This paper was written in 2009 as a plenary
for a conference at the University of Limerick, and combines elements of two
project so which I was working, my study of the mid nineteenth century
`Mysteries of the Cities’ (published in late 2011 by McFarland, U.S.A) and
recurrent work, in reviews and talks on the latest versions of crime fiction in
the 1990s and early twenty-first century.
1. Counter-history
I have always regarded myself as basically
a historian, if a cultural historian. I like to chart how structures of myth,
genre, theme, change across time and place, and how those changes reveal the
actual forces at work in the varying periods. So in crime fiction I have argued
in a recent book that in series from 1800 to 2000 the detective is developed,
death becomes the central crime, and the modern formation is diversity,
especially of gender and ethnicity, but also diversity of form itself. I would
always avoid any facile sense that things are improving, but would certainly
expect to find them changing, consistently different.
Puzzling, then, and even disturbing, to
find in my recent work that this does not seem to be the case. In recent months
I have been working in two areas of crime fiction. One is updating my Palgrave
Macmillan book Crime Fiction 1800-2000
to become Crime Fiction 1800 to the Present,
and this has involved looking at a remarkable amount of new material – mostly
fiction but also impressive amounts of new critical material. At the same time
I have been researching a long-planned project, to look at the sudden emergence
in the 1840s of the sub-genre of `The Mysteries of the Cities’, first in France with Eugène Sue, then in London
with George Reynolds and around the world as far as St
Petersburg and Melbourne.
The puzzle, and the disturbance, was to
find a remarkable amount of similarity, even identity, between the two
formations, 1840s mysteries and crime fiction at the turn of the 20th
to 21st centuries. In my title today I have isolated three major areas of
congruence, Cruelty, Conspiracy and Capital
Cities, and I will
explore these overlaps, especially the first two categories, and explain why
the third, cities, is different. I fear the differences won’t make us moderns
feel very progressive.
2. Cruelty
The charges brought against the Newgate
Novel in the 1830s and 1840s rested on its representation of violence: some
just felt it was wrong that the audience was invited to enjoy the violence, but
more searching commentators felt that the form worked, as we might now say, to naturalise violence, to make
the criminal life seem structural to society when previously, as in the Newgate
Calendar, criminality had firmly been identified as aberrant and its practitioners
extirpated on the gallows. These anti-Newgate novel commentators did not note
that in their own time social analysts, not only alarmist ones, were
identifying the existence of a new criminal class, hidden in the new cities,
people who preferred a life of crime, and often violent crime, to a life of exploited
labour. One interesting question, looking back, is if there is any truth in the
idea that things were changing then, or was it just that publishing was now for
a much wider readership in fiction and newsprint and that accordingly the old
social controls of publication were weakening and long silent views were
appearing? The best answer, I suggest, is a bit of both: things were changing,
and urbanisation was a major force in criminal self-identification and random
violence, but also the means of reproduction of narratives about these matters
were increasingly in hands other than the hegemonic and morally censoring elite
of the past. It will be interesting to consider whether this is also true of
the late twentieth century formations which I am going to argue are surprisingly
similar in many ways to the formations of the 1840s.
First: cruelty. I remember when elements of this argument first
appeared to me. In the 1980s I was a regular crime reviewer for the Sydney Morning Herald: I would get a swag
of books in and decide which to use for a theme-focused column each month,
trying to avoid or at most accommodate the pressures put on me by editors, both
on the paper and in publishing houses. It was a Jonathan Kellerman title of
1988 entitled On the Edge, it had a white
jacket, which my wife told me were then fashionable with the designers. And
like much American crime fiction, it was embossed. But embossed with the tip of
a knife just protruding from, as it were, the belly of the book onto its
jacket, at the end of a long red curve indicating an incision. So we were actually inside the belly looking
at the knife tip coming in. I blinked at this, and penetrated the book. The
story had no knife, no belly wound. It was the designer or publisher or, let’s
blame the easiest, the publicity person, who had dreamed up this jacket design.
Or nightmared it up. I felt offended as both a reader and author and also a
rather squeamish person. I thought of the recent Ed McBain Widows with a horrible multiple-wound knife-murder at the start,
and others like that. Things were changing. Was it to respond to readers’ anxieties ? Or was it just to up
the level of shock, horror and sadomasochistic fun in an increasingly blood-soaked
and horror-jaded market. Was the knife in our heads ? I decided I had had
enough and wouldn’t be party to disseminating this somatic manipulation. I wrote
a goodbye column, Stephen Knight Turns in his Trenchcoat.
