Department of English and American Studies Influences of Golden Age

Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Bc. Agáta Hamari Influences of Golden Age and Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction on “Robert Galbraith” Master’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: Jeffrey Alan Smith, M.A., Ph.D. 2016 1 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Author’s signature 2 I would like to thank my supervisor, Jeff Smith, for his support and guidance. A big thank you to my family and Martina, Lenka, and Eliška, my friends. The biggest thank you to Jakub, my everything. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS 1 Introduction ............................................................................................................... 5 2 Detective Fiction ....................................................................................................... 7 2.1 Detective Fiction and Its Beginnings ................................................................ 7 2.2 Detective Fiction of the Golden Age ................................................................. 9 2.3 Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction ......................................................................... 14 2.4 “Robert Galbraith” ........................................................................................... 20 3 The Plots: Summaries and Analyses ....................................................................... 22 3.1 The Cuckoo’s Calling ..................................................................................... 22 3.2 The Silkworm ................................................................................................... 27 3.3 Career of Evil ................................................................................................... 33 4 Characters ................................................................................................................ 38 4.1 The Great Detective ........................................................................................ 38 4.2 The Sidekick ..................................................................................................... 44 4.3 The Police ......................................................................................................... 47 4.4 The Murderers and Their Motives ................................................................... 51 5 Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 55 6 Works Cited ............................................................................................................. 59 4 1 INTRODUCTION “Death in particular seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of innocent amusement than any other single subject.” This 1934 quote by Dorothy L. Sayers (qtd. in James) clearly describes the fascination with detective fiction which persists to this day. Although it could be argued that the fascination is not limited to the English-speaking population of the world, it is the English and Americans who have written the best-known detective stories; especially in the so-called Golden Age of detective fiction and the hard-boiled genre of crime fiction. This thesis will be dealing with the novels by J. K. Rowling written under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, which is going to be the author’s name used in this thesis. In the three novels, The Cuckoo’s Calling (2013), The Silkworm (2014), and Career of Evil (2015), there are a number of aspects which seem to reference the two subgenres of detective fiction mentioned above, and the thesis will focus on tracing these influences. In The Cuckoo’s Calling, Galbraith’s Great Detective Cormoran Strike is introduced and investigates the murder of a famous supermodel which was previously ruled out as a suicide. The novel seems to follow a classic Golden Age detective fiction pattern, from its plot and the manner in which clues are presented to the reader to the surprising ending and revelation of the murderer. The Silkworm deals with Strike’s investigation of the disappearance of a notorious writer, which later turns into a murder investigation as well. In this novel Galbraith presents the reader with a closed circle of suspects, which is another Golden Age device used in his novels. The plot of Career of Evil focuses on a serial killer who is obsessed with Strike – something that can be seen in Agatha Christie’s The ABC Murders or as early as the stories of Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty. However, although the plots of the novels are very much “Golden Age”, the character of the Great Detective and the circumstances under which he is living seem to 5 be influenced much more by the hard-boiled stories of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett. There are several other detective fiction stock characters in the novels, too, and the relationship of the detective with these characters will be examined: most notably it will be Robin Ellacott, who is Strike’s secretary and subsequently sidekick. The thesis is, excluding the introducing and concluding chapters, divided into three chapters. The first chapter focuses on detective fiction as a genre and is divided in four sub-chapters: the history of the genre, detective stories of the Golden Age, hard-boiled detective fiction, and an introduction of the three novels by Robert Galbraith. Julian Symons’s Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel and P. D. James’s Talking about Detective Fiction will be used as the main reference materials for the history of the genre and the description of the Golden Age and hard-boiled subgenres of detective fiction. The second chapter is divided in three sub-chapters while each of them focuses on the plots of the individual novels by Galbraith. The third chapter is devoted to the individual characters in the novels and is divided in four parts: the Great Detective, the sidekick, the police, and the murderers. There the characters mentioned will be analysed in relation to their counterparts in Golden Age and hard- boiled novels. 6 2 DETECTIVE FICTION 2.1 Detective Fiction and Its Beginnings Detective fiction is a distinctive genre of literature which is concerned with a mystery within the story – usually a murder – which is investigated by a detective and which the reader is supposed to solve according to clues presented to them by the author. In her book Talking about Detective Fiction, P. D. James offers a definition of the genre: What we can expect is a central mysterious crime, usually murder; a closed circle of suspects each with motive, means, and opportunity for the crime; a detective, either amateur or professional, who comes in like an avenging deity to solve it; and, by the end of the book, a solution which the reader should be able to arrive at by logical deduction from clues inserted in the novel with deceptive cunning but essential fairness. (James 15) Another definition is provided by W. H. Auden in Julian Symons’s book Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: “The basic formula is this: a murder occurs; many are suspected; all but one suspect, who is the murderer, are eliminated; the murderer is arrested or dies” (Symons 14). These definitions apply largely to the detective story of the so-called Golden Age of detective fiction and not as much to the later developed genres such as the hard-boiled school, but they also apply to the stories of Robert Galbraith. But before all these stories saw the light of day, there were other writers who helped shape the genre as we know it today. Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Murders in the Rue Morgue is considered to be the first modern detective story and Poe himself has been called “father of detection” (Symons 35). The story features the first “Great Detective” C. Auguste Dupin, who 7 shares many traits with later Great Detectives such as Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot, and is narrated by a sidekick of the detective, which is another common detective story feature. More importantly, as stated by Heather Worthington in the “From the Newgate Calendar to Sherlock Holmes” chapter of A Companion to Crime Fiction, the story “not only [offers] a rational explanation of a mystery or solution to a crime, but also [sets] in place narrative and thematic patterns that are still apparent in modern crime fiction” (Worthington 22). These narratives are “not the straightforward pursuit of the criminal […] but something new – an intelligent analysis of facts that leads to a resolution, a process of inductive thought” (Worthington 22). The way Poe makes his Great Detective investigate the crime later becomes a model for the manner in which other Great Detectives work. The novel which is considered to be the first detective novel written in the English language is Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, described by T. S. Eliot as “the first, the longest, and the best” of modern detective novels (James 23). Rather unusually, the central crime is not a murder but a theft of a large diamond. However, it does feature police officers who are just incompetent enough to come to a wrong solution for the crime, which then has to be investigated by an amateur detective. The setting of the story is an isolated house – a trend later seen in many Golden Age detective stories – and the plot includes a number of “red herrings”: clues which are designed to set the reader off their path to the right solution. Perhaps the best-known detective preceding the detectives

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