant as “el maravilloso veneno, destinado … a producir una revolución en terapéutica (the marvelous poision destined to produce a revolution in therapeutics)”17. Clara’s familiarity with such a plant indicates that her medical knowledge and skill surpass those of her male contemporaries and suggests that Clara has been either trained as a curandera (healer) or is, at least, familiar with folk remedies. The narrator’s reaction to Clara’s discovery is ambivalent and fueled by professional jealousy; on one hand, the narrator admires Clara’s knowledge and skill, but, on the other hand, he is envious of her discovery. The narrator’s reaction to Clara’s abilities can be attributed to the tension that existed between practitioners of formal medicine and informal healers during the nineteenth century. Clara’s superior medical knowledge makes her a threat to her male contemporaries, including the narrator, because her superior ability undermines their own power and authority as men of science. In response to the threat that Clara presents, the narrator re-inscribes the image of the Republican mother in “La bolsa de huesos” in an effort to preserve what he believes to be woman’s true and natural role. Although the narrator describes Clara as deviant and criminal throughout the story, he describes her as a loving and devoted mother in the final moments of her life. On her deathbed, Clara embraces a photograph of her son, a gesture that can be read as her acceptance of the maternal role. By choosing an appropriate feminine role and abandoning her pursuit of science and reason, Clara is redeemed. The lesson that Holmberg’s story implies is clear; women who aspire to a life outside the domestic sphere are a threat to the future of the Argentine nation because they have abandoned the all-important role of wife and mother. In the introduction to “La bolsa de huesos”, Holmberg confirms that a fundamental goal of his short story is to impart a moral lesson. Written to thank his friend Belisario Otamendi for his careful reading of the short story, Holmberg’s introduction also gives the author the opportunity to refute his friend’s criticism of his work. According to Otamendi, “La bolsa de huesos” is a poor example of detective fiction because of its

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unconventional ending. Instead of being arrested and imprisoned, the murderess escapes criminal prosecution, an irregularity which prompts Otamendi to suggest that “esa persona criminal tiene que ir a manos del juez de instrucción y luego a las del juez del crimen (that criminal has to go to the hands of the examining magistrate and then to the criminal judge)”18. In response to Otamendi’s claims, Holmberg reminds his friend that “La bolsa de huesos” is fiction and he justifies the ending by claiming that “la muerte no es en todos los casos un castigo para el criminal, mientras que puede ser un cielo para la conciencia (death isn’t always punishment for the criminal, whereas it can be heaven for the conscience) 19 “. Holmberg’s comment about death, punishment and life after death suggests that Clara’s story is meant to impart a lesson. The narrator of “La bolsa de huesos” explicitly expresses his desire to moralize; upon discovering the perpetrator’s identity, he claims that he wants to save Clara from herself. Although the narrator relates Clara’s story of betrayal and revenge, his desire to maintain his position of authority will not allow Clara’s crime to go unpunished. By calling her barbarous, cruel and vindictive likening her to Schariar, one of the two kings from the 1001 Tales of the Arabian Nights, the narrator insinuates that Clara is a man-hater and he implies that her revenge is unfounded. “ Vea, señorita; ahora no puedo hacer otra cosa que felicitarme por haber dado término a su obra; porque, se lo juro, su venganza, digna de un Schariar, o de cualquier bárbaro semejante, ha concluido (Look here, young lady, I am unable to do anything other than congratulate myself for having put an end to your work, because, I swear to you, your vengance, worthy of a Schariar or some similar barbarian, has ended)” 20. The narrator’s opinion of Clara is closely related to nineteenth century conceptions of femininity and appropriate female behavior. Men were the guardians of social order and the only legitimate administrators of legal justice while women were expected to comply with the rules of the patriarchal system. During the nineteenth century, family honor was intrinsically linked to female sexuality and women who transgressed the boundaries of appropriate feminine sexual behavior were duly punished by their male relatives. Ironically, women who took the law into their own hands and actively defended their honor were vilified for having transgressed the boundaries of appropriate feminine behavior. When the narrator of “La bolsa de huesos” recommends that Clara commit suicide in order to escape criminal prosecution, the narrator imposes his own version of civil law. The narrator becomes Clara’s judge and jury and his punishment is more severe than the punishment Clara would receive if she were tried in the court system by the State. Before the

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law, nineteenth century women were considered inferior and child-like. In the eyes of the court, women were judged incapable of murder and were not held responsible for their crimes. In contrast, women suffered more severe consequences on a symbolic level; the murderesses depicted in fiction of the fin-de-siécle were punished by going completely mad, committing suicide or being exiled21. Since the future of the Argentine nation depended heavily on women embracing the role of wife and mother, the narrator contrasts a negative example of an educated professional woman with a more positive image of Republican motherhood to argue against the women’s participation in the public sphere and to reinforce appropriate feminine gender roles. By imposing a severe penalty on Clara, the narrator restores the social order and symbolically preserves the future of the Argentine nation. “La bolsa de huesos” presents an idealized vision of Republican motherhood in order to preserve the image of women in the cultural imagination of late nineteenth century Argentine citizens. The final image of Clara can be read as a response to the changes that were occurring during the late nineteenth century. As Argentine society underwent an economic transformation, gender roles were redefined. More and more women began to seek employment outside the home and women’s changing place in society prompted some authors to glorify the image of Republican motherhood, a role which was obviously being threatened as women entered the workforce. In “La bolsa de huesos”, the narrator pathologizes Clara’s mind and interprets her actions as the behavior of someone who is mentally ill. Clara is described as mad and hysterical because she does not conform to nineteenth century definitions of femininity. By describing Clara’s deviant behavior as an illness, the narrator implies that Clara’s disease is both preventable and curable. The narrator suggests that Clara’s sickness can be discouraged and eliminated through the rigorous control of female sexuality and “La bolsa de huesos” justifies the subjugation of women through government regulation and medical law. 1

Hilda Sabato, “On Political Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century: Latin America,” The American Historical Review 106. 4 (October 2001), 1290-1326. 2 Francine Masiello, Between Civilization and Barbarism: Women, Nation, and Literary Culture in Modern Argentina (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 5. 3 Masiello 5. 4 Masiello 92.

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Alberto Guerrino, La psiquiatría argentina (Buenos Aires: Editores Cuatro, 1982), 71. 6 Amelia Stewart Simpson, Social and Literary Expression in Latin American Detective Fiction (Ph.D. Diss. The University of Texas, 1986), 37. 7 Josefina Ludmer, “Mujeres que matan,” Revista Iberoamericana 62.176-177 (1996), 781-797. 8 Simpson 37. 9 Simpson 38. 10 Eduardo Holmberg, Cuentos fantásticos (Buenos Aires: Librería Hachette, S.A., 1957), 263. All of the translations used in this text are my own. 11 Holmberg 235. 12 Holmberg 233. 13 Patricia Oliart, “Una mujer en busca del reconocimiento masculino,” Ed. Margarita Zegarra, Mujeres y género en la historia del Perú (Lima: CENDOCMujer, 1999): 285. 14 Holmberg 227. 15 Holmberg 227. 16 Holmberg 225. 17 Holmberg 232. 18 Holmberg 169. 19 Holmberg 170. 20 Holmberg 225. 21 Gabriela Nouzeilles, “Ficciones paranoicas de fin de siglo: naturalismo argentino y policía medica,” MLN 112.2 (1997): 232-252.

CHAPTER ELEVEN SUFFRAGETTE FICTIONS: THE RECONSTRUCTION OF MILITANT IDENTITY IN THE NOVELS OF GILLIAN LINSCOTT LINDA MARTZ

Writing in History Today, Paul Preston once observed that historians are often avid readers of detective fiction, perhaps because the activities of historian and detective are not dissimilar: both are “solvers[s] of riddles about society,”1 and the societies reflected in detective fiction can seem as complex and politicised as the societies historians try to reconstruct. In addition, detective fiction may be set in a historical past, thus contributing to the ongoing debate among historians as to whether there is a “problem” with historical fiction2 or, in other words, in what ways and under what circumstances fiction can inform the understanding of history. After all, the best-researched historical monograph will never shape a larger understanding of the past among the general public in the ways that fictional representations can. A text that seeks to use history to create characters driven by what Georg Lukàcs referred to as their “sociohistorical ensemble”3 rather than by modern conventions, or that “involves imaginative outreach to the strangeness and difference of the past,” as Richard Slotkin put it,4 can indeed bring the reader to a sharpened perception of that past–but only if the author’s purpose is to engage history in that fashion. Historical detective fiction uses history in a variety of ways, with varying pedagogical intent. A reader of, say, Anne Perry’s Charlotte and Thomas Pitt novels may indeed gain some sense of life was like for a Victorian police inspector and his wife, but do readers of Elizabeth Peter’s Amelia Peabody mysteries come away from the text with a belief that enlightened Victorian women were comfortable wielding

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authority or expressing their physical desires, or do they rightly sense a subversion of past standards of propriety for comic effect? One of my prime areas of research is the British militant suffrage movement and its sociological context, and it was at a conference on the making and meaning of women’s suffrage and citizenship in the United Kingdom that I first discovered the character of Nell Bray, the “suffragette sleuth” as the book blurbs all named her, in the novels of Gillian Linscott, who was present for a book signing. The Nell Bray series comprises eleven murder mysteries, published between 1991 and 2003. Delighted at the idea that a writer of historical fiction was actually attending a history conference, I approached the novels with two questions in mind. The first concerned what would appear to be something of a paradox: how is it possible to construct a character who is both suffragette and sleuth, when the former term most commonly denotes an individual whose dedication to her cause overrides all other activities? The second question grew out of one of the themes raised by the conference, and often broached in similar contexts: given the extent to which suffragette identity has always been, and continues to be, highly contested terrain,5 how do works such as Linscott’s shape contemporary understanding of the militant movement and of the construct of the suffragette? As the meaning of that particular feminist movement can still generate significant and often very heated exchanges in the press,6 where would these works be placed on such a battleground? Some terms first need to be clarified. While the word “suffragette” has come in the popular understanding to signify any woman who worked for women’s suffrage, it in fact specifically denoted mostly British women whose suffrage work took a militant form. Coined by the British newspaper The Daily Mail in January 1906, the word referred primarily to members of the Women’s Social and Political Union, active from 1903 until the First World War, and to members of its splinter organizations. They never felt the need to define specifically what they meant by “militancy,” a fluid concept that took many forms. Generally, the “militant” suffragist, or “suffragette,”7 brought her political actions to public spaces, and sought to draw attention to both the specific question of the vote as well as the larger issue of the social, political and economic inequalities between men and women. Suffragette actions were orchestrated to push both government boundaries and social tolerance for women’s protest. When they could, the militant women adopted forms of public protest British men had used in their suffrage struggles, challenging the authorities to respond in like fashion by granting women the vote. But British authorities did not, and responded to initially non-violent protest

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by increasingly repressive and violent means. Members of the Women’s Social and Political Union then raised the stakes by instituting a campaign of property destruction, with dwindling numbers of active, unincarcerated women causing increasing damage until a truce was called at the beginning of World War I. At the end of the war, a segment of the female population was given the right to vote and to be elected in time for the General Election of December 1918. Historiographically, two threads have emerged to characterize these women: for some, the suffragettes were catalysts, empowered feminist activists who stirred a generation to action. For others, they were the hysterical manipulated followers of selfaggrandizing leaders, who did more harm than good to the cause of women’s rights. Both threads continue to appear scholarly work on the movement. How then could the conjoining of “suffragette” and “sleuth” seem paradoxical? A suffragette was defined first and foremost by her actions: her slogan was “Deeds, not Words” and, for a militant as active and nationally prominent in the movement as Nell Bray is depicted as being, this was no idle boast. In both their autobiographical writings and publications contemporaneous to their struggle, suffragettes used metaphors of military combat to describe almost relentless expectations of activism and physical challenge8; another compared the isolated focus of a suffragette’s life to that of a nun in a convent.9 As the campaign developed, activism increasingly had very specific consequences: namely prison terms, physically debilitating hunger strikes and psychologically debilitating forcible feeding, all occupations difficult indeed to reconcile with the activity of detection. How then does Linscott resolve what would appear to be two apparently contradictory activities? Her solution is one of elegant simplicity: the suffragette movement itself is most notable in the series by its absence. In three of the novels, Nell’s suffrage activities are of marginal relevance to the narrative: Dead Man Riding10 is set in 1900, during Nell’s college years and before the founding of the movement, while both Hanging on the Wire11 and Absent Friends12 take place after the militant campaign has ended: in Hanging on the Wire the wartime truce has been called, and in Absent Friends women have just been granted the vote. Dead Man Riding allows insight into the shaping of Nell’s militant feminist persona, but the latter two novels are clearly after a page in her own and her country’s history has turned. In fact, the suffrage campaign appears in any sustained fashion only in Dance on Blood13, in which the unwilling Nell works with another suffragette to discover how the police are obtaining inside information on the

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suffragettes’ arson campaign, of which Nell disapproves. Far more typical is Sister Beneath the Sheet14, in which Nell Bray is sent to the French city of Biarritz to represent the WPSU in an inheritance dispute, the movement having been bequeathed £50,000 by a notorious prostitute in a will drawn up just hours before her death. All of the action is set in France, where the movement is evoked only occasionally and simply by name. In Blood on the Wood15, Nell is again sent away from her work in the London campaign, this time to the Cotswolds to collect a painting that had been left to the movement and which turns out to be a forgery. Apart from the odd remark by Nell that Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the Women’s Social and Political Union, will be angry at the way events are evolving, the movement is again absent. Widow’s Peak16 is also set entirely in France, where Nell is on a climbing holiday in the Alps, trying to overcome her fury at the government’s recent “torpedoing” of some very promising suffrage legislation; this information is imparted on the first page of the novel, after which the movement does not appear in the text at all. Dead Man’s Music17 also sees Nell on holiday, this time at a family home in the country to rest from overwork and the stresses of the suffrage campaign. Again, little mention is made of the campaign except in the form of regret on the part of Nell’s family that Nell, supposedly on a break from such stressful activities, has become involved in investigating a murder for which a man has already been condemned to die. In The Perfect Daughter,18 Nell travels to Devon to comfort a cousin by marriage on the suicide of the woman’s daughter, only to end up investigating what she then concludes is a murder; the suffrage campaign is evoked only because the daughter briefly became involved in suffragette activities, apparently following Nell’s example.19 Even within the brief passages where the suffragette movement does appear, this paradox is not allowed to surface. Take, for example, the inevitable incarcerations that most active suffragettes underwent. In Stage Fright, Nell is invited to a reception at the home of a socially prominent and disapproving aunt, who is willing to overlook Nell’s two terms in prison because for her, as Nell comments, “blood is thicker even than prison clothing.”20 As Stage Fright is set in 1909, the incarcerations of Nell’s historical equivalent would have been relatively short. Nell’s prison experience is confirmed in Crown Witness21 when she is slated to march in a procession with other ex-prisoners but, despite references to her prominence and her activism, and even to her being on the run from the police,22 Nell does no further prison time in the line of suffragette duty– and thus her investigations remain unhindered. She is incarcerated again once, in Crown Witness, but for intervening during a friend’s wrongful

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arrest for murder. The paradox thus emerges briefly in that her incarceration impedes her investigation of the crime but, because her arrest was outside the context of her political activities, Nell allows herself to be swept up into what turns out to be a successful escape attempt–a very un-suffragette-like response and one with which she is not comfortable, but which allows her to resume the hunt for the real murderer and thus clear her friend. Because she is not incarcerated as a suffragette in the novels, she also does not have to contend with the other physical limitations that would have kept a historical counterpart from functioning efficiently as a detective, i.e. those brought on by hunger-striking to provoke early release or to demand recognition of political prisoner status, as that strategy was adopted in the middle of 1909, after Nell had concluded her prison experiences. Hunger-strikers were initially released from prison when authorities deemed their health to be in danger, but by October of that year, they were being forcibly fed by tubes inserted, usually with tremendous pain, in their noses and mouths. This highly traumatic experience, which the women likened to an instrumental rape, was replaced by something equally pernicious in April of 1913. Women who hunger-struck were temporarily released when near death and then reincarcerated when their physical condition had improved, after which they hunger-struck and were released again. The frequent repetition of near starvation was intensely debilitating: recovery times lengthened and long-term health conditions developed. Had the fictional Nell hungerstruck and been force-fed, the trauma of that experience would still have been very present and most likely would at best have compromised her concentration and energy levels, as it did with her historical counterparts. If Nell had been released in order to recover, she would have been what suffragettes called a Mouse, physically severely weakened yet constantly on the run from the Government Cat to avoid re-arrest and the completion of her prison term. Yet despite not having hunger-struck, Nell is at one point given physical symptoms consistent with hunger-striking. When in Dead Man’s Music Nell’s brother Stuart, a medical doctor, persuades her to stay with his family in the country for health reasons, he observes, “To be honest, I’ve seen healthier things on a dissecting slab. You’re thin as a besom broom and your complexion’s like something out of the British Museum manuscript room.” Nell’s retort, “Well, at least you didn’t say the mummies’ gallery” triggers in her a bout of hysterical laughter (2). Linscott gives Nell the severe weight loss, jaundiced skin and psychological instability of the recovering hunger-striker, but attributes their cause to fatigue, thus reflecting a typical physical reality for a

