Detective Fiction from Stalin to Brezhnev

In the Stalinist era in the USSR, detective fiction was actually a taboo genre. It was distinctly associated with so-called bourgeois, hostile values and was seen as a means of corrupting the petty-bourgeois strata of society. The figure of the public security officer in the literature was overshadowed with the figure of a brave Chekist (a Soviet political security officer), who waged a ruthless struggle against class enemies and other antagonistic elements, both external and internal. Instead of a policeman, there was a spy or counterintelligence officer in the arena. It is clear that such texts were propagandistic rather than literary. It was only after the death of Stalin and the fall of the regime of Lavrentiy Beria, in the mid-1950s, that the question of creating a new image of law enforcement arose. During the Khrushchev Thaw, the Soviet govern-ment tried to make this image more humane, closer to the citizens, to bridge the gap between the state and society: the police (militsiya) protects ordinary workers and peasants and does not persecute and punish them. Therefore, the authorities welcomed the first attempts to present a new hero in literature: a police officer.

It was at that time, in the 1960s, that the rise of the militsiya detective novel, the genre that became an analogue of the Western police procedural in the Soviet Union, took place. This genre, rich in documentary elements and close to an essay, was a variant of an occupational (labor-related) novel. At the same time, the Soviet militsiya novel reveals typological similarities with the Western police procedural: both depict a collective hero and, instead of a brilliant lone detective, there is an ordinary employee, part of the law enforcement system. The first book of this genre was Ivan Lazutin's novel Militsiya Sergeant (1959). Later works by Arkady Adamov, Nikolay Leonov, and Julian Semenov formed a genre pattern of the militsiya procedural story. As early as in the 1970s, such stories widely circulated and acquired their plot stereotypes, so against their background stood out the most striking examples of the genre: the novels of Arkady and Georgiy Vayner A Vertical Race (1971), A Visit to the Minotaur (1972), A Cure for Fear (1978), and The Era of Mercy (1976).

During the first two decades of his printing career, Richardson was associated with seven journals: The True Briton (1723–1724), The Plain Dealer (1724–1725), The Daily Journal (1721–1737), The Prompter (1734–1736), The Daily Gazetteer (1735–1746), The Weekly Miscellany (1733–36), and The Citizen (1739). Years before the appearance of his first work of fiction, he was already known among his fellow printers for being a gifted writer. In the January 1736 issue of the Gentleman's Magazine (p. 51), Edward Cave, the editor, observed that Richardson had “often agreeably entertain’d with Elegant Disquisitions in Prose.” Among these anonymous works were likely pieces contributed to some of these journals as well as such pamphlets as The Infidel Convicted (1731), The Oxford Methodists (1733), The Apprentice's Vade Mecum (1734), and the Seasonable Examination of the Pleas and Pretensions of the Proprietors of, and Subscribers to, Play-Houses, Erected in Defiance of the Royal License (1735).

Since anonymous publication in this period was a closely guarded secret between writers and printers, the inquisitive reader today has few opportunities to establish authorship beyond a reasonable doubt. The only recorded attribution by early commentators to identify Richardson's anonymous contributions, one to the True Briton, is found in John Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, where in a footnote he states that “it seems highly probable that the sixth [No. 6 (June 21, 1723)] was written by himself as it is much in his manner.” Although earlier Richardson scholars have dismissed this attribution, after a more thorough examination of this journal, I found grounds for suspecting that this and at least 11 other issues owe something to this printer. In any case, the political themes in letters signed A.B. in True Briton No. 9 (July 1, 1713); No. 19 (August 19, 1723); No. 24 (August 23, 1723); and No. 25 (August 26, 1723) are closely connected and appear to be written by the same person. As I will argue, the five letters in this journal signed with women's names also appear to be written by the same person, and most likely Richardson.

