The New Image: The Tough Copper and Ethnic and Sexual Minorities

4.2The New Image: The Tough Copper and Ethnic and Sexual Minorities

James’s police officers are not cardboard personae but fully-developed characters with detailed personal history and both private and work relationships. Inspector Daniel Aaron is not an anonymous member of Dalgliesh’s team in Original Sin, nor is he a happily married man with cosy home, wife and children. He has a mortgaged flat with “kitchen sink full of unwashed dishes, a bathroom whose door had to be pushed against the weight of a heap of dirty and malodorous towels, unmade beds and clothes strewn over the bedroom” (365). His girlfriend leaves him with the mortgage, a flat whose furniture he dislikes, outrageous telephone bill and a lawyer’s bill that he has to pay in instalments.

Inspector John Massingham has got separate rooms in his parents’ house where he can conduct his love affairs in privacy and at the same time enjoy the service of his parents’ staff who cook, wash and clean for him (James, TD 171), but after the death of his mother he has to endure his father’s solitude and demands for attention. Inspector Kate Miskin takes out the highest possible mortgage to be able to afford a two-bedroom flat which remained unfurnished until she saved “the money to buy the austere, well-designed modern furniture she liked; the sofa and two easy chairs in real leather, the dining table and four chairs in polished elm, the fitted bookcase […] and professionally designed kitchen which held only minimum of necessary utensils” (TD 155). The flat is a symbol of achievement and success, a realistic dream of a realistic character.

James’s detectives are not always nice and courteous to the interrogated and the times when the detective was believed to treat “all the suspects with the gentlemanly politeness” (James, “Introduction”) belong to the past. The modern detectives are over-worked men and women who may easily lose their temper and who, although they never come near the harsh methods frequently presented in American detective fiction, can make the suspect very uncomfortable. Julian Symons emphasises that British writers were slower to treat the police in the brutal way of the hard-boiled school (167), but they had their suspicions. Sergeant Robert Buckley joins the police because he recognizes in himself “a streak of sadism which found a certain mild satisfaction in the pain of others without necessarily needing actively to inflict it” (James, SS 181). Sergeant Oliphant is tactless, quick to antagonise witnesses (James, DD 348) and crude bordering on insolent, which, however, brings results (DD 352). Chief Inspector Rickards has no evidence that Oliphant is a bully, but in Rickards’s view he looks like one: “He was six feet of disciplined flesh and muscle, dark and conveniently handsome […]. He drank too much […] and in all, he represented all the qualities in a young detective which Rickards disliked: aggression, only controlled because control was prudent, a frank relish for power, [and] too much sexual assurance” (DD 212). Christie’s policemen did not display aggression and longing for power and, above all, did not have sexual life of any kind. Or if they did, it took place in conventional marriages and it was never discussed.

During the cultural revolution of the 1960s it became understood that sex played a crucial part in everybody’s life. Attitude to sexuality relaxed considerably at that time, sex became inseparable from mainstream fiction and subsequently detective fiction also became more sexually explicit (James, TDF 146). William Rubinstein indicates that once it became acceptable to write about sex, it became too tempting for detective-fiction writers to leave overt depictions of sex out of the detective novels because it sold well. For P. D. James sex is not a marketing strategy. She understands that if her stories and characters are to be considered realistic, sex must be included. She is never too explicit or vulgar and she portrays sex as a natural part of life of all her characters, including the police officers.

Whereas Christie’s Sergeant O’Connor, nicknamed by his colleagues ‘The Maidservant’s Prayer’, takes a young maid out for dinner where he gently extracts all information from her, pays for the meal and courteously leaves (CT 103), James’s Sergeant Masterson has sex with a suspect in his car (SN 224) and a long-term relationship with a married woman (SN 227). Kate Miskin is single but sees the necessity of having a lover, “intelligent, personable, available when needed, skilful in bed and undemanding out of it” (James, OS 154). Sergeant Francis Benton-Smith is understood to be “dangerously close to love” but with no expectations that his love affair with a young actress could last (Lighthouse 23). James’s policemen are not womanisers, neither are they unnecessarily promiscuous but still, to write about their sexual lives to such an extent as James does would have been unthinkable for Christie and other Golden-Age writers. It would have been similarly unimaginable to create a policemen who would not be white, male and protestant or Roman Catholic. Yet, James’s characters are both male and female and of various social, ethnic and religious backgrounds.

In the first half of the twentieth century ethnic minorities were not represented in the police force and consequently, they do not appear as detectives in detective fiction of that period. This situation started to change, though very slowly, in the second half of the last century, and according to Julian Symons, in the late sixties no publisher and only a few readers would have found it shocking that a detective might be a Negro or a Jew (167). Although it stopped to be shocking for the reader, the relationship between the majority and the police officers coming from ethnic or religious minorities continued to be problematic³⁰.