I don’t think I was wrong – just last week
a British reviewer decided there was too much violence and gave up, to be
upbraided on radio by a lady publisher with a very posh voice. Ooah Naoow, we
are meeearely giving the paaaublic whaaut it waaaunts. Yes - like cigarettes,
very strong cider and public executions.
Where are we now ? A well-dressed well-spoken
young lady student comes into my office, takes a seat and politely says `Professor
Knight I wanted to discuss my essay plan with you. I am thinking of writing on disembowelling
in the modern thriller.’ My first response is to blurt out `Does your mother
know?’ But I know that’s wrong. `Oh’, I weakly say, `let me look at your
essay-plan.’ We actually used to call it disembowelling studies. I notice that
Patricia Cornwell’s Predator includes
a lectureette on disembowelling and how the knife behaves, as if from the
inside. The young ladies would find that interesting.
At least it’s not that sensitive introspective
stuff in all the other modern literature classes, which we call `Me Studies’.
Or perhaps it is: there is some good analysis on the serial-killer fiction and
the Brett Easton Ellis /Stella Duffy school of brutal violence as a somatic
realisation of personal identity in a posthuman world. The tattoos just go a
bit deeper.
Back to the cruelty mainstream. I have been doing a body count lately as part
of my critical policing. The term itself is pretty interesting: here are a few
1970s novels and films (it’s a Vietnam
term) and just a couple from the 1990s. I notice that one of the 3 novels with
this title is missing from the Library of Congress stack. Then there is the
1992 rock group Body Count with their big hit, the not uncontroversial, `Cop
Killer’ by Ice-T. I think the term `body count’ isn’t used much in titles because
it is too uneuphemised: the really savage body-count novels have nice titles
like Roses are Red, Paint It Black, Birdman, Cross Country. Cornwell gets closer to business with The Body Farm and Cruel and Unusual, but those earlier titles are noticeably less euphemised
than her recent ones, apart from the recent Predator
– but that is the name of a police project on serial killing, not an
uneuphemised term for the killer himself, and here, herself too.
Hidden inside the euphemism lies the body
count. From the late eighties to early noughties there is a fairly steady
count: in two figures. There will be a couple of multiples, usually a family,
with quite a bit of nastiness in the reporting – from blackened bodies to multiple
wounds, very multiple, and extra touches like beheadings. There are also single
deaths stitched through the narrative, often of casual victims, or police taken
out, or possible suspects, red herrings neatly filleted. And, to me very interestingly,
there is also what I’d call cruelty foreplay, which is then abandoned: typically
a group of hostages taken who end up not getting killed. It is as if, to speak
grimly, serious North American murder is between say 12 and 18, just like a
real life school shoot-up. Perhaps it was the single victim that really annoyed
Chandler so
much about the classic mystery ?
Like motor cars and red wine, bigger and
stronger is held to be the best in body counts. I score James Patterson’s very
recent Cross Country at a remarkable
108 kills, and there are quite a few other possibles and probables: not, as in
aerial warfare because you’re just not sure, but because the author is too
hurried or vague to clarify some outcomes. This total includes, interestingly,
a set of 34 hostages who are in fact finished off, the foreplay completed. That
surprised me. I like the BBC Radio5 description of this book: `You’re
completely engrossed in it from start to finish.’ Gross is right. Then it goes
on `Absolutely incredible.’ Is there a tongue in a BBC cheek here ? The back covers
of these books are worth studying: most blurb-merchants just recycle the magic
words, you know, pacy, exciting, gripping, page-turning -- present participles
are good, they have no sense of completion. I like the comment by Crime Time, whatever that might be, on Patterson’s
Roses are Red `Left my mouth watering
for the next Alex Cross’… My mouth watering ? There are in fact some bite
wounds in the story.
A step now across the Atlantic – and indeed
across the Irish Sea and indeed the River
Severn. I don’t think either nascent
Irish or just conceivable Welsh crime fiction figures in this litany of
cruelty. But some English writers claim to belong. Mark Timlin’s Paint It Black of 1993 says on the back jacket
`you will need a calculator for the body count.’ This is not true, and this
novel is one of two examples I will cite here to suggest that when English writers
go in for cruelty they do it on a faked up and mechanistic basis. Paint it Black is basically a solid story
about drug problems touching the detective’s daughter, now elsewhere like her
mother. Two decently developed sections show his intervention and his destruction
of a lorry-load of drugs. Then in part three he is suddenly involved in a flimsily
related plot, with changing identities and a crazy final shoot-out: then the
hero with his car wrecks a light plane as it takes off. I make the body-count
just from this section (there were none previously) a decent American-style 19,
plus the added benefit of a foetus burnt with its mother in a car-crash. It all
seems a bit cranked up to me.
