Crime Uncovered: Private Investigator

Description

The private investigator is one of the most enduring characters within crime fiction. From Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade – the hard-boiled loner trawling the mean streets – to Agatha Christie’s Captain Hastings – the genteel companion in greener surrounds – the P. I. has taken on any number of guises. In Crime Uncovered: Private Investigator, editors Alistair Rolls and Rachel Franks dive deep into crime literature and culture, challenging many of the assumptions we make about the hardy P. I.



Assembling a cast of notable crime fiction experts, including Stephen Knight and Carolyn Beasley, the book covers characters from the whole world of international noir – Giorgio Scerbanenco’s Duca Lambert, Léo Malet’s Nestor Burma and many more. Including essays on the genealogy and emergence of the protagonist in nineteenth-century fiction; 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 icon, Crime Uncovered: Private Investigator will redefine what we think we know about the figure of the P. I.



Rolls and Franks have engaged here the tension between the popular and scholarly that is inherent in any critical examination of a literary type, along the way unraveling the mystery of the alluring, enigmatic private investigator. Crime Uncovered: Private Investigator will be a handy companion for any crime fiction fan.

Acknowledgments

Editors' Introduction

Case Studies

Interrogations

Reports

Contributor Biographies

Sujets

• Arts visuels
• Arts visuels
• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinema
• Popular Culture
• Literature
• General officer
• Television
• Art
• General
• Cultural Studies
• Drama
• Radio
• Film

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 avril 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783206339
• Langue: English

Extrait

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.
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
EDITORS’INTRODUCTION
CASE STUDIES
INTERROGATIONS
REPORTS
CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
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.
EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION
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 broad-brush-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 authoritatively, 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 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 disrupt