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suffragette in the latter part of the campaign but nonetheless allowing Nell to recover rapidly and investigate unhampered by physical or psychological considerations. If the suffragette movement exists in the novels predominately as backdrop, what purpose is served by having Nell Bray be a “suffragette sleuth”? Or, to put that question from another angle, by having Nell Bray embrace a “suffragette identity” in all of these first-person narratives, what message is being conveyed about the nature of that identity? What exactly is being transmitted to a contemporary audience? The answer to that would be found, not in Linscott’s treatment of the movement as its presence is negligible, but rather in her development of the character of Nell Bray herself, Linscott’s personification of a particular set of attributes. Conversely, much of what makes Nell a good suffragette also makes her an effective detective in the novels. First, she is extremely intelligent, capable of countering any opponent, political or otherwise, and of analysing and functioning in a wide variety of contexts. Not only does she have the trained mind of an Oxford education, in a time when any collegeeducated woman was a rarity, but she is also knowledgeable on a wide range of subjects. She is familiar with the works of contemporary playwrights, and is also a personal friend of George Bernard Shaw, who enlists her help in protecting the leading lady of his scandalous latest play.23 Her knowledge and appreciation of modern music allows her to be drawn into a government plot to recover some stolen and highly indiscrete love letters.24 In exchange for exempting Mrs. Pankhurst from further arrest, she allows herself to be pressured by Prime Minister David Lloyd George into going undercover as a sort of production supervisor for a special private presentation of the Strauss opera Salomé, whose libretto by Oscar Wilde has been denied authorization for public performance by the censors and whose title role will be sung by the key suspect. Her extensive knowledge of contemporary politics is essential to understanding some of the intrigues in which she finds herself, be they in the manipulations of Prime Minister David Lloyd George, the variations in theoretical shadings among the residents of an anarchist commune,25 or the imperial aspirations of a retired admiral.26 More specific, perhaps, to any construction of Nell’s suffragette identity is her physicality. Hanging on the Wire opens with Nell sitting on a rooftop, reading her mail while escaping from a mob angered by her political discourse; in The Perfect Daughter, she discusses ju-jitsu techniques for throwing policemen to the ground; in Stage Fright, she agrees to be the body guard of a woman protesting inequalities in divorce

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law even though the woman had been threatened with murder by her enraged husband. She is an inveterate hiker and climber, covering miles on foot in her investigations and keeping pace with local guides on her Alpine holiday. She climbs fences, stows away in coal and horse wagons, scales drainpipes and breaks through hedges to break into buildings that may contain information crucial to solving the murder. Fundamentally, though, the distinguishing element of Nell’s identity is her resolute modernity. She is very much the New Woman. She is single, but has had sexual relationships. She supports herself with the earnings of some stocks left to her by her father and by her own labour as a translator. She constantly questions authority, using her own judgement to decide her course of action even when hierarchical conventions would require otherwise. In fact, she uses convention when it suits her, by for example consciously adapting her dress to convey specific impressions, and ignores it when it doesn’t, as when she takes in a male lodger to help make ends meet. She functions well in a huge range of social class contexts, equally competent, though not necessarily comfortable, in an upper class social gathering as in an East End music hall for transvestites. Her cases, in an echo the large body of suffragette autobiographical writing, are recounted in the first person: she is her own subject, recognizing her strengths and weaknesses but resolutely shaping her own narrative. All of these characteristics would certainly contribute to the construction of an interesting New Woman in the context of a piece of Edwardian historical fiction. But Nell is not simply an Edwardian detective, or a New Woman detective; she is a suffragette, and how that particular construct has been translated and transmitted has been subject to contentious debate since the question of the movement’s historicity was first addressed. The suffragette movement is probably the most studied women’s movement in history, but the suffragette is also a regular reference in popular culture, and one which is often quite ambiguous when not downright negative. Two examples from different periods in the 20th century will suffice here: those not old enough to remember the 1964 Disney film version of Mary Poppins, with Mrs. Banks singing “Sister Suffragette” and neglecting her family in favour of her half-baked political inclinations, might be familiar with the novels of Tracy Chevalier, author of the best-selling Girl With a Pearl Earring. Her 2001 Fallen Angels, contains a suffragette character, the educated and free-thinking Mrs Coleman, whose political activism leads not only to the neglect of her family but ultimately to the murder of one of her children. In a paper presented at a conference commemorating the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Women’s Social and Political Union, Katherine Cockin

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analysed contemporary British fiction of the genre known as “chick lit” (i.e., targeting a younger, female audience) and determined that the suffragette construct was employed in it regularly and exclusively to signify rigidity, anti-modernism and sexual frigidity27. Linscott’s detective stories are contemporary with the works that Cockin analysed, and both evoke in fictional form the battle for control of suffragette identity that began when the suffrage campaign was in full swing, as suffragettes themselves tried to historicize their activities. Linscott’s Nell is an effective counterweight to the “chick lit” imagery, but then the Nell Bray novels would not appear to be reaching the same audience. While the Linscott series has been published by a several mainstream and/or widely distributed publishers including Little, Brown and Company/Virago Press, St. Martin’s Press, and TimeWarner Books, it is interesting to note that not all the books are widely available even through the standard used book channels–except in American large print editions clearly intended for an audience vastly different from that of chick lit fiction. Where, then, would Linscott’s Nell figure on the battleground for suffragette meaning? Do we see enough of Nell’s “socio-historical ensemble” to gain an understanding of how an Edwardian woman, especially one with a brain for problem-solving and a nose for trouble, might come to political activism? While the women of the militant movement would be dismayed to hear certain historians and the authors of “chick lit” characterize them in terms once used by anti-suffragists, I do think they would have been proud to claim Nell Bray as one of their own. 1

Paul Preston, “Down these Mean Streets the Historian Must Go,” History Today 35.4 (1985), 7. 2 To reformulate the question posed by Harry E. Shaw, “Is there a problem with historical fiction (or with Scott’s Redgauntlet)?” Rethinking History 9.2/3 (2005), 173. 3 Georg Lukàcs, The Historical Novel, London: Merlin Press, 1962, 19. 4 Richard Slotkin, “Fiction for the Purposes of History,” Rethinking History 9.2/3 (June 2005), 224. 5 Linscott herself was unaware of the controversy within academic circles surrounding the suffragettes when she wrote most of the Nell Bray series. The character of Nell grew out of an appreciation of the movement that dated back to her school days; her principle source materiel included Sylvia Pankhurst’s 1931 The Suffragette Movement and Roger Fulford’s 1957 Votes for Women (Personal correspondence dated May 15th, 2007). 6 A number of books and articles on the suffragette movement and its leaders appeared in the first years of 21st century, timed to mark the movement’s centenary in 2003 and illustrating the considerable range of often violently contrasting

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perceptions. The exchanges during that period between two of those authors, June Purvis and Martin Pugh, in the pages of the Times Higher Education Supplement spring vividly to mind. 7 The term “suffragist” is used to denote those women who worked for the vote using more conventional means. 8 For example, see Emmeline Pankhurst, My Own Story, London: Virago Press, 1979, or Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement, London: Virago Press reprint, 1977. 9 Annie Kenney, Memoirs of a Militant, London: Edward Arnold and Company, 1924, 110. 10 Gillian Linscott, Dead Man Riding, Time Warner Paperbacks 2003, first published London: Virago Press, 2002. 11 Gillian Linscott, Hanging on the Wire, New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1993, first published London: Little, Brown and Company, 1992. 12 Gillian Linscott, Absent Friends, London: Virago Press, 1991. 13 Gillian Linscott, Dance on Blood, London: Virago Press, 1998. 14 Gillian Linscott, Sister Beneath the Sheet, New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1991. 15 Gillian Linscott, Blood on the Wood, London: Virago Press, 2003. 16 Gillian Linscott, Widow’s Peak, London: Warner Futura Books, 1994. American title: An Easy Day for a Lady. 17 Gillian Linscott, Dead Man’s Music, London: Virago Press, 1996. American title: Dead Man’s Sweetheart. 18 Gillian Linscott, The Perfect Daughter, London: Virago Press, 2000. Linscott won the Crime Writers Association Ellis Peters Historical Dagger for this novel. 19 As if to illustrate why historians read detective fiction but don’t necessarily write it, Linscott has told me that this is due to they way in which she organized her work as a writer: “Yes, I can well see in theory that [combining suffragette activity with detection] should have been difficult, but in many ways I found it a help in deciding where to go next. It was always clear to me that the Nell stories had to be sideways on to what was happening in the movement. So I’d look at some real event: eg the 1911 pre-coronation march, the incendiary bomb in Lloyd George’s house, the Cat and Mouse Act arrests and ask what Nell would be doing and how that might tie in with a murder. I tried to give a hint now and then of the breadand-butter nature of Nell’s ordinary work for the movement, committees, worrying about finance, printing pamphlets etc. to suggest that it wasn’t all murders.” (Personal correspondence dated May 15th, 2007). 20 Gillian Linscott, Stage Fright, London: Warner Futura Books, 1993, 1. 21 Gillian Linscott, Crown Witness, London: Warner Books, 1996. 22 Max in Dance on Blood 23 Stage Fright. 24 Dance on Blood. 25 Crown Witness. 26 The Perfect Daughter.

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Katherine Cockin, “Inventing the Suffragettes,” The Women’s Social and Political Union Centenary Conference, The Women’s History Network and The Women’s History Group, University of Portsmouth, 11th October 2003.

CHAPTER TWELVE EXHUMING THE PAST: LUCHA CORPI’S CHICANO MOVEMENT MYSTERIES PABLO RAMIREZ

Lucha Corpi’s mysteries, Eulogy for a Brown Angel and Cactus Blood, were published in the 1990s, when proleptic visions of Latinos as the “majority minority” began to circulate in earnest and gain rhetorical strength in the United States. Government agencies, educational institutions, and various media outlets started to focus on what Kirsten Silva Gruesz identified as the “present-progressive focus on Latino emergence.”1 This future-is-now attitude encouraged state officials and educators to see the future in the present and plan accordingly. More than a few US Latino Studies programs staked their relevance to the public sphere on the future emergence of Latinos as the “majority minority.” Even historians and others concerned with narrating the past looked to the “Latino future” and gave the State a mandate: create a newly inclusive past or contend with a large segment of the population that does not see itself reflected in the history of the nation. While cynics claimed that this was a purely political (and hence ahistorical) manoeuvre, others pointed out that the presence of a large Latino community in the United States was not a sudden development but the result of a long history of migration and US intervention in Latin America. With the Latino community and the nation encouraged to reconstruct a usable past according to visions of the future, it is not entirely surprising that Lucha Corpi’s mysteries about Gloria Damasco, a psychic Chicana detective who has visions of both the future and the past, should emerge out of a time of proleptic visions. However, these mysteries are not a mere reflection of their time. On the contrary, they are an intervention that scrutinizes how temporal distance can be and is mediated for the necessary task of narrating the history of the US nation and fashioning a political and racial identity. In Lucha Corpi’s Eulogy for a Brown Angel and Cactus Blood, events that took place during the height of the Chicano Movement in the early

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1970s were buried only to resurface in the 1980s. At the time the mysteries take place, the events of the Chicano National Moratorium and the UFW Delano strike may have made it into the official historical record but end up in the 1980s at a far remove from the everyday consciousness of most Chicanas and Chicanos. When Gloria returns to the site of the Chicano National Moratorium eighteen years later, she discovers that very little has changed in the barrio. Gloria associates this lack of progress with a failure to remember. Few people seem to know about the Moratorium or the killing of Ruben Salazar. All that seems to remain of the events of that day is plaque with Ruben Salazar’s name on it. Disappointed, Gloria realizes that there was “little to remind people of the events that at the time we thought would shape our political future in California.”2 History seems to have been reduced from a narrative to a mere marker of time, a symbol of a forgotten and inert past. In both mysteries, former Chicano Movement activists long for the days when they had a grasp on the future and felt that they were making history. With the passing of the 1970s, they feel that they have stepped out historical time; they are no longer capable of shaping the future. In the 1980s, when these mysteries take place, the past has been subsumed by a celebratory narrative of progress and integration, “The Decade of the Hispanic,” created by US businesses and the media in order to encourage US Latinas and Latinos to become good consumers. The return of an unsolved murder or a past injustice from the heyday of the Chicana/o civil rights activism, however, disrupts this presentist and uncritical narrative of progress. Through the use of a psychic detective whose visions resists and therefore sutures the rupture between the two decades, Corpi’s mysteries re-insert the present back into historical time.

Visions and Plots In Corpi’s first mystery, Eulogy for a Brown Angel a young boy is murdered during the Chicano National Moratorium. On that day, August 29, 1970, over twenty-five thousand people gathered in East Los Angeles to protest the US intervention in Southeast Asia and the disproportionately large numbers of Chicanos drafted into the armed services. Their protest against the State soon becomes a fight with the police. The day ends with the police murdering one of the community’s few public voices, Los Angeles Times reporter Ruben Salazar. Gloria Damasco and her friend Luisa are fleeing from the riot when they see a young boy lying dead on the street. As they come closer, they realize that someone has filled the little boy’s mouth with human excrement. It is at this moment that Gloria

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Damasco has her first psychic experience. She leaves the confines of her body and flies over the protestors; she then goes to downtown Los Angeles, where Black and Latino men gaze at the world through a drunken haze; and finally to Beverly Hills, where the rich white people are waited on by their dark-skinned servants. Her first use of her psychic powers becomes a matter of distance and perspective, which also gives her a grasp of the socio-political reality of Los Angeles. With the help of Kenyon, a white police officer, Gloria spends the next few days after the protest searching for the killer. After she puts herself in danger, her husband requests that, for the sake of their daughter, Gloria put aside her investigation. Gloria reluctantly agrees and does not reopen the case until after her husband’s death in 1988. Corpi’s second mystery, Cactus Blood, begins with a dream of a woman crucified on a cactus and a rattlesnake preparing to strike. Gloria Damasco has decided to become a licensed detective and has begun her training with former policeman Justin Escobar. Her first case involves the death of two mutual acquaintances who took part in the United Farm Workers’ Delano strike and grape boycott of 1973. Sixteen years later, it seems that the killer is targeting a group of friends who took part in this protest. When Gloria arrives at the possible murder scene of Sonny Mares, who was found dead from poisoning, she notices two punctures in the mattress, clearly made by a pair of scissors. Next to the punctures is a scrap of paper with the word “always” written on it. As they continue examining the scene, they make a disturbing discovery: a bundle of herbs tied with a band of snakeskin on the doorstep. This makes both Gloria and Justin suspect this might be the work of Ramon Caballos, a shaman who claimed that placing such a bundle on a doorstep would cause the occupant to die of poisoning. During the UFW strike, Ramon blew up a storage tank filled with pesticide. In order to ensure that the UFW did not become the object of a smear campaign, Sonny Mares (the murder victim) and his friend Art Bello (who is missing) testified in court against Ramon. Their testimony helped convict Ramon, who received a long sentence. Ramon has recently escaped from prison and has not been caught by the police. When Gloria and Justin find a tape of the UFW strike playing in the VCR, it seems clear that Ramon is exacting his revenge for the testimony Sonny and Art provided close to twenty years ago. It soon becomes apparent, however, that the key to all these events is Carlota Navarro, an undocumented woman who was raped twenty years ago by her employer, Dr. Stephens. After her rape, Carlotta attaches a note to Stephens’s mattress with a pair of shears. The note warns him to “Watch your back always.” Unable to go to the police, she decides to go to

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her friend Josie’s house. Beaten and bruised, Carlota runs across a field sprayed with Parathion, a nerve gas that paralyzes insects. The same day she is raped, she begins to suffer from memory lapses, depression, and nerve damage due to pesticide poisoning. She soon becomes active in the farm workers’ struggles to ban dangerous pesticides and participates in the Delano strike.

