Holmes in the Empire: Postcolonial Textual

Home , Anjan Dutt, Baritsu, Bijoya Ray, Byomkesh (franchise), Byomkesh (web series), Dibakar Banerjee

HOLMES IN THE EMPIRE:

POSTCOLONIAL TEXTUAL AUTHORITY, TRANSCULTURAL ADAPTATION, AND CRIME FICTION AS WORLD LITERATURE

Michael Brandon Harris-Peyton

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the University of Delaware in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English

Summer 2019

HOLMES IN THE EMPIRE:

POSTCOLONIAL TEXTUAL AUTHORITY, TRANSCULTURAL ADAPTATION, AND CRIME FICTION AS WORLD LITERATURE

Michael Brandon Harris-Peyton

Approved: ______John R. Ernest, Ph.D. Chair of the Department of English

Approved: ______John Pelesko, Ph.D. Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences

Approved: ______Douglas J. Doren, Ph.D. Interim Vice Provost for Graduate and Professional Education and Dean of the Graduate College

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that in my opinion it meets the academic and professional standard required by the University as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Signed: ______Emily S. Davis, Ph.D. Professor in charge of dissertation

Signed: ______Thomas M. Leitch, Ph.D. Professor in charge of dissertation

Signed: ______Siobhan Carroll, Ph.D. Member of the dissertation committee

Signed: ______Stewart King, Ph.D. External member of the dissertation committee

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank my advisors, Emily S. Davis and Thomas Leitch. I am eternally grateful to Emily Davis for her generosity with her time, her capacity to glean the best ideas from a roving discussion, and for pushing me to be a better postcolonialist. For first introducing me to the academic study of crime fiction, genre and adaptations, for supporting my theoretical claims while simultaneously challenging them, and for his limitless capacity to correct punctuation in drafts, I am indebted to Thomas Leitch.

I also want to thank my dissertation committee. I thank Siobhan Carroll for patiently reading several very rough drafts, encouraging me to explicitly state my interventions, and reminding me that there is writing beyond the academy. For shepherding spin-off articles related to this project through conferences and publication, and for his patience with international post, I thank Stewart King.

I also want to thank the Department of English at the University of Delaware, for funding all the writing time, research trips, and conference travel that fueled this project.

I reserve a particular thank-you to the department chair, John Ernest, for patiently listening to a young graduate student who, years ago, came to his office to see what he thought of this project and its punny title.

There are countless others to thank: Gabriella Ibieta, Abioseh Porter, Jennifer

Yusin, and Stacey Ake, who collectively set me on the path of postcolonial genre critique as an undergraduate at Drexel University. My friends varied acts of emotional and moral

iv support. My parents and in-laws, for believing in the project, and in me. My students, who reminded me to take my own writing advice. Fellow crime fiction enthusiasts, like

Andrew Pepper, Patrick Deer, Louise Nilsson, and Jesper Gulddal, who engaged with this project’s ideas and made academic conferences less intimidating. It takes a village to raise a dissertation.

For first sharing with me a pencil-annotated English translation of Satyajit Ray’s

Feluda mysteries, for tolerating my tendency to do research all night and sleep during the day, and for explaining her husband’s obsession with postcolonial crime fiction to friends and relatives, I especially want to thank my wife, Pujashree Das.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

TABLE OF FIGURES ...... viii ABSTRACT ...... ix

Chapter

1. A STUDY IN CRISIS ...... 1

1.1 An Unrequired Introduction ...... 1 1.2 A Case History of Originality ...... 7 1.3 The Object of Investigation ...... 19 1.4 Witnesses and Methods...... 22 1.5 Enter the Detective ...... 35 1.6 The Plan of Investigation ...... 42

REFERENCES ...... 48

2. THE SIGN OF THE FORE ...... 54

2.1 Colonizing the Textual Past ...... 54 2.2 The Empire Looks Back ...... 59 2.3 Transatlantic Roads All Lead to Holmes ...... 74 2.4 Disinterring Textual Bones ...... 84 2.5 Neither Kith nor Kin in England ...... 94

REFERENCES ...... 99

3. CASES OF IDENTITY ...... 101

3.1 Rehistorizing Detective Fiction ...... 101 3.2 Critical Circulation, Strategic Subordination ...... 106 3.3 The Price of Entry: Cheng Xiaoqing’s Authorship ...... 113 3.4 The Guru and the Indian Holmes: Ray’s Homage ...... 123 3.5 Signs of Alterity: Huo Sang and Feluda as Uncomfortably Holmesian . 134 3.6 Rehistorization and Its Discontents ...... 148

REFERENCES ...... 151

4. THE SPECULED BRANDS ...... 156

4.1 Local Traditions, Refashioned Genres ...... 156 4.2 Tropic Justice, Tropic Adaptation...... 161 4.3 Byomkesh Bakshi: Truth-Seeking Without State Justice ...... 165 4.4 Bakshi Via Feluda’s Ray ...... 178 4.5 Feluda: Incidental Justice and States of Exception in Emergency India 186 4.6 Huo Sang: Justice-Seeking Without the Truth...... 199 4.7 Reference Versus Reverence ...... 215

REFERENCES ...... 218

5. THE FINAL PROBLEM, DEFERRED ...... 221

5.1 Reintegration: Into the Cultural Commons ...... 221 5.2 The Curious Case of the Period Revival ...... 232 5.3 The Contemporary Reboot Mystery ...... 246 5.4 The Eighty-Seven Percent Solution: On Fandom, Copyright, and Authority ...... 261 5.5 Holmes in the Cultural Commons ...... 267 5.6 Coda: World Literatures, Postcolonial Authorship, and Democracy ..... 271

REFERENCES ...... 279

vii

TABLE OF FIGURES

Figure 1: The table of contents as listed in the 1941 edition of Haycraft’s Murder for Pleasure...... 79

viii

ABSTRACT

Scholarly and popular discussions of detective fiction, and crime fiction largely, tend to place Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories at the center of the genre.

That centralized model of the genre, where Holmes stories are afforded genre- establishing power, is maintained despite resistance from the genre’s constituent texts and historical realities. This Anglocentric model positions the genre as a British product with all other traditions existing as solely responses to or localizations of a Western genre.

This dissertation analyzes how genre texts challenge conventional notions of authorship, nationality, and literary value using this Anglocentric, Sherlock Holmes-focused model of the detective fiction genre as a case study. Ultimately, this project suggests alternative, non-hierarchical models of authorship, genre, and textual authority based on approaches in postcolonial criticism, world literature, and adaptation studies.

The first chapter identifies a “crisis of originality” in the academic humanities: an awareness that conventional notions of authorship and national literary tradition are unsustainable, but a reluctance to abandon those concepts because of their historical value in organizing scholarly work. This crisis is made visible via the Holmesian case study—how the history of, and intertextual relationships within, detective fiction interact with the prevailing, Anglocentric narrative of the genre. The second chapter rereads histories of that genre, like those by Sayers, Haycraft, and Ascari, noting that historical complexities of the genre’s transnational development are replaced with narratives that

ix privilege anglophone texts and a colonial model of original-and-response. The third and fourth chapters read colonial and postcolonial detective fiction in India and China—

Satyajit Ray’s Feluda mysteries, Saradindu Bandyopadhyay’s Bakshi stories, and the crime fiction of Cheng Xiaoqing—to examine how they deploy intertextual relationships to Holmes to gain access to audiences and textual authority even as their finer textual details resist that Anglocentric narrative. The fifth and final chapter examines multimedia adaptations of Holmes and the postcolonial detectives, as well as their internet fandoms, to explore emerging models of the genre, and of authorship and textual authority, which displace the Anglocentric model and its conventional notions of authorship and national literary categories.

Chapter 1

A STUDY IN CRISIS

1.1 An Unrequired Introduction

“Sherlock Holmes requires no introduction.” This notion, reiterated by myriad scholarly introductions to edited collections, undergraduate essays, and fan websites has two nearly universal properties. First, it tends to initiate those same introductions it marks as unnecessary; second, it signals the beginning of a sort of discursive gymnastics where

Sherlock Holmes must be described but is (the speaker assumes) already known.

“Sherlock Holmes,” the words themselves, possess a sort of iconic power—they call forth the character, the Sherlockian canon of Doyle’s stories, the genre around those stories, popular adaptations of those stories, and the archetype of the detective as eccentric genius. They also, famously, might be used to sarcastically denote when someone is being obtuse. Remarkably, the significance “Sherlock Holmes” does not even depend on a person’s experience of the Sherlockian canon itself—it is a meme, its meaning can be learned without the direct experience of where it comes from.

The “requires no introduction” maneuver reliably masks an anxiety about “where it comes from”—why Sherlock Holmes is the signifier for the meme, the character, the archetype, and the genre. Even when this move is not explicitly present, when instead

Sherlock Holmes is only implied not to need an introduction, this same discursive anxiety exists. It must quickly be set aside, buried, or explained away in order to continue; a 1 lexical sleight of hand is required. For instance, the writer of the dust-jacket description for Leslie Klinger’s The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes had to begin with this sleight of hand straightaway. “If Sherlock Holmes is not the greatest detective in the history of literature,” the dustjacket’s very first sentence asserts,

there is little doubt that he is the most beloved. Tales of his brilliant use of observation and deduction to solve the most unusual and sensational crimes first appeared in the pages of the Strand[1] magazine in the late nineteenth century. The reading public quickly embraced the whodunits of Holmes and his colleague, Dr. John H. Watson, with a fervor that surpassed all other detective stories in history, electrifying Victorian readers everywhere, and Holmes soon became the quintessential detective.

The author of the dustjacket manages to expertly blend history and elision, though it’s unclear whether this blend is intentional, since the terminology does resemble, in an uncanny way, the earlier descriptions of Sherlock Holmes’ entry into popular culture I examine in chapter two. The easy but fundamentally uncertain linkage of the criteria for

“greatest detective” and “most beloved” sets up a series of innocent juxtapositions that substitute for a process. Holmes “appeared” in the Strand, and the “reading public” embrace, first, the texts (the “whodunits”—a genre2) and then the characters themselves with a “fervor” greater than that of any prior manifestation of the detective character.

Holmes becomes the “quintessential detective” because he was popular. What made

Holmes, and the Holmes stories, popular and resonant with the reading public is erased

1 Notably, the first Sherlock Holmes story, the novel A Study in Scarlet, was actually published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual, 1887. However, the idea that the character became popular only after the publication of the short story “A Scandal in Bohemia” in the Strand in 1891 is a fundamental dogma of both contemporary studies of Holmes, and in histories of the genre. 2 Oddly enough, very few Holmes stories are actually “whodunits,” but the fact that the dustjacket feels as if it must name a subgenre at all is more interesting, for this study, than whether it names the correct one. 2 using syntax alone—the abstract subject in the phrase “the reading public quickly embraced” appears to answer the question while actually avoiding it.

In the process, however, the blurb does reveal the source of its anxiety—it must confront the fact that Holmes, while “the quintessential detective,” was not the first detective and did not emerge from a cultural vacuum. The popularity of the character

(again, an unexplained popularity) guarantees a primacy of attention, if not a chronological primacy. Holmes became quintessential because he was popular; Holmes was popular because he was better, Holmes was better because he was the quintessential detective. The question of how Holmes got to be the icon, the meme, and the archetype— of the actual historical-material processes that provided this series of texts primacy over other texts, which must now exist in relation to Holmes—is trapped in a closed loop of superlatives.

This anxiety pops up again in the early pages of Klinger’s influential edition of the Holmes texts. John le Carré’s introduction interrupts itself to deal with this anxiety— after reflecting on the characters and their dynamics, he begins a new paragraph by positing that “[n]o amount of literary study, thank Heaven, no earnest dissertations from the literary bureaucracy, will ever explain why we love one writer’s voice above another’s” (LeCarré xiii). His theory for why Holmes is so beloved is Doyle’s capacity for “narrative perfection” (xiii); le Carré’s appeal to the ineffability of “perfection” and the texts’ alleged inability to be explained by study shuts down the question. It also, incidentally, permits le Carré to propose his own theory, couched in the vague terminology of the aesthetic and the groundlessly evaluative—to provide, in other words, an answer which can neither be substantiated nor contested. In the terms of pop

3 psychology, this is avoidance behavior. Tellingly, Leslie Klinger’s own preface, placed just before le Carré’s, manifests a different response—explicit and contradictory disavowal of the discussion it is participating in. Despite offering an excellent and extensively footnoted edition, with an “extensive bibliography,” illustrations and commentary, his edition is “not a work for the serious student of Arthur Conan Doyle”

(Klinger xii). It is the closest any introduction has come, in my experience, to simply saying “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Here, I intend to talk about it—the “it” here being the continued centrality of

Sherlock Holmes to an entire genre and its history. This position—this Anglocentric model for crime fiction as a genre—marks even contemporary scholarship on detective or crime fiction. It is also symptomatic of a politics of genre, and a more global politics of access, that marks not only detective fiction but globe-spanning networks of genres and texts—but more on that momentarily. At its most basic, this Anglocentric history of the detective fiction genre is the product of a historiographic reconfiguration, an effort to place Sherlock Holmes at the genre’s center, functioning as a point of origin without being “the first” entry in the genre. This historical reconfiguration has been traced in several recent scholarly works, and in works reaching as far back as the early twentieth century. These scholarly works are willing, on occasion, to challenge the status of

Holmes as “first” or as the originator of this or that trope, but they are consistently unwilling to move Sherlock Holmes from the center of the genre itself. Likewise, new works in the genre are subordinated to (or, at least, made to exist in perpetual reference to) Holmes by virtue of this structure for the genre—but, rather than decenter Holmes, they make use of this subordinate position. The history of the genre, as it exists, is

4 marked by an anxiety about origins—and it is marked so because placing its origins in

Holmes is heuristically and politically useful but also obviously problematic. This anxiety drives three central questions in this work: why did the history get reconfigured in this way? Why is it so useful that we continue to sustain it despite its obvious (and some less obvious) problems? How can we get away from these problems? These three driving questions apply both to the Holmes canon specifically, and to the field of literary studies generally. Contemporary scholarship on the history of the genre, like those by Maurizio

Ascari or Stephen Knight are typically oriented toward balancing the replacement of an ostensibly false genre-history with a more accurate one while illustrating the invariable usefulness of Holmes as a genre-center. Instead, my inquiry here turns to the politics and motives for that balancing act, to explain the drive to configure and maintain that troublesome history and genre map, and to explore the consequences, costs and failures of that maintenance.

The centrality of Doyle’s stories to the “reconfigured” genre history position them, along with other texts articulating a relationship to Holmes-as-origin, as sites where the actual development of the genre and that preferred artificial history intersect. The complex transnational production of Holmes, I argue, is reconfigured (both in traditional histories by Haycraft, Sayers, and others, and in more contemporary scholarship) to serve a narrative in which the Holmes stories are the original detective stories even if they’re not the first detective stories, and their immediate location of origin (imperial Britain) has sole or special claim to valued or original productions in that tradition and genre. This forces all generically-connected texts (even predecessors) into a subordinate literary and

5 historical position—subordinate to Holmes and metonymically subordinate to Victorian

British literary-creative (and sometimes even juridical) power.

A historically unsustainable but convenient fetishization of originality and cultural ownership, pervading the academic humanities, motivates and supports this historical reconfiguration while also creating the anxiety I’ve illustrated here. This historical reconfiguration serves a persistently colonial power structure in which imperial

Victorian Britain, as the core, possesses the textual authority to produce originals and all other times and places, as peripheries, produce responses. The anxiety that marks critical and historical discourse on the genre (and beyond it) is produced by the fragility of that power structure and the potential consequences of its failure on a variety of academic and cultural narratives. In short, the initial usefulness of the reconfigured genre history is to sustain a strikingly colonial model of who is allowed access to textual authority—i.e. the ability to author—and the quality of “originality” that enables that authority, in detective- driven crime fiction or elsewhere. Anxieties and fissures begin to appear when the notion of originality is challenged, when notions of authorial ownership of an idea are subverted.

Historically, even when these notions are challenged, they remain useful, and so they must be constantly (and often simultaneously) acknowledged, disavowed and maintained.

These relationships reveal the complicated historical and generic processes that underlie an ostensibly straightforward (and fundamentally counterfactual) history and schematic for the genre.

An attention to the relations that subsequent or (allegedly) subordinate works articulate to the Holmes ur-text, particularly in a world literary or postcolonial context, reveals how the processes of textual circulation, cultural or linguistic translation and,

6 most powerfully, adaptation exposes and challenges this Eurodiffusionist (specifically

Victorian Anglodiffusionist, or Anglocentric) model of the detective genre and the notion of originality in itself. Ultimately, if detective fiction texts are made—through an act of scholarly history or popular branding—to serve a colonial, hierarchical textual agenda, details in the texts themselves reveal that they do so uncomfortably. These oft-overlooked details expose the failure of notions of authorial originality, national literary production and colonial mimicry to describe the relations of these texts to their predecessors. This phenomenon, in turn, exposes assumptions beyond detective fiction—assumptions about the merit and importance of texts that determine what gets scholarly attention, which texts get to access global marketplaces, who gets to be an author, and what constitutes the

“world” in world literature. Pulling on loose threads in the Sherlock Holmes problem, in other words, has implications well beyond Holmes’ genre and field of interest. It exposes the politics of literary value and originality and that politics’ impact on our economies of attention—what texts are important for studying or consuming, who makes them, and how we get (or don’t get) to consume them.

1.2 A Case History of Originality

I intend to discuss Sherlock Holmes’ genre-organizing position, and its wider implications on notions of originality and textual authority, primarily in phenomenological terms—the process and its attendant anxieties manifest here, it produces a readable response there; they are marked by elisions or absences, and tolerated because the product remains useful. The primary work of the first half of this study is to make this anxiety legible, and to make it inform how we read texts that

7 articulate a relationship to both the Holmes canon and a globe-spanning detective fiction genre. The object of the second half is to trace that relationship with the constructed “text of origin” in those works which might be (and often are) marked in subordinate terms, in order to demonstrate that historically, it was often more beneficial to deploy that hierarchical or colonial relationship subversively than to challenge it directly. Both halves of this work are staunchly oriented around textual artifacts—print fiction, introductions, translator’s notes, films, genre histories, websites, fandom products—and what they might be seen as doing. Rather like the tension between the preferred historical narrative and the actual history, however, the implications of this study refuse to be confined to a series of cases, and so phenomenology blends into theory. The anxiety about detective fiction and Holmes is symptomatic of a larger, more abstract problem, and the textual artifacts investigated in this work offer the potential to work through or perhaps finally exit from that problem. This problem is central to the academic work of English departments and their various alternate incarnations, and to the humanities more broadly; however, rather like the Sherlockians, scholars have gotten very good at disavowing and working around the problem. This problem, to put it succinctly, is originality.

On the face of it, this hardly seems like it deserves the title “problem” or

“crisis”—originality, at least in common understanding, is taken for granted. However, it might be fair to say that literary and cultural studies have been wrestling with the concept since the very first English programs were piloted in Scottish and colonial universities.

Other members of the larger field of the humanities have fixated on the concept for a longer span—the law (particularly anglophone Common Law’s view on intellectual property), art, history, philosophy and particularly aesthetics have been more explicit in

8 their fascination with originality. The problem with originality is that it is central to how the field is organized and judged to be “obvious” while not, in fact, being clear or obvious at all.3 It is not at all clear, if one stops taking the concept for granted, whether texts and artifacts are promoted, studied, licensed, and sold because they are original or if they are marked original because they have been promoted, studied, licensed and sold. I argue, in essence, that the presence of the second as even a possibility is the best evidence for it—that originality, as a concept, is used as a way to avoid taking a critical look at the politics and processes behind how something gets access to critical attention, praise, publication and distribution. It avoids sticky discussions about influence and genre and substitutes an aesthetic quality for questions of access. While the desired or assumed relationship between originality, influence, and genre has been codified in several competing ways, via either explicit theoretical discussions or through frequent uncritical use within and beyond the academy, the variety of approaches, and the constant return to the problem, demonstrates that the actual interaction between these concepts is not at all clear. Originality, as a touchstone for textual value, consigns these interactions to an impenetrable black box, replacing a complex system with an individuated, fundamental concept that is difficult to question and even harder to define.

It’s not surprising, then, that having such a slippery ideological linchpin—a particularly floaty floating signifier—produces all sorts of ostensibly distinct but interrelated anxieties in the study of cultural artifacts and texts. Many of literary and

3 The legal concept of originality in U.S. and U.K. patent law is predicated on precedent and a juridical case-by-case interpretation of what constitutes an original and creative effort on the part of the authoring agency. As in literary studies, the simple, defined concept belies an extensive politics and a continuous process of negotiation and redefinition. 9 cultural studies’ most influential texts are shaped by an encounter with originality, its paradoxical implications, and the anxiety this instability produces. The broad sampling of influential scholarly texts that follows reflects the long disciplinary and historical reach of originality’s disruptive influence.

For instance, we might understand Walter Benjamin’s idea of “aura” in the influential essay “The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility” as a conceptual tool to differentiate the experience of an original artifact and its copy. This move replaces the ineffable “originality” with a nearly synonymous ineffable feeling or presence, the “aura.” This substitution of “originality,” or some aspect of it, for “aura” creates a series of productive problems in Benjamin’s influential essay. That the person experiencing an object would have to know that they were looking at an original or a copy (or more precisely, they would have to be told) in order to perceive the aura implies that, without context or a historical narrative, there is nothing to differentiate the human experience of an original art object from an experience of an exact copy. Perhaps this is why Benjamin aligns “aura” with context itself—one needs experience of the context to understand the context. It is instructive that “aura” seems to function as both the quality of singular originality and as the possession of a context. There is an equally fascinating and productive problem with the extensibility of the idea of the art object itself, questions thankfully taken up by performance theory, adaptation studies, and other theoretical approaches: where, for instance, is a text object or a filmic object located? Have I, in reading mass market paperbacks and going to movie theaters, only ever experienced copies, or is the original object virtual, and therefore infinitely instantiated? If aura is the quality of being imbedded in cultural tradition, of having a context, then how can

10 mechanical reproductions and copies not have an aura, as the product of labor (even if it’s mechanical labor) in a cultural context? Each copy, each transcription, performance, translation, adaptation or recording, becomes a distinct art object and experience on its own.

These questions, and the subsequent scholarly attempts at answering them, are integral to Benjamin’s continued scholarly influence. The “aura” model, with its ambiguities, exposes a disciplinary anxiety about where (and by whom) the “real art” is created and who and where the copy is manufactured. This is not to say that Benjamin’s larger argument in his essay is somehow wrongheaded—only that the distinction between copy and original becomes an increasingly prominent and unstable site of discussion, furnishing an accessible encounter with the problem of originality, albeit in other terms, for literary scholars and grad students. As critical responses and successors to Benjamin’s argument make clear, the anxiety refuses to be contained and set aside. Relabeling it as

“aura,” or confining discussion to a particular kind of cultural artifact, though useful as a way of identifying an encounter with this phenomenon (as this work does with its attention to the Holmesian genre), risks disguising a larger problem as a series of smaller ones.

My use of the term “anxiety” whenever an encounter with the concept of originality has to be dealt with comes from another influential, though dated, branch of literary scholarship. These more recent (though not necessarily contemporary) works fall into a subtly different tendency than Benjamin’s theoretical aesthetics: they tended to talk about the problem, or to atomize it, focusing on a specific manifestation of the larger crisis rather than acknowledge the crisis systematically. This move is fundamental to the

11 genre of academic or scholarly writing—an issue must be materialized in the scholar’s field, after all—but this often meant that a symptom of the encounter in a particular authorial canon or genre was taken for the central problem. Part of the objective of this study is to find a method for using a canon or genre to investigate the problem without succumbing to this particular issue.

For instance, Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence and Gilbert and Gubar’s

The Madwoman in the Attic take an author-oriented approach to the problem of originality, permitting them to couch the crisis in personal and Freudian psychological terms (like “anxiety” itself) and to restrict its long-reaching consequences to one of the preferred objects of study in the (aptly named) humanities: the Romantically-imagined,

Enlightenment-created individual human author, and the texts they have privileged access to and authority over as intellectual property. In effect, however, author-centered arguments surrender their extensibility and limit their larger applicability by depending on a fundamental aspect of the idea of originality: that unrealistic figure of the lone,

Romantic author. Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence confronts the problem of how an author becomes an author by assuming that there is some distinction, or at least a spectrum, between an original text and a text which has been influenced by others. The titular anxiety of influence is, according to Bloom, a response to the realization that the same authors and texts which inspire a person to author a text of their own pose a direct threat to the new text’s (and the new author’s) authority as a creator of original things.

Using a series of poets as a case study, Bloom identifies a process of both nurturing and disavowing a history of influence. In Bloom’s case, only “strong poets” have crossed the

(arbitrary and unsubstantiated) boundary between derivative and truly creative work by

“wrestl[ing] with their strong predecessors.” These strong poets “make that history [of influence] by misreading one another, so as to clear imaginative space for themselves”

(Bloom 5). Aspiring authors must enter the literary tradition by acknowledging and being inspired by predecessors, and by deeming them worthy of mention and misreading; then, they must disavow that predecessor by that act of that misreading and thereby conceal or destroy the history of influence. “The argument of this book,” Bloom notes, is the existence of an inevitable battle between “priority” (the “natural” chronological order of texts and authors) and “authority” (the “spiritual” or influential hierarchy of texts and authors) (Bloom 9-10). My work in this study might be understood as an odd reconfiguration of this battle—the conflict between actual historical-material conditions and the authority-driven, author-centered narrative of literary history that erases those conditions to serve a colonial, Anglocentric cultural politics.

Bloom, notably, confines his “battle” (and its consequences) to the field of anglophone poetry specifically—the consequence of the anxiety’s inescapability and the inevitability of conflict with the predecessor is that “poetry in our tradition, when it dies, will be self-slain, murdered by its own past strength” (Bloom 10). This inevitable loss permits Bloom to sustain a politics and aesthetics based on the notion that art is capable of an objective decline in quality and is therefore subject to non-arbitrary evaluative standards. This assertion enables the politics of canonicity that Bloom would later make a public career out of, one that becomes untenable if it is extended beyond Bloom’s initial argument. If authors, in general, are doomed to a conflict between priority and authority, and doomed to lose that conflict, then authorship rapidly transforms into replication and all cultural production is a degenerate form of its predecessors—authority is revealed as

13 increasingly arbitrary, and therefore the “strong” authors Bloom prefers are placed in the same category as the unspecified “weak” ones. This collapse between copy and original, author and copycat, is both Bloom’s greatest problem and the source of much of his influence on the field—countless scholars have (justifiably) taken up arms against his work using this collapse as the point of entry. To put a generation of counterarguments succinctly, in Bloom’s critical system, originality is a necessary condition for authorship, but originality is also fundamentally impossible because of the inescapability of literary influence. Bloom’s disavowal of his own argument’s extensibility in The Anxiety of

Influence, his move to explicitly limit the discussion to English poets, can be read as an attempt (successful or not) to save the work from an encounter with originality’s inherent instability on the scale of an entire field.

Gilbert and Gubar’s work in The Madwoman in the Attic, while clearly referring to Bloom’s anxiety of influence (xiii), should not be read solely as a response to that work. While departing from much of Bloom’s politics and aesthetics, it is still centered on the idea that an individual human must be responsible, and must assert responsibility, over any particular produced text. The new anxiety of authorship, however, represents “a radical fear that she cannot create”—it grows out of the female inversion of Bloom’s

Freudian masculine author. Instead of the anxiety that one will be inferior to, or consumed by, predecessors producing the conflict, as in Bloom, the anxiety of authorship is the fear that authorship is impossible and that entry into the canon as someone else’s

“precursor” will not therefore be permitted (48-49). The newly added limitation of sex

(the female author will be isolated from the canon because she is female) takes the place of Bloom’s limitation to English poets. This permits the authors to settle their argument

14 within feminist criticism and politics, asserting “a quite different literary subculture” for women authors (50), strategically framing a field-affecting crisis within a circumscribed set of cases and analytical methods. Gilbert and Gubar, in the process of examining a female literary history, encountered the paradoxical concept of originality and worked around it, containing what amounts to a sample of it so that it could be studied in miniature. Their use of sex as the boundary condition for their work is particularly illuminating, however, since the exclusion of female authors from the canon, and thus the special form of anxiety that generates, directly addresses the colonial, masculine politics of an Anglocentric model of anglophone literature. Much of the discussion of colonial authors using or subverting the Anglocentric genre model in this study is indebted to this version of the anxiety in general—colonial authors must work to be included at all first, and as “strong” authorial presences second, and must perpetually resist the possibility erasure.

An instructive refashioning of the anxiety of originality happens in the early pages of Robert Crawford’s 1992 Devolving English Literature. Crawford’s work aims to expose the inherent constructedness and coloniality of the central cultural, historical and geographic position England inhabits within English-language literary and cultural studies; my own project here, by comparison, seeks to do the same thing on the scale of a genre as a means of illustrating the unexpected “downstream” consequences of that

Anglocentric model of literature. Crawford’s mission—the recovery of a “usable past”

(5) for anglophone literature—can only progress once an Anglocentric model has been deconstructed. In that move, Crawford anticipates my own move with detective fiction: that the material details of the component texts resist or subvert the false point-of-origin

15 model they are supposed to serve, but these details are only visible when we approach texts empirically, rather than aesthetically or evaluatively. Crawford’s motivations in

Devolving English Literature are limited to his textual corpus—he builds a model of

English literature that attempts to de-marginalize Scottish, Welsh, and American contributions to Modernism and other literary movements which would otherwise be understood as originating in English English literature (7-9). My work here aims at an earlier step in the process: the corpus of Holmes-centered detective fiction should be taken as a demonstration of the material processes and motivations behind, and the historical utility of, a field-defining politics of originality that is directly connected to colonially-inflected Anglocentrism. For Crawford, Anglocentrism in literary studies is the problem—for this study, Anglocentrism in detective fiction and literary studies more broadly is the visible product of, and the desired result of, a colonial value system masked by the ambiguous concept of originality. Thus, Crawford lays some of the groundwork for one of this project’s key interventions: that the politics of originality is meant to serve Anglocentric genre models, and the uncritical use of one maintains the other.

The stakes of this project to the overlapping fields of world literature and crime fiction studies are predicated on how this politics of originality restricts and endangers the progress of those fields, in particular their democratizing or “glocal” contemporary aims. The tendency of world literature, both historically and in the present, to define the

“world” in its name in narrowly Eurocentric ways—to organize the field into valued, primarily Western or European textual objects and the “non-Western” texts that influence or respond to them—depends on questions of “literary merit” or masterpiece-hood. These

16 evaluative concepts are necessarily based on an aesthetic politics supported by the discourse of originality and textual authority. Attempts to move world literature away from this evaluative, Eurocentric system are met with a dual challenge: resisting the field’s history as a colonial-academic tool and building new criteria for membership or attention which is not contaminated by that colonial politics. The three foci proposed by

David Damrosch in What is World Literature?—circulation, translation, and production—are meant to supplant this Eurocentric system with empirical criteria. A text in world literature, in Damrosch’s system, is defined by the global reach of its conditions of production, its ready translation, and its success in transnational circulation (4).

Damrosch’s proposed system is central to this study, both in terms of these three foci and in what Damrosch does not confront—namely, the power structures and historical forces which shape access to circulation, translation, and production. Damrosch’s influential work, to put it succinctly, is not about that politics—in the words of Alexander Beecroft,

Damrosch operates “avowedly and deliberately from the perspective of how the modern

West understands and makes use” of non-Western, primarily ancient, texts (2).

Thus, while Damrosch’s foci allow us to read and codify how a text becomes world literature, his and others’ approach to world literature as a field is, effectively, as a

Western imperial-cultural enterprise. I am hardly the first to call attention to the forces behind these three foci and the problems with this deployment of world literature; the same argument was made, in slightly different terms, in the influential discussion between Damrosch and Gayatri Spivak at the American Comparative Literature

Association conference in 2011, later transcribed and published in the journal

Comparative Literature Studies. In that discussion, Damrosch concedes immediately that

17 the field, and its associated field of comparative literature, can be “ideologically complicit with the worst tendencies of global capitalism” (456). Spivak’s characterization of the field as implicit in a shallow sampling of, and ideological support for, commodified multiculturalism and a false “level playing field” of literature, while nested in the conditions of the present, highlight world literature and comparative literature’s historical roots in cultural imperialist practices and the fields’ avoidance of discussing that historical baggage (467). In other words, world literature is marked by a Eurocentric value system predicated on Western originality and non-Western response. It is complicit in a neo-colonial rebooting of that asymmetrical power arrangement but it is also equipped with the means to interrogate and expose that politics. This project intervenes at this site of asymmetrical power and potential interrogation.

When taken as a “mode of circulation and of reading” (Damrosch 4), world literature as a lens can assist in exposing originality, origins, and textual ownership as problematic concepts. The notion of circulation, as attention to how a text has moved and propagated through a network of consumers, necessitates an investigation of material movement and history. The concept of translation, taken both literally and in a looser sense of transmission across cultural gradients, requires a focus on how texts and contents are made mobile, and how they are put to use in each new place they arrive—how they are mobilized. It likewise highlights how the notion of locality, or localness, is fashioned and deployed. Finally, world literature’s attention to production directs our attention to how texts are made and used as raw materials for future texts, how they are appropriated

(in the postcolonial sense) or adapted. These three moves furnish world literature’s capacity, as Alexander Beecroft illustrates in An Ecology of World Literature, to move

18 beyond a Euro- or Western-centric model of global literary circulation by drawing attention to the interaction between literature and its environment, rather than literature’s participation in “a literature” or “the literary” as evaluative categories (3-9). This study depends on that focus on the connection between literature and its environment— especially the interaction between a text, its genre, and the power structures which shape the terms of those interactions—in order to expose, read, and move beyond hierarchical forces within world literature and crime fiction as a genre.

1.3 The Object of Investigation

Scholarly work which attempts to confront some aspect of the politics of originality is marked by the standard academic desire to confine and circumscribe a problem so that it doesn’t step too far outside an individual scholar’s specialization. Work in fields like literary studies, cultural studies, and literary history maintain this structural practice for its obvious benefits and promote interdisciplinary research when this approach must be bent to the conditions of a stranger problem. An institutional (and often individual or cultural) aversion to the sort of teamworked research seen in other fields, joined with this desire not to step on the toes of other scholars, means that any discussion of a transdisciplinary issue is doomed either to be cut into tiny pieces or to be subject to scholarship which is almost recklessly generalist. This, I propose, is what happens to the problem of originality: we either only talk about our own specific experience of it, or we risk flattening the diverse experiences of this quiet crisis in some sort of general systematic survey. We are left with either a mountain of lore-based case studies or an insufficiently detailed monster, full of erasures.

This work attempts to go around those structural limitations by mirroring the form of a longitudinal study. It uses a string of interrelated, roughly chronological cases and an interdisciplinary lens to survey a larger portion of the crisis than would normally be practical. In addition to providing coherence over a larger discussion, the relationships between individual cases are central to an understanding of the originality crisis’ implications on who, where, when, and what is worthy of circulation, preservation, and scholarly attention. Those individual relationships describe different trajectories of power, subtle deviations from the expected models of genre and originality-enabled textual authority.

Certain disciplinary approaches are armed with terminology and models that might, if used together, allow more explicit access to both the expected models and subtle deviations from them—to the processes, politics, and anxieties bound up in the continued use of “originality,” and to the places where the contradictions creating that anxiety become visible and troubling. A combination of conceptual tools from several fields is one of the central moves of this study. I operate under the theory that literary and cultural studies has the tools to look critically at (and perhaps escape) the colonial politics of originality, but only when disciplinary boundaries are blurred. This project, in response to the manifestations of this anxiety of originality I’ve illustrated previously, attempts to combine theories from postcolonial studies, world literature, genre theory and adaptation studies into a model that can identify, openly discuss, and offer ways out of the crisis of originality politics. The attempt to confine the crisis, or to chop it into little pieces, has historically done little to provide a measure of control or precision, though the desire to map and master a specialized domain remains a useful, if sometimes problematic,

20 scholarly strategy. This specificity, however, does not provide an escape from the dense, theoretical nature of a problem of this scale—even at smaller scales, the problem remains hard to articulate directly. Thus, this project fashions an interdisciplinary model to do two kinds of work:

1. Historically, this study attempts to historicize the Sherlock Holmes

model in order to argue that this model, the Holmesian genre of

detective fiction, was a transnational, colonial project from its

inception, and only later fashioned into a British or English national

literary artifact, hereafter “the Anglocentric genre.” As such, the

Holmes model is not the product of a single author or nation free of

outside influence but is presented as such for colonial and political

motives that survive to the present and extend beyond Holmes or

detective fiction.

2. Theoretically, I use this history, and the referential practices of

colonial or postcolonial primary and secondary texts that articulate a

relationship to Sherlock Holmes, to continue the effort to decenter

Britain in literary studies and in the disciplinary categories of the

global anglophone or world literature.

By using methods from postcolonialism, world literature and adaptation studies, I challenge the convenient (and unsustainable) notion of textual originality, Romantic authorship, and Britain’s privileged position as the “original” source of literary models in the global anglophone cultural network.

The Anglocentric colonial values bound up in the discourse of originality have lingering transdisciplinary consequences, especially at a time where the “global anglophone” is emerging as a powerful disciplinary label. Thus, while this study works with a specific body of texts and constructs specific theoretical models, the broader disciplinary aims for that work are, first, to demonstrate a coherent, pervasive interdisciplinary problem created by sustaining a model of originality-as-textual-value; second, to propose a transdisciplinary model for replacing it; and third, to use that transdisciplinary model to produce more realistic, and more just, ways of analyzing and connecting texts on a global scale. This study brings this transdisciplinary lens to bear on print and filmic texts as well as their commentary, marketing materials, author’s or translator’s notes, and scholarly treatment. In this sense, the work of this study is to tie together the work of several diverse fields in order to advance a common goal: to try to build just and useful models for connecting texts and their contexts.

1.4 Witnesses and Methods

The governing concept for this project—the thing that ties together the fields of postcolonialism, world literature and adaptation studies—is an attention to genre as both a heuristic and as a cultural tool. This project’s main activity, studying the relationship between the Holmes genre and postcolonial detective fiction articulating a relationship to that genre, cannot be a comparative study in the traditional sense—comparing these new works to Holmes as a central touchstone would be counterproductive, replicating the notion of Holmes’ exclusive, central position as original. Instead, this project approaches the adaptation of the Holmes model in terms of genre. Genre, in the context of my work

22 here, is perhaps best articulated by Vilashini Cooppan: genre manifests specific cultural concerns while simultaneously “tracing out cross-cultural […] patterns of transmission and circulation” (19). Cooppan’s style of generic analysis refuses to be simply comparative, and produces new ways of approaching critical issues in literary and cultural studies—reorganizing the field in terms of storytelling mechanisms and networks, instead of categories of nation, geography, or historical period which serve a literary hierarchy and cut works off from their intertextual, often intercultural, networks of reference. In this sense, I am also indebted to Wai Chee Dimock for her “Introduction:

Genres as Fields of Knowledge” from the 2007 special issue of PMLA, where she calls for conceptualizing genre as a network and theorizes the effect of structuring a discipline

(or in my case, a critical inquiry) along those lines, instead of periods, historical movements or other traditional canonical divisions.

While scholars like Cooppan and Dimock propose a model of genre geared to understanding genre’s cultural role and its significance to people authoring texts, E. D.

Hirsch’s older work in Validity in Interpretation (1967) calls attention to the effect of genre on the reader or consumer. Hirsch imagines genre as a “hermeneutic circle”

(108)—genre is identified after the act of reading but becomes retroactively integral to understanding what one has read. Thus, genre is not only relevant as a way of speaking or packaging ideas but is essential to the process of reading or consuming. Rick Altman’s more recent work in Film/Genre further advances this notion by imagining genre as both a cultural tool and a marker of authorial and textual value (Altman 66-67) in addition to imagining it as a contact zone—genres, and their values and hierarchies, are constantly iterated, reiterated, and contested. Hirsch and Altman’s analyses support my assertion

23 that articulating textual relationships in hierarchical terms is an unstable, politically motivated act, rather than an application of any concrete aesthetic standard. Likewise, genre’s attention to intertextuality and the gradual evolution of storytelling conventions set aside notions of originality or national cultural autochthony. Paradoxically, this allows genre to talk about originality as an aspect, rather than as a fundamental concept, in analyzing texts, furnishing a “first step” outside that colonial construct.

Said’s 1978 Orientalism formalizes the study of lingering colonial constructs in literary and cultural studies (and widely, the Western academy), formalizing postcolonialism as a discipline by applying the Foucauldian notion of discourse to the academic study of “The East” as an artificial opposite to “The West.” For Said,

“Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident’” (2), used to support the political, economic, and military subjugation of Orientalism’s “Other” places

(11). This fundamental Orient-Occident binary underlies other influential binaries, like center-periphery, author-mimic and original-copy—something especially visible when looking at the reception of postcolonial texts and authors in an Anglocentric genre like detective fiction. For Said, these binaries contaminate Western intellectual work, rendering it historically and ideologically suspect. Even if we abandon Orientalist methods, its effects linger in debates over canonicity and the very notion of the value of an original text authored by a single person: colonialist attitudes inflect the process “of designating which texts, authors, and periods are the ones best suited for study” (Said

16). Said thus inaugurates postcolonialism’s larger mission—the identification of discourses, ideologies, and specific cultural practices that enable colonialism, and the

24 construction of alternatives that prevent arbitrary subjugation, either by former colonizers or emerging postcolonial power structures. The field is left with two questions: 1. Can we access (or represent) the colonized subject outside the ideology of the colonizer? and 2.

Can we avoid replicating this ideology and the material injustices it carries with it? Are there alternatives? In terms of this study, these questions might be refashioned as: Can we discuss the interconnectedness of European and postcolonial texts outside a matrix of colonialism-enabling originality? Can we talk about postcolonial adaptations without subordinating the adaptation?

While the work of Said and other early postcolonial (sometimes colonial) critics identifies the fundamental focus of the discipline, their early efforts in identifying colonial discourses and dismantling artificial, monolithic unities depend, to some extent, on the notion that authenticity and representation are feasible, stable goals. As Gayatri

Spivak establishes in “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, early postcolonial efforts have a problem that they apparently inherited from Marxist critique: the subject position of the colonized is stuck in essentialist, colonial terms. She starts with a conversation between poststructuralists Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, setting out a particular problem:

[F]irst, that the networks of power/desire/interest are so heterogeneous, that their reduction to a coherent narrative is counterproductive—a persistent critique is needed; and second, that intellectuals must attempt to disclose and know the discourse of society’s Other. Yet the two systematically ignore the question of ideology and their own implication. (66)

Like Said, Spivak starts out critiquing an academic discipline for replicating systems of colonial thought—namely, for creating its own imaginary subject while claiming full

25 representative authority.4 Here, the Marxist tendency towards class homogeneity and internationalism imagines formerly colonized spaces and peoples as “transparent” and the

West as a fully coherent subject, leading to critical erasure. To avoid a colonial textual logic, we must avoid reading texts (or people) monologically.

The problem, for Spivak, is the recovery of postcolonial identity (via history) outside the colonial East-West binary.5 Colonial elites, like the colonizers, cannot cleanly represent the people, and are “at best native informants for first-world intellectuals interested in the voice of the Other,” permanently stuck in the European-Other binary

(79), dependent on a discourse of original and copy, of center and periphery. Attempting to use subaltern subjects to recover “lost origins” is potentially disastrous because it recreates the homogenizing epistemic violence of the colonialist project (80)—one speaks over when one tries to speak for. Spivak calls for a discourse that critiques “postcolonial discourse with the best tools it can provide”: forever unavoidably implicit in erasure and representation, but cautious to “not simply substitut[e] the lost figure of the colonized”

(91).

While unmediated subjectivity, and unmediated history, might be inaccessible, this does not mean that the agency of colonial and postcolonial subjects is impossible.

Homi Bhabha uses his concepts of hybridity and mimicry to recover agency for the colonized through, in effect, adaptation and appropriation. Bhabha begins The Location

4 Recall Spivak’s argument in her debate with Damrosch, mentioned earlier—world literature uncritically understood has the same tendency to create an imaginary “world” over which it claims canonical authority. 5 This influential tendency in postcolonial criticism explicitly lays the grounds for Robert Crawford’s effort to extract a “usable past” from a center-periphery Anglocentric model of British literary studies that I mentioned earlier. 26 of Culture (1994) with a theoretical abandonment of stable subjectivities and fixed notions of Self and Other (personal, national, or cultural). Instead, Bhabha insists, scholars “need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences” (1). The moment of contact and articulation of difference is the site of the production of identity and subjectivity. For Bhabha, identity and subjectivity are produced in interaction, never essentially stable or complete, always repeated and re- articulated (9).

Bhabha’s concept of the “Third Space,” where the enunciation of difference occurs, highlights the ambivalent process behind cultural identity and subject-formation.

By examining this space, “we begin to understand why hierarchical claims to the inherent

‘originality’ or ‘purity’ of cultures are untenable” (Bhabha 37). Homogenous identity and subjectivity, as well as exclusive control over texts and enunciatory spaces are, for

Bhabha, impossible to substantiate. Historical evidence, where it exists, reveals these concepts as results of a colonial politics and therefore hybrid, formed by a pattern of interaction and relative positioning (a history, we might say, of intertextual-intercultural connection and relation). The ambivalence of these absolute categories mandates repetition and continuous re-articulation to make them seem mythical and fundamental, without history (Bhabha, citing Lyotard, 56). This complex of mythification-via- repetition, Bhabha later notes, exposes a contradiction between these categories’ reality and their constructedness (66) that makes colonial resistance and agency possible. The phenomenon at the beginning of this chapter—that Sherlock Holmes perpetually

“requires no introduction”—is a version of this phenomenon. Reiteration and re-

27 articulation result in mythification, erasing the need for empirical evidence, but also call attention to their own erasures.

The site of resistance lies in mimicry—a concept Bhabha had first outlined in his

1984 article “Of Mimicry and Man.” In that article, Bhabha asserts that “colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite,” whose effect “on the authority of colonial discourse is profound and disturbing” (“Mimicry” 126). The cultural inferiority of the colonized, a precondition for colonial ideology, is challenged by the notion that the colonized subject might become like the colonizer, that mimicry or parody might turn to parity. Thus, the manifestations of this capacity for “reform” (the occupation of a hybrid position, a subject “the same, but different”) becomes a site of potential resistance (127-129) that must be contained if that colonial authority is to be maintained. This project’s focus on the maintenance of the Anglocentric Holmes model, and resistance to that model posed by colonial and postcolonial texts operating successfully in that genre—“like Holmes, but different”—is enabled by Bhabha’s observation here.

Following Bhabha’s 1984 article, in 1989 Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin tackled the subject of colonial authorship and subjectivity in The Empire Writes Back. Mirroring

Bhabha’s notion of mimicry, these authors continue the postcolonial use of the term

“appropriation” to refer to “the process by which the language [of the colonizer] is taken and made to ‘bear the burden’ of one’s own cultural experience,” creating a literature that is “always written out of the tension between the abrogation of the received English which speaks from the centre, and the act of appropriation which brings it under the

28 influence” of the postcolonial (38). They describe how the crisis of authentic representation creates the possibility of postcolonial authorship, explaining:

[M]any writers were forced into the search for an alternative authenticity which seemed to be escaping them, since the concept of authenticity itself was endorsed by a centre to which they did not belong and yet was continually contradicted by the everyday experience of marginality […]. Thus the conditions of post-colonial experience encouraged the dismantling of notions of essence and authenticity. (Ashcroft et al, 39-40)

The abandonment of fetishized authenticity and originality are linked to moments of resistance, mimicry, and identity-enunciation in a way that might position adaptation as both a resistant textual practice and as a way of highlighting the fluidity of culture itself.

Spivak’s “best tools” for critique, for The Empire Writes Back, “include the assumption of authority, ‘voice’, and control of the ‘word’, that is, seizure and control of the means of interpretation and communication.” Importantly, this textual authority “is achieved by means of a ‘rewriting’ of canonical stories” (96). Adaptation,6 in this text, is implicitly built into authorship—but still, unfortunately, it seems to be exclusively postcolonial authorship; the unchallenged “original” authorship of the colonizer (that which is appropriated) leaves room for adaptation studies to contribute meaningfully. As Ashcroft,

Griffiths and Tiffin’s title suggests, the empire can write back, but in their analysis, its writing remains confined to the role of a response to the center. This notion of response- as-subordinate remains packed up in the term “appropriation;” this project opts to replace this term, and unpack the empire-writes-back politics, by employing the term (and

6 The term “appropriation” remains a functional term in adaptation studies as well (see, for example, Julie Sanders’ Adaptation and Appropriation, 2006) but I find that the connotation of the term makes it particularly fraught and in need of replacement. Where adaptation seems to imply agency (an adapter), appropriation implies a stigmatized tendency to take what isn’t yours, providing the appropriator with agency but depriving them of a sense of legitimacy or authority. 29 theories of) “adaptation,” where the concept of the center and the original are both considered unsustainable. Like appropriation, adaptation concerns the ways the circulation of texts turns into whole networks and genres of texts—it is a process of creation and a politics of membership—but unlike appropriation, adaptation’s politics of membership does not automatically accept that the subsequent text is, in some way, bound to exist only in reaction or subordination to the first.

Adaptation studies, historically, spent much of its time contending with this hierarchical original-response relationship between a text and its potential sources, and thus it frequently runs into the black box of originality, albeit under a variety of disguises.

A desire to avoid intermedial comparison at all, or to demand absolute fidelity to the source material, marks adaptation studies’ earliest encounters with originality. Virginia

Woolf’s 1926 essay “The Cinema” famously asserts that each medium, separately, has its strengths, and that any attempt to do the work of one with the other (to adapt) will inevitably result in disaster. Adaptation, it seems, is doomed to be too much like, or not enough like, its source—the adaptive relationship, at this stage, automatically engenders subordination. Even an intramedial sense of adaptation—such as the generic relationship between Holmes and one of the postcolonial detectives operating in the same medium— would be caught up in such a hierarchy. Discussions of fidelity and medium specificity are results of an anxiety over the actual relationship between texts, authors, and the elusiveness of genre and form. Thus, for Woolf, mixing (a departure from creativity and originality) is disastrous, obfuscatory, and ultimately results in a damaged product and a damaged textual authority.

By the time of adaptation studies’ earliest scholarly efforts—like George

Bluestone’s 1957 Novels into Film—the discourses of fidelity to “the original” and medium specificity have troubled the discussion for years. Bluestone, instead, contends that each work, whether “adaptation” or “original,” has its own creative value, and that one does not have any particular virtue over the other. Similarly, Bluestone asserts that adaptations should not be read as exclusively in relation to source materials (5-6); furthermore, a source text should be read “less [as] a norm than a point of departure” (x).

Bluestone does not, however, break out of early adaptation studies’ perennial binary—the printed “original” and the cinematic “adaptation.” Sergei Eistenstein’s “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today” maintains this binary, and a sense of medium specificity, but subverts the notion that adaptations and originals exist in a sort of historical, hereditary relationship. The attempt to hierarchize them is the work of “very thoughtless and presumptuous people” hoping for some “virgin birth of art” (Eisenstein 145). Instead, a

“whole ancestral array” (145) of cultural models are available to inform a new text, and thus adaptations are the normative cultural product, rather than an inferior product to some “virgin birth,” some singularly original text.

André Bazin, in his 1948 essay “Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest,” takes

Eisenstein’s model one step further. Bazin argues that authors in both media borrow strategies from each other, tailoring them to narrative needs and technical demands (58-

60). Bazin predicts that in 2050 “works” would be (re)performed across various media without distinction or rank, each iteration contributing to the articulation of the work.

There would be, in Bazin’s media future, no pretensions toward an imaginary “unity of the work of art,” nor a stable notion of the individual author. The “original” work of art

31 wouldn’t matter any more “than the chronological precedence of one twin over the other”

(62). Echoing the future political interventions of fandom studies, Bazin abandons the notion of the author and chronological precedence simultaneously. To avoid setting the media in competition over the spirit of the work, the work must be placed beyond the agency of a single author or the ownership of a single person. Enshrining a Romantic, creative singular author, for Bazin, “springs from a bourgeois, intellectualist reflex” (59), a desire to monopolize textual authority and cultural power.

In an attempt to formalize adaptation studies’ questioning of single authors and originals, Dudley Andrew, in his 1981 article “Adaptation,” famously calls for a

“sociological turn” in adaptation studies, to move away from comparative-evaluative work to answering a core question: what is the cultural function of adaptation (70)?

Andrew then emphasizes adaptation’s place in a “complex interchange between eras, styles, nations, and subjects” (72), urging adaptation studies to imagine adaptation as a discursive strategy for connecting texts to historical and cultural context.

By 2000, adaptation scholars were critiquing their own field for inheriting “the assumptions of the dominant New Criticism,” which rests on an obsessive “hierarchy or opposition of original and copy” (Ray 45) and a desire to “define the essence of poetry, the novel, and literature” (46). In response, a one-to-one relationship between an adaptation and its apparent source was replaced with each text “afloat upon a sea of countless earlier texts from which it could not help borrowing” (Leitch, “Adaptation

Studies at a Crossroads” 63), and this, instrumentally for my work here, initiated a breakdown of the literature-to-film (and more broadly, the one source to one adaptation) fixation. Contemporary works, like Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation (2006) and

Thomas Leitch’s Film Adaptation and Its Discontents (2007) abandon a comparative, fidelity-oriented focus in service of larger examinations of the role of audience and reception (Hutcheon) or the role of adaptation studies as an academic discipline (Leitch).

