Dangerous Spaces: Investigating Multimodal Performances in British and Irish Detective Fiction

Home , A Kind of Murder, Rachel Verinder, The Moonstone, The Trial for Murder, The Ultimate Crime

DANGEROUS SPACES: INVESTIGATING MULTIMODAL PERFORMANCES IN BRITISH AND IRISH DETECTIVE FICTION

KELLY BECK

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2019

For Mom, Dad, Scott, and Julie–my foundation and guiding stars

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project would not have been possible without the unfailing support of many people in my professional and personal life. I am especially indebted to my committee chair, Dr. Phillip Wegner, whose positivity, intelligent feedback, and inexhaustible support motivated me throughout every step of this process. Additionally, this project would not have developed as it has without the help and guidance of the other members of my committee. I would like to thank Dr. Marsha Bryant for her indefatigable strength and willingness to think outside the box, Dr. Judith Page for her inspiring joy and selfless nature, Dr. Roger Maioli for his unceasing good humor and ability to see the big picture, and Dr. Charles Mitchell for his continuous kindness and openness to new ideas. Working with this compelling group of people has taught me that passion should always drive my work and influence the choices I make.

I must also thank every student I’ve taught over the past twelve years. They have been some of the greatest teachers in my life and always inspire me to give my very best for other people. Specifically, I have to thank the members of my ‘Dissecting a

Crime’ and my ‘Forms of Crime Narrative’ classes at the University of Florida. Their enthusiasm and intelligence inspired so much of this project, and I am eternally grateful for their hard work and insightful conversations.

Nobody has been more important to me during this process than my amazing group of friends and family. I cannot thank Jill, Heather, Neil, Stacey, and Caitie enough for their nonjudgmental emotional support and love, without which I would not have evolved into the person I am today.

Finally, my family has been the most driving force in my life and deserve more thanks than I can give them here. The Barch and Beck families have taught me the importance of community and love no matter how far apart we are. I must thank them for providing strength and laughter when I needed it most, and more importantly, for never letting me forget who I am. Among this group, there are a few who I need to thank by name: Linda, Mackenzie, Chris, Steve, Cathy, Carol, Mary, Grandma, Emma, Ben,

Madison, Nicole, Scott, DJ, Julie, Mom, and Dad. They knew I could do this before I did and have been my most ardent cheerleaders. Their love and support inspire me every day to try to be the woman they already think I am.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

LIST OF TABLES ...... 8

LIST OF FIGURES ...... 9

ABSTRACT ...... 10

1 INTRODUCTION: THE FACTS OF THE CASE ...... 12

Historicizing Detective Fiction’s Genre and Form Issues ...... 14 Terminology and Framework ...... 21 The Plan of This Work ...... 28

2 THE TEXT AS AUTHOR-CONSTRUCTED PERFORMANCE SPACE...... 33

The Dramaturgical Semiotics of a Novelistic Text ...... 35 Spatial Mapping and Crime Scenes ...... 45 The Temporal Art of Crime Storytelling ...... 54 Framed! ...... 60 Mixed Point of View Casts ...... 62 The Evolution of First-Person Point of View ...... 70

3 MOVING INSIDE: DOMESTIC SPACES AND THEIR PERFORMANCE POSSIBILITIES ...... 75

The House as Theater ...... 77 The Butler Did It! ...... 79 Sensational Women in Dangerous Spaces ...... 81 Hybrid People and Places: Marian Halcombe’s Case for Lead Detective ...... 83 What’s in a Name?: Du Maurier’s Developing Detective ...... 89

4 UNDERESTIMATED INVESTIGATORS IN PUBLIC SPACES ...... 96

It’s Only a Number ...... 97 The Miss Marple Effect and Her Rural Realm ...... 98 Urban Peculiarities and Politically Charged Spaces ...... 104 The Power of Silence When Sleuthing Across Spaces ...... 110 The Courtroom Scene ...... 116 The Dock Scene ...... 119

5 TANA FRENCH’S LIMINAL SPACES AND VOCAL VENTRILOQUISM ...... 123

Worldbuilding and Performative Borderlands ...... 126 Fairytale Forests, Secret Gardens, and the Borderlands Between ...... 128 Their Secret Garden ...... 132 Showdown with a Psychopath ...... 138 Empty Estates and Dangerous Domestic Liminality ...... 146 Empty Boxes: Interrogation Rooms and Their Theatrical Potential ...... 152 A Scene Reading of Connor Brennan’s Interrogation ...... 156

6 CODA ...... 165

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 167

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 186

LIST OF TABLES

Table page

Table 5-1. Interrogation scenes’ segment breakdown ...... 157

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure page

Figure 2-1. My continuum of Bloch's temporal concepts ...... 55

Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

DANGEROUS SPACES: INVESTIGATING MULTIMODAL PERFORMANCES IN BRITISH AND IRISH DETECTIVE FICTION

Kelly Beck

May 2019

Chair: Phillip Wegner Major: English

Dangerous Spaces investigates the polyvalent storytelling modalities interwoven in British detective fiction and the ways those modalities rely on human bodies in a variety of spaces. Most critics who explore detective fiction acknowledge the genre’s deep roots in the world of theater, yet they do not delve into the intricacies such assumptions warrant. My dissertation draws upon performance theory to drive its analytical methodology and explores detective fiction’s phenomenological dynamism in new ways. My work participates in Maurizio Ascari’s call to reexamine the genre through a critical lens that illuminates its cross-fertilization with other modes and genres. In this project, I address a missing narrative in the genre’s critical history and explore one of the foundational elements of both detective fiction and theatrical performance: space and its performative possibilities. I argue that detective fiction authors, who also have a background in theater, transcode signification systems from performance and literary creation processes into a new hybrid writing style that relies on spatial awareness and place-making practices in more dynamic ways than critics have previously noted.

Reading detective fiction through a performance and spatial lens allows texts in its canon to share the stage with other novels not traditionally included under the detective

fiction label. Putting these texts in conversation, Dangerous Spaces maps a variety of literary places and examines the ways authors and fictional detectives with an acute performance consciousness engage space during crime scene investigations, witness interviews, and suspect interrogations. Questions about liminality, perception, mythic space, power struggles, and mimetic imagination converge throughout Dangerous

Spaces’ foray into the world of British detective fiction over the course of the past 160 years.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: THE FACTS OF THE CASE

Neither truth alone is our solution, for our reality exists in plural.

–Jonah Lehrer Proust was a Neuroscientist

The stage is set, the curtain rises. We are ready to begin.

–Sherlock Holmes The Abominable Bride

Space. It is a simple word, yet, it affects every aspect of our lives in fundamental ways. We rarely examine the fact that our engagement and reaction to it determine how we think, behave, feel, perceive, and subsequently, know our world. If I asked: where are you?, the responses would produce a myriad of concrete and abstract answers that would communicate everything from specific (or not so specific) locations to events, emotional states, or analysis. Each response would provide much more than a simple spatial indicator, since they also illustrate a part of the individual’s unique spatiotemporal subjectivity, influenced by a lifetime of memories and cognition. In fact, the response would provide a clue to the individual’s story beyond the moment’s frame.

Space functions as building blocks of culture and subjective identity and in ways we are only now beginning to understand.

For a concept so intrinsically connected to memory, maps, mobility, and mentality, critical work on spatial theory presents a number of difficulties, many stemming from issues of defining space and differentiating it from other spaces.

Additionally, space as its own disciplinary focus within the humanities is surprisingly new and is often overshadowed by other theoretical frameworks. Space plays a minor role and is often relegated to the wings for the academic spectacle’s central

performance. However, as Marvin Carlson declares, invoking his own spatial figure,

“The important work is on the boundaries" (“Manitchora” 97)—and so to the boundaries we must go.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) reminds us that boundaries are “limits of anything whether material or immaterial;” and borders present the “edge, brink, or margin” of those limits. Indeed, the concrete or abstract concepts embedded in limits and margins open a pathway for theoretical explorations of how these limits and boundary lines determine human interactions. In fact, many of the most intense human conflicts in history occur over boundaries. Creating, maintaining, and transgressing boundaries always present spatial challenges and clashes. My work in this project takes a critical interest in how space, whose very existence is predicated by abstract and concrete borders, manifests different clashes between and performances by the bodies occupying it.

In particular, my project focuses on British detective novels as a literary crux of spatiality and performance. However, such a claim opens into debates concerning the definition and boundaries of the genre, debates that have lasted over a century and a half. Like other popular literature, detective fiction continues to generate intense critical discussions over the problematic practice of delimiting generic possibilities. Critics, including, among others, Julian Symons, Daniel Chandler, and Maurizio Ascari, stress the importance of accepting the in-between nature of generic borders. Like them, I work on the boundaries of genre and storytelling modes, as I delve into the genre’s theatrical nature in ways that directly affects how we talk about the canon.

Historicizing Detective Fiction’s Genre and Form Issues

The most difficult aspect of discussing detective fiction lies in determining what constitutes the genre in the first place. Often detective fiction and the novel are considered synonymous. Indeed, when we look at the practice through a twenty-first century lens, many of the novel’s formal elements contribute to the detective genre’s narrative function and publication history. However, Chandler reminds us that genre definitions are always historically specific, and thus need to be investigated on an individual basis. Symon’s encyclopedic historical account, Bloody Murder: From the

Detective Story to the Crime Story (1972) similarly warns against assumptions that the genre can be reduced to a single defining statement concerning its narrative tropes, storytelling forms, or presentational modes. However, Symons further observes that there are two qualifications upon which every critic writing about the genre agrees: “It should present a problem and the problem needs to be solved by an amateur or a professional detective through the process of deduction” (13). While such a simplified definition provides a starting point for his classification, Symons recognizes that such generalized qualifications present the same problem the novel does: If the parameters are so undefined, could not anything with a narrative problem and a logically thinking character qualify for inclusion in the genre? Delimiting the genre thus proves necessary to distinguish it from other, similar genres, and to legitimize its importance. In order to lay the groundwork for my coming investigations, I need to briefly restate the facts of the case. This in turn will make clear how my genre blurring and boundary transgressions intervene in this long-standing critical debate.

Any such historical summary is by no means exhaustive. The complex history of the genre, as well as its origins and later international vibrancy, cannot be examined in

the limited space I have available. My project focuses specifically on British literature, so my periodization will ignore American and French contributions to the genre’s development as well as other world literary traditions that produce their own rich and diverse canons of detective fiction.1 I would also maintain that crime fiction more broadly understood has a long-standing tradition in British culture that predates the creation of the nation’s police and detective force, a fact that brushes against the commonplace assumption that the genre rose as a result of the development of these two policing agencies. Indeed, detective fiction’s tropes and formal structures are evident in popular storytelling forms long before critics had a name for the genre. Ernst

Bloch, for example, identifies Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1599-1602) as in the genre’s purview; and Aphra Behn’s “The History of the Nun or the Fair Vow Breaker” (1689) and

William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) can also be included in its family tree. The tradition crosses centuries, and therefore, proves particularly difficult to discuss without some kind of delimited framework. With this in mind, I begin my story in the mid- nineteenth century, when literary serial production boomed and questions about the genre and its popularity intensified.

One of the most significant developments for detective fiction as a genre occurred with serial installments, which were published in popular magazines in the period. These narratives were later combined and resold in single volumes that we now label as novels. Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon are

1 The American tradition developed the hard-boiled and procedural sub-genres, which are amongst some of the most widely read and famous examples in detective fiction. Part of the reason I do not address the American tradition in this work steams from the American tradition’s tenuity of the theatrical. For further reading into the historical connections between the British, American, and French traditions, I suggest Leroy Lad Panek’s Before Sherlock Holmes: How Magazines and Newspapers Invented the Detective Story (2011).

considered some of the most prolific “novelists” in the British canon, but they were first and foremost serial writers who were immensely popular with the Victorian reading public. Their popularity derived in part from their fictions’ generic hybridity, bringing together gothic and sensation fiction tropes, whose fast-paced action sequences and mystery-centered plotlines translated into the cliffhanger structure that weekly installment writing required to maintain its readership.2 With the rise in 1842 of the nation’s first official detective force, and all three authors’ subsequent inclusion of detectives in their work, questions began to emerge in both popular and critical circles concerning how to classify such texts. The “sensation fiction” label proves, even today, to be especially difficult to overcome; however, I contend that we need to reconsider how these three authors’ comingling of genres produces modern crime stories. I will address this issue later on, but for now, I return to our brief history. Popular serial narratives were also transformed very rapidly—in some cases before they were completed—into dramatic works performed in both the legitimate theatre and penny gaffs. While their melodramatic stage renditions further complicated their status as literature, such adaptations intensified the genre’s popularity across all socioeconomic levels of Victorian culture.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, as publishing practices and popular tastes shifted, the serial installment mystery morphed into the short story. This development led later critics such as Symons and M.A. Kayman to declare the short

2 The generic hybridization with two traditions not critically respected often presented contentious intersections between critical and popular reviews of Dickens, Collins, and Braddon’s work. This battle between popular and “respected” literary artifacts continues today, and while it is imperative to recognize how this battle has shaped the genre’s development and definitions, it must be relegated to a peripheral consideration in my larger project’s focus.

story the most suitable form for the genre. This claim is reinforced by the fact that some of the best-known examples of detective fiction were the short stories produced by Sir

Arthur Conan Doyle and his contemporaries. Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series (1887-

1926) advanced the crime story’s already rich literary history and solidified many of the genre’s conventions, still deployed by crime writers today. While he may not be the first to do so, most critics now recognize Doyle as the writer who most successfully combined the conventions used by other writers into a single cohesive form.

The short story reigned supreme until the beginning of what has been termed the genre’s Golden Age–the period from 1918 to 1945–marked by a shift into the full-length novel form. The Golden Age also signals the beginning of the genre’s legitimation as an important literary form, a revaluation largely begun by authors who had turned into critics. Members of The Detection Club, founded in 1929 by Anthony Berkley and

Dorothy Sayers, began publishing articles and anthologies that codified the fluid genre’s rules. The most famous of these include Ronald Knox’s “The 10 Commandments of

Detective Fiction” (1928), Austin Freeman’s “The Art of the Detective Story” (1924), S.S.

Van Dine’s “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories” (1928), and W.H. Auden’s “The

Guilty Vicarage” (1948). Sayers was also instrumental in such a codification of the genre through her volume, The Omnibus of Crime (1929). Of course, none of these writers agreed absolutely on the rules, and each publication reflected the author’s own work and place in the tradition. While argumentative and playful, The Detection Club’s efforts were driven by very serious intentions, since the main goal of their collaborations and other publications was “to raise the literary level of the detective story and to distinguish it” from other genres (Curran 61). Following The Detection’ Club’s pioneering

work, subsequent critical attention turned to the genre’s lasting power, literary conventions, formal innovations, and cultural influence. Throughout the Golden Age and into the post-war era, the recently codified genre began to branch into various subgenres. This development resulted in critical discussions concerning these new cultural productions, as well as their merit and place in the tradition.

The above historical narrative dominated immediate post-war critical work on detective fiction. However, with the rise of theory in the 1970s and 1980s, critical discussions of the genre moved into entirely new terrain. Feminist critics resurrected female writers and fictional detectives largely ignored in the canonical histories; Marxist critics scrutinized the socioeconomic conditions that gave rise to the genre, with special attention to surveillance culture and the carceral system; cultural materialists reexamined print culture’s effect on the genre’s publication history and reception; postcolonial theorists moved the conversation beyond the national boundaries of Great

Britain, the United States, and France; and psychoanalytic critics reassessed detective and criminal characters along the basis of unconscious impulses and mental disorders.

However, with these new theoretical approaches, detective fiction’s literary history remained largely unchanged. Only recently have scholars revisited the genre and its literary and cultural history to investigate alternate possibilities, which in turn decenter the traditional historical narrative.

Ascari’s A Counter-History to Crime Fiction: Supernatural, Gothic, Sensational

(2007) presents one of the most fundamental challenges in recent scholarship to this narrative. Ascari problematizes the purely rational and scientific assumptions behind older definitions by reintegrating sensation fiction and blurring the genre’s tenuous line

between realism and fantasy. He explores Victorian spiritualism and supernatural inquiry alongside the rise of scientific reason and realism traditionally associated with the fin de siècle. By exploring these intersections, Ascari reopens the critical conversation to explore detective fiction’s amorphous history “where its conventions mingle” with other genres and forms, and whose “cross-fertilization” allows creative innovations (xii). Ascari’s work becomes vital to my investigation, as he questions traditional histories of the genre and demands further inquiry into alternate approaches.

My own work participates in his call for a new lens by also examining detective fiction’s

“cross-fertilization” with theatrical performance.

My study is further informed by David Kurnick’s critical inquiry into the novel form.

While Kurnick does not include detective fiction in his brilliant study, Empty Houses:

Theatrical Failure and the Novel (2011), he, like Ascari, questions fundamental assumptions underlying contemporary literary history. Kurnick approaches the production and reception debate concerning the nineteenth century novel via the public/private distinction made between theatrical and novelistic collisions. He challenges the commonplace assumption that the decline of Victorian theater gave rise to a more individuated readership and that the novel’s interior turn rejected the communal activity of performance. Instead, Kurnick asserts the development of the novel’s defining privatized psychologies and spaces illustrate a desire for the communal and public. This becomes evident in five major authors—William Thackeray, George

Eliot, Henry James, James Joyce, and James Baldwin—self-conscious deployment of theatrical imaginings. Kurnick’s insistence that the modern novel’s form and structure cannot be extricated from theatrical imaginings provides the groundwork upon which I

build throughout this project. His integration of space and its importance to these public and private imaginings allow me to fill a crucial void upon which neither Ascari nor

Kurnick touch.

Judith Flanders’ The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime (2014) provides cultural and material support both to Ascari and Kurnick’s central claims concerning formal hybridity and my insistence that ignoring theater leads critics to miss some of the genre’s most vital influences. Flanders demonstrates that the general claim that Victorian theater declined while novel readership rose is incorrect, and is based on twenty and twenty-first century critics’ choice to ignore Victorian theatrical texts. Flanders dedicates quite a bit of attention to theater culture and melodrama’s intimate connections to gothic, sensation, and detective stories. She further reminds us that an exclusive focus on the era’s written materials—literature and play scripts in particular—creates the illusion of decline, because such written materials can be experienced across time while performances cannot. Flanders shows us that the two practices were so intimately intertwined that novel reading and theater attendance sometimes occurred simultaneously. Lyn Pykett, in The Sensation Novel (1994), supports Flanders’ historical reading of theatrical and literary intersections, and maintains that the 1860s was “the sensational decade” in the

“era of spectacle” (1-2). While his primary focus lies with the sensation novel, Pykett argues that the culture of spectacle, performance, and exhibition was so intrinsic to

Victorian life that it impacts literature in “far more profound and enduring ways” (68) than other critical narratives allow. Thus, while Ascari and Pykett recognize the major role

theater played in the development of detective fiction, they also do not investigate sufficiently the genre’s performative possibilities.

My project aims to address such an oversight by investigating foundational elements of both detective fiction and theatrical performance: space and its performative possibilities. I argue that theatrical and performance techniques, especially those connected to spatiality, have not disappeared with detective fiction’s codification as a modern literary genre. In fact, I maintain that such techniques are so entrenched in the genre’s conventions that the symbiosis between detective literature and theatrical performance remains foundational for the genre. As further evidence for my claim, every author I analyze was intimately bound to performance in some substantial way. They either acted or wrote for the theater and/or film, in addition to publishing their literary works. My project focuses on how bodies in space shape both detective stories and performance, so much so that we can read authorial and character performances within the pages of detective fiction in a manner similar to how we engage a theatrical performance. While in many ways necessary and important, the work undertaken to establish literature and performance as separate areas limits innovative new readings by denying both practices’ similarities and interconnected histories. I hope my work serves as a testament to the pioneering efforts that have come before me and opens a path that reunifies both practices and thereby illuminates their intertwined storytelling possibilities.

Terminology and Framework

Thus far, I have bandied about a bit freely concept-terms like detective fiction, performance, and space. I agree with Symons, Chandler, and Fredric Jameson that strict definitions of such terms and concepts often prove more confusing and confining

than necessary. Critics disagree, often vehemently, about these concepts, and my purpose here is not to respond to such long-standing debates3. Rather, I wish to elucidate the central concepts as I use them in my project and clarify how such polyvalent and contentious terms usefully inform my work. So, let us advance into what

Gay McAuley calls “the terminological minefield” (17) and introduce our main theoretical players.

Space as a concept for theoretical engagement, especially in literary fields, is a relatively new disciplinary offshoot. Pioneering studies such as Gaston Bachelard’s The

Poetics of Space (1957), Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1974), and

Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) provide the basis for substantial shifts in how twentieth century thinkers engaged space as both cause and effect, force and product. These works provide important methodologies for how I will engage detective fiction, and I will focus on how space and worldbuilding directly affects the crime genre across time.

The human geographer Yi-Fu Tuan does not often engage literature in his work; however, my usage of space and place as terms throughout my project stem directly from his pioneering studies. According to Tuan, space and place are terms that cannot function without the other. They do not operate as binary opposites, but rather as two ends on a spectrum. In Tuan’s sense, space is the “abstract term for a complex set of ideas” (Tuan 34) and requires human engagement to evolve into the more concrete notion of place. Space’s inherent abstract qualities create conceptual difficulties in any

3 These critical debates and histories do affect my reasoning, but to address them now would sidetrack my immediate purpose for a different project focus. These histories have been exhaustively engaged by others, but the work here focuses elsewhere. Therefore, I will only briefly address these debates and histories when they become necessary.

discipline. As a concept, space is predicated upon an individual’s complex set of ideas, and like all abstract definitions, makes consensus well-nigh impossible. Usage, therefore, must be specifically determined in each case, and context is vital.

Tuan’s spatial theories have many layers and nuances, but I wish to focus on only one aspect of them as a conceptual crux of my project. As the more concrete term, place emerges from the abstract qualities of space as it “acquires definition and meaning” (126). This usually occurs through human beings physically engaging the space and adding “geometric personality” (17) to it with the accumulation of pragmatic and meaningful objects. In this way, “place is a pause in movement [and] the pause makes it possible for a locality to become a center of felt value” (138). When people feel a connection to a specific locality and begin to build a story of their lives—either as an individual or as a community—space can become a place, a center of value, familiarity, and most importantly, security. As the abstract pole of the continuum, space operates differently. Tuan elucidates:

Freedom implies space; it means having the power and enough room in which to act. Being free has several levels of meaning. Fundamental is the ability to transcend the present condition, and this transcendence is most simply manifest as the elementary power to move. In the act of moving, space and its attributes are directly experienced. […] Ideas of abstract space…develop out of movement – out of the direct experiencing of space through movement. (52)

For Tuan, freedom and movement encapsulate the essence of space. Such freedom and movement operate on a physical and metaphysical plane. Tuan maintains that space implies freedom, and for my purposes, this means possibilities. Kinesthetically, space allows us to move around physically; it presents an openness that invites the possibility of experiencing the world around us and developing a sensory schema of our current reality. Freedom and possibility also exist in the realm of perception and

thought, wherein we can transcend our current condition and move forward, improving our reality, accumulating knowledge, and building over time the story of our lives.

These physical and metaphysical realities coexist and cannot be extricated from each other if spatial possibilities are to develop into a sense of place.

This differentiation between space and place, and how one becomes the other, directly ties Tuan’s ideas to Gay McAuley’s work on space in performance, and Marvin

Carlson’s exploration of performance as a theoretical concept. For McAuley, the theatrical event is a “dynamic process of communication” (7) between performer and spectator, and its characteristic feature is “movement rather than mimesis” (92). This is because the actor is first and foremost a body moving through a space, energizing it with meaning specific to its spatiotemporal moment. Carlson also sees performance as dictated by movement of skilled bodies activating spaces; however, he defines the theatrical production, or event as McAuley calls it, as a collection of performances that are essentially repeated copies extending over time (Performance 4). For Carlson, performance is a different concept than theater or production. Performance occurs as a conscious “doubling” of oneself “to have a specific effect” (Mantichora 95). In essence, theatrical performance occurs when a person stands “before a group of fellow humans and ask[s] them to see him as something else, as a fictional being, given a new reality by their willingness to look at him in a different way, as a character” (Keynote 18).

Performance thus requires active participation and conscious engagement on the parts of both spectator and performer to achieve a sense of theatricality, no matter where the performance occurs. Carlson, like McAuley, works with spatiality in this interpersonal exchange and recognizes that “the same process of altering our perception can be

applied to any part of our experience, including the space we inhabit” (Keynote 18). In this way, how we see and how we behave directly influence the possibilities of performance in any space that provides the potential for human communication. Despite their differing disciplines and fields of focus, McAuley, Carlson and Tuan present the possibilities of dynamic interaction, perception shifts, and movement as the defining features of space.

McAuley further explores many different kinds of spaces and places that make performance possible and meaningful. In his book, McAuley moves fluidly between the pragmatic physicality of space and the conceptually abstract as he attempts to uncover the ontological core of theatrical performance. He systematically breaks down the intricacies of theater, audience, practitioner, stage, presentational, rehearsal, fictional, onstage, offstage, textual, and thematic spaces. I exclude from this list the most important space McAuley explores, because, for him as well as for my work, performance space operates as the center of theatrical events, and is a spatial concept that is not bound by the actualized theater building. Performance space is “the unitary space in which the two constitutive groups (performers and spectators) meet and work together to create the performance experience” (McAuley 26). For McAuley, the performance space overrides and subsumes the division between practitioner and audience spaces, thereby providing a place for the two to come together in a dynamic exchange of energy and meaning (26). In his definitions, McAuley slides between space and place, and while he makes no reference to the difference between the two terms, this movement becomes meaningful if we examine together McAuley and Tuan’s spatial theories.

Tuan differentiates three principal types of spaces, what he terms mythical, pragmatic, and abstract or theoretical. In Chapter 2, I will discuss mythical space in more detail and in relationship to detective fiction. However, it is important to recognize that mythical space is “a conceptual schema” that synergistically grows from and informs pragmatic space, wherein the practical application of bodies in spaces encodes symbolic meaning once perception shifts into a more conceptual mode of spatial engagement (Tuan 17). This type of interaction is also true of perception and engagement in performance space as McAuley defines it. The stage functions as a prime example of Tuan’s mythic space, since the empty stage exudes possibilities.

Audiences do not know what the live stage event will bring during any performance, and thus, their tension and excitement anticipates the possibilities in that locus. The audience transforms the stage into a mythic space rife with illusionary and symbolic potential. The performers, on the other hand, as practitioners who transform the performance space into place, must see the stage as a pragmatic space in which they enact their craft. The perceptual movement during a performance between pragmatic and mythic space is a delicate one for audience and performer alike, but the synergistic energy bouncing around these conjoined spaces at once activates the pragmatic and mythical in a single space. In this way, the performer and the spectator engage a single place that continuously oscillates between spatial possibilities, and their shared participation in coding and decoding symbolic meaning ultimately activates a place’s unique meaning-making potentialities.

So what connection, my audience may ask, do these three critics, whose work deals primarily with physical space, have with literature and its settings? In genre

literature like detective fiction, space moves beyond symbolic properties and becomes a vital function in the storytelling process. Characters must operate within distinct places in detective fiction, and in the process of concealing or revealing secrets, they shift their behavior to a conscious series of repeated behaviors most appropriate for the spaces they occupy. Thus, Tuan’s work on space and place coalesces with Carlson and

McAuley’s studies of performance to create a framework through which I am able to read in new ways British detective fiction. The novels that take center stage in my project often transgress generic boundaries, drawing at once upon aspects of the genres of sensation, gothic, mystery, detective, romantic suspense, procedural, and thriller. These works span three centuries and present a cast of characters as different as their generic classifications. Despite their formal differences, however, every text I investigate share two foci: space and performance consciousness.

Since plays are taught in English departments alongside novels, short stories, and poetry, conventional criticism too often applies literary and cultural theory to theatrical texts. My approach, however, inverts this method. Rather than viewing plays from a literary perspective, I examine literature through a theatrical and performance theory lens, which, as a performer, director, and choreographer myself, means I focus on the space of and performances by an author and their characters. I examine literature’s spaces and places as performances spaces wherein characters activate conscious performances to deceive or reveal during the course of an investigation.

