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Criminal Sensations: Neo-Victorian Detectives

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Abstract

In many respects, the detective novel represents sensation fiction’s most successful and enduring legacy, as well as its most persistent ongoing engagement with popular culture.

This chapter traces the detective descendants of the sensation novel from Sherlock Holmes through to contemporary neo-sensational detective fiction, examining the way in which the specific tenets of the sensation novel (including the domestic setting, the emphasis on family secrets, and the figure of the amateur detective) are redeployed in the detective genre. The ongoing tensions between literary and popular fiction are addressed here via an exploration of popular historical detective novels, including Emily Brightwell’s The Inspector and Mrs Jeffries (1993) and Tasha Alexander’s And Only to Deceive (2005), which, whilst distinct from what Linda Hutcheon terms ‘historiographic metaficton’, nonetheless represent a significant cultural engagement with the Victorian past, and specifically with the sensation novel.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Agatha Christie, ‘Greenshaw’s Folly’ in The Adventures of the Christmas Pudding (London: Collins, 1960), p. 229.

  2. 2.

    The character of the writer appears repeatedly in the neo-sensation novel: examples include Alice Lincroft in Holt’s Shivering Sands, Brian Thompson’s Bella Wallis and Kate Ardleigh Sheridan in Robin Paige’s Victorian Mystery series.

  3. 3.

    Melissa Schaub identifies detective fiction as specifically ‘middlebrow’, arguing that as it was both ‘popular and […] intellectually respectable […] it was the form where high and low were most likely to mingle and become middlebrow’ (Middlebrow Feminism in Classic British Detective Fiction: The Female Gentleman [Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013], p. viii).

  4. 4.

    Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms (1983; London: Verso 2005), p. 148.

  5. 5.

    Heilmann and Llewellyn, Neo-Victorianism, p. 16.

  6. 6.

    Hadley, Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative, p. 59.

  7. 7.

    Scott McCracken, Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 51.

  8. 8.

    See Clive Emsley and Haia Shpayer-Makov, eds., Police Detectives in History, 1750–1950 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017).

  9. 9.

    Although Kent eventually confessed and was convicted, there has been speculation that she was covering for her brother, and may not have committed the crime . See Kate Summerscale , The Suspicions of Mr Whicher; or The Murder at Road Hill House (London: Bloomsbury, 2008).

  10. 10.

    Margaret Oliphant, ‘Novels’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Aug. 1863, p. 169.

  11. 11.

    Anon., ‘Our Female Sensation Novelists’, The Christian Remembrancer, Vol. 46, Jul–Oct 1864, p. 210.

  12. 12.

    Suzanne Moore, ‘The Simple Art of Detection: The Female Detective in Victorian and Contemporary Mystery Novels’, Modern Fiction Studies, 47:2 (Summer 2001), pp. 449–450. Moore’s review article examines Catherine Ross Nickerson’s The Web of Iniquity: Early Detective Fiction by American Women (Duke University Press, 1998)—a study which evidences significant parallels between the Victorian sensation novel and nineteenth-century American detective fiction, particularly in terms of the emphasis on domesticity.

  13. 13.

    Hadley, Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative, p. 63.

  14. 14.

    T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), p. 464.

  15. 15.

    The latest BBC television adaptation of Collins’s novel (2018) replicates this structure via the multiple interviews Mr Nash (a scrivener hired by Walter to help solve the case) conducts with the various ‘witnesses’, which are interspersed throughout the series.

  16. 16.

    Anon., ‘Lady Audley on the Stage’, The London Review of Politics, Society, Literature, Art, and Science, Vol. 6 (March 7 1863), p. 245.

  17. 17.

    Lillian Craton , The Victorian Freak Show: The Significance of Disability and Physical Differences in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Amherst: Cambria Press, 2009), p. 143.

  18. 18.

    See Anthea Trodd, Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989).

  19. 19.

    Stephen Knight, Crime Fiction Since 1800: Detection, Death, Diversity (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010 [2nd edition]), p. 233.

  20. 20.

    Wilkie Collins, ‘The Diary of Anne Rodway’ in The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Vol. 5: The Victorian Era (Peterborough, Ontario, Broadview, 2006), p. 486.

  21. 21.

    Brantlinger, ‘What is “Sensational” about the “Sensation Novel”?’, p. 16.

  22. 22.

    Moore, ‘The Simple Art of Detection’, Modern Fiction Studies, 47:2 (Summer 2001), p. 448.

  23. 23.

    Ibid., p. 449.