This retargeting of adaptation studies is perhaps best articulated by postcolonial film scholar Robert Stam in his introduction to Literature and Film (2005), an anthology which he co-edited with Alessandra Raengo. After beginning, deceptively, with a traditional case study of a novel and its film adaptation, Stam asserts his mission is “to deconstruct the unstated doxa which subtly construct the subaltern status of adaptation

(and the filmic image) vis-a-vis novels (and the literary word), and then to point to alternative perspectives” (4). In one swift move, Stam sets his sights on the historical bogeymen of adaptation studies: fidelity discourse, medium specificity and the literature- into-film paradigm, using inherently postcolonial terminology to argue against the subordination of adaptations as copies in opposition to an original. In this, he echoes

James Naremore’s earlier (2000) introduction to Film Adaptation, where he identifies adaptation studies’ core problems: “literature versus cinema, high culture versus mass culture, original versus copy” (2). Like Spivak’s colonial subaltern, it seems adaptation studies cannot speak to the larger study of culture while it is under the sway of a narrow, original-copy dichotomy that serves a certain politics of value. For Stam, setting these doxa aside permits the entry of other disciplines into adaptation studies—and, I would assert, allows adaptation studies to enter other disciplines. Stam notably challenges a

“Euro-diffusionist view” of literary history and adaptation that gives the West exclusive control over originality and the hierarchy of cultural value that implies (11).

While Stam emphasizes the entry of other fields into adaptation studies, Leitch has emphasized how adaptation studies might gesture outwards. In “Twelve Fallacies in

Contemporary Adaptation Theory” (2003), Leitch takes aim at many of the same “doxa”

Stam would identify, ranging from medium specificity and fidelity to the field’s self- imposed marginality, noting:

adaptation study has sought a separate peace less for aesthetic or theoretical than for institutional reasons: to defend literary works and literature against the mass popularity of cinema, to valorize authorial agency and originality in a critical climate increasingly opposed to either, and to escape […] from theoretical problems. (168)

The de-marginalization of adaptation studies begins, for Leitch, with a move towards a synthetic discipline—“textual studies”—which abjures artificial distinctions between media and abandons the ideological defense of fidelity, authorial control, and originality in favor of a focus on how texts are made and obtain cultural power (167-168).

Joining Leitch in this move towards a more egalitarian adaptation studies is Linda

Hutcheon in A Theory of Adaptation. Here, she offers a theoretically-grounded discourse on creativity and originality, and a clear notion of adaptation as “repetition without replication”—a definition that recalls Bhabha’s mimicry, “repetition without representation” (modified from “Mimicry” 128), and “raises the question of the authorization of colonial representations” (“Mimicry” 132)—literally, the authorial control over representational text. Hutcheon, like Stam and Leitch, articulates a “de- hierarchizing impulse” (Hutcheon xiv) through a sustained challenge to the notion of textual originality and authorial control. Hutcheon further attributes adaptive agency to stories themselves (177), decentering the individual author in favor of cultural or

34 institutional agency, positioning originality as a convenient construct concealing more complex accounts of textual production.

While adaptation studies provide a series of flexible tools for re-conceptualizing authorship and originality, the core problem my project is concerned with—lingering artifacts of colonial power structures in literary and cultural studies—grows out of a postcolonial perspective. Like adaptation studies, some of postcolonialism’s most fundamental issues grow out of a sense of textual hierarchy and questions of who can author texts. As with other fields in literary studies, each of these disciplines is shaped by some encounter with the problem of origins and originality and by attempts to sideline, work around, or excavate the politics behind that facile concept. My project’s object—to understand this encounter and to synthesize an interdisciplinary approach to it by examining its manifestation in one genre—uses the tools of adaptation studies, and the organizational scheme of world literature, to examine a problem framed in postcolonial terms.

1.5 Enter the Detective

Sherlock Holmes is the natural candidate for coping with the bafflingly diverse,

Rashomon-like, threads of this problem. The relationships between these cases, the all- important focus of this work, pass through Holmes—this is the central aspect of their genre, the node of their network. As I’ve discussed earlier, the reasons why that sign is the node, so complex and illustrative of the problem, prompted my initial attention to the larger problem of originality and cast the canonical status of Holmes as a particularly accessible miniature of that problem, its politics, benefits, failures, and consequences.

The decision to focus on this textual network was further reinforced by the close theoretical alignment, especially in the early twenty-first century, of the discourses of empire and crime. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s 2000 Empire has had a significant impact on the basic terms of this study and informed the choice to focus on detective fiction as this study’s site of inquiry. Hardt and Negri change their focus from Europe’s decolonized holdings to the contemporary world as a systemic whole (which they term

“Empire”), in the process shifting the model of imperialism from the discourse of

Victorian civilizing to a discourse of criminality. Where prior empires had centers, peripheries, and histories, contemporary Empire is a global, totalizing, and history-less system that erases its own history and boundaries in order to position itself as natural and inevitable (xiv-xv). This Empire is a transnational network of agencies working in a

“juridical formation”—deviance from Empire is figured in terms of crime, rather than in terms of alterity or opposition (3)—though the shift between Victorian imperial discourses and the language of crime is not a large leap, as more recent scholars have illustrated. This enhanced role for the discourse of crime is particularly productive for my own work—if contemporary systems of cultural and political power use crime in the place of Otherness, crime fictions contain within them the possibility of “alterity”—of both Othering and an escape from colonial ideology (130). The Empire model also applies, at least metaphorically, to the structure of the Holmes-centered genre itself: as the second chapter of this work illustrates, the privileged position the Sherlock Holmes texts have over the boundaries of the genre relies on a politics that reconfigures boundaries and obscures and erases intertextual historicity. In effect, there is an Empire

36 of Holmes, and its maintenance depends on a colonial politics of origins, authority, and intertextuality.

Several works of colonial and imperial historiography have illustrated postcolonial concerns about European cultural hegemony, colonial subjectivity, and authorship by using Sherlock Holmesian fiction, or crime fiction more generally. Priya

Joshi’s 2002 In Another Country, for instance, argues that the arrival of the novel in

Indian colonial libraries was both a site of British cultural dominance and a powerful subversive opportunity for anticolonial agency—and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes novels are among the most common entries in those libraries. This and other recent works

(like Pablo Mukherjee’s Crime and Empire) concentrate on the circulation of periodicals and detective fiction in the British Empire as materializing what Spivak and Bhabha had previously theorized—that colonial agency is possible through textual ambivalence

(potential intertextuality) and circulation, and that stable subjectivity, authenticity, originality and cultural purity are absurd not only theoretically but empirically.

In the same vein, Caroline Reitz’s 2004 Detecting the Nation: Fictions of

Detection and the Imperial Venture examines the role of the British detective (in the fictions of Collins, Dickens, Kipling and predominantly Doyle) in the ongoing contention about policing, subjectivity and empire described historically by Mukherjee’s Crime and

Empire. Reitz specifically challenges the assumptions that detective fiction reinforces a separation between imperial center and colonial periphery (43-45) and that detective fiction is inherently separate from the colonial adventure stories written by authors like

Kipling and Haggard (82). As Reitz puts it, “[t]he detective narrative turned national concerns about abuses of authority into a popular story about British authority in the

37 contact zone of Victorian culture; this in turn allowed the detective and the imperial project to become extensions of rather than anathema to English national identity” (xiii).

The detective story, for Reitz, was always already transnational and imperial, rather than purely domestic—and her project endeavors to put it “back into the vast, interconnected world that produced it” (87).

Citing Mukherjee and Reitz’s scholarly work as well as Stephen Knight’s influential 2004 genre-genealogy Crime Fiction, 1800-2000, Christine Matzke and

Susanne Mühlehen published an edited collection of essays entitled Postcolonial

Postmortems: Crime Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective in 2006. Noting that “even in its early days, crime fiction transgressed national boundaries” and emerged in colonized literary communities (3), Matzke and Mühlehen task their collection with investigating the cultural value of detective fiction that motivated this rapid, transnational spread. While the introduction concentrates primarily on the factors that motivated the genre’s ability to travel—and thus, assumes that the genre came from a single place, the imperial center—the essays in this collection offer a wide range of instances in which the genre was put to subversive local use, and was remade as necessary. One essay, Suchitra

Mathur’s “Holmes’ Indian Reincarnation” argues that Satyajit Ray’s Feluda stories occupy a Bhabha-esque hybrid position, repeatedly displacing Holmes in a “contact zone” of British master detective narratives and “border-crossing” (12) Indian cultural conditions. Using the notions of translation and appropriation (and metaphorically, reincarnation), Mathur challenges the notion that Ray’s stories are “merely ‘mimic’ texts condemned by their own belatedness to forever occupy a secondary position” (89).

Recent scholarship on crime fiction as a world or global literary genre has taken up this transnational narrative for the genre and has attempted to push further. This recent scholarship notes that while crime fiction familiar to anglophone readers is marked by the processes of colonialism that occurred alongside its early texts, the genre must be understood as more than a Western genre created in response to colonial conditions— crime fiction, as a global genre, is not simply a Western “import” to formerly-colonized societies, but a complex, dialogic tradition of writing with several parallel histories, marked by contact and mobility in many directions at once. This is one of several points made in Stewart King’s 2014 article “Crime Fiction as World Literature,” alongside critical observations on why crime fiction scholarship is, like much of literary studies, generally organized into national literary categories and histories in accordance with

Moretti’s “law of literary evolution” (Moretti 58, cited in King 9). His article also notes the institutional tendency to view popular texts and “high culture” as distinct bodies, with the latter more likely to be judged worthy of translation and read as world literature, resulting in a dearth of perspectives on crime fiction as a global genre (11). This differential access to classification as world literature, not incidentally, needlessly limits world literature to works with “key values” like “originality” and “timelessness” (Gelder

11, in King 12). The result in crime fiction studies is a pattern of nationalized and uncritical crime fiction history which, as King puts it,

tend to begin with the translation of foreign—mainly Anglo-American and French—models such as the novels and short stories of Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Georges Simenon into the national language. In the second phase, scholars identify and evaluate crime narratives by local writers in terms of the degree to which they are imitative of foreign models or contribute to the creation of national crime fiction. (9)

King’s article proceeds to argue for a study of crime fiction as a reader-oriented world literature—one that examines how the genre and its texts are used, deployed and circulated, as much as how they are produced by authors.

This movement towards reading crime fiction as world literature continued in the wake of King’s article. The 2017 collection Crime Fiction and World Literature—which contains a very early prototype of this project’s main argument7—represents a sustained effort to read crime fiction as a diverse, global genre both within and without national literary categories. The collection, in its own terms, is the first to “treat crime fiction as a significant participant in the international sphere of world literature” (Nilsson, Damrosch and D’haen 2). The collection draws direct links between world literature and globalized popular culture, breaking down the distinction between “pop” and “high” culture, along with the values which support that distinction, in order to better understand the transnational flows of genres and texts.

The problem that remains is how to synthesize disciplines with diverse views on a single problem, diversely instantiated—the problem of originality, genre and textual authority. While postcolonial studies, adaptation studies, crime fiction scholarship and world literature routinely overlap, all four of these disciplines have rarely appeared together. With the exception of Robert Stam and a few others, adaptation studies rarely cite postcolonial scholarship; postcolonialism, likewise, has avoided using language from adaptation studies, instead tackling the same issues under the label of cultural hegemony and appropriation. Studies of crime fiction on a global scale have, in general, borrowed

7 See Harris-Peyton, “Holmes Away from Home: The Great Detective in the Transnational Literary Network.” The main argument there mirrors the goals of this dissertation’s second chapter, albeit in very different terms. 40 extensively from postcolonialism (and now from world literature) but rarely from adaptation studies. And yet the chief (and oldest) impasses of these disciplines—fidelity, originality and authorship for adaptation; authenticity, subjectivity and representation for postcolonialism; inclusion, translation, and intertextuality for world literature—are fundamentally analogous and convergent. The fact of the matter is that Bhabha’s mimicry and Hutcheon’s adaptation enact the same principles (if not the same hierarchy), and that

Bazin’s budding transmediality is, in many ways, postcolonial transculturation or world literary circulation in other terms. A single nexus of issues marks, subdivides and impairs the critical capabilities of those fields: namely, the cultural lineage of text, the control of cultural artifacts, and the authority to produce relevant texts. In simpler terms, the core issues are the same: the construction of textual authority, barriers to accessing that authority, and how texts connect to each other in genres.

Usefully, there has already been some overlap between postcolonial literary studies and adaptation scholarship, though the different terminology used to describe the encounter with the originality problem has frustrated extended cooperation. The works of

Suchitra Mathur and Priya Joshi have talked about the nature of postcolonial adaptation and allusion in different terms, preferring Bhabha’s firmly hierarchical “mimicry” and

“appropriation” to Leitch, Stam and Hutcheon’s less- or differently-hierarchical

“adaptation” and “intermediality.” Robert Stam, continuing a career-defining anti- hierarchical tendency, has published (with Ella Shohat, in 1994) Unthinking

Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, a wide-ranging investigation into lingering colonial tendencies and resistant moves in (primarily) film and television— there is a natural step between his “subaltern status of adaptation” and the textual

41 representation and tropic manifestations of subaltern subjectivities. Leitch’s calls for a

“textual studies” that dismantles the easy, unsustainable categories that separate forms, genres, and continents mirrors contemporary postcolonialist efforts, like Emily Davis’ challenge in Rethinking the Romance Genre, to dismantle a colonial “narrative in which the primacy of an originary text or collection of texts function as the tradition to which all other versions [or adaptations] must simply write back” (Davis 2013, 3). My own work here argues for a new attention to how and why a culturally influential figure or genre circulates with a global anglophone or world literature in order to illustrate how that mobility directly undercuts the hierarchy of “writing” and “writing back.” This attention is made possible by combining postcolonialism’s attention to genre, politics and historical power structures, adaptation’s anti-hierarchical impulses and attention to textual production and world literature’s attention to global circulations and inclusion.

1.6 The Plan of Investigation

Given the usefulness of the term “adaptation” to highlight the subversive cracks in the discourse of originality, and the usefulness of postcolonial theoretical models for exposing that discourse’s consequences for narratives about what is and is not worth publishing, reading, circulating, and studying, it is not terribly surprising that this study organizes itself as a series of differently articulated relationships between texts and a genre identified by a powerful ur-text. Each chapter, with the exception of this one, focuses on a different “mode of relation,” or strategy used to connect texts and authors to empowered genres or prior texts in order to construct their own textual authority and access global literary marketplaces.

In examining these modes, each chapter deals with fiction texts and their metatexts—reviews, marketing material, production notes, Wikipedia representation, and scholarly commentary—unpacking the strategies (and subversive challenges) behind their arguments for textual authority and value in a Holmes-centered genre. Some modes are more suited to deployment in the texts themselves, and others are more commonly observed in secondary texts. Accordingly, this work balances literary studies’ traditional preference for reading primary texts (i.e. fiction) with the demands of examining a politics of genre and value that is often most obvious in commentary. As a result, the chapters of this study embrace a “backwards” pattern which begins with an in-depth examination of politics in textual commentary before returning to the literary texts and examining their complex, and often ambivalent, engagement with that politics.

The second chapter concentrates on the mode “reorigination.” This mode is especially visible in critical histories of texts or genres, and so the second chapter traces the construction of the prevailing historical narrative for the evolution of detective-centric crime fiction. These histories often begin with Edgar Allen Poe or some other figure but concentrate originary power in the genre in the figure of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock

Holmes mysteries. These histories share a teleological orientation towards Holmes, concentrating power in the Holmesian “Canon” as the center of a transnational genre, and then use preceding and subsequent developments in that genre to allocate cultural power to preferred figures, political systems or national traditions. In the process, these histories erase alternative genre paths and even crime fiction texts’ own arguments about their genre membership and production history to serve a politics of Holmes-as-origin. This chapter includes a brief reading of the first Holmes mystery, A Study in Scarlet, in order

43 to demonstrate that Conan Doyle’s texts themselves defy this historical erasure, naming predecessors and engaging in their own politics of genre membership.

The third chapter turns to the mode of “rehistorization,” and introduces two of this project’s three colonial or postcolonial crime fiction “threads” or traditions—Satyajit

Ray’s Feluda mysteries, written in postcolonial India, and Cheng Xiaoqing’s Huo Sang mysteries, written in Republican China. Rehistorization is most visible in editorial material, translator’s notes, publisher’s statements and authorial accounts of production meant as marketing or promotional material. In this mode, a text’s actual or supposed history of production and genre influence are reconfigured to comply with the prevailing values of the reoriginated histories from the second chapter. In the specific cases of Ray and Cheng, this meant emphasizing a connection to Sherlock Holmes and the

Anglocentric model of detective fiction as a genre and concealing or downplaying local predecessors and their developments and innovations in detective fiction, and accepting a culturally devalued or subordinate position in exchange for access to audiences and circulation. This process occurs complexly in the texts themselves, but is especially prominent and straightforward in translations, translator’s prefaces, and “back-of-the- book”-style promotional statements. The mysteries themselves resist a total subordination to the Anglocentric model, innovating on the genre in unexpected ways and calling out, however obliquely, to local audiences and traditions. This resistance also demonstrates that these modes of relation, as strategies, are not mutually-exclusive—texts can and do deploy more than one, sometimes within the same sentence.

The fourth chapter picks up this attention to genre innovation as an assertion of textual authority, examining the mode of “refashioning,” a mode especially legible in the

44 texts themselves and in film adaptations. In this mode, local and Anglocentric narratives of genre membership co-exist in a text, and authors assert their authority in the genre based on this process of hybridization or localization. In effect, this mode takes reorigination’s histories and turns their politics around, asserting that crime fiction has always, in some form, been available in the local tradition, with British models of the genre now available, in the postcolonial moment, to contribute to new developments in their national or ethnolinguistic tradition of detective fiction. These narratives of national generic tradition still rely, however, on the Anglocentric narrative of genre importation or

“translation” commonly seen in traditional genre histories. This chapter also introduces this work’s third “thread”—Saradindu Bandyopadhyay’s Byomkesh Bakshi mysteries, written in colonized India—in order to demonstrate how texts written under colonial conditions assist in the refashioning mode by establishing local alternatives to hegemonic, Anglocentric examples of crime fiction that the emerging traditions (framed in anticolonial or nationalist terms) can call upon as “indigenous” textual predecessors.

The fifth and final chapter of this project turns its attention to the emerging mode termed “reintegration,” represented by critical developments like crime fiction as world literature and enabled by internet-mediated fandom cultures and prolific contemporary adaptations. This chapter turns to “branded,” or explicitly named Holmes adaptations, like the BBC’s Sherlock, CBS’s Elementary, and the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes films, and the similarly branded film and comic adaptations of the Indian detectives Byomkesh

Bakshi and Feluda. Focusing on these adaptations’ promotional materials, production accounts, academic responses and fan products, this final chapter traces how filmmakers, comic book adaptation writers and artists, and fanfiction producers all configure their

45 textual authority in ways which directly challenge the politics of originality and the attendant colonial hierarchies of textual value, legitimacy, originality, and authorship.

Instead, they pose new models for constructing textual authority that suggest a globally reintegrated genre—an internet-mediated global crime fiction market that is not, in popular or academic reality, bound by national literary boundaries or conventional notions of cultural property. While bound up with their own politics and problems, like toxic fandom, neocolonial and corporate intellectual property practices, and internet accessibility, these emerging strategies suggest points of departure for crime fiction scholarship, and for textual or literary scholarship more generally, from Anglocentric or colonial models. They model how the academic humanities might develop more accurate, inclusive, and just methods for reading cultural artifacts in the context of a globalized popular culture.

By viewing these texts through the lenses of postcolonial relations of power and theories of adaptation, their potential to resist the category of “minor” or “local” texts and position themselves as world literary (or, more broadly, world popular culture) objects becomes apparent. My emphasis throughout is on what any text has the potential to do— what can be done, not necessarily what has been done—precisely because the fetishization of originality has artificially limited what can be done within the scope of literary and cultural studies. In other words, I try to demonstrate what might be gained, what new possibilities made feasible, if we consciously expose and dismantle a lingering colonial ideology. In short, this work is searching for a way out from under the shadow of originality in the ambitious hope that doing so will expand literary and cultural studies and ameliorate the field’s isolation and popular devaluation by bringing it back into

46 contact with the daily, less-hierarchical experience of cultural texts. The theoretical aim of this work is to expose originality as a facile concept, to illustrate different ways of understanding intertextual relationships that resist originality’s inherent hierarchy, and in so doing to shift the potential role of literary and cultural studies away from colonial cultural gatekeeping. That gatekeeper role, I propose, is increasingly irrelevant in a globalized and multi-pop-cultural world where access to the means of authorship is widespread.

Following a modified version of Damrosch’s three foci—access to circulation, the politics of translation, and the textual authority posed by adaptation—through a network of texts all connected, in some way, to Sherlock Holmes exposes the complexity concealed behind notions of original and copy, of center and periphery, of “first” text and subsequent adaptation. The complexity of the history of the Holmes-centered genre, its movements and deployments transculturally, and the ways it is put to use long after its initial colonial usefulness, together challenge us to move beyond easy notions of authorship and textuality, and the system of values built in to those concepts. This system of values—an ideology of originality based on cultural “purity,” authorial subjectivity and textual control—served literary studies’ roots as a British colonial tool and continues to mark how we discuss and value texts. By tracing a history of transcultural fashioning, circulation, and adaptation of one of anglophone literary culture’s most prominent narrative structures—the Holmesian detective story—this lingering, oft-disavowed fixation on originality and Romantic authorship becomes visible, making it possible to challenge the problematic centrality of Britain in literary and cultural studies on new historical and theoretical grounds. In so doing, we might also displace the colonial

47 structures of cultural value that came with this British centrality in favor of a more just and more globally oriented “textual studies,” a literary studies without arbitrary field distinctions or a fixed, archaically imperial temporal-geographic center.

REFERENCES, Chapter 1

Altman, Rick. Film/Genre. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. Print.

Andrew, Dudley. “Adaptation.” Concepts in Film Theory. New York: Oxford University

Press, 1985. 96-106. IN Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader. Ed.

Timothy Corrigan. 2nd Ed. New York: Routledge, 2012. 65-72. Print.

Ascari, Maurizio. A Counter-History of Crime Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,

2007. Print.

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and

Practice in Postcolonial Literatures (1989). 2nd Ed. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Print.

——. Preface. The Postcolonial Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 1995. xv-xvi.

Print.

Bazin, André. “Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest.” Esprit 16.146 (July 1948): 32-40.

IN Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader. Trans. Bert Cardullo. Ed.

Timothy Corrigan. 2nd Ed. New York: Routledge, 2012. 57-64. Print.

Beecroft, Alexander. An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present

Day. New York: Verso, 2015. Print.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility:

Second Version.” Selected Writings Vol. 3: 1935-1938. Cambridge MA: Belknap

Press, 2008. 21-34. Print.

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Print.

——. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” October 28

(Spring 1984): 125-133. PDF.

Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973). Second Ed. Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1997. Print.

Bluestone, George. Novels into Film (1957). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,

2003. Print.

Cooppan, Vilashini. Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in

Postcolonial Writing. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Print.

Crawford, Robert. Devolving English Literature (1992). 2nd Ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press, 2000. Print.

Damrosch, David. What is World Literature? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,

2003. Print.

Damrosch, David and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. “Comparative Literature/World

Literature: A Discussion with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and David Damrosch.”

Comparative Literature Studies 48.4 (2011): 455-485. PDF.

Davis, Emily S. Rethinking the Romance Genre: Global Intimacies in Contemporary

Literary and Visual Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Print.

Dimock, Wai Chee. “Introduction: Genres as Fields of Knowledge.” Remapping Genre

Spec. Issue of PMLA 122.5 (2007): 1382-1383. PDF.

Eisenstein, Sergei. “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today.” Film Form. Trans. Jay

Leyda. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1947. 195-233. IN Film and Literature: An

Introduction and Reader. Ed. Timothy Corrigan. 2nd Ed. New York: Routledge,

2012. 144-146. Print.

Gelder, Ken. Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field. London:

Routledge, 2004. Print.

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer

and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (1979). Second Ed. New Haven,

CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Print.

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press,

2000. Print.

Haycraft, Howard. Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story.

London: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1941. Print.

Hirsch, E. D. Jr. Validity in Interpretation. New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1967.

Print.

Hutcheon, Linda with Siobhan O’Flynn. A Theory of Adaptation (2006). 2nd Ed. New

York: Routledge, 2012. Print.

Joshi, Priya. In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India.

New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Print.

King, Stewart. “Crime Fiction as World Literature.” Clues: A Journal of Detection 32.2

(Fall 2014): 8-19. PDF.

Klinger, Leslie S. Preface. The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes. Ed. Leslie S. Klinger.

New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2005. xi-xii. Print.

Knight. Stephen. Crime Fiction, 1800-2000: Death, Detection, Diversity. New York:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Print.

Le Carré, John. Introduction. The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes. Ed. Leslie S. Klinger.

New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2005. xiii-xvi. Print.

Leitch, Thomas. “Adaptation Studies at a Crossroads.” Adaptation 1.1 (2008). 63-77.

PDF.

——. Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of

the Christ. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Print.

——. “Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory.” Criticism 45.2 (2003):

149-171. PDF.

Mathur, Suchitra. “Holmes’s Indian Reincarnation: A Study in Postcolonial

Transposition.” Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime Fiction from a Transcultural

Perspective. Eds. Christine Matzke and Susanne Mühelen. New York: Rodopi,

2006. 87-108. Print.

Matzke, Christine and Susanne Mühelen. “Postcolonial Postmortems: Issues and

Perspectives.” Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime Fiction from a Transcultural

Perspective. Eds. Christine Matzke and Susanne Mühelen. New York: Rodopi,

2006. 1-16. Print.

Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review 1 (2000): 54–68.

PDF.

Mukherjee, Upamanyu Pablo. Crime and Empire: The Colony in Nineteenth-Century

Fictions of Crime. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Print.

Naremore, James. Introduction. Film Adaptation. Ed. James Naremore. New Brunswick:

Rutgers University Press, 2000. Print.

Nilsson, Louise, David Damrosch and Theo D’haen, “Introduction: Crime Fiction as

World Literature.” Crime Fiction as World Literature. Eds. Louise Nilsson, David

Damrosch and Theo D’haen. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. 1-12.

Print.

Ray, Robert B. “The Field of ‘Literature and Film’.” Film Adaptation. Ed. James

Naremore. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000. 38-53. Print.

Reitz, Caroline. Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Venture.

Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2010. Print.

Said, Edward. Orientalism (1978). New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1979.

Print.

Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.

Sayers, Dorothy. Introduction. Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, and Horror.

London: Gollancz, 1928. PDF.

Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the

Media. New York: Routledge, 1994. Print.

Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture.

Eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Chicago: University of Illinois Press,

1988. IN Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. Eds. Williams

and Chrisman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. 66-111. Print.

Stam, Robert, and Alessandra Raengo, eds. Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory

and Practice of Film Adaptation. Malden: Blackwell, 2005. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. “The Cinema” (1926). The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 4: 1925-1928.

Ed. Andrew McNeillie. New York: Harcourt, 1994. Print.

Chapter 2

THE SIGN OF THE FORE

2.1 Colonizing the Textual Past

Few, if any, critical histories of the detective fiction genre assert that Sherlock

Holmes is the first detective, or that Doyle’s stories are the first detective stories. Some, like T.S. Eliot, in “Dickens and Wilkie Collins,” assert that Wilkie Collins’ The

Moonstone is the first entry in the genre. Others, like Haycraft and Sayers, assert that

Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin stories or Gaboriau’s Lecoq narratives are the first definitive examples of a genre centered around investigation, crime and detection. Other scholars have offered candidates by Dickens, R.L. Stevenson or LeFanu’s gothic mysteries—or, in one influential case, the anonymously-authored The Notting Hill Mystery (Symons 51)— as “firsts” of the genre. There also exists a rich scholarly tradition of arguing that narratives of colonial adventure and scholarly discussions of colonial techniques of power—in effect, colonial policing or colonial policy—set off the production of factual and fictional investigative stories (for instance, see Mukherjee’s Crime and Empire and, further back, Miller’s The Novel and the Police). The race to assert a definitive genealogy for detective fiction takes place in a crowded field. The endeavor happily slides between asserting a new genealogical chart for detective fiction globally and asserting one for detective fiction in English—and with few notable exceptions, the whole enterprise takes for granted that global detective fiction came out of anglophone detective fiction. 54

The histories analyzed in this chapter can be sorted into two overlapping varieties.

The first variety were written by authors, critics or fans to address the existing community of detective fiction authors and enthusiasts. The second, generally more contemporary, variety are academic histories produced for a scholarly audience. What these two varieties share is the assumption that detective fiction, as it currently exists, grew out of a particular anglophone textual corpus: the stories of Sherlock Holmes. This is different from asserting that Sherlock Holmes, and the texts referentially bound up in the mention of the character’s name itself, were the first detective stories. Instead, one of the most prominent (though often not explicit) features that histories of the genre share is a teleological orientation towards the arrival of Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous work.

Some histories share this orientation even as they attempt to contest it—particularly contemporary scholarly histories, which frequently attempt to reconnect detective fiction to prior literary practices long overlooked. To assert that a text lies at the beginning of the genre is to assert that it marked the development of Holmes, the genre’s center or paragon, and thus that older work has special iconic power by Holmesian association.

Thus, these histories engage in a process of reorigination, where a preferred or convenient origin narrative replaces or erases the one that the texts propose for themselves.

Holmes, as a nexus of author, text, history, national context, and genre conventions—as the icon of a genre—with the power both to explain a genre and to stand in for it metonymically, is up for grabs in these scholarly histories. Those works which precede Holmes have generic power because they are associated, genealogically, with the single body of works which can signify for the whole genre. Those works that come after

Holmes are empowered and validated by the genre connection, while simultaneously being subordinated to the Holmes ur-text—they exist forever in reference to the icon, a response. They cannot beat the iconographic power of Holmes (even in a scholarly context skeptical of the equation of popularity with significance) and so instead they are compelled to join it. The histories appear to propose linear progressions of texts, but in fact what they offer is a network, rather like a Roman roadmap, in which all paths lead to

Holmes.

Holmes is never the first of the detectives, but Holmes lies waiting at the center of the history, ahistorical, always already complete. To borrow a concept from Walter

Benjamin, the Holmes icon splits the origin of the genre from its genesis. Origin,

Benjamin notes, “is not intended to describe the process by which the existent came into being, but rather to describe that which emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance. Origin is an eddy in the stream of becoming, and in its current it swallows the material involved in the process of genesis” (Benjamin 45). The origin is the most visible product of some generic tradition, forcing all other materials in that genre canon to exist in relation to it while erasing its own historicity. The act of composing a genre history is, in that sense, to propose what happened in “the process of becoming” and to enact or reverse that “disappearance” of constituent materials. But historiography also allocates significance and cultural power. Holmes, as an origin, can provide power to anything connected to it—especially any text proposed to have taken part in its genesis.

Holmes is always the origin, but the scholarly histories are fighting over what text, what author, what nation, what period is responsible for creating something so important.

Genre, fundamentally, is a cultural machine for both coding how a text is to be read or consumed and, as Fredric Jameson asserts, as a mechanism to “filter out historical difference and the radical discontinuity of modes of production and […] cultural expressions” (Jameson 130). While Jameson is concerned with capital and the requirements of Marxist history, his definition of genre works just as well to discuss the allocation of cultural influence and power: connection between texts permits the sharing of cultural significance in the same way that announcing one’s membership in an exclusive club erases the distinction between individuals in order to take advantage of the power of association. Attention to the announcement of genre membership can reveal, in

Jameson’s terms, “the political unconscious” of a text: its negotiations with other powerful cultural trends, and the historical conditions that make this negotiation necessary.

Of course, the precise mode of production, the actual intentions of its producer, and the thoughts of its consumer are actually inaccessible, and so it might be better, in the context of this study, to say that moments which announce some relationship to a genre or to another text offer a glimpse at the text’s potential “political unconsciousnesses”: what negotiations and power relations it might be trying to construct, and what those constructions might assert about the historical context, producers, and readers of that text.

Genre conventions carry historical and cultural baggage, and what a text appears to do with that baggage indicates what histories it proposes for itself. These potential histories deal with (and sometimes subvert) the narrative of the origin, and of who, or what, is allowed to produce and consume texts connected to that origin. Texts can use or resist the process of reorigination.

While this project is concerned, on the whole, with those texts that come after

Holmes in the histories, and what interesting things they do (or, more accurately, what they might be construed as doing) with the nigh-unavoidable iconographic power of

Holmes over the genre and what this means for the shape of textual criticism in general, this chapter is concerned directly with the construction of this iconographic power and what is at stake in that construction: with the process of reoriginating detective fiction in

Holmes. This chapter attempts to uncover why genre histories with myriad field interests, ideological concerns, and historical arguments consistently implicitly or explicitly reinforce the iconic power of Sherlock Holmes over the detective fiction genre. Of particular interest is how that iconographic power is reinforced, and what a genre history stands to gain by maintaining Holmes’ empire over the genre. This investigation asks why the most conservative as well as even the most progressively postcolonial or anti- establishment histories of the genre replicate a model of the detective fiction genre that is so deeply Anglocentric that it puts not just a product of Britain, but an iconic product of the Victorian British Empire, at the origin of a global and transhistorical network of powerful cultural products. In the process, it also might explain why the genre of “the detective genre history” is fixated with a scramble for textual territory in the genesis.

The following readings make the perilous scholarly move of trying to organize the genre of “the detective genre history” into three periods. It is worth noting that these periods are somewhat arbitrary, and that the first two periods overlap quite a bit. Not unlike the histories themselves, these periods function as a shorthand for grouping texts with similar features together so that some core trajectory across all the periods will be more easily visible despite individual variation. In the case of this history of histories, the

58 trend to be made visible is the continually reinforced privileged position of Sherlock

Holmes in the genre, and individual variations on that trope manifest in the “how” and the “why” of this continual reinforcement. To mirror a claim made by these histories themselves, my outline here is meant to be more suggestive than comprehensive, and is furnished mostly by texts existing in a connected chain of citation—the histories in later sections cite those in the prior, often to challenge their assertions or to congratulate-but- modify their efforts. Following this outline of histories, I turn to a detective text— specifically, to the first Sherlock Holmes entry, A Study in Scarlet, the first text in the

Holmes canon and one, oddly, oft-neglected in genre histories—to briefly illustrate the history it proposes for itself as a member of a genre. This second move illustrates the gap between textual history and genre history that calls attention to the consequences of reorigination and models the sort of analysis that is the work of subsequent chapters.

Instrumentally, A Study in Scarlet’s own account of its generic origins, genesis and membership subverts its (later) privileged position in the detective genre, asserting a complex textual history that reaches beyond the geographic and cultural boundaries of the

British imperial metropole that would later adopt it as cultural icon.

2.2 The Empire Looks Back

On the surface, the question of what the earliest genre histories—those written by

British detective fiction aficionados and scholars while the British Empire still existed— stand to gain by reinforcing the Holmes-as-Origin model is easily answered. The genre had become popular throughout the empire and elsewhere; securing responsibility for a globally popular genre in a text and an author that had been (or could be) adopted as a

59 national symbol of Britain increased the cultural clout of metropolitan Britain. In a facile sense, claiming responsibility for the detective fiction genre via Holmes stakes a simple chain of claims: 1. Britain is the best at the production of literature because its literature is universally popular; this demonstrates that 2. Britain possesses an inherently superior means of cultural production; therefore 3. Britain’s self-proclaimed role at the center of its political, linguistic, economic and cultural empire is fully justified. This argument is inherently circular, but it possesses political utility throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In addition to haunting these genre histories, this circular argument has a more corporeal presence in legislative debates on colonial administration like

Macaulay’s “Minute Upon Indian Education,” poetic justifications of British imperial domination a la Kipling, essays on Britain’s cultural duty to the world like Orwell’s wartime essays, and nationalist pronouncements on the quality of the British literary mind over all rivals.

This argument for British cultural supremacy was the product of a deliberate and self-justifying national and imperial project of Victorian cultural and moral improvement whose aims were complex. For example, Priya Joshi points out in In Another Country that colonial libraries in nineteenth and early-twentieth century India seemed to follow an agenda straight out of Macaulay’s “Minute”—anglicization as a colonial policy and moral imperative—but adds that the “bland and familiar” narrative of British colonial administrators imposing British texts on colonial subjects ignores both the profitability of

India as a book market and Indian authors’ almost immediate integration of British tropes and styles with indigenous forms8 (4-5). Joshi’s attention to the consumption of British

8 More on this integration in chapters three and four. 60 texts in India highlights that a simplistic narrative of Britain’s cultural dominance over a colony depends, ironically, on a much more complex account of the reading preferences and creative decisions of colonial readers and authors (9-10). The market in India, alone, accounts for more than £300,000 of British book exports at its peak (39), driven by local

Indian interest in British fiction (for a variety of educational, political, or personal reasons) and an effective British monopoly on importing books to its colonies (41), not by some inherent British skill at producing good literature. This point is further made by the texts that were imported: these were primarily fiction and melodrama, with a healthy dose of sensational or detective fiction—popular but stigmatized genres by nineteenth century standards. Eleven of the fourteen libraries Joshi surveys offer Doyle’s work (64), and fiction holdings typically outstrip nonfiction travel guides, scientific treatises, and other technical works (60). In this context, to argue that British textual products weren’t affected by this deployment—and that the intensely profitable colonial marketplace, driven by local readers, didn’t eventually have some effect on imperial fiction-making— would be a challenging argument indeed.

And yet, early genre histories tend to disavow any “foreign” or colonial influence whatsoever, maintaining the narrative of British cultural supremacy while ignoring both the implicit notion that British culture exists in interaction, and the explicit notion that

British culture had been weaponized for colonial use. Notably, however, the earliest scholarly efforts of note in charting the history of the detective genre, apart from those brief efforts present in the stories themselves, emerge during the gradual decline of

Britain’s authority over its colonies in the early twentieth century. In effect, these histories became necessary as articulations of British cultural power at the moment

61 metropolitan Britain’s political power was subjected to internal (colonial) and external

(nationalist) challenge. These early histories were written during the “Golden Age” of detective fiction—a variety of detective fiction that seems, in particular, to be responding to this perceived imperial decline by engaging in sanitized, rational puzzle-oriented cozy mysteries which emphasize the triumph of scientific, orderly (and ideally British) legal institutions. Stephen Knight, in his entry on the Golden Age for The Cambridge

Companion to Crime Fiction, links these desires with interwar Modernism, offering

Agatha Christie’s works as typical for advancing a “conservative” Modernism (90-91) in response to post-World War One national and colonial uncertainty. Genre histories written in this same period—and in the case of Dorothy Sayers’ history, by an author of prominent “Golden Age” mysteries trying to push the genre to engage in social commentary—can be seen as responding to that imperial anxiety.

The effort to (re)construct a history of the detective genre begins in earnest in introductions to anthologies written by British authors of Golden Age detective fiction stories. One of the earliest attempts at a comprehensive account of the development of the genre is the preface to E. M. Wrong’s 1926 anthology Tales of Crime and Detection.

Wrong’s introduction is particularly fascinating for both its departures from its contemporaries and the ways it establishes the future practices of the genre-history.

Parallel, more commonly known attempts at a history of the genre were written in the same period, but they were chiefly concerned with the critical comparison of some new work with other, prior similar works and the distillation of rules or “commandments,” in the case of Knox or Van Dine. They were, in other words, histories constructed for the purposes of aesthetic evaluation, to back up the author’s opinion on whether a work is a

62 worthy addition to some idealized genre, and often lacked any sustained engagement with the material conditions of the genre’s history. Wrong’s preface is a departure from this type; it constitutes, instead, one of the earliest attempts to definitively assert a genealogy and typology of the genre in order to explain why Britain is both a fertile audience for the works and centrally responsible for the production of the genre as a global cultural phenomenon. Wrong’s history is so notable as the site of this turn, in fact, that Howard

Haycraft reprinted his entire preface in his collection The Art of the Mystery Story,9 offering it as the “first on the subject to be compiled in accordance with critical principles” (18). This is not, however, what Wrong advertises his preface as doing. The collection it introduces is organized as a taxonomy of the genre, and the preface sets out to investigate the genre’s varieties and standards to establish membership criteria and to police the boundaries of the genre. It is an attempt, in other words, to construct a canon.

The boundaries of this canon must be backed up by some apparently non-arbitrary principle, and Wrong’s preface turns to history and taxonomy to furnish this principle.

Wrong’s account views Britain’s literary culture as the first one to get detective fiction right—the very first sentence notes that the “detective story is of respectable antiquity if we judge it by its remote forebears, though it is recent times only that have made it into a branch of art”—and his selection of those “recent” works that constitute detective fiction as an “art” are predominantly British productions. The core question of the beginning of his account is “why the art of detective fiction lay for centuries untouched, and its effective history is crowded into the last eighty years”; he theorizes,

9 The pagination used here, in fact, comes from Haycraft’s reprint, as Wrong’s original collection is something of a rarity. 63 briefly, that the absence of fully formed detective fiction “as an art” from the Roman

Empire, the Greek literary tradition, or the earlier emblems of “Western Civilization” is due to those civilizations not having developed a “law of evidence” in the mold of British common law, “for detectives cannot flourish until the public has an idea of what constitutes proof” (19). Attaching the development of the genre to the advent of specifically British notions of criminality and justice, as if those were the inevitable results of any sufficiently advanced legal system, creates a circular justification for the centrality of Britain’s power in the genre—the genre depends on British legal practice, and so it could only have ever been developed by Britain. This reveals the construction of

Wrong’s history of the genre as a self-fulfilling narrative—it supposes that the genre was waiting to be activated by the right historical result, rather than the genre being the result of its history.10

Having established a self-justifying orientation towards British control of the genre, Wrong’s selection of precursors carries additional weight—he begins with Biblical apocrypha, moves to Herodotus, and notes the abnormal absence of precursors among the

Romans, mirroring the popular discourse of British history as a passing of the torch from

Jerusalem, to Athens, to Rome, and to London (19-21). He is quick to dismiss

Francophone mystery stories, dismissing Balzac’s Vautrin as but a distant branch of the generic tradition, safely disinheriting France as a rival possessor of the genre’s forebears

(and by extension the torch of Western Civilization). Simultaneously, he sets aside

“sensational” works (which he tacitly associates with the French tradition) because they

10 It also ignores the prominent role crime writing and crime fiction had in establishing those British juridical norms in the first place. See Mukherjee’s Crime and Empire (2003). 64 lack the “reason” of British logical detection and therefore lack the desire to promote the police over the criminal mastermind (19-20). When Wrong shifts, two paragraphs later, to Edgar Allan Poe as the inventor of the rational detective story, he is careful to avoid any complicated discussions of Poe’s national origin or affinities. As an added precaution, he only gives Poe half the credit, noting that he originated only “one of the two lines on which the detective story has grown—a private investigator chronicled by an unimaginative friend” (20). Poe is afforded the honor of partial inclusion in genesis in exchange for his national membership remaining unmentioned. Poe initiated “one of the two orthodox traditions of to-day, but it was not developed and made popular for over forty years—not in fact till 1887, when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published A Study in

Scarlet” (20).

Prior to the arrival of Arthur Conan Doyle, in Wrong’s history, readers of the genre simply had to make do with “the other and less rigorous” strand of the genre, a more sensational variety led by the safely “English” Wilkie Collins and popularized by

Charles Dickens. These works are, however, incomplete in their “orthodoxy,” and the trajectory from Collins’ The Woman in White to The Moonstone to Dickens’ incomplete

Edwin Drood is directed towards the texts’ increasing resemblance to a proper English mystery—a logical puzzle (21). Meanwhile, Wrong is careful to give credit to “Collins and Gaboriau” (admitting a passing French influence) for making “stories of crime”

(notably not, in Wrong’s phraseology, “detective fiction”) popular in “England and

America.” These precursors are given the privilege of preparing an anglophone audience to receive the genre’s perfected instance “in 1887, the great year when Sherlock Holmes

65 broke upon the world” (21). Wrong notes “[v]ixere fortes ante Agamemnona,[11] but we have forgotten them, and tend to think of the pre-Holmes detectives as of the pre-

Shakespearian drama; to call them precursors only” (21-22). Wrong, while happy to point out this tendency, does little to combat it; to do so would surrender control of the genre to the far more complex history of pre-national or transnational influences he has spent much of the text burying. The remainder of Wrong’s introduction is an extended illustration of the formal rules of his contemporary Golden Age detective fiction, and an argument that this British-author dominated field of formal mysteries are the purest and most advanced form of the genre—they are what the genre is supposed to be, and not simply the result of a series of historical circumstances to which alternatives might have occurred. For Wrong, without Victorian and early twentieth-century Britain, there is no

“art” of detective fiction and no feasible alternative. Without British, specifically English, input, the genre would have simply ceased to develop rather than developing along alternative paths.

Dorothy Sayers’ history of the genre, published just three years after Wrong’s, recycles much of Wrong’s work, but does so in more critical depth. Like Wrong, Sayers’ introduction announces that it is primarily concerned with how Britain, specifically, managed to create such a widely consumed and popular genre. Sayers’ ties Wrong’s juridically-inclined history to several new, Modern discourses—sociology, psychology, and a barebones theory of cultural eugenics. Her history, an introduction to the anthology

Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, and Horror (retitled The Omnibus of Crime in

11 The Latin phrase here translates as “brave men lived before Agamemnon,” a shorthand reference to the notion that Agamemnon’s courage obscures that of any brave predecessors. 66 the U.S.), begins by noting that “man” (though it becomes increasingly obvious she means a British or American man) is inclined to the art of “self-tormenting,” as he

delights to occupy his leisure moments with puzzles and bugaboos. The pages of every magazine and newspaper swarm with cross-words, mathematical tricks, puzzle-pictures, enigmas, acrostics, and detective stories, as also with stories of the kind called “powerful” (which means unpleasant), and those which make him afraid to go to bed. (Sayers 72)

Following Wrong, she notes that the tale of horror and sensation and the tale of detection both have ancient forebears, but notes that “the detective-story has had a spasmodic history, appearing here and there in faint, tentative sketches and episodes, until it suddenly burst into magnificent flower in the middle of the last [nineteenth] century” (71-

72). In the section that immediately follows, “Early History of Detective Fiction,” she places Poe’s three Dupin stories alongside “Thou Art the Man” at the beginning of the genre. In citing these works, she is careful to illustrate that they contain the seeds for the genre’s several branches and siblings, but that none of the texts are fully-fledged detective stories—they are “serious exponent[s]” of the genre without being fully developed (73). Poe’s stories “anticipated” the “future development” of the genre (76), but in anticipating, are not themselves participants in the genre. Full participation is reserved primarily for British authors.

For much of the middle section of the introduction, Sayers departs from a textual history of the genre to meditate on why “the detective-story should have had to wait so long” for Poe to sow the seeds. In a textbook illustration of the Orientalist tendency to substitute inaccessibility to Western scrutiny with an assertion of absent content, she asks, “why did it not develop earlier? The Oriental races, with their keen appreciation of intellectual subtlety, should surely have evolved it. The germ was there” (73). She then

67 lists those mystery products of “The Oriental races” that are readily available—including

Aesop, Biblical apocrypha, the Hercules myths, and an “Indian folk tale”—before returning to “European Literature” via the “Bel-and-the-Dragon motif,” the tale of Tristan and Iseult, and Voltaire’s Zadig. Each is carefully positioned as a precursor transmitting a desire for mystery and trickery that sadly lacks the “puzzle” of the detective story and its positive representation of law enforcement figures. Echoing Wrong, Sayers laments the lost opportunity of the Romans who, while “logical and given to law-making, might have been expected to do something with it, but […] did not” (73-74). Citing E. M. Wrong’s history as a good first attempt at explaining the genre’s patchy history, and agreeing that a lack of evidence and proof standards built into British common law might have stymied the earlier development of the genre, Sayers adds complexity to Wrong’s legal theory, asserting:

One may go further, and say that, though crime stories might, and did, flourish, the detective-story proper could not do so until public sympathy had veered round to the side of law and order. It will be noticed that, on the whole, the tendency in early crime-literature is to admire the cunning and astuteness of the criminal. This must be so while the law is arbitrary, oppressive, and brutally administered […]. We may note that, even to-day, the full blossoming of the detective-story is found [only] among the Anglo-Saxon races. It is notorious that an English crowd tends to side with the policeman in a row. The British legal code, with its tradition of ‘sportsmanship’ and ‘fair play for the criminal’ is particularly favourable to the production of detective fiction, allowing, as it does, sufficient rope to the quarry to provide a ding-dong chase, rich in up-and-down incident. (74-75)

The distinction between Anglo-Saxons, with their advanced legal systems and public sympathies, and the unarticulated Other whose laws remain “arbitrary, oppressive, and brutally administered” refigures malleable cultural generalizations into ostensibly more empirical, (pseudo)scientific theories of race.

In this context it is less surprising that Sayers is willing to give some ground to the French tradition of the genre that Wrong earlier had dismissed. The “Anglo-Saxon” race’s fundamental dominance of the genre is placed at the top of a racial hierarchy for the production of detective stories—the French, as the next “race” down, have “a good output of detective-stories, though considerably smaller than that of the English-speaking races” because while their national detective forces are “greatly looked up to,” the French

“street policeman” is not so respected as the British one. The next group, in Sayers’ detective story-producing spectrum, “the Southern States of Europe,” are less productive than the French because “the law is less loved” (75). Adding to this taxonomy of

European races as detective fiction producers—and perhaps attempting to validate the racial hierarchy by using foreign testimony to dispel accusations of biased nationalist self-promotion—she includes a tongue-in-cheek observation made in 1927 by the

Weimar novelist and playwright Lion Feuchtwanger that the British are culturally (and racially) distinguished from other Europeans by an attention to mundane detail. This explains how the apotheosis of the genre could only arrive in the hyper-observant detective solving a logical puzzle, and how that detective could only be British. “Taking these two factors together,” she concludes, “we begin to see why the detective-story had to wait for its full development for the establishment of an effective police organisation in the Anglo-Saxon countries” (75). Like Wrong, the genre waits for its correct form to be discovered by the British—all other alternative versions are incorrect or incomplete, produced by authors disabled by the tendencies of their “race.”

Sayers ultimately returns to the subject of Poe’s works, attributing the genre’s first material steps to his short stories, noting that “Poe has got most of [the genre’s

69 features], at any rate in embryo” (80). Her version of Poe, however, lacks the explicit national origin of the British and French authors she names—her continual use of

“Anglo-Saxon” as a racial stand-in for anglophone societies tacitly admits his non-British status but positions his actual status (as American) as both safely inside the Anglo-Saxon category and subordinate to the English Anglo-Saxon point of racial origin. A tacitly

American Edgar Allan Poe may have originated many of the genre’s tropes, but England, in Sayers racially-marked history, originated Poe. This unusually subtle subordination of

American cultural production to the nation’s British colonial (and ostensibly racial) origins emerges again in the language used to describe Poe’s approach to the genre:

“embryo” versus the fully-grown variety used by his British successors. Poe, “like a restless child, played with” the genre until he flippantly abandoned it.

Almost immediately thereafter, Sayers asserts that the British rediscoverers of the genre were motivated, in part, by having come of age reading the works of the American author James Fenimore Cooper. For a second time in as many paragraphs, the American author figure who might have influence over the detective genre is personally deterritorialized (Fenimore Cooper’s American thematic trappings are named, but his geographic location is not) and infantilized in comparison to British practitioners of the genre—Fenimore Cooper “fires” the “imagination of childhood,” but has no place in adult detective fiction. Even the notion of personal influence is subverted here—Cooper does not himself “fire” the “imagination”; instead, the “imagination of childhood was fired” by his texts’ availability to British children (85). The British practitioners are, accordingly, split along adult-child metaphorical lines, Fenimore Cooper’s popularity in

“boyhood” or “childhood” contrasted with the serious “novelists and readers” these

70 adolescent British readers would become: “In the ‘sixties, the generation who had read

Fenimore Cooper in boyhood turned, as novelists and readers, to tracing the spoor of the criminal upon their own native heath” (85).

Having firmly cemented British responsibility for having “perfected a more varied and imaginative genre” of detective fiction, and having subverted the possibility of outside influence by relegating it to the status of generic “embryo” or “childhood” fixation, Sayers has prepared her history to return to the centrality of Sherlock Holmes.

Her section headers, up to this point in the history, have followed the theme of “Edgar

Allan Poe: Evolution of” Plot, Detective or other essential genre component, or have been grammatically simple headers explaining a point of meditation. Having finally run out of Poe’s works and completed a careful negotiation of racial and national boundaries to control the genre’s irritatingly promiscuous influences, the section headers become more explicit in their organization of the genre into periods. The first post-Poe section is entitled “The Pre-Doyle Period,” establishing (yet again) the teleology of the history— like the Western theological calendar, all events prior to the arrival of the central figure are preparing for that arrival, and all events after are reacting to it.

This “Pre-Doyle Period” is marked by Sheridan Le Fanu’s supernatural mysteries

(insufficiently developed because they rely on the supernatural and subvert the “fair play” of the genre with its readers, but otherwise excellent) and Wilkie Collins’ The

Moonstone. That novel, Sayers asserts, “is probably the very finest detective story ever written” and “as near perfection as anything of its kind” (89), but is denied the position of generic origin because it was too like other novels of sensation (Sayers implies that it is simply too long) and was not singlehandedly responsible for a boom in the popularity of

71 the genre. By comparison to Collins’ sedate but masterful novel, Doyle’s A Study in

Scarlet was “flung like a bombshell into the field of detective fiction […]. The effect was electric” (92). With the arrival of Holmes “the ball—the original nucleus set by Edgar

Allan Poe nearly forty years earlier—was at last set rolling.” The new texts that followed, while they were “not new, indeed, for, as we have seen, it is as old as Collins and Le

Fanu,” permitted British authors to push “great developments in a scientific age” of detective fiction (95). American influence over the genre, and with it America’s racial position, is contained within a discourse of infancy that places a barely-metaphorical

“made in Britain” label on American cultural production.

In an interesting departure from Wrong’s history, for Sayers the centrality of

Holmes in the genre guarantees British control of the genre but does not mark an end to the genre’s forward development. Sayers, in fact, claims that “the newness of the genre and the immense prestige of Holmes blinded readers’ eyes” to the new, more rigorous texts that were produced by Golden Age authors adhering to modern “fair-play” standards for the detective story. Holmes, with his “immense prestige,” enables the

British to claim responsibility for the genre’s popularity, but also establishes a British monopoly on subsequent improvements and even the future formal perfection of the detective story. The remainder of Sayers’ history, echoing Wrong’s historical account, details a list of generic “best practices” that will enable future refinements, and even predicts that those varieties pioneered by British authors post-Holmes (like the “medical mystery”) will expand to wholly dominate the genre at some future point (95).

