Crime Uncovered: Private Investigator [1 ed.] 9781783205240, 9781783205233

Citation preview

crime uncovered series

Editors Alistair Rolls Rachel Franks

private investigator private investigator investigator

p r i vat e i n v e st i gat o r

intellect Bristol, UK / Chicago, USA

First published in the UK in 2016 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK First published in the USA in 2016 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA Copyright © 2016 Intellect Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Series: Crime Uncovered Series ISSN: 2056-9629 (Print), 2056-9637 (Online) Series Editors: Tim Mitchell and Gabriel Solomons Copy-editing: Emma Rhys Cover Design: Gabriel Solomons Layout Design and Typesetting: Emily Dann Production Manager: Tim Mitchell

ISBN: 978-1-78320-523-3 ePDF: 978-1-78320-524-0 ePUB: 978-1-78320-633-9 Printed & bound by Bell & Bain, UK.

p r i vat e i n v e st i gat o r edited by Alistair Rolls & Rachel Franks

intellect Bristol, UK / Chicago, USA

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Contents

7

A C K NO W L E D GE M ENTS

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E D ITORS ’ INTRO D U C TION

21

C ASE ST U D IES

139

INTERROGATION s

159

REPORTS

184

C ONTRI B U TOR B IOGRAP H IES 5

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Ack n o wl e d g e m e n t s This volume is one of several research outcomes coordinated by ‘Detective Fiction on the Move’, a strategic network that is generously supported by the Faculty of Education and Arts, University of Newcastle, Australia; members of the network, in the present volume, include Jean Anderson, Rachel Franks, Jesper Gulddal, Stephen Knight, Alistair Rolls and Clara Sitbon. The editors are also grateful to the State Library of New South Wales for providing support for the project and for facilitating access to collection materials. Particular thanks are given to the NSW State Librarian and Chief Executive, Alex Byrne and the Mitchell Librarian, Richard Neville.

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E D ITORS ’ INTRO D U C TIO N Alistair Rolls and Rachel Franks Rereading Investigation and Re(-)Presenting Private Investigators

In his opening lecture at an Italian crime fiction conference Why Crime Fiction Matters in Melbourne in 2014 Stephen Knight reflected on the trajectory of scholarship in the field, which has gradually moved away from the broad-brush-stroke surveys of the genre towards more theoretically sophisticated studies and, more generally, a higher level of academic engagement to mirror crime’s location in the literary marketplace. The move, he concluded, has been away from connoisseurship towards scholarship. When Intellect commissioned us to edit a collection of essays on the private investigator, it struck us immediately that we should need to manoeuvre ourselves strategically in this light, to place ourselves at a point somewhere on this line with connoisseurship at one end and scholarship at the other. Our brief was to assemble academics in the field (scholars) who could present the private investigator in various settings and guises, and from varied perspectives, but who would, in so doing, produce work accessible for an educated but more generalist audience (connoisseurs, in other words). Such moves are not without risks, foremost among which is, as we discussed with Knight following his presentation, an eddying effect: greater representation and normalization of critical reflection among an increasingly savvy crime fiction readership can lead, while simultaneously standing in opposition to, a kind of academic window-dressing, a dilution of academic register. The risk, in other words, is that the scholar should become the new connoisseur. In his most recent book, Secrets of Crime Fiction Classics (2015), Knight goes a step further towards remedying this situation; or, perhaps, as it seems to us, he deliberately inoculates himself against the potentially negative side-effects of broader public outreach by tackling head-on a style of criticism that has all the appearances of the broadbrush-stroke approach but which is always already embedded, self-consciously, in the secondary literature. Knight is quite clear on this: he embarks upon a study of what he styles ‘21 enduring stories’ in his capacity, and only because he can situate himself au-

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Crime Uncovered: Private Investigator

thoritatively, as ‘a scholar and critic of the genre [and] a cultural historian of criminography’ (2015: 1). The approach that he adopts to bridge the gap while avoiding compromise is a carefully contextualized use of (and simultaneously an apologia for) synopsis. His aim, which appears simple, but is so in appearance only, is to ‘pay attention to the voices of the texts themselves’ (Knight 2015: 4). For, and this has also been at the heart of our own work in recent years, it is, paradoxically, the voice of the text that is typically erased from crime fiction scholarship with its seemingly obligatory adherence to a set of rules every bit as binding as those set out by S. S. Van Dine (in Haycraft 1928 [1947]: 189–93). And unlike the novels that they study, scholarly texts have tended to be unable to break free of such stricture; crime fiction, for its part, flourishes under constraint, flouting rules and thumbing red herrings at editorial, authorial and readerly control. Interestingly, when discussing his choice to divide Secrets of Crime Fiction Classics into sections, Knight seems to suggest a certain resistance on the part of his chosen classics, almost as if the texts have begun to speak themselves through their failure to conform neatly to his three categories – Beginnings, Mainstream and Diversity. In particular, the latter two categories prove difficult to define. For scholars like Lee Horsley this is not so surprising. As she notes, there is an increasing tendency in critical crime fiction discourse to undermine the very notion of the mainstream, and perhaps especially as such categorization pertains to the type of enduring classic presented by Knight; to use her words, it seems that ‘the charge of conservatism is based on a misapprehension’ (Horsley 2005: 19). Furthermore, the search for truth that guides – or at least appears to guide – our PIs is not necessarily what motivates the readers of crime fiction. After all, the great reveal à la Hercule Poirot only occupies a few pages of a crime novel; the investigation that precedes it and on which it is predicated cannot be ‘negated’ by it, Horsley notes (2005: 19), consciously using a term associated with Franco Moretti. When a text speaks to us, therefore, it speaks itself both in the sense of speaking of itself as text (revealing its own textness, in other words, of which the revelation of truth is just one manifestation) and of speaking itself as a multiplicity of meanings (revealing in this way its textuality, which is to say, its tendency to intend beyond its own ostensible parameters, and, in our specific case here, beyond the limits of the detective’s chosen solution).1 In this light, which is to say, that of a theory of text informed by post-structuralism and deconstruction, to allow text to speak is to risk its escaping detectival and critical control; this tendency of the crime fiction classic to eschew its own truth, or, as Horsley suggests, to ‘disrupt’ (2005: 19), is another reason for crime fiction’s popular appeal. If we wish to go one step further here, it is by suggesting that crime fiction is the classic, or ideal, embodiment of deconstructionist theory by virtue of its reflexive staging of the process of meaning-making, by actualizing one convincing reading (the solution) from among any number of virtual meanings (red herrings). If diversity and mainstream are, as Knight (2015) notes, difficult to tease apart, it is precisely because the text’s natural intention towards otherness speaks, always already, to

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Editors’ Introduction

an inner diversity. The revelation of detectival ‘truth’ is an incentive to reread, then, to pursue other meanings, other truths. Pierre Bayard’s famous studies of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (Agatha Christie, 1926), The Hound of the Baskervilles (Arthur Conan Doyle, 1902) and indeed Hamlet (William Shakespeare, c. 1602) have all taken a psychoanalytic approach, predicated on treating the written words on the page as paranoid delirium or, at least, a veneer beneath which meanings are to be decoded or read in reverse; the results have shocked audiences, who are still, despite the theories of text mentioned above, unused to having the narrative truths of their favourite detectives challenged (which is, of course, why crime fiction is, perversely, so ideally suited to demonstrating the deconstruction of truth). Indeed, even Bayard himself appears to have been shocked by his own revelations. His initial hypothesis, that ‘Truth’ cannot be monolithic or metaphysical but presents itself instead in the form of much more subjective ‘truths’, is so well proven by the end of his essay Qui a tué Roger Ackroyd?/Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? (1998) that Bayard’s own preferred guilty party effectively replaces Dr Sheppard. Clearly, as noted by Jesper Gulddal and Alistair Rolls (2015), there is something ironic about the emergence of a new Truth from a reread founded on the deconstruction of textual truth itself. After all, when Poirot questions whether Flora Ackroyd really wishes to know ‘all the truth’ (Christie 2002 [1926]: 104), a term which can be mapped, logically enough, onto the French expression that Bayard latches onto – ‘toute la vérité’ – it is perhaps not simply an innocent Frenchification of our more familiar Anglo-Saxon phrasing ‘the whole truth’, with its conjuring of the inviolable, the essential, the objective; it speaks perhaps, instead, to a whole spectrum of truth, a world of potential truth-production. And Dr Sheppard’s own slips of the tongue, including his repeated use of the figure of speech ‘to tell the truth’ (Christie 2002 [1926]: 9, 10), are such that it is (fundamentally) unclear whether his narrative is written as part of his confession or whether his confession is written on the basis of his narrative. Is he lying by omission, to use Bayard’s term, in order to avert suspicion from his own guilt or to exonerate someone else? Or is he simply disrupting truth itself? After all, Poirot is introduced, by Sheppard, in the act of hurling vegetable marrows around the neighbourhood, a violent (if fantastically rural) act of disruption as opposed to the signature of a man whose role is supposedly to restore order to the fractured idyll.2 Critical rereadings of the type offered by Bayard, which effectively rewrite the story, attest to our readerly desire to produce meaning, to have a text speak, uniquely, to us in spite but also because of its potential for diversity. The very act of textual deconstruction speaks, ultimately, to the existence of meaning, not its dissolution in disruption. In this way, the detective figures our own (new) quest for order. Another recent type of rereading, more creative than critical this time (even if Bayard’s work can be seen to bridge the gap between the two, or at least to trouble the waters) speaks to a kind of retroactive diversification of the traditional. We are thinking

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Crime Uncovered: Private Investigator

here of Anthony Horowitz’s Sherlock Holmes novels The House of Silk (2011) and Moriarty (2014). In the first, a final Holmes case is recorded by an ageing Watson and placed for safekeeping until such time in the future (our reading present) as its publication will not shock the public; in the second, Holmes is a spectral figure as we are plunged into a case that unfurls immediately after the detective’s apparent fall to his death and in whose unfurling doubt is cast on Holmes’s death (and/or survival) as well as on the ‘true identity’ of the other characters. Between them Horowitz’s novels engage subtly with Holmes scholarship, in particular Bayard’s 2008 study of The Hound of the Baskervilles, in which he posits that Arthur Conan Doyle only reluctantly brings Holmes back from the dead after the incident at the Reichenbach Falls because of public outrage at the end of the Holmes stories. According to Bayard, Doyle’s solution is to have his detective come back and succeed in a case while at the same time failing. What Horowitz does is to bring Holmes back in death (in his first text) and to mix detectival success and failure with doubt over his demise (in the second). For our purposes, Horowitz’s novels highlight various aspects of crime fiction’s allegorical potential and its capacity to speak across historical (and other) boundaries. Where in Secrets of Crime Fiction Classics Knight has to decide whether Doyle’s famous detective is better categorized as a pioneer (in his Beginnings section) or as part of the Mainstream, in the framework of the present volume it is the status of Sherlock Holmes himself, as a ‘consulting detective’, that is seen to be problematic. As an independently wealthy individual who nonetheless advertises his services for a fee and also works with the official police force, Holmes is the very incarnation of the conundrum set by Intellect when commissioning this new series of crime fiction studies. For the purposes of this book, with its focus on private investigators, it was decided that the remuneration and official status of the protagonist would both need to be taken into account in the selection of our chapters: if not remunerated, he or she would be a ‘sleuth’; if part of the official forces of law and order, he or she would be a ‘detective’. Since Holmes is problematic in both regards, we are delighted to count him among our private investigators – our aim, after all, is to inform readers but also to problematize what may all too easily be (mis)construed as a well-defined genre. In A Study in Pink (2010), the first episode of the BBC television series Sherlock (2010–ongoing), written by Steven Moffat and directed by Paul McGuigan, this is satirized when Dr Watson (Martin Freeman) accepts a payment on Holmes’s (Benedict Cumberbatch) behalf when the latter is proving himself particularly disobliging. (Incidentally, Poirot is difficult to pin down, too: in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd he refuses payment [Christie 2002 (1926): 103], as he is voluntarily emerging from retirement to free himself from the simplicity of life in the English cottage garden, but admits that he is genuinely interested in money.) In Horowitz’s novels, it is Holmes’s status as living or dead, present or absent, detecting or being detected that comes to the fore, running in parallel to the investigations that constitute the major part of each diegesis proper. Coupled with Horowitz’s own reflex-

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Editors’ Introduction

ive musing on his role as the official new voice of the Holmes stories (including his own ‘ten rules’ of how to remain faithful to Doyle’s esprit, something that would doubtless have appealed to the spiritualist in that author), this provides an interesting critical edge to The House of Silk and Moriarty. Horowitz’s sixth rule (2014 [2011]: 402) establishes the need for detailed research of the period, in order that the correct atmosphere and surroundings be set. This is, however, something that, as Knight notes (2015: 91), is selectively lacking from Doyle’s original Holmes stories. That the text reflects back onto the period in a way that the original tends not to do is itself suggestive of the ‘re’ in our rereading. The objectivity with which Horowitz represents Holmes’s world (as opposed to re-presenting it, or presenting it again) is consciously woven into the atmosphere as well as the narrative structure, which has Watson recalling the events belatedly and conferring them to a long-distant reading future. The symmetry of the Carstairs’ house, for example, is almost perfect, but not quite right: It was what I would have termed a villa, built in the classic Georgian style, white and perfectly square, with elegant windows placed symmetrically on either side of the front entrance. This symmetry extended to the trees, of which there were many fine specimens but which had been planted so that one side of the garden almost formed a mirror image of the other. And yet, at the very last moment it had all been spoiled by an Italian fountain which, though beautiful in itself […] had nonetheless been positioned slightly out of kilter. (Horowitz 2014 [2011]: 46) Watson’s reaction – to wish to replace the fountain ‘two or three yards to the left’ – recalls Poirot’s obsession with the symmetry of his moustache, a reminder of Horowitz’s interest in that other classic of the genre. But it is the foreignization here that introduces the Other. Although spatial, geographical and national displacement is to the fore in this example, chronological displacement, or disruption, is arguably more important. The criminal activity at the heart of the ‘House of Silk’ turns out to be tawdry; it also makes of this historical novel a rereading of the present: it is none other than a paedophile ring of considerable political influence, including prominent government ministers and, of course, members of the clergy. For readers at the time of its publication, The House of Silk offers an allegory of the present through an almost perfect mapping of the past. As such, it fits the model of what Knight terms the ‘postmodern crime novel’ (2015: 174) (his example is The Name of the Rose [Umberto Eco, 1983]). The clue it turns out was in the title, which Horowitz chose early because ‘[i]t just felt right’ (2014 [2011]: 398): the eponymous house is itself anagrammatically ‘slightly out of kilter’, introduced early on as being part of the Society for the Improvement of London’s Children, or, of course, SILC (which from the outset ‘just feels wrong’). This recalls the precise imprecision of

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Crime Uncovered: Private Investigator

the imperfect stitch in a Persian carpet; it also signals Horowitz’s self-awareness as a critical rereader of the classic crime novel. His task is, in this sense, not so far removed from our own: it is to move from the mimicry of connoisseurship towards the theoretical training of the scholar. Criticism, in other words, with a creative edge. In Moriarty, too, the history of crime fiction and some of the specific concerns of this study of the private investigator are present between the lines. Throughout, the reader suspects that the characters are not all they seem. Inspector Athelney Jones, the detective from Scotland Yard, takes the place of Sherlock Holmes after the latter’s apparent demise at the Reichenbach Falls, moving from former hapless foil to almost perfect replica of the original; and yet, throughout we wonder whether this is not another of Holmes’s legendary disguises. Moriarty’s spectral presence can be felt on the shoulders of the American Pinkerton agent, Frederick Chase, who teams up with Jones to track down an American criminal mastermind who has relocated to London to fill the power vacuum left by the parallel disappearance of Holmes’s nemesis. Horowitz’s position as pretender to the throne is clearly staged here, with good humour as well as well-judged reflexivity. As all turns out not to be as first appeared, we learn that Jones is Jones after all, even if he falls (apparently) fatally at the end of the novel, just as Holmes had (apparently), prediegetically, at its inception. Chase is not Chase, on the other hand; instead, he is Moriarty. And the spectral, coughing figure that has been tracking him? Holmes perhaps, but possibly the (co-)authorial presence of Conan Doyle himself whose own best efforts to kill off his detective are being repeatedly denied posthumously, just as they were in his lifetime. Christie’s presence is palpable, too, as proleptically signalled in the essay accompanying The House of Silk, where Horowitz lauds her capacity to find diversity in the constraints of a formulaic genre: ‘The narrator did it,’ he includes as proof of her genius. For, in addition to being a fake American, Chase is also the narrator of Moriarty (who ends up being the eponymous hero, and narrator, in disguise). Uncannily, though, as Rolls’s chapter in this book will show, transatlantic migration, especially of the feigned variety, is central to the development of twentieth-century crime fiction. James Hadley Chase and Peter Cheyney were key figures in the American crime wave that hit France in the years immediately following World War II, which in time saw the hardboiled thriller evolve into something recognizable as French noir. But like Horowitz’s Frederick Chase, James Hadley Chase was a pseudonym (for René Lodge Brabazon Raymond); and he was, of course, like Cheyney and Moriarty, English, not American. Our aim in the present volume is to bring something of Horowitz’s creative objectivity to our study of the private investigator. We shall present PIs in all their breadth of performance, using their ostensibly familiar figure as a guide through literary contexts with which the crime fiction connoisseur will hopefully be unfamiliar. We shall also represent them, however, allowing the context of their publication to inform our analysis of their appearance. Accordingly, we shall follow Knight’s lead and make use of the synopsis; but, like Knight too, we hope to surround the guiding figure of the ever-pres-

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Editors’ Introduction

ent PI, whose stereotypical image we can all call instantly to mind, with that extra guiding layer of scholarship. In this way, familiarity will be overlaid with newness, and texts will be reread in the varying senses of the term: reading again (for renewed pleasure), reading anew (for new pleasures), reading reflexively (in the light of theory and existing scholarship) and reading against the grain (in the bliss of the uncanny, or the defamiliarizing of the familiar). Indeed, in structuring this volume there were several, immediately obvious options, including a chronological approach, an evolutionary approach as well as a cartographic approach that would see the volume appear as a map plotting the PI’s progress around the world. Yet the idea of rereading investigation and re(-)presenting the private investigator persisted. As part of a project-meeting in Sydney, in late summer, we attended ‘Pulp Confidential’ at the State Library of New South Wales. This exhibition (7 February–10 May 2015), designed to showcase the extraordinary archive of Frank C. Johnson, an Australian pulp publisher of the 1940s and 1950s, served to supply an answer on the best way in which to present the curated chapters of this work. Stepping off a balmy and bright Macquarie Street into the Library, past an impressive façade of sandstone, through the historic vestibule and up to a dimly lit suite of galleries, via a grand marble staircase we – in just a few minutes – replicated the journey of the private investigator. In making our way from a major thoroughfare, busy with office workers, shoppers and tourists into galleries with walls resplendent with the imagery of sex and violence we, essentially, moved from the light of the sensation novel, through to the clue-puzzle into the darkness of the hardboiled and beyond. This journey took us, perversely, away from the street and the everyday into a repository of knowledge, an idealized bastion of history and literature. To access and unearth the layers of these ‘mean streets’ we had, in essence, to remove ourselves from those very streets and enter those refined settings more closely identified with the traditional ‘body in the library’ and the crime fiction – indeed the broader literary – canon. This volume attempts to interrogate, and to play with, these journeys in and out of the dark; to position the academy as guides to interpret and extrapolate these works, taking the public back to a space that they once owned but, in many ways, have forgotten. The chapters that follow demonstrate this evolution of environment for the private investigator from genteel settings to blackened crime scenes, and back again, with which we can only interact vicariously, belatedly. We begin with the, often neglected, role of the offsider – or sidekick – who is unpacked by Rachel Franks with a case study of Agatha Christie’s Captain Arthur Hastings, the banker, soldier, secretary and farmer who also helped to resolve some of fiction’s most complicated cases but was destined to live his life in the shadow of the great Belgian Detective, Hercule Poirot. In this chapter the descent from the ‘Golden Age’ clue-puzzle into the hardboiled and, briefly, the noir is outlined as an example of how offsiders may be subject to the parameters set by the private investigators they work with while resist-

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Crime Uncovered: Private Investigator

ing containment within the different generic declensions of crime fiction. The darkened streets are then explored through one of the world’s most famous fictional private investigators, as Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade is critically examined by Jesper Gulddal. Here the reader is presented with different constructions of darkness – that found within the iconic back alleys of these stories and that which is articulated through a masculine narrative. These shadows are revealed through the relationships that Spade constructs against a backdrop of how the hardboiled serves to mock the conventions of the clue-puzzle while simultaneously highlighting the obvious failings of society in the United States between World Wars I and II. Carolyn Beasley similarly explores Lew Archer, created by Ross McDonald. The darkness here is easier to discern. Archer is not a man that can be labelled as Other, a fictional construction to exemplify a national mood at a particular point in time. The darkness is more tangible, as there is a realism to these shadows – a litany of family secrets, including the private investigator’s own secrets – that could very easily be ours to try and hide. Society is there, too, ready to superimpose a layer of anxiety through systematic revelations of local social decay or the aftermath of war. These issues are acknowledged, through McDonald’s novels, in the desire to seek a just world as well as a merciful one. Lucy Andrew next looks at fiction and format in her review of Veronica Mars, an important figure within the corpus of private investigators, as well as an icon of the small screen and a positive role model for young women. Importantly, this character is one who, as outlined in Andrew’s chapter, actually grows up, thus troubling traditional boundaries of the young female detective as a coming-of-age story and re-constructing this apparently familiar character type. In this way, Veronica Mars is removed from a generic high school and into the world of the noir private investigator. Ideas of translation and adaptation are then investigated by Alistair Rolls, who looks at some of the complexities of partnerships within crime fiction through Carter Brown’s Mavis Seidlitz. The idea of PIs working with partners is an aspect of the genre that is often ignored in favour of the stereotypical tough man wearing a coat and hat, smelling of whisky, the loner making his way through darkened streets to solve cases that are just as dark. Here, the characters are – in their own way – just as tough, the smell of alcohol just as apparent, but there is something significant that differentiates these works from the (mythical) norm. This chapter shows a sense of camaraderie and, more importantly, genuine affection for a professional partner that is rarely seen. In this world cases are solved in the metaphorical as well as the physical dark. Clara Sitbon remains on the continent as she explores the Frenchification of Dave Fenner. In this chapter it is shown how the private investigator can evolve not only across genres, or individual novels, but within a series and even within a single novel, as demonstrated here in the case of James Hadley Chase’s No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1939), which has been rewritten and reissued multiple times to see a single story – and a single private investigator – diversified and tailored to suit the tastes and

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Editors’ Introduction

sensibilities of a changing readership. In reference to the shadows explored here, it is demonstrated that some readers resent this approach and prefer older, darker issues to reimagined, sanitized stories. Deborah Walker-Morrison then explores the question of format, with a focus on the translation and adaptation of film. The idea of transatlantic exchange, this metonym of the evolution of noir and the PI, is again taken up, in this case to reveal how one of the first truly ‘French’ PIs, Léo Malet’s Nestor Burma, struggles to hang on to his (original, French) identity as he is adapted for the cinema. The big screen proves too significant a backdrop not to exert a pull towards the stereotypes of the private investigator informed by classic Hollywood portrayals, not the least of which being Bogart’s (as Spade, as Marlowe, but always ultimately as himself). This transatlantic shadow-play is then relocated, in the volume’s next section, on international noir. Focusing on Europe Barbara Pezzotti takes readers to Italy with Giorgio Scerbanenco’s Duca Lamberti. These novels bring the concept of the hardboiled up-to-date through the examination of contemporary issues including urbanization, pollution, consumerism and the rise of a particularly brutal brand of organized crime. This is important, as the private investigator novel is, traditionally, character driven. In this chapter, the idea of setting is brought to the foreground, as it becomes, in many ways, as critical to the storylines as the characters who inhabit these spaces. This, as is explained, is part of a reimagining of the American invention of the hardboiled for an Italian readership. Carolina Miranda looks to South America and investigates how easily Argentina made the transition from imported crime fiction to the generation of homegrown examples of this genre, including María Inés Krimer’s Ruth Epelbaum. These novels extend the challenge to well-known settings for such works, from big cities in the United States to exotic metropolises around the world, in addition to looking at how important social constructions can influence crime fiction writers and readers. Epelbaum, for example, demonstrates how gender and religion can underpin stories of corruption and organized crime. It is fitting, that in a volume that charts the trajectory of the PI into the dark, this chapter brings serious social issues to the light. Our journey continues with Jean Anderson’s study of contemporary French crime fiction and the idea of the ‘chick dick’. Here, this increasingly popular character-type is reassessed against the idea of the more formal, professional private investigator and the genre of ‘chick lit’. This examination emphasizes the extremes of the crime fiction genre: from the refined women of Victorian settings, through to the noir novel and on to more modern, everyday settings readers can easily relate to. The ‘chick dick’, all too often and too easily dismissed, plays a crucial role in offering women as central protagonists and in providing storylines that connect easily to the worlds we live in. Of course, without practitioners of crime fiction there is no connoisseurship or scholarship. To acknowledge those who construct the platform, upon which the works in this volume are built, we also present three interrogations with writers who have focused their efforts on the production of the private investigator. Paul D. Brazill inter-

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Crime Uncovered: Private Investigator

views English author Nick Quantrill, the creator of Joe Geraghty – a PI based in northern England’s rain-soaked Hull. On the other side of the world Rachel Franks interviews Leigh Redhead about her popular Melbourne-based protagonist, stripper-turned-PI, Simone Kirsch. This is followed by Beth A. Butler and her interview with Spanish author Fernando Lalana which presents some of his insights on the idea of the private investigator, including his own, very popular creation, Fermín Escartín. We then move into the shadows. Leading the discussion is Stephen Knight’s historical overview of the private investigator, which details the emergence of this now firmly entrenched icon of what has grown to become the world’s largest fiction genre. This survey offers important insights into the genealogy of the PI, challenging assumptions that this type of investigator simply emerged, fully formed, out of the American imagination with the production of the hardboiled man and of trench coats trawling mean streets. Janice Allan also provides an historical perspective on the private investigator, adopting the lens of sensation fiction. Sensation fiction, as readers are shown here, is a genre that is permeated by a culture of suspicion, where the assumption is that everyone has something to hide. This is demonstrated through the creation of an army of amateur and paid watchers. From the suspicious spouse to the paid spy, such investigators attempted, with varying degrees of success, to penetrate the smooth surface of respectability to reveal the seething mass of crimes and deception below. These early iterations of the private investigator provide a foundation for those who would follow to investigate the private but also the more public crimes that would dominate new societies. Crime fiction was conceived of as a popular form of fiction. While this popularity endures, with it has come critical acceptance and integration into the literary mainstream. As we hope this volume will demonstrate, nowhere is this tension between the popular and scholarly, in terms of conception, production, reception and criticism, better personified than in the figure of the private investigator. References Bayard, Pierre (1998), Qui a tué Roger Ackroyd?/Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?, Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. ––––– (2002), Enquête sur Hamlet: Le Dialogue de sourds, Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. ––––– (2008), L’Affaire du chien des Baskerville/Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong: Reopening the Case of the Hound of the Baskervilles, Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Christie, Agatha (2002 [1926]), The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, London: HarperCollins. Gulddal, Jesper and Rolls, Alistair (2015), ‘Mobile Criticism: Pierre Bayard’s Irreverent Hermeneutics’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 52: 1, pp. 37–52. Horowitz, Anthony (2014 [2011]), The House of Silk, London: Orion. ––––– (2014), Moriarty, London: Orion. Horsley, Lee (2005), Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, Oxford: OUP.

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Editors’ Introduction

Knight, Stephen (2014), ‘Politics and Policing in World Crime Fiction’, in Why Crime Fiction Matters: The Italian Case, Australian Centre for Italian Studies, La Trobe University, Melbourne, 21 November. ––––– (2015), Secrets of Crime Fiction Classics: Detecting the Delights of 21 Enduring Stories, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. Rolls, Alistair (2009), ‘An Uncertain Space: (Dis-)Locating the Frenchness of French and Australian Detective Fiction’, in Alistair Rolls (ed.), Mostly French: French (in) Detective Fiction, Oxford: Peter Lang, pp. 19–51. Still, Judith and Worton, Michael (eds) (1993), Textuality and Sexuality: Reading Theories and Practices, Manchester/New York: MUP. Van Dine, S. S. (1928 [1947]), ‘Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories’, in H. Haycraft (ed.), The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays, New York: Simon & Schuster, pp. 189–93. Notes 1

For Still and Worton (1993: 1–68, especially 4–6) the terms ‘textness’ and ‘textuality’, while appearing to oppose each other, with the former embodying containment and the latter an explosion outwards, ultimately boil down to the same thing: text is a delimiting of the infinite, a way of capturing on the page a multiplicity of meanings.

2

For a reading along these lines that suggests Poirot himself may have killed Roger Ackroyd see Rolls (2009: 48–51).

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Case Studies 22 Ca p ta in Arth ur Ha sti ng s Rachel Franks 34 Sam Spade Jesper Gulddal 46 Lew Arc h e r Carolyn Beasley 58 Ve ro n ica Mar s Lucy Andrew 68 Mavis S e i dli t z Alistair Rolls 80 Dave Fe n n e r Clara Sitbon 92 Ne st o r B ur m a Deborah Walker-Morrison 1 06 Du ca L a mb e rti Barbara Pezzotti 1 16 Ru th Epelb aum Carolina Miranda 126 L ou is e Morvan Jean Anderson

Ca p ta i n A rt h u r H ast i n g s Nationality: English / Creator: Agatha Christie Rachel Franks

Introduction: In the shadows The modern crime novel is, ostensibly, about the victim of murder. Infractions of fraud, forgery and the vast array of misdemeanours that once dominated crime fiction tales have been summarily displaced. Crime fiction and the fiction of murder are now synonymous. Readers want a dead body and the producers of the world’s largest genre politely oblige. Murder is the crime du jour. Murder of every conceivable type: the cold, calculated kill; death as an outcome of an uncontrollable jealous rage; murder committed by everyday men and women who kill ‘for love, money and to cover up a crime’ (S. J. Cannell, quoted in Bowman 2009); and the efforts of mostly unremarkable murderers – co-workers, lovers, neighbours, relatives, partners and ex-partners – fleshing out the work of serial killers. Yet a cold, lifeless body cannot provide for a story of investigation without an intermediary. There must be a mechanism residing between the alert reader and the cold corpse, one that communicates not only the crime but also the resolution of that crime. Thus, the crime novel is one about the protagonist: the man or, increasingly, the woman who will make a murderer account for their actions. Often the pursuit of a criminal mind presents a path that is too intense to be followed easily. As murderers often offer extreme types, so, too, can the hunters. For this reason writers have created junior colleagues to work alongside their great detectives. Often dismissed as the assistant, the faithful friend or the sidekick, these characters fulfil a critical role in storytelling with some of the best-known names in crime fiction coupling their formidable private investigator with a companion who is a more accessible construction, one that interacts more easily, than the extraordinary genius they work for, with other characters and with readers. Edgar Allan Poe provided an anonymous narrator for C. Auguste Dupin; Arthur Conan Doyle provided Dr John H. Watson for Sherlock Holmes; and Agatha Christie produced Captain Arthur J. M. Hastings O.B.E. to accompany Hercule Poirot.

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Case Studies: Captain Arthur Hastings

The literary lineage of an old Etonian In 1920 Agatha Christie introduced readers to her most famous creation, Hercule Poirot, a retired Belgian police officer, taking refuge in England during World War I. A man based upon the template of Sherlock Holmes, Poirot is presented as ‘a brilliant detective with idiosyncrasies, supported in his role by a respectable but idiotic sidekick, Captain Hastings’ (Cook 2013: 114). Yet Hastings is not an idiot – he was designed to be dull; to offer support to, but in no way detract from, the achievements of Poirot, but he is not a stupid man. Educated at Eton, Hastings fought admirably at the Front, was promoted to Captain, served his government, and went on to be recognized with an Order of the British Empire. The label of ‘lesser man’ persists, potentially, as a result of his literary lineage and Poirot’s consistent cruelty towards him, rather than because of his own investigative failings. Edgar Allan Poe was the ‘first truly modern exponent’ of the form known today as crime fiction (Rachman 2011 [2010]: 17). Dorothy L. Sayers has argued there are five of Poe’s stories ‘in which the general principles of the detective-story were laid down for ever’: ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841); ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ (1842); ‘The Gold Bug’ (1843); ‘Thou Art the Man’ (1844); and ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1844) (Sayers 1947 [1928]: 72). Of these, there are three – ‘Rue Morgue’, ‘Marie Rogêt’ and ‘Purloined Letter’ – which feature C. Auguste Dupin: an intellectual admired for an outstanding ability to solve the most baffling of criminal puzzles. Monsieur Dupin is not a self-proclaimed private investigator and does not construct himself in the mould of the great detective. Poe, for all of his creative and intellectual resources, did not have the tools to present his problem-solver in this way because ‘[a]t the time Poe wrote, the word detective did not exist, in English’ (Silverman 1991: 173) and it would be another century before the term private investigator became entrenched in popular parlance. The stories, in which Dupin appears, are noted for presenting ‘a genre in miniature’ (Whalen 1999: 226) and acknowledged as crucial in setting the foundation for the idea of the great detective within crime fiction and also, crucially here, of the one who would report the exploits of that detective. Dupin’s nameless narrator documents the essentials of the case, provides a pedestal upon which the focus of his storytelling might reside and, importantly, presents context for the ‘narrative which follows’ (Poe 1975 [1841]: 143) to inform and engage the reader. The concept of the companion would be taken up, most famously, by Arthur Conan Doyle. John Watson, as the chronicler for Sherlock Holmes, has much in common with Arthur Hastings. Both are ex-military men, are brave, fiercely loyal and, eventually, give up a shared residential space with their respective detective to marry. Another, significant, similarity is the notion of the companion as less important, less intelligent than the men they accompany, a fact acknowledged by Watson: ‘[Holmes] was a man of habits,

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Crime Uncovered: Private Investigator

narrow and concentrated habits, and I had become one of them. As an institution I was like the violin, the shag tobacco, the old black pipe’ (Doyle 1951 [1923]: 162). Hastings the man Having held a position at Lloyd’s, Arthur Hastings joined the army in response to Britain’s engagement in World War I. He was not a man seeking a long career in the military: readers are told he may return to Lloyd’s after the war, either that ‘or a fresh start altogether’ (Christie 2007a [1921]: 18). As Hastings follows in Poirot’s shadow, impressions of conflict follow in his own. Having been ‘invalided home from the Front; and, after spending some months in a rather depressing Convalescent Home’ (2007a [1920]: 9), Hastings finds himself a guest at Styles Court. The war theme continues, and in Murder on the Links (1923) Hastings, travelling by train, passes ‘through Amiens’ and explains to a fellow traveller that ‘I was wounded once, and after the Somme they invalided me out altogether. I had a half-fledged Army job for a bit. I’m a sort of private secretary now to an M.P.’ (Christie 2007b [1923]: 13). Much has been made of Hasting’s old-fashioned attitudes, his propensity to fall in love and his brain that is significantly slower than Poirot’s, ‘the very interesting man’ he shares rooms with (Christie 2007b [1923]: 14). He is also prone to jumping to conclusions – the result of a fertile imagination (Christie 2006a [1927]: 42). Such flaws are admitted willingly by Hastings and demonstrate an insight into his own character that is to be admired; they are also an indicator of his capacity to understand people, a trait of which Poirot is particularly proud. Hastings is also incredibly courageous and very honest. Poirot, always quick to point out his friend’s failings, notes: ‘As I have frequently told you, Hastings, you have a nature so beautiful and so honest that unless you are yourself deceived, it is impossible for you to deceive others’ (Christie 2006a [1927]: 110). Hastings is also open to new methods of investigation including the use of fingerprints, though this proves an irritant to Poirot (Christie 2007b [1923]: 26–27). Christie openly acknowledged Hastings as a direct descendant of the anonymous narrator of Dupin and, more obviously, of Watson as the narrator of Holmes. In Dumb Witness (1937) Hastings teases Poirot, acknowledging his genius but also his predictability: ‘Poirot, I – the humble Watson – am going to hazard a deduction.’ ‘Enchanted, my friend. What is it?’ I struck an attitude and said pompously: ‘You have received this morning one letter of particular interest!’ ‘You are indeed the Sherlock Holmes!’ (Christie 2007e [1937]: 45–46, original emphasis)

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Case Studies: Captain Arthur Hastings

Hastings did have more ambition than to be the ‘humble Watson’, revealing, in The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), that he wants something more: Mary Cavendish leant forward. ‘What would you really choose as a profession, if you could just consult your inclination?’ […] ‘Well, I’ve always had a secret hankering to be a detective?’ ‘The real thing – Scotland Yard? Or Sherlock Holmes?’ ‘Oh, Sherlock Holmes by all means.’ (Christie 2007a [1920]: 18–19) This goal would be harboured, Hastings working hard, hoping ‘for once, to have the pleasure of crowing over Poirot’ (Christie 2006a [1927]: 105). He could not have predicted that in his final case he would cast aside the role of Watson and, finally, take up the mantle of Holmes. Hastings the intermediary In addition to her plays and short story collections Agatha Christie wrote 66 mystery novels, of which half would feature the famous Belgian Detective Hercule Poirot. Over the decades Poirot would be accompanied, on his investigations, by several recurring characters, including Inspector Japp, Colonel Race, Superintendent Spence, Ariadne Oliver and the man who was, perhaps, his most loyal companion – Captain Arthur Hastings. Hastings narrates 26 short stories but, of the 33 novels in which Poirot appears, he features in only eight. The last novel in which Hasting plays a part sees him return to Styles, the setting for his first case with Poirot, 55 years earlier. Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case was first published in 1975, yet Christie had composed the work many years before in anticipation of ‘being killed in the raids’ on London during the Blitz. The manuscript was deposited into a bank vault with instructions that, upon her death, it should be given to her daughter (Christie 2010 [1977]: 509). One of Hastings’ most important roles across these works is that of intermediary. Firstly, between Poirot and other characters, as seen, for instance, in his observations of Poirot and Inspector Japp: ‘Poirot did not agree, I knew. But he merely said non-committally: “mais oui, c’est possible”’ (2007d [1933]: 139). Secondly, Hastings is an intermediary between Poirot and the reader, as well as for Christie; her own intense dislike for the ‘insufferable’ man is well documented (Cook 2013: 124). A sustained friendship with a proven British loyalist also endorses Poirot’s ‘credibility’ (Cook 2013: 113) while his very British manner takes the edge off Poirot’s arrogance, his ‘gratified smile and an air of mock humility’ (Christie 2007c [1932]: 240). Through Hastings, Christie also explored

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the philosophy of forgiveness. If Hastings is able continually to forgive Poirot – for all of his attacks, insults and offences – then surely, so too, should the reader. Such tolerance also makes Poirot’s occasional expressions of affection – ‘Mon ami, Hastings! he cried. Mon ami, Hastings!’ (Christie 2006a [1927]: 4) – more believable. Christie would establish a gulf between the two men, one that widened over the years, and would draw comment from Hastings: ‘How I wish I had been with you,’ he said with deep regret in Peril at End House (Christie 2007c [1932]: 9) about The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928). Dispatched, with his wife, to the Argentine, Hastings’ appearances would be less frequent and less important. In The A.B.C. Murders (1936) there is a foreword – written by Hastings – in which he advises: ‘I have departed from my usual practice of relating only those incidents and scenes at which I myself was present. Certain chapters, therefore, are written in the third person’ (Christie 2012 [1936]: 7). In this way his role, despite its importance, is being phased out. Christie no longer had a need for Hastings, and his small but vital contributions to the cases being investigated by Poirot, were easily dispensed with. It is also of some note that when crime fiction writer Sophie Hannah was commissioned to resurrect Monsieur Poirot in The Monogram Murders (2014) she did not feel it necessary to breathe life, once more, into Captain Hastings. Hastings the hardboiled detective In Curtain the idea of the companion living in the shadows of the great private investigator takes on special meaning. Hastings is transformed, throughout the text, from supportive sidekick to hardboiled investigator followed by a brief descent into noir. The journey, through the subgenres of crime fiction, of the much-aged Hastings provides a rare insight into the capacity for the clue-puzzle to offer tales much darker than refined country estates and other genteel settings often allow. One of the main sources of darkness is Poirot himself, who is at his cruellest, telling Hastings coldly to: Go away. You are obstinate and extremely stupid and I wish that there were someone else whom I could trust, but I suppose I shall have to put up with you and your absurd ideas of fair play. Since you cannot use your grey cells as you do not possess them, at any rate use your eyes, your ears and your nose. (Christie 2009 [1975]: 74) Hastings is more determined, more loyal, more willing to commit his own wrongdoings than before. The setting is darker: Styles Court, once a ‘glorious old place’ and ‘a fine property’ (Christie 2007a [1920]: 27), is now a dilapidated boarding house, the one-time grand residence now a site of decay. The reader cares less for the characters: there is little to admire and nobody to command affection. The result is that while there is some

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Case Studies: Captain Arthur Hastings

curiosity around the identification of the murderer there is little interest in the victim. In many instances the characters care less for each other, with the strongest references to a pervasive noir mood being provided by the interactions between Hastings and his daughter Judith. Hastings admits that, of all his children, it is Judith whom he has secretly ‘always loved best’, although he ‘had never for one moment understood her’ and ‘was, frankly, a little nervous of [her]!’ (Christie 2009 [1975]: 8). Such love is not reciprocated. The open contempt that Judith holds for her father – one she easily articulates as hatred (2009 [1975]: 120) – presents, for example, a reflection of the dysfunctional mother-and-daughter relationship in James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce (1941). Judith Hastings seeks academic excellence and scientific discovery; Veda Cain has more fiscally based motivations. In one of the many attacks on her mother Veda claims that ‘with enough money I can get away from you, you poor, half-witted mope’ (Cain 1989 [1941]: 238). Our ‘Golden Age’ hero is thus reduced, by detective and daughter, to a man in the shadows. The final appearance of Hastings would also be the final appearance of Poirot: in this tale the little grey cells would present the solution to their last investigation. Or would they? Much has been made around the resolution of Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) and if the killer, as revealed by Poirot, was a correct identification or merely a convenient one. Pierre Bayard famously asked Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? (originally published as Qui a tué Roger Ackroyd? in 1998, it first appeared in English in 2000, translated by Carol Cosman). In his seminal work on the topic Bayard convincingly redirects guilt from Dr James Sheppard to the doctor’s sister, Miss Caroline Sheppard. Yet a much stronger case can be made for a manufactured solution within Curtain, with much evidence coming from within the text while many important clues are to be found in the broader Poirot canon and in Christie’s autobiography. In re-framing the solution offered by the Curtain narrative it is essential to explore the idea of the double solution. In 1929 cousins Manfred B. Lee and Frederic Dannay launched the career of Ellery Queen: anthologist, protagonist and pseudonym of the two men. Queen would become a commercial and literary success, entertaining readers for decades. One of the hallmarks of the Queen stories was the inventiveness of the crimes committed and the way in which they were resolved. Of particular interest is the ploy of the double solution in which a mystery is solved twice: first with a very logical solution and subsequently with the correct one (Ackers-Jordon 1998: 136). In Curtain Christie has, it is argued here, reversed Queen’s plot device of the double solution. Instead of offering the name of someone who could have been the killer and then unveiling the actual killer, Christie presents the real killer, the murderer of Mrs Franklin, and then substitutes this explanation with the identification of another plausible, and substantially more palatable, one. Christie had, of course, advocated the delivery of justice from her first novel – ‘we do hope, if there has been foul play, to bring the murderer to justice’ (Christie 2007a [1920]: 70) – but in this instance justice is merely manufactured,

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a simple solution that serves to satisfy the reader and, more importantly, Hastings. Clues within the text The narrative of Curtain is the culmination, readers are told, of a series of murders. The killer and the next victim are at Styles. In a written confession Poirot reveals Stephen Norton to be a vicarious killer, one who worked in the mode of William Shakespeare’s Iago, of Othello (c. 1603), goading others to commit murder. In his confession Poirot declares: ‘By taking Norton’s life, I have saved other lives’ (Christie 2009 [1975]: 220). Poirot, too, is now a murderer. It is then asserted that there was a third killer at Styles: Captain Hastings. Only one of these claims can be made without doubt. Norton may or may not have incited murder prior to his arrival at Styles; that Poirot takes Norton’s life is certain; but the killer of Mrs Franklin is not Hastings, I argue; rather, it is his daughter Judith. If means, motive and opportunity are explored, Judith – who ‘is grave and slightly scornful’ with, always hanging about her, ‘a suggestion of tragedy’ (Christie 2009 [1975]: 28) – is a logical and obvious killer (as evinced by Rolls and Gulddal in a study of Pierre Bayard’s ironic detective praxis [2014]). Mrs Franklin is poisoned with physostigmine, from the calabar bean (the topic of Dr Franklin’s scientific research) (150). Judith has easy means to access the toxin as well as an extended knowledge of the bean and its effects. She also has the most to gain from Mrs Franklin’s early departure. Motive comes in the form of her belief that Mrs Franklin is ‘a very stupid woman’ (30) whose eradication would benefit society as well as the latter’s husband. Judith also desires to become the next Mrs Franklin. Indeed, almost immediately upon the dispatch of the unwanted woman, Judith announces her engagement to Dr Franklin and her plans to follow him to Africa to pursue his research (192). Crucially, it is Judith who fetches Mrs Franklin’s drops when she demands them (148), thus executing her plan to poison a woman whom she believes to be a burden and who acts as her rival. More compelling perhaps than this evidence is Mrs Franklin’s failure to act to save herself. If, in line with Poirot’s accusation, she has attempted to murder her husband by poisoning his coffee, only for Hastings inadvertently to switch the coffee cups with the result that she consumes the fatal drink herself, we may wonder why Mrs Franklin does not attempt to save her own life by confessing what she has done so that an antidote may potentially be administered (and she certainly feels she has something to live for in her pursuit of the aristocratic and wealthy Boyd Carrington). In addition, Poirot’s correspondence, containing his confession, presents outrageous claims and few facts. It is also delivered four months after his death: time, perhaps, for Judith to found her career and her home in Africa, offering reassurance to Hastings that, having achieved her immediate goals – her pursuits of Dr Franklin and scientific research fulfilled – she was no longer a likely murderess. Accordingly, the shooting of Norton is again part of the elaborate ploy to protect Judith, as the former knows of the affair she is already

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Case Studies: Captain Arthur Hastings

conducting with Dr Franklin at the time of Mrs Franklin’s death. Such knowledge has the potential to be brought to bear when neither Hastings nor Poirot are alive to defend the young murderess. It also needs to be remembered that, in his role as the hardboiled detective and despite his love for her, Hastings (Christie 2009 [1975]: 8) names, if only to himself, Judith, ‘like her namesake before she cut off the head of Holofernes’, as the killer (193–94). Some supporting evidence In presenting other parties as guilty Poirot fulfils the demand Hastings previously made of him in Murder on the Links (1923). In this work Hastings asks Poirot to denounce another as guilty in order to save Dulcie Duveen: the woman who would become his wife: No, Bella must be protected. […]. How this was to be accomplished I did not see clearly. But I pinned my faith to Poirot. He knew. […] He must find some pretext other than the real one. It might be difficult, but he would manage it somehow. And with Bella unsuspected […] all would end satisfactorily. (Christie 2007b [1923]: 265–66, original emphasis) On this occasion Poirot had no need to lie. In a case of much confusion Hastings believed Bella guilty, though the woman he believed to be Bella was Dulcie (Bella’s twin sister) who also thought Bella guilty. Bella admitted guilt as she thought Jack was guilty. As both Hastings and Dulcie protected Bella, and Bella protected Jack; Poirot worked out the real killer was Marthe. Certainly Poirot has a history of crafting clever responses to despicable crimes. In Murder on the Orient Express (1934) Poirot concocts a story of a stranger who boarded the train, stabbed Mr Ratchett, then ‘a few minutes later, dressed in ordinary clothes, he left the train just before it started off’ (Christie 2006b [1934]: 240) to protect the real murderers. It is therefore conceivable, however fanciful the suggestion may first appear, that Poirot would offer up three murderers to shield the woman his most faithful friend loved and who called him Uncle Poirot. Another fact to consider is the role reversal seen within the text. Poirot still attempts to manage Hastings throughout the investigation. Hastings, as a result of Poirot’s immobility, has significantly more autonomy within this work than in his previous appearances. This is in addition to Hastings’ caring for and humouring his friend, much as one might a child. An example of this is seen when Poirot writes: ‘I made at once the big fuss – urged remedies upon you. For the sake of peace you consented to drink a cup of chocolate’ (Christie 2009 [1975]: 211). This Hastings does despite his firm view that the drinking of chocolate is ‘a revolting habit’ (Christie 2007e [1937]: 45). As the power dynamic of the relationship is clearly shifting Poirot may believe that the only way to

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Crime Uncovered: Private Investigator

maintain his position is to control the outcome of the crime. Moreover, Poirot encourages Hastings in the letter that acts as the denouement to take a new wife (Christie 2009 [1975]: 220) – a suggestion, perhaps, that is doubly motivated: to exert control over the life of Hastings after his own death; and to encourage him to displace his love for his youngest daughter (though she has neatly relocated to Africa), distancing him from her proclivity for murder and allowing him to focus his affections on another (safer) woman. It also needs to be remembered that Hastings is, despite his ability for action, a gentle man. In Christie’s autobiography there is only one reference to Poirot’s companion. In referring to the plot for The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and the idea of Watson as a murderer, she declares emphatically: ‘My mind boggled at the thought of Hastings murdering anybody’ (Christie 2010 [1977]: 342). That Hastings may be a murderer (even an accidental one) in Curtain, contradicts Christie’s own assessment of this important character. As this novel was written in the 1940s and published in 1975 there was certainly sufficient time for Christie to change the opinion evinced in the posthumously published story of her life. Certainly, that the author’s opinion as to the unlikelihood of Hastings as murderer material remained unchanged tends to undermine the text’s proposition that he might have murdered Mrs Franklin, even unknowingly. Conclusion The function, in fiction, of the detective’s companion can be as important as the function of the detective. The idea of the companion as a broker between a great genius and a reader is a proven literary device within the genre, from Poe to Doyle to Christie, and it remains popular today. In Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case, Poirot takes the initiative to identify three men as killers – Norton, Hastings and himself – in order to protect Judith. In this way Agatha Christie cleverly draws a circle from the Golden Age novel for which she is best known, to the hardboiled and the noir, only to return to the Golden Age with an impossibly neat ending. It is Arthur Hastings who facilitates this fascinating literary journey – a man wounded in the war that, for him, ‘would always be the war’ (Christie 2009 [1975]: 5, original emphasis). If the military motif is taken further, Hastings’ name can be read as a reference to England’s loss at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Coupled with the beginning of World War II, the earliest setting for the novel, the two conflicts serve as bookends for loss and fear of loss. ‘Throughout the books Poirot belittles Hastings’ intellectual ability – and straightens his tie’ (Cawthorne 2014: 67), but, despite the cruelty and the darkness that mark their final case, Hercule Poirot throws Arthur Hastings ‘an affectionate glance’ and declares him ‘[m]y loyal friend’ (Christie 2009 [1975]: 25). Readers, too, may regard Captain Hastings with affection.

