English Studies Forum

The Forum Reviews

The Epistemological Detective

Lawrence Frank. Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence: The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle. Palgrave, 2003. 249 pp. £45.

By Neil McCaw, King Alfred’s College

            The espoused objective of this new critical work is to view the detective fictions of Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, and Arthur Conan Doyle as “participating in the critique of those traditional doctrines and a prevailing common sense that [John Stuart] Mill challenged in ‘The Spirit of the Age’” (3). Frank intends to situate these writers in terms of an alternative, emergent worldview, one that was “secular and naturalistic in opposition to nineteenth-century scriptural liberalism, Natural Theology, and the vestiges of an Enlightenment deism that were often conservative in their political perspectives” (3). In this context, the genre of detective fiction is seen in itself as new, in terms of both content and ideology, standing in opposition to a value system that in key ways was passing into historical memory. The genre is implicated as at the forefront of contemporaneous responses to modern Victorian controversies, and detective writers themselves identified as radicals, asking detailed and profound questions about the fundamentals of nineteenth-century society. In particular, Frank argues, writers of detective fiction focused upon new epistemological, as well as narratological issues, being influenced as they were by emergent disciplines of philology, geology, paleontology, archaeology, and evolutionary biology.

            Frank makes it clear from the outset that his reading of detective fiction runs contrary to previous critical studies of the genre, and he rejects explicitly the theses of Stephen Knight [Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction (1980)], Dennis Porter [The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction (1981)], D. A. Miller [The Novel and Police (1988)], and Ronald R. Thomas [Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science (1999)]. Their apparently new-historicist leanings are blamed for an overarching tendency to downplay the radical significances of detective fiction, reinforcing the idea of the genre as fundamentally conservative. Frank refuses to accept what he sees as this inherited critical orthodoxy, and wishes to highlight alternative critical and cultural contexts, arguing that detective fiction is more epistemologically unstable than other critics have led us to believe: “in excavating the past, the detective encounters an infinite regress without a point of origin: there is no firm grounding for any hypothesis” (26).

            To give credit where it is due, the analysis offered in this study is clear, strong, and well supported by evidence. Frank writes in a perceptive and erudite fashion. He has much to say, and for the most part he is interesting and concise. The problem, almost inevitably perhaps, is that much of what he has to say feels rather familiar. By choosing to re-walk such well-trodden paths as Poe, Dickens, and Conan Doyle, there is often very little room to manoeuvre and achieve a critical position that is not almost inescapably related to much that has been said before. Thus we have an interesting but at times completely unremarkable examination of “The Murders in the Rüe Morgue” – even when Frank works hard to insert the relevance of alternative historiographies (Lyell, Nichol, Newton, Buckland, Whewell etc.) he often ends up making points that have been made before. It is a short story that has been so over-analysed, as the so-called first-case of detective fiction, that one must doubt whether there is anything new that can be said. As if to highlight this, the chapter on “The Gold Bug” instantly feels fresher and more critically groundbreaking, even though it utilises the same frame of reference (natural history, geology, evolutionary theory, cosmology, etc.) as the previous chapter. In the mere fact of examining a less critically cultivated work, the criticism feels more incisive, and the conclusions more sharp.

What is to be welcomed is Frank’s insistence on trying to achieve a new critical position, even when some of his assertions feel a little eccentric. In the opening chapter on Dickens, for instance, it is announced (with little hint of irony) that: “it may not be immediately apparent that Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852-3), like Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rüe Morgue” (1841), should be read within the context of ongoing controversies over the nebular hypothesis” (71). Indeed ! Unfortunately, the discussion that follows, though at times interesting and well researched, is highly speculative in terms of its relation to Dickens’s novel. There is too much of the “Dickens may well have known [my italics]” type of thing, and (for me) not enough specific textual detail to hold the argument together. In the case of such a notoriously inconsistent reader as Dickens, whose sources often followed no discernible pattern and whose research varied so widely, it would have been helpful to make more explicit and sustainable links between novels and textual influences, rather than falling back onto a more general Bakhtinian thesis about the inevitable and indiscernible overlapping of intellectual discourses which means that even if we have absolutely no evidence whatsoever of someone reading a particular text we can still make a link at a discursive level. Thus everyone has read everything and the web of allusion is infinitely wide and all-encompassing. It is certainly fair comment to point to Bleak House as being intertextually dense (even if Dickens himself didn’t appreciate quite how much), but whether that provides for an ultimate degree of latitude in terms of intertextual referencing I remain unconvinced.

            The first chapter on Conan Doyle, focusing on The Sign of Four, suffers from similar awkwardness. The novella is read in relation (rather narrowly, I feel) to Winwood Reade’s The Martyrdom of Man (1872) and then Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). The discussion offers insight, yet the balance is significantly away from the primary text, which becomes lost in the wealth of cultural cross-referencing and allusion. This is all the more strange for the contrast it strikes with the second and third Conan Doyle chapters, discussing The Hound of the Baskervilles, which are far more focused upon the primary text itself. The reading is insightful and impressive, and the scientific discourses Frank accesses are used to supplement the readings of the novella, rather than the other way around. The discussion benefits from this, and this is perhaps the most effective section of the book as a whole. Much of what is said offers a valuable addition to the canon of Sherlock Holmes scholarship.

The study finishes with a statement that “The Hound of the Baskervilles offers its own check to the bent of certain narratives that celebrate the triumph of the modern” (206). Thus “the year is waning, along with the orthodoxies that once sustained men and women in the nineteenth century” (p206). This is a manifestation of the opening claim that the study intends to strike a new note in the criticism of detective fiction, seeking to read familiar texts in a new light. This is what makes this is an interesting study. It offers in places an impressive contribution to the wealth of criticism on the detective genre. At the same time, for me, it rather overstates its case. Firstly, the differences between its espoused critical position and the supposed orthodoxy it rejects are often hardly visible to reading eye, comparisons often as apparent as contrasts. Secondly, the distinctness and originality of the study is inhibited by subject matter that is, at times, overly familiar. However strong the analysis, Frank never breaks wholly new ground. Such a comfortable selection of primary texts makes it almost impossible to say radically new things, regardless of the supposedly alternative cultural/intellectual focus. Hence the discussion is too often framed by things that have been said and heard before, and however interesting these things may still be, the reader is left wanting a little more.