While these two histories are only a small selection of the accounts of detective fiction written in this period, they represent both a popular anxiety and its temporary

72 resolution. Wrong’s and Sayers’ historiographic efforts to claim British responsibility for the popular genre by codifying its history are continually interrupted by their attempts to contain textual influence. The genre, in these histories, is only barely contained by redrawing the boundaries around the works of Doyle. To establish these boundaries, both

Wrong and Sayers must contend with French, American, and other participants. Wrong attempts to do so by mirroring a translatio imperii-style history of Britain: key foreign figures are identified individually, rather than nationally, and Britain is imagined as both exceptional and in a direct cultural lineage with Greece, Rome, or Biblical Israel (19).

Sayers instead broadens how membership in Britishness is construed by replacing it with references to an abstracted “Anglo-Saxon” civilization.12 Likewise, she places members and nonmembers along a linear path of cultural development figured in terms of biological growth—embryo, childhood, adulthood—turning the language of popular eugenics theories to the discourse of genre. These processes reorient the history of the genre around a figure they can easily claim and control, and then secure sole British responsibility for that figure’s production.

The material fact of Holmes’ popularity is retroactively attributed to the advancement and quality of the nation that claims production rights, erasing any notion of historical chance or outside assistance. British empire over a genre (and by extension, over some fraction of global popular culture) depends on British control of the genre’s metropole. So that metropole must first be identified, and then it must be identified as a

12 It might be argued that the contemporary move to replace explicit Anglocentrism with the “Global Anglophone” category is in danger of doing the same thing. As suggested in the first chapter, part of this study’s larger intervention (and the work of its final chapter) is to explicitly confront this possibility and use models suggested by postcolonial detective fiction and contemporary internet fandoms to avoid it. 73

British product. The popularity of Holmes as a historical fact is a resource these histories take advantage of to build a culturally comforting and politically useful narrative. They lay claim to the texts’ popularity while pretending to explain it. In the process, the production of detective fiction, the printing and consumption of Doyle’s works and others, ceases to be simply a matter of economics or taste and becomes a patriotic act.

These histories inextricably link the promotion of the genre and the promotion of British culture itself, merging genre fandom with Anglophilia. The distinction between that fandom and Anglophilia, as later histories of the genre will demonstrate, becomes increasingly difficult to identify; critical attention to the genre is tied up, voluntarily or involuntarily, in promoting Britain’s cultural hegemony.

2.3 Transatlantic Roads All Lead to Holmes

Only a few years after Wrong and Sayers’ short histories, there are several quiet challenges to the link between British cultural superiority and the popularity of the detective fiction genre. These midcentury histories, much like their predecessors, are responding as much to the conditions of their time as to calls for scholarly historical work. Whereas earlier genre histories were concerned with establishing and policing the boundaries and ownership of the genre, mid-century genre histories are more concerned with expanding that notion of ownership or cultural responsibility to illustrate a transnational solidarity around detective fiction. Not unlike Sayers’ subtle inclusion of the United States in her “Anglo-Saxon” civilization, these newer histories preserve

British centrality while expanding the membership of responsible parties. In the case of the American critic Howard Haycraft’s genre history Murder For Pleasure (1941), the

74 most prominent example of this period’s histories, Sayers’ abstracted “Anglo-Saxon” responsibility is further expanded to a Western Civilization (one that, thanks to its publication in 1941, seems to exclude the Germans but include the French), and E. M.

Wrong’s translatio imperii-esque history of the genre is revised from Jerusalem, Athens,

(oddly not) Rome, London to Jerusalem, Athens, (still oddly not) Rome, Philadelphia,13

Paris, London. In Haycraft’s account, and other genre histories like it,14 Irish, French, and American authors are given a larger role in the process of genesis, and the transatlantic position of Poe becomes rhetorically crucial. Nonetheless, an explicitly

British Doyle remains at the center of this newly-imagined transnational creative effort, identified as both its chief beneficiary and its most visible exponent.

Works in this phase of detective fiction historiography are marked by promoting a coherent notion of (some variant of) Western Civilization using the genre as an example—though the genre, and Western Civilization, seem to depend primarily on

Anglo-American efforts. In postcolonial terms, an effort to tie the old periphery more closely to the center is made by permitting some members of the periphery to join the center, and by locating a new periphery in those unnamed and unnameable Others who don’t produce the right kind of texts but are (perhaps) happy to consume them. Like the

Golden Age histories’ obsession with preserving a British empire in the world of detective fiction while the actual empire is under challenge, these midcentury histories

13 This schematic for history uses Philadelphia metonymically for the United States likely because Poe first wrote the first Dupin story while living in that city. 14 Among the most typical of these is A. E. Murch’s 1958 The Development of the Detective Novel. That book’s visual components and its table of contents are a perfect model of history where a transnational effort is detailed but Sherlock Holmes is a central British masterwork. 75 can be read as responding to the conflicts and anxieties of their historical context, mirroring larger political and cultural trends. Remaking detective fiction as a collective effort promotes the notion that there is cultural parity, or at least common ground, between the previously distinct national groups that are observed to produce it. In

Haycraft’s context of the Second World War (whose presence even marks the text’s first sentence), a cultural solidarity between the U.K. and its possessions, the U.S. and France formed around detective fiction necessitates a shared history and cultural toolbox—and this expanded cultural common ground has obvious political utility. Other histories in this period mimic that pattern—A. E. Murch’s 1958 genre history, for example, expands the union of detective fiction-producing cultures slightly further; if the producers he identifies were mapped out, the territory would stretch from North America to the western border of the new Warsaw Pact, following closely the boundaries of the equally new NATO.15 Regardless of the political usefulness of this transnational genre- solidarity,16 the Holmes icon remains the center of these histories. The power of association is revered and preserved by keeping the most popular text at the center—this power simply gets deployed for new political aims.

15 With some exceptions: Murch’s Crime Fiction NATO includes Ireland and excludes the Nordic countries and all of Germany. 16 There’s a chicken-and-egg argument here: whether a preexisting political and cultural solidarity was present and the histories were furnishing yet another example, or whether these histories are manipulating academic exercise to invent this solidarity. I suspect both are simultaneously true: that solidarity had (or has) some material reality, and constant reiteration, even in special-interest academic discourse, had a role in maintaining that ideological solidarity. “The West,” like any category, must be constantly called into existence but doesn’t arrive totally out of a vacuum. A British-American axis of crime fiction also serves to “pass the torch” from the declining empire to the ascendant nation while maintaining a distinctly British claim to the generic origin. 76

The most commonly cited example from this period, Haycraft’s Murder for

Pleasure, begins by establishing just how culturally important detective fiction is, regardless of its status as a popular (ostensibly un- or sub-literary) literature. Haycraft details the emergence of “raid libraries” in Luftwaffe-besieged London in 1941 and explains that those ad hoc libraries are stocked with “detective stories and nothing else”

(vii). Haycraft is unwilling to theorize why detective stories are the go-to for Londoners sheltering underground—noting that any theory would make for interesting, but academic, reading—but concludes that detective fiction, “for whatever reason,” has gradually come to hold a privileged position in “modern civilized existence” (viii). He notes, tongue partially in cheek while citing M. Somerset Maugham, that detective fiction may one day be studied by graduate students as a cultural artifact and laments that no extended attempt at a history of the influential genre has yet been undertaken. Instead, there have been only the “excellent but brief critical studies” by the likes of E. M. Wrong and Dorothy Sayers, a handful of obscure, “rather academic” treatises that are no longer in print, and a scattered array of how-to manuals (viii-ix). Murder for Pleasure, in

Haycraft’s terms, tries to fill the void by “providing a reasonably readable and useful outline of the main progress of the detective story from Edgar Allan Poe to the present”

(ix). Haycraft inherits from Wrong and Sayers the desire to begin the genre’s history with

Poe, though, as we shall see, he frames Poe’s role rather differently, acknowledging his

Americanness. He organizes his history around influence “either in technique or in popularity” rather than “literary merit per se” (x). This method allows Haycraft to orient his history towards how the genre arrived at Sherlock Holmes, rather than having to deal with the various texts and branches of the genre that received literary or critical attention

77 on their own. This structure reinforces a model of the genre as a direct, linear progression—a directional “evolution” (x)—rather than as a complex association of texts.

It substitutes coherence for complexity, in exchange projecting the image of a stronger bond between any text marked as participating in this (quite literal) genealogy. Haycraft then signals, for the first time, what he believes ties together the varied authors (the nations they metonymically represent) and texts of his history: proper detective fiction can only be produced by cultures with strong “democratic institutions” (note the

American-accented echo of Sayers’ and Wrong’s British “legal” institutions) and the production and popularity of detective stories might be read as an indicator of the strength of those institutions (xii).

In the context of Haycraft’s cultural theory and his academic mission, the structure of Murder for Pleasure’s chapters is indicative of a very specific transatlantic arrangement of power (see figure 1.) The fact that Poe’s creation of the detective genre takes place in Philadelphia (the “PLACE: AMERICA,” fig. 1) in 1841 is essential to

Haycraft’s democratic theory of the genre—and the fact that Poe’s chapter is parenthetically annotated as “Genesis” (again, in distinction to the “origin,” presented as

“Renaissance”) is no accident. Haycraft asserts that Poe’s creation of the character Dupin could only have occurred in Philadelphia in 1841 because the city was undergoing a

“literary revival” that “wore the face of a popular and democratic revolt” against literature as an elite activity (2). Thanks to the advent of “cheap magazine publishing,” which occurred first in Philadelphia (the “American Athens,” according to Haycraft), the prevailing cultural notion was that “the concept of ‘literature’ for the few was giving way to the idea of ‘reading’ for the many” (2). Briefly retreading the ground of Sayers and

FOREWORD vii CHAPTER I. TIME: 1841 PLACE: AMERICA (Genesis) i II. THE IN-BETWEEN YEARS (Development) 28 III. PROFILE BY GASLIGHT (Renaissance) 45 IV, ENGLAND: 1890-1914 (The Romantic Era) 62 V. AMERICA: 1890-1914 (The Romantic Era) 83 VI. THE CONTINENTAL DETECTIVE STORY 103 VII. ENGLAND: 1918-1930 (The Golden Age) 112 VIII. AMERICA: 1918-1930 (The Golden Age) 159 IX. ENGLAND: 1930- (The Moderns) 181 X. AMERICA: 1930- (The Moderns) 207 XI. THE RULES OF THE GAME (A Reader Looks at Writers) 223 XII. THE MURDER MARKET 259 XIII. FRIENDS AND FOES (The Critical Literature) 272 XIV. A DETECTIVE STORY BOOKSHELF 298 XV. DICTATORS, DEMOCRATS, AND DETECTIVES 312 XVI. THE FUTURE OF THE DETECTIVE STORY 319 XVII. A COMPREHENSIVE DETECTIVE STORY Quiz 327 XVIII. WHO’S WHO IN DETECTION 340 APPENDIX A: “THE PURLOINED LETTER” CONTROVERSY 387 APPENDIX B: SHERLOCK HOLMES' NAME AND OTHER ADDENDA 391 INDEX 395

Figure 1: The table of contents as listed in the 1941 edition of Haycraft’s Murder for Pleasure. Note: the original list is printed over two pages.

Wrong, he notes that “[p]uzzle stories, mystery stories, crime stories, and stories of deduction and analysis have existed since the earliest times” but that “the detective story itself is purely a development of the modern age…[f]or the essential theme of the detective story is professional detection of crime” (4). In essence, Haycraft reinforces a

British claim to the genre through the genre’s dependence on the nineteenth century invention of “professional detection” but asserts a key, catalytic role for the United

States: it is responsible for establishing a cultural atmosphere and an economic means where elite “literature” could be supplanted by popular “reading.”

Haycraft dismisses the notion that the genre might have been invented earlier, in

Hebrew or Greek texts, by arguing “it would be quite as logical to maintain that the primitive pipings of the Aegean shepherds were symphonies because the modern symphony includes passages for reed instruments” (6)—by arguing, in other words, that the presence of some generic tropes alone does not make any text a member of the contemporary genre: a more complex combination of tropes and good timing do. He does note, however, that the obvious predecessors of the “Hellenic and Hebraic civilizations” give credence to the argument that the development of the genre runs in parallel to the development of democratic institutions (6). He deals similarly with the French predecessor that Poe’s Dupin names in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Dupin’s dismissal of Vidocq at the end of that story is taken at face value by Haycraft, who agrees with Dupin that while Vidocq has common ground with a proper detective, his incomplete methodology disqualifies the character, and the francophone texts in which he figures, as earlier instances of the genre (24-25). That this disavowal might have more to it than a simple illustration of difference does not appear in Haycraft’s analysis.

The exclusive control over the genre’s genesis that Haycraft affords to (a now explicitly American) Poe is cemented, shortly thereafter, by an anecdotal account of

Abraham Lincoln being a fan (26). This also, not incidentally, furnishes the notion that detective stories are directly connected to democratic institutions and the intellectual environment necessary to lead them. The genre is, from this point on, always an avowedly Anglo-American cultural project, with significant assistance from the French.

The chapter titles for much of Haycraft’s remaining text reinforces this notion, bouncing between “America” and “England” in chapter couplets dedicated to a historical period.

The French semi-peripheral membership, likewise, is displayed in a single interruption in this pattern—the sixth chapter is dedicated to “The Continental Detective Story” and lacks a temporal marker beyond its placement between the chapter couplets representing

“The Romantic Era” and “The Golden Age.”

The title of Haycraft’s second chapter, perhaps more than any other, enshrines

Holmes as the “origin” of the genre in complement to Poe’s “genesis.” The texts that span the half-century between Poe’s first attempts at the genre and Doyle’s perfection of it are simply called the “in-between” texts, as if in the chronology of history, those texts were always intended to span a gap, rather than exist in their own right. That this period has no defining characteristics besides being “in-between” indicates that this history has a distinct, predetermined destination—the “Profile by Gaslight (Renaissance)” of Arthur

Conan Doyle. The final paragraph of the “in-between” chapter usefully sums up its position:

Gaboriau, Collins, Dickens. Each contributed something toward fictional detection. Jointly, they kept the form alive: saved the theme, perhaps, from premature extinction. And Collins dropped, in passing, a single, matchless pearl. But the creation of a really great detective character, the writing of full-length

detective stories concerned with detection and nothing else, was still two decades away locked in the questing brain of a red-cheeked school-boy in Edinburgh. (44, emphasis in original)

The use, and italicization, of the term “toward” is telling—these authors and texts furnished, at best, raw materials for the production of some superior work; they are less responsible for it than those texts named in “Genesis,” but are nonetheless essential to its arrival because they preserved a tradition and prepared an audience. Collins, in a ritual of praise so common to these histories it might be construed as a marker of generic membership for the whole detective fiction history canon, must be given credit for his (in some histories, tragically) premature masterwork. The proper respects have been paid so that it may seem, on the surface, that the history is not rushing for Doyle and Holmes— and indeed, the performance of a genre-typical nod to Collins seems to be the sole purpose of that chapter.

Haycraft’s arrival at Holmes spends more time than some of the other histories on biographical details for Arthur Conan Doyle, and is careful to mention his “mixed Anglo-

Irish blood” and his (almost stereotypically) middle-class ascent from humble upbringings to physician and world-renowned author via British and American periodicals (46). Haycraft’s emphasis of Doyle’s economic mobility and ethnic hybridity does not, however, serve to subvert his Britishness or his status as a transnational cultural icon. Instead, it forces the inclusion of Irish (ancestral) involvement along with an

American narrative of socioeconomic mobility and American publication power in the effort to construct that iconic status. Haycraft also returns to one of his earliest assertions—that influence and artistic merit are not closely interconnected—by reminding his readers that “[a]side from his masterly creation of character, little real

82 originality or inventiveness can be claimed for Doyle” (54). Instead, Doyle and Sherlock

Holmes are given credit for getting the genre into new (readerly and writerly) hands.

Their popularity encourages the adaptation, homage, translation, and international circulation not just of Doyle’s texts, but of his predecessors (60-61) and, presumably, his successors. This popularity, Haycraft asserts, is not due to the artistic quality of the texts themselves; it is not “intricacy or bafflement that causes the tales to be read and re-read with a never diminishing thrill, when the slick product of to-day is forgotten in an hour. It is the ‘romantic reality’ of their comfortable, nostalgic British heartiness” (56). Doyle captures British nostalgia for a (fictionalized) period in which the empire had no rival, or at least no rival that couldn’t be defeated by rational detection. Quoting William Bolitho,

Haycraft concludes that “[h]e is more than a book[17]. He is the spirit of a town and a time.”

Haycraft’s complex centralization of Holmes in the history is firmly cemented by the beginning of the subsequent chapter, the first of the period-grouped transatlantic couplets, which quotes E. M. Wrong’s observation that genre historians “tend to think of the pre-Holmes detectives as of the pre-Shakespearean drama; to call them precursors only.” Haycraft adds a strategically tongue-and-cheek annotation: “[a]nd mere precursors they were, for the most part, though recent attempts have been made to disinter their literary bones, chiefly for the benefit of those aficionados of the esoteric, the edition collectors” (62). Any scholarly challenge to Holmes-as-Origin growing out of those texts condemned to “The In-Between Years” or the dark times prior to “Time: 1841 Place:

17 The grammar of this statement is interesting, since it collapses the distinction between Doyle as author, Holmes as character, and the texts as product. 83

America” is summarily dismissed, relegated to the “esoteric” predilections of “the edition collectors.” That the centrality of Holmes might be serving both Haycraft’s political agenda and an older discourse of British cultural hegemony is dismissed in a single sentence added to an assertion so common that Haycraft could simply borrow another writer’s wording. The stakes of this historical structure to Haycraft's agenda are finally laid out in one of the text’s short, terminal chapters. The fifteenth chapter, “Dictators,

Democrats, and Detectives,” offers an extended explanation of how the Allies’ dispute with that “grimly real Moriarty of Europe” is rooted in a shared cultural tradition between

“England, France, America, and to a lesser extent the Scandinavian commonwealths” that

“Central Europeans” and “Teutonic empires” do not share and find fundamentally politically inconvenient (315). The chapter goes on to imply that fascism cannot spread among the Allies due to the same values that promote the production of detective fiction

(317-318). Holmes, in other words, becomes the transcultural keystone for the unity of the Allied powers. Any account which decentralizes Holmes (or, like those of Sayers and

Wrong, tries to make him a solely nationalist product) risks undermining the politically necessary concept of a united, democratic and transatlantic Western civilization—and so

Haycraft must carefully craft a new genre history that depends on nationalist ownership of author figures but not necessarily their works. Holmes must be, at once, a British masterpiece and a transnational product.

2.4 Disinterring Textual Bones

The most recent phase of genre histories abandons any effort to provide a complete history of the genre as a coherent entity. Instead, these histories are marked by

84 their attempts to expose one or more major influences on or consequences of the genre’s development, often returning to those same “branches” and offshoots of the genre, those devalued texts that prior histories had dismissed or neglected entirely. Histories in the mid-century and Golden Age veins continue to be produced and published by both academic and popular presses (Martin Priestman’s Crime Fiction from Poe to the

Present, for example, hints the old pattern in the title itself and adopts it directly, discussing anglophone detective fiction almost as if no other traditions exist), but the overwhelming majority of new work in the field of genre fiction scholarship operates in this new pattern. In essence, the “esoteric” histories of Haycraft’s “edition collectors” have become the vanguard of a reborn discipline. Much like the transition between the early and midcentury histories of the genre, however, these late-twentieth and early- twenty first century histories can never quite push Sherlock Holmes from the center of the genre (if for no other reason than the character’s popularity and signifying power).

So, they must literally work around Holmes.

Perhaps the most coherent and explicit example of this new trend to “disinter” dismissed generic predecessors is Maurizio Ascari’s A Counter-History of Crime Fiction, published in 2007. Ascari’s reimagined history of the genre changes the terms of the genre itself, tracing several threads (which he groups together under “criminography”) in order to establish where detective fiction’s formalized tropes came from and to permit the re-entry of “heretical” texts that would normally be excluded from the canon of detective fiction, or the larger category of “crime fiction.” By his own account, Ascari’s attempt to build a counter-history is motivated by a process of literal re-reading—with each new work of criticism on detective fiction, or the cultural dynamics of science, pseudoscience

85 and policing in the Victorian period, Ascari claims that the literary and interpretive frameworks he had used to understand detective fiction were revealed as more and more ill-fitted to the texts themselves. The genre began to disintegrate as the atypical particulars of each detective story became more obvious. As the genre’s features become less clearly defined, the notion of a linear, genealogical history for that genre becomes unsustainable, and a wider array of predecessors is needed (x-xi). Ascari reduces the scale of this claim in his introduction, however. He notes that his counter-history “does not aim to study the nineteenth-century development of mainstream detective fiction, but rather to map those hybrid zones where its conventions mingle with those of sensation fiction and the ghost story, or are else conflated with the discourses of pseudo-sciences”

(xi-xii). Immediately thereafter, he asserts that “[p]arodies, adaptations, translations to and from foreign languages, as well as the critical works that the ramifications of crime fiction fostered, and that in turn fostered the public recognition of popular literature, will all be taken into account as contributing to the formation and the canonical status of the genre” (xii). In other words, Ascari is less interested in how the texts were made than in how the genre was made—the process of myth-building around the texts to create a genre is as important as the authoring of the texts themselves.

As might be expected in this case, as Ascari’s survey continues the hybrid zones gradually expand to consume the entire genre, save perhaps for a rump “mainstream” in the figure of Sherlock Holmes, and the “parodies, adaptations, [and] translations” are gradually revealed as essential to the “cultural processes” that both establish and populate genres. “Doyle’s works,” as Ascari foreshadows in his introduction, “are thus presented as the hub of a complex cultural phenomenon, the Sherlock Holmes ‘myth’” (xiv)—this

“myth” is the coherence of the genre itself. Even with the myriad new predecessors and influential texts Ascari presents throughout the body of his work, the detective fiction genre cannot exist without Sherlock Holmes at its center. The major difference between

Ascari’s genre history and those of his predecessors (Wrong, Sayers, Haycraft, and their compatriots) is that the origin position of Holmes is examined as a construction, rather than as an inevitable circumstance. His work is an attempt to “restor[e] detective fiction to the cosmopolitan dimension that presided over its origin”—a coded attempt to argue that the iconic Holmes, specifically, is a cosmopolitan product—“in an effort to attain a better understanding of a genre whose complexity has been underplayed for both ideological and aesthetic reasons” (xv, emphasis mine). The political, intellectual, and cultural choice to place Holmes as an origin is made openly, and every attempt is made to justify it and to discuss its importance in the popular conception of the genre as a coherent category. Ascari, like his predecessors, has no intention of changing this conception because it is useful. By proposing new predecessors and more complex notions of influence and history, Ascari is distributing Holmes’ iconic power in new directions (the “underplayed” complexity) and investigating how and why this iconic power was constructed (for “both ideological and aesthetic reasons”).

The material content of Ascari’s monograph is a survey of texts with profound impact on the genre, but whose inclusion in the genre was (and still is) denied.

Specifically, Ascari argues for an expanded role for sensation fiction and the supernatural, because “[f]rom its inception, the discourse on detective fiction discarded the sensational lineage of the new genre, grounding its literary status on its association with scientific method and highbrow literature” (1). Ascari notes that one of the primary

87 vehicles of this association with the scientific and the literary is through the creation of

Sherlock Holmes as the genre’s icon. The scientific nature of the detection and the stories’ immediate popularity were useful in tying the genre, and its practitioners, to late

Victorian and Modern scientific and literary values. Holmes had political power, and so the genre had to be tied to that power for survival (1). In exchange, the genre buried its connections to the less-valued tradition of sensational literature. Subsequent genre histories—Ascari specifically cites Haycraft’s Murder for Pleasure—formalized this burial “in order to sustain a normative view of the genre” around a powerful and popular icon. Accordingly, these histories display a “chauvinistic competition for the identification of the ur-detective story” (3). Interestingly, Ascari never articulates why these histories would try to identify the “ur-detective story,” though he does note in passing that Haycraft’s emphasis on Poe as the producer of the ur-text was “probably designed to emphasize the Americanness of detective fiction” as a whole (3).

Implicit here is the assertion I’ve made throughout this survey—that the scramble for the ur-text is an attempt to allocate or distribute responsibility for genesis, and therefore a scramble for a legitimate claim to the origin’s power. However, Haycraft’s obsession with Poe is not quite as simple as emphasizing the “Americanness” of the genre, as Ascari asserts. Instead, it joins American means of production to a British icon, constructing a coalition or American successorship rather than an exclusive claim; it is less an on-the-nose nationalist move than an attempt to forge some cosmopolitan transatlantic connection. Ascari’s own work does not escape this same motivation. His fixation with the sensational (though more realistic historically than an exclusive focus on

Poe) is nonetheless a scramble for ur-textual responsibility. The primary difference is that

88 the connection is not a binary between America and Britain, but a network spanning

Britain and a cosmopolitan assembly of authors and states. Tellingly, this cosmopolitan assembly, though more open and historically grounded than an exclusively anglophone coalition, is entirely populated by European and American players: “Great Britain, the

United States, France and—occasionally—Italy” (xv). The desire to identify ur-texts, to furnish connections and influences, is an indispensable exercise for literary, textual or cultural scholarship. It is, in short, valuable and informative. Even when used in an uncritical fashion (as we’ve seen in the early and middle phases, and in Ascari’s

Eurocentrism), this scholarly habit can reveal that the genre, its origin and its genesis are

“the result of a cultural construction” rather than “the essential qualities of a certain number of” texts (xiv). The selection of ur-texts, and the allocation of responsibility and power for whatever these texts are ur- to is always already political, always, in Ascari’s terms, “a somewhat arbitrary process” (xii) that can be read for its inherent politics. In short, A Counter-History of Crime Fiction, and new scholarly histories like it, deploy the same self-interested narrative patterns of genre origin and influence as their predecessors but are redeemed by their deliberate attention to that deployment as a choice made in a historical and political context.

The concluding chapter of A Counter-History comes closest to articulating this complex situation fully. It begins by identifying a “Sherlock Holmes ‘myth’” (156): the quotes around myth presage Ascari’s complicated use of the term in a Barthesian sense

(as a grossly overburdened sign) and in a theological sense (an origin story, instructional fable and sacred text, all at once). He notes that at the time of its arrival, Sherlock Holmes was not already mythic, despite the early and midcentury histories’ most earnest efforts to

89 present it this way. It took transmedial textual adaptations, like Sidney Paget’s illustrations in The Strand (which expanded on textual clues for Holmes now-iconic appearance); an 1899 American stage adaptation written and acted by William Gillette

(who added Holmes’ signature pipe and expanded his mannerisms) and performed in

Buffalo, New York and London; and transnational magazine circulation for the text to reach the pop-culture equivalent of critical mass (157). Once it did, a genre was retroactively constructed around it (indeed, the earlier survey of Wrong’s, Sayers’ and

Haycraft’s scholarship perform that process of genre construction). During this process of consolidation via circulation, adaptation, and translation, texts, textual criticism, and even

“inconsistencies” in the Holmes texts that did not support this new genre were disconnected from the newly Holmes-centered genre.

Ascari deliberately confounds the distinction between the literary and religious uses of the term “canon,” arguing that there is a “pseudo-religious dimension to this phenomenon” and that religious (particularly Catholic18) critics were central in the implementation of the canon (158-159). Anthologists, likewise, attempted to collect and curate this canon (167-168), answering a distinctly British fin de siècle anxiety over threatened empire, or a distinctly post-Victorian theological anxiety over an increasingly secularized Britain, by offering morality texts steeped in Victorian rationalism, modern psychology and logical positivism (158-160, 170-171). In attempting to explain this phenomenon at the conclusion of A Counter-History, however, Ascari reaffirms a belief in the centrality of Sherlock Holmes and Britain in the universe of the genre. While “the

18 Ascari notes that Ronald Knox, G. K. Chesterton, and Dorothy Sayers were either Catholic or had Catholic affinities and produced theological texts in addition to their literary and scholarly repertoires (159-162). 90

United States, France, and—occasionally—Italy” have a part to play, Victorian (and barely post-Victorian) Britain’s cultural needs and anxieties remain the sole focus of the text’s conclusions. Ascari’s criticism has looked the artificiality of the genre (and the politics of those genre histories) in the eye but has failed to leave the old methods and fixations behind. By means of the “Sherlock Holmes myth,” Britain remains the proprietor of the genre, regardless of the fact that the myth and the genre are constructions. The origin, geographically and generically, cannot be escaped even as it is revealed as a product with a complex history. The association of origin with “singularity” is particularly apt here—no matter how much energy is expended, scholarship cannot escape the gravity of the object, regardless of whether it is a construction or a natural phenomenon. Its cultural mass, apparently, is too great.

Interestingly, even scholarship with an ideological stake in challenging cultural

Anglo- or Eurocentrism can only do so incompletely in this context—the utility of the

Holmesian icon seems, in nearly all cases, to outweigh its potentially subversive theoretical baggage. Scholarship on detective fiction that makes any attempt at a history of the genre is obligated to pay its respects to Holmes and to imagine the genre as answering specifically British cultural needs; when the genre is deployed elsewhere, the needs it serves are either inherited from Britain, usually via colonialism, or directly analogous. What contemporary scholarship does do, by way of escaping this pattern, is to turn the scholarly genre history around. Instead of their objective being the construction of a new history, recent scholars use the existing histories to illustrate something more interesting and subversive.

For instance, the objective of Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee’s Crime and Empire

(2003) is to illustrate how the discourse of crime was a tool for Britain to imagine itself as an imperial metropole. The text illustrates the creation of detective fiction and the discourse of criminality not simply in terms of a British invention of discourse, but of a

British invention of discourse that depended on the knowledge gained from British colonial activity. Theoretically, it resists becoming a genre history by figuring the genre in rhetorical terms: detective fiction is a symptom, a product that is part of a larger cultural enterprise. Structurally, it resists the typical genre history by ending it prematurely—the latest work examined by Mukherjee is Collins’ 1868 The Moonstone— and by confining the geographic scope of the study to exclude Poe. Instead, Mukherjee writes a history of a discourse. While the presence of the popular genre, and of Sherlock

Holmes, inflects the text’s context, it opts not to include them. The question of the centrality of Britain to the genre or discourse is summarily avoided by Mukherjee’s choice to examine specifically British and colonial discourses. Mukherjee’s postcolonial hypothesis—that the language of crime, since it was complicit in a complicated colonial enterprise and subject to intense domestic debate, can never “unproblematically present one viewpoint about rulership, justice, legality, morality, or deviance” in the anglophone world (5)—is also an argument about the politics of the genre, but is safely insulated from the latent imperial discourse of the genre histories by avoiding the term “genre” itself. This latent imperial discourse haunts Mukherjee’s text by its absence but fails to derail or subvert its mission precisely because Mukherjee’s mission is to illustrate the subversiveness and complexity of any discourse of crime and any genre that employs that discourse. Even as Mukherjee’s account in Crime and Empire avoids explicitly

92 challenging imperial or Anglocentric histories of detective fiction in the mode of Sayers or Wrong, his attention to the subversive tendencies of British discourses of crime challenges how we understand those genre histories’ preferred progenitor texts.

Caroline Reitz’s Detecting the Nation moves one step further, arguing that detective fiction, specifically, was a tool for altering British self-perception from “island kingdom” to “sprawling empire” (Reitz, back cover). While this premise reinforces the notion that the genre was developed by Britain solely to respond to British conditions,

Reitz’s later readings, like Mukherjee’s in Crime and Empire, undercut the idea that the production of these texts was geographically restricted to Britain. These texts, Reitz argues, are generically dependent on narratives of crime and colonial adventure produced not just in response to the colonies, but often produced in and by those colonies, in order to imagine Britain as a distinct entity in the first place (Reitz xvii). Britain is central in any discussion of the genre, by Reitz’s logic, because Britain fashioned itself using that genre as a tool, and then deliberately distributed that tool to others so that they might imagine Britain in the same way. Britain was essentially invented by its role in inventing detective fiction. Reitz’s text concludes by saying that if “we see the detective as a homegrown emanation of the metropolitan center, completely distinct from such other figures as the colonial explorer (or mining engineer), we overlook this important lesson about identity in the Victorian period”: that it is produced in a “vast, interconnected world” and subject to constant influence, policing and negotiation (87). The narrative that

Britain produced the detective fiction genre because of some cultural superiority, common to older genre histories, is turned against the concept of Britain itself. Instead,

Britain used the genre of detective fiction to create the impression of cultural cohesion

93 and superiority, to police its identity, and detective fiction still carries, and therefore exposes, the marks of that process. Britain and Holmes are still at the center, but the jockeying for the genesis or the ur-text has turned from a competition for connection to the power of Holmes and detective fiction (as a product of a great Great Britain) to competition for credit for the invention of Britain itself (as a product of Holmes’ and detective fiction’s cultural work). In a fascinating turn, the pattern of Holmes-as-Origin can survive even the inversion of the Britain-Produced-Holmes narrative. It can be inverted and used to interrogate Britain in a postcolonial context. The icon of Holmes, it seems, cannot escape the role of origin because of its own multifaceted utility to scholarship.

2.5 Neither Kith nor Kin in England

It is important to illustrate, in closing this chapter on histories and origins, that despite the utility of Holmes-as-Origin discourse to constructing coherent (and politically convenient) genre histories and scholarship, neither Doyle nor the characters he creates make any attempt to claim this particular status. As might be expected, the finer details of the texts themselves subvert the larger metanarrative about them. The Holmes texts, and in particular the first story, A Study in Scarlet, make extensive use of claiming predecessors and influences in order to furnish a sense of intertextuality and, therefore, a sense of genre membership. From a practical standpoint, one of the major day-to-day uses of genre is as a method of selection and market access—genre memberships mark texts according to who might like to consume them. A first text by an unknown author

(despite the genre histories’ paradoxical presentation of Holmes as somehow instantly

94 and eternally popular) would be obligated to advertise its shared qualities and to name predecessors—even as it also attempts to advertise its own originality and novelty. The result, particularly visible in the early pages of A Study in Scarlet, is a complex avowal- disavowal of prior famous literary detective figures, none of whom are British in origin.

These details reveal, or perhaps recall, that the genre was not a “homegrown” British product, that the discourses of novelty, originality, and genre are often paradoxical and fluid, and that no one author or national canon can claim sole responsibility over the origin, the genesis, or even the organization of the genre.

While A Study in Scarlet may have been “flung like a bombshell into the field of detective fiction” in the 1887 Beeton’s Christmas Annual, it did not do so as a quintessentially British product in a homegrown British genre. In fact, it did not even do so alone. The text’s involvement in non-British (or, more precisely, non-English) textual networks, and the demands that genre play upon old and new necessitates a careful negotiation with predecessors and companions. A Study in Scarlet is, from the beginning, engaging in a complicated avowal-through-disavowal—of genre, of the genre’s international dependencies, of involvement in the colonies and the periphery.

Sherlock Holmes, in A Study in Scarlet’s second chapter, disavows a relationship with Poe’s Inspector Dupin and Gaboriau’s Monsieur Lecoq. An explicit disavowal by name, ironically, is a strong indicator of a relationship—particularly so when being “not original” is simultaneously taboo in discussions of value but essential to participating in a genre and obtaining a receptive audience. Holmes, at least, is anxious to name and dump these predecessors, and does so in the second chapter—Lecoq is a hapless bungler, and

Dupin far too slow and improbably lucky (42-43). Watson’s attachment to Dupin leads to

95 a little tension—mirroring the reader’s recognition of both common membership and critical dismissal—but Watson is ultimately won over by his new roommate’s feats of rational detection. Holmes must perform for Watson and the reader a careful act of “yes, that’s what I do, but no, not like them.” He is the same enough to be mistaken for them, different enough for the mistake to matter. Holmes, unable to have arrived ex nihilo but incapable of subordination, is at one point identified as a fan of his sensational predecessors (in Watson’s famous table “Sherlock Holmes—his limits,” 9). They are not so much predecessors or models as learning experiences, and as such, they can share power through genre without interfering with, or subordinating, Doyle’s new text. We shall see this same positioning (the contextualization of predecessors as learning tools, not as predecessors proper) deployed and equally ignored in the postcolonial texts discussed in later chapters.

Even before disavowing a relationship with an American paranormal romanticist who resided on the Continent and published transatlantically, and another relationship with a French author, Doyle’s first Holmes story begins to pile up things translated to or translated from other places. In the first paragraph of A Study in Scarlet, British coloniality, particularly the human effort of constructing a British empire, is on display in

Watson’s mobility in Afghanistan, London, Calcutta, Peshawar, Kandahar province, and in the presence of Afghan Ghazis, Islam, various fevers, contagions and colonial ailments

(7-14). Within a few pages, a dead man with American business cards turns up, apparently somehow connected to a German murder case and socialism (though this ends up being a red herring). And all before this, just to emphasize the truly recycled, temporally subsequent nature of the text, the first half of A Study in Scarlet is subtitled as

96 a “reprint” from the “memoirs” of John H. Watson, a man with avowedly “neither kith nor kin in England” (14), and the second half ostensibly derived, all but its closing chapter, from the testimony of the guilty party.

Everything, it seems, is either from the colonies or is a secondary copy of something British deeply in contact with the colonies, and with criminality. Furthermore, the entire text is presented via a conceit that marks it as an obvious counterfeit, for these are not really memoirs at all. In the latter half of the text, the narrative hops across

Northern Europe and North America, involving all sorts of foreign entanglements including an American Mormon love quadrangle involving ambiguous parentage and incomplete religious conversion, the American wilderness itself, a Euroamerican living among Native Americans and adapting their skills to the role of an itinerant London cabbie, the international postal system, and a case of mistaken translation. A conscientious reader can hardly be surprised at the volume of secondary signs, faked clues, and questionable origins. From the labeling of the text to its content, A Study in

Scarlet seems to throw its semiotic tentacles in all directions, involved in a complex and international world of circulating people, things, and ideas.

The history the text proposes for itself, both in terms of its memoir conceit and in terms of its more obvious genre membership, is complex and deeply involved in both

British imperial and transnational matters. Unlike later histories, the text desperately seeks out its own history and its connections to others. Not surprisingly, genre histories like those of Wrong, Sayers, Haycraft, and even Ascari neglect A Study in Scarlet’s geographic and generic promiscuity in favor of simpler narratives. Inconvenient connections and textual inconsistencies are simply overlooked to preserve the coherence

97 of a historical narrative. A Study in Scarlet reveals that a process of constructing Holmes as an icon and generic origin took place deliberately, that it purposefully excluded textual moments that were subversive or problematic, and that the genre was reconfigured after the arrival of Doyle’s work in order to enshrine that work. This complex process, which I term reorigination, can only be exposed when commentary and scholarship about a seminal, iconic text is carefully compared to the content of the text itself. Attention to this process reveals the politics and power dynamics of a genre, and opens up the possibility that this power can be not just redeployed by association (as is the case with the scramble for the ur-text found in scholarship), but comprehensively hacked in order to mount a criticism of the concept of origin and textual ownership, to turn generic association (and textual subordination) into a source of textual authority and critical power.

The next chapter examines two “threads” of Holmesian detective fiction that do just that. These works, like Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, resist fitting cleanly into a preferred narrative of influence and origins. The stories—Satyajit Ray’s Feluda mysteries in India, and Cheng Xiaoqing’s Huo Sang mysteries in China—enact a process of rehistorization to subtly challenge the applicability of British (or, as this chapter argues,

British-claimed) cultural models or British cultural hegemony in service of an anticolonial nationalist agenda. Meanwhile, these same texts use references to Holmes, and to an Anglocentric narrative of the origins of detective fiction, as a “price of entry” to an international literary marketplace, allowing them to mount a critique of colonial cultural hierarchies from within. In the process, they mix local and ostensibly British generic models on equal terms, even as they are marked as depending on a British mold.

REFERENCES, Chapter 2

Ascari, Maurizio. A Counter-History of Crime Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,

2007. Print.

Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne. New

York: Verso, 1996. Print.

Doyle, Arthur Conan. A Study in Scarlet. Reproduced in: The New Annotated Sherlock

Holmes: The Novels, ed. Leslie Klinger. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.

Haycraft, Howard. Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story.

London: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1941. Print.

Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.

Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1981. Print.

Joshi, Priya. In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India.

New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Print.

Knight, Stephen. “The Golden Age.” The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. Ed.

Martin Priestman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Print.

Knox, Ronald A. “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes” (1911). The Diogenes

Club [Website], 1999. www.diogenes-club.com/studies.htm. Accessed 2 April

2015.

Macaulay, Thomas Babington. “Minute on Indian Education.” Selections from

Educational Records, Part I (1781-1839). Ed. H. Sharp. Delhi: National Archives

of India, 1965. 107-117. PDF.

Miller, D. A. The Novel and the Police. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,

1989. Print.

Mukherjee, Upamanyu Pablo. Crime and Empire: The Colony in Nineteenth-Century

Fictions of Crime. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Print.

Murch, A. E. The Development of the Detective Novel. New York: Philosophical Library,

1958. Print.

Priestman, Martin. Crime Fiction from Poe to the Present. 2nd Ed. Tavistock: Northcote

House, 2013.

Reitz, Caroline. Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Venture.

Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2010. Print.

Sayers, Dorothy. Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, and Horror. London:

Gollancz, 1928. PDF.

Symons, Julian. Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel. London:

Faber and Faber, 1972. Print.

Van Dine, S. S. (1928) “Twenty rules for writing detective stories,” reproduced at The

Thrilling Detective,

(accessed May 2019).

Wrong, E. M. “Crime and Detection.” The Art of the Mystery Story. Ed. Howard

Haycraft. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1946. 18-32. Print.

100

Chapter 3

CASES OF IDENTITY

3.1 Rehistorizing Detective Fiction

The contemporary history of detective or crime fiction—the one used as shorthand at academic conferences and the introductions to edited collections and fiction anthologies—is more likely to cite Poe as the originator of the genre than any other figure. Arthur Conan Doyle is, of course, always mentioned; the Holmes canon is presented, as is the case in the previous chapter’s histories, in a privileged paragon or apogee position, the pinnacle of the genre’s formal development and cultural impact. This model poses two serious dangers:

First, this history relies on a notion of linear progress in both genre and criminal justice. This linear progress model locates Anglo-American or Euro-American examples of crime fiction and real-world criminal justice at the point of origin. This is dangerous not so much because it is inaccurate (chronology is arguably on their side), but because it invites the assumption that the conditions of the genre’s development occurred first in, and because of, a Western cultural environment, establishing a colonially-inflected model of linear progress where the rest of the world moves towards the “perfected” state of

Euro-American juridical practice and crime fiction.

Second, this historical model subscribes to a linear timeline of generic development that supposes the genre is something to be achieved, rather than an

101 emergent product of myriad cultural, economic, and political forces; an idea which endorses the idea that crime fiction relies on a coherent, formal genre structure that had to be developed and refined. This echoes the problematic, though popular, notion that genre fiction is a reactionary body: in other words, that there are a series of strictly set tropes and structures which must be deployed in order to perform genre membership, regardless of time or location. Genre is, in this model, a checklist of immovable, formal properties from which any significant departure exiles the text into some other genre or liminal zone. For instance, the trope of the detective failing to solve the crime can be understood as a condition where a text is exiled into “literary” or “postmodern” detective fiction—a very useless distinction, since the failure to solve the mystery occurs in historically- identified “literary” and “popular” crimes stories abundantly, much to the chagrin of clean taxonomies or formal generic boundaries.

If, as I’ve argued in the previous two chapters, the discourse of origin and originality is concerned more with allocating cultural ownership and textual authority than chronology or genre evolution, attention to how the discourse of origins is deployed takes on a politics separate from simple historical narrative. To put it another way: the ways a text, and the texts that comment on it, put this constructed history to use to make a case for their significance challenge the simplistic formalist and linear-historical notions listed above, and the simplistic notions of national cultural property and authorship I’ve discussed in the first two chapters of this work. Paying attention to how these texts interact with the Anglocentric genre history narrative as a constructed narrative can expose how these texts’ historical realities challenge the value system that historical narrative supports.

102

This chapter identifies and examines one particular mode of interaction with that history: rehistorization. In this mode, texts, or works commenting on, advertising or analyzing those texts, strategically substitute the historical realities of their genre membership and production with the hegemonic, Anglocentric narrative in order to gain access to that narrative’s cultural power. Notably, this is the closest my study gets to a mode in which these texts support that narrative—as the second chapter implied, however, none of these texts sit comfortably within the Holmes-as-origin narrative of the genre. None of these subordinated or adapted texts are without agency. Instead, these texts perform an incomplete compliance with that narrative for their own ends.

Subsequent chapters describe modes of relation which are less and less compliant, more and more openly subversive, of the Holmes-as-Origin genre model. It is important to note, however, that the modes are not organized chronologically: the texts do not always evolve over time to become more resistant to the prevailing genre history. There is no strong, linear sense of moving from colonial acquiescence to postcolonial resistance, for example. Each mode should be understood as a strategic choice in a particular moment, rather than as subsequent updates to crime fiction’s resistant potential.

The stakes of rehistorization are especially high for postcolonial crime fiction scholarship, which is why an examination of that scholarship comprises a large portion of this chapter. The reoriginated narrative of crime fiction as a genre, shaped by early works like Sayers’ and Haycraft’s histories19 and carried through into contemporary scholarship,

19 This is not to say Sayers’ or Haycraft’s accounts are considered valid or serious in contemporary scholarship—they are routinely critiqued as anachronistic, colonial, unsystematic, and even outrightly racist. Instead, they possess influence over scholarship inasmuch as they were early attempts at critical work in crime fiction, and available for successive scholars to respond to, depart from, and work around. As historical 103 limits the available academic language and academic expectations for work in crime fiction. The gradual scholarly (and popular) movement away from an explicitly colonial,

Anglocentric narrative for the genre has not, generally, been accompanied by a gradual movement away from the deployment of Anglocentric language or concepts. In other words, scholarship in crime fiction has embraced complex histories and theoretical lenses but has not managed to shake off the terms of the Holmes-centric model. For example, postcolonial analysis of Indian crime fiction asserting the genre’s capacity for critique of colonial or neocolonial power structures tends to deploy the familiar and accessible language of the Holmes analogy in order to describe translated (or even Indian anglophone) fiction to an academic audience and publication industry dominated by

Western, English-speaking specialists. As the last chapter suggests, the familiarity and accessibility of that language is due to a colonial politics of attention. Historical or descriptive accuracy is thereby sacrificed for the sake of access to global attention.

Rehistorization also calls attention to the concept of “influence” in contemporary world literature scholarship, and world literature’s varied political and theoretical positions on translation. The fiction texts covered in this chapter are translated texts—and ones which, despite their age, have only reached the English language recently. The distinction between these texts’ presence in world literature scholarship in English and the sizes of their audiences reflects a serious problem: world literature still primarily defines the influence or value of a text by its success in anglophone\readership. The

Damroschian definition of “influence”—a text’s success at moving beyond its original

documents, it is not surprising that their proposed histories for the genre, littered as they are with references to primary texts and firsthand research, survive critiques of their idiosyncrasy or nationalistic bias. 104 cultural context—implicitly predicates that success on gaining the attention of anglophone readers and critics. Thus, world literature risks overlooking texts, like the

Feluda or Huo Sang mysteries, which were circulated and translated very prolifically,20 but which arrived in English only recently. Rehistorization, in which a text performs a subordinate relationship to a hegemonic, anglophone text, calls attention to the inherent asymmetries of power built into both genre membership and academic studies of translated or transnational texts.

Important work is being done with, and despite, an Anglocentric discourse of crime fiction. As in their associated fiction texts, signaling genre membership requires that the scholarship be recognized by readers as relevant to a pre-established body of interest. As a result, traditional languages, histories, and discourses must be deployed in progressive scholarship, even if only to position one’s argument against them. This language, which automatically codes any texts discussed in terms of response to a hegemonic center, constitutes both an opportunity and a problem. This critical presentation as a subordinated, “translated” take on a purely Western genre, describable

20 See chapter four for a more in-depth discussion of this translation and circulation, but a good approximation of the situation might be borne out by the following “back of the napkin” numerical examples: The Feluda mysteries were translated into several languages within India—a national textual market with containing over a billion people—throughout the twentieth century, but only obtained a systematic translation into English in 2001. Similarly, the Huo Sang mysteries, once banned and now revived in a Chinese literary marketplace with (again) over a billion people, failed to enter the anglophone transnational marketplace of texts until 2007. Yet, our attention to them in anglophone humanities scholarship is enabled by their late arrival in an English-speaking textual marketplace containing approximately 400 million readers, with a billion potential English-as-a-second-language readers. By sheer numbers, using English translation or English academic attention as a metric for success seems absurd, until one takes into account how the history of anglophone political and economic hegemony might bias the study of world literature. 105 in a language that based on analogy or comparison to Holmes, is contested by the primary texts’ treatment of important genre tropes. In these finer details, the language of

Holmesian dependence and analogy—of subordinate rehistorization—breaks down, even as the larger text and context maintain the performance of that discourse. This chapter’s main aim is to expose that language and examine the complex processes behind its survival, its continued deployment, and its potential to be used in arguments for textual agency.

3.2 Critical Circulation, Strategic Subordination

Two bodies of work whose texts and secondary commentary put this process on full display are Cheng Xiaoqing’s Huo Sang mysteries and Satyajit Ray’s Feluda mysteries. The short mysteries featuring Cheng’s detective character, Huo Sang, were written in Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s. As Cheng was among the first translators of

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes mysteries, as well as those of Christie, Milne, and others, into Chinese, critical commentary on these mysteries has tended to emphasize the similarities to Holmes. This comparison is legitimized, in part, by Cheng’s stated goal with the mysteries (to demonstrate the benefits of “Western” rational problem-solving), and by all the clever nods to Holmes fans, including Huo Sang’s initials. Ray’s Feluda mysteries, written in Calcutta on a near-annual basis between 1965 and Ray’s death in

1992, have a less material relationship to Holmes, though secondary material—including introductions by translators, work by scholars, reviewers, and comments by Ray himself—makes extensive use of the texts’ apparent debt to Sherlock Holmes.

Remarkably, the strongest emphases on the Huo- or Feluda-to-Holmes connection occur

106 in critical work on these stories in English. Introductions to translations of the stories emphasize the connection at the expense of others, highlighting the power of the Holmes connection in justifying the expense of transcultural textual movement and in accessing anglophone readers’ attention. The texts themselves are more ambivalent, though their historical local conditions also, as this chapter demonstrates, require a certain degree of deference to Holmes, emphasizing the degree to which the Anglocentric model of the genre has affected notions of value within the genre in formerly colonized (or in the case of Shanghai, semi-colonized) spaces. In other words, they emphasize the deployment of

Anglocentric genre-origin models as a colonial tool.

While these texts, and the non-Holmesian textual traditions they sometimes nod to, may not be familiar to Western, anglophone academics, this is entirely the point. They performed a certain relationship to Holmes in order to gain access to attention and transcultural circulation, trading the danger of being subordinated to Holmes and thus devalued by an origin-focused academic value system for possible access to the attention of nonacademic audiences. The complexities of this move, its motives and manifestations in the texts, are highlighted by what came after: a parallel process of rehistorization that occurred in their academic treatment and translator’s forewords. This chapter examines the processes and politics of this two-step rehistorization in the order an English-speaking reader might encounter it: I begin with the secondary material’s characterization of the

Holmes connection, usefully complex as features of excellent academic arguments but inflected with the Anglocentric discourses necessary to the argument that these are not just niche texts but useful material for a publishable critical discussion. The chapter then turns to the more ambivalent processes by which the texts rehistorize themselves,

107 layering references to different traditions, local or otherwise, but periodically emphasizing a connection to Holmes in order to satisfy the cosmopolitan (read: lingering

British Victorian) reading values of the local colonial or postcolonial reader while also satisfying those same readers’ sometimes-contradictory, often anticolonial, desire to articulate a familiar, local generic tradition. Attention to these competing desires, and the process of rehistorization, enables us to view these texts with more postcolonial agency than they are typically ascribed.

Even a cursory survey of academic articles and publications indicates that these two bodies of work have not penetrated very far into the sphere of academic attention.

The Huo Sang mysteries’ analytical or critical presence in English depends on a handful of scholars (there is far more material in Chinese than in English) and a single translator:

Timothy C. Wong, who translated a selection of the stories into English as Sherlock in

Shanghai in 2006. Similarly, the Feluda stories have been discussed only in regional academic or critical material; material accessible in English, or available via the MLA’s article databases and other critical publication searches, is particularly rare, though these entries slightly outnumber available work on Huo Sang. This lack of discussion would not, on the face of it, be a good justification for the cultural or historical relevance of these works. However, when publication and translation figures for these series are considered, the critical silence is loud indeed. The Huo Sang mysteries were popular among a segment of the literate Shanghai population, though few circulation figures or original printings of the various literary magazines where the stories first appeared exist today. Xiaoqing’s stories also experienced a significant revival in China in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, with omnibus reprints published by, surprisingly, the Ministry

108 of Public Security. The first volume sold 80,000 copies, the twenty-third and final volume 17,000 (Kinkley 119). The English translation of a selection of these stories, by

Timothy C. Wong, has sold well enough to persuade Amazon.com to keep it stocked since 2006, though the used book resale listings suggest that it’s primarily used in college courses; Wong’s translation apparently arrived too late for the brief academic visibility of

Huo Sang, postdating the glut of scholarship on the detective, mostly in translation, that thinned out after 2001.21

The Feluda mysteries were markedly more popular, by sales and translations, and the stories have been translated into several South Asian languages along with English.