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Case Studies: Captain Arthur Hastings

References Ackers-Jordon, Cathy (1998), ‘Ellery Queen: Forgotten Master Detective’, M.Lib.St. thesis, Flint: University of Michigan-Flint. Bayard, Pierre (2000 [1998]), Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? The Mystery Behind the Agatha Christie Mystery (trans. Carol Cosman), New York: New Press. Bowman, Rob (2009), Castle: Deep in Death, Burbank: ABC Studios. Cain, James M. (1989 [1941]), Mildred Pierce, New York: Vintage Crime. Cawthorne, Nigel (2014), A Brief Guide to Agatha Christie Queen of Crime, London: Constable & Robinson Ltd. Christie, Agatha (2006a [1927]), The Big Four, London: HarperCollins. ––––– (2006b [1934]), Murder on the Orient Express, London: HarperCollins. ––––– (2007a [1920]), The Mysterious Affair at Styles, London: HarperCollins. ––––– (2007b [1923]), Murder on the Links, London: HarperCollins. ––––– (2007c [1932]), Peril at End House, London: HarperCollins. ––––– (2007d [1933]), Lord Edgware Dies, London: HarperCollins. ––––– (2007e [1937]), Dumb Witness, London: HarperCollins. ––––– (2009 [1975]), Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case, London: HarperCollins. ––––– (2010 [1977]), Agatha Christie: An Autobiography, London: HarperCollins. ––––– (2012 [1936]), The A.B.C. Murders, London: HarperCollins. Cook, Cathy (2013), The Agatha Christie Miscellany, Stroud, UK: History Press. Doyle, Arthur Conan (1951 [1923]), ‘The Adventure of the Creeping Man’, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, London: Penguin, pp. 162–84. Hannah, Sophie (2014), The Monogram Murders: The Brand New Hercule Poirot Mystery, London: Harper Collins. Poe, Edgar Allan (1975 [1841]), ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, New York: Vintage, pp. 141–68. Rachman, Stephen (2011 [2010]), ‘Poe and the Origins of Detective Fiction’, in Catherine Ross Nickerson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction, Cambridge: CUP, pp. 17–28. Rolls, Alistair and Guldall, Jesper (2014), ‘Bayard’s/z Irony: From Text back to Work’, Literary Studies Seminar, 9 April, University of Newcastle, Australia. Sayers, Dorothy L. (1947 [1928]), ‘The Omnibus of Crime’, in H. Haycraft (ed.), The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays, New York: Simon & Schuster, pp. 71–109. Silverman, Kenneth (1991), Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance, New York: Harper Perennial. Whalen, Terence (1999), Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Political Economy of Literature in Antebellum America, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

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Go Further Novels Christie, Agatha (2012 [1936]), The A.B.C. Murders, London: HarperCollins. ––––– (2009 [1975]), Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case, London: HarperCollins. ––––– (2007 [1937]), Dumb Witness, London: HarperCollins. ––––– (2007 [1933]), Lord Edgware Dies, London: HarperCollins. ––––– (2007 [1932]), Peril at End House, London: HarperCollins. ––––– (2007 [1928]) The Mystery of the Blue Train, London: HarperCollins. ––––– (2007 [1923]), Murder on the Links, London: HarperCollins. ––––– (2007 [1920]), The Mysterious Affair at Styles, London: HarperCollins. ––––– (2006 [1934]), Murder on the Orient Express, London: HarperCollins. ––––– (2006 [1927]), The Big Four, London: HarperCollins. ––––– (2006 [1926]), The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, London: HarperCollins. Short stories Christie, Agatha (2009 [1974]), Poirot’s Early Cases, London: HarperCollins. ––––– (2007 [1924]), Poirot Investigates, London: HarperCollins. Books Christie, Agatha (2010 [1977]), Agatha Christie: An Autobiography, London: HarperCollins. York, Richard A. (2007), Agatha Christie: Power and Illusion, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Makinen, Merja (2006), Agatha Christie: Investigating Femininity, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Horsley, Lee (2005), Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, Oxford: OUP. Bloom, Harold (ed.) (2001), Agatha Christie, New York: Chelsea House. Plain, Gill (2001), Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body, Edinburgh: EUP. Rowland, Susan (2001), From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Bayard, Pierre (2000 [1998]), Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? The Mystery behind the Agatha Christie Mystery (trans. Carol Cosman), New York: New Press. Gill, Gillian (1990), Agatha Christie: The Woman and Her Mysteries, New York: Free Press. Television Agatha Christie’s Poirot (1989–2013, London: LTW and ITV).

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Title

‘It is hard now to describe just what I went through that day. Afterwards, thinking it over, I am inclined to put something down to the atmosphere of Styles itself. Evil imaginings came easily to mind there.’ CAPTAIN arthur HASTINGS

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Sam Spade Nationality: American / Creator: Dashiell Hammett Jesper Gulddal

Anatomy of a private investigator The literary life of Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade was as brief as his posthumous career has been enduring. Appearing only in The Maltese Falcon (first serialized in Black Mask in 1929) as well as in three later, less influential short stories, he has become an icon of popular culture and is widely recognized as the archetypal private investigator of interwar hardboiled detective fiction. Raymond Chandler had Spade in mind when stating that Hammett had taken ‘murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley’ (1995 [1944]: 988), and numerous later PIs both in literature and on film, including Chandler’s own Philip Marlowe, trace their pedigree directly to the antihero of Hammett’s most successful novel. This lasting appeal must be ascribed to the careful positioning of Spade within a network of cultural and historical reference points that determine him. Spade draws on entrenched American mythologies of individualism and self-reliance, yet also responds to the modern phenomenon of urban crime and, more generally, to the social and political turmoil that marred the United States at this time. Walking the ‘mean streets’ of San Francisco with confidence and savvy, always the master of the situation however puzzling or dangerous, Spade has the qualities needed to come out on top in this brutal world of everyone-for-himself: unsentimental, jaded and opportunistic both financially and sexually, he is also committed to a personal code of conduct that tells him apart from the criminals he hunts. As his name suggests, Spade is also a flat character; he is not one of those literary figures with whom we feel intimately acquainted upon closing the book. If readers sometimes experience such a sense of familiarity when reading a novel, it is not simply because of the perfect realism of the portrait – after all, literary characters are at best models, equipped with a degree of transparency and intelligibility that we rarely encounter in real people. Instead, the illusion of roundness is achieved via the application of literary strategies that align with the reigning theory of personal identity at a given time. The nineteenth-century novel, for example, created the illusion of depth by es-

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Case Studies: Sam Spade

tablishing a detailed biographical context around the characters, implicitly claiming that the identity of the person is a function of his or her life-story. Similarly, modernist literature of the early twentieth century evolved in part out of a suspicion against this idea of narrative identity and opted instead to establish its characters by showing the internal workings of the mind, most obviously in the form of inner monologue or stream of consciousness. Spade as a character conforms to neither of these models. Strictly a man of the present, he is without a past that illuminates his current actions and seemingly has no aspirations for the future beyond mere survival. Moreover, he lacks the deep interiority of modernist characters and is little given to overthinking things; in fact, Hammett consistently opts for an external mode of narration based on dialogue and actions and very rarely gives us direct insight into the protagonist’s mind. It would seem that this two-dimensionality is at odds with the iconic status of Spade as the model of a hardboiled PI. Yet, the power of Spade’s character is due precisely to its lack of biographical and mental depth. Spade is precisely not a psychosocially understandable individual, but a look, an attitude, a style. As I argue here, Spade is ultimately the agglomeration of five central features: his appearance, his treatment of women, his treatment of men, his working method and his professional code of conduct. Accordingly, I opt for an anatomical approach that aims to disaggregate Spade via a close analysis of Hammett’s coolly sophisticated text. If Spade is more about projecting an attitude than portraying a psychologically believable individual, then appearance in the broadest sense of the word – looks, gestures, mannerisms – is evidently of the utmost significance. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Spade’s face is described in the very first paragraph of The Maltese Falcon, and the unusual features identified here are brought up again in each of the three short stories: Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-green eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down – from high flat temples – in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan. (Hammett 1992 [1929]: 3) The contrast could hardly be greater between this original Spade, who is also said to be ‘quite six feet tall’ with an ‘almost conical’ body (4), and Humphrey Bogart’s character in John Huston’s 1941 film adaptation. More to the point, the descriptive register utilized in this passage is not simply that of the gloomy noir thriller; on the contrary, the tone approximates comedy with its heavily stylized, cartoonish use of lines and v shapes. While this angularity suggests that whoever hits Spade will get hurt himself, it also com-

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bines with the hooked nose, high temples and yellow-green eyes in evoking a caricature of the devil. The likening of Spade to a ‘blond satan’ makes this visual reference explicit and adds a further moral dimension, recalling Friedrich Nietzsche’s controversial idea of the predatory ‘blond beast’ with no regard for conventional morality. As one would expect of a hardboiled PI, Spade both drinks and smokes heavily. In fact, alcohol and, even more so, cigarettes are indispensable to establishing him as a character. Spade rolls and lights himself a cigarette more than twenty times in The Maltese Falcon, and Hammett is evidently keen to explain the routines of hardboiled smoking in all its details. This use of the cigarette as an attribute recalls Sherlock Holmes’s pipe, yet the smoking habits of the two master detectives have opposite meanings. Whereas Holmes smokes to relax his body and stimulate his mind, Spade’s cigarettes symbolize his standout personality trait, namely a hyper-masculine toughness defined above all by an unshakeable self-assurance and composure in the face of danger. Characteristically, he consistently pulls out his cigarette paper and tobacco bag at moments of high tension, demonstrating in this way his calm mastery of the situation. Spade’s hyper-masculinity is implied by almost everything he says or does from his streetwise argot to his ability to hand out and take a beating, yet his relationship to women is particularly important in terms of defining him as a male archetype. Arguably, both Spade as an individual character and hardboiled detective fiction as a genre are centrally concerned with projecting a certain ideal of masculinity – an image of resourcefulness, confidence and power. The historical background for this gender connection is the incipient emancipation of women in early-twentieth-century America, as evidenced by the introduction of female suffrage in 1920, rising female workforce participation and a new independence of women, epitomized by the ‘flapper’ phenomenon. Seen in this light, Spade signals a reassertion of masculinity in the face of a perceived blurring of gender lines. It is already clear from Spade’s interactions with the secondary female characters that his relationship to women is essentially one of physical, intellectual and sexual dominance. Being ‘lanky’ and ‘boyish’ (Hammett 1992 [1929]: 3), Spade’s secretary, Effie Perine, is of no sexual interest to her employer and instead serves as a helper, fulfilling and even anticipating Spade’s every wish from rolling his cigarettes to sending flowers for his partner’s funeral. Her eagerness to please is rewarded with the ambiguous compliment that she is a ‘damned good man, sister’ (160), yet Perine is also condescended to for being ‘a nice rattle-brained angel’ (28) and for letting her ‘women’s intuition’ (42, 99) deceive her with respect to the novel’s dangerous seductress, Brigid O’Shaughnessy; moreover, she receives a series of touches and caresses that in a modern-day work environment would fall under the category of sexual harassment. The interactions with Iva Archer – his lover and wife of his murdered partner – show a different side of Spade’s personality, namely his aversion to long-term relationships and, ultimately, to emotional attachments and love. Seemingly wanting to marry immediately after having been widowed,

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Case Studies: Sam Spade

this woman is consistently represented as a nuisance, and Spade does his utmost to avoid her. After all, he is not the marrying kind. One might assume that Brigid O’Shaughnessy, as the archetypal femme fatale of the hardboiled genre, would serve as an active and capable counterpoint to the passivity of Effie Perine and Iva Archer. This is not necessarily the case. O’Shaughnessy is certainly competing hard for the prized statuette, killing Spade’s partner ‘in cold blood, just like swatting a fly’ (Hammett 1992 [1929]: 212), although mostly relying on what is seen as the principal means available to her as a woman: sex, manipulation and lies. Unlike his secretary, however, Spade is never fooled by her histrionics and repeatedly disarms her with detached irony. Accordingly, the battle of minds and the dangerous game of seduction normally associated with female protagonists of the hardboiled genre never quite materialize in The Maltese Falcon. As the sexual side of their relationship makes clear, Spade remains on top at all times, refusing to be controlled and never making careless promises: when O’Shaughnessy offers to pay for his services with sex, Spade, reasserting his dominance, responds by kissing her ‘roughly and contemptuously’ (57). Hammett’s representation of women as either sexual/professional handmaidens or crafty manipulators might be seen, with justification, as an expression of misogyny. Yet, we should recall that supporting characters in the Spade corpus are often represented as weak or corrupt so as to make Spade’s positive qualities stand out all the more clearly. This logic is equally at work in the case of the male characters. The most obvious example is the perfumed and bejewelled Joel Cairo. Explicitly labelled as ‘queer’ (Hammett 1992 [1929]: 42) and embodying in every attribute the stereotype of the effeminate homosexual, Cairo is no match for Spade who overpowers and disarms him on two separate occasions. Since the pistol is the hardboiled novel’s chief emblem of masculinity, unarming someone by force means to ‘un-man’ him, and this gender implication is made even more obvious in the case of Cairo by the smallness of the weapon and the feebleness of the resistance he puts up. As a further accentuation of Cairo’s unmanliness, Spade punishes him like he would a woman: with three open-hand slaps across the face, ordering him beforehand to ‘take it and like it’ (69). These early encounters with the relatively harmless Cairo initiate a pattern of coding the power balance between men in terms of homosexual dominance and submissiveness. This is true of the relationship between detective Tom Polhaus and his ‘boy-friend’ (Hammett 1992 [1929]: 20) Lieutenant Dundy, and it also manifests in Cairo’s affectionate nursing of Wilmer Cook at the end of the novel, which, when rejected, leads Spade to comment that this is ‘[t]he course of true love’ (199). Moreover, Cook is referred to by Spade as Gutman’s ‘gunsel’ (110), a term often taken to mean ‘hired gunman’, but in fact a pejorative term for the passive partner in a homosexual relationship (Gardner 1965: 74; Safire 2004: 36). Spade’s unceremonious manhandling of the young man offers solid textual confirmation of this pattern:

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Spade lagged a little, so that, when they were within fifteen feet of Gutman’s door, he was perhaps a foot and a half behind the boy. He leaned sidewise suddenly and grasped the boy from behind by both arms, just beneath the boy’s elbows. He forced the boy’s arms forward so that the boy’s hands, in his overcoat-pockets, lifted the overcoat up before him. The boy struggled and squirmed, but he was impotent in the big man’s grip. The boy kicked back, but his feet went between Spade’s spread legs. (Hammett 1992 [1929]: 120) When this event occurs more than half-way through the novel, it is already a familiar scene, yet Spade’s overpowering of Gutman’s hit-man goes a step further than his repeated disarming of Cairo. The positions assumed by the two parties, the juxtaposition of ‘the boy’ and ‘the big man’, and the language of lifted overcoats, squirming, impotence and spread legs make it apparent that Spade is not just ‘un-manning’ Wilmer Cook, but figuratively subjecting him to homosexual rape. This is not to say, in the manner, for example, of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, that Hammett or his protagonists are latently gay; rather, the sexualization of the struggle is a means of representing the ‘gunsel’s’ total submission to Spade as the dominant male. Whether interacting with women or men, Spade’s main attribute is his self-assured mastery of the situation. Spade’s relationships with both women and men are represented as power struggles, and the power he exerts over others is seen to be based mainly on a physical assertion of masculinity; if things rarely come to blows, it is because of the absence of antagonists of similar stature and prowess. This emphasis on bodily strength sets Spade apart from his predecessors in the history of detective fiction. Detectives such as C. Auguste Dupin, Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot are cerebral beings for whom bodily needs, from sleep to sex, are distractions threatening to cloud their brilliant minds. Moreover, the bodies of these sleuths tend to have little investigative relevance and rarely – with Holmes as a possible exception – contribute to solving the mystery. Accordingly, pace Gill Plain (2001: 8–9) and others, the crime tends to manifest in the form of disembodied intellectual puzzles that can only be cracked by exertion of the ‘little grey cells’. Interestingly, the three short stories featuring Sam Spade conform roughly to this traditional model. Seemingly without irony, these stories cite some of the key conventions of the ‘Golden Age’ detective novel: the confined setting with a limited number of suspects, the generous use of red herrings and clues, and even the final elucidation of the mystery, which is a feature most commonly associated with Poirot. Most importantly, the solution comes about as a result of an intellectual endeavour that has Spade read clues, weigh up motives and alibis, and find contradictions in the testimonies of the various suspects. Following an influential account that originates in Raymond Chandler’s essay ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ (1944), Hammett is often seen as instrumental in in-

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Case Studies: Sam Spade

venting a specific American style of detective-writing in direct opposition to the British clue-puzzle format. However, what we encounter here are in fact Agatha Christie stories transplanted to an American urban context and given a coat of hardboiled veneer. Even though it was published first, The Maltese Falcon is much more innovative than the three short stories and departs decisively from established genre conventions. In this novel, the scrutiny of clues is no longer the principal way of structuring the detective story. While it is still possible to point towards a few residual clues, Hammett generally avoids them and even mocks the clue as a contrived and unrealistic plot device. A striking case in point occurs early in the novel when Spade visits O’Shaughnessy in her apartment. When the woman briefly leaves the room, Spade takes the opportunity to rummage through her belongings, learning that her drawer ‘held two packs of playing-cards, a pad of score-cards for bridge, a brass screw, a piece of red string, and a gold pencil’ (Hammett 1992 [1929]: 59) – before lighting another cigarette as a sign of his distractedness. The idea of rummaging casually in this way is itself at odds with the methodical approach of past detective heroes; it implies that success as a detective relies on chance and luck rather than superior mental abilities. More importantly, the objects in the drawer have no narrative significance. In a Christie novel where the plot depends on material clues, objects such as these would be of signal importance and potentially hold the key to the mystery. In Hammett’s novel, they are not only meaningless, but flaunt this meaninglessness, implicitly berating the reader for seeking the truth in trivial objects. The falcon statuette itself is another manifestation of this logic: presumed to be solid gold beneath the black enamel, it turns out to be made of lead. This revelation not only signals the futility of the quest for this artefact, but also the futility of looking for final meanings underneath the surface of signs. If traditional detectives were able to reach the correct conclusion by interpreting clues, it was due to the nature of the fictional world in which they operated. The world of Holmes and Poirot is defined by an ontological stability that ensures that effects (clues) are systematically correlated to causes (murders); and since the master sleuth knows the laws of correlation, it is only a matter of time before he or she reaches the right conclusion (Moretti 1988: 145). Not so in Spade’s world. This world is defined instead by contingency understood as the absence of such correlation and consequently the absence of a fail-safe path leading from the first items of evidence to the successful conclusion. Spade is working under the conditions of uncertainty and contingency; he can rarely trust the people who surround him, least of all his clients, and the unravelling of the mystery does not come about as a result of a rigorous methodology, but involves a strong element of chance. The short parable of Flitcraft, which Spade relates to an uninterested O’Shaughnessy while they wait for Cairo, is a reflection on this contingency (DeFino 2004: 76–77). A stereotypical middle-class American with a successful business and a seemingly perfect family life, Flitcraft one day narrowly escapes death when a beam falls from a build-

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ing on the sidewalk in front of him. In response to this near-accident, he abandons his family without telling them, yet eventually starts a new life almost identical to the one he left behind. The conclusion Spade draws from this story highlights the importance of being in alignment with the world. The falling beam teaches Flitcraft that life is not a ‘clean orderly sane responsible affair’ (Hammett 1992 [1929]: 64), and that the contingency of the world is something that cannot be controlled, but must be accepted and embraced: Life could be ended for him at random by a falling beam: he would change his life at random by simply going away. […] He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling. (Hammett 1992 [1929]: 64) Spade’s working methods reflect this fundamental uncertainty and absence of rational order. Although he is evidently an intelligent man, intelligence is no longer the be-all and end-all of detective work, and his attempts at traditional detection mostly fail to yield results. When finding a newspaper with the shipping-news column torn out in Cairo’s hotel room, Spade rightly concludes that the Maltese Falcon must have been shipped to San Francisco on a steamer from Hong Kong. However, his deductions are in vain: when he arrives on the dock, both the artefact and the gang of thieves are long gone. Instead, Spade obtains the Falcon through no detective work of his own, having it delivered to his door by the mortally wounded Captain Jacobi. Similarly, his pursuit of the gang to the San Francisco suburb of Burlingame, which is triggered by what appears to be clever detective tactics, turns out to be a dead end, and the criminals instead surprise him at his home after he has given up the search. In both cases the positive outcome materializes as a result of chance and the agency of others rather than Spade’s superior abilities as a detective. The modus operandi corresponding to the contingency of Spade’s world, then, is not one of reading clues or pursuing leads, but of aligning oneself with the chaos of urban life. Like Flitcraft in the parable, Spade accepts that the world is not a ‘clean orderly sane responsible’ affair and, consequently, that criminal mysteries cannot be solved in a purely cerebral way by cracking the code. Playing on O’Shaughnessy’s characterization of him as ‘wild and unpredictable’, he explains that his detective method, far from seeking to impose order on chaos, aims to exploit chaos as a means of drawing out the truth: ‘My way of learning is to heave a wild and unpredictable monkey-wrench into the machinery. It’s all right with me, if you’re sure none of the flying pieces will hurt you’ (Hammett 1992 [1929]: 86). While the protagonists of classic detective fiction only entered the stage after the crime had been committed, examining it in a detached and retrospective manner, Spade is ultimately an agent of interference and disruption – someone who inserts himself directly into the unfolding crime, gathers information

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Case Studies: Sam Spade

by wreaking havoc, puts his life at risk in the process, yet ultimately prevails by virtue of his masculine power. Little seems to differentiate Spade from the criminals he pursues. Lying, extorting, cheating and beating his way through the novel, he is the perfect antihero, stripped of all remnants of idealism. Friendship and love are alien concepts to him; not only does he have an affair with his partner’s wife, but also pulls off a masterpiece of cynicism by first having sex with O’Shaughnessy at home, then going out to search her apartment while she sleeps before finally buying them both breakfast on the way back. It is a pattern both in the novel and the short stories that the people he is employed by are as shady as the people they hire him to investigate, and in The Maltese Falcon the employer turns out to be implicated in the crime itself. This blurring of the lines between victims and criminals echoes a similar moral ambiguity in Spade’s own character. Spade is a private operator, crafting out a livelihood at the interstices of law and crime without belonging fully to either. This grey-zone position allows him to sell his services and loyalty to the highest bidder. If the novel in the end has him reject the increasingly enormous offers of money, it is not because of moral misgivings, but because his analysis of risk versus reward yields a negative result. For Hammett, later a member of the American Communist Party and a target of McCarthyist persecution, this commercialization of loyalty is a reflection of the amoral nature of private enterprise and, ultimately, of capitalism itself. Although his behaviour at times seems sociopathic, Spade is not an amoral person. His conduct and decisions are guided throughout by a personal code of conduct, which he explains to Brigid O’Shaughnessy at the end of The Maltese Falcon in an attempt to justify why he is not prepared to let her escape arrest. His enumeration of seven reasons is interesting not least for what it fails to include. Spade expresses no moral qualms about people murdering each other, nor does he suggest that O’Shaughnessy should stand trial because she has broken the law. Humanist morality and legal conscience are absent from his explanations, and the reasons given point instead to a strictly individual set of norms with plenty of in-built flexibility. First and foremost, they are based on a logic of self-preservation: letting O’Shaughnessy go free might lead to his being charged with murder in her place and would in any case make her indebted to him in a way that would put him further at risk; after all, the woman is a killer and highly likely to rid herself of liabilities. Second, Spade invokes business interests: by killing his associate, O’Shaughnessy has violated the bond, however practical in nature, between business partners, and it would be bad for business if Spade were to let her go. Finally, Spade refers to a certain sense of masculinity, comparing the detective to a hunting dog that cannot be expected to let loose its prey; moreover, he dislikes the idea of being ‘played […] for a sucker’ (Hammett 1992 [1929]: 213–34). This triple logic of self-perseverance, business acumen and untamable masculinity falls short, perhaps, as a moral charter worthy of emulation or universal adoption, yet it does fulfil its purpose in the narrative context of the novel, namely to complete the

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portrayal of Spade while at the same time, indirectly, offering a bleak characterization of the social environment that determines him. The image of the hunting dog is apt: in a world whose organizing principle is homo homini lupus – man is a wolf to man – being the top dog is the only way of ensuring one’s freedom and survival. As I have suggested here, the power of Sam Spade as a detective hero is not a matter of biographical or psychological realism; in fact, Hammett shuns these traditional tactics of character representation, choosing instead to draw his protagonist as a man without emotional depth or a life-story to shed light on his identity. Accordingly, his five main features – appearance, relationship to women, relationship to men, modus operandi and code of conduct – do not coalesce into a complex picture of an individual, but define an attitude – a hyper-masculine mode of being that responds to gender issues and social problems of early-twentieth-century America. In his seminal study ‘The Typology of Detective Fiction’ (1977), Tzvetan Todorov argues that the attraction of Hammett’s brand of detective fiction lies in the double reader-response that it provokes: curiosity with respect to the way in which the crime was committed, and suspense regarding the fate of the protagonist (Todorov 1977: 51–52). However, the Spade stories, above all The Maltese Falcon, clearly also appeal to readers, and arguably predominantly male readers, because of Spade and the attitude he embodies. Hammett’s novel is precisely just as much about Spade himself as the crimes he investigates.

In addition to bringing to life an attitude, Spade also embodies two more gen-

eral issues. First, there is a political aspect to his character. Spade is a man trying to gain his bearings in a complex and often dangerous world where government institutions are weak, where fixed gender roles have started to come undone and where individuals, always distrustful of each other, find themselves in a permanent state of all-against-all combat. Read in this way, Spade’s character amounts to an indictment of the United States of the interwar period, and his hardboiled attitude is consequently not something that is laudable in itself, but must be regarded instead as a defence against the failings of society at large. Second, Spade can be seen as a symbol of modern man: a solitary individual thrown into a world without metaphysical certainties and universally binding norms. Like the heroes of French existentialist literature, Spade is tasked with lifting the burden of existence himself – although, in contrast to those anguished relatives, his endeavours take the entirely practical form of making a living and staying alive. Never allowing life to take on a false aura of meaning, he negotiates the contingency of things by improvising and by striving to preserve a degree of personal dignity in a world of corruption and crime. Spade’s steely masculinity reflects both these issues: it is a response to social incohesion as well as to the corrosiveness of modernity.

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Case Studies: Sam Spade

References Chandler, Raymond (1995 [1944]), ‘The Simple Art of Murder’, Later Novels & Other Writings, New York: Library of America, pp. 977–92. DeFino, Dean (2004), ‘Lead Birds and Falling Beams’, Journal of Modern Literature, 27: 4, pp. 73–81. Gardner, Erle Stanley (1965), ‘Getting Away with Murder’, Atlantic Monthly, 215: 1, pp. 72–75. Hammett, Dashiell (1992 [1929]), The Maltese Falcon, New York: Vintage. Moretti, Franco (1988), ‘Clues’, Signs Taken for Wonders, London/New York: Verso, pp. 130–56. Plain, Gill (2001), Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body, Edinburgh: EUP. Safire, William (2004), The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time, New York: Simon & Schuster. Todorov, Tzvetan (1977), ‘The Typology of Detective Fiction’, The Poetics of Prose (trans. Richard Howard), Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp. 42–52. Go Further Novels Hammett, Dashiell (1983), The Four Great Novels (The Dain Curse, The Glass Key, The Maltese Falcon, Red Harvest), London: Picador. Short stories Hammett, Dashiell (2001), Crime Stories & Other Writings, New York: Library of America. ––––– (1999 [1932]), ‘Too Many Have Lived’, Nightmare Town, New York: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, pp. 305–20. ––––– (1999 [1932]), ‘A Man Called Spade’, Nightmare Town, New York: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, pp. 277–304. ––––– (1999 [1932]), ‘They Can Only Hang You Once’, Nightmare Town, New York: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, pp. 321–32. Books Dussere, Erik (2014), America is Elsewhere: The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer Culture, Oxford: OUP. Horsley, Lee (2005), Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, Oxford: OUP. Borde, Raymond and Chaumeton, Étienne (2002), A Panorama of American Film Noir 1941–1953 (trans. Paul Hammond), San Francisco: City Lights Books. Layman, Richard; with Julie M. Rivett (eds) (2001), Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett: 1921–1960, Washington DC: Counterpoint. Haut, Woody (1999), Neon Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction, London: Serpent’s Tail. ––––– (1995), Pulp Culture: Hardboiled Fiction and the Cold War, London: Serpent’s Tail. Naremore, James (1998), More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts, Berkeley: University of California Press.

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O’Brien, Geoffrey (1997), Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir, New York: Da Capo Press. Silver, Alain and Ursini, James (eds) (1996), Film Noir Reader, New York: Limelight Editions. Films Huston, John (1941), The Maltese Falcon, Hollywood: Warner Bros. Dieterle, William (1936), Satan Met a Lady, Hollywood: Warner Bros. Del Ruth, Rory (1931), The Maltese Falcon, Hollywood: Warner Bros.

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Title

‘Then it happens we were in the detective business. Well, when one of your organization gets killed it’s bad business to let the killer get away with it. It’s bad all around – bad for that one organization, bad for every detective everywhere.’ sam spade

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Lew Archer Nationality: American / Creator: Ross Macdonald Carolyn Beasley

Pity over punishment Raymond Chandler may have led us through the dark and threatening mean streets of Los Angeles, but it was Canadian-born writer Ross Macdonald who threw open the white picket gate of post-war suburban California (McCann 2010: 56) and drew the reader of crime fiction ‘back in the living room [Dashiell] Hammett had taken them out of’ (Collins 1986: 123). This evolution also offers a map of social changes impacting America as a result of Roosevelt’s New Deal policies (McCann and Pease 2000; Reilly 1980: 989). Even Archer’s name holds a sense of history marching onwards, with Macdonald deliberately calling his protagonist after Sam Spade’s doomed, and seemingly forgotten, partner in Hammett’s 1929 The Maltese Falcon (Worthington 2011; Lehman 2000: 141). Just as much of the world was moving beyond post-war reconstruction and towards a new period of domestic, economic stability, so too crime fiction’s protagonists were growing equally inward-looking (Whiting 2005; McCann and Pease 2000). The story of Archer’s world, then, needs to begin with the California witnessed through the eyes of Chandler’s fictional private detective Philip Marlowe. Marlowe’s California was symptomatic of the social and political adjustments that occurred in large American cities in the years immediately after World War II (Grella 1988: 105). These changes during the 1940s and early 1950s included rapid population influxes to cities, the mixing of diverse cultures due to post-war refugee movements, as well as the need for new legal, political and policing structures to deal with prohibition and organized crime (Scaggs 2005: 55; Moore 2006: 25). It is the suite of policies set in place to address these issues that preoccupy author Ross Macdonald and his protagonist Lew Archer. One of the most visible of these on Archer’s world is the effect of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, more commonly known as the GI Bill (McCann and Pease 2000). This wide-reaching transition programme offered returning GIs cash payments for university and college tuition, favourable business loans, low-interest mortgages requiring no down-payment, and encouragements to purchase new rather than

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Case Studies: Lew Archer

long-existing housing. The result was an explosion of economic activity, an expanding middle class and more opportunities for unfettered financial hijinks (Rzepka 2005: 220; McCann and Pease 2000). It is in the disillusionment caused by this combination of the desire for upward mobility, greater access to education, the existential unease and boredom of suburbia (Moore 2006: 175; Lehman 2000: 169), and the assumption that returned soldiers can simply ‘resettle’ back into functional lives that Macdonald finds the grist for his stories (Lehman 2000: 106). For the reader enjoying the novels in the era in which they were published, Macdonald calls on society’s ingrained delusions about what it means to be happy, wealthy and embedded in family (Horsley 2005: 92). There seems little point in being educated and hard-working in this post-GI Bill society, when those who have seemingly reached the pinnacle of the American dream collapse in ennui-driven dysfunction. Indeed, there is rarely any happiness in Archer’s world. A fascination with family dynamics It is this idea of the dysfunction of the family that links most of Macdonald’s Archer stories (Wolfe 1976: 117; Moore 2006: 29) and that provides the dynamics through which questions about social structure, harmony and the damage wreaked by interpersonal relationships are explored (Binyon 1989: 44; Browne 1990: 107). Families are naturally complex sites that see grand themes acted out every day in dramas to which most readers can relate. The family’s function as a close unit of individuals instinctively encourages the concealment of truth between members under the guise of protection and unity (Knapp 2006: 81) and presents a hothouse of multiple and conflicting interactions, cross-generational misunderstandings and scars from the past (Knapp 2006: 77; Lehman 2000: 169). While Archer is the first to argue that he engages in his work for love rather than money (Binyon 1989: 44), it is these tensions and the unresolved family mystery that are the mainstays of his income. Typically hired by a family member to locate another family member or stolen object, Archer finds himself immediately immersed in a viper’s nest of eroding relationships, long-existing rivalries and intense distrust. His investigations tend to reveal, particularly in the later novels, that the crime has its origin in buried family secrets or traumas of past generations, secrets that current generations will kill to keep silent (Horsley 2005: 92). The Doomsters (1958) is a perfect illustration of these themes. The family matriarch laments that her brood is plagued by an ancestral curse, and Macdonald presents the central character, Carl, as suffering from the genetic mental illnesses that claimed the life of his suicidal mother. The long-suffering wife of Carl, Mildred, is both victim and perpetrator. Hence she demonstrates Macdonald’s typical pattern of victims becoming victimizers and is a visible motif of how, as Archer comments in The Doomsters, ‘the current of guilt flowed in a closed circuit if you traced it far enough’ (Macdonald

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1958: 182). This cycle of guilt positions the families Archer encounters in a state of united and individual breakdown. As a unified mass, the family or ‘house’ points to the weakest member as the official cause of their troubles (as they do with Carl in The Doomsters); however, privately each member is facing a personal disintegration that they blame on another member. Not only is it apparent, as Woody Haut (1999) accurately suggests, that Macdonald’s work ‘ruthlessly attacks the totalitarianism of family life’ (16), but it is also clear that he is carefully and repeatedly dismantling the post-war notion that financial success and stability lead to domestic bliss. There are no ideal families in Archer’s world (Knight 2004: 124). This critique of the role of family life in achieving social stability is made even more explicit when family is considered as a symbolic, rather than merely genetically linked, entity. Even when the various players do not appear to be linked by blood, Archer often discovers they are secret love children, or unknowingly siblings, or trapped by the mysteries of paternity and maternity (Lehman 2000: 170; Knapp 2006: 74) and accidentally murder their own. Houses, Archer observes in The Doomsters, are symbolic of a ‘cannibalistic family hunger’ (Macdonald 1958: 51) that turns members against one another. Typical plot devices Like the nodes on a family tree, Archer finds every murder connects back to an earlier murder until, via a process of working backwards through time, the rotting source-roots are exposed. This movement through time is what David Lehman (2000) considers to be a typical element of an Archer mystery. Two plotlines are separated by an often decade-long gap in time between the past events of the crime itself and the timeframe of the investigation (Nelles 1987: 8; Lehman 2000: 174). Archer is typically engaged to investigate or is drawn into an open, recent and often trivial, mystery and it is from here that he learns that the distant past held an unsolved mystery that was actually the origins of the event he has been contracted to resolve (Lehman 2000: 173). Macdonald prided himself on the intricacies of his plots (Sharp 2003: 423) and drew heavily on Aristotelian theories of tragedy. This was a natural marriage given the classical tragedy’s focus on the relationships with mothers and fathers, the role of fate, the entwining of murder with family history (Sharp 2003: 414), and Macdonald’s own career as an English Literature student and academic during the years of intense debate between the plot-focused Chicago and language-centred New Criticism schools of literary criticism (Knight 2004: 124; Sharp 2003). Macdonald confirmed this nexus himself when he wrote in 1968: ‘I think of the stories as tragedies, Archer as a peripatetic chorus’ (quoted in Sharp 2003: 441). The story of Oedipus was of particular influence (Lehman 2000: 29) with this interest in the entwining of past trauma with intense fixation on a parent most clearly illustrated in The Chill (1963), where the Oedipus myth is played out no less than three times (Lehman 2000: 173).

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Case Studies: Lew Archer

The detective as analyst Just as an exploration of family dynamics is central to Archer’s works, so, too, is the psychological. Archer does not merely investigate crimes; he explains lives (Browne 1990: 106). Through this explaining, his work is inherently psychoanalytical in that he is an agent of recall for hidden memories, traumatic amnesias and mental traumas. His role as detective is not only to solve the crime, but also to unravel the delusional fantasies, neuroses and misunderstandings from the truth of events and motivations. This tendency to function as more of a therapist than an investigator (Porter 2003: 109) is often remarked upon in the novels. A client’s daughter in The Blue Hammer (1976), for example, comments that ‘you are a shrink, aren’t you […] I can smell the dirt in you, from people’s dirty secrets’ (Macdonald 1976: 26). Just as the therapist searches for the most useful mix of engagement and detachment with the client and often with the family, Archer engages in emotional involvement with this initial client and then withdraws his emotional support in order to gather objective information not only about the case from interlocutors, but also about the client. This protects Archer from being swallowed by the all-consuming and destructive family dynamic and allows him the distance that is lacked by those in the family he is investigating (Knapp 2006: 80). A fascination for why people act as they do marks Archer as a new breed of private eye (Symons 1972 [1993]: 183; Sharp 2003: 413). Chandler’s Marlowe, for instance, has no interest in understanding the causes of the deadly emotional damage suffered by his murderers (Sharp 2003: 414). In contrast, Archer consistently searches for and insightfully sympathizes with the motivations for socially disruptive actions. In The Blue Hammer, he determines that a young man ‘may be emotionally unstable. Anybody with his family background would be likely to be’ (Macdonald 1976: 141). Another character, who drinks to the point of insanity, is regarded by Archer as drinking from ‘pain, pain of being himself’ (1976: 186). As part of his pattern of engagement and detachment, Archer also often acts as a substitute father figure for the young adults in his stories by taking them under his wing, attempting to reset their path, or offering them advice when they are in emotional disarray (Symons 1972 [1993]: 172; Sharp 2003: 413). This occurs in virtually every novel, for instance through his interactions with Carl and Mildred in The Doomsters, Fred and Doris in The Blue Hammer and Miranda Sampson in The Moving Target (1949). This interest in conveying psychological truths (Symons 1972 [1993]: 173) also positions Archer as a product of his times. Macdonald’s work developed alongside popular interest in the notion of unconscious motives and Freudian, Jungian and Reichian theories of behaviour (Knapp 2006: 74). The era’s growing fascination with the hidden causes of action also permeated Macdonald’s home and domestic writing life. Macdonald’s wife, the writer Margaret Millar, is also widely considered to be another influence that led his work towards the psychoanalytical (Knight 2004: 146). Indeed, Millar is re-

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garded as one of the first authors to work in the genre of the psychological suspense thriller (Nolan 2007: 7). The act of therapy also provided a crucial element for many of his novels’ plots through the inclusion of a therapist, psychologist or counselling health professional into the complex fray of the story (Lehman 2000: 174). In The Doomsters, for example, his first act of investigation is to meet with the psychiatric nurse assigned to the escaped inmate who has paid him a late-night visit with a plea for help. In Archer’s world, crime is less a moral transgression or an evil than an outcome of mental illness and emotional deprivation (Lehman 2000: 175), be it neurosis or narcissism born in childhood or a fracturing of sanity under the stresses of family demands (Knapp 2006). As he explains in The Moving Target, crime is seen as something unleashed by ‘environment, opportunity, economic pressure, a piece of bad luck, a wrong friend’ (1949: 109). Even the policeman MacKendrick, in The Blue Hammer, echoes this ethos, commenting that nearly everybody is the criminal type: ‘all they need is the opportunity’ (1976: 145). Like the professional therapist, Archer is a ‘student of human complexity’ (Moore 2006: 78) and even when emotionally touched or affected by what he sees, he is always in professional control as an observer rather than a participator (Moore 2006: 81). He is highly rational rather than violent, more dependent on thought than action (Moore 2006: 21). This interest in the inner workings of others means that the reader is offered a richer, more emotionally insightful interpretation of the reasons for crime than by other hardboiled authors or, indeed, sociological analysis (Porter 2003: 109; McCann 2010: 56). Yet this professionalism means that Archer, perhaps also much like the professional therapist, cannot connect with others beyond the duration of the case (Moore 2006: 166). Just as he packs clothing supplies for his visits because he does not ‘know whether the job would last an hour or a month’ (Macdonald 1949: 4), he leaps into others’ lives, resolves their problems and then leaps out again (Moore 2006: 166). Other than Macdonald’s last Archer novel, The Blue Hammer, there are no romantic connections with the clients beyond the stray kiss (Nelles 1987). The shadow of war The shadow of World War II also looms over many of the male characters’ lives as they struggle to cope with the ordinariness of civilian life after their wartime elevation into heroes or officers of influence (McCann and Pease 2000). The Moving Target’s Alan Taggert, for instance, is described as one of many men who graduated from high school into privileged positions in World War II, only to find that ‘war was their element, and when the war was finished, they were finished’ (Macdonald 1949: 189). Archer’s skill of delicately drawing out traumas, such as these, buried in his client’s lives, allows him insight into the actions of the damaged and the guilty. Through this sensitivity to the complexity of human nature, Archer interprets Taggert as ‘a new kind of man, calm and

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Case Studies: Lew Archer

unfrightened’ because he places no ‘special value on human life’ and ‘could do evil almost without knowing it’ (185). The war, in Archer’s eyes, is merely one of many traumas that citizens must deal with. In this way, World War II is treated as a distant backstory rather than a dominant scar in most of the characters’ lives (Moore 2006: 127). The pain of personal experiences of the war suffered by Archer, or any of the characters, is rarely discussed openly in the earlier novels but always discretely noted. The loss of male family members is mentioned in passing as a deep source of guilt and emotional injury, and on occasion offered as a watershed moment for behavioural change. This is most clearly evidenced by the descent into alcoholism and random gifting of wealth by Ralph Sampson in The Moving Target, who, we learn through dialogue between Archer and his client’s daughter, made millions from a war that eventually robbed him of his son. As Macdonald’s writing career moved into the 1970s, there seemed to be a greater ease of reference to the war years and a more direct link to the conflict’s ability to devastate the mental health of soldiers. The Blue Hammer presents Gerard Johnstone, housebound father of a suspect, alcoholic and victim of a nervous breakdown that ‘all goes back to the war’ (1976: 20) and that has left him with ‘nobody home upstairs’ (20). This absence of wartime personal history in the protagonist and his clients is markedly different to those private eyes who follow in Archer’s wake, who, like John D. Macdonald’s Travis McGee of what Lewis D. Moore (2006) terms the ‘transitional’ period of hardboiled writing, are quite articulate about the effect of the war on their mental and physical health. The dysfunction of class Archer’s world and the world of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer share similarities in identifying America’s post-war shift to the right of the economic and political spectrum, but treat it in dramatically opposed ways. Spillane’s ‘super-macho punisher hero’ Mike Hammer (Horsley 2005: 88) constantly asserts that Americans need to stomp out any threats to unfettered consumption and right-wing conformity through threats of violence and fisticuffs in order to live well. He argues against the organization of labour and for the right of the United States to implement economic reform that favours the individual and corporatized flow of capital. In contrast, Archer presented a more civilized and reasoned approach to happiness that centred on easing middle-class neuroses and promoting psychological wellbeing (Horsley 2005: 88). In his eyes, this movement toward the right threatened to undermine the working and living conditions of Southern California’s agrarian-based labour force for personal gain. In The Moving Target, for instance, Archer expresses sympathy for the Mexican field workers protesting for better employment terms on his client’s farms. When his client’s daughter observes that her father is trying to starve the workers into breaking their strike, Archer comments that it is easier to swindle people ‘if you don’t admit they’re human’ (Macdonald 1949: 110).

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In stark contrast to Spillane’s overt and constant anti-communist message, Macdonald is humanist and gently liberal. Macdonald’s kind treatment of the disadvantaged also extends to thieves, thugs, con artists (Rzepka 2005: 222) and the similarly marginalized domestic staff who are often more dignified than the masters of their tactfully named ‘bad luck houses’ (Macdonald 1958: 131). In The Moving Target, Felix, the Filipino houseboy, explains that his well-known family has sent him to the United States to study at university, yet he faces the prejudice of his employer, who remarks that he cannot trust him, or other staff, due to the colour of his skin. Just as his professionalism keeps him from speaking out, so too does The Doomsters’ ageing housekeeper and nurse, Mrs Hutchinson, lie to protect her employee out of loyalty to her own profession as much as dedication to her employers. When she upholds the deception of the family doctor, it is because she is afraid her visually advancing years mean she will never be able to get another job in her field (Macdonald 1958: 143). The values displayed here could be likened to those of Archer himself: he too is hired labour and, like his oppressed characters, embraces a professional code of conduct that is a highly regarded yet rare commodity in the morally, financially and legally corrupt post-war world. In the middle-class setting of Santa Teresa, where ‘money is lifeblood in this town. If you don’t have it, you’re only half alive’ (Macdonald 1949: 242), the private investigator is not the chivalrous knight of Chandler’s world, but simply the rentable man who is best for the job at hand (Porter 2003: 97), which happens to be, in most of Archer’s cases, being ‘good at finding people’ (Macdonald 1949: 7). Archer’s sensitivity towards identity and the impact of the traumas of the past is often seen to be a direct reflection of Macdonald’s own difficult adolescence. Macdonald, born Kenneth Millar in 1915 in California to Canadian parents, was abandoned by his father at around 2 years old and was shuffled from relative to relative after the age of 6 (Rzepka 2005: 221). As his list of published works (and pseudonyms) grew, Macdonald moved away from his Chandleresque roots and, approximately eight novels into Archer’s eighteen-book fictional life, began to draw on his own traumas as an abandoned child (Rzepka 2005: 220) with stories focused more overtly on missing fathers (Nelles 1987). Tellingly, the pseudonym of Macdonald was, in fact, his father’s middle name (Nelles 1987: 6). Similarly, given Macdonald’s family’s own poverty during his formative years in Canada, it is of little surprise that his writer’s eye lingered on injustice, corrupting power and waste of wealth, making these ideas the criminal centre of so many of Archer’s investigations (Porter 2003: 109). So too, many of the novels’ delicate use of ideas around psychoanalysis were born from Macdonald’s own experiences with psychotherapy, which he undertook after a nervous breakdown, caused by the arrest of his daughter for vehicular homicide, and embraced for its ability to help him come to terms with his own repressed memories (Rzepka 2005: 220).

