PROOF

Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgements viii

Notes on Contributors ix

Introduction 1 Vivien Miller and Helen Oakley

1 From the Locked Room to the Globe: Space in Crime Fiction 7 David Schmid

2 The Fact and Fiction of Darwinism: The Representation of Race, Ethnicity and Imperialism in the Sherlock Holmes Stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 24 Hilary A. Goldsmith

3 “You’re not so special, Mr. Ford”: The Quest for Criminal Celebrity 40 George Green and Lee Horsley

4 Hard-Boiled Screwball: Genre and Gender in the Crime Fiction of Janet Evanovich 59 Caroline Robinson

5 “A Wanted Man”: Transgender as Outlaw in Elizabeth Ruth’s Smoke 76 Susan E. Billingham

6 Dissecting the Darkness of Dexter 91 Helen Oakley

7 The Machine Gun in the Violin Case: Martin Scorsese, Mean Streets and the Gangster Musical Art Melodrama 106 Mark Nicholls

8 In the Private Eye: Private Space in the Noir Detective Movie 121 Bran Nicol

v PROOF vi Contents

9 “Death of the Author”: Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s Police Procedurals 141 Charlotte Beyer

10 “Betty Short and I Go Back”: James Ellroy and the Metanarrative of the Black Dahlia Case 160 Steven Powell

Index 177 PROOF

1 From the Locked Room to the Globe: Space in Crime Fiction David Schmid

In his foreword to Kristin Ross’ The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune, Terry Eagleton comments that space “has proved of far less glamorous appeal to radical theorists than the apparently more dynamic, exhilarating notions of narrative and history” (Eagleton 2008: xii). This observation also applies to much criticism of crime fiction, which has tended to treat the genre primarily in terms of narrative struc- ture and temporality, rather than in terms of spatiality, mostly because of the teleological bent given to that criticism by its emphasis on the solution to the crime. Exemplary in this respect is Tzvetan Todorov’s chapter in The Poetics of Prose entitled “The Typology of Detective Fic- tion”, in which he argues that crime fiction narratives are structured by a double temporality: the reconstruction of events leading up to the murder and the progress of the detective’s investigation, with both nar- ratives eventually converging at the point of the crime’s solution. There is no doubt that crime fiction is centrally concerned with time; recon- structing not only who did what but when they did it is a crucial part of the detective’s job. This chapter will argue that crime fiction is a pro- foundly spatial as well as temporal genre because, as Geoffrey Hartman points out, “to solve a crime in detective stories means to give it an exact location: to pinpoint not merely the murderer and his motives but also the very place, the room, the ingenious or brutal circumstances” (Hartman 1999: 212). When one thinks of the vast literature of crime fiction criticism that concerns itself with representations of space in the genre, it is obvi- ous that the importance of spatiality in crime fiction has already been treated extensively. Much of this criticism, however, engages with the

7 PROOF

8 From the Locked Room to the Globe role of space in crime fiction in a relatively passive manner, which means that houses, suburbs, cities and so on are treated merely as back- ground or setting rather than as determinative forces. Fredric Jameson, in a thought-provoking essay on Raymond Chandler, argues that spaces in Chandler’s fiction are characters, or actants, and it is this more active sense of space as it appears in crime fiction with which this chapter is concerned (Jameson 1993: 43). In “From Space to Place and Back Again”, geographer David Harvey argues that “Representations of spaces have material consequences in so far as fantasies, desires, fears and longings are expressed in actual behaviour” (Harvey 1993: 22). Consequently, he remarks, the questions critics need to ask about such places include “Why and by what means do social beings invest places (localities, regions, states, communities or whatever) with social power; and how and for what purposes is that power then deployed and used across a highly differentiated system of interlinked places?” (Harvey 1993: 21). If we apply such questions to crime fiction, questions animated by an understanding of space as a dynamic, strategic and historical category, we will see that space in crime fiction narratives is much more than set- ting; indeed, it provides us with a way of taking a fresh look at questions that have been debated time and time again in crime fiction criticism over the years, such as, “Is the genre characterised primarily by closure, the neat tying up of loose ends, or by open-endedness and ambiguity; is crime fiction best described as being characterised by individualised approaches to both the causes and solutions to crime, or does it imag- ine and put into play more collective, structural analyses of these issues; and, finally, does crime fiction have the potential to produce radical, counter-hegemonic critiques of the ways in which power is mobilised in capitalist, racist and patriarchal social formations, or is it instead an essentially conservative, bourgeois genre that supports the status quo?” In attempting to generate answers to these questions, Gaston Bachelard’s notion of “topoanalysis”, as practised in his The Poetics of Space, is promising for its attention to what he describes as “the system- atic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives” (Bachelard 1994: 8). He might shed light on the intense affective attachments read- ers of crime fiction form to such spaces as Sherlock Holmes’ Baker Street or Dashiell Hammett’s San Francisco. Michel de Certeau’s description of walking in the city also deserves careful consideration, especially his claim that such walking can potentially elude panoptic, totalising con- ceptualisations of space, thus opening up the possibility that movement through space in crime fiction might contribute to the project of gen- erating new, counter-hegemonic conceptions of space. More generally, PROOF

