Most Urban Blues Urban Blues
URBAN
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BLUES:
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DETECTIVE
FICTION
M E T R O P O L I TA N
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SUBLIME
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I begin with some numbers. In 1656 the largest city in western
Europe was Naples, with 360,000 inhabitants; but an outbreak of
plague that year devastated the city, reducing its population to
about half that number, and it did not regain the same level until a
century later. At that time, in the mid-eighteenth century, London
was approximately twice that size, with 700,000 inhabitants, and
by 1801 London had become the first European city to reach the
level of about 1 million inhabitants that Rome had attained in the
first and second centuries a.d., at the height of its power, before
dwindling to a twentieth of that size in the Middle Ages. Throughout the nineteenth century London’s population expanded rapidly:
by 1841 it had doubled to almost 2 million; forty years later, by
1881, it had doubled again to almost 4 million. Paris’s development
began from a smaller starting point but expanded no less rapidly.
In 1801 it was half the size of London, with 500,000 inhabitants. By
1871 this figure had almost quadrupled to 1.8 million. Only eight
years later, in 1879, it had reached 2.2 million, and by the end of
the century Paris had more than 2.5 million inhabitants.
Numbers never speak for themselves – they must be subjected
to interpretation if they are to yield their secrets – but here the
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work of interpretation is easy and the numbers are readily loquacious. They indicate that one aspect of the process of modernization undergone by European societies since the beginning of
the nineteenth century has been a rapid and thorough urbanization. Within a few short generations, Europe was transformed
from a largely rural society in which most people lived in small
villages or towns into an increasingly industrial and metropolitan
society in which more and more people lived in a single capital
city. The increase in population in all major European cities during the nineteenth century is far too rapid and drastic to be explicable solely in terms of redistricting patterns or of local birth rates,
especially taking into account the frequency of infant dysentery
and the regular outbreaks of cholera, influenza, and other diseases
that killed millions of people well into the twentieth century.
Rather, it must have been due in large measure to the influx into
the city of young people and families in search of new economic
opportunities. Throughout Europe, beginning around 1800, millions abandoned the countryside in which their families had often
lived for centuries, pursuing the same or closely related occupations generation after generation, and they came to the big city.
What did they find there? Early descriptions, and not only early
ones, in novels, letters, diaries, and newspaper accounts, suggest the
mixture of astonishment and fear with which those who came to
the new cities experienced their enormous new dimensions, the
unheard-of numbers and speed and noise. In the traditional village, strangers had been an unusual phenomenon, immediately
recognizable as such and usually exposed to suspicion and interrogation; in the modern metropolis, people found themselves surrounded constantly by strangers, on the teeming streets and in the
crowded apartment houses, at work and in the shops and trams and
subways. In the village, life had been largely predictable, and surprises rarely strayed beyond a narrow range; in the metropolis, unexpected change became the only rule, and whole industries were
invented that devoted themselves to creating and marketing various forms of astonishment. In the village, employment patterns
had tended to be passed down within families and small groups of
families (many traditional European family names are derived
from hereditary occupations: Smith, Schmidt, Lefèvre, Fabbri); in
the metropolis, people were on their own, elbowing their way into
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new professions, trying to get ahead of their rivals by contacts,
shrewdness, and any other available means. Large, threatening,
seemingly incomprehensible, a source of danger at least as much as
of salvation, the nineteenth-century big city presented itself to its
fascinated and anxious spectator-participants as what we may term
the metropolitan sublime, no less disquieting than the natural
sublime that had so fascinated the eighteenth century.
Beyond the staggeringly inhuman vastness of the natural sublime, the Enlightenment had always sensed the mystery of God’s
power; and even through the artistic sublime that formed its civilized counterpart, the voice that seemed to speak was not merely
human but was inspired and hence authorized by a transcendent
instance. In this way the very awesomeness of the sublime could
come to seem consoling in the eighteenth century: we ourselves
might not fully understand the divine plan that it concealed, and
as individuals we might even end up being crushed by it, but we
could not doubt for a moment that there was indeed such a plan
and that what it intended was our good. But what were the citydwellers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to do with the
new Tower of Babel that confronted them as the metropolitan
sublime? The great cities were too secular, too human, too profane
in all ways for their inhabitants to be able to conceive of them on
the model of divine sublimity; yet to abandon the attempt to
understand them altogether would mean to succumb to a potentially devastating conceptual and ethical nihilism. So the search
for mystery continued: yet now the mysteries that could be sought
after were no longer divine, transcendent, and benevolent but
human, concealed – and therefore inevitably evil. And if the natural sublime could yield consolation even when it was not fully
understood (for are not the ways of God ultimately hidden even to
the pious soul?), the metropolitan sublime could console its anxious victims only if, and to the degree that, they could penetrate
and understand it.
