Naturally there has been much discussion about the recently released movie 'Sherlock Holmes' (2009) directed by Guy Ritchie, well known for British-set gangster movies notably 'Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels' (1998), 'Snatch' (2000) and 'Revolver' (2005). He does seem to have suffered from diminishing returns and whilst he has a loyal fan base notably among men living in London, he has never recaptured the success that he achieved with his first feature movie in 1998. Moving from contemporary Britain to the 1890s might be a sensible step for him to break away a little from seemingly repeating the same formula over and over. He has managed to keep attracting high profile actors, Brad Pitt appeared in 'Snatch' and for 'Sherlock Holmes' he has Robert Downey Jr. as Holmes and Jude Law as Dr. Watson. Downey Jr.'s comeback which really got going in the mid-2000s has continued and does not seem to have suffered from appearing in Ritchie's movie, there is already talk of a sequel. Unsurprisingly for a Ritchie movie London is the setting and there is a lot of action. Interviews with the leading actors, notably, Law, have emphasised, however, that though the movie has the feel of something very 21st century, in fact in characterisation it is taking steps back to the original stories.
In the very hot summer of 1995, for £1.99 I got a complete set of the original Sherlock Holmes stories, published by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 1887-1927 and set 1875-1904/14. I have also read a couple of the pastiches, possibly the best known 'The Seven Percent Solution' (novel 1974; movie 1976) by Nicholas Meyer and 'The Last Sherlock Holmes Story' (1978) by Michael Dibdin. There were four novels and fifty-six short stories written by Doyle. This is one reason why Holmes is such a good character for television serials. A short story is sufficient for an hour long television drama. As the 'Inspector Morse' (1987-2000) and 'Poirot' (from 1989) series have have shown a short novel generates a decent two-hour programme. Many modern detective novels are far longer and so cannot be as easily made into one-hour programmes. Doyle began the Holmes stories in the era when serialised stories in magazines were incredibly popular and, even as late as the 1920s, this format had not really died away.
Holmes was in fact in a very crowded markeplace. If you read collections of other genuine Victorian and Edwardian detective stories, notably in the collections, 'The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes' (1970), 'More Rivals of Sherlock Holmes: Cosmopolitan Crimes' (1971), 'The Crooked Counties: Further Rivals of Sherlock Holmes' (1973), 'The American Rivals of Sherlock Holmes' (1979) all collected by Sir Hugh Greene and 'Rivals of Sherlock Holmes' (1982) and 'Rivals of Sherlock Holmes: 2' (1980) [this was a US publication hence an explanation for it being published in reverse order in the UK; no doubt there were difficulties in the similarity in title to Greene's books] both by Alan K. Russell and more recently, 'Rivals of Sherlock Holmes' (2008) by Nick Rennison, you can find dozens of fictional detectives from different countries, even a couple of female ones like Loveday Brooke, who have been severely overlooked, but none of them have endured like Holmes.
The reason why Holmes stuck out from the crowd at the time and still does today, is very much due to the elements that Ritchie has brought out in this latest movie. One element is the action. I have been rewatching the Jeremy Brett (1933-95) portrayal of Holmes in the television series that ran 1984-94 and Holmes is often pulling out his revolver (as does Watson) or at least a weighted cane. He also demonstrates knowledge of bare-knuckle boxing and bartitsu, a martial art developed in Britain 1898-1902 based on jujitsu. In the novels he is also described as a singlestick (i.e. staff) fighting specialist, it was overtaken by fencing in the 20th century but was an Olympic sport as late as 1904; Holmes generally uses his cane in this way.
It is unsurprising that Holmes is skilled in combat given his involvement with murderers and thugs of all kinds as well as ferocious dogs. If you read any of the 'rivals' books you see that these other detectives are mainly cerebral and solved crimes simply by thought. In many ways they are the precursors of the more genteel detective stories, notably those of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, that came to the fore in the 1920s and 1930s, presumably as their audience was from the generation who had seen too much of violence first or second hand through the First World War. Of course, though we are in a society, which certainly in the UK, has been seeing war casualties consistently for the past nine years, these days we certainly expect our television and movie characters to be armed and ready to fight physically.
Another element of Holmes which makes him appealing at the time and subsequently, and again is an element that appears relevant in the 2010s, is his moral ambivalence. In sharp contrast to many his 'rivals' and certainly detectives of the first two-thirds of the 20th century, Holmes is not necessarily a force for the status quo or even for the law. Whilst not working for the law per se he is, certainly at times, a force for justice. The Holmes stories establish the assumption of the slow or even bumbling official police (and in Holmes's case, also royal and civil services as many of his cases are political rather than criminal) that appears in so many stories, but Holmes does not always aid authority and at times sits as personal judge and jury on people he captures.