Daniel Aaron in Original Sin is a non-practicing Jew but despite this fact he is called a “Jew-boy”. He confesses that he “wasn’t meant to hear, of course, he [John Massingham] would have thought that was rather bad form, insulting a chap to his face. […] His actual words were ‘our clever little Jew boy’, but somehow I [Aaron] don’t think it was meant as a compliment” (368), and he believes that his religious background may hamper his chances of promotion (369). The situation of ethnic minorities was even more complex. Macpherson’s report that condemned the police as a racist institution brought forth greater awareness of the racial problem both in and outside the force. As a result, ethnic minorities were to be involved in regular training in the police and the police were to reflect “the cultural and ethnic mix of the communities they serve” (“The Macpherson”). According to Bethan Loftus, two broad opposing perspectives on minority relationships subsequently emerged. The first is characterized by resentment towards the demands on diversity terrain, and is expressed primarily by white, heterosexual, male officers. The second emphasises the persistence of a white, heterosexist, male culture, and is held by women, and minority ethnic and gay and lesbian officers.

P. D. James realistically reflects the representation of ethnic minorities in the police. Her early texts, published at the time when the police officers were exclusively Britain-born, do not contain any ethnic characters. Later, as the situation started to change, she created a few ethnic characters. However, she is a critic of the multinational character of Britain and in her treatment of racial issues she tends to side with the first of the views mentioned above. She occasionally criticises positive discrimination, and it is the incessant reforms and attempts at dealing with the race question that her half-Indian character, Francis Benton-Smith, blames for making the lives of minorities in the police difficult:

He had hoped, if not for friendship, for tolerance, respect and acceptance, and to an extent he had earned them. But he was aware that he was still regarded with wary circumspection. He felt himself to be surrounded by a variety of organisations, including the criminal law, dedicated to protecting his racial sensitivities, as if he could be as easily offended as a Victorian virgin confronted with a flasher. He wished that these racial warriors would leave him alone. Did they want to stigmatise minorities as over-sensitive, insecure and paranoid? (Lighthouse 20).

Benton-Smith is even suspected of taking advantage of his racial background and of harassing his colleagues:

[I]t must have helped you to get taken on. It can’t be easy, the job you have chosen – not easy for your colleagues, I mean. One disrespectful or disobliging word about your colour and they’d find themselves sacked or hauled up before one of those race-relations tribunals. Hardly part of the police-canteen culture, are you? Not one of the boys. Can’t be easy to cope with. (James, PP 288).

James does not deny the existence of racial issues in the police, she understands the difficulty of the minorities to fit in the traditionally white culture but she does not blame the white policemen entirely for it. In her view the artificial attempts at establishing equality among various races stir anxiety and deepen the distrust among their members.

While being wary of the racial question and omitting the voice of homosexual police officers altogether, James clearly shows the difficulties of female police officers. Her female characters are not mere woman police constables taking care of female suspects who were criticised in the Golden-Age detective fiction, as was discussed in chapter 2.4. She reflects the changes and acceptance of women into specialised departments and makes her female detective, Inspector Kate Miskin, a member of the criminal investigation department. When Miskin starts her job, she is made to feel the “all too common prejudice against female officers” (James, PP 145). After she is promoted to Dalgliesh’s team, she becomes respected as a detective, but her colleague John Massingham still half-regrets “the days when women police officers were content to find lost children, […] reform prostitutes […] and if they hankered for the excitement of criminal investigation, were suitably occupied with […] juvenile delinquents (James, TD 97). Although women joined the specialised departments in the 1960s, a suspect in the 1986 novel A Taste for Death finds it surprising and uncomfortable that “a woman he had taken to be no more than Dalgliesh’s helot, whose role was to take unobtrusive notes and sit as a meek and silent witness, was apparently licensed to question him” (187). Miskin is an experienced detective who is valued for her intelligence, common sense and hard work but she is still regarded by Massingham as a more vulnerable and thus second-rate detective.

In later novels, Miskin praises a colleague who has “no hang-up about working with a woman senior to himself, or, if he had, was more skilful than most of his colleagues at concealing it” (James, OS 306). Suspects and witnesses are no longer surprised when they are questioned by a female detective but success does not come easily, “being a woman in the macho world of the police” (OS 369). According to Sally R. Munt, Miskin is “hard, deductive, ambitious, taciturn, private, principled, honest and loyal – a model hero” (24). Still, her career in the police is limited and she knows that she probably entered the force ten years too soon to become the first woman Chief Constable (OS 368). It is only in the latest novel featuring Dalgliesh and his team that Miskin is sure she will be promoted to detective chief inspector and can hope for further progress (James, PP 148). Munt claims that James introduced Miskin for the sake of realism (24). It is also for the sake of realism that Miskin may come closer to her dream only in the first decade of the 21^st century.