David Schmid 9 when he claims that “Every story is a travel story – a spatial practice” (de Certeau 1984: 115), he provides about as succinct a rationale for a focus on space as one can imagine. For this chapter, however, the work of Marxist critics in general, and of Marxist geographers in particular, is especially useful in trying to understand the representation of space in crime fiction. This is partly because, as Ernest Mandel argues in Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story, there is a certain homology between bourgeois society and crime fiction. “Isn’t the whole of bourgeois society one big mystery, anyway?” he asks at one point (Mandel 1984: 72), and then he later adds, isn’t “bourgeois society, when all is said and done, a criminal soci- ety?” (Mandel 1984: 135). In a similar vein, geographer Philip Howell points out a series of connections between Marxism and crime fiction, arguing that “Marx’s treatment of the capitalist city is shot through with rich seams of mystery and melodrama, sensation and surprise”, and that “Marxian political economy is itself generically a nineteenth century ‘mystery of the city’ ” (Howell 1998: 363). Interestingly, such Marxist-inflected analyses do not necessarily lead to identical or instrumental conclusions about the genre: Mandel, for example, is generally pessimistic about the political effectivity of the crime fiction genre, arguing that it epitomises bourgeois ideology, while Howell believes that crime fiction is capable of producing counter- hegemonic political critique. In other words, the appeal of Marxist studies of crime fiction is precisely their unpredictability, an unpre- dictability fed by the fact that they have thought through the relation between space and crime fiction more rigorously and seriously than any other school of criticism. In particular, such work assists in exploring the potential of crime fiction, through its representations of space, to produce what Fredric Jameson famously describes as a “cognitive map” of the social totality (Jameson 1990: 347). Even if this goal is not pos- sible (as Jameson seems to believe), the attempt itself is potentially of enduring value for the way it forces the systematic study of what crime fiction has to tell us about the ways in which power is spatialised. In what follows, we will move from the smallest functional unit of space in crime fiction, namely the locked room, to the largest, the globe. The reasons for this organisation are partly increased clarity, and partly because representations of each type of space in the genre possess cer- tain features and challenges unique to that type, as well as similarities with other types. Moreover, as the chapter moves from smaller to larger spaces, it will become clear that space is both a potential constraint and an enabling possibility in crime fiction. Some spaces may be too PROOF

10 From the Locked Room to the Globe large and complex for crime fiction to handle, at which point other genres, such as spy fiction and the thriller, might be able to represent such spaces more effectively. It is also important to emphasise, however, that while the overall movement here is from smaller to larger spaces, it is very important to keep in mind how different spatial scales inter- act with each other in crime fiction. In his book Spaces of Hope, David Harvey emphasises repeatedly the importance of working with a vari- ety of spatial scales simultaneously, despite the difficulties in doing so, and argues that “Ways have to be found to connect the microspace of the body with the macrospace of what is now called ‘globalization’ ” (Harvey 2000: 49). This chapter shares his aim. There is a particular appropriateness in beginning an examination of the role of space in crime fiction with a discussion of the locked room. Not only is it the smallest functional unit of space in the genre but it also appears in what is generally taken to be the origin of crime fiction, Edgar Allan Poe’s 1841 story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”. Moreover, some critics have read the locked room as a peculiarly apt symbol of some of the genre’s defining characteristics. S. E. Sweeney, for example, argues that:

That fourth-floor apartment in the Rue Morgue, its doors doubly locked and its windows nailed shut, represents in one simple archi- tectural paradigm all of the insoluble conundrums and ingenious solutions of detective fiction. More important, the locked room – with its imagery of enclosure and entrapment, and its reference only to elements within its own finite space – provides a perfect metaphor for the inherent self-reflexivity of the genre. (Sweeney 1990: 1–2)

There is indeed a sense in which the locked room epitomises the extent to which the genre of crime fiction makes a fetish out of closure, and in this sense it seems to mimic the certitude of the solution arrived at by the omnipotent detective. At the risk of stating the obvious, how- ever, one must emphasise that the most salient point about Poe’s locked room, as indeed with all the other locked rooms in the genre, is that it is in fact not locked but only appears to be so. The L’Espanayes’ window proves to be a line of flight in both a literal (for the ourang-utang) and a Deleuzian sense; that is, something that connects with multiplicities (in this case the space of the city) (see Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 9–10). Two points immediately emerge here. First, studying representations of space in crime fiction can give us a way of contesting a characterisation PROOF

David Schmid 11 of the genre that dismisses it as a closed, formal system. Second, it is possible that space in crime fiction is rhizomatic in the Deleuzian sense; that is, it consists of what Manuel Castells describes in another con- text as a “space of flows”, a series of connected nodal points forming a large network, rather than a group of mutually exclusive spaces with no connection between them (Castells 2001: 171). Joan Copjec argues that the fact that locked rooms in crime fiction are always breached demonstrates that the “detective ...is not, as is com- monly believed, on the side of metalanguage, of the reparation of the signifier’s default. He is, instead, on the side of the failure of metalan- guage, he represents the always open possibility of one signifier more. Out of every locked room he is always able to extract a letter, a corpse, a clue that was literally undetectable before he arrived on the scene” (Copjec 1993: 177). Crime fiction often represents that possibility of “one signifier more”, the potentially infinite extension of meaning, in spatial terms, as in Poe’s “The Purloined Letter”. The focus of Auguste Dupin’s investigation in this story is the Minister D’s house, in which he is suspected by the police of having hidden the stolen letter that gives the story its title. In many ways, the minister’s house is the locked room of the Rue Morgue on a larger scale, or, at least, it is treated that way by the hapless prefect and his minions, who search for the letter by treating the house as if it is a bounded space that can be divided up and subjected to a systematic, penetrating and totalising gaze. They might extend their search by including the houses on either side of the minister’s house, but their ways of seeing and measuring space do not alter. Their failure to find the letter thus constitutes a trenchant critique of their concept of spatiality, and so it is worth thinking about how Dupin approaches the challenge differently in spatial terms. Two things stand out right away: the role played by Dupin in directing the minis- ter’s attention to the street so that he may switch the purloined letter with his own substitute, and his emphasis on making sure his personal line of flight was assured; that is, that he would be able to escape from the minister’s house and return safely home. What these points have in common is that Dupin does not approach the space of the minister’s house as a closed system; rather, he proceeds from the premise that the space of the house is connected to larger spaces, a premise that in turn dictates strategic decisions made by Dupin. A number of other observations suggest themselves at this point. First, a concentration on the spaces of crime fiction apparently de-centres a critical emphasis on the solution of the crime per se and instead focuses on the movements (both literal and metaphorical) that lead PROOF

