Crime Fiction in the City: Capital Crimes

Crime Fiction in the City: Capital Crimes expands upon previous studies of the urban space and crime by reflecting on the treatment of the capital city, a repository of authority, national identity and culture, within crime fiction. This wide-ranging collection looks at capital cities across Europe, from the more traditional centres of power - Paris, Rome and London - to Europe's most northern capital, Stockholm, and also considers the newly devolved capitals, Dublin, Edinburgh and Cardiff. The texts under consideration span the nineteenth-century city mysteries to contemporary populist crime fiction. The collection opens with a reflective essay by Ian Rankin and aims to inaugurate a dialogue between Anglophone and European crime writing; to explore the marginalised works of Irish and Welsh writers alongside established European crime writers and to interrogate the relationship between fact and fiction, creativity and criticism, within the crime genre.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Apr 30, 2013
• ISBN: 9781783160372

Book preview

Notes on Contributors

Lucy Andrew is a Ph.D. student and postgraduate tutor at Cardiff University where she is researching the origins of juvenile detective fiction in Britain. Her research interests include crime fiction for both children and adults, and children’s popular fiction in Britain and America from the Victorian period to the present day. Her publications are ‘Away with dark shadders! Juvenile detection versus juvenile crime in The Boy Detective; or, The Crimes of London. A Romance of Modern Times’, Clues: A Journal of Detection, 30/1 (spring 2012), 18–29, and six entries for the forthcoming publication 100 British Crime Writers.

Maurizio Ascari is Reader in English literature at the University of Bologna. His main areas of interest are late nineteenth-century British and American literature, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century crime fiction, the Grand Tour and the issues concerning the formation and ‘deconstruction’ of the literary canon. His publications include In the Palatial Chamber of the Mind: Comparative Essays on Henry James (Pescara, Italy: Edizioni Tracce, 1997), A Counter-history of Crime Fiction: Supernatural, Gothic, Sensational (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and Two Centuries of Detective Fiction: A New Comparative Approach (editor; Bologna: COTEPRA, 2000).

Margaret Atack is Professor of French at the University of Leeds. Her research lies primarily in the areas of the literature, thought, film and culture of France in the twentieth century, and particularly the Occupation and Second World War in French fiction and film, women’s writing, crime fiction and May 68. Her publications on crime fiction include Crime and Punishment: Narratives of Order and Disorder, special issue (editor), French Cultural Studies, 12/3 (October 2001). She is currently working on publications from the major AHRC-funded project: ‘Narratives of the Second World War in France 1939 to the present’, including War and Occupation 1940–1944: Other Stories, Stories of Otherness, special issue (editor), French Cultural Studies (August 2011), Framing Narratives of the Second World War in France: New Readings (co-edited with Christopher Lloyd) (2012), and Literature and the Second World War: Remapping the Landscape (with Christopher Lloyd, in preparation).

Kerstin Bergman is Senior Research Fellow in comparative literature at Lund University, specializing in contemporary Swedish and international crime fiction, and is currently working on a research project on the function of science in crime fiction today. Among her recent publications are Kriminallitteratur: Utveckling, genrer, perspektiv (Crime fiction: history, genres, perspectives; Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2011, with S. Kärrholm), ‘Paradoxes of understanding the other: Mankell explores the African darkness’, Scandinavian Studies, 82/3 (2010), 337–54, ‘The well-adjusted cops of the new millennium: neo-Romantic tendencies in the Swedish police procedural’, in Andrew Nestingen and Paula Arvas (eds), Scandinavian Crime Fiction (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011), pp. 34–45, and ‘Fictional death and scientific truth: the truth-value of science in contemporary forensic crime fiction’, Clues: A Journal of Detection, 30/1 (spring 2012), 88–98.

