Second-Wave Detective Fiction and the Police

4Second-Wave Detective Fiction and the Police

4.1A Move to Realism and the Disappearance of the Great Detective

The Golden-Age detective fiction writers concentrated on the puzzle and the plot. “Readers of the 1930s expected that the puzzle would be both dominant and ingenious and that the murderer in his villainy would exhibit almost superhuman cunning and skill” (James, TDF 91). As a result, Golden-Age writers had their victims dispatched by licking poisoned stamps, being battered to death by church bells, poisoned by cat claws and found dead in locked and barred rooms (James, TDF 65). P. D. James points out that because of the need for more and more bizarre ways of murder, some of them could not possibly work in practice. This, nevertheless, did not trouble the contemporary reader who was not interested in “the swift bash to the skull followed by sixty thousand words of psychological insight” (TDF 92). Julian Symons notices that already by “1950 there were few drawings of the grounds and the house, […] stories based on the elucidation of alibis through time-tables had vanished, nobody was dealing in unknown poisons, and methods of murder had become noticeably less bizarre” (160). The writers had set on the way of realism and psychology.

Modern writers did not just want to entertain their readers with an ingenious murder mystery; they wanted to provide a novel combining “popular entertainment with a study of people and problems” (Symons 160). Since the writers started to ask “Why rather than How” (Symons 161), the psyche of the criminals and their family background began to get more attention. Characters have become more developed; writers have become more realistic in their treatment of crime, more precise in their dealing with the detection of crime and crime fiction has become closer to general fiction than ever before (James, TDF 146). Crime has remained at the heart of a detective novel but stopped to be its only ingredient.

Novels by P. D. James comply with some of the rules of the Golden Age and some critics, consequently, place them alongside novels by Christie, Sayers and Allingham (Hubly). Erlene Hubly, however, argues that James departs from this tradition and her novels should be regarded as representatives of the second-wave crime fiction. According to Hubly, “stressing neither plot nor detective, James’s novels are concerned not just with a puzzle-murder but with the ‘corrosive, destructive aspect of crime,’ the way it shatters the lives of all it touches, [which is the theme that takes James] beyond the mystery novel into the realm of general popular fiction.” Moreover, James demonstrates in her novels that the world is not an orderly place where everything can be explained by reason and where after a short aberration the order can be restored. James takes the advantage of a close setting with a limited number of suspects, but she uses it “as a means of examining reality” (Hubly). She does not pretend that everything is all right with the society, nor does she believe it is going to be so in foreseeable future.

In her “Introduction” P. D. James explains that the “carefully researched television plays and documentaries on the police have made the public far more knowledgeable. They are unlikely to be convinced today by the unrealities of the Golden Age.” In order to create a realistic detective novel and convince the readers, modern detective fiction writers, including P. D. James, give more space to detailed description of the setting and characters, and the same applies to the picture of the police and of the realities of their work.

Agatha Christie does not pretend that all detection work is done by the official investigator or the amateur detective: “There was a police surgeon, a police photographer, fingerprint men. They moved efficiently, each occupied with his own routine” (Clocks 14); “the photographs had been taken, and measurements recorded” (Zero 113). She does not, however, go into greater detail and generally all the forensic work is done by “general practitioners who, at the request of the detective, do the postmortem on their examination table after evening surgery and next morning are able to give the detective a more precise description of precisely how the victim died than a modern forensic laboratory would be able to do offer after a fortnight’s intensive work” (James, “Introduction”). James’s police are to a greater extent dependent on the team of professionals and the description of their work becomes elaborate:

The room was overcrowded but the experts in death, investigating officers, finger print officers, photographer and scene-of-crime searchers, were adept at keeping out of each other’s way […] hands sheathed in gloves […]. Now those hands poured the remnants of the tea into a collecting flask, stoppered, sealed and labelled it, gently eased the cup and saucer into a plastic bag; scraped a sample of blood from the marble limb and placed it in the specially prepared tube; took up the limb itself, touching it only with the tips of the fingers and lowered it into a sterile box. (SS 185).

James’s detectives have deep knowledge of pathology (James, PP 177) and visit the victims’ postmortem of which the reader is given a detailed account (James, OS 275). James informs her readers about the lookout and equipment of police stations, including the “stainless-steel bath trolley for the reception and hosing-down of drowned bodies” (OS 269), notice boards, computers, and telephones necessary for police work; and she also mentions the work of Met’s Press Bureau that is “responsible for setting up press conferences and for liaison with the media” (OS 270). James also refers to the history of the police and in Original Sin the team is stationed at the Wapping Police Station, “the oldest police station in the United Kingdom, [since] the River Police were established in 1798, thirty-one years before the Met” (270), as discussed in chapter 1.4.

Besides putting more emphasis on research and scientific details, P. D. James, as a modern detective-fiction writer, introduces a much more realistic detective. The idea of the superman became highly unpopular during the war (Symons 160) and the idea of an eccentric bachelor helping the professional police when they are at loss began to appear exceedingly ridiculous (Symons 155). “Because of the growing importance of realism [...], in part arising from the comparative reality of television series, the professional detective has largely taken over from the amateur. What we have are realistic portrayals of human beings undertaking a difficult, sometimes dangerous, and often disagreeable job, beset with the anxieties common to humanity” (James, TDF 146). Reading public knew that the only person to be called to investigate a violent death is the professional detective who is assisted by a team of experts, not an elderly gentleman with nothing better to do.

Since P. D. James was aiming at as much realism as possible (James, TDF 125), she had no choice than to make her detective Adam Dalgliesh a professional policeman. James admits that if she had started writing later, she would have made her detective a woman “but this was not an option at the time when women were not active in the detective force” (James, TDF 124). Dalgliesh is a realistic character, a Scotland-Yard detective, promoted to commander in the course of James’s writing, with fully-developed private and professional history; however, he retains some of the eccentricities typical of the Great Detectives, he is a successful poet, obsessed with English language (James, SN 56) and very critical of his colleagues’ imperfections. He is therefore, similarly to Hercule Poirot earlier, purposefully excluded from this study.