Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies

4.3The Myth of the Thick Policeman

As already mentioned, James’s police officers show a deep knowledge of pathology; they cooperate with forensic scientists and understand the work of scene-of-crime investigators. However, the popular image that has survived for several decades is the image of a dumb, unimaginative police officer. James’s policemen are believed to think in clichés (James, OS 368) and tend to jump to the most obvious conclusions: “It was […] the basis of most police work. Only when the obvious proved untenable was it necessary to explore less likely explanations” (James, DD 194). As a result of their reliance on the most straightforward interpretation of facts, the police are seen as “too thick, ignorant and insensitive” (DD 370). Even Dalgliesh cannot help criticising an officer who, similarly to Christie’s lynx-eyed Inspector Miller³¹, has “excellent eyesight [but] the trouble is that there’s no connection between his eyes and his brain” (James, SN 169). Although it is “never safe to rely on the stupidity of the police” (James, SS 354) and it is advisable not to “underestimate the police because of what you read in the upmarket papers” (James, TD 64), a literate cop remains a surprise (James, OS 311) and wits of the police continue to be questioned.

Similarly to Christie, James’s characters tend to show greater respect to senior officers than to the juniors. The officers in lower ranks often remark that they are not taken seriously and that the interrogated do not mind showing their disrespect (James, Lighthouse 178). Not only are their not respected, but they are also treated with little civility and sometimes with downright rudeness. Especially the suspects in a position with authority, “more used to putting questions than answering them, [are] unwilling to antagonise the chief investigating officer but venting their resentment on a subordinate” (James, PP 227). Christie’s junior officers have to put up with negligence and irony but they never hear that “those great steel hoods of the Thames Barrier are very erotic. You two [Miskin and Aaron] should borrow a police launch. You might surprise yourselves” (James, OS 342). To have the sexual lives of detectives discussed by a suspect would have been unthinkable during the Golden Age of detective fiction.

Although the modern police officers are no longer recruited primarily from agricultural labourers and unemployed craftsmen, and while they receive a long-term training, the public still sees their work as a rather working class occupation for the badly educated. In fiction at least, the lack of higher education is often given as the motive for entering the police. Kate Miskin joins the force because she does not want to study in the sixth form or at university (James, OS 150) and a rebellious son at the age of eighteen and straight from school joins the police as an act of defiance (OS 162). Sergeant Robert Buckley passes his A-levels with reasonably good results but he does not go on to university because he judges that “success would come quickest in a job for which he was over- rather than under-qualified and where he would be competing with men who were less rather than better educated than himself” (James, SS 181). Sergeant Robbins with a degree in history from a redbrick university and Oxford-educated Benton-Smith with a degree in English consequently face rejection and resentment of the majority of the less educated colleagues.

Not only is the job of the police officer considered a working-class occupation, it also comes with little prestige attached. Daniel Aaron believes that his parents are ashamed of his job (James, OS 162), and Chief Inspector Rickards’s mother-in-law disapproves of her daughter’s choice of a partner because it is beneath her to marry a police officer (James, DD 312). On the other hand, although the job is not prestigious, it provides job security and a sense of order. Kate Miskin joined the force because she “was ambitious […] and prefer[s] order and hierarchy to muddle. I wanted a career where I could earn well from the start, hope for promotion” (James, TD 326). Kate Miskin “had made a life for herself. She had escaped by hard work, ambition – and, of course, by some ruthlessness – from poverty and failure” (James, Lighthouse 309). The police is shown as an ideal chance for ambitious people with poor social background who hope to improve their living conditions and who long for a career and promotion based on hard and continuous, even if not prestigious work.

4.4Crime and Criticism and a Cry for the Bobby

Christie’s characters seem to be pleased by Scotland-Yard officers coming to investigate a crime, since they believe in the superiority of the Metropolitan Police. James’s characters, on the other hand, tend to express disapproval of the London detectives. They tend to side with the local police who are reckoned to be competent (James, Lighthouse 134) and generally good (James, PP 301). The rise in crime is put down to cutting expenditures on local policing and subsequent disappearance of the Bobby from small villages. It is believed that some crimes “wouldn’t have happened if we’d still had our village policeman” (James, OS 254). In places where the police remained, they are criticised for abandoning the traditional methods and for “poor supervision, too much reliance on technology and not enough good old-fashioned detection” (James, DD 335). It has become a popular argument of the papers that “it was time to get back to the bobby on the beat” (DD 347), and Chief Inspector Rickards would give “a dozen computers for a DC who can sense when a witness is lying” (DD 204). Faced with criminality and violence, James’s characters long nostalgically for the perfect Bobby who is believed to solve everything.

The characters are, on the other hand, positive that the current state of the police is unsatisfactory. Although, as has been said earlier, British writers avoided picturing their police as vicious brutes, characters in James’s writing usually fear them. Kate Miskin wonders what it was in the past that “had produced such fear of authority, such terror of the police” (James, OS 340). Their methods are reckoned as suspicious and nothing about the police can reassure a suspect (James, SS 191). Any contact with them is considered disagreeable and they are “never kind, only when it suits them” (James, TD 375). Police officers are hardly human beings and they are devoid of any human instincts (OS 416), and are not seen as positive characters coming to those in need but as nosy parkers causing unnecessary pain. Since some believe that the police are “the oppressive fascist agents of capitalist authority” (OS 434), when they are labelled as bothering (James, Lighthouse 216), it sounds almost like a compliment.

