Abstract
In the emergence of new forms out of the popular confession a major difference is marked, as has already been observed, by the change in the voice which gives meaningful form to the narrative. The substitution of the criminal by the detective would seem to resolve the tension found in the confession by unequivocally celebrating the capture of the subversive adventure within the detective story’s ‘official’ moralizing syntax. On the other hand, it might be argued, the insistence on crime in the early novel indicates the survival of the vitality of the adventure as a resistance to official ideologies, marking the novel, as in D. H. Lawrence’s much later statement of the case, as itself a form of subversive adventure:
Philosophy, religion, science, they are all of them busy nailing things down, to get a stable equilibrium. Religion, with its nailed-down One God, who says Thou shalt, Thou shan’t, and hammers home every time; philosophy, with its fixed ideas; science with its ‘laws’: they, all of them, all the time, want to nail us on to some tree or other.
‘I don’t think I like mysteries. If I did I wouldn’t have become a detective.’
Detective Sergeant Dick Bloodworth, in Loren D. Estleman,
The Glass Highway (1984)
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Notes
D. H. Lawrence, ‘Morality and the Novel’ (1925), in A. A. H. Inglis (ed.), D. H. Lawrence: A Selection from Phoenix (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 177.
Lennard Davis, Resisting Novels (London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 24–5.
D. A. Miller, ‘The Novel and the Police’, Glyph, VIII (1981), p. 141.
See Katherine MacDermott, ‘Literature and the Grub Street myth’, in Peter Humm et al., Popular Fictions. Essays in Literature and History (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 18–21.
Edmund Wilson, ‘Why Do People Read Detective Stories?’ in Classics and Commercials: a Literary Chronicle of the Forties (New York: Farrar, Strauss, 1950), p. 236. As this text will make clear, I do not share Wilson’s ‘enchantment’ with Sherlock Holmes (nor, I might add, his distaste for Dashiel Hammett), and would myself locate the beginning of this decline in Holmes himself.
Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘A Study in Scarlet’ [1887], in The Complete Sherlock Holmes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p. 24.
Dickens, ‘The Detective Police’ (’A Detective Police Party’, 1850), in The Uncommercial Traveller and Reprinted Pieces (1858), (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 485.
Philip Collins, Dickens and Crime (London: Macmillan, 1965), p. 205.
W. H. Wills, ‘The Modern Science of Thief-Taking’ [Household Words, 13 July 1850], reprinted in Thomas Waters, The Recollections of a Policeman (New York Cornish, Lamport, 1853), p. 191. It is clear that Wills’ opinions were shared by Dickens. See Philip Collins, Chapter I X.
Andrew Forrester, ‘The Unknown Weapon’ (1864), in E. F. Bleiler (ed.), Three Victorian Novels (New York: Dover, 1978), p. 25.
Michèle Slung, introduction to Catherine Louisa Pirkis, The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective [1893] (New York: Dover, 1986), p. ix.
Andrew Forrester, ‘The Unknown Weapon’, in E. F. Bleiler (ed.), Three Victorian Novels, p. 59.
See R. C. Terry, Victorian Popular Fiction, 1860–80 (London: Macmillan, 1983), p. 56. The expression ‘Enigma novel’ is taken from The Spectator, XXXIV (28 Dec. 1861) 1428, and the review of Uncle Silas was published in The Saturday Review on 4 February 1865.
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© 1992 Martin A. Kayman
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Kayman, M.A. (1992). The Romance of the Detective. In: From Bow Street to Baker Street. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21786-1_5
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