Then there is Mo Hayder, another British claimant
to cruelty, and much better-looking than Timlin too. The back cover of Birdman (1999) has `not for the
faint-hearted’ -- from Val McDermid of all people -- and from the publisher, an
`astonishing novel of frightening and raw intensity’. Well, like Timlin, yes and
no. It certainly starts with five nastily decomposing bodies, with quasi-forensic
Y cuts and, the best bit, live finches sown into the chest cavity of each. Well
formerly live finches you understand. But there are no more bodies after chapter 4
(and they are very short chapters) except the killer who is, yes, a deranged
doctor, and has the decency to top himself, without any finches. He’s just an
ex-public schoolboy turned necrophile, run of the mill stuff for England.
Hayder has turned away from this squeezed-out
cruelty in later books and now writes decent plodding local mysteries: she has even
moved her scene and her only moderately troubled detective to the sad depths of
Bristol. I
speak as a Cardiff
resident.
Well, with an apology for the English
failure to alarm us in a properly energetic manner, I hope I have done enough
to remind you of the multi-violent character of recent crime fiction: I think
it goes back to Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon
of 1981, with its posed and mutilated families rather than the surprisingly reticent,
in visual terms, The Silence of the Lambs
of 1988. It’s certainly different from the golden age and the tough guys are
not in this tough a league. But what about the 1840s ?
From
the start of Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de
Paris of 1842-3 we are aware of the forbidding presence of The Schoolmaster. An educated man, he has
turned fully to crime, with his hideous sidekick La Chouette (`The Owl’), agent
in his thefts and murders and the brutal exploiter of girls into prostitution,
including the beautiful and still in a way innocent La Goualeuse (The Street
Singer’). Our hero, who roves the vileness
of inner Paris
at night to seek out subjects for his moral crusades, is Prince Rodolphe, as
strongly committed to both normative morality and its authoritarian imposition
as ever a crusader was. To be brief: the Schoolmaster is captured, bound,
brought into Rodolphe’s study. There, in a chapter entitled `Punition’ (`Punishment’),
the noble liberal Prince has his doctor, a noble black Caribbean,
blind the Schoolmaster. After this high-flown vigilante violence the criminal is
left in a cellar to develop his penitent soul: it’s the Foucauldian disicplinary
model in full flow, right down to we can see him but he can’t see us.
In Reynolds’s Mysteries of London, 1844-5, the central criminal is `The
Resurrection Man’. His own practices are grisly, with a good amount of horrible
detail as he blows up houses and executes the weak – he actually rarely just digs
up bodies: that is an ironic title: he mostly just positions people for
resurrection. He is also the main enemy of the hero Richard Markham, of whom more
in a while. Just as a reformed criminal, Le Chourineur (The Stabber), captured
the Schoolmaster for Rodolphe, so in the end, after nearly a million words of
multifarious narrative, the reformed Cranky Jem revenges himself on the
Resurrection Man and with general approval walls him up in his own cellar and just
waits until he starves to death – Patricia Cornwell could have written the body-finding
scene.
Reynolds offers much more in this cruel mode:
there is a harrowing, lengthy and sometimes semi-pornographic sequence about
the fall into prostitution of Lucy Harrington, the savage vengeance she takes
on her oppressors, and the rotting corpse she becomes. Reynolds does this more
than Sue. The illustrations in the book form of the Mystères are genteel parlour pictures, not the savage sub-Gillray
Cruickshank cuts that emphasise brutality and threatened violence in both
Reynold’s penny weekly and volume formats.