Visions and Historiography At first it may seem that Corpi’s psychic Chicana, whose visions make her a witness to both past and future events, would make an unlikely and disappointing detective and historian. After all, as eminent historian Carlo Ginzberg claims, both the detective and the historian reconstruct an event he or she has neither witnessed nor experienced from a scattering of clues and documents. In contrast to the sciences, where knowledge claims are based on the quantification and repetition of observed phenomena, history establishes its knowledge claims on the ability to individualize and reconstruct the unseen, thus making “historical knowledge indirect, presumptive, [and] conjectural.”3 In other words, historians, like detectives, reconstruct a narrative of an event that they have not witnessed by interpreting clues. The question that then comes to mind is, “How can a detective who uses the very suprasensible intuition that Ginzburg precludes from historical and criminal inquiry, be both a witness and a detective–both a witness and a historian?” If both the historical narrative and the detective story require a distance between the event and its reconstruction, then by such a criterion Lucha Corpi’s mysteries must surely fail. After all, her visions do not provide her with the emotional detachment that comes with distance. Quite the contrary, her visions involve all her senses. She doesn’t passively observe the event; she experiences it. As Mark Phillips points out, history has an inferential character, so much so that “if somehow we could revisit the past in a time machine–a fantasy which for most historians would represent the most secure confirmation–the result would not be historical knowledge at all. The reason is that for the historian to have knowledge of the past, he must re-enact it in his own mind.”4 However, her visions do not provide Gloria with such a time machine. “Being there” is not what enables her to solve the mystery or to reconstruct a historical narrative. Gloria Damsco may be “present” in the sense that she experiences the sights, smells and sounds of where the murder took place; she may even see the shadowy figure of the killer and the weapon he or she used. However, this does not release her from her

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obligation to reconstruct a narrative from the scattered clues and visions she is given. Paying attention to the rule of the mystery genre, her visions never clearly show the killer. In fact, they often suffer from a lack of a clear perspective or context. Rather than providing a neat resolution to the crimes, her visions become an urgent call for interpretation, which in turn creates an ethical obligation on Gloria Damasco’s part. As Gloria explains, “I also realized that regardless of how I felt about my heightened perception, once the dreams and visions came I would be committed–like an unskilled cryptographer–to extract meaning from them and to act on the knowledge”(Corpi 1992, 32). Along with the distance of time that both mysteries introduce, it is her interpretive skills–together with the moral obligation that comes from being a witness–that makes her psychic detective work an engagement with Chicano historiography.

Visions and Witnessing Gloria’s visions allow her to traverse time and space and transform her into a witness, which in turn creates a moral obligation to investigate and become a detective, as well as a historian. For Gloria, the act of witnessing becomes an opportunity for interpretation and critique. But what happens if you are present when the crime first occurs? In other words, what happens when the act of witnessing binds you to one place and one time? In these mysteries, an act of witnessing which creates a bounded relationship between the witness and a singular time and place clearly precludes the re-enactment necessary for interpretation. In Lucha Corpi’s mysteries, being what I will call the legally bound witness is not simply fraught with danger. For Chicanas and Chicanos, this act of witnessing blurs the line between witness and cultural informant/traitor. Gloria Damasco is not a legally bound witness. Because her act of witnessing comes in the form of psychic visions, Gloria is unable to testify in a court of law; she cannot close the gap between the moment of witnessing and the moment of testimony. Her psychic gifts may make her a witness, but not a credible one. The historical knowledge that she gains about crimes committed almost twenty years in the past cannot enter any official or legal record. Besides their supernatural origins, what makes her testimony problematic in a court of law is the fact that her visions do not provide the universal eyewitness knowledge the courts desire. As Derrida points out in Demeure: Fiction and Testimony: In saying, I swear to tell the truth, where I have been the only one to see or hear and where I am the only one who can attest to it, this is true to the

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Dislodged from a singular time and place, Gloria’s witnessing does not have this universal quality and hence no credibility. While a detective who has reconstructed an event he or she has never witnessed may take part in the legal proceedings of a case, Gloria’s contractible relation to time and space bars her from taking part in the same legal proceedings. In her reading of Corpi’s mysteries, Bickford observes that “None of the criminals in Corpi’s novels are ever put on trial; they are either killed prior to apprehension by the criminal justice system or they commit suicide… Justice is served–in that the guilty parties are dead–but it is not the criminal justice system that has accomplished this result.”6 While the crimes are neither resolved nor tried by the State, the act or prospect of Chicanos bearing witness in a court of law is nonetheless a central concern in both mysteries. Corpi’s mysteries tend to focus on historical issues of distance and perspective in order to examine how the State admits and legitimates testimony and evidence. In doing so, Corpi very carefully juxtaposes moments of witnessing with State-sanctioned police violence. In Eulogy, Mando, the fifteen-year-old gang member, witnesses a man kill a boy as Chicanas and Chicanos flee from police who are tear-gassing and beating the demonstrators of the Chicano National Moratorium. Before Art and Sonny witness Ramon blow up the storage tank in Cactus Blood, sheriff deputies and teamsters are beating the striking farm workers, who have adopted a strategy of non-violent protest. These juxtapositions remind us that the Chicano community must still contend with a legal system that criminalizes the very conditions and reactions that the State has created. Not surprisingly, cooperating with the State, specifically the police, places Chicanos on the dangerously shifting border between witness and informant. Eulogy for a Brown Angel focuses on one witness in particular: Mando, a fifteen-year-old Chicano gang member, who saw the murderer carrying the dead child in the streets. In order to avoid the police, Mando goes to Gloria for help. Unfortunately, because she lacks the training and the resources to capture the boy’s killer, she reluctantly agrees to work with an unorthodox policeman, Kenyon. He tells Mando that he will receive police protection if he becomes a witness. However, there is one condition: Kenyon makes it clear that Mando will only receive protection if he agrees not only to be a murder witness but a police informant on gang activities in the barrio, as well. In Eulogy, the police want to use

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Mando’s entry into the legal apparatus to get the ammunition they need to eradicate the gangs in East Los Angeles. Mando’s moment of witnessing quickly thereafter becomes enmeshed in a whole network of relations that sets conditions on how his testimony enters the legal system. If he does testify against both the killer and the gang members, he will be seen as a traitor, making it impossible for him to live in the barrio. If he does not cooperate with the police, he receives no police protection and the killer silences him permanently. Frustrated with the choices available to Mando, Gloria complains, Kenyon was a cop. Even if he was genuinely interested in seeing that no harm came to Mando, he had to bargain on behalf of the establishment. I too had to bargain–on Mando’s behalf. It seemed so unfair for Mando and for me and even for Kenyon, that we should have to make a pact with the devil. […] That was our legal reality: the deal, the only thing we had to show for centuries of institutionalized injustice. (Corpi 1992, 45)

It is precisely this issue of the deal, a pact between Chicanos and the State, that preoccupies both mysteries. There is no guarantee that the evidence Chicanos provide will not become ammunition the State can use to control and subjugate the Chicano community. Faced with these options, Mando decides not to become a State’s witness and is murdered. The theme of the violence of witnessing is repeated in Cactus Blood, which concerns a group of friends are haunted by the fact that two of their group testified against one of their own in a court of law. Although their testimony saved the UFW from a smear campaign, for decades both Sonny and Art are racked with guilt. As Art explains, “You have to remember that Chicanos in the civil rights movement viewed any collaboration with the police as treason. [. . .] So, we were witnesses for the prosecution and collaborated with the enemy.”7 At first it appears that their act of bearing witness sets the events of this mystery in motion. However, the real focus of Cactus Blood is Carlota’s inability to bear witness against Dr. Stephens. Unable to transform her grief into a legal grievance, her crime is buried only to resurface during her memory lapses, during which Carlota reenacts the rape. Like a sleepwalker, she has no memory of these reenactments. This continual return to the scene of the crime does not allow her to deal with the past precisely because these returns take place in forgotten time. Moreover, evidence of the crime against her are scattered among the effects of the deceased. Her only recorded public testimony of her rape is a taped interview that lies among the effects of Gloria’s recently deceased friend.

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It is not Carlota but Remmi Stephens, daughter of Carlota’s rapist, who unearths this past injustice and unsettles the present. On her deathbed, Mrs. Stephens begs Remmi to find Carlota and ask her forgiveness. Remmi pursues this extralegal means of making amends and inadvertently helps to set in motion the events of this murder mystery. This unearthing of a past crime, allows us as readers to see how history shapes or shaped the relations and desires of a whole set of characters. We also become aware of how the past gains its strength by the multitude of perspectives and effects it creates in the present. In her search for Carlota, Remmi meets Phillipe Hunter, the husband of Carlotta’s friend Josie, and they fall in love. Josie finds out about their affair and accidentally kills Phillipe. She attempts to cover up the crime by framing Ramon Caballos, the man imprisoned for the explosion. She helps Ramon escape from prison and places the snakeskin bundles on Sonny’s and Art’s doorsteps. Since Phillipe participated in the UFW Delano strike, she hopes the police will suspect Ramon of his murder. As the past begins to take on a movement of its own, it escapes Josie’s intentions and begins to unsettle more and more lives. Sonny sees the bundles and begins to think dwell on the past, regretting his testimony. Unable to overcome his writer’s block and guilt-ridden about his past, to Josie’s shock, he commits suicide. Remmi’s brother, who follows her to Sonny’s apartment as she continues her search for Carlota, comes across Sonny’s dead body and decides to frame Carlota, so he can preserve his father’s good memory. He decides to frame Carlota by puncturing the mattress with a pair of scissors. Josie’s crime of passion inadvertently and indirectly brings the crime against Carlota to light. Because Josie’s crime cannot be explained without referring to Carlota’s rape, the crime against Carlota is finally, if only partially, entered into the legal record close to twenty years later. This small victory is overshadowed by the fact that Carlota still cannot bear witness. In the end, everyone agrees to deny knowing Carlota’s whereabouts, so she can return to Mexico with Ramon, who considers it his destiny to take care of her. This denial, however, is soon associated with an act of forgetting. As Gloria laments, “Throughout the sheriff’s interrogation, I kept denying Carlotta’s whereabouts. Yet in doing so, I felt as if I had taken an eraser and little by little deleted my last memories of her”(Corpi 1995, 242). Carlota disappears to Mexico and leaves carrying the novel’s main marker of time: a cactus whose flowering cycle matches Carlota’s own growth and progress. Her grandmother told her that her life would change every five years with the blooming of the cactus. On the seventh cycle, which begins as the mystery ends, Carlota would finally

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find peace. Readers are left with a concept of progress that is cyclical in nature.

Conclusion Corpi’s mysteries return to a half-forgotten event in the past in order to unsettle comfortable notions about the present. They take on the function of historiography by reminding (Chicana/o) readers about a time of political activism and grassroots organization that has been subsumed by narratives of progress and assimilation. If history is the reconstruction of events that the historian has most likely never witnessed, one could also argue that the goal of most public historical projects is to give people a set of memories of events they have never experienced. As historian Vance Smith asserts, “The return to what the self has forgotten is also, in a sense, a return to what the self never could have known.”8 Similarly, Corpi’s mysteries, through Gloria’s visions, address not only the issue of forgetting but question the distinction between memory and history. Instead of Gloria telling them their motivations, the characters reveal the different memories and motivations involved in the murder. Solving the murder does not simply involve revealing the killer. It is a moment for characters to share (and confess) their memories with each other and thus gain a historical perspective on the crime, their lives and their future. In order to move forward, these mysteries remind us about the necessity of returning to sites of past injustices in order to interpret and to witness. As a curandera (healer woman) tells Gloria, “To look into the past…is to look into the future. But it takes a certain talent, a great gift, to see how the past will become the future. That what’s your gift all about” (94). 1

Kirsten Silva Gruesz, “Utopia Latina: The Ordinary Seaman in Extraordinary Times,” Modern Fiction Studies 49.1 (Spring 2003), 55. 2 Lucha Corpi, Eulogy for a Brown Angel (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1992), 130. 3 Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and Historical Method, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi, (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1989), 106. 4 Mark Phillips, “Distance and Historical Representation,” History Workshop Journal 57 (Spring 2004): 135. 5 Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000) 40-41. 6 Donna M. Bickford, “A Praxis of Parataxis: Epistemology and Dissonance in Lucha Corpi’s Detective,” Meridians 5.2 (2005), 65. 7 Lucha Corpi, Cactus Blood (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1995), 184–85.

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Vince D. Smith, “Irregular Histories: Forgetting Ourselves,” New Literary History 28.2 (Spring 1997), 174.

PART V DOUBLED IDENTITIES

CHAPTER THIRTEEN DUALITY: THE HUMAN NATURE OF DETECTIVE FICTION KATHRYN OLIVER MILLS

In Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne Baudelaire wrote, “La dualité de l’art est une conséquence fatale de la dualité de l’homme”: art is necessarily dual because the nature of man is dual.1 Baudelaire may or may not have called the genre of detective fiction “art.” The “father” of modern poetry nonetheless had something to do with the emergence of this relatively new genre, though, and his axiom applies to murder mysteries as much as to verse, or paintings.2 The nature of detective fiction is fundamentally duplicitous. Indeed, it is a telling coincidence that novels of detection were inspired by an actual doppelgänger. Edgar Allan Poe drew on Eugène François Vidocq’s Mémoires (1824) for what T. S. Eliot has called the first detective story.3 In life, Vidocq was both the policeman (he was put in charge of the first Brigade de Sûreté in 1817, and he subsequently started Le Bureau des Renseignements, the first modern detective agency) and the criminal (he was a robber before he got recruited to detection, and, unfortunately, it was discovered that as a detective Vidocq had a tendency to prepare crimes in order to solve them).4 The duality of detective fiction goes far beyond that particular example of double-dealing, though. The notion that the art of mysteries is directly related to the duality of human nature provides a general means of grasping the essential identity of a multi-faceted genre. “Duality” is a broad concept. Because of the sympathy he betrayed for “la beauté particulière du mal,”5 the indirect sympathy he demonstrated for the crime genre through his interest in Edgar Allan Poe, and the direct relevance of his seminal essay, Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne, to the subject of modern, and in particular to non-canonical, literature, I have followed the two principal levels of artistic doubleness isolated by Baudelaire. In his essay on modern art, Baudelaire discusses the duality within man, and the consequent duality of man’s perception and

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representation of experience. I will start by focusing on the two poles which Baudelaire–following St. Augustine, and Pascal–locates within human nature, (“l’esprit” and the “coeur”),6 and show how those two basic human tendencies define contrasting traditions within the genre of detective fiction. Then, like Baudelaire, I will extend the notion of duality from the inner world to the outer one. Man has two opposing faculties within him (the mind and the heart), and, for detective fiction as for modern art, according to Baudelaire, there are two corresponding levels of understanding the world: for Baudelaire there is the “fini” and the “infini,”, and for mysteries there are the hard facts, and their greater significance. Human nature as well as facts along with their interpretation are key ingredients of detective fiction; as we shall see, these essential elements are fundamentally dual.

