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Mys-Reading the Past in Detective Fiction and Law

2010; Routledge; Volume: 22; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1525/lal.2010.22.2.288

1541-2601

Neil Sargent,

Crime and Detective Fiction Studies

AbstractThis essay examines the philosophies of history at work in the narrative conventions governing the presentation of the past in its relations with the present in the analytical and hard-boiled detective story. True to its roots in an Enlightenment philosophy of science, the analytical detective story adopts a teleological view of history, in which the past is narratively positioned in a fixed relation to the present, such that the detective can work backward from the traces of this past that remain in the present, in order to explain the hidden causal principles behind the mystery. For the hard-boiled detective, inhabiting a post-Newtonian universe, the relations between past and present are still open to renegotiation. Caught between the contingencies of the present and the uncertainties of the future, the hard-boiled detective is forced to adopt a less teleological attitude toward the past, which results in the detective becoming a protagonist in the mystery, and placing the detective at odds with the objectivist philosophy of history on which the adversarial criminal trial process is based.Keywords: detective fictionphilosophy of historylaw Notes1. For representative works, see Barbara Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the Relationship Between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law, and Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983) Google Scholar; Barbara Shapiro, Beyond Reasonable Doubt and Probable Cause: Historical Perspectives on the Anglo-American Law of Evidence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) Google Scholar; Douglas Patey, Probability and Literary Form: Philosophic Theory and Literary Practice in the Augustan Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) Google Scholar; Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Certainty and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) Google Scholar; Alexander Welsh, Strong Representations: Narrative and Circumstantial Evidence in England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992) Google Scholar; Jan-Melissa Schramm, Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature and Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) Google Scholar.2. Interestingly, while Welsh, supra note 1, and Schramm, supra note 1, survey a range of canonical literary texts in their discussion of conventions of proof in Victorian law and literature, very little emphasis is placed on the conventions of proof operative in the emergent genre of detective fiction, perhaps because the formal detective novel does not subscribe to the narrative conventions of literary realism in the same way as a text such as Bleak House. The most extensive treatment of the relation between forensic modes of proof and detective fiction is that by Ronald R. Thomas, Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) Google Scholar; see also Stephen Kern, A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels, and Systems of Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004) Google Scholar and E. J. Wagner, The Science of Sherlock Holmes (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2006) Google Scholar.3. Dennis Porter, The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 25, 26 Google Scholar. Porter cites Poe as the originator of this narrative convention of backward construction, while Poe gives the credit to William Godwin in Caleb Williams. Id. at 25.4. In this sense the reader of a detective story functions very much in the manner of a jury at a trial. See Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957; London: Pimlico, 2000), 31 Google Scholar. While Watt stresses the analogy between the role of the reader of a realist novel and the role of the jury, the emphasis in much of the critical literature on the detective novel focuses on the competition between reader and detective in arriving at a solution to the problem. However,Watt's analogy speaks eloquently to the role of the reader at the moment of the denouement, when the detective reveals his or her proofs to the reader.5. See William W. Stowe, "From Semiotics to Hermeneutics: Modes of Detection in Doyle and Chandler," in The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory, ed. Glenn W. Most & William W. Stowe (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1983), 376–78 Google Scholar; see also Neil Sargent, "Murder and Mayhem in Legal Method: or, the Strange Case of Sherlock Holmes v. Sam Spade," in Law, Mystery and the Humanities, ed. Logan Atkinson & Diana Majury (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 40, 57–58 Google Scholar.6. Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 44 Google Scholar.7. Id. at 45.8. Id.9. Id. at 47.10. Id.11. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (London: Oxford University Press, 1946), 243 Google Scholar, and the discussion of "Who Killed John Doe?" at 266–76. See also Robin R. Winks, The Historian as Detective: Essays on Evidence (Hagerstown, NY: Harper Torchbooks, 1969) Google Scholar.12. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet (London: Ward Lock, 1887; London, John Murray, 1967), 30 Google Scholar.13. See Collingwood, supra note 11, at 234–35.14. Id. at 235.15. Id. at 236, 240, 241.16. Id. at 237.17. Id. at 266–73.18. This narrative preference for circumstantial evidence over evidence of testimony is not confined to the analytical detective story; see Schramm, supra note 1, at 56–66; see also Welsh, supra note 1, at 23–42; Welsh, "Burke and Bentham on the Narrative Potential of Circumstantial Evidence," 21 New Literary History 607 (1990) Google Scholar; Barbara Shapiro, "Circumstantial Evidence: Of Law, Literature, and Culture," 5 Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 219 (1993) Google Scholar; Shapiro, Beyond Reasonable Doubt and Probable Cause, supra note 1, at 212–20.19. See Collingwood, supra note 11, at 240–41.20. In "The Blue Carbuncle" Holmes even claimed to be able to deduce the state of a man's marriage from the state of his hat, reasoning that a wife who allowed her husband to go out with his hat unbrushed no longer had any affection for her husband. Even the secrets of the emotions are thus like an open book to Holmes, who can read them from the visible signs or traces on the clothes of his visitor with as much assurance as if the wife herself were physically present and could be interrogated on the matter. Sir ArthurConan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (London: George Newnes, 1892; Penguin Books, 1994), 149–50 Google Scholar; see also Marcello Truzzi, "Sherlock Holmes: Applied Social Psychologist," in The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce, ed. Umberto Eco & Thomas A. Sebeok (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 67–68 Google Scholar.21. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Red-Headed League," in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, supra note 20, at 30.22. For a detailed discussion of Holmes' semiotic method see Thomas A. Sebeok and Jean Umiker-Sebeok, "'You Know My Method': A Juxtaposition of Charles S. Peirce and Sherlock Holmes," in Eco & Sebeok, supra note 20, at 11–54; and Gian Carlo Caprettini, "Peirce, Holmes, Popper," id. at 135–53. See also Stowe, supra note 5, at 367–70.23. See Todorov, supra note 6, at 44–45.24. For a discussion of this presentist standpoint towards the past, see George Herbert Mead, The Philosophy of the Present (Chicago: Open Court Publishers, 1932; Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002). Mead rejects the historicist claim that the past exists in any completed sense independent of the present, insisting that our apprehension of the past, like our apprehension of the future, can only have any meaning in reference to an emergent present. So it is necessarily from the standpoint of the present that we seek to understand the past. And as the present changes, so too does our understanding of the past, id. at 41–43, 52–56.Following Mead, it is this emergent quality of the present, which cannot be explained only by reference to the events or the processes that allegedly gave rise to it in an already completed past, which alters the relation between past and present in the hard-boiled detective novel, and which renders Holmes's method of reasoning backwards from observable effect located in the present to an antecedent cause located in the already completed past problematic; see infra text at notes 48, 49.25. In a passage that could be equally applicable to the decision-making of the hard-boiled detective, H. Richard Niebuhr comments: It has often been remarked that the great decisions which give a society its specific character are functions of emergency situations in which a community has had to meet a challenge. Doubtless ideals, hopes and drives toward a desirable future play their part in such decisions; … Yet the decision on which the future depends … is a decision made in response to action upon the society, and this action is guided by interpretation of what is going on. H. Richard Niebuhr, The Responsible Self: An Essay in Christian Moral Philosophy (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1963), 59 (italics added) Google Scholar.26. "That—that story I told you yesterday was all—a story," she stammered…."Oh, that," Spade said lightly. "We didn't exactly believe your story.""Then ?"…"We believed your two hundred dollars." Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1930; New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 33 Google Scholar.27. John Dewey, "Historical Judgments," in The Philosophy of History in Our Time, ed. Hans Meyerhoff (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959), 163, 172 Google Scholar; originally published in John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1938), 230, 239 Google Scholar.28. This formula could be expressed by the idea that there is an intelligent design behind the mystery. But the intelligent design does not rest in the mind of God, but in man. It is man's purposes that the detective is investigating, as manifested in the material world of action and motives. This formula runs throughout the Holmesian canon, from "The Red-Headed League" to The Hound of the Baskervilles. The detective should not look for supernatural causes, but natural causes located in the mind of man.29. See Niebuhr, supra note 25, at 61–65.30. Id. at 63. See also Herbert Blumer, Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 81–82, 109–11 