Crime Uncovered: Detective

By Intellect Books

Crime Uncovered: Detective is an examination – and celebration – of the most iconic police detectives in the long and bloody history of crime fiction, film and television, identifying the individual characteristics that define these much-loved figures and discussing how they relate to their surroundings, country and class – and the criminals they relentlessly pursue. Detectiveexamines the changing role of the authority figure in crime fiction and film, and analyses how the most imaginative creators cleverly subvert the key elements of both the detectives themselves and the genre they inhabit. The detectives included cover all the important names, making for a truly international spread.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Nov 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781783206322

Book preview

DETECTIVE

intellect Bristol, UK / Chicago, USA

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: Stephanie Sarlos

Production Manager: Tim Mitchell

ISBN: 978-1-78320-521-9

ePDF: 978-1-78320-522-6

ePUB: 978-1-78320-632-2

Printed & bound by Bell & Bain, UK.

DETECTIVE

edited by Barry Forshaw

intellect Bristol, UK / Chicago, USA

Contents

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

CASE STUDIES

INTERROGATIONs

REPORTS

CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

Barry Forshaw

What is the reason for the enduring popularity of detective fiction? The answer may be a multinational one. American titans of the genre (past and present), may appear to dominate, but that is to ignore the wealth of distinctive sleuths from all points of the compass – in languages other than English – since the genesis of the genre in nineteenth-century Britain, with Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins being the progenitors of the police detective (the subject of this study, as opposed to the private detective). The duo produced (almost by accident) a variety of key elements – dogged protagonist, complex plotting, surprising revelations.

By the early twenty-first century other elements had been added to the mix, freighting in a greater degree of psychological realism and (notably in the Scandinavian branches of the field) elements of acute social critique and even subtle philosophical underpinnings that frequently stray into the realms of ‘serious’ literary fiction, according the genre a belated intellectual recognition. All these notions are to be discussed (from a variety of perspectives) in the following pages.

In an increasingly unstable world (where, for example, the rise of totalitarian religious fundamentalism has spread from theocratic countries to the secular West), novels featuring detectives are particularly satisfying in that we are invited to relish the chaos unleashed by the crime and criminals before the status quo is re-established – a process that has a particular resonance for the British character (more so than for, say, Americans – the barely contained pandemonium of the large American city is never really tamed). Of course, when (as mentioned earlier) Dickens and Collins introduced several of the key tropes of detective fiction (in such classics as Bleak House [1852] and The Moonstone [1868]), neither author had any thoughts of creating a genre (although it is instructive to remember that their books, while massively popular, lacked the literary gravitas in their day that later scholarship dressed them with; this was the popular fare of the day, dealing in the suspense and delayed revelation that was later to become the sine qua non of the genre). Apart from the sheer pleasure of reading a good detective novel, the ‘added value’ in many of the best examples has long been the implicit (or sometimes explicit) element of social criticism freighted in by the more challenging writers. Among popular literary genres, only science fiction has rivalled the crime novel in ‘holding the mirror up to nature’ (or society). Bestselling modern writers such as Ruth Rendell, Ian Rankin and P. D. James have kept alive (and developed) the tradition of social commentary via their police sleuths, which was always a key element in the genre, although rarely at the expense of sheer storytelling skill, the area in which the crime field virtually demolishes all its rivals.

British detective fiction can (and often does) divide into two distinct (although not mutually exclusive) genres. The first is the undemanding divertissement, wherein the puzzle (and its ingenious solving) is central: in this area, British writers, notably Christie and the like, have had few equals. But the other stream, that of the dark investigation of psychological states, is generally perceived as being more endemic in the Nordic countries, though it remains a central strand in writing from the United Kingdom (French and Italian detectives add intriguing new elements to the mix, redolent of particular national characteristics). And not just writing; note is taken here of the many impressive films and television adaptations of detective fiction.

