University of Dundee DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY A Mongrel Tradition Contemporary Scottish Crime Fiction and its Transatlantic Contexts Kydd, Christopher Award date: 2013 Link to publication General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 28. 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A Mongrel Tradition Contemporary Scottish Crime Fiction and its Transatlantic Contexts Christopher Kydd Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Dundee, September 2012 For Evie ii Contents Acknowledgements iii Candidate’s Declaration iv Supervisor’s Statement v Summary vi Introduction 1 1: Hard-Boiled Hard Men 57 2: Set in Darkness 140 3: All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye 209 4: The Crime of Miss Jean Brodie 267 Conclusion 351 Bibliography Primary Sources 356 Film and Television 361 Audio Sources 362 Secondary Sources 363 iii Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for their financial support throughout this project. Without them, this work would not have been possible. I would also like to thank the staff and students at the University of Dundee for their many helpful suggestions during my research. I am especially grateful to my supervisors Dr. Aliki Varvogli and Dr. David Robb for their patience, support, and profoundly informed feedback. Special thanks to Dr. Brian Hoyle, Dr. Jodi- Anne George, and Professor Aidan Day who have acted on my Thesis Monitoring Committee over the years and commented astutely on several drafts. Further honourable mentions must go to Dr. Keith Williams, Dr. Chris Murray, and Professor Ken Newton who, in informal conversations with me about my work, suggested illuminating critical avenues that shaped this project. I would also like to thank Professor Charles McKean and Julie Danskin from the History Programme for pointing me in the direction of historical sources that informed the second chapter of this thesis. Further thanks to Julie for her support and invaluable proof-reading skills during the final stages. I am also grateful to Louise Welsh for agreeing to be interviewed by me and offering such sparkling and honest responses to my questions. Finally, I would like to thank my Mum and Dad most of all, for their inexhaustible supply of kindness and encouragement. iv Candidate’s Declaration I declare that I am the author of the thesis; that, unless otherwise stated, all references cited have been consulted by me; that the work of which this thesis is a record has been done by me, and that it has not been previously accepted for a higher degree. Signed: __________________________________________ Date: __________________________________________ v Supervisor’s Statement This is to certify that Christopher Kydd has carried out research under my supervision and that he has fulfilled the conditions of the relevant Ordinance of Regulations for the completion of a PhD degree. Doctor Aliki Varvogli English Programme School of Humanities University of Dundee vi Summary This thesis discusses contemporary Scottish crime fiction in light of its transatlantic contexts. It argues that, despite participating in a globalized popular genre, examples of Scottish crime fiction nevertheless meaningfully intervene in notions of Scottishness. The first chapter examines Scottish appropriations of the hard-boiled mode in the work of William McIlvanney, Ian Rankin, and Irvine Welsh, using their representation of traditional masculinity as an index for wider concerns about community, class, and violence. The second chapter examines examples of Scottish crime fiction that exploit the baroque aesthetics of gothic and noir fiction as a means of dealing with the same socio-political contexts. It argues that the work of Iain Banks and Louise Welsh draws upon a tradition of distinctively Scottish gothic in order to articulate concerns about the re-incursion of barbarism within contemporary civilized societies. The third chapter examines the parodic, carnivalesque aspects of contemporary Scottish crime fiction in the work of Christopher Brookmyre and Allan Guthrie. It argues that the structure of parody replicates the structure of genre, meaning that the parodic examples dramatize the textual processes at work in more central examples of Scottish crime fiction. The fourth chapter focuses on examples of Scottish crime fiction that participate in the culturally English golden-age and soft-boiled traditions. Unpacking the darker, more ambivalent aspects of these apparently cosy and genteel traditions, this final chapter argues that the novels of M. C. Beaton and Kate Atkinson obliquely refract the particularly Scottish concerns about modernity that the more central examples more openly express. 1 Introduction Scottishness is not some pedigree lineage. This is a mongrel tradition! - William McIlvanney. 1 There is no tradition of the crime novel in Scotland – no particularly Scottish equivalent to Agatha Christie or Raymond Chandler. - Ian Rankin. 2 Concluding his 2009 introductory guide to Scottish literature, Gerard Carruthers argues that ‘the most significant Scottish literature is, perhaps, to be most approvingly registered when it contributes to a wider, rather than just a “local” culture’, and for this reason he proposes that ‘a future direction for Scottish literary study should lie in the area of comparative literature’. 3 In the same conclusion, he apologetically admits that his study, for the sake of maintaining a cohesive discussion, excludes ‘the best-selling mode of Scottish literature: crime fiction’ ( SL , 198). Contemporary Scottish crime fiction is indeed an important omission from his otherwise impressively far-reaching survey, not only because it is ‘the most popular form of Scottish literature’ ( SL , 198), but also because, in line with his conception of ‘the most significant Scottish literature’, it is a rich, recognizably Scottish contribution to a wider international culture and it constitutes a particularly revealing body of fiction for comparative analysis. 1 William McIlvanney, [Speech given on a demonstration in the Meadows, Edinburgh, in 1992] as quoted in Neal Ascherson, Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland (London: Granta Books 2003), p. 75. 2 Ian Rankin, ‘Foreword’, in Len Wanner, The Crime Interviews: Volume Two (Glasgow: Blasted Heath, 2012), Kindle edition. 3 Gerard Carruthers, Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), pp. 198-199. Subsequent references to this text will use this edition with the page numbers indicated in parenthesis in the main body of the thesis. 2 This thesis takes up the two-sided gauntlet thrown down in Carruthers’s conclusion and examines contemporary Scottish crime fiction in just these terms. In particular, it gauges the role that Scottishness plays in Scottish crime texts since the late 1970s, situating this Scottishness and the texts within their wider transatlantic contexts. At a superficial level, of course, it would seem tautological to interrogate the Scottishness of texts that are largely written by Scottish authors, set in Scotland, and about Scottish characters. These factors, however, offer little insight into Scottishness and do little to illuminate the texts themselves. For Scottishness to be a meaningful condition of the texts in question, it is necessary to address a number of issues more specific to contemporary Scottish crime fiction that complicate the suitability of this national categorization. These issues are to do with the complex ways that nations and genres operate in an increasingly globalized world. Indeed, popular crime fiction has now spread across every national boundary and, significantly, it most often appears in standardized forms that constitute cultural offshoots of the American hard-boiled tradition. Although currently less in vogue, the genre’s other key tradition, the English golden-age murder mystery, also retains a considerable purchase on contemporary crime fiction. This global