Sometimes Holmes's punishments can be seen as harsh, at other times he is lenient. Consequently, on beginning a Holmes story, in contrast to those of his rivals and most successors, there is no certainty that the status quo ante will be restored and that the 'correct' punishment will be meted out. I have always enjoyed such uncertainty in crime novels which is what drew me to the detective stories of people like Josef Škvorecký and Leonardo Sciascia, though for them the ambivalence usually comes more from the society in which the detective is operating rather than from the detectives themselves.
In an era when we have a character such as Dexter Morgan, a fictional police forensics specialist who is also a serial killer (novels by Jeff Linday 2004-9; television series 'Dexter' 2006 onwards), moral ambivalence seems to fit with what people are seeking in their detective series. In addition, since the 1970s we have seen even police detectives, let alone private ones, violating laws, breaking and entering and assaulting suspects to the extent that by the late 1980s it was being perceived as rather a cliche.
The element of Holmes which takes the moral ambivalence further is his drug addiction. Holmes is shown as a regular cocaine injector and, at times, a smoker of opium too. Whilst we tend to think of our own time as one in which drugs are the most common the restrictions on things like cocaine were not introduced until after the First World War, partly as a result of frontline troops taking opiates during the war (there are interesting parallels between drug abuse in the trenches of the First World War and drug abuse by US soldiers in the Vietnam War). In addition, there was an increased moral stance after 1918 which saw prohibition of narcotics in the USA follow the prohibition of alcohol. All of this was wrapped up in the sense of the decline of the 'race' and physical weakness that had become apparent in the UK even in the 1910s when up to 40% of volunteers for the Army had to be turned away as being unfit, though usually for malnutrition rather than drug abuse. I once found a play from 1927 which, even then, showed the 'hero' seeking cocaine on a night out in London. This theme appears in some Agatha Christie stories, but by then, drug abuse was seen very much as an activity of the silly rich as it was for many decades that followed, and, to some extent, is today.
Another thing about the 'real' Holmes is his comparative youth. Doyle says that by 1914, in 'His Last Bow' (1927), Holmes is around 60, this means that for the period covered by the main stories we know, he ranges from 21 in 1875 to 50 in 1904. However, given his expertise in so many topics, the usual assumption is that he was middle aged. The latest movie is set in the 1891 when Holmes would be 37. Downey Jr. is 44; Law has just turned 37. Thus, whilst to many commentators they seem too young for the parts they are playing (Brett was 51-61 when playing Holmes, though certainly in the early series looked younger) they are in step with what Doyle envisaged. If you take all these elements togther - lead character: maverick in his late thirties, active, intelligent, skilled in various forms of fighting, ambivalent towards the law, sexually ambiguous, drug addict, mixes with high and low society you can see why Holmes fits perfectly for the kind of movies Ritchie makes.
Watson, played by Law, looks like a young John Steed (from 'The Avengers' series 1961-9; 'The New Avengers' 1976-7) which is probably unsurprising. Like Steed, Watson, though a doctor has military background and has served in India and been wounded which suggests frontline action. He is shown in the novels wielding both a cane and a revolver. In Doyle's stories, any suggestion of anything more than companionship between Holmes and Watson is ruled out. Watson marries Mary Moran after 'The Sign of the Four' (1890) set in 1888, though his wife has died by the time of 'The Mystery of the Empty House' (1903) which is set in 1894 and is the first story after Holmes comes back from his supposed death. To some degree questions about Holmes and Watson's sexuality stem more from later 20th century attitudes rather than those of the 19th century when all kinds of house sharing were common and thus could be a basis for different narrative imperatives.
The final question, then, is why, if Holmes and Watson have always been characters that would be right at home in a Guy Ritchie, gangster-style movie, are we so surprised to see them like this? To a great extent it comes back to the genteelisation of detectives in the post-First World War era. Ironically Doyle was still writing at a time when his ambivalent detective, though still popular, was effectively becoming obsolete. Instead the reading public had a desire for detective stories in which the status quo ante was always firmly re-established and even private detectives were bastions of the law, and, as importantly, of authority (which is not always the same thing).
After Doyle's death in 1930, Holmes was increasingly assimilated into the canon of the more comfortable culture of the 'stately home' detectives like Christie's Poirot, Lord Peter Wimsey (in the series of novels by Dorothy L. Sayers published 1923-42) and Albert Campion (in Margery Allingham's novels published 1929-65; then by Philip Youngman Carter 1968-70). Partly this was through spoofs and the simplification of Holmes into the rather austere but amiable deerstalker-wearing character that most people associate with the name. Of course, we should all know how Holmes should be attired due to the detailed drawings accompanying the original stories, you can buy fully illustrated editions of the stories nowadays.
