Detecting change: Gender and ethnicity in the detective novel

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

The full range of analytical tools required to address this supposedly formulaic genre is made apparent in an essay by Gina and Andrew Macdonald. Focussing on "ethnic detectives in popular fiction," the authors begin by proceeding through a brief history of earlier models and occurrences (differentiating between "faux" or incidental and "true" uses) and establishing three separate forms of usage ("enthusiast," "interpreter," "sociologist" (6066). That overview is preamble to analyzing the need to and difficulties behind defining the concept "ethnic" itself and an exemplification of those issues thorough specific discussions of contemporary, Native-American examples (66-78).

Model-building concerns are then followed with a general analysis of various exampies, categorized in terms of "literary consequences," of the use of ethnicity in detective fiction: for "local color," "discovery of commonalities," "conflicts," and-the longest section-"socio-political ends" (78-93). The article closes with an extensive list of nearly thirty different ethnic categories and their detectives and authors as well as an extensive bibliography. In short, the essay is a taxonomic marvel and demonstrates-as does the volume as a whole-the enormous range and diversity of primary texts and critical issues that can be assembled around just one aspect of the detective novel.

That range and diversity of argument is also engagingly demonstrated in reading across the essays, allowing us to note, for example, that the Macdonalds place Aaron Upfield's Napoleon Bonaparte series in their category of "enthusiast" and describe its representation of the "rich variety" of Australian culture (63). Michael Cohen reads Upfield somewhat differently in his essay, however, noting Upfield's "stereotyping," "silly romanticism and nonsense," and "really repulsive" portrayal of blacks (149-50). Clearly, detective fiction offers opportunity for critical exchange.

Other essays in Diversity further cross-textual discussion as well. Margaret Kinsman sees the detective novel as a site for exploring issues of female agency, the central focus of Walton' and Jones's Detective Agency. Jones herself develops a chapter of Agency for Klein's volume, while co-author Walton offers her own discussion of race, ethnicity, and identity in Diversity. The volumes likewise suggest other exchanges. It would be intriguing, for example, to consider the white, middle-class detectives from Nickerson's Web of Iniquity through the race and class lenses used by Bailey to discuss Barbara Neely's Blanche White, a detective who also happens to be a black housemaid (Diversity 186-204). These crossreferences serve nicely to suggest ongoing developments among particular arguments and specific critics.

The very wealth of materials available for discussing diversity and multiculturalism does not come without a price, of course. To some extent, a focus on diversity and detective fiction produces a specific tension. Stated in the simplest of terms, as writers of and on detective fiction vary, alter, and develop the narrative genre known as the detective novel, does there come a point at which the genre is exceeded and becomes something else entirely? Does detective fiction become more a vehicle for discussing diversity than a genre to be addressed as such? Such a question is fraught with its own critical hierarchies of value, most notably that of genre (aesthetics/poetics) over diversity (culture/politics)-an opposition that again finds voice both within criticism of the fiction and the fiction itself. But this is a genre known for (and dependent upon) a wide readership and equally wide sales. Genre expectations, with direct implications for reader consumption and hence publishing interest, are more than an idle academic question in such a situation.