DCI Shakespeare

Another occasional #LitCritForTeachers post.


Shakespearean Allusion in Crime Fiction: DCI Shakespeare by Lisa Hopkins, 2016 (Palgrave Macmillan)

Hopkins tells us:

‘Shakespeare is a pervasive presence in detective fiction’ (1)

She notes there are three main ways in which this can happen - 

• quotation
• merely touching on a detail
• called on as a detailed guide to human character

Shakespearean allusion in crime writing is a way of borrowing Shakespeare's status to assert that the detective novel (etc) is a literary form in its own right. 

‘Shakespearean allusion serves a variety of purposes. First and most obviously, Shakespeare is an unimpeachable source of cultural capital, but at the same time one perceived as popular enough to be free of any connotations of elitism or inaccessibility.’ (8)

Referring to details that you recognise also helps to balance out the fact that the text is trying to deceive you, the reader: 

‘Shakespearean allusion also has consequences for the reader and for the status of the text itself: it interpellates the reader and establishes the literary status of the text. G.K. Chesterton notes in ‘The Ideal Detective Story’ that ‘The detective story differs from every other story in this: the reader is only happy if he feels a fool,’ and yet feeling a fool is also a potentially unnerving and unsatisfying state. It can however be counteracted if one does not feel quite such a fool because one can at least recognise Shakespeare’ (10)

Hopkins also notes of crime writing that: 

‘It is a commonplace of the genre that a fine line divides the detective from the criminal’ (17)

which is a particularly useful thought when considering Hamlet as part of Elements of Crime Writing.

Hopkins notes the massive number of Shakespearean quotations and allusions in both the work of Dorothy L. Sayers and Ngaio Marsh, among others. One of the functions Shakespeare fulfils in these works is to demonstrate the status of the detective - to make him one of the 'good guys', because he is educated. She makes the argument that this is necessary because of the need to position readers on the same side as the detective: 

‘Detective fiction needs to position readers in this way for two main reasons. In the first place, it is generally nervous about the legitimacy of its own enterprise, because it can by no means be taken for granted that detection itself is a legitimate enterprise. Alongside a rather vaguely felt conviction that it is a citizen’s duty to help the police typically sits an often more powerful view hat doing so will almost certainly entail things that are literally, inherently and in absolute terms deplorable: reading other people’s correspondence, eavesdropping on conversations and generally prying into a sphere radically and inalienably constituted as private.' (11)

 ‘The only thing that can justify violation of this ethos of privacy being sacrosanct is if the policeman too is an insider, and allowing to quote Shakespeare is a foolproof way of constituting him as one; this is particularly marked in the case of Ngaio Marsh’s Alleyn, both the most intrinsically inquisitive and also the most sustainedly Shakespearean of detectives’ (11)

She refers to Golden Age detective fiction here, and it would be interesting to see if the same attitudes can be found in modern crime fiction.

Hopkins also notes that there are three plays which are more commonly alluded to in crime fiction than others: unsurprisingly Hamlet and Macbeth are two of the three. The final one is oddly, Midsummer Night's Dream: 

‘On the surface the least likely of plays to be connected to crime, Dream proves to have a surprising affinity with the genre because it speaks to so many of its key concerns: drug-taking, land ownership, violence against women, and the question of artisanship versus mass production, with attendant implications for the literary status of crime fiction itself.’ (184)

Finally, there's a link here to an open access article on Shakespearean allusion in the crime novels of Georgette Heyer: https://www.nature.com/articles/palcomms201652

Quick Quote: Barthes on The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

The reader will perhaps recall a novel by Agatha Christie in which all the invention consisted of concealing the murderer beneath the use of the first person of the narrative. The reader looked for him behind every 'he' in the plot: he was all the time hidden under the 'I.' Agatha Christie knew perfectly well that, in the novel, the 'I' is usually a spectator and that it is the 'he' who is the actor. 

Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology, tr. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith [Boston: Beacon Press, 1970], pp. 34-5.

Bayard - Distraction and disguise in crime fiction

Aware that there is not much out there on The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, I have been reading the book by Pierre Bayard, the French critic, Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? with the intent of blogging about it to provide some resource. I have not finished yet – indeed I am yet to reach his actual dissection of the specific novel, but in his general justification for the approach of taking a novel where the solution has been given at the end, and then deciding that someone else actually did the murder, he makes some interesting points about detective fiction in general, which seem worth considering for Elements of Crime Writing, even if you are not reading TMoRA.

Distraction and disguise in crime fiction

Bayard is not in fact talking about false moustaches, but about more literary forms of disguise. He points out:

The advantage of distraction is that it highlights the aim of detective fiction, which makes it unique among literary forms: to prevent an idea from taking shape. Most literature tries to stimulate a certain idea or a certain group of images or sensations in the reader, but here we find ourselves in that original situation in which all the tension of the work is directed, through a detailed organization of invisibility, toward the prevention of thought. (Bayard, 2000, p. 25)

This is an interesting point in exploring crime writing – does it hold for all crime writing or only for those detective/ mystery novels which follow Van Dine’s rules about the solution being withheld to the end, but with enough clues that the reader could have solved it, or at least feels that they could have at the end? It is also interesting to debate the truth of the statement – surely to an extent anything with a ‘twist’ ending would fall into this category – or is that only part of what such a piece of fiction is doing? Is it attempting to provoke thought in its very twistiness?

The main items which I thought were of interest, however, were Bayard’s categorisation of the ways in which disguise and distraction can be achieved in relation to the identity of the murderer.  He exemplifies these and discusses them almost exclusively in reference to the works of Agatha Christie, but they are fruitful to explore in the light of other crime writing also.

