Detectives

Peter Brooks, in his new book, Seduced by Story, writes that the detective story is the most rule-bound of genres. He writes, “When the game is played fairly, the story presents us with all the facts, and the detective will pick those that are truly clues and enchain them into the narrative that leads to the solution.” And the reader would follow along with the detective’s intellect to the solution, though the author also does all she can to place obstructions in the reader’s path, disguising some clues, adding distracting characters, and intentionally sending readers down false paths. And sometimes an author doesn’t even present all of the facts! Though I read a great many detective stories (why I do so is an ongoing conversation I have with myself) I usually feel deceived reading in this genre because it is the purpose of the author to confuse the reader with too many characters, motives, clues and suspects. The detective story attempts to place me in the position of the detective searching for a murderer, but it is not a role I covet not least because the author refuses me the freedom to investigate as would be my wont. I have to attend to only those clues and facts the author offers, and I cannot ignore those that are intended to deceive. Josephine Tey’s detective, Alan Grant, in a slightly different context says, “You could get away with anything if you distracted their attention.” And it seems to me that detective writers create sufficient distraction so that they can get away with anything in their narratives. 
            But this distraction is integral to the formula of the detective story, and this prescription, suggests Brooks, allows the reader to focus on something else. He writes, “Yet it seems to me that what we really seek in the detective story is the sense of discovering a solution from intelligence working on a recalcitrant reality, claiming a victory of mind over matter, wresting order from the apparent chaos represented by the crime.” But in fact intellect is not always a detective’s first or strongest method. Strafford, in John Banville’s Snow, “had a way, when he was trying to sort the facts of a case, of lapsing into a sort of dull half-trance. Afterward, when he had come back to himself, he would hardly be able to remember what direction his thoughts had taken, or what the result of them had been.” This work effort, however, is all accomplished by the detective invisibly to a reader. Following intuition is infeasible. Perhaps that is why a detective story is referred to as a ‘page-turner:’ the reader hurries on to discover the murderer and is not first focused on the intellectual work of the detective and certainly not their intellect! It is engagement in a world more exotic than reality that draws many to the detective story. In the novel The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, this comment appears: “And dull men in offices read detective stories” the latter being escape and vicarious pleasure from the life of the former. 
            But perhaps it is not a natural but an invented chaos the detective story portrays: to paraphrase Beckett’s Estragon who refuses Vladimir’s offer to describe his dreams with this objection: “This one isn’t enough for you?” This one is definitely enough for me and is getting nastier every day! In fact, I prefer the character of a detective like Adam Dalgleish who wants only to find himself and is distracted from doing so by the presence of crime. When he is not dealing in gritty murder, Dalgleish publishes poetry. A policeman in Josephine Tey’s To Live and Be Wise says to Alan Grant, “I was just thinking how shocked the writers of slick detective stories would be if they could witness two police inspectors sitting on a willow tree swapping poems.” I have read a significant number of detective stories and streamed not a few shows and I don’t think following the intelligence of the detective solving the murder is what draws me to the genre. In some sense, I don’t really care who committed the murder: the motives for the murders are often mundane—greed, jealousy (which is almost the same thing), love (ditto), and revenge. Solving the murder and arresting the murderer suggests that now these sins will be eliminated from the social order, though the detective knows that soon he will be called to another murder scene. Lew Archer says, “I used to think the world was divided into good people and bad people, that you could pin responsibility for evil on certain definite people and punish the guilty.” Archer knows that such is not the case. No, what interest me about the detective scene is the character of the detective of which intellect is only a part: they are a complete person engaged in a full life. The detective formulaically is almost always an unwed, divorced or widowed lonely individual who braves and battles the criminally cruel forces of the world though inevitably to find one murderer only leads to the next murder. The detective works alone though their contacts in the community are often called upon and they are often assigned a partner of lower rank to aid in the investigation. I think of Wimsey’s butler, Bunter, and the number of sergeants who accompany the detective in the investigation. Often the detective is an outsider to society and can even be in conflict with the regular police. I think of Sherlock Holmes or EZ Rawlins. Sometimes I don’t admire the detective’s personality and I do not read further. Hercule Poirot is one such example as is Lord Peter Wimsey, for whom detective work is merely a hobby. In Nine Tailors Wimsey says to a police official who complains of the difficulty of the profession, “You musn’t quarrel with your bread and butter, Superintendent. No difficulty, no fun!.” But the superintendent responds, “Fun? Well, my lord, it’s nice to be you!” Indeed, Wimsey himself discounts the role of the intellect in the search for the criminal: he announces that his detective work represents “The triumph of instinct over reason.” The ending of every detective story is always known: the detective of record will find the murderer and the social scene will return to some semblance of order, though the detective (except for Wimsey) does not seem to be either satisfied nor content at his work.  Unlike in a Shakespearean comedy where society begins anew with nuptials, the order that the detective story ending portrays reminds us that underneath what might appear to be order, chaos continues to swell. The murder indicates that the social order has been shattered, and there is no lack of venality in society. Alas, that next story in the book series or television show begins with yet another murder that is motivated by the regular evil motives for homicide. They are, these motives, in fact, universal and enduring. Occasionally politics might appear as the motive for murder; in Foyle’s War politics is complicit in the crime but is not usually its main motivating force. Foyle is a local police detective attempting to solve murders in the violent and corrupting environment of World War II. Complicating his investigation are the politics of the war and the venal attempts of some to take advantage of the situation. Underlying the politics that arise as an accompaniment to World War II exist the usual motives: see above. In Ben Pastor’s Martin Bora novels, Bora, not a detective by profession, serves as a Nazi lieutenant in the war effort. He is himself complicit in mass murderer. In each of the novels (I have read the first five of the series) Bora is ordered by his superiors to investigate the crime and catch the murderer, but the task is connected to the Nazi war effort rather than to a quest for justice. Bora is a proud-enough Nazi, and nothing he does in his search for the murderer can erase the crimes in which he plays a significant role. I do not like Martin Bora nor do I have much interest in the crime he investigates. In the Martin Bora series, Bora finally is an accomplice to murder most foul. 
            I’m presently reading John Banville’s detective novel The Lockup. (Banville has written a number of detective novels under the pseudonym Benjamin Black. I’ve read them all.) Strafford is yet another solitary, lonely detective who isn’t all that enamored of his work. Quirke, the forensic pathologist, is a deeply troubled human, instigates the investigation into what he says is a suspicious death of Rose Jacobs. Again there will be a political theme to the novel, this time I suspect related to the Holocaust, but it is not the murder, the politics nor the discovery of the perpetrator that interests me but the character of the detectives who interest me. I prefer to follow them rather than the clues.