The nature and commercial availability of the English translations suggest a slightly different use for the translated editions—the Amazon bestseller rank for Penguin’s omnibus translations is higher than the University of Hawaii’s translations of Huo Sang.22

A popular press’ omnibus translation suggests widespread nonacademic use, and reviews on Amazon suggest that the primary audiences are fans of Satyajit Ray in the English- speaking world (where his influence on contemporary filmmaking is more widely known than his career as an author of mysteries) or Bengalis who cannot read Bangla but are nostalgic for stories they heard or read as children. This impression is reinforced by the

21 For an in-depth examination of the cultural and nationalist politics behind this period of recovery and revival for Cheng Xiaoqing’s mysteries, see this study’s fourth chapter. 22 The 2001 edition of the Feluda omnibus is ranked 8,004,815th in books, and 531,553rd in the “Mystery, Thriller and Suspense” categories, though the 2015 republication of the collection is ranked much higher, at 347,619th in books. Wong’s single-volume translation of selected Huo Stories is ranked 2,370,282nd in books (for the paperback edition) and 144,874th in the “Mysteries” category, which is apparently distinct from “Mystery, Thriller and Suspense,” where the translated volume is not listed. All figures from June 2019 (“Complete Adventures of Feluda Volume 1 (v. 1),” “The Complete Adventures of Feluda (Volume 1),” “Sherlock in Shanghai: Stories of Crime and Detection by Cheng Xiaoqing.”) 109 availability of “bootleg” English translations of some of the stories, meant for circulation within and outside India, available for free on the internet prior to the publication of

Penguin’s omnibus. In essence, both of these bodies of texts were influential locally—at least, in the case of Huo Sang, prior to the “death” of the mystery genre after the Chinese communist revolution and after the “rebirth” in the aftermath of the Cultural

Revolution—and have enough potential as curiosities, artifacts of nostalgia, or academic evidence to encourage their translation. As the next chapter discusses in detail, the Feluda mysteries occasioned extensive film adaptation, and Cheng’s mysteries underwent a political and academic revival, ending up enshrined as the forbear of modern Chinese crime writing, in addition to translations and reprints. Thus, they are locally popular, worthy of translation, though perhaps critically undervalued. A key point in this chapter is the problematic relationship that creates that undervaluation: they must connect to an

English-language textual tradition in order to gain academic relevance, but that connection can obscure the texts’ value for academic study or even popular translation by depriving them of that always-elusive qualities of originality and value. There is both agency and danger in rehistorization’s playing along with the hegemonic genre narrative, depending on the desired audience.

A less circular justification of my attention to these works, and to these regions, can be made in political—or, at least, academically political—terms. Recent developments in crime fiction that emphasize its inherent nature as a transnational or world literature have, with alarming regularity, imagined the “world” in “world literature” as either exclusively the Western democratic world or the Western democratic world and its subordinate discontents. Even the recent work of scholars like Stewart

110

King, Stephen Knight and Andrew Pepper, who argue explicitly against both a bordered version of the genre and of the world that produces it, slip into a model of world literature that focuses on what circulates in Western countries and in Western languages. This phenomenon is through no fault of their own—both King and Pepper separately identify the pervasiveness of traditional genre history, problems of practicality, the institutional pressure to produce coherent bodies of research, and the politics of translation as obstacles to “worlding” crime fiction (King 10-14; Pepper 6-11). In this sense, I could justify my attention to these texts as a simple matter of coverage: someone needs to look here, to expand the patchwork of studies trying to map crime fiction as a global genre. At the heart of the problem is a well-intentioned model of world literature running into the unarticulated politics I spent the prior two chapters articulating: confining the subjects of our academic studies to literature which has, in loosely Damroschian terms, circulated and had impact beyond the culture that produced it means that any literature that argues for inclusion in an anglophone-dominated world literary network, but which does not succeed, or succeeds in a way that fails to make a case for academic or readerly attention, is overlooked. The model ignores, or at least marginalizes, the effect of a colonial politics on what is allowed to circulate. My objective, by examining the language of rehistorization in this chapter, and in interrogating the discourses of textual authority and transcultural adaptation throughout this study, is to expose that attention politics and move, however incrementally, towards a new, inclusive model of genre fiction and world literature.

The material, economic and political conditions in colonial and postcolonial India, and pre- and post-civil war China, combined with a residually-colonial institutional

111 politics of what counts as value, influence or Damroschian “impact,” worked to prevent or undercut the necessary preconditions of intercultural circulation: these texts, like countless others, were denied access to critical recognition and timely translation. As a result, even the most progressive models of crime fiction as a world literature conceptualize a world in which more than half of the human population is either absent or underrepresented. Regardless of the size of the “local” audience, these texts have not been valued enough transnationally to be translated into English, except decades later as artifacts of intellectual curiosity or nostalgia. Ironically, the politics of translation within

India (and to a lesser extent, China) means that, by failing to achieve English translations, these texts were often marked by their own audiences as somehow unworthy of translation—as culturally inferior ersatz products, local knockoffs of Euro-American brands. The ultimate result is the map of crime fiction as a world literature featuring large regions labeled “hic sunt eiusdem”—here there are more of the same.

The lack of critical circulation may, however, be usefully indicative of another process. While the Holmes stories have had their history reconfigured, often in direct conflict with their textual content, to argue for a certain hegemonic model of the genre and satisfy an institutional and political drive for nation-bound literary categories, historical and cultural conditions forced the Huo Sang and Feluda mysteries to perform a self-subordinating act to this genre history. To put it another way, while the Holmes stories acknowledge a complex history and generic genealogy and are silenced by critical or imperial necessities, the Huo Sang and Feluda stories deliberately disguise a complex generic genealogy and replace it with Holmes in order to obtain some of Holmes’ cultural-imperial power. This process necessitates a critical subordination. These figures

112 are marked as local Holmeses even, in some cases, by their authors and fans, and they put that label to work to enable their own publication and their local and global appeal. In more conservative scholarly and aesthetic hierarchies these works are considered derivative and localized and therefore unimportant—that is the danger I mentioned earlier—but, if their publication figures and cultural influence are any indication, dismissal by a literate elite and the resultant academic subordination was a small price to pay.

3.3 The Price of Entry: Cheng Xiaoqing’s Authorship

It is important to reiterate that the process of rehistorization is performed not just by the literary text, but also by academic and publisher commentary on the text. In the case of Cheng Xiaoqing’s Huo Sang texts, the process is apparent in the mysteries and in their subsequent marketing, republication, translation, and academic critique. The Huo

Sang stories are interesting, in particular, for two reasons: the extent to which the process of rehistorization is distributed across primary and secondary texts, and, like the reorigination of Holmes and detective fiction largely, the extent to which this process is legible and incomplete in both textual bodies. To put it simply, the Huo Sang mysteries, and their attendant commentary texts, perform the process of rehistorization openly. As with the previous chapter, I begin here with the commentary, and return to the primary text later. Unlike the previous chapter, this reverse-chronological move is meant not to set the language of the commentary against the features of the texts but instead to illustrate parallel processes inspired by a genre politics that survives, unscathed, from

1920s Shanghai to the present-day global literary marketplace.

113

The first point of encounter with these mysteries, for any contemporary anglophone readership, is probably the back cover of Timothy C. Wong’s Sherlock in

Shanghai, to date the only collection of Huo Sang mysteries translated into English. As a marketing tool—doubtless written by someone at the University of Hawaii Press with an eye to book sales—the back cover is a spectacular example of attempting to negotiate the demands of genre membership: the text is like others you’ve read, but different, subordinated to predecessors with signifying power, but new and worthy of your attention. The leading paragraph spends most of its time emphasizing the continuity between 1920s Shanghai and 1890s London, and the parallel connections between the characters of Huo Sang and Holmes. It notes that the inclusion of Bao Lang as a

“Watson-like I-narrator” is a “rare instance of so direct an appropriation from foreign fiction.” The back cover then steps into the realm of authorial intentionality, noting that

Cheng’s aim in inventing Huo Sang as a Chinese Holmes, “to introduce” an implicitly

Western version of “critical thinking to his readers,” is bound up with his decision to merge the structural characteristics of Holmesian mystery with more “traditional”

Chinese “sensationalism.” The back cover’s three small paragraphs, as the translation anthology’s advertisement for itself, thus engages in an honest but sometimes dizzying balancing act, emphasizing how Holmes-like these stories are while demonstrating how they have been modified to fit Chinese tastes, employing “recognizably native elements even as he espouses more globalized views of truth and justice.”

A process of rehistorization is publicly performed—Holmes is the original, Huo

Sang is the local variant, deliberately subordinated not out of a sense of colonial inferiority, but in order to reach anglophone audiences via translation. The potential for

114 hierarchy between Holmes and Huo Sang is there—the language of the back cover, for instance, presents the Huo Sang texts as teaching products, failing to identify any such practical aim for the culturally elevated Holmes—but any hierarchy is troubled by the focus on cultural adaptations, on a long Chinese literary tradition, and on the unchallenged right of the author to translate and bend a transnational genre to local audiences and his own pedagogical aims. The back cover ends with an academic statement of purpose: “Sherlock in Shanghai introduces a kind of Chinese writing that will surprise many Western readers and shed much needed light on our picture of early modern Chinese fiction.” The decision to emphasize the connection with familiar, culturally-powerful Holmes—a connection that threatens subordination or localization— serves instead to diversify Western perceptions of Chinese literary production. As with much of the other metatext on Huo Sang, the moment which threatens to fetishize a

British “original” is replaced by a maneuver that explicitly denies subordination, replaces it with transcultural adaptation, and engages in the Holmesian genre model as a price of entry to “Western” readerly attention. The result is assertions about the text which are individually quite problematic, but which are collectively performing a self-conscious act of marketing, putting a colonial discourse to use for anticolonial ends.

Timothy Wong’s preface to the collection he translated does similar work, albeit in more explicitly academic terms. Wong’s objectives in translating these stories is academic; he hopes that the collection “will help to break down the misleading and artificial barrier between the fiction of traditional and modern China that has been such an obstacle to understanding China’s native tradition of fiction making as a whole”

(Wong xi). Still, with this laudable academic objective, Wong has some reservations

115 about the power or value of genre fiction generally and must therefore signal Cheng’s fiction as exceptional. Of Cheng’s pedagogical aims—the introduction of Western rationalist modes of thought to the Chinese reading public—Wong states that “[i]n choosing to do so through the medium of crime fiction, he, perhaps more than all others assigned to obscurity because what they wrote mostly entertained, deserves to be noted in any history of twentieth-century Chinese fiction” (x-xi). In his anxiety, Wong reproduces some of Cheng’s contemporary critics. He notes that Cheng’s earlier translations of

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes mysteries, and Cheng’s later “adaptation” of the model to

China with Huo Sang mysteries, were part of a late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Chinese cultural modernization project, the New Culture Movement, which was fraught with a dual desire to strengthen China against Euro-American imperial appetites while also modeling that strength on Euro-American cultural and political models. This complex anticolonial cultural movement occurred in part through the translation of

Western genre fiction—termed “textbooks in disguise” by Cheng himself (vii)—and the production of new, politically active Chinese literary fiction. The effort in genre fiction, familiarly, was subordinated to other, ostensibly less “genre” nationalist literary projects—those Chinese “literary” writers, Wong notes, “denigrated the motive to entertain as subversive” (ix). Thus, Cheng Xiaoqing’s contribution to that movement is both important to and stigmatized by his contemporaries and by scholars in the present.23

23 As we shall see in the next chapter, however, Cheng’s fiction does get revived by Chinese academics trying to construct a national history of crime fiction. This revival disregards the cultural politics of the New Culture Movement as bourgeois, and re-reads Cheng’s mysteries for the purposes of nationalist or Maoist literary autonomy. As a result, Cheng’s presence in Western scholarship is doubly stigmatized, first by marking his work as “derivative” genre fiction, and then by his texts’ repurposing as state propaganda. 116

How Cheng, and how his contemporary promoters like Timothy Wong, handle this binary is through a process of open rehistorization.

Instructively, Wong’s introduction avoids applying the term “author” to Cheng

Xiaoqing. The first paragraph of this introduction is an extended comparison of Sherlock

Holmes and Huo Sang, a “detective fully intended to be a Chinese version” of Holmes. In this context, Cheng is a talented manufacturer, as his “skill in producing these accounts of

Huo Sang’s adventures far eclipsed that of all other Chinese writers of popular detective fiction” (vii)—Cheng “developed from a translator” into a “writer who was obviously stimulated by what he had read in English and subsequently rendered into Chinese” (viii).

Cheng’s role as translator has a certain ambiguous authority and persists even when

Wong discusses his Huo Sang stories, as if he had also translated those, rather than composed them himself. The inherent distinction between authorship and translation doubtless fed the denigration of genre fiction that, as Wong notes, occurred during the

New Culture movement that Cheng was participating in, though perhaps not in the expected way—Chinese fiction that was “made up” or “invented” was deemed escapist, rather than reformist, by New Culture critics, and so the status as translator of popular fiction carried more authority than the role of popular author (viii-ix). Cheng’s move from translation to “a certain [kind of] adaptation” (viii) or “another kind of translation”—appropriation and modification of a genre model for local aims—is never quite termed “authorship” in Wong’s introduction. Instead, the terms “producing” (vii),

“publish[ing],” and engaging in “China’s native condition of fiction making” (xi, italics mine) are used, alongside other various uses of translation- and adaptation-inflected terms. Even so, Cheng’s “translations” of Holmes are so well locally adapted that they

117 are “essentially undistinguishable from contemporary native creations” (viii), and his

Huo Sang mysteries are implicitly “contemporary native creations.” Wong’s ambivalence about authorship in his introduction might be chalked up to the introduction’s argumentative aim: the blending of Western ideas and Chinese traditions in the Huo Sang mysteries “break down the artificial barrier between the fiction of traditional and modern

China,” a simplistic distinction predicated on Western translation facilitating generic contamination of the modern versus Chinese purity in the traditional (xi). Cheng’s status in the introduction is thus politically charged—his non-authorial author status is an argument against simplistic notions of literary nationalism or purity, since his creations are both Chinese and otherwise.

While it may at first seem odd for an academic translator to deliberately undersell the personal creative or textual authority of the author he is translating, the decision to avoid the term “author” does illustrate several key points about both Wong’s big-picture academic aims in translating this work and the cultural movement whose historical aims

Cheng’s mysteries serve. Cheng’s role as translator of Western fiction had a certain prestige in the context of the Chinese New Culture movement. As King-Fai Tam notes in

“The Traditional Hero as Modern Detective: Huo Sang in Early Twentieth-Century

Shanghai,” Cheng Xiaoqing was able to avoid the ire and dismissal of contemporary

Chinese literary critics, who devalued all popular literature, by playing up his role as translator of culturally valuable Western fiction and positioning his own work as simply the next step, from translating to something akin to localizing. In other words, Cheng

(and many of his contemporaries in the crime fiction genre) “summoned to their defense the reputation of better-known Western colleagues from the classical period of detective

118 fiction as a way of gaining respectability,” sacrificing the possibility of being seen as authors for the prestige of being translators. This move’s desired result has consequences for the conventional title of “author,” as in emphasizing their secondary status to Western

“colleagues,” they secured “benevolent neglect” from critics (Tam 141). Cheng, as a pedagogical translator, exists in a liminal authorial space: he must combine genre artifacts from two cultures he holds as equals, even though, at the time, one of the cultures holds a distinct material-political advantage over the other.

Thus, Cheng’s mysteries must pay a double price of entry. First, in the context of the New Culture movement’s bootstrap modernization of Chinese culture, the texts must engage in a Chinese literary-generic tradition while emphasizing a Westernizing (but also an anti-Western colonial) objective and heritage, signaling that this is not simply a translation of “foreign fiction” but, in trying to elevate Chinese literary culture, foregoing a claim of “serious” literariness. Second, both Cheng and Wong, as his modern translator, must avoid subordinating a modern Chinese tradition to a British one while paying the price of entry to a contemporary, English-language dominated, global literary marketplace. The generic-historical subordination to the genre’s self-identified apex,

Sherlock Holmes, thus saves the work from critical derision or obscurity in both 1920’s

Shanghai and contemporary literary markets but deprives Cheng of a position as author of “original” texts. Early Huo Sang mysteries, and Wong’s preface to them, engage in this cultural toll-paying process with a distinct deference to the Holmesian genre model to avoid critical dismissal as merely “popular” literature, thus necessitating Wong’s continual effort to position Cheng as exceptional. Interestingly, Cheng’s later Huo Sang stories, especially those written in the 1930s as the New Culture movement shifted from a

119

Republican modernization effort to an explicitly anti-foreign, anticolonial effort informed by the brewing Chinese Civil War, begin to depart from this performed relationship with

Holmes, placing the texts on more equal footing with their British and Chinese forebears.

This latter portion of the Huo Sang canon engages in a different relationship to the genre’s Holmesian center than covered by my term rehistorization. This decidedly more anticolonial process of relation, which I term refashioning, is the focus of the next chapter. (This chapter’s reading of some earlier Huo Sang mysteries overlaps with this later phase, especially in the story “Cat’s Eye,” which can be read as engaging in both rehistorization and refashioning.)

Scholarship on the Huo Sang mysteries available in English is marked by the desire to acknowledge the homages to Holmes in Huo Sang but to explain how the stories use those homages to carve out a space between Chinese traditionalist models and

Western empirical-imperial models of crime fiction. This effort is complicated by the politics of the New Culture Movement and by more contemporary political discourse on the relationship between Chinese and Western culture. Because the New Culture

Movement is explicitly political and reformist in its objectives—and Cheng’s “textbooks in disguise” a perhaps more personal version of that grand national renovation—and because post-1949 Chinese literature is marked by accusations of contamination by communist political aims (if it is discussed at all), these works tend to be viewed as propaganda, and thus radically devalued by academic and popular audiences who subscribe to the notion that literature should be unique, original, and somehow apolitical.

Scholarship or secondary material making a case for Cheng’s importance must therefore draw some contrast between Cheng’s texts and propaganda while accounting for Cheng’s

120 objectives and his maneuvers to avoid the ire of his contemporaries. The result, as King-

Fai Tam describes, is scholarship marked by “cultural colonialism” that involves the

“denial of the presence of indigenous cultural elements” (143), a systematic hyper- emphasis on the relationship between Huo Sang and Sherlock Holmes. Tam’s point in his article, that Huo Sang hybridizes traditional Chinese and Western forms, is ultimately an excavation of aspects of Cheng’s detective stories—specifically references to Chinese archetypal figures and juridical ethics—obscured by rehistorization and the language of

Anglocentric crime fiction.

With this complex characterization, and complex local pedagogical aims, it is noteworthy that the Huo Sang mysteries have—albeit belatedly—achieved international circulation. There is no small irony in the stories’ current cachet: written in the revolutionary period of the early twentieth century, for an audience of middle and upper- class Shanghai locals, they are now the subject of academic attention and translation. The subsequent Chinese Civil War and the transformation of China into a communist state radically altered the nature of crime fiction, as scholars like Tam, Wei Yan and Jeffrey

Kinkley point out. The revolution, these scholars note, succeeded in reducing Chinese detective fiction to “sub-literature” (Kinkley 113) or refashioning it as anti- counterrevolutionary, anti-spy fiction (because “there should be no crime in Socialist

China,” Wei 254). The reproduction of pre-revolutionary crime fiction texts was suppressed until the end of the Cultural Revolution over three decades later. Cheng’s mysteries thus ended up in a gray area of cultural history, as artifacts of a short-lived bourgeois modernization effort, only to be rediscovered decades later as a literary- historical curiosity. The ways these texts have been put to work—to emphasize Western

121 influence, to combat an exaggeration of that influence, or (in an ironic turn) to argue for a revived, “indigenous” tradition of modern crime fiction and fund China’s Ministry of

Public Security in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution (Kinkley 119)—all hinge on the cultural cachet the Huo Sang mysteries obtain via their strategic deployment of a

Holmesian tradition. That a bourgeois cultural reformist canon of mysteries from the

“semi-colonial” Republican period should be resuscitated in the aftermath of the Cultural

Revolution to fund the Ministry of Public Security is obviously unusual. This unexpected redeployment of these mysteries, as support texts for a repressive state security apparatus and as a literary curiosity asserting Chinese cultural sovereignty, occurred alongside rereleases of Chinese translations of Sherlock Holmes stories. The sales figures according to Kinkley—the aforementioned 80,00 copies of the first volume and 17,000 copies of the final volume (119)—emphasizes their usefulness as successful artifacts of a rehistorization process that allows the texts to attest to both the credibility of Holmes as an imported tradition and the literary-nationalist value of Chinese traditional classics.

Meanwhile, even in the early twenty-first century, the vast majority of twentieth- century Chinese genre literature—pre- or post-1949—remains untranslated and inaccessible to a global audience. Even the recent explosion in the popularity of science fiction translated from Chinese has done little to promote the translation and global circulation of Chinese crime fiction written after Orientalist European translations of

“classical” Judge stories. As Wong’s introduction illustrates, the distinction between (and the vast difference in value and marketability) classical and modern Chinese cultural products remain. Chinese crime fiction remains, generally and despite the work of

Wong’s preface, classed as unworthy of exportation or translation on the grounds that it

122 is either bourgeois Westernizing artifact—subordinated as a colonial knockoff—or shallow communist propaganda. Chinese “literature” (in the value-laden sense) available outside China remains firmly imperial in origin. Post-imperial products are pedagogical, are propaganda, and are thus subject to dismissal on the laughably archaic but persistent grounds that serious cultural products cannot be political.

3.4 The Guru and the Indian Holmes: Ray’s Homage

Notably, the rehistorization of Cheng Xiaoqing’s Huo Sang mysteries can be read as a complexly anticolonial process. This is not the case with this chapter’s Indian example: Satyajit Ray’s Feluda mysteries. In contrast to Huo Sang’s milieu—interwar

Republican China, particularly the internationally-partitioned Shanghai—Feluda operates in postcolonial Calcutta. The Feluda mysteries, written and set between the 1960s and

1980s in an independent India, do not engage in quite the same sort of rehistorization as

Cheng’s Chinese mysteries, though many of the maneuvers and potential motivations are analogous. As with Huo Sang, the process of rehistorization happens both in the primary texts and quite prominently in English translations and scholarly commentary. A generic continuity with Sherlock Holmes and thereby with an Anglocentric tradition of detective fiction is favored over a more complex history of local influences and genre interaction, with the explicit aim of accessing greater circulatory power. Both the Huo Sang and the

Feluda canons, as the latter sections of this chapter detail, comport uncomfortably with a process they deploy strategically, along with its attendant colonial hierarchy. Without the anticolonial and pro-republican aims motivating Cheng’s cultural transportation, and without a personal history of translation, much of the process of rehistorizing Ray’s

123 mysteries is enacted in translator’s notes, author’s prefaces, the literary press, and strategic publisher’s choices about title translation and back-of-the-book marketing language. English language newspapers in India, in particular, tend to rely on Holmesian language when describing the Feluda stories, often in an attempt to review and market a new film or comic book adaptation of Ray’s detective.

Unlike Cheng’s pre-communist Chinese detective fiction, the translations of

Ray’s Bengali mysteries are motivated, if the choice of publisher and the translator’s own introduction are to be taken at face value, by cultural nostalgia rather than by academic programs. Gopa Majumdar’s two-volume omnibus English translation of the Feluda mysteries, published by Penguin in 2000, differs from Timothy C. Wong’s translations of the Huo Sang mysteries, published by the University of Hawaii Press in 2007, in two telling ways: All thirty-five entries in the Feluda mystery canon are translated and compiled in the collection, whereas many of the seventy-plus Huo Sang mysteries are not featured in Wong’s collection. The Feluda omnibus also contains no transparent academic argument whatsoever, while the selection of stories in Wong’s translation bears out Wong’s theory about Chinese literary modernity. Instead, Majumdar’s introduction to her translation omnibus begins with an account of her childhood discovery of the Feluda mysteries. After spending the middle of her introduction giving a publication and adaptation history of the original Bengali texts, she returns to her motives for translation:

Translating the Feluda stories has been a deeply fulfilling experience for me. Some of the early stories took me back to my early teens, when a ride in a taxi would cost the princely sum of one rupee and seventy paise, and a bearded foreigner in colorful clothes was likely to be called a ‘hippie’[…]. More importantly, translating these stories gave me insight into the author’s mind and a chance to rediscover his varied interests, ranging from music and magic to history and hypnotism and, of course, cinema […]. Those who have read them before may be pleased to find them all together in an omnibus edition. To those who

124

haven’t, one hopes it will give an excellent opportunity to get acquainted with a legend in Bengal, and catch a glimpse of the brilliant mind of its creator. (Majumdar xii-xiii)

Majumdar’s motivation, and her justification, for the act of translation plays on two moves: a cultural or touristic nostalgia among expatriate Bengalis or fans of crime fiction and an appeal to fans of Ray, with particular attention to his fans outside India, where his status as filmmaker is more widely known than his work as an author, to get to know a

“legendary” figure from a different perspective and through a different medium.

As an artifact of an international Satyajit Ray fandom, Majumdar’s decision to place an “Author’s Note” from Ray himself and a foreword by his wife Bijoya prior to her own introduction is telling. The Rays’ letters, the first introducing the nature of the stories and the second describing the moment Satyajit Ray decided to try his hand at detective stories, frame the stories as artifacts, whereas Majumdar’s introduction historicizes and assigns value to them. Ray’s letter, the first voice of commentary for the entire omnibus, begins: “I have been an avid reader of crime fiction for a very long time.

I read all the Sherlock Holmes stories while still at school” (Ray, “Author’s Note”). In the author’s own words, the stories are described as a form of fan-produced fiction, a consumer of a genre taking up the task of creating new genre pieces. The second sentence offers a reference to Sherlock Holmes without any framing context whatsoever. It is automatic, its rhetorical function apparently obvious to readers. The two sentences together have the effect of sounding like an assertion of credibility, as if his right to compose in the genre was subject to question: “I’ve done the reading. I paid my dues to the gatekeeper of the genre years ago.” The remainder of the note, which simply describes the primary characters and the magazine where the stories first appeared, is

125 disconnected from this assertion. Bijoya Ray’s subsequent foreword reads as an account of two fans debating the nature of genre and audience: Ray expresses to his wife a desire to try his hand at something other than science fiction, and they both immediately hit upon detective fiction as the natural choice. Both wonder how Ray will write detective stories that suit a children’s magazine, avoiding “sex and violence—the backbone of crime thrillers” (Bijoya Ray, “Foreword”). These two accounts enact a credibility- building exercise.24 Ray’s reference to his avid readership of Holmes rehistorizes his texts, at least for readers of the translated omnibus, as part of a long generic tradition with roots in Holmes. Bijoya Ray’s account describes a self-conscious deployment of genre while emphasizing Ray’s status as a creative artist, foreshadowing the Majumdar introduction’s desire to use the omnibus to explore and argue for Ray’s creative genius.

Popular materials on Feluda, like the character’s Wikipedia entry, engage in a similar translation-marketing exercise. The Wikipedia entry, while arguably not carrying the same intellectual weight as a translator’s introduction or a scholar’s article, is powerful as a common first point of contact between the character and new audience members. The English version of the entry for Feluda relies heavily on Holmesian parallels, explaining:

Ray had deep interests in crime fiction and he read all of Sherlock Holmes fictions in his school days. And when Ray himself started writing crime fiction, unsurprisingly, the character Sherlock Holmes inspired his writings. Feluda’s character resembles Sherlock Holmes and Tapesh/Topshe’s character resembles Dr. Watson. (“Feluda”)

24 This particular rhetorical move, in addition to being a good example of rehistorization, foreshadows the moves undertaken by fans and screenwriters in this work’s final chapter. 126

This explanation occurs in the first two sentences of the article’s first section, “Character development of Feluda,” under the subheader “Inspiration from Sherlock Holmes.” The remainder of that section maintains the presence of Holmes, including tracking the most prominent mentions of that character in the stories themselves. The section is accompanied not by an illustration of Feluda but by one of Sidney Paget’s sketches of

Holmes. Later parts of the entry, describing other recurring characters in the Feluda mysteries, maintains this use of Holmesian analogy—though “analogy” is hardly the correct term, since the implication is that these characters are analogous because they were directly inspired by Doyle’s characters. Topshe is “based on Arthur Conan Doyle’s conception of Dr. John Watson,” and the criminal mastermind Meganlal Meghraj “has been compared to Professor Moriarty” (“Feluda”). These comparisons are not well substantiated by sources (or, as the next section illustrates, by the texts themselves). The source, where cited at all, is the introduction to a 2011 comic book spinoff of Ray’s series, The Criminals of Kailash, written by Subhadra Sen Gupta and illustrated by Tapas

Guha. By no means, however, are these comic book authors, or the authors of the

Wikipedia entry, alone in this easy comparison.

This rehistorization is assisted by the literary press in English, both in India and elsewhere, which seems to consistently rely on a cross-cultural accommodation of Feluda to Holmes. This reliance is so powerful, in fact, that in discussing my work on the stories with Bengali friends, more than one hinted that the stories occurred in the same fictional universe as Sherlock Holmes, albeit several decades later. The Feluda mysteries, somewhat disappointingly, absolutely do not—Holmes is just as fictional in Feluda’s world as he is in ours; the detective’s travels to London in the story “Feluda in London”

127 include a humorously unsuccessful search for the fictional 221B Baker Street, in what may be a sly commentary on the gulf between the Indian image of the former colonial center and its considerably more mundane reality. Topshe, the narrator, notes dolefully that the plaque on 220 Baker Street—the nearest non-fictional address to 221b—is “good enough” (Ray, “Feluda in London” 554). A Feluda fan—particularly one who hadn’t read the stories since childhood—might be forgiven for supposing Holmes and Feluda inhabit the same fictional universe, however, given the preponderance of Feluda-as-Indian-

Holmes tropes in reviews of new comic book and film adaptations.

Even a brief survey of press on the transmedial network of Feluda texts and adaptations demonstrates the ease and utility of this rehistorizing move: an article which critiques several recent film adaptations for being staid cannot help but compare the adaptations to the success of BBC’s Sherlock, and the usual raft of inflammatory comments in the comments section includes several assertions that adaptations of Feluda stories are doomed because Feluda himself is a shadow of Holmes (Bhattacharya). A planned documentary reported in the Times of India, “Feluda: A Sleuth Story,” features an attempt to insert an illustration of Feluda into footage of the area of London around the purported location of 221B Baker Street (Z. Sen). An interview in The Telegraph featuring Sandip Ray, the director of several Feluda film adaptations, and Anjan Dutt, the director of films featuring Bengal’s other favorite detective, Byomkesh Bakshi, must nod towards Holmesian parallels for both, though they confine it to a functional parallel of

“Watson” characters and dismiss the comparison as simplistic (M. Das). An article in The

Indian Express celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the first Feluda mystery makes use of Holmesian language, though it is careful to position that use in a

128 compare-and-contrast sense as a way of emphasizing Feluda’s lack of fanfiction in comparison to a Holmesian revival (Gupta). Similarly, an article in the Express promoting another Sandip Ray adaptation figures the detective as an “echo” of Holmes, though the author of the article is careful to catalog several important departures as well

(A. Das). Importantly, many of these rehistorizing moves are careful to assert a level of difference, unwilling to make the Wikipedia entry’s inaccurate assertion that the characters are directly parallel.

Scholarly rehistorization of the Feluda mysteries is a similarly pragmatic exercise.

My own scholarship, including this work, is not innocent of emphasizing an audience- accessible generic continuity, even if only to make more obvious the colonial politics embedded in that act. Pinaki Roy’s article in the Spring 2018 issue of Clues, “The

Postcolonial Sleuth for Adolescents: Rereading Satyajit Ray's Feluda Narratives,” does just this. In his discussion of the complex interplay of globalization, Bengali identity, and postcolonial commentary in the texts, Roy turns to how the Feluda stories have been fitted into various histories of postcolonial writing and crime fiction in India. Roy tellingly chronicles the Indian generic pedigree of the Feluda stories in great detail in order to highlight how the stories depart from prior entries in the genre by being both for adolescents and openly anticolonial—but he must continuously use the language of

Holmes literary types in order to describe structural features of the story to a predominantly non-Indian academic audience.25 In one such instance, he employs both

Holmesian language and Indian genre predecessors, arguing:

25 The journal Clues, while circulated internationally, is published in the U.K., and its articles are primarily in English. 129

His 14-year-old male cousin—Tapesh Ranjan Mitra, nicknamed Topshe—takes on the Dr. Watson role as narrator for most of Feluda’s adventures. Feluda’s associate, Lalmohon Ganguli—a middle-aged Brahmin who lives in Garpar, Kolkata—writes detective potboilers under the pseudonym Jatayu and features in his books the superheroic Prokhor Rudra, who can be identified as a caricature of Arindam Das, the super-sleuth created by Panchkari De in 1928. (Roy 80)

This act of hybrid genre-reference is the first, but not the last, such move in Roy’s article.

His article’s core point—that Feluda might be understood as the first detective in India to be neither a colonial figure nor a hyper-nationalistic Indian superhero, and thus the first postcolonial detective of local production—is nonetheless marked by a timeline of detective fiction’s development in India which takes an English origin, and reader familiarity with that origin, for granted. Roy’s discussion of Ray’s entry into the genre in

India begins with a list of imported authors who had achieved “international and critical acclaim;” he lists, in order, Poe, Doyle, Chesterton, Bentley, Christie, Sayers, Hammett,

Marsh, and Carr (79). Feluda’s most immediate forebear, the detective Byomkesh Bakshi

(by Saradindu Bandyopadhyay, the subject of part of the next chapter) is dismissed on the grounds that “Scholar Sukumar Sen does not view Bandyopadhyay as an original writer of detective fiction, arguing instead that Bandyopadhyay's Byomkesh Bakshi and Ajit

Bandyopadhyay are constructed on the model of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson respectively” (S. Sen 193 in Roy 80). While Roy avoids ever calling Feluda the Indian

Holmes, the language of Holmesian types—the Watson, the Moriarty, et cetera—is used to describe Indian predecessors and to describe nearly every character in the Feluda stories except Feluda himself—Topshe is the Watson, and the villain Meghraj “resembles

Conan Doyle’s Professor Moriarty” (84). Roy’s argument is thus marked by a contrast between his postcolonial argument and the language necessary for that argument to be acceptable, or even comprehensible, in Western scholarship dominated by the

130 anglophone model of detective fiction. In Roy’s article, it is impossible to properly historicize the genre without homage to British and American imports, and difficult to describe the stories’ structural features without reference to Holmes. In this sense, we might recognize a sort of unwilling rehistorization. Roy’s argument depends on a complex historicization of the character more akin to the “refashioning” I describe in the next chapter. But in order for the argument to work clearly, some rehistorization is necessary.

Roy does offer an excellent and exhaustive account of the Indian heritage of the

Feluda stories in his article, though this is, I argue, not coincidentally after Roy describes the later Feluda mysteries’ transition from an adolescent to an adult audience, with the addition of the Jatayu character in “The Golden Fortress” in particular (83-84). It is only after the arrival of more adult themes (the occasional murder, international violence, and a slight change in the travel range of the characters), paired with the maturation of the narrator, Topshe and the introduction of the author-parodying Jatayu character, that Roy can fully articulate his claim that Ray’s mysteries are not firmly Holmesian. Here, Roy recaps Sen’s history of crime fiction in India, which begins before the Sepoy Mutiny and thus well before either the importation or the authoring of any Holmesian story. “These stories,” he is careful to note, “were openly Eurocentric” in character (85) but led to the development of the non-Eurocentric Feluda. Feluda and Bakshi “moved Indian detective fiction away from insipid Western adaptations” (86), but as the language of Roy’s article indicates, the act of “moving away” from Holmesian tropes and types still invokes the power of Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective over how the genre, and its component texts, are described and connected.

131

Suchitra Mathur’s characterization of the Feluda stories makes similar use of rehistorizing moves—in emphasizing Feluda as a sort of “reincarnation” of Holmes, she emphasizes the continuity between the two canons as a means of illustrating Ray’s mysteries’ value as artifacts of an unstable colonial politics for crime fiction. Holmes, she notes,

has remained immortal in India, a constant object of admiring consumption, imitation, and adaptation. Is this continuous subcontinental obsession with the Great Detective the mark of a colonial hangover, the inevitable slavishness of Naipaulian ‘mimic men’ who yearn to embrace, however belatedly, the discourses of science and modernity that underpin the Holmesian canon? Or can certain forms taken by this obsession be seen to embody a postcolonial resistance, a subversive Bhabhaian mimicry, that destabilizes the continuing ideological hegemony of colonial modernity in our ‘globalized’ contemporary world? In this essay, I would like to answer these questions through an examination of a Bengali avatar of Sherlock Holmes—his reincarnation as Feluda in the stories written by Satyajit Ray. (Mathur 88)

Mathur deftly examines the act of literary self-subordination, asking whether the Feluda stories, as metaphorical reincarnations or avatars of Holmes, are doomed to inhabit “a secondary position in the world of detective fiction” (89). Her article then examines

“slippages” of various kinds which emphasize a departure from Holmesian modes and in so doing emphasize the limits of a colonial politics of detective fiction. Some of these slippages include a radically different approach to trivia and knowledge between the two detectives (93)—a difference not only ignored, but actually falsely reversed by the Feluda

Wikipedia entry—where Holmes’ carefully curated “mind attic” is contrasted to Feluda’s more expansive and diverse interests. Mathur’s approach to the language of rehistorization is contained by her use of death and reincarnation as a metaphor for

“postcolonial transposition,” deliberately highlighting the power of British models over a globalized detective fiction genre, and perhaps less deliberately highlighting the

132 stranglehold Holmesian terminology has on academic discussions of crime fiction generally. In emphasizing Feluda’s subversive postcolonial potential, her article must perform these moves in order to highlight them. Feluda’s alternative cultural legacies—

Ray’s indebtedness to Bengali or Indian textual predecessors, rather than just Holmes—is downplayed or erased in the process. To make her point to an audience preconditioned to read detective fiction in relation to the hegemonic Holmes model, rehistorization is a necessary move.

As the last two sections’ emphasis on commentary and metatext suggests, however, the texts themselves acquiesce only uneasily in rehistorization. The range of commentary and scholarship’s willingness to engage in rehistorization is fairly broad— from the happy Holmesian comparison of translator’s notes, promotional materials and news articles, to the less comfortable process seen in some interviews and in scholarship like Roy’s and Mathur’s articles. Looking at the trappings of rehistorization in these secondary materials highlights what makes rehistorization different from the reorigination of the previous chapter, and distinct from simple misrepresentation: rehistorization is always conditional, deployed for a rhetorical end and not presented as complete and unproblematic, and is thus capable of establishing the grounds for a more subversive attention to plurality in cultural influence. The condition for rehistorization is most frequently accessibility; as seen in the translator’s notes in particular, rehistorization is driven by the desire to present familiar and powerful references for readers, even if the question of which references are “familiar” is predicated on a history of colonial cultural discrimination or suppression. The result is a lopsided and incomplete idea of crime

133 fiction as a global genre, and a similarly incomplete understanding of a text’s cultural roots and its arguments for genre membership.

3.5 Signs of Alterity: Huo Sang and Feluda as Uncomfortably Holmesian

Secondary textual materials provide useful sites for excavating the process because they are often quite transparent about the act or rehistorization: they uneasily paint over the complexities of the primary texts in an effort to represent those texts to an audience and marketplace. The grounds for this balancing act in a secondary text are the ambivalences and genre performance choices of the primary text. In the absence of a careful reading of these things in the primary text, rehistorization can take on the flavor of critical misrepresentation. Indeed, these secondary histories are not engaging in false advertising any more than the histories in the previous chapters are engaging in a historical cover-up. To argue that every translator, publisher, or academic who has to sell the idea of a text’s importance is misrepresenting these texts and their histories would be both reckless and counterfactual. The process of rehistorization occurs in commentary and marketing material under similar conditions to the process of reorigination in genre histories: because of the narrative texts’ inherent ability to provide grounds for different narratives of genre membership and the demands of literary-political concerns to select one narrative over another. The rehistorization of a text is grounded in a text’s potential to indicate, its agency, rather than any abstract notion of authorial or textual intention. If

“historization” is the process of obtaining or uncovering a history, the “re-” in rehistorization draws attention to how the history which is available or most popular for a text exists in reaction to all the potential histories a text proposes for itself. The objective

134 of this section is to illustrate the choices several example texts make by drawing attention to the traditions and histories which remain present, even as the texts are rehistorized in

Holmesian terms.

This ambivalent capacity of the text, its network of potential histories, is necessary in the case of the Huo Sang and Feluda stories because of the demands of transculturally adapting genre conventions—demands which grow out of the material and cultural conditions of transnational, transcultural networks of circulation. In the case of

Huo Sang, the text has to perform a complex cultural lineage—both Holmesian and

Chinese—precisely because it is trying to transport genre ideas between cultural marketplaces. The historical record of Cheng Xiaoqing’s pedagogical intentions for the stories informs, but is not absolutely necessary for, the process of rehistorization to be viewed; neither must Cheng’s translators, critics or fans intend to rehistorize the text in order for this process to occur. It’s actually the other way around: by reading the texts as engaging with the terms of this mode of relation, we can see as a series of choices what might otherwise be viewed as either arbitrary or culturally mandatory features in the Huo

Sang mysteries. It shifts the emphasis, in this case, from a formalistic view of the genre to a view that positions adaptation as strategy rather than necessity.

The first Huo Sang mystery Wong includes in his translation, “The Shoe,” is an excellent example of how subtle, perhaps otherwise incidental, textual choices are part of a coherent strategy of self-positioning. The Huo Sang mysteries, while carefully rehistorized as a Chinese Holmes, position themselves in several textual traditions at once, nodding not just to a stereotypically Holmesian, Victorian model of crime fiction but to several models. Wong’s introduction spends a bit of time in the first paragraph

135 establishing that Huo Sang is “intended to be a Chinese version of Sir Arthur Conan

Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes” before proceeding to highlight the similarity to that character and Cheng’s attendant departure from the traditional crime-solving figure in China: the judge. The judge figure, as a “wise and righteous” character “solving cases as an authority figure presiding over a host of underlings, and alternately manipulating and intimidating those brought before him,” is placed in direct contrast to the Holmesian scientific detective (vii). This is not to say, however, that echoes of the judge character are absent from Huo Sang mysteries. “The Shoe” features Lieutenant Fan of the Shanghai

Police, whose physical appearance, personal habits and professional mannerisms all strongly resemble those of a traditional judge character. In an avowal-disavowal process similar to the one featured in the Holmes text A Study in Scarlet, however, this character is presented as an incompetent and arrogant figure, a “half-cocked functionary with a narrow mind, and prone to jealousy—in other words, a run-of-the-mill government bureaucrat” with no scientific or systematic expertise, or any real interest in justice (2).

Fan relies on stereotype, instinct and intimidation, like a traditional judge: he begins the mystery by claiming to have the whole thing figured out, relying on an assumption that a murdered young married woman must have been unfaithful and been murdered by her illicit lover, thanks to the presence of a lone ostentatious men’s shoe in her bedroom (17).

His physical appearance, too, is an open nod to stereotyped Qing-era bureaucrats and traditional judge characters—Fan is “tall, corpulent,” with “broad shoulders and a prominently protruding midsection,” clad in dark robes (5). In addition, Fan ignores the dead body and other material clues to focus on the artifact most obviously out of place, substituting sensational speculation for routine police work (3-5). Thus, while not echoed

136 in the main detective character, “The Shoe” nods to the judge tradition, taking a shot at all narrow-minded bureaucrats and jaded investigators in the process. The fact that this avowal is in the context of a satirical, unsympathetic character does not negate its potential as a nod to an alternative crime fiction tradition; it only suggests that Cheng’s relationship to this tradition is more rebellion than homage.

A particularly fraught aspect of the Huo Sang mysteries’ relationship to predecessor texts, Holmes or otherwise, is the construction of a consistent adversary for the detective. The Moriarty to Huo Sang’s Holmes, the master thief called “the South

China Swallow,” makes an obvious structural nod to the Holmesian model specifically, and to other traditions of serial crime fiction more generally. Even the language I’ve used to describe this character—the Moriarty—suggests the powerful hold Holmes has over the language identifying tropes in the genre. And indeed, while the South China Swallow is a worthy adversary for Huo Sang and an object of frustration, the analogy has additional, less well-fitting layers. Due to the multiple traditions the text evokes and the political and ethical commentary it sets out to make, the Swallow is not a comfortable analogy or direct adaptation of the Moriarty role. The South China Swallow, to put it directly, is not figured as a malevolent character. On more than one occasion, in fact, Huo

Sang is sympathetic to the aims and actions of the master thief, highlighting a gap between local law enforcement demands and the demands of personal or ethical justice.

In one particularly noteworthy case, “Cat’s Eye,” Huo Sang actually defrauds an unsympathetic and politically suspect client with the unwitting assistance of the Swallow.

In “Cat’s Eye,” a retired bureaucrat has just returned from Beijing, where he purchased a cat’s eye gem from the former imperial collection on the black market. The bureaucrat,

137 on his return, receives a threat from the Swallow: donate the value of the gem to the

Shanghai public education fund or the gem will be stolen. The bureaucrat hires Huo Sang and Bao Lang to prevent the theft (172-173). In the elaborate game of cat and mouse that forms the bulk of the story, the Swallow eventually outsmarts Huo Sang but returns the gem, since Huo Sang had convinced the bureaucrat to make a smaller donation to the fund. Rather than trap and turn in the Swallow, Huo Sang deliberately fails to catch the thief. Reminding a flabbergasted Bao Lang that while the Swallow “functions outside the straight-and-narrow path of the law, he has never strayed beyond the bounds of honor and propriety” (182), the detective decides to keep the gem until the bureaucrat donates the full value, temporarily assuming the role of the Swallow for the good of Shanghai’s public education (183).

A number of other small changes, adaptations to the text’s political, cultural and historical environment, also propose alternatives to a Holmes-dominated impression of the Huo Sang mysteries. As Wei Yan has noted, Huo Sang’s approach to the law, and to notions of the public good, depart from the Holmesian pattern. In a period where anything connected to “the fundamentally corrupt institutions of government” (247) is incapable of delivering justice, Chinese detective fiction abandoned Judge Bao-style investigations for alternative models—most prominently Sherlock Holmes. However, while it would be easy to assume that Holmes was the most popular alternative model because of either British colonial politics in China26 or some inherent aesthetic quality,

26 Traditional discussions of this colonial cultural politics, as challenged in Timothy Wong’s introduction, tends to align British detective fiction with British-credited scientific modernity. Cheng’s pedagogical aims seem to depend on this Orientalist alignment of rationality with Western civilization, but actually engages in a more complex cultural and genre bricolage. 138

Wei Yan notes that the popularity of the model has more to do with the “ethical models” demonstrated by Holmes’ cases than with purely generic models. Thus, while Huo Sang’s character features and plots are often direct nods to one of Doyle’s scientific mysteries, the ethical lessons inherent in the character of Huo Sang are specialized for their context.

Most prominently for Wei Yan, whereas Holmes enforces rational justice on behalf of middle and upper-class Victorian British citizens, Huo Sang champions the values of the poor, espousing the philosophical school of Mohism, which promotes radical impartiality and egalitarian ideas (251). This reading explains the particularly visible departure from

Holmesian values in “Cat’s Eye,” where the detective defrauds a paying client for the greater good; it likewise places Huo Sang in the tradition of some other Western detective models (Cheng also translated mysteries by Christie, Queen, van Dine, and Sayers, among others) and the traditional Chinese youxia or “wandering errant” figure

(translation via Wei 251).

These changes occur alongside nods to Holmes, including features like the detective’s general adherence to scientific deduction, his initials, and his relationship with his narrator and assistant, Bao Lang. Particularly notable is Huo Sang’s flair for suspense with Bao Lang. On more than one occasion, Huo Sang relishes the chance to leave Bao

Lang in the dark and force him to make several guesses before revealing his own, ultimately rational, explanation. As in any number of Holmes mysteries, this move serves to build suspense and tension for the reader as well, and the narrator’s ignorance is frequently a point of comedy or of frustrating misdirection. In yet another unexpected move in “Cat’s Eye,” however, this flair for the dramatic reveal backfires, as it allows the

Swallow to fool both detective and narrator by taking advantage of their lack of open

139 communication. As a result of these structural homages, the texts invite comparison to

Holmes, gaining cultural and circulatory cachet by doing so. But the influences range far beyond Sherlock Holmes. Specific changes range from open cultural adaptations or translations of Holmesian features, which support a Chinese Holmes narrative, to more radical departures motivated by commentary on systems like European colonialism, international capitalism, Chinese egalitarianism and the gradual failure of a Western-style republic in post-Xinhai China. Rehistorization is writ large over these stories, as the largest structural features and many of the surface details are overt nods to a Holmesian cultural inheritance, but the small print remembers Chinese politics and traditional literary forms. These texts thus invite comparison to Holmes but maintain signs of alterity—details which suggest multiple traditions operating at once.

Perhaps because of its different historical and political context, the Feluda stories engage in rehistorization more incompletely. If “Chinese Holmes” is written in large print over the structure of Huo Sang, then “Indian Holmes” is written on Feluda in characters of a more modest size. Certain entries in that series clearly and openly perform the adaptation of Holmesian genre touchstones, inviting direct comparison and categorization as a local riff on the Holmesian tradition. Others engage in a more explicitly hybrid process, giving the Anglocentric model equal weight as other patterns of intertextual influence, freely borrowing from or referring to several distinct bodies of work—British,

Indian, or otherwise. This distinct mode, termed refashioning, occurs particularly in later

Feluda stories, and will be discussed in the next chapter. For the moment, I shall focus on

Feluda texts, or moments in the texts, which use rehistorization to make an argument for the attention of local and international crime fiction audiences. Three Feluda-centered

140 texts offer a particular abundance of examples: the stories “The Golden Fortress,” “The

Mystery of the Elephant God,” and “Feluda in London.”

As with Huo Sang, the specifics of some features suggest an outright homage to the Holmesian tradition of crime fiction. Feluda’s chief recurring adversaries, unlike the

South China Swallow, bear much closer resemblance to Moriarty, or to the suburban entrepreneur with a suspect colonial past, like the antagonists of The Sign of the Four and

“The Adventure of the Speckled Band.” The villain of “The Golden Fortress,” for instance, is an Indian paranormal charlatan, popular in the United States, who has returned to India in search of a lost treasure. The charlatan, ironically, is lured by the implication of treasure based on the past-life visions of a young Bengali boy named

Mukul. He not only buys the boy’s fanciful narrative, but kidnaps him as a guide to the treasure, located in the titular Golden Fortress in far-away Rajasthan (202-206). Feluda, accompanied by his narrator Topshe, is hired by Mukul’s parents to locate the boy, and treats the veracity of the boy’s visions, and the alleged treasure, as a mere accessory to the kidnapping (204-206). Like the antagonist of “The Speckled Band,” the charlatan is eventually destroyed by his own tendencies. He is so fixated on a potentially nonexistent treasure that he ignores the very real danger of an enraged, aggressively territorial peacock (267). In a conclusion laden with potential nationalist commentary, the wounds inflicted on this antagonist by India’s national bird are so severe that Topshe comments that he’d “been suitably punished already” when they turn the charlatan-cum-kidnapper over to the police (268).

“The Mystery of the Elephant God” introduces the series’ Moriarty figure,

Maganlal Meghraj. Meghraj, a career criminal residing in Varanasi and Calcutta, makes

141 his fortune through dangerous and exploitative domestic industries, with a significant drug- and artifact-smuggling racket on the side. He is introduced in the story “Joi Babu

Felunath,” or “The Mystery of the Elephant God,” as the “richest and most powerful man in Varanasi,” whose factory has just burnt down and whose home has just been raided by the police (519). In contrast to the secular Feluda—who travels to the sacred city of

Varanasi not out of religious devotion, but because he craves a local dessert and is bored with the lack of intriguing casework in Calcutta (511)—Meghraj is cloaked in symbols of shallow religiosity and Hindu nationalism (540). He appears first in the home of a suspicious new religious figure, Machchli-Baba, who claims to live in the river Ganges and whose name is, arguably, a Bengali pun on the English idiom “fishy” (514). After the

Ghoshal family hires Feluda to recover a missing statue of the god Ganesh, a family heirloom of enormous value, it becomes clear that while wealthy locals are distracted and flocking to this fishy Mystic, valuable religious artifacts are being taken from their homes by Meghraj’s underlings (521). Like Moriarty, Meghraj is a criminal mastermind almost beyond the reach of local or national police. His work is done through underlings, and the narrative never actually shows Meghraj commit any crime more serious than intimidation and harassment (535, 544).

The political particulars of Maganlal Meghraj, however, permit the entry of distinctly Indian concerns into a Holmesian style of super-adversary for the super- detective. In Ray’s cosmopolitan India, Meghraj represents a toxic deployment of national identity. By surface considerations, Meghraj is more successfully and traditionally Indian than Feluda is, but his failures highlight a distinction between Ray’s ideal Indian citizen and an empty nationalist performance of Indianness. His overt

142 religiosity—being based in Varanasi, being surrounded by religious symbols, being an acolyte of the suspicious mystic—and his status as a self-made entrepreneur of great political influence are contrasted with the means by which he obtains power and wealth: he steals and exports Indian religious artifacts to European-backed smugglers, in exchange for other contraband. The narratives featuring Meghraj as a villain make a point, in fact, of headlining contested artifacts and lingering colonial relationships. Nearly all feature stolen gems (“The Mystery of the Pink Pearl”) or religious statuary, with

Meghraj’s cosmopolitan capitalist trappings, and ideal citizen reputation, providing the perfect cover for selling out his home nation. The villain’s international success and religious performativity (539-541) can be interpreted as a parody of the British ideal

Indian subject: Meghraj is intrepid, unsentimental, and visibly traditional. In this sense, he acts as a foil for Ray’s more well-rounded, cosmopolitan model of postcolonial Indian citizenship, as demonstrated via the character of Feluda: rational, open-minded, broadly skilled, dismissive of superstition, and not particularly concerned about fame or wealth.

The twist of the story “The Mystery of the Elephant God”—that the missing Ganesh statue was never stolen by Meghraj, but by a servant in the household of the owners

(569)—acts, like Huo Sang’s case in “The Shoe,” to illustrate a contrast between flashy intrigue and the mundane details of crime. Meghraj, as the flashy, nationalist man of mystery, is ultimately irrelevant to the core mystery of the story that introduces him.

