Criminally Good Detectives – From Marple to Maeve
- robyncoombes
- Nov 9, 2023
- 9 min read
Updated: Feb 26, 2024
“The coat maketh the detective” (me).
“In troubled times, readers like to turn to forms of entertainment that emphasize the rule of law and order (even if sometimes ambiguously) over the chaos they may be facing in their everyday lives” (Schaffer 10).
To say I’ve found my new genre …
Now the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness has given way to relentless rain and scented candles, I find myself defenceless against a good detective novel. Not that I limit my obsessions to seasons. This one started brewing earlier this year while writing my dissertation on, of all things, Jane Austen and greenhouses. The only light at the end of that particular polytunnel was the promise of page-turner police procedurals. Once the final word-prunings were at the safer side of the submit button, the two-foot stack of Jane Casey novels I had diligently parked were a sight more delicious than roast potatoes. (I knew a stealthy binge was not an option. I’d be missing my deadline and mainlining crime.) So from one literary Jane to another I hopped with nary a backward glance. The Reckoning was beckoning (Maeve Kerrigan, book 2).
My next post will unashamedly gush about my new and now favourite book series of all time, but for now we pause for …
No not The Angelus
Jeremy Brett in Granada's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
... A Defence of Detective Fiction:
As Laura Marcus states, often “detective fiction, like other genre fictions, is seen as a popular and lesser subset of high or 'proper' literature” (1). Yet when we stop to think, “the literature of detection, with its complex double narrative in which an absent story, that of a crime, is gradually reconstructed in the second story (the investigation), its uses of suspense, and its power to give aesthetic shape to the most brute of matter, has been seen as paradigmatic of literary narrative itself” (Marcus 1). Another critic considers this double narrative as a vestige of gothic fiction; “While one narrative line is driving forward to revelation and enlightenment, another is working in the opposite direction, toward concealment and erasure” (Nickerson 30). Clever stuff.
Now we have that out of the way …
Bear with
A Brief Crime Line:
Detective fiction emerged as a natural response to (amongst other things) rapid urbanisation and increased crime, the Victorian’s fascination with said crime, the cheaper printing and greater literacy that spurred the likes of penny dreadfuls and the Newgate Calendar, along with surging social change and the creation of the Metropolitan Police force in 1829, followed by the CID in 1878. All considered, crime fiction’s methodical puzzle-solving and reassuring resolutions, not to mention the rational explanations of that authoritative figure, the detective, assuaged the public with comforting conformity while satiating their appetite for sensation.
Most agree that Edgar Allan Poe’s
"The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) is the first detective story, with its influential investigator -
C. Auguste Dupin - serving as an early archetype for subsequent sleuths. Expanding into novel form, Monsieur Lecoq joined Dupin as one of the forefathers of literary detectives, appearing in Émile Gaboriau’s L’Affaire Lerouge in 1866. Sandwiched between this illustrious pair however is Inspector Bucket of Charles Dickens’ 1852 Bleak House. Considered the first in English fiction, it is Bucket who solves the puzzle at the heart of that labyrinthine tome. (Try explaining the plot of this to your bewildered Leaving Cert Irish oral examiner … I’m not sure what my game was on this one.) Employing a variety of perspectives and fragmented narratives (a signature of many crime subgenres today), Bleak House is as one critic states, “a distinctly modernist text” (Welsh 124), and as this critic confirms, hostile to analysis mid-Irish oral.
Next up is Sergeant Cuff of Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868). Said to be the first English detective novel, The Moonstone brought methods such as crime reconstruction to the genre. Collins’ epistolary accumulation of evidence, including witness testimonies, journals, and letters, not to mention the evocative Shivering Sands, clearly influenced Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles with its similar array of narratives and manuscripts, and atmospheric quivering mire (“the setting is a worthy one” (HB 29)). But decades before that criminal masterpiece came Collins’ other major contribution, The Woman in White (1859), with its ferociously popular detective - though amateur and female - Marian Halcombe. It wasn’t until 1887 that A Study in Scarlet introduced Sherlock Holmes, and you don’t need telling the indelible imprint that super-sleuth has left on just about every following fictional detective.
Since Collins brought crime into the domestic space, it has flourished into form and assumed its own subgenre; the domestic thriller or domestic noir (think Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train, most things with ‘Girl/Woman’ in the title). But there are more iterations of crime fiction today than there are characters in Bleak House.
At the tip of the crime iceberg we have locked-room mysteries, (The Moonstone, Murder on the Orient Express, And Then There Were None, clearly a staple of Agatha Christie); legal thrillers (Anatomy of a Murder, Anatomy of a Scandal); espionage (anything John le Carré basically); the hard-boiled P.I. (e.g. Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe); and of course, cosy crime (Miss Marple I’m looking at you, even though your knowledge of cyanide, arsenic, belladonna and strychnine is frankly alarming).