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Case Studies: Lew Archer

The secret history of Archer Archer is often only passingly described in the novels. More is discovered about his appearance from the conversational comments of others than from his own narration, although even these offer only small, partial snapshots. Sheriff Ostervelt in The Doomsters insultingly remarks on his blue eyes and 6’2” frame (Macdonald 1958: 38). His troubled history is only reluctantly revealed and usually only included to reiterate the novels’ themes of guilt, burden and regret. When, in The Doomsters, the reader learns that the juvenile Archer had run-ins with the law as a ‘street boy […] gang-fighter, thief, pool room lawyer’ (Macdonald 1958: 191) and was set on the right path by an ageing policeman, it is to contrast this mentorship against Archer’s own deliberate failure to save the damaged young Tom Rica from abuse, prison and heroin addiction. There are a smattering of other biographical facts scattered throughout the novels: he is in his thirties, served in military intelligence during World War II and trained as a police officer with the Long Beach California Police Department before getting fired after encountering colleagues engaging in corruption (Binyon 1989: 43). Archer’s alcoholism is given a passing reference in many of the novels as an illustration of the self-destruction and hypocrisy that typify the world around him as well as within. ‘We were all guilty,’ Archer muses in The Doomsters, ‘[w]e had to learn to live with it’ (Macdonald 1958: 191). The collapse of his marriage to the mysterious ‘Sue’ is an ongoing haunting that carries him from story to story, keeping him as trapped as his clients in regret for the past. The Doomsters, for instance, ends with Archer wondering where she is and whether she has aged as she ‘lay in ambush in time’ (Macdonald 1958: 191). The sense of nostalgia for a past that has been lost gives an ever-present sadness to Archer’s narratorial voice across all the stories. In The Doomsters he muses that the sounds and smells of a drive-in restaurant remind him of pre-war times, ‘before people started dying on me’, and that while his life has ‘dwindled down to a series of one-night stands in desolate places’ there is little point in self-pity (Macdonald 1958: 133). Archer’s personal philosophy Whereas Marlowe views the world with a sense of existential angst as the downtrodden knight who relentlessly stumbles to his feet in the face of a violent world, Archer is wearily resigned (Lehman 2000: 170) and frequently remarks that he deals in the sorrows of others (Porter 2003: 56; McCann and Pease 2000). Archer’s sensitivity towards the inevitability of human actions marks him as a more philosophically complex character than those who had preceded him in the genre (Sharp 2003), including Marlowe. His recurrent allusions to Dante’s Inferno (Lehman 2000: 171) act as a metaphor for the eternally trapped individuals and families that stumble across his path. Archer’s voice and language, too, is of equal sophistication. As T. J. Binyon explains, Dashiell

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Hammett may have innovated by introducing classicism into the language of crime fiction, and Chandler through the romantic, but it was Macdonald who moved the genre’s prose into the poetic and decadent (Binyon 1989: 44). These literary affections allowed Macdonald to signal a man who was better-read than his hardboiled predecessors, and who was insightful enough to turn to the torments of the past in order to understand both the sinner and the victim of sin. This wider view of the world and its sufferings is also suggested by his later stories, which broaden to feature ecological disasters, such as an oil spill in Sleeping Beauty (1973) and forest fire in The Underground Man (1971). These narratives use environmental damage to suggest that just as man’s innately damaged nature means he cannot find peaceful solace within his own blood and community, neither can he live in harmony with nature. For Archer, man cannot help but corrupt and contaminate all he touches. Over all, this sadness for the lingering pain of others signals a shift in the way the detective story represents its purpose and moral outcomes. Whereas traditionally detective fiction intends to resolve a crime in order to achieve justice, Archer’s investigation into a crime tends to be undertaken in order to relieve characters of their suffering, or at least to ease the guilt they have assigned to themselves. Herein lies one of the most distinctive of Macdonald’s contributions to the genre: the private investigator whose dream it is to make the world not a just place, but a merciful one. References Binyon, Timothy J. (1989), Murder Will Out: The Detective in Fiction, Oxford: OUP. Browne, Ray B. (1990), ‘Ross Macdonald: Revolutionary Author and Critic; Or the Need for the Oath of Macdonald’, Journal of Popular Culture, 24: 3, pp. 101–11. Collins, Michael (1986), ‘Expanding the Roman Noir: Ross Macdonald’s Legacy to Mystery/Detective Authors’, South Dakota Review, 24: Spring, pp. 121–24. Grella, George (1988), ‘The Hard-boiled Detective Novel’, in R.W. Winks (ed.), Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, Vermont: Foul Play Press, pp. 103–20. Haut, Woody (1999), Neon Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction, London: Serpent’s Tail. Horsley, Lee (2005), Twentieth Century Crime Fiction, New York: Oxford University Press. Knapp, John V. (2006), ‘Ross Macdonald, Family Systems Detective’, Clues: A Journal of Detection, 24: 2, pp. 73–88. Knight, Stephen (2004), Crime Fiction 1800–2000: Death, Detection, Diversity, New York: Palgrave. Lehman, David (2000), The Perfect Murder: A Study in Detection, Michigan: UMP. Macdonald, Ross (1949), The Moving Target, New York: Random House. ––––– (1958), The Doomsters, London: Fontana. ––––– (1976), The Blue Hammer, New York: Random House. McCann, Sean (2010), ‘The Hard-Boiled Novel’, in Catherine Ross Nickerson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction, Cambridge: CUP, pp. 42–57. McCann, Sean and Pease, Donald E. (2000), Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise

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and Fall of New Deal Liberalism, Durham: Duke University Press. Moore, Lewis D. (2006), Cracking the Hard-Boiled Detective: A Critical History from the 1920s to the Present, North Carolina: McFarland & Company. Nelles, William (1987), ‘Ross Macdonald’, Critical Survey of Long Fiction: Supplement, Pasadena: Salem Press, pp. 271–80. Nolan, Tom (2007), ‘The Literary Lives of Margaret Millar and Ross Macdonald’, Clues: A Journal of Detection, 25: 3, pp. 7–8. Porter, Dennis (2003), ‘The Private Eye’, in M. Priestman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, Cambridge: CUP, pp. 95–114. Rzepka, Charles (2005), Detective Fiction, Cambridge: Polity. Scaggs, John (2005), Crime Fiction, London: Routledge. Sharp, Michael D. (2003), ‘Plotting Chandler’s Demise: Ross MacDonald and the Neo-Aristotelian Detective Novel’, Studies in the Novel, 35: 3, pp. 405–26. Symons, Julian (1972 [1993]), Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel, New York: Mysterious. Whiting, F. (2005), ‘Bodies of Evidence: Post-War Detective Fiction and the Monstrous Origins of the Sexual Psychopath’, Yale Journal of Criticism, 18: 1, pp. 149–78, 208. Wolfe, Peter (1976), Dreamers Who Live Their Dreams: The World of Ross Macdonald’s Novels, Ohio: Popular Press. Worthington, Heather (2011), Key Concepts in Crime Fiction, New York: Palgrave. Go Further Novels The Lew Archer novels Macdonald, Ross (1976), The Blue Hammer, New York: Random House. ––––– (1973), Sleeping Beauty, New York: Knopf. ––––– (1971), The Underground Man, New York: Knopf. ––––– (1969), The Goodbye Look, New York: Knopf. ––––– (1968), The Instant Enemy, New York: Random House. ––––– (1966), Black Money, New York: Random House. ––––– (1965), The Far Side of the Dollar, New York: Random House. ––––– (1963), The Chill, New York: Knopf. ––––– (1962), The Zebra-Striped Hearse, New York: Random House. ––––– (1961), The Wycherly Woman, New York: Random House. ––––– (1959), The Galton Case, New York: Random House. ––––– (1958), The Doomsters, London: Fontana. ––––– (1956), The Barbarous Coast, New York: Random House. ––––– (1954), Find a Victim, New York: Random House. ––––– (1952), The Ivory Grin, New York: Random House. ––––– (1951), The Way Some People Die, New York: Random House.

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––––– (1950), The Drowning Pool, New York: Random House. ––––– (1949), The Moving Target, New York: Random House. Short Stories Macdonald, Ross (1977), Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer, Private Investigator, New York: Mysterious Press. Books Avery, Kevin and Nelson, Paul (2015), It’s All One Case: The Illustrated Ross Macdonald Archives, Seattle: Fantagraphics Books. Marrs, Suzanne and Nolan, Tom (2015), Meanwhile There Are Letters: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald, New York: Arcade Publishing. Gale, Robert L. (2002), A Ross Macdonald Companion, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. Nolan, Tom (1999), Ross Macdonald: A Biography, New York: Scribner. Bruccoli, Matthew Joseph (1984), Ross Macdonald, San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Macdonald, Ross (1981), Self-Portrait: Ceaselessly Into the Past, Santa Barbara: Capra Press. Wolfe, Peter (1976), Dreamers Who Live Their Dreams: The World of Ross Macdonald’s Novels, Ohio: Popular Press. Macdonald, Ross (1973), On Crime Writing (No. 11), California: Capra Press. E x t r a c t s / E s s a y s /A r t i c l e s Browne, Ray B. (2004), ‘Ross Macdonald: Revolutionary Author and Critic; Or the Need for the Oath of Macdonald’, Journal of Popular Culture, XXIV: 3, pp. 101–11. Sharp, Michael D (2003), ‘Plotting Chandler’s Demise: Ross Macdonald and the Neo-Aristotelian Detective Novel’, Studies in the Novel, 35: 3, pp. 405–426. Collins, Michael (1986), ‘Expanding the Roman Noir: Ross Macdonald’s Legacy to Mystery/Detective Authors’, South Dakota Review. 24: Spring, pp. 121–124. Films Rosenberg, Stuart, (1975), The Drowning Pool, USA: Warner Bros. Smight, Jack (1966), Harper, USA: Warner Bros. Television Archer (1975, New York: NBC). The Underground Man (1974, Los Angeles: Paramount Television).

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Title

‘My chosen study was other men, hunted men in rented rooms, aging boys clutching at manhood before night fell and they grew suddenly old. If you were the therapist, how could you need therapy? If you were the hunter, you couldn’t be hunted. Or could you?’ LEW ARCHER

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Veronica Mars Nationality: American / Creator: Rob Thomas Lucy Andrew

Neptune, nostalgia and new media Veronica Mars is the rarest of things: a girl detective who actually grows up. Unlike the Nancy Drews of the world, who remain forever on the cusp of adulthood, stranded in that no-man’s-land between high school graduation and the beginning of (adult) life, Veronica Mars, ten years on from her first appearance, is attending her high school reunion as ‘a high-powered New York city lawyer’ (Thomas 2014a). Well, almost. That, of course, is not the full story. To get to this point, Veronica Mars has been through a lot: cancelled after three seasons in 2007, despite attempts by both creator Rob Thomas and devoted fans to keep the series going, the new film project was only able to get off the ground after 91,585 Kickstarter backers gave $5.7 million to help Thomas achieve the ‘impossible’: ‘to bring Veronica back to life’ (Thomas 2014b). In its original television series format Veronica Mars (2004–07, Warner Bros) was obviously aimed at a teenaged audience. In its first two seasons, it was set in a high school, with a teen protagonist and, as Lisa Emmerton observes, ‘was broadcast on networks that targeted a youth audience’ (2011: 123–24). What made the series original, however, was the introduction of elements of film noir and the hardboiled detective genre, which gave this teen drama a more sophisticated, adult edge. For its first two seasons the show coupled episodic cases with season-long mysteries which were more personal to Veronica: in Season 1, Veronica solves the murder of her best friend, Lilly Kane, and, ostensibly, her own rape; in Season 2, Veronica investigates the bus crash which killed several of her high school classmates and the resolution of this case also rewrites the ending of her own rape case, which she had seemingly solved the season before. Season 3, which transfers the action from Neptune High to Hearst College, changes the sequence. There is no longer a season-long mystery, but shorter narrative arcs – principally, the campus rapes and the murder of the Dean of Hearst College – which, as Rhonda V. Wilcox and Sue Turnbull note, ‘are no longer directly about Veronica, thus weakening the emotional balance’ and ensuring that ‘the third season does not match the

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Case Studies: Veronica Mars

quality of the first two – which, in fact, form a narrative unit of their own’ (2011: 13, 15). The shift between the second and third seasons was not just a structural one. As Wilcox argues, in Season 3, ‘the narrative moves into more emphasis on the noir’ (2011: 64), a conscious decision by Thomas who, discussing the change in the opening titles for Season 3, states that: In season one, when we first did the titles the network was very clear on wanting to sell it as a high-school show rather than a noir show. And certainly the original titles helped emphasize that. But once we went to college and had a chance to redo the titles, I wanted it to feel noir. (Thomas 2007a) It was, perhaps, this privileging of the noir over the teen-drama elements that doomed the series to its premature end. By the end of Season 2, the teen show that the networks had approved had come of age. Veronica herself, in fact, had come of age before the events of Season 1 unfolded. As the series opens, Veronica is a far cry from the ‘virginal, naïve young girl’ of the flashback scenes to her 16-year-old self (Wilcox and Turnbull 2011: 4). Having been ‘fasttracked to maturity’ after her best friend is murdered, she herself is drugged and raped, her boyfriend dumps her, her father is ejected from the sheriff’s seat after bungling Lilly’s murder case, her mother abandons her, and she is ostracized by her peers after she makes the mature decision to stand by her father rather than her friends. Veronica is ‘fearless, both book and street smart, and incredibly savvy, strong enough to stand on her own’ (Fitzwater 2006: 195, 199). She is also cynical, jaded and angry and she recognizes both the corruption of her hometown of Neptune and the fact that this corruption can never be truly overcome. Despite her obviously adult identity, however, the serial mysteries of the first two seasons, coupled with the high school setting, help to position the series in the realm of teen drama. The season-long narrative arcs are not quite the coming-of-age stories crucial to the traditional teen series, but the central mysteries that Veronica solves in the first two seasons do help her to make sense of and, to an extent, come to terms with her enforced loss of innocence and premature coming of age. Veronica does not make the journey from innocence to experience in the first two seasons of Veronica Mars – this has already happened before we meet her – but she does discover how she reached her adult destination. Joyce Millman (2006) pinpoints the precise moment that ‘Veronica’s childhood is over’ as the final scene of Season 2, where Veronica, about to embark on a post-graduation trip with her father, waits in vain for him to join her at the airport: ‘Veronica’s “abandonment” at the airport coincides with her high school graduation – symbolically the entrance into adulthood, the time of our lives when we begin to see our parents as flawed humans, not infallible gods’ (Millman 2006: 57). By this point, Veronica has dis-

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covered all she needs to know about the adult identity that she has been growing into for two seasons. Veronica Mars’s coming-of-age narrative and Veronica Mars’s teen-drama status are over and, with them, the network’s interest in the series. In its third series, Veronica Mars becomes too noir for its new network, the CW, and Veronica has moved too far beyond the experience of the network’s target audience for the show. When the CW gave Rob Thomas the option to ‘wrap it [the series] up in a nice bow’, ending with the sense of resolution characteristic of a teen-drama series finale, Thomas ‘made the decision not to do that. Because I wanted to go down swinging’ (John 2014). Thomas remained loyal to his image of the series and, in true noir fashion, Veronica does not claim a final victory over Neptune at the end of the series. Corruption triumphs once more as Veronica casts her vote for her father in the upcoming sheriff’s election, knowing that her own illegal antics have doomed his campaign. Just as Veronica is left fighting a losing battle against her corrupt hometown at the end of Season 3, so Thomas was fighting a losing battle against the CW in his attempt to keep his noir detective show on the air. Unwilling to admit defeat, he tried a new tactic, putting together a presentation video for a possible fourth season, with Veronica no longer a small-town teenaged private eye, but an adult, fully fledged FBI agent embarking on her first case. Discussing the rationale behind this change of direction, Thomas admits: One of the reasons that I was interested in the first-year F.B.I. show was that Dawn Ostroff, the president of the network, had mentioned to me on a couple of occasions that she was interested in a first-year cops show. […] all of this is an effort to say to the network ‘pick us back up’. They might think that America has decided about Veronica Mars, teen PI, but we might get a new chance from everyone in Veronica Mars, F.B.I. (Thomas 2007b) More significant than the new FBI focus, was what was omitted from the Season 4 presentation in terms of characterization, setting and cast: Veronica’s PI identity, the corrupt town of Neptune and the familiar cast of characters who made up Neptune’s community were all, notably, absent. This was, in effect, a new series, with Veronica herself as the only point of reference for the fans of the original Veronica Mars series. Thomas discussed the fan response to the presentation in positive terms – ‘The nice thing about the fan reaction was that: “We liked the show as it is but if bringing her back as an F.B.I. agent is what keeps it going, we will follow there.” Which is great.’ (Thomas 2007b) – but it was evident that ‘Veronica Mars, F.B.I.’ would be produced for the network rather than the fans. Years after the CW rejected this idea, Thomas initiated what was, by his own admission, a ‘last-ditch attempt’ to revive Veronica Mars, by launching a campaign on

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Case Studies: Veronica Mars

popular crowd-funding website Kickstarter, asking dedicated Veronica Mars fans to dig deep and pledge $2 million towards the production costs of a Veronica Mars film (Thomas 2014a). The campaign went live on 13 March 2013 and, within eleven hours, the $2 million target had been reached. By the time the campaign closed on 11 April 2013, Veronica Mars had made Kickstarter history, with backers pledging $5.7 million towards the film. This time, Thomas’s revival of Veronica was centred not on the desires of television networks, but on those of the fans. Here Thomas rejected his FBI version of Veronica because ‘I couldn’t figure out a way to weave her friends into a F.B.I. case. We wrote the story we did to give an opportunity to bring every fan favorite onto the screen’ (Cheney 2014). This was not just a Veronica Mars revival: it was a reunion. The reunion was threefold: between the fans and Veronica Mars; between the cast members of the show; and between the characters within the show. The premise of a high school, ten-year reunion was an effective one as it ticked several boxes for the fans. Firstly, drawing parallels between the film’s internal, fictional plot and the external production story of Veronica Mars reinforced the fans’ connection with and ownership over the film, as they played a key role in its production. Just as the Veronica Mars television series ‘rewards viewers for their loyalty and diligence’ with a number of intratextual, inside jokes which ‘ask us to recall information from previous episodes’ (Emmerton 2011: 128), so the film draws upon Veronica Mars’s production narrative as the source of inside jokes for its loyal fans. These fans will observe in the opening of Rob Thomas’s Veronica Mars (2014) movie a clear parallel with the Season 4 FBI presentation. After the initial scene-setting voice-over – for the benefit of newcomers – the scene turns to a professional-looking, smartly dressed Veronica attending a job interview for corporate law firm Truman-Mann. Not only does her interview outfit recall her FBI attire, but the situation – being on the cusp of a new life and working for the ‘big guys’ rather than the oppressed outsider – mirrors the earlier FBI scenario. Later in the film, there is a more direct reference to the FBI presentation as Veronica’s former beau, Leo D’Amato tells her, ‘I could have sworn that I heard somewhere that you were with the F.B.I.’, to which Veronica replies, ‘Another life maybe’ (Thomas 2014a). Thus, the film wryly draws attention to an alternative path that Veronica Mars might have followed. This other life has been reduced to a throwaway comment, an inside joke dismissed so quickly by Veronica that it leaves fans in no doubt of its meaning: that their Veronica – the fan-funded Veronica, is far superior. A further inside joke which draws attention to Veronica Mars’s production story occurs when Veronica’s boyfriend, Piz, is recording a radio piece on a fading celebrity who ‘was broke. And worse, people considered her passé. She thought about restarting her moribund career with a Kickstarter campaign […] but the potential for further humiliation was daunting’ (Thomas 2014a). Here the film pats itself, and its fans, on the back for reviving Veronica’s ‘moribund career’ in just such a fashion. Another, more subtle, nod to the film’s production story arises in the New York busker’s rendition of

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the series’ theme song, ‘We Used to Be Friends’, which seems to draw deliberate attention to the film’s limited budget – a budget, of course, which has been provided by the fans. The song’s opening lines – ‘A long time ago, we used to be friends / But I haven’t thought of you lately at all’ – are particularly appropriate, given the triple reunion that the film offers to fans, cast and characters. But it could also be viewed as the film thumbing its nose at the television networks that rejected the series. They used to be friends, but Veronica Mars has had no need to think of them lately. A second reason for the film’s adoption of the reunion scenario is to align the fans’ experience with Veronica’s and, in doing so, to reassure them that they have not missed any of the action. In Veronica’s opening voice-over, she reveals ‘I got out [of Neptune] when I was nineteen’ (Thomas 2014a). At 19, the age which Veronica had reached when the series was cancelled, Veronica’s life as the fans knew it ceased to exist. Not only did Veronica leave Neptune and, thus, Hearst College to take a psychology degree at Stanford University, but she also abandoned her private investigator role: ‘I haven’t worked a case since I transferred to Stanford’ (Thomas 2014), she reassures her interviewers at Truman-Mann. When Veronica discovers that her ex-boyfriend, fan favourite Logan Echolls, has been accused of his new girlfriend’s murder, Veronica reveals in a voice-over that ‘I haven’t seen or spoken to Logan Echolls in nine years’ (Thomas 2014). There is one familiar face in Veronica’s life in the form of her Season 3 boyfriend, Stosh ‘Piz’ Piznarski, but it transpires that Piz and Veronica broke up after she left Hearst College and have only been dating again for a year – in which time they have made so little romantic progress that she has yet to meet the parents, a scenario that is on the horizon at the beginning of the film. So Veronica is poised to begin a new life – an uncharacteristically sensible life where she will pursue a serious relationship with the ever-steady Piz, who has never been popular with the fans, and a high-powered career working for a multinational law firm whose ‘job is to make sure that frivolous lawsuits disappear before they reach the courtroom’ (Thomas 2014). The film then proceeds to dismantle Veronica’s new life and identity as she is drawn back to Neptune to clear Logan’s name. Despite her assertion that ‘I don’t do that anymore’ (Thomas 2014), Veronica is about to ‘do that’ all over again. The key function of the reunion scenario, therefore, is to give the nostalgia-fuelled fans exactly what they want: the Veronica Mars of old, complete with those defining characteristics that the Season 4 FBI presentation denied them: the Neptune setting, the ensemble cast who make up the Neptune community and, most importantly, Veronica’s private investigator role. Fans are treated to a host of familiar faces in familiar positions. Unlike Veronica’s new life in New York, the town of Neptune and its people seem reassuringly unchanged. Mr Clemmons, still principal of Neptune High, tells Veronica that her absence has signalled ‘ten years of peace and quiet, Veronica. […] It’s been . . . boring’ (Thomas 2014a). No real progress seems to have been made in Neptune since Veronica’s departure: her father, Keith Mars, is still a struggling PI and his friend,

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Case Studies: Veronica Mars

Cliff McCormack, still a low-rent lawyer; the repulsive Vinnie Van Lowe still makes his money from spying on people, but now as a paparazzo rather than a seedy private eye; Veronica’s high school rival, Madison Sinclair, is still a Grade-A bitch; Dick Casablancas is still a lecherous surfer dude with no apparent job; and Wallace and Mac have taken the career paths expected of them – high school basketball coach and well-paid computer whizz respectively. This reassuring sameness, however, is just the surface level of the Veronica Mars revival. To truly satisfy the fans, and to restore Veronica to her rightful role in Neptune, the film has to go back to the series’ noir roots. Nostalgia and noir go hand-in-hand in the Veronica Mars film as the fans’ desire to return to the Veronica Mars of old is fulfilled though the film’s noir elements. According to Lee Horsley, the noir thriller is characterized by ‘the ill-fated relationship between the protagonist and society’, a society where ‘the things that are amiss cannot be dealt with rationally and cannot ultimately be put to rights’ (Horsley 2001: 8, 11). Discussing the Neptune of the television series, Alafair Burke observes that, ‘[i]n Neptune, the criminal justice system is consistently either indifferent or incapacitated. Neptune, in short, is lawless’ (Burke 2006: 116). This is no less the case when Veronica returns to Neptune in the film. The deceased sheriff, Don Lamb, has been replaced by his equally corrupt and publicity-hungry brother, Dan Lamb. When Veronica brings him evidence that should clear Logan’s name, the sheriff responds: ‘I don’t give a shit. I don’t care if Logan ain’t the guy. America thinks he’s guilty and that’s good enough for me’ (Thomas 2014). Nothing has changed. Lamb, like his brother before him, is concerned with appearances rather than justice. Morality is worth nothing in Neptune. Those who try to better themselves are doomed to failure. Despite the fact that former bad-boy Logan has seemingly ‘got his life together’ (Thomas 2014a), this does not stop him from becoming the prime suspect in his girlfriend’s murder case. In a similar fashion, the moral transformation of Veronica’s friend Eli ‘Weevil’ Navarro, former leader of the PCH motorcycle gang, is stalled by the Sheriff’s Department. Although he now has a ‘hot wife, cute kid’ and, he brags to Veronica, ‘I own my own shop now. And I haven’t been on my bike since Valentina was born’ (Thomas 2014), after trying to rescue socialite Celeste Kane from a gang of thugs, Weevil is shot for his troubles and framed by the Sheriff’s Department for the attack on Celeste. By the end of the film, he is back on his bike, embroiled in his criminal lifestyle once more. In a more extreme case, the reform attempt of Deputy Sacks – who, having spent years serving a corrupt Sheriff’s Department without complaint, is finally ready to speak out – is brutally quashed as he is murdered before he can testify. The town of Neptune and its corrupt rulers will not allow progress: as a result, the town and its inhabitants are just as Veronica and her fans left them. It is Neptune’s corrupt system, then, that is responsible for the fulfilment of the fans’ deepest desire: the restoration of Veronica to her private investigator role. As Alain Martaus observes when discussing the Veronica Mars television series, ‘without the ex-

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istence of a corrupt justice system, there would be no need for Veronica to resort to vigilantism to regain a sense of control over her own life and environment’ (Martaus 2009: 82). This link is even more clearly articulated in the film. The injustices dealt out to Logan, Weevil, Sacks and others reinforce Veronica’s determination to return to her former detective role. Notably, it is soon after the revelation that Sheriff Lamb does not ‘give a shit’ (Thomas 2014a) whether Logan is guilty or innocent that Veronica’s new life starts to disintegrate. Piz ends their relationship after she chooses to stay in Neptune to help Logan rather than returning to New York to meet Piz’s parents, and then Truman-Mann rescind their job offer as ‘they wanted someone who cared enough to return a call’ (Thomas 2014a). Keith begs Veronica ‘not to let this town take you down like it does everyone else’ but, as long as Neptune remains ‘an iniquitous hellhole’, so Veronica will remain to fight its corruption (Thomas 2014a). In its television format, and especially in Season 3, the noir elements of Veronica Mars worked against the networks’ vision of the show as a teen drama, centred around a coming-of-age narrative. In the film, by contrast, the noir elements help to fulfil the desires of the audience for which the film was produced: this time, not the networks but the fans. Regardless of its financial success or failure, the film has enjoyed one victory – that of its existence – and although, like Season 3, it concludes in typical noir style, with an emphasis on the corruption of the system, Veronica’s final voice-over offers a new perspective on her relationship with Neptune and her PI identity and so the film ends on a more positive note than Season 3: Dad always said that this town could wreck a person. It’s what happens when you’re playing a rigged game. I convinced myself winning meant getting out. But in what world do you get to leave the ring and declare victory? This is where I belong. In the fight. It’s who I am. I’ve rolled around in the mud for so long, wash me clean and I don’t recognize myself. So how about I just accept the mud and the tendency I have to find myself rolling in it? My name is Veronica, and I’m an addict. Hello Veronica. (Thomas 2014a) Again, there are parallels here between the internal film plot and the external production plot. Both Veronica Mars and Veronica Mars have been trapped in limbo but have now found themselves. Both have re-entered the ring. Veronica’s ‘addiction’ to detective work and her determination to fight Neptune’s corruption mirrors the fans’ addiction to Veronica Mars and their determination to fight for the series’ continued existence in one form or another. Veronica’s rejection of her stable and prosperous new life with a high-powered job and a dependable partner in favour of an unpredictable, financially insecure but thrilling lifestyle, rolling in the mud of Neptune, parallels the fans’ rejection of popular new shows – dead certs to be renewed by the networks season after season – in favour of a low-budget, small-scale fix of Veronica Mars. Since the film,

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Case Studies: Veronica Mars

Rob Thomas has also produced two Veronica Mars novels (2014–15) and a metafictional web series spin-off, Play it Again, Dick (2014). Veronica Mars may be sliding down the scale of media formats but, so long as Neptune is corrupt and her fans are loyal, there is little doubt that Veronica Mars, PI, will remain ‘in the fight’. References Burke, Alafair (2006), ‘Lawless Neptune’, in Rob Thomas and Leah Wilson (eds), Neptune Noir: Unauthorized Investigations into Veronica Mars, Dallas: Benbella Books, Inc., pp. 114–23. Cheney, Alexandra (2014), ‘SXSW: Director Rob Thomas Predicts Nancy Drew-Like Future for “Veronica Mars”’, http://variety.com/2014/digital/news/sxsw-director-rob-thomas-predicts-nancydrew-like-future-for-veronica-mars-1201128474/. Accessed 22 December 2014. Emmerton, Lisa (2011), ‘This Teen Sleuth’s Tricks Aren’t Just for Kids: Connecting with an Intergenerational Audience’, in Rhonda V. Wilcox and Sue Turnbull (eds), Investigating Veronica Mars: Essays on the Teen Detective Series, Jefferson, NC/London: McFarland & Company, Inc., pp. 123–36. Fitzwater, Judy (2006), ‘From Golden Girl to Rich Dude Kryptonite: Why Veronica Mars Is in with the Out-Crowd’, in Rob Thomas and Leah Wilson (eds), Neptune Noir: Unauthorized Investigations into Veronica Mars, Dallas: Benbella Books, Inc., pp. 194–203. Horsley, Lee (2001), The Noir Thriller, Basingstoke: Palgrave. John, Emma (2014), ‘Veronica Mars, the Movie: Fans Gave the Money, There Was All This Pressure’, The Guardian, 13 March, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/mar/13/veronica-mars-moviefans-money-pressure-return-kickstarter-funded-marshmallows. Accessed 22 December 2014. Martaus, Alaine (2009), ‘“You Get Tough. You Get Even”: Rape, Anger, Cynicism, and the Vigilante Girl Detective in Veronica Mars’, Clues, 27: 1, pp. 74–86. Millman, Joyce (2006), ‘Daddy’s Girl’, in Rob Thomas and Leah Wilson (eds), Neptune Noir: Unauthorized Investigations into Veronica Mars, Dallas: Benbella Books, Inc., pp. 46–57. Thomas, Rob (2014a), Veronica Mars, Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. ––––– (2014b), ‘By the Fans: The Making of the Veronica Mars Movie’, Veronica Mars, Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. ––––– (2007a), ‘Going Undercover with Rob Thomas’, Veronica Mars: Season Three, Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. ––––– (2007b), ‘Pitching Season 4’, Veronica Mars: Season Three, Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Wilcox, Rhonda V. (2011), ‘So Cal Pietà: Veronica Mars, Logan Echolls, and the Search for the Mother’, in Rhonda V. Wilcox and Sue Turnbull (eds), Investigating Veronica Mars: Essays on the Teen Detective Series, Jefferson, NC/London: McFarland & Company, Inc., pp. 49–66. Wilcox, Rhonda V. and Turnbull, Sue (2011), ‘Introduction: Canonical Veronica: Veronica Mars and Vintage Television’, in Rhonda V. Wilcox and Sue Turnbull (eds), Investigating Veronica Mars: Essays on the Teen Detective Series, Jefferson, NC/London: McFarland & Company, Inc., pp. 1–22.

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Go Further Novels Thomas, Rob and Graham, Jennifer (2015), Veronica Mars: Mr. Kiss and Tell, New York: Vintage Books. ––––– (2014), Veronica Mars: The Thousand Dollar Tan Line, New York: Vintage Books. Books Dunn, George A. (ed.) (2014), Veronica Mars and Philosophy: Investigating the Mysteries of Life (Which is a Bitch until You Die), Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Kaveney, Roz (2006), Teen Dreams: Reading Teen Film and Television from Heathers to Veronica Mars, London and New York: I. B. Taurus. Willett, Ralph (1996), The Naked City: Urban Crime Fiction in the USA, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. E x t r a c t s / E s s a y s /A r t i c l e s Bennett, Lucy, Chin, Bertha and Jones, Bethan (2015), ‘Introduction’, in Lucy Bennett, Bertha Chin and Bethan Jones (eds), ‘Crowdfunding’, special issue, New Media & Society, 17: 2, pp. 141–48. Booth, Paul (2015), ‘Crowdfunding: A Spimatic Application of Digital Fandom’, in Lucy Bennett, Bertha Chin and Bethan Jones (eds), ‘Crowdfunding’, special issue, New Media & Society, 17: 2, pp. 149–66. Cochran, Tanya R. (2015), ‘Crowdfunding the Narrative, or the High Cost of “Fan-ancing”’, in Lucy Bennett, Bertha Chin and Bethan Jones (eds), Crowdfunding the Future: Media Industries, Ethics & Digital Society, New York: Peter Lang, pp. 31–46. Hills, Matt (2015), ‘Veronica Mars, Fandom, and the “Affective Economics” of Crowdfunding Poachers’, in Lucy Bennett, Bertha Chin and Bethan Jones (eds) ‘Crowdfunding’, special issue, New Media & Society, 17: 2, pp. 183–197. Norman, Taryn (2015), ‘“She’s pretty hardboiled, huh?” Rewriting the Classic Detective in Veronica Mars’, in Jean Anderson, Carolina Miranda and Barbara Pezzotti (eds), Serial Crime Fiction: Dying for More, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 208–18 Scott, Suzanne (2015), ‘The Moral Economy of Crowdfunding and the Transformative Capacity of Fanancing’, in Lucy Bennett, Bertha Chin and Bethan Jones (eds) ‘Crowdfunding’, special issue, New Media & Society, 17: 2, pp. 167–82. Tussey, Ethan (2015), ‘Fixing Television by Funding a Movie: The Crowdfunding of Veronica Mars’, in Lucy Bennett, Bertha Chin and Bethan Jones (eds), Crowdfunding the Future: Media Industries, Ethics & Digital Society, New York: Peter Lang, pp. 157–172. Chin, Bertha, Jones, Bethan, McNutt, Myles and Pebler, Luke (2014), ‘Veronica Mars Kickstarter and Crowd Funding’, in Mel Stanfill and Megan Condis (eds) ‘Fandom and/as Labor’, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, 15, http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/ article/view/519/423. Accessed 16 June 2015. McCann, Sean (2010), ‘The Hard-Boiled Novel’, in Catherine Ross Nickerson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction, Cambridge: CUP, pp. 42–57.

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Pepper, Andrew (2010), ‘The American Roman Noir’, in Catherine Ross Nickerson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction, Cambridge: CUP, pp. 58–71. Braithwaite, Andrea (2008), ‘“That girl of yours—she’s pretty hardboiled, huh?”: Detecting Feminism in Veronica Mars’, in Sharon Marie Ross and Louisa Ellen Stein (eds), Teen Television, Jefferson, NC; London: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, pp. 132–49. Gillan, Jennifer (2008), ‘Fashion Sleuths and Aerie Girls: Veronica Mars’ Fan Forums and Network Strategies of Fan Address’, in Sharon Marie Ross and Louisa Ellen (eds), Teen Television, Jefferson, NC; London: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, pp. 185–206. Online Nguyen, Viet (2014), Play It Again, Dick, Burbank, CA: The CW, http://www.cwseed.com/shows/play-itagain-dick/episode-one/?play=38d4f19c-30d5-463c-a2e8-0998cc2d1442. Accessed 16 June 2015. Films Thomas, Rob (2014), Veronica Mars, USA: Warner Bros. Television Veronica Mars (2004–2007, USA: Warner Bros Television).

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M av i s S e i d l i t z Nationality: American / Creator: Carter Brown Alistair Rolls

Partner in crime and metonym for crime fiction partnership Australian authors of crime fiction often fly under the radar. Barry Maitland, who is one of Australia’s leading contemporary exponents of the police procedural genre (albeit with his own unique take, influenced at once by his career as an architect and professor of architecture, and a passion for the work of Georges Simenon), is a case in point. Among the media praise for his work presented on the inner cover of his most recent novel, Crucifixion Creek (2014), is the following from The Australian: ‘Australia has arguably one of the top five crime writers in the world, and you may well never have heard of him. It’s Barry Maitland.’ The same can also be said of Australia’s other great undiscovered treasure, Carter Brown. Like Maitland, Carter Brown, aka Alan Geoffrey Yates, originated from the United Kingdom; and again like Maitland, he set his novels outside Australia.1 His detectives (they include cops as well as private investigators) are based in the United States, mainly New York and California; they include Al Wheeler, Danny Boyd, Rick Holman and Johnny Rio, these last two being PIs specifically located in Hollywood. In all probability it is this disconnection between place of authorship and setting of plot that lies behind Peter Robb’s assessment of Carter Brown as a hybrid figure.2 (Authorial disconnection is, of course, not uncommon in ‘Australian’ crime fiction; as Stephen Knight’s work has shown [1986: 446], many authors of crime fiction that passes for ‘Australian’ were born overseas, with many never losing their connection to their ‘other’ nationality.) What may also have lain behind Robb’s comment, on the other hand, and certainly what I infer from it, is that Brown figures hybridity. For, and this is where his case is more complicated than Maitland’s, Brown embodies multiple hybridities: as a writer or – to use a post-structuralist term that divorces the physical being from the text produced – as a scriptor, he is British and Australian; as an author, he is Australian and American in terms of the agencies of his detectives and his publishers; and perhaps most interestingly, as a publishing phenomenon, he is global and, especially, French.

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Case Studies: Mavis Seidlitz

Perhaps not unsurprisingly, his PIs reflect both Brown’s displacement of self and his continuous globetrotting (his life, if we are to judge from his autobiography, was one of constant round-the-world cruises and flights, and trans-continental railway journeys, which saw him meeting with literary agents and matching his hard-drinking protagonists round for round);3 they may well have offices in Los Angeles, but their work takes them interstate and, often, overseas. The constantly felt need to situate authors and their characters, which sees us questioning whether or not, say, Barry Maitland or Peter Temple are strictly speaking authors of ‘Australian crime fiction’, has, I argue, contributed to Brown’s disappearance from view in the world of Anglo-Saxon crime fiction. Robb’s appeal to his hybridity is perhaps also born from a desire to redeem Brown, to bring him back from the obscurity of displacement. And so it is with the character who is the focus in this chapter – Mavis Seidlitz. She too is forever displaced, travelling interstate from Los Angeles to New Orleans (Good-Mourning, Mavis [1957]) to exotic islands (A Bullet for My Baby [1955]), to Mexico City (Murder Wears a Mantilla [1957]) or to London (The Killer is Kissable [1955]), solving crimes by frenetically colliding with cases and resisting spatial restraints; indeed, Mavis cannot even be contained inside her own clothing. As Kathleen Gregory Klein notes, ‘[a]t least once in each book she inhales too deeply and breaks a bra strap with predictable results; several times in each novel she “loses” her clothes’ (1988: 195). In the framework of Klein’s discussion of female–male investigative partnerships, Mavis cuts a striking but predictable, and wholly negative, figure; ‘as a first-person narrator,’ Klein continues, ‘Seidlitz cooperates in her own minimization’ (1988: 196). And yet, Klein herself contributes to Mavis’s minimization, or at least to the delimiting of her textual potential and her redefinition in spatial terms: ‘The American version of a foolish, unaware female private eye comes, naturally enough, from Hollywood’ (1988: 195). Seen from an American perspective, Mavis, a failed actress, can only ever be a stereotype, even an active participant in stereotyping. It is only when we de-situate her that we can see her as something else – as a participant in a renewal of a national narrative. And not, or at least not exclusively, an American one. As Toni Johnson-Woods notes, of all Brown’s detectives, ‘the French favourite is Mavis Seidlitz’ (2009: 66). In Paris, and again in the relatively small circles of crime fiction aficionados (such as those who congregate at the bookshop L’Amour du noir in the 5e arrondissement), Mavis is far better-known than in her native Hollywood. Indeed, it is only by consulting French materials that one can even establish the basic details of her trajectory. For example, it is arguably to Klein’s credit that she is almost right in her calculation that Mavis appeared in twelve novels (1988: 195). It is in fact doubly difficult to know in how many, and which, novels Mavis ‘appears’: on the one hand, she appears in novels in which she plays only a minor role, in which case it is difficult to talk as Klein does of ‘Mavis Seidlitz novels’; on the other hand, her name does not by any means feature in all the titles of those books to which one might legitimately refer as Mavis Seidlitz novels. The easiest way to calculate Mavis’s appearances is to follow

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Johnson-Woods’s lead and to consult French sources. A quick glance through the catalogue of French publishers Gallimard’s famous crime series, the Série Noire, reveals that Klein’s figure of twelve novels does in fact correspond to the number of appearances that Mavis made in the market where she has left her mark, which is to say in French translation.4 If one counts the 1955 title Honey, Here’s Your Hearse!, which appears to have escaped Marcel Duhamel’s team of translators at the Série Noire, a series synonymous with French crime fiction since the autumn of 1945, she appeared in a total of thirteen novels. The following list of titles shows that Mavis appears in name more often in French translation (four titles) than in the original English (two titles): •

The Killer Is Kissable (1955) / Le fol amour de Mavis (1965)

•

A Bullet for My Baby (1955) / Mavis se dévisse (1961)

•

Honey, Here’s Your Hearse! (1955)

•

Good-Mourning, Mavis (1957) / Jamais de Mavis! (1961)

•

Murder Wears a Mantilla (1957) / La Bergère en colère (1961)

•

None But the Lethal Heart (1959) / Adios, Chiquita! (1960)

•

The Loving and the Dead (1959) / Un brin d’apocalypse (1959)

•

Lament for a Lousy Lover (1960) / Télé-mélo (1961)

•

Tomorrow Is Murder (1960) / Demain, on tue (1960)

•

The Bump and Grind Murders (1964) / Sans voiles (1965)

•

Seidlitz and the Super-Spy (1967) / À coup de gaffes (1968)

•

Murder is So Nostalgic (1972) / Mavis et le vice (1973)

•

And the Undead Sing (1974) / C’est vous le zombie? (1977)5

These titles confirm the tone of Brown’s novels and the genre of which they are emblematic. They are chosen to be catchy, often based on word plays or deformed cultural references (West-Sooby 2009); as such, they often bear little to no relationship to their respective plots. Furthermore, Brown’s novels rarely contain the name of the protagonist. In fact, only Mavis receives this honour, and especially in French translation. The most apparent reason for this is the way that her first name lends itself to French puns: the ‘vis’ ending can be pronounced either /vi/ or /vis/ in French, with the result that Jamais de Mavis! sounds like jamais de ma vie!, a commonly used French expression (often jamais de ‘la’ vie!) that can be literally translated as ‘never in my life’ or, more colloquially, as ‘not on your life’, while Mavis se dévisse or Mavis et le vice play on the ‘s’ sound, which makes Mavis sound like ‘my screw’ (My Screw is Coming Unscrewed) or rhyme with the French word for ‘vice’ (Mavis and Vice). There is, however, another possible reason for Mavis’s eponymous status, and it is related to Klein’s topic, which is to say her status as partner. If we follow Mavis’s biographical journey from Hollywood wannabe to stenographer for the Johnny Rio Detective Agency to fully fledged partner and private investi-

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gator, it is tempting to assume that when Klein discusses her role it is in reference to a series of books in which she is the protagonist. And yet, this is not always the case; instead, while the narration and the identity of the protagonist always coincide, Mavis and Johnny Rio share these roles; furthermore, Mavis appears as narrator and protagonist while still Johnny’s assistant, and he can be found in the role after she has become his partner. In A Bullet for My Baby, for example, Johnny tries to reassert his independence and takes on a case that involves his acting, without Mavis, as a bodyguard for a client while she hosts a weekend gathering on an island. Mavis follows Johnny to the island and does little more than become angry and jealous as other women flirt with him. In fact, she plays almost no role in the plot (and this in a novel translated into French as Mavis se dévisse), and would hardly even amount to a Hitchcockian MacGuffin were it not for her importance as part of a series of novels in which the Johnny Rio Detective Agency becomes synonymous with this woman who represents a very particular type of PI, in other words with Mavis Seidlitz. For his part, Johnny occupies the narrative and solves the crime by doing little else than repeatedly getting drunk. His only decisive act is arguably the one that sees him take the novel into its denouement: profiting from a power outage that plunges the island into darkness, he grabs Mavis’s hand and heads to the spot on the island where all will become clear. In actual fact it transpires that he has unwittingly taken someone else’s hand and that this person is the murderer. This important but comical gaffe notwithstanding, the fact remains that, at the crucial moment, Johnny and Mavis are bound by trust, a trust that not even their respective and continual infidelities can break. And it is precisely this paradoxical blend of trust and infidelity that, when mapped onto Johnny and Mavis’s constant mobility and translocation, primes their partnership for translation; it is the essence of their translatability in the Benjaminian sense of the term (Benjamin 1968: 70). It is in just such terms – of trust between partners – that Barbara Johnson couches her seminal analysis of fidelity and translation: While the value of the notion of fidelity is at an all-time high in the audiovisual media, its stocks are considerably lower in the domains of marital mores and theories of translation. […] [For] while both translators and spouses were once bound by contracts to love, honor and obey, and while both inevitably betray, the current [Johnson is writing in the 1980s and her reference here is to deconstruction] questioning of the possibility and desirability of conscious mastery makes that contract seem deluded and exploitative from the start. (Johnson 1985: 142) Johnson’s questioning of ‘conscious mastery’ is doubly interesting here because it can be extended as much to crime fiction, and the master narratives that have governed the scholarship of the field, as to translation studies, where the question of fidelity is

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still present, if not more powerfully so, today. The genre of which Carter Brown’s works are metonymic is understood, through the broad lens of objectivity (which all too often relies on received wisdom over and above close reading of text), to be all about mastery, about tough detectives wresting control of events, investigations, and narratives from tough criminals. While this understanding of ‘hardboiled’ crime fiction consciously blurs the lines between right and wrong, with fidelity to justice and laws replaced to varying degrees by personal, existentially situated moral codes, the idea that this is actually what prevails in hardboiled narratives is itself an unhelpful (and perhaps undesirable, deluded and even exploitative) conception, if not misconception. Mavis Seidlitz’s relationship with Johnny Rio is predicated on love and infidelity, but most importantly on an equal dose (albeit one that varies from text to text) of incompetence and unconscious mastery of events. In terms of translation, and Mavis’s place in the annals of French crime fiction, the dominant critical narratives are equally misleading. The Série Noire is explained, time and time again, as a series born in translation, and, more specifically, of a love on the part of French readers of American crime fiction that was a logical part of the aftermath of World War II. Accordingly, the first titles of the Série Noire were translations of texts originally written by American authors, packaged with the famous words ‘traduit de l’américain’ (‘translated from the American’) across the front cover. As I hope to have demonstrated elsewhere, this view is a myth sustained, almost wilfully, in the face of a number of stumbling blocks. For one thing, the early years of the Série Noire were dominated not by the PIs of Dashiell Hammett (Sam Spade) and Raymond Chandler (Philip Marlowe) but by those of Peter Cheyney (Lemmy Caution) and James Hadley Chase (most famously, Dave Fenner),6 and Cheyney and Chase were both British authors emulating an ‘American style’. Hardboiled crime fiction, for its part, was born of the failure of the American dream and a tension between the reality of the prevalent consumerist culture in America and the parallel myth of ‘authenticity’, which is to say that America itself is not an homogenous entity capable of sustaining, or consciously mastering as its own, a genre of writing. This is especially true in the case of a genre that had, since the time of Edgar Allan Poe and his French detective, C. Auguste Dupin, and their French translator Charles Baudelaire, been the subject of a continual crossing of borders;7 and crucially, the translation praxis operated by Marcel Duhamel and his team at the Série Noire had, at the very least, an open mind when it came to fidelity (and texts did not always bear the famous slogan ‘traduit de l’américain’, not only because most of the texts were written by British authors but also because some were written ‘originally’ by French authors under American-sounding pseudonyms and were therefore not translations at all, at least not in any traditional sense of the term).8 In fact, translation served, and most pointedly in those early years, as a vehicle for the reappropriation of American mastery. Texts in which American detectives struggled to win-out over crime and corruption, or won their battle only by compromising the traditional values of jus-

