Detectives 1

 

In his more recent serial detective novel, A Line to Kill, author Anthony Horowitz again writes himself into the plot and plays an inept companion to crack detective Daniel Hawthorne on the trail of yet another murderer while ostensibly assigned to write a biography of Hawthorne. In two previous novels Horowitz has played Hawthorne's sidekick and in the process himself almost became a victim of murder. Many detectives require attendants, often they are sergeants, but (except for Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby in Midsomer Murders, also written by Anthony Horowitz) detectives are usually loners: divorced, widowed, never married nor presently in a relationship. In A Line to Kill, Hawthorne complains that no one wants to listen to him speak about himself and his work, but Horowitz responds, “Why do you think there are so many detective stories? People are fascinated by detectives, by what you do!” As I finish another in a long and groaning shelf of detective stories from Britain, Ireland, France, Norway and the United States, I have been wondering the same question. What is the fascination with detectives and especially those that investigate and solve crimes of murder. This post begins that investigation. It should continue. Because the enthrallment with detectives and murder tales interests me—and E, as well, who also has been adding to her groaning shelf. And I don’t forget the myriad streaming detective shows I have consumed over the past not-that-many years. Detective books and shows have not been a lifelong passion of mine, though I do remember that when I was thirteen years old I excitedly read the complete Sherlock Holmes.  When I was visited London years later I even sought out 221B Baker Street but felt as silly there as when on my journey through Italy I couldn’t find Juliet’s balcony in Verona. And of course as an English major I have read and studied the tales of E.A. Poe, some of which are detective stories. Poe's fictional detective C. Auguste Dupin, like so many detectives who have followed, is a lone character who is contacted by the police when they are unable to solve the crime. That is Hawthorne’s position; it was also that of Sherlock Holmes.

            A beginning, then, and as in many beginnings, this one will be overly simplistic. What is it that detectives do? In many of the stories, there has been a disruption in a seemingly unspoiled and uncorruptible environment. The disruption is usually a murder that unsettles the formerly pristine environment. Sometimes the location, as in Shetland, is isolated and seemingly immune from violent crime, but into which heinous crimes occur. Suspects are residents with an abundance of motives of each is made obvious. In detective stories no environment no matter how isolated and bucolic remains free from homicide and depravity; often the crime is grisly, violent of course, and inexplicable. The detective enters this scene, and in the effort to do his work struggles to remain untouched by an inevitable immersion in the sordid and criminal. Detectives do manage to maintain a somewhat strict ethical code and remain uncorrupted. I recall Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon) telling Bridget O’Shaughnessy that she had mistaken his character if she thought he wouldn’t turn her over for the murder of Miles and Thursby. George Gently, Christopher Foyle, Inspector Lewis, Adam Dalgleish and Alan Grant stick to a strict moral standard. Now, this situation is not necessarily true for American detective stories where the murders take place in an environment already spoiled by murder and corruption (Los Angeles, for example) and in which the detective (again working often alone) embodies a cynicism but struggling to remain somewhat above the venality in which he must immerse him/herself in ferreting out the culprits. Finally, however, the motives for the murders are almost always relatively petty, and I guess so too must be the murderers. 
               And the task of the detective whose world had been already disrupted by death, divorce and abandonment pursues justice to set the world aright again. In Shakespeare the world is set aright again with marriage, but such is not the case in the detective stories. In detective stories the murderer must be found out and sent for punishment. Sometimes the murderer commits suicide and avoids trial and imprisonment. But murder will out, as a saying goes. And the serial volumes recounting the work of any single detective, think Poirot, Maigret, Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey, Adam Dalgleish and Alan Grant, et al.,suggests that there is ultimately no end to murder and no return to a safe and pristine world. It would seem to me that one attraction of these detective stories, then, is a confirmation of the world as corrupt and dangerous and of the necessity to be always on ready guard. We read to confirm our suspicions and the detective is our knight not in shining armor but coat and tie who may solve one murder but another soon awaits.! We are not saved but affirmed in our suspicions and anxieties. You see, the detective stories say, we were right all along: the world is a frighteningly threatening place and if I feel safe inside the books I am presently reading in my easy chair, there is really no safe haven from peril. The detectives tell me so.