Postcolonial Postmortems (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft S.)

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Postcolonial Postmortems

102

Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft

In Verbindung mit Norbert Bachleitner (Universität Wien), Dietrich Briesemeister (Friedrich Schiller-Universität Jena), Francis Claudon (Université Paris XII), Joachim Knape (Universität Tübingen), Klaus Ley (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz), John A. McCarthy (Vanderbilt University), Alfred Noe (Universität Wien), Manfred Pfister (Freie Universität Berlin), Sven H. Rossel (Universität Wien)

herausgegeben von

Alberto Martino (Universität Wien)

Redaktion: Ernst Grabovszki Anschrift der Redaktion: Institut für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Berggasse 11/5, A-1090 Wien

Postcolonial Postmortems Crime Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective

Edited by

Christine Matzke and Susanne Mühleisen

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006

Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de “ISO 9706:1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents - Prescriptions pour la permanence”. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. Die Reihe „Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft“ wird ab dem Jahr 2005 gemeinsam von Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York und dem Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin herausgegeben. Die Veröffentlichungen in deutscher Sprache erscheinen im Weidler Buchverlag, alle anderen bei Editions Rodopi. From 2005 onward, the series „Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft“ will appear as a joint publication by Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York and Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin. The German editions will be published by Weidler Buchverlag, all other publications by Editions Rodopi. Cover design: Sabine Barry ISBN-10: 90-420-2014-8 ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2014-6 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006 Printed in The Netherlands

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS CHRISTINE MATZKE AND SUSANNE MÜHLEISEN Postcolonial Postmortems: Issues and Perspectives

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STEPHEN KNIGHT Crimes Domestic and Crimes Colonial: The Role of Crime Fiction in Developing Postcolonial Consciousness

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WENDY KNEPPER Confession, Autopsy and the Postcolonial Postmortems of Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost

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TOBIAS DÖRING Sherlock Holmes – He Dead: Disenchanting the English Detective in Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans

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SUCHITRA MATHUR Holmes's Indian Reincarnation: A Study in Postcolonial Transposition

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KATJA SARKOWSKY Manga, Zen, and Samurai: Negotiating Exoticism and Orientalist Images in Sujata Massey’s Rei Shimura Novels including an interview with Sujata Massey

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VERA ALEXANDER Investigating the Motif of Crime as Transcultural Border Crossing: Cinnamon Gardens and The Sandglass

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ELFI BETTINGER Riddles in the Sands of the Kalahari: Detectives at Work in Botswana

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GEOFFREY V. DAVIS Political Loyalties and the Intricacies of the Criminal Mind: The Detective Fiction of Wessel Ebersohn

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A.B. CHRISTA SCHWARZ Colonial Struggle on Manhattan Soil: George Schuyler's 'The Ethiopian Murder Mystery'

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XAVIER PONS 'Redneck Wonderland': Robert G. Barrett's Crime Fiction

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PATRICIA PLUMMER Transcultural British Crime Fiction: Mike Phillips's Sam Dean Novels including an interview with Mike Phillips

255

REFERENCES

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

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NAME INDEX

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SUBJECT INDEX

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS About half of the papers collected in this volume were presented in a first version at the annual conference of the Association for the Study of the New Literatures in English (ASNEL) at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt, in May 2004. We would like to express our thanks to the convenor, Frank Schulze-Engler, and his efficient team for hosting our panel; to the speakers, authors, and delegates for their enthusiastic responses, and to our colleagues who later followed our invitation to contribute to this volume. We are indebted to Manfred Pfister for accepting this book for the IFAVL-series, and to Ernst Grabovszki for his editorial advice. At Rodopi we would like to thank Marieke Schilling and Pier Post for administrative and technical support. Thanks also to our anonymous readers for their constructive comments; to Marek Spitczok von Brisinski and Aderemi RajiOyelade for the language editing; and to Sabine Barry for designing the book cover. Finally, a big thank you to our numerous informal crime fiction scouts who have provided us with plenty of spinechilling material over many years, and to Geoff Davis for contributing to our initial brainstorming session. This collection is to all who love books with a bit of bloodcurdling mystery, especially to our friends and colleagues who share our passion.

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POSTCOLONIAL POSTMORTEMS: T

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ISSUES AND PERSPECTIVES Christine Matzke and Susanne Mühleisen

Introduction: The 'Anatomy' of Crime Writing Crime fiction has been one of the most prolific literary genres in the last 150 years and continues to be so, as a glance at any bookshop, bestseller book list, or the reading matter of fellow passengers on trains, tubes and buses will confirm. However, 'the study of the genre', as Stephen Knight has recently pointed out, is a little 'harder to detect',1 though by no means as obscure and marginal as it used to be. The very popularity and mass appeal of crime fiction initially made it an unlikely subject for scholarly pursuit, except for the critical musings of early writers and some of their acolytes in their attempt 'to justify their writing and reading habits'.2 It was in the 1960s and 1970s that a wealth of academic literature began to emerge on the history and typology of the genre,3 later also on ideological frameworks and the social contexts in which they were placed.4 Today, research on TP

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Stephen Knight, Crime Fiction, 1800-2000: Detection, Death, Diversity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. x. Heta Pyrhönen, Murder from an Academic Angle: An Introduction to the Study of the Detective Narrative (Columbia: Camden House, 1994), p. 4. See, for instance, Tzvetan Todorov, 'The Typology of Detective Fiction [1966]', trans. by Richard Howard, in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, ed. by David Lodge and Nigel Wood, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 2000), pp. 137-144; Julian Symons, Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974); Jochen Vogt, ed., Der Kriminalroman: Zur Theorie und Geschichte einer Gattung, 2 vols (Munich: Fink, 1971). Especially in the early 1980s, with groundbreaking studies like Stephen Knight, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1980) or Dennis Porter, The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction (New Haven: P

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crime fiction continues to thrive, particularly on the novel and its various sub-genres (the clue-puzzle, the 'hardboiled' or private-eye story, the police procedural, the psychological thriller, etc.), with prestigious academic publishers devoting whole book series to the genre. While the 'anatomy'5 of the prototypes of crime fiction seems to be rather well described, a closer investigation of the ever-increasing corpus shows that such an approach might provide us with a blurred xray of the skeleton, but not an image of the entire body. The boundaries of the genre have become fuzzier than ever, stretching over a wide range of registers, themes and styles, from pulp fiction to highly literary novels with elements of crime, from cosy mysteries with a sense of closure to fragmented narratives focusing on racial tensions, gender conflicts or the morals of violence. While the very diversity of the genre is often obscured by marketing strategies of publishing houses where a clear identification of the genre is a vital selling point,6 such business tactics cannot deny that former classifications of crime writing as part of a 'low' or 'popular' literature have long been rendered invalid. Now the search continues for 'other', more appropriate critical paradigms. Attention has, for example, been paid to the upsurge of feminist crime fiction since the mid-1970s and its attempt to counteract and rewrite the masculinist traits of the genre; others have addressed issues of multiculturalism and 'race', or the construction of sexual identities.7 One feature that has been increasingly noted of late is that crime fiction 'is a more interwoven and international body of TP

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Yale University Press, 1981). Richard Alewyn, 'Anatomie des Detektivromans', in Der Kriminalroman, 2 vols, ed. by Jochen Vogt (Munich: Fink, 1971), II, pp. 372-404. Cf. Ulrich Suerbaum, Krimi: Eine Analyse der Gattung (Stuttgart: Phillip Reclam, 1984), p. 211. See, for example, Priscilla L. Walton and Manina Jones, Detective Ageny: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1999); Carmen Birkle, Sabina Matter-Seibel and Patricia Plummer, eds, with Barbara Hedderich, Frauen auf der Spur: Kriminalautorinnen aus Deutschland, Großbritannien und den USA (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2001); Stephen F. Soitos, The Blues Detective: A Study of African American Detective Fiction (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1996); Maureen T. Reddy, Traces, Codes, and Clues: Reading Race in Crime Fiction (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003).

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writing than has often been recognised'.8 While cosy mysteries continue to be associated with the 'English', or the 'hardboiled' seen as a particular 'American' variety, regional boundaries of the classic crime novel no longer hold – and probably never did in the first place. The clue-puzzle, for example, also developed in North America or Australia at an early stage, adapted to a local context (or for a prospective reading public);9 nowadays we increasingly encounter investigators with a migrant or transcultural background operating across countries and continents.10 TP

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Crime Fiction in Colonial and Postcolonial Contexts Indeed, a closer look confirms that detectives have long left their 'home turf', Britain and the United States, to emerge in postcolonial societies. Australia, for instance, is a continent whose crime fiction is remarkably well-described and similar, if less comprehensive, attempts have also been made for Africa.11 Even in its early days, crime fiction already transgressed national boundaries, as many of the Golden Age detective novels (e.g. Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle) were drawn to colonial cultures.12 Especially the East – India TP

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Knight, Crime Fiction, 1800-2000, p. xiv. See Stephen Knight, 'Crimes Domestic and Crimes Colonial: The Role of Crime Fiction in Developing Postcolonial Consciousness', this volume. For examples see Katja Sarkowsky, 'Manga, Zen, and Samurai: Negotiating Exoticism and Orientalist Images in Sujata Massey's Rei Shimura Novels' and Patricia Plummer, 'Transcultural British Crime Fiction: Mike Phillips’s Sam Dean Novels' (both this volume); other examples include Victor Headley's Off Duty (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2001) and Seven Seals (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2003), Marcos M. Villatoro’s A Venom Beneath the Skin: A Romilia Chacon Mystery (Boston: Justin, Charles & Co., 2005) and Lucha Corpi’s Black Widow’s Wardrobe (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 2000). Stephen Knight, Continent of Mystery: A Thematic History of Australian Crime Fiction (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1997); John Loder, Australian Crime Fiction: A Bibliography 1857-1993 (Port Melbourne: Thorpe, 1994); Eugene Schleh, ed., Mysteries of Africa (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1991). For a fuller exploration see Tobias Döring, 'Sherlock Holmes – He Dead: Disenchanting the English Detective in Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were

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and China – and to a considerable extent also the Middle East held a particular fascination for the British reader at home,13 as did certain African settings. Quite a few of Agatha Christie's narratives – such as Murder on the Orient Express (1934), Murder in Mesopotamia (1936) or Death on the Nile (1937) – share this interest while other titles signal one of the downsides of this attraction; a nonchalant racism which seemed perfectly acceptable at the time (Ten Little Niggers (1939), also published as And Then There Were None and Ten Little Indians).14 The interrelation between colonial authority, crime and literature, one might conclude, in many ways shaped the European perception of the Orient with all its images of the inscrutable Asian, the occasional 'noble savage', or journeys into the 'heart of darkness' that expressed little hope for the future of the colonised territory.15 In Crime and Empire (2003), for instance, Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee investigates the centrality of the language of policing, of law, of crime and punishment to the formation of authority of the British Empire in its relationship with India. Caroline Reitz, in Detecting the Nation (2004), likewise confirms the inextricable link between crime fiction and the imperial enterprise.16 Stories of order and disorder in the colonial era – in personal narratives, travel writing and in the emerging genre of crime fiction – thus offered a particular perspective on the 'other' who could be seen both as a threat to and mirror of the imperial power. Order and discipline as primary colonial interests could then be affirmed through the investigation of crime and the reconstruction of a social stability so typical for the genre. TP

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Orphans', this volume. Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Crime and Empire: The Colony in NineteenthCentury Fictions of Crime (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Reeva S. Simon, The Middle East in Crime Fiction: Mysteries, Spy Novels, and Thrillers from 1916 to the 1980s (New York: Lilian Barber, 1989). Frankie Y. Bailey, 'Racism', in The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing, ed. by Rosemary Herbert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 369. See also Charlotte Tümpner, ed., Agatha Christie und der Orient: Kriminalistik und Archäologie (Bern: Scherz, 1999). Sharon A. Russell, 'Elspeth Huxley's Africa: Mystery and Memory', in Mysteries of Africa, p. 28. Caroline Reitz, Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Venture (Ohio: The Ohio State University Press, 2004). CDRom.


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Crime fiction, especially of the 'classical' clue-puzzle type, has always been a genre with highly moralising potential, in which conflicting perspectives could be negotiated through questions of good and evil, often confirming the status quo.17 While such aspects are still of central interest to the exploration of postcolonial detective novels – as in questions of authority and social power – crime fiction has long proved that it has more to offer. Often, the social order is no longer restored, but questioned through alternative notions of justice. While a morally ambiguous closure has also been a standard pattern of the conventional hardboiled,18 postcolonial texts moreover suggest that power and authority can be investigated through the magnifying glass of other knowledges, against the local or global mainstream, past and present, or against potential projections of a dominant group and a (neo-)imperial West. Many authors have thus broadened the theme of investigation to address issues of community, beliefs and identity constructions across geographic and national boundaries, including gender and race relations. Others have broadened the genre by inventing recognisable sub-categories which relate to the social, political and historical formations of their specific postcolonies.19 TP

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The 'Ethnic' Investigator While research on postcolonial 'genre-bending' in relation to crime fiction is still wanting20 – as are genre studies in the context of postcolonial literatures on the whole21 – a number of enquiries have TP

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For an essentially conservative view on crime fiction see Porter, The Pursuit of Crime, and John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976); cf. Andrew Pepper, 'Black Crime Fiction', in The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, ed. by Martin Priestman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 211. See, for example, Soitos, The Blues Detective, p. 24. Knight, Continent of Mystery, p. 13. – with the exception, again, of Australia; see Knight, Continent of Mysteries, pp. 13-15. See also Knight, 'Crimes Domestic and Crimes Colonial', this volume. Cf. Ranka Primorac, 'The Eye of the Nation: Reading Ideology and Genre in a Zimbabwean Thriller', in Versions of Zimbabwe: New Approaches to Literature

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already been devoted to the 'ethnic sleuth', mostly in the framework of US American writings. Terms like 'ethnic' and 'minority', 'multicultural', 'cross-cultural' and 'postcolonial' have often been used as synonymic labels for investigators belonging 'to a community whose history, values, and way of life differ from those of the so-called mainstream', their stories turning 'into an illustration of ethnic friction and cultural confrontation and thus into a comment on the challenges of everyday life in a "multicultural" society'.22 Margaret J. King and Peter Freese are among those who see the ethnic investigator primarily as a cultural arbitrator, someone who operates in a '"contact literature'" (reminiscent of Mary L. Pratt's 'contact zones'23) 'which express[es] the contact between cultural spheres'24 and mediates its inherent tensions. Others have defined the 'postcolonial detective' more radically as part of a counter-tradition, a subversive figure linked to the struggle of marginalised peoples 'against cultural hegemony and assimilation and neo-colonialism',25 in which 'diversity' and 'hybridity' are celebrated. A third, but by no means final category, are those for whom the above agendas overlap,26 who not only want to subvert TP

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and Culture, ed. by Robert Muponde and Ranka Primorac (Harare: Weaver Press, 2005), pp. 161-162. Peter Freese, The Ethnic Detective: Chester Himes, Harry Kemelman, Tony Hillerman (Essen: Die Blaue Eule, 1992), pp. 9-10. Other terms in circulation include the 'vernacular' or 'colloquial' detective. Cynthia S. Hamilton, 'The Signifying Monkey and the Colloqiual Detective: Reading African American Detective Fiction', in Complexions of Race: The African Atlantic, ed. by Fritz Gysin and Cynthia S. Hamilton (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2005), pp. 221-239. For Pratt, 'contact zones' are 'social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination'. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 4. Margaret J. King, 'Binocular Eyes: Cross-Cultural Detectives', The Armchair Detective, 13 (1980), p. 253. Ed Christian, ed., The Post-Colonial Detective (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001), p. 1. See, for example, Dorothea Fischer-Hornung and Monika Mueller, 'Introduction', in Sleuthing Ethnicity: The Detective in Multiethnic Crime Fiction, ed. by Dorothea Fischer-Hornung and Monika Mueller (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), pp. 12-13; Adrienne Johnson Gosselin, 'Multicultural Fiction: Murder with a Message', in Multicultural Detective Fiction: Murder from the 'Other' Side, ed. by Adrienne Johnson Gosselin (New York: Garland, 1999), pp. 3-14.


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'common Euro-Americentric ideological and literary expectations',27 but also detect particular tropes in 'ethnic' crime fiction which play an important role in the constitution of a community's identities. Steven Soitos's The Blues Detective has done so for African-American crime fiction, pointing out how the insider/outsider position of the detectives (their 'double consciousness'), together with community-specific language and practices 'help to define a coherent worldview shared by African American authors'.28 Whether this worldview is indeed so coherent remains to be explored,29 as does the concept of the 'ethnic' investigator. Today, the 'ethnic' detective can take on many shapes and guises, as this volume also demonstrates. A Native American sleuth, for example, may be anything from 'a hunter whose companions are being killed off one by one' to a 'native princess with a flair for fashion, a lesbian pushing feminist theories and attitudes, or a computer whiz using high-tech means to skirt the law and assist the weak'.30 As Gina and Andrew Macdonald suggest, the fact that such figures can now be seen in detective roles reflects on the changed attitudes toward assimilation and otherness in mainstream culture. Often, this raises another set of questions. Do practitioners of 'ethnic' detective fiction need to be 'ethnic' themselves in order to be 'truly' representative (a topic frequently broached in relation to authors like Tony Hillerman)? When are 'ethnic' investigators a genuine means for social or political commentary, when are they merely a means to add exotic 'colour', not unlike their colonial predecessors?31 While these issues certainly require further investigation, we believe that an inquiry into postcolonial crime fiction calls for more than a mere postmortem of the investigator's ethnicity. TP

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Soitos, The Blues Detective, p. 4. Soitos, The Blues Detective, p. 4. Cf. Soitos's 'double consciousness' with King's idea of the '"binocular eye," the insightful man with "double vision" who can bridge the gaps between cultures'. King, 'Binocular Eyes', p. 260. See Christa Schwarz, 'Colonial Struggle on Manhattan Soil: George Schuyler's "The Ethiopian Murder Mystery"', this volume. Gina Macdonald and Andrew Macdonald, Shaman or Sherlock?: The Native American Detective (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2002), p. 3. Gina Macdonald and Andrew Macdonald, 'Ethnic Detectives in Popular Fiction: New Directions for an American Genre', in Diversity and Detective Fiction, ed. by Kathleen Gregory Klein (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999), pp. 60-113.

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Postcolonial Postmortems: Towards a Transcultural Perspective What, then, does the 'postcolonial' bring to the genre of crime fiction apart from well-known discourses of 'resistance', 'subversion' and 'ethnicity', all of which are undoubtedly valid and form an important part of the debate? And why the link to a 'postmortem'? A dissection and medical examination of a body to determine the cause of death, the 'postmortem' of the postcolonial not only alludes to the investigation of the victim's remains, but also to the body of the individual text and its context, or the 'corpus' of crime fiction labelled as 'postcolonial'.32 From a historical point of view, this can mean an investigation into how colonial situations have been re-created and re-investigated from the perspective of the colonised;33 or it can stand for a close examination of the narrative processes itself.34 Ultimately, the 'postmortem' can also imply an examination of postcolonial literature which increasingly uses elements of crime fiction for 'social' rather than 'criminal' detection. Indeed, various contributions to this volume emphasise a figurative rather than a literal interpretation of crime, while others use specific criminal acts to explore the state of a postcolonial nation. It is also notable that crime fiction increasingly transcends, if not invalidates, national boundaries. More often than not, writings which we deem 'postcolonial' now portray a world where 'cultures' are no longer seen as separate entities located in particular geographic terrains – and fighting over 'domination' – but a world characterised by an increasing interconnectedness in response to what Vera Alexander calls 'important phenomena of present-day life'.35 These are, for example, experiences of transTP

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See Wendy Knepper, 'Confession, Autopsy and the Postcolonial Postmortems of Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost', this volume. For an example see Edmund Bohan's The Matter of Parihaka (Christchurch: Hazard Press, 2000). Cf. Döring, 'Sherlock Holmes – He Dead', this volume. Vera Alexander, 'Investigating the Motif of Crime as Transcultural Border Crossing: Cinnamon Gardens and The Sandglass', this volume, p. 141.


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national mobility and migration, financial and cultural globalisation, the establishment of supranational institutions, or the development of new technologies, especially of travel and communication.36 While contending that many parts of the world are still shaped by the experience of colonialism and its aftermath, we would like to emphasise that this is not the sole point of reference for the literatures produced in these societies, but may be one among many other experiences. Our postmortem can thus be read both as the conventional element of any crime investigation in a postcolonial society, and as a retroactive analysis of postcoloniality in contemporary cultures. While theoretical studies of the 'transnational imaginary' and 'transculturalism' are still in the process of being developed37 – despite their almost inflationary use; and while we do not proclaim the mortem of postcolonialism in favour of currently trendy terms, this volume intends to interrogate literary concepts of 'postcoloniality' and 'crime' from transcultural perspectives in the attempt to offer new critical impulses to the study of crime fiction and to provoke further debate on the subject. TP

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Outline of Chapters In the introductory essay to this collection, Stephen Knight illustrates the role crime fiction can play in the development of a postcolonial

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Cf. Frank Schulze-Engler, 'Transnationale Kultur als Herausforderung für die Literaturwissenschaft', Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 50.1 (2002), p. 66. Schulze-Engler, 'Transnationale Kultur als Herausforderung für die Literaturwissenschaft', p. 79. For early influential examples see Arjun Appadurai, 'Here and Now', in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997 [1996]), pp. 1-23; Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake, 'Introduction: Tracking the Global/Local', in Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, ed. by Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 118. See also Graham Huggan and Frank Schulze-Engler in Towards a Transcultural Future: Literature and Society in a 'Post'-Colonial World, ed. by Geoffrey V. Davis, Peter H. Marsden, Bénédicte Ledent, and Marc Delrez (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004).

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consciousness. Using Australia as his prime example, but with reference to other regional and ethnic literatures such as the Welsh, Knight shows how crime fiction has been gradually utilised to understand and recognise colonial and 'quasi-colonial' oppression, thus helping to construct a greater awareness of social, cultural and political matters. While much of early Australian crime writing took up the colonial notion of 'Terra Nullius' in the form of 'zero-setting stories' with no recognisable location, the presence of place became of increasing importance with the gradual rise of local subject identity, of both settlers and First Nation peoples. Knight guides us through some of the main stages of Australia's crime fiction history and its growing self-identification, before turning to other literatures which equally used the genre to respond to different forms of domination. While a number of regional British crime novels 'resisted the inherently colonising power of the metropolis', African-American and other ethnic literatures have reworked the genre in terms of anti-racist, feminist or anti-colonial critiques. In contrast, Welsh crime writing is still in the process of transformation from a 'fully colonised crime fiction to a resistant postcolonial version'; yet even this little recognised genre has already proven its potency by debating local self-awareness and identities. With her paper on Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, Wendy Knepper offers a central contribution to the debate on the 'postcolonial postmortem'. Investigating both its literal and figurative meanings, Knepper first reflects the theoretical implications of the concept, before engaging in a close reading of Ondaatje's texts. Particular attention is paid to concepts of alibi, confession and confession narrative and, most importantly, to the meaning of autopsy in a postcolonial context. While a forensic postmortem can be the central focus of the narrative, the idea of the postcolonial postmortem also invites an investigation into the 'postcolonial' itself; and into the genre of crime fiction. Knepper utilises these ideas to examine how identities and alternative 'truths' are constructed in Anil's Ghost through various layers of confessions, alibis and autopsy procedures; and how these practices are themselves constantly called into question as precise methods for engendering verity. While the actual bodies under forensic examination bear witness to the ongoing tensions and violence in the body politic of Sri Lankan society, the forensic anthropologist,


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Anil, and her fellow characters are also forced to dissect their own identities, convictions and morals in a world haunted by contemporary terror and a traumatic colonial past. In his 'Sherlock Holmes – He Dead', Tobias Döring gives an exemplary analysis of the role of the classic English detective as a master storyteller who gathers facts and evidence to finally deliver a coherent story, thus linking the past with the present. Such cosy and affirmative re-establishment of wholeness and order, Döring demonstrates, is challenged by the characteristic ambiguity and distrust of order in postcolonial literatures. 'To the extent that detective fiction is a programme of narrative restoration, postcolonial narratives are likely to resist it', Döring contends. These fundamental questions about the negotiations of genre by postcolonial literatures are at stake when the anatomy of the English detective is reconsidered in works like Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans. Set in the inter-war 1930s, the novel has a classic 'private detective' as its central character: Christopher Banks, expatriate child to English parents in Shanghai, orphaned and brought to England at an early age, however, proves to be a rather unreliable narrator. His quest to resolve the mystery of his childhood, the disappearance of his parents in colonial Shanghai, turns into a dismantling of the myth surrounding the very tools and methods of classic detection. Döring dissects the role of the detective as a cultural legend by looking also at the literary negotiations of Ishiguro's text and their shaping power in the problematic persistence of this myth, such as Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes adventures, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness or Charles Dickens's Great Expectations. Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes also made it to Indian shores soon after his first appearance at 221 Baker Street and has been a constant favourite of the Indian reading public ever since. This popularity of the 'Great Detective' may be seen as a strong indicator of the ways in which discourses of science and modernity, written into this 'English book', re-formed the colonised subject and created anglicised babus. Such a reading, however, Suchata Mathur argues in her article on 'Holmes's Indian Reincarnation', is premised upon a manichean view of colonial dynamics, a view that sees the 'native' as a passive victim swept away by the cultural forces unleashed by the colonial master. Homi Bhabha's more enabling notion of mimicry, on the other hand, allows us to view 'the native' as simultaneously a colo-

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nised subject and a postcolonial agent, a veritable 'contact zone' wherein acceptance of 'master' discourses is a form of subversive appropriation that gets inscribed in border-crossing hybrid texts. Mathur's essay explores the ways in which the Feluda stories, written by Satyajit Ray, repeat, translate and displace the figure of Holmes specifically, and the genre of detective fiction in general, within a postcolonial context. Many of the classic detective novels have engaged in orientalist images – an issue that is also at stake in a contemporary transcultural negotiation with such 'exoticism' of the East: Sujata Massey's Japanese-American Rei Shimura novels make critical use of this construction of the Orient as a field of Western projection. Katja Sarkowsky argues in her contribution that here, 'orientalist discourse analyses provide an important backdrop for the discussion also of contemporary popular culture and its deployment of Japan and Japanese culture as setting, as structural element for the plot, or a stereotypical recourse'. The successful mystery series, set mostly in Japan, features as its central character a young woman of Japanese-American descent, Rei Shimura, antique dealer and involuntary part-time sleuth. Through her involvement with stereotypical Japanese themes such as 'Manga, Zen, and Samurai' (among others) she explores issues such as cultural belonging and critically investigates history and tradition. Her insider/outsider role in Japanese society puts notions of gender and ethnicity to crucial investigation and undermines pre-conceived expectations of readers and characters on the plot level alike. Katja Sarkowsky's article is supplemented by a recent interview with Sujata Massey. Vera Alexander's contribution investigates 'the motif of crime as transcultural border crossing' in two novels, Romesh Gunesekera's The Sandglass and Shyam Selvadurai's Cinnamon Gardens. Like some of the other titles dealt with in this volume, these works by authors of Sri Lankan origin would not primarily be billed as crime fiction. However, Alexander looks at the ways crime is used in these writings 'in questioning naïve dichotomies of good and evil, in criticising oppressive social orders and in presenting borders as spaces of flexibility, insight, and innovation', and argues for a shift of focus from postcolonial to transcultural concepts in her readings. Both The Sandglass and Cinnamon Gardens were written at the end of the 1990s and are


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family sagas – set in different times and places – where death, secrets and, ultimately, crime upsets the domestic lives of the protagonists and leads to an investigation of transgressions of social boundaries. Alexander analyses the function of death in these works as 'a central moment of initiation at which Gunesekera's and Selvadurai's protagonists are forced to review their own lives and to assess in how far they allow the past […] to govern their present and future'. Unlike in the 'classic detective fiction', however, the transcultural novel does not trust the master narrative to smoothly tie up the knots between past and present, thus allowing for open-ended ambiguity. In 'Riddles in the Sands of the Kalahari' Elfi Bettinger explores contemporary detective fiction with a Botswana setting. Since the late 1990s, Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency novels featuring Precious Ramotswe and a noteworthy cast of supporting characters have topped Western best-seller lists, praised for their heart-warming simplicity and their apparent ability to portray the 'African soul'. Bettinger analyses this reassuring appeal by highlighting how idiosyncratic characters and exotic setting, rather than plot and suspense, are being employed to create comforting, sentimental images of peace and stability. Focusing on the theme of ritual murder also to be found in The Screaming of the Innocent (2002) by Unity Dow, Bettinger illustrates how McCall Smith's texts deny the complexities of modern African societies by relegating such practices to timeless static traditions which ultimately do not disturb the nostalgic idealisation projected in the books. Dow's novel, on the other hand, firmly embeds the discourse of 'ancient rituals' in the context of modernity. By using multi-focalisation and cinematic narrative techniques, and a group of politically conscious women, rather than an intuitive investigator, as the protagonists to solve the crime, Dow avoids simplistic dichotomies of good and evil and calls attention to the on-going project of national liberation in a Botswana riddled with injustice, contradictions and disillusionment. Geoffrey Davis introduces us to the world of Wessel Ebersohn's crime fiction written during the last fifteen years of apartheid South Africa; he also attempts to give crime fiction, and particularly Ebersohn, a long-overdue recognition in South African literary history. Ebersohn's work was determined by the political climate of the times, when apartheid not only governed society, but also the country's

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criminal environment, with offenders repeatedly being members of the state apparatus designed to keep law and order. Davis demonstrates how Ebersohn employs the detective genre to criticise political oppression and give readers an insight into the then 'national state of mind'. 'Political Loyalties and the Intricacies of the Criminal Mind' thus takes us through various aspects of Ebersohn's crime fiction: the misshapen spatial divisions which shaped the country for many years, particularly those of Johannesburg; the manner in which Ebersohn 'writes' apartheid society, often satirising the travesty of its restrictions but also developing a sustained critique; and his portrayal of white society, its fears and insecurities which gave rise to right-wing Afrikanderdom as its most warped manifestation. Such complexities are negotiated by the detective figure Yudul Gordon, a Jewish psychologist with the Department of Prisons, who combines the skills of the psychologist and critical citizen with those of the traditional investigator. These skills enable Gordon to negotiate the countless charades his country offers, and to explain the paradox of 'attraction and repulsion' he has for his society. A.B. Christa Schwarz offers us insights into a little known text by George Schuyler, 'The Ethiopian Murder Mystery', a novella initially serialised in the African-American newspaper Pittsburgh Courier in 1935-36. At a time when the genre had hardly been touched upon by African-American writers, Schuyler used the format of a murder mystery to fictionalise the then ongoing Italo-Ethiopian War. Unusually, the story of the colonial struggle has been moved to Manhattan, where a team of African-American detectives investigates the murder of an Ethiopian prince in Harlem, near 'Little Italy'. By bringing the battle 'closer to home', Schuyler not only aimed at raising awareness of the conflict, but also proffered his own brand of literary Pan-Africanism which was unlike the romanticised philosophies of 'shared roots and black global brotherhood' prevalent at the time. Schwarz discusses the novella in the context of Schuyler's journalistic and critical writings which had little sympathy for solidarity on the sole basis of skin colour. Instead, national allegiance is of greater importance than racial solidarity; and a simplistic black/white binary thus avoided. Schuyler does not fantasise about an imaginary Africa, but presents concrete political realities of espionage and anti-colonial struggle transferred onto Harlem soil. By doing so, he not only repositions


15

notions of good and evil, justice and injustice, but also contemporaneous understandings of 'race'. That not all contemporary Australian crime fiction has made the leap from a 'fully colonised' to what Knight has called 'a resistant postcolonial' genre, is apparent in Xavier Pons's analysis of Robert G. Barrett's oeuvre. A writer of pulp fiction with little literary merit, Barrett has nonetheless achieved cult status among local readers for his ability to create a 'Redneck Wonderland' in his texts. Projecting an image of Australia which celebrates the archetypal nationalistic working class 'ocker' ('a rough and uncultivated Australian male'), Barrett leaves no stone and stereotype unturned to create the desired effect. Pons carefully takes us to the repertoire of paradigmatic Australiana representations embodied in the character of protagonist Les Norton. Norton represents the quintessential male working class hero without being restricted by working class conditions; a deliberately anti-intellectual private eye who loves his Australian beer, a bit of 'biffo' (violence) and plenty of gratuitous sex, and who displays an intolerant attitude towards people of different colours or creeds, be they Jews, Japanese, Koori or homosexuals. Conversant in popular topics and the local variety of English known as 'strine', the novels continuously revel in a variety of Australian icons, from clothing to household appliances and real-life fellow-countrymen. Pons, however, cautions that the ostensibly documentary nature of the novels is misleading, safe for its populist conservatism which seems widely shared. Black British crime fiction is the focus of the last contribution by Patricia Plummer. The insider/outsider role of the ethnic detective is given an additional perspective in British Black (as in African-American) fiction with a black investigator operating in a predominantly white society. Here, the identification is not just with 'the victims or perpetrators of crime, but […] those who try to correct the balance that murder upsets' (Woods, quoted in Plummer). Plummer focuses on Mike Phillips, Black British author of a hardboiled urban crime series with Caribbean-born journalist Sam Dean as the central detective figure. Sam Dean is here described as the ultimate twentieth-century transcultural figure, a man whose migrant background and engagement in the global metropolis provides him with many, sometimes conflicting, identities and voices. Patricia Plummer's article is supplemented by a recent interview with Mike Phillips.

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With such rich exemplary material at hand, we are nevertheless aware of the gaps a collection like this necessarily has. About half of the papers were presented in a first version at the 2004 ASNEL conference in Frankfurt, in a section devoted to crime fiction. The focus of the articles is thus on (crime) fiction written in English (with the exception of Suchitra Mathur's contribution), even though we are conscious of the fact that there is a large body of interesting work written in various African, Asian and Pacific languages, let alone other European tongues. It is therefore hoped that this volume will inspire future comparative research on postcolonial transcultural crime fiction, also across languages.

CRIMES DOMESTIC AND CRIMES COLONIAL: THE ROLE OF CRIME FICTION IN DEVELOPING POSTCOLONIAL CONSCIOUSNESS Stephen Knight T

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I Terra Nullius is the chilling phrase that was used to justify the English seizure of Australia: it was declared by the colonial power 'the land of no-one' and so available for occupation. This legalised imperial crime still resonates in Australia, even increasingly so, and can be taken as an archetype of the kind of colonial manoeuvre that postcolonialism explores and deplores. But the land itself also resonates – in Australian art and popular culture the enormous, varied continent is represented as both dramatically beautiful and radically life-threatening, as if the merits and risks of imperial possession remain a part of the national consciousness, or subconsciousness. This is nowhere clearer than in crime fiction, that massively popular genre that is co-extensive with the expansive and appropriative societies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and which, crucially, is structured by a dialogue between a crime and its resolution, so making the form ideally suited for debates about threats and consolations, aberrations and constraints, crimes and punishments. The absence and presence of the land is one of the elements of this postcolonially revealing crime fiction that I want to discuss. But there are other features of interest about the relation between crime fiction and a postcolonial consciousness, both about Australian crime fiction as a readily comprehensible test-case of how such a genre operates in such a context and also in two other areas which I will explore (but not colonially possess). First will be the ways in which crime fiction can operate within a country and its cultures as a way of recognising quasi-colonial oppressions – especially those of gender and race. And then I will look at the ways in

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which a postcolonial crime fiction can develop, outlining how in the last few years crime fiction has become a significant cultural contributor as Wales, England's first colony, and its last, begins to construct a postcolonial consciousness. Not all aspects of the postcolonial analysis of crime fiction are positive. Colonialism is still with us. At the time of writing this paper, early 2004, UK TV seemed dominated by American police shows like Law and Order, FBI, C.S.I.: the striking thing about them all is that there is rarely any doubt about who is the criminal: the class selfdoubt found in Doyle and Christie is quite absent, replaced by an insistent anxiety whether our totally reliable men and women of the law will impose their order on the deranged, unstable perpetrators, who are socially and all too often nationally foreign to the body of American order. There is no mystery, no doubt: just anxiety that we will not punish our enemies enough. Watching those shows and then turning to the news from Iraq demonstrates a sort of seamless continuity of imperialist ideology and practice that deeply resembles the theory and the actuality of landtaking under the concept of Terra Nullius.

II Australian crime fiction developed in a number of varied ways in its response to and realisation of the realities of colonisation. One of the most striking was a strange reworking of Terra Nullius itself. When I started reading Australian crime fiction, in battered second-hand books and much-thumbed magazines, I was startled to find how much of it was quite without a geographic setting, either literal or implied. For example E. M. McDuff's Murder in the Theatre, published in Melbourne in 1944,1 is a standard city hospital mystery – but nothing tells you where on earth, literally, this hospital is. A better writer, A. E. Martin, who produced a range of strongly flavoured and somewhat psychological mysteries like Common People (1944),2 wrote and published in Australia, yet managed to avoid clear localisation in spite of TP

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E. M. McDuff, Murder in the Theatre (Melbourne: Lothian, 1947). A. E. Martin, Common People (Sydney: Consolidated, 1944).

Crimes Domestic and Crime Colonial

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the strongly realistic flavour of his writing. Perhaps there are banal reasons: to appeal to an English audience the colony keeps quiet about itself; or in terms of internal tensions, you avoid the contempt of Sydney readers by concealing your Melbourne base, and vice versa. Yet there is clearly more here than mere convenience or cunning. Even when authors do locate their stories in Australia, as in Randolph Bedford's almost stereotypically Aussie bush stories about Billy Pagan, Mining Engineer (1911),3 they just happen in an unspecified and undynamised outback. I have written in my book about many other examples, right up to the 1970s, of these zero-setting stories.4 The writers, and presumably the audience, being neither possessors nor dispossessed, neither landtakers nor natives, apparently live by choice in the kind of terra nullius in which the native people were in fact forced to live. The colonial subject's identity is always a matter of uncertainty – a topic to which Homi Bhabha often turns his mind. But equally uncertain is the actual physical, geographic, location of that subject. The lack of personal location did not mean these writers could not write with verve and often actually about doubtful identity – some, like J. M. Walsh, Arthur Gask or the Goyder sisters writing as 'Margot Neville', could make the unspecific nature of their setting, the lack of locational identity of the colonised subject, a dynamic part of the anxiety of their mysteries. But there were other kinds of writers who, having more strongly identified, located, positions, were able to explore different aspects of the colonised situation more directly. Some spoke for the possessors, the land-takers. Henry Kingsley, brother of the English liberal ideologue Charles Kingsley, produced the three-volume novel The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn in 1859, published in London.5 Here the viewpoint is firmly that of a landtaker, and crime is interference, by white troublemakers as well as natives, with orderly taking and profitable enjoyment of land by the English gentry. The hero sees the TP

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Randolph Bedford, Billy Pagan, Mining Engineer (Sydney: New South Wales Bookstall, 1911). For a discussion of this phenomenon see Stephen Knight, Continent of Mystery: A Thematic History of Australian Crime Fiction (Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press, 1997), pp. 152-157. Henry Kingsley, The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn (London: Macmillan, 1859).

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Australian land as 'the new heaven and the new earth',6 and there is no Victorian doubt about this imperialist religion. The land-taker novel is a recognisable subset of the genre of Australian crime fiction and here the land is strongly identified and romanticised – there is none of the sense of alienation from topography found in the zero-setting novels mentioned previously. Zero-setting and land-taking are two criminographical responses to the colonial situation, but there are others. One is the representation of the voice of the dispossessed, which I will come to shortly. But another, stranger, more emphatic, is a presence of place that is not only romantic and touristic but also important enough to be part of the plot. It is common in the more melodramatic Australian stories for the criminal to be destroyed by the land itself, and some of these can be zero-setting stories, a bizarre, probably dialectic, feature. That the land can be unnamed and also powerful indicates its role in complicit postcolonial anxiety. Bush fires are the favourite force of vengeance, much loved in films, closely followed by dangerous snakes and floods as the agents of justice. It is a curious displacement of human agency onto the land, as if it has itself become the law, as if having declared terra nullius has given that terra a curious quasi-human power of its own. Are the colonisers the criminals that the stolen land will ironically avenge? It is well-known in postcolonial literary studies that a romantic appreciation of the scenery is something that almost infallibly goes along with an outsider's, coloniser's viewpoint, and that native authors do not deal in emotive and symbolic representations of landscape unless the landscape is part of nativist myth as in Australian dreamtime stories or early Celtic saga. To admire landscape, especially a narrativised use of landscape as in some Australian crime fiction, is a form of appropriation, a cultural colonisation parallel to political and military colonisation.7 But dispossession is also dealt with more directly, if not positively. Early Australian crime fiction recognises native presence both as part of the landscape and as noble savages – a good example is Charles TP

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Kingsley, Geoffry Hamlyn, p. 146. For a discussion of this point see Stephen Knight, A Hundred Years of Fiction: Writing Wales in English (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004), pp. 12-13.


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Rowcroft's The Bushranger of Van Diemen's Land of 1846,8 published in London. But natives are also seen as people who can live in the land without either a sense of alienation or a sense of forced dominance. This familiarity with the land is expressed especially through the 'black trackers', natives with special – often amazing – skills in reading tracks, signs written on the land. A familiar colonial device is to incorporate such figures as assistants to the imperial police; this common feature of bush novels led to a popular set of stories by Arthur Vogan called The Black Police (1890), also published in London.9 The most developed and complex version of this is the well-known series by Arthur Upfield focusing on a partwhite with the caricature name of Napoleon Bonaparte – whites seem to have taken real pleasure in this inherently demeaning carnivalisation of native vigour: another example was a successful indigenous cricketer named Julius Caesar. Upfield was an Englishborn Melbourne journalist and he meshed the classic clue-puzzle with the bush narrative: the crimes Bony tracks in fact operate among a rural Australian version of Christie's white propertied class and their hangers-on. Much stress is laid on appreciating landscape and native flora and fauna. Through Bony the land is enlisted to resolve problems in white culture, playing a fantasy role in imperial anxiety and Upfield's audience matched: he came to be published successfully in London, but, strikingly, his great success was in America from 1943 on as American troops became a neo-imperial presence in Australia.10 The Bony stories have at last been displaced as a native voice by recent work in which the crime genre has been reclaimed for native dissent. In several short stories, starting with 'Westralian Lead' in 1990,11 Mudrooroo created a detective both tough and challenging, named Detective Inspector Watson Holmes Jackamara of the Black Cockatoo Dreaming. In the name Mudrooroo mocks Holmesian attitudinising, not the native: Jackamara is not a figure of fun but a TP

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Charles Rowcroft, The Bushranger of Van Diemen's Land (London: Smith and Elder, 1843). Arthur Vogan, The Black Police (London: Hutchinson, 1890). For a discussion of this see Knight, Continent of Mystery, p. 159. Mudrooroo Narogin, 'Westralian Lead', in Crimes for a Summer Christmas, ed. by Stephen Knight (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1990), pp. 25-47.

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sombre investigator and punisher of white men's crimes in the modern world. Archie Weller has written less formal stories including his novel The Day of the Dog (1981),12 which shows how young people of native stock become pressured into social exclusion and towards crime. The strongest single voice of this kind has been Philip MacClaren's well imagined and strongly developed Scream Black Murder (1995).13 A winner of a prize for indigenous fiction, he reclaimed the urban police procedural by making his police detectives a man from Sydney's urban ghetto of Redfern and a woman who had been a mission school child separated from her parents. Realising both institutionalised racism and the ease with which kooris – the native name for natives in that part of Australia – can slip toward white culture and corruption, the novel makes it seem natural, as well as proper, to have competent black professionals supervising the problems of their own world, and so moves a long way from the subservient, semi-mystical black trackers of the past. That recovery of a voice for the dispossessed is not unfamiliar in the colonial and postcolonial world. Less familiar, but perhaps not in fact less widespread, is the development in Australian crime fiction of a voice for the white settlement, those immigrants who were themselves victims of a secondary colonisation by capitalism and landowners and who were, in an Australian financial metaphor called 'currency' rather than 'sterling' people, the workers, small farmers and rural labourers. It is well known that these people were the focus of the bush ethos disseminated by Henry Lawson in his very popular stories published around the turn of the century, and here developed the ideal of the tough, restrained, ironic Australian that remains the national image – however inappropriate. What is less well known is that a surprisingly extensive crime fiction was a major part of the earlier construction of self-consciousness among the settlement people, with stories often set on the goldfields, first of Victoria, then New South Wales and Queensland. This fiction is especially found in the Australian Journal which began in 1865. It was closely modeled on the London Journal, but a striking amount of the material was written and set in Australia and a good deal of it reworked and localTP

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Archie Weller, The Day of the Dog (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1981). Philip MacClaren, Scream Black Murder (Sydney: HarperCollins, 1995).


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ised the popular London police detection form. J. G. Borlase, a busy hack writer, created 'The Memoirs of an Australian Police Officer' and these were soon ghosted by Mary Fortune, who went on to write many stories over fifty years, including a long-running and high quality series called 'The Detective's Album'.14 Both Borlase's James Brooke and Fortune's Mark Sinclair are mounted police, as was required in even the comparatively limited expanse of the state of Victoria. But they are not a soldierly imperial police, as in Kingsley, and they employed no black trackers, as in Vogan; the crimes they investigate are committed against the working people of the white settlement. They detect thefts and murders with close attention to detail as did 'Waters', the internationally successful but inherently straightforward detective of the 1850s created in London by William Russell.15 This low-level detection, overshadowed as it has been by heroic figures like Sherlock Holmes, had an important social and ideological effect – a double effect. In one way it suggested that the ordinary people could police themselves in a nonauthoritarian way, and this was an important feature, creating a settlement consciousness. But for readers outside the class of the detective and the characters involved in crime the plain detectives might also suggest that such people can be peacefully enlisted on the side of law and order, joining the cause of the propertied, just as the black trackers inherently supported the squatters. In Britain there appears to be a similar dialectic contact between the plain-style detectives and the voice of the Chartists. In both countries the potentially dangerous types – intelligent and energetic ordinary men, who might be criminals or even revolutionaries – are represented as fully respecting, indeed enforcing, the values of new bourgeois society. TP

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Fortune started 'The Detective's Album' series in 1868; a small anthology was published under that title (Melbourne: Clarson, 1871) but almost all her work was confined to periodicals: for an account of this remarkable writer see Lucy Sussex, The Fortunes of Mary Fortune (Melbourne: Penguin, 1989). Examples of work by Borlase and Fortune can be found in Dead Witness: Best Australian Crime Stories, ed. by Stephen Knight (Melbourne: Penguin, 1990). William Russell, of whom nothing is known (the name is believed to be a pseudonym), founded the plain-style police fiction that was so popular in midcentury London; like Fortune he wrote regularly for periodicals.

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Strong as this demotic detecting was in the mid-nineteenth century, very curiously the plain detectives went underground: as Australian crime fiction grew more self-conscious it quite abandoned any idea of using police-figures as heroic crime-solvers. The origins of this change appear to be a development of postcolonial consciousness, or at least a sense of new identity among the settlement people. Though some influence of the convict grievance against authority may well have persisted, it was primarily the growing Australian labour and union movement, merging with the newly developed bush ideal, which identified police increasingly with the propertied classes. There developed as a result a strong strain of zero-policing crime stories, where the just outcome is achieved without a detective and where the moral resolution is often some way natural, as when execution occurs through fire or flood.16 Yet, after a long absence, the plain Australian detective, the image of the mounted trooper, resurfaced at a crucial moment in Australia's postcolonial history. When Britain joined the common market, Australia's economy was badly affected and even those who still thought of England as home had to think again. America largely filled the colonial gap and crime fiction registered that. Like England, Australia had been notable for the lack of interest in the Americanstyle private eye – there had been quite a few attempts, but none broke through into success. Then in 1980 Peter Corris, an academic historian turned journalist, started his long-running Cliff Hardy series, with The Dying Trade (1980)17 and his success dramatically outlined Australia's re-orientation towards the Pacific and America. But though Hardy is, like Spade and Marlowe tough, lonely and determined, he is also very much an Australian everyman with the attitudes formed in the development of the bush myth now located, as new foci of Australian selfidentification, in Sydney and the Pacific. Previously Melbourne had been the more important city for business, politics and culture, because boats from Europe stopped there before Sydney. Aircraft, though, stopped first at Sydney, and that, a Pacific port where TP

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For a discussion of this phenomenon see Knight, 'Detection without Detectives', Continent of Mystery, pp. 124-132. Peter Corris, The Dying Trade (Sydney: McGraw-Hill, 1980).


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Melbourne faced only Tasmania and the Antarctic, was open to the growing American influence. This new-old figure of the down-to-earth Australian investigator caught on as a hybrid self adaptable to new ideologies, both postcolonial and neocolonial in its transfer from an English to an American model. Marele Day created a lively feminist detective in Claudia Valentine, elegant but insightful, capable of both patient and sensitive inquiry and decisive action: she first appeared in The Life and Crimes of Harry Lavender (1988),18 and appropriately enough Day won a prize in America. Australian crime fiction has in the last twenty years explored a range of local dissenting positions such as Claire McNab's lesbian thrillers, starting with Lessons in Murder (1990),19 the black tradition already discussed and a thriving continuance of pro-criminal crime fiction, a form which links back to heroic convict biographies, lacks the inherent moralism of the American crime novel and long precedes the criminal-sympathetic work of Donald Westlake and Elmore Leonard.20 TP

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III What we can see in Australian crime fiction is evident elsewhere. Crime fiction is an early, often the first, voice to respond to new social and cultural encounters generated by the colonial situation. The crimes that were realised as personal and domestic were also projected directly or indirectly as social and political. In some sense white Australia is like a laboratory for that kind of study, as it is basically an exclusive nineteenth- and twentieth-century society, with a single point of origin and with, because of its geographic location, distinctly limited influences – though they exist. I have glossed over the role of south-east Asia in the fiction: the islands to the north are a recurrent site of crime, adventure and racial

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Marele Day, The Life and Crimes of Harry Lavender (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1988). Claire McNab, Lessons in Murder (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1990); this novel was in fact first published in the USA (Tallahassee: Naiad, 1988). For comment on the criminal saga see Knight, Continent of Mystery, p. 128.

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ideology.21 As that sort of laboratory, the variety of generic and subgeneric uses of crime fiction in postcolonially explicable ways in Australia can be used as a guide to what is going on elsewhere, though perhaps less visibly and less continuously. Inside Britain there were earlier than many realise regional crime fictions that implicitly resisted the inherently colonizing power of the metropolis – the 1860s included Robert Curtis's Irish Police Officer and James M'Levy's austere Glasgow series called 'Curiosities of Crime'. The recent period has seen regionally conscious policing, from the television series Z Cars set in the Liverpool area around 1960 to John Harvey's Nottingham, Reginald Hill's Yorkshire and most notably Ian Rankin's Edinburgh. Colleagues working in other languages will know of the Catalan self-consciousness developed through Pepe Carvalho, or the Sicilian focus of the work of Leonardo Sciascia, and many more examples across Europe. James McClure and Wessel Ebersohn in South Africa, Paul Thomas in New Zealand have worked in the same way. However, it is noticeable that there remain modern versions of the Arthur Upfield approach, as authors set their work in foreign parts to gain the impact of quaintness and cultural appropriation – Italian-set mysteries with a tourist flavour sell well in England, but the authentic French works of masters like Sebastian Japrisot seem to rouse little interest. The most striking examples of crime fiction mediating resistant communal self-consciousness in recent years have been developed in North America: they range widely and are mostly well-known. The explosion of feminist work in the last twenty years has been well described by Priscilla Walton and Manina Jones in their book Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition (1999).22 There are several notable features: one, rather forgotten, is how slow and uncertain the movement was at first. Between what is usually recognised as the first proper feminist thriller, Marcia Muller's Edwin of the Iron Shoes (1977), and her second, Ask the Cards a Question (1982), was a gap of five years – hardly a rapid take off.23 TP

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For a discussion of this feature see Knight, Continent of Mystery, pp. 163-167. Priscilla Walton and Manina Jones, Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Marcia Muller, Edwin of the Iron Shoes (New York: McKay, 1977); Ask the


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Equally striking in my view is the fact that Muller and Sara Paretsky and their followers were not only feminists: their novels are notable for the amount of attention they give to communal and political issues – the feminists deal directly (as the male 'hardboiled' writers rarely did, in spite of their claims) with real social and criminal corruption that leads to murder. They link crimes domestic and crimes political in a way that is very familiar from a postcolonial reading, and even when the personal politics deal with separatist feminism and lesbianism, as in the influential work of Barbara Wilson, social politics are still strongly emphasised. Thirdly, and related to this political sense, it is notable how soon and how strongly the issue of race became a feature of the feminist form. The black-white conflict in America is clearly one interpretable in terms of postcolonialism, with the black population as a forced settlement through international slavery, and the sorts of pattern I have described with Australian native peoples are clearly and more richly realised in the vastly bigger country. As is revealed in Stephen Soitos's book The Blues Detective (1996),24 some of the first black narratives use crime fiction as their mode: both Pauline Hopkins and John Edward Bruce wrote like this in the early twentieth century and a little later there appeared a distinguished predecessor of Mudrooroo's ironic crime fiction in the Harlem Renaissance writer Rudolph Fisher's modernist and antiracist reworking of the clue-puzzle form in The Conjure-Man Dies (1932).25 There was even a parallel to Upfield in the Florian Slappey stories by the white Southerner Octavius Roy Cohen that were serialised in the 1920s and 1930s in The Saturday Evening Post. But as might be expected American black culture developed a powerful resistant attitude, notably in the novels of Chester Himes. But these were far from naïve, or utopian: Himes created two black police detectives who were tough and racially selfconscious, but were also hybridised by their conflict with white culture into a violent aggression that was in fact relatively ineffective TP

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Cards a Question (New York: St Martin's, 1982). Stephen F. Soitos, The Blues Detective: A Study of African American Detective Fiction (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1996). Rudolph Fisher, The Conjure-Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem (New York: Covici Friede, 1932).

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as resistance: the last published novel in the series has the bitter title Blind Man with a Pistol (1969).26 Such irony arises easily in postcolonial situations: it was a possible starting point for resistance in black American crime writers like George Baxt, and appeared in postmodern form in Ishmael Reed and Clarence Major, all working in the 1960s and 70s. But the anti-authoritarian black detective could also be serious, from John Ball's ground-breaking In the Heat of the Night (1965) to Walter Mosley's very popular Easy Rawlins, first appearing in Devil in a Blue Dress (1990):27 his adventures, spread over decades, steadily rewrite the history of California and America from a low-level black perspective. Black women detectives developed later but more rapidly. Dolores Komo's fairly mundane Clio Brown in 1988 was quickly superseded by the crisp and pointed work of Nikki Baker, with her lesbian detective Ginny Kelsey in 1991, the blunter work of Eleanor Taylor Bland with 'Big Mac' a lesbian policewoman in 1992,28 and then came the major impact of Barbara Neely's large, thoughtful, unforgiving black housemaid called Blanche White – the name bears its own sign of the danger of hybridity. In Blanche on the Lam in 1992 Neely used Blanche to expose the crimes, including racial patronisation, of the respectable white wealthy, but to emphasise the bite of her internal postcolonialism her second novel, Blanche and the Talented Tenth (1994) turns its critique on the idea going back to W.E.B. Du Bois that the black people need above all to generate their own elite.29 Neely, through Blanche, shows this elite to be deeply corruptible, as alienated as Himes's detectives but less in touch with the racial traditions, inescapably enlisted to the cause of white bourgeois America. Combining feminist and an anti-colonial critique, black feminist fiction has had a deep impact and other American ethnicities have followed their path, including American-Hispanic and AmericanChinese authors. The strongest fit to the postcolonial situation has TP

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Chester Himes, Blind Man with a Pistol (New York: Morrow, 1969). John Ball, In the Heat of the Night (New York: Harper, 1955); Walter Mosley Devil in a Blue Dress (New York: Norton, 1990). For a discussion of these writers see Stephen Knight, Crime Fiction, 1800-2000: Detection, Death, Diversity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 188-191. Barbara Neely, Blanche on the Lam (New York: St Martin's, 1992); Blanche and the Talented Tenth (New York: St Martin's, 1994).


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been material about Native Americans. The long-standing series by the white American Tony Hillerman has largely avoided critique of the kind directed at Upfield because of Hillerman's evident commitment to and knowledge of the Navajo people he writes about and his strong liberalism, but more recent material has been generated from within a range of native people, including some from Alaska and parallels from the Canadian Innuit communities. These texts usually argue for a multi-cultural position, with values parallel to and inherently challenging those of white America, like some of the black authors, notably Neely, though there are also texts which can be better described as transcultural, where difference is seen as a variance within a shared overarching ideology – this seems especially characteristic of the new wave of Asian-American writers like S. J. Rogan. The American pattern has been both imitated and separately generated elsewhere, and not only in Australia. Two important Londonbased voices in dissident crime fiction are Gillian Slovo and Mike Phillips. Slovo is one of a group who used crime and detection in both a personal feminist way and also a wider socio-political dimension, and, like Barbara Wilson, her politics tended to be international. In her first, Morbid Symptoms (1984),30 Slovo explores from the incisive viewpoint of Kate Baeier, an investigative journalist, issues around feminism, motherhood and psychoanalysis as they relate to a complex set of criminal disruptions that have their origins in the brutally defended apartheid system of South Africa – Slovo's own country of origin. There was a clear move in the 1980s in Britain to sustain the radical thriller, as in the Pluto series where Morbid Symptoms appeared, but Slovo's novel stands out for its range and depth as both highly effective crime writing and also firmly investigative radical, and international, politics. Others worked in similar ways, but the politics of the pseudonymous 'Hannah Wakefield' are less well rooted in local character and the well-created feminist detectives of Liza Cody, Sarah Dunant and Val McDermid do not have the sharp political edge that Slovo offered. Mike Phillips is parallel to Slovo as the most productive and thoughtful of the British writers who have handled the situation of the Black British in the modern period. The oppressions he traces are TP

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Gillian Slovo, Morbid Symptoms (London: Pluto, 1984).

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rarely as direct as those on which the Americans base their novels, but he is especially strong in delineating the subtle forces of racism and race-based deprivation and the different ways in which people accommodate themselves to these forces. His first novel, Blood Rights (1989) powerfully conveys the commitment, anxiety, complicity and partial success of Sam Dean, who is sometimes called Sambo, and not only as a joke, but whose full name is, not inappropriately, Samson. Many elements of oppression and developing self-consciousness arise in Phillips's fiction, and even linking with the New York scene in Point of Darkness (1994).31 For Sam Dean Mike Phillips traces a subtle path, one remarkably close in its nuances and strains to the way Homi Bhabha has outlined the situation of the hybridised colonial subject. There have been other Britain-based writers in the same field. Victor Headley's Yardie series looks at black crime from street-level in a way both tough and rigorous, but some other British contributions seem more trivial, such as Susan Moody's comic 'Penny Black' series and the unconvincing creation by the white author Reginald Hill of a black detective in Joe Sixsmith. TP

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IV The movement from a fully colonised crime fiction to a resistant postcolonial version was in Australia a multi-layered development over at least half a century and in the U.S.A. a similar period has seen the rise of ethnically conscious crime fiction, but it can be remarkably fast. Wales is a new and evolving laboratory case. In the past Welsh crime fiction was primarily touristic. Some just mimicked the coloniser, as in Glyn Daniel's Welcome Death (1954),32 where in an Anglicised south Wales rural village people behaved like just like Agatha Christie's English – and the crimes are detected by a patronising Cambridge don, a notable symbol of enlistment for the author, himself a Cambridge don but of Welsh origin. Differently colonial was the inherently first-contact text Murder at the Eisteddfod (1973) by John TP

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Mike Phillips, Blood Rights (New York: St. Martin’s, 1989); Point of Darkness (London: Michael Joseph, 1994). Glyn Daniel, Welcome Death (London: Gollancz, 1954).


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Ellis Williams.33 It outlined authentically Welsh practices with some sympathy and was itself published by a small Welsh press, but it accepts a distinctly English form of analysis and investigative style – though because the detective is a Welsh-speaking Welshman on holiday from Scotland Yard there is some awareness of the impact of hybridity and enlistment. A simpler form of colonial crime fiction – and much better-selling – is exemplified in the recent series by Rhys Bowen, beginning with Evans Above (1997),34 in which an amiable but not too bright Welsh police detective operates in the romantic landscape of Snowdonia – note the colonial mockery of the native name in the title. This was first published in New York before appearing in London, yet it is in a long-standing English-oriented tradition that represents the Welsh as amiable buffoons, as if they were black and white minstrels. Tourism and enlistment are not the only colonial features of Welsh crime fiction. Zero-setting occurs as well. Jim Tucker has, under the name 'Bill James', written a long and successful series about two police detectives called 'Harpur and Iles', starting with You'd Better Believe It (1985).35 Effectively plotted and paced, the novels are notable for two things. First the rich style, both in the characters' energetic and flamboyant speech and the wittily pointed narration itself. But the novels are a performance without a stage: there is nothing to indicate clearly where this town is, except by the sea, somewhere west of London. Nothing reveals the setting is Wales – even the style is without sign of south Welsh bravura. No doubt here too gaining an international market is a motive (in England, primarily), but there may also be a subconsciously motivating sense that an English-speaking Welsh writer does not really live anywhere. A more positive postcolonial cause could lie behind the zero-setting: there may be, as in the fiction of Raymond Williams and Emyr Humphreys, a wish to avoid the stage-Welsh effect of much south Welsh writing (including Dylan Thomas's prose) which is felt to be a cringingly colonial performance. So, as an effective part of England, in crime fiction as in much else, Wales repressed its separate and physical identity, for a complex TP

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J. Ellis Williams, Murder at the Eisteddfod (Llandysul: Gomer, 1973). Rhys Bowen, Evans Above (New York: St Martin's, 1997). Bill James, You'd Better Believe It (London: Constable, 1985).

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of reasons. But this has changed, and very recently. In the last few years Wales has gained a form of devolved government and there has also been a substantial boom in south Wales, focused on the new Cardiff Bay development, funded through European money and mysterious global capital. These two somewhat contradictory influences, a form of self-government and internationally controlled prosperity, have generated a flood of writing and publishing, mostly in Cardiff – probably because the city is the major channel for and site of hybridisation rather than a consciously national capital. Most of this fiction is critical of incoming money and related crimes, all derived from London; the authors debate, construct, Welsh identity in a dissident atmosphere. Jim Tucker, under another of his pseudonyms, David Craig, has started a series very firmly set in Cardiff, tracing, as in Bay City (2000),36 the corruption and murder that go along with this new, and now consciously recognised, colonialism. His detectives are an ironic, flawed Cardiff local and – a stronger but also stranger statement of postcolonial possibilities – a young black man with an Oxford degree who speaks Welsh and bears the first name Glyndwr, for Owain Glyndwr, the nationalist warrior who proclaimed, and partly won, Welsh independence around 1400. This is not a belittling namegame like Napoleon Bonaparte, but is a positive nativist reference, and blackness is appropriated as a symbol of modern Welshness – still colonised, not yet in Europe. Jim Tucker is not alone. While the 'Evans Above' school of selfdenigrating crime fiction continues, there is also a police detection series by Alison Taylor, set in north Wales and consistently exploring the multiple conflict between three forces: English influence of all kinds (including American influence of course), the urban, and so bourgeois, life of the English-speaking Welsh, and the still strong Welsh language culture that is primarily rural. In her best known novel, In Guilty Night (1996),37 Taylor uses the genuine scandals of the corrupt management of English-run children's detention homes, a dark image of colonial incursion, as the focus for these tensions, and she has returned to these issues steadily, and seriously, in her work since then. History functions here also: the criminal's family name is TP

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David Craig, Bay City (London: Constable, 2000). Alison Taylor, In Guilty Night (London: Hale, 1996).


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Hogg, and the text plays with the contemporary rhyme, mentioned by Shakespeare, that saw Richard III as 'hog' (the white boar was his badge). He was of course succeeded, with Welsh military support, by a Welshman in Henry Tudor, who became Henry VII. Like Tucker calling his detective Glyndwr there is an ironic, but also a mythic, recourse to history in present distress. Nativist myth can at least have a palliative function in the colonial situation. While many writers in Wales ponder portentously on Welsh identity, it is arguable that some of the most searching analysis of the current situation with regard to colonising forces and resistance to them is going on in this new genre of self-aware and hybridised Welsh crime fiction. It is, as happened in Australia, a model of colonial and postcolonial processes being realised at the same time at a national political level, while American and to a degree British crime fiction have shown the same processes at work within a multi-layered, internally colonised, society. Crime fiction is of course only one of the many genres and voices in which nations and peoples debate their situation and identity: but a case can clearly be made for the recurrent importance of the genre in this context. Important in part because it is so well equipped to debate the relationships between crime domestic and crimes colonial and also – and most importantly – because it conveys those debates and those tensions, indeed those crimes, in morally and emotively legible personal terms. Many authors around the world have used the immense popularity and the crime-revealing structure of the genre to deliver, unostentatiously, affectively, and so all the more effectively, the potentially postcolonial meaning of crime fiction.


CONFESSION, AUTOPSY AND THE POSTCOLONIAL POSTMORTEMS OF MICHAEL ONDAATJE'S ANIL'S GHOST Wendy Knepper

Every tongue got to confess is not only the title of a collection of folktales by Zora Neale Hurston, it also aptly summarises the drive to storytelling that propels the confession narrative in recent postcolonial crime novels such as Patrick Chamoiseau's Solibo Magnifique, Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace, Austin Clarke's The Polished Hoe, and Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost.1 In the crime novel, the confessional narrative has long been a source for investigating the meaning and role of crime, punishment, and justice in society, often through the tricks, diversions, and digressions of the confessing subject, someone who typically offers an aberrant or sociopathic perspective. Notable examples of confessions in crime narratives include Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Albert Camus's L'étranger, Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. While the narrator in Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd selectively presents and conceals information, other confessional narratives surprise the reader with the frank portrayal of crime as a delightful or philosophically meaningful activity, albeit in a framework of interpretation very different from the dictates of law and order or the conventions and norms of the given society. It is this discursive potential of the confessional narrative to restructure the frameworks of interpretation – both within the novel and society – that I would like to explore within the TP

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Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace (London: Virago, 1997); Patrick Chamoiseau, Solibo Magnificent, trans. by Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokurov (New York: Vintage International, 1999); Austin Clarke, The Polished Hoe (Birmingham: Tindal Street Press, 2004); Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost (London: Picador, 2000).

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context of postcolonial crime fiction. Confession can dissolve or blur the categories of identity, disclose other mysteries, draw attention to additional crimes and identify socio-political injustices that merit further investigation. As we shall see in Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, the Otherness of the confessing subject in the postcolonial crime narrative challenges the known and accepted frameworks for understanding truth and social justice. The postcolonial crime or detective novel has only recently been identified as a subject worthy of closer critical attention. In 'Introducing the Post-Colonial Detective',2 Ed Christian suggests that this genre relies on Western generic police methods and plot conventions presented along with indigenous cultural insights and wisdom. A more subtle and nuanced definition is offered by Yumna Siddiqi who nicely points out the differences in the postcolonial crime or detective novel – the potential for Othering the genre, if you will – when she observes that there has been 'a recent spate of postcolonial novels that use the format of the mystery or detective story but tweak it or turn it inside out in what becomes a narrative of "social detection," to borrow a phrase from Fredric Jameson, a "vehicle for judgments on society and revelations of its hidden nature."'3 To this, we might add Peter Hitchcock's observation that if we think of postcoloniality as a genre, its role is to 'question genre, not just as a fulfilment of the law of genre, but as a means to dissolve the very classifications and divisions that produce it'.4 Following Hitchcock's lead, we can consider the manipulation or subversion of generic conventions as a purposeful, politicised activity. Disrupting the 'law and order' of the literary genre is a means to question accepted truths about 'law and order' in the postcolonial society. The editors of this collection have called attention to this potential for Otherness by introducing the term 'postcolonial postmortems'. What are we to make of this term as a description of the TP

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Ed Christian, 'Introducing the Post-Colonial Detective: Putting Marginality to Work', in The Post-Colonial Detective, ed. by Ed Christian (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 1-16. Yumna Siddiqi, 'Police and Postcolonial Rationality in Amitav Ghosh's The Circle Of Reason', Cultural Critique 50 (2002), p. 176. Peter Hitchcock, 'The Genre of Postcoloniality', New Literary History 34 (2003), p. 327.