Stephen Knight is Professor of English literature at the University of Melbourne. His main research interests are crime fiction, medieval cultural studies and Welsh fiction in English. He has published widely on crime fiction, notably Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1980), Continent of Mystery: A Thematic History of Australian Crime Fiction (Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 1997), Crime Fiction 1800–2000 (London: Macmillan, 2003) and The Mysteries of the Cities: Urban Crime Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (Jefferson, NC: Macfarland, 2012). He has also written widely on Welsh fiction in English, including A Hundred Years of Fiction: Writing Wales in English (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004). In 2001 he was awarded the Ned Kelly Lifetime Achievement Award for services to Australian crime fiction.

Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin is Professor of Italian at Trinity College Dublin. His research interests include translation studies, Dante and Boccaccio studies, and creative writing. His publications include ‘Christ stopped at Eboli: fortunes of an American translation’, in Joseph Farrell (ed.), The Voices of Carlo Levi (Oxford, Bern, New York: Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 175–208, Patterns in Dante: Nine Literary Essays (co-editor; Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005) and Translation and Censorship: Patterns of Communication and Interference (co-editor; Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2009). As Cormac Millar, he is the author of two crime novels published by Penguin, and is currently working on a third.

Catherine Phelps is a Ph.D. student and postgraduate tutor at Cardiff University where she is currently researching Welsh crime fiction written in English. Her research interests are crime fiction, postcolonialism and Welsh writing in English. Her publications are ‘Re-shaping crime fiction in Alison Taylor’s Simeon’s Bride’, Assuming Gender, 1/1 (2010), ‘Minstrelsy in Malcolm Pryce’s Aberystwyth Mon Amour’, in Almanac: Yearbook of Welsh Writing in English (Cardigan: Parthian Books, 2011), pp. 47–69, and five entries for the forthcoming publication 100 British Crime Writers.

Gill Plain is Professor of English literature and popular culture at the University of St Andrews, where she is director of the MLitt in women, writing and gender. Her research interests are twentieth-century war writing, crime fiction, theories of gender and sexuality and popular British cinema. Her published work includes Twentieth-century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), Ian Rankin’s Black and Blue: A Reader’s Guide (New York and London: Continuum, 2002) and John Mills and British Cinema: Masculinity, Identity and Nation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006). She is currently working on a literary history of the 1940s.

Ian Rankin is the author of over thirty crime novels to date, notably the Inspector Rebus series. His many awards include the British Book Awards Crime Thriller of the Year (2005, 2007), and the Grand Prix du Roman Policier (2005). In 2005, he was given the lifetime achievement award from Crime Writers’ Association Cartier Diamond Dagger.

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Introduction:

LUCY ANDREW AND CATHERINE PHELPS

The growth of the metropolis in the early nineteenth century has been the subject of much commentary by contemporaneous thinkers. Charles Baudelaire and, later, Georg Simmel, both noted the alienation felt by city-dwellers, fuelled in part by the anonymity of the urban space. In his seminal essay, ‘The metropolis and mental life’, Simmel also expanded on the individual’s freedom to develop outside a closed rural community or small town. As many were drawn to the city in search of work, so they left the watchful eye of a familiar and secure community.¹ No wonder, then, that the city became such a popular setting for a relatively new genre: crime fiction. The sprawling urban streets provided a multiplicity of settings from Dickens’s rookeries to the decayed yet aristocratic Fauborg Saint-Germain, home to Poe’s creation, Auguste Dupin. Anonymous and alone amongst a transient population, a criminal could go undetected, even hide behind new identities. This was also true of the urban detective. The Parisian police-chief Eugène-François Vidocq, often referred to as ‘the first detective’, was one who confidently slipped between criminality and legality.² Sherlock Holmes, too, became famous for his disguises, allowing him to move undetected on the city streets. This brings us to an aspect of the urban space that crime fiction utilizes so well: the duality inherent in this city space, one where boundaries are crossed, even blurred. A city can provide a centre of authority alongside a ‘seedy underbelly’. Criminals and police rub shoulders while corruption spreads its malign influence to those in authority, exemplified in the twentieth-century crime novels of Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy, both of whom use Los Angeles as a setting. Still, unlike their rural counterparts, cities are in a constant state of flux through decay and regeneration and many crime writers find themselves acting as literary cartographers of an authentic but rapidly changing urban space.

