If you can get them to think: an ethical defence of crime fiction
by Ellenore Chapman, Bolton University
Introduction
There is a strong ethical message to be found in crime fiction, prompting the argument that all literary texts “cannot avoid being about ethics”(1), just as a romance novel is about romance, or a crime novel is about crime. This does not mean that books are either intrinsically good or bad and I do not believe that there should be a canon of “good” texts which all people should read. Instead I would argue that the emotional or intellectual stimulation generated by reading a text allows the reader to explore ethical/moral difficulties.(2) Martha Nussbaum suggests that:
A novel, just because it is not our life, places us in a moral position that is favourable for perception and it shows us what it would be like to take up that position in life.(3)
This view is especially relevant in the realm of crime fiction. We are put in a position to see a crime, and then through identification with the detective we sit in judgement. We are in judgement of the happenings in the novel and also in the choices of the detectives. Do we agree with what they have done, the decision they have reached? This active reading stimulates us intellectually, even if we are not stimulated emotionally. We are then able to reflect on similar issues (if not always situations) in our own lives.
Crime fiction is often labelled as paraliterature and like most popular fiction is excluded from official canon because it is not elite or exclusive enough. As a result whole genres are ignored along with the excellent literature that arises within them (Romance is a well known victim of this sort of elitist canonization). Raymond Chandler, writing in the 1940’s, expounded on this elitism in relation to crime fiction:
Neither in this country nor England has there been any critical recognition that far more art goes into these books at their best than into any number of goosed history or social-significance rubbish.(4)
Although later in his life he was to take a less aggressive stance, saying; “My whole career is based on the idea that the formula doesn’t matter, the thing that counts is what you do with the formula; that is to say, it is a matter of style.”(5) Martin Priestman suggests that Chandler “came to appreciate more fully that great literary art could rise above genre limits.”(6) This adds weight to the argument that a canon of texts is an outdated notion and neglects to measure a work on its own merit. However, Ian Rankin, a great advocate of crime fiction has acknowledged that in recent times “Britain has got a lot better in recognising that crime fiction can be literature.”(7)
We will examine three novels, each one from an important stage in the history of crime fiction. This is to enable us to explore the similarities between the themes of the novels and the apparent differences in approach. The first is Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) from what is referred to as the ‘Golden-Age’ of crime fiction, generally taken to refer to the inter-war years. The most recognisable aspect of this type of crime novel is its ‘clue-puzzle’ structure, whereby multiple suspects are eliminated by “rational analysis of determinedly circumstantial evidence.”(8) What made the clue-puzzle structure so unusual was “that the reader is challenged to match the detective’s process of identifying the murderer.”(9) This novel has been chosen due to its famous violation of several of the ‘rules’ of the golden-age crime novel. However, beneath the plot gymnastics it was able to both confront and comfort the anxieties of the reader. The second novel is Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939) from the ‘Hard-Boiled’ school that flourished in America. What came to be termed hard-boiled crime novels first appeared in the 1920’s, and emerged from:
The American far west with a particular emphasis on the state where the advancing frontier finally ran out of land, and where the American dream may be said to have come to an end in more than one sense.(10)The Big Sleep is our introduction to the character of Phillip Marlowe, whose narrative style has become the quintessential voice of hard-boiled novels. These novels, generally in first person, focused on the narrator and their “ability to survive against the odds.”(11) Unlike the Golden Age detective,
The private eye is held up to be the stubbornly democratic hero of a post-heroic age, righting wrongs in a fallen urban world in which traditional institutions and guardians of the law… are no longer up to the task.(12)
The final novel is Ian Rankin’s Knots and Crosses (1987) which as an example of the ‘Police-Procedural’ novel “shifts the emphasis to the team work and routine.”(1)3 A feature also found in Knots and Crosses is the shift towards “transgressor-centred narratives”(14) which happened gradually after the Second World War. What we see with transgressor-centred narratives are the “competing centres of consciousness”(15) which fill the void left by the eroded detective drive. Knots and Crosses is an interesting example of the serialised crime novel because this first novel was originally intended to be a one-off with Rebus’s actual death at the end. By combining elements of the two earlier novels Rankin has been able to “transplant into Britain the mood and the feel of the great American private eye tradition.”(16)
These novels will be used to show how the ethical certainty of the golden-age gradually gives way to the ambiguity of the more recent transgressor-centred police procedural. However, despite the move towards more complex and ‘problematic’ novels their ethical power remains. This effect will be examined by looking at the characterisation, the narration and structure of these novels.
The detectives play an essential part in the novels. As our recurrent protagonists they will be the focus of the exploration of characterisation. In their state of alienated otherness to the society which they serve, the detectives are able to regard the crime and the suspects objectively. This otherness aids the reader by enabling them to displace their own selves into the text, analogous to the detective. The detectives are representatives of law and in earlier novels we see them also representing all that is good and right in the conflicted society in which they exist. Focusing on justice rather than simply following the law.(17) This gives the detectives a defined role within the text and we shall explore how these authors have responded to the assumptions of that role. Hercule Poirot (Christie) is perhaps the most two-dimensional of the detectives; nevertheless he is surrounded by an aura of conservative correctness and is a reassuring centre of calm in the post war era. Phillip Marlowe (Chandler) on the other hand is a ‘hero’ who has the “ability to stay magically untarnished in a society which tarnished everything it touched”(18), who as “both narrator and detective”(19) holds moral authority over the society he portrays. John Rebus (Rankin) by comparison is a morally ambiguous detective, who nevertheless is solidly cast in the ‘hero’ mould. That we could be lead to believe that Rebus, in the gothic tradition of Jekyll and Hyde, could be our transgressor is just an example of how far removed he is from the absolutes of Poirot. Yet Rebus is only really one step beyond Marlowe, being a hero that has been unable to escape being tarnished by his society. The extent to which the detectives appear as two-dimensional is reliant upon the narrative techniques employed in the novels. The heavy veiling of Poirot makes him appear much more artificial and this is in contrast with our first-person experiences with Marlowe and Rebus.