This process of making Holmes genteel was achieved most by the Basil Rathbone movies (1939-46) which also, with Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson, demoted that character to a far more bumbling role than he had held in the stories (this view had been countered in Meyer's and Dibdin's novels and most visibly in the 1988 movie 'Without A Clue' in which Holmes is simply a figurehead for Watson's detective work). It is against this Rathbone portrayal, often repeated (I remember seeing all the Rathbone Holmes's movies more than once in the 1970s and early 1980s) with Holmes as a bastion of authority, even the US military machine, that so much of what has followed featuring Holmes is set and it has proven difficult to shake off his Rathbone attire let alone that manner, to get back closer to the original, distinctive character.
George Orwell, wrote in 1946, the article 'The Decline of the English Murder' in 'Tribune', you can read it in full here: http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/essays/decline-of-english-murder.htm He argued in the light of the violence of the recently ended Second World War that murder in Britain was becoming more brutal and the coverage of murder cases and the fictional crime stories would become so too. To a great extent it is wrong, as many people do, to see Orwell as arguing that the Christiesque style of detective stories was coming to an end. Christie herself would remain a bestseller for the rest of her life (to her death in 1976) and continues to sell very well today. Orwell, in fact, was marking the point at which 'true crime' stories were coming more to the fore. An audience hardened by wartime experiences could stomach greater detail than would have been reported before.
Yet, as in the post-First World War period after 1945, you can see a desire for fictional murder stories that have the status quo ante restored, sometimes even back to the class structure of the pre-1939 period. Christie's novels of the time reflect some of the post-war social changes but because of that, in fact more firmly re-emphasise the continuing values of stability, especially in rural Britain. Thus, it is not surprising that for so long we were happy to accept a Sherlock Holmes who, whilst looking into Gothic elements of late Victorian life, seemed to be able to shine rational light into the dark corners and restore the civility that we all too often see wedded to the Victorian era. However, hopefully in a time which is more honestly like the late Victorian period in terms of poverty, disease, drug abuse and social division, it seems right that we again engage properly with a fictional character adept in such an environment.
Showing posts with label Hercule Poirot. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hercule Poirot. Show all posts
Sunday, 3 January 2010
Friday, 2 January 2009
Historical Detective Stories and Political Correctness
The detective novel in the UK rose to prominence from the 1840s and having come to a peak in the late Victorian period has never really dipped. Each decade seems to refresh the genre with new characters and styles. People see 'golden ages' of the genre such as the 1890s and the 1930s but in fact the detective novel has constantly evolved to reflect the changing society in which we live. The genre has always straddled different elements of British society. Sherlock Holmes mixed with royalty and street urchins and everyone in between. Crime is something which touches on all levels of society and the motives such as greed, lust, jealousy, anger, etc. are universal. Detective novels reflect our society or certainly our view of our society. In the past three decades there has been a desire for grittiness and authenticity, partly in reaction to the 'country house party murder' styles of the mid-20th century and also reflecting the trend to more realistic writing and drama which came in the 1960s. As the detective story has penetrated into every corner of British society and, increasingly into other countries too, people have sought out other times and places in which to set such stories.
As a brief aside, in terms of places for detective stories, the detectives have always been well-travelled, Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot solved crimes in Egypt and Iraq. He was a Belgian operating in the UK or its empire and so worked within the norms of contemporary British society. US detectives became very popular in the 1970s with a whole slew of television series coming from the USA to the UK. However, the first detective stories of note in the UK, with a character working completely in a foreign setting, were the Maigret novels, written by the Belgian Georges Simenon, but set in France. He wrote 72 novels and 28 short stories featuring police detective Jules Maigret. Part of the attraction for British readers/viewers of these, often bleak stories, was that they were in a different legal, and to some extent, moral, setting. One reason why I think that the novel 'Gorky Park' (1981) by Martin Cruz Smith was so popular was because of that aspect, i.e., of trying to solve a crime while working in the Soviet state machine. For the same reason I was always interested in the detective novels of Leonardo Sciascia (1921-89) set in modern-day Italy with the detectives facing corruption and influence, and the four Lieutenant Boruvka novels of Josef Skvorecky (born 1924), set in Czechoslovakia under Communist rule during the 1960s-70s.
Simenon set his stories in the times they were written (1931-72) but they now have been conflated in the popular imagination to a period in the 1950s. Of course, many fictional detectives have very long careers. Poirot was middle-aged when he appeared in his first novel in 1926 and yet, was not killed off until 1976; like Simenon, Christie set her stories in the contemporary world. I suppose, in theory, Poirot could have still been operating in his late 80s or his 90s in the 1970s and Maigret could have had a forty-year career, but to some degree such longevity would have stretched credibility if articulated. As a result, we now tend to see these stories of being of a particular decade and Poirot, on television, has now been assigned the 1930s; as Maigret and Miss Marple have been given the 1950s (though Marple seems to have been shifted back a bit in the recent, poor quality, overly light-hearted ITV episodes).