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tice, made elbow room for a new national allegory for France in the immediate post-war period. At the time, these texts were being consumed in French translation, and in a French translation whose skopos privileged the target readership over the language and culture of the source text, as part of a French publishing series that was redefining crime fiction, not only in France but also internationally. So, what can be made of these deliberate abuses of the translation pact, and crime partnership, at Gallimard in the years immediately following the German occupation and subsequent Liberation of Paris at Allied, and especially American, hands? Johnson’s view of the natural tendency of the marriage between author and translator to lead to (potentially fruitful, perhaps even desirable) infidelity has particular poignancy in this context. As Johnson writes, [i]t might […] seem that the translator ought, despite or perhaps because of his or her oath of fidelity, to be considered not as a duteous spouse but as a faithful bigamist, with loyalties split between a native language and a foreign tongue. Each must accommodate the requirements of the other without their ever having the opportunity to meet. The bigamist is thus necessarily doubly unfaithful, but in such a way that he or she must push to its utmost limit the very capacity for faithfulness. (Johnson 1985: 143) Similarly, the love felt by the French for their American liberators, which is ostensibly reflected in the vogue for American crime fiction, is only one side of a coin; the other is marked by the understandable resentment felt by a nation whose identity had been crushed by occupying forces for four years and whose freedom was bought by American forces and economic aid. An historically situated understanding of the unfaithful translation strategy of the Série Noire must take into account the great unsayable truths of life under occupation (including, of course, collaboration and the vicious reprisals that followed, and of which women were particularly the victims), which were not aired publically until the 1970s.9 The victories won by chance by American investigators, who require partners as well as a healthy dose of luck, which are the hallmark of the Série Noire, allow – allegorically, which is to say, between the lines, or behind enemy lines – for that more honourable form of collaboration that was epitomized by the French resistance movements. And importantly, translation allows these other truths to be said indirectly; for as post-war images of that famous icon of the French Republic, Marianne, showed, the light of Liberation was too bright – to look to the future meant averting one’s gaze from the harsh spectacle of reality.10 That the Série Noire was precisely not the product of, or vehicle for, a unilateral wave of Americanophilia in France, which might otherwise have lent itself to a more faithful translation praxis, is not only attested to by the rapid inclusion of French

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authors in the series (from 1948) and the subsequent deployment of (increasingly) French-focused and French-based narratives; it is also demonstrated by the star status achieved in France by Anglo-Saxon authors otherwise largely over-looked in their countries of origin. As is emerging here, Carter Brown, with his enduring appeal in France, is a good example of the cachet that came with being published in the Série Noire. Names, careers and fortunes could be made in France, and this is still the case today for authors who are better known there, in translation, than in their countries of origin, including Douglas Kennedy, for example. James Hadley Chase outdid Hammett and Chandler in terms of the number of titles published in the Série Noire (57 to 9 and 9, respectively); Peter Cheyney dominated the early years (1945–1949) with 7 of the first 22 titles (alongside Chase with 6);11 they were all eclipsed, however, by the figures achieved by Brown, who by 1974 could boast a staggering 121 titles in the Série Noire. Indeed, Mesplède and Schleret (1996: 64) raise the question of whether or not one man, whom incidentally they classify as ‘British’, could have written so prolifically (200 or so titles with global sales figures exceeding 50 million), but they also refer their readers to his American publisher’s claims that no partners were involved. As far as we can tell, Brown worked alone. The same, of course, cannot be said of his private investigators. And so we return to Mavis Seidlitz, and the matter of her gender and her status as variously faithful and unfaithful partner. For Kathleen Gregory Klein, detective fiction is ‘a fictional form so well defined and predictably structured [that it] lends itself easily to parody’ (1988: 173). This, she argues, is all the truer when the private eyes are women because, as a general rule, their authors ‘undercut their protagonists to reinforce a social standard of female inequality and, in so doing, undermine the genre in which they write’ (1988: 174). We might speculate as to whether such practice reinforces the parodic nature of the genre as much as it undermines it. Be that as it may, this metonymic role of the female PI (parody within and of a parody) lends a double-edge to female detectival agency, which in turn lends itself particularly well to the formation of an allegorical narrative. Weak – ‘minimized’, to use Klein’s term – the female private investigator is ‘an intruder into the public realm controlled by masculinist, patriarchal power’; and as such, ‘[s]he attempts to infiltrate another culture, to learn its secrets, and to either make a place for herself there or remake that world to suit her values’ (Klein 1988: 174). As a spy or double-agent, then, a female PI must necessarily function metonymically inside the Série Noire, whose very purpose was, from its inception, to transfer American culture into France while at the same time infiltrating that culture with subverted translation strategies, taking it over under the guise, or cover story, of submitting to it. Seen in this light, the theory that translated literature moves predominantly from a (source) culture of relative economic power to one (the target) of relative economic weakness,12 is subtly overturned, and an American genre morphs into ‘French crime fiction’ even as the slogan reads (in French, and often when the text is not American, thereby multiplying the layers of irony) ‘traduit de l’américain’. Thus, for better or worse, Mavis uses,

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just as she abuses, her gender. While this cannot fully explain the enormous success of Brown’s various PIs in France, it does go some way to explaining Mavis’s particular popularity. She is, I contend, always already a French double-agent when, and wherever, she appears. The urtext for this allegorical reading that sees Mavis mapped onto Marianne, and her victories over evil as indirect French revisioning of the history of Liberation, is none other than the text chosen by Duhamel to open his series in the autumn of 1945 – Peter Cheyney’s La Môme vert-de-gris (originally published as Poison Ivy in English in 1937). If I give the French title first here, it is because Duhamel’s decision to rename Cheyney’s novel, and to make the femme-fatale figure the eponymous hero,13 is foundational in terms of the Série Noire and its systemization of translatorly infidelity. As I have noted elsewhere, Duhamel’s choice of title deforms the vague, ambiguous original title – Poison Ivy – and situates it historically in its translated context: môme is a French term for ‘kid’ or, in this generic context, ‘dame’; vert-de-gris, or greenish-grey, is the precise term used in French to denote the colour of the uniforms worn by the German occupying forces (Rolls 2006). Given that souris, or mouse, is another term typically used at the time to render the English ‘dame’, the reference to la souris grise, or grey mouse, the term used to designate female officers of the Wehrmacht, becomes clear.14 The dame Carlotta, the nightclub singer who is part of the gang of villains pursued by Cheyney’s fetish detective Lemmy Caution, is therefore, obliquely and insidiously, preordained as an object of hatred for a French post-war readership. The surprise produced when at the very end of the denouement the leader of the gang throws his gun to Carlotta, who, against all expectations, turns it back on him, is all the more powerful in translation. Carlotta, it turns out, is the classic sleeper. Her role as double-agent is perceived, almost unconsciously, by Lemmy, who believes he sees her ‘change of colour’ as a flash in her eyes in the instant before she is handed the gun and, with it, secures his victory over evil. Thus we have a foundational narrative of the hardboiled crime partnership as allegory for an Allied victory over an axis of evil, in which France is represented by a female double-agent standing as an overtly sexualized Marianne and thereby claws back a degree of self-determination. This sets the scene for Mavis. When Johnny Rio takes her hand in A Bullet for My Baby, it does not matter that it is not her hand; or, rather, it is significant in that it signals an exposure of feigned allegiances. And neither does it matter that Mavis’s role is only a cameo in the text – the fact is that she is there to guide him, just as Carlotta is there to guide Lemmy. The French title, of course, highlights the importance of her role: while Mavis se dévisse is easily laughed off as a facile pun (Mavis, or ‘my screw’, is coming unscrewed), it reinforces her ability, even while becoming ‘unhinged’, to unscrew cases, to work against the grain and, ultimately, to do the opposite of what one might expect. (Incidentally, there are many significant comparisons between the two texts, including both Johnny and Lemmy spending much of their time in their respective cases stumbling blindly in the dark.) The term ‘fetish detective’,

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too, is important: Carlotta is fetishized throughout Cheyney’s text, and Lemmy at one point muses on the case while riffling through the contents of her underwear drawer. Indeed, it is – in psychoanalytical terms – fetishism that allows Lemmy both to see and not see Carlotta’s true colours, allowing her cover story to remain intact.15 In the same way, Mavis’s famous wardrobe malfunctions are no trifling abuses of trusses; instead, they allow the reader’s focus to be drawn, fetishistically, to particular body parts while her strength lies elsewhere, in partnership. For Mavis is always part of Johnny and Mavis, just as is Johnny, no matter how hard each tries to get along without the other. And if Mavis occurs in name more often in French than in her (near-)native American, it is because she is not an emblem of American crime fiction in French translation but of crime fiction as a truly, and unfaithfully, Franco-American partnership. References Benjamin, Walter (1968), ‘The Task of the Translator’, Illuminations (trans. Harry Zohn), New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., pp. 69–82. Brown, Carter (1983), Ready When You Are, CB!: The Autobiography of Alan Yates alias Carter Brown, Melbourne: Macmillan Australia. Dussere, Erik (2014), America is Elsewhere: The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer Culture, Oxford: OUP. Gorrara, Claire (2003), ‘Cultural Intersections: The American Hard-Boiled Detective Novel and Early French Roman Noir’, Modern Language Review, 98: 2, pp. 590–601. Johnson, Barbara (1985), ‘Taking Fidelity Philosophically’, in J. F. Graham (ed.), Difference in Translation, Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, pp. 142–48. Johnson-Woods, Toni (2009), ‘Crime Fiction’s Cultural Field: Carter Brown in France’, in Alistair Rolls (ed.), Mostly French: French (in) Detective Fiction, Oxford: Peter Lang, pp. 53–73. Klein, Kathleen Gregory (1988), The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre, Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Knight, Stephen (1986), ‘Real Pulp at last: Peter Corris’s Thrillers’, Meanjin, 45: 4, pp. 446–52. Lhomeau, Franck (2000), ‘Le roman “noir” à l’américaine’, Temps noir, 4, pp. 5–33. Maitland, Barry (2014), Crucifixion Creek, Melbourne: Text. Mesplède, Claude and Schleret, Jean-Jacques (1996), Les auteurs de la Série Noire : Voyage au bout de la Noire 1945–1995, Paris: Joseph K. Rolls, Alistair (2006), ‘Throwing Caution to the French Wind: Peter Cheyney’s Success Overseas in 1945’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 43: 1, pp. 35–47. ––––– (2014), Paris and the Fetish: Primal Crime Scenes, Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi. Rolls, Alistair and Walker, Deborah (2009), French and American Noir: Dark Crossings, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Sapiro, Gisèle (2010), ‘French Literature in the World System of Translation’, in Christie McDonald and Susan Rubin Suleiman (eds), French Global: A New Approach to Literary History, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 298–319.

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West-Sooby, John (2009), ‘Lost – and Found – in Translation: The Frenchification of Australian Crime’, in Alistair Rolls (ed.), Mostly French: French (in) Detective Fiction, Oxford: Peter Lang, pp. 123–40. Go Further Nove l s The Mavis Seidlitz novels (all published by Horwitz in Sydney) Brown, Carter (1974), And the Undead Sing. ––––– (1972), Murder Is So Nostalgic. ––––– (1967), Seidlitz and the Super-Spy. ––––– (1964), The Bump and Grind Murders. ––––– (1960), Lament for a Lousy Lover. ––––– (1960), Tomorrow Is Murder. ––––– (1959), The Loving and the Dead. ––––– (1959), None But the Lethal Heart. ––––– (1957), Good-Mourning, Mavis. ––––– (1957), Murder Wears a Mantilla. ––––– (1955), A Bullet for My Baby. ––––– (1955), Honey, Here’s Your Hearse! ––––– (1955), The Killer is Kissable. Other novels Cheyney, Peter (1937), Poison Ivy, London: Collins. Books Rolls, Alistair and Walker, Deborah (2009), French and American Noir: Dark Crossings, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Mesplède, Claude and Schleret, Jean-Jacques (1996), Les Auteurs de la Série Noire: Voyage au bout de la Noire 1945–1995, Paris: Joseph K. Yates, Alan G. (1983), Ready When You Are, CB!: The Autobiography of Alan Yates alias Carter Brown, Melbourne: Macmillan. E x t r a c t s / E s s a y s /A r t i c l e s Johnson-Woods, Toni (2014), ‘Crime on the Airwaves: The Carter Brown Mystery Theatre’, Australasian Journal of Popular Culture, 3: 1, pp. 73–93. ––––– (2004), ‘The Mysterious Case of Carter Brown’, Australian Literary Studies, 21: 4, pp. 74–88. Forbes, Jill (1997), ‘Winning Hearts and Minds: The American Cinema in France 1945–49’, French Cultural Studies, 8: 22, pp. 29–39. ––––– (1991), ‘The “Série Noire”’, in B. Rigby and N. Hewitt (eds), France and the Mass Media, London: Macmillan, pp. 85–97.

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Notes 1

Crucifixion Creek is the first of Maitland’s Belltree Trilogy, a series of books starring Aboriginal detective Harry Belltree and set in New South Wales. This first Harry Belltree novel is set in Sydney; the second, which Maitland has just completed as I write these lines in October 2014, is set, like me, in Newcastle and the Hunter Valley. Maitland remains most famous for his Brock and Kolla series, which are set in and around London and south-east England.

2

Robb, himself a globetrotting Australian author, made this comment as part of his keynote address at a crime fiction conference held at the University of Wollongong (Telling Truths: Crime Fiction and National Allegory, University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia, 6–8 December 2012).

3

Al Wheeler is a continually recurring narrative interruption into Yates’s autobiography (Brown 1983: passim); indeed, his presence in the text, which verges on an act of self-coauthoring, may be considered to offset the patent lack of information given about Carter Brown the author. Here the protagonist is a metonym but also a fetish, designed to veil, as well as to point to, that aspect of Brown’s life for which he is best known.

4

Indeed, facts that are difficult for an Anglo-Saxon scholar to ascertain are much more readily available to French readers. An accurate list of Mavis Seidlitz titles is in fact available online on French Wikipedia: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carter_Brown#S.C3.A9rie_Mavis_Seidlitz. Accessed 8 October 2014.

5

The order is chronological, based on the publication date of the English title and alphabetical when more than one English title appears in any given year. This figure of thirteen novels is borne out by Claude Mesplède and Jean-Jacques Schleret in their comprehensive catalogue of the Série Noire (1996: 64).

6 7

See the chapter by Clara Sitbon in the present volume. For an analysis of the way in which the hardboiled genre emerged in the United States from the disillusionment of those returning from World War I, see Claire Gorrara (2003); on the tension between consumerism and the myth of authenticity as drivers of American noir, see Erik Dussere (2014: 11–15); for a reading of French noir through the lens of transatlantic exchange, see Alistair Rolls and Deborah Walker (2009).

8

The first French author of the Série Noire was Serge Arcouët; his first novel, La Mort et l’ange (1948, Death and the Angel) appeared under the pseudonym of Terry Stewart.

9

The release in Parisian cinemas of Marcel Ophul’s seminal documentary film Le Chagrin et la pitié [Pain and Pity] on 5 April 1971 is seen as a watershed moment.

10 The image I have in mind is Paul Colin’s famous poster of 1944, in which Marianne, bearing the stigmata after the dark years of occupation, shields her eyes against the blinding light of a new dawn. 11 Cheyney is another author whose name still resonates in French circles. The lengths to which Duhamel went, unsuccessfully, to try to retain Cheyney after this period when better cuts on sales saw him enticed away from Gallimard are recorded by French scholar of the roman noir Frank Lhomeau (2000). 12 For a study of the economics of literary translation along these lines, see Gisèle Sapiro (2010).

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13 My colleague Deborah Walker might well prefer the term femme fatalitaire here insofar as the dame Carlotta proves herself to be a double-agent and deadly, as it turns out, only to the protagonist’s enemies (see Rolls and Walker 2009). 14 This explains the title of ‘White Mouse’ given by the Gestapo to Nancy Wake, the famous bordercrossing resistance fighter, who was born in New Zealand and raised in Australia before moving to France with a French husband. After the occupation, Wake joined the Special Operations Executive and trained in England and fought in France throughout the war. 15 For an analysis of the Freudian fetish in crime narratives, see Alistair Rolls (2014).

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D av e F e n n e r Nationality: American / Creator: James Hadley Chase Clara Sitbon

Two private eyes for the price of one René Lodge Brabazon Raymond remains relatively unknown, especially compared to his first novel, No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1939); indeed, his success was almost vicariously enjoyed under a variety of assorted pseudonyms that he used throughout his literary career: James Hadley Chase stood alongside Ambrose Grant, James L. Docherty and Raymond Marshall. According to urban legend, No Orchids for Miss Blandish was written over the course of six weekends as a vehicle for importing crime fiction from the United States into England on the one hand, and in order to make money on the other. There is a strong parallel to be drawn here with the rise of noir fiction in France – in which context No Orchids for Miss Blandish became a classic (again) – in the years immediately following the end of World War II and in particular with the French Série Noire, which Marcel Duhamel created in Paris six years after Chase created Dave Fenner, and for exactly the same reasons. The story of Miss Blandish resembles many crime stories of that time, but its particularly high degree of violence sets it apart: the novel indeed features eight murders, many killings and woundings, floggings, torture, rape and unprecedented cruelty. Private eye Fenner himself behaves like a thug and marks a point in the trajectory of the crime novel, establishing corruption and violence as the norm of human behaviour. But this is a point that will be addressed in greater detail in due course. There has been relatively little written about No Orchids for Miss Blandish, George Orwell’s brilliant 1944 essay notwithstanding. Originally entitled ‘The Ethics of the Detective Story from Raffles to Miss Blandish’ and published in October 1944 in Horizon, this essay would later become one of the most precious works on Miss Blandish. There is more to this novel than meets the eye, however. This seemingly simple novel was first written by Raymond as James Hadley Chase in 1938 and published by Jarrolds in 1939. It was then translated into French by Marcel Duhamel and published in his infamous Série Noire in 1946. Intriguingly, Chase rewrote it in 1961, allegedly to adapt it

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to a more contemporary readership, and it was subsequently re-translated for the Série Noire in 1962. One might assume that the changes would be minor in nature, if the need were only sociological; however, the different versions, and their respective (English and French) evolutions, are not clearly mapped out, and it becomes difficult to tell them apart, as this Amazon reader testifies: I purchased this for my kindle expecting the original 1939 version. This is not it!! And so the two stars. This is a rewritten re-edited version from around 1962. There are televisions mentioned to replace the original radios, but worst of all I read that characters had different fates than in the 1939 classic. I think it should be made clear which version you are getting and both should be offered.1 The confusion only intensifies when one tries to untangle these knots, as versions multiply with no apparent coherence or discernible logic. It is to this matter that I turn my attention here, first by tracing a path through the publishing maze and then by focusing on Dave Fenner, the novel’s private eye. I question whether, and if so to what extent, the novel has evolved, and whether the figure of the private eye has evolved with it. In other words, as the novel was ostensibly rewritten to be better adapted to a new readership, did the PI need to undergo the same changes? By the same token, can Dave Fenner be seen to function as a metonym of the evolution of reader expectations when it comes to crime fiction? Indeed, even though Fenner never manages to save Miss Blandish from Slim, he undergoes significant changes in terms of behaviour, ethics and demeanour that suggest a clear division between two tendencies, which will be developed in due course. The Crime Fiction Library (BiLiPo)2 in Paris has in its catalogue the two original copies of the novel: the first one written in 1938 and published in 1939 by Jarrolds in London, and the second one written in 1961 and published by Panther Editions the same year. The paratext of this second version states its reason for being in explicit terms: The present Panther edition has been rewritten and revised by the author who feels the original text with its outmoded dialogue and its 1938 atmosphere would not be acceptable to a new generation of readers who may be curious to read the most controversial, the most discussed and the best known gangster story ever to have been written. (Chase 1961) There seems indeed to have been a need to adapt the novel to suit a readership that might not understand the contextual subtleties of the 1930s. More importantly, the justification only affects the atmosphere and the dialogue, not the characters, nor their ethics or morals. The 1939 novel was subsequently adapted for the stage in 1942 in a play written by Chase himself, with the help of Robert Nesbitt and Val Guest.

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Indeed, ‘in 1942, the play of the book, written by the author and Robert Nesbitt with additional dialogue by Val Guest, was presented at the Prince of Wales Theatre, London, where it ran for several months’ (Chase 1961 [1939]).3 Consequently, No Orchids for Miss Blandish presents three ‘originals’: the 1939 version, the 1961 version, as well as the 1942 play.4 In addition, one must also note a number of irregularities across and between these ‘originals’. In fact, on closer inspection, a very small inscription can be discerned on the first page of the book: ‘367th Thousand’. Moreover, this copy is undated, which adds to the confusion. Fortunately, I was able to locate the 1939 text in a local library, or at least that is what the catalogue stated. However, on the first page, written in the smallest of characters, can be made out the words: ‘500th Thousand’. Furthermore, this opening page states that, [i]n the past twenty-five years, no other character in fiction has so gripped the public imagination. The B.B.C. has mentioned Miss Blandish. Many reviewers and plays have burlesqued her. Her name has become as familiar to the public as any of the greatest Hollywood stars. She has been accepted as a household word. Because this copy is some 25 years older than the 1939 original, it must have been published circa 1964. Also, if we try to calculate the average number of books sold per year, we can establish that the copy held at the BiLiPo in Paris was printed circa 1957. In addition, if we compare the opening pages of the 1964 copy (the first version) with the 1961 copy (the second version), we cannot help but notice that the same review from the Liverpool Post was used for both texts. Two solutions suggest themselves: either this review is from 1939 and was reused in 1961. Or it is the review of the 1961 version that was used for the 1964 re-edition of the 1939 text. But why use the same review for two dramatically different texts? Either way, this contributes to a blurring of the lines and to the confusion of the reader. Corgi Books are the only other publishing house to have republished the original 1939 version, and this in the 1970s. Once again, there is no specific date on the book, and the only indication we have is the ‘publishing history’. We notice that the copyright gives both years: 1939 and 1961, whose texts are not the same. This, again, fosters confusion. A close look at the text, however, serves to determine that the text is based on the first version of the novel. In short, there is the 1939 edition published by Jarrolds, which is the first version of the text (and which is difficult to find). There is also its 1957 re-edition, still published by Jarrolds (which is the text I examined in Paris). There is, on top of this, a third re-edition, dating from 1964. It is in fact this version of the text that is the most problematic. Indeed, why re-publish the 1939 text, which is to say, the first version, after the revised 1961 text has appeared, especially if the latter was designed to adapt the story to a con-

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temporary readership? And then, of course, the first version also has its stage version, which is to say, the play of the same name. Lastly, there is the revised 1961 version itself. There is also another very interesting fact. In 2009, Bruin Books published a new edition of No Orchids for Miss Blandish, under the supervision of Jonathan Eeds. The promotional material for the book states that: ‘This is a newly revised edition of the famous crime novel NO ORCHIDS FOR MISS BLANDISH. For the first time, this edition combines the original text from 1939 with the revisions made by the author in 1961.’5 This copy, therefore, appears to be a combination of the two versions. But one could reasonably ask which parts are drawn from the 1939 text and which parts are drawn from the 1961 text. Is anything more than arbitrary choice at play? There are no indications to be found anywhere in this version. This confusion is fostered by the texts themselves. One can note a certain number of differences in tone, style and plot. Before going any further, it is important to point out that the first version (1939) is, broadly, more violent, cruder and more graphic than the 1961 revision. In the space available here I shall focus on the three telling points of difference, examples that rather give the lie to the idea of changes necessitated by reader expectations. First of all, there is the incipit, a feature that is, by virtue of its prime position, necessarily significant: in 1939, ‘it began on a summer morning in July’; in 1961 on the other hand, ‘it began on a summer afternoon in July’. Why has the action suddenly shifted in time? Were people earlier risers in the 1930s? Second, Bailey’s state of mind is also highly revealing of the fact that the 1961 version of the text is tremendously bowdlerized compared to its 1939 counterpart. Indeed, in the first version, Bailey ‘had been hitting the booze hard the previous night and the heat didn’t help. His mouth felt like a bird-cage and his eyes were gritty’ (Chase 1957 [1939]: 5). In 1961, ‘he had been drinking the previous night and the heat worried him’ (Chase 1961: 7). The later text is unquestionably toned down. Finally, the description of the blonde waitress confirms these differences between the two versions of the text, but it also, and most importantly, points to the arbitrariness of the choices made in the 2009 blended version. In 1939, [t]he blonde, who was leaning over the counter, gave him a smile that made Bailey think of a piano. She had worked on herself until she looked as good as any movie star until you got close to her, then she wasn’t so hot. She patted her tight little curls and stretched so that her large breasts poked at Bailey through her thin dress. (Chase 1957 [1939]: 5) In 1961, she seems to have lost both her importance and her relevance. Indeed, ‘the blonde leaning over the counter smiled at him. She had big white teeth that reminded Bailey of piano keys. She was too fat to interest him. He didn’t return her smile’ (Chase 1961: 7). The 2009 hybrid version simply mixes Chase’s texts from 1939 and 1961 and adds links:

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The blonde leaning over the counter smiled at him. She had big white teeth that reminded Bailey of piano keys [1961]. She had worked on her appearance making herself look [added for the hybrid version] as good as any movie star until you got close to her; then she wasn’t so hot. She patted her tight, yellow curls and stretched so that her large breasts poked through her thin dress [1939]. Looking her over Bailey decided that she was too fat to interest him. He didn’t return her smile. (Chase 2009: 1) The beginning of the second chapter corroborates this idea. In the 1939 version (the version studied here is the 1957 re-edition), one can read: His hand felt warm and hard, and she was glad of its comfort in her darkness. Slim lounged against the wall, bored with the reaction of his killings. He was relaxed and eased like a man who was sexually satiated. (Chase 1957 [1939]: 40) In this version, Slim is in command; he is the one making all the decisions, including challenging his mother. In fact, here, his mother is emphatically against his touching Miss Blandish in any way, shape or form, but he manages to manipulate her into accepting. In the 1961 version, she flatly refuses and he does not argue. In this example, he appears like a serial killer, a genuine sociopath. In 1961, the tone differs dramatically: ‘his hand on her arm felt hard and warm. It was her only contact in the darkness. [New Paragraph] From her chair, Ma Grisson stared at Miss Blandish’ (Chase 1961: 35). Here, Slim simply disappears, along with the fact that he is a serial killer. In this version, it is Ma Grisson who pushes Slim to take advantage of Miss Blandish, because she thinks it will make him more of a man. In the 1964 re-edition, one can read: ‘His hand felt warm and hard. She was glad of its comfort in her darkness. [New Paragraph] Slim had gone upstairs. He was tired, relaxed, and bored after the killing’ (Chase 1964 [1939]: 33). Because this version is a re-edition of the 1939 text, it reinstates Slim as the murderer he is, but it is important to point out that there is a slight attenuation here, as Slim has performed one killing, as opposed to the multiple killings referred to in the original text. Apart from the disappearance of any sexual connotation, this version suggests that the aforementioned murder is quite recent, whereas the first version suggests that the killings could have been spread out over time. This variety not only fosters textual confusion, but it also indicates a tendency that will be continued by Dave Fenner himself.6 It seems that the two versions present us with two drastically opposed characters, as if there were two different versions of the same private eye – the first one blunt, and shocking, and the second one romanticized and, in some instances, faded. The first version portrays him as plainly big, with ‘massive shoulders’ and ‘hard muscles’ that would make ‘wood creak’ (1957 [1939]: 82).

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In 1961, on the other hand, we learn that he has ‘the air of a man with nothing to do and all the time in the world to do it’, as well as ‘an attractively ugly face and a pugnacious jaw of a man who likes to get his own way and generally does’ (69). The 1939 reader sees a private eye that is assertive, who will not give into Mr Blandish’s requests: ‘[w]hen I get on to a case, I handle it my way or not at all. […] I am my own boss and I ain’t taking orders from no one […] not even for five hundred grand’ (1957 [1939]: 87). In the 1961 version, Fenner’s determination seems to have evaporated: ‘you’ll leave it to me and I’ll try not to disappoint you’ (73). Furthermore, Fenner’s methods are violent in the first version: His fist, moving like a streak of light, thudded into Pete’s face, sending the Mexican over backwards in his chair. He landed with a crash, his legs jammed under the desk. Fenner moved round quickly and, reaching down, closed his fist round Pete’s shirt-front and hauled him to his feet. […] Pete was in a bad way. Blood was running down his chin and nose. (Chase 1957 [1939]: 94) In the second version, however, he would rather waive information than wave his fists; blackmail becomes his weapon of choice: Harry was telling me about the girl you took to Miami last summer. She was a minor. Pete! I’m surprised at you! You stand to get a two-year stretch for that little indiscretion. […] I want information. I’ll trade you what you want for what I want. (Chase 1961: 78) Arguably, the most significant change in the chapter revolves around the question of money, which is so often at the heart of crime novels, on one side of the law or the other. In the first version, Mr Blandish offers Fenner 500,000 dollars plus 5,000 dollars in expenses if the detective can locate Miss Blandish. Such a sum of money is almost unheard of at the time. In 1961, however, the sum is considerably diminished – to 30,000 dollars plus 3,000 dollars in expenses. The underlying question here does not necessarily gravitate around the amount of money paid to Fenner, but rather around the consequences of such a reduction in payment. Indeed, it is possible that Fenner’s more restrained modus operandi in 1961 reflects a diminished incentive. The first version presents a story that is bold, fast and divested of any lengthy description. Chase seems to focus closely on Fenner, allowing only the Grisson Gang to penetrate these tightly constructed scenes, and even so always to Fenner’s benefit. Indeed, portraying the Grisson Gang as ruthless, violent and unscrupulous only serves to give more credit to the private eye, who, by trying to take them down, asserts his power. More importantly, the first version reflects a global tendency in crime fiction at the time, which consists in blurring the lines between the criminals and the ones inves-

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tigating them. As Orwell points out (2000 [1944]: 257), No Orchids for Miss Blandish is the ‘1939 version of glamourized crime’, where ‘the detective is almost as great a rogue as the gangsters, and actuated by the same motives’. Indeed, the novel revolves around the pursuit of power, including the PI’s. The second version presents some changes that remould Fenner’s character. The Grisson Gang undergoes a shift in leadership that will either undermine or reassert Fenner’s power. Indeed, the first version establishes Ma Grisson as the one true leader of the gang. She covers for Slim’s mistakes. But more importantly, she is the one who decides to keep Miss Blandish as she is convinced the young girl will be the cure to her son’s impotence. Miss Blandish is, for Ma Grisson, the insurance that her son will one day be able to take over. As an example, Slim ‘noticed that her [Miss Blandish’s] pupils were pinheads. He thought it pretty smart of Ma to give this judy dope. It took all the starch out of her and made her a languorous, consenting woman’ (1957 [1939]: 102). In the second version, the decision belongs to Slim and Slim alone: Miss Blandish is only referred to as ‘the drugged girl’ and Slim makes a point of specifying to Miss Blandish: ‘She [Ma Grisson] doesn’t want you. She wants to get rid of you. If it wasn’t for me, you’d be at the bottom of a river by now’ (1961: 84). This example suggests that Slim is the leader in the second version, and that he does as he pleases. If he is not fully reinstated as the serial killer he appears to be in the original text, he is nonetheless invested with real influence in his criminal organization. This tends to disculpate the second Dave Fenner, who is again destined to win out in his pursuit of power against the Grisson Gang but still at the cost of Miss Blandish. The last element I address here is exemplary of this idea of two Dave Fenners. During his investigation, Fenner looks into the whereabouts of the second-class thug who kidnapped Miss Blandish before the Grisson gang took over. This is why he interrogates Anna Borg, Riley’s ex-girlfriend. In 1939, our private eye is not short of brutality: he pins her down, slaps her across the mouth, and demonstrates that he can be extremely persuasive, violently so (1957 [1939]: 113). In 1961, however, he deploys a stratagem that consists of making Anna believe that he works for an agency and that his bosses are interested in her talents for a show on Broadway. Such methods, which appear to be less effective – Fenner does not get as much solid information as he does when he brutalizes her – make him a far gentler PI than his 1939 counterpart. Lastly, the 1961 Fenner defies the very definition of the PI, and his function and role in the novel evolve in quite an unexpected way. Indeed, not only is Fenner a private detective in this second version, but he also takes on the appearances of a lawyer – a man appointed to represent someone’s interests – as seen when the policeman in charge of the investigation into Miss Blandish’s kidnapping tells him: ‘The Captain told me to call you. […] He tells me you are representing Blandish now’ (1961: 87). Furthermore, we learn shortly afterwards that the policeman is quitting and that he has brought copies of his files for Fenner. One is therefore encouraged to think of the fundamentally two-

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faced Fenner as a man of ‘a thousand faces’: once a toughened-up journalist, he turns to private investigation, climbing the social ladder and becoming a lawyer as well as a policeman, which reinforces his credibility to the eyes of the 1961 reader. This chapter can only offer a brief summary of the many questions raised by the publishing maze that is No Orchids for Miss Blandish. The few examples I have provided serve the purpose of asking important questions. Is Dave Fenner one private eye that has evolved to please a readership? Or is he, on the contrary, just an excuse to rewrite a novel that could not be understood in a new context? These questions point to the status of the PI; they also raise the problem of the PI’s credibility when he is reworked over time. Is Dave Fenner metonymic of readers’ expectations? That is, can one assume that 1960s readers sought intelligence and measure on the part of their PI and brutality from their thugs? Can this evolution also be deemed metonymic of the evolution of crime fiction itself? Indeed, both versions present a PI who fails to accomplish his mission, namely to bring Miss Blandish back to her parents safely. The 1939 version, true to authentic crime fiction as mythologized, inter alios, by Orwell, blurs stereotypes by portraying a violent and ruthless Fenner, and leaves the reader questioning the PI’s ethics. The 1961 version, however, seems to demonstrate a will to reinstate stereotypes by remoulding Slim as a dangerous psychopath rather than a spineless mommy’s boy and Fenner as a gentle PI who abides by a strict moral code. These questions are only the starting point of further investigations that need to be carried out in order to answer another, larger question that refuses to go away: given Miss Blandish’s fate, were all these changes made simply to save the face of the private eye? References Chase, James Hadley (circa 1957, circa 1964 [1939]), No Orchids for Miss Blandish, London: Jarrolds. ––––– (1961), No Orchids for Miss Blandish, London: Panther. ––––– (2009 [1939/1961]), No Orchids for Miss Blandish, Oregon, USA: Bruin Books. Orwell, George (2000 [1944]), ‘Raffles and Miss Blandish’, Essays, London: Penguin, pp. 257–68. Go Further Novels The Dave Fenner novels Chase, James Hadley (1940), Twelve Chinks and a Woman, London: Jarrolds. ––––– (1939), No Orchids for Miss Blandish, London: Jarrolds. Other novels by James Hadley Chase Chase, James Hadley (1984), Hit Them Where It Hurts, London: Jarrolds. ––––– (1983), Not My Thing, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1982), We’ll Share a Double Funeral, London: Robert Hale.

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––––– (1982), Have a Nice Night, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1981), Hand Me a Fig Leaf, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1980), Try This One for Size, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1980), You Can Say That Again, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1979), A Can of Worms, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1979), You Must Be Kidding, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1978), Consider Yourself Dead, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1977), I Hold the Four Aces, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1977), My Laugh Comes Last, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1976), Do Me a Favour, Drop Dead, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1975), Believe This – You’ll Believe Anything, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1975), The Joker in the Pack, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1974), Goldfish Have No Hiding Place, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1974), So What Happens To Me?, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1973), Have a Change of Scene, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1973), Knock, Knock! Who’s There?, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1972), Just a Matter of Time, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1972), You’re Dead Without Money, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1971), An Ace Up My Sleeve, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1971), Want to Stay Alive?, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1970), Like a Hole in the Head, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1970), There’s a Hippie on the Highway, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1969), The Vulture Is a Patient Bird, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1969), The Whiff of Money, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1968), An Ear to the Ground, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1968), Believed Violent, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1967), Have This One on Me, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1967), Well Now – My Pretty, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1966), Cade, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1966), You Have Yourself a Deal, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1965), The Way the Cookie Crumbles, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1965), This Is for Real, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1964), The Soft Centre, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1963), One Bright Summer Morning, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1963), Tell It to the Birds, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1962), A Coffin from Hong Kong, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1962), I Would Rather Stay Poor, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1961), A Lotus for Miss Quon, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1961), Just Another Sucker, London: Robert Hale.

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––––– (1960), Come Easy – Go Easy, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1960), What’s Better Than Money, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1959), Shock Treatment, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1959), The World in My Pocket, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1958), Not Safe to Be Free, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1957), The Guilty Are Afraid, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1956), There’s Always A Price Tag, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1955), You’ve Got It Coming, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1954), Safer Dead, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1954), Tiger By the Tail, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1953), I’ll Bury My Dead, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1953), This Way for a Shroud, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1952), Double Shuffle, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1952), The Fast Buck, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1951), Strictly for Cash, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1950), Figure It Out for Yourself, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1950), Lay Her Among the Lillies, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1949), You Never Know with Women, London: Jarrolds. ––––– (1949), You’re Lonely When You’re Dead, London: Robert Hale. ––––– (1948), The Flesh of the Orchid, London: Jarrolds. ––––– (1946), I’ll Get You for this, London: Jarrolds. ––––– (1945), Eve, London: Jarrolds. ––––– (1944), Miss Shumway Waves a Wand, London: Jarrolds. ––––– (1941), Miss Callaghan Comes to Grief, London: Jarrolds. ––––– (1941), The Dead Stay Dumb, London: Jarrolds. Notes 1

http://www.amazon.com/Orchids-Blandish-James-Hadley-Chase/product-reviews/. Accessed 17 November 2014.

2

Bibliothèque des Littératures Policières (BiLiPo), or Crime Fiction Library. I am grateful to the staff at the BiLiPo, especially Samuel Schwiegelhofer, who assisted me in my research for this paper in July 2014.

3

The previous two quotes are taken from the ‘Editors’ Note’ of Chase’s 1961 Panther version.

4

It is important to specify that the 1939 version still remains inaccessible. The originals have not been located and, as previously mentioned, one can never be sure which version booksellers have put on the market.

5

https://www.angusrobertson.com.au/books/no-orchids-for-miss-blandish/p/9780615336268. Accessed 17 November 2014.

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6

It is important to state that this study of Dave Fenner has been limited by the availability of the text. I have only been able to work in detail on copies made of the third chapter of what passes for the ‘first version’ (again, my thanks to the BiLiPo for their help in making these texts available to me). For the accuracy of the comparison, I am therefore only able to compare the third chapter of each version of the novel.

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‘You don’t want a guy like me, you want a private dick with fallen arches who’s anxious to make a livin’. When I get on a case I handle it my way or not at all.’ DAVE FENNER

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Nestor Burma Nationality: French / Creator: Léo Malet Deborah Walker-Morrison

Big screen adaptations of the PI in French film noir ‘What, a Private Detective and French? That’s rare!’ – La Nuit de Saint-Germain-des-Prés Self-reflexively alluded to in the opening sequence of Bob Swaim’s 1977 eponymous big-screen adaptation of Léo Malet’s La Nuit de Saint-Germain-des-Prés/The Night of Saint-Germain-des-Prés (1955), the above quote still sums up the marginalized, somewhat incongruous place of the PI in the Franco-French polar.1 If the PI is already a marginalized figure in the French crime novel, the number of French films since 1946 that feature a private investigator rather than a police inspector or commissioner, total six, according to my calculations, all but one of which are adapted from three French novelistic PIs: Malet’s Nestor Burma, Jean-Patrick Manchette’s Eugène Tarpon, and the Série Noire creation, Gabriel Lecouvreur, aka Le Poulpe, who appears in a number of novels in Marcel Duhamel’s famous series, each time contributed by a different author from Duhamel’s stable.2 This seems in stark contrast to the iconic, hardboiled PI of Anglo-American pulp fiction, who is so central to classic American film noir and popular western culture. And yet, recent research has questioned even this central tenet of noir studies, framing it as more critical construct than cinematic phenomenon. Bran Nicol’s recent study notes that only a handful of classic American noir films figured the PI as central protagonist (2013: 33), a point explored in depth by film noir historian Dan Hodges on his extensively researched and referenced website, The Film Noir File.3 But ubiquity and iconicity are not one and the same. However infrequent his appearance, the PI as embodiment of the unceasing quest for knowledge and truth in the face of danger and despair, which is also the quest for human dignity in an increasingly corrupted world, remains a central trope in noir, on both sides of the Atlantic. I will argue that the above observation applies also – if not equally – to French film noir, despite its even smaller corpus. The case for noir

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as a transatlantic exchange having been extensively made (see, for example, Rolls and Walker 2009), this chapter will take the constitutive hybridity of our corpus of French polars as a given, drawing on American examples to examine its French homologues, looking at ways in which the French PI embodies not just a cultural hybrid, but tropes of masculinity which are at once transcultural and culturally and historically situated. Despite and even because of his semi-outsider status, the cinematic PI (whether American, French or other) owes his popularity to his capacity to embody key elements of mythologized hegemonic masculinity: testosterone-driven physique, heavy jaw: large shoulders and upper body, i.e. ‘masculine’ features; and physical bravery and strength, i.e. the inclination and capacity to exercise physical violence. The PI also unsettles hegemonic masculinity by using the aforementioned attributes, along with his street-smart intelligence and independent action, to question existing power structures in the service of some higher ‘truth’. Where he appears alongside official investigators (cops, lawyers), the latter are portrayed as lacking in these physical, intellectual and/ or moral virtues. Where PI actors such as Bogart play the lawmakers, they are most often simultaneously cast as outsiders within a flawed or corrupt system. Much has been made of the PI’s masochistic streak: it is a cliché of the genre that the protagonist is beaten senseless at least once per episode/film. But this ritual beating is part and parcel of the reaffirmation of hegemonic masculinity: like the boxer, cowboy, good cop, the noir PI must demonstrate he can prevail whatever the odds, can take whatever fate throws his way. No matter how many times he is knocked out, he will regain his feet and remain the last man standing. In this context, it is still worth quoting Chandler’s famous description of the noir PI as a man who can walk the ‘mean streets’ of the modern city ‘though he is not himself mean’; who is ‘neither tarnished nor afraid […] a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it’ (Chandler 1995: 977). The quintessential hardboiled American PI, particularly as played by Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941) and as Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe in The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1944), released in France in 1946 and 1947, respectively,4 provided key inspiration for the first French private detective, Léo Malet’s Nestor Burma, whose cinematic incarnations will provide the main focus for the present chapter. Cultural hybrid, he is inspired more by the Anglo-American hardboiled hero than by Inspector Maigret, Simenon’s staid, bourgeois cop, who is referred to disparagingly in a number of Nestor Burma novels. To the streetwise, instinctive toughness of his American avatars, Burma adds a cultural refinement, literary knowledge (Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Prévert and Vian, to name but a few) and philosophical sensibility (from surrealism to existentialism) that are quintessentially French. Protagonist of some 32 novels, including most famously 120, rue de la Gare, written and set in 1941 during the Occupation, and the fifteen New Mysteries of Paris (‘Nouveaux Mystères’), each one set in a different arrondissement of the city and written between 1954 and 1959, Burma has been

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the subject of three cinematic adaptations: 120, rue de la Gare (Jacques Daniel-Norman, 1946), starring René Dary; La Nuit de Saint-Germain-des-Prés, starring Michel Galabru; and Nestor Burma, Détective de choc/Nestor Burma, Shock Detective (Jean-Luc Miesch, 1981), starring Michel Serrault.5 .