The narrators are our friends during our time reading these novels. The degree of trust we place in them can be manipulated by the relative narrative distance in such a way as to confront or to comfort us. Dr. Sheppard’s narrative makes powerful use of this. His apparent dull conservatism lulls us into his way of thinking to such an extent that we fill in any ellipses by inserting ourselves-as-narrator into the text to create a smooth narrative. The then revelation that he has, all along, been the murder is a violation of the trust we had of him as a friend, but also a shock to discover how easily we could be deceived. Marlowe is our ironic and yet protective guide through his murky world, where he takes the brunt of the violence to protect us. He is a friend who sees that we are too morally dubious ourselves to be able to walk his ‘mean streets’ unguided. The unnamed narrator of Knots and Crosses flits through the minds of most of the characters in the novel constantly changing the narrative focaliser, all the while weaving a narrative that seeks to frame Rebus as a schizophrenic murderer; that is until Rebus’s first person narrative erupts out of the text for one chapter and fills in the gaps that the unnamed narrator could, or would not.
The structure of golden-age crime fiction usually relied upon the initial victim as a threat to moral and social order. Their death being a catalyst for the entrance of the detective, who must then remove the murderer because "a human being who has exercised the right of private judgement and taken the life of another human being is not safe to exist amongst the community".(20)
This seeks to re-enforce the accepted values of society that crime should and would be punished. However this chapter will explore how within each of these novels is a darker theme which shows how the rich and powerful will always evade punishment. What this chapter will also examine is how the structure of the plot plays an important role in the deliverance of this theme, how each author has in their own way transgressed from the accepted norms of their era and what effect this has upon the reader.
1. Robert Eaglestone. Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 1997. p.30
2. ibid. p.39
3. ibid. p.43
4. Dennis Porter. ‘The private eye’ in Martin Priestman (ed). Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2003. p.103
5. ibid.
6. ibid.
7. Nicholas Wroe. ‘Bobby dazzler.’ The Guardian. 28 May 2005. [http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/crime/story/0,,1493837,00.html] Accessed: 10/11/2006
8. Stephen Knight. ‘The golden age’ in Martin Priestman (ed). Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2003. p.79
9. ibid.
10. Porter. ‘The private eye’ op.cit. p.95
11. Ian Ousby. The Crime and Mystery Book. London: Thames and Hudson. 1997. p.91
12. Porter. ‘The private eye’ op.cit. p.97
13. Ousby. op.cit. p.139
14. Lee Horsley. Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2005. p.114
15. ibid.
16. Wroe. loc.cit.
17. Leonard Lawlor. ‘Jacques Derrida’ The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Winter 2006 Edition. Edward N. Zalta (ed.) [http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2006/entries/derrida/] Accessed: 09/12/2006
18. Ousby. op.cit. p.117
19. ibid. p.111
20. Anne Hart. Agatha Christie’s Poirot: The life and times of Hercule Poirot. London: Harper Collins. 1997. pp.126-7
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Chapter One: Characterisation
An essential part of our ethical experience with a text is our ability to identify with its characters. Scott McCracken suggests that it is:
possible to begin to argue that the act of reading detective narrative can itselfbe a creative process, where the reader inserts her-or himself into the definitions provided by the text as part of a process of experimentation which measures their adequacies and inadequacies.(1)
Crime fiction makes this process possible for us by creating detectives who exist as outside observers (just as we are observers to the text) to a realistic and contemporary world. Poirot’s refugee status, Marlowe’s honest-loner, and Rebus’s fractured sense of self-identity renders each detective an exile within their own community, giving them the distance required to observe it. This sense of otherness is an important function for the reader to be able to identify with the detective.
[The detective] is able to cross the boundaries of class, ‘race’ and gender that normally define the self in a way that other people cannot. This brings the detective dangerously close to the criminal, but allows him or her to guide the client and, crucially, the reader through unchartered areas of modern society.(2)
A problem for characterisation in crime fiction is that more so than traditional stock-characters the ‘detective’ has a defined role within the text. Essentially they exist because they are there to do something: they are there to reveal and neutralise the criminal threat to society.
Christie’s Hercule Poirot, literally a ‘brave buffoon,’ appears in 1926 as an effeminate Belgian refugee. His otherness as a foreigner allows him to be an observer of the British society which he has entered. Yet by making him Belgian he is associated with ‘that brave little country’ from the Great War, and is generally awarded a warmer response than if he were French. Poirot represents a move away from the masculine physical world represented in earlier crime fiction. Showing how information gathered from the traditionally female role (gossip and household knowledge) could resolve crime. He also acts as a balm to a country recovering from the Great War and surrounded by the simmering political unrest which was to eventually erupt into the Second World War.
Golden-age crime fiction, with its Aristotelian emphasis on plot (discussed in chapter 3), often resulted in characters which were two-dimensional. In effectively creating an Aristotelian ‘great souled man’ in Poirot, Christie is left with a character that is almost too good. Through the veil of Dr. Sheppard in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd we do not see Poirot act immorally. This veiling of Poirot means that he is unknowable. Dr. Sheppard’s manuscript, which was written with the intention of being “published someday as the history of one of Poirot’s failures”(3), seeks to paint Poirot as ridiculously as possible. He has “an egg-shaped head, partially covered with suspiciously black hair, two immense moustaches, and a pair of watchful eyes.”(4) In this early encounter Dr. Sheppard refers to him as ‘Mr. Porrott’, highlighting both the disdain he has for this foreign character and also how alien Poirot is to his environment. Poirot’s distance from us and his apparent moral perfection allows him a god like status and in;
several cases he unashamedly took the law into his own hands and played judge and jury…. Sometimes, following a private interview with Poirot, a timely suicide would occur.(5)This can be seen in the penultimate chapter of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd during a private interview between Poirot and Dr. Sheppard: "… I am willing to give you the chance of another way out. There might be, for instance, an overdose of a sleeping draught."(6)
Despite, or because of this he remains unrealistic and his buffoonery can seem affected. Poirot will always be other as he is delivered to us one removed and whilst this is necessary to the competitive element of the clue-puzzle structure, it leaves us with a character that is able to make remarkable deductions based on circumstantial evidence. Because of this, if an accusation of the detectives being stock characters was to hold at all, it would be in reference to a detective like Poirot. We never have the intimacy with him that we share with the narrator so whilst this enables us to observe Poirot and his actions objectively, just as he observes the society he inhabits, we will never be able to know him. We will only ever know what others think of him.