Fourteen key detectives

In 1962’s Cover Her Face, P. D. James introduced Detective Chief Inspector ADAM DALGLIESH, a necessary yet pessimistic, critical embodiment of ‘the spirit of ’45’, the postwar welfare state whose aims were to be eclipsed by the onset of Thatcherism. James’s Dalgliesh, in contrast (Lisa Fluet argues in her chapter), moves among private charity organizations resistant to the influx of expert public planning, landed gentry, lower-middle-class life and council estates, suggesting that the emblematic ‘gentleman detective’’s peculiar perspective on the dispensing of justice in aid of public welfare will bring into relief those figures most immune to feeling anything towards the proffering of aid. The character of James’s detective is crucial to this study of Dalgliesh’s movements through the post-war, Thatcherite and twenty-first-century time frames.

Katarina Gregersdotter’s chapter discusses one of the most influential fictional characters in Scandinavian crime fiction. In Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s ten crime novels, Detective Martin Beck is clearly the protagonist, but he is at the same time part of an investigative team. Gregersdotter discusses and compares Beck, the professional detective, to Beck, the private family man in his home. He responds to, and is affected by, both environments, but in varying ways. Martin Beck is also discussed as a product of a society, yet a critical and active member of the same. He is critical of society at the same time as he is a protector of this society in which he lives. These multiple, and often contradictory, roles make him still a unique character in crime fiction.

A great part of the international success of Andrea Camilleri’s series set in a fictional Sicilian village, is due to his protagonist, Commissario SALVO MONTALBANO, modelled on the figure of Inspector Maigret. Like his literary colleague, Montalbano is a lover of good food and has an analytical mind and a powerful gift of insight that enables him to understand people and their behaviour. Unlike his French forefather, however, he lives alone and he has a stormy long-distance relationship with his fiancée, Livia Burlando. Barbara Pezzotti shows how, through the character of Montalbano, Camilleri fights against a repository of clichés about Sicily and Sicilians. Indeed, contrary to the crime fiction tradition of having a Northern Italian policeman investigating in the South, prey to the Mafia and plagued by omertà (code of silence), Montalbano and his efficient team are all Sicilians. The range of crimes he investigates and the relation between the police force and the local population in Camilleri’s stories show a different Sicily, more homogeneous – for better or worse – with the rest of Italy and the entire world.

Exactly what did JULES MAIGRET do during the war? Jon Wilkins’s chapter on Georges Simenon’s phlegmatic French copper looks at his creator: Simenon the man and Simenon the writer. How did he square his own ethical beliefs with the aesthetics of writing? Wilkins investigates the claims of collaboration and anti-Semitism against Simenon and considers what Maigret would have been doing with those values during the war years. Simenon wrote six Maigret novels from 1939 to 1945, but not one of them mentioned the war. Is it over-simplistic to say that Simenon believed so much in the timeless format of novel writing that he didn’t consider the war was relevant to his stories – or was there a darker reason?

Michael Connelly’s Detective HIERONYMUS ‘HARRY’ BOSCH is a Los Angeles cop of the darkest hue; his origins (argues Darren Brooks) as complex as the city in his soul: born in the City of Angels to a prostitute murdered in his pre-teens, his early life was one of foster homes until the army intervened. Post-Vietnam, he returned to LA and its police force, the bomb damage of his childhood and military service combining with his early experiences as a beat cop to create a powerful cocktail of a detective: characterized and guided as much by vengeance and robust moral force as by civic obligation. Bosch’s bone-deep pessimism and tortured disposition – legitimated by the murder of his mother and subsequently wounded adolescence – reflect the principles of an established noir antihero. Brooks’s essay explores the ways in which the principles of noir fiction can co-exist with the traditional police procedural, and how a detective who stands as an avatar of both disciplines can reconcile his benign civic duty with a moral yearning for true justice.