The “Heart” and the “Mind” of Detective Fiction At its origin, detective fiction involved exchanges between France, America, and England (see footnote 1). Two identifiable and contrasting trends within the genre of detective fiction crystallize around detective fiction’s engendering mélange of Anglophone and Francophone cultures. In 1927, Eliot noted a fundamental dichotomy along the genre’s bicultural lines. In his essay “Wilkie Collins and Dickens” he theorized that the novel of detection split down the middle into the French roman policier, a plot usually governed by a police officer which emphasizes the process of detection, and the English “mystery,” which would often involve a genteel amateur who delves into psyches along the way to resolving the plot’s enigma with clues, and sometimes with a bit of intuition.7 Eliot’s theory opposed Simenon’s Commissaire Maigret to Christie’s Miss Marple; Baudelaire would doubtless say that this opposition is a function of a tension between the “mind” (resulting in the roman policier) and the “heart” (engendering the “mystery”). It is an interesting cultural and historical statement that Eliot’s distinction no longer holds the line at national boundaries. The French seem to be staying within the realm of the “policeman novel” while modifying that professional tradition with elements from the “heart” side of the equation. Jean-Hugue Oppel’s Commissaire Valencia crosses conventional gender lines as a woman, and she introduces the personal sphere to the professional one by interacting with her husband and kids in the course of her investigations. The much-vaunted intuition of Fred Vargas’ Commissaire Adamsberg flies in the face of his colleagues’ less successful technical know-how. In current romans policiers, the scientific

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process of police investigations has been tempered by the human elements Eliot had associated with mysteries. In the Anglophone literature, on the other hand, “police novels” have come to dominate the traditional mystery. In England there is some nostalgia for the genteel and amateur detective. P.D. James’ Inspector Adam Dalgliesh is also a poet, and Peter Lovesy, whose book, The Last Detective, features a very prosaic police-man, dips into the mystery as an academic parlour-game in works like Thus Died Adonis. In general, however, Sherlock Holmes has been replaced by the like of Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse, a blue-collar police-man who operates on the fringes of academia in Oxford. John Harvey’s Charlie Resnick is also a working police-man. And, still in the British Isles but further North, in Scotland, Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus is one more hard-drinking officer who did not go to University. As for America, that country has always had a strong gum-shoe tradition (Hammett, Chandler), despite periods of nostalgia for the British style (Amanda Cross, Martha Grimes). And by far the strongest now writing are strongly entrenched in police detection: James Lee Burke, Michael Connelly, Faye Kellerman, Sara Paretsky, George Pelekanos. Despite the dominance of the policier tradition in French, American, and British crime fiction, it is worth emphasizing that all of these novels of detection are also heavily invested in the human element. The story behind the crime is generally well developed, and the personal lives of the detectives are usually more in the fore than was the case for many earlier versions of the genre. Maigret’s unfortunate wife was a model nonentity, for example, whereas Adamsberg’s love-life–and that of many other current heroes and heroines of detective fiction–regularly provides at least a sub-plot to the book’s major intrigue. Thus, this very cursory summary of the current scene in detective fiction suggests that the two poles of technical detection (mind) and human interest (heart) are–as Eliot surmised–inherent to the genre. And so crime novels are well-rooted in the fundamental duality Baudelaire noted within man, and within art. While the fundamental dichotomy remains, however, the two extremes Eliot and Baudelaire noticed are distributed differently throughout their two cultures of origin, and throughout the genre, as times change. The world has moved towards a greater interest in, and dependence, on technology; the social system has changed so that fewer lives are spent in genteel country houses. Concomitantly, the English tradition has moved towards the professional while maintaining its human interest. After World War II, women became more active in the work-force, and personal lives have become more exposed to the public eye. In parallel, the French tradition of police investigations has becoming increasingly feminized

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(Jean-Hugue Oppel’s Commisaire Valencia is a woman) and humanized (Commissaire Valencia goes home to discuss her children with her husband). Indeed, in Le Roman Policier ou la Modernité Jacques Dubos has theorized that a sensitivity to changing times is a defining characteristic of the genre, noting the genre’s “modernity” at its inception8 as well as now.9 And although defining the roman policier as essentially modern might seem a far cry from situating the genre’s identity within a metaphysical definition of man, in fact, detective fiction’s essential modernity is directly related to its source in human nature.

The “Finite” and the “Infinite” in Detective Fiction Again, art is dual because it reflects human nature, which is dual. And according to Baudelaire, duality is the essence of modernity. In Peintre de la Vie Moderne, an essay about modern art which critics still respect today, this is how Baudelaire, and many modern critics following him, define “la modernité”: “C’est le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent, la moitié de l’art, dont l’autre moitié est l’éternel et l’immuable” (Baudelaire 467).10 Human nature involves a thinking, rational element, and something that goes beyond the rational; along parallel lines, modern life involves the immediate, but it also involves something eternal. A closer look at the poet’s discussion of how to represent modern life will develop detective fiction’s apprehension of the outside world, and its fundamentally double nature. Baudelaire’s thesis in his seminal essay is that art should draw the “poétique” from the “historique” (Baudelaire 466); modern painting–and literature–are derived from those two contrasting elements. By “historic” Baudelaire meant the kind of quotidian life which he illustrates by discussing military parades, cars, women’s make-up, prostitutes, and current fashions. Although today’s readers are accustomed to the idea of the everyday as art–in great part due to Baudelaire’s artistic revolution, and its follower–sat the time, discussion of fashion magazines, etc., in what had traditionally been a very abstract genre, the ars poetica, was radical. In the concluding sentence of Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne, Baudelaire praises Constantin Guys, his model artist, because he portrays “les archives précieuses de la vie civilisée” (Baudelaire 501).11 Their degree of success would, of course, vary, but many writers of detective fiction make a comparable claim; although the historical mystery does exist, part of the detective fiction’s broad popular appeal is the very contemporary quality vindicated by Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne. We have already seen that the degree of emphasis on the “investigation” as

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opposed to that of “human interest” in mysteries tends to be timesensitive. Further, early examples of the genre made their claim on verisimilitude almost painfully explicit by incorporating newspapers and journalists to their narrative. Poe used newspapers both as a narrative device and as a solution to the mystery in Le Mystère de Marie Roget. Gaston Leroux’ Rouletabille (Le Mystère de la Chambre Jaune, Le Parfum de la Dame en Noir) is a journalist, and bolsters the story with regular references to newspaper articles. Thus, from early on, mysteries were presented as the real reports you might read in a newspaper. This link was reinforced, moreover, by the fact that many early stories of detection were also published in newspapers. And to this day, even when mystery writers are not self-consciously presenting themselves as reporters, the genre still exploits backdrops to make itself the “chronicler” of its time. Since Poe described the streets of Paris in the Mystère de Marie Roget, and Conan Doyle the fogs of London, readers of crime fiction have been able to situate themselves imaginatively in places they might visit: Simenon’s Quai d’Orsay, Raymond Chandler’s California, the Parisian arondissements represented by San Antonio and Fred Vargas, Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh, George Pelekanos’ Washington D.C., These works often abound with common little details of daily life: where the characters like to eat, when they do their shopping, what their city looks like in certain kinds of weather, and so on. In fact, life’s trivia is officially of the utmost importance to the genre because it is the stuff of possible clues which could lead to the resolution of the story’s mystery. And the significance of the clue leads us back to Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne, and to the particular duality of detective fiction. For Baudelaire in 1861 the ordinary and the extraordinary are two distinct and coexistent aspects of art: “La modernité, c’est le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent, la moitié de l’art, dont l’autre moitié est l’éternel et l’immuable” (Baudelaire 467).12 For Baudelaire–and he is undeniably an authority in this domain–“modernity” is not a simple matter of archiving current events. For modern art, “contingent” circumstances must always contain “eternal” significance. Most of us, according to Baudelaire, are not capable of seeing the significance of the everyday: “le fantastique réel de la vie est singulièrement émoussé” (Baudelaire 469).13 The artist, on the other hand, is capable of seeing the “fantastical” within the banal, “il en a la mémoire et les yeux pleins.”14 In order to solve the mystery, the detective, too, must see the significance of things which are often very ordinary. Clues are simple facts which contain hidden meaning, usually about a matter of life or death in a murder mystery. The narrative, the resolution, and the interest of a

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mystery are defined by the reading of clues which take the story from start to finish, from crime to dénouement. The Mystery of the Purloined Letter, for example, is solved when someone finally notices the missing letter in full view on the mantel. Miss Marple resolved enigmas by noticing such banal matters as whether milk bottles were left at a certain house on a given day. Fictional police detectives unravel mysteries by “reading” the ballistic evidence correctly, and seeing through the factual errors of alibis. Like a good artist, the successful detective sees reality clearly, but is also capable of seeing beyond reality to understand its greater meaning.

Conclusion: the Duality, Modernity, and Humanity of Detective Fiction And so, duality is a fundamental and defining trait of crime fiction. Detective fiction depends on the detective as well as the reader’s ability to perceive reality on two levels (facts and their interpretation). That double skill is a function of man’s dual faculties, those of the intuitive heart and the reasoning mind. The fundamental duality between heart and mind within human nature has defined two different traditions–roman policiers and mysteries–within the genre. The traditions emphasizing the investigation on the one hand, and the human element, on the other, change with time, establishing the genre of crime detection as quintessentially modern. Modern art is itself defined by duality, the coupling of unchanging principles with changing variables which reflect their times. And ultimately, “La dualité de l’art est une conséquence fatale de la dualité de l’homme” (Baudelaire 456).15 A divided human nature is at the core of stories of crime and passion on the one hand (the heart), detection and control on the other (the mind). Indeed, it makes as much sense to define crime fiction by the outgrowths of its underlying duality as by the duality itself. Simply put, detective novels are essentially human because of their double nature, and they are particularly modern because of their dual character. Perhaps this defining combination of modernity with humanity explains why this line of fiction is so very popular. True, mysteries are by definition a “popular” genre in the sense that they are not considered high literature. They are also a “vital” form, though, in the sense that they represent life (they spring from human nature, and they follow Baudelaire’s code for “painting modern life”), and in the sense that they are thriving. This is a genre which–with the best specimens–has the virtues of tight plots, complex character portraits, and evocative as well as current settings in an age when some critics have described modern literature as moribund.16

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Written about the drawings Constantin Guys, Baudelaire’s model artist for the essay, the last line of Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne also describes the essential vitality of the best detective fiction: “Souvent bizarre, violent, excessif, mais toujours poétique, il [Constantin Guys, Baudelaire’s model artist] a su concentrer dans ses dessins la saveur amère ou capiteuse du vin de la vie” (Baudelaire 502).17 1

Charles Baudelaire, Curiosités Esthétiques (Paris: Garnier, 1962, 1986). Baudelaire catalyzed the emergence of the genre by translating Poe into French in the 1850’s. Emile Gaboriau read Baudelaire’s translation and published L’Affaire Rouge in 1865. Arthur Conan Doyle borrowed from Gaboriau and Poe, importing the budding genre across the channel with A Study in Scarlet (1887). And so it went–Fortuney du Boisgobey took over Gaboriau’s detective, Lecoq. Maurice Leblanc inaugurated the Arsène Lupin series at the end of the 19th century; and by the beginning of the 20th century, the genre was well established. The beginning of the twentieth century saw the emergence of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, and Dorothy Sayer’s Lord Peter Wimsey in England; Simenon’s Inspector Maigret in France and Belgium; and Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled detectives across the Atlantic. For more on the history of detective fiction, see T.J. Binyon, “Murder Will Out” the detective in fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) and Julia Symon, Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History (Harmondsworth, 1974). 3 Eugène Vidocq, Mémoires (Philadelphia: T.B.Petersen and Brothers, 1859). 4 For more on Vidocq’s life, see Hadgetts, E.A. Bayley, Vidocq, A Master of Crime (London: Selwyn and Blount, 1928); and Eugène François Vidocq, Mémoires (Philadelphia: T.B. Petersen and Brothers, 1859). 5 “The particular beauty of evil.” All translations from the French are mine. 6 The “mind” and the “heart.” 7 T.S. Eliot, “Wilkie Collins and Dickens,” Selected Essays 1917-1932 (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1932), 377. 8 “C’est au croisement d’une histoire sociale et d’une histoire des lettres que s’inaugure le genre dès le Second Empire.” (The genre is inaugurated at the meeting point between social history and literary history in the Second Empire). Jacques Dubos, Le Roman Policier ou la Modernité (Editions Nathan, 1992) 8. 9 “Mais où la mobilité croissante du genre culmine, c’est dans la recherche de l’effet de surprise, de l’imprévisible, de l’inédit, et c’est là qu’il atteint au plus dense et au plus aigu de sa modernité, cette modernité qui fait de lui, aujourd’hui encore, notre exact contemporain.” (But the genre’s growing mobility culminates in the quest for surprises, the unpredictable, that which is not said, and that’s where it acheives its densest and sharpest level of modernity, that modernity which makes detective fiction our exact contemporary, even today). (Dubois 220). 10 “Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which is half of art; the other half is the eternal, the unchanging.” 2

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“The precious archives of civilized life.” “Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which is half of art; the other half is the eternal, the unchanging.” 13 “The truly fantastical quality of life is terribly flat.” 14 “His memory and eyes are full of it.” 15 “The duality of art is an inevitable consequence of the duality of man.” 16 In a way echoing Baudelaire’s concerns in Peintre de la Vie Moderne, in Can Poetry Matter (Greywolf, 1992) Dana Gioia notes that poetry has become rarified by too tight an association with academia (cf. Baudelaire’s discussion of art academies vs. the “street” art of Constantin Guys), with the result that it no longer reflects ordinary life; more than a few readers have regretted a comparable loss of vitality in the modern French novel in particular. 17 “Often bizarre, violent, excessive, but always poetic, he knew how to concentrate the bitter or heady taste of life’s wine in his drawings.” 12

CHAPTER FOURTEEN THE PLAY OF IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE IN POE’S TALES OF RATIOCINATION ILANA SHILOH

Identity is an inherently ambiguous term. It may denote either the state of being the same as someone or something, or the state of being oneself or one thing and not another. Identity thus conflates the notions of sameness and of difference. This dialectic also characterizes the concept of personal identity as delineated by Paul Ricoeur, which is contingent on four attributes: numerical identity, qualitative identity, uninterrupted continuity across time and change, and finally, permanence in time that defines sameness.1 Whereas the first two dimensions of personal identity are grounded in difference: I am one of a kind, distinct from all others, and possess a singular quality of being, the last two terms are grounded in sameness, signifying one’s continuous identity with oneself over time and change. The play of identity and difference is one of the central thematic and formal threads in Edgar Allen Poe’s detective stories. Poe is traditionally regarded as the father of detective fiction, the writer who, in the words of the genre’s first historian, Howard Haycraft, “swiftly, and in the brief compass of only three slight narratives… foretold the entire evolution of the detective romance as a literary form.”2 Two of these ‘slight narratives,’ “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) and “The Purloined Letter” (1845) have established the paradigm of the analytic detective story. This paradigm consists of two consecutive narratives, the story of the investigation and the story of the crime, the former being foregrounded at the expense of the latter. It is characterized by the figure of the brilliant and eccentric detective, accompanied by the admiring and slightly stupid foil. It contains devices such as the locked room, concealment by means of the ultra obvious, or the expansive and condescending explanation when the chase is done.3 And, above all, it is grounded in the belief that “the mind, given enough time, can understand everything.”4

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The implications of this belief are ontological as well as epistemological. The world can be explained by reason because it is based on reason. The locked room in the Rue Morgue is not really locked: the mystery is only apparent. Underneath the maze of false clues, misleading evidence and lying witnesses is a chain of events governed by a logical pattern of cause and effect. “This,” argues Holquist, “is the enabling discovery Poe makes for later authors: he is the Columbus who lays open the world of radical rationality which is where detectives have lived ever since.”5 Holquist’s assertion aptly summarizes the critical consensus about classical detective fiction, whose inception is commonly attributed to Poe. But I would like to suggest that there is a profound difference between Poe and his successors. Whereas most of the works of Arthur Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie project worlds of radical rationality, in which the chaos and senselessness associated with crime are vanquished by the exercise of the investigator’s transcendent reason, Poe’s detective tales offer a more complex and troubling vision. This complexity and ambiguity is rendered mainly through Poe’s construction and deconstruction of the notions of identity and difference. As noted by most critics, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” as well as “The Purloined Letter” are marked by doubling and correspondences. The first modern detective story is structured around three pairs of characters: Dupin and the nameless narrator, Madame L’Espanye and her daughter, and the sailor with his orang-utan. The three pairs curiously mirror each other. Each live in utter seclusion. The amateur detective and his friend voluntarily sequester themselves in a time-eaten and grotesque mansion, where they “existed within [themselves] alone.”6 Madame L’Espanye and her daughter “lived an exceedingly retired life,” employing no servants and admitting no visitors; the orang-utan was “kept carefully secluded” by its captor, the sailor.7 The physical isolation symbolically suggests their alienation, their status as voluntary or unwilling outcasts. Dupin is alienated from his milieu by his superior intellect on the one hand, and his extreme poverty on the other; the mother and daughter have alienated themselves; the sailor wanders in foreign lands, and the ape, the ultimate Other, is foreign to the entire human race. Another point of resemblance is the internal hierarchy within each pair. Dupin dominates his friend by virtue of his unquestionable brilliance; the mother dominates the daughter by virtue of kinship and age; the sailor dominates the ape by sheer power of oppression. What is the thematic significance of these structural correspondences? They seem to suggest the blurring of ethical distinctions, the reduction of

