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Detective
Edited by Barry Forshaw
Crime Uncovered
Series Bristol: Intellect,
2016 Paperback. 220 p.
ISBN 978-1783205219. £19.50
Reviewed
by Charles Brownson Arizona
State University
Detective is a book of commissioned
essays on two themes: the growing international reach of the genre, and the
propensity of it to reflect the social conditions of its time. In his
introduction, Barry Forshaw asks what is the source of the enduring popularity
of detective fiction. He finds the answer in its ability to palliate the chaos
of an unstable world [7] which drives the other part of his answer, the growing
international interest in the genre. The evidence is provided by thirteen “case
studies” – brief critical essays on important writers and the detectives they
have created. The list, which could easily get out of hand, is sensibly limited
to professionals (the police), giving the group of thirteen a natural unity
which brings the two themes to the fore. The list is five Scandinavians, three
British, two French, and one each American, Spanish, and Sicilian.(1) Here we see exposed one difficulty in
the plan of this book. Among the requirements for detective fiction are a
general adherence to the rule of law and an institutionalized agency empowered
to punish lawbreakers. Past traditions of the detective genre have been
tolerant of the amateur, but we now find amateur detectives implausible and
vigilante justice unacceptable. The strongest fictional detectives are now
policemen, but by sensibly choosing policemen for his case studies, Forshaw
willy-nilly limits the field to those western European countries which can meet
the two conditions of the rule of law and of institutionalized enforcement,
thus hiding the readers’ much wider interest in the detective genre
internationally. However, it is undeniable that the detectives chosen for
discussion are key figures. Looking over the list, one figure
stands out: Georges Simenon’s creation Chief Inspector Jules Maigret. He is the
oldest of the group and by far the nearest to the English Classic tradition of
Christie, Sayers, and the other original practitioners of the consolidated genre.
His importance is indicated by the fact that, although there is a case study
devoted to Maigret, [Jon Wilkins : 34-43] he is mentioned in nearly all of
them. Maigret’s mode of detection, with its heavily intuitive component, his
dogged methods [46-47], and his uxorious ordinariness are qualities which are
conspicuously significant to the modern formula. Hercule Poirot, Lord Peter
Wimsey, The Thinking Machine, and others of the early tradition were
notoriously wooden. Just as the amateur detective has become unacceptable, so we
no longer enjoy the puzzle at the expense of the humanity of those involved:
victim, criminal, bystanders, and crucially, the detective. Simenon and Maigret
were first on the field in all these. It matters not whether the detective is
happy or, more usually, unhappy in his relationships; what counts is that like
us, he needs a refuge of intimacy. In many contemporary stories the detective’s
private relationships take up as much of the narrative as solving the case. It
matters not that the detective must be a rational person; as a person, we
demand the human qualities of sympathy, intuition, fallibility, and others once
thought to be an impediment to the detective’s work. In these and other ways,
Maigret is a figure against whom the contemporary detective is defined. The case studies are supplemented by
four essays of wider scope, though the space in which they have to work
severely limits how far the authors are able to explore their subjects, which
are all concerned with the book’s second theme of the way in which the
detective formula is able to engage in social commentary. These four concluding
essays, or “reports” as they are called, discuss the maverick, the secular and
the maladroit detective, with final observations on television. This last report, by Jean Gregorek,
usefully consolidates some of the implications of the book’s theme of the new
vigor brought to the genre by its more international audience. His nominal
concern is with British television, but in pointing out the sheer number of
televised detective dramas [210] and the new diversity of their settings [211]
he provides an exact analog to what is going on outside Britain. In a few
remarks on “the power of place” he notes that earlier detectives were
metropolitan. The use of these professionals to solve crimes committed elsewhere
reflected “the extension of a unifying metropolitan influence and the
subsequent weakening of the regions as self-sufficient.” [211].(2) And just so
does the genre reflect changes in the society in which it is embedded. The reports on the maverick
and maladroit, by Steven Peacock and Jamie Bernthal respectively, take this
matter of social commentary farther. Peacock begins by pointing out the importance
of the single-hero action drama (the thriller) and its association with a
brutalism derived from the hard-boiled formula. [182-183]. Now we find the
“old-school practitioner” dispensing extra-legal justice superseded by a new
