Well-Traveled Sleuths

Writing in today’s Sunday Times of London, John Sutherland extols the virtues of detective fiction as a global phenomenon. As his springboard, he employs the recently published non-fiction book The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction, by Patrick Anderson. He begins:

Reading fiction (particularly the recreational variety) involves such quirky likes and dislikes that the big picture tends to get lost. But very big and very interesting things have been happening in those interlocking genres, crime, mystery and thriller, over the past few years.

The biggest thing is that they’ve taken the whole show over. In his recently published treatise The Triumph of the Thriller, Patrick Anderson makes the point that 40 years ago, when he began reviewing, there was never a thriller in the American bestseller lists. Those books were down in the literary cellar--next to the garbage cans.

No longer. Last week, in the authoritative New York Times hardback-fiction bestseller list, 10 of the 16 titles qualify as thrillers, and six of those are clear-cut detective stories. “Triumph” is too feeble a term. The biggest (and most inexplicably successful) seller of all time, The Da Vinci Code, is, of course, a detective story. Robert Langdon, the Harvard symbologist, is a Sherlock Holmes de nos jours: a code-breaker, clue-interpreter, crime-buster, world-saver.

The most interesting aspect of Sutherland’s essay may be his point about the influence of detective fiction and thrillers transcending cultures and borders:

As national boundaries melt away, however, so the detective novel has--simultaneously--regionalised itself more narrowly than ever in its history. Sticking with Scotland, another internationally superfamous detective is Inspector [John] Rebus, a sleuth who rarely ventures farther south from his Edinburgh beat than Morningside, or farther north than the Water of Leith. Judging by the rows of books on “Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh” on sale, the creator of Rebus should get an award from the Scottish tourist board. And, if there is room on the Rankin mantelpiece, what with all those Mystery Writers of America Edgar and The Crime Writers' Association Dagger trophies, he should get an even bigger award for services to the British book trade. According to Ken Gelder, in his recent, excellent monograph Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field, Rankin accounted for an incredible 10% of British book sales at one point.

One of the first detective novels I felt really pleased with myself for reading was Raymond Chandler’s The High Window. It opens with a wonderful description of Pasadena, roasting in high-summer heat and the stew of moral corruption. At that early stage of my life, Pasadena, that eastern outpost of Los Angeles, was as unvisitably foreign a place to me as Arthur C. Clarke’s The Sands of Mars. I now live there much of the time (something that in the 1950s would have seemed as unlikely as space travel) and I can virtually MapQuest the action of Scott Frost’s Alex Delillo detective stories, which set out to do for Pasadena what Rankin has done for Edinburgh. Not, so far, alas, with the same sales success, but with the same pinpoint attention to location, location, location.

Sutherland leaves the last word to the Italians, which is a fitting tribute considering the death earlier this month of Michael Dibdin:

So, why do Italy and the Italian detective novel hit the mark so effectively with us culturally xenophobic anglophone readers? Why does it “speak to us”, hitting so many familiar chords? Why are we so taken with Brunetti, Zen and Montalbano? Why has the Italian detective novel succeeded in breaching our cultural defences, when so many others have failed? [Donna] Leon says the answer is simple. “[The Italians] have no illusions. They know that all politicians are corrupt, they know that all institutions are corrupt and they never pretend that they are anything but that.”

She finds this nihilism “very refreshing”. The Italian view of life, she thinks, is the most honest. “Italians know about human nature--they understand it perhaps better than anyone else does. They know that people are weak and greedy and lazy and dishonest, and they just try to make the best of it; to work around it.” They know they’ll never change it, but resolve to live their lives as best they can, nonetheless.

It’s a satisfying explanation. The implicit, false promise in much Anglo-Saxon detective fiction is that crime can be cleared up. And if only enough of it is cleared up, by the omnicompetent sleuth, we shall one day find ourselves in the sunny uplands of crimelessness. Happy ever after in white-hat utopia, all the black hats put away or blown away.

The disillusioned Italians think differently. It makes for great detective fiction. Some would say the best. ...

To read the entirety of Sutherland’s piece, click here.