James Naremore says of noir that ‘it can describe a dead period, a nostalgia for something that never quite existed, or perhaps even a vital tradition’ (1998: 39). Noir nostalgia has been characterized as ‘false’ and ‘constructed’ (MacCannell 1993: 280) or ‘fetishistic’ (Rolls and Walker 2009: 6–29) as the simultaneous knowledge and denial of the present in favour of an obsessive longing for a past one knows never existed. If we accept this definition of noir as the simultaneous holding of incompatible truths, as a privileging of desire over knowledge, as a nostalgia for something that never quite existed, then the noir PI can be seen as a distillation, a crystallization, almost a mise en abyme of noir sensibility. If Swaim’s La Nuit de Saint Germain-des-Prés (henceforth, Saint-Germain) will provide the main focus of the present discussion, it is not in terms of any notion of fidelity-to-the-letter of Malet’s source text, but because of the way it sheds light on noir as a quintessentially hybrid construct, as fetishistic nostalgia, as a weapon against existential angst generated by capitalist-driven modernity, and on the noir protagonist as existentialist antihero and cipher of triumphant, or discomforted, masculinity. As early as 1955, in their seminal study, Borde and Chaumeton (2002 [1955]) noted that the PI of American noir was in part a solution to a moral dilemma – the desire to critique patriarchal power structures, the official representatives of law and order, without falling foul of code-based self-censorship: Casting too many aspersions on the official U.S. police force was a ticklish problem. The private detective, midway between order and crime, running with the hare and hunting with the hounds, not overly scrupulous and responsible for himself alone, satisfied both the exigencies of morality and those of the criminal adventure story. (Borde and Chaumeton 2002 [1955]: 7) In France, the moral failure of law and order as a result of Vichy Collaboration with the Nazi Occupier in the four years from 1940 to 1944 makes the need for such a critique even more compelling. Who better to articulate such critiques than surrealist-anarchist poet and budding crime-writer, Léo Malet. Born during the dark Vichy years, Malet’s Burma is first and foremost a foil and critique of official French power structures. He is also a complex, unpredictable, Janus-faced figure, by turns the beleaguered anarchist-outsider, witty seducer, surrealist dreamer and intellectual action-hero: the quintessential free-agent, Dynamite Burma, the guy who knocks mystery flat out. The first Nestor Burma novel, 120, rue de la Gare, was written and set during the

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Case Studies: Nestor Burma

Occupation. Nestor Burma is shown returning home after a brief ‘holiday’ as a POW in a German Stalag. Filmed in 1945 and released after the Liberation, in 1946, the big-screen version is most productively read in the context of its production. 120, rue de la Gare, was both a popular and critical success. In the top 25 per cent of films released in France in 1946, its tone and thematic are in line with the hymns to the French resistance that dominated French screens after the Liberation.6 Via Burma, the film displays the spectacle of triumphant Gallic masculinity and a concomitant disavowal of the defeat and moral compromise that accompanied the Occupation and Vichy Collaboration. In line with the central thematics of post-war French film, Burma’s maverick interventions can be read as a cipher for the Resistance, which had, necessarily, to be portrayed as unproblematically virile and triumphant. It is no accident that Burma’s journalistic sidekick, Marc Covet, is portrayed in the film as an ineffectual, cowardly, closet-gay bumbler. The function of the mystery and of the secondary characters, male and female alike, is to boost the virile, action-hero status of Dynamite Burma. Malet’s anarchistic noir sensibility is thus abandoned in favour of an adventure-comedy. A key plot element of the novel, Burma is a freshly released POW: this detail, an unwelcome reminder of the situation of over a million French POWs incarcerated following Pétain’s Armistice, along with the quasi-totality of the historical context, is tellingly evacuated from the film. The sole allusion to the Occupation is in a series of road blocks, which the hero will break through as easily as he slips out of police handcuffs. Malet’s dreamer, who frequently problematizes ‘the boundaries between the real and the imaginary’ (Gorrara 2001: 278), becomes a fully-conscious, self-congratulatory Gallic cockerel. Dynamite Burma’s swashbuckling muscle and disrespect for official police authorities are clearly intended as a cipher for Resistance machismo and nationalism versus Vichy compromise. Far from the down-at-heel outsider of the novel, the first big-screen Burma is an affluent, successful detective-agency boss who first appears at the wheel of a huge convertible, owns an elegantly furnished apartment complete with faux Japanese manservant, whose duties include giving Burma judo lessons – a pretext to display Burma’s strength and intelligence as he easily beats his servant-teacher. In the background, a self-congratulatory poster reminds us that Burma also knocks out mystery crime cases: ‘Nestor Burma met le mystère K.O.’. René Dary’s Burma is never once under any real threat: totally in control, always two steps ahead of the criminals, the competition and his various sidekicks and helpers, not to mention the law, he escapes the masochistic fate of the hardboiled PI. Never once knocked senseless, the obligatory test of his manhood in the suffering of physical pain comes in the form of a stray bullet in the arm during the final sequence, which is of course received with barely a grimace – the proverbial scratch is hidden, then proudly displayed to the female love-interest as a bloody wound. Fast-forward to 1980: Jean-Luc Miesch’s Nestor Burma, Détective de choc is a failed attempt at satirical anti-noir, in the vein of Truffaut’s Tirez sur le pianiste/Shoot

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the Pianist (1960), but without the self-reflexive dimension – and this, despite the film’s setting in the contemporary showbiz world of the French punk rock scene. The criminal intrigue is incomprehensible but this is not in itself a problem. Noir is built more on atmosphere and character than on plausible plots. And it is here that the film fails, as French critics were quick to note. Attempts at noir humour involve Nestor as a confused cipher of discomforted masculinity: he meets a pretty client, sporting a garish tie which goes suddenly erect at the thought of an intimate rendezvous, then flaccid as she mentions macrobiotic food, all this with clownish, Benny Hill-like sound effects. He eats cat food, shoots a police inspector with a water pistol, turns up for work wearing a clown’s red nose, arrives at a punk club on a pink motorcycle, looking like a middle-aged, closet cross-dresser. Irony is a tightrope, but the film loses its balance almost from the opening scenes, and the attempt at surrealist absurdism falls, without a safety net, into grotesque slapstick and postmodern pastiche. Even if the contemporary equivalent of anarchistic art was undoubtedly punk, Serrault’s high camp – perhaps a hangover from his star drag-queen role in La Cage aux Folles (Édouard Molinaro, 1978) – cannot sustain the edgy, moral non-centre, the anxiety and the social critique essential to the noir PI. Sandwiched uneasily between these two adaptations, the film which brought Léo Malet back into the public eye after thirty years of obscurity, and to which we now turn, is Bob Swaim’s Saint-Germain, released in 1977. It is a fitting tribute to noir’s constitutive hybridity that the quintessential French noir PI should be an American reading of Léo Malet (see Rolls and Walker 2009: 158–61). While not a close adaptation, Swaim’s is the only one to retain the existential angst of Malet’s Burma. As arthouse retro-noir directed by an American ex-student of anthropology, Saint-Germain has a more distanced, self-reflexively critical stance on this quintessential French PI than any other adaptation to date. The fetishistic nostalgia, solitude and anxiety central to the noir PI are retained, distilled and reconstructed by their geographical and socio-historical context. Together with the literary and philosophical references (Vian, existentialism, Lettrism), Swaim retains Burma’s rain-soaked trenchcoat (but not his Maigret-like pipe) and wise-cracking witticisms, his hard drinking, incidental womanizing and anarchistic disdain for authority and convention. Disregard for official discourses on truth are shared with the Bogart archetype, though this incarnation of Burma is more modern than both the classic American PI and his French novelist-creator in his easy acceptance of nonconventional forms of sexuality. Lacking the American star’s masculine good-looks and barely taller, he nonetheless fascinates by his world-weary, sardonic humour and teddy-bear gruffness. Lacking the steeliness of Bogart’s Spade – Galabru’s Burma would have shrugged his shoulders and walked away from the treacherous Brigid O’Shaughnessy – but resembling his Marlowe in The Big Sleep, he is frequently lost and at the mercy of dark forces more powerful than he. A cipher of fragile hegemonic masculinity, he is like his American avatars: ‘a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it’, constantly on the verge of

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bankruptcy, beaten senseless in the dogged pursuit of truth, one step behind the action until the final resolution, yet inescapably French. A man of few words, he nonetheless possesses the trenchant wit of the novelistic first-person narrator; but he is more solitary, more fragile and introverted than Malet’s Burma – different to the rougher, tougher American figures immortalized by Bogart. Michel Galabru’s Burma is at once an outsider and a middle-aged French everyman. It is almost as if he has suddenly resurfaced after having slept through the decade of the Liberation and immediate post-war years. World weary, down-at-heel, without the muscle but still getting the girl, he takes to philosophical lengths Malet’s detective’s ironical distance and existential angst in a world too rapidly changing. Swaim’s focus on Burma’s nostalgic clumsiness is brilliantly served by his actor’s physique and performance, and Galabru shuffles from scene to scene like an extraterrestrial landed in a post-war Saint-Germain that he barely recognizes: payphones are a foreign invention; the young exchange fatuous inside jokes; pretty girls dress in trash cans. If jazz is a breath of fresh air, the incongruity of American-speaking black jazzmen in his native Paris leaves him non-judgemental but uncomprehending. As an extension of his anarchistic relationship to power, (here centred around his refusal to kowtow to either his insurance-boss employer or police pressure) he embodies a post-May ’68 take on French ambivalence in the face of post-war American-driven capitalist modernization. As an anarchist, Malet’s position could only be one of fetishistic nostalgia: for an idealized future in the past which would never materialize and never existed. Swaim’s own ambivalence to capitalist modernization, which attracted him to Paris in the late 1960s, and a nostalgia for a Saint-Germain he never experienced first-hand explain the period-piece approach and enable the gaze of the film-maker strangely to double that of his protagonist. By no means a box office hit, Saint-Germain was generally appreciated by French critics for its atmospheric portrayal of Saint-Germain; its original choice of comic actor, Michel Galabru, for the main role; and its deft direction of actors in secondary roles.7 The film was even seen as contributing to a much needed renewal of the codes of the French polar, with Swaim’s distanced mise-en-scène coupled with realist décors avoiding the trap of facile historical exoticism (Colpert 1977: 116). In the preface to the 1979 edition of Malet’s novel Saint-Germain, crime writing duo Boileau–Narcejac’s description of Burma positions him very much as a homegrown French version of the classic hardboiled PI, a twentieth-century Gavroche gone to seed, the underdog who comes out exhausted but on top, smiling through the blood and bruises, winning on points (cited in Malet 1979 [1955]: 8). Their final qualifier, ‘winning on points’, is an ironical allusion to the Dynamite Burma’s ‘knock-out’ pretensions, relentlessly foregrounded in 120, rue de la Gare and conspicuously absent in Swaim’s atmospheric noir rendition. If the novelistic Burma can be regarded as Malet’s alter-ego, the real correspondences lie with the author’s philosophical views and marginalized social situation (Emanuel 2006:

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84); the triumphant masculinity of Dynamite Burma the lady-killer appears to be more wishful thinking. Tellingly, while he praised Swaim’s adaptation and was grateful for the publicity, Malet (whose ideal Burma was none other than Bogie himself) preferred Dary’s cocky, action hero and Guy Marchand’s street-smart, debonair ladies’ man of the TV series (1991–2000) to Galabru’s more fallible, solitary, dreamier flâneur (Prolongeau 1995). The latter’s greater resemblance to the often down-at-heel, extra-fictional Malet (who spent many a lean year, some of them doing odd jobs at Gallimard) was apparently too close for comfort. Unsure of his author’s reaction to the off-beat casting of Galabru, Swaim includes a self-reflexive exchange in which Burma’s secretary reminds him to call Malet. Galabru, perhaps wisely, procrastinates: ‘OK, Yes… tomorrow…’ Bran Nicol (2013: 77) sees the existential engagement of the PI as contrasting with the armchair detective and the classic cop, in that the former’s engagement is visceral not economic. In this way, the line between professional and personal is irretrievably blurred. The fee, the promise of material gain, is a lure. Even if it can be eschewed – and we see Nestor refuse to continue with his case on this basis – the advance needed to keep bankruptcy at bay must be accepted. The lure is thus always a trap, propelling him into the city’s labyrinthine back-alleys and trendy clubs, in search of the truth that is the real prize. Thus he stubbornly refuses to give up on the case even after the jewellery has been found and he has been paid, even after he is beaten up (again) and warned off by the police. The search for the truth – Fiat Lux, ‘to shed light’, is Burma’s motto – is the PI’s real motivation but as in all true noir, its discovery will prove, in the end, of little comfort. The film’s closing image: a mid-shot chiaroscuro freeze-frame of Galabru-Burma leaving the crime scene (resolved with the death of the murderer at the hands of his police-inspector father) is anything but a look of triumph. The agency and ultimate narrative mastery of the PI protagonist – and Malet is no exception – are often rendered via first-person narration: because he has lived to tell the tale, there is a degree of certainty that he will prevail.8 Moreover, despite the subjective focus, Peter Messent also notes that the ‘authoritative seeing eye of the detective at work’ confers at least the illusion of objectivity: ‘the authority that comes from close, continual, and apparently detached observation’ (quoted in Nicol 2013: 149). In a sense, one regrets, in Saint-Germain, the absence of the classic, first-person, off-screen narration, which would have enabled Swaim to accentuate Burma’s agency as well as make more use of Malet’s sardonic humour. What is gained, on the other hand, is a greater sense of solitude and mystery surrounding the protagonist, often shot from the back and more often a silent observer and listener than his more loquacious literary model. Swaim’s original project was to adapt the best known and most nostalgic of the New Mysteries of Paris, Brouillard au Pont de Tolbiac/Fog on the Tolbiac Bridge, set in the 13e arrondissement in the 1950s, in which Malet-Burma revisits his anarchist past.9 But by the 1970s the area was under reconstruction so the project fell victim to the very modernization Malet and Swaim both deplored. Encouraged by his producer, Swaim

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turned instead to Saint-Germain, as a more commercial and exportable project, given the connection with still fashionable Sartrean existentialism. Having met with a number of French PIs as part of the preparation for Saint-Germain, Swaim reminds us that the real characters are nothing like their fictional avatars, who, like the cowboy, are mythical figures bearing little resemblance to any socio-historical reality. They are distilled ciphers of key aspects of masculinity, where intimate relationships signal the end of agency and in which the greatest quest – the solving of crime – is symbolic of the search for truth, the desire to shed moral light on the darkest corners of society. Fiat Lux, as Burma’s door sign proclaims. From Malet, Swaim retains the writer’s penchant for literary references, opting for Boris Vian, the twentieth-century incarnation of Baudelaire and chronicler of Saint-Germain, considered by Naremore (1998: 11) to be the incarnation of French noir sensibility. Vian’s Manuel de Saint-Germain-des-Prés (1974) was the sole inspiration for Swaim’s evocation of the quartier and provided the film’s poetic frontispiece, which places the entire film en abyme, as a kind of dreamwork: ‘If you have such a need to free yourselves from your darkest passions […] Know this: fantasy is there to guide you. The imagination knows no rules, no limits’ (Vian 1997 [1974]: 32). Following the opening credits, a final black-and-white still comes to life and a rain-drenched, trenchcoated Burma, shot from the back, enters the film’s crepuscular first scene, framed mysteriously, like a cross between the lone urban cowboy and Baudelairean flâneur, as he makes his way towards the legendary Café de Flore. One is reminded of the final chapter of Jean-Pierre Esquenazi’s recent volume on (American) film noir, which extends to the noir protagonist, Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer’s ideas around Baudelairean ‘flâneur writing’. Here, Esquenazi notes the flâneur’s sensual penetration of the city, of its sights, sounds and odours (2012: 383). But Burma also reminds us of the flâneur’s simultaneous alienation from the object of his desire. Invited to hip, basement nightclubs, he looks somewhat dazed and confused, declaring, ‘I’m not with it.’ Another character responds charitably, that Nestor is ‘a night-owl from another time’. As Esquenazi (2012: 383–84) observes: ‘But the flâneur isn’t part of this world: unenthused at the city’s flashing lights, its constant loudness and movement, he rejects their heady illusion and thus remains an outsider.’ Nestor’s Saint-Germain adventure, guided by the flamboyantly gay, self-styled writer ‘Saint-Germain de Saint-Germain’ (in fact a New York-born, Jewish impostor, played with brio by American composer, Mort Schuman) will thus leave him cold. Beneath the glittering surfaces, Burma’s gaze reveals a decaying world, ‘one Benjamin describes as the shape of modernity, where the brightness of neon lights doubles as miserable poverty and darkness’ (Esquenazi 2012: 384). For reviewer, Gilles Cèbe (1977: 54), as much as Vian, the melancholy anxiety and painful nostalgia of Swaim’s Burma evokes one of Malet’s own early poems: ‘My pained awakenings are sunless flowerless / While my anxiety flaps like a shroud in the wind.’ Swaim was praised for his imaginative, atmospheric rendition of post-war Paris,

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an achievement made more impressive by the film’s tiny budget. Financial constraints probably enriched the film aesthetically. Unable to afford the big-budget, multi-set recreations of the retro-genre, the first-time feature director relied on cinematic detail: a prologue opening on a red neon Hôtel sign flashing in the dark glasses of a black American jazz trumpet player; opening credits composed of a nostalgic song against a series of black-and-white stills; rain-washed streets outside the Café de Flore; the murky depths of the Seine at night; claustrophobic sets reminiscent of Trauner’s poetic-realist reconstructions of 1930s Paris. The film retains little of Malet’s convoluted plot: Burma is paid by an insurance broker to investigate a jewellery theft. When the prime suspects (trumpeter, Charlie McGee, habitué of fashionable basement jazz clubs of Saint-Germain and an associate) are murdered, Burma begins to suspect there may be more to the crime than meets the eye. Among the novel’s few details to be retained, en abyme, for its poetic resonance, is an extract from Ernest B. Schoedsack’s 1932 film, The Most Dangerous Game, under its French title, Les chasses du Compte Zaroff, in which a sadistic count, bored with hunting down animals for sport, resorts to the most elusive and fascinating bounty of all, human prey. Zaroff is clearly a cipher for the killer but he is also reminiscent of the PI in his obsessive tracking down of the perpetrators of crime. But the noir PI is always both hunter and hunted: in a surreal scene at the Clignancourt flea markets, Burma half tracks a suspect, half flees down the labyrinthine streets of the market before receiving the ritual blow to the head that will leave him unconscious and no further advanced in his quest. As anguished seeker of truth, the PI is always already the moral centre of the intrigue. In noir, he is a struggling moral compass in a corrupt world. Appearing with the Occupation and Liberation as an outsider to the law, the French PI has, as noted above, traditionally been associated with the Resistance. Swaim adds a reference (again not in the novel) by making one of the minor criminal figures an ex-collaborator. Whereas Léo Malet’s PI compares himself (favourably) to other fictional detectives: ‘Philip Marlowe, Hercule Poirot or Nestor Burma, as you wish’ (Malet 1979 [1955]: 88), Swaim’s dialogues turn Galabru’s physical non-resemblance to Bogart and other Hollywood stars to the film’s advantage. When Nestor attempts to question McGee’s black musician friends (with Saint-Germain acting as interpreter, even though it later turns out the musicians are fluent in French), one remarks in English: ‘With a face like that, Humphrey Bogart ain’t got nothing to worry about.’ The ensuing laughter of course leaves the monolingual Burma none the wiser. In an earlier scene, Galabru-Burma insists self-reflexively on his unsuitability as a leading man, declaring: ‘I’m no Gary Cooper.’ One might have expected ‘I’m no Humphrey Bogart’, but we already knew that – and perhaps this Burma actually prefers romantic comedy to film noir. Rather than a romantic hero, Nicol (2013: 34) sees the PI as one who investigates the concealments of others at the expense of his own private life, both in terms of intimate relationships and intellectual reflection. Here too, Bob Swaim’s adaptation is an

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interesting hybrid: displaying more of the solitude of the American PI, he is revealed to be mistrustful but capable of, and perhaps even longing for, intimate engagement. In classic American noir, such longing is of course expressed as lust for an unattainable or unscrupulous femme fatale. Saint-Germain, both novel and film, is notable for the absence of the dangerous woman, whose function, in the film, is occupied by the bisexual failed poet and psychopathic murderer, Rémy Brandouel (played by Daniel Auteuil in his first major screen role) – but we do not know this until the denouement. Masculinity must be affirmed by heterosexual activity, especially in a film whose crime plot revolves around a bisexual, interracial love triangle: both the murderer, Brandouel and his girlfriend, Taxi, were in love with the first victim, black trumpet player, Charlie McGee. So, Burma must have his romantic encounter, although it will necessarily be fleeting. As is often the case, the PI, as seeker of truth, simultaneously works towards concealment when it comes to relationships with women. But Swaim’s Burma is a tender-hearted tough guy, a womanizer in spite of himself, still holding a flame for his first love, pursued rather than a pursuer of women. Furthermore, the latter are not the unscrupulous fatales or alluring temptresses of much noir; here, they are jealously possessive. When a girlfriend is disappointed to realize Nestor’s romantic tryst was in fact a pretext to advance his investigation, she takes comically Freudian revenge, throwing Nestor’s tie to her rather vicious pet parrot, to be returned, shredded to ribbons. Malet’s belle Hélène, his faithful secretary and unattainable but clearly desired feminine ideal, provides much of the light relief of the novels. In a stark departure from their light-hearted flirtatiousness, Swaim’s Saint-Germain transforms the faithful Hélène Châtelain into an efficient but jealously protective, middle-aged mother hen. According to the film-maker, the intention was to accentuate Burma’s solitary melancholy. This is certainly achieved. While the novel has Burma and Hélène dining out with friends and spending a jolly weekend in the countryside in the middle of the mystery (Malet 1979 [1955]: 93), Swaim’s Burma is shown in long shot, through a window, dining alone, or on the street, looking wistfully into the black waters of the Seine, a cipher for the dark underbelly of Parisian life. Via the character of Taxi, played by Chantal Dupuy, whose wide eyes, angular features and long, straight black hair evoke a young ingénue version of Juliette Greco, the line between the personal and the professional is again blurred as we suspect Burma’s interest in the newly crowned Miss Poubelle (Miss Trash Can), Queen of Saint-Germaindes-Prés, may lie beyond his inquiry. A short scene between the two reads more as a tender conversation in which two dreamers clearly recognize one another. On the whole, relationships with women are notable for their bitter-sweet fragility. Swaim is at times more faithful to Malet’s surrealist origins than the author himself. In the novel, Miss Poubelle contestants are dressed in old fruit and vegetables; Swaim takes the costuming beyond surrealism, to the more anarchist-inspired Dadaist absurd: instead of costumes, the girls teeter across the stage of the basement club, squeezed into metal trash cans.

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Among the surreal fauna of Saint-Germain, another invention of the film, a burly sailor, dressed in full uniform and captain’s hat, whose hotel room is full to the bulwarks with bottled replicas of nineteenth-century sailing ships and who regales a bemused Burma with tall tales of shipwrecks and illegal cargoes, turns out never to have set foot outside Paris. These seemingly minor plot details, in their cumulative contribution to the universe into which Burma is plunged, are key to constructing Saint-Germain as dreamscape, highlighting the character’s sense of alienation and existential angst. Released a decade after May 1968, in a modernized France at the end of its postwar economic expansion, Saint-Germain hesitates between offering an almost postcard image (arty black-and-white stills reminiscent of Doisneau and Brassaï) of a romanticized Saint-Germain-des-Prés as popularized by Vian, Greco, cellar jazz clubs and the existentialist cool of Sartre and Beauvoir. Juxtaposed against modernist alienation, the city can also be an object of beauty. As Esquenazi notes, it can even become a landscape that rivals nature, a critical instrument even ‘insofar as it enables an ironic gaze on disenchanted reality’ (2012: 387, 388). The double-edged sword of the Parisian streets, which seduced and inspired Baudelaire and so many others since, is put under the melancholy, nostalgic gaze of Swaim’s camera in Saint-Germain, as it doubles that of its sardonic, disenchanted PI protagonist. The three cinematic adaptations of Malet’s Nestor Burma use the hybridity of noir to map a certain evolution of French masculinity from triumphant free agent to solitary, existential antihero, and from there to momentarily discomforted buffoon. (No definitive conclusions can be drawn from Miesch’s failed adaptation, however: Serrault would subsequently play a ‘straight’ PI, in Claude Miller’s masterful Mortelle Randonnée/Mortal Circuit [1982], and Burma would be resurrected by television a decade later as a post-feminist, tenderly macho PI hero.) Of the three, we have argued that only Michel Galabru, in Swaim’s Saint-Germain, comes close to capturing the alienation and fetishistic nostalgia of Malet’s melancholy detective. The PI is a product of his environment, an animal of the streets, whether those streets are in LA or Paris. Nowhere is this truer than in Malet, whose New Mysteries of Paris were not just crime novels but ethno-sociological explorations of a Paris he felt to be disappearing as he wrote, as France modernized, fuelled by the Marshall Plan, and as the Paris of the anarchist author’s youth, in which each arrondissement resembled a village, began to be transformed into a twentieth-century post-industrial metropolis. Nestor Burma, quintessential French noir PI, is even more mythical a figure than his American predecessors in that he exists all the more vividly as an enduring creation of the collective, critical imagination. References Borde, Raymond and Chaumeton, Etienne (2002 [1955]), Panorama du film noir Américain 1941–1953/ A Panorama of American Film Noir 1941–1953 (trans. Paul Hammond), San Francisco: City Lights. Cèbe, Gilles (1977), ‘La Nuit de Saint-Germain-des-Prés’, Écran, 59, June, pp. 54–55.

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Chandler, Raymond (1995), ‘The Simple Art of Murder’, in Frank McShane (ed.), Chandler: Later Novels and Other Writings, New York: Penguin, pp. 977–92. Colpert, G. (1977), ‘La Nuit de Saint-Germain-des-Prés’, Cinématographe, 28, June, p. 117. Emanuel, Michelle (2006), From Surrealism to Less-Equisite Cadavers: Léo Malet and the Evolution of the Fench ‘Roman Noir’, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Esquenazi, Jean-Pierre (2012), Le film noir: Histoire et significations d’un genre populaire subversif, Paris: CNRS Éditions. Gorrara, Claire (2001), ‘Malheurs et ténèbres: Narratives of Social Disorder in Léo Malet’s 120, rue de la gare’, French Cultural Studies, 12: 3, pp. 271–83. Hodges, Dan M. (2015), The Film Noir File, http://www.filmnoirfile.com/. Accessed 30 March 2015. MacCannell, Dean (1993), ‘Democracy’s Turn: On Homeless Noir’, in Joan Copjec, (ed.), Shades of Noir, London/New York: Verso, pp. 279–98. Malet, Léo (1979 [1955]), La Nuit de Saint-Germain-des-Prés/The Night of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris: Éditions des autres. Messent, Peter (1997), ‘Introduction: From Private Eye to Police Procedural – The Logic of Contemporary Crime Fiction’, in Peter Messent (ed.), Criminal Proceedings: The Contemporary American Crime Novel, London/Chicago: Pluto Press. Naremore, James (1998), More than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press. Nicol, Bran (2013), The Private Eye: Detectives in the Movies, London: Reaktion Books. Prolongeau, Hubert (1995), ‘Marchand est le Burma le plus vrai que j’ai jamais vu’, Libération, 13 January, http://www.liberation.fr/medias/1995/01/13/marchand-est-le-burma-le-plus-vrai-que-jai-vu_120038. Accessed 3 March 2015. Rolls, Alistair and Walker, Deborah (2009), French and American Noir: Dark Crossings, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Swaim, Bob (1977), La Nuit de Saint-Germain-des-Prés/The Night of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, France: Filmologies. Vian, Boris (1997 [1974]), Manuel de Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris: Pauvert. Go Further Novels The Nestor Burma novels (available in translation) Malet, Léo (1995 [1957]), Casse-pipe à la Nation/Death of a Marseilles Man, (trans. Barbara Bray), London: Pan Macmillan. ––––– (1993 [1959]), L’envahissant cadavre de la plaine Monceau/The Tell-Tale Body on the Plaine Monceau (trans. Peter Hudson), London: Pan Macmillan. ––––– (1993 [1956]), Brouillard au pont de Tolbiac/Fog on the Tolbiac Bridge (trans. Barbara Bray), London: Pan Macmillan. ––––– (1991 [1958]), Du Rebecca rue des Rosiers/Mayhem in the Marais (trans. Alex Buchet), London: Pan Macmillan.

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––––– (1991 [1955]), Les rats de Montsouris/The Rats of Montsouris (trans. Peter Hudson), London: Pan Macmillan. ––––– (1991 [1954]), Le soleil nait derriere le Louvre/Sunrise Behind the Louvre (trans. Peter Hudson), London: Pan Macmillan. ––––– (1991 [1948]), La cinquieme procede/Mission to Marseilles (trans. Olive Classe), London: Pan Macmillan. ––––– (1991 [1945]), Nestor Burma contre C.Q.F.D./Dynamite Versus QED (trans. Peter Hudson), London: Pan Macmillan. ––––– (1991 [1943]), 120, rue de la Gare (trans. Peter Hudson), London: Pan Macmillan. Films Miesch, Jean-Luc (1981), Nestor Burma, Détective de choc/Shock Detective, France: Zénith. Swaim, Bob (1977), La Nuit de Saint-Germain-des-Prés/The Night of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, France: Filmologies. Daniel-Norman, Jacques (1946), 120, rue de la Gare, France: Sirius. Telefilms Frydland, Maurice (1988), Les Rats de Montsouris/The Rats of Montsouris, France: Films A2. Mitry, Jean (1959), Énigme aux Folies-Bergères/The Enigma of the Folies-Bergères, France: Gimeno Phillips Films. Lorenzi, Stellio (1954), La Nuit d’Austerlitz/The Night of Austerlitz, France: RTF. Television Nestor Burma (1991–2000, France: Antenne 2/France 2). Notes 1

The translation of this transcription and all following translations from the French are the author’s own.

2

The outlier is Claude Miller’s Mortelle randonnée/Mortal Circuit (1982), starring Michel Serrault as ‘L’Oeil’/‘The Eye’; it was adapted from an American novel, Mark Behm’s Eye of the Beholder (1980). Manchette’s Morgue pleine/Crowded Day at the Morgue (1973), featuring ex-cop PI Eugène Tarpon, was adapted in 1984 by Jacques Bral, as Polar, with Jean-François Balmer; the film version of Le Poulpe/The Octopus, by Guillaume Nicloux (1998), starred Jean-Pierre Darroussin.

3

The five classic noir films featuring a PI as central protagonist are The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941), The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1944), Murder My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk, 1944), The Lady in the Lake (Robert Montgomery, 1947) and The Brasher Doubloon (John Brahm, 1947).

4 Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1929) first appeared in French translation in 1936 in Gallimard’s Scarabée d’or Series as Le faucon de Malte. Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939) was published in the Série Noire in France in 1948, translated by Boris Vian. 5

A decade later, the ‘Nouveaux Mystères’ also gave rise to a popular French TV series (39 episodes,

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1991–2003), featuring Guy Marchand as Burma. For reasons of space, I will limit discussion to the big-screen adaptations. 6

With 2,905,234 entries, 120, rue de la Gare is listed 28th out of 134 films released in France in 1946 and 16th out of 63 French productions. Of the top ten French films, a full 50 per cent are hymns to the Resistance: Mission Spéciale/Special Mission by Maurice de Canonge; Le Père tranquille/ Mr. Orchid and La Bataille du rail/Battle of the Rails by René Clément; Henri Calef’s Jéricho/ Jericho; and Raymond Bernard’s Un ami viendra ce soir/A Friend Will Come Tonight. By contrast, the cynical US PI noir The Maltese Falcon, released in France in 1946 as Le Faucon maltais attracted only 501,613 entries. Bogart’s reputation in France during the post-war period (1946–56) as the quintessential noir PI appears to rest on two films that were not popular successes: The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep. Undoubtedly, Bogart’s other roles, which included unofficial investigators, lawyers and gangsters, not to mention his unwilling resistance hero of Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942), all feed into the construction of the mythical PI figure.

7

The film could boast only 28,652 entries in four weeks according to Le film français,

8

A convention which Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950) famously deconstructs.

9

Unless otherwise referenced, information regarding the film and comments by Bob Swaim were

l’hébdomadaire des professionnels du cinema, no. 1683, 1 July 1977.

provided in an interview with the author, held in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris, 4 April 2015.

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Duca Lamberti Nationality: Italian / Author: Giorgio Scerbanenco Barbara Pezzotti

The hardboiled detective Italian-style Duca Lamberti is the most famous private detective in the history of Italian crime fiction. A former doctor struck off the register and imprisoned for practising euthanasia, then turned private eye, he is the protagonist of four crime novels written by Giorgio Scerbanenco and set in 1960s Milan. Scerbanenco was the first Italian writer successfully to exploit the conventions of the American hardboiled subgenre and create ‘the hero that Italian crime fiction had been waiting for’ (Oliva 2003: 180). Through Duca’s adventures, Scerbanenco tackled urbanization and pollution, consumerism, and the rise of brutal organized crime in Milan and Europe. His novels also portrayed a changing Italian society where the traditional family was gradually being replaced by new family structures and women were trying to break free from a sexist society in which they were treated largely as objects.1 Far from emulating or parodying the American model, Scerbanenco was able to adapt the hardboiled formula into an Italian context and give Italian readers believable and engaging stories. Ultimately, the Duca Lamberti crime series marked the beginning of a wave of successful Italian gialli that had close ties with the urban setting and a sustained focus on Italy’s political and social conflicts.2 Born in 1911 to a Ukrainian father and an Italian mother, Scerbanenco migrated from Rome to Milan with his widowed mother when he was 16. A journalist, he was in charge of the readers’ letters section of the women’s weekly Annabella. In 1966 Scerbanenco published the crime novels Venere privata/A Private Venus (2012 [1966]); Traditori di tutti (1966, translated as Duca and the Milan Murders [1970] and as Betrayal [2013]); I ragazzi del massacro [The Massacre Kids] (1999 [1968]) and I milanesi ammazzano al sabato [Milanese Kill on Saturdays] (2005 [1969]), before Scerbanenco’s untimely death that same year put a sudden end to Duca Lamberti’s adventures.3 The series was an immediate success and also inspired a number of film and television adaptations.4 Internationally reputed, Scerbanenco was the first Italian crime writer to have his books translated into several languages (including French, English and Spanish).

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He also won the prestigious Grand Prix de la littérature policière in France in 1968 for Traditori di tutti. Duca Lamberti’s character is notable because he is one of the few private detectives in the Italian crime fiction tradition. The most common character is a police detective who mostly investigates alone but has to work within the constraints imposed by the organization for which he works. Famous examples are Leonardo Sciascia’s Captain Bellodi, Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Inspector Ciccio Ingravallo, and Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Salvo Montalbano. The amateur detective is also present in Italian crime fiction, such as in the case with Sciascia’s Professor Laurana and Umberto Eco’s William of Baskerville. By contrast, the professional private eye is an uncommon figure. This can be explained by the difficulty of writing realistic private detective stories set in Italy. Indeed, till the late 1980s the Italian Code of Criminal Procedure did not provide for the use of a private detective to help the defence in criminal cases. This narrowed the private eye’s range of activities and made it difficult for crime writers to engage with the genre. This trend is also consistent with a Continental European tradition of fictional police detectives (Messent 2012: 43). Before Scerbanenco’s series was published, only one other author had a private detective as his main protagonist, with little commercial success. While Franco Enna set most of his stories in the United States, his Tempo di massacro [A Time for a Massacre] (1955) features Leslie Colina, an American private detective on holiday in Rome.5 After the disappearance of a friend, Dwing Dempsey, and an attempted murder, Colina starts investigating in an unknown city. Colina is the typical ‘tough guy’ of the hardboiled tradition. He is violent (‘I shoot first,’ [Enna 1955: 153]), he kills without remorse, and he is in favour of capital punishment (‘It’s a shame that in Italy you don’t have the electric chair or the gas chamber. With some people, it’s a real shame,’ [1955: 61]).6 He uses and abuses women. As Pistelli points out, Colina is a belated imitator of the brutal and misogynist American hardboiled detective (2006: 383–84).7 While Enna’s Colina is an unconvincing imitation of a foreign formula, Duca Lamberti is an interesting character who presents some characteristics of the American gumshoe, but also differs from it. According to Glenn W. Most, European and American detective fiction ‘tended to differ from each other in many regards, at least until the thoroughgoing Americanization of European culture that marked the second half of the twentieth century’ (2006: 69). In Most’s words, a European detective fiction urban environment is ‘a necessary setting for the mortal incidents but is not complicitous in them or deeply altered by them’ (69) and the detective is optimistically ‘first and foremost a city-lover’ (69). This is not the case with Duca Lamberti who, more like Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, ‘is not at all integrated into [the city]’ (70). In particular, Duca shares with his American counterparts an outrage at the changes occurring in the urban environment:

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There are still people who don’t realize that Milan is a great cosmopolitan city. They have failed to notice that the scale of things has altered. They talk about Milan as though it ended at the Porta Venezia, and as though the people ate nothing but panettoni and pan meino. Mention Marseilles, Chicago or Paris, and everyone knows you’re talking of a wicked metropolis, but with Milan, it’s different. Surrounded as they are by the unmistakable atmosphere of a great city, there are still idiots who think of it in terms of local colour, looking for la brasera, la pesa and mangari il gamba de legn [sic]. They forget that a city of two million inhabitants is bound to acquire an international flavour. There’s precious little left nowadays of the old local colour. From all over the world, spivs and layabouts are converging on Milan in search of money. They all come, madmen, drunks, drug-addicts, even those who are simply without hope. (Scerbanenco 1970 [1966]: 108–09) Scerbanenco’s series is undoubtedly tied to the historical context in which it was written, appearing in the aftermath of the economic boom. Between 1950 and 1963, the country experienced rapid industrialization and unprecedented economic growth, which were accompanied by increased wealth and the birth of a consumer society. However, as Paul Ginsborg comments, if Italy’s industrialization emphasized and reinforced the road to prosperity for an individual or a family, it also ignored the collective and public dimension of these economic and social changes (1990: 223). In what can be defined as a delayed industrial revolution, 3 million people moved from the South to the more industrialized North looking for work and often experiencing hardship and discrimination. Simultaneously, Northerners moved from villages to towns, and others began to commute daily to work in the larger cities. In the years of the so-called Economic Miracle, shoddily-built state housing development scarred the symmetry of cities and created bleak and impoverished suburbs. Rapid industrialization deeply affected the environment in the countryside. As Martin Clark puts it, ‘dreary housing estates arose all round city outskirts, most of them put up without benefit of planning permission and often without roads, schools, lighting or even sewage. Parks and open spaces were destroyed’ (2008: 434). In addition, Milan, once a big village heavily bombed during World War II, was gradually turning into a modern metropolis with its growing issues of criminality and marginalization. It was in that period that the old Milanese mala, a collection of small groups of petty criminals, grew in size and upgraded to drug dealing and firearm trafficking (Lucarelli 2008: 66–118). In a mass culture society, Scerbanenco stood out in the way he put misfits and ostracized people at the centre of the narrative, first and foremost the protagonist of his crime stories. Duca Lamberti is a marginalized person struggling to find his place in the new Italian social fabric after three years in prison. Guilt-ridden (his father died of a heart attack when Duca was imprisoned for euthanasia), tainted by a criminal re-

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cord, and in search of a purpose for his life, Duca shows the duality of the hardboiled detective identified by Stephen Knight (1988: 71–87): he is tough, but sensitive; and he is intelligent, but prefers to resort to violence to achieve his goals. In dialogue, he voices his criticism of the superficiality and selfishness that characterized Milan society in the 1960s; his inner thoughts, on the other hand, reveal sensitivity and vulnerability. This contrast between cynicism and sensitivity and, ultimately, the duality that characterizes Duca’s humanity makes him more credible than Enna’s Colina and one of the most appealing detectives in the history of Italian crime fiction. Scerbanenco’s melancholic detective experiences a trajectory that turns him from a ‘home insider’ into an ‘away outsider’, according to Porteous’s famous definition (1985: 118–19). In other words, from being a professional who fits into Italian society, his experience as an inmate makes him a ‘home outsider’, that is a local person experiencing fear, refusal and entrapment, or, again, an ‘away outsider’, a type of marginalization typical of migrants and misfits. Embodying Scerbanenco’s own alienation (he was a half-Ukrainian migrant from Rome), the fictional detective comments: ‘the growth of a city brings benefits, of course, but it brings changes too, some of which make you think’ (Scerbanenco 1970 [1966]: 109). Through his eyes, the reader is able to see a growing urban environment, increasingly host to unauthorized buildings, pollution, marginalization and violence. Duca Lamberti observes Milanese society with a critical eye when he detects what Baudrillard calls ‘the great era of consumerism’ (1970 [1966]: 193), which has contaminated all aspects of human life. In Venere private/A Private Venus the detective has just been released from prison and is hired by a wealthy industrialist to investigate his son Davide’s past, in order to help him stop drinking. At the beginning of the novel, Lamberti and Davide meet two young women in a country restaurant: [T]he girl was away for three minutes and came back with another girl just like her, they seemed like two suits of the same cut, one of one colour and the other of another, because the first was blonde, the second was a brunette. Their resemblance wasn’t so much physical, or in the clothes they wore, it was a spiritual resemblance. They approved his buying a number of small bottles, they were pleased with the Giulietta. (Scerbanenco 2012 [1966]: 39) In this passage, the two women agree to spend the night with Duca and Davide when they realize that Davide is rich and owns an expensive car. Duca ironically observes that they fit into the ‘spiritual climate’ of the economic boom years. The contrast between Duca’s concern over the consequences of the economic boom in Italian society – that often borders on rage – and the indifference of the average Milanese is striking:

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What was real, for those people in the street, was going to the tobacconist to buy filter cigarettes, so that they didn’t feel so bad about smoking, and every now and again thinking about the next morning, the office, the work that had to be finished before the boss summoned them, or looking for a moment at those two girls standing alone waiting for the tram, with their low-cut tops. These were the natural dimensions of life, the rest they only read about, he stabbed his wife 27 times, or else, housewife with five children involved in vast drug ring, or else, gunfight between rival gangs in Viale Monza, all this was only reading, quite stimulating, but then they went back home and found the gas bill waiting to be paid. (Scerbanenco 2012 [1966]: 162, original emphasis) The average Milanese thinks that crimes are performed by an ‘Einstein of crime’, that typical evil genius of the classic detective novel. They also read the sensationalist news as if it is fiction or stories that have nothing to do with their own life. By contrast, Duca investigates a Milan where crime is not an aberration. On the contrary, violence is now inherent in a sprawling area where betrayal and greed are widespread and where criminals often go unpunished. Indeed, Scerbanenco sees the increase in criminality as an unavoidable side-effect of Milan’s development into a metropolis. He also describes the new business of the Milanese underworld as being as efficient as the legal economy: ‘highly organised, exactly like an import-export company’ (Scerbanenco 2012 [1966]: 191). Criminal organizations may also move out into the suburbs ‘like big factories’ (2012 [1966]: 200).8 Like the typical hardboiled detective, Duca does not shy from violent methods to make people confess their crimes. However, unlike Colina, he maintains a code of honour that prevents him, for example, from hitting women. Duca also presents other interesting differences from the American gumshoe. First of all, he is not in competition with the police. In fact, he often cooperates with a police team that reflects the new geographical composition of Northern Italian cities in the aftermath of the Economic Miracle (Pieri 2004: 152–53).9 Duca is not from Milan (his family comes from Emilia Romagna); his mentor, Chief Inspector Carrua comes from Sardinia, and his friend and police officer Mascaranti is from Sicily. This is a very interesting element, as in a crime series where the clash between Northerners and Southerners in Milan is acknowledged (‘he was a terrone,’ [Scerbanenco 2005 (1969): 130])10 this peaceful cooperation between people from different regions of Italy is uncannily symbolic of a social assimilation that would indeed be realized in the following decades. Moreover, being himself an outsider, Duca does not discriminate against people, migrants or otherwise, on the basis of race or ethnicity. Quite surprisingly for the times, several prostitutes that Duca meets during his investigations are described as honest and clever women. Particularly interesting is Duca’s encounter with Herero, a black prostitute, in I milanesi ammazzano al sabato [Milanese Kill on Saturdays]. When Duca asks her if she has been to Rome, she answers:

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I’m from Rome. […] of course, I don’t descend from Julius Cesar, as you may guess from the color of my skin, but I am from Rome, I was born and bred in Rome. Can’t you hear it from my accent, policeman? (Scerbanenco 2005 [1969]: 88) In his depiction of a marginalized female character with sharp intelligence who resists society’s estrangement and judgement, Scerbanenco mirrors his own experience as a ‘foreigner’ in Italy.11 Duca is also fond of elderly people and of those of the lower-middle class who have been left on the fringe of the new hedonistic Italian culture. They are often victims of crime; sometimes they are the victim’s family and friends, in which case, they have been doubly victimized – first by the loss of a daughter or sister, and then by society itself. Duca’s partiality towards the Milanese lower-middle class and its values of honesty and solidarity has led some critics to emphasize the conservative nature of Scerbanenco’s novels. Among others, Guido Bezzola highlights Duca’s ‘Arcadian dream of a pre-industrial and patriarchal society’ (1977: 152). Alternatively, with his honesty and desire for justice, like a hardboiled American detective, Duca is a ‘Janus figure, and individual who looks backward to a more noble past while at the same time staring open-eyed at the world before him’ (Geherin 1985: 201). However, apart from lacking other ‘trademark mannerisms and idiosyncrasies of other famous literary detectives’ (Van der Linde 1996: 304), such as alcohol dependency and misogyny12 (even though he shares the homophobia of some of his forefathers), Duca Lamberti is also able to commit to other people. Far from being the ‘fully pathological version of American individualism’ (Breu 2005: 1–2) as many of his American fictional colleagues, he is in a relationship. And yet, he does not surrender to a typical middle-class family life, as Inspector Maigret and other European fictional detectives tend to do; indeed, his ‘family’, composed of his unmarried sister, with her illegitimate child, and Livia Ussaro, his girlfriend, an eccentric philosophy teacher who experiences prostitution for her research on the exploitation of women in Italian society, is highly unusual in the still traditional Italian society of the time. Duca’s unconventional fictional family probably reflected the experience that Scerbanenco had as a journalist that put him in contact with the changing fabric of Italian society. In particular, Livia represents the ‘new’ Italian woman. University educated, she has a rational mind and does not fear making her point clear. She also refuses to be patronized by Duca: ‘I’m not remotely interested in what you like or don’t like’ (Scerbanenco 2012 [1966]: 158). Inflexible in her hatred towards men who exploit women, in Venere private/A Private Venus she agrees to go undercover to unveil a prostitution ring and ends up being tortured and disfigured. However, she refuses to be victimized and keeps on helping Duca in subsequent investigations. Duca calls her ‘Minerva’ after the Greek goddess of wisdom and turns to her when he needs to clarify his thoughts. Livia is therefore very far from the stereotype of the femme fatale, but is also different from the opposite stereotype of the subdued and angelic woman.

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In conclusion, far from imitating a foreign formula, Scerbanenco successfully used the conventions of the American hardboiled crime novel to create a successful Italian private detective and write stories to which Italian readers could relate. In the figure of Duca Lamberti the giallo finally had a credible Italian sleuth who walked the mean, but equally realistic, streets of the Italian metropolis in the economic boom. References Bezzola, Guido (1977), ‘Preistoria e storia del giallo all’italiana’, in V. Spinazzola (ed.), Letture 1977, Milan: Il Saggiatore, pp. 103–25. Breu, Christopher (2005), Hard-Boiled Masculinities, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Burns, Jennifer (2011), ‘Founding Fathers: Giorgio Scerbanenco’, in G. Pieri (ed.), Italian Crime Fiction, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, pp. 27–47. Canova, Gianni (1990), ‘Giorgio Scerbanenco’, Problemi, May–August, pp. 157–66. Carloni, Massimo (1994), L’Italia in giallo. Geografia e storia del giallo italiano contemporaneo, Reggio Emilia: Edizioni Diabasis. Clark, Martin (2008), Modern Italy: 1871 to the Present, London/New York: Routledge. Crovi, Luca (2002), Tutti i colori del giallo. Il giallo italiano da De Marchi a Scerbanenco a Camilleri, Venice: Marsilio. Di Ciolla, Nicoletta (2010), An Uncertain Justice: Crimes and Retribution in Contemporary Italian Crime Fiction, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Enna, Franco (1955), Tempo di massacro [A Time for a Massacre], Milan: Mondadori. Geherin, David (1985), The American Private Eye: The Image in Fiction, New York: Hungar. Ginsborg, Paul (1990), A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943–1988, London: Penguin. Guagnini, Elvio (1979), ‘“L’importazione” di un genere: Il giallo italiano tra gli anni Trenta e gli inizi degli anni Quaranta. Appunti e problemi’, Note novecentesche, Pordenone: Tesi, pp. 221–57. Knight, Stephen (1988), ‘“A Hard Cheerfulness”: An Introduction to Raymond Chandler’, in B. Docherty (ed.), American Crime Fiction: Studies in the Genre, Basingstoke: McMillan, pp. 71–87. Lucarelli, Carlo (2008), Storie di bande criminali, di mafie e di persone oneste, Turin: Einaudi, pp. 66–118. Mazzola, Alessandro (2006), ‘Giorgio Scerbanenco e Duca Lamberti: Note su un incontro fatale’, Delitti di carta, 6, pp. 37–47. Messent, Peter (2012), The Crime Fiction Handbook, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Most, Glenn W. (2006), ‘Urban Blues: Detective Fiction and the Metropolitan Sublime’, The Yale Review, 94: 1, pp. 56–72. Oliva, Carlo (2003), Storia sociale del giallo, Lugano: Todaro Editore. Padovani, Gisella (1989), L’officina del mistero. Nuove frontiere della narrativa poliziesca italiana, Enna: Papiro Editrice. Paoli, Marco (2007), ‘Duca Lamberti nel contesto della criminalità e del miracolo economico nei gialli di Giorgio Scerbanenco’, in A. Gillian and J. Butcher (eds), Narrativa italiana degli anni Sessanta e Settanta, Naples: Libreria Dante & Descartes, pp. 117–24.

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Petronio, Giuseppe (2000), Sulle tracce del giallo, Rome: Gamberetti. Pezzotti, Barbara (2012), The Importance of Place in Contemporary Italian Crime Fiction: A Bloody Journey, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. ––––– (2014a), Politics and Society in Italian Crime Fiction: An Historical Overview, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. ––––– (2014b), ‘Crime and Capitalism: Giorgio Scerbanenco’s and Massimo Carlotto’s Italian Domestication of American Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction’, Clues: A Journal of Detection, 32: 2, pp. 51–61. Pieri, Giuliana (2004), ‘Crime and the City in the Detective Fiction of Giorgio Scerbanenco’, in Robert Lumley and John Foot (eds), Italian Cityscapes: Culture and Urban Changes in Contemporary Italy, Exeter: UEP, pp. 144–55. ––––– (2012), ‘Introduction’, in G. Scerbanenco, A Private Venus, Oxford: Hersilia Press, pp. 5–11. Pistelli, Maurizio (2006), Un secolo in giallo. Storia del poliziesco italiano, Rome: Donzelli. Porteous, J. D. (1985), ‘Literature and Humanist Geography’, Area, 17: 2, pp. 117–22. Rambelli, Loris (1979), Storia del giallo italiano, Milan: Garzanti. Ricci, Andrea (2001), ‘Il pulp dei film tratti da Scerbanenco arriva anche a Tarantino’, Spunti e Ricerche, 16: 1, pp. 17–31. Scerbanenco, Giorgio (1970 [1966]), Traditori di tutti/Duca and the Milan Murders (trans. Eileen Ellenbogen), New York: Walker. ––––– (2005 [1969]), I milanesi ammazzano al sabato [Milanese Kill on Saturdays], Milan: Garzanti. ––––– (2012 [1966]), Venere privata/A Private Venus (trans. Howard Curtis), Oxford: Hersilia Press. Van der Linde, J. (1996), ‘Detective en anti-detective: Narratologie, psychanalise, postmodernisme’, Rivista di letterature moderne e comparate, 58, pp. 303–16. Go Further Novels The Duca Lamberti novels Scerbanenco, Giorgio, (2014 [1966]), Traditori di tutti/Betrayal (trans. Howard Curtis), Oxford: Hersilia; (1970 [1966]), Traditori di tutti/Duca and the Milan Murders (trans. Eileen Ellenbogen), New York: Walker. ––––– (2012 [1966]), Venere privata/A Private Venus (trans. Howard Curtis), Oxford: Hersilia Press. ––––– (2005 [1969]), I milanesi ammazzano al sabato [Milanese Kill on Saturdays], Milan: Garzanti. ––––– (1999 [1968]), I ragazzi del massacro [The Massacre Kids], Milan: Garzanti. Books Paoli, Marco (2015), Giorgio Scerbanenco: Urban Space, Violence and Gender Identity in Post-war Italian Crime Fiction, Brussels: Peter Lang.

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Notes 1

Among the most relevant studies on Scerbanenco are Loris Rambelli (1979); Elvio Guagnini (1979: 221–57); Giuliana Pieri (2004: 144–55; 2012: 5–11); Alessandro Mazzola (2006: 37–47); Marco Paoli (2007: 117–24); Jennifer Burns (2011: 27–47); and Barbara Pezzotti (2014a: 58–74).

2

Giallo, gialli in the plural, is the term commonly used to define crime fiction in Italy. It means ‘yellow’ from the colour assigned to the covers of one of the first Italian series of crime fiction called ‘I libri gialli’ and launched in 1929 by the publisher Mondadori. The question of the origin of the term is however complex and not entirely resolved. See Maurizio Pistelli (2006). In this article I use the term giallo in its widest meaning, that is to say a story where there is a crime and an investigation takes place, as commonly accepted by authoritative scholars, such as Giuseppe Petronio (2000).

3

The first crime series Scerbanenco wrote was a 1940s whodunit series set in Boston featuring Inspector Jelling as the protagonist.

4

Three of Scerbanenco’s short stories inspired the film Milano calibro 9 by Fernando Di Leo (1971), while one of them, entitled ‘Milano calibro 9’ was turned into the movie La mala ordina/ The Italian Connection (1972) – also with Di Leo as director; Di Leo also directed the film version of I ragazzi del massacro in 1969; I milanesi ammazzano il sabato [Milanese Kill on Saturdays] inspired Duccio Tessari’s La morte risale a ieri sera [Death Occurred Last Night] (1970); Venere private/A Private Venus was the basis for Yves Boisset’s Il caso Venere privata [The Private Venus Case] (1970). According to Andrea Ricci, the Italian movies inspired by Scerbanenco’s novels are precursors of Quentin Tarantino’s postmodern noirs. See Andrea Ricci (2001: 17–32).

5

Franco Cannarozzo, aka Franco Enna, wrote a series of books and a collection of short stories featuring private detective Leslie Colina. Only Tempo di massacro (1955) was set in Italy. For an analysis of Enna’s crime stories see Gisella Padovani (1989: 75–104) and Pistelli (2006: 371–77).