12 From the Locked Room to the Globe to that solution. To put it another way, a spatial emphasis produces a processual rather than a teleological understanding of crime fiction, and thus a view of crime fiction that stresses its ambiguities and open- endedness rather than its self-enclosed and self-reflexive systematicity. Second, what follows from this is that a premium is placed on the detec- tive’s ability to move through a variety of spaces, which might mean, among other things, a concomitant emphasis on how this mobility is actualised, what restraints may be placed upon it, and so on. Finally, there is the oft-noted fact that the detective produced in these fictions is a singular, seemingly omnipotent individual, which suggests in turn that crime, in terms of both its causes and solutions, is best thought of in individualistic terms. Does an emphasis on space tend to challenge or simply underwrite this emphasis on individualism? One way to address at least some of these questions is to examine another very popular representation of houses in crime fiction, namely, the country house mysteries of Agatha Christie, and to discuss how much they do or do not share the characteristics that define Poe’s treat- ment of the minister’s house. The automatic answer, of course, is “not at all” because the Christie country house, at first glance, appears to be another example of crime fiction’s tendency to treat space as an isolated category, cut off from the larger social world. In The Country and the City, Raymond Williams presents a famous deconstruction of the country- house myth, and the relations of production that myth represses, but in a less well-known passage he addresses the evolution of the country- house novel into the middle-class detective story. Although some might be inclined to see this transition as a decline, Williams argues that “It is not a sad end; it is a fitting end” because “the country-house ...was indeed a proper setting for an opaqueness that can be penetrated in only a single dimension: all real questions of social and personal rela- tionship left aside except in their capacity to instigate an instrumental deciphering” (Williams 1973: 250). When one thinks of the classical mystery form celebrated by W. H. Auden in “The Guilty Vicarage”, with its emphasis upon a closed society and a limited number of suspects, and the extent to which that form is instantiated in such texts as The Body in the Library and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, it seems difficult to disagree with Williams’ assessment, harsh though it may be. It also seems to suggest that emphasising the spaces of crime fiction does not necessarily produce a consistent or uniform reading of the genre; unlike Poe’s houses, for example, Christie’s do appear to be more enclosed and insular. With this said, however, if we look at Christie’s oeuvre as a whole, rather than at PROOF

David Schmid 13 individual texts, and at the place of seriality and repetition within that oeuvre, a somewhat more complex picture emerges. David Trotter argues that, despite its best efforts, crime fiction, even of the most traditional type, is never quite able to remove the disturbing impact created by the presence of a dead body at the centre of the genre. According to Trotter, a residue of horror (which he describes in terms of the Kristevan abject) remains (Trotter 1991: 71–72). Similarly, although individual Christie texts may or may not be invested in protecting and reinforcing the essential innocence and order of the country house/small village way of life, when one considers the arc of her career as a whole, it is incon- testable that these apparently idyllic spaces are in fact as blood-soaked as Chandler’s mean streets. Before we get to the streets of the city, however, we need to make several short stops along the way, because the next spatial locale we must visit is crime fiction set in the small town (as opposed to the coun- try village), and in this respect I want to emphasise the work of the American writer Jim Thompson precisely because it stands as such an extreme point of contrast with the work of Agatha Christie. Indeed, most of the differences between them are so obvious as to be scarcely worth enumerating. Thompson’s work is much more violent, places a far greater emphasis on psychopathology, is formally much more exper- imental, and in particular reminds us of the debt owed by American crime fiction to the genre of the Western. Richard Slotkin has described in detail the gradual move of the dime novel western to the streets of hard-boiled crime fiction, and Thompson shows us how those two gen- res may be placed in productive tension with one another, rather than one neatly supplanting the other (Slotkin 1998: 126ff). In his many nov- els set in and around West Texas, Thompson reworks the myth of the American frontier to devastating effect, making it impossible to accept the mythologisation of the west that characterises the most traditional versions of the American national imaginary. Given the vast differences between them, what is the point of comparing Christie and Thompson? Although the small town that provides the setting for Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me at first glance appears just as insular and isolated as one of Christie’s villages, in fact, Thompson uses this small town setting in a much more expansive manner. First, it is a space criss-crossed by the migrational movements of hobos, one of whom will be the indirect cause of the protagonist’s downfall. Second, despite its small size and insularity, Thompson is very clear about how this small town stands in a synecdochic relationship to much larger spaces and concepts, so that the way Lou Ford, the homicidal sheriff at the centre of the book, PROOF