1) the murderer’s ‘function’ in society: that is, certain professions seem to offer a degree of protection from suspicion. Bayard notes doctors, policemen, pharmacists and judges in this category.

2a) ‘literary function’, suggests Bayard, is an even better disguise. The murderer can be disguised as victim; either through being threatened with death or persecuted in some other way, or they can fake their own deaths.

2b) the other literary function which offers protection is that of investigator. Bayard points out this goes back to Oedipus Rex. ‘Since he is on the side of the law, the murderer reaps the natural benefits of a kind of presumption of innocence’ (Bayard, 2000, p. 23). This is a broad category including all those who help the investigator (so Dr Sheppard in TMoRA is included, and I think you could argue for Claudius in Hamlet also, if that is one of the texts you are studying).

N.B. In a later chapter Bayard mentions a third literary function that protects Sheppard: that of narrator. TMoRA is not unique in following this form (See this article from the Independent, but be warned, they do not all conceal their guilt ). The reader has to trust the narrator in a detective novel, and if they are unreliable narrators, that is usually concealed from the reader until the solution is unveiled. In the case of TMoRA, Dr Sheppard is doubly protected because not only is he the narrator (see post on Barthes) but also he is fulfilling the role we normally see Hastings in - dumb, reliable, innocent and 100% transparent Hastings - so we trust him by proxy. 

3) the final disguise which Bayard points out  is the traditional one, the alibi, the ‘disguise as absence’. There is an irony here as the usual intention behind the disguise as absence is often in order to return literally in disguise as someone else in order to commit the crime.

It might be worth considering in the context of Elements of Crime Writing whether these are distinctive characteristics of the detective genre or of crime writing, or somewhere in between - do murderers always conceal their involvement? Do writers always wish to conceal the truth from the reader? 

Reference:

Pierre Bayard Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? Published in French in 1998; published in English (trans. Carol Cosman) 2000, by the New Press (New York). 

Aristotle on Crime Fiction, according to Dorothy L Sayers

I came across this brilliant essay by Dorothy L Sayers (creator of Lord Peter Wimsey, one of the best detectives of all time, imho), in a collection of critical essays on detective fiction edited by Robin Winks and published in 1980. It was actually a reprint from her collection of essays called Unpopular Opinions. She certainly knew how to coin a title.

Now, to anyone who reads the Poetics with an unbiased mind, it is evident that Aristotle was not so much a student of his own literature as a prophet of the future. He criticised the contemporary Greek theatre because it was, at that time, the most readily available, widespread and democratic form of popular entertainment presented for his attention. But what, in his heart of hearts, he desired was a good detective story; and it was not his fault, poor man, that he lived some twenty centuries too early to revel in the Peripeties of Trent's Last Case or the Discoveries of The Hound of the Baskervilles. (p. 178)

Tongue firmly planted in cheek, Sayers goes on to treat detective fiction as if it were tragedy, according to Aristotle's Poetics. His definition of tragedy, she suggests, is very fitting for detective fiction:

"The imitation" (or presentment, or representation - we will not quarrel over the word) "of an action that is serious" - it will be admitted that murder is an action of a tolerably serious nature - "and also complete in itself" - that is highly important since a detective story that leaves any loose ends is no proper detective story at all - "with incidents arousing pity and fear, where with to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions." (pp. 179-80)

When she puts it like that, it seems perfectly reasonable to put tragedy and detective fiction in the same bracket (a useful link to bring in Hamlet to the genre, which I will probably talk about at some length in a future post). She raises several terms from tragedy which are useful for talking about detective fiction. Peripety - a reversal of fortune - can come in any number of cases, but often in the case of the victim, who is frequently someone very wealthy or or very important, who is 'reduced to the status of a mere dead body' (p. 184). Hamartia - the characteristic or failing that brings about tragedy - is often applicable either to the victim or indeed to the villain. One of Aristotle's final concepts is that of Discovery - the denouement of the story. Aristotle, says Sayers, has several types of discovery, but she is most interested in the fifth type.

He calls it discovery through bad reasoning by the other party. The instance he adduces is obscure, the text being apparently mutilated and referring to a play unknown. But I think he really means to describe the discovery by bluff. Thus, the detective shows the suspect a weapon saying, "If you are not the murder, how do you come to be in possession of this weapon?" The suspect replied: "But that is not the weapon with which the crime was committed." "Indeed?" says the detective, "and how do you know?" (p. 185)

This strikes me as a very useful concept for considering elements of crime writing. The other forms of discovery, which are fairly self explanatory, are: 1) discoveries made by the author himself (rather scathingly noted by Sayers and which we might refer to as a deus ex machina); 2) the discovery by signs and tokens (e.g. the discovery that someone is left handed leads to his being revealed as the murderer); 3) discovery through memory, when a detective's memory is finally jogged and he remembers a similar case that reveals all (Miss Marple's uncanny memory of parallel occurrences in St Mary Mead that suddenly make the case crystal clear, if only to her); and 4) discovery through reasoning.

In passing Sayers makes a good point about The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, one of the set texts on Elements of Crime Writing (AQA B). 'Arguing from the particular to the general, we may be seduced into concluding that, because the original Dr. Watson was a good man, all Watsons are good in virtue of their Watsonity. But this is false reasoning, for moral worth and Watsonity are by no means inseparable' (p. 188). The narrator of TMofRA, the doctor, presents himself as playing Watson to Poirot's Holmes, and therefore we are led into not suspecting him.

A final quote, which delights me: 'few people can have been inspired to murder their uncles by the literary merits of Hamlet' (p. 180). It's the 'few' that gets me. Not none.

Sayers, D. L. (1946) 'Aristotle on Detective Fiction' in Unpopular Opinions (London: The Camelot Press), pp. 178–190.