Introduction

In many ways, the detective novel is about what desperation drives people to do, and this conception is amplified in and through areas where adversity abounds. As a result,

It is the very insistence upon the concreteness of neighborhood borders that fuels both the narratives and character development in (Neo-)Victorian crime writing, as they directly reflect the bourgeoisie's growing anxiety over uncertain spaces and “the ‘invisibility’ of the poor” by engineering the “socio-spatial visibility” of London's social castes in and through writing (Harputlu 2016, 41). And, in order to do this, they must build upon the actual sociopolitical cartographic efforts of the mid to late nineteenth century.

Charles Booth's Poverty Map (1889) printed as twelve sheets in the Map Descriptive of London Poverty in 1898–1899 (Figs. 1 and 3) provides the most important visual reference for the socioeconomic breakdown of Victorian

London's various districts. As Zeynep Harputlu notes in “Mapping Poverty in Late-Victorian Fiction”:

Booth's meticulous detailing of the city based on economic activity further marginalizes the poor (even though that was not his aim) and thus provides a convenient backdrop for (Neo-)Victorian literature, which undoubtedly thrives at the intersection of the perceived borders of poverty and the unseen deeds of those crossing between said boundaries.

Introduction

When Hexter from Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140 talks about a novel he has written, he describes it as “mostly a detective novel, I guess you’d say, or an adventure novel where it's just one damn thing after another” (Robinson 2017, 392). One of the pitfalls in emulating traditional action-packed noir and hardboiled narratives, both subgenres of crime fiction, is that one can run into the problem of reducing the work to a pure thriller. Consequently, a pure thriller narrative, which can include psychological, action, and crime thrillers, might make it difficult to effectively address societal, political, and other issues. Rather than writing another pure dystopic, science fiction thriller, Robinson is more interested in coupling noir/hardboiled1 and cli-fi genres to comment on environmental degradation because, as he argues in the afterword of Green Planets, “it's only when you shrink the novel to the thriller that you run into problems in representing ordinary realities” (Canavan and Robinson 2014, 245).

In this chapter, I examine the relationship of New York 2140 with traditional hardboiled noir texts of the 1920s–1940s by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Specifically, I examine the relationship between the hardboiled and Anglo-hypermasculine noir narratives of early twentieth-century America and the rhizomatic dystopian and utopian ecology of New York 2140. Although noir has an uncanny capacity to draw the reader's attention to the scenic and the setting of our environment, it does so in limited ways. While the landscape in classic noir texts remains secondary to the plot and action, New York 2140 places the landscape at the heart of the narrative in order to raise awareness of climate change. In short, New York 2140 reenvisions conventions of violence, crime/criminals, and victims found in noir narratives to elicit action from readers against environmental degradation.

In New York 2140, Robinson depicts a near future of the planet suffering from sea level rise due to a warming climate. Unique to this novel is the fusion of dystopian and optimist outlooks on our future. In this novel, New York City is the new Venice, canals replace streets and we read about how people adapt to these changes.

The Sierra Leone mining industry is over 90 years old, so there is a historical legacy of environmental deterioration in places. Mining inherently generates large volumes of waste and impacts the natural environment physically, chemically, and biologically. Unprotected mineral residue stockpiles pollute the environment and are potentially hazardous. Water systems are impacted by damming, discharge of pollutants into watercourses, sedimentation, seepage of contaminants into groundwater, and storm runoff from waste rock and tailings piles. There is more qualitative data to support this and some specific studies have quantified environmental change. Satellite imagery, tailings piles, polluted water bodies, flooding, siltation in streams and rivers, potholes, and waterborne diseases such as bilharzia, onchocerciasis, or “river blindness” and schistosomiasis (Worley Parsons Ltd. 2010).