Life in the city was an epistemological adventure, exciting but
risky – and it could become a matter of life and death.
The title of Eugène Sue’s Mysteries of Paris (1842–43), one of the
great publishing successes of the nineteenth century, already indiY
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cates as much. Under the surface of Paris lie hidden vast subterranean depths to which only the expert eye of the author has full
access. Sue’s Paris is a city not of one big divine mystery (his novel
is not entitled The Mystery of Paris) but of countless small and
all-too-human ones. Every character in it has a secret, a past he or
she is anxious to conceal, an identity based on either a falsehood or
a crime or, usually, both. Even Rodolphe, the humorlessly moralistic protagonist, has been driven into the role of judge and executioner by his guilty conscience for his youthful sins. All the characters are linked by webs of association, complicity, and passion of
which they themselves are often unaware. In the end the frustration of not only some of the most evil designs but also of almost all
of Rodolphe’s noble projects leaves the reader who stands outside
the fiction with a sense of the inescapable tragedy of the social
spiderweb in which all the figures are helplessly trapped and with
the impression that he and the author alone recognize clearly its
true nature – a consolation denied everyone within its fictional
world. The characters cannot escape the past and themselves, and
often the discovery of the hidden truth has lethal consequences.
Rodolphe’s attempt to undo the past goes aground on the inability of his rediscovered daughter, Fleur-de-Marie, to forget that
she was once a prostitute, for her guilty conscience drives her
first into a cloister and then to her death. But we as readers
thereby learn a cautionary wisdom: that in Sue’s Paris as in our
own there is a mortal secret concealed at the heart of everyone and
that every concealment is inexorably punished by an eventual
revelation.
In Sue, that secret almost always involves a death or a falsehood
or both, and it exerts a fascination which under certain circumstances can take on an irresistibly erotic dimension. This is also
one of the lessons of Charles Baudelaire’s great sonnet ‘‘À une
passante’’ (‘‘To a Woman Passing By’’) published just fifteen years
after Sue’s novel:
La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait.
Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse,
Une femme passa, d’une main fastueuse
Soulevant, balançant le feston et l’ourlet;
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Agile et noble, avec sa jambe de statue.
Moi, je buvais, crispé comme un extravagant,
Dans son œil, ciel livide où germe l’ouragan,
La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue.
Un éclair . . . puis la nuit! – Fugitive beauté
Dont le regard m’a fait soudainement renaître,
Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l’éternité?
Ailleurs, bien loin d’ici! trop tard! jamais peut-être!
Car j’ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais,
O toi que j’eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais!
[The deafening street around me roared.
Long, slender, in full mourning, majestic grief,
A woman passed by, with an ostentatious hand
Raising, swinging her festoon and hem;
Agile and noble, with a statue’s leg.
As for me, contorted like someone extravagant, I drank
In her eye, a livid sky where the hurricane germinates,
The sweetness that fascinates and the pleasure that kills.
A lightning flash . . . then the night! – Fleeting beauty
Whose glance made me suddenly be reborn,
Will I never see you again except in eternity?
Somewhere else, very far from here! Too late! Perhaps never!
For I do not know where you fled, you do not know where I
am going,
O you whom I would have loved, o you who knew it!]
