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BOOK REVIEW: Peter Thoms. DETECTION AND ITS DESIGNS: NARRATIVE AND POWER IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY DETECTIVE FICTION. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1998.

1999; Indiana University Press; Volume: 42; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2979/vic.1999.42.3.550

1527-2052

Joseph A. Kestner,

Philosophy, History, and Historiography

Reviewed by: Detection and Its Designs: Narrative and Power in Nineteenth-Century Detective Fiction Joseph A. Kestner (bio) Detection and Its Designs: Narrative and Power in Nineteenth-Century Detective Fiction, by Peter Thoms; pp. xii + 176. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1998, $32.95. Critical study of narratives of detection has become a field of crucial importance for Victorianists during the last two decades. One may cite such strong assessments as Stephen Knight’s Form and Ideology in Detective Fiction (1980), Martin Priestman’s Detective Fiction and Literature (1990), and Martin Kayman’s From Bow Street to Baker Street (1992) as especially important examples of the reevaluation of the genre in recent critical discourse. In addition, a number of important critical essays by such writers as Audrey Jaffe and Rosemary Jann on Arthur Conan Doyle, or by Ronald Thomas on scientific and imperialist connotations, recognize the significance of this material for any consideration of Victorian culture. Peter Thoms in his astute and engaging study Detection and Its Designs follows the example of several predecessors in evaluating detective literature. Thoms intends the word “designs” in his title to suggest that detective literature has a covert project of its own, namely “to exert control over others” (2). In this manipulation, Thoms asserts, the detective’s “desire for authorial mastery disturbingly resembles the oppressive deeds of the criminal,” for the detective “threatens the autonomy of individuals as he invades their privacy and attempts to define their identities” (2). At the same time, however, detective literature “undermines the authority of the detective, skeptically questioning his motives,” an element stressed by emphasizing the “resemblance” of the detective to the criminal (7). Thoms contends that detective literature demonstrates this ambiguity about the purposes of detection by repudiating both “the recovery of order” and “the imposition of closure” (10) in its narratives. In fact, for Thoms, storytelling is suspect and its authority subverted in such literature. To reinforce his theoretical position, Thoms draws upon the works of five writers: William Godwin, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Arthur Conan Doyle. From the above summary, it will be clear that Thoms’s work is influenced by, [End Page 550] above all, Michel Foucault’s discussion of surveillance in Discipline and Punish (1977) and by the extension of Foucault’s ideas in D. A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police (1988). The force of Foucault and Miller is especially evident in that Thoms devotes two of his five chapters to Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) and Dickens’s Bleak House (1853), texts also discussed by Miller. However, Thoms begins his study with a reading of Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), an acknowledgment of another significant critical assessment, Ian Ousby’s Bloodhounds of Heaven (1976). Indeed, with the exception of Poe, the authors emphasized by Ousby are those examined by Thoms. What are the implications of this fact? Thoms’s evaluations are marked by a deft cleverness. For example, Dupin dethrones reporters’ accounts in “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1842–43) to establish “his own theory and thus his own supremacy” (60). Dupin in the three famous Poe short stories “emerges not as the criminal’s polar opposite but as an ambiguous figure who shares that transgressor’s desire for control” (70). Inspector Bucket of Bleak House is a threatening rather than saving figure: “Detection does not have to be successful to effectively determine its prey,” Thoms notes (83). Bucket instead “enforces submission” and “jeopardizes individuality” (86). Thoms is certainly correct that in The Moonstone there is a growing “paranoia in which characters suspect that they are constantly observed” (98): “story-telling becomes an attempt [. . .] to create a repressive structure to contain the forces of misrule” (110). Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) “becomes disturbingly like his criminal counterpart” (136) by deploying shock, violence, fear, and sadism to sustain mastery in his ruthless surveillance, all supposedly in the pursuit of justice. In Conan Doyle’s narrative, the reader “assumes a masochistic position, while Watson functions as a sado-masochist. He recreates suffering as a narrative experience” (140). While discussing some of the same texts analyzed by Miller and Ousby, Thoms expands their insights by...