Google Scholar; Anselm L. Strauss, Mirrors and Masks: The Search for Identity (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1959; New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2007), 47–52 Google Scholar.31. Niebuhr observes: An agent's action is like a statement in a dialogue. Such a statement not only seeks to meet, as it were, or to fit into, the previous statement to which it is an answer, but is made in anticipation of reply. It looks forward as well as backward; it anticipates objections, confirmations, and corrections. It is made as part of a total conversation that leads forward and is to have meaning as a whole. Niebuhr, supra note 25, at 64. See also Blumer, supra note 30, at 81, 82.32. See Sargent, supra note 5, at 58.33. On this point, see also John Scaggs, Crime Fiction: The New Critical Idiom (London: Routledge, 2005), 60 Google Scholar.34. See Stowe, supra note 5, at 376–78.35. See Dewey, supra note 27, at 172; see also Mead, supra note 24, at 43. Stowe comments that "Marlowe's interpretive activities produce something more than, and very different from, simple knowledge of previously existing facts; they produce murders." Stowe, supra note 5, at 376.36. See Sargent, supra note 5, at 56.37. See supra text at note 19.38. See Hammett, supra note 26, at 212, 213.39. John Dewey, Experience and Nature (New York: Dover Publications, 1958), 206 n.4 Google Scholar.40. Here again, we see the aptness of Watt's analogy between the role of the reader and the role of a jury, supra note 4. Watt observes: [B]oth want to know "all the particulars" of a given case—the time and place of the occurrence; both must be satisfied as to the identities of the parties concerned…. and they also expect the witnesses to tell the story "in his own words." The jury, in fact, takes the "circumstantial view of life," which T.H. Green found to be the characteristic outlook of the novel. Id. at 31.41. See Sargent, supra note 5, at 56.42. Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1950; New York: Vintage Books, 1988), 17 Google Scholar.43. See Liahna K. Babener, "Raymond Chandler's City of Lies," in Los Angeles in Fiction, ed. David Fine (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 109 Google Scholar; Stephen Knight, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 149–58 Google Scholar; John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 142–53 Google Scholar; George Grella, "The Hard-Boiled Detective Novel," in Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robin W. Winks (Woodstock, VT: Foul Play Books, 1988), 111–16 Google Scholar; see also Scaggs, supra note 33, at 70–73.44. Steven Marcus, introduction to The Continental Op, by Dashiell Hammett (New York: Random House, 1974), ix–xxix Google Scholar; also published in Most & Stowe, supra note 5, at 197–209; see also Cawelti, supra note 43, at 166–68.45. Marcus, supra note 44, at xxii–xxiv. Marcus relates "the unresolvable paradoxes and dilemmas" in Hammett's writing with Hammett's vision of society, especially in the 1920s, the period of prohibition, in which "American society had in effect committed itself to a vast collective fiction," at xxii.46. See discussion at note 28.47. See Hammett, supra note 26, at 64.48. Id. at 63.49. Id.50. See Mead, supra note 24, at 36. Mead states: "[T]he emergent when it appears is always found to follow from the past, but before it appears it does not, by definition, follow from the past."51. Id. at 46."The difficulty that immediately presents itself is that the emergent has no sooner appeared than we set about rationalizing it, that is, we undertake to show that it, or at least the conditions that determine its appearance, can be found in the past that lay behind it."52. Christie uses this theme very deliberately in her novel, Sleeping Murder (London: William Collins, 1976, at 35–36) Google Scholar, in which Miss Marple explicitly warns two of the protagonists in the mystery about the consequences of stirring up the past, lest it disrupt their lives in the present, which of course it does. In terms of the narrative structure of the story, however, it is not the detective who has stirred up the past, but the other protagonists. In the hard-boiled detective story, it is the detective who stirs up the past.53. For a historical discussion of the shift from an accusatory model of the criminal trial process to the adversary model, see John H. Langbein, "The Criminal Trial Before the Lawyers," 45 University of Chicago Law Review 263 (1978) Google Scholar; see also John H. Langbein, "The Historical Origins of the Privilege Against Self-Incrimination at Common Law," 92 Michigan Law Review 1047, 1048 (1994) Google Scholar. Langbein refers to these two models of trial as the "accused speaks" theory of the trial and the "test the evidence" theory of the trial, labels that could equally well be used to denote the forms of trial relied on in the denouement of the hard-boiled and the analytical detective story. See also Schramm, supra note 1, at 101–09.54. Steven Marcus makes this connection in his discussion of the Flitcraft story (see supra note 44, at xix), where he observes in a footnote to the text: "It can hardly be an accident that the new name that Hammett gives to Flitcraft is that of an American philosopher [Charles Sanders Peirce]—with two vowels reversed—who was deeply involved in just such speculations."