The two key female detectives of Scandinavian TV drama are examined in portmanteau fashion by Jacky Collins: Søren Sveistrup’s SARAH LUND (Sofie Gråbøl playing the most significant of modern Nordic Noir police women in three seasons of Forbrydelsen/The Killing [DR1, 2007–12]); and a Scandinavian detective who would further confound our understanding of the female incarnation of deliverer of justice, Hans Rosenfeldt’s complex Saga NORÉN (Sofia Helin) from Broen/Bron/The Bridge (SVT1/DR1, 2011–ongoing). Both series are at once located within the establishment and, due to the two women’s distinct personality traits, are also placed at the margins of the conventional. As the series progress, we witness the manner in which Lund and Norén uneasily inhabit these dual arenas, via their interactions (or lack of the same) with those around them. Collins explores the notion of dysfunction as a prerequisite for these key female police protagonists of Scandinavian crime drama, and what this implies for the representation of female identity in this context.

Erin E. MacDonald examines the work of Ian Rankin, who published Knots and Crosses, the first of his Inspector JOHN REBUS novels in 1987, and has since become known as Scotland’s greatest living crime fiction author. Set in Edinburgh, the bestselling Rebus series defines what James Ellroy labelled the ‘Tartan Noir’ genre, with its roots in both Scottish literary traditions and American crime novels. A cross between the hardboiled loner detective and the urban policeman, Rebus reveals his vulnerability in every performance of the Scottish masculinity that he tries desperately to maintain in the face of a swiftly changing society. The Rebus novels, according to MacDonald, combine Scottish history and questions about Edinburgh’s dark past with clever plotting and careful characterization. Inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous Jekyll and Hyde character, Detective Inspector John Rebus is the epitome of the light/dark duality. Named after a type of puzzle, the man is as enigmatic as the mysteries he uncovers. Psychologically damaged by his army days and by a traumatic stint training for the sadistic SAS, he is unable to commit to any personal relationships, turns to alcohol to erase his nightmares, and lives by a moral code that often conflicts with proper police procedure.

David Platten examines the literary career of Chief Inspector JEAN-BAPTISTE ADAMSBERG, the detective now synonymous with the stories of Fred Vargas. He first appears in her 1991 novel, L’homme aux cercles bleus/The Chalk Circle Man, which is considered by aficionados to be her finest work. Here we encounter a method of detection owing little to the application of reason, logic, erudition, psychology or forensic science, though one which has served him and his creator well over the course of seven novels, one graphic novel and three short stories. And it is difficult to imagine quite how Poirot, Maigret, Scarpetta or Montalbano, or even the great Sherlock Holmes, might fare, faced with the prospect of investigating misdeeds involving werewolves, bubonic plagues, Roman gods, vampires and ghosts. Adamsberg operates in the outer realms of human experience. He attempts to connect with the liminal, the barely perceived sensory impression – the glint of a precious stone, perfume, patterns of soil around a tombstone –; flies in the ointment of ordered reality.

As one of the most beloved of all fictional detectives, featuring in Colin Dexter’s novels and the long-running ITV television series (1987–2000), Colin Dexter’s dyspeptic Oxford-based INSPECTOR MORSE provides the benchmark of an enduring character type: the melancholic loner, steeped in alcohol, high culture and humanism. My chapter considers Morse’s origins and legacy, and explores the quintessential ‘Britishness’ of Dexter’s creation. It also provides close analyses of Dexter’s influences and ethos, and discusses subsequent outgrowths of the franchise.

Håkan Nesser has written ten VAN VEETEREN novels, all translated into English. The order of the translated versions though is out of synch with the original publication order (which takes us from Det grovmaskiga nätet/The Mind’s Eye [1993] to Fallet G/The G File [2003]); the translations, too, follow in every case some considerable period after initial publication. Nesser seems here to be following the pattern laid down by Sjöwall and Wahlöö with a self-contained sequence of ten books written in a ten-year period, and Peter Messent examines how the series develops and to what thematic ends, focusing on the character of Van Veeteren as he moves from active police service into what we might call an equally active retirement. Messent also looks at the particular philosophical bent behind the character which makes him different from his contemporary fictional detective equivalents, and the particular tension between a commitment to the law and a commitment to justice which at times produces unexpected and boundary-breaking fictional results.