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postcolonial crime novel? It could refer to a crime novel set in a postcolonial society, where a forensic postmortem is carried out during the course of a murder investigation. Alternatively, the term 'postcolonial postmortems' invites a figurative interpretation of the narrative as an investigative process or retroactive analysis that takes the postcolonial itself as the subject under investigation. This introduces another dilemma for both 'posts' (the 'postcolonial' and the 'postmortem') construct the relationship to the past differently. The postmortem presumes that the subject is dead while the postcolonial suggests that the colonial is a residual presence, still alive in some sense. What does it mean to conduct a postmortem on a subject who is still breathing, still alive? As a literary critical term, 'postcolonial postmortems' seems to imply that this genre of fiction dissects and examines multiple subjects in various states. Finally, one might ask: how do the postmortems and the postcolonial cross-examine one another? Does a postcolonial perspective change the meaning or role of the postmortem procedures? These are some of the questions that the term 'postcolonial postmortems' prompts one to ask. Next, I will look at how we might rethink the genre of the crime novel in light of these issues.

The Crime Novel and Its Postcolonial Postmortems One might begin by considering the role that the postmortem traditionally plays within the context of the crime story. Literally, in forensic or medical terms, the postmortem is the examination and reporting process that aims to identify the cause(s) of the death. This process includes an autopsy of the body, a preliminary report (normally within a few days) and a full postmortem report, which may take several weeks or months to submit. During an autopsy, all parts of the body undergo a detailed inspection to determine the presence, nature and extent of any disease or damage. This involves cutting open the head and dissecting the body in order to remove all organs, including the brain. It can also include the removal of tissue or bone samples for further investigation. A postmortem is typically required as part of a modern murder investigation and serves as part of the overall evidence used to establish the time and cause of death. Forensic evidence can also be used to assist in determining the actual place of death.

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In the context of literary postcolonial postmortems, it is particularly useful to recall the etymology and multiple meanings of the word 'autopsy'.5 Initially, the term referred to the act of 'eye-witnessing' or 'seeing with one's own eyes' (from the Greek autoptƝs meaning eyewitness). A second meaning is first recorded in 1678: the contemporary sense of 'autopsy' as the 'dissection of a body to determine cause of death'. Thirdly, 'autopsy' can refer figuratively to any 'critical dissection' or act of analysis. Often, the crime story entails the interplay between the literal postmortem processes and the metaphorical act of autopsy, which involves dissecting, cutting apart and examining the various kinds of evidence presented, such as confessions, testimonies, alibi, reports by eye-witnesses, etc. In an investigation of a crime, the literal and metaphorical meanings of autopsy are subject to critical dissection and analysis. Autopsy then is undertaken by the investigator and the reader as the critical activity of seeing for oneself and reconstituting the body of evidence – a process that goes beyond the autopsy report or eye-witness accounts. In metafictional terms, the postmortem also invites the reader to consider the body of the text. In the classical detective story, for example, the investigation into the crime serves to repair and restore the wounds in the social order caused by the murder. Thus, we can say that society is sutured together once more in the classical detective novel. Unlike the body, which still bears seams that testify to the processes of forensic investigation, the social fabric or body may be seamlessly repaired through the novel as a kind of postmortem in the more figurative sense of the word. Finally, the aesthetic form of the novel itself bears consideration. How does it assemble and suture together the fragments of narrative? While the classical novel often aspires to wholeness and to order, the question is whether such an outcome is either possible or ethically desirable in the postcolonial society or crime novel. Mirroring the body of the victim as well as the postcolonial society itself, the postcolonial postmortem typically bears its scars and seams for all to see who would look more closely at the social or textual body. By pursuing strategies of disorder, dissection, TP

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defacement, and digression, the reader is often left with a sense of incompleteness and fragmentation. Considering the detective story as a kind of postmortem in the figurative sense of the word, the crime novel can be seen as performing a double act of retroactive analysis. In retelling the story of the investigation, a more comprehensive investigation into the meaning and causes of death, including philosophical, psychological, sociological or ethical concerns, can take place. For the postcolonial crime novel, the postmortem entails a metafictional, metaphorical, and analytic investigation into postcolonialism itself. This is to say, that there are two bodies under examination on the autopsy table of the postcolonial postmortem: the body of the victim (plot of the crime novel) and the body of the (post)colonial society. Two bodies are dissected, pulled apart and examined, the body of the victim and the body politic. The postcolonial postmortem is a complex process because it plays with the literal and figurative interpretations of the postmortem. Consequently, the body of the victim is transformed into a site of multiple investigations and subject to many, often overlapping or intersecting modes of analysis and meaning. Patrick Chamoiseau's Solibo Magnifique captures very well the pathos and irony of autopsy in the postcolonial crime novel when the narrator observes: Suspecting a crime, the police picked him up as if he were a bit of ordinary garbage, and the coroner autopsied him into little pieces. They cut his head bone open to pick the cream of his brain for the mystery of his death. They cut open his chest, cut out his lungs and heart. They spilled his blood into clear glass tubes, and from his stomach they impounded his last sharkstew. And when Sidonise sees him again, sewn up badly as some miserable shift… oh-lord! How does one put into words a sadness so great it refuses to bathe a brave woman's eyes… That is why, dear friends, before I speak, I ask this favour. Imagine Solibo in his most handsome days […].6 TP

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Solibo is fragmented during the autopsy procedure. For Sidonise, the woman who loves him, this is an act of defacement, a reduction of the man's body to a poorly-sewn garment. It is also ironic for Solibo has died an accidental death and an autopsy was not legally required. By

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contrast, the narrative asks us to reconstruct Solibo and imagine him as a living subject before the autopsy. The narrative functions a postmortem in a figurative sense, returning the victim to life and to wholeness in order to analyse the events that led to this decomposition of the subject. In this instance, while the State and the police destroy the subject in order to know, the postcolonial crime narrative performs a kind of restorative magic, enabling the victim to speak once more, to have his or her voice heard through storytelling and citations recorded in the novel. Yet, this narrative postmortem also involves dissection and fragmentation in order to figure out the mystery. Like the procedures of the autopsy though, the narrative itself pursues a fragmentary approach, piecing together the accounts of various witnesses and incorporating various documents to create a text that is a double for the fragmented body on the autopsy table. In the postcolonial context, the forensic postmortem may tell us the literal cause of death, but this may not lead to a resolution of the mystery surrounding the death and its circumstances. Rather, death serves to foreground the mysterious and fragmented in the postcolonial order. The impulse to resurrect the dead, to restore social order and to create a seamless narrative is a rather risky endeavour. For the investigation into the crime also probes another body, the postcolonial subject. Unlike the victim who is dead, the postcolonial is not postmortem: the colonial subject is often still breathing within the postcolonial. Attempting to cut up this body is akin either to violence or to surgery – either destroying or repairing the (post)colonial order through intrusive measures. For unlike the victim who cannot literally be resurrected, an investigation into postcolonialism always risks resuscitating the colonial subject, that entity that continues to haunt the living and 'speak through' them in daily life, whether in speech, actions or in the shared interpretive framework. Such a novel raises questions about agency: who is the speaking subject(s), and whose confession(s) is (are) being heard? Like the influence of any human, colonialism lives on in imagination and memory, continuing to haunt the psyche. Thus, any act of exploring the postcolonial as it were really a dead subject involves an intrusive action, a wounding that may actually affect the living, perhaps wounding them fatally in the effort to know fully.


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In a postcolonial context, the fact that a postmortem has a dual subject can make it a perilous undertaking. This is so because the investigation into the death of the human subject also entails an investigation into the postcolonial order, which can have profound consequences for the living. The postcolonial postmortem confronts the spectre of temporality or the haunted present in which the voices of the dead continue to trouble the living. The debates and theories concerning the 'postcolonial'7 with respect to time, narrative and historical perspective are redoubled if we consider that the postcolonial postmortem seeks to interrogate the meaning of the postcolonial through an investigation into its subjects. Deborah Wyrick suggests a number of ways of interpreting the 'post' in postcolonialism: TP

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Postcolonial postmortems will inevitably interrogate the role of narration, reassembling the fragments of history through the shards of testimonial narrative. Such discourses question their own narrative techniques for 'framing' the killer. This patchwork tale cuts open, dissects, and tears apart the (post)colonial subject on the table. However, in this instance, the purpose is not so much to establish a

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Notably, there is a distinction between 'post-colonial' with a hyphen and the 'postcolonial' without a hyphen. The former is a descriptive term referring to the historic period that follows the colonial era. Stuart Hall called into question the meaning of the post-colonial in his essay titled 'When was "the Post-Colonial"?: Thinking at the Limit', in The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons. ed. by Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 242-260. This version of the 'postcolonial' invites us to examine the ideological, psychological and sociological ways in which the colonial continues to resonate. Postcolonial theory or perspectives deconstruct or examine critically colonial codes, genres and modes of thought. As such, certain writers living under colonial rule can be said to offer a postcolonial perspective. This topic was first discussed by Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 3. Deborah Wyrick, 'Editor's Introduction: Colonial Posts', Jouvert, 7.2 (2003), par. 16, http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v7i2/ed72.htm [accessed April 20, 2005].

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cause of death as it is to investigate the hidden motives and undercurrents that motivate: how the apparently dead continues to speak through the living. The question of the testimonial or confession is tied to two important and related ways of thinking about the roles and conventions of the crime novel. The first has to do with the ways in which one traditionally defines the roles of the witness, the perpetrator, the suspect, the victim, and the investigator. In a classical detective novel, the roles of the witness, the suspect, and the perpetrator may be subject to slipperiness, resulting in the switching of roles. However, the investigator is normally not a witness, a suspect or a perpetrator. Very rarely, if at all, is the victim able to play the role of investigator, witness, suspect or perpetrator (sometimes letters by the victim are discovered later, enabling the victim to testify as a postmortem witness to his or her own death). However, in a postcolonial context, particularly when the novel traces the life of a subject who is haunted by the colonial past, the roles of the victim and the detective or investigator are increasingly problematic. In fact, rather than role switching, one may find an elision of roles as one person is both a victim and a perpetrator simultaneously, making it difficult to make a moral judgement about 'right' and 'wrong' actions or even the 'nature of justice' itself. When one brings a postcolonial perspective to a repressive regime or a colonial order, the very act of upholding the law may become suspect and even 'criminal'. When a subject moves between or among conflicting interpretive frameworks of crime, law, punishment, and justice, the determination of right or wrong actions may become problematic. Consequently, the postcolonial crime novel also calls into question the meaning and role of the alibi, making it increasingly difficult to determine and/or establish one for the various players in the narrative. Etymologically, alibi means 'elsewhere', and is a locative of alius as '(an)other', meaning in another time or way or another name (the modern 'alias' being an assumed name). An alibi is conventionally a way of establishing that one could not have committed a crime because one was elsewhere. In a postcolonial context, this 'elsewhere' may refer to a different social order as the subject moves from one interpretive framework to another. In a postcolonial novel, the question of place may be suspect as the novel explores the extent to


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which the colonial is Othered and elsewhere through the processes and presence of the coloniser and the colonial concept of nationhood. Austin Clarke, author of the postcolonial crime novel titled The Polished Hoe, nicely emphasises the problematic signification of place-names when he describes why his postcolonial island is set in a place called Bimshire, rather than Barbados. In an interview, he explains that Barbados is known as little England (having been given this appellation by Churchill) and that Barbados has the name of a county in England because it 'is [in effect] an overseas English county', and is also a derogatory way of referring to a very English way of being.9 'But, in my mind, I deliberately made it Bimshire to demonstrate the extent to which even people living in an oppressed situation could be Anglophiles'.10 In effect, Clarke provides Barbados with an alias, suggesting that not only people but places and societies can assume other identities. The alias, Bimshire, becomes the subject under investigation as the detectives takes down the lengthy, digressive confession of Mary-Mathilda who admits to castrating and killing her lover.11 The confession of this perpetrator bears evidence to colonial history, interrogating the ways in which English and European colonial modes of thinking continue to haunt the imagination, memories, and lives of the island inhabitants. Power relations, the policing of the island and the carrying out of the law are examined, revealing that different laws apply to different individuals, depending on their relation to the colonial order. Thus, the alias is related to the question of alibi or the way in which the 'elsewhere' continues to speak through the individual, possibly even giving them an alibi by demonstrating that this person was ideologically elsewhere when the crime was committed. An alibi is based on the evidence given by a witness or other evidence that proves it impossible for a person to have been present at the time the crime was committed. For example, an insanity plea can TP

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Austin Clarke, 'An Interview', January Magazine (November 2002), http://www.januarymagazine.com/profiles/aclarke.html [accessed February 24, 2005]. Clarke, 'An Interview'. Clarke, The Polished Hoe, pp. 506-509.

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be seen as a kind of alibi or alius, suggesting that the person was somehow not 'mentally there or present' at the time of committing the crime. This person is an alius or (an)Other, perhaps even adopting an alias as a manifestation of this Other identity. Such is the case in Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace, where it turns out that the perpetrator of a crime (Grace Marks) was actually possessed by another person (Mary Whitney) at the time of the murder. Ironically, when Grace Marks flees the scene of the crime, she 'chooses' the alias of Mary, her dead friend, in order to conceal her own true identity.12 This concealment of identity turns out to reveal identity as Atwood herself suggests in the title of the novel. The 'alias' of Mary turns out to be her alibi as it is determined that Grace was emotionally and psychologically elsewhere when the crime was committed (her 'saving grace' as it were). The postcolonial crime novels play with the conventions of aliases and alibi, suggesting often that the 'perpetrator' of a crime is 'elsewhere' or '(an)Other', displaced as a result of his or her postcolonial perspective or experiences, and thus unable to determine fully what is a right or wrong action. Alternatively, individuals and places often have multiple names, official and unofficial, often bearing witness to the norms, power structures, and cultural legacies of the (post)colonial society. Aliases provide alternative ways of viewing the subject's role and place in society. As a result, the reader may find it difficult to determine and judge the 'rightness' or 'wrongness' of the perpetrator's actions. Indeed, the narrative may leave the investigator as well as the reader struggling with the difficulties of establishing truth, the proper social order, and the meaning of the alibi. The alibi may itself be a form of confession. The very act of establishing that one was elsewhere when the crime was committed may be proof that one is guilty. The confession may reveal evidence about the commission of yet another crime or injustice. Multiple, often repressed, voices are heard for the first time. In this context, confession plays a remarkably charged, ambiguous, and even dangerous role. For confessions may reveal more than intended, even challenging the social order, and in so doing have unintended consequences for the living. TP

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Anil's Ghost: Performing Postcolonial Postmortems With these observations, I would now like to turn to Anil's Ghost and explore how effectively it fulfils the potential of postcolonial postmortems. This detective novel is set in Sri Lanka, a place where the residual influences of colonial ways of valuing race, religion, and ethnicity have erupted into ongoing postcolonial tensions and violence, notably between the Sinhalese and the Tamil. Anil Tessera, a forensic anthropologist and human rights investigator is assigned to work with Sarath Dizasena, an anthropologist and representative of the Sri Lankan government, to determine whether allegations of State violations of human rights can be substantiated. However, the investigation soon takes a rather evasive course as the detectives have to prove that there is a victim and a crime, a process that involves a number of narrative and investigative detours. According to Ondaatje himself, the novel is composed of 'experienced or imagined fragments',13 and tends to stray from a linear course. What begins as a double journey, a double narrative' is interrupted by 'shifts and forks in the plot', including the role of the bereaved artist Ananda who mourns the disappearance of his wife Sirissa and the role of Gamini the surgeon.14 Weaving through the personal memories and experiences of these four main characters, the novel continues beyond the actual investigation and thus offers a fragmented, decentred story. This shift from the realm of the public investigation into the private raises the question as to whether or not the novel shies away from the complex, myriad sources of terror and crime. While recent criticism suggests that the novel addresses difficult issues such as the politics of human rights,15 terrorism,16 the difficulTP

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Michael Ondaatje, 'Pale Flags: Reflections on Writing Anil's Ghost', Wasafiri, 42 (2004), p. 62. Ondaatje, 'Pale Flags', p. 62. Roberta Bacic, 'Dealing with the Past: Chile-Human Rights and Human Wrongs', Race & Class: A Journal for Black and Third World Liberation 44.1 (2002), pp. 19-31. Teresa Derrickson, 'Will the "Un-truth" Set You Free?: A Critical Look at the Global Human Rights Discourse in Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost', Literature Interpretation Theory, 15 (2004), pp. 131-152. Margaret Scanlan, 'Anil's Ghost and Terrorism's Time', Studies in the Novel, 36.3

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ties of living with violence17 and the role of transnational identities,18 Teresa Derrickson rightly points out that initial book reviews 'were not altogether favourable'19 as critics attacked the apolitical views of the novel. Among the criticisms the book has received are claims that the author pursues a personal narrative at the expense of the political, demonstrates a romance with and for history that lays bare 'bourgeois political sensibilities and ultimately reactionary commitments'20 and avoids confronting the issues that trouble Sri Lanka.21 Even Ondaatje's defenders could be seen as damning the novel. One critic who admires the aestheticism and compassion of the novel and sees in it a 'reassertion of life itself, which is the fountainhead of all art'22 effectively undermines the analytic potential of the novel, particularly with observations such as the 'exhilarating feeling […] at the end of the book is a permanent cure for the loss of lives and culture in Afghanistan and elsewhere'.23 Margaret Scanlan sums up all of these critics concerns (whether in the form of praise or blame) by asking whether or not Ondaatje risks 'aestheticizing terror, repeating the modernist gesture of turning away from atrocity to timeless form'.24 She remarks that the novel 'reproduces no political rhetoric, adjudicates no political crimes, projects no political solutions', but concludes nonetheless that the novel effectively 'replicates the experience of terror' through its fragmentary narrative techniques and ruptures in time.25 TP

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(2004), pp. 302-318. Tod Hoffman, 'Seeing Ghosts', Queen's Quarterly, 107.3 (2000), pp. 446-447. Victoria Cook, 'Exploring Transnational Identities in Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost', Comparative Literature and Culture 6.3 (September 2004), http://clcwebjournal. lib.purdue.edu/clcweb04-3/cook04.html [accessed February 24, 2005]. Derrickson, 'Will the "Un-truth" Set You Free?', p. 131. Antoinette Burton, 'Archive of Bones: Anil's Ghost and the Ends of History', Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 39.1 (2004), p. 51. Tom LeClair, 'The Sri Lankan Patients [Review of Anil's Ghost]', The Nation, 19 June 2001, p. 31. Geetha Ganapathy-Doré, 'Fathoming Private Woes in a Public Story: A Study of Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost', Jouvert, 6.3 (2002), par. 14. http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v613/anil.htm [accessed February 24, 2005] Ganapathy-Doré, 'Fathoming Private Woes in a Public Story', par. 15. Scanlan, 'Anil's Ghost and Terrorism's Time', p. 302. Scanlan, 'Anil's Ghost and Terrorism's Time', p. 302.


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More than introducing terror and doubt, I propose that the novel calls into question the meaning and role of 'poetic justice' in society, prompting the reader to examine critically the assumptions about truth that inform Western concepts of social justice. By examining how Ondaatje appropriates and transforms the conventions of the Western crime novel for his postcolonial postmortems, I will demonstrate that Ondaatje's poetics lead us to consider the irreconcilable choices and the consequences for the individual as well as the collective. As the narrator observes, Sri Lanka is a 'more complicated world morally'.26 In a world of terror where 'not even the information of who the enemy was' (11) can be discerned it is difficult to decipher the motives and identities of others. An aura of mystery tinged by fear is inevitable. Such a world has consequences for the role of the detective persona, the meaning of the alibi and alias, the role of confession and the function of the postcolonial autopsy. A closer interrogation reveals that such poetics are never simple or apolitical. From the outset of the narrative, the issue of Anil's position as an outsider, her alibi and her alias are thematised in the narrative. Though she is a native of Sri Lanka, she returns to it as an outsider, 'with a long-distance gaze' (11) after 15 years absence from the country. When Anil ironically toasts the country where every political opinion is supported by its own army, Sarath tells her, 'You talk like a visiting journalist' (27). Later, Sarath admonishes her, 'You can't just slip in, make a discovery and leave' (44), and warns her that sometimes the law is on the side of power not truth (44), so she should be careful what she reveals and to whom (45). The question of the alibi is called to the reader's attention through Anil's persistent efforts to relate her own timeline to that of the victims and suspected killers. Within the first 14 hours of her arrival, Anil confronts the corpse of a person killed at the same time she took her early evening walk in the Pettah market (13). She experiences a kind of shock as she translates the time of the crime into her personal narrative of displacement as she traversed time zones on route to Sri Lanka. Thus, she considers her alibi: the place where she was at the time of the crime. TP

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Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost, p. 11. All subsequent references to the text will be cited in parentheses with reference to the page number(s) only.

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Although the narrator, in an act of indirect speech, reports that Anil 'never usually' translates the crime into her personal timeline, this is but the first in a series of episodes where Anil establishes a personal relationship to the victim. In a narrative that is criss-crossed by flashbacks and narrative asides, the narrator presents another picture of Anil. There is an anecdote of Anil speaking to her husband, explaining how she keeps on digging and searching for bodies, even when exhausted. She says that she repeats what someone confided to her: ' […] how it could be me in the grave I'm working on. I wouldn't want someone to stop digging for me… I always think of that when I want to quit' (34). That night, the husband watches while the sleeping Anil continues to make digging motions. Later, Anil repeats literary citations that reveal she suffers from a sense of collective guilt. She affiliates herself with 'voices she can trust', internalising 'old friends, sentences from books' such as from The Man in the Iron Mask, 'We are often criminals in the eyes of the earth, not only for having committed crimes, but because we know that crimes have been committed' (54). Thus, her confessions and interior monologues are composed of fragments: bringing together the words of others as the discourse of the self. For Anil, the threshold between life and death – the possibilities for hope, desire, and emotional satisfaction – is negotiated through acquiring and giving names. Indeed, we are told that she had been given two inappropriate names and coveted her brother's second name, Anil. The narrator observes that her childhood primarily as 'the hunger of not having the name' and the 'joy of getting it' (68). The name was something she had hunted down like a lover and in fact she trades an undisclosed sexual favour to obtain the name from her brother. Thus, sexuality, incestuous relations, and gender-crossing are all played out in the act of acquiring a name. Ironically, we do not learn Anil's own given name. Thus, she herself is a kind of double for Sailor, someone who is shrouded in mystery because we know the alias rather than the given name (though eventually we do learn Sailor's name). More importantly, the issue of aliases versus the 'real name' calls into question the problem associated with ever knowing the true identity of a person. The discovery of Sailor is important to Anil because she believes that to 'give him a name would name the rest' (56). Presumably, this includes not only those other nameless victims or 'lost


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voices' but also those who have perpetrated what appears to be a crime. Thus, the dead can take on the power to name, to accuse, and to seek justice. Unlike the conventional detective story, where the mystery seeks to elucidate the identity of the killer, the focus is on the victim. Anil observes 'without identifying Sailor, they had no victim yet' (176). In the process of identifying the victim, which involves fragmentation and reconstruction, a thoroughgoing investigation into (Sri Lankan) society is enabled. Sailor is the name or alias that Anil gives to the skeletal remains of a recently deceased person found at a governmentprotected archaeological site, thus suggesting a State cover-up. In fact, Sailor is one of four bodies found, which she names Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor (with the rather dark undercurrent that she once referred to her ex-husband Cullis as a tinker, 37). Sailor is kept with this crew as a kind of 'disguise' (63), thus assuming a 'false identity' as a much older body from the sixth century. This site where the body is found is analysed for traces of pollen and earth samples that indicate where it was originally located. Meanwhile, the body is cut apart in the hope that its fragmented condition will obscure the complete story of what this evidence means. In order to preserve the evidence, it must be deconstructed; this is a fitting metaphor for the postcolonial crime novel. Unlike most victims in a conventional Western, criminal investigation, the skeleton in this postcolonial crime story has an alibi, an alias, and an assumed identity: he was someone else in another time and place when the crime took place. This ironic, metaphoric use of the conventions of the Western crime novel is a kind of haunting in a more figurative sense – that familiar yet Otherworldly presence that flouts reason, attesting to truths that survive the boundaries of the known/unknown. Attempts to establish the identity of Sailor serve to interrogate other identities and prompt confessions from people. Recognising that Ananda, the artist who reconstructs Sailor, has feet that are similar to that of the skeleton, she asks Ananda about his occupation and comes to the conclusion that Sailor, like Ananda, was a miner. Ironically, this bit of evidence turns out to be more useful than the face that Ananda reconstructs for Sailor, which turns out to have a peaceful expression and to be younger looking than expected. This surprises Anil until Sarath informs her that Ananda's wife Sirissa disappeared during a

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campaign to wipe out insurgents (185). In the three years following her disappearance, her body has not been recovered. This double confession, of Ananda to Sarath and of Sarath to Anil, prompts a reinterpretation of the face. It becomes the visage of Ananda's wife. Thus, Sailor's skeletal structure serves as a literal framework for establishing alternative truths and identities. Confessions prompt one to reinterpret evidence, considering other angles and perspectives as well as how the emotional impact of trauma can transform identities. In the confessional mode, even apparently stable categories such as the sex of a person are transformed in the act of reconstructing what might have been once true. Another idea of confession is exemplified by the 'marginalia criminals' (230) who introduce punctuation marks, underlining, mock confessions, and opinions in books. This 'defacing' of books changes the textual identity, offering a multiply-voiced, subversive text. These false confessions contain among them more serious remarks, thus suggesting that confession is never completely true or false, serious or playful. In the context of these remarks on marginalia as a kind of crime, one might also think of Anil herself as a marginal text. At one point during the investigation, she comes across the rest-house's oneshelf library, which houses Agatha Christie, P.G. Wodehouse, Enid Blyton, John Masters, the 'usual suspects in any Asian library' (58). She had read most of them as a child or teenager. Instead, she turns to Bridges' World Soils to help her with her investigation. This passage situates Anil life history in relation to a colonial world order where mysteries are solvable, perhaps even laughable. It is tempting to read Anil as a marginal comment on these books and Anil's Ghost as a kind of confession at the margins of Western crime writing. Indeed, the novel continuously demonstrates Anil's marginalised condition as her marriage falls apart. Though she includes herself in Sri Lankan society when she provides a report of her findings at the end of her seven-week stay, she almost immediately afterward is confronted with evidence demonstrating that she has failed to understand what people are really saying or not saying to her. Finally, the novel itself may be said to marginalise Anil as her story is pushed aside to make way for that of others. Remarkably, the novel never provides us with that confessional moment we long to hear more about, the one in which we would learn Anil's own postmortem report of her experi-


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ences in Sri Lanka and her thoughts about her 'alibi'. How does her Otherness prevent her from seeing herself as part of the narrative process rather than as outside? Whether in the role of forensic scientist, Human Rights investigator or diasporic Other, she seems to be living her life according to the conventions of the classical detective novel in which the detective restores social order and is never the perpetrator. By contrast, the narrative suggests that her Otherness does not exculpate her from suspicion. In a society where fear is a 'national disease' (53), the confessional mode – even about private matters – is political and potentially dangerous. Dialogues are characterised by evasiveness, ambiguity, and opaque allusions to the violence that permeates Sri Lankan society. Confession itself becomes suspect. Sarath, for instance, is careful not to do or say anything that can be construed as a confession or used as evidence against him. For example, he makes sure that the tape recorder (used to record notes about archaeology and about the bodies found) is turned off before offering comments on what the president is like (45). Early on Anil questions Sarath's loyalties and suspects that he may well have ulterior motives: 'He was high up in the State-sponsored Archaeological Department, so how much a part of the government was he? Was he its ear and eye while assigned to aid her in the Human Rights investigation and report? In that case who was she working for?' (28) Her suspicions are partly founded on previous experience where Human Rights workers were deprived of evidence and dispatched from the country in the interests of 'the "good of the nation"' (28). Partly, as well, her suspicions are based on her inability to perceive fully and identify precisely the sources of terror and violence in Sri Lankan society. When Sailor is discovered, she confronts Sarath, suggesting that he might arrange for the body to disappear and stating that she does not know where he stands because he 'feel[s] that the purpose of truth is more complicated, that it's sometimes more dangerous here if you tell the truth' (53). He does not directly refute these accusations, but points out to her that everyone is scared, and that even she only dares to whisper her fears and veiled accusations, when six hours away from Colombo. Subsequently, her fears and doubts seem wellfounded when Sarath disappears and is incommunicado following the discovery that Sailor is actually Ruwan Kumara (269). Finally, the

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skeleton of Sailor conveniently disappears and Sarath publicly distances himself from Anil, seemingly leaving her without any evidence of human rights abuses. Upon leaving the hospital, they face one another for the last time and she tells him that she wants no more help from him. He slaps her in the face and they seem to part on bad terms. Later that night, when Anil discovers the body of Sailor has been returned to her along with the tape recorder, she is surprised to discover that she has wrongly suspected him. Playing the tape recorder, which is placed in the rib cage of the skeleton, Anil hears their observations about the skeleton and then the voice of Sarath on tape, whispering and confessing: I'm in the tunnel of the Armoury building. I have just a moment. As you can tell, this is not any skeleton but Sailor. It's your twentieth-century evidence, five years old in death. Erase this tape. Erase my words here. Complete the report and be ready to leave at five tomorrow morning. There's a seven o'clock plane. Someone will drive you to the airport. I would like it to be me but it will probably be Gunesena. Do not leave the lab or call me. (284)

Anil replays this taped message, 'listening to everything again' (284). This tape functions as a confession and as a kind of postmortem, prompting the reader to reconsider the meaning and motives behind this crime story. Sarath's taped confession is a postmortem in a number of senses. Firstly, Sarath has recorded his message on the tape containing Anil's postmortem analysis of Sailor. Thus, Sarath's comments are an appendix to this postmortem analysis. Secondly, Sarath is providing a postmortem in a figurative sense. He is helping Anil to wrap up the investigation and to perform an analysis of what has gone right and wrong during the course of its proceedings. Thirdly, Sarath is postmortem in the sense that he represents the voice of the living who speaks through the dead. Fourthly, ironically, Anil is probably listening to the voice of the dead as Sarath is either already dead or in the process of being killed. The tape functions as Sarath's own postmortem, providing the evidence that explains the socio-political causes that lead to his death. Speaking from beyond the grave, Sarath is Anil's ghost. Sarath's embodied and disembodied voice represents a category that confounds the conventions of the crime story: he is the dead victim who is also the living investigator.


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As a postmortem, this taped confession offers evidence that raises questions and offers alternative perspectives on the truth, suggesting that the dead cannot be simply 'put to rest' through an investigation. While Sarath may be innocent in Anil's eyes and from the perspective of the United Nations, he is guilty in the eyes of the Sri Lankan State that seeks to keep Sailor's death a secret. Sarath's confession also prompts one to imagine what is running through Anil's mind. Anil's failure to interpret the situation correctly has fatal consequences. If we examine her motives closely, it is hard to know to what extent she is culpable and of what she might be guilty. Did she unwittingly or wittingly expose Sarath to danger? Did Anil value human rights above other considerations (such as trust in Sarath) and compromise his life through her actions? Did she simply fail to understand the realities of life in Sri Lanka? As the Other in Sri Lankan society, she fails to understand the coded messages and voices of the living. This is Anil's alibi: the 'elsewhere' that makes it impossible for her to fathom fully her place in Sri Lanka. The novel does not offer us clear-cut answers. Anil's confession is tellingly absent, leaving us to consider what innocence and guilt mean in this dangerous and morally ambiguous world. Thus, Sarath's postmortem is also a postcolonial postmortem, offering the reader an analysis of the ambiguous conditions and frameworks for social justice in a world haunted by the colonial past and the terrors of ongoing and violence. Throughout Anil's Ghost, we are confronted with the subversive handling of the crime genre's conventions and tropes. One investigator is a suspect in a cover-up of a murder and turns out to be the victim in another crime narrative. Another detective persona is given an alibi and alias, essential to our understanding of the ambiguous, ironic role she plays in the series of events that lead to murder. Rather than the 'whodunit' or the 'whydunit' or the 'howdunit', the novel prompts us to examine the conventions and processes of investigation as well as the investigators themselves. Their confessions, alibi, and aliases are subject to interrogation. Like Anil, Sarath assumes other identities and speaks from the elsewhere of another place. Sarath's voice speaks through Sailor and Sailor's body as a testimonial to what will happen to Sarath himself. He will be literally 'erased' from the tape. His body will also turn up on the autopsy table. In searching for evidence of human rights abuses, Sarath becomes that very 'body of evidence'

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which they seek to locate. A photo of Sarath's body is among those brought by Amnesty International to Gamini (Sarath's brother) for analysis during which he tape records his observations. Looking at this defaced image and recording his observations, Gamini recognises 'the innocent' wounds on the body (287), the marks that identify his brother. Running to the morgue he confronts the body, confessing 'This scar I gave you hitting you with a cricket stump' (287). It is noteworthy that this confession carries within it evidence of the colonial presence of Britain in the boy's lives, the defining mark that lets the one brother identify the corpse of the other. Thus, the body of Sarath also performs its own confession and postcolonial postmortem. His body gives evidence to the presence of the postcolonial and speaks from beyond the grave to the one who is in a position to understand the evidence by seeing it from another perspective. The question of deciphering meaning by reading bones and listening to the tales told by the body brings one to another confessional mode embodied in the strategies of the narrative itself. For if Anil, is decentred and marginalised by the progress of the novel's course, one might ask: what subject, what mystery does the narrative pursue? Ondaatje himself has eloquently described the mystery of the novel as being the subject of truth itself: The truth! One of the things I wanted to get at was that we in the West have a tradition of believing that there are always answers, always solutions. American foreign policy is based on that belief. You can bomb your way to victory if you want, or you can bomb your way to having your truth accepted in another country. I think that one of the most important things that comes up in Asian writing is that sometimes you can have tragedy and light simultaneously. There's an odd kind of balance. It's a terrible thing to admit to or accept, but there is an acceptance of it. Truth can be, you know, as dangerous as falseness.27 TP

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Truth itself is suspect from Ondaatje's perspective. This is not simply epistemological doubt in the Western sense, but rather a more profound postcolonial postmortem of Western ways of constructing the truth. The need to assert truth can be a violent impulse and have

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Michael Ondaatje, 'Meander, if you want to get to town: A Conversation With Michael Ondaatje', Interview by Peter Coughlan (Toronto: March 28, 2001), http://www.kiriyamaprize.org/winners/2000/2000ondaat_interview.shtml [accessed February 24, 2005].


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criminal consequences. By re-writing the crime genres from a Diasporic viewpoint that values Asian perspectives, Ondaatje dissects and examines the ways in which the colonial concept of truth as something that can be wrested or imposed is both literally and figuratively the source of postcolonial postmortems. Thus, through the conventions of the mystery story Anil's Ghost articulates a postcolonial epistemology about the possibilities for establishing truth and social justice. This raises the question of how the body politic or the social order is examined through the postcolonial postmortems of the novel. In this context, it is significant that Ondaatje's postmortem invokes the multiple meaning of autopsy: dissecting the body, seeing for oneself, and critical analysis. This process involves questioning how we as readers witness events in Sri Lanka and come to understand the body politic through the crime story. As readers, we are presented with a world in which terror, violence, and terrorism are ongoing, leaving behind fragmented and defaced bodies and unidentified victims as well as faceless perpetrators. Instead of the body politic as metaphor, we are witnesses to the fragmented body politics of Sri Lankan society. We see evidence everywhere of a society strewn with body parts, where the fragmented body is not a mirror for the lack of political unity but rather the consequence. The novel dramatises a number of crimes that take place during the investigation, including among them a murder on a train, an account of kidnapping, the discovery of a crucified person, a suicide attempt and descriptions of other suicide attempts. In fact, the symbolic head of State is literally defaced and blown apart by a suicide bomber. The head and the face are fragments of the body strewn throughout the narrative, including: the heads posted on stakes during massacres, the decapitated head of Sailor, the face given to Sailor by Ananda, the face of Sarath which is left untouched when he is tortured, the missing head of the President, the head of the Buddha statue that is blown apart (because hungry thieves are looking for a treasure that will buy them food) and the heads that Ananda creates and reconstructs for the Buddhas. Heads are cut apart, blown apart, defaced, effaced, and reconstructed for medical, anthropological, forensic, military, political, and personal needs and purposes. The narrative performs its own postmortem procedures, dissecting heads and bodies in order to offer an analysis of the postcolonial situation.

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Rather than clear answers about the cause of death, the postcolonial Sri Lanka is a place in which the body is the ongoing site of terror, counter-terror, fragmentation, and investigation. The living are emotionally, psychologically, and physically fragmented by history; they have become the living artefacts of this world where inherited tensions among ethnic groups and fierce nationalisms still contend in a postcolonial context. In this sense, a postmortem examines how the dead speak through the living and the living through the dead. By exploring how various discourses of the body offer ways of dissecting or viewing it, Ondaatje performs his own kind of autopsy, one that involves multiple forms of dissection through anthropology, forensics, surgery, art restoration, sex, and the simple human embrace. Unlike Anil who sees truth in bones and looks for the amygdala (135) or the place where the brain houses fearful memories, Ondaatje presents the body as a site of mystery and plenitude. By viewing the body from multiple perspectives and through multiple discourses, he offers a postcolonial view of the body as a site to be deciphered. The marginal, fragmented, and digressive narrative seems to move to another rhythm or logic if one considers the various ways it interrogates how the body is inscribed as well as how it is dislocated through the narrative discourse. In a sense then Ondaatje too is a 'marginalia criminal' who rewrites the body-as-text that has been inscribed by imperial ways of viewing it. His writing gently, playfully, humorously, and mordantly subverts the assumptions about the truths the body can be made to speak: what it can be made to confess. In the now controversial ending to the novel – which seems to risk aestheticising violence according to some critics – Ondaatje offers an alternative perspective on the role of the autopsy procedure. Thieves smash the head of a Buddha statue and break apart its body. The narrator uses evasive, negative language to question how this body is situated within a continuum of violent assaults on the body, stating: 'Still, this was broken stone. It was not a human life' (300). Despite the fact that this is not a 'political act or an act perpetrated by one belief against another' (300), the act has political consequences because the 'neutral' and 'innocent' fields around the statue are burial grounds for torture victims, 'where trucks came to burn and hide victims who had been picked up' (300). In the act of artificing together this fragmented face (301), Ananda chooses to leave all it looking quilted together


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(302), preserving the signs of fragmentation. Thus, the postmortem procedure repairs the damage, but does not efface its history of violence. Autopsy is also presented as a life-giving moment when Ananda paints the eyes of a newly created Buddha, wearing a cotton shirt given to him by Sarath (like Anil, he is also haunted by the ghost of Sarath, 305). This act of giving life to the Buddha is also an act of witnessing the landscape from another perspective. During this autopsy, Ananda sees 'the angle of the world' from the Buddha's perspective (307) for a brief moment. Reflected in the mirror, Ananda shares a sacred moment: 'when the eyes […] would see him, fall into him. The first and last look given to someone so close. After this hour, the statue would be able to witness figures only from a distance' (306). In creating such faces, this act of witnessing also confesses the need to be witnessed. Autopsy as the art of seeing for oneself is also depicted as seeing through the perspectives of the Other. Facing the Buddha serves as a warning, reminding one of the difficult but necessary act of autopsy in postcolonial postmortems: an activity that requires reflection and indirection in order to grasp the fleeting moment. Ondaatje neatly resolves the problem of how to perform a postmortem on the postcolonial for he chooses to dissect bodies that cannot be said to be either living or dead – the statuary body of the Buddha and the confessional body of Sailor-Sarath. These postmortem bodies bear witness and testify: one is blind and yet capable of insight while another is dumb yet capable of speech. This 'poetic justice' is at the heart of Ondaatje's postcolonial postmortems. These autopsy procedures enable us to 'see for ourselves' the political and the personal through an investigation of the meanings of the confessional narratives and the fragmented body politics (as opposed to the body politic) of Sri Lankan society. Performing postmortems in the forensic and the figurative senses of the word, Anil's Ghost interrogates the meaning of the voices, presences, and signs that haunt the postcolonial subject.


SHERLOCK HOLMES – HE DEAD: DISENCHANTING THE ENGLISH DETECTIVE IN KAZUO ISHIGURO'S WHEN WE WERE ORPHANS Tobias Döring

I When Dr Watson learns about the profession of his mysterious new flatmate in 221 B Baker Street, his first reaction is to cite a literary source to indicate where the likes of Sherlock Holmes are to be found: 'You remind me of Edgar Allan Poe's Dupin', he says with reference to the well-known tales published in the 1840s, some four decades earlier. And he adds with curious candour: 'I had no idea that such individuals exist outside of stories'. Holmes at once dismisses the comparison and declares that, in his opinion, Dupin may have had 'some analytical genius' but was otherwise 'a very inferior fellow'.1 This minor dispute among the two most celebrated figures from the English cult and culture of detection, recorded in 'A Study in Scarlet' (1881), the founding story of the Holmesian canon, points to a major issue in the genre: the functional relation between the prototypical detective and the reality of stories. On the one hand, Watson's comment just works as a clever writer's ploy to underline the realistic nature of his narrative by contrasting it teasingly to an earlier writer's narrative inventions. Arthur Conan Doyle, as it were, winks at us as if to say he knows we know where he derived his inspiration from. And yet, with Holmes's comment, he goes on to hoodwink us into believing that his own creation is not only superior but is, in fact, no literary TP

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Arthur Conan Doyle, The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, 2 vols, ed. by William S. Baring-Gould (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1967), I, p. 162.

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creation altogether but an actual individual existing 'outside' the purview of mere stories. 'A Study in Scarlet' concludes with Watson announcing that he has 'all the facts' in his journal and is about to present them to the reading public.2 Here the genre founds itself on the claim that it simply documents what happened in the real world, the reality shared by its readers. No doubt, we must be wary of such claims and always remind ourselves of the fictional conventions by which this world and its protagonist have been constructed. On the other hand, the issue can well be turned around. Rather than appreciating the detective as a story-telling product, we should perhaps appreciate him as a powerful producer of such tales which offer a particularly fair or fitting version of things to the world. The classic detective, first and foremost, is a master story-teller. True, his investigative work more often lies in finding clues and gathering facts, in interviewing suspects and inspecting sites of crime – all of which activities we associate more with reading, analysing and interpretation. But all these activities are just preliminary and preparatory steps for the climactic moment, the grand delivery of the tale which he invariably unfolds to solve the mystery by integrating every bit of evidence into one coherent story. Whether for Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Lord Peter Wimsey or any of their latter-day inheritors: in each case the denouement involves the presentation of this narrative, often for a nervous audience full of potential suspects, when the plot of crime is being unravelled and the criminal identified. Holmes's famous science of deduction thus owes a great deal to Aristotelian poetics, which he practically applies. In the pure and gentlemanly arm-chair version of his trade, he need not even see the evidence himself. 'You mean to say', asks Watson, 'that without leaving your room you can unravel some knot which other men can make nothing of, although they have seen every detail for themselves?'3 The 'knot' is Aristoteles' key word for the rules of successful plot construction. As a 'consultant detective' Holmes's capacity indeed lies in providing a conclusive ending to the incomplete or incoherent stories that his troubled clients tell him. TP

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Doyle, The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, I, p. 234. Doyle, The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, I, p. 160.

Disenchanting the English Detective

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This point has important consequences for the ideological profile of the genre – and for its recent intersections with postcolonial discourses and transcultural issues which the present volume sets out to explore. In a sense, all genre fiction, whether fantasy, mystery, romance or whatever, is inherently conservative, reaffirming preexisting formulas and so reassuring readers of an existing order. But this holds true with special force for the tradition of detective fiction. In his classic analysis of the genre, Tzvetan Todorov has shown that the whodunit generally involves a narrative duality: it 'contains not one, but two stories: the story of the crime and the story of the investigation'.4 In the usual chronology of events, the former ends before the latter can begin, so in the record that we read the efforts of investigation produce a step-by-step research into the secrets of the past, ultimately mediating to us what lies hidden there. This analytic process of detective fiction, according to Todorov, is driven by a constitutive absence: the story of the crime 'is in fact the story of an absence: its most accurate characteristic is that it cannot be immediately present in the book'.5 The task of the detective, then, is restorative in more than one respect. His work lies not only in identifying perpetrators and in restoring the missing jewels or whatever stolen goods he was employed to find; he also re-installs the missing links between the present and the past, between the story of the crime and the society living in its aftermath, as he substitutes his master narrative for the mysterious absence. Working with Todorov's terms, we can say he brings to the book what formerly could not be present in it, thus making it whole again and re-establishing full order. The detective's tie with narrative, in this view, is less an ontological than a functional feature: he sees to it that loose ends, like loose criminals, are finally tied up. It is this closing gesture of restoring order, firmly embedded in what Suerbaum calls the 'grammar' of detective fiction,6 which poses a TP

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Tzvetan Todorov, 'The Typology of Detective Fiction [1966]', trans. by Richard Howard, in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, ed. by David Lodge and Nigel Wood, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 2000), p. 140. Todorov, 'The Typology of Detective Fiction', p. 140. Ulrich Suerbaum, Krimi: Eine Analyse der Gattung (Stuttgart: Phillip Reclam, 1984), p. 12. P

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particular challenge for contemporary postcolonial writers, whose work is usually noted for modes of ambiguity, open-ended structures, inconclusive or recursive story telling and a general distrust of order. Although the supposed 'subversive' role which postcolonial writing was once thought to play7 no longer serves as a denominator for this vast and varied literary field, we can still say that master narratives and visions of established order are more often troubled, critically questioned, explored or exposed in postcolonial writing than restored or recuperated as in the detective genre. This has strong political implications and shows that the emergence of postcolonial crime fiction involves both a promise and a problem. What kind of definite conclusions should postcolonial writing celebrate? What standards of justice, what narrative authorities, what powers of restoration are available in a transcultural field whose history has long been marked by conflicting legal standards and contested claims of order? What satisfactory endings can postcolonial detectives concoct or offer and for whom? Such are the central questions concerning 'postcolonial postmortems' here at stake, questions which a recent volume on this subject has not even managed to raise, let alone address.8 Yet even a cursory glance at the historical and political context shows that they demand attention. With Conan Doyle's domestication of Dupin, the French detective figure first developed in the American tales by Edgar Allan Poe, the genre took root in Victorian Britain at the same time when the empire was formally established – more than just a temporal coincidence, as I would like to argue in this paper. Classic English crime fiction, I suggest, is a resolutely domestic genre, typically set in London or the Home Counties, and yet it builds its plots and cultural strategies on the availability of locations outside the familiar territory, places elsewhere, whence sinister forces come to haunt the home. The twentieth-century flowering of the genre, often referred to as the Golden Age of English mystery writing, occurred in the 1930s, i.e. not long before the structure of the imperial world, as an immediate TP

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See the argument in the well-known survey by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: The Theory and Practice of Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989). See Ed Christian, ed., The Post-Colonial Detective (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001).


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consequence of the Second World War, began to crack and yield to decolonisation. In the most influential contemporary account of this far-reaching process, Frantz Fanon has analysed this period as a time of radical transition in which the 'whole social structure' was to be 'changed from the bottom up', an act of protracted and necessary violence that he sums up in a famous phrase saying that decolonisation 'is, obviously, a programme of complete disorder'.9 So, if postcolonial societies have historically emerged from programmatic 'disorder', we would expect their literary production not to celebrate scenarios of conventional order but, on the level of symbolic intervention, to continue efforts towards changing and restructuring the social text. To the extent that detective fiction is a programme of narrative restoration, postcolonial narratives are likely to resist it. However, the rich and manifold examples of popular crime fiction recently published in the postcolonial world and attested, for example, throughout the present volume tell a different story. Without doubt, the classic genre holds considerable attractions and evidently offers many uses for contemporary writers – perhaps because its tightly plotted order, on the level of literary construction, helps to produce alternative versions to the experience of a dismally disordered world. To the extent that the strictures of the genre make up for structures in society, detective fiction could precisely work for writers and for readers not as facile escapism but as imaginative substitutes for what in actuality is missing. As a matter of fact, the same argument can be made about the English master versions of the genre, whose most popular period cannot be called a 'golden' age without serious qualification. The 1930s, after all, were not only a pre-war but a postwar period, when British soldiers as well as civilians were only just beginning to recover from shell-shock and the trauma of the Great War, a difficult and torturous process that still holds a painful place in cultural memory.10 It may not be too far-fetched even to credit the TP

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Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. by Constance Farrington (London: Macgibbon and Kee, 1965 [1961]), p. 29. See the contributions in The Literature of the Great War Reconsidered: Beyond Modern Memory, ed. by Patrick J. Quinn and Steven Trout (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001).

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detective genre with some power to contribute to this recovery process. In a recent interview, at any rate, the Japanese-English writer Kazuo Ishiguro has suggested as much when he says he finds English detective novels very poignant, because they were actually written and read immediately after the Great War, by a generation trying to recover from the trauma of that war. [...] These dectective stories portray a very cozy functioning community where just one thing has gone wrong – somebody has murdered somebody. And all it takes is for this detective to come from outside and unmask the murderer and everything goes back to being rosy again.11 TP

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Ishiguro is speaking here about the background of his own novel When We Were Orphans, published in Britain in 2000.12 Situated in the 1930s, it tells the story of a private consultant called Christopher Banks, known as 'the most brilliant investigative mind in England' (Orphans 33). His career is self-consciously modelled on the work of Sherlock Holmes, yet he can only repeat or replay this model with a difference. It is this subtle difference, crucial for the project of postcolonial genre writing, that concerns me here. As Ishiguro's narrative takes its cue, though not its form, from the great tradition of detection, it moves to question the conventions of this imperial genre and explores contemporary legacies. While it recognisably transfers some settings, characters, concerns and props familiar from classic mystery writing, it places them into a shifted perspective in which they all begin to look pale, hollow and increasingly dysfunctional. In this way, When We Were Orphans urges us to reconsider the anatomy of the English detective and so provides a highly relevant example to address the questions raised above: how does the conventional figure fare in postcolonial writing? Whose authority can vouch for justice and restore a sense of order? What narratives can be constructed here to address, or to redress, the trauma of a violent past? TP

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Alden Mudge, 'Ishiguro Takes a Literary Approach to the Detective Novel: Interview by Alden Mudge', Book Page (September 2000), http://www.bookpage.com/009bp/kazuo.ishiguro.html [accessed March 3, 2005]. Kazuo Ishiguro, When We Were Orphans (London: Faber and Faber, 2000). All subsequent references are included in the main text.


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II Kazuo Ishiguro, born in 1954 in Japan, emerged in the 1980s as a new literary voice and soon became an internationally acclaimed writer of the English language. He had moved with his family to Britain at the age of six, grew up in Surrey and subsequently went through all kinds of educational experience, including university and working as a grouse-beater for the Queen Mother at Balmoral Castle.13 To be sure, Japan has never been a British colony, and this writer clearly cannot be seen as representative of the wretched of the earth – but nor can writers like V.S. Naipaul, Michael Ondaatje or Salman Rushdie whose status as transcultural figures in contemporary anglophone literature corresponds in many ways to Ishiguro's standing. His work, that is to say, can fruitfully be viewed and read in postcolonial terms because it shares and shapes the discourse of displaced perspective through which postcolonial writing has critically made its impact upon English literature. Best known for The Remains of the Day (1989), his third novel, winner of the Booker Prize and model for an opulent MerchantIvory film production (1993), Ishiguro has repeatedly explored the central myths of Englishness during late-imperial heydays, reviewing them from a strategically decentred point of view. In The Remains of the Day he transcribes the rambling thoughts of an old gentleman butler reminiscing about the 1930s when his master, representative of fascist sympathies in the aristocracy, was trying to forge an alliance between Britain and Nazi Germany. The brilliance of Ishiguro's 'exposition of the ideology of service', in Homi Bhabha's words, here 'lies in his linking the national and international, the indigenous and the colonial, by focussing on the anti-semitism of the interwar period', an exploration of historical and racial in-betweenness that 'resonates with Walter Benjamin's view of history as a "view from the outside, on the basis of a specific recognition from within"'.14 TP

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Cynthia F. Wong, Kazuo Ishiguro (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2000), p. vii. Homi K. Bhabha, 'Anxious Nations – Nervous States', in Postcolonial Theory and the Emergence of a Global Society, ed. by Gordon Collier, Dieter Riemenschneider and Frank Schulze-Engler, Acolit Special Issue 3 (Frankfurt

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In When We Were Orphans, Ishiguro offers another such review of the same period, presenting a doubly determined experience of English culture seen by an insider from the outside or an outsider from within. His main device, again, is to mediate the entire world of the book through the eyes and voice of a central character, the highly articulate though somewhat fallible Christopher Banks, and so to create distance by faking intimacy in narration. As an expatriate child and early orphan, Banks is placed in a peculiar position. Born to English parents in Shanghai around 1900, he grows up in the so-called International Settlement of this city which he, according to his own account, regards as his true home. His father is employed there by a trading company whose shady business seems to involve the trafficking of opium in the Chinese hinterland, while his mother openly campaigns on moral grounds to stop this lucrative practice. Various incidents and half-remembered episodes from this troubled time eventually resurface in Banks's memories, whose winding course we follow often wondering how much of them are retrospective inventions bridging gaps or covering embarrassments. At any rate, the happily remembered period of his Shanghai childhood comes to a brutal ending when first the father, then the mother mysteriously disappear. The boy, then aged eleven, is taken 'home' to England to be looked after by a distant aunt, although to him this means moving to a foreign country previously known only from books. So he resents his enforced departure from Shanghai and, among the English class mates at his boarding school, remains self-conscious because he feels he lacks 'connections': without parents or family, his ties to society are all exclusively produced by cultural means. Against this background, and not unlike in the 1987 novel by Naipaul, the narrative explores the 'enigma of arrival' by which the colonial or expatriate slowly makes his way into the mother country, trying to figure out the rites and rules of its social structure. For Banks, it is mainly his professional work as a detective that eventually gives to him a local habitation and a name in English culture. Thus, in

a.M.: IEAS, 1998), p. 13. Bhahha is referring here to Peter Osborne, 'Small-Scale Victories, Large-Scale Defeats: Walter Benjamin's Politics of Time', Walter Benjamin's Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, ed. by A. Benjamin and Peter Osborne (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 93.


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order to discuss Ishiguro's exploration into the functioning and failure of the classic sleuth, it is crucial to appreciate the making of this figure, in the first half of the novel, before considering its gradual demise when, in the second half, the world that made him falls apart. The 'Mannering case', the 'Trevor Richardson affair', the 'Roger Parker case', the 'Studley Grange business', the 'dispiriting crimes' in Coring – Banks's narrative is studded with asides that refer to his professional activities (Orphans 9, 19, 29, 31, 113, 134). What is most significant about these remarks is the casual manner in which they happen to come up. This serves to endow the whole business of detection with an aura of familiarity, not just suggesting that all these 'affairs' are rather incidental – in the way no English gentleman would ever credit a professional activity with great importance – but also producing a gentle air of knowingness, as if we should naturally know of them. In fact, beside the names or headlines, we hardly learn a single detail about any of the cases mentioned. No crime is ever reported, no plot revealed, no suspect identified – all such matters are strictly peripheral but in their background situation they remain distinctly present. Throughout the first half of the novel, we learn a great deal more about Banks's social aspirations or romantic interests than about the actual job he is supposed to have been doing all the time. The English detective, then, presents himself here as a figure loosely associating with the more fashionable circles of society, while seeing about the ugly incidents that occur at its side and discreetly clearing up their messy bits. As readers or listeners to his meandering monologue we are necessarily drawn into this circle, as if we shared the social world whose goings-on Banks's confidential voice alludes to. However, we must surely note that this detective figure, in the context where he acts and works, already appears to be anachronistic if not obsolete. This is pointed out the first time Banks reveals his vocational interest publicly. Early in the narrative, the summer he 'came down from Cambridge' (Orphans 3), he tells us about a London society gathering to which his well connected schoolfriend helpfully takes him along. There he strikes up conversation with an elderly gentleman who, in a gesture of benevolence, suggests to give him introductions to some people so as to launch him properly on a career. He plans to be 'a private consultant', Banks announces. To which the

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unnamed gentleman, spokesman of the upper-class voice of the period, replies: 'Naturally, naturally. [...] Not interested in museums, by any chance? Chap over there, known him for years. Museums. Skulls, relics, that kind of thing' (Orphans 15). Banks's chosen term, just as his chosen role in life, aligns himself immediately with Sherlock Holmes, who boasts to Watson that he is 'a private detective', supposedly 'the only one in the world'.15 This private and exclusive status is an essential precondition for Holmes's celebrated pose, partly artist, partly scientist and thoroughly a dandy.16 Self-employed, selfeducated and always indepedent, the classic sleuth can operate in a clear distance, often clear opposition, to the ordinary agents of the state such as the dull-witted police inspectors that form stock-figures in the genre. It is this status which Banks desires to attain but which, in the eyes of contemporary society, is little more than a Museum piece, a 'relic' of the times gone by, henceforth an object of historical study like the old 'skulls' that promise a more adequate career. Ishiguro's novel, therefore, presses us to view the detective figure in the 1930s like the collector's item of a dying species. The Golden Age of English mystery, whose personnel and setting it so powerfully conjures up, appears to be merely gilded. In the context of the novel, Banks resolves to give up his ambition for the kind of fashionable reputation that might turn him into a celebrity. Instead, he comes to realise 'that in this country, detectives tend not to participate in society gatherings' but rather 'tend to be earnest, often reclusive individuals who are dedicated to their work' (Orphans 12). Dedicating himself to this work ethic, he pursues his professional calling and, for all we learn from the constant references to his successful cases, soon makes a splendid name for himself in the wider world. Yet before examining the peculiar mode of his investigations, I would like to consider the point just established: the belatedness of the detective figure. This is not simply a matter of the thirty odd years between's Banks's appearance and the activities of Sherlock Holmes. TP

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Doyle, The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, I, p. 160. See Werner v. Koppenfels, 'Mysterium und Methode: Sherlock Holmes als Heldenfigur des Fin de siècle', in Die 'Nineties: Das englische Fin de siècle zwischen Dekadenz und Sozialkritik, ed. by Manfred Pfister and Bernd SchulteMiddelich (Munich: Francke, 1983), p. 168.


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For even Conan Doyle's hero is troubled by this point. In the very scene, quoted at the opening of my paper, where he first explains his scientific principles he goes on to admit some deep dissatisfaction: 'There are no crimes and no criminals in these days,' he said, querulously. 'What is the use of having brains in our profession. I know well that I have it in me to make my name famous. No man lives or has ever lived who has brought the same amount of study and of natural talent to the detection of crime which I have done. And what is the result? There is no crime to detect, or, at most, some bungling villainy with a motive so transparent that even a Scotland Yard official can see through it.'17 T

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Transparency is useless, darkness must prevail, so that Holmes can show his mettle. For the exceptional professional, life and crime are far too unexceptional 'in these days'. Crucially, then, the archetypal English investigator already feels he comes too late, as if visiting a museum where the glorious cases that could have made his name are kept only as memories. The motif recurs and – paradoxically – still intensifies in the course of Holmes's career. 'The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans' (1895), for instance, opens with Holmes in a state of anger and ennui – 'The London criminal is certainly a dull fellow', he says looking out of the window: 'This great and sombre stage is set for something more worthy than that' – restlessly hoping for some criminal event 'of interest' that might rescue him from painful inaction.18 In the fin de siècle period where all chance for real challenge seems to be exhausted, where the blank spaces of mystery are rapidly diminishing and dullness everywhere takes over, the detective operates after his prime, re-staging one last time a heroic quest for justice and enlightenment. In the world of modernity, therefore, the constitutive absence which Todorov identified as the core of the whodunit turns out to be the absence of adventure. It surely is significant that most Sherlock Holmes stories feature the word 'Adventure' in their title. This indicates how the late-Victorian English genre provisionally restores a sense of what is missing and offers hopes for glorious feats and individual action to help save the world. These are the hopes activated also in Christopher Banks's TP

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Doyle, The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, I, p. 162. Doyle, The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, II, p. 432.

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noble sentiments: 'I had always understood', he tells us of his calling, 'that the task of rooting out evil in its most devious forms, often just when it is to go about unchecked, is a crucial and solemn undertaking' (Orphans 30). Such a heroic view of his vocation is constantly reiterated. But in view of the belatedness just analysed, we understand that the detective's role, in fact, is rooted in nostalgia for a romantic world, a world of individualism and masculine perseverance that has passed away (if it, indeed, ever existed). Against this background we also understand the reason for the detective's distanced role as outsider and loner,19 often stated but seldom explained: for all his modern scientific credits, he brings home an ethos and excitement deriving from things past – or things exotic – that can still challenge independent spirits, while all around the inhibitions of modern institutional life take over. Thus, the working of the detective genre ingeniously combines domestic with colonial issues as it investigates civilization and its discontents. In this perspective, Ishiguro's transcultural text centring on the expatriate figure conducts a laboratory experiment to dissect the cultural anatomy of the English detective. The only time we see Banks at his work distinctly supports this impression. Here, he investigates 'the Studley Grange business' in Oxfordshire; we find him with his magnifying glass, tool and emblem of his trade, searching for clues in 'the walled garden – containing the pond where Charles Emory's body had been discovered – in the lower grounds of the house' (Orphans 31). Again, we never learn any details of the actual case – who on earth was Charles Emory? – but the kind of detail we are given is significant enough. To begin with, the 'walled garden' is a curious feature, quite unusual for an English country house where the open grounds would provide ample space for the type of landscape garden generically known as 'English'. The enclosed or walled garden, by contrast, is known from quite a different context: in the monastic culture of medieval Christianity the hortus conclusus manifests a precious cultivated spot, amid the barbarous or arid wilderness – hence its iconographic function in the cult of Marian veneration, where it signifies the precious power of virginity as well as a Garden of Eden. In the literary tradition, too, the 'walled garden' has long TP

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Suerbaum, Krimi, p. 52.


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functioned as a topos, and it is in this sense, I suggest, not in the sense of descriptive realism, that we should understand it here. The occurrence of this literary topos early on in Ishiguro's novel, I would argue, gives us the first and decisive clue to locate Banks's tale not in a realistic world, but in the enchanted world of literature, a world constructed through traditional texts. This detective's work, we should acknowledge, is placed at one remove from actualities, carefully cultivated behind walls of tradition. Even more significant, however, is the piece of equipment that he uses to perform his task, the magnifying glass, a highly over-determined object that also serves to determine its bearer and so merits close attention. Early in the narrative, Banks records its history as follows. It was given to him on the occasion of his fourteenth birthday, a few years after he arrived in England from Shanghai. Two friends from boarding school had taken him 'to a teashop in the village' to have 'scones and cream cakes', before they suddenly produced the gift-wrapped package that contained the magnifying glass, which he has kept ever since. Even at the present point of storytelling, some fifteen years later, it is with him: I have it here now before me. Its appearance has changed little over the years; it was on that afternoon already well travelled. I remember noting this, along with the fact that it was very powerful, surprisingly weighty, and that the ivory handle was chipped all down one side. I did not notice until later – one needs a second magnifying glass to read the engraving – that it was manufactured in Zurich in 1887. (Orphans 8)

This moment magnifies the material as well as the symbolic determinants that shape this figure. The glass is 'well travelled' and so links the current owner to an ancestry of unknown and yet familiar figures, perhaps even transferring onto him some of the cultural prestige of its global travels. The material of the handle and the year engraved in it strongly recall colonial relations with the notorious trade in ivory, while the circular gesture – reading the engraving with a second magnifying glass – suggest the circuitous ways in which such relations are to be detected. The gift of the glass, then, should be seen less as a personal than a cultural favour bestowed on Christopher. The gift performs not only his premature inauguration into the detective's role which, as the friends anticipate, would be his own in future; it also

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performs his late initiation into the Englishness which, as we learn, has never really been his own although he was naturally supposed to share it. Here, in a rite de passage on his fourteenth birthday, complete with tea and scones and English country life, the expatriate orphan is symbolically adopted into mother country culture and, as a token of this act, receives the tool by which he is to make his way. However, the identity conferred on him long predates his personal career and, in a sense, outlives him. The magnifying glass is, as he says himself, part of a 'popular myth' (Orphans 9), a myth we might add about the powers of science, of sight, of knowledge and rationality to restore order to the world. Banks's further fate puts this myth to the test and leads to its complete erosion, by confronting it with some of the more violent developments in late-imperial twentieth-century politics. At the climax of this confrontation we observe how Banks wields his magnifying glass like a sacred weapon or a charm, as though he tries to re-enchant a terrible reality with the old certainties of myth. But the weapon has gone blunt and only shows how useless his professional role is in the world he finds himself. Towards the ending of the novel, his quest has led him into the interior of Shanghai, brutally devastated by Japanese attacks, where he stumbles across the remains of a Chinese family butchered by the bomb raids. A little girl takes him to a mutilated woman's corpse, whom he at once inspects: 'perhaps out of habit as much as anything else, I bent down and began to examine her through the glass. Her stump looked peculiarly clean; the bone protuding out of the flesh was a shiny white, almost as though someone had been polishing it' (Orphans 272). The gross comparison suggests the absurd incongruity between his polished pose and the dire situation. And yet it is the only pose he is able to adopt. This should not be construed as a problem of character psychology but, I think, as demonstrating the problematic persistence of a cultural myth. Ishiguro shows us his protagonist, in the helpful phrase of a reviewer, 'as a man deformed into genre'.20 These deformations include Banks's faith in the investigative powers symbolised by the magnifying glass and resulting from the literary models which he follows and whose relevance the novel undermines. When, in the TP

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scene just cited, he is surprised by a Japanese soldier, he identifies himself with the words: 'My name is Banks, Christopher Banks' (Orphans 274), thus citing the identificatory formula of yet another gentleman from popular English mythology, as if to signal that he, too, is meant to save the world. His Sherlock Holmesian glass just like the James Bond-mannerism, mainly serve to show the literary ancestry of Ishiguro's detective: this orphan has been parented by English books.

III Ishiguro's literary negotiations with the heritage of Sherlock Holmes is not really a singular case. In an unbroken tradition beginning in the 1880s, many stories have been published by writers other than Doyle who use the figure he created for their own creative purposes. The popularity of this peculiar genre around the character of Holmes is widely documented. As two recent researchers remark, 'the writing of pastiches and parodies began within five years of the first Sherlock Holmes story being published. It blossomed during the whole of the twentieth century and, remarkably, it flourishes even more today'.21 In order therefore to appreciate the critical edge of Ishiguro's version and, more fundamentally, to gauge its particular potential as a postcolonial Sherlock Holmes postmortem, we need to think more carefully about the cultural strategies at work in Arthur Conan Doyle and the mystery tradition. Despite his French-American literary ancestry, briefly noted at the outset, Sherlock Holmes is generally perceived as quintessentially English – a point on which almost all readers agree. Werner von Koppenfels observes his status as a national hero and embodiment of Englishness;22 Lesli J. Favor notes Conan Doyle's constant assertion of 'the eminence of English over the Other-than-English' and concludes that 'Holmes is pure English';23 Patrick Brantlinger, in his wellTP

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Peter Ridgway Watt and Joseph Green, The Alternative Sherlock Holmes: Pastiches, Parodies, and Copies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), p. 1. Koppenfels, 'Mysterium und Methode', p. 177. Lesli J. Favor, 'The Foreign and the Female in Arthur Conan Doyle: Beneath the

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known study of nineteenth-century British literature and imperialism, singles out the Sherlock Holmes stories as popular examples for the same discourse of light and darkness that also, among others, shaped Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) and encodes some of the deep anxieties in English culture at the time: 'Sherlock Holmes cannot tolerate a mystery without solving it, nor can Doyle: the darkness of this world will soon disperse, and light, radiating especially from England and Sussex, will be universal'.24 The collusion of Doyle's fiction with contemporary colonial discourse is indeed brought home with the often xenophobic, not to say racist, overtones in portraying the illustrious villains whose machinations Holmes uncovers, frequently stereotyped figures reflecting notions about 'Southerners' or 'Easteners' or Germans in late-Victorian England. And yet the issue is more complex; the villains are not simply 'foreign' nor Holmes 'pure' English – whatever this might mean. As I would like to suggest, Holmes tirelessly fights against foreign elements threatening to corrupt society, but the real threat he must fight lies in the tacit understanding that English society is so vulnerable and exposed to these dark influences as a consequence of its imperial projects. The anxieties of otherness at home arise from the colonial connections. Oriental connections are a case in point, especially relevant in view of Ishiguro's novel. At their very first encounter, recorded in 'A Study in Scarlet', Holmes surprises Watson with the statement: 'You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive'.25 In the context of the story, this serves to establish Holmes's legendary powers of deduction enabling him to reconstruct whole life-stories from the minutiae he observes. But in the cultural context where the narrative is set, the statement equally reveals the background setting of a colonial outside, an Oriental space whence characters are on occasion summonned or whither they can be dismissed, just as the plot demands. At the opening of the founding story, Watson tells us that he, as an assistant surgeon with a regiment in India, had indeed served in the second TP

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Candy Coating', English Literature in Transition (1880–1920), 43.4 (2000), pp. 398-399. Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830– 1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 252. Doyle, The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, I, p. 150.