Even so, a particular feature of the Feluda mysteries ensures that other textual traditions are not only suggested, but actually personally present. Where the only crime author in a Holmes story is Watson, the Feluda mysteries are swarming with writers of crime fiction. Feluda’s Watson, his younger cousin Topshe, gradually grows over the

143 years from a pre-teen narrator to an aspiring and competent author. Topshe’s personal reading habits, however, challenge any notion that Holmes is the only textual tradition present. He may be a Watson, but he’s a Watson who reads local crime fiction and quite a lot of Herge’s Tintin adventure comics and isn’t shy about comparing his cousin’s detecting adventures to other texts. At the beginning of “The Mystery of the Elephant

God,” Topshe informs his readers that the forthcoming crime adventure reads

“suspiciously like a certain Tintin comic” (511) almost apologetically, self-conscious of the need to characterize events in the terms of other relevant texts. Fictionalized versions of contemporary Indian writers—either specifically or in stereotype—appear in several mysteries, beginning with the first Feluda story, “Danger in Darjeeling,” published in

1965. The Indian genre fiction author, who writes under a pseudonym, also has the dubious distinction of being this first investigation’s culprit. Beginning with “The Golden

Fortress,” the detective-narrator duo are joined by a new member of the team, an Indian sensational spy fiction author nicknamed Jatayu (his real name is Lalmohan Ganguli)—a figure played for comic relief, since he writes stories set in exotic locales but is notoriously provincial and careless in his research. Jatayu’s cross-cultural inaccuracy is, simultaneously, a commentary on Indian provinciality, an indictment of carelessly researched and derivative adventure fiction written by Indians or otherwise, and a good- natured joke at the author’s own expense, since Ray’s Feluda mysteries are written in locales his Calcutta-based Bengali readers would find exotic, though these locales are primarily within India. As a character, Jatayu is doubly fascinating for his referential potential and the absence of a parallel figure in most British or American detective fiction. Arthur Conan Doyle, for example, never gave Holmes and Watson a regular third

144 wheel, more clueless than Watson, who was a thinly disguised version of H. Rider

Haggard.

Topshe’s willing intertextuality—his references to Tintin and his reverence for the mystery author in “Danger in Darjeeling”—and Jatayu’s open parody of Indian thriller authors invite the possibility of alternative textual histories. Even so, the texts happily juxtapose these references with homage to Holmes. The mystery “Feluda in London” features a pilgrimage to 221B Baker Street, whose status as a fictional address serves to highlight the distinction between London in the postcolonial Indian cultural imagination and London in reality (554). While the ever-provincial Jatayu is perpetually impressed by minor British conveniences (remarking upon the ease of buying an excellent pen, for example (548), Feluda and Topshe find London not altogether different from Calcutta— though, for the absence of the fictive home of the “guru” Holmes, the city is something of a disappointment. The inclusion of this search, and its disappointing result, illustrate the nature of rehistorization in the Feluda mysteries generally: Holmes is a “guru” (the term stands untranslated in the English), a teacher rather than a predecessor or some sort of imposing example (554). In yet another strange moment of equivalency, the entire mystery of “Feluda in London” hinges on the search for a boy who may be either Indian or English—none of the characters can tell, including their client, Ranjan Majumdar

(536). The search for this boy, now an adult, is undertaken to locate and clarify the experience of their Indian client, who was educated in Britain and possesses “European” features (535) but who, after an injury, retains no memory of his time at school or his friends there.

145

Feluda and company travel to London in search for a childhood friendship and instead uncover a history of racism, bullying and murder. Feluda’s investigation reveals that the boy is Peter Dexter, and that he died while he and Ranjan Majumdar were schoolmates in Cambridge, during a boating incident that involved both boys. Feluda and company also learn, via a vehemently racist Englishman, that Peter’s brother, the terminally ill Reginald Dexter, is currently living in India running a tea plantation (555).

After interrogating several expatriate Indians and some British schoolmasters—in the process advertising the surviving postcolonial connection between Britain and India in a way that positions both places equally—Feluda’s breakthrough comes from Mr. Hookins, the aging groundskeeper at the school, who reveals that Peter and Ranjan constantly fought about Peter’s vehement anti-Indian racism. Peter Dexter’s racist diatribes had led to a confrontation during which the teenaged Ranjan allowed him to drown in the River

Cam. Peter’s brother Reginald is unable to pin the blame on Ranjan Majumdar because

Dexter is too openly racist for British authorities to take seriously as a witness (558). The only other witness, Mr. Hookins, covers up the murder to protect Ranjan (561-562). The

Dexters’ racism, combined with their ambiguous appearance and involvement in the tea industry, it is implied, are a result of an attempt to compensate for a racial ambiguity or for cultural “contamination” resulting from too much time in colonial India, rather like the sinister colonial doctor of Doyle’s “The Speckled Band.” However, unlike several of

Doyle’s antagonists, the problem for the Dexters originates not in how closely they are involved with India, but on their near-pathological denial that such involvement actually connected and merged their Britishness with Indianness. In the end, this colonial ambivalence is a moot point, for moments after Feluda solves the mystery, Ranjan

146

Majumdar urgently recalls Feluda and company to Calcutta. Upon their return, they find

Majumdar shot and killed and the Calcutta police baffled. Feluda notes to Topshe that the gunshot suicide of one Reginald Dexter, in a local hotel, has been reported in the morning paper (562-563), implying that the cycle of racism, revenge, and death started by Peter

Dexter and Ranjan Majumdar has reached its fatal conclusion. Feluda’s unwillingness to notify the police or the press of his findings in the final moments of the story, rather like

Huo Sang’s desire to defraud a corrupt client in “Cat’s Eye,” marks his refusal to accommodate narrow-minded colonial attitudes, even if it violates the terms of his role as investigator.

The absence of Holmes from London, the status of Holmes as “guru,” and the positioning of London and Calcutta as equally important cities connected by a complex history in the story prefigure the model of text-adaptation relationship that is the work of the next chapter—refashioning, or the positioning of local and Holmesian traditions on equal footing, rather than as strategically subordinate to Holmes, as is the case in rehistorization. The nature of the Holmesian references in “Feluda in London,” and the departure from a Holmes-Watson dyad in “The Golden Fortress,” illustrate a greater unwillingness to structure the stories on Doyle’s model, even as translator’s notes and commentary on the Feluda mysteries prioritize Holmesian comparison. The addition of

Jatayu as an authorial self-parody further departs from the Holmesian model and joins

Topshe’s passion for Tintin and adventure stories as a way of advertising how Ray’s mysteries operate in multiple generic traditions at once. What keeps these examples from straying into the territory of hybrid refashioning is that they are made visible by a deliberate inclusion of Holmes as a generic foil. The addition of Jatayu, the absence of

147

Holmes from London, and other such details stand out primarily because they are unexpected in a text that cloaks itself in openly Holmesian trappings.

3.6 Rehistorization and Its Discontents

Rehistorization and its slippages can be seen as variations of Bhabhaian mimicry or textual hybridity—albeit versions of mimicry as a mercenary acts, necessary attempts at self-marketing to gain access to prestige and thus to audiences and publication, neither a purely subversive nor purely sycophantic. Rehistorization is a product of a complex, multi-layered cultural hierarchy rather than an imaginary, totalizing cultural dominion.

This process occurs in parallel with other traditions in the text; Holmesian references in rehistorization should be understood as something more than an additive but less than a full structural adaptation. In the case of Huo Sang and of Feluda, Holmes might be understood as a “guru” (as in “Feluda in London”)—a guide or model of action whose name and presence opens doors. Accusations of colonial cultural coercion and sycophancy, while useful as a constant reminder of the exploitative and culturally destructive nature of colonialism, can and often do erase the agency of colonial texts operating in and deploying this mode. There is danger in imagining their authors as colonial cultural middlemen so utterly dominated by their colonizers that their ability to author “original” texts is stripped away. On the other hand, a narrative which imagines the texts as radical departures from, or purely subversive commentary on, colonial models is equally counterfactual, since such a narrative would inherently imagine these authors as only “writing back” to a colonial tradition. The textual reality exposed by attention to rehistorization is much more complicated and, usefully, can simultaneously

148 condemn the politics of colonialism without exaggerating the degree of cultural domination—without, in other words, implying that there is something dominant about anglophone or Euro-American cultural practices, and something subordinate about colonized cultures. Instead, these authors (along with editors and scholars), operating in a complex cultural and political environment, deploy existing power structures to accomplish some meaningful goal, making problematic but necessary choices to promote one generic tradition over another, in order to best market or frame their works.

Even in an environment focused on the dangers of Western cultural dominance, like Huo Sang’s milieu, references to textual traditions like Holmes are seen as tools to be repurposed, rather than as artifacts of some cultural supremacy that is beyond reproach.

Thus, textual responses to rehistorization divorce a useful cultural technology from the culture which claims to own it in practice, while acknowledging the power that ownership claim has over the performance of genre membership and access to audiences.

The deviations of textual details from a clean narrative of rehistorization indicate the performativity of that subordinating move, highlighting its use value while casting doubt on its fundamental truth. Feluda must search for Holmes in London, but Holmes’s absence strips London of its colonial-cultural power. Because Holmes no more lives in

London than in Calcutta, Ray can operate as a legitimate inheritor of that tradition. Even so, Ray must acknowledge the signifying potential of Holmes and of the fictive London that detective inhabited. Huo Sang must, in the context of the New Culture Movement, similarly inhabit a space somewhere between homegrown character and Holmesian adaptation, in order to avoid the ire of cultural critics who would devalue a domestic

149 crime fiction for being escapist, and a pure foreign translation for being cultural self- subjugation.

The ambiguous space occupied by rehistorization is erased by an academic and critical tradition that accepts a single point of origin for the crime fiction genre. Such highly centralized models can only sustain a single tradition at a time, collapsing multiple parallel traditions of crime fiction (in my case) into a single, Anglocentric map of the genre. The process of rehistorization is necessitated by this process, even as it is erased.

Rehistorization covers up the evidence that it was an option, rather than the default mode, for relationships between texts in a genre. This erasure, much like the previous chapter’s

“reorigination,” is motivated by the intersection of politics at the time and a lingering historically colonial politics built into publishers’, critics’ and readers’ notions of what texts have value and why. Whereas reorigination’s objective is to establish and lay claim to an empowered “point of origin” in a genre, constructing that origin in the process, rehistorization takes advantage of the narrative reorigination creates, privileging a connection to the point of origin in the history of a newer text in order to borrow some of an older text’s power. As with reorigination, rehistorization is most visible in secondary texts, since the primary texts—the mysteries themselves—offer details that deviate from their characterization in secondary texts and the objectives those commentaries have. The next chapter is dedicated to examining what happens when these alternative histories of the text become more immediately visible in both commentary and text. This is, at least in the context of the Huo Sang’s textual revival and the Feluda mysteries film and other adaptations, generally chronologically subsequent to those texts that propose a Holmesian rehistorization, suggesting a growing confidence in the ability of the texts to circulate on

150 their own terms and name fewer colonially powerful references. This tendency from rehistorization to refashioning, the mode of relation described in the next chapter, is neither universal or necessary, however, as texts like Saradindu Bandyopadhyay’s

Byomkesh Bakshi mysteries, written around the same time as the Huo Sang mysteries and well before the Feluda stories, are comfortable operating in this mode from the start.

Nor do film adaptations feel any need to subordinate a local tradition to a Victorian

British one, though there is an easy and obvious answer to this: since they’re adapting rehistorized texts, part of the room for references to prior texts, allocated to Holmes and to others, is taken up by reference the adapted work. That answer, while suggestive, is incomplete.

REFERENCES, Chapter 3

Bhattacharya, Sumit. “Sherlock Holmes and the Tragedy of Feluda.” Rediff.com. 12

January 2012. www.rediff.com/movies/column/cyber-star-sherlock-fossilised-

feluda/20120112.htm. Accessed 17 June 2017.

Cheng Xiaoqing. “Cat’s Eye.” Sherlock in Shanghai: Stories of Crime and Detection.

Trans. Timothy C. Wong. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007. 165-183.

Print.

——. “The Shoe.” Sherlock in Shanghai: Stories of Crime and Detection. Trans. Timothy

C. Wong. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007. 1-44. Print.

“Complete Adventures of Feluda Volume 1 (v. 1).” Amazon.com. Accessed 21 June

2019.

151 www.amazon.com/Complete-Adventures-Feluda-Satyajit-Ray

Das, Antara. “The Cult of Feluda.” The Indian Express, 04 January 2009. N.p.

http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/the-cult-of-feluda/405830/. Accessed 10

June 2017.

Das, Mohua. “When Feluda Met Bomkesh.” The Telegraph [India], 20 April 2012. N.p.

www.telegraphindia.com/entertainment/when-feluda-met-bomkesh/cid/429202.

Accessed 10 June 2017.

Doyle, Arthur Conan. A Study in Scarlet. Reproduced in: The New Annotated Sherlock

Holmes: The Novels, ed. Leslie Klinger. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. 3-208.

Print.

“Feluda.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 18 June 2019.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feluda. Accessed 22 June 2019.

Guha, Tapas, and Subhadra Sen Gupta. Satyajit Ray’s Feluda Mysteries: The Criminals

of Kailash. New Delhi: Puffin Books India, 2011. Print.

Gupta, Abhijit. “Feluda, Satyajit Ray’s Much-Loves Private Investigator Turns 50.” The

Indian Express [New Delhi], 29 March 2015. N.p.

www.indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/books/feluda-satyajit-rays-much-loved-

private-investigator-turns-50/. Accessed 10 June 2017.

Haycraft, Howard. Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story.

London: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1941. Print.

King, Stewart. “Crime Fiction as World Literature.” Clues: A Journal of Detection 32.2

(Fall 2014): 8-19. PDF.

152

Kinkley, Jeffrey C. “The Post-Colonial Detective in People’s China.” The Post-Colonial

Detective. Ed. Ed Christian. New York: Palgrave, 2001. 112-139. Print.

Knight. Stephen. Crime Fiction, 1800-2000: Death, Detection, Diversity. New York:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Print.

Majumdar, Gopa. Introduction. The Complete Adventures of Feluda, vol. 1. Trans. Gopa

Majumdar. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2001. ix-xiii. Print.

Mathur, Suchitra. “Holmes’s Indian Reincarnation: A Study in Postcolonial

Transposition.” Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime Fiction from a Transcultural

Perspective. Eds. Christine Matzke and Susanne Mühelen. New York: Rodopi,

2006. 87-108. Print.

Pepper, Andrew. Unwilling Executioner: Crime Fiction and the State. Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2016. Print.

Ray, Bijoya. Foreword. The Complete Adventures of Feluda, vol. 1. Trans. Gopa

Majumdar. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2001. viii. Print.

Ray, Satyajit. “Author’s Note.” The Complete Adventures of Feluda, vol. 1. Trans. Gopa

Majumdar. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2001. vii. Print.

——. “Danger in Darjeeling.” The Complete Adventures of Feluda, vol. 1. Trans. Gopa

Majumdar. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2001. 1-24. Print.

——. “Feluda in London.” The Complete Adventures of Feluda, vol. 2. Trans. Gopa

Majumdar. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2001. 533-564.

——. “The Golden Fortress.” The Complete Adventures of Feluda, vol. 1. Trans. Gopa

Majumdar. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2001. 199-274. Print.

153

——. “The Mystery of the Elephant God.” The Complete Adventures of Feluda, vol. 1.

Trans. Gopa Majumdar. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2001. 507-570. Print.

Roy, Pinaki. “The Postcolonial Sleuth for Adolescents: Rereading Satyajit Ray’s Feluda

Narratives.” Clues: A Journal of Detection 36.1 (Spring 2018). 78-89. PDF.

Sayers, Dorothy. Introduction. Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, and Horror.

London: Gollancz, 1928. PDF.

Sen, Zinia. “Feluda Goes Back to London.” The Times of India [Kolkata], 4 October

2015. N.p.

www.timesofindia.com/Article.aspx?eid=31812&articlexml=FELUDA-GOES-

BACK-TO-LONDON-04102015110005. Accessed 10 June 2017.

Tam, King-Fai. “The Traditional Hero as Modern Detective: Huo Sang in Early

Twentieth-Century Shanghai.” The Post-Colonial Detective. Ed. Ed Christian.

New York: Palgrave, 2001. 140-158. Print.

"Sherlock in Shanghai: Stories of Crime and Detection by Cheng Xiaoqing."

Amazon.com. Accessed 21 June 2019. www.amazon.com/Sherlock-Shanghai-Stories-Detection-Xiaoqing

“The Complete Adventures of Feluda (Volume 1).” Amazon.com. Accessed 21 June

2019. www.amazon.com/Complete-Adventures-Feluda-1

Wei Yan. “Sherlock Holmes Came to China: Detective Fiction, Cultural Meditations, and

Chinese Modernity. Crime Fiction as World Literature. Eds. Louise Nilsson,

David Damrosch, and Theo D’haen. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.

Print.

154

Wong, Timothy C. Preface. Sherlock in Shanghai: Stories of Crime and Detection, by

Cheng Xiaoqing. Trans. Timothy C. Wong. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i

Press, 2007. vii-xii. Print.

155

Chapter 4

THE SPECKLED BRANDS

4.1 Local Traditions, Refashioned Genres

Up to this point, this study has used adaptation theory primarily as a way of directing attention to the processes and politics surrounding the marketing, translation, and circulation of colonial or postcolonial fiction within a transnational genre. The intertextual relationship between these texts would not, at least historically, be classed as adaptations—the Huo Sang and Feluda mysteries, for all their intertextual references, homages, and marketing choices, are not direct adaptations, in the conventional sense, of any particular piece of Doyle’s fiction. That being said, adaptation studies’ particular focus on process and the decentering of Romantic notions of authorship are powerful tools beyond the “one-to-one” notion of adaptation, as they call attention to the importance of explicit intertextual reference to circulation and to the global politics of who can make valued or “original” texts.

The focus of this chapter—the refashioning mode of intertextual relation—is most readily visible in film adaptations, though this is not the only place this relation occurs.

As the end of the last chapter suggested, the process of refashioning—of positioning the hegemonic, colonial textual history alongside the otherwise-erased local tradition as a way to assert textual authority and genre membership—is visible in film adaptations because those films typically acknowledge the existence of its print source material in 156 order to argue for genre-audience attention. This acknowledgment constitutes, at least, a small, binary local tradition: the relation between the source and the adaptation. It also tends to highlight the complexity of the textual source’s traditions by forcing them into interaction with filmic conventions. Joined with other avenues for homage or reference, for example, the local and global tastes and conventions of filmmaking, these adaptations are fertile ground for refashioning, for positioning colonial or transnational connections as equal components of a text and an emerging local tradition.

As the last chapter illustrated, the process of rehistorizing a text—of substituting its actual history for a hegemonic or Anglocentric one—serves a politics of access resulting from a restrictive discourse of authorship and genre membership. However, in discussing the process of rehistorizing, the multiple audiences that this politics of access applies to were generally imagined monolithically, as a global readership. That chapter’s focus on critical reception, however, indicates that there are at least two distinct audiences to access: first, access to “critical” attention, whether contemporary or future, local or international; second, access to a larger body of local and global “consumer” audiences interested in the genre. The historical contexts of the Huo Sang mysteries and the Feluda stories described in the third chapter meant that I focused on each audience in turn—Huo Sang’s access to critical reception and future academic translation, and

Feluda’s access to local audiences and future expatriate consumer audiences in translation. This chapter’s focus on the refashioning mode—the presentation of plural local and hegemonic traditions in relative equivalence—tends to balance attention to critical and casual readership or viewership. Blended references to multiple traditions are, perhaps, indicative of a more populist argument for access and attention. This is

157 particularly true in the Huo Sang mysteries, which routinely bounce between rehistorizing and refashioning: there is very little chronological evidence that each subsequent story is less easily identified as part of the Holmesian genre-narrative, and likewise less concerned with being acceptable to the gatekeepers of the New Culture

Movement’s aesthetic politics. While that movement and its aesthetics, critically, decline in tandem with the Republic of China, Cheng’s mysteries do not chart a clear trajectory from New Culture to something else. Instead, the texts’ reactions to both the New Culture

Movement and Republican decline are more granular, reacting perhaps to local politics, shifts in publication demands, or even feedback from readers, local critics, and magazine editors. Ironically, however, the ambiguity of the genre politics in the Huo Sang mysteries did not save it from the aggressive suppression of detective and crime fiction in the early People’s Republic, though that same ambiguity will enable the texts’ rehabilitation as communist-compatible crime writing much later in the twentieth century. The Feluda stories have a similar, but more clearly chronological trajectory: they become more explicitly political and grow away from a deference to British models for how crime fiction is supposed to work as the years go by, in parallel to the increasing age of their readership. However, the stories’ politics reject the growing anticolonial nationalism of Indian politics, quietly articulating a counter-narrative of postcolonial multiculturalism—using the mode of refashioning to make a nascent claim for themselves, and the detective fiction genre as a whole, as a syncretic, globalized strategy of storytelling. Ray’s work directing the film adaptation of his own detective stories makes a case for detective film—if not all detective fiction—as a global genre with a complex, transcultural history.

158

The new textual strand introduced in this chapter, Saradindu Bandyopadhyay’s

Byomkesh Bakshi mysteries, serves to illustrate another configuration of refashioning.

The Bakshi mysteries are, of the three bodies of text here, the most likely to be named as explicitly derivative by critics and audiences. These stories are, while influential in the

Indian history of crime fiction production, positioned as artifacts of a colonial cultural hierarchy—they are an attempt at “local” fictionmaking. This is likely due, in part, to the author’s participation in, and disaffection with, early Bollywood and his own desire to stop writing the popular mysteries in favor of more culturally “elevated” projects. It is also, perhaps, a simple matter of chronology—the early Bakshi mysteries were written in colonial India, and thus marked, for postcolonial audiences and critics, with the taint of cultural dominion. However, I argue that these two factors—the stories’ connection to

India’s early domestic film industry, and their origins as colonially-inflected local fictionmaking—make the Bakshi stories unlikely but fertile sites for uncovering the refashioning of an anticolonial Indian genre of crime fiction where one might expect

Anglocentric rehistorization.

Like the previous chapter, this chapter joins its theoretical illustration of refashioning with a close reading of a particular trope or site where it occurs in the texts.

There is a shift in scale between rehistorizing and refashioning. Rehistorization, where a single history is superficially imposed and performed, concentrated on the language of similarity or analogy (in commentary) and subtle shifts in tropes or genre mechanisms in the fiction, like narrator-sidekick, relationship to nemesis, and detective methodology or ethos. Refashioning, where various histories are co-posed, shifts its attention from subtle structural changes to radical changes in the political or ethical underpinnings of crime

159 fiction—the precise terms of justice, juridical norms, and the detectives’ relationship to those things. This is not to say that the third chapter’s focal changes did not have theoretical implications; in fact, in the case of the two textual strands carried over from that chapter, the changing of the terms of justice is closely connected to those earlier, structural changes.

Refashioning, as a mode of relation, becomes visible through an analysis of how the ostensibly universal norms of justice are composed, in the texts, of a syncretic mix of local and European Enlightenment ideas. The parallels between refashioning in the genre and this refashioning of norms of justice are straightforward: just as these stories network and employ the multiple traditions and histories of the genre offered by local tradition and colonial exchange, they fashion forms of justice which make use of norms influenced by colonial transcultural exchange. Both local and colonial traditional norms of justice are, to borrow a term from Mukti Lakhi Mangharam’s Literatures of Liberation,

“contextual universalisms” (4). That is to say, like the other democratic, ideal universals analyzed by Mangharam—freedom, equality, et cetera—justice is historically presented as the property of European (sometimes even specifically British) Enlightenment ideology, imposed on the world through colonial intervention. As Mangharam points out, however, these ideas developed, via both colonial interaction and “locally grown,” in multiple cultures simultaneously, and all of them were “universals,” or ideas understood to apply to all people (4-5). Thus, norms of freedom, equality, and justice are products of pre-existing local versions of universal ideas synthesized and translated through colonial

160 contact.27 The detective fiction I read in this chapter participates in this ongoing synthesis, narrating the production of a contextually universal set of juridical norms which are simultaneously local (contextual, existing in response to local conditions) and global (universal, at least in the minds of those who adhere to these norms). By analyzing how these stories imagine, synthesize and implement these norms, we can also see how they imagine, adapt, and implement multiple (likewise contextually universal) traditions of detective fiction in text and film.

4.2 Tropic Justice, Tropic Adaptation

The parallel structure of the last section’s concluding sentence is not incidental— these stories synthesize juridical norms and adapt genre traditions. On the whole, this project depends on adaptation studies’ theoretical dedication to authorship as a form of synthesis: authors, whether adapting a novel to film or writing a new entry in a genre, are synthesizing multiple, sometimes competing, sets of traditions and generic norms. The conventional, Romantic notion of authorship marks this form of authorship as subordinate derivation or mimicry.28 My project’s investment in rejecting this definition in favor of authorship-as-adaptation is predicated on the notion that the Romantic definition erases exactly the sort of complex cultural interaction that a European colonial power might want to erase for ideological reasons. Literary studies and its relatives

27 Mangharam’s project with democratic ideals is, incidentally, very similar to the work this study is doing with detective fiction—decolonizing it by arguing against the notion of sole, Western invention and emphasizing transportation, circulation, and adaptation or synthesis. 28 This baggage of the term mimicry is a key reason why Bhabha’s hybridity and mimicry are not used in the place of this study’s more cumbersome terms, like “refashioning.” 161

(cultural studies, film studies, and the like), with their disciplinary roots in this colonial period, continue to accept this definition implicitly or institutionally, creating structural biases, crises, and blind spots that threaten the advancement of those disciplines and their adaptation to a popular culture dominated by digital or virtual means of distribution and production. This study is, in effect, a demonstration of the theoretical possibilities enabled by the broad application of theories of adaptation to the problem of building, attributing, and describing the politics of textual authority in a genre with global reach and colonial roots.

It would be a mistake to imagine rehistorization as a somehow subordinate or qualitatively lesser practice than refashioning. As the prior chapter demonstrated, the act of subordinating a text to a single hegemonic tradition, even in the face of textual realities, is a product of the politics of access and circulation. Rehistorized texts tend to resist or slip out from under the imposed historical narrative and deploy it strategically in reaction to lingering asymmetries of power. Refashioning, while more “liberated,” because it poses hegemonic and local traditions as equals, exists as a response to specific conditions or demands. For example, one of the motives for refashioning in the Huo Sang mysteries, explored in this chapter, is the complexity of illustrating moral responsibility in the absence of a functional state apparatus of justice. In another of this chapter’s examples, refashioning is observed as a product of an attempt by a filmmaker to construct a local, postcolonial aesthetic tradition for crime film. Refashioning may be liberatory or resistant, compared to rehistorization’s mercenary dedication to access, but both processes are necessitated by historical forces. Both processes also, on occasion, come into conflict with other moves in the texts.

162

In the previous chapter, the process of rehistorizing was traceable in tropic or structural changes to the available Holmesian and local traditions. Specifically, the language used to describe the detective’s skills, their relation to their spaces and environments, and the nature of their nemeses were altered significantly by the interaction of local traditions and the Anglocentric genre narrative’s utility to marketing, translation, and movement within and beyond local audiences. The politics of rehistorization were thus made visible—the stories, and their secondary contexts, were visibly mixing local traditions and British ones, but downplaying the local involvement as part of an effort to reach a larger audience or obtain colonially-hegemonic caches of textual authority. Part of those changes, as noted, strayed even further than the politics bound up in rehistorization, where these and other structural modifications made the effort to downplay the mixing of local and British generic traditions more difficult, in some cases stopping that concealment altogether. Thus, this study distinguishes between rehistorization, where both traditions are present, but one is downplayed in primary or secondary materials, and refashioning, where these diverse traditions are posed in a relatively equal arrangement. Like rehistorization, the process and relation of refashioning is visible in the changes it makes to how the genre is executed in texts.

Unlike rehistorization, however, the legible change refashioning makes in the texts analyzed here sits closer to the ideological roots of the texts and genre: the ethics and demands of justice itself. The scale of the change—structural features versus an ideological foundation—is indicative of the change between rehistorization and refashioning. Rehistorization participates, albeit unwillingly, in the colonial subordination of the local to the ostensibly “universal” Western mode. Refashioning

163 interrogates the universality of the Western mode, using the local mode to expose alternative, potentially “universal” modes that are equal to, and perhaps competing with, the hegemonic one. These texts unabashedly counterpose “universal” or cosmopolitan juridical norms (which, despite the labels, are distinctly Western colonial products) with local conventions and contextual demands—they assert valid alternative paths. In essence, refashioning is an inherently postcolonial act that remains obscured by discourses of derivation or rehistorization, but which can be exposed by careful rereading of the texts through the theoretical lens of transcultural adaptation and the tropic lens of juridical norms.

The readings of texts involved in refashioning, here, focuses on coequal genre traditions and interrogations of the norms of justice. The texts do not, however, interrogate these norms the same way, do not pose the same alternative norms or traditions, and do not do so for the same reasons. The alternative forms of justice, and the alternative genre traditions, posed in the texts are highly dependent on the historical context. The Huo Sang mysteries covered here, for instance, tend to critique legalistic and

Western modes of justice, and become more explicit in their discomfort with how those modes fail in common situations. While they are still ostensibly pedagogical documents, what is important to teach the reading public seems to change as the New Culture movement’s push for Westernization comes up against the Republic of China’s discontents—increasingly populist, nationalist, and Marxist political liberation movements. The Feluda stories covered here tend to come from the latter part of that series, following a doubled pathway: the aging up of its readership and the emergence into power of a less anticolonial, more nationalist, more authoritarian Indian government.

164

In mid-series Feluda mysteries, and some of its film adaptations, The Emergency and its ideological stakes loom large, as does the cultural hegemony of American-influenced genre norms. The new addition to the series covered in this study—the Byomkesh Bakshi mysteries by Saradindu Bandyopadhyay—is chronologically contemporary with the Huo

Sang mysteries, produced during a period of Indian passive anticolonial resistance and global conflict. While often understood as simpler or “more derivative” than the Feluda mysteries by scholars in the field, the text’s immediate historical context combined with its “conventionality” allows both the stories and their afterlives—especially their image in public memory and their film adaptations—to engage in a detailed deconstruction of universal norms of justice (in reality and in fiction) in the light of open colonialism, post-

Independence authoritarianism, and Western imperial collapse. In the case of all three textual threads, analyzing their attempts to refashion a new, ostensibly “national” or ethnic tradition of crime fictionmaking serves to challenge their common critical treatment as derivative or colonial textual artifacts.

4.3 Byomkesh Bakshi: Truth-Seeking Without State Justice

The Byomkesh Bakshi mysteries reveal a complex notion of justice, even if they don’t openly critique their colonial milieu. While not the first story by Saradindu

Bandyopadhyay to feature the character Byomkesh Bakshi, “Satyanweshi,” (or “The

Inquisitor” in its English translation by Sreejata Guha), is narratively the first Byomkesh

Bakshi mystery. Set in 1925, the story describes the case which introduces Bakshi to his narrator-roommate, Ajit. The title signals, at the first, a radical move towards an alternate form of justice, as it is the self-identifying term for the series’ protagonist. Byomkesh

165

Bakshi distances himself from the work (and the colonial or cosmopolitan norms of justice built into the work) of the detective, the private eye, or the “consulting detective” by calling himself a “satyanweshi,” a “seeker of truth” in a literal translation. The English translator’s choice of “inquisitor” has some religious connotations—the inquisitor as the seeker of fundamental truth—and is faithful to the original Bengali term, though the historical baggage of “inquisitor” as a brutal, repressive ideological police force in service to a religious authority is, perhaps, not well-matched. The word “satyanweshi,” as the title of the story and the professional title of the main character, begins the work of distancing Bakshi from the forms of police and justice which are part of the (then contemporary) British colonial authority, as it signals a lack of interest in punishment or management in favor of the excavation of the truth. In this sense, the choice of term is similar to the Holmesian “consulting detective,” inasmuch as it signals an interest in the investigation and a disinterest in the resultant legal machinations, but with an added distancing from the act of police detection. The departure of the term from any use of legal investigative connotation—the absence of any form of “detective”—however, signals a radical distaste for the colonial government’s ideas of justice. If “Satyanweshi” and the rest of the Bakshi canon is as derivative of British genre traditions as scholars have assumed, it seems to be using these traditions to argue against other, more concretely colonial imported traditions. This move, at the very least, places it in the realm of rehistorization and resistance. The wide translation, adaptation and influence of the

Bakshi mysteries, however, makes a strong argument for a sort of “downstream” refashioning—the Bakshi mysteries have the potential to articulate an equality between

166

Holmesian and other traditions by virtue of its politics of justice, and its afterlives in film and television do some of this work.

The most comprehensive critical work on Bakshi to date is Pinaki Roy’s 2008 monograph The Manichean Investigators. While Roy’s more contemporary writing on

Bakshi tends to group the character, and the stories, as part of a tradition marked by dependence on colonially imported genre modes, The Manichean Investigators posits a postcolonial Bakshi as the Manichean opposition of the colonial Holmes. While this naturally might position Bakshi as a response to a Eurocentric genre hegemony, Roy is careful to point out that Bakshi’s resistance comes less from explicit opposition than from departure, a push for “indigenous decolonization” of detective fiction (x). Bakshi’s resistance to British colonial influence over Indian crime fiction, and to British colonial norms of justice and investigation, is subtle, accomplished via a mixing of Western tools with Indian cultural identity and local necessities rather than open anticolonial commentary. Roy theorizes, too, that this indirect resistance is in alignment with the

Bengali intelligentsia’s general policy of nonviolent cultural dissent (xv) and may be ascribed to Bandyopadhyay’s own instinct to preserve his day-job as a lawyer working in the colonial legal apparatus (7). With the first ten Bakshi mysteries are set in colonial

India, Bakshi’s status as “satyanweshi,” indifferent to the legal consequences of crime, allows the stories to avoid interacting with colonial police procedures—justice is obtained without the intervention of colonial law enforcement, who only show up at the end to collect the guilty party.

“Satyanweshi” begins with Ajit, the narrator, echoing his Holmesian predecessor,

Watson. He is an adrift bachelor, with no employment, living off a pension and looking

167 for a better place to live. Unlike Watson’s disastrous interaction with the maintenance of the British Empire, however, Ajit is adrift for more esoteric reasons: his education is complete, and he has resolved to “remain a bachelor” and spend the rest of his life engaged in “the literary arts” while living off the interest from his father’s legacy. Ajit takes a room in a boarding house in an unfamiliar, but “in the light of day,” typical

Calcutta neighborhood. That neighborhood’s position, “flanked on one side by dwellings of badly-off non-Bengalis, on another by a degenerate slum, and on the third by hutments of the pale-skinned Chinese,” establishes the area as a product of British colonial movement and exploitation, and codes it as extremely dangerous after dark (2). Several months after first arriving, Ajit notes that the Bengali-language daily paper has reported on a murder particularly close to the house, and that police suspect a cocaine smuggling ring is responsible for the neighborhood’s high murder rate (4). Shortly thereafter, a mysterious man shows up seeking a room in the house. There are no rooms remaining but taking a liking to the man, named Atul, Ajit agrees to split his room with him until he can find better lodgings (5). The two become friends, though Ajit’s suspicions are aroused when he finds Atul laying on the floor of their room, eavesdropping on Anukulbabu in the room below, after a second murder has occurred in the neighborhood (9). Later that evening, a boarder in the house is also found dead; Atul insists that it is murder, even though the door was locked from the inside (11). After several days, Atul is taken by the police as the potential murderer (18).

Atul’s sudden reappearance in the house, to Ajit’s relief, begins to clarify the situation: Atul is Byomkesh Bakshi, operating undercover to out the cocaine smuggling operation (23-24). He’d approached the police and proposed this undercover scheme, but

168 a bureaucratic miscommunication means that the local police didn’t know about his undercover status (25). His cover now blown, Bakshi turns the colonial government’s incompetence to his advantage, and with the help of Ajit, Byomkesh sets a trap, suspecting the murderer lives in their boarding house. When the landlord enters their room and tries to kill Bakshi in his sleep, the two restrain and arrest him. Byomkesh reveals what gave the landlord away: he charges almost nothing for his homeopathic remedies, but can afford to import drugs from abroad, using the imports as cover for international cocaine trafficking (21-27). In the story’s conclusion, Byomkesh invites Ajit to stay with him, in a much safer part of the city, and explains the meaning of the brass plate beside the door: “Byomkesh Bakshi: Inquisitor” (24-28).

The conventional nature of the story, both in the terms of Holmesian mystery and the more contemporary Golden Age mystery, belies an unconventional relationship between the state police forces and the investigator. Bakshi’s presence as an undercover local investigator belies the Calcutta colonial police’s lack of mobility and competence— police raids, while visible examples of the colonial government’s ability to use overwhelming force, do little to prevent or solve the area’s murders. That same neighborhood is an artifact of colonial dislocation—at the confluence of “non-Bengalis,” a slum, and a Chinese neighborhood—and the crimes’ connection to drug smuggling nod to India’s, and especially Bengal’s, place in the British colonial network. The colonial police are unable to police the colonial capital, especially when the opportunity for criminality is furnished by the British Empire’s colonial policies. The offhand mention of the Chinese neighborhood recalls India’s role as a producer of drugs meant for export to

China decades earlier. Bakshi’s comical and counterproductive arrest mid-story

169 reinforces the notion that the function of the police in colonial Calcutta is less to police the city and solve murders than it is to project the image of order. The story’s use of

Holmesian and Golden Age tropes—the genius detective, the down-and-out but gentlemanly narrator, the locked room murder, a closed cast of suspects—highlights the distance between British-established norms of justice and storytelling and the realities of policing a colonial metropolis: neither the tropes nor the policing quite occupy the role that is expected. The villain’s final assertion as he is being arrested is that Bakshi and the police have conspired to frame him, and that “there is a legal system in this country and I have plenty of money too” (23). The implication that the police might feasibly operate a conspiracy, and that money will solve what the legal system cannot is not contested—

Bakshi’s response is only to gesture to the incriminating pharmaceutical evidence and leave the determinations of truth up to chemical testing and his personal testimony, which he insists must be taken immediately, as if to furnish him with an acceptable exit from the entire business (24). Having sought the truth and found it is victory enough in colonial

India. The processes of actual legal justice, of personal guilt or innocence, and the fate of the criminal occur outside the scope of the narrative, and thereby outside the interest of the narrator Ajit.

The Bakshi mysteries’ complex and layered traditions of genre and justice are highlighted, particularly, by a large hiatus in production. New textual traditions, and modified notions of (now postcolonial) Indian justice, emerge after the series’ hiatus from 1938 to 1952. During that period, Bandyopadhyay ceased writing new Bakshi mysteries (and, in fact, considered the series to be over) and moved to Mumbai to write for the booming Indian domestic film industry. Disillusioned with the entire film

170 enterprise, Bandyopadhyay relocated to Pune and took up writing again, including a novel-length return to the world of Byomkesh Bakshi, The Menagerie (Guha ix). The emergence of American-style hardboiled noir influences in the Bakshi mysteries, previously more in line with Holmesian or Golden Age genre tropes, is particularly visible in The Menagerie and in the English translation by Sreejata Guha. Guha, then a graduate student in translation studies, says in her introduction to her earlier collection of

Bakshi translations, Picture Imperfect, that the work of translating these mysteries hinged upon careful choices between preserving the original styling of the text and translating them to have the same effect transculturally. She notes:

In order to keep the laudable qualities of Saradindu’s writing intact, I have often had to make choices that either preserve the cultural flavour and topical references of the original, or recreate a corresponding echo in the English language that nevertheless retains a neutral cultural space for the original. In the intricate, didactic and theoretical domain of translation theory, validity and ‘justifications’ for such choices are still the subject of much contention and the ‘task of the translator’ is still under debate. (x)

The preservation of the literary style is critical, too, because the narrator of the stories,

Ajit, has literary aspirations and the style of the narration is part of his characterization.

The act of reading The Menagerie in translation is a useful exercise, since it highlights, counterintuitively, that the noir elements were not a product of Guha’s desire to maintain cultural affect by finding an English “echo”; they were present in the original text and required little adaptation from the text’s (perhaps deliberately) overwrought, metaphor-rich literary Bengali. The Menagerie uses myriad American hardboiled tropes, including the city in a heatwave, a series of femmes fatales on a strange and mysterious estate maintained by a jaded former magistrate, blackmail, a case with too many moving parts, the physical and emotional echoes of the recent World War, a metaphor-laden

171 narrative voice, a fixation on men’s fashion, and casual misogyny exploited by the aforementioned femme fatales. This is not to say, however, that this particular tradition of crime fiction overwrites the style of Bandyopadhyay’s Bakshi mysteries. The character of

Bakshi continues to defy these noir motifs, remaining an optimistic, clever, and generally nonviolent detective with a wife and infant child, highlighting that the noir elements of the story, much like “Satyanweshi’s” Holmesian and Golden Age trappings, are a reflection of Ajit’s literary tendencies and cosmopolitan reading habits (despite his claims of growing alienation from the literary elite, who have sold out to the film industry [11]).

The shift in subgenre trappings has remarkably little impact on the characters, reflecting

Ajit’s attempt to portray complex cases using whatever style is in vogue at the time

(“Satyanweshi,” indeed, is contemporaneous with Golden Age mysteries, and The

Menagerie written at the tail end of the noir or hardboiled literary moment). Bakshi’s sense of justice does not uncritically embrace a hardboiled morality, either—the modes of justice, like the generic traditions, are mixed but not competing. Instead, genre tropes are selected when strategically necessary to explain or illuminate a local circumstance.

Outside the scope of the story’s fictional universe, too, the style shifting away from British Golden Age murder mysteries and towards American hardboiled detective stories is likely connected to the author’s time working in the film industry, whose cultural mores were more closely connected to French and American tendencies than

British ones. This also explains The Menagerie’s open satire of the film industry—one key element of the mystery hinges on a female actress carrying off a jewel heist by

172 exploiting the misogyny of her Tollywood29 employers and the attentions of wealthy men, for example. This incident is one of several in the novel where Bandyopadhyay parodies his own naive motivations for turning from writing to work in adapting fiction to the screen. This is not to say that hardboiled elements weren’t present before: even

“Satyanweshi,” which includes a Golden Age “locked room” trope, is set in a multicultural, down-and-out neighborhood in Calcutta that drips with hardboiled-but- anticolonial social commentary (2). The presence of an American and British tradition of detective narration in early- and mid-twentieth century India is not surprising, as a natural outgrowth of the inundation of the Indian literati with imported British mysteries in the late nineteenth century created a significant market for popular literature in English that would only have expanded with the presence of American military personnel (and their attendant popular texts) in eastern India during the Second World War.

The Menagerie is, from the first, a text interested in using noir tropes to explore the decline of empire. The narrative is littered with objects, details, and circumstances left in the wake of rapid decolonization: the client is a morally-suspect retired magistrate who worked for the colonial government, the setting is that magistrate’s farm next to a field of abandoned military vehicles, and the farm’s residents include a disfigured chemist

(implied to be a pro-independence terrorist), jilted brides, addicts, and a disgraced

British-educated doctor. From the first meeting, Nishanathbabu, the retired judge, engages in oblique political commentary—asking at first whether there is a Bengali word for “blackmail,” and responding “scornfully” when Ajit notes that the language is

29 The term for the Kolkata-based Bengali-language film industry, a portmanteau of “Tollygunge”—the part of Kolkata where the industry was historically centered—and “Hollywood.” 173 dependent on the English loanword (5). In his subsequent description of the residents of his farm (one of whom he suspects is blackmailing him in a byzantine fashion), each character has fallen from their social status, and his farm, “Golap Colony,” operates as a sort of safe zone for those left behind by social disorder. The farm’s doctor was once a famous surgeon who lost his license, for example, and the carriage driver was certified to drive cars prior to being exposed as an addict (5-9). Nishanathbabu seeks Bakshi’s assistance on two cases whose connection he does not make clear. The first and most conventional mystery is the case of blackmail, which involves someone leaving car parts around his residence to disturb his retirement and wreck his fragile health. The second case comes just as Nishanathbabu is preparing to leave: he asks Bakshi to locate

Sunayana, a “B-grade” film actress, or as much information about her as he can. Bakshi and Ajit speculate that the two inquiries are related, though they are unable to get anything more out of Nishanathbabu (9).

Pursuing the second mystery, Bakshi and Ajit befriend Ramen Mullick, a “film encyclopedia”—a wealthy and well-connected enthusiast who knows everyone and everything about the local Tollywood film industry. Mullick reveals that Sunayana’s real name was likely Netyakali, and that her brief career ended under bizarre circumstances.

A master of makeup and disguise, the extremely secretive Netyakali secured minor parts in several films before being caught up in a romance with a local jeweler. Just before the two were rumored to run off together, the jeweler is found dead in his shop, overdosed on nicotine, and twenty thousand rupees worth of items are missing from the display.

Netyakali was never found (13-17). The following morning, Bakshi, Ajit and Ramen

Mullick are all summoned to Nishanathbabu’s farm in the countryside, where Bakshi

174 surmises that Nishanathbabu suspects that one of his tenants is the mysterious Netyakali, and that she might be connected to the blackmail (18). Thereafter, a dizzying array of new characters and red herrings are revealed—the novel includes an illustrated map of the farm, called “the zoo” by the locals, in order to simplify the residents’ complex grudges, relations, and access to each other (27). Bakshi and Ajit despair at the case’s complexity, exacerbated when Nishanathbabu is found dead one morning, apparently of complications due to poor health. Bakshi, true to character, insists that this is murder (59-

67).

Bakshi’s attempt to interview each resident separately is sabotaged and disrupted by the residents’ own desire to keep separate, but scandalous, personal secrets unrelated to the death or blackmail. For instance, the farm’s chemist is revealed as a failed terrorist, and his daughter, Mukul, has been abandoned by her lover, Nishanathbabu’s live-in nephew, Bijoy, for Bonolokhhi, a newly arrived young woman with a tragic backstory of betrothal, betrayal and abandonment. Brojodas, a religious man who works on the farm, converted only after Nishanathbabu had sent him to prison—he was a clerk in

Nishananth’s own office who betrayed his trust (38). This betrayal later takes on a more ethical angle, as Brojodas’s past criminal behavior comes after he discoverers that

Nishanath’s young wife is the widow of a Punjabi auto mechanic Nishanath had personally sentenced to a long imprisonment (123-126). Nishanath’s death also occasions the entry of Pramod Barat, an intrepid police inspector who proves to be the only member of law enforcement inclined to accept Bakshi’s pronouncement that the judge’s death isn’t an open-and-shut case of poor health (72). Barat does much of the police-restricted

175 work outside the narrative perspective, verifying records and ordering officers to watch the farm on Bakshi’s instruction and against the advice of his superiors (71-72).

Gradually, the tangled web of criminality at Golap Colony is revealed. The case of the blackmail—with auto parts from the rusting, abandoned field of military vehicles nearby being left in conspicuous places—is not meant to be directed at Nishanathbabu at all, but is being done to blackmail Damayanti. She received a letter from an individual she believes to be her former husband, now released from jail, instructing her to leave money for him in a specific location when engine parts appear on the farm. However,

Damayanti’s former husband actually died in prison, and the only other person who knows of this connection is Bijoy (124). Bijoy, Bakshi surmises, might have revealed this secret in an amorous or post-coital state to Mukul or Bonolokkhi. This does little, initially, to clarify Nishanath’s murder until Barat reveals that the elderly judge seems to have died after being hung upside-down in a way that would make it look, at least initially, as if his high blood pressure had killed him; both Bakshi and Barat conclude that a woman could not have done this without an accomplice (80). After Bakshi follows the farm’s resident physician, Dr. Bhujangadhar, into the Anglo-Indian neighborhood of

Calcutta (108) and discovers the doctor has some interest in a brothel, Bakshi sends

Barat’s associate Bikash Dutta to infiltrate the place. Dutta reports that, while “two disreputable women” live in and operate the property, the landlord has a locked room reserved for his own use (130). This space, Bakshi reveals later, is the doctor’s underground plastic surgery clinic (144). Bakshi’s hatches a scheme to expose the blackmailers and murderers using photo prints, obtained via Ramen Mullick, that show the nearly unrecognizable face of the missing actress Netyakali.

176

Bakshi then returns to Golap Colony and gathers all the suspects in a Poirot-style denouement, a situation Ajit describes as “beat[ing] the silver screen of Bengal hollow— it was pure Hollywood” (144). There, Bakshi describes his hypothesis, depending on the outburst of the guilty party to confirm his theory: Dr. Bhujangadhar and Bonolokkhi are not who they seem, but are in fact a British educated doctor and actress turned con- artists—facts confirmed by Barat’s subsequent police research (147). Bonolokkhi is

Netyakali, the actress, the jewels she stole years before are still hidden in Dr.

Bhujangadhar’s secret surgery (144), and her partnership with the disgraced plastic surgeon allows her to change her appearance. She and her physician accomplice infiltrated Golap Colony with the intention of extracting the wealth from it: she made

Bijoy fall in love with her and embezzle money from his uncle to so that they could elope

(150-152). Likewise, she uses her sway over Bijoy to obtain Damayanti and Nishanath’s secret, feeding it to Dr. Bhujangadhar, who pretends to be Damayanti’s long-dead husband in order to run the blackmail operation (149). When Nishanathbabu calls the famous satyanweshi Bakshi in to investigate the mysterious auto parts situation, they attempt to end the investigation by murdering Nishanathbabu in a way that might be attributed to poor health (152). After this is revealed, Barat, as the representative of the law present, pulls his revolver and attempts to arrest Dr. Bhujangadhar and Netyakali.

This prompts the scene which Ajit describes, specifically, as “pure Hollywood”:

Bhujangadhar went up to Bonolokkhi and stood before her. The scene that followed beats the silver screen of Bengal hollow; it was pure Hollywood. Bonolokkhi rose and put her arms around Bhujangadhar. The latter gathered her into his arms in an ardent embrace and planted a long kiss on her lips. Then he held her face in both hands, and in a tone brimming with feeling, said, “Come, it’s time to be on our way.”

177

Death came without warning, like a bolt from the blue. The sound of crunching glass came from their mouths just before the couple collapsed together on the floor, lying in a heap at the foot of Nishanathbabu’s photograph. (144)

The criminals’ suicide by hidden cyanide capsule renders state justice impossible. Barat’s role in the novel, subsequently, is simply to confirm prior circumstances that Bakshi has already hypothesized. Bakshi, far from disappointed, is almost delighted by the filmic, improbable conclusion of the case (144-145), and his exposure of everyone’s various scandals and lies renders the farm a much healthier and more functional institution, at least within the scope of the novel’s final moments. Bijoy, suitably chastened from his philandering habits, is encouraged to marry Mukul (154), thus establishing social stability within Golap Colony’s small society. In a departure from the Bakshi mysteries’ more typical presentation of criminals as unsympathetic artifacts of a colonial system,

Netyakali and Bhujangadhar are presented as sympathetic, albeit deviant, products of postcolonial gaps in authority: they are Indians, educated abroad in England, who find in each other “their own supreme archetypes,” “criminal and anti-social” but as deeply in love as “a tiger and his mate” (147). Skilled in imitation, society has no role for them beyond an exploitative film industry career or crime (148). It is thus fitting that they escape state justice in a scene which echoes film.

4.4 Bakshi Via Feluda’s Ray

By the time the last Bakshi mystery was written in 1970, the subversive potential of that series’ model of justice had lost some of its bite, since official decolonization had long since taken place. However, this model, along with the characters and mysteries themselves, remained appealing to Indian postcolonial audiences. Bandyopadhyay’s

178 detective stories obtained a second life in translation, first in print in Hindi, and then in adaptation, as nationally-broadcast (and still widely available) Bengali and Hindi- language television shows and film. In fact, of all Indian detective fiction, the Bakshi mysteries are perhaps the most widely and successfully adapted, having spawned several dozen film and television series over the last half-century. This ubiquity contributes, perhaps, to critical disdain for the series as a result of the widespread academic conceit of popular genre products as conventional, conservative and derivative. As Pinaki Roy indicates in The Manichean Investigators, as of 2008, one of the few critical references to

Bakshi available on the internet is a brief mention in a Wikipedia article then titled “Non-

Canonical Works Related to and Derived from Sherlock Holmes” (123). As of the time of this writing (June 2019), the Wikipedia entry has been retitled to “Sherlock Holmes

Pastiches,” losing some critical precision and, surprisingly in the post-canonicity environment of the internet, striking a more evaluative tone with the term “pastiche.”30

Importantly, the Bakshi mysteries (and also Ray’s Feluda stories) are only mentioned in terms of their film and television adaptations: the printed texts are apparently unworthy of the label “pastiche.”

Satyajit Ray’s 1976 film adaptation of The Menagerie is a particularly strong example of the “downstream refashioning” potential of the Bakshi mysteries. While the stories by Bandyopadhyay, even post-Independence, evince a passive resistance to the hegemonic genre model embodied in Holmes and articulate a fittingly alternative model

30 To say nothing of the term “pastiche” being used in the Sherlockian (or Holmesian) fandom to label any attempt at writing new Sherlock Holmes stories. Marking Feluda and Bakshi as new Sherlock Holmes stories is, arguably, more reductive than saying they were “derived” from the Holmes genre pattern. 179 of justice to avoid the involvement of British colonial jurisprudence, the film adaptation by Ray places these anticolonial concerns firmly beyond the scope of the film. The Ray adaptation of The Menagerie positions itself as an experimental, post-noir mystery that engages in social commentary on contemporary Indian issues rather than as an artifact of outdated colonial resistance. If the print stories engage in resistance via the promotion of

Indian notions of justice and by explicitly avoiding any discussion of the colonial situation, the film treats the story as if its colonial concerns are period artifacts, accessories rather than fundamental concerns. The Menagerie, the print novel, is participating in and reacting to the norms of a Eurocentric model of detective fiction, layering it with Indian traditions and norms. Chiriakhana, Ray’s film adaptation, is reacting to The Menagerie as an artifact of the Indian postcolonial tradition of detective fiction, adapting it to the norms and requirements of an internationally recognized Indian filmmaking tradition and stepping beyond solely anti-imperial concerns. Reaction to (or strategic avoidance of) colonial structures in Bandyopadhyay’s novel is replaced by the not-altogether-different politics of film adaptation. The hegemonic, Anglocentric narrative of detective fiction is acknowledged, but positioned alongside an Indian tradition now metonymically represented by the print Bakshi mysteries, and by American influence on film genres, and on detective fiction in particular. These traditions constitute source materials for the film adaptation, equally likely to be modified, ignored, or used.

