Adapting Detective Fiction : Crime, Englishness and the TV Detectives [1 ed.] 9781441156624, 9781441186171

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Adapting Detective Fiction

Also available from Continuum Continuum Literary Studies Series Also available in the series: Active Reading by Ben Knights and Chris Thurgar-Dawson Beckett’s Books by Matthew Feldman Beckett and Phenomenology edited by Matthew Feldman and Ulrika Maude Beckett and Decay by Katherine White Beckett and Death edited by Steve Barfield, Matthew Feldman and Philip Tew British Fiction in the Sixties by Sebastian Groes Canonizing Hypertext by Astrid Ensslin Character and Satire in Postwar Fiction by Ian Gregson Coleridge and German Philosophy by Paul Hamilton Contemporary Fiction and Christianity by Andrew Tate Crime Culture edited by Bran Nicol, Eugene McNulty and Patricia Pulham English Fiction in the 1930s by Chris Hopkins Ecstasy and Understanding edited by Adrian Grafe Fictions of Globalization by James Annesley Imagination of Evil by Mary Evans Joyce and Company by David Pierce London Narratives by Lawrence Phillips Masculinity in Fiction and Film by Brian Baker Modernism and the Post-colonial by Peter Childs Milton, Evil and Literary History by Claire Colebrook Novels of the Contemporary Extreme edited by Alain-Phillipe Durand and Naomi Mandel Postmodern Fiction and the Break-Up of Fiction by Hywel Dix Seeking Meaning for Goethe’s Faust by J. M. van der Laan Sexuality and the Erotic in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad by Jeremy Hawthorn Such Deliberate Disguises: The Art of Phillip Larkin by Richard Palmer The Palimpsest by Sarah Dillon The Measureless Past of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida by Ruben Borg Women’s Fiction 1945–2000 by Deborah Philips

Adapting Detective Fiction Crime, Englishness and the TV Detectives

Neil McCaw

Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York, NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © Neil McCaw 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Author has asserted his/her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 9781847063076 (hardcover) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

viii

Chapter 1: Introduction – Adaptation and Cultural History

1

Chapter 2: Sherlock Holmes and the Authenticity of Crime

19

Chapter 3: Miss Marple, Criminality and Englishness

40

Chapter 4: Morse, Heritage and the End of History

60

Chapter 5: Jack Frost and the Condition of England Question

75

Chapter 6: Cadfael, Medievalism and Modern Nationhood

92

Chapter 7: DCI Barnaby and an English Aesthetics of Crime

108

Chapter 8: Conclusion – Detecting the Nation

125

Notes Bibliography Index

132 173 189

Acknowledgements

Lasting thanks to my family, especially my parents, whose support has always been appreciated, even though I don’t think I’ve ever actually said so (until now). And enormous gratitude to Margaret Hamer, without whom I may never have become a detective fiction obsessive. She has a lot to answer for. Finally, love to Tracey. Now, at least, she has evidence that she was right all along – I probably do watch too much television.

Chapter 1

Introduction – Adaptation and Cultural History

During the later twentieth century there was a growing ‘fashion for commissioning adaptations’1 in the United Kingdom, a momentum which, as Peter Reynolds has argued, ‘continued unabated into the early 1990s.’2 This phenomenon of adaptation (on film, television and stage) was directly related to the broader socio-economic and cultural context: ‘the popularity of adaptations . . . in the 1980s had as much to do with economics as it did with aesthetics . . . Unemployment amongst actors was higher than it had been for a very long time, and state funding of even major national [Theatre] companies was barely more than minimally adequate.’3 In times of hardship, producers appeared keener to play safe by reworking familiar stories rather than gambling on the untried and the untested. But this was also clearly was more than a matter simply of economics, for period adaptations (probably the largest category at this time) are notoriously expensive to film. The choice of which texts to adapt thus had a wider cultural-ideological import, in terms of what these texts said about national identity and how they tapped into the British public’s, nostalgic longing for the order and beauty of the past.’4 The vast array of national literary ‘classics’ chosen to be adapted, in particular, thus provided an opportunity for the modern nation to be re-imagined in a way that commemorated an earlier time in the national past, offering an appealing contrast to modernity. This heritage tendency was not confined to Britain, and there are prominent examples of this within European cinema: ‘ “Heritage cinema” emerged in the 1980s with the success of European period films such as Chariots of Fire, Jean de Florette and Babette’s Feast.’5 However, in Britain there was a more explicit propensity towards romantically remodelling the past: ‘French heritage films . . . tend to display different contents, focusing on historical figures and moments in pre-Revolutionary France . . . [and] tend not to present a rosy view of the past and thus differ significantly from the turn-of-the-century bourgeois domesticity of the British films.’6

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Consequently, in addition to a large number of period films produced in the United Kingdom, including the Merchant-Ivory subgenre (which featured A Room with a View (1985), Maurice (1987) and Howards End (1992)), as well as other ‘classic’ productions such as A Passage to India (1984), in the last two decades of the twentieth century alone the roll-call of period adaptations on British television was also vast. It included: A Tale of Two Cities (BBC, 1980), Brideshead Revisited (Granada, 1981), The Barchester Chronicles (BBC, 1982), The Woman in White (BBC, 1982 and 1997), Pickwick Papers (BBC, 1985), Silas Marner (BBC, 1985), Oliver Twist (BBC, 1985), Clarissa (BBC, 1991), Middlemarch (BBC, 1994), Martin Chuzzlewit (BBC, 1994), The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders (ITV, 1996), The Mill on the Floss (BBC, 1997), Our Mutual Friend (BBC, 1998), Great Expectations (BBC, 1999), David Copperfield (1999), in addition to a thriving industry of Austen adaptations of which Mansfield Park (BBC, 1983), Pride and Prejudice (BBC, 1995), and Emma (A&E, 1996) were prominent examples. The heritage impulses of this plethora of British7 adaptations manifestly related to the politics of ‘the National Heritage Acts of 1980 and 1983 . . . acts [which] reworked concepts of public access and use in terms of commodification, exhibition and display, encouraging the forthright marketing of the past within a thoroughly market-oriented heritage industry.’8 Adaptations such as The Jewel in the Crown (1984)9 used ‘the national itself – or at least, a version of the national past’ as ‘commodities for consumption in the international image market.’10 American audiences especially ‘enjoyed the experience of being voyeurs not only of an alien lifestyle in the past but in a foreign land, yet a land enough like the United States so as not to be threatening and inhabited by people who actually speak English.’11 Heritage television (as with heritage film) was successful for the way in which it propagated ‘apparently more settled and visually splendid manifestations of an essentially pastoral national identity and authentic culture.’12 A powerful, pervasive national mythology was being observed and admired through the lens of literary adaptation. The commercial viability of this nostalgia became ever more important within the increasingly market-driven context of British television broadcasting, in which the desire for economic (rather than artistic, aesthetic) success grew, especially after the 1990 Broadcasting Act. This economic necessity made the adaptation of detective fictions particularly attractive, for (as with literary ‘classics’) they brought with them a large constituency of readers (as the most read of all fictional genres), which must have made the holy grail of national and international commercial success seem more readily achievable. The exponential growth of interest in the last two

Introduction – Adaptation and Cultural History

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decades of the twentieth century in the reworking of detective fiction, and its classic Anglicized variant in particular,13 illustrates this perceived commercial viability, with (in the United Kingdom) adaptations of the work of (for example) Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Gladys Mitchell, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, Ruth Rendell, P D James, Colin Dexter, R D Wingfield, Reginald Hill, and Caroline Graham. There is a common thread of nostalgia in the representation of the English nation in many (if not all) of these adaptations, an implied discourse of national loss that plays out in relation to the innate narratives of crime and criminality. It is a particularly seductive mix, within the context of a British culture imbued with a sense of a glorious national past, and at the same time increasingly traumatized by the consequences of spiralling crime.14 Adapting detective fiction engages with both national identity and criminality in harness, viewing the adaptations themselves as part of a wider cultural process through which British identity was defined and negotiated, a collective process of national identity formation inextricably linked to ideas of a criminal Other: ‘television is probably the major source of imaging in western industrialized societies today.’15 These adaptations can be seen as a symptom of and also a medium for that process, with popular television interwoven into the daily, commonplace ‘domestic and national rituals’16 by which British culture shapes and comes to know itself ‘in reciprocal relations.’17 This negotiation and then re-negotiation of national identities is especially pervasive in relation to ‘popular’18 TV shows with considerable numbers of viewers sustained across multiple episodes, with television in this sense ‘a centre of meaning and . . . a social context.’19 For this reason each of the chapters in Adapting Detective Fiction has as its focus a later twentieth-century television detective fiction with longevity, popularity and a high cultural profile, those most prominent in the televisual role of what Anthony Giddens has called the ‘binding of social relations across time and space.’20 The role of these TV detective fictions in the process of defining the nation and ‘constituting as a group those whom it addresses as such,’21 is specifically related to the prevailing ideological context in the United Kingdom; in the years of the 1980s this meant the cultural and political phenomenon of ‘Thatcherism’22 and its rather contradictory embodiment of free-market radicalism and moral conservatism. In relation to the texts produced during 1990s the discussion will shift to the growing reaction against this Thatcherite doctrine, and especially the advent of ‘New Labour’ in the later 1990s: ‘ “ ‘New’ Labour” is the favoured means of denoting the [Labour] party under [Tony] Blair.’23 In both cases the analysis will

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consider later twentieth-century politics growing out of the emergence and impact of a form of ‘New Right’ ideas from the later 1970s onwards, and a consequent (at least partial) removal of issues of law and order ‘from the political economy into the realms of individual morality and pathology.’24 For this was an Othering of criminality that was the counterpoint to an idea of national identity as a positive, vital social attribute: ‘membership of the national community is prior to the contractual citizenship fostered by liberalism: nationhood encompasses common identity and is expressed through a common culture which links state and civil society.’25 For Stuart Hall, under Thatcherism it was not simply the case that being British became ‘once again identified with the restoration of competition and profitability; with tight money and sound finance (“You can’t pay yourself more than you earn!!”) – the national economy debated on the model of the household budget.’26 Thatcherite ideology was a ‘particularly rich mix’ that combined the ‘resonant themes of organic Toryism – nation, family, duty, authority, standards, traditionalism’ with the ‘aggressive themes of a revived neo-liberalism – self-interest, competitive individualism, anti-statism.’27 All articulated through a traditional conservative moral framework: on law and order, the themes [were] more policing, tougher sentencing, better family discipline, the rising crime rate as an index of social disintegration, the threat to “ordinary people going about their private business” from thieves, muggers, etc., the wave of lawlessness and the loss of law-abidingness . . . the sources of many a populist campaign by moral entrepreneur groups and quoting editors.28 Thatcherism thus amounted to a ‘new populism’29 that characterized the 1980s, a philosophy that strove for ‘a coherent national strategy built around the defence of the territorial integrity of the nation-state, national sovereignty and an integrative state patriotism.’30 Further, it defined itself in its relation to a hardline criminal justice agenda: ‘the strengthening of internal security (Criminal Justice Act 1982, Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, Public Order Act 1986), [and] the launching of law and order campaigns.’31 This was a key strand of a wider rejection of ‘the politics of consensus and compromise’ and an embracing of ‘conviction politics,’32 a move ‘towards more authoritarian methods of criminalization . . . taking in the police, the courts, the prisons, and subsidiary parts of the system.’33

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However, despite the Thatcherite attempt to impose an ideological ‘consensus’ over time the UK population shifted in its view of the world, becoming tired of ‘tough’ versus ‘caring,’ leading to increasing numbers of citizens ‘to complain about . . . a loss of fairness . . . in everyday life, as well as a loss in quality, especially in the quality of services, sacrificed to a rather ruthless individualism and greed.’34 By the 1990s this growing resistance culminated in ‘New Labour,’ a political rhetoric that was (even if for some ‘little more than skin deep: a marketing and media creation’35) nevertheless tangibly modernizing, centred on notions of national harmony and coherence instead of division and fragmentation: ‘individual stake-holding involves a one-nation idea about including all individuals in society.’36 In terms of crime policy in particular, New Labour presented itself as an antidote to Thatcherism, reshaping ‘the ground established by the Conservatives in the 1980s and 1990s,’ moving away from ideas of crime as an ‘ “individual pathology” shaped largely by the family’ and rejecting the notion that ‘any attempt to “explain” criminal acts is to condone them and to deny individual responsibility.’37 The interlinking of issues of crime and national identity within pervading political discourses of this period correlates with the burgeoning interest in detective fiction adaptations on British television: ‘representations of the world in written discourse are engaged in constructing the world, in shaping the modalities of social reality, and in accommodating their writers, performers, readers, and audiences to multiple and shifting subject positions within the world they both constitute and inhabit.’38 These detective narratives became part of the cultural construction of nationality and criminality, both determining and determined by the wider ideological context. Each ‘act’ of adaptation examined in Adapting Detective Fiction is as such viewed as a form of reading, wherein an originating text is interpreted in terms of its contemporaneous culture. This produces what Tony Bennett has called an interaction ‘between the culturally activated [the originating source] text and the culturally activated reader [the adaptor(s)], an interaction structured by the material, social, ideological, and institutional relationships in which both text and readers are inescapably inscribed.’39 It is a demonstration par excellence of Stanley Fish’s point that texts do ‘not lie innocently in the world but are themselves constituted by an interpretive act, even if, as is often the case, that act is unacknowledged.’40 When read as two texts in tandem, adaptations (a symbiosis of source and adapted text) make clear the nature of that interpretive act more than any other type of text, with the process of adaptation itself a form of cultural reading, rooted in the

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interface between the individuality (biological, psychological, spiritual)41 of the adaptor, and the historical context (social, cultural, political) the adaptor works within: the interpretative reception of a text always presupposes the context of experience of aesthetic perception: the question of the subjectivity of the interpretation and of the taste of different readers or levels of readers can be asked meaningfully only when one has first clarified which transubjective horizon of understanding conditions the influence of the text.42 The framing context of knowledge, beliefs and assumptions that inform the adaptive process, what Foucault has called the episteme, is ‘the “apparatus” which makes possible the separation, not of the true from the false, but of what may from what may not be.’43 Individual adaptations are effective ‘moments of reception’44 within this, revealing the temperament of this reception to be key, and therein altering the polarities of the process Rob Pope has called ‘textual intervention’; whereas for Pope the ultimate focus should be on the originating text here it is not, nor even on the adapted text, but on the process of adaptation as a measurement of cultural history. Examining the process of reception as an ‘actively critical invocation of various kinds of historical context’45 produces an acute awareness of the function of adaptation as a form of cultural translation. The consideration of one (originating) text as embodied in the form of another (adapted) text, sees the two texts themselves as ‘meaningful [primarily] as a source of mediation between past and present,’46 with the comparative nature of the examination of adaptation as a process placed stage centre. This historical focus identifies Adapting Detective Fiction on a particular point of the scale of adaptation studies, self-confessed in its declaration of the importance of the cultural process of adaptation, a process illustrated through a comparative critical methodology that reads originating sources and adaptations as linked, evolving narratives and as such avoids a fraught comparison of medium/genre specifics. It is the narrative and its inherent ideological assumptions that are the concern here, rather than mediumspecificity or the aesthetics of form. Much has been written on the aesthetics of television that has important things to say about the medium’s means of expression, styles, conventions and forms,47 and there is a much greater body of work (in terms of number) that focuses on the aesthetics of written fictional forms. But the concern in this study is with the elements of the originating source and adaptation that can be more cogently compared, so as to ensure that the debate does not run aground on the perilous rocks of medium-specificity. For, as the George Bluestone’s seminal Novels into Film

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has well illustrated, as soon as the aesthetics of form are introduced into the discussion of adaptation a limiting/limited debate follows, with judgements about which version is ‘better’ commonplace. And the reason for this lapse into evaluation is that adaptation across different forms involves two essentially and inescapably different sets of formal principles: ‘I have assumed, and attempted to demonstrate, that the two media [novel and film] are marked by such essentially different traits that they belong to separate artistic genera.’48 For Bluestone, because ‘the novel is a linguistic medium, the film essentially visual,’49 there are different ‘governing conventions’ for each, which ‘are further conditioned by different origins, different audiences, different modes of production, and different censorship requirements.’50 The ‘visual rhythms’ of film are seen as especially unique: ‘the inter-cut, the parallel development, the extreme long shot, the fade-out, the fade-in, the dissolve, the flashback, all became common currency in editing techniques.’51 Which all leads to the common sense acknowledgement that ‘the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.’52 This recognition of the inherent qualities of different forms is unarguable. Two texts, originating and adapted across different forms, are obviously going to be different in many ways. For just one example, what Seymour Chatman defines as the inherent ‘over-specification’53 of film (‘a plenitude of visual details, an excessive particularity’54) is of a different order to that of the novel. It is thus sensible to accept at the outset that ‘writer, filmmaker, comic strip artist, choreographer – each finds his or her own ways to evoke the sense of what the objects of the narrative look like.’55 And in terms of television in particular, despite the fact that there is much that can be said about its own intrinsic aesthetics and representational strategies, this need not result in a rejection of the comparative analysis of source and adapted texts, especially when, as in this study, formal and aesthetic particularity is not the central concern. It is the nature and status of the narratives of identity and criminality that is the overriding focus for me, across both source and adapted texts, a focus that (in its relative historical orthodoxy) swims against the tide of many recent works on adaptation: ‘the future of adaptation studies is best illuminated by looking at the questions most likely to lead it away from its dependence on one-to-one comparisons between specific adaptations and works of literature, a category that provides both a repository of privileged intertexts and a touchstone of value for new texts.’56 This hostility towards what Dudley Andrews calls ‘the most frequent and most tiresome’57 comparative critical discussions is particularly pronounced in its rejection of the idea that ‘the task of adaptation is the reproduction in cinema of something essential [my italics] about an original text.’58

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The problem with such a rejection of comparison is that it is too often based on a conflation of two separate elements: a comparative approach to adaptations, and debates about value, fidelity and authenticity. Yet in reality there is nothing in a comparative methodology that is intrinsically nor inevitably concerned with issues of authenticity. The question as to whether film and television somehow sells short an adapted text need never come up. In a culture which ‘venerates originality,’ the process of adapting an original work might be ‘often thought – even it if it is an unspoken thought – to be an inferior creative activity,’59 but in the analysis of adaptation as a process/practice such snobbery is hardly inescapable. The readings in each of the succeeding chapters will journey between fiction and television as interrelated cultural texts, with no sense of TV adaptations as slaves to their literary sources. They will highlight adaptation in its cultural context. For, as Brian McFarlane in Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation has acknowledged, ‘[the] conditions within the film [and indeed television] industry and the prevailing cultural and social climate’ at the time the adaptation is produced ‘are two major determinants in shaping any [my italics] film, adaptation or not.’60 The comparative analysis of adaptation is thus recognized to be a common approach, but despite (or perhaps because of) this conventionality it has a more coherent frame of reference than the increasingly amorphous strand of adaptation studies in which the term ‘adaptation’ itself becomes unfeasibly slippery. The rejection of the sense of the ‘authoring’ power of an originating source (which has much in common with past debates about the ‘death’ of the author more generally), allied to disciplinary tensions related to the status of film and television studies (in which there is an inherent resistance to the ‘dominance’ of the literary), has reached a point when it is difficult at times to know what exactly it is that is distinct about adaptation anymore, in the chaos of: ‘version, variation, interpretation, continuation, transformation, imitation, pastiche, parody, forgery, travesty, transposition, revaluation, revision, rewriting, [and] echo.’61 If the point of widening the range of the term adaptation is to celebrate limitless intertextual fluidity, why does this process need to be labelled ‘adaptation’ at all? For the gamut of intertextual forms that now come under the umbrella of adaptation studies, as part of a growing tendency to problematize adaptation as a term in itself, has seen it take on an illusory postmodern quality, with critics bundling together a range of comparable, but in some ways distinctly different cultural practices with ‘adaptation’ as the summative critical label. It might be perfectly reasonable to say that ‘adaptation studies mobilize a wide vocabulary of active terms,’62 but there is a danger that if

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the qualifying rubric is widened much further then adaptation studies will end up chasing its own tail to the point of unrelenting dizziness. Losing sight of the nature of the adaptive relationship results in a notion of adaptation as a form of infinite intertextual regression, influenced (but moving far beyond) Gérard Genette’s notion of cultural texts as palimpsests.63 The relegation of the notion of an originating text sees a range of adaptations (and part adaptations) fusing into one barely decipherable (though wholeheartedly implied) ur-text. Unless there is a residual and coherent sense of a source text (as an entity, an influence, a co-presence, not necessarily a fixed essence), then the very basis of the discussion of adaptation and its processes within the frame of cultural-historical interpretation is undermined, and adaptations themselves dematerialize into the vagueness of epistemological (and even ontological) crisis. It has reached the point when it is seemingly contentious even to acknowledge that the impact of an adaptation is reliant on ‘the audience’s awareness of an explicit relationship to a source text.’64 Instead the increasinglyvoiced contemporary critical view is that ‘to be first is not to be originary or authoritative.’65 If it is the case, as Thomas Leitch has claimed, that comparative discussion is ‘unlikely to play a leading role in advancing adaptation studies as it struggles to emerge from the disciplinary umbrella of film studies and the still more tenacious grip of literary studies,’66 then the future of these studies is likely to be ever more diffuse. And this scattering of adaptations to the four winds will make reading them as a form of cultural history much more difficult. Some form of comparative methodology is a necessity in order to fully understand the fact that ‘the past . . . can never be transcribed, it always has to be reinvented. And it is never innocently reinvented but will always bear the fingerprints and distortions of the time which reinvented it.’67 Reading across texts produced at different cultural moments requires some sense of a source-text relationship. This needs to be ‘a more realistic, complex and nuanced understanding of adaptation’ than has sometimes been the case, and to avoid positing ‘the “original” source/individual adaptation relationship as a direct, unmediated and ahistorical one,’68 but with these caveats it is clear that critical comparison is, within the context of a cultural-historical discussion, the most fruitful approach. All of which is not to say that critical works that examine adaptation without focusing on originating texts lack insight. Even the most sustained attempts to develop a theory of adaptation that is more about the adaptations themselves than the adaptive practices and processes that have produced them, have much to say about adaptations per se. Linda Hutcheon’s

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A Theory of Adaptation, for instance, is a sophisticated examination of what Hutcheon calls ‘adaptation’ (she uses the term as a catch-all for intertextuality in all its forms) which although not ultimately achieving (or in truth even attempting) a unifying, coherent critical methodology makes a persuasive case for the importance of adaptation as a field of study. It offers a critically informed yet pragmatic world-view, acknowledging how ‘there are many and varied motives behind adaptation and few involve faithfulness,’69 and, drawing on the influence of Genette, foregrounds what Hutcheon calls ‘the audience’s “palimpsestuous” intertextuality,’70 the complex interplay between texts and reading and viewing contexts. There is a healthy balance defined between the role of the individual adapter and the culture within which they work, an acknowledgement of the at times inescapable issue of medium-specificity, as well as an understanding of how texts can both accord with and resist their contexts: ‘an adaptation can obviously be used to engage in a larger social or cultural critique. It can be used to avoid it, of course.’71 The only blind spot to this ‘theory’ of adaptation is that, because of its inherent movement away from comparative (source-adaptation) analysis it prevents a resolution to the problems it sets itself. It is true to say that ‘it is difficult to set up a regular methodology for investigating how far cultural conditions (e.g. the exigencies of wartime or changing sexual mores) might lead to a shift in emphasis in a film as compared with the novel on which it is based,’72 but it is difficult to establish the impact of cultural change at all if your critical method avoids sustained text-to-text comparison. For this method is the key to such a text-context understanding, offering the best opportunity for comprehending the nature and consequences of implied social change, and the role of cultural texts within this. Therein the discussion in Adapting Detective Fiction will focus not on the more limited compare/ contrast methodology wherein questions of verisimilitude (to an originating essence) become part of the endgame, but instead will use the comparison/ contrast as the basis for a consequent examination of late twentieth-century cultural history. Originating and adapted texts will be seen as both reflecting and shaping this history and cultural frame: ‘fully illuminating the meaning of a text requires exploring all of the sources of the text, not only earlier texts but social sources as well.’73 This sidesteps Sarah Cardwell’s sense of the novel-adaptation comparison as ‘an inadequate starting point for the interpretation, analysis and evaluation of individual adaptations.’74 For although it is correct to point out that many examples of the dominant trends of adaptation criticism (medium-specific, comparative, pluralist) have a limited focus on ‘the adaptations themselves

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as independent artworks,’75 to focus on adaptations as ‘independent artworks’ in isolation is itself limiting as an understanding of the cultural dynamics of adaptation, in as far as individual adaptations shape/respond to historically specific cultural change. Once adaptations are detached from their informing source(s) there is little left that marks them out as adaptations at all. They can still be studied as cultural texts in and of themselves, but less convincingly as ‘adaptations,’ or else the term risks becoming completely meaningless in its intertextual ubiquity. Looking at the ‘aesthetic and generic particularities’ of adaptations, and their ‘televisuality’76 (as Cardwell suggests) lacks the cultural-historical engagement of a consideration of what Cardwell has defined as ‘adaptation-as-process.’77 It is through a critical framework of comparison and contrast that shifting attitudes and ideologies are thrown into sharpest relief. In an attempt to achieve the best of all (critical) worlds, this study is concerned with texts in themselves and the transition between them. The focus on adaptation in context thus highlights the extent and nature of adaptations taking place ‘in a creative as well as an interpretive context that is ideological, social, historical, cultural, personal, and aesthetic.’78 There is a recognition that ‘this wider context of creation and reception must . . . be of interest to any theory of adaptation that defines the term as process, as well as product.’79 This is intended to overcome what James Naremore has identified as the problem of comparative adaptation studies which stop ‘at the water’s edge . . . hesitant to move beyond literary formalism and ask more interesting questions,’80 those most notable for the way in which they ‘demonstrate a commitment to the critical activity known as “close reading.” ’81 For although there is a specific focus on individual TV programmes, rather than a more generic sociological examination of television per se (a conscious departure from what Alan McKee has characterized as the ‘absolute majority’82 of ‘normal’ academic works that ‘study television without even thinking about programming’83), close reading is only the starting point of the discussion of adaptation-as-process, which quickly moves beyond the parameters of a limited textual reading. Here the overarching concern is with particular adaptations of particular aspects of identified texts, within particular contexts. There is no attempt to establish a generic, historically transcendent ‘taxonomy’ of adaptation that implies a constancy of form, or a universality of adaptive practices. The analysis is instead concerned with adaptations as necessarily individual and contingent. Not only do taxonomies risk reductivism, they also imply ‘judgements and a consequent ranking of types, normally covertly governed by a literary rather than cinematic perspective.’84 Thus, there is a conscious effort not to

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assume the superiority of ‘literary’ source materials over their adaptations: ‘contemporary critics of adaptation who enshrine literature at the heart of their subject increasingly find themselves grappling with the consequences of that decision.’85 This marks a movement away from what might be called the ‘literature on screen’ form of critique, wherein the focus is on the way in which literariness is translated to film or television: ‘why has the field [of adaptation studies] continued to organize itself so largely around . . . the proposition that novels are texts, movies are intertexts, and in any competition between the two, the book is better?’86 Adapting Detective Fiction is concerned primarily with popular fiction as the source, and television as the medium of adaptation, and as such a sense of cultural hierarchy (a logic in which literature often trumps film, which trumps television, which trumps popular fiction) is not an issue in the same way as it is in (say) the discussion of Jane Austen film adaptations, although issues of cultural hierarchy, fidelity and canonicity are at times pertinent. Instead, sources and adaptations are read both in their own right and also in their relationship as successive texts; the idea that somehow adaptation should show deference (through fidelity) is fundamentally rejected, and ‘fidelity’ and ‘authenticity’ only become relevant as inherently unstable elements of the adaptive process. Chapter 2 focuses on the adaptation of Sherlock Holmes. It looks, in particular, at the critically acclaimed and hugely successful (both in the United Kingdom and overseas) series (produced by Granada television from 1984–, starring Jeremy Brett as Holmes), within a history of Holmes adaptations across the twentieth century. This history reveals an ongoing, if unsteady engagement with notions of ‘fidelity’ and ‘authenticity,’ linked to the idea of a Holmesian ‘canon’ (of the original Conan Doyle stories). This sense of canonicity is particularly prominent in the Granada series, which strives for (an imagined) authentic version of Conan Doyle. This discourse of authenticity in relation to a constructed (and familiar) national past relates to evolving ideas of heritage and national culture, in part a response to the tumultuous social context of Britain during the 1980s. Holmes offers a point of historically sanctioned contrast, representing a time of apparent order and stability, which soothes contemporary anxieties about the national present. Yet, as the Granada series develops it becomes apparent that its discourse of authenticity is increasingly fragile. The impact of changing attitudes towards the police and policing inflect Conan Doyle’s narratives with a new concern with the distinction between law and natural justice. These narratives also provide a contemporary intervention into debates about nationhood and national identity. But perhaps the most compelling

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influence on the nature of the Granada adaptations is the changing face of British television broadcasting, fundamentally altered by the impact of free-market ideology. The Broadcasting Act (1990) is seen to have major implications, stipulating the need for independent production companies to produce new programming and fund themselves from the revenues generated by the programmes, rather than being financially maintained by networks/broadcasters. The impact of this change of culture on the Granada productions was immense. With budgets under growing scrutiny, and cost-cutting measures introduced, the desire to deliver the Conan Doyle stories in all their detail and historical glory was compromised by the push to make a financial profit. Locations were (economically) rethought, and narratives reworked with cost in mind. Consequently, the later (post1990) films in the series depart more obviously, and more regularly, from the originating Doyle texts. Landscapes, actions, and even motivations are completely reworked, resulting in a version of Holmes that is at times more pastiche than adaptation. Perfectly decent pastiche, it is true, but far from the original spirit of the series as it developed in the early 1980s. The fundamental (and deeply ironic) paradox of this is that the impact of Thatcherite economics was to push the adaptations further away from the very world (of the Victorians) that Thatcherite political rhetoric took such pains to commemorate. Chapter 3 examines the ways in which Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple novels have been adapted, most specifically the series of BBC adaptations produced and broadcast during the mid-1980s to early 1990s, starring Joan Hickson. The process of adaptation is placed in relation to the wider cultural status of Christie’s work, and its inherent relationship with notions of English national identity. The Chorion relaunch of Christie is viewed as an attempt (even if only implicitly) to overcome the cultural snobbery that has confronted her work, as well as the predisposition of critics to read Christie as simplistic and stereotypical. In the Miss Marple novels themselves, however, such orthodox archetypes of Englishness are seen as only part of the story, juxtaposed as they are with accompanying tensions in the presentation of what exactly it means to be English. At one level the strategic unity of the English country village is sustainable, as a rhetorical backdrop to the crime narratives, but at another this unity lacks substance and meaning. By the time of the later Miss Marple novels Christie is seen to have lost her faith in the integrity and coherence of her overarching English mythology. The narratives of the novels thus shed light on twentieth-century negotiations of national identity. In the novels written before, during, and immediately after the Second World War the impact of modernity

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is gradually and increasingly felt, and the traditional image of England is tentatively renegotiated. National identity appears progressively more wizened, losing vitality and social meaning, and it is only at the point of criminal action that any sense of meaningful collective identity is realized, when communities react to the violations of crime and attempt to define themselves in opposition to this. There is as such an intrinsic connection between national identity and criminal identity, a perverse form of symbiosis. In the TV adaptations, however, set against the backdrop of profound social unrest in the earlier 1980s, an image of constancy and order is more uncompromisingly represented, a nostalgic harking back to an England of imagined times. The episodes deploy all their televisual wiles in order to achieve this effect. Yet in the final analysis this image is compromised by the fact that Englishness is never really demonstrated as a meaningful social identity. The inherent contemporary reflection on the nature of criminality in many of the Marple episodes problematizes the notion of criminal behaviour as a simple matter of individual will in its portrayal of mental instability and individual compulsion. This prevents the easy Othering of the criminal act in a way that would facilitate a clear and unambiguous collective response to crime. Englishness is denied its key method of defining itself. Chapter 4 examines the ways in which Colin Dexter’s ‘Morse’ novels were adapted into the cultural phenomenon of Inspector Morse. The range of these episodes, with the exception of The Remorseful Day (which falls outside the time frame of this study), are considered in relation to ideological debates and government legislation relating to the meaning and maintenance of ‘National Heritage’ in the United Kingdom, and the relationship between this national heritage and national history. This was part of a wider re-imagining of Britishness/Englishness87 by the Conservative government during this period, embodied in a range of policies and political initiatives. A sense of an emergent, strident Englishness is thus flavoured with nostalgia, a nostalgia woven into the texture of Inspector Morse, wherein meaningful social history is silenced in the name of a fossilized, static sense of national being constructed around a highly conservative image of national culture and icons. This image is fundamentally distanced from the social realities of England as a nation, and Oxford as a symbolic city. It encapsulates a prescribed, elitist culture (signified by snobbery and opera), that also taps into and shapes ongoing debates in the later twentieth century about the nature of television broadcasting, and ‘quality’ television in particular. Morse on television thus offers a strategic rebranding of Englishness, in which the harsher, more troublesome aspects of British social reality, detailed at length in Colin Dexter’s novels, are erased from the national

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landscape. They are replaced by an effective ‘end’ of history (as process), wherein citizens live their lives in front of a façade of English images and stereotypes, and Morse himself is metamorphosed from an erratic misogynist into a melancholy, rather pathetic (yet heroic) aesthete. Margaret Thatcher’s own statement that ‘there is no such thing as society’ comes to life in the Morse adaptations, where there really is no society of any significance at all. This has a particular impact on the way criminality is depicted; there is no social context to allow criminal acts to be viewed sociologically, and so criminality can only ever be a simplistic avowal of individual greed, fear and self-preservation. The seedy, the ugly, the subversive, ultimately the challenging aspects of social life have all been removed, lost in the triumph of an aestheticized heritage history. Chapter 5 is concerned with the relationship between the A Touch of Frost television series (1992–) and R D Wingfield’s ‘Jack Frost’ novels, a relationship that encompasses a markedly different aspect of English national identity to the other chapters in this study. This is the world of the contemporary urban, and Wingfield’s novels in particular detail a society that is morally rudderless, lacking in shape, and devoid of meaning. An ethical void sees individuals without purpose, living outside the parameters of an accepted, normalized moral framework. This gloomy moral nihilism is symptomatic of a society experiencing what Emile Durkheim called ‘anomie.’ Within this morass, the role of Frost (as policeman) is contradictory; he is part of the problem as much as he is part of the solution. Society has no meaning as an enriching formation, no positive reality, to the extent that even the police themselves are compromised as apathetic participants in the encasing pointlessness. In the TV adaptations, however, Frost becomes both moral arbiter and more effective legal enforcer. There are signs of his novelistic eccentricity, in his unconventional anti-authority stance, but despite this it is much more clear on television whose side he is on and what his motivations are. His sexism is gone, his clumsy gaucheness toned down, and he is to be admired rather than pitied or pilloried. He is tolerant and compassionate and has a purpose; more certain, most of the time, about where blame lies. Because of this, society no longer seems beyond redemption, for it contains someone within it (Frost) who offers the possibility of positive social change. He may be disorganized and thoughtless, but his intentions are good; he is the moral register, and as such he makes social meaning feasible again. Chapter 6 considers the adaptive process by which Ellis Peters’s ‘Cadfael’ novels were translated onto the small screen during the mid-later 1990s. It begins by considering the wider Cadfael marketing ‘industry,’ and discusses

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this in terms of its inherent nostalgia. This nostalgia is traced into the Cadfael novels, but ultimately seen as displaced by the concerted way in which the texts attempt to recreate national history, albeit one tinged with a presentism that calls on supposedly universal values under the guise of the explicitly medieval narratives. Peters’s work is reliant on diligent research, with her history rigorously reconstructed with an overarching presumption of its truthfulness, yet it is also wholly subjective in its engagement with wider questions as to the meaning of history, particularly as a process of change. A key element of these novels is the contemporary fascination with the Medieval, which identifies them within a wider ‘Medievalism,’ a discursive re-imaging of the past that has less to do with the actual details of the Middle Ages and more to do with the modern need to configure its history in ways that complement its own sense of self. Thus, buried within the historical tales there are allegories of modern political and cultural dilemmas, mirroring a variety of modern concerns, with apparently universal solutions offered to these specific historical problems. The Medieval world might be carefully realized, but it is fundamentally the world of the readers of the novels themselves, in different garb and tinged with a fondness for Middle-Age chivalry. In the television adaptations things are significantly altered. Whereas ‘the Medieval’ is presented by Peters with sympathy and fellow feeling, on TV it is reduced to a fundamentally malign cultural essence, symptomatic of a barbarity and callousness that is (by implication) far from any modern sensibility. This accords with a wider national self-fashioning during the last decade of the twentieth century, in which Britain viewed itself as increasingly new and modern, a (self-defined) departure from traditional and conservative elements of Britain’s history and a key element of ‘New Labour’ mythology later articulated by British prime minister Tony Blair. Within the context of this self-reflective fin de siècle revisionism, the Medieval becomes a caricature of past-ness, an embodiment of cruelty and the brutalization of the human essence, and a clear contrast to the supposedly enlightened, cultured, and inclusive 1990s. Criminals are sadistic, victims are culpable, and it is only Cadfael himself (as representative of civilisation) who offers a way through the chaos. History is reworked, re-imagined in a way that flatters the self-esteem of modern Britain. Chapter 7 examines the relationship between the TV Midsomer Murders and the novels written by Caroline Graham in which DCI Barnaby and the inhabitants of the Midsomer villages first appear. The novels themselves are situated within the context of the stereotypical English ‘whodunnit,’ in particular relation to the presentation of the English village, a historical

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image of national selfhood exhibiting (it seems) an organic, conservative version of social change. The bucolic ideal is upheld in a variety of ways in Graham’s novels. However, the ethnic coherence this presumes, drawn from a sense of an unambiguous English identity, is continually undermined. Not so much by the acts of the criminal, which are only temporarily destabilizing, but more by the way in which social fragmentation, and individual (non-criminal) nonconformity, are represented as threats to the status quo. Underpinning all of the Midsomer novels is a growing sense of society losing coherence. Englishness is under attack from social change and the individuals who are emblematic of this change. Sergeant Troy, DCI Barnaby’s helpmate, is perhaps the most obvious example of this. Troy is the Thatcherite stormtrooper who represents (in stereotype) all of the worst excesses of the aspirant 1980s. He is a brash, uncaring philistine, selfish and antisocial, politically incorrect and almost violently hostile to multiculturalism. His assertiveness is aggression, his desire closer to avarice. He stands on the compromised intersection between tradition and flux, a product of social mobility yet violently hostile to difference. On television, however, Midsomer Murders tells a very different tale to the Graham novels. Gone are the fundamental social disruptions, and instead a model of social function, in which individuals work together (albeit at times unwittingly) for the maintenance of social order, is more successfully realized. There is an intrinsic harmony to the Midsomer villages (despite the obvious fact that their fictional crime rate is around 10,000 times the national average). What is important is what happens when the crimes are solved; the fixed, preserved reality of the English village transcends all the upset, with equilibrium invariably restored. This perception of harmony matches prevailing political rhetoric during the late 1990s, and the contemporaneous perception of social divisions being healed by an overarching politics of consensus, a conciliatory rejection of polarization and ideological conflagration. The ultimate consequence of this shift towards downplaying social tensions, in terms of the depiction of crime and criminality on television, is an aestheticization of murder, in which viewers of the Midsomer series are encouraged to overlook the moral and sociological dimensions of crime and instead to metaphorically bask in the carnivalesque extravagance and artistry of the convoluted acts of murder that are portrayed. Thus, Adapting Detective Fiction is in one sense a study of specific instances of adaptation, and the originating sources and adapted texts themselves. But it is also more than this. It is a study of the politics of representation in the last decades of the twentieth century, and of the role of television detective fictions in this. It is about the mutually informing interrelation of

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cultural texts and political rhetoric and ideas, about the connections between ideas of crime and criminality (and criminology more generally) and popular cultural understandings of human behaviour and culpability; most of all, it is about the relationship between culture and social change, and how a detailed consideration of the processes of adaptation reveals much about the shifting nature of the world in which we live. Adaptation is in this sense the basis for an exercise in cultural history, an examination of the character and nature of the last decades of the twentieth century, and an illustration of the fundamental role detective fictions play in popular beliefs about the nature of crime and Englishness.

Chapter 2

Sherlock Holmes and the Authenticity of Crime

Sherlock Holmes is perhaps the ‘original pop culture icon,’1 among the most adapted of all literary characters. Consequently, the figure of Holmes commands an almost unrivalled popular-cultural presence, with the mere silhouette of his ‘image’ (itself only a ‘version’ of Arthur Conan Doyle’s own creation) recognized worldwide. As Julian Symons has noted, ‘the enduring power of the Sherlock Holmes myth is astonishing.’2 This myth incorporates film, television, stage and radio adaptations as well as a thriving pastiche fiction market, an almost limitless supply of merchandise, and a vast number of societies for aficionados across the world.3 Hotels and tourist attractions have been named after the great detective, as well as restaurants, pubs and a whole host of advertising and other paraphernalia has utilized his name and image. There is even a discrete pseudo-biographical publishing market.4 The longevity and prevalence of Holmes’s international celebrity was illustrated par excellence when in 2006 he appeared as an icon on the search engine Google to mark the anniversary of Arthur Conan Doyle’s death. Within this wider cultural presence of Holmes the original Conan Doyle stories are often obscured. The history of Holmesian appropriations is one of ‘palimpsestuousness,’5 a ‘relationship of copresence’6 between an almost limitless number of Holmesian texts in a ‘ceaseless circulation’7 of images, characters, settings, and plotlines. Such adaptations imply a form of ‘relational reading’8 wherein each version of Holmes is inflected with elements of those that have preceded it more than the originating tales themselves. This palimpsestuousness was apparent from the very beginning of the history of stage, film and television adaptations of Holmes, with Charles Brookfield’s parodic skit Under the Clock (1893) and Charles Rogers’s pastiche stage-play Sherlock Holmes (1894), both contemporaneous reworkings of the emerging Holmes legend. Thus, the original stories were from the outset over laden by subsequent interpretations and adaptations,

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with Conan Doyle himself even contributing to this palimpsest with a fiveact play which he offered to the great Victorian actors Henry Irving and Beerbohm Tree.9 These stage incarnations were quickly followed by a vast number of Holmesian silent movies made in the early twentieth century,10 a ‘frenzy of reinvention’11 that saw ‘over fifty silent Holmes movies produced’12 between 1910 and 1920 and 47 titles from 1921 to 1924.13 Once talking pictures arrived, the ‘frenzy’ became yet more intense, with films featuring actors such as Clive Brook, Raymond Massey, Arthur Wontner, as well as various foreign actors in European films, including a series made in Germany during the 1930s (of which Der Hund Von Baskerville was a personal favourite of Adolf Hitler, who had a print of it in his private collection, found in Berchtesgarden in 194514). These numerous interpretations of Holmes contribute to his status as perhaps ‘the most popular motion picture detective of all time.’15 What stands out in this chronology of adaptation is the wide range of uses to which filmmakers have put Holmes, and the degree of artistic license taken in departing from the parameters of the Conan Doyle stories. This diversity of interpretation lies behind the irony of the fact that just as Holmes was being favoured by the Nazis he was also recruited as a weapon in the prevailing Allied discourse of propaganda in the 1930s and 1940s;16 Basil Rathbone’s character confronted the political evils of Nazism and foreign dictatorship in films such as Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942) and Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1943). The Rathbone films deployed many of the familiar elements of the Holmes myth, including his dress, habits and speech, but he was transplanted to a new historical and political context: ‘updated from their Victorian settings to incorporate patriotic and anti-fascist messages that fitted the times and inspired the audience to acts of heroism against the enemies of King and Country.’17 This series of propaganda films implied the universal timelessness of Holmes as quasi-superhero and largely overlooked the Conan Doyle source texts (The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Pearl of Death (loosely based on ‘The Six Napoleons’) were exceptions to this).18 On television, however, Conan Doyle’s stories have been given greater prominence within the adaptive process. Holmes was played in the 1950s and 1960s by Alan Wheatley in episodes which, according to David Stuart Davies, took ‘a great deal of dialogue straight from Doyle’s texts.’19 When Douglas Wilmer took over the role for the BBC, he also insisted on working from the original tales: ‘I felt the shadow of the Sherlock Holmes Society looming over me like a great black bat. I used to say “They’ll tear you apart if you get these details wrong!” ’20 Peter Cushing played Holmes for

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16 more episodes from 1968 and pushed for ever greater ‘authenticity’: ‘throughout his life, from childhood to old age . . . [he had] adored reading and re-reading the adventures of Sherlock Holmes.’21 Cushing insisted, for instance, that the Paget illustrations be used as the guide for costumes and scenes, although (as shall emerge) this gesture was rather more problematic as an indicator of authenticity than Cushing appeared willing to acknowledge. Over more recent decades a succession of actors have acted the role of Holmes on film and television, including Christopher Plummer, Michael Caine, Christopher Lee, Rupert Everett, Jonathan Pryce, and most recently Robert Downey Jr. And the dominant trend of the adaptations they have featured in has been towards pastiche rather than towards a self-consciously literal interpretation of Conan Doyle’s narratives. The character of Sherlock Holmes has become effectively a franchise. Many of these adaptations, such as Murder by Decree (1979), Without a Clue (1988), Sherlock Holmes and the Leading Lady (1992), The Case of the Silk Stocking (2004), The Baker Street Irregulars (2008) and Sherlock Holmes (2009), have as close a relationship with the Holmesian pastiche fiction market as they do with the stories of Conan Doyle, a market that encompasses thousands of fictional titles in which Holmes (for instance) solves the Jack the Ripper case, is Jack the Ripper, meets Dracula, has a family, and time travels. Here it is the cultural identity and prominence of the figure of Holmes that is deemed important rather than any of the original stories he featured in. For Christopher Frayling, this typifies the history of Holmesian reworking, with many of the elements of Holmes as he exists in popular culture not actually coming ‘directly from the original stories on which they were based.’22 It is certainly the case that ‘most of the plays and films bear little resemblance to the stories’ and stand ‘quite outside the Doyle canon.’23 To distinguish this wider cultural industry of pastiche and adaptation from the short stories and novels written by Arthur Conan Doyle, the latter have become known within Holmesian circles as the ‘the canon’24 or ‘Sacred Writings.’25 This is unwittingly ironic. For despite claims that Conan Doyle has ‘only recently’ been ‘taken seriously by the academic community,’26 the reality is that the Holmes stories are still largely regarded as popularcultural rather than high cultural artefacts;27 not at all the stuff that ‘canons’ are usually made of: until recently, national cultures were predicated on the idea of a canon, a set of texts that everyone knew. In the case of Britain they included the Bible, Shakespeare, anthologies of poetry such as Palgrave’s Golden

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Treasury or Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of English Verse, and the great novels: Jane Austen, Dickens and some modern classics. The existence of a canon is essential to a culture. It means that people share a set of references and resonances, a public vocabulary of narratives and discourse.28 This view of ‘the canon’ as an essential part of a shared heritage of ‘sanctioned narratives’29 has historically been an elitist one, embodying a ‘judging [of] literature’30 that serves as a means to ‘calibrate the nuances of creative excellence.’31 Such elitism does not sit easily with the popularcultural Holmes. His status within mass culture conflicts with the canonical celebration of what Charles Altieri has called ‘selective memories of traditions or ideals,’32 as well as with the normative impulses of selection and exclusion that a canon implies: ‘the fantasy of a best self to be excavated from our historical being.’33 And yet, despite the apparent incongruity of the idea of a popular-cultural Holmesian canon, the inherent canonical sense of a selection of texts to be revered, adhered to and distinguished from other non-canonical materials has still been maintained by Holmes enthusiasts. The potential of a canon to traditionalize (‘canons are closed’34) is just as evident in relation to Holmes as it has been when applied to more explicitly ‘literary’ texts. This is implicit in David S Payne’s view of the cultural status of Holmes in the later twentieth century: Sherlock Holmes is the most famous character in English literature. He has no peer. Put me in Harvard Yard and I can find you learned people who do not know what Shylock did for a living. But everyman will tell you not only that Holmes was a detective but what he looked like as well.35 Here Payne does not call into question the validity of canons of learnedness, education, culture, and literature; the legitimacy of ‘English literature’ and the aesthetic judgements of ‘Harvard Yard’ are assumed. Rather what is being asserted is a compatibility between the Holmes stories and such hallowed canons, using Holmes as part of the wider process of maintaining cultural value in a world in which (as Harold Bloom has claimed): ‘things have however fallen apart, the center has not held, and mere anarchy is in the process of being unleashed upon what used to be called “the learned world.” ’36 An almost dogmatic sense of ‘the canon’ as an indicator of cultural value underpinned the initial development of the Granada television series of Sherlock Holmes adaptations, conceived in the early 1980s in the United Kingdom. The notion of a limited set of texts to be revered and maintained

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was fundamental, implying accordance with the claim that ‘the Sherlock Holmes canon is among world literature’s most firmly rooted points.’37 What mattered within the Granada ‘project’ was that (at a number of levels) the Holmesian canon was strictly adhered to: ‘the 32 Sherlock Holmes films which Michael Cox produced for Granada Television maintain the integrity of Doyle’s texts in ways which other adaptations, including the famous series of films featuring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, do not.’38 This sense of the supposed faithful ‘integrity’ of more literal adaptation echoes with ideas of adaptation that equate literality with moral propriety: ‘terms like “infidelity,” “betrayal,” “deformation,” “violation,” “bastardization,” “vulgarization,” and “desecration” proliferate in adaptation discourse, each word carrying its specific charge of opprobrium.’39 Keeping to the word of the Holmesian canon identified (by implication) non-literal adaptations as of a lower stature and cultural significance. The quest for the literal thus becomes a matter of ethics, illustrating Harold Bloom’s characterization of canon-defenders as those ‘who wish to preserve it for its supposed . . . moral values,’40 even though in reality any attempt to define what literality and authenticity are in practical terms is inevitably futile. The Granada series was first produced by Michael Cox41 and initially written by the experienced English scriptwriter John Hawkesworth. At an early stage their shared determination ‘to set the record straight’42 led Cox to put together a Holmesian reference manual for all the crew working on the series, based on his detailed reading of Conan Doyle’s stories: ‘I started out with the aim of making a series which was as faithful as possible to the original stories.’43 The guide-book was called The Baker Street File,44 and everyone from make-up artists to set designers had access to this digest of ‘the canon,’ which was to provide the basis for their work on the series.45 This is key to what Scott Allen Nollen has called the attempt ‘to adhere slavishly to the conception [of Holmes] first popularized in The Strand.’46 This quest for the holy grail of authenticity was supported by Jeremy Brett as Holmes. His attempt to bring the great detective to life embodied a commitment to the Conan Doyle stories and a desire to produce faithful representations of these. He would ‘carry that book [of Holmes stories] around with him on the set and if the directors or the writers departed at all from the story he would want to know why. He was almost puritanical about that.’47 This Puritanism was rooted in reverence, to the extent that Brett ‘at times became angry with writers and directors [post Hawkesworth] who seemed to have little or no respect for the original stories.’48 To address this, new scriptwriters were ‘all given the same ground rules about structure and characterisation.’49

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The first Granada series, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, opened with A Scandal in Bohemia.50 This utilized dialogue and plot specifics from the Conan Doyle story; Cox saw its fidelity as an ‘homage to Sidney Paget.’51 Individual scenes were based on original Strand Magazine illustrations by Paget, images that were also used as the bookends of the commercial breaks. Yet, the irony of attempting to recreate an authentic vision of Conan Doyle’s Holmes that is reliant on Paget’s illustrations illustrates the chimerical nature of the desired ‘authenticity.’ As Dick Riley and Pam McAllister have noted: ‘Sherlock Holmes is universally recognised by his deerstalker hat. Yet it was an artist, not the author, who first imagined this accessory and attached it to the detective.’52 Paget himself was an adaptor, and so to utilize his work as part of the process of being faithful to Conan Doyle illustrates the all-encompassing nature of Holmesian palimpsest. ‘Authenticity’ was thus unwittingly deployed by Granada as something akin to Adorno’s ‘cult of authenticity,’53 an idea of the real that is ultimately drawn from ‘adaptations, as well as . . . the primary source text.’54 Nevertheless, most of the episodes in this first series show a clear reliance on Conan Doyle’s stories,55 what Nollen naively calls the ‘amazingly faithful adaptations of the original stories and . . . respectful and atmospheric performances . . . and settings.’56 Perhaps most crucially, most of the TV narratives maintain the configuration of guilt, innocence and detection that is apparent in the short stories, the essential inner workings of the tales. Where there are changes in the portrayal of criminal tendencies, crime and its setting, and the relationship between victimhood and culpability, these often relate to nuances in the representation of national identity, as in The Naval Treaty57 and The Greek Interpreter.58 In the former, the French origins of the character Gorot (‘his people are of Huguenot extraction’59) are absent from the adaptation and as such he is assumed innocent within the narrative because of his Englishness. In The Greek Interpreter, when the character of Wilson Kemp (Latimer’s accomplice) is cast as French rather than English, his criminality is articulated via this foreignness. Thus, what happens in these episodes is that England is both more explicitly under threat from foreign criminality and also the necessary arena for justice. In Conan Doyle’s ‘The Greek Interpreter’ the ‘justice’ of the narrative takes place in Budapest: ‘they had each been stabbed . . . and the Hungarian police were of opinion that they had quarrelled and had inflicted mortal injuries upon each other.’60 Whilst in the Granada episode justice occurs on a train in England, when Latimer jumps out and is killed and Kemp is later arrested. Miss Kratides, the foreign ‘poor’ ignorant ‘prisoner’ of the original story, then becomes implicated through

