PROOF Contents

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 narratives 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 setting; 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 imagine 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 systematic 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 society?” (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 unpredictability 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 certain 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.

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