Though Simenon's Maigret is well known in the UK, there was another foreign-based detective that had already made it into UK culture, though, these days he is pretty much forgotten. This is Judge Dee (the 7th century CE Chinese detective not the 2000s fictional British judge). There were 15 novels written in English by Dutchman Robert Van Gulik between 1949-67; you can still find some paperback copies in second-hand bookshops. Van Gulik had originally translated Chinese stories from the 14th century CE featuring a detective-cum-judge of the 7th century and then went on to write a number of his own. There have been a couple of attempts at televised versions, but the use of Caucasian actors to play ancient Chinese in the six episodes produced for the UK's Granada Television company in 1969, hardly boded for success.
Of course, we have long had historically-set detective stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did not publish 'The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes' until 1927 though it features stories set in the 1880s and 1890s. The Sherlock Holmes stories were published 1887-1927 and feature cases set 1881-1914. Aside from Van Gulik, however, historical detective stories (as opposed to stories written in the past but at the particular time they were set) did not really come to the fore until the advent of Ellis Peters and her Brother Cadfael series (published 1977-94) with twenty novels and a short story collection. These stories are set between 1137-45 CE, a time when England was in civil war. Her series was boosted by the success of Umberto Eco's 'The Name of the Rose' (1980; in English from 1983) featuring another medieval monk-detective that seemed to give literary legitimacy to such stories. Since then, the floodgates have opened and I have read detective novels in periods from the 1330s BCE in Ancient Egypt through Ancient Rome and Roman Britain to Elizabethan England to 17th century Japan to Russia of the 1860s to post-war Germany of the late 1940s.
As with the Maigret novels, we are interested in seeing how detectives operate in societies with different moral and legal codes to our own. This is where the challenge that I want to address in this posting, comes in. We want our detectives to be heroes, even if they are highly flawed ones. To a great extent we want them to act as a force for what is morally right, often against the hostility or ambivalence or disinterest of society. Most of us expect the detective (whether private or employed by the state) to restore things to the status quo ante, the situation of the norm of before the crime occurred. Of course, it is never back to the previous situation entirely, but that is the nature of stories, they move on even if the ending is similar to the beginning.
People are critical of novels actually written historically for including attitudes that we would not find acceptable today. This week I again read a passing criticism of John Buchan's novels as being casually anti-Semitic and racist (interestingly his support of Scottish nationalism was lauded, something he would have been criticised for in the 1910s) and that leaves a bitter taste in our mouth and dampens our enjoyment of the stories. The implied criticism is that these things should now not be reproduced, in whatever media, at all.
People often comment that women are portrayed in submissive or purely auxiliary roles (partly this is because we are unfamiliar with the female detectives of Victorian stories, notably Loveday Brooke, a series of her adventures would do very well on television; there is also a Mrs. Paschal I have not come across yet in my reading). Interestingly, of course, women in the Sherlock Holmes stories often play more active roles, sometimes as the instigators of crime, notably in the first ever Holmes short story, 'A Scandal in Bohemia' (1891) in which a woman outwits Holmes and in 'The Three Gables' (1926).
To some degree, looking back to the past, people, including authors, often see the suppression of women as greater than was the case. Whilst they were second-class citizens they were often far more active in society than most people credit. Medieval England, especially during times of wars and crusades, was often effectively run by women; abbesses were often immensely powerful. To some extent, this is why the medieval Church so much promoted the portrayal of the Virgin Mary as a 'proper' woman. She is shown as a woman who takes little control over her life and is used by God and shipped across the Middle East by Joseph. It is more likely that, even in the 1st century CE, she would have been back in Nazareth running the business while waiting the birth of her child leaving Joseph to go off and register in Bethlehem. Do not even start me on writing Mary, wife of Jesus, out of history for the same purpose. If I had a time machine I would go and back and interview Mary the mother and Mary the wife about the challenges of living with the man; their great involvement in his career and tell them how their roles would almost be erased by historians.
The big bugbear of historical novels of any kind, but especially crime novels, because they often involve assumptions about types of people, is the racist aspect. Racism has been with us forever, but, interestingly, again, our societies, especially in Britain, were far more ethnically mixed in the past than people assume. Roman Britain had people coming to it from right across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. People from Syria have been found buried in the city of Bath. Britain had constant links to different nationalities and races. The crusades revived such connections and Elizabeth I introduced racial legislation because it had become a factor. It is interesting that the dramatisations of Philip Pullman's Sally Lockhart stories and 'Doctor Who' episodes under Russell T. Davis in the 2000s are seen as odd for featuring ethnic minorities in past settings. However, in fact, they are far closer to the truth than most people realise. Britain has always been diverse and there have always been people who discriminate, just as today.