As Murray Pratt notes, there are an estimated 5 million speakers of Norwegian worldwide. By 2014, 23 million copies of Jo Nesbø’s HARRY HOLE novels (1997–2014) had been sold. Riding on the crest of Nordic Noir, it is the city of Oslo that, with few exceptions, figures prominently as the locus, the atmosphere, of the crimes investigated by Detective Harry Hole. Translation, and the Gothic-exotic, are paramount in understanding Nesbø’s global success. More than this, however, the persona of the frostbitten maverick, the worlds of corruption and delinquency he navigates and brings into ambivalent juxtaposition with the values and ethics to which he struggles to subscribe, are transnational in nature – negotiations across boundaries, histories and politics. The city maps supplied as prologue to many of the adventures contrasts with the international itineraries the narratives follow. Crime fiction is often considered as national allegory; however, Hole’s policing, it can be argued, applies via global circuits as a decoding of transnational connections and how they shape one locality. It is within this ambit that his variance from sociality and regulation, tenuous hyper-masculinity, detachments and attachments, absences and presences, can begin to be understood.

Stewart King explores the representation of Seville and Spain in Robert Wilson’s JAVIER FALCÓN series. Consisting of four books, The Blind Man of Seville (2003), The Silent and the Damned (2004; US title: The Vanished Hands), The Hidden Assassins (2006) and The Ignorance of Blood (2009), the series centres on the figure of Javier Falcón, ‘Inspector jefe del Grupo de homocidios’ in the Seville police force. As the title of the first book suggests, site and sight (or lack thereof) are closely linked as Wilson seeks to uncover the Seville hidden behind the romantic, tourist images of the Andalusian capital. Focusing on Falcón’s role as a guide, King examines the detective’s developing awareness of his and his country’s troubled past as well as its turbulent present.

My own essay on Henning Mankell’s KURT WALLANDER novels (1993–2013) is an examination of the influence of (and the multiple iterations of) the most iconic male character in Scandinavian crime fiction. It is notable, for instance, that following the various original Swedish television adaptations of the Wallander novels from the production company Yellow Bird (also responsible for the films based on the Millennium trilogy of Stieg Larsson [2004–07]), the same production company was involved in the production of the British series starring Kenneth Branagh (BBC, 2011–ongoing). English audiences were massively enthusiastic towards the latter, having no problems with a largely English cast, speaking English but set down in a genuine Swedish milieu. With the concept thus anglicized, British television audiences began to see Swedish locations such as Ystad as slightly more picturesque versions of, say, London or Manchester – it might be argued that the success of the show is down to this piquant synthesis of familiarity and novelty. Mankell’s continuing significance is examined in the context of the material it subsequently influenced.

Apart from the studies of individual detectives, a variety of thematic essays follow. Steven Peacock’s THE MAVERICK DETECTIVE discusses the enormous international success of Scandinavian crime fiction – Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo/Millennium series as novels and films, The Killing on television. Noting that the detective genre is experiencing a resurgence of popularity and acclaim, Peacock identifies and explores a recent adaptation within the genre itself: a marked return of the hard-edged maverick detective subgenre, as popularized in 1950s hardboiled PI novels and films, and in the Hollywood action thrillers of the 1970s. It also addresses the fact that in the United States and United Kingdom, rather than creating original protagonists (as was predominantly the case in the 1970s and 1980s), makers of contemporary film and television favour adaptations of novels featuring maverick detectives. Such adaptations are now more popular and numerous than at any time since the heyday of film noir in the 1940s and 1950s. In identifying recently recurrent types of modern mavericks, the chapter first considers why the maverick figure has re-emerged at this time, particularly in the United States and United Kingdom; second, explores sociopolitical currents coinciding with the re-emergence of the form; and third, reappraises the qualities in ‘literary/middlebrow’ texts such as Ian Rankin’s Rebus (1987–2012) and Henning Mankell’s Wallander series.