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meaningful differences into a meaningless sameness. If the investigator, the victim and the perpetrator mirror each other, the pursuit of crime is divested of moral validity. This aspect is foregrounded in “The Purloined Letter,” where the detective and the criminal, Dupin and Minister D., are presented as each other’s doubles. They are similar both in character and in deed, a similarity symbolically suggested by their denotation by the same letter D. Like the Minister, Dupin is a mathematician and a poet. Both men are gifted with analytical thought, intuition and imagination. It is this latter quality that allows for “the identification of the reasoner’s intellect with that of his opponent,”8 Poe’s dictum for criminal investigators, which has been adopted as the modus operandi by contemporary police organizations. Identification does not imply identity. It implies an initial difference, bridged by a leap of imagination. Dupin ascribes the failure of the police to the fact that “they consider only their own ideas of ingenuity; and, in searching for anything hidden, advert only to the modes in which they would have hidden it.”9 To put it simply, rather than asking “what would I have done in that situation?” the Prefect should have asked “What would I have done in that situation, had I been Minister D.?” But, in an ironic twist on the play of identity and difference, Dupin’s success comes from the same place as the Prefect’s failure. To understand the criminal, Dupin has recourse to introspection rather than to imagination. Being the Minister’s double, he solves the case precisely because he asks himself, “What would I have done in that situation?” The idea of a double, suggests Freud in his classic paper on “The Uncanny” (1919) implies the existence of two persons who are considered identical because of a striking physical resemblance.10 The appearance of a double creates an uncanny effect, because it re-activates our long discarded animistic conception of the universe, and creates ontological disorientation. Doubling counteracts our experience of the world and challenges basic categories of perception and thought. This is also the implication of the correspondence between Dupin and Minister D, and it functions to associate the mystery not only with the crime, but also with the solution. Dupin and the Minister are established as each other’s doubles by virtue of their personalities and their mirroring activities and motivations. Both employ the same means to attain similar ends. The Minister substitutes an incriminating letter of the Queen’s lover with his own facsimile, appropriating the original in order to gain ascendancy over the King. Dupin substitutes the purloined letter with his own facsimile, in order to gain ascendancy over the Minister. The purloiner of the letter

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looks for power, while the detective seeks remuneration and revenge (the Minister once did him “an evil turn” and Dupin promised to remember). Dupin’s solution of the case is not motivated by ethical concerns, by a desire to restore order or to do good in the world. He is driven by vanity and the wish to settle old personal accounts. If in “The Purloined Letter,” the recurrent motif of doubling functions mainly to obliterate the moral differentiation between detective and criminal, in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the same motif operates to subvert the distinction between human and non-human. It is worth noting that in the first modern detective story there is no actual crime. There is just senseless violence inflicted by a confused and desperate animal. The animal is both aggressor and victim. Although consistently described as a fierce, uncontrollable beast, the ape has nonetheless been brutally abused by its human master. The complicity and interchangeability between man and beast is symbolically underscored by two mirroring episodes. In the first, the starting point of the entire bloody rampage, the orang-utan shaves in front of a mirror, imitating the sailor. In the second, the ape seizes the old woman by the hair and flourishes the razor about her face, “in imitation of the motions of a barber.”11 Violence, Poe seems to suggest, does not necessarily reside in animal nature. It erupts when the animal identifies with its human masters–rather than the other way around. The customary dichotomy between human and non-human is further destabilized by the fact that the ape is the only creature capable of feeling remorse. The orang-utan, “conscious of having deserved punishment,” seems “desirous of concealing its bloody deed” and suffers “an agony of bloody agitation.”12 The obliteration of the distinction between human and animal nature is also conveyed by the imagery of splitting, the inverse of the imagery of doubling. And splitting, in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” is repeatedly conceptualized in terms of decapitation, the separation between head and body.13 The entire mystery, the locked room conundrum, is triggered by a fissured nail, in which the head was invisibly broken off the body. This is the detail that the police failed to notice and that produced the illusion of a hermetically sealed space, which could not have been entered or exited by the murderer. Likewise, the old lady’s throat was slashed by the orang-utan so that “the head [was] absolutely severed from the body.”14 And if Madame L’Espanye remains all body and no head, the Prefect is, in the final account, “all head and no body.”15 That is why he fails. Paradoxically, in Poe’s tales of ratiocination the traditional hierarchy between head and body is implicitly inverted. If the head is the metonymy

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for reason and the body represents irrationality, these distinctions do not overlap with the division between the human and non-human. Thus the ape reaches the highest frenzy of bestiality when identifying with its human master, and Dupin attains the quintessence of humanity by giving free reign to his irrational nature. Dupin’s feats of deductive brilliance begin with a trance-like state, in which he gives the impression of a lunatic; the Espanye neighbors mistake the cries of the ape for those of a lunatic; and the Prefect erroneously takes the Minister for a fool because he (correctly) believes that all fools are poets. In all three instances irrational nature is likened to madness, and madness establishes an invisible link between detectives, poets and raving orang-utans. Irrationality verges on madness, but it is also inextricably bound with ratiocination. It is the creative component of Dupin’s “Bi-Part Soul,” the domain of imagination, intuition and insight. If the success of the deductive process is contingent on “the identification of the reasoner’s intellect with that of his opponent,” it is ultimately contingent on a leap of the imagination that has nothing to do with reason. Poe’s genius resides in the fact that he accurately assessed what modern psychology would empirically prove: the role of creativity in problem solving. He also realized that “mathematical axioms are not axioms of general truth,” and that mathematical logic is different from the logic of the human psyche: “for two motives, each of a given value, have not, necessarily, a value when united, equal to the whole.”16 The persistent imagery of splitting, of decapitation, thus functions to ironically subvert the false dichotomy between body and head. It has also another role: to question the very notion of identity. If doubling suggests that two separate entities are one, if it reduces differences to sameness, then splitting performs the inverse operation, transforming identity into difference. The most famous instance of this transformation is of course the purloined letter, a fictional object that has become the focus of postmodernist critical discourse, igniting a heated debate between Lacan, Derrida, and Barbara Johnson, among others.17 In Poe’s narrative, in the course of the letter’s circulation, it is substituted, stolen, crumpled, folded and refolded, substituted again and retrieved. Its precise contents are never revealed. And because we do not know its contents, i.e. its qualitative identity, we cannot determine its continuity and permanence over time; for all we (and Dupin) know, he may have retrieved a different letter. The folding and substitution produce a chain of multiple replications, and thus problematize numerical identity and question the concepts of uniqueness and originality. The letter seems to be telling us that identity is a false category, a circulating, shifting signifier.

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The oscillation of identity and difference undermines the foundation of logical deduction. Logical deduction is based on syllogisms, in which a conclusion inevitably follows from two valid premises. As Dupin elegantly puts it, “the deductions are the sole proper ones and … the suspicion arises inevitably from them as a single result.”18 In the theoretical constructs of ratiocination there is no place for ambiguity, fluidity or multiplicity. But ambiguity and fluidity underpin both phenomenal and psychological reality, as Dupin and his creator well knew. Poe’s relevance and appeal, in postmodernist discourse, reside in the fact that in his detective tales he simultaneously constructs a world of radical rationality, and deconstructs it through the play of identity and difference. 1

Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) 115-17. 2 Howard Haycraft, Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story (New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1941) 11. 3 Tzvetan Todorov, “The Typology of Detective Fiction,” ed. David Lodge, Modern Criticism and Theory (New York: Longman, 1993) 157-65. 4 Michael Holquist, “Whodunit and Other Questions,” The Poetics of Murder, ed. Glenn W. Moss and William W. Stowe, The Poetics of Murder (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983) 157. 5 Holquist 157. 6 Edgar Allan Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Illustrated Stories and Poems, (London: Chancellor Press, 1994) 78. 7 Poe 82, 97 respectively. 8 Poe, “The Purloined Letter,” The Complete Illustrated Stories and Poems 326. 9 Poe 327. 10 Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” On Creativity and the Unconscious, trans. Joan Rivière (New York: Harper and Row, 1958) 140. 11 Poe 101. 12 Poe 101. 13 John T. Irwin, “The Battle of Wits between Writer and Reader; A Clue to a Clew; The Coding of Head and Body; Dupin’s Doubleness,” The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges and the Analytic Detective Story (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994) 197. 14 Poe 93. 15 Poe 101 16 Poe 328. 17 John P. Muller and William J. Richardson, ed., The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida and Psychoanalytic Reading (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). In this volume see, for example, Jacques Lacan “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,” trans. Jeffrey Mehlman 28-54, Jacques Derrida, “The Purveyor

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of Truth,” trans. Alan Bass 173-213, Barbara Johnson, “The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida” 213-251. 18 Poe 89.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN ASSUMED IDENTITY: AGATHA CHRISTIE’S NOVELS ADAPTED FOR THE STAGE BEATRIX HESSE

Even after Agatha Christie’s death in 1976, her oeuvre has continued to grow; not because any of her works happened to be discovered posthumously, but because other authors have added books to the canon by novelizing original plays by Christie or by dramatizing her novels. The resulting novels and plays are invariably marketed under Christie’s name: the frontispiece of the 1981 play Cards on the Table1 for instance reads: “Agatha Christie’s Cards on the Table–Adapted for the Stage by Leslie Darbon”. However, it is not with questions of authorship that I will concern myself here; what is just as intriguing is the fact that novel and play are considered as virtually identical–the play is not regarded as a separate work but merely as Christie’s novel put on the stage. This supposed “identity” between a novel and its stage adaptation is of course illusory, as a comparison between any narrative text and its dramatization will quickly show. In the following, I will stick to the example of Christie adaptations, largely for convenience, since her novels have been adapted for the stage very frequently. However, my observations also apply to the dramatization of detective fiction in general. One major problem facing an adaptor of detective fiction for the stage is the immediacy of drama, that is, the absence of a narrative instance. Although twentieth-century dramatists have experimented with the introduction of a narrator figure on stage–for instance Thornton Wilder in Our Town and Arthur Miller in Death of a Salesman–this device never became particularly popular, because it is clearly at odds with the demands of stage naturalism as represented by the conventions of the well-made play. The twentieth-century crime play has largely conformed to these conventions, thereby not only imitating detective fiction, which has always tended to strive for some kind of “realism”, but also adapting itself to the general staging conditions in English theatres. Due to a

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predominance of proscenium stages (often of very little depth) and a general lack of technical equipment that would allow quick set changes, the English theatre has produced an apparently interminable series of plays set in drawing-rooms–many of which actually were crime plays, such as Frederick Lonsdale’s The Last of Mrs Cheyney2 and Patrick Hamilton’s Gaslight3. By the time changes in theatre architecture permitted the staging of “memory plays” that move freely in time and space, the adapted crime play was practically extinct. While the use of narrative perspective thus becomes almost impossible on stage, it is of major importance in detective fiction. Although detective fiction has traditionally prided itself of the “invisibility” of its narrative technique, it has also strongly relied on the manipulation of narrative perspective to achieve its effects–as usual in detective fiction, anything that is not seen assumes particular importance. It may even be argued that as a genre detective fiction is largely concerned with the process of mediation, since the central event of the plot, the crime, is by definition absent from the text and may only be approached by means of clues or via the testimony of witnesses. Hence, detective fiction–for all its supposed conventionality–has produced several novels with an experimental narrative technique, for instance Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone and Dorothy Sayers’ The Documents in the Case. The way narrative perspective operates in detective fiction has been lucidly explained by Peter Hühn: The plot of the classical detective novel comprises two basically separate stories–the story of the crime (which consists of action) and the story of the investigation (which is concerned with knowledge). In their narrative presentation, however, the two stories are intertwined. The first story (the crime) happened in the past and is–insofar as it is hidden–absent from the present; the second story (the investigation) happens in the present and consists of uncovering the first story. […] Conventionally, the coupling of these two stories is presented to the reader in a specifically involved manner (invented by Poe and standardized by Conan Doyle). Employing Gérard Genette’s and Seymour Chatman’s distinction between story and discourse, one can define the narrative organization of a classical detective novel as follows. The usual constellation of story and discourse (the abstractable preexistent sequence of events and acts versus its mediation in narrative) occurs twice over: the story of the crime is mediated in the discourse of the detective’s investigation; and the story of the detective’s investigation, in its turn, is mediated in the narrator’s discourse (for instance in Dr. Watson’s uninformed written account of Holmes’s detection). In both cases the story is hidden for the most part so

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that the reader is doubly puzzled–trying to make out the mysterious crime story by way of the almost equally mystifying detection story.4

As the reference to Holmes and Watson shows, Hühn is referring mainly to detective fiction that makes use of the device uncharitably called “the idiot friend” by Christie. Christie’s most daring variation of the device of the idiot friend occurs in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, in which she made her Watson-character the culprit. Readers were infuriated by the supposed “unfairness” of this trick, since they had automatically considered the first-person narrator exempt from suspicion. Robert Barnard describes the novel’s initial reception: Arguments raged, friends fell out, and the newspaper columns vied with each other in giving the book gratifying publicity. The air was rent with cries of ‘foul,’ ‘unfair,’ and ‘cheat,’ enunciated with a degree of passion which only a nation of sportsmen can muster.5

What Christie had done was the violation of a convention summed up by Father Knox in his “Detective Story Decalogue” thus: “The criminal […] must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.”6 Readers exclude the actual culprit from suspicion not on the basis of the logic of the plot, but on the basis of the conventions of the genre. This device obviously could not be transferred to the stage version. When Michael Morton adapted The Murder of Roger Ackroyd for the stage, he could no longer count on audiences automatically discounting the novel’s narrator as a possible culprit–Christie’s main device of deception had got lost in the transfer to the stage. The sole reason the murderer does not immediately come under suspicion in the stage play is his apparently watertight alibi–and appropriately, Morton rechristened the play “Alibi”. In Arnold Ridley’s stage adaptation of Christie’s Peril at End House, the superfluity of the Watson character, who is after all but a narrative device, is very obvious. In this novel, the “idiot friend” is Poirot’s usual Watson, Captain Hastings. Since in the transfer to the stage, Hastings loses his function of narrator, Ridley allots him the new function of “straight man” in the traditional comedy couple of clown and stooge. For instance, at several points in the play, Poirot credits Hastings with improbable specialist knowledge in order to effect an entrance, making Hastings suffer all the embarrassment of the victim of a practical joke. One example shall suffice: after Hastings has introduced Poirot to their new client, Miss Nick Buckley, Poirot bestows much praise on himself, remarking at the same time how much more agreeable it would have been had Hastings praised

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him: “One does not keep the dog and bark oneself.”7 This joke is taken straight from the novel, but there it is Nick who is speaking: ‘One should not keep a dog and have to bark oneself’, agreed Nick with mock sympathy. ‘Who is the dog, by the way? Dr. Watson, I presume.’8

In the novel, this remark is intended to demonstrate Nick’s flippant conversational style, while in the play, it serves to turn Poirot and Hastings into a comic double-act. Even without the presence of an “idiot friend”, the absence of narrative perspective is sometimes keenly felt in the stage adaptations of Christie’s novels, particularly in the last dramatization she ever wrote: Go Back for Murder, based on her novel Five Little Pigs, in which Poirot investigates a murder committed 16 years ago. The murder victim is a modern painter, and in Book II of her novel, Christie introduces an experiment in narrative technique clearly indebted to modern painting, more precisely, to the theories of Cubism. As Cubism attempts to render three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional canvas by showing the same object from different perspectives at once, Christie shows the same sequence of events from five different perspectives: each of the five suspects writes a report of the crucial period preceding the murder. It is the combination of the various limited subjective accounts that allows the ordering intelligence of the detective to arrive at objective truth. Due to its retrospective plot interest and experimental narrative technique, Five Little Pigs is particularly difficult to adapt for the stage. Eventually, in the play version, Christie chose to present the material of Book II in the form of an extended flashback. The flashback is announced in the following manner: one of the witnesses, Meredith, begins to relate his version of the events of 16 years ago. As he is speaking, the lights go off, Meredith’s voice is heard in the dark, and when the lights come on again, it is 16 years ago, with Meredith (as his younger self) just arriving on the scene of the crime. The way the flashback is introduced suggests to the audience that the flashback is meant to be an illustration of Meredith’s speech. However, after a short conversation, Meredith exits, while the flashback continues. Accordingly, the audience must now suppose that the flashback does not illustrate Meredith’s testimony but is intended to show what really happened 16 years ago. It is only after the end of the flashback that Justin Fogg, the functional detective in charge of the case, points to certain inconsistencies in the flashback, which only then is revealed to be a collated version of the narratives of the various suspects. In contrast to the novel version, the audience is not in a position to disentangle the various

