Masquerade, Crime and Fiction

Crime Files Series General Editor: Clive Bloom Since its invention in the nineteenth century, detective fiction has never been more popular. In novels, short stories, films, radio, television and now in computer games, private detectives and psychopaths, prim poisoners and over- worked cops, tommy gun gangsters and cocaine criminals are the very stuff of modern imagination, and their creators one mainstay of popular consciousness. Crime Files is a ground-breaking series offering scholars, students and discern- ing readers a comprehensive set of guides to the world of crime and detective fiction. Every aspect of crime writing, detective fiction, gangster movie, true- crime exposé, police procedural and post-colonial investigation is explored through clear and informative texts offering comprehensive coverage and theoretical sophistication. Published titles include: Hans Bertens and Theo D’haen CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CRIME FICTION Anita Biressi CRIME, FEAR AND THE LAW IN TRUE CRIME STORIES Ed Christian (editor) THE POST-COLONIAL DETECTIVE Paul Cobley THE AMERICAN THRILLER Generic Innovation and Social Change in the 1970s Lee Horsley THE NOIR THRILLER Fran Mason AMERICAN GANGSTER CINEMA From Little Caesar to Pulp Fiction Linden Peach MASQUERADE, CRIME AND FICTION Criminal Deceptions Susan Rowland FROM AGATHA CHRISTIE TO RUTH RENDELL British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction Adrian Schober POSSESSED CHILD NARRATIVES IN LITERATURE AND FILM Contrary States Heather Worthington THE RISE OF THE DETECTIVE IN EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY POPULAR FICTION Crime Files Series Standing Order ISBN 978-0–333–71471–3 (Hardback) 978-0–333–93064–9 (Paperback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England Masquerade, Crime and Fiction Criminal Deceptions Linden Peach © Linden Peach 2006 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2006 978-0-230-00658-4 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-28245-6 ISBN 978-0-230-62540-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230625402 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Peach, Linden, 1951– Masquerade, crime and fiction : criminal deceptions / Linden Peach. p. cm. – (Crime files) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Detective and mystery stories, English – History and criticism. 2. Detective and mystery stories, American – History and criticism. 3. Popular literature – English-speaking countries – History and criticism. 4. Masquerades in literature. 5. Crime in literature. I. Title. II. Series: Crime files series. PR830.D4P385 2006 823Ј.087209—dc22 2006045669 10987654321 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 For Angela Contents Preface viii Acknowledgements xvii 1 Mocking Modernity 1 2 Gender and Performance in the Criminal Masquerade 25 3 The Cadaver as Criminalised Text 56 4 Where Does That Criminality Come From? Writing Women and Crime 81 5 Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Sara Paretsky: The New Woman 104 6 Masquerade, Criminality and Desire in Toni Morrison’s Love 129 7 Writing the Serial and Callous Killer into (Post) Modernity 150 Conclusion 173 Notes 177 Index 181 vii Preface Crime hardly exists outside of narrative. The crime we read about, hear about and, indeed, experience is usually placed within a narrative; either for us in the way in which it is reported or by us through cultural or personal perspectives, prejudices or fears. For example, in December 2005, a British newspaper reported the trial of a gang led by a teenage girl who kicked a man to death on the South Bank in London. In a style of street crime that the press were reporting as a new craze, she invited their vic- tim to smile for the mobile phone camera as they took pictures of the incident. Press coverage likened the vicious assault to those in Stanley Kubrick’s well-known film, A Clockwork Orange (1971), based on a novel by Anthony Burgess. In doing so, the press did not simply report the crime but place it within a larger, cultural narrative, linking the offender to the principal protagonist in Kubrick’s film. This particular piece of contextualisation is pertinent to the subject of this book because the association of a contemporary crime to a well-known text from the pre- vious century highlights how the crime itself, carried out for the camera as much as for the thrill, was itself a performance. Indeed, this is the principal motif in A Clockwork Orange in which Alex de Large in one incident bursts into an elderly couple’s home, kicks the man almost to death and rapes his wife in front of him. For the gang this is entertainment; they wear bizarre masks and Alex himself performs a soft-shoe kick- dance, landing his blows to the rhythm and lyrics of ‘ “Singin” in the Rain’. The choreographed rape of Mrs Alexander in which Alex slits her clothes from her pants upwards is itself reminiscent of the late- nineteenth-century, brutal serial murders of London prostitutes by a murderer who was never caught and became known as Jack the Ripper. The press coverage of the South Bank murder reinforces the performance dimension of the murder by linking it with a text that interleaves choreographed violence, slapstick, musical cinema and dance. The assaults in that text are in turn associated with ways in which a Victorian killer did not simply commit but perform his murders, making a spectacle of his victims. Popular culture, the media and even serious literature play a large part in the cultural process by which crime is turned into narrative. But, par- adoxically, they also help us to understand how the social and personal configuration of crime is determined. Although focusing upon this viii Preface ix process might appear to divert our attention from what we might think of as ‘real’ crime against persons and property, it highlights an equally important social phenomena: the process by which society confronts and absorbs ‘real’ crime. The South Bank murder serves as a useful introduction to many of the themes in this book. It is an example of a type of street crime that has been a prevailing public concern since the nineteenth century but reap- pears in different guise in different periods, like ‘garrotting’ in the Victorian period discussed in Chapter 2. It illustrates the significant role the press and the media play in configuring crime. But, most impor- tantly for the theme of this book, it reinforces an aspect of criminality that was overlooked in criminology until about the 1920s: the excite- ment that criminals derive from it. As Alex says in a voice over in A Clockwork Orange he is looking for ‘surprise visit[s]’ that are ‘a real kick and good for laughs and lashings of the old ultra-violence’. The emphasis in this book is upon an aspect of the psychology of crime that is highlighted in the press coverage of the South Bank murder and in both the novel A Clockwork Orange and its film adaptation: masquerade and performance. At one level, crime as performance is pursued in this book on the understanding that it contributes to the fuller socio-psychic explanation of criminality. But the primary interest is in the way in which it provides a literary space in which larger issues per- taining to masquerade, especially the construction of gender and the enactment of gendered social relations, might be pursued. Studies of modern literary representations of crime have usually focused upon the differences between detective fiction and the crime novel, and between the various subgenres of crime writing. These include private eye fiction, the gangster story, the police procedural narrative, the forensic science case, the criminal psychology story, the serial killer narrative and lawyer procedural fiction. They have each come into prominence at different times, and in the twentieth century their respective popularity usually depended upon the interleaving of book publishing, the movies and television. However, all these particular gen- res and subgenres are only specific developments within a much larger field: the response of the literary and the popular imagination to crime. In concentrating on ‘crime writing’, criticism has tended to neglect this bigger picture. Chapter 1 places the book’s principal concerns with masquerade, performance and criminality in a wider perspective in which criminality is seen as mimicking, even mocking, modernity.

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