In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd Poirot fulfils his assigned role to neutralise the threat that is caused by Dr. Sheppard. As his name and position suggests Dr. Sheppard’s role in society should be one of care and guidance. Instead he violates that position and the power of that violation is conveyed via his role as narrator. Poirot’s role in this novel is then to expose the threat to the select few (we, the readers), then to contain and neutralise it: That the real danger lies within society must be suppressed, so in true Utilitarian style Poirot works for the greater good and conceals the truth of the murder of Roger Ackroyd.
Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe is a move back to the masculine physicality of the early detectives. In his earliest incarnation in the Black Mask magazines his name was originally Mallory(7) suggesting a link to the chivalry and heroism connected to King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. This air of nobility which is distinctly un-American sets him up as an outsider, which is suggestive of the otherness which had been afforded to Poirot. Marlowe is a private detective who “is as far from the real working police and positive social agents as he is from gangsters and their negative social operations.”(8) Yet he is also an average man attempting to do an honest job, who for “’twenty-five dollars a day and expenses’, […] is willing to risk getting himself ‘in Dutch with half the law enforcement of this country.’”(9) The dark world that Marlowe inhabits reflects post-prohibition California, attempting to recover from the Great Depression. This was an era which had criminalised honest men and women for something they had always done, and almost certainly created the crime organisations which are, by the time of the novel, controlling many American towns and police forces in The Big Sleep. And ironically, set into this corrupt landscape is the Marlowe, rendering him a crusading knight in a foreign land.
Whether consciously or unconsciously Chandler was to address the lack of intimacy with the detective found in golden-age crime fiction which was a barrier to moral displacement and identification. He achieved this by emphasizing the ‘I’ of Private eye of Phillip Marlowe. In The Big Sleep we have the detective as the first person narrator and by shaking off the ‘Watson,’ by discarding the clue-puzzle rules, we are able to dispense with the necessity of a ‘stupid filter.’ In doing so we are given unprecedented access to the detective’s thought process. Marlowe’s status as a ‘moral authority’ over all he surveys arrives through the first person narration:
The use of fanciful image, the satirical diminishment, the arch manner, and the detached voice are all characteristic features of Marlowe’s method of simultaneously judging the world and holding himself apart from it.(10)
However “even the simplest story cannot be described without employing the language of value”.(11) And it is the fanciful images of his metaphors and similes that reveal the ethical judgement, as we see here at Marlowe’s first meeting with Carmen Sternwood; “She came over near me and smiled with her mouth and she had little sharp predatory teeth.”(12) Marlowe has already judged, and signalled, her as threat with reference to her predatory nature. There are also hints of her split personality with reference to her ‘smiling with her mouth.’ He is telling us that her smile is not a genuine smile, that there are two sides to her; the social flirt and the observant predator. It is comments like these which seduce us to see people and actions from Marlowe’s point of view. So that even if it is just for the duration of our reading time we give ourselves up to the experience of being Marlowe. His moral authority in The Big Sleep is enhanced by the theme of knights, in particular the references to the “stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armour rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree”(13) which sits over the entrance doors to the Sternwood mansion. Marlowe takes on the literal role of a ‘knight errant’, willing to fight for money, yet abiding by a code of chivalry. He even goes on to investigate the disappearance of Rusty Regan because he “couldn’t solve it”(14) and his own sense of justice had to be served. Marlowe’s chivalry and essential goodness sets him in juxtaposition with the self-serving and corrupt landscape of the novel. However, on his final visit to the Sternwood mansion, Marlowe the dejected loner and resigned to the nastiness of his fellow man, is still seemingly untarnished and he is still the knight. And through his trials in the novel Marlowe has been able to show how despite the dangerous society they inhabit, it is within the family unit that the real danger lies.
Rankin’s John Rebus is the most transgressive of the detectives we are discussing. His otherness is marked by his name, which is the definition of a type of puzzle where words are represented by pictures or symbols, making Rebus an avatar for puzzles. He inhabits the grey area between moral and immoral, yet he is a move toward official law enforcement. As ex-SAS he should be the ultimate embodiment of physical masculinity, however due to military experimentation he has been emasculated and rendered as broken and ineffective: “He is a ‘failed human being’”(15) and his only power or authority resides in his job. Rebus inhabits a realistic gritty eighties Edinburgh, a setting with which we can still identify with. Unlike Poirot and Marlowe, Rebus’s otherness has been created artificially by the psychological endurance experiments which were performed upon him. His traumatic experience enables us to engage with him empathically and creates the reader experience necessary for identification with the detective and then displacement of ourselves into the text. The ‘breaking’ of Rebus also diminishes his otherness to his society, rather than being morally superior he is ‘one of us’.