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witnesses’ testimonies. Therefore, Justin alone can solve the case, which he does by proving that one of the suspects misrepresented a conversation she overheard. A second, shorter, flashback follows, which shows the conversation as it really took place–this flashback, however, is obviously intended as an illustration of Justin’s speech. Thus, the device of the flashback serves different functions in the course of the play, and an audience can hardly be blamed if they fail to allot the correct ontological status to the respective instances: Is it an illustration of speech, of individual memory, of collective memory, or of the Past? Go Back for Murder no longer keeps up the pretence that the spectators might have solved the mystery by themselves. This is a violation of the “fair play rule” applying to classical detective fiction; and the drama critic of the Daily Mail accordingly complained: “I felt cheated by this one.”9 As will have been noticed, Agatha Christie removed Hercule Poirot when she adapted Five Little Pigs for the stage and replaced him by the somewhat less colourful character of Justin Fogg. Go Back for Murder is not the only play in which she did so: in all of her stage versions of Poirot novels, the Great Detective is conspicuous by his absence and has invariably been substituted by another functional detective. In Appointment with Death, for instance, the investigation is carried out by Dr. Sarah King, and in Murder on the Nile (Christie’s stage version of her novel Death on the Nile) by Father Borrowdale, the guardian of the murdered woman. Both Dr. King and Father Borrowdale have a definite stake in the case and hence double as potential suspects. This device may be accounted for by an attempt to reduce cast size; however, Marvin Carlson has pointed out that the stage crime play in general is characterized by a blurring of the basic actantial roles of detective, victim, and culprit.10 There has been a great deal of speculation as to why Christie chose to remove her most famous creation from the stage versions of her novels. It has variously been argued that she thought Poirot too overwhelming a personality on stage, that he was all too clearly revealed as nothing but a mixed bag of mannerisms, and that she had never seen him cast satisfactorily. A comparison between the novels and their respective stage versions, however, shows that in the stage plays, the amount of actual detection going on is severely reduced. Obviously a character sitting in an armchair exercising his “little grey cells” is not a very arresting spectacle. Therefore, I would claim that there is nothing inherently wrong with the character of Poirot as a stage detective; the fundamental issue is the function of the detective on stage. And here we are approaching the

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second major problem for the adaptor: the different poetics applying to detective fiction and the crime play. In literary criticism, the crime play as a genre has so far been largely neglected, and it has usually been tacitly assumed that it conforms to the same conventions as detective fiction. An analysis of some 300 twentiethcentury crime plays, however, has revealed this assumption to be patently untrue–in several respects, the crime play substantially departs from the conventions of detective fiction.11 In particular, the crime play as a genre differs from the detective novel in the following ways: x The crime play tends to focus on the character of the criminal rather than on the character of the detective. x While detective fiction heads towards a surprise revelation at the end, the crime play is more concerned with creating maximum suspense in the course of the action. x While the detective novel is mainly interested in Knowledge, the crime play is more concerned with Emotion. The reduced status of the detective is clearly in evidence in Christie’s policy of replacing Poirot by minor detectives, while the crime play’s focus on the villain is best demonstrated by the stage version of Appointment with Death, where Christie even changed the identity of her murderer in order to make the central villainess the culprit. The basic difference between the creation of surprise and suspense has been very persuasively pointed out by Alfred Hitchcock in the famous Truffaut interview. There is a distinct difference between ‘suspense’ and ‘surprise,’ and yet many pictures continually confuse the two. I’ll explain what I mean. We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let us suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, ‘Boom!’ There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware that the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions this same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: ‘You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There’s

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a bomb beneath you and it’s about to explode!’ In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed.12

A particularly good example of replacing surprise by suspense occurs in Christie’s dramatization of her novel The Hollow. The initial situation in the novel and the play version is the same: The murderess is trying to poison her accomplice. In the novel version, this murder attempt comes as a complete surprise, as the following quotation will show. “You should not drink that tea,” said Poirot, taking the cup from her [Henrietta] and replacing it on the tray. “Tea that has not been made with boiling water is not good to drink.” “Does a little thing like boiling water really matter?” Poirot said gently: “Everything matters.” There was a sound behind him and Gerda came into the room. […] Gerda lifted a teacup and drank. […] Gerda leaned back in her chair. Her lips were very blue. She said stiffly: “I feel – not very well – if John – John –” Poirot came round the table to her and eased her sideways down in the chair. Her head dropped forward. He bent and lifted her eyelid. Then he straightened up. “An easy and comparatively painless death.” Henrietta stared at him. “Heart? No,” her mind leaped forward. “Something in the tea. Something she put there herself. She chose that way out?” Poirot shook his head gently. “Oh, no, it was meant for you. It was in your teacup.”13

In the play, the fifteen seconds of surprise are replaced by–not quite fifteen, but perhaps five–minutes of suspense. Here, the audience is allowed to watch the murderess poisoning her accomplice’s drink–but so does the intended victim, and in the ensuing scene, the accomplice tries to avoid drinking her tea, while the murderess attempts to force it on her. Inspector Colquhoun, the play’s Poirot replacement, arrives and hands the hysterical culprit the poisoned drink by mistake. HENRIETTA. (Rising) I’ll go and get the tea. (She crosses and exits Left. GERDA looks cunningly towards the door Left, rises, moves to the drinks table, takes a small poison bottle out of her handbag and stretches out her hand towards HENRIETTA’s glass. She pauses, takes a handkerchief from her handbag and lifts the glass with it. HENRIETTA re-enters quietly Left. She carries a tray of tea. GERDA, with her back to HENRIETTA, is unaware of the entry. As HENRIETTA watches, GERDA tips the contents of the poison bottle into HENRIETTA’s glass, then replaces the bottle and handkerchief in her handbag. HENRIETTA quietly

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CHAPTER FIFTEEN exits. GERDA turns, moves below the sofa and sits. HENRIETTA re-enters, crosses to the coffee table and puts the tray on it.) Here’s your tea, Gerda. GERDA. Thank you so much, Henrietta. HENRIETTA. (Moving to the drinks table) Now, where’s my drink? (She picks up her glass.) GERDA. (Pouring milk into the cup) This is just what I wanted. You are very good to me, Henrietta. HENRIETTA. (Moving slowly down Right.) Shall I have this? Or shall I have a cup of tea with you? GERDA. (Pouring the tea, cunningly) You don’t really like tea, do you, Henrietta? HENRIETTA. (Sharply) I think, today, I prefer it. (She puts her glass on the coffee table and crosses to the door Left.) I’ll go and get another cup. (She exits Left. GERDA frowns with annoyance, and rises. She looks around, sees the revolver on the mantelpiece, glances at the door Left, then runs to the mantelpiece and picks up the revolver. She examines it, notes that it is loaded, nods with satisfaction and utters a little sob. The INSPECTOR enters down Right.)[…] (GERDA sobs hysterically. The INSPECTOR crosses to the coffee table, picks up HENRIETTA’s glass, sniffs it, takes it to GERDA and hands it to her. GERDA, not noticing what it is, drinks the contents of the glass. After a few moments, she rises, staggers and crosses below the sofa. As she starts to fall the INSPECTOR crosses to her and lowers her on to the sofa. HENRIETTA enters Left. She carries a cup and saucer. She crosses hurriedly to Left of the sofa, kneeling and putting the cup and saucer on the coffee table, as the INSPECTOR takes the empty glass from GERDA.) HENRIETTA. Gerda, Gerda. (She sees the glass. To the INSPECTOR) Did you–did you give her that? INSPECTOR. Why, what was in it? HENRIETTA. She put something in it–out of her bag. (The INSPECTOR picks up GERDA’s handbag, opens it and takes out the poison bottle.) INSPECTOR. (Reading the label) I wonder how she got hold of that? (He feels GERDA’s pulse, then shakes his head.) So–she’s killed herself. HENRIETTA. (Rising and crossing to Right) No, it was meant for me.14

The above scene is an almost perfect illustration of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s definition of what constitutes dramatic dialogue: If I merely show two people sitting together and drinking coffee while they talk about the weather, politics or the latest fashions, then I provide neither a dramatic situation nor dramatic dialogue, no matter how clever their talk. Some other ingredient must be added to their conversation, something to add pique, drama, double meaning. If the audience knows that there is some poison in one of the coffee cups, or perhaps even in both, so that the conversation is really one between two poisoners, then

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this little coffee-for-two idyll becomes through this artistic device a dramatic situation, out of which and on the basis of which dramatic dialogue can develop.15

The last point, the triumph of head over heart in detective fiction and of heart over head in the crime play, is best exemplified by the two different endings of Ten Little Niggers. The novel ends with a letter of confession in which the criminal solves what has so far seemed an insoluble mystery. Both the final revelation of the mystery and the obsession with “insoluble problems” are specific preoccupations of the detective novel. In the play version, by contrast, the insoluble problem of in what order the ten dead bodies on a desert island came to die is replaced by a happy ending: two of the characters (fortunately a man and a woman) turn out to be innocent; they survive the ordeal, fall in love and get married, in accordance with the alternative ending of the nursery rhyme of the “Ten Little Niggers”: “We got married–and then there were none!” While the advisability of introducing a love interest into a detective novel has been widely contested, some kind of romantic interest is evidently thought indispensable in a stage play. A famous anecdote has it that when William Gillette adapted the Sherlock Holmes story “A Scandal in Bohemia” for the stage, he desperately cabled to Conan Doyle “May I marry Holmes?” and obtained the author’s permission. Since Gillette’s Sherlock Holmes, the typical crime play ending shows a couple locked in an embrace. I have concentrated on the most striking differences between Christie’s novels and their stage adaptations. Other instances might be added at will– however, the above examples already show that, apart from inevitable changes between novel and drama caused by the spatial confinement and absence of narrative mediation on stage, dramatizations tend to introduce unnecessary innovations, including additional humour, a boiling-down of the actual investigation process and occasional substantial plot changes down to the identity of the actual culprit. The above examples also reveal the different aesthetic agendas of detective novel and crime play: while the detective novel strives to arouse intellectual curiosity, the crime play aims at creating maximum emotion, a state of intense suspense thrown into relief by an added love interest. The identity of the adaptor is of minor importance for the faithfulness of the adaptation–Christie herself was far more daring and innovative in the dramatization of her own works than her most recent adaptor, Leslie Darbon. Darbon’s attempt to stick rather closely to the original novels proves that Christie had already assumed the status of a cultural icon by the late 1970s. Yet it would be a mistake to assume that any of Christie’s novels and their respective stage adaptations

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are absolutely identical–calling A Murder Is Announced and Cards on the Table plays by Agatha Christie eventually turns out to be nothing but a clever marketing ploy.

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Appendix: A Chronology of Plays Adapted from Christie Michael Morton, Alibi, Prince of Wales’s, 15 May 1928 (London: French, 1929); source: novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (London: Collins, 1926). Frank Vosper, Love from a Stranger, Wyndham’s, 2 February 1936 (London: Collins, 1936); source: short story “Philomel Cottage” (in: The Listerdale Mystery, London: Collins, 1934). Arnold Ridley, Peril at End House, Vaudeville, 1 May 1940 (London: French, 1945); source: novel Peril at End House (London: Collins, 1932). Agatha Christie, Ten Little Niggers, St. James’s, 17 November 1943 (London: French, 1944); source: novel Ten Little Niggers (London: Collins, 1939). Agatha Christie, Appointment with Death, Piccadilly, 31 March 1945 (London: French, 1956); source: novel Appointment with Death (London: Collins, 1938). Agatha Christie, Murder on the Nile, Ambassador’s, 19 March 1946 (London: French, 1948); source: novel Death on the Nile (London: Collins, 1937). Moie Charles and Barbara Toy, Murder at the Vicarage, Playhouse, 14 December 1949 (London: French, 1950); source: novel The Murder at the Vicarage (London: Collins, 1930). Agatha Christie, The Hollow, Fortune, 7 June 1951(London: French, 1952); source: novel The Hollow (London: Collins, 1946). Agatha Christie, The Mousetrap, Ambassadors, 25 November 1952 (London: French, 1956); sources: radio play Three Blind Mice and novella “Three Blind Mice” (in: Three Blind Mice and Other Stories, New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1950). Agatha Christie, Witness for the Prosecution, Winter Garden, 28 October 1953 (New York: French, 1954); source: short story “The Witness for the Prosecution” (in: The Hound of Death and Other Stories, London: Collins, 1933). Agatha Christie and Gerald Verner, Towards Zero, St. James’s, 4 September 1956 (London: French, 1958); source: novel Towards Zero (London: Collins, 1944). Agatha Christie, Go Back for Murder, Duchess, 23 March 1960 (London: French, 1960); source: novel Five Little Pigs (London: Collins, 1942). Leslie Darbon, A Murder Is Announced, Vaudeville, 21 September 1977 (London: French, 1978); source: novel A Murder Is Announced (London: Collins, 1950). Leslie Darbon, Cards on the Table, Vaudeville, 9 December 1981(London: French, 1982); source: novel Cards on the Table (London: Collins, 1936).

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Published by Samuel French in 1982. For the bibliographical data of the Christie plays see appendix. 2 London: Collins, 1925. 3 London: Constable, 1939. 4 Peter Hühn, “The Detective as Reader: Narrativity and Reading Concepts in Detective Fiction,” Modern Fiction Studies 33:3 (Autumn 1987), 451-66, 452. 5 Robert Barnard, A Talent to Deceive: An Appreciation of Agatha Christie (New York: Dodd, 1980) 37. 6 Ronald Knox, “A Detective Story Decalogue,” ed. Robin W. Winks, Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays (Woodstock: Foul Play Press, 1988) 200202, 200. 7 Arnold Ridley, Peril at End House (New York and London: French, 1945) 26. 8 Agatha Christie, Peril at End House (London: Collins, 1932) 21. 9 Quoted from Charles Osborne, The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie (London: Collins, 1982) 130. 10 See Marvin Carlson, Deathtraps: The Postmodern Comedy Thriller (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993) 49. 11 A more extensive study of the twentieth-century crime play as a genre is currently in preparation. 12 François Truffaut with the collaboration of Helen Scott, Hitchcock – Revised Edition (London: Paladin Grafton Books, 1986) 91. 13 Agatha Christie, The Hollow (London: Pan, 1952) 181f. 14 Agatha Christie, The Hollow, in: The Mousetrap and Selected Plays (London: HarperCollins, 1994) 173-283 15 Friedrich Dürrenmatt, “Problems of the Theatre,” James L. Calderwood and Harold E. Toliver, eds., Perspectives on Drama (New York: Oxford UP, 1968) 2548, 35f.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN UNCANNY IDENTITIES IN ABE KƿBƿ’S THE RUINED MAP BRUCE WILLARD ESPLIN AND GREGORY THEREL ESPLIN

One of detective fiction’s distinctive features is the genre’s capacity to test the limits of societal boundaries. Be they the thin lines between criminal and cop, brutality and justice, or civility and barbarism, the appeal of detective fiction lies in its unfettered exploration of these boundaries within the speculative realm of fiction. While much enjoyment can assuredly be gained by the detective novel’s affirmation of societal order and its cogent rendering of the complex schematics of civil justice, surely another pleasurable aspect of the genre resides in the transgression of these boundaries. Typically, the reader derives this kind of pleasure, perhaps cathartic or vicarious, from the deviant behavior of the criminal. Yet transgression is not merely limited to the criminal side of the law. A common trope sees the investigator attempting to outsmart his quarry by duplicating criminal thought patterns. Equally prevalent is the darker, more sinister theme of corrupt justice as the detective takes on the very criminal behavior–sometimes even surpassing it–that of the criminal he is tracking. A third, related theme is the detective’s loss of psychic distance from his prey, sometimes to the point that he begins to sympathize, identify, or even bond with his target.1 This negotiation of the precarious boundary between the civil and the criminal is a vital element of detective fiction’s appeal. Yet what if the detective’s investigation were to involve an even greater disintegration of psychic boundaries: that is, to the point that the act of investigation would lead, not to a rational resolution of the central mystery, but to an existential crisis in the detective himself? Such is the premise of Abe Kǀbǀ’s The Ruined Map in which the protagonist comes to question his own fragile identity.2

