The House of Keeping

Abstract

Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s Martin Beck series and McClure’s Kramer and Zondi procedurals attempt, with varying degrees of success, to confront the social structures within which their detectives must work. Nicolas Freeling’s Van der Valk series, too, deals consciously with its own Dutch environment, anatomizing facets of Holland’s social system in the context of a wider European community,¹ but it has another, formal mission to accomplish. Earlier sub-genres of detective fiction seem inadequate vehicles to foreground the sorts of questions Freeling wishes to ask about contemporary society. He recognizes that Golden Age and hard-boiled detective fiction practiced their own “strategies of containment,” and that such texts were “staged … as an interference between levels” which prevented the reader from seeing the underlying contradictions in socioeconomic reality (Jameson, The Political Unconscious 53–56). On the one hand, Golden Age novels suppressed historical continuity; on the other hand, hard-boiled fiction allowed the return of history but romanticized a single investigator who was finally incapable of coping with his complex world. The police procedural, as Freeling envisions it, will insist upon those very contradictions, focusing specifically on the period of transition inaugurated by World War II.

The combination of the fait divers and the detective novel has produced for the last hundred years or more an enormous mass of “crime stories” in which delinquency appears both as very close and quite alien, a perpetual threat to everyday life, but extremely distant in its origin and motives, both everyday and exotic in the milieu in which it takes place. Through the importance attributed to it and the surfeit of discourse surrounding it, a line is traced round it which, while exalting it, sets it apart. In such a formidable delinquency, coming from so alien a clime, what illegality could recognize itself?.

Michel Foucault