6 7

Translations used in this chapter are my own, unless otherwise stated. Interestingly, in Tempo di massacro the disempowered figure of the Italian private detective is acknowledged. When Colina asks Inspector Giunta if there are private eyes in Italy, Giunta answers, ‘the few detective agencies available don’t deal with crimes, but only with family and business matters. Little things’ (Enna 1955: 53–54).

8 9

For an analysis of the relation between crime and capitalism in Scerbanenco, see Pezzotti (2014b). This choice can again be explained by the difficulty of including a ‘proper’ private detective in a crime story set in Italy. Interestingly, in the last novel of the series, Lamberti joins the police force.

10 ‘[T]errone’ is a derogatory term to indicate a person from the South. 11 As he explains in ‘I, Vladimir Scerbanenko’ (A Private Venus) the writer had to face discrimination for most of his life because of his Ukrainian origins (2012 [1966]: 251–81). 12 On the representation of women in Scerbanenco’s novels, see Pezzotti (2014a: 71–72).

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‘Life is a well of marvels, there’s everything in it: rage, diamonds, cut throats, and Livia Ussaro.’ DUCA LAMBERTI

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R u t h E p e lb a u m Nationality: Argentinian / Creator: María Inés Krimer Carolina Miranda

Buenos Aires noir Throughout the twentieth century crime fiction has, according to critic Jorge Lafforgue, underpinned the Argentinean system of literary fiction like no other genre (1997: 1).1 Since the 1900s, various literary fashions have eagerly advocated for both the classic whodunnit and the hardboiled subgenres, promoting and demoting them into and out of the canon. Amelia Simpson (1990) claims that, with only sporadic local production, the local readership was consistently exposed to foreign detective fiction from the late nineteenth century well into the 1930s. While, as will be addressed later, the phenomenon of imported crime fiction is clearly observed throughout the 1940s and 1950s when the genre bore the indelible marks of a translated and foreign product, from the 1970s there emerged a robust offering of homegrown crime writing which began incorporating some local elements such as national setting or more familiar social and historical backdrops. The focus of this chapter is Argentinean María Inés Krimer, who is associated with a new wave of crime authors coming to the fore in the 2000s, one which has changed the locus of crime writing by relocating it exclusively to Argentinean soil. Krimer was born in Paraná, in the province of Entre Ríos, in 1951. A lawyer who has been a full-time writer for over a decade, Krimer has published a collection of short stories, Veterana [Veteran] (1998), but is best known for her novels La hija de Singer [Singer’s Daughter] (2002), which was awarded the first prize of the Fondo nacional de las Artes; El cuerpo de las chicas [The Girls’ Body] (2006); Lo que nosotras sabíamos [What We Knew] (2009), which won the prestigious Emecé Prize in 2008; and La inauguración [The Inauguration] (2011), which also received the first prize of the Fondo nacional de las Artes. Most of her novels are set in contemporary Argentina; they combine mystery and suspense, addressing current social and cultural issues. Her later works, in particular, incorporate elements of the thriller novel and focus on themes of xenophobia, prejudice and state-sanctioned violence. In particular, I shall focus here on those of Krimer’s novels that form a three-

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Case Studies: Ruth Epelbaum

volume series: Sangre kosher [Kosher Blood] (2010) and Siliconas express [Siliconas Express] (2013). At the time of writing this chapter Sangre fashion [Fashion Blood] (2015), the last novel of the Epelbaum saga, had not been published.2 In general, Krimer’s novels problematize the social, political and cultural anxieties of a modern Buenos Aires seen through the eyes of a Jewish woman private detective, Ruth Epelbaum. The series was written for the Negro Absoluto [Absolute Noir] collection.3 Edited by prestigious hardboiled writer Juan Sasturain, the collection was first published in 2008 (by Ediciones Aquilina). It has twenty one novels to date and is firmly anchored in local history, culture and customs as contributors must follow a strict set of rules: they have to be written by Argentinean authors; they must write a three-novel series; and crimes are to be exclusively set in Buenos Aires. The name of the collection plays upon two ‘absolutes’. On the one hand, it is ‘absolutely’ Argentinean, as writers, settings and issues addressed are all native to that country. It is also a playful denomination as noir is, par excellence, an ‘absolutely’ hybrid genre. This is reflected by the collection’s titles, which incorporate elements of hardboiled and clue-puzzle novels as well as those of the pursuit and spy genres. Thus, Negro Absoluto has become a vehicle for representing a change in local writing, epitomizing a creative boom observed in the Argentinean crime fiction of the last decade. With two novels already published in the collection, Krimer’s detective is doubly distinctive: first, because a woman writing hardboiled fiction is a rare incursion into this predominantly masculine field, particularly in the Argentinean literary context;4 second, because Ruth Epelbaum works independently and does not collaborate with the police – she is paid by the hour for sniffing around within a community she knows well, which turns her into the first kosher PI that Buenos Aires, and Argentina, has ever seen. Narrated in local vernacular and including a variety of Yiddish expressions and sayings, Krimer’s novels Sangre kosher and Siliconas express emulate a classic hardboiled style reminiscent of the early V. I. Warshawski novels by American Sara Paretsky, the first of which was published in 1982. Krimer’s saga comprises realistic pieces of fiction, with convoluted plots, displaying the degree of physical violence expected of a hardboiled novel (yes, Ruth is occasionally beaten up). Above all, the series introduces a woman PI, a Jewish woman who is not afraid to expose the pillars of her community and, apart from the risks associated with the job, lives a relatively quiet life in Villa Crespo, one of the two Jewish areas of Buenos Aires.5 Ruth is resourceful, in her mid-fifties, and, while savvy and practical, she is conservative in some of her ways: the right side of mumsy, she wears petticoats, refuses to buy a mobile phone, does not have a car, prefers public transport, and cannot bring herself to install a second-hand computer given to her by her cousin Lea. She solves her cases by doing some still effective, old-fashioned legwork, drawing on the help of a tight network that appears in both novels: her part-time maid and sidekick, Gladys; a chatty cousin, Lea; and Lola, a loyal, streetwise transvestite friend. Furthermore, Gladys’s husband, a sergeant in the Forensic Department of the National Federal Police, is also part of Ruth’s web, providing useful insights

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into the official investigations of the cases they get involved in. Ruth’s web of unofficial sidekicks is metonymic of the collective imagination, which also provides an interesting reflection on the development of the genre in Argentina. Having been exposed to numerous coups d’état (there were actually six in the twentieth century) the various official institutions policing the National Territory, such as the National Police, are often unpopular, untrustworthy organizations, often evoking repression, corruption and abuse of authority and power. As a result, police detectives are not as highly regarded, or indeed respected, as in the Anglo-Saxon tradition: ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘I’m late. Are you Ruth Epelbaum?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘The Yiddish detective?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Pleased to meet you.’ ‘[…] I don’t find the comment funny anymore. Here PIs often get bad press […]. For us Marlowe is as strange as Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple.’ (Krimer 2013: 18) As Sasturain points out in his foreword to Sangre kosher, the female protagonists of crime novels are often English and police detectives (Krimer 2010: 7). What makes Ruth Epelbaum stand out is that she is neither. Thus, Ruth’s network of unofficial resources allows her to bridge, perhaps to question, the distinction between the PI and the (police) detective. In her case, being a PI means she is able to challenge authority quasi-unofficially while engaging with the readership. Being second-generation Jewish, and having lived in the capital for a decade, Ruth offers a(nother) privileged insider–outsider perspective (Carter and Walker-Morrison 2013: 10). On the one hand, having worked for the Israelite Society Archive for thirty years, she knows the collectivity ‘like the palm of my hand […] I was that community’ (2010: 30). She is also well regarded and often invited to tour the country, lecturing on Jewish history in Argentina. On the other hand, she retains the inquisitive eye of someone who is still discovering the metropolis, thus exposing the amorality of a modern city in general and issues at the heart of her Kehilá, her community, in particular. Her first assignment is finding the missing daughter of an eminent member of the Kehilá, José Gold, who is known as ‘Chiquito’ Gold (‘Little’ Gold) despite being described as chubby and fat (2010: 18). Risking a scandal in the run-up to the local Kehilá elections, Chiquito Gold would rather keep the police out of this matter and turns to one of the community’s own for help. It later becomes apparent what other reasons Chiquito Gold has to want to keep this matter quiet. From the outset, Ruth presents herself as dutiful and professional, a woman who ‘cannot keep out of trouble’ and needs to scrub surfaces to uncover the truth: ‘I won-

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dered what it was that pushed me to keep searching. Like when I used to work for the Archive, I only wanted to uncover the truth’ (2010: 51). Ruth’s occasional flashbacks advance the plot and create suspense. Likewise, they offer snippets of national history, as her recollections are, for the most part, historically accurate. While her Archive boss had assured her ‘it’s not that we want to kick you out […] but we have to pass on the mantle’ (2010: 30), it was her over-inquisitiveness that had cost her the job: she recalls how (as something of an expert on Jewish immigration history with extensive knowledge of the family history of most of the foundational families of the Jewish community in Argentina) she was often invited to lecture on ‘candelabra, photographs and spitoons’ brought over from Europe by their ancestors but ‘[she] was only interested in talking about the brothels’ (2010: 13). Her obsession with the Swi Migdal, the organized group of Polish Jewish men trafficking women from Eastern Europe that operated in Argentina between the 1860s and 1930s, attracts unwanted attention from her boss: ‘I really like you, Ruti,’ he had told her, ’but I think you are out of your depth here. I have to tell you that the work you do in the archive is one thing, which is of fundamental importance for preserving the history of our community, but it is a different thing altogether to go about airing our schmates and talking about an organization which, at best, you are not seeing in the right context.’ (Krimer 2010: 56) Her interest in the Swi Migdal and the potential link to a criminal organization in the present proves right in the end, as Chiquito Gold’s daughter is shown to be only a diversion: she turns up on her own accord, having been hiding after accidentally seeing something she should not have. Gold is in fact part of an organization that, for decades, ‘emulated the modus operandi of the Swi Migdal’ with the difference that ‘instead of importing Polish women, they brought girls from the Buenos Aires conurbation and the interior’, who were subsequently trapped in a prostitution network (2010: 176). Unfortunately, the deaths of Gold and another man at the top of the ring do not put an end to the problem and Ruth’s quest for the truth continues as a sideline in the second instalment. Siliconas express is set a few years later, when Ruth’s reputation as the first idishe private detective of Buenos Aires, as rare as that may be, is already well-established. The novel opens (and closes) with Ruth and her cousin Lea at their local hairdresser’s. While they wait for their treatment, they watch a documentary-cum-reality show on makeovers featuring graphic scenes of a woman undergoing a very invasive procedure carried out by a flamboyant and well-known surgeon. As the plastic surgery industry and the cocaine business boom in Buenos Aires, the intricate novel presents a Ruth who is romantically involved with Hugo, a policeman who, she then discovers, has been facilitating security for a ring of drug traffickers commanded by Dr Vidal, the famous plastic surgeon and television presenter. Putting in implants for the glitterati by day and

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removing them from Paraguayan, Peruvian and Bolivian young mules by night, Vidal is described as ‘the sculptor of the stars, a Michel Angelo who, instead of sculpting marble, carves skin and fat and bones’ (2013: 20). The fact that a few of these young women have died in his exclusive clinic to feed the expensive cocaine habits of TV presenters and powerful businessmen reminds us of Marlowe’s expression: ‘[t]o hell with the rich. They make me sick’ (Chandler 1989 [1939]: 59). But Ruth does not judge; she detects, and thus exposes, epitomizing ‘the stubbornly democratic hero of a post-heroic age, righting wrongs in a fallen urban world in which the traditional institutions and guardians of the law, whether out of incompetence, cynicism or corruption, are no longer up for the task’ (Porter 2003: 97). From the sordid underbelly of Villa Crespo to the opulent area of San Isidro, from the exclusive gated community of Cañuelas to the seedy floating casino of Madero Port, Siliconas express depicts the scandalous juxtaposition of the lives of a population seemingly divided into first- and second-class citizens. Just as in the first novel of the saga, the advance of the investigation is interrupted by subplots and a series of interesting dialogues between Ruth and Gladys as they bake sponge cakes and drink tea. Gladys, Ruth often points out, is a lame maid but a very good reader (she is an avid consumer of gossip magazines) and an even better storyteller. Like a modern Scheherazade versed in popular culture and current crime affairs, Gladys often exploits her storytelling powers to wriggle out of some of her chores: Ruth knows that whenever she is asked to run an errand she brings up one of her intriguing ‘tramontina tales’ (2010: 55), alluding to the affordable and most common weapon of choice featured in the stories she reads in the newspapers.6 For Ruth, it is not so much what Gladys tells but how she concentrates on every detail (2013: 88). These vignettes of daily crimes and misdemeanours highlight the kind of mean city Buenos Aires really is. Likewise, Gladys proves a spellbinding narrator when she recounts, with scientific precision, the autopsy reports passed on to her by her husband. In this case Ruth is hired by Dr Samuel Kartz who is discretely but keenly looking for Silveyra, a former business partner who has, as he puts it, something that belongs to him (2013: 19). Silveyra is a minor celebrity, the boyfriend of a tabloid diva, Marcia Tesoro (modelled on an actual TV personality). Constantly in the public eye, she has been sculpted by Vidal and is very happy to advertise his celebrity beauty treatments on her daily show. Silveyra turns out to be involved in the drug trafficking ring run by Vidal. Katz plays his part too: once Vidal’s partner at the clinic (and the other business), Katz has been cut out of the picture after attracting unwanted attention through his involvement in a fatal case of malpractice. With the expert advice in the field of her transvestite friend Lola, who has been under the knife many times, Ruth approaches Vidal’s exclusive beauty centre under the pretence of being assessed for a nip-tuck. As the investigation advances, Ruth keeps coming back to the clinic for further tests, defying Vidal’s advice: ‘you are a sensible woman […], stop snooping around’ (2013: 48). One afternoon, and a few bodies later (including the television diva, Hugo and Katz),

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Vidal finds Ruth in his office searching his computer. Ruth confronts him: she knows he made his fortune by smuggling drugs inside implants carried by young girls from neighbouring countries, lured with the promise of citizenship once they delivered the merchandise (2013: 164). But Vidal has planned his escape carefully: having earlier dismissed the receptionist and the rest of the personnel, he attempts to administer Ruth with an overdose of anaesthetics. He is interrupted, however, by the receptionist who accidentally triggers the alarm when she returns to retrieve the mobile phone she has left behind. Apparently, it later transpires, the noise was such that ‘the police called’ and after having been forced to perform a liposuction, ‘Vidal had no other choice than taking me to the recovery room’ (2013: 168). Thus, Ruth escapes with a bruised – though flat – stomach and Vidal manages to flee the country. To ascertain the significance of Krimer’s contribution to Argentinean crime fiction, it is important to briefly mention the backdrop against which both writer and PI operate. From the 1900s Argentinean readers have been exposed to mainly imported crime fiction. Popular collections, following the model of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American dime novel, began to flourish as early as the mid-1910s, but it was not until the mid-1940s that crime fiction began to be considered prestigious literature. This phenomenon was promoted by Jorge Luis Borges and collaborator Adolfo Bioy Casares, creators and editors of the Séptimo Círculo collection, which published 366 novels between 1945 and 1983. If crime fiction was frowned upon by ‘serious’ Argentinean writers up to the 1940s,7 after the reign of Séptimo Círculo the genre was no longer classed as ‘literatura de kiosco’ (news-stand literature) (Mattalia 2008: 117). Two of the most distinctive features of the collection were a preference for foreign fiction (almost 90 per cent of the titles were imports) and the close focus on the whodunnit; for Borges in particular it was important to promote a model that, while retaining the subtle escapist effect of the reading experience, adhered to the grammar of the clue-puzzle novel with a special note: no signs of realism or violence. Other successful collections, such as Rastros (Acme, 1944–1957), Pandora (Poseidón, 1940s), Evasión (Hachette, 1951–55) and Serie Negra (Tiempo Contenmporáneo, 1969–77, edited by prestigious writer, Ricardo Piglia), continued to publish a variety of crime fiction, offering a wide-ranging mix of noir and classic puzzle novels. Although from the 1950s collections like these were much more receptive to local writers, they also featured a substantial number of imports ranging from classics (such as Christie, Hammett and Chandler) to new and upcoming authors. It is in this respect that the Negro Absoluto collection in general, and Krimer’s saga in particular, establish themselves as important enterprises. On the one hand, the collection is exclusively home-grown: not only is it powered by ‘local blood’, as the website claims, but it is also entirely set on home soil. For editor Sasturain, after an Argentinean crime fiction tradition forged by collections like Séptimo Círculo, Rastros, Evasión and Serie Negra, it was indeed time that crime and justice were ‘exclusively ours’ and that this type of fiction

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happened ‘down our road’, to use the colloquial expression.8 On the other hand, Krimer’s novels have successfully introduced a woman private detective with a distinctively local DNA, one who lives and moves around a geographic and cultural territory that is not only familiar but also relevant to the local reader of today. Furthermore, the fact that Krimer’s PI is part of a series of novels whose focus extends beyond the ending, beyond the romantic closure that end-stops so many novels with female protagonists (DuPlessis 1985), makes Ruth Epelbaum a most enduring character. Finally, Krimer’s ‘Kosher’ series drives towards realism. As a result, Ruth Epelbaum epitomizes what Karim Molander Danielsson (2002) terms a ‘dynamic detective’: this is a woman who ages, one who is involved in crimes and settings reflecting societal change. As a private detective Ruth’s inquisitive eye exposes all types of crime endemic to the big city, from corruption and scandal within the Jewish community to a more sophisticated and complex type of organized crime involving high-ranking politicians and public personalities. In this way, she remains unequivocally modern in her references to current issues and social anxieties. Thus, Ruth Epelbaum is absolutely Argentinean, absolutely current, absolutely noir. References Bosco, María Angélica (1954), La muerte baja en ascensor, Buenos Aires: Emecé. Carter, Ellen and Walker-Morrison, Deborah (2013), ‘Cannibalistic Māori Beheaded Rupert Murdoch: (Mis)representations of Antipodean Otherness in Caryl Férey’s “Māori Thrillers”’, in Jean Anderson, Carolina Miranda and Barbara Pezzotti (eds), The Foreign in International Crime Fiction: Transcultural Representations, London: Continuum/Bloomsbury, pp. 9–21. Chandler, Raymond (1989 [1939]), The Big Sleep, New York: Ballantine. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau (1985), Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Fingueret, Manuela (1996), ‘Las inmigraciones judías: Del campo a la ciudad: Del gaucho judío al cuentenik de barrio’, in H. Vazquez-Rial (ed.), Memoria de las ciudades. Buenos Aires 1180–1930. La capital de un imperio imaginario, Madrid: Alianza, pp. 303–09. Israel, S. (n.d.), ‘A History of the Jewish Community in Argentina’, http://jafi.org/nr/exeres/6a7d1480a44a-4ed2-acb0-ed141eb744ca,frameless.htm?nrmode=published. Accessed 11 December 2014. Krimer, María Inés (2010), Sangre kosher [Kosher Blood], Buenos Aires: Ediciones Aquilina. ––––– (2013), Siliconas express [Silicones Express], Buenos Aires: Aquilina. Lafforgue, Jorge (ed.) (1997), Cuentos policiales argentinos, Madrid: Alfaguara. Mattalia, Sonia (2008), La ley y el crimen. Usos del relato policial en la narrativa argentina (1880– 2000), Madrid: Iberoamericana/Verbuet. Miranda, Carolina (2013), Rereading the Writings of Roberto Arlt (1900–1942) within the Framework of Argentine Theatre and Popular Literature: A New Way of Interpreting a Major Latin American Author, Lewiston/New York: Edwin Mellen. Molander Danielsson, Karin (2002), The Dynamic Detective: Special Interest and Seriality in

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Contemporary Detective Series, Upsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Porter, Dennis (2003), ‘The Private Eye’, in M. Priestman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 95–114. Simpson, Amelia S. (1990), Detective Fiction from Latin America, Toronto: Associated University Presses. Go Further Novels The Ruth Epelbaum novels Krimer, María Inés (2015), Sangre fashion [Fashion Blood], Buenos Aires: Aquilina. ––––– (2013), Siliconas express [Silicones Express], Buenos Aires: Aquilina. ––––– (2011), La inauguración [The Inauguration], Buenos Aires: El Ateneo. ––––– (2010), Sangre kosher [Kosher Blood], Buenos Aires: Aquilina. ––––– (2009), Lo que nosotras sabíamos [What We Knew], Buenos Aires: Emecé. ––––– (2006), El cuerpo de las chicas [The Girls’ Body], Buenos Aires: Tantalia. ––––– (2002), La hija de Singer [Singer’s Daughter], Buenos Aires: Sudamericana. ––––– (1998), Veterana [Veteran], Buenos Aires: Florida Blanca. Books Anderson, Jean, Carolina Miranda and Barbara Pezzotti (eds) (2012), The Foreign in International Crime Fiction: Transcultural Representations, London: Continuum. Fingueret, M. (1996), ‘Las inmigraciones judías: Del campo a la ciudad. Del gaucho judío al cuentenik de barrio’, in H. Vazquez-Rial (ed), Memoria de las ciudades. Buenos Aires 1180–1930. La capital de un imperio imaginario, Madrid: Alianza. 1996, pp. 303–309. Knight, Stephen (2004), Crime Fiction Since 1800: Detection, Death, Diversity, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mattalia, S. (2008), La ley y el crimen: Usos del relato policial en la narrativa argentina (1880–2000), Madrid: Iberoamericana/Verbuet. Scaggs, John (2005), Crime Fiction: The New Critical Idiom, London: Routledge. E x t r a c t s / E s s a y s /A r t i c l e s Miranda, Carolina, (2015), ‘More than the Sum of its Parts: Borges, Bioy Casares and the Phenomenon of the Séptimo Círculo Collection’, in J. Anderson, C. Miranda, and B. Pezzotti (eds), Serial Crime Fiction: Dying for More, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 31–40. ––––– (2014), ‘Blood Beyond Borders: Claudia Piñeiro’s Las viudas de los jueves (2005)’ in Clues: A Journal of Detection, 32: 2, pp. 79–89.

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Notes 1 2

All translations, unless otherwise noted, are mine. Personal communication with Irène Barki, Krimer’s literary agent. Here, Ruth’s inquiries contribute to dismantling a sweatshop of undocumented Bolivian immigrants. Orchestrated by an élite fashion brand operating in a sought-after area of the city, the case resonates among Argentinian readers: in 2006 a fire in a Buenos Aires sweatshop revealed the widespread utilization of illegal Bolivian immigrants as a cheap labour force under a debt-slavery regime.

3

I would like to thank Alistair Rolls for raising this question during Why Crime Fiction Matters, a symposium organized by the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies, La Trobe University, 21 November 2014.

4

While there are a number of contemporary women worthy of mention writing crime fiction in Argentina, the most significant precursor of the genre is María Angélica Bosco. Unlike other 1900s authors turning an occasional interest in crime fiction, Bosco published ten classic puzzle novels and was editor of various literary publications. Her first piece, La muerte baja en ascensor [Death Going Down] (1954), perhaps also her most enduring novel, was awarded the Emecé literary prize and was published in the prestigious Séptimo Círculo collection, to which I refer later.

5

Argentina has the biggest Jewish community of South America with 187,000 Jews, 90 per cent of whom live in the capital (Israel n.d.). The first wave of Jewish immigrants arrived in Buenos Aires in 1889: they were Russians fleeing the pogroms and heading to the province of Santa Fe where they planned to settle as land workers. The 1920s saw a second major wave of Jewish immigration, this time from Eastern Europe. By then, an exodus had begun to take place from the countryside to the capital city. Seeking education as their way to advance in the social, economic and cultural ladder, the majority of the orthodox Jews arriving a decade earlier had moved to the capital and settled in the area of Once, in the centre of Buenos Aires. Neighbouring Villa Crespo was the chosen place for the Eastern European Jews; Yiddish was the lingua franca (Fingueret 1996: 302–09). Once and Villa Crespo have retained their traditionally Jewish heritage.

6

Established in 1910 as a hardware store by Italian immigrant Valentín Tramontina, Tramontina is Brazil’s most popular brand of cutlery. Nowadays the company offers over 16,000 products and is present in over 120 countries. In Argentina, a particular kind of Tramontina serrated knife with wooden handle is widely owned, as it is inexpensive; indeed, the brand is often used metonymically for ‘a serrated knife’, particularly the type used for asados, Argentinean barbeques. For more on Tramontina, see http://www.tramontina.com.ar/es/.

7

I am referring to Paul Groussac and Eduardo Holmberg. Groussac’s 1884 El candado de oro [The Gold Lock] and Holmberg’s 1896 La bolsa de huesos [The Sack of Bones] constitute two of the most influential pieces published before the 1900s. Both were writers, distinguished scholars, translators and literati of their time; they published under pseudonyms as a means of distancing themselves from this popular genre (Miranda 2013: 91–92).

8

http://www.negroabsoluto.com/texto.htm. Accessed 4 October 2014.

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Title

‘Here PIs often get bad press […]. For us Marlowe is as strange as Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple.’ RUTH EPELBAUM

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L o u i s e M o rva n Nationality: French / CReator: Dominique Sylvain Jean Anderson

A ‘chick dick’ à la française? This chapter has two aims: first, to explore briefly a particular evolution of women-authored private investigator, or PI, characters, from hardboiled tough-gal ‘dicks’ to more ideologically ambivalent ‘chick dicks’, arguably influenced by a chick-lit model and thus linked to some of the apparently contradictory values of third-wave feminism; and second, to focus on the possible and largely unnoticed appearance of such a PI in French crime fiction. Dominique Sylvain has published over a dozen crime novels, beginning in 1995 with Baka!, which featured Private Investigator Louise Morvan. Although Sylvain has since moved on to other lead characters, notably a female Franco-American alliance in the Ingrid and Lola series, whose first novel, Passage du désir/The Dark Angel, appeared in 2004,1 and a male–female police duo in her most recent novel, L’Archange du chaos [The Archangel of Chaos] (2015), her PI Morvan merits closer examination. I will explore here the extent to which Morvan might be seen as a uniquely French example of a contemporary woman investigator who has much in common with Anglo-Saxon trends. Readers of British crime fiction have access to a range of women-authored work featuring female investigators, many of them extremely well known. From Agatha Christie’s Jane Marple to P. D. James’s Cordelia Gray and on to the plethora of tough-girl contemporary investigators such as Val McDermid’s Lindsay Gordon and Kate Brannigan or Zoë Sharp’s Charlie Fox, women have written characters working outside the state infrastructure with considerable skill, tracking down murderers and ensuring justice for victims. In the American context, the roles of writers such as Sue Grafton (Kinsey Milhone) and Sara Paretsky (V. I. Warshawski) have been widely studied as examples of feminist revisions of the hardboiled tradition of independent detectives (Reddy 1988; Klein 1988).2 The French crime fiction scene, at first sight, shows no such tendency. The most

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established names in investigation are male and policemen: Georges Simenon’s Inspector Jules Maigret; Frédéric Dard’s Detective Inspector Antoine San-Antonio; and Fred Vargas’s Chief Inspector Adamsberg. While there are some women investigators to be found, they are not well known, neither in France nor to the export market. Maurice-Bernard Endrèbe’s Elvire Prentice and Charles Exbrayat’s Imogène McCarthery featured in half a dozen novels each from the late 1940s to the 1970s, but these are chiefly comic, even caricatured representations.3 Chéryl, hairdresser girlfriend of the legendary Le Poulpe, is the principal investigator in a series spin-off from the more substantial original (the Série Chéryl [1996–ongoing] accounts for a dozen of the 285 books), and occasional examples of strong women characters can be found, such as Maud Tabachnik’s lesbian journalist Sandra Khan and Danielle Thiéry’s Inspector Edwige Marion.4 Female private investigators were, however, and remain, rarities: French crime fiction has apparently not provided a platform for what can be seen as a central preoccupation of second-wave feminism in the Anglo-Saxon crime-writing tradition: the creation of a space for exploring contentious issues of gender, criminality and violence.5 This is no straightforward project: Kathleen Gregory Klein points out the difficulties, for crime fiction writers, of meshing (humanist) feminist values and the hardboiled traits typically associated with the PI: ‘[e]ither feminism, or the formula is at risk’ (1988: 202). Maureen Reddy, considering a broader range of subgenres, apparently reaches the opposite conclusion, claiming that feminist crime writing ‘participates in the larger feminist project of redefining and redistributing power’ (1988: 149). Both critics seem to focus on the politics of creating female detectives whose pursuit of justice, often quite overtly on behalf of individuals from oppressed social groups, makes it possible to read them as avenging female heroes. In Britain, James’s Cordelia Gray and Liza Cody’s Anna Lee showed varying degrees of sisterly solidarity and physical endurance and courage in their investigations. While American Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone or Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawsky are far from unflawed, for many readers and critics they stood as models of a new and somewhat masculinized toughness under the banner ‘girls can do anything’ – and while they might have been victims of violence, they also inflicted it on others. Anglo-Saxon, women-authored PI crime fiction of the 1970s and 1980s deliberately set out to challenge stereotypes and arbitrary limits imposed by gender behaviour models. The mid-1990s would see these heroic figures challenged in turn. As chick lit began to celebrate all the contradictions of ‘femininity’ and to make a space for an almost parodic representation of the conflicting ideals of contemporary womanhood à la Bridget Jones, so too did a new female detective take shape, one whose beliefs and behaviours reflect what Rosalind Gill (2006) refers to as the messy, contradictory quality of women’s experiences of their selves.6 Martha Rampton (2014) sums this up neatly by referring to the third-wave feminist belief in the possibility of having both a push-up bra and a brain: it is no longer considered necessary to avoid make-up, plunging necklines,

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stiletto heels and other outward signs of ‘feminine’ sexuality to exercise brainpower.7 Although there are some common elements between the chick dick and a style of female detective stories known as ‘tart noir’, also originating in the mid-1990s, there are some important differences. As authors Lauren Henderson and Sparkle Hayter, hosts of website tartcity.com, have put it, their new ‘tart’ heroines are ‘independent-minded female sleuths who are tough enough to take on thugs and corrupt cops, tender enough to be moved by tough, tender men (or women, as the case may be)’ (Henderson and Hayter 1999–2008). They are ‘neofeminist women, half Philip Marlowe, half femme-fatale, who make their own rules, who think it’s entirely possible to save the world while wearing a drop-dead dress and four-inch heels’. While membership of the ‘tart noir’ group of writers has evolved over time, they have had and continue to have considerable commercial success. The name emphasizes a strong sexual element in the novels – Henderson’s protagonist Sam Jones is a dominatrix – not always present in works which fit the chick-lit mystery combination more generally, and while humour is a requirement, the novels tend to be dark in overall tone and the heroines relatively sure of themselves.8 On the lighter side, the most striking example of what Cathy Cole (2004) calls ‘feisty chicks’ in recent crime fiction and the one I propose here as a paradigm for the chick dick is undoubtedly Janet Evanovich’s wayward Stephanie Plum: a bounty hunter rather than a PI, her genes are clearly present in a following generation of increasingly ‘chick’ investigators (albeit sometimes of the sleuth variety rather than PIs per se), such as Pamela DuMond’s Annie Graceland, a slightly psychic cupcake baker; JoAnna Carl’s chocolate maker Lee McKinney; Gemma Halliday’s shoe designer Maddie Springer; or Kate Harrison’s ‘secret shopper’ in a series beginning in 2011. Cara Black has created an interesting blended PI, Paris-based Franco-American Aimée Leduc, who shows many traits of the chick dick in a series that sets each volume in a different arrondissement of Paris. The success in both the United Kingdom and the United States of these generically hybridized crime novels, what we might call ‘chick-lit cosies’ or ‘romantic crimedies’, hangs to a large extent on reader interest in a new variation on the female detective theme: neither elderly spinsters nor widows with time on their hands and a sharp eye for the quirks of human nature, nor briskly masculinized tough gals, nor even well-brought-up young ladies of previously unsuspected strength and endurance, these characters are female heroes of a very different kind from those produced by second-wave feminism thirty or forty years ago. They can be seen to exemplify neo-liberal post-feminist ideals which claim to de-objectify women by empowering them: the ‘sexually autonomous heterosexual young woman who plays with her sexual power and is forever ‘“up for it”’ (Gill 2006: 258).9 In this sense, they combine characteristics of the hardboiled investigator (brain plus fists) and the femme fatale (push-up bra) – precisely Sylvain’s project in creating Louise Morvan.10 Crime fiction traditions of sexual and powerful women are arguably tainted

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enough by the femme fatale image to render a straight combination inoperable, and to necessitate a degree of irony and/or parody that quickly leads to a comic tone, which may or may not dominate the narrative. Before examining Sylvain’s work in some detail, it will be helpful to look more closely at the paradigm-setting US model, Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum.11 In One for the Money (1994) Plum has just lost her job selling lingerie and becomes a bounty hunter who must track down criminals awaiting trial who have failed to make their scheduled court appearances: while not strictly a PI, she is thus constantly involved in missing persons inquiries. Her ineptitude is legendary, particularly where cars are concerned, and she is exposed to physical danger on a regular basis. She is attractive, but in a dishevelled state much of the time (her curly hair is especially untamable); sexually drawn to two very macho characters (a policeman and a former US Ranger running a security service); she is surrounded by a New Jersey ‘family’, which includes not just actual relatives (a loud-mouthed grandmother, a pot-roast-cooking mother and a resigned father), but a generously proportioned, lycra-wearing former prostitute workmate and a sleazy boss, her cousin Vinnie. She lives alone, and her household is described chiefly in terms of her pet hamster’s feeding requirements and her empty refrigerator: a majority of her self-catered meals are fast and/or junk food. Since she dislikes exercise, the fit, or otherwise, of her clothing also gives rise to regular comment. These characteristics can be seen to echo many of the traits associated with Fielding’s Bridget Jones. Jones too has difficult relationships with her parents and her two ‘suitors’. She struggles with her appearance and is an incompetent cook; indeed, despite her intelligence, her episodic incompetence becomes a dominant (and endearing) element in the narrative. The plethora of chick-lit titles published in Jones’s wake is well known. Critics have pointed an accusing finger at the formulaic nature of the new subgenre as a whole: Stephanie Harzewski (2006b: 34) cites a ‘Make Your Own Chick-Lit Novel!’ model originally published in the magazine Book in 2003, which lays out the necessary ‘ingredients’. While the transfer into crime fiction must respect some of the rules of that established genre, and there are clearly variations on the basic Evanovich model within chick-lit ‘crimedies’,12 essential characteristics of the chick dick may be listed as follows: physical attractiveness; perceived grooming deficit and/or compulsive interest in clothing, especially shoes, giving rise to detailed descriptions; a degree of incompetence but eventual success (the heroine will always get her man); strong, usually heterosexual, attraction(s); a solitary home (often with a pet); a motley (sometimes substitute) family; and an inability to provide for herself (financial and/or culinary inadequacy). What is perhaps most striking is the combination of conflicting characteristics: independence and neediness, empowerment and uncertainty, are present in permanent and dynamic (dis)equilibrium. Control – over multiple aspects of personal and professional life – seems alternately achievable and impossible. To what extent does Sylvain’s concept of combining the hardboiled and the femme

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fatale to create a tough but relatively isolated, highly sexualized and often self-critical character correspond to these basic parameters transferred into crime fiction by way of the chick dick? To explore this depiction I focus here on four Louise Morvan novels: the first, Baka! (1995), the second, Sœurs de sang [Blood Sisters] (1997), the fourth, Techno bobo [Techno Ouchy] (1999) and the most recent, La Nuit de Geronimo [Geronimo’s Night] (2009). Morvan’s early appearances stress her controlling but solitary nature. Half French and half English, she has inherited her detective agency from her PI uncle, found murdered in a parking lot. Morvan takes over in part from a desire to avenge him; however, she must first get the agency on a firmer footing. In Baka! she coolly exchanges sexual favours for a job tip-off from a journalist:13 she is hired by a French bishop to track down his nephew, who has dropped off the radar in Japan.14 The investigation leads to her uncovering a plot to steal a valuable lacquer screen, among other art frauds, but she has returned to France before she realizes the truth about one murderer, with whom she had a sexual liaison. Much of the focus in this novel is on aspects of life in Japan, and the character of Morvan and even her detecting activities are by no means the author’s only concern. She does, however, emerge as a sexually uninhibited and physically daring young woman with a strong sense of humour. The second novel in the series, Sœurs de sang, introduces Commissaire Serge Clémenti, a widower in his fifties who is immediately attracted to Morvan and who becomes the brooding Mr Darcy in the background of several of the novels. Morvan and her personal relationships become more central to the narrative, although her motivation for seducing Clémenti is not merely erotic. In one scene, she attempts to obtain access to useful police information by dressing to seduce: perfume, suspender belt, stockings, a silk blouse and a designer suit – ‘in that order and nothing else’ (Sylvain 1997: 216).15 Techno bobo, published two years later, is also set in France. Morvan investigates the apparent suicide of two young women who were caught up in the seedier side of the Paris nightclub scene (drugs and prostitution). Within this context, she again does not hesitate to exploit her physical charms in the pursuit of her investigation. She chooses a low-cut leather dress as ‘battle dress’ (Sylvain 1999: 121, 213) and in a separate episode performs a partial striptease on a tabletop to extract information (190). Her brief relationship with Clémenti has by now broken down as a result of her unfaithfulness, and his reduced role as Morvan’s link to the police dominates their continuing but suppressed mutual attraction. As a result of the break up, she has been drinking more than she should and gained weight (73): her smoking habit has also yellowed her teeth (44) and she smells, although not unpleasantly, of sweat (43). Despite these flaws, she continues to be considered attractive, with the face of a Madonna, and to lust (idly, for the most part) after men she encounters (73). In the final book in the series, La Nuit de Geronimo, Morvan is called on to find the source of mysterious and threatening e-mails sent to the family and associates of

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a scientist working in the field of genetic engineering, whose suicide some years previously is also revealed to have been murder. She works with an exotic and attractive motorbike-riding former soldier of Russian descent, investigator Mathias Dotko, with whom she engages in mild flirtation (Clémenti having taken up with a star television reporter in the meantime) before literally riding off with him into the sunset at the end of the story, leaving Clémenti to drown his sorrows in gin. Although Morvan lives alone, she has a substitute family of sorts – the proprietor and regulars of the bistro Le Clairon des copains. While she often eats here, it is also a kind of extramural office space where she writes up reports, delegates surveillance tasks and exchanges pleasantries. Her at-home cooking skills are limited by the ingredients available at any given time (Sylvain 2009: 53) and food shopping is low on her list of priorities (156). Alongside these details, which reveal the limitations on Morvan’s self-sufficiency, is one especially telling passage: at the end of the final novel, she realizes her senses are on high alert: ‘she felt more alive than ever before’ (355) because of a man in her life. As she comments, this is both satisfying and unbearable (355). Clearly there are elements here that correspond to the indicators of the ‘chick dickdom’ outlined above. Although the nearest pet in her life belongs to her neighbour, and the narratives are not entirely focalized by one person but instead pass from character to character, Morvan shares a number of traits with chick dicks. She is independent but reliant on male intervention, physically strong but at the mercy of attackers, a seductress but with obvious physical flaws. The cumulative result of this combination, however, appears to be the creation of a somewhat antipathic character. One reviewer expresses this as being confronted with a kind of puzzle, a woman ‘both steely and emotionally vulnerable’ (Anon. 2012).16 By no means as accident-prone as Stephanie Plum, she still regularly encounters difficult and dangerous situations, such as a near rape in La Nuit de Geronimo and several beatings, from some of which she requires male rescue. As the series progresses the criminal activities in the background grow increasingly complex, including drugs, prostitution and international GMO terrorism, while the sexual self-exploitation becomes less frequent, to such an extent in the closing novel Morvan arguably has less in common with the typical chick dick as previously defined. Formal critical reception of the Morvan series has been mixed, perhaps in part because of fellow Viviane Hamy-published writer Fred Vargas taking the greater share of the limelight. However, we might also ponder the extent to which Sylvain’s project of creating a hybrid detective character has baffled readers unused to female investigators in the first instance, let alone the mixed-message model that Morvan represents, particularly in the earlier works. In this context it is interesting to consider the much warmer reception of the series that features a retired police detective, Lola Jost, and an American masseuse, Ingrid Diesel. Perhaps in dividing what are arguably two strands of Morvan’s character (intellect and toughness versus sensuality and sexuality) between two characters, Sylvain has simplified the task of readers and critics less exposed to, and

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thus less receptive of, the chick-dick version in all its contradictions. Certainly praise for the Ingrid and Lola series has been fulsome: François Busnel (2011) of L’Express has gone so far as to proclaim the author the new leading light of French crime fiction. The book so warmly received is Guerre sale/Dirty War (2011). The first in the series, Passage du désir, has been translated into English by Nick Caistor as The Dark Angel (Maclehose, 2014). The same story has also reached French television screens in two versions, in 2011 and 2014. Interestingly, Sylvain has expressed some concerns about Maclehose’s marketing of The Dark Angel: in response to a question about the cover design (bright red with caricatural silhouettes of the two women, with fonts familiar to readers of chick lit – this compared to the sombre tones of the original covers),17 she stated: I like the style and the energy it conveys. I guess that the readers will get an immediate sense of the differences between Ingrid and Lola, although I must admit that I am a bit worried; I hope that readers will not file me into the ‘chick lit’ category. (Pocock 2012) While she is happy to consider Morvan as part of the chick dick category,18 the division of conflicting characteristics over two separate characters is clearly a move away from the concept of the ‘dynamic (dis)equilibrium’ referred to above and inherent in the chick dick: instead of internal conflict in the protagonist, a space is created for interaction and cooperation.19 Whether Louise Morvan constitutes a failed experiment in chickdick crime fiction within the framework of a literary culture unprepared to receive her, through lack of exposure to both female PIs and third-wave feminism, is a moot point: what is clear is that she meets many if not most of the criteria for classification as a chick dick à la française. References Anon. (2012), ‘La Nuit de Geronimo de Dominique Sylvain (Points)’, Black Novel Blog, 19 August, http:// black-novel.over-blog.com/article-la-nuit-de-geronimo-de-dominique-sylvain-points-108687093. html. Accessed 10 December 2014. Budgeon, Shelley (2011), Third Wave Feminism and the Politics of Gender in Late Modernity [e-book], London: Palgrave Macmillan. Busnel, François (2011), ‘Planète polar’, L’Express, 1 June, http://www.lexpress.fr/culture/livre/planetepolar_996700.html?xtmc=busnel_figure_de_proue_sylvain&xtcr=5. Accessed 2 December 2014. Cole, Cathy (2004), Private Dicks and Feisty Chicks: An Interrogation of Detective Fiction, Fremantle, WA: Curtin University Books. Duffy, Stella (2002), ‘Stella Duffy’s Top 10 Tart Noir Books,’ The Guardian, 7 August, http://www. theguardian.com/books/2002/aug/07/bestbooks.fiction. Accessed 11 January 2015. Evanovich, Janet (1994), One for the Money, New York: Scribner.

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Fielding, Helen (1996), Bridget Jones’s Diary, London: Picador. Flipo, Georges (2010), La Commissaire n’aime point les vers/The Commissioner Does Not Like Poetry, Paris: La Table ronde. Gill, Rosalind (2006), Gender and the Media, London: Polity. Grenaudier-Klijn, France (2012), ‘An American in Paris or Opposites Attract: Dominique Sylvain’s “In-Between” Bicultural Detective Stories’, in Jean Anderson, Carolina Miranda and Barbara Pezzotti (eds), The Foreign in International Crime Fiction: Transcultural Representations, London: Continuum/Bloomsbury, pp. 87–98. Hamilton, Deborah (1994), ‘The French Detective Novel 1920s–1990s: Gendering Genre’, Ph.D. thesis, State College, PA: Pennsylvania State University. Harzewski, Stephanie (2006a), ‘The New Novel of Manners: Chick Lit and Postfeminist Sexual Politics’, Ph.D. thesis, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. ––––– (2006b), ‘Tradition and Displacement in the New Novel of Manners’, in Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young (eds), Chick Lit: The New Women’s Fiction, New York/London: Routledge, pp. 29–46. Henderson, Lauren and Duffy, Stella (1999–2008), ‘Stella Duffy and Lauren Henderson Present Tart City’, http://www.laurenhenderson.net/tartcity/index2.html. Accessed 11 January 2015. Kim, Julie H. (2012), Murdering Miss Marple: Essays on Gender and Sexuality in the New Golden Age of Women’s Crime Fiction, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Klein, Kathleen Gregory (1988), The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre, Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Pocock, Ella (2012), ‘“I Sometimes Picture My Two Girls on the Silver Screen” – Dominique Sylvain interview’, http://maclehosepress.com/tag/dominique-sylvain/. Accessed 21 December 2014. Rampton, Martha (2014), ‘The Three Waves of Feminism’, http://www.pacificu.edu/about-us/newsevents/three-waves-feminism. Accessed 2 December 2014. Reddy, Maureen T. (1988), Sisters in Crime: Feminism and the Crime Novel, New York: Continuum. Sylvain, Dominique (1995), Baka!, Paris: Viviane Hamy. ––––– (1999), Techno bobo [Techno Ouchy], Paris: Viviane Hamy. ––––– (2009), La Nuit de Geronimo [Geronimo’s Night], Paris: Viviane Hamy. Vanacker, Sabine (2015), ‘Series Fiction and the Challenge of Ideology: The Feminism of Sara Paretsky’, in Jean Anderson, Carolina Miranda and Barbara Pezzotti (eds), Serial Crime Fiction: Dying for More, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 99–110. Go Further Novels The Louise Morvan series Sylvain, Dominique (2012), Le Roi Lézard [The Lizard King], Paris: Viviane Hamy. ––––– (2009), La Nuit de Geronimo [Geronimo’s Night], Paris: Viviane Hamy. ––––– (2001), Strad, Paris: Viviane Hamy. ––––– (1999), Techno bobo [Techno Ouchy], Paris: Viviane Hamy.

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––––– (1998), Travestis [Transvestites], Paris: Viviane Hamy. ––––– (1997), Sœurs de sang [Blood Sisters], Paris: Viviane Hamy. ––––– (1995), Baka!, Paris: Viviane Hamy. The Ingrid and Lola series Sylvain, Dominique, (2015 [2011]), Guerre sale/Dirty War (trans. Nick Caistor), London: Maclehose. ––––– (2014) Ombres et soleil [Shadows and Sunlight], Paris: Viviane Hamy. ––––– (2014 [2004]), Passage du désir/The Dark Angel (trans. Nick Caistor), London: Maclehose. ––––– (2011), ‘Pique-Nique’ (short story) (trans. Jean Anderson) in William Rodarmor (ed.), French Feast: A Traveler’s Literary Companion, Berkeley, CA: Whereabouts Press, pp. 174–181. ––––– (2007), L’Absence de l’ogre? [When the Ogre’s Away], Paris: Viviane Hamy. ––––– (2006), Manta corridor [Manta Corridor], Paris: Vivane Hamy. ––––– (2005), La Fille du samouraï [The Samourai’s Daughter], Paris: Viviane Hamy. The Aimee Leduc series Black, Cara (2015), Murder on the Champ de Mars, New York: Soho Press. ––––– (2014), Murder in Pigalle, New York: Soho Press. ––––– (2013), Murder below Montparnasse, New York: Soho Press. ––––– (2012), Murder at the Lanterne Rouge, New York: Soho Press. ––––– (2011), Murder in Passy, New York: Soho Press. ––––– (2010), Murder in the Palais Royal, New York: Soho Press. ––––– (2009), Murder in the Latin Quarter, New York: Soho Press. ––––– (2008), Murder in the Rue de Paradis, New York: Soho Press. ––––– (2007), Murder on the Ile Saint-Louis, New York: Soho Press. ––––– (2006), Murder in Montmartre, New York: Soho Press. ––––– (2005), Murder in Clichy, New York: Soho Press. ––––– (2003), Murder in the Bastille, New York: Soho Press. ––––– (2002), Murder in the Sentier, New York: Soho Press. ––––– (2000), Murder in Belleville, New York: Soho Press. ––––– (1999), Murder in the Marais, New York: Soho Press. The Casey Jones series Munger, Katy (2009), Bad Moon on the Rise, Jackson, WY: Thalia Press. ––––– (2001), Better Off Dead, New York: Avon Books. ––––– (2000), Bad to the Bone, New York: Avon Books. ––––– (1999), Money to Burn, New York: Avon Books. ––––– (1998), Out of Time, New York: Avon Books. ––––– (1997), Legwork, New York: Avon Books.