An encounter of this sort, between a man and a woman apparently linked only by the merest chance that both happen to be
walking on the same sidewalk at the same moment, is inconceivable in a traditional village – where, to begin, it would be out of
the question that the speaker could have no idea who the woman
was and whether they would meet again. Only in the teeming
metropolis can two strangers encounter, or almost encounter, each
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other in this way. Against the loud and undi√erentiated background of the crowded street, the woman appears in isolated
splendor almost as a divine epiphany: her own Apollonian grace
and solemnity turn the poet who encounters her into the opposite,
a Dionysian maenad, a bacchant who drinks a superhuman and
deadly inspiration from her celestial eyes. She is certainly a figure
of the poetic Muse who inspires literary fictions (romantic and
Romantic ones), such as, for example, this very poem, a carefully
constructed and memorable verbal artifact that opposes yet also
captures the inarticulate and ephemeral screams of the modern
urban street. Unsurprisingly, Baudelaire interprets her in radically
erotic terms as well, in a tradition of male poets and their female
Muses that goes back at least to the Latin elegists – ‘‘You ask me
whence I write so many love poems, / Whence my book comes
softly to the lips. / It is not Calliope, not Apollo who sings them for
me. / My girlfriend herself creates my poetic talent’’ (Propertius
2.1.1–4).
But most striking in the present connection is that the poet is
above all fascinated by the fact that the unknown woman is in
mourning: we hear that she is tall and thin, that she has eyes and
hands and legs, but otherwise we learn nothing about her except
that she is ‘‘in full mourning, majestic grief.’’ Whom is she mourning? Who has died? What was their relation? What happened to
the dead woman or (far likelier, we presume) man? Was the death
entirely natural? Indeed, can we be quite certain that she does not
have the dead person on her conscience? Might she have killed
him herself? If so, how and why? Was it with pleasure, as the poet
hopes she will do for him? We shall never solve these mysteries.
But that does not matter. What counts is that this woman is completely oriented toward a mortal past that she can never forget and
we can never learn, that she conceals a dark secret within her that
poisons her present: for this not only opens up a space in her
imagined life for the poet but also makes her the perfect match for
him. Her tall, dark, and anonymous shape and her slow and statuary grace turn her into a sublime figure, and also into a figure for
the sublime, an embodiment of the imagination turned away in
mourning from present realities and an emblem for a past that has
been irremediably lost and that nothing in the present can compensate. She is one of those figures of exile and loss that popuR
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late Baudelaire’s melancholy imagination: ‘‘I think of my great
swan . . . / . . . and then of you, / Andromache . . . / I think of the
Negress . . . / Of whoever has lost what cannot be found again, /
Never, never! . . . / . . . of many, many others!’’ (‘‘The Swan’’). What
could possibly be more seductive for the poet of the metropolitan
sublime?
The lesson of Sue and of Baudelaire is that in the end, whatever
else it may also conceal, every urban mystery also contains at least
one death or at least one lie or, more likely, both. This also happens
to be one of the rules of the game of the detective novel, the
literary genre that has most completely dedicated itself to exploring the modern experience of the great city. When I suggest that a
fundamental connection links crime fiction and the metropolis, I
do not in the least mean to imply (1) that all readers of detective
novels live in big cities or (2) that only detective novels are set in
big cities or (3) that all are. For (1) anectodal evidence and the
sales figures of contemporary detective novels certainly suggest
that they are not being read only by big-city readers; after all, one
does not have to live in the metropolis to sense some of the icy
currents of modernization and to feel both dread and fascination
for what one is told about life in the big city. And (2) there is a
strong historical link between the novel and the big city going
back at least to the early nineteenth century – think of Honoré de
Balzac, of Charles Dickens, of James Joyce and Marcel Proust and
Alfred Döblin. But the big city is so complex a phenomenon that it
o√ers ample material to a variety of artistic forms, allowing detective fiction to focus on certain aspects of the modern urban experience and other subgenres of the novel on others. Last, (3) the
example of Agatha Christie should be enough to prove that detective fiction does not depend essentially on the big city. For she
became one of the world’s most popular authors on the basis of
numerous mystery stories in which by preference she isolated a
small set of characters from the world – in a train, on an island, in
a country house – and then assigned to the detective’s and the
reader’s ingenuity the task of identifying which of the least likely
culprits was really the guilty one. Christie’s model proves that
detective novels can be set on the Orient Express and on a Nile
steamer and in Mesopotamia or even in an English country house
no less successfully than in the arrondissements of Paris or in the
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slums of Detroit. And yet, for all their crime and detection, her
novels seem to be exercises in ratiocination and ingenuity, and to
belong more to the category of riddles or crossword puzzles rather
than providing the kinds of deeper anxieties and satisfactions that
many readers of detective fiction seem to crave. We may consider
her an eloquent counter-example, an important exception who
proves the general rule that detective novels tend instead to favor
the metropolis.
For Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin is inseparable from Paris, Arthur
Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes from London, Georges Simenon’s
Maigret from Paris again, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe or
Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer from Los Angeles – to name only
these. Or to reverse the direction of inference: for many of us, the
image of these cities is deeply influenced by the detective fictions
set in them that we have read. Indeed, one sure sign of a town’s
graduation to the status of a world-class city is that detective fictions can finally come to be set in it – think in recent years of Patricia Cornwell’s Richmond, Virginia, of Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh,
or of Alexander McCall Smith’s Gaborone, Botswana. Some recent
crime novels, which regard the deceptions and duplicity of urban
political and economic power structures with such fashionably
deep suspicion that they must abandon the city at some point in
their plots in order to seek out a hidden truth that can be uncovered
only in the wilderness, furnish only a partial counter-example –
partial for here, too, the metropolis is an indispensable starting
point and ultimate frame of reference. Thus in Martin Cruz
Smith’s Gorky Park (1981), Arkady Renko’s dogged investigation
of a brutal triple murder in an amusement park in Russia’s largest
city leads him through the blazing peat-bogs of Shatura to a bloody
climax in the desolate wastelands of northern New Jersey; while in
Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (1992), Smilla’s obstinate refusal to accept an easy explanation for the death of a young
boy in Denmark’s capital eventually obliges her to embark on a
dangerous voyage through the North Atlantic that culminates (or,
alas, unravels) on an island o√ the coast of Greenland.
Indeed, the big city o√ers the writer and reader of detective
fiction so many advantages that it is not hard to understand why
these two phenomena have so often coincided.
To begin with the practical benefits for the novelist: a large city
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provides an inexhaustible supply of colorful persons and striking
incidents and thereby permits the novelist to explore his or her
characters and their society not only in a single story but in a series
of novels and tales. Conan Doyle’s or Simenon’s lengthy series of
stories could only have been set in a small village if a series of
murders, each the object of a single tale, had bit by bit decimated
it, indeed annihilated it – which would have been intrinsically
implausible and would have had the added inconvenience of awkwardly reducing the number of possible suspects. That is, detective
fiction requires not only a detective, a criminal, and one or more
victims but also and above all lots of survivors (who in certain
regards represent us readers), and obviously the big city has far
more of these to o√er than any small town can. A series of stories
like those about Holmes or Maigret gives its readers as a whole a
rounded and fascinating portrait of the detective and his associates, a catalogue of a large range of more or less criminal, more or
less innocent characters, and a gradually evolving depiction of the
London or Paris in which they have all been engaged for so many
years. And yet various alternatives to the big city or the small
village as the scene for crime fiction can easily be conceived. The
simplest is the constantly varied locale, as in Christie’s Hercule
Poirot series – though in this case the striking character of the
detective must bear the burden of supplying the unity and continuity of interest that variety of locale cannot. All in all, the
detective does indeed seem to work best in a big city – especially
when he figures in a series of stories and not just in one. But we do
not yet seem quite to have understood either why the detective
prefers the metropolis, nor why detective stories tend to come in
series rather than individually.
Another reason for the preference for metropolitan settings
might well be thought to lie in the notion that the complexity of
the problem represented by the crime is thereby radically increased, so that the detective’s intellectual labors in solving it
become all the more di≈cult and interesting. And yet this cannot
be the whole explanation either. For although it is true that the
genre founded by E. T. A. Ho√mann and Edgar Allan Poe located
its essence precisely in the combination of the detective’s extraordinary ratiocinative capabilities with the complex and unpredictY
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able urban setting that posed his talents such a challenge, it did
not take long for the tradition represented above all by Agatha
Christie and her followers (like Ruth Rendell in the Inspector
Wexford series) to recognize that the degree of di≈culty of the
puzzle was largely independent of the number of possible suspects
or could even vary inversely to it. Already the cast of ten in
Christie’s And Then There Were None (first published as Ten
Little Niggers, 1939) was more than complicated enough for most
readers – and in that example the characters were sequestered in a
mansion on an otherwise uninhabited island, like especially remarkable laboratory specimens whose purity must be preserved
from contamination. Even in the lengths to which their host, the
mysterious U. N. Owen, must go in that novel in order to isolate his
victims from contact with the outside world, we can sense the
pressures of the big city from which they are being surgically
separated.