Where does this leave our fictional detectives who work in such racist, misogynistic settings? Well, to some degree, despite all the attention to detail, the author is almost compelled to make them anachronistic. The series that made me most aware of this was 'Heat of the Sun' (3 episodes in 1998) starring Trevor Eve and Susannah Harker. The series was about a superintendant sent from Scotland Yard to work in the British colony of Kenya in the 1930s. It was a picturesque setting and an interesting one given what I have said above about detection in different contexts. However, what jarred was how liberal Eve's character, Albert Tyburn, was. In fact, he was more so than the Superintendant Peter Boyd character, that Eve has played since 2000 in the series set in contemporary UK , 'Waking the Dead'. Tyburn's attitude to Africans and to women seem very peculiar, especially when characters around him showed the racism and misogyny of the times in such a colonial setting. More accurate, on this basis, was the movie 'White Mischief' (1988) which is also set in Kenya in the same era and also features the actor Joss Acland. I suppose that to have shown Tyburn as dismissive of blacks and women would have made it impossible for most viewers to have engaged with him as a hero.
Another similar situation develops in the first two of Philip Kerr's 'Berlin Noir' triology (called that even though the third book is set in Vienna), 'March Violets' (1989) and 'The Pale Criminal' (1990). They are set in Berlin, respectively in 1936 and 1938, and feature a private detective called Bernhard Gunther. He ends up working for the Nazi police machine. However, Gunther's character is again too liberal for someone operating in that time frame. Of course, not everyone in Germany in the 1930s was anti-Semitic and many people opposed the Nazi regime, but they tended not to be police officers (we can get into a great debate here about the Communist sympathisers among the police ranks before 1933, I know there has been research on this). Any with such sympathies would not have been in any position of influence by 1936 and certainly not being employed by Reinhard Heydrich by 1938.
To some extent, Gunther is a counterpoint to the set-up in which he is operating. Reading detective stories we tend to accept the state approach as a 'norm' and, in this context, it could lead us to accepting Nazi attitudes which clearly, Kerr, knowing he is treading on risky ground having a novel set in the Nazi regime, is keen to avoid. (Looking back at those novels I was embarrassed to find Kerr has a character called Otto Rahn and in my Beckmann stories I have a character called Otto Beckmann and one of his detective constables is called Bruno Rahn. This is despite my efforts to stay away from any similarly named characters.) Whilst I am not expecting Kerr to have a full blown anti-Semitic, misogynist, homophobe character as hero, he could have made him less 'nice'. Perhaps the gritty detectives are reserved for our bitter times which strive for equality of all, so allowing the characters to be different by not being so politically correct.
I am not arguing for novels featuring hate-filled xenophobes and male chauvinists, but I am hoping that we can have 'heroes', or at least detectives in a leading role, who are not so out-of-step with the times in which they are operating. This has sometimes been the case in some of the historical detective stories that have been produced in the past thirty years. I am tolerant of historically-set detectives to a greater extent than some people I know, I think because I recognise that you cannot make them so alien that readers find no connection to them. One friend of mine condemned the Cadfael series as total fantasy as he argued that in the medieval period the local lord simply arrested whoever he felt was guilty and had them executed, or tortured and then executed, and that there was none of the forensic analysis that Cadfael conducts. To some extent, you see such behaviour in the stories such as seeking to detect witches by floating women in the river. Cadfael, despite being a monk, because of his worldly nature (he had fathered a son by a Syrian woman whilst on crusade), is allowed to be more rational and, to some extent, bring in apparently Enlightenment thinking. That is what you assume until you remember that Greek logical analysis and Occam's Razor were intellectual concepts that would have been familiar to most medieval monks. Working with Occam's Razor you have the same kind of deductive thinking that Sherlock Holmes employed. I suppose I am wanting my cake and to eat it, but I do believe a balance can be struck to allow modern readers to access the characters, not feel turned off by their behaviour and yet not make the whole process overly anachronistic.
To find ways of achieving this, I return to Robert Van Gulik. I read a fascinating interview with him when he was asked how he dealt with the issue I raise here. It would be useful if his attitude was made more widely known to authors of historical detective stories. What he did was to have his Judge Dee character as a very devout Confucian. Whilst Confucianism still provides a foundation for many modern day Chinese attitudes, a lot of its elements would be unacceptable to Western readers, for whom van Gulik was writing over an 18-year period (1949-67). Of course, this period itself saw vast changes in attitudes in Western society.