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Afghan war and was seriously wounded in the battle of Maiwand.26 Henceforth, the Orient, including China and the Far East, figures throughout many of the tales in the conventional double function: as a place of danger and attraction, a training site for English gentlemen and a stronghold of the evil forces aiming at his life. In 'The Adventure of the Speckled Band' (1883), for instance, Doyle's own favourite story from the canon, the villain Roylott executes his murderous plots with the assistance of an Indian snake which he has trained to creep through the nooks and crannies of an English country house. In 'The Man with the Twisted Lip' (1887), the investigation takes Holmes to a notorious opium den in the London East End, an Oriental surrogate in the metropolitan topography, which turns out to be a place of transformation, disguise and dangerous corruption of a middle-class husband. In 'The Adventure of the Dying Detective' (1887) the fatal and contagious illness which Holmes appears to have contracted when working on a case in Rotherhithe 'near the river' is introduced as 'a coolie disease from Sumatra', thus confirming Holmes's sinister description of the Orient: 'There are many problems of disease, many strange pathological possibilities, in the East, Watson'.27 And yet, this East is simultaneously the place of travel, power, domination and colonial adventure on which Victorian Britain built imperial claims. This ambivalence is richly registered in Doyle's fiction, even in the examples mentioned. The spread of 'a coolie disease' in East London near the river is, of course, only the reverse side to the spread of colonial consumer goods – among them drugs like opium or cocaine, to which Holmes cultivates personal connections – showing the material connections between the metropolis and dependent territories which this same river, as the imperial waterway, provides and represents. Similarly, the opium den caters for the needs of many contemporary aesthetes and English gentlemen, like Wilde's Dorian Gray, whose refined tastes demand both the pleasure and the pain derived from opium and the Eastern trade.28 And the Oriental snake that Dr Roylott TP

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sends into the paradise of English country life, in fact, is easily revealed as pure projection: as a biological species, the 'Indian swamp adder' does not exist;29 besides, snakes have no hearing, so no snake could ever have been trained like Roylott's to obey an acoustic signal – an idea derived entirely from the fantastic repertoire of Oriental tales and snake charming. Be this as it may, the crucial point is that Doyle's ruthless villain Dr Roylott, holder of Indian animals and dark associate of the gypsies, effectively operates on the basis of what Holmes calls his 'Eastern training'.30 For it is this notion of the East as a vast English training ground and obligatory starting point for a professional career that is not just manifest in Dr Watson's own Afghan experience but more famously expressed in Disraeli's Tancred with the words: 'The East is a career'.31 Ishiguro's novel, we can now see, leads us into the backstage area of classic English crime fiction. This Sherlock Holmes rewriting does not simply add or enlarge or continue the familiar narratives, but turns their fictional topography around and questions the kind of familiarities on which they found themselves. In this way, his project sets up a more radical alternative to the canonical versions than the kind of stories Watt and Green refer to as 'the alternative Sherlock Holmes'.32 When We Were Orphans, by contrast, works in the same way as do postcolonial strategies, i.e. rewriting English classics with the aim to historicise, localise or ironise their fictions.33 For decades, following Conan Doyle's example, English crime writing has used Oriental backdrops and Chinese characters as stock figures of evil. In the period after the Great War, especially the work of Edgar Wallace provides many such examples for their unbroken popularity. Whether in the figure of the dumb Chinese servant in The Green Archer (1923) or in the ingenious coup uncovered in the The Daffodil Mystery (1920), where cunning drug dealers hide the goods they smuggle inside artificial flowers, or in the drama of inheritance and kidnapping TP

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See Doyle, The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, I, p. 266. Doyle, The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, I, p. 262. Epigraph to Said's Orientalism. See Watt and Green, The Alternative Sherlock Holmes. See Tobias Döring, Chinua Achebe und Joyce Cary: Ein postkoloniales Rewriting englischer Afrika-Fiktionen (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1996).


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in The Yellow Snake (1926), China is invariably confirmed as treacherous territory and a bulwark pitted against English culture. However, in the perspective established through a postcolonial critique we note at once that this simply reveals again the downside of imperial business. The daffodil drug dealers, above all, smuggling their goods from China inside the epitome of Englishness, only repeat – in reverse direction – the large-scale British importation of drugs into China calculated to corrupt and weaken a whole population, a historical event known since the 1840s as the Opium War and still topical in the early twentieth century where Ishiguro's Shanghai plot is set. In fact, the code-name 'Yellow Snake' by which the most powerful and elusive double agent between the Chinese-British frontlines of Shanghai is known in When We Were Orphans, sounds like an immediate reference to the title of the Wallace novel. In this way, Ishiguro's rewriting collects and recollects, cites or displays many of the stock features from the colonial archive of crime fiction in order to recontextualise them in new ways. As mentioned in the previous section, Ishiguro's method lies in placing the familiar figure of the gentleman detective into the broils of twentieth-century history, confronting him with the atrocities of the 1937 Sino-Japanese war and the invasion of Shanghai. This historical prelude to the larger invasions and atrocities which would soon engulf the world is here recorded in the most curious and telling ways. For example, when Banks arrives in Shanghai in September 1937, he joins the fashionable ballroom parties in the Palace Hotel where the current political events form a marginal subject of dinner table conversation and an object of bemused observation from the hotel's French windows. Banks is immediately handed opera glasses to survey the bloody battle apparently just raging in the harbour, 'but the focus was entirely wrong for me'; eventually he manages 'to see various boats still going about their normal business right next to the fighting' (Orphans 160). Through such a bizarre combination of 'normal business' with military action, his view through the opera glasses perceives the historical spectacles of violence in surely a wrong focus: as entertainment for a class of distant onlookers whose privileged position, however, will soon be undermined. And yet it would be equally wrong to assume that Ishiguro's focus on Shanghai or his portrayal of local characters and Chinese history

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were somehow more 'authentic' or in any way invested with greater cultural authority. Such notions would be quite misleading. Ishiguro, after all is not a Shanghai nor a Chinese writer who could be claimed to approach local realities with the presumed privilege of 'inside' views (however problematic such a notion generally is). On the contrary, he works from a Japanese-English position and tells his entire story through the eyes and voice of an adopted English narrator. Apparently, he has not even visited the modern city to do research or gather impressions of its flavour,34 so that his Shanghai is entirely a textual reconstruction from available sources. As a consequence, the novel reproduces, rather than subverts, several prevalent stereotypes, for instance about Chinese characters, many of whom occupy just such a marginal position and feature in the same way as in English genre fiction. But this, precisely, is the point. By letting his protagonist perpetuate these fictions Ishiguro exposes them as fictions and reveals the strategies in which they have long been mediated through literary texts. The opera-like view of military action, the gaps and inconsistencies in Banks's narrative, the fallacies and absences around which he construct his tale, constantly remind us of the principle constructedness of all colonial crime story. The novel's evident pastiche and literary bricolage, which constantly perpetuates preexisting stories, thus undermine the classic detective's role as master of original story telling. Try as he might, Christopher Banks always finds himself in situations where the focus and the framing are somehow 'entirely wrong'. Not unlike his early modern namesake Christopher Columbus, pioneer and prototype of colonial discourses, he never seems to realise quite where he has arrived. As a marker for these continuing mystifications, his missing parents play a crucial part. Their unresolved fate functions as the central mystery that drives the plot and leads Banks back to his remembered childhood home, where he should launch the large investigation that is to reunite him with his family. This long-expected operation does not just form the climax and conclusive ending to his Holmesian aspirations; in some way, it also forms the first beginning TP

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of his vocational training. Since his father's disappearance, we learn, Banks has constantly indulged in fantasies of restoration: first in the childhood games with his Japanese friend Akira – 'day after day we invented and played out endless variations on the theme of my father's rescue' (Orphans 107) –, then in the early ambitions during his time at the English boarding school and, eventually, in his professional activities as a detective. The novel leaves no doubt that this professional role has been adopted and translated from Conan Doyle's fiction and that the missing parents function as the central absence which propels Banks's whole career, constantly prompting him to develop compensatory scenarios as if to forestall the completion of his quest. It is the loose ends of his family history which he feels compelled to tie up. So, in both senses of the term, he is determined to take on the detective's role and provide a happy ending to the incompleted story of his parents' lives. In Ishiguro's rewriting, then, the classic investigator, cult figure and defining mark of Englishness, mainly struggles to define his own place and identity. To analyse this process we must look more closely at the steps and stages of his quest. Significantly enough, his professional search begins in the British Museum, central storehouse of the kind of information that he needs to learn about the place where he grew up. He spends days of research in the Reading Room 'gathering material on the history of the opium trade in China', in which his father's firm had been involved (Orphans 63), and collects topical newspaper articles that he receives from 'a correspondent' in Shanghai. Whereas the archives of Shanghai, he later finds out, 'are in chaos' (Orphans 207), the imperial archive in the metropolis promises to offer precisely what he seeks to reconstruct peripheral histories. Ishiguro here highlights the archival function of the central library, also analysed by Thomas Richards, as the 'interface between knowledge and the state', an increasingly important function for the running of the empire: 'Preeminent among the knowledge-producing institutions of Empire, the British Museum was charged with the collection of classified knowledge, both ordered knowledge and, increasingly, secret knowledge'.35 However, the decisive clue that could have set Banks on the right trail TP

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Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fanstasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993), p. 15.

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– even if he does not realise this at first – is a newspaper cutting, the reverse side of which happens to show a photograph of Wang Ku (Orphans 114). It is this Chinese warlord, here introduced as, literally, belonging to the other side, who plays the decisive role in Banks's family mystery – although we only learn this crucial point at the end of Banks's failing search. The institutional knowledge classified, collected and accessible in the imperial archive, on which the celebrated detective relies, eventually turns out to be as questionable as the local Shanghai archives. With Banks's return to China, in the second half of the book, his family investigation enters into the operational phase while his narrative continues to give us an account of his adventures. But at the same time the narration takes on an increasingly surreal, dream-like quality, with extraordinary twists of plot, improbable encounters and ever more unlikely developments, so that we should be wary of its manifest content. Throughout the novel we have no other source of information to check the accuracy of what its homodiegetic and personalised narrator tells us. And yet there are sufficient signals in the text, I think, to question his reliability and read his tale, at least in the Shanghai parts, as a blend of childhood memories and fantasies, latent desires and wish-fulfilling elements. As soon as he comes back to Shanghai, for instance, almost three decades after his parents' disappearance and his departure for England, it seems to be a foregone conclusion that he will soon find their whereabouts and bring them home well and alive. The mere arrival of the celebrated detective appears, for everyone concerned, sufficient guarantee that now, at last, the world will be put right. As the local representative of the Shanghai Municipal Council puts it, 'you've come here to us in order to tie up the case once and for all. How marvellous! It's wonderful news!' (Orphans 155) His greeting shows how the detective is expected to perform the Aristotelian task of tying or tidying up all loose ends of the story. In a particularly absurd development, the Municipal Council is from now on constantly concerned to make arrangements for the welcoming ceremony by which the happy family reunion is to be publicly celebrated. The fact, however, that 'Jessfield Park' is chosen to stage this great event (Orphans 159), draws a direct link to Christopher's and Akira's early role play in which the same place figured as a venue to mark the triumph of the father's rescue (Orphans 111) – this point


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suggests that Banks's narrative has meanwhile returned to the childhood games which are now being re-imagined or re-lived. There is even a slight suggestion that his delirious tale of rescue might have been prompted by opium consumption: Inspector Kung, one of his local doubles and a witness he consults to identify his parents' prison tells him that he can best remember when indulging in a pipe (Orphans 217). In this way, all the traditional feats of analytic reason, encyclopedic memory and narrative conclusion which the English detective is supposed to bring about are here questioned or denied. Ironically, it is left to another character entirely to present the solution of the mystery and, in a replay of the classic narrative authority, provide a plausible, though deeply worrying conclusion to the Banks family saga. This character is 'Uncle Philip', a family friend well known to Christopher from childhood days and close associate of his mother's campaign against the opium trade. Towards the end, he turns to out be a man of several identities, a double agent, traitor, criminal and partner in the atrocious crime that the detective was supposed to solve. Instead, the detective's professional identity rapidly dissolves when 'Uncle Philip' now tells him the real story of his life and, at the same time, destroys his last self-sustaining fictions: But now do you see how the world really is? You see what made possible your comfortable life in England? How you were able to become a celebrated detective? A detective! What good is that to anyone? Stolen jewels, aristocrats murdered for their inheritance. Do you suppose that's all there is to contend with? Your mother, she wanted you to live in your enchanted world for ever. But it's impossible. In the end it has to shatter. (Orphans 294)

Here, finally, the Sherlock Holmes identity, conferred onto this orphan, shatters. The classic role pattern disintegrates. And this does not occur only in consequence of larger historical or outside developments: neither the 1937 Japanese invasion of Shanghai nor the rubble and the victimage resulting from the war could deter the English detective from pursuing his professional search. His ultimate devastation, rather, comes with the destruction of what Uncle Philip calls his 'enchanted world', the painful realisation that he owes his rise in English society to the fortune and benevolence of a Chinese warlord, i.e. the kind of person his professional duty would have been to fight. Thus, Christopher Banks comes into his true inheritance by losing all

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his cultural capital and former functions: the knowledge that is here restored to him robs him of his rationale. What remains for the concluding section of this paper is to assess the significance of Ishiguro's novel with regard to my leading question: what does it mean, in the context of contemporary debates on anglophone literatures, to disenchant the figure of the English detective in such a radical, though subtle, manner?

IV Few readers, arguably, will come to this climactic moment of the novel, the speech just cited that reveals the secret family history, without immediately thinking of a similar concluding moment in a Victorian novel where the same kind of revelation shatters the narrator's illusions: Charles Dickens's Great Expectations (1860/61). As in Ishiguro's case, Dickens's protagonist is an orphan who has managed to carve out a social career for himself only to realise at the end that all his aspirations have been financed by a criminal, a former English convict now living in a colonial background space, Australia. The hero's name, moreover, is ironically echoed in Ishiguro's Philip – so that the links between the Victorian and the postcolonial novel are unmistakable. In addition, therefore, to the Conan Doyle connection centrally pursued with the detective figure, When We Were Orphans draws further intertextual connections to canonical English texts and repeatedly highlights their significance. When, for example, Banks is taken into custody, the Japanese Colonel driving him through devastated Shanghai reminisces about English landscape and literature as follows: 'England is a splendid country [...]. Calm, dignified. Beautiful green fields. I still dream of it. And your literature. Dickens, Thackeray. Wuthering Heights. I am especially fond of your Dickens' (Orphans 276). If, as I argued at the outset, classic detective fiction draws on the power of story telling and relies on the reality of stories, such a self-conscious use of literary clichés must have special relevance in Ishiguro's project. Unlike its central protagonist, When We Were Orphans is highly aware of cultural ancestries and literary memories. Banks is constructed as a character who never quite remembers fully or reliably


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what seems to have defined him. By contrast, as the cited speech exemplifies, Ishiguro's novel constantly remembers English cultural icons and registers their influence while, at the same time, critically reconsidering their present use and standing. In particular, through its intertextual strategies of clear citation, oblique reference, distant echo or allusion, the text both seeks and denies it own affiliation to familiar writing, as if to request and at the same time to reject adoption into the canon of Eng. Lit.: the novel draws on all such pre-existing literary stories only to redraw them. Edward Said has famously argued that 'the world of high modernism' was characterised by pervasive difficulties of filiation, so that Western societies came under pressure to seek different ways of producing or securing social bonds so as to substitute for traditional family ties.36 These were cultural techniques which he describes as 'affiliation' and paradigmatically identifies in the teaching and studying of literature. It was through the institutional production of a social network, manifest in a shared repertoire of literary references, that such an 'affiliative order' was created in the attempt to restore social authority.37 And it is through the pastiche and subtle parody of these affiliative moves in literature that Ishiguro's novel, when revisiting the social culture of high modernism, records its demise. In taking up the literary bond with English culture, When We Were Orphans is also taking it apart. The title trope is crucial for this project. The figure of the 'orphan', as Said's earlier argument suggests, has traditionally represented the search for substitute affiliations and is, in fact, traditionally represented in many classic novels where a 'whole range of characters' are based upon this premise: 'orphans, outcasts […], solitaries and deranged types whose background is either rejected, mysterious or unknown'.38 Precisely because given family ties are lost, obscure or severed in these cases, they press towards affiliative orders. The figure of Banks, too, works in this way. In a recent reading of Ishiguro's fiction, Shao-Pin Luo makes just this point, noting that his protagoTP

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Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 17. Said, World, p. 19. Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985 [1975]), p. 92.

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nists 'all construct pseudo-identities for themselves, performing roles they perceive as required of them by their adoptive society' and, in their quest for community, 'try to appropriate substitute familial affiliations'.39 Ishiguro's disenchanted version of the English detective can well be analysed along these lines suggested by Said's reading of Dickens. In Great Expectations, Said says, 'Pip situates himself at and affiliates himself with the centre of several family groups, families whose authority he challenges by trying to institute his own through the great expectations that finally destroy him'.40 Likewise, Luo says, Banks creates a 'fantasy world' and constructs an 'adoptive family', a family of orphans defined not by blood but by affiliation,41 thus raising the issue of social belonging. But there may even be more to it. The trope of orphanhood has also special bearings on the positioning of postcolonial literature. Banks's inconclusive search for his missing parents ironically corresponds to the novel's intertextual strategies, as if seeking affiliation to an English parent text. In his young years, the expatriate boy Christopher declares to 'Uncle Philip' that he would like to 'copy' him at times so as to 'learn to do things the English way'; to which the avuncular authority replies that his father ought to be 'the one to have this great privilege' (Orphans 77). On the level of narrative, the little boy's desire for emulation and cultural assimilation is later realised in the upper-class English voice in which the mature narrator articulates himself. But on the level of the cultural discourse in which Ishiguro's novel takes a part, this strategy of copying or imitating English modes rather serves to deconstruct the paternal models imitated. James Wood observes that 'Christopher's world seems to have been borrowed from an English novel', so that the narrator is just 'producing a masquerade of a style that is already something of a masquerade'.42 That is to say, Ishiguro's highly accomplished stylistic pastiche not only reveals that this writer has indeed learned to do things the English way, but also reveals that these ways are cultural techniques to be taken on, rather TP

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Shao-Pin Luo, '"Living the Wrong Life": Kazuo Ishiguro's Unconsoled Orphans', The Dalhousie Review, 83.1 (2003), p. 58. Said, Beginnings, pp. 96-97. Luo, 'Living the Wrong Life', pp. 59-60. Wood, 'The Unconsoled', p. 47.


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than essential features of natural filiation. Just as the vision of family order that Ishiguro's detective represents turns out to be a vision of acquired familiarity and borrowing, the version of English fiction which Ishiguro presents here disenchants the authority of Englishness and robs it of its privileged aura: 'Uncle Philip', at the end, turns out to have been 'Yellow Snake'. What remains are literary fantasies. The final re-encounter between Banks and his surviving mother bears this out. In a post-war epilogue to the main time-frame of the novel, he travels to Hong Kong in the 1950s to visit Rosedale Manor, a Christian hospice where he meets an amnesiac old woman who does not recognise him as her son. But what could have been a moving scene of filial return and reconnection, again seems to replay the ending of a literary pre-text, a 1930s English mystery novel about secret sojourns in the Far East, James Hilton's popular Lost Horizon (1933). Here, too, the final focus in the epilogue is on a failing reencounter with an old woman in a Christian hospice and on an Englishman with failing memory in Shanghai. Even at its concluding moment, then, When We Were Orphans draws attention to the many ways in which it situates itself in existing literary topographies and recycles English fantasies of transcultural connection. For all these reasons, the novel's obsession with orphanhood and parenthood works also as a critical engagement with the discourse about postcolonial writing and the issue where it might be situated in international cultural fields. The family metaphor, after all, has sometimes been applied to characterise the many branches of contemporary anglophone writing. But the sheer proliferation of intertextual allusions rather turns When We Were Orphans into a network of affiliations in which all social bonds are matters of construction and adoption instead of given family links. Thus dissecting some prevailing cultural myths, Ishiguro's mystery novel performs a postmortem of the English detective's telling power as well as of postcolonial story telling. If the orphan serves to figure questions of belonging, this figure also serves to question the categories used for contemporary writers such as Ishiguro. As Brian Finney argues, 'in Ishiguro's fiction to be orphaned, to be deprived of parental security, becomes a trope for transnational identity, for doing without fatherland or mother-

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land'.43 And yet, the crucial point resulting from Ishiguro's critical dissection seems to me that it finally challenges us to rethink the identity of the paternal figure from which his central character derives. Despite the signs of Englishness that constantly surround this figure, Sherlock Holmes is far from clear in his own cultural positioning. Perhaps it is just Conan Doyle's insistance in making him appear to be such a complete English gentleman and dandy which marks him out as questionable. 'Was Sherlock Holmes's Mother Indian?', a contributor to the Baker Street Journal asks, basing this hypothesis on 'Holmes's reticence about his family, his behaviour patterns, his profound knowledge of India, and his physiognomy'.44 Speculations apart, it is clearly suggestive that Holmes's own family background is never really established in any of the tales – a remarkable gap in the fictionally constructed world which sets him up as a mysterious outsider, a figure of unknown cultural origin and uncertain social place. For all the curious efforts – in the English heritage industry no less than in twentieth-century literature – to validate the life and legacy of this character and its extraordinary cultural enchantment, Ishiguro's rewriting of the English detective, in the last analysis, has served to confirm Dr Watson's wisdom: such individuals do not exist outside of stories. TP

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Finney, 'Figuring the Real'. Percy Phelps, 'Was Sherlock Holmes's Mother Indian?', Baker Street Journal, 49.1 (1999), p. 21; on the question of Sherlock Holmes's putative Indianness, see also the chapter by Suchitra Mathur in the present volume.

HOLMES'S INDIAN REINCARNATION: A STUDY IN POSTCOLONIAL TRANSPOSITION Suchitra Mathur

It was in 1903 that Sherlock Holmes first enacted his return from the land of no-return.1 Of course, within the framework of scientific rationality already well-established for detective fiction, this miraculous return of the dead had to be explained away in an appropriate manner – the return, it turns out, was not from the world beyond life, but only from the world beyond western civilisation. In the years when England mourned the death of the 'first criminal agent in Europe', Holmes, we are told, had been 'in Tibet, and amus[ing himself] by visiting Lhassa, and spending some days with the head lama…then passed through Persia, looked in at Mecca, and paid a short but interesting visit to the Khalifa at Khartoum'.2 For a man who, in the sixty adventures penned by Conan Doyle, never stepped outside Europe, this is certainly an impressive itinerary, and yet it is incomplete in its record of the places that, by the end of the nineteenth century, were already marked by his presence. He was, for instance, well-known in India where the works of Conan Doyle were present in public libraries since the 1890s.3 Nor have they ever been out of TP

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'The Adventure of the Empty House' – the Conan Doyle story in which he brought Holmes back to life – was published in 1903. The narrative itself, however, is set in 1894, exactly two years after Holmes's disappearance over the Reichenbach Falls in 'The Final Problem'. I have chosen to highlight the former date because my concern throughout this paper is with the (re)production and reception of this Conan Doyle character rather than with the actual content of the Holmesian canon itself. Arthur Conan Doyle, 'The Adventure of the Empty House', in The Complete Sherlock Holmes, 2 vols (New York: Doubleday, 1930), II, p. 488. All subsequent references to Holmes stories will be from this two-volume edition. Priya Joshi, In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in

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circulation since then. Holmes has remained immortal in India, a constant object of admiring consumption, imitation, and adaptation. Is this continuous subcontinental obsession with the Great Detective the mark of a colonial hangover, the inevitable slavishness of Naipaulian 'mimic men' who yearn to embrace, however belatedly, the discourses of science and modernity that underpin the Holmesian canon? Or can certain forms taken by this obsession be seen to embody postcolonial resistance, a subversive Bhabhian mimicry, that destabilises the continuing ideological hegemony of colonial modernity in our 'globalised' contemporary world? In this essay, I would like to answer these questions through an examination of a Bengali avatar of Sherlock Holmes – his reincarnation as Feluda in the stories written by Satyajit Ray.4 In her meticulously researched essay on the origins of detective fiction in India, Francesca Orsini identifies the detective novel as one of those genres that 'was brought into India 'ready-made', without the intellectual and historical substratum that had generated it in Europe'.5 This total lack of any indigenous roots, one could argue, makes detective fiction a colonial imposition, and its adoption by Indian writers, clearly a case of copy-cat reproduction wherein 'black pens' write 'white texts' that have no identity of their own.6 A quick look at the TP

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India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 64. Though Joshi does not focus specifically on detective fiction in her investigation of the history of the 'English book' in India, it is significant that all lists of library books, as well as the first books to be published by Macmillan specifically for colonial consumption, include not just Conan Doyle, but also Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins. Detective fiction, both of the sensational variety as well as from the Holmesian canon, was thus clearly popular in India almost from the time of its initial appearance in Britain. Satyajit Ray's Feluda stories appeared originally in Sandesh, a children's magazine he edited, from 1965 to 1992. In this paper, I will be using the English translations of these stories which have appeared in seven separate collections of stories between 1989-1998. Francesca Orsini, 'Detective Novels: A Commercial Genre in Nineteenth-century North India', in India's Literary History: Essays on the Nineteenth Century, ed. by Stuart Blackburn and Vasudha Dalmia (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), p. 436. In his path-breaking psychological study of colonialism's impact on both the coloniser and the colonised, Black Skin/White Masks, trans. by Charles Lam

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Feluda stories appears to bear out this claim. In both the portrayal of the detective figure and in their narrative emplotment, these stories closely imitate the original Holmes canon. From his physical description as an exceptionally tall and agile man, to his uncanny detective powers based on meticulous observation and encyclopedic knowledge in specialised areas, Feluda is Holmes incarnate. In fact, Feluda himself frequently invokes Holmes as his model.7 And this pseudoHolmes has his own substitute Watson in his cousin Tapesh, who is his faithful companion and the recorder of all Feluda's adventures. Even the cases themselves echo those handled by the Great Detective; not only do the problems invariably focus on restoration of property and/or identity rather than murder, but the clients also usually belong to the Bhadralok, the anglicised Bengali middle class that most closely resembles the largely bourgeois clientele of Holmes. Are the Feluda stories then merely 'mimic' texts condemned by their own belatedness to forever occupy a secondary position in the world of detective fiction? Once again, Ray's own statements appear to support this claim: TP

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Markmann (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1967), Frantz Fanon begins with the startling statement that 'For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white' (p. 10). A little later he goes on to explain this claim in detail: 'Every colonized people – in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality – finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, the culture of the mother country. The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards' (p. 18). This notion of slavish mimicry is given fictional elaboration in V. S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men. Though scattered references to Sherlock Holmes can be found throughout the Feluda canon, it is when Feluda is actually in London, standing in Baker Street, that he most openly acknowledges his debt to the master: 'Guru, you showed us the way. If I am an investigator today, it is only because of you'. Satyajit Ray, 'Feluda in London', trans. by Gopa Majumdar, in The Mystery of the Pink Pearl: The Final Feluda Stories (New Delhi: Penguin, 1998), p. 160.

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When I wrote my first Feluda story, I scarcely imagined he would prove so popular that I would be forced to write a Feluda novel every year. To write a whodunit while keeping in mind a young readership is not an easy task, because the stories have to be kept 'clean' […] I hope adult readers will bear this in mind when reading these stories.8 TP

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This self-conscious categorisation of the Feluda stories as simple children's literature most clearly marks their postcolonial distance from the production of the metropolitan centre; native mimicry remains a childish counterpart of the mature English text. And yet, a closer reading of these stories reveals slippages, variations on the 'master' text, that problematise their status as merely poor copies that aspire to, but never quite achieve, identity with the original. As Bhabha points out, such ostensibly faulty mimesis, the 'same, but not quite' characteristic of native mimicry creates a 'double vision which in disclosing ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority'.9 Bhabha sees such mimicry as subversive, as a site of resistance that is 'not necessarily an act of political intention […but] the effect of an ambivalence produced within the rules of recognition of dominating discourses'.10 The slippages and variations that separate the Feluda stories form the Holmes canon can thus be read as signs of postcolonial questioning and re-visioning of canonical metropolitan detective fiction. This 'double vision' of mimicry is most evident in the process of naming itself. The detective-protagonist of Ray's stories is known as 'Feluda'. This, however, is not the name that appears on his formal visiting card that announces his profession as a private investigator. The name found there is 'Pradosh C. Mitter', the official given name of this central character who is nicknamed 'Feluda'.11 And even this nickTP

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Satyajit Ray, 'Foreword', in The Adventures of Feluda, trans. by Chitrita Banerji (New Delhi: Penguin, 1988), p. 8. Homi K. Bhabha, 'Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse', in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 88. Italics present in the original. Homi K. Bhabha, 'Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817', in The Location of Culture, p. 110. A nuanced analysis, though in fictional format, of this Indian practice of giving


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name is deceptive since it is actually composed of two parts – of a name and an honorific, 'felu' and 'da', where 'Felu' is the nickname and 'da' is a shortened form of 'dada' which is the title for older brother. 'Feluda', then, is the name given to the detective by his young narrator-cousin; it is a name that combines familial intimacy and respect, and one that is not used by any other character to address the detective in the stories. And yet, just as the Conan Doyle detective stories are known under the name of Holmes, Ray's detective oeuvre is known under the name of Feluda. For purposes of identification, then, Feluda is Holmes's native counterpart, his 'Other'. But this mirroring, this mimicry, can now be seen to be marked by slippages that cannot be shored up within a simple western Self vs. native Other binary. Instead, what emerges is 'the self and its doubling, the hybrid' wherein hybridity is defined as 'a problematic of colonial representation and individuation that reverses the effects of colonial disavowal, so that other 'denied' knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority'.12 In the case of Feluda, at least two different kinds of 'denied' knowledges underpin the hybrid. The name 'Feluda' foregrounds a familial intimacy that is studiously avoided in the portrayal of Holmes, the aloof and self-contained genius whose only family connection, his brother Mycroft, is mentioned just a few times in the entire canon. At the same time, by making the honorific 'da' an intrinsic part of the detective's name, the Feluda stories enforce an open acknowledgement of respect for the detective. This respect, of course, is also fully due, and duly accorded, to Holmes, but under the guise of being earned and voluntarily given, rather than automatically expected or demanded. Holmes's authority is ostensibly premised upon the idea of 'first among equals', on a notion of meritocracy that runs through the discourse of colonial modernity. No external social markers place Holmes above his fellow men; he is simply 'Holmes' to his 'Watson', whose respect for the detective is based on his inherent qualities and capabilities. Ray's detective, on the other hand, is accorded this respect through an external marker that aligns authority with familial TP

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each child two names – an official 'good' name, and an unofficial nickname – is found in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2004). Bhabha, 'Signs Taken for Wonders', p. 114.

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hierarchy rather than merit. But seen in the light of these previously 'denied' knowledges, the basis of Holmes's authority is rendered doubly ambiguous – not only is it made alien, non-familial, and thus estranged, but it is also stripped of its consensual appearance and its apparent premise of equality. Native mimicry thus undermines the alleged centrality, the unchallenged authority, of the Great Detective within the (post)colonial context. And in the process, Feluda emerges as not just a passive 'mimic man', but a mocking 'mimic' rival, an alternate centre of authority that is firmly rooted within the indigenous soil. The intimate native connection is equally evident in the epistemological and ontological frameworks that structure the Feluda stories. The mode of knowledge that usually dominates Holmesian detective fiction is scientific rationality. Detection, Holmes tells Watson, 'is, or ought to be, an exact science and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner'.13 It consists of a 'just sense of proportion' in determining the relative importance of different sorts of facts, in observation and deduction which together result in the 'analytical reasoning from effects to causes' which succeeds in unravelling a case.14 Detection, then, is the practical application of a form of knowledge that also frames Holmes's other activities – from his often malodorous chemical experiments to his monographs on subjects as varied as tobacco ash and the connections between hands and professions. Knowledge thus encompasses the physical world within an objective classificatory system encoded in specialised reference books that then become the new Bibles of the modern world. Following in Holmes's footsteps, Feluda too embraces this form of knowledge and its attendant methodology. From catching criminals by identifying cigarette butts and perfumes, to spending all his spare time reading books on topics as varied as Hindu mythology and the history of the circus, Feluda is clearly a convert of these new Bibles. The fact that he is frequently shown to be reading, and thereby collecting specialised knowledge from authoritative sources penned by others rather than authoring them himself (as Holmes does) may be seen as TP

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Arthur Conan Doyle, 'The Sign of Four', in The Complete Sherlock Holmes, I, p. 90. Doyle, 'The Sign of Four', p. 90.


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yet another sign of his secondariness, of the inevitable lag between the English original and the native copy. And yet, this very reading also creates a slippage, an intrusion of excess that cannot be contained by the original. Feluda's reading, as mentioned above, is not directed towards one goal; his thirst for knowledge is omnivorous and no subject is beyond his curiosity. At the beginning of 'The Golden Fortress', for example, we find Feluda reading a book on geometry, a subject that he discusses in some detail with Tapesh, but which then does not play any significant role in the ensuing detective narrative.15 The detailed discussion clearly places Feluda outside the category of 'desultory readers' who, according to Watson, 'are seldom remarkable for the exactness of their learning […since] no man burdens his mind with small matters unless he has some very good reason for doing so'.16 Holmes takes this utilitarian view of knowledge acquisition to its logical conclusion: TP

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I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it, there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.17 TP

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But Feluda's 'brain-attic' does appear to have elastic walls since his voracious reading on diverse subjects does not appear, in any way, to hamper his detective capabilities. In 'The Buccaneer of Bombay', for instance, we learn that Feluda's knowledge of popular Hindi films has allowed him to help his friend Lalmohan Ganguly write a bestseller

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Satyajit Ray, 'The Golden Fortress', trans. by Chitrita Banerji, in The Adventures of Feluda, pp. 9-10. Doyle, 'A Study in Scarlet', in The Complete Sherlock Holmes, I, pp. 20-21. Doyle, 'A Study in Scarlet', p. 21.

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that the Bombay film industry wants to make into a movie.18 In gratitude, Ganguly takes Feluda and Tapesh with him to Bombay, where, of course, Feluda is successful in solving a case of smuggling without any problem. The extraneous 'lumber' of popular culture does not, in any way, push out the needed furniture in this detective's brain. Furthermore, in the Feluda stories, the cases themselves frequently move out of the paradigm of scientific rationality. In 'The Golden Fortress', for example, Feluda is charged with finding a small boy who has willingly gone with a para-psychologist to find the golden fortress that he remembers from his previous life. Similarly, in 'The Mystery of Nayan', Feluda has the task of protecting a young boy who has an uncanny power with respect to numbers.19 In both cases, the criminals that Feluda helps to apprehend definitely belong to the material world, but in neither case does the resolution of the criminal case explain away the supra-rational powers attributed to the children in the first place. In fact, in 'The Golden Fortress' even the idea of para-psychology as a system of knowledge is not undermined in any way since no criminal intent is ultimately attached to the para-psychologist who first took the young boy on his journey of discovery. And further legitimacy is given to the non-rational by including towards the end of the narrative a description not only of an existent place that corresponds to the boy's visions, but also of indications that a buried treasure does indeed lie there, protected by the very peacocks that also played a major role in the boy's recollections of his past life. Such narratives provide a marked contrast to classic Holmes's tales such as The Hound of the Baskervilles where Holmes dismisses family legends as fairy tales and, while not denying the existence of 'the Father of Evil', claims his investigations to be confined to 'this [material] world'.20 He then goes on to prove his case by unmasking the 'hellish hound' as merely a large mastiff treated with a peculiar mixture of phosphorous. It is this total and unquestioning reduction of TP

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Satyajit Ray, 'The Buccaneer of Bombay', trans. by Chitrita Banerji, in The Adventures of Feluda, pp. 96-97. Satyajit Ray, 'The Mystery of Nayan', trans. by Gopa Majumdar, in Feluda's Last Case and Other Stories (New Delhi: Penguin, 1995), pp. 210-211. Doyle, 'The Hound of the Baskervilles', in The Complete Sherlock Holmes, II, p. 681.


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the real to the scientifically knowable, to a rationally proscribed world view, that is challenged by the Feluda stories. This expansion of the detective fiction world is paralleled in the Feluda stories by the expansion of the classic Holmes-Watson pair into a trio that includes Feluda, Tapesh, as well as Lalmohan Ganguly. The last named character was introduced by Ray in 1971, and is then found in almost all subsequent stories. Since Tapesh adequately fulfills the roles of both narrator and admiring foil to the Bengali detective, there is no obvious need for this third character. The inclusion of Lalmohan Ganguly is thus clearly a case of excess, of a self-proliferating mimicry that goes beyond the scope of the original colonial text. Rather appropriately, then, this third character is an author, a spinner of best-selling adventure tales with a larger-than-life hero whose exploits are a fantastic refraction of Feluda's 'real' work. And the creator of this James Bond-like superhero is himself known to his adoring public by the grandiose mythical pseudonym of Jatayu. Ganguly thus occupies a slippery position in the Feluda stories. Most obviously he joins Tapesh in acting as a foil to Feluda; while the young Tapesh plays the role of the aspiring neophyte, the much older Ganguly fulfills the part of the admiring baffoon, the comic relief whose utter incompetence allows readers to experience a sense of superiority even as they are constantly lagging behind the genius of Feluda. The dual roles played by Watson are thus split into two separate characters by Ray. But this splitting also results in a metamorphosis whereby Ganguly emerges as a two-headed creature who is simultaneously a foil and a double for Feluda. As Ganguly, the timid man with a limited intellect, he provides an effective contrast to Feluda. But as the writer Jatayu, the same character not only follows in the footsteps of his mythological namesake by acting as Feluda's reliable lieutenant, but also rivals Feluda in fame.21 At the same time, this TP

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Jatayu is the name of a mythical bird in the Hindu epic Ramayana. This valorous bird sacrifices his life attempting to rescue Sita from the clutches of the villainous Ravana when the latter is escaping in his flying chariot after having kidnapped her. Sita is the wife of Rama, the royal protagonist of this epic, who is also considered to be an avatar of God Vishnu (part of the supreme Hindu trinity). The name Jatayu is, thus, associated not only with valor, but also with steadfast loyalty to Rama, who is regarded as the very epitome of righteousness. Since Feluda often refers to Ganguly as Jatayu, this nom de plume also functions, indirectly, to

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writer of mystery thrillers also de-stabilises Feluda's authority by introducing a metafictional element into the texts. When Jatayu, the writer, details the exploits of his fictional hero Prakhar Rudra, he assumes a position akin to that of Ray himself, the author of Feluda's exploits. And though the stories ostensibly bolster Feluda's primacy by constantly pointing out the fabulous exaggerations that mark Prakhar Rudra as a product of an overblown derivative imagination, a link is nevertheless forged that implicitly draws attention to the fictional excesses that mark Feluda's own portrayal, and by extension, the portrayal of Holmes, Feluda's 'original'. If Prakhar Rudra, for example, is made unbelievable by his simultaneous mastery of several forms of martial arts, then how does a reader react to Feluda's own display of previously unknown martial arts skills in the same story? The above problem faces the reader in 'The Buccaneer of Bombay' which also foregrounds the place of the entertainment industry, of the spectacular productions of the Bombay film industry, in the 'real' world of Feluda. There is no counterpart for this eruption of popular culture, of such leaps of the creative imagination, within the staid scientific world inhabited by Sherlock Holmes. This does not mean that the Holmes canon has no references to the strange or the fantastic. But such intrusions in the Holmesian world are always exoticised, removed from the here and the now, and linked up either with the farflung colonies or the distant past. And all such gothic elements in these detective tales are carefully made subservient to the ultimate triumph of scientific rationality. Whether it is desolate moors dotted with prehistoric huts and haunted by hellish hounds, or mysteriously disappearing treasure chests that are protected by strange-looking savages, Holmes is ultimately able to reduce all such spectacular elements to rational facts, to scientific data that can then become grist to his analytical mill. In the Feluda stories, on the other hand, the nonrational and the spectacular are neither presented as exotica, nor ultimately contained within a narrowly factual framework. Instead, such elements retain their independent place within Feluda's world, creating an enormously heterogeneous vision of reality. Daring train chases, ferocious tigers who act like fawning kittens around their trainers,

reinforce Feluda's status as the moral centre, as the veritable Rama in these stories.


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middle-class professionals who become ascetics and retreat to remote caves in the Himalayas – these are all presented as part of Feluda's lived reality, as elements that are not explained away, but made part of the explanation and the final resolution. This heterogeneous world may be seen as yet another instance of the hybrid created through subversive mimicry. In this case, the hybridity raises questions regarding the adequacy of the rational scientific world view, embodied in the Holmes stories, as the ultimate arbiter of truth and reality. At the same time, the heterogeneity of Feluda's world may also be seen to challenge the static homogeneous stereotypes created by colonial discourse to comprehend and control native peoples and places. As Nicholas Stewart points out, the Holmes stories are deeply implicated in imperial discourse and repeatedly represent natives from the colonies in stereotypical terms as 'the criminal and the undesirable' counterparts of honourable Englishmen like Watson.22 The Feluda stories explode this stereotype, not through a simple inversion of the Manichean aesthetics of colonial discourse, but by presenting the de-limited Other of the empire as a complex Self in its own right. Throughout the Feluda stories, the centre/periphery binary is rendered obsolete by the singular focus on one location – the Indian subcontinent. In fact, taken together, the Feluda stories almost read like a travel guide to India since almost every story takes us to a different location within this vast land mass, focuses on its own particular geography and culture, and thus highlights the enormous variety that characterises India. At the same time, these stories are also permeated by a sense of India as a unified country, as a sovereign nation-state that is bound by systems of communication, of law and order, and of commerce, as well as more intangible cultural ties such as the ubiquitous presence of Hindi films in all parts of the country. In this respect, the Feluda stories appear more a form of 'writing back' rather than mimicry.23 While the latter concept refers, in TP

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Nicholas Stewart, 'A Post-Colonial Canonical and Cultural Revision of Conan Doyle's Holmes Narrative', http://www.qub.ac.uk/en/imperial/india/conandoyle.htm [accessed June 21, 1999]. The idea of 'writing back', of native responses to the colonial experience as well as native assertions of indigenous cultures and identities, is an important element of postcolonial discourse. Bill Ashcroft's, Gareth Griffiths's and Helen Tiffin's The Empire Writes Back: The Theory and Practice of Post-Colonial Literatures

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postcolonial theory, to native inscriptions of 'master' discourses, the former signals a more direct challenge to colonial authority through the oppositional assertion of indigenous native knowledges and perspectives. The Feluda stories, while mimicking Holmesian detective fiction in their skeletal framework, completely indigenise the genre in all its narrative details. And while this nativisation of details with respect to setting and characters merely undermines the static colonial stereotypes of the colonies, the specifically Indian transformation of more fundamental thematic concerns, such as what constitutes knowledge and crime, results in a much more direct challenge to the coloniser. The ways in which the inclusion of non-rational knowledge systems in the Feluda canon challenge the epistemological framework of the Holmes stories have already been discussed above. With respect to crime, the Feluda stories enact a specifically nationalist re-definition of property rights that deliberately overturns the colonial reduction of the colonies themselves to possessions. In several Feluda stories, the crime being investigated is the stealing of ancient artefacts, which are part of India's national heritage, and their purchase by foreign buyers who are willing to pay large sums of money for these priceless objects without inquiring too closely into the method of acquisition. Though such stories end with the capture of the criminals responsible for the thefts rather than the final recipients of the stolen goods, the emphasis in the final resolution is on the restoration of property to its rightful place and owner, to India. It is this assertion of India's indisputable right to its own past that fundamentally refutes the coloniser's claim to colonial property. By this definition of property rights, the Agra treasure in The Sign of Four rightfully belongs back in Agra. In the Conan Doyle novel, however, the Agra treasure rightfully belongs to Mary Morstan and Thaddeus Sholto. The latter's claim to ownership is based on direct inheritance from his father, while the former's is established by her possession of a document (itself an inheritance from her father) that details the location of the treasure. The origin of the treasure and how it was claimed by the two fathers, though ultimately explained by the narrative, are not instrumental in

(London: Routledge, 1989) is one of the first works of postcolonial theory that analysed this element of postcoloniality in detail.


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defining the identity of either owners or criminals. Jonathan Small, despite his claim of previous ownership, is clearly the villain in the novel because of his attempts to take away the treasure from its current possessors and the violence he uses in this endeavour. The treasure itself sits at the bottom of the Thames at the end of the narrative, its disappearance not only facilitating the romantic union of Watson and Mary Morstan, but also, at a thematic level, indicating some ambiguity about reconciling justice with ownership in this particular case. And yet, nowhere in the novel is there any serious consideration of returning the treasure to its place of origin, to any descendants of the Indian rajah who had originally sent it to Agra for safekeeping. History, especially the history of the colonies, thus has no place in the definition of crime in the metropolis. Property ownership is here defined on the basis of British laws of inheritance and documentary evidence that is seen to have at least a quasi-legal standing. Such laws of inheritance and documentary evidence play a role in several Feluda stories also, but only when valuable relics are seen to be personal possessions rather than the public property of the nation. In 'Crime in Kedarnath', for instance, the case revolves around a valuable pendant given by a local rajah to an itinerant practitioner of ayurvedic medicine, Bhavani Upadhyaya.24 To legitimise this wandering ascetic's possession of such a priceless object, the rajah also gives Upadhyaya an official royal testament recording this gift of gratitude. Upadhyaya's rightful ownership of the pendant is thus substantiated by documentary evidence that effectively supersedes the right of inheritance – the rajah's son does not claim the pendant after his father's death. In fact, inheritance is now routed through Upadhyaya who bequeaths it to his nephew at the end of the story. And the nephew is clearly the legitimate inheritor, not only because he receives the pendant from its rightful owner, but also because he treasures this inheritance for its symbolic rather than material value. If the real value of the pendant for Upadhyaya was its representation of the rajah's gratitude, then the true value of the pendant for the nephew is its role in uniting him with a long-lost uncle. It is Ganguly, a permanent TP

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Satyajit Ray, 'Crime in Kedarnath', trans. by Gopa Majumdar, in The House of Death and Other Feluda Stories (New Delhi: Penguin, 1997), pp. 165-166.

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member of the detective trio, who turns out to be this nephew, and he is only present at the scene because of his desire to protect this strange ascetic from harm. The criminals in this story, then, are defined as such not only by their attempts to steal the pendant from its rightful owner, but also for valuing it purely in material terms. Such a definition of crime strikes a telling blow against the capitalist economic logic that structures colonial modernity, and therefore, not surprisingly, governs the Holmes stories. For Holmes's clients, the value of their property is always calculated in material terms, in exact pounds and shillings. And these pounds and shillings constitute wealth only when they are put into circulation – commerce is omnipresent in the Holmesian world. Whether it is Holmes himself buying information from his army of street urchins, returning colonials investing money in their neighbourhoods, or aspiring entrepreneurs selling everything from geese to their own special talents and services, Conan Doyle's turn-of-the-century England is a glorious market economy. Almost no one in this world underestimates or scoffs at the value of money. In the Feluda stories, on the other hand, money constantly takes not only second place to other more intangible concerns, but even becomes associated with graft and criminality. It is those who view precious objects only in material terms, ignoring their historical, national or personal sentimental value, that are marked as criminals. Even Feluda, the embodiment of modern professionalism, is susceptible to these non-material influences. His tender care of books that are carefully covered to prevent damage, his biting anger at the idea of India's national treasures being stolen and sold to foreigners, his quiet appreciation of the old houses occupied by many of his clients, all portray Feluda as a man who understands the value of the past, of the need to preserve history for its own sake. Such a love of history, of the past and its continuity in the present, has little place in the life and world of Sherlock Holmes. Such considerations, in fact, only come into Holmes stories when related to specific individuals and family history, and even then, as in The Hound of the Baskervilles, bloodline is important only as a scientific fact that helps to explain the present. Establishing identities through bloodlines by connecting the past with the present is also a recurrent concern in many Feluda stories. And yet, when it comes to individual identity, these stories do not fully conform to the Holmesian pattern of defining selfhood. The

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legitimacy of identity is tied, in Holmes's world, to the idea of singularity; self-evident consistency in name, words, and deeds is what ensures a person a legitimate place in the modern world. Secrecy, duplicity, the putting on of masks – all attempts to hide one's true identity are suspect, and usually, criminal. It is not surprising then that the revelation of true identity is such a consistent part of Holmesian resolutions. Whether it is the literal unmasking of the child in 'The Yellow Face', or the discovery that Stapleton is actually a Baskerville in The Hound of the Baskervilles, the solution to mysteries in Holmes stories proclaims the establishment of a single real identity for every individual.25 This insistence on the impermissibility as well as the impossibility of hiding one's true identity may be linked to the discourse of colonial modernity. It is this discourse that not only creates static and homogeneous stereotypes of both the coloniser and the native, but also renders criminal any ambiguities, any variations that do not fit neatly into its model of modern civilisation.26 TP

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It is important to note here that Holmes's own frequent assumption of various disguises does not qualify as the assumption of another identity in these duplicitous terms. The distinction is made very clear in the Holmes stories where the readers are never kept in suspense for long regarding any of Holmes's disguises. Furthermore, Holmes is never discovered by another; it is he who reveals his own true identity, which not only does away with any sense of deception, but also reinforces the idea of Holmes's sense of a single coherent self. In this respect, Feluda follows Holmes faithfully; his impenetrable disguises are assumed only to gather information and/or self-protection, but never for deception. See, for instance, Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Crime and Empire: The Colony in Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Crime (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Though Mukherjee's focus in this study is on the ambiguities that characterise the depiction of crime in relation to the colony in nineteenth-century British crime fiction, it is premised upon a recognition of 'how the rhetoric of crime became a crucial, perhaps a dominant strain in the British representation of India from the mid- to late eighteenth century onward' (p. 24). Mukherjee's work is also valuable for the connections it delineates between the criminalisation of the colonies and the discourse of crime within the domestic sphere: 'If, in Britain, the "criminal classes" were seen as an aberration to the norms of society, in India their counterparts were seen to sum up the essence of society […]. After all, religion, which should be the chief vehicle for the dissemination of morality in society, was as "criminal" as everything else in India' (p. 33).

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The Feluda canon questions this colonial model of identity in stories that mimic the Holmesian hidden identity problem, but enact a significant reversal in their resolution. Though, in typical Holmesian fashion, the true identity is revealed – we do find out that Bhavani Upadhyaya is actually Ganguly's uncle, that Karandikar, the tigertamer (in 'The Curse of the Goddess'), is actually Biren, the long-lost youngest son of Mahesh Chowdhury – the characters continue to lead lives under their assumed identities with Feluda's knowledge and blessings!27 Revelation, thus, does not automatically lead to an erasure of the alternate identity; instead the two now co-exist with equal legitimacy – Biren not only inherits a share in his father's property, but also gets back his job with the Great Majestic Circus as Karandikar, the tiger-tamer. It is this co-existence that offers the most potent challenge to the colonial stereotype of the native. As Bhabha points out, to shore up its own legitimacy, colonial discourse has to endlessly repeat and recreate its stereotypes.28 As a result, multiple representations of the native come into existence – the inscrutable oriental, the savage barbarian, the brown sahib, etc. But each is self-contained. An individual native may slip from one into another, but this slippage is involuntary and dependent on circumstances. In the Feluda stories, the natives embrace multiple identities simultaneously and selfconsciously. Bhavani Upadhyaya chooses to adopt the identity of an ascetic, while simultaneously asserting his connection with the Bengali bhadralok by recognizing Ganguly as his legitimate heir. This co-existence of pre-modern and modern identities undermines the colonial attempt to contain the native within a single stereotype. At the same time, the preference given to the pre-modern identity may be read as yet another instance of 'writing back' to colonial modernity since it enacts, once again, a nationalist celebration of the pre-colonial past. TP

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Satyajit Ray, 'The Curse of the Goddess', trans. by Gopa Majumdar, in The Royal Bengal Mystery and Other Feluda Stories (New Delhi: Penguin, 1997), pp. 348349. Bhabha, 'The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism', in The Location of Culture, p. 66.


I began this essay by looking at Ray's Feluda stories through the lens of Bhabha's concepts of mimicry and hybridity. In his elaboration of these concepts, Bhabha clearly attributes a resistant power to both the act of mimicry and the hybridity it produces, but this resistance is not seen to be a result of any explicit political intention on the part of the mimic. Instead, according to Bhabha, the process of adapting and indigenising the 'English book' itself opens up fissures in the ostensibly impregnable mantle of colonial authority, and it is our perception of these fissures that, retrospectively, makes the act of mimicry embody a form of resistance. In Bhabha's formulation, then, there is a temporal slippage between the effects and recognition of resistance; while the effects (hybridity, endless colonial repetition, etc.) are experienced synchronically with the mimicry, the recognition comes later, when the mimicry is viewed from the vantage point of postcolonial hindsight. Since Bhabha's own focus is on the colonial world, his analyses can easily maintain this diachronic perspective. However, the Feluda stories belong to post-independence India, not to the colonial period. In purely temporal terms, therefore, the effects as well as the recognition of the subversive mimicry in these texts operate in the postcolonial present. Furthermore, the stories exhibit a form of intentional resistance through their deliberate privileging of a nationalist perspective. It is, in fact, the nationalist indigenisation of various detective fiction elements that creates the 'same, but not quite' aspect of mimicry in these stories, and becomes the source of the cracks that are then revealed in the Holmesian worldview. Seen from this perspective, the Feluda stories do not appear to fit Bhabha's model of mimicry wherein '[m]imicry conceals no presence or identity behind its mask: it is not what Césaire describes as "colonization-thingification" behind which there stands the essence of the présence Africaine'.29 In other words, such resistance only de-stabilises the monolithic hegemony of colonial discourse without necessarily positing a native alternative. The presence in the Feluda stories of such an alternative undermines the subversive potential of these 'mimic' texts. Even as the mimicry reveals gaps and fissures in the discourse of colonial modernity that structures the Holmesian world, the indigenous alternatives fill up these cracks so that the overall façade of TP

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Bhabha, 'Of Mimicry and Man', p. 88.

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detective fiction remains intact. Though defined differently, crime and criminals are still identified in the Feluda stories, and, while other forms of knowledge may be acknowledged to exist, Feluda continues to use the celebrated Holmesian method of observation and deduction to solve his cases. There are thus no unseemly loose threads that threaten to unravel the fabric of detective fiction whose warp and woof consist of the presentation of a problem and its solution by the detective. Does that mean that at least at the generic level, the Feluda stories are ultimately nothing but slavish imitations? Are the variations at the level of characterisation, setting, and even theme, nothing but cosmetic changes – a change of garb for the same colonial deity rather than a true reincarnation that would portend a new form of salvation? I would like to argue that the hope offered by this particular native avatar of the Holmesian narrative can only be understood through the concept of postcolonial rather than colonial mimicry. Bhabha's model, set in the colonial world, takes into account only the dominating presence of colonial discourse, of the powerful 'English book' that the native is subjected to, and that, in turn, is subjected to the native's mimicking appropriation. But in a different time, in a world where nationalist discourse is competing with colonial discourse for hegemonic control, the native is confronted with a 'Book of Authentic India' alongside the 'English book'.30 Subjected to such dual textual TP

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The paradigmatic 'English book' within the colonial context is, of course, the Bible, which is what Bhabha focuses on in 'Signs Taken for Wonders'. In my essay, I have used the trope of the 'English book' to refer to the Holmes canon. There is no specific native mirror text; the counter-trope of the 'Book of Authentic India' may be applied to any text that claims authoritative indigenous knowledge. The Hindu epics, Ramayana and Mahabharata, would qualify as such, and Feluda is shown to be engaged in their study in 'Mystery at Golok Lodge', trans. by Chitrita Banerji, in The Adventures of Feluda, pp. 153-190. Books dealing with Indian history also have this mark of authority. In 'Robertson's Ruby' (trans. by Gopa Majumdar, in Feluda's Last Cases, pp. 283-336), for example, the book Life and Work in Birbhum, which details the history of the place where Feluda and company are vacationing, is instrumental in leading Feluda to the solution of the problem. Ironically, this history is written by an Englishman, Rev. Pritchard – 'authentic' India is thus itself a creation of an Englishman, signifying, once again, the slippage that is characteristic of postcolonial mimicry with respect to nationalist discourse.


interpellation, the native also enacts a double mimicry, a transformative appropriation of both discourses. This complex act of postcolonial mimicry, which simultaneously questions the monolithic constructs of both colonial and nationalist discourses, creates a slippery protean hybrid that constantly defers any notion of identity. Read from this perspective, the Feluda stories may be seen to enact a never-ending ritual of masking – while the mimicking of Holmes appears to mask a nationalist 'essence' (Feluda's 'real' Indian roots are evident in his daily practice of yoga), this 'essence' itself turns out to be a mask that mimics nationalist identity behind which, once again, one can find a colonialist 'reality' (Feluda's commitment to yoga is a result of his 'modern' desire to keep physically fit, not any spiritual aspirations). Identity is thus constantly deferred – Feluda is not Holmes, not an Indian Holmes, not a desi jasus, not a Holmesian jasus, ad infinitum.31 The same process of deferral may also be seen to operate at the level of the narrative itself. The stable framework of detective fiction, as outlined above, requires the presentation of a problem and its solution by the detective. Within the narrative, the problem may be redefined as more facts come to light, or even change in its focus. In 'A Case of Identity', for example, the problem is initially the whereabouts of Mr Hosmer Angel (for Mary Sutherland), then his identity and reason for disappearance (for Watson), and finally, the means of punishing an individual who has committed no legal crime (for Holmes). Within the narrative, solutions are provided for each of the problems – Hosmer Angel is actually Mary's stepfather in disguise who has been duping her for the sake of her money, and who, though he cannot be punished right now, 'will rise from crime to crime until he does something very bad, and ends on a gallow'.32 Such multiplying of problems and solutions, however, never blurs the distinction between the two. Problems and solutions remain the two poles of TP

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The term 'jasus' is the one used for detectives in Hindi detective fiction. This term, while incorporating the new kind of detective inaugurated by English detective fiction, also brings with it an association of the indigenous spying tradition of the Mughal courts. Orsini's article on detective fiction details the complex interplay between this native tradition of spy literature (where the protagonists are 'ayyars' – spies with supra-rational powers) and imported detective fiction in the creation of Hindi 'jasusi' fiction. Doyle, 'A Case of Identity', in The Complete Sherlock Holmes, I, p. 201.

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detective fiction, the narrative counterparts to the oppositional characterisation of detective-protagonist and criminal-antagonist. Holmes and Moriarty may closely resemble each other in their intellect and methods, but the two are not interchangeable – Moriarty embodies the problem, while Holmes is the solution. It is this narrative framework that is frequently de-stabilised in the Feluda stories. In 'Feluda in London', for example, the detective is charged with the task of finding out the identity of a boy in a photograph that has two friends standing side-by-side.33 Feluda's client (Mr Majumdar) is one of them, but his loss of memory has made him forget the identity of the other one. But this problem of the identity of the boy in the photograph is solved in chapter three itself when the boy's cousin identifies him as Peter Dexter from an advertisement placed in a newspaper by Feluda. From this perspective, there is a six-chapter narrative excess, a proliferation that does not seem required by the basic detective framework. And what happens in these chapters is a series of protean shifts whereby solutions become problems, and vice versa. Once the boy's identity is known, this itself becomes a problem since Feluda's client associates 'something unpleasant happen[ing]' with the name Dexter.34 The solution to this problem, the discovery that Dexter's death was caused by Majumdar, contains within it a legal crime, which, in turn, is solved/avenged through Majumdar's wilful murder by Peter's younger brother, who then commits suicide. The narrative ends with the stark description of two violent deaths, and there are no comments from Feluda to clarify whether these corpses represent a problem or a solution. And this open-endedness at the level of the narrative is duplicated in character portrayal. The conventional opposition between character roles such as criminal and victim, for example, is blurred in the case of Majumdar and Dexter who not only look alike in the photograph, but also enact both roles simultaneously when Dexter's virulently racist comments lead to Majumdar's act of violence. Slippage of identity between characters is thus paralleled by the proliferation of identities for a single character as he plays multiple roles that, in Holmesian terms, are mutually incompatible. Majumdar is simultaneously the victim (of racist abuse) and the TP

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Satyajit Ray, 'Feluda in London', p. 134-135. Satyajit Ray, 'Feluda in London', p. 144

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criminal, and even Feluda, the objective solver of crimes, becomes complicit in the problem when he learns the truth about Dexter's death but does nothing about it. In this context, Feluda's total silencing by the narrative towards the end of this story may be seen to mark the limits of Holmesian detective fiction. What such detective fiction then appears incapable of speaking about, of dealing with, is the complexity of the colonial encounter and its continuing repercussions for the native (people/place).35 And it is this ongoing 'colonial affect', which confronts the native simultaneously with colonial and nationalist discourses, that is the source as well as subject of postcolonial mimicry. The dual postcolonial mimicry creates a slippage in both colonial (the 'savage native') as well as the nationalist (the native as 'innocent victim' of colonial brutality) stereotypes, resulting in a fundamental de-stabilisation of the genre that is rooted in the ideologies of British colonialism and nationalism. Postcolonial detective fiction, then, may be seen as an TP

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None of the Holmes stories engage directly with colonialism, though many characters are seen to have colonial connections. Significantly, such colonial connections are almost invariably associated with criminality. The only 'safe' colonial import is material wealth, especially when this wealth is invested in English progress back home, as seen in The Hound of the Baskervilles. But more intense colonial involvement, signaled by the importation of native artifacts, people, customs, is the mark of a dangerous infection that can de-stabilise the British home world. Stories like The Sign of Four and 'The Speckled Band' exemplify this fear generated by too deep a colonial intrusion into the domestic realm. This concern with the safety and integrity of the domestic world, combined with the insistence on a home-bound setting (Holmes ventures outside Britain only once, in 'The Final Problem', and even then he goes only to the continent, not to the colonies), makes the Holmes canon part of a domestic British nationalist discourse that defines 'true' British identity in opposition to the colonies. Nationalist and colonialist discourses are thus linked within the framework of modernity. The fact that Feluda actually does venture out of India, and even goes to London, may then be seen as yet another example of postcolonial mimicry that simultaneously undermines both nationalist and colonialist discourses.

108 Suchitra Mathur

anomalous term.36 The postcolonial transposition of Holmes to a land beyond western civilisation does indeed result in a kind of 'death' and reincarnation, not just of the detective, but of detective fiction itself. TP

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My claim that 'postcolonial detective fiction' is an anomalous term is not meant to negate the existence either of detective fiction written by postcolonial writers or of postcolonial detectives in the work of metropolitan writers. The latter figure, in fact, is the subject of The Post-Colonial Detective (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001) ed. by Ed Christian. The essays in this collection identify the postcolonial detective in terms of his native origins and the specific ethnic knowledges/ indigenous experiences that distinguish him from the metropolitan detective. In this sense, Feluda might qualify as a postcolonial detective because of his native origins, but his method of functioning, as I have attempted to show, is almost entirely derived from Holmes. From the perspective of the essays in this collection, therefore, Feluda would be merely a copy-cat detective, rather than a postcolonial detective. I would rather read him as a postcolonial mimic detective.

MANGA, ZEN, AND SAMURAI: NEGOTIATING EXOTICISM AND ORIENTALIST IMAGES IN SUJATA MASSEY'S REI SHIMURA NOVELS Katja Sarkowsky

Introduction: 'Japan' in American (Popular) Culture Japan is 'in' in popular culture: martial arts and bushido, the way of the warrior, are featured strongly and often ironically in recent movies such as Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill or Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog, Tokyo's Pachinko parlours, Shinto shrines, and cultural misunderstandings between Japanese and Americans serve as background for Western loneliness in Sophia Coppola's Lost in Translation and Japan during the crisis of its modernisation offers the American hero the opportunity for individual redemption through tradition in Edward Zwick's Last Samurai. Lian Hearn's highly acclaimed Otori clan trilogy is only one prominent example of the abounding historical and fantasy novels set mostly in feudal Japan. And last but not least, Japan has become a setting for successful crime mysteries such as Laura Joh Rowland's Sano Ichiro series, Mo Hayder's Tokyo or Sujata Massey's Rei Shimura novels.1 This fascination with 'Japan' and 'Japanese culture' is not new. As literary critic Traise Yamamoto argues, TP

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Ghost Dog (1999), dir. by Jim Jarmusch; Kill Bill I (2003), Kill Bill II (2004), dir. by Quentin Tarantono; Lost in Translation (2003), dir. by Sophia Coppola; Last Samurai (2003), dir. by Edward Zwick; Mo Hayder, Tokyo (London: Bantam, 2004); Lian Hearn, Across the Nightingale Floor (New York: Picador, 2002), Grass for His Pillow (New York: Picador, 2004), Brilliance of the Moon (New York: Picador: 2005); Laura Joh Rowland, Shinju (New York: HarperTorch, 1994), Bundori (New York: HarperTorch, 1996).

110 Katja Sarkowsky

since Commodore Perry's unwelcome landing on the closed shores of Tokyo Bay in 1853, Japan has increasingly served as one of the many mirrors in whose reflection the West represents and constructs itself. Alternately figured as the absolute Other whose difference signifies the necessity to conquer, either militarily or economically, and as the mysterious and seductive Other whose exoticism is the come-on for Western cultural penetration, Japan has been consistently 'Japanized' by the West. […] In the overlap of the geopolitical and geocultural, the Japanese and Japan constitute a crucial site at which white Western masculinity (re)establishes its superiority, dominance, and, increasingly, innocence.2 TP

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Yamamoto, like many other critics, thus places historical and contemporary depictions of Japan and Japanese culture in the context of Orientalism as a discourse seeking to establish Western subjectivity through the objectification of the 'East'. And while Japan has never been colonised by European or American powers in the way other countries have, the discursive subjectification (in its double sense) works in similar ways: as a self-affirmation of 'the West'. Despite the critique directed at Edward Said's concept of Orientalism, the basic idea of the discursive construction of the 'Orient' as a field of Western projection has remained highly influential: As both geographical and cultural entities – to say nothing of historical entities – such locales, regions, geographical sectors as 'Orient' and 'Occident' are manmade. Therefore as much as the West itself, the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that has given it reality and presence in and for the West. The two geographical entities thus support and to an extent reflect each other.3 TP

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While the homogeneity and monodirectionality of Said's reading of these discursive constructions is problematic,4 the concept of Orientalism nevertheless offers a helpful tool for analysing not so much the TP

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Traise Yamamoto, Masking Selves, Masking Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 11. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Penguin, 1995), p. 5. Said has taken up this critique and modified his approach to a certain extent in his Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994 [1993]). Nevertheless, his concept of Orientalism remains an important and productive bone of contention in present discussions of representational politics and strategies.

Negotiating Exoticism and Orientalist Images

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contemporary images of Japan themselves, as I will argue, as the awareness and critical reflection of stereotyping in contemporary literature; in this process of reflection, long-standing orientalist images are perpetuated or deconstructed – and sometimes both at the same time. Thus, orientalist discourse analyses provide an important backdrop for the discussion also of contemporary popular culture and its deployment of Japan and Japanese culture as setting, as structural element for the plot, as background, or as stereotypical recourse. While the analyses of orientalist discourses have focused mainly on 'white' literature in order to highlight their political function of (white) Western self-affirmation,5 textual (and visual) negotiations of stereotypes and orientalist images are equally important in 'minority' texts and/or those featuring minority protagonists. The presence and effectiveness of stereotypes and orientalist images in American everyday life and cultural and political discourse is reflected not only in autobiographical writing and literary fiction,6 but also in popular genre writing where these images are deployed with various agendas, reaching from creating 'exotic atmospheres' to critically investigating and debunking these images and their functions. With regard to the mystery novel genre, Theo D'Haen argues that multiethnic crime fiction TP

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A recent example is Mari Yoshihara's Embracing the East, in which she points to the role of women in the shaping of American orientalism and argues that white women writers and artists found in the deployment of orientalist images a tool for questioning and renegotiating the role of (white) women in American society: 'White women played pivotal roles in inscribing gendered meanings to Asia, both complicating and replicating the dominant Orientalist discourse founded upon the notion 'West = male vs. East = female'. Their participation in Orientalist discourse offered many American women an effective avenue through which to become part of a dominant American ideology and to gain authority and agency which were denied to them in other realms of sociopolitical life'. Mari Yoshihara, Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 6. For the role of stereotypes in Japanese American women's autobiography, see for instance Yamamoto, Masking Selves, Masking Subjects. A highly illustrative example for self-conscious negotiations of the complex relationship between orientalist images, Japanese American identity formation, and gender politics is David Mura's Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei (New York: Anchor, 1991).

112 Katja Sarkowsky as a form of popular literature […] mediates the (often unspoken) aspirations of a particular population group in the United States. If these aspirations include the preservation of at least part of the Asian cultural heritage, they obviously also include a powerful wish to 'become American' in the full sense of the word, with all that implies in terms of adaptation to 'American' patterns of life and freedom of thought, even if these patterns may have originated historically with America's 'white' or 'Caucasian' population.7 TP

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The intermeshing of (often but not always stereotypical) images, the characteristics of the mystery genre, and identity politics is particularly strong when the 'ethnic' detective investigates not only his or her own community but if the protagonist's 'ancestral country' is used as a setting or as a backdrop to structure the crime or other subplots. However, D'Haen's conclusion that by the end of the day the narratives all seek to affirm American values seems too general and does not do justice to the complex negotiations of imagery and identity politics carried out in many popular crime novels; as D'Haen argues, what marks many 'ethnic' crime novels is the reflective investigation of stereotypes and their longevity – and in some cases, this includes an investigation of what 'American' means and of the effects of setting 'American' against 'Japanese' values, thus simultaneously performing, reflecting upon, and deconstructing stereotypical imagery. It is this connection between the reproduction of stereotypes and their potential deconstruction through the crime mystery genre that I am interested in here. Given these complex overlaps, in the first part of this essay I will look at some of the images that have shaped the image of 'Japan' and 'Japanese culture' in popular genres, at their history, function, and at the changes they have undergone. In the second part, I will turn to the crime mystery genre in particular, and to the ways in which it can function as a platform for negotiating stereotypes and social hierarchies. Against the background of feminist and 'ethnic' revisions in the crime mystery genre particularly in the past two decades, I will turn to Sujata Massey's Rei Shimura novels as a series that deliberately works

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with the evocation of stereotypes in order to question them. Thus, the question needs to be raised whether – as many of the above cited analyses of contemporary culture seem to suggest – all depictions of Japan, because of the seemingly inescapable orientalist backdrop, necessarily perpetuate stereotypical images and indeed serve as 'a selfaffirmation of the West'. This I will address then in greater detail in my reading of the novel The Samurai's Daughter.

'Queer Little People': Orientalist and Exoticist Images of Japan Long ago the best and dearest Japanese friend I ever had said to me, a little before his death: 'when you find, in four or five years more, that you cannot understand the Japanese at all, you will begin to know something about them.' After having realized the truth of my friend's prediction, – after having discovered that I cannot understand the Japanese at all, – I feel better qualified to attempt this essay.8 Lafcadio Hearn TP

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Lafcadio Hearn, a writer who chose Japan as his home in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century and became a Japanese citizen under name of Koizumi Yakumo, has produced a number of accounts of country and culture that significantly helped shape the image of Japan in the United States. When looking at the representation of Japan, the Japanese, and Japanese culture in American literature, a number of topoi emerge that have changed to some extent over time but that nevertheless display a surprising longevity of strategies of representation: feminisation (and sexualisation), infantilisation, inscrutability, fundamental cultural difference, and dehistorisation are features which the imagery of Japan shares with that of other Asian countries and cultures in the 'Western', more specifically, American imagination; nevertheless, these topoi have to be seen in the specific historical and political contexts in which they emerge, are instrumentalised, and changed.

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Traise Yamamoto has identified infantilisation and feminisation as two central strategies in the writings on Japan in order to contain the potential threat of cultural otherness. Gendering Japan as female is central to the ease with which Western discourse, informed by both nationalism and misogyny, shifts between the romantic and the brutal, between structures of reciprocity and structures of mastery. This gendering is also the primary mechanism through which the body of the Japanese woman is conflated with and becomes a metonymic representation of Japan itself. The assignation of the feminine to Japan is thus literalized through the body of the Japanese woman, which is then metaphorized as national/cultural landscape.9 TP

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It is a Japanese female figure, the geisha, which has advanced to the quintessential image of the subservient and erotic Asian woman. And while most popular uses of this imagery rely on severe misunderstandings of who or what a geisha was and is in Japanese cultural contexts, it is these supposed traits of eroticism, skill, submissiveness, and mirroring of (white) male needs that has shaped to some extent the image of Japanese (and, as Yamamoto argues, in extension, the Japanese American) woman in the popular imagination: the Japanese woman 'as an ideological construction of the West in general, and of the United States in particular, has consistently depended on variations, but not displacement, of the geisha stereotype'.10 And it is, therefore, this image that is tackled explicitly or implicitly by some contemporary texts with the aim to debunk stereotypes of Japanese femininity, as I will show in my analysis of Sujata Massey's novels below. The depiction of the Japanese and Japanese culture as 'inscrutable', together with the erotization inherent in the geisha stereotype, is part of its exotic appeal. 'Inscrutability', the notion of a cultural difference incomprehensible to the Western observer as illustrated in the quote by Lafcadio Hearn above, is largely assigned to individuals supposTP

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Yamamoto, Masking Selves, Masking Subjects, p. 23 Yamamoto, Masking Selves, Masking Subjects, pp. 23-24. While the geishastereotype persists, there have been significant variations; with Yoshi Kuzume, Yamamoto lays out four distinct phases that the image of Japanese women have undergone between 1860 and 1990: the 'sensual geisha girl', the oppressed 'heathen woman', the 'emancipated Japanese woman' after World War II, and the 'empowered Japanese woman' since the 1970s (see Yamamoto, p. 23).


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edly difficult to understand for Westerns, displaying 'a lack of emotions', wearing 'masks' impossible to decipher for non-Japanese; however, this image of 'inscrutability' is also translated onto Japanese culture and society 'as such', its institutions, rituals, and customs often portrayed as impossible to learn within a life time and as rigid and unchanging. It is this ascribed rigidity of social structure and custom which, as will be shown, is used as a structural element in popular literature to set off the individualist (and thus assumed to be countercultural in the Japanese cultural context) traits of the protagonists. This ascribed rigidity also defines the dehistorisation of Japan. This dehistorisation has two central aspects: one is the preferred setting of historical, preferably feudal Japan in popular literature and film – Hearn's Otori clan trilogy, Rowland's Sano Ichiro crime mysteries, or earlier works such as James Clavell's Shogun are examples of this tendency. The other aspect is the seeming rigidity of Japanese cultural traditions that are portrayed as remaining essentially unchanged throughout centuries and fundamental cultural and political upheavals.11 Clashes between tradition and modernisation as portrayed in Zwick's movie Last Samurai or to a certain extent also in Shogun (both the novel and the movie/mini-series) underlie the basic dehistorisation of Japan; even thrillers such as Philip Kaufman's 1993 movie Rising Sun (based on Michael Crichton's novel by the same title), that portray contemporary Japanese business culture are built on the tension between Japanese traditions incomprehensible to Western TP

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Examples for this attitude can be found in writings on Japan of all genres. Peter Tasker, for instance, in his 1987 popular study The Japanese, frequently explains political, cultural, social, and economic constellations in contemporary Japan with arrangements in feudal Japan, portraying them as essentially unchanged: 'The factional tendency was embedded in Japanese politics long before the concept of representative democracy arrived. In feudal Japan a samurai owed absolute loyalty to his clan: its alliances and enmities, which could date back generations and yet be reversed overnight, were automatically his. In return the clan provided him with security and advancement. By contrast, the samurai's loyalty to the national government – the Shogunate – was secondary and conditional. […] in modern Japan, factions exist in all walks of life, from the playground to the boardroom. In tea ceremony, flower arrangement, karate, indeed nearly all traditional arts and sports, different sects compete for supremacy just as bitterly as large corporations do for market share'. Peter Tasker, The Japanese: A Major Exploration of Modern Japan (New York: Truman Talley Books, 1987), p. 159.

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viewers without a cultural translator (the investigator John O'Connor ins Rising Sun just like Nathan Algren, American Civil War hero hired to teach Japanese troops in The Last Samurai, stranded pilot John Blackthorne in Shogun, etc.) and aggressive modernisation and technological advancements. The changes that these images have undergone since the late nineteenth century have been explained by critics like Yamamoto as mainly due to internal processes and cultural (and economical!) crises in 'the West', relatively disconnected from changes within Japan itself (unless, of course, these changes were due to 'Western influences, such as American occupation after the Second World War).12 But while a strong case can be made for reading a movie like Rising Sun as a product of fears in the US of growing Japanese business power combined with economic problems in North America and Europe, the problematic aspect of these arguments is that they tend to ignore – like Said's original formulation of the concept of Orientalism to some extent – the reciprocity and the close connection between cultural, political, economical developments both between Japan and the US in particular and in an increasingly globalised exchange of images, cultural codes and exotic commodification in general.13 So the value of looking at the patterns of stereotypisation and the identification of recurring orientalist imagery does not so much lie in the analysis of contemporary popular texts in terms of orientalist cultural imagery itself but in looking at the ways in which these images are used on a metalevel – how are these images consciously negotiated, perpetuated, rebuked, played with, deconstructed? How do they intertwine with plot structure? What role do they play within genre conventions as well as vice versa: what happens with these images through genre conventions? And finally: what exactly can this mean in the context of the crime mystery genre? In order to assess these questions and discuss them with respect to Sujata Massey's Rei Shimura series, in addition to the history of the representation of Japan and Japanese culture, the changing role of ethnicity and gender in contemporary TP

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See for example Yamamoto, Masking Selves, Masking Subjects, p. 23. See Graham Huggan's 'Introduction', in The Post-Colonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 1-33.


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crime fiction has to be taken into account; novels such as Massey's, as I will illustrate, draw on a number of writing and genre traditions.

Of Noble Samurai and their Modern Daughters: Revisions of the Crime Mystery Genre and Sujata Massey's Rei Shimura Novels Much has been written on the reformulation of classic detective scripts by women writers particularly since the 1980s; Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton and Marcia Muller are credited for re-writing the hardboiled genre a la The Maltese Falcon through their tough protagonists V.I. Warshawski, Kinsey Millhone and Sharon McCone, Amanda Cross and others as having redefined the more genteel traditions in crime mystery.14 In addition to these feminist revisions of established popular genres, more recently closer attention is being paid also to redefinitions of crime mystery through increased attentions to issues of ethnicity and the introduction of sleuths belonging to 'ethnic minority' groups. According to Dorothea Fischer-Hornung and Monika Mueller, in 'ethnic' detective fiction TP

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the importance of the detective's community of origin often supersedes the traditional loneliness of the detective. Sometimes the 'ethnic plot,' frequently dealing with aspects of the traditional way of life of the community from which the detective derives, also seems to diminish the importance of the detective plot. Furthermore, ethnic detective novels address issues of personal and social identity that reflect the importance of the ethnic community for the particular detective. The intensity of the detective's negotiation of his or her ethnic identity tends to directly correlate with the distance that the detective's particular ethnic group has from 'mainstream' society.15 TP

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I focus here on the American writing traditions; in the British and other contexts, of course many more authors could (and should) be listed. For a broad discussion of different traditions in feminist crime writing, see for instance Feminism in Women's Detective Fiction, ed. by Glenwood Irons (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995). Dorothea Fischer-Hornung and Monika Mueller, 'Introduction', in Sleuthing Ethnicity: The Detective in Multiethnic Crime Fiction, ed. by Dorothea FischerHornung and Monika Mueller (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), p. 12.

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The role of ethnicity elaborated here obviously refers to detectives operating in the context of multicultural societies as members of 'minority groups'. This is particularly important for crime mysteries such as Dale Furutani's Ken Tanaka novels which are mostly set in the US and thus contextualise the protagonist as a Japanese American dealing with stereotypes of Japan, Japanese people and culture in the United States – stereotypes that the protagonist himself occasionally subscribes to as well – against the background of an infamous history of racist exclusion laws, internment, and conflation of 'Japanese' and 'Japanese American'. In these novels, the occasional setting in Japan serves as a way to more effectively negotiate shifting meanings and conflicting interpretations of 'Americanness'.16 In the texts that I want to focus on here, Sujata Massey's detective novels, questions of ethnicity and cultural belonging are even more complex. Massey's protagonist Rei Shimura is – like Furutani's Tanaka – a young Japanese American; unlike Tanaka, Rei lives and works in Tokyo, first as an English language teacher and then as a freelance antiques dealer and occasional writer. Most of the novels are set in Japan; thus, Rei's negotiations of ethnic identity (and the ways in which these negotiations intertwine with the crime plots) have to be analysed in the context of the depiction of construction of cultural foreignness and alienation not in the US but in Japan. Read as a series of crime mysteries drawing on the one hand on feminist revisions of the genre, the novels have to be seen also on the other hand as part of the 'ethnic rewriting' of crime mysteries that takes questions of ethnicity beyond the context of ethnic negotiations within individual nation states to a global level of transmigration and changing national contexts – for both the protagonists themselves and for the questions of 'ethnicity', 'culture', and 'belonging'. One aspect that so far has marked the Shimura series (and which seems to change now with the latest novel The Pearl Diver) is the choice of titles that obviously point toward a particular aspect of 'traditional' or contemporary Japanese culture. This strong focus on the cultural, social, or historical in relationship to the crime plot is confirmed by Massey when she states in an interview: 'When writing a TP

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For a detailed analysis of Furutani's novels with this specific focus see D'Haen's 'Samurai Sleuths and Detective Daughters'.


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book, I start with the setting and the Japanese cultural art that I would like to learn more about – and I take it from there. The murder and motive come later'.17 The choice of titles raises a set of expectations closely connected to the stereotypes invoked by the aspect of Japanese culture referred to. Most of Massey's novels cleverly call up these expectations and the images associated with them only in order to debunk them through the crime plot. The series' first novel, The Salaryman's Wife, picks up on the 'typically Japanese' business man, the sarariman; at the same time, the title alludes to the murder victim of the novel. Of all of Massey's Shimuranovels, this is probably the one remaining closest to a genre formula in its aspects of an 'English country house crime novel' with a clear nod towards Agatha Christie.18 The novel serves as an introduction of the protagonist, Rei Shimura. 'It was dark outside, turning the train door's glass into a mirror. I saw myself as I always appear: small, Japanese American, and with the kind of cropped haircut that's perfect in San Francisco but a little too boyish for Japanese taste'.19 The title suggests a centrality of Japanese business culture and, in extension, of gendered hierarchies in Japanese society. While both aspects are important in the novel, they have little connection to the actual crime, TP

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Claire E. White, 'A Conversation with Sujata Massey', in Writers Write: The Internet Writing Journal, http://www.writerswrite.com/journal/oct98/massey.htm [accessed March 13, 2005]. See also the interview with Sujata Massey following this essay. See also the following interview with Sujata Massey. Sujata Massey, The Salaryman's Wife (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), p. 2. D'Haen comments on this passage: 'The difference here is not with the putative homogeneity of the American ideal, but with the Japanese norm. Through her physique, or her self-description of it, Rei expresses not an unease with her specific slice of multicultural America, but rather […] with the thrust for uniformity of Japanese identity' (D'Haen, 'Samurai Sleuths and Detective Daughters', p. 46). While the indication of Rei's alienation in Japanese society and her derivation from certain social norms is certainly important, I would read this passage nevertheless rather in the context of genre conventions. Particularly women's crime mysteries told in first person narration such as Massey's tend to use this kind of self-introduction in which the protagonist not only presents herself to the reader but also hints towards future conflicts. Sue Grafton in particular uses the selfintroduction of her protagonist Kinsey Millhone so frequently that it could be read as a formula.

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the murder of a salaryman's wife, as it turns out – but they are used throughout the novel to mislead both the narrator and the reader, thus playing a vital role within the genre conventions. The following Zen Attitude obviously draws not only on one of Japan's traditional religions, Zen Buddhism, but also plays with the ever increasing fascination of Americans and Europeans with that religion and its 'typically Japanese' values of self-discipline, persistence, and a fatalistically accepting outlook on life. Set in large parts on the temple grounds of fictional Horin-ji in Kamakura south of Tokyo, the novel plays with the different expectations evoked in the reader on the plot level as well as on a structural level. Massey's third Shimura-novel's title The Flower Master indicates one of the novel's central characters (and, as it turns out, not the murderer but someone closely connected to the murder) and the setting of the murder in an ikebana school; like with the previous novels, the title here also seeks to call up a set of expectations and stereotypes connected to flower arrangement as both a 'traditional' Japanese art and as an art with a history of being marketed as exotic and refined in the West. The following novel's title The Floating Girl is less obvious. Most directly, it refers to the murderess trying to kill herself by drowning at the end of the novel, the 'floating girl' pulled to safety by Rei.20 However, there is also a relationship between the novel's focus, manga, and the youth culture connected to it to Japanese woodblock prints called ukiyo-e, 'pictures of the floating world' (meaning images of the 'pleasure quarters') which draws a direct connection between manga and the modern day 'floating world' of seedy hostess bars in which Massey's plot is set to a large extend. The Bride's Kimono is obvious in its reference; in contrast to the previous novels, this one is set mainly in the United States. Here, the title refers once again to one of the crime 'victims': a kimono in Rei's responsibility that is stolen from a museum in Washington DC. Parallel to the crime plot around the stolen cloth and a Japanese tourist murdered because she is mistaken for Rei herself, a historical story of love, rivalry, and betrayal is constructed around the kimono and its original owner. Thus, the title referring to the object of contention in the novel can be read at both levels. The Samurai's Daughter by referring to Japan's famous warriors picks up on an TP

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image that is probably one of the most excessively used 'Japanese' topoi in contemporary American popular literature and film.21 Massey's latest novel The Pearl Diver is set exclusively in the United States. The title refers to an aspect of Japanese culture which, as the protagonist herself points out in the text, is little known, not one of the 'typically Japanese' cultural aspects alluded to in the earlier novels: central focus is a Japanese woman who used to work as a pearl diver and who married an African-American GI during the Vietnam War. The actual topic of the novel around which the central crime plot is structured is the Vietnam War, war crimes, and, secondarily to an extent, the fate of Japanese war brides in the US, questions of alienation and cultural displacement, as well as the rejection faced by biracial couples in the 1970s in both Japan and the United States. However, as always with Massey's novels, the obvious motif is not the real one: while the narrative of cultural displacement provides an important framework for the story, the 'real' motif is the history of covered up war crimes. And something else is unexpected: The Pearl Diver is a murderless crime mystery. As such, it confirms a tendency in Massey's writing that could be characterised as moving from foregrounding the crime plot to foregrounding psychological and historical aspects; that is, a shift from a clear affiliation with the genre and its conventions to using aspects of the crime genre not as a means to its own end, but as a vehicle for other themes.22 So all of Massey's Shimura novels by way of their titles refer either to a 'traditional' aspect of Japanese culture or, particularly in the most recent The Samurai's Daughter and The Pearl Diver, to aspects of Japanese and American history, or both. The stereotypical images evoked are then countered by their function in misleading the reader, by first implicitly suggesting a central role of 'Japanese culture' in the crime and then debunking the stereotype through the crime plot itself. While some of Rei's problems in solving the crimes arise from her being perceived and often feeling as a foreigner and her own occasional perception of Japanese society as rigid and static, the evoked TP

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The Last Samurai is one obvious example. Other recent movies that use samurai references and their transferral from historical Japan to contemporary America are Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog and Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill I and II. See also the interview with Sujata Massey following this essay.

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stereotypical images of 'Japan' and their reflection are set against a depiction of contemporary Japan as a highly dynamic and constantly changing society. The focus on 'traditional culture' suggested by the titles is indeed Rei's own focus and interest: the protagonist is interested more passionately in Japanese history and traditional artifacts than most of the Japanese people she associates with (with the exception of her mentor, antiques dealer Mr Ishida). It is this emphasis on 'history' and 'tradition' that provides a framework for the novels' deconstruction of the very expectations the titles raise through the crime plots – and, closely connected to these plots, through the novel's negotiations of gender and ethnic identity. By addressing issues of history and tradition, gender, and ethnic identity, I do not only follow the lead of what I see as central concerns in Massey's novels; it is these fields in which strategies of orientalist and exoticist representation are the strongest and most firmly established. The crucial issue here is not the identification of stereotypes; rather, proceeding from the assumption that these strategies of representation and the images in which they are condensed play a role in contemporary cultural production that is highly complex – the strategies and stereotypical images are directly addressed and creatively dealt with in the texts. On the one hand, this has an affirmative effect: these strategies and images are necessary parts of an iconography that achieves the effect of recognition necessary to satisfy a mass audience's need for exoticism and thus to sell the book. On the other hand, the evocation of these strategies and images is deployed in order to at least partially debunk them. It is this ambivalent and ambiguous process of affirmation and deconstruction that I am interested in.

The Role of the Past: 'History' and 'Tradition' While the dehistorisation of Japan is, as Traise Yamamoto argues, most strongly associated with European high modernism,23 it is a strategy still to be found in many of the contemporary depictions of Japan and Japanese culture as well. Graham Huggan has pointed out that 'remoteness' or more drastically, a nostalgic 'elsewhere' is one of TP

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the most powerful components of exoticism;24 when looking at dehistorisation as the 'freezing' of Japan in the feudal past and as explanations of current constellations not in terms of historical changes but in terms of essential unchangeability, it becomes obvious that this 'remoteness' is not only one of geography and constructions of cultural difference, but also one of time. The appeal of the 'elsewhere' works on two different levels: on the level of setting the plot in the past (as in Laura Joh Rowland's series) and on the level of dealing with the past and understandings of history in the context of a contemporary setting as in Massey's novels. However, while in Rowland's case the setting in sixteenth century Japan certainly achieves the desired exotic appeal, Massey's integration of history into her crime plots occasionally has an exoticizing side effect, but it primarily serves to present contemporary Japan and Japanese culture as bound up with but not determined by historical constellations while at the same time reflecting an awareness of the potentially exoticizing effect of some of the strategies drawn on. Massey largely escapes exoticist dehistorisation by making history an issue on different levels. One obvious and increasingly important strategy is events of the past as central to the crime plot; particularly in the two latest novels, The Samurai's Daughter and The Pearl Diver, the crimes Rei investigates are directly connected to past crimes committed in the context of World War II and the Vietnam War respectively. In The Samurai's Daughter, the crime Rei investigates is not only directly related to Japan's infamous history of brutal labor exploitation and forced prostitution during its imperialist expansion in the Pacific and specifically during World War II; the crime is an attempt to prevent the victims of Japan's imperial past to speak out and potentially receive compensation and is presented against the background of the denial of these crimes in contemporary Japan and the resurgence of 'new imperialists'. In short, competing understandings of history and historiography are the actual bone of contention in the novel. In The Pearl Diver, this connection between history and the crime plot is somewhat different, although the structural similarities are obvious. Here, the Vietnam War and individual participation in and TP

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cover-up of a massacre of civilians are central to the novel. The connection between different strands of the plot, the history of American involvement in Vietnam, and the issue of social ostracisation of biracial marriages in both Japan and the US is tight, thus shifting the focus of the novel: while Rei still investigates a number of disturbing occurrences, the crime plot recedes in favour of social and historical issues much more strongly than in any of the other novels. This is partly but not exclusively due to the lack of a murder victim; the only murders happening in this novel are murders of the past. A second major strategy to address history, its impact on the present and the way in which it is addressed individually and collectively is through things, things as both historical artefacts and epitomised history. Here, the potentially exoticizing effect of the strategy is obvious; awareness of the assumptions, of images of 'traditional' Japan that are deliberately used. The fact that Rei is a freelance antiques dealer can hardly be underestimated in the evaluation of the role of history for plot, structure, and the ways in which Massey not only counteracts the dehistorisation of Japan in the popular imagination, but in which she addresses and negotiates this dehistorisation by explicitly turning antique objects, 'traditional' things of the past into significant objects for the plot in the present. Accordingly, many of Massey's Rei Shimura-novels circulate around objects and their ambiguous signification: a tansu (a chest of drawers) and a scroll in Zen Attitude; a scroll and a sword in The Samurai's Daughter; or a bridal kimono in the novel of that title. These objects are not only central to the crime and its resolve; as antiques they are not only part of history. Rather, through the stories that they carry and that inscribe them, they are history. These objects are not simply treated as the aspect of 'traditional' Japanese culture as which they appear at first glance; rather, this initial appearance is used to mislead both protagonist and reader: what 'culture', 'tradition', and 'history' mean or can mean is negotiated in the context of their potential significance for the present and, more specifically, for the crime plot.


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Negotiating Social Roles and Hierarchies: 'Gender' As argued above with Yamamoto and others, one of the central strategies to represent Japan and Japanese culture has been feminisation and one of the most pervasive images is that of the geisha.25 In her novels, Massey counters the image of the geisha by presenting a broad range of Japanese (counter-)femininities that appear as such through their open juxtaposition to social norms of femininity as perceived by Rei. Most notably, Akemi Mihori in Zen Attitude presents such a counterimage: Akemi, a former judo champion and unmarried at the age of thirty, is presented not only as a counter-image of 'the Japanese woman' but to everything associated with 'Japaneseness' (by Rei who is not free of stereotypes and stereotypical expectations herself!) through her intense bodily presence: TP

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Akemi Mihori had crept up behind us. She had swapped her judo-gi for a black spandex sports bra and shorts that revealed bulging muscles in her legs and arms. […] 'Hey, aren't you American?' Akemi said in English, grabbing my hand in a handshake like iron. I was relieved when it ended. She used the same hand to vigorously wipe her damp brow, raining a few drops of sweat on me.26 TP

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Akemi also presents a counter-model to an assumed Japanese heteronormativity in the context of strict gender roles and hierarchies. While not a homosexual, she is certainly coded as a lesbian and mistaken by both Rei and her lover Hugh as such. 'Why did you ask me to keep this dinner secret from Hugh?' I asked. 'He doesn't trust me. He'll be upset.' 'What gives you that idea?' I asked, my stomach doing a funny skip when Akemi laid her hand over mine. She laughed at my obvious nervousness. 'What do you think? At your party, he introduced me to women but no men. He thinks I like girls, doesn't he?' With mighty concentration, I forced my

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There is not necessarily a contradiction in identifying the strategies of infantilisation and feminisation and at the same time acknowledging the continual presence of hypermasculine stereotypes such as the samurai. On different levels, both present a model of strict (gender-)hierarchy. Also, the samurai image has never 'made it' to the level of national metonymisation. The samurai, hence, is a stereotypical image; feminisation is a strategy of representation that finds is epitomisation on the level of images in the geisha. Sujata Massey, Zen Attitude (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), pp. 46-47.

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While the depiction of Akemi if not as a homosexual but as a homosocial woman draws on a number of stereotypical depictions of lesbians, her character is used to criticise both the geisha-like image of Japanese women and Japanese social institutions – from marriage to the social organisation of religion. However, hers is not the position of a social outsider, as Rei finds out: rather, she is presented as integrated and popular in her community, thus proving false Rei's initial assumption of Akemi as a loner, an assumption based on Akemi's career choice as a judo champion, her disgrace at the Seoul Olympics, her defiance of norms of femininity.28 So while Akemi presents transgressions of gender norms that in the range of what is being depicted in Massey's novels is an exception in its radicalness, many of Akemi's gender transgressions can be read along the lines of Rei's own defiance of social expectations and norms. Thus, more importantly than depicting of counter-images as such, both normative and stereotypical images of Japanese femininity are openly negotiated and reflected upon, often directly set against a supposed American norm. TP

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'I'm kind of sorry for Japanese American women.' Nicky looked at me thoughtfully. 'Let's face it, you can almost pass for Japanese, but your personality's all wrong. You can't possibly attract anyone here. You have boundaries, and they don't. Japanese girls are kinky. They do things you couldn't imagine.' I could have said a million things. Nicky, like so many of the foreign men I'd met in Tokyo, believed Japanese women had a peculiar combination of emotional purity and sexual willingness that made them the ultimate mates.29 TP

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As much as Rei resents and criticises Nicky's geisha-image of Japanese women and his condemnation of her as un-Japanese: one of the issues the protagonist is confronted with on a regular basis – not only when dealing with the orientalist fantasies of gaijin men – is the feedback by Japanese women that she does not conform to what is presented as norms of Japanese femininity: 'Japanese women don't like to cry out,' Miss Kumiko said brightly. 'Not even when delivering babies. When my niece was born, my sister was silent. At moments of severe pain, she bit a handkerchief. Would you like a handkerchief?' 'No, thank you, and this is hardly childbirth. It's a bikini wax.' Damn my American half for making this process necessary. If I'd been fully Japanese, I would have inherited the hairless gene. But I was a hafu or hanbunjin or konketsujin or whatever name Miss Kumiko secretly used for mixed-race people. It was my own stupid vanity that had brought me into Power Princess Spa before the start of July beach season.30 TP

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Obviously, gender norms and ethnic constructions intertwine in the perception of Rei's non-conformity. In the narrator's self-ironic statement, the notion of a genetic norm intertwines with on the one hand a desire to live up to a beauty standard that is not only Japanese but also – maybe even more so – American. On the other hand, it reflects her perception as un-Japanese by the Japanese women around her, namely by the beauticians: 'When we spoke on the phone, we thought you were a typical Japanese, so we quoted you the price of a small wax. However, Miss Kumiko reports that you required the large wax. Therefore, the fee is a bit higher: six thousand yen. Is that fine?' The entire reception room seemed to be leaning closer to hear my embarrassed answer. 'Fine,' I said glumly.31 TP

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direct textual negotiations of gender roles and norms happen in Rei's relationships with men, more specifically, in her relationship with the Scottish lawyer Hugh Glendinning. It is important here to note that gender roles and expectations are not much of an issue while Rei is in a relationship with Takeo Kayama, heir to a prestigious ikebana school and Rei's lover in The Flower Master, The Floating Girl, and The Bride's Kimono. Thus, the rigid binary often depicted between a gender hierarchal East and a 'liberated' West does not hold.33 In her relationship with Hugh, Rei explicitly sees and rejects the geisha stereotype (however accurate this assessment may be in this situation): 'Oh, I forgot. Gaijin prefer an Oriental fantasy girl who always agrees'.34 Here, the constellation between a (white) European man and a Japanese (American) woman is – structurally at least – a mirroring of an often reproduced image in literature when it comes to Japanese women (or Asian women in general): Madame Butterfly, the tragic victim of careless and empty (Western) male promises. The image of Japanese women as presented in Madame Butterfly (the novel, the play, and the opera) is characterised by her sensuality, desire to please, her willingness to patiently wait,35 helplessness, and economic dependence. May it be for what this constellation culturally suggests or for Rei's (occasionally desperate) attempts to fit in Japanese society, or both: at least at the beginning of the series, Rei explicitly rejects the very prospect of a relationship with non-Japanese men: '"I don't do gaijin," I once said to Karen when she wanted to fix me up with a blue-eyed investment banker. It was not why I traveled halfway around the world'.36 This initial rejection of specific constellations in TP

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seeks to instruct Rei as to 'proper' Japanese feminine behaviour and who thus most clearly illustrates, at least in the early novels, this close overlapping of gender and cultural-national codes. See also D'Haen, 'Samurai Sleuths and Detective Daughters', pp. 46-47. See Yamamoto, Masking Selves, Masking Subjects, pp. 25-27; Yoshihara, Embracing the East, e.g. pp. 7-8, 184-186. Massey, The Salaryman's Wife, p. 100. While the image of women waiting for men is not restricted to the Madame Butterfly constellation in cultural representation, it does fit the framework of that constellation and Rei's struggle with it when she tells Hugh at one point: 'I'm not exactly the waiting type' (Massey, Salaryman, p. 103). Massey, Salaryman, p. 71. See also p. 94.


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love relationships as well as the issues that arise in these constellations, therefore, is central to the ways in which not only gender and gendered images but also ethnicity and ethnic identity are negotiated in the novels.

Questions of Cultural Belonging: 'Ethnicity' Since Massey's novels are set both in Japan and the United States, negotiations of ethnicity are more complex than Fischer-Hornung and Mueller state for the 'ethnic crime novel' when they see ethnic detectives 'involved in […] negotiations of identity, which often seem to pose the question of whether race is more important than culture in constituting identity or vice versa'.37 The novels' settings in Japan and the United States demand on the one hand a different self-positioning of the protagonist, depending on her immediate context. On the other hand, they call for an investigation of the different ways in which the texts narratively address and negotiate notions of ethnicity. In The Samurai's Daughter, a novel that most directly deals with Rei's strategies of self-positioning, the protagonist states: TP

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Many children of Japanese and Caucasian unions turn out to have milky coloring, but I had the same complexion as my father and Uncle Hiroshi and my cousin Tom. My hair was more brown-black than black, though, and I couldn't say my nose was Japanese. In the United States, I was often assumed to be foreign-born; in Japan, I was assumed to be Japanese until people realized I couldn't read.38 TP

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Obviously, both 'racial' and cultural features play a central role for the narrator; (visual) recognition as Japanese or American is paramount for belonging. Questions of ethnic/cultural self-definition, therefore, depend to a large extent on the perception of others and the correspondence between self-definition and being defined. Early on in the series, 'Japanese' and 'American' are categories of identity that are mutually exclusive: '"I have a question for you." I kept my voice light. "Do you think of me as Japanese or American? […] It's impossible to

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Fischer-Hornung, Mueller, Sleuthing Ethnicity, p. 12. Sujata Massey, The Samurai's Daughter (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), p. 6.

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be both"'.39 'Japanese' and 'American' here are cultural, not national categories; as such, they are juxtaposed as binaries and mutually exclusive, and the obvious answer to Rei's question, 'Japanese American', is caught precisely in the gaps opening up between the categories. While at first glance Rei's categorical statement 'It's impossible to be both' reproduces the notion of fundamental cultural difference between Japan and America so prevalent and necessary for orientalist and exoticist constructions,40 the way in which the protagonist's constant process of self-positioning in Japan and the US is presented indicates the constructed character of the binary opposition onto which Rei falls back in her statement. Hugh recognises the fallacy of Rei's question when he replies: 'What do you want me to say? That you have the face and figure of the woman in the Japanese art book, but a meaner streak than Tonya Harding? That despite your tea ceremony manners, you're absolutely undaunted by power?'41 Nevertheless, the juxtaposition of 'Japanese' and 'American', its impact on Rei's self-definition, and the protagonist's cultural competence play a significant role for her investigations. The notion of fundamental cultural difference is promoted by individual characters; the texts, however, tell stories of transcultural processes. Therefore, the tension between Rei's attempts to define herself in clear ethnic and cultural categories and her perception particularly in her Japanese environment as a hafu, a mixed-race person, on the one hand and the ongoing deconstruction of the very cultural binaries Rei draws on the other hand is deployed to simultaneously evoke and debunk certain (stereotypical) expectations in the reader. The conventions of the crime genre and the crime plot are of central importance in this context, since – depending on the specific tradition with the genre and on the character of the detective – they are built on a tension of breaking and affirming social rules. As Andrew Pepper notes, '[d]etection is a means of social control as well as social revolution. The detective is opposed to dominant values and yet part of the machinery through which those values are affirmed. He or she TP

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Massey, Salaryman, p. 306. See for instance Huggan, The Post-Colonial Exotic, pp. 17-18; on the 'domestication' of difference also pp. 201-203. Massey, Salaryman, p. 306.


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undercuts but also reinscribes relations of domination and subordination'.42 This refers particularly to ethnicity and race. In Massey's novels, ethnicity is first and foremost an issue that at first glance concerns the protagonist only; however, at a closer look the direct link between Rei's struggles to ethnically and culturally position herself and her investigations becomes obvious. TP

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Burdensome Ties: Ethnicity, Culture, and History in The Samurai's Daughter One example is Rei's 'oral history project' while visiting with her parents in San Francisco: I hoped to make a record of the style in which the Shimuras had lived before the massive modernization that came in the 1960s. I was interested in such things as the way Buddhist precepts were followed in the normal daily routine, and also in the artifacts of that life: the cooking pots my grandmother used, the quilt designs, the landscape design of the camellia garden that had surrounded the old house in West Tokyo.43 TP

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Rei's investigation into her Japanese family history by interviewing her father and uncle and by looking at old documents, household goods, and furniture begins as an individual search for understanding her family and cultural heritage, a strong aspect of ethnic self-identification. However, this search turns out to be closely linked to the investigation of the murder of a Filipina woman forced into prostitution by the Japanese during World War II and one of the potential plaintiffs for a class action suit: parallel to uncovering her grandfather's role in nationalist propaganda in the 1930s, Rei investigates this case that leads her toward the 'new imperialists', a movement not only denying Japan's war crimes but seeking to re-establish Japan's 'imperial greatness' and national pride. History is thus intensely personal; the sought-after ethnic and cultural self-definition through family roots leads to a fundamental re-evaluation not only of the 42 TP

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protagonist's own position in (Japanese) society, but also to a reevaluation of what Japan means to her and for her self-definition: I didn't want to know about my great-grandfather's ridiculous beliefs. If only Uncle Hiroshi's files had been filled with old menu plans and garden designs. I'd built my life around the cultural traditions that made Japan humane: the elegant, fragile, admirable things. Things like that had survived in museums, but apparently not in my family's home.44 TP

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Through an awareness of her family's history, the matrix against which Rei reads herself and her life choices shift: from a juxtaposition of 'Japan' and 'America' to a revision of her view on Japan towards a more differentiated position that takes into account not only the somewhat romanticised everyday,45 but also the way in which the past impacts Japan's present – beyond any of the determining essentialism that characterises exoticist images of Japan. But Rei's probing into her family history as a project of ethnic selfpositioning has a structural impact as well. The Buddhist precepts that she discusses with her father during the interview opening scene of The Samurai's Daughter – no killing, no stealing, no misuse of sex, no lying – serve as a constant point of reference throughout the novel. In their initial conversation on the Buddhist precepts, her father tells her with regard to the fourth precept against lying: 'In Japan, it's always been considered allowable to tell certain kinds of lies out of compassion, or because that lie serves a greater good'.46 It is primarily this precept (or, more specifically, its pragmatic modification) that the narrator frequently refers to: '"Shimada," I lied. I was doing this so often now, I was certain not to get to heaven – Buddhist or otherwise. TP

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"My name is Reiko Shimada"'.47 While these references are often ironic and funny, they nevertheless play a central role for decisive moral decisions Rei makes throughout the plot: in particular, the decision to not name her young cousin Chika as her accomplice in a break-in during the investigation, a decision which results in Rei's deportation from Japan. The 'samurai's modern daughter' does not sacrifice her life but her happiness; her loyalty is not to state authority and the law when it comes to taking personal responsibility for her own mistakes, but to her family and to decisions of conscience. Through the constant reference to Buddhist precepts throughout the novel, this decision has to be read in the structural framework set up by these references: 'Buddhism' – in its Zen variant usually associated so closely in imagery with the samurai in popular culture – as an ethical foundation wins over blind obedience to higher authorities – the latter being another of the aspects linked to the samurai. Therefore, Buddhism plays a very different role in this novel then in the earlier Zen Attitude, where the presentation of 'Zen' was playing with the reader's expectations of both spiritual serenity and a more worldly laid-back attitude towards life, and where the clue lay in undermining this image by criticising the gender hierarchies in institutionalised Buddhism and by letting a monk be the bad guy. While still playing tongue-in-cheek with some of these expectations, their undermining in The Samurai's Daughter happens by displacement and redefinition, by having Rei face decisions with long-term effects on her life and her happiness. TP

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Conclusion The shift towards a structural function of Buddhism in The Samurai's Daughter goes hand in hand with a general shift towards more psychological depth, a greater importance of ethical decisions with lasting impact in Massey's two latest novels. In The Pearl Diver, this move away from the classic crime formula, this retreat of the crime plot in favour of more direct negotiations of other (social, historical, political) issues is, as pointed out above, reflected in the absence of a

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murder victim. While in the earlier novels, these issues supported the crime plot, in the two more recent novels, the crime plot supports the addressing of these other issues. It remains to be seen what this implies for the further development of the series and for the increasing involvement 'in world politics and history' as envisioned by Massey.48 So what does this mean for the representation of Japan and Japanese culture and the negotiation of orientalist and exoticist images? While The Samurai's Daughter and The Pearl Diver, like the earlier novels, work creatively with well-established iconographic 'fragments' of Japan and Japanese culture, by focusing more strongly on twentieth-century Japanese (and to some extent American) history, they also move away to a certain extent from these images as both orientalist and exoticist background. The setting of these novels in the United States (to a large extent in The Samurai's Daughter, entirely in The Pearl Diver) contributes to this development. Nevertheless, these images and their gendered and ethnic implications remain central, and it remains to be seen what will happen with them in the context of the upcoming novels, Typhoon Lover and Girl in the Box;49 so far, while their role changes with the shift of the role of crime genre conventions in Massey's novels, they continue to serve as a framework of reference. As such, of course, they cannot be seen outside the circulation of images in a globalised commodity cultural; but as Graham Huggan has pointed out in the context of marketing postcolonialism and the 'exotic', 'to see commodity culture as necessarily compromising and/or imperialistic would be as absurd as to see all postcolonial writers/thinkers as heroic agents of liberation'.50 Massey's negotiations of these images are critical maneuvers, funny, ironic, sometimes affirmative, always playful, and in any case an important example for creative re-negotiations of established images in contemporary popular culture. TP

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'A WAY TO TALK ABOUT WHAT'S HAPPENED TO SOCIETY': AN INTERVIEW WITH SUJATA MASSEY Questions by Katja Sarkowsky (conducted by email on May 18, 2005)

KATJA SARKOWSKY: How did you create your protagonist, Rei Shimura? How did you get the idea for the character? SUJATA MASSEY: I spent about two years coming up with the character; I wanted an outsider who would not be as autobiographical as myself, but with a really good motivation to fit into society. Thus, I created a half-Japanese, half-American woman. KS: Each of your novels focuses on another aspect of Japanese culture, as most of the titles suggest (as in Zen Attitude, The Bride's Kimono, The Flower Master). How do you decide on your topic? SM: I write about what I like the most! I studied ikebana, collected antiques and textiles. I wanted to like anime, but I couldn't, yet realised they were the most significant 'export' from Japan, so I wrote about that. I actually feel there are three parts to the Rei series: the first four books, which as you mention, focus on cultural arts; the middle three, from Bride's Kimono to Pearl Diver, which are set in the United States because of reasons of parenting my young children (I could not travel). But there is a part three that is very exciting for me: Rei novels, starting with The Typhoon Lover (October 2005) and continuing with Girl in a Box (2006) and another book I hope to start writing next month. These novels take Rei back to Japan, but in an espionage capacity. They were written as a response to the war, and my desire to write about killing that has a more realistic content. KS: Identity politics in the 1990s put many writers on the spot who chose protagonists of ethnic backgrounds different from their own.

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Has that been an issue in your case? Any reactions from the Japanese American community to your mysteries? SM: Nothing extremely critical, thank goodness. I think that in this day, we all realise that a man can write as a woman, a woman as a man, and so on. Just think of Alexander McCall Smith and his series set in Botswana. KS: Your crime mysteries seem to draw on a number of different traditions within the genre: on classical 'whodunnits', on women's crime mysteries but also on a tradition that sought to actively introduce issues of ethnicity into the mystery plot. Also, your novels can be read as 'introductions to contemporary Japanese culture' as you provide a lot of cultural explanation. Do you see yourself in these traditions to a certain extent? And where do you see the role of politics, history, social questions (all of which play an important role in the novels from the beginning) in relation to the crime mystery plot for the novels to come? SM: I was unsure of myself when I started writing, so I tried to follow a classic mystery structure. The Salaryman's Wife is a classic English country house murder mystery, but set in the Japan Alps. I love books like this, but I began to realise I could spread my wings as I went along. I think the tide really turned with The Samurai's Daughter, which was a rough book, very hard to write, but let me express things I wanted to say about comfort women and human rights abuse, in general, during war. And war guilt!! You know I am half German – I have spent a lot of time thinking about untold family stories, and that added to my desire to write about World War II. The Pearl Diver continues my discussion about war – and in it, I'm happy to introduce the first of my 'murderless' murder mysteries. I don't believe you need to have a murder to have a good book. Fortunately, my editor agrees and let me do it in a later book (don't want to give it away until you've read it). I think there's tons of space to break the rules in mystery. After Pearl Diver is The Typhoon Lover, coming out this October. I'm very happy with this book; for the first time, Rei had a bona fide job solving a mystery, and it relates to art theft from the National Museum in Iraq – a real situation. Girl in a Box continues Rei's involvement in world politics and history. I think the book after that will be more personal – a mystery relating to her family, but set in Hawaii, where

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Japanese make up the largest percentage of the population. My series is a way for me to talk about what's happened to society – wealth, poverty, discrimination against various minority groups, war. I would never consciously lecture to people, but Rei is the person who shares my world view the most closely. I recently read novels by Philip Roth (Plot Against America) and John LeCarré (Absolute Friends) that are in the suspense/thriller mode but rooted in political commentary. I admired them so much. KS: Rei often makes a point to address and rebuke well-established stereotypes of Japanese people, of Japanese women in particular; naturally, this comes up the context of Rei's relationship with Hugh. Is this mainly part of the psychological struggles of your protagonist or do you deliberately engage in a 'didactic project' to counter the 'Madam Butterfly' stereotype, the image of the submissive Asian woman in relationship with a white man here as well? SM: Great idea! I never thought of telling people who complained to me about Hugh (there are legions) that it was a didactic project. Actually, I go through phases with Rei's love interests. I get tired of Hugh, I bring in Takeo, and then I miss Hugh again and bring him back. He's like your first boyfriend in college – hard to forget. All I can say about men is that there is an amazing new man on Rei's horizon – the first man who genuinely is in awe of her powers, and rather submissive (but in a good way). But the development of this relationship will take three books; you'll see. BOOKS BY SUJATA MASSEY The Salaryman's Wife (1997) Zen Attitude (1998) The Flower Master (1999) The Floating Girl (2000) The Bride's Kimono (2001) The Samurai's Daughter (2003) The Pearl Diver (2004) The Typhoon Lover (2005)


INVESTIGATING THE MOTIF OF CRIME AS TRANSCULTURAL BORDER CROSSING: CINNAMON GARDENS AND THE SANDGLASS Vera Alexander

In Search of a Motif Why read or write crime fiction? An instruction manual addressed to prospective writers of crime fiction proposes a semi-Horatian answer to this question, defining crime fiction as 'fiction that is written primarily for its entertainment value which has as its subject some form of crime'.1 By contrast, a recent survey of crime fiction and its various sub-genres from 1800 to 2000 concludes with a comment on what is termed 'Postmodern Crime Fiction' which states that postmodern 'crime fiction can, by being less determinate and simplistic than usual in its processes and outcomes, be a means of questioning certainties about the self, the mind and indeed the ambient world'.2 Similarly, Laura Marcus, following Heta Pyrhönen, describes detective fiction as 'a kind of laboratory' which TP

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has been central to psychoanalytic, hermeneutic, structuralist, semiotic, and poststructuralist narrative theories, and has been deployed both to secure and to trouble literary borders and boundaries, including the distinction between high and low literature and the divide between modernist and postmodernist fiction.3 TP

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Henry R. F. Keating, Writing Crime Fiction (London: A&C, 1986), p. 1. Stephen Knight, Crime Fiction, 1800-2000: Detection, Death, Diversity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 195. Laura Marcus, 'Detection and Literary Fiction', in The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, ed. by Martin Priestman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 245-246.

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These statements about the functions and effects of crime fiction indicate a paradigm shift in the ways in which the genre has been read and regarded in the past twenty-odd years, a shift that could be described as a de-trivialising of crime writing in line with other forms of popular culture's gaining critical and academic acceptance for their potential of supplementing and challenging canons and other master discourses. However, in spite of these developments, in most bookstores, crime fiction still tends to inhabit a separate section of its own. In this essay, I intend to look beyond the pleasure principle in analysing the function of crime in a body of transcultural anglophone writings which are not primarily billed as crime fiction. In doing so, I intend to rearrange the bookshelves so as to re-socialise crime in literary terms by crossing and questioning the border separating crime fiction from other fictional works. The two texts analysed in this essay, Romesh Gunesekera's The Sandglass and Shyam Selvadurai's Cinnamon Gardens,4 both published in 1998, are neither 'whodunits' nor detective stories.5 But that does not stop them from being postmortems or from containing elements of crime fiction. Such 'ingredients' of crime fiction include: more or less mysterious deaths, family feuds, attempts at uncovering and reconstructing the past in order to set right former wrongs, cases of fraud, and memories of transgression and violence. What is common to these criminal actions is that in overstepping and even erasing the line separating right from wrong, crimes enhance awareness of the existence and location of borders. The act of transTP

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Romesh Gunesekera, The Sandglass (New York: Riverhead, 1999 [1998]), hereafter abbreviated as SG. Shyam Selvadurai, Cinnamon Gardens (London: Anchor, 2000 [1998]), hereafter abbreviated as CG. This is where these two novels differ significantly from an important novel which could otherwise have been another legitimate subject of investigation in this essay, Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost (London: Picador, 2000; cf. also Knepper's paper, this volume). Focussing on an expatriate forensic anthropologist, Anil Tissera, the novel describes a process of reconstructing the identity of a murdered man with the civil war in Sri Lanka as background. While Anil's Ghost will have a shadowy presence throughout this essay, I would, however, argue that its stress on the practises of crime detection and subservient use of transcultural themes presents the opposite case of the novels mainly analysed here and might blur the boundaries of the case argued here and related topics.

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gressing thus both situates and criticises boundaries and, as a result, the oppositions defined by them. This questioning of clear binaries as exemplified by the juxtaposition of the legal and the illegal is here understood to be one of the principal characteristics of transculturality. While border crossings in crime fiction are often cast in terms of destructive transgressions which threaten social stability, transcultural writings such as the ones examined below can be said to use crime motifs in questioning naïve dichotomies of good and evil, in criticising oppressive social orders and in presenting borders as spaces of flexibility, insight, and innovation. In order to trace the effects of crime elements in Gunesekera's and Selvadurai's novels and to show how the criminal, the postcolonial and the transcultural intersect in them, it is, however, first necessary to expand and clarify the theoretical premises so as to explain analogies between postcolonial discourse and crime fiction and to determine their transcultural functions.

Transcultural Transitions The nature of crime as a border transgression and the generic gap between crime fiction and 'other novels' are not the only boundaries worth mentioning here. I would argue that both of the novels discussed below confront readers with spatial and temporal border crossings, forcing them to bridge different geographic locations and time levels, and to experience the continual crossing between them in terms of what I term transcultural transitions marked by an ongoing negotiation of identity and change. The significance of transculturality as a key concept is emphasised by its link with important phenomena of present-day life: migration, globalisation, transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and the complexities arising from the need to balance multiple cultures in a context of shifting and changing boundaries along with rapid developments in technology, transportation and communication. To briefly sketch the major border crossings involved in the two novels: both were written by authors of Sri Lankan origin who now live in the West, in England and Canada respectively. While not all migrant writing is automatically transcultural, I propose that the

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involvement of more than one culture is among the defining conditions of transcultural writings, and I intend to show that Gunesekera's and Selvadurai's novels can be regarded as examples of this kind of writing. Some of the spatial and temporal border crossings evident in the authors' biographies are reflected on the level of the novels' plot lines. Gunesekera's characters in The Sandglass emigrate from Sri Lanka to England, and in the case of Selvadurai's Cinnamon Gardens, readers are confronted with a protagonist likewise influenced by both Ceylonese and English culture, who is moreover an internal exile on account of his clandestine homosexuality. Both novels therefore describe migrants and characters living on the shifting border between several identities and cultures. With regard to temporary boundaries, The Sandglass forces readers to repeatedly shift not only between England and Sri Lanka, but also between the 1950s and the 1990s; to be precise, between the time of the death (murder?) of Jason Ducal in 1956, and the year 1993, in which his son Prins investigates his father's death, in which Pearl, Jason's wife, dies in England, and in which her great-granddaughter, Dawn, is born. Cinnamon Gardens, by contrast, is set in 1927 Ceylon (the name Sri Lanka went by until 1972) and uses the historical background of the Donoughmore Commission's6 negotiations of Ceylonese franchise to highlight the main characters' struggle for independence and the freedom to step across lines set by traditions in their search for identity. This not only forces Selvadurai's readers to review the impact of a decisive moment of colonial history on the present by travelling into the colonial past to TP

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Led by the Earl of Donoughmore, this royal commission was sent to investigate the shortcomings of the 1924 Manning Constitution of Ceylon and to suggest constitutional reforms. In Shyam Selvadurai's own words: 'The purpose of the commission is to grant more power to Sri Lankans and to put in place a constitution through which this power can be exercised. The jockeying for power by the various ethnic, cultural, caste and religious groups reveals immediately the multifaceted, multi-cultural nature of Sri Lankan society. This period also marks the first serious rift between the Sinhalese and the Tamils, the Sinhalese demanding a centralized government, the Tamils and other minorities asking for a more federated system'. Shyam Selvadurai, 'Cinnamon Gardens: Speech to the Canadian Bookseller's Association', http://www.interlog.com/~funnyboy/ speech.htm [accessed November 19, 2003]. HT

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assess similarities and changes between the temporal location narrated and their own. The investigation of Sri Lanka's past and its inevitable reconstruction of colonial dependency clearly stresses the affinity that exists between revisiting the structural violence of colonial apparatus and the reconstruction of criminal actions as represented in crime fiction. In both instances, human agents turn back from the vantage point of the present to reconsider and interpret past developments that have led up to it. Boundaries and change are important keywords in coming to grips with the concept of transculturality. The prefix 'trans' suggests dynamic aspects, as in transport, transfer, translation, while at the same time challenging the clarity, reliability and stability of the boundary which is being crossed, traversed and highlighted in the process. Crispin Thurlow, in an essay distinguishing the transcultural from related concepts such as 'inter-' and 'cross-cultural' captures these characteristics as follows: I […] prefer the sense transcultural creates of moving through and across cultural systems, in whatever way they may be constituted or conceived. It allows better, I think, for the fluidity of these systems, their porous boundaries and constantly reorienting expressions, as well as the conceptual spaces that open up between traditionally defined cultural systems – the putative 'Third Space' of Bhabha (1994) and the borderlands of Anzaldúa (1987) – that emerge between shifting patterns of sociocultural organisation and practice.7 TP

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In a similar vein, Ellen E. Berry and Mikhail N. Epstein define 'transculture' as 'an open system of symbolic alternatives to existing cultures and their established sign systems'.8 In Berry and Epstein's theory, the term 'transculture' is coined in order to revive critical sensitivity towards culture, based on the authors' perception of a terminological devaluing of the concept of culture as a whole: 'The prefix 'trans-' is added in order to revitalise the meaning of culture in its dynamic and trans-formative quality, and to restore the integrative TP

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meaning of culture' (89). In this definition, then, the concept of transculturality not only contains flexibility, it also engenders a new dynamics. Both The Sandglass and Cinnamon Gardens were written at the end of the 1990s. This is a period which can be described as a time of transition, re-evaluation and the search for new directions: the inevitable approach to the impending new millennium constitutes something like a border crossing in its own right. Homi K. Bhabha in his introduction to The Location of Culture characterises this sense of transition as follows: [I]n the fin de siècle, we find ourselves in the moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion. For there is a sense of disorientation, a disturbance of direction, in the 'beyond': an exploratory, restless movement caught so well in the French rendition of the words au-delà – here and there, on all sides, fort/da hither and thither, back and forth.9 TP

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This moment of transit, or transition, poses numerous questions of identity, change, sequence and, more generally, order. The act of traversing a border constitutes both a crossing and a 'crossing out', resulting in a merging or blurring of categories and perhaps even of principles. These processes sometimes obscure the fact that there can be no true return to the past, nor any objective kind of closure, as all explanations of past events will be incomplete and semi-imaginary. Informed by globalisation and a rethinking of border concepts taking place in cultural studies, postcolonial writing at the end of the twentieth century has reached a stage of relative popularity and circulation. Postcolonial novels and migrant fiction as well as popular media have started to have an effect on cultural production and reception, and the new literatures in English are in a process of transforming entire branches of scholarship, especially in redefining the discipline formerly known as English.10 One of the transitions that can be TP

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detected is one from a predominance of explicitly postcolonial concerns in the confrontation between different cultures to a more general reviewing of the significance of cultural contact in terms of transcultural perspectives. In my reading, the two novels chosen perform this transition by establishing a link between the colonial pasts portrayed (1920s, 1930-50s) and the postcolonial 1990s. Debates triggered by postcolonial writing and theory can be said to have widened their focus to encompass migrant and diasporic writing in general and to measure the history of colonial suppression and injustice against more recent developments, such as globalisation and transnationalism. In this context, borders can be said to have changed status: from being regarded as demarcation lines functioning as a means of separation, borders have come to be regarded as linking factors and they have even been recognised as spaces in their own right, which challenge not only different respective cultures but entire traditional concepts of residence, identity, positionality, and standards of various kinds.11 This results, among other things, in a revaluation of binary oppositions and former hegemonies. While conditions of enforced migration, multicultural tension, identity loss and social marginalisation continue to mark discourses of cultural contact, the quality and quantity of migrant activities, such as creative writing, have established migrants, including those from formerly colonised regions, as an emerging cultural vanguard. In acknowledging that cultures have to be recognised as imaginary, constructed and heterogeneous communities, one must also allow for the continuing validity and lasting importance of intercultural TP

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A Fine Balance (London: Faber and Faber, 1995)), murder (Bharati Mukherjee's heroines in Wife (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1975) and Jasmine (London: Virago, 1990)), Sunetra Gupta's The Glassblower's Breath (London: Phoenix, 1994)), incest (Indrani Aikath-Gyaltsen's Daughters of the House (London: Phoenix, 1994 [1992])), rape (also Jasmine), and many other transgressions can happen in the best of novels and short stories, e.g. Vikram Chandra's story collection Love and Longing in Bombay (London: Faber and Faber, 1997). Terms such as Gloria Anzaldúa's 'borderlands' and Mary Louise Pratt's 'contact zones', though both writers come from very different backgrounds, reflect this new recognition of borders as spaces which is taking shape in different discourses, e.g. in Gita Rajan and Radhika Mohanram, eds, Postcolonial Discourse and Changing Cultural Contexts: Theory and Criticism (Westport: Greenwood, 1995), p. 5.

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concepts of identity, definable communities, acceptable boundaries and customs. One of the negotiations foregrounded by the motif of crime is the ongoing battle between the perceptible dissolution of familiar structures in a globalised context and the emotional need for reliable boundaries and categories. As will be shown in the textual analyses below, crime constitutes a strong stimulus for investigation as crime highlights the violation of rights and rules and triggers the desire to recover lost 'truths', to reinstate rights where they properly belong, to assign compensation and to re-establish order and security, however brittle. Even a successful investigation of crime, however, by recovering disturbingly heterogeneous details, reveals grey areas of doubt and opens up insights into complex lines of causation, many of which elude closure, a feature crime fiction shares with reconstructions of historical developments, including colonial histories of suppression and dispossession. While the black and white binary assumptions of colonial ideology and practices have long been in a process of being deconstructed, this cannot happen once and for all: the emotional and psychological need for clarity and the sense of safety that comes with clear evidence can be said to constitute a nagging impulse to re-examine these assumptions. In highlighting transcultural perspectives of these negotiations, this essay focuses on perspectives which, for all their non-oppositional qualities, are at present still in a state of being defined. How does transculturality derive from modernity? How does transculturality relate conceptually to discourses of postcolonialism and postmodernism? What makes the concept of transculturality both hard to grasp and worth exploring is the absence of a definitive 'map' pointing out the different concepts, terminologies and schools of thought in existence. Coined by Fernando Ortiz in the Cuban context,12 the term 'transcultural' has been adopted into postcolonial discourse, shifting its focus from the process of transculturation to the Janus-faced concept of the border as a means of both separating and linking different cultures. Paradoxically, despite its having been coined in the 1940s, transculturality still seems to be a 'new' term which is out to be TP

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adopted and adapted at a critic's discretion.13 Mary Louise Pratt, for instance, has applied the term in her conceptuaisation of cultures as '"contact zones", social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination'.14 While in Pratt's application of the concept of transculturation intercultural concepts such as the centre or metropolis versus the periphery or dominant versus subordinate cultures are still present, more recent adaptations have used the term 'transcultural' precisely to challenge such binary hierarchies, as, for instance, in Susanne Reichl's use of the term: TP

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Transculturation is also a narrative device, a semiotic technique, a translational strategy. Transcultural novels resort […] to inventing and recreating, appropriating and syncretising, seizing and subverting, or simply adhering and reinforcing, materials transmitted from the various cultures which they seek to bridge or mediate between. None of those cultures and materials, in theory, is privileged more than the other.15 TP

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This freedom of rigid categorisation is both liberating and unsettling. For the context of dealing with the dissolution of categories and classifications, hierarchies and, ultimately, borderlines, crime, real and

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This is suggested by transculturality concepts as diverse as Berry and Epstein's, or Marie Vautier's, who seems to suggest using the concept as a collective term for everything migrant: 'La transculture (or la transculturation, i.e. trans-cultures) is a useful term which overcomes some of the difficult and awkward divisions in terminology in English-Canadian criticism and theory, in that it is an umbrella term for concepts such as l'écriture migrante, First Nations writing, and métissage texts'. Marie Vautier, 'Religion, Postcolonial Side-by-Sidedness, and la transculture', in Is Canada Postcolonial?: Unsettling Canadian Literature, ed. by Laura Moss (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2003), p. 269. Dirk Hoerder, in his turn, works from a different standpoint when he defines transculturality as an expansion of the concept of transnationalism: 'Transnationalism […] implies that people, cultural patterns, and material goods are not confined by nation-state boundaries. Transculturalism expands this approach by reducing the role of the nation-state[…] in favour of regions or social spaces'. 'Transculturalism(s): From Nation-State to Human Agency', Zeitschrift für Kanadastudien, 45 (2004), p. 8. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 4. Susanne Reichl, Cultures in the Contact Zone: Ethnic Semiosis in Black British Literature (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2002), p. 43.

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fictional, poses an important question: can we do away, even conceptually, with binarisms altogether, or with clear demarcations? What about authorities that lay down laws decreeing how to define right and wrong? If there are boundaries that need to be upheld, how is this process to be conceptualised? Clearly, these questions lead to a continuous negotiation rather than a single right answer. To confront them is not necessarily synonymous with giving in to what Mieke Bal has termed 'chaos anxiety'.16 They form part of a necessary debate, and it seems to me that the theme of crime in the novels which this essay now turns to foregrounds the need to negotiate, often in an indirect and roundabout way, between more traditional, predominantly intercultural models of conceptualising cultures on the one hand, and transcultural departures on the other. TP

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Romesh Gunesekera, The Sandglass (1998) The Sandglass is predominantly a family saga, linking two neighbouring Sri Lankan families, the Ducals and the Vatunases. Told in an achronological fashion and evoking a rather sombre atmosphere, the novel unravels such facts as the unhappy marriage of Jason and Pearl Ducal which is marred by Jason's business ambitions, Pearl's moving from Sri Lanka to London, and the subsequent deaths of two of their children. Pearl and Jason's remaining son, Prins, becomes obsessed with the idea of uncovering hidden details about his father's death, and it is this purported crime which is of specific interest to the present investigation. It is not until about half-way through the novel that readers are first given a succinct report of Jason's demise:

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In this essay, Bal lists connections between culture studies and narratology and maps the limits of 'the pervasive taxonomical bend of narratology' by arguing that '[d]elimitation, classification, typology' may be 'a remedy to chaos-anxiety' but '[t]here is no direct logical connection between classifying and understanding texts'. See 'Close Reading Today: From Narratology to Cultural Analysis', in Grenzüberschreitungen: Narratologie im Kontext/Transcending Boundaries: Narratology in Context, ed. by Walter Grünzweig and Andreas Solbach (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1999), p. 20.


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Jason Ducal had died on March 22nd 1956, at eight-fifteen in the evening. He was found on the floor of his office with a bullet in his head, and a smashed watch on his wrist. [...] Next door, Eddy Kaduwira, Chairman of Sanderson Bros., also lay dead, with the gun that killed both of them in his hand. (SG 134) P

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Unlike in a genuine crime investigation, it takes The Sandglass fewer than six pages to resolve the mystery. At the time of his death, Jason Ducal is involved in a business fight with his rival Esra Vatunas about the monopoly over the alcohol industry of Sri Lanka, and one could have been justified in suspecting this rivalry to be the motif for Jason's killing. However, as the narrative quickly reveals, Jason Ducal has simply had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time as he happened to be within the firing range of a suicidal homosexual colleague: [W]hat pushed Eddy to fire the gun was not the oscillating fortunes of the local liquor trade; rather, it was the exposure of his sexual predilections in a police raid that took place on the afternoon of the same day. (SG 138) The early reports simply noted the bizarre double deaths and Jason's demise; they dwelt much more on Eddy Kaduwira's sensational […] sexual habits. But the later reports, after the inquest, told a neater story of suicide and tragic misfortune. Eddy […] had marched into his office and sat behind his Chairman's desk as if to survey his life's work. Then he had apparently pulled out a World War II Mauser automatic from his desk drawer, put it in his mouth and pulled the trigger. The bullet had gone through his mouth, severing his brainstem, and passed clean out of the back of his neck. The bullet not only instantly killed Eddy Kaduwira, but burst through the glazed teak panels of his economically partitioned office and unerringly smashed into Jason Ducal's skull. It killed him on the spot […]. (SG 140)

Compressed as this explanation is, the crime-like episode at the centre of the novel raises more questions that it answers. What other, transcultural, issues does this somewhat quixotic episode relate to in Gunesekera's novel, and what is the function of the crime motif? A closer look at the various strands of the narrative suggests that one mystery is replaced by another17 and the investigation at the centre TP

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In his review of The Sandglass, Tom Beer, who makes a similar observation, lists the following mysteries: 'Why did Jason die? What do Pearl's life and death mean? Where is "home" for the men and women who hover between a Sri Lanka

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of the narrative is a futile one into the nature of death as the ultimate border. Readers learn about the scheming involved in this in the following report by Jason's son Prins who disputes the accidental nature of his father's death and spends much of his adult life in Sri Lanka bent on uncovering a more sinister truth about Jason: 'Esra was very sharp. He saw how a new drink could really make big bucks – boom or burst. He is the one who came up with the idea: Vambrosia. […] Esra knew it would be a colossal winner. To lose his opportunity to intoxicate all our crapulous heads for years to come was too apocalyptic for Esra to contemplate. Especially if he was to lose to a company represented by my father: the enemy whose house had its backside shoved right in his face.' Esra had […] called for a team of fixers. He instructed them to concoct a story for the morning paper that would expose a potential link between a sexually debilitating nervous disorder and Ambrose Budego's staple liquor. (SG 112-113)

As indicated by the title, one of the main themes in the novel is the passing of time. In reviewing memories and personal narratives the characters, especially Prins Ducal and his alter ego, the narrator Chip, Pearl's tenant, who lacks a family and history of his own, try to make sense of the past, make stories out of history. There is a strong correlation between time and place throughout the novel; travel equals the passing of years. The eponymous sandglass is a metaphorical means of making the passing of time visible, of translating it into space. The changing of place performed by the sand becomes a stand-in for the passing of time and the changes people undergo as they pass through time. The two main time levels correspond to different locations: the novel is set in 1993 London, covering two entire days. The novel's chapter divisions chart the passing of time before Pearl's funeral and the birth of her great-granddaughter. As the sand trickles from the top glass into the bottom one, life goes out of Pearl as the family approach the birth of her great-granddaughter, Dawn. Of the two crucial events, death and birth, the former dominates the tone of the novel. It is not only Jason's and Pearl's deaths which make for the much lamented

that no longer exists and an England far from the fictional universe of Pearl's beloved Father Brown mysteries?', 'The Sandglass by Romesh Gunesekera', Salon, 1 October 1998, p. 149.