A hint toward explaining more satisfactorily the link between
the big city and detective fiction is provided by the fact that it is
this setting that most sharply separates modern detective stories
from their pre-modern predecessors. Of course, murders are committed and murderers are apprehended throughout world literature, in Oedipus the King, in Hamlet, in many other pre-modern
texts: yet in these older cases the city plays no role, or only a
marginal one, and in essence what we find is a family or court
intrigue working its way to a catastrophic conclusion. At the beginning of Sophocles’ play, the chorus of citizens does indeed ask
Oedipus for help against the plague, but the crime he investigates
turns out to involve only himself and his immediate family (and,
of course, in a certain sense, all of us). By contrast, in the first
modern detective story, E. T. A. Ho√mann’s Mlle de Scudéri
(1820), the Parisian setting is indicated in the first sentence by the
generic marker typical of the detective story, the street name that
exactly specifies not only a geographical location but also a social,
economic, and cultural one: ‘‘In the rue St. Honoré lay the little
house in which Madeleine de Scudéri, well known for her gracious
poetry, resided by the favor of Louis XIV and the Marquise de
Maintenon.’’ And the series of murders the story recounts could
not be conceived of anywhere but in a large city – indeed, Ho√R
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mann lingers with relish on the details of the terrifying e√ects of
these crimes on the city’s numberless and nameless inhabitants:
The Parisians breathed a sign of relief at being rescued from
the monster that had been able to direct its secret, murderous
weapons with impunity against friend and foe. But soon it
was reported that the terrifying arts of the accursed La Croix
had found a new heir. Like an invisible, malevolent spirit,
murder sneaked into the most intimate circles that family –
love – friendship were capable of forming, and rapidly and
infallibly it seized the unhappy victims. The man who was
seen today in blooming health tottered around the next day
sick and frail, and the doctors’ greatest skill could not save
him from death. Wealth – a lucrative position – a beautiful,
perhaps too young wife – that was enough to be hounded to
death. The most terrible distrust sundered the holiest bonds.
The husband trembled at his wife – the father at his son –
the sister at her brother. – The food, the wine remained
untasted at the meal which one friend gave to others, and
where once pleasure and games had ruled, wild glances spied
after the concealed murderer. Fathers of families were seen
fearfully buying groceries in distant locations and cooking
them themselves in some filthy rented kitchen, fearing diabolical treachery in their own home. And yet the greatest,
most watchful caution was often fruitless.
The same emphasis on the city of Paris and the terror that
bizarre and inexplicable crimes cause among its inhabitants recurs
in Poe’s stories of Auguste Dupin, with the addition of other
elements that have since become standard features: the bloodcurdling detail of the horrific e√ects of the application of extreme
violence to human flesh; the newspaper as the almost always misled and misleading voice of public opinion; the police as a state
institution that is supposed to solve such crimes but is obliged, by
custom and inclination, to follow established rules and for that
very reason is capable only rarely, if ever, of dealing satisfactorily
with ingenious and eccentric criminals; the detective’s confidant, a
stand-in for the ba∆ed and admiring reader. These will be the
very elements upon which Arthur Conan Doyle will seize and pass
on as canonical to the whole of the later tradition.
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An extraordinary recent novel by Fred Vargas, Pars vite et reviens tard (2001; Have Mercy on Us All, 2003), re-activates all
these elements in the same setting of metropolitan Paris – ‘‘the
capital of the nineteenth century’’ (Walter Benjamin) – of which
the detective novel has always been especially fond. Vargas recreates persuasively the capricious, intuitive, and charismatic investigator, his sturdy, systematic, loyal, and rather obtuse assistant,
the inexplicable series of murders, and above all the gradually
gathering storm clouds of hysterical terror that convulse the baffled urban population. But she contributes to the traditional formula, not only an astonishing humor and a poetic sensitivity to the
nuances of the French language and the tremors of the human
heart, but above all an archaeologist’s sense of the temporal stratification of any culture, its ironic sedimentation of very di√erent
historical experiences in immediate and troubling juxtaposition to
one another. In most of Vargas’s detective novels, it is the very
survival of antiquated modes of life into a modernity that has tried
in vain to forