Detecting change: Gender and ethnicity in the detective novel

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Summer 2000 by Catano, James V

KATHLEEN GREGORY KLEIN, ed. Diversity and Detective Fiction (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999), pp. 262, cloth, $51.95, paper, $25.95.

PRISCILLA L WALTON AND MANNA JONEs. Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the HardBoiled Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 328, cloth, $45.00, paper, $16.95.

CATHERINE ROSS NICKERSON. The Web of Iniquity: Early Detective Fiction by American Women (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 296, cloth, $49.95, paper, $17.95.

Thanks to texts such as Julian Symons's classic Bloody Murder: From the Detective Novel to the Crime Story: A History (1972), the detective genre is heir to a well-known historical progression that begins with Poe, moves through the excessively hothouse atmosphere (in the American mind) of British cozies, and culminates in the "corrective" (again to the American mind) of the hard-boiled tradition popularized by Hammett, Chandler, and Hollywood. Symons has updated his text over the years to accommodate changes in the genre. But the challenge to the British "rules of mystery fiction" that he portrayed in terms of American writers found such ready acceptance that it has itself become an accepted part of the tradition. Now that tradition is being challenged by new variations, developments, and outright rejections of the popular Poe-to-Chandler history.

Anyone interested in the detective novel and its newly disputed tradition could do a lot worse than begin with the three texts reviewed here. In combination, they not only rework the traditional genre history, with its early beginnings in the middle of the nineteenth century, but they also provide insight into where the tradition is likely to be headed in the foreseeable future. Describing the rule-bound frame of detective fiction as a genre nevertheless capable of promoting innovation and variation is the ultimate project of each of these works.

But these volumes are interested in more than fitting other works into the traditional taxonomy. It is true that they still tend to concentrate on the American school, with Englishspeaking authors from other continents included, most notably, in Klein. Nevertheless, in the overall landscape portrayed here, the commonly accepted tradition comes to be seen as an admittedly strong current in a much more complex river running from Nickerson's mideighteenth-century female domestic-gothic tradition of detective narratives to Klein et al.'s portrayal of our own turn-of-the-twenty-first-century's explosion in figures and formats.

For all of these works, the most visible challenges to the genre come from within. Today, a plethora of new detectives operate according to recognizable rules gleaned mainly from the hard-boiled genre while offering direct variations and challenges to the very form itself. Most notable (and most often noted) are a trio of female detective writers and their female private eyes: Marcia Muller (Sharon McCone), Sarah Paretsky (V.I. Warshawski), and Sue Grafton (Kinsey Millhone), along with other lesser-known figures such as Linda Barnes, Liza Cody, and Sandra Scoppetone.

Displaying the female dick as the most visible challenge to an admittedly phallocentric tradition sets up a too-easy and too-absolute binary model, however, as many of these writers suggest. Myriad alternatives to the current tradition are to be found in terms of any number of variables and variations: racial, ethnic, gay; detective, insurance investigator, medical examiner. It is less a question of finding new and interesting alterations and more a question of where to start in such a burgeoning field.

At least part of the job of Kathleen Klein's Diversity and Detective Fiction is to provide a much-needed road map for general readers, pulp aficionados, and teachers. Her declared motive in assembling the collection is "the increasing responsibility of educational institutions to address America's multicultural society and the often overlooked opportunities present in the cultural contexts of detective fiction" (2). Primary emphasis, then, is not on the detective novel per se, but on demonstrating and developing concerns regarding diversity and multiculturalism, and to do so by offering the detective novel as an exemplary source for such discussion.

The collected essays support Klein's claims rather well. Structured around a set of shared concerns broadly summarized here as women's voice and agency, race and racism, ethnicity, and (lightly) class, the essays readily demonstrate the use of these issues by a wide variety of authors not only for plot or character development, but as components within the narrative's thematic arguments as well-often as a direct response to racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and other such tendencies common within the earlier days of the tradition. The "new" detective novel produces a range of materials intended to counter past ills, and these essays on them admirably demonstrate the resulting complexities and ensuing interpretive requirements placed on students and theorists of the genre.