Alison Joseph’s REASON AND REDEMPTION : THE DETECTIVE IN THE SECULAR AGE explores the crime fiction phenomenon under the notion of ‘detective as priest’, arguing that in a secular age, the detective comes to fulfil a very human yearning to see order imposed upon chaos, to believe that redemption is possible, to get to the end of the story and find that the right thing happened after all. Quite often, too, the detective is in some sense other-worldly – single, an outsider, a ‘voice in the wilderness’. Writers need the detective to be the interface between our story, the truth as we wish to tell it, and the way our reader meets that story head on and imposes their own truth upon it. The detective as priest is therefore positioned mid-way between the reader’s need for life to have a structured, meaningful narrative, and the writer’s need for exactly the same.

Jamie Bernthal’s TALENT ENOUGH IN HIS PROFESSION: THE MALADROIT Detective considers a familiar figure in British detective fiction: the highly-ranked police official whose self-confidence is undented by his failure to read a crime scene. He invariably arrests the wrong person on circumstantial evidence, but has a good public reputation. Arthur Conan Doyle created an iconic example in 1887: Inspector Lestrade is less interested in catching criminals than in taking credit in the press. The character reflects a populist paranoia over professional policemen – trained men, not gentlemen, with unfettered access to private space. They were generally depicted as driven by money rather than justice. Throughout the early twentieth-century, the Doylean mould of British detective fiction thrived, but Scotland Yard was taken more seriously. This led to a tension in presentation: the policeman had to be sufficiently simple to require the sleuth’s assistance but also self-aware enough to show Scotland Yard in a positive light, as knowing its limits and consulting the expert.

THE NEW REGIONALISM IN CONTEMPORARY TELEVISION POLICE DRAMA by Jean Gregorek examines the fashion in which earlier cross-class detective duos and conflicts have largely been replaced in British detective series by cross-regional detective duos in the period of New Labour and after. Realist TV crime dramas supply the basis for Gregorek’s hypothesis, examining the George Gently series (BBC1, 2007–ongoing), Hinterland (BBC1, Wales/BBC4, 2013), Broadchurch (ITV, 2013–ongoing), Lewis (ITV, 2006–14), Happy Valley (BBC1, 2014) and Scott and Bailey (ITV, 2011); TV series in which class divisions and discourses have become muted in favour of regional differences, corresponding to the whole kindlier, gentler New Labour ‘We are all middle class’ rhetoric, and replaced (in Happy Valley and Hinterland at least) by an emphasis on social issues of rural depopulation, unemployment and austerity, but without representing class conflict or working-class resentment. But the above only hints at the wide range of issues addressed in the following pages. ∗

CASE STUDIES

INSPECTOR SALVO MONTALBANO

Barbara Pezzotti

INSPECTOR MORSE

Barry Forshaw

CHIEF INSPECTOR JULES MAIGRET

Jon Wilkins

DETECTIVE MARTIN BECK

Katarina Gregersdotter

DETECTIVE HARRY BOSCH

Darren Brooks

INSPECTOR KURT WALLANDER

Barry Forshaw

DETECTIVE INSPECTOR JOHN REBUS

Erin E. MacDonald

DETECTIVE HARRY HOLE

Murray Pratt

CHIEF INSPECTOR JAVIER FALCÓN

Stewart King

DETECTIVEs SARAH LUND & SAGA NORÉN

Jackie Collins

detective JEAN-BAPTISTE ADAMSBERG

David Platten

COMMANDER ADAM DALGLIESH

Lisa Fluet

DETECTIVE VAN VEETEREN

Peter Messent

INSPECTOR SALVO MONTALBANO

NATIONALITY: INTALIA / AUTHOR: ANDREA CAMILLERI

Barbara Pezzotti

Montalbano: A new detective for a new Sicily

The Sicilian Andrea Camilleri (b. 1925) is the most famous contemporary Italian crime writer. His highly entertaining series featuring Commissario (Inspector) Salvo Montalbano has won an enormous readership in Italy.¹ Camilleri’s books, set in an invented Sicilian village called Vigàta, and the subsequent TV series produced by the state TV RAI, to the revival of Italian crime fiction or giallo² in the 1990s and 2000s and the progressive shift from foreign crime fiction to local in the preferences of Italian readers.³ The Montalbano detective series has also enjoyed international recognition with translations in Greek, Norwegian, Turkish, Lithuanian, Japanese, Estonian, Hungarian and Gaelic, as well as in the most commonly used languages. Today Camilleri is considered one of the most popular contemporary writers in the world with an estimated 65 million books sold worldwide.