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sombre atmosphere in The Sandglass.18 Upon Jason's death, Pearl decides to emigrate to England, where her life is marred by the ensuing deaths of two of her children: in 1966, her daughter Anoja dies in childbirth, and her son Ravi, Prins's younger brother, commits suicide in 1983. Pearl's move to London marks the end of her active life, as she henceforth mainly spends her time enveloped in memories of her past which she tells to Chip while knitting, or watching TV.19 Time virtually stops in a sandglass unless it is turned onto its head, and in Gunesekera's novel, the sand takes up its march through the measuring hole again when Chip and Prins, in their death vigil for Pearl, review the time span of her life, scrutinising the grains for their meaning and focusing especially on the 1950s. What holds together the crime plot summarised at the beginning and the other themes, such as time, death, or immigrant struggles, is the character of Prins Ducal. If this novel can be compared to crime fiction, Prins is a detective figure, along with the narrator, Chip, who spends his days listening to Pearl's stories, and, on another level, with the reader who is piecing together the significance of the various links between past and present. Prins's efforts at finding out about his father's death are interesting in the context of crime and border-crossing because they both highlight and obscure the line dividing life and fiction. Pearl spends most of her time in England watching old films and telling the story of her life to Chip. Her memories are thus continuously punctuated by filmic elements, mostly taken from 1930s and 1940s Hitchcock thrillers and TP

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The Gale Literary Database entry on Gunesekera explains that the names of the rivalling families are implicated in evoking gloom: 'in Sinhala, "Ducal" derives from dhukka, meaning "sadness", and Vatunas means "the fallen"'. Rocío G. Davis, 'Romesh Gunesekera: Sidelights', in Twenty-First-Century British and Irish Novelists, ed. by Michael R. Molino (Detroit: Gale, 2002), pp. 111-120. Many of the other names – Dawn, Pearl, Prins – are evidently telling names, too, a stylistic device that in my reading of the novel metafictionally corresponds to the blurring of the lines between fiction and reality which is so characteristic of different members of the Ducal family. 'Pearl never seemed to sleep. Perhaps it was because she never travelled; at least, at the time that I got to know her. She had travelled in a once-and-for-all migration […], but for the rest of her life she seemed inert. [...] Everything around her moved: pictures on her TV screen, the earth, the moon, but Pearl herself was quite sedentary' (SG 187).

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detective films. Similarly, in reconstructing his father's death, Prins employs filmographic imagery and vocabulary, which suggests that for him, too, the line separating his real life and fiction is obscured, if not deliberately erased: The picture that emerged from the official papers was so consistent, Prins declared, that he felt he had been there. 'More than been there, you know,' he insisted. 'I feel I have seen the movie. I know the story from all the angles, because every cock-arsed theory fits so perfectly. Like cogs linking one wheel to another and everything turns in turn.' (SG 135, my emphases)

Prins's absurd reversal of the significance of reality and fictional representation must be read in connection with recent changes in the status of popular culture as opposed to master narratives noted above: for Prins, 'having seen the movie', clearly an instance of fictionalisation, takes precedence over witnessing a real event; avowed (and recorded) constructions of reality depose the original event or serve as the yardstick by which to gauge their credibility. A simple reversal of the hierarchy of reality and mimesis is, however, not where Gunesekera's play with the dividing line between fiction and reality ends. Gunesekera's novel depicts a cast of migrant characters who, in a manner reminiscent of Walter Benjamin's angel of history, are propelled towards their futures with their faces turned to a past which is neither quite real nor quite imaginary. The 'movie' which Prins (re)constructs in his mind, from second-hand facts, actually has a greater presence and validity for him than his actual witnessing the events leading up to his father's death would have had – understandable in view of the fact that he was only six years old at the time, but still indicative of the novel's metafictional strategy of selfconsciously mixing different levels or degrees of representation in its attempt to recreate the border-line situation of migrants. While the past is irretrievable, Prins's efforts show that to reconstruct the past is a creative act: reconstructing a past crime and constructing a fictional genre like a film are activities which go hand in hand, as when Chip quotes Prins: Then he told me that recently he had been trying to find out what had really happened back in 1956. 'Trouble is, when I look back I see him and everything


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else through so many filters. Nothing you can be sure of, you know. It makes it all very difficult. I have to build it up, pixel by pixel, in my mind.' (SG 75)

There is no final 'big picture' in this transcultural reconstruction, where the solution of the main problem is replaced by a new problem, a new disappearance. The detective plot in The Sandglass is left wilfully unfinished: shortly after Pearl's funeral, Prins and Chip come across a tin filled with notebooks (i.e. Jason's diaries) which potentially contain all the missing links which Prins has sought for years. However, in an anticlimactic gesture which invalidates his entire previous quest, Prins refuses to open the notebooks: 'Who cares anyway?' Prins angrily pushed the tin away and glared at me. 'I know there were two bullets fired the night he died. One for each of them. But only one ever got into the official reports. The other was recovered. It was murder, and it was fixed. I am sure of that. But who cares any more? Now they are both gone, it's a dead world. There is enough bloody trouble in the one we live in, you know.' (SG 267)

Clearly, his mother's death has made him lose interest in his quest, and thus one unfinished mystery is followed up by another when Prins shortly afterwards disappears from Colombo. As he is at the time of life at which Jason died, this parallel suggests that there is no real closure for the migrants portrayed: the only way out of their borderline location is death. The open-endedness of the Jason crime plot also suggests that the crime of the past is constructed and exists in the mind of the investigator. Jason may not have been murdered, but his son may need an imagined murder to cope with his death. Prins clings to this fantasy rather than risk exposing a painful past as less dramatic than he perceives it to be. Clearly, this is a function of crime that goes beyond the simple goal of finding a villain and seeing justice done. Jason's imaginary murder provides a violently dislocating setting onto which a dislocated transcultural migrant like Prins can project his origins. The theme of crime investigation in The Sandglass thus foregrounds an ambition to unravel, understand and ultimately construct the past in the context of immigrant dislocation. The murder of Jason Ducal, real or imagined, symbolises the memories of the unfinished – and interminable – business of ever fully leaving behind one's country

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of origin.20 Prins's obsessive investigation allows him to hover on the borderline between cultures, but also on the borderline between past and future. The fact that Gunesekera refuses to establish a recognisable form of closure suggests that the borderline situation of the migrants he portrays cannot accommodate a definite ending. Pearl is 'replaced' by Dawn and Prins becomes a victim as a stand-in for his deceased father. Thus, the balancing act between different cultures and the limitations imposed by past and present continues. TP

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Shyam Selvadurai, Cinnamon Gardens (1998) While crime in The Sandglass functions as a metaphor to illustrate the transcultural constraints on the lives of migrants, Shyam Selvadurai's novel proposes a different function of the crime motif. Jason Ducal's death in Gunesekera's novel constitutes a decisive moment without, however, bringing about any definitive knowledge or insight. By contrast, Selvadurai's protagonist Balendran experiences his brother Arul's death as a moment of enlightenment, of being shocked into an awareness of injustices and double standards in the society and, more precisely, the very family he is a member of. The crime which plays a pivotal role in Selvadurai's novel is not real or putative murder. Its criminal status is even less definite than the Jason Ducal plot because the concept of crime is fragmented to involve a large cast of characters. The novel lights up many disparate dark corners of society so that a degree of criminal activity seems to be a part of normalcy. What then constitutes a crime? Cinnamon Gardens is set in the eponymous elite area of Colombo, Ceylon in the year 1927. Rather than move across several time levels, Selvadurai sets his novel in the 1920s. By setting his story in a historical past,

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Evidently, this image of being haunted by the past constitutes a parallel to Anil's Ghost, although there it is the Sri Lankan civil war which is mainly blamed for causing the memories and guilty feelings of Anil and all the other characters affected by the killing of Sarath Diyasena. The Sandglass, as part of its strategy of blurring reality and fiction (or the imagination) on the other hand, takes the edge off this topic by associating Sri Lankan conflicts with the semi-comic family feud of the Ducals and Vatunases.


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Selvadurai does not want to suggest remoteness or closure. Rather, his focus seems to be on the origin of present-day problems and unresolved conflicts caused by intercultural and transcultural border negotiations begun in the past. Selvadurai leaves it to his readers to spell out the implications of this return to the colonial past.21 The novel revolves around two protagonists, the young school teacher Annalukshmi Kandiah and her middle-aged uncle Balendran Navaratnam, the second son of an overbearing landowner.22 The dual shape of the narrative can be regarded as constituting a decentring in its own right as this structure forces readers to continually shift attention from one protagonist to the other. In determining the role of crime in this novel, crowded though it is with topics seemingly unrelated to crime,23 it must first be stated that the term 'crime' itself has an astonishingly high frequency in the text.24 In the context of this essay, TP

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With regard to the genesis of Cinnamon Gardens the author observes: 'I had become fascinated by the 1920s in Sri Lanka and how much relevance that period has to the current problems of the country. I think of Cinnamon Gardens not as a historical novel, but more as a metaphor for the present'. Selvadurai, 'Cinnamon Gardens: Speech to the Canadian Bookseller's Association'. The context of Balendran's and Annalukshmi's private dramas is the Donoughmore Commission's negotiation for Ceylonese franchise. The novel therefore portrays emancipation struggles both on the personal level of Balendran and Annalukshmi, and on the nation-wide one. Emancipation, both in terms of decolonisation struggles and individual quests for freedom involves a breaking of social and mental boundaries which, by creating new living conditions, can be read as marking a transcultural transition. The novel has, in fact, been criticised for trying to cover too large a range of themes and issues: 'Selvadurai takes on too many themes from too many angles. Not only do these themes impinge on one another but they affect his artistic focus'. S.W. Perera, 'In Pursuit of Political Correctness: Shyam Selvadurai's Cinnamon Gardens', Sri Lanka Journal of the Humanities, 24-25.1-2 (19981999), p. 108. Perera's judgment may be accurate as far as the merits of composition of Selvadurai's narrative are concerned. However, given that the plurality of themes dealt with in Cinnamon Gardens, or at the least, brought to bear on the novel – politics, family scandals, gayness, emancipation – create a sense of disorder and confusion, it could be argued that this effect is at least partly intentional. For instance, in the following passage: 'Annalukshmi's qualification as a teacher was held to be her greatest crime by her mother's relatives […] A career as a teacher was reserved for those girls who were too poor or too ugly to ever catch a husband. […] She might as well have joined a convent' (CG 3-4, my emphasis). The significance of this seems to go beyond mere rhetorics as it leaves readers

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however, the transgressions involved in Annalukshmi's rebellion against restrictions imposed on women are of minor importance, and therefore, this essay will focus on the Balendran-plot and, in it, on the role of sexual transgressions. Balendran is a homosexual and thus engages in relations classified as criminal by British laws against sodomy. Readers are reminded that 'it hadn't been that long since the Wilde trial' (CG 141), and if homosexuality is banned in England, it certainly is a dark secret worth keeping in Ceylonese society. The only time Balendran was able to enjoy a long-term relationship was during his student days in England twenty years ago. This affair has ended in a nightmare, as his imperious father, having been briefed about his son's inclinations, bore down on the lovers unannounced and took Balendran back to Ceylon, not without instilling in him a mixture of fear and guilt that marred his entire life and left him both economically and psychologically dependent on his father. Since a public acknowledgement of his inclinations would have ruined the reputation of his family, Balendran has forsaken his English lover Richard and has settled for an unfulfilling double life with a wife and son as dictated by his father; a life punctuated by occasional clandestine forays into the red light district of Colombo. The year 1927 is a landmark for him, as it is for his entire country. Firstly, a visit to Ceylon by his former lover Richard as a member of the Donoughmore Commission leads him to review his earlier decision to return to the constraints of his family and society instead of continuing his relationship with Richard in England. Secondly, his elder brother Arul who has been ousted from the family for the transgression of marrying a low caste servant woman (named Pakkiam), dies in exile. Balendran pays his brother a deathbed visit in India, during which Arul reveals that their father, who keeps Balendran under his thumb for his sexual abnormality, used to exploit Pakkiam's mother sexually and threatened to do the same to her underage daughter. In Arul's words: 'You have been blind to the reality of life,

with the impression that crime is omnipresent and that almost the entire cast of elite society members is regarded as criminal on some count or other: crime is a part of everyday life.


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Bala. You have spent your whole life living by codes everyone lays down but nobody follows' (CG 273). This realisation causes a fundamental shift in Balendran's selfimage and view of his society in which he no longer regards himself as the only culpable member. Cinnamon Gardens is quite literally a postmortem in so far as the insights Balendran gains on Arul's death cause him to re-evaluate his entire society and his own role in it: Arul's death reveals the presence of the proverbial skeletons in the cupboard not only of one particular family. Colombo's elite society as a whole is portrayed as predicated on self-constructions and selfstylisation, and it is revealed how much denial of the truth, deception and corruption goes into the upholding of these constructions. In the course of the novel, both Balendran and Annalukshmi serve as catalysts who uncover some of these constructions. Their personal journeys lead to an understanding of the double standards which their society rests on. Thus, these two 'black sheep', whose transculturality is defined by the conflict between their private ambitions and publicly prescribed roles, fulfill a function similar to that of migrants in that they challenge the stability of social structures and the assumptions on which these are based. Readers of Selvadurai's novel are not only led to sympathise with the seeming 'villains' (as opposed to the self-righteous mimics) but they are, moreover, confronted with the realisation that the definition of what constitutes a crime is subject to change. For Balendran's father, to abuse low caste women and even children, and to commit adultery is not a criminal act as long as nobody knows and talks about it. To do what could be regarded as 'the decent thing' and marry a lower caste lover, as does Arul, however, is quite explicitly depicted as a crime: 'Arul had committed the crime. He had fallen in love with Pakkiam, he had wanted to make her his wife. He had loved where he should have simply lusted' (CG 279, my emphasis). Readers in different cultural locations will choose to attach labels of 'criminal' and 'victim' differently; in any case, however, they need to review their concept of crime as being one among many and as context-dependent. In line with the novel's refusal of closure, the ending sees both protagonists at a threshold location in which their destinies are left pending. Balendran disappoints readers who have built up hopes for a dramatic coming-out story ending in his happy reconciliation with

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Richard, or at least an oedipal showdown between himself and his domineering father. Instead, Balendran decides that it is selfishness which has been the cause of much pain and suffering in his family. To come out would be a selfish action on his part and so he decides to keep playing his role, although he makes an effort to keep in touch with Richard. Crime is used as a means of unveiling and criticising the double standards of Ceylonese patriarchal elite society which lead to a disjunction of right and wrong, and it is left to the reader-detective to supply the missing link between 1920s Ceylonese social conditions and the conflicts of the 1990s. At the same time, the very notion that there can be acts self-evidently and objectively constituting crimes is challenged by the novel's emphasis on a radical disjunction between private and public concerns. With so many injustices being perpetrated and criminal actions going on – colonial suppression and complicity, the racism experienced by Annalukshmi and some of her friends, inequalities among men and women, rich and poor, restrictions on the rights of free speech and many more – any concept of normalcy and social standard is exposed as being perpetually undermined and self-undermining by a level of crime continuously constructed in everyday reality.

Crime and No Punishment Having named lack of closure as one of the common elements between these two examples of fictional works not officially declared as works of crime fiction yet incorporating crime motifs, to draw a conclusion from this investigation seems a somewhat incongruous task. There are no clearly identifiable suspects whose guilt has been incontestably established, and there is nothing and nobody to lock away in a symbolic act of reinstating public safety. Transcultural novels cannot allow for such an ending. However, there are morals to be drawn from the analyses above, and they mainly revolve around the question of how to think beyond the binary constructions and hegemonic schemes which dominate postcolonial discourse. In this context, transculturality can offer insights into the complexities of cultural contact and interaction across


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spatial, temporal and cultural divides. What is demonstrated by focussing on crime motifs in postcolonial writings is the necessity of dealing with the tension between binarisms on the one hand and the dissolution of boundaries as suggested by transculturality. Could a similar effect have been achieved by two works officially billed as crime fiction? While this makes for a speculative ending, I would suggest that, despite the opening of critical discourses to popular writings, this would have narrowed not only the readership addressed and reached, but also the reception strategies employed in dealing with the novels. Even if hyphenated to form a generic category of 'postcolonial-transcultural-crime writing', the texts would risk facing the criticism of trivialising colonial injustices: clichés are in the eye of the beholder. However, by indirectly arguing that crime has shifted place and that it constitutes a motif worth exploring in tracing the ambivalent undercurrents of postcolonial writings, the two novels analysed here successfully use sensibilities honed by popular culture, for instance film consumption and the stereotyping strategies acquired from popular writings. In the two novels examined above the crime motif and the investigation of transgressions serve as markers of boundaries. Death, whether natural or not, functions as a central moment of initiation at which Gunesekera's and Selvadurai's protagonists are forced to review their own lives and to assess how far they allow the past – which they discover to be at least semi-fictional or imaginary – to govern their present and future. By facing past transgressions, both Prins Ducal and Balendran break free from mental and physical stagnation and the authority of the past. Thus, crime functions as an important plot device for introducing shifts in thinking or practical changes and for inducing insights into the power of the past. In the context of writings labelled as 'postcolonial' which involve a prolonged preoccupation with the past and its impact on present-day concerns, this can be regarded as a significant transcultural transition to the gift of the complex and elusive present.


RIDDLES IN THE SANDS OF THE KALAHARI: DETECTIVES AT WORK IN BOTSWANA Elfi Bettinger

For Liselotte Glage Botswana is not exactly a country that comes to mind when thinking of postcolonial crime. Readers may remember Botswana as one of the front-line states of South Africa, threatened by the crossfire between the apartheid regime's military forces and the revolutionary movements of the neighbouring nations stricken by civil war. Despite these threats, Botswana has over the past decades been described as a singular success story in postcolonial nationbuilding, offering its citizens political stability and economic prosperity.1 The favoured epithet in the international press for this quiet heartland in the midst of political turmoil – the Switzerland of Africa – is anything but suggestive of a remarkable crime rate. Against the backdrop of such an unmarked canvas, no expectations had to be met when in 1998 Alexander McCall Smith, Professor of Medical Law in Edinburgh, put Botswana on the map of international crime fiction.2 Introducing a new serial detective into an already densely populated field of extraordinary sleuths, he inscribed himself into the terrain by conjuring up a refreshingly new local colour. Over the years, Precious Ramotswe, founder of Botswana's NO. 1 LADIES' TP

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Anon., 'German Foundation Says We are the Best', Daily News Online, 24 August 2004, http://www.gov.bw/cgi-in/news.cgi?d=20040824 [accessed October 30, 2004]. Although Bessie Head's stories feature violent and criminal acts in traditional rural Botswanan society, they do not fit into the crime genre. Bessie Head, The Collector of Treasures: Botswana Village Tales (Oxford: Heinemann, 1992 [1977]).

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DETECTIVE AGENCY. FOR ALL CONFIDENTIAL MATTERS AND INQUIRIES. SATISFACTION GUARANTEED FOR ALL PARTIES. UNDER PERSONAL MANAGEMENT has steadily acquired cult status. With over a million copies sold in the USA, the series became the essential British summer read of 2003, a success that was repeated in 2004.3 The novels have also been favourably received in Botswana, where tourist interest finds itself deflected from the Okavango Delta to Mochudi and Gaborone.4 Success on such a scale suggests that McCall Smith's novels must have hit a nerve in the current cultural climate. Amanda Craig of The New Statesman has identified a paradigmatic shift within the detective genre. After the consolation it formerly offered, the genre has, in her view, given way to a fashionable gloom, neurosis and self-indulgence, to psychological quirks, kinks and social realism. And here comes the challenge: 'Botswana […] returns us to something simpler, and more humane. The solution to a crime really matters in such a small population, and is also made to matter to us'.5 Kathy Weissman concurs: TP

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You also become deeply fond of Botswana (this is important since, to the average Westerner, Africa is still a 'dark' – that is, unknown – continent). These wise, charming books leave you feeling washed clean and peaceful, with an expanded sense of humanity.6 TP

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First published by Polygon, a small Scottish house, the books have since been republished by Random House in the US and in a new cheap Abacus edition in Britain. The series, with a sixth volume announced for 2004, is popular and has received honours: The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency was on the list of the ten best-selling books in the US for over a year. It received two Booker Judges' Special Recommendations and was voted one of the International Books of the Year and the Millennium by the Times Literary Supplement. See Anon., 'Botswana Detective to Hit Big Screen', Daily News Online, 3 December 2003, http://www.gov.bw/cgi-bin/news.cgi?=2003123 [accessed October 30, 2004]. Bruce Bennett from the University of Botswana History Department advises visitors: 'For a deeply sympathetic (and very funny) view of present-day Botswana, read Alexander McCall Smith', 'Suggested Reading: Fiction', 16 January 2004, http://www.thuto.org/ubh/about/about03.htm [accessed October 30, 2004]. Amanda Craig, 'The Morality of Mma Ramotswe', http://www.amandacraig.com/ pages/journalism/reviews/mccall_smith.htm [accessed October 30, 2004]. Kathy Weissman, 'Review: The Kalahari Typing School for Men', http://www.bookreporter.com/reviews/037542217X.asp [accessed October 30, T

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She credits McCall Smith with an 'astounding ability to enter the soul of a woman as well as the soul of Africa' because he was born in what is now Zimbabwe. As well as working on the criminal law of Botswana, he helped set up the country's university law faculty. Weissman claims universality for him and showers praise because 'somehow he manages to communicate the specific feel and spirit of Botswana while also creating characters that transcend the barriers of geography, culture, and gender'.7 In a BBC profile of the author, Caroline Frost wonders if McCall Smith's 'day job presents its own philosophical complexities and dilemmas, [his] writing offers an escape to a place that celebrates moral certainty, warmth and compassion'.8 The writer himself modestly corroborates these views: 'These books are very non-aggressive, very gentle. They're quiet books, there's a lot of drinking of tea. They're about good people leading good lives'.9 The quality of 'ordinariness' celebrated by so many reviewers, the so-called 'down-to-earth philosophy', the 'common sense', is spiced up by mildly inoffensive feminist reflections and a patriotic pride in a happy Botswana where small problems take precedence over large-scale problems such as AIDS or violence. The books thus subvert the dominant representation of Africa as the bleak, hopeless continent while reinforcing notions of a gentle, dignified African simplicity. Mma Ramotswe solves a number of small crimes rather than one single major case. Contrary to genre conventions of the clue-puzzle form, plot is not the main focus. The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency does not offer the standard mysteries: the first book's cases range from TP

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2004]. Weissman, 'Review'. Caroline Frost, 'Alexander McCall Smith: Profile', 14 February 2004, http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/profile/mccall-smith.shtml [accessed October 30, 2004]. McCall Smith explains his astounding success in the USA: 'I think the Americans who read them are fed up with in-your-face social realism - here's something which is much more gentle, somewhat old-fashioned. They've been going through a terrible time domestically, and my books are an antidote'. Marcel Berlins, 'Precious Ramotswe and Me: Alexander McCall Smith Talks to Marcel Berlins', The Guardian, 21 January 2003.

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exposing a sponger, to finding out whether an Indian girl has a boyfriend, to investigating a worker's injury claim, to restoring a stolen car to its rightful owner, to revealing the reasons for a doctor's puzzingly inconsistent performance. Rather than complex emplotment, it is the characters in their exotic setting which account for the books' attractiveness. Feisty, easygoing, preferring her bush tea to whisky, 'traditionally built' Mma Ramotswe starts her business with a strong sense of right and wrong, adhering to the rules of politeness, courtesy and respect. Able to empathise deeply with her fellow human beings, she knows the locality and has a sharp eye for human behaviour. She has been seen as a sort of Miss Marple, with whom she shares a remarkable number of traits. Like the elderly spinster from St Mary Mead, that cosy village with the astonishingly high murder rate, Mma Ramotswe believes that human beings are essentially the same everywhere. She relies on informal gossip and draws her conclusions by analogy. When asked by an incredulous lawyer whether women can be detectives, she answers: 'Women are the ones who know what's going on. They are the ones with eyes. Have you not read Agatha Christie?'10 There is a conspiratorial sense among the female characters that men 'went about with their eyes half closed for much of the time. [...] That was why women were so good at tasks which required attention to the way people felt. Being a private detective, for example'.11 The originally Victorian idea of 'separate spheres' pervades the whole series,12 offering plenty of opportunities for humourous observations. However, like Miss Marple, this heroine knows that murders are mostly committed by people intimately known to their victims – one of the deeply subversive features of the so-called 'cosy' mysteries.13 TP

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Alexander McCall Smith, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (London: Abacus 2003 [1998]), p. 59. Alexander McCall Smith, The Kalahari Typing School for Men (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2002), pp. 16-17. For this feature of Miss Marple's world view see Evelyne Keitel, Kriminalromane von Frauen für Frauen: Unterhaltungsliteratur aus Amerika (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998), pp. 46-47. The deceptive cosiness is explored by Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 61-112. On the erosive suspicion of betrayal, see Stephen Knight, Crime Fiction,


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Mma Ramotswe is surrounded by a remarkable cast of supporting characters – her fiancé Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, 'Botswana's finest mechanic' from Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, her assistant, Mma Makutsi, with an astonishing ninety-seven per cent in the final exam at Botswana secretarial college, Mma Potokwane, the formidable housemother of the orphanage and a couple of minor characters. They are all endowed with idiosyncratic traits, which keep recurring like leitmotifs throughout the text. This tightly knit microcosm is carefully extended over the series: as their stories unfold, human interest starts taking over the detection business. With the adoption of two children, family life becomes important, while Mma Makutsi's promotion – to both assistant manager of the garage and assistant detective – results in parallel detective narratives. Gaborone in Botswana is the centre of the characters' world, from which the everywhere else is perceived with mild interest and tolerance. Viewed from their perspectives, world affairs are firmly put in their local place. Thus Mr J.L.B. Matekoni muses that if Jesus came back today he would most probably be a mechanic: with Israel being too dangerous a place, he would surely choose Africa, in particular Gaborone.14 'Botswana was a well-blessed country. Nobody starved and nobody languished in prison for their political beliefs'15 – with such a pride of place, the Western world is firmly decentred. Although troubled by aspects of traditional attitudes toward women, marriage, family duty and witchcraft, Mma Ramotswe 'did not want her people to become like everybody else, soulless, selfish, forgetful of what it means to be an African, or, worse still, ashamed of Africa'.16 Reassuringly for a Western audience, she bears no ill will towards the former colonisers: 'What's the point in digging up events of the past if the effect was just to poison the present?' Referring to her heroes Seretse Khama, chief and the first President of an independent Botswana, and Nelson Mandela, she considers forgiveness to be 'the real African TP

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1800-2000: Detection, Death, Diversity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 91-93. Alexander McCall Smith, Tears of the Giraffe (New York: Anchor 2002 [2000]), p. 153. McCall Smith, Tears, p. 78. McCall Smith, The No. 1, p. 214.

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way, the tradition that was closest to the heart of Africa'.17 Proud of being African, she wouldn't never want to be an American, 'no thank you'18 – which constitutes only a mild rebuke to the West and to America – given the escalating forms of discrimination and xenophobia which keep the majority of Africans immobile anyway. Despite their simplicity, the novels also engage in ongoing debates. With their strong heroine in the centre, Western gender discourses are refashioned to suit their new environment. Gender stereotypes, however, are destabilised without being seriously challenged. That girls can be mechanics does not unhinge the firm belief in women's superior social skills or in men's basic rationality. Traditional codes of conduct are both questioned and endorsed. When mocking Western obsession with body weight, McCall Smith keeps good company with writers who celebrate the ample female form.19 New in the field, assistant detective Mma Makutsi is intrigued by Cesare Lombroso's nineteenth-century theory of criminal physiognomy. But she knows a scholarly work when she sees one. The British Council Library supplies her with Theories of Crime which she prefers to Mma Ramotswe's professional bible, The Principles of Private Detection by Clovis Anderson.20 Anthropological debates are playfully introduced: Mma Makutsi has read about the archeologist Richard Leaky's claim that the human species originated in East Africa. She concludes that 'we are all the same people. Eskimos, Russians, Nigerians. They are TP

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'Seretse Khama was forced into exile [...] simply because he had married an Englishwoman. How could they have done such an insensitive and cruel thing to a man like that? [...] But he himself never made much of this later on. He did not talk about it and he was never anything but courteous to the British Government and to the Queen herself. [...] Then there was Mr Mandela [...] he had forgiven those who had imprisioned him. [...] She had never been able to understand why we should wish to punish those who repented for their misdeeds'. McCall Smith, Tears, pp. 62-63. McCall Smith, The No. 1, p. 214. See eg, Grace Nichols, The Black Fat Woman's Poems (London: Virago, 1984). Among the ever increasing number of women detectives, Stephen Knight finds with Dolores Komo's Clio Brown and Barbara Neely's Blanche White at least two black sleuths proudly wearing their big bodies. Knight, Crime Fiction, 1800-2000, pp. 188-191. Alexander McCall Smith, Morality for Beautiful Girls (London: Abacus, 2003 [2001]), pp. 174-175.


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the same as us. Same blood. Same DNA'.21 Investigating on university premises, Mma Ramotswe stumbles on a case of sexual harassment. In the mention of Professor Tlou's biography of Seretse Khama, the author possibly pays a tribute to an academic colleague from the local History Department.22 When Mma Ramotse pronounces her recent subscription to The Journal of Criminology to be an expensive mistake because of 'its meaningless tables and unintelligible prose',23 chuckles throughout senior common rooms are almost audible. Incorporating foreign extraliterary material into the text allows for dissemination of knowledge. However, it may also instil a comforting certainty that familiar value systems are ubiquitously shared. Mma Ramotswe's royalist leanings – she adores Queen Elizabeth II – or Mr J.L.B. Matekoni's eulogy of British cars add, at least on the surface, an amusing touch of eccentricity. An increasing familiarity erases difference and accommodates a Western audience, who are enabled to feel intimately at ease with another culture. The reception process shows just how Mma Ramotswe has metonymically been turned into an icon of an unthreatening Africa: TP

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Intelligent without being educated, sophisticated without ever having left her country, sharp without malice, she is a delightful original and an evocative reminder of a calm, leisured way of life that still exists in parts of post-colonial Africa.24 TP

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In McCall Smith's detective novels character and the exotic setting dominate over plot. With such an emphasis on local colour, one critic went as far as to remark: 'Perhaps it is misleading to categorise the books as crime fiction; they're more about Africa than about detection'.25 And indeed, Mma Ramotswe herself suggests this when telling a client: 'We are not here to solve crimes. We help people with their TP

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McCall Smith, Morality, p. 9. McCall Smith, Tears, p. 183. Mma Ramotse refers to Thomas Tlou, Neil Parsons, and Willie Henderson, Seretse Khama: 1921 – 1980, with an epilogue by Mwalimu Julius K. Nyerere (Braamfontein: Macmillan Boleswa, 1995). McCall Smith, Tears, p. 200. Marcel Berlins, 'Precious Little Happenings: The Full Cupboard of Life', The Guardian, 19 July 2003. Berlins, 'Precious Little Happenings'.

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problems in their lives'.26 However, in the midst of all this gentleness and non-violence, one crime sticks out and has received wide attention in the reception of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency – ritual murder. The internet reading group guide alerts its readers: 'This crime will bring Mma Ramotswe face-to-face with one of Africa's most frightful traditions – the use of human bones in the making of muti (medicine)'.27 When the book came out in 1998, McCall Smith could not anticipate that ritual murder would be a subject of public discourse in Britain following September 2001, when the headless, limbless torso of an African boy was found in the Thames. The desire to discover 'sinister rituals' seemed to fuel the public imagination, producing some remarkably racist discourse. Commenting upon the press coverage, Josie Appleton states 'that with few issues left on which Britain feels able to assert a kind of moral superiority, the assumptions about the savagery "over there" looked similiar to colonial talk'.28 In the light of postcolonial theory the representation of ritual murder offers a particularly sensitive faultline where the construction of the abject other can be seen at work. In her critique of Mary Daly's naively ahistorical description of the practice of sati in India, Uma Narayan has pointed to the intellectual and political problems that any uninformed account generates when it ignores the complex ways in which the past is reconfigured in the present in terms of supposedly unchanging traditions.29 To seriously examine the meaning of ritual murder, an analysis of the strategies of its representation in McCall Smith's The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency will firstly consider the TP

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McCall Smith, Morality, p. 56. Anon. '[Alexander McCall Smith/Books]', http://www.randomhouse.com/ features/mccallsmith/books.html [accessed October 30, 2004]. Josie Appleton, 'Mysticism and Murder', 21 October 2003, http://www.spikedonline.com/Articles/00000006DF8A.htm [accessed October 30, 2004]. Appleton quotes the anthropologist Adam Kuper, who claims that the press 'employed nineteenth century stereotypes at which Kipling would have blushed'. For Kuper's talk and the transcript of the conference 'Attention Seeking: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition', 16 November 2002, see http://www.instituteofideas.com/ transcripts/AS1.pdf [accessed October 30, 2004]. Uma Narayan, Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third-World Feminism (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 46-80. TH

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connections between the claims of authenticity and simplicity on the one hand,30 and the need to call into question the limits of the detective genre on the other hand. Secondly, a reading of a Botswanan crime novel on ritual murder, Unity Dow's The Screaming of the Innocent, will explore how the social and cultural complexities of the crime can be approached by renegotiating the formulaic conventions of the detective genre. The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency is characterised by a thirdperson narration which is primarily focalised through Mma Ramotswe's eyes, although Mr J.L.B. Matekoni or Mma Makutsi have their fair share in the narrative. The novel starts with the opening of the agency. The first case of an impostor is quickly solved, a case of fraud that hardly fulfils the expectations of the crime genre. The following introductory chapters recapitulate in detail the heroine's childhood, youth and disastrous marriage, which provides the link to the next case of a husband who has disappeared. Mma Ramotswe has to kill a crocodile to find his remains – yet there is zero crime, little mystery and only short suspense. With chapter six, the focalisation shifts abruptly. The abduction of a young boy by two men is recounted from the boy's own frightened perspective with a perturbing effect. His disappearance develops into the plotline running underneath the everyday cases. It is this case which eventually provides some of the mystery and suspense expected in detective novels.31 The father of the 'lost boy', refusing to believe in evil spirits, asks for Mma Ramotswe's help after the police have given up the search. Her confident tone suddenly becomes hesitant: 'We can't really do very much for him'. Her refusal to deal with the case is immediately greeted with relief by her secretary Mma Makutsi (81). Quiet Mr J.L.B. Matekoni pronounces it 'hopeless from the beginning', his comment leaving no TP

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On the persistence of the authentic as a moral and aesthetic category see Virginia Richter, 'Authenticity: Why We Still Need It Although It Does Not Exist', paper presented at the international conference Transcultural English Studies: Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of the New Literatures in English (ASNEL/GNEL), Frankfurt, 19-23 May 2004. In his review 'Bush Tea Gumshoe' of The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, Simon Beckett notes with ambiguous glee: 'And with abducted children and suspected muti-murders among the wayward husbands and petty insurance scams, there's a reassuringly dark edge beneath the surface'. The Observer, 15 June 2003.

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doubt about his conviction: 'That boy would have been taken for witchcraft. He's dead now' (89). The narrative has to grapple with expressing the unsayable, the taboo that nevertheless has to be articulated for the reader's sake: She glanced at her friend. This was a subject that one did not talk about. This was the one subject which would bring fear to the most resolute heart. This was the great taboo. 'How can we be sure?' Mr J.L.B. Matekoni smiled. 'Come on, now, Mm Ramotswe. You know as well as I do what goes on. We don't like to talk about it do we? It's the thing we Africans are most ashamed of. We know it happens but we pretend it doesn't. We know all right what happens to children who go missing. We know.' (89-90, italics added)

Their muted conversation enacts the silence which constitutes the characters' mutual understanding and emotional bonding. 'She looked up at him. Of course he was telling the truth, because he was a truthful, good man' (90). Her conclusions are offered by way of narrated monologue which transforms a general conviction into a hypothetical individual opinion: The boy had been taken by a witchdoctor and killed for medicine. Right there, in Botswana, in the late twentieth century, under that proud flag, in the midst of all that made Botswana a modern country, this thing had happened, this heart of darkness had thumped out like a drum. The little boy had been killed because some powerful person somewhere had commissioned the witchdoctor to make strengthening medicine for him. She cast her eyes down. (90, italics added)

Although at first troubled by nightmares (91), she soon regains her equilibrium under the Botswanan sun. At the edge of the Kalahari, she finds herself at ease: 'Somewhere, far away, there was a grunting sound, but she was not afraid, and she walked out of the hut to stand underneath the sky and draw the dry, clear air into her lungs'. She muses: 'I am just a tiny person in Africa, but there is a place for me, and for everybody, to sit down on this earth and touch it and call it their own' (123). More disturbing than the therapeutic effects of the vast African landscape, touches of humour are strategically placed in the text to dispel the horror (144). Mma Ramotswe ponders whether Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, like the average man she has read of, thinks about sex over


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sixty times a day. The humourous tone falls flat when she learns of a little bag he found which, contrary to her assumptions, does not contain diamonds: There was a smell, dry, musty odour, as he extracted the three small objects from the bag. Now she understood. He need say nothing further. Now she understood why he had seemed so distracted and uncomfortable. Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni had found muti. He had found medicine. (147)

Her risky dealings with the owner of the muti, the powerful Mr Charly Gotso, leave Mr J.L.B. Matekoni apprehensive about her safety. His anxiety is countered with comic relief when he returns to his favourite unconfessed fantasy of rescuing a Mma Ramotswe in danger, a fantasy guiltily enjoyed since he imagines her being naked (180-181). Eventually she goes off to hunt down the witch doctor in the bush – 'in dead country', fully aware of the risks: 'This was evil incarnate, the heart of darkness, the root of shame. This man, for all his mumbojumbo and his spells, was a murderer' (221, italics added). When face to face with the witch doctor's wife, she thinks of an effective way to threaten her into submission. '[The police] have evidence against you and the Government wants to hang you too. Your husband first; you later. They do not like witchcraft, you know. They are ashamed. They think it's not modern' (223-224, italics added). The effect is immediate: though far out in the bush, on the margins of the adminstration's power, the woman is tricked into a confession. Throughout the novel, there is a feeling of helplessness in the face of the state's inability to protect its citizens. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni voices his feelings about the deadlock situation: The police will be doing nothing to find out how and where it happened. Because they are scared. Every one of them. They're just as scared as I am and those two boys out there under that car. Scared, Mma Ramotswe. Frightened for our lives. Every one of us – maybe even you. (90)

The fear of harm from magic practices is coupled with a feeling of powerlessness in the face of the ruling elite's complicity: 'The police had a limited interest in pursuing crime, and certain sorts of crime interested them not at all. The involvement of the country's most

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powerful figures in witchcraft would certainly be in the latter category' (176). Without giving away the outcome: one of the solutions to the crisis the text offers is that human bones can be bought cheaply in Johannesburg (225). This is an easy way out to save Botswana's face (and one which the series repeatedly employs).32 Ritual murder is literally pushed over the borders of Botswana, into South Africa. In the end, the harrowing episode of the 'lost boy' fades once again into the great African sky, contained in a conflation of femininity, landscape and Africa: TP

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The sun went, and it was dark. He sat beside her in the comfortable darkness and they listened, contentedly, to the sounds of Africa settling down for the night. A dog barked somewhere; a car engine raced and then died away; there was a touch of wind, warm dusty wind, redolent of thorn trees. He looked at her in the darkness, at this woman who was everything to him – mother, Africa, wisdom, understanding, good things to eat, pumpkins, chicken, the smell of sweet cattle breath, the white sky across the endless, endless bush, and the giraffe that cried, giving its tears for women to daub on their baskets; O Botswana, my country, my place. Those were his thoughts. (232)

In its discourse of ritual murder, the novel draws on the rhetorical strategies of an unspecified 'African shame' and a general 'lack of modernity' that produces a conglomeration of contradictory and conflicting attitudes: it allows a reassuring but ideologically problematic patriotism to remain in place while framing locally specific social problems as timeless traditions beyond change. In its unqualified idealisation of the era following national independence – personified in the text by the figures of Seretse Khama and Mma Ramotswe's beloved Daddy – it leaves no room for those hopes that have been dashed in the meantime. Denying the complexities inherent in any society, the novel reduces Botswana to an exotic setting, a static social formation, solidly balanced like the mantra reproduced in each volume. An undeconstructed notion of simplicity signifies the kind of

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'Africanness' which is intelligible to Western readers since the modernist cult of 'primitivism',33 while ritual murder is swallowed up in a lacuna of silence. It is as if the silence in the midst of McCall Smith's narrative calls for an outcry that is expressed in the title of Unity Dow's novel, The Screaming of the Innocent (2002).34 Unity Dow is a human rights activist, a legal scholar and the first woman appointed to the Botswana High Court.35 Although her novel does not announce itself as a detective story it clearly has the investigation of a crime at its centre. While McCall Smith's texts draw on simple story-telling structures, which in their seemingly oral simplicity borrow from a modernist primitivism, Dow's text displays a transcultural quality by working with different narrative patterns and networks of intertextual references. The novel's self-conscious experiments acknowledge familiarity both with Western popular culture and political discourses. TP

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This impression is supported by the 'African' design of the novels' covers. For an elucidating analysis of different forms and functions of 'Primitivism' see Glenn Jordan and Chris Weedon, Cultural Politics: Class, Gender, Race and the Postmodern World (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). See esp. the chapter 'Primitives, Politics and the Avant-garde: Modern Art and its Others' which offers a definition: '"Primitivism" is characterised by a hungering for absolutes, a drive for universality and a powerful desire to escape from modern Western industrial, alienating society. It has taken many forms, from the celebration of rural peasant life at home to an engagement with cultures that are radically Other' (p. 320). Unity Dow, The Screaming of the Innocent (North Melbourne: Spinifex, 2002). Whereas the original version appeared in a small Australian publishing house, the novel was translated into German within a year and published in cheap, accessible paperback: Unity Dow, Die Beichte, trans. by Berthold Radke (Munich: Goldmann, 2002). Besides The Screaming of the Innocent, Unity Dow has published two more novels: Far and Beyon' (North Melbourne: Spinifex, 2001 [2000]), a novel about growing up in the age of AIDS, and Juggling Truths (North Melbourne: Spinifex, 2003), which presents growing up in rural Botswana in the sixties from the perspective of a child. Bruce Bennett states that 'Unity Dow is rapidly emerging as a leading Botswana writer'. Bennett, 'Suggested Reading'. See The Urban Morgan Institute for Human Rights' interview with The Hon. Ms. Unity Dow, Judge of the High Court of Botswana, conducted by Bert Lockwood on Wednesday, 15 May 2002, Faculty Library, College of Law, http://www.law.uc.edu/morgan/newsdir/dow020515/ [accessed October 30, 2004]. T

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The novel opens with a subject position familiar from horror thrillers of the body-slashing kind: the reader perceives the world through the eyes of a hunter, a psychopath. There is an almost unbearable tension, a startlingly incongruity. The narrative voice insists on Mr Disanka being the good husband, good father, good lover, good businessman and community leader. However, what we see with the focalisation through his eyes while he is cruising through the village in his Toyota slowly erodes the narrator's reliability. The reader has to pick up the clues to piece together the horror – what the stalker's bodily reactions betray in ogling a trusting village child, while his own overfed little daughter, sitting beside him in the car, is stuffing her face. The child who is the target of his gaze slowly comes into focus. For him, she 'was an impala that wasn't noticing the poacher for what he was, an impala that was mistaking the poacher for a game warden' (7). Witholding any clarity of meaning, language ceases to be a transparent medium. As strange turns of phrase echo a strange mind set, eg, 'his task of harvesting fertility before it erupted into public view' (7), the language evokes uneasiness and distrust. The next chapters continue in a similar fashion. A second man is introduced, Motlababusa Bokae, a sadist, known for his 'near- and actual rapes of young girls' (9). Not quite a chief, he is a Head Man who acts as a type of judge. He frequently visits his witch doctor and hates 'women, chiefs, lawyers and parliamentarians' (11). A third man, Mr Molatedi Sebaki, is the power hungry, slimy deputy headmaster of the local highschool, who plants an evil charm in his boss's office. He is generally called 'Mr Brown' for his arse-licking. A nightly meeting brings the three 'pillars of the community' together (21) – a ghastly assembly of men, of masculinity in a terrifying mode. Their selection criterion for being accepted into their group is again pronounced in a disturbing idiom: 'We are looking for a man with a hard heart, a heart of stone, a heart of a real man. [...] Willing to do [...] the ultimate thing. We are hunting a lamb [...] a hairless lamb' (21). With the language growing both more familiar yet uncanny, the reader gradually realises the men's outrageous design. A sharp cut from the seedy scene in the night bar to clear daylight presents rural Gaphala, where Amantle Bokaa is to spend her year of national service. The narrator's foreshadowing casts a dark spell: 'She had no way of knowing she was soon to be instrumental in stoking the


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fire of five-year-old fears and waking up a five-year-old ghost' (24). The narration's present time of 1999 finds her cleaning out the village clinic's storeroom where she comes across a box labelled 'Neo Kakang 94', containing blood-caked clothes (51). 'The words 'ritual murder' exploded in her head' (54). For readers unfamiliar with the discourse of ritual murder, the novel offers several occasions to learn its way of speaking. Different characters explain the crime using precise definitions: 'the villagers believed Neo had been killed for the purposes of what southern Africans call muti and what in the Setswana language is called dipheko' (129). The insistent reverberation of phrases like 'a hairless lamb' or 'the harvesting of human parts' ensure the gradual understanding of the gory details of the crime and the secrecy of its cover-ups. History and locality are carefully described with an abundance of information that almost explodes the structure of a detective novel. Multiple points of view create a sense of community without producing a romanticising effect. Instead, the narrative's polyphonic quality articulates conflicting insights, of victims, perpetrators and the ones caught in-between. A policeman, almost in tears, asks for a transfer because he is suffering from nightmares: 'These people are powerful: I don't want to end up dead or mad' (74). Government officials themselves are shown to be in the thrall of witchcraft and sorcery. Convinced of the power of muti, they rely on their own traditional doctors for an antidote. The self-consciously complex narration shuns chronology in favour of powerful juxtapositions. Much of the novel's representation is inspired by cinematic techniques. By shifts in time and place, the process of detection is both historicised and contextualised. Flashbacks juxtapose generations of women and different living conditions, a diversity of views that insists on the specific locatedness of knowledge and truth. With Amantle and her friends, the focus lies on the generation of young women who have grown up after independence, in a political climate that promised education, freedom and self-determination. These are rights that they are prepared to stand up for. Obviously twenty-two-year-old Amantle functions as a role model. As a detective figure, however, she is not the solitary, heroic individual, but a member of a group, of mostly young women who can count on and are in need of each other's solidarity in their political

176 Elfi Bettinger

struggle. These heroines' activism, their knowledge of means of civil disobedience, their effective use of both the traditional public forum, the kgotla, and the media for their campaign, insists on Botswana being firmly part of the globalised, modern, contemporary world. The process of detection, of unravelling the network of silence, is a only feasible as a collective enterprise. Amantle organises the villagers, negotiates with the authorities, gets legal support from her lawyer friends in the capital, who prevent the evidence from disappearing as has hitherto happened in such cases. They are all are up against the highest levels of power. Like in the final showdown of a Western, the villagers confront the authorities at the Kgotla in Gaphala. Another radical shift in focalisation to Disanka's older daughter casts doubts on that forum's ability to solve the conflict. Lesego secretly watches while her father is sitting unperturbed among the local worthies and government notables. A flashback propels her into the past: 'Five years had passed since the fateful night on which she'd watched her father's hands as they'd wrapped little parcels' (182). Refusing to lay the past to rest in memory, she is compelled to use the present tense: 'Fear had squeezed out the five years that had passed, and as always happened, she couldn't recall the events if she thought of them as having occurred in the past; she could recall them in the present tense only' (183). This self-conscious act of narration testifies to the persistence of sights that cannot be relegated to memory. Lesego had spied on her father and the two other men on the very night of the murder. Normally the voyeur is empowered by the gaze, by being in control, but here, in the act of looking, the daughter is fatally torn between loyalty to and fear of her father: What's he doing? Why would clothes be in a fridge? Why are the men changing in the middle of the night? What does this all mean? She is afraid. Her father individually wraps the pieces in cellophane he usually keeps to wrap meat for customers. She watches his big hands, and shivers; those hands have held her and loved her. (186)

Again, it is the way of speaking in harrowing detail which slowly gives away what she actually sees: 'The men consult in whispers. She catches the word 'anus' and sees the men as they continue to wrap. They place the tiny parcels in a plastic bag, then place the bag in the


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deep-freezer' (183). It is the word 'anus', referring specifically to human anatomy which initiates the shocking revelation, the proof for the long-held suspicion that these three men committed the ritual murder. In a filmic shot-reverse-shot, the narrative picks up Disanka's perspective. He just recalls his painful apprehension of having lost his daughter's love. Without knowing exactly how much she saw of their nightly action, this family man wallows in his sorrow without ever questioning or repenting his involvement in murder (195). Through the politicians' manoeuvring, the assembly of the Kgotla is staged as a successful negotiation for transparency. The necessary moves are performed which instil a sense of closure. However, this view is shattered when the final chapter reveals the missing bits of the puzzle. The novel ends on a note of anxiety that justice may after all not be achieved; no comforting security is provided. The only evidence is again in the hands of the authorities, whose corruption and incompetence have been established. The open ending, not in terms of the detection process but in terms of justice, is articulated in Amantle's final thought: 'Is there a monster lurking in all of us? And if we're so paralysed by fear, if we don't dare face this evil, who will heed the screams of the innocent?' (214) In The Screaming of the Innocent, Dow takes up the case of fourteen-year-old Segametsi Mogotsi whose death in 1994 has ever since been a point of reference in the discussion of ritual murder. The crime has never been solved; no culprits have been identified or brought to justice. With the law enforcement being perceived as inert and corrupt, the authorities brought in Scotland Yard to investigate. When their final report was not released by the government, student riots broke out in Gaborone, with the national guard moving in to brutally quell civil unrest. In the aftermath, Segametsi's death and the questionable proceedings in its wake have developed into a case study for political activists, anthropologists and cultural critics.36 TP

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See, for example, Ornulf Gulbrandsen, 'The Discourse of "Ritual Murder": Popular Reaction to Political Leaders in Botswana', in Beyond Rationalism: Rethinking Magic, Witchcraft and Sorcery, ed. by Bruce Kapferer (New York, NY: Berghahn, 2002), pp. 215-233; Charlanne Burke, 'They Cut Segametsi Into Parts: Ritual Murder, Youth, and the Politics of Knowledge in Botswana', Anthropological Quarterly, 73.4 (2000), pp. 204-214; James Mathokgwane, 'Where is Justice?', May 1997, http://www.peacelink.it/afrinews/14_issue/p4.html T

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With spectacular crimes like ritual murder, the temptation is great to fall back on essentialist concepts of tradition and identity. Undeconstructed notions of an 'anti-modernity' and 'an African shame' help to generate and to sustain fear and helplessness in the face of a supposedly unchanging fate as they feature in McCall Smith's text. Dow's horrid tale, however, radically challenges the discourse of 'ancient rituals', by embedding ritual murder in the very conditions of modernity. In her novel, Dow engages with many of the contradictions and tensions that have intensified in post-colonial times: the legal, political and bureaucratic processes of the state apparatus which are experienced as being closed off and removed from public surveillance. She carefully explores the breakdown of civil consensus which takes place along along the lines of power conflicts between rich and poor, male and female, young and old, urban and rural, tribal and national, endowed with or deprived of access to education. Last but not least, the novel insists on a feminist agenda as an integral part of a larger struggle for human rights. Annie Gagiano notes that in contrast to the aberrant behaviour of serial killers like Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, 'Dow emphasizes that [...] the horrific act is possible because misogyny of a profound and implacable kind is embedded in the society'.37 The young lawyer Boitumelo points out to the young attorney, her colleague on the other side of the bar, what is at stake in society at large: TP

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We are interested in criminal law; it's just that our area of interest hasn't been classified as criminal law – yet! I think wife beating's a crime, as is marital rape! as is refusing to care for one's offspring! as is abuse of power! as is closing women out of the army and customary courts! as are many discriminatory practices no one wants to even name, let alone tackle! (133)

Read against the nostalgic idealisation of McCall Smiths's generally peaceful Botswanan society, Dow's novel calls attention to the unfin-

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[accessed October 30, 2004]; M.G. Molomo, 'Civil-Military Relations in Botswana's Developmental State', African Studies Quarterly, 5.2-3 (2001), http://web.africa.ufl.edu/asq/v5/ v5i12a3.htm [accessed October 30, 2004]. Annie Gagiano's review is the only substantial discussion of Dow's novel published so far. See her column on LitNet African Library: http://www.litnet.co.za/africanlib/innocent.asp#top [accessed October 30, 2004].


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ished project of liberation. Read against his text, hers is the story of a disillusionment with the promises of liberation, independence and democracy as rapacity, corruption and violence have plagued so many post-colonial societies. This disillusion cannot be seen as divorced from the events and ideologies of the independence era – even in the case of Botswana, which succeeded in establishing itself as a properous and peaceful nation with the fastest growing economy in the world between the year of its independence in 1966 and 1980. Described as a 'paternalist democracy', the effects of the compromises and exclusions in the process of nation formation still linger on.38 Writers and critics who insist on 'authentic' 'African traditions' tend to replicate those power structures which the colonial state sanctioned in its own interests, and which it passed on as its legacy to the postcolonial nation. When they uncritically idealise 'traditional culture' they subscribe to authoritarian and patriarchal versions of customary authority, they effectively cement the marginalisation of oppositional authority such as women, elders or ethnic minorities. As Ashley Dawson has recently argued, colonial hegemony appears to have been more easily subverted within the realm of popular art than within state-sanctioned 'high' art. Historically it has been 'the syncretic realm of popular arts [...] that has proven most responsive both to the energies unleashed by independence and to the bitter disappointments of the postcolonial era in Africa'.39 The popular genre of the detective novel is one of the sites where it is shown that 'life has never been easy in the contact zone'.40 TP

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Neil Parsons, 'The Botswana History Pages', 1999, http://ubh.tripod.com/bw/ bhp1.htm [accessed October 30, 2004]. Ashley Dawson, 'The Short Century: Postcolonial Africa and the Politics of Representation', Radical History Review, 87 (2003), p. 235. Dawson, 'The Short Century', p. 235.


POLITICAL LOYALTIES AND THE INTRICACIES OF THE CRIMINAL MIND: THE DETECTIVE FICTION OF WESSEL EBERSOHN Geoffrey V. Davis

I Let me begin – in the manner of a detective novel by the South African writer Wessel Ebersohn – with a prologue in which a crime or series of crimes is depicted: Stories were rife in the 80s that white policemen were at the core of the train killings and responsible for the conflict between the African National Congress and the Inkatha Freedom Party which resulted in a huge loss of human life. This week, these suspicions were confirmed by a former detective in the apartheid police force, who made a startling confession to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Wayne Hugh (34) told the TRC that white policemen disguised themselves as blacks and pushed people off trains. He also confessed that: - He personally killed five people by throwing them off trains. - He had a role in the cover-up of the hit squad killing of anti-apartheid activist David Webster. […] - The Johannesburg City Council paid the Civil Cooperation Bureau [which carried out the killings] for their covert operations. - [He] confirmed that the bloody ANC-IFP fights at the time were fuelled by the actions of the security police. […] He and other security force members would leave their car at Jeppe station and board a minibus to Park Station where they would get on the train. 'We threw about five people off the train who were killed [he said]. We then picked up our vehicle, which was parked at the next station, and went back to the scene of the crime to make sure they were dead and the case would be investigated by our own unit.

182 Geoffrey V. Davis We wore balaclavas and made ourselves look like blacks by painting or dyeing exposed skin with black shoe polish and wearing gloves.' He agreed [with the judge] that the people he killed in the train were not a threat to the regime and that throwing innocent people off trains was an extreme escapade to fuel political violence.

That extract is taken from The Sowetan newspaper of March 22, 2001. The South African satirist Christopher Hope used to maintain that during the apartheid era it was not particularly difficult to be a satirist in South Africa because the government virtually wrote your texts for you. It would almost seem that the same might be said of the detective fiction writer Wessel Ebersohn.

II Detective fiction has rarely been considered a major genre in South African literature.1 While most black writers devoted their energies primarily to opposing apartheid – and not infrequently paid a price for their endeavours in the form of banning, house arrest, exile and even death – not a few white writers, usually liberal but sometimes quite radical, achieved an overseas readership and an international reputation. What they were, of course, writing was not usually detective fiction – although some, like André Brink with A Dry White Season, might perhaps be said to have flirted with the genre. Be that as it may, to be writing work in such a supposedly lighter vein, work which did not in some manner engage relevantly with 'the system', was viewed by some as politically somewhat irresponsible. To overlook those writers who nonetheless did turn to detective fiction would, however, be to do a disservice to such as Wessel Ebersohn. When I was asked to write about him for this volume, I rapidly TP

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Michael Green concludes an article on Ebersohn with the remark that 'the work of Wessel Ebersohn, no less than the genre in which he works, is more deserving of attention than the current critical silence would suggest'. Green, 'The Detective as Historian: A Case for Wessel Ebersohn', Current Writing, 6.2 (1994), p. 110. A glance at Michael Chapman's Southern African Literatures (London: Longman 1996) or Christopher Heywood's new History of South African Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2004) will serve only to confirm the absence of detective fiction from major studies of Southern African literature.

Political Loyalties and the Intricacies of the Criminal Mind 183

realised that although I seemed to have spent a disproportionate part of my academic life reading South African literature, I had never actually encountered, let alone read, any South African detective fiction. So imagine my surprise, or rather my delight, when, interested as I had always been in investigating the relationship between South African political history, particularly during the apartheid era, and the practice of literature, I discovered a writer in whose fiction apartheid itself determines the criminal environment, the criminals are not infrequently the police, more especially the Special Branch, and the genre of detective fiction is deployed not only to criticise political oppression in the writer's country but also to provide an acutely observed psychological diagnosis of 'the national state of mind'.2 TP

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III The novels with which I shall here be concerned are A Lonely Place to Die (1979), Divide the Night (1981) and Closed Circle (1990).3 They are set firmly over the highly significant period 1976-1990, that is from the Soweto uprising through the various States of Emergency imposed in the mid-1980s as opposition to the system both inside and outside the country gathered pace to the effective ending of apartheid in 1990. To a considerable extent the novels chart the demise of the apartheid system, revealing the moral perversities attendant on the process and analysing the fears and anxieties which approaching social transition generated in white, especially Afrikaner, society. Although Ebersohn prefaced Closed Circle with a note warning the reader against '[confusing] those who hold official positions in the story […] with the real incumbents of the years 1984 to 1990' (n.p.), one is often tempted to disregard this disclaimer and do one's own detective work in matching fictional characters with their historical counterparts. This is particularly the case with Divide the Night and Closed Circle where government ministers, prominent members of TP

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right-wing organisations and their victims are not particularly difficult to identify.4 Chronologically speaking, A Lonely Place to Die opens the series. It is set in 1977, one year after the uprising in Soweto and other black townships. Whites are beginning to worry about the situation created by the independence of countries to the north – Angola and Mozambique presumably – where majority rule has been instituted. They are also, we learn, becoming ruffled by overseas pressure in the world of sport and the new articulateness of black political demands.5 Their unease is finding expression in the rise of far right-wing political organisations (fictionally the Boere Nasie). Divide the Night reflects the situation in the country one year later (1978). It is the last year of the repressive Vorster government. Black opposition – in the form of the Black Consciousness Movement – has been crushed through the wholesale bannings and detentions of late 1977; its leader, Steve Biko, has been murdered – by the police, as later became evident; only vestiges of the movement are still active;6 some of its erstwhile members are forsaking social endeavour as a means of opposition in favour of the armed struggle.7 Ebersohn is unusually specific in indicating when the third novel, Closed Circle, is set: Part I in September 1984; Part II in November 1984; Part III in April 1986; and an epilogue which rounds things off up to 1990. This was the period when mass opposition escalated, the townships were made ungovernable through rent and consumer boycotts, the far-right launched last ditch stands in an attempt to preserve white hegemony, massacres and many unexplained killings of oppositional figures such as academics and trades unionists took place, while piecemeal efforts at reform foundered, unable as they were to halt the final onset of real change. Ebersohn, sets his detective novels, then, in truly turbulent times. TP

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Since the artificially segregated urban environment of apartheid plays a not insignificant role in all three novels, we should perhaps also look carefully at where they are set. Ebersohn's detective works for a government department, so he lives in the administrative capital of Pretoria. Some, but not much of the action, consequently takes place in what the author wryly terms that 'neat, almost antiseptic city',8 – which is 'outwardly […] a gentle and lovely place, softened by its thousands of jacarandas'9 whose 'dense purple canopy […] had been responsible for many ill-considered proposals of marriage'.10 The primary spatial locations of the novels, though, lie elsewhere: in A Lonely Place to Die it is the rural Transvaal of the fictional Middelspruit; in Divide the Night it is Johannesburg; and in Closed Circle it is again Johannesburg, but also further afield in Durban and Natal. Divide the Night and Closed Circle, especially, are preeminently novels of Johannesburg. And as the psychologically disturbed serial killer of Divide the Night warns us: 'In Johannesburg it's bad'.11 Shifting his locations about the city, Ebersohn offers a remarkable portrait of a place divided by wealth – but also by the legislation of apartheid. So we move from Hillbrow, already a prey to inner-city decline and here the scene of multiple murders, to Braamfontein, home of liberal causes, where the members of oppositional organisations will be targeted by right-wing violence and police harassment, to the rich northern suburbs, which provide an occasional haven for the detective's long-suffering and frequently panic-stricken wife, unable to cope with the perils her husband's irregular activities expose them both to. And then, passing the distinctive yellow clay mine dumps and desolate disused mine shafts, we move out to the townships – to Soweto, 'something between a city and a concentration camp',12 but viewed here – compassionately – as 'simply the dwellings of a very depressed human community no more and no less dangerous than any such community anywhere on earth';13 and, finally, to TP

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Alexandra, sole-surviving inner-city black residential area, 'a black island in Johannesburg's wealthy northern suburbs'14 – terrorised here by vigilantes under police protection. Reading the novels, we become as familiar with the city's mean streets as we have long been with Chandler's Los Angeles. TP

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IV Each of the novels has a prologue depicting a shocking criminal incident which sets the investigation in train. In Divide the Night a halfstarved Coloured girl entering through the half-open door of a shop in an attempt to steal a box of biscuits is caught by the owner and shot – although 'executed' would be a more precise description of what happens. In A Lonely Place to Die an escaping black man is hunted down by police who resolve to 'fuck him up good' before taking him in.15 In Closed Circle, three people, restricted in terms of apartheid laws, are attacked: a black trade unionist is assassinated by letterbomb before the eyes of his child; shots are fired through the window of a white, former member of the military wing of the ANC, Umkhonto we Sizwe [Spear of the Nation], who has served time in prison; and the body of another white, a banned author, is found after his murder. In each novel, as we shall see, the investigation of a single case widens out into an analysis of the 'condition of the nation itself'.16 Apartheid society provides the backdrop to all three novels. And here again the period is particularly important – for Ebersohn gives us the last fifteen years of the system, which were characterised by hesitating reform coupled with brutal repression on the one side and growing opposition on the other. To a large extent the legislation of apartheid determines the plots of the novels. It conditions the movements of the characters, especially the blacks since, as A Lonely Place to Die reminds us, 'the laws of the country and the unrelenting efficiency of the police force saw to it that no black man ever stepped out TP

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of line'.17 Thus, in A Lonely Place to Die, a rural Transvaal town has a curfew siren to ensure that 'everyone with a black face would be off the streets'18 by nine o'clock in the evening, while in Divide the Night, the elderly shop keeper turned right-wing fanatic and serial killer, spends his spare time 'check[ing] kaffirs in the street' – as he puts it – 'to see if they've got passes. And if they haven't we take them to the police station'.19 In white areas, black domestic servants are confined to separate accommodation: to interview a black witness in Divide the Night the detective thus has to seek her out in the 'cell-like room' on the roof of the building where she works.20 When the detective needs to visit the black townships of Soweto and Alexandra, and realising that he is himself subject to apartheid restrictions, he concludes: 'I can't safely go into Soweto at night without a permit, especially on a weekend. I'll get picked up'.21 So, in one of those scenes familiar from works such as Brink's A Dry White Season, he enters clandestinely, illegally, so as not to arouse the suspicions of the police. When, in Closed Circle, he finds himself unexpectedly in a relationship with the wholly amoral Indian widow of one of the murdered activists, we learn that she had happily been 'contravening the racial provisions of the Immorality Act by having intercourse with a white man and for as long as she had been ignoring the Group Areas Act by living in a white area'22 – which, as far as the sexual encounters are concerned, is of course what the detective is now doing, too! Not surprisingly, when the Immorality Act falls to the reform process, she relishes the sudden opportunity 'to be legal'. Ebersohn delights, too, in satirising the absurdities of petty apartheid restrictions: when the two go out for dinner, their presence in the restaurant occasions anxious conversation between the manager and the headwaiter, as to whether it is worse to serve them or create a scene by refusing to do so. Eventually, we learn, 'the veal piccata became possible'.23 TP

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If the psychology of race relations informing such a society plays a key role in all the novels, it is the apparent cheapness of black lives which constitutes its most extreme manifestation. Himself hunted by the police in A Lonely Place to Die, the detective reflects on the perverse logic of those pursuing him and the black monk whose life he is attempting to save: 'That he was English-speaking made him an outsider. That he was Jewish made him a creature apart, not a man, but a Jew. To kill an Afrikaner was murder. To kill a Jew might be no more than culpable homicide. But N'Kosana was black. Killing him would not be a crime of any description'.24 This is the same mindset which, in Divide the Night, allows the killer, Weizmann, to believe that he is within his rights to slaughter a succession of blacks in supposed defence of his property. And apparently it is an attitude shared by court judges too, as the decisions on the cases recorded in the police files reveal: 'No one was to blame […]. No one could be considered responsible […]. No one was guilty…';25 the deaths were 'justifiable homicide'.26 How, the detective not surprisingly wonders, could 'this man have gone on killing all the time without anything being done. Each incident seemed to have been followed by immaculate legal proceedings, but nothing had happened'.27 In such a climate of racial oppression, it is not surprising that, for the detective, it repeatedly proves extraordinarily difficult to gain the confidence of any black witnesses to crimes – not least, of course, because the detective, in this case a psychologist working for the Department of Prisons, is initially perceived – understandably – as himself an agent of the system. All three novels thematise aspects of the struggle raging in the last years of apartheid between those who sought to defend the system in the name of white racial ideology and those who opposed it. They develop a sustained critique of the laager mentality, the ideology and the criminal activities of the Security Branch – what Freek in Divide TP

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the Night sarcastically terms 'the glamour department of the police'.28 In A Lonely Place to Die, for example, a policeman accuses the English-language press of distorting the news to discredit the Afrikaner,29 a Catholic monastery is attacked and black monks regarded as subversive are threatened30 and viciously assaulted.31 In Divide the Night the security police make much of the detective's possession of banned books – since they have no better argument to taunt him with;32 they are seen to be conspiring with far right-wing organisations (whose meetings are addressed by ministers of the government) to defeat the ends of justice; and, in a scene graphically exemplifying the many deaths in detention of the 1970s, they sadistically torture a young black woman to death.33 In Closed Circle which, one should TP

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Ebersohn, Divide the Night, p. 164. Ebersohn, A Lonely Place to Die, p. 63. Ebersohn, A Lonely Place to Die, p. 166. Ebersohn, A Lonely Place to Die, pp. 216-217. Ebersohn, Divide the Night, p. 102. Ebersohn, Divide the Night, pp. 185-194. The scene referred to was the main reason why the novel was originally banned under Section 47 (2) (e) of the Publications Act on May 1, 1981. The section in question provided for a finding of 'undesirability' if a book was regarded as 'prejudicial to the safety of the state, the general welfare or the peace and good order'. When Ebersohn appealed aginst this decision, the book was unbanned on December 24, 1981, the author benefitting from the more liberal interpretation of the censorship laws introduced under J.C.W. van Rooyen. The Board`s reasoning for lifting the ban on the book offers an unusual perspective on the work. It concluded: 'Many readers would regard this book as an abuse of the novel for propagandistic purposes […] and would accordingly find it in poor taste or even disgusting. Although there is a new trend in this book, in so far as a woman is tortured (by the police) the Board has come to the conclusion that this kind of writing would not create animosity between whites and blacks or undermine public order. By over-emphasizing the torture scene […] the book […] becomes counter-productive and would lead to disgust with regard to the description rather than the fictional characters who torture the woman. […] The present publication does not incite or attempt to undermine but can be regarded as a sharp attack by way of fiction against the possible abuse of powers. This amounts to political criticism, which the Act does not intend to stifle, even if unwarranted – annoying as this kind of criticism by way of fiction may be to a substantial number of South Africans'. For details see Francis Galloway, comp., SA Literature 1981 (Johannesburg: Ad Donker, 1983), pp. 37, 103-104; and Louise Silver, A Guide to Political Censorship in South Africa (Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand, Centre for Applied Legal Studies, April 1984),


remember, takes place amid the turmoil of the mid-Eighties, Ebersohn pens what is tantamount to an in-depth study of apartheid society in its last throes, making frequent reference to the perverted ideology of the Security Branch: their avowed willingness to commit murder if that is 'what we have to do to defend our people',34 their shifting of the blame for their own crimes on to 'black-on-black violence'.35 He records the sustained attempt to eliminate the radical opposition, black and white alike: the assassination of opponents of the regime through letterbombs and shootings, the killing of trade unionists;36 and the targeting of restricted persons in their homes.37 He devotes several pages to a documentary account of the political conflict of 1984-85: the rent and consumer boycotts, which contributed to making the townships ungovernable; the burnings of government buildings; the widespread demand by black students that there should be 'no education before liberation'; the massacres at Winterveld, Langa and Mamelodi;38 the mass funerals and the necklacing;39 and what he terms 'the more specific assassinations' of activists – unnamed here in the text, but clearly recognisable to those who followed the turbulent events of those days. Much of this – and particularly as it concerns the activities of the Security Branch – prefigures the kind of material that would later emerge as evidence at the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.40 TP

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pp. 148-149. Wheelwright in Ebersohn, Closed Circle, p. 201. Ebersohn, Closed Circle, p. 235. In this connection one might refer back to my opening quotation from The Sowetan. Ebersohn, Closed Circle, pp. 36-37. Ebersohn, Closed Cicle, Prologue, pp. 11-15. Ebersohn, Closed Circle, p. 220. Ebersohn, Closed Circle, p. 221. In his illuminating article on Ebersohn, Green quotes the author himself on the difficulties which the contemporary political reference of his fiction posed for him in terms of the conventional solving of the case by the detective in the detective novel: 'the problem with Closed Circle was that I am aware that there have been many of these sorts of killings in South Africa and almost none, in almost no cases have the killers been brought to justice, so I just simply couldn't have the fictitious character brought to justice'. Green, 'The Detective as Historian', p. 98.