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Published in 1967, The Ruined Map is narrated in the first person by a nameless detective hired to investigate the disappearance of sales executive Nemuro Hiyoshi. The executive’s wife, Haru, is unable to provide any substantial clues or possible explanation for her husband’s disappearance, requiring the detective to piece together Nemuro’s life with objects found in his clothes. The detective’s strongest link to Nemuro is through Haru’s younger brother, who is also looking for the missing executive. But when the brother is killed in a quarrel, the detective begins to question whether the missing man is not, in fact, himself. The Ruined Map occupies a curious space within the genre of detective fiction. With a private detective as protagonist and a standard plot of investigation, the novel seems, at first glance, a straightforward roman policier. Yet, closer investigation reveals more: Abe’s blending of Japanese and western gothic traditions in detective fiction plays to genre familiarity while simultaneously transcending it. Although only recently becoming known in the international imagination with the advent of “J-Horror,” owing largely to the success of films like Ringu (1998), the gothic has long been a prominent feature of Japanese fiction and folklore in general.3 One basis of the modern gothic in Japan can be found in kaidan, ghost stories both written and performed orally as a popular form of entertainment throughout the Edo period.4 With the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and its attendant era of renewed contact with the West, new literary, scientific, and philosophic ideas would come to greatly influence Japanese writers. Particularly influential in the realm of the supernatural and gothic was Edgar Allan Poe, who tremendously influenced Abe, as well as Hirai Tarǀ, who took his pen name as the Japanese formulation of “Edgar Allan Poe,” “Edogawa Rampo.”5 Abe, then, had two rich traditions to draw from. In addition to these external influences, already a feature of Japanese cultural production by the time of Abe’s writing in post-war Japan, the Japanese colonial enterprise would provide Abe with an even more significant perspective from which to reflect on his identity, as well as on conflicted themes of group and individual subjectivities in his writing. Growing up in the Japanese puppet state of Manchuria, in modern northeast China, Abe found himself living on the fringes of Japan, both geographically and culturally. Although founded on rhetoric of pan-Asian brotherhood, Manchuria was rather a creation of Japanese imperialism, a fact which betrayed such egalitarian idealism. Identifying both as Manchurian and Japanese, Abe came to understand what Timothy Iles describes as the, “duality of his citizenship as a colonial Japanese, or citizen of the world.”6 Abe’s complex subject position thus challenged

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establishment definitions of what it meant to be Japanese. In The Ruined Map Abe takes the disruption of subjectivity even further, to the point of the destruction of the ego itself. The confused investigator frames the metaphysical problem of identity as he comes to suspect himself as the culprit. Here, Abe is most concerned with questioning the metaphysical foundational of identity, the atomized conception of the Self, a formation seemingly crystallized since the Meiji era I-novel. Rather than investigating sexuality or national identity, he pursues identity to its roots, these being contingent on the very existence of a basic version of subjectivity that would provide a meaningful sort of distinction between the self and the Other. In suggesting a more ambiguous, complex conception of identity, he employs the figure of the Doppelgänger, a trope commonly found in both the gothic fiction of the West and the Japanese context. A prime example of the latter is Edogawa Rampo’s short story, “The Twins,” where a man murders his identical twin brother in order to impersonate him and enjoy the trappings of his material success.7 In Abe’s The Ruined Map the double manifests itself, as the private investigator comes to take on the identity of the missing individual he is pursuing. Abe employs the detective genre in a thoroughly postmodern manner. By the narrator’s involvement in the case as the inquirer, he implicates himself into the situation that he seeks to investigate. Slavoj Žižek makes this distinction between the postmodern detective narrative and the variety that conforms to the sensibility of modernism, based on contrasting epistemological assumptions. In traditional detective narratives, the investigator conceptually reconstructs the crime after closely scrutinizing physical evidence, interrogating suspects, and applying his substantial analytical capabilities to the situation, the paradigmatic case here being Sherlock Holmes. The modernist detective retains his independent status as an objective observer, not implicated in that which he investigates. In contrast, Žižek suggests, the postmodern, “hard-boiled” detective finds that his investigation is altered by his own presence, that he shapes what he observes.8 In other words, the essential difference between these two models is that the postmodern detective comes to understand that he cannot simply solve the crime without becoming involved himself in the same events. Such a detective cannot find the truth without in some respect affecting the outcome. With the modernist detective, on the other hand, the reality he discerns behind the suspect’s illusions is in no way shaped by his investigation. Another, equally skilled detective, would discover the identical facts that make up the case.

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With the postmodern detective story, though, the particularities of the detective determine that which is discovered. It sometimes happens that the detective comes to discover he is actually responsible for the very crime he has been investigating, because of his involvement in altering the nature of the world through his attempt to discover the truth. This occurs in The Ruined Map when the detective comes to fully identify with the missing man he has been hired to locate and to take on his identity. This plot device injects a tragic irony as it is precisely the investigator’s zeal for catching his prey that leads to his own demise.9 One can identify an earlier example of such reversal in the tragedy of Oedipus, who vows to seek revenge on the man who killed his father only to discover that it is he, who is that man.10 Aristotle, in the Poetics, defines tragedies that include “reversal” and/or “discovery” as “complex plots” opposed to “simple” ones (1452a).11 This dramatic reversal of identity that Aristotle associates with such complex forms of tragedy in the Poetics is evident in Abe’s The Ruined Map. Also, the shift of identity in Abe’s novel that retrospectively bestows irony on the inquirer’s efforts represents something similar to Aristotle’s notion of dramatic “discovery” and its accompanying “reversal of future” that emerge out of a “probable or necessary sequences of events” (1452a23).12 Again, along these lines, Abe demonstrate how the detective’s act of investigation is not distinct from that which he seeks to find. While at the beginning of the novel the detective-protagonist has been hired to locate Nemuro, but only has a few physical objects to go on: a matchbook embossed with the name of a café and a scrap of newspaper. By the end of the novel, it becomes apparent that the significance of the clues was only constructed by the investigator himself. Having no causal correspondence to any events leading to the man’s disappearance, the clues, merely false ones that lead the detective astray, signify only what meaning he imposes on them. In this way the title of Abe’s novel is significant. The map–the correspondence between signifier and signified– was always ruined; or, to be more precise, the map denotes nothing save what its reader projects. More than merely this failure of representation, though, seems to haunt our detective; rather, the fundamental anxiety confronting him lies in the odd sense of familiarity accompanying him during the investigation. His confusion about his own identity with the missing man is not unrelated to his increasing episodes of déjà vu and the uncanny. In one telling passage, the detective worries: In the final analysis, supposing that this sensation of familiarity was actually not really memory, supposing it was merely the false sense of déjà

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vu disguised as memory, then even conclusion that I was now on my way home became similarly merely a pretext for rationalizing this feeling of déjà vu. If that were true, my very self would be open to doubt, something I could not call me.13

This strange conjunction of the familiar with the unfamiliar here brings to mind Freud’s essay of the “Uncanny,” the Unheimlich.14 In his discussion of the etymology of the word, he notes that Heimlich, the German Heim relating to home, familiarity, and intimacy, is not entirely unrelated to Unheimlich. As Freud writes: Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of Heimlich.”15

While this complex sentiment prevails as the novel progresses, another aspect of Freud’s formulation of the concept has importance. Following Freud’s exploration of the ambiguity surrounding the meaning of the word “uncanny” is the phenomenon of the double, citing the work of Otto Rank and drawing upon E.T.A. Hoffmann’s fiction as an example of the phenomenon. In describing the figure of the double in Hoffmann’s The Devil’s Elixir, Freud writes the following description that could easily be claimed for the detective in The Ruined Map: The subject identifies himself with someone else, so that he is in doubt as to which his self is, or substitutes the extraneous self for his own. In other words, there is a doubling, dividing, and interchanging of the self.16

Abe’s detective undergoes such a crisis of identity by adopting Nemuro’s subjective position, occupying the same places he once did, interacting with the same people and so on. As the detective’s identity merges, it ultimately corresponds to the man, whom he as been hired to locate. This loss of the self is an uncanny one. Terrifying to be sure, it also seems inviting, attractively familiar. For the detective, at least, it may be that his collapse into Nemuro’s identity represents something not entirely undesirable, as previously in the novel he has demonstrated an interest in escaping the boundaries of his subjectivity. In a telling passage, the detective describes his affinity, shared, incidentally, with the pursued man, for driving the motorways and for the blurring of his identify offered by the speed of automotive propulsion: I was immersed to my very core in noise, but I heard nothing; it was if I were in a great silence. All I could see was the concrete road running

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The notion, that one cannot be seen, represented, mapped when the self is suspended, holds strong appeal. At the time of the novel’s appearance, the influence of existentialism was just beginning to wane as a more thorough disillusionment with the very philosophical foundations of identity as such was on the cusp of emerging with post-structuralism and its critique of the ideological baggage inherited from Enlightenment humanism. By undermining the possibility for fixed identity, The Ruined Map represents Abe’s substantial movement towards a fully postmodern sensibility, distinct from the existential modernism of his earlier landmark novel, The Woman in the Dunes (1964).18 While Abe seeks to question post-WWII nostalgia for an earlier, pre-capitalist Japan, identity as such remains largely unquestioned in The Woman in the Dunes, as the protagonist’s resistant individualism allows him to cope in the absurd situation in which he finds himself— trapped by scheming villagers in a remote hut at the bottom of a sand pit. In The Ruined Map, Abe no longer assumes that the self can function as to guarantee the authenticity and originality of one’s identity. Abe’s conscious engagement with European literary sensibilities, must, inevitably, be subjected to the scrutiny of the orientalist critique. Formulated by Edward Said, the orientalist critique revealed a systematic discourse of difference perpetuated by European colonial powers in the Middle East at the height of European domination of the region in the 19th century. In the decades since Said’s argument appeared in 1978, the paradigm has been widely applied to various colonial contact zones to explain the differences in power and knowledge between the colonized and colonizer. Yet as others have shown, this critique, while an important intervention in its original context, serves to perpetuate polar conceptions of culture and cannot always be so readily applied.19 Abe’s deconstruction of a concrete subjectivity in this novel would seem to problematize the suggestion that this project, by analyzing a work of Japanese literature through the conceptual schema of the gothic tradition and the detective genre, is in some sense enacting an agenda of intellectual imperialism, imposing a foreign theoretical framework that suppresses the culturally specific significance of the work. Isn’t such an approach, orientalist critics might argue, simply inscribing the Other with Western cultural presuppositions, thereby neglecting the local conditions of literary production and reception, co-opting the work instead within the strictures of the European tradition? This critique, when applied to the mystery

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genre in the Japanese context at least, neglects the important fact that modern Japanese literature did not emerge in isolation but was greatly influenced by the developments of European and North American fiction. Further, the adoption of foreign genres and literary conventions was not simply an act of mimicry, but one of absorption and modification. Ultimately, if the cartography of identity formulation remains haunted by the uncanny presence of the Other, a force, though typically repressed, always remains capable of returning, then the hermetic binary of the West and Japan underpinning such a critique is fractured, if not entirely ruined. 1 A similar dynamic can be seen between Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino’s characters in the Michael Mann film Heat (1995). 2 Unless otherwise noted, Japanese names will be rendered surname first. Scholars publishing with their surname last will be noted according to their preference. 3 See Machiko Iwasaka and Barre Toelken, Ghosts and the Japanese: Cultural Experience in Japanese Death Legends (Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1994). 4 Noriko T. Reader, “The Appeal of “Kaidan”, Tales of the Strange,” Asian Folklore Studies 59 (2000): 265-283. 5 Timothy Iles, Abe Kobo: An Exploration of His Prose, Drama and Theatre. (Fececchio: European Press Academic Publishing, 2000) 29. 6 Iles 26. 7 See Rampo, Edogawa. “The Twins” in Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination, trans. James B. Harris (Boston: Tuttle, 1956) 123-142. 8 See Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1991), 58-60. 9 A similar, if not identical, example can be found in Jorge Luis Borges’s story, “Death and the Compass.” The murderer is able to lure his victim to an isolated location of his choosing by anticipating that his victim, Detective Lonnrot who he knows is investigating the ongoing murders, will surmise that the next killing will occur at that location based on the geographical pattern of the other slayings. However, what the victim does not know is that he is one that is going to be murdered, the significance of the previous murders being only a means to summon the detective to his death. 10 This phenomenon is also at work in Lars Von Trier’s The Element of Crime (1984) as the detective Fischer comes to suspect that it might be he, who is responsible for the child “lotto” murders. 11 The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, Vol. II, Jonathan Barnes ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984) 2323. 12 Barnes 2324. 13 Abe Kǀbǀ, The Ruined Map, trans. E. Dale Saunders (New York: Random House, 1969) 277.

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Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVII, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955) 219-252. 15 Freud 226. 16 Freud 234. 17 The Ruined Map 174-5. 18 Kǀbǀ Abe, The Woman in the Dunes, trans. E. Dale Saunders (New York: Random House, 1964). 19 For the most well known basis for a critique of such binarism, see Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture. (London: Routledge, 1994).

CONTRIBUTORS

Suzanne Bray is senior lecturer in English the Catholic University of Lille, France. She specialises in the history of ideas in Britain during the twentieth century, particularly in the area of religious thought, and has published extensively on the relationship between literature and theology. Her published articles include studies of T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers and Charles Williams. She also translates, mainly in the fields of theology and ethics. Bruce Esplin is a Ph.D. student in modern Chinese literature and teaches Mandarin at the University of Madison-Wisconsin, in the US. His research focuses on pre-Cultural Revolution Chinese films about the Korean War. Gregory T. Esplin is a Ph.D. student in the Philosophy program at Purdue University, in the US. His specialization is post-Kantian Continental Philosophy with particular interest in Heidegger and Deleuze. His dissertation will consist of a comparative study of these two figures, under the direction of Prof. Daniel W. Smith. Beatrix Hesse has studied and worked at the universities of Paderborn and Bamberg, Germany, where she currently teaches English Literature. Her main research interests are Shakespeare and contemporary drama and fiction. At present she is preparing a book-length study on the development of the English crime play in the twentieth century. Anita Higgie received her Ph.D from the University of Paris VII and is Director of English Studies at the Catholic University of Paris. Her research interests focus on English medieval mystics. Her most recent publication is an English language textbook for French students on British and American history and civilization.

212

CONTRIBUTORS

Natacha Levet received her doctorate from the University of Limoges, France, in 2006 and is Maître de Conférence at the Institut Universitaire de Formation des Maîtres of Limousin, France. Her research focuses on contemporary French detective fiction. She has published in Temps Noir and written several entries in the Dictionnaire des Littératures Policières (second edition), publication pending. Linda Martz received her Ph.D from the University of Paris VII. She is Assistant Professor of English and History at the American University of Paris, and also lectures on urban and cultural history at the Catholic University of Paris. She publishes on suffrage history and on urban studies. She is also the co-author of several language teaching texts and of a textbook in English for French students on British and American civilization. Marc Michaud is a Maître de Conférence at the Catholic University of the West in Angers, France, where he teaches Native American literature, detective fiction, and literary translation. His primary research interest is in where the domains of detective fiction and minority writing intersect. His publications include several pieces in Temps Noir. Kathryn Oliver Mills is an Associate Professor of French Language and Literature at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. She has published numerous articles on various aspects of the poetry in verse and in prose of Charles Baudelaire. She is now seeking a publisher for her book, “Formal Revolution in the Time of Baudelaire and Flaubert,” written last year in Burgundy during the tenure of a fellowship from the Appalachian College Association. Pablo Ramirez received his Ph.D. in American Cultures from the University of Michigan. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph, Canada, where he teaches nineteenth-century American literature and US Latina/o studies. He has published articles on Chicana/o literature and popular culture.