A great part of the international success of Andrea Camilleri’s series is due to Commissario Montalbano, an engaging character and a notably original figure in Italian crime fiction. Contrary to the giallo tradition of having a Northern policeman investigating in Southern regions prey to the Mafia and plagued by the omertà (code of silence), Montalbano and his efficient team are all Sicilians. Equally important, the detective not only successfully investigates deaths ordered by criminal organizations, but also looks into a wide range of bourgeois crimes that often intertwine with political intrigues, or are mistakenly taken for Mafia killings. Finally, the series features a fruitful relation between the police force and the local population with the latter not afraid to help in the investigation. It may be argued that by using a Sicilian detective and presenting a different Sicily, Camilleri confronts and subtly detonates a repository of clichés about Sicily and Sicilians. In so doing he also reacts against the rhetoric of the Northern League, a secessionist political party that rose to power in the 1990s under the aegis of deeply controversial Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.⁴

The ongoing Montalbano series was inaugurated in 1994 with La forma dell’acqua (translated as The Shape of the Water, 2002); that book was followed by 21 novels and several collections of short stories. The recurring format represents a synthesis of the standard police procedural and a classic puzzle scenario where all the clues are scattered throughout the story – and the solution often comes as a revelation to the Sicilian detective. Modelled on the figure of Simenon’s Inspector Jules Maigret, Montalbano is also a lover of fine cuisine and shares with his literary forefather a keen analytical mind and a penetrating insight into people’s behaviour. However, unlike Maigret, Montalbano lives alone near the sea, in a small villa at Marinella, a fictional suburb of the fictional village of Vigàta. He has a tempestuous long-distance relationship with his fiancée, Livia Burlando, who lives in the North of Italy. The series makes much play with Montalbano’s complicated private life, following a recurrent trend in recent crime fiction which registers a progressive shift ‘from investigation and case to protagonist and life’ (Molander Danielsson 2002: 148–49). This shift has allowed Priscilla L. Walton and Manina Jones to compare a variety of crime series to the autobiographical style of writing (Walton and Jones 1999: 153–54). Indeed, the series follows an aging Montalbano, who becomes more melancholic and disillusioned about the meaning and the usefulness of his job, and questions his relationship with Livia, his relatives and friends. In this sense he is very different from Maigret, whose relationship with his wife is unproblematic in the Simenon series. Montalbano is also notably different from Leonardo Sciascia’s fictional detectives whose private lives are either non-existent or are never discussed in the novels.

The dissimilarities between Sciascia’s and Camilleri’s crime novels are particularly intriguing. Fellow Sicilian Sciascia (1921–1989) was a much-acclaimed master of Italian crime fiction and the first Italian author to provide a lucid and measured analysis of the role of the Mafia within Italian politics and society. He also drew attention to the many flaws in Italian politics in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, and meditated upon the meaning of justice and power, and the relationship between the Catholic Church and the state.⁵ Among his books are some internationally known crime novels, translated into several languages, including English, French, Spanish and German. In his crime novels Il giorno della civetta (1961; translated first as Mafia Vendetta in 1963 and then republished as The Day of the Owl, 1984) and A ciascuno il suo (1966; first translated as A Man’s Blessing in 1968 and then as To Each His Own, 1992) in particular, the two investigators, respectively Captain Bellodi and the amateur detective Professor Laurana, investigate Mafia crimes.⁶ In both novels, the detective is a disempowered figure who is defeated by the Mafia. The police detective Bellodi is a foreigner combating a hostile social environment, and is ultimately being transferred back to the North of Italy, while the Sicilian Laurana is unable to deal with a gangrene that is infecting his homeland, and is mocked by his fellow villagers before finally being murdered. Since the