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her ‘cold heart and not a single shred of compassion’ (Holmes). The adaptations rely even more explicitly on a sense of Englishness as an indicator of morality or good behaviour in opposition to the intrusion of the foreign. The implication is that when criminality is confined to English borders there is a greater chance of it being solved. This marks a tentative reassertion of a defined English ‘core’ identity, one that is regularly present in many of Conan Doyle’s other Holmes tales. This ‘core’ stands in contrast to the foreign world beyond in stories such as ‘The Engineer’s Thumb,’ ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery,’ and ‘The Six Napoleons,’ and novels including A Study in Scarlet and The Valley of Fear. In different ways Germans, Italians, Australians and Americans are disparaged, indicted as inferior in relation to the prevailing, idealized notion of Englishness within the context of later nineteenth-century cultural politics. This was a reflection of Britain’s changing position in the international hierarchy, a diminution of British cultural and political status since the high point of the 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations. Conan Doyle’s tales displace the decrease in national self-confidence caused by economic decline (the ‘Great Depression’ from 1873–1896), foreign policy disaster (e.g. the fall of Khartoum), and the rise of aspirant nations as leading world economic and military powers (the United States, Germany), with an over-compensating reassertion of a superior Englishness. It is interesting that the underlying nationalism of the Granada Holmes adaptations of the 1980s vocalizes a comparable sense of national identities. For Andrew Higson, these ideas of national identity were inextricably related to socio-cultural change: ‘traditional notions of national identity . . . upset by the recognition that British society was increasingly multiracial and multicultural.’61 Indeed, within the Granada episodes there is evidence of an apparently more confident, traditional (albeit relatively subtle) national chauvinism of the kind Edward Said defined as ‘a codified, if only marginally visible, presence.’62 There is a collective interest and identity implied in the reworked Holmes stories, a nostalgic, heritage view of national identity that necessarily ‘stresses distinctions between good guys (us) and bad guys (them)’63 and places ‘us’ at the peak of the hierarchy. Thus, these narratives of detection become vehicles for identity formation, establishing the coherence and clarity of the host (English) identity around which all other identities revolve. The nature of this Englishness is reinforced by the order in which the Holmes stories were adapted and broadcast. For the initial Granada series of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes included only five (out of the thirteen)

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of the stories that were in Conan Doyle’s collection of the same name. As a consequence, it is not until the ninth television episode that the audience witnesses a murder, Kratides in The Greek Interpreter. The series does not include either ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’ or ‘The Five Orange Pips’ (which are the fourth and fifth stories in the Conan Doyle collection), both of which contain murders. This choice is not explained away by the copyright problems64 faced by the producers when selecting material to adapt, but says much about the nature of the TV ‘product’ manufactured by Granada. The focus in that first series is on the ‘game’ element and the methods Holmes uses to uncover the truth, features of ‘typical detective stories’ that are ‘remarkably free from the realities of violence.’65 By downplaying the prevalence of death, the series evokes a cosier view of the past within which relatively mild disorder is ultimately contained and ‘the inevitableness’ of ‘wrongdoing . . . punished.’66 The viewers of the Granada series enjoyed stories with an ‘absence of strain in the tale of detection . . . [and] the assurance of resolution.’67 There was an inherent and familiar comfort of a ‘mystery [that] will be solved’68 framed within the overarching ‘tendency towards nostalgia.’69 And it was this nostalgic impulse that created the sense of a past ‘displayed as visually spectacular pastiche,’ a sumptuous invocation of later nineteenth-century culture free from ‘social critiques.’70 This age of relative order stood in stark contrast to the political backdrop of the early to mid-1980s in the United Kingdom, within which the British police force was, as Robert Reiner has rightly indicated, almost continually ‘subject to a storm of political conflict and controversy,’71 including contentious police behaviour during the miners’ strike (1984–1985) and the urban riots in Liverpool, Brixton and Handsworth in 1985.72 The Holmesian captivating combination of order and nostalgia and the inherent ‘petty-bourgeois ideology’ of themes such as ‘authority, law and order, patriotism, national unity, the family and individual freedom,’73 chimed with the contemporaneous Thatcherite rhetoric of moral and political order and its celebration of the Victorian past: ‘those were the values when our country became great, but not only did our country become great internationally, also so much advance was made in this country.’74 Thatcher lauded ‘a great reforming age, whose zeal we should do well to emulate in terms of our own age and its needs,’75 a quasi-hagiography of the Victorian era and its ‘urbanization of society . . . expansion of wealth and knowledge . . . transformative power of technology’ that was part of a broader ideology that identified the nineteenth century as ‘much more like ours than like the societies that had gone before.’76 As such, the audience for the Holmes episodes was transported back to what Michael Hardwick calls ‘that world

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“where it is always 1895,” ’77 with their own social and political anxieties soothed by the ‘continuous feel of calm and of stately pace.’78 This heritage view of the national past was ‘in many ways symptomatic of cultural developments in Thatcherite Britain.’79 Historical distinctness and differences were collapsed into an implied continuity of values and moral truth with the specific aim of renovating the national sense of self: we still acclaim the scientific and technological innovations to which Britain gave birth and which ushered in the industrial and scientific age. We can look back at the history of our Empire in the confidence that it was not a scourge to other peoples, but contributed to the well-being of mankind. It brought peace, law and dramatic development to a quarter of the globe. We have given to the world the English language, which is now close to being to the modern world what Latin was to the ancient . . . slow organic growth has endowed our political life with a special virtue, offering a moral as well as a political example to mankind. We . . . are certain that we belong to a ‘happy breed,’ as Shakespeare put it in the mouth of John of Gaunt.80 Within such a perception of historical continuity, the Holmesian approach to crime is (by implication) apparently ‘timeless,’81 suggesting that twentiethcentury problems might be as equally solvable as nineteenth-century ones. In this sense the television episodes become (albeit unwittingly) complicit in the ongoing Thatcherite validation of ‘Victorian Values.’ They speak to the later twentieth-century ache for what Raphael Samuel has called ‘lost stabilities,’82 and articulate ‘the mythology of a unified national self,’83 a ‘kind of reverse image of the present, exemplifying by its stability and strength everything that we are not.’84 The second series of Granada adaptations, The Return of Sherlock Holmes,85 was produced by June Wyndham-Davies rather than Michael Cox. They began, as Peter Haining has claimed, with a similar commitment to maintain ‘authenticity and visual quality’86 as was typical of the first series. Yet the context of production had started to change: ‘as is the way with television companies when they see they have a guaranteed success on their hands with established values, it was felt that budgets could be cut and expenses pared down a little.’87 Beyond the most obvious difference from the first series, which saw Edward Hardwicke replacing David Burke as Watson, the Conan Doyle narratives were altered more frequently and more significantly; The Empty House88 was reconfigured around a new plotline involving Holmes at the site of Gordon’s death in Khartoum; The Second Stain89 and

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The Musgrave Ritual90 saw major changes of narrative emphasis (such as Holmes’s use of cocaine in the latter), and The Six Napoleons91 contains an entirely new section which focuses on the Anglo-Italian community in London but which in reality is little more than a composite of Italian national stereotypes (emotional volatility, secret societies, violence, revenge, vendettas etc.). In other episodes there were also significant changes in the nature of the representation of crime and criminality. The Priory School,92 for instance, concludes with James Wilder falling to his death after kidnapping Lord Saltire rather than being sent away to Australia to redeem himself and make his fortune. This provides punishment and harsher moral judgement in response to his criminality, as opposed to the rehabilitation and opportunity for redemption that Conan Doyle’s story offered. The Duke of Holdernesse is made less complicit, whereas originally he ‘condoned a felony, and . . . aided the escape of a murderer.’93 Therein the adaptation shows a greater tolerance for the behaviour of the aristocracy and much less towards the Duke’s illegitimate son. The Abbey Grange94 goes further in its reinterpretation of the central crime. The portrayal of Brackenstall as a blackguard, having murdered his wife’s dog and burnt it ‘and threatened the same to her’ offers mitigation when Croker later kills him, even though this murder is clearly premeditated. The crime is viewed as justified, in an episode that implies that the victim deserved his own fate, and the murderer Croker is consequently depicted as a noble gentleman. He worries not only that Lady Bracknell will be held responsible if he flees but that ‘some other poor devil’ will get the blame even if she doesn’t. He takes responsibility for his actions, and Holmes lets him off. In what becomes a trend in the Granada adaptations, Watson then declares that he is ‘uneasy’ with his friend taking the role of both advocate and judge: ‘forms are society Holmes, manners maketh man.’ Although it seems clear that the abusive husband is culpable for his own fate, the episode has Watson, as the voice of ‘decent’ society, point out the need for proper legal process in the treatment of the murderer. There are to be no short cuts, and there is to be no ad hoc justice. Conan Doyle’s original narrative contains none of Watson’s hesitations and doubts about the ethics of Holmes’s behaviour, which highlights what is the central dichotomy of the Holmes/Watson relationship in the Granada episodes. Watson embodies a respect for the official legal channels and processes, those criminal justice processes through which ‘the state responds to behaviour that it deems unacceptable . . . delivered through a series of stages: charge; prosecution; trial; sentence; appeal; punishment.’95 Holmes, on the other hand, articulates a notion of ‘natural justice,’ emphasizing the ‘basic principles necessary to

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ensure fairness in legal proceedings; principles of justice deriving from the nature of humanity; and principles of justice which would obtain in a state of nature and which are independent of social relationships.’96 Holmes’s recourse to natural justice and its implicit sense of ‘fairness’ is also apparent in both The Man with the Twisted Lip97 and the feature-length The Sign of Four.98 In the former, Conan Doyle’s evident tolerance for the fraudulent behaviour of Neville St Clair is accentuated, with even greater focus on the harmless, cultured side of his beggar persona Hugh Boone. Boone is seen to quote Shakespeare, Dickens and the Bible. Watson calls him ‘an aristocrat among beggars.’ When the episode ends with a Shakespearean quote from Neville St Clair and him burning Boone’s disguise on a bonfire the effect is to almost entirely overlook the immorality of his behaviour. It is seen as a localized misdemeanour against the good faith of his wife rather than a crime against society as a whole. Because of his social background St Clair is given the chance to make reparation (as in the original story), but in the adaptation this is justified more explicitly in relation to his cultured nature and the benefit to society this entails. Thus, the moral framework of the narrative doesn’t simply maintain Conan Doyle’s favouring of the middle above the working class: ‘if the police are to hush this thing up, there must be no more of Hugh Boone.’99 Instead it depicts a cultured middle class more deserving of the tolerance of the law precisely because of the idealized Englishness it represents. In The Sign of Four the villain Jonathan Small is given an additional, extended monologue detailing his personal history and rationalizing his criminality, providing a yet more sympathetic interpretation of his behaviour. For the initial TV viewers, this sympathy would have been amplified (inadvertently) by the fact that Small was played by John Thaw, who was at this time in the public consciousness in the UK through his lead role in the (by then) popular Inspector Morse series.100 The Sign of Four was then followed by The Devil’s Foot,101 which contains a number of elements not drawn from the Conan Doyle story; these include Holmes’s use of the syringe, his subsequent mania, the symbolic discarding of his drug paraphernalia, and an extended set-piece where Holmes hallucinates after inhaling the Devil’s Foot, replete with images of Blake, the Reichenbach Falls, and Moriarty. Such ‘uncanonical self-indulgences’102 were matched by a reworking of the finale in which Dr Leon Sterndale holds Mortimer Tregennis over the toxic fumes and does not (as in the short story) wait outside the room for him to take his own life. Watson (again) is displeased with Holmes for letting the ‘criminal’ off and lectures his friend for ‘taking the law into his own hands,’ arguing that ‘it’s not the point’ that he himself might have done the same

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in similar circumstances. He balances Holmes’s own application of a higher law with a rational, legalistic viewpoint which strongly contrasts with the Conan Doyle scene: ‘ “I think you must agree, Watson, that it is not a case in which we are called upon to interfere. Our investigation has been independent, and our action shall be also. You would not denounce the man?” “Certainly not,” I answered.’103 The adaptation appears far less comfortable dealing with what Martin A Kayman calls ‘another sort of crime not circumscribed by law . . . territories that the Law does not reach.’104 The adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles105 marked a watershed in the Granada series, with growing signs that the changing context of British broadcasting was going to have a major impact. The production was dogged by budgetary shortcomings, as too much had been spent on the episodes that preceded it: Silver Blaze,106 Wisteria Lodge107 and The Bruce-Partington Plans.108 The racing scenes in the former had been particularly expensive to film. Consequently, things had to be scaled down for The Hound; character numbers were reduced (e.g. no Lestrade), it was filmed in Yorkshire rather than on Dartmoor, and expensive supernatural special effects were avoided: ‘this production, and the seriously hostile reviews it received, were the turning point in the fortunes of the Granada series of Holmes films.’109 For Michael Cox, the changing political/financial climate was the key factor: ‘our [financial] strategy did not allow us to make the Hound of our dreams.’110 That said, there are some changes of emphasis that have little to do with production issues, but which nevertheless alter the tenor of the film. For instance, the murder of Sir Charles Baskerville seems more grievous because he is cast up until that point as a much-loved member of the aristocracy ‘who fostered many good causes.’ And the crimes of the escaped convict Selden are made more heinous when it is said that he murdered ‘a whole family’ with ‘such savagery.’ Yet, the depiction of Selden as a murderous lunatic is then balanced by the revelation that the authorities have carried out ‘surgery to tame him’ (a forehead scar reveals a lobotomy) which has left him ‘like a child.’ Because of this Watson and Sir Henry agree to let him be smuggled out of the country because he is seen as ‘harmless’; in the book Watson is nothing like as compassionate and chases him in armed pursuit. As such, the adaptation contains mixed messages, first beatifying a victim and demonizing a criminal, then indicting the criminal justice system for is brutality against the murderer. Within the context of growing social crime,111 the tendency of some of the Granada adaptations made in the mid-late 1980s to emphasize (often through the persona of Watson) the need for legalistic punishment and

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retribution is hardly a surprise. It complements the espoused ‘law and order’ agenda of the Thatcher period. The television episodes assert shared ‘ “common sense” ideologies’112 such as respect for the law and the need for the state to be strong in its management of criminals. Although viewers may find themselves in support of Holmes’s actions, they are regularly reminded of the need for official processes and procedures to ensure that things are done properly. The recognition of the importance of such procedures chimes with the passing of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) in 1984, an act of parliament that created a legislative framework for the powers and responsibilities of the police forces of England and Wales: ‘an Act to make further provision in relation to the powers and duties of the police, persons in police detention, criminal evidence, police discipline and complaints against the police.’113 Thus, Holmes paradoxically represents both ‘a fundamental premise of liberal theory – the rule of law’ as well as a challenge to this premise through his methods and recourse to natural justice; he illustrates what Sean McCann calls ‘the tensions fundamental to democratic societies that constantly throw that principle [of law] into doubt.’114 These tensions do not threaten the ‘breakdown of traditional norms and values’115 but they do embody the poles of a fundamental debate about the nature of ‘justice’ within the framework of state law-enforcement. Holmes’s greater tolerance for certain types of criminal behaviour, and his participation in forms of justice-giving that fall outside official sanction, in one sense bears out Dennis Kavanagh’s view (within the context of the later 1980s) that ‘over time the proportion [of British people] preferring “caring” to “tough” policies has increased by one-third and the “carers” are now in a substantial majority.’116 However, the tension between state law and natural law within the Granada TV adaptations also taps into a longstanding debate within crime fiction, the central question as to ‘what can hold a society of individuals together as individuals and how can it overcome the competing forces that always threaten such an order.’117 Holmes’s behaviour can be viewed as a particular response to the ‘threat to “ordinary people going about their private business” from thieves, muggers, etc., the wave of lawlessness and the loss of law-abidingness,’118 for when the official law is found deficient, Holmes steps in to make up the deficit. By the time of the The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes series, the context of UK broadcasting had changed significantly. A revolution of sorts had taken place: ‘between 1979 and 1989/90 a transformation took place in the British economy, and by extension the wider society and culture.’119 The impact of the free-market economics of the Conservative government (since its election

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in 1979) was felt in the Peacock Report of 1986, which ‘explored . . . the options for the de-regulation of British television,’120 and the Broadcasting Act of 1990 that grew out of this. This Act expanded the private sector role in British television significantly. Both ITV and the BBC were forced to commission at least 25% of their original programming from independent producers and the ITV franchises were allocated via an auction process.121 This ‘emphasis on independent production’122 led to ‘total costing,’ wherein the revenue generated from programmes had to meet the costs of running entire production companies. It amounted to a major cultural shift in the climate of UK television production: nothing would ever be the same again, the old certainties were dead and the harsh realities of capitalism arrived at Wood Lane and Portland Place. Whole departments were razed and working practices abolished, and something called an internal market was put in place. Radio Times was outsourced, the permanent make-up staff went, engineers, editors and set-designers were suddenly out of a job.123 The impact of this new broadcasting culture on The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes was instantaneous, evident from the version of Conan Doyle’s ‘The Disappearance of Lady Carfax,’124 which was relocated to Cumbria because filming in the Lausanne of the original story was too expensive. The inherent Gothic fear of the foreign conjured up by Conan Doyle is thus translated into a domestic danger, with key events taking place in and around the Lake District. Whereas originally Lady Frances was a classical Gothic female victim, the ‘drifting and friendless woman’ who ‘is helpless . . . migratory . . . [who] has sufficient means to take her from country to country and from hotel to hotel,’ she is adapted into a less cosmopolitan version of what Conan Doyle called the ‘stray chicken in a world of foxes . . . [who] when she is gobbled up . . . is hardly missed.’125 The villainy she faces in the TV adaptation is also English (rather than Australian), in the form of the criminal Holy Peters. This is a significant departure from Conan Doyle’s depiction of what Stephen Knight has called ‘disturbing events [that] are . . . caused by past and foreign-based immorality.’126 It results, in the conclusion of the episode, in Watson shooting Peters as a means of freeing the English landscape from criminality of its own making; in the original story the villain is not caught and Europe remains under threat. Yet despite this apparent success Holmes berates himself for not stopping the ‘tragedy’ of Lady Frances being drugged and suffering brain damage.

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Whereas in the originating story he merely acknowledges the ‘temporary eclipse to which even the best-balanced minds may be exposed,’127 here he implicitly acknowledges his own guilt and fallibility. By this time the profit-hungry TV schedulers in the United Kingdom had become transfixed by the success of the 2-hour Inspector Morse films and wanted Granada to follow suit with a series of 2-hour Holmes episodes. The Master Blackmailer128 was the first of these, based on Conan Doyle’s ‘Charles Augustus Milverton.’ The narrative is ‘modernised’ in terms of the cultural and moral assumptions that underpin the plot, with the catalogue of blackmails carried out by Milverton including one on an army Colonel who has been indiscreet with a male lover. Holmes himself is shown explicitly romancing a maidservant in the course of his investigation, something that many viewers felt amounted to a breach of faith in recasting the emotionless, asexual Holmes as a lothario. Whilst in the originating story he acknowledges that ‘I have walked out with her each evening, and I have talked with her’129 in the adaptation he is shown cavorting with and kissing her. Beyond these nuances, the episode also includes the most sustained example of Watson and Holmes at odds about the rule of law and the importance of official police procedure. Watson argues that it is ‘technically illegal’ for Holmes to burgle Milverton’s house in order to retrieve stolen letters, labelling Holmes’s plans a case of ‘the cudgel before the brain.’ In the Conan Doyle story the doctor is hesitant about the scheme, but accepts it as ‘morally justifiable so long as our object is to take no articles save those which are used for an illegal purpose.’130 He then goes on to insist on being involved: ‘I give you my word of honour – and I never broke it in my life – that I will take a cab straight to the police-station and give you away unless you let me share this adventure with you.’131 Ultimately the original story sees him accept the need for Holmes’s unconventional methods, acknowledging that he is: thrilled now with a keener zest than I had ever enjoyed when we were the defenders of the law instead of its defiers. The high object of our mission, the consciousness that it was unselfish and chivalrous, the villainous character of our opponent, all added to the sporting interest of the adventure. Far from feeling guilty, I rejoiced and exulted in our dangers.132 On television, Watson enjoys no such ‘thrill,’ and is deeply hesitant about becoming involved in Holmes’s plans. The sense of Holmes being morally compromised pervades, particularly when Lady Swanstead shoots Milverton

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and viciously and repeatedly stamps on his face as he is dying.133 At the end of the episode Holmes concedes that ‘there are certain aspects of which I am not proud,’ and requests that Watson ‘bury this case.’ He has condoned Milverton’s murder, failed to achieve ‘legal’ justice, and suffered the condemnation of his friend. The tone of this ending is downbeat, with no place for the defiant speech of Holmes found in the Conan Doyle: The fact is that I knew this fellow Milverton, that I considered him one of the most dangerous men in London, and that I think there are certain crimes which the law cannot touch, and which therefore, to some extent, justify private revenge. No, it’s no use arguing. I have made up my mind. My sympathies are with the criminals rather than with the victim.134 The subsequent film, The Last Vampyre,135 an adaptation of ‘The Sussex Vampire,’ saw the originating story so fundamentally rewritten as to become a pastiche; what Jeremy Brett later called ‘pretend Doyle.’136 For Michael Cox it was ‘a comprehensive journey through Hammer horror film country.’137 Brett was reported to have said: ‘basically, it’s not the canon anymore; we’re only doing bits.’138 Part of the reason for this non-canonical detour was, he believed, the loss of the week’s pre-rehearsal (due to changes in the broadcasting context and the resultant budget cuts). This prerehearsal was when (in the previous series of adaptations) Brett examined the scripts and made sure they were ‘true’ to the original stories. Yet, in truth only some of the changes to ‘The Sussex Vampire’ can be explained in terms of budgetary matters, or the fact that the original short story needed significant development to fill out a feature-length adaptation. For the Conan Doyle tale is almost completely changed, with the invention of the vampiric character of Don Stockton as the centrepiece of this. The TV film focuses on Stockton from the start, with his ‘killing’ of the blacksmith Carter (after they have a row) and the baby Ricardo (after he touches him). These events, and the Gothic mythology of the St Clair family (to which Stockton belongs) draw on the popular consciousness of the Hammer-horror tradition of the supernatural (and vampirism in particular). It is a world of bats, ruins, and elemental signifiers (clouds, storms etc.), ultimately rife with Gothic pastiche. Significantly, Holmes gets caught up in all of this. His superbly rational, objective mind is compromised through his premonitions about Stockton (which are later realized), depicted in extended supernatural scenes wherein the detective visits a sinister ruin and has visions and an outof-body experience. Notably, although the adaptation later attempts to

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explain this supernatural experience away (in terms of how the sun breaks over the ruin and produces hallucinatory effects), this is contradicted by the general air of the episode, which relies upon the mythical heritage of vampirism and Gothic villains. Both the mistress Ferguson and her maid are sexualized after riding out with Stockton, for example, echoing the female sexualization and vampirism found in the legends of Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) and Stoker’s Dracula (1897). This mythology climaxes at the end of the television episode with the discovery that Mr Ferguson’s son Jack has been exhibiting vampiric behaviours, consciously aping the Gothic tradition Stockton is a signifier of. The ultimate death of both Stockton and Jack provides an apparently neat closure, yet it answers none of the questions about the power and prevalence of the supernatural that the episode poses. This fundamentally contradicts Holmes’s statement in the originating short story that ‘the idea of a vampire was to me absurd. Such things do not happen in criminal practice in England,’139 marking a shift of emphasis that loses sight of the fact that the original Holmesian narratives are about what Gill Plain calls ‘confronting and taming [my italics] the monstrous,’ a ‘literature of containment, a narrative that “makes safe.” ’140 The Granada film might appear to banish vampirism and criminality through the eventual death of the villainous protagonists, but in legitimizing the supernatural it fundamentally compromises the Holmesian rationale. It depicts a world beyond the scope of rational thinking men and any modern system of state justice. The movement towards pastiche continues with The Eligible Bachelor,141 not so much a reworked and re-emphasized version of Conan Doyle’s ‘The Noble Bachelor’ as a source narrative turned inside out. It focuses on a wholly different central character from that in the Conan Doyle story, and the resultant plotline has many more differences than similarities. The family seat of Glavern that is the setting is an exoticized space inhabited by a leopard and a baboon, a version of Stoke Moran from Conan Doyle’s ‘The Speckled Band.’ Lord Robert (the bachelor of the title) has various mortgages and debt problems, has been married twice before, and has had his first wife murdered and his second institutionalized. The second wife’s sister has been horribly disfigured as a punishment for her interference in Lord Robert’s affairs. He is thus unambiguously guilty of murder, kidnapping and malicious wounding. Whereas in ‘The Noble Bachelor’ the compassion of the reader is for the unfortunate bachelor himself (who is effectively jilted), in the TV adaptation Lord Robert is not sympathetic at all. He is an unpleasant criminal sadist. The story is not one of wistful regret but of an entrenched, psychopathic, criminality. It is a stark departure, one that

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Nancy Banks-Smith called a ‘decent dairy-maid of a story . . . tarted up as a painted hussy of a film.’142 After The Eligible Bachelor Jeremy Brett apparently insisted that he would ‘never play Sherlock Holmes again unless Doyle’s stake in the plot was paramount.’143 Yet, by the time of the next series of adaptations, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, there was no indication of any greater canonical fidelity than in the episodes that immediately preceded it. The Three Gables144 was reconfigured around the character of Langdale Pike (to provide a role for the suitably flamboyant actor Peter Wyngarde), and the sense of criminal culpability reworked with Mrs Klein more clearly complicit in the murder of Douglas Maberley. Whereas previously ‘she smiled – yes, by Heaven! she smiled, like the heartless fiend she was, as he looked up at her’145 in the adaptation she directly orders the beating that ruptures Maberley’s spleen and leaves him vulnerable to pneumonia. At the conclusion of the TV episode, Holmes tells her to break off the engagement with the Duke of Lomond as well as to pay for Mrs Maberley’s round-the-world trip as compensation, and Watson (with a familiar refrain) complains that he has ‘let her off the hook.’ In the Conan Doyle story Watson offers no such challenge to the sense of an ‘aloof, super-intellectual and slightly inhuman detective’ who is ‘a kind of saviour of society, somebody who did illegal things for the right reasons, who was really one of us.’146 It is, again, the Granada series that focuses on the fundamental tensions between state and natural law. The Dying Detective147 only reaches the (admittedly rather thin) plot of the Conan Doyle short story three quarters of the way through the episode, and what precedes it is entirely new material. The Golden Pince-Nez148 takes a similar degree of license, although this was in part due to Jeremy Brett’s failing health, which prevented him filming at times and left him in a wheelchair between takes.149 The episode does not feature Watson either, because Edward Hardwicke was away filming Shadowlands.150 Beyond such practical necessities for change the script takes the story into fresh territory, with an added political dimension involving the struggle for women’s rights and suffragism, and this reworking of the ‘canon’ continues in The Red Circle,151 with a fresh voiceover for Watson (the originating text was delivered through a third-person narration), and an additional subplot related to a ‘refuge for the Italian [émigré] community.’ As with The Six Napoleons, the episode proffers a stereotypical depiction of the Italians. There are also further reflections on the nature of the law, Inspector Hawkes announcing that the heroic Gennaro will be arrested and tried for murder (to ‘go through with the proceedings’ of English law) even though his ‘killing’ of the assassin was

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justified. It is still important that proper process is adhered to. The Conan Doyle story, by contrast, showed Gennaro likely to get a ‘pretty general vote of thanks’ in New York for killing a member of a feared secret society, and Inspector Gregson conceding that ‘I do not think she [Gennaro’s wife] or her husband has much to fear’152 from the legal system. The adaptation then ends with the bridging of the gap between the legal system and natural justice, with Holmes noting that ‘the law is what we live with,’ and Watson reporting that ‘English justice looked kindly on the young couple, and soon afterwards they left for Australia.’ Official procedure has been observed and taken its (sanctioned) natural course. The penultimate episode in the entire Granada Holmes project, The Mazarin Stone,153 was dogged by off-camera problems, with Brett in hospital and the script consequently rewritten so that Holmes could be replaced by Mycroft in the narrative. Everything except the villain and the title is lost from the original story, which is blended into another Conan Doyle tale, ‘The Three Garidebs.’ This was followed by the final adaptation broadcast, The Cardboard Box,154 which draws together the overarching tensions of crime and responsibility found in previous episodes. Sympathy is directed towards the murdering husband, Jim Browner, despite his drunkenness and questionable character. Holmes openly wishes the man had committed the crime in France because they ‘acknowledge the crime of passion’ there, and he would be treated more leniently by the law as a consequence. This greater empathy with the plight of the murderer (despite him severing the ears of his wife and her lover) is facilitated by an amended plotline wherein the husband murders his wife and her ‘lover’ after coming across them accidentally in a park and losing control of himself, rather than calculatedly rowing out to kill the two lovers in their boat in a premeditated fashion (as he did in the Conan Doyle tale). The emotional weight of Holmes’s concluding speech (taken almost word-for-word from the original story) is given greater significance by the way in which the adaptation more explicitly questions the nature of guilt: ‘what object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.’155 Coming at the end of the final Granada episode this serves as a fitting and poignant epitaph to the series as a whole, and in particular to the ongoing questioning of the nature of criminality and the distinction between state law and natural justice. Across the range of the Granada Sherlock Holmes adaptations contemporaneous views of Englishness are negotiated, crime and criminal responsibility are re-examined, and the impact of fundamental changes to the British

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television industry are felt. The series begins within one broadcasting context and ends amidst another. The impact of the UK government’s free-market political philosophy on the British television industry (namely the 1990 Broadcasting Act) ultimately worked against Granada’s aspirations for verisimilitude in their depiction of the Victorian world of the great detective. Ironically, the Thatcherite reforms of broadcasting help relegate ‘the Victorian,’ so much admired in Conservative political rhetoric, to the realms of pastiche, making it increasingly difficult for Granada to realize the nineteenth century in the detail they desired. What Philip Lynch has called the ‘more assertive English cultural identity’156 apparent under Thatcherism was not in this case well served by its free-market economic philosophy, and the consequent shift of the Granada series away from the Holmesian canon. As budgets were cut and production schedules scaled down, the idealized, ‘faithful’ adaptation of Holmes was compromised. And yet, notwithstanding the debilitating impact of the changes in British broadcasting on the series, in truth (despite its pretensions to ‘authenticity’) signs of a reworking of the originating source materials were apparent from an early stage. A number of the episodes from the first series onwards represent national identities, the conception of the law, and the nature of criminality in ways that mark a departure from the Conan Doyle stories. Episodes such as Wisteria Lodge, The Devil’s Foot, Abbey Grange and The Master Blackmailer all evidence a significantly greater tolerance for criminal behaviours and a questioning of the relationship between state and natural law, and The Greek Interpreter and The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax portray an accentuated linkage between nationality and criminality. Thus, the prevailing Granada ethos of ‘faithfulness’ and ‘authenticity’ to the Holmesian canon was regularly sidestepped. The wider socio-political context of the Granada project, within which the rhetoric and ideology of Thatcherism was pervasive and highly influential, redirected many of the concerns of Conan Doyle’s own stories. The Holmes adaptations encapsulate the growing acknowledgement of the importance of the law as process, as embodied in PACE, whilst at the same time they illustrate a declining confidence as to the ability of legal process to control crime (a lack of confidence that underpinned Thatcherite calls for stiffer law and order policies). Episodes such as The Last Vampyre show concern about the apparently unsolvable nature of certain criminal activity, as well as anxiety about whether the prevailing system of criminal justice can ever be a sufficient barrier to wanton and extreme violence. Therein the Granada Sherlock Holmes episodes illustrate the difficulties of attempting to faithfully and authentically adapt fictions on television. Such

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authenticity is inherently and cripplingly subjective, with the process of adaptation entailing such a vast array of competing agendas and circumstances as it seeks to transcend the social, cultural and political divide between the context of the originating texts and that of the moment of adaptation. Thus, the Granada series became haunted by a ghoul of its own making, striving for the impossible dream of definitive, Conan Doylean episodes that dutifully brought Holmes to life for a later twentieth-century audience. The series may have begun with a self-confessed reverence towards Conan Doyle’s work, but by the end, for an array of reasons, his Holmes stories became as much an obstacle to be negotiated as a guiding light to be followed.

Chapter 3

Miss Marple, Criminality and Englishness

When Chorion, the intellectual property owning brand creation and management company, paid £10 million for the rights to Agatha Christie’s works in 1998 it made her ‘the flagship author of . . . [their] literary estates division.’1 It was a wise investment. The Christie brand quickly quadrupled the company’s annual turnover to £4m. This grew further with fresh television adaptations, plus a new stage version of And Then There Were None, which opened in London’s West End in October 2005. However, in reality Chorion was not taking much of a financial risk. It is estimated that ‘there are now 2 billion Christie editions in print’2 across the world, and it is an often-quoted truism that Christie has been translated into more languages than any other writer: ‘by the time of her death, she was, according to a UNESCO report, the most widely read British author of all time, translated into 103 languages – 14 more than William Shakespeare. Her total readership was estimated then at 2,000,000,000.’3 Despite the obvious potential of the Christie brand, Chorion did more than simply cash in on its existing strength; their marketing strategy proclaimed a strategic rebranding and relaunch of Christie with a fresh new identity in an effort to ensure that her work is ‘as popular today as when the stories first hit the shelves.’4 The 2004– Marple series of adaptations, produced by ITV Studios and broadcast in the United Kingdom on ITV1, with their contemporary livery and plots reworked in light of modern social concerns,5 bears this out. It has firmly cemented Christie’s position at the forefront of British popular culture, with little sign of what Tamsen Harward, Literary Estates manager at Chorion, implied to be a general underestimation of Christie’s worth to the nation: ‘how come this British woman, whose stories are excellent at gripping the reader, motivating reluctant readers and suitably challenging precocious readers, is not studied in the United Kingdom?’6 In truth, Harward was confusing two different things. For to be studied is one thing, to be widely read quite another.

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For many readers and viewers it is Christie’s quintessential Englishness that is central to her appeal: ‘Christie offers us a world of perfect order and only wicked and evil people disturb that perfect order but they are invariably captured. That’s why people in Buchenwald read her – we have a desire to believe the world is an English village.’7 And yet, for others the representation of England in her work is too reliant on simplistic and comfortable stereotypes and a static view of the world, making her ‘the doyenne of the Cosy School.’8 There has been a commonly expressed view that ‘the sort of book Christie writes . . . [is] intellectually negligible and socially irrelevant,’9 that: to insulate your writing totally from life is also to make it trivial. Although crime stories are fairy tales, in the end they must inevitably be “about” life more than most other fiction. We can enjoy a certain degree of makebelieve, but if the effect is wholly artificial, in the end we dissent from what is being offered us.10 This negativity towards Christie’s work is part of what Harward alluded to above. It was not until relatively recently, with the work of critics such as Alison Light, Susan Rowland, Gill Plain, and Merja Makinen, that the view of Christie’s fiction as deeply conservative11 and lacking in cultural significance was significantly revised.12 This chapter will attempt to straddle these differing critical trends, and to see Christie both in terms of her traditional and her more radical aspects. First, it will examine the ways in which the Miss Marple novels utilize stereotypes in their articulation of a vision of rural England, a vision that Christie claimed was ‘as real to me as it could be . . . there are several villages remarkably like it, even in these days.’13 This is the world of ‘the typical English country village’14 of St Mary Mead and other ‘archetypal English village[s]’15 with delightfully traditional names such as Chipping Cleghorn. Such places imply a shared culture, something akin to what Ferdinand Tönnies labelled Gemeinschaft: ‘[the] perfect unity of human wills as an original or natural condition which is preserved in spite of actual separation.’16 Following on from this, however, the chapter will also consider the ways in which the Miss Marple novels move beyond such conservatism by problematizing the extent to which this stereotypical idea of national life squares with tangible, lived social and national experience. For beyond their nostalgic ‘homesickness’ for a national life ‘squashed into the south-east corner of England . . . endless cricket, fair play . . . village teas and punting through long green summers,’17 there are obvious tensions

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and contradictions in terms of what it means to be English within these fictions: ‘the nation state or society . . . is often revealed in criminology or crime writing as contested territory.’18 By the time of At Bertram’s Hotel, the penultimate Marple novel,19 there is a clear recognition by Christie that establishing a coherent sense of national identity is highly problematic, with England itself reduced to a self-conscious set of signifiers, a triumph (or perhaps nightmare) of simulation. This troubled representation of Englishness in the Miss Marple novels is fundamentally connected to the textual portrayal of crime and criminality. In particular, there is a demonstrable link between crime and what Hugh Seton-Watson has called ‘a nation . . . [as] a community of people, whose members are bound together by a sense of solidarity, a common culture, a national consciousness.’20 For it is through the nature of the communal reaction to criminal behaviour that the underlying coherence of English national identity is most evidently expressed. When it comes to the BBC series of adaptations21 (1984–), however, crime is not shown to have the same cohering properties. Within the context of what is a more apparently confident delineation of national culture, crime is less socially cohesive, and there is greater degree of reflection as to the nature of criminality and criminal responsibility. This only becomes a problem when, in the later episodes of the series, this self-confidence deteriorates, and Englishness fragments into a bricolage of contradictory signs. At this point the socially cohering properties of crime are required to bolster the idea of a communal identity, but they are not in evidence and the viability of a unified nationality is entirely undermined. This is significant because of the way in which traditional detective fiction illustrates an implied (sometimes explicit) connection between crime and national identity. In Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, for example, as was mentioned in the previous chapter, to be foreign is to stand on the threshold of criminality. There is an ongoing iteration of the inherent differences between an idealized English ‘core’ and a dubious foreign (criminal) Other. This Otherness takes in German, Italian, French, Asian, Australian and American perpetrators. There are sinister German spies in stories such as ‘The Engineer’s Thumb’ and ‘His Last Bow,’ sadistic American fanatics in A Study in Scarlet and ‘The Five Orange Pips,’ and criminals who are ‘polluted’ by their experiences of nations such as India, Italy and Russia in ‘The Speckled Band,’ ‘The Six Napoleons,’ and ‘The Golden Pince-Nez.’ Characters turn to various forms of criminality as a consequence of their foreignness, or else owing to their time in foreign places and the impact of supposedly alien cultural practices. Conan Doyle created a multiplicity of

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examples of ‘the menace, the alien, the Other - the one we fear, avoid, and condemn,’22 with the response to crime in the Holmes tales very often a nationalistic one in its resistance to a foreign foe or cultural influence, and the resulting investigative quest a matter of inscribing a particular Englishness in response to this. In Christie’s Miss Marple novels there are also moments where criminality is defined in relation to foreignness. In A Murder is Announced and The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, for example, Rudi Scherz, the hapless stooge, and Giuseppe, the Italian butler, are (respectively) introduced as foreign scapegoats. The former is a particular object of threat and suspicion, linked with the introduction of illegal firearms into England: ‘ “foreign make – fairly common on the Continent – Scherz did not hold a permit for it – and did not declare it on coming into England.” ’23 He is an example of the ‘relatively powerless’ individual who ‘can easily be blamed for a condition.’24 He is ‘identifiably “different” ’ but fulfils the ‘societal requirement for some “other” or “out group” that serves the needs of groups to foster and maintain integration.’25 The need for a European scapegoat in this case was a symbolic displacement of post-Second World War anxiety, Scherz’s foreignness standing in contrast to an implied native Englishness trying to assert itself after the war as if it was an unarguably coherent national identity, what Benedict Anderson has called a ‘deep, horizontal comradeship.’26 However, such a straightforward demarcation between English ‘victims’ and foreign deviants, ‘members of groups that are widely believed to be a political threat in a society,’27 soon crumbles. For in fact Christie’s Miss Marple novels rarely equate foreignness with criminality by the time of the fictional resolution: ‘Christie does not take the simple path of making the murderer a stranger, a foreigner or a servant: the threat is closer, more disturbing than that.’28 As such, both Scherz and Guisseppe are no criminal masterminds. Indeed, ultimately they both become murder victims themselves. The only foreign perpetrators in the Marple novels are Lawrence Redding (who is Irish) and Marina Gregg (who is American), and in neither case is their foreignness explicitly implicated in their crime. For the most part the suggestion of an overseas ‘enemy’ against which the native English can unite ends up being one of the many plot red herrings. As such, national identity is never fully realized as a ‘naturally given or metaphysically sanctioned racial or territorial essence.’29 Notwithstanding this absence of a consistent foreign threat against which Englishness can define itself, Christie’s Marple fictions have themselves often been viewed as an encapsulation of a certain type of English identity.

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She was, for instance, one of the targets of Raymond Chandler’s observation that ‘the only reality the English detective writers knew was the conversational accent of Surbiton and Bognor Regis,’30 as well as one of the writers Dorothy Sayers had in mind when she wrote of ‘the full blossoming of the detective-stories . . . among the Anglo-Saxon races.’31 And there is much in the Miss Marple novels that epitomizes a certain kind of English identity, what Robert Barnard calls the ‘eternal fairyland disguised as an English village.’32 And Christie’s ‘collective of stereotypical Englishness,’33 her paradigm of rural England, has been particularly influential in the history and development of English detective fiction in the twentieth century.34 The idealized world ‘shut off from the social preoccupations of the day,’ caring ‘little about what happens in London, and Europe,’35 is archetypal and seductive. It implies the possibility of a world that is unified and operating according to age-old principles. Miss Marple herself, as amateur detective, reinforces the strength of this ‘rural world of recognizable types and established hierarchies, where there is plenty of leisure, no real hardship, little work to do . . . and the companionableness of a close-knit (if gossipy) community.’36 Her village, St Mary Mead, is seen as having an inherent ‘harmony and rest about it,’37 despite the punctuations of criminality. It represents a selective vision of English rurality ‘as a kind of expanded country house with a traditional social hierarchy firmly in place.’38 The assumption of a ‘homogeneous national culture and exclusionary national or ethnic belonging,’39 Tönnies’ Gemeinschaft, suggests a certain kind of English life, ‘anyone who came here would buy into certain things – Shakespeare, Magna Carta, free speech and so on.’40 Yet, the traditional hierarchy and stereotypical image of England in Murder at the Vicarage says little about Englishness as a meaningful, lived identity beyond the ‘imagined’ aspects of this national community.41 The common bonds of solidarity and fellow feeling that define a broader sense of belonging are poorly defined; the framework of the novels broadly asserts these, but they are unevenly demonstrated. And this is where the representation of crime becomes so crucial. For it is the communal response to crime that reveals the underlying collective identity: ‘the community must be protected. Shut up these people where they can’t do any harm – even put them peacefully out of the way.’42 Without crime as the spur to such a ‘sense of solidarity . . . national consciousness’ (in Seton-Watson’s terms), there is no clear social adhesive, little to define what Englishness really is. The importance of crime in the process of defining English national identity is as such apparent across the range of Miss Marple novels. In Murder at the Vicarage it is acknowledged in the revelation that the

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community ‘tittle-tattle’ about social deviance is ‘so often true.’43 In the second Marple novel, The Body in the Library, the reassertion of community comes after a corpse is found within the sanctified (upper class) home. The library, the bastion ‘of long occupation and familiar use and of links with tradition,’44 has been violated, but it is at the very moment of this crime that the coherence of Englishness is most apparent, encapsulated in the way in which ‘St Mary Mead was having the most exciting morning.’45 This collective consciousness also underpins the community response to Colonel Bantry as a suspect: ‘a slight here, and a snub there, and invitations that are refused, and excuses that are made.’46 Criminal behaviour therein activates fellow feeling, making crime itself (as Emile Durkheim argued), ‘an inevitable, although regrettable phenomenon . . . a factor in public health, an integral part of all healthy societies.’47 In the Miss Marple stories the response to criminality crystallizes common English values, the necessary ‘collective sentiments’48 of English identity. Thus, crime becomes ‘normal and necessary,’ for it is only because of the stimulation of crime that ‘the collective conscience will not wither and recede from public visibility.’49 In Marple, people ‘come together to express their outrage over the offense and to bear witness against the offender’ and in so doing ‘develop a tighter bond of solidarity than existed earlier.’50 Criminals therein generate ‘a sense of mutuality among the people . . . by supplying a focus for group feeling.’51 The pattern is thus clear: national stereotypes are first established, then undermined, before national identity is reasserted through the common response to crime. In The Moving Finger this begins with the prevailing village Englishness of the opening pages and the portrayal of Lymstock, St Mary Mead in everything but name. The village has ‘its roots in the past . . . [before] somewhere in seventeen hundred and something the tide of progress swept [it] . . . into a backwater.’52 It offers a hallowed vision of ‘the country . . . good air, quiet life, nothing to do.’53 The narrative then introduces the reader to the dark underside of this apparent idyll: ‘ “what kind of place is this for a man to come to lie in the sun and heal his wounds? It’s full of festering poison, this place, and it looks as peaceful and as innocent as the Garden of Eden.” ’54 Although the picture-postcard surfaces of Lymstock are ‘interesting from a collector’s point of view,’55 there is an apparent lack of communal feeling uniting the inhabitants of the village: ‘there’s plenty of adultery here – and everything else. Any amount of shameful secrets.’56 As a result it is unclear at this point what English identity actually means, in terms of shared values and behaviours. But once crime occurs the village responds collectively: ‘Lymstock would have been

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annoyed.’57 There are at last signs of a consensus: ‘not joining our village parliament? We’re all agog over the news.’58 And it is this response to criminality that brings the English together within a wider frame of Englishness that is a trope for interiority and belonging.59 This textual interrogation of ideas of Englishness in the earlier Marple novels was part of a contemporaneous cultural trend within which national identity was ‘reworked . . . around the character of the English “race” or “stock” as “civilised” expressed through English literature and landscape.’60 Work by a range of authors, including J B Priestley (most obviously his English Journey (1934)), viewed Englishness as increasingly fraught with tensions: ‘the England Priestley finds is a mess of conflicts and contradiction.’61 Crucially, it was the passing of community and connectedness that was most lamented: ‘the people do not really belong to the place they are in, but are camping in it. They are nomads without a tribe.’62 It was a mourning of the loss of (an albeit imagined) English continuity that became even more poignant after the Second World War, as the post-war Marple novels poignantly show. In these, national identity increasingly lacks coherence, struggling to cope with the impact and effects of profound social and historical change: Fifteen years ago one knew who everybody was . . . They were people whose fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers, or whose aunts and uncles, had lived there before them. If somebody new came to live there, they brought letters of introduction, or they’d been in the same regiment or served on the same ship as someone there already.63 This is the cultural insecurity of ‘a class in society that felt it had everything to lose,’64 embodied in the ideas of a nation under threat: Every village and small country place is full of people who’ve just come and settled there without any ties to bring them. The big houses have been sold, and the cottages have been converted and changed. And people just come – and all you know about them is what they say of themselves. They’ve come, you see, from all over the world. People from India and Hong Kong and China, and people who used to live in France and Italy and in little cheap places and odd islands . . . But nobody knows any more who anyone is.65 And because of this Christie’s work increasingly shows Englishness as hard to sustain in any meaningful sense. The ‘subtler links’ that hold English social

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life together have ‘fallen apart,’66 neighbourhood loyalty and shared interest evaporating, to the extent that people don’t even know the names of their neighbours anymore. The bonds of collective belonging have been undermined because there are so many people ‘going about the country with borrowed identities.’67 Yet, despite the pessimism about the possibility of defining Englishness found in novels such as A Murder is Announced, crime, or rather the communal response to crime, still provides some basis for a shared identity. In this respect, the notion of a typical, common English social life is vital. The murderer Charlotte Blacklock counts on the fact that all the English respond in a similar fashion when they are confronted with an announcement of imminent crime. The resulting collective mad dash to the site of the soonto-be murder highlights a predictable national culture within which villagers are united. This like-mindedness becomes the defining feature of English national identity, what in one of the earlier Marple novels was characterized as ‘a half-scared, half-avid gleam in almost everybody’s eye.’68 In They Do It With Mirrors this commonality of Englishness as a lived identity is less adequately realized, partly because of a growing questioning of the validity of the overarching Edenic rural stereotype of the English village: ‘ “Maybe, Jane,” she said, “that St Mary Mead of yours isn’t quite the idyllic retreat that I’ve always imagined it.” ’69 There is a manifest lack of faith in any meaningful sense of the nation, no evidence of the security and sure knowledge that comes from a coherent national selfimage. In the post-war context the village-green mythology of Englishness was becoming absurd, set against the backdrop of the doubt-ridden austerity of the nation: by the end of World War II the reassurances offered by the classical kind of detective story had become very shaky indeed. The social and religious structure of society had changed so much that its assumptions seemed preposterous. The pretence that the world was static could no longer be maintained.70 As such the Marple novels begin to anticipate the moment when, in the words of Raoul Vaneigem, ‘the myth of coherence is so undermined by the criticism of facts that it cannot mutate back into coherent myth.’71 The version of England that is represented is ‘as much a mythical kingdom as any realm of musical comedy, but the fantasy derived from nostalgia, not invention. It was a fly-in-amber land, in which were perpetuated the ways and the values of a society that had begun to fade away.’72

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The later novels are even more marked by an explicit acknowledgement of all-encompassing socio-cultural change. There is, for example, the resourcefulness and sheer potential of modern femininity that is Lucy Eyelesbarrow in 4:50 from Paddington: ‘Lucy Eyelesbarrow was thirty-two. She had taken a First in Mathematics at Oxford, was acknowledged to have a brilliant mind and was confidently expected to take up a distinguished academic career.’73 This strident modernity infuses everything: ‘St Mary Mead was not the place it had been. In a sense, of course, nothing was what it had been.’74 Even village life is carried out ‘quite close to an airfield . . . most frightening. Two panes in my little greenhouse broken the other day.’75 Christie’s representation of Englishness reflects the view that ‘the old mainstream values and ideas that had once been the backbone of her [Miss Marple’s] generation were fading rapidly,’76 embodied in the new housing development that forces her ‘to register the passage of time and the arrival of new ideas’:77 the detachment of young wives who shopped at the supermarket and wheeled prams about the quiet streets of St Mary Mead. They were all smart and well turned out. Their hair was crisp and curled. They laughed and talked and called to one another. They were like a happy flock of birds. Owing to the insidious snares of Hire Purchase, they were always in need of ready money, though their husbands all earned good wages; and so they came and did housework or cooking.78 England is thus a shifting idea, fundamentally in flux, far beyond what Anne Hart calls ‘mild hints of changes under way.’79 The later Marple texts ‘exploit universal doubts, hopes and fears’80 about the nature of the English nation, and return repeatedly to the question ‘what does it mean to be English?’81 They illustrate adroitly the fact that national unity is complex because, as Anthony Easthope has argued, it requires a ‘collective identification with a common object which is [then] accompanied by identification of individuals with each other.’82 In Christie’s novels the only signs of such a collective identification appear in the presence of crime. When crime happens, characters vocalize their national identity, as in 4:50 from Paddington: ‘they’re everywhere, these people. Infiltrating! Why the Home Office lets them in beats me.’83 Deviance leads to a sense of more familiar nationhood that the law-abiding English retreat into: ‘Let’s chuck all this – Go back home to England.’84 It is just such a familiarity that motivates an innate national sense of self-preservation in The Mirror Crack’d: ‘ “you mustn’t let it

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make you nervous in any way, because I’m sure it’s nothing to do with us . . . with all these American gangsters and things like that, well I suppose it’s nothing to be surprised about.” ’85 For Stephen Knight, the prominence of social change is evidence of how the later Marple novels ‘darken somewhat.’86 However, it is not just a case of these novels indicting change: ‘[the] brave new world that was springing up, the world that by all accounts was foreign to all she had known.’87 For in fact Miss Marple begins to accept the changing present, ‘the houses were different, the streets were called Closes, the clothes were different, the voices were different, but the human beings were the same as they always had been.’88 What is significant is that this acknowledgement of change results in the past itself being called into question, with Marple wrestling with memories that ‘hardly seemed real.’89 The previous idealizing of history (as nostalgia) is replaced first by a realization of continuities between the new world and an imagined old world, and then a growing sense that the rural stereotype of Englishness lacks (indeed has always lacked) substance. This revelation reaches its apotheosis in At Bertram’s Hotel (1965), the Marple novel that marks the ultimate unravelling of the idea of a coherent English identity. The inherent quasi- postmodern critique of national identity is much more than what Susan Rowland has identified as ‘antiVictorian and anti-nostalgic’90 sentiments. For Bertram’s is about the misdirection inherent in mythologies of Englishness, wherein national identity effectively becomes ‘an act of impersonation and denial,’91 characterized by ‘mimicry and masquerade.’92 Within the logic of the novel, Bertram’s Hotel isn’t really there other than in the minds of those who visit it. As an embodiment of lived English identity, it has never really existed. The ‘comfortable, solid tea-and-chintz reputation’93 of the traditional London hotel94 is flipped on its head, indicating (as Christie’s notes for the novel clearly imply) what might best be called a virtual physicality: ‘At Bertram’s Hotel began, not with archetypal characters, but an archetypal place (for anthropologists, “an Ur-Hotel” ’): ‘real bit of old England . . . Edwardian comfort.’95 The critique of Englishness begins with the opening description of the hotel, a place frozen in time: ‘by 1955 it looked precisely as it had looked in 1939 – dignified, unostentatious, and quietly expensive.’96 But it is not just the war that has been erased from record: ‘inside, if this was the first time you had visited Bertram’s, you felt, almost with alarm, that you had re-entered a vanished world. Time had gone back. You were in Edwardian England once more.’97 Within the context