V One of the points Ebersohn makes through what his detective uncovers in both Divide the Night and Closed Circle is posed as a rhetorical question: 'How many of the people', he wonders, 'in all of those houses – brick and tile, carpeted, coal-fire-in-the-living-room, servants-quarters-out-the-back, neatly kept gardens lush with shrub and flowers – how many of them had any idea at all of the things that were done in their defence?'41 or – as the purpose of the exercise is more sarcastically phrased in Closed Circle – 'to allow little blond children to grow up in safety and security?'42 It thus behoves me perhaps to ask what kind of portrait of white society the author offers, since it is at the core of what he has to tell us. Some aspects of Ebersohn's portrayal of white society may be regarded as satirical; he can be a very witty writer and he seldom misses an opportunity to poke fun. Take, for instance, the scene in which his psychologist detective bewails the character of some of the white women from the northern suburbs who seek his services – bored as they are: 'They sit at home, conducting tea parties […] They are overrun by servants, who do all the work around the house. They have nothing to do except discover all sorts of ailments within themselves. They are leeches on the backside of humanity…'.43 Or consider the dismal view he takes of his civil service boss with his 'over-abundance of all the regular public-service character traits […] suspicious of his juniors, frightened of his superiors, untrustworthy, ambitious, but not energetic enough to do anything about it […] and pompous to camouflage his many inadequacies…'.44 There are many other such examples. As befits a writer of detective novels, Ebersohn has a sharp eye for the details of human behaviour, and his novels abound in shrewdly observed critical portraits, especially of the more conservative members of society. Not for nothing does he set A Lonely Place to Die in the rural Transvaal, where the patrician local Member of Parliament TP

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prides himself on his knowledge of 'his' blacks and is thus convinced that the African accused of his son's murder could not have committed the crime. But look at the terms in which he expresses this opinion, unaware as he is of the torments to which that innocent African has been exposed: 'I've known that kaffir since he was a piccanin and, mad or not, he would never harm any member of my family'.45 Or note in Closed Circle the patronising tone of the white publisher, who considers himself so unreproachably liberal, but cannot forebear to mention that although they do publish a lot of writing by black authors, 'of course we have to do a lot to it, polish it up…'.46 The leitmotif of Ebersohn's portrayal of white society in all three novels, however, is not, as one might perhaps expect, white power, but white fear at losing it. It is a fear generated by the circumstances of late apartheid society, by the prospect of approaching social change beyond one's capacity to deal with it. An old woman in Divide the Night expresses the opinion that 'the neighbourhood is going to the dogs. It's much worse now than it used to be. Since they took away the petty apartheid business, everything has been going to the dogs. The parks everywhere are full […] All the decent people are moving away'.47 Weizmann, the murderer in the same novel fears – as a poor white – the 'slow illimitable rise' of those now moving into Hillbrow, who are poorer than he, but nevertheless, he feels, are undermining his livelihood. He fears, too, the day when they will rise out of their 'depressed and stultifying life'48 and pose a threat to the future of his poor white customers and their children. It is the crystallisation of fears such as this which leads, as both A Lonely Place to Die and Divide the Night clearly demonstrate, to the emergence of 'lunaticfringe' organisations.49 And, as Closed Circle further reveals, this fear is also shared by members of the Security Branch. For, as the psychologist-detective knows, the members of the Security Branch are 'typical white South Africans' in as far as 'they shared the same fear of the great, voteless, barely literate, prolifically breedTP

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ing black tide that seemed certain to engulf them. They shared the same hopes for their children and the same unspoken dread that these hopes could not be realised. But in them […] fear had become obsession'.50 It is the unholy alliance of whites disaffected in this manner which generates crime in these novels. And, as the example of the detective's timorous wife Rosa not infrequently illustrates, this climate of fear embraces other whites, too, who live in fear of the Security Branch51 – and not because of any crime they may themselves have committed. TP

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VI At the heart of white South African society lies Afrikanerdom. The very title of the novel Closed Circle is to be interpreted as a symbolic representation of the volk. As a security police officer with fascist inclinations explains to our detective: 'Afrikanerdom is a closed circle, complete and perfect. There is no way in except by birth and no way out except by death. It is a perfection that is of God'.52 By the end of the novel, however, when the crimes that would preserve Afrikaner power have been revealed, the detective is able to hurl that interpretation back in the face of the same officer: 'Your closed circle, perfect, you said. – It's broken now. Not everyone wants to be part of your nightmare'.53 The nightmare – and that again is one of the major concerns of this novel – is this attempt to perpetuate the Afrikaner hold on power through terrorism. Afrikanerdom, like white society as a whole, finds itself at a crossroads where the very institutions of its hegemony are being undermined. It finds itself at a time of crisis – for such is the import of the speeches of members of the Afrikaner Revival Movement. Academics who question the sanctity which legitimises Afrikaner power are tarred and feathered;54 rebellious theologians are seen as undermining the resolve of the volk in the face TP

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Ebersohn, Closed Circle, p. 39. Cf. Ebersohn, Closed Circle, p. 78; and Ebersohn, Divide the Night, p. 130. Ebersohn, Closed Circle, p. 202. Ebersohn, Closed Circle, p. 288. Ebersohn, Closed Circle, p. 54.


of ideological change;55 reformers in the government, even hesitant ones – and one thinks here of some in the administration of P.W. Botha – are regarded as betraying their own people, as 'selling out the white man'.56 Their policies, it is asserted, can lead – as the extremist polemics of the right, in a powerful evocation of the Afrikaner past, would have it – only to the renewed incarceration of women and children in a concentration camp.57 The polemics of the right are not, of course, the only Afrikaner voices heard in the novels, and it is perhaps important therefore to retain in one's mind a somewhat different image of Afrikanerdom, best encapsulated perhaps in the sympathetic characterisation in all three novels of Colonel Freek, the detective's Afrikaner police confidant, who – unlike the more traditonal foil of detective fiction – is by no means subservient or intellectually inferior to the detective, but shares his enjoyment in solving problems58 and provides a constantly reliable source of support, although neither of them is aware of just how well 'their talents and spheres of influence supplemented each other […] filling the gaps in their abilities that even the best-equipped of men always possess'.59 Not the least attractive feature of Col. Freek is the way his intense loyalty to his people finds expression through a sense of personal responsibility which comes to the fore 'when faced with the worst consequences of government actions'.60 Typical of Freek's refreshingly unorthodox approach is the curious scene in which he is to be seen delivering a car boot full of groceries to an impoverished township household – his explanation of this rather unexpected charitable act being that since the head of the family had been arrested for stealing the goods, his family might as well profit from the proceeds! That, too, is no doubt a South African reality61 – and one to which Ebersohn would also have us pay attention. The negative side of Afrikanerdom is represented in Ebersohn by the right-wing groups which have emerged from the frustrations of a TP

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people faced with the prospect of losing power and unable to comprehend what is happening to them. That Ebersohn perceived such organisations as a major threat to democratic transition is evident from the pervasiveness of their activities in all three novels. In A Lonely Place to Die, the murdered son of a prominent Afrikaner family turns out to have been an active member of 'some lunatic secret society, dedicated to saving South Africa for the white man' known as the Boere Nasie.62 In Divide the Night, the murderer, Weizmann, turns out to be 'a member of an anti-communist organisation called the South African Freedom Campaign' – and as such enjoys the crucial support of the Afrikaner establishment, a significant number of whom, it turns out, are also members.63 In Closed Circle, the red, white and black swastika-like flag of the Afrikaner Revival Movement, an organisation closely modeled on the Afrikaanse Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) led by Eugene Terreblanche, is everywhere displayed; its radical, antigovernment stance, which leads it to disrupt meetings of the ruling party, provokes official action against a white political gathering for the first time.64 For such were the divisions of Afrikanerdom in the final days of apartheid. TP

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VII From what I have said so far, it must be apparent that the works of Ebersohn are remarkable not only for the skill with which a detective fiction is woven into a complex account of apartheid society, but also for the perceptive psychological and sociological analysis to which that social order is subjected. And indeed, the political insight which informs these novels, is, for me, one of their prime attractions. Faced with the last-ditch stand, the rear-guard action, of reactionary white South Africa and himself the victim of violent, life-threatening assault, Ebersohn's detective realises that he is dealing not so much with 'a wave of crime' as with 'the national state of mind that made

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Ebersohn, A Lonely Place to Die, p. 30. Ebersohn, Divide the Night, p. 164. Ebersohn, Closed Circle, p. 272.


such crises possible'.65 His account of the fears and anxieties of white society, reminiscent as it is of similar fears famously expressed in Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country, his evocation of the supposed twin 'threats' represented by communism (P. W. Botha's 'total onslaught'!) and black advancement, and his depiction of the rise of right-wing, populist organisations together with his sympathetic delineation of the evolution of black resistance – all these constitute a comprehensive analysis of the diverse political loyalties of apartheid society, which one hardly expected to encounter in detective fiction. TP

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VIII Lest it be thought that I am wilfully choosing to overlook a central feature of all detective fiction, namely the character of the detective himself, let me, in conclusion, offer a brief portrait of Yudel Gordon, psychologist with the Department of Prisons in Pretoria. Like most of his predecessors in the genre, he has been equipped by his creator with a mix of characteristic eccentricities and stereotypical attributes. Thus he is viewed by his friends as 'far too unconventional to become a successful civil servant';66 he is a secular Jew, enamoured of Jewish cantoral music and married to – as well as much harassed by – a Jewish wife, whom he is not averse to betraying, if only – to the amusement of Freek – very occasionally. Like others of his profession he sometimes falls back on hunches and intuition, often finds himself on the wrong side of the law (apartheid law in this case, of course), frequently comes into conflict with the police (the Security Branch in his case) and just as frequently endangers his own life. What distinguishes him from his detective colleagues is the way he uniquely combines the skills of the psychologist with those of the detective. As he puts it with disarming modesty to the politician Pretorius in A Lonely Place to Die: 'I cure minds as a profession and catch murderers in my spare time'.67 As a psychologist he may of course be assumed to be possessed of skills which are extraordinarily useful to TP

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Ebersohn, Closed Circle, p. 216. Ebersohn, Closed Circle, p. 41. Ebersohn, A Lonely Place to Die, p. 180.


one involved in the practice of detection. Indeed, as Freek concedes, 'there were some things that were more obvious to a perceptive psychologist than they could ever be to any policeman'.68 Yudel provides abundant evidence of this. He can, for instance, extract information from a witness through recourse to hypnosis, as he does in Divide the Night; he has clinical insight into the effects of schizophrenia, which enables him to conclude as to the innocence of the accused in A Lonely Place to Die. Even the insecurities of the Security Police are no secret to him.69 He is sensitive to the smallest psychological detail, to every phrase or word or look 'that would make everything understandable'.70 He has great insight into character, discerning the 'introspective and intelligent' Rebecca behind the contemptuous exterior, detecting the incestuous relationship between Marthinus and Marie, identifying Marthinus's father's neglect of him while a boy and diagnosing its effects in insecurity and sadism.71 Yudel displays a scholarly interest in the psychology of violence too, questioning Freud's association of sadism and sexuality and developing his own theory on sadism as a distortion of the will to power, as evidenced in both Divide the Night and A Lonely Place to Die.72 Above all, he is insatiably curious about human behaviour. Far from sharing the loathing some feel for Johannesburg, he loves the place, since it is there that 'the whole vast catalogue of human experience and motivation was there for him to observe and try to comprehend'.73 In all three novels, he betrays the fact that he enjoys 'feeling his way through the twisted grottoes of human experience',74 'examining what he terms "his own species'" immense propensity for violence',75 and giving himself up to the 'insidious stimulation of the hunt'.76 He is, we learn, and in spite of all that he experiences, a TP

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Ebersohn, A Lonely Place to Die, p. 33. Ebersohn, A Lonely Place to Die, p. 133. Ebersohn, A Lonely Place to Die, p. 123. Ebersohn, A Lonely Place to Die, p. 107. Ebersohn, Divide the Night, p. 187; and Ebersohn, A Lonely Place to Die, pp. 166167. Ebersohn, Divide the Night, p. 72. Ebersohn, A Lonely Place to Die, p. 149. Ebersohn, Closed Circle, p. 50. Ebersohn, Closed Circle, p. 278.


committed South African77 who 'could no more live anywhere else than he could […] close the book on these cases and forget them'.78 Perhaps it is his very South Africanness which enables him to transcend the racial barriers of his society and motivates him to display the compassion he does with the minorities, the oppressed, the underdogs, the victims. He displays sympathetic understanding for the 'simmering desperation'79 of lesbians and homosexuals – Rebecca in A Lonely Place to Die; Wheelwright in Closed Circle – struggling to find recognition in a country like South Africa.80 And he is – how could it be otherwise with his wealth of experience? – considerably in sympathy with black people's plight and their struggle against the oppression of apartheid. There is something intensely moving about that moment in Closed Circle when he learns that the assassinated Fellows Ncgube's widow Elizabeth has herself been, as the press report puts it, 'gunned down and bludgeoned to death in front of her children'81 – an incident which 'for the first time in all of his adult life'82 reduces him to tears. How does Yudel Gordon, the reader often wonders, manage himself to negotiate the myriad perversions of the society in which he lives, how does he – and as a Jew he is himself a member of an oppressed minority – survive apartheid? One answer is provided in a revealing passage in Divide the Night. Entering Soweto at night – illegally and with some trepidation – on a visit to a young woman who will herself soon die at the hands of the Security Police and who – even at very great risk to herself – will not betray either his identity or the purpose of his visit, Yudel reflects on the contradictions of the society in which he lives and the ambiguities of his own relationship to it: TP

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He would have admitted it to no one but himself, but something within Yudel was quickened by being part of the apartheid society. He loved the stimulation of it, the threat of the police, the excitement of visits like this one, the troubled presence

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Political Loyalties and the Intricacies of the Criminal Mind 199 of Soweto, Thembisa, Atteridgeville, Mdantsane, Guguletu, Kwa Mashu … There was much that would not exist in any more sophisticated society that contributed to giving Yudel's experience of life a sharpness that in a truly free society it would have lacked. He hated the system under which he lived with its attendant exclusiveness and injustices, but he would have lived nowhere else. Within the framework of this singular society there was much at which he was unusually accomplished. In a certain sense, he was a big league player. And this was his home turf.83 TP

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The complex emotions with which Ebersohn invests the portrait of his prison psychologist-cum-detective and the almost paradoxical interaction of attraction and repulsion which informs his somewhat unorthodox activities contribute much to the reader's admiration for the figure of Yudel Gordon. For as a detective in apartheid society Yudel Gordon is not only a 'traditional' policeman well acquainted with the 'intricacies of the criminal mind', he is a critical citizen who understands the diverse 'political loyalties' tearing his society apart. The fascination of the detective stories of Wessel Ebersohn, set as they are against the historical and political backdrop provided by the moral perversities and social upheavals of apartheid South Africa, lies not least in their subtle portrayal of a detective quietly and effectively committed to the righting of social and political injustice. As such, they can be just as rewarding and instructive as the more 'serious' fictions of his better-known contemporaries. We should not neglect Wessel Ebersohn, for – like his detective – he too is 'a big league player' and the detective novel is his 'home turf'.

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COLONIAL STRUGGLE ON MANHATTAN SOIL: GEORGE SCHUYLER'S 'THE ETHIOPIAN MURDER MYSTERY' A.B. Christa Schwarz

Counting among the little known works of African-American fiction, George Schuyler's novella 'The Ethiopian Murder Mystery: A Story of Love and International Intrigue' represents a rare attempt to fictionalise the colonial battle that was the Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935-1936.1 Schuyler usually wrote to deadline which means that this detective story, serialised in the black weekly newspaper Pittsburgh Courier between August 1935 and February 1936, can be read as a writer's direct response to the Italo-Ethiopian crisis which developed into a full-blown war when Italian troops invaded Ethiopia on October 3, 1935. When 'The Ethiopian Murder Mystery' appeared in print Schuyler had already published two novels and a multitude of pulp fiction pieces – the latter a type of work he was, as suggested by Robert A. Hill and R. Kent Rasmussen, very ambivalent about. Desiring economic security, Schuyler appreciated the guaranteed income his serialised pulp fiction offered, but as a writer he was unhappy about what he regarded as his 'partisan writing'.2 While writing his story on the Italo-Ethiopian war, Schuyler was under pressure. He wrote the tale's first instalments while stationed in Mississippi where TP

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George S. Schuyler, 'The Ethiopian Murder Mystery: A Story of Love and International Intrigue [1935-1936]', in Ethiopian Stories, ed. by Robert A. Hill (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995), pp. 51-122. Schuyler quoted in Robert A. Hill and R. Kent Rasmussen, 'Afterword', in Black Empire, ed. by Robert A. Hill and R. Kent Rasmussen (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991), p. 269. Schuyler's pulp fiction pieces include several detective tales published before and after the publication of 'The Ethiopian Murder Mystery'.

202 A.B. Christa Schwarz

he was to increase circulation for the Courier. As the newspaper's editorial writer, columnist, and contributor of fiction, Schuyler fought hard to complete his weekly assignments, 'grinding out material by the yard and the pound'.3 Readers of the story, which was for the first time published as a coherent text in 1994, will surely recognise some of the flaws Hill and Rasmussen find in Schuyler's newspaper fiction – 'clumsy melodramatic plotting, stereotyped characters, stilted dialogue' – but Schuyler's text, providing not only an unusual example of early African-American detective fiction, but also unique insights into African-Americans' positioning with regard to a colonial battle that involved the last independent nation on the African continent, offers more than enough in compensation.4 Schuyler's venture into what was at that time a genre barely touched upon by African-American writers was inspired by Rudolph Fisher's detective novel The Conjure-Man Dies (1932), which Frankie Y. Bailey describes as the first 'classic detective novel set in an urban black community and featuring black protagonists'.5 Another source of inspiration for 'The Ethiopian Murder Mystery' may have been Courier headlines which, next to announcing news on the Italo-Ethiopian conflict, highlighted espionage cases and screamed murder.6 TP

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George Schuyler, 'Letter to Josephine Schuyler', November 1935, quoted in Robert A. Hill, 'Introduction', in Ethiopian Stories, p. 2. Hill and Rasmussen, 'Afterword', p. 269. Other contemporary African-American authors who dealt with the Italo-Ethiopian conflict in their works are Langston Hughes and Melvin B. Tolson. See chapter 4 of John Cullen Gruesser, Black on Black: Twentieth-Century African American Writing about Africa (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000). Frankie Y. Bailey, Out of the Woodpile: Black Characters in Crime and Detective Fiction (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), p. 54; Rudolph Fisher, The Conjure-Man Dies (London: X Press, 1995 [1932]). There are several indications for Schuyler's inspiration by Fisher: in Fisher's novel an undertaker is the murderer – in Schuyler's story the daughter of an undertaker is accused of murder; both tales feature a team of black detectives; like Fisher himself, Fisher's sleuth Dr Archer is a medical doctor – like Schuyler himself, Schuyler's sleuth Bates is a journalist. Schuyler's text also directly refers to the central confusion in Fisher's novel: his African protagonist's apparent death and resurrection. The Irish policeman Sullivan suggests that 'Maybe the African guy wasn't croaked at all'. Schuyler, 'Ethiopian Murder Mystery', p. 74. For a spy story combined with the Italo-Ethiopian theme see J.A. Rogers, 'Shrewd Ethiopian Secret Police Trap Spies: Greek Is Trapped in Net and Deported',

Colonial Struggle on Manhattan Soil 203

Explaining her motivation for sticking to the detective format, the feminist African-American author Barbara Neely stated: 'I realized the mystery genre was perfect to talk about serious subjects, and it could carry the political fiction I wanted to write'.7 One might suspect that Schuyler viewed the genre similarly as he set out to draw attention to the Ethiopian struggle and raise Pan-African awareness. It will be interesting to explore the tensions that arise when Schuyler, a provocative author infamous for claims such as 'our language, our culture, our training are not African or Negro, but American',8 presents an essentially Pan-African detective tale. Intriguingly, Schuyler in his story transfers the Italo-Ethiopian colonial struggle to the officially neutral ground of the United States and thus to what Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt describe as 'the world's first postcolonial and neocolonial country'.9 Setting his tale in Manhattan and primarily in Harlem, Schuyler, with a certain twist, mirrors the original site of conflict. What is the position of African-Americans with regard to this relocated colonial struggle between Italy and Ethiopia? What happens to what Singh and Schmidt suggest is 'African Americans' struggle toward self-determination in a post-bellum, post-slavery, but still raceridden, quasi-colonial United States'10 in Schuyler's story? Given the fact that Schuyler was one of the first African-American crime fiction writers, the question of how he interprets the genre's crucial elements, the binary of good/evil and ideas of justice and punishment, will also TP

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be of significance. These are just some of the themes addressed in this exploration of a fascinating tale by an idiosyncratic writer who over the years managed to estrange most critics and friends by shifting from socialism to conservatism and, of particular significance in light of his involvement in Ethiopia's colonial struggle, from anti-colonialism to a defence of continued colonial rule in Africa.11 TP

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'Something to Help Ethiopia in her Hour of Extremity' Following the rules of the detective genre, 'The Ethiopian Murder Mystery' starts off with a corpse: The Ethiopian Prince Haile Destu, member of an Ethiopian spy circle, is found murdered in his Harlem apartment. The black police Lieutenant Jim Williston unveils Destu's intimate connection to Crissina Van Dyke, the daughter of a wealthy African-American undertaker. Suspected to have murdered Destu out of jealousy, Crissina, who had also spied for Ethiopia, is arrested and subsequently released on bail. Roger Bates, a young black journalist in love with Crissina, resolves to clear her name and starts his own investigation in collaboration with Williston. Bates finds out that the black Eritrean Ali Sibra, who belongs to an Italian team of secret agents, rented a flat on Destu's floor until the day Destu was murdered. Sibra is also killed, and Bates eventually uncovers the Italian spy network which comprises, next to Sibra, four white men and the white attractive Sylvia Ferndon, all of whom, with the exception of Ferndon, are eventually murdered. Cleverly linking the crime to the current Ethiopian crisis, Bates seeks out Oscar Holcombe, the chairman of the Help Ethiopia League. Holcombe passes on to the Ethiopians Bates's valuable information that the Italian agents plan to kill the Ethiopian agents. Bates eventually understands that the murders are connected to the invention of a death ray for Ethiopia by the white Professor Tankkard and solves the murder case: the perpetrators are Ethiopian secret agents, headed by Sadiu Mattchu, who intend to secure the lethal weapon to liberate their country from the Italian invaders. Kidnapping Bates, they manage to escape with Tankkard's

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Nickieann Fleener, 'George S. Schuyler', in American Newspaper Journalists, 1926-1950, ed. by Perry J. Ashley (Detroit: Gale, 1984), p. 320.


plans but ensure that Bates will be set free and that Crissina will be exonerated. Schuyler clearly 'dedicates' his story to the Italo-Ethiopian conflict, thereby giving the marginalised Ethiopians a voice. Surpassing the efforts of other black contemporary newspapers, the Pittsburgh Courier covered the Italo-Ethiopian conflict with the sense of a mission. Next to Schuyler, the Courier's ace reporter was J.A. Rogers who was sent to Ethiopia as a war correspondent. The black weekly complemented its star team's efforts with photographs from the battlefield, interviews, historical articles, and cartoons. As one reader commented in a letter to the editor, the Courier succeeded in its mission 'by giving to the public concrete facts and FIRST HAND information which Black America is hungry for at this particular time'.12 Schuyler happily reported that the Courier 'is coming to be one of the largest thorns in [Mussolini's agents'] side, what with its vigorous pro-Ethiopian policy in cartoons and editorials'.13 What Schuyler does not mention here is that his detective tale represented another facet in the Courier's attempt to raise awareness about the Italo-Ethiopian conflict and evoke pro-Ethiopian sentiments. 'The Ethiopian Murder Mystery' constituted an alternative way of exploring the crisis and offered readers the entertaining and exciting opportunity to 'detect' the Italo-Ethiopian conflict with the help of Schuyler's two detective figures. The story was thus part of Schuyler's efforts to 'do something to help Ethiopia in her hour of extremity'.14 The story's conclusion underlines this purpose. Mattchu, head of the Ethiopian spy network dispatched to New York, explains: 'Ethiopia is fighting for her life. [...] Italian bombs have killed thousands of defenseless women and children' – a statement mirroring Schuyler's editorial comment that 'men, women and children in far-off Ethiopia are being smashed to death by airplane bombs, riddled by machine gun bullets, TP

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Frank Ferrell, '[Letter]', Pittsburgh Courier, 27 July 1935, sec. 2, p. 2. For other newspapers' coverage of the conflict see, for example, William R. Scott, The Sons of Sheba's Race: African-Americans and the Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935-1941 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 44. George S. Schuyler, 'Views and Reviews', Pittsburgh Courier, 7 December 1935, sec. 1, p. 10. Schuyler, 'Views and Reviews', Pittsburgh Courier, 23 November 1935, sec. 1, p. 10.


suffocated by poisonous gasses'.15 Readers of Schuyler's reprinted tale who are unfamiliar with the conflict may in fact be surprised by how little information Schuyler provides on the Italo-Ethiopian war in his story. Apart from the above-mentioned exception, references to the conflict are usually brief and readers merely learn about the 'plans of the Italians to invade and conquer Ethiopia'.16 The reason is simple: framed by the overarching story of the Italo-Ethiopian war in the Courier, Schuyler's detective tale presents an additional 'lighter', more entertaining narrative that was originally embedded in the larger newspaper context. Schuyler aimed at more than raising African-Americans' awareness of the conflict. Dissatisfied with African-Americans' reactions, he complained that 'the bulk of blackamoors will just let off steam on corners and in barber shops, and that's all'.17 One may view Schuyler's transfer of the colonial struggle in 'The Ethiopian Murder Mystery' from Ethiopia to Harlem as a strategy to not only stir additional attention but also to provoke readers into taking action. Choosing Manhattan as the setting for his detective story, Schuyler brought the colonial dispute 'home' and thus too close for African-Americans' comfort. Schuyler's transfer of the colonial struggle further gains significance in light of African-Americans' efforts to get involved in the ItaloEthiopian war. As the Courier noted in July 1935, before the war had begun, 30,000 African-Americans had voluntarily registered to join the ranks of the Ethiopian army. This initial enthusiasm however fell flat as the USA maintained a neutral status and US citizens' joining of a foreign army was judged illegal. Moreover, there were practical considerations: the transfer of African-Americans to Ethiopia would not only have required a lot of time but, more significantly, there were not enough funds to cover the expenses.18 Moving the action to Harlem as Schuyler did thus offered fresh access to the conflict. William R. Scott suggests that one reason for African-Americans' tendency to watch events unfold in Ethiopia rather than actually interTP

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Schuyler, 'Ethiopian Murder Mystery', p. 122; Schuyler, 'Views and Reviews', 23 November 1935. Schuyler, 'Ethiopian Murder Mystery', p. 89. Schuyler, 'Views and Reviews', Pittsburgh Courier, 27 July 1935, sec. 1, p. 10. Schuyler, 'Views and Reviews', 27 July 1935.


fere may have been their occupation with pressing domestic concerns. African-Americans were confronted with the effects of the Great Depression as well as racial discrimination, segregation, and an increasing number of lynchings.19 In 'The Ethiopian Murder Mystery', Schuyler pushed all of these quasi-colonial domestic struggles into the background, leaving the stage almost solely to the Italo-Ethiopian conflict. There is not a single passage alluding to Depression-era Harlem. One does, however, catch brief glimpses of racial discrimination. When the black detectives Williston and Bates leave the racially marked environment of Harlem and move downtown, racism enters the scene. In one instance, Williston questions a white male perfume sales assistant who 'was anxious to get rid of this officer. Suppose some wealthy patrons should come in and find a big Negro sitting down there!'20 In another scene, Williston and Bates enter the Belgrade Hotel, 'an exclusive hotel [sic], hence no Negroes were wanted loitering around. Because of the civil rights law, they could not be barred, but they could be discouraged'.21 An astute observer of civil rights concerns, Schuyler did not completely delete evidence of domestic issues, but his prominent concern in 'The Ethiopian Murder Mystery' was Ethiopia's colonial struggle. But what kind of action were African-Americans to take? Intriguingly, Schuyler refrained from even mentioning a popular choice of protest among Harlemites: rioting and boycotts of Italian products. In August 1935 first clashes between African-Americans and Italian Americans, many of whom owned businesses in Harlem, erupted, and calls for boycotts were made.22 Schuyler obviously decided to silence TP

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Scott, The Sons of Sheba's Race, pp. 55-56. Schuyler, 'Ethiopian Murder Mystery', p. 63. Schuyler, 'Ethiopian Murder Mystery', p. 108. Scott, The Sons of Sheba's Race, pp. 59-60. See also for instance 'Harlemites Rush to Aid Ethiopia', Pittsburgh Courier, 3 August 1935, sec. 1, p. 3, which states that 'the boycott of Italian imports was reported to be gaining momentum'. Rienzi B. Lemus, 'Harlem Eyes Italian Taverns As War Starts: Eyes Of Nation Observe Harlem', Pittsburgh Courier, 12 October 1935, sec. 1, p. 2. See also 'Italians Clash With Negroes', New York Herald Tribune, 4 October 1935, n.p.; repr. in Harlem On My Mind, ed. by Allon Schoener (New York: Random House, 1968), pp. 140141. In other fictional pieces unconnected to the Italo-Ethiopian crisis Schuyler did not shy away from depicting Harlemites' negative attitudes towards Italian Americans who, owning the majority of Harlem's businesses, were often


this issue and instead concentrated on the real Italo-Ethiopian battle. Moreover, as evident in his columns and in 'The Ethiopian Murder Mystery', Schuyler favoured a more sober and efficient channel for pro-Ethiopian activism: donations. He wanted African-Americans to '[go] down in [their] jeans' to finance concrete support for Ethiopia in the form of 'two or three squadrons of fighting planes and […] a dozen field hospitals'.23 While average African-Americans could not be expected to get involved in secret missions like Schuyler's fictional characters Bates and Crissina, they could, as suggested in the story, donate money and sponsor Dr Huggins's Friends of Ethiopia, the reallife version of Holcombe's fictional Help Ethiopia League.24 TP

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Pan-Africanism in Action As Hill points out, 'The Ethiopian Murder Mystery' is an example of 'literary Pan-Africanism'.25 Considering that Schuyler was infamous for his provocative essay 'The Negro-Art Hokum' (1926), in which he claimed that 'the Aframerican is merely a lampblacked Anglo-Saxon', and for later statements proposing that 'there is more in common between the white and colored folk in America than there is between the colored folk here and the colored folk anywhere else', this move toward an acknowledgment of kinship between African-Americans and Africans may surprise.26 TP

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perceived as taken Harlemites' money. See for instance the character Joe Savino in Schuyler's serialised Harlem-based murder story 'Sugar Hill', Samuel I. Brooks [George S. Schuyler], 'Sugar Hill', Pittsburgh Courier, 25 March-10 June 1933, sec. 2, p. 1. Schuyler used several pseudonyms for fictional pieces published in the Courier. See Hill and Rasmussen, 'Afterword', pp. 264-265; and Gruesser, Black on Black, pp. 106-110. Schuyler, 'Views and Reviews', Pittsburgh Courier, 7 March 1936, sec. 1, p. 10. Schuyler, 'Ethiopian Murder Mystery', p. 114. Holcombe's protection of Ethiopians will be dealt with in more detail later. Hill, 'Introduction', in Ethiopian Stories, p. 1. Schuyler, 'The Negro-Art Hokum', Nation, 16 June 1926, p. 662; Schuyler, 'Views and Reviews', 15 September 1934. This however does not mean that Schuyler did not display interest in the African continent prior to the Italo-Ethiopian crisis. He was the first African-American to write an 'African' novel. Slaves Today (New


Schuyler's change of tack towards Pan-Africanism is linked to the Italo-Ethiopian crisis. What Hill describes as 'the trauma of Italy's conquest of Ethiopia and clear evidence of Europe's diplomatic perfidy'27 obviously left an impression on Schuyler who repeatedly asked for Pan-African support for Ethiopia in his mid-1930s' journalistic work. In his Courier columns he called on African-Americans to finally 'demonstrate their vaunted solidarity with their brothers across the sea'.28 As this somewhat sarcastic statement indicates, Schuyler's attitude towards the concepts of race consciousness and race solidarity still seemed characterised by a certain discomfort with matters of 'race'. Schuyler was nonetheless willing to claim African-Americans' connection to what he described as 'the world's oldest land and the largest single group of independent black people on earth'.29 Clearly, his brand of Pan-Africanism is distinct from a romanticised celebration of shared roots and black global brotherhood à la Marcus Garvey. Hill points out that Schuyler 'viewed African-Americans as tied [to Africa] in a common opposition to imperialist domination and the myths of white supremacy and black inferiority'.30 As white colonial powers classified black people all over the world as part of one homogenous black race, blacks were to some extent forced to develop a Pan-African sensibility and a certain sense of black solidarity. Schuyler was thus convinced that a victory of Italy over Ethiopia 'would be a major catastrophe for the darker peoples of the world' and that 'the cause of white imperialism will be immeasurably advanced and the cause of black liberation will be hopelessly retarded'.31 According to Schuyler, reaching out to help Ethiopia was a must for African-Americans – not only with regard to the question of the war's actual outcome. As he wrote in November 1935, shortly after the outbreak of war, African-Americans' support would constitute 'a magnificent spectacle [Schuyler's italics]' which 'would not only increase our TP

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York: AMS Press, 1969 [1931]) uncovered the explosive story of modern slavery in Liberia. Hill, 'Introduction', p. 14. Schuyler, 'Views and Reviews', 7 December 1935. Schuyler, 'Views and Reviews', 7 March 1936. Hill, 'Introduction', p. 6. Schuyler, 'Views and Reviews', 23 November 1935; Schuyler, 'Views and Reviews', 7 December 1935.


self-esteem and pleasantly surprise the Ethiopians, but it would tremendously enhance our prestige in the eyes of the white world [Schuyler's italics]'.32 In 'The Ethiopian Murder Mystery', however, Holcombe seems to be the only convincing Pan-Africanist. Readers of Schuyler's newspaper column knew that he valued Holcombe's real-life model Huggins as 'a cultured, accomplished, brilliant and honest Negro who for very long has seen clearly the fundamental issues at the bottom of world white [sic] imperialism from the viewpoint of the Negro'.33 Schuyler certainly does not romanticise Holcombe. When Bates visits him to pass on information, Holcombe seems rather gruff and sits 'motionless', his voice carrying 'a slight note of mockery'.34 Holcombe's type of Pan-African undertaking, readers learn, is an extremely serious business. One gains the impression that Holcombe does not trust Bates – an attitude which seems unjustified given Bates's proven pro-Ethiopian activism. However, Holcombe's efficiency and race consciousness cannot be doubted. He is well connected to the Ethiopian secret agents, knows how to contact them, and manages to protect them. In light of Schuyler's sober Pan-African spirit, it cannot really surprise that his depiction of race solidarity does not always convince in 'The Ethiopian Murder Mystery'. While Bates, who works for the Negro Courier and calls on African-Americans to support Ethiopia by donating money to Holcombe's organisation, is clearly involved in the pro-Ethiopian struggle, his Pan-African engagement does not seem wholly convincing. Bates contributes directly to the Ethiopian agents' victory by informing Holcombe that the Italian agents are out to kill the Ethiopians. This handing over of 'the dope'35 means a death sentence for two Italian agents. As Bates later learns from Mattchu, the head of the Ethiopian secret mission: 'Meester Holcombe he conveyed to me the information you so kindly gave. When those two gentlemen came here earlier this evening looking for me, I was prepared'.36 TP

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Schuyler, 'Views and Reviews', 23 November 1935. Schuyler, 'Views and Reviews', 23 November 1935. Schuyler, 'Ethiopian Murder Mystery', p. 115. Schuyler, 'Ethiopian Murder Mystery', p. 115. Schuyler, 'Ethiopian Murder Mystery', p. 122.

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Mattchu not only fended off their attack but moreover managed to kill them. Bates's decision to actively influence the Italo-Ethiopian battle seems linked to his Pan-African consciousness. He apparently cherishes his position as quasi-agent for Ethiopia, advertising himself to Holcombe as 'probably the most valuable man in the country to you people' who '[has] seen all of the principal Italian agents' and 'can recognize them easily any time'.37 This image of Bates as a PanAfrican warrior however becomes blurred when Bates realises the consequences of his acts. His face takes on an 'outraged expression'38 when learning the connection between his passing on of information and the Italian agents' death. While this may be an indication of his naiveté, one might also wonder whether Bates in fact primarily intended to support the Ethiopians in their battle. As needs to be remembered, Bates's main aim is to exonerate Crissina who will then presumably return his love. Having reached a deadlock, Bates visits Holcombe and passes on information about the Italians – an act that may in this context be read as a simple attempt to stir action which might allow him to prove Crissina's innocence. Clearly, Schuyler's portrayal of African-Americans' dedication to a Pan-African struggle suffers from his mixing of a detective story with a romantic tale – an assessment that seems supported by an analysis of Crissina's Pan-African spirit. Crissina's Pan-African involvement as an agent for Ethiopia is presented as lying in the past. Nevertheless she apparently attempts to support Ethiopia also on Harlem soil as she tries to remind Destu, who has fallen for the attractive Ferndon, of the importance of his mission. Yet Schuyler from the very beginning portrays Crissina as a character lacking in sympathy. She is pictured as superficial – she so far rejected Bates due to his lack of economic power – and there is also a hint at intraracial colour prejudice as readers learn that her father would presumably reject the dark-skinned Bates as a suitable husband for his light-skinned daughter.39 Her proEthiopian activism also seems tainted: while she indeed tries to lead Destu back on track, readers may wonder about her motivation. TP

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Schuyler, 'Ethiopian Murder Mystery', p. 115. Schuyler, 'Ethiopian Murder Mystery', p. 122. Crissina's lawyer, Grassety, suggests that her father is colour-prejudiced. Schuyler, 'Ethiopian Murder Mystery', p. 71.

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Crissina seems too eager to assert that jealousy was of no significance for her actions. While thus accepting Destu's involvement with a darker and less beautiful African-American woman, an affair 'that was all right so far as [she] was concerned', Destu's involvement with the attractive white Ferndon who represents a serious competitor for Destu's love and attention, causes her to take action: 'I felt it was time to intervene'.40 She is quick to add that her only thoughts were about Ferndon's potential membership in an Italian spy circle, yet readers might suspect that she would in fact like to be the near-white and beautiful woman by Destu's side. The suspicion that Crissina's display of Pan-Africanism is more a pose she strikes to win Destu over than an expression of racial solidarity is strengthened when she reveals her earlier involvement in the pro-Ethiopian struggle to Bates. He is moved by her commitment to the Ethiopian cause: '"Now Criss," he said, a new respect for her in his tone, "you've explained how in your desire to help Ethiopia, you assisted Destu in espionage in Europe […]. […] That's a real service, and I know you did it for the love of the race."'41 Hill quotes this passage as evidence of Schuyler's 'change of stance'42 regarding PanAfricanism, but reading Schuyler's text more closely, one realises that Bates errs in his assessment. Wanting Crissina to, on the one hand, be as inspired about the Pan-African mission as he is and, on the other hand, to be only marginally interested in Destu, Bates claims race solidarity for her. Significantly, the above-quoted scene continues. Crissina herself points to a different motivation for her involvement in the pro-Ethiopian struggle: 'I was merely one of them. It just happened that I was a close friend of Prince Destu. As I told you, it was he who got me into the works'.43 This seems to be less an attempt at modesty than a moment of honesty. Like many other women, she was infatuated with Destu, and more or less accidentally became a kind of Bond girl. 'Love of the race', readers recognise, had very little to do with her decision to become a spy for Ethiopia. Interestingly, a similar display of lack of enthusiasm for the Ethiopian cause is evident in Schuyler's TP

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Schuyler, 'Ethiopian Murder Mystery', p. 90. Schuyler, 'Ethiopian Murder Mystery', p. 89. Hill, 'Introduction', p. 15. Schuyler, 'Ethiopian Murder Mystery', p. 90.

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later Ethiopian adventure tale 'Revolt in Ethiopia' (1938-1939).44 The story's African-American protagonist Dick Welland only reluctantly helps an Ethiopian princess in her quest to liberate her country from the Italian invaders. He repeatedly fends off the princess' attempts to convince him of joining her before his infatuation eventually leads him to support her mission. Critically exploring the Pan-African involvement of AfricanAmerican characters in 'The Ethiopian Murder Mystery' one comes to the conclusion that there is surprisingly little connection between Ethiopians and African-Americans. They even seem physically distinct as the Ethiopians are marked by a 'savage' feature: their hair seems out of control. Destu's hair is thus described as 'frizzy', and Mattchu and the Eritrean Sibra both have 'bushy hair'.45 Both the Ethiopian and the Italian agents essentially remain foreigners, international travellers intent on leaving the United States as soon as their mission is completed. The links between African-Americans and Ethiopians are thus necessarily fragile. Mattchu seems to underline the necessary spatial separation of African-Americans when explaining to Bates: 'We admire your perspicacity […] but it is dangerous to our interests to have you abroad'.46 Interestingly, it also does not seem advisable for Africans to stay in Harlem: in Schuyler's story and in Fisher's novel the royal African characters' weaknesses – women, drugs, gambling – which result in their deaths, could be read as effects of Western civilisation. African-Americans and Africans may be racially connected but they no longer belong together. At the scene of his crucial meeting with Holcombe, Bates states: 'I'm a race man, too'.47 Only few months before 'The Ethiopian Murder TP

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Rachel Call [George S. Schuyler], 'Revolt in Ethiopia: A Tale of Black Insurrection against Italian Imperialism [1938-1939]', in Ethiopian Stories, pp. 123-227. Schuyler, 'Ethiopian Murder Mystery', pp. 53, 77. Mattchu's hair is described as 'bush hair'. Schuyler, 'Ethiopian Murder Mystery', p. 119. A similar distinction in physical appearance is evident in the Courier cartoon series 'Sunnyboy Sam' in which, in keeping with the Italo-Ethiopian conflict, the two African-American protagonists travel to Ethiopia. See for instance the instalment by Holloway, 'Going Native!', Pittsburgh Courier, 19 October 1935, sec. 2, p. 11. Schuyler, 'Ethiopian Murder Mystery', p. 120. Schuyler, 'Ethiopian Murder Mystery', p. 114.


Mystery' was written, Schuyler had denied this very claim for himself: 'Some of the more racially chauvinistic of my Negro friends have occasionally charged that I am not a "Race Man." This is quite true. I have no concern for anything as abstract as a race, whatever a race may be'.48 With 'The Ethiopian Murder Mystery' Schuyler presents a Pan-African tale that sometimes seems to come close to undermining its own message. The theme of racial solidarity, it seems, is nothing that comes natural to either Schuyler or his characters. TP

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Getting Away with Murder Schuyler's novella is presented in a formal framework that seems to indicate its status as a typical detective tale: the story starts out with a murder and ends with a revelation scene. Readers are also presented with clichés of the detective genre such as the femme fatale (Ferndon) or a stereotypically effeminate gay character (shop assistant). Moreover, Schuyler's black detectives Williston and Bates repeatedly refer to the classical detective tradition by calling each other variations of 'Sherlock Holmes'.49 Schuyler's inclusion of a Maltese symbol in his narrative – a ring with a Maltese cross serves as identification of the Ethiopian agents – could, as Hill suggests, also be read as a nod to a legacy of white detective fiction.50 Additionally placing his tale in what was a fairly young African-American detective tradition, Schuyler makes numerous references to Fisher's novel The ConjureMan Dies – for instance by opting for a plot that evolves around the murder of an African royal.51 Yet in contrast to Fisher who, while challenging the detective tradition, presented a basically classical locked room mystery, Schuyler could indeed be said to be trying to TP

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Schuyler, 'Views and Reviews', Pittsburgh Courier, 23 February 1935, sec. 1, p. 10. See Hill, 'Introduction', pp. 13-14. Hill however includes this quote to argue for Schuyler's abrupt transformation into a committed Pan-Africanist. Schuyler, 'Ethiopian Murder Mystery', p. 84. For variations of the name see p. 73 and p. 77. Hill, 'Introduction', pp. 28-29. As mentioned in an earlier note (5), there are several other references to Fisher's novel. Hill also underlines that Schuyler was inspired by Fisher's novel. Hill, 'Introduction', p. 8.


get away with murder as he slays many of the basic rules of the classical detective genre. Looking at the 'Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories' as defined by S.S. Van Dine in 1928, one can conclude that Schuyler ignores most of them. Instead of focusing on his detective story, he includes a 'love interest' in his tale, comes up with knife throwing as a surprise method of killing, and, moreover, transcends the genre by combining a detective tale with a spy story, adding a touch of science fiction with his inclusion of a death ray.52 'The Ethiopian Murder Mystery' begins with a striking sentence: 'New Yorkers mind their business because they have so much business to mind'.53 By deciding to tell a New York tale, Schuyler refuses to restrict himself and his black detectives to a racialised geographical area they, as African-Americans, seem assigned to. In contrast to Fisher, whose detective tale focuses on the 'black metropolis' Harlem, Schuyler's two main investigators Bates and Williston jump into taxis or take the subway and race through Manhattan, thereby regularly crossing the geographical colour line. They move from black Harlem into Harlem-based Little Italy, enter shops on fashionable Fifth Avenue, and continue their investigation in the 'white' downtown Belgrade Hotel. As mentioned earlier, this display of disrespect for racial boundaries incurs punishment in form of discrimination.54 Yet despite the obstacles white racist characters put in the black detectives' paths their investigations prove very efficient. Stopped by a hotel employee, TP

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S.S. Van Dine [Willard Huntington Wright], 'Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories [1928]', in The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by Howard Haycraft (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1973 [1946]), p. 189. As Hill and Rasmussen show, death rays featured in several movies of the early 1930s and also in contemporary fiction. Schuyler again picked up the idea of a death ray in his serialised story 'Black Empire' (1937-1938) which features an 'infernal machine" that can destroy air fleets. Hill and Rasmussen, 'Afterword', pp. 307-309. Samuel I. Brooks [George S. Schuyler], 'Black Empire: An Imaginative Story of a Great New Civilization in Modern Africa [1937-1938]', in Black Empire, pp. 143-258. Schuyler, 'Ethiopian Murder Mystery', p. 53. There is one exception: Blacks' entry into Little Italy does not seem to have any consequences, a fact that could be viewed in light of the changing meanings of race over time. While Italian Americans are today considered 'white', they are repeatedly referred to as 'wops' in Schuyler's story – a derogatory term which indicates their inferior status as ethnic 'others'.


Williston for instance merely needs to flash his police badge – proof of his empowered status – in order to clear the path. When observing the Italian agents in the Belgrade Hotel, the investigators experience a moment of crisis as Ferndon registers surprise at the sight of two black men's presence in an environment defined as white, yet they succeed in the end. In another instance, Williston is able to turn his 'conspicuous' blackness into an advantage. Faced with a white shop assistant's reluctance to co-operate, Williston could be said to play the 'race card': aware of the assistant's discomfort with his presence in the shop he announces 'I'll wait' – a statement which almost magically speeds up the procedure.55 Looking at other examples of black American detective fiction, the lack of fear Schuyler's black detectives display when crossing the colour line seems remarkable. Bates and Williston certainly know that they have to confront racial discrimination as soon as they cross into a white-defined New York space. But unlike for instance Fisher's black detectives, who never leave Harlem, or Walter Mosley's black investigator Easy Rawlins, who tries to avoid leaving the black community of Watts, they display no hesitation to go wherever their investigation leads them.56 Against Stephen F. Soitos's claim for black detectives, for Schuyler's black investigators the colour line thus does not prove 'primary in any case or social relation'.57 Significantly, in Mosley's novels, Rawlins's fears are mainly connected to the racist nature of the police force – a feature typical of black detective fiction. The police force in 'The Ethiopian Murder Mystery', in contrast, is integrated. Whereas in Fisher's detective novel one of the black characters displays incredulity when confronted with a black police officer – 'they don't have no black detectives'58 – and the police force depicted by Mosley is defined as white, Schuyler's characters are not surprised when meeting black policemen, and Williston works happily side by side with the Irish police officer Sullivan. Unlike the black detective TP

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Schuyler, 'Ethiopian Murder Mystery', p. 84. For the hotel scene see p. 110. See for instance Walter Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress (London: Pan, 1992 [1990]), p. 58. Stephen F. Soitos, The Blues Detective: A Study of African American Detective Fiction (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), p. 31. Fisher, The Conjure-Man Dies, p. 48.


duo in Chester Himes's Harlem cycle, Williston is not positioned at the lowest rank of the police hierarchy; as Lieutenant he is superior in rank to Sullivan. Analogous to this move beyond a strict racial binary, Schuyler complicates issues central to detective stories: the dichotomy of good and evil along with questions of justice, guilt, and punishment. While Schuyler in his later Ethiopian adventure tale 'Revolt in Ethiopia' clearly settles these issues as he portrays the Italians as cruel murderers and torturers, readers presented with 'The Ethiopian Murder Mystery' outside a contemporary Courier context, which would have clearly marked the term 'Italian' as 'evil' or 'criminal' and 'Ethiopian' as 'good' or rather 'innocent', are presented with a problem. It seems hard to divide sympathies between the Ethiopians and the Italians or to label the two factions of agents 'good' or 'evil'.59 One reason for these difficulties lies in Schuyler's presentation of the spy teams: both are portrayed as foreigners. On the one hand – apart from Ferndon – they have distinct accents. Of Destu it is for instance said that 'he talked kind of funny, like a foreigner', and Sibra's accent also uncovers his status as a 'foreign fellow'.60 On the other hand, the agents' physical appearance indicates their state of 'otherness'. While the Ethiopians' hair, as mentioned earlier, seems to set them apart, the Italian agents' physical appearance corresponds to that described in a 1921 New York Times article which focuses on Harlem's Little Italy quarter: 'Who does not recognize an Italian when one sees one in New York, stocky of build, dark-visaged, with black hair'.61 In 'The Ethiopian Murder Mystery', everyone can spot Italians, and the conclusion after a description of a man as 'short and quite dark' necessarily is: 'Must have been an Italian'.62 Significantly, both white and black Americans derogatively refer to Italians as 'wops',63 thereby clearly defining them as 'others'. TP

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For a discussion of the Italians' cruelty in 'Revolt in Ethiopia' see Gruesser, Black on Black, p. 116. Schuyler, 'Ethiopian Murder Mystery', pp. 53-54, 78. Ernest Harvier, 'A Walk in Harlem Brings Surprises', New York Times, 2 January 1921, sec. E, p. 18. Schuyler, 'Ethiopian Murder Mystery', p. 78. See, for example, Schuyler, 'Ethiopian Murder Mystery', p. 93.


This 'othering' of groups of characters is a typical feature of detective fiction but Schuyler's definition of 'the other' differs decisively from most detective stories. In white crime fiction 'othering' usually occurs according to a racial divide, and very often blackness in these texts seems inextricably linked to evil. As evident for instance in Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress (1990), which does not feature a single sympathetic white character and involves white male killers and a white paedophile, the situation can be reversed in black detective fiction. Schuyler, in contrast, does not rely on this racial binary, thereby displaying what Norma R. Jones in a more general context describes as Schuyler's reluctance 'to reduce virtue and villainy to a simple matter of race'.64 In 'The Ethiopian Murder Mystery', foreigners are situated on both sides of the racial divide, and both sets of foreigners represent outlaws. As secret agents they have come to the US prepared to perpetrate any crime necessary to get hold of Tankkard's plans – a fact that makes all of them potential criminals. But while Schuyler's foreigners are criminals, they do not live up to the definition of 'others' as usually portrayed in crime fiction where, as Colin Watson underlines, one usually comes across 'despicable and evil-intentioned foreigners'.65 Again exploding a racial binary, Schuyler portrays both white and black agents as having 'evil intentions' but generally far from despicable. Readers consequently find beauty among white spies – Ferndon is described as 'startlingly beautiful' – as well as among black spies: Sibra is 'tall, black and handsome with […] features like a Greek god'.66 On the Ethiopian agents' side, Destu seems basically irresistible. Readers can only briefly catch a glimpse of the agents' fundamental 'evil' nature: Ferndon's 'cold blue eyes' in which one could see 'steel and the reflection of icebergs' seem to be a match for the 'cruel little yellow eyes' of Sadja, a member of the Ethiopian team.67 TP

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Norma R. Jones, 'George Samuel Schuyler', in Afro-American Writers from the Harlem Renaissance to 1940, ed. by Trudier Harris (Detroit: Gale, 1982), p. 248. Colin Watson, Snobbery with Violence: English Crime Stories and Their Audience, rev. ed. (London: Eyre Methuen, 1979), p. 123. Schuyler, 'Ethiopian Murder Mystery', pp. 77-78, 110. Schuyler, 'Ethiopian Murder Mystery', pp. 110, 119.


The Ethiopians' superiority, their swift violence, and their successful elimination of opponents may evoke a certain amount of sympathy for their victims. This is also due to the fact that readers get to know the Italian spies in the course of the story which develops into a narrative of their failure, entrapment, and destruction while the Ethiopians remain invisible until the final chapter. Their intelligence and efficiency, evident in Mattchu's sharp features and the 'dangerous gleam in his eyes',68 seems to mark them as particularly evil. While the Ethiopians in the end refrain from killing Bates and give him the opportunity to exonerate Crissina, they are responsible for the five murders occurring in Schuyler's story. Even Bates, a strong supporter of Ethiopia, is shocked when faced with the extent of the Ethiopians' killings. As readers learn at the story's very end, the Ethiopians, having cleverly left no trace of their presence in the United States, will manage to escape and thus get away with murder. While justice seems to be served on a small scale as Crissina's name will presumably be cleared and Bates will finally 'get the girl', the Ethiopians' killing spree will remain unpunished. Yet there is one element in the story that makes all the difference because it leads the reader to what could be described as the story's overarching narrative. Mattchu explains to Bates on the story's last page: '"This is war, my friend," […]. […] "Ethiopia is fighting for her life. We cannot be squeamish. Italian bombs have killed thousands of defenseless women and children. What are the deaths of a few men like Sibra, Moroni, Donatelli and Bostoni compared to them?"'69 While Bates's detective work is at this point actually over as he has identified the murderers, he here could be said to detect what Schuyler presents as the 'real' and far worse crime: Italy's cruel colonial aggression which is the Italo-Ethiopian war. It is this connection of the detective story with the story of the real-life Italo-Ethiopian conflict which repositions all assessments of good/evil and justice/injustice. While Ethiopia thus represents the aggressor in Schuyler's story, the larger story of the Italo-Ethiopian war reveals the 'real' culprit: Italy. The Ethiopians' getting away with murder, which implies their sucTP

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cessful application of Tankkard's death ray, thus becomes a necessity to prevent Italy from getting away with mass murder.

Italy vs. Ethiopia On African soil, the conflict between Italy and Ethiopia was fought between unequal opponents. Well equipped and financed Italian forces attacked an Ethiopian army that lacked access to modern military technology.70 By transferring the battlefield to New York, Schuyler sets the stage for a battle fought out under circumstances dramatically altered. On one level, African-American support enhances the standing of the Ethiopian faction in Harlem/New York. Beyond this Pan-African effort, the Ethiopian position seems profoundly strengthened as Schuyler depicts a battle among professionals. Sent to New York to fulfill their respective secret missions, the two teams of agents seem to be on an equal footing. Italy vs. Ethiopia thus turns into a match with an open outcome. Given the story's Pan-African nature, one may have expected Schuyler to present this match as a battle in black and white. Yet Schuyler moves beyond such a simplistic racial binary, indicating the inadequacy of the concept of race. As Lillie Jones concludes in her review of Schuyler's Ethiopian Stories, 'many of the characters […] are drawn as either pro-black or anti-black, loyal to the cause or traitors to it'.71 Yet in Schuyler's story loyalty is less related to skin colour or race than a question of national allegiance. Crucially, 'The Ethiopian Murder Mystery', underscoring Hill and Rasmussen's claim that Schuyler 'always put nation over race',72 is not about a racial conflict. Instead, it deals with a concrete colonial battle between two nations that is not sufficiently described when presented as a conflict solely along racial lines. Mirroring 'real' conditions – as black Italian colonial TP

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According to Scott, 'Ethiopia's troops were supplied largely with firearms that were more than forty years old'. Moreover, the Ethiopian air corps comprised 'fewer than twenty planes, most of which were obsolete'. Scott, The Sons of Sheba's Race, p. 75. Lillie Jones, '[untitled review of Ethiopian Stories, by George S. Schuyler]', African American Review, 31 (1997), p. 183. Hill and Rasmussen, 'Afterword', p. 299.


subjects Somalians and Eritreans fought on the Italian side during the Italo-Ethiopian war – Schuyler's Italy in 'The Ethiopian Murder Mystery' does not only signify whiteness. This reality is reflected in the Eritrean Sibra's membership in the Italian spy network. Significantly, he is not presented as a race traitor. He thus does not seem to be antiblack but rather pro-Italian. As readers learn, Sibra is an Italian colonial subject who worked for the government in Eritrea and was then trained in Italy. Significantly, Sibra is clearly a fully accepted member of the Italian spy team. There is no sign of a rejection of the racial 'other'. On the contrary: the 'whitest' Italian agent Ferndon, blonde and beautiful, is well-known for crossing the colour line sexually. When she sighs that '"Destu was such a sweet fellow,"' her white Italian colleagues debate her preference for black men, wondering: '"Why do you like dese black men so much, Seelvia?" […] "Everyvair you have some black lover. In Paris, in Venice, in Rome."'73 The answer is clear: for Ferndon, racial difference makes all the difference. Providing each faction with a fair share of a racial 'other', Schuyler includes the white and presumably American scientist Tankkard in the Ethiopian team. Like Sibra, Tankkard does not betray 'his' race by supporting the racial 'other'. Instead, he supports a country threatened by colonialist aggression. He hands the Ethiopians his plans for a death ray, thereby influencing the outcome of the war and, as Mattchu recognises, '[rendering] a great service to Ethiopia'.74 As evident in Mattchu's final monologue in which he dramatically underlines that 'Ethiopia is fighting for her life', Tankkard does what Schuyler presents as what is 'right'. Characters in 'The Ethiopian Murder Mystery' seem to have a moral choice: they either decide to be on the side of the colonial aggressor Italy, or they align with Ethiopia, a country symbolising freedom and independence. Viewed from a 'racial' perspective, this war clearly is a conflict between black and white as Italy represents white imperialism and Ethiopia black independence, yet Schuyler apparently refuses to reduce his story to this simple racial binary. As 'The Ethiopian Murder Mystery' takes off, readers are confronted with what appears to be a reversal of the actual colonial conTP

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flict in Ethiopia. At first glance, it seems that in Schuyler's story, as on Ethiopia's battlefields, Ethiopians are the first to lose their lives. However, the situation is, as revealed later, very different. While the real colonial battle was started by Italy, Schuyler's story starts off with an Ethiopian act of aggression. Killing one of their own who, in addition, is a member of Ethiopia's royal family, seems an extraordinary step and, tellingly, another deviation from a black/white binary. The message is clear: like Schuyler, Mattchu values nation over race as evident in his proud declaration: 'Our only allegiance is to Ethiopia'.75 When a national emergency is at hand, he has no particular qualms about killing Destu who, a 'sensualist'76 drawn to women and drugs, has become a liability for Ethiopia. Significantly, the perpetrators of this act of violence are revealed only at the very end – until then one is led to suspect that the Italians committed the murder. The Ethiopians remain invisible throughout most of the story. Indeed, invisibility seems to be one of their most impressive skills.77 The discovery of their multiple murders towards the narrative's end therefore comes as a surprise. In the story's last instalment the extent of the Ethiopian spies' activities is on display: Mattchu not only ordered the killing of Destu but also eliminated the majority of Italian agents, committing another blackon-black crime by murdering Sibra. Adhering to the example of white contemporary hardboiled writers, who allow 'some of the white women [to] get away at the end of the stories',78 Schuyler excludes only Ferndon from the Ethiopian's killing spree. Compared to the Ethiopian battlefields, the tables are turned in Schuyler's story: the Italian agents are reduced to passivity, desperately attempting to grasp the chain of events controlled by the Ethiopians. Significantly, their initial plan of action is thwarted. Instead of grabbing Tankkard's plans in Destu's apartment, a 'panic stricken' Ferndon is forced to '[rush] from the apartment'.79 Killing Destu before Ferndon can make her TP

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Schuyler, 'Ethiopian Murder Mystery', p. 122. Schuyler, 'Ethiopian Murder Mystery', p. 121. Mattchu indicates these skills in his conversation with Bates: 'You have never seen me before. I have seen you often'. Schuyler, 'Ethiopian Murder Mystery', p. 121. Maureen T. Reddy, Traces, Codes, and Clues: Reading Race in Crime Fiction (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), p. 29. Schuyler, 'Ethiopian Murder Mystery', p. 121.


move, the Ethiopians reduce the Italian agent to helpless feminine weakness. Her male colleagues fare no better. As Sibra, Moroni, Donatelli, and Bostoni attempt to take action, their lives are swiftly taken by the Ethiopians. Indicating their inferiority, the Italian agents falsely believe that 'Dese contry eet ees bad luck to us',80 but they suspect the wrong nation: it is not the United States but Ethiopia, forced to fight for her life, that is responsible for their destruction. Next to Schuyler's emphasis on the Ethiopians' ability to dominate the action, his insistence on their cold-bloodedness seems striking – particularly in comparison to other African-American writers' portrayals of Africans. During the Harlem Renaissance the black cultural movement – which by the time of 'The Ethiopian Murder Mystery' was slowly fading away – black writers and painters fantasised about Africa in their works. As Michel Feith points out, they often made use of 'signifiers of the African landscape' such as the jungle and associated 'music and dancing, tom-toms and rhythm […] with the people, whose body is depicted as a locus of power and sensuous beauty'.81 In contrast to such fantasies about Africa and Africans, whose nationality is usually not specified, Schuyler presented a concrete African nation and, as Hill notes, 'a concrete expression of cultural and political realities'.82 One of few African-American writers to actually travel to Africa, Schuyler refused to romanticise the continent and its inhabitants. With the exception of Destu whose 'weaknesses',83 as mentioned before, however may be linked to Western society's influences, he instead presents Ethiopians mainly as shrewd, cold-blooded, quick, and intelligent. This fits into his belief, as voiced in the Courier, that 'far from being the benighted, ignorant savage, a notch above the gorilla, which white folk love to depict, the African today is quite alert and informed [Schuyler's italics]'.84 To an extent, however, Schuyler in 'The Ethiopian Murder Mystery' seems to refer to Africans' alleged TP

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Schuyler, 'Ethiopian Murder Mystery', p. 105. Michel Feith, 'The Syncopated African: Constructions of Origins in the Harlem Renaissance (Literature, Music, Visual Arts)', in Temples for Tomorrow: Looking Back at the Harlem Renaissance, ed. by Geneviève Fabre and Michel Feith (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 58. Hill, 'Introduction', p. 6. Schuyler, 'Ethiopian Murder Mystery', p. 120. Schuyler, 'Views and Reviews', Pittsburgh Courier, 17 August 1935, sec. 1, p. 10.


savage character, for instance choosing knife throwing as the Ethiopians' killing method. Sadja, the expert Ethiopian knife thrower, moreover reminds Bates 'of a black leopard he had once seen at the Bronx Park zoo'.85 Yet the nature of Sadja's acts of murder belies this appearance: he masters a spectacular art of murder that demands a large amount of control. Sadja works with enormous precision and his acts are barely visible. Even in a crowded subway station, he does not miss his target and consequently never endangers innocent bystanders. One could also read the Ethiopians' absence until the narrative's very end as Schuyler's reversal of another stereotypical 'black' role: the Ethiopians simply refuse to entertain the reader. Their knife throwing show is staged invisibly. Schuyler contributed to the circulation of new images of Africans and, more specifically, of Ethiopians. Announced prominently, the Courier started a campaign to educate African-Americans about Ethiopia. Schuyler and Rogers were thus claimed to 'write a series of articles dealing with the life, customs, history, progress, population, and, fighting strength [sic] of Ethiopia'.86 In his only contribution to the series, Schuyler focused on technology. He was clearly aware of the Ethiopians' undeveloped technological state and its existence as what Langston Hughes poetically described as a 'Poor little joker with no poison gas'.87 Yet in August 1935, two months before the outbreak of the Italo-Ethiopian war, Schuyler claimed Africans' potential for technological advancement: '[the African] is rapidly becoming industrialized and is now quite familiar with the white man's tools. He is using them today. He will be manufacturing them himself tomorrow [Schuyler's italics]'.88 Here, a fascinating parallel to 'The Ethiopian Murder Mystery' is revealed. Having picked up Tankkard's plans for a TP

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Schuyler, 'Ethiopian Murder Mystery', p. 119. 'Two Best Informed Men On Ethiopia In U.S.A.!', Pittsburgh Courier, 27 July 1935, sec. 1, p. 1. Langston Hughes, 'Broadcast on Ethiopia [1936]', in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. by Arnold Rampersad (New York: Vintage, 1994), p. 192. Quoting from a letter in his Courier column, Schuyler pointed to Ethiopia's 'necessities of modern technic [sic] and progress' and Ethiopians' 'full realization of the power of modern technic [sic]'. Schuyler, 'Views and Reviews', Pittsburgh Courier, 29 February 1936, sec. 1, p. 10. Schuyler, 'Views and Reviews', 17 August 1935.


death ray – the 'white man's tool' – there is no doubt that the Ethiopians will manufacture and use the lethal weapon in Ethiopia. In contrast to contemporary white newspaper stories which claimed that, 'Italian "flame-throwers" when they go into action, will be looked upon by the barbarous Ethiopian tribes as actual devils', Schuyler's story ends with the Ethiopians' access to modern US war technology and readers' envisioning of the future: technologically advanced Ethiopians will turn the tables and lethally shock the allegedly 'civilised' Italian invaders.89 As John Cullen Gruesser concludes regarding Schuyler's later African tale 'Black Empire' (1937-1938), Schuyler, in contrast to earlier African-American authors, no longer 'asserted that the superior morality and spirituality of people of African descent would redeem the continent'.90 In 'The Ethiopian Murder Mystery', Schuyler instead points toward Ethiopians' cold-bloodedness and strong belief in the power of modern technology. The match of Italy vs. Ethiopia is thus won with ease by modern, intelligent Ethiopians. They succeed in what is depicted as a battle between nations which does not follow the rules of black vs. white. In the end it is a white American who, ignoring the United States' official neutral stance, enables Ethiopia to participate in modern warfare – a reversal of positions which, as readers may expect, may have dramatic consequences for Africa's colonial geography. TP

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Floyd J. Calvin, 'War Activities Quicken Harlem Trade Interests', Pittsburgh Courier, 25 October 1935, sec. 2, p. 1. According to Calvin, the quote is from the Mirror of 24 October 1935. Gruesser, in the context of Schuyler's story 'Revolt in Ethiopia', which also ends with the Ethiopians' potential access to modern weapons, similarly concludes that 'Schuyler shows that the Ethiopians can and will use sophisticated armaments effectively'. Gruesser, Black on Black, pp. 115116. Gruesser, Black on Black, p. 106.