Over-drinking, over-smoking, over-womanising, Rebus lacks the sense of moral certainty that had been present in Poirot and Marlowe. Whilst these earlier characters could be held up as examples of how to behave in morally dubious situations the character of Rebus lacks that ‘role model’ quality. His moral status within the novels is more a prompt for analysis, a prompt for the reader to examine his or her own moral centre. In creating Rebus, Rankin has taken a step away from the certainty that is present in most crime fiction and in doing so moves into the realm of the Gothic. The surface reading of Knots and Crosses sees Rebus portrayed as a ‘Jekyll & Hyde’ character. Textual omissions and narrative gaps leave space for Rebus to hypothetically be the murderer. This is a narrative technique which has been used to great effect in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and I shall explore it in more detail in the following chapter. Rebus is the most fully dimensional of the detectives and he most fully breaks the stock character mode. Whilst, eccentricities aside, Poirot and Marlowe could feasibly exchange texts it would be impossible to imagine either in the ethical grey area in which Rebus resides, we could not imagine “Nothing tasted better than a venial sin”(16) coming from either of the earlier detectives.
In Knots & Crosses the danger is brought closer to home with Rebus the reader’s prime suspect and the subsequent realisation that all the murders were preludes to the kidnap of his daughter. Unlike The Murder of Roger Ackroyd we are not actively invaded and confronted by the narrator/murderer, instead it is the invasion of the character we identify with that causes the most shock. Because we had entertained doubts as to his involvement in the killings, then we are given unprecedented access to his harrowing past, we feel guilty for having doubted him, whilst also feeling vindicated because he is innocent. Rebus’s role as detective ought to be a heroic one, with references to Hercules(17) and Alexander the Great, (18) however it is the cunning sinner Sisyphus(19) that he has much more in common with. Unlike Poirot and Marlowe who are each protected by their essential goodness, Rebus, with “his moral fibre crumbling like a dry cheese-biscuit”(20) is vulnerable to attack from others because rather than being elevated above the society, he is in it. Whilst the police-procedural novel is based on team work and we do not expect Rebus to be doing everything we at least expect him to be doing something, but he is totally ineffectual, right up until the final moments in which he symbolically dies underneath the dead body of his blood-brother:
Reeve, started, froze for a second, then folded like paper, falling across Rebus, smothering him. Rebus, unable to move, decided it was safe to go to sleep now…”21
Our ability to identify with the detectives, which is enhanced by their position as other to their community, allows us to project ourselves into the text; we too are other to that fictional community. Analogous to the detectives we interact with the text at an intellectual level, thus engaging our moral selves. Our expectations of a detective’s role are undermined through these texts; often we see them performing ‘just’, rather than ‘lawful’ acts, again engaging us intellectually to decide for ourselves whether we would have followed their path.
1. Scott McCracken. Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 1998. p.72
2. ibid. p.63
3. Agatha Christie. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. London: Harper Collins. 2002. p.365
4. ibid. p.32
5. Anne Hart. Agatha Christie’s Poirot: The life and times of Hercule Poirot. London: Harper Collins. 1997. p.281
6. Christie. op.cit. p.362
7. Stephen Knight. Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd. 1980. p.137
8. Knight, Stephen. Crime Fiction, 1800-2000: Detection, Death, Diversity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2004. p.113
9. Lee Horsley. Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2005. p.85
10. ibid. p.84
11. Wayne C. Booth. The Company we keep: an ethics of Fiction. California: University of California Press. 1988. p.92
12. Raymond Chandler. The Big Sleep. London: Penguin Group. 2005. p.3
13. ibid. p.1
14. ibid. p.168
15. Nick Hasted. ‘A life in writing: The detective of darkness.’ The Guardian. 21 April 2001. [http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/crime/story/0,,475876,00.html] Accessed: 10/11/2006
16. Ian Rankin. Knots and Crosses. London: Orion. 2005. p.38
17. ibid. p.18
18. ibid. p.164
19. ibid. p.18
20. ibid. p.65
21. ibid. p.21
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Chapter Two: Narrative
Wayne C. Booth in his book The Company We Keep (1988) talks at length about the role of books and implied authors as friends and the relationship we have with these friends. However, I would argue that it is the narrator with whom we have the closest friendship. This makes reading the equivalent to spending time with a friend. A friendship we have chosen to put our trust in because of the pleasure and profitability it offers us(1) but which we also seek to spend time nurturing “for the sake of the friendly company itself”(2) There is anecdotal evidence to suggest that spending time with these narrator-friends could affect the morality of the reader after the book is closed, however there is very little proof of this effect. What I would argue is that whilst we are reading a book (entertaining a friendship with the narrator) we engage with the desires and aspirations offered to us and are drawn into collusion with our new friend. Looking at the three novels, we can see how the authors have used our trust in our narrator-friend to confront (Murder of Roger Ackroyd), guide (The Big Sleep) and destabilise (Knots and Crosses) us.
The manipulation of narrative distance plays an important role in our relationship with the narrator and the text itself. Through the use of “deliberate understatement”, we are invited to imagine for ourselves “what the experience involved must have been like.”(3) This technique aids the readerly experience of identification and displacement, which is explored in the previous chapter, because: "The more ‘here and now’ the narrative is – both spatially and temporally – the more likely the reader is to enter into the characters experiences."(4)
Here we will look at each book in turn examining narrative techniques and how they work to create narrative distance and how our friendship with the narrator affects us and our reading of a text.
Famous for its narrative transgression, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd could easily be the basis for much current transgressor based Crime Fiction. Dr. Sheppard is the first person narrator, our friend during this journey and yet he is the murder. "Mrs Ferrars died on the night of the 16th-17th September – a Thursday. I was sent for at eight o’clock on the morning of Friday the 17th. There was nothing to be done. She had been dead some hours."(5)
From this first paragraph we can see how his bland conservatism lulls us into his point of view and throughout the novel we are drawn to trust him, to “find him blandly consoling and so overlook the cause of his stated worries.”(6) The steady, calm, narration of the first paragraph and a half is so effective at maintaining the illusion of the first-person narrator as “the mouthpiece for the truth”(7) that when we reach the final half:
To tell the truth, I was considerably upset and worried. I am not going to pretend that at that moment I foresaw the events of the next few weeks. I emphatically did not do so. But my instinct told me that there were stirring times ahead.(8)
We do not ‘read between the lines’ instead we take Dr. Sheppard’s words at face value. The trust we have in our narrator friend blinds us to any ellipses in the text. During chapter four ‘Dinner at Fernley: II’, the twenty minutes during which he is committing the murder, and framing Ralph, is quite obviously left unaccounted for. However because we trust Dr. Sheppard so fully few readers would be concerned by the missing time and where these ellipses appear we insert ourselves into the text, filling the gaps with imagined bland and mundane happenings, living the role for a moment. Remarking on his own narration, Dr. Sheppard says:
I am rather pleased with myself as a writer. What could be neater, for instance, than the following:
‘The letters were brought in at twenty minutes to nine. It was just on ten minutes to nine when I left him, the letter still unread. I hesitated with my hand on the door handle, looking back and wondering if there was anything thing I had left undone.’