However, this collection considers an aspect of the metropolis that has been neglected: the city as capital. From the mid-nineteenth century, when crime fiction began to emerge as a distinct genre, London, Paris and Rome were established as common settings for European city mysteries. Though later forms, such as the British country house mystery, moved the action to a rural location, in the last few decades there has been a resurgence of city-based crime fiction, particularly of narratives based in capital cities. Etymologically, ‘capital’ reminds us that these cities are the head of the body politic, placed above the other cities of the state, even speaking for the nation in its entirety. Usually centres of state governance and authority, capital cities may encourage us to draw semantic parallels with the term ‘capital punishment’. Recently, the action has moved beyond the traditional European centres of culture – London, Paris and Rome – to less familiar, unglamorous, potentially marginalized capital cities such as Edinburgh, Cardiff, Dublin and Stockholm. In the wake of the recent proliferation of capital crime narratives, this collection of essays considers the significance of using specific urban spaces as locations for crime fiction. Most obviously, these urban spaces lend authenticity to crime narratives by providing a factual basis for fictional accounts. The capital crime narrative’s authenticity, however, arises not only from its foundation in a real location but also from the manifold opportunities for crime which the urban space creates.

These manifold opportunities in one urban space are often built upon closely bound opposites and dualities: rich and poor live in close proximity, the apparatus of the state co-exists with a criminal underworld. Its inherent contradictions and internal divisions present a source of rich material for the crime writer. Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin casts a practitioner’s eye over capital city crime fiction and argues that these divisions, the metaphorical fissures in the city walls, as well as providing inspiration for the writer can also contribute to a city’s identity. He goes on to explore how a city like Dublin defines and maps itself in contrast to both its rural hinterland and to other rival towns. Nevertheless, Ó Cuilleanáin proposes that it is the crossings through boundaries, social structures, between country and city, that are the most fruitful. It is the opportunity to break through these contradictions that, as Ó Cuilleanáin argues, places the capital city in a unique, creative position.

The setting of urban crime fiction is replete with tensions, contradictions and dualities; foremost of these frictions is the juxtaposition of the capital city’s public façade with its murkier, non-tourist persona, which suggests that the city’s dark underside is never far from the surface. Capital crime narratives, then, illuminate the connections between the shady and respectable faces of the city and, consequently, point to the disturbing duality of the urban space. The duplicitous city becomes part of the conundrum which the text poses for the detective protagonist and/or the reader to solve. The city’s secrets must be exposed through the mapping of the urban space if the crime narrative is to fulfil its truth-seeking agenda. In her analysis of Jean-François Vilar’s romans noirs, Margaret Atack explores the role of the detective-flâneur, Victor Blainville, in unveiling the hidden city through a process of urban cartography designed to make Paris knowable to the reader. This mapping of the city, she argues, does not make safe the urban space, but points to its constant evolution and consequent destruction. The detective not only exposes the city’s secrets but uncovers its mythic past and, in his role of photographer and rag-picker, attempts to preserve this past, offering a reconstruction of Paris and its crime scenes.

Like Vilar’s Paris-set romans noirs, Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh-based Rebus series engages with and responds to the rapid evolution of the urban space. Rankin’s evaluation of his depiction of Edinburgh explores the difficulties faced by the writer in attempting to map the progress and to produce an authentic representation of the constantly developing capital city, particularly with regards to the blending of fact with fiction, and the relationship between Edinburgh’s mythic past and its present reality. Gill Plain observes in her analysis of the Rebus series that, as Edinburgh evolves in reality, there is a change, too, in the way that the city is mapped within Rankin’s work. There is a notable transition from the Edinburgh of Knots & Crosses (1987), the first Rebus novel – vaguely mapped, steeped in literary allusion and preoccupied with the city’s mythic past – to the representation of the city in the novel The Naming of the Dead (2006), with its cartographical precision, engagement with popular culture and grounding in present reality. This promotion of Edinburgh’s present reality over its mythic past, Plain argues, allows for a re-inscription of the city’s identity beyond the national and towards the global.