Van Gulik argued that Dee operated to a moral code that he, the author, accepted was out of step with the contemporary world, unsurprising given the 1300-year difference. Yet, it was a moral basis from which the character was motivated and behaved. Elements he highlighted was the fact that Dee has a number of wives, whereas, today polygamy is seen as wrong. In particular, Dee, as a good Confucian, emphasised filial loyalty to the extent that he forces two sisters to return to slavery into which their father sold them. Interestingly, van Gulik also returned to aspects of the original stories, such as the functioning of lesbians in the era. This gave him more room in which to operate and, to an extent, shows the complexity of 7th century China and the wide scope of writing of that time. Van Gulik did play down the supernatural element which was common in detective literature of that time, but his settings are often spooky and one can understand the supernatural attributes people of the time would have attached to them and the occurences that happened there.
Ellis Peters, in contrast, would not have been able to find such a rich basis in the 12th century literature available to us in the way 7th century Chinese writing could be accessed by van Gulik. However, all things that happen in our contemporary society have been happening for millenia. Humans remain humans with all the desires and discriminations that they have had through the centuries. In my own writing I have tried to stick to van Gulik's approach and have made my Otto Beckmann a good Bavarian Catholic with mild discriminatory tendencies, which, as a policeman, he can be brought to face the consequences of. Any discrimination actually blinds you to facets of particular humans, something dangerous when investigating crime. His perception of women is in line with his society, and so, out-of-step with much of ours. I make no apologies for that. If historical detective stories are not only going to be entertainment, but, like all detective stories, tell us about the society in which the detectives operate, then we need to tolerate our 'heroes' behaving a little less anachronistically.
As a brief aside, in terms of places for detective stories, the detectives have always been well-travelled, Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot solved crimes in Egypt and Iraq. He was a Belgian operating in the UK or its empire and so worked within the norms of contemporary British society. US detectives became very popular in the 1970s with a whole slew of television series coming from the USA to the UK. However, the first detective stories of note in the UK, with a character working completely in a foreign setting, were the Maigret novels, written by the Belgian Georges Simenon, but set in France. He wrote 72 novels and 28 short stories featuring police detective Jules Maigret. Part of the attraction for British readers/viewers of these, often bleak stories, was that they were in a different legal, and to some extent, moral, setting. One reason why I think that the novel 'Gorky Park' (1981) by Martin Cruz Smith was so popular was because of that aspect, i.e., of trying to solve a crime while working in the Soviet state machine. For the same reason I was always interested in the detective novels of Leonardo Sciascia (1921-89) set in modern-day Italy with the detectives facing corruption and influence, and the four Lieutenant Boruvka novels of Josef Skvorecky (born 1924), set in Czechoslovakia under Communist rule during the 1960s-70s.
Simenon set his stories in the times they were written (1931-72) but they now have been conflated in the popular imagination to a period in the 1950s. Of course, many fictional detectives have very long careers. Poirot was middle-aged when he appeared in his first novel in 1926 and yet, was not killed off until 1976; like Simenon, Christie set her stories in the contemporary world. I suppose, in theory, Poirot could have still been operating in his late 80s or his 90s in the 1970s and Maigret could have had a forty-year career, but to some degree such longevity would have stretched credibility if articulated. As a result, we now tend to see these stories of being of a particular decade and Poirot, on television, has now been assigned the 1930s; as Maigret and Miss Marple have been given the 1950s (though Marple seems to have been shifted back a bit in the recent, poor quality, overly light-hearted ITV episodes).
Though Simenon's Maigret is well known in the UK, there was another foreign-based detective that had already made it into UK culture, though, these days he is pretty much forgotten. This is Judge Dee (the 7th century CE Chinese detective not the 2000s fictional British judge). There were 15 novels written in English by Dutchman Robert Van Gulik between 1949-67; you can still find some paperback copies in second-hand bookshops. Van Gulik had originally translated Chinese stories from the 14th century CE featuring a detective-cum-judge of the 7th century and then went on to write a number of his own. There have been a couple of attempts at televised versions, but the use of Caucasian actors to play ancient Chinese in the six episodes produced for the UK's Granada Television company in 1969, hardly boded for success.
Of course, we have long had historically-set detective stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did not publish 'The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes' until 1927 though it features stories set in the 1880s and 1890s. The Sherlock Holmes stories were published 1887-1927 and feature cases set 1881-1914. Aside from Van Gulik, however, historical detective stories (as opposed to stories written in the past but at the particular time they were set) did not really come to the fore until the advent of Ellis Peters and her Brother Cadfael series (published 1977-94) with twenty novels and a short story collection. These stories are set between 1137-45 CE, a time when England was in civil war. Her series was boosted by the success of Umberto Eco's 'The Name of the Rose' (1980; in English from 1983) featuring another medieval monk-detective that seemed to give literary legitimacy to such stories. Since then, the floodgates have opened and I have read detective novels in periods from the 1330s BCE in Ancient Egypt through Ancient Rome and Roman Britain to Elizabethan England to 17th century Japan to Russia of the 1860s to post-war Germany of the late 1940s.