All true, you see. But suppose I had put a row of stars after the first sentence! Would somebody then have wondered what exactly happened in that blank 10 minutes? (9)The violent breaking of trust, the realisation that we as readers can be so manipulated destabilises our ‘friendship’ with the narrator. The violation we feel at the reveal of this novel is more acute than that of a liked character being identified as the murderer. It is the discovery that our reliable and trustworthy friend has been lying to us and has been leading us down his immoral path without our knowledge. It affects us deeply because in the above mentioned ellipsis and others like it throughout the novel we have been inserting ourselves into the narrative to fill the gaps and makes us aware of our own “possible deviance.”(10) Throughout the novel we have been lead to see Dr. Sheppard’s narration as truthful and reliable and it is what our friendship has been based upon. However once we discover we have been deceived the relationship changes. Instead of passively colluding with Dr. Sheppard we now examine him and his role as the narrator: "we recognize the unreliability of narrative itself, the existence of gaps where we do not recognize them: ‘We see how this opens a door that will be difficult to close’".(11)
It is this unreliability of narrative which has been advanced in Knots and Crosses. Unlike The Murder of Roger Ackroyd there is no identifiable narrator-friend because Rankin makes great use of free-indirect discourse, continually shifting the narrative focaliser so that we seem to be inside the minds of almost every character in the novel. This is used to chilling effect in the opening of chapter eight:
There was a picture of her there, asleep on the bed with her arms spread wide. She opened her mouth in a slight gasp.
Outside, in the living-room, he heard her movements as he prepared the garrotte.
That night, Rebus had one of his nightmarish dreams again.(12)Here we move through the thoughts of one of the victims, the murderer and finally back to Rebus, “the unsettling effect” of which “is heightened by [his] unstable position.”(13) The very vivid and immediate section with the victim and murderer is so anonymous that the ellipsis between the two sections allows the reader to imagine that Rebus’s nightmare is in fact his own reality of which he is unconscious.
The narrative of this novel, especially the unheimlich “threatening eruptions”(14) of Reeve’s narrative, creates ambiguity which is the antithesis of the traditionally resolution driven crime novel: like a gothic novel this is a text that seeks to confuse and disrupt. Our anonymous narrator-friend destabilises our ideas of “assured identity”(15) by undermining our desire for a clear protagonist. Rebus is shown to be a fractured, broken human being and this is reflected by his many narrative doubles. The narrative of Gordon Reeve is woven in such a way as to appear to be the dark side of Rebus. Almost as much narrative space is given to Jim Stevens, the only real detective in Knots and Crosses in the classic crime novel sense. Stevens's determination and enthusiasm contrasts with Rebus’s dejection and ineffectiveness. Like The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, we fill in any ellipses by the easiest means possible, usually that which the narrative guides us towards. Therefore Rebus is a schizophrenic serial-killer, rather than the object of an anonymous serial-killers obsession. Cleverly, because Rebus’s past is a place that the narrator will not go we are kept removed from the truth whilst enticed to consider what might have happened:
Trapped in its cell, the face screaming
Let me out Let me out
Let me out…
‘John? Are you okay there?’(16)This use of explicit ellipsis draws us into the text at a very personal level, as we try to complete the puzzle of ‘Rebus’. In order to do this we find ourselves compelled to try to identify with this morally suspect character, an act that makes us uncomfortable because, like Dr. Sheppard such identification may make us realise that we are more like him than we would like. In order to enable sympathetic identification with Rebus his first person narrative erupts out of the text in chapter twenty-two: “I had been in the Parachute Regiment since the age of eighteen.”(17) The opening “I” is such a contrast to what has gone previously, the illusion of intimacy and immediacy provided by free-indirect discourse is destroyed by the actual immediate and intimate relation with Rebus’s subconscious. As in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd where the narrator is revealed to be the murderer, this transgression from the accepted form makes us question all that has gone before. The door that was opened by Christie(18) remains wide open as we realise our narrator-friend has been deceiving us, lying by omission, and telling us a story that seeks to frame Rebus as the serial-killer. It is only through the direct narration of Rebus’s subconscious that we can come to know, what in this novel, can be called the truth.
Both The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Knots and Crosses present us with deceitful and unreliable narrator-friends, however this does not make us deceitful or unreliable people. Our friendships with these narrators act as prompts for self-inspection and judgement. Just how easy was it to be fooled by Dr. Sheppard? Just how easy was it to be led to believe that Rebus was the serial-killer? The answer to both is, very. We are left to explore the uncomfortable question, why? These novels teach us to mistrust appearances and encourage us to be cautious in our relationships with narratives.