14 From the Locked Room to the Globe punishes others expresses simultaneously both his own individual psy- chopathologies and the imperatives of the system of which he is a representative. There is another important point about the differences between Christie’s and Thompson’s versions of small-town crime fiction that needs to be emphasised: although similar scales of space may provide writers of crime fiction with similar sets of potentialities, there are no iron laws of necessity that determine which combination of potential- ities is actualised. This is a point that is actually much easier to forget when we turn to the cities of crime fiction, precisely because certain highly influential representations of urban space have come to stand in for how such spaces are represented in crime fiction as a whole. Before looking more closely at those representations, however, we must ask the following question: Why has the space of the city been considered for so long to be the privileged locale for crime fiction? One index of this privilege is just how little (comparatively speak- ing) crime fiction has been produced that is set in the suburbs of cities, rather than in the cities themselves. Consequently, there is also a lack of crime fiction criticism that discusses this subject. In her fascinating book, White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth Century American Novel, Catherine Jurca includes a chapter on James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce, but Jurca does not say much about why the suburbs have seemed to be a relatively unpromising territory for crime fiction writers. One might make a similar point about representations of regional space in crime fiction. Although Jim Thompson could be read as a regional crime writer, and although more recent writers such as James Crumley and James Lee Burke have tried to extend the territory of the hard-boiled novel outside of the city, these efforts still tend to be the exceptions that prove the rule. One can only speculate about the reasons for the relative dearth of regionally based crime fiction, but it may have some- thing to do with quite pragmatic issues, such as territorial restrictions that prevent law enforcement officers from crossing state lines. Tony Hillerman has evaded this limitation by having the main characters in his police procedurals, Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, be members of the Navajo Tribal Police, and so their territory extends over a much wider area. At the moment, though, most other crime fiction writers seem to prefer to stay in more traditional locales. None of these locales is more traditional and more preferred than the city, and there are a number of reasons for this preference. As long ago as 1901, G. K. Chesterton argued, in his essay “A Defence of Detec- tive Stories”, that the detective story is “the earliest and only form of PROOF

David Schmid 15 popular literature in which is expressed something of the poetry of mod- ern life” (Chesterton 2005: 135). According to Chesterton, this poetry is expressed through the way detective fiction emphasises the fecundity of the urban landscape: “there is no stone in the street and no brick in the wall that is not actually a deliberate symbol – a message from some man, as much as if it were a telegram or a post-card” (Chesterton 2005: 135). Chesterton values the overdetermined signifying power of the city found in detective fiction, because it emphasises the “romance of detail in civilization” (Chesterton 2005: 135). Although many readers of crime fiction cherish the image of London that appears in the Sherlock Holmes stories for the reasons Chesterton describes, it is equally true to say that many others find such depictions unrealistic and unsatisfying precisely because of their romantic quality. Part of the reason the city has been such a dominant space in crime fiction, therefore, is because the urban has also been presented as the basis for an aggressive realism in the genre, as in Raymond Chandler’s famous evocation of “mean streets” and his championing of the work of Dashiell Hammett. The Holmesian city and the hard-boiled or noir city would at first glance appear to have very little in common with each other, but closer inspection reveals a number of important similarities in how traditional and hard-boiled detectives traverse urban space. Philip Howell draws attention to the fact that crime fiction is charac- terised by “a rationalist or realist epistemology” and that “geographical description plays a central role in the epistemological claims of most detective novels, as one of the most powerful constructions of verisimili- tude” (Howell 1998: 359). Bearing this fact in mind, although (according to Howell) there is nothing intrinsically urban about crime fiction, we should not be surprised that cities figure so prominently in the genre because they are the ideal stage for the detective to show off his skills. To put it another way, the city is large enough to present a challenge to the detective determined to bring it under his control, and for the reader to be impressed when he does so, but it is also small enough to make the detective’s ambition viable rather than ridiculous. To the extent that the detective personifies the “subject supposed to know”, and to the extent that what that subject knows is space, the city provides the perfect backdrop for the detective’s activities. This is not to say that the types of knowledge produced, or the detec- tive’s strategies, or the outcomes, are always the same. Indeed, another important element of the appeal of urban space to the genre of crime fic- tion is its status as a multi-accentual sign: it can mean different things to different authors according to what it is they want to accomplish. PROOF

16 From the Locked Room to the Globe

In Red Harvest, for example, Hammett emphasises not the Continental Op’s ability to control Personville, but his ability to tear it apart. In The Maltese Falcon, on the other hand, Sam Spade’s knowledge of the city is meant to impress the reader. Although it is not clear how “portable” Sam’s knowledge is (as when he’s decoyed and sent out of the city by Gutman), there’s no doubting the fact that he knows San Francisco like the back of his hand. The same might be said of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, but in Marlowe’s case, his achievement is perhaps even more impressive, because he comes as close as anyone does to giving coher- ence to a decentred city like Los Angeles through his ability to connect spaces within the city that are normally separated. As Dean MacCannell puts it, “Philip Marlowe walks freely through the mean streets of the city’s underside in one scene and, in the next, strides with the same non- chalance across the oriental carpets of the hot-house billionaire General Sternwood” (MacCannell 1993: 287). The reader is presumably meant to both admire and appreciate the detective’s ability to move around urban space so freely and with such confidence. This is far from being the whole story, of course, for there are also a number of other representations of urban space in crime fiction that work to contest the hard-boiled private eye archetype that has become so influential by highlighting the lacunae of that archetype. Sara Paretsky’s novels that feature the female private investigator V.I. Warshawski, for example, engage the question of what a woman’s experience of urban space should or will be. The debate on this sub- ject has been long and convoluted, ranging from the claim that women cannot possibly occupy public space in the same way as a male flaneur because of the strength of the public/private divide, to the argument that certain classes of women have always occupied public space and that a failure to recognise this fact overemphasises the passivity and victimisation of women. At the heart of this debate lies the question of whether writers should emphasise the dangers or the liberatory possibilities of the city for women. It is imperative to remember the simple and brutal fact that women’s experience of public space is undeniably different from that of men, because of the ways in which women’s mobility and behaviour in that space is constantly regulated, or even prohibited, by violence and harassment. However, one also has to emphasise resistance, the possibility that women who are not solely victims but are also active participants in the improvement of urban space can alter the city. It is precisely this combination of awareness and resistance that we find in Paretsky; she acknowledges that women’s experience of public PROOF