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of 1960s England such an image is perverse, akin to a modern themepark attraction: It’s a question of atmosphere . . . Strangers coming to this country (Americans, in particular, because they are the ones who have the money) have their own rather queer ideas of what England is like . . . there are a lot of people who come abroad at rare intervals and who expect this country to be – well, I won’t go back as far as Dickens, but they’ve read Cranford and Henry James, and they don’t want to find this country just the same as their own!98 Therein what Baudrillard called the ‘signs of the real’ have been substituted for ‘the real itself’: ‘an operation to deter every real process by its operational double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes.’99 Yet, this is not the familiar misdirection of the Marple novels, when (typically) ‘none of it seems real.’100 The various images and representations of an idealized, romanticized England in Bertram’s might, the novel suggests, be all there is. The question of identity shifts from epistemology to ontology, with the sign-system that is the Hotel a museumification of an indiscernible past, a realm in which ‘the real’ is not just ‘no longer what it used to be’101 but an empty sign. Because of this emptiness, ‘nostalgia assumes its full meaning.’102 And At Bertram’s Hotel is founded in deep nostalgia, an alluring vision of a supposedly lost national reality, with (ultimately unsustainable) stereotypes of Englishness reworked into a heritage tourist attraction. The enchanting nature of this manufactured past is apparent from the reaction of the foreigners at the Hotel, intoxicated by this world that never was: ‘ “the Pendlebury’s were quite right about this place, Elmer. It just is old England. So beautifully Edwardian. I just feel Edward the Seventh could walk right in any moment and sit down there for his afternoon tea.” ’103 The fact that they are not even real foreigners complicates matters even further. Everything in this fake world ‘is subject to aestheticization, culturalization,’104 making it a quintessential commodity, designed for the consumption of an unwitting market, for dubious moral purposes. The Hotel is a spectacle, but not in the sense of what R A York calls ‘a manifestly fictitious spectacle.’105 It is instead a symptom of a sick culture which ‘erases the dividing line between true and false, repressing all directly lived truth beneath the real presence of the falsehood maintained by the organization of appearances.’106 Discomfort, alienation, unease and an overwhelming

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sense of doubt predominate. Bertram’s Hotel is a sign of a national culture in crisis. As such, by the conclusion of the novel the reader realizes that the England of At Bertram’s Hotel has only the appearance that ‘nothing has changed since the turn of the century.’107 Miss Marple’s hesitancy about the reality of the modernizing landscape in novels such as The Mirror Crack’d is transposed into a realization that the reason ‘ “none of this place seemed real at all” ’108 is precisely because ‘Bertram’s Hotel had not changed. It was just as it had always been.’109 Although everything ‘ “seemed all right . . . it wasn’t. It was mixed up – real people and people who weren’t real,” ’110 The line between fiction and reality is blurred, aptly illustrated by the sub-plot about the attack on the Irish Mail train, a barely disguised recycling of the infamous true-life history of the Great Train Robbery.111 England as spectacle thus sees the ‘submission of more and more facets of human sociability – areas of everyday life . . . to the deadly solicitations (the lifeless bright sameness) of the market.’112 There is a manifest attempt to ‘systematize and disseminate appearances’113 for the benefit of willing consumers, a market-driven ‘colonization of [a faked] everyday life.’114 Hotel guests (literally) buy this image, this experience, this history. By the time of Miss Marple’s most plaintive lament on the passing of time, the reader of the novel is left in little doubt that she is actually lamenting the loss of Englishness as she has known it: Miss Marple rose to her feet. She cast a glance round her and murmured ‘Poor Bertram’s.’ ‘What do you mean – poor Bertram’s?’ ‘I think you know quite well what I mean.’ ‘Well – looking at it from your point of view, perhaps I do.’ ‘It is always sad when a work of art has to be destroyed.’ ‘You call this place a work of art?’ ‘Certainly I do. So do you.’ ‘I see what you mean,’ admitted Father. ‘It is like when you get ground elder really badly in a border. There’s nothing else you can do about it – except dig the whole thing up.’115 England has become artifice, with individuals playing roles drawn from a menu of stereotypes, in settings constructed specifically for the purpose. This melding of appearance and reality leads, inexorably, to the climactic

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moment when Bertram’s Hotel is uncovered as the front for a national crime syndicate. Nationhood has been strategically hijacked for immoral ends, the manipulation of Englishness implicated in organized criminality. England, as imposter, has been an actor in the evolving criminal drama. The depiction of Bertram’s Hotel thus entails Christie’s most definitive, self-conscious deliberation on the slipperiness of English identity. Bertram’s is not about what Gill Plain calls an ‘embracing of the modern,’116 but rather about the trauma of being confronted by it. It is fundamentally concerned with the differences between the idealized Edwardian world of Christie’s youth and a later-century England, a rejection of ultimately unsustainable mythologies of Englishness. Therein the novel enacts a postmodern simulation of Englishness, ‘the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal,’117 an essential questioning of the nature of the nation (as sign). In Bertram’s, as in the final Marple novel, Nemesis, crime no longer provides the basis for the revelation of community ties. There are no tangible signs of people coming together and realizing their similarities and shared values, when faced with criminal acts. Instead, the relationship between national identity and criminality (for indeed there still is such a relationship), reinforces the sense of disintegration. Effectively the polarities of the connection have been reversed. Rather than crime fostering Englishness, performed Englishness fosters crime. In Bertram’s an international criminal network hides in the shadows of the image of an esteemed London hotel, whilst in Nemesis a web of murder and deceit lurks behind the staged commemoration of a national past embodied in the ‘Famous Houses and Gardens’ heritage tour: ‘mainly visiting historic [my italics] buildings and gardens.’118 Both novels draw attention to the bewitching, potentially destructive nature of outmoded national stereotyping, the ways in which criminality can appropriate Englishness for its own ends and utilize it as part of the process of misdirection. In decoding these stereotypes Miss Marple comes to understand the extent to which mythical notions of Englishness can be harmful rather than enriching. Therein crime is no longer the catalyst to a realization of the bonds that join people together, but rather the catalyst for the realization that there are no bonds joining the English together anymore, beyond the false memories of nostalgia. There is no such self-knowing critique of nostalgia evident in Miss Marple adaptations, however. The never-never land of cinematic/televisual Englishness is a staple, commonplace element of a range of reworkings, including what Sanders and Lovallo have called the ‘silly cinematic travesties’119 starring Margaret Ruthford in the 1960s,120 to later US CBS film adaptations

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starring Angela Lansbury (The Mirror Crack’d (1980)) and Helen Hayes (A Caribbean Mystery (1983) and Murder with Mirrors (1984)). In each of these there are clear signs of England as the romanticized (often Hollywood-ized) stereotype of old.121 And this leaning towards nostalgia is particularly evident in the BBC television adaptations, first appearing during the nostalgiafuelled mid-1980s in Britain. The series is imbibed with a sense of the passing of a bygone world, self-consciously deploying many of the ‘stock’ elements of a stereotypical, conservative Englishness. Each episode strives for the impression of an authentic national landscape: hostile to history and its invisible origins, and yet longing for an impossibly pure context of lived experience at a place of origin, nostalgia wears a distinctly utopian face, a face that turns toward a future-past, a past which has only ideological reality.122 And this inherent sense of looking back from the 1980s to the world of a past Englishness of earlier decades proved intoxicating. The BBC series became a cultural phenomenon, with the ‘Christie for Christmas’123 the media tag given to the Marple episodes broadcast during the Christmas holiday period in the United Kingdom.124 This TV scheduling placed the series at the summit of the British broadcasting schedule and British national-cultural life more generally, taking their place as the supposed epitome of Englishness. And it is easy to see why these episodes, dreams of an implicitly coherent (mythical) English past, proved so popular. For the 1980s was a decade characterized by an ongoing attempt by the British government to restore a sense of national greatness, through rhetoric, policy and even military means. The election of the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher in May 1979 was in many ways a statement of the British public’s dissatisfaction at the apparent decline of their nation, and Thatcher promised a return to former national prominence, and a greater clarity of national identity: we know that our literature is a general inspiration. We rejoice that Britain is still respected in all free countries as the ‘Mother of Parliaments’ and the custodian of the principle of the rule of law . . . our policies have never been merely a local version of an international creed; they have always been and remain British policies, for application within the framework of British institutions, which have evolved slowly since Saxon days.125

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There is much about the BBC Miss Marple adaptations that offers such a continuity of identity. They chime with particular examples of government legislation that were as much about the symbols and accoutrements of national identity as they were about what it was really like to be English/ British. The 1981 Nationality Act, for instance, was an emblem of a wider governmental interest in the question of how to legally define national identity. And yet, despite its rhetorical significance, in reality the Act had very limited impact on the way that British people lived their lives. In statistical terms the number of resident British citizens who were affected by it was very small, because the amount of children born in the United Kingdom to non-British parents (who under the 1981 Act would no longer be eligible to reside) was tiny. Thus, the Act represented a strident (yet muddled) legal attempt to restrict access to ‘Britishness’ and enshrine the connection between Britain as a place of residence, society, and culture, and Britishness as a common identity: the crucial irony of the 1981 Act is that it is designed to define a sense of belonging and nationhood which is itself a manifestation of the sense of racial superiority created along with the Empire, while simultaneously it cuts the ties of citizenship established in that same historical process.126 The ideological renegotiation of the terms of contemporary national identity was also apparent in the turbulent social history of England during the 1980s: ‘an atmosphere of brooding tension hangs over the inner cities, areas which have been variously described as powder kegs and tinder boxes.’127 And the urban racial violence of 1980–1981 in Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, London and Leeds, and the consequent political policy interest in the links between criminality and race stood in a somewhat perverse (though complementary) relation to the parallel interest within national-political discourse in the relationship between history, national identity and heritage as signified by the National Heritage Acts of 1980 and 1983. Thatcherite policy making marked a reappraisal of the nature of English/Britishness within the context of its focus on issues such as ‘immigration, crime and punishment,’128 even if (ultimately) its engagement with issues of race and ethnicity also revealed the inherent tensions between its ‘fundamental mission . . . to put the Great back into Britain’129 and the reality of a ‘growing social and spatial polarisation’130 within the nation at large. This wider political-public discourse on national identity throws into sharp relief the BBC Miss Marple adaptations and their beguiling nostalgic haze of ‘imagined community.’ For each of these adaptations works hard to

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establish an appealing coherence and order to the idealized framework of nationhood, making Robert Barnard’s question about the Marple stories, ‘what is it precisely that people find so cosy about such stories?’131 seem hopelessly naïve, if not obtuse. The attraction of the ostensibly guileless Englishness of the series is obvious, beginning with the opening credits of each episode and their heady combination of jaunty title music (clarinet, brass and strings), with pastoral, hand-drawn images, in pastel shades, of village landmarks and personalized caricatures. The scenes are rural, inescapably English in a stereotypical tradition. They depict rolling hills, verdant trees, cricket-playing young men (despite the aside of an undefined corpse by the side of a sight-screen), female servants in period dress, prim gentlemen pushing archaic bicycles, village shops (with no signs of broken windows or attendant beggars), mock-Tudor cottages, picturesque churches, and sprawling country estates (protected by imposing walls and gates), and fierce-looking aristocratic women raised above all that they survey. The opening credits (the titles to which claim the authenticity of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple) illustrate a highly marketable interpretation of England: ‘tastefully evocative of the small-village and comfortable middleclass life.’132 There is a soft-lens ‘visual attention to detail’133 that contributes to a fantasy of England being reassuringly ‘intensified.’134 The first episode of the series, The Body in the Library,135 opens in a suitably reassuring fashion. The trauma of the corpse inside Gossington Hall is offset by the introduction of Miss Marple as what the Chief Constable calls ‘forensic intuition developed to the point of genius.’ She is the woman Sir Henry Clithering praises as ‘one of the most formidable criminologists in England.’ Such confidence in the solvability of crime is amplified in The Moving Finger,136 which reworks the originating novel so as to include Miss Marple from the outset (she is absent for much of the Christie narrative). In Sleeping Murder137 Marple offers reassurance both through her detective capabilities and also her status as representative of a unifying Englishness, a privileging of an idealized past over the lived present: ‘changes all the time, now what’s the good of that?’ However, in subsequent episodes of the series this nostalgic vision of an apparently reassuring Englishness is increasingly confronted by the forces of modernity, those same forces that Christie’s novels foreground. In At Bertram’s Hotel,138 contradictions between elements of the national past and present are explicit from the opening scenes of Miss Marple journeying to London on a steam train and Bess Sedgewick arriving aboard a BOAC jet at London Airport. In one sense this is inherently nostalgic, ‘a movement towards the past from the present, and back again,’139 but the warmth of the

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nostalgic gaze is cooled by the historical specifics of Sedgewick’s world: ‘by resurrecting time and place, and a subject in time and place, it shatters the surface of an atemporal order and a prefab cultural landscape.’140 Rather than a reconciliation between images of England past and England present the adaptation hints at disjuncture, symbolized by the clashing incidental music accompanying these conflicting images. This is a world where an uneasy tension between the historical and the contemporary is characteristic; the receptionist tells Miss Marple ‘I don’t think you’ll find it much changed’ just as Elvira Blake exclaims ‘I’m dying to see ITV; I hear it’s ghastly.’ Superficiality and image threaten the implied stability of the past, made flesh in the supposed dangers of commercial broadcast television. Marple is more able than most to accommodate change, ‘it should have changed, shouldn’t it? The essence of life is to go forward,’ but even she winces at the thought of familiarity and tradition being turned on their heads: ‘what was once so reassuring now seems to be false. Menacing even.’ A Caribbean Mystery141 poignantly encapsulates this potentially unhealthy coming together of past and present in the imagery of its opening scene; a stereotypical English village is littered with rotten apples decaying on the ground, and these apples are then attacked by wasps. It is only at the conclusion of the episode, when Miss Marple is driven through the rainy English countryside on her way home (‘I missed it, you know, I missed it very much’) that the nostalgic impulse reasserts itself, and it seems possible that the idyll might be able to survive a little longer. Only for the unresolved tensions between mythic past and avaricious present to return in They Do it With Mirrors,142 which opens and closes with film reel of historical London, and characters shedding tears over past identities inescapably detached from the lived present. These tears are symptomatic of a wider cultural mourning, a melancholy that also infuses the final adaptation in the BBC series, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side.143 From the moment the episode opens with the symbolic revelation that Gossington Hall (the setting for The Body in the Library) has been auctioned off to the highest foreign bidder, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that Englishness is not what it once (thought it) was. The subtle fragmentation of Englishness in the BBC Miss Marple adaptations thus increasingly undermines the imagined community, threatening to compromise the attempt to establish a comforting, nostalgic, framework of English identity. It is a coherent and conservative sense of national character that is entirely in keeping with contemporaneous Thatcherite longings for former greatness: ‘it is interesting that Miss Marple’s recent

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renaissance, particularly as far as television is concerned, has occurred during the Thatcher decade; are not the Victorian values she apparently upholds what we have been encouraged to espouse?’144 Yet the series also runs counter to the prevailing political rhetoric in its more nuanced exploration of criminal responsibility, departing from the orthodox Thatcherite morality tale wherein ‘the individual is an end in himself, a responsible moral being endowed with the ability to choose between good and evil,’145 and instead problematizing moral culpability both in the prominent, regular association of criminal responsibility and compromised mental health and also through (at times) a more explicitly sympathetic portrayal of criminal wrongdoing. The adaptations contain few (if any) examples of a consensual national-cultural response to crime via which Englishness can be (re)established, which is a significant departure from the Marple novels. As such, although there is at times evidence of an indictment of individual criminal responsibility (in The Body in the Library, for example, the murderer Josie is defined as ‘quite remorseless’) for the most part judgements about criminality are less obviously represented as matters of individual free will. Often crime appears to be symptomatic of an individual pathology, a disease of the mind rather than of the moral constitution. The perpetrator of the poison pen letters in The Moving Finger, for instance, is labelled as ‘pathological,’ and the criminality of Lance Fortescue in A Pocketful of Rye culminates in a deranged state of mind that results in him driving in front of a truck and killing himself. Just as the sinister and ‘terrible, possessive’ behaviour of Dr Kennedy in Sleeping Murder manifests itself in an eventual mental collapse, and the complete loss of his grip on reality: ‘I didn’t want to do her harm, just hold her close. Tight. Safe.’ In the novel, his actions are seen as possibly passing ‘the borderline between sanity and madness,’146 but they are still also the product of conscious deliberation: ‘I had to kill Lily – now I’ll have to kill you. Like I killed Helen.’147 The change of emphasis in the adaptations encourages the viewers to see crime not simply as a matter of individual choice, but rather the result of an inherent compulsions and mental instabilities, vividly captured in the sociopathy148 of the criminal mastermind Bess Sedgewick in At Bertram’s Hotel, who manically crashes to her death, laughing hysterically in a moment of what seems to be perverse ecstasy. This reinterpretation of criminality leads to greater sympathy being shown towards a number of the criminals. In Murder at the Vicarage, for instance, Ann Protheroe takes her own life because she is unable to deal

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with the guilt she feels for having killed her husband. This marks a notable departure from the novel, in which she stands trial and is convicted of her crime. In the adaptation posthumous tolerance is forthcoming: ‘I don’t think Anne Protheroe ever recovered from what she’d done.’ The greater prevalence of compassion is also apparent in Nemesis, which despite opening with a quest to ‘serve the cause of justice,’ ends up blurring the lines of responsibility and criminality when Miss Marple allows (indeed to an extent facilitates) the suicide of the murderous Clotilde. When the deranged woman says she is to retire to bed (with her mug of poisoned milk) Marple knowingly replies that she is ‘sure that will be quite alright.’ The condoning of the suicide ultimately sees Marple offering a level of sympathy for the murderer and her family: ‘the world’s changed and they haven’t changed with it.’ In the adaptation of The Mirror Crack’d the increasing humanity shown towards criminals is apparent in the reciprocal killing of the murderer, when the compassion of Marina Gregg’s husband Jason Rudd (who realizes she has killed twice) leads him to end his wife’s mental turmoil. This is condoned by Miss Marple, deemed to be for the best, ‘done from love . . . it was the only way,’ whereas in the novel there is no unambiguous indication of Rudd’s complicity in his wife’s death, ‘his eyes met hers, but he did not speak.’149 It is this greater tolerance that also provides the basis for the rehabilitation of Michael Rafiel in the adaptation of Nemesis. His journey from tramp and one-time petty criminal to respectable custodian of his father’s estate sees him leave his past completely behind him, a clear contrast with Christie’s own rejection of the possibility of redemption: ‘one rather doubts that . . . I don’t know that he’d be able to help himself.’150 The reconfiguring of notions of criminal responsibility and the greater sense of compassion towards criminal acts in the BBC adaptations makes it unfeasible that the prevailing sense of Englishness can be bolstered through a collective response to crime. Crime is no longer the social adhesive of the originating novels. Thus, although the representation of Englishness is in some senses more coherent on television, a more effectively ‘imagined community’ in its conservative longing for an Edenic England past through the sounds, sights and images of a rural haven, much of this apparent coherence is part of an unsustainable nostalgia: ‘understood not as given bits of the real but as suffused with ideality, giving on to the type of the beautiful, the extraordinary, or the culturally authentic . . . reality is figural rather than literal.’151 The stability of the picturesque, mythical picture of England imagined for television is persuasive and alluring, and the success of the

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series no doubt, at least in part, is the result of this allure. But the series contains within it a tacit recognition that behind the imagining of English national community there are few concrete ties holding people together. The BBC Miss Marple might in lots of ways have fitted with the political context of the 1980s, in which the desire to re-energize British self-esteem through a commemoration of the national past was rapacious. But ultimately, nostalgia is really all there is; the prospect of a coherent and unified national response to crime, indeed to any aspect of social life, is shown to be increasingly remote.

Chapter 4

Morse, Heritage and the End of History

The early 1980s in the United Kingdom was a ‘pivotal and also startling moment’1 in terms of perceptions of history and heritage. First, the National Heritage Act (1980) established the National Heritage Memorial Fund to provide financial assistance ‘for the acquisition, maintenance and preservation of land, buildings and objects of outstanding historic and other interest,’2 and this was then followed by the National Heritage Act (1983), introduced with what Patrick Wright has called ‘considerable patriotic clamour on all sides.’3 The 1983 Act established Boards of Trustees to take over the governance of leading national museums, in addition to creating the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England (popularly known as English Heritage).4 The founding mission of English Heritage was to ‘secure the preservation of ancient monuments and historic buildings,’ to encourage ‘the preservation and enhancement of the character and appearance of conservation areas,’ and to ‘promote the public’s enjoyment of, and advance their knowledge of, ancient monuments and historic buildings.’5 Both these pieces of heritage legislation were symbolic manifestations of an emergent contemporary governmental perception that national history (albeit a certain kind of national history) should be reified, controlled, monitored and commemorated in an attempt to preserve it for present and future generations. The nostalgia at the heart of the BBC Miss Marple adaptations was, as illustrated in the previous chapter, in harmony with such a cultural aspiration. The heritage acts were also part of an ongoing attempt by the UK Conservative government to inscribe its own ideals of the nation, rooted in ‘a public sense of history,’6 complementing the ongoing negotiation and re-negotiation of contemporary national identity in the wider political sphere. Touchstones such as the Falklands conflict of 19827 threw these ideas into sharper focus, when a supposedly shared nationalhistorical past was mobilized in support of military conflict with Argentina. This past was both broadly affiliative and nationalistic: ‘the people of the Falkland Islands, like the people of the United Kingdom, are an island

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race.’8 It was couched in a grand rhetoric that implied a national identity that transcended history: we were fighting for people, but people must have principles by which to live. They have to be governed by fair principles because liberty and justice are the only things that give life its dignity and meaning. We shall try to uphold those on the part of our citizens wherever they look to us for their defence.9 Just as, during the Miners’ Strike of 1984–1985 part of the governmental discourse attempted to define a privileged collective national identity against which striking miners could be contrasted as ‘the enemy within,’10 the Falklands conflict was presented as a moment of national self-identification. The fact that the subsequent 1983 General Election victory for the Thatcher government was directly related to the success of the Falklands campaign, ‘a victory which returned her to Downing Street on a wave of patriotism,’11 suggests that the government’s nationalist rhetoric struck a chord with many British voters. The ideological interest in the management of the resources of the past embodied in the National Heritage acts, allied to the wider political rhetoric about the essential nature of the nation in the context of ‘external’ challenges, was also played out in film and television, with ‘the national itself – or at least, a version of the national past’ as the ‘prime selling-point. Images of Britain and Britishness . . . became commodities for consumption in the international image market.’12 The Inspector Morse (1987–) television series, with its homesickness for a shared historical past, was a particular articulation of this tendency towards national selffashioning. The dreaming spires of Oxford stand in synecdochic relation to overarching values of civilization and cultured reasoning, freed from the taint of modernity and technologization, and thus the series harks back (by implication) to mythical times past, a constructed history that is the silent Other of Morse’s twentieth-century existence: first we might consider a world in which Chief Inspector Morse not only drives his own classic car but manages to park it at will anywhere in the centre of Oxford, a city not of traffic congestion and pedestrial dangers, of fast-food litter and rolling drunks, of after-dark violence and urban decay, but one captured on film as a kind of rolling postcard, devoid of the ‘intrusions’ which characterize any British urban landscape.13 Morsean nostalgia is as such abundant, with the Oxford of the TV series far ‘cleaner, quieter, better ordered, prettier, less industrial and certainly

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sunnier’14 than the real Oxford. It is an example of the fact that, as David Lowenthal has argued, ‘what heritage does not highlight it often hides.’15 This nostalgic, sumptuous reconstruction of Oxford/England in all its architectural and cultural splendour is an example of Ian Gordon’s ‘retrospective styling,’16 identifying Inspector Morse as what by the later 1980s in the United Kingdom was being defined as ‘quality’ television. This sense of ‘quality’ was articulated by the British government White Paper, Broadcasting in the ‘90s: Competition, Choice and Quality, published in November 1988, which crystallized prevailing ideas about standards and TV programming17 and was the basis of the 1990 Broadcasting Act that fundamentally changed the culture of UK television more generally. Both the White Paper and the consequent act of parliament were primarily concerned with the introduction of free market economics into the television industry, but they also contained implicit assumptions about the nature of ‘quality’ culture and what viewers should be watching. Within the context of the imminent arrival of satellite television broadcasting, these debates (which led to the establishment of the ‘Campaign for Quality Television’) were judged by many to be ‘both welcome and necessary.’18 For the producers of Inspector Morse there was a direct relationship between ruminations about ‘quality’ production values and the ethos of the series and its success: ‘Morse worked because of [my italics] its quality . . . it didn’t try to talk down to people, and it looked good. It used the best classic devices: using Oxford as a setting for a murder mystery was a bit like using a country house, for example. But the idea was always to make it a challenging, high-quality show.’19 The implication here is that the ‘quality’ branding was fundamentally related to both TV stylistics, ‘a particular pace or style of camerawork, or level of detail in the mise-en-scène, or type of performance, or particular set of themes,’20 and also the commercial strategies of the UK broadcasters: as network audiences declined in the face of competition from the proliferation of cable and satellite channels in the 1980s, the networks became less concerned with attracting mass audiences and increasingly concerned with retaining the most valuable audiences: affluent viewers that advertisers were prepared to pay the highest rates to address.21 The status of Inspector Morse as a TV brand thus contributed to broader ‘debates about television, quality and the future of British broadcasting’ and the concomitant ‘anxieties concerning the fate’22 of British television as it moved into the twenty-first century. Even 20 years on, within the context of the anniversary celebration of the first Morse TV broadcast, the position

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of the series within wider discourses of aesthetic quality and an exported televisual national-cultural heritage was seemingly taken for granted: ‘Morse . . . became one of the biggest exports in the history of British television drama. The shows were sold to a total of 200 countries from Mongolia and Nepal to Malawi, El Salvador and Papua New Guinea. According to ITV, a billion people, just under a sixth of the world’s population, have watched at least one episode.’23 And yet, the hallowed, higher-cultural status of Morse belies the tensions and contradictions that reside beneath the apparently untroubled surface of the nostalgic ‘heritagisation’ of the original Colin Dexter novels. The seemingly serene ‘quality’ of each TV episode masks the complexities of the process of translation from novel to television. Critical debate on Morse has at times touched on such issues of adaptation,24 but for the most part it is the TV incarnation of the detective that has been discussed rather than the Dexter novels. In contrast, this chapter offers a culturally situated examination of Morse-as-adaptation(s) – not just the TV episodes, nor just the novels, but the cultural territory that lies between the two. In particular, the Morse texts will be viewed in terms of their seductive representation of a dehistoricized English national identity, a comfortingly nostalgic image of the nation that has more to do with heritage than it does social reality, and which reconfigures crime and criminality so as to downplay even the slightest possibility of broader social disquiet. The nostalgia of the Inspector Morse TV series thus relies on a process of selection; on stripping away the supposedly inconvenient or undesirable and re-reading the English nation in light of an idealized essence. It posits ‘a “once was” in relation to a “now” ’ creating ‘a frame for meaning, a means of dramatizing aspects of an increasingly fluid and unnamed social life.’25 The nostalgic desire for a ‘lost’ England leads to the discarding of many of the elements of society (portrayed in the novels) that do not fit with the backdrop of such a heritage, resulting in the picturesque bubble that is Morse’s world.26 This world is divorced from wider social realities, with little place afforded to the impact and possibilities of social change: ‘disengaging the past from the present by reducing it to nostalgia . . . so it becomes a means for either defusing or ignoring social tension.’27 Indeed, there is little place for a broader recognition of society more generally, an echo of Prime Minister Thatcher’s own infamous epitaph for the 1980s, delivered in the same year that the first Inspector Morse TV episode was broadcast: ‘there is no such thing as society.’28 The characteristic absence of coherent social process in the Morse adaptations can thus be seen as part of a broader attempt to ‘appropriate, preserve,

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rearrange, collect, and reproduce “history” as a symbolic enclosure embodied in handsome, well-kept buildings – a “history” exempted from the ravages, and freedoms, of history.’29 This grows out of a wiping clean of social life, with ‘plots, and the personalities . . . much changed for television,’30 and the supposedly ‘anti-social’ elements of the novels, those most likely to cause ‘distress and misery to innocent, law-abiding people’ and ‘undermine[s] the communities in which they live’31 purged. The sheer variety of disruptive social energies (errant sexual desire, threatening class identity etc.) brought to life by Colin Dexter have no place within such an idealized social framework. The reconfiguration of behaviours that ‘overlap with conceptions of deviancy and delinquency’32 is clear from the first adaptation, The Dead of Jericho.33 The ‘normative element’34 of the adaptive process sees the disappearance of the antisocial reality of Oxford, what in the novel35 was defined as ‘the pervasive truancy, the mindless vandalism, and the sheer bloody-mindedness of those truculent adolescents to whom all notions of integrity, scholarship, or even the meanest of the middle-class virtues were equally foreign and repugnant.’ 36 There is no comparable depiction of the later 1980s within the TV version of the novel, England is sanitized. In Last Bus to Woodstock37 this sees Gaye, the sexually available barmaid at The Black Prince who entices men away from their families, replaced by a mumsy landlady named Vicky Phillips, a nurturer who upholds ideals of respectability and family. And Margaret Crowther is no longer a suicidal depressive who is unable to face the domestic drudgery of her family life, the woman who ‘read a book on Mothercraft and came to the worrying conclusion that much of motherhood was distasteful to her – even nauseating.’38 On television she is upbeat and career-driven, bubbly and capable, no challenge to the sanctity of the English family. Thus, modes of behaviour that threaten the idyllic image of the ‘social’ framework are erased. The transformation of these female characters is part of a broader normalising of sexuality, with the Inspector Morse episodes featuring more mannered forms of sexual behaviour than the brazen earthiness of the Dexter novels: ‘the gender politics of the original novels were not thought suitable for “quality” television.’39 Pervading, seedy sexuality gives way to a nostalgic national heritage, and (as Lyn Thomas rightly points out) this leads to ‘the principal difference’ between the Morse adaptations and the originating fictions, which is ‘the relative absence of sexual objectification in the portrayal of the women characters in the TV version.’40 The ‘sexually predatory element’ of the narratives, particularly as exhibited by Morse himself, ‘is replaced by romantic yearning.’41 For Charlotte Brunsdon, the

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Chief Inspector’s revised misogyny should be seen within ‘the discursive context of equal opportunities,’ which ‘clearly demanded a more subtle approach’42 to such gender issues. The TV Morse’s romantic yearning parallels his wider longing for the past, and his hostility towards the intrusions and inconveniences of the present. He ‘harks back’43 to a simpler time when England was more traditional, old-fashioned even, a pining that is encapsulated in his admiration for A E Housman.44 Morse is ill at ease with modern life, articulated through his curmudgeonly, begrudging manner. And his gaze is fundamentally nostalgic, coloured by ‘a sense of historical decline . . . a sense of the absence or loss of personal wholeness and moral certainty . . . a sense of the loss of individual freedom and autonomy . . . and a sense of the loss of simplicity, personal authenticity, and emotional spontaneity.’45 On television he comes to represent a cultured disillusionment with the crudity of the present day. This refinement of the character of Morse matches the broader tendency in the series to downplay the assumed vulgarity of human behaviour more generally. Last Bus to Woodstock, for instance, revises the promiscuous sexuality of the missing Sylvia Kaye, seeing her no longer as the girl whom any ‘accommodating motorist could [not] fail to be impressed by her minimal skirting and the lovely invitation of the legs below.’46 In the novel she lives in a world of disruptive sexual energies, wherein individuals are defined not by any positive social contribution they might make but by their rampant desires, inhabited by men such as John Sander: he realizes well enough that his dedication to pornography is coarsening whatever sensibilities he may once have possessed; that his craving is settling like some cancerous, malignant growth upon his mind, a mind crying out with ever-increasing desperation for its instant, morbid gratification. But he can do nothing about it.47 In the adaptation this world is remade, and the cancerous deviance is absent; Sanders is transformed from a predatory sexual sadist into a pitiable geek. The adaptation of The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn48 similarly silences the seediness of late 1970s of the originating text. The low-grade soft-porn film The Nymphomaniac, which is showing at the local cinema in the novel (which Morse and Lewis go to watch), is replaced by the erotic art of Last Tango in Paris and then by 101 Dalmations, which Lewis takes his wife and children to see. Thus, illicit sexuality is usurped, just as in The Riddle of the Third Mile,49 when the disreputable world of the Flamenco Topless Bar is entirely erased.

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The ‘subterranean premises [that] had once been carpeted in heavy crimson’50 and the ‘company christened Soho Enterprises – the latter owning, in addition to the topless bar, two dubious bookshops and a small (strictly members only) pornographic cinema,’51 are traded for a gentleman’s club in Pall Mall, with men lured there not with the promise of sexual favours but by an offer to present a TV documentary series. The expunging of sordid sexuality is complemented by the reworking of the class landscape, which shifts the social realm away from the grittier realities of common life. In Last Seen Wearing52 George Taylor is no longer the man who ‘had not made much of a success of his life,’53 and who has been left high-and-dry by the economic crisis facing Britain in the mid-1970s. There is no ‘voluntary redundancy’54 after the ‘reorganisation of the Cowley Steel plant,’55 followed by a lapse into ‘doing little but casual jobs, and drinking rather too much and gambling rather too much.’56 On television, Taylor (now Craven) is a controlling and highly successful businessman, one of the chief beneficiaries of the Thatcherite culture of entrepreneurship rather than a victim of the economic failures of the previous decade. He is on the police committee, a school governor and an acquaintance of the Headmaster. He is, in other words, a ‘powerful man.’ Morse notes that this is why they have been told to devote so much time to the case of his missing daughter, Valerie: ‘an ordinary missing person gets about a week.’ Craven is the representative of the materially driven, aspirant middle class whose wealth (rather than talent) secures social status. His daughter attends Homewood School for Girls (‘Rich and thick,’ Morse says as he first arrives at the school), rather than the local comprehensive school of the novel. She is not a teenage vamp who sleeps with her Headmaster, but rather a naïve victim-of-sorts; she runs away from home after walking in on her mother and the Headmaster Phillipson having sex. Unlike in Dexter’s story, Valerie is not the killer of Baines, denying any link between her social background and her propensity for criminal action. Instead her affluent family takes its confident place within a wider ‘reification of social categories,’57 a class hierarchy that appears as a fixed element of the national landscape. The ‘ideological and practical domination’58 of the social strata the Cravens represent is (in class terms at least) secure and uncontested. In The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn, Quinn himself is given a class makeover, residing in an impressive rural cottage rather than a dingy rented flat: ‘they do alright these academics’ (Morse). He is involved in no salacious, grubby plotline wherein he seduces the heavily pregnant Mrs Greenaway whilst her husband is at work at the car plant at Cowley. And he is joined in his metamorphosis by his colleague Christopher Roope,

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who becomes a clean-cut dashing dilettante with a public-school accent, equipped with striped blazer and cravat, rather than the long-haired, bearded left-wing radical from Bradford that he is in the Dexter novel: ‘too young, too cocky; too loud and splashy, like a vulgar speedboat churning through the placid waters of the Syndicate regatta.’59 Both Quinn and Roope are in class terms much more in keeping with the idealized haven that Oxford has become. The nostalgic reworking of English culture typical of these Morse adaptations of the 1980s is no less pronounced in the adaptations produced in the 1990s, as the reconsideration of social identities in The Daughters of Cain60 illustrates. In the novel Kevin Costyn is described as ‘crude and vicious; and during the current summer term his sole interest in class activities had focused upon his candidature for the British National Party in the school’s annual mock-elections.’61 He displays the form of antisocial ‘unpleasantness . . . found in decaying neighbourhoods,’62 where ‘incivilities’ and a profound lack of ‘civility and consideration for others’63 predominate. His mother is described as a blowsy, frowsy single parent who had casually conceived her only son (as far as she could recall the occasion) in a lay-by just off the Cowley Ring Road, and who now lived in one of a string of council properties known to the largely unsympathetic locals as Prostitutes Row.64 This is a world of the uncultured and uncouth, as Morse makes clear in his initial response to Ellie Smith: ‘ “Rings in her nose, Lewis? Pretty tasteless, isn’t it? Like drinking lager with roast beef.” ’65 Yet, on television, such ignorance and vulgarity are painted over. Costyn is destructive but redeemable, and Kay (rather than Ellie) Smith is well spoken and carefully manicured, owning a flat in Chelsea and of ‘some education.’ Inspector Morse is thus characterized by middle-class sensibilities and a broadly home counties identity; even the English regions tend to be silenced. As with Roope in Nicholas Quinn, in the novel of The Dead of Jericho Anne Scott is from the north of England, ‘at the time of Anne’s birth and throughout her childhood, the family had lived in Rochdale.’66 But on television67 her Rochdale origins are jettisoned. Just as with Dr Hobson, who loses ‘the broad north-country vowels in “luv” and “blunt”; the pleasing Nairn she had’;68 the ‘north-country accent’69 and the North-East of England background are absent from the television incarnation of the character. This lessening of the diversity of English identities is part of the nostalgic discourse of middle-Englishness that characterizes the series, a discourse within which Lewis’s wife becomes Oxford ‘born and bred’ rather than

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Welsh, and which in The Way Through the Woods sees the complete removal of the foreign Other, with the narrative no longer centring on the disappearance of the Swedish backpacker, Karin Erikkson, ‘of the classic Nordic type,’70 and instead reworked as an explicitly English narrative of criminality. The televisual Oxford thus becomes part of a mythical Englishness that is ultimately southern, affluent, and mannered. It is a nation lacking in cultural diversity, light years from the gritty, multicultural modern reality of Oxford: ‘this could be any street in any town in any part of Britain . . . it’s typical. And it’s crime rate is typical too . . . There are leafy suburbs, an industrial heartland, a bustling city centre, Victorian terraces, housing estates, and the city stretches out into the countryside beyond.’71 Every aspect of the turbulent social background of the novels is expunged, ‘the previous evening had been a bad one, with the City and County police at full stretch with the (virtual) riots on the Broadmoor Lea estate: car-thefts, joy-riding, ram-raids, stone-throwing.’72 In Dexter’s stories, rather than picking their way cerebrally through a host of crimes, the police spend ‘until almost dawn behind a riot-shield, facing volleys of bricks and insults from gangs of yobbos clapping the skidding-skills of youths in stolen cars.’73 And this unrest is amplified by the fact that ‘the police as a whole were going through a tough time in public esteem: allegations of corrupt officers, planted evidence, improper procedures – such allegations had inevitably created suspicion and some hostility.’74 The removal of ‘nuisance behaviour’75 from the Morsean landscape, in addition to many of the ‘strange, unfathomably depraved . . . people’76 most likely to disturb the equilibrium, sees everyday life ‘restaged’ in ‘sanctioned sites, events, images and conceptions,’77 an ideal backdrop for a series that identifies itself as popular ‘quality’ entertainment. The Morse episodes embody a hallowed sense of culture, but one that (because of its rich associations with history) lacks social dynamism, and is instead rooted in a longing for stability through its reliance on ‘an impression of pastness.’78 ‘Redeployed’ in this way, history becomes ‘purged of political tension,’ and this creates ‘a unifying spectacle . . . like the guided tour as it proceeds from site to sanctioned site,’ the national past ‘occurs in a dimension of its own – a dimension in which we appear to remember only in order to forget.’79 The flattening out of the socio-historical landscape, removing the potential for collective tension and disquiet, results in a quasi ‘End of History’; there is little chance of progression or the ‘succession of social relations.’80 History ‘understood as a single, coherent, evolutionary [my italics] process,’ is replaced by a cessation of social and historical development, leading to what Francis Fukuyama has called ‘a form of society

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that [has] satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings.’81 Nostalgia removes the means of change, leading to a social impasse. Contrary to the claim that Inspector Morse’s enduring popularity is due to the fact that the series ‘tuned in to the end of the period of deference, when the public was no longer prepared to buy into the myth of Oxford, or many other myths for that matter,’82 in reality quite the opposite is true. The Oxford of Morse is ‘an imaginary construct . . . not the “real” Oxford,’83 a televisual city whose contemporary social history has no place in its nostalgic fossilization of England. The television viewer of Inspector Morse thus witnesses the type of history Nietzsche paradoxically called ‘unhistorical,’ with viewers little more than ‘inquisitive tourists . . . clambering about on the pyramids of the great eras of the past.’84 Such a ‘monumental history’ is to be observed rather than participated in, for it commemorates greatness and tradition and forces our understanding of history ‘into a universal mould.’85 High culture and picturesque architecture are the outward symbols of this Morsean unhistorical frame. Actual social experience is de-prioritized in contrast to a view of the world that has no implicit sense of process, within which the rhizomic connections between celebrated past and lived present are denied. This static sense of history makes sociological explanations of criminality unfeasible. Thus, the murders in each Morse episode, set against the backdrop of an idealized culture that is honoured more than it is experienced, become ‘a collection of “effects in themselves,” ’86 situated within a fictionalized historical present that is little more than an idealized past in disguise. This past/present configuration suggests a heritage history, one that privileges the sort of past ‘celebrated at popular festivals, at religious or military anniversaries . . . an “effect in itself.” ’87 Which means that whereas Colin Dexter’s novels feature reflections on the impact of social forces on individual (criminal) behaviour, the TV adaptations show no such interest. Morsean murders are divorced from socio-cultural influences, detached from the social realities of collective Oxford life, and this detachment underpins the framework of morality and criminality: ‘killings of occasion . . . [that] come out of particular family or professional circumstances.’88 Sylvia Kaye might still be working class, with her (single) mother confessing ‘5 minutes in a lay-by, that’s all it took to have her,’ but her social background is no longer linked to her eventual fate in the way that it is in the novel of Last Bus to Woodstock. There, her ‘careless and provocative sensuality’89 made her a culpable victim who ‘turned nasty and sour then. “You don’t want to see me again, do you? You’re just like the rest.

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Bi’ of sex and a blow out and you’re off” . . . She sounded like a common slut, a cheap, hard pick-up from a Soho side-street.’90 In the adaptation not only is she no longer complicit in her own fate, but when it turns out that her death was an accident rather than murder she is viewed as tragically unfortunate. The episode ends with a marked tone of melancholy and regret, which encapsulates the accidental nature of her passing, and the more sympathetic reworking of her character. By not focusing on the social forces shaping characters and their actions, the television episodes concentrate instead on individual(ized) motivation and culpability. In Last Seen Wearing, for instance, the central murder is no longer explained in terms of the social life of the victim. In the novel Mrs Phillipson says of Baines: ‘he was everything that’s bad in life. He was mean, he was vindictive, he was sort of calculating. He just delighted in seeing other people squirm.’91 Baines’s antisocial behaviour (he is a bully and serial blackmailer) provides the rationale for his death, with even Morse talking of his ‘warped and devious mind.’92 His negative impact on society more generally, as well as his treatment of specific individuals, brings about his downfall, and society is seen as improved by his passing. In the TV adaptation, however, Baines has become Miss Baines, the much-liked Deputy Headteacher, ‘a very special person.’ She might have used her influence (she knows of the Headmaster Phillipson’s extra-marital affair) to get what she wanted, but she is nothing like the character of Baines in the novel, a fact that accentuates the grievousness of Phillipson’s recklessness and complicity in her death. His is an act of self-interest and self-preservation. In The Last Enemy such individual, socially detached criminal motivations are in abundance. Arthur Drysdale’s murderous behaviour is related to the fact that he only has 6 months to live due to brain cancer (which has fundamentally altered his personality), the murder of the Master Reece a matter of personal revenge, and Nicholas Ballarat, who ‘advises half the world’s governments,’ is killed because he previously ran off with Drysdale’s wife. As Richard Sparks has argued, murder is throughout equated with either ‘a crime of passion’93 or else a matter of ‘power and passion and personal failings in Oxford colleges’; there is no sign of killing viewed in relation to wider social relations, or criminal motivations interpreted in light of the deprived socio-cultural background of the perpetrators. And because the adaptations focus on individual desires rather than the social aspects of human behaviour the crimes depicted are rooted in human dilemmas (jealousy, greed, fear, power etc.) that are not context specific, not essentially related to a particular time and place in history. In this sense

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they suggest themselves as universal, ‘beguilingly timeless, and upon which the impress of the 1980s and their troubles is denied.’94 The failure to confront broader social issues in Inspector Morse is poignantly illustrated in the adaptation of The Daughters of Cain when, at the conclusion of the episode, there is not enough evidence to charge anyone with the central crime, the murder of a wife-beating bully and sadist. In effect the murder is condoned, the legal ‘innocence’ of the murderer and her accomplices after the fact determined by the refusal of the Crime Prosecution Service to take things further; Mrs Brooks’s status as a battered wife is a key factor in this decision whereas in the novel this led to her being ‘remanded in custody in Holloway prison.’95 Even the police are complicit in this ‘cover up,’ Superintendent Strange sheepishly stating that resources will not allow them to pursue the case any further, a decision taken at ‘the highest level.’ The only exception is Lewis, who is outraged at the prevailing apathy. Mrs Brooks returns home a heroine, welcomed by her neighbours, and her daughter Kay leaves Oxford as a free woman with her boyfriend. The unpleasant Brooks has been conveniently purged, without need for a trial or any lengthy self-reflection on the part of society as a whole about the prevalence of spousal abuse. Most people simply go back to their normal lives as if nothing has happened. This sense of society ultimately undisturbed by the impact of crime is also evidenced by Death is Now My Neighbour,96 which is wholly concerned with the socially irrelevant (beyond the University walls) battle for the role of Master of one of the Oxford colleges. It might be a contest between older values (Julian Storrs) and new ambitions (Denis Cornford), but there is little broader significance to this clash, little evidence that either man is likely to have an impact beyond the university sanctum. The resident Master, Clixby Bream, mocks the modernity of Cornford’s supposed plan to introduce ‘Media Studies’ into the university curriculum, and although Cornford’s wife Shelly embodies a contemporary, vibrant and confident femininity, the fact that she is American places her outside the hallowed Englishness. The adaptation makes her a mildly sympathetic character, a woman who is blackmailed into sleeping with Bream because of her love for her husband (‘I can make Denis Master, but only if you . . . the tiny sacrifice . . . huge reward’), but she is always viewed from a distance. Bream himself is motivated only by personal revenge, Cornford having once slept with his wife and ‘ruined his marriage.’ He has no intention of living up to his agreement to help Denis’s cause in exchange for Shelly’s sexual favours: ‘you could do it a thousand times and I still wouldn’t support Denis.’ As such, Morse’s triumph in stopping Bream from staying on as

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Master after the withdrawal of both Storrs and Cornford from the election is significant only in terms of his vanquishing of a particularly repellent blackmailer. It has no broader social implications and does little to purify the polluted atmosphere of the Oxford college. By threatening to reveal Bream’s blackmailing behaviour to the local press Morse forces him to leave Oxford, thereby removing himself from the protected sanctity of the idyll, but Cornford’s withdrawal from the race to be Master suggests that even modest change is now unlikely. Whereas in the novel it is unregulated ambition per se that is checked, with Shelly Cornford sleeping with Bream through avarice (‘more than anything in the world she wanted Denis to be Master’97) and then killing herself because she is unable to face the consequences of this ambition, in the adaptation it is the prospect of change itself that is dashed. This denial of history-as-process is also encapsulated in The Wench is Dead,98 the penultimate episode of the Inspector Morse series. The television adaptation centres on the inherent differences between the Victorian and contemporary treatment of crime, and the extent to which progress has been made in investigative procedures and evidence-gathering techniques. Morse is sure that things have improved since Victorian times: ‘it seemed to Morse pretty much odds-on that if the case had been heard a century later, there would have been no certain conviction.’99 He believes that ‘the timehonoured “presumption of innocence” – the nominal glory of the British Legal System’ was ‘compromised’100 by the behaviour of the police and legal system in the nineteenth century, and is disparaging about the fact that Victorian prejudgements – wholly pejorative prejudgements – had been rife . . . and the attitude of the law officers no less than the general public had been, throughout, one of unconcealed contempt for, and revulsion against, the crude, barely literature, irreligious crew of the Barbara Bray.101 Yet, Morse’s own process of evidence gathering and deduction is no more sophisticated than that of the police in the original case. He constructs his case solely on the basis of an intuitive sense that the modern police are more advanced than the Victorian force. By the end of the episode Morse’s attempt to situate himself as a universal ‘reader’ of the past, outside historical prejudices and processes, is no more than barely achieved. Dr Van Booren (the US academic expert on the case) never accept Morse’s interpretation (‘it was just a puzzle you found a way to solve’), and although his thesis seems to be confirmed by his visit to Ireland and the highly significant

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discovery of a missing corpse, it is difficult not to see his rejection of the original case (‘all based on surmise and prejudice’) as deeply ironic. If history has progressed since the nineteenth century, the evidence is less than convincing, for the similarities between past and present investigations are as prevalent as the differences. The only TV adaptation where change becomes a notable feature of the narrative is The Way Through the Woods.102 For whilst the episode is contextualized in relation to the novel’s wider philosophical concern with ‘the eternal problem of justice’ and the extent to which ‘the function of law . . . [is] to provide that framework of order within which men and women could be protected as they went about their legitimate business,’103 there is also a more specific, localized engagement with history. Morse teases out the ‘fine distinction between the law and justice’104 in relation to the case of the abused (but ultimately murderous) Karen Anderson within the context of specific changes in UK policing in the mid-1990s that have a major impact on his own working life. His proposed demotion from Detective Chief Inspector is directly related to the recommendations of the Sheehy Report,105 an effort to ‘modernise’ British policing in the earlier 1990s, and this symbolizes an ever-greater tension between Morse and new police methods: ‘everyone is a potential customer . . . once upon a time we solved crime with a brain and a notebook . . . the romance has gone.’ Morse’s sense of outrage, rooted in his perception of a vulgar present violating the sanctified canons of the past, is clear: ‘can you see Holmes and Moriarty plunging over the Reichenbach Falls these days? . . . Today the area would be sealed off and surrounded by firearms officers while a hostage negotiator was sent for.’ And yet, even here, when it is clear that the world is changing around Morse, that society is evolving, he still manages to resist the impact of this change, with the adaptation ultimately unconvincing in its realization of history-as-process. Morse’s potential demotion never happens, and the episode leaves him in much the same position as he began; alienated, in many respects, but never completely marginalized. In each of the Morse television adaptations the impulse towards a nostalgic re-imagining of the English landscape fundamentally alters the depiction of crime and criminality as it was originally conceived in Colin Dexter’s novels. Inspector Morse might be ‘firmly located in the present’ in terms of featuring ‘modern’ social dilemmas, but it is also (and perhaps overridingly) ‘set in the past’106 through its nostalgic view of England and Englishness. An idealized world of a bygone nation predominates as the framing context for the questions of justice, morality, motivation and responsibility that form the tightly organized narratives of crime and detection. Morse represents

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the type of ‘heritage’ that is to a large extent a cultural response to frightening social change, an essentially static form of history that is ‘not a testable or even [necessarily] a reasonably plausible account of some past’ but instead ‘a declaration of faith in that past.’107 It is a mythical construction, one that has much more to do with contemporary need than it does with the realities of past times, a displacement of late twentieth-century angst about the condition of England. This heritage impulse ultimately results in a conflation of ‘all the past, commingling epochs without regard to continuity or context . . . [assigning] events to generalized good old days (or bad old days) or to the storyteller’s “once upon a time.” ’108 In the Inspector Morse TV adaptations the sum of national history is collapsed into ‘a single frame.’109 The frame is beautifully designed, it is in keeping with the aesthetic peaks of English cultural achievement, but it is a frame nevertheless; static, fixed in time, disregarding of the impact of historical change. The pruning of the national landscape that characterizes Morse on television, and the dispensing of the social fluidity of the novels, is thus a strategic withdrawal to a world in which the destabilizing impact of (social) history is minimized, if not, in truth, entirely overlooked.