Crime narratives, therefore, are not only concerned with the authentic representation of the city and the exposure of its secrets but also with the possibility of reconstructing, remapping and, hence, recreating the city. One of the most obvious ways in which this re-creation occurs is in the physical remapping of the urban space through the process of cultural tourism. The capital city, in particular, with its thriving tourist industry and its sizeable and culturally diverse population becomes a breeding ground for crime as it provides the criminal with money, anonymity, easy prey and a vast network of accomplices and adversaries. By bringing to the fore the unpalatable, non-public aspects of the city’s identity, crime fiction transforms urban criminality into a tourist attraction. Privileged in literature, fictional crime is reabsorbed into the mythic identity of the urban space. Both Rankin and Plain point to the construction of Rebus’s Edinburgh as a site for tourism which has achieved a physical presence within the real city. Beyond the obvious examples of cultural tourism, such as walking tours of Rebus’s Edinburgh, the reader’s voyeuristic gaze at the city’s ‘mean streets’ could also be interpreted as a form of tourism. Looking through the detective’s eyes, armchair flânerie if you will, the reader can safely walk streets that normally they may fear to tread. The dangerous underbelly is safely caught between crime fiction’s pages. Catherine Phelps explains how this process has contained the multicultural community of Cardiff’s Tiger Bay. Tourists view capital cities as representative of national identity. However, national identity can be threatened by those considered ‘other’ within their midst. As globalization expands, crime fiction increasingly explores anxieties around immigration and national identity. However, Cardiff’s multicultural community is an unusual one, having settled in the area several generations ago and subsequently intermarried with the local Welsh community. Phelps explores how spaces are made in capital city crime fiction in order to place those who upset traditional notions of national identity and who are subsequently exoticized and mythologized.

Like the Tiger Bay crime fiction discussed in Phelps’s essay, the Vatican City mysteries examined by Maurizio Ascari use a specific setting within the capital city in order to engage with political issues on a wider scale. Similarly to Rankin’s Rebus series, Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons (2000), a key text in Ascari’s analysis, engages with cultural tourism through the creation of an official tour inspired by the book and its film adaptation. The remapping of the capital city in the Vatican mysteries, however, moves beyond its alteration as a cultural construction for the tourist to a drastic revisioning of the city’s history as the texts challenge the foundations of the Catholic Church. Ascari emphasizes how the mid-nineteenth-century Vatican City mysteries by authors such as Del Vecchio and Mistrali and, later, Brown’s Angels and Demons, use the specific urban setting of the Vatican to help authenticate a political point and to fuel a global debate. Thus, the implications of the revisioning of the capital city in crime fiction are not simply local and geographical but, more crucially, global and political.

The politicization of the capital crime novel is nowhere more evident than in Scandinavian crime fiction. Kerstin Bergman’s timely examination of Scandinavian crime focuses on Stockholm, Sweden’s capital and one of northern Europe’s more remote urban metropoli. Stockholm-based crime fiction maps the depictions of a transforming urban space and, in common with writers like Ian Rankin, the Swedish crime writer becomes a literary urban cartographer. Still, these Scandinavian depictions are overtly politicized. As in other capital crime fictions, Stockholm is a locus of power for Swedish crime writers. Bergman’s survey tracks these transformations of the city and the subsequent shifts in power from Stieg Trenter’s idyllic representations of the city and Stockholm’s emergence as a character in crime fiction, to Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s police procedurals in which the city becomes criminogenic, that is, the deteriorating urban space is seen to breed crime, through Liza Marklund’s feminist revision of the city as a patriarchal power base, and finally Jens Lapidus’s contemporary crime fiction which, like much modern-day Scandinavian crime fiction, examines the effects of globalization and multiculturalism in Stockholm. In common with much capital crime fiction, Stockholm becomes a trope in the urban space’s transformation from being a localized signifier of national identity to a more transnational space.