The film adaptation, in short, positions the Bakshi mystery as an “original,” capable of recontextualization, rather than as a “reaction” that is exclusively a product of its time.

The film does this, perhaps most obviously, by shifting the temporal setting of the story. While the novel is set in the early 1950s, and thus awash in the aftermath of world

180 war and decolonization, the film is set in the mid-1960s. The field of decaying military vehicles, the relative disorganization of the police, and Nishanath’s complicity in British colonial legal practice are erased from the film. Nishanath’s character is altogether less jaded and existential—while the novel’s retired judge muses abstractly about the illusive nature of true justice and Indian self-government (24), the film’s characterization of the judge as a strange old man with a very young wife is less philosophical and more exploitative and patronizing. Where, in the novel, the relationship between Nishanath and his “wife” Damayanti are revealed as primarily non-romantic and a product of Bijoy’s childhood empathy with a prisoner’s wife gradually evolving into a loving relationship

(116), the film presents their relationship as potentially sexually exploitative. These, and some changes to the mystery’s solution, establish the exploitation of women as a theme in the film—a theme in some ways opposed to the empowered, and sometimes manipulative, female agents of the novel. Changes to the relationship between Bakshi and the forces of state justice—primarily the police, though also the client, the retired magistrate—might also be attributed by the story’s temporal dislocation. References to the immediate postwar period and to the struggle for independence are erased or replaced, as the film moves the story to the mid-1960s. The farm’s disgraced chemist is no longer implied to be a failed (but semi-sympathetic) independence terrorist, for instance—such an identification would have been controversial in 1960s India, marked by bursts of other ideologically-motivated terrorist acts. The film retains the characters of Barat and Dutta, and police officers appear altogether more plentiful and willing to assist Bakshi than the novel suggests. Certain noir elements are likewise removed: Bakshi’s sense of moral obligation to continue investigating the two cases after Nishanath’s death, as presented in

181 the novel, is changed to personal and financial motivations in the film. Bakshi makes his dislike of the culturally elitist judge obvious from the film’s opening scenes.

The film strategically downplays Bandyopadhyay’s critique of the film industry as shallow and misogynistic by stripping its femme fatale of any agency. The novel portrays Bonolokkhi and Bhujangadhar as a criminal mastermind couple, deeply in love and criminally equal, who commit a tragic but romantic suicide to escape state justice

(144). The film’s conclusion departs rather radically—in the mounting pressure of the final, expository scene, Bonolokkhi explodes into an emotional outburst, accusing her husband of exploiting her, forcing her into films and crime as a powerless accomplice.

Her agency as an actress and criminal exploiting misogyny is stripped away, attributed to the intellect, ambition, and amorality of her husband. The film ends not with the

(ironically very cinematic) joint suicide, but in a screaming match of mutual recriminations that Bakshi calmly walks out of, leaving the mess for the waiting police.

The changed role for Bonolokkhi, and the different ending that it generates, is perhaps a result of the demands of practical filmmaking. For example, while the novel presents images of Netyakali in film as ambiguous or imprecise, the film features a scene where her film debut is re-screened for the protagonists, placing an entire, deliberately stereotypical Bollywood or Tollywood musical number in the middle of Ray’s film. No uncertainty about Bonolokkhi being Netyakali can be sustained after this point—both the audience and the characters can see that the same actress plays both—and so this scene is set later in the film as confirmation of her identity. The film instead relies on a different event to instigate Bakshi’s suspicion: Bonolokkhi’s dialect does not match the small village she claims to be from, a mistake not made by (and indeed out of character for) the

182 master actress of the novel. The scene also refashions the novel’s commentary on the film industry—and the novel’s parody of filmic tropes, such as the “kiss of death” ending—in more Indian terms: while the novel parodies midcentury Hollywood and Tollywood dramatic tropes, the film parodies the moves of music-driven Tollywood and Bollywood romance films. Ray effectively splits and localizes Bandyopadhyay’s critique; Indian film has a sufficiently independent tradition to warrant commentary separately from Western film.

Bonolokkhi’s disempowerment, her reduction from co-villain to victim, is similarly a product of Ray’s implicit argument for Indian film as a syncretic but independent tradition. The entire femme fatale trope, so integral to Western noir traditions, is absent because the film avoids the visual and auditory language, and the narrative beats, of hardboiled American crime film or European noir. Chiriakhana, as

Ray’s first attempt at a crime or detective-driven film, fashions an experimental (and sometimes bizarre) visual and musical style that is altogether distinct from these Western genres. As Ray himself wrote in a letter to a colleague, he is engaging in a “total avoidance of occidental thriller clichés,” maintaining the conventional mystery film structure while trying to “invest a western genre with an indigenous[31] character” that would encourage an attentive audience (Ray in Robinson 232-233). For example, much of the film takes place in broad daylight (including the scene where Bakshi tails Dr.

Bhujangadhar to his brothel-surgery) and makes use of a claustrophobic camera style which suggests the film was made in real locations, rather than on a set. The effect

31 As Ray’s own comments on his detective stories’ relationship to Holmes, discussed in chapter 3, indicate, Ray’s language for genre adaptation is generally aligned with this work’s “rehistorization” mode, even when the produced texts are more complicated. 183 incidentally creates (without much character commentary) the impression of oppressive spring heat, which the novel describes extensively. Montage sequences of interviews and significant objects, presented with dizzying speed and in no particular order, replace the novel’s orderly interview scenes. The score, composed by Ray, is consistently upbeat.

Comical scenes, usually involving Bakshi in disguise or Ajit being frightened or uncomfortable (no longer the narrator, he functions as comic relief), join this soundtrack to create a murder-cum-comedy of errors. Tellingly, Bakshi first visits Golap Colony dressed as a stereotypical Japanese tourist, so that he might take photographs without arousing suspicion. This ethnic stereotype, and a chance encounter on the train with a businessman who (unlike Bakshi) can actually speak Japanese, push the film from an

Indian noir mystery to murder-comedy.

This departure from noir affects the film’s model of justice, as well: by presenting each character as flawed and worthy of mockery, the burst of mutual recriminations that replace the suicide scene is played as poetic justice—Bakshi’s departure from the scene, stepping outside to laugh with Ajit and the police, implies that the strange characters of

Golap Colony, far from being the tragic products of a colonial system in collapse, are dysfunctional Indian citizens who deserve each other. Indeed, it would be hard to blame decolonization for these characters’ fates, since by the time in which the film is set, India had been independent for two decades. This, too, prevents police justice within the film, albeit for different, more whimsical reasons—while the culprits are still alive, no officer wants to enter the room, filled with arguing, maladjusted adults and at least one disintegrating marriage, to arrest them.

184

While these changes could be used to critique or evaluate Ray’s adaptation, they also reveal a process of refashioning: many of the film’s noir tropes or pastiches of

Tollywood, Bollywood and Hollywood tropes are positioned as equally subject to alteration. In other words, privileged aspects of hegemonic Western anglophone genres, literary originality, and fidelity to Bengali genre “classics” are equally secondary to

Ray’s experimentation with a Bengali or Indian iconography of crime film. All of these hierarchical concepts—fidelity, originality, and the sanctity of imported genres—are stripped of their power and used as materials for the construction of Ray’s film and his proposed tropic language for Indian crime film in general. Counterintuitively, Ray’s lack of deference to the source material’s ideological or aesthetic commitments, and the critical dismissal of Bakshi mysteries as foundational but derivative, permit myriad future adaptations by other film and television producers to treat the stories’ (and even prior adaptations) as raw material to articulate new traditions. Subsequent Bakshi mystery adaptations are shaped by Ray’s initial politics of adaptation and genre—and, as featured in the next chapter, future adaptations embrace his willingness to radically alter or depart from those texts, while also embracing Bandyopadhyay’s willingness to stick his characters, almost unchanged, into new genres. Ray’s treatment of crime film as established in Chiriakhana, particularly his penchant for featuring almost childlike whimsy, character study and non-state karmic punishment as an antidote to taking crime’s violence too seriously, would inform his later work writing and adapting his own detective stories into film.

185

4.5 Feluda: Incidental Justice and States of Exception in Emergency India

The previous chapter’s discussion of “postcolonial rehistorization” in scholarship about the Feluda mysteries identified Pinaki Roy’s 2018 article “The Postcolonial Sleuth for Adolescents: Rereading Satyajit Ray's Feluda Narratives” as depending on refashioning but engaging in extensive rehistorizing in order to remain accessible to a nonspecialist audience (See 3.2). Of particular interest at the time was Roy’s description of the structure of the Feluda mysteries, which calls to several textual traditions—namely, those of Arthur Conan Doyle and Panchkari De—in a single sentence:

His 14-year-old male cousin—Tapesh Ranjan Mitra, nicknamed Topshe—takes on the Dr. Watson role as narrator for most of Feluda’s adventures. Feluda's associate, Lalmohon Ganguli—a middle-aged Brahmin who lives in Garpar, Kolkata—writes detective potboilers under the pseudonym Jatayu and features in his books the superheroic Prokhor Rudra, who can be identified as a caricature of Arindam Das, the super-sleuth created by Panchkari De in 1928. (Roy, “The Postcolonial Sleuth” 80)

While a purely Anglocentric tradition of detective fiction is displaced by the reference to

Panchkari De’s detective character, Roy’s article continues to take the English origins of the genre as fact. In effect, in arguing that Feluda was the first postcolonial Indian detective—neither beholden to a colonial Indian identity or a self-consciously nationalistic Indian identity—Roy must mark out several textual predecessors as too derivative of British models to constitute a legitimate alternative tradition. He aligns his argument, at least in part, with that of the literary scholar Sukumar Sen, who dismisses

Bakshi (in particular) as part of a colonial tradition too contaminated by British colonial subjugation to be worthy of “authentic” status (Sen 193, in Roy 80). Roy’s argument contextualizes Feluda’s position in an Indian crime tradition that includes Panchkari De,

Saradindu Bandyopadhyay, and others, while simultaneously positioning it in the British

186 tradition of detective fiction. While Roy’s article seems, on the surface, to privilege connection and departure from the British tradition—thus engaging in rehistorization in an “empire writes back” mode—the presence of the Indian tradition in his article exhibits the process of refashioning, albeit one frustrated by the necessities of publishing literature scholarship internationally. In identifying both of these traditions in the Feluda mysteries themselves, the article implicitly positions the texts as engaging in refashioning. In identifying the Feluda mysteries as postcolonial, Roy highlights both the refashioning relationship and the trope which best helps to expose it: alterations in the terms and norms of justice in reaction to decolonization and independence.

The difficulty of fully divorcing refashioning from rehistorization is the difficulty of divorcing the text from its commentary. In the previous chapter, “The Golden

Fortress” (“Sonar Kella”) was identified as engaging in rehistorization because of its use of the Holmesian tradition as a “generic foil”—a point of contrast and departure, a relationship that still positions these texts as reaction. However, a closer examination of the norms of justice in these texts, including “The Golden Fortress,” offers the possibility of a less reactionary relationship—refashioning emerges in their subsequent film adaptations, which replace the Holmesian generic foil with the adapted texts themselves as foils. “The Golden Fortress’” film adaptation, Sonar Kella also benefits from a direct relationship to another foil—it is Ray’s second attempt at a detective film, after his adaptation of Bandyopadhyay’s Chiriakhana. Thus, “The Golden Fortress,” Sonar Kella, and Chiriakhana operate in a coherent tradition built around Ray’s effort to produce a coherent genre of Bengali crime fiction. The hegemonic influence of Anglocentric models crime writing—and even crime film—is crowded out by local predecessors.

187

The politics of justice, and particularly of what constitutes evidence and adequate punishment, are central to the mystery of “The Golden Fortress.” As discussed in this work’s third chapter, the story begins with a young Calcutta boy, Mukul Dhar, claiming to remember fragments of a past life when he was a warrior, living in a sandy place near the titular “golden fortress.” Journalistic coverage of the boy’s odd claims—especially his assertion that he recalls burying treasure under the floor of his home in this past life— attracts the attention of criminals, as well as the parapsychologist Dr. Hajra. Mukul

Dhar’s father consents to Dr. Hajra’s proposal to take the boy to Rajasthan, where there are a number of fortresses, in order to determine whether these past life visions are a legitimate phenomenon. Mr. Dhar then contracts Feluda to follow the two to Rajasthan, after a local Calcutta boy who resembles Mukul was briefly kidnapped and interrogated about the treasure before his kidnappers realized he was the wrong child. Mukul’s father fears the potential kidnappers will pursue Dr. Hajra and his son to Rajasthan. Topshe’s skepticism about Mukul’s status as a “jatismar” (203), as the narrator of the story, is assuaged by Feluda’s assertion that “it is foolish to accept or reject anything without sufficient evidence” (207). Notably, this departs from Western scientific standards of evidence: Feluda does not dismiss the paranormal out of hand, since a lack of evidence to disprove it does not constitute, in his thinking, proof. This modification of the standard

“burden of proof” built into Western criminological techniques recurs throughout the narrative. For much of the story, for example, it is not clear if any crime has occurred at all, but because criminal presence cannot be disproved, Feluda remains contracted (by

Mukul’s father) to follow the boy and Dr. Hajra around Rajasthan. Feluda’s open- mindedness about the supernatural is also an implicitly anticolonial or postcolonial move:

188 as an Indian detective, he is unwilling to dismiss traditional Indian modes of thought as unscientific or superstitious without explicit proof, implicitly rejecting the positivist discourse that was used, historically, to justify the subjugation and management of India by a “rational” British colonial authority. The legitimacy of this perspective is countenanced by the character of Dr. Hajra. Far from a shill for the paranormal, Dr. Hajra has built a career marked by debunking spiritualist fraudsters. In his characterizing incident, Dr. Hajra, while on a speaking tour in the United States, exposes a “spiritual healing” center in Chicago, run by an Indian conman named Bhavananda, as a scam.

This, not incidentally, leads Feluda and Topshe’s erudite Uncle Sidhu to note disparagingly that “Americans are easily impressed” by Indian-flavored spiritualist ideas

(214). Hajra, like Feluda, represents a synthetic position on scientific proof, free from both superstition and a colonialist dismissal of local forms of knowledge, but avowedly against uncritical thinking.

The story’s flexibility about the nature of proof extends to more colonial trappings as well. Unfamiliar with Rajasthan, Feluda uses foreign produced, predominantly British guidebooks (208). Several key elements of the mystery depend on imported knowledge.

The author-parodying character Jatayu, introduced in this story, notices that one character, “Mr. Globetrotter,” is no globetrotter at all because he asserts that he shot a wolf in Tanganyika. Jatayu, having consulted Western-authored guides in his past research, is aware that there are no wolves in Tanganyika (240)—this comes on the heels of Jatayu admitting he is fairly ignorant of foreign places, despite writing adventure novels set in them featuring his protagonist Prokhor Rudra. These guidebooks, products of colonial zoology, geography, and science, are not challenged—their knowledge is

189 understood as being a wholly adequate substitute for direct experience, and no irony is present when Indian characters consult them for knowledge about India itself. Feluda considers evidence regardless of the conditions of its sourcing or production: Indian paranormal concepts are treated as equally valid as colonial guidebooks. The story never passes any judgment on either—the guidebooks are accurate, and Mukul’s supernatural powers are neither confirmed nor explained away. This epistemological move is political:

Ray’s Indian renaissance-man, as a model for the idealized Indian investigator and intellectual, fashions a cosmopolitan model of what counts as knowledge. Ideas, regardless of their production or sourcing, are considered valid until conclusively invalidated. This is notably in opposition to the dominant mode of Indian anticolonial nationalism common at the time the story was written, the radical Indian exceptionalism that instigated the political crisis aptly termed “The Emergency”—Ray, and his detective, do not reject Western modes or democratic standards as much as re-purpose or refashion them. Ray and his protagonist are both pragmatically cosmopolitan about methods, epistemologies and—in the case of the Feluda mysteries and Ray’s films—very pragmatic about forming “patchwork” or transnational genres.

The total absence of the police, except at the story’s very end, is indicative of the model of justice being proposed by “The Golden Fortress,” and its attendant generic consequences. The story reveals that the real Dr. Hajra was attacked prior to Feluda and

Topshe’s arrival. The man accompanying Mukul is Bhavananda, disguised as Dr. Hajra and seeking both Hajra’s ruin and Mukul’s hypothetical treasure. Bhavananda’s crimes include kidnapping, assault, impersonation, theft and what appears at first to be attempted murder, after he advises his sidekick, the fraudulent “Mr. Globetrotter,” to delay Feluda,

190

Topshe, and Jatayu by forcing them to jump from a moving train at gunpoint.

(Globetrotter fails and is forced to jump from the train himself, and his gun is revealed to be a stage prop of Japanese manufacture, somewhat reducing the menace of his character and the seriousness of that episode in the story [260].) This is, of course, in addition to his past crimes in the United States, for which he was deported (214). In the penultimate scene of the story, Bhavananda, in search of the treasure, is digging up the floor of an abandoned, ancient house that Mukul says was once his when Topshe and a revolver- armed Feluda catch him in the act. In defiance of the adventure story tropes humorously instantiated by Jatayu’s fears of bandits and violence, the “Hollywood Western” tropes used by Topshe to characterize Rajasthan visually (249), and the detective fiction tropes expected by the audience, this armed standoff is promptly defused by a distinctly local factor: Bhavananda is attacked by a wild peacock that is using the house as its nest.

Injured and badly bleeding from the neck after this attack, Topshe notes that “he had been suitably punished” (268). His arrest moments later by the only police officer in the story is downplayed compared to the peacock attack—Bhavananda runs directly into the officer’s arms to escape the enraged, territorial national bird of India. His accomplice,

Mr. Globetrotter, disappeared after jumping from the train earlier in the story, and so his fate is left open to interpretation. Mukul, simply pleased to have seen the “golden fortress”—the nearby yellow fortress of Jaisalmer—is wholly unaffected by his kidnapping. Like a Byomkesh Bakshi mystery, the crimes entail their own punishments in generically unexpected ways, with the police arriving at the conclusion to collect the chastened criminals. Subsequent juridical proceedings are beyond the interest of the detective or narrator: Topshe only says that “Bhavananda was handed over to the local

191 police. The charges against him were many” (269). The story ends, like Ray’s adaptation of Chiriakhana, with the main characters—Jatayu, Topshe, and Feluda—having a laugh at the whole experience (272). Compared to the stereotypical endings of Anglo-American crime fiction, like a Holmesian restoration of social order by the police, or a noir reflection on the unending impossibility of crime-solving, this ending contains both humor and a distinct lack of interest in a preexisting, state-enforced social order.

Ray’s own adaptation of this story in the film Sonar Kella maintains this unique sense of proof, justice, and consequence while continuing the author-director’s work

(begun in Chiriakhana) to fashion a distinctly postcolonial Indian notion of crime fiction and filmmaking. Like Chiriakhana, the film Sonar Kella is quite willing to adapt, refit, or abandon established genre expectations and tropes. While Chiriakhana stripped the noir

(and some filmic parody) elements out of Bandyopadhyay’s novel and replaced them with a more experimental and lighthearted tone which recalled both Tollywood and

Bollywood filmmaking tropes and pre-Indepdnence Bakshi mysteries, Sonar Kella’s source material was already marked with these features. “The Golden Fortress” contains a few explicit references to Hollywood visual or narrative moves—Topshe cites

“Hollywood Westerns” as being not unlike their experience (249), inspired in part by the local geography of Rajasthan resembling the American Southwest and the story’s preponderance of chases and guns. The printed text and the filmic one do use these

Hollywood Western tropes, but freely modify them with local elements: the chases are in

Hindustan Ambassador cars or on camelback, for example, and of the two revolvers, one is of British colonial manufacture and the other is a Japanese-manufactured fake. The character of Jatayu, already a vehicle for genre commentary—he spends much of “The

192

Golden Fortress” working on adapting the events to the plot of his next Prokhor Rudra adventure novel—maintains this role in the film adaptation.

Western scholarship on Sonar Kella has historically been a mixed bag. While great attention has been paid to Ray’s efforts to fashion a syncretic tradition for his detective films, this has typically been characterized as Ray appropriating Western genre tropes and grammars and applying or modifying them to an Indian context. This structural Anglo-American centrism is due, in all probability, to a lack of access on the part on anglophone scholars. For example, one of the earliest surveys of Ray’s films in

English, Ben Nyce’s 1988 study Satyajit Ray: A Study of His Films, begins by apologizing for errors, noting that Nyce is incapable of speaking, understanding, or reading Bengali and thus relies on subtitles. His study, incidentally, makes few mistakes or errors based on this knowledge gap, but instead has other issues: Nyce is seemingly unaware that Chiriakhana exists at all, and refers to Sonar Kella as Ray’s “first detective film;” Nyce is likewise completely unaware that the film is an adaptation, let alone an adaptation of one of Ray’s own published mysteries32 (154). Nyce’s objectives, however, seem to be as a sort of “discoverer” of Ray,33 summarizing and critiquing his work.

Unsurprisingly, he notes that Ray’s “important early experiences as a film viewer were almost entirely with American films of the 1930s and 1940s, the work of Ford, Capra, the

American films of Lubitsch and other European directors. He loved the American development of different film genres” (154). Regardless of Nyce’s motivation for this

32 He also, rather comically, insists on spelling Dr. Hajra’s name “Hazra,” in the British fashion, despite this same spelling error being integral to outing the impostor Bhavananda/Dr. Hazra in the text and the film. 33 “Discoverer” in the sense of Columbus “discovering” the New World. 193 assertion, it is important: the American traditions of detective and cowboy films forms one of the several generic traditions available for refashioning in Ray’s film adaptation.

Andrew Robinson’s 1989 study, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye (which makes fewer mistakes and is at least aware that Chiriakhana existed and was itself an adaptation) makes a similar assertion, “Chiriakhana shows Ray’s command over the idiom of the

American thriller of an earlier time,” before noting Ray’s attempt to avoid those clichés in that film (232). When Robinson moves on to Sonar Kella, he notes Ray’s alteration of the typical terms of justice, proof, and crime film tone, though he explains these in different terms. Feluda, as a character, has a “modern and scientific” outlook but

“preserves a healthy open-mindedness about the supernatural” (231), and the changes in tone and visual style from an American “thriller” are explained in terms of the film’s audience—the film must cater to the “attention of a child” (233).

Attention to the ways the film alters or reacts to these genre norms, and to its source materials (both in terms of “The Golden Fortress” and Ray’s previous detective film Chiriakhana) reveals, however, that these changes are not purely responses to

Western genre demands or the demands of an adolescent audience. Ray’s departure from

American clichés is, in effect, only the first step of refashioning: Ray synthesizes various predecessor traditions to build a visual grammar for Sonar Kella, and for his future detective films. For example, in order to maintain the same ethos of justice, and adapt to the realities of filmic form, some alterations to the plot are necessary. The names and identities of the villains are revealed to the audience within the first fifteen minutes of the film, while Feluda and company don’t quite figure it out until the two-hour mark.

Robinson implies this structural alteration is to change the film from a “whodunit” to a

194

Hitchcockian thriller for children (note, again, the language of exclusive reference to

Western “originals”), but this alteration is also necessary for visual storytelling. For example, while the text simply explains that Mukul, in his preoccupied state, doesn’t consider one stranger different from another at the end of the story, the interactions between Mukul and his captors (and how they convince him that Bhavananda is the

“real” Dr. Hajra) form a key part of the film’s action. Ambiguities available to the text— the exact extent of Mukul’s psychological detachment or his supernatural powers, for instance—are less available to the film, where the audience can observe Mukul’s behavior. Some changes seem to exist primarily for their visual interest: the discovery that the fort at Jaisalmer is the titular “golden fortress” is done through a rather tedious process of elimination described in the text; in the film, Bhavananda hypnotizes Mukul into successfully recalling the location, replacing this long process with a single, dramatically-filmed scene which, incidentally, implies that Mukul really does recall a past life. The violence of the story is toned down in the film, much as the sexual elements were toned down in Chiriakhana. Violence, in Sonar Kella, is abstracted so that the protagonists are almost never participants: Mr. Globetrotter, Bhavananda’s disciple, is not thrown off the train at gunpoint, as he is in the text, but instead (in a truly bizarre scene) apparently throws himself off after a chance encounter with the real Dr. Hajra in an adjacent coach. Feluda comments that “the problem has solved itself,” and the character is never seen again.

The climactic scene, in Mukul’s supposed past home, is altered in an opposite sense—the chance attack of a peacock is replaced with a more thriller-esque, but less bloody, armed standoff. The film establishes that Bhavananda has a phobia of peacocks

195 early on—replacing, incidentally, the detail that Mukul has a birthmark he claims is a scar from when he was pecked by a peacock in a past life. Instead of being attacked by an angry peacock in the final scene—which would have involved somehow getting a peacock to appear to near-fatally injure an actor—the peacock simply causes Bhavananda to pull his gun, shocking Mukul into realizing he can’t be Dr. Hajra and beginning a chase scene inside Jaisalmer fortress. During this chase, Feluda and Topshe disarm and capture Bhavananda and recover Mukul. Notably, Bhavananda is disarmed when Feluda, almost without looking, shoots Bhavananda’s hat off his head, causing him to drop his gun, which Topshe then recovers. Mukul’s joyous laughter at Bhavananda’s capture is meant to signal to the audience that, having solved his vision of a past life, Mukul as returned to a psychologically normal state. In the film, neither Dr. Hajra nor any police are present. Instead, Singh, Feluda and company’s physically imposing Punjabi driver, throws the stunned Bhavananda over his shoulder and carries him away, as the peacock watches. The print story’s peacock attack, while humorous in description, would be impractical to film and would disrupt the film’s lighthearted, family-friendly tone. In effect, the film must replace bodily violence with psychological violence in order to maintain the visual style and tone Ray establishes for Bengali crime film.

Topshe’s literate genre references must also be altered, since the film lacks his narration. While Topshe is occasionally prone to textual comparison—referring to situations or scenes as being like a “Hollywood Western” or, in the case of a different adventure, being like a plot from Herge’s Tintin comics—the film must make these references visually. Some of these are fairly direct—Topshe is filmed flipping through an

English-language Tintin comic at least twice in Sonar Kella, for instance. Other visual

196 references rely more on the audience’s familiarity with Hollywood touchstones. In perhaps the film’s most famous scene, Feluda, Topshe and Jatayu are riding camels in the desert, chasing after a train, in the hopes of reaching Jaisalmer before the villains and

Mukul. The visual motif recalls a Fordian cowboy train chase or train robbery scene, albeit with Indian flair: the revolver-wielding Feluda leads a caravan of camels, galloping in pursuit of a moving train against the backdrop of a wide, dry expanse of scrub desert.

This scene remains influential in Bengali and Indian film—so much so that the corresponding scene in “The Golden Fortress,” where the camels are obtained after attempting to stop the train on foot, is routinely misremembered in favor of the film presentation.34

The layering of traditions built into film or other form-changing adaptation processes is interesting, especially in the case of the Feluda adaptations, because Ray would subsequently helm several of the more popular instances of Bengali crime film after Sonar Kella—including adaptations of the Feluda mystery “The Elephant God” as

Joi Babu Felunath (which is also the original Bengali title of the story). Ray’s role as both writer and adapter positions his authorship in an unusually secure position, but also stands as a good example against the fidelity discourse that once characterized adaptation theory and implicitly positioned adaptation as subordinate to authorship. Ray’s adaptations are securely a form of authorship, even when not adapting his own work, though changes in self-adaptation can be read as “improving” or “fixing” a flawed original text. Some of the changes seen in Sonar Kella might indeed be understood as

34 This error, as I recall, even occurs in the murals in modern Kolkata’s “Sonar Kella Park.” The residential park is dedicated to the printed story but features murals clearly inspired by the visuals of Ray’s film. 197

Ray “cleaning up” the plot of “The Golden Fortress” or making it less violent and more exciting. Other changes are more political—references to bombings (Ray 210) and disorder in Calcutta in “The Golden Fortress” are erased from Sonar Kella, as are any references to Jaisalmer’s proximity to the restive India-Pakistan border. The villains are changed, both in backstory and presentation: Bhavananda and his sidekick “Mr.

Globetrotter” (A.K.A. Mr. Bose) are presented as a con-man and an alcoholic, respectively, in the film, which features a scene in which they argue about the rules of the board game Snakes and Ladders. Bhavananda, in the film, was outed as a fraud by Dr.

Hajra in Allahabad, not Chicago, simultaneously reducing the primary villain’s seriousness (he is no longer an international criminal) and toning down the print story’s commentary on the American fertilization of Indian spiritualism.

The distinction between Ray’s style in print and his style in film, and his willingness to bridge that distinction by altering his own texts in adaptation, reinforce the notion that he is attempting to fashion a coherent but transnationally-sourced vision of what Bengali or Indian detective film should do, not unlike Saradindu Bandyopadhyay’s motivation for refashioning British and Indian (and later American) sensibilities on detective fiction into the avowedly Indian figure of Byomkesh Bakshi. Both forms of refashioning are liberatory and anticolonial, inasmuch as they recover older genre models and assert a new, hybrid and avowedly local or national genre tradition. Ray’s cosmopolitan pragmatism in filmmaking perhaps represents a more stringent departure from the center-periphery or empire-writes-back paradigm than Bandyopadhyay’s

Bakshi, who is trapped (at least for the first ten texts) under the imminent authority of the

British colonial apparatus. However, as we shall see in the next section, on Cheng

198

Xiaoqing’s Huo Sang mysteries, the politics of refashioning can remain anticolonial without necessarily aiming to establish a liberated or transnational generic tradition.

4.6 Huo Sang: Justice-Seeking Without the Truth

Both the multifaceted moves towards refashioning as a mode of intertextual relation and the localized, flexible norms of justice in Cheng Xiaoqing’s Huo Sang mysteries are marked by China’s turbulent mid-twentieth century. Cheng’s position as author of these mysteries and as the key translator of imported Western crime fiction

(including nearly all of the Doyle, Milne, and Van Dine translations available in Chinese prior to the late 1970s) affords him a central place in the historical narrative of Chinese crime fiction. This position is fraught, both in Western scholarship on Chinese crime fiction (as we saw in the last chapter) and in contemporary Chinese scholarship, because of the politics of authorship: having the “grandfather” of modern Chinese crime fiction also be the primary translator of imported Western crime fiction troubles the politically desirable notion of a pure indigenous crime tradition and the equally desirable notion of a tradition solely beholden to Western points of origin. Western scholarship on Cheng has indeed tended to strip him of some textual authority, rehistorizing his work to highlight

Western cultural influence. Chinese critical work on Cheng has historically taken advantage of this easy erasure as well: outside of a few brief reprieves, crime fiction as a genre was aggressively suppressed in the People’s Republic of China. Grouping the genre’s local origins in figures like Cheng (who was not only a Western-linked translator, but a middle-class Methodist convert, not an ideal Maoist figure) and the texts’ origin in

199 the “semi-colonial period”35 made it easier to retroactively justify the state’s original position that crime writing in Chinese was a bourgeois, counterrevolutionary literary form. Under Mao in particular, there could be no crime in a socialist utopia, except that which is committed by foreign spies. To suggest otherwise, even fictionally, was politically dangerous.

Rehistorization, in this study, is generally convenient or useful to authors and scholars working in a world crime fiction environment still marked by colonial hierarchies. This instance of rehistorization, however, may be the only one in which subordinating a genre to a Western tradition was politically convenient for an entire counter-colonial state apparatus. The refashioning mode, on the other hand, presents itself in two places for the Huo Sang mysteries: in the texts inherently, and in the surrounding discourse when, and only when, rehistorizing stops being politically useful to China’s culture-policing state apparatus as grounds for censorship. The handful of times when that second condition is true produced discussions of how Huo Sang and Bao Lang understand justice in China. This statement requires some clarification: at moments when crime fiction was not suppressed in China, scholarship on the genre’s development and discussions of the value of that genre to real-world understandings of justice in China proliferate. These discussions include positioning Cheng Xiaoqing centrally in the history of the genre and examining his characters’ definitions of justice. Huo Sang stories are, in these moments of official state sanction for detective fiction, critically refashioned—they

35 This is the communist government’s official term for the period after the end of the Qing dynasty until the rise of the PRC in 1949, casting the Republic as a purely foreign, colonial government. (See Kinkley’s “The Post-colonial Detective in People’s China,” 113). 200 are presented as participants in both the ancient Chinese tradition of crime writing (like

Judge or Lord Bao, and more contemporary nonfiction crime writing) and as artifacts of an imported Western tradition, not unlike the official narrative of how Marxism became

Maoism. The norms of justice presented in Cheng’s mysteries are likewise positioned as contact zones between Western scientific crime investigation and Chinese moral norms, rather than the products of some bourgeois Western mimicry. Sometimes, as in the period when the Huo Sang mysteries were republished by the Ministry of Public Security during the detective fiction “thaw” of 1979-1989, these norms of justice were refashioned in more literal ways as well.

The movement away from self-subordination to a Western tradition in the texts themselves occurs piecemeal, as one might expect from a series gradually evolving away from its “point of departure” over time. Rehistorization becomes less useful as the idea of a Chinese tradition of modern crime fiction becomes more accepted. Adherence to the juridical norms presented in imported fiction, however, is consistently challenged from the earliest texts—the shifting political environment in the Republic of China produces a pragmatic sense of justice, which depends on the police as often as it depends on extralegal action. In other words, the stories are, from the first, comfortable improvising on the genre’s structures to assert a more complex notion of justice. While the chronology of the Huo Sang mysteries is not at all clear—Timothy C. Wong, in his translation, notes that dating the texts is a challenge since Cheng “never received the editorial or scholarly attention devoted to writers of what was considered truly ‘serious’ fiction in his time” (211)—what is clear is that the stories do not follow a clear chronological path from rehistorizing to refashioning. The two modes—strategic

201 subordination to Western traditions and a mixing or co-posing of traditions, respectively—are not mutually exclusive. This refashioning of juridical ethics in the mysteries, for example, is not a particularly radical departure from the Holmesian model of the genre (since Holmes, too, frequently bends the norms of justice and improvises on the genre it is deployed, ironically, to formalize). Such departures indicate a textual tradition connected to both an ancient Chinese genre and an imported Western one, responding to local demands and emerging norms.

There is a specific way that the Huo Sang mysteries prefer to articulate and respond to evolving juridical norms: the character of the South China Swallow, a master thief who would be expected to be an adversary of Huo Sang if those texts played by a purely Western stereotypical genre rulebook. However, that character’s appearances are generally cast as heroic or anti-heroic, and occasionally displace Huo Sang and Bao Lang from stories entirely. Compared to the previous chapter’s discussion of these mysteries as rehistorized—primarily connected in scholarship to the hegemonic Holmes narrative, but parenthetically resisting being fully subsumed—the South China Swallow-centered stories are often openly resistant, bending the norms of the genre to engage in explicit social commentary. The story “The Cat’s Eye” was, in the last chapter, offered as a representative example of how the texts resisted rehistorization by critics and translators.

Here, that same story, along with the Swallow-featuring “On the Huangpu,” stand as prime examples of texts engaging in refashioning. The complex models of justice displayed in these texts—enabled by the refashioning of local and imported genre tools and traditions—would later allow Cheng’s mysteries to be rehabilitated in the PRC when crime fiction and crime fiction scholarship were no longer banned. In other words, the

202 texts’ own genre-refashioning moves would allow a later, critical or political refashioning that afforded these mysteries a central place in the official histories of Chinese crime fiction, as a key step between classical forms and modern, detective-driven crime fiction.

(This was helped, no doubt, by the absence of positive police figures in these stories, making them useful to the People’s Republic as subtle commentary on the defunct36

Republic’s failings.) As a result, crime fiction produced in China during the 1979-1989 thaw would come to identify the Huo Sang mysteries as a legitimate core or point of origin for an entire generation of modern Chinese crime fiction—Huo Sang posed not as subordinate to Judge Bao or Sherlock Holmes, but alongside them.

The story “Cat’s Eye,” discussed in the third chapter of this work, contains the most obvious discussion of Huo Sang’s notion of justice available in English translation.

The plot of the story deserves some reiteration here: Huo Sang is hired to protect a prized gem by a wealthy bureaucrat, though he knows that the gem was obtained from the deposed Imperial court, probably only semi-legally. Huo Sang is hired because his client has been threatened by the South China Swallow, who will steal the gem unless the client makes a sizeable donation to a Shanghai social cause. Huo Sang, as a condition of his employment, forces his client to make a smaller donation to that cause (173). Seeing an opportunity to do more social good, Huo Sang (with some protest from Bao Lang) informs his client that he has failed and pretends to be the Swallow in order to extort a full donation—sacrificing, in part, his professional reputation and violating the law. Huo

Sang justifies this course of action to Bao Lang, noting: “that South China Swallow is a good man” and a worthy opponent (183). He continues: “When I asked him [the client] to

36 “Defunct” is something of a misnomer. The Republic survives, nominally, in Taiwan. 203 put in thirty or fifty thousand the other day, he chose the lesser sum. Even though I don’t know the man’s background, I would wager his coffers aren’t filled with unsullied dollars. I didn’t take the case for his sake” (183).

As the translator, Timothy C. Wong, notes in his introduction, the “South China

Swallow, a rather romanticized individual who operates outside the law as much as Huo

Sang and Bao Lang do within it” has “identical social goals” as the detective and his sidekick (x). Wei Yan, as I discussed in the last chapter, aligns this ethics of justice with a revived Mohist ethos. For Wei, the resulting literary realignment away from traditional

Chinese Judge Bao court stories and toward classical youxia or “wandering errant” stories cast the Huo Sang mysteries’ sense of justice as more egalitarian than legalistic (252).

While some of the Huo Sang mysteries depart from a purely Mohist ethos, the role of the

Swallow is consistent: the character functions less like a morally reprehensible Moriarty figure, and more as a secondary protagonist against a legal environment which is itself antagonistic. Regardless of the consistency of this ethical position, the South China

Swallow reliably signals not criminality but ethical complication.

In the story “On the Huangpu,” that character’s role in the mystery is mostly unseen: the Swallow contacts Huo Sang to warn him away from the case (130-131), and is later revealed to have been trying to resolve the situation himself from the shadows

(164). The mystery begins when Huo Sang is hired by a morally upright local businessman, whose young son has been kidnapped and ransomed by a gang of river pirates whom Huo Sang had encountered in a previous mystery. The businessman, Yu

Shoucheng, does not hire Huo Sang to dispense justice, but instead to simply deliver the ransom payment (126-127), though to Bao Lang’s surprise, Huo Sang intends to defeat

204 the gang and recover the child without delivering the money (130). This story also features some of the more espionage-themed elements of later mysteries in the series, including extensive disguises, drugged cigarettes, and Huo Sang and Bao Lang engaging in direct, violent confrontation with their adversaries (146-147). Having duped and drugged the crew, Huo Sang ties up the crew (and keeps an eye out, since he suspects the

Swallow may make an appearance) and Bao Lang is charged with locating the client’s son and getting him safely to land. The plan goes slightly awry, as the police have abandoned their posts and are not waiting on the riverbanks. Furthermore, Bao Lang is discovered by what he believes to be a boat of pirates returning from the city, forcing him to fire at the boat and alert the few pirates who are not drugged that something is going on (153). Bao continues with the plan, however, and ends up in an armed standoff with a pirate in a dark room where the boy is being kept. In the crossfire, Bao Lang is shot in the arm, and a young boy is shot in the head and killed (154).

Waking up in the hospital some time later, Bao Lang, feeling guilty over the loss of their client’s son, desperately wants to know the fate of their plan. It is here that the story’s notion of justice is spelled out: Bao, with a final lucky shot before losing consciousness, had killed the last pirate and saved the client’s son; the boy who had been killed was a different ransomed child. Huo Sang presents Bao Lang with a news article, headlined “Wonderful Work from the Dr. Watson of the East,” to fill him in on the results of their action (the fictional press’ genre commentary is presented without comment, though as an artifact of Cheng’s authorship and Wong’s translation, it is an excellent example of rehistorization, [157]). Subsequently, Huo explains that the dead child was the kidnapped son of “the private narcotics dealer Hao Caisheng” (158). The

205 pair note that they are thankful that their client, Yu Shoucheng, is wealthy from “honest business ventures” and not, like Hao Caisheng, in possession of “money tainted with the blood of drug addicts,” which would likewise taint their reward (161). The revelation that the dead young boy’s family is involved in socially harmful business practices alleviates some of Bao’s distress that he was unable to save him, refiguring the boy’s death less as a tragedy in its own right than as a tragic result of his family’s moral inadequacies.

Responsibility for that death, and for Bao’s lucky shot which killed the pirate, is credited in passing to divine intervention, reinforcing the notion that this particular death is a form of fated justice (159-160). A discrepancy in the number of pirates captured reveals to

Huo Sang that the Swallow had intervened. The police find an extra pirate on the boat that neither Bao nor Huo tied up, much of the pirates’ ill-gotten loot is missing, and a mysterious thank-you note has appeared at Huo and Bao’s residence (163).

The casual dismissal of the death of the son of a morally suspect family, joined by the mystery’s increased violence and the shadowy heroism of the South China Swallow, signal that several contextual definitions of justice are operating in the text. The mysteries’ typical indifference to legalistic proceedings and disdain for the investigative capacity of police is joined by a sense of collective innocence and guilt. In effect, individual responsibility for crimes is replaced with crime as a symptom of familial (in the case of the Hao son’s tragic death) or social failure. In fact, this aligns less with the radical egalitarianism of Mohist ethics, for Mohist impartiality would not permit the assignment of guilt on a familial basis. Instead, “On the Huangpu” and other Huo Sang mysteries take an altogether more populist approach in which whole families can be considered complicit in social or economic crime and justice, in the absence of an

206 effective state law enforcement apparatus, can be obtained only by individual, extralegal action. This ethos is not so much Mohist, Maoist or Marxist as it is populist, but it is particularly difficult to pin down—this ambiguity in terms of ideological commitment, as we shall see, will enable Cheng’s reclamation (or, in essence, hostile refashioning) as a post-Revolutionary author of Maoism-compatible crime writing tradition. This model of justice is also a problem for adherents in crime fiction studies to Haycraft’s archaic notion that detective fiction can only be produced by societies with strong democratic institutions.37 The Huo Sang mysteries, and particularly their model of justice, might be understood as shaped by the failure of a new, ostensibly democratic state to build any successful legal institutions. Huo Sang’s ethics of justice are shaped, in fact, by the absence of (and a lack of interest in) those intuitions.

Cheng Xiaoqing’s notion of the relationship between justice and crime fiction in the absence of democratic intuitions is illustrated readily in one of the few stories that features the South China Swallow but not Huo Sang or Bao Lang: “At the Ball,” published in 1930. The modes of justice presented in this text evince an attention to the emerging popularity of Marxist social values and dissatisfaction with the social inequalities of Imperial and Republican China in the semi-colonial period, though it is not clear if this text predates or postdates “One the Huangpu” and “Cat’s Eye,” thanks to the uncertainty of those stories’ original publication dates noted by Wong earlier. The

37 Ironically, Haycraft’s democratic exceptionalism for crime fiction was accepted by Soviet and Maoist critics of crime fiction during the Cold War, who turned the condition on its head, asserting that democratic and bourgeois capitalist institutions created crime, and therefore, enabled crime fiction to be imaginable. See Kinkley’s Chinese Justice for a summary of the Maoist position, and the work of East German scholar Ernst Kaemmel, translated in Most and Stowe’s 1983 collection The Poetics of Murder. 207 absence of sympathetic detective characters is a core feature of “At the Ball.” While Huo

Sang and Bao Lang are mentioned, they are replaced in the story by a police detective and his assistant, with notions of duty and justice appropriately aligned with his wealthy benefactor’s interests, rather than an adherence to the law or to Huo Sang’s social propriety. The story, which centers on the debutante ball of wealthy Republican bureaucrat Xu Zhenyang’s daughter, is unsympathetic in its critique of materialism, social inequality, and the sycophantic Westernized values of the Republic’s wealthy oligarchs. Far from Huo Sang’s socially conscious sense of justice, the detective figure in this text, Qiao Youmin, is described as cold, calculating and motivated by career ambition (184). Xu commissions Qiao to protect the debutante ball—as the newly-named chief of the Bureau of Charitable Donations, Xu has drawn the ire of the South China

Swallow, who has written to indicate that he intends to steal Xu’s daughter’s emerald necklace during the ball itself (185). The function of the debutante ball is less to feature his daughter, Xu Yufeng, than to show off that necklace, which has been “crafted from antique materials found in the Qing emperor’s palace” (186), thus representing the status and wealth of the Xu family, and their post-imperial political clout (not unlike the Qing- sourced cat’s eye gem in “Cat’s Eye”).

When firecrackers are set off at the ball, causing a panic among the guests, the necklace disappears from Yufeng’s neck (189-190). Qiao’s response, to suggest sealing the ballroom and searching all the guests—including several prominent political and industrial figures—is immediately met with ire from the attendees and the host, who believe being frisked and searched is beneath their station. The discord reveals a series of unsavory prejudices within the group, especially Xu’s underestimation of his daughter’s

208 intelligence and personal appeal, his distrust of her womanizing suitor, Tang Dongmei, and his personal greed (191). When, a moment later, Xu reaches into his pocket for a handkerchief and finds an emerald necklace, he defuses the tense situation by allowing all the guests to leave, over Qiao’s objections (192). Dejected at losing his chance to catch the Swallow, Qiao mopes. Moments later, when Yufeng points out that this necklace is a fake, Qiao claims that he “anticipated” this development (193). Qiao’s dependable assistant, Yang Nanshan, has independently sprang into action—noting that one of the female guests had a “prominent adam’s apple,” he follows the guest to their hotel and sends a message to Qiao that he believes he has cornered the Swallow (193). Qiao returns to the Xu family semi-triumphantly a few minutes later—while the Swallow has already escaped, another emerald necklace is found in the disguise the thief left behind (194).

Yufeng, however, reveals that this second necklace is yet another counterfeit. In his typical fashion, the Swallow sends a thank-you note to Xu Zhenyang the following day, which reads in part:

I especially want to thank you for the emerald necklace, which you have kindly allowed me to acquire. I have already turned it into cash, which I will distribute for the relief of refugees in the northwest. This should help you make up for some past wrongs […], which I think you should find agreeable. You acquired the necklace, after all, by exploiting the blood and sweat of the common people; for me to use it for their benefit now should surely meet with your approval, if you have any conscience at all. (194)

While other stories featuring both Huo Sang and the Swallow are, arguably, still tied to the stories’ pedagogical aims (i.e. promoting rational problem-solving techniques), this narrative departs from that objective to engage in political commentary. The Swallow’s professional tone and gentle shaming—he appeals to his victim’s moral compass and concludes his letter by wishing his detective adversary future career success (194)—add

209 complexity to the populist model of justice illustrated in Huo Sang-centric mysteries.

Much like those stories’ advocacy for rational thought, the Swallow’s commentary at the end of “At the Ball” feels more pedagogical than revolutionary, as if addressing wealthy readers of the story itself, reminding them of their social and moral responsibilities and warning them away from “decadent ways of life” (194).

This argument is reinforced by the presentation of certain characters as not irredeemable—Xu Yufeng, for instance, with her canny eye for fake jewelry and her willingness to simply let the necklace go, is portrayed as more realistic, rational, and less materialistic than her father or her suitor (192-193). The story’s structure—a twist on the detective story that retains all the expected components but shifts primary sympathy to the criminal—represents a particularly complex refashioning of genre rules, hybridizing a police procedural, a conventional detective story, and a heist narrative. The Swallow’s ideological aims also furnish the grounds for a future Maoist interpretation (or reinterpretation), positioning this story as an inverted predecessor for later, communist

“spycatcher” narratives. In those later texts, popular as a replacement for detective fiction in the People’s Republic, state police forces root out decadent, counterrevolutionary spies in the service of foreign, capitalist powers. “At the Ball” might be read as a narrative of a revolutionary criminal exposing decadent state officials in the service of foreign capitalist interests. This reading, of course, is only viable within the context of Cheng’s works’ communist rehabilitation—in the texts themselves, the ideological and generic baggage, and notions of justice, are ambiguously populist but not exclusively communist.

These ideologically complicated notions of justice, along with the stories’ generic evolution and local innovations, positioned Cheng Xiaoqing as a particularly flexible

210 figure for future refashioning into either a pariah figure or the “master of detective fiction” in Chinese (Kinkley 139). Wong’s collection of English translations ignores this critical refashioning entirely. He posits that Cheng’s years as a writer of detective fiction ended in the mid-1940s, and that the subsequent communist banning of that genre as

“foreign or feudalistic” firmly concluded his efforts in the genre. Wong notes the possibility that Cheng’s Holmes translations circulated “underground” at this time, and that he wrote three “sensational adventure stories” during a brief political experiment with Maoist crime writing in the late 1950s, after retiring from his job as a high school teacher. Thereafter, he turned to traditional poetry. His poems were published in 1982 in

New York by Cheng’s daughter, who had been in the United States since 1948 (210).

This biographical narrative obscures Cheng’s attempts at detective fiction after the revolution and his revival after the un-banning of crime writing in China in 1979, where

Cheng’s translations of Holmes and others, and his own Huo Sang stories, were republished and sold by the Ministry of Public Security. While the translations could be marked as foreign products, and thus viewed from a critical and ideological distance

(indeed, the MPS’s publication wing saw fit to abortively reprint these in 1956, during the brief experimentation with communist crime fiction that ended in 1961 [Kinkley 2,

247]), the Huo Sang mysteries could only be republished as a Chinese cultural product by either being branded as equally foreign (as works from the “semi-colonial” period) or by being marked as ideologically safe.

This altogether different form of refashioning, the critical revival of Cheng’s works by virtue of their ideological and generic ambiguity, occurs after the death of Mao and the CPC’s subsequent (albeit short-lived) cultural liberalization. Crime fiction,

211 permitted for the first time since a brief thaw of the 1950s, rapidly expanded as a genre in the period between the death of Chairman Mao in 1979 and the events in Tiananmen

Square in 1989. However, as Kinkley notes in Chinese Justice, Chinese crime fiction, lacking an immediately available local tradition to build upon, had to draw from two foreign traditions—imported, literally foreign Eastern Bloc crime fiction and the ideologically foreign crime fiction produced during what the party refers to as the “semi- colonial” period—the post-Qing Republic of China period (98). Cheng Xiaoqing’s detective fiction saw a significant revival during this period as a prototype for detective- driven crime fiction. The survival of his manuscripts joined with his late-career acquiescence to the ideological demands of communism in crime fiction to enable this rediscovery. (Cheng’s last mystery, The Bloody Case of Big Tree Village, published with

Party approval in 1956, remains untranslated. The story, aptly summarized by Kinkley, is an attempt to graft Cheng’s older values onto the communist-approved counterrevolutionary espionage genre [Kinkley 247-252].)

This positioning of Cheng as differently foreign, in comparison to the imported

Eastern Bloc crime fiction, constitutes a double act of refashioning. Equally foreign as

Victorian British or Warsaw Pact crime fiction, the Huo Sang mysteries are foreign and

“semi-colonial”—subordinate to a hypothetical, fully “original” Chinese crime writing tradition, but not subordinate to the equally suspect bourgeois crime fiction from the

West. Later, as state-approved Chinese crime fiction is redeveloped, the Huo Sang mysteries are understood as the genre’s true point of origin, erasing (when convenient) the stories’ textual connections to foreign traditions. Both refashioned approaches are equally fictive. Cheng’s mysteries are neither fully foreign nor fully indigenous, since

212 detective fiction as a genre is inherently transnational in development. Nonetheless, these two problematic critical positions depart from the mode of rehistorization and are thereby closer to the mysteries’ self-positioning as generically and ethically complex products of multiple traditions of detective fiction and justice.

In the midst of the 1980s thaw, the collected translations of Sherlock Holmes

(primarily translated by Cheng in the pre-communist period), as well as his Huo Sang mysteries, were reprinted extensively by the Ministry of Public Security to fund their operations. This, as Kinkley points out, was part of a bureaucratic turf war between the

MPS and the state’s Ministry of Justice for control of the origins, production and publication of Chinese crime fiction, and thus control of the public’s discursive toolbox to understand and think about Chinese law and justice (Chinese Justice 3-5). The Huo

Sang mysteries did not come through this process unscathed—the MPS’s reprints were refashioned in a very literal sense. The texts were revised by the MPS to play up Huo

Sang’s disdain for conspicuous consumerism, corrupt Republic of China policing, and colonialism, and exaggerated the character’s (and the author’s) implied affinity for revolutionary socialism. This refashioning served to provide the basis for a modern,

Chinese genre of crime fiction by adapting a pre-communist body of crime fiction.

Instead of outright censorship, the modes of justice in the Huo Sang mysteries were apparently tweaked and recast as sympathetic to Maoist notions of equity and justice

(196, note 123, 404). However, this editorial move left Cheng’s mysteries in a gray area for publication and reception: as propaganda, and apparently imitative of Sherlock

Holmes, it was dismissed by Western scholars and translators; as an important foundation for Chinese crime fiction of the period, it was studied by Chinese scholars. Notably,

213

Cheng was now ideologically safe to study, because of the revisions, which in many occasions went unnoticed or unnoted by scholars in China and elsewhere (see note 123 in

Kinkley for two examples).38 This explains, in part, the rehistorization these stories see in the hands of Timothy Wong in translation and Kinkley and others in Western criticism, who both argue that the Huo Sang mysteries are important artifacts but imitating or subordinate to Western originals. Emphasizing Cheng’s reliance on British literary traditions places his mysteries partially outside the tradition of communist Chinese literature, enabling Western scholars to discuss them as historical or pedagogical artifacts and forestalling, at least for a time, the stigma of being termed propaganda. The Huo

Sang mysteries, it seems, can only dodge one institutional bullet at a time—they can be rehistorized and subordinated to the Holmesian tradition to dodge dismissal as

“subliterary” or “unoriginal” propaganda, or they can be refashioned and sometimes marked as propaganda, and dodge the bullet of “bourgeois” and similarly “unoriginal”

Western colonial genre-mimicry. Neither solution is fully representative the texts themselves, which occupy a complex position between traditions and the varied politics of justice. In other words, the way the texts refashion themselves in their historical context—by offering a complex, not-entirely-Western ethos of scientific investigation and justice—is more complex, and more flexible, than their subsequent rehistorization or refashioning by scholars, translators, and republishers after the reemergence of the texts

38 The MPS’s refashioning of the Huo Sang mysteries foreshadows, albeit darkly, the “reintegration” mode of the next chapter, since in modifying the mysteries for their own institutional purposes, they propose a departure from the notion of authorial ownership and original textual inviolability. However, their communist ideological aims therein confuse notions of popular ownership and state control, preventing the delocalization and de-stratification inherent in reintegration. 214 in the 1980s. Much like Huo Sang’s juridical ethos, however, the truth of the text is secondary to desired ideological or ethical outcomes.

