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Private
Investigator
Edited by Alistair Rolls
and Rachel Franks
Crime
Uncovered Series Bristol:
Intellect, 2016 Paperback
187 p. ISBN 978-1783205233. £19.50
Reviewed
by Charles Brownson Arizona
State University
As with the others in this series (1)
this volume gives us essays predominately on the European P.I. (exceptions are the iconic Sam Spade and
Lew Archer), and deliberately so. As editors Rolls and Franks explain in their
introduction [14-15], their goal is to give a more expansive account which will
allow them to avoid both the hagiographic and the lit-crit modes used
heretofore.(2) As the sub-genre of the P.I. is and has been overwhelmingly
American, it is hardly surprising that the studies included here should be of
figures less familiar to American readers. The result is a quite interesting
analysis of new possibilities. The figure of the P.I.
derives from the pulp fiction of the 1920s and 30s and is commonly said to have
reached its first apogee in Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op and Raymond
Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. This positions the Private Investigator between the
earlier amateur detective and the later police professional, but this is a hard
distinction to make. As the editors say [12], along with the true amateur
working for free (a ‘sleuth’) and an official professional (a ‘detective’) are
many difficult exceptions. Holmes, for example, is well-remunerated and
independent, yet to our minds hardly a P.I. Neither is Dickens’s Inspector
Bucket, variously a paid professional and a man working on his own. The rough
distinction we want is the hard-boiled, itself a somewhat fuzzy category
characterized by violent or coercive methods, whether used by self-employed
(that is, private) gumshoes or by rogue
cops working on their own. What the P.I. is not is an amateur, meaning an
unpaid aficionado or craftsman using exclusively rational means — Miss Marple
or Peter Wimsey. In our time the amateur has
disappeared — the police will not tolerate vigilante justice, and the resources
needed for a modern crime story can only be commanded by a government
institution. These same limits work against the P.I. and have forced a drift
toward the thriller, in which the investigator is motivated more by
self-protection than any desire to solve a crime.(3)
A consequent interest of this book would be, and is, some examples of the
continued life of the P.I. and, facilitated by its choice of case studies, something
of the reasons for it. The opportunity for overt social criticism is one, in
American writing now largely forced into the background or ceded to other
sub-genres. But as Pezzotti says [107], in Italian there are few instances,
greatly overshadowed by the policemen Ingravallo (Gadda), Bellodi (Sciascia),
and Montelbano (Camilleri), and the same is true in other countries. Is the
P.I. endangered? Some further thought on this matter would have been welcome,
but this is rightly not a book of sociology or cultural history and it has
quite enough to do as it is. A matter quite clear is
that the second home of the P.I. is France. Louise Morvan and Nestor Burma are
given full exposure, and wherever the discussion touches on the idea of noir
and the French postwar interest in it the French role is acknowledged. It is
necessary to remember that the detective genre was a creation of the French as
much as the English, and that the social uses of it, especially noir with its
emphasis on universal corruption and isolated models of existential freedom
would operate much more strongly in France, isolated and occupied as it was during
the war. One oddity is the first
essay (by Rachel Franks) on Poirot’s chronicler and quondam sidekick Captain
Hastings. Hastings would appear to be the most unlike a P.I. as could be
imagined. He works free and is at first bound to Poirot, hardly independent. He
is a fastidious man of delicate sensibilities and an alert respect for what is
not done by an English gentleman. His inclusion among the Private Investigators
is due to his status [15] as an ‘offsider’—a man who lives in the shadow. That
the shadow is cast by Poirot and that he is not an investigator (he functions in most of the stories as an
intermediary between Poirot and the other characters, and between Poirot and
the reader,(4) is of no moment. Franks’s
claim is that Hastings summarizes the whole future of the P.I. as his
character, goaded by Poirot’s cruelty toward him (notably contrasted by
Poirot’s attitude toward Miss Lemon) becomes more self-determined and finally dark in the final novel Curtain (1975). This claim would seem to be a stretch, but a
thought-provoking one quite outside the constraints of the conventional
hard-boiled P.I., constraints which all of the essayists here seek to escape. The book concludes,
following the format of the series, with two essays of a more general nature.
Stephen Knight, who the editors identify as a guiding influence on their work
[10], writes on the 19th-century origins of the P.I. Knight provides a thorough
survey of the proto-P.I. which proposes a typology of the P.I. beginning with
the Bow Street Runners, who were both public and private in nature—that is,
having a quasi-institutional and regulatory function combined with their status
as for hire. The turning point, in Knight’s analysis, comes around 1850, when
the nascent figure of the P.I. is consolidated as a self-employed professional.
The amateur has by now largely disappeared. (The example of the amateur cited
is Bulwer’s Pelham, but also includes the late, hybrid case of Collins’s The Moonstone, in which the hired P.I.
fails to explain the crime and the mystery is actually solved by an amateur.)
It is very noticeable how many of the instances cited by Knight are of working
operatives, not literary characters, or, like Vidocq, memoirists. Knight’s
examples include many who, while showing some characteristics of the fully
developed P.I., do not actually work by detection. This is very helpful,
reminding us of how a literary creation emerges from real-life situations and
becomes an imaginary being. The second historical essay,
by Janice Allan, discusses specifically the “sensation” novel typified by
Wilkie Collins and Mary Braddon. It is of particular interest for the P.I. that
sensation fiction was a female phenomenon.(5)
The detective is not necessarily female but the reader’s sympathy is shifted to
the female victim or, in the case of Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, the criminal, and the nominal detective
appears as a meddling threat. The title of Allan’s article, “To See is to
Suspect : Investigating the Private in Sensation Fiction” reveals her
intention, which is to interpret literally the words private eye—the observer who reveals that which is hidden. Sensation fiction is “saturated with
references to vision” [174] but more particularly “a form of vigilant watching demanded
by a fictional universe where appearances are assumed to be deceptive and sight
cannot be dissociated from suspicion” [174-175]. Implicit in her analysis is
how sensation fiction shifts attention from the (female) subjects of home and
middle-class domesticity, contrasts vision with the (male) somatic action,
introduces new topics such as divorce and the disobedient servant, and reveals
the technological aspects of seeing. The reader is encouraged to shift his view
of women to the active and engaged. This is, in my opinion, a significant
repositioning of sensation fiction in the context of the P.I. and aptly
concludes a book which is intended to rethink the private investigator and
enlarge it beyond the conventional view of the hard-boiled American. __________________________ (1) There are two
previous: Anti-Hero (2015) and Detective (2016). (2) Hagiography is the
mode Rolls and Franks call connoisseurship. ‘Lit-crit’ is my term for the
overly scholarly and esoteric. The editors cite as their guide between these
poles primarily Stephen Knight (Secrets
of Crime Fiction Classics, 2015) as well as a very useful list of other
similar sources. (3) For example Roman
Polanski’s 2010 film The Ghostwriter, or
for an earlier instance, Six Days of the
Condor (James Grady, 1974). (4) In another usage
Hastings is the chronicler and the means by which the detective can remain the
‘closed mouth’, revealing his inference chain only at the end of the story. (5) Collins was of course
a man, but he strongly advocated the rights of women and placed them at the
center of his book The Woman In White.
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