Chapter 5

Jack Frost and the Condition of England Question

The discussion of the relationship between the A Touch of Frost television series and the R D Wingfield novels that were its inspiration touches on different territory to that considered in other chapters of Adapting Detective Fiction. The fictional worlds of Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Inspector Morse, Cadfael and DCI Barnaby are poles apart from Frost’s contemporary English urban. The Frost ‘police procedural’1 narratives are about the harsh, often misshapen realities of modern life and its concomitant personal misdeeds and misdemeanours. There is little sign within these narratives of a mythologized national past, a rural dreamtime, or a pseudoacademic haven. Perhaps most notably, there is also little sign of nostalgia. Indeed, since Jack Frost’s appearance in R D Wingfield’s Radio 4 play Three Days of Frost,2 through the TV adaptations and their related CDs and audiobooks,3 there has been a marked difference between the tone and focus of the Frost ‘product’ and the cultural recycling of these other fictional detectives. Not only is Frost the only fictional detective discussed in Adapting Detective Fiction not to have been explicitly utilized within a wider discourse of (national) cultural nostalgia, he is also the one who most clearly deviates from the popular paradigm of the assured, uncanny crime solver. The Frost novels in particular also engage with very different ideas of national culture and history, and privilege differing views of criminality. Society and social process in Frost is unlike Holmes’s Victorian London, Miss Marple’s St Mary Mead, Morse’s Oxford, Cadfael’s Medieval Shrewsbury, or Barnaby’s rural Midsomer. The reader is from the outset confronted with the consequences of profound social disintegration, a ‘disorganization of the relation of the personality to its internalized moral culture’4 and a loss of a coherent sense of aspiration and ambition. This is a version of what Emile Durkheim called ‘anomie’; society beyond moral consensus and regulation; society almost beyond society itself. Individuals

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shift aimlessly from social action to social action with little direction or consequence. This idea of ‘anomie’ is crucial to an understanding of the social model delineated in the Frost novels, and their extremely bleak, doom-laden vision of the national landscape. In the TV adaptations, on the other hand, this anomic world is reworked, in some cases transcended, with the re-imagining of the character of Inspector Frost crucial to this. It is a re-imagining that represents an attempt to re-establish a moral core in contemporary (fictional) society, the introduction of a social and moral ‘truth’ against which individual characters’ actions can be measured. This, as will become clear, is not always fully realized, but it at least allows the television episodes to overcome some of the bleakest pessimism of the novels. By articulating a more coherent moral centre the adaptations achieve a partial recovery from the novelistic world of utter pointlessness, devoid of authority, and depict criminality not as symptomatic of an enslaving social malaise but rather as the consequence of individuals straining against the limitations of their own existence. R D Wingfield’s ‘Jack Frost’ novels are characterized by their depiction of society as overloaded with apathetic and rudderless town-dwellers who commit crimes fuelled by a range of barely defined motivations. The textual world is policed by a lead character (‘Frost’) who is himself amoral, lacking in a coherent sense of his own purpose and objectives. Events take place against the backdrop of a deteriorating moral consensus, ‘a state of ethical normlessness or deregulation’ that sees individuals ‘without adequate ethical guidance as to their conduct.’5 It is a world within which ‘fractured and overlapping identities’ appear the norm,6 where ‘mechanical solidarity’7 is absent. The ‘semblance of solidity, authority, and objectivity’ has foundered and individuals have moved beyond ‘social discipline.’8 There are a number of elements to this sense of widespread amorality. The characterization of DI Frost as morally ambivalent is particularly significant, especially within the context of a society lacking an evident moral or ethical consensus. The consistent portrayal of the victim of crime as culpable or compromised is also key to the blurring of the lines of moral responsibility. This sense of victimhood forces the reader to engage with questions of greater or lesser guilt, the moral relativity of crime. And the absence of stable and clear cut moral positions ensures that the narrative focus is not simply on the progress and unfolding of the investigation towards an ultimate, confident and self-assured revealing of guilt and innocence, but rather on an investigation taking place on much

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shakier ground, to the extent that despite the ultimate revelation of ‘who did what?’ other questions still remain unresolved. The first Frost novel, Frost at Christmas,9 is suffused with such a moral relativism, laced with deep pessimism as to the condition of society. Indeed, the two aspects are interrelated. It bears the imprint of later 1970s and early 1980s negativity in the United Kingdom as to the prevailing state of the nation, published as it was in 1984 having been written in the last years of the previous decade,10 years in which Britain was crippled by economic uncertainty, and led by an unstable and increasingly unpopular national government. This gloom came to be an important element in the rise to power of Margaret Thatcher as British Prime Minister in May 1979, ‘on a profound wave of frustration, anxiety, and bitterness.’11 Taking advantage of a general perception of society as in terminal decline, Thatcher skilfully implicated the outgoing British Labour Government in this economic and moral collapse: ‘the truth is that crime grows where the pressure of established values and conventions is removed.’12 She made capital out of the pitfalls of an apparently ‘ever-changing and sinful world’13 and teased public aspirations with promises about the future role the ambitious and morally centred individual could play in the improvement of the nation: ‘we shall never have social morality without having individuals of moral worth . . . Part of the reason for our decline is that Britain now shows every sign of a destruction of individual and productive energy.’14 Thatcher’s powerful political rhetoric was intrinsically related to perceptions of the failing health of the country: we know that Britain has been in dire straits before, and that she has recovered. She will recover again. But that recovery depends on a recognition of just how far we have fallen. When we took over the Government . . . we found a nation disillusioned and dispirited . . . Last Winter, there can have been few in Britain who did not feel, with mounting alarm, that our society was sick – morally, socially and economically . . . we should not allow ourselves to lose a vivid memory of what happened, and of the reversion towards barbarism that took place.15 Frost at Christmas was written against the backdrop of this emergence of Thatcherite ideas and rhetoric: ‘between 1975 and 1979 both Thatcher and [Keith] Joseph16 outlined . . . many of the broad policy objectives of what came to be known as Thatcherism.’17 It depicts a society in collapse, with an interrelated pair of narrative strands that detail the murder of

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a young girl, and a bank robbery committed decades previously. Tracey Uphill goes missing after leaving her Sunday school, when her part-time prostitute mother (who uses the ‘school’ as a convenient day-care facility) fails to collect her because she has not yet finished with one of her male clients: ‘each week the man seemed more violent in his lovemaking, pummelling, pounding, clawing. He hurt her.’18 The contrast between the frail family life of the Uphill’s and the brutality of the ‘work’ that sustains it, is clear: ‘[the client was] an animal, a savage animal.’19 Mrs Uphill’s illicit behaviour is as such directly implicated in her daughter’s disappearance and her own consequent anguish and suffering. This blurring of the line between victim and perpetrator is also apparent in the parallel story of the retired bank manager, Mr Powell, whose son killed himself when on the verge of bankruptcy, and whose wife is dying of Alzheimer’s Disease. For Powell is also revealed to have stolen £20,000 from his bank in 1951 and to have murdered one of his branch employees (Fawcus) in the process. Although he altruistically stole the money to help his son, he is a killer nevertheless. Thus, when the two plot strands come together at the point at which Frost finds the buried remains of Fawcus whilst looking for the body of Tracey Uphill, the boundaries between guilt and innocence are confused. This is amplified by the fact that Frost is led to the discovery of the body by Martha Wendle, a psychic, who (it turns out) killed Tracey Uphill in a rage after she fatally injured one of her cats. The society within which these events occur is clearly anomic. Morality, ‘the indispensable minimum’ of life ‘without which societies cannot live,’20 has broken down to the point that straightforward, confident judgements about the moral dimensions of human behaviour are unfeasible. The crimes depicted illustrate an absence of positive social ambition, respect and authority, an implicit retreat from communal ties and shared interests, with individuals acting beyond ‘external society and moral constraint.’21 Modern Britain is represented as ‘a state that has no terms . . . strictly speaking, a non-state, a no-reality, an absence of anything to experience.’22 The bleakness of Mrs Uphill’s life is symptomatic of this ‘no-reality.’ There is an otherworldly quality (in a dystopian sense) to this life, matched by the putrid background: many years ago, when he was a small child, he [Frost] had sat on this same towpath, probably not far from this same spot, and had fished for tiddlers. But there was nothing living in the water now. Denton Union Canal, long since abandoned by the once thriving barge trade, was now a choked, evil-smelling backwater.23

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Denton is characterized by a soullessness Durkheim defined as people living ‘just for the sake of keeping alive.’24 Frost’s resignation about the world around him encapsulates the anomie: ‘poor little sod . . . I’ve nearly killed people in my car time and time again . . . it was only luck that saved me. He didn’t have the luck . . . I’m sorry for her, but I’m sorry for him, too.’25 When a local vicar’s interest in pornography (including pictures of schoolgirls) is revealed it is dismissed by Frost as a ‘harmless little hobby.’26 And the detective’s ineptitude further implicates him in the moral malaise: ‘it’s not grief and sorrow at my wife’s death that makes me sod things up – I’m just a natural sodder-upper and nothing’s going to change me.’27 He is part of the morally compromised everyday life of ordinary people, not a detached reasoning machine. When Superintendent Mullett remarks that the vicar’s books tell what sort of person he is Frost replies ‘exactly the same sort as the rest of us.’28 Even when the crimes are solved he accepts that he ‘did sod all’29 to bring about their resolution. This picture of incompetence culminates in Frost breaking into the murderer Powell’s house to look for evidence, before being shot by him. He doesn’t just ignore the rule of law and due process but is prepared to carelessly give his life away through his haphazard, shambolic behaviour. He is in this sense the antithesis of detectives such as Holmes, Marple, Morse, Cadfael and Barnaby, in their largely measured cerebral interrogation of the evidence, and appears barely equipped to act as the moral counterweight for the pervading criminality. Whereas the foibles and idiosyncrasies of these other detectives are tolerated because they do not impair (indeed, at times they assist) their investigative faculties, with Frost his personal weaknesses serve to reinforce the sense that society is not in safe hands, and indeed might collapse in on itself: ‘the collective conscience is something on the wane, not a force being violated or conformed to by the victims of its withdrawal.’30 Frost, just like the world around him, displays an ‘absence of social accountability,’31 and a lack of ambition. This world contrasts entirely with the emergent Thatcherite ‘politics of aspiration,’32 an ambition-driven political logic within which there is little place for those who cannot (for whatever reason) realize social aspirations: ‘what about the individual, families and communities without means? . . . join the race; run as fast as you can and see what you achieve. Such an incentive motivates some of the people some of the time. For the others it is doubly exhausting and with no guaranteed success.’33 Frost at Christmas suggests that a consequence of ongoing, thwarted ambition is the fading away of this ambition, until the point at which society loses its defining rationale. This marks a transition from what

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Robert Merton called ‘conformity,’ in which social goals and the means of achieving them are widely accepted, towards ‘retreatism,’ where individuals disengage with sanctioned social processes after becoming disillusioned by ‘goals’ that appear beyond their reach. In effect, they give up.34 A Touch of Frost,35 the second novel in R D Wingfield’s series, reiterates the same loss of ‘spontaneous consensus’ and ‘internal [social] solidarity.’36 It opens with the brutal assault of Paula Grey, a stripper who is attacked because she is dressed as a schoolgirl; the assailant resorts to extreme violence when he realizes she is not actually a teenager (young women being his fetish). The implication of the narrative is that Paula herself must bear some of the responsibility for the attack, a responsibility that is extended when the thwarted, frenzied rapist takes out his frustrations on 17-year-old Wendy Raynor. Yet Frost himself remains flippant, morally ambivalent towards the unfolding drama: ‘Paula, my love, if ever you feel like being raped again, any hour of the day or night, just give me a ring and I’ll be right over.’37 And his levity is legitimized when the victim pulls back the sheets of her hospital bed and invites him to jump in with her. This prevailing amorality sees society turning in on itself in a ‘morbid and harmful’38 fashion. The novel is full of characters that have lost sight of what Durkheim called the ‘constant relations with neighbouring functions,’39 with no evidence of a collective conscience. Central to this is the ongoing questioning of notions of guilt and innocence. First, there is the runaway 15-year-old schoolgirl, Karen Dawson, implicitly disparaged as a pupil of ‘St Mary’s College for Girls . . . a very exclusive, extremely expensive private school for the daughters of the filthy rich.’40 Here the distinction between victim and perpetrator is compromised when it emerges that Karen is consensually working in the strip club of small-time gangster, Harry Baskin, as well as being his (under age) lover. The predatory criminal Baskin then becomes the victim of crime himself, when his club The Coconut Grove is robbed by the prime suspect in a fatal hit-and-run accident. This web of moral confusion becomes yet more complex when the pawnbroker Sammy Glickman is robbed and shot whilst simultaneously being implicated in the theft of a set of Victorian gold sovereigns from the pensioner (and long-time petty criminal) Lil Carey. Finally, the body of a drug-addict tramp, Ben Cornish, is discovered. Cornish, who has ‘been living rough ever since his family chucked him out a couple of years back. He started out as a wino – cheap booze laced with meths or surgical spirit – then he progressed to heroin,’41 is at first decreed an accidental death, until it emerges that he was savagely beaten before his death by his drug dealers.

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Within this context of ubiquitous crime Frost is hapless. The insightful deductions and impressive array of guiding knowledge of the classical fictional detective are absent. Here is a man who can barely dress himself properly, who has a flawed method and a hopeless memory. He makes no attempt to disguise these flaws: ‘I’m not that clever . . . I can’t even tell the difference between a fifteen-year-old girl schoolgirl and a thirty-yearold woman.’42 This judgement is confirmed by others: ‘there was no comparison between the two men [Inspector Allen and Inspector Frost]. One was a policeman, the other was rubbish.’43 As Frost says when he is asked by a victim to get her money back, ‘if we can, Lil, but we’ve got a lousy track record. We haven’t recovered a penny of anyone’s money up to now.’44 He acknowledges he is ‘always wrong,’45 and that his methods lack sophistication and effectiveness, ‘I’ll listen to one fair story and one only . . . and then your teeth get knocked out.’46 And his self-deprecating irony merely reinforces the sense of his own ineptitude, ‘I’m doing my Sherlock Holmes stuff and you’re taking the piss.’47 Yet, despite the fact that Frost offers little hope that he will unravel the tangles of criminality, the reader is drawn to him as a humane, compassionate, tolerant and understanding man. He counters the stereotype of the 1980s as embodying a ‘loss . . . of kindness,’48 showing empathy even for serious sexual offenders: he should be revelling in the thought of what other prisoners, who love to wreak vengeance on sexual offenders, would do to Price once he was put away. But the man was so ineffectual, so pathetic, that Frost had to fight hard to stop feeling sorry for him.49 His compassion is also evident in his treatment of the rogue policemen Vic Ingram, a man who has previously shown him little more than contempt. When Ingram asks Frost to turn a blind eye to his killing of PC Dave Shelby he is almost apologetic in his refusal to endorse a fit up: it would be a nice easy way out, wouldn’t it, son? The trouble is, I’m a cop. Not a very good one, perhaps, but still a cop. I don’t really know why I became one, but one thing I’m sure of, I didn’t become a cop . . . to let a dead man, even if he was a crook, be wrongly accused of murder. Your way would be easy. It would keep everyone happy. But it would be wrong son. I just couldn’t do it.50 The third Frost novel, Night Frost,51 begins with the aftermath of the disappearance of schoolgirl Paula Bartlett, who (it emerges) has been murdered

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by her schoolmaster, Mr Bell. Bell had sex with her and strangled her before hiding her body in a crypt. Frost decides that the only way to secure a confession is to plant incriminating evidence, and after he does so Bell yields. Running alongside this investigation is the suicide of another young schoolgirl, Susan Bicknell, who has been sexually abused and exploited as part of a bestial pornographic film syndicate. A leading local councillor (Knowles) is implicated in the production and distribution of these films. Frost’s ad hoc justice sees Knowles confess to everything except the most graphic videos in exchange for ‘losing’ evidence and sparing Susan’s mother the horror of finding out what her daughter has been involved in. The resolution of this case then overlaps with the harassment and persecution of Mr and Mrs Compton, who are sent poison pen letters and eventually have their home burnt to the ground as part of an elaborate insurance scam. This results in the death of Mr Compton, who may (it would seem) actually have been killed by his wife. This labyrinth of criminalities once again points to a massive ‘reduction of regulative power’ to the extent that society appears ‘pathological.’52 There is no semblance of coherent social order. This is reflected in ‘a sense of moral groundlessness,’53 an interruption of what Merton calls ‘the consensus of parts, the integration of individual ends, the social value-complex.’54 All the characters, with the exception of Susan Bicknell, are morally compromised by their criminal behaviour whilst at the same time falling victim to the criminal or immoral behaviour of others. This is reinforced in the case of the ‘Granny Ripper’ murders, wherein a serial killer who has himself been the subject of serial abuse by his grandmother when he was a child cuts the throats of and disembowels a number of elderly women. All the while Frost’s ineptitude amplifies the prevailing anomie, displaying the absence of coherent regulative norms. When he first meets Frost, DC Gilmore notes: ‘a detective inspector! This rag-bag was a detective inspector!’55 Frost personifies a wider sense of police powerlessness, encapsulated in ‘there’s sod all we can do about it.’56 He is stuck in a rut of underachievement and cluelessness: ‘this was all his life seemed to be lately, making balls-ups, getting bollockings from [Superintendent] Mullett, and then sent out to make a fresh balls-up.’57 His working practice is without direction and order, ‘I haven’t the faintest idea what to do next . . . I can’t solve the cases I’ve got. I don’t want any more.’58 Within this context Gilmore acts as a barometer of Frost’s malaise, ‘the old fool had no idea what to do next,’59 longingly imagining a Frost-free world: ‘thank

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heaven Inspector Allen would be back on Monday and he’d be working with a real copper for a change.’60 Amidst the ongoing shambles Frost is able to be both empathic and inappropriate simultaneously. Of the schoolmaster Bell he notes: ‘I almost feel sorry for the poor sod . . . A choice young naked piece of nooky offering herself. I wouldn’t like to bet I’d have turned my nose up at it . . . Just his rotten luck she turned out to be a teaser.’61 He offers a compassionate, nonjudgemental response to such sex offenders that contrasts wholly with the 2003 television TV episode Held in Trust. In this, Frost assaults a paedophile and argues that ‘these people shouldn’t have rights, they molest children.’ On television he is prepared to sacrifice his whole career by admitting the assault (he is proud of it) rather than having it swept under the carpet after his colleagues agree to cover it up. He articulates a populist outrage at the nature and extent of sex crimes, advocating harsher punishments for offenders. And in this there is little sign of the Frost of the novels, whose liberal tolerance serves to blur the boundaries between morality and immorality, and to call into question rigid value judgements. The next novel in the Frost series, Hard Frost,62 begins with an intruder breaking into a house and puncturing the skin of a young child with a needle. This is the introduction of the psychosexual disorder known as piquerism, wherein offenders gain pleasure from puncturing bodies with sharp objects, such as pins, needles, syringes or knives. The serial criminal in this case is Sidney Snell, who for a time is also the chief suspect in the murder of three young children found suffocated in their beds. The revelation that these murders are in fact committed by the children’s depressed mother, Nancy, precipitates her own death at the hands of her husband, and this focus on children as primary victims continues with the murder of 7-year-old Dean Anderson, whose prostitute mother doesn’t even realize he is missing as she is with a client, and the kidnapping and imprisonment of Bobby Kerr, who is left home alone while his mother and boyfriend go to the pub. Both boys are snatched as part of an extortion attempt, with the blackmailer Finch seeking to force a self-centred egotistical millionaire supermarket owner (who was indirectly responsible for Finch’s wife losing her job and subsequently committing suicide) to pay £250,000 ransom. Finch is only caught when Frost plants evidence incriminating him, echoing his actions in the case of the child killer Bell in Night Frost. The depiction of the kidnappings, as with the earlier novels, again implicates poor parenting as a facilitating factor in the ensuing criminality. Although the two boys themselves are free from blame their mothers (in

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particular) are not, and are examples of the morally compromised victims typical of the Frost novels. And this sense of compromise continues with the abduction and assault of Claire Stanfield, which is revealed to be a staged ransom scam, and the murder of lifetime criminal Lemmy Hoxton, committed in self-defence in response to Hoxton’s attempted rape. Within this world even murder is morally relative, with Frost telling the solicitor of the two women suspected of killing Hoxton that he will ‘lose’ their original confessions (in which they revealed their lesbian lifestyle) so that their sexuality and private life do not become part of the trial and their claims of self-defence are not undermined. The novel is fundamentally ambivalent, lacking a consensual moral context and implying an imminent ‘death of society, that is, no society whatever, not even a disorganized one.’63 The relentless tide of amorality and criminality and the absence of a prescribed moral impetus has brought about the collapse of social organization. The last of the later twentieth-century Frost novels (before the character was reprised in A Killing Frost (2008)), was Winter Frost,64 which details a familiar myriad of interlinked crimes. First, there is the murder of 7-yearold Vicky Stuart, and then the abduction of another girl of the same age, Jenny Brewer, who goes missing after she is sent to visit her grandmother because her mother’s physically abusive boyfriend does not want her around. The investigation of these crimes overlaps with the case of the ‘pillow case burglar,’ an armed robbery of a petrol station mini-mart and the resultant accidental shooting of a have-a-go-hero, the disappearance of 11-year-old Tony Scotney (who is eventually killed in a road accident while trying to escape a paedophile), the deceit of Nelly Aldridge (who has imprisoned her special needs son for decades after he murdered her lover), the ram-raid robbery of a jewellery shop, and a series of abductions and vicious murders of women. Throughout all of these cases the relationship between criminal and victim is paradoxical; the parents of the child victims are negligent, the armed robbery is fraudulent, and the Aldridge family is rife with various examples of physical and emotional abuse. Even in the case of the grievous sexual murders, most of the victims live on the fringes of legality, with the one exception of Inspector Liz Maud, who is snatched while acting as a decoy as part of Frost’s botched surveillance operation. This leaves him, rather than Maud herself, implicated in her suffering: ‘I am not going into the [witness] box to tell the world what those bitches did to me.’65 The novel as a whole shows crime out of control and the police floundering in their attempts to bring criminals to justice. Each crime leads to, or intersects with, at least one other, and almost every character is implicated

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in some misdeed within this distinctly unhealthy social formation. Crime is not an offence against ‘strong collective sentiments’66 as there are no strong collective sentiments to offend. Denton is a cesspool of deviance, with little sign of shared or communal values, underpinned by a complex of human motivations; the barely defined, at times inexplicable nature of these is encapsulated most effectively in the psychopathic lesbian rapist-murderers, who resort to seemingly unrepresentable extremes of violence. Even the police undermine the sanctity of the law, with Frost telling one suspect he’ll falsify evidence to convict him of a robbery he previously got away with, ‘I’d just be giving the wheels of justice a squirt of oil,’67 then telling another that he ‘might ask this nice constable to step outside for a moment while you accidentally smash your face against all four of these walls.’68 When asked if he’ll ‘turn a blind eye’ to the fact that Nelly Aldridge’s son killed his mother’s lover, Frost replies: ‘just watch me, Taffy. That old cow kept her son hidden away for years just to save her own skin. I’d like to get her for that, but she’s too old and it happened far too long ago.’ Ultimately, however, the prevailing anomie gets the better of him and he rather characteristically acknowledges that he is ‘too flaming tired to care.’69 Adapted for television as A Touch of Frost (1992–), Wingfield’s narratives take on a rather different complexion. The seedy edginess of the novels is sanitized, and perhaps most crucially the character of Frost himself is reworked. His chauvinism and mildly predatory sexuality are removed to make him more palatable for a popular audience: ‘[the] sleazy comedy of Wingfield’s books seldom translated on to the television screen.’70 As Wingfield himself acknowledged, the central character of the TV series is of a different order: ‘I have nothing against David Jason as Frost at all . . . he just isn’t my Frost.’71 This recasting, along with the loss of the ‘tougher style of the books,’72 facilitated a fundamental shift in the tone and character of the Frost stories: ‘with the more uncouth characteristics of R D Wingfield’s original character ironed out – his predilection for swearing, chain-smoking and cheerful sexism would not have sat well with an ITV family audience – Frost’s defiantly old-fashioned coppering characteristics came to the fore.’73 There is an inherent attempt to make ‘both Frost and the milieu he inhabited appealingly universal,’74 going beyond the bleakness and pessimism of the 1970s and 1980s that so clearly inflected the Frost novels and achieving a relevance for later audiences. In the first TV episode, Care and Protection (adapted from Frost at Christmas),75 Frost’s frank confession about his wife’s terminal illness (‘the truth is, I can’t handle it’) draws on the universal sympathies of the audience from the outset. His guilt humanizes him: ‘she was my wife and she

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was dying and I couldn’t feel anything for her.’ However, unlike in the novel, in which Frost’s attitude was symptomatic of a wider cultural languor, on television his problem is that he cares too much, and becomes too emotionally involved in his cases. This is what leads him to make misjudgements and mistakes. His passion is accompanied by a deep insight into the foibles of ordinary people: ‘the thing is people do kill their kids; nice people, loving people, with beautiful kids, and they kill them.’ As such, Frost is realistic about and even tolerant of the apparently immoral behaviour of women such as the prostitute mother Mrs Linda Uphill, ‘there’s a lot like her nowadays; even in a place like this I could name a couple of dozen. And not just the likes of her, I mean respectable middle-class ladies paying for their little extras in life.’ He understands the nature of the underbelly of society where dubious behaviour goes largely unchecked, unencumbered as he is by rigid moral judgements. And because he is a less chaotic, shambolic character on television his tolerance and understanding carries more weight, directing the responses of the viewers more effectively and encouraging their sympathy (rather than condemnation) for the morally flawed victims. As he says to DC Barnard: ‘times are hard, Clive my son, try and be a bit more charitable . . . You sell what you’ve got available.’ The audience takes his words more seriously because they take him more seriously. This transformation of Frost turns his self-deprecating confession about only being ‘a street copper’ into an effective declaration of moral authority. His wife may have come to despise him for his lack of desire to seek promotion in the police force, but in reality his lack of career ambition gives him a human, real-world quality. He even confesses to being drunk during the ‘greatest’ moment of his career, the shooting that led to him being awarded the George Cross. This ongoing attempt to rework Frost into the moral arbiter sees the removal of the scenes from the novel that show him breaking and entering the suspect Powell’s house in order to find evidence, and the rewriting of the ending so that the investigation concludes successfully with Tracey Uphill found alive. Both alterations bolster Frost’s status and provide the audience with a more comforting, less morally ambiguous narrative resolution. The complexity of the narrative of Wingfield’s A Touch of Frost is such that it was adapted into three distinct episodes: Conclusions,76 Nothing to Hide,77 and Stranger in the House.78 Conclusions features the hit-and-run sub-plot of the novel, within which Frost’s attitude to police process is familiarly casual: ‘we like to beat up our own suspects, it’s one of the few pleasures we’ve got left.’ But he is noticeably less of a shambles than in the Wingfield text,

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perhaps most evident in the ending when rather than ignoring orders and stumbling into a hostage scene without permission (showing a recklessness and lack of value placed on his own life that verges on what Durkheim called ‘egoistic suicide’79), he is instead chosen by his superiors as the officer best equipped to negotiate with the hostage taker. Nothing to Hide adapts the Ben Cornish plotline from A Touch of Frost, with Frost displaying his local familiarity with Cornish ‘since he was a kid,’ and acknowledging that he had ‘been in trouble since the day he was born.’ The investigation is conducted relatively efficiently, in accordance with official police procedure. Frost does not misidentify the cause of death (as he does in the novel), and although a bottle of rum is overlooked as evidence and it is not initially spotted that Cornish had been brutally assaulted before death, it is clear that these errors are the fault of the incompetent medical examiner (Mackenzie) and not Frost. To emphasize this (and further enhance Frost’s status in the narrative) he agrees to ‘carry the can’ for Mackenzie’s mistakes: ‘in the end it’s down to me.’ Not only is he not responsible for making the mistakes, he is noble enough to cover up for the person who is. The murder victim Cornish’s plight is no longer portrayed in terms of social depravation: ‘don’t give me any of that nonsense about an unhappy home . . . we gave that boy everything.’ He is not the child of a criminal family he is in the novel. Frost reflects that by the time Ben was 14 ‘he was put in a home: beyond parental control,’ but recognizes that his parents were ‘decent ordinary people leading decent ordinary lives.’ This denies the connection between his criminality and inadequate socialization, further emphasized when it emerges that Cornish was actually killed by his decent, previously law-abiding brother-in-law (rather than the drug dealers of the novel), a man who was driven to the crime by his anger and frustration at being repeatedly burgled and exploited by Cornish. The third of the episodes drawing on this novel is Stranger in the House, which adapts the missing teenage-girl storyline and the hooded serial rapist sub-plot. In the former, Alison Cook (Karen Dawson in the novel) disappears after a man is spotted in her bedroom when she is given a lift home from school. Neither Alison nor her mother are sexualized victims, as they are in Wingfield’s text. Furthermore, rather than leering at rape victims, Frost actively and sensitively supports them: ‘together we’ll beat him,’ he says to one of them. The politically incorrect, morally questionable levity towards rape in the Frost novels is entirely reversed, illustrating just how far the character of Frost has been reworked in order to provide the adaptations with a more apparent, coherent moral register. Thus, when

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WPC Hazel Wallace says that the life of the promiscuous young victim’s life will not have been ruined by the attack, Frost is robust in his response: ‘the rapist doesn’t know that and neither do you.’ The episodes Not with Kindness80 and Widows and Orphans81 encompass most of the narrative of Night Frost. The first reworks the Compton blackmail plot and the Paula Bartlett murder, but begins with Frost at the grave of his wife to accentuate his transformation into a man of greater substance. He is not the chain-smoking drunk-driver of the novel, still flawed but now also admirable. He discourages overt sexism, and rather than constantly leaving his phone off the hook so that he can avoid being contacted by colleagues about work he vociferously objects to his sisterin-law talking on the phone too long precisely because it prevents such contact. In terms of his investigations, despite the fact that Paula Bartlett was apparently blackmailing her stepfather for supposed sexual harassment, the sexual dimension to her disappearance is completely toned down. Mrs Compton is not sexualized, and the pornography sub-plot is sanitized, with Susan Bicknell (who in the novel was manipulated into making exploitative sexual films with animals) removed entirely. The only element of the sexual undertone of the novel to remain is Frost’s sexual empathy with the child killer Bell: ‘if I’d have been in your shoes . . . who can say.’ This is part of the broader watering down of the novels, which in the Widows and Orphans episode sees the most graphic and extreme elements of the ‘Granny Ripper’ storyline subdued. The episodes Penny for the Guy82 and House Calls83 unpick the complexities of the final adapted novel, Hard Frost, which marked a return to the adaptation of Wingfield’s novels after two series of Frost screenplays newly written for television. Penny for the Guy is concerned with the kidnapping of Dean Anderson and Bobby Kirby, with Dean found dead in the early frames of the episode: ‘poor little devil; what rotten bastard did that to you sonny?’ Bobby Kirby is then kidnapped, another one of the many children in the Frost stories who belong to a ‘no parent family,’ and who are (as such) almost limitlessly vulnerable. Frost’s handling of the investigation is initially flawed, a ‘monumental cock-up’ (according to Superintendent Mullett), but by the conclusion, when Frost has planted evidence to ensure the murderer Finch’s conviction, the detective has shown himself to be both courageous and pragmatic: ‘I do understand, but . . . you killed one little boy, and you were prepared to let another one die, so you’ll forgive me if I don’t lose any sleep.’ House Calls focuses on the piquerism of Sidney Snell, the death of Lemmy Hoxton, and Mrs Grover’s murder of her three children. In the former

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investigation, Frost asks Snell to swear on the bible that he ‘will never be a bad boy again’ and lets him go free. He is not foolishly lax (as he is in the novel) so much as misguidedly trusting; the flaw in his procedure is an over reliance on what one of his colleagues calls ‘another one of your hunches.’ But he offers a compassionate justification of his actions: ‘look around you, his world has collapsed . . . I nicked him once before and he was sent to prison and used as a punchbag; now that shouldn’t happen again.’ He released Snell because he ‘felt bloody sorry for him.’ When confronted with Mullett’s accusation of ‘stupid’ unprofessionalism Frost’s defence is more confident and articulate than any self-justification he offers in the novels: ‘I’m a good policeman . . . not one of the new kind, I’m the old-fashioned kind, with feelings and gut instincts. Alright I don’t play by the rule book and I cut corners, but my judgement is good.’ When it is revealed that Sidney Snell only carries out the piquerist attacks because he is deluded, thinking he is giving the children life-saving injections, and that in fact Mrs Grover is responsible for the killing of her three children, Frost’s compassion is ultimately vindicated. When considered en masse, it is clear that the television adaptations of Frost depart from the sense of withering anomie prevalent in R D Wingfield’s novels, where social collapse is characterized by the breakdown of moral consensus and the marked absence of personal ambition and aspiration. This departure from the novels comes, primarily, as a consequence of the reworking of the character of Frost himself. Although he is still slovenly and disorganized he is no longer symptomatic of a morally amorphous society. Instead of standing apart from society and social process he becomes the moral anchor. His passion and caring and pragmatic morality provide the point of contrast with ubiquitous criminality. He might be unorthodox, and he rarely bows to convention, but all the while he respects the fundamental (implied) overarching values of his society, and the decency of ordinary people and ordinary lives. He provides the viewer with a moral register by which to understand (and even judge) criminality, a criminality that is never allowed to wander into the inexplicable or the incomprehensible, which might explain why the most extreme, irrational example of deranged criminality (the lesbian killers of Winter Frost) were never adapted for television. Frost’s distrust of authority and his unconventionality are rationalized by his overarching focus on ‘getting the job done,’ restoring a sense of moral order, and respecting the underlying truths that underpin the superficialities of human social life. An important consequence of this is that the Frost adaptations offer a much more individualized view of crime to that evident in Wingfield’s

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novels. Rather than criminal deviance being an almost inevitable symptom of society as an amoral soup, with criminals stumbling from one act to another, deviance is defined in relation to individuals actively engaging in crime ‘when they cannot get what they want through legitimate channels.’84 They become ‘frustrated or angry, and . . . try to get what they want through illegitimate or criminal’85 means. Rather than apathetically drifting into a criminal lifestyle, individuals strain ‘toward a valued goal’ or ‘away from an aversive situation.’86 There is a much clearer sense of personal motivation, and a more tangible sense of society to rail against: it is only when a system of cultural values extols, virtually above all else, certain common symbols of success for the population at large while its social structure rigorously restricts or completely eliminates access to approved modes of acquiring these symbols for a considerable part of the same population, that antisocial behaviour ensues on a considerable scale.87 The thief/rapist Lemmy Hoxton and his female murderers in Hard Frost symbolize on the one hand the striving towards social goals (economic benefit and sexual power), and on the other the retreat from adversity (being outed as lesbians and having their domestic life uncovered). In the adaptations, fear, ‘frustration and thwarted aspiration’88 are the key drivers of criminal ‘expression,’ as opposed to the aimless lapse into deviance that is characteristic of the novels. Society is imagined as a place in which ‘the-end-justifies-the-means doctrine becomes a guiding tenet for action,’89 with less of a corrosive deterioration of ambition and authority. Individuals do not resign themselves to their stolid fate and the role of criminality in this, but instead seek out their social goals by illegal means. Ultimately, the depiction of criminality in the Frost adaptations shifts away from the ‘retreatism’ (in Robert Merton’s terms) typical of the novels, set against the backdrop of an anomic society in which a moral consensus and social integration are lost. The shift is towards crime as social ‘innovation,’ in the sense that it is a reaction against a more realized social reality and the cohering properties of a more effectively established value system. This is represented by the detective, viz. Frost. Social deviance (crime) therein becomes a necessary ‘outermost extreme,’ and the ‘ritualized punishment’ of criminality acts to reinforce social identity. The ‘collective conscience’ is (by the law-enforcing actions of Frost) ‘recognized, reaffirmed, and celebrated,’ whereas in the novels this consensus has evaporated.90 On

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television, individuals may still follow alternative (not socially prescribed) methods of achieving their goals, often criminal ones, but whereas in the novels it was difficult to identify where the boundaries between criminality and victimhood, morality and immorality, lay, on television these boundaries are more successfully identified. Frost himself personifies the process of re-establishing the ethical equilibrium. Whereas the prevalence of crime in the novels functions as ‘an index of [wider] social disintegration,’91 in the adaptations the extent and nature of criminal activity is re-imagined, with what remains identified as symptomatic of a social pathology that the detective can diagnose and ultimately cure.

Chapter 6

Cadfael, Medievalism and Modern Nationhood

Edith Pargeter, it has been claimed, is ‘the originator of the contemporary market in historical crime fiction,’1 responsible for the introduction of the medieval period as ‘an important present in historical crime series’2 through her series of medieval historical novels featuring the investigative monk Cadfael (1977–1994). These novels, written under the pseudonym ‘Ellis Peters,’ have had a major impact, both on the genre of historical fiction and British contemporary culture more generally. The Cadfael novels have generated their own spin-off industry of radio dramatizations,3 audiobooks,4 CD soundtracks and a range of related publications which attempt to draw on the nostalgic popularity of Peters’s creation, including The Cadfael Companion,5 Brother Cadfael’s Herb Garden6 and Cadfael Country.7 The ‘intriguing mélange’8 of images that make up the Cadfaelian past (as expressed through this multiplicity of Cadfaelian texts) seduce the modern audience with hints of a bygone culture whose pre-industrialized simplicity implies a national life that is less cluttered and more organic. The Cadfael ‘product’ offers ‘a resort from the stresses of . . . rapid social change’9 in stark contrast to a modern world that, according to Marshall Berman, ‘shatters into a multitude of fragments, speaking incommensurable private languages’ having lost ‘its capacity to organize and give meaning to people’s lives.’10 However, there is more to the Cadfael phenomenon than nostalgia. The use and status of history within the Cadfael novels in particular goes beyond a simplistic and selective regurgitation of a lost and mourned national essence. The engagement with a version of the national past might at times seem reassuring, as much ‘about the present in which it was made’ as it is ‘the past in which it was set,’11 but this is only one aspect of the wider historical, indeed historiographical complexity of Ellis Peters’s work, wherein the tension between heritage and history, between the past we desire and the past that we live, is never far from the surface.

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In the Cadfael television adaptations, produced by Central television and broadcast between 1994 and 1998, this tension is between the nostalgic impulses of a cosy, coffee-table medievalism, conveyed through the comforting contextualizing voiceovers and faux medieval titles and captions, and an underlying engagement with questions as to the relationship between a symbolic medieval past and the ideology of the later-twentieth-century present. The notion of such a fundamentally interactive relationship between the imagined Middle Ages and the lived present bears out Norman F Cantor’s view that medieval civilization stands toward our postmodern culture as the conjunctive other, the intriguing shadow, the marginally distinctive double, the secret sharer of our dreams and anxieties . . . the Middle Ages are much like our culture of today, but exhibit just enough variations to disturb us and force us to question some of our values and behaviour patterns and to propose some alternatives or at least modifications. The difference is relatively small, but all the more provocative for that.12 It is a presentism that manifests itself in both the universalizing tendencies of the Ellis Peters novels, their ‘powerful tribute of recognition to something in medieval culture that speaks to us of ourselves through the . . . distracting layers of cultural difference,’13 and the recasting of medieval culture as the antithesis of an implied, idealized modernity in the TV adaptations. Ultimately, these representations of the medieval past take their place not within an isolated discourse of nostalgia but within a wider process of later twentieth-century self-imagining, wherein the ‘the Medieval’ is largely emptied of intrinsic meaning and is reconfigured in light of contemporary concerns. It becomes, in short, whatever we require it to be. The Cadfael novels depict fictional characters ‘interwoven into and shaped by’ the ‘turbulent background’ of the twelfth century. This contributes to what Peters herself called an ‘amalgam of stark fact and derived fiction.’14 This apparently unproblematic cocktail brings together ‘the known, recorded and agreed facts of English and Welsh history’15 and the fictionalized lives of ‘the teeming thousands whose names are not recorded in the histories.’16 Therein the role of Peters as historical novelist is ‘to imagine, to name, and to fit [everything] into the trellis of history.’17 Her reliance on ‘the apparently dry-as-dust pages of historical chronicles,’18 and in particular the Cartulary (register) of Shrewsbury Abbey that first

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became available at the National Library of Wales in 1975, underpins the depiction of the period, ‘both spiritual and practical.’19 Yet, such a combination of fact and fiction is far from unproblematic. For the reconstruction of history in the Cadfael novels, nay any literary reconstruction of history, is potentially contentious and invariably disputable. Question marks about the nature and status of historical reconstruction are inherent in the genre of historical fiction, a genre that is necessarily subjective in the ways in which it brings events and characters from the past to life. An objective, consensual representation of the past is illusory. The attempts within the Cadfael novels to infuse fictional narratives of detection with a researched and authenticated ‘history’ illustrate this. For they each, in their own ways, indicate a form of coming-to-terms with the meaning of history, and historical process, an engagement with profound questions about the ‘underlying designs, polarities or “deep structures” beneath’20 historical events. Peters may have characterized her process as a simple quest for historical accuracy, but this overlooks the ideological nature of that quest. It is clear, for instance, that the Cadfael novels utilize ‘history’ to conjure up something akin to what Raymond Williams called ‘knowable community.’21 Cadfael is the embodiment of a shared, catholic system of values, a manifestation of a universalist interpretation of the national past in which the dilemmas and values of the Medieval world are purported to be those of history more generally, concerned with questions of personal desire and sovereignty, social liberty, poverty and wealth, and the dynamics of power and authority. In his policing of society, Cadfael relies on an implied moral consensus that is historically transcendent and which entails prescribed codes of behaviour. Peters’s use of Medieval history thus indicates the specificity of the ethical and spiritual context, but nevertheless when Cadfael speaks he is speaking for a humanity that goes beyond any localized, historically particular idea of truth and morality. Consequently, although none of the Cadfael novels make an explicit declaration as to their status as an ‘attempt to think seriously about the meaning of historical process,’22 their narrativizing of supposedly ‘real’ historical events for dramatic purposes embodies such a thought process. For instance, the texts illustrate the link between fictional narratives of the past and an extrinsic metanarrative of history that positions them: ‘it is, it ought to be, a morality. If it strays from the side of angels, provokes total despair, wilfully destroys . . . the innocent and the good, takes pleasure in evil, that is unforgivable sin.’23 The specifics of medieval history are thus utilized as part of what Leo Bersani has called ‘the illusion of historical

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authenticity,’24 allowing readers ‘the luxury of assigning precise beginnings to experience, and of thereby making experience more accessible . . . for sense-making distinctions and categories.’25 Such a realization as to the historiographical character of the ‘Cadfael Chronicles’ draws attention to their contribution to the wider cultural process of appropriating the Middle Ages. The novels (and also, as shall emerge, the adaptations) play a part in the discursive formation of ‘the Medieval’ in contemporary culture; they are part of the wider ‘medievalismby-collage’26 identified by Nickolas Haydock’s as commonplace. They are part of an illusion of the historical past that serves the self-interests of twentieth-century culture, a discursive form of the Middle Ages that has become known as ‘Medievalism,’ or as Jacek Fisiak has argued (because of the plurality of approaches to and appropriations of this historical period) ‘Medievalisms.’27 This ‘process of creating the Middle Ages’28 is a received history that is ‘a collection of ideas generated from what people think the Middle Ages may have been rather than what they actually were.’29 The Cadfael novels offer such a history, founded as they are in a kind of detailed primary research that Peters claimed resulted in a version of the past that was ‘accepted as authentic.’30 The novels make manifest the popular historian’s conjuring trick of showing the past ‘at once distant from yet related to our own.’31 They draw attention to connections and shared values between the contemporary and a coherent and homogeneous Middle Ages that is ‘endowed with a monolithic uniformity.’32 Contextual historical detail becomes the handmaiden of this process, giving life to the ‘the firm texture’33 of the period. A Morbid Taste for Bones (1977), for example, is on the surface the story of a pilgrimage of Brothers to the Welsh village of Gwytherin so as to reclaim the bones of St Winifred. The delusional Brother Columbanus claims he has been experiencing visions of the dead Saint in which she laments her poor treatment in Wales and asks to be removed to Shrewsbury Abbey. The Abbot believes Columbanus and initiates the expedition of monks to Gwytherin to take back their ‘heritage.’ But as soon as the Brothers arrive in Wales they find the local people hostile, opposing the removal of the bones. This anger increases when one of the Welsh elders is offered a bribe to give up the relic, and subsequently murdered when he refuses. Yet, despite the apparent Medieval nature of this tale there is also a very clear contemporary edge to the narrative, most specifically in relation to the ongoing political debate about Welsh devolution in the mid-later 1970s.34

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For when the pilgrims arrive in Wales there is an almost imperialistic tension between English and Welsh, and Cadfael is ‘stirred to an atavistic fervour of Welshness by this homely eloquence.’35 The evolving political metanarrative draws attention to the colonial mistreatment of the Welsh by the English, and the absence of democracy and fairness in their political and cultural relationship. As Engelard says, ‘all these strangers having visions and ecstasies, and interpreting them to suit themselves, yet nobody ever really asked Saint Winifred what she wanted. They all claimed they knew better than she did.’36 This works as a political allegory, with the status and treatment of St Winifred paralleled with that of the nation of Wales itself, a nation yet to be asked what it wants (in the form of a referendum), but with numerous self-interested outsiders more than willing to speak on the nation’s behalf. The spurious claims of Columbanus to speak for Winifred represent a colonial attitude wherein the outsider deems themselves equipped to make decisions on behalf of others, without consultation. The topicality of the underlying political issues in A Morbid Taste for Bones (in relation to the 1970s in the United Kingdom) thus signals a broader modernizing, universalizing tendency within the Cadfael canon as a whole, wherein the distinctiveness of the fictionalized ‘medieval’ society (beyond researched specifics of date, place and historical event) is given an implied trans-historical resonance. The historical context is realized with care and labour, but the underlying political and ethical concerns of the novels transcend the period of the Middle Ages. Justice, in particular, is seen to have a universal quality, inspired by Cadfael’s ecumenical theology: ‘God disposes all. From the highest to the lowest extreme of a man’s scope, wherever justice and retribution can reach him, so can grace.’37 This justice is not just universal but also infallible: ‘God’s justice, if it makes no haste, makes no mistakes.’38 As such, within the incendiary context of the civil war between the forces of Maud and Stephen, the Cadfael novels articulate a faith in the innate potential of both individuals and nations to overcome the influence of the prevailing socio-political conditions, and in so doing to re-establish order, justice and fairness, founded on a consensual morality. England, it is accepted, is a turbulent and contrary place ‘in this chaos of civil war,’39 with citizens behaving unpredictably: ‘I do not like the way I see England going.’40 But in novels such as The Sanctuary Sparrow (1983) this fear, and the accompanying labyrinthine political intrigues and tensions, are defined in relation to an idea of Shrewsbury that sees the town as an emerging haven that ‘had good cause to thank God and King Stephen for relative order’41 despite having so many of its citizens killed. The law of the land is

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viewed both as ‘grim enough’ yet as also trying ‘to be fair.’42 Cadfael expresses hope for the future that this ‘law is coming round very sensibly’43 in the direction of the morality of which he is the leading proponent. This establishes an overarching view of the Medieval world that is increasingly, if tentatively, positive and sympathetic: ‘Peters herself, still aspire[s] to optimism about our future.’44 The political realities of the times are acknowledged, ‘there were plenty of lords ready and willing to change sides if fortune blew the opposite way,’45 as England ‘convulsed with siege and slaughter and disruptions.’46 But, nevertheless, this is a world rooted in human values such as respect, decency and honour. The novels recognize the harsh realities of civil war and the extremes of human personality, whilst at the same time they humanize their setting in a way that speaks to a contemporary readership in that it draws attention to the universality of the Cadfaelian value system. England is ‘a land at war with itself . . . [where] you may take it as certain that order breaks down, and savagery breaks out,’47 but the stories do not lose sight of a time when the country ‘enjoyed a settled rule, [so] there must be another such to come.’48 Cadfael’s acceptance that characters such as Courcelle in One Corpse Too Many are ‘a sign of the times’49 also implies their transience. In the future the ‘duplicates of him in every corner of the realm’50 will not affect the longer-term prognosis for the nation: as between Stephen and Maud, Cadfael felt no allegiance; but these young creatures, though two of them held for Maud and two for Stephen, surely belonged to a future and an England delivered from the wounds of civil war, beyond this present anarchy.51 The overarching view of the novels is thus clear. Medieval social and political upheaval might be the background to the narratives, with ‘no roads in England now that can be called safe,’52 but the world that is depicted keeps alive the potential for a society within which the rights of individuals are respected and upheld as part of a mutually beneficial social contract. The faith in this ideal underpins Cadfael’s rationalizing of Shrewsbury as a more reasoned, controlled environment in novels such as The Pilgrim of Hate (1984). Here society ‘had run . . . in orderly fashion for four years, and kept off the worst of the chaos that troubled so much of England elsewhere.’53 Death is ‘so common a matter now’54 but in the context of hope and optimism for the future: ‘there was, after all, a great deal of human happiness in the world, even a world so torn and mangled with conflict, cruelty and greed.’55 By and large, ‘safety here in Shropshire under Hugh Beringar was as good as anywhere in England.’56 There is an

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embracing moral framework within which all things take their place, and which shapes the prescribed standards of behaviour. When Empress Maud’s attempted coup is not successful the novel makes it clear that this is because of her failure to adhere to such accepted codes of civility: ‘she never made move to win them [Londoners], nothing but threats and reproaches and demands for money ever since she entered. She’s let the crown slip through her fingers for want of a few soft words and a queen’s courtesy.’57 Maud does not observe social and political niceties or understand her obligations and responsibilities and she pays the price of the throne of England because of this oversight. The Medieval world is in this sense (in symbiotic relation to an imagined present) ‘idealized through chivalry,’58 with the courtly moral framework articulated through the words and actions of Cadfael, despite his partial outsider status (as a Welshman). Notwithstanding the civil war between Maud and Stephen, and the fighting and killing and treachery that results from this internecine conflict, Shrewsbury becomes a microcosm of a ‘best’ England that can emerge out of the strife. It is an England where decent people articulate values of compassion and understanding. There is a conquering human nature that is not compromised by the pervading political tumultuousness and the duplicity and dishonesty of twelfthcentury military conflict and high politics, a presumed Englishness in keeping with that idealised within national political rhetoric during the years in which the novels were published: ‘the pride is the achievement of your forebears whose work . . . done by English hands, was unsurpassable by that of any living nation.’59 Whilst the publication of the Cadfael novels spanned the period from 1977 to 1994, the Cadfael TV adaptations (1994 to 1998) emerged from a different political and cultural context. The post-Thatcherite years in the United Kingdom marked a phase of reassessment of the political and cultural priorities established during the 1980s. Whereas the dogma of free-market Thatcherism had dominated the previous decade, much of the 1990s saw a gradual movement away from the nature and particularly the tone of previous political discourse.60 There was an increasingly concerted attempt to fashion a profoundly modern self-image for turn-ofthe-century Britain, a self-image shaped as a response, in part, to fear: ‘far from extrapolating confidently into the social and cultural future, we are now stranded and uncertain of our location.’61 The prevailing political assumption was that to be contemporary was everything: ‘moved at once by a will to change – to transform.’62 The most obvious manifestation of this espoused modernity came with the renaming of the traditional left

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of centre parliamentary Labour Party as ‘New Labour,’ an attempt to redefine its identity as a fresh, radical alternative to everything that had gone before, to distance itself from its history: ‘across a whole range of areas, New Labour has broken with the past.’63 The title of (soon-tobe Prime Minister) Tony Blair’s presentation of his political creed and convictions, New Britain: My Vision of a Young Country (1996), encapsulates exactly this sense of newness.64 This cultural idiom gave birth to the ‘Cool Britannia’ phenomenon of the later 1990s,65 part of a ‘fiercely anti-traditional’66 mindset within which with the main interest in history (according to Patrick Wright) was as a ‘dustbin into which to cast . . . opponents.’67 This was an era that reverberated with a self-confessedly modern desire to ‘shape fresh ideas about directions in which to move,’68 a desire that at times transcended political lines, with first the departing Conservative Prime Minister John Major advising people not to ‘waste time on the past – it’s gone. Out there, up and down the country, people are concerned about the future, not the past,’69 and then the succeeding New Labour Prime Minister Blair defining his mission ‘to set an ambitious course for this country. To be nothing less than the model twenty-first century nation, a beacon to the world.’70 Both evidence Doulgas Kellner’s contention that ‘in modernity, selfconsciousness comes into its own,’71 encapsulated in Blair’s celebration of the ‘new, new, new: everything is new.’72 The Cadfael adaptations incorporate a comparable (though admittedly rather more subtle) self-awareness of their own modernity. This is conveyed through an imagined, implied opposition between the contemporary world of the later twentieth century (and of the viewing audience) and the overtly, stereotypically ‘historical’ world of the Middle Ages that the adaptations manufacture. The television episodes bring to life many of the ‘popular connotations’ of the medieval that ‘stand for the opposite of modernity in ways both dismal and oddly alluring.’73 The televisual Medievalism of Cadfael is ‘de-idealized,’74 containing little of the compassionate humanity that was apparent in the Ellis Peters novels. Society is drained of its positive energy and reconfigured into a grotesque of ‘the dark ages of humanity,’75 rife with images of the Middle Ages as uncouth and uneducated. Cadfael himself is an exception, symptomatic of a potentially more humane, shared culture, but his innate goodness is often suffocated by the deviousness, violence and mistrust of others. This Medievalism is thus of a very different nature to that which predominates in the novels. From the opening credits of the first episode it is clear that a particular Middle Ages, with imitation carved wooden titles, and

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Benedictine theme music, is being propagated. It is a history of the medieval world that is closer to caricature, defined by crude moral simplicities. One Corpse Too Many76 first defines these ‘familiar binaries’77 of Medievalism in its depiction of Empress Maud, represented as a freedom fighter favoured by the people, and her rival Stephen, shown as a cruel and heartless tyrant. Stephen is not the man of the novels, who was portrayed as fundamentally decent. On the contrary he is reduced to a sadistic and predatory dictator with little sympathy for those around him. The adaptation offers a far less sophisticated examination of the King’s capricious personality than Peters, who was even-handed as well as more nuanced in her characterization. She resisted the temptation to demonize Stephen78 as he ‘stamped and raged’79 then ‘fretted, fumed and feasted.’80 He is instead described as ‘a big, noisy, handsome, simple-minded man, very fair in colouring, very comely in countenance, and at this stage in his fortunes totally bewildered by the contention between his natural good nature and his smarting sense of injury.’81 Despite the hints of genocide in him ordering the deaths of the 94 rebels at Shrewsbury, he is nevertheless shown as having an innate decency and sense of chivalry: ‘energy and lethargy, generosity and spite, shrewd action and incomprehensible inaction, would always alternate and startle in King Stephen. But somewhere within that tall, comely, simple-minded person there was a grain of nobility hidden.’82 In the adaptation of The Sanctuary Sparrow,83 medieval society is similarly cast as blinkered and bigoted. The episode maintains the outline of the novel’s tale of domestic crime, with both the initial victim and the ultimate perpetrator coming from the same family, and thus it continues to explore the gender implications of the central crime in terms of the lack of value given to a woman’s domestic role. However, the callous brutality of the TV episode surpasses Peters’s text. This is evident at the conclusion, in particular, when an arrow fired into the swollen belly of the pregnant murderer kills her and her unborn child. Such commonplace barbarity is equally apparent in The Leper of St Giles,84 in which the iniquity of forced marriage becomes a central element of the plot. Where the tone of the novel is tolerant and even understanding about the cultural practice of what is primarily an arranged marriage, ‘such things were the commonplace of marriage where there were lands and wealth and powerful alliances to be gained,’85 on television there is no such consensual arrangement. The guardians of the young bride-to-be Iveta are shown to have ‘beaten’ her since she was 10 years old, illustrating an oppressive undercurrent of violence within everyday medieval life; they will impose their will on her in whichever way they have to. It is a similar clinical brutality that characterizes

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The Virgin in the Ice,86 wherein the virginal Sister Hilaria is raped and smothered by the dastardly Richard Boterell, as well as The Devil’s Novice,87 wherein the assassination of one of the King’s emissaries is symptomatic of a broader culture of lawlessness within which murder and illegality are rife. Barbarism is ubiquitous. In Monk’s Hood88 this extends to both murderer and victim, with the soon-to-be-killed Gervase Bonel threatening to beat his wife, then to kill his stepson, and finally trying to force himself (sexually) onto his maid. He is physically intimidating and morally reprehensible, emphasized through his ill-mannered vulgarity that is far from any notion of medieval chivalry. He is a notable departure from the character in the novel, ‘old and irritable, not used to being crossed’89 but certainly not vindictive or unpleasant: ‘he was not a bad man . . . only elderly and set in his ways, and used to being obeyed.’90 On television it comes as little surprise when the vainglorious bullying of this petty tyrant results in a murderous attack against him, and he is callously poisoned. Cadfael is as such littered with images of cruelty, viciousness and moral corruption, often reinforced by a pervading extreme, fanatical religious practice; the collective bleeding of the brothers in A Morbid Taste for Bones91 is just one example of this. The constructed medieval world of the adaptations is distinct from the universalism and fair-mindedness of the morality of the novels. The televisual Medievalist caricature estranges the Middle Ages, carving out a vision of the national past as fundamentally Other, ‘this abjected, traumatic otherness . . . lodged deep within social and individual identity, a foundational difference at the heart of the selfsame.’92 So, when in St Peter’s Fair,93 Euan of Shotwick is stabbed and has his tongue removed, and a second victim has his eyes put out, this is more than a simple case of political infighting. The cruelty is symbolic, both within the narrative (both victims are protecting political secrets) but also in terms of the temper of the Medieval world that is depicted. It is entirely different in nature to the portrayal of the murder of Euan of Shotwick in the novel, wherein his neck is broken in a struggle with assailants, of whom Cadfael reflects that ‘I doubt if they ever meant to kill [him].’94 In the adaptation, the murderer’s cruelty is deliberate and calculated, designed to terrorize and intimidate. It is synecdochic, signalling a wider culture of violence. The adaptation of The Raven in the Foregate95 goes yet further in its depiction of harsh extremism. Its opening scene sees the head of a ‘traitor to King Stephen’ impaled on a pole and being pecked by a raven, which then cuts to a second scene showing another traitor shot through the eye with a bolt. The narrative delights in the medieval caricatures that

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are the fanatical ‘Norman’ priest Ailnoth and the sadistic torturer Lord Cassale, the latter newly created for the TV episode. Cassale extracts information from suspects with all the flare later associated with the Spanish Inquisition, delighting in the fear he induces in his victims and embodying a longstanding stereotype of the ignorant Dark Ages. His presence fundamentally alters the tone of the adapted narrative as it moves away from Ellis Peters’s closely researched plotline. As with the penultimate episode of the series, The Holy Thief,96 the parameters are redrawn. In the latter this is achieved through the depiction of the priest Herluin, who is characterized by his ongoing ranting about the sins of women. He displays a fundamentalist intolerance that sits comfortably alongside fresh scenes in which supposed thieves are ‘tried’ by being thrown into the river to see whether they drown (and can then be declared innocent). Even the previously heroic Beringar is seen openly supporting this barbaric and anti-rationalist ‘medieval’ practice. He is reduced to the level of a blinkered, simplistic local, far from the cultured and intelligent helpmate of Cadfael in the novels. The final adaptation in the four series of Cadfael, The Pilgrim of Hate,97 sees the Ellis Peters novel little more than a distant memory. It is rewritten as a story of patricide and religious extremism. Characters are lost, others invented, and entirely different crimes are placed central to the narrative. Almost all the events, individual psychologies and motives are altered. The character Luc shifts from being the romantic hero of the book to the murderer, and the unprincipled murderer of the novel is redrawn as the sympathetic victim. The heroine Melangell is no longer a chaste, angelic character; instead her brother Walter talks of the ‘dozens [of men] you’ve had before.’ These inversions of character are matched by a reworking of the plot to the extent that grotesque fundamentalism and intolerance become the driving forces behind the narrative; for Ellis Peters these had barely featured. Luc chokes his father with a crucifix, fuelled by intolerance and hatred, Brothers birch themselves until they bleed as penance for having impure thoughts, and pilgrims visit Shrewsbury Abbey for the perverse spectacle of ‘cripple’s day,’ a morally debauched sham attended by shysters and pickpockets at which the greatest talent demonstrated seems to be the ability to fake disability in order to make money. The movement away from the shared humanity and rational freewill depicted in Ellis Peters’s novels across the 13 TV episodes of Cadfael illustrates distinct differences between the imagined Medieval past and the contemporary world of the TV viewers. The episodes ‘confront the modern with powerful trauma’98 in their profound historical Otherness.