David Schmid 17 space is different from that of men, and that a mobile and indepen- dent woman could well be attacked and brutalised. However, she also emphasises that resistance to this situation, though difficult, is possi- ble. Crucially, Paretsky believes that this resistance should be collective rather than individual. Warshawski does not exist in isolation, but rather develops a community of resistance that gives her the power and sup- port to travel through dangerous urban space. For example, in Blood Shot, Warshawski draws on the help of a number of people during the course of her investigation. Some of them, such as her friend Lotty Herschel and her neighbour, Mr. Contreras, are recurring characters in the Warshawski novels (a fact that reinforces the permanence of Warshawski’s collective approach to the dangers of inhabiting urban space) and others appear just in Blood Shot, such as the indomitable Miss Chigwell, who provides Warshawski with crucial assistance dur- ing the dramatic conclusion of the novel. It is true that Warshawski is not always happy about having to rely on others; indeed, her insistent individualism (which is just as often portrayed as childish rather than principled) is often a source of conflict between her and her friends. Nevertheless, Paretsky persistently presents Warshawski as a member of a larger group and in doing so problematises the individualism of her detective in ways that can help us visualise a city that is a place of danger but also a place of collective struggle. This same emphasis on collective struggle throughout a variety of spaces can be found in the work of female crime fiction writers other than Paretsky. For example, in her trilogy of novels featuring the ama- teur detective Gloria Damasco, Chicana writer Lucha Corpi advances what she has described as the overall goal of her writing, “to bring jus- tice into the world” (Beitiks 2000). Beginning with Eulogy for a Brown Angel (1992), Corpi interweaves events from recent Chicano history into her mystery narratives, giving Damasco’s investigations a real-world relevance and resonance. Eulogy is set against the background of the 1970 Chicano Moratorium, an event organised in Los Angeles to protest the Vietnam War. The efforts of the local police to disperse the thou- sands of protestors led to over 150 injuries and 4 deaths. In Eulogy, Gloria describes the visual aftermath of the disturbances in terms of a disordered urban space that impacts everyone who occupied it:

The cleaning crews were already at work. Piles of clothing were strewn, still saturated with the smell of teargas and blood. Picnic gear, containers full of food and drinks were everywhere. We even saw a stroller and a baby rattle. Luisa and I looked straight ahead as PROOF

18 From the Locked Room to the Globe

if that way we could keep our hearts from racing, our minds from remembering. (1992: 40)

Corpi describes the emotional impact of the remnants of violence on both Damasco and her best friend, Luisa Cortez. Not only does Cortez help Damasco successfully solve the murder that forms the centre of Eulogy, in a way reminiscent of Warshawski and her support community, but also Cortez is killed at the end of the novel, underlining the extent to which women crime fiction writers often pay heightened attention to the dangers of occupying space. The work of such writers as Chester Himes and Walter Mosley rep- resents a similarly revisionary understanding of urban space in crime fiction. Between 1957 and 1969, Himes wrote nine detective novels featuring the black police detectives Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson. Himes referred to these novels as his “Harlem domestic series”, and this description indicates the centrality of Harlem to this series, and especially Himes’s exploration of Harlem as a racialised space. Himes’s use of “domestic” also suggests the extent to which he insistently poses the question, “Where is ‘home’ for African Americans?” Himes’s detec- tive novels produce a complex and multi-faceted picture of Harlem, and although black people overwhelmingly populate the criminal milieu that Himes explores they do not always provide the impetus for crime. In fact, Himes very often explores the varieties of white entry into Harlem, and the consequences of that entry. For example, in the last novel in the series, Blind Man With A Pistol, one strand of the intricately woven plot concerns the murder of a white man who had come into Harlem looking for sex with black male prostitutes. Similarly, in The Real Cool Killers, a white man, Homer Galen, is killed because of his penchant for paying young black women in order to let him whip them. Despite the prominence of inter-racial contact in Himes’s Harlem, he does not question whether Harlem can be accurately described as a “black space”. For example, in Blind Man, Himes admits that “most of the commercial enterprises ...and real estate [in Harlem] are owned by white people”, but that, despite this fact, Harlem is “the black people’s to enjoy. The black people have the past and the present, and they hope to have the future” (Himes 1989: 20). Himes’ sustained attention to the relationship between race and space, along with Paretsky’s examination of women’s experience of the city, both constitute notable revisions to the hegemonic hard-boiled image of urban space, characterised as it is by the complex heroism of PROOF