4.7 Reference Versus Reverence

One of the more unusual consequences of examining the refashioning mode of intertextual connection is that it highlights the distinction, common in popular discussions of adaptations but often lost in scholarly textual analysis, between reference and reverence: refashioning, in combining local and imported traditions on equal grounds, can and often does position predecessors as raw material, rather than “good” texts worthy of a respectful nod. This is particularly obvious in the case of the ideological revision of the Huo Sang mysteries in republication: the refashioning of a Chinese tradition of crime fiction depended on a form of unacknowledged revision that Western scholars would interpret as a violation of the texts, marking their appropriation as a form of state propaganda and stripping them of literary veracity. It is, indeed, challenging to argue that these revisions came from a place of valuation or textual respect, and yet, the effort required to perform that work does suggest that the mysteries were considered otherwise

“worthy” of national-literary canonization, or at least fertile candidates for retroactively imagining a canonical tradition. The endeavor to refashion a generic tradition by recovering and modifying local and “imported” (or at least, claimed by hegemonic powers as their) models is, much like the modes of justice explored in this chapter’s readings, shaped by ethically complicated postcolonial circumstances. These postcolonial circumstances are further complicated by the Bakshi mysteries’ and the Huo Sang stories’ temporal position. They are products of societies in colonial or semi-colonial positions

215 whose reception, adaptation, or rehabilitation occur during and after decolonization.

Much like crime fiction as a genre, they are artifacts of a transcolonial culture of crime writing. Like crime fiction as a global genre, they are the product of colonial and transcultural interactions, and forever marked by that contact. Rather than writing them off (and writing the genre off) as colonial artifacts indebted to a hegemonic Anglocentric tradition, careful examination of how the texts interact with their various traditions and influences exposes the process of refashioning, and a politics that traces a departure from colonial hegemony to something more complex than straightforward anticolonial resistance or postcolonial reaction.

Refashioning, as observed in these cases, can be understood as a transitional state, between the colonial hegemony (or the employment of the image of colonial hegemony) of rehistorization and the rejection of closed, linear national or linguistic traditions that mark reintegration, the mode examined in the final chapter. By historical coincidence, the texts best suited to examining these modes occur during periods of formal or modal transition—the advance of mass publication and literacy (in China, Victorian Britain, and colonial India), of domestic filmmaking (in post-independence India) and, in the next chapter, the transition from “conventional” to digital forms and fan cultures on an asymmetric but global scale. In a similar parallel, the motivations for these modes of intertextuality are bound up, respectively, in colonialism, anticolonial nationalism, and globalization. The simple chronologies of these parallels, however, risk erasing the possibility that the transition can go both ways—rehistorization does not ascend to refashioning irreversibly any more than coloniality irreversibly transitions to postcoloniality.

216

The pluralization of traditions necessary for refashioning lays the necessary groundwork for reintegration. This chapter’s analysis generally simplifies these plural traditions into two traditions or varieties of tradition within a genre—the local and the hegemonic, imported mode—for ease of discussion. Of course, any local conception of a genre, whether the “universal” hegemonic one or the equally “universal” local one, is made up of several traditions in interaction. The proliferation of adaptations, digital products, and user communities enabled or made visible by the advent of the internet, as seen in the next chapter, makes this simplification almost comically visible. Because of competing processes like delocalization and hyperlocalization operating in these late twentieth century contexts, the number of available traditions or takes on a genre proliferate almost without limit. Refashioning, and the necessities that shape it, are exposed as artificial and, outside its historical context as a transcolonial move, futile.

Instead, this historical context necessitates reintegration: the process of acknowledging the complex, interconnected nature of any genre or tradition and the futility of gatekeeping that genre using ownership or origination claims. Refashioning is about claiming equal status for genre traditions imagined as separate, interacting in a colonial

“contact zone.” Reintegration is about acknowledging a historical reality both particular to crime fiction and extensible to cultural studies largely: genre traditions were always already produced and interpellated by cultural interaction.

217

REFERENCES, Chapter 4

Bandyopadhyay, Saradindu. “The Inquisitor” [“Satyanweshi”]. Picture Imperfect and

other Byomkesh Bakshi Mysteries. Trans. Sreejata Guha. New Delhi: Penguin

Books India, 1999. 1-154. Print.

——. The Menagerie. In The Menagerie and Other Byomkesh Bakshi Mysteries. Trans.

Sreejata Guha. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2006. 1-27. Print.

Cheng Xiaoqing. “Cat’s Eye.” Sherlock in Shanghai: Stories of Crime and Detection.

Trans. Timothy C. Wong. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007. 165-183.

Print.

——. “On the Huangpu.” Sherlock in Shanghai: Stories of Crime and Detection. Trans.

Timothy C. Wong. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007. 124-164. Print.

——. “At the Ball.” Sherlock in Shanghai: Stories of Crime and Detection. Trans.

Timothy C. Wong. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007. 184-194. Print.

——. Dashucun Xue An [The Bloody Case at Big Tree Village]. Shanghai: Shanghai

Wenhua Chubanshe, 1956. Print.39

Guha, Sreejata. Translator’s Note. Picture Imperfect and other Byomkesh Bakshi

Mysteries. Trans. Sreejata Guha. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1999. vii-xi.

Print.

Haycraft, Howard. Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story.

London: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1941. Print.

Kaemmel, E. (1962) “Literature Under the Table: The Detective Novel and its Social

Mission.” The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory. Eds.

39 Reference and summary via Kinkley’s Chinese Justice. No English translation exists. 218

Glenn W. Most and William W. Stowe. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Publishers, 1983. Print.

Kinkley, Jeffrey C. Chinese Justice, the Fiction: Law and Literature in Modern China.

Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Print.

Majumdar, Gopa. Introduction. The Complete Adventures of Feluda, vol. 1. Trans. Gopa

Majumdar. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2001. ix-xiii. Print.

Mangharam, Mukti Lakhi. Literatures of Liberation: Non-European Universalisms and

Democratic Progress. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2017.

Print.

Nyce, Benjamin. Satyajit Ray: A Study of His Films. New York: Praeger, 1988. Print.

Ray, Satyajit. “Author’s Note.” The Complete Adventures of Feluda, vol. 1. Trans. Gopa

Majumdar. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2001. vii. Print.

——, director. Chiriakhana. Star Productions, 1967. Film.

——, director. Sonar Kella. Government of West Bengal, 1974. Film.

——. “The Golden Fortress.” The Complete Adventures of Feluda, vol. 1. Trans. Gopa

Majumdar. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2001. 199-274. Print.

——. “The Mystery of the Elephant God.” The Complete Adventures of Feluda, vol. 1.

Trans. Gopa Majumdar. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2001. 507-570. Print.

Robinson, Andrew. Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye. Berkeley, CA: University of California

Press, 1989. Print.

Roy, Pinaki. “The Postcolonial Sleuth for Adolescents: Rereading Satyajit Ray’s Feluda

Narratives.” Clues: A Journal of Detection 36.1 (Spring 2018). 78-89. PDF.

219

——. The Manichean Investigators: A Postcolonial and Cultural Rereading of the

Sherlock Holmes and Byomkesh Bakshi Stories. New Delhi: Sarup and Sons,

2008. Print.

Sen, Sukumar. Crime Kahinir Kaalkranti. Kolkata: Ananda Press, 1988. PDF.

“Sherlock Holmes Pastiches.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia

Foundation, Inc. 18 June 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feluda. Accessed 22

June 2019.

Wei Yan. “Sherlock Holmes Came to China: Detective Fiction, Cultural Meditations, and

Chinese Modernity. Crime Fiction as World Literature. Eds. Louise Nilsson,

David Damrosch, and Theo D’haen. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.

Print.

Wong, Timothy C. Preface. Sherlock in Shanghai: Stories of Crime and Detection, by

Cheng Xiaoqing. Trans. Timothy C. Wong. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i

Press, 2007. vii-xii. Print.

——. “About Cheng Xiaoqing.” Sherlock in Shanghai: Stories of Crime and Detection,

by Cheng Xiaoqing. Trans. Timothy C. Wong. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i

Press, 2007. 207-210. Print.

——. Publication Notes. Sherlock in Shanghai: Stories of Crime and Detection, by

Cheng Xiaoqing. Trans. Timothy C. Wong. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i

Press, 2007. 211-212. Print.

220

Chapter 5

THE FINAL PROBLEM, DEFERRED

“The Ruling in Leslie S. Klinger vs. Conan Doyle Estate means that Sherlock Holmes, or 87% of him, now belongs to us all.” —Roberta Pearson, “Sherlock Holmes, the De Facto Franchise”

5.1 Reintegration: Into the Cultural Commons

The moves and modes described in this project are products of material conditions instantiated by two long-lived paradigms: the notions of authorial origination and of cultural ownership. Their combined impact on economies of attention and textual authority mark the academic study of texts, and especially mark the boundaries and content of world literature as a disciplinary category. The first paradigm—authorial origination—is most readily expressed by the idea that authors have absolute creative control over texts, and thus that any text which articulates a connection to another is subordinately appropriating (negatively) or “nodding to” (neutrally) the work of the prior author. The second paradigm is visible in the widespread classification of textual artifacts in terms of belonging to an author who is situated in a specific culture and ethnolinguistic or national tradition. The colonial or postcolonial situation of the texts in the last two chapters, in particular, allows these two paradigms to manifest in a single, academically familiar configuration that is generally termed “the empire writes back.” These texts, if they are noticed at all, are understood in colonial terms. Even in the most well-

221 intentioned postcolonial analyses of crime fiction, these texts are commonly discussed as responses to a hegemonic cultural body, the periphery responding exclusively to the center. The prevalence of this empire-writes-back paradigm, both in contemporary crime fiction studies and in the early eras of postcolonial analysis, is hard to contest—this study has had to contend repeatedly with the power of that idea over the language of postcolonial analysis (even in opposition), with varied success. For example, the vocabulary of this paragraph’s leading sentence, where things “are the product of material conditions instantiated by,” represents an effort to avoid the simpler, less verbose, and more problematic “are responses to.” The language of original and copy, of the first call and second response, with its historical usage as a means of erasing, evaluating, and policing texts, traditions and authorship, pervades the grammar of anglophone humanities scholarship: we either deploy it uncritically or resist and respond to it verbosely.

This empire-writes-back paradigm leaves us with a fundamental problem, broadly conceived, in this study: the problem of textual authority being built on the terms of originality or derivation—who has it, how one gets it, where it is produced, and what it looks like. This project’s focus on detective fiction made this problem particularly visible, since detective fiction’s genre constructions and generic history are fixated on the concept of authority. Generically, the detective figure is empowered to recover history and author a coherent narrative of crime and justice, literally (re)constructing authority or, sometimes, failing to do so in illuminating ways. The detective fiction genre—with its historical devaluation as “genre” or formulaic writing and the aggressive centralization of the genre by fans, scholars and producers around a core Holmesian tradition, here termed

222 the Anglocentric, Holmes-as-Origin model—is constantly in the process of asserting its cultural authority and policing the means of its production, distribution and identification.

It is a genre about authorship and authority, and the terms of “legitimate” authorship in that genre are highly contested. This double fixation on authority and authorship makes detective fiction a good example for this study, since the language naturally directs attention to hierarchy and political forces acting on and within texts and their genres.

However, the problem of negotiating textual authority, and the impact of that negotiated authority on the hierarchies of genre membership, textual circulation, and access to readership, is common to cultural artifacts in myriad forms and genres.

The main objective of this study, up to this point, has been to deconstruct hegemonic narratives of genre history and genre membership in order to expose the pervasive power of, and modes of resistance to, an empire-writes-back model supported by black-box concepts of authorship and originality. The most basic tenet of this deconstruction is that we are always already “writing back,” and that the subordination or devaluation of authorship built into this notion of “writing back” is predicated on a model of original authorship—i.e. “Romantic authorship”—that is entirely counterfactual. To respond to a prior text, or even a diverse body of prior texts, does not cast an entire work solely as a response; all authorship and textual authority is situated in a sea of traditions, examples, and historical-political contexts. The narrative which splits authorship into

“original” and “response,” and which denies the legitimacy of the second, has nothing to do with the methods of human cultural production and everything to do with the necessities of politics at the time these concepts were codified into anglophone culture. It is a colonial politics of authority, codified into a persistent paradigm by the dual

223 establishment of institutional criticism and intellectual property in the anglophone world under British imperial hegemony. The critique that I am overstating the impact of colonialism on cultural history runs headlong into a historical non-coincidence: both academic criticism and intellectual property law were established in, shaped by, and deployed in currently recognizable forms via the systems of a British state dependent on colonialism for its survival. The long-term implications of these colonial constructs have been nonlinear and chaotic—nobody in 18th century England worried (at least on record) that a stereotypically Romantic notion of authorship might outlive the empire and distort the discourses of twenty-first century culture scholarship. Few in the early industrial revolution worried that burning carbon fuels might do something to the climate. Serious problems emerge nonetheless.40

The work of this chapter thus turns from deconstruction to an exploration of the tools available to get out of this paradigm, including both their potentials and their limits.

This chapter also presents the final, still-emerging mode of relation termed reintegration, which offers some of the clearest means of departing from a toxic paradigm of textual authority. These means of departure, often a product of the technological and cultural changes introduced by the internet into popular culture, are incomplete—it would be a mistake to present reintegration, or the internet-based twenty-first century culture that readily enables it, as utopian. Like reorigination, rehistorization, or refashioning before it, reintegration is more often useful than explicitly benevolent, and there is no guarantee

40 The widespread but not universal academic refusal to deal directly with the problem of textual authority, described in chapter one, might be understood as crisis denial, not unlike climate change denial. The implication, in both cases, that this denial is an existential threat is not accidental. 224 that it moves exclusively in a desirable or utopian direction, marked as it is by a past colonial politics and a contemporary neoliberal or neocolonial politics. Like its compatriots, reintegration has the theoretical potential for resistance, and comes the closest to offering concrete terms for departing from the originality-based textual authority paradigm. Uncovering this potential depends, as with the other concepts, on the analytical toolboxes provided by postcolonial analysis, adaptation studies, and world literature. It also depends on developments in fandom studies, and (as the language of this project has routinely implied) discourse analysis, the digital humanities, and a bit of actor-network theory, though these last four provide conceptual or methodological support rather than theoretical or critical tools.

The process of reintegration can be explained as the re-emergence (or, perhaps, an emergence for the first time) of a cultural commons in the aftermath of the modern tendency to enclose those cultural commons within national ethnolinguistic boundaries.

The process of that past cultural enclosure is well-documented in scholarship, especially analysis of the creation of national cultural identities, and the contemporaneous academic acceptance of those categories as part of nationalist projects.41 The condition prevalent before was not perfectly open or even remotely global, however—traditions have always had a relationship to language, movement and geography. Access to these cultural commons are always restricted in some fashion, much in the same way that access to literal commons was restricted by whether or not one could easily travel to it. The creation of a globe-spanning network of anglophone and non-anglophone cultural

41 With respect to crime fiction’s role in that enclosure process, see the previously discussed work of Caroline Reitz and U. P. Mukherjee. 225 artifacts enabled by the internet, however, has substantially reduced the problem of access to these “cultural commons,” thus posing the possibility (albeit always an incomplete one) that traditions can get delocalized, appropriated, adapted, transported, and translated with relatively little deference to notions of propriety, ownership and authorization. This is not always positive—see, for example, the continuing, very colonially-informed problems of cultural appropriation and the monetization of appropriated resources on the internet—but it does challenge our traditional notions of what it means for a text or tradition to belong somewhere, or to someone. In effect, reintegration acknowledges the entropy of textual authority: without maintenance, ideas, genres, and traditions tend to spread beyond convenient categories, resisting any easy definition of ownership.

The inbuilt danger of reintegration is shared with reorigination, rehistorization, and refashioning: there are preexisting cultural, economic, and political hierarchies that can eclipse this mode’s egalitarian potential. Access to textual artifacts, traditions, and ideas is inherently unequal because, for example, access to the internet remains unequal—it is still dominated by an English-speaking, economically-privileged population, and thus, texts produced outside that linguistic and economic milieu have a much more arduous path to circulation via digitization. This inequality, and the

“monetization” or appropriation of cultural resources enabled by digital culture—both embarrassing developments for the internet utopians of the late 1990s42—are perhaps the most obvious threats to reintegration’s culturally-democratic potential. Importantly, however, reintegration provides the conceptual grounds to contest or negotiate issues of

42 I include myself in this critique. 226 access and appropriation, even if it routinely fails. This is why this study has been careful not to posit that reintegration or refashioning are qualitatively better than rehistorization or reorigination—each has a different variety of resistance potential because their methods are adapted to different political or hierarchical contexts. Instead, this work has organized these concepts in order of their obvious resistance. Reorigination, occurring primarily in crime fiction histories, constructs a hegemonic, Anglocentric genre model marked by colonial political expediencies. Rehistorization adapts that hegemonic discourse to, in effect, sneak past normal colonial barriers to attention and circulation, but does not fully abandon its genre history for the hegemonic one. Refashioning places multiple traditions alongside one another to access multiple audiences, hedging its bets while articulating a new, often postcolonial, genre tradition. Reintegration is, by comparison, a much less subtle endeavor, abandoning genuflection to an Anglocentric genre model (in the specific case of Holmes-style detective fiction) in favor of asserting a genre as a globally created and global, collectively owned mode of storytelling.

Thus, reintegration is effectively a post-authority or post-national mode, rather than just a transnational or multinational one. Reintegration embraces practices like composite, multi-text adaptation, indirect adaptation, and extensive chains of reference as markers of a texts or author’s own self-credentialed authority, rather than subversions of that authority. It abandons purist notions of authorship, originality, and literary or generic tradition—all of which mesh poorly with the realities of genre membership—by treating them as inconvenient, undesirable, and unrealistic. It might be understood as a form of

“genre pragmatism”: it uses any artifacts or traditions that are accessible and useful to reach audiences. Fittingly, it is marked more by historical obstacles to access and

227 economic forces of corporate colonialism than it is to nationalist ideas of cultural ownership or the conventions of print-oriented intellectual property law. If the refashioning of the last chapter was anti- or postcolonial, reintegration is potentially post- neocolonial.43

Reintegration’s textual realities also direct attention to the Foucauldian “author function”—specifically, to the role of labeled attribution as a tool, rather than an essential concept. While hardly the first time this concept has appeared in this project, in the context of fandom and adaptation production in this chapter, the value of the “author function” as a form of branding is especially important. Coercive or “toxic” forms of fandom and textual authorization routinely fall back on older, more hierarchical notions of textual authority. Judith May Fathallah, in her 2017 book Fanfiction and the Author, describes the spectrum of responses to textual authority and the power of the author function, noting that “[supposedly] [d]erivative writing that changes popular culture is legitimated and empowered—because and so far as the author says so. [Later,] however, we will begin to see the deconstruction of the legitimation paradox at work, as the legitimacy of authorship itself begins to be questioned” (10). The “legitimation paradox”

Fathallah refers to specifically denotes how fanfiction is credentialed—how the textual authority of the fan author is constructed—through subordination to the empowered

“original” author (or author function) and the simultaneous capacity of fanfiction to erode that “original” author’s own authority over the text. The authority of the primary author,

43 There is an important distinction here between “post-neocolonial” and “anti- neocolonial”—reintegration is post-neocolonial because it exists and reacts to a neocolonial regime of intellectual property laws and other forces. It is not necessarily always posed against those regimes, and so it is not universally anti-neocolonial. 228 inherent to institutional and critical structures like international intellectual property law and autochthonous national literary traditions, gradually collapses in the face of genre reintegration: the “author function” gets gradually replaced by a “genre function,” wherein references and homages to other texts mark “legitimate” authorship and genre membership, replacing narratives of originality and textual origination. In this study’s specific case, Holmes gets referenced and reimagined so often that the function of the character to denote an Anglocentric tradition gets supplanted by a deterritorialized, globalized genre tradition.

The choice of the term “reintegration” to mark this mode is, at best, a pragmatic decision. The term usefully suggests a recovery, a return to a prior state. This, while not entirely accurate, allows us to place reintegration in relation to this work’s first mode, reorigination. Reorigination reflects the scramble for textual authority by asserting a single point-of-origin for a powerful genre and national ownership of that origin.

Reintegration, by contrast, refers to the collapse of that historical maneuver and the emergence of a view of the genre as having been transnational, complicated, mobile and

(as contemporary scholarship on detective fiction is wont to say) emergent. Far from having a single moment of perfect instantiation—Sherlock Holmes—towards which all prior and subsequent texts respond, the genre evolved gradually and, critically, in multiple times and places. The “integration” in reintegration is meant to point to the recovery of this generic history as a product of cultural globalization—while the genre can and has been deployed to reinforce particular cultural hegemonies, the genre and its descendants, the products of genre imperialism, are understood to have mixed ancestries and no singular origin. Reintegration is not necessarily in opposition to reorigination’s

229 genre narrative—detective fiction fans, for instance, are still likely to hold Sherlock

Holmes as a formal origin for their preferred subgenre—but denies its exclusive power over the genre in the present. For example, it is entirely possible, in the context of reintegration, to discuss Cheng Xiaoqing’s Huo Sang mysteries as “Sherlock Holmes fanfiction,” but the evaluative baggage that the term “fanfiction” might have had, in pejoratively marking a text as derivative or subordinate, is no longer an especially serious obstacle to its translation, circulation, or access to genre readership. It may, in fact, increase access in certain contexts. The evaluative obstacles to reading detective fiction as an integrated global genre, in other words, are not what they once were. The genre may not be fully egalitarian or globally integrated (language and access to digitization, as stated, remain a technical barriers), but there is potential, and significant economic and fandom incentive, for movement in that direction. Reintegration points towards a future of open source44 production and indiscriminate proliferation.

The proliferation of fan products, reboots, adaptations, and revivals of Holmes has played a part in the contemporary recovery of crime fiction as world literature. As a popular and accessible example of a genre experiencing a transnational bump in cultural visibility, crime fiction offers an excellent model for examining issues of cross-cultural genre migration, translation, and international franchising. This also inspired a recovery of historical examples of transnational crime fiction. The creation of this subfield—crime fiction specifically understood as a world literature—also drew the Anglocentric model of the genre’s history into the critical light for the first time in several decades. The

44 As the case Klinger vs. Conan Doyle Estate Ltd., described later in this chapter, suggests, this open-sourcedness is quite literal and has a direct impact on how genre artifacts are made and how they spread. 230 anachronistic persistence of this model in a supposedly global, postmodern field like world literature inspired this project: I was invited to an academic conference, listened to scholars discuss Holmes and detective fiction in that Anglocentric mode for three days, and on the final day presented an argument that their histories were based on an unrealistic, colonial notion of how the genre works. Rather than being ejected from the room, I was encouraged to begin this project. Ultimately, the persistence of this

Anglocentric model, even in well-meaning world literature scholarship, can be attributed to the institutional paradigm of textual authority and its effects on what was readily available for scholars to build upon. World literature, as a field, has been limited by institutional factors to considering a fairly narrow slice of the world. Debates over the precise definition of world literature—is it only literature which is popular around the world, or a catch-all for all literatures not in the transatlantic British-American cultural dyad, or only literatures which were historically influential across contemporary national boundaries?—and systems of academic training and valuation ensured that world literature was, essentially, inclusive of European and North American cultural products and the exceptional non-Western products that existed in some still-subordinate relation to them. Efforts to escape that limitation and promote a more egalitarian or sociological approach to world literature—including changing the field to “world literatures”—are hampered by institutional factors like the relatively small number of anglophone academics able to read, or to even be critically aware of, texts in non-Western languages.

It is hampered, in other words, by a colonial politics of who counts as “the world” and what is important to them. The purely liberatory potential of reintegration is also hampered by the persistence, in contemporary adaptation and fan discourse, of residual

231 constructions of authenticity, membership, and textual authority, as the readings in this chapter demonstrate. Fathallah’s “legitimation paradoxes” abound, and frequently cause trouble.

This chapter’s readings focus primarily on texts produced during the Holmesian revival of the mid-2000s and early 2010s. This particular period was chosen because the revival occurred on a global scale, though its British and American products are the most common objects of scholarly discussion, and thus described extensively here. However, the global reach of this genre-based revival of Holmes and Holmes-like detective texts strongly suggests the reintegration of detective fiction as a global or world literary genre.

The readings that follow analyze the revival on precisely these terms, looking for convergences and commonalities in production, marketing, and fandom that substantiate this newly reintegrated global genre. In the process, analyzing the artifacts of this revival, and their textual afterlives, illustrates how reintegration depends upon and encourages an environment where traditional notions of textual authorization—concepts of authorship, ownership, textual fidelity, originality, et cetera—are challenged and replaced.

Examining how these concepts are challenged and replaced in a reintegrated genre offers the opportunity for academic criticism to likewise escape those outmoded concepts and move towards a study of texts that is more realistic and more just.

5.2 The Curious Case of the Period Revival

The relatively sudden emergence of “period adaptations”—adaptations which feature a historical setting in prominent relation to the plot—in the early 2010s was a transcultural phenomenon. In addition to Guy Ritchie’s Holmes films, which in the words

232 of one scholar are “stylistically atypical of Sherlock Holmes adaptations” and draw on the “action-adventure genre” (Polasek 397), the Indian detective Byomkesh Bakshi, previously examined in this study, received the “period action-adventure” treatment, in film and in other media. The relatively sudden and clustered emergence of this kind of adaptation invites some questions: Was there some shared impetus for this cluster of adaptations? Did one see the success of the other and decide to copy the approach, or did all of these emerge from local traditions? While challenging to concretely determine, the possibility that the market for period action film adaptations of traditional detective franchises was a transcultural phenomenon suggests the global reintegration of the crime fiction genre. This possibility is further reinforced by a second, albeit less radical, kind of adaptation that emerged simultaneously: the conscientious update or reboot, where a historical detective is re-imagined in a contemporary milieu. This variety, too, gained special traction in the early 2010s, including the BBC’s Sherlock and comic book adaptations of Feluda. There is also a similar temporal clustering of translations—the comprehensive English translations of Bakshi and Feluda mysteries, and of the Huo Sang mysteries, align with this revival of Holmes-flavored detective fiction adaptations, generally preceding this revival’s emergence in film and television by a few years.45

These correlations suggest, if not shared causes, then a shared environment of adaptation and circulation. This emerging, globally integrated detective fiction genre is less subject to linguistic or nationalistic border-policing, and it apparently created a shared market for

45 The Penguin Feluda Translations were completed by 2000. The more selective Bakshi translations were published in 1999 and 2006. Timothy Wong’s collection of Huo Sang mysteries, incomplete but as-yet the only English translations of Cheng Xiaoqing’s mysteries, was published in 2007. 233 period action adaptations, contemporary reboots, and internationally targeted translation enterprises. Why these adaptations emerged when they did is, in part, beyond the scope of this study. However, the means by which these adaptations emerged together are indicative of the emergence (still incomplete) of a global, single market for crime fiction products.

It is a convenient misnomer to refer to this period as a “revival”—there has hardly been a period between the early twentieth century and the present in which there was not some Holmes or Holmes-like detective being adapted across several media. In the same sense that detective fiction was transnational from the beginning, the Holmesian subgenre of detective fiction has been transmedial from its inception. Conan Doyle’s stories were consistently transmedial objects: famously, Paget’s illustrations and William Gillette and company’s stage presentations of the characters and plots not only worked from the source material in Conan Doyle’s serial texts but added details and components to the

Holmes mythos which were later integrated into future texts. The first mystery, A Study in Scarlet, is even fictively transmedial—it is composed, within its fiction, of several composite texts in various forms, which together describe the investigation and background of a crime. Later entries depend on illustrations or adaptations for certain forms of characterization now considered “canonical” to Holmes—the deerstalker hat, pipe, and physical appearance of the detective depend not on printed textual description but on transmedially-produced details. Early film adaptations like those starring Basil

Rathbone, which shift the setting to the mid-twentieth century and portray Watson as comically dense, have a similar role: they have a tendency to add details which later become firmly associated with the “original” detective-and-narrator duo, and a related

234 tendency to adapt indirectly, that is, to produce stories that resemble, but are not the same as, any one narrative by Arthur Conan Doyle. In this sense, Holmes-oriented texts anticipate contemporary franchising, collective authorship and fanfiction as much as nineteenth century serialization or pastiche. These transmedial efforts in storytelling are connected and collectively create a single iconic fictional world, but are not the work of a singular author, performer, or corporate interest and are individually, in many cases, ephemeral textual events as much as they are archive-able artifacts. The scholarly work of Ashley Polasek examines this transmediality in detail, under the auspices of

Sherlockian adaptations. Her work is usefully summarized in a series of posts on Twitter by Polasek (posted on 7 April 2018 and inspired by an ongoing controversy in the

Sherlock Holmes fandom and its more formal branches) where she notes that her

“research systematically builds the argument that iterations of the Holmes character are contextual reinterpretations of a source work, making them all part of a coherent, readable whole. […] In short, there is not a real Holmes and a series of lesser, secondary versions. There is only one Holmes.” Thus, the figure can be understood as a single, transmedial object of complex authorship and origins. Likewise, the subgenre of crime fiction that Holmes is used in metonymy for—the Holmes-like or detective-centered genre—can be understood, on a global scale, as a genre with a complex notion of origins and textual authority, marked by deference or resistance to colonial politics which inspired the Anglocentric model of the genre.

What marks the “revival” of the 2010s as important for this study is its results. It achieved greater popularity and cultural reach than prior bursts of Holmesian adaptation, given the success of its constituent texts, and created a suddenly even more lucrative

235 market for Holmes-like products. The revival also, by virtue of its timing, brought

Polasek’s argument46 to the fore in fan and scholarly discussions, as the sudden expansion of those fandoms and the sudden direct interest of a broad critical audience highlighted questions of textual authorization, genre, fan gatekeeping, and attention.

Finally, this revival, already transnational because of the first two achievements here, was joined by an associated revival in diverse Holmes-like detective figures being adapted or presented transmedially. This final point demands some description: Holmes-like texts, or texts which assert some connection to the Holmes-centric genre model described in this study, had their connections highlighted by this successful revival;47 awareness of this connection resulted in their adaptations or new, transmedial stories taking advantage of the lessons, opportunities and audiences exposed by the Holmes revival. Critically, the explicitly Holmesian texts of the revival were comfortable telling new stories and adapting the character to new contexts, genre situations, and settings—comfortable authoring texts—and adding to a transmedial mythos. The revival of connected, Holmes- like detectives mirrored this process, re-creating these other detectives as transmedial figures beyond the control of a single author, cultural milieu, or language community while also asserting legitimate textual authority in the face of a historically problematic and ostensibly “subordinate” connection to the hegemonic genre figure Sherlock Holmes.

46 In terms of Polasek’s “there is only one Holmes” assertion, these other detectives, including Feluda, Byomkesh Bakshi, and Huo Sang, are not necessarily part of the Holmesian supertext, but operate in complex connection to it. These complex connections are the “modes” of this study. 47 The terms of this specific connection are similar to rehistorization—the connection to the powerful text is emphasized over local traditions, but the local traditions were not erased or ignored. Textual authority was articulated in less hierarchical terms. Metaphorically, the Holmes connection was less a “price of entry” here than the accessible “gateway text” for a global genre. 236

They assert their position fully, not as “lesser, secondary versions” of Holmes, nor of their particular detective figure. While some commentary on these texts engages in a process of reorigination or rehistorization still (reviews for the Bakshi or Feluda adaptations still tend to play up the Holmes angle, for example), the texts themselves make an argument for textual authority and circulate in a global market alongside transmedial Holmes adaptations.

The revival of Holmesian detective fiction in the early 2010s was kicked off by

Guy Ritchie’s 2009 film Sherlock Holmes, a film adaptation which conscientiously recasts itself as both period film and action piece—writer-producer Lionel Wigram notes in one interview that one of his core motives for imagining this adaptation was that

Conan Doyle’s stories “would refer to a fight off screen. We’re putting those fights on screen” (Douglas). Period aesthetics and a concern for the demands of the Hollywood blockbuster mark the Ritchie adaptation, which rebels against what one film journalist called the “sexlessly debonair” Holmes of the midcentury film adaptations featuring Basil

Rathbone. Instead, the adaptation deploys the Late Victorian, fin de siècle Bohemian aesthetics of figures like those featured in the art of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, using the notedly eccentric but action-appropriate actor Robert Downey Jr. to portray Holmes

(Lyall AR1). Importantly, Ritchie’s adaptation is predicated on a “return to the original texts” in spirit, as it rejects the deerstalker hat, pipe, and Inverness cloak added by other transmedial stage and film version of Holmes, and likewise rejects the appearance of

Holmes and Watson popularized (sometimes in opposition to textual description) by

Strand illustrator Sidney Paget. Instead, Wigram argues that the texts by Conan Doyle describe (or, at least, allow the reader to imagine) a radically different aesthetic that

237 meshes with the demands of contemporary Hollywood action film, asserting in one interview that:

I’d always felt when I read the original stories that somehow the images that I had in my head of Sherlock Holmes were different than anything I’d seen in a movie. To me, he was a much more Bohemian character, he’s a much more modern character than the Basil Rathbone based character that we’ve seen in all the TV stuff. Much [as] I love the TV and “Masterpiece Theater” stuff, the Jeremy Brett stuff, it felt like there was a lot more to be done. Sherlock Holmes in the Conan Doyle is a man who is quite happy to spend two weeks lying on his sofa doing nothing between cases. He’s a man who does do bare-knuckle fighting and goes down to the East End and fights when he’s not on a case, just to clear his head. He’s a man who has killed Moriarty using baritsu, which is a form of ju-jitsu. He’s a man of action and I felt a very modern character that kids of today could really relate to, both as a misfit and as a man who goes his own way. (Douglas)

Wigram’s assertion of textual authority through fandom—i.e., through dedicated childhood readership—belies a trend in the period adaptations of the 2010s revival: the period action film as a return to the historical context and the reader-effect, rather than the literal terms, of the source texts. In effect, Wigram (along with the director of the

Bakshi film adaptation described momentarily) predicate their authority to create new texts with an old detective figure on the assertion that the intervening adaptations have featured boring, staid, or unsympathetic takes on characters and stories which are, in fact, more radical, subversive or contemporary than those adaptations suggest. The grounds for this adaptation’s relevance, rather than the invention of a new-but-similar character or story world, are ironically predicated on those prior adaptations and their success in circulating and gaining attention. Wigram notes that:

Hollywood movies at this point are always looking for ways to do branded materials. [...] Sherlock Holmes has been popular for a hundred years, and anywhere you go in the world, people have heard of Sherlock Holmes. They know he’s the greatest detective in the world. They might not know the exact details, they may have seen something on TV, they may have never read a book, but they know about Sherlock Holmes, they know about Watson. (Douglas)

238

He is then seconded by an assertion from the adaptation’s star, Robert Downey Jr., that the Holmes brand “has like a 98% name recognition or something like that” (Douglas).

This unsourced assertion of the character’s pervasive influence, familiar to readers of this work’s first and second chapters, serves as a basis for Wigram’s narrative of recovery of and fidelity to the Conan Doyle texts, highlights the demand for branded or familiar content for Hollywood’s profitability, and the contingent dependence of a film on that familiarity to gain the attention of consumers.

Director Guy Ritchie, noted by Wigram and fellow producer Susan Downey for his visual and storytelling style, is pronounced as ideal for this recovery, though

Wigram’s overwhelming presence in interviews and development documentation leaves little space for Ritchie to assert any specific textual authority. Materials and reportage published prior to the film’s premiere on 25 December 2009 hardly feature Ritchie at all48—the impression is that Sherlock Holmes is Lionel Wigram’s personal Holmes recovery project, and so most of the material featuring Wigram engages in constructing his textual authority. This construction, as described, has a rather fraught relationship with Holmesian transmediality—there seems to be special power in arguing for a “return to the originals,” even as the film merges elements from Victorian occultist trends,

Bohemian aesthetics, and plot elements from several of Conan Doyle’s stories and outside sources. The production’s appeal to production company Warner Brothers, too, depended on a certain transmediality: Wigram enlisted the help of artist John Watkiss to draw a twenty-five-page graphic novel to go with his original spec script. The visual style

48 To be fair, Ritchie was in the midst of divorce proceedings at the time, and thus probably otherwise occupied. His presence figures more strongly in post-release reviews than in pre-release promotions of the film. 239 of that document played an instrumental role in the adaptation being picked up by the studio (Douglas).

The critical and financial success of the Guy Ritchie adaptation and its sequel were instrumental in creating a new market for period action-mystery films featuring rebooted “classic” detective figures. In much the same way that Conan Doyle’s success with Sherlock Holmes created a powerful, accessible, and politically convenient point around which to organize a genre and its market of authors, publishers and readers, the

Ritchie film adaptation’s success—even in the face of some conservative Holmesians’ disdain—has positioned it as either the center or the point of origin for the 2010s

Holmesian revival. It tapped into and prepared an audience for this revival on an international scale, increasing demand for adaptations which both preceded and succeeded it. It helped to codify and identify a demand in the detective-driven crime film market on a global scale, and period, action-oriented detective films start to emerge with greater frequency after 2009.

Like Sherlock Holmes, Byomkesh Bakshi has been a transmedial text from early in its lifetime. Beginning with Ray’s 1967 adaptation discussed in the previous chapter, the 33 Bakshi mysteries have been serially adapted for television, radio, and film

(“Byomkesh Bakshi in Other Media”). Specifically, the Satyanweshi Byomkesh Bakshi and his compatriot Ajit have been re-imagined in six separate television series (primarily in Bengali), seven of the Bakshi mysteries have been adapted into radio plays (again, primarily in Bengali), and the Bakshi canon has produced nineteen film adaptations (four stand-alone films and four film series, mostly in Bengali but some in Hindi) with the detective character portrayed by more than a dozen actors. In order to promote the films,

240 actors have portrayed the characters in cameo roles in other television series—famously garnering some tongue-in-cheek questions about time travel (G. Roy). This transmedial or adaptation afterlife, much like the more conventional “Masterpiece Theater” adaptations of Holmes, remained healthy right through the 2010s revival. The market identified by Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, however, did extend to India, and new takes on

Bakshi in film began to emerge with greater frequency after 2010—of the nineteen extant film adaptations, sixteen were released after 2010. 2015 also marked the first Hindi film adaptation, permitting the Bakshi film tradition to expand beyond Bengali regional filmmaking and subtitled releases throughout India.

That 2015 Hindi-language adaptation, Dibakar Banerjee’s Detective Byomkesh

Bakshy! (note the spelling difference) is perhaps the film adaptation most clearly taking advantage of Bakshi’s capacity for historical aesthetics and action-oriented investigation, reinterpreting a detective who, like Holmes, was imagined with more cerebral qualities in other texts. Banerjee’s argument for textual authority was based on this more action- oriented take and depended, uniquely, on the semi-permeable language barrier between

Hindi and Bengali. Banerjee’s stated motives in rebooting Bakshi mirror Lionel

Wigram’s motives for Holmes—namely, an attempt to make the character appeal to young, contemporary audiences and to return, in some capacity, to the potential of the original texts for excitement and thrill-seeking (“Hindi ‘Byomkesh’ for Youth”). The production company, Yash Raj Films, purchased the rights to 31 of the 33 Bakshi mysteries in all languages except their original Bengali—the director noted that the choice to make the film in Hindi, and to leave the rights to Bengali-language adaptations to other companies, was because “we don`t want Bengali audiences to be alienated from

241

Byomkesh...it’s a mark of respect. I want to make Byomkesh for the Hindi film audience, the pan Indian [sic] audience and the international audience” (“Hindi ‘Byomkesh’ for

Youth”).49 In effect, Banerjee and the film production company both legally and symbolically base their argument for textual authority—their right to interpret and author a new Bakshi text—on a politics of translation and international circulation, on bringing

Bakshi to the global masses but leaving the active tradition of Bengali-language adaptations its own imaginative and linguistic space.

Having drawn a line between Bengali (implied to be traditional) and “big-budget

Hindi” adaptation, Banerjee’s adaptation is comfortable making some fairly dramatic changes to the circumstances of the texts on which it bases its authority. Most obviously, the spelling of Bakshi is changed to Bakshy—according to Banerjee, this is for typographic aesthetics, serving to make film posters and DVD-covers more aesthetically pleasing and, apparently, emphasizing the strength of the character through the alleged strength of “y” over “i” (Joshi). The setting and plot, too, are departures from the Bakshi mysteries—while the film is loosely based on the novel Satyanweshi, several new plot elements and characters are introduced, including noir elements (and a few femme fatale characters) that Bandyopadhyay wouldn’t include in his novels until Chiriakhana and later works. The film is also set in the midst of the Second World War, significantly later

49 This would be roughly the equivalent of Guy Ritchie setting his Holmes adaptation in 1890s London but having all the characters speak American English, as a mark of respect to the sovereignty of the British-English Holmes tradition and to increase the possibility of international circulation. Alternately, the American television adaptation of Holmes in Elementary, which chooses to set its universe In New York in the present, and thus features dialogue predominantly in American English (with the exception of Miller’s expatriate Holmes and others) might be another parallel example of linguistic distancing as an argument for separate authority. 242 than Satyanweshi was originally set, in order to achieve a particular historical aesthetic that Banerjee found tonally appropriate:

[Banerjee] places his tale in 1943, in the blacked out, panic-ridden city cowering under the threat of Japanese bombs. For Dibakar, it’s the atmosphere and the sense of time and space in the Byomkesh books that is unparalleled. “He subtly weaves in time and place into the plot, organically connects them without making it seem like a history lesson,” he says. Something he wanted to attempt as a filmmaker. He sets the film in war-time Calcutta when, as he puts it, “it was a far more exciting and interesting, thriving and kickass, heterogeneous and cosmopolitan city than it is today; when Chinatown was more widespread; when it was a huge shipping port and a flourishing business centre. All kinds of exciting adventures were happening. (Joshi)

Banerjee interprets the Bakshi mysteries as subtly anticolonial and sociological: the

Bakshi mysteries are “socially oriented. The division of Bengal, riots, political disturbances all lurk in the background of the sleuthing” (Joshi). This interpretation, which incidentally echoes this work’s interpretation of those mysteries in the preceding chapter, opens up the textual space necessary to emphasize periodicity in the 2015 film adaptation. From a technical standpoint, Banerjee’s dedication to the period-action reboot of Bakshi as legitimate or authorized interpretation is borne out in the tactics used to produce the film—the production company boasts of historical accuracy and long workshops for actors and crew (“I Prefer Doing”) and the extensive use of preserved, historical neighborhoods and visual effects to recreate wartime, colonial Calcutta (“I

Prefer Doing”).

When Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! released, it was met with mixed reviews and ultimately only narrowly profitable—due, in significant part, to international audiences

(See Bollywood Hungama, “Box Office: Understanding” and “Box Office: Worldwide”).

While such a reception may seem troubling to the idea that a reintegrated market for detective-driven, Holmes-like detective fiction is emerging, the international figures

243 suggest otherwise: Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! made a higher-than-average percentage of its profits in North American circulation (“Box Office: Worldwide”). While the causes of this higher-than-average North American profitability were never formally examined, a large expatriate Indian audience, consisting of both Hindi- and Bengali-speakers, and the industry-standard North American release with English subtitles, were likely joined by an appetite for action-reboots of popular detectives established by Ritchie’s 2009 film, its 2011 sequel, and the popularity of the Holmes-centric television series Sherlock

(starting in 2010) and Elementary (starting in 2012). In effect, Banerjee’s 2015 film probably suffered from market saturation in India50 (where subtitled Bengali-language

Bakshi adaptations were practically an annual national cinematic event after 2010) and a voracious appetite for internationally sourced detective-driven narratives in North

America that lowered the resistance to subtitles and translated texts. Banerjee’s film was reportedly successful enough, despite its apparent lack of profitability, to necessitate a sequel, due for release sometime after 2019 (Rakshit).

Notably, in light of how textual authority is established with these adaptations, homage or even reference to a Holmes-centric or Anglocentric model of the genre is very limited, if it appears at all. An emergent, globally reintegrated genre can gesture to this constructed model of the genre while subverting it—the language indicative of

50 Banerjee noted that the American film Fast and Furious 7 premiered in India on the same weekend and out-competed his action-centric take on Byomkesh Bakshi. The director framed his observation in culturally nationalist terms, noting that “Indian films are losing their ground in India and if we don’t wake up and try all out to give them good content, they will move towards a new kind of cinema. We will become like Europe.” Compared to Banerjee’s pre-release ambitions of international circulation (and the film’s actual success in some contexts of international circulation), this nationalist argument for film tradition rings odd. (See India.com’s “Dibakar Banerjee: Trying to Change the Taste of the Movie Watching Public.”) 244 reintegration is often one of improving a commonly known, highly-valued “brand” or tradition (see Lionel Wigram) or of recovering or re-imagining a tradition connected to a global genre but neglected by non-local audiences (see Dibakar Banerjee). In neither case is the produced text beholden to a particular Holmes text or to a model of the genre that allocates credit (and power over) itself to British or Eurocentric traditions. Unlike Ray’s

1967 adaptation of Chiriakhana, for example, Banerjee’s Bakshi film contains no direct references to Sherlock Holmes—paralleling the source story “Satyanweshi,” which is likewise unconcerned with rehistorizing itself in Holmes-deferential terms. Ritchie’s film, which (as a fully-branded Holmes adaptation) we might expect to nod to a particular text by Conan Doyle, does not do so: the plot of the film, and of its sequel, use characters, tropes, and ideas from Conan Doyle texts (and post-Doyle Holmes pastiche texts) but re- imagines the character with radical departures from the existing canon of texts and films.

Figures of authority over these new texts deploy a language of fandom as credential, rather than genre homage or explicit deference: in effect, these authors, operating in a reintegrated genre, argue that their attention to and passion for a textual tradition qualifies them to bring new texts to new and established genre audiences. If each of this study’s modes of intertextual relation are understood as different arguments for textual authority and genre membership, the language of reintegration is, paradoxically, the most dependent on genre consumption but the least concerned with notions of property, propriety or ownership—the practice of naming one’s textual predecessors is still active, but the “anxiety of influence” and the allocation of that influence to “foreign” and/or hegemonic powers which previously threatened to mark a text as derivative has been

245 replaced. Derivation and influence are not positioned as anathema to a text’s value or its producer’s authority—response, in a reintegrated genre, is not an all-consuming position.

5.3 The Contemporary Reboot Mystery

The expanded market for Holmes-style detective fiction extends well beyond period-action reboots, however. As the international circulation of Detective Byomkesh

Bakshy! suggests, temporal or linguistic displacement from the source texts is a popular tactic for establishing adaptive or interpretive textual authority. Products marked by this displacement—like the period-action film or the contemporary reboot—are artifacts of an active transnational market that is ambivalent about conventional barriers to circulation, like subtitling or unfamiliarity with the source materials. In these respects, the contemporary reboot requires special attention. The process of adapting a historical detective figure and their stories into a modern context would seem, on the face of it, to be more fraught and more likely to obtain unfavorable comparison than simply creating a new, contemporary detective in homage to the historical one. Yet, the rebooting of colonial or Victorian era detectives in modern locales and situations was a popular strategy in the early 2010s (and, in fact, was similarly popular throughout earlier twentieth century adaptations). Scholarship in fandom studies and adaptation studies offer a straightforward answer to this: reusing a branded character, even one in the public domain, is a safer prospect than inventing an entirely unknown one in terms of the branded content’s ability to reach an audience. While unfair critical comparison is still a risk, it is ultimately a minor one: the tactics of this mode of adaptation are directed at getting general or generic audience attention, not necessarily critical approval. The

246 success of these reboots in the early 2010s at obtaining critical approval as well suggest that academic and nonacademic criticism is currently far less dependent on evaluative concepts like originality that it has been—indeed, as the early chapter of this study suggests, the relationship between expert criticism and originality has always been complicated and, historically, necessitated a certain amount of maintenance and evasion to be sustained at all. Clever homage is positioned as legitimate artistry, though the precise nature of authorship and authorization are still problematic. The movement is in the direction of more open textual authority—towards genre integration—but the movement is incomplete.

The relatively open discourse on authorship, authorization, and adaptation necessitated by these reboots is important because, first, the rebooting trend was transnational and second, the nature of the reboots suggests a genre increasingly comfortable with its transnationality and its plural traditions. Perhaps because their seriality demands increased emotional or attentional investment from audiences and also demands a larger body of sources to draw on for new content, serial media produced during the 2010s revival engage in a very complex negotiation for textual authority and genre legitimacy but are especially willing to revive, adapt, or pull from devalued, lost or stigmatized sources in order to make that argument. A particularly good example of this dedication to both clever homage and the use of obscure or devalued sources is the contemporary Sherlock Holmes reboot Sherlock, which premiered in 2010 on the BBC.

That adaptation has garnered particular attention in academic and critical circles and is frequently used as a case study in adaptation and fandom studies scholarship, because of its creators’ argument for their own textual authority and the series’ relationship to its

247 very active internet-mediated international fandom. Given the quantity and excellent quality of scholarship on BBC’s Sherlock and its fandom—like Roberta Pearson’s entry

“Sherlock Holmes, the De Facto Franchise” in the 2015 collection Popular Media

Cultures, and the edited collections Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom, Sherlock and

Digital Fandom and the very comprehensive 2018 study Sherlock’s World—key moves in this scholarship are worth glossing to illustrate how textual authority was constructed and how strongly indicative the series’ reception is in demonstrating the terms of the reintegration mode of textual relation and genre construction.

Benjamin Poore’s 2012 Adaptation article “Sherlock Holmes and the Leap of

Faith,” for example, stands out as an early effort to excavate the implications of a layered

Holmesian textual universe sustained by fandom production. Poore recasts the popularity, and the repeated revival, adaptation, and addition to the Holmes canon in terms of religious practice or mythology, noting that while fandom is typically a gatekeeping phenomenon for adaptation (as in, fandom consists of textual consumers assessing and evaluating new products’ “pure” or true relationship to a core canon of texts), if sustained for long enough, that fandom begins to produce new texts which reinterpret, and eventually outnumber and dwarf, the source (159). Poore qualifies this theological characterization, noting that coding Holmesian fandom as religious might challenge progress in the field toward rectifying the traditionally opposed categories of “academic” and “fan” (whose convergence he terms “aca/fen,” borrowing from Henry Jenkins’ 2006

Fans, Bloggers and Gamers).51 Instead, Poore specifically identifies a religious

51 The position of scholars on crime fiction does tend towards this type—to date, the academic culture in seminars on issues in crime fiction tend to be marked by scholars who started by “working seriously” on some more conventionally acceptable academic 248 institutionality as marking the fandom, drawing a parallel between sacred texts and the long-lived institutions whose traditions are accredited to those texts, but which eventually surpass them (159-160, 168). Poore cites Thomas Leitch’s characterization of Holmes’ textual afterlife from Film Adaptation and its Discontents, namely that “each new version of Holmes’s adventures challenges the authority of all previous versions” (Leitch 234 cited in Poore 162). Ultimately, the “modernization project” of the BBC’s contemporary reboot of Holmes and Watson lies in a sort of temporal adaptation—the transference of the idea that “Holmes was using the cutting-edge technology of his time” to a different time, changing the content but preserving the affectation. The argument of the creators of the reboot, Moffat and Gatiss, for authority to make radical changes in a counterintuitively sacred and flexible canon is

to set the stories in a version of our modern world, but one where the Holmes Canon never existed, and to stuff it with in-jokes for an audience back in our world which is familiar with the Canon. Sherlock speaks in one way to casual viewers and in another way to fans, who are invited to trace the updating and changes made, in the adaptation process, to stories like A Study in Scarlet/ “A Study in Pink,” or “A Scandal in Bohemia”/ “A Scandal in Belgravia,” as well as to pick up on throwaway comments. (164)

In other words, textual authority for Sherlock is predicated on clever homage and critical distance52 from the source materials, which in turn opens up the imaginative space

interest and have crime as a “side interest” or as the preferred case study they subject their theoretical field to (this study included). This has thankfully not been exclusively the case for two decades but, given the strange position of “Sherlockian” or organizationally-sanctioned superfan of Doyle’s detective, as both casual and professional, crime fiction has a history of ambiguously fandomesque academic practice, i.e. Jenkins’ “aca/fan” (plural “aca/fen”). Anyone who doubts the applicability of this still-ambivalent aca/fen status for detective fiction scholars is invited to navigate the academic job market while branding themselves as a specialist in crime fiction. 52 Echoing my own characterization of Guy Ritchie’s 2009 adaptation, Poore notes that Ritchie’s re-imagining of Holmes in more action-oriented, Hollywood-appropriate terms 249 necessary not just for Gatiss and Moffat’s modernization of the stories, but for an active community based on (ostensibly less “professional”) fan fiction production. In a parallel to the last chapter’s mode (refashioning), this form of textual authority, and the openness of the Holmes tradition demonstrated by its success with audiences and fans, suggests that the future of the Holmes canon is not a finite end to fictionmaking possibilities (as suggested by Jenkins in Convergence Culture), but a canon sustained by a growing body of adaptations and the blurring of the boundary between professional or sanctioned new texts and unofficial, or fanfiction, products. Accordingly, Poore argues

that adaptation and fan fiction while filling in these narrative gaps, paradoxically erode the original Canon by making it seem smaller in comparison—just one planet in a constellation—and by offering connections and resonances between adaptations, and between adaptations and fan fiction, rather than between source text and adaptation. […] Eventually, the Holmes universe will be stuck together by fan-fiction and adaptations; that will be the glue which prevents Jenkins’s ‘breaking point’, rather than the Canon itself. (169)

The use of adaptation and fan fiction as glue rings especially true of Sherlock’s first episode, “A Study in Pink,” which is meant to mirror the first Holmes text, A Study in

Scarlet. Notably, the scene in that novel (described earlier in this work) where Holmes explains his characteristics to Watson by both citing and rejecting fictional predecessors is absent from Moffat and Gatiss’ adaptation. Such a scene might ring false in the context of television, or would perhaps break the universe of the show if one subscribes to

Holmes’ inordinate influence on detective fiction—it might, if one subscribes to an

Anglocentric model of the history of crime fiction, be impossible for Holmes to explicitly cite and dismiss CSI or The Bridge or some other television detective series since those

makes it “modern Hollywood films which represent a reassertion of faith in a written text’s literal truth” (165). 250 works wouldn’t exist in a world where Conan Doyle had never written A Study in Scarlet.