For these reasons, my definition of detective fiction is not predicated on the type of detective present nor his/her methodologies. When I reference detective fiction, I mean texts that include characters who recognize the spaces around them as sites of

performance, which can be activated and decoded through the place-making process enacted by the bodies that occupy such spaces over time. As such, I understand detectives as characters who see and engage spaces differently than others. They self- consciously recognize the potential each space offers its occupants, and purposefully read bodies in such spaces as active in a form of theatrical performance, designed for an audience and aimed to achieve a specific effect. In my project, performance and literature function as symbiotic partners in literary meaning-making. As in the case of the age of spectacle in which they evolved, the detective fiction I explore consciously merges two now distinct practices into a single storytelling process, thereby highlighting the inherent theatricality coded into the genre and setting it apart from others.

The Plan of This Work

Space not only drives my dissertation’s conceptual focus, it provides its organizational structure. In the chapters that follow, I map a series of performance spaces central to detective fiction, beginning with the particular spaces of the novel itself and domestic interiority. I then expand outward to examine public spaces and their performance potential, before once again narrowing my focus to liminal spaces. Chapter

2, “The Text as Author-Constructed Performance Space”, explores the detective story as a material example of a consciously constructed performance space, driven by the author’s awareness of their own linguistic performance as much as their characters’ physical performances. The chapter analyzes the semiotic codes and formal constructions authors deploy in their worldbuilding efforts, as well as the forms of character development that require reader engagement. Focusing on spatial mapping, temporal continuums, framing, and point of view, this chapter reads Charles Dickens’

Bleak House (1852-1853) as a prototype of how authors code theatrical writing

techniques into the novel’s linguistic schemas. They do so, I argue, to program readers to perceive the text, its spaces, and character performances in a dualistic fashion. As in a theatrical production, the way the performance is constructed and enacted determines its success in fulfilling audience expectations; and in this case, the performance event is synonymous with the formal and linguistic performances of crime writers in the production of their stories.

Chapter 3, “Moving Inside: Domestic Spaces and Their Performance

Possibilities,” moves inside the novel’s story space itself. In this chapter, I investigate how the worldbuilding and storytelling techniques deployed by crime writers produce a consciousness within the text that characters perform roles in their domestic spaces. I read the house itself as a theater with unique and shifting audiences. Understanding the house as a series of performance spaces waiting to be decoded enables me to examine anew a group of famous sensation texts that are also participants in the generic tradition of the detective novel. I investigate the emergence of empowered characters, traditionally marginalized due to gender and class status, in Wilkie Collins’ The

Moonstone (1868) and The Woman in White (1860), and in Daphne du Maurier’s

Rebecca (1938). Each novel presents a character, often assumed as not possessing investigative acumen, whose intelligence and ability to see like a detective stems directly from their understanding of the spaces they occupy. Each character demonstrates a unique consciousness of place-making and the way other characters perform roles to achieve specific effects. I explore how the ability to generate counter spatial readings and performances as they uncover crimes marks these characters as powerful detectives, despite their gender, marital, or class status.

Chapter 4, “Underestimated Investigators in Public Spaces,” crosses the boundary separating interior from exterior and explores an array of public spaces found in detective fiction. Like the private places of Chapter 3, the ability to activate public locations as performance spaces allows often marginalized members of the social collective to emerge in dynamic and powerful ways. Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple series (1930-1976) and Christopher Fowler’s Peculiar Crimes Unit novels (2003-2018) present performative dichotomies between rural and urban landscapes. Each series features octogenarian investigators who, in their pursuit of murderers, consciously move through public spaces as spectator and performer. Intimate knowledge of spatiotemporal histories links the aging detectives’ investigations directly to their spatial location. I use this fact to comment on the shifting perceptions of mythic and pragmatic space in detective fiction. Shifting spatial perceptions and performances also drive this chapter’s final reading of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Trail of the Serpent (1860) as further evidence of the conscious theatricality encoded in the genre. The novel’s dual storyline offers a glimpse into the differences between the techniques and thematic focus employed by the detective and sensation genres. Braddon’s mute detective’s hunt for a multiple murderer thrusts physical performance into the forefront of the novel’s meaning making schema. The plot requires readers to engage the novel as they would a theatrical text, and in so doing, challenges critical distinctions between theatrical and the novelistic form.

The points mapped in my project thus far coalesce in Chapter 5, “Tana French’s

Liminal Spaces and Vocal Ventriloquism.” This chapter opens with an examination of liminal spaces and the ways they connect with performance history. As in the previous

chapter, the borderlands and boundary lines found in public space remain centrally important in both a physical and metaphysical sense. I then proceed to read the increasingly smaller and private performance spaces of the home and workplace found

French’s In the Woods (2007) and Broken Harbor (2012). Such liminal spatializations bring into focus an often-ignored aspect of the genre: the interpersonal and emotional challenges detectives face during murder investigations. Both bordered and unbordered crime scenes drive my analysis, and they raise questions of transgression and spatial power relationships as they are played out theatrically between suspect and detective. The emphatically bordered interrogation room presents a final space for analysis. Here the discussion in Chapter 2 of author-constructed performance space resurfaces as I develop a scene reading and spatial blocking analysis of In the Woods and Broken Harbor. French’s detailed worldbuilding, liminal challenges, synesthetic spatial activation, and consciously constructed physical and vocal performances offer some of the most illuminating examples of theatrical performance coded within the novelistic medium. French also consciously deploys and makes contemporary nineteenth-century genre codes, and her Dublin Murder series thus serves to bring my project full circle.

The spatial emphasis and performance focus of my dissertation enables me to explore the intermingled traditions from which contemporary crime fiction grew and thereby responds to Ascari’s call for detective fiction to be read through new critical lenses. In The Abominable Bride, Sherlock Holmes advances an observation about the theatrical nature of his work that not only serves as the epigraph to this chapter, but which also inspired my entire project. So, it seems only fitting to conclude the

introduction and begin my investigation proper with one of Holmes’s most famous declarations: “Come Watson. The game is afoot!” (Complete Stories Volume I 881).

CHAPTER 2 THE TEXT AS AUTHOR-CONSTRUCTED PERFORMANCE SPACE

Every writer of fiction, though he may not adopt the dramatic form, writes in effect for the stage. –Charles Dickens Speech at the Royal Theatrical Fund Dinner, 1858

The space is, of course, not an empty container but an active agent; it shapes what goes on within it, emits signals about it to the community at large, and is itself affected. –Gay McAuley Space in Performance

The novel and the stage. The two are very different spaces and forms, separated by dimensionality and physicality, yet both present some of the most successful entertainment experiences in popular culture. As art forms, both textual and performative storytelling stem from the same premise: the revelation of human experiences enacted by fictional entities in a unique time and place for the enjoyment and/or edification of other human beings. As the place where reality and fantasy converge, stories, in prose or on stage, share fundamental characteristics. As a theater professional and a literary scholar, I have found these similarities much more interesting than observations concerning the manner in which the two storytelling modes compete for a seat at the critical table. Perhaps this, more than any other historical or critical rationale, motivates my decision to begin our journey in the nineteenth century, where the lines between individual and communal forms of storytelling merged in a dance of fiction and fantasy that thrilled consumers of popular forms from different gender, race, and socioeconomical groups. Literature and performance were understood to work together, and no one knew this fact more than Charles Dickens.

As with many of his contemporaries, Dickens loved the theater. When he was not writing, the author could be “found backstage, just adoring being part of it all” (Callow

67). Despite his inability to make a living as an actor or playwright, Dickens mapped his

“strong perception of character and oddity” and his “pleasure in the stage devices of coincidence and contrivance” onto his novels (Callow 67). Ivan Kreilkamp also takes great interest in Dicken’s technical and stylistic ability to embed vocal and performance modes in fiction: “From the beginning of his career in the 1830s and 1840’s, he used public speaking as a means by which to infuse his written work with the authority of voice and dramatic performance. […] From The Pickwick Papers onward, Dickens’s work succeeded in the marketplace in part by acting as a script for improvisational public performance” (90). Kreilkamp taps into some of the most significant qualities of

Dicken’s writing style; however, his central focus lies with how the mythos of the

Victorian storyteller developed in a culture of intersubjective performance production. I wish to use Kreilkamp’s insights as a basis for my own investigation of the intricacies of

Dickens’s prose, and the profound effect his techniques have on the perception of his dramatic novels as author-constructed performance spaces.

Dickens’ unique writing style is vital to understanding the inextricability of the performative and novelistic in nineteenth-century theatrically motivated authors like

Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Twentieth and twenty-first century modal reception studies define the performative and novelistic as either a bodily representation or a linguistic presentation of narrative, and therefore forget that nineteenth century audiences blurred the boundaries between communal performance and private reading.

Victorian spectatorship and readership were fluid receptive functions, permeating public

and private spaces. Dickens understood this fluidity better than anyone. He was a writer firmly entrenched in both worlds, and despite his critical failure as a playwright and actor, his engagement with and knowledge of visual performance is fundamental to the construction of his novels. Dickens’ great accomplishment, as I will show throughout my dissertation, was coding the theatrical into detective fiction’s DNA. The result of this genetic coding is twofold: first, these codes have become inextricable from British detective fiction as a whole, and second, Dickens’ gives us a practice of reading. Later writers take up these formal and style techniques, thereby transforming Dicken’s innovation into a tradition. Therefore, these two storytelling modes must be examined together to fully appreciate the impact dramaturgy and performance had on the development in the nineteenth century of the novel more generally and detective fiction in particular.

The Dramaturgical Semiotics of a Novelistic Text

Ann Ubersfeld’s work in theater semiotics provides a launch point for exploring how Dicken’s dramaturgical style becomes so effective at activating the narrative text as a performance space. Ubersfeld outlines two linguistically based categories that in effect create a theatrical text on paper. Dialogue and didascalia—the stage and production directions embedded in the text—produce a diachronic communication between text and reader that “implies a spectator capable of spatiotemporally organizing multiple, simultaneously deployed signs” (10). Ubersfeld further maintains that the reader or spectator’s ability to narratively organize a series of interconnected signification systems relies on textual gaps. These gaps open up a host of missing narratives, unanswered questions, and ghost performances, for which the performance

“bears [the] responsibility for answering” and filling (10). While the performance bears

the responsibility for filling in theses gaps, it is the author’s linguistic performance that initially activates the reader’s engagement. The authored text, the performance, and its reader-spectators all bear responsibility for diachronic meaning-making.

I will return to the issue of narrative gaps and ghost performances throughout my project, but here I wish to address Ubersfeld’s discussion of these textual gaps on a syntactic level. Performance texts present more than story gaps and performance possibilities, since by the very nature of performance’s physical narrative embodiment, the text must also situate those gaps in space and time. Therefore, spatial and temporal vocabularies are necessarily embedded into the text’s dialogue and didascalia, which, according to Ubersfeld, serve a purpose beyond a merely poetic or symbolic function. In performance, spatiotemporal matrices become necessary for actors to construct their performance in a concrete space, and these markers are activated at the level of grammar. Ubersfeld argues that syntagmatic units of adverbials, adjectival phrases, verb tenses, and nominals activate linguistic patterns that the reader decodes to fill in the play script’s textual gaps. These syntactic signification systems are necessarily spatialized in any the performance event. If we understand theatrical texts as Ubersfeld does—on the level of the building blocks of these spatialized linguistic codes—we can theatrically read Dicken’s great novel, Bleak House (1852-1853) and uncover the parallels between his syntagmatic grammar of space and that in dramatic texts.

Dickens begins Bleak House in this way: “London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather” (3).

This sentence stands out in two ways. First, it reads more like a play script’s didascalia

than the opening line of an 861-page novel. Consider Leopold Lewis’s melodramatic sensation The Bells (1871), which similarly opens: “Interior of a Village Inn in Alsace.

Table and chairs, R. 1 E; L. 1 E. an old-fashioned sideboard, with curious china upon it, and glasses […] The country covered with snow is seen through the window; snow is falling…It is Christmas Eve” (119). The novelist and dramatist both begin with sentence fragments identifying location, time, weather, and spatial occupants, both inanimate and human. Dickens sets his novel’s stage, just as does Lewis, dramatically. He manifests the visual differently than other novelists, stylistically manipulating the opening sentence in such a fashion as to render a staged space on the page. By opening Bleak House in this way, Dickens effectively blurs the boundaries between the intimacy and privacy of novel reading and a physical space occupied by moving communal bodies.

This transformation occurs at the level of syntactic construction and illustrates an extension into the novelistic text of Ubersfeld semiotic spatial matrix. Seymour

Chapman and Gay McAuley discuss the fundamental differences between literature and performance–Chapman for film and McAuley for theater. Ultimately, however, both do so in a way that will better enable us to understand how text and performance converge, especially when connected to grammatical matrices grounded in spatiotemporality.

Both observe that one of the primary differences of performance and literary forms lies between showing and asserting. Chapman reminds us that in visual performance “the dominant mode is presentational, not assertive. The film doesn’t say, ‘This is the state of affairs,’ it merely shows you the state of affairs” (128).1 Visual performances show

1 Debate about showing versus telling extends beyond differences between literature and theater. Showing and telling are the basis for conversations about Modern novels’ split between storytelling and affect. For a more extensive discussion of this literary theory, see Frederic Jameson’s Antinomies of

events unfolding and require their audiences to decode accurately such a presentation.

Telling occurs in the realm of textual fiction when, in the absence of a presentation of the physical body, the reader depends on a narrative voice relaying information about a character’s psyche and behavior. I contend that detective fiction requires a more performative presentational mode of description because its focus is as much on the space of the narrative as the characters that move through it. Dickens’s script-like style moves beyond surface modal engagement and literary telling. His work builds literary space differently than other writers by embedding dramatically coded language and syntax, which evoke a physical performance.

In this vein, let’s examine Dickens’ phrase, “the Lord Chancellor sitting in

Lincoln’s Inn Hall” more closely. Its syntactic order sets up a sequence of linguistic signs that presents the illusion of a complete sentence where “the Lord Chancellor” is in the subject position and “sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall” is in the predicate position. After all,

“to sit” is an action verb and follows a noun; therefore, the logical syntactic reading implies a complete sentence. Dickens, however, removes the auxiliary verb that would grammatically transform the infinitive “to sit” into the present progressive “is sitting.”

Since “sitting” cannot operate as a verb without its auxiliary “is,” the absent auxiliary and

“sitting’s” syntactic placement after “the Lord Chancellor” fundamentally changes the relationship of the two parts of speech. The linguistic actor is not performing the action of sitting as the syntactic order initially signals; instead, “sitting” transforms into a participial, a descriptor of the actor, not the action itself. All that remains is for us to bracket the participial phrase, and the text would read thus: “the Lord Chancellor [sitting

Realism (2013) and Phillip E. Wegner’s “The Possibilities of the Novel: A Look Back on the James-Wells Debate” in the Henry James Review (2015).

in Lincoln’s Inn Hall].” Once again, without an 861-page novel at hand, the text looks very much like a dramatic script where action attributed to characters is largely delineated by participial based stage directions following the named character: “Hans

[rising from table and turning round]” (Lewis 121). As such, Dickens’ spatialized linguistic construction presents bodies rather than action in the textual space and, like a dramatic text, requires the reader/spectator to activate the narrative movement by filling in the syntactic gaps. Bleak House’s first grammatical subject is presented not by way of interior novelistic assertion, but rather through performative showing.

Beyond the opening line, Dickens dramaturgical style continues in Bleak House’s first three paragraphs. Dickens repeatedly removes verbs from his sentences or transforms them into gerunds or participials. Both part-of-speech shifts transform the predicate into a nominal phrase, effectively leaving the sentences grammatically incomplete. This unveils grammatical patterns of performative verbs as nominal phrases, not active units, and thereby further blurs the boundaries between novelistic telling and performative showing. This is especially the case when the moves occur in succession. When we read Bleak House’s opening paragraphs in their totality, a series of syntactic gaps begin to form a pattern, and this pattern develops the textual space differently from other novelistic styles.

Dickens unique syntactic styling calls us to reexamine our conventional practice of reading when approaching space in literary texts, since his awareness of spatial mapping and theatrical conventions shapes how we respond to his literary performance.

As I mentioned previously, Dickens removes verbs and uses participials throughout

Bleak House’s opening to describe the novel’s spaces and what occupies it. For

example, Dickens presents a scene in which the “smoke lowering down from chimney- pots, making soft black drizzle” surrounds London’s “foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill humor, and losing their footholds on street corners”; moreover, the “mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound-interest” (3). Mud, smoke, animals, people, fog, gaslight, ships, and buildings emerge as individual syntagmatic units populating the textual and narrative space. However, no single entity emerges as the scene’s focal point; and once again, Dickens deploys participials—“lowering,” “making,” “jostling,”

“losing,” “sticking,” and “accumulating”—to grammatically balance the content descriptions within his unique grammar of space. In so doing, Dickens effectively equalizes and harmonizes the scene by providing a syntactic communion between its individual pieces and their unique spatialized existence.

While I have inserted syntactic connections to illuminate the relationships between these scenic details, Dickens does not. He removes the linguistic signifier for action, and without those action verbs driving the sentences to completion, the syntagmatic units render the individual textual images motionless. Standing on their own, these sentence fragments operate as freeze-frame tableaus such as those one would experience in physical performances. By placing these tableaus in adjacent succession, Dickens creates the illusion of dynamic motion, as the missing verbs require the reader/spectator to fill in the syntactic gaps and actively participate in linguistic decoding and recoding. In this way, Dickens conjures physical movement through grammatical stasis, using parallelism and content development that harmoniously flow from one individual description to another. Movement occurs in the

suspended space between the novel’s sentences. Just as in performance, the reader/spectator can simultaneously experience movement, track subtle changes in the space’s configuration, and recognize human beings in rhythm with their surroundings.

Dickens creates a scene that mimics performative presentation rather than novelistic assertion, and thereby shows how the two modes can unfold interdependently.

Dickens’s world-building technique resonates on many levels with the works of crime fiction that contributed to the development of the genre we recognize today.

While most critics of the genre would not include Dickens, they do so only by ignoring a few historical facts. First, Dickens introduced English fiction’s first official detective in

Bleak House, and wrote repeatedly about the new detective force in the popular magazine Household Words. Secondly, Dickens often collaborated with Wilkie Collins, the author credited with penning the first official British detective novel, The Moonstone

(1868). Finally, Dickens conscientiously began writing the incomplete The Mystery of

Edwin Drood (1870) as a detective novel, but died before completing it. Thus, Dickens’ role in shaping later crime fiction should not be understated. Despite his lack of knowledge of the formulas contemporary critics now use to identify detective fiction,

Dickens script-like style, formal structuring, and voicing deeply influenced the writers who would develop the Victorian sensation novel into the genre.

To further advance my claim, I would like to turn momentarily to Fredric Jameson and his work on Raymond Chandler’s crime fiction. Despite Jameson’s focus on a distinctly American sub-genre of detective fictions, Jameson’s work matters for our discussion in three distinct but interconnected ways: spatial mapping, temporal movement, and framing point of view. In his recent short study, Raymond Chandler:

The Detections of Totality, Jameson discusses the ways the crime text programs its readers. Jameson claims that readers pass through an initial stage where both appropriate decoding techniques and the skills needed to read the codes of space are learned (31). If we accept Jameson’s claim, then Dickens’s evocation of London and the writing technique by which he maps space in Bleak House becomes vital to understand how crime readers have been programmed to read space and place.

A variety of living creatures, from humans to dogs and horses, do appear in

Dickens’ opening description, moving through London’s muddy streets and foggy lanes.

Despite the presence of human characters in this ensemble, they do not overwhelm the scenic description, nor do they represent the focal point of the opening. If what will become in the twentieth century the dominant form of the novel is characterized by a turn to human interiority, thereby placing characters at the narrative heart, Dickens brushes against this trend by minimizing the human presence in London’s spatial map.

Indeed, in Dickens’ hands, space becomes more dynamic than its occupants. As

Jameson puts it in terms of Chandler, Dickens’ “spaces are ‘characters’ or actants” in their own right (Jameson 71). Dickens’s opening equalizes both the details within the description and character and space in the novel. As the initial programming moment,

Bleak House’s opening moves beyond merely establishing a functional or symbolic backdrop; the novel programs its readers to actively engage space as a dynamic force that requires as much attention as the characters who move through it.

This unique spatial dynamism becomes even more pronounced when Dickens shifts from his spatialized tableaus into his description of the London fog:

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of

shipping, and the waterside of pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out in the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great chips; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. (3)

Once again, Dickens’ grammatical choices program his readers for spatial mapping: parallel prepositional phrases determine the narrative relationships and verbal assertions are once again absent from the text. This linguistic performance requires readers to experience London’s spatiality in a unique way that effectively programs us to pay attention to spatial mapping in its totality and in a way that moves beyond a mere recording of characters’ locations.

The 153 words dedicated to the fog illustrates how Dickens maps a three- dimensional space in a textual space bound by two-dimensions. Fog is liminal, neither a gas nor a solid. Fog fills up a space, moves within it with no regards for man-made boundaries. Fog is in-between the physical and intangible, and as such, defies the ability to code our sensory experience into words that accurately capture its liminality, its movement, and its feel. Rather than trying to present a description of the fog, Dickens utilizes its in-betweeness to produce a space that evokes a visceral experience, one that moves beyond the primacy of sight.

Part of our engagement with Dickens’ London fog relies on its non-linear mapping of the space in which it exists. The “everywhere” of his paragraph’s opening sentence begins with the Thames as its center. The Thames River winds through southern England, essentially splitting London horizontally in half. Dickens moves us from the west with “fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows” to the east with “fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.” He then maps specific place markers

in the “Essex marshes” and the “Kentish Heights,” a narrative move that demarcates the counties north and south of the “great (and dirty) city.” In two successive sentence fragments, Dickens touches each point of the compass, thereby mapping the totality of

London and its surrounding counties. The fog acts as the unifying agent connecting places, objects, and people within a known concrete map of London’s sprawling space.

Dickens’ two-dimensional horizontal mapping also evokes a vertical spatiality when he connects the lowered ground of the “Essex marshes” with the “Kentish heights.” He then reverses this sweep from the ground to the hills, as he places “people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog” (3). The spatial disorientation of looking for the ground and only seeing a “sky of fog” confuses the senses and blocks any mapping of one’s relationship to the ground. This gesture ultimately unites the horizontal and vertical axes, as the fog fills in negative space. By connecting the ground to the sky with the same syntagmatic unit he uses to map north, east, south, and west, Dickens literarily activates a three-dimensional map of London and thereby transforms the city into a performance space for its occupants.

The use of fog as a device for unifying the map of London also involves narrative movement, as the fog seeps and expands outwards in all directions at once. This produces a new way of theatrically manifesting space in the novel. The opening paragraphs of Bleak House don’t simply present a list of the things and people inhabiting the novel; nor does the description aim merely to “realistically” mirror an existing space. Rather, Dickens manifests a concrete reality, known intimately by his readers, through a linguistic experience. If we consider performance as a mode of storytelling that relies on performative showing and unfolds in a three-dimensional

physical space, then it becomes clear that Dickens style embodies performative modes within a written text. The static sentence fragments develop a dynamic three- dimensional space and evoke a unique literary experience that requires readers to engage the text at once synchronically and diachronically. By removing conventional linguistic markers of action, while mapping spaces at the same time, the novel’s opening presents a sequence of tableaus that evoke non-linear world-building. Dickens creates an intersectionality of physical, social, and mental spaces through a style that transcodes atmosphere and visceral performative experiences to the page. These narrative techniques for experiential place-making will prove essential for the ways later detective fiction creates character collisions and activates crime scenes.

Spatial Mapping and Crime Scenes

Space as both a construction and theoretical concept is central to detective fiction. Michael Arntfield’s important book explores the “empirical and practical applications of forensic expertise” in Victorian literature; he reads the transformation of

Gothic fiction’s “imaginative constructs” into Inspector Bucket’s suspectology (33).

Arntfield maintains, “The future application of forensic science in the context of murder scenes had already begun over a decade earlier” (52), and explicates his argument with

Edgar Allan Poe’s “Murders at the Rue Morgue” (1841). Dickens’ worldbuilding in Bleak

House also illustrates this forensic and spatial consciousness. He codes murder scene forensics into the text’s material space and establishes a spatial matrix through which characters engage crime scenes.

Characters activate their spaces and, in doing so, illustrate “the spatial organization of the fictional world is always to be perceived in terms of ideology”

(McAuley 18). This process unveils space as dynamic: “Place making is fundamentally

an art of milieu,” John Dixon Hunt explains, and “it creates a midst in which we see or set ourselves, [we create] places to be lived in” (2). The logical extension to Hunt’s claims shows that as human place-making alters space, it constructs a narrative of everyday rituals and routines that are unique to the person who occupies and acts on the space. For example in Bleak House, Esther inquires after Richards health, and he replies, “You may read it in the whole room. It is all over here” (607). She “reads”

Richard’s despondency and hopelessness in his room’s disorder. His “half-dressed” and “unbrushed” hair mirrors the space until he “look[s] as wild as his room” (607). As such, the complex, interlocking system of spatial production and human behavior construct a subjective narrative, which can be perceived and decoded by outsiders who enter the space.

As Dickens’ novel illustrates, detective fiction utilizes the human understanding of how place-making functions. The novel itself serves as a material space for its author’s linguistic performance, while simultaneously presenting fictional spaces that require readers actively to engage with them in the meaning-making process. It is my contention that this spatial and performance consciousness sets the genre apart from other narrative forms and closes the critical gap between linguistic and performative storytelling. McAuley’s work on the significance of space in performance connects the ways a spectator engages a performance and how a mystery reader engages a novel.

As with Ubersfeld, McAuley views “the theatrical event as a dynamic process of communication in which the spectators are vitally implicated, one that forms part of a series of interconnected processes of socially situated signification and communication, for theatre exists within a culture that it helps to construct, and it is the product of a

specific work process” (7). McAuley underscores the fact that space acts on the performer as much as the performer acts on the space. The dynamic process of social, cultural, and narrative construction that occurs between spectator and performer programs a unique spatial awareness, in which the communication process relies on spectator participation in the decoding of space and body performance. As with Bleak

House, crime novels activate a similar dynamic, such that the interactions between space and its occupants, and space and its audience, mimic those found in theatrical performance. This requires readers, both within and external to the narrative, to deploy a blend of theatrical seeing and novelistic reading as they work to decode spatial mappings and narrative secrets.

McAuley also cites Ubersfeld who states that “the theatre is space” (1), and later maintains that “the action of the play thus emerge[s] from the spatial organization of the fictional place, and the sequence of events [is] determined by the ‘collisions’ this spatial organization permitted” (81). I similarly read crime scenes as performance spaces where “nothing exists in isolation” (McAuley 16) and in which “the primary signifiers are physical and even spatial in nature” (McAuley 5). A crime like murder is a unique collision which produces a complex interlocking set of signifiers. The initial act which may not have been socially performative in nature, becomes so with the arrival of outside audiences (investigative team, jury, journalists, and so forth) who struggle to decode the spatial signifiers and reanimate the victim’s story.

One of the hallmarks of detective fiction’s divergence in the nineteenth century from sensation and gothic fiction lies in the shift from witness testimonials and hearsay to empirical evidence. In Bleak House, Inspector Bucket hears about the three suspects’

proximity to the crime scene, but declares, “that don’t signify anymore” (726). The witnesses’ testimonies “don’t signify” viable clues without concrete evidence to tie the crime’s narrative together. Rapidly advancing technology created a new importance of

“trace evidence” in criminal investigations. Trace, as opposed to circumstantial, evidence assumes that human beings cannot occupy space without leaving physical evidence of their presence. When it comes to crime narratives, “No one killed without taking something (usually unintentionally) from a scene. Or leaving something behind”

(Graham 175). Bucket is aware of Hortense’s theatricality as she attempts to frame

Lady Dedlock for Tulkinghorn’s murder; therefore, to ensure he arrests the correct suspect, Bucket must tie the murder weapon to Hortense and prove her presence at the crime scene. Witness statement are not enough for her arrest; he needs trace evidence.