  24. 24.

    Ibid., p. 450.

  25. 25.

    Heidi H. Johnson, ‘Electra-fying the Female Sleuth: Detecting the Father in Eleanor’s Victory and Thou Art the Man’ in Marlene Tromp, Pamela Gilbert, and Aeron Haynie, eds., Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth in Context, p. 255.

  26. 26.

    Ibid.

  27. 27.

    Moore, ‘The Simple Art of Detection’, p. 450.

  28. 28.

    Trodd, Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel, p. 5.

  29. 29.

    See Christine Colón , Writing for the Masses: Dorothy L. Sayers and the Victorian Literary Tradition (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), and Susan R. Hanes , ‘The Persistent Phantom: Wilkie Collins and Dorothy L. Sayers’ , Wilkie Collins Journal, 3 (2000), n.p.

  30. 30.

    See Emrys, Wilkie Collins, Vera Caspary, and the Evolution of the Casebook Novel.

  31. 31.

    Like Ripper Street, Oscar de Muriel’s Frey and McGray books (2015–2018) are also set in the wake of the Ripper murders.

  32. 32.

    M. R. C. Kasasian’s The Gower Street Detect ive series (2013–2017) is an example of the form which is heavily influenced by Sherlock Holmes, but which features a female detective.

  33. 33.

    McCracken, Pulp, p. 70.

  34. 34.

    D. J. Taylor, ‘Murder she/he wrote’, The Guardian (23 August 2008), n.p.

  35. 35.

    Anon. [J. R. De Capel Wise], ‘Belles Lettres’, Westminster Review, 30:1 (1866), p. 126.

  36. 36.

    Taylor, ‘Murder she/he wrote’.

  37. 37.

    Brian Thompson, The Widow’s Secret (London: Chatto & Windus, 2013), p. 24.

  38. 38.

    There is also an echo here of Collins’s The Woman in White, which allegedly drew on the case of Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton , who imprisoned his wife on an asylum . In this respect, Collins , too, exposed the questionable morals of his seemingly respectable acquaintances.

  39. 39.

    Taylor, ‘Murder she/he wrote’, n.p.

  40. 40.

    Nadine Muller, ‘Dead Husbands and Deviant Women: Investigating the Detective Widow in Neo-Victorian Crime Fiction’, Clues, 30:1 (Spring 2012), p. 99.

  41. 41.

    McCracken, Pulp, p. 61.

  42. 42.

    John Stevenson, Amazon Review of The Inspector and Mrs Jeffries (28 March 2015), https://www.amazon.co.uk/Inspector-Mrs-Jeffries-Emily-Brightwell/product-reviews/1472108868?pageNumber=4.

  43. 43.

    Heilmann and Llewellyn, Neo-Victorianism, p. 6.

  44. 44.

    Emily Brightwell, The Inspector and Mrs Jeffries (1993; London: Constable and Robinson, 2013), p. 46.

  45. 45.

    Marian Halcombe represents an obvious exception to this.

  46. 46.

    See, for example, Collins’s The Evil Genius.

  47. 47.

    McCracken, Pulp, p. 60.

  48. 48.

    Christian Gutleben, Nostalgic Postmodernism: The Victorian Tradition and the Contemporary British Novel (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001).

  49. 49.

    See Sherry Lynne Rosenthal , Four Essays on the Nostalgic Appeal of Popular Fiction, Film, and Television (San Diego: University of California Press, 1983).

  50. 50.

    Tasha Alexander, And Only to Deceive (New York: Harper, 2006), p. 82.

  51. 51.

    A similar gesture is evident in Raybourn’s Silent in the Grave (2006), in which the narrator -protagonist, reviewing her collection of books, notes ‘Some of them were good novels, by proper authors. Much of it was complete rubbish’ (Richmond: MIRA, p. 220).

  52. 52.

    ‘Dead Husbands and Deviant Women’, p. 104.

  53. 53.

    Ibid., p. 106.

  54. 54.

    Muller’s article is an obvious exception to this.

  55. 55.

    Heilmann and Llewellyn, Neo-Victorianism, p. 4.

  56. 56.

    McCracken, Pulp, pp. 56–61.

  57. 57.

    Ibid., p. 57.

  58. 58.

    Ibid., p. 58.

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  1. Department of Arts and Humanities, Brunel University, London, UK

    Jessica Cox

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Cox, J. (2019). Criminal Sensations: Neo-Victorian Detectives. In: Neo-Victorianism and Sensation Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29290-4_3

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