Ethiopia was unable to defend her territory and was consequently defeated by the Italian troops in May 1936. What followed was an Italian occupation which ended in 1941 with British and Ethiopian troops' reconquest of Ethiopia and the restoration of Haile Selassie to power. Schuyler's story, in contrast, foresees a radically different course of events which, however, lies beyond the story's formal ending. Knowing that the Ethiopian agents will safely return home with Tankkard's plans, readers can expect the death ray to be put into action against the Italian invaders. As indicated in the story, the results will be dramatic. One of the Italian agents believes that the death ray 'may breeng disaster upon our armies', and Mattchu is certain that it 'will annihilate the Italians who have invaded our country'.91 These acts of violence will be necessary to reverse the Italians' previous disruption of order. On a more general level, the colonisation of Africa and, indeed, white aggression against non-whites anywhere in the world could be said to constitute the first acts of a colonialist disruption of order. It seems worthwhile to imagine what might happen after the Ethiopians' destruction of the Italian army. How will other colonised African countries react? In his newspaper column Schuyler speculated that the Italo-Ethiopian conflict 'will very likely be the match that will touch off the world powder keg again […]. All the great exploiting powers of the world who are squeezing […] the colored brethren in Africa, Asia and America stand to lose everything by another world war [Schuyler's italics]'.92 Add the death ray to the Italo-Ethiopian conflict, and the disruption of what was to become a colonial order in one country can be imagined to result in a chain reaction as the 'white man's tools' are passed on. Schuyler's use of the detective format corresponds to his story's transgressive content. Although aware of the rules of the detective genre, Schuyler was willing to bend them to create his scenario for an alternative history of the Italo-Ethiopian conflict. While Fisher, his predecessor in African-American crime fiction, enlarged the field by 'inventing' the black urban crime story, Schuyler prioritised his PanAfrican mission and apparently arbitrarily crossed the genre's boundaries. His detective tale in fact represents two crime stories in one. TP

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While readers try to figure out the smaller-scale mystery of Destu's murder and the ensuing events, they are also faced with an overarching crime story that reveals the already known culprit: the colonialist aggressor Italy. With 'The Ethiopian Murder Mystery' Schuyler provided contemporary African-American readers with an entertaining and easily accessible story, yet unlike his earlier detective tales, 'The Ethiopian Murder Mystery' represents a case of pulp fiction with a purpose.


'REDNECK WONDERLAND': ROBERT G. BARRETT'S CRIME FICTION Xavier Pons 'It's just so, so Oz' (R.G. Barrett, 'Bowen Lager', You Wouldn't Be Dead for Quids, p. 137) Is it a coincidence if there appears to be some kind of affinity between Australia and crime fiction? Envisaged from a pragmatic point of view, the affinity is pretty much beyond dispute, and appears from the fact that so many contemporary overseas crime or thriller writers, such as British authors Dick Francis (In the Frame) or Hammond Innes (Golden Soak), as well as French authors such as ADG (Kangouroad Movie) or Hervé Claude (Requins et coquins) have set some of their stories in Australia. And, of course, the country has produced a bumper crop of crime writers of its own, many of whom have attained the status of classics, from Fergus Hume's The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886) down to the Cliff Hardy stories of Peter Corris, without forgetting Carter Brown or the Napoleon Bonaparte stories of Arthur Upfield. Writing crime fiction seems to be a favourite pastime with Australians, from High Court judge Ian Callinan1 to former underworld figure Mark Brandon 'Chopper' Read.2 Crime fiction is sometimes relegated to the 'popular literature' category, in a condescending gesture which assumes that it is inherently inferior to 'mainstream' writing. The distinction between these categories is a very questionable one, and Australian examples show that many 'mainstream', i.e. artistiTP

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Author of The Coroner's Conscience (Rockhampton: Central Queensland University Press, 1999). Author of Pulp Faction: The Revenge of the Rabbit Kisser (Melbourne: Floradale Productions, 1995).

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cally and intellectually respectable, authors – from Marcus Clarke (His Natural Life) to Peter Carey (The Tax Inspector), Randolph Stow (The Suburbs of Hell) or Brian Castro (Pomeroy) – have produced crime fiction, not as a sideline but as part of their 'regular' output, giving this kind of fiction an unusual degree of respectability. With writers like Gary Disher, Carmel Bird, Victor Kelleher or Gabrielle Lord, the line between 'crime' and 'mainstream' fiction becomes thoroughly blurred. This is not the case with the writer I will focus on in this paper, Robert G. Barrett, whose novels have little literary merit, yet are quite revealing of contemporary Australian culture. There is no space here for a thorough investigation of the prominence achieved by crime fiction within the framework of Australian literature, but it is clear that the country's history, especially the part played by convicts in the early years of settlement, has been a significant factor. Few observers would establish a connection between contemporary Australians and the criminals transported to Botany Bay and other penal settlements some two centuries ago. And yet the weight of history can still be felt. Australia's convict heritage continues to resonate with the public, turning delinquents and criminals into victims and magnifying their misdeeds into heroics, as appears from the enduring popularity of Ned Kelly, son of a convict, bushranger and arguably Australia's most popular hero. Ned, incidentally, has lent his name to the major Australian award for crime fiction. What Christine Cremen called 'the crime-fiction tradition of a country whose first white settlers arrived with a rap sheet'3 is in a sense a natural outcome of Australia's history. Australia's geography has no doubt contributed as much as its history. Its spectacular scenery, its beaches, deserts and jungles made it a most suitable background for tales of adventure and mystery, pitting man not simply against his fellow-man but against nature as well. If national cultures are located at the intersection of history and geography, it follows that Australia's culture has a good deal to do with crime, which is no doubt why crime – and crime fiction – has a good deal to do with Australia's culture. TP

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Christine Cremen, 'Gothic Matilda', Sydney Morning Herald, 2 November 2002, p. 43.

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Almost by definition, crime fiction focuses on the seamy side of society, and even though it tends to reflect middle-class anxieties of law and order it may also provide a counterpoint to celebratory national narratives in the process. The world depicted is usually one of violence, transgression and savagery, far removed from the pictures of tranquil progress towards ever greater prosperity, decency and justice featured in much official discourse. In this sense, crime fiction defamiliarises Australia by foregrounding its strangeness, by describing it as an alien, exotic and threatening environment that has little to do with the everyday experience of its citizens. In part this effect is achieved by locating the story in remote places, like the outback in Upfield's fiction or in Janette Turner Hospital's Oyster. Their very remoteness and strangeness suggest an 'other' Australia, whose dangers can be experienced vicariously without the sense, on the reader's part, that one might very well be exposed to them. But the defamiliarisation process can also focus on thoroughly familiar locations, places and environments that millions of Australians have a personal acquaintance with, and represent them from an unfamiliar angle. The suggestion here is that behind the non-threatening homeliness of those locations – Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Perth, etc. – there lie unexpected dangers. The exotic need not be geographically distant – cultural distance will do the trick just as well. Like beauty, exoticism lies in the eyes of the beholder, not in the object or location, and since the average reader of crime fiction is not personally acquainted with the world of crime, even the most familiar of locations can be turned into an exotic setting. Yet this is exoticism of a different order than the one provided by outback locations because it works by subverting the sense of familiarity usually associated with the location. To focus on the murderous rituals of Aboriginal magic in the Australian heartland (as in Upfield's The Bone Is Pointed) is one thing, but to describe human sacrifices attempted barely a stone's throw from the staid city of Adelaide (as in Robert G. Barrett's Leaving Bondi) is another, with quite different resonance. The former will make you glad you live in 'civilised' parts while the latter will disturb you with the thought that 'civilisation' is just a surface illusion and that actually you are not safe anywhere. There is a sense that crime fiction exposes the truth about Australia, a truth that official discourses keep decently hidden. As Stuart Coupe wrote about Susan Geason's novel Shark Bait, which

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features protagonist Syd Fish, 'Syd's Sydney is the real city, not the stuff they put in tourist brochures'.4 Of course such an approach is apt to essentialise the location, to suggest there is such a thing as the real Sydney, or the real Australia, which is a very dubious proposition in this postmodern age. What crime fiction provides is not so much the truth as an alternative version of it – no truth at all, in fact, but just another angle, another vision, like that of the sewers running underneath Bondi,5 the deadly murk beneath the sunny, hedonistic beach. TP

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Crime writer Robert G. Barrett is one of the biggest selling authors in Australia.6 He has been described as 'the king of popular Australian fiction'7 and has been said to have 'a cult following'.8 I might as well make it clear here that, for all his popularity, he is not a particularly good writer, even though he's been improbably described by reviewer Kate Collins as 'clearly the most notable Australian author since Henry Lawson, no sweat'.9 His books are very thinly plotted, characters are stereotyped, and the writing itself is quite repetitive. But what he's got going for him is how thoroughly saturated with Australiana all his stories are. A critic of Henry Lawson said that to read him abroad was to breathe the air of home, and no doubt the same could be said of Barrett (the resemblance does not go much further, though). Barrett is something of a curiosity in the sense (among others) that his books are full of Australia, more than any other books I know of. As Graeme Blundell reported, 'His publishers say that if you don't know Les Norton [the protagonist of almost all of Barrett's novels], then you don't know Australia in the 80s and 90s'.10 This is a fairly misleading TP

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Anon., '[untitled]', http://www.susangeason.com/fiction.html [accessed January, 10, 2004]. Robert G. Barrett, Leaving Bondi (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2000), p. 4. Cf. Jason Steger, 'Mr Romper Stomper', The Sunday Age, 21 December 2003, p. 23: (Barrett) 'sold more than one million copies in Australia […]'. Backcover blurb of R.G. Barrett, Rosa-Marie's Baby (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2003). Terry O'Connor, 'Crime Pays for Laid-Back Bob Barrett', The Courier-Mail, 25 March 1996, p. 6. Quoted on the back cover of Robert G. Barrett, White Shoes, White Lines and Blackie (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 1992). Graeme Blundell, 'Let There be Angst', The Weekend Australian, 17-18 July 1993, p. 9. H

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statement, however, as it could be argued that Les Norton's Australia bears only a superficial resemblance to the real country, and owes more to fantasy than to fact. But what image of Australia does he project? Some reviewers have declared themselves appalled by the crassness of the image portrayed. Andres Kabel has said of Barrett's hero, Les Norton, that he 'comes across as a loathsome creature, and the other characters are all caricatures. Gratuitous violence and sex scenes with no relevance to the plot are thrown in every now and then, and all these scenes are smutty and cheap […] That the Les Norton series might be seen, based on its airport presence, by overseas visitors as prime Aussie crime fiction fills me with despair'.11 Many more reviewers have shrunk from the unmistakably ocker flavour of Barrett's fiction, with Vanessa Gould denouncing for example 'his blatant populism, sexism and anti-everything agenda'.12 But Barrett himself is quite unrepentant, and glories in his ockerdom. Here is how he described his background: TP

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I grew up in Bondi in Sydney, Australia. I went to Bondi Beach Public School then on to Randwick Boys High. I left school at 14, did a few odd jobs then a trade as a butcher, mainly in the Eastern suburbs before finally working as a boner in various meatworks around the inner city with two trips to Ross River meatworks at Townsville, Queensland thrown in. I gave up boning after a hindquarter fell on me tearing the tendons in my right arm. I always liked writing letters and reading, so while I was on worker's compensation I did three writing courses at the WEA, Worker's Education Authority.13 TP

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This clearly was not the making of a sophisticated Australian intellectual. Barrett himself 'admits he deliberately goes out of his way to avoid political correctness and to antagonise the so called literary elite; the establishment. He doesn't write to impress critics, or writers, or the Australia Council. He writes for his readers and likes to put 11 TP

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Andres Kabel, '[untitled review of R. G. Barrett's Leaving Bondi]', Crime Factory, 1 (2001), p. 56. Vanessa Gould, 'Barrett Behaving Badly', The West Australian, 6 November 1997, Section: Today, p. 3. Anon., 'Official Robert G. Barrett Website', http://www.harpercollins.com.au/ robertgbarrett/about%20bob/bio.htm [accessed January 10, 2004]. HT

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humour into his work'.14 It is tempting to see Barrett as an unusually articulate redneck bent on smashing all the idols of Australian political correctness, but such a view would be overly flattering. Although the quality of his writing does not warrant much further analysis, the picture he paints of Australia is nonetheless revealing. His books are both a celebration of Australia, and a denunciation – celebration of those aspects he likes and denunciation of those aspects that irritate him. To make sense of Barrett's treatment of Australia and its culture, it is useful to dwell a little on three specifically Australian terms that might be used to describe him and his character Les Norton. The terms are 'ocker', 'larrikin' and 'battler' and, according to Katherine Brisbane, they capture 'the roots of the Australian character'.15 In a sense, Barrett and Norton16 are all three rolled into one, even though there is more to them than that. An ocker is 'a rough and uncultivated Australian male, often aggressively Australian in speech and manner'.17 A 'larrikin' is either a hooligan or 'one who acts with apparent disregard for social and political conventions',18 while a 'battler' (the full phrase often is 'little Aussie battler') is 'a person with few natural advantages, who works doggedly and with little reward'.19 It is clear that those concepts do not apply one hundred per cent to Barrett and Norton – unlike the battler, for instance, they do pretty well financially through their endeavours. But, taken together, they define an archetypal working class Australian with a strongly nationTP

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Anon., 'Official Robert G. Barrett Website', http://www.harpercollins.com.au/ robertgbarrett/about%20bob/pressrelease.htm [accessed January 10, 2004]. Katherine Brisbane, 'The Battler, the Larrikin and the Ocker', Commonwealth, 11.1 (1988), p. 13. One should, of course, distinguish between the author and his protagonist – Barrett did insist 'I'm not Les Norton' (http://www.harpercollins.com.au/ robertgbarrett/about%20bob/bio.htm [accessed January 10, 2004]). However, Les is his alter ego, a larger-than-life version of Barrett, and Les's opinions and tastes are by and large a reflection of his creator's. Anon, '[Australian Words]', http://www.anu.edu.au/ANDC/Austwords/ocker.html [accessed January 10, 2004]. Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary, ed. by J.M. Hughes, P.A. Mitchell and W.S. Ramson (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1992 [1987]), p. 635. Anon, '[Australian Words]', http://www.anu.edu.au/ANDC/Austwords/battler. html [accessed January 10, 2004]. HT

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alistic bent which tends to make him something of a xenophobe, who is rather a male chauvinist and likes his beer as well as a bit of 'biffo' [violence]. The working class or blue collar element is quite marked in Barrett's fiction, although it comes with some ambiguities. Both the novelist and his protagonist, Les Norton, lack the benefits of a university education – though they would not admit there is much benefit to one, apart from the fact it is synonymous with a middle- or uppermiddle class background. Barrett is not so much 'rough and uncultivated', despite his unmistakable working class background and the fact that he left school at 14 to become a butcher, as deliberately antiintellectual. As he put it in an interview, 'If I had a uni degree I wouldn't write the way I write. Know what I mean? I came up through the school of hard knocks'.20 This is reminiscent of Henry Lawson's diatribes against universities, even though when Barrett refers to Lawson it is only because the latter's face used to adorn $10 bills.21 But while Barrett and Norton are described as regular working class Aussies, the protagonist enjoys a lifestyle which is beyond the reach of most working men. Les, when he is not jetting about the country in business class, is made to drive Jaguars and such like. He stays at luxury resorts and expensive hotels and dines at what he would call 'grouse', i.e. excellent, restaurants. Of course someone else usually picks up the bill, but it is still the kind of life which the working class would regard as fantasy rather than reality. The contradictions in Norton's character are encapsulated by the fact that while he likes gourmet food, he professes almost complete ignorance in respect of wine.22 The latter feature signals his belonging to the working classes, who prefer their beer, while social élites are supposed to sip their chardonnay. The former, however, suggests he is a cut above the average bloke, so that he seems to have it both ways. TP

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Chris Beck, 'Big Man's Reckoning', The Age, 8 November 1997, Section: Saturday Extra, p. 2. Cf. Robert G. Barrett, You Wouldn't Be Dead for Quids (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 2003 [1985]), p. 27: 'when Les pulled a $10 bill out of his wallet Henry Lawson started blinking at the light'. Cf. Barrett, Guns'n Rosé (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 1996), p. 81: 'Les had to admit that wine was just wine to him. He could tell good from bad, red from white, then after that it was all plonk […] Try as he might, Norton was a wine phillistine […]'.

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Barrett likes to send up middle-class, arty types like publishers – Les pretends he's one, and when asked by aspiring poet Blythe how he got his broken nose he replies 'Playing rugby union at university'.23 The words 'union' and 'university' conjure up a world of privilege and distinction, of snobbery too – the opposite, almost, of the fair dinkum Aussie battler. But has Barrett got it right? His vision (he was born in 1943) here seems outdated, going back to the pre-Whitlam days or even earlier, when a university education was very expensive, out of the reach of the working class, and when union was a gentlemen's game, as against the more proletarian league (which, significantly, Les used to play). Both have been professional games for a while, and 'union' no longer has quite the same snobbish connotations.24 In Barrett's social vision, the working class is not set up against a recognisable middle or upper class against which it might have to struggle. The wealthiest of his characters, Norton's boss Price Galese, would be hard to pin on a class chart: he owes his wealth (he is driven in a Rolls Royce and is always described as wearing beautiful suits) to his illegal gambling club and his string of race horses. Barrett's working class man is simply one who enjoys his beer, his rock music (like Norton, he's a man in his early thirties), and a bit of biffo. The novels leave no doubt as to Norton's love of beer. In Leaving Bondi, for instance, it is said that 'the VB [Victoria Bitter] on tap was good',25 and there are references to 'a cold Eumundi Lager'26 or 'a cold Fourex'27 – all Australian brands that indicate, in addition to his love of beer, a strong nationalistic streak. Australian rock music is another prominent feature, with Les parading his liking of bands such as Cold Chisel, AC/DC or Rose Tattoo (oddly enough, he does not mention Jimmy Barnes's 'Working Class Man'). As for 'biffo', it is one of the mainstays of the novels, in which many episodes describe Norton beating assorted villains to a pulp. Barrett's working class is just synTP

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Barrett, Leaving Bondi, p. 88. Cf. Robert G. Barrett, Davo's Little Something (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 2002 [1992]), p. 80: 'Both doctors were old friends from their waggish university and rugby union days […]'. Barrett, Leaving Bondi, p. 2. Barrett, Leaving Bondi, p. 9. Barrett, Leaving Bondi, p. 11.


onymous with decent, early middle-age Australian blokes which, in terms of social analysis, is hardly enlightening. More significant, from a cultural point of view, is Barrett's deep affection for Australia which is reflected in his liberal use of the adjective 'Australian' (always with positive connotations, as in much nationalistic writing of the 1880s and 1890s), and which shines from the page, as in this passage: 'Five minutes later Les was heading out of Cooktown on his way to Cairns, staring at the road ahead thinking what a nice day it was and how lucky he was to be living in Australia'.28 While Sydney is the focal point of most stories,29 they range far and wide, and Barrett's novels offer a sweeping panorama of the country, as each of them takes place in part in a different and lovingly described area: the Central Coast of New South Wales in Guns 'n Rosé, North Queensland in Goodoo Goodoo, the Newcastle area in The Wind and the Monkey, Wagga-Wagga in Mud Crab Boogie, the Gold Coast in White Shoes, the South Coast in Mystery Bay Blues, Melbourne and the Apollo Bay area in Rosa-Marie's Baby, etc. This provides Barrett with an opportunity to celebrate the natural beauty of all those different environments. And although, as you'd expect with crime fiction, some characters are terrible villains, Australians are generally presented as attractive and likeable people, as in this aside about Gary and the bus driver, described as 'two of your true blue, laconic, leg-pulling Australians'30 or in this well-meant but patronising remark: 'Australian women. Aren't they just the most adorable creatures?'31 Barrett's nationalism also shows in his use, mostly in celebration, of a variety of Australian icons. These can be items of clothing such as R.M. Williams boots,32 Akubra hats and thongs,33 household appliTP

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Robert G. Barrett, Goodoo Goodoo (Sydney: HarperCollins, 1998), p. 234. Cf. Barrett, You Wouldn't Be Dead for Quids, p. 35: 'Sydney on a clear winter's day is without doubt the prettiest city in Australia and arguably the prettiest in the world'. Barrett, Goodoo Goodoo, p. 87. Barrett, White Shoes, p. 199. Cf. Robert G. Barrett, Mud Crab Boogie (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2003 [1998]), p. 27: 'Being an old Queensland country boy Les loved his R.M. Williams riding boots, as most country people do. They're comfortable, they go with just about

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ances such as the Hills Hoist,34 or phrases that have a peculiarly Australian ring to them, such as 'Anzac' or 'The good old tall poppy syndrome'.35 A significant part of his fiction centres on iconic Australian settings, with both geographical and cultural significance. Examples include the Bondi area in Sydney, and its world-famous beach. Norton lives there, and goes to the beach a lot. There is also Kings Cross, Sydney's red-light district, where Norton works. Nor should we forget pubs, a mainstay of Australian popular culture, and, beside Bondi, plenty of other beaches, which tend to symbolise Australia's hedonistic culture. The prominence of these settings gives the novels an almost quintessential Australian flavour with which the local reader can easily identify. Like any true-blue Aussie, Barrett is very proud of his fellowcountrymen. As he put it in the foreword to Rosa-Marie's Baby, speaking about members of the armed forces, 'These people make me so proud to be an Australian'.36 There is indeed a militaristic note to Barrett's patriotism, what with his admiring depiction of fictional Major Garrick Lewis37 or his tribute to General Peter Cosgrove, who led the Interfet force in East Timor.38 Such a note has always been part of Australian nationalism, from Henry Lawson (cf. such poems as 'The Star of Australasia' or 'The Blessings of War') down to the current revival of popularity of the Anzac Day celebrations. Barrett here runs true to type. TP

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anything…'. Cf. Barrett, Goodoo Goodoo, p. 156: 'Shorts or jeans with T-shirts either tucked in or hanging out was the main dress, along with battered Akubras, R.M. Williams and plenty of good old Aussie thongs'. Cf. Barrett, Goodoo Goodoo, p. 15: '[…] Les […] hung his washing out on the Hills Hoist like any good Bondi housewife'. Robert G. Barrett, Mystery Bay Blues (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2003 [2002]), p. 183; cf. Barrett, Davo's Little Something, p. 51: 'the Aussie tall poppy syndrome'. Barrett, Rosa-Marie's Baby, p. 3. Robert G. Barrett, The Day of the Gecko (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 1995). Cf. dedication of Barrett, Leaving Bondi: 'This book is dedicated to Major General Peter Cosgrove and all the Australian Forces who served in East Timor […]. I know they did a great job up there and they're still doing a great job. And we should all be proud of them'.


Barrett's claims to relevance as a social commentator have a good deal to do with the fact that contemporary Australian society is very much present in his fiction. It is full of topical references to a variety of iconic real-life characters, such as failed entrepreneur Christopher Skase,39 the embodiment of the Australian version of the 'greed is good' philosophy; Aboriginal activist Charles Perkins,40 the embodiment of indigenous militantism; the puritanical minister-cum-politician Fred Nile,41 the embodiment of the Australian characteristic known as wowserism; not to mention right-wing politician Pauline Hanson, celebrity stockbroker René Rivkin,42 comedians Roy Slavin and H.G. Nelson (of 'Fatso the fat-arsed wombat' fame),43 champion swimmer Ian Thorpe,44 top model Elle McPherson,45 etc. The accumulated references and allusions give the impression that the novels are a deliberate distillation of contemporary Australia. Barrett also refers to a good many topical issues, such as the Hindmarsh Island bridge controversy;46 the Ausflag competition to design a new flag for Australia;47 the 'bodies in a barrel' and the Beaumont children mysteries in Adelaide,48 etc. TP

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Cf. Barrett, The Day of the Gecko, p. 178: 'Les was half looking at something in the paper about Christopher Skase'. Cf. Barrett, Leaving Bondi, p. 47: 'Didn't you see the bloke on the tivee the other night. Sayin' burn all the place down for the Olympic games. This is the start mite'. Cf. Barrett, You Wouldn't Be Dead, p. 41: 'that whingeing prick from the Festival of Light'. Cf. Barrett, Leaving Bondi, p. 9: 'it would be even nicer to see the looks on all their faces when Les Norton, major investor, started hanging round the film set, a big cigar in one hand and a set of worry beads in the other'. Cf. Barrett, White Shoes, p. 226. Cf. Leaving Bondi, p. 145 'Even though the pool was only fifteen metres long, Les started doing laps like he was Ian Thorpe […]'. Cf. Mud Crab Boogie, p. 12. Cf. Barrett, Leaving Bondi, p. 165: 'The only touch of colour was an Aboriginal flag painted on a sheet of corrugated iron at the end of a paddock. Secret women's business, thought Les. Christ! Why waste millions of dollars arguing over the joint? It's a swamp'. Cf. Barrett, Mud Crab Boogie, p. 141. Cf. Barrett, Leaving Bondi, p. 144: 'They had some good murders and things in Crow Eater Territory. It wasn't long ago they found eight bodies stuffed in barrels in an old bank vault. They still hadn't found out what happened to the three

240 Xavier Pons

It is not just contemporary Australia that Barrett evokes – he occasionally serves up some slices of Australian history as well. Thus, he refers to the mistreatment of Australian prisoners of war by the Japanese,49 to the role of Japanese midget submarines in WW II,50 to the fighting in New Guinea51 and he contributes his mite to explain the mysterious disappearance of P.M. Harold Holt in 1967: Barrett subscribes to the familiar (but wild) theory that he was a Chinese spy – but adds that attempts by a Chinese submarine to pick him up failed, and he ended up with a bullet through the skull.52 This element of fantasy should alert us to the fact that his vision of Australia hardly accords with the received academic view. Indeed, Barrett glories in his anti-intellectualism. He spells this out on his website, declaring: TP

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I deliberately go out of my way to avoid political correctness and to antagonise the so called literary elite; the establishment. I know they hate the fact that a non academic, uneducated, loose cannon like me can sell so many books, and I have to confess: the smell of their arses burning mixed with the sweet smell of success is 53 music to my nostrils. TP

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Beaumont children'. Cf. Barrett, Leaving Bondi, p. 14 : 'My job definitely isn't the Burma Railway […]'. Cf. Robert G. Barrett, The Wind and the Monkey (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2002 [1999]), pp. 285-286. Cf. Barrett, Davo's Little Something, p. 52. Cf. Barrett, The Day of the Gecko, p. 181. Anon., 'Official Robert G. Barrett Website', http://www.harpercollins.com.au/robertgbarrett/about%20bob/bio.htm [accessed January 10, 2004]. Anon., 'Literature – Robert G. Barret', http://www.dinkumaussies.com/ LITERATURE%2FRobert%20G%20Barrett.htm [accessed January 10, 2004]. Cf. Barrett, Leaving Bondi, p. 83: 'Stuck with some bimbo trapped in an Agatha H

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unambiguous: 'Les caught his reflection in a mirror near the bar. He'd seen that expression before. In the meatworks when a steer cops it in the back of the head with a stun-gun'.56 However, this is not to say Barrett dislikes all writers. 'On a rotten, cold, boring day in winter', he writes, his hero Les 'liked nothing better than to kill a few hours in the library, going over big old books about ancient ruins and other countries and their people'.57 Les (and by implication Barrett himself) is not completely anti-intellectual, then, even if it takes a 'rotten, cold, boring' winter day to drag him to the library. Les likes a good read, which to him generally means popular fiction (like Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm, which he reads in Mystery Bay Blues) rather than any highbrow stuff. In The Day of the Gecko, he looks at a poster in someone else's flat: 'Les had a closer look. Jean-Paul Sartre. Buggered if I know who that is, he shrugged'.58 But he's also fond of the Beat writers, especially Kerouac, and is said to read Charles Bukowski. There is a modicum of literary references in Barrett's novels – to Ernest Hemingway (whose name he spells with two 'm's);59 to Alan Duff's Once Were Warriors,60 and to a very few Australian writers such as C.J. Dennis61 and Peter Corris.62 And if Les is shown reading Helen Demidenko's The Hand that Signed the Paper, that is because referring to the controversy that book generated provides another opportunity to lambaste the literary establishment: TP

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Christie time warp while she reads me her poetry'. Barrett, Leaving Bondi, p. 83. Barrett, Rosa-Marie's, p. 22. Barrett, The Day of the Gecko, p. 75. Cf. Barrett, The Wind, p. 30. Barrett, Guns'n Rosé, p. 9: '[…] Norton thought he might stomp on the bloke's groin a few times, "Jake the Muss" style, just for fun. So he did'. The reference, in Barrett, Leaving Bondi, p. 59, is a very indirect one, where the phrase 'the sentimental bloke' is used as rhyming slang for 'coke'. Referred to, also in Barrett, Leaving Bondi, p. 66, through his detective hero: 'Who do you think you are? Cliff Hardy?'

242 Xavier Pons In a way I feel sorry for the sheila that wrote it. All the fuckin' shit she's going through. I mean, all the poor bastard did was write a book and half put one over those turnip heads running the literary scene. Now they want to burn her at the 63 stake. TP

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For all the disingenuity of this statement – Demidenko, whose real name is Darville, was widely criticised not just for impersonating a Ukrainian woman but for the anti-semitism in her novel – this shows greater awareness of the world of literature than is usual with the average ocker. Also on the cultural front, Les, and by implication Barrett, are not complete philistines, as appears from the reference to the controversy around painter William Dobell: 'He had a drama with the art establishment over the Archibald Prize'.64 What is evidenced by the references to Demidenko and Dobell is less an interest in cultural matters per se than a desire to castigate the high priests of Australian culture. Barrett also likes to send up Australia's 'arty' TV channel, SBS, whose sometimes recondite 'ethnic' programming he mocks in The Day of the Gecko: 'there was no way he was going to watch the late movie on SBS – The Revenge of Grudnar the Crab Sheller – a tormented drama of conflict and intrigue in a seventeenth-century Icelandic fish factory'.65 But he is ready to acknowledge that SBS puts on some good shows too: 'Most of the time it's shit with subtitles. But now and again they come up with an absolute ripper'.66 Anyone who finds merit in SBS can only be an ambiguous ocker. Barrett's ambiguity also appears from his treatment of the Australian variety of English, sometimes known as 'Strine'. This treatment can be slightly ironical, as in the following passage where Les is talking to a butcher: TP

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'Yehmadewodillyav?' [Yes, mate, what will you have?] the butcher asked in perfect strine. 63 TP

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' Redneck Wonderland ' 243 'Gizdoogillosachugstag,' [give us two kilos of chuck steak], replied Les. 'Rydo' [right oh]. 'Njobidubwillya,' [and chop it up, will you] asked Les. 67 'Nowurriesmade' [no worries mate]. TP

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[Les] and Warren couldn't figure out how [fictional TV personality] Roy and the people who appeared on his show could use the word 'mate' so much. 'G'day, mate, 'Ow are ya mate. Or'right mate. I got some mates over 'ere wanna see ya, mate. Yeah righto, mate. I'll bring me mates over too, mate.' Les used the word 'mate' himself a bit. It was a unique part of Australian terminology. But he also liked an expression he picked up from some surfies at Bondi, who often used to greet or refer to each other as plain 'Me old', short for 'Me old mate'. And not 69 flogging the word 'mate' all the time. TP

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As if replacing one cliché with another will do much for the language. In addition to his aggressive nationalism, the ocker is characterised by his uncompromising male chauvinism and his intolerant attitude towards such groups as homosexuals, migrants and the Aborigines. In short, if political correctness emphasises non-discrimination, feminist aspirations, multiculturalism and Aboriginal rights, ockers take up precisely the opposite position. But how appropriate is the 'ocker' label in the case of Barrett? Reviewers, especially female ones, have denounced him as an unreconstructed male chauvinist whose books display what Anne

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Susskind called 'the ugly side of Australian blokeyness'.70 Barrett claims that 'Almost as many women read my books as men'71 but that, even if true, does not quite exonerate him. His character Les sees women primarily as objects of sexual gratification (thus in Leaving Bondi he rapes a comatose young woman whom he has just rescued, turning from white knight into blackguard) who are to be subjected to male authority and power: 'The idea of having some sheila get over the top of him in bed was complete anathema to Norton; he'd rather let some bloke beat him in a fight'.72 He occasionally picks up Joseph Furphy's prejudices against Aussie women – he held that their distinctive characteristic was an unmistakable moustache – when he writes that 'Coral ran her tongue over her top lip and all the hairs on her moustache glistened with a moist, slick sheen',73 and he is not above letting out a rant against feminists, as with this unflattering portrait of an imaginary feminist author: 'Kastrine Kreen was a screaming, howling feminist werewolf. She hated blokes with a vengeance […] If Kastrine had her way, she'd rally the sisters, get done up as Herod then run out and slaughter every newborn male for the next hundred years'.74 In fairness, it should also be noted that Les Norton can also be a courteous, generous and attentive lover. This does not absolve him but it may mitigate the sin. As for minority groups, Les Norton's attitude is summarised by fellow character Jimmy Rosewater, who's seen him reading Demidenko's The Hand that Signed the Paper, as follows: 'You hate abos. It's only natural that you're anti-semitic and you hate Jews too'. To which Les replies ironically: 'Don't forget poofs and Asians. I hate them too, you know'.75 Les is here spoofing the ocker, or possibly hedging, as his attitude is in fact fairly ambiguous. TP

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Anne Susskind, '[untitled review]', The Sydney Morning Herald, 'Spectrum', 21 December 1996, p. 11. http://www.harpercollins.com.au/robertgbarrett/about%20bob/bio.htm [accessed January 10, 2004]. In 'A Fortnight in Beirut', Barrett, You Wouldn't Be Dead for Quids, p.73. Barrett, Gecko, p. 168. Barrett, Wind, p. 28. Barrett, Guns, p. 153.


Barrett cannot be said to be overtly homophobic. His novels have their homophobic moments76 but then this is a reflection of the prejudices that permeate Australian society at large rather than of the author's own. Yet he does occasionally condone a mocking attitude of the kind, which in reality if not in fiction, may result in homophobic violence.77 This is hard to reconcile with his denunciation of gay bashings in Davo's Little Something78 but it is another of Barrett's ambiguities, who apparently wants to have it both ways. One finds a similar ambiguity in the treatment of ethnic minorities. The Japanese are one nationality that Barrett thoroughly loathes, both on account of their aggression of Australia during WWII and of their insistence that it is their right to hunt whales and dolphins. In an interview he referred to 'those stinking Japanese' and 'those lovely, dolphin-slaughtering Japs'.79 As the first quote makes it clear, beyond the specific reasons he mentions, Barrett has an almost instinctive dislike of the Japanese. This is confirmed for example by a passage in which Barrett describes people promenading in Surfers' Paradise: TP

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There were plenty of others walking too; people of all ages, sex, nationalities, shapes and sizes. Some would smile, some would even give a quick greeting. All except the Japanese. They avoided eye contact as if their lives depended on it, and appeared absolutely terrified to say 'g'day'. Well, up yours too, thought Les. And your whaling companies, your drift-nets and your attitude towards the environ80 ment in general. Shitty little bastards. TP

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Cf. the homophobic scene in Victor Harbor (Barrett, Leaving Bondi, p. 175) or the homophobic banter of the detectives (Barrett, Davo's Little Something, p. 75). Cf. Barrett, You Wouldn't Be Dead for Quids, p. 54: '[…] he looked like a walking greenhouse and was obviously gayer than carnival time in Rio. "Yesss," he crooned, eyeing Norton up and down. "What can I do for youuu?" "What can you do for meee?" replied Les derisively'. Cf. Barrett, Davo's Little Something, p. 74: '[…] every shitpot little thug in Sydney thinks he's got a licence to go out and bash any poor bugger walking down the street who doesn't look like John Wayne'. Vanessa Gould, 'Barrett Behaving Badly', p. 3. Barrett, White Shoes, p. 30. While Barrett's description of how Japanese tourists on the Gold Coast behave may be accurate, it does not take into account the fact that unscrupulous tour operators sometimes herd them towards stores which sell goods at widely inflated prices (the operator gets his cut) and warn them against going to 'ordinary' places because they supposedly face all kinds of dangers there. Small wonder those Asian tourists look a bit bewildered when promenading along

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Not much room for ambiguity there, even if Les is not always Barrett's mouthpiece. His treatment of Jews, however, is far more ambiguous, and more along the lines of his treatment of homosexuals. Les thinks it is OK to swindle Jews, no doubt because it is always some kind of payback: Les moved in [to his new house], after brassing his Jewish landlord for exactly that amount of rent. Norton didn't do this out of malice or prejudice; he did it simply to save money and knowing that if you live in Bondi and have a Jew for a landlord it's more or less compulsory for the 'goyen' to have a go and try to get their own back. Norton always reckoned it was worth ten years of his life just to see the look on Benny Rabinsky's face when he found he'd been taken to the 81 cleaners for around five hundred bucks. TP

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The same Les is described in a different novel, with exquisite taste, as a 'man who, in the short space of time he'd been in the Eastern suburbs, had probably rolled over more Jewish landlords and estate agents than Rommel's Panzer Division'.82 Here is how Barrett depicts a Jewish character: 'KK was Kelvin Kramer, a good Jewish boy if ever there wasn't one. The only word to describe KK was conman – with a capital K […] KK would put his grandmother on a slave block if he thought there was an earn in it'.83 This piece of blatant anti-semitism may be to some extent mitigated by the following observation: 'Scruples, ethics or a sense of fair play definitely weren't part of Kelvin Kramer's make-up, and despite coming from a fairly decent family, KK's standing in the Jewish community couldn't have been any lower if he'd been related to Joseph Mengle [sic]'.84 It should also be mentioned that Les is a member of the mostly Jewish Hakoah Club. Should one try to reconcile those fairly contradictory statements? Or are the contradictions irreconcilable, a sign that Barrett has contradictory feelings on the subject? What it all suggests is that, like many people, he has not thought the issue through, and he wavers between TP

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the sea front… 'Grungle', in Barrett, You Wouldn't Be Dead for Quids, p. 83. Barrett, White Shoes, p. 2. Barrett, White Shoes, p. 7. Barrett, White Shoes, p. 7.


gut feelings with a distinct anti-semitic tinge to them and a residual regard for political correctness. Similar ambiguities attach to his treatment of other ethnic groups. He denounces 'Wogs with their dopey bloody ethnic rivalries'85, but has Les say to his brother 'Well come down and I'll introduce you to my neighbour. He's a Werris [Werris Creek – rhyming slang for Greek], but he's not a bad bloke'.86 In other words, he demonstrates grudging acceptance of ethnic diversity – not his first choice, to be sure, but something that cannot be avoided, and that true-blue Aussies have to live with. No less ambiguity attaches to his treatment of Aborigines, even though they do not feature very prominently in his novels. They are mostly depicted in stereotypical fashion – as street thugs in Leaving Bondi, or as hopeless drunks in Goodoo Goodoo: 'Les could see he wasn't dealing with an indigenous person, a Koori or an Aboriginal woman [note the dismissal of politically correct terms]. Yellow dress was just a foul-mouthed, drunken thing in need of a good smack in the mouth; woman or not'.87 Guns is a little different, since one of the main characters, Jimmy Rosewater, is Aboriginal and is presented as handsome, intelligent and likeable. Les cannot help taking the mickey out of him a bit: TP

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'[…] the first thing I'd do is shove a bomb under ATSIC and blow it to the shithouse. Then shoot the lot of the whingeing bastards.' Norton looked evenly at the horrified look on Jimmy's face. 'Well, not really. What I'd do is get all the whites out of Australia and leave all the abos here with an AK-47 each, a thousand rounds of ammo and a few flagons of plonk. Then come back in about a month and there'd be none of the cunts left. Well, maybe a few. But fuck them – we'd 88 just poison 'em like they did in the good old days. Maybe gas 'em this time'. TP

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This is not meant to represent either Les's or Barrett's true sentiments, and the passage is then described as 'Norton's despicable tirade'. Yet one wonders once again is this is not simply a nod to political correctness (much as Barrett professes to despise it), like the

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Barrett, Gecko, p. 45. 'Grungle', in Barrett, You Wouldn't Be Dead for Quids, p. 101. Barrett, Goodoo, p. 114. Barrett, Guns, p. 65.

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statement that 'All Aborigines, with their brown skin and perfect teeth, have got beautiful smiles'.89 Such a generalisation cannot help but smack of racism. TP

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So far, we have seen Barrett running fairly true to the ocker stereotype, though with significant ambiguities. One area in which he definitely parts company with ockerdom is the environment. Barrett would seem to have a genuine commitment to its protection: he donates ten per cent of his royalties to Greenpeace and some more to the Wombat Rescue and Research Project. Barrett is acutely aware of the damage that has been inflicted on his beautiful Australia, as appears from this passage where Les is driving through Queensland: 'Where there were once millions of trees, it was just expanses of nothing. What were left were just dead, grey claws, groping towards the burning blue sky […] It was truly depressing and such a ridiculous waste of Australia's dwindling resources'.90 His novels include several passages supporting the environmental movement and blasting its opponents, like the following: TP

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all he [Les] seemed to get was these three miserable radio announcers ripping into greenies. It was one non-stop tirade interrupted only by commercials, and Les couldn't believe so much venom could pour out of one tiny speaker. All some poor souls were trying to do was stop what's left of the rainforests from being turned into chopsticks and glossy wrapping for the Japanese so a couple of hundred beer-bellied truck-drivers could keep their jobs. But the way these radio wallies had whipped themselves into a lather, you'd have thought the greenies were ruining the economy, raping women in the streets and throwing babies up in the air and catching them on bayonets while they ran around growing pot every91 where. TP

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Support for greenies has never been the ockers' strong suit (their attitude towards the environment is encapsulated by the nineteenthcentury saying – 'if it moves, shoot it down; if it doesn't move, chop it down'), so that Barrett cuts a distinctly non-ocker figure in this respect – almost a model of political correctness. This is also the case of his

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dislike of 'shock jocks', the popular radio hosts, such as John Laws, Ron Casey or Alan Jones92 who pander to ocker prejudices. TP

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There is, in Barrett's novels, a curious disjunction between the 'outsider' world in which Les moves and the 'insider' one he inhabits. The latter is a nocturnal underworld peopled by gamblers, assorted thugs and killers, corrupt police, etc., while the former is more of a surface world, full of ordinary people – barmaids, retirees, clergymen, musicians, tradespeople, etc. The effect is not to suggest that beneath the sunny surface of Australian society there lies a brutal, sinister reality of which most people are not aware, which might lay the groundwork for a critique of the society. The connections between the two worlds are almost non-existent, as evidenced by the fact that Les keeps completely silent about the 'nocturnal' aspects of the 'diurnal' settings he visits. His 'outsider' acquaintances, that is those not connected with his Kings Cross world, never get to hear about his more outlandish doings, whether the blowing up of Bondi Baths with a nuclear device (The Day of the Gecko), the discovery of a huge shipment of cocaine on the South Coast (Mystery Bay Blues), his foiling of a terrorist plot to bring down the plane in which the US President is travelling (White Shoes) or his chancing upon a monstrous creature born of genetic experiments gone wrong (Goodoo Goodoo). It is as if a fantasy world and a socially-recognisable world were simply juxtaposed. The escapist element detracts from what whatever social critique Barrett may have been intent on but this is not to say his fiction lacks a social and political subtext. His are novels written by an Australian, for Australian readers, and about Australia (though a few take place overseas – in Jamaica or Hawaii). Their basic purpose is to entertain but they also serve to celebrate various aspects of contemporary Australia, and, though to a lesser degree, to criticise others. But what does the resulting depiction amount to? Does Barrett really have his finger on Australia's pulse? The documentary nature of much of this fiction is in fact misleading, even though it has been said that the Norton novels 'resemble

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documentary journalism'.93 His vision of Australia might be termed that of an enlightened ocker if there was in fact such a creature. But 'enlightened ocker' is pretty much a contradiction in terms. His fiction is a fantasy of Australia, abounding in beer, great seafood, great sex, very good rock music and beautiful natural settings. It is an exaltation of working class Australia, but without the restraints imposed by a limited income or the need to hold down a job in a supermarket or a factory. His Australia, to borrow the title of Midnight Oil's last album, is a sort of 'Redneck Wonderland'94 enriched by fantasies of gracious living. Some redneck features – the xenophobia, the racism, the homophobia – are toned down to make the product less crude and more palatable to the public but these are counterbalanced by a surfeit of sex and violence. This gives Barrett's books a wide appeal among ordinary Australians, who see in them a reflection of popular views about the country and can easily identify with this Australia. Is Barrett's fiction in any way subversive or does it, on the contrary, uphold most of the common icons which signify Australia's identity? With the exception of their concern for the environment, the novels clearly do not clamour for significant change on the country's major political or social issues. They suggest Australia is the 'You Beaut Country' or 'Godzone', as it is sometimes labelled,95 the very best place on earth. Barrett mainly wants to conserve – the environment as well as the entire society. Although he said he loves strirrers,96 he does not try to disturb his readers by suggesting that all is not well in some respects and changes are called for. His books are an exercise in national navel-gazing and Barrett is clearly no part of what TP

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Michael J. Tolley, 'Stay with Cleary', Australian Book Review, 187 (1996-1997), p. 81. Though devoid of the album's political contents, which were thus summarised by Paul Mitchell: 'this album is concerned primarily with Australia's current political climate'. Never a band to shirk a cause, it's clear from the urgency inherent to Redneck Wonderland that Midnight Oil did not wish to be voiceless in arguably one of the most important political moments Australia has faced, http://www. shootthemessenger.com.au/u_sep_98/music/oils.htm [accessed January 10, 2004]. Cf. Anne Summers, 'A Hundred Years of Oz', www.annesummers.com.au/ 100oz.pdf [accessed January 10, 2004]: 'This is not to say that we don't believe we live in Godzone country, the greatest country on earth, who held "the best Olympics ever" and all the rest of it'. Cf. 'Acknowledgments', in Barrett, Boogie, p. viii.


Janette Turner Hospital called 'the anti-establishment establishment', defined as 'The university people and the arts bureaucrats and the literati: that distinguished group who look after culture and host conferences and play safe games of subversion in the literary journals and newspapers'.97 Although Barrett stays well clear of political debates in his novels, their contents suggest he shares much of the conservative outlook of the current prime minister, John Howard, who sees the Aussie 'battlers' as his main constituency. The only overtly political comments occur in an early novel, and are critical of the policies of Paul Keating's government. Since 1996, when Howard succeeded Keating, political comments have vanished from the pages of Barrett's books, as if with a conservative government all was now well in Australia and no criticism was called for since the political leadership could be trusted to do the right thing; according to Barrett's lights. While there is conflict in his novels – after all, conflict and its resolution is the staple of popular fiction – the conflict is always a matter of individuals rather than social or ideological forces, and it is, therefore, a mere sideshow to the placid spectacle offered by a happy Australian society. Thus, one of the basic cultural divides in Australia is that between bush and city, but Barrett straddles that divide so easily that, from reading his books, one would hardly suspect its existence. Les Norton hails from rural Queensland ('an old Queensland country boy'). He has become something of a city slicker but has not lost touch with his roots, embodied by brother Murray who still lives out in the bush. The two brothers are quite close and get along famously, as if to suggest that whether you live in the bush or in the city makes very little difference as long as you are a true-blue Aussie. Barrett is in fact more of a populist than a stirrer. This is confirmed by his understated sympathy for Pauline Hanson, a red-headed Queenslander, like his hero Les Norton. The Australia he depicts is one she would approve of – peopled by resourceful, self-reliant, likeable, 'ordinary' Aussies like Norton, with Aborigines and migrants as a colourful part of the background, but not in sufficient numbers to pose any challenge to the dominant anglo culture. In this respect, it is hard to find in the novels any awareness of the country's postcolonial TP

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condition. There is no sense of its colonial past, of Aboriginal dispossession and struggles, of Australia's relations with its neighbours as well as its former metropolis, of the hybridity of Australia's contemporary culture, etc. The country seems safely enclosed in a sort of bubble, with almost no connections to the outside world or to its own past. It has no more urgent preoccupations than a hedonistic enjoyment of its scenery, its women, its beer, steaks and seafood, and of course the need to make a bit of money to support that hedonistic quest. To be sure, there are some serpents in the Australian paradise – villains whose activities might disrupt the normally pleasant order of things and who must, therefore, be put out of action. But those villains are either of very little overall importance – two-bit thugs, bullies and crooks who get severely beaten up by Norton for their pains – or they are a matter of pure fantasy, with no connection to the travails of Australian society. His early novel Davo's Little Something had a more marked social dimension to it. Its hero has a recognisable working class dimension, and the story focuses on homophobic violence (even though that too led to fantasy rather than to a critique of Australian society). But it is with the Les Norton books than the writer really hit his stride, and their continuing popularity is an incitement simply to turn out more of the same, to give fantasy priority over social concerns, and feed the nationalistic complacency of his readers. Barrett's is fiction with narrow, uncritical intellectual horizons. While it does display the 'shrewd topicality' that Peter Pierce found in the crime fiction of such authors as Peter Corris, Gabrielle Lord and Shane Maloney,98 it lacks their accompanying 'incisive analysis'. It celebrates an Australia that casts almost no shadow – it may have a seamy side, as exemplified by Kings Cross with its gambling clubs, prostitutes and heroin addicts, but those things never grow to menacing proportions: they are contained within a small area and do not impinge much on the otherwise pleasant national way of life. The things that irk Barrett about Australia are simply those that make your good old ocker's blood boil: drunken, aggressive Aborigines, presumptuous foreigners, especially of the Asian variety, poofters TP

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Peter Pierce, 'Tale End', Bulletin, 121.31 (2003), p. 74.


and up-themselves pointy-headed intellectuals (not infrequently poofters themselves), socialist Governments who take the hard-earned cash of the decent citizens and redistribute it to the above undeserving groups – the usual suspects of Australian populism. Although Barrett's novels deploy almost the entire symbolic repertoire of Australia's culture, if they are subversive of anything, it is of the progressive vision that some Australians have been trying to implement over the last three decades. The very popularity of the books suggests that their conservative social, cultural and political views are widely shared, and that so-called 'bleeding heart' reformers have an uphill task on their hands.


TRANSCULTURAL BRITISH CRIME FICTION: MIKE PHILLIPS'S SAM DEAN NOVELS Patricia Plummer

Introduction More than 160 years have passed since Edgar Allan Poe created his amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin, who solved the horrific murders in the Rue Morgue more or less from his armchair. The genre of mystery writing has since undergone a considerable development and has evolved from an Anglo-American venture into an international phenomenon. Different subgenres have emerged and new ideas have been introduced with each stage of its history. Amateur detectives turned professional, they included women in their ranks, moved from the dark boulevards of Paris to cosy settings in rural England and across the Atlantic to West Coast urban mean streets. At the beginning of the twenty-first-century crime fiction is still alive and kicking. Especially the subgenre of hardboiled fiction that was initially characterised by a specifically American brand of aggressive masculinity has proved to be surprisingly flexible and open to reinterpretation. In her study of hardboiled fiction, Gabriele Dietze argues that crucial developments within the genre can be linked to external factors. She reads the hypermasculine American tough guys vis à vis changes in sexual politics as well as post World War I (Dashiel Hammett, Raymond Chandler), II (Mickey Spillane, Ross Macdonald) and Vietnam war (Andrew Vachss) crises of masculinity.1 But what happens when hardboiled fiction is appropriated into a British migrant setting? Are genre conventions still at work and to what ends may they be applied? Or TP

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are they twisted, questioned, distorted, even transcended? Nowadays, mystery fiction is written in most countries across the globe. Apart from the USA, Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain and the Scandinavian countries, new crime authors have emerged in Russia, Turkey, Greece, Israel and Japan, in Australia, South America and in some African countries. In this process of crime fiction going global genre boundaries are often useful maps for new authors. They are, however, also increasingly questioned by writers who share a multicultural or cosmopolitan background and whose fictions often resonate strongly with a political agenda. The actual murder investigation becomes a prop in a plot which is more concerned with issues of gender, ethnicity and migration, the global vs. the local, and how these forces impact on and shape individual identities. These are matters that are fast becoming the actual sites of investigation in crime fiction, or at least in its more complex (and thus often less commercial) manifestations. Looking back at the history of crime fiction, this recent development can be traced back to two major innovations in the genre: women authors who have written against the grain of masculine hardboiled fiction since the 1970s2 and ethnic writers who have further transformed and questioned the conventions of the genre through the creation of ethnic investigators since the late 1980s. According to Peter Freese an ethnic detective is TP

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the criminal investigator who not only solves a murder mystery […] but who also introduces the reader to an unknown ethnic culture and thus assumes the function of a cultural mediator. If the detective belongs to a particular ethnic group, that is, to a community whose history, values, and way of life differ from those of the socalled mainstream, his or her story inadvertently turns into an illustration of ethnic friction and cultural confrontation and thus into a comment on the challenges of everyday life in a 'multicultural' society.3 TP

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Carmen Birkle, Sabina Matter-Seibel and Patricia Plummer, 'Unter der Lupe: Neue Entwicklungen in der Krimilandschaft', in Frauen auf der Spur: Kriminalautorinnen aus Deutschland, Großbritannien und den USA, ed. by Carmen Birkle, Sabina Matter-Seibel and Patricia Plummer, with Barbara Hedderich (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2001), pp. 1-9. Peter Freese, The Ethnic Detective: Chester Himes, Harry Kemelman, Tony Hillerman (Essen: Die Blaue Eule, 1992), pp. 9-10.

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However, this definition raises a number of questions. Is every ethnic detective automatically a cultural mediator? Where is the difference to purely commercial (crime) fiction in which the investigator assumes the function of tourist guide? When does a detective qualify as 'ethnic'? What about the issue of authenticity? Although Freese does not consider these pitfalls and bases his analyses on a conventional model of society (dominant or mainstream vs. 'ethnic' culture), he implicitly challenges the issue of authenticity by including Tony Hillerman in his study, who has convincingly introduced a wide readership to Navajo culture without actually being Native American. Ethnicity thus remains a debated and highly contested site in contemporary crime fiction. Many contemporary writers from different cultural and national contexts such as Doris Gercke (German), Valerie Wilson Wesley (African-American), Mike Phillips (CaribbeanBritish), Jean-Claude Izzo (French), Batya Gur (Israeli) and Henning Mankell (Swedish) have explored the subversive potential of the genre and have created investigators who mediate between different cultural groups. They may be 'ethnic' – such as Valerie Wilson Wesley's African-American PI Tamara Hayle or Batya Gur's Inspector Ochajon who functions as both an insider of Israeli society (being a Jewish member of the police force and an academic) and as a cultural outsider (being a migrant from North Africa). Or they may not be 'ethnic' such as Doris Gercke's protagonist Bella Block who investigates in a variety of social and cultural settings, for instance when travelling through Eastern Europe, deeply suspicious of authorities, questioning stereotypes, eventually becoming an outsider herself.4 In crime fiction, especially in its new and challenging variants, the investigator is often a liminal figure. Ethnic detective fiction – as Adrienne Johnson Gosselin argues, echoing Gloria Anzaldúa – inhabits a borderland in which 'disparate realms of theory – that of multiculturalism and that of detective fiction as genre – converge'.5 In TP

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the following I will show how issues of multi- or rather transculturality are negotiated within the genre of Black British crime fiction. I will begin with a brief overview of Black British crime fiction and will then discuss Mike Phillips's Sam Dean novels. The focus of my analysis will not lie on the plot – i.e. the tale of crime and detection – but on the depiction of the protagonist and his relations to other characters, the function of place and the issues of race and migration. As I will argue, Phillips writes his very own version of British hardboiled fiction, reinventing the genre as transcultural detective fiction.

So What Is Black British Crime Fiction? Since the 1990s, a number of Caribbean-British crime writers have emerged whose novels are often tough, many of them sinister and rather violent. Victor Headley has written a trilogy beginning with Yardie (1992)6 in which he tells the story of D, a Jamaican cocaine peddler who smuggles drugs into the UK and sets up his own business in the criminal underworld of London. In 1994, Donald Gorgon published Cop Killer,7 a novel about a man whose mother gets killed accidentally by a deeply racist and corrupt police force. According to the blurb, one of her sons TP

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is under PRESSURE – and the only way out is to settle the score. It's time for a different brand of 'justice' on the streets of London where he's the judge, jury and executioner! In the orgy of violence that follows, the only remaining question is – can the cops stop him before he stops them?

In a review of Yardie, which might just as well be applied to Cop Killer, Tony Sewell argues: This is a novel that indirectly gives us an insight into authenticity, particularly for the identity of the Black British male. […] This dualism of feeling left out of the mainstream of Britain and looking towards Jamaica as an authenticating force for your masculinity, has been a key driving force in Black male expression. Too

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Adrienne Johnson Gosselin (New York: Garland, 1999), p. 4. Victor Headley, Yardie (London: The X Press, 1992). Donald Gorgon, Cop Killer (London: The X Press, 1994).

Transcultural British Crime Fiction 259 much of the criticism of Yardie is boringly located on the violence and so called 'negative' images. For God's sake! This is meant to be a gangster story not a black Mary Poppins. In my view the violence could have been a bit more gorier with a higher body count. What Headly [sic] struggles with through D is the release of the Black British self – whatever that may be. It is because this species is so uncertain – which is why he can never make him his hero.8 TP

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The 'Black British self' as released in Black British pulp fiction is embodied as a disturbingly violent masculinity that reinforces the very stereotypes it is confronting. These gangster novels depict a bleak racist urban reality in which angry young black men are permanently excluded from power, wealth and any form of productive social participation. In the neogothic fictional world of Cop Killer their frustration and anger turns them into an army of the 'living dead': The world was a harsh, brutal, savage and unfair place where the hopes and dreams of ordinary black men like himself were crushed by a society that worked to keep him in his place. […] At school he had seen the dreams of able black friends destroyed by a system that labelled them fit only for the dole, factory, or street corner. So much talent blown away. He despised all those wasted years he had spent working in pointless jobs for bosses who looked at him as though he was a form of life one step up from a dog. Every day, as he cruised the streets, he saw too many hopeless, soul-destroyed youths who burned with an undirected, uncontrollable rage. The living dead of a damned generation. The going-nowhere victims of a society, whose power to destroy minds, was stronger than that of any known obeah. The cop killer knew his own rage would never leave him, it just seemed to grow stronger every day. He refused to allow it to eat into his soul like the cancer that took his father. Instead, the anger would drive him on to both avenge his mother and strike fear into the beats that turned him into the living dead.9 TP

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Headley's and Gorgon's bad guy-protagonists are also descendants of an earlier Jamaican tale of rebellion, namely Perry Henzell's 1972 film The Harder They Come starring Jimmy Cliff, which was novelised by Michael Thelwell in 1980. Cliff's rudeboy musician Ivan, who fights against injustice and dies in a High Noon-type shoot-out with the police, is a victim turned gangster who finally and ironically becomes 8 TP

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a star. Nevertheless, these gangster novels and films are literally locked up in the very systems of injustice they are writing against. The situation changes, though, when there is a black detective. As Paula Woods writes with reference to the US context, black investigators let 'readers know that African-Americans are not just the victims or perpetrators of crime, but are also those who try to correct the balance that murder upsets'.10 While Headley's and Gorgon's gangsta novels thus explore British society from the margins, Mike Phillips has created his own version of hardboiled fiction in the Sam Dean series. Phillips's choice of genre reflects Gosselin's statement about ethnic detective fiction as a borderland: TP

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The first decision I made was that [my first novel] would be located in a specific genre. I wanted to write about London, and I wanted to write about it in my voice rather than in the voice of a white Englishman or a foreign 'postcolonial.' To achieve this I had both to confront English literary traditions and throw off the universalised imagery and generalized concerns of blackness which I felt like a dead weight on my shoulders. The narrative and formal discipline of a genre, I decided, would be my escape route. I chose crime fiction by reflex, but when I started thinking about how to do it a number of problems emerged.11 TP

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Interestingly, the way in which Phillips describes this process of choosing a genre in order to inscribe his perspective into mainstream literary traditions and thus question its conventions, is similar to how numerous women crime writers have commented on their very first experiences as writers. Mike Phillips actually compares himself to African-American author Barbara Neely since she uses the genre in a similar way, 'presenting the black characters as ordinary human beings with a full range of human sympathies, and using the issue of crime as an instrument for exploring the immorality of various kinds of social exclusion'.12 In an interview Neely states that her political agenda is indeed more important to her than the question of genre: 'What I set TP

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Paula L. Woods, ed., Spooks, Spies and Private Eyes: An Anthology of Black Mystery, Crime and Suspense Fiction of the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh: Bantam, 1996), p. xiii. Mike Phillips, 'Black British Writing – So What Is It?', in London Crossings: A Biography of Black Britain (London: Continuum, 2001), p. 151. Phillips, 'Black British Writing', p. 155.


out to do was really to write political fiction, that is social commentary. When I wrote the first Blanche book, I didn't know that I was writing a mystery novel. […] My intent in that book was to write about race and class in America in a funny and accessible way'.13 Valerie Wilson Wesley, who is equally concerned with matters of race and class, consciously bends the genre rules and captures this subversive element in the playful image of her protagonist Tamara being a 'medium-boiled' private eye.14 TP

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Mike Phillips's Sam Dean Novels Mike Phillips's journalist-cum-investigator Sam Dean is definitely not a medium-boiled detective. He has to date investigated in four novels: Blood Rights (1989), The Late Candidate (1990), Point of Darkness (1994) and An Image to Die For (1995).15 In The Late Candidate, Sam investigates the murder of Councillor Aston Edwards, a black North London politician who was a controversial public figure and also one of Sam's oldest childhood friends. In Point of Darkness, Sam is on a visit to New York. He is also there to do Hector, another childhood friend from the Caribbean, who is dying of cancer, a favour and find Hector's daughter Mary who has mysteriously disappeared. Sam Dean is a street-wise Caribbean-born freelance journalist living in North London whose name echoes Dashiel Hammett's private eye Sam Spade. Like the American hardboiled detectives, Dean has a way with the ladies but this feature is exaggerated to the point that it becomes a parody of male fantasies. In The Late Candidate, for instance, Sam has an intelligent and beautiful girlfriend, Sophie, but also sleeps with Marcie, a strangely disfigured Irish femme fatale, as well as with her beautiful blonde sister-in-law Shelagh and lusts after the Shelagh's barely twenty-year-old daughter Kim. His TP

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Carmen Birkle and Barbara Hedderich, '"Blanche is my political heroine": Interview with Barbara Neely', in Frauen auf der Spur, p. 125. Sabina Matter-Seibel, '"A medium-boiled P.I.": Interview with Valerie Wilson Wesley', in Frauen auf der Spur, p. 115. Mike Phillips, Blood Rights (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989), The Late Candidate (London: Penguin, 1990), Point of Darkness (London: Michael Joseph, 1994), and An Image to Die For (London: HarperCollins, 1995).


obvious erotic power and penchant for fatal women may therefore also be read as an allusion to his namesake, the biblical hero Samson. Dean occasionally chooses to ignore the law. In The Late Candidate he breaks into a house in a rather professional way in order to retrieve the diary of Kim, which in itself is an act of violating someone else's privacy: 'The glass cutter made a tiny high-pitched squeak as I drew round the plunger where I'd stuck it to the window, and I paused in case the dogs heard it, but nothing moved. Then I jerked my wrist and the glass came free'.16 At times, Dean can be rather violent, for instance when he struggles with a group of three lesbian women who attack him after he has gate-crashed a party: TP

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The whole episode had been embarrassing, but as I drove along I found myself chuckling. Ironically, it was probably my macho upbringing that saved me. Incapable of imagining that those awkward females could hurt me, I had reacted with a clinical precision; and that just went to show the danger of rigid mental habits, because if the women had been even moderately efficient fighters, they might have put me to hospital.17 TP

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But then there are surprisingly sensitive touches, like when he gazes at a neglected cityscape and muses: 'Through the back window we could see the railway line clearly in the pale grey light. It was overgrown with wild shrubs and flowers, but it had a pretty, delicately rural look about it. I could picture it as the subject of a water colour'.18 In Blood Rights, the first book in the series, Dean turns out to be a connoisseur of Victorian art – and always the sarcastic social critic: TP

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I had been staring at the line of watercolours on the wall facing me, and Baker followed my gaze, smiling. He nodded at the pictures. 'They're nice, aren't they? My wife collects watercolours.' 'Oh, I got most of them years ago,' she said, coming back and handing me a glass. They were Victorian, I guessed; and they were the sort of pictures now fetching tidy sums at auctions. But I was ready to bet she had inherited or been given them. 'I could hardly afford to collect them now.'

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Phillips, Candidate, pp. 75-76. Phillips, Candidate, pp. 83-84 Phillips, Candidate, pp. 143.

Transcultural British Crime Fiction 263 I'd heard that story before. The world was full of things that people like the Bakers couldn't afford.19 TP

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This socio-political awareness is another typical feature of Dean's. Whenever he senses social injustice he is prone to digress, as when he approaches the South London home of Conservative MP Grenville Baker: Baker's house was reached through a maze of short streets, crescents and squares. As I parked on the end of his crescent a vagrant memory struck me. During the nineteenth century Engels wrote that the houses and shops of the rich lined the main streets of Manchester, while the people who worked for them were hidden behind the barricade of wealth. We lived now in subtler times. Busy streets like Wandsworth Road were lined with council flats, while behind them nestled older houses, restored, gentrified and expensive.20 TP

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His macho features combined with his artistic expertise, academic background and complicated relationship with his ex-wife and son make Sam Dean a rather unusual hardboiled detective. The kind of setting one would expect is one of urban 'mean streets' and the Sam Dean novels contain a fair amount of that. Dean's London is not the place advertised in glossy tourist brochures; it is the reality of a socially and ethnically diverse capital: When I saw pictures of London in magazines or brochures I recognised the familiar landmarks like Big Ben, but they had little to do with the city I lived in. To me London was an endless succession of streets like this, their features continually altering and reforming, grimaces on the face of a toothless old man.21 TP

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While Dean – in spite of his education and professional background – sees himself as an 'ageing black street punk', another character in The Late Candidate describes him as 'a survivor. I used to admire that, but it's like you died years ago, and now you're like a ghost, a bundle of memories and frustrated desires haunting the city'.22 TP

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Phillips, Blood Rights, pp. 7-8. Phillips, Blood Rights, p. 8. Phillips, Candidate, p. 35. Phillips, Candidate, pp. 43-44.

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Indeed, Phillips uses his first-person narrator to provide his readers with vivid descriptions of the many and ever-changing faces of multicultural London: Half an hour later I was on my way up to North London to meet Walter. Past the old Harringay stadium the traffic slowed down and I braked to avoid a little group of children crossing against the lights. The streets had become an avenue of shops, Greeks and Indians, open for business and trading furiously. Aubergines and big peppers; vegetables as far as the eye could see. The colour and bustle of a festival. I'd seen it like this dozens of times before, but the sight always did something to me. When I lived there as a boy Sunday used to be drab and grey, nothing to do till the pictures started in the evening. My memories were of a different place.23 TP

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The private eye is thus established as the voice of the city. He reports about the misery and injustice of impoverished inner city areas and the corruption and falseness at work in institutions and political parties. Phillips's detective novels thus assume a function established in realist British fiction since the nineteenth century, namely that of social criticism. The journalist who records social changes in the metropolis and appeals strongly to his audience's empathy invariably reminds one of the social reportage created by Charles Dickens, and it is certainly no coincidence that the above-quoted simile of London's streets resembling a toothless old man has a decidedly Dickensian flavour. In addition to these vivid sketches of London, there are numerous reminders of Dean's Caribbean past, which is a reality not shared by the next generation: 'I went back to watching the sky feeling disturbed and angry. My son had never seen the place where I was born. He wouldn't even be able to imagine me as a child, playing cricket in the middle of a village street with Aston'.24 Phillips's investigator is surrounded by fleeting Caribbean memories and by a set of friends wherever he goes; the Caribbean thus seems to be everywhere. As Phillips states in London Crossings: 'The grand narrative of the Caribbean is the narrative about engagement with the world outside the region, and if there is a tradition which frames writing of the Caribbean, it is the tradition of dispersal'.25 The detective's mind is thus also TP

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Phillips, Candidate, p. 110. Phillips, Candidate, p. 55. Phillips, 'Black British Writing', p. 146.