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Books Cole, Catherine (2004), Private Dicks and Feisty Chicks: An Interrogation of Crime Fiction, Fremantle: Curtin University Books. Mizejewski, Linda (2004), Hardboiled & High Heeled: The Woman Detective in Popular Culture, New York: Routledge. McNab, Claire, Board, Sherri L., Flora, Kate, Paretsky, Sara, Munger, Katy and Redmann, J. M. (1999), Nuts and Jolts: Writing Sex and Violence [audio-cassette], Seattle: Tree Farm Communications. Walton, Priscilla L. and Jones, Manina (1999), Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition, Berkeley: University of California Press. Doane, Mary Ann (1991), Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis, New York: Routledge. Notes 1

The award-winning novel Passage du désir was televised under the same title (France 2, February 2012), starring Muriel Robin and Fatou N’Diaye as the investigators, and again in 2014 starring Robin and Anne Le Nen.

2

For the British market, see Kim (2012). Her analysis also includes more recent trends.

3

Prentice is a Marple-inspired eccentric (Endrèbe translated crime fiction, including Christie’s work) and McCarthery is a tartan-clad, red-headed force of nature. A film version, Imogène McCarthery, directed by Alexandre Charlot and Franck Magnier and starring Catherine Frot (UGC/TF1), appeared in 2010 to very muted acclaim.

4

Curiously, male-authored Inspector Viviane Lancier (Georges Flipo) shares many stock traits of the chick dick (preoccupation with her weight, inability to cook adequate meals, lusting after unsuitable male colleagues – see discussion below).

5

Deborah Hamilton’s thesis (1994) lists an impressive number of female-authored crime fiction featuring female investigators, but few of these are private investigators, and the vast majority of the authors remain unknown to a wider public. French television crime series have featured women as principal investigators since at least the 1970s; my focus here is on print.

6

A case could be made for a similar evolution in male detectives, as contemporary crime fiction increasingly casts doubt on absolute values (such as ‘right’ and ‘wrong’) and deploys more and more flawed investigators (alcoholics, drug addicts, self-doubters), but this is seldom expressed in terms of gender.

7

The mid-1990s transition can arguably also be traced in the evolution of Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone, whose love life takes on increasing importance with the introduction of a permanent partner from 1991, or in V.I. Warshawski’s feelings of estrangement from her niece, a thirdwave feminist with very different values, in recent books (particularly from 2009 onward) – see Vanacker (2015). For ‘tart noir’, see the tartcity.com website: other associated writers include Stella Duffy, Laura Lippman and Katy Munger.

8

See Duffy (2002): the tart noir ‘remit’ specifies: ‘maybe comedic, maybe violent, maybe sexual, definitely new-woman, neo-feminist, strong, smart and sharp’.

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9

Gill points out that this is in many ways worse than objectification, since it creates a form of ‘agency’ that is entirely dependent on self-objectification. Although I do not disagree with this position, I will focus here on the power within fiction that can be exercised by a female self using her sexuality to influence male behaviour.

10 Personal communication (e-mail, 6 September 2014). 11 This should not be taken as an indication that Sylvain was imitating Evanovich: although she is aware of the American writer’s work, the first books in each series appeared in the same year, 1995. 12 For example, in choice of narrative perspective: while many chick-lit authors prefer a systematic first-person narrative, perhaps in imitation of the Bridget Jones’s Diary approach, this is far from a fixed ‘rule’. 13 This relationship might be described as an early example of the ‘friends with benefits’ concept. Morvan goes on to have casual sex with an American woman and a Japanese man who is later revealed as a probable murderer. 14 Baka!, like the 1998 Morvan novel, Travestis [Transvestites], has been extensively revised by the author. In the interests of exploring the origins of the series, only the original version is cited here. 15 All translations are my own. 16 The comment continues: ‘She strikes us as a strong woman, protected behind the armour she has forged, but we also see her as fragile, at the mercy of a man who keeps her hanging around, who really gets to her. And the men she really gets to are left in the dust’ (Anon. 2012). 17 Since Hamy’s ‘Chemins nocturnes’ collection features dramatic black-and-white photographic images, the contrast is especially striking. 18 Personal communication (e-mail, 6 September 2014). 19 For a fascinating discussion of this, see Grenaudier-Klijn (2012).

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‘She saw a black leather dress with a plunging neckline and thought it would make the ideal outfit for pursuing her inquiries in clubs. [...] She went into the shop, tried on a size 36 and bought it. She would add this battle dress to the inflated bill she was planning to send to Karim Abdoulazane.’ LOUISE MORVAN

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I N TE R R O G ATI O N S 140 q u a n t r i ll , Nick co nducted by Pa u l D. B raz i ll

146 r e d h e a d , Leigh co nducted by Rach el Fra n ks

152 l a l a n a , Fernando co nducted by B eth A . B u tler

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Q u a n t r i ll , Nick crea to r o f Jo e G erag h t y

Nick Quantrill writes gritty crime fiction set in his home city of Hull, England. Quantrill has produced a trilogy around Joe Geraghty: Broken Dreams (2010); The Late Greats (2012); and The Crooked Beat (2013). In this interview, Quantrill talks about his work and some of the influences that helped him to realize Geraghty: a character that offers some tradition, and a few twists, for readers who prefer their crimes solved by a private investigator. The Dead Can’t Talk (2016) will be published by Caffeine Nights. Can you give us an overview of the private eye that features in your books? Joe Geraghty is a fairly small-time guy operating in his (and my) home city of Hull, East Yorkshire. He’s a fairly regular bloke dealing with a tough job and a hard, but changing city. I wanted to give him a team to work with, essentially move away from the idea of the PI as a loner. To that end, he works with Don and Sarah Ridley, who are father and daughter. Don is a retired police officer, so he has useful contacts, as well as a less than wholesome past. Sarah is there to offer support to Joe and Don, but soon proves herself to be more than capable of doing the job. Geraghty’s a former rugby-league player, which is something that has dual purpose. Firstly, it gives him the kind of background that enables him to get his hands dirty without being easily intimidated. Secondly, one of the city’s defining features is the sport, so it was initially a method to inject some local colour (i.e. cheap gags at the expense of those unfortunate enough to support the wrong team), but I quickly realized Geraghty was a tool for examining his city. Why did you choose a private eye as a protagonist instead of a policeman, which is much more common in British crime fiction? I actually tried writing a policeman first, but it just didn’t work. I’m not averse to doing research for novels, but as much as I love reading police procedurals, I found writing one hard work. Maybe it was the fear of getting it wrong, but if I was to write about the police, I’d want it to be realistic, and that’s obviously difficult to do. Graham Hurley’s DI Faraday series is superb for that feel, but I don’t think I’ve got it in me to produce something

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I’m happy with. With a private eye you’ve got so much more freedom, both as a writer and in terms of what you do with your character. The structure and conventions of the crime novel can be a very helpful tool, but a procedural might feel a little too restrictive for me. Everything’s fair game with a private eye and you don’t have the inconvenience of having to obey the law. Which fictional private eyes – if any – were you a fan of before starting the series? To be truthful, not too many. I read widely within crime fiction, so I suppose the relative lack of private eyes within the genre is reflected in my reading. I’ve read plenty of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and enjoyed and learned from them. More up to date, I’d read the odd Dennis Lehane, etc. to get a more modern feeling for what was happening within the genre, but the big one for me, the one that set off a light bulb above my head, was Ray Banks’s Cal Innes series. Innes is an unofficial PI, trying to hustle a living within the broken and dispossessed, unable to stay away from the Manchester underworld. Maybe it was the northern England setting, but I immediately felt drawn to it. The contemporary nature of the plots was compelling and chimed with what I wanted to do. Innes is a million miles away from Philip Marlowe, but it showed me that you could update the blueprint in interesting ways. Do you think they were an influence? Massively, but in different ways. Chandler’s writing is immense, but his work was done seventy years ago. The mean streets he had Marlowe patrol aren’t my mean streets. His work is characterized with femme fatales, wise-cracks and bottles of whiskey in desks. Mine isn’t. I very deliberately wanted to move away from that and put my own spin on the genre. Ray Banks is a great example of twisting the genre and very much inspired me to follow my own path and think through what I wanted to say. I wanted Geraghty to be a fairly regular northern man, one very much rooted in his home city with no real desire to escape it, maybe even like myself. He simply wants to rub along, but is unable to turn away from trouble, so it’s fair to say some of Marlowe’s DNA has been passed along. How does location influence your private eye stories? Rain-soaked Hull is a long way from Chandler’s Los Angeles! Indeed it is, but equally Chandler’s Los Angeles doesn’t exist now (I assume). When I think of Los Angeles on the page, I think of Michael Connelly’s sometime-PI, Harry Bosch, who lives in a fractured and diverse city. Maybe things don’t change that much after all? In that respect, Hull is no different to Los Angeles. It’s a city that’s constantly changing and has its own story to tell. I’m always thrilled when reviewers remark that the setting feels like a character in my novels. Hull’s historical purpose has been based around the fact that it’s a port, but as government policy changed in the 1970s and killed the deepsea trawler industry, it has spent decades searching for a new purpose, possibly finding it

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through an influx of green technologies and its appointment as 2017 UK City of Culture. With my debut, Broken Dreams, I went for the bullseye, looking at how the death of the fishing industry in the mid-1970s and the resultant lack of jobs and opportunity still resonate in the present day. On the surface, The Late Greats was about a missing pop star and his reformed band. Underneath that it was about very different people negotiating a city at the end of the line with a largely static population. The final Geraghty novel, The Crooked Beat, is a story about smuggled cigarettes, but captures the changing nature of the city’s port, as it moves towards a new beginning, regenerating itself as a green hub. Have you met or researched any real-life private eyes? How do they differ from the fictional variety? I’ve never (knowingly) met a real-life PI. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to ahead of writing one. My intention was never to faithfully recreate their work. That would be as foolish as trying to put the realities of policing on the page. As much as Geraghty feels real to me, he’s a tool to tell a story. I did do some online research before writing. It seems that much of the work is mechanical, serving legal papers, etc. It’s not the stuff dreams are made of. I did try to get a feel for what type of person would become a PI, so I could understand the skillset the job required, the kind of person who would be suitable, and from there created Joe Geraghty. Do you think that the private eye is more suited to the United States, perhaps because of the landscape? Maybe it’s because I’m not as well-read in the private eye genre as some, but I don’t understand why it remains more prevalent in the United States. I understand that the PI represents something about the American psyche, but stories are stories and cities are cities with their own rhythms and hidden corners. There’ll always be crime that slips through the cracks because the police are lazy, incompetent or unable to investigate. As a writer, the PI is the perfect tool to explore society and mop those crimes up with. They’re semi-legitimate, certainly to the extent people respond to them, and they’re naturally inquisitive, yet they’re not bound to act in the same way as a police officer. Ultimately, they may take cases on from clients, but they answer to themselves and their own moral code. They’re the perfect creation, be they for American writers or otherwise, to really look the world around them in the eye. Are private eye stories more plot or character driven? I think as writers we aspire to both plot and character, knowing you can’t have one without the other. They really are that intertwined. I found over the course of the Geraghty trilogy that character started to inform the plot, though. When I wrote the first novel, Broken Dreams, Geraghty was very much a construct. I knew what he was about, but I didn’t necessarily know him. In the second novel, The Late Greats, we briefly meet his

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brother, who’s facing financial problems. In The Crooked Beat, I knew that if his brother did something stupid, acting out of desperation, Geraghty wouldn’t hesistate to do whatever it would take to put it right. The plot came from that simple kernel of truth about his character. I think one of the great things about private investigators is that you have the choice on how you portray them on the page. They can be the heart of the story (character driven) or they can be more detached, looking in at the story (plot driven). I’ve found with the Geraghty novels that they’re very much his story wrapped around a plot. When I write short stories, he’s very much a tool for telling someone else’s story. Would you consider writing a private eye novel that's set in a place you don’t know well? I don’t think I would. Location seems to be such a deeply-embedded aspect of the private eye novel. It’s a necessity, really. If a private eye is to be successful, he has to know both the streets and the people who live there. If you put Geraghty in, say, Newcastle, he wouldn’t be able to function. He just wouldn’t have the networks around him that he needs. Equally, that goes for the writer, too. I could use online resources and talk to people, but I don’t really know a city like Newcastle. It’s one thing to know the street names, another thing altogether to know the rhythms of the people. If I was writing a police procedural, I reckon I could get away with it, the connection to place maybe isn’t as important. With a private eye novel, it feels like it’s all or nothing, there’s no cheating.  Photograph: @NeilHolmes © 2015. Used with Permission.

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Title

‘Chandler’s writing is immense, but his work was done seventy years ago. The mean streets he had Marlowe patrol aren’t my mean streets. I wanted Geraghty to be a fairly regular northern man, one very much rooted in his home city with no real desire to escape it.’ NICK QUANTRILL

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R e d h e a d , Leigh creat o r o f S imo ne Ki r sch

Leigh Redhead is a popular, and award-winning, crime fiction author from Adelaide, South Australia. Redhead has published a series of private investigator novels that tell the stories of Simone Kirsch: a tough stripper-turned-PI. These include: Peepshow (2004); Rubdown (2005); Cherry Pie (2007); and Thrill City (2010). In this interview, Redhead reveals some of her insights into writing and some of her experiences that serve to bring her writing to life. You’ve had a really varied career – having held some exciting (and possibly not so exciting) jobs – what made you want to become a writer? I’ve had a lot of weird jobs. When I was 17 I worked as a cook and deckhand on a prawn trawler going from Cairns to Cape York, and we’d stay out at sea for three months at a time. I thought it would be a great chance to catch up on reading all the classics, and brought a lot of Tolstoy on board with me, but after finding a box full of Picture magazines and crime novels left behind by previous deckhands, War and Peace went unread. After the trawler I moved to Sydney and tried to get a number of straight jobs, but when that didn’t work out I ended up working as a lingerie waitress and erotic masseuse. After finishing university I moved to Melbourne and again tried to enter the straight world – but all I could get was checkout chick, or waitressing at Pancake Parlour. I used to walk past one of those peepshow places, all depressed at my waitressing job, and look at the sign saying ‘ladies wanted, any nationality, inquire within’ and that’s how I started working as a stripper and a peepshow girl – and came up with the idea for my first book. I had wanted to be a writer from when I was about 4 years old, before I could even read or write. My mum read me a lot of stories and as soon as I heard them I thought – dang, I want to make up stories too. I used to dictate them to her – make her write them down for me, and then I’d illustrate them. I’d particularly like to bind them, too, so they’d look like real books. When I was 7 I started working on a novel, called Diana the Duck. I’d always been a fan of the cartoon Secret Squirrel (about a squirrel that was a private investigator) and Diana was like a precursor to my character Simone Kirsch, only avian.

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Crime fiction can be a tough genre to crack, it’s very competitive. How did you get your first break? I was really lucky. I’d just moved to Northern NSW from Melbourne, and had a couple of drafts of Peepshow, about stripper and newly minted PI Simone Kirsch, already written. I joined the Northern Rivers Writers Centre and applied for this mentorship that they run every year – basically you submit the first 50 pages of your novel, and if selected get to spend a week in a lovely guesthouse in the Byron hinterland with a few other writers and a published author, working on your book. The author that year was Marele Day – the godmother of contemporary Australian women’s crime fiction, whose character Claudia Valentine works as a PI on the mean streets of Sydney. I was desperate to get in, and I did! Marele helped me to fix up those first fifty pages (which were embarrassingly awful) and as part of the mentorship I got to send the manuscript to her publisher, Allen and Unwin, and, incredibly, they accepted it. That was one of the happiest days of my life. You have a BA in Communications, an M.Phil. in Creative Writing, a couple of teaching qualifications and you are now working on your Doctorate. Has studying writing changed how you write? Not really. It’s probably changed how I read more than anything. When I first started my Master’s a professor told me to watch out that my academic writing didn’t start influencing my crime writing and mess it all up. But I don’t have that much control over what I write, or how I write. It just comes out the way it does. I do think I’ve improved though – and that’s from practice – four novels – and teaching writing. I’ve had to articulate what I do and how I do it, and teach a variety of different narrative techniques that I hadn’t even heard of when I started writing my first book. Reading students’ works-in-progress and critiquing manuscripts also helps your own writing and I think I’ve learned more than the students when I’ve been teaching. (Don’t tell them that!) Kirsch is a tough character and you’ve worked hard to ensure she’s larger than life; did you always intend that her cases would form a series or did you think the first book was going to be a one off? I had really hoped it would be a series. I love reading series PI characters myself and grew up on Trixie Belden books, before graduating to Kinsey Millhone, V. I. Warshaswki, Cliff Hardy, Elvis Cole, Claudia Valentine and Kate Brannigan. There’s something great about spending time with a character you love and know well and there’s such great character development in a series. Before I knew Peepshow was going to be published I’d already started on the second, and I usually have ideas for the next book or two. Now that there are a few novels in the series is there anything that you would have done differently in the beginning; would you have changed Simone in any way?

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I wouldn’t have changed Simone in any way, but I would have gone lighter on specific details of her backstory. If you reveal details early on, you’re stuck with them – and even if you might want to change things further down the track you can’t, you have to play fair with the reader. Readers relate well to Simone, what do you think it is that makes her so attractive to people who also read crime fiction with private investigators from more traditional crime-fighting backgrounds: the ex-cops, the lawyers or the military types?  I think she’s a bit different. She’s an outsider (actually a double outsider – a PI is outside the law and a stripper is outside of ‘straight’ society) but at the same time she’s incredibly normal. She doesn’t have any special, superhero-esque skills. She can’t take down a bar full of bikers with judo moves, can’t hack into government databases or pick any lock, doesn’t carry a gun or have sidekicks who can summon up vast arsenals of weapons to get her out of a jam. She has to use her wits, her personality and her intelligence to solve cases and confront villains. She doesn’t have a perfect body, puts on weight easily, isn’t morally above reproach and lets her desire (for sex, alcohol, revenge) often get the better of her. The novels are written in first person, which helps readers get inside her head and find out she’s down to earth, self-deprecating, world-weary and funny. She’s someone you’d want to have a beer with. Writing crime fiction involves some critical decisions; why did you choose to make Simone a private investigator instead of a cop?  Probably because my favourite crime novels are private investigator novels. PIs get to have all the fun. They’re independent, lone operators, not constrained by bureaucracy. They get to bend the law, don’t have to run every move past their superiors, and can be sarcastic and trash-talking in a way the police can’t. In Australia private investigators aren’t allowed to carry weapons – which means they can’t just pull out a gun and shoot the antagonist at the end – they have to get creative. There’s an outsider outlaw element to them that I really like. In Peepshow Simone becomes a PI when she’s rejected by the police service because of her background, which is probably just as well as I can’t really see Simone fitting in with that police culture. I also prefer PIs to series amateur detectives, because I find it hard to suspend disbelief when amateurs are constantly stumbling over crime scenes à la Murder She Wrote. When you were writing Peepshow, did Simone’s character come first and you built a story around her, or did you come up with the plot and then superimpose Simone? The character first. And the title! Simone was actually my stripping name so she’s a bit of an alter ego. When I began working in the peeps I immediately wanted to write about the experience, because the setting and the characters were so kooky – and not at all like how you usually see strippers and the sex industry portrayed in books, TV and film.

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But Peepshow didn’t start as a crime novel because although I’d always loved crime fiction, I didn’t think I could write it. I had this idea in my head that you needed to come up with an intricate plot straight away and would probably need wall charts of suspects and red herrings mapped with mathematical precision. (In the last ten years I’ve talked to a whole bunch of crime writers and I’ve found out that’s not the case at all. Although a few plot beforehand, most fly by the seat of their pants. The old plotters versus pantsers debate…) So I decided Peepshow should be, I dunno, a literary, young-stripper-comes-ofage type novel. So I started writing it and it was terrible. Nothing happened beyond Simone lying around in the peeps pondering her Brazilian and her existential angst while she watched the interplay between the coloured lights and the mirrors in the peepshow booth. Then I went to a Melbourne writer’s festival session with Robert Crais and Kinky Friedman called ‘Why Write Crime’ and they said, why would you write anything else? You can explore any theme or topic you’d cover in a literary novel, but you get to entertain people at the same time. It was a bit of a light-bulb moment. Why not make Simone a private investigator? So then I went and did the actual Certificate IV Inquiry Agents course for research, and I came up with the plot when I found out that a strip-club boss had molested a couple of my friends. I was so angry I wanted to kill him, so I did the next best thing: fictionalized him and had his mutilated body wash up on St Kilda Beach. I had no idea who’d murdered him, and had to write the book to find out. Will Simone still be investigating in ten, or even twenty, years? I hope so. I want to find out what happens to her. But it’s going to be tough for her to keep her licence since she gets up to so much dodgy stuff. She’s going to have to hide her shenanigans a bit better. She’s not stripping so much these days, though, as she’s just turned 30 and her investigations have left her with a dodgy back and a few scars that might turn the punters off. Setting is an essential element for any type of novel but it can make or break a crime novel. You’ve lived in Simone’s world; do you still do research to make this world real for readers or do you rely on experience? I rely a lot on past experience, but I still like to hang out in strip clubs and dodgy pubs whenever I can (not as much as I’d like, with two young children). I have friends in the industry and like to keep up with what’s happening, so that the information in the books is current. I would hate for someone in the sex industry to read one of my books and think ‘hang on, that’s bullshit – that’s not what it’s like’. If I’m writing about a setting I have to visit it. You can get a lot of information on YouTube and the Internet, but I need to know what places smell like and how people talk and what they talk about. All the little details that give a story verisimilitude. And you often meet people during your research that

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become inspirations for characters in the book. Simone’s mentor figure Tony Torcasio is based on a cop turned private investigator who taught my PI course. Australia has a long tradition of producing strong women to fill the pages of our crime novels. Are there any female crime fiction characters that you think Simone would look up to? Definitely Marele Day’s creation Claudia Valentine, the ass-kicking feminist PI. She could be Simone’s mum, and Peter Corris’s Cliff Hardy could be her dad When you’re not writing crime fiction, what sort of crime novels do you read? I have a lot to do with Sisters in Crime, and always go crazy buying books at their events, so I read a lot of Australian female crime writers and pretty much every subgenre of crime: domestic thrillers, police procedurals, PIs, historical crime. I’m also reading a lot of classic and contemporary noir fiction for my Ph.D., both Australian and international. I love the darker stuff and am attempting a stand-alone noir novel of my own. What next for Simone Kirsch?  I’ve nearly finished book number five. It’s called Repentance Creek and involves Simone returning to the hippy community she grew up in, and uncovering corruption and a decades-old murder.  Photograph: Tsc Tempest Photography © 2015. Used with Permission.

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L A L AN a , Fernando crea to r o f Ferm ín E sca r tí n

Fernando Lalana is an award-winning writer from Zaragoza, Spain. He has authored more than one hundred novels for young readers, including four whose private investigator protagonist is the awkward but endearing Fermín Escartín: El asunto Galindo [The Galindo Affair] (1996),1 Amsterdam Solitaire (1998), La tuneladora [The Tunnel-Borer] (2006) and El último muerto [The Last Corpse] (2010).2 Escartín also makes a secondary-character appearance as a private detective in La maldición del bronce [The Curse of the Bronze] (2005).3 Here, Lalana kindly shares his experiences, perspectives and insights regarding Fermín Escartín. How did you come up with the character of Fermín Escartín? Escartín was born in 1996 with El asunto Galindo in response to a request by the Danish publisher Gyldendal. The noir novel is a very universal genre that I imagined could be welcomed by Danish readers in a manner similar to that of my usual Spanish readers. So I created an investigator who would narrate in first person (one of the characteristics of the subgenre) but I decided to create a somewhat peculiar guy. Therefore he’s a newcomer, a bit clumsy, funny and from Zaragoza, as am I. That way, if the Danish wanted to know something about Escartín’s homeland, they would learn something about Zaragoza, Aragón and Spain. How did you acquaint yourself with the role of the private investigator? Real detectives are not like noir novel detectives, which are pure invention. If you try to approach real investigators (like Lorenzo Silva does in Spain with his Civil Guard officers) you can produce a novel of suspense or intrigue, but not a noir novel. All of my models are literary. I read and have read a lot of noir novels and, seeing what others do, I have created my own characters. My literary influences in this sense are endless (from Hamlet to Lemaitre), but I will focus on two: one foreigner, the Swedish author Henning Mankell (the true master of the recent wave of novelists from Nordic Europe) and his amazing character Kurt Wallander; and one Spaniard, Francisco González Ledesma and

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his character Ricardo Méndez – in my humble opinion – the best author and the best character of noir novels written in Spanish. Curiously, Wallander and Méndez are not private investigators, but police inspectors. Describe Fermín Escartín. What are his greatest virtues and defects? What characteristics distinguish him from other private investigators? Contrary to what many readers believe, Escartín is a very intelligent guy, recipient of a special award upon finishing his studies and the youngest professor of his graduating class in the Faculty of Letters. Because of his character (he engages in a public ruckus with his professor), he is expelled from the university and decides to become a detective (which causes his conservative wife to abandon him). Since he has been a great reader of detective novels, Escartín believes that he has learned enough from them (and from the CEAC academy’s correspondence course) to practise the profession. But as a detective, he is a disaster. Escartín only comes off as brilliant when a novel case falls into his hands, and this occurs very few times; in his entire life he only solves five cases with brilliance – those in the four novels in which he is the protagonist and the one where he appears as a secondary character in La maldición del bronce (Alfaguara Infantil). This approach is what makes Escartín different from other detectives; he is not an amateur detective but a professional, but a very bad professional – an upstart with flashes of genius but also very long periods of mediocrity, even incompetence. If not for the fact that his father left him the apartment where he lives as an inheritance, surely he would live off public charity. What’s the importance of Fermín Escartín’s status as ex-university professor? What does this add to his investigations? Escartín was destined to be a boring university professor. Upon losing his position, his life makes a complete turn and he becomes a detective without ever having thought about it before. The fact that he has been a university professor is barely relevant, but the fact that he has been a great reader of detective novels all his life is what leads him to believe – erroneously – that he can become one of them. Fermín Escartín is the protagonist of several of your novels; what are the challenges and pleasures of re-encountering the same character in different novels? Taking up again with a former character always has great appeal, to be able to develop him more deeply and to define his characteristics more precisely. You feel more creative, a better writer. I believe that this allure is special if you develop your project thinking in this manner from the beginning. I have had the occasion to experience it with the Marijuli & Gil Abad, investigaciones [Marijuli & Gil Abad, Investigations] series – also novels of intrigue, but for a younger audience than Escartín’s – a series in which we watch the four protagonists grow from 12 to 25 years of age. For me, it continues to be one of my greatest literary experiences.

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But this is not the case with Fermín Escartín. My relationship with Escartín is very gratifying, but it was not planned this way. I did not plan to do a series with his novels. I wrote the four novels about Escartín for different reasons, for different publishers and at very different times – with four or five years between each of them; also, because of this, the character has aged so much from one novel to the next, from the guy in his twenties in El asunto Galindo to the 50-year-old in El último muerto. The fact that Bambú, the publisher, finally brought the novels together in their Exit collection, giving unity to their image, happened suddenly due to the unexpected success of La tuneladora. Of all the novels that feature Fermín Escartín as private investigator, which is your favourite? Why? Without a doubt, my favourite is El último muerto, the one that closes the series. It is the most complex, the most recent, the only one that I wrote knowing that I was producing a new title after the publisher, Bambú, had already shown an interest in pulling all of the novels together in the same collection; I wrote El último muerto with a certain awareness of making a series and it is the only one of the four in which this occurs. The more-thanmature Escartín of El último muerto is beginning the last part of his career as a detective and he deliberately has details that link him to González Ledesma’s character Méndez, who is for me, I repeat, the best character of the Spanish noir novel. In addition, I allow myself to revive my favourite character of the entire saga, hired hit woman Elisa Lobo, and to introduce readers to Escartín’s ex-wife, thus delving a bit into his background. Nevertheless, in spite of my preferences, commercial success continues to be on the side of La tuneladora, followed by El asunto Galindo. Fermín Escartín’s investigations lead him to observe many themes of social importance – urbanization, domestic violence, the Spanish Civil War, justice and the economic crisis, among others. Is there one that is more important to you? Again I like El último muerto because it touches upon several different themes among those that you mention. If I have to choose a behaviour that is particularly detestable, it would be what you call domestic violence, one of the leitmotifs of this novel. Social inequalities and inequalities between men and women are perhaps the two issues that, personally, worry me most about the society in which we live. In my novels I have never been able to treat the first one with the intensity that I would have liked; on the other hand, my faithful readers know how much I like to alter the habitual male and female roles in my novels in order to make young readers think about the extent to which we are conditioned by our prejudices. What are the most personal marks that you leave on the adventures of Fermín Escartín? I am not at all fond of portraying or identifying myself with my characters. I do not have anything in common with Escartín, nor with most of my protagonists. Perhaps the set-

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tings of my novels are closest to my personal world. Zaragoza, my city, is very common in my books (and more so in recent years). My neighbourhood, the historical district, where Escartín also lives (a five-minute walk from my real home), has been the setting of many of my novels. Some of them, like El Círculo Hermético [The Hermetic Circle] (2009), I believe take place completely within the streets that can be seen from my home’s window. The most personal of Escartín’s novels is Amsterdam Solitaire, where almost all of the characters are real and a good number of them are my friends. It is also the only one of all of my books in which I appear in person, as a very secondary character, without even a line of dialogue. In my first novels – and I believe this happens to many writers – there was an important personal component. Even though I haven’t been the protagonist of any of my works, some of them evolved in worlds that were very close to me at that time – the theatre in El zulo [The Hiding Place] (1985), the car races in Scratch (1992) or the military service in Morirás en Chafarinas [You Will Die in Chafarinas] (1990)4 but Escartín’s novels are from a later period, in which the professional has already substituted the personal. Describe your readers’ reaction to Fermín Escartín. Young readers like these books because they are like books that adults read (with adult characters, without adolescents in the cast). At that age, the last thing they want is to be treated like children. Many are surprised to find that they read them with ease and that they finish them in less time than they expected. The novels show them that they are capable of dealing with literature. They are surprised at the use of humour. And, most of all, they like Escartín’s antiheroic air. Deep down, adolescents do not feel like heroes, but antiheroes. They relate to his blunders, but they like that, in the end, things turn out well for him. Will there be a new encounter with private investigator Fermín Escartín? I see it as unlikely in the short term. The publisher, Bambú, does not seem very disposed to prolonging the series and I now do not see Escartín as published in another collection; so, for now, we will continue with Lola Andrade, whom I consider the natural heir of Escartín, in Parque Muerte [Death Park] (2012) and soon in La maldad o algo parecido [Wickedness or Something Like It] (forthcoming). But I am convinced that I will encounter Fermín again at least one more time. I cannot pinpoint a time for it, but I am absolutely sure. Of course, it would help if some readers would write to the publisher asking for a new novel with this character. I do not know if I have explained myself…  Many thanks to Fernando Lalana for his gracious collaboration. Muchísimas gracias. Photograph: Fernando Lalana © 2015. Used with Permission.

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Notes 1

Gyldendal’s 1996 publication carries the title Galindo ha desaparecido/Galindo Has Disappeared and appears under Kaleidoscope, a division of Gyldendal.

2

The translations of these titles are from the English-language catalogue of Bambú’s (Editorial Casals) website http://www.editorialbambu.com/en/catalogue/exit/?coleccio=96. Accessed 10 December 2014; the novels themselves have not been translated into English.

3

This title translation and those that follow are my translations; again, the novels have not been translated into English.

4

Pedro Olea’s 1995 film of the same name, Morirás en Chafarinas, is based on this novel.

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R e p or t s 160 The Nineteenth- Century Private Eye Stephen Knight 172 To See Is To Suspect: Investigating the Private in Sensation Fiction Janice M. Allan

Report

The Nineteenth- Century Private Eye Stephen Knight

The public private eye The private eye is so much a feature of twentieth-century American identity, equipped with car, gun and inner sensitivity, that it seems an act of lèse-majesté to reflect about him elsewhere in place and time. Yet, tough as it may seem, truth is our goal in the criminography business, and professional investigations beyond the formal police have a lengthy and complex history outside the between-wars Californian urban chevalier. In the earliest period, public and private detection could overlap. The special detective force formed in 1749 by the novelist Henry Fielding and his magistrate brother John, named the Bow Street Runners after the London magistrate’s court where they were based, provided the officers with very small salaries; it was assumed they would amplify their income from rewards for recovery of goods and prosecution of criminals, but it was also perfectly possible to employ them privately in a case of interest to a wealthy citizen. Serving private interests, not social order, remained a domain of public detection after the establishment of a police force in 1829 and then a detective force in 1842: in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), the Verinder family privately employs the detective Sergeant Cuff to regain their missing jewel of immense value – without, as it turns out, real success on his part. Just before Sir Robert Peel founded the London police in 1829 – to be named ‘bobbies’ after him – as a new public force still capable of privatization, there were two literary realizations of the power of private detection, expressing its extremes. One was the confident and successful Mémoires (1828–29) of Eugène François Vidocq, an ex-soldier and ex-jailbird who became a major figure in the Parisian police force that enacted Napoleonic ideas of control. His memoirs show him using informers as well as his own investigations, often in disguise. He disavowed one of the volumes generated by his co-authors, but he was instantly famous in bookshops and on the stage, where the disguise function had special appeal. Before long Vidocq was under examination and threatened with the sack – so in 1833 he opened ‘Le Bureau des Renseignements

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Universels pour le Commerce et l’Industrie’, the first private detective agency (Morton 2011: 217-38). At the same time as Vidocq’s well-structured private detection, Edward Bulwer, to go on to be Member of Parliament for both parties, Conservative minister for the colonies, and eventually Lord Lytton, took a different path. His very successful novel Pelham (1828) not only deals with lofty life in Paris and London, including the British Parliament, but also involves the well-born Henry Pelham in a murder mystery – he finds the body of a man known to be the enemy of his close friend Sir Reginald Glanville. Pelham undertakes inquiries and in the dramatic climax engages a professional criminal to help clear his friend’s name in the heart of dangerous London. As Bleiler notes, the mystery is based on a real Bow Street case, but here asserts the possibility of noble, external detection – the novel’s subtitle is The Adventures of a Gentleman (see Bleiler 1976a: vii). The energy of Vidocq and the positioning of Pelham will interweave through the century. The disciplinary inquirer emerges There had been no detection in the eighteenth-century Newgate Calendar crime stories (Knight 1980: 8–20), usually set in villages and small towns, and focusing on horrific, community-threatening murders; the criminals, would normally be observed by a member of the community or sometimes struck down by their own conscience – the spiritual community intervening. But in the new cities such structures were unavailable and incredible, and a specialist was required to cast light on a mysterious crime, which would now often be typical of urban confusion, such as theft, or fraud. The gap between Vidocq’s realistic activities and Pelham’s languid bravery was to be filled by inquirers, heroes of the new mode of fiction. The first were curious but baffled, like William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly (1799), or the often anonymous observers of the ‘Tales of Terror’ in Blackwood’s Magazine; all of these combine a sense of a need to inquire into criminal disorder, including the impositions of the establishment, but make central the stress and sensation perceived and shared by the main character, not any purposive, outcome-oriented sense of righting wrongs. A social mission and a single inquirer would soon emerge, bringing skills, increasingly medical and legal, capable of tracing criminal activities in the new anomie of the cities. This person would bring what Michel Foucault calls ‘disciplinary’ expertise to bear on human crime and confusion.1 Disciplinary detection developed from the 1830s onwards, focusing on a crime, or perhaps just an element of social or familiar disorder. A skilled person will inquire into crimes like theft and fraud, not murder or other bodily harm. This always surprises modern readers, so accustomed to ‘Death’ and ‘Murder’ in the titles of mystery stories, but the crimes that are explored early on

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are both those which were more likely to have been encountered and also, more importantly, closer to those which the respectable literate audience could imagine being committed against them, or indeed by them, in those imaginative processes by which readers participate intuitively in their fiction. In our time the readers, as well as the criminals, have grown bolder. The disciplinary detectives emerged slowly. A first literary figure was old-style: 1827 saw the publication of Richmond: Scenes in the Life of a Bow Street Runner, probably by Thomas Gaspey. Like Vidocq, Richmond knows criminals, and is also active in inquiries, but has no special skills that could be called disciplinary. The first figure to operate in that mode was a doctor, in Samuel Warren’s Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician, which ran in Blackwood’s Magazine from 1830–37. Warren was already studying law when he began the Passages and there is more crime than disease to be found here. Worthington argues persuasively that the disciplinary viewpoint and the case structure make these operate like crime fiction and point towards overtly criminographical patterns to come.2 The doctor studies the people he treats closely and comments on how they can at times fall into crime. Worthington notes that he often links ‘the deviant and the diseased’ (2005: 52), but he does almost no detection and his disciplinary expertise basically establishes his position of authority. While in some cases he does show, as Worthington comments, ‘an observant and detecting eye’ (65), he can only be regarded as a preliminary to private detection. Though the professional private detective was a known entity, he did not appeal to authors. The negative features of the figure were memorably created by Charles Dickens in Mr Nadgett of Martin Chuzzlewit (1842–43), ‘the man at a pound a week who made the inquiries’ for the Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Assurance Company. He is distinctly unheroic, ‘a short, dried-up, withered old man […] mildewed, threadbare, shabby’ but he also has weight: ‘he belonged to a class; a race peculiar to the City; who are secrets as profound to one another, as they are to the rest of mankind’ (Dickens 1951 [1842–43]: 447). A benign version of such a figure emerges when the discipline becomes law in the ‘Experiences of a Barrister’ stories sometimes attributed to Warren, especially in American pirated editions exploiting his name. The first, ‘The March Assize’ (1849) is old-style melodrama in tone and outcome, and resolved through confession – a malign shop-worker frames his employer for theft and sees him executed. ‘The Second Marriage’ (1849) includes a little off-stage detective work by the barrister’s attorney, and two further stories approach private detection. In both ‘The Contested Marriage’ (1849) and ‘The Writ of Habeas Corpus’ (1849) a genteel young lady is being deprived of rightful property: in the first, her now dead husband disowned her, and so their son’s title and lands have gone elsewhere; and in the second, brutal relatives are trying to certify the young woman insane to seize her inheritance. The themes suggest both an aspirational audience and a female readership. The middle-class lawyer is attentive and supportive,

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but the cases are resolved through the busy inquiries of the lower-middle-class attorney, Mr Ferret, with his ‘quick, gray, eye’ (Anon. 1856: 46). The barrister himself is called Sharpe, and while the names may be an ironic form of class constraint, the figures function strongly and develop clear elements of detection: Indefatigable, resolute, sharp-witted and of a ceaseless, remorseless activity, a secret or a fact had need be very profoundly hidden for him not to reach and fish it up […] Mr Ferret had been for many years Mr Simpkins’ managing clerk; but ambition, and the increasing requirements of a considerable number of young Ferrets, determined him on commencing business on his own account. (Anon. 1856: 45) In ‘The Contested Marriage’ Ferret travels around England and finally finds proof of the original marriage. In ‘The Writ of Habeas Corpus’ he is more assertive and pries the heiress away from her aggressive relatives. The author even recognizes the links to amateur detection when his ‘astute attorney’ (Anon. 1856: 80) consults a servant named Susan Hopley, a deliberate reference to Catherine Crowe’s 1841 novel of that name where an intelligent woman servant solves a crime with a certain amount of detection involved. Not himself an amateur, Ferret is calm, acute, petit-bourgeois, working for money and giving good value – the private investigator in all but name. The private detective appears The ‘Experiences of a Barrister’ was followed in 1850 in Chambers’s Magazine by a series of seven stories called ‘Confessions of an Attorney’, in title throwing the focus onto Ferret’s role, though the attorneys are here named Flint and Sharp (the latter now without an e). But there is little Ferret-style actual detection here, nor is there in Leaves from the Diary of a Law-Clerk (1857), by ‘William Russell’, the still unidentified pseudonym for the author of the earlier Recollections of a Detective Police Officer, first appearing in Chambers’s in 1849, but the private detective does emerge in function if not yet in full recognition in The Diary of an Ex-Detective (1860), a Ward Lock yellow-back by Thomas Delf, writing as ‘Charles Martel’. In spite of the title, the detective is still linked to the police and is at times called Inspector F---, which must suggest the famous Inspector Field, who retired from the police in 1852 and opened a private agency (he was written about by Dickens in Household Words and is accepted as the model for Mr Bucket in Bleak House [1853]). In the stories he is at times active and persistent in detection, almost always operating alone, and is rewarded with a £100 note in ‘The Lost Portfolio’, but as the Prime Minister has shared the chase and arrest, the narrative might all be seen as fantasy. The stories are miscellaneous, even random, in social focus. ‘The Gamester’ is a sentimental version of the Richmond-Waters gentleman gambler; ‘Cheating the Gallows’

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reveals blood-stained conflict among middling-class city shop-people (the police take on the case because there is a reward offered); ‘The Golden Haired Wig’ is a joke story about Bandy Bill the Welsh burglar, in elaborate female disguise. There are also two long stories with several chapters, one of which: ‘Moneybags and Son’ tells how a rich grocer’s son steals his father’s money and betrays a middle-class girl from Russell Square, but both survive near-fatalities, she from a suicide attempt, he from a fight, and actually, improbably, marry happily. The growing recognition of the detective is clear from Tom Taylor’s play, The Ticket-of-Leave Man (1863).3 Here Hawkshaw is a detective attached to the police, but the story has him operating almost entirely alone, in disguise and physically active, finally successful after a major fight scene. The chief criminal says he is ‘the cutest detective in the force’ (Taylor 1981 [1863]: 3) and the name ‘Hawkshaw’ itself became a common slang term for a detective. This figure overlaps in areas and methods of activity with the central operative of The Revelations of a Private Detective, produced by ‘Andrew Forrester’ in 1863. This author has been identified as James Redding Ware (Flanders 2010), though the legal and business knowledge shown in the Forrester stories seems to have little contact with Ware’s work. Forrester is best known for the stories in The Female Detective (1864a) featuring a woman connected to the police but operating with more independence and intelligence than the central figure of The Revelations of a Lady Detective (1864),4 which was probably written by W. Stephens Hayward as ‘Anonyma’ (1864). The activities of Forrester’s private detective are uneven through the stories. He is at first employed by a solicitor, though more often works, like many of these early figures, in insurance cases. The author evidently has legal knowledge, as the cases can be frauds based on wills and trusts, and there are legal jokes like the defender Mr Tortuous Dodge who ends up in jail, and Mr Loosetongue the divorce lawyer, as well as Police Inspector Slimy. A number of the cases are resolved because the detective extracts confessions, often after recognizing a former criminal, though he does closely observe doubtful people as when in ‘Mrs Fitzgerald’s Life Policy’ he discovers the Ireland-based couple are enjoying the £3,000 they have received for her death. In the final story, ‘Arrested on Suspicion’, the resolution relies on solving a complicated cipher – this story also makes an admiring reference to Edgar Allan Poe, and elsewhere Mr Ferret the attorney is mentioned (1863: 173). The image of private detection is not yet formed as a generic pattern, and variety recurs in Forrester’s second collection, Secret Service: Recollections of a City Detective (1864b) (‘Secret Service’ was the title of Dickens’s Chapter 38 in Martin Chuzzlewit (1951 [1843–1844]), detailing Nadgett’s actions). It begins with a lively election-management story where the agent supervises a near-crime rather than detecting any. Basically non-detective narratives follow, both realizing and questioning bourgeois values. In ‘Mistaken Identity’ when a respectable tradesman is summonsed for child support, the

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agent finds with some inquiries that a traveller who resembles the tradesman gave his card to a seduced maid. A different outcome for bourgeois malpractice is in ‘A Romance of Social Life’, where after a rich merchant marries his clerk’s daughter, she frames a servant for theft when she herself has been stealing for her lover. The girl goes to jail; all is discovered, in part by the agent; the wife becomes a prostitute; and the merchant marries the noble, and beautiful, servant. The stories wander in tone as well as topic. While the last-discussed are quite thoughtful, the election candidate who succeeds in the first is named Mr Jollefat, and in the searching ‘Who Was the Greatest Criminal’ the clerk is Mr Thinshanks, and the lawyers are Snayke and Croak for the prosecution, but, fortunately, Shark for the defence. Varied in length and methodologies, recurrently socially critical, these are vigorous narratives, but not yet a recognizable and repetitive subgenre. A London-based, insurance-linked private eye is the central figure of The Notting Hill Mystery, published as a serial in Once a Week in 1862–63 and a book in 1865; its author ‘Charles Felix’ has now been identified as Charles Warren Adams, then owner of the publisher Saunders and Otley (Ashley 2012: xiv). Set as recently as 1858, the novel has an underlying bond to sensationalism – the plot depends on long-separated twins and the mesmerist villain manages to poison his wife for her money by feeding the poison to her sister. This ‘series of crimes, in their nature and execution almost too horrible to contemplate’ (‘Felix’ 1865: 284) is tracked down by a plain-minded insurance agent named Henderson, whose firm asks him to investigate this rapidly cashed claim. Transatlantic private detection Neither Forrester’s intermittent investigator nor Adams’s anti-sensationalist inquirer was influential in England, but the private eye did gain ground in America. In 1865 Leaves from the Note Book of a New York Detective (Williams 1865) appeared. James Brampton, known as J. B., meets a doctor named John B. Williams, who becomes his narrator (his profession and even initials may have influenced Doyle). They meet in a bar: Brampton does some instant analysis, of a very Holmesian kind, of a young man who comes in, then tells the doctor a story of his deeds. He is very interested and Brampton sends him his case notes, so providing the basis for the book. Though he says he is connected to the official police, the stories give very little sign of any real link, and in the first story he is paid $500 by a family member to investigate a murder. He is involved in cases, many of murder, all over the country, ranging from widespread forgery in ‘The Coiners’ to violent murder and a long dangerous pursuit in ‘The Struggle for Life’. Brampton often detects, examining crime scenes, but quite often a chance observation or overheard conversation is key to the unravelling of the problem, though he is also notable for pursuing suspects across the country, at times showing great courage. Eighteen of his cases are offered, and the volume is finished with mystery stories involving other narrators.