In fact, the series is exceptionally bare of references to other crime fiction in popular culture, and Watson’s blog about Holmes’ exploits an alternate, Conan Doyle-less 2010’s cultural environment to go viral over the course of the first season. Instead of the explicit citation-and-disavowal maneuver, Sherlock signals its genre membership, and its status as a fan-motivated adaptation, with homages to both the source texts and the larger body of

Holmes adaptations, Sherlockian fandom, and television crime dramas. For instance, in

“A Study in Pink,” the villain is revealed to be a serial-killing cab driver motivated by

Moriarty (rather than a lovelorn American motivated by revenge). Holmes’ glee at the realization that he’s chasing a serial killer arrives out of television serial killer stereotypes

(at least, indirectly), and in the process of the chase, several casual observers (echoing years of fan fiction production and scholarly speculation) hint at Holmes psychological status and the homoerotic undertones of Holmes and Watson’s relationship. In effect,

“teasing” readers by disparaging their other potential genre-favorites in A Study in Scarlet is replaced by teasing Holmes fans with nods to popular theories about the characters and defied expectations about television detective shows—an alternate but no less effective signal of genre literacy and connection.

This notion of the futurity of the Holmes canon being held together by products like BBC’s Sherlock and varied bodies of fanfiction filling in narrative spaces and unexplored textual possibilities is shared by other scholars working with Gatiss and

Moffat’s contemporary Holmes reboot. This futurity, while indicative of a reintegrated genre, is fraught with complications. As Judith May Fathallah points out in Fanfiction and the Author, fandom always contends with the “legitimation paradox,” since fandoms

251 operate with gatekeeping and genre policing tactics to hierarchize, promote or silence its members’ activities, and fan products which are legitimated, or ascribed textual authorization (in other words, legitimate authorship) do so by gaining the approval of official or institutional (often corporate or estate) figures with legal and creative power over that intellectual property (10-12). Thus, while fandom and fan production—whether

“official,” like the BBC’s reboot, or “unofficial”—can deconstruct the boundaries between fan and author, between authoritative or source texts and their otherwise- subordinated responses, they do so in an environment still marked by traditional hierarchies (14). For the purposes of this study, Gatiss and Moffat’s status as both

Holmes superfans writing what is essentially fanfiction, and as corporately-sanctioned

“professional” fictionmakers, is demonstrative of the historically-determined, residually colonial politics of textual authority—they are effectively fanfiction authors who can officially police other fanfiction produced by institutionally disempowered or “non- professional” authors, middlemen in a hierarchical empire of Holmes authorship. Their power over the BBC’s adaptation is not unlike the increased power of the British middle class due to historical colonialism—they both support and are supported by the historical hierarchy and, by virtue of their increasing power and influence, they subvert that power structure’s core definitions of authority. This ambivalence is reflected in the creators’ statements about fanfiction—they have sometimes embraced fanfiction, with Gatiss asserting once that “everything is canonical” (Poore 164), and sometimes expressed disdain for it (Fathallah 11).

The emergence of a British contemporary reboot of Holmes, as one might expect from a globally integrated genre demand, both developed in parallel to an American one

252 and coincided with an international, though primarily anglophone, raft of contemporary re-imaginings of historical detectives. The American series, CBS’s Elementary, premiering in 2012, was immediately plagued by accusations of derivation or of riding on the coattails of the BBC reboot’s success—though, as the title of the series suggests,

Elementary takes a much less homage-based approach to Holmes, branching out into fully new narratives, changing the setting and the time, and integrating references and ideas from both transmedial sources53 and Holmes-like fiction outside the British-centric

Holmes Canon. Despite a radically different format (an American serialized police procedural with twenty-four episode seasons vs. the BBC’s three feature-length episode pattern), the show encountered resistance on grounds familiar to the colonial and postcolonial texts covered in this work’s earlier chapters: it was accused of uncreative derivation, a colonially-subordinate54 cultural product attempting to mimic and monetize a connection to a British original.

The Guardian newspaper’s review of Elementary’s first episode (which premiered in the U.K. in October 2012, a month after its release in the U.S.) strikes a conciliatory tone about the similarities between the British Sherlock and the American

Elementary. This conciliatory tone, however, provides a vehicle to air the language of colonial derivation and mimicry without committing to it. Reviewer Mark Lawson begins the article by meditating on the ways in which contemporary television production

53 The title’s reference to the apocryphal phrase “Elementary, my dear Watson” suggests the series is comfortable reaching well outside canonical sources of Holmes content. 54 It seems, on the face of it, absurd to classify an American television product as culturally or colonially subordinate to a British one, given the asymmetry of the power dynamics between the U.K. and the U.S., but, as this study has noted repeatedly, this cultural politics is operates on lingering historical impacts and resists updating. 253 encourages and rewards products with strong intertextual connections and similarities before noting that “[e]ven so, the terms in which Elementary might have been sold to the

American network CBS will arouse strong curiosity in admirers of BBC1’s Sherlock, and possibly rather harder emotions in the creators and producers of the British show”

(Lawson). The language of this article, not unlike the language of the Feluda Wikipedia entry described in this work’s third chapter, relies on placing the American product in direct relation to the British one—specifically Sherlock, momentarily erasing the existence of the Conan Doyle source texts on which both rely. For instance, the article notes that “Lucy Liu plays what we might loosely call the Martin Freeman role,” framing

Liu as dependent on Freeman, despite the fact that both actors are playing the Watson role. Lawson seems simultaneously to be aware that there is a phenomenon where British television shows are remade in the U.S., warranting some “grievance,” and that

Elementary is not one of those shows even as his article attempts to pose it as one. He concedes that the American show “derive[s] not from Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’s

British hit but from the stories of Conan Doyle” and that there is sufficient space for both to exist in the public domain, before returning to a list of other British shows that had

American adaptations (or vice versa) which were subject to intellectual property disputes and accusations of unfair derivation (Lawson).

Other press materials, reviews, and commentary are similarly worried by concerns of unoriginality: a discussion with journalists and producers at the 2012 San Diego

Comic Con, for example, briefly spiraled into almost-satirical levels of tension, with one journalist (credited only as “[French Journalist]” in the transcription by Sheila Roberts) asserting that “[t]he French people are concerned that your show may borrow from the

254

BBC’s Sherlock and what Steven Moffat has done” before bluntly asking what makes

Elementary different from its BBC-produced sibling. Elementary producers Robert

Doherty and Carl Beverly posit that they’re both fans of Sherlock, that the French people

“are very smart,” and nod to the Basil Rathbone-starring Sherlock Holmes adaptations as textual predecessors to the extensive tradition of bringing Holmes into the present. Carl

Beverly also notes that the BBC’s Sherlock came “on the heels of the movie,” referring obliquely to Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes,55 and that all concerned are “doing something original with the character and also honoring the historical truth of the character” (Roberts). Having asserted their textual authority (and implicit originality and fidelity) through the language of historical recovery and fandom, the remaining interview turns to Elementary’s relationship with Conan Doyle’s works, rather than prior film or television adaptations.

This resistance is notably reduced, or even absent, in both fandom scholarship and the adaptations’ respective fandoms. Ashley Polasek, in a 2013 article on these recent

Holmes adaptations, characterizes the relatively short-lived viability of the unoriginality argument in fan and scholarly discourse, observing that

[w]ith a character as long-lived and as venerated as Sherlock Holmes, there is always a certain amount of anxiety preceding a new adaptation. In anticipation of the first episode of Elementary, fans and critics were awash in anxiety over the series. Much, though not all, of this dissipated when it began its run on 27 September, just as similar anxiety over Sherlock Holmes (2009) and Sherlock (2010) dissipated in the wakes of their premieres. Interestingly, much of the anxiety over Elementary is related to its perceived encroachment on the

55 Between the erasure of the French journalist’s credentials and the sudden appearance of the 2009 film in the conversation (it had not yet been mentioned), it’s hard not to read this as a tense exchange. The veiled threat of exposing both CBS and the BBC as riding on the coattails of Guy Ritchie helped to shut down a circular argument about originality, adaptation, and television production. 255

intellectual property of Sherlock. On viewing even the pilot of the series, it is clear that such anxiety is misplaced. (392)

Perhaps because of the generic distinction between BBC’s shorter, higher production value series and CBS’s weekly Holmes-featuring police procedural—one that Polasek and other scholars describe as between “quality television” and common television (385), tied to admittedly aesthetic concerns—Elementary has not garnered the same critical or academic attention as Sherlock, and the fandom for that show is somewhat smaller and less vocal than the one for the BBC series. There are several edited collections, special issues, and articles focused on Sherlock in the academy, while Elementary has not garnered parallel attention: Polasek’s 2013 article remains one of the few to focus on the

American series. Concerns of prestige and access mark this varied treatment: on a practical level, CBS’s show may simply have too many episodes, demanding a larger time investment in fandom and filling in more narrative space that would otherwise be explored by fans, than Sherlock. The bar to personal expertise or investment, and the effort required to clear narrative space for fan speculation and fanfiction, may be too high. Likewise, the American show has not been distributed as widely, though this is in part dependent, again, on the size and dedication of the fanbase, since Sherlock’s circulation transcends its authorized circulation boundaries through fan piracy, unofficial subtitling, and translation.

This different treatment—and, in fact, the traditional academic distinction between “quality television” and other television—is marked by a colonial politics of cultural prestige, rather than one obviously predicated on textual authorization or ambiguous originality. Polasek defends her use of the term, while admitting its aesthetic roots, as a traditional academic term used to denote genre; this conscientious note leaves

256 space for future discussion on how that academic and aesthetic use is constructed, and directs reader attention to works which do so—namely Bignell and Lacey’s Popular

Television Drama: Critical Perspectives, and Jancovich and Lyons’ Popular Quality

Television: Cult TV, the Industry, and Fans (393 endnote 1). The aesthetic and generic politics on which that tradition is based is marked by a colonial politics of originality, place of origin, and a colonial economy concerning who can create valuable content.

Elementary’s success as a television show (now in its seventh season) is indicative of an integrated global genre,56 but its failure to garner the attention of its British prestige- television contemporary exposes the residual politics of an Anglocentric origin for

Holmes-like crime fiction on the evaluative criteria of the genre.

The graphic novel adaptations of Satyajit Ray’s Feluda mysteries constitute yet another interesting example of the limits of this form of textual authority and reintegration in a contemporary, global cultural economy dependent on intellectual property and the asymmetries of globalization and cultural hegemony. Published from

2009 to 2011, scripted by Subhadra Sen Gupta and illustrated by Tapas Guha, the six graphic novels feature Ray’s famous detective and many of the stories’ other characters—including, obviously, sidekicks Topshe and Jatayu—but do not directly adapt any single story or plot.57 Suchitra Mathur, in a chapter in the edited collection Textual

56 The show has allegedly escaped cancellation numerous times due to the strength of its audience in international syndication and the international recognizability of its star, Lucy Liu. See, for example, Nellie Andreeva’s account of the renewal (from May 2018) on Deadline. 57 This liminal status, like the status of Elementary or Holmes pastiches or, more distantly, of the colonial and postcolonial texts which are featured in this and the prior two chapters, blurs the distinction between traditionally separate forms of authorship— between simply operating in a genre, adapting a source text, and writing fanfiction. There is obviously a gradient between these forms, but the boundaries between the forms, and 257

Travels: Theory and Practice of Translation in India, uses these graphic novel adaptations to explore the boundaries between translation, adaptation, and a third mode of authorship that, like Ritchie’s and Banerjee’s film adaptations and the plots of episodes of

Elementary, seems to be engaging in a sort of professional fanfiction production which is understood as legitimate authorship in the contemporary genre (though Mathur’s language suggests discomfort with this form of authorship as authorship). Importantly, while the titles of the graphic novels in English recall translations of Bengali titles for the source texts written by Ray, the plots of these graphic novel adaptations bear, in general, only a loose resemblance to any of Ray’s texts. Thus, a multiform capacity for authorship is present in the graphic novel adaptations—first, the authority of translation, second, the authority of adaptation, and third, the authorship seen in this chapter’s discussions on reintegration, the authorship of fandom co-creation or audience-expansion.

Likewise, Mathur points out that these texts step out of a purely Holmesian mode of detective fiction (despite Sen Gupta and Guha’s introduction emphasizing that tradition), borrowing on the visual and narrative style of Hergé’s Tintin comics and, during periods of action especially, on American comic visual conventions à la

Superman. Mathur contests the terms of Guha’s own statements that the visual style is mostly Tintin, noting that with the addition of American conventions, the comic participates in two distinct comic or graphic novel traditions, in addition to the Holmesian and Ray traditions of crime fiction writing (Mathur 52). She likewise contests the notion that the graphic novels, which update the language and temporal setting (in part, as seen

the governing feature of the gradient itself, depend on arbitrary decisions. Scholarly attempts to codify this system are thus likely to accomplish little. 258 before, to account for the ubiquity of mobile phones), are to be understood as

“simplified” versions of Feluda mysteries for children. Instead, Mathur argues, they are engaging in a parallel pool of cultural references and genre expectations which is just as nuanced and complex as any featured in Ray’s own writing. For Mathur, this process of cultural, linguistic, and temporal translation, along with indirect adaptation, is indicative of a politically significant emergence of globalized or internationalized tastes in Indian audiences (53). She does not position this globalized form of readership in especially positive terms—the “simplification” (which is not, as she points out, actually simplified at all), while perhaps meant for younger audiences, replicates a “neo-liberal politics of globalization” which “interpellates a reader who is a privileged product of these forces of globalization.” In effect, this form of authorship can be liberatory, but the specific maneuvers and conditions of Sen Gupta and Guha’s authorship split the audience for

Feluda into several “demographically distinct” groups experiencing equally distinct

“cultural moments.” Mathur posits, however, that by reading these texts in connection with all of the Feluda source texts, adaptations, and translations, an emergent, less asymmetrical politics of readership and (in the Indian context) democracy might be visible (58). Thus, for the purposes of this study, these graphic novel adaptations can be understood as artifacts of the emergent reintegrated genre, and their arguments for textual authority an incomplete example of the reintegration mode frustrated by the terms of a residual, traditional politics of genre, access, value and authority.

The difficulties of articulating a reintegrated genre and the modes authorship, translation, and adaptation it requires are compounded (as Mathur notes) by Sen Gupta and Guha’s characterization of their own endeavor. Sen Gupta and Guha have appeared

259 in this study before—in the third chapter, the introduction to their graphic novel adaptation (which was referred to as a “spinoff” text) was revealed as one of the primary sources for the problematic Wikipedia characterization of Feluda (see p. 125). As a popular point of first contact, especially for anglophone readers, the description of the characters and their inspirations and histories featured on Wikipedia are all predicated on material produced by the authors of these adaptations and based entirely on their own interpretation of the Feluda textual tradition. Guha and Sen Gupta engage in a process of rehistorizing Feluda in Ray’s texts, relying on simplistic comparisons to figures and tropes in Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, even as they improvise on that tradition, borrowing a narrative tonality and a visual style from (as Mathur and others have noted) Hergé’s Tintin comics. More confusing still, if we accept Mathur’s characterization that Sen Gupta and Guha targeted their texts to younger readers as a gateway product to the more “literary” Ray texts as that readership matures (even if, as

Mathur notes, the reality was more complex), this suggests that Guha and Sen Gupta’s introductory materials, heavy on Holmes references, were meant either for an adolescent audience already more familiar with Holmes than Feluda, or for an “adult” reader deciding whether or not to buy the text on behalf of an adolescent.

The very readerly context which enables the success of Guha and Sen Gupta’s

Feluda-branded product—the gradual emergence of a reintegrated global genre—is undercut by authorial self-positioning that tries to comply with a more hierarchical,

Anglocentric model of the genre. Sen Gupta and Guha’s texts evince the possibility of a reintegrated global crime fiction genre, even as the politics of asymmetric or “neoliberal” cultural globalization are enshrined in the text. This is not unusual, since this

260 reintegration is, in large part, a product of that neoliberal or corporate neocolonial cultural politics and its adaptation to (or decline in the face of) a networked global popular culture. Reintegration’s emergent state means that it is incomplete, and holdovers from older, more hierarchical genre politics—and from contemporary forces of intellectual property, neoliberal corporate colonialism, and residual cultural nationalism—persist, at least for the time being. To believe that reintegration would ever be total or complete is, as this chapter’s introduction asserts, a product of utopian thinking. Reintegration, like the other modes of relation presented in this work, is descriptive of a performed process.

5.4 The Eighty-Seven Percent Solution: On Fandom, Copyright, and Authority

The revival of Holmes-style detectives and mysteries at the turn of the twenty- first century, already pushing on the boundaries of conventional notions of authorship, authorization, and nationalized genre, perhaps inevitably came to push on the legal apparatus which sustains those traditional concepts. In sustaining these traditional concepts, that system also sustains the transnational, conventionally neoliberal politics which resists or subverts the mode of reintegration—the mode on which these “revival” texts depend for their access to and success with audiences. The most public example of this pushback can be found, not in any film or television adaptation, but in the legal proceedings between the Conan Doyle estate and anthology editor (and occasional

Holmes pastiche author) Leslie Klinger.

Roberta Pearson, in her contribution “Sherlock Holmes, the De Facto Franchise” to the 2015 edited collection Popular Media Cultures articulates a particularly useful

261 theoretical reading of this legal case’s implications: the Holmes “urtext”—as Pearson terms the source texts authored by Conan Doyle—constitutes the core of a de facto franchise which exists, unlike a de jure franchise, outside of estate or corporate control.

In a quotation from Matt Hills’ contribution to the 2012 collection Sherlock and

Transmedia Fandom, featured in Pearson’s chapter, the potential for Holmes or other transmedia properties with de facto franchising to defy the normal terms of textual authority and ownership are spelled out:

Sherlock might be thought of as de facto transmedia where there is no guiding (corporate) hand compelling any unity across media and across narrative iterations, precisely because there is no singular franchise, but rather a network of intertextualities— some disavowed, others privileged—which contingently coalesce into the reinventions and extensions of cultural myth […]. Textual pathways through de facto transmedia are far more plural and decentered than the possibilities offered by de jure transmedia, with its legally-bound authenticities of rights-owning franchise maintenance. (Hills, in Pearson 188)

In other words, the lack of singular, corporate or estate control over the Holmes Canon enables other fictions to be produced in relation to that body of texts without being subjected to intellectual property policing or discourses of textual authority (described by

Hills as “legally-bound authenticities”). Pearson’s observation of this open-source status for Sherlock Holmes in the present parallels the use of that character as an icon for a subgenre, as described in this study’s earlier chapters: control of the origination and distribution of Holmes constitutes, historically, an attempt to police or control an entire popular genre on a global scale, via an Anglocentric model of crime fiction centered around Holmes. Texts operating in a similar genre or textual mode to the one metonymized by Holmes must, therefore, deal with that colonial politics of control, deploying or resisting a connection to it through this study’s various “modes of relation”—reorigination, rehistorization, refashioning, or reintegration. The challenge to

262 the economic and legal channels of that control—namely, the 2013 U.S. legal case

Klinger vs. Conan Doyle Estate Ltd.—represents a structural manifestation of reintegration, an artifact of that emergent mode.

The details of that case, as read by Pearson and others, warrant attention, since its outcome reflects (and shapes) the incomplete nature of reintegration. In the U.K. and

Canada, the entire canon of Sherlock Holmes stories authored by Arthur Conan Doyle entered public domain in 1980, despite some legal challenges and attempts to lay claim to all or part of that body of texts or its conceptual products. In the United States, however, the vagaries of copyright law allowed Conan Doyle’s last direct descendant to lay claim to part of the Holmes canon (especially those published on or after 1927) via a legally- constituted estate, which is now held (after Jean Conan Doyle’s death in 1997) by nine indirect Conan Doyle descendants. Barring a sequel to the US Copyright Term Extension

Act of 1998 (which seems depressingly likely, given the political situation in the United

States), the last Holmes story penned by Arthur Conan Doyle will enter the public domain in the U.S. by 2023. The estate’s claim to the last dozen (by the time of Pearson’s article, the last ten) “official” Holmes stories enabled them to effectively demand licensing fees for any major Holmes-themed cultural product, by arguing that their control of part of the Holmes canon constitutes exclusive legal rights to the entire intellectual property (see Pearson 193). Major Holmes-themed products, including

Sherlock, Elementary, and the Ritchie film adaptations, paid the estate a licensing fee, if only to avoid litigation or potentially being barred from distribution in the U.S., a major market. Pearson argues that there is secondary value to this licensing as well, noting that

“official” licensing acts as a sort of Foucauldian author function for the text, emphasizing

263 a connection to a symbolically powerful brand or individual (195). This argument that

Holmes and other characters remained “incomplete” until the final texts by Conan Doyle, and that thus any use of Holmes or Watson depends on those texts held by the estate, was the subject of legal dispute in Klinger vs. Conan Doyle Estate Ltd.

This legal challenge to the Conan Doyle Estate’s control over Holmesian licensing emerged during a smaller dispute, when Leslie Klinger’s attempt to publish

Holmes pastiches ran into the threat of litigation by the estate. Klinger’s legal challenge, notably joined by advocacy in the fandom facilitated by his website “Free Sherlock,” made the argument that the Holmes and Watson characters, and the general structures and tropes of those texts, were initially fashioned in A Study in Scarlet and did not substantially change with additional texts. The estate dissented, with their lawyer

Benjamin Allison arguing that “Holmes is a unified literary character that wasn’t completely developed until the author laid down his pen”—an argument notably supported by “two literary experts.” These experts, Larry Woiwode (currently the poet laureate of North Dakota) and Valerie Sayers (currently in the English Department at

Notre Dame) invoked the distinction between “flat” and “round” characters traditionally derived from narrative theory as well as the archaic distinction58 between “popular” and

“literary” fiction to argue that Holmes, as a literary figure, was incomplete until Conan

Doyle’ last Sherlock Holmes story. These arguments, ironically, depended on moving

Holmes from the realm of popular fiction to literary fiction—a proposition overturned by

58 Readers will forgive the editorialization here—these literary arguments, in addition to being at odds with this study’s theoretical underpinnings, were so specious that even a conservative interpretation of U.S. copyright law rejected them on two separate occasions. 264

Conan Doyle’s own characterization of A Study in Scarlet and other Holmes mysteries as

“cheap fiction”—and were ultimately rejected by the court’s ruling in favor of Klinger

(199-201). The estate’s appeal, in 2014, on the grounds that the earlier ruling would put countless other historical properties in danger of instantly passing into public domain, was rejected out of hand, and the estate was forced to pay Klinger’s legal fees (202), though they retained the rights to license those Holmes texts still in copyright in the U.S.

The outcome of the case, in Pearson’s characterization, made waves in “the

U.S.A., to the U.K., China and India, attesting not only to Holmes’s status as a global cultural icon but also to the increasing salience of I.P. laws in a networked society” (195).

Pearson’s choice of geographic examples is notable, in the case of this study, since each of the named countries had a historical tradition of both explicit Holmes adaptations and fiction that articulated a relationship to Holmes regardless of its roots in hybrid imported and local traditions of crime writing. Pearson argues, accurately, that the case’s outcome reflects a transformation in textual economies that has not yet been matched by a transformation in legal codes or the professional discourses of textual production. She cites Yochai Benkler, who posits that “[w]hat characterizes the networked information economy is that decentralized individual action—specifically, new and important cooperative and coordinate action carried out through radically distributed, nonmarket mechanisms that do not depend on proprietary strategies—plays a much greater role than it did, or could have, in the industrial information economy” (Benkler, in Pearson 196). In the global genre of detective fiction, the legal reality enshrined in Klinger vs. Conan

Doyle Estate Ltd. was playing catch-up to the textual reality.

265

This challenge to the legal and institutional aspects of textual authority, as

Fathallah demonstrates in her 2017 book, is necessarily only a small part of the ideological and institutional obstacles to fully realized reintegration. Toxic fandom culture, from fan gatekeeping to preserved aspects of authenticity discourse (like the arguments of the scholars in Klinger vs. Conan Doyle Estate Ltd.) still suffers from a variety of “legitimation paradoxes.” The international examples of Holmes-like fiction used in this study, for example, are both historically and currently marked by a vestigial politics of cultural authenticity through national credentialing—in essence, they and products like CBS’s Elementary or the “stylistically atypical” Sherlock Holmes film, are marked by a lack of British national membership (even when, in the case of producer and director, they are authored by British individuals) and encounter at least marginal resistance to inclusion or transnational circulation. The hegemony of the United States over global anglophone popular culture, and the rising awareness of the economic and cultural potential of Indian and Chinese products and markets, offsets part of this resistance both in “official” and fan discourses, but the work is incomplete. The

“radically distributed, nonmarket mechanisms” identified by Benkler are functioning, but while they are radically distributed and not bound by traditional market forces, they are still marked by historical discourses of value, authorization, and locality. The value of these fan cultures, and the adaptive frameworks they propagate, are in their potential to escape these politics, if only occasionally, and to sustain discourses around cultural texts so that future discourse might evolve towards a more complete departure. As Ann

McClellan notes in her 2018 study Sherlock’s World, the potential for Holmes discourses to resist the collapse or atrophy inherent in “post-object fandom” (36, 219) contains

266 powerful potential for further subversion of authenticity and authority discourses.59

Outside the discourse of Holmes as a tradition, the genre of detective-driven crime fiction contains similar potential: as long as production in the genre continues to deal with its historical relationship (or over-emphasized subordination) to Sherlock Holmes, it has the potential to move towards fuller reintegration, towards the use of Holmes as a common resource rather than a marker of authority and authenticity.

5.5 Holmes in the Cultural Commons

The line between explicit fanfiction production and “legitimate” authorship, like the line between adaptation and original, cannot remain clear in the context of textual production in a genre. The examples in this chapter, of contemporary period action adaptations, modernized adaptations, and transmedial fan adaptations, emphasize the amount of intellectual work necessary to maintain any functional distinction between author, adapter, and fan. These examples also advertise the popular erosion of these distinctions as digitally mediated, audience-visible textual production exposes the real processes of authorship and the construction of textual authority. Reintegration, where a global genre’s textual tools finally move into a global “cultural commons,” remains an incomplete process—the construction of “legitimized” textual authority remains necessary on the part of creators, though the tools and discourses necessary to construct this authority are increasingly accessible. Fan culture, and the post-digital production of

59 “Post-object fandom” is defined by McClellan as the ability of a textual canon to sustain fan discourse and fanfiction production via the “constant deferment of completion” (9), a phenomenon where a fan community is driven to not let a textual world conclude and given the necessary space in that world to imagine new characters, narratives, and events. 267 texts that culture now celebrates, offer imperfect but suggestive models for how a colonial politics of authorship and value might be set aside. In the case of Holmes fandom, credentialing authors based on assertions of fan status is not terribly new:

Satyajit Ray, in articulating his motives for writing the Feluda mysteries, famously asserts that he was a childhood fan of Sherlock Holmes as a way of gaining entry into a legitimized, colonially-hegemonic British tradition of crime fiction. Cheng Xiaoqing was famously credentialed as an author of Holmes-like crime fiction through his status as one of the Chinese translators of Arthur Conan Doyle’s fiction. The main shift, in the contemporary production environment, is that this form of credential is no longer necessarily self-subordinating: Lionel Wigram, Mark Gatiss, Steven Moffat, Robert

Doherty and Carl Beverly have all asserted personal Holmes fandom, and produced explicitly Holmes-branded entries into the genre without serious challenges to their right to do so. Their Indian and Chinese historical counterparts, simply operating in a genre symbolically represented by Holmes, still experience a higher bar to entry, translation, and circulation in the genre, but this is changing. The increasing critical perception of crime fiction as a world literature, and the popular translations of these Indian and

Chinese texts at the turn of the twenty-first century, represent the emerging possibility of escape from a colonial politics of textual value and authority. This escape is enabled by a growing movement away from conventional narratives of authorship, origins and originality and the growth of a digitally mediated global marketplace for diversely produced crime fiction.

An effect of this globalization is, still, a neocolonial imposition of hegemonic textual aesthetics and notions of value—the growth of American cultural power over

268 popular culture, for instance, shaped the precise terms under which Byomkesh Bakshi was adapted for a pan-Indian and international film audience. Neocolonialism, like historical colonialism, however, is a two-way street: improvising on these hegemonic values or conventions with local or hybrid elements is a form of resistance to that hegemony and frequently alters the terms of that hegemonic culture itself. The small, but notable, success of Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! in North America stands as one example. The integration of subtle colonial political commentary into Conan Doyle’s origin story for Watson in A Study in Scarlet is another. Attempting to construct grand narratives of national ownership, language-spanning traditions, and colonial cultural mimicry of a European colonial power obscures the vagaries and resistance potentials of individual texts. Fandom, adaptation, and other approaches to texts which call attention to the forces of authority and reception expose how an individual text can be used and how it might be positioned.

The legal case Klinger vs. Conan Doyle Estate Ltd. also exposes some of the strangeness of genre and homage in a reintegrated, global detective fiction genre.

Klinger’s own argument for keeping the tropes, characters, and structures of Sherlock

Holmes stories in the public domain rested on the notion that those textual artifacts were functionally completed in the first published Holmes text. In the process of the case,

Klinger had to identify a list of ingredients for a Holmes story and distinguish whether each one first emerged in a public domain or copyrighted text (see Pearson 198-199).

While such an endeavor seems entirely sensible under the demands of contemporary intellectual property law, the implication that a popular character who is still routinely deployed and iterated upon either directly in adaptations, wildly re-imagined in online

269 fanfiction, and indirectly commented upon through new entries in Holmes-similar detective fiction, can be reduced to a discrete and functionally complete list of characteristics verges on absurdity. The theoretical underpinning of this aspect of the legal argument—that literary or mythic characters can ever be considered a complete or finished object, and that Sherlock Holmes’ lack of completion constitutes a realistic obstacle to open use, demonstrates the gulf between the discourses of intellectual property and the realities of globalized popular culture. That the character is frequently deployed as a marker of genre-literacy, as a means of emphasizing or gaining entry into a popular genre, makes the idea that the character is capable of a coherent, consistent, and complete description very difficult to substantiate.

Holmes, especially in the context of this study’s Indian and Chinese examples, along with in fan discourse, is a palimpsest or fetish: Holmes references are signs which mark valued circulatory power, membership, and authority in a variety of ways and under a variety of circumstances, regardless of the character’s formally-codified textual characteristics or whether the comparison is particularly fitting. The modes of relation examined in this chapter, and in the prior chapters, are simply different ways of performing that reference and coping with (often resisting) the politics which make that reference necessary. They are different ways of accessing and deploying the power of a text that holds representative power over a genre, evolving, iterating, and adapting constantly and prolifically. The mode of reintegration, especially, is marked by its ability to make this deployment, and this evolution, transparent and thus strip it of its ability to sustain and conceal its inherent asymmetries of power. Author, fan and adapter are exposed as hierarchical categories of producer, constantly under negotiation, with that

270 hierarchy historically read back onto their textual products; their modes of textual production possess no inherent distinctions.

5.6 Coda: World Literatures, Postcolonial Authorship, and Democracy

If the traditional notion of authorship, predicated on constructs like originality and autochthonous national literary traditions, is counterfactual, then its politics and its continued use in the academic humanities is necessarily counterproductive. Indeed, that authorial construct, and its supporting politics, have long been officially out of favor in postcolonial studies, adaptation studies, and world literature, though they still constitute an anachronistic (but persistent) hurdle for studies in genre fiction. Contemporary realities in textual marketplaces—changes wrought by digitization and internet fandom, self-publication, and growing postcolonial access to the means of globalized cultural production—highlight that those traditional notions are not only contemporarily problematic but were even counterfactual at their historical points of emergence. For example, scholars working on Romantic Era, nineteenth-century, and Modernist anglophone literatures, (like Jack Stillinger’s Multiple Authorship and the Myth of

Solitary Genius and Adriana Craciun’s Writing Arctic Disaster: Authorship and

Exploration), have noted that the single human author, in possession of their originality, was never a viable image of authorship and textual authority. Similarly, postcolonial scholarship (including Huggan’s The Postcolonial Exotic, Brouillette’s Postcolonial

Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace, Davis’ Rethinking the Romance Genre, and

Mwangi’s Africa Writes Back to Self) has long argued against an “empire writes back” paradigm and examined how value is attributed to postcolonial texts in a global

271 marketplace, though there remains some asymmetry between scholarship on postcolonial

“high” literature60 and genre texts. My project’s aim has, in that context, been to ask why and how such a model is sustained. Using Holmesian detective fiction as a site helps to expose these questions because of that genre’s extremities: its centralization, its fixation on authority, its extraordinary dependence on transcultural movements, and its extreme global proliferation.

The answer, ultimately, comes down to how our current economies of attention are shaped by colonial politics: these anachronistic models of authorship, textual authority, and value are academic and critical shorthand, but were developed to serve a self-justifying system of cultural white supremacy and colonial exploitation. While this study has not generally used racial terms to describe this politics of textual authority, the development of studies into global crime fiction, genre fiction fandoms, and the gatekeeping and politics built into academic attention, genre access, and fandoms makes this articulation necessary. The allocation of textual authority to some empowered figures, places, and times, and the almost-reflexive subordination of others supports a notion of global cultural production where predominantly white, “developed” societies engender original thought and all others simply follow in their wake. More disturbing still, these colonial-racial politics of authorship are indirectly coded into international intellectual property law—a form of law, though currently endangered by digitization, which exercises disproportionate influence over what texts popular audiences and academics have access to. The liberalization of discourses of textual authority, evinced by

60 Of course, when postcolonialism made its early arguments for inclusion, this “high” literature inhabited an even more stigmatized position than postcolonial genre fiction, marked more by obscurity than explicit devaluation, does today. 272 the discussion on the reintegrated global genre in this chapter, may depart from a direct interpretation of this colonial discourse, but the discourse that replaces it must still be articulated and negotiated in an environment irretrievably shaped by that unjust model of textual authority, production, and ownership, and its attendant asymmetries of power.

Those colonial asymmetries of power, despite my best efforts, shaped the material terms of this project. For example, a film adaptation of a Huo Sang mystery was promoted in China and due to release in 2018 or 2019. That film has apparently been released, but even in a digitally connected world information is limited; access to texts from societies deemed by Western critics, politicians and popular audiences to be producing either knockoffs or propaganda are not economically or culturally valuable enough to justify the effort to translate and transport. As a result, all but the most basic details of the Huo Sang film are absent from the anglophone internet. This is not a unique situation: Western devaluation, combined with Chinese government control of information, means that China is partially isolated from an emerging, reintegrated global popular culture. Another similar, critically important example: as discussed in chapter four, the Huo Sang texts were altered during their reprint by the Chinese Ministry of

Public Security—no records of those changes exist (since they officially did not happen), and the difficulties of locating and comparing various editions of the texts means that I cannot be entirely sure that all of Timothy Wong’s translations are free from this ideological adjustment (though I trust his scholarly reputation enough to chance it). A third, thankfully more easily rectified, example of the impact of a colonial politics of value on this text regards the scholarship on Ray’s films Chiriakhana and Sonar Kella by

Andrew Robinson and Ben Nyce. Both texts, featured in chapter four, are widely cited

273 and considered to be authoritative documents in the American Satyajit Ray aca/fandom, despite both making errors so comically obvious that it raises the question of whether either man had ever spoken to Ray or consulted a native speaker of Bengali.61 As postcolonial Indian texts, unfamiliar to American or other Western audiences, the scholarship was apparently never subjected to source verification. Robinson and Nyce are not entirely to blame—the politics of which foreign languages or foreign media are valued left them both in the precarious position of introducing unfamiliar texts, in an unfamiliar filmmaking convention, into an ill-prepared critical environment. Fortunately, subsequent scholarship on Ray’s detective films has not had to make those precarious first steps, and thus had the luxury of offering corrective measures.

The stakes of this project are manifold, though we might conveniently distill a general statement: Access to global attention and circulation is not egalitarian or democratic—it is built on a hierarchy of cultures and production modes established by, and in service of, exploitative colonial forces which have not yet been displaced. Ignoring these forces, by taking questions of availability, translation, textual authority, and genre membership at face value, serves to perpetuate this politics in the academic humanities and impair that discipline’s ability to cope with or critically examine an emerging global popular culture. My work’s organization of texts into several “modes” of coping with this ensconced power distribution aim to make that power structure legible, to deconstruct its various terms, and to trace how textual and market realities might be deployed in service of more just and accurate discourses.

61 I concede, here, an unfair benefit: I’m married to a Bengali cinephile. 274

In terms of postcolonial studies, this project makes two interventions that are worth reiterating here. The first, and most reiterated one, is to demonstrate the possibilities enabled by combining theoretical developments in postcolonialism and adaptation studies. The two fields have a powerful shared politics of egalitarianism and attention to the processes surrounding textual production that benefit from conversation, both within and without the study of crime fiction. The second intervention is more genre-specific, and more easily articulated now, at the end of this study, than in its midst: the value of crime fiction to postcolonial theoretical aims. As demonstrated by works like

Andrew Pepper’s Unwilling Executioner and Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee’s Crime and

Empire, crime fiction traces the construction and discourses of state, imperial, or neocolonial authority. Emphasizing how local conditions, ideas, and juridical norms modify this genre works to decolonize the idea of justice. Emphasis on local and “glocal” developments in the genre challenges historical discourses where justice, like originality or crime fiction itself, is a product perfected by hegemonic powers and imposed on the world. Attending to crime fiction’s relationship to authority, in a postcolonial context, deconstructs a unipolar juridical world, and poses justice as a pluralistic, composite cultural endeavor dependent on the contributions and frameworks offered by diverse groups. Crime fiction, far from a conservative, imperialist genre, can be a progressive cite for recovering the histories and genealogies of our ideas of justice. In a world increasingly shaped by the abdication or decline of hegemonic powers and their forms of international justice, crime fiction can critically examine the terms of recovered, new, or emergent, non-hegemonic modes of justice and how they might cooperate to build new juridical regimes within and beyond the boundaries of the state.

275

For adaptation studies, this project joins existing scholarship in emphasizing adaptation’s value as a way of understanding textual production processes and the transnational movement of texts. My intervention in that field is thus more disciplinary than theoretical: this project continues work by Leitch, Stam, Hutcheon and others to extend the politics of adaptation beyond a text-to-film paradigm, exposing various politics of genre and value in the process. This project is especially invested in the recent explorations of adaptations in the context of “border crossing” or transcultural textual movement (see, for example, Rezaie’s “Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman: A Border-

Crossing Adaptation in a Border-Blocking Time”). Examining transcultural or cross- cultural adaptations, broadly conceived in this study, lays bare the binary and multilateral exchanges between and within cultural groups and allows us to examine the sometimes- unexpected configurations of power those interactions call into being. Critically, adaptation can read these interactions outside the discourses of influence, cultural autochthony and contamination, and high culture as the binary opposite of genre.

For world literature, and specifically the study of crime fiction as world literature, this project constitutes an argument for historical accuracy and global inclusivity. I have read the disciplinary category of “world literature” in its most optimistic sense—this work imagines world literature, as Damrosch puts it, as a “category from which nothing can be excluded” (110). While this characterization, according to Damrosch, supposedly renders the entire term useless, I argue, that world literature shouldn’t be a category at all but should instead be the default mode of understanding cultural production, especially genre fiction, on a global, human scale. In this sense, I am aligned with scholars like

Alexander Beecroft and Stewart King. World literature, as it currently exists, is marked

276 by its history of being conceived in reaction or opposition to a prevailing model of the academic study of culture where artifacts are categorized by narrow, national categories.

As a result, it replicates a colonial totalizing politics of the world which is not fully inclusive of that world; but, critically, it does not have to continue doing so. Nor is this approach necessarily unrealistic—a rigorous effort to examine the relationships between texts, genres, and their mobility is possible, though it is institutionally demanding. Such an approach, however, is necessary for the research and teaching in the humanities to retain academic rigor and popular relevance in a world marked by a globalized, multipolar, translated, and “born-digital” popular culture.

In respect to the Sherlockian fandom, and fandom studies more generally, this project’s stakes rest in the observation of reintegrated genres and the opportunities and risks built into that globalized circulation of texts, categories, and fan communities. As

Wojton and Porter argue throughout Sherlock and Digital Fandom, internet fandoms are capable of both powerful advocacy and profound repression and exclusion. The egalitarian possibilities of the internet are, as well, threatened by neocolonial corporate practices, resurgent enforcement of intellectual property law, and continued lack of access to the internet itself for a large portion of humanity on technical, governmental and linguistic grounds. Internet-mediated, fandom-policed, arguably democratic popular culture has its own attendant costs and benefits, though it continues to offer new ways of approaching popular culture, textual authority, inclusion and globalization outside the dominant, historically colonial narratives of genre and cultural property detailed in this study. The role of academics and critics as gatekeepers to cultural participation, risible as it always was, has long since been overturned—research is still catching up to the new

277 models of participation and authorship created by fan communities and popular texts, whose details and practices have outstripped the terms of established theoretical models.

This study has significant implications for the theorized relationship between crime fiction and democratic juridical and legal institutions. Regardless of whether

Haycraft is correct in his assertion that the genre depends on democratic institutions to form (this study has already argued that he is not correct), the global cultural power of crime fiction means that contemporary, democratic institutions now depend on a healthy popular discourse of justice shaped by crime fiction products. Imagining this politically powerful genre’s history and heritage in purely Anglocentric terms risks enshrining an exclusive, colonial idea of crime discourse at the center of democratic public and intellectual life. A genre, employed by democratic societies on a global scale, which is imagined as a “white” or “Anglo-Saxon cultural product” implies that democratic justice is a white, anglophone invention that serves exclusively white, anglophone interests.

Accepting this origin narrative justifies the lingering presence of racial, regional, and economic forces of discrimination in global juridical institutions. The forces of

Eurocentrism, neocolonialism, and white supremacy already constitute a serious threat to multicultural, democratic societies; yielding the origins of crime fiction, and by association the entire concept of justice and law enforcement, to those toxic forces, even casually, is entirely unacceptable.

By positioning crime fiction as an international, globalized human cultural practice, we can allocate power in the genre more equitably and with a greater attention to inclusion, accuracy, and cultural justice. This maneuver is extensible to the study of literature, and genre fiction, more broadly on the grounds that narratives of absolute

278 cultural property and origin are based on erasures—of complicated histories, circulations, or transcultural exchanges—that require effort to maintain, thus implicating the parties which benefit from that erasure. These erasures are undone by attention to textual evidence, especially artifacts of the processes of adaptation, articulations of genre membership, and the construction of textual authority. By analyzing genre outside a confining matrix of colonial values and national categories, we can, to echo a famous

Holmesian adage,62 avoid the capital mistake of twisting texts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit texts.

REFERENCES, Chapter 5

Andreeva, Nellie. “‘Elementary’ Renewed for Season 7 by CBS.” Deadline. 12 May

2018. deadline.com/2018/05/elementary-renewed-season-7-cbs-1202381658/.

Accessed 24 July 2019.

Bandyopadhyay, Saradindu. Picture Imperfect and other Byomkesh Bakshi Mysteries.

Trans. Sreejata Guha. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1999. Print.

——. The Menagerie. In The Menagerie and Other Byomkesh Bakshi Mysteries. Trans.

Sreejata Guha. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2006. Print.

Banerjee, Dibakar, director. Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! Yash Raj Films, 3 April 2015.

Film.

Beecroft, Alexander. An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present

Day. New York: Verso, 2015. Print.

62 See “A Scandal in Bohemia” for the unmodified version. 279

Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets

and Freedom. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. Print.

Bignell, Jonathan and Stephen Lacey. Popular Television Drama: Critical Perspectives.

Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005. Print.

“Box Office: Understanding the Economics of Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!” Bollywood

Hungama. 14 April 2015. www.bollywoodhungama.com/news/box-office-

special-features/box-office-understanding-the-economics-of-detective-byomkesh-

bakshy/. Accessed 1 June 2019.

“Box Office: Worldwide Collections of Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!” Bollywood

Hungama. 4 April 2015. www.bollywoodhungama.com/news/box-office-special-

features/box-office-worldwide-collections-of-detective-byomkesh-bakshy/.

Accessed 1 June 2019.

Brouillette, Sarah. Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace. New York:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Print.

“Byomkesh Bakshy in Other Media.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia

Foundation, Inc. 18 June 2019.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byomkesh_Bakshi_in_other_media. Accessed 20 June

2019.

Cheng Xiaoqing. Sherlock in Shanghai: Stories of Crime and Detection. Trans. Timothy

C. Wong. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007. Print.

Craciun, Adriana. Writing Arctic Disaster: Authorship and Exploration. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2016. Print.

280

Damrosch, David. What is World Literature? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,

2003. Print.

Davis, Emily S. Rethinking the Romance Genre: Global Intimacies in Contemporary

Literary and Visual Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Print.

“Dibakar Banerjee: Trying to Change the Taste of Movie Watching Public.” India.com. 9

April 2015. www.india.com/showbiz/dibakar-banerjee-trying-to-change-the-taste-

of-movie-watching-public-345552/. Accessed 1 June 2019.

Douglas, Edward. “CS on Location with Sherlock Holmes.” ComingSoon.net. 5 March

2009. www.comingsoon.net/movies/features/53180-cs-on-location-with-sherlock-

holmes. Accessed 10 June 2019.

Doyle, Arthur Conan. “A Scandal in Bohemia.” Reproduced in: The New Annotated

Sherlock Holmes: Volume I, ed. Leslie Klinger. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.

5-40. Print.

——. A Study in Scarlet. Reproduced in: The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The

Novels, ed. Leslie Klinger. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. 3-208. Print.

Elementary. CBS Television Studios / Timberman-Beverly Productions / Hill of Beans

Productions, 27 September 2012 – Present.

Fathallah, Judith May. Fanfiction and the Author: How Fanfic Changes Popular Cultural

Texts. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017. Print.

Guha, Tapas (art) and Subhadra Sen Gupta (script). Beware in the Graveyard. New

Delhi: Puffin Books India, 2009. Print.

——. A Bagful of Mystery. New Delhi: Puffin Books India, 2009. Print.

——. Murder by the Sea. New Delhi: Puffin Books India, 2009. Print.

281

——. A Killer in Kathmandu New Delhi: Puffin Books India, 2010. Print.

——. Danger in Darjeeling. New Delhi: Puffin Books India, 2010. Print.

——. The Criminals of Kailash. New Delhi: Puffin Books India, 2011. Print.

Haycraft, Howard. Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story.

London: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1941. Print.

Hills, Matt. “Sherlock’s Epistemological Economy and the Value of ‘Fan’ Knowledge:

How Producer-Fans Play the (Great) Game of Fandom.” Sherlock and

Transmedia Fandom: Essays on the BBC Series. Eds. L.E. Stein and K. Busse.

Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2012. 27–40. Print.

“Hindi ‘Byomkesh’ for Youth, Says Dibakar Banerjee.” Zee News. 24 June 2013.

zeenews.india.com/entertainment/bollywood/hindi-byomkesh-for-youth-says-

dibakar-banerjee_139703.html. Accessed 19 June 2019.

Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. New York:

Routledge, 2001. Print.

Hutcheon, Linda with Siobhan O’Flynn. A Theory of Adaptation (2006). 2nd Ed. New

York: Routledge, 2012. Print.

“I prefer doing unconventional roles like in ‘Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!’; money is not

an issue for me, says actor Sushant Singh Rajput.” CNN-IBN [Now News18]. 11

September 2014. https://www.news18.com/news/india/i-prefer-doing-

unconventional-roles-like-in-detective-byomkesh-bakshi-money-is-not-an-issue-

for-me-says-actor-sushant-singh-rajput-712974.html. Accessed 20 June 2019.

Jancovich, Mark and James Lyons. Popular Quality Television: Cult TV, the Industry,

and Fans. London: British Film Institute Press, 2008. Print.

282

Jenkins, Henry. Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Media Consumers in a Digital Age. New

York: New York University Press, 2006. Print.

Joshi, Namrata. “A Cycle Bell Rings: Byomkesh Bakshi, the Sleuth Filmmakers Probe.”

Outlook: The Fully Loaded Magazine. 19 January 2015.

www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/a-cycle-bell-rings/293064. Accessed 19

June 2019.

King, Stewart. “Crime Fiction as World Literature.” Clues: A Journal of Detection 32.2

(Fall 2014): 8-19. PDF.

Lawson, Mark. “Elementary: The Strange Case of the Second Modern-Day Sherlock

Holmes.” The Guardian Culture Blog. 24 October 2012.

www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2012/oct/24/elementary-

strange-case-second-sherlock-holmes. Accessed 12 June 2019.

Leitch, Thomas. Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The

Passion of the Christ. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.

Print.

Leslie S. Klinger v. Conan Doyle Estate, Ltd. Complaint for Declaratory Judgment,

United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division,

February 2013.

Lyall, Sarah. “Is That You Sherlock?” The New York Times, 21 January 2009, p. AR1.

Print.

Mathur, Suchitra. “Graphic Adaptations/Textual Negotiations: Reading Feluda in

English.” Textual Travels: Theory and Practice of Translation in India. Eds. Mini

Chandran and Suchitra Mathur. New Delhi: Routledge India, 2015. 48-61. Print.

283

McClellan, Ann. Sherlock’s World: Fan Fiction and the Reimagining of BBC’s Sherlock.

Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2018. Print.

Mukherjee, Upamanyu Pablo. Crime and Empire: The Colony in Nineteenth-Century

Fictions of Crime. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Print.

Mwangi, Evan M. Africa Writes Back to Self: Metafiction, Gender, Sexuality. New York:

State University of New York Press, 2010. Print.

Nyce, Benjamin. Satyajit Ray: A Study of His Films. New York: Praeger, 1988. Print.

Pearson, Roberta. “Sherlock Holmes, the De Facto Franchise.” Popular Media Cultures:

Fans, Audiences, and Paratexts. Ed. Lincoln Geraghty. New York: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2015. 186-205. Print.

Pepper, Andrew. Unwilling Executioner: Crime Fiction and the State. Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2016. Print.

Polasek, Ashley. “Surveying the Post-Millennial Sherlock Holmes: A Case for the Great

Detective as a Man of Our Times.” Adaptation 6.3 (Spring 2013): 384-393. PDF.

—— (@SherlockPhD). “3/ My research systematically builds the argument that iterations

of the Holmes character are contextual reinterpretations of a source work, making

them all part of a coherent readable whole. Every part is a component of that ever-

expanding and ever-more complex whole.” Twitter, 7 April 2018, 15:53,

twitter.com/SherlockPhD/status/98270782009629698.

Poore, Benjamin. “Sherlock Holmes and the Leap of Faith: The Forces of Fandom and

Convergence in Adaptations of the Holmes and Watson Stories.” Adaptation 6.2

(Fall 2012): 158-171. PDF.

284

Rakshit, Nayandeep. “Have the Sequel to ‘Detective Byomkesh Bakshy’ Ready, Confirm

Dibakar Banerjee and Sushant Singh Rajput.” DNA India. 6 April 2015.

www.dnaindia.com/entertainment/report-have-the-sequel-to-detective-byomkesh-

bakshy-ready-confirm-dibakar-banerjee-and-sushant-singh-rajput-2075118.

Accessed 5 June 2019.

Ray, Satyajit, director. Chiriakhana. Star Productions, 1967. Film.

——, director. Sonar Kella. Government of West Bengal, 1974. Film.

Rezaie, Naghmeh. “Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman: A Border-Crossing Adaptation in a

Border-Blocking Time.” Literature/Film Quarterly 46.4 (Fall2018): N.p. Web.

Ritchie, Guy. Sherlock Holmes. Warner Bros. Pictures, 25 December 2009. Film

——. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. Warner Bros. Pictures, 16 December 2011.

Film

Roberts, Sheila. “Comic-Con: Executive Producers Robert Doherty and Carl Beverly

Talk New CBS Series ELEMENTARY, Comparisons to SHERLOCK, and

More.” Collider. 17 July 2012. collider.com/robert-doherty-carl-beverly-

elementary-interview/181309/. Accessed 13 June 2019.

Robinson, Andrew. Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye. Berkeley, CA: University of California

Press, 1989. Print.

Roy, Gitanjali. “21st Century Byomkesh? Sushand Singh Rajput, Dibakar Banerjee on the

Possibilities of Time Travel.” NDTV Movies. 31 March 2015.

movies.ndtv.com/bollywood/21st-century-byomkesh-sushant-singh-rajput-

dibakar-banerjee-on-the-possibilities-of-time-travel-751021. Accessed 20 June

2019.

285

Sherlock. Hartswood Films / BBC Wales / WGBH, 25 July 2010 – 15 January 2017.

Television Series.

Stam, Robert, and Alessandra Raengo, eds. Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory

and Practice of Film Adaptation. Malden: Blackwell, 2005. Print.

Stein, Louise Ellen and Kristina Busse (eds.). Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom: Essays

on the BBc Series. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2012. Print.

Stillinger, Jack. Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius. Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1991. Print.

Wojton, Jennifer and Lynnette Porter. Sherlock and Digital Fandom: The Meeting of

Creativity, Community and Advocacy. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company,

2018. Print.

286