In addition to the physical traces we leave behind, the accumulation of possessions, and the ways these objects personalize a place and wear it down through everyday living creates a unique narrative of a human life. These traces contribute to the development of space as a character, a place, with its own unique narrative that is both connected to and separate from the story of the various characters: “Rooms get an awful look about them when they are fitted up, like these, for one person you are used to see in them, and that person is away…so, empty rooms, bereft of a familiar presence, mournfully whisper what your room and what mine must one day be”

(Dickens 774). A place and its occupants thus function symbiotically: the former acts as the spatial signifier of conscious and unconscious human behaviors and the latter activate the space as ideologically meaningful. In detective fiction, space exists in a

constant state of flux. This evidentiary story becomes the focal point of the detective’s investigation.

As the inciting action of a detective story, crime freezes space, making it a liminal, in-between place. After human bodies violently collide, an unnatural stasis overtakes the otherwise dynamic space and keeps it from moving forward beyond the moment of the crime. For example, Dickens activates objects on Tulkinghorn’s last walk through London. He fuses the warning, “Don’t go home!” to clocks, chimney stacks, and a Roman in a painting with questions concerning agency and silence (648). After the gunshot, however, the Roman no longer “eagerly point[s],” but rather appears “as if he were a paralysed dumb witness” (651). Dickens assigns a dynamism to the Roman that freezes into silence the moment he “witnesses” Tulkinghorn’s murder. Thus, violence transforms dynamism into stasis and creates a presentational space for Bucket to investigate.

Physical boundaries are constructed by investigative teams to preserve the scene for inspection and analysis or, what I refer to as decoding and recoding. Arresting the progression of the place means that everything in the physical space takes on a double meaning; thus, the most insignificant detail can become a clue to be decoded. At the crime scene, Bucket “found the wadding of the pistol with which the deceased

Tulkinghorn was shot” and explains that “it was a bit of the printed description of your house at Chesney Wold” (726-727). The wadding thus contains two possible narratives.

First, it links the crime scene with the Dedlock’s manor and provides evidence of Lady

Dedlock’s involvement. Alternately, Mrs. Bucket discovers the rest of the manor’s description in Hortense’s room. When she “puts the pieces together and finds the

wadding wanting” (727), the evidence places Hortense not Lady Dedlock at the crime scene. Bucket applies a forensic lens to the scene’s objects and sees dual narratives at play. In this way, the crime scene’s liminal status requires all those who step across the boundary line to see it synchronically in its arrested temporal state, and then reassemble its elements diachronically in order to see the whole.

Once again, McAuley provides insight into how crime scene technicians in detective fiction engage this spatial dualism. The framing agent in theatrical performance activates a performance space. Within such a space, “objects on the stage tend to merge into the background, and they become meaningful only when handled, looked at, or referred to. It is through the agency of the actor that objects are brought to the attention of the audience” (91). The performance space, whether or not formally bordered with a proscenium arch, is always separate from that of the spectator.2 Within such a space, the performance derives meaning from the ways the performer’s body frames, or activates, the various signification systems at play in it.

Much like the objects that populate a performance space, objects in the crime scene merge into the background until they are required for use. In the moment of a crime, these objects can become activated by the participants’ use of them in an expected manner (i.e. a lamp becomes a tool with which to attack a person). In this way, they become vital in fusing place with characters. When the detective enters the framed performance space of the crime scene, he also activates objects. However, the

2 I hesitate to use the absolute in this statement, since performances do sometimes cross into or occur in the audience space. When this occurs, however, the audience undergoes a perception shift that remaps their spatial configurations and body performance. This often results in feelings of spatial transgression and discomfort, since they are aware that the performance space occupies a separate space in which they do not functionally belong. As such, despite the forcible convergence of the two spaces in these cases, an audience’s understanding of theater spatiality and place-making still functions within an understanding that a performance space as separate from their own.

detective does so for the spectator’s attention. As a result, our perception shifts based on where the detective places his focus. Dickens repeatedly draws reader attention to seemingly insignificant details like Lady Dedlock’s bracelet (707) and “drawers, desks,

[and] pockets” (698). Dickens refuses the reader access to Bucket’s deductions about these objects; therefore, Bucket’s handling of the evidence brings it to our attention and challenges readers to decode its significance. Until he activates the objects, however, we remain unaware of their presence, and rely on Bucket to explain their meaning.

Crime scenes operate in a similar way both during the occurrence of the crime and in the subsequent investigation. Because we, like the detective, are not always privy to the object’s importance in the execution of the crime, we engage the crime scene as a performance space waiting to be decoded. Only by remaining unchanged after a crime has occurred can the scene be understood as a performance space, where all the objects in it potentially can be reactivated in the reconstruction of the missing narrative.

After the investigators have wrested every significant clue from the static place, the scene re-enters a dynamic temporal plane. However, Hunt reminds us that any place “involves not only the inhabitants and users, but the history of the place that is made or remade” (3). Edward Casey and Yi-Fu Tuan highlight the fact that the human body is the main activating agent for shaping the meanings of a space. Dickens also highlights this idea in Bleak House: “You are impaneled here, to inquire into the death of a certain man. Evidence will be given before you, as to circumstances attending that death, and you will give your verdict according to…evidence, and not according to anything else. The first thing to be done, is to view the body” (145). In Victorian jurisprudence, the body remained in the crime scene for jury viewing. In this way, the

body allows the jury access to an otherwise inaccessible place. They too decode the body in space and participate in remaking the scene’s narrative. The communal viewing then expanded to murder tourists, thereby transforming the crime scene into a communal theatricalized space (Flanders 34). Because a human “body implicates space” (Tuan 389), the memory of the crime, especially if it is a particularly heinous one, marks the space as perpetually other. Older significations of the space are replaced by the memory of the crime. This makes the space take on a mythic status: no matter how often the place is occupied by new inhabitants, the scene remains frozen as the place where X happened.

As mythic space, the crime scene represents a private place transformed into a public one. While detective fiction focuses on a multitude of crimes, murder is the one around which most crime writing revolves. P.D. James reminds us that murder is “the unique crime, [because] it carries an atavistic weight or repugnance, fascination, and fear” (11), and it is the “ultimate crime for which no human reparation can ever be made” (12). Tuan’s discussion of the “mythic space” as a product answering the needs of the group (405-406) speaks to the horror and fascination produced by such a crime and the communal need to understand and cope with it. In Bleak House, six characters die, some in spectacular circumstances. Characters mourn Captain Hawdon, Mr. Krook,

Jo, Lady Dedlock, and Richard, but Mr. Tulkinghorn’s murder generates a public spectacle that the other deaths do not. “A great crowd assembles” for his funeral and an “immense” number of “inconsolable carriages” pass by his house, the scene of his murder (Dickens 699). Tulkinghorn’s house becomes a narrative focus, and references to the crime scene surface in other characters’ plotlines. The murder crime scene is

located outside of everyday routines, and, like the stage, “‘fictionalizes’ to some extent whatever is presented [in] it” (McAuley 28). Tuan also claims that mythic space is anthropocentric on a grand scale, where the center or “the place of men” is the focus

(405). In this way, the crime and later criminal investigation locate a previously insignificant space in these larger maps, and shifts the ideological focal point to the place of human collision. In this way, the crime scene takes on a liminal in-between state as neither public nor private.

The remapping of space within these larger social frameworks begins with the most important body occupying it, that of the victim. The transformation of a human life into a victim incites spatial stasis. Victims of a violent crime become part of the space itself, as another object to be decoded. Oftentimes, after the initial inspection of the body, the victim is removed from the scene and seems to become of secondary importance. However, while the victim’s body may become secondary as an object to be decoded, the memory of the event in the space remains active. Chesney Wold’s

Ghost Walk actualizes the Gothic family curse trope into this type of spatial stasis.

Lady’s Morbury’s death freezes the manor’s terrace with “something of a mysterious interest, in addition to its real charms” (Dickens 497). Esther imagines herself as

Morbury haunting the Ghost Walk and must shift her perception when Lady Dedlock appears. In this way, Dickens fuses the legend of Lady Morbury’s death with Lady

Dedlock’s story; Esther’s imagination informs the novel’s mysteries and manifests memory into physical form (506). Tulkinghorn’s house mirrors the Ghost Walk once his body activates the place’s mythic potential. If bodies implicate place and activate performance spaces, then the dead body performs the dual role of producing a static

place of violent trauma, while simultaneously activating the missing ghost narrative of its life and death. Once trace evidence allows the investigator to reanimate the body as object-to-be-read—or an absent performer in the missing story of the crime—the narrative totality fuses the space’s mythic liminal status with the victim. The victim subsequently becomes “reified into the landscape” through the new mythic status of crime victim (Heissenbuttel 87). The place and its static body instigate the investigation around which the genre revolves.

The Temporal Art of Crime Storytelling

Beyond a space’s status, temporality in detective fiction establishes some of the most basic principles and conventions of the genre. Jameson maintains that

“storytelling is a temporal art” (Antinomies 8). Similarly, Ernst Bloch’s reading of detective fiction speaks to this temporal dimension by laying out three characteristics that he argues define the genre: the suspense associated with guessing; the unmasking and discovery process; and, most importantly for our discussion, the narrative events that must be reconstructed through the investigation. I refer to this last pre-narrative as the omitted beginning. On the most fundamental level, the entire point of the deductive process is to recover the lost narrative. The concepts of seeing and knowing become integral to this investigative process and depend largely on notions of cause and effect.

The levels at which characters and spectators know the omitted narrative and see its causes and effects involve a heightened temporal self-awareness. This power, more than any other element, determines a character’s function in the text. Ostensibly, only the victim and the criminal know the complete pre-narrative: witnesses and suspects know partial aspects of it, even if they are not fully aware of what they know; and the detective, like the reader, knows none of it, at least at the beginning.

The tensions between characters’ abilities to see and know require a more extensive discussion of time planes within detective fiction’s plot construction. Bloch maintains, “Something is uncanny, that is how [the story] begins. Investigative uncovering is indeed only one aspect, aimed at the origin. Investigative edification is the other, aimed at the destination. There, the finding of something that has been, here, the creation of something new” (262). If we visualize these two sets of interrelated terms as

I do in Figure 2-1, we can better understand how temporal planes influence detective fiction’s conventions as well as the ways readers experience the text.

Figure 2-1. My continuum of Bloch's temporal concepts

If we put origin and destination at opposite sides of a temporal continuum along which a detective, and by proxy the reader, moves in the course of discovering the omitted beginning, we see how the investigative mental processes are held in tension

with each other as they oscillate back and forth along the continuum.3 As the detective moves away from the origin, or omitted beginning, towards the destination—the closure of the case with the discovery of the pre-narrative—s/he remains in a constant state of finding what was there through investigative uncovering. The paradoxical tension that occurs as the detective moves further towards the destination collapses the idea of finding by transforming the uncovered clues into information that can be used to reconstruct the case: this is what Bloch calls investigative edification. This necessitates using the found information to create the narrative in its totality.

In this way, detective fiction requires the detective and the reader to operate in two distinct temporal locations, the past and the present. The line indicating “Time

Present” will continuously move forward along the continuum towards the destination, the case’s closure, but it cannot do so without investigatively “seeing” both the now and then (the here and there). The detective and reader’s present in the narrative is related to the continuum whereby, with each new piece of information or clue, past events contribute to a new narrative. This requires the detective to be able to see diachronically and synchronically as s/he constructs the constantly changing narrative. The frozen space of the crime scene requires a synchronic focus to uncover the significant clues, and “absorb all the minutiae of an official enquiry” (Graham 204). At that same time, to see the narrative’s totality requires a diachronic mode that must discover events. It is

3 According to Aston and Savona, Chronological Time is a theatrical term denoting the linear time sequence of the narrative totality. Theater has four structural temporalities that will be important for this discussion. Plot Time is the restructuring or reordering of the events from the chronological time to shape the here and now of the narrative present. Plot Time engages in time shifts like flashbacks, reportage, and time between scenes or acts when in the interest of the dramatic present. Time Present is the location of the spectator in the “here and now” of the fictional universe unfolding in dramatic action; the spectator experiences this time line as a continuous temporal plane. Lastly, Performance Time refers to the finite period of time for the narrative events to unfold.

important to note that these actions are not presented in a flashback manner, where the scene exists in only one temporal and spatial plane.

Bleak House’s ten interwoven plotlines illustrate Dicken’s ability to influence readers’ seeing during investigative uncovering. I address narrative voice and framing’s influence on Dickens’ structure in the next section, but I must discuss the novel’s overlapping temporality before I address the vocal performances’ contribution to the mystery’s edification. The novel’s plotlines focus on character narratives that are instrumental to the mystery. Esther, Lady Dedlock, Inspector Bucket, Mr. Tulkinghorn,

Mr. Guppy, Mr. Snagsby, George, Jo, Mr. Smallweed, and Mr. Woodcourt’s narratives occur in parallel time present, and each is told linearly according to the character’s experience. Dickens, however, weaves the novel’s mysteries together non-linearly throughout the ten; thus, Bleak House’s structural spatiotemporality complicates the novel’s shift between now and then. Readers observe document exchanges, overhear conversations, witness blackmail attempts, and see the killer enter Mr. Tulkinghorn’s house. Yet, Dickens builds these events into different plotlines without elucidating direct connections between them; thus, plotline multiplicity effectively masks the truth. Bleak

House’s structure requires readers to engage both a synchronic and diachronic mode of seeing to assemble a total linear narrative, which reveals the killer and her motives.

During an investigation, the detective is in a constant state of absorbing data,

(re)creating the crime, and thereby uncovering the omitted narrative. The investigation takes on a Janus-like temporal movement, both forwards and backwards. As a tightly structured plot time, the ghost narrative exists in a state of flux, simultaneously being discovered and re-written. This Janus-effect adds another layer to both the detective’s

and the reader’s liminal status as outsider and insider: they must exist spatially, temporally, and socially within and without the scene in order to see the narrative whole.

McAuley’s work on the theatrical space proves important to understanding the temporal conflations that allow crime scenes to be viewed as performance spaces. His work also ties directly to Bloch’s concepts of investigative uncovering and edification.

The synchronic viewing of individual details speaks to McAuley’s claim that “the central fact of theatrical semiosis [is] the complex interplay between the physical and the fiction, and the meanings that emerge from that interplay” (22). Theatrical physicality absorbs a network of bodies, gestures, objects, and spaces that, when interwoven, participate in the construction of a fictional event with its own codes of signification and meaning. In

Bleak House for example, the woman dressed in black recurs in Lady Dedlock, Esther,

George, Jo, and Inspector Bucket’s plotlines. The figure generates different narrative possibilities with each appearance, and links the omitted beginning to current crimes.

The interplay between the figure’s physical presence and her narrative performance requires a theatrical mode of decoding to uncover her connection to the mystery.

Dickens recodes her action’s meaning each time the woman in black resurfaces in a new plotline. Inspector Bucket’s deduces in Chapter 54 that two characters dress as veiled figure: Lady Dedlock to hide her identity and Hortense to frame Lady Dedlock for murder. Both Lady Dedlock and Hortense activate self-conscious performances as the woman in black, which construct the murder’s false narrative. Thus, as McAuley claims,

“being an event rather than an object, performance is radically unstable in the meanings it generates and in the activities it engages” (16). As with Bleak House, the network of clues in detective fiction operates as signifiers whose relationship to each other

construct an event, and this solidifies into the truth of the omitted beginning. Thus,

McAuley’s theory of radically unstable meanings operates as well at the most basic levels of detective fiction. The genre relies on the understanding that objects, space, bodies, and behaviors can generate more than one fictional series of events, and are not bound by the confines of cause and effect in the same way as in other modern novels. Just like a detective observing a crime scene, “the spectator in the theatre does not receive information in a purely linear way; while some systems are functioning in a linear manner (notably the narrative), others are perceived as a simultaneity” (McAuley

35).

If we consider the detective as a spectator and the crime scene as a performance space, what becomes evident are the intersection of theatrical and novelistic modes within detective novels. Detective novels, like stage performances, must operate linearly in constructing a narrative plot or investigation. Conversely, however, the process of uncovering the omitted narrative and reconstructing the events is non-linear. As with a theatrical audience, the detective—and by proxy the reader— receives information out of sequence. The mode of information collecting thus relies on all the senses operating simultaneously in order to construct meaning. The clues uncovered by detectives operate in a state of McAuley’s “radically unstable” dynamism, constantly adjusting their relationship to the constructed narrative as the “complex interplay” between the growing network of clues often threaten to destabilize and obstruct the detective’s investigative edification and reconstruction of the crime’s ghostly performance. As in the case of theater, what the characters and authors choose to show their audience and the way in which they show it, determines the level of narrative

instability and complexity among the intersecting details. These narrative challenges operate the level of narrative framing, and thus Jameson’s theory of the programming of readers of detective fiction usefully illustrates how space, time, and mapping embed the possibility of radically unstable theatrical dynamism into the genre’s constructed performance spaces.

Framed!

As in the case of theater performances, literary framing serves an important function in the textual space. Such framing in literature is nothing new, and it relies on a human body to activate the textual space. Structurally, frame narratives provide another layer of meaning, another story, operating in tandem with the embedded story or stories. Appearing most prominently in the first and last pages of a text, the frame encloses and introduces the central narrative situation. It can also bring together multiple nested narratives that inevitably comment on the frame story. More importantly, in detective fiction the frame functions to the program the readers in the ways discussed by Jameson. Systems of signification and meaning making are established to encourage reader engagement. The frame technique teaches the reader how to engage with the central spaces of the novel by introducing point of view, establishing setting, signaling temporal displacements, and constructing a core story out of which all others evolve.

While not all literary texts utilize framing conventions, I contend that all detective fictions do so, albeit in a variety of specific and concrete ways. At its outset, the frame and its narrative point of view establish the signification system the novel will deploy.

There are, of course, many different practices assembled under the larger umbrella of detective fiction: the whodunnit, the howdunnit, the whydunnit, and the howcatchum,

among others. However, all these sub-genres rely on framing to signal to the reader the ways they should engage the narrative. Narratives from the detective’s, the criminal’s, the victim’s, or the witness’s point of view differ greatly, and the framing techniques teach the reader how to approach any specific plot.

Frames in detective fiction also draw the reader into the narrative by presenting an element of intrigue and mystery. The frame almost always contains the introduction to or revelation of what Bloch refers to as the missing narrative. Moreover, as Ubersfeld notes for both literature and theater, the text contains gaps, and these gaps create missing narratives, unanswered questions, and ghost performances, which the text ultimately answers or completes. The frame story contains the crime, and it is the secret that galvanizes the characters to action. The majority of the text follows the detective team through its journey to discover the text’s omitted beginning, which hovers at the edges of every clue, suspect, witness statement, and interrogation. Similarly, the purpose of detective fiction is to reveal the frame’s secret. The main narrative’s goal is to fill in the gaps and bring the frame story into focus, such that the totality of the plot becomes visible.

Detective fiction operates under the three basic techniques of narrative framing outlined in Mieke Bal’s study, Narratology. The first technique introduces the embedded story before fading into the background. The frame’s reintroduction at the end of the story is not necessary; but if it reemerges, it does not affect the embedded story or its outcome. This first technique is most clearly evident in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s

Sherlock Holmes series. The second framing technique occurs when the frame narrative functions as a parallel story that leads to some form of change for the

characters and/or the investigation. In this technique, the frame proves necessary for the reader to decode some aspect of the primary narrative. Dickens’ Bleak House deploys this second technique. The third framing technique occurs when the frame narrative remains invisible. When the author reveals the frame’s presence or true function, a new truth forces the reader to dismantle and reassemble the primary narrative in order to fully grasp the story’s meaning. This technique is used to produce the shock effect so many readers have come to expect from the genre. Agatha

Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) and Anthony Horowitz’s Moriarty (2014) are two of the superb examples of this last technique.

Mixed Point of View Casts

Any discussion of framing in detective fiction begins with the narrator. The narrator is the single most powerful device used by a crime writer to program their readers. This power derives from the generic formulas that have been refined during the more than century and a half of the genre’s development. Dickens and Collins utilized frame programming and developed unstable interplays between narrative voices to construct their novels. These conventions enable them to signal their aims from the outset, and this allows the author to initiate the process of mapping the narrative’s performance spaces. The earliest examples of detective fiction proper—Bleak House and The Moonstone (1868)—deploy a mixture of first- and third-person narration. This blend produces a trust that the first-person narrator possesses an intimate knowledge of events. First-person narration in detective fiction relies on a specifically situated

Character-Bound Narrator, whose “‘I’ is to be identified with a character in the fabula it itself narrates” and “usually proclaims that it recounts true facts about her- or himself. ‘It’ pretends to be writing ‘her’ autobiography” (Bal 22). Bal’s definition establishes the

detective fiction narrator as storyteller, “a visible, fictive ‘I’ who interferes in his/her account as much as s/he likes, or even participates as a character in the action” (18).

This mark of novelistic interiority fuses the speaker’s experience of the case with the reader’s involvement in the investigation. It also functions as a reminder for the reader that all information has been mediated by a character who desires to recount the events. Moreover, because the speaker is not omniscient, s/he has the potential to be in error or even lie about these events. The first-person narrator thus functions as a theatrical performer who activates meaning in the textual space.

Juxtaposing the interiority evoked by a first-person narrator with a disembodied third-person narration programs the reader to read both novelistically and theatrically as s/he encounters each new event. I need to clarify here the distinction between novelistic and theatrical seeing. First, to see novelistically means the reader identifies, often unconsciously, with the character’s interiority, and as a result, privileges the narrator as trustworthy. This narrator can be first- or third-person, but in either case, the reader assumes a false omniscience. This results in the reader believing the information presented is complete and, as a result, that s/he can make reliable judgements about characters, events, places, and objects. Seeing theatrically, however, involves the reader possessing a double perception, at once connecting with a character and actively assessing the behavior of a character as a performance. What remains unsaid thus often proves more important than what is stated. If a reader sees a text theatrically, s/he can recognize textual gaps and activate the most meaningful signification systems. Studying detective fiction at the level of form means understanding that the two modes are both at work in any text. Many crime writers

manipulate the modern assumption that we can engage narratives in only one of these ways in order to conceal vital information and hold the reader in a state of un-knowing.

This in the end heightens suspense and creates interest in the missing narrative.

Dicken’s Bleak House illustrates how blending first- and third-person narration establishes the twin framed and embedded narrative. This technique reinforces notions of false omniscience that will affect how detective fiction subsequently develop. Bleak

House is complexly plotted, with a large cast of characters. While there are at least ten plot lines, these all intersect with the novel’s secret concerning the parentage of the heroine, Esther. This claim may raise eyebrows from those who conclude that, due to its placement, the Jarndyce and Jarndyce court case functions as Bleak House’s frame narrative. Indeed, Chapter 1 would seem to embody Bal’s first framing technique, with the lawyer-as-investigator. However, approaching the novel as detective fiction calls into question the use of the court case as the frame. In fact, the first installment constructs a three-dimensional space. Throughout this long and complex novel, the court case functions as a thematic touchstone, juxtaposing the theme of stasis and dynamism. However, it fades into the wings with the introduction of the quest to discover Esther’s origins. As such, the opening installment becomes less about framing and more concerned with programming the reader to engage space in a theatrical mode of seeing.

Bleak House’ opening installment establishes the space in which numerous collisions of bodies occurs. Point of view becomes vitally important to understanding how the novel frames these collisions. In Chapter 2, Dickens introduces Lady Dedlock’s story through an unnamed first-person narrator. This is a prime example of Bal’s “actor

‘I’: which from the point of view of identity, coincides with the narrator [but who is] probably not important from the point of view of action” (28). Lady Dedlock’s unknown observer “stands apart, observes the events, and relates the story according to its point of view, [acting] as witness” (Bal 28). The narrator relays Lady Dedlock’s observations without inserting herself into the narrative. As her story progresses, it is only the occasional “my” or “our” slipped into the text that indicates the narrative is related through a first-person point of view. The use of a narrator who is at once a knowledgeable “I” and a detached storyteller both provides insight into her identity and programs the reader to engage with Lady Dedlock.

The first-person narrator demonstrates an emotional connection to Lady Dedlock, relaying her opinions about places, events, and issues without ever entering the narrative as a character herself. She refers to Lady Dedlock as “My Lady Deadlock”

(Dickens 9), and possesses intimate knowledge of Lady Dedlock in both her public and private world. “My lady” is a traditional mode of address that a maid uses for her mistress, and, as such, acts as a signifier of the narrator’s status. I will explore the figure of the domestic detective more fully in Chapter 3, but the narrator’s status here is vital to how we decode the information we receive concerning Lady Dedlock. The narrator “I” becomes a spectator, who with the interjected first-person address, draws the reader into Lady Dedlock’s world as an empathetic witness. As someone who exists in a liminal plane, the disembodied domestic narrator can observe Lady Dedlock’s social and private performances.

Lady Dedlock’s secret drives Bleak House. When Chapter 2 opens, the narrator comments on the world of fashion, one which Lady Dedlock inhabits in an almost

queen-like manner. The narrator parallels Lady Dedlock’s world of fashion with the

Court at Chancery, whose description in the preceding chapter establishes it as a temporally liminal space, at once dynamic in its daily activities, yet static in its totality.

The socially-driven world of fashion is a similar liminal “deadened world” whose

“scenes” flit by in tableau (Dickens 9), but with social respectability and being “perfectly well bred” (11). Lady Dedlock maintains her wealthy status and achieves her position at the “centre” and “top” (11) of the fashionable world by hiding the fact that she gave birth to a child out of wedlock. The narrator, whose knowledge of Lady Dedlock’s secret remains ambiguous, observes her mistress in her daily activities, and notices that “My

Lady Dedlock, having conquered her world, fell, not into the melting but rather into the freezing mood” (11). After achieving her status, Lady Dedlock keeps the secret that could ruin her by “freezing” her emotional dynamism in both public and private spaces.

Concealing this secret requires her to perform the role of an emotionless aristocrat. At its core, Bleak House relates the community’s hunt to uncover this missing origin narrative, and this missing story serves as the narrative’s frame.

This narrator as non-actor presents itself in Lady Dedlock’s narrative. This presentation programs the reader to engage Lady Dedlock through theatrical seeing, observing her behaviors, speech, and body expression from a spectator’s point of view.

The narrator allows Lady Dedlock to keep her secret by remaining an observer with no access to her interiority. “Seeing, taken in the widest sense, constitutes the object of narrating” (Bal 19), and the reader, like the narrator, experiences Lady Dedlock’s story from the outside. Dickens’s narrative relies for its effects on Lady Dedlock alone having access to the novel’s central secret. As in later detective fiction, her secret creates the

frame, and determines how the other embedded narratives weave themselves into the novel’s totality.

Unlike Lady Dedlock, Esther appears to firmly establish herself in the novel’s world. Lady Dedlock maintains a performance rather than creating it, since she freezes her act of narrative creation after hiding her secret. Esther, conversely, bursts on stage in a dynamic state. She introduces herself by stating, “I have a great deal of difficulty in beginning to write my portion of these pages” (16). Thereafter, she continues to demonstrate a strong active “I” by relating an anecdote that at once presents her unique voice, relays character traits, and establishes her as the center of the novel. Esther’s awareness of her status as narrator and creator goes beyond the witnessing we see with the narrator in Lady Dedlock’s story. Esther declares she has “a silent way of noticing what passed before [her], and thinking [she] should like to understand it better”

(16). This situates Esther as observer of those around her, while also establishing her as a novelistic creator, with the power to determine what her audience knows. What sets Esther apart from Bleak House’s other major characters is that she is the only first- person narrator who maintains the strong personalized “I” throughout.

Using this form of a mixed point of view ultimately draws our attention to the connections between the novel’s two “I’s”. The effect is to enclose Esther within the frame established by Lady Dedlock’s story. As Lady Dedlock’s illegitimate child, Esther is the secret Lady Dedlock keeps, and she is the “crime” every other character in the novel seeks to unmask. Dickens utilizes these two different first-person narrators to establish a theatrical frame for reading Lady Dedlock and to launch other characters’, as well as the reader’s, quest to recover the missing narrative. When Lady Dedlock

ultimately confesses the secret to Esther, the frame and its secret converge, with only the reader remaining as a witness. The reader thereafter no longer operates as an investigator, but rather as a conspirator, who desires that other characters remain ignorant of the truth. Dickens builds suspense by playing on our mutual desire to protect the frame secret and Lady Dedlock’s performance. As with later more proper detective fictions, the efforts of other characters to recover the frame’s secret serves as the narrative crux.