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Their harsh medievalism encourages viewers to see themselves as morally superior to the caricatured past, a past which in the novels had offered the ‘possibility of transhistorical alliance and mutual transformation.’99 There is no such potential in the television Cadfael. This shifting Medievalism is an example of what David Lowenthal has called ‘altering our inheritance.’100 For Lowenthal this is an inevitable part of a culture’s self-definition: we reinterpret relics and records to make them more comprehensible, to justify present attitudes and actions, to underscore changes of faith. The unadulterated past is seldom sufficiently ancient or glorious; most heritages need ageing and augmenting. Individually and collectively we revise the inherited past to enhance self-esteem, to aggrandize property, to validate power.101 In the case of the Cadfael adaptations the altering of the national inheritance leads to the creation of a demonized medieval Other that serves to enhance twentieth-century self-esteem by diminishing the distant English past. This Other is contained within narratives that provide a ‘secure framework for the representation and control of the unfamiliar or threatening,’102 but which nevertheless symbolize the apotheosis of difference, a fundamental opposition to ‘the industrial present’ that is motivated ‘primarily by a vision of the [present and] future.’103 Therein the Middle Ages functions as ‘an absolute alternative to modernity,’104 one that ‘structures the narrative of modernity’105 through its inherent sense of opposition. It is what Paul Strohm has called ‘the medieval’ as ‘a kind of Jurassic Park . . . which they . . . need, as an absent guarantor.’106 This is not the only way in which the national ‘inheritance’ is altered in Cadfael, however. For the casting of Derek Jacobi in the lead role, a marked departure from the ‘thickset and burly’107 Welsh Brother of the novels, is a hugely significant change. Despite the fact that Welsh actors Glyn Houston and Philip Madoc both played Cadfael in the successful BBC Radio 4 adaptations (reinforcing the sense of Cadfael as ‘a renegade . . . a Welshman from over the border’108), doubts ‘within ITV about the appeal of a medieval detective’109 resulted in the casting of the esteemed Shakespearean actor Jacobi, a man who, as Producer Stephen Smallwood has acknowledged, is ‘by no stretch of the imagination’ Welsh, and ‘didn’t try to pretend to be Welsh.’110 This casting leads to a downplaying of Cadfael’s Welsh identity in the first two series of adaptations, a major shift from the way in which the novels take Cadfael’s Welshness as read: ‘they call

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me Brother Cadfael, I’m as Welsh as Dewi Sant, and I’ve been about the world, as you may have guessed.’111 Some of the novels, including Monk’s Hood, centre on Cadfael’s Welshness, from the ‘sheep as Welsh as Brother Cadfael’’112 to him ‘instinctively calling his good-day in Welsh.’113 Here Cadfael finds ‘his heart and mind’114 assertively and passionately Welsh, an aspect of his identity that underpins everything he does, perhaps most notably in his reaction to Meurig’s murder of Gervase Bonel: all his Welsh blood rose in helpless sympathy with so strong a hunger and love for the land, which Meurig’s blood would have granted him, but by Norman-English law his birth had denied him. There was almost a nobility about him in this hour, and the bleak force of his longing carried with him judges, witnesses, even Cadfael.115 This Welsh identity is a key factor in Cadfael allowing Meurig to go free as a symbolic victim of English nationalism: nature had meant him to be amiable, kindly, unembittered, circumstances had so deformed him that he turned against his nature once, and fatally, and he was all too well aware of his mortal sickness. Surely one death was enough, what profit in a second?116 The casting of an English Cadfael on television neutralizes much of the political subversion implicit in the prevalent ethnic Welshness of the novels. It is not until the adaptation of A Morbid Taste for Bones (the seventh episode out of thirteen) that Cadfael’s Welsh identity is even mentioned, when Brother Jerome states simply that ‘you are Welsh, Brother Cadfael.’ In this tale, so closely imbued with ideas of the cultural pillaging of the Welsh by the English, it is perhaps no surprise that the series at last engages explicitly with the question of Cadfael’s national identity. It would be extremely problematic to erase this from the narrative, as Cadfael is taken on the pilgrimage to reclaim St Winifred precisely because he is a Welsh speaker.117 As such the profound ‘consciousness of . . . oppositions’118 between the English and the Welsh is at last conceded, with the producers of the TV series seemingly less hesitant (because of the popularity of the adaptations by that time) about marketing a Welsh Medieval TV detective.119 Nevertheless, despite the revelation of Cadfael’s Welshness, the way in which the adaptations ‘enshrine national identities’120 offers no particularly Welsh ‘discourse of national belonging.’121 Most significantly, national identity is significantly less explicit as a motivating factor in human and

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(especially) criminal behaviour. It is instead the Medievalized context itself that shapes such behaviour, the culture of cruelty, which is typified by extremes of behaviour and religious doctrine. Whereas the medievalism of the novels places a greater emphasis on the free moral choices individuals make in order to further, strengthen or maintain their position through criminal actions, on television characters are depicted as brutalized subjects whose criminality is a manifestation of the callous world around them. Individuals make decisions and choices that seem entirely in keeping with the inherent violence, greed and vulgarity of the society within which they live. Thus, in The Sanctuary Sparrow the violence of the prevailing culture is captured in the frequency of needless death: I have stood on the field of battle with my armour smoking with the blood of the fallen and felt nothing. Such is war’s harvest after the first death. No other reaches your heart. But Susannah – it should have ended in some other way. Cadfael’s words are not taken from the novel, and question the social convention of death as a punishment. He relates Susannah’s death to his wider interpretation of the nature of criminality as determined by outside forces: ‘whatever she did, came from something within her which might have been best if it had not been made [my italics]’; her environment and her treatment by her family and society have driven her to criminality. This is a crucial reworking of the novel, which accepts the possibility of provocation but fundamentally holds to the idea that individuals make free choices to behave in the way they do: ‘whatever she did of worst . . . came of that in her that might have been best.’122 For Ellis Peters, Susannah was mistreated and carried out revenge in response to that mistreatment when she need not have done. It was not the Medieval context that fundamentally changed her and ‘made’ her into something she previously was not, but her own decision to pursue this particular course of action rather than any other. On television, it is almost as if she has no choice but to adopt criminal means to free herself from her domestic enslavement. Such a sense of determinism is also apparent in the adaptation of The Devil’s Novice, wherein the medieval world ‘breeds felons like a rotting cat breeds maggots.’ Canon Eluard even suggests at one point that the hanging of Meriet (who has by then become the chief murder suspect) should go ahead regardless of his innocence in order to satisfy the need for closure, implying a culture within which justice, fair play and due (legal)

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process are irrelevancies and in which random violence is typical. As indeed it is at the conclusion of The Rose Rent, when the wanton hysteria of Miles (who has already murdered Brother Eluric and Bertred because of his sexual desire for Mistress Perle) sees him kidnap her and attempt to set them both on fire. This tendency of the Cadfael adaptations to portray society as inhabited by sadistic killers and duplicitous fraudsters, a world rooted in violence, immorality, and double-dealing, reaches its dramatic peak in the final two episodes, The Holy Thief and The Pilgrim of Hate. In The Holy Thief the character of Lord Beaumont is rewritten as an embodiment of the brutality and dishonour of the age. He is thoroughly dispreputable, cruel and manipulative. He tries to buy the slave girl Daalny for his own sexual pleasures (later forcing her owner into selling her to him), and ultimately is uncovered as a murderer, having crushed the skull of his victim. He stands in clear and direct contrast to the humanity of Cadfael, who lectures him that he does not even know what love is. Even Beaumont’s eventual mea culpa has violent overtones, when he drives a sword through his stomach and kills himself. His action is in keeping with the broader culture of violence of which he is a signifier, contrasting with the character of the same name in the Ellis Peters novel. For Peters, Beaumont was an ambivalent, pragmatic supporter of King Stephen, politically sensitive and astute: ‘this has become a war which cannot be won or lost. Victory and defeat have become alike impossible. Unfortunately it may take several years yet before most men begin to understand.’123 He is not a murderer, and at the conclusion of the novel insists Daalny is set free, proving himself more of an emancipator than a sexual predator. The final episode of the series, The Pilgrim of Hate, illustrates perhaps more than any other the shift in the perception and depiction of the Medieval world. The adaptation features a son (Ciaran) stealing the bones of his murdered father as part of a perverse reversal of the pilgrimage of St Winifred. Both he and his brother, Luc, who is later revealed to be the murderer, are motivated by a skewed sense of religious faith, a form of fundamentalism that drives them to behave in irrational and seemingly incomprehensible ways. Cadfael is outraged by what he sees as their manipulation of religious wisdom: ‘how dare you play God.’ Whereas the plot of the novel viewed criminal action in relation to individually motivated free-will, particularly in relation to the political murder of Rainald Bossard (a supporter of Empress Maud), the stereotyping of the ‘dark’ medieval world characteristic of the television version leaves no room for such an interpretation. Here crime is the product of deranged funda-

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mentalist fervour, emerging from a harsh, uncompromising society. The protagonists are imbued with hostility and zealotry through their ongoing and continual exposure to ‘scenes of violence and brutality [that have] tended to incite more violence.’124 The unbridled excesses of the Medieval world increase the propensity for violent acts, creating a cycle of action and reaction that has profoundly negative social consequences. Whilst the Cadfael novels offer a nostalgic engagement with a past heritage for a modern audience (potentially at least) disillusioned with certain aspects of modernity,125 the cultural stereotyping of the medieval in the TV series moves the adaptations further and further away from the parameters of these novels. This is a movement from (in Umberto Eco’s terms) the Middle Ages ‘as a pretext . . . the Middle Ages . . . taken as a sort of mythological stage on which to place contemporary characters,’126 towards a very different sense of the medieval as a ‘barbaric age, a land of elementary and outlaw feelings . . . Dark par excellence.’127 The TV incarnation of Cadfael demonstrates the supposed backwardness and moral bankruptcy of the imagined medieval age as part of its engagement with ‘ideological trends circulating during the moment of production,’128 in particular the late twentieth-century vocabulary of contemporaneity, and the accompanying celebration of the shiny new-ness of modern British culture. Therein the status of the adaptations as ‘a barometer of the social and cultural life of the last decades of the twentieth century’129 sees the liberal humanist universalism of Ellis Peters filtered and ‘reimagined’ through ‘the prisms and grids and discourses’130 of a national identity striving to establish itself as the epitome of the modern; the Middle Ages have been ‘stretched . . . in order to provide an ideological space in which a society can explore and articulate’131 its own self-image. This malleable Medievalism displaces the view of human agency in the novels, the ‘naïve autonomy and a persistent choice making,’132 with a portrayal of the commonplace, extreme and most significantly determining brutality of the TV episodes. The prevailing culture of violence and its erratic extremes of behaviour are contextualized as part of an Other world that is harsh and cruel. It is a version of the Middle Ages akin to what Steve Watson has called ‘a cultural palimpsest . . . disembedded from its chronological context,’133 a ‘tranche of mutually reinforcing signifiers’134 that crystallizes into a ‘brand image’135 of the Medieval, one that is overridingly an ideological legitimization of modernity.

Chapter 7

DCI Barnaby and an English Aesthetics of Crime

Detective fictions in the ‘classical’ style of the whodunit?1 engage in the process of confronting and then suppressing threats to the presumed/ assumed homogeneity of social life. The reader is led through a familiar plot arch of order – disorder – order restored, in which the attempt to subvert the status quo is resisted and overcome: the magic formula is an innocence which is discovered to contain guilt; then a suspicion of being the guilty other has been expelled, a cure effected, not by me or my neighbours, but by the miraculous intervention of a genius from outside who removes guilt by giving knowledge of guilt.2 Caroline Graham’s Detective Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby, or ‘Midsomer’3 novels utilize many of the traits of this traditional form, despite being written in the later twentieth century. They present ‘a reassuring world’ in which those who try to disturb the established order are ‘discovered and punished’4 that in many respects is similar to the fictional England of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple. From The Killings at Badger’s Drift, nominated by the Crime Writers’ Association as one of the ‘top 100 crime novels of all time,’5 the representation of criminality and Englishness in Graham’s detective fiction sees a self-conscious (and stereotypical) England presented (initially at least) as the stable arena into which crime intrudes. Just as in Christie, criminal characters draw attention to, and through their actions crystallize the core values of the overarching social framework they are transgressing. However, ultimately, in the Midsomer novels it becomes clear that criminality is not a momentary disturbance of the equilibrium, but in fact the void between the stereotypical appearance of Englishness and an implied, underlying lived reality, drawn into sharp focus in the narrative

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conclusion. Therein the ‘containment of ostensibly subversive pressures’6 is only partial. For the implied, supposedly coherent sense of English ethnic identity, an ‘idea of societal groups, marked especially by shared nationality, tribal affiliation, religious faith, shared language, or cultural and traditional origins,’7 is threatened by an emergent English counter-identity that bears the imprint of the political/ideological context of the 1980s from which the novels first emerged. There is an explicit portrayal of England’s social fragmentation (common to other detective fictions of this period, as previous chapters reveal), as well as a broad-brush critique of Thatcherite ideology, embodied in the characterization of DCI Barnaby’s protégé, Sergeant Troy. Both of these elements jar with the picture-perfect image of Englishness that the various Midsomer villages symbolize. Consequently, notwithstanding the fact that the sense of social fragmentation in the novels is at times muted, and the abrasive, aspirant Thatcherite identity of Troy is routinely marginalized, the disruptive energies of the novels are still never entirely exhausted. On television, however, it is quite another story. For one of the key differences between Caroline Graham’s novels and their corresponding Bentley TV adaptations, branded as Midsomer Murders and broadcast on ITV1 in the United Kingdom, is that subversiveness is in short supply. By the time the television episodes were broadcast in the later 1990s, the implicit critique of Thatcherism that characterizes the novels was outmoded, and so is absent, and an appetite for images of social harmony and cohesion rather than disintegration replaced it. As such, the television adaptations overlook the challenges to notions of coherent social identity depicted by Graham. Instead they make the socio-political formation of England essentially benign (despite the all-too-frequent instances of murder), with community (as opposed to individual) disquiet kept to a minimum. The novels repackage murder as a socially detached aesthetic performance, offering TV viewers a carnivalesque escape from any serious engagement with questions of criminality and social responsibility. The assumed nucleus of English identity is apparent in the first DCI Barnaby novel, The Killings at Badger’s Drift, which revives the Christiesque Gemeinschaft, society viewed as a national ‘living organism.’8 The depiction of the murder victim, Emily Simpson, is rife with such national associations, through her status as an English teacher and an aficionado of perhaps the most potent icon of Englishness, Shakespeare. Her life, in terms of the values she represents, marks her out as symbolic of an idealized national community, a ‘real and organic life.’9 Even characters whose lives are lived at the margins of this idealized national community, such as the working-class

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barmaid Mrs Sweeney, reiterate its pervasiveness in noting how the victim did not have ‘an enemy in the world.’10 The old man Jake (who ‘can’t read nor write to this day’11) authenticates the figurative status of Miss Simpson as longstanding Englishness: ‘she used to teach me in English.’12 This status relates closely to the myth of a bucolic, historical identity that holds sway over much of the novel: the Traces went back to Norman times. Effigies of Sir Robert Trayce and his wyffe Ismelda and her cat rested eternally in the cool of the thirteenthcentury church. Traces had shed a modest amount of their landowning blood in the two world wars and returned to their squirearchical duties garlanded with honour. The words security of tenure were meaningless to them. They had never known anything else.13 National-historical principles have been passed down through generations, distilled into a seemingly frozen union between past and present. Such a notion of a historically transcendent Englishness underpins the geography and architecture of the village of Badger’s Drift: ‘Barnaby turned into the main leg of the T. Church Lane was not as long as the Street and ran very quickly into open country – miles and miles of wheat and barley bisected at one point by a rectangular blaze of rape. The church was thirteenth-century stone and flint.’14 Even Miss Simpson’s cat bears witness to the esteemed national-historical inheritance: ‘Barnaby spotted Wellington, a solid cat the colour of iron filings, with four white socks, on top of a grand piano. The name seemed apt.’15 An idealized version of English life, resistant to change, predominates. Outsiders are required to recognize the obligations that this timelessness brings with it, obligations that form part of the prevailing social capital, ‘the values that individuals and groups possess and the resources that they have access to which can promote . . . social relationships and ties.’16 In Graham’s figurative reconstruction of the English national landscape this social capital is the glue that bonds people together. The sense of ethnic coherence is also present in the second DCI Barnaby novel, Death of a Hollow Man: ‘her nose was larger than she would have liked but she capitalized on this by hinting at a rather tragic immigrant Jewish background. A suggestion that would have horrified her grandparents, sturdy Anglo-Saxon farm workers from Lincolnshire.’17 But increasingly such images of Englishness are unpicked, to the point that the idyll is no longer easily sustainable: ‘Compton Dando had not seen such excitement since three boys from the Council Estate burned down the bus shelter.’18

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This feeds ‘the villagers’ in their ‘growing distrust of change,’19 and generates a sense of unrest: at the moment matters were quite sluggish. No shortage of crime (when was there ever?) but for the past few days it had been seedy, run-ofthe-mill stuff. There were occasions – not many, never long – like this. Other periods seemed to hold such an escalation of smashing and grabbing; of screaming, squealing tyres and breaking bones that Barnaby sometimes felt he had been sucked into an ever-spinning maelstrom of brutality.20 The threat of social disintegration is supplemented by a prevailing atmosphere of threat in the novel Written in Blood: ‘Laura did not own a dog and had more sense than to walk around an English village in the dark for no apparent reason.’21 Society, as a community with shared values and behaviours, is seriously in doubt: the article in question had been thrown down by someone from the municipal dwellings. Although these hideous breeze-block buildings were placed . . . on the very edge of the village proper, the social pariahs housed within seemed to think they could go wherever they liked, shouting, playing music, revving their disgusting motor bicycles.22 These energies of modernity represent a flagrant disregard for the ideals of English village life, ‘in the summer they even swarmed all over the Green to watch the cricket, bringing pushchairs and picnics and hideous tartan rugs.’23 The picturesque scene is fundamentally undermined, with even the local architecture compromised by ‘the prominent display of burglar alarms [which] detracted from a Christmas-calendar image of perfection.’24 In Faithful Unto Death, the threat to English identity is equally pronounced: ‘the gate was permanently hanging off its hinges. This slovenly departure from the approved norm was accepted with a resigned shrug by the village.’25 Standards (of Englishness) are seen to be slipping. There may be ‘nothing more conservative than an English village,’26 but the superficial image of peace and harmony and tradition is not what it once was: ah, Fawcett Green! Constable Perrot sighed with pleasure as he gazed about him. Dozing in the sunshine the place looked remarkably unspoilt. A great deal of the surrounding land belonged to a stately home which

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had been bought by a Far Eastern conglomerate. They had planted rather a lot of beautiful and unusual trees, created a large lake and left the rest alone.27 The imagined world of ‘thatched cottage[s] of such dreamlike perfection’28 is detached from lived social reality, artificially maintained for future generations who might not be worthy of the effort: ‘it was almost impossible to believe it was occupied by credit-carded, telly-watching, bar-coded human beings. A gingerbread family might have been more appropriate.’29 The ‘Midsomer’ novels thus call into question the plausibility of the seductive national mythology of a harmonious village existence, doubting the extent to which this imagined Englishness is compatible with real modern lives. Aside from the solution of the crimes and the bringing to justice of the perpetrators (which has to happen for the formal conventions of the whodunit to be fulfilled), the attempt to contain social disquiet, to suppress the wider social threats to the imagined ethnic harmony of the English villagers, is less and less successful. Instead of purging England of tension the novels leave the reader with a vision of Englishness in transition, heterogeneous and only superficially at ease with itself. This unease is most apparent in the depiction of the ebullient, brash Sergeant Troy, the most explicit and sustained challenge to the village-green Englishness of the Midsomer novels. Troy is a caricature of the brash and aggressive social mobility of the Thatcherite 1980s, intolerant of difference and avaricious in terms of his desire to further his own social position at all costs. The simplistic anagram of ‘Tory’30 that is his name reinforces his encapsulation of Thatcherite ideology, simultaneously respectful towards elements of inherited tradition and yet markedly impatient with unwieldy and cumbersome conventions. He is distrusting of ‘the people’ and at the same time reliant on a notion of ‘common sense’ truth: ‘what on earth was the point of being in the force with all the dreary forms and typing and gormless people endlessly asking you gormless questions.’31 Troy’s reaction against the staid conventionalism and inherent insularity of the community he is investigating is paradoxical, for it is belied by the fact that everything he does as a policeman ends up protecting this insularity. He is thus a man founded in later twentieth-century contradictions as to the nature of the English (cultural) landscape, as he polices ‘perfection. The sort of house that turns up on This England calendars and tourist posters. The exile’s dream of home’32 whilst at the same time articulating the grievances of a socially aspiring working-class identity: ‘he remembered his mum cleaning for old Lady Prendicott who always looked as if she dressed in Oxfam rejects.

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And he remembered wearing her grandson’s castoffs: ludicrously expensive clothes from the White House and Harrod’s when all he longed for was jeans and a Batman T-shirt.’33 Troy’s ambiguity is symbolic of the wider Thatcherite schizophrenia of English ethnicities; one, rooted in an identity handed down through the ages, reliant on an almost mythic idea of the national past, in tension with another, more modern, emergent, fundamentally urban identity that is socially mobile and (inevitably) more ethnically dilute. In Troy’s case this tension manifests itself in vulgar intolerance. He exhibits extremely challenging behaviours, including rampant sexual chauvinism: ‘as Troy knew to his philandering benefit, it [pregnancy] was the one time you could hold open house with nobody having to foot the bill.’34 His is an explicitly macho-heterosexual gaze, ‘after showing in Tim and Avery, Troy pointedly moved his chair several feet away. Then he sat, legs protectively crossed, giving off waves of macho fervour, his breathing ostentatiously shallow.’35 And the vitriol of his sexual prejudice is one of the things that defines him: ‘queers were bad enough, he thought . . . but clever queers . . . There had been a particularly repulsive example of the species in a case the previous year.’36 Troy is, ultimately, the voice of a narrow, politically incorrect ‘little England’-ism that has no respect for cultural difference: ‘it seemed to him that you could go on for a very long time indeed before you ran out of decent English plays without putting on foreign rubbish. And communist rubbish at that.’37 In Written in Blood this urban Thatcherite identity particularly clear: ‘Troy spoke with the authority of a British Gas and Telecom shareholder.’38 He becomes the personification of crass modernity: ‘urban spirit incarnate, weaned on exhaust fumes, addicted to multi-storey car parks and multiplex cinemas carpeted with popcorn, to ziggurating shopping malls studded with zooming glass lifts and throbbing to the beat of hard rock, to spaceinvaded pubs.’39 His stereotypical aspirant masculinity parallels that of ‘Mrs Thatcher’s designer gladiators,’40 the cultural philistines disguised as iconoclasts who turn historical architecture into ‘a Tudor theme park,’ a literal and metaphorical ‘vile despoliation of England’s green and pleasant’41 land. Troy is thus a product of his time, laden with all the uncouth chauvanisms and outraged prejudices against multiculturalism that Caroline Graham can manage: ‘foreigners, the pigmentally challenged or differentially abled . . . anyone in fact who did not fall into the lower middle to working class white male aggressively heterosexual brotherhood were diminished, in Troy’s categorisation, to “they.” ’42 There is no tolerance, only hostility,

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shown towards Otherness: ‘you’d have thought they were a load of foreigners the way there were cracking on, Italians. OR jabbering Caribbeans.’43 As such racism and class insecurity go hand-in-hand: ‘Troy detailed Policewoman Brierley to show Sir Willoughby out and watched the Bentley depart with a curl of his lip, thinking, Sinjhan. If I’d got a name like a Paki newsagent I’d keep it to myself.’44 He is viciously (ironically) protective of the ‘purity’ of his mongrel Englishness, which reaches a particular low point when ‘Troy’s mouth pursed with a moue of distaste. If there was one thing that turned him up, it was white women dressing like blacks. “If that girl was mine,” he muttered, “I’d drag her home, wash that red muck off under the tap and give her a good clout.” ’45 By the time of the later Midsomer novels Troy’s behaviour comes under challenge, resulting in the Sergeant being ordered to attend a ‘Behavioural Correction Course’46 to address his impropriety. The fact that he is identified as in need of ‘correction’ is (at last) an indication of the changing times and perhaps more specifically of the growing impact of the Equal Opportunities agenda on the police force in the United Kingdom. But until this point in the series of novels Troy is the apotheosis of a conservative refusal to change with the times, whilst (paradoxically) symbolizing the social consequences (i.e. social mobility) of the very change he abhors. And it is parochialism and fear that explains the paradox; a narrowness of attitude combined with an all-consuming anxiety about maintaining a hard-won social position. The position of the confrontational Troy within a society that is not fully at ease with itself illustrates the overarching inability of the Midsomer novels to suppress possibilities and indications of social change. At times, deviance appears constrained by a functionalist notion of social ties, wherein ‘the tendency on the part of one or more of the component actors to behave in such a way as to disturb the equilibrium’ results in ‘re-equilibration by counteracting forces.’47 Yet the effectiveness of this reassertion of structure is called into question, both by unresolved social tensions and also by Troy as an embodiment of an uncontained individual agency. Social action might be seen to occur ‘within a social system of mutually dependent parts that contribute to the functioning of the [social] system,’48 but the fixity of the system is still not guaranteed: ‘the degree of closure of societal totalities – and of social systems in general – is widely variable. There are degrees of “systemness” in societal totalities, as in other less or more inclusive forms of social system.’49 This points to a more fluid social organization in Graham’s fictions, and an inherent social process comparable to what Anthony Giddens has called

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‘structuration.’50 The structuration of individuals such as Sergeant Troy sees them defined by/within a framework of social action that shapes rather than determines their behaviour, allowing for individual agency in relation to ‘properties which make it possible for discernibly similar social practices to exist across varying spans of time and space and which lend them “systemic” form.’51 Troy’s role in the process of upholding the order of English society, whilst at the same time challenging the equilibrium of this apparently ordered world, indicates the extent to which (as Giddens suggests) individual will and implied social structure can coexist, even if it is at times an unsteady alliance. Troy’s police work illustrates ‘the rationalization of action as chronically involved in the structuration of social practices.’52 He both structures and is structured by society. Energetic and thrusting individualistic ambition takes its place within the context of the seductive power of English national (structuring) mythologies of place, culture and collective identity. It is a combination of what Burrow has labelled ‘both archaic and individualistic’53 social characteristics, and it offers (at least) a tentative accommodation between society and individual. On television, however, the Midsomer Murders depicts a more explicitly functionalist (perhaps even communitarianist54) view of society that ‘entails a form of social control in which neighbourhoods regulate the conduct and morals of their members, demanding support for established norms and less individual assertiveness.’55 This is a social system in which, according to Talcott Parsons, ‘a sufficient proportion of its component actors [are] adequately motivated to act in accordance with the requirements of its role system, positively in the fulfilment of expectations and negatively in abstention from too much disruptive, i.e., deviant, behaviour.’56 The community reaction to crime demonstrates ‘a dynamic propensity towards equilibrium,’57 and whilst this is not unique to the Midsomer television series (there are elements of this tendency towards equilibrium in all classical English detective fiction), it is clear that the adaptations of Caroline Graham’s novels are much more functionalist than the novels themselves in their overriding presumption of society as ‘intrinsically harmonious.’58 This assumption of inherent harmony resonates with the contemporaneous ideological context in the United Kingdom, in particular with the emergence of ‘New Labour’59 as a political rhetoric in the 1990s; notably, the pilot episode of Midsomer Murders, The Killings at Badger’s Drift, was first broadcast on 23 March 1997, a matter of weeks before the election of the ‘New’ Labour government of Tony Blair. Blair’s philosophy was

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rooted in the notion of harmonious inclusivity: we need to build a relationship of trust, not just within a firm but within a society. By trust, I mean the recognition of mutual purpose for which we work together and in which we all benefit . . . opportunity is available to all, advancement is through merit and . . . no group or class is set apart or excluded.60 ‘New Labour’ marked a transition from Thatcherism to a post-Thatcherite (if not, in all honesty, entirely beyond Thatcherite) political climate,61 in which notions of community and society (anathema to the more extreme elements of Thatcherism) moved centre stage as ideals to be aspired to. These notions became an article of faith, to the extent that (as Simon Prideaux has persuasively argued), the new government refused to acknowledge that ‘community can mean different things to different people at different times in different places and situations.’62 The inherent New Labour (functionalist) conception of social forces working towards coherence and continuity entailed a range of presumptions about how society accommodated antisocial impulses and potentially destructive social energies. The ‘voluntaristic theory of action’63 at the heart of functionalism rationalizes individual motivations, desires and behaviours in terms of their inherent desire to seek to bolster rather than undermine the social framework, if they are provided with the opportunity of so doing. This ‘paradigm of evolutionary change’64 does not foresee sudden and assertive social disruption, as society’s ‘integrative function’65 is to resolve the tensions between ‘pattern-maintenance [structure] and goalattainment [agency].’66 The concept of equilibrium is the ‘fundamental reference point.’67 The episodes that make up Midsomer Murders embody similar presumptions. They offer a functionalist ideal rather than a complex social reality. Their model of society is a trope of convenience, strategically deployed to tap into the audience’s fondness for nostalgic images of the socially stable, mutually reinforcing national ‘past,’ and although murder punctures the outward complacency of the ideal image things are not destabilized for too long; disruptions are resolved in order for control and harmony to be re-established. The ‘normative goal’68 of each episode is a demonstration of social capital and the effectiveness of ‘social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them.’69 The nature of this fictional social framework ensures that instead of the implied ‘modernity’ of later twentieth-century Englishness implicit

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in the Cadfael narratives, the Midsomer tales offer escape, the ‘fictional reassurance’70 of a ‘highly focused version of an English archetype’71 that provides comfort to the viewer through imagined (wished for) social order. This archetype is continually reiterated, as if by repeating itself it becomes more achievable as a social model. In The Killings at Badger’s Drift, when the camera first pans across the cottage scene its gaze deliberately takes in the village notice-board commemorating the numerous occasions it has won a ‘Best Kept’ award. Light pastoral incidental music accompanies Miss Simpson’s ride on her three-wheeled bicycle through the village square, and the sense of nostalgic community is established when a passing motorist (who we later discover to be the local doctor) slows down and wishes her a ‘good morning’ through the open window of his classic car. Villagers on horseback make their way by, and the local Post Office thrives as a communal hub, vibrantly alive. The murder of Miss Simpson both interrupts this community and also establishes it as a social ‘fact.’ For Miss Bellringer can only be sure that something unpleasant has happened to her friend (before her body has even been discovered) because she is able to offer a close reading of the constancy of village life. She notices that Miss Simpson, unusually for her, slams her front door when she returns from the woods: ‘some people close doors and some people slam them. Emily was very much a closer.’ She also did not padlock her tricycle, which is again seen as highly suggestive. Thus, whilst the murder compromises the idyll, the adaptation nevertheless manages to maintain the integrity and coherence of the English backdrop. Deviancy is contained by the triumph of the ‘genteel world of immaculate lace curtains, graceful thatched roofs and roses arcing around the door.’72 This patch of England, ‘chocolate-box pretty and effortlessly green,’73 is never seriously jeopardized, and a contented compromise is achieved between order and threat: ‘homely pots of jam in the larder but rattling skeletons in the cupboard.’74 Key to the televisual strategy of minimizing challenges to the social order is the fundamental reconfiguration of the character of Sergeant Troy. Most of the more obnoxious aspects of his personality are removed, and he becomes defined almost solely in terms of his role helping the diligent (but frankly prosaic) DCI Barnaby in assuaging the temporarily disturbed cultural landscape of the village. Troy’s difficult personality (from the novels) is suppressed, and his outbursts are limited to much more benign (even if at times hopelessly crass) observations on human life. What is left of his bigotry becomes regulated by the sobering influence of Barnaby, who symbolizes a fundamental human decency; Barnaby is an Everyman

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figure, at times showing intuition and insight but more commonly a simple image of a family man of moral consequence and professional integrity. When, for example, Troy speculates about whom it was Miss Simpson saw in the woods before she was killed, ‘ “it could have been arse bandits,” ’ it is Barnaby who marks out the boundaries of acceptability for his young Sergeant: ‘ “you are as politically correct as a Nuremberg rally.” ’ Troy is consequently toned down and made more amenable to the local landscape, as well as less offensive to viewers. As John Nettles, the lead actor in the series, recognizes: ‘ “Troy is nowhere near as unpleasant as he is in the novels.” ’75 The actor who brought him to life, Daniel Casey, is acceptant of the necessary changes that had to be made in adaptation: ‘ “in the books . . . he is racist and sexist and homophobic, and every kind of “ist” or “ic” you can think of.” ’76 By moving the character of Troy away from Caroline Graham’s caricature of later 1980s Thatcherite avariciousness and callous self-interest he takes his place alongside Barnaby as a largely unquestioning upholder of the traditional order, defined in terms of his functional role to police (i.e. maintain, uphold) an assumed English ethnicity. Despite the fact that he is at times something of a buffoon, he is nevertheless part of the reason why, by the end of each Midsomer episode, the fossilized society of the archetypal English detective narrative, rooted in ideas of a coherent and shared, stable identity, survives. The television Troy does not threaten the status of the village as a contained world, and the predominant value system secures ‘ “the ultimate triumph of good over evil and the restoration of peace and tranquillity to the small communities,” ’77 perpetuating what Stephen Knight has called ‘an individualist intellectual quietism.’78 This contributes towards the comfortable coziness of the series as it delineates its particular vision of Englishness: ‘in the USA, the programme has been screened by the A&E network to millions of loyal viewers who indulge themselves on a sumptuous diet of English stereotypes – thatched cottages, village fêtes, red telephone boxes and wacky country folk.’79 The ‘exaggerated world of make-believe’80 of the Midsomer series thus manufactures an implied form of social consent. There is no evidence of the deeply polarized ideologies of the 1980s that inflect Caroline Graham’s novels. This imagined consensus chimes with the New Labour ‘benign view of capitalism,’81 a virtual apoliticism that accords with Will Hutton’s characterization of later twentieth-century politics as a tacit acknowledgement that ‘the ideological contest of the twentieth century has been settled.’82 Tony Blair’s New Labour government may have been part of ‘a palimpsest already reworked by Thatcherism,’83 but its vision of a ‘popular

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politics reconciling themes which in the past have wrongly been regarded as antagonistic’84 was distinctly conciliatory. The attempt at an amalgam of ‘liberal, conservative and . . . specifically socialist components as well’85 represents the ambitious scale of the ideological compromise at the core of New Labour and its implicit attempt to escape the partisan tensions of the previous decade.86 Such a sense of escape from social and political tensions characterizes Midsomer Murders. Political concerns about the nature and extent of crime and society in later twentieth-century England are displaced by an image of crime as spectacle, an aesthetic conception of criminal behaviour that is defined by its inherent sense of deliberate composition. The notion of crime as a form of distraction and entertainment (minus any engagement with questions of context and social responsibility) fits with the view of the later twentieth century as a ‘diminishing sphere of public political engagement’87 marked by a broader ‘political disinterestedness’88 and ‘depoliticization.’89 The disengagement from criminological-political debates in the series, and the atomizing of criminal acts into detached, cultivated set-piece spectacles, is symptomatic of a rhetoric of social and political consensus: a consensus of the well-intentioned, embracing rich and poor, young and old, suburbs and inner cities, black and white . . . successful and unsuccessful. In place of the Thatcherite cold shower, it offers a warm bath, administered by a hegemonic people’s party appealing equally to every part of the nation.90 This is a political appeal Andrew Rawnsley has called ‘safe to the point of constipation,’91 a reflection of Prime Minister Blair as an ‘ideology-free pragmatist’92 for whom all that really matters ‘is what works.’93 It is an inherent pragmatism captured in Blair’s election speech of 1997, in which he sought to reassure the British public that a vote for New Labour was: ‘not a vote for outdated dogma or ideology of any kind.’94 For Betty Willingale (co-producer of the early series of the Midsomer Murders), such a lack of ideology is key to the presentation of crime within the series: ‘ “this is not cutting edge: it is escapism . . . There is no social comment.” ’95 The sense of ideology-free artifice manifests itself in a selfconsciously meta-fictional style: ‘ “it’s a comedic take on the whodunit, in the glorious English tradition of the detective story, stretching back to Conan Doyle and before. It is almost, but not quite, a send up.” ’96 Each episode (re)presents archetypes and images of old with a noticeable

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tongue-in-cheek and a very large pinch of salt. And the light-heartedness of these images of a mythologized Englishness contributes to the broader tendency in the series to ‘aestheticise violent murder,’97 an evolution of Thomas De Quincey’s elaboration of the performative and artistic aspects of heinous crime. Murder is raised to the status of an art-form: people begin to see that something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed – a knife – a purse – and a dark lane. Design . . . grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment, are now deemed indispensable to attempts of this nature.98 The effect of this aestheticization is a temporary elision of morality, what George Bataille has called a ‘transgression’ that ‘suspends a taboo without suppressing it.’99 Viewers are allowed, indeed encouraged, to put aside the moral dimensions of criminal acts and to focus on their aesthetic merits. They are therein given the means to escape the social realities of crime and criminality. The fact that the Midsomer series emerged at exactly the point at which the rate of ‘homicide’ in the United Kingdom had reached a century-long high100 makes the nature of this ‘escape’ particularly poignant. These ‘aestheticised’ murders in the Midsomer series involve deliberate compositional choices as to the means and methods of crime, with the murderers themselves rarely seen as disorganized, chaotic offenders. This produces in the viewer ‘a sense of nonthreatening pseudo-terror,’101 with just the right balance of fear and security. There is as such an inherent, ironic (unwitting) rebuttal of W H Auden’s view that ‘detective stories have nothing to do with works of art.’102 The Midsomer episodes offer ‘lifethreatening violence as perceived by an involved, but secure, observer,’ an ‘otherworldly state of suspension.’103 Violent crimes are not aestheticized so as to encourage the viewer ‘to take pleasure in the spectacular representation of other people’s pain [my italics],’104 but the crime itself (separated from its consequences) is meant to be entertainingly pleasurable rather than spine-chillingly frightening or sociologically challenging. In The Killings at Badger’s Drift this is apparent in the ‘slasher movie’-style double killing of Iris and Dennis Rainbird, which is much changed from the novel (wherein Dennis is not murdered at all). On television both mother and son are butchered in their own home in a fashion reminiscent of the shower scene of Hitchcock’s Psycho, with dramatic close-up shots of the blood-splattered kitchen knife used as the murder weapon. Supplemented with subsequent dialogue about how Mrs Rainbird has been ‘almost

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decapitated,’ this represents set-piece, armchair comedy-horror, with the viewer’s attention carefully drawn to the details most likely to titillate and amuse. This aesthetics of murder continues in Death of a Hollow Man,105 opening with a scene of a shadowed, unidentified praying woman, artistically shot against the backdrop of a three-quarter moon and a host of religious icons. Doom-laden choral music paves the way for the culmination of the scene, when the woman is savagely struck on the back of the head with a lethal weapon, filmed in shadowed silhouette. The killing is impersonal and detached, just as the bizarre murder-by-suicide of Esslyn Carmichael, who is shown unwittingly slashing his own throat with a razor in front of a fee-paying theatre audience. There is little emotional purchase for the viewer in either case, with murder itself the centre-stage spectacle. Indeed, the episode even ends with Barnaby wryly drawing attention to the performed nature of the killings: ‘can you believe anyone would commit murder for the sake of the theatre?’ The aesthetic centrepiece of the adaptation of Death in Disguise106 is the murder of ‘The Master,’ Ian Craigie, part of a scene best described as a combination of knife-throwing circus act and spiritualist séance. The characters are portrayed as bold, Technicolor caricatures, and the murder itself (with the knife hurled across a packed room so surreptitiously that no-one even notices it strike into the heart of the victim) an uncanny reversal of the logic of G K Chesterton’s ‘The Arrow of Heaven.’107 The viewer is distracted by the irregular nature and aesthetic ingenuity of the crime, a crime that is (ambiguously) portrayed as both ‘just’ and morally irrelevant. It captures the inadequately realized relationship between morality and artifice, a relationship that is also ambivalent in Written in Blood.108 This opens with a social context for past crime, the rural panorama of Ireland (Dunglow, 1955) wherein a young abused boy kills his father with a shotgun, yet it is only a matter of seconds before the narrative decamps to the performative playfulness of Midsomer: ‘if someone doesn’t get murdered soon you’ll only get tetchy.’ A cartoon-version of crime thus predominates, with the adaptation depicting a highly performative version of transvesticism, with Gerald Hadleigh’s childhood sexual exploitation manifesting itself in a reductively simplistic transvestite-homosexuality. His sexually explicit outcry (‘I had him and he had me’) just before he is bludgeoned to death with a candlestick is part of a stagey set-piece killing in which the perverted ‘history of England’ represented by Honoria Lydiard takes its revenge on contemporary sexual liberation, but in a way that has little to do with the tensions between feasible (he is a caricature, she is a lunatic) social realities.

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The final adaptation drawn from Caroline Graham’s ‘Midsomer’ novels, Faithful Unto Death,109 offers a further aesthetic reworking of crime, the episode opening with an image of an imitated England past in the form of a village fete with a Tudor theme; identity and performance go handin-hand. The core elements of the narrative of the novel, embezzlement, kidnap, blackmail and murder are all still there, but they are undermined by regular moments of light comedy that serve to detract from the seriousness of the criminal acts. The sub-plot of Barnaby unwittingly consuming hash cakes is particularly damaging in this sense, with his consequent erratic behaviour, peaking in him singing ‘in England’s green and pleasant land’ in the local pub, just plain odd. In the world of Midsomer, criminality (in this case the growing and local distribution of marijuana) is just as likely to be the object of humour as it is moral condemnation. Eventually the light-heartedness of this episode gives way to the aestheticizing of crime, with the reworking of the murder of Brenda Buckley. Rather than being prosaically (and accidentally) struck by a car in a Heathrow Airport car park, she is instead pursued to her death in a countryside car chase. This ends with her being rammed off the road by an unidentified vehicle, with theatrically blacked-out windows, before she careers under the trailer of a lorry laden with newly felled trees. The scene of decapitation is apparently so horrific (captured in Barnaby’s warning to Troy that ‘you don’t want to look at that’) that it is kept off camera. The murder is as such a dramatic and carefully composed set-piece which, through its melodramatic manipulation of the viewer, implies crime as, above all other things, a matter of extravagant spectacle. The treatment of the acts of murder in Midsomer Murders thus makes the crimes themselves more interesting than the criminals, victims or detectives. They are the sort of crimes that George Orwell claimed give ‘the greatest amount of pleasure to the British public,’110 an aesthetic departure from the ‘pitiful and sordid’ cases that are ‘only interesting from a sociological and perhaps a legal point of view.’111 Crime is raised (or lowered, depending on your point of view) to the level of ‘the spectacle,’ part of what Debord has called the ‘permanent opium war’112 that distracts viewers away from harsher social realities. Ironically, crime as an aesthetic event becomes, albeit inadvertently, ‘the acme of ideology,’113 buried within it ‘the essence of all ideological systems: the impoverishment, enslavement and negation of real life.’114 Just as with the political rhetoric of New Labour, it is ideological precisely because it tries so hard not to be ideological, a loaded encapsulation of ‘modern passivity.’115 The spectacle of murder is part of an entertaining but fundamentally

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superficial distraction, a misdirection in the spirit of what Mikhail Bakhtin called the carnivalesque. The reaction to violence in each episode of Midsomer Murders is a catharsis generated by ‘ritual spectacles’116 within which the television viewers glory in the composed, conceptually elaborate nature of criminal acts and are as such distracted from the sociological issues of criminality and victimhood. In the subsequent episodes of the Midsomer series, those with original screenplays not adapted from Caroline Graham’s novels, this tendency towards aesthetic carnival has evolved yet further. The performative, spectacular aspects of the acts of crime have grown increasingly bizarre. It has become one of the defining characteristics of the Midsomer franchise since 1997 that murder must be ever more extraordinary. Victims have been decapitated with a sword and shot with a bow and arrow (Death’s Shadow, 1999), slashed to death and injected with pure nicotine (Strangler’s Wood, 1999), bludgeoned with a cricket bat (Dead Man’s Eleven, 1999), gored by a pitchfork (Judgement Day, 2000), electrocuted in a wired truck (The Electric Vendetta, 2000) as well as on an exercise bike (A Tale of Two Hamlets, 2002), impaled on a plough (Tainted Fruit, 2001), torched inside a giant straw effigy (The Straw Woman, 2003), stabbed with a gardening fork in a deckchair (Orchis Fatalis, 2004), skewered to death in an Iron Maiden (Talking to the Dead, 2008), spiked in the neck with a corkscrew (Secrets and Spies, 2009) as well as (perhaps most extraordinarily), had their arms and legs staked to a lawn with croquet hooks while being bombarded with bottles of vintage wine fired from a giant imitation medieval catapult (Hidden Depths, 2004). Each carefully constructed ‘act’ places the viewer in a world outside usual moral considerations, with the horror of ritualized assault trivialized by regular assertions of ‘play,’ what Vivian C Sobchack has called the ‘balletic free fall’117 of aestheticization. It is a carnivalesque that celebrates the ‘temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order,’118 the depiction of murder becoming a fundamentally ‘creative act’119 and a means of social and psychological escape. As such, unlike the novels on which it was originally based, the Midsomer Murders television series strives to ensure its audience is under no illusions – everything they see is make-believe. There is no serious engagement with the sociology of crime, and it is the audience’s role simply to sit back in their armchairs and enjoy the fun: ‘the carnival spirit with its freedom, its utopian character oriented toward the future, was gradually transformed into a mere holiday mood.’120 And it is this ‘holiday mood’ that most characterizes Midsomer, providing a poignant (unwitting) correlation between the TV episodes and their socio-political context. For the ideology-lite

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rhetoric of New Labour, in which social disquiet is downplayed by an implied and idealized functionalist sense of society within which the grand political divergences of the past are seen as exactly that (of the past), is also the (lite) ideology of the Midsomer franchise. Viewers are distracted from moral and social concerns by the representation of crime as a kind of pantomimic per formance. There is no attempt to offer criminological interpretations of human behaviour in its social context. Instead, there is the promise of flight from the everyday, a detached glorification of murder in its apparently limitless variety of forms.