David Schmid 19 the individualised, white male protagonist. With this said, however, it is also worth pointing out the continuities between these writers. Despite the fact that all of them produce convincing analyses of the ways in which power is spatialised in urban settings, none of them have any optimism about the possibility for change. Critics have disagreed about whether this is a limitation of the crime fiction genre per se,orjusta shortcoming of these particular authors, but the fact remains that crime fiction is stubbornly reticent about how to change the ways in which space is organised, despite producing thought-provoking analyses of that space. The problems created by this tendency of crime fiction to provide accurate diagnoses of both the problems of contemporary societies and the extent to which those problems are imbricated complexly with rep- resentations of space, but to be much less forthcoming about solutions that are anything except individual, are thrown into even sharper focus when the genre deals with units of space larger than the city, up to and including the globe. This point can be illustrated by discussing The Uncomfortable Dead, a Mexican crime novel published in 2005 and co- written by the dean of Latin American crime fiction writers, Paco Ignacio Taibo, and Subcomandante Marcos, of the Zapatista National Libera- tion Army. Taibo and Marcos’ novel is just one example of the flood of crime novels from non-English-speaking countries that have been made available in English translations over the last 20 years. Interestingly, the popularity of crime fiction writers not from either Britain or the United States has grown so much that in 2005 the British Crime Writers Asso- ciation controversially announced that writers in translation would no longer be able to compete for its most prestigious award, the Golden Dagger. Instead, a new category was created, the International Dagger, for works of translated crime fiction. Although this change was presented by some in positive terms, with A. S. Byatt, for example, arguing that “the prize has given the transla- tor’s art more profile” (Petrona 2010), in truth the work of translators of crime fiction, and in particular the way in which they make a wider vari- ety of spaces available to English-speaking readers of crime fiction than ever before, remains largely invisible. In an essay written for the British Council, publisher and editor Christopher MacLehose has argued that

If European crime fiction is attractive to British and American read- ers now in part it must be the attraction of the unfamiliar location, the unfamiliar politics. Petros Markaris’ stories of municipal corrup- tion in a brilliantly-rendered Athens are infinitely more instructive PROOF

20 From the Locked Room to the Globe

and entertaining than the wearisome regurgitations of many-times digested plots of political and union warfare in North America. (MacLehose 2006)

One could make the same argument for the popularity of crime fiction from Latin and South America, but again the work of the translators for Akashic Books’ popular city-based noir series (whose titles include Istanbul Noir and Mexico City Noir) along with that of Carlos Lopez, Taibo and Marcos’ translator, remains largely unacknowledged. TheUncomfortableDead, which is set in both the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, and in Mexico City, follows Elías Contreras, an investigator for the Zapatista investigation commission, and Héctor Belascoarán Shayne, a private detective from Mexico City and recur- ring character of Taibo’s, as they try to unravel the mystery of a dead man leaving messages on answering machines by looking for someone named Morales. As the plot thickens, it becomes increasingly clear that the ultimate crime under investigation is that of neoliberalism itself, as we realise when one of the characters declares: “The murderer is the system. Yes! The system. When there’s a crime, you have to go looking for the culprit upstairs, not downstairs. The Evil is the sys- tem, and the Bad are those who serve the system” (Taibo and Marcos 2005: 63). What the novel calls the Bad and the Evil may sound like very simplistic concepts, but in fact Taibo and Marcos present them as extremely complex, overdetermined ideas with a wealth of possi- ble definitions. For example, Chapter 9 of TheUncomfortableDead, appropriately titled “The Bad and the Evil” consists of definitions and discussions of these concepts from both actual personages (by means of quoting from their writings), including Angela Davis, Leonard Peltier, Federico García Lorca, Pablo Neruda and Mumia Abu-Jamal, and charac- ters from the novel, including the apparent villain of the piece, Morales, who reminds the reader of the systemic nature of corruption when he says “Afraid of the law? Come on, get serious. Haven’t you understood yet that we are the law?” (Taibo and Marcos 2005: 177, emphasis in original). Taibo and Marcos thus define the crime and the criminal in explic- itly systemic terms, and their novel makes clear repeatedly that, as we might expect, the crimes of neoliberal globalisation and those responsi- ble for those crimes extend across the entire planet, not in the sense of there being a conspiracy (although the novel often seems to subscribe to a conspiratorial point of view), but in the sense that neoliberalism is a form of what Slavoj Žižek has called “objective violence”, a normally PROOF

David Schmid 21 invisible type of violence that represents the smooth everyday function- ing of the capitalist system (Žižek 2008: 1). Faced with such a crime and with such an expansive list of criminals, The Uncomfortable Dead forces us to ask, what can crime fiction do? Can it adequately repre- sent the transnational, even global, totality that defines this kind of crime? Taibo and Marcos come up with a suggestive answer to these ques- tions. In a very practical demonstration of what it means to work at different spatial scales simultaneously, Contreras and Belascoarán realise the necessity of their working together. Together, they arrive at the con- clusion that the character named “Morales” they have spent the novel looking for is actually a multiplicity of Morales. Consequently, they each choose their own Morales and enact their own brand of justice. The Zapatistas sentence their Morales to ten years of community service, whereas Belascoarán kills his Morales by throwing him down a stairwell because he realises there is no point in turning him over to authori- ties who are just as corrupt as Morales. Granted, these are both very unconventional solutions, but they can also be read as resolutely “local” responses to “global” problems. To put it another way, crime fiction definitely has something of value to say about all spatial scales, from the locked room to the globe, but the content of those statements is unpredictable. This unpredictability is precisely what makes these state- ments useful; in the context of a genre about which both fans and critics alike tend to generalise, a focus on the spaces of crime fiction has the potential to remind us how diverse and creative crime fiction continues to be.