As with the Maigret novels, we are interested in seeing how detectives operate in societies with different moral and legal codes to our own. This is where the challenge that I want to address in this posting, comes in. We want our detectives to be heroes, even if they are highly flawed ones. To a great extent we want them to act as a force for what is morally right, often against the hostility or ambivalence or disinterest of society. Most of us expect the detective (whether private or employed by the state) to restore things to the status quo ante, the situation of the norm of before the crime occurred. Of course, it is never back to the previous situation entirely, but that is the nature of stories, they move on even if the ending is similar to the beginning.
People are critical of novels actually written historically for including attitudes that we would not find acceptable today. This week I again read a passing criticism of John Buchan's novels as being casually anti-Semitic and racist (interestingly his support of Scottish nationalism was lauded, something he would have been criticised for in the 1910s) and that leaves a bitter taste in our mouth and dampens our enjoyment of the stories. The implied criticism is that these things should now not be reproduced, in whatever media, at all.
People often comment that women are portrayed in submissive or purely auxiliary roles (partly this is because we are unfamiliar with the female detectives of Victorian stories, notably Loveday Brooke, a series of her adventures would do very well on television; there is also a Mrs. Paschal I have not come across yet in my reading). Interestingly, of course, women in the Sherlock Holmes stories often play more active roles, sometimes as the instigators of crime, notably in the first ever Holmes short story, 'A Scandal in Bohemia' (1891) in which a woman outwits Holmes and in 'The Three Gables' (1926).
To some degree, looking back to the past, people, including authors, often see the suppression of women as greater than was the case. Whilst they were second-class citizens they were often far more active in society than most people credit. Medieval England, especially during times of wars and crusades, was often effectively run by women; abbesses were often immensely powerful. To some extent, this is why the medieval Church so much promoted the portrayal of the Virgin Mary as a 'proper' woman. She is shown as a woman who takes little control over her life and is used by God and shipped across the Middle East by Joseph. It is more likely that, even in the 1st century CE, she would have been back in Nazareth running the business while waiting the birth of her child leaving Joseph to go off and register in Bethlehem. Do not even start me on writing Mary, wife of Jesus, out of history for the same purpose. If I had a time machine I would go and back and interview Mary the mother and Mary the wife about the challenges of living with the man; their great involvement in his career and tell them how their roles would almost be erased by historians.
The big bugbear of historical novels of any kind, but especially crime novels, because they often involve assumptions about types of people, is the racist aspect. Racism has been with us forever, but, interestingly, again, our societies, especially in Britain, were far more ethnically mixed in the past than people assume. Roman Britain had people coming to it from right across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. People from Syria have been found buried in the city of Bath. Britain had constant links to different nationalities and races. The crusades revived such connections and Elizabeth I introduced racial legislation because it had become a factor. It is interesting that the dramatisations of Philip Pullman's Sally Lockhart stories and 'Doctor Who' episodes under Russell T. Davis in the 2000s are seen as odd for featuring ethnic minorities in past settings. However, in fact, they are far closer to the truth than most people realise. Britain has always been diverse and there have always been people who discriminate, just as today.
Where does this leave our fictional detectives who work in such racist, misogynistic settings? Well, to some degree, despite all the attention to detail, the author is almost compelled to make them anachronistic. The series that made me most aware of this was 'Heat of the Sun' (3 episodes in 1998) starring Trevor Eve and Susannah Harker. The series was about a superintendant sent from Scotland Yard to work in the British colony of Kenya in the 1930s. It was a picturesque setting and an interesting one given what I have said above about detection in different contexts. However, what jarred was how liberal Eve's character, Albert Tyburn, was. In fact, he was more so than the Superintendant Peter Boyd character, that Eve has played since 2000 in the series set in contemporary UK , 'Waking the Dead'. Tyburn's attitude to Africans and to women seem very peculiar, especially when characters around him showed the racism and misogyny of the times in such a colonial setting. More accurate, on this basis, was the movie 'White Mischief' (1988) which is also set in Kenya in the same era and also features the actor Joss Acland. I suppose that to have shown Tyburn as dismissive of blacks and women would have made it impossible for most viewers to have engaged with him as a hero.