This convergence of frame and embedded narrative becomes more complicated as a result of Esther’s unique position. As we move from the theatrical spectator of

Lady Dedlock’s story to Esther’s expression of her interior, Dickens forces us to shift how we perceive each character. The reader experiences Esther’s interiority in a state of omniscience. However, Dickens complicates our relationship with Esther’s narrative position as her story progresses. Esther consistently demonstrates her prowess as a keen observer of human behavior, so while we may be experiencing her interiority, she makes it very clear that she experiences others through observation and deduction.

Early on, Esther expresses one of the most important concepts for reading detective fiction, when she refers to her ability to “notice what passed before [her],” and claims,

“my comprehension is quickened when my affection is” (17). Esther is aware that an emotional connection to a character, whether in a novel or on the stage, engages the audience’s affection in a way that makes us more active readers or spectators. The reader’s “affection” prompts heightened observation and ultimately “comprehension”— especially in readers who trust that she tells us everything that passes through her

mind. Esther engages our affection, which stimulates a belief in false omniscience: that is, we forget that she too is a character with secrets to protect.

Midway through her narrative, the reader begins to get evidence that Esther has been refusing us total access to her interiority. For example, she omits details about her emotional connection to Mr. Woodcourt:

I have forgotten to mention—at least I have not mentioned—that Mr. Woodcourt was the same dark young surgeon whom we had met at Mr. Badger’s. Or, that Mr. Jarndyce invited him to dinner that day. Or, that he came. Or, that when they were all gone, and I said to Ada, “Now my darling, let us have a little talk about Richard!” Ada laughed and said—. But I don’t think it matters what my darling said. (201)

Esther implies in her qualifier that she does not forget to inform the reader about Mr.

Woodcourt’s presence; rather, she chooses the omission. The repeated series of “or” statements illustrate these omissions are numerous and ongoing. When she halts her revelation mid-thought, Esther highlights her right to privacy and denies us access to her emotional state. Thus, only when she reveals that she has been keeping secrets from us do we discover that we have been both novelistic confidante and theatrical spectator at the same time. Readers misrecognize this fact because of their affection for the first-person narrator, their intimate connection with her psyche, and their knowledge of her status as the crime, or secret. Esther’s voice is unique amongst Bleak

House’s characters. Her intelligence and confidence emerge forcefully throughout the novel. She speaks her mind and reveals new facets of her personality in each chapter she narrates. At first, Esther’s kindness and empathy mask her strength. She appears to function as an angel in the house character until she claims her right to privacy and reveals her narrative omissions. In this way, Esther draws attention to the fact that her story requires a blend of novelistic and theatrical seeing to comprehend the narrative

whole. Esther’s unique voice and dualistic performance connects her to other characters in detective fiction. In many ways, Miss Marple (Chapter 4) and Rosalind

(Chapter 5) function as later Esthers, and they too require the same practice of reading to uncover the narrative’s meaning. If we engage Bleak House with an assumed divide between novel and performance, we risk misunderstanding our dual position as reader and spectator, a misunderstanding that effectively limits our comprehension of the plot.

Dickens forces us to maneuver between novelistic seeing and theatrical seeing, and thereby makes evident the ways mystery writers activate narrative places as performance spaces to be decoded and recoded.

The Evolution of First-Person Point of View

Dickens’s experiments in the blending of the theatrical and novelistic had a profound effect on his friend and writing partner, Wilkie Collins, who produced the first critically acclaimed detective novels in English literature. Collins developed a narrative style that fuses the first-person witness spectator and the novelistic confidante in the form of witness statements. He uses this technique most effectively in The Woman in

White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868), both of which I discuss more fully in Chapter

3. When these witness statements are compiled and arranged according to their place in the crime’s timeline, the narrative whole takes shape. Characters engage the mystery’s conflicts as dramatic events and its places as performance spaces. These first-person narrators serve as physical participants, performers, and witnesses who activate the process of uncovering and discovery central to the crime plot. Collins, as with Dickens, utilizes script-like dialogue and character voicing to challenge conventions of novelistic interiority. Characters and readers alike recognize that they are not privy to

all the information and must engage their surroundings and fellow characters with the astute eye of a spectator, and not the false omniscience of a confidante.

Dickens and Collins both develop a narrative style that invites trust in their first- person narrators. This trust was solidified as a central aspect of the genre by Sir Arthur

Conan Doyle, who shifted from a cast of characters serving as narrators, to a single first-person narrator. While Doyle’s work in the short story form places him outside the scope of my focus on the detective novel, his influence on the style and conventions of later detective novels cannot be ignored. Despite Dickens and Collins’ earlier experiments, Doyle is often credited as the “father” of British detective fiction. There are many reasons for his influence: his blend of adventure and deduction, the condensation of multiple plotlines to a focus on single crime, and a memorable central detective.

While I acknowledge the importance of all of these elements, I believe Doyle’s most important contribution the developing genre is his use of a first-person narrator detective in the figure of Dr. Watson. Watson’s performances in both the frame and primary narratives fuse novelistic and theatrical seeing and establish the primary practices within the genre for many years to come.

As with the narrator of Lady Dedlock’s story, Esther, and Collins’ witnesses,

Watson as a narrator is acutely aware of his position as storyteller. However, unlike his predecessors, Watson creates an autobiographical frame that serves as an entry point into Holmes’s cases without being necessary for decoding the primary narrative. This technique presents a secret, but instead of a crime, the unknown is his partner, Holmes.

As creator and character, Watson provides access to his own interiority and activates novelistic seeing for the reader; at the same time, Watson shows that he is unable to

read other characters, especially Holmes. This move activates theatrical seeing as a central mode of engagement to the readers of the series. Watson’s efforts decode

Holmes’s behaviors, expressions, and domestic space, which he believes will provide insight into Holmes’s interiority, becomes as intriguing as Holmes’ own struggles to decode suspects and crime scenes.

The Watson figure presents a unique narrative positioning, at once interior and exterior, which inaugurates a unique programming of the readers of detective fiction.

His at once insider and outsider standing becomes the foundation of the story’s structural development, and deeply influences later practitioners of the genre. For example, Agatha Christie manipulates the Watson trope, and proves that the programming of readers is inextricably linked to the text’s point of view, framing, spatializations, and temporal markers. In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), Dr.

Sheppard’s first-person status immediately situates him as the novel’s Watson figure to

Hercule Poirot’s Holmes. Seasoned detective readers have been pre-programmed to trust what the Watson figure tells them and to engage the mystery’s clues more clearly and comprehensively than this narrator is able to do. Dr. Sheppard’s performance as a narrator plays on our expectations of him to be a trustworthy character, who cannot match the lead detective in intelligence or investigative prowess. The self-conscious deployment of the Watson figure creates the illusion that the missing frame narrative contains the story of the murder, effectively masking the novel’s true secret (which is that Dr. Sheppard has committed blackmail and double homicide).

The dialogue-driven narrative is punctuated by double-edged discourse and narrative gaps; only at the novel’s end do readers discover this performance is highly

stylized and plotted to lead us astray. Once Poirot names Sheppard as murderer, the novel’s frame and embedded narrative converge and reveal to the reader/spectator that we have engaged the narrative novelistically when we should have been doing so theatrically. Sheppard effectively activates the reader’s confidence in a false omniscience, and as a result, the reader either ignores or inaccurately fills in spatial and temporal gaps that in fact serve as clues to Sheppard’s criminal involvement. The fusion of the frame and primary narrative requires a complete recoding of the all preceding events, spaces, timelines, and frames. Subsequent readings of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd present a completely new story, one whose performances and narrative gaps reveal themselves in the embedded dialogue and didascalia. This now seems so evident that we wonder how we missed them the first time. With our new mode of seeing—or what Wittgenstein would term the aspect change—the novel transforms into a theatricalized space in which every object is placed in such a way as to create a narrative illusion activated by its unique frame and narrative voice. Christie often stated that she considered herself more of a playwright than a novelist, and her dramaturgical writing style crosses both forms throughout her oeuvre: most of her novels follow a three-act structure, begin with a ‘Cast of Characters’ list, and utilize dialogue driven plots. Christie activates her novel as a performance space that requires a hybridized engagement through both theatrical and novelistic seeing in order to discover its secret.

The formal techniques constituting detective fiction’s power can be traced back to

Dickens and Collins’ experiments in blending dramaturgical with novelistic writing techniques. As the genre continued to evolve through the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries, these storytelling codes became more and more hybridized until readers could no longer tell where one ended and the other began. When we shift our critical perception and explore the detective novel as a performance space we can recover vital aspects of the genre’s unique power and attraction. The narrator’s performance, however, only begins to plumb the depths of the detective novel’s theatrical borrowings.

The performances of characters within the narrative enhance the author’s performance without—and both performances rely on an acute spatial awareness on the part of the writer and reader. My remaining chapters map the genre’s many fictional places in order to understand how performance spaces serve as the locus for the genre’s characters to stage their intellectual and physical battles.

CHAPTER 3 MOVING INSIDE: DOMESTIC SPACES AND THEIR PERFORMANCE POSSIBILITIES

Country house discourse, then, is profoundly defined by a sense of time and place, by the haecceity of a particular estate. –Kari Boyd McBride Country House Discourse

We were like two performers in a play…we had to put up this show, this miserable sham performance for the sake of all these people I did not know and did not want to see again. –Daphne du Maurier Rebecca

Perception is the key to space. The manner in which the eye processes space can transcend visual worldbuilding and become multi-sensory. In Chapter 2, I discussed the stylistic and formal techniques authors use to map detective fiction’s narrative and textual spaces and how these can often determine the extent of reader/spectator participation in active meaning making. I will now enter the worlds found in detective fiction and explore the ways characters perceive and engage the spaces they encounter. Just as on a stage, different characters engage the same space differently based upon their age, race, gender, social status, and any number of other factors.

Jennifer M. Groh maintains that knowledge of spatial boundaries manifests in human perception and behaviors. As our eyes move, our brain updates its spatial matrix, which subsequently contributes to the ways we embody sensations, process movement, and construct spaces. Groh simplifies this concept by stating that we humans use our brain’s constructions of spaces to think and remember (2-5). Samuel

T. Shanks applies Groh’s concept of cognitive architecture, which is “focused on identification of the borders between objects,” to the theater and performance (44).

Shanks explores the eye’s ability to re-program its cognitive architecture as the brain

engages in extending and shifting borders between spaces, objects, and bodies. He also draws upon Jerzy Grotowski’s claim that “space determines how we think” (16), to argue that the audience’s gaze can be controlled by a script’s spatial language. In this way, cognitive awareness of borders becomes vital to the narrative in both text and performance. As an audience experiences a series of shifting boundaries, they

“become increasingly comfortable with their ability to shift cognitive boundar[ies] of performance space” and remap their cognitive architecture (Shanks 44). In this way, worldbuilding and character relationships develop when space alters.

Repeated re-mappings activate a container schema mentality, or the “mental construct that allows each of us to conceptualize something as existing ‘within’ something else” (Shanks 44). Performances rely on nested container schemes in scene changes, stage dressing, character placement, and audience space.

Performances activate these schemas on physical and metaphysical levels, and without such processes, plots lose their dynamism. Space is re-shaped numerous times in a single performance, and these changes determine the actualized and symbolic signification systems. Shanks and McAuley maintain that activating performance spaces and their container schemas requires a spectator who remains open to retraining their brain. Space’s centrality in the performative mode makes these perception shifts fundamental to the form’s codes. Detective fiction foregrounds space in a similar manner, and I contend that performance’s constant re-negotiation mirrors the repeated re-programming detective fiction readers undergo as the narrative develops space and their borders. Spatial shifts require readers to remain active high-

attention spectators. Each addition to the space remaps the novel’s cognitive architecture and challenges reader perceptions of character, plot, and setting.

This chapter investigates the domestic house as a theater space in which multiple container schemas are active. Readers and characters renegotiate interior and exterior borders and learn to activate spaces in ways aligned with their needs. McAuley maintains that, “the idea of an interior without an exterior is peculiarly unnerving, for users of buildings need to be able to relate the inside to the outside” (48). These interior and exterior binaries directly affect the systems of social interaction that exist in and around them. Dillon questions if it is possible to represent an interior non-theatrically, since literature’s physical creation of space frames the domestic’s interior space as a stage that “demands to be seen differently” (Muthesius qtd. in Dillon 105). Each domestic container schema creates a new audience and performer relationship, and detectives emerge as they develop new spatial agency and activate the roles of spectator and performer.

The House as Theater

The manor house constitutes the setting for a significant portion of British fiction.

The establishment and maintenance of British institutions often prove inseparable from these domestic establishments. The mapping schema of British places revolves around the manor house as an idealized center of human relationships. As such a center, the manor house is both a physical place and a cultural myth. This combination enables interrelated codes of meaning, whereby the place is often mistaken for the myth and the myth, in turn, helps produce the place. The pomp and ceremony of grand houses make them ideal for elaborate performances that perpetuate these myths. Kari Boyd McBride argues that the house and its occupants participate in performances of legitimacy that

construct a male-centered site of power. Thus, the domestic participates in myths concerning gender, class, and culture, and the manor house’s theatrical nature shapes those myths through domestic performances.

These spaces enable an elaborate and shifting performance of domesticity.

Body proxemics affect the manor’s ordered interrelationships, and spatial shifts produce a new dichotomy between audience and performer. For example, the foyer is a transitional space in which the border of the house’s interior and exterior activates specific social rituals. These rituals arise from the cultural codes of guest, host, and hospitality. Moreover, object arrangement, physical gestures, and linguistic exchanges enact the foyer’s cultural codes at the level of performance. When characters shift to the dining room, ritualized interactions transform into those forms appropriate to the new space. The same can be said of drawing rooms, the family’s private quarters, and servants’ quarters. The manor’s spatial configuration modifies cognition and influences behavior. Cultural myths also impact a domestic space’s interior and produce layers of interpersonal performance based on power. In turn, manor communities activate forms of domestic spectatorship that contribute to the house’s functionality.

The power dynamics between the master and servant participate in the performer-spectator mentality. This dynamic necessitates a mode of seeing akin to that of a detective. These characters whom I identify as domestic detectives do not control the spaces they occupy. They operate at a disadvantage and develop behaviors to counter such an imbalance. They become active agents through their ability to see the manor as a theater with a collection of performance spaces. They decode rooms,

people, and behavior through observation and deduction, and as a result, they become more powerful.

The Butler Did It!

In detective fiction, the butler did it! trope illustrates upper-class fears of domestic power. Spatial proximity to secrets complicates the manor’s power structures. McBride suggests:

The (re)articulations of country house discourse served ultimately to mediate change, doing the cultural work that allowed for the transfer of power from one group to another, for the renegotiation of social and economic relationships, and for the emergence of new subjectivities. It was only by connecting what was new to what was known – by giving innovations the imprimatur of age and by painting the novi homines with the patina of venerable respectability – that the revolution could be affected. (9)

The three novels I examine in this chapter engage in such rearticulations and renegotiations of power relationships. These novels illustrate the transfer of power from the master to domestic detective. Such powers obtained by domestic detectives extend beyond their more inscribed legal rights.

As I noted in Chapter 2, while Charles Dickens creates British literature’s first detective, his friend and collaborator, Wilkie Collins is often credited with penning the first true detective novel, The Moonstone (1868). Like Dickens, Collins experimented with style and calls into question cultural ideologies. The Moonstone’s steward, Gabriel

Betterage, challenges the manor house’s power structures and becomes a domestic detective in the process. During his years of service, Betterage climbs the domestic hierarchy, advancing from pageboy to farm-bailiff to house steward. He gains knowledge of the house’s exterior and interior functions, which affords him a unique position among the staff. Additionally, he knows room details, people’s habits, and

communal place-making patterns. These knowledges coalesce into a domestic cognitive network and shrinks the power imbalance between Betterage and his employers.

When Rachel Verinder’s diamond is stolen, Betterage’s knowledge renders him vital to both the household’s continued functioning and the police investigation. When

Sergeant Cuff arrives at the manor, Betterage offers the detective advice:

My experience of the women-servants, when Superintendent Seegrave laid his embargo on their rooms, came in handy here. “May I make so bold, Sergeant, as to tell the women a third thing?” I asked. “Are they free (with your compliments) to fidget up and downstairs, and whisk in and out of their bedrooms, if the fit takes them?”

“Perfectly free,” said the Sergeant.

“That will smooth them down, sir” I remarked, “from the cook to the scullion.”

“Go and do it at once, Mr. Betterage.”

I did it in less than five minutes. (162-163)

This exchange illustrates the ways in which Betterage’s “experience” is spatialized on the levels of the household and the investigative. His experiences in the household gives him the power to influence Cuff’s actions. He recognizes the freedom to move through the manor implies trust and this enables him to “smooth” the tension other members of the staff experience. Betterage’s suggestion illustrates an understanding that spatial movement provides agency in a situation that threatens both freedom and privacy. His suggestion also functions on the investigative level. He creates a less tense space for the detective and fosters cooperation between the staff and investigator. Betterage spatializes their interactions, which provides Cuff with the opportunity to investigate the psychological motivations of the household.

Cuff states his intent “to see the servants, and to search their thoughts and actions…instead of searching their wardrobes” (173). This expressed goal departs from eighteenth-century investigative methods and introduces a new mode of discovery. He applies this method to all members of the household, regardless of gender or socioeconomic status. This demonstrates an open-mindedness and disregard for existing hierarchies. Moreover, Betterage galvanizes the domestic staff to claim new agency.

They begin “mak[ing] their inquiries” on their own and collecting clues that prove instrumental in Cuff’s investigation (216). The investigation’s success relies on Cuff’s unique mode of “seeing”. He recognizes the house as a performance space and understands his position as an outsider in it. Without insider help, his actions might encourage characters to withhold the truth. Thus, Cuff relies on Betterage as an

“observant man” (173) and his investigative partner. Betterage similarly deploys Cuff’s methodology, and their partnership fuses the inside and outside.

As both domestic detective and narrator, Betterage occupies a position of power in both the novelistic and performative sense. Betterage’s novelistic power stems from his artistry as a storyteller. His performative power stems from his spatial knowledge and an awareness that domestic rituals are performances. He relates a story, participates in an investigation, and this provides him with power beyond his position.

Tellingly, Betterage’s elevation does not threaten his employers’ authority; instead, he earns respect from all members of the community. In this way, The Moonstone uses crime and theatricality to challenge Victorian concepts of socio-economic hierarchy.

Sensational Women in Dangerous Spaces

Betterage’s position as both steward and investigator gives him access to most of the house. However, gender denies him access to Rachel Verinder’s room. The

room serves the final container schema in a continuum from public to private space,

Rachel allows only a few trusted women into her private space, and this creates a place in which secrecy and mystery have the potential to be sexualized in dangerous ways.

Collins’ novel plays with the dangers of conflating female morality with space by staging the Moonstone’s theft at night in Rachel’s room. The theft implies an invasion of her space, which also suggests an assault on her virtue. Thus, the crime compounds the space’s mystery and threatens the women who have access to it.

Betterage’s daughter, Penelope is Rachel’s lady’s maid, and occupies a unique position in the novel. She both keeps Rachel’s secrets and functions as a domestic detective. She “observe[s],” “see[s],” “overhear[s],” “notice[s]”, and “detect[s]” behaviors that “no intelligent lady’s maid could misinterpret for a single instant” (132). Collins utilizes verbs associated with investigative methodology to attribute these skills to a domestic servant. Penelope “observes” Rachel’s behavior as a spectator watches a performance, and she interprets meaning like a detective. After the theft, Penelope deploys these skills to counter the Superintendent’s charge that she stole the

Moonstone. His class and spatial prejudice necessitate she heighten her observation and performance to allay his suspicions.

As a woman, Penelope occupies a paradoxical place defined by gender expectations and spatial proximity. She brings Betterage “news from the upper regions”

(102) and makes deductions “from signs and tokens” (113). Penelope is the first character to identify Godfrey Ablewhite, the novel’s criminal, as a “nasty, sly fellow

(120), and she rightly perceives his behavior as a performance aimed at manipulating the community. Betterage dismisses her assessment as fancy; however, the novel

reveals Penelope’s observations and deductions are correct. In this way, Penelope functions in the narrative as Cuff’s female counterpart.

Penelope’s appearances in the novel are brief and overshadowed by her father’s detective and vocal performances. Penelope emerges only in her father’s story; she does not narrate her own. She has no first-hand textual agency; however, her investigative labor elevates her narrative agency. In detective fiction, peripheral female characters like Penelope emerge as powerful figures through their detective skills and spatial activation. This in turn further expands the genre’s progressive possibilities.

Hybrid People and Places: Marian Halcombe’s Case for Lead Detective

Between November 1859 and August 1860, Dickens serialized in his two-penny magazine All the Year Round Collins’ newest story, The Woman in White. Published eight years before The Moonstone, The Woman in White participated in two emerging subgenres: the sensation novel and the detective story. As one of the first sensation novels, The Woman in White stands as a milestone in British fiction. The novel speaks to changes in national culture by highlighting such concerns as Walter Hartright’s contrasting reactions to the city and the country, his marriage to an heiress despite being common born, and the secret socialist societies of Europe that act as independent forms of justice. However, the novel centers on questions of women’s rights in marriage and legal inheritance for both sexes. The novel’s identification as sensation fiction derives from its characters’ clash in melodramatic landscapes over legal issues surrounding identity.

The conspiracies surrounding the legal right to inheritance of the two main characters, Sir Percival Glyde and Laura Fairlie, drives the novel’s multiple plots, and makes the spaces they inhabit vitally important. The novel’s play with deception and

secrets and its concern with person’s “secret self” (Collins 517) are characteristics of

Victorian Gothic fiction. At the same time, the concealing and unveiling of secrets are also key elements of the detective genre. Discovering a secret grants a character an advantage over another, and thus positions of power are redefined based on a character’s abilities to see and activate places as performances spaces.

A number of critics have mapped the novel’s geography, place, and landscape in terms of gender and legal agency. For example, Sidia Fiorato identifies the three graveyard scenes as pivotal moments of female agency. In these scenes, the novel’s victimized women reestablish their identity through a bodily recording of their life history and death. This makes the graveyard’s space a site of women’s revolt against the patriarchal hegemony of Victorian England. Ann Elizabeth Gaylin further shows how narrative space is infringed upon through eavesdropping on the part of both characters and the reader. Both Fiorato’s and Gaylin’s readings establish the importance of the novel’s physical spaces as a site of agency for the novel’s female characters. While their insights ground my analysis, I shift away from spatialized concerns over the victim and victimizer binary, and focus instead on the novel’s manor house and landscape as performance spaces. Such an approach challenges the novel’s generic placement and raises the possibility that it represents an early experiment in detective fiction.

As the compiler of the novel’s depositions and the voice that begins and ends it, the working-class hero of the romantic plot, Walter Hartright, serves as the novel’s narrative focus. With no legal claim to his own land, Walter’s identity does not rely upon familial place. Instead, his attachment to land performs what John Dixon Hunt terms place-making. Walter discovers a connection to Limmeridge and sees it as a place to

build a life. Walter is a drawing master, and the reader expects he possesses a talent for clearly seeing space. However, he lacks spatial awareness and fails to cognitively map his surroundings. As the romantic hero, seeing the landscape through his emotional attachment to Laura satisfies demands of the sensationalist genre, but such limited sight becomes problematic for a character who also occupies the role of an amateur detective: it is precisely his inability to decode landscape that contrasts him with the novel’s hybrid female character, who ultimately emerges as the novel’s real detective.

Despite Walter’s narrative power, Marian Halcombe’s hybridity complicates

Walter’s privileged position in the text, and shifts the investigation’s focus to her. At their introduction, Walter’s description of Marian immediately establishes her as a physically contradictory character, with a “rare beauty of form” and “easy elegance” coupled with a “swarthy complexion, masculine mouth and jaw,” and “prominent, piercing resolute brown eyes” (24-25). By blending masculine and feminine qualities,

Collins immediately sets Marian apart from the novel’s other women. Moreover, her perception and quick intelligence establish her, despite her legal position, as a powerful, hybrid character. She is an unmarried, upper-class woman with no title or inheritance.

Therefore, her physical hybridity converges with a paradoxical inability to reconcile independence with her financial dependency. Marian’s ultimate power derives from her

“piercing resolute” eyes and an ability to navigate her situation with unusual intelligence.

Marian’s first conversation with Walter illustrates that her intelligence derives from her powers of observation. She declares her spatial perceptions, unlike his, will “go out to misrepresent nature” (27). She further affirms that “women can’t draw […] their

eyes are too inattentive” (27) and describes herself as “dark and ugly” (26). As she assesses her looks and social position as disadvantageous, Marian knows she cannot afford to be “inattentive.” Her joke about “misrepresenting nature” illustrates her ability to perceive space and her recognition of art’s inability to represent nature objectively.

Once Marian’s journal entries take over the narrative voice, her deductions prove correct, as she comes to recognize Blackwater Park as a dangerous performance space for disadvantaged women.

As soon as Marian and Laura move to Blackwater Park, Marian begins to explore and assess this new space. She describes her rounds of “sight seeing” as a “day of investigations and discoveries” (176). Her “seeing” becomes inseparable from her activities of “investigating” and “discovering.” This conflation signifies her role as the novel’s detective and identifies her spatial investigation as instrumental to solving the coming crime. She takes a day to investigate Blackwater Park’s grounds, describing the square’s “circular” fishpond and surrounding turf, the “stifled” grounds, the “small and poor and ill-kept” garden, and the “wasted” lake with its “still, stagnant waters…separated into pools and ponds, by twining reeds and rushes, and little knolls of earth” where she notices the movements of frogs, rats, and snakes on the far side with its “damp and marshy, overgrown [ground] with rank grass and dismal willows”

(176-178). Marian’s immersion in the landscape contrasts with Walter’s Romantic dis- engagement with space. She records her observations with precision, and in so doing, engages in narrative place-making. Her investigation exposes the Park’s “wasted” and

“dismal” performative space as wild, contradictory, and dangerous.

On the other hand, Laura conflates Blackwater with Victorian assumptions of domestic safety and privacy. She believes her bedroom provides safety from Sir

Percy’s abuse, and the boathouse provides privacy. The novel’s opening maps

Blackwater Park as a contrast to Laura’s childhood home, and her conflation of the two indicates her lack of critical thought. Marian, conversely, engages the doubled space and grows “suspicious of everybody and everything” within Blackwater Park’s borders.

Her behaviors become a domestic performance, and she warns Laura to “speak low”

(243), since in a house of eavesdroppers and performers only “silence is safe – and

[they] have need of safety in this house” (232). In this way, Marian activates Blackwater

Park as a performance space. She uses performance to impose new place-making practices on the manor and thereby secure their safety.

Count Fosco is the only other character aware of the space’s performance possibilities, and the threat outsiders pose to the power he embodies. Before Fosco and

Percy finalize their plan to disinherit Laura, Fosco asks Percy, “Where are your eyes?

Can you look at Miss Halcombe, and not see that she has the foresight and resolution of a man?” (287). Fosco contrasts Percy’s powers of observation with those of Marian and draws attention to the dangers of being inattentive. He recognizes Marian as an adversary and hence his equal in intelligence and power to map their space. Fosco silences Percy until Marian’s bedroom light goes out, because he knows “she is sharp enough to suspect something, and bold enough to come downstairs and listen if she can get the chance” (282). The Count is aware of the danger Marian presents to him in

Blackwater Park’s interior spaces. He recognizes her ability to move through this space gives Marian a distinct advantage, and he moves their conversation outside.