By contrast the first person narration of The Big Sleep seems to be reliable. Phillip Marlowe is: "witty, ironic, and aloof...a narrator whose verbal dexterity both evaluates and works to contain the moral disorder of the society he investigates."(19)
Through the use of first person narration we are seduced into the ‘us vs. everyone-else’ world that Marlowe inhabits. This is possible because Marlowe makes his superiority to the world “a secret between him and the reader.”(20) As our narrator-friend Marlowe is protective and by being “essentially good and honourable, he provides the reader with a stable, trustworthy perspective.”(21) However the pervious novels have taught us to be wary of narrators and there is more to Marlowe’s narration than meets the eye. Marlowe is a man disgusted by the society he inhabits, is fearful of sexual women (the predatory Carmen and the strong Vivian), but sees it as futile to make any effort to change. He would prefer to continue his existence as “part of the nastiness.”(22) And much rather than relate to the other characters he holds himself apart, uninterested in anyone but himself. In doing so, the other characters are narrated in such a way that contains “the disturbing knowledge that all other people are themselves individuals.”(23) This is every bit as dangerous as the transgressions of Dr. Sheppard and the nameless narrator of Knots and Crosses. More fully than these narrators, Marlowe seduces us into his world where he is the lone hero, the last knight, fighting on our behalf. Our friend lulls us into believing that the right sort of person can remain untarnished by the society he inhabits, whilst at the same time exhibiting a cynicism and an inability to relate to people honestly which can only have been achieved by being tarnished.
We can be so seduced by Marlowe because we are so close to him narratively, first person and present tense, we are in his head and at the same time we are his sidekick. Much like the pre-reveal Dr. Sheppard, we are in collusion with his derisive take on his surroundings, but unlike The Murder of Roger Ackroyd there is no narrative shock. Marlowe is able to continue uninterrupted and we complete our friendship with him as the tough-guy loner in a bar, having “a couple of Scotches.”(24) Marlowe is our moral guide through his murky world; the assumption is that we, like the characters he narrates, are morally dubious enough to require a guide. This ‘holier-than-thou’ tone is very different to The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Knots and Crosses, where the narrative also assumes we are not perfect but instead prompts us to examine ourselves through a confrontation, or, destruction of our expectations.
Our friendships with the narrators, initially based on trust, enable us to project ourselves into the texts to fill in ellipses. And we have seen with these novels how the authors have then been able, through the use of narrative distance, to manipulate us, in order to confront, guide, and destabilise.
1. Wayne C. Booth. The Company we keep: an ethics of Fiction. California: University of California Press. 1988. p.173
2. ibid.
3. Jeremy Hawthorn. Studying the Novel, 4th edition. New York: Oxford University Press Inc. 2001. p.78
4. ibid
5. Agatha Christie. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. London: Harper Collins. 2002. p.9
6. Stephen Knight. Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd. 1980. p.122
7. Lee Horsley. Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2005. p.45
8. Christie. loc.cit.
9. ibid. pp.366-7
10. Knight. Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction. op.cit. p.112
11. Horsley. op.cit. p.47
12. Ian Rankin. Knots and Crosses. London: Orion. 2005. p.53
13. Horsley. op.cit. p.116
14. ibid. p.115
15. Stephen Knight. Crime Fiction, 1800-2000: Detection, Death, Diversity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2004. p.197
16. Rankin. op.cit. p.51
17. ibid. p.157
18. Horsley. op.cit. p.47
19. ibid. p.83
20. Knight. Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction. op.cit. p.142
21. Horsley. op.cit. p.85
22. Raymond Chandler. The Big Sleep. London: Penguin Group. 2005. p250
23. Knight. Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction. op.cit. p.147
24. Chandler. op.cit. p.251
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Chapter Three: Structure
The structure of a crime novel is very important when it comes to the expression of the themes of the novel. As mentioned previously, the golden-age clue-puzzle novel makes the most striking use of structure. The emphasis on the structure is reliant upon Aristotle’s concept of tragedy; “For (i) a tragedy is a representation not of human beings but of action and life”(1). Therefore representing generalisations, rather than particular individuals. What this means is that the construction of the piece relies heavily on the theme, rather than what Chandler would later call the ‘writing’. Booth argues that the re-enforcement of values is another important feature of crime novel structure, stating that:
Every detective story depends upon and re-enforces many values: most of them require us to believe that crimes should be and generally are punished, that the troubles of society can be attributed to a small number of evil characters who can be purged from our midst.(2)
Whilst each of the three novels presents a seemingly conformist reading, an exploration of how the author has used the structure will show how they have encoded readings which challenge our basic assumptions. In all three novels we see how external gloss hides, or creates, internal corruption. And rather than crime being the result of evil characters, it is a larger problem with wider socio-political implications.
Christie spectacularly diverged from accepted golden-age structure in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by breaking two of Ronald Knox’s ‘Ten Commandments’:
1. The Criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.
9. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal from the reader any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.(3)
The breaking of these two ‘rules’ and the subsequent outrage illustrates the power of the structure, the importance of the “game.”(4) Christie had not played fairly; it was claimed, thus highlighting the artificiality of the traditional clue-puzzle novel. However in respect to the rules of the game Christie provides the answers in the final chapter, ‘Apologia,’ where Dr. Sheppard reveals the gaps in his narrative like a magician showing how a trick was done; “All true, you see.”(5) The way Christie pushed the boundaries of the prescribed structure was more powerful than trickery or game playing.
It was a brilliant structural device, enacting the fear the respectable bourgeois held that disorder within society, threats against the self might be caused from within the charmed circle, and by someone who seemed most trustworthy. But the structural audacity went further than this. The murderer spoke throughout as ‘I’ and this may well have woken, especially in those who complained the most, an awareness of possible deviance within the readers’ self.(6)
Without the rigid, predictable structure of golden-age crime fiction Christie would not have been able to create such an effect and any attempt to convey the message of the ‘danger within’ would have been less effective as it would lack the power created by the violation of the accepted structural norms.