ESHIA are standard requirements for implementing mining projects in Sierra Leone, today. Environmental laws mandate continuous monitoring for environmental and health impacts in populations around mine sites, but this is not routinely done. The early mining industry and colonial government were primarily concerned about how poor environmental management might impact economic efficiency and supply to the mineral commodity chain. The Mines Department underscored that:

Methods of mineral extraction and processing, data from exploratory surveys, geology, geomorphology, weathering, and erosion can indicate areas where potentially hazardous materials may be present in the environment. The reports of the SLGS, mining company ESHIA reports, research studies, and historical narratives on the mining industry are useful sources of information, also. There are naturally occurring contaminants associated with minerals present in the environment that are released and concentrated by extractive methods.

Writings of the late Sierra Leonean scholar of African theology, Harry Sawyerr, God: Ancestor or Creator? (1970) and The Practice of Presence (1968) discuss God in traditional West African religion. He is the supreme being, creator, omnipotent, the Great Ancestor, and “a living God who can do for human beings what nobody else can” (Sawyerr 1970, 4). In Sierra Leone, the Mende calls him Ngewo, the Kono, Yataa and the Temne, Kurumasaba. Ancestral spirits are intermediaries between God and humans as ancestors remain an integral part of the family, clan, and ethnic group. There is an intricate relationship between spirituality and nature. Ceremonies involving the ancestors occur at sacred places such as forests, bushes, trees, water bodies, caves, stones, and shrines generally categorized as the sacred bush. In the traditional worldview, it is sacrilegious to violate revered places, and trees in the sacred bush should not be cut down. In precolonial times, that sacrilege was punishable by death. Today, arbitrators might levy heavy fines on the guilty (Fenton 1948). A major area of conf lict between communities and mining companies is the desecration and/or destruction of such places. Many sites of religious significance to landlordindigene communities in Sierra Leone have been lost to mining. This loss continues as extraction expands in the country. I document some examples of lost sites that are also of anthropological interest. I also discuss how government policies and laws address the sacred bush and other cultural heritage matters.

Christian missionaries observed strong religious beliefs, spirituality, and attachments to sacred places of worship among Sierra Leoneans. These proselytizers and others did not fully understand the underpinning worldview such as the important role of ancestors and responsibilities to future generations. Rituals at sacred sites were viewed as primitive, superstition, or witchcraft that ideally should be eradicated.

Introduction

With When Death Comes Stealing, African American writer Valerie Wilson Wesley introduced her protagonist Tamara Hayle in 1994 and has since penned eight novels featuring the character. A single mother, Hayle is a Black woman, who used to work as a cop with the Belvington Heights police department,1 a space dominated by White men, but owing to her teenage son Jamal's racial victimization by her coworkers, she resigns from her job and during the course of the novels runs a private investigation firm, Hayle Investigative Services, Inc. Primarily set in Newark (except for her third novel, Where Evil Sleeps (1996), which is set in Jamaica), the novels are narrated in the first person, and are written from the perspective of a Black woman2 (Soitos 1996, 234), and Hayle examines the lives of African Americans in Newark, New Jersey, in the way Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins examines African American lives in Los Angeles. As such, Wesley's novels provide readers with what Astrid Erll refers to as “both a first- and a second-order observation” which gives “us the illusion of glimpsing [a] past” (in this case experiential), while simultaneously reflecting upon the “very processes of representation” (2008, 391). This is evident, as Hayle is proud of her city and its cultural heritage and, as critic John Gruesser has argued, both Hayle and the city of Newark are “overlooked and underestimated” by the dominant White males, and yet they survive. Hence, Hayle can be viewed as a symbol for the city (Gruesser 2005a, 89). Additionally, the novels contribute to the cultural memory of a traumatic past (c.f. Erll 2012, 239) as they capture the aftermath of the racial riots of 1967, which shaped the current sociopolitical reality of the city of Newark, and primarily deal with Hayle's lived experience as she tries to professionally confront the world of crime while forging a decent life for herself and her son.

Secondary readings reveal a little more about Wesley and her literary creation. For instance, about the characterization of Hayle, in an interview with John Gruesser, Wesley herself states, “I wanted to create a character who was a very empowered, very smart, savvy professional private detective” (Gruesser 2005b, 171).