But Reynolds was working in the context of
the London
penny dreadfuls about urban crime, where Sue was coming off the tradition of French
Cooperism and romantic adventure. The London
Police Gazette style publications, as
well as the Newgate novels, had opened up a world of cruel behaviour and
violent representation of it. The body count is not at Patterson levels, but it
is at the double figures norm of the 1990s. However, there are differences. The
1990s really liked its violence to impact on agonised victims: quiet curvy
women with glass fragments stuck in their eyes, beheaded babies, bourgeois professional
hostages like exploded rag dolls. The 1840s did enjoy marking pain on bodies,
especially the bodies of young women, but it saved its worst cruelty for forms
of punishment, hangovers of the sovereign power execution system. The modern
villains either escape, to be discussed under conspiracy, or get their just
deserts very easily – in the imaginatively sadistic Cross Country the killer, who has scored his century, is merely
tackled to the ground by Alex Cross and shot in the head by his cop girl-friend.
It makes you wonder whom we moderns are identifying with -- victim or killer ?
Perhaps we are subtextual conspirators ?
3. Conspiracy
This takes us to our next topic. The master
criminal is familiar enough in crime fiction but tends to appear in popular
series fiction rather than in what are felt to be the more searching one-off
forms. Collins and Gaboriau don’t use a serial criminal, nor did Christie or Chandler. Their perpetrators
may be similar, but that ideological repetition is recreated each time. The
detective is serial protection, the threats are different, sitting ducks
trundling across the detective’s gaze. The master criminal conspiring all the
time against order seems like a simplification, a response of a simplistic or a
tiring author. Doyle invents Moriarty as he kills off Holmes, and he proves
useful on Holmes’s return – though not in major late stories like The Hound of the Baskervilles, `The
Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton’ or `The Adventure of the Creeping
Man’.
As soon as the city mysteries appear in the
1840s, they have recourse to a mastermind behind the malpractice. Perhaps this
is because of their serial form -- a set of different villains would fragment
the reading experience unbearably; but perhaps it is also a sign of the
limitations of their real interrogation into criminality. This is the area
where the 1840s and 1990s are most similar, and modernity seems to have made no
real movement either forward or back, as
it has in the other two categories under discussion.
In Sue there is the master criminal The Schoolmaster,
who is dealt with as described above. The Skeleton is there at the end to threaten
Rodolphe’s life and then disappear into the crowd, characteristic of
masterminds in present fiction. But he does very little: the real conspirator
is the Countess Sarah Macgregor, formerly Rodolphe’s lover, mother of the
daughter he thinks is lost, who plans to manipulate him into marriage through
the daughter she has hidden away with criminals – indeed the Chouette and the
Schoolmaster are themselves just instruments of a conspiracy. Sarah is very bad
and very beautiful – and described as English – perhaps the Scots won’t mind
this misattribution. The Irish folks perhaps might mind the fact that Rodolphe’s
loyal Little John figure, Sir Walter Murphy is also called English – though he
is in the French rather oddly surnamed just Murph.
Sarah’s aristocratic-level malice is
matched by Sue’s one bourgeois conspirator, the very evil notary Ferrand. He
lends money to, extorts and generally monsters the deserving poor and white-collar
people, including sexual assault on his female servants. Sue’s liberalism is basically
pro-aristocratic and anti-bourgeois, very different from later French writers
like Gaboriau and also contemporaries like Balzac. There are some real
villains, all from one family, named Martial, and a cast of minor criminals,
but the malice of the narrative is driven by the three-class tier of
conspirators, Sarah, Ferrand and Schoolmaster-Chouette. It’s interesting that
they all impact on Rodolphe personally – Sarah and the low-lifers directly by
taking his daughter, Ferrand by
harassing his gentry friends and the deserving poor he befriends. The
conspiracy is more personally than
socially focused, and is defeated by Rodolphe personally as well. We’ll see
more of this personalisation.
In Reynolds, the pattern of multi-level
conspiracy also exists, but somewhat differently located in social terms. Richard
Markham is our hero, born into the upper bourgeoisie but fallen on hard times
and variously assaulted by swindlers, tricksters and the justice system. He
rises socially when he very improbably himself becomes a noble when he is the
military leader of resistance in the Italian state of Castelcicala. At first a
Count, but not a body-count, he will be a Prince, just like Rodolphe when his
father-in-law dies. One recurring and conspiratorial enemy is the Resurrection
Man – he robs and extorts on a wide basis, but his recurrent hatred is against
Richard. But does itself justify his cruel end ? Hardly: it is the whole
society that casts him out. Higher up the social scale, the bad aristocrats are
fairly feeble conspirators: they manage to get Richard into jail as an utterer
of forged notes, but their malice pales beside the much amplified threat of the
bourgeoisie and even, Reynolds’s real target, the bourgeois state. The central conspirator
looks forward to the 1990s: he is a character with multiple names, real skills
in the city, banking, politics and involving others in his plots. I like his
name, Mortimer Greenwood, because it has a smack of the urban outlaw about it.