Chapter 8

Conclusion – Detecting the Nation

A recurring theme of this volume has been escape. Not the kind that Auden labelled ‘the fantasy of escape’ implicit in detective fiction, which is ‘the same, whether one explains the guilt in Christian, Freudian, or any other terms,’1 but something more specific than this. Each of the chapters has identified and illustrated the varying extent to which the most popular examples of later twentieth-century British detective television offer their viewers a diversion away from a troubling national present and towards an idealized form of society that exemplifies a ‘best’ of Englishness. In the adaptations that emerge from the 1980s especially, there is a fundamental nostalgia in this flight from the real. The Granada Sherlock Holmes series tantalizes viewers with its images of an apparently coherent (and authentic) nineteenth-century past within which criminals are shepherded towards incarceration by the definitive detective superhero. The BBC Miss Marple offers a mirage of earlier-twentieth-century community. And Inspector Morse transports its viewers into an idealized national culture largely devoid of the ugly stains and uncouthness of modernity, policed by a man of education and aesthetic sensitivity. In the adaptations of 1990s, the sense of a homesick longing for a glorified national past is in some respects displaced, but the implied vision of an idealized national essence is never too far from the surface of the narratives. A Touch of Frost offers morally regenerative hope for the future, Cadfael implies the triumph of modern values over historical stereotypes, and Midsomer Murders denies present-day anxieties in a carnivalesque, socially detached staging of an ultimately comforting national myth. Yet, in each instance the rhetoric of escape is never entirely encompassing. For the adapted texts, especially when viewed in light of their relationship with their originating sources, are revealed as multi-faceted, complex, and at times contradictory. This textual ‘polyphony’2 contributes to a partial, at times fractured, sense of national identity. Going beyond John Cawelti’s sense of the ‘conventional’ and the ‘inventional’3 impulses of popular fictions,

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these adaptations are discursively unstable texts: ‘although superficially conservative in its reliance upon resolution and the restoration of the status quo, implicit within the genre is a considerable degree of resistance.’4 The analysis of adaptation-as-process reveals the extent of the negotiation of identities within and between originating and adapted texts: ‘holes can and may appear: challenges, mobilised through the same media that have previously and successfully been used to contain them.’5 The TV adaptations in themselves are thus clear transgressions of what John Fiske has called the ‘traditional semiotic account of how television makes, or attempts to make, meanings that serve the dominant interests in society,’6 in that their narratives are too multi-faceted to serve as ‘the perfect fictional form for the sacramentality of the executive institutions of the state.’7 Therein the comparative analysis of adaptation results in an ever-greater awareness of the ‘progressive’ elements of the televisual texts in particular: ‘discourses of social change are articulated in relationship with [my italics] the meta-discourse of the dominant ideology.’8 Viewing these TV programmes through the lens of adaptation highlights an unresolved, perhaps irresolvable, ‘state of tension between forces of closure, which attempt to close down . . . potential of meanings . . . and forces of openness, which enable its variety of viewers to negotiate an appropriate variety of meanings.’9 Far from being conservative, traditional forms that absorb prevailing cultural messages and repeat them by rote (an accusation levelled (often unfairly) at detective fiction), adapted detective narratives offer critique, and renegotiate and reformulate these messages for their own purposes as ‘a prime site where the dominant have to recognize the insecurity of their power, and where they have to encourage cultural difference with all the threat to their own position that this implies.’10 These competing, intra-textual impulses see a prevailing sense of nostalgic retreat to a mythologized national past coexisting with a modern deconstruction of the very notion of a unified national identity. Thus, Sherlock Holmes reveals the illusory nature of the authentic Victorian world it strives to conjure up, and becomes increasingly self-conscious of its departure from the Holmesian canon; this sheds light on the tension between contemporary free-market political ideology and the nature of heritage television. The enticing nostalgic treacle of Miss Marple, particularly seductive during a period of national tension, is watered down through a contemporary (re)interrogation of notions of guilt and criminal motivation that problematizes the idea of national community. Morse becomes snared by a trap of its own making – collapsing history into

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heritage in a way that hinders the very social change that 1980s Conservative political ideology was founded on. And both Cadfael, which counteracts nostalgic Medievalism with contemporary chauvinism, and Midsomer, which can only sustain its own mythology of the past by denying any meaningful social connection between the rarefied world of the English village and the modernity of England, illustrate the contradictions and complexities of establishing a coherent, overarching sense of Englishness. Even A Touch of Frost, which tries hard to overcome the social nihilism of the originating R D Wingfield novels, still struggles to overcome the sense that criminality is endemic within the contemporaneous [English] social formation. In each case it is the detective who can best make sense of the contradictory national landscape, embodying the possibility of social coherence. Even DCI Barnaby, in Midsomer Murders, who is often mundane and prosaic, is shown to be the decoder of the intricacies of modern life, a version (albeit a toned down one) of the detective-hero archetype. Therein it is the role of the TV detective to transcend social division and national fragmentation, and to draw together the different strands of identity into a meaningful whole that ultimately paints a picture of the nation that viewers find attractive (as the popularity of the programmes illustrates), despite the underlying conflicts and tensions. This implies ‘an idea (or a hope, or a dream) about controlling crime . . . [that] both realise[s] and validate[s] a whole view of the world, one shared by the people who become the central audience.’11 The cohering powers of the lone detective are not infallible, however, as (for example) the later episodes of the Holmes and Marple series illustrate. And this movement away from the idea of the detective alone as the panacea for criminal immorality underpins the development of television crime fiction in the last decade of the twentieth century. Lynda La Plante’s Prime Suspect (1991)12 was particularly influential in this, fostering a new genre in which collective, scientific-crime investigation becomes the predominant means of enquiry: ‘Prime Suspect shook the foundations of the genre and changed telly detectives forever.’13 Across multiple featurelength episodes, viewers are confronted not with a ‘whodunnit?’ but rather a ‘did he do it?’ Instead of the identity of the perpetrator being plucked from a maelstrom of murder and misdirection, the whole point of Prime Suspect I (as with each successive instalment of this La Plante franchise) is to begin with a potentially guilty party, and then to witness the police forensic investigation as the detectives attempt to establish criminal guilt. The graphic face of crime (rape, torture, sadism, mutilation etc.), empathy for victims and their families in their trauma and suffering, and the

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painstaking-scientific evidence, mark out Prime Suspect as distinct from previous detective fictions on UK television. The eventual moment of revelation is not about the audience’s surprise as to the murder’s identity, but rather its abhorrence as to the nature of the crime, and (perhaps most crucially) moral incomprehension at the extent (and yet banality) of profound evil-doing. Prime Suspect was the first of what is now a long line of British crime dramas fascinated with the outlandish excesses of criminality, including Messiah (2001–),14 the Wire in the Blood (2002–)15 continual (adapted from novels by Val McDermid), as well as other LaPlante vehicles such as Trial and Retribution16 and, most recently, Above Suspicion.17 Within the framework of these shows the embedded and ongoing consideration of contemporary evil is more pronounced, and more extreme. Above Suspicion I, for example, includes a scene in which a serial killer is witnessed biting the tongue out of his live victim. Representations of such severe criminal behaviours have become TV commonplaces in these and other shows, such as Cracker (1993– ),18 Silent Witness (1996–),19 and Waking the Dead (2000–).20 Each betrays an interest in the most gratuitous elements of crime within the framework of forensic-scientific police investigation, largely playing down any more wide-ranging engagement (in any explicit sense) with questions as to the nature of English national identity. Series such as Prime Suspect and Wire in the Blood are thus part of a broader, universalizing (rather than specifically national) mythology of the infallibility of science and the cohering powers of forensic analysis and categorization. This mythology has resulted in ‘the CSI effect,’21 wherein the cultural influence of TV crime shows that privilege detailed forensic techniques, most notably the US CSI franchise, have fundamentally reshaped popular understandings of scientific processes and advances within the context of police procedure. This has, so the story goes, made it more difficult to persuade juries of criminal guilt, as they now apply unrealistic (TV-influenced) standards of proof to real-life cases. This fetishization of forensics transcends national boundaries, born out by the extraordinary popularity of forensic-heavy shows all over the world. In 2007, for instance, the two most watched TV shows on the planet were incarnations of the forensic-detective fiction format, CSI: Las Vegas (repeating its success from 2006), and CSI: Miami,22 and for the 2008–2009 season in the United States 9 out of the top 20 most watched shows were scientific-crime fictions, including two elements of the CSI franchise, as well as NCIS, Criminal Minds, The Mentalist, Without a Trace and Cold Case.23 All 3 CSI series (including CSI: New York) were also in the top 20 most

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watched programmes in Australia, France, Germany, Italy and Spain (with each series in the franchise licensed to more than 180 countries in total).24 This forensic fetishism marks a transition away from the sense of the detective as the leading ‘sense maker’ in an explicitly national context, as the character most able to encapsulate (if not indeed bolster) a nation and overcome the complexities of contemporary life in their uncovering of truth. There is instead a clear identification of the detective within the context of (and by implication, subject to) seemingly infallible science. It is science that uncovers, decodes and identifies. Detectives are inescapably reliant on its wisdom and power, implying the triumph of knowledge and teamwork rather than individual inspiration. Television shows such as Silent Witness and Waking the Dead are as such ensemble pieces, with detectives working alongside forensic scientists, archaeologists and psychologists, within investigations framed by scientific principles more than by the intuitive genius of a single detective figure. Viewers are encouraged to have faith not in the infallibility of the investigative mastermind so much as the sense-making perfection of forensic techniques – these are what give meaning to the world and turn ambivalence into coherence. Human identities, including national identities, become matters of genetic proof and DNA markers. The fact that this science-worship is often based on a perverted, wildly unrealistic conception of the capabilities and potential of forensic investigation merely illustrates the power and pervasiveness of this scientific discourse as a mythology. Yet, despite the international obsession with forensic investigation as a means of securing (more universal) meaning and truth, British crime/ detective television in a more traditional format25 has sustained its popularity into the twenty-first century. At the time of writing, Midsomer Murders is still a regular feature of ITV1 scheduling, as are the ongoing adaptations of Agatha Christie’s Poirot (1989–), and reworkings of Reginald Hill’s literary Dalziel and Pascoe novels (1996–) have been broadcast by the BBC as recently as 2008. In addition, Miss Marple has been re-presented in the ITV1 Marple series (2004–), and the Morse brand has been perpetuated (following the death of the lead actor John Thaw) by the sequel Lewis (2006–), which features many of the familiar locations as well as maintaining the high production values of its predecessor. Add to these further episodes of A Touch of Frost,26 and other recent series such as The Inspector Lynley Mysteries (2001–2007) and Rosemary and Thyme (2003–2007), and it is clear that the appetite in the United Kingdom for the more orthodox detective fiction format, minus the intricacies of complex forensic science, is still ravenous.

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Without the framing presence of science and scientific categorization these British series tend towards a nostalgic realization of the English nation, with frequent use of stylized images of setting and landscape (Lewis, Lynley,27 Rosemary and Thyme), as well as utilizing detection itself as an activity that furthers national identity. Therein detecting becomes a more democratic affair, illustrating a greater shift away from the reign of the lone detective genius as the decipherer of social meaning (and as such the prescriber of national values) towards a greater recognition of collaborative investigative process. The relationships between Lewis and his sidekick Hathaway, Lynley and Havers, and Boxer and Thyme do not merely recycle the archetypal format of detective/helper (Holmes/Watson, Poirot/ Hastings etc.), but re-imagine detection itself as a more symbiotic process in which individual inspiration has less of a part to play. Truth and meaning are revealed by shared endeavour, and as such a wider English identity is emboldened through group participation in a unifying process of crime solving in accordance with a mutual value system. Criminals stand much more clearly in opposition to a collective national identity, with the prevailing morality reinforced by more than a single outrider. In the 2007 adaptation of Agatha Christie’s At Bertram’s Hotel,28 for example, Christie’s hotel is remade; rather than serving as a front for an organized crime syndicate it has become part of an international conspiracy to provide a safe haven for fleeing Nazis. As a consequence, a national outrage is generated that crystallizes a coherent Englishness within the context of the ongoing investigation. The viewer comes to know what Englishness is far more clearly than the reader of the Christie novel ever did, or indeed the audience of the 1987 BBC adaptation, because the characters themselves all seem to know what national identity is. This reassertion of a more coherently defined nationhood is important within the process of what Richard Sparks has called ‘the infiltration, through the media, of notions of crime, law and order into everyday [British] life.’29 For not only do detective television programmes shape the way in which viewers experience crime as a cultural phenomenon, ‘ “crime scarers” such as Crimewatch UK do in a very real and particular sense employ the same syntax of depiction, narration and editing as crime fictions do,’30 but most TV viewers’ experience of crime comes through them. This makes the representation of criminality such a significant aspect of national-cultural life. TV detective fiction provides a popular, communal arena within which identities (including criminal identity) can be teased out and negotiated. Rather than confirming ‘the domestic isolation of the viewer[s]’31 and restricting them to ‘a position of impotence,’32

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TV detective drama serves both as a barometer and a shaper of social attitudes towards crime and Englishness, providing an opportunity for viewers to consider their own positions from within the safety of their own homes. Therein such television has a key role in ‘the private life of a nation-state,’33 providing the basis for the local, domestic and national imagining of community: ‘a community of address in which viewer and TV institution both look at a world that exists beyond [and yet around] them both.’34 Within this wider cultural engagement, the lack of a unified and unifying national identity across the range of popular later twentieth-century detective adaptations, the ongoing ‘oscillation . . . between the coherence of myth and the myth of coherence,’35 is particularly apposite in terms of how viewers imagine their own identities. For the discursive instability of these TV fictions refracts a wider cultural hesitancy as to the nature of Englishness, and a cultural ambivalence as to the relationship between English identity and ideas of criminality and criminal responsibility. And whilst this is an ambivalence that is also found in many of the originating source fictions, in the TV adaptations themselves, produced against the backdrop of specific and sustained cultural-political attempts to fashion a coherent Englishness in the later twentieth century within a multicultural, ideologically fraught culture, the clash between a nostalgic discourse of identity and a modern national self-fashioning appears symptomatic of a more deep-rooted identity crisis. Reading these television detective fictions as adaptations illuminates the process by which the English nation tries to define itself as socially meaningful and knowable. And it is this fundamental link between the detective format and our understandings of Englishness, part of the overarching social function of the genre, that is one of its most abiding fascinations.

Notes

Chapter 1 1

2 3 4

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Peter Reynolds, ‘Introduction’ to Reynolds (ed.), Novel Images: Literature in Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 5. Peter Reynolds, ‘Introduction,’ p. 5. Peter Reynolds, ‘Introduction,’ p. 5. Sue Parrill, Jane Austen on Film and Television: A Critical Study of the Adaptations (London: McFarland & Co., 2002), p. 6.5. Ginette Vincendeau, ‘Introduction’ to Ginette Vincendeau (ed.), Film/Literature/Heritage: A Sight and Sound Reader (London: BFI, 2001), p. xvii. Ginette Vincendeau, ‘Introduction,’ p. xix. This association between British national culture and ‘heritage’ is not intended to deny the heritage dimensions of other national cultures at this time, and the relationship between heritage and politics: ‘French heritage films rose to prominence also in the 1980s, during the first phase of Mitterand’s socialist government’; Ginette Vincendeau, ‘Introduction,’ p. xix. However, there is (it is argued) a particular dimension to the British debate about heritage during the later twentieth century. Andrew Higson, ‘Re-presenting the national past: nostalgia and pastiche in the heritage film’ in Lester D Friedman (ed.), Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism, 2nd edition (London: Wallflower, 2006), p. 95. The programme was about the last days of the British Raj in India, based on the Raj Quartet of novels by Paul Scott (1966–1974). Andrew Higson, ‘Re-presenting the national past: nostalgia and pastiche in the heritage film,’ p. 91. Sue Parrill, Jane Austen on Film and Television, p. 6. Andrew Higson, ‘Re-presenting the national past: nostalgia and pastiche in the heritage film,’ p. 93. In The Politics of the Police, 3rd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), Robert Reiner attempts a taxonomy of fictional detective ‘types.’ All of the adapted detective fictions mentioned in this chapter broadly relate to one of two of the categories Reiner outlines: ‘Classic sleuth’ sees a hero who is a ‘grey-celled wizard (usually amateur), with unidentified (initially) crimes, villains with personal motives who are ‘outwardly respectable,’ victims who are ‘exceptionally murderable,’ settings that are ‘respectable, upper-class, often rural,’ police who are ‘honest plods,’ and with the plot structure of ‘order – crime – red

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herrings – deduction – order restored.’ The ‘police procedural,’ on the other hand, has ‘routine cops’ using forensic techniques, ‘murder for gain,’ villains who are ‘not sympathetic,’ victims as ‘ordinary, respectable folk . . . weak, guileless innocents,’ settings that are more urban, police as ‘dedicated professionals,’ and a plot structure of ‘order – crime(s) – one damn thing after another – use of police procedures – order restored’ (p. 150). ‘Reported crime peaked in 1992 when 109.4 indictable offences were recorded per thousand population. A rising trend in reported crime began in 1954, when the figure was 9.7.’ See A Century of Change: Trends in UK Statistics Since 1900, House of Commons Research Paper 99/111, 21 December 1999 (p. 14), www.parliament. uk/commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99–111.pdf. Accessed 18/12/2009. Michelle Mattson, ‘Tatort: The generation of public identity in a German crime series,’ New German Critique, Number 87, Special Issue on German Media Studies (Autumn, 1999), pp. 161–81 (p. 162). Roger Silverstone, Television and Everyday Life (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 21. Paul C Adams, ‘Television as gathering place,’ Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Volume 82, Number 1 (March 1992), pp. 117–35 (p. 119). ‘Popularity’ is defined here as an amalgam of viewing figures and wider cultural resonance. In the case of the Granada Sherlock Holmes (which lasted for a decade and even resulted in its own ‘tour’ of the set in Manchester), Morse (again longstanding and generating its own tourist industry), Cadfael (spin-off products), and Midsomer (a wider cultural phenomenon), this wider cultural resonance is particularly apparent. The fashion for the BBC Miss Marple adaptations to take pride of place in the Christmas broadcasting schedule is also an important indicator of popular success, as is the longevity of A Touch of Frost (1992–2010). This wider cultural impact was inextricably linked toimpressive viewing figures, especially Inspector Morse (9th most watched series in Britain in 1989, 1990, 5th in 1993, 10th in 1995, 7th in 2000), and A Touch of Frost (5th most watched in 1996, 3rd in 1997, 4th in 1999 and 2001, 10th in 2003, 8th in 2004, 9th in 2005). All figures from BARB (Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board). See www.barb. co.uk/index/index. Paul C Adams, ‘Television as gathering place,’ (p. 117). Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), p. 17. Richard Sparks, Television and the Drama of Crime: Moral Tales and the Place of Crime in Public Life (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1992), p. 47. The catch-all label given to the political creed articulated by UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, characterized by free-market economics, moral conservatism, strict law and order policies, and a prominent sense of the distinct superiority of the British nation in relation to the other nations of the world. Steven Fielding, The Labour Party: Continuity and Change in the Making of ‘New’ Labour (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), p. 5. This was characterized by a Social Democratic agenda that accepted market economics and was far less explicit/ideological in its support for the working class than the British Labour Party previously had been.

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Notes

Mike Brake and Chris Hale, ‘Law and order,’ (pp. 137–54) in Phillip Brown and Richard Sparks, Beyond Thatcherism: Social Policy, Politics and Society (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1989), p. 147. Philip Lynch, The Politics of Nationhood: Sovereignty, Britishness and Conservative Politics (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), p. 54. Stuart Hall, ‘The great moving right show’ in Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques (eds), The Politics of Thatcherism (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1983), p. 29. Stuart Hall, ‘The great moving right show,’ p. 29. Stuart Hall, ‘The great moving right show,’ p. 37. Andrew Gamble, ‘Thatcherism and Conservative politics’ in Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques (eds), The Politics of Thatcherism (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1983), p. 113. Philip Lynch, The Politics of Nationhood, p. 128. Rani Dhavan Shankardass, ‘Ten years of Thatcherism in historical perspective: conservatism in Britain,’ Economic and Political Weekly, Volume 24, Number 51/52 (23–30 December 1989), pp. 2849–58 (p. 2855). Andrew Gamble, ‘Privatization, Thatcherism, and the British state,’ Journal of Law and Society, Volume 16, Number 1 (Spring, 1988), pp. 1–20 (p. 3). Alan Norrie and Sammy Adelman, ‘ “Consensual authoritarianism” and criminal justice in Thatcher’s Britain,’ Journal of Law and Society, Volume 16, Number 1 (Spring, 1988), pp. 112–28 (p. 113). Ralf Dahrendorf, ‘Changing social values under Mrs Thatcher’ in Robert Skidelsky (ed.), Thatcherism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1988), p. 195. Stephen Driver and Luke Martell, New Labour: Politics After Thatcherism (Oxford: Polity Press, 2002), p. 158. Stephen Driver and Luke Martell, New Labour, p. 56. Stephen Driver and Luke Martell, New Labour, p. 118. Louis A Montrose, ‘Professing the Renaissance: the poetics and politics of culture’ in H Aram Veeser (ed.), The New Historicism (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 16. Tony Bennett, ‘Texts, readers, reading formations,’ in Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh (eds), Modern Literary Theory: A Reader, 2nd edition (London: Edward Arnold, 1992), p. 216. Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in this Class? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 164. What Hans Robert Jauss famously called the ‘horizon of expectations’; see (for example) Jauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception, translated by Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). Hans Robert Jauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception, p. 23. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings (London: Random House, 1988), p. 197. Rob Pope, Textual Intervention: Critical and Creative Strategies for Literary Studies (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 22. Rob Pope, Textual Intervention, p. 21. Robert C Holub, Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 58.

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For just a few examples, see: Gunhild Agger and Jens F Jensen (eds), The Aesthetics of Television (Aalborg: Aalborg University press, 2002); Nikos Metallinos, Television Aesthetics: Perceptual, Cognitive and Compositional Bases (London: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996); Robert Watson, Film and Television in Eductaion: An Aesthetic Approach to the Moving Image (London: Routledge, 1990); and Anthony Barker, Television, Aesthetics and Reality (Newcasle-Upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006). George Bluestone, Novels into Film: The Metamorphosis of Fiction into Cinema (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1966), p. viii. George Bluestone, Novels into Film, p. viii. George Bluestone, Novels into Film, p. viii. George Bluestone, Novels into Film, p. 18. George Bluestone, Novels into Film, p. 64. Seymour Chatman, ‘What novels can do that films can’t (and vice versa)’ in Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen and Leo Braudy (eds), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 4th edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 407. Seymour Chatman, ‘What novels can do that films can’t (and vice versa),’ p. 407. Seymour Chatman, ‘What novels can do that films can’t (and vice versa),’ p. 419. Thomas Leitch, ‘Adaptation studies at a crossroads,’ Adaptation, Volume 1, Number 1, pp. 63–77 (p. 69). Dudley Andrew, ‘Adaptation’ in Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen and Leo Braudy (eds), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 4th edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 423. Dudley Andrew, ‘Adaptation,’ p. 423. Peter Reynolds, ‘Introduction,’ p. 7. Brian McFarlane, Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), p. 21. Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (Oxford: Routledge, 2006), p. 18. Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, p. 18. See Genette’s Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (1982), translated by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky, foreword by Gerald Prince (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, p. 22. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), p. 13. Thomas Leitch, ‘Adaptation studies at a crossroads,’ (p. 68). Robert Giddings, Keith Selby and Chris Wensley, Screening the Novel: The Theory and Practice of Literary Dramatization (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), p. 50. Sarah Cardwell, Adaptation Revisited: Television and the Classic Novel (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 25. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, p. 13. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, p. 21. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, p. 94. Brian McFarlane, Novel to Film, p. 22.

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James M Welsh and Peter Lev, ‘Introduction’ to Welsh and Lev (eds), The Literature/Film Reader: Issues of Adaptation (London: Scarecrow, 2007), p. 48. Sarah Cardwell, Adaptation Revisited: Television and the Classic Novel (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 205. Sarah Cardwell, Adaptation Revisited, p. 71. Sarah Cardwell, Adaptation Revisited, p. 205. Sarah Cardwell, Adaptation Revisited, p. 10. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, p. 108. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, p. 144. James Naremore (ed.) [with an introduction], ‘Introduction,’ Film Adaptation (London: Athlone, 2000), p. 9. Robert Giddings and Erica Sheen (eds), ‘Introducion’ to The Classic Novel: From Page to Screen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 11. Alan McKee, ‘What is television for?’ in Mark Jancovich and James Lyons (eds), Quality Popular Television: Cult TV, the Industry and Fans (London: BFI, 2004), p. 182. Alan McKee, ‘What is television for?’ p. 182. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (eds), ‘Introduction’ to Adaptations: From Text to Screen, Screen to Text (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 2. Thomas Leitch, ‘Adaptation studies at a crossroads,’ (p. 63). Thomas Leitch, Film Adaptation and its Discontents: From ‘Gone With the Wind’ to ‘The Passion of the Christ’ (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 2007), p. 6. Although the term ‘British’ is often used in relation to UK governmental policies and agendas, in reality it is the particular representation of a pervasive ‘English’ identity that is primarily under discussion in this study. The often interchangeable nature of the two terms in cultural and political discourse is, however, unarguable.

Chapter 2 1

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Alan Barnes, author of Sherlock Holmes on Screen, quoted in The Perfect TV Detective (BBC Scotland, 2008). Julian Symons, Portrait of an Artist: Conan Doyle (London: Whizzard Press, 1979), p. 15. In Sherlock Holmes: Screen and Sound Guide (London: Scarecrow Press, 1994) Gordon E Kelley claims that ‘over 360 active Sherlock Holmes societies worldwide meet regularly to read, discuss and perform playlets centred around these famous stories and the immortal characters created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’ (p. xiii). This includes works such as William S Baring-Gould’s Sherlock Holmes, A Biography of the World’s First Consulting Detective (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962), Michael Harrison’s The World of Sherlock Holmes (NEL, 1975) and most recently Nick Rennison’s Sherlock Holmes: The Unauthorized Biography (Atlantic, 2006). In Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree [1982], Gérard Genette acknowledges the original use of the term by Philippe Lejeune.

Notes 6

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Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree [1982], translated by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky, foreword by Gerald Prince (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), p. 1. Gérard Genette, Palimpsests, p. 400. Gérard Genette, Palimpsests, p. 399. When Irving said he wanted to change elements of the play the project was put on hold. It wasn’t until later, when the American actor William Gillette offered to adapt the play, that the project moved forward. This required an initial agreement to Conan Doyle’s condition that there was to be no ‘love interest’ in the play. When Gillette later telegraphed Conan Doyle asking if he could marry Holmes off in the play, the reply made it clear that there were no longer any restrictions: ‘You can marry him, murder him, or do anything you like to him.’ See (for example) Daniel Stashower, Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle, (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1999), p. 214. Stashower also notes how ‘in truth, Gillette’s Sherlock Holmes had little more than a nodding acquaintance with Conan Doyle’s creation’ (p. 214). These include (but are by no means limited to) Sherlock Holmes Baffled (1900), Held for Ransom (1905), and Un Rivale de Sherlock Holmes (1908), the series of Danish films starring Viggo Larsen, the German series of seven The Hound of the Baskervilles adaptations, the French series starring Georges Treville, as well as British versions of A Study in Scarlet (1914) and The Valley of Fear (1916). A Study in Sherlock (BBC Bristol, 2005). David Stuart Davies, Starring Sherlock Holmes, with a foreword by Ian Richardson (London: Titan Books, 2007), p. 15. The latter starring Eille Norwood. ‘It is not possible to determine the exact number of silent motion pictures, but well over 125 are known’; Gordon E Kelley, Sherlock Holmes: Screen and Sound Guide, p. 1. David Stuart Davies, Starring Sherlock Holmes, p. 34. Chris Steinbrunner and Norman Michaels, The Films of Sherlock Holmes (London: Citadel, 1991), p. 7. These films are discussed at length in Amanda J Field, England’s Secret Weapon: The Wartime Films of Sherlock Holmes (London: Middlesex University Press, 2009). Of all the stories, it is The Hound of the Baskervilles that is most commonly adapted, even within the context of a series of adaptations (such as the Rathbone) where few other original stories are used. This may well account for Owen Dudley Edwards’s assertion that Dartmoor has become central to Holmesian mythology: ‘probably no location is more famous in the Holmes saga apart from Baker Street itself, and it receives far more detailed description than Baker Street ever gets.’ (Owen Dudley Edwards, The Quest for Sherlock Holmes: A Biographical Study of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), p. 83.) Ian Richardson, ‘Foreword’ to David Stuart Davies, Starring Sherlock Holmes, p. 7. It should be acknowledged that one element of this overlooking of the Conan Doyle stories was related to issues of copyright, and the costs filmmakers were faced with in paying for the rights to adapt the original material.

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David Stuart Davies, Starring Sherlock Holmes, p. 75. Quoted in David Stuart Davies, Starring Sherlock Holmes, p. 86. Despite the fact that subsequent critics have noted that ‘in the aspect of fidelity’ this series ‘certainly scored high’ (Peter Haining, The Television Sherlock Holmes (London: Virgin, 1994), p. 64), Wilmer’s dissatisfaction with production values led him to give up on the role in 1965 (after 13 episodes). Tony Earnshaw, An Actor and a Rare One: Peter Cushing as Sherlock Holmes (London: Scarecrow Press, 2001), p. 1. Christopher Frayling, Nightmare: Birth of Horror (London: BBC Books, 1996), p. 13. Julian Symons, Portrait of an Artist: Conan Doyle (London: Whizzard Press, 1979), p. 18. See, for just a few examples of the prevalence of this implicitly religious term: Carl William Thiel, The Basic 100: The 100 Most Important Critical Studies and Association Items to the Sherlock Holmes Canon as Suggested by John Bennett Shaw: An Annotated Collector’s Guide (Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 1996); E W McGinley, An Illustrated Monograph on the Use of Firearms in the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Being a Treatise on the Development of Firearms and Their Application in the Canon (London: Mycroft Holmes Society, 1994); Philip Weller, Sherlock Holmes and Airguns: An Investigation of the Use of Air-guns in the Holmesian Canon (London: Sherlock Publications, 1995). Matthew E Bunson, Encyclopedia Sherlockiana: An A-to-Z Guide to the World of the Great Detective (New York: Macmillan, 1994), p. xv. Scott Allen Nollen, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at the Cinema: A Critical Study of the Film Adaptations (London: McFarland & Co., 1996), p. 3. This was illustrated in 2007 when the Culture Secretary of the British government, Tessa Jowell, claimed that Conan Doyle ‘does not occupy a significant enough position in the nation’s consciousness.’ See ‘Rankin accuses Jowell of “literary snobbery” over refusal to list Conan Doyle’s house,’ The Scotsman, 7 February 2007: www.thescotsman.scotsman.com/ianrankinandrebus/Rankin-accuses-Jowell-of-literary.3344432.jp. Accessed 02/08/2009. Jonathan Sacks, The Home We Build Together: Recreating Society (London: Continuum, 2007), p. 69. This argument was also rehearsed in ‘Wanted: a national culture,’ The Times, 20 October 2007. See www.timesonline.co. uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article2697772.ece. Accessed 07/07/2009. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Verso, 1994), p. 380. David Johnson (ed.), The Popular and the Canonical: Debating Twentieth-Century Literature 1940–2000 (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 201. Jan Gorak, The Making of the Modern Canon: Genesis and Crisis of a Literary Idea (London: Athlone, 1991), p. 221. Charles Altieri, ‘An idea and ideal of a literary canon’ in Robert von Hallberg (ed.), Canons (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 41. Charles Altieri, ‘An idea and ideal of a literary canon,’ p. 43. Lee Morrissey, ‘Introduction: “The canon brawl: arguments over the canon” ’ in Morrissey (ed.), Debating the Canon; A Reader from Addison to Nafisi (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 12.

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David S Payne, Myth and Modern Man in Sherlock Holmes: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Use of Nostalgia (Bloomington, IN: Gaslight Publications, 1992), p. 3. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (Basingstoke: Papermac, 1996), p. 1. Gordon E Kelley, Sherlock Holmes: Screen and Sound Guide, p. xiv. Elizabeth A Trembley, ‘Holmes is where the heart is: the achievement of Granada television’s Sherlock Holmes films,’ in William Reynolds and Elizabeth A Trembley (eds), It’s a Print! Detective Fiction from Page to Screen (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1994), p. 11. Robert Stam, ‘Introduction: the theory and practice of adaptation,’ in Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (eds), Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p. 3. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon, p. 4. Cox’s detailed reminiscences on this process are found in A Study in Celluloid: A Producer’s Account of Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes (Cambridge: Rupert Books, 1999). The volume consists of a series of articles that appeared in the Gazette and later in the Sherlock Holmes Detective Magazine between 1996 and 1999. David Stuart Davies goes as far as to claim that ‘without him [Cox] there would have been no Granada Sherlock Holmes series.’ (See David Stuart Davies, Bending the Willow: Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes (Chester: Calabash, 1996), p. 21.) David Stuart Davies, Starring Sherlock Holmes, p. 122. Michael Cox, A Study in Celluloid: A Producer’s Account of Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes (Cambridge: Rupert Books, 1999), p. 10. Later published as Michael Cox, The Baker Street File: a Guide to the Appearance and Habits of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, specially prepared for the Granada Television Series (Chester: Calabash Press, 1997). Some of the technical, ‘filmic’ aspects of this process are discussed in detail in Elizabeth A Trembley, ‘Holmes is where the heart is: the achievement of Granada television’s Sherlock Holmes films.’ Scott Allen Nollen, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at the Cinema, p. 229. David Burke (the first Granada Watson), quoted in The Perfect TV Detective (BBC Scotland, 2008). Brett followed in the footsteps of Eille Norwood and Peter Cushing in carrying around his Holmes volume while filming. Edward Hardwicke, who followed Burke as Watson, has noted how Brett ‘would drag it back’ to the original text at every point (A Study in Sherlock (BBC Bristol, 2005)). David Stuart Davies, Bending the Willow, p. 46. Michael Cox, A Study in Celluloid, p. 58. First broadcast on 24 April 1984. Michael Cox, A Study in Celluloid, p. 42. A detailed examination of the way in which the series utilized original Paget images can be found in Peter Haining’s The Television Sherlock Holmes. See pp. 103–6, for example. Dick Riley and Pam McAllister, The Bedside, Bathtub and Armchair Companion to Sherlock Holmes (New York: Continuum, 1999), p. 1. See Theodor W Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, translated by Tnut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (London: Routledge 1973), p. 3.

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Sarah Cardwell, Adaptation Revisited: Television and the Classic Novel (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 25. Many episodes in the first tranche (including The Dancing Men, The Solitary Cyclist, The Crooked Man, The Speckled Band (Cox called this ‘one of the most faithful of all the adaptations we made,’ (A Study in Celluloid, p. 34)), The Blue Carbuncle, The Copper Beeches, The Norwood Builder, The Resident Patient, and The Red-Headed League) stay closely within the parameters of the Conan Doyle stories. The Final Problem was reworked, but most of the changes relate to the need to dovetail the narrative with other stories that did not precede it when Conan Doyle first wrote them. Scott Allen Nollen, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at the Cinema, p. 234. First broadcast on 8 May 1984. First broadcast on 1 September 1985. Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Naval Treaty’ in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (London: Penguin, 1963), p. 212. Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Greek Interpreter’ in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (London: Penguin, 1963), p. 198. Andrew Higson, ‘Re-presenting the national past: nostalgia and pastiche in the heritage film,’ p. 93. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 75. David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 248. The US 75-year copyright protection for works produced after 1906 meant that only half of the canon was available to Granada initially. The Valley of Fear and the later short stories were owned by Lorindy pictures, who had bought the rights in the United States. By 1988, however, Granada had struck a deal concerning US copyright which freed up much more of the canon for prospective adaptation. Julian Symons, Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), p. 19. Julian Symons, Bloody Murder, p. 19. George N Dove, The Reader and the Detective Story (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997), p. 18. George N Dove, The Reader and the Detective Story, p. 18. Gordon E Kelley, Sherlock Holmes: Screen and Sound Guide, p. xiv. Andrew Higson, ‘Re-presenting the national past: nostalgia and pastiche in the heritage film,’ p. 91. Robert Reiner, The Politics of the Police, 3rd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. ix. These urban disturbances repeated a similar pattern of unrest in 1981, during which time police conduct was also widely criticized. The high point of this public disquiet about how the police operated came with ‘a series of scandals revealing serious malpractice’ (Reiner, p. 66) in the later 1980s and early 1990s which resulted in the eventual release of two groups of individuals previously convicted of terrorist atrocities, popularly known as the ‘Guildford Four’ and ‘Birmingham Six.’

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Martin Jacques, ‘Thatcherism – breaking out the impasse’ in Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques (eds), The Politics of Thatcherism (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1983), p. 53. Margaret Thatcher, ‘TV Interview for London Weekend Television Weekend World,’ 16 January 1983. See www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/display document.asp? docid=105087 (Margaret Thatcher Foundation). Accessed 10/09/2009. Margaret Thatcher, ‘Letter to The Times,’ 14 July 1977. See www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=103417 (Margaret Thatcher Foundation). Accessed 10/09/2009. Dick Riley and Pam McAllister, The Bedside, Bathtub and Armchair Companion to Sherlock Holmes, p. 7. Michael Hardwick, The Complete Guide to Sherlock Holmes (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1986), p. 8. David S Payne, Myth and Modern Man in Sherlock Holmes, p. 21. Andrew Higson, ‘Re-presenting the national past: nostalgia and pastiche in the heritage film,’ p. 93. Margaret Thatcher, 16 July 1979, ‘Speech to the Conservative Political Centre summer school (“The Renewal of Britain”).’ See www.margaretthatcher.org/ speeches/ displaydocument.asp?docid=104107 (Margaret Thatcher Foundation). Accessed 10/09/2009. Scott Allen Nollen, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at the Cinema, p. 224. Raphael Samuel, ‘Mrs Thatcher’s return to Victorian values’ in T C Smout (ed.), Victorian Values: A Joint Symposium of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the British Academy December 1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 9. Samuel argues (p. 11) that the use of the ‘Victorian’ trope began when Thatcher ‘stumbled on the phrase’ during a TV interview with Weekend World, on 16 January 1983. Raphael Samuel, ‘Mrs Thatcher’s return to Victorian values,’ p. 18. Raphael Samuel, ‘Mrs Thatcher’s return to Victorian values,’ p. 18. The episodes were The Empty House, The Priory School, The Second Stain, The Musgrave Ritual, The Abbey Grange, The Man With the Twisted Lip, The Six Napoleons, The Devil’s Foot, Silver Blaze, Wisteria Lodge and The Bruce-Partington Plans. Peter Haining, The Television Sherlock Holmes, p. 8. David Stuart Davies, Bending the Willow, p. 77. First broadcast on 9 July 1986. First broadcast on 30 July 1986. First broadcast on 23 July 1986. First broadcast on 20 August 1986. First broadcast on 13 August 1986. Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Priory School’ in The Return of Sherlock Holmes (London: Penguin, 1981), p. 136. First broadcast on 16 July 1986. Barbara Hudson, ‘Criminal justice,’ in Eugene McLaughlin and John Muncie (eds), The Sage Dictionary of Criminology, 2nd edition (London: Sage, 2006), p. 93.

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Barbara Hudson, ‘Natural justice,’ in Eugene McLaughlin and John Muncie (eds), The Sage Dictionary of Criminology, 2nd edition (London: Sage, 2006), p. 258. First broadcast on 6 August 1986. First broadcast on 29 December 1987. Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Man With the Twisted Lip’ in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (London: Penguin, 1981), p. 143. Four episodes of Morse had been broadcast by the time The Sign of Four was screened (29 December 1987), including The Wolvercote Tongue only a few days earlier (25 December 1987). First broadcast on 6 April 1988. David Stuart Davies, Starring Sherlock Holmes, p. 139. Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot’ in His Last Bow (London: John Murray, 1966), p. 187. Martin A Kayman, From Bow Street to Baker Street: Mystery, Detective and Narrative (London: Macmillan, 1992), p. 224. First broadcast on 31 August 1988. First broadcast on 13 April 1988. First broadcast on 20 April 1988. This episode was notable for the way in which, in an echo of the changes made in The Greek Interpreter, the villain Murillo is shot on a train, creating the greater sense of punishment and moral retribution than the off-stage report of him and his secretary being ‘murdered in their rooms at the Hotel Escurial at Madrid’ in the Conan Doyle story. England, once again, is reinstated as the arena for justice. See ‘The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge,’ in His Last Bow (London: John Murray, 1966), p. 39. First broadcast on 27 April 1988. David Stuart Davies, Starring Sherlock Holmes, p. 145. Michael Cox, A Study in Celluloid, p. 144. Mike Brake and Chris Hale, ‘Law and order’ in Phillip Brown and Richard Sparks, Beyond Thatcherism: Social Policy, Politics and Society (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1989) claim that ‘between 1980 and 1986 there was a 45% increase in the number of notifiable offences reported to the police’ (p. 147). Deborah Jermyn, Crime Watching: Investigating Real Crime TV (London: I B Tauris, 2007), p. 178. For the full text of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (1984), see the UK Statute Law Database: www.statutelaw.gov.uk/content.aspx?activeTextDocId= 1871554. Accessed 06/08/2009. Sean McCann, Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism (London: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 6. Sandra Walklate, ‘Perspectives in criminological theory’ in Yvonne Jewkes and Gayle Letherby (eds), Criminology: A Reader (London: Sage, 2002), p. 24. Dennis Kavanagh, Thatcherism and British Politics: The End of Consensus? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990 edn [1987]), p. 298. Sean McCann, Gumshoe America, p. 7. Stuart Hall, ‘The great moving right show’ in Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques (eds), The Politics of Thatcherism (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1983), p. 37.

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Edgar Wilson, A Very British Miracle: The Failure of Thatcherism (London: Pluto, 1992), p. 81. John Corner, Sylvia Harvey and Karen Lury, ‘Culture, quality and choice: the de-regulation of TV 1989–91’ in Stuart Hood (ed.), Behind the Screens: The Structure of British Television in the Nineties (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1994), p. 5. For full details of the legislation see the Broadcasting Act (1990), at www.opsi.gov. uk/acts/acts1990/Ukpga_19900042_en_1. Accessed 17/07/2009. Michelle Hilmes (ed.), The Television History Book (London: BFI, 2003), p. 50. Stephen Fry, ‘The BBC and the future of public service broadcasting,’ 7 May 2008. See www.bbc.co.uk/thefuture/transcript_fry2.shtml. Accessed 17/07/2009. The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax was first broadcast on 21 February 1991. The series also included Thor Bridge (first broadcast on 28 February 1991), Shoscombe Old Place (7 March 1991), The Boscombe Valley Mystery (14 March 1991), The Illustrious Client (21 March 1991) and The Creeping Man (28 March 1991). Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax’ in His Last Bow (London: John Murray, 1966), p. 138. Stephen Knight, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1980), p. 87. Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax’ in His Last Bow (London: John Murray, 1966), p. 158. First broadcast on 2 January 1992. Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘Charles Augustus Milverton’ in The Return of Sherlock Holmes (London: Penguin, 1981), p. 168. Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘Charles Augustus Milverton’ p. 169. Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘Charles Augustus Milverton’ p. 170. Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘Charles Augustus Milverton’ p. 173. In the Conan Doyle story, the violence of the unidentified female attacker is less frenzied. She: ‘emptied barrel after barrel into Milverton’s body’ and ‘ground her heel into his upturned face’ before fleeing. See Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘Charles Augustus Milverton’ in The Return of Sherlock Holmes (London: Penguin, 1981), p. 177. Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘Charles Augustus Milverton’ in The Return of Sherlock Holmes (London: Penguin, 1981), p. 179. First broadcast on 27 January 1993. Quoted in David Stuart Davies, Starring Sherlock Holmes, p. 164. Michael Cox, A Study in Celluloid, p. 193. Quoted in David Stuart Davies, Bending the Willow, p. 147. Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire’ in The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), p. 113. Gill Plain, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), p. 3. First broadcast on 3 February 1993. Quoted in Michael Cox, A Study in Celluloid, p. 197. David Stuart Davies, Starring Sherlock Holmes, p. 171. First broadcast on 7 March 1994. Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of the Three Gables’ in The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), p. 91.

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Julian Symons, Bloody Murder, p. 18. First broadcast on 14 March 1994. First broadcast on 21 March 1994. In The Man Who Became Sherlock Holmes: The Tortured Mind of Jeremy Brett (London: Virgin, 1997), Terry Manners details just how much Brett’s health impacted upon the filming of the later series: ‘the lithium and steroids were having a devastating effect. He was getting so big that Esther Dean had to prise him out of his old frock-coat – but he still refused to wear a new one. Different trousers had to be used each day as his weight fluctuated . . . The only thing that seemed to fit him was Holmes’s Trilby hat’ (p. 205). A biopic of C S Lewis, starring Anthony Hopkins in the lead role. First broadcast on 28 March 1994. Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of the Red Circle’ in His Last Bow (London: John Murray, 1966), p. 86. First broadcast on 4 April 1994. First broadcast on 11 April 1994. Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of the Cardboard Box’ in His Last Bow (London: John Murray, 1966), p. 65. Philip Lynch, The Politics of Nationhood: Sovereignty, Britishness and Conservative Politics (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), p. 129.

Chapter 3 1

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Cosima Marriner, ‘Chorion solves the mystery of how to sell old detective stories,’ The Guardian, Wednesday, 21 September 2005. See www.guardian.co.uk/ media/2005/sep/21/pressandpublishing.citynews. Accessed 14/11/2009. Cosima Marriner, ‘Chorion solves the mystery of how to sell old detective stories.’ Earl F Bargainnier, The Gentle Art of Murder: The Detective Fiction of Agatha Christie (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Press, 1980), p. 199. See ‘About us’ at www.chorion.co.uk. Accessed 14/11/2009. Many of the episodes have ‘updated’ the plot themes, which has created some controversy for the series. Regarding the adaptation of The Body in the Library, for instance, ‘there is a sexual twist that was absent from the book. The rewrite was made, the producers said, because the original plot would not resonate with a modern audience.’ See Matt Wells, ‘The case of Miss Marple’s sepia-tinted photo,’ Guardian.co.uk, 22 October 2004. See www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2004/ oct/22/media.books. Accessed 30/11/2009. As quoted in Tom Geoghegan, ‘The mystery of Agatha Christie,’ BBC Online, 13 September 2005. See www.news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4238798.stm. Accessed 14/11/2009. As quoted in Tom Geoghegan, ‘The mystery of Agatha Christie.’ Earl F Bargainnier, The Gentle Art of Murder, p. 7. Reported in Robert Barnard, A Talent to Deceive: An Appreciation of Agatha Christie (London: Fontana/Collins, 1980), p. 4.

Notes 10

Julian Symons, Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), p. 130. Throughout this chapter ‘conservative’ will be used generically, referring to a conventional, traditional and conformist mindset, whereas the hypostasized version of the term (‘Conservative’) will be used as a shorthand referring specifically to the British political party of the same name, led by Margaret Thatcher from 1975–1990. See Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991); Susan Rowland, From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001); Gill Plain, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001); and Merja Makinen, Agatha Christie: Investigating Femininity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Other more ‘radical’ interpretations of Christie include: Marion Shaw and Sabine Vanacker, Reflecting on Miss Marple (London: Routledge, 1991); Linden Peach, Masquerade, Crime and Fiction: Criminal Deceptions (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006; and, Christiana Gregoriou, Deviance in Contemporary Crime Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007). Agatha Christie, An Autobiography (London: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 449. Dennis Sanders and Len Lovallo, The Agatha Christie Companion: the Complete Guide to Agatha Christie’s Life and Work (New York: Berkeley, 1989), p. 68. Dennis Sanders and Len Lovallo, The Agatha Christie Companion, p. 233. Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Association (Gemeinschaft und gesellschaft), translated by Charles P Loomis (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 42. Tana Wollen, ‘Over our shoulders: nostalgic screen fictions for the 1980s’ in John Corner and Sylvia Harvey (eds), Enterprise and Heritage: Crosscurrents of National Culture (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 182. Linden Peach, Masquerade, Crime and Fiction: Criminal Deceptions, p. 3. Sleeping Murder was published last, originally conceived as the concluding Marple novel, but it was written around 1940 and should be viewed as such. Hugh Seton-Watson, Nations and States: An Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of Nationalism (London: Methuen, 1977), p. 1. BBC Radio 4 produced another series of adaptations of all the Miss Marple novels during the period 1993–2001, starring June Whitfield as Miss Marple. These fall outside the scope of this chapter. Thomas H Pauly, ‘The criminal as culture,’ American Literary History, Volume 9, Number 4 (Winter, 1997), pp. 776–85 (p. 776). Agatha Christie, A Murder is Announced [1950] in Miss Marple Omnibus: Volume One (London: HarperCollins, 1997), p. 351. Karim Murji, ‘Scapegoating’ in Eugene McLaughlin and John Muncie (eds), The Sage Dictionary of Criminology, 2nd edition (London: Sage, 2007), p. 370. Karim Murji, ‘Scapegoating,’ p. 370. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), p. 7. .

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Jeffrey S Victor, ‘Moral panics and the social construction of deviant behaviour,’ Sociological Perspectives, Volume 41, Number 3 (1998), pp. 541–65 (p. 541). Stephen Knight, Crime Fiction 1800–2000: Detection, Death, Diversity (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), p. 91. Manfred Pfister and Ralf Hertel, Performing National Identity: Anglo-Italian Cultural Transactions (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), p. 9. Raymond Chandler, ‘The simple art of murder’ (1944) in Howard Haycraft (ed.), The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays [1946], with a new introduction by Robin W Winks (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992), p. 234. Dorothy L Sayers, ‘The omnibus of crime’ in Howard Haycraft (ed.), The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays [1946], with a new introduction by Robin. W Winks (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992), p. 75. Robert Barnard, A Talent to Deceive, p. 6. Susan Rowland, From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell, p. 63. One of the most conspicuous examples of the influence of this paradigm is Caroline Graham’s ‘Inspector Barnaby’ series, first published in the later 1980s, and the subsequent Midsomer Murders television series, both discussed at greater length in Chapter 7. Robert Barnard, A Talent to Deceive, p. 26. Marion Shaw and Sabine Vanacker, Reflecting on Miss Marple, p. 8. Agatha Christie, The Murder at the Vicarage [1930] in Miss Marple Omnibus: Volume Three (London: HarperCollins, 1997), p. 520. Susan Rowland, From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell, p. 49. Paul Gilroy, Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures (London: Serpent’s Tooth, 1993), p. 72. Ken Smith, Chairman of the J B Priestley Society, talking about Priestley’s own 1930s sense of Englishness. Quoted in Sarfraz Manzoor, ‘Bradford reflects on many shades of Englishness,’ The Observer, Sunday, 5 July 2009. See www. guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/jul/05/bradford-englishness-jb-priestley. Accessed 20/11/2009. The sense of ‘imagined’ community obviously draws heavily on Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. Agatha Christie, The Murder at the Vicarage, p. 586. Agatha Christie, The Murder at the Vicarage, p. 517. Agatha Christie, The Body in the Library [1942] in Miss Marple Omnibus: Volume One (London: HarperCollins, 1997), p. 18. Agatha Christie, The Body in the Library, p. 37. Agatha Christie, The Body in the Library, p. 81. Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, translated by Sarah A Solovay and John H Mueller, edited by George E G Catlin (New York: The Free Press, 1966), p. 67. Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, p. 71. Richard A Hilbert, ‘Anomie and the moral regulation of reality: the Durkheimian tradition in modern relief,’ Sociological Theory, Volume 4, Number 1 (Spring, 1986), pp. 1–19 (p. 6).

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Kai T Erikson, Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance (New York: John Wiley, 1966), p. 4. Kai T Erikson, Wayward Puritans, p. 4. Agatha Christie, The Moving Finger [1943] in Miss Marple Omnibus: Volume One (London: HarperCollins, 1997), p. 164. Agatha Christie, The Moving Finger, p. 159. Agatha Christie, The Moving Finger, p. 225. Agatha Christie, The Moving Finger, p. 182. Agatha Christie, The Moving Finger, p. 200. Agatha Christie, The Moving Finger, p. 170. Agatha Christie, The Moving Finger, p. 267. In labelling Christie’s textual Englishness as a ‘trope’ it is not my intention to deny the fact that for some English people this ‘trope’ closely matched the reality of their lives, as a variety of other critical studies have revealed. These include Frank Trentmann, ‘Civilization and its discontents: English neo-Romanticism and the transformation of anti-Modernism in twentieth-century Western culture’ (Journal of Contemporary History, Volume 29, Number 4 (October 1994), pp. 583– 625) and Catherine Brace, ‘Publishing and publishers: towards an historical geography of countryside writing, c. 1930–1950’ (Area, Volume 33, Number 3 (September 2001), pp. 287–96). Trentmann discusses in detail the popularity of rural pursuits such as hiking in 1930s, and their relationship with pervading ideas of national identity; Brace considers the tradition of experiencing and then writing about the countryside during the same historical period. Rod Brookes, ‘ “Everything in the garden is lovely”: the representation of national identity in Sidney Strube’s Daily Express cartoons in the 1930s,’ Oxford Art Journal, Volume 13, Number 2 (1990), pp. 31–43 (p. 32). John Baxendale, ‘ “I had seen a lot of Englands”: J B Priestley, Englishness and the people,’ History Workshop Journal, Number 51 (Spring, 2001), pp. 87–111 (p. 92). J B Priestley, Rain Upon Godshill: More Chapters of Autobiography (London: Heinemann, 1941), p. 266. Agatha Christie, A Murder is Announced [1950] in Miss Marple Omnibus: Volume One (London: HarperCollins, 1997), p. 410. Julian Symons, Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), p. 17. Agatha Christie, A Murder is Announced, p. 410. Agatha Christie, A Murder is Announced, p. 410. Agatha Christie, A Murder is Announced, p. 411. Agatha Christie, The Moving Finger, p. 278. Agatha Christie, They Do It With Mirrors [1952] in Miss Marple Omnibus: Volume Two (London: HarperCollins, 1997), p. 518. Julian Symons, Bloody Murder, p. 19. Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, translated by Donald NicholsonSmith (London: Rebel Press, 2001), p. 125. Colin Watson, ‘The message of Mayhem Parva,’ in H R F Keating (ed.) Agatha Christie: First Lady of Crime (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977), p. 107.