Introduction

William Shakespeare is one of the few authors in the world who have gained the privilege of beginning their work by means of a question when this is too often considered a testament to bad style. His tragedy Macbeth (c. 1606) opens with the first witch asking, “When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lighting, or in rain?” instigating a play which continuously poses new questions, rather than presenting a clear-cut moral compass that leads its audience to the road of individual redemption. This opening question symbolizes the omnipresence of paradoxes which infiltrate the entirety of the play, in this case, that neither of the tempestuous phenomena to which the witch alludes here would normally appear in complete isolation. Right from the outset, Shakespeare denies any certainties in the dramatic world of Macbeth. Elena Ciobanu notably writes that

However, rather than framing this ambiguity as logical waste, it also carries with it its own counterpart, namely a productive understanding of early modern mentalities and the move from the Middle Ages to the early modern age (cf. Gaskill 2000). Following Malcom Gaskill's argument that one should refrain from capturing the ideas of the early modern mind statically, as if ideas and mentalities were inactive, and his alternative is turning toward investigating “interactions between discourses and historical actors participating in them” (2000, 16), this chapter explores how the conceptual flexibility of the early modern mentalities is used by Jo Nesbø's 2018 adaptation Macbeth to rewrite Shakespeare's tragedy into a twenty-first-century tale of crime, drugs, and corruption. The notion of “cultural memory,” as used by Astrid Erll, offers itself here well to identify the historical and conceptual contexts which are subsequently referred to by the novel, that is national, temporal, or genre boundaries, since cultural memory studies as a field of research defines itself “by the transcending of boundaries” (Erll 2008, 4).

In this book, l demonstrate that the low-level mining area conflicts of sub- Saharan African countries, such as Sierra Leone, and their influences on mineral policy, law, and development fundamentally stem from cultural conundrums. Cultural differences in the conceptualization of land rights, and land use and management between the state and the customary authority are inherent in mineral commodity chains causing conflicts. I emphasize that the customary landlord–stranger institution and its cultural underpinnings are central to an understanding of mining conflicts in Sierra Leone. I examine how the state addresses cultural differences in mining, and land governance, more generally. The book is a contribution to the world system research on culture in commodity chains, the literature on African mining conflicts, and the anthropology and social and environmental mining history of Sierra Leone.

Sierra Leone is located on the west coast of Africa with a land area of about 72,000 square kilometers, about the size of Ireland. The country is bordered by Guinea to the north and Liberia to the south. Politically it is divided into 5 provinces, 16 districts, and 190 chiefdoms (Figures 1.1–1.3). Under British colonial rule that ended in 1961, the area comprised The Colony (now Western Area) and the Protectorate. Sierra Leone became a Republic in 1971. The population is approximately 8.5 million made up of several ethnic groups (Temne, Mende, Limba, Kono, Korankoh, Fullah, Mandingo, Loko, Sherbro, Susu, Kissi, Krim, Vai, and Yalunka) and Krio (Creole) descendants of freed slaves resettled in Freetown in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. Women make up 51 percent of the population. Around 44 percent of the population lives in urban areas.

Introduction

Images of Black people have always been integral parts of the American popular imagination. Literature, song, drama, and other media from the eighteenth century and into the present have widely reproduced and distrib-uted an American popular image of Black identity. This image exists in a world of popular culture, an uncertain space that cultural theorist Stuart Hall describes as a “contradictory space […] of strategic contestation” where group and individual identities are shaped and disputed (Hall 1996, 470). In a similar fashion, Astrid Erll describes how contested popular spaces are influenced by a broad “media of cultural memory” that can “generate and mold images of the past which will be retained by whole generations” (2008, 389). For both of these theorists, popular culture and media are not transparent conveyors of meaning but are instead makers of meaning that shape our perceptions of individuals and communities; the image of Blackness created in American popular culture is both an indicator and influencer of real lived Black experiences. In texts that engage with the unseen structures associated with popular concepts of Black identity, crime imagery often brings this contest of meaning to the surface; in many popular American texts from the slave era through the present, there is a persistent association of Blackness with images of crime and criminality, an association often used to justify the enslavement, incarceration, and impoverishment of Black communities (Fig. 4.1). The development of Black crime fiction as a literary genre in the United States is of note, therefore, because of the long history and influence of explicitly anti-Black popular culture texts that associated images of Black people with images of criminality. How can crime fiction narratives by Black authors that depend upon and emphasize the retelling of criminal acts add to or transform this Black popular image? How can crime fiction narratives that rely upon generic similarity, simultaneously resist generic tendencies toward stereotype?