Marian also recognizes the spatial dynamic and anticipates Fosco’s actions. She gains the metaphorical and literal high ground by eavesdropping on the ledge above the men. The novel conjoins two spaces when Marian ventures onto the roof and crouches

“down between the flower pots” (283), where “the sweet-scented leaves of the flower on my left hand, just brushed my cheek as I lightly rested my head against the railing”

(285). Her contact with the flowers and house railing activates a hybridized space, at once natural and domestic. This performative space is one Fosco fails to recognize, and it provides Marian with the power of the investigator. In this way, Marian activates a place of “between-ness,” where landscapes are treated as rooms and rooms are treated as landscapes (Heissenbuttel 86).

Her occupation of the doubled space, however, also proves dangerous. She falls ill after the experience, and temporarily loses her powers of sight and memory. At the high point of her illness, Marian cries out that the fever cripples both her “head” and

“sight” (298). Unlike similar literary scenes, Marian ignores the cultural implications of her illness. Instead, she focuses on her head and sight, thereby deconstructing the text’s sensationalist thrust and transforming her illness into another investigative concern. She cannot leave her sick bed and, as a result, cannot control the spectator and performer positions she has activated for herself at Blackwater Park. The temporary disruption of her detective skills nullifies her power, and Fosco gains the advantage.

During Marian’s two and half month illness, Anne Catherick dies and is buried under the name of Lady Laura Glyde, while Laura is incarcerated in an asylum under the name of Anne. Once Marian recovers, her powers return, and she works to uncover the truth of Laura’s supposed death. She activates her spatial knowledge to find Laura

and Walter, acquire a London apartment, and discover Fosco’s location. Her narrative status as an in-between character transforms the landscape of the genre. Her defiance and strength questions notions of female agency in sensation fiction, and her hybridity becomes an asset in her work as a detective. These attributes will later be taken up by other social outliers in the genre.

Collins’ worldbuilding goes beyond the melodramatic set pieces of sensation fiction, and positions the borders between the interior and exterior as spatial hybrids bound to power, privacy, and pursuit. As in the case of Betterage, Marian pens the central narrative; like Penelope, she proves the more objective observer and record keeper; and finally, like Cuff, Marian reads the places in which she is an outsider as performance spaces to be in activated during conflicts. Both The Moonstone and The

Woman in White locate legally powerless and socially marginalized characters in places of narrative power. In this way, Collins blurs generic tropes and challenges traditional notions of class and gender hierarchy. Reading The Woman in White as sensation fiction places our focus on the roles of the victim and victimizer and the themes of emotion and legal identity. However, to do so blinds us to the novel’s similarities to The

Moonstone and its status as proto-detective fiction. As hybrids, both novels shift narrative focus to space and performance. This enables new conversations about power and agency in Victorian literature and allows unexpected characters to take center stage.

What’s in a Name?: Du Maurier’s Developing Detective

In 1938, Daphne du Maurier published a novel that still resides on the list of Best

Mysteries of All Time. However, as with Collins’ The Woman in White, Rebecca (1938) is not identified as a detective novel. The novel’s cover describes it as “Romantic

Suspense,” or what I identify as neo-sensationalist fiction. While this label situates the novel within a specific literary and popular culture tradition, it denies its inclusion in the canon of detective fiction. With its palimpsest of tropes and traditions, the novel hovers as a generic outlier, at once gothic, sensation, mystery, crime, and romance. I read

Rebecca as an origin story of a detective, who, by necessity, learns to decode people, places, and performances in order to secure the safety of herself and the people she loves.

Rebecca tells the story of a young woman who moves into a domestic space not her own and which becomes dangerous to her. Unlike Collins’ novel, Rebecca presents a different type of dangerous domestic space. In this novel, the manor is a crime scene and remains frozen in memory. Manderley Hall is marked by the crime and becomes uninhabitable. Characters associated with the house’s history—staff, husband, family, friends, and townspeople—have already remapped their social schema with the manor as the center of trauma. The narrator, however, possesses no knowledge of the Hall’s history or previous occupants. The story surrounding Rebecca’s disappearance hovers on the edges of every social interaction connected to the house, but little information is relayed to the narrator. She discovers that Manderley Hall remains unchanged and is marked by Rebecca’s earlier history of place-making. The narrator reads a book of poetry in which “the name Rebecca stood out black and strong, the tall and sloping R dwarfing the other letters” (33). Another character later explains that “the beauty of

Manderley that you see to-day, the Manderley that people talk about and photograph and paint, it’s all due to her, to Rebecca” (274-275). The house perpetuates Rebecca’s memory and she cannot be extricated from its spaces. This fact denies the narrator

place-making agency in her new home. In response, she develops a method to decode space and performances and claim power over her situation.

As the novel opens, the second wife of Maxim and the novel’s unnamed narrator, who I will call UN, observes the house’s occupants as “liv[ing] within a “frame” (38): they activate “stately little performance[s]” (68) and play “parts” on the “stage” that is

Manderley Hall (82). Furthermore, Manderley is referred to as “the most famous show- place in all the country” (273). Such descriptions transform the manor into a performance space akin to a theater building. This then makes Marvin Carlson’s concept of ghosting performance useful for a reading of Rebecca. Carlson claims ghosting relies on “recycle[d] past perceptions and experience in imaginary configurations” (3) that are “deeply involved in memory, because it is memory that supplies the codes and strategies that shape receptions, and, as cultural and social memories change, so do the parameters within which reception operates” (5). He further notes that in this way perception is reconfigured through different interpretive communities.

The Manderley “stage” creates tension between memory and progress in two ways. First, performances of domesticity activated by Rebecca in life are repeated by the domestic staff after her death. Manderley’s domestic staff actively recycles their remembered past and shape UN’s perception of the house and its domestic rituals as theatrically performative. Secondly, the performance of normalcy by Maxim in public generates contrasting stories. This scenario deploys a false performance code and re- shapes memory into an imaginary configuration. These scenarios misrepresent

Rebecca’s murder as an accident and freeze Manderley in a series of ghosting performances.

The ghost performances function within a code of domestic meaning unique to the manor and spatialized by the bodies occupying it. UN’s arrival activates the fusion of past and present performances through her occupation of Rebecca’s spaces. UN’s spatial activation initiates a struggle between those who wish to memorialize the past in a frozen performance of normalcy and those who wish to transform Manderley. UN’s struggle to transform a marked crime scene proves more difficult than she expects. As the second wife, she is an outsider in a space she neither owns nor creates—indeed, at times, she is not even allowed to enter it. The domestic staff are hostile to her presence and refuse UN physical and psychological agency as mistress of the manor. These actions transform Manderley into a dangerous place for UN, because as “someone

[who] enters the performance space who is [originally] not supposed to be in that space”

(McAuley 74), UN becomes a transgressor in this domestic space and experiences the discomfort and powerlessness born from displacement.

UN’s growing awareness of this situation activates her engagement with her new space and she learns to decode it as both spectator and performer. As a spectator, UN must learn to see her new space‘s amorphous levels of signification in order to function in it. As performer, she must activate the spaces she enters and work towards a developing a performative agency. UN identifies herself as an “interloper” (109) and a

“guest” (137) who feels “guilty…and deceitful, as though I were staying in somebody else’s house” occupied with objects “which I had no right to touch” (84). UN’s feelings of guilt are at odds with her happiness with Maxim, and they serve as the catalyst for her

evolution. She gradually reverses her guest status through spatial exploration, familiarizing herself with places that make her uneasy. UN does not function as

Rebecca’s double, nor does her obsession stem from a desire to be Rebecca. Rather, her behavior grows from her status as an outsider. As a budding detective then, she must learn to masters domestic performance and spatial decoding.

Misconceptions about UN’s character arise from her initial childlike vocal performance. As she matures, her voice strengthens and becomes more critical.

Tellingly, each of her maturation steps occurs spatially. Her first exploration leads UN to Rebecca’s bay, a place that holds Manderley’s biggest secrets. Her investigations inspire the “furtive seed of curiosity that grew slowly and stealthily,” and she seeks

“’these things [that] are not discussed, they are forbidden’” (120). Her curiosity alters her perception of Manderley Hall and provides opportunities to establish agency. UN

“glean[s] little snatches of information to add to [her] secret store” (121) and initiates uncomfortable conversations with Mrs. Danvers and Frank to elicit information about

Rebecca’s life. Her efforts to re-code Manderley’s spaces requires that she identify

Rebecca’s marks and re-activate them. UN overwrites Rebecca’s memory by moving furniture, using her possessions, and re-enacting past behaviors. She analyses which place-making choices affect the staff’s behavior, and in response, establishes new routines. As her perception develops, she discerns the domestic performances that mask secrets and memorialize past power. UN fuses the past and present during this process, which in turn forces past crimes and secrets to “tumble into place like pieces of a jig-saw” and “fit themselves into a pattern” (268).

While UN’s place-making and investigation into Manderley’s secrets does not uncover Rebecca’s murder, her investigation provides the code the reader needs to shift their perception of Maxim. UN’s discovery knits together a narrative both disturbing and enlightening; she decodes spatial, linguistic, and behavioral patterns that transform

Rebecca from murder victim to psychopath.1 The novel reveals that Rebecca manipulates everything and everyone for her own pleasure. Maxim emerges as a victim of her power games, and for whom Manderley functions as a prison. Rebecca tricks him into killing her, and establishes her final triumph as his guilty secret. In this way, she freezes her ghosting performance in the house itself. UN maps Rebecca’s double- valenced performance of illusion and psychopathy into a narrative whole and claims agency. UN’s investigation reverses Rebecca’s power and casts aside her haunting presence, thereby ultimately freeing Maxim from his guilt.

These three novels illustrate that textual spatializations of domesticity provide opportunities for unexpected detectives to emerge. In each novel, illusion and truth intertwine with exterior and interior places. As a container schema, the British domestic sphere functions as a performance space in which peripheral characters demonstrate investigative acumen, intelligence, and agency. Male characters develop their power by maintaining order and providing partnerships. As with Betterage, they blur class lines and ultimately acquire the title of detective. Conversely, female character’s empowerment arises from their need to procure safety and protect others. Penelope,

Marian, and UN are never identified as detectives, despite their investigative skills and

1 The novel does not specifically identify Rebecca with the psychopath label; however, the narrative details UN collects and pieces together paint a textbook example of psychopathy as contemporary psychology has come to define it. Perhaps this amalgamation of psychopathy, crime, personal investigations, and ghost performances brought Rebecca to Hitchcock’s attention.

spatial activations. Shifting our lens to a theatrical and spatial approach, enables us to see and understand their performances in a new light. Such a reading strategy relocates these characters on center stage as powerful figures in a world that often relegates them to the sidelines.

CHAPTER 4 UNDERESTIMATED INVESTIGATORS IN PUBLIC SPACES

When something’s out of whack, when people don’t match their locations, a little bell goes off inside my head. –Arthur Bryant The Victoria Vanishes

When an expert feels that there is something wrong about a picture or a piece of furniture or the signature on a cheque he is really basing that feeling on a host of small signs and details. He has no need to go into them minutely–his experience obviates that–the net result is a definite impression that something is wrong. But it is not a guess, it is an impression based on experience. –Hercule Poirot The ABC Murders

Public space as a perceived, constructed, and experienced place, like private space, is socially constructed. The most significant differences between public and domestic spaces centers around the perception of privacy, solitude, and flexibility.

Conventional wisdom understands the domestic sphere as implying a privacy that the openness of a public space denies. Invasions into the home’s private spaces almost always operate under insider and outsider spatiality rules and are often associated with gender and class issues. Detective fiction, however, regularly deconstructs the boundaries between public and private, and shows that privacy doesn’t operate as we might expect.

To enter into the public sphere requires a shift in perception. The sheer number of other bodies occupying the space necessitates a heightened awareness of proximity and movement. This produces a collective experience, wherein a person’s spatial occupation is “defined by the presence of other people” (Tuan 403). Just as the domestic space evokes a sense of place through routines, public spaces transform into place through a combination of its “composite of natural endowments (the physique of

the land) and the modifications wrought by successive generations of human beings”

(Tuan 409). In this way, public spaces become marked with unique identities that can be read within a larger dynamic system of cultural signification and human interaction.

My exploration of places outside the British home is organized around another spatial dichotomy central to detective fiction, and, as scholars like Raymond Williams point out, in British literature and culture as a whole: the opposition of the rural and the urban. This dichotomy creates a tension between surveillance and anonymity, and it is this tension upon which the entire sub-genre of detective fiction relies for its generic coding.

This dichotomy also produces some of the genre’s most unique detectives.

Detectives in a public space perform a version of themselves, and play on assumptions of their place in society. These characters are commonly deemed no longer useful to the community, and are socially and spatially displaced by more able members.

Detective fiction challenges assumptions concerning such usefulness and provides examples of detectives who deploy their age or physical disability as strengths. These detectives refuse to be bound to a private domestic place, and venture into public crime scenes in order to most effectively serve their community.

It’s Only a Number

Elderly detectives are not common in the genre, but the few who exist stand out from others. These detectives combat assumptions in their respective communities concerning their feebleness, mental deterioration, and social awkwardness. In

Christopher Fowler’s Peculiar Crimes Unit series, Oscar Kasavian sums up the prejudice that plagues these aging detectives: “The elderly are weak precisely because they live in the past” (White Corridor 25). Kasavian questions elderly detectives’

emotional and psychological perception of the contemporary, and believes they are no longer useful in a modernized world. Their age, he assumes, thus serves as a detriment to effective police work. However, Fowler’s detectives Arthur Bryant and

John May, as well as Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, prove these assumptions incorrect.

With over eighty years of life experience, these investigators critically engage historical events, human behavior, and spatial codes, discovering patterns within them. Marple,

Bryant, and May’s connection to their past readies them to read the present in unexpectedly effective ways.

The Miss Marple Effect and Her Rural Realm

Christie’s Miss Marple novels make up one of the most famous country house mystery series in the world. Many assume, following P.D. James, that Christie’s novels are stripped down, simple, and predictable. However, I read their script-like form as the source of these novels’ sustaining power. Dialogue and spatial mapping dominate

Christie’s style and demand a different approach to her character’s interaction in their community. Christie’s theatrical style introduces clues and character behaviors in bursts, and she often presents seemingly paradoxical information. This challenges her readers to fill in narrative gaps and solve the mystery. Stripped-down descriptions of scenes and simple sentences mark each word as a possible clue, and thus demand heightened attention. Miss Marple’s status as an insider codes her personality to match her space and affords her an advantage during her investigations. Miss Marple’s memory of the community’s history provides a means through which she decodes these character behaviors and information.

Miss Jane Marple is an elderly spinster who resides in the village of St. Mary

Mead. Christie plays on stereotypical images of the traditional English village in her

descriptions of the place’s spaces and residents. The English village is often understood “as an anchorage and sanctuary from the current urban anxieties of increasing crime, inner-city riots, stressful lifestyles, the destructive impacts of globalization and the fracturing of society” by maintaining a constructed imaginary façade of peace, satisfaction, and community (Thomas xvii). However, St. Mary Mead challenges this myth of village life. Christie constructs a place where violent crime, suspicion, surveillance, anxiety, stress, and fractures simmer beneath the outward appearance of peace and satisfaction. Christie reveals that tight-knit communities generate unique forms of surveillance through gossip and spying, and spatial clashes between insiders and outsiders catalyze conflict. These rural settings contrast with the urban world, yet they too are plagued by the challenges experienced by city dwellers.

However, if surveillance, anxiety, stress, and communal fragmentation are ubiquitous, they manifest in ways unique to the group’s experiential space. Miss Marple participates in these rural paradoxes as a spinster detective. In this way, Christie’s novels delve into issues concerning utility and age as much as the myth of English village life.

Miss Marple’s spinsterhood detaches her from familial obligations. The family home as a place of peace and usefulness for women is central to the village’s identification of itself. Even into the twentieth century, unmarried women occupied peripheral social positions, and normative gender politics often limited their communal power. However, the village proves to be more accepting of the spinster and often provides a space in which they can function as insiders. Miss Marple’s choice to remain unmarried thus rejects the idea that a woman’s usefulness stems from family life, and

she spends the majority of her time outside her domestic space. She claims agency in public spaces and proves useful to her community by solving crimes. Her spinsterhood and age grant Miss Marple an unexpected freedom of movement, and she activates the role of a spatially coded spectator-cum-performer when her investigation requires it.

Christie’s writing style transforms her novel into a performance text that activates a multi-layered spectatorship. Marple’s observations function as an exercise in mental dexterity, and she adopts the mentality of an audience member during her investigations. She utilizes her status as a spectator to blend into the background and become, socially and textually, invisible. Throughout the series, Christie’s omniscient narrator communicates Miss Marple’s reception in public spaces. The narrator identifies

Miss Marple as “the old lady” (Body in the Library 16), “the provincial Lady” (Nemesis

16), and “fluffy old girl” (Nemesis 16). Descriptions of Marple highlight her age and social position within the provincial community. She exemplifies one myth of rural female domesticity: as a resident of the countryside, other characters expect Miss

Marple to be “fluffy,” “scatty,” and “simple” (Nemesis 16-7). These assumptions overlook her intelligence and code her as unthreatening. These descriptions create a distancing effect from the detective, as they conflate Miss Marple with spatial and gender generalizations. Miss Marple’s external appearance and demeanor meet the expectations of an elder provincial lady and mask the traits that make her an effective detective: “Seeing you with your wool and the pretty things you knit and all that— anyone would think you were as gentle as a lamb. But there’s times I could say you’d behave like a lion if you was goaded into it” (Nemesis 8). Miss Marple’s maid suspects her mistress of possessing “ruthlessness” (Nemesis 8), and yet even she has difficulty

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reconciling Miss Marple’s kindness and gentleness with the ferocity she demonstrates in murder investigations. Even in the police station where her deductive ability is respected, Miss Marple occupies her age’s social invisibility: “In the corner of

Superintendent Harper’s office sat an elderly lady. The girls hardly noticed her. If they did they may have wondered who she was” (Body in the Library 156). Miss Marple is hardly noticed by the younger generation, whose energy and mobility privilege their social utility over hers. She sits in the corner and knows they perceive her as “the elderly lady” in a space allocated to a younger and active generation. Her “Nemesis” moniker jars with her provincial old lady performance. Miss Marple cannot claim her moniker without becoming a communal anomaly, something that would threaten her insider status. As a member of a closed rural community, Miss Marple proves an effective detective, because she is coded as fitting her space. She ultimately becomes threatening to others precisely because she blends into the space and observes without being observed.

Miss Marple is aware of her need to mask the lion with the lamb. She activates her invisibility as an investigative strength rather than a social weakness. Remaining an unseen observer grants her opportunities to gather information. Christie manipulates

Miss Marple’s double performer and spectator position and challenges her readers’ ability to decode the novel as a performance space. For example, in The Body in the

Library, Miss Marple is absent for forty pages before re-emerging in the narrative. These disappearing acts transform her into to a silent spectator in two ways. First, she fades into professional anonymity when the official investigators move around crime scenes and discuss their deductions. Secondly, the reader forgets that Marple is present in the

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room, since she remains silent. Christie’s novels are dialogue driven, and thus Miss

Marple’s silence removes her from the text. She remains invisible until she chooses to step forward and activate the space through her tremendous linguistic power. This invisibility makes her an especially effective detective. She poses a threat because characters forget her, a fact Christie’s theatrical text further reinforces.

Miss Marple’s role as a silent spectator enables her to observe how characters interact. She knows how to listen, and she develops a comprehensive understanding of human behavior and community patterns as a result. Her knowledge includes historical, social, cultural, and interpersonal details of the places to which she travels. Her age and memory further provide her an advantage over other investigators, as she draws from her past experience to recognize unconventionality in spatiotemporal behavior patterns. For example, in The Body in the Library, Miss Marple knows the victim’s dress clashes with witness reports and deduces from this fact that her body had been moved.

She reads the state of the victim’s nails, and in this way discovers which witness is lying. The crime’s theatricality emerges as Miss Marple infers motives from breaks in spatial patterns.

Christie clarifies that Miss Marple’s skill derives not from “women’s intuition” or guesswork, but “specialized knowledge” and a theatrical mindset (Body 93). Miss

Marple’s theatrical spectatorship teaches her that characters in public perform a version of their lives, and she therefore never trusts surface performances. Miss Marple declares repeatedly that people in general are too trusting and that “you simply cannot afford to believe everything that people tell you” (Body 149). She assumes everyone is a performer and decodes human interactions as a form of social theater. For Miss

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Marple, showing and telling function as theatrical opposites. Behavior patterns upstage speech, and habits outweigh stories. Her practice of theatrical seeing reveals social performances and linguistic and physical discrepancies as clues to social ruptures.

Miss Marple also proves adept at activating the performance event and transforming herself into a character for an audience. In The Body in the Library, Miss

Marple arms herself with a parish charity book and pushes herself into a suspect’s house. There, she plays the part of a provincial old lady her audience expects. Miss

Marple pretends to solicit donations for the church fund and uses the church book as a prop to gain the suspect’s trust. She activates a physical and linguistic performance to catch the suspect off guard. At first, the suspect is taken aback and confused, but as

Marple’s performance builds, the suspect becomes “amused [by the] eccentric old bean” and “funny old tabby” (165). As a result, Miss Marple’s eccentricity and chatter induces the suspect to reveal the information she seeks.

Similar performances pepper the series and serve as one of Miss Marple’s most useful investigative techniques. In Sleeping Murder (1970), she plays on the assumption that “old ladies are supposed to be inquisitive” and entices her audience to gossip about

“local news” (73). In 4:50 from Paddington (1957), she plays an invalid to shift her physical proximity to the crime scene and accumulate information. When she performs her age, Miss Marple controls the tone of the space and evokes discomfort, pity, trust, comradery, and confusion in interviews. She utilizes the old lady character to activate a performance space that allows Nemesis to emerge. She both convinces her audiences that she is harmless and decenters their social performance, thereby claiming agency.

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Christie’s elderly spinster reminds us that in the world of detective fiction age is only a number.

Urban Peculiarities and Politically Charged Spaces

Fowler’s Bryant and May series exhibits many of the same formal and tropic elements, including aging detectives, a focus on spatiotemporal patterns of human behavior, and the self-conscious activation by detectives and criminals of performance spaces. Fowler’s octogenarian duo lives in twentieth-century London. Crime narratives set in the megalopolis require spatial perceptions that differ from those deployed in the

English village of Miss Marple. London’s placement as a global epicenter demands a

“psychogeographical connection” (Off the Rails 228) to and understanding of the real, fictional, and mythic spaces of the city for Fowler’s detectives to be effective. Fowler’s focus on odd spaces and their peculiar crimes necessitate a unique cognitive mapping of London to generate social and political meaning-making. As with Miss Marple,

Bryant and May possess a unique ability to decode anomalous bodies and objects found in public spaces. If Miss Marple’s reading practices center on patterns of human behavior, Bryant and May’s focus first and foremost on space. London’s frenetic history drives the characters’ theatrical re-activation of the cityscape’s places as centers of trauma.

The series’ crime scenes are chosen for their connections to past trauma and violence, in both systemic and individual senses. They function as site-specific performance spaces connected to London’s violent past. Site-specific theatre is a historically based practice, and occurs when performers theatricalize real places during community rituals to imbue the space with the memory of past events. Such a practice elevates the specific site into a sacred space as communal ritual and historical place-

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making collide during the performance (Carlson 10). Trainor and Carlson maintain that site-specific theater can move beyond a community’s religious rituals and activate a politically charged message when “the place where this or that catastrophe occurred becomes an incorruptible and convincing witness to it” (Victor Hugo qtd. in Carlson

Keynote 11-12). Re-activating a memory of trauma plays with the community’s fear of repetition of the event. The performance reactivates spatial memory and shapes spectators’ responses. In the Bryant and May series, the criminal’s site-specific performances intensify communal fear to a nearly uncontrollable pitch. These fears stem from history, memory, and the city as a character in its own right.

One of the most impressive, and oppressive, characteristics of London is its size, in terms of both its space and demographics. By the nineteenth century, the city had grown so large that it produced a “source of anxiety for an indigenous Londoner. He or she would never know all of the city thoroughly; there would always be a secret

London in the very act of its growth. It can be mapped, but it can never be fully imagined. It much be taken on faith, not on reason” (Ackroyd 586). As a produced space, London functions as a palimpsest of history whose population must reconcile with the spatial and historical places of their daily routines. The city’s size and frenetic atmosphere require its occupants to cognitively remap the place. Mapping the city operates both positively and negatively, and transforms the city into a character. Peter

Ackroyd utilizes descriptive nouns—wilderness, desert, labyrinth, stain, spectacle, monster, and giant, amongst others—to capture the city’s vast intricacy and energy. He maintains that these nouns become powerful when we consider London as a body (1-

3). This image is steeped in a long tradition of pictorially mapping the city. Like so

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many other cartographers and historians before him, Ackroyd describes London’s

“byways” as resembling “thin veins and its parks…like lungs. In the mist and rain of an urban autumn, the shining stones and cobbles of the older thoroughfares look as if they’re bleeding” (1). Fowler recalls Ackroyd ’s imagery when May observes Londoner’s moving through the Underground: “They’re like blood cells pulsing through an artery […]

They’re feeding the city with energy. There’s no pushing and shoving, it is orderly and purposeful” (Off the Rails 216). Both Ackroyd and Fowler fuse architectural with corporeal imagery, thereby making the cityscape an extension of its population as much as a character in its own right. Ackroyd affirms that “we must regard [London] as a human shape with its own laws of life and growth” (2). London’s places mark its identity and map it into, not onto, the subjective identity of its occupants. Londoners exist in a symbiotic relationship with their city, both feeding off its and being consumed by its vibrancy.

London also boasts a long history of crowds rising collectively in fear or anger, and these mobs often exploded into violence against places and people. Fowler’s

Peculiar Crime Unit (PCU) is predicated on London’s history of fear and paranoia culminating in violence. The PCU is responsible for solving cases that have the potential to cause city- or nation-wide panic. The city’s paradoxical propensity to order and chaos heightens the pressure for the PCU to solve quickly their cases. The dynamic body of London informs the detectives’ approach to crime scenes, and requires them to repeatedly remap the city.

As with Miss Marple, Bryant and May’s location requires their characters to conform to the spaces they occupy. Miss Marple possesses the same depths of

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strength and intelligence as these urban partners, yet the village space denies her the opportunity for an outward performance. Bryant and May, however, live and work in a city whose contradictory nature produces characters who perform very different roles.

Even the city’s old ladies “pushed back with force” (Off 421) and are coded as “tough old birds” that people “wouldn’t wanna mess with” (439). Thus, Bryant and May’s unrelenting antagonism and attempts to restore order mirrors the space they occupy and challenges prejudices against their age.

Bryant and May’s eighty years of life in the city position them as the PCU’s leaders. Both men possess the ability to decode bodies in layered spaces and recognize discrepant tensions between what belongs and what is out of place. Bryant avows:

There’s nothing I don’t know about the streets of London. I know where the iron from St. Paul’s railings came from, and who haunts the Rose and Crown in Old Park Lane, and what went on in the Man-Killing Club of St. Clement Danes and the Whores’ Club of the Shakespeare’s Head Inn, and how to play Mornington Crescent without cheating, and why there was a London craze for electrifying yourself in the mid-eighteenth century. (White Corridor 158)

Bryant’s spatial knowledge includes the streets, architecture, superstitions, myths, histories, and games of the massive city. Bryant respects London as a “human shape with its own laws of life and growth” (Ackroyd 2), and in this way, he becomes an exception to Ackroyd’s pronouncement that no one can really know London. This spatial intelligence allows the PCU “to close the cases few could understand, let alone solve,” because “no-one had their arcane depth of knowledge, or was able to use it in the cause of crime prevention” (Fowler White 23). Their spatial understanding enables them to grasp the ways myth and history converge to determine human behavior.

Bryant and May recognize the intricacies of London as a produced social space and

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body, and they know they “can’t catch the criminal if [they] don’t understand his milieu”

(Victoria Vanishes 101).

Spatiality drives the series, as crimes staged in odd places activates the PCU’s involvement. The locales of the crimes prove to be chosen for their theatrical potential.