But his real name, which clue-happy crime fiction readers will pick up before
they have read very far, is Eugene Markham: he is Richard’s elder brother, the
bad other of the hero, naughtily named for Eugène Sue.
A determined conspirator, manipulating and damaging
innocent people along the way, a bit of a sexual monster, cruel, relentless –
and very close to the conspired against central figure: Mortimer as bad Other could
be come straight from the work of Patterson or especially Cornwell where
detective and master-conspirator are ideological siblings. Reynolds exploits
the very common `double’ or `twin’ structure of nineteenth-century fiction to
express two modes of response to modern civilisation, one of plodding probity,
harassed but eventually rewarded, and one of very dodgy exploitation, initially
decked with splendour but finally humiliated. The trick is, Reynolds like Sue
sees his conspirators defeated and morality triumph: that is the one point
where the modern conspirator writers diverge: they like to let him – has there been
a her conspirator ? – live on to another story, another anxiety.
In the modern authors conspiracy is also a
basic manoeuvre – but not the Brits. Timlin’s final cruelty spree does use a minor
conspirator motif, with one apparent monster turning into another one whom we
thought a fairly good guy. Mo Hayder’s semi-cruel villain just conspires to
find pretty druggies for his post-mortem attentions. In all these writers the
mad genius is a very convenient figure, avoiding any difficult questions about
the origins of criminality. Sue and Reynolds do link the conspirator figure
into formations of their period: both Ferrand and Greenwood represent the insurgent bourgeoisie,
new forms of wealth and wealth-production that were to haunt fiction from
Dickens’s Mr Merdle to John Galsworthy’s Forsyte
Saga. Cornwell develops this figure in
Temple Gault, replaces him with Jean Baptiste
Chardonne, and makes the crucial step of running both across several novels, so
effectively serialising them. The fact that Chardonne is a were-wolf with a
name like a dodgy wine makes you wonder if she is satirising conspiracy. Like
the double-figure body count, it seems modernity needs multiple conspirators to
generate real mystery, or twistery, and
this can give problems. Patterson, not a great literary craftsman, tries this in Roses are Red, but after discarding one possible master conspirator
after another, he has got himself into such a banalising set of twists that he
simply has to tell you on the last page who the true conspirator was – a totally
improbable senior police colleague. This mere name, a ghost of conspiracy,
haunts later books with his undeveloped presence as at the end of Cross Country. It is much like the early
crime writers being forced back on confession to get them out of narratorial
jail.
But as in Sue and Reynolds, the personal
contact between conspirator and central
problem-solving figure is crucial – and again
like cruelty, something that the early twentieth century classics
largely avoided or, as in Chandler,
left implied. In Predator Scarpetta herself is as usual very close personally to a
serious conspirator, and her niece Lucy is ever more closely threatened by the
instrument of another. It gets deeply improbable: the conspirator’s glamorous
lady assistant picks up Lucy in a bar, then infiltrates Quantico, then gets a
job in male form on the equipment being used in the Predator survey. What a
girl ! The Countess Sarah would probably bow to her. But with a knife in her
hand.
You could argue that just as the
identification of the killer at the end of a golden-age or tough-guy story is
in fact only a formal closure with no ideological weight, but simply invites the next novel in the
series of repetition compulsions, so the way in which the modern thriller of
cruelty merely gestures towards identifying the real conspirator, with a quick
flick of exchanged cards at the end, is
itself both an expression and a
euphemisation of the individualist anxiety that in capitalism anyone can be,
and structurally should be, your enemy.
I suggest it is for both the sociologists
and the psychiatrists to expound the role of conspiracy in these books and its
evidently crucial and compulsive link with cruelty. What from about 1850 to
about 1980 was censored out of narratives of disorder is certainly now, and
then, not under censorship. Is that good ? It doesn’t look like an advance to
me.
So much for conspiracy: or nearly. I have a
rabbit in my hat. An Irish rabbit. Not only Paris
and London have
mysteries in the early 1840s. In 1844 there was another city, called Londres.
Paul Féval provided its Mystères.