The collection ends with an essay that returns to those capital cities considered the birthplace of crime fiction: Paris and London. Expanding upon Maurizio Ascari’s observations on the role that the early City Mysteries played in providing a starting point for the crime fiction genre, Stephen Knight presents a more detailed examination of their importance and influence upon later crime fiction. Like Ascari, Knight considers the political implications of the City Mystery. Still, Knight goes on to propose that the City Mysteries offer a more authentic experience of the urban space and suggests that the later figure of the detective blurred the realism of narratives exploring anxieties inherent in the new metropolis. Unlike Poe or Holmes who investigate and operate within a bourgeois enclave, the authors of City Mysteries portray complex cross-class negotiations. G. W. M. Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London (1846), in particular, provides a detailed urban cartography of a variety of city spaces, which, coupled with a rich diversity of characters, offer a multifarious reading of the city. The City Mysteries, though sometimes conservative by modern-day standards, can offer a surprisingly liberal perspective and may have more in common with later crime fiction. Knight points to their revisioning of marginalized groups within these texts: from plucky women to sympathetic bands of gypsies. State authority is questioned and corruption uncovered. Despite their conservatism and subsequent placement within the crime fiction canon, the City Mysteries appear to have more in common with more contemporary, ‘grittier’ texts that explore the urban space.

This collection hopes to introduce the reader to some critical and cultural insights into crime fiction and capital cities. Needless to say, this is an introduction rather than an exhaustive list as this collection considers European capital cities through a European perspective. Still, this collection does not present European crime fiction as a homogeneous entity. Despite the seemingly narrow remit, a surprisingly wide array of themes and a variety of cultural identities come under discussion. Each capital city has its own literary and political history, and authors choose to engage with this history in a number of different ways. Yet, there are connections, too, between the manner in which the texts present capital cities and in the difficulties that they face in doing so. Despite their differing natures, capital cities share similar concerns as they act as representations of national identity, contain symbols of state authority, law courts and prisons, for instance, and are magnets for cultural tourism. As a result, capital crime fiction comes with its own set of considerations and complexities, considerations that distinguish it from urban crime fiction generally, creating a unique genre.

Notes

1 Georg Simmel, ‘The metropolis and mental life’, in David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (eds), Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings (London: Sage, 1997), pp. 174–86 (pp. 180–1).

2 For more on the life of Vidocq, see James Morton, The First Detective: The Life and Revolutionary Times of Vidocq (London: Ebury Press, 2004).

2

Edinburgh

IAN RANKIN

Living in Cardenden as a teenager, I’d written about the place to try to make sense of it. I was asking: how do I fit into the scheme of things? I was also making my home town seem more exciting and romantic than it really was. And I was playing God, controlling the world of my fictional creations in a way that was impossible in reality.

Moving to Edinburgh in October 1978, it was natural that I would start writing about this strange, complicated city – though to term Edinburgh a ‘city’ can sometimes seem an exaggeration. With a population of around half a million, it is overshadowed by many conurbations south of the border, and even by its close neighbour Glasgow. Robert Louis Stevenson described his birthplace as ‘not so much a small city as the largest of small towns’. I describe it in my books as ‘a city the size of a town that thinks like a village’. It’s true that Edinburgh can seem claustrophobic at times. Walking through the Cowgate can feel like being at the bottom of a narrow canyon. Live in the place long enough, and it’s hard to venture out without bumping into friends and acquaintances. Yet at the same time the city can appear cold and unwelcoming. Visitors note that strangers don’t chat at bus stops the way they do in Glasgow or Belfast. Privacy is guarded at all times:

There were those who said that Edinburgh was an invisible city, hiding its true feelings and intentions, its citizens outwardly respectable, its streets appearing frozen in time. You could visit the place and come away with little sense of having understood what drove it. This was the city of Deacon Brodie, where bridled passions were given free play only at night. The city of John Knox, his rectitude stern and indomitable. You might need half a million pounds to buy one of the better houses, yet outward show was