But although Dupin is largely considered the first, Holmes is undoubtedly the Great Detective. According to one critic, Poe “left it to others, notably Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, to explore the possibilities of the character of the detective, of which his deductive methods would be but one facet” (Rachman 3).
Sidney Paget's illustration for Doyle's "The Man with the Twisted Lip" (1891)
While Holmes owes a debt to his predecessors, he doesn’t think too highly of them:
“Dupin was a very inferior fellow … really very showy and superficial.
He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a
phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine’” (16).
And Lecoq?
“a miserable bungler … I could have done it in twenty-four hours. Lecoq took six months or so” (16-17).
- A Study in Scarlet
According to our Sherlockian lecturer of Victorian Modernities, The Hound of the Baskervilles is indeed a masterpiece, and writing earlier this year about its uneasy mix of science and superstition made me aware of just how complex this short and economical novel is. Due to Conan Doyle’s masterly characterisation and novel addition of early forensics to the genre, this definitive detective has been adapted for screen more than any other fictional character … over 250 times!
Doyle’s stories are deficient only in that, as Maureen Reddy states, “women can never act as detectives themselves in a Holmesian world” (1). Enter Miss Marple (ahem, a decade after Poirot) in 1930 with Murder at the Vicarage, the “spinster stereotype” whose “lifetime of nosiness - which might also be called close observation - constitutes her special power as a detective” (Reddy 2).
Joan Hickson (above left), Julia McKenzie (below left), & Geraldine McEwan (above right) as Miss Marple
“With her white-haired, pink-cheeked and "fluffy" appearance, a visual echo of the knitting that is always in her hands, she is the most unlikely crimebuster on earth. But her peculiarly female wisdom enables her to cut to the heart of a conundrum” (Thompson).
Cosy crime’s amateur sleuths, says Katharina Vester, “[w]ith few exceptions, … solve crimes with skills that are stereotyped as feminine, such as relating to other people, listening, gossiping, community-building, and networking” (33). Such feminised knowledge, she argues, is actually transvalued as a powerful advantage “over the male police detectives … who are depicted as rational and evidence—rather than intuition-driven” (33). Though Golden Age crime novels tend to essentialise these supposedly gendered traits – intuitive women and logical men – at least instinct is positively positioned as a creative transcension of the limits of patriarchal reason and linearity i.e. Miss Marple sticks it to the man?
As far as detective fiction goes, I favour a series over a standalone, but as my obsession is in its infancy, I have much to happily read and learn in the bewilderingly large canon of classic and contemporary crime. From psychological thrillers to forensic whodunits, my trajectory has so far taken me along the scenic route of Sherlock, Poirot, Marple and Wimsey, staying clear of the Chandleresque and cleaving to the cosy. So it was straight from Sayers to (one-two skip a few) Tana French for me, whose hugely popular and brilliantly addictive Dublin Murder Squad series of six I devoured in quick succession. As Mark Lawson reviewed for The Guardian, French employs a “policy of cop rotation” (I see what he did there) whereby “the works are sequential, [but] the connections between them are unusually tangential for the genre. […] Eschewing a franchise protagonist, French grants the controlling perspective to a different detective each time.” A central character in one novel thus takes a backseat in the next, and so on. While this creates interwoven worlds and characters “layered with memories, secrets and sensitivities in the way that real people are” (Lawson), I tend to agree with an Irish Times article that argued as “a police procedural series develops, we grow less interested in procedure and more invested in the police” (“Irish Queens of Crime Fiction”). It can be jarring after investing time with one protagonist for them to disappear into the periphery of the next novel, where we're expected to bond with a new detective!
But bond we must. And worry not, both In the Woods and The Likeness, each centring a different half of the dynamic Rob and Cassie duo, were made into an RTÉ/BBC co-production in 2019 (reuniting Love/Hate’s Nidge and Tommy), if that’s your jam. My personal favourite, The Secret Place, brings two separate investigators into the seemingly safe seclusion of a South Dublin boarding school beset by murder (delicious) where detective Frank Mackey (a character at turns central and peripheral to the other novels) has personal claims to be concerned.
But I have found not only my favourite detective, (who just happens to be female and Irish) but, I’ll say it, my favourite book series. The DS Maeve Kerrigan in question currently features in ten novels, with an eleventh on the way in March 2024, (plus short stories and e-novellas published in between to appease Casey's rabid fanbase). She is “one of the most thoroughly human and convincing police officers in the fictional ranks”, says Laura Wilson for The Guardian, while Catherine Kirwan’s review of the latest instalment (The Close, published earlier this year), expresses my sentiments exactly:
“so good that it’s impossible to describe without gushing.”
A post-dissertation gift to myself from myself
So now this crime history lesson comes to an end, expect an imminent post on Jane Casey’s marvellous Maeve Kerrigan series. Run Don’t Walk. I have told everyone to read these just so I can start a very niche book club, in which we will exclusively fan ourselves with copies of The Close while discussing DI Derwent. If you know you know.
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