They score OK for cruelty – a lot of ladies left to scream and starve and
wither in dungeons, and plenty of violence between men, including that standby
in the cruelty business a mad doctor long before Stevenson and modern
television. There is also quite a bit of city stuff, but this is not your hero with
all-round badness conspiracy, nor yet your class enemy to the honourable gentry
conspiracy. This is real Ian Fleming style international crazy plot conspiracy.
The central figure is called the Marquis de
Rio Santo. Handsome, and free with it, charming, and keeping many at his beck
and call, a friend of the Czar and the president of Brazil,
he has a mysterious secret that drives his potent presence in London and around the world. We discover fairly
soon that while his front is that of a highly active Don Juan, his secret is
this. Please expect to feel proud, generous Irish hosts.
He is really Fergus O’Brian: he grew up in London and then Scotland. His father died in misery
and he has huge hatred of the English state. He has Scottish allies from his
time there and with massive wealth built up from the years when, after escaping
from transportation to Australia,
he became master of a world-wide pirate fleet – I told you you’d be proud. He
has now perfected a plot to destroy the Bank of England, the House of
Parliament and the English Royal Family, all with overseas support from Russian,
Portugal, Brazil and indeed Ireland,
from where 10000 armed men will march on London
when he gives the word. All the London
criminals – said to be 100000 -- are under his command, his army of `gentleman
of the night’.
That’s what I call a conspiracy. This is
very much a French take on the English capital, and Fergus gained the approval
of Napoleon himself when his pirate ship sailed past St
Helena.
The novel actually contains a lot of sharp
critique of English lords, parliamentarians, business men, but none of Reynolds’
institutional critique. It is a fully Gothic and political conspiracy without
an in-the text target, just operating as a paranoia thriller – and so it is
like those very popular cold-war thrillers that authors have struggled to
revive.
4. City
Féval’s knowledge of the city of Londres is more or less touristic, though, interestingly,
he like Reynolds sees the Thames as a dangerous waterway – as did Sue with the
Seine and indeed Dickens with the Thames.
There’s a tide to follow up there. But Féval falls short of Sue and Reynolds in
charting the new city, as Balzac had done and
Zola would do, and as Dickens was already doing in Sketches by Boz and the great walk across London by Bill Sykes and the hero in Oliver Twist.
There’s a huge topic, still not fully
developed, in the way in which by the early mid nineteenth century in Paris and London, and Philadelphia and New
York, and on every other continent, people recognised
they were in a new context. Housing, transport, water supplies, sewage, health
services, religious observation and above all personal identity and personal
threats were not only magnified but categorically changed by the new
agglomerations that were the spin-off of industry, business and the transportation,
national and international, that aggrandised them.
Reynolds and, especially, Sue record their
cities before major changes, though both wrote as the demolition men were
beginning to work on the worst areas – the Rue des Fèves was gone before Haussmann
changed Paris for ever, and the great St Giles’ rookery at the top of Charing
Cross Road was under the hammer before Reynolds wrote about it. Sue is the
simpler: he locates the homes of the wealthy and the poor in the right places,
and does show how the barriers are the domain of social slippage and
negotiation - as well as the final execution; he also, almost in TV documentary
style, homes in on the Rue du Temple (still there) as the site of events
through the middle of his multi-volume series. But he still tends to divide good
and bad, and the pastoral sequences along the Oise are all good, while the
ferocity of the Seine at Asnières is almost unrelieved.
And though Sue does chart Paris
as no-one had before, and as Hugo only had in the medieval past in Notre Dame de Paris and would in the near future in Les Misérables, at the end Sue’s story simply leaves for Rodolphe’s
apparently paradisal Germanic estate.
Reynolds’ city is both more detailed and more
varied. We go into thieves’ kitchens in the centre, the east and south of the
river; there is action in the smart and ensnaring west end, in unreliable professional
central London, and when we get out of the city it is not to Sue’s pastoral leisure
but to fine houses riven with tensions and aspirations together. Reynolds is particularly
strong on the malign institutions of the city, from banking houses, through prisons
with their terrible treadmills through to the at best dubious house of parliament
with its offshoot in the Home Secretary’s vicious office for letter espionage.
More than Sue, Reynolds envisages a dialectical and teeming city, with figures funnelling
into it from all over the country, and indeed the world., He too envisages an
ideal exit for Richard and Isabella in their Italian principality, but plenty of
the citizens remain at home to battle on with their just about manageable
lives.
