Detectives 2

Inspector Hackett, in Benjamin Black’s novel, Elegy for April, reflects that he was happiest when he had just graduated police college and was just a Guard on the beat. Now, a higher ranked detective—an Inspector—though he is better paid, in possession of an office all his own and has earned the respect of those below and even above him—yet he enjoys much less pleasure than he did when he was just a beat policeman. “There was no comparison,” he avers, “between his present conditions and what they had been in those early days when he came up first to Dublin from the Garda Training College at Templemore and was handed his badge and truncheon and sent out into the streets.” Hackett feels that the policeman who walked the street on the beat—what in the slang was referred to as the flatfoot—was “what the policeman was supposed to be, a guardian of the peace.” While everyone slept in the darkness of night, while everybody went to their work or to the schools and libraries for their studies, the police officer who “pounded the pavement” guaranteed the safety and sleep of the citizenry. “Without him there would be mayhem, robbery, and rapine, blood in the streets . . . It was a solemn duty, the duty of care with which the policeman was entrusted.”

     Hackett’s expression speaks from an idealism that no longer holds much influence, if, indeed it ever really did. But isn’t that what idealism aspires to: a perfected and impossible nature of things. We do not now live in the best of times. Henning Mankell’s detective, Kurt Wallander, says that “It had become more difficult to be a police officer. They were living at a time characterized by a sort of criminality that nobody had experienced before.” Even the police now do not feel safe. And our histories and on-going contemporary events have cast a dark pall on the professional reputations of the police forces. Perhaps . . . But I do not mean to engage with this argument here. Rather, I want to consider what Hackett might mean when he suggests that promotion to Inspector seemed to him “not so much a promotion as a dilution of duty.” What Hackett might point to here is a distinction between the ultimate purpose of the work of a beat policeman and that of a detective. I am these days interested in detectives: in pandemical isolation I read a great many detective novels and watch on the telly not a few British detective shows. Hackett refers here to his belief that the primary role of the policeman is to guard the peace and protect life. The effect of the work of the beat policemen is to make the civilian population safe and secure as they pursue their lives.
     Now, Hackett does not define what exactly he means by his promotion to the rank of detective as a dilution of duty, but I would like to suggest what he might have intended in that feeling. Hackett considers the beat policeman to be “a guardian of the peace . . . at all times of the day, but especially at night, when law-abiding citizens were abed and all manner of peril and menace might be let loose upon the city.” The policeman defends life. But the detective is called into action only after all manner of peril and menace has been let loose: the detective doesn’t defend the peace though his/her work might have the effect of restoring it,  but the detective does not so much protect life in his work as s/he pursues death. At the center of the detective novel is a murder, and the narrative follows the detective as he attempts to solve the violent crime and reveal the murderer. The detective immerses him/herself in the business of death, engaging with coroners, forensic pathologists, and suspects, but for the detective the condition of greater society does not enter into his/her vision. The detective is called into action by death and s/he is immersed in that death until the murderer is accused and removed from society.  Death is what motivates the detective, and in his work the detective is immersed in death. There is little noble in the work that the detective engages; rather, his activity engages with only the slimiest elements of society. And so the dilution that Hackett ascribes to his promotion from a beat policeman to the rank of Inspector-detective might refer to his belief that in the latter role he no longer protects and guards the peace; rather the detective only begins work when the peace and order of society has already broken down and he must muck about in the detritus. “Cursed spite, that ever I was born to make it right,” might be the motto of the detective.