Bibliography

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Index

Aborigine, 3, 29–32, 37 city, 15–16, 19–20, 70, 149 acculturation, 104 Code of the West, 45, 56, 56n5 Adventure of the Speckled Band, the, colonial, 25, 34, 38 3, 25, 28, 32, 36–38 colonisation, 3, 25, 31, 35, 36, 38, 99 African Americans, 18, 52, 100 colonised, 25, 36, 38 Andaman Islands, 29, 31–3, 37–8 comedy, 59–74 archetypes confessions, 3, 40, 41–3, 55, 85, 164 conventional, 60, 72 Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur, 2, 3, 24–39, generic, 3, 4, 5, 67, 92 121 mythic, 2, 42 Corpi, Lucha, 17–18 noir, 124 country house, 2, 12–13, 143–4 Assassination of Jesse James by the criminal celebrity, 3 Coward Robert Ford, the, 46–8 quest for, 40–57 authorship, 1, 5–6, 60, 72, 141–57 criminality, 2, 36, 41, 93, 96, 118, 143, 146–9 Be My Baby, 107, 110–12 cross-dresser, 4, 83–7, 89n1 Beck, Martin, 5, 143, 150, 154 Cuba, 98–101 Belascoarán Shayne, Héctor, 20–1 Cuban-American, 94, 97–103 Billy the Kid, 40, 43, 53–4 Cuban Revolution, 98 Black Dahlia, the, 6, 160–74 Black Dahlia Avenger, 6, 161–9, 171–2 Damasco, Gloria, 17–18 Blind Man with a Pistol, 18 dancing gangster, 117–18 Blood Shot, 17 Darkly Dreaming Dexter, 91 border-crossing, 79–85 Darwin, Charles, 3, 24–39 bounty hunter, 3–4, 59–74 De Niro, Robert, 61, 109, 114, Brick, 5, 121–39 118–19 British Crime Writers Association, 19 detective link to serial killer, 91–104 camera work, 107–8, 111–16, 121–2, police and detection, 141–57 131–3 Canada, 79, 84, 89n3 private eye, 119–39 capitalism, 148 Sherlock Holmes, 24–39 Capote, Truman, 160 space and detection, 7–21 carnivalesque, 59, 67, 73 Dexter, 4, 91–104 Castro, Fidel, 98–100 diegetic, 5, 107 Chandler, Raymond, 8, 13, 15, 16, 63, dime novels, 13, 56n5 70, 121, 127, 132 Dylan, Bob, 45, 55, 106 Chesterton, G. K., 14–15 Chicano/a, 17 Eulogy for a Brown Angel, 17 Chinatown, 122, 138 Ellroy, James, 6, 160–74 Christie, Agatha, 2, 12, 13, 121, 144 Ellroy, “Jean” Hilliker, 161, 173–4 citizenship, 79–80, 84 empire, 34–8

177 PROOF

178 Index ethnicity hard-boiled, 3, 59, 72, 142, 145–51 Canada, 76–98 cities of hard-boiled fiction, 2, 15, Cuban Americans, 91–104 18, 121 Darwinism, 24–39 crime fiction, 4, 13, 59, 87 Italian-Americans, 59–74 detectives, 15, 70 link to space, 17–20 novels, 14 Scandinavia, 141–57 private eye, 16, 45, 61 West, the, 40–57 screwball, 59–74 Evanovich, Janet, 3–4, 59–74 tradition, 77 evolutionary theory, 3, 24–39 Hardin, John Wesley, 3, 41–57 Expressionism, 116 Harlem, 18 Harnisch, Larry, 6, 161–2, 166, 174 fan culture, 60, 61, 66, 72–4 heterotexts, 156 FBI (Federal Bureau of High Five, 70, 72 Investigation), 91 Hillerman, Tony, 14 femininity, 80 Hilliker Curse, the, 173–4 feminism Himes, Chester, 18 link to genre and masculinity, Hodel, Steve, 160–74 89–104 Hollywood, 63, 106, 110, 115, 121, link to space, 16–18 167, 172, 174 screwball comedy, 59–74 Holmes, Sherlock, 3, 8, 15, 24–39, 121, transgender, 76–89 132, 157 femme fatale, 124, 132 Hot Six, 67, 69 Finger Lickin’ Fifteen, 66 Hugo, Victor, 165 Follow Me!, 5, 129–30 hybridisation, 1, 2, 4, 60, 73 Ford, Robert Newton “Bob”, 3, 40, hybridity, 59, 91–2 44–8 Four to Score, 65, 68, 69, 74 ideology, 4, 9, 38, 91–2, 127 Fraser, Brendan, 121–4, 128 immigrants, 98–104 frontier, 13 imperialism, 34–6, 38 FTA (Failure to Appear), 62, 65, 67, 69, Indian, 32, 37–8 70, 71–2 individualism, 12, 17, 49, 127, 155 Italian-American, 3, 59, 65 gangster, 2, 4–5, 43, 76–8, 80–5, 88, 89n3, 106–19 gansterisation, 157 James, Jesse, 3, 43–8, 53 globalisation, 1, 10, 20 Jumpin’ Jack Flash, 107, 111, 114 globe, 9, 19, 21, 103 GoodFellas, 107, 117 Killer Inside Me, the, 13 Gothic, 42, 51, 54, 95–6 Kollberg, Lennart, 147–8, 157 Gray, John, 76–89 gumshoe, 121, 139 LAPD (Los Angeles Police gun, 62, 65, 68–70, 81–2, 87–8 Department), 161, 163, 164, 166, gunfighter, 42–4, 49–53 168–9, 171, 174, 182 gunman, 42–3, 49, 53, 56 LaGuerta, Maria, 97–8 Latin American writers, 19 Hammett, Dashiell, 8, 15, 16, 63, 70, Latino/a, 91, 97, 99 101–4 121, 127 Laura, 124–5, 134–7 Hard Eight, 72–3 lesbian, 77, 81, 86 PROOF