The recent work of crime novelist Attica Locke provides some compelling answers to these questions. Two of her novels, Black Water Rising (2009) and Pleasantville (2015), both enliven and develop a contemporary discourse on crime writing and Black experience that begins at the start of the twentieth century.

Introduction

As the capital of the British Empire in India, Calcutta (Figure 6.1) in the nineteenth century was a bustling metropolis that housed important administrative, commercial, and cultural centers of the colonial government. However, all was not well in this “city of palaces.” Contemporary accounts in both English and Bengali testify to the ubiquity of crime and illegal activities in the city. Criminals negotiated the space of the city and its infrastructure in novel ways, giving rise to heterogeneities that challenged the logic of the per-fectly organized, disciplined city that the colonial administration wanted to approximate. There was an insidious battle for the space of the colonial city, and the stakeholders—the victims, the criminals, the police, and the detectives—were all implicated.

In the history of Calcutta, the year 1868 would be noteworthy for a few reasons. It was the year when the colonial government brought into force the Contagious Diseases Act (CDA). Under this law, sex workers were expected to get registered with the colonial government on the one hand and undergo compulsory checkups for venereal diseases on the other. The same year saw the inauguration of the detective department of the Calcutta Police. These two interventions on the part of the colonial government exemplified a con-solidation of the stranglehold of colonial discipline over urban space. As such, they facilitated greater surveillance and control over the subject population. Though the CDA was repealed in 1888 after protracted opposition from several social groups, the detective department continued to flourish. Simultaneously, the late nineteenth century witnessed the inception of detective fiction in Bengali. These were anticipated by semi-autobiographical accounts penned by both European and Indian employees of the police. A close analysis of some of these texts reveals fascinating intersections and interactions between urban space, colonial discipline, and the act of detection.

This chapter attempts a spatial analysis of some of these texts, more specifically, the semi-autobiographical accounts penned by two employees of the detective department of Calcutta Police. Its focus lies in the production of what Henri Lefebvre calls social space and its production through various social processes.

Introduction

Agatha Christie's work has traditionally been regarded as emblematic of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, which covers the twenty or so years between the two world wars. Her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published in 1920, and her most famous works—The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), Murder on the Orient Express (1934), Death on the Nile (1937)—are products of this period as well. This timeframe is aptly referred to as the Golden Age because the most widely read and influential novels of Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, John Dickson Carr, S. S. Van Dine, and Marjorie Allingham were written at the time as well. Yet to limit Christie's achievement to the years between the two world wars is a failure to acknowledge the fact that Christie, as well as several other Golden Age authors, continued to produce major work after 1940. In Christie's case, she continued to write until the mid-1970s, and the later books comment on the changing mores and values of the times, most interestingly those associated with the young generation of the mid and late nineteen sixties. As a result, analyzing these late novels demonstrates that the label “Golden Age” and the years 1920–1940 as its time period are both “uncertain spaces” that need to be qualified by attention to the entire span of Christie's career.