The puzzle element of golden-age crime fiction demands active reading because the readers are:
Involved as active participants in the production of meaning. Analogous to the detective rather than in thrall to him, the reader is invited to interpret, to exercise intellectual activity rather than just passively submitting to a conventional and endlessly repeated, always predictable ritual.(7)
In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd this engages us so fully that Christie is able to teach us about the dangers of society through a powerful violation of our expectations. By presenting us with “terrifying and pitiable [incidents]”(8), thus engaging us emotionally and intellectually, we are able through a method of catharsis to balance our moral selves. Our reaction to the discovery of Dr. Sheppard’s betrayal and deviance as Knight mentioned previously, raises the awareness of our own capabilities for betrayal and deviance. Whilst also reminding us that other people, all other people, are possible threats. Curiously, it also shows how the governing forces will also preserve the façade of safety and security:
Well, she will never know the truth. There is, as Poirot said, one way out…
I can trust him. He and Inspector Raglan will manage it between them. I should not like Caroline to know.(9)This suggests that the knowledge of a threat from within society is more dangerous than any number of murderers masquerading as respectable people.
In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd that a crime should be punished is evident, the impending suicide of Dr. Sheppard sees to that. However the novel does not abide to the idea that “the troubles of society can be attributed to a small number of evil characters.”(10) Instead it reinforces the power of the façade, showing a society “in which all social exchange is theatrical.”(11) In preserving the façade (in Poirot and Inspector Raglan ‘managing it’) Christie “implies that the class represented is preying on itself, and that it contains the seeds of its own destruction.”(12) So rather than comforting the reader The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a novel which confronts and questions the basic assumptions upon which all social interactions are made. This, if we have been engaged with the text at an emotional and intellectual level will lead us to examine the society which we inhabit.
Whereas for Christie (and Aristotle) the plot was the most important element, for Chandler it was the character. In The Poetics Aristotle states that if a writer:
Puts in sequence speeches full of character, well-composed in diction and reasoning, he will not achieve what was [agreed to be] the function of tragedy; a tragedy that employs these less adequately, but has a plot… will achieve it much more.(13)
However, whilst the well plotted piece may achieve the aim of crime fiction (tragedy here referring simply to any non-comedic work) it may not be as interesting as a more strongly character based piece. In The Simple Art of Murder, talking of generic golden-age crime fiction Chandler says, “The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.”(14) This ‘back-handed’ compliment to writers like Christie emphasises the move that Chandler was to make. In The Big Sleep the “meticulous organisation of the story”(15) was gone and in its place we have a compendium of scenes where Chandler has let the characters run away with the ‘writing’. Contrary to The Poetics view of tragedy this results in a plot which powerfully engages with the disaffection of the era in which it was written. By suppressing the fabula (the ‘first story’ or chronological order of the events leading up to the murder) the sjužet (the ‘second story’ or the narrative events in causal order) is allowed priority. Our attention is thus drawn to the “dangerous and problematic quest”(16) which Marlowe embarks on, rather than on the details of the crime (and just which crime) he has been brought in to solve. The quest is so absorbing that by the end of the novel, despite all the action, nothing appears to have changed. Through this effect Chandler illustrates how a relative lack of plotting can be as powerful as a finely wrought plot in demonstrating “the way in which personal crimes are inescapably bound up with wider socio-political dishonesty and wrong doing.”(17)
The Big Sleep addresses the problems of society explicitly unlike The Murder of Roger Ackroyd where they are encoded. Using Marlowe as a knightly guardian, Chandler leads the readers down the “’mean streets’… which the detective hero must go.”(18) These city scenes are interspersed with the domestic story of the Sternwood's until the two plots are united in chapter thirty-one with Carmen pointing the gun at Marlowe in a murderous fit of madness. This effect brings “out the corruption within outwardly respectable society.”(19) As in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd the reader has an emotional and intellectual investment and this social criticism should lead the reader to examine their own society. What we also see is the murderous Carmen (Marlowe’s killing was part of the job and therefore legitimized, which is not unproblematic) removed from society; “Get her out of here and see that she’s watched every minute”(20) whilst escaping punishment from the law. This further enforces the depth of corruption as the familial façade of respectability is able to be protected at the cost of accepted values of crime and punishment. Unlike The Murder of Roger Ackroyd there is no sense that Carmen’s crime is being covered up because the truth of it would be too shocking and dangerous for society; rather Marlowe takes on the burden of knowledge for the sake of General Sternwood, so “he could lie quiet in his canopied bed, with his bloodless hands folded on the sheet…”(21) safe in an illusory world. The Big Sleep illustrates Marlowe’s “ability to survive against the odds.”(22) By showing us how it was done the novel suggests that we can aspire to be as ‘untarnished.’
Knots and Crosses, like the previous novels, seeks to explore the “fracture between glossy, wealth-driven appearances”(23) and a much darker reality. Martin Priestman describes this novel as combining:
a classic serial-killer plot with the idea of high-level corruption, in a hushed-up military training scheme whose extreme mental cruelty has driven Rebus from the SAS into the police, and the killer over the edge via a traumatic moment of sexual self-recognition.(24)
This is the same type of official corruption we saw in The Big Sleep. The rich and powerful, because they are so, are able to evade any punishment for their actions. The officers and army officials remain anonymous throughout the novel and evade identification. The characters of Rebus and Reeves are suggestive of post-novel Dr. Sheppard and Carmen Sternwood in that they illustrate what it is for broken or failed human beings to struggle for survival and meaning. This struggle forms the backbone of the novel with “the traditional style investigation of the early murders [being] constantly intercut with the tension of trying to prevent the next.”(25) This is a blind struggle for Rebus and it is juxtaposed with the Michael/Jim Stevens sub-plot, which sees the reporter in a more traditionally detective role. We see Stevens following up on leads, out on surveillance and piecing together his own ‘case’ with a level of accuracy that evades Rebus. The inadequacy of Rebus as a detective is such that he must symbolically die, under the actually dying Reeve, at the end of the novel. Unlike Marlowe, Rebus is a hero who is fatally tarnished by the corrupt society he inhabits. This tells the reader that it is impossible to emerge intact. That in the society which Knots and Crosses depicts it is possible for the powerful to avoid retribution, whilst the innocent pay for those crimes.