Bryant and May investigate a body suspended in a museum preservation tank, a firebombed body in a bank alcove, several dead women staged as drunks in old London pubs, bodies tarred and feathered in abandoned store fronts, bodies laid out in gated gardens, bodies rising from graves, victims burned alive in Guy Fawkes effigies, and the murder of actors timed with their character’s death onstage. The staging of these crimes necessitates the PCU know London’s violent history, so they can understand how “the rituals of crime have taken on a theatrical guise” (Ackroyd 153). The site- specific nature of the crimes cannot be extricated from the place’s traumatic past. In

Bryant and May Off the Rails, Bryant opines: “We did see him. He was caught by the camera, and in the process [of dying] he became his own urban myth” (378). The specificity of the crime scene layers the historical ghost performance of the

Underground’s Night Crawler with the death of a college student. The camera transforms his death into a performance that perpetuates the Night Crawler myth and provokes fear in London’s travelers. The series illustrates that human behavior has

“deep-rooted beliefs in what constitute[s] public and private spaces [and these are] hard-wired into the human psyche (Off 410). Thus, character behavior comes to be

“about pack mentality, leadership establishment, and group behavior” (Off 256). When the Night Crawler emerges from myth into the Underground’s concrete space, his appearance invokes memories of past social upheavals and creates the potential for the

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London community to explode in violent protest. Bryant and May must engage the crime as more than a metaphorical ghost performance, but rather as a theatrical puzzle activated in a site-specific performance space. The duo’s deductive methodologies rely on their expansive historical and spatial knowledge, in addition to their ability to activate the city as a performance space.

Bryant’s investigative power derives from his mastery of the city as a historical place and as a container schema. As with Miss Marple, Bryant slips between spectator and performer during his investigations. His character fuses his professional role with the city’s theatrical potential. May tells Bryant that he missed his vocation and “really should have been on the stage,” to which Bryant replies, “The city is my theatre” (Full

Dark House 349). Bryant activates London as his theater and performs the role of an eccentric, bumbling old man. Bryant is an eccentric, often clumsy, old man; however, he self-consciously heightens these characteristics and plays a version of himself for his social audience in the PCU, Scotland Yard, and the public. He performs variations of his character, shifting according to his audience. He is contradictory in nature, and like his city operates as an agent of order and chaos. This duality requires Bryant to master the art of re-coding his character according to a space’s potential and the needs of the case; and in so doing, he traverses his city theater as master performer and investigator.

London’s size refuses repeated proximity to others unless a character occupies a sub-group defined by professional and domestic spaces. Bryant and May choose to make the PCU their family, and their repeated proximal relationship to their coworkers conflates the professional with the personal. Bryant activates his old man performance

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for his co-workers as much as for the London community, and in so doing, illustrates the fluidity between his performer and investigative roles. For example, in White Corridor

Bryant holds a performance review on Waterloo Bridge. He identifies the bridge as the central point in London’s history, and spends the majority of his free time there. After the review concludes, the medical examiner muses, “Only [Bryant] could turn Waterloo

Bridge into his office” (337). His colleagues recognize that Bryant’s place in London’s spatial schema extends beyond the borders of his office and he blurs the lines between his various roles. Bryant’s place of work is the city itself, and his role as detective cannot be extricated from its spatiality. I read Bryant’s declaration that “the city is his theatre” in conjunction with his ability to “turn” Waterloo Bridge’s into a professional place. Bryant acts on the bridge and transforms it. He actuates a place-making process by comingling his experience of the bridge with that of the medical examiner. This re-codes a landmark within a polyvalent signification through which history, community, profession, and theater become layered into a new spatiality. As with the city in which he works and lives, where Bryant’s performance begins and ends remains ambiguous. His centrality in preventing explosions of mob violence requires a fusion of master performer and detective into a single subject.

The Power of Silence When Sleuthing Across Spaces

Thus far, this chapter has investigated detectives who are ensconced in either a rural or urban setting. Miss Marple, Arthur Bryant, and John May’s powers to know a place, its occupants, and patterns require specialized knowledge of their respective milieus in order to be effective. This spatial condition is not lost on these detectives.

Arthur Bryant laments, “My greatest field of expertise is wasted here […] I know absolutely nothing about the countryside” (White Corridor 158). Because he is

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unfamiliar with the space and its codes, his hunt in the countryside for a serial killer becomes laborious and frustrating. Similarly, Miss Marple remains aware that her expertise is largely predicated on her provincial space. She encounters cases in

London, but commences her investigation only after she returns to the country. Again, their spaces code their characters and activate their performances in service of their communities; removing them from their space limits their investigative abilities.

Violent criminals, however, do not always remain within the confines of a city or a village. In both true crime accounts and in fiction, transitioning between spaces allows criminals a way to evade the law. This mobility was one of the most important reasons why the London police force established the detective department on June 12, 1842.1

Detectives possessed a freedom of movement that police officers, who were bound to their beat, did not (Flanders 142-149). Even in modern policing, spatial jurisdiction plays an important role in criminal investigations. One of the highest positions in a department belongs to the homicide detective, who can move across jurisdiction boundaries in violent criminal pursuits.

As with our octogenarians, detectives who become most powerful transitioning between public places are often those whose social and cultural value is in question.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Trail of the Serpent (1860) presents a prime example of how detectives manipulate stereotypes and perform across rural and urban spaces.

Braddon creates a mute detective, whose disability determines character perceptions about his intelligence. Her choice makes The Trail of the Serpent a stand out text even

1 The 1842 Detective Department was identified by its headquarters’ address at Scotland Yard (SY for short); however, once detective departments sprang up around the country, Scotland Yard transitioned to the nickname specific to the detective force. The department was renamed the Criminal Investigative Department (CID) in 1878, which expanded outwards from the city and across Great Britain (Flanders 147).

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by today’s standards. However, Braddon remains largely overlooked in the study of nineteenth-century detective fiction. Critics recognize her as one of the authors who established the sensation novel; however, her work across genres remains peripheral due in part to the lasting power of the sensation label. Like Collins, Braddon began publishing in 1860, twenty-eight years before the term detective fiction entered English vocabularies. Both authors penned hybrid novels that “take the conventions of popular novels, casebooks, and stage melodrama and fuse them into [what would become the] detective novel” (Trail 409). Braddon’s theatrical writing style mirrors Dickens, and her

Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) deploys some of the same experimental crime tropes used by Collins in The Woman in White (1860). These facts have led Chris Willis and R.F

Stewart to credit Braddon’s The Trail of the Serpent as the first detective novel.

The Trail of the Serpent’s spatial construction and its detective’s ability to transform public spaces into performance sites perfectly situates the novel within my framework. The performance of space in the novel determines how readers react to the characters. Braddon’s acting career and knowledge of theatrical sign systems enabled her to work into The Trail of the Serpent many theatrical figures. Sarah Waters draws attention to the novel’s numerous “systems of signs and forms of communication

[wherein] messages are translated, or resist translation, from one language or one medium to another, with crucial consequences” (Trail xx). Waters focuses on the ways

Detective Peters’ sign systems force readers to become more aware of the slippery nature of verbal and gestural communication. However, Waters skirts around the theatrical nature of these sign systems. She touches on the translation from one

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medium’s sign system to another, yet she does not fully engage with the contributions of performance codes to the slipperiness of Braddon’s linguistic and narrative choices.

Trail of the Serpent presents three central characters who control and manipulate signs in a performative fashion: the melodramatic multi-murderer, Jabez North; the underestimated investigator, Detective Peters; and his foundling protégé, Sloshy. While

Jabez North performs the supervillain role, he plays a peripheral role in my analysis.

Instead, I focus on Detective Peters, whose abilities to pass through places, decode them, and generate a performance illustrate the novel’s dynamic narrative sequences and to the unique way it translates showing into telling.

Braddon initiates a tension between the theatrical and novelistic by constructing conflicting modes of communication and translation that call into question the information the reader receives. As readers, we remain at the translator’s mercy, since the translator chooses the modes of linguistic coding, decoding, and recoding deployed throughout the novel. For example, In Book 1 Chapter 5, the narrator presents a scene in a countryside tavern. The scene focuses on Jabez’s refusal to help a woman he impregnated. Mid-conversation, a tavern’s patron “brushed against his shoulder,” and this passing contact results in Jabez reprimanding the man. The patron shrugs his apology, indicates he is mute, then sits at a nearby table and reads his newspaper.

Jabez forgets the man is present and continues to abuse his mistress (Braddon 37).

This scene situates Jabez North, his mistress, and their child at the center of the narrative. The scene appears early on, shortly after the revelation that Jabez has committed double homicide, and appears to function to set up Sloshy’s foundling story

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and to confirm Jabez North’s villainy. In the novelistic mode, the scene does its job effectively and presents an effective psychological portrait of the villain.

Four books and twenty-six chapters later, however, Braddon recodes this scene from a different point of view, and in so doing, re-situates it within the theatrical mode.

The mute tavern patron turns out to be Detective Peters, who relays his version of the scene: “I laid my hand upon his shoulder sudden. He turned round and looked up at me.

[…] the look of a man as guilty of what will hang him and thinks that he’s found out”

(Braddon 245). In Peter’s version, the brush against Jabez’s shoulder transforms into purposeful contact to illicit a visceral reaction from a man adept at performing innocence. Peters’ deliberate contact with Jabez further commences a social performance: “I sits down and takes up a newspaper. I signified to him that I was dumb, and he took it for granted that I was deaf as well–which was one of those stupid mistakes your clever chaps sometimes fall into” (Braddon 246; emphasis added).

Peters self-consciously deploys physical gestures appropriate to his space, and manipulates Jabez’s assumptions. He utilizes the tavern’s performative spaces to disappear behind his newspaper prop and eavesdrop on Jabez’s conversation. In this way, Braddon recodes the scene into a public performance, where Peters performs a role that reinforces his audience’s assumptions about his capacities.

This double perspective produces a tension between the novelistic and theatrical that operates throughout the entire text. First, The Trail of the Serpent presents a disconnect between spatial performance modes. Jabez’s performance operates according to the behavioral codes of domestic space. He associates the tavern with privacy, and berates Peters when he disrupts it. Peters’ performance, however,

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operates within the conventions of a theatrical performance space. Jabez remains unaware of the staged nature of Peter’s performance, and he thus incorrectly assumes a spectator position and fails to interpret meaning. As a result, communication between performer and spectator flows one way and influences Jabez’s assumption that the drama he sees is more than an illusion. Jabez’s mistake is a common one that detective fiction encourages. He sees the performance novelistically, and this fuels his overconfidence that he controls the information exchange. Presenting the scene twice, forces the that the reader to undergo a perception shift. The theatrical nature of Peters’ performance insists that the reader too adopt a double awareness to decode the novel, especially once we are exposed to his gestural system.

Additionally, Braddon makes us aware throughout the novel that dumb does not mean deaf, and neither one signifies an inability to think. Peters states that Jabez misreads the theatrical nature of their exchange and makes the “stupid mistake” of assuming that Peters is deaf and hence harmless. Peters activates muteness as a performance in a public space. This confers on him a unique linguistic power that transforms into professional and narrative power. Braddon embeds this modality into the very structure of her novel and makes her readers more aware of silent performances they cannot see. As with the layered codes of theatrical performance,

Peters’ gestural language only occurs by translation into literature. Often, Braddon does not provide the translation, but only makes the reader aware when it occurs. We cannot decode meaning through linguistic means alone, since the novel also relies on physical gestural systems of signification. The text requires that we do as we do with dramatic scripts and fill in narrative gaps. Braddon plays against each other assumptions of what

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fills those gaps, and thereby activates a unique tension between her two narrative modes. Power positions established in the theatrical mode drive the power positions in the novelistic mode.

Braddon challenges the limited effectiveness of a singular system of communication, and shows that words alone cannot reveal the layers of meaning deployed in the novel. Through the tavern scene, she re-programs the reader’s approach to the text, before progressively expanding the range of these performances.

In each scene, “ocular demonstrations” (Braddon 139) and theatrical sign systems drive character performances during their struggles. The court trial and the arrest at the

Liverpool docks illustrate how these multi-layered signification systems operate within the bounds of novelistic storytelling to activate theatrical modes.

The Courtroom Scene

The court serves as one of the novel’s most fascinating performance spaces, which, like the tavern, presents a contradictory space composed of private communication and public spectacle. Multi-layered language systems play out in the courtroom in a theatrical meta-narrative rife with power struggles. The prisoner in the dock, Richard Marwood, is innocent but is presumed guilty from the outset. Only

Detective Peters knows that Jabez North is the real murderer, but his social position, as a scrub in the official police force, renders his deductions inconsequential. Braddon situates the courtroom as a performance space for a “drama” wherein the accused in the dock “is playing his great act” (52) for the “spectators” (51) in the gallery and on the bench. As the accused, Richard Marwood occupies center stage, while Detective

Peters disappears into the crowd of spectators and watches the drama unfold.

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Braddon activates the courtroom within a multivalent signification system that transcends commonplace equations of public trials with theatrical dramas. Performance theorists remind us that part of theater’s uniqueness derives from its multiple sensory- based signification systems at work in its narrative meaning-making. Performers physically activate these signification systems through their corporeal presence, spatial proximity, spoken language, physical gestures, object use, gaze, and bodily contact.2

Hierarchies of power are built on stage by using these performance techniques and, the performer who controls spoken language often possesses the most power. In this way, a theatrical performance seems to parallel a court trial: the side that controls the audience’s perception wins the case.

However, Braddon activates silence and gesture in her courtroom stage as the signification systems that determine the trial’s verdict. Richard focuses on Detective

Peters, who begins to sign a message, and “the crowd did not see what Richard saw”

(56). Unbeknownst to anyone— including the reader—Peters devises a plan to save

Richard from the gallows. Like a theatrical director, Peters provides Richard a specific character to play during the trial and celebrates when Richard commences the performance by redirecting his gaze to nothing and placing weeds in his button hole.

The silent communication across space undermines the role in the performance the system assigns Richard. With two gestures, Richard transforms himself from an accused murderer into a madman who believes he is Napoleon Bonaparte (67). Since

Richard functions as the drama’s central performer, the dock’s size and exclusivity magnify Richard’s gestures and cause them to register with his audience. They suggest

2 See Gay McAuley’s Space in Performance for a theoretical and analytical breakdown of each of these elements in theatrical semiosis and performance application.

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clues to his mental state and require behavioral decoding to make sense. Readers and spectators deduce a story from his gestures, until his lawyer catches on to the performance and translates the performance into spoken language.

In this way, spatial awareness proves necessary to decode the moment a performance moves beyond verbal telling. The most significant aspect of this scene’s meaning-making derives from the spatial locations occupied by Peters and Richard.

Peters’ silent position among the spectators renders him invisible to the crowd. This juxtaposes with Richard’s centrality in the courtroom. The spatial dichotomy between seen and unseen is bridged by a gestural language, as any verbal communication at that distance would disrupt the codes of conduct the space of the courtroom demands.

The men transform sign language into a different gestural system, a bodily performance dependent on an implied narrative and the audience’s ability to decode it. The trial’s spectators may not possess the knowledge necessary to do so, but they can decode

Richard’s performance. As such, they remain unaware of the dual meaning-making systems at play and believe Richard’s gestures of insanity reflect reality rather than a theatrical performance directed by Peters. Just as Peters and Richard at once occupy private and public spaces in the court, their meaning-making system transforms from private to public. Strikingly, in a trial space that traditionally privileges spoken language,

Peters and Richard prove that physical performance holds a more powerful position in the trial’s battle over meaning.

The reader also occupies in relationship to this scene the position of theatrical spectator rather than novelistic confidante. We decode Richard’s gestural language just as the trial’s spectators do. After Richard’s lawyer translates his behavior into words, we

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possess the knowledge to reread the scene and see the silent meaning-making at play.

Braddon foregrounds the novel’s performative codes and removes the sense of false omniscience detective fiction often generates in its purely novelistic modes. Unlike the trial’s spectators, we remain aware that dual language systems are at work. We are equally aware that we cannot decode them, as we are spectators outside the textual space. In this way, Braddon reverses traditional power relationships and privileges the bodily in a theatrical mode over the linguistic codes of the novel.

The Dock Scene

The trial scene is not the only one where Detective Peters activates a space’s performance possibilities and reveals the novel’s propensity to situate its narrative in the tension between the novelistic and the theatrical. The novel is rife with performance events: Jabez North stages a performance in a Paris garden grove in order to incite the novel’s heroine to murder her fiancé; Sloshy infiltrates the insane asylum to help

Richard escape; and Sloshy pretends he lives in an apartment building in order to overhear Jabez North’s secret. All of these performances climax on the novel’s largest stage, with its biggest audience, on the Liverpool docks. As the scene opens, Detective

Peters is again absent. However, at this juncture Braddon has already programed her readers to embrace dual novelistic and theatrical modes of seeing, and so readers become confident that Peters is hidden in the crowd. Peters and his partner wear costumes, thereby further reinforcing the framing of the scene as a theatrical production and activating the reader’s decoding operations to include gestures.

As the scene progresses, Peter’s partner draws attention to a coffin being loaded onto the ship (357). He deploys gestures and verbal cues to direct their backups’ gaze to the investigative focus, but their inability to read places as performance spaces

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makes even this overt attempt at communication futile. The detective’s disguise as an elderly gentleman allows him to overcome this block to communication, and he occupies a position in close proximity to the coffin. His character’s social status prevents the coffin’s retainer from refusing his conversation and provides the detective a way to test his theory. This requires the detective to perform a social transgression: he places a hand on the coffin and pulls its cover around its edge. This prompts shock from fellow passengers, and the gesture flusters the coffin keeper who removes the cover. The detective declares: “You were greatly alarmed just now, lest the person within should be smothered. You were terribly frightened when I drew the heavy canvas over those incisions in the oak” (Braddon 380). At this moment, Peters steps into the scene and arrests Jabez, who is hidden inside (378-380). The scene’s theatrical execution cannot function without the detective first transforming the crowd into an audience.

As with the novel’s other performances, the coffin minder operates at a disadvantage, as he assumes his exchange with the elderly gentlemen is real and not performed dialogue. The performative nature of the exchange becomes necessary because of the nature of this particular public space and its codes. The detectives test the retainer’s reactions to determine the coffin’s true use; and it is the performance frame that provides the means of procuring this vitally important information. Since they suspect the coffin functions as a mode of transportation, the detective activates it as a performance object and challenges its public meaning as a sign of death. Touching the coffin transforms the crowd into an audience: the detective breaks custom by touching the covering, thereby drawing the crowd’s attention. The public shock contrasts with the coffin keeper’s fear that Jabez will suffocate. His actions unfold counter to public

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behavioral codes, and provide the evidence that the coffin does not function as the crowd assumes. Again, we see the gesture, hear the dialogue, but remain unsure of its meaning until the detective translates his performance into language. Braddon provides textual details to build the dock’s space and provides her audience with everything they need to experience effectively the multi-coded performance. Without access to the dock’s material space, body and linguistic performance resist meaning. These gaps situate the novel as detective fiction by demonstrating how its codes function in a way similar to those at play in more canonical works in the genre.

Braddon divides her novel into two distinct plots. One follows Jabez and the other

Peters. The double plot structure further underscores the tension between theater and literature. First, Braddon divides her novel into small sections, utilizing dialogue and pace to build to a crescendo. These techniques mimic a play’s structure and encourage a different form of the reader’s engagement. Second, the dual plot structure enables

Braddon to splice together two genres in a single novel. Jabez’s narrative deploys the tropes and effects of a melodrama. He is a stock villain, who celebrates his evil nature and overacts throughout the narrative. His plot contains no mystery nor questions about actions or motives. Detective Peter’s plotline, on the other hand, deploys the tropes and effects of a detective novel. The detective’s centrality shifts focus to investigations and deduction, thereby privileging the detective character as the narrative’s crux. Evidence and witness statements become more significant than criminal deeds, and the tone shifts from emotional to clinical. Tellingly, the narrative openness of Jabez’s plot collapses in Peter’s as it builds a mystery concerning motives, guilt, meaning, and justice. Braddon programs her reader for these two different genres by using theatrical

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language systems, and it proves effective in both. The Trail of the Serpent thus functions as a hybrid text, wherein the melodrama’s theatrical codes in Jabez’s plot sustain the detective plot and enhance its effect.

Despite their varying personalities, social position, and methods, each of our detectives share the capacity to decode and activate place as performance spaces.

Additionally, each of these detectives challenge assumptions of utility and value by defying stereotypes of age and physical ability. Marple, Bryant, and May have aged beyond what society deems useful, yet they demonstrate the value of historical knowledge in a profession where a reading of space and behavior patterns determine success. Peters’ narrative power inside and outside the text challenge assumptions based on his disability, and illustrates the symbiotic relationship between communicational systems. For the characters and their genre, public spaces code their personality and methodology, and thereby set the stage for a comparison of the similarities and differences between performance and literature. The dynamism of public spaces provides a new avenue through which detective fiction flourishes, and Christie,

Fowler, and Braddon shine spotlights on characters who are often overlooked. These characters forgo domestic life and prove that intelligence and utility are not bound by age or ability, but by how a person “sees” their world.

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CHAPTER 5 TANA FRENCH’S LIMINAL SPACES AND VOCAL VENTRILOQUISM

Liminality makes sense only within social dramas as they unfold. – Bjorn Thomassen “The Uses and Meanings of Liminality”

The important work is on the boundaries. – Marvin Carlson “Mantichora” Interview

What is it about this job that makes people grateful that I can act like a human being? –P.D. James The Lighthouse

Conventional criticism too often applies assumptions concerning detective fiction’s static characters, singular plots, and lack of realism to all novels in the genre.

These generalizations are grounded in the norms established in the Golden Age, as I discussed in Chapter 1. As its writers celebrated and codified the genre, their work became the standard texts readers used as the template for all future reading. Their arguments concerning the genre established the framework though which readers and scholars experience different texts. This results in a disregard of novels that utilize trauma to make the form new.

Traumatic experiences lie at the center of more recent work in the genre and instigate both a physical and psychological remapping of place. These re-mappings reverse the valences of safe and dangerous places, and call into question dominant interpersonal power relationships. Golden Age texts also participate in this remapping process, as they require communities to reconcile truth and reorganize the structure of their community. Intertextual references to crimes in other novels in a series shows that characters and communities sometimes evolve outside a single work’s spatiotemporal

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frame. Other texts restrict a character’s growth to a single novel and utilize violence to instigate a dramatic remapping of psychological place. In either case, these texts activate the concept of liminality and produce spatial and psychological challenges that instigate dynamic change.

In the early twentieth century, anthropologists began studying states of liminality and their effect on communities. Arnold van Gennep explored liminality in his research on social rites of passage. Van Gennep distinguished three ritual stages an initiate must undergo to fulfill the ritual’s purpose: first, initiates must be physically separated from their community and accept the rite’s challenge; second, they complete the challenge and submit to different forms of suffering; finally, they emerge from the rite and are incorporated back into their community. The second stage functions as the rite’s liminal phase, wherein initiates transition from one social identity to another. An initiate’s new communal role is predicated on an ability to endure the liminal stage.

Since van Gennep’s groundbreaking work, some scholars have applied his three-stage model of liminal passage to a reading of traumatic experiences.

In the 1960s, Victor Turner extended van Gennep’s liminality concepts to secular rites of passage, and his work has influenced literary studies. Turner defines liminality as the betwixt and between that individuals, communities, and cultures experience during transitional phases (Thomassen 16). Turner claims that liminality functions as a threshold, and hence exists within spatiotemporal dimensions. Places, psychological states, communities, and events can be liminal if they experience a sense of disorientation, placelessness, and powerlessness during certain challenges. Violent

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crimes catalyze liminal experiences and initiate a community’s shift into a transition phase.

Turner defines social drama as “an eruption from the level surface of ongoing social life, with its interactions, transactions, reciprocities, its customs making for regular, orderly sequences of behavior” (Turner 33). Turner maintains that social dramas provide avenues through which secular societies actualize liminal rites when

“expressions of a deeper division of interests and loyalties” manifest in conflict (150).

These crises drive the dynamic sequences of redressive actions communities enact to reharmonize such breaches and reactivate their cultural myths. Turner further links social dramas with narrative genres in literature, theater, and film. Turner argues that the social drama is the “experiential matrix from which the many genres of cultural performance, beginning with redressive ritual and juridical procedures and eventually including oral and literary narrative, have been generated” (158). Such generic practices both represent and simulate liminality for its audiences.

Such states of liminality are at the heart of contemporary detective fiction. In “The

Simple Art of Murder” (1944) Raymond Chandler claimed that no previous writer in the genre possessed the ability to blend an intellectual puzzle, well-rounded characterization, solid plotting, and vivid atmosphere into a successful work of art (210).

Whatever their validity in his moment, later writers prove Chandler premature in his claims. For example, Tana French in her Dublin Murder Squad series maps conflicts outside the investigation and judicial procedures that challenge both characters and readers to embrace the discomfort and ambiguity inherent in social dramas. These novels layer three types of liminal experiences: communal, spatial, and psychological.

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Worldbuilding and narrative techniques manifest anxiety through sensory experiences and thrust readers into a sense of placelessness.

French trained as an actress at Trinity College Dublin and worked as a professional on the stage before turning to writing full time. French’s acting background provides her with a mastery of vocal ventriloquism, skills through which she develops complex spaces and dramatically constructs dialogue-driven performances. Her style successfully embeds the theatrical within the novel form, and this enables her to embody the psychological liminality of trauma in an interactive fashion. Her liminal planes affect all of her characters and thrust them into transformative uncertainties during the investigation. French activates Turner’s three stages in her portrayal of character relationships, and in this way, she forces her detectives into performative borderlands.

Worldbuilding and Performative Borderlands

In Chapter 2, I discussed how violent crimes arrest a space’s dynamism and force it into an unnatural stasis from which ghost performances are exhumed. The boundaries drawn around these remapped spaces of violent collision literally mark them as other, a place where only a culturally sanctioned few may transgress the boundary between inside and outside. Another way of describing such a place is in terms of liminality. Crime scenes actualize liminality in a concrete place. Such places are betwixt and between two stages of human experiences. Crime scenes also function on a psychological plane, as such states of liminality only arise when victim and victimizer violently collide.

French’s builds her novelistic crime scenes through a performance mentality.

Her hybrid narratives splice together the police procedural and gothic. This combination

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produces a visceral discomfort and even revulsion in her readers. Both genres highlight spatial construction and the effects that places have on people. A character’s ability to decode threatening spaces determines their choices and fate: characters without such skills become victims, and those possessing it are either criminals or detectives. Both genres also place mystery and violent encounter at the narrative center. Finally, both require a sense of closure to fulfill the reader’s expectations of generic formulas. This closure requires a logical explanation for motives and clues.

However, gothic fiction and police procedurals differ in effect, and this difference enables French to activate liminal performance spaces. For example, gothic fiction produces reactions stemming from terror, shock, isolation, and discomfort. This reaction is often visceral and intense. Contrastingly, police procedurals produce a clinical engagement with threatening spaces and violence. Readers calmly engage the mystery, thereby reducing the horror that violence produces. The central question driving the meaning-making schema shifts from genre to genre: gothic fiction asks can s/he get out of this alive?, while the procedural asks how will s/he get out of this? The shift from can to how transforms uncertainty into certainty and readers shift from emotional terror to intellectual curiosity. In other words, while gothic fiction simulates psychological liminality, police procedurals construct spatial liminality.

French sews together psychological and spatial liminality, thereby intensifying her narrative effects. How the characters get through challenges cannot be extricated from the question of if they can emerge from the liminal plane at all. For French’s characters, spaces activate psychological liminality. This means her detectives experience transitional states the moment they cross the boundary defining the crime

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scene. This threatens the detectives’ mental and emotional states, which produces a sense of disquiet and peril throughout the novel. Moreover, liminality depends on participation in the transformative process, and as a result, readers become more active in the novels’ psychological landscapes as traumatic borderlands. French’s style also hybridizes novelistic and theatrical script-text form. As in the cases of Braddon and

Christie which I discussed in Chapter 4, French engages a dual mental perception that requires her readers to decode the novels as both spectators and participants.

Fairytale Forests, Secret Gardens, and the Borderlands Between

As the title of French’s first novel suggests, In the Woods (2007) deploys cultural narratives about wild and cultivated landscapes to produce layered liminalities. French activates three specific public landscapes as sites in which occurs her characters’ social dramas and transition rites: the Knocknaree woods, an archeological dig site, and

Dublin Castle’s garden. These places function as site specific stages for character performances. Characters face mirrored challenges in these three places, and this layers their liminality into a collective psychological experience. Fully mapping the novel’s crime scene proves nearly impossible, since their boundary lines blur and challenge the detective’s ability to navigate space.