CONTRIBUTORS

213

Marcie Rinka received her doctorate in Spanish and Portuguese from Tulane University in 2003. She has taught all levels of Spanish language and literature at Bowling Green State University, Ohio Northern University, Tulane University, Southern University at New Orleans and the University of San Diego. Her research interests include Latin American women writers, feminist literary theory, second language acquisition and computer-assisted learning. In addition to publishing numerous entries in The Encyclopedia of Latin American and Caribbean Cultures (Routledge 2001) and Latin American Women Writers: An Encyclopedia (Routledge 2009), she is author of Revista: conversación sin barreras (Vista 2007). Ilana Shiloh received her Ph.D in American literature from Tel Aviv University, where she taught detective fiction in the Department of English. She is currently lecturer and Head of English Studies in the College of Management in Rishon Lezion, Israel. She is the author of Paul Auster and Postmodern Quest: On the Road to Nowhere (Peter Lang, 2002) and her book Metaphors of Paradox in Detective Fiction and Film is forthcoming from Peter Lang. She has published a range of articles on contemporary fiction, film and theater. Faye Stewart is finishing her dissertation, “Queer Investigations: Genre, Geography, and Sexuality in German-Language Lesbian Crime Fiction,” in Germanic Studies at Indiana University in the US. She currently teaches German language, literature, and culture as Brown Junior Visiting Scholar at Southwestern University. Her research interests include contemporary German and Austrian literature, film, and popular culture, and the history and representation of queer desires from the eighteenth century to the present. Benoît Tadié teaches English and American literature at the University of Paris III/Sorbonne Nouvelle. He is the author of L’Expérience moderniste anglo-américaine 1908-1922 (Paris: Didier, 1999) and of Le Polar américain, la modernité et le mal (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2006). He has edited and translated Dubliners by James Joyce (Gens de Dublin, Paris: Flammarion, 1994) and has edited Revues modernistes anglo-américaines, lieux d’échanges, lieux d’exil (Paris: Ent’revues, 2006).

214

CONTRIBUTORS

Harry Vandervlist is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at The University of Calgary, in Alberta, Canada. He writes on Canadian Literature and on Samuel Beckett’s fiction. In 2001 he edited Jon Whyte: Mind Over Mountains: Selected and Collected Poems. Sharon Wheeler is Field Chair in Print Journalism, PR and Publishing at the University of Gloucestshire in the UK. She is co-editor with Richard Keeble of The Journalistic Imagination (Routledge 2007), is completing Feature Writing for Journalists for Routledge, and contributes to Print Journalism (Routledge 2005). She is the editor of www.reviewingtheevidence.com.

INDEX Abe, Kǀbǀ, 3, 203ff AIDS, 12, 13, 14 Aldyne, Nathan, 8 Allen, Paula Gunn, 98 Amoz, Claude, 135 Anglicanism, 2, 77ff Argentina, 2, 59, 64, 65, 74, 141, 143, 146, 149, 151 Argentine, 60, 64, 74, 143, 144, 149, 151 Aristotle, 206 Baranger, Luc, 135 Bastid, Jean-Pierre, 137 Baudelaire, Charles, 3, 175ff Baxt, George, 8 Black Mask, 106, 107, 116 Blake, Michelle, 78, 84, 88 Blake, Victoria, 15 Bloch, Jon P., 16 Bon, François, 135 Borges, Jorge Luis, 66, 209n Borrelli, Paul, 133, 134, Boys Town, 10 Brac, Virginie, 135 Brandon, John G., 108 Brockmann, Suzanne, 15 Buchan, John, 108 Buin, Yves, 133 Burke, James Lee, 177 Burnett, W.R., 106, 107, 135 Butler, Gerald, 114, 116, 117 Butor, Michel, 135 Cain, James, 107 Cain, Paul, 106 California, 60, 107, 164, 179 Canada, 2, 59, 60, 119ff, Capone, Al, 106, 115 Catholic, 1, 3, 11, 13, 14, 81, 83, 85, 88

Chandler, Raymond, 95, 177, 179 Charles, Kate, 77, 78, 81, 83, 86 Charteris, Leslie, 113, 114 Charyn, Jerome, 59 Chase, James Hadley, 105, 107, 112, 113 Chesterton, G.K., 77, 78, 87, 88n Chevalier, Tracy, 159 Cheyney, Peter, 105, 107, 111 Chicago, 106, 108, 110, 111, 112, 115, 118 Chicana/o, 3, 163ff “chick lit”, 160 Christie, Agatha, 3, 24, 36, 77, 176, 184, 191ff citizenship, 141, 155, 204 civil rights, 43, 52, 53, 168, 174 class (social), 82, 84, 105, 111, 116, 117, 159 Clevely, Hugh, 107 Coca Cola, 49, 50 Collins, Wilkie, 176, 192 Conan Doyle, Arthur, 179, 184, 192, 199 Connelly, Michael, 177 Connolly, John, 15 consumer, 37ff Cook, Robin, 105 Copp, Rick, 16 Corpi, Lucha, 3, 163ff corruption, 13, 97, 107, 110, 117, 132, 135, 142, 203 “cosy”, 7, 13, 16 Couturier, Hélène, 135 Cranston, Pamela, 78, 85 crime fiction, 2, 7ff, 77, 110, 111, 117, 119, 126, 127, 129, 130, 134, 135, 177, 179, 180 crime play, 191, 192, 195, 196, 199

216 Cross, Amanda, 177 Cubism, 194 Curtis, James, 114, 115, 116, 117 Daly, John, 106 Daly, Mary, 85 Dantec, Maurice G., 133, 134 Darbon, Leslie, 191, 199 “death by landscape”, 122 Deloria, Vine, 96 Derrida, Jacques, 167, 187 Despentes, Virginie, 135 detective fiction, 1, 2, 3, 19, 21, 32, 37, 39, 45, 46, 48, 59, 77, 78, 86, 88, 105, 125, 142, 143, 144, 149, 153 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 183, 184, 191, 192, 193, 195, 196, 199, 203, 204 Detective Weekly, 107 deviant, 143, 147, 149, 151, 205 Dexter, Colin, 177 Dibdin, Michael, 105 Dick, Philip K., 133 Dickens, Charles, 176 Dickson, Jack, 8, 10 doppelgänger, 3, 175, 205 Douthwaite, L.C., 108 East Los Angeles, 164, 169 Echenoz, Jean, 135 Edinburgh, 179 ethics, 59, 61, 63, 65, 66, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 144, 167, 184, 186 Faber, Enriqueta, 145 Fawcett, Frank Dubrez, 105 Feierstein, Ricardo, 60, 63, 64, 65, 73, 75 feminism, 7, 154, 155 femme fatale, 45, 47, 48, 147 flashback, 194, 195 folklore, 204 Fonteneau, Pascale, 135 Forrest, Katherine V., 8, 9, 15 Freud, Sigmund, 41, 185, 207 Gallison, Kate, 78 gang, 105ff, 168, 169 gangster, 106ff,

INDEX “gaydar”, 19, 20, 21, 22, 29, 30, 31, 32 gender, 1, 7, 19, 23, 29, 30, 84, 123, 146, 147, 151, 176 genre, 1, 2, 7, 8, 9, 10, 15, 16, 19, 21, 22, 39, 43, 45, 46, 95, 98, 107, 119, 120, 121, 124, 125, 126, 127, 129, 130, 133, 134, 135, 136, 142, 143, 144, 160, 167, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 183, 192, 193, 196, 203, 204, 205, 208, Glasgow, 8 gothic, 204, 205, 208 Greene, Graham, 114, 115, 116, 117 Greenwood, D.M., 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 87 Grierson, Cecilia, 145 Grimes, Martha, 177 Gronau, Maria, 1, 19ff Groussac, Paul, 143 Guttierrez, Gustavo, 85 Hallas, Richard (Eric Knight), 107 Hamilton, Patrick, 192 Hammett, Dashiell, 95, 106, 135, 177, 181n Hansen, Joseph, 7, 8, 9 “hard-boiled”, 2, 9, 46, 105, 106, 107, 108, 111, 114, 116, 117, 130, 205 Harlem, 37, 38, 39, 40, 43, 44, 45, 46, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52 Harvey, John, 177 Hill, Reginald, 15 Himes, Chester, 1, 37ff Hirai, Tarǀ, 204 historical fiction, 3, 153, 154, 159 Hitchcock, Alfred, 196 HIV, 1, 7, 11, 12, 13 Hoffmann, E.T.A., 23, 34n, 208 Holland, Isabelle, 78, 84, 86 Holmberg, Eduardo Ladislao, 141ff homosexuality, 9, 10, 17, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 29, 31, 32, 84, 85 Hunter, John, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 117

QUESTIONS OF IDENTITY IN DETECTIVE FICTION hybridity, 2, 22, 108, 129, 133, 134, 136 identity, 1, 2, 3, 9, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 38, 40, 44, 45, 49, 50, 52, 59, 60, 63, 64, 65, 73, 75, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 119, 122, 127, 128, 133, 141, 143, 146, 147, 150, 153, 154, 158, 159, 160, 163, 175, 178, 183, 184, 185, 187, 188, 191, 196, 199, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209 imperialism, 204, 208 Izzo, Jean-Claude, 136 James, Dean, 17 James, P.D., 78, 79, 82, 83, 84, 86, 87, 177 Janson, Hank, 105 Jewish, 2, 59ff Kellerman, Faye, 60, 61, 62, 63, 72, 75, 177 Kellerman, Jonathan, 15 Kersh, Gerald, 114, 115, 116, 117 King, Laurie R., 9 Knight, Eric, 107 La Noire, 134, 135 Lacan, Jacques, 187 landscape, 39, 95, 96, 97, 100, 119, 122 Lansdale, Joe R., 15 Latin America, 64, 141, 142, 143, 145, 163 Latina/o, 163, 164, 165, lesbian, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 29, 31, 32, 85, 219 Lewis, Ted, 105 Lewis, Wyndham, 111, 112, 114 Linscott, Gillian, 3, 157ff London, 80, 110, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 156, 179 Lonsdale, Frederick, 192 Los Angeles, 7, 10, 60, 62, 164, 165, 169 Lovesy, Peter, 177 Lower East Side, 108 Luisi, Paulina, 145

217

Majzels, Robert, 60, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75 Manchette, Jean-Patrick, 135 Manchuria, 204 Manhattan, 39, 41 marketing, 37, 38, 39, 41, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 200 Marseille, 134 McCoy, Horace, 107, 133 McDermid, Val, 8, 10, 14, 15 McNab, Claire, 9 medical profession, 142, 143, 145, 147 medicine, 142, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149 Meiji Restoration, 204, 205 memory, 13, , 41, 63, 64, 65, 72, 95, 98, 99, 164, 169, 170, 171, 192, 195, 206, 207 mental illness, 142 Mexico, 127, 170 Meyer, Charles, 78, 84, 89n Michaels, Anne, 120 Miller, Arthur, 191 minority (ethnic), 163 misogyny, 144, 147 Monsalve, Carlos, 143 Morton, Michael, 193 Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, 65 murder, 12, 13, 29, 41, 42, 61, 63, 64, 65, 70, 77, 78, 80, 82, 87, 107, 114, 133, 135, 143, 144, 147, 148, 150, 151, 154, 156, 157, 159, 164, 165, 166, 168, 169, 170, 171, 175, 170, 183, 184, 186, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 200, 205 murderer, 79, 83, 87, 135, 157, 168, 186, 193, 196 NAFTA, 2, 120, 127 narration, 95, 96, 97, 98, 109 narrative, 2, 9, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 28, 29, 31, 32, 67, 68, 70, 105, 106, 107, 117, 135, 155, 158, 159, 164, 166, 167, 171,

218 179, 183, 187, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 200, 206 nationhood, 141 Naturalism, 144, 191 Nava, Michael, 7, 8, 9, 10, 16 Navajo 95ff Negro spiritual, 40, 42 New Woman, 159 New York, 42, 61, 62, 63, 85, 87, 109, 112 noir, 2, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13, 105, 117, 119, 121, 129, 130, 133, 134, 135, 136 Olivera, Carlos, 143 Ondaatje, Michael, 120 Oppel, Jean-Huge, 176, 178 Orwell, George, 106, 111, 112, 114, 116 Pankhurst, Emmeline, 156, 158 Paretsky, Sara, 177 Paris, 1, 3, 23, 24, 25, 28, 34n, 179 Pelekanos, George, 177, 179 Perry, Anne, 153 plot, 7, 8, 12, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 77, 78, 87, 96, 99, 109, 115, 127, 158, 164, 176, 178, 180, 192, 194, 199, 204, 206 Poe, Edgar Allan, 3, 143, 144, 175, 179, 183ff, 192, 204 police, 9, 10, 11, 13, 15, 23, 24, 29, 30, 31, 37, 38, 41, 42, 43, 48, 50, 61, 63, 84, 95, 96, 98, 110, 113, 115, 121, 122, 145, 153, 155, 156, 158, 164, 165, 168, 169, 170, 175, 176, 177, 180, 185, 186 politics, 7, 8, 9, 10, 14, 16, 24, 35n, 59, 79, 81, 106, 111, 112, 114, 116, 119, 121, 123, 141, 143, 144, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 163, 164, 165, 171, 198 postmodernism, 187, 188, 205, 206, 208 press/publishing, 7, 8, 14, 15, 16, 47, 48, 52, 54n, 106, 129, 135, 160, 215, 218 psychopath, 37, 38, 41, 44, 47, 52

INDEX pulp (fiction), 105, 106, 108, 113 race, 1, 38, 40, 41, 42, 43, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 54n, 84, 163, 184 Rampo, Edogawa (Hirai Taro, 204, 205, 209 Rankin, Ian, 105, 177, 179 rape, 11, 12, 37, 61, 62, 157, 165, 166, 169, 170 Raymond, Derek, 105 realism, 107, 142, 191 red herring, 24, 28, 30 religion, 2, 43, 59, 60, 64, 72, 75, 77, 84, 111, 144, 147 “Republican motherhood”, 2, 151 Rickman, Phil, 78, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 87 Ridley, Arnold, 194 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 135 Robins, Fenton, 108 Rodríguez Dulanto, Laura, 145 Ruether, Rosemary Radford, 85 Said, Edward, 208 Sayers, Dorothy, 77, 78, 192 schizophrenia, 107, 110 science fiction, 135, 136 Série Noire, 133 sex/sexuality, 1, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 16ff, 38, 44, 47, 48, 49, 62, 84, 86, 123, 124, 150, 151, 159, 160, 205 Simenon, Georges, 176, 179, 181n Soho, 113, 115, 116, 117 Spencer-Fleming, Julia, 78, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88n Spong, John Shelby, 85 stage adaptation, 191, 193, 194, 199 Stevenson, Richard, 7, 8, 9, 10, 16 Stukas, David, 16 suffragette, 2, 154ff suffragist, 145, 154, 160 Sumners, Cristina, 78, 89n suspense, 16, 196, 197, 199 The Thriller, 107, 114 thriller, 9, 113, 130 Tracy, Don, 106

QUESTIONS OF IDENTITY IN DETECTIVE FICTION tradition, 1, 2, 9, 10, 59, 60, 67, 68, 71, 72, 74, 75, 79, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 97, 98, 99, 105, 106, 108, 113, 114, 116, 135, 145, 176, 177, 179, 193, 204, 208 uncanny, 39, 185, 203, 206, 207, 209 Unheimlich, 207 United Farm Workers, 164, 165, 169, 170 Upfield, Arthur, 95 urban, 9, 10, 39, 50, 133, 135 Varela, Luis V., 143 Vargas, Fred, 176, 179 Vautrin, Jean, 135 victim, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 46, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 77, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 165, 185, 186, 193, 194, 195, 198, 200, 201, 204, 216 victimization, 2, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 44, 47, 48, 50, 52, 65, 72, 73, 74

219

Vidocq,Eugène François, 175 violence, 12, 27, 38, 40, 42, 43, 45, 46, 50, 52, 61, 65, 75, 82, 83, 99, 105, 106, 109, 111, 112, 113, 114, 116, 123, 124, 125, 126, 131, 132, 135, 155, 168, 169, 181, 186 Wallace, Edgar, 106, 107, 110, 111, 114 Washington D.C., 179 weapon, 43, 62, 166 West End, 110 Wilder, Thornton, 191 Wilson, Barbara, 8 Wilson, John Morgan, 1, 7ff Wings, Mary, 8 witness, 23, 60, 63, 64, 65, 70, 73, 74, 77, 83, 156, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 184, 192, 194, 195 Wodehouse, P.G., 108, 109, 110, 113, 114 Zubro, Mark Richard, 8, 9, 10, 11