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a cultural archive – as far as the city of London is concerned and also with respect to his memories of his Caribbean childhood. Through these images and memories of different places past and present, Phillips creates not so much a fragmentary but a multi-faceted or caleidoscopic vision. Sam Dean is the link between the rural world of his Caribbean past and the urban world of his British present and thus reminds us that black identity in Britain does not begin at one specific date with the arrival of Caribbean migrants but stretches beyond that – in spatial, temporal and cultural terms. Dean is obviously a character who can unite these different worlds in himself rather effortlessly. He owes this ability to genre conventions in crime fiction, especially in the masculine tradition; the male investigator – be it Edgar Alan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin, Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes or the lonely tough guys of the hardboiled genre – is traditionally a loner devoid of family ties or stable personal relationships. Dean is no exception here: he is a divorcee who only ever talks to his son on the phone. Nevertheless, Dean is connected to a web of characters, family, friends, acquaintances, many of them linked to his Caribbean past. There are a number of characters who have a background of migration like himself, such as Aston – 'Kid I grew up with long ago and far away'26 – who come from the same place in the Caribbean as he does. Then there are other minor characters, who represent other aspects of that multilingual contact zone: TP

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Maman Nightingale was from one of the islands where they spoke a French dialect and, together with half a dozen other local black boys, I was crazy for her daughter Francine. We hung about their house most days tripping over our tongues. But instead of throwing us out Maman treated us with a kind of amused affection […]. She cooked the same food she used to back home in the Caribbean – pepperpot, black puddings, exotic bakes – there was always a pot on the fire, and if you were one of her boys, as she called us, you could always walk in and pull up a chair and have a meal. For many years it was like a second home.27 TP

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Another character, Walter, is a young black man who grew up in Wales and who used to work for Aston: 'He'd been brought up by a white couple who'd adopted him, and I think he must have spent a lot

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Phillips, Candidate, p. 112. Phillips, Candidate, p. 91.


of his boyhood reading about famous black men like Martin Luther King and wanting to be like them'.28 Yet another perspective on race is provided by Mary, the girl Sam is looking for in New York City. She is the child of a mixed-race marriage and comments thus on her situation: TP

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I grew up outside of everything. We didn't belong anywhere. Nobody wanted me. What do they call us? Half-breed. Half-caste. […] And the blacks. They hate you for being what you are. They call you different names but at best they think you're weird 'cause you're not like them, like you don't know or don't give a toss about back home or the mystical mystery of true blackness. All that shit.29 TP

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Most of the characters in Phillips's novels, especially those closely associated with his protagonist Sam, are moving to and fro in between races, cultures, even nations. There are no clear-cut boundaries that apply for all of the characters, there is no permanent confrontation of black and white. Rather, the emphasis lies on individual experiences. These characters represent a continuum of migratory experiences, racial and ethnic affiliation, education, class, gender and sexual preference. Phillips explores this idea even further in the character of Sophie, a woman of Argentinean-Scottish extraction with whom Sam has a onand-off relationship: 'When I first met her she'd had curly black hair. Now it was brown with light gold streaks, and the way she looked had changed, from recognisable Latin American with a hefty dash of African blood, to someone indeterminately Mediterranean'.30 On meeting her in New York, Sam Dean reflects: TP

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It was odd. Somehow it felt as if I'd forgotten what she looked like, or as if I were face to face with a new and different Sophie. In London she'd seemed foreign, maybe Italian, Spanish, something like that. Exotic, but without knowing it was hard to tell what she was. Here in New York she looked not unlike a dozen of women I'd passed that morning, with the Spanish Caribbean air: high-nosed profile, curly black hair, and a skin dark enough to announce the ubiquitous

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Phillips, Candidate, p. 15. Phillips, Candidate, p. 180. Phillips, Candidate, pp. 53-54.

Transcultural British Crime Fiction 267 African blood. Her manner had changed too. Now she was more open. Laughing a lot, and with something a little swaggering about the way she carried herself.31 TP

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Although Sam does not possess Sophie's mysterious chameleon-like ability to blend in visually with her surroundings, looking, walking, gesturing, joking and flirting along with whatever group she is currently immersed in, he has a perfect ear for dialects, accents and different inflections. He notices minute details when listening to Mary, the English girl whom he has managed to rescue: Her voice was stronger and she sat up and looked straight at me. Up to now her accent had been muffled, difficult to distinguish, because she'd begun to speak with an American intonation, broadening her vowels, and softening her consonants. But now her voice was pure Gloucester.32 TP

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It is therefore pure irony with regard to Sam's linguistic and visual competence, that on his arrival in New York City he is driven by a Haitian cab driver who takes him to all the wrong places due to a series of misunderstandings: '"When I said Jamaica," I told him, "I didn't mean I was from Jamaica. That is where I want to go. Jamaica, Queens. Jamaica Avenue."'33 No matter how difficult the case or how seductive the women, Sam hardly ever looses control. He keeps his cool and remains a detached observer. However, in one rare outburst directed at Hadida, a young woman who is a cousin of his (and who becomes another one of his many lovers), he comments on his personal experience of migration and the impact it has had on his life: TP

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When I left home I was ten, eleven, a baby, it was going to the moon. When you got on the boat to go to England or wherever none of us knew what would happen, whether we would ever come back. When you left it was like dying, everything familiar disappearing in one go, just like that. Everything you were going to see from then on was cold and dark and strange. The dark side of the moon. Maybe that's not what it's really like but that's how it feels, and nobody but us knows what that means. […] To you it's the old days, or part of your background or something to do with your mother or black history or some exotic

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Phillips, Darkness, p. 26. Phillips, Darkness, p. 171. Phillips, Darkness, p. 2.

268 Patricia Plummer romantic bullshit. Back home, back home, y'all say as if you know what you're talking about. To me it's the foundation of my life. I don't understand it, because I'm not that kid any more and I'll probably never go there again, but it's what I am. I owe this.34 TP

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Conclusion Mike Phillips's Sam Dean novels are crime novels as well as social novels. As Phillips states: Writing crime fiction had begun to demonstrate that I had a subject which didn't confine me within the colour of my skin, but which gave me a platform from which I could exploit my roots in the experience of being black in Britain, while linking my writing to themes which extended beyond race and location.35 TP

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He provides his readers with a panoramic vision of London which in turn functions as a microcosm of British society. Phillips explores both the centre and the margins of contemporary Britain and allows for different voices and different perspectives. His range of characters, themes and motifs adds up to what he has elsewhere referred to as a 'mosaic': Listening to the survivors of the Windrush, their stories, interwoven as they are with our experience, remind us once again that they and their successors are a diverse group of individuals, shaped by a specific and peculiar history, moved by their own rational calculations, impelled by their own needs and ambitions; and linked together by the rich and complex history they now share with the people among whom they came to live. Taken together, their separate experiences form a mosaic outlining the last fifty years of Britain's history.36 TP

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Recreating this mosaic or web of experiences is the real case or concern at the heart of his crime novels. Phillips's investigator is not so much a mastermind but a master reader, listener, observer of multiracial Britain. Sam Dean is a man who lives life to the full. A multi-

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Phillips, Darkness, p. 148. Phillips, 'Black British Writing', p. 155. Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips, Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain (London: HarperCollins, 1999 [1998]), p. 7.


vocal detective who moves about in an increasingly globalised world. He is a man of many identities – black, Caribbean, British, Londoner – an interpreter of dialects and cultures, a truly transcultural investigator whose realm is the metropolis, that contact zone of migrant experiences. His sense of inhabiting a borderland is perhaps most acute during his sojourn in New York City: I couldn't even think of anywhere to go where I'd feel safe, apart from Alvin's shop, and I didn't want to turn up there, just in case. In that moment I had a sense of being cut adrift, a solitary speck in an ocean of the unknown. But underneath it all there was a fugitive gleam of delight. Free at last.37 TP

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Via his choice of genre, Mike Phillips's crime novels engage in a multiplicity of negotiations with mainstream literary traditions, British and American, with issues of migrant stories/histories, with the current complexities surrounding concepts of nation, space and identity. Relating his perspective to that of other British crime writers is a task that needs to be done, albeit not within the scope of this essay. Moreover, it will be interesting to trace Phillips's influence on emerging young Black British writers such as Courttia Newland, whose detective novel Snakeskin (2002) introduces Ervine James, a young Black British private investigator.38 It will also be worth investigating how Phillips himself moves on in the genre. After all, he may have left Sam Dean behind for good but his latest novel, A Shadow of Myself (2000),39 which is conceived as the first part of a trilogy, has opened up a whole world of new possibilities. Part novel, part fictional biography, part thriller, it is set in Cold War Moscow in the late 1950s and in post-Reunification Berlin and Prague in the late 1990s. A Shadow of Myself traces the stories of two half-brothers, George, who grew up in East Berlin with his Russian mother, and Joseph, who grew up in London with his English mother, with that of their father, the Ghanaian Kofi Coker, who is living in London and whose story unfolds in the interpolated entries from his 'Diary of Desire', recorded in Moscow in 1957. TP

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Phillips, Darkness, p. 191. Courttia Newland, Snakeskin (London: Abacus, 2002). Mike Phillips, A Shadow of Myself (London: HarperCollins, 2000).


Mike Phillips's novels are thus representative of the new global (crime) fictions mentioned earlier on. They record and explore issues of transculturality within a decidedly British framework, and illustrate what the author calls 'crucial global issues for this new century. The relationship between nationalism, ethnicity, nationality and citizenship, for example, or between poverty and wealth, between reality and myth and between different kinds of conflicting identities, both public and private'.40 TP

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Phillips, 'Black British Writing', p. 143.

CREATING TRANSCULTURAL CRIME FICTION: AN INTERVIEW WITH MIKE PHILLIPS Questions by Patricia Plummer1 TP

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PATRICIA PLUMMER: I find it intriguing how many careers you have pursued. You have worked as a teacher, social worker, journalist, television broadcaster, lecturer and curator (I hope I haven't left anything out). And in between you have written a number of critically acclaimed and highly successful books, including several crime novels. What made you turn to fiction? MIKE PHILLIPS: In hindsight none of these 'careers' were fundamentally different, but you have, in fact, hit on something fundamental, because I didn't sit down and choose these things from a list of available careers. You have left out a few things which are related to the point I'm trying to make. When I left school I worked in a public library, which I always think of as the basis of my education, because when I worked there I simply read everything I could. I was only a teenager, so I had a naïve idea that all the knowledge of the world was at my fingertips. I began reading classic novels and poetry, beginning with A and intending to work my way through to Z. The same with poetry and non-fiction works. I only spent four years in the library, before I left to go to university, so I didn't get as far as I wanted, and this was a job to which I decided never to return. After university I tried to get the sort of job that my classmates were applying for and getting. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but in any case, although I applied for hundreds of traineeships and jobs of various kinds I didn't get one. It was difficult in those days, the

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This interview is an agreed record of a series of conversations we had between January and May 2005.


sixties, for a black graduate. The sort of careers that other graduates were entering, simply did not employ black people. Executive and administrative jobs only opened up to us in the late seventies, and even then it was a struggle. I was a decade and a half too early. So I went to work doing unskilled, manual work, and concealing the fact that I had a degree because if you went for a job in a factory or a garage and you said you had a degree, they would think that you were some sort of confidence trickster or lying or something like that. So I worked in the really unpleasant jobs which were open to migrants for about two years. But, of course, I had begun to be committed to the idea of being a writer, as a sort of distant dream, so I was restless, and I decided to go back to university. The 'new' universities were just being established and they took a broader range of students, so I got into Essex. They turned me down for the English course, so I entered the Politics MA, which was short of recruits! This led me into the 'street' politics which was fashionable at the time, and I ended up squatting in Notting Hill, in a house which we converted into a project for housing homeless black boys. I didn't think of it as social work, more as a political action. In the meantime I was getting interested in teaching young people, who (like myself) felt excluded and alienated by the school system, so I enrolled to do a Post Graduate Certificate of Education at Goldmiths College. When I left Goldsmiths I was back where I started. No work. I didn't really want to sign up as a teacher in a comprehensive. I didn't know if I could, anyway. I had felt ignored and cold shouldered during my teaching practice, and afterwards I had started applying for jobs with the usual result. Fortunately, I was offered a job as an 'outreach' teacher. My job was to make contact with school dropouts and truants and persuade them to enter classes in the local Further Education system. This was difficult and frustrating work, which no one took seriously at the time anyway, but after about a year of this, a BBC team came along making a documentary about black school dropouts. Someone had told them that I was the expert on young blacks and they were desperate for me to be in their film. I said yes – but I was really anxious to make some extra money, so I said only on condition that I wrote the script. They agreed, then they asked me to be the presenter. As a result of being on the TV I was then offered a job (with a salary!) running an advice centre in Manchester. So I was at last

Interview with Mike Phillips 273

almost part of the system with a real job. The pay was very low, but it was still a steady job. The project was only planned for one year, however. By some chance, a producer on the BBC World Service had seen me on TV. He got in touch and asked me to do interviews for a World Service programme broadcasting to the Caribbean and South America. I said yes, of course, was given a tape recorder and sent out to do weekly interviews about anything which might interest the World Service audience. This was my introduction to broadcasting and journalism. I had always wanted to write, so I thought this was my big chance and I started submitting articles about the interviews I was doing to various newspapers and journals like the New Statesman. I began writing features occasionally for the Guardian and inside a couple of years I had become known as a freelance journalist. This was another kind of education and I became a sort of insider in the world of newspapers, radio and TV without having a steady job anywhere. My first real job with the BBC was as Education Officer in London, and I moved from there to produce news programmes for Channel Four. In 1983, however, I was offered the opportunity to start a new course for young black journalists at the Polytechnic of Central London (now the University of Westminster). This returned me to academic life, although I was involved in a course which was essentially vocational. I went to PCL at a point where cultural studies was just about to take off and various people were holding conferences, talking and writing about the subject. Totally by accident, at PCL, I was in the middle of all this intellectual excitement, and because I was teaching media I began taking a serious interest in studying the media, and the cultural theory attached to it. This was somewhat interrupted when I began writing novels. I had always wanted to write novels, but when I became a university lecturer, it seemed to be the first time in my entire life, up to that point, that I had the leisure of three months of freedom with a guaranteed income during the summer to sit down and write. I started writing short stories for my own pleasure during the first year at PCL. I submitted one of my stories which is in London Crossings to a short story contest. I got the second prize, but at the award ceremony I met a small publisher, who was also a poet named Desmond Johnson. He offered to publish the short stories. He couldn't afford to pay me an advance and I never got any money from him for the stories, but they


were published, and he started encouraging me to write a novel, which I started in the summer of my third year of teaching. I wrote a TV series (adaptation of Blood Rights) and one more novel while I was at PCL, and then I left to write a film script in Hollywood, but my interest in cultural studies didn't diminish and I began (slowly) applying many of its ideas to what I was writing, and to understanding my own career, and the environment in which I had grown up. This led me back in a neat circle to literary criticism, but trying to earn a living at the same time led me into taking the job as resident writer at the Royal Festival Hall. This in turn led me into the world of museums, archives and libraries, where I had started. But once again, I felt that the sector was missing any awareness of my own experience. Becoming a curator seemed to be a natural step in expressing my interest in the history which had been a part of my life. The point of all this is that these transitions were to some extent random, and driven by the pressure to earn a living, or to escape from routine boredom, or to escape from being defined in the way that other people saw me. More positively, I was searching all the time for opportunities to express who I thought I was, instead of being trapped in the obvious definition – black migrant. Everywhere I went there was this invitation, or command to present myself as an established idea – an African, a Caribbean, an American, or some or other thing which had been written down and codified before I came along. My own interest was in discovering myself. But the truth is that I simply went from opportunity to opportunity, largely driven by this need to earn a living, and constrained by my own (limited) abilities. Believe me, if I could have made a living by being a nuclear physicist or dog catcher then you would have found that on my CV. PP: In London Crossings you write that you 'chose crime fiction writing by reflex' – could you explain that? Were there any writers of crime fiction whose books you particularly enjoyed (or still enjoy) reading? MP: I enjoyed crime fiction before I started writing it. The story of Blood Rights seemed to come to me as a crime fiction, but when I started writing it I really was playing around, experimenting with the genre in an effort to find out if it could accommodate my feelings – I suppose the reflex was one of challenge, in which I set out to confront


the literary history with which I was familiar. I liked reading Hammett, Chandler, Ross MacDonald in particular, but I don't enjoy reading those writers very much now, although I still admire specific technical aspects of their work. Intellectually, I feel a lot more kinship with such writers as Graham Greene and Eric Ambler now. I actually wanted to write something like Joseph Conrad's Secret Agent, because it still seems like a prediction about present day politics. I also admired Eco's Name of the Rose enormously. As soon as I began to write myself, these were the writers who seemed to have a more relevant and interesting way of talking about crime in our society. Nowadays I think of the American private eyes as part of a rightwing polemic about society which I want to oppose. PP: Would you place yourself within a specific group or school of British crime writers? MP: No. I'm the only one like me. I was the first to write in the way that I do about the details of the London landscape, about local government and media from the point of view of a migrant. I was the first, and still the only one I think to challenge received ideas about crime being a sort of morality play. I am still the only one to play with ideas about citizenship and identity as a feature of the confluence between crime and social preferences. Whenever I appear on a platform with other British crime writers I find it an awkward and difficult experience, because we disagree in so many fundamental ways of seeing society and history. PP: Are you a member of a network of crime writers? MP: When I started I joined the Crime Writers Association. I left subsequently, because I had naively expected a group of people who debated and discussed the literary issues implicit in writing crime fiction. Instead I found a club of professionals who, by and large, were not much interested in questioning or challenging the essential assumptions of crime fiction. I really did not want to be one of those people, because, unlike them, I was dissatisfied with the status quo. I despised the tradition which saw crime as a morality play in which the good triumphed over evil, because in my experience, throughout history, from slavery and colonialism onwards, it was the baddies who


had won. I think I made them uncomfortable, and their view of black people made me angry. PP: It seems that Sam Dean is the first Black British investigator – or am I mistaken there? MP: No. There isn't another one as far as I know. One or two recent writers have made an attempt to write what they described as crime fiction, but they lacked all understanding of the genre and didn't take the form seriously enough to be taken seriously. PP: Would you describe Sam Dean as your fictional alter ego? After all he is a Londoner who works as a journalist and has a Caribbean background. MP: Yes. More precisely, Sam Dean was my fictional alter ego. He was, to a large extent the author's voice. I'm not certain how much he reflects me in the present day. PP: Did this element of fictional autobiography make it easier for you to create the character? MP: Absolutely, or you can read that the other way round. The autobiography made it much easier for me to create fiction. It became possible to continue without a worked out plan or any clear idea of where the book was going because whenever things got difficult I could fall back on an element of autobiography. PP: You once said that reading reviews of your first crime novel, Blood Rights, reinforced your sense of isolation since critics kept comparing you to American authors such as Ross Macdonald, Raymond Chandler and Chester Himes. But isn't this comparison to some extent inevitable? After all your character Sam Dean, the streetwise sleuthing journalist, seems somewhat akin to the American hardboiled private eyes, doesn't he? MP: I agree that the form made comparisons to the American hardboiled dicks inevitable. On the other hand, Sam's world view, his thoughts and his experiences are completely different. I truly objected to being compared with Chester Himes, for instance, because I always found his authorial voice uncomfortably consistent with a racist view of American behaviour and identity, and it always struck me that his


characters were caricatures who reinforced every racist prejudice. I read him as a sad, desperate man who was always forced to support the racism of his time. My intention was just the opposite. But the real problem was that readers who opened my books expecting to find an exact parallel to the elements they enjoyed in such writers were certain to be disappointed. It really annoyed me that so many people came to the books with those expectations, because it meant that they couldn't understand that I was trying and largely succeeding, in doing something rather different. PP: In London Crossings you write that when you were a young boy Selvon, Lamming and Naipaul were 'the authors whose names were blazoned on the bookshelves' around you. In 1998, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the arrival of the Empire Windrush, E. R. Braithwaite, Beryl Gilroy and George Lamming were celebrated as 'pioneers' of Black British writing. Do you see yourself as belonging to a particular generation or group of Black British or CaribbeanBritish writers? MP: As you know I was part of the team which made the documentary series Windrush – and I wrote the book Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain with the participation of my brother, Trevor, who had been the producer of the TV series and was responsible for collecting the interviews on which it was based. We started this two years before the Windrush anniversary and as the release of the TV series and the publication of the book approached various institutions and individuals began attaching their events to the name Windrush. This was entirely understandable given the PR power of a big TV series and related book. But this was also a part of what I have to describe as a racist framework, since so many institutions felt that they couldn't feature events involving black writers or historical figures without some special framework to justify it. Windrush became a 'celebration' of this that and the other. This made it more palatable to various authorities and probably the general public, but I didn't think of the anniversary as a celebration at all. In the case of Samuel Selvon I deliberately stayed away from the event – the celebration of Samuel Selvon at the Museum of London, which was arranged by David Dabydeen – firstly, because I don't think of Selvon as a 'pioneer' of Black British writing, except in a


rather tangential way. Secondly, I am continually distressed by the racist manner in which Selvon inscribes black migrant identity, and I certainly would not want to 'celebrate' his writing. I have a great deal more liking and respect for George Lamming, but I don't think of him as a 'pioneer' either, except in the same tangential manner as Selvon. Beryl Gilroy is a different case. She is, actually, in the sense that I would use the term, a pioneer of Black British writing, but I don't find her work interesting or astute enough to think about, much less celebrate. Beryl writes from inside the post-migrant skin of someone who feels she belongs in Britain and nowhere else, someone who has made that choice and is now exploring its consequences. In comparison, both Selvon and Lamming write as exiles from the Caribbean without any interest in describing or exploring a post-migrant and specifically British identity. In fact they would not have understood the concept. Muddling all these people together with what comes later, simply because they happen to be black and happen to be in Britain at some point during their lives, is more than careless. It ignores the long process of change and involvement with British society and identity. This 'pioneer' stuff is a careless and racist reflex in which people link all blacks together by looking at the colour of their skins rather trying to understand and analyse what they're actually doing. When I began writing it was, at least partly, an attempt to distinguish myself from such writers as Selvon and Lamming, and that was also one of reasons I adopted the crime fiction form and persona – to make the distinction absolutely clear and dramatic. I regarded myself as belonging to the first generation of writers creating fiction from inside a consciousness which was both black and British – i.e. the first to regard Britain – unambiguously – as 'home'. PP: Blood Rights was published more than thirty years after Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners (1956). Joan Riley called her first novel in which she juxtaposes the Caribbean and London The Unbelonging (1985). Sam Dean is neither a 'lonely Londoner' nor is he 'unbelonging', is he? MP: Precisely. Sam Dean is not a lonely Londoner. He grew up in London. He knows parts of it like the back of his hand. It is part of the air he breathes. He loves it instinctively because it is part of him, and he is part of it. The black people with whom he identifies are not


necessarily Caribbean. They might be African, or Greek, or Turkish, or Indian. The point is that they share the experience of being migrants and becoming British. He belongs where he is, which is what distinguishes him from the generation of Caribbean heroes who were dislocated exiles and aliens. PP: Usually series of crime novels are set in a specific location, invested with a generous amount of local colour. Yet while most of your Sam Dean novels are certainly set in London and there is a considerable amount of detailed and very vivid descriptions of numerous settings within Greater London (and Manchester), the Caribbean is always present as an additional point of reference. Moreover, Point of Darkness is mainly set in New York, a city with a strong Caribbean community. And in Blood Rights one of the characters, Roy, a mixedrace boy has this idea of going to Africa sometime. To me this multiplicity of settings amounts to a rather unique project – relocating the genre around the 'Black Atlantic', creating transcultural crime fiction. MP: Well, I would agree with the concept of relocating the genre round the transcultural, while I take issue with the use of the 'Black Atlantic' as a point of reference. The point about the multiplicity of locations is a demonstration about how a specific location can be transformed, 're-inscribed' by social memories and by the meeting and mingling of different streams of history. In this case, my writing attempts to go beyond re-inscribing and sets out to argue, by implication, that individuals can 'belong' in a number of different places. What I was trying to show, eventually, was that the ability to 'reinscribe' the location, London, was a process which released new capacities in Sam Dean, and allowed him to escape the limitations of being a Londoner into the possibility of belonging anywhere he chose. PP: Did writing detective fiction open up new possibilities for you? Or are you really writing about the same issues as in your non-fiction books and projects? MP: Writing detective fiction did open up new possibilities for me. I'm speaking now about the themes and issues. The first point is that the first series of Sam Dean books was, in my progress as a writer, a way of clearing the tangle of ideas and emotions which brought me to writing. By the time I published the fourth book I was beginning to


understand that I had now expressed what I would call my juvenile ideas about my identity and I was ready to begin exploring the issues which emerged from experience. At the same time, my survey of the first four books had begun to teach me what those themes were. Knowing what they were and understanding or exploring them, however, were two different kinds of enterprise. When I started the Sam Dean series I had a definite schedule in mind. One of the authors who had enthused me back in the days when I worked in the library was Balzac. I set out, literally, to write a version of the Comédie Humaine, that is, to focus on a different area in society with each book and insert Sam into them. I think I managed to achieve this best in The Late Candidate, but as I went along I had the feeling that (1) all these areas of society were actually connected and linked – and trying to explore them separately obscured these connections. (2) I began to feel that the details of these sectors, their structures and how they worked weren't important in the way that I had assumed. Instead, it was what made them connect and work together which was important. (3) I began to be convinced that I did not know enough. Part of the problem was that when you write novels, you spend a lot of time writing novels rather than experiencing how society works. Research is one way of defeating the isolation, but that leads to an academic method, presenting and reporting evidence rather than assimilating and transforming experience in a fictional mode. The alternative is to begin repeating yourself endlessly. I needed to find ways of feeding new perspectives into my work. This was partly the point of my non-fiction and critical writing. Another strand of experience is the curatorial work I'm doing, along with my involvement in issues of heritage and public art, and black history in Britain. Also the work I've undertaken in learning about life, history and religion in Central and Eastern Europe. It's a circular process. All this emerges in my fiction – or will emerge – although the extent to which this is a conscious process worries me. PP: Who are your readers?Are they the same people that read your non-fiction books? MP: I don't know who my readers are now. When I was writing the first Sam Dean series my readers were the general audience for crime fiction. In the time since then my readership has declined and shifted.


My crime fiction readers are less interested in the books I wrote after the last Sam Dean, or more precisely my publishers put a great deal less effort into promoting the new books. In the years since the last Sam Dean a new audience in the universities and in the black community seems to have begun appearing – I was deeply disappointed that A Shadow of Myself seemed to have been read by so few people, but in the last two years it seems to have become more and more popular. Oddly enough, my readers now split into two main groups. The first know my work through Sam Dean and know nothing about my nonfiction and later novels. The second know about me through Windrush and have no idea about the books I wrote before then. The second bunch annoy me more. PP: I find it interesting that Dean is partly an outsider (given his permanent shortage of money, his shattered marriage etc.) and partly an insider (he is an academic, a journalist whose work people admire, he has friends everywhere who come from various walks of life) in society. MP: The outsider/insider dichotomy in Dean's character is a reflection of my own experience. That is the true autobiographical element. It's been typical of my life and at one time I used to find it strange and frustrating, now it seems normal. During any month, week or day, I might have a conversation with an old friend from student days who now happens to be a government minister, or a famous broadcaster who I used to teach, or a multi-millionaire who is a fellow Board member. I will certainly have meetings or dinner with the director of a national institution like the British Museum or the National Gallery or the National Archive. My name, my image, and my opinions will appear in a national newspaper or TV. In the next moment I might be talking with an old friend who has just come out of prison or is unemployed. My existence depends on my ability to keep working and earning enough to pay the next month's rent. This is how it is. PP: Did it ever occur to you to write about, say, a police inspector or a forensic psychologist and thus move your protagonist more firmly into the centre? MP: How could I write about a police inspector? My only experience of such people was to see them on the other side of a fence – the


enemy. I've never known a policeman socially, except for one boy at school who was a playground bully and later on became a police inspector. He went to a school reunion and ended up arresting one of the other boys. I literally, could not imagine the thoughts of such a person. This would have been a step too far. Besides, the minutiae of crime and problem solving really do not interest me. It is the social resonances that I write about. In my view the imposition of a policeman as hero is a political statement which positions the novel in the arena of rightwing polemics about law and order. PP: Let us talk about the issues of gender and sexuality. Sam Dean is a bit of a womanizer. To me this seems like a reference to the hardboiled PIs who are always getting involved with beautiful and often dangerous women (Tess in Blood Rights and Marcie in Late Candidate remind me of these femme fatale-type women). Or is that something that just happened because Dean assumed a fictional life of his own? MP: Dean's relationship with women is both a reference to the private eye tradition and a product of his own fictional life. On one level women like Marcie in The Late Candidate are a reflection of this tradition. On another level, it is a genuine reflection of the relationships in which Dean was involved. PP: In the genre of women's crime fiction it is a convention that the female investigator serves as a role model for female readers. Does the same apply to male protagonists and their readers? MP: I'm not sure about reader identification. Sam Dean was too much of an individual character to excite that sort of identification in the readership which first took to the novels. He was black and most of the readers were white. When black people began reading the books I suspect that he was seen as too eclectic, too much of a loner, too educated, too world weary, too much involved with a wide range of people, too resistant to adopting a recognisable identity. I've never encountered anyone who said they identified with Sam Dean. I regret this. PP: I hope you don't mind another comparison with women's crime fiction. In an interview Valerie Wilson Wesley, the creator of mysteries featuring Tamara Hayle, the first female African-American PI,


once said: 'In women's writing the focus is more on family and community than in men's writing. The [female] detective is not a loner divorced from social obligations and ties'.2 Sam Dean – like the classic male detectives – seems to keep personal matters safely at a distance. But he does have a strong emotional bond with his son. However, we never even get to know his son's name. So the fatherson-relationship also reinforces Dean's isolation and (along with his frequent affairs) links him again to the masculine hardboiled tradition. TP

PT

MP: Oh dear! To begin with I don't see Sam Dean as being in any way divorced from social obligations and ties. Note that when he is involved in any mystery or difficulty it is as a result of being called in by an old friend or relative. His social ties and obligations are simply wider and more complex than the narrow family-based ones that Valerie is talking about. I would argue that in some ways Sam is more obligated than the average female would be because he has no excuses to cut himself off from involvement with the wider world. Another important point is this – Sam Dean keeps a distance not from his own personal involvements – the distance is between himself and the reader. He would reply that you don't know the name of his son, not because it is not important to him, but because it's none of your business. The difference is one of style. He's interested in telling you what happened and what the implications of it might be in the world. He's not interested in gossiping about his life, except in the sense that it illuminates these matters, because the book is not about him and his personal life – it's about the events in which he happened to be engaged and what they mean. In terms of the character's life, I think Dean would say that there are many kinds of isolation, just as there are many kinds of social obligations and ties. It is also possible to isolate oneself from the wider world by embracing the minutiae of family life. His isolation is the logical product of someone trying to be a decent person in a public environment which is exactly the opposite.

TP

2 PT

Sabina Matter-Seibel, '"A medium-boiled P.I.": Interview with Valerie Wilson Wesley', in Frauen auf der Spur: Kriminalautorinnen aus Deutschland, Großbritannien und den USA, ed. by Carmen Birkle, Sabina Matter-Seibel and Patricia Plummer, with Barbara Hedderich (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2001), p. 119.


On the other side of the coin he refuses the comfort of isolating himself from that wider world by surrounding himself with the familiar. Perhaps this is a masculinist preference for adventure and exploration which links him to the hardboiled tradition, but it seems to be shared by many women in any case – V.I. Warshawski, for instance. Valerie's take on family seems to me to be a very specific product of an African-American world view. Sam Dean is a very different kind of animal. He is an unattached man who has been around for a while. With so many friendships and contacts there would be something odd about him if he managed to avoid sleeping with several women. Sam finds women attractive and arousing. He likes people also. The link between those things is obvious. His temperament and his will to involvement in what goes on around him makes the permanent isolation of monogamy difficult for him. I think Sam believes that sex between two consenting adults is normal and pleasurable, and he resists the notion that a conventional marriage is somehow a morally superior and normative arrangement. In the present day this is not an exclusively masculine view. PP: I find that Hadida/Bonny in Point of Darkness is an interesting character and I very much like the way you created Sophie. She has this hybrid, chameleon-like quality. Were you able to experiment more with her than with Sam Dean, who is tied more strongly to the conventions of literary realism? MP: This is a perceptive reading. I've always been disappointed that readers' attention seems to pass over what's happening with these women in the books. Hadida in Point of Darkness was based exactly on a cousin of mine with whom I grew up, and I didn't have to think much about her character. She was just there. Sophie was different, because she was an amalgam of women I had known and she had several elements that I admired about different women, although I drew on the specific background of one of them. Sophie is actually Sam's alter ego. She has already been released from many of the communal identities within which Sam is confined to float free and make her own choices about who she is. Sam admires this and unconsciously aspires to that condition. Sophie was also a way of talking in the novels about the mixed race population which is a major part of the black community but which no one talks about in terms of iden-


tity. Most black people have a multiplicity of mixed origins in Britain and Europe, but they are continually forced into a box which labels them as one thing or the other. With Sophie I wanted to begin exploring precisely the chameleon quality of black identity in real life, the ambiguity which most writers simply ignored up to that point. Since that time writers like Zadie Smith have begun unpicking their origins and creating characters who have this ambiguous quality as part of their identity. PP: Obviously there is a lot of social criticism in your books and to me as a Dickens scholar it also seems that there is something decidedly Dickensian in your descriptions of the 'mean streets' of London. MP: Of course Dickens was a literary influence. I have always loved Dickens's books. To me he was an inspiration and part of how and why I learnt to write. I had read all of his novels before I began my degree and when I came to study him as an undergraduate I was astonished at how much more there was in the books than I had ever imagined. The feel of London and England was an important metaphor for me, and I always had his minor characters, like Quilp and Dick Swiveller in the back of my mind when thinking about how to construct and use character, but what was most important to me I think was the symbolism and the poetry of the later books, like Little Dorrit. My feel for the form of the novel was tied up in understanding the way he created pairs and groups of characters, balanced them against and within the landscape and each other, used the language in all its variety to comment on the action and the characters, while at the same time creating a blazing, angry critique of his times. He offered so much to a novelist. So much to learn. Beautiful. In London it's hard not to run up against Dickens's legacy almost every day – a way of seeing the place and a feel for its history. From time to time I think of his characters or his descriptions without prompting, for no reason, except that they are there, somehow, in my mind, and of course, all over and inside the London landscape. PP: The last of your Sam Dean books, An Image to Die For, was published in 1995. Since then you have published two more novels/thrillers, The Dancing Face and A Shadow of Myself, that are individual works. What made you move away from your successful series?


MP: I didn't exactly move away from the series. Let's say that I wanted to do it better. I could have gone on producing Sam Dean books, but the predictability which began to creep into his response made me angry and frustrated. I wanted to break the mould. The other issue is that I came to believe that good writing was partly the product of good criticism. There was no critical background or detail which could help me understand Sam Dean or what I was writing. As usual I had to start doing it myself. Therefore it was a rather new experience for me at Frankfurt [i.e. the ASNEL conference in May 2004] when you read your paper about Sam Dean. It was good to hear a critic seeing the same things I did in the novels and exploring them from a different point of view. I've now got to a stage where I have a better understanding of what I was doing in the books and what Sam stands for, and I want to write Sam again. He'll be different, I think, but better. I have quite a lot of writing to do before I start, but I might interrupt my present plans and do the Sam Dean book I have in mind anyway. PP: You obviously have a very visual imagination. I sometimes could literally 'see' certain scenes in my mind's eye; especially some of the scenes in The Point of Darkness are very Tarantino. You mentioned earlier on that you wrote a Hollywood film script (for Boyz 'n' the Hood) and that you were also involved in the TV adaptation of Blood Rights. Could you tell me some more about that? MP: Blood Rights was made into a three part TV mini-series for the BBC in the late 1980s. I didn't like it much because the producers misread my intentions and were concerned to render it as a piece about young black criminals and Thatcherite politics. I'm not sure that even now the radical thrust of Sam's identity, its ambiguity would appeal to the current outlets. They look at me and at the books and see 'black' and they start trying to reconstruct them according to their preconceptions. Maybe one day it will happen after they're taught to see better. We are, in any case, so dominated in this country by an American world view that Sam is seen as uncomfortably ambiguous. He isn't inscribed with the accoutrements of African-American 'blackness' or a conventional 'West Indian' persona. He doesn't rap, sing, dance or talk jive. He isn't confined to a ghetto. He isn't a black nationalist. As one black American said to me once: 'I don't know who he is'. But of


course, that is the point. Not good for the movies. PP: Have you got any plans for further crime novels? Will Sam Dean reappear? MP: Yes. Sam Dean will reappear. Right now I'm writing a novel for World Book Day 2005. I'm negotiating curating an exhibition for London Transport about Migration and Modernity based on their archive collection. I'm writing (very slowly) a book about British identity. I'm planning a crime novel set in the eighteenth century in which the Prince Regent (George IV) Beethoven, Haydn and Prince Esterhazy will be characters in a landscape ranging from Vienna to the slave plantations of the Caribbean. This is apart from my regular work, reviewing for the Guardian, etc. Somewhere in there Sam Dean is advancing. BOOKS BY MIKE PHILLIPS

Sam Dean-Series Blood Rights (1989) The Late Candidate (1990) The Point of Darkness (1994) An Image to Die For (1995)

More Fiction Smell of the Coast (1987) Boyz 'n' the Hood (1991) The Dancing Face (1997) A Shadow of Myself (2000)

Non-Fiction Community Work and Racism (1982) Notting Hill in the Sixties (with photographs by Charlie Phillips) (1991) Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain (with Trevor Phillips) (1998) London Crossings: A Biography of Black Britain (2001)


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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

VERA ALEXANDER is an assistant professor at Saarland University at Saarbrücken. She holds an MA from the Centre of Colonial and Postcolonial Studies from the University of Kent at Canterbury, and her doctoral dissertation dealt with transcultural functions of education and migration in South Asian diasporic novels written in English. She is currently working on a postdoctoral thesis on North American Life Writing. Her research interests include postcolonial writing, diaspora, transculturality, Indian and South Asian anglophone literature, writers from the South Pacific, anthologies, and children's literature. ELFI BETTINGER teaches British Literature and Culture at the University of Braunschweig. She has published several essays and a critical study on Virginia Woolf. She co-edited a collection of essays on masquerade and gender and acted as guest editor of the yearbook Querelles on transgression and femininity. Besides working on crime and detection within postcolonial contexts she is currently completing a study on crime and gender in Early Modern English culture. GEOFFREY V. DAVIS teaches English at the universities of Aachen and Duisburg-Essen. He read Modern Languages at Oxford, wrote his doctorate on East German literature and received the degree of Dr. habil for a thesis on South African writing during and after apartheid. His research interests lie primarily in the fields of African, Australian and Canadian literature. He has just co-edited a volume on the practice of Black and Asian British theatre. He is co-editor of the African studies series Matatu and of Cross/Cultures: Readings in the Post/Colonial Literatures in English, both published by Rodopi. He is currently chair of the European Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (EACLALS).

314 Notes on Contributors

TOBIAS DÖRING is Professor of English Literature at the University of Munich. He specialises in Postcolonial Literatures and Early Modern Studies. His publications include Caribbean-English Passages: Intertextuality in a Postcolonial Tradition (London: Routledge, 2002), Eating Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Food (co-edited with Markus Heide & Susanne Mühleisen, Heidelberg: Winter, 2003) and Performances of Mourning in Shakespearean Theatre and Early Modern Culture (London: Palgrave, 2006). WENDY KNEPPER earned her doctorate in Comparative Literature at University of Toronto in 2001. She was awarded a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellowship, which was held in association with Harvard University's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute (2003-2004) and the Africana department at New York University (2004-2005). Currently, she is teaching a course on Caribbean gender theory at the Humboldt University Berlin as well as completing a monograph on Patrick Chamoiseau's life and oeuvre. Previous publications include articles on medieval romance in Arthuriana and utopia in Dalhousie French Studies. Articles on Afro-Caribbean masculinities and bricolage are forthcoming in Masculinities in African Literature and Cinema (Palgrave, 2006) and Small Axe (Fall 2006). STEPHEN KNIGHT is Distinguished Research Professor in English Literature at Cardiff University where he teaches and supervises on crime fiction, Robin Hood and Welsh fiction in English. His most recent books are Crime Fiction 1800-2000 (London: Palgrave, 2003), Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003) and A Hundred Years of Fiction: Writing Wales in English (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004). SUCHITRA MATHUR has worked in the area of Indian-English fiction within a framework of feminist and postcolonial theory, focusing on how concepts of an 'Indian' feminism may be developed from the work of Indian-English women writers. More recently, she has begun to investigate how certain 'popular' literary genres have fared in their postcolonial journeys. She is currently assistant professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the

Notes on Contributors 315

Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India, where this growing interest in cultural studies is fostered by her students along with whom she is busy exploring the socio-cultural contours of scientific discourse and the limits of disciplinary boundaries. CHRISTINE MATZKE currently teaches African literatures and theatre at the Institute of Asian and African Studies, HumboldtUniversity, Berlin. She is co-editor of the African studies series Matatu published by Rodopi. Her publications include articles on various aspects of African literature, theatre and culture, especially the performing arts in Eritrea. Of late she has become interested in postcolonial crime fiction and is currently contemplating the acquisition of a magnifying glass to help her with the investigation. SUSANNE MÜHLEISEN has taught English linguistics at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University, Frankfurt, and the University of Hannover. She has published widely on Caribbean Creole languages in various socio-cultural contexts, such as Creole Discourse: Exploring Prestige Formation and Change Across Caribbean English-lexicon Creoles, (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2002); ed. Creole Languages in Creole Literatures (JPCL Special issue) and ed. (with Bettina Migge) Politeness and Face in Caribbean Creoles, (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2005). She has also worked in other areas of linguistics at the interface of postcolonial studies, including postcolonial translation. Her interest and enthusiasm in postcolonial crime fiction is the result of years of commuting and long train journeys. PATRICIA PLUMMER teaches British and Anglophone literature and culture at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. Her doctoral dissertation on Charles Dickens's style was published in 2000. She is co-editor of Perspektiven der Frauenforschung (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1998), Frauen auf der Spur: Zeitgenössische Kriminalautorinnen aus Deutschland, England und den USA (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2001) and Subversive Romantik (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2004) and has published articles on contemporary Anglophone literature, travel writing, gender issues and popular culture. In the summer semester of 2005 she was visiting

316 Notes on Contributors

professor for gender and intercultural studies at the University of Koblenz-Landau. She is currently completing her Habilitation on 'Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Culture'. XAVIER PONS is Professor of English at the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail (France), and a past President of the European Association for Studies on Australia. He has published widely on Australian literary and historical issues. His latest publications are Departures (Melbourne: Melbourne University Publisher, 2002) and Les Mots de l'Australie (Toulouse: PU Mirail, 2005). He is currently writing a book on Australian stereotypes. KATJA SARKOWSKY received her PhD in American Studies in 2003 from Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. She has taught postcolonial literatures as well as American literatures and history and currently works as a lecturer, researcher, and coordinator at the Center for North American Studies (ZENAF) in Frankfurt. She has published on postcolonial theory and Native American and First Nations writing and recently co-edited an essay collection on gender relations and the public sphere. CHRISTA SCHWARZ was educated at Bonn University (Germany), Queen Mary and Westfield College (University of London, England), and at the University of Sussex (England), were she completed her doctorate in 1999. She is an independent scholar and author of Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (Indiana University Press, 2003). Her main research interests are African American literature and, particularly, the Harlem Renaissance. She has taught at the University of Potsdam and Free University (Berlin) and currently lives in Berlin.

NAME INDEX A ADG Aikath-Gyaltsen, Indrani Alewyn, Richard Alexander, Vera Ambler, Eric Anzaldúa, Gloria Appadurai, Arjun Appleton, Josie Ashcroft, Bill Atwood, Margaret

229 145 2 8, 12, 13, 139 275 145, 257 9 168 62, 97 35, 44

B Bacic, Roberta Bailey, Frankie Y. Baker, Nikki Bal, Mieke Ball, John Barrett, Robert G. Baxt, George Beck, Chris Beckett, Simon Bedford, Randolph Beer, Tom Benjamin, A. Benjamin, Walter Bennett, Bruce Berlins, Marcel Berry, Ellen E. Bettinger, Elfi Bhabha, Homi

45 4, 202 28 148 28 15, 229-253 28 235 169 19 149, 150 66 65, 66, 152 173 163, 167 143 13, 161 11, 19, 30, 65, 66, 88, 90, 91, 102, 103, 104, 144

318 Name Index

Bird, Carmel Birkle, Carmen Blundell, Graeme Blyton, Enid Boehmer, Elleke Bohan, Edmund Borlase, J. G. Bowen, Rhys Braddon, Mary Elizabeth Brantlinger, Patrick Brink, André Brisbane, Katherine Brooks, Samuel I. Brown, Carter Bruce, John Edward Burgess, Anthony Burke, Charlanne Burton, Antoinette

230 2, 256, 261, 283 232 50 41 8 23 31 88 73, 74 182, 187 234 215 229 27 35 177 46

C Call, Rachel Callinan, Ian Calvin, Floyd J. Camus, Albert Carey, Peter Carvalho, Pepe Casey, Ron Castro, Brian Cawelti, John G. Chambers, Iain Chamoiseau, Patrick Chandler, Raymond Chandra, Vikram Chapman, Michael Christian, Ed Christie, Agatha Clarke, Austin Clarke, Marcus

213 229 225 35 230 26 249 230 5 41 35, 39 255, 275 145 182 6, 36, 62, 108 3, 4, 17, 21, 30, 35, 50, 119 35, 43 230

Name Index 319

Claude, Hervé Clavell,s James Cody, Liza Cohen, Octavius Roy Collette, Ann Collier, Gordon Collins, Kate Collins, Wilkie Conrad, Joseph Cook, Victoria Coppola, Sophia Corpi, Lucha Corris, Peter Coupe, Stuart Craig, Amanda Craig, David Cremen, Christine Crichton, Michael Curti, Lidia Curtis, Robert

229 115 29 27 203 65 232 88 11, 74, 275 46 109 3 24, 229, 241, 252 231 162 32 230 115 41 26

D Dabydeen, David Daniel, Glyn Dawson, Ashley Davis, Geoffrey V. Day, Marele Delrez, Marc Dennis, C. J. Derrickson, Teresa D’Haen, Theo Dickens, Charles Dietze, Gabriele Disher, Gary Disraeli, Benjamin Dissanayake, Wimal Dobell, William Döring, Tobias

277 30 179 9, 13, 14, 181 25 9 241 45, 46 111, 112, 118, 119, 126, 128 11, 82, 84, 264, 285 255 230 76 9 242 3, 8, 11, 59, 76

320 Name Index

Dostoevsky, Fyodor Doyle, Arthur Conan Dow, Unity Du Bois, W.E B. Duff, Alan Dunant, Sarah

35 3, 11, 17, 59, 60, 62, 68, 69, 73-76, 82, 86-88, 91-94, 97- 99, 105, 265 13, 169, 173, 177, 178 28 241 29

E Ebersohn, Wessel Eco, Umberto Epstein, Mikhail N.

13, 14, 26, 181-199 275 143

F Fabre, Geneviève Fanon, Frantz Favor, Lesli J. Feith, Michel Ferrell, Frank Finney, Brian Fischer-Hornung, Dorothea Fisher, Rudolph Fleener, Nickieann Fortune, Mary Francis, Dick Freese, Peter Frost, Caroline Furutani, Dale

223 63, 89 73 223 205 78, 85, 86 6, 117, 129 27, 202, 214, 215, 216 204 23 229 6, 256, 257 163 118

G Gagiano, Anne Galloway, Francis Ganapathy-Doré, Geetha Gask, Arthur Geason, Susan Gercke, Doris

178 189 46 19 231 257

Name Index 321

Ghosh, Amitav Gilroy, Beryl Gorgon, Donald Gosselin, Adrienne Johnson Gould, Vanessa Grafton, Sue Green, Graham Green, Joseph Green, Michael Griffiths, Gareth Grünzweig, Walter Gruesser, John Cullen Gulbrandsen, Ornulf Gunesekera, Romesh Gupta, Sunetra Gur, Batya Gysin, Fritz

36 278 258, 259, 260 6, 257, 258, 260 233, 245 117, 119 275 73, 76 182, 184, 190 62, 97 148 202, 208, 209, 217, 225 177 12, 13, 140, 142, 150, 151, 152 145 257 6

H Hall, Stuart Hamilton, Cynthia S. Hammett, Dashiel Harvey, John Harvier, Ernest Haycraft, Howard Hayder, Mo Head, Bessie Headley, Victor Hearn, Lafcadio Hearn, Lian Hedderich, Barbara Henderson, Willie Henzell, Perry Herbert, Rosemary Hermes, Liesel Heywood, Christopher Hill, Reginald Hill, Robert A.

41 6 255, 261, 275 26 217 215 109 161 3, 30, 258, 259, 260 113 109, 115 2, 256, 261, 283 167 259 4 257 182 26, 30 201, 202, 208, 212, 214, 215, 220,

322 Name Index

Hillerman, Tony Hilton, James Himes, Chester Hirschen, Andrea Hitchcock, Peter Hoerder, Dirk Hoffman, Tod Hope, Christopher Hopkins, Pauline Howard, John Huggan, Graham Hughes, J. M. Hughes, Langston Hume, Fergus Humphreys, Emyr Huntington Wright, Willard Huxley, Elspeth

223 6, 7, 29, 257 85 6, 27, 28, 276 257 36 147 46 182 27 251 9, 116, 122, 123, 130, 134 234 202, 224 229 31 215 4

I Innes, Hammond Irons, Glenwood Ishiguro, Kazuo Izzo, Jean-Claude

229 117 3, 11, 64-67, 70, 73, 77-79, 83, 85, 86 257

J James, Bill Jameson, Fredric Japrisot, Sebastian Jarmusch, Jim Jones, Alan Jones, Lillie Jones, Manina Jones, Norma R. Jordan, Glenn Joshi, Priya Junger, Sebastian

31 36 26 109, 121 249 220 2, 26 218 173 87, 88 241

Name Index 323

K Kabel, Andres Kapferer, Bruce Kaufman, Philip Keating, Henry R. F. Keitel, Evelyne Kelleher, Victor Kemelman, Harry King, Margaret J. Kingsley, Charles Kingsley, Henry Klein, Kathleen Gregory Komo, Dolores Koppenfels, Werner v. Knepper, Wendy Knight, Stephen Kuper, Adam

233 177 115 139 164 230 6 6, 7 19 19, 20, 23 7 28, 166 68, 73 8, 10, 35 1, 3, 5, 9, 10, 15, 17, 19-26, 28, 139, 164, 165, 166 168

L Lamming, George Laws, John Lawson, Henry LeCarré, John LeClair, Tom Ledent, Bénédicte Lemus, Rienzi B. Leonard, Elmore Light, Alison Lockwood, Bert Loder, John Lodge, David Lord, Gabrielle Luo, Shao-Pin

278 249 22, 232 137 46 9 207 25 164 173 3 1 230, 252 83

324 Name Index

M MacClaren, Philip Macdonald, Andrew Macdonald, Gina MacDonald, Ross Major, Clarence Maloney, Shane Mankell, Henning Marcus, Laura Marsden, Peter H. Martin, A. E. Massey, Sujata Masters, John Mathokgwane, James Mathur, Suchitra Matter-Seibel, Sabina Matzke, Christine McCall Smith, Alexander McClure, James McDermid, Val McDuff, E. M. McNab, Claire Meißner, Iris Milligan, Barry Mistry, Rohinton Mitchell, P. A. M’Levy, James Mohanram, Radhika Molino, Michael R. Molomo, M. G. Moody, Susan Mosley, Walter Moss, Laura Mudge, Alden Mueller, Monika Mühleisen, Susanne Mukherjee, Bharati

22 7 7 255, 275 28 252 257 139 9 18 3, 12, 109, 112, 114, 116-134; 135137 50 177 11, 16, 87 2, 256, 261, 283 1 13, 136, 161-168, 172, 173, 178 26 29 18 25 257 75 144 234 26 145 151 178 30 28, 216, 218 147 64 6, 117, 129 1 145

Name Index 325

Mukherjee, Upamanyu Pablo Muller, Marcia Muponde, Robert Mura, David

4, 101 26, 27, 117 6 111

N Nabokov, Vladimir Naipaul, V. S. Narayan, Uma Narogin, Mudrooroo Neale Hurston, Zora Neely, Barbara Neville, Margot Newland, Courttia Nichols, Grace Nyerere, Mwalimu Julius K.

35 65, 88, 89 168 21, 27 35 28, 29, 166, 203, 260, 261 19 269 166 167

O O’Connor, Terry Ondaatje, Michael Orsini, Francesca Ortiz, Fernando Osborne, Peter

232 8, 10, 35, 36, 45, 46, 47, 54, 55, 56, 57, 65, 140 88 146 66

P Paretsky, Sara Parsons, Neil Pepper, Andrew Perera, S. W. Pfister, Manfred Phelps, Percy Phillips, Mike Phillips, Trevor Pierce, Peter

27, 117 167, 179 5, 130-131 155 68 86 3, 15, 16, 29, 30, 257, 258, 260-270; 271-287 268 252

326 Name Index

Plummer, Patricia Poe, Edgar Allan Pons, Xavier Porter, Dennis Pratt, Mary L. Priestman, Martin Primorac, Ranka Pyrhönen, Heta

2, 3, 15, 255, 256, 257, 271, 283 255, 265 15, 229 1, 5 6, 145, 147 5, 139 5, 6 1, 139

Q Quinn, Patrick J.

63

R Rajan, Gita Rampersad, Arnold Ramson, W. S. Rankin, Ian Rasmussen, R. Kent Ray, Satyajit Read, Mark Brandon Reed, Ishmael Reddy, Maureen T. Reichl, Susanne Reitz, Caroline Richards, Thomas Richter, Virginia Riemenschneider, Dieter Riley, Joan Rogan, S. J. Rogers, J. A. Roth, Philip Rowcroft, Charles Rowland, Laura Joh Rushdie, Salman Russell, Sharon A. Russell, William

145 224 234 26 201, 202, 208, 215, 220 12, 88-90, 93-96, 99, 102, 103, 106 229 28 2, 222 147 4 79 169 65 278 29 202 137 20, 21 109, 115, 123 65 4 23

Name Index 327

S Said, Eward W. Sarkowsky, Katja Scanlan, Margaret Schleh, Eugene Schmidt, Peter Schoener, Allon Schulte-Middelich, Bernd Schulze-Engler, Frank Schuyler, George Schwarz, A.B. Christa Sciascia, Leonardo Scott, William R. Selvadurai, Shyam Selvon, Samuel Sewell, Tony Siddiqi, Yumna Singh, Amritjit Silver, Louise Simon, Reeva S. Slovo, Gillian Smith, Zadie Soitos, Stephen F. Solbach, Andreas Spillane, Mickey Steger, Jason Stewart, Nicholas Stow, Randolph Suerbaum, Ulrich Summers, Anne Susskind, Anne Symons, Julian

76, 83, 84, 109, 116 3, 12, 109, 135 45, 46 3 203 207 68 9, 65 7, 14, 201- 227 7, 14, 201 26 205, 206, 207, 220 12, 13, 140, 142, 154, 155, 157 277, 278 258, 259 36 203 189 4 29 285 2, 5, 7, 27, 216 148 255 232 97 230 2, 61, 70 250 244 1

T Tarantino, Quentin Tasker, Peter

109, 121, 286 115

328 Name Index

Taylor, Alison Taylor Bland, Eleanor Thelwell, Michael Thomas, Dylan Thomas, Paul Thurlow, Crispin Tiffin, Helen Tlou, Thomas Todorov, Tzvetan Tolley, Michael J. Tolson, Melvin B. Trout, Steven Tümpner, Charlotte Tucker, Jim Turner Hospital, Janette

32 28 259 31 26 143 62, 97 167 1, 61 250 202 63 4 31, 32, 33 231, 251

U Upfield, Arthur

21, 26, 27, 29, 229, 231

V Vachss, Andrew Van Dine, S. S. Vautier, Marie Villatoro, Marcos M. Vogan, Arthur Vogt, Jochen

255 215 147 3 21, 23 1, 2

W Wakefield, Hannah Wallace, Edgar Walsh, J. M. Walton, Priscilla L. Watson, Colin Watt, Peter Ridgway Weedon, Chris Weissman, Kathy

29 76, 77 19 2, 26 218 73, 76 173 162, 163

Name Index 329

Weller, Archie Westlake, Donald White, Claire E. Williams, John Ellis Williams, Raymond Wilson, Barbara Wilson, Rob Wilson Wesley, Valerie Wodehouse, P. G. Wood, James Wood, Nigel Woods, Paula Wong, Cynthia F. Wyrick, Deborah

22 25 119 30, 31 31 27, 29 9 257, 261, 282, 283, 284 50 72, 84 1, 61 260 65 41

X, Y, Z Yakumo, Koizumi Yamamoto, Traise Yoshihara, Mari Zwick, Edward

113 110, 111, 114, 116, 122, 128 111, 128 109, 115


SUBJECT INDEX

A Adventure and crime fiction

25, 28, 69, 75, 80, 87, 89, 95, 213, 217, 230, 284

African authors crime fiction settings African-American authors crime fiction Alias Alibi American crime fiction Apartheid

169, 173, 181 3, 13, 169, 173-178, 181, 182-199 4, 13, 163, 165, 166, 169, 170, 172, 173, 175, 178, 179, 182-199 7, 27, 201-227, 257, 260, 282 7, 10, 14, 15, 27, 201-227, 260, 282 42, 43, 44, 47, 48, 49, 52 42, 43, 44, 47, 49, 52 3, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 33, 62, 255, 261, 275, 276 13, 14, 29, 161, 181, 182, 183, 185, 186, 187, 188, 190, 192, 195, 196, 198, 199

Asian crime fiction settings

Asian-American Australian crime fiction setting Autopsy

4, 11, 12, 88-108, 139-159 12, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 53, 55, 57, 66, 72, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 88-108, 139-159 12, 29, 109-137 3, 10, 15, 17-25, 33, 229-253 17, 19, 20, 24, 25, 229-253 10, 37, 38, 39, 40, 47, 49, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57

B Black British crime fiction

15, 29, 30, 255-287

332 Subject Index

Botswana setting British regional crime fiction

13, 161-179 10, 26

C Caribbean Colonial(ism)

and crime fiction discourse modernity Confession ‘Contact literature’ ‘Contact zones’

15, 257, 258, 261, 264, 265, 269, 274, 276, 277, 278, 279 9, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 25, 43, 70, 71, 74, 75, 95, 107, 142, 159, 179, 201207, 209, 219, 220, 221, 222, 226, 252 3, 4, 10, 14, 21, 30, 31, 33, 73, 74, 77, 78 97, 102, 103, 104 88, 91, 100, 101, 102, 103 10, 35, 38, 40, 42, 43, 44, 47, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 57 6, 12 6, 12, 147, 179, 265, 269

D Detective tools Diasporia Displacement Domestic crime fiction

71, 72, 73 51, 55, 145 65, 121, 279 13, 17, 25, 27, 33, 62, 70, 207

E English crime fiction Detective ‘Ethnic’ detectives

Ethnicity and crime fiction

3, 11, 62, 68, 69, 74, 75, 76, 88, 104, 119 59-86 5, 6, 7, 14, 15, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 111, 112, 117, 118, 129, 256, 257, 260 12, 28, 45, 56, 116, 117, 118, 122, 127, 129, 131, 132, 135, 136, 247, 256, 260, 266, 270

Subject Index 333

F Feminist crime fiction Forensic investigations

2, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 112, 117, 118, 163, 178, 203 10, 37, 38, 40, 49, 51, 55, 56, 57

G Gender and crime fiction crossing

114, 116 2, 5, 12, 17, 122, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 134, 144, 163, 166, 256, 266, 282 48, 50

Genre and crime fiction

1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 11, 20, 33, 36, 53, 55, 59, 60, 61, 63, 68, 72, 88, 98, 111, 112, 117-121, 130, 134, 136, 139, 140, 152, 162, 163, 169, 179, 182, 183, 203, 204, 214, 215, 226, 255-257, 260, 261, 265, 269, 274, 279, 282 postcolonial literature 5, 6, 8, 11, 36, 41, 62, 63, 64, 82, 107, 111, 258, 269, 270 Globalisation 5, 9, 15, 88, 116, 118, 134, 141, 144, 145, 146, 176, 256, 269, 270 Golden Age detective novel 3, 11, 60, 62, 63, 68 H Harlem setting Holmes, Sherlock

Human rights

14, 201-227 3, 8, 11, 23, 59, 60, 64, 69, 73, 74, 8689, 92- 99, 101, 103, 104, 105, 107, 108, 214, 265 45, 51, 52, 53, 136, 173, 178

I Identity investigations

5, 7, 10, 15, 19, 24, 32, 33, 36, 44, 48, 49, 50, 53, 72, 79, 81, 85, 86, 88, 90,

334 Subject Index

and names

100, 101, 102, 103, 105, 106, 112, 117, 118, 122, 129, 135, 141, 142, 144, 145, 178, 243, 258, 269, 280, 282 21, 22, 28, 30, 32, 42, 44, 48, 49, 66, 73, 78, 82, 90, 91, 95, 101, 133, 261, 262

Indian crime fiction Italo-Ethiopian War

11, 88-108 14, 201, 206, 219, 221, 224, 225

J Japanese-American setting

12, 109-137

K, L Landscape in crime fiction zero-setting stories Lesbian crime fiction Literary canon

20, 21, 31, 57, 70, 82, 114, 131, 170, 172, 223, 275, 285 18-19, 20, 31 25, 27, 28 59, 75, 76, 82, 83, 88, 89, 90, 91, 96, 98, 102, 140

M Masculinity Migration Mimicry Modernism Modernity Anticolonial Multiculturalism Myths Australian colonial

15, 110, 174, 255, 258, 259 3, 9, 118, 141, 145, 256, 258, 265, 267 11, 88, 90, 91, 92, 95, 97, 103, 104, 105, 107 83, 122 11, 13, 69, 146, 172, 173 178 88, 91, 100, 101, 102, 103 2, 6, 118, 145, 243, 256, 257, 264 24 20, 209

Subject Index 335

Hindu nativist of detection of Englishness

95 20, 33 11, 72, 85 65, 72, 73, 79, 83, 85, 86

N Narrative authority constructions processes

62, 63, 81 59, 60, 64, 78, 80 8, 37, 38, 40, 41, 45, 56, 61, 63, 105, 106 Nationalism and crime fiction 15, 14, 15, 17, 22, 32, 33, 43, 56, 98, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 114, 131, 183, 230, 231, 236, 237, 238, 243, 250, 252, 270, 286 Native American detective 7, 29, 257 O ‘Orient’ and crime fiction Orientalism Orphan figure

3, 4, 12, 74, 75, 76, 102 12, 74, 75, 76, 110, 111, 113, 116, 122, 127, 130, 134 11, 66, 83, 84, 85

P Political correctness Politics and crime writing

Postcolonial consciousness crime writing

discourse disorder society

233, 234, 240, 243, 247, 248 27, 45, 46, 51, 55, 134, 136, 137, 168, 173, 175, 177, 178, 182, 183, 184, 190, 195, 196, 199, 203 17, 18, 24, 39 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12, 17, 27, 31, 33, 35, 36, 39, 40, 42, 44, 49, 62, 63, 64, 82, 84, 107, 161 61, 65, 84, 141, 146, 158 63, 64, 67 3, 8, 9, 17, 28, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 49,

336 Subject Index

subject postmortem

55, 56, 63 40, 42, 57 8, 9, 10, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 45, 47, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 85, 140, 157

R ‘Race’ in crime fiction

Racism and crime fiction Restoration of order

2, 5, 15, 17, 27, 28, 30, 45, 129, 131, 188, 203, 209, 210, 212, 213, 215, 220, 221, 222, 258, 261, 266, 268 4, 22, 30, 74, 158, 207, 248, 250, 277 5, 11, 38, 40, 51, 56, 61, 62, 63, 64, 69, 72, 79, 82, 83, 89, 104

S Shanghai setting South African crime fiction Sri Lankan setting Stereotypes

Sub-genres of crime fiction classic detective

66, 72, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81 13, 14, 26, 29, 181-199 12, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 53, 55, 57, 139159 15, 74, 78, 97, 98, 101, 102, 107, 111, 112, 113, 114, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 125, 128, 137, 166, 202, 232, 248, 257, 259

12, 13, 36, 37, 49, 60, 64, 78, 82, 117, 202 clue puzzle 2, 3, 5, 21, 27, 60, 73, 163 cosy mystery 2, 3, 11, 36, 73, 164 ‘hardboiled’ 2, 3, 5, 15, 26, 27, 117, 222, 255, 256, 258, 260, 261, 263, 265, 276, 282, 283, 284 police procedural 2, 22, 23 private-eye 4, 24, 261, 264, 275, 276, 282 psychological thriller 2

Subject Index 337

T ‘Terra Nullius’ Transcultural

Transnational identity

10, 17, 18, 19, 20 3, 9, 12, 13, 15, 29, 61, 62, 65, 70, 85, 130, 140-149, 153, 154, 155, 157, 158, 159, 173, 255, 258, 269 8, 9 46, 85

U Urban crime fiction

15, 22, 185, 202, 226, 255, 259, 263, 265

W Welsh crime fiction

10, 30, 31, 32, 33

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Einladung zur Literaturwissenschaft

Einladung zur Literaturwissenschaft

Francia 35: Forschungen zur westeuropäischen Geschichte

Postcolonial Postmortems (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft S.)

Reading Song Lyrics. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen Und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Cheeky Fictions: Laughter and the Postcolonial (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 91)

Transcultural Graffiti: Diasporic Writing and the Teaching of Literary Studies (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft ... & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Exiles, Emigres and Intermediaries: Anglo-Italian Cultural Transactions. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Stories and Portraits of the Self. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Women Writing Greece: Essays on Hellenism, Orientalism and Travel. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Performing National Identity: Anglo-Italian Cultural Transactions. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Sites of Exchange: European Crossroads and Faultlines (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 103)

Discovering Patterns in Mathematics and Poetry (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen Und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Solo Performances: Staging the Early Modern Self in England. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen Und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Translation Practices: Through Language to Culture (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

One Less Hope: Essays on Twentieth-Century Russian Poets (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 101) (Internationale ... & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Negotiating Afropolitanism: Essays on Borders and Spaces in Contemporary African Literature and Folklore. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Multi-Ethnic Britain 2000+: New Perspectives in Literature, Film and the Arts. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

The Play within the Play: The Performance of Meta-Theatre and Self-Reflection. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Tropes for the Past: Hayden White and the History Literature Debate (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft ... & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Neue Sachlichkeit 1918-33: Unity and Diversity of an Art Movement (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 104)

Heroism and Passion in Literature: Studies in Honour of Moya Longstaffe (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 77)

The Singer and the Scribe: European Ballad Traditions and European Ballad Cultures (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 75)

British Romanticism and Italian Literature: Translating, Reviewing, Rewriting (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft) (v. 92)

Europa in Grande Sertão: Veredas Grande Sertão: Veredas in Europa (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 85)

Remapping Reality: Chaos and Creativity in Science and Literature (Goethe - Nietzsche - Grass) (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden ... & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

This Anguish, Like a Kind of Intimate Song: Resistance in Women's Literature of World War II (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden ... & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Women Write Back: Strategies of Response and the Dynamics of European Literary Culture, 1790-1805. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Cultural Transfer through Translation. The Circulation of Enlightened Thought in Europe by Means of Translation. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Facing the East in the West: Images of Eastern Europe in British Literature, Film and Culture. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen Und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

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