In the Woods’ opens with a flashback to the morning of an unsolved crime. In

1984, three children living in the Knocknaree estate enter the nearby woods. When they do not return home for supper, the police search the woods. One child is found, while the other two remain missing. The surviving child has no memory of the events in the woods. Decades later he becomes a detective under the name, Rob Ryan. Ryan is the narrator of the main events of the novel.

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French’s opening scene situations the Knocknaree woods as a space for childhood trauma. While the unsolved case is not the novel’s central mystery, it’s ghosting memory shapes Rob’s character. Thus, the unsolved crime comes to function as the novel’s liminal center. The Knocknaree wood draws on traditional fairy tale tropes, and presents a wild space where danger threatens community’s youth and unexpected violence can occur. The wood symbolizes a communal unknown and a liminal site of mythic trauma. The wood cannot be remapped as the place where the children disappeared. Indeed, the case’s unsolved nature transforms past and present and remaps the space as timeless: “a thin rim of trees had been left untouched…One had a broken piece of blue plastic rope heavily knotted around a high branch, a couple of feet dangling. It was frayed and mildewed and implied sinister Gothic history—lynch mobs, midnight suicides—but I knew what it was. It was the remnant of a tire swing (30-

31). After the children disappear, so too does the wood’s vibrancy. The tire swing ties the children’s absence to the space and memorializes their trauma with decay. Their presence in the wood activates a Gothic violence that links the past and present. The community does not touch the remnants of the trauma, thereby marking the space’s timelessness as other. In this way, French makes explicit the fact that a transgressive human presence in the forest results in displacement.

As an adult, Rob returns to the woods to combat his fear. However, the wood’s timeless liminality gives it a unique narrative agency. The wood identifies Rob as an

“intruder,” whose “presence had instantly been marked” (272). His outsider status wreaks havoc with his sense of place and time. This results in Rob conflating his childhood trauma with his current investigation. He and Katy Devlin, the novel’s young

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victim, remain marked as crime victims, and in turn both mark the site of violence with their bodies: “The wood was watching me, with an equivocal collective gaze” (272), and

“I knew beyond all doubt I would never get out of the wood” (282). The wood’s duality overpowers Rob’s attempt to regain control of the novel’s spaces and his narrative. In the woods, he exists outside of time and societal structures. The forest as actant thus presents a direct challenge to Rob’s identity, and his reactions highlight his ongoing alienation from his community. Even as an adult, Rob cannot “get out of the woods,” and this leaves him in a state of schismogenesis, a psychological state that occurs when initiates do not complete the liminal rite’s third stage (“Notes Towards” 689). That is, rather than reintegrate into society, Rob remains in a permanent state of liminal uncertainty. Rob’s spatial programming as a child identifies threat with unbounded wildscapes. The passage of time does not diminish this association, a fact Rob does not fully comprehend, even as an adult.

This presents a fundamental challenge for Rob, since his role as a detective requires a more comprehensive spatial awareness. Until the case in In the Woods, Rob separates Knocknaree’s wood from other crime scenes with which he engages. When

Katy’s body is found in the archeological dig site close to the Knocknaree forest, Rob blurs the spaces and reenters a psychologically liminal state. Tellingly, he becomes increasingly unable to differentiate between threats and offers of help, between victims and perpetrators, and between safe spaces and threatening ones. The archeological dig transforms from an historical to an investigative space when the killer dumps Katy

Devlin’s body in it. The murderer’s theatricalization challenges Rob’s and his partner

Cassie Maddox’s ability to map the crime scene into a narrative unity that produces

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meaning (i.e. the solution to the crime). The lack of a clearly bordered space for the crime compounds the community’s fear. The woods and archeological site function as liminal extensions of each other, as both actualize the unknown through violence.

The dig’s borderless space necessitates Rob and Cassie decode the crime scene before it too fuses with timeless trauma. The absent boundaries increase ambiguity and disorientation in both the community and investigation. For Rob, these borderless places escalate the psychological danger he faces, and movement between these places presents increasing problems for Rob’s and Cassie’s partnership. Rob and Cassie transition from Dublin Castle to Knocknaree village to the dig site and back again. The movement away from Dublin’s urban space to the rural one requires a shift in spatial perception that Cassie, not unexpectedly, proves more capable of achieving than Rob, as he perceives human constructed spaces as safe and reliable and wild spaces as dangerous. In contrast, Cassie sees these different spaces as interconnected. She also perceives Rob’s limitations as both investigator and victim.

Cassie’s attempts to help him reconcile his spatial liminality, and Rob’s rejection of her efforts results in tension between the partners. He refuses to let her know what he is thinking, and he separates himself from the person he relies on most in a personal and professional capacity. This thrusts Rob even further into his psychological liminality, and this proves dangerous both to himself and the investigation.

All of this is further exacerbated when Rob comes to trust Rosalind, the victim’s sister and killer, more than his partner. He conflates Katy’s murder with this friends’ disappearance, and confuses Rosalind with his own victimhood. This psychological comingling makes him incapable of accurately decoding her performance, much to his

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peril. French situates Rosalind as the novel’s master director and performer. Rosalind is a psychopath who possesses the ability to read other people’s failings and manipulate them for her pleasure. Her dominant status prevents other characters from decoding her lies. For example, she dates Damien and manipulates him to commit murder. Moreover, as retribution for his treatment of her, Rosalind spreads gossip to ruin her father’s reputation and cast suspicion on him.

Their Secret Garden

Rosalind also recognizes Rob’s psychological state and chooses site-specific locations in which to stage her performance of victimhood. Rosalind activates Rob’s spatial miscoding by steering him towards places that make him feel safe, such as a

Dublin public garden, and then instills in him a false sense of omnipotence by playing the damsel-in-distress. In this way, Rosalind transforms the Dublin garden into a performance space riven by power struggles.

Gardens are unique spaces in contemporary culture. Located at the intersection of the public and private, gardens provide a place of care and sanctuary. Gardens also symbolically function as spaces of inclusion and community. They represent places where humans commune with other living things in a struggle against time. Robert

Pogue Harrison maintains that “this feeling of inclusion derives in part from being in an enclosed space marked by borders,” and in fact most language’s etymological lineages for “garden” derive from some sort of boundary term (56). The garden’s physical boundary creates an idyllic place for those occupying such an enclosed space. Unlike

Knocknaree wood, the garden activates a visceral sense of safety and care, especially when the space’s design elicits aesthetic pleasure and spatial engagement from the spectator. Harrison further notes that “gardens are first and foremost places where

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appearances draw attention to themselves, presenting themselves to us as freely given”

(54). Thus, gardens operate as a quintessential performance space for sensory spectatorship and participation. They require an unconscious spatial perception shift, whereby spectators enter a liminal plane of engagement that reconciles in-betweenness and self-exhibition.

Rob’s garden interviews with Rosalind illustrate the ways the novel reverses these cultural expectations. Gardens are a paradoxical space, a natural landscape designed by human hands. The appearance of wildness derives from the living nature of the garden, yet the intense amount of work the space requires is often overlooked. In this way, the enclosure invites spectators to view its flora as wild but safe, rebellious but cared for. As with a theatrical stage, a garden is crafted, and it relies on spectator assumptions for its effects. Bodies occupying these gardens also participate in the visual performance effect and spatial assumptions. Rosalind capitalizes on the garden’s paradoxical nature and performs a version of character that, like the place, appears natural and safe.

While Rosalind and Rob may not think of garden spaces in these terms, they intuitively grasp its signification systems and activate within its borders a different form of social interaction. Rosalind gives no forewarning when she arrives at the Murder

Squad’s headquarters in Dublin. She knows Rob needs her witness statement and therefore he will not turn her away. This impromptu interview immediately establishes

Rosalind in the position of power. She forces Rob into a cold reading of a performance she has planned. She activates double-edged performative responses that require him to fill the gaps between what she says and the manner in which she says it. This allows

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her to assess his ability to read her performance and the power she possesses to steer the investigation. She reinforces her dominance even further by choosing the garden as the site for their interview.

When Rob encounters Rosalind in the office reception area, she stands by the window, gazing “wistfully” into the sunshine. Rob admits she “made a lovely picture” and likens the tableau to a “Pre-Raphaelite greeting card” (147). Without explicitly registering this fact, Rob casts Rosalind in a victim role. Her wistful gaze and physical appearance transform Rosalind into an artistic model, an image she then translates into a damsel-in-distress. Rob’s programming forces him to accept the fictional role she self-consciously performs. Rosalind adds vocal and spatial elements to this visual tableau to reinforce his theatrical reimagining of her character. When Rob ushers

Rosalind toward the squad room, she replies, “But do we have to go in there? It’s such a lovely day, and I’m a little claustrophobic – I don’t like to tell people, but … Couldn’t we go outside?” (147). Her response contains five beats1 that are significant in isolation but become powerful when she strings them together. Additionally, the five beats program their interactions.

Rosalind makes her first move by presenting her disagreement over turf in the form of a question: “But do we have to go in there?”. Her choice of words appears to hand Rob the decision about the interview space; however, opening with “but” and

1 Every actor and director has his or her own way of describing scene breakdowns. Gay McAuley provides four terms most used in theatrical circles for these particular breakdowns: segments, beats, moments, and blocks. He uses Aarne Neeme’s definitions to inform his own, and I too will use some of these terms to discuss my breakdown. For our purposes here, a segment indicates a fabula in the narrative map, and the linear sequence of these segments creates the narrative arch for the scene. A beat represents a “transaction or a completed action… between two or more participants.” A moment represents a “thought, an act, or a speech act…more likely to be something internal to the individual actor” (McAuley 165).

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posing a question challenges his authority at the same time as she acknowledges it.

Dublin Castle’s architecture signifies it as a space of authority, whose occupants share in its power. Thus, the squad room acts as a place where Rob possesses the dominant power. Rosalind’s seemingly innocent question shapes Rob’s choice to remove himself from his space.

Rosalind continues, “It’s such a lovely day.” This second beat recalls the tableau she constructs by the window. With her observation, she fuses her pronouncement with a visual aesthetic, thereby merging her identity with the day itself and setting it in contrast with the building’s interior. When in beat three she admits she is claustrophobic, Rosalind builds upon the tableau and presents it as a place of weakness. She feigns a fear of enclosed spaces and constructs her victimhood in a way that connects outdoor spaces with safety. She reverses assumptions about the interior and exterior and redefines which spaces are dangerous and which are safe.

Ironically, her presence renders all spaces dangerous, yet her theatrical consciousness programs how people interact with her. This functions as her primary tool in masking her true menace. For this reason, in beat four–“I don’t like to tell people”–reestablishes

Rob’s false position of power. Rosalind presents her weakness as a secret and invites him into her confidence. This trust transforms his care from professional to personal and cultivates a desire on his part to establish a safe place for them to talk. She performs the damsel-in-distress trope to activate his white-knight syndrome and more tightly bind him to her.

The final beat bookends with another question the signification system she has established. When she asks, “Couldn’t we go outside?”, she suggests an alternate

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place and uses the collective “we” to transfer the apparent decision-making power back to Rob. The three statements between her questions, however, leave no room for refusal, since she plays to his desire to save her from a victimhood he himself cannot escape. The five beats’ spatial focus allows her to then activate the garden as a performance space where she fulfills his expectations about her role in Katy’s murder.

In this way, Rosalind prompts Rob to fill in her unspoken performance gaps with a false narrative in which she is victim and not the killer.

Rob’s childhood programming works against him in this interview scene. He drops his guard, because the garden’s bordered space functions as the foil to the crime scene. The wood’s uninviting and threatening wilderness is neutralized in the garden where its cultivation transforms wilderness into a place of communal peace and safety.

Unlike Knocknaree wood, birds flit about the hedges, around the “carefully wild little pathways,” and through overhanging branches that provide protection from the sun

(296). In this protected and “carefully wild” place, Rosalind performs an older form of femininity that is both strong and weak, part fantasy and part reality, sexually dangerous and youthfully pure—it is at once bound to nature’s freedom while also being traumatically confined.

Her performance is convincing, and even when Rosalind’s dangerous nature surfaces, the garden’s natural backdrop skews Rob’s reading of her. For example, she

“sharply” shuts down Rob’s offer to include Cassie in the interview; she insists on knowing the violent details of the crime and doesn’t react to her sister’s rape story; and she snaps at Rob when he asks a question she does not want to answer. These seemingly insignificant moments illustrate breaks in her performance pattern; however,

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Rob recodes their meaning to fit the identity she had established at the outset. After each performance anomaly, Rosalind reactivates a normative gender relationship with a gesture that overwrites her linguistic anomalies. She establishes a proximity close enough to him that he is aware of her body essentially under his. She also “look[s] up at him” four times throughout the interview. Rob describes those looks as “grateful”

(148), “pure, unblemished faith” (149) “flattering” (149), “tentative” (152), and “soft”

(153). The gesture of looking up at him performs a state of helplessness that proves intoxicating for the white knight Rob. He cannot see beyond the role she plays, and she knows it. Rosalind creates the staged scene and continues to reinforce her coded gestures until they possess an almost unstoppable performative power for meaning- making.

Her gestures allow Rosalind to play a linguistic game with Rob that unveils important information about the investigation without him realizing she is doing so. She draws Rob into participating in her story’s creation by layering performance signification systems and encouraging him to respond to her silences. As a result, she effectively insinuates that the killer is a man, her father is sexually and physically abusive, and she is eighteen and can speak to Rob without a guardian. She implies a plausible story for the crime that does not include her at its center. These false narratives firmly position her in a state of both safety and narrative dominance. She weaves these plot points into her physical and linguistic performance, so Rob believes the details were his deductions rather than her suggestions. As with Rosalind’s sister, family, and friends,

Rob falls victim to her manipulation without ever realizing he is being victimized. At the novel’s conclusion, Rob notes to his readers: “But before you decide to despise me too

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thoroughly, consider this: she fooled you, too. You had as good a chance as I did. I told you everything I saw, as I saw it at the time. And if that was in itself deceptive, remember, I told you that, too: I warned you, right from the beginning, that I lie” (409).

Rob allows us access to his psyche and warns us of the need to examine his narrative critically. His character slides between his past identity as victim and his present one as detective, and his narrative engages in a similar temporal disjunction. His situates his readers in the narrative present and provides no hints to his character’s knowledge of the investigation’s outcome. In this way, his point of view draws the reader into a spectator position without us recognizing we are watching a performance. The psychopath manipulates us as much as she manipulates Rob. When Rob draws attention to how “she fooled [us] too,” the novel reveals its status as a social drama at once for its characters and readers.

Showdown with a Psychopath

Rob status as a threshold person, who “elude[s] or slip[s] through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space” (“Liminality and Communitas” 359), is an anomaly in detective fiction. Usually, the genre presents investigations as liminal time periods for the community’s affected by the violence. The victim’s family and friends undergo the most overt transition rite, since the trauma from the victim’s death plunges them into a spatiotemporal dimension that is described as betwixt and between. Various studies show how victims’ family and friends evolve after violent traumas and learn to reintegrate into society. Rosalind and her family describe their ability to cope with Katy’s murder, and Rosalind manipulates assumptions about weakness and liminality to gain power over Rob and steer the investigation as she

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desires. The novel’s treatment of the family and Rob mask the textual liminality Rosalind as a psychopath represents.

In the Woods draws attention to the ways investigations function for detectives as liminal time periods. The common assumption that the detective is simply doing his job, or is operating as a hegemonic figure, ignores the intense liminal experience investigators undergo during cases. Such assumptions also ignore the psychological and emotional repercussions that repeated exposures to social dramas can have on detectives. French, however, centralizes their challenges and programs her readers to experience their struggles. As with Turner’s description of the installation rite, detectives submit to a communal outsider status and are often verbally and physically abused by the community they investigate.2 If a case proves particularly difficult or remains unsolved, detectives frequently prove unable to move on. and describe feeling haunted by the victim, their mistakes, and bitter knowledge of the family’s trauma.

Many detectives condition themselves to shut down emotionally in order not to be permanently affected by heinous crimes. These experiences shatter their sense of safety and professional effectiveness (Waters Interview). Both Cassie and Rob undergo variations of these effects during and following the case. The emotional and psychological repercussions of Katy’s murder and Rosalind’s manipulation threaten their ability to recover. Cassie’s challenge reverses the detective’s spectator position and activates a performance for Rosalind.

2 The rite is complex, but the most important stage of the ritual is called “The Reviling of the Chief-Elect,” during which the chief is cut and struck by the headman. He is kept awake all night, and any member of the community who feels wronged by the incoming chief may revile him and express his indignation in great detail. During this ordeal, the new chief must sit silently and endure the physical and verbal abuse “like a slave” with a downcast head to complete the installation rite. After the liminal phase concludes, the chief may not resent or hold these abuses against any of the rite’s participants. (“Liminality and Communitas 362-363)

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Cassie’s climactic showdown with Rosalind challenges Cassie with the kinds of dangers outlined by Turner. Unlike her partner, Cassie is fully aware of the dangerous position she enters when she volunteers “to go one-on-one with a psychopath who just murdered her little sister” (386). Cassie also knows she must use the psychopath’s manipulation tactics against her in order to have any opportunity to make an arrest.

Indeed, she must outperform the master manipulator by using Rosalind’s performance codes and spatial activation techniques against her. The “double-edged game” (394)

Cassie plays against Rosalind is not a game, however; nor does it function as a simulated transition rite where the liminal phase is bound by a known entry and exit point. Cassie’s experience with Rosalind illustrates the most dangerous form of liminality, since the experience is not controlled by outside parties. Cassie submits to the type of abuse simulated in a transitional rite, and Rosalind causes as much pain as possible. As the scene develops, it recodes other interactions with Rosalind, whereby the investigative team and reader act as an audience to the “subterranean, nightmarish…battle of wills” (395) that leaves us unsure if Cassie can emerge from the meeting unaffected.

Rob’s garden interviews with Rosalind resurface during Cassie’s performance, whose multiple audiences engage the performance differently because of their changed mode of reception. Cassie’s primary audience is Rosalind, whose assumptions about space, power, and her own superiority determine Cassie’s performative choices.

Cassie works from a script that she hopes will reveal Rosalind as a psychopath and fulfill the conditions necessary for an arrest. Her performance requires active participation from her primary audience, and Cassie deploys a performance strategy

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specifically designed to incite Rosalind’s engagement. Cassie’s script also aims to relay information to Cassie’s secondary audience, her investigative team, who listen to the exchange in their surveillance van. The team’s position as audience presents a complete reversal of Rosalind’s placement as spectator, and is more akin that of the audience in a theater. The team must remain immobile in a darkened enclosed space, unable to participate in the performance occurring a block away. Abercrombie and

Longhurst maintain that such inactivity does not mean the audience is passive; in fact, immobility demands the spectator’s intellectual attention remain in a heightened state throughout the performance in they are to cognitively “unfold the planned on-stage activity” (Abercrombie and Longhurst 54). Cassie’s double-edged game requires a similar level of attention, as it is a performance designed for two audiences, outcomes, and plots that will determine the futures of everyone involved in the case. Cassie’s performance must simultaneously convince Rosalind that her performance is genuine and follow the proper procedures demanded by her secondary audience.

As with Rosalind’s activation of the castle’s garden as a performance space,

Cassie also chooses an in-between space that lies between the estate’s houses and the

Knocknaree forest. In a reversal of Rosalind’s choice, Cassie forfeits her spatial power when she leaves headquarters and enters Rosalind’s domain. This choice creates an illusion that Rosalind holds power in the conversation. This public space also presents a sense of privacy akin to that of the garden. For these reasons, Rosalind concludes the place is safe for her. Cassie plays on Rosalind’s perception of outdoor spaces, and positions herself as the weaker character in order to draw Rosalind into the conversation. Rosalind’s is accustomed to controlling her world and her superiority

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complex makes her incapable of believing that Cassie might possess a matching intelligence or performance capability.

Cassie’s performance is difficult, dangerous, and ultimately damaging. Rosalind thrives on manipulating others, especially those she views as challenges. Rosalind makes it clear throughout the novel that Cassie is “not useful” to her because Rosalind views her as a figure who cannot be controlled as easily as her partner (385). Cassie manipulates Rosalind’s perception of their interpersonal dynamic in order to get her to relinquish her power. As in the case of those who submit to social rites of passage,

“Cassie was deliberately letting Rosalind hurt her, maul her, delicately peel back layers of pain to feed on them at her leisure” (Woods 394). The more damaged Cassie becomes, the more vicious Rosalind grows. Finally, she gives in to her hubris and brags about her crime. The danger intensifies when Cassie reestablishes her dominant position in the performance. Once Cassie drops her performance, Rosalind attacks her. leaving Cassie’s face “branded” (403). Her wound serves as marker of the psychological trauma Cassie undergoes during their conversation, which leaves her

“still half somewhere and someone else, and not to be touched until she gave the sign”

(403). Even with her team’s arrival, Cassie remains in a liminal place, unable to re- emerge from the in-between performance space she has activated. The psychological damage on Cassie remains long after the arrest, and her full reintegration back into the investigative community requires time and space. Cassie’s willing submission to the

Rosalind’s brutality equips her to emerge from her victimized state and grow from the experience. Rob, however, still cannot. His traumatic childhood proves unreconcilable

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after the Devlin case falls apart, and he falls into a schismogenic state, unable to fully reintegrating back into his professional community.

Rob’s decision at the novel’s conclusion to resign from the Murder Squad stems from his experience as the secondary audience during Cassie’s showdown with

Rosalind. Since Rob only hears the exchange, the scene requires a different mode of engagement with Rosalind’s performance. The aural nature of the performance heightens its liminality, forcing the team to utilize a different mapping system based purely on sound to comprehend the performance. As Rob privileges eyesight in order to read Rosalind, he initially misapprehends the verbal cues in her first performance for him. As I indicated above, in the garden interviews he does not recognize her sharp replies, emotionless reactions, and playful laughs as performance breaks. His image of a victimized teenager dominates his perception and blocks any accurate decoding.

In the van, Rob’s traumatic past connects his fear of not knowing and his inability to see. The only knowledge he retains of his experience are his injured body in the hospital and his reading of the police report, which describes his bloody shoes and arms wrapped around a tree. These images are coded with his fear of not knowing where he was, how he got there, or why his friends were gone. As a result, he processes trauma through sight and touch. They become Rob’s primary senses for perceiving the world and feeling safe. Sound and darkness, on the other hand, signify danger for him. He relies on the power of sight to provide meaning in any performance. Thus, removing his ability to see Rosalind in the showdown proves necessary for him to recode her identity.

Forced to remain immobile in the dark surveillance van and unable to see, Rob’s sense of himself as a savior of Rosalind collapses. It his experiences in the van of her

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performance that teach him to recognize her as the killer. The contrast between Cassie and Rosalind’s voices shifts his reception. As the showdown commences, Rob describes “the [moving Vespa’s] weird stereo effect” and the “footsteps jolting the mike”

(391). When Cassie drives onto the estate, she ceases to speak, and the men must deduce her movement through non-verbal cues. This thrusts human movement into an auditory plane apart from the physical body. Once Cassie and Rosalind’s voices echo in the van, Rob codes physical gestures into their vocal performance. He “pictures” how

Rosalind opens the door and how “Cassie’s face upturned and tense” complements “her hands deep in her suede jacket” (391). He has observed Cassie for years; therefore, he applies her past performances to the current situation. However, imagining Cassie’s

“face upturned” repeats the interpretive move Rosalind forced on him in the garden. In

Rob’s imaginative rendering, Cassie’s body proximity and physical gesture of looking up at Rosalind fulfills his image of her weaker power position.

Losing his power of sight forces Rob to listen differently, and he recode his perception of the performance. Rob begins to hear the “sharp, dangerous note” (400) in

Rosalind’s snappy replies. In the garden, he ignores discrepancies in her tone; in the estate lane, however, he finally hears the dangerous undertones behind her “tinkling

[…] emotionless” laughs (392). As he learns to accurately read her performance, Rob proves capable of newly grasping Rosalind’s image, stripped of his previous illusions.

In this way, he builds a picture of the truth. In both cases, spaces affect Rob’s perception of the character performances and determine the narrative outcome.

This scene also activates a third audience that of the reader. If as I argued in

Chapter 2 we consider the text as a material performance space, we will be able to

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recognize that the reader simultaneously engages three interconnected liminal performance planes during the scene: Cassie’s liminal rite, Rob’s experience of the scene, and our own engagement with the text. Since we only get the story through the mediation of Rob’s first-person narration, we, like him, experience the showdown between Cassie and Rosalind only via the audio. In this way, we are forced to theatrically engage the novel’s text as one would a script and fill in the silences. At the same time, we novelistically engage Rob’s liminal interiority through his reactions to his position as an audience to the performance. We have become accustomed to his narrative voice throughout the novel; therefore, our interpretation of the auditory cues and dialogue align with Rob’s interpretation of the two women’s movements. As Rob recodes the women’s vocal performance, however, there are moments when we are left with “Nothing” (395), “Movement” (393), and “Silence” (399). In these moments, all narrative knowing exists between Cassie and Rosalind. We are aware that Cassie’s performance is scripted; therefore, our ability to activate what Jennifer M. Groh calls

“embodied cognition,” (205) or Maria Tatar terms “mimetic imagination,” (13) increases during those silences.3 We fill in the visual picture only hinted at in the aural performance.

French forces readers at once to engage Cassie’s performance as a script and as mediated through Rob’s responses. Like Rob, the reader remains unaware of the

3 Groh’s notion of “embodied cognition” posits that “thought might involve simulating the activity patterns in our sensory and motor areas of the brain.” In other words, the neural pathways connecting memory, thought, and sensory perception do not fire individually during cognitive processing, they fire simultaneously. As a result, embodied cognition occurs when our thought process simulates a sensory response that would occur if a person was physically present during an imagined scenario (205). This kind of cognitive engagement links active intellectual participation with imagination and bodily sensation. This resembles Maria Tatar’s literary theory of “mimetic imagination” and to audience participation theories in theater and performance studies. In each case, a liminal in-between state develops between cognition and body, reality and fantasy.

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exact nature of Cassie’s bodily performance, since we are not in a spectator position that privileges sight. Rather, we occupy a liminal place between theatrical and novelistic engagement with the narrative. French denies us the privilege of sight, rendering the women’s performance open for interpretation and imaginative reconstruction as much on our part as on that of Rob. French utilizes theatrical performance codes and activates a narrative version of Wittgenstein’s aspect change in order to enable us to see the events of the narrative through a new lens.

Empty Estates and Dangerous Domestic Liminality

The interface between spaces and their activation as borderlands remains a major focus for French in her later writings. For example, her novel Broken Harbor

(2012) similarly relies on liminal spaces to drive the narrative. However, in this later novel she shifts her attention from public to private spaces. Broken Harbor plays on tropes of domesticity drawn from the gothic and sensation traditions while further stressing their liminality and psychological menace. The novel reverses the myth of the idyllic village and presents an Irish ghost estate whose community is displaced and isolated. French’s deconstruction of domestic myths proves as haunting as the victims’ ghost performances in the crime scene.

In the Woods balances descriptive worldbuilding with plotting; however, a greater percentage of Broken Harbor is spent on describing the crime scene and interrogation rooms. This in part arises from the different narrative focus at play in French’s fourth novel. In Broken Harbor, Senior Detective Mick “Scorcher” Kennedy partners with rookie Richie Curran in an investigation of a triple domestic homicide. Scorcher’s need to solve the case parallels his responsibility to teach Richie the skills he needs to do his job well. The reader also receives benefits from Scorcher’s training of Curran, since this

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forces him to narrate for his trainee otherwise taken-for-granted aspects of the crime scene and suspects. The training motif foregrounds spaces and the performances that occur within them. The reader too experiences first-hand instruction on reading crime scenes and interrogation of suspects. In this way, Scorcher’s narrative programs readers to decode the novel’s spaces and character performances.

The novel’s crime scene has two distinct but interconnected spaces: the house of

Jenny and Patrick Spain and their neighborhood. The Spains moved from the city to

Brianstown, a neighborhood that advertises community, security, and anchorage, or a safe harbor, for its residents. These vast estates appeal to the mythos of village life in order to entice twenty-first century consumers of “premier living [and] luxury houses”

(Broken 13). The Spains change spaces in order to participate in a culturally constructed performance, whereby idyllic domesticity becomes evidence of professional success. Their move occurs near the end of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger era, and soon after moving with their children, Jack and Emma, into their new house, the Spains suffer two major setbacks. First, Patrick Spain loses his job in the 2008 financial crash and the family slides into bankruptcy. Secondly, their neighborhood proves far from idyllic. The building company’s haste and disregard for quality results in the house falling apart around them. Moreover, the majority of the neighborhood remains unfinished, with

“random collections of walls and scaffoldings” peppering the “hedge maze” landscape of

“odd gaping hole[s]” and missing “house fronts…littered with broken ladders, lengths of pipe, [and] rotting cement bags” (13). The Spains live in a decaying borderland, without the communal connections and physical safety they were promised. Richie calls

Brianstown “the village of the damned” (13), and his observation proves accurate.

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The estate’s houses embody a series of concentric container schemas. Interior and exterior boundaries divide houses, streets, and neighborhood entrances, and these borders separate the abandoned and inhabited sides of the estate. The small number of inhabited houses at first seem immune to the dilapidation. However, once Scorcher and

Richie enter the Spain’s house, they discover the estate’s ruin mirrored in the fabric of the Spain family life. The public space invades and infects the private sphere, and marks the house as a dangerous, liminal place.

As with French’s earlier work, the novel hybridizes gothic and procedural crime scene descriptions. French layers sensationalized gore with stripped-down, evidence- focused descriptions of the crime scene. Broken Harbor’s hybridized world building taps into gothic tropes of mistaken identities, hidden secrets, and violence. The domestic murder at the center of the novel is violent, bloody, and horrifying, and the procedural form dictates full immersion into these details. Thus, French’s formal hybridity forces her readers to engage the violence in an intimate sensory fashion, and this exacts a visceral as much as an intellectual reaction. Such an engagement of mind and body locates both the detectives and readers in a liminal experience and they are challenged to decode the house and remain unaffected.

At first glance, the Spain’s home presents more questions than answers. As

Scorcher and Richie enter the house, their initial impressions jar with their perception of the surrounding neighborhood. They encounter a “perfect” hallway with “clean walls,” accented by a “sparkling mirror, organized coatrack, [and the] smell of lemon room freshener” (19). The adjacent sitting room mirrors the hall’s order and freshness. A second more careful look, however, uncovers incongruities. Scorcher muses that the

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front hallway and sitting room “should have felt welcoming, but damp had buckled the flooring and blotched a wall, and the low ceiling and the just-wrong proportions…outweighed all that loving and care and turned the room [into] a place where no one could feel comfortable for long” (19-20). The hallway and sitting room are performance spaces for the enactment of the social codes one expects for guests.

However, the architectural design and spatial disproportion of these spaces block these codes. Again, space determines how we think; as such, no amount of effort can overwrite the room’s disproportions and the discomfort they generate. Order and cleanliness merely performatively mask the reality of the neighborhood’s degeneration and the Spain’s financial ruin.

These incongruities intensify the further Scorcher and Richie penetrate the house. Jagged holes are ripped into the walls and offset the otherwise immaculate spaces. These holes represent the first clue to the disruption of the space and psyche of the Spain family. Both detectives react strongly to this visual and spatial anomaly.

Scorcher gets a “needle-fine vibration, starting in my temples and moving down the

[skull] bones into my eardrums” (19). He observes Richie “grimacing and licking his lips, like an animal that’s tasted something putrid” (19). These incongruities trigger a synesthetic response that fuses sight, touch, sound, and taste into a single experience.

Sounds are “raw, and ripped open” and “bounce” off walls (14), “needle fine vibrations” race through skulls, and space tastes putrid. French layers these gothic figures into her clinical descriptions in order to jar the reader’s sensory impressions. Efforts to reconcile these anomalies proves impossible, and this establishes the fact that “this [case] is different” (29)—for both the detectives and readers.

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The spatial and sensory anomalies generate uncertainty and discomfort and produce a liminal state for all participants. Patrick and Jenny Spain suffer multiple stab wounds in their living room, and the organization of the space indicates a violent and bloody struggle. Jack and Emma are smothered in their beds and laid out peacefully.

Scorcher feels nauseous as his perception shifts from seeing the children as sleeping to murdered. Oddly, the house is littered with an excessive number of baby monitors that suggest constant surveillance of the children. This detail present two possible perpetrators of the crime: either an outsider invaded the space and murdered the family, or one of the parents killed them before violently ending their own life. The fact that the bodies of Patrick and Jenny are curled up next to each other suggests a firm partnership even in death, and codes the attack as committed by an outsider. The holes in the walls and the manner of the children’s deaths, conversely point to one of the parents. The anomalous space thus generates two conflicting narratives: one of familial order and love and another of violence and chaos. French defies any easy reading, and forces readers to imagine the motivations behind these possibilities. As with readers, characters are similarly conflicted in how to read this space. The space thus mirrors the family’s psychological state and infects the characters that enter it.

Both Scorcher and Richie experience the sensory and psychological liminality characteristic of the house. The ghost estate generates the in-betweenness that plagues the Spain family, and over time this degenerates the boundaries between fantasy and reality for the parents. As their financial situation intensifies, both adults register a sense of threat to their family’s wellbeing while struggling to perform normalcy for their children. Patrick imagines an animal threat, whereas Jenny perceives an

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internal one. As a result, both parents turn to extremes to control their space. Patrick rips holes in the walls and places baby monitors around the house in his efforts to catch the animal. Jenny compulsively cleans in response to the spatial and psychological chaos. The protector role consumes Patrick, and Jenny forces her family to enact performances of normalcy. Both adults self-consciously perform for their children in order to mask the psychological deterioration they experience. This transforms their domestic life into a theatrical performance that extracts an emotional cost they cannot sustain.

Ironically, the threats perceived by the Spains are not only imaginary. As the investigation proceeds, Scorcher and Richie discover multiple layers of surveillance active in the Spain house. Surveillance comes from different parts of the neighborhood, and it turns their house into a performance space for external as well as internal spectators. After the Spains isolate themselves, their best friend, Connor, occupies the abandoned house across the street and watches them through the back windows.

When the family is away, he enters their space to try and reestablish a connection to them. Additionally, the baby monitors transmit radio signals to the Spain’s neighbors, who shockingly consume the family’s decay as entertainment. Thus, instead of fostering community, the ghost estate’s dysfunction breeds suspicion, obsessive behaviors, and hopelessness. In it, the boundaries between public and private blur, and the estate’s spatial reality invades the Spain’s home. Jenny and Patrick’s understanding that they are being watched poisons their psyche and transforms their behaviors. Both parents seem aware that the house and its surroundings affect their well-being, but they believe they can overcome the danger by performing older domestic myths. As a result,

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neither considers leaving what has become a toxic space, as they equate leaving with failure. The domestic myths override their spatial reality and plunge both into a psychotic break. This collapse culminates in Jenny Spain murdering her family in a desperate attempt to save them.

Empty Boxes: Interrogation Rooms and Their Theatrical Potential

An enclosed performance space whose boundaries cannot deter outside observers finds its natural twin in the interrogation room. Interrogation scenes pepper the novel, and, as with the crime scenes, the perceptions of both characters and readers elicit a visceral effect. The interrogation room is the space in the novel that most resembles a theater. It activates self-conscious performances and heightened awareness on the part of the audience. Unlike the domestic space where ghost narratives emerge from objects and architecture, the interrogation room is a blank box container. As with a stage, the space becomes meaningful only when bodies activate it.

Once the performance commences, the “audience becomes increasingly comfortable with their ability to shift their cognitive boundary… [and] include their own role in the production in a more conscious way” (Shanks 44). The room’s architecture determines the rules for interactions and movement. The room’s narrow dimensions and forced proxemics further influence its theatrical potential. “The power of the theatrical frame” means that everything occurring in the room is potentially “meaningful, [and] even if nothing is happening that too will be interpreted as meaningful” (McAuley 42). Thus, the audience observes a performance and participates in discovering meaning.

Interrogations are predicated on expectations of audiences both inside and outside the activated space. Detectives and suspects perform for these different audiences, and they do so for different purposes. The detectives hope to uncover new

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information relevant to the crime and the suspect hopes to hide it. Additionally, both sides play reciprocal roles in relationship to their seen and unseen audiences. As in improvisation, detectives and suspects must absorb offered information, quickly decode it accurately, and make ad hoc performance choices in order to achieve their goals.

Unlike those in a theater, however, the interrogation room’s performances operate in contention rather than in communion with each other. This activates a zone of liminality which transforms the performances into power struggles. The participants in these struggles deploy theatrical techniques to convince their audiences that their performance is genuine. In this way, the interrogated and the interrogator simultaneously occupy the positions of seer and seen. This oscillation between these roles charges the space with performative potential.

Characters behind the one-way mirror add a third audience to the performance.

The one-way mirror grants power to the unseen observer who remains anonymous to the performers. This position proves the most dominant one in the tripartite audience system. Each audience remains aware of the other’s efforts, and this consciousness of performance charges the space with heightened narrative possibilities.

In this way, the struggle for knowledge becomes a theatrical performance. The interactions between interrogator and suspect are “necessarily spatialized,” since “if two actors are present onstage, they must be placed physically in relation to each other and the dynamics of their physical placement will necessarily create meaning” (McAuley 94).

The condensed nature of the interrogation room’s performance space magnifies the physicality of the performers’ placement. Looks, gestures, and mobility activate

“different meanings depending on the physical orientation of the speakers to each other,

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to the audience and to elements of the presentational space” (McAuley 94). Moreover,

“these modes of bodily action all function in relation to speech, for in theatre speech becomes a spatial function: whatever is said in the theatre is necessarily positioned in some way in relation to the performance space, and the position becomes part of the meaning conveyed” (95).

Similar activations of performative possibilities are evident in French’s interrogation room scenes. For example, in In the Woods, during an interrogation, Rob and Cassie recognize they are not receiving the information they need. After declaring that the suspect has been “bullshitting [them] all evening, and [he’s] had enough,” Rob lunges across the table at the suspect, who leaps backwards out of his chair, prepared to defend himself. Cassie grabs Rob’s arm and shouts at him to stop (Woods 260). Rob activates the room with a combination of words and gesture. He signals his frustration by shouting obscenities at the suspect. He then closes the physical proximity between them with a quick lunge into the suspect’s personal space. The table no longer functions as a barrier between the two men, and the suspect’s reaction indicates he understands that the room’s enclosed space limits his ability to respond. Rob’s physical movement becomes aggressive and activates a heightened tension between the three bodies. Thus, with a few words and a single movement, Rob transforms his role in the performance from that of a controlled authority figure to a frustrated and dangerous man. This transformation disrupts the initial signification system that had been activated in the interrogation room. Rob’s actions create a new performance possibility and force the suspect to rapidly recode his place in the room.

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Rob admits to the reader that the outburst and lunge is a staged performance that he and Cassie have “as smoothly choreographed as any screen stunt” (260); moreover, it is one they have performed a dozen times. Once Cassie “calms” Rob, their performance continues, replete with practiced dialogue, body gestures, and directed gazes. They consciously construct a narrative that extends beyond the spatiotemporal frame and requires their suspect, their sole audience member, to fill in the narrative gaps: “Ryan…just stay cool, OK? Remember what happened last time” (260). Their verbal and gestural signifiers oscillate between a number of possible meanings. They force the suspect into a new performance, one wherein power has subtly been shifted to

Rob and Cassie. All of this requires intense concentration as bodies shift positions in dynamic relation to each other.

In the interrogation room, the dual performative consciousness energizes the space and heightens the shifting spatial and physical signifiers each time body proximity and physical orientation shifts in relation to the spoken word. French dedicates multiple chapters to her interrogation scenes, and her detailed attention to spatiality and bodily movements serve as novelistic case studies of performance. In most cases, she places two detectives in the interrogation room, which allows the investigative duo to perform a dynamically complex signification system, activated by body proximity, spatial orientation, and language. As we saw in the case of Rob and Cassie, the pair often performs in tandem, each with a predetermined role that is designed to create a constantly shifting system of movement and speech. They energize their space through well-practiced performances, and thereby consciously activate a more dynamic liminality than that created by the space’s procedural liminality. However, not every

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interaction in the interrogation room consists of practiced behaviors. Such performances develop in the moment, and generate high levels of anxiety and discomfort on the part of all the parties involved.

A Scene Reading of Connor Brennan’s Interrogation

There are a number of significant parallels between the formal style developed by Charles Dickens in the earliest moments of the genre and that of French. For example, as with Dickens’ script-like prose, French deploys curt phrases to indicate extra-dialogic stage directions, activates the room as a performance space, and relies on dialogue-driven exchanges to develop her scenes. Thus, as in the case of Dickens, and so many of the other writers I have explored in my dissertation, French’s novels read as if for performance. I would thus like to conclude my discussion with an example of the specific ways French achieves her fusion of theatrical and novelistic forms. To do so, I will use a directorial lens and analyze beat-by-beat the first interrogation in Broken

Harbor of Connor Brennan.

As the novel’s main suspect, Connor Brennan submits to three separate interrogations. His first interrogation can be broken down into two scenes. Each begins with the detectives entering the room. Scorcher and Richie have a different goal in each scene. In the first scene, they want to establish that Connor’s has intentionally surveilled the Spains; and in the second, they aim to extract Connor’s confession. Each scene can be broken down further into thirteen segments (see Table 5-1). The movement from one segment to the next often occurs when a beat is completed. At this transitional moment, the scene’s tonal quality shifts, the narrative theme changes, a different theatrical sign system becomes dominant, or a combination of the preceding occurs.

These transitional elements create some of the novel’s most dynamic moments, since

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the transitions produce major advances in the plot, new information in the investigation, and sometimes unexpected visceral effects. Each segment uses specific physical movements and body proxemics to code meaning into the performances.

Table 5-1. Interrogation scenes’ segment breakdown Segment Number Scene One Scene Two Segment 1 Establishing the Relationship Dual Entrance Segment 2 Introductions Friends Again Segment 3 City Boys in the Countryside Phone Gimmick Segment 4 Scorcher Arrives You will Wait Segment 5 B&E or Murder? Scorcher Returns Segment 6 Family Preliminaries You Have to Choose Segment 7 The Kids Who Is It? Segment 8 Past Tense Problems The Offer Segment 9 The Voyeur’s Timeframe Dissolving into Thin Air Segment 10 Connor’s Personal Info You Loved Them Segment 11 Closing In Weaving the Story Segment 12 Connor’s Silence The Confession Segment 13 The Exit The Exit

Scene One commences as Richie alone enters the interrogation room and offers

Connor a glass of water. Prior to this, Richie and Scorcher observe Connor from behind the one-way mirror. They determine that Richie’s unassuming presence and relative youth mark him as non-threatening. In segment one, Richie activates the interrogation room as a place for casual conversation and equalizes their positions. The segment contains two beats. Beat one occurs when Richie hands Connor a cup of water.

McAuley reminds us that objects in theatrical performances possess three interrelated functions: “to enhance the impression of reality…social context, or milieu;” to express an individual character’s emotion without speech; and “to devise…expressive interactions between characters” (171). Objects in the interrogation room operate in the same way as those on stage: they “necessarily serve to shape and define that space, and equally necessary, ha[ve] an impact on the human users of the space” (McAuley 173). Unlike a

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domestic or public place, the interrogation room provides a limited number of objects. A table and three chairs complete the room’s furnishings, and the sparseness enhances the room’s black box performances. Such a space offers fewer details that could redirect a suspect’s attention away from its other human occupants. Thus, any object brought into the space embodies new meaning in the performance.

Beat one’s significance emerges from the object’s ability shape the performances and emerging narratives. The table and chairs specify at least one human position in the space, since the suspect must remain in the center of the room and face the one- way mirror. Connor has clearly internalized the discomfort the space produces. The room is not his, so its emptiness intensifies his feelings of stress and anxiety. Since he occupies center stage, Connor prepares to be aggressively confronted by the detectives. Richie’s entrance, however, assuages Connor’s anxiety and programs a narrative contrary to the room’s code. Richie passes Connor the water and asks three questions about the water. The pace is quick, and the answers easy. Richie layers his gestures with non-invasive questions. Richie uses gesture, object exchange, and vocal performance to activate the space as a friendly, more collegial one.

In beat two, Richie continues to establish trust between himself and Conner. This segment also revolves around another object exchange: “He’s after giving you the dud chair” (Broken 174). Richie then adjusts the stage dressing by helping Connor switch chairs. In a room where the focus remains on the suspect, Richie draws attention away from Connor and toward the chair. This shifts the spatial energy away from the human body and onto the object. The chair overwrites Connor’s position and allows him to move. Richie codes Connor’s freedom to move with a second act of care that provides

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a momentary reprieve from his role. Richie signals awareness that Connor is more than a suspect. His attention to Connor’s physical and emotional needs defuses the scene’s tension. Richie’s, performance, however layers comfort with suspense, which play on

Connor’s fears. As he comments on the “dud chair,” Richie throws a “quick surreptitious glance at the door” (174). The glance is a performative gesture that redirects attention away from Connor and the chair to the door. Thus, this moment codes the chair exchange as a transgressive act. The glance is a subtle gesture, designed to prepare the stage for Scorcher’s arrival. In performance, the actor’s gaze directs the audience’s gaze; therefore, so Richie’s gesture also draws Connor’s attention to the door. Gordon

Craig maintains that an “important entrance was to be proceeded by suspense, and then to come…like a chapter heading of some grand old romance: it thrilled, and was intended to thrill” (117). Richie knows his performance objective in these first segments is to build Connor’s suspense and prepare the room for recoding. Scorcher’s entrance will completely disrupt the spatial tone established by Richie. Richie’s performance mitigates tension, while Scorcher’s performance is designed to thrill.

Segments two and three continue the repartee between Connor and Richie.

These two segments are dialogue based, with no spatial movement. After switching the chair, Richie balances on Connor’s side of the table, chats about Dublin, and relays information about his background. Richie is, of course, playing a character from which he assumes Connor will distance himself. Richie prompts Connor to contradict his statements in a semi-playful manner, with the aiming of encouraging Connor to drop his guard. Richie can be playful because he occupies the same side of the table with

Connor. His half-sitting, half -turned away proximal relationship to Connor creates an

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affect of nonchalance. They may have different personalities and goals, but the two men are literally on the same side. Despite his higher elevation than Connor, Richie shrinks the distance between them by overwriting his higher-level position with laughter, a thick Dublin accent, and cheerful toasts (Broken 174-175).

This relationship transforms immediately when Scorcher enters the room in segment four. His arrival does not disappoint. It disrupts the calm atmosphere and reverses Richie’s system of meaning. The rapid shift disorients the suspect and intensifies his liminal state. Scorcher re-energizes the room by using four distinct performance techniques. First, he increases the scene’s pacing through the speed and power of his entrance. He then elevates the tension with a sound cue of banging the door. Next, he spins Connor’s vacated chair to the other side of the table; finally he throws himself into it (Broken 176). Through these techniques, Scorcher appropriates the dominant position in the room and claims both men’s focus. His claim on the space increases when he moves the same chair moved by Richie in segment one. Richie gently manipulates the chair and thereby codes his care for Connor into the object. In direct contrast, Scorcher takes the chair as his own. His aggression energizes the object, thereby fusing it with his personality. As he throws himself into the chair, Richie slides off the table and into the chair next to his partner. This spatial reconfiguration places both detectives opposite Connor and leaves him alone. The table no longer serves as a connecting point but a physical barrier. Moreover, Richie is spatially and figuratively no longer on Connor’s side. This further increases Scorcher’s power, since body and object placement indicate that everything and everyone occupying the room belongs to him.

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Scorcher’s dominance of space continues in segments five through ten, with an unrelenting rhythmic barrage of questions and comments directed at Connor. The dominant performance system in this sequence shifts between gestural and vocal. The gestures are comparatively shorter than in the previous segments, and are centered in the hands and face. The finger wagging, raising the hand, and pointing direct the dialogue at Connor and highlight questions that demand a response. The minimalism of these gestures once again shifts the atmosphere in the space. Connor’s stillness in these segments makes Scorcher’s small hand gestures the only point of movement in the room. As with language, movement draws focus on stage. Scorcher’s gestures and rapid questions literally place power in the detectives’ hands.

Once the detectives move through introductions and establish their purpose in the interrogation, they deploy a series of questions that probe at Connor’s role in the crime. This allows Scorcher and Richie slowly to increase the room’s tension, building toward a crescendo in segment eleven. Once they confirm that his voyeurism is aimed at the Spain family, Connor sinks into silence, thereby signaling his awareness of their questions’ purpose and attempting to re-establish his own power by refusing to relay further information. This prompts segment eleven’s beat sequence, and intensifies the room’s energy. Layered movement and language keep Connor off balance and unable to orient himself in the rapidly shifting performance space. This creates a visceral feeling of enclosure and defenselessness.

To accomplish this effect, Scorcher remains seated at the table and takes the majority of the vocal performance, while Richie moves to the room’s periphery and out of Connor’s direct sightline. As Scorcher builds the story of Connor’s voyeurism, Richie

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moves in circles around the periphery. This creates a system of movement and stasis between the two detectives. Speech requires Connor to focus on Scorcher, but movement draws his attention to Richie. The next significant moment in this segment occurs when Connor continues to resist Scorcher’s questions and proves capable of withstanding the pressure. To increase Connor’s discomfort level, Richie starts

“skimming the sides of his shoe soles off the linoleum on each step, with a horrible squealing noise” (183). The discordant noise punctures the rhythmic tone of Scorcher’s questioning, and adds an aural disruption to the scene’s layered meanings. Richie changes where his shoes squeal and this jars Connor’s concentration. Richie’s tightening circles combine the sound’s harshness with an increase in spatial energy.

His pacing and sounds become the dominant signifiers in the room and code Connor’s body as one ensnared in a trap. This performance puts Connor on edge and increase his anxiety. Finally, Connor jumps, signaling that the detectives have successfully disrupted his concentration. Scorcher leans across the table and closes the physical distance between them. This forces Connor to maintain eye contact at the moment

Scorcher insinuates that Connor has murdered the Spain family.

Connor’s liminal experience crescendos in this moment, and his resistance to the interrogation. He refuses to respond and slams the room back into a very loud silence.

The struggle to control the narrative remains suspended between the three bodies in the room. Connor refuses to speak, stares at himself in the mirror, and remains immobile. He disengages from the detectives and refuses any longer to participate in the performance. At this moment, Scorcher and Richie realize they can no longer read his performance and retreat to a position of observation. At this moment, French shifts

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from a theatrical, script-like form to a novelistic interior point of view. Dialogue ceases and Scorcher muses, “But in that thick, overheated stillness I understood for the first time exactly how fine the line was, and how very easily crossed…It horrified me, how deep in my gut I wanted it” (184-5). As the reader audience cannot experience the interrogation room as a physical space and receives the performances via the written word, the silence on the stage requires French to fill the void with Scorcher’s reflections about their inability to read Connor’s performance and his reassessment of how to approach Connor. The moment Scorcher reactivates the performance, French reverts to the script-like style, and dialogue and movement replaces thoughts. This continues until

Richie and Scorcher end the interrogation and exit the space.

The interrogation room represents one of the most effective theatrical spaces in detective fiction. Spaces like the house or the forest stand in stark contrast to the emptiness of the interrogation room. This in-between place stands as a bordered stage, or container schema, and to enter it requires a movement from exterior to interior. For people not connected to the department, crossing the threshold into the murder squad’s building generates feelings of placelessness that increase discomfort the further one penetrates the building’s interior. Conversely, the detectives’ sense of place and belonging is activated with their entry into the building. However, despite their position as figures of power, their relationship to the interrogation room proves a constant challenge. It is the one room whose power derives directly from their skill in activating the performative potential of the space. In this way, the room presents as much a challenge to the detectives as it does to the suspect. Each character places him or herself in a spectator’s frame, and must deliver a performance that feeds off and

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transfers energy to the audiences, whether they be in the room or behind the glass.

Submission to the room’s liminality requires preparation on all sides and an understanding that what occurs in its frame has the potential to change lives. The vulnerability of French’s detectives arise from the spatial challenges they endure.

French’s theatrical consciousness fuses the psychological interiority of the novel with the spectacular spatial performances of the theater. She embeds theatrical codes in her novels and thereby challenges her readers to engage her novels as literary detectives, using details to fill in the narrative gaps and create from them a performance montage. French produces a jarring hybrid practice that demands a combination of novelistic and theatrical seeing. In this, she stands as an especially effective representative of a long line of detective fiction writers whose connection to theater fosters generic and modal fusion. Her work harkens back to the nineteenth century, when performance and literature worked as partners in engaging their audiences. Such modal symbiosis energizes her Dublin Murder series. She blurs lines between modes and genres as effectively as the genre’s originators. Like them, she exposes what we, as performers strutting across our stages, share with all detectives: “I crave truth. And I lie” (French 4).

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CHAPTER 6 CODA

After we have paid our tribute of regret to the affair, considered as a calamity, inevitably, and without restraint, we go on to consider it as a stage spectacle. –Thomas De Quincey On Murder Considered One of the Fine Arts

Superlative theatre. I applaud the spectacle. – Sherlock Holmes The Abominable Bride

Mystery fans prefer immersion in their dangerous fictional worlds. Mystery fans want to actively participate in a good mystery’s many challenges as both dazzled spectator and active detective. Such an experience cannot function without a recognition of the foundational role space, and especially theatrical space, plays in the genre. Space and place operate at the genre’s heart as we see detective fiction’s literary and theatrical manifestations emerge in our everyday world.

Nineteenth century murder tours were only the beginning of efforts to take the genre’s worldbuilding focus and realize it in physical forms. From Jack the Ripper tours through London to Inspector Morse tours of Oxford, crime enthusiasts continue to fuse literature and theatricality into a rich hybrid of formal and modal storytelling. As the previous century neared its end, new theater spaces were created to enable immersive experiences for mystery fans. The Sherlock Holmes museum, which functions more as a theatrical set than a repository for artifacts, opened in 1990, making 221B Baker

Street a reality in contemporary London. In these immersive experiences, actors dress in costume, utilize props, and engage in oral storytelling practices as they activate real places as performance spaces.

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Dinner murder mysteries, escape rooms, participant theater board games, and interactive virtual spaces have exploded in popularity within the last decade and a half, and they continue to change the way detective fiction fans engage mystery’s spatial puzzles. The inherent hybridity evident in early crime fiction novels have evolved into the next stage of theatrical consciousness and place-making. Through full theatrical immersion, fans become the detective and hone their ability to see spaces, their performance possibilities, and inhabitants as symbiotic entities in the ghost narrative.

Investigating the spatial and theatrical foundations of crime fiction opens new avenues of critical conversation as academic work in the genre continues to emerge. With the battles humanities departments now face, the way we approach our work will inevitably evolve. Perhaps, Maurizio Ascari’s call for “creative innovation” and “cross fertilization” not only applies to literary investigations in the genre, but to the very nature of our critical practices as well (xii). Perhaps, we need to go to the borders of genre and mode to see our disciplinary place differently. Continuing to uncover detective fiction’s deep relationship with performance and spatiality presents opportunities for us to participate in creative innovation and uncover new mysteries that can unlock the potential of the humanities in the coming century.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Kelly Beck completed her Ph.D. in English at the University of Florida in May

2019. She earned her bachelor’s degree in English, history, and secondary education in

2008 from Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. For eight years, she worked as a high school teacher, during which time she returned to Oakland University to complete her master’s degree, graduating in 2014. Kelly has fifteen years of theater experience as a choreographer and production partner with multiple high school theatrical groups in southeast Michigan. She brought her passion for physical and experiential storytelling to her academic pursuits and her work with the Harn Museum of Art’s interactive mystery app in Gainesville, Florida. Her academic interests include British literature, crime fiction, performance studies, spatiality, and storytelling techniques in literature, theater, and film.

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