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Agatha Christie, 4:50 from Paddington [1957] in Miss Marple Omnibus: Volume One (London: HarperCollins, 1997), p. 551. Agatha Christie, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side [1962] in Miss Marple Omnibus: Volume Two (London: HarperCollins, 1997), p. 324. Agatha Christie, 4:50 from Paddington, p. 712. Dennis Sanders and Len Lovallo, The Agatha Christie Companion, p. 250. Marion Shaw and Sabine Vanacker, Reflecting on Miss Marple, p. 58. Agatha Christie, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, p. 326. Anne Hart, The Life and Times of Miss Jane Marple (London: Sphere, 1990), p. 48. Janet Morgan, Agatha Christie: A Biography (London: Fontana/Collins, 1984), p. 260. Discussed by Sarfraz Manzoor in ‘Bradford reflects on many shades of Englishness,’ The Observer, Sunday, 5 July 2009. See www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/ jul/05/bradford-englishness-jb-priestley. Accessed 20/11/2009. Antony Easthope, Englishness and National Culture (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 22. Agatha Christie, 4:50 from Paddington, p. 601. Agatha Christie, A Caribbean Mystery [1964] in Miss Marple Omnibus: Volume Two (London: HarperCollins, 1997), p. 70. Agatha Christie, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, p. 467. Stephen Knight, Crime Fiction 1800–2000: Detection, Death, Diversity (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), p. 135. Agatha Christie, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, p. 331. Agatha Christie, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, p. 332. Agatha Christie, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, p. 331. Susan Rowland, From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell, p. 41. Simon Featherstone, Twentieth-Century Popular Culture and the Forming of English Identity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), p. 13. Simon Featherstone, Twentieth-Century Popular Culture and the Forming of English Identity, p. 13. Dennis Sanders and Len Lovallo, The Agatha Christie Companion, p. 311. There have been conflicting interpretations of which actual hotel Bertram’s was based on. Janet Morgan, for example, favours Fleming’s. Many other critics (including Sanders and Lovallo) have identified Brown’s as the originating hotel. Janet Morgan, Agatha Christie, p. 337. Agatha Christie, At Bertram’s Hotel [1965] in Miss Marple Omnibus: Volume Three (London: HarperCollins, 1997), p. 345. Agatha Christie, At Bertram’s Hotel, p. 345. Agatha Christie, At Bertram’s Hotel, p. 349. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman.(New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), p. 4. Agatha Christie, The Body in the Library, p. 42. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, p. 12. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, p. 12. Agatha Christie, At Bertram’s Hotel, p. 430.

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Jean Baudrillard, Transparency of Evil (London: Verso, 1993), p. 16. R A York, Agatha Christie: Power and Illusion (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), p. 17. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1995), p. 153. Agatha Christie, At Bertram’s Hotel, p. 350. Agatha Christie, At Bertram’s Hotel, p. 371. Agatha Christie, At Bertram’s Hotel, p. 354. Agatha Christie, At Bertram’s Hotel, p. 457. Committed in August 1963, this was at the time the largest robbery (in terms of the value of what was stolen) in British history, making anti-heroic celebrities of the robbers themselves, most notably Ronnie Biggs. Retort, ‘Afflicted powers,’ New Left Review, Volume 27 (May–June 2004), pp. 5–21 (p. 8). Retort, ‘Afflicted powers,’ (p. 8). For a wider discussion of this concept, see Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle. Agatha Christie, At Bertram’s Hotel, p. 489. Gill Plain, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, p. 23. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, p. 2. Agatha Christie, Nemesis [1971] in Miss Marple Omnibus: Volume Three (London: HarperCollins, 1997), p. 42. Dennis Sanders and Len Lovallo, The Agatha Christie Companion, p. 299. These films were Murder She Said (1961), Murder at the Gallop (1963), Murder Most Foul (1964), Murder Ahoy! (1964). The reworkings of 4:50 from Paddington, After the Funeral (a Poirot novel), Mrs McGinty’s Dead (Poirot again) were extremely free with the original stories, and the final Rutherford/Marple film was an original screenplay. Other Marple adaptations have featured Gracie Fields (Goodyear TV Playhouse, 1956), Inga Langen (Murder at the Vicarage (Mord im Pfarrhaus), 1970), and Ita Ever (The Secret of the Blackbirds, 1983), and there was also a Japanese anime series Agatha Christie’s Great Detectives Poirot and Marple that featured Miss Marple in a variety of investigative situations. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 23. Dennis Sanders and Len Lovallo, The Agatha Christie Companion, p. 74. Marple adaptations featured prominently in the BBC Christmas TV schedule in 1984, 1986, 1987, 1989, 1991 and 1992. Margaret Thatcher, 16 July 1979, ‘Speech to the Conservative Political Centre Summer School (“The Renewal of Britain”).’ See www.margaretthatcher.org/ speeches/ displaydocument.asp?docid=104107 (Margaret Thatcher Foundation). Accessed 10/09/2009. David Dixon, ‘Thatcher’s people: the British nationality act 1981,’ Journal of Law and Society, Volume 10, Number 2 (Winter, 1983), pp. 161–80 (p. 173). Anon, ‘Victims of Thatcherism,’ Economic and Political Weekly, Volume 20, Number 41 (12 October 1985), pp. 1717–18 (p. 1717). Andrew Gamble, ‘Thatcherism and Conservative politics’ in Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques (eds), The Politics of Thatcherism (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1983), p. 113.

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Sanford J Ungar, ‘Dateline Britain: Thatcherism,’ Foreign Policy, Number 35 (Summer, 1979), pp. 180–91 (p. 181). John Mohan, ‘The political geography of Thatcher’s Britain,’ Area, Volume 19, Number 2 (June 1987), pp. 189–90 (p. 189). Robert Barnard, A Talent to Deceive, p. 198. Marion Shaw and Sabine Vanacker, Reflecting on Miss Marple, p. 93. Marion Shaw and Sabine Vanacker, Reflecting on Miss Marple, p. 94. Marion Shaw and Sabine Vanacker, Reflecting on Miss Marple, p. 94. Episode 1 of the series, first broadcast on 26–28 December 1984. Episode 2 of the series, first broadcast on 21–22 February 1985. Episode 6 of the series, first broadcast on 11 and 18 January 1987. Episode 7 of the series, 25 January and 1 February 1987. Sally R Munt, ‘Grief, doubt and nostalgia in detective fiction or . . . “death and the detective novel”: a return,’ College Literature, Volume 25, Number 3 (Fall, 1998), pp. 133–44 (p. 142). Kathleen Stewart, ‘Nostalgia – a polemic,’ Cultural Anthropology, Volume 3, Number 3 (August 1988), pp. 227–41 (p. 227). Episode 10 of the series, first broadcast on 25 December 1989. Episode 11 of the series, first broadcast on 29 December 1991. Episode 12 of the series, first broadcast on 27 December 1992. Marion Shaw and Sabine Vanacker, Reflecting on Miss Marple, p. 8. Margaret Thatcher, ‘The moral basis of a free society,’ Daily Telegraph, 16 May 1978. See www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=103687 (Margaret Thatcher Foundation). Accessed 10/09/2009. Agatha Christie, Sleeping Murder [c. 1940] in Miss Marple Omnibus: Volume Three (London: HarperCollins, 1997), p. 336. Agatha Christie, Sleeping Murder, p. 333. The notion of sociopathy utilized here is drawn from David T Lykken, The AntiSocial Personalities (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995), wherein the sociopath is seen as someone whose unsocialized character is a product of their upbringing as much as of any inherent, psychological ‘peculiarities of temperament’ (p. 7). Agatha Christie, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, p. 505. Agatha Christie, Nemesis, p. 183. John Frow, ‘Tourism and the semiotics of nostalgia,’ October, Volume 57 (Summer, 1991), pp. 123–51 (p. 125).

Chapter 4 1

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Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. ix. See The National Heritage Act (1980), chapter 17, at Office of Public Sector Information Archive, www.opsi.gov.uk/ RevisedStatutes/Acts/ukpga/1980/cukpga_19800017_ en_1. Accessed 21/10/2009. Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country, p. 38.

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The National Heritage Act (Scotland) followed in 1985. See The National Heritage Act (1983), chapter 47, at Office of Public Sector Information Archive, www.opsi.gov.uk/RevisedStatutes/Acts/ukpga/1983/cukpga_19830047_ en_1. Accessed 30/10/2009. Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country, p. 65. In April 1982 Argentina invaded and occupied the Falkland Islands (Guerra de las Malvinas), which had been a British-governed territory since the nineteenth century. They were restored to British control in June of the same year. Margaret Thatcher, ‘House of Commons speech: Falklands Islands,’ 3 April 1982. See www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid= 104910 (Margaret Thatcher Foundation). Accessed 25/10/2009. Margaret Thatcher, ‘House of Commons statement: Falklands Islands,’ 15 June 1982. See www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid= 104969 (Margaret Thatcher Foundation). Accessed 25/10/2009. Margaret Thatcher, ‘Speech to the Conservative Party 1922 Committee,’ 19 July 1984. See www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid= 105563. (Margaret Thatcher Foundation). Accessed 25/10/2009. Elsewhere in the same speech Thatcher compared the clash with the striking miners to a battle against a ‘tyranny’ that might ‘enter upon this country if the people lose their supreme confidence in themselves and lose their roughness and spirit of defiance.’ Elizabeth Hammond, ‘I’m proud of the Iron Lady image,’ (an interview with Margaret Thatcher), Finchley Times, 7 July 1989. See Margaret Thatcher Foundation, www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=107726. Accessed 07/01/2010. Andrew Higson, ‘Re-presenting the national past: nostalgia and pastiche in the heritage film’ (pp. 91–109) in Lester D Friedman (ed.), Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism, 2nd edition (London: Wallflower, 2006), p. 91. Simon Barker, ‘ “Period” detective drama and the limits of contemporary nostalgia: Inspector Morse and the strange case of a lost England,’ Critical Survey, Volume 6, Number 2 (1994), pp. 234–42 (p. 235). Simon Barker, ‘ “Period” detective drama and the limits of contemporary nostalgia,’ (p. 235). David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 156. Ian Gordon, ‘Superman on the set: the market, nostalgia and television audiences’ in Mark Jancovich and James Lyons (eds), Quality Popular Television: Cult TV, the Industry and Fans (London: BFI, 2004), p. 153. Ralph M Negrine in Politics and the Mass Media in Britain (London: Routledge, 1989) points out that ‘the various themes and proposals which are developed in the White Paper can be traced back to earlier reports . . . the Peacock Committee report on financing the BBC and the commissioned report on Subscription Television’ (p. 236). Charlotte Brunsdon, ‘Problems with quality,’ Screen, Volume 31, Number 1 (Spring, 1990), pp. 67–90 (p. 67). Brunsdon also notes the work of the Broadcasting Research Unit, including their pamphlet Quality in Television (London: John Libbey, 1989). The Unit operated from 1981–1991.

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Original Producer Ted Childs quoted in Guy Adams, ‘Morse: the no.1 gentleman detective,’ The Independent: Media, Friday, 27 April 2007. See www. independent.co.uk/news/media/morse-the-no1-gentleman-detective-446440. html. Accessed 17/04/2009. Sarah Cardwell, ‘Is quality television any good?: generic distinctions, evaluations and the troubling matter of critical judgement’ in Janet McCabe and Kim Akass (eds), Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond (London: I B Tauris, 2007), p. 30. Mark Jancovich and James Lyons, ‘Introduction’ to Mark Jancovich and James Lyons (eds), Quality Popular Television: Cult TV, the Industry and Fans (London: BFI, 2004), p. 3. Peter McLuskie, ‘Jewel in the Crown,’ The Museum of Broadcast Communications. See www.museum.tv/archives/etv/J/htmlJ/jewelinthe/jewelinthe.htm. Accessed 24/04/2009. Guy Adams, ‘Morse: the no.1 gentleman detective,’ The Independent: Media, Friday, 27 April 2007. See www.independent.co.uk/news/media/morse-the-no1gentleman-detective-446440.html. Accessed 17/04/2009. See the articles and chapters by Thomas, Sparks and Barker (for just three examples), quoted elsewhere in this chapter. Kathleen Stewart, ‘Nostalgia – a polemic,’ Cultural Anthropology, Volume 3, Number 3 (August, 1988), pp. 227–41 (p. 227). This tendency in the Inspector Morse television series towards social detachment has also been previously discussed by Sparks, Thomas, and Barker, all cited in this chapter. Ian Gordon, ‘Superman on the set: the market, nostalgia and television audiences,’ p. 153. Margaret Thatcher, ‘Interview for Woman’s Own,’ 23 September 1987. See www. margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=106689 (Margaret Thatcher Foundation). Accessed 16/10/2009. The full quotation is: ‘there is no such thing as society. There is living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate.’ Some commentators have denied that Thatcher’s words represented an anti-society view, and point to other speeches and interviews where she said something very different about the role of society. See (for example) much earlier speeches such as ‘Let Our Children Grow Tall,’ delivered at the Institute of Socio-economic Studies, New York: 15 September 1975 (before she was prime minister), in which she argues that ‘society is a living organism resting on processes and changing relationships’ (p. 11) and ‘we must build a society in which each citizen can develop his full potential both for his own benefit and for the community as whole; in which originality, skill, energy and thrift are rewarded; in which we encourage rather than restrict the variety and richness of human nature’ (p. 12). This sense of social potential was encapsulated even more explicitly in ‘The Healthy Society’ speech given on 2 December 1976, in which Thatcher imagined ‘a society in which the

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vast majority of men and women are encouraged, and helped, to accept responsibility for themselves and their families, and to live their lives with the maximum of independence and self-reliance . . . a society where everyone feels himself a responsible member of the community in which he lives and works; where he is inspired to play his part in ensuring the well-being of that community . . . founded on the family. Family life is the bed-rock on which the healthy society must be built’ (p. 81). Both speeches can be found in Margaret Thatcher, Let Our Children Grow Tall: Selected Speeches 1975–1977 (London: Centre for Policy Studies, 1977). Whether Thatcher’s words in 1987 are taken as a fundamental rejection of the notion of society or not, what is clear is that in the balance between individual and society the British Conservative government of the 1980s saw the aspiring individual as the key to national success. Kathleen Stewart, ‘Nostalgia – a polemic,’ (p. 232). Bill Leonard, The Oxford of Inspector Morse and Lewis, with a foreword by Colin Dexter (Gloucestershire: The History Press, 2008), p. 5. Home Office, Getting to Grips with Crime: A New Framework for Local Action (London: Home Office, 1997) as quoted in Tim Newburn, Criminology (Cullompton: Willan, 2007), p 574. In terms of UK legislation, the debate during the 1980s and 1990s about antisocial behaviour culminated in the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act. Andrew Millie, Anti-Social Behaviour (London: Open University Press, 2009), p. 4. Millie, drawing on a range of other sources, categorizes four types of ASB: (1) ‘Acts directed at people’ including ‘intimidation/harassment,’ (on various grounds), (2) Environmental damage’ including ‘criminal damage/vandalism’ and ‘litter-rubbish,’ (p. 3) ‘misuse of public space’ including ‘drug/substance misuse,’ ‘street drinking, beginning prostitution, kerb crawling, sexual acts, abandoned cars, vehicle-related nuisance,’ and (4) ‘disregard for community/ personal well-being’ including ‘noise, rowdy behaviour, nuisance behaviour, hoax calls, animal-related problems’ (p. 12). First broadcast on 6 January 1987. Andrew Millie, Anti-Social Behaviour, p. 16. First published in 1981. Colin Dexter, The Dead of Jericho (1981) (New York: Ivy Books/Ballantine, 1997), p. 10. Colin Dexter’s Last Bus to Woodstock was first published in 1975 whilst the TV adaptation of the novel was episode 4 of series 2, first broadcast on 22 March 1988. Colin Dexter, Last Bus to Woodstock (1975) in The Third Inspector Morse Omnibus (London: Pan, 1993), p. 41. Lyn Thomas, Fans, Feminisms and ‘Quality’ Media (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 39. Lyn Thomas, Fans, Feminisms and ‘Quality’ Media, p. 39. Lyn Thomas, Fans, Feminisms and ‘Quality’ Media, p. 39. Charlotte Brunsdon, ‘The structure of anxiety: recent British television crime fiction’ in Edward Buscombe (ed.), British Television: A Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 201.

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Lyn Thomas, Fans, Feminisms and ‘Quality’ Media, p. 41. Housman’s most well-known cycle of poems, A Shropshire Lad (1896), idealizes its implied rural idyll and ruminates on the nature of England present and past. Bryan Turner, ‘A note on nostalgia,’ Theory, Culture and Society, Volume 4, Number 1 (1987), p. 147, as quoted in John Frow, ‘Tourism and the semiotics of nostalgia,’ October, Volume 57 (Summer, 1991), pp. 123–51 (p. 135). Colin Dexter, Last Bus to Woodstock, p. 3. Colin Dexter, Last Bus to Woodstock, p. 63. The novel was published in 1977. The adaptation was episode 2 of series 1, first broadcast on 13 January 1987. The novel was published in 1983. The adaptation was episode 2 of series 3, first broadcast (as The Last Enemy) on 11 January 1989. Colin Dexter, The Riddle of the Third Mile (1983) New York: Ivy Books/Ballantine, 1997), p. 17. Colin Dexter, The Riddle of the Third Mile, p. 225. The novel was published in 1976. The adaptation was episode 2 of series 2, first broadcast on 8 March 1989. Colin Dexter, Last Seen Wearing (1976) (New York: Ivy Books, 1997), p. 31. Colin Dexter, Last Seen Wearing, p. 31. Colin Dexter, Last Seen Wearing, p. 31. Colin Dexter, Last Seen Wearing, p. 31. Stephen Reicher and Nick Hopkins, ‘Psychology and the end of history: a critique and a proposal for the psychology of social categorization,’ Political Psychology, Volume 22, Number 2, Special Issue: Psychology as Politics (June 2001), pp. 383–407 (p. 383). Stephen Reicher and Nick Hopkins, ‘Psychology and the end of history,’ (p. 383). Colin Dexter, The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn (1977) (New York: Ivy Books, 1997), p. 6. This episode was the 2nd of the ‘special’ episodes (i.e. not part of an ongoing series), first broadcast on 27 November 1996. The novel was published in 1994. Colin Dexter, The Daughters of Cain (1994) in The Fourth Inspector Morse Omnibus (Basingstoke: Pan Books, 1998), p. 278. Elizabeth Burney, Making People Behave: Anti-Social Behaviour, Politics and Policy (Cullompton: Willan Publishing, 2005), p. 2. Anthony E Bottoms, ‘Incivilities, offence and social order in residential communities’ in A von Hirsch and A P Simester (eds), Incivilities: Regulating Offensive Behaviour (Oxford: Hart, 2006), p. 239. Colin Dexter, The Daughters of Cain, p. 278. Colin Dexter, The Daughters of Cain, p. 306. Colin Dexter, The Dead of Jericho, p. 52. The novel was first published in 1981. The Dead of Jericho was episode 1 of series 1, first broadcast on 6 January 1987. Colin Dexter, The Dead of Jericho, p. 125. Colin Dexter, The Dead of Jericho, p. 185.

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Colin Dexter, The Way Through the Woods (1992) in The Fourth Inspector Morse Omnibus (Basingstoke: Pan Books, 1998), p. 46. The novel was first published in 1992. The Truth About Crime, Episode 1, (BBC, 2009). First broadcast on July 2009. Colin Dexter, The Way Through the Woods, p. 73. Colin Dexter, The Way Through the Woods, p. 84. Colin Dexter, The Way Through the Woods, p. 111. Chara Bakalis, ‘Anti-social behaviour orders: criminal penalties or civil injunctions?’, The Cambridge Law Journal, Volume 62, Number 3 (November, 2003), pp. 583–86 (p. 586). Colin Dexter, Service of All the Dead (New York: Ivy Books, 1996), p. 3. The novel was first published in 1979. Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country, p. 65. Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country, p. 65. Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country, p. 65. Stephen Reicher and Nick Hopkins, ‘Psychology and the end of history,’ (p. 391). Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin, 1992), p. xii. Bill Leonard, The Oxford of Inspector Morse and Lewis, p. 164. Christopher Bird, The World of Inspector Morse, with a foreword by Colin Dexter (Basingstoke: Boxtree, 1998), p. 12. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On the uses and disadvantages of history for life’ in Untimely Meditations, translated by R J Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 68. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On the uses and disadvantages of history for life,’ p. 69. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On the uses and disadvantages of history for life,’ p. 70. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On the uses and disadvantages of history for life,’ p. 70. Christopher Bird, The World of Inspector Morse, p. 57. Colin Dexter, Last Bus to Woodstock, p. 4. Colin Dexter, Last Bus to Woodstock, p. 153. Colin Dexter, Last Seen Wearing, p. 202. Colin Dexter, Last Seen Wearing, p. 240. Richard Sparks, ‘Inspector Morse: “The Last Enemy” ’ in George W Brandt, British Television Drama in the 1980s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 97. Richard Sparks, ‘Inspector Morse: “The Last Enemy,” ’ p. 100. Colin Dexter, The Daughters of Cain, p. 528. This was the third of the ‘special’ episodes (not part of an ongoing series) first broadcast on 19 November 1997. Colin Dexter, Death is Now My Neighbour (1996) in The Fourth Inspector Morse Omnibus (London: Pan, 1998), p. 723. First broadcast on 11 November 1998. Colin Dexter, The Wench is Dead (1989) (London: Pan, 1990), p. 103. Colin Dexter, The Wench is Dead, p. 132. Colin Dexter, The Wench is Dead, p. 132.

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This was the first of the ‘special’ episodes (not part of an ongoing series) first broadcast on 9 November 1995. Colin Dexter, The Way Through the Woods, p. 238. Colin Dexter, The Way Through the Woods, p. 239. The Sheehy Report (1993) contained recommendations about performancerelated pay, short-term contracts, changes to pension arrangements, and the reconfiguring of the promotions structure. After an effective public relations campaign by the Police Officers’ Federation most of the recommendations were overlooked by the UK Conservative government. Charlotte Brunsdon, ‘The structure of anxiety: recent British television crime fiction,’ p. 201. David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 121. David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, p. 137. David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, p. 139.

Chapter 5 1

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The ‘police procedural’ is a defined subgenre of detective/crime fiction, as is the ‘whodunnit?’ or ‘classic sleuth’ narrative. Both are defined in detail (as are many other crime subgenres) by Robert Reiner, The Politics of the Police, 3rd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 150. See ‘R D Wingfield,’ The Telegraph, 8 August 2007 at www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ obituaries/1559701/R-D-Wingfield.html. Accessed 08/09/2009. In the play Leslie Sands took the lead role. Audiobooks of all the Frost novels are available, narrated by David Jason, published by HarperCollins. Talcott Parsons, ‘Foreword’ to Emile Durkheim, Education and Sociology, translated with an introduction by Sherwood D Fox (New York: The Free Press, 1956), p. 9. Wayne Morrison, ‘Anomie’ in Eugene McLaughlin and John Muncie (eds), The Sage Dictionary of Criminology, 2nd edition (London: Sage, 2007), p. 12. Wayne Morrison, ‘Anomie,’ p. 14. Paul Rock, ‘Sociological theories of crime’ in Mike Maguire, Rod Morgan and Robert Reiner (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, 4th edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 9. Paul Rock, ‘Sociological theories of crime,’ p. 11. R D Wingfield, Frost at Christmas [1984] (London: Corgi, 1992). The genesis of the novel is detailed in ‘R D Wingfield,’ The Telegraph, 8 August 2007 at www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ obituaries/1559701/R-D-Wingfield.html. Accessed 08/09/2009. Sanford J Ungar, ‘Dateline Britain: Thatcherism,’ Foreign Policy, Number 35 (Summer, 1979), pp. 180–91 (p. 181).

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Margaret Thatcher, ‘Speech to Scottish Conservative party conference,’ 13 May 1978; see www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid= 103684 (Margaret Thatcher Foundation). Accessed 10/09/2009. Margaret Thatcher, ‘The moral basis of a free society,’ Daily Telegraph,16 May 1978; see www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid= 103687 (Margaret Thatcher Foundation). Accessed 10/09/2009. Margaret Thatcher, ‘HCS (motion of confidence)],’ 28 March 1979. See www. margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=103983 (Margaret Thatcher Foundation). Accessed 10/09/2009. Margaret Thatcher, ‘Speech to the Conservative Political Centre summer school,’ 16 July 1979; see www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp? docid=104107 (Margaret Thatcher Foundation). Accessed 10/09/2009. Keith Joseph was one of the key architects of ‘Thatcherite’ ideology, and was a fundamental influence on the development of British politics during the 1980s. E H H Green, ‘Thatcherism: an historical perspective,’ Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Sixth Series, Volume 9 (1999), pp. 17–42 (p. 18). R D Wingfield, Frost at Christmas, p. 13. R D Wingfield, Frost at Christmas, p. 15. Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society, translated by Karen E Fields (New York: Free Press, 1997), p. 13. Richard A Hilbert, ‘Anomie and the moral regulation of reality: the Durkheimian tradition in modern relief,’ Sociological Theory, Volume 4, Number 1 (Spring 1986), pp. 1–19 (p. 4). Richard A Hilbert, ‘Anomie and the moral regulation of reality,’ (p. 4). R D Wingfield, Hard Frost [1995] (London: Corgi, 1996), p. 164. Emile Durkheim, Moral Education: A Study in the Theory and Application of the Sociology of Education, foreword by Paul Fauconnet, translated by Everett K Wilson and Herman Schnurer, edited with an introduction by Everett K Wilson (New York: The Free Press, 1973), p. 57. R D Wingfield, Frost at Christmas, p. 256. R D Wingfield, Frost at Christmas, p. 323. R D Wingfield, Frost at Christmas, p. 339. R D Wingfield, Frost at Christmas, p. 344. R D Wingfield, Frost at Christmas, p. 352. Richard A Hilbert, ‘Anomie and the moral regulation of reality,’ (p. 6). Richard A Hilbert, ‘Anomie and the moral regulation of reality,’ (p. 10). Rani Dhavan Shankardass, ‘Ten years of Thatcherism in historical perspective: Conservatism in Britain,’ Economic and Political Weekly, Volume 24, Number 51/52 (23–30 December 1989), pp. 2849–58 (p. 2857). Rani Dhavan Shankardass, ‘Ten years of Thatcherism in historical perspective: Conservatism in Britain,’ (p. 2858). Merton first outlined these social stages in ‘Social structure and Anomie,’ American Sociological Review, Volume 3, Number 5 (October 1938), pp. 672–82. They are: ‘conformity,’ ‘innovation’ ‘ritualism’ (wherein the goals cannot be

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achieved but individuals nevertheless continue working slavishly within prescribed social frameworks), ‘retreatism,’ and ‘rebellion’ (where new goals and means of achieving these are striven for). R D Wingfield, A Touch of Frost [1987] (London: Corgi, 1992). Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society, translated by W D Halls, with an introduction by Lewis A Coser (New York: The Free Press, 1997), p. 297. R D Wingfield, A Touch of Frost, p. 261. Emile Durkheim, Moral Education, p. 13. Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society, translated by George Simpson (New York: Free Press, 1933), p. 372. R D Wingfield, A Touch of Frost, p. 49. R D Wingfield, A Touch of Frost, p. 12. R D Wingfield, A Touch of Frost, p. 86. R D Wingfield, A Touch of Frost, p. 136. R D Wingfield, A Touch of Frost, p. 151. R D Wingfield, A Touch of Frost, p. 279. R D Wingfield, A Touch of Frost, p. 317. R D Wingfield, A Touch of Frost, p. 382. See, for example, Ralf Dahrendorf, ‘Changing social values under Mrs Thatcher’ in Robert Skidelsky (ed.), Thatcherism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1988), p. 195. R D Wingfield, A Touch of Frost, p. 391. R D Wingfield, A Touch of Frost, p. 424. R D Wingfield, Night Frost [1992] (London: Corgi, 1992). Richard A Hilbert, ‘Anomie and the moral regulation of reality,’ (p. 2). Richard A Hilbert, ‘Anomie and the moral regulation of reality,’ (p. 2). Robert K Merton, ‘Durkheim’s division of labour in society,’ The American Journal of Sociology, Volume 40, Number 3 (November 1934), pp. 319–28 (p. 322). R D Wingfield, Night Frost, p. 11. R D Wingfield, Night Frost, p. 43. R D Wingfield, Night Frost, p. 248. R D Wingfield, Night Frost, p. 345. R D Wingfield, Night Frost, p. 303. R D Wingfield, Night Frost, p. 432. R D Wingfield, Night Frost, p. 378. R D Wingfield, Hard Frost [1995] (London: Corgi, 1996). Richard A Hilbert, ‘Durkheim and Merton on Anomie: an unexplored contrast and its derivatives,’ Social Problems, Volume 36, Number 3 (June 1989), pp. 242–50 (p. 244). R D Wingfield, Winter Frost [1999] (London: Corgi, 2000). This was never adapted for television. R D Wingfield, Winter Frost, p. 503. Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, translated by Sarah A Solovay and John H Mueller, edited by George E G Catlin (New York: The Free Press, 1966), p. 67. R D Wingfield, Winter Frost, p. 31.

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R D Wingfield, Winter Frost, p. 185. R D Wingfield, Winter Frost, p. 452. ‘R D Wingfield – Obituary,’ Telegraph.co.uk, last updated 8 August 2007. See www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1559701/R-D-Wingfield.html. Accessed 05/05/2009. ‘R D Wingfield – Obituary,’ Telegraph.co.uk. ‘R D Wingfield – Obituary,’ guardian.co.uk, last updated 4 August 2007. See www.guardian.co.uk/news/2007/aug/04/guardianobituaries.obituaries. Accessed 05/05/2009. Robert Fairclough, ‘A Touch of Frost,’ Screenonline, www.screenonline.org.uk /tv/ id/1206994/. Accessed 05/05/2009. Robert Fairclough, ‘A Touch of Frost.’ First broadcast on 6 December 1992, with a screenplay by Richard Harris. First broadcast on 20 December 1992, with a screenplay by Richard Harris. This was the third and final episode of the first series. First broadcast on 23 January 1994, with a screenplay by Richard Harris. This was the third episode of the second series. First broadcast on 30 January 1994, with a screenplay by Christopher Russell. This was the fourth and final episode of the second series. For Durkheim it was the loss of an individual’s ‘average contentment’ precipitated such suicidal impulses. These suicides could grow out of a disconnection between the person and their society. See Emile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, translated by John A Spaulding and George Simpson, edited with an introduction by George Simpson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 250. First broadcast on 13 December 1992, with a screenplay by Richard Harris. This was the second episode of the first series. First broadcast on 16 January 1994, with a screenplay by Richard Harris. This was the second episode of the second series. First broadcast on 9 February 1997, with a screenplay by Malcolm Bradbury. This was the first episode of the fifth series. First broadcast on 16 February 1997, with a screenplay by Malcolm Bradbury. This was the second episode of the fifth series. Robert Agnew, ‘Strain theory’ in Eugene McLaughlin and John Muncie (eds), The Sage Dictionary of Criminology, 2nd edition (London: Sage, 2007), p. 421. Robert Agnew, ‘Strain theory,’ p. 421. Robert Agnew, ‘A revised strain theory of delinquency,’ Social Forces, Volume 64, Number 1 (September 1985), pp. 151–67 (p. 154). Robert K Merton, ‘Social structure and Anomie,’ American Sociological Review, Volume 3, Number 5 (October 1938), pp. 672–82 (p. 680). Robert K Merton, ‘Social structure and Anomie,’ (p. 680). Robert K Merton, ‘Social structure and Anomie,’ (p. 681). Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. 1933), p. 85. Stuart Hall, ‘The great moving right show’ in Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques (eds), The Politics of Thatcherism (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1983), p. 37.

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Rosemary Erickson Johnsen, Contemporary Feminist Historical Crime Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 21. Rosemary Erickson Johnsen, Contemporary Feminist Historical Crime Fiction, p. 21. There were 5 such adaptations: A Morbid Taste for Bones, Once Corpse Too Many, Monk’s Hood, The Virgin in the Ice and Dead Man’s Ransom. Narrated by actors including Sir Derek Jacobi, Roe Kendall, Stephen Thorne, Patrick Tull and Johanna Ward. Robin Whiteman, The Cadfael Companion: The World of Brother Cadfael, with an introduction by Ellis Peters (London: Macdonald, 1991). Robin Whiteman and Rob Talbot, Brother Cadfael’s Herb Garden (London: Little Brown, 1996). Rob Talbot and Robin Whiteman, Cadfael Country: Shropshire and the Welsh Border (London: Macdonald, 1990). Nickolas Haydock, Movie Medievalism: The Imaginary Middle Ages (London: McFarland, 2008), p. 5. Steve Watson, ‘Touring the Medieval: tourism, heritage and Medievalism, in Northumbria’ in Tom Shippey and Martin Arnold (eds), Appropriating the Middle Ages: Scholarship, Politics, Fraud (Studies in Medievalism XI 2001) (Cambridge: D S Brewer, 2001), p. 242. Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1985), p. 17. James Chapman, National Identity and the British Historical Film (London: I B Tauris, 2005), p. 1. Norman F Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1991), p. 47. Nancy F Partner, ‘Foreword: Medieval presentism before the present’ in Eileen A Joy, Myra J Seaman, Kimberley K Bell and Mary K Ramsey (eds), Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. xi. Ellis Peters, ‘Introduction’ to Robin Whiteman, The Cadfael Companion: The World of Brother Cadfael, p. 13. Ellis Peters, ‘Introduction’ to The Cadfael Companion: The World of Brother Cadfael, p. 13. Ellis Peters, ‘Introduction’ to The Cadfael Companion, p. 13. Ellis Peters, ‘Introduction’ to The Cadfael Companion, p. 13. Margaret Lewis, Edith Pargeter: Ellis Peters (Bridgend: Seren, 1994), p. 86. Margaret Lewis, Edith Pargeter, p. 86. Claudio Guillén, Literature as System: Essays Toward the Theory of Literary History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 6. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973), p. 174. Peter Allan Dale, The Victorian Critic and the Idea of History: Carlyle, Arnold, Pater (London: Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 3.

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Edith Pargeter as quoted in Margaret Lewis, Edith Pargeter, p. 20. The original quotation features in James Vinson, D L Kirkpatrick and Lesley Henderson (eds), Twentieth-Century Crime and Mystery Writers (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 848. Leo Bersani, ‘Realism and the fear of desire,’ in Lilian Furst (ed.), Realism (London: Longman, 1992), p. 241. Leo Bersani, ‘Realism and the fear of desire,’ p. 241. Nickolas A Haydock, ‘Arthurian melodrama, Chaucerian spectacle, and the waywardness of cinematic pastiche in First Knight and A Knight’s Tale’ in Tom Shippey and Martin Arnold (eds), Film and Fiction: Reviewing the Middle Ages (Studies in Medievalism XII 2002) (Cambridge: D S Brewer, 2003), p. 6. Jacek Fisiak, ‘Introduction’ to Fisiak (ed.), Medievalisms: The Poetics of Literary Re-Reading, Studies in English Medieval Language and Literature v. 21 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2008), p. 7. It is also worth drawing attention to an earlier, perhaps more formative sense of ‘medievalism,’ discussed in Kathleen Biddick’s The Shock of Medievalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), wherein ‘in order to separate and elevate themselves from popular studies of medieval culture, the new academic medievalists of the nineteenth century designated their practices, influenced by positivism, as scientific and eschewed what they regarded as less-positivist, “non-scientific” practices, labelling them medievalism’ (p. 1). Leslie Workman (‘Editorial,’ SIM, VII, 2) quoted in Richard Utz and Tom Shippey, ‘Medievalism in the modern world: introductory perspectives’ in Richard Utz and Tom Shippey (eds), Medievalism in the Modern World (Turnhout: Brepolis, 1998), p. 5. Angela Jane Weisl, The Persistence of Medievalism: Narrative Adventures in Contemporary Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 29. Ellis Peters, ‘Introduction’ to The Cadfael Companion, p. 13. Kevin J Harty, ‘Cinema Arthuriana: an overview,’ in Kevin J Harty (ed.), Cinema Arthuriana, Revised edition (London: McFarland, 2002), p. 7. Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past: the Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), p. 45. Margaret Lewis, Edith Pargeter, p. 84. The 1970s was marked by fervent debates about the nature of political representation in relation to the discrete nations that make up the United Kingdom. As part of this, the 1974–1979 UK Labour government proposed a Welsh Assembly as part of a wider programme of devolution of political power. The culmination of these debates, a national referendum, did not happen until 1979 (at which point the Welsh people voted against such an Assembly). Ellis Peters, A Morbid Taste for Bones (London: Warner Books, 2000), p. 39. Ellis Peters, A Morbid Taste for Bones, p. 224. Ellis Peters, One Corpse Too Many (London: Futura, 1989), p. 192. Ellis Peters, The Potter’s Field (London: Warner Books, 2001), 229. Ellis Peters, One Corpse Too Many, p. 170. Ellis Peters, One Corpse Too Many, p. 171. Ellis Peters, The Sanctuary Sparrow (London: Futura, 1991), p. 8.

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Ellis Peters, The Sanctuary Sparrow, p. 58. Ellis Peters, The Sanctuary Sparrow, p. 220. Margaret Lewis, Edith Pargeter, p. 138. Ellis Peters, The Leper of St Giles (London: Futura, 1987), p. 10. Ellis Peters, Monk’s Hood (London: Warner Futura, 1998), p. 7. Ellis Peters, The Virgin in the Ice (London: Warner Futura, 2000), p. 9. Ellis Peters, The Devil’s Novice (London: Futura, 1987), p. 18. Ellis Peters, One Corpse Too Many, p. 170. Ellis Peters, One Corpse Too Many, p. 171. Ellis Peters, One Corpse Too Many, p. 192. Ellis Peters, St Peter’s Fair (London: Futura, 1987), p. 56. Ellis Peters, The Pilgrim of Hate (London: Futura, 1987), p. 18. Ellis Peters, The Pilgrim of Hate, p. 26. Ellis Peters, The Pilgrim of Hate, p. 16. Ellis Peters, The Pilgrim of Hate, p. 151. Ellis Peters, The Pilgrim of Hate, p. 187. Jacek Fisiak, ‘Introduction’ to Fisiak (ed.), Medievalisms, p. 7. Margaret Thatcher, ‘Speech at the Cutlers’ Feast,’ 28 April 1983. See www. margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=105300 (Margaret Thatcher Foundation). Accessed 08/01/10. Margaret Thatcher’s premiership has become synonymous with an uncompromising assertion of free-market nationalism: ‘I cannot change my style. I do hold to things very very firmly, as you know.’ See ‘TV interview for the BBC,’ 17 December 1984, at www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument. asp?docid=105592 (Margaret Thatcher Foundation). Accessed 01/09/2010. Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 3. Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air, p. 13. Stephen Driver and Luke Martell, New Labour: Politics After Thatcherism (Oxford: Polity Press, 2002), p. 160. Andrew Rawnsley is just one of the political commentators to note the contradictory nature of Blair’s modernity: ‘New Labour was the product of traumatic and multiple failures. Tony Blair’s rhetoric might be relentlessly futuristic, but he was fixated by the past’; see Rawnsley, Servants of the People: The Inside Story of New Labour (London: Penguin, 2001), p. xiv. ‘Cool Britannia’ was a phrase commonly (and eventually disparagingly) used by the media after the election of Prime Minister Tony Blair in May 1997. It was intended to conjure up a sense of the trendy modernity of late twentieth-century Britain, exemplified when Blair hosted soirees for leading (hip) cultural figures of British society at his official home, 10 Downing Street. Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. xiii. Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country, p. xiii. Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis, p. 1. John Major, ‘Conservative Party conference speech,’ 1994. See www.johnmajor. co.uk/speechconf1994.html. Accessed 18/08/2009. Notwithstanding Major’s

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occasional foray into imaginings of the future, his broader reputation is as a traditionalist: ‘the Prime Minister whose casual wardrobe favoured blazers and cardigans, and whose rhetoric lingered nostalgically on warm beer, village greens and bicycle-borne old maids’; see Rawnsley, Servants of the People, p. 14. Tony Blair, ‘Labour Party conference speech,’ 1997. See www.prnewswire.co.uk/ cgi/news/release?id=47983. Accessed 18/08/2009. Douglas Kellner, ‘Popular culture and the construction of postmodern identities’ in Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman (eds), Modernity and Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 141. Tony Blair, ‘Speech to the Congress of Socialist Parties,’ Malmö, 7 June 1997; quoted in Rawnsley, Servants of the People, p. 309. Nancy F Partner, ‘Foreword: Medieval presentism before the present’ in Eileen A Joy, Myra J Seaman, Kimberley K Bell and Mary K Ramsey (eds), Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. xi. Jacek Fisiak, ‘Introduction’ to Fisiak (ed.), Medievalisms, p. 7. Jacek Fisiak, ‘Introduction’ to Fisiak (ed.), Medievalisms, p. 7. First broadcast on 29 May 1994. Nancy F Partner, ‘Foreword: Medieval presentism before the present,’ p. xi. Partner identifies these binaries as medieval/renaissance, dark ages/reawakening, superstition/reason and corporate/individual. This particular discussion will concentrate largely on the second and third of these. Sharon Kay Penman’s novel When Christ and His Saints Slept (1994) offers a similar portrayal of Stephen as indecisive and unable to control those around him. Ellis Peters, One Corpse Too Many, p. 8. Ellis Peters, One Corpse Too Many, p. 12. Ellis Peters, One Corpse Too Many, p. 12. Ellis Peters, One Corpse Too Many, p. 60. First broadcast on 5 June 1994. First broadcast on 12 June 1994. Ellis Peters, The Leper of St Giles, p. 25. First broadcast on 26 December 1995. First broadcast on 18 August 1996. First broadcast on 19 June 1994. Ellis Peters, Monk’s Hood, p. 39. Ellis Peters, Monk’s Hood, p. 72. First broadcast on 25 August 1996. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (ed.), ‘Introduction’ to The Postcolonial Middle Ages (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. 5. First broadcast on 19 August 1997. Ellis Peters, St Peter’s Fair, p. 126. First broadcast on 26 August 1997. First broadcast on 23 June 1998. First broadcast on 28 December 1998. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (ed.), ‘Introduction,’ p. 5. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (ed.), ‘Introduction,’ p. 5.

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David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 325. David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, p. 325. Roger Silverstone, Television and Everyday Life (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 21. Robert Stein, ‘Medieval, modern, post-modern: Medieval studies in a post-modern perspective’ in Cultural Frictions: Medieval Cultural Studies in Post-Modern Contexts, Georgetown University, October, 1995. Published in hypertext: www.georgetown. edu/labyrinth/conf/cs95/papers/stein.html. Accessed 18/08/2009. Robert Stein, ‘Medieval, modern, post-modern.’ Robert Stein, ‘Medieval, modern, post-modern.’ Paul Strohm, ‘Cultural frictions: conference commentary,’ Cultural Frictions: Medieval Cultural Studies in Postmodern Contexts Conference Proceedings (1995), available at www8.georgetown.edu/departments/medieval/labyrinth/conf/cs95/ papers/strohm.html. Accessed 18/08/2009. This commentary was later revised into the book chapter ‘Postmodernism and History,’ in Paul Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 149–62. Ellis Peters, Once Corpse Too Many, p. 103. Philip Madoc quoted in Decoding Cadfael (Free@Last TV Ltd, 2007). Narration to Decoding Cadfael (Free@Last TV Ltd, 2007). Stephen Smallwood quoted in Decoding Cadfael (Free@Last TV Ltd, 2007). Ellis Peters, One Corpse Too Many, p. 77. Ellis Peters, Monk’s Hood, p. 194. Ellis Peters, Monk’s Hood, p. 197. Ellis Peters, Monk’s Hood, p. 198. Ellis Peters, Monk’s Hood, p. 227. Ellis Peters, Monk’s Hood, p. 248. Ellis Peters, A Morbid Taste for Bones, p. 28. Margaret Lewis, Edith Pargeter, p. 10. This feeling was reinforced, no doubt, by the topicality of Welsh nationalism in the later 1990s, very much in the popular consciousness because of the ongoing political dialogue about the feasibility of a Welsh National Assembly in the United Kingdom, leading to a vote on Welsh devolution in September 1997. The New Labour manifesto for the parliamentary election of the same year had promised just such a devolved assembly for Wales, subject to a national referendum. Kevin J Harty, The Reel Middle Ages: American, Western and Eastern European, Middle Eastern and Asian Films about Medieval Europe (London: McFarland, 1999), p. 6. Anna Czarnowus, ‘Artificial discourse of national belonging: the case of Anglo-Saxonism’ in Jacek Fisiak (ed.), Medievalisms, p. 50. Ellis Peters, The Sanctuary Sparrow, p. 271. Ellis Peters, The Holy Thief (London: Warner Futura, 1993), p. 209. Theodore L Dorpat, Crime of Punishment: America’s Culture of Violence (New York: Algora, 2005), p. 124.

Notes 125

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Inside the dust jackets of the Futura paperback editions of the novels there are advertisements for linked heritage walks around Shrewsbury Abbey and also calls for support for the Abbey Restoration Project. Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality: Essays, translated by William Weaver (London: Picador, 1987), p. 68. Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, p. 69. Robert Stam, ‘Introduction: the theory and practice of adaptation,’ in Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (eds), Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p. 45. Marcia Landy, ‘Introduction’ to Landy (ed.), The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), p. 1. Gina Macdonald and Andrew F Macdonald, ‘Introduction’ to Macdonald and Macdonald (eds), Jane Austen on Screen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 6. John Simons, ‘Introduction: from Medieval to Medievalism’ in John Simons (ed.), From Medieval to Medievalism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), p. 5. Norman F Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages, p. 40. Steve Watson, ‘Touring the Medieval: tourism, heritage and Medievalism, in Northumbria’ in Tom Shippey and Martin Arnold (eds), Appropriating the Middle Ages: Scholarship, Politics, Fraud (Studies in Medievalism XI 2001) (Cambridge: D S Brewer, 2001), p. 242. Steve Watson, ‘Touring the Medieval: tourism, heritage and Medievalism, in Northumbria,’ p. 248. Steve Watson, ‘Touring the Medieval: tourism, heritage and Medievalism, in Northumbria,’ p. 248.

Chapter 7 1

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3

A whodunit or whodunnit is defined as a plot-driven narrative that is often complex, and within which the ‘puzzle’ element (who committed the crime?) is the primary concern/focus. The narrative offers the reader a position as quasi-investigator, and they are given enough clues and information to make this position ‘feel’ a viable one. Their task is to utilize this information so as to identify the perpetrator of the crime from amidst an array of potential suspects. This is (ideally) not to be deduced before the final pages of the book or the final scenes of the film/television episode. Robert Reiner, in The Politics of the Police, 3rd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), labels these ‘classic sleuth’ tales (p. 150). W H Auden, ‘The guilty vicarage,’ in Robin W Winks (ed.), Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays (Woodstock, Vermont: Countryman Press, 1988), p. 24. There are seven novels featuring DCI Barnaby: The Killings at Badger’s Drift (1987), Death of a Hollow Man (1989), Death in Disguise (1992), Written in Blood (1994), Faithful Unto Death (1996), A Place of Safety (1999) and A Ghost in the Machine (2004). To date, neither of the last two texts has been adapted for television.

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11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

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Julian Symons, Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), p. 18. Susan Moody (ed.), The Hatchards Crime Companion: 100 Top Crime Novels Selected by the Crime Writers’ Association (London: Hatchards, 1990). Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (eds), Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism (London: Manchester University Press, 1994), p. 10. Webster’s Dictionary (1911). Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Association (Gemeinschaft und gesellschaft), translated by Charles P Loomis (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 39. Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Association, p. 37. Caroline Graham, The Killings at Badger’s Drift [1987] (London: Headline, 1997), p. 49. Caroline Graham, The Killings at Badger’s Drift, p. 49. Caroline Graham, The Killings at Badger’s Drift, p. 48. Caroline Graham, The Killings at Badger’s Drift, p. 91. Caroline Graham, The Killings at Badger’s Drift, p. 26. Caroline Graham, The Killings at Badger’s Drift, p. 27. Gerry Mooney, ‘Social capital’ in Eugene McLaughlin and John Muncie (eds), The Sage Dictionary of Criminology, 2nd edition (London: Sage, 2006), p. 385. Caroline Graham, Death of a Hollow Man (London: Headline, 1990), p. 28. Caroline Graham, Death in Disguise (London: Headline, 1993), p. 6. Caroline Graham, Death in Disguise, p. 7. Caroline Graham, Death in Disguise, p. 137. Caroline Graham, Written in Blood (London: Headline, 1995), p. 11. Caroline Graham, Written in Blood, p. 25. Caroline Graham, Written in Blood, p. 25. Caroline Graham, Written in Blood, p. 67. Caroline Graham, Faithful Unto Death (London: Headline, 1997), p. 2. Caroline Graham, Faithful Unto Death, p. 24. Caroline Graham, Faithful Unto Death, p. 47. Caroline Graham, Faithful Unto Death, p. 84. Caroline Graham, Faithful Unto Death, p. 84. ‘Tory’ has been the shorthand moniker for the British Conservative Party since the nineteenth century. Caroline Graham, The Killings at Badger’s Drift, p. 36. Caroline Graham, The Killings at Badger’s Drift, p. 38. Caroline Graham, The Killings at Badger’s Drift, p. 38. Caroline Graham, Death of a Hollow Man, p. 145. Caroline Graham, Death of a Hollow Man, p. 160. Caroline Graham, Death of a Hollow Man, p. 162. Caroline Graham, Death of a Hollow Man, p. 198. Caroline Graham, Written in Blood, p. 239. Caroline Graham, Faithful Unto Death, p. 84. Caroline Graham, Death in Disguise, p. 7. Caroline Graham, Death in Disguise, p. 7. Caroline Graham, Faithful Unto Death, p. 123.

Notes 43 44 45 46 47

48

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50 51 52 53

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56 57 58 59

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Caroline Graham, Death in Disguise, p. 142. Caroline Graham, Death in Disguise, p. 183. Caroline Graham, Death in Disguise, p. 214. Caroline Graham, Faithful Unto Death, p. 219. Talcott Parsons, The Social System, with a new preface by Bryan S Turner (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 250. Simon Prideaux, Not So New Labour: A Sociological Critique of New Labour’s Policy and Practice (Bristol: Policy Press, 2005), p. 11. Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), p. 283. This concept is discussed at length in Giddens’s The Constitution of Society. Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society, p. 17. Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society, p. 26. J W Burrow, ‘ “The village community” and the uses of history in late nineteenthcentury England’ in Neil McKendrick (ed.), Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society in honour of J H Plumb (London: Europa, 1974), p. 284. ‘Communitarianism’ is the later twentieth-century philosophical movement that reacted against unchecked capitalist individualism and advocated (in its place) a supportive, mutually interested vision of society that regulated individual behaviour through its gently normative social framework. Michael Freeden, ‘The ideology of New Labour’ in Andrew Chadwick and Richard Heffernan (eds), The New Labour Reader (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), p. 45. Freeden identifies the American sociologist Amitai Etzioni as one of the sources of this view within New Labour rhetoric, a view of society that is characteristic of his ‘Communitarianism,’ the philosophy Stephen Driver and Luke Martell have called New Labour’s ‘antidote to Thatcherite individualism’; see Stephen Driver and Luke Martell, New Labour: Politics After Thatcherism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), p. 167. Talcott Parsons, The Social System, p. 27. Simon Prideaux, Not So New Labour, p. 15. Simon Prideaux, Not So New Labour, p. 30. This is described by Steven Fielding (among others) as primarily ‘[Tony] Blair’s party,’ a self-conscious political attempt ‘to demonstrate to voters that the [Labour] party had fundamentally and irreversibly changed with his election as leader . . . no longer that which many imagined it to have been during the late 1970s and early 1980s’; Fielding, The Labour Party: Continuity and Change in the Making of ‘New’ Labour (Basingstoke: PalgraveMacmillan, 2003), p. 3. Tony Blair, ‘The stakeholder society,’ Fabian Review (February 1996) in Paul Richards (ed.), Tony Blair in his Own Words (London: Politico’s, 2004), p. 160. Steven Fielding, for one, argues that ‘it should make us appreciate how far the means by which contemporaries understand the significance of “New” Labour existed long before Blair became leader’; Fielding, The Labour Party, p. 36. Elsewhere, Andrew Chadwick and Richard Heffernan have perceptively pointed out that ‘the emergence of New Labour essentially reflects a process of party change, one that was gradual, incremental and caused by a confluence of external political shocks suffered by Labour and the internal responses these

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shocks engendered. Such shocks, defeat in the general elections of 1979, 1983, 1987, and 1992, the seemingly unstoppable forward march of the Thatcher governments . . . the supposed irrelevance of collectivist, anti-statist social democratic politics . . . all prompted considerable changes in Labour’s conception of itself as a political party’; see Chadwick and Heffernan, ‘Introduction: the New Labour phenomenon’ to Andrew Chadwick and Richard Heffernan (eds), The New Labour Reader, p. 1. Simon Prideaux, Not So New Labour, p. 143. Talcott Parsons, ‘The structure of social action’ in Peter Hamilton (ed.), Readings from Talcott Parsons (London: Tavistock, 1985), p. 70. Talcott Parsons, Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1966), p. 23. Talcott Parsons, ‘A paradigm for the analysis of social systems’ in Peter Hamilton (ed.), Readings from Talcott Parsons (London: Tavistock, 1985), p. 177. Talcott Parsons, ‘A paradigm for the analysis of social systems,’ p. 176. Talcott Parsons, ‘A paradigm for the analysis of social systems,’ p. 171. Mark D Chapman, ‘But what is a community? The continuing development of a New Labour concept’ in Peter Manley Scott, Christopher R Baker and Elaine L Graham, Remoralizing Britain?: Political, Ethical and Theological Perspectives On New Labour (London: Continuum, 2009) , p. 122. Robert D Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), p. 19. Ken Worpole, Dockers and Detectives – Popular Reading: Popular Writing (London: Verso, 1983), p. 33. Richard Sparks, ‘Inspector Morse: “The Last Enemy” ’ in George W Brandt (ed.), British Television Drama in the 1980s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 97. Jeff Evans, Midsomer Murders: The Making of an English Crime Classic (London: BT Batsford, 2002), p. 5. Jeff Evans, Midsomer Murders, p. 5. Jeff Evans, Midsomer Murders, p. 5. John Nettles quoted in Jeff Evans, Midsomer Murders, p. 57. Daniel Casey quoted in Jeff Evans, Midsomer Murders, p. 67. John Nettles quoted in Jeff Evans, Midsomer Murders, p. 8. Stephen Knight, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1980), p. 44. Jeff Evans, Midsomer Murders, p. 11. Jeff Evans, Midsomer Murders, p. 6. Simon Prideaux, Not So New Labour, p. 131. Will Hutton, The State We’re In: Why Britain is in Crisis and How to Overcome It (London: Vintage, 1995), p. 16. Richard Heffernan, New Labour and Thatcherism, p. 177. Tony Blair, ‘The third way: new politics for the new century’ in Andrew Chadwick and Richard Heffernan (eds), The New Labour Reader, p. 28. Michael Freeden, ‘The ideology of New Labour’ in Andrew Chadwick and Richard Heffernan (eds), The New Labour Reader, p. 44.

Notes 86

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For just one example of this inherent tendency to elide political differences, Steven Fielding argues that ‘within the same sentence’ Tony Blair was able to portray ‘democratic socialism and progressive liberalism as “cousins” ’ (p. 48). Stefan Skrimshire, ‘Demoralizing Britain: ten years of depoliticization’ in Peter Manley Scott, Christopher R Baker and Elaine L Graham, Remoralizing Britain?: Political, Ethical and Theological Perspectives On New Labour (London: Continuum, 2009) , p. 39. Stefan Skrimshire, ‘Demoralizing Britain: ten years of depoliticization,’ p. 39. Stefan Skrimshire, ‘Demoralizing Britain: ten years of depoliticization,’ p. 39. David Marquand, ‘The Blair paradox’ in Andrew Chadwick and Richard Heffernan (eds), The New Labour Reader, p. 78. Andrew Rawnsley, Servants of the People: the Inside Story of New Labour (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 5. Andrew Rawnsley, Servants of the People, p. 9. Quoted in Andrew Rawnsley, Servants of the People, p. 7. Andrew Rawnsley, Servants of the People, p. 9. Betty Willingale quoted in Jeff Evans, Midsomer Murders, p. 15. John Nettles quoted in Jeff Evans, Midsomer Murders, p. 56. Stephen Knight, Crime Fiction 1800–2000: Detection, Death, Diversity (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), p. 18. Thomas De Quincey, ‘On murder considered as one of the fine arts,’ in Robert Morrison (ed.), On Murder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 10. Joel Black claims that the origin of this central idea is the work of Friedrich Schiller, who in his essay ‘Reflections on the use of the vulgar and the lowly in works of art’ (1802) wrote: ‘he who abased himself by a vile action can to a certain extent be raised by a crime, and can be thus reinstated in our aesthetic estimation’ see Black, The Aesthetics of Murder: A Study in Romantic Literature and Contemporary Culture (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. 35. George Bataille, Death and Sensuality: A Study of Eroticism and the Taboo (New York: Walker & Co., 1962), p. 36. The rate of homicide in the United Kingdom peaked at 14.5 homicides per million population in 1995. See A Century of Change: Trends in UK Statistics Since 1900, House of Commons Research Paper 99/111, 21 December 1999 (p. 14), www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99–111.pdf. Accessed 18/12/2009. Joel Black, The Aesthetics of Murder, p. 71. W H Auden, ‘The guilty vicarage,’ in Robin W Winks (ed.), Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 15. Joel Black, The Aesthetics of Murder, p. 73. Margaret Ervin Bruder, ‘Aestheticizing violence, or how to do things with style,’ (1998) Film Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, www.gradnet.de/papers/ pomo28.papers/mtbruder98.htm. Accessed 15/06/2009. With a screenplay by Caroline Graham, directed by Jeremy Silberston, this was first broadcast on 29 March 1998. With a screenplay by Douglas Watkinson, directed by Baz Taylor, this was first broadcast on 6 May 1998.

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Published as part of The Incredulity of Father Brown (1926). In the Chesterton story the notion of murder by long-distance knife-throwing is the central misdirection of the story. With a screenplay by Anthony Horowitz, directed by Jeremy Silberston, this was first broadcast on 22 March 1998. With a screenplay by Douglas Watkinson, written by Baz Taylor, this was first broadcast on 22 April 1998. George Orwell, ‘Decline of the English murder’ [1946] in Decline of the English Murder and Other Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 9. George Orwell, ‘Decline of the English murder,’ p. 10. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995), p. 30. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, p. 151. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, p. 151. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, p. 15. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, translated by Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984b), p. 5. Vivian C Sobchack, ‘The violent dance: a personal memoir of death in the movies’ in Thomas R Atkins (ed.), Graphic Violence on the Screen (New York: Monarch, 1976), p. 84. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 10. Michael Mourlet, ‘In defence of violence’ in Christine Gledhill (ed.), Stardom: Industry of Desire (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 233. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 33.

Chapter 8 1

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W H Auden, ‘The Guilty Vicarage,’ in Robin W Winks (ed.), Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays (Woodstock, VT: Countryman Press, 1988), p. 24. Mikhail Bakhtin conceptualizes this plurality of voices in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, translated by Caryl Emerson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984a) and also The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M M Bakhtin, translated by Caryl Emerson (London: University of Texas, 1981). ‘Conventions are elements which are known to both the creator and his audience beforehand – they consist of things like favourite plots, stereotyped characters, accepted ideas, commonly known metaphors and other linguistic devices, etc. Inventions, on the other hand, are elements which are uniquely imagined by the creator such as new kinds of characters, ideas, or linguistic forms,’; see John G Cawelti, ‘The concept of formula in the study of popular literature,’ in Bob Ashley (ed.), Reading Popular Narrative: A Source Book (London: Leicester University Press, 1997), p. 71. Gill Plain, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), p. 6. Roger Silverstone, Television and Everyday Life (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 177. John Fiske, Television Culture (London: Routledge, 2003 edn.), p. 1.

Notes 7

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Ken Worpole, Dockers and Detectives – Popular Reading: Popular Writing (London: Verso, 1983), p. 32. John Fiske, Television Culture, p. 47. John Fiske, Television Culture, p. 84. John Fiske, Television Culture, p. 326. Stephen Knight, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1980), p. 2. Produced by Granada Television, first broadcast on 7 April 1991. Gareth McLean, ‘OnTVBlog,’ guardian.co.uk, 6 January 2009, www.guardian. co.uk/culture/garethmcleanblog/2009/jan/06/lynda-la-plante-abovesuspicion-gareth-mclean. Accessed 29/01/2010. Produced by BBC Television, this was adapted from the novel Messiah by Boris Starling (1999). Produced by Coastal Productions for ITV, first broadcast on 14 November 2002. Produced by La Plante Productions, first broadcast on 19 October 1997. Produced by La Plante Productions, first broadcast on 4 January 2009. This was adapted from Linda La Plante’s own novel Above Suspicion (2005). Produced by Granada Television, first broadcast on 27 September 1993. Produced by BBC Television, first broadcast on 21 February 1996. Produced by BBC Television, first broadcast on 4 September 2000. See, for just one example amongst many studies of the cultural impact of forensic crime television, Dennis Stevens, Media and Myths in Criminal Justice: The CSI Effect (Sudbury, MA: Jones & Bartlett, 2009). See ‘Winners of the 3rd International TV Audience Awards,’ announced at TV Fest 08, the 48th Monte-Carlo Festival, produced by Eurodata TV Worldwide, 8–12 June 2008. Eurodata, www.tvfestival.mc/2008/modules/PHOTOS_NEW/ eurodataUK.pdf. Accessed 29/01/2009. Nielsen Media Research, TV Zap, 24 January 2009, www.tv.zap2it.com/ tveditorial/tve_main/ 1,1002,272%7C%7C%7 Cseason,00.html. Accessed 29/01/2009. Kris De Leon, Buddy TV, www.buddytv.com/articles/csi/csi-the-most-popularshow-on-e-20652.aspx. Accessed 29/01/2009. The classic whodunit and the ‘police procedural’ detective formats are here conflated. For although much has been written about the distinctions between these two forms, it is my contention that there are far more similarities than there are differences, and that many of the most popular British detective shows are in truth hybrids of both forms (e.g. Morse). The ‘concluding’ episode was broadcast on 5 April 2010. The irony of this in relation to The Inspector Lynley Mysteries is that the series is based on the novels of Elizabeth George, an American novelist. Broadcast on 23 September 2007, produced by ITV Productions in partnership with Chorion. Richard Sparks, Television and the Drama of Crime: Moral Tales and the Place of Crime in Public Life (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1992), p. 24. Richard Sparks, Television and the Drama of Crime, p. 156.

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John Ellis, Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 166. John Ellis, Visible Fictions, p. 170. John Ellis, Visible Fictions, p. 5. John Ellis, Visible Fictions, p. 163. Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, translated by Donald NicholsonSmith (London: Rebel Press, 2001), p. 125.

Bibliography

Primary Sources: Television Sherlock Holmes The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Granada, 1984–5) The Return of Sherlock Holmes (Granada, 1986–7) The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (Granada, 1991–3) The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (Granada, 1994)

Miss Marple The Body in the Library (BBC, 1984) The Moving Finger (BBC, 1985) A Murder is Announced (BBC, 1985) A Pocketful of Rye (BBC, 1985) The Murder at the Vicarage (BBC, 1986) Sleeping Murder (BBC, 1987) At Bertram’s Hotel (BBC, 1987) Nemesis (BBC, 1987) 4:50 from Paddington (BBC, 1987) A Caribbean Mystery (BBC, 1989) They Do It With Mirrors (BBC, 1991) The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side (BBC, 1992)

Inspector Morse The Dead of Jericho (Zenith, 1987) The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn (Zenith, 1987) Service of All the Dead (Zenith, 1987) Last Seen Wearing (Zenith, 1988) Last Bus to Woodstock (Zenith, 1988) The Last Enemy (Zenith, 1989) The Way Through the Woods (Carlton, 1995) The Daughters of Cain (Carlton, 1996) Death in Now My Neighbour (Carlton, 1997) The Wench is Dead (Carlton, 1998)

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A Touch of Frost Care and Protection (Yorkshire, 1992) Not with Kindness (Yorkshire, 1992) Conclusions (Yorkshire, 1992) Widows and Orphans (Yorkshire, 1994) Nothing to Hide (Yorkshire, 1994) Stranger in the House (Yorkshire, 1994) Penny for the Guy (Yorkshire, 1997) House Calls (Yorkshire, 1997)

Cadfael One Corpse Too Many (Central, 1994) The Sanctuary Sparrow (Central, 1994) The Leper of Saint Giles (Central, 1994) Monk’s Hood (Central, 1994) The Virgin in the Ice (Central, 1995) The Devil’s Novice (Central, 1996) Saint Peter’s Fair (Central, 1996) The Rose Rent (Central, 1997) The Raven in the Foregate (Central, 1997) A Morbid Taste for Bones (Central, 1997) The Holy Thief (Central, 1998) The Potter’s Field (Central, 1998) The Pilgrim of Hate (Central, 1998)

Midsomer Murders The Killings at Badger’s Drift (Bentley, 1997) Written in Blood (Bentley, 1998) Death of a Hollow Man (Bentley, 1998) Faithful Unto Death (Bentley, 1998) Death in Disguise (Bentley, 1998)

Primary Sources: Fiction Christie, Agatha (1993) An Autobiography (London: HarperCollins) Christie, Agatha (1997) Miss Marple Omnibus: Volume One (London: HarperCollins) Christie, Agatha (1997) Miss Marple Omnibus: Volume Two (London: HarperCollins) Christie, Agatha (1997) Miss Marple Omnibus: Volume Three (London: HarperCollins) Dexter, Colin (1990) The Wench is Dead (London: Pan) Dexter, Colin (1993) The Third Inspector Morse Omnibus (London: Pan) Dexter, Colin (1996) Service of All the Dead (New York: Ivy Books)

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Dexter, Colin (1997)The Dead of Jericho (New York: Ivy Books/Ballantine) Dexter, Colin (1997) The Riddle of the Third Mile (New York: Ivy Books/Ballantine) Dexter, Colin (1997) Last Seen Wearing (New York: Ivy Books) Dexter, Colin (1997) The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn (New York: Ivy Books) Dexter, Colin (1998) The Fourth Inspector Morse Omnibus (Basingstoke: Pan Books) Doyle, Arthur Conan (1963) The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (London: Penguin) Doyle, Arthur Conan (1963) The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (Harmondsworth: Penguin) Doyle, Arthur Conan (1966) His Last Bow (London: John Murray) Doyle, Arthur Conan (1981) The Return of Sherlock Holmes (London: Penguin) Doyle, Arthur Conan (1981) The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (London: Penguin) Graham, Caroline (1990) Death of a Hollow Man (London: Headline) Graham, Caroline (1993) Death in Disguise (London: Headline) Graham, Caroline (1995) Written in Blood (London: Headline) Graham, Caroline (1997) The Killings at Badger’s Drift (London: Headline) Graham, Caroline (1997) Faithful Unto Death (London: Headline) Peters, Ellis (1993) The Holy Thief (London: Warner Futura) Peters, Ellis (1987) The Leper of St Giles (London: Futura) Peters, Ellis (1987) The Devil’s Novice (London: Futura) Peters, Ellis (1987) St Peter’s Fair (London: Futura) Peters, Ellis (1987) The Pilgrim of Hate (London: Futura) Peters, Ellis (1989) One Corpse Too Many (London: Futura) Peters, Ellis (1991) The Sanctuary Sparrow (London: Futura) Peters, Ellis (1998) Monk’s Hood (London: Warner Futura) Peters, Ellis (2000) A Morbid Taste for Bones (London: Warner Books) Peters, Ellis (2000) The Virgin in the Ice (London: Warner Futura) Peters, Ellis (2001) The Potter’s Field (London: Warner Books) Wingfield, R D (1992) Frost at Christmas (London: Corgi) Wingfield, R D (1992) A Touch of Frost (London: Corgi) Wingfield, R D (1992) Night Frost (London: Corgi) Wingfield, R D (1996) Hard Frost (London: Corgi) Wingfield, R D (2000) Winter Frost (London: Corgi)

Television Documentaries The Perfect TV Detective (BBC Scotland, 2008) A Study in Sherlock (BBC Bristol, 2005) The Truth About Crime, Episode 1, (BBC, 2009) Decoding Cadfael (Free@Last TV Ltd, 2007)

Articles, Interviews and Papers A Century of Change: Trends in UK Statistics Since 1900, House of Commons Research Paper 99/111, 21 December 1999, www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/ rp99/rp99–111.pdf. Accessed 18/12/2009.

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Stewart, Susan (1993) On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press) Strohm, Paul (2000) Theory and the Premodern Text (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press) Symons, Julian (1972) Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History (London: Faber & Faber) Symons, Julian (1979) Portrait of an Artist: Conan Doyle (London: Whizzard Press) Talbot, Rob and Whiteman, Robin (1990) Cadfael Country: Shropshire and the Welsh Border (London: Macdonald) Thatcher, Margaret (1977) Let Our Children Grow Tall: Selected Speeches 1975–1977 (London: Centre for Policy Studies) Toulmin, Stephen (1992) Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press) Thiel, Carl William (1996) The Basic 100: The 100 Most Important Critical Studies and Association Items to the Sherlock Holmes Canon as Suggested by John Bennett Shaw: An Annotated Collector’s Guide (London: Battered Silicon Dispatch Box) Thomas, Lyn (2002) Fans, Feminisms and ‘Quality’ Media (London: Routledge) Tönnies, Ferdinand (1974) Community and Association (Gemeinschaft und gesellschaft), translated by Charles P Loomis (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul) Tulloch, John (2000) Watching Television Audiences: Cultural Theories and Methods (London: Arnold) Utz, Richard and Shippey, Tom (eds) (1998) Medievalism in the Modern World (Turnhout: Brepolis) Vaneigem, Raoul (2001) The Revolution of Everyday Life, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Rebel Press) Veeser, H Aram (ed.) (1989) The New Historicism (London: Routledge) Vincendeau, Ginette (ed.) (2001) Film/Literature/Heritage: A Sight and Sound Reader (London: BFI) Vinson, James, Kirkpatrick, D L, and Henderson, Lesley (eds) (1991) TwentiethCentury Crime and Mystery Writers (London: Routledge) Wahl, Otto F (2003) Media Madness: Public Images of Mental Illness (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press) Watson, Robert (1990) Film and Television in Eductaion: An Aesthetic Approach to the Moving Image (London: Routledge) Weller, Philip (1995) Sherlock Holmes and Air-guns: An Investigation of the Use of Air-guns in the Holmesian Canon (London: Sherlock Publications) Welsh, James M and Lev, Peter (eds) (2007) The Literature/Film Reader: Issues of Adaptation (London: Scarecrow) Weisl, Angela Jane (2003) The Persistence of Medievalism: Narrative Adventures in Contemporary Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan) Whiteman, Robin (1991) The Cadfael Companion: The World of Brother Cadfael, with an introduction by Ellis Peters (London: Macdonald) Whiteman, Robin and Talbot, Rob (1996) Brother Cadfael’s Herb Garden (London: Little Brown) Williams, Raymond (1973) The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus)

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Index

4:50 from Paddington 48 Abbey Grange, The 28, 38 Above Suspicion 128 Adams, Guy 152n. 23 Adams, Paul C 133nn. 17, 19 adaptation-as-process 11 Adelman, Sammy 134n. 33 Adorno, Theodor W 139n. 53 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The 24, 25–6 aestheticization 15, 50, 120 of murder 17, 119–23 aesthetics 6–7, 22, 63, 74 of crime see under aestheticization Agger, Gunhild 135n. 47 Agnew, Robert 159n. 84–6 Allingham, Margery 3 Altieri, Charles 22, 138nn. 32–3 ambiguity 113 ambivalence 76, 80, 84, 106, 121, 129, 131 amorality 76, 80, 84 anarchy 22, 97 And Then There Were None 40 Anderson, Benedict 43, 145n. 26 Andrew, Dudley 7, 135nn. 57–8 anomie 15, 75–6, 78, 79, 82, 85 anxiety 12, 27, 38, 43, 62, 93, 114, 125 appearance and reality 51–2 ‘Arrow of Heaven, The’ 121 At Bertram’s Hotel 42, 49–52, 55, 57, 130 Auden, W H 120, 125, 165n. 2, 169n. 102, 170n. 1 Austen, Jane 12 authenticity 8, 12, 23, 24, 27, 38–9, 53, 58, 94–5, 110, 125 authority 4, 9, 90, 94 distrust of 89 moral 86

Babette’s Feast 1 Bakalis, Chara 155n. 75 Baker Street File, The 23 Baker Street Irregulars, The 21 Bakhtin, Mikhail 123, 170nn. 116, 118, 120, 170n. 2 Banks-Smith, Nancy 36 barbarism 100–1 Barchester Chronicles, The 2 Bargainnier, Earl F 144nn. 3, 8 Baring-Gould, S 136n. 4 Barker, Anthony 135n. 47 Barker, Simon 151nn. 13–14 Barnard, Robert 44, 55, 144n. 9, 146nn. 32, 35, 150n. 131 Barnes, Alan 136n. 1 Bataille, George 120, 169n. 99 Baudrillard, Jean 50, 148nn. 99, 101–2, 149nn. 104, 117 Baxendale, John 147n. 61 BBC 32, 103 Miss Marple adaptations 54–9, 125 TV scheduling and Englishness 53 Bennett, Tony 5, 134n. 39 Berman, Marshall 92, 160n. 10, 162n. 62 Bersani, Leo 94, 161nn. 24–5 Biddick, Kathleen 161n. 27 Bird, Christopher 155nn. 83, 88 Black, Joel 169nn. 101, 103 Blair, Tony 3, 16, 99, 115, 118, 119, 162n. 65, 163nn. 70 ,72, 167n. 60, 168n. 84, 169n. 86 Bloom, Harold 23, 139nn. 36, 40 Bluestone, George 6, 7, 135nn. 48–52 Body in the Library, The 45, 55, 57 ‘Boscombe Valley Mystery, The’ 25, 26 Bottoms, Anthony 154n. 63 Brace, Catherine 147n. 59

190 Bradbury, Malcolm 159n. 82–3 Brake, Mike 134n. 24, 142n. 111 Brett, Jeremy 23, 34, 36, 37 Brideshead Revisited 2 Broadcasting Act (1990) 2, 13, 32, 38, 62 Broadcasting in the ‘90s: Competition, Choice and Quality 62 Brook, Clive 20 Brookes, Rod 147n. 60 Brookfield, Charles 19 Brother Cadfael’s Herb Garden 92 Bruce, Nigel 23 Bruce-Partington Plans, The 30 Bruder, Margaret Ervin 169n. 104 Brunsdon, Charlotte 64, 151n. 18, 153n. 42, 156n. 106 Bunson, Matthew E 138n. 25 Burke, David 27, 139n. 47 Burney, Elizabeth 154n. 62 Burrow, J W 115, 167n. 53 Cadfael Companion, The 92 Cadfael Country 92 Cadfael novels and television adaptations 15, 92, 125, 127 barbarity 100–1 extremism 101–2 historical fiction 94–7 justice 96 Medievalism and 95, 99–100, 103, 105, 106–7 Middle Ages 93, 95–6, 101, 103 national inheritance 103 presentism 93 sexuality 101 violence 105–6 Welsh identity 104 Caine, Michael 21 canonicity 12, 21–3, 36, 73, 96, 140n. 64 Cantor, Norman F 93, 160n. 12, 165n. 132 capitalism 32, 118 Cardboard Box, The 37 Cardwell, Sarah 10, 11, 135n. 68, 136nn. 74–7 140n. 54, 152n. 20

Index Care and Protection 85–6 Caribbean Mystery, A 53, 56 Carmilla 35 carnivalesque 123 Cartmell, Deborah 136n. 84 Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, The series 31, 32 Case of the Silk Stocking, The 21 Casey, Daniel 118, 168n. 76 Cawelti, John G 125, 170n. 3 Central Television 93 Chadwick, Andrew 167n. 61 Chandler, Raymond 44, 146n. 30 Chapman, James 160n. 11 Chapman, Mark D 168n. 68 Chariots of Fire 1 Chatman, Seymour 7, 135nn. 53–5 Chesterton, G K 121 chivalry 16, 33, 98, 100, 101 Chorion 40 Christie, Agatha 3, 13, 40, 108, 129, 145nn. 13, 23, 146nn. 37, 42–6, 147nn. 52–8, 63, 65–9, 148nn. 73–5, 78, 83–5, 87–9, 96–8, 100, 103, 149nn. 107–10, 118, 150nn. 146–7, 149–50 see also Englishness Clarissa 2 Classic sleuth 132–3n. 13 close reading 11 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome 163nn. 92, 98–9 coherence 4, 5, 9, 13, 55, 59, 76, 95, 116, 129 absence of 17, 46, 63, 75, 76, 82 in critical methodology 10 of Englishness 45, 49, 58, 109, 117, 118, 127, 130, 131 establishing 25, 42, 127 ethnic 17, 110 myth of 47, 53, 131 in national identity 42, 43, 46, 56 in social process 63 Cold Case 128 collective belonging 47 collective conscience 90 collective consciousness 45 collective identity 14, 44, 48, 115

Index common sense ideologies 31 communitarianism 167n. 54 comparative methodology 7–8, 9 compassion 15, 58, 81, 83, 89, 98 Conclusions 86–7 continuity 74, 116 historical 27 of identity 54 implied 27 loss of English 46 realization of 49 Cool Britannia 162n. 65 core identity 25 Corner, John 143n. 120 Cosy School 41 Cox, Michael 23, 30, 34, 139nn. 41, 43, 49, 51, 142n. 110, 143nn. 137, 142 Cracker 128 Crimewatch UK 130 Crime Writers’ Association 108 criminal justice process 28 Criminal Minds 128 CSI effect 128 CSI: Las Vegas 128 CSI: Miami 128 CSI: New York 128 cultural hierarchy 12 cultural history and adaptation 1 cultural identity 21, 38 cultural insecurity 46 cultural palimpsest 107 cultural politics 25, 131 cultural texts 11, 18 as palimpsests 9 cultural translation 6 Cushing, Peter 20–1, 139n. 47 Czarnowus, Anna 164n. 121 Dahrendorf, Ralf 134n. 34, 158n. 48 Dale, Peter Allan 160n. 22 Dalziel and Pascoe novels 129 Daughters of Cain, The 67, 71 David Copperfield 2 Davies, David Stuart 137nn. 13, 14, 138nn. 19–20, 139nn. 41–2, 48, 141n. 87, 142nn. 102, 109, 143nn. 136, 138, 143

191

DCI Barnaby see Midsomer Murders and television adaptations Dead Man’s Eleven 123 Dead of Jericho, The 64, 67 Death in Disguise 121 Death is Now My Neighbour 71 Death of a Hollow Man 110, 121 Death’s Shadow 123 Debord, Guy 122, 149nn. 106, 114, 170nn. 112–15 delinquency 64 depoliticization 119 De Quincey, Thomas 120, 169n. 98 deviance 43, 64, 85, 115, 117 absence of 65 constraint of 114 and crime 90 and nationhood 48 social 45, 90 Devil’s Foot, The 29, 38 Devil’s Novice, The 101, 105 Dexter, Colin 3, 14, 63, 64, 68, 69, 74, 153nn. 36–8, 154nn. 46–7, 50–1, 53–6, 59, 61, 64–6, 68–9, 155nn. 70, 72–4, 76, 89–92, 95, 97, 99–101, 156nn. 103–4 ‘Disappearance of Lady Carfax, The’ 32 Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax, The 38 Dixon, David 149n. 126 Dollimore, Jonathan 166n. 6 Dorpat, Theodore L 164n. 124 Doubinsky, Claude 135n. 63 Dove, George N 140nn. 67–8 Downey Jr., Robert 21 Doyle, Arthur Conan 3, 12, 19, 20, 42, 119, 140nn. 59, 60, 141n. 93, 142n. 99, 142n. 103, 143nn. 125, 127, 129–34, 139, 145, 144nn. 152, 155 see also Granada series Dracula 35 Driver, Stephen 134n. 35, 162n. 63, 167n. 55 Durkheim, Emile 45, 75, 79, 80, 146nn. 47–8, 157nn. 20, 24, 158nn. 36, 38–9, 66, 159nn. 79, 90 Dying Detective, The 36

192

Index

Earnshaw, Tony 138n. 21 Easthope, Anthony 48, 148n. 82 Eco, Umberto 165nn. 126–7 Edwards, Owen Dudley 137n. 16 Electric Vendetta, The 123 Eligible Bachelor, The 35 elitism 14, 22 Ellis, John 172n. 31–4 Emma 2 empathy 37, 81, 83, 127 sexual 88 Empty House, The 27 ‘Engineer’s Thumb, The’ 25, 42 English Heritage 60 English Journey 46 Englishness 25, 37, 41, 43–5, 98, 125, 131 BBC Miss Marple adaptations and 54–7 coherence and 49, 58 collective response to crime and 58 consensual national-cultural response and 57 critique of 49–50 historically transcendent 110 idealized 29 identity of 108–10, 111 imagined 112 as lived identity 47 loss of 51 modernity and 48 mythical 68, 120 nostalgia and 52, 53, 55, 67 simulation of 52 social life and 46–7 tensions and 46 textual interrogation of ideas of 46 troubled representation of 42 episteme 6 equilibrium 17, 68, 91, 108, 114–16 Erikson, Kai T 147nn. 50–1 ethical void 15 ethnic coherence 17, 110 Etzioni, Amitai 167n. 55 Evans, Jeff 168nn. 72–7, 79–80, 169nn. 95–6 Ever, Ita 149n. 121 Everett, Rupert 21

Fairclough, Robert 159nn. 73–4 fairness 29, 61, 96, 97, 101 loss of 5 Faithful Unto Death 111, 122 faithfulness 10, 23–4, 38 Falklands conflict (1982) 60–1 Featherstone, Simon 148nn. 91–2 fellow feeling 44, 45 female sexualization 35 fictional reassurance 117 fidelity 12, 24, 36, 138n. 20 Field, Amanda J 137n. 16 Fielding, Steven 133n. 23, 167nn. 59, 61, 169n. 86 Fields, Gracie 149n. 121 Fish, Stanley 5, 134n. 40 Fisiak, Jacek 95, 161n. 27, 162n. 58, 163nn. 74–5 Fiske, John 126, 170n. 6, 171nn. 8–10 ‘Five Orange Pips, The’ 26, 42 foreignness and Conan Doyle novels 24–5, 32, 42 and Miss Marple novels 43–4 forensic fetishism 128–9 Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders, The 2 Foucault, Michel 6, 134n. 43 Frayling, Christopher 21, 138n. 22 Freeden, Michael 167n. 55, 168n. 85 Frost at Christmas 77–8, 79–80, 85 Frost novels and television adaptations 15, 75 amorality 80, 84 anomie 75–6, 78, 79, 82, 85 compassion 81, 83, 89 emotions 85–6 empathy 81, 83, 88 loss of spontaneous consensus and internal solidarity 80 moral compromise 82, 84 moral register 89 moral relativism 76–7 sexuality 82, 83, 85, 88 social deviance in 90 Frow, John 150n. 151, 154n. 45 Fry, Stephen 143n. 123

Index Fukuyama, Francis 68, 155n. 81 functionalism 116 Gamble, Andrew 134nn. 29–30, 32, 149n. 128 Gemeinschaft 41, 44, 109 Genette, Gérard 9, 137n. 5, 137n. 6–8 Geoghegan, Tom 144nn. 6–7 George, Elizabeth 171n. 27 Giddens, Anthony 114, 133n. 20, 167nn. 49–52 Giddings, Robert 135n. 67, 136n. 81 Gillette, William 137n. 9 Gilroy, Paul 146n. 39 Golden Pince-Nez, The 36, 42 Gorak, Jan 138n. 31 Gordon, Ian 62, 151n. 16, 152n. 27 Graham, Caroline 3, 16, 109, 113, 122, 166nn. 10–15, 17–29, 31–42, 167nn. 43–6, 169n. 105 see also Midsomer Murders Granada series 12, 26, 125 and adaptations 27–31, 33–9 canonicity and 22–3 Granada Television 23 see also Granada series Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations 25 Great Expectations 2 Great Train Robbery 51 Greek Interpreter, The 24, 26, 38 Green, E H H 157n. 17 Gregoriou, Christiana 145n. 12 Guillén, Claudio 160n. 20 guilt 33, 37, 58, 80, 85, 108, 125, 126, 127, 128 Haining, Peter 27, 139n. 51, 141n. 86 Hale, Chris 134n. 24, 142n. 111 Hall, Stuart 4, 134nn. 26–8, 142n. 118, 159n. 91 Hammond, Elizabeth 151n. 11 Hard Frost 83–4, 88, 90 Hardwick, Michael 26, 141n. 77 Hardwicke, Edward 27, 36, 139n. 47 Harris, Richard 159nn. 75–7, 80–1 Harrison, Michael 136n. 4

193

Hart, Anne 48, 148n. 79 Harty, Kevin J 161n. 31, 164n. 120 Harward, Tamsen 40 Hawkesworth, John 23 Haydock, Nickolas 95, 160n. 8, 161n. 26 Hayes, Helen 53 Heffernan, Richard 167n. 61, 168n. 83 Held in Trust 83 Heritage cinema 1 heritage television 2 Hertel, Ralf 146n. 29 Hickson, Joan 13 Hidden Depths 123 Higson, Andrew 25, 132nn. 8, 10, 12, 140nn. 61, 70, 141n. 79, 151n. 12 Hilbert, Richard A 146n. 49, 157nn. 21–2, 30–1, 158n. 52–3, 63 Hill, Reginald 3, 129 Hilmes, Michelle 143n. 122 ‘His Last Bow’ 42 Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England see English Heritage Holmes, Sherlock 12, 19 see also individual entries Holub, Robert C 134n. 46 Holy Thief, The 102, 106 Hopkins, Nick 154nn. 57–8, 155n. 80 Horowitz, Anthony 170n. 108 Hound of the Baskervilles, The 18, 30, 137n. 16 House Calls 88–9 Housman, A E 65, 154n. 44 Houston, Glyn 103 Howards End 2 Hudson, Barbara 141n. 95, 142n. 96 human sociability 51 Hutcheon, Linda 9, 135nn. 65, 69–71, 136nn. 78–9 Hutton, Will 118, 168n. 82 hyperreal 52 innocence 24, 64, 80, 94, 108 legal 71 presumption of 72 Inspector Lynley Mysteries, The 129

194

Index

Inspector Morse 14, 29, 33, 61, 125, 126–7 absence of social process in 63–4 criminal motivations in 70–1 history-as-process, denial of 72–3 middle-class sensibilities in 67 nostalgia and 61–2, 63, 69, 73 sexuality in 64–7, 69–70 social issues treatment in 71–2 static history in 69 as TV brand 62–3 Irving, Henry 20 ITV 32, 63, 103 ITV1 40, 109, 129 Jacobi, Derek 103, 160n. 4 Jacques, Martin 141n. 73 James, P D 3 Jancovich, Mark 152n. 21 Jason, David 156n. 3 Jauss, Hans Robert 134nn. 41–2 Jean de Florette 1 Jensen, Jens F 135n. 47 Jermyn, Deborah 142n. 112 Jewel in the Crown, The 2 Johnsen, Rosemary Erickson 160nn. 1–2 Johnson, David 138n. 30 Joseph, Keith 157n. 16 Jowell, Tessa 138n. 27 Judgement Day 123 justice 24, 61, 73, 96 ad hoc 82 criminal 4, 28, 30, 38 natural 28–9, 31, 36–8 state 35 Kavanagh, Dennis 31, 142n. 116 Kayman, Martin A 30, 142n. 104 Kelley, Gordon E 136n. 3, 137n. 13, 139n. 37, 140n. 69 Kellner, Douglas 99, 163n. 71 Kendall, Roe 160n. 4 Killing Frost, A 84 Killings at Badger’s Drift, The 108, 109, 115, 117, 120 Knight, Stephen 32, 49, 118, 143n. 126, 146n. 28, 148n. 86, 168n. 78, 169n. 97, 171n. 11 knowable community 94

La Plante, Lynda 127 Landy, Marcia 165n. 129 Langen, Inga 149n. 121 Lansbury, Angela 52 Larsen, Viggo 137n. 10 Last Bus to Woodstock 64, 65, 69 Last Enemy, The 70 Last Seen Wearing 66, 70 Last Vampyre, The 34, 38 Le Fanu, Sheridan 35 Lee, Christopher 21 Leitch, Thomas 9, 135n. 56, 66, 136n. 85 Leon, Kris De 171n. 24 Leonard, Bill 153n. 30, 155n. 82 Leper of St Giles, The 100 Lev, Peter 136n. 73 Lewis 129 Lewis, Margaret 160nn. 18–19, 161nn. 23, n. 33, 162n. 44, 164n. 118 liberalism 4, 31, 107, 119 Light, Alison 41, 145n. 12 literature on screen 12 Lovallo, Len 52, 145nn. 14, 15, 148nn. 76, 93–4, 149nn. 119, 123 Lowenthal, David 103, 140n. 63, 151n. 15, 156nn. 107–9, 164nn. 100–1 Lynch, Philip 38, 134n. 25, 144n. 156 Lyons, James 152n. 21 McAllister, Pam 24, 139n. 52, 141n. 76 McCann, Sean 31, 142nn. 114, 117 McDermid, Val 128 Macdonald, Andrew F 165n. 130 Macdonald, Gina 165n. 130 McFarlane, Brian 8, 135n. 60, 72 McGinley, E W 138n. 24 McKee, Alan 11, 136nn. 82–3 McLean, Gareth 171n. 13 McLuskie, Peter 152n. 22 Madoc, Philip 103, 164n. 108 Major, John 99, 162n. 69 Makinen, Merja 41, 145n. 12 Manners, Terry 144n. 149 Mansfield Park 2 Man with the Twisted Lip, The 29 Manzoor, Sarfraz 148n. 81 Marquand, David 169n. 90

Index Marriner, Cosima 144nn. 1–2 Marsh, Ngaio 3 Martell, Luke 134nn. 35–7, 162n. 63, 167n. 55 Martin Chuzzlewit 2 Massey, Raymond 20 Master Blackmailer, The 33, 38 Mattson, Michelle 133n. 15 Maurice 2 Mazarin Stone, The 37 Medievalism 16, 95, 99–100, 103 medium-specificity 6, 10 Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, The 36 Mentalist, The 128 Merton, Robert 80, 82, 157n. 34, 158n. 54, 159nn. 87–9 Messiah 128 Metallinos, Nikos 135n. 47 Michaels, Norman 137n. 15 Middle Ages 93, 95, 101 Middlemarch 2 Midsomer Murders and television adaptations 16, 17, 125, 127 aestheticization 119–23 carnivalesque 123 English identity 108–12, 120 escape from social and political tensions 119 ethnic coherence 110 fictional social framework 116 national-historical inheritance 110 sexual exploitation 121 social disintegration 111 social order 117–18 structuration 115 urban Thatcherite identity 113 violence 120 Millie, Andrew 153nn. 32, 34 Mill on the Floss, The 2 Milverton, Charles Augustus 33–4 Miners’ Strike (1984–5) 61 Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, The 43, 48–9, 51, 53, 56, 58 Miss Marple novels and television adaptations 13, 54–9, 125, 126 see also Englishness Mitchell, Gladys 3 modern femininity 48

195

modernity 13, 48, 55, 98–9, 103, 107, 111, 113 self-awareness of 99 Mohan, John 150n. 130 Monk’s Hood 101, 104 Montrose, Louis A 134n. 38 Moody, Susan 166n. 5 Mooney, Gerry 166n. 16 moral authority 86 moral confusion 80 moral consensus 76, 89, 90, 94 moral culpability 57 moral groundlessness 82 moral judgement 28, 86 moral nihilism 15 moral propriety 23 moral register 89 moral relativism 76–7, 84 moral truth 27 Morbid Taste for Bones, A 95–6, 101, 104 Morgan, Janet 148nn. 80, 94–5 Morrison, Wayne 156nn. 5–6 Morrissey, Lee 138n. 34 motivation 13, 48, 71, 79, 85, 103, 106, 115, 116 criminal 70, 76, 126 personal 90 Mourlet, Michael 170n. 119 Moving Finger, The 45, 55, 57 Munt, Sally R 150n. 139 Murder at the Vicarage 44–5, 57–8 Murder by Decree 21 Murder is Announced, A 43, 47 Murder with Mirrors 53 Murji, Karim 145nn. 24–5 Musgrave Ritual, The 28 Naremore, James 11, 136n. 80 national chauvinism 25 national consciousness 42, 44 national culture 12, 14, 21, 42, 53, 57, 63, 75, 130, 132n. 7 in crisis 50–1 homogeneous 44 idealized 125 predictable 47 National Heritage Acts (1980, 1983) 2, 54, 60

196

Index

National Heritage Memorial Fund 60 national-historical inheritance 110 national identity 3, 4, 13–14, 53, 104–5 Britishness and 54 coherent 42, 43, 46 Granada Holmes adaptation and 24, 25 like-mindedness and 47 political-public discourse on 54 quasi- postmodern critique of 49 transcending history 61 national inheritance 103 national self-confidence 25, 42 Nationality Act (1981) 54 natural justice and legal system 28–9, 31, 36–8 Naval Treaty, The 24 NCIS 128 Negrine, Ralph M 151n. 17 Nemesis 52, 58 neo-liberalism 4 Nettles, John 118, 168nn. 75, 77, 169n. 96 New Britain: My Vision of a Young Country 99 New Labour 3–4, 5, 16, 99, 115–16, 118–19, 124, 162n. 65, 167n. 55, 167–8n. 61 new populism 4 New Right 4 Newburn, Tim 153n. 31 Newman, Channa 135n. 63 Nielsen Media Research 171n. 23 Nietzsche, Friedrich 155n. 84–7 Night Frost 81–3, 88 ‘Noble Bachelor, The’ 35 Nollen, Scott Allen 23, 138n. 26, 139n. 46, 140n. 55, 141n. 81 nonconformity 17 normalizing of sexuality 64 Norrie, Alan 134n. 33 Norwood, Ellie 137n. 13, 139n. 47 nostalgia 2, 3, 14, 16, 47, 50, 59, 60, 125 Englishness and 52, 53, 55, 67 of homesickness 41 and Inspector Morse 61–2, 63, 69, 73 and pastiche 26 Nothing to Hide 86, 87

Not with Kindness 88 Novels into Film 6 Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation 8 Oliver Twist 2 One Corpse Too Many 97, 100 Orchis Fatalis 123 organic Toryism 4 Orwell, George 122, 170nn. 110–11 Otherness 43, 61, 68, 101, 107 criminal 3, 4, 14, 42 historical 102 hostility towards 114 medieval 103 Our Mutual Friend 2 Paget, Sidney 24 palimpsestuousness 19–20, 24, 118 cultural 9, 107 and intertextuality 10 Pargeter, Edith 161n. 23 Parrill, Sue 132nn. 4, 11 Parsons, Talcott 115, 156n. 4, 167nn. 47, 56, 168nn. 63–7 Partner, Nancy F 160n. 13, 163nn. 73, 77 Passage to India, A 2 passion 86, 89 crime of 37, 70 pastiche 13, 26, 34, 35, 38 fiction market 19, 21 Patterson, Lee 161n. 32 Pauly, Thomas H 145n. 22 Payne, David S 22, 139n. 35, 141n. 78 Peach, Linden 145n. 12, 145n. 18 Peacock Report (1986) 32 Pearl of Death, The 18 Penman, Sharon Kay 163n. 78 Penny for the Guy 88 period adaptations, on British television 2 Peters, Ellis 15, 16, 160nn. 14–17, 161nn. 30, 35–41, 162nn. 42–3, 45–57, 163nn. 79–82, 85, 89–90, 94, 164nn. 107, 111–17, 122–3 see also Cadfael novels and television adaptations

Index Pfister, Manfred 146n. 29 Pickwick Papers 2 Pilgrim of Hate, The 97–8, 102, 106 piquerism 83, 88 Plain, Gill 35, 41, 52, 143n. 140, 145n. 12, 149n. 116, 170n. 4 Plummer, Christopher 21 Pocketful of Rye, A 57 Poirot 129 Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) (1984) 31, 38 police procedural 133n. 13, 156n. 1, 171n. 25 political allegory 96 political disinterestedness 119 political rhetoric 5, 13, 17, 18, 38, 57, 61, 77, 98, 115, 119 Pope, Rob 6, 134nn. 44–5 popular-cultural Holmesian canon 21–2 popularity 133n. 18 power 31, 35, 70, 77, 93, 94, 102, 103, 126, 129 authoring 8 cohering 127, 128 enduring 19 regulative 82 seductive 115 transformative 26 presentism 93 Pride and Prejudice 2 Prideaux, Simon 116, 167nn. 48, 57–8, 168nn. 62, 81 Priestley, J B 46, 147n. 62 Prime Suspect 127–8 Priory School, The 28 Pryce, Jonathan 21 Puritanism 23 Putnam, Robert D 168n. 69 Radio 4 75, 103 Radio Times 32 Rathbone, Basil 20, 23 Raven in the Foregate, The 101–2 Rawnsley, Andrew 119, 162n. 64, 169nn. 91–4 Red Circle, The 36

197

Reicher, Stephen 154nn. 57–8, 155n. 80 Reiner, Robert 26, 132n. 13, 140nn. 71, 72, 156n. 1, 165n. 1 relational reading 19 Remorseful Day, The 14 Rendell, Ruth 3 Rennison, Nick 137n. 4 retreatism 80, 90 Return of Sherlock Holmes, The 27 Reynolds, Peter 1, 132nn. 1–3, 135n. 59 rhetoric 26 of escape 28, 30, 119, 120, 125 political 5, 13, 17, 18, 38, 57, 61, 77, 98, 115, 119 Richardson, Ian 137n. 17 Riddle of the Third Mile, The 65 Riley, Dick 24, 139n. 52, 141n. 76 Rock, Paul 156n. 7–8 Rogers, Charles 19 Room with a View, A 2 Rosemary and Thyme 129 Rose Rent, The 106 Rowland, Susan 41, 49, 145n. 12, 146nn. 33, 38, 148n. 90 Russell, Christopher 159n. 78 Ruthford, Margaret 52 Sacks, Jonathan 138n. 28 ‘Sacred Writings’ 21 Said, Edward 25, 138n. 29, 140n. 62 St Peter’s Fair 101 Samuel, Raphael 27, 141nn. 82–4 sanctioned narratives 22 Sanctuary Sparrow, The 96–7, 100, 105 Sanders, Dennis 52, 145n. 14, 148nn. 76, 93–4, 149nn. 119, 123 Sanders, Julie 135nn. 61–2, 64 Sayers, Dorothy L 3, 44, 146n. 31 Scandal in Bohemia, A 24 scientific discourse, as mythology 129 Second Stain, The 27 Secrets and Spies 123 Selby, Keith 135n. 67 self 16, 103 best 22 national 27 see also individual entries

198

Index

self-awareness 99 self-confidence 25, 42 self-consciousness 21, 42, 52, 53, 99, 108, 126, 167n. 59 self-defence 84 self-esteem 16, 59, 103 self-identification 61 self-image 98, 107 self-interest 70, 95, 96, 118 self-preservation 15, 48, 70 Seton-Watson, Hugh 42, 145n. 20 sexual chauvinism 113 sexuality 35, 64–7, 69–70, 82, 83, 85, 88, 101, 113, 121 sexual prejudice 113 Shadowlands 36 Shankardass, Rani Dhavan 134n. 31, 157nn. 32–3 Shaw, Marion 145n. 12, 146n. 36, 148n. 77, 150nn. 132–4, 144 Sheehy Report 73, 156n. 105 Sheen, Erica 136n. 81 Sherlock Holmes (1894) 19 Sherlock Holmes (2009) 21 Sherlock Holmes and the Leading Lady 21 Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon 20 Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror 20 Shropshire Lad, A 154n. 44 Sign of Four, The 29 Silas Marner 2 Silberston, Jeremy 169n. 105, 170n. 108 Silent Witness 128, 129 Silent World of Nicholas Quinn, The 65, 66, 67 Silver Blaze 30 Silverstone, Roger 133n. 16, 164n. 102, 170n. 5 Simons, John 165n. 131 Six Napoleons, The 25, 28, 36, 42 Skrimshire, Stefan 169nn. 87–9 Sleeping Murder 55, 57 Smallwood, Stephen 103, 164n. 110 Smith, Ken 146n. 40 Sobchack, Vivian C 123, 170n. 117 social action 115 social capital 110, 116

social change 48–9 social collapse 89 social consent 118 social context 3, 12, 15, 121, 124 social control 115 social crime 30 social deviance 45, 90 social disintegration 4, 52, 75, 91, 111 social fragmentation 17, 109 social harmony 109 social morality 77 social reality 5, 14, 63, 69, 90, 112, 120, 122 social ties 114 social value-complex 82 sociopathy 57 solidarity 42, 44, 45, 76, 80 Sparks, Richard 70, 130, 133n. 21, 155n. 93, 168n. 71, 171nn. 29–30 ‘Speckled Band, The’ 35, 42 Stam, Robert 139n. 39, 165n. 128 Stashower, Daniel 137n. 9 state and natural law, tensions between see natural justice Stein, Robert 164n. 104–5 Steinbrunner, Chris 137n. 15 Stevens, Dennis 171n. 21 Stewart, Kathleen 150n. 140, 152n. 25, 153n. 29 Stewart, Susan 149n. 122 Stoker, Bram 35 Strand Magazine, The 23, 24 Stranger in the House 86, 87 Strangler’s Wood 123 Straw Woman, The 123 Strohm, Paul 103, 164n. 106 structuration 115 Study in Scarlet, A 25, 42 subversiveness 109 supernaturalism 34–5 ‘Sussex Vampire, The’ 34 Symons, Julian 19, 136n. 2, 138n. 23, 140nn. 65–6, 144n. 146, 145n. 10, 147nn. 64, 70, 166n. 4 sympathy 29, 34, 37, 57, 58, 85, 86, 104

Index Tainted Fruit 123 Talbot, Rob 160nn. 6–7 Tale of Two Cities, A 2 Tale of Two Hamlets, A 123 Talking to the Dead 123 taxonomies 11 Taylor, Baz 169n. 106, 170n. 109 textual polyphony 125 textual intervention 6 Thatcher, Margaret 15, 26, 53, 63, 77, 133n. 22 141nn. 74–5, 80, 149n. 125, 150n. 145, 151nn. 8–10, 152–3n. 28, 157nn. 12–15, 162nn. 59–60 Thatcherism 3, 4, 38, 77, 98, 109, 116, 118 Thaw, John 29 Theory of Adaptation, A 9 They Do It With Mirrors 47, 56 Thiel, Carl William 138n. 24 Thomas, Lyn 64, 153nn. 39–41, 154n. 43 Thorne, Stephen 160n. 4 Three Days of Frost 75 Three Gables, The 36 ‘Three Garidebs, The’ 37 tolerance 15, 28, 29, 31, 38, 58, 83 Tönnies, Ferdinand 41, 44, 145n. 16, 166nn. 8–9 Touch of Frost, A 15, 75, 80–1, 85–6, 87, 125, 127 Toulmin, Stephen 162nn. 61, 68 transvesticism 121 Tree, Beerbohm 20 Trembley, Elizabeth A 139nn. 38, 45 Trentmann, Frank 147n. 59 Treville, Georges 137n. 10 Trial and Retribution 128 trust 89, 116 Tull, Patrick 160n. 4 Turner, Bryn 154n. 45 unconventionality 89 Under the Clock (1893) 19 Ungar, Sanford J 150n. 129, 156n. 11 United States 2, 25, 128 urban Thatcherite identity 113

199

Valley of Fear, The 25 values 7, 26, 31, 61, 82, 93, 98, 109, 110, 129, 130 continuity of 27 cultural 22, 90 established 27, 77, 90 human 97 moral 23 old 48, 71 overarching 61, 89, 108 shared 45, 52, 85, 94, 95, 111 universal 16 vampirism 35 Vanacker, Sabine 145n. 12, 146n. 36, 148n. 77, 150nn. 132–4, 144 Vaneigem, Raoul 47, 147n. 71, 172n. 35 Victor, Jeffrey S 146n. 27 ‘Victorian Values’ 27, 38 Vincendeau, Ginette 132nn. 5–7 Virgin in the Ice, The 101 virtual physicality 49 voluntaristic theory of action 116 Waking the Dead 128, 129 Walklate, Sandra 142n. 115 Ward, Johanna 160n. 4 Watkinson, Douglas 169n. 106, 170n. 109 Watson, Colin 147n. 72 Watson, Robert 135n. 47 Watson, Steve 107, 160n. 9, 165nn. 133–5 Way Through the Woods, The 68, 73 Weisl, Angela Jane 161n. 29 Weller, Philip 138n. 24 Wells, Matt 144n. 5 Welsh, James M 136n. 73 Welsh devolution 164n. 119 Wench is Dead, The 72 Wensley, Chris 135n. 67 Wheatley, Alan 20 Whelehan, Imelda 136n. 84 Whiteman, Robin 160nn. 5–7 whodunit 165n. 1, 171n. 25 Widows and Orphans 88 Wilder, James 28 Williams, Raymond 94, 160n. 21

200 Willingale, Betty 119, 169n. 95 Wilmer, Douglas 20 Wingfield, R D 3, 15, 75, 76, 85, 156nn. 2, 9–10, 157nn. 18–19, 23, 25–9, 158nn. 35, 37, 40–7, 49–51, 55–62, 64–5, 67, 159nn. 68–72 Winter Frost 84–5 Wire in the Blood 128 Wison, Edgar 143n. 119 Wisteria Lodge 30, 38 Without a Clue 21 Without a Trace 128

Index Wollen, Tana 145n. 17 Woman in White, The 2 Wontner, Arthur 20 Workman, Leslie 161n. 28 Worpole, Ken 168n. 70, 171n. 7 Wright, Patrick 60, 150nn. 1, 3, 151n. 6, 155nn. 77–9, 162nn. 66–7 Written in Blood 111, 113, 121 Wyndham-Davies, June 27 Wyngarde, Peter 36 York, R A 50, 149n. 105