Index 179

Life of John Wesley Hardin as Written by police procedural, 1, 5, 14, 91, 92, Himself, the, 3, 41, 49 141–57 Lindsay, Jeff, 91, 96 postmodern, 5, 67, 139, 145–6, 151, locked rooms, 2, 9–11 155 Los Angeles, 6, 16, 17, 70, 123, 162, Prado, Miguel, 97–9 167, 172 private eye, 121–39, 155 Prohibition, 78, 79 Maltese Falcon, the, 5, 16, 124, 126–7 psychopathology, 13–14 Man who Laughs, the, 165 psychopaths, 54, 131 manhood, 49, 79, 82–3, 87, 100 Purloined Letter, the, 2, 11 Mankell, Henning, 143, 150 Purple Gang, the, 76, 78, 83, 87 Marcos, Subcomandante, 2–3, 19–20 Mariel boatlift, 100 quest romance, 3 Marlowe, Philip, 16, 63, 123, 133 quest for knowledge, 121 Marxist, 9, 148 masculinity, 4, 67, 69, 72, 77, 78, 87, race, 2, 4, 6, 18, 24–39, 80, 89n8, 89, 95, 97 91, 99 McFiddie, Buster, 76–89 racial stereotyping, 25–8, 32, 38 Mean Streets, 5, 106–19 Ranger, 62, 66–7, 73, 74 melodrama, 5, 9, 106–19, 143–4 Ray, Man, 166, 169 melos, 107–8 Real Cool Killers, the, 18 Mexican writers, 1, 19, 20, 102 realism, 4, 15, 144–5, 147 Miami, Florida, 4, 72, 91–104 Red Harvest, 16 modernity, 77, 138, 144 romance, 61, 83, 129 Morelli, Joseph, 65–6, 71–4 Ronettes, the, 110 Morstan, Captain, 29–31, 38 Ruth, Elizabeth, 76–89 Mosley, Walter, 18 musicals, 106–19 San Francisco, 8, 16, 70, 126, 166 My Dark Places, 160–1, 167 savages, 27, 28–34 myth, 3, 12–13, 42, 46, 50, 53, 54, 98, Scandinavian crime fiction, 141–57 123, 147–8, 160, 165, 173 Scarface, 117 mytho-apocalyptic, 4, 92 Scorcese, Martin, 5, 106–19 Screwball, 63, 64–7 nationhood, 79 serial killer, 2, 3, 4, 42–3, 49, 51, 54–5, Native American, 52 57n6, 91–7 neo-Gothic, 4, 91–2, 95–6 Seven Up, 66–8, 70–1 neoliberalism, 20 sexuality, 4, 5, 77, 95, 125 New York, 107 Sholto, Major, 29–31, 38 New York New York, 119 Short, Elizabeth, 160–74 noir, 5, 15, 20, 63, 121–39, 145, 167 Sign of Four, the, 3, 25–34, 37 silent gangster film, 117 One for the Money, 59, 64, 65, 72–3 Sjöwall, Maj, 5, 141–57 Ontario, 76 Small, Jonathan, 29–34, 37 Origin of Species, the, 25–26 Smoke, 76–89 outlaw, 2, 3, 4, 40–56, 76–89 Smokin’ Seventeen, 66, 73 social bandit, 44, 52, 53 Paretsky, Sara, 16–17, 18, 59 spaces in crime fiction, 1, 2–3, 5, 7–21, Plum, Stephanie, 59–74 46, 56, 66–7, 70–1, 121–39, 153 Poe, Edgar Allan, 2, 10–12, 26 Spade, Sam, 16, 63, 127 PROOF

180 Index

Spanish, 101–4 true crime, 6, 160–2, 167, 173 spatiality, 7, 11 Two for the Dough, 62–3, 65, 74 spectatorship, 116–8 spy fiction, 10 Uncomfortable Dead, the, 3, 19–21 Study in Scarlet, a, 25, 26, 34–6 urban space, 1, 14–19, 96, 126, supra-diegetic, 5, 107 148–9 Surrealism, 166, 169 vampiric, 95–6 Taibo, Paco Ignacio, 1–2, 19–21 Venezuelan, 101–4 television, 1–2, 4, 70, 73, 91, 101 Victorians, 34 Three to Get Deadly, 70, 72 vigilante, 52, 92 thriller, 10, 61 Tompson, Jim, 2, 13–14 Tonga, 24–39 Wahlöö, Per, 141–57 transculturation, 104 Warshawski, V.I., 16–18, 59 transgender, 76–89 Watson, Doctor John, 29, 34–6, 132 translation, 19, 152 West, the U.S., 13, 41 transnational, 2, 21 western genre, 55 transsexual, 83, 86, 89n1 Westerns, 3, 13, 61, 77 Trenton, New Jersey, 3, 59, 63, 65, 66, 70, 73 Zapatista, 19–21