The public in James’s writing are constantly worried about the abuse of power and the police are frequently criticised for their pleasure to exercise it. Dalgliesh admits that “no one joins the police without getting some enjoyment out of exercising power” (James, TD 191) but warns his subordinates that whenever the pleasure becomes the end, it is necessary to look for another job. Despite the long tradition of unarmed, civilian police, the police officers are seen as oppressors who in the process of the investigation “learn a lot of secrets you’ve no particular right to know and cause a lot of pain. Do you enjoy that? Is that what gives you your kicks?” (James, DD 367). The public believes the police officers inflict vengeance on the suspects (TD 435) and are ready to use whatever methods to get their man.

The press have always paid a lot of attention to police work and any time some doubts arise concerning the police methods, they give it a lot of coverage. The police are bound by rules and regulations and often complain about the difficulties they bring to their work: “The criminal justice system has favoured criminals for the last forty years. […] The answer is to get good honest evidence and make it stick in court” (James, OS 370). They confess that “enough difficulties are placed in the path of the police in this country; we don’t voluntarily add to them” (James, SN 82). Despite this and the fact that the public is well informed about the rights of the police, the police are awaited with terror: “She thrust the morbid images out of her mind and made herself remember what he in fact was; a twentieth-century senior police officer, bound by Force regulations [and] restricted by Judges’ Rule [...]. She had expected to feel anxiety, but not this rush of humiliating terror” (James, SS 201). Though the British police are under constant supervision of other institutions, some of the interrogated “react to perfectly ordinary questions with a disconcerting mixture of fear and endurance as if you were secret police from a totalitarian dictatorship” (James, DD 272), not a country with a long tradition of non-military police.

Christie’s characters are usually supportive of the police, those coming from the middle and upper classes in particular. However, James’s police are let to feel “wariness […] amounting to dislike. It was not an uncommon phenomenon nowadays, even among the middle classes” (James, DD 256). The police are continuously suspected of hidden violence and striking terror into the interviewed: “Both [Miskin and Aaron] had been very polite, almost gentle with her [Miss Blackett] but she hadn’t been deceived. They were still interrogators and even their formal expressions of sympathy, their gentleness, were part of their technique. She was surprised […] how she had known this and known them for the enemies they were even in the tumult of her fear” (James, OS 246). The feeling of fear of the police was not only the result of their new image, tougher and more virile, but also of their representation on television, influenced by American police series (Emsley, EB 130); and in The Skull beneath the Skin watching “one of those documentaries devoted to exposing the corruption, brutality and racism of the police” (255) is directly blamed for undermining the authority of the police and arousing fear and resentment.

When the police are not feared, they are not welcomed and their presence is constantly complained about. Although they are eagerly anticipated when a crime is discovered, their presence is soon seen as a violation of privacy and begins to be bitterly resented. “The police, like rat-catchers, were accepted as necessary adjuncts to society, required to be immediately available when needed, occasionally praised but seldom consorting with those not privy to their dangerous expertise, surrounded always by a faint penumbra of wariness and suspicion” (James, Lighthouse 316). They come by invitation and consent but they are not welcome (James, PP 187): Dalgliesh is aware that “his presence was irksome. It could hardly be welcome, he knew that. He was used to being the harbinger, at best of ill news, at worst of disaster” (James, SN 195). As a detective, “horror and death were his trade and, like an undertaker, he carried with him the contagion of his craft” (James, DD 99). Similarly to Christie’s characters, James’s protagonists are afraid of antagonizing the police and “however disagreeable or inconvenient their presence, when they call on you, you have to let them in” (James, OS 227) because only “the fools or the very powerful antagonise the police” (PP 411). According to James, “having the police in the here is like having mice in the house. You can sense them scrabbling away even when you don’t actually hear or see them and once they’re in you feel you’ll never get rid of them” (OS 205). As has already been suggested, in contrast to Christie, James’s characters are more outspoken critics and although they are wary of the police, they do not hesitate to voice their criticism.

Since the police uncover a lot of secrets during their work, James’s characters, trying to protect their privacy, consider their job as distasteful (James, PP 336) or describe the police as “little scavengers […]. It must be a strange job, sniffing around for evil like a dog round the trees” (James, SN 138). The police take advantage of people talking and “it was pointless to try to keep anything private from them. Everything […] would be nosed out by this impertinent young man and reported to his superior officer. [What they do is to] discover, magnify, misinterpret and use to make mischief” (SN 147). They are not expected to help, but to harass, intimidate, and harm.

Whereas in “television police series he [the policeman] remained incorruptible […] in the greater freedom of the novel […] policemen could be portrayed as brutal and corrupt” (Emsley, EB 130). Consequently, James’s characters believe that “innocent people do sometimes get harassed” (James, OS 265) and “haven’t quite the confidence [they] once had that they [the police] don’t make mistakes” (OS 263). The decline in confidence in the ability of the police to tackle crime effectively is another feature of the second-wave detective fiction. Although the police in the Golden-Age fiction seek help at the private sleuth with the most complicated cases, they are believed to be competent to deal with everyday crime. By contrast, the police in modern detective fiction are either rendered incompetent or uncaring. It is not rare that characters “didn’t place their confidence in our wonderful boys in blue. […] The police haven’t an impressive clear-up rate when it comes to domestic burglary” (James, OS 46), or when it comes to mugging and street violence: “What was the point of ringing the police? They didn’t have a chance of catching the muggers and this would only add to their statistics of crimes reported but unsolved” (OS 137). The characters feel disillusionment, disappointment and scepticism. According to Emsley, this change was caused by the growing distance between the policemen and the community they were supposed to police (EB 130), which explains the calls for the Bobby to return back to his beat and to turn back to more traditional ways of policing.