What I will discuss here primarily are some of the novels she published between 1965 and 1970, books in which she depicted the youth culture of those turbulent years: the rebelliousness, the rejection of authority, the widespread bohemianism that involved drugs and the relaxation of sexual standards. This is a world far removed from the country estates or middle-class tourist life she commonly treated in the past, and her vision of the world is darker, with the books taking on their own noirish sensibility. Five books from this period—At Bertram's Hotel (1965), Third Girl (1966), Endless Night (1967), Hallowe’en Party (1969), and Passenger to Frankfurt (1970)—include references to the new youth culture that was exploding in the Western world.

Introduction

True crime and crime fiction are sibling rivals in an increasingly crowded, and often increasingly profitable, publishing market that lures writers of crime-focused material with the idea that crime might pay after all. Publishers also look to crime works for profits and publicity. Readers consume the stories of criminals and their victims for numerous reasons, including satisfying voyeuristic interests of prurience, indulging in Schadenfreude in criminal activities, learning about crime in their communities, and the desire to solve the ultimate puzzle: murder.

Both true crime and crime fiction writing engage with the subject of the malefactor, usually the murderer. Both types of writing have long histories, and both have enjoyed widespread popularity through an ability to regularly update a tried and tested storytelling formula in response to changing reader expectations as well as changing social views on crime and punishment. Both, too, routinely feature on nonfiction and fiction lists of bestselling titles.

These two writing traditions obviously share a genealogical lineage; yet a clear segregation has been developed by writers, publishers, and consumers. This is most overtly seen in labeling practices and in how these works are traditionally separated in bookstores and in libraries.

True crime and crime fiction are generally associated by booksellers and librarians through carefully planned geographical proximities that allow people—be they browsers, buyers, or borrowers—to transition easily from one section to another. Occasionally, neat rows of shelving face each other in a primitive fact versus fiction standoff, almost daring readers to make a choice and commit to either those texts that assert the truth and offer information or those volumes that make no such claims to the real and seek, primarily, to entertain. Clear signage denotes the subject matter of “crime” but while true crime and crime fiction texts, as argued here, are always related, with the boundaries between them often becoming distorted, these works are rarely fully integrated under a single banner of “crime writing.”

This chapter unpacks the liminal space between true crime and crime fiction, looking at how often only a few more facts or a few more fictions can be required for a writer to realign their work, to deliberately remove one crime writing label and effortlessly apply the other.

In the colonial era, government geologists and mining engineers, and professionals and management at mining companies were predominantly Caucasian while Africans worked as laborers. The permanent mining enclave today is more racially and ethnically diverse, not a melting pot but rather a bubbling cauldron. Traditional structures wrestle with new hierarchical arrangements that support capital-intensive and technologically advanced extractive operations. Top management of foreign companies is typically expatriate, largely Caucasian, but today, including Chinese. Managers make up a small percentage of the workforce. Expatriate employees are hired under a different and higher salary scale than well-qualified Sierra Leonean or other African counterparts for equal or greater work. These spaces are plagued by issues like racial and class discrimination, ethnic strife, gender marginalization, and related unrest.

During the early years of mining in Sierra Leone, there was an influx of job seekers. An early photograph taken by Fowler-Lunn (1938, 128–129) in 1931 at Makong showed a six a.m. roll call with close to 300 people seeking employment as labor for the day. Figure 6.1 similarly shows labor outside the Sierra Rutile Plant Site seeking work in 2005. By 1963, Sierra Leone had the highest percentage of young men, out of the total male population giving up farming for mine employment compared to other West African mining economies. The SLDC employed about 5,000 men in 1931 at the iron ore mine at Marampa. When the Mining Wages Board of Sierra Leone introduced new wage policies in 1945 under the Wages Board Ordinance and as the company adopted labor-saving techniques, it gradually reduced its wage labor workforce. The numbers decreased from 4,195 in 1940 to 2,692 in 1960 and to 2,500 in 1975 (Clark 1966; Saylors 1967). This naturally affected workers now dependent on a new livelihood and their families. Tension occurred in mineworker households because the pay did not cover the many responsibilities.