Despite the importance of plot to Knots and Crosses Rankin “sees his novels as more character-driven than plot-driven engines.”(26) Although this may be an attempt to distance his writing from more traditional crime fiction as he campaigns to get crime novels accepted as more than paraliterature. Speaking to The Observer in 2002 he said: "The structure and all that red herring stuff is perhaps why crime novels are not taken more seriously. They are too obviously a fictional construct."(27)
Whilst Knots and Crosses is not as meticulously organised as The Murder of Roger Ackroyd it is not as loose as The Big Sleep. The structure of Knots and Crosses allows for the exploration of “the things that we are scared of” and the ability to “ask ourselves the question, should we be afraid of [them]?”(28) It involves us in active reading which stimulates us to look at ourselves. In regards to the issues in the novel, which should we truly be afraid of, the psychotic serial-killer, or the anonymous forces which created him?
By looking at these three novels we have seen how the structure has been used to promote the theme of external gloss vs. internal corruption. How Christie used the rigid rules of the golden-age to violently bring this message home to her readers, how Chandler in his abandoning of plotting brought out the disaffection of the era, finally how Rankin echoing back to Christie uses our expectations of structural form to destabilise us. We have seen how the values of a society can be reinforced or challenged by the structure of a novel, and we have looked at how the challenges prompt us to examine our own societies.
1. Aristotle. Poetics (Translator: Richard Janko). Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company. 1987. p.8
2. Wayne C. Booth. The Company we keep: an ethics of Fiction. California: University of California Press. 1988. p.152
3. Ian Ousby. The Crime and Mystery Book. London: Thames and Hudson. 1997. p.67
4. ibid.
5. Agatha Christie. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. London: Harper Collins. 2002. p.367
6. Stephen Knight. Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd. 1980. p.112
7. Lee Horsley. Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2005. p.44
8. Aristotle. op.cit. p.13
9. Christie. op.cit. p.368
10. Booth. loc.cit.
11. Horsley. op.cit. p.40
12. ibid.
13. Aristotle. op.cit. p.9
14. Raymond Chandler. The Simple Art of Murder. New York: Vintage Books. 1988. p.11
15. Stephen Knight. Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction. op.cit. p.149
16. Horsley. op.cit. p.72
17. ibid.
18. Martin Priestman. Crime Fiction from Poe to Present. Plymouth: Northcote House Publishers Ltd. 1998. p.54
19. ibid.
20. Raymond Chandler. The Big Sleep. London: Penguin Group. 2005. p.250
21. ibid. p251
22. Ousby. op.cit. p.91
23. Martin Priestman ‘Post-war British crime fiction’ in Martin Priestman (ed). Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2003. p.183
24. ibid.
25. ibid. p182
26. James Campbell. ‘An inspector falls.’ The Guardian. 26 January 2002. [http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/crime/0,,639413,00.html] Accessed: 10/11/2006
27. Anthony Bourdain and Ian Rankin ‘Criminal Masterminds’. Guardian Unlimited. 15 October 2002. [http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/crime/story/0,,811925,00.html] Accessed 10/11/2006
28. Sveinn Birkir Björnsoon. ‘Dancing Pigs and Drunken Detectives.’ The Reykjavík Grapevine. 30 June 2006. [http://www.grapevine.is/default.aspx?show=paper&part=fullstory&id=1277] Accessed: 10/11/2006
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Conclusion
Crime novels, as with all literary texts, are about ethics. They are about people making choices between living well and living badly. What the novels we have looked at have also shown is how these choices are affected by the society in which people live.
Identification with the detectives enables the reader to displace themselves into the text. It enables them to ‘live the role’ for the duration of the reading experience. In this identification and displacement the moral-self of the reader is stimulated and they see the detectives “as better or worse than [their] own assumed quality.”(1) By judging the morality of the detective they are judging themselves.
Whilst a reader is displaced into a text their trust is placed in the narrator, their intimate friend for the period of reading. Christie used this trust to challenge and confront her readership, using the violation of accepted narrative form to criticize a society which consumed itself from within. Rankin, likewise, created an illusion of intimacy which enabled the anonymous narrator to marginalise and frame the innocent (if morally dubious) Rebus. The realisation that Rebus had been hidden illustrated how easily the reader was able to be fooled by appearances. Chandler also fools us with appearances. Marlowe, in his guise of knightly guide suppresses the individuality of others and refuses to trust us to walk his ‘mean streets’ unaided. These relationships with the narrators engage the morality of the reader, and prompt them to examine not only themselves, but also the society they inhabit.
The conflict between external gloss and internal corruption is a theme which is taken further in the structure of the novels. The values of crime and punishment are seemingly reinforced. However, they are at the same time being undermined by the suppression of the truth. All three novels see the detectives colluding to the suppression of the crime which they are involved in. This sees a reinforcement of the glossy façade which perpetuates the degeneration within. All three novels seek to open the reader’s eyes to the hidden truth of the structure of society.
These crime novels, with their emphasis on the social constructs of law, stimulate us intellectually as readers as we explore the ethical repercussions of both the crime and the detectives’ actions. “The point for now is not to appraise particular works or teachings but to stress that all works do teach”(2) and they teach through this stimulation, through engaging our own sense of morality. This does not necessarily mean that anything is learnt, that is in the hands of the individual reader. However, “if you can get people to think about what they have done, then they sometimes change, a little. But that is the only way.” (3)
1. Wayne C. Booth ‘Why banning ethical criticism is a serious mistake.’ Philosophy & Literature, Vol.22, no.2, 1998, p.375
2. Wayne C. Booth. The Company we keep: an ethics of Fiction. California: University of California Press. 1988. p.152
3. Alexander McCall Smith. ‘Ask the author: Mma Ramotswe answers your questions!’ The official author website: Alexander McCall Smith. n.d. [http://www.randomhouse.com/features/mccallsmith/ask.html] Accessed: 28/08/2006
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