Another similar situation develops in the first two of Philip Kerr's 'Berlin Noir' triology (called that even though the third book is set in Vienna), 'March Violets' (1989) and 'The Pale Criminal' (1990). They are set in Berlin, respectively in 1936 and 1938, and feature a private detective called Bernhard Gunther. He ends up working for the Nazi police machine. However, Gunther's character is again too liberal for someone operating in that time frame. Of course, not everyone in Germany in the 1930s was anti-Semitic and many people opposed the Nazi regime, but they tended not to be police officers (we can get into a great debate here about the Communist sympathisers among the police ranks before 1933, I know there has been research on this). Any with such sympathies would not have been in any position of influence by 1936 and certainly not being employed by Reinhard Heydrich by 1938.
To some extent, Gunther is a counterpoint to the set-up in which he is operating. Reading detective stories we tend to accept the state approach as a 'norm' and, in this context, it could lead us to accepting Nazi attitudes which clearly, Kerr, knowing he is treading on risky ground having a novel set in the Nazi regime, is keen to avoid. (Looking back at those novels I was embarrassed to find Kerr has a character called Otto Rahn and in my Beckmann stories I have a character called Otto Beckmann and one of his detective constables is called Bruno Rahn. This is despite my efforts to stay away from any similarly named characters.) Whilst I am not expecting Kerr to have a full blown anti-Semitic, misogynist, homophobe character as hero, he could have made him less 'nice'. Perhaps the gritty detectives are reserved for our bitter times which strive for equality of all, so allowing the characters to be different by not being so politically correct.
I am not arguing for novels featuring hate-filled xenophobes and male chauvinists, but I am hoping that we can have 'heroes', or at least detectives in a leading role, who are not so out-of-step with the times in which they are operating. This has sometimes been the case in some of the historical detective stories that have been produced in the past thirty years. I am tolerant of historically-set detectives to a greater extent than some people I know, I think because I recognise that you cannot make them so alien that readers find no connection to them. One friend of mine condemned the Cadfael series as total fantasy as he argued that in the medieval period the local lord simply arrested whoever he felt was guilty and had them executed, or tortured and then executed, and that there was none of the forensic analysis that Cadfael conducts. To some extent, you see such behaviour in the stories such as seeking to detect witches by floating women in the river. Cadfael, despite being a monk, because of his worldly nature (he had fathered a son by a Syrian woman whilst on crusade), is allowed to be more rational and, to some extent, bring in apparently Enlightenment thinking. That is what you assume until you remember that Greek logical analysis and Occam's Razor were intellectual concepts that would have been familiar to most medieval monks. Working with Occam's Razor you have the same kind of deductive thinking that Sherlock Holmes employed. I suppose I am wanting my cake and to eat it, but I do believe a balance can be struck to allow modern readers to access the characters, not feel turned off by their behaviour and yet not make the whole process overly anachronistic.
To find ways of achieving this, I return to Robert Van Gulik. I read a fascinating interview with him when he was asked how he dealt with the issue I raise here. It would be useful if his attitude was made more widely known to authors of historical detective stories. What he did was to have his Judge Dee character as a very devout Confucian. Whilst Confucianism still provides a foundation for many modern day Chinese attitudes, a lot of its elements would be unacceptable to Western readers, for whom van Gulik was writing over an 18-year period (1949-67). Of course, this period itself saw vast changes in attitudes in Western society.
Van Gulik argued that Dee operated to a moral code that he, the author, accepted was out of step with the contemporary world, unsurprising given the 1300-year difference. Yet, it was a moral basis from which the character was motivated and behaved. Elements he highlighted was the fact that Dee has a number of wives, whereas, today polygamy is seen as wrong. In particular, Dee, as a good Confucian, emphasised filial loyalty to the extent that he forces two sisters to return to slavery into which their father sold them. Interestingly, van Gulik also returned to aspects of the original stories, such as the functioning of lesbians in the era. This gave him more room in which to operate and, to an extent, shows the complexity of 7th century China and the wide scope of writing of that time. Van Gulik did play down the supernatural element which was common in detective literature of that time, but his settings are often spooky and one can understand the supernatural attributes people of the time would have attached to them and the occurences that happened there.
Ellis Peters, in contrast, would not have been able to find such a rich basis in the 12th century literature available to us in the way 7th century Chinese writing could be accessed by van Gulik. However, all things that happen in our contemporary society have been happening for millenia. Humans remain humans with all the desires and discriminations that they have had through the centuries. In my own writing I have tried to stick to van Gulik's approach and have made my Otto Beckmann a good Bavarian Catholic with mild discriminatory tendencies, which, as a policeman, he can be brought to face the consequences of. Any discrimination actually blinds you to facets of particular humans, something dangerous when investigating crime. His perception of women is in line with his society, and so, out-of-step with much of ours. I make no apologies for that. If historical detective stories are not only going to be entertainment, but, like all detective stories, tell us about the society in which the detectives operate, then we need to tolerate our 'heroes' behaving a little less anachronistically.
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