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This established the detective in American publishing, but he had appeared there before. Poe created an inquirer who, although based in Paris, and with many characteristics of the future well-born amateur, was open to taking money for solving puzzles – he accepts the Prefect’s cheque for the extraordinary sum of 50,000 francs for locating ‘The Purloined Letter’. There had been an even earlier American version of the English barristers and attorneys in W. S. Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine 1837–38 series ‘The Diary of a Philadelphia Lawyer’, but those stories tend to rely on confessions rather than any real detection – Poe edited that magazine in 1839 and developed the model substantially. Private detectives soon proliferated in America. The Scottish migrant Allan J. Pinkerton had founded his ‘National Detective Agency’ as early as 1850 and in 1874 included among his literary output a private eye novel, The Expressman and the Detective, which combines realistically the new modes of rail travel and detection, but he moved on to less realistic activities in The Gypsies and the Detective (1879) where the Pinkerton operative is a gentlemanly Englishman with several languages, including Romany. Where in England long-established police detection and an apparent nervousness about the social forces involved seem to have deferred the impact of the private eye, in America the Brampton/Pinkerton model became widely disseminated in the already thriving dime novel form. Harlan Page Halsey’s detective ‘Old Sleuth’ had been appearing since 1872 – as Gary Hoppenstand (1982: 136–37, 166–74) reports, he was in fact young but favoured an old man’s disguise and, with Nick Carter (very popular from 1886 on), was the basic model from which the sophisticated and nationally emotionalized ‘tough-guy’ private investigator emerged after World War I. Detection sublimated England remained distant toward extra-police detection: in the crime fiction collection made by Graham and Hugh Greene, of some hundred titles from before 1886 only four can be added to the private detective stories already mentioned, and two of those are American.5 Sherlock Holmes, who first appears in 1887, is both a culmination and a side-tracking of the private eye tradition: the early stories make it clear that is structurally what he is. Early in A Study in Scarlet he has ‘clients’ and his flat is ‘a place of business’ (Doyle 1989 [1888]: 21); people are sent to him ‘by private inquiry agencies’ (21); and in the first Strand story, admiring the King of Bohemia’s horses, he says ‘There’s money in this case, Watson, if there is nothing else’ (432). Underlying the rhetoric of the stories is a clear structure of private detective operations – there are three real processes by which Holmes solves cases, all of them overlapping noticeably with earlier models like Ferret or Henderson.6 Holmes has excellent professional-style archives and can at times see the pattern of one case in another from the past; he will go off himself alone, usually in disguise, to discover crucial evidence; he will inspect the scene of the crime with his narrator, Watson. This is not what Holmes is

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famous for – he is always remembered for the arias of ‘deduction’ by which he will identify a man’s profession from some detail of his clothing, a woman’s recent actions from some item she carries. A skilful simplification and materialization of what Poe called C. Auguste Dupin’s ‘rich ideality’ (Poe 1908 [1841]: 382), this condenses the aura of science and the everyday context, but, very strikingly, this famous capacity of Holmes is never actually used to solve a crime. Equally, it becomes decreasingly evident that Holmes detects for a living – from the start he evidently has some private income, and as he goes along his practices become more and more those of a connoisseur and a gifted amateur, so much so that by the early 1890s a rival detective appeared, a straightforward hard-working anti-Holmes. Arthur Morrison was a journalist born in London’s East End who would become famous for the social – and socialist – realism of his revelations of slum life, Tales of Mean Streets (1894) and A Child of the Jago (1896). Described by E. F. Bleiler as ‘the most successful’ of the Doyle parallels published by the Strand (1976: vii), he was interested in crime fiction, and would offer an ironic response to it in ‘The Dorrington Deed-Box’ (1897), a series about a recurrent petty criminal who actually, if accidentally, also clears up a number of crimes. A more purposive response to the elitist romance of Holmes was Morrison’s creation of Martin Hewitt, whose first adventure ‘The Lenton Croft Robberies’ appeared in Strand Magazine in March 1894. Hewitt is true to the plain English tradition, being a law-clerk turned private investigator; he observes, questions servants and works out the crime. The first story is simple, even ironic – the secretary’s parrot has stolen the jewels – but the second, ‘The Case of the Dixon Torpedo’, involves a national matter where his unheroic way of studying the ‘curious chances and coincidences’ (Morrison 1976b: 17), as well as some acute detailed observation, leads him to a well-concealed surprise revelation. A lively variant, with a tradition of female detection to renew, appeared in The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective (1894) by the prolific novelist Catherine L. Pirkis. Loveday is a little over 30; her eyes narrow to slits when she is thinking. Left alone and penniless when young, she worked away as a detective and now has her own Fleet Street Agency: her previous employer calls her ‘one of the shrewdest and most clear-headed of my female detectives’ (Pirkis 1894: 7). Much like the 1860s woman detectives she is knowledgeable – in the first story she picks up the literary references that reveal a secretary to be bogus – and also very astute: in the second she works out that a devoted mother has substituted a sister to enable her criminal brother to escape. English aftermath As Joseph Kestner (2003) has shown in a detailed study, there were to be more female private eyes, like George Sims’s Dorcas Dene: Detective (1897), who works to support her husband, an artist who has gone blind, or the definitely clever Cambridge-oriented Dora

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Myrl, The Lady Detective (1900) created by M. McDonnell Bodkin, another male writer seeking the female audience. The astonishingly prolific L. T. Meade who produced twelve short story collections and 314 popular novels, 60 of them devoted to mystery, generated her own female private detective, the astutely observant Miss Florence Cusack, and a doctor-narrator in five short stories not collected until 1998 (in a sixth Florence is not mentioned).7 Male private detectives were to thrive in England much better than is remembered. J. S. Fletcher’s elderly London-based detective had an American-linked description in his first collection The Adventures of Arthur Dawe (Sleuth-Hound) (1909), and these and the following collections, though distinctly limited in both plot and writing, were popular. Edgar Wallace’s low-level inquirer, Mr J. G. Reeder (first collected in Room 13 [1924]), is a former policeman now employed as an agent by the public prosecutor and his modest caution, and lack of Wallace-style bravura, brought success in six books and a television series from 1969. Agatha Christie produced many sets of short stories, including Parker Pyne Investigates (1934). He is a retired civil servant who devotes himself to solving marital and similar problems, often using his staff to bring discreet cheer to deserted women. Christie was clearly amusing herself, but to some purpose – here she first deployed Miss Lemon, to star as Poirot’s secretary in the long ITV series (1989–2013) with David Suchet, and also Ariadne Oliver, her own droll doppelgänger, who reappeared in five Poirot novels, one of her own (The Pale Horse [1961]) and has also starred in modern television played by Zoë Wanamaker. Christie may well have been ironizing the private eye form because of its new authority in America, and another response to that was by Peter Cheyney. A minor English poet and journalist, after a friend bet he could not write an American-style thriller, he produced a lively tough-guy pastiche in This Man is Dangerous (1936), starring Lemmy Caution, and then a London-based version with the handsome Irish investigator Slim Callaghan, whose series ran on through the wartime city. Cheyney is reliably reported as having outsold Christie – the first Callaghan, The Urgent Hangman (1938), like the rest, is a complicated story balancing Slim’s cunning and courage with his interest in well-dressed ladies. Cheyney, who also wrote tough-guy style spy stories – Dark Duet (1944) was the strongest – died in 1951 at 55, and though his post-war success in France is still remembered there (see Rolls’s chapter in the present volume), he is almost forgotten in England. It seems that the success of Chandler and his many imitators, especially in film, made the private eye novel irretrievably American – the few later English versions were little more than tokens, like the ironic film Gumshoe (1971), directed by Stephen Frears and starring Albert Finney, and the wry, under-plotted ‘Hazell’ series in novels and on television (Thames Television, 1978–1979) by ‘P. B. Yuill’. In spite of its apparent weakness in Britain, the subgenre retained its potential, and when feminist private eyes were the strong-minded order of the day, authors like Gillian Slovo, Liza Cody and Sarah Dunant used the private eye very effectively in Lon-

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don. But just as Americans rarely acknowledge that some of the most subtle and devious of the clue-puzzlers came from their own sometimes not so tough land, so the achievements of the private detective in the nineteenth century and in England remain a subject that only the most patient of criminographical investigators will manage to ferret out. References Anon. (1837–38), ‘The Diary of a Philadelphia Lawyer’, Gentleman’s Magazine (United States). Anon. (1856), The Experiences of a Barrister, London: Brown. Anon. (1857), ‘The Confessions of an Attorney’, in William Russell, Leaves from the Diary of a Law-Clerk, London: J. & C. Brown & Co. ‘Anonyma’ [William Stephens Hayward?] (1864), The Revelations of a Lady Detective, London: Vickers. Ashley, Mike (2012), ‘Introduction’, in Charles Warren Adams (author), The Notting Hill Mystery, London: British Library, pp. viii–xiv. Bleiler, Everett Franklin (1976a), ‘Introduction’, in Richmond: Scenes in the Life of a Bow Street Runner, New York: Dover, pp. v–xiv. ––––– (1976b), ‘Introduction’, in Arthur Morrison (ed.), Best Martin Hewitt Detective Stories, New York: Dover. Bodkin, M. McDonnell (1900), Dora Myrl: The Lady Detective, London: Chatto and Windus. Brown, Charles Brockden (1799), Edgar Huntly, or the Memoirs of a Sleepwalker, Philadelphia: Dobson and Dickins. Brown, John Russell (1981), ‘Introduction’, in Tom Taylor (ed.), The Ticket-of-Leave Man, London: Heinemann, pp. vi–ix. Bulwer, Edward (1828), Pelham, or the Adventures of a Gentleman, London: Colburn. Cheyney, Peter (1936), This Man is Dangerous, London: Collins. ––––– (1938), The Urgent Hangman, London: Collins. ––––– (1942), Dark Duet, London: Collins. Christie, Agatha (1934), Parker Pyne Investigates, London: Collins. Collins, Wilkie (1868), The Moonstone, London: Tinsley. Craigie, Dorothy (ed.) (1966), Victorian Detective Fiction: A Catalogue of the Collection Made by Dorothy Glover and Graham Greene, London: Bodley Head. Crowe, Catherine (1841), The Adventures of Susan Hopley, London: Nicholson. Dickens, Charles (1951 [1842–43]), The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, London: Oxford University Press. ––––– (1996 [1850]), ‘A Detective Police Party’, in Peter Haining (ed.), Hunted Down: The Detective Stories of Charles Dickens, London: Peter Owen, pp. 71–90. Doyle, Arthur Conan (1926), Memories and Adventures, London: Murray. ––––– (1989), Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Stories, with Illustrations from the ‘Strand Magazine’, Ware: Wordsworth. ‘Felix, Charles’ [Charles Warren Adams] (1865), A Notting Hill Mystery, London: Saunders and Otley.

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Flanders, Judith J. (2010), ‘The Hanky-Panky Way: Creators of the First Female Detectives: A Mystery solved’, Times Literary Supplement, 18 June, pp. 14–15. Fletcher, J. S. (1909), The Adventures of Arthur Dawe (Sleuth Hound), London: Digby Long. ‘Forrester, Andrew’ (1863), The Revelations of a Private Detective, London: Ward and Lock. ––––– (1864a), The Female Detective, London: Ward and Lock. ––––– (1864b), Secret Service: Recollections of a City Detective, London: Ward and Lock. Godwin, William (1794), Things as They Are, or Caleb Williams, 3 vols, London: Crosby. Hoppenstand, Gary (ed.) (1982), The Dime Novel Detective, Bowling Green, OH: BGUP. Kestner, Joseph A. (2003), Sherlock’s Sisters: The British Female Detective 1864–1913, Aldershot: Ashgate. Knight, Stephen (1980), Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction, London: Macmillan. ‘Martel, Charles’ [Thomas Delf] (1860), The Diary of an Ex-detective, London: Ward Lock. Meade, L. T. and Eustace, Robert (1998), The Detections of Miss Cusack, Sauk City, WI: Battered Silicon Despatch Box. Morrison, Arthur (1976a), Best Martin Hewitt Detective Stories, New York: Dover. ––––– (1976b), ‘The Case of the Dixon Torpedo’, in Arthur Morrison, Best Martin Hewitt Stories, New York: Dover, pp. 17–30. Morton, James (2011), The First Detective, London: Ebury. Pinkerton, Allan J. (1874), The Expressman and the Detective, New York: Kemp and Cooke. ––––– (1879), The Gypsies and the Detective, New York: Carleton. Pirkis, Catherine Louisa (1894), The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective, London: Hutchinson. Poe, Edgar Allan (1908 [1841]), ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’, ‘The Purloined Letter’, in Edgar Allan Poe (author), Tales of Mystery and Imagination, London: Everyman, pp. 378–410. ‘Richmond’ [Thomas Gaspey?] (1827), Richmond: Scenes in the Life of a Bow Street Runner, 3 vols, London: Colburn. ‘Russell, William’ (1857), Leaves from the Diary of a Law Clerk, London: Brown. Sims, George (1897), Dorcas Dene: Detective, London: White. Taylor, Thomas (1981 [1863]), The Ticket-of-Leave Man, John Russell Brown (ed.), London: Heinemann. Vidocq, Eugène François (1828–29), Les Mémoires, 4 vols, Paris: Tenon. Wallace, Edgar (1925), The Mind of Mr J. G. Reeder, London: Hodder and Stoughton. Warren, Samuel (1832/39), Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician, 3 vols, Edinburgh: Blackwood. Williams, John B. (1865), Leaves from the Note Book of A New York Detective, New York: Dick and Fitzgerald. Worthington, Heather (2005), The Rise of the Detective in Early Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction, London: Palgrave. ‘Yuill, P. B.’ [Gordon Williams and Terry Venables] (1977), Hazel Plays Solomon, London: Penguin.

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Notes 1

For a discussion of ‘disciplinary detection’ see Chapter 2, ‘Making the Case for the Professionals’, in Worthington (2005: 46–102).

2

On Warren, see Worthington (2005: 49–68).

3

The play was adapted from Le retour de Melun by Edouard Brisebarre and Eugène Nus; see John Russell Brown’s Introduction to his edition of The Ticket-of-Leave Man (1981: vi).

4

There is an often-repeated misconception that ‘Anonyma’’s Revelations are from 1861, which appears based on the misreading of an unclear British Library date-stamp on the book.

5

See Craigie (1966): Arthur à Beckett, Fallen Among Thieves (1870) and Charles Henry Ross, A Private Inquiry (1870) are English: curiously, the former edited comic magazines and the latter was best known as a cartoonist.

6

In his memoirs Doyle refers to the ‘Sharps and Ferrets’ of the early detective tradition (Doyle 1926: 75).

7

She worked on this project with her regular mystery co-author, ‘Robert Eustace’, the doctor Robert Eustace Barton, who would in 1920 join Dorothy L. Sayers in writing The Documents in the Case.

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To See Is To Suspect: Investigating the Private in Sensation Fiction Janice M. Allan

I had mechanically turned in this latter direction, and was strolling along the lonely high-road – idly wondering, I remember, what the Cumberland young ladies would look like – when in one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop by the touch of a hand laid lightly and suddenly on my shoulder from behind me. There, in the middle of the broad, bright high-road – there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from heaven – stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments. – The Woman in White (p. 63) This scene, taken from the first instalment of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859–60), is universally viewed as the iconic moment of sensationalism, what D. A. Miller describes as its ‘primal scene’ (1995: 152). In reaching out her hand to touch Walter Hartright, the titular Anne Catherick simultaneously reaches out from the page to touch the reader, establishing sensation fiction as a somatic genre, one that aims to shock and excite: to produce a literal sensation upon the body. In the words of a contemporary reviewer, ‘excitement, and excitement alone, seems to be the great end at which they aim’ (Mansel 1863: 482). Until very recently, moreover, the critical assumption has been that such sensations are primarily and predominately rooted, as they are in the scene above, in the sense of touch. As Dehn Gilmore suggests, ‘we assume the term “sensation” to refer to bodily feeling and physical impressions […] The received or relayed touch is where the genre starts and what it enacts’ (2013: 87). Situating the sensation novel within the context of Victorian exhibitionary culture, Gilmore, in contrast, encourages us to adopt a new way of reading the genre, one that puts ‘physicality in the background, to foreground an attention to the intersection of visuality, sensation, and modernity’ (88). Following her lead, this chapter will argue that sensation fiction is a genre not simply saturated with references to vision – a problematic but essentially neutral concept – but, more specifically, with a form of vigilant watching demanded by

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a fictional universe where appearances are assumed to be deceptive and sight cannot be dissociated from suspicion. The characters that populate these fictions are, as Aurora Floyd says of the ever-watchful Mrs Powell, ‘all eyes!’ (Braddon 1998 [1863]: 343). The Victorians were, as Kate Flint reminds us, ‘fascinated with the act of seeing’ and ‘with techniques of seeing, both technological and physiological’ (2000: 1, 59). Whether as a cause or effect of this fascination, it is no coincidence that this same period witnessed the rise of the illustrated press and photography, the democratization of art, the growth of local and national museums, the birth of sensation dramas and the panopticon, the rise of archaeology – the discipline of making the hidden visible – and, of particular relevance to this discussion, the Great Exhibition. For, in contrast to critics such as Andrew Miller, who argue that exhibition halls, such as that of the Great Exhibition, ‘created spectacles before which people adopted an attitude of solitary and passive observation’ (Miller 1995: 57), I would suggest that they trained the public in the practice of active and vigilant watching associated with the reading and writing of sensationalism. The exhibition, according to Thomas Richards, transformed its objects ‘into the focal points of aesthetic and linguistic contemplation. Its peculiar ambience charged things with special significance’ (1991: 31); in so doing, it ‘elevated the quotidian to a newly remarkable status’ (Gilmore 2013: 88). Like an army of amateur detectives, the Exhibition’s viewers were trained to recognize that ‘apparently mundane or meaningless objects can suddenly take on or be assigned value and meaning’ (Freedgood 2010: 8). And if the Great Exhibition, as Richards suggests, inaugurated a ‘new way of seeing things’ (1991: 18), it was a mode of vision based on the premise that the most ordinary and seemingly innocuous of objects was potentially teeming with hidden and uncontemplated significance and hence warranted close scrutiny and attention. The Exhibition thus represents an important context for this new way of reading the sensation novel as a visual rather than a purely somatic medium, a form of writing in which anything – human or inanimate – can suddenly become an ‘object of suspicion’ (Collins 1992 [1875]: 20). But what was new in the genre – beyond this ‘new way of seeing things’ – was the fact that readers were being encouraged to train their gaze not on the mysteries and enigmas of the distant past or foreign other but squarely on the most familiar aspects of present-day English domesticity. In the often-cited words of Henry James, ‘[t]o Mr Collins belongs the credit of having introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors’ (1865: 593). And thus, what the Great Exhibition did for the products of the world, the sensation novel did for middle-class domesticity: exposing the home and its inhabitants to new levels of scrutiny and interrogation. In so doing, the genre was simply capitalizing on a new and growing perception that ‘[b]eneath the smooth current of English social existence were hidden many strange things which now for the first time are brought to light’ (Anon. 1859b: 8d). This perception stemmed, in large part, from the revelations of the newly constituted Divorce Court,1 whose proceedings, as reported in the daily papers,

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made readers aware of unsuspected levels of marital misery and infidelity, as well as a number of high-profile domestic crimes, especially those, like the Road Murder of 1860, in which a young and seemingly innocent middle-class woman proved herself capable of murder and deception.2 The relationship of the sensation genre to such sensational divorce and criminal cases has been well documented,3 but what interests me here is not simply the ways in which the sensationalists’ appropriations from the contemporary courts help to destabilize idealized constructions of middle-class domesticity but, in addition, how they contribute to the growing awareness and culture of watching. Thus, in writing about the murder at Road, a commentator discusses not only how this ‘murder invades every English home with a shudder of alarm, and shakes the sense of security in every family circle’, but also how ‘[e]very personal privacy, every domestic secret, has been laid bare with an unflinching hand to every prurient eye’ (Stapleton 1861: x–xi). Nor is it clear which represents the greater threat. In much the same way, periodical writers lament how the revelations of the new Divorce Court have ‘disturbed our previous notions of conjugal felicity’ (Lamb 1860: 556) but are also careful to remind their readers that they are under continual observation: [S]uspicion once awakened, twenty witnesses spring up about her, who, from beneath their eyelids, all blind and unobservant as they had appeared, had noticed trifles light as air, which when collected seemed a link of damning evidence […]. The reason of all these scandals in the Divorce Court is that men and women fail to realize the greedy watchfulness with which their neighbours and their servants scan and criticize every look and action of their lives. (Anon. 1864b: 142) This was the culture in which sensation novels were produced and consumed and they bear the clear imprint of their time. Two types of watchers imported directly from this climate are the suspicious servant and the private investigator, the latter being the most lowly and despised of all spies. To prove adultery in the new Court, corroboration of the act was necessary but adultery, as John Sutherland reminds us, is ‘an offense which has many participants but very few eyewitnesses’ (1991: 245). Of these few, servants and private investigators were the most prominent and both assumed a key role in the unfolding dramas of the Divorce Court. Of the two, it was perhaps servants who represented the greater threat to privacy as they had unparalleled access to the most intimate spaces and activities of the home. ‘Amongst all privileged spies’, Mary Elizabeth Braddon is at pains to warn her readers, a lady’s-maid has the highest privileges. It is she who bathes Lady Theresa’s eyes with eau-de-cologne after her ladyship’s quarrel with the colonel; it is she who administers sal-volatile to Miss Fanny when Count Beaudesert, of the Blues, has jilted her. She has a

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hundred methods for the finding out of her mistress’ secrets (Braddon 2003 [1862]: 346). The power such access offered – the power to see what was hidden from others – was, moreover, consolidated by the fact that servants were, by definition of their roles, near-invisible presences within the house. Indeed, the ideal servant, as Rachel Smillie (2015: 12) suggests, ‘should be inconspicuous to the extent that their presence is almost negated, they should behave as if absent from household events’. This invisibility, Smillie asserts, ‘is potentially problematic as it allows the disobedient servant to establish near constant surveillance of the family while remaining unobserved and undetected’ (2015: 12). One can, in fact, gauge the level of anxiety regarding what was commonly deemed a crisis in master–servant relations from the following advice offered by Benjamin Smith’s Sunshine in the Kitchen; Or, Chapters for Maid-Servants: Bite your tongue until it bleed rather than allow it to whisper one word concerning them […]. Burn your finger at the candle rather than allow it to point to the blot in the honour of the family of which for a time you form a part. (Smith 1872: 92) Turning to the fiction itself, it is Braddon who engages most closely with this construction of the servant as domestic spy, most obviously in characters such as Phoebe Marks from Lady Audley’s Secret (1862).4 Phoebe enters the novel as a silent and almost invisible presence: she ‘crept slowly over the thick grass, and gliding into the avenue by the side of the fish-pond, disappeared under the rich shelter of the limes’ (Braddon 2003 [1862]: 64). Having thus approached her fiancé, ‘so still and sudden, that I thought you was an evil spirit’, her first words place her firmly within the culture described above: ‘I can see the well from my bed-room window, Luke […] I saw you sitting here, and came down to have a chat; it’s better talking out here than in the house where there’s always somebody listening’ (65). Phoebe’s first documented act, moreover, is to bring Luke into the house to exhibit its splendours, including those of Lady Audley’s boudoir and dressing-room where, finding her mistress’s keys amongst the strewn-about clothes, she proceeds to open a casket of jewellery. Luke’s clumsy handling of Lady Audley’s jewels, within this intimate and private space, lends itself to a sexualized reading of violation, a reading further strengthened when Luke’s ‘examination’ of the casket reveals ‘a secret drawer, lined with purple velvet’ containing a baby’s shoe and lock of hair (70). Possessing herself of these relics, Phoebe is now in a position, not simply to blackmail her employer, but to destabilize class relations by assuming mastery over her. This position is further consolidated when she later witnesses Lady Audley attempting to murder her first and legal husband, George Talboys, by pushing him down a well. It is, however, significant that Phoebe’s knowledge of this crime remains un-narrated, communicated only by an exchange of charged looks.

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‘I have been altering the blue dress. It is rather dark on this side of the house, so I took it up to my own room, and worked at the window’. The girl was leaving the room as she spoke, but she turned round and looked at Lady Audley as if waiting for further orders. Lucy looked up at the same moment, and the eyes of the two women met. ‘Phoebe Marks’, said my lady, throwing herself into an easy chair, and trifling with the wild flowers in her lap, ‘you are a good industrious girl, and while I live and am prosperous you shall never want a firm friend or a twenty-pound note’. (Braddon 2003 [1862]: 115) With her motives and allegiances impossible to decipher, Phoebe glides in and out of the remaining narrative, conspicuous only for her ‘active, searching glance’ (164). She is, however, absent from its conclusion, having exited the text as silently as she entered it. As suggested above, the second type of watcher imported directly from the new culture of surveillance and suspicion was the private investigator. Casting their eyes over the opening page of The Times on any given day, readers would have encountered advertisements, such as the following: PRIVATE INQUIRY OFFICE, 20 Devereux-court. W.C. Established 1852, under the direction of CHARLES FREDERICK FIELD, late chief inspector of the detective police of the metropolis. This office has had confided to it some of the most remarkable cases of the day; namely, the Smyth forgeries, the Worcester forgeries, the Rugely murders, horse poisonings, incendiary fires, divorce cases, &c. (Anon. 1869: 1b) This advertisement provides a useful reminder that the boundaries between police and private investigators were, at this time, far more malleable than today. Some, like Field, retired from the force to undertake private work but other members of the Detective Force accepted private work on the side, while even those undertaking investigations in an official capacity were happy to accept incentives and rewards from interested individuals and parties. At the same time, the fact that Field’s office was established in 1852 – the same year in which he was being lauded as Inspector Bucket in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House – testifies to the fact that such agencies predated the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857. And yet, for many, private investigators were seen as the direct (and most unfortunate) by-product of the new Court: the ‘evil genius of every divorce drama’ (Anon. 1867: 728). Not only did such agents – with their unregulated intrusions into the private lives of English families – reignite fears of the Napoleonic espionage system (and ‘Nothing is more offensive to an Englishman than the character and trade of a spy’ [Anon. 1864a: 250]), but it was assumed that those employed to find evidence of adultery would be willing to manufacture what they were unable to uncover by any

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other means. According to The Saturday Review, for example, ‘[t]he thing sought to be obtained being evidence, it is unimportant to the party employing the spy whether his commodity is found or made’ (Anon. 1859a: 810). It is, therefore, unsurprising that literary representations of private investigators, even when not employed for the purposes of collecting evidence of infidelity, are often less than favourable.5 Wilkie Collins’s 1866 novel, Armadale, offers one of the genre’s most hostile portraits in the character of James Bashwood: No eye for reading character, but such an eye as belongs to one person, perhaps in ten thousand, could have penetrated the smoothly-deceptive surface of this man, and have seen him for what he really was – the vile creature whom the viler need of Society has fashioned for its own use. There he sat – the Confidential Spy of modern times, whose business is steadily enlarging, whose Private Inquiry Offices are steadily on the increase. There he sat – the necessary Detective attendant on the progress of our national civilization; […] a man professionally ready on the merest suspicion (if the merest suspicion paid him) to get under our beds, and to look through gimlet-holes in our doors; a man who would have been useless to his employers if he could have felt a touch of human sympathy in his father’s presence; and who would have deservedly forfeited his situation, if, under any circumstances whatever, he had been personally accessible to a sense of pity or a sense of shame. (Collins 1989 [1866]: 627) Working for a private inquiry office in the inauspiciously titled Shadyside Place, Bashwood is devoid of a single redeeming characteristic and is, in fact, atypical of the genre’s treatment of investigators. Collins’s later novel, The Moonstone (1868), for example, offers a far more balanced portrayal of investigators in Sergeant Cuff, who is called to the Verinder country house to investigate the theft of the titular diamond. What Cuff brings to the case (unlike his local predecessor) is superior vision – his eyes ‘had a very disconcerting trick […] of looking as if they expected something more from you than you were aware of yourself’ (Collins 1986 [1868]: 133) – and vigilant watching of the family, especially its young women, constitutes a key aspect of his investigative method. Before the day is out, Cuff makes a vital connection between a stained nightgown and the missing gem but, ultimately, fails to solve the crime because, it appears, he lacks the skills and expertise to ‘read’ Rachel Verinder. Thus he erroneously concludes that she has, with the help of the maid, Rosanna Spearman, stolen her own diamond to pay back secret debts. It is difficult to determine whether Cuff’s failure stems from Rachel’s class status, her gender, or a combination of both but, given the consistency with which both police and private detectives are represented by the sensationalists, not simply as working class in origin but, in addition, as unable to hide or shed their roots, one might

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attribute it to the first cause.6 Mr Morcross, of The Fallen Leaves, stands for all his brethren when he is described by Collins as follows: ‘well dressed; his manner was quiet and self-possessed – and yet he did not look like a gentleman’ (1879: 295). Braddon’s Aurora Floyd (1863) provides a useful example to explore how representations of paid investigators intersect with contemporary class biases and anxieties within the sensation genre. Sent by Scotland Yard to the Mellish estate to investigate the murder of the stable manager, Mr Joseph Grimstone is characterized, in equal measure, by his astute vision and class attributes: The stranger advancing from the turnstile was a decent-looking person, dressed in dark tight-fitting clothes, and making no unnecessary or ostentatious display of linen, for his coat was buttoned tightly to the chin. He looked at Talbot and John as he passed them, – not insolently, or even inquisitively, but with one brightly rapid and searching glance, which seemed to take in the most minute details in the appearance of both gentlemen […] He looked at the bank, regarding it, now from one point, now from another, like some skilful upholsterer taking the measure of a piece of furniture. Then walking slowly round the pond, he seemed to plumb the depth of the stagnant water with his small gray eyes. (Braddon 1998 [1863]: 497) Associated, in each of his appearances, with ‘a greasy little memorandum-book’ and ‘a stumpy morsel of a lead-pencil’ (prompting the narrator to query, ‘when do these sorts of people begin their pencils, and how is it that they always seem to have arrived at the stump?’ [506]), Grimstone betrays his class status every time he ‘smack[s] his lips’ (507) and speaks with his mouth full (538). Furthermore, as long as Grimstone’s skills are being exercised on behalf of Scotland Yard, he represents an unwelcome intruder, threatening to expose the family’s secrets and transgressions (Aurora Mellish’s bigamy and potential murder). And here, the detective’s dubious class status compounds the threat, as the aristocratic home is not simply exposed to investigative scrutiny but also to the prying eyes of the lower classes. Once, however, Grimstone agrees to work with Mellish – ‘I’m prepared to act with him, and to accept any reward his generosity may offer’ (498) – he becomes an unwelcome but necessary ally and traditional class hierarchies are re-established once more. When he is no longer perceived as a threat, the narrator can acknowledge that there is ‘something almost miraculous in the manner in which Mr Joseph Grimstone contrived to make himself master of any information which he wished to acquire’ (519). Following a detailed investigation in which Grimstone demonstrates his skills by tracing a button used as gun wadding to an ex-employee, Stephen Hargreaves, he correctly identifies the murderer but is denied the satisfaction – moral and monetary – of capturing him when his reluctance to share the reward leaves him with too few men to watch the suspect, who escapes. In the end, it falls to two male

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relatives, one the ‘heir of Sir John Walter Raleigh Bulstrode’ (541) and the other a humble sea captain motived by family loyalty rather than money, to catch and subdue the ‘Softy’. Nor should it pass without comment that the almost feudal relationship adopted by these two men in their struggle against Hargreaves once again bolsters traditional class hierarchies. Paid investigators may have their uses but, Braddon seems to suggest, such matters are always better dealt with in-house. It was precisely this belief that led many sensation novelists to depict amateur rather than paid investigators, members of the family whose loyalties could not be bought or sold and who were committed to protecting the reputation of the family rather than bringing a criminal to justice. Regardless of their sex, amateur investigators tend to be motivated by a desire to solve a mystery or crime in which they have a close and vested interest. Thus, Robert Audley, from Lady Audley’s Secret, wants to solve the mystery behind the disappearance of his best friend, a disappearance inextricably bound up with the secret past of Lady Audley. Walter Hartright works to re-establish the true identity and position of Laura Fairlie, the woman he loves. Margaret Wilmot and Eleanor Vane, of Henry Dunbar (1864) and Eleanor’s Victory (1863) respectively, seek to identify and avenge the men responsible for their fathers’ deaths. For male investigators, such as Robert and Walter, the process of detection is paradoxical. On the one hand, it leaves them ‘stained with vile associations, and unfit company for honest gentlemen’ (Braddon 2003 [1862]: 407) but it also works to consolidate their class and/or gender status. Much, for example, has been written about how Robert Audley’s ‘investigation of Lady Audley’s secret is the means to the establishment of his own identity as a professional man’ (Petch 2000: 10); and there is no doubt that the skills he develops as a detective stand him in good stead for practising the law. Peeling off the layers of Lady Audley’s false identities, Robert develops the habits of patience, orderliness and rational analysis. Such attributes are, however, achieved at the expense of Lady Audley, who ends her days sequestered in a Belgian asylum to protect the family from the scandal of a public trial. Indeed, the gendered nature of Robert’s investigation – in which a transgressive woman is subjected to a disciplining and controlling male gaze – is writ large for all to see. As a case in point, Robert’s unauthorized trip to Lady Audley’s locked boudoir to interrogate her portrait bears a striking resemblance to the scene of metaphorical violation perpetrated by Luke Marks in the opening chapter of the novel. Much like Robert, Walter enters the novel as an indecisive and vacillating character, a neutered being ‘admitted among beautiful and captivating women, much as a harmless domestic animal’ (Collins 1985 [1860]: 89). And, indeed, he is only able to take an active role in the investigation once he has returned from an adventure in South America, where he has forged a properly masculine identity. So armed, Walter is determined, as Ann Gaylin suggests, to ‘wrest back not only Laura’s identity and inheritance from Fosco and Sir Percival but also control of the narrative from his presumed ally, Marian Halcombe’ (2003: 123). Here, as in so many sensational narratives, Walter also

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‘wrests’ control of the investigation from Marian who is, for the first half of the novel, an astute and resourceful detective. And yet, in representing Marian catching a debilitating fever while eavesdropping without her petticoats, the novel ultimately confirms traditional views that detection is no role for a woman. With Marian rendered appropriately passive, Walter carries on the investigation, solves the mystery of Percival’s illegitimacy and claims, as his reward, Laura’s hand in marriage. The notion that detection unsexes a woman is particularly prevalent in the narratives of Braddon and most obviously in the character of Eleanor Vane. If assuming the office of a spy sullies the male investigator, it renders the female investigator little short of monstrous. As Eleanor’s friends warn her, undertaking an investigation into the death of her father ‘will waste your life, blight your girlhood, warp your nature, unsex your mind, and transform you from a candid and confiding woman into an amateur detective’ (Braddon 1996 [1863]: 164). Having ‘taken upon herself an unnatural office’ (191), Eleanor sacrifices her domestic and wifely duties and pays the price when, sick of living in ‘an atmosphere of mystery’ (243), in which he felt ‘very much like a spectator who looks on at a drama which is being acted in a language that is unknown to him’ (214), Gilbert Monckton leaves his wife. Following this salutatory lesson, and after an appropriate period of suffering and repentance, the novel’s conclusion sees a thoroughly domesticated Eleanor reunited with her husband. For a more positive representation of the female amateur investigator, we must turn to Collins’s 1875 novel, The Law and the Lady. Having learnt that her husband, Eustace, married her under an assumed name, Valeria Macallan determines to discover why. Accepting that the ‘wisest thing I can do, in my present situation, is to suspect everything’ (80), she launches an investigation that reveals, first, that her husband was tried for the poisoning of his first wife, a trial that resulted in a verdict of ‘Not Proven’, and, finally, that his wife committed suicide and hence Eustace is legally, if not morally, innocent. What is important to note, however, is that Valeria’s investigation does not in any way unsex her or damage her femininity. In fact, it is precisely the attributes normally gendered as feminine that allow her to succeed. As a detective, Valeria is characterized, time and time again, by her ‘resolution’ (55, 65, 68, etc.), but here resolution springs not from masculine strength but from her womanly love for her husband. At the same time, it is Valeria’s patience, curiosity, emotionality and downright irrationality – all socially constructed traits of femininity – that enable her to see what the law – the representative of patriarchy – chooses to ignore as beneath their notice. Thus, it appears that this novel goes further than most in promoting the female detective but, even here, Valeria chooses to abandon the investigation, in its final stages, to nurse her husband and the final solution is left to her male advisors to piece together. Sensation fiction, as we have seen, is a genre permeated by a culture of suspicion where the assumption is that ‘every creature [has] a secret, part of themselves, hidden deep in their breasts […] whose influence was to overshadow all their lives’ (Braddon

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1996 [1863]: 130). Thus, it is hardly surprising that it is populated by an army of amateur and paid watchers. From the suspicious spouse to the paid spy, such investigators, with varying degrees of success, attempt to penetrate the smooth surface of respectability to reveal the seething mass of crimes and deception below. Infecting the genre’s readers, not simply with its shocking touch but with a new form of suspicious sight, middle-class domesticity would never look the same again. References Anon. (1859a), ‘The Divorce Court at Work’, The Saturday Review, 31 December, pp. 809–10. ––––– (1859b), Untitled, The Times, 12 January, p. 8d-f. ––––– (1864a), ‘Private Inquiries’, The London Review, 8, 5 March, p. 250. ––––– (1864b), ‘Respondents and Co-Respondents’, The London Review, 9, 6 August, pp. 141–43. ––––– (1867), ‘The Morality of Divorce’, The London Review, 14: 365, 29 June, pp. 727–28. ––––– (1869), ‘PRIVATE INQUIRY OFFICE’, The Times, 19 November, p. 1b. Braddon, Mary Elizabeth (1996 [1863]), Eleanor’s Victory, Stroud: Alan Sutton Publishing Limited. ––––– (1998 [1863]), Aurora Floyd, R. Nemesvari and L. Surridge (eds), Peterborough: Broadview Press. ––––– (2003 [1862]), Lady Audley’s Secret, N. M. Houston (ed.), Peterborough: Broadview. Collins, Wilkie (1879), The Fallen Leaves, Library Edition, London: Chatto & Windus. ––––– (1985 [1860]), The Woman in White, J. Symons (ed.), London: Penguin. ––––– (1986 [1868]), The Moonstone, J. Stewart (ed.), Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics. ––––– (1989 [1866]), Armadale, C. Peters (ed.), Oxford: OUP. ––––– (1992 [1875]), The Law and the Lady, J. Bourne Taylor (ed.), Oxford: OUP. Flint, Kate (2000), The Victorians and the Visual Imagination, Cambridge: CUP. Freedgood, Elaine (2010), The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel, Chicago: UCP. Gaylin, Ann (2003), Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust, Cambridge: CUP. Gilmore, Dehn (2013), The Victorian Novel and the Space of Art: Fictional Form on Display, Cambridge: CUP. James, Henry (1865), ‘Miss Braddon’, The Nation, 1: 19, pp. 593–94. Lamb, Robert (1860), ‘The Philosophy of Marriage, Studied under Sir Cresswell Cresswell. By a Manchester Man’, Fraser’s Magazine, 62, pp. 553–69. Mangham, Andrew (2007), Violent Women and Sensation Fiction: Crime, Medicine and Victorian Popular Culture, London: Palgrave. Mansel, H.L. (1863), ‘Sensation Novels’, Quarterly Review, 113, pp. 482–514. Miller, Andrew H. (1995), Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative, Cambridge: CUP. Petch, Simon (2000), ‘Robert Audley’s Profession’, Studies in the Novel, 32: 1, pp. 1–13. Richards, Thomas (1991), The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914, Stanford: SUP. Shpayer-Makov, Haia (2011), The Ascent of the Detective: Police Sleuths in Victorian and Edwardian England, Oxford: OUP.

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Smillie, Rachel (2015), ‘Now You See Her – Now You Don’t: Household Spies in Aurora Floyd and Lady Audley’s Secret’, Clues: A Journal of Detection, 33: 1, pp. 8–17. Smith, Benjamin (1872), Sunshine in the Kitchen; Or, Chapters for Maid-Servants, London: Wesleyan Conference Office. Stapleton, Joseph W. (1861), The Great Crime of 1860: Being a Summary of the Facts Relating to the Murder Committed at Road, London: E. Marlborough & Co. Steere, Elizabeth (2013), The Female Servant and Sensation Fiction: ‘Kitchen Literature’, London: Palgrave. Surridge, Lisa A. (2005), Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction, Athens: Ohio University Press. Sutherland, John (1991), ‘Wilkie Collins and the Origins of the Sensation Novel’, Dickens Studies Annual, 20: 1991, pp. 243–53. Notes 1

The 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act took a step towards the democratization of divorce by establishing a civil divorce court in London (thus transferring it out of the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts), simplifying the process and significantly reducing the cost. Inscribing the sexual double standard into the statute books, husbands could petition for divorce on the grounds of adultery alone while women were required to prove adultery plus bigamy, rape, incest, sodomy, bestiality or desertion without cause. While the Act made divorce possible for a wider range of the middle classes, it did nothing to alter the situation for the working and lower-middle classes for whom the costs and central location of the court remained insurmountable obstacles.

2

On the morning of 30 June 1860, a young boy, Frances Saville Kent, was found to be missing from his seemingly secure middle-class home and was later found in an outdoor privy with his throat cut. From the start, suspicion rested on the residents of the house and first a nursemaid and then the 16-year-old sister, Constance Kent, were arrested for the crime. The case against Constance faltered and the murder remained unsolved until 1865 when Constance confessed. For an analysis of the case and its impact on the sensation genre, see Mangham (2007: 49–86).

3 4

See, for example, Mangham (2007) and Surridge (2005: 132–64). The other obvious example from Braddon’s corpus is Mrs Walter Powell from Aurora Floyd. For readings of this character, see Smillie (2015) and Steere (2013: 112–14).

5

Given the slippage between police and private investigators, my discussion does not distinguish between them. As we shall see, the more meaningful distinction within this type of writing is between professional and amateur investigators.

6

In this respect, the novels reflect the historical reality: ‘All the evidence shows that the majority of police officers – and thus also most detectives, who were nearly always recruited from the force – originated from the working class, with a minority from the lower middle class’ (Shpayer-Makov 2011: 257).

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Title

‘There he sat – the Confidential Spy of modern times, whose business is steadily enlarging, whose Private Inquiry offices are steadily on the increase. There he sat – the necessary Detective attendant on the progress of our national civilization.’ WILKIE COLLINS

183

Contributors

Alistair Rolls (editor) is Associate Pro-

itorial board for the Australian Journal of

fessor of French Studies at the Universi-

Crime Fiction. An award-winning writer,

ty of Newcastle, Australia. His research

her work has been presented at numerous

interests focus predominantly on French

conferences and published in a wide va-

crime fiction but extend to crime fiction

riety of books, journals and magazines as

more broadly. His books in the area in-

well as on social media.

clude French and American Noir: Dark Crossings (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009),

Janice M. Allan is Associate Dean Ac-

which he co-authored with Deborah

ademic (Assurance) within the School

Walker, and Paris and the Fetish: Primal

of Arts and Media at the University of

Crime Scenes (Rodopi, 2014). He is cur-

Salford. She is the executive editor of

rently co-leading the ‘Detective Fiction

Clues: A Journal of Detection and editor

on the Move’ network at the University

of Bleak House: A Sourcebook (Routledge,

of Newcastle with Jesper Gulddal, and as

2006). She has also published a range of

part of that he is currently working, inter

articles and book chapters on sensation

alia, on the novels of Agatha Christie, the

fiction, including essays in Blackwell’s A

essays of Pierre Bayard and the early years

Companion to Sensation Fiction (2011),

of the Série Noire.

The Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction (2013) and Victorian Literature

Rachel Franks (editor) is Conjoint Fel-

and Culture (2015). She is currently work-

low at the University of Newcastle, Aus-

ing on an article on detective fiction for

tralia and Coordinator, Education and

Oxford University Press’s Bibliographies

Scholarship at the State Library of NSW.

in British and Irish Literature and is

Rachel holds a Ph.D. in Australian crime

co-editing The Cambridge Companion to

fiction and is an active researcher in the

Sherlock Holmes.

fields of crime fiction, food studies and information science. She serves on several boards and committees including the ed-

184

Contributors

Jean Anderson is Associate Professor

(eds), Serial Crime Fiction: Dying for More

and Programme Director for French at

(Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 219–230.

Victoria University of Wellington, where she founded the New Zealand Centre for

Carolyn Beasley is Program Director of

Literary Translation in 2007. Her research

undergraduate and postgraduate Writing

interests are in late-nineteenth-century

at Swinburne University of Technology,

and contemporary women’s writing, par-

in Victoria, Australia. She lectures and

ticularly about ageing, francophone writ-

writes widely on the relationship between

ing (Tahiti, Mauritius, Belgium), literary

crime fiction and social change. She is

translation and crime fiction. She is the

also an award-winning fiction writer, lit-

co-editor (with Carolina Miranda and Bar-

erary judge and author of The Fingerprint

bara Pezzotti) of The Foreign in Interna-

Thief (Sniper Books, 2013) and The Memo-

tional Crime Fiction: Transcultural Rep-

ry of Marble (Lighthouse, 2013).

resentations (Continuum, 2012) and Serial Crime Fiction: Dying for More (Palgrave

Paul D. Brazill is an English writer who

Macmillan, 2015).

currently teaches EFL in Bydgoszcz, Poland. He has published two collections

Lucy Andrew gained her Ph.D. in Chil-

of short stories, 13 Shots of Noir (Untreed

dren’s Literature from Cardiff University,

Reads, 2011) and Snapshots (Pulp Metal,

where she has taught modules on chil-

2012) and a crime novel Guns of Brixton

dren’s literature. Her thesis focused upon

(Caffeine Nights, 2012). He has also con-

the origins and development of the boy

tributed dozens of short stories to maga-

detective in British children’s literature

zines such as Pulp Metal and Mean Streets,

from 1865 to 1940. Her research interests

and his story Guns of Brixton was includ-

include children’s and adult crime fiction,

ed in The Mammoth Book of Best British

popular culture studies and children’s

Crime (Robinson, 2011). In 2010, Brazill’s

literature from the nineteenth century to

short story ‘The Tut’ was nominated for a

the present day. Her publications include

Spinetingler Award. He edited two anthol-

‘“Away with Dark Shadders!” Juvenile

ogies in 2012, Drunk on the Moon (Dark

Detection versus Juvenile Crime in The

Valentine, 2012) and True Brit Grit (Guilty

Boy Detective; or, The Crimes of London:

Conscience, 2012), the latter in coopera-

A Romance of Modern Times’ in Clues:

tion with Luca Veste. Brazill has his own

A Journal of Detection, 30: 1 (2012), pp.

web blog, which features numerous inter-

18–29; Crime Fiction in the City: Capital

views with established writers, including

Crimes (co-edited with Catherine Phelps)

J. J. Connolly, R. J. Ellory and Tony Black.

(University of Wales Press, 2013); and ‘“Exspecta Inexspectata”: The Rise of the

Beth A. Butler, Ph.D., is Associate Pro-

Supernatural in Hybrid Detective Series

fessor of Spanish at Muskingum Univer-

for Young Readers’, in Jean Anderson,

sity in Ohio, USA. Her research interests

Carolina Miranda and Barbara Pezzotti

include Spanish detective fiction and eat-

185

Crime Uncovered: Private Investigator

ing disorders in Spanish and Latin Amer-

2015) and he is now working on the many

ican fiction.

novels of G. W. M. Reynolds, who out-sold Dickens but has been silenced by literary

Jesper Gulddal received his Ph.D. in

critical orthodoxy.

Comparative Literature from the University of Copenhagen and is currently

Carolina Miranda lectures at Victoria

Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies at the

University, Wellington. Her research in-

University of Newcastle, Australia. A spe-

terests include translation and twenti-

cialist in European literature of the eight-

eth-century Latin American literature.

eenth and nineteenth centuries, he has

An editorial board member of the Aus-

published books and articles mainly on

tralian Journal of Crime Fiction, she has

the literary history of anti-Americanism

published a monograph on Roberto Arlt’s

(Anti-Americanism in European Litera-

theatre and narrative work, and various

ture [Palgrave, 2011]) and the nexus of mo-

pieces on Argentine, Spanish and New

bility and movement control in the mod-

Zealand  crime fiction. Together with

ern novel. Recently he has developed an

Jean Anderson and Barbara Pezzotti, she

interest in detective fiction, focusing par-

co-edited The Foreign in International

ticularly on questions of genre evolution.

Crime Fiction: Transcultural Representa-

Essays have appeared in journals such as

tions (Continuum, 2012) and Serial Crime

New Literary History, Arcadia, German

Fiction: Dying for More (Palgrave Macmil-

Life and Letters, Nineteenth-Century Con-

lan, 2015).

texts and Comparative Literature. In parallel with his work on detective fiction, he

Barbara Pezzotti (Ph.D., Victoria Univer-

is currently writing a book on the impact

sity) is an honorary research associate of

of modern movement control practices on

the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies

the modern novel.

(ACIS). She has published journal articles and book chapters on Italian crime fiction

Stephen Knight is in retirement an Hon-

and the figure of the detective and the

orary Research Professor at the University

serial killer in Spanish and New Zealand

of Melbourne, having worked for lengthy

crime fiction. She is the author of Politics

periods at the Universities of Sydney and

and Society in Italian Crime Fiction: An

Cardiff. Interested especially in the so-

Historical Overview (McFarland, 2014)

cial role of literary culture, he has written

and The Importance of Place in Contempo-

on figures like King Arthur, Robin Hood

rary Italian Crime Fiction: A Bloody Jour-

and Merlin, and has published widely on

ney (FDU Press, 2012). She is also co-editor

crime fiction, from Form and Ideology in

(with Jean Anderson and Carolina Miran-

Crime Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 1980)

da) of two volumes on international crime

to The Mysteries of the Cities (McFarland,

writing: The Foreign in International

2012). His most recent book is The Poli-

Crime Fiction: Transcultural Representa-

tics of Myth (Melbourne University Press,

tions (Bloomsbury Academic, 2012) and

186

Contributors

Serial Crime Fiction: Dying for More (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Clara Sitbon is a Scholarly Teaching Fellow at the University of Sydney. She completed her Ph.D. thesis on literary hoaxes and the Boris Vian/Vernon Sullivan affair at the University of Newcastle, Australia in 2015. She is currently working to establish a theory of literary hoaxes and to map in greater detail their various manifestations across France, Australia and the UK. She has also published a number of articles on post-war French crime fiction, especially in the area of the Série Noire. She is a member of the University of Newcastle’s strategic research network ‘Detective Fiction on the Move’. Deborah Walker-Morrison is Associate Professor of French at the University of Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. She has published widely on French cinema, with a focus on the work of Alain Resnais (Le style cinématographique d’Alain Resnais, de Hiroshima Mon Amour aux Herbes Folles [Edwin Mellen, 2012]) and film noir (French and American Noir: Dark Crossings [Palgrave MacMillan, 2009], co-authored with Alistair Rolls). Of mixed European and Maori descent, she has published a number of articles and book chapters on Maori cinema. Her current projects include a biography and documentary film on Déwé Gorodé and a book on gender in French film noir.

187

crime uncovered series private investigator The private investigator is one of the most enduring characters within crime fiction and in Crime Uncovered: Private Investigator, editors Alistair Rolls and Rachel Franks dive deep into crime literature and culture in an attempt to unravel the mystery of this alluring and enigmatic figure. Assembling a cast of notable crime fiction experts, the book examines characters from the page and screen from Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade – the image of the hard-boiled loner trawling the mean streets – to Agatha Christie’s Captain Hastings – the genteel companion in greener surrounds – as well as other examples from international noir including Giorgio Scerbanenco’s Duca Lamberti, Léo Malet’s Nestor Burma, and many more. Including case studies, general essays, interviews with crime writers Leigh Redhead, Nick Quantrill, and Fernando Lalana, and analyses of the transatlantic exchanges that helped to develop public perception of a literary and filmic type, Private Investigator seeks to redefine what we think we know about this fascinating protagonist. Alistair Rolls is associate professor of French studies at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Rachel Franks is conjoint fellow at the University of Newcastle, Australia, and coordinator of education and scholarship at the State Library of New South Wales.

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