sort of maverick, exemplified by Kurt Wallander, who finds his route to “succor
and sanctity: retreat from colleagues, family and modern living” [187] blocked
by commitments to the community. The modern maverick thus offers a “crucial
corrective” [188] to the ills of modern society such as the growth of terrorism
and distrust of the official police.(3) This is a point which runs through
Forshaw’s case study of Wallander [69-77]. Bernthal’s report on the
maladroit detective moves in the same direction as Peacock. The contrast
between Holmes and his bumbling counterpart Lestrade, and the contemporary
pairing of Morse and Lewis [Forshaw : 26-32], charts a course from buffoon
to one hobbled by shortfalls of character, education, or experience – from
comedy sidekick to bitter but earthy hero. Incompetence is no longer a laughing
matter. The old tradition of benevolent maladroitness is an indicator of
nostalgia for a vanished past. [208] It is Alison Joseph’s report
on “Reason and Redemption : The Detective in the Secular Age” which
provides the most leverage for thought on this book’s theme of the relationship
between the detective formula and the society in which it is embedded. It is
the detective who drives the genre’s enduring popularity, because he “allows us
to find order within chaos, redemption in the face of evil” [191]. In looking
over the case studies it is easy to see the truth of this. But the key point
has to do with the second reference in Joseph’s title: secular. While the
origins of the matter of order and redemption can be traced far back to the
mystery cults and the figure of the hero [193], it is in the present “fallen
age” as she terms it, in which reason has replaced mystery and heroes are
fallible, that we need the detective more than ever. Again, the truth of this
is stark in the list of case studies. It seems also that the closer these
detectives approach the “new brutalism” discussed by Peacock the more urgent
this need becomes. But those quieter sleuths
apparently more dedicated to reason, such as Dalgliesh and Montalbano,
display a strong redemptive component in their self-justifications. They are in
this business despite a deeply embedded evil they are dedicated to root out and
the possibility of failure. How unlike Poirot in times of yore. In only one respect will I
take Detective to task, and that is
its acceptance of the reductive classification of “police procedural.” The true
procedural is defined by its first appearance, Freeman Wills Crofts’s The Cask (1920, the same year in which
Christie’s equally foundational The
Mysterious Affair at Styles was published). The Cask is premised not on detection but on procedure. That is, by the thorough and systematic working through of every possibility which the puzzle
offers. The term as it is now used attempts only to distinguish the rational
methods of Holmes from the intuitional ones of Maigret, but in fact the
procedural is neither rational nor intuitional. It is mechanical. It is a
police procedural because only the police could have the resources for such a
way of proceeding. As a story-telling strategy the procedural has obvious
defects, and the pure procedural is rare. Most contemporary tales which are not
thrillers nevertheless have a strong procedural component. This is the way the
police go about their work. But equally to the contemporary sensibility, the
procedural sidesteps the aspect of magic built into the original fictional model
of Sherlock Holmes in which the detective’s inference chain is hidden from the
reader by the uncomprehending Watson until the results can be produced all at
once, voilà!, like Houdini emerging
from his confinement. This quibble aside, one would have
wished to see the dual interest in social analysis and the international scope
of the detective genre explored further, as revealed in the case studies and
the reports, in particular intriguing hints of ways in which the two might be
bound together. But the reality is that both topics are far larger than can be
accommodated within the space of two hundred pages. As explanations for the
renewal and expansion of the genre in our time, Forshaw and his colleagues have
identified a conjunction of significance deserving further scrutiny. ____________________ (1) For the
Scandinavians: Hole, Beck, Wallander, van Veeteren, and the Lind/Norén team. For
Britain: Morse, Dalgliesh, Rebus. For the French: Maigret, Adamsberg. For the
others: Bosch, Falcón, and Montalbano (with whom we ought to include the
creations of fellow Sicilian Leonardo Sciascia). (2) Paraphrased
by Gregorek from Stephen Knight’s “Regional Crime Squads”. In Ian Bell [Editor]. Peripheral
Visions, University of Wales Press, 1995. (3) An
inference, undrawn by Peacock, is that if the original thriller hero has
fissioned into two forms, the old-school practitioner and the new more
socialized Wallander type, this must reflect a parallel ambivalence in society
as to the best way to address our problems. Unhelpfully, we usually ignore this
distinction and call both types thrillers.
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