This is where the 1840s part from the
modern fiction of cruelty. Though Patterson and Cornwell often set their
stories in Washington and Boston, and Hayder and Timlin use London (though a very
limited London, suburban and desocialised for Hayder, suburban and caricatured
for Timlin), none of them could not be
said to be taking issue with the city as such, as you could argue McBain did in
the Police Procedural and it is often thought Chandler did with Los Angeles
(though I think that his city corruption is just a cover for his gender politics
and that actually Mickey Spillane’s New York is closer to a tough look at an
American city). But urban issues became a real concern in the later twentieth century,
so much so that I have recently argued for a new sub-genre which I call urban collapse.
The curiosity is that its authors are not really writing thrillers of cruelty
or conspiracy.
You might think so from the opening of
James Ellroy’s first in the urban collapse mode, The Black Dahlia. A young woman’s body lies on waste ground in the
heart of the city, literally cut in two. But it is also drained of blood, a
human discard rather than the victim of torture, as she would have been in the cruelty
writers. The city turns out to be even more tormented than the woman. Ellroy
goes back in time to the Zoot Suit riots and further to Hollywood
corruption, and involves partly good police in his powerful account of the
dangers, immoralities and exploitations of the modern city. He continued this
mode in The Big Nowhere and LA Confidential -- the
first is the most telling of the titles. Though he does tend to find a
sentimental resolution as when at the end of The Black Dahlia we look forward to a child from the mind-weakened
cop and the body-scarred woman who have suffered with the city, and though the
stories can as in the film of LA
Confidential be re-wound into vintage cosiness, Ellroy set a standard not
pursued in his increasingly allegorical and referential Underworld USA series.
I would see two serious followers in urban
collapse: George Pelecanos with his quite powerful exposés of Washington
DC, starting with A Firing Offense, and Ian Rankin with a now completed series about Edinburgh, its variations
and its multiple instabilities. Both of these are refracted through strong but
also troubled central figures but they avoid the collapse into personality that
is the sentimental get-out for Cornwell with Scarpetta and Patterson with Cross,
and they especially avoid the sentimental subjectivism of cruelty and
conspiracy.
The difference from the 1840s is the sense
that the cities are not new and so mystifyingly threatening, but are running
down and losing the idea of communality. The modern urban collapse genre, that is,
uses a fantasy communal city of the past as its totem of value, just as the
1840s city analysis used a rural communal fantasy. You have to be reminded of
Raymond Williams describing the `escalator’ of positive memory in The Country and the City.
The main difference with the third of my three
categories is that in the modern city material the methods used are not going
back to the 1840s, but are deploying approaches that come from intervening
sub-genres. They are a mix: some elements descend from a police proceduralism
in method – Ellroy, especially; some elements look to tough-guy narrative
technique – Pelecanos especially; and
other elements pick up the `great policeman’ model – mostly Rankin, but he uses
the other two strands as well, and they all appear here and there.
If the modern cityism develops primarily
twentieth-century modes of detection, and also epistemology, and ontology, and
ideology, the modern mode of cruelty,
and its related technique of scientisim, both lead into aspects of the body,
that somatisation of individualism, and also that interrogation of inividualism.
The 1840s avoided that through the pillars of morality and gentry faith that
were still standing. The mode of conspiracy remains to some degree in the urban
collapse stories but only as a plot instrumentality not as a tracing, and
displacing, of any or all sociopersonal responsibilities for crime as it is in
its alliance with cruelty. And cruelty
itself seems as lively now as then, but now more brutally, and solipsistically,
exploited as specular horror against the innocent, not as the last sadistic
spasms of sovereign judgement, as it was in the 1840s.
This is effectively why the city material
has now separated from the cruelty-conspiracy structure: the latter duo has
become privately fixated, where in the 1840s it still had a general and social
reach that empowered its use as an element of an investigation of the dramas of
the city.
Not only are the city stories now separated
from cruelty and conspiracy, where in the 1840s they all worked together, a
dynamic, if neurotic, mix. I think the urban collapse genre is already thinning
out and not just because the cities have in the post-Reagan and Thatcher years
improved through investment. Now, as then, the key is perceptions of threat and
they have become more privatised. We still have mysteries in the city, but we
are too concerned with our own personalised detective stories, our pleasures in
cruelty and our delusions in conspiracy, to recognise those real urban mysteries
either in our plots or our titles.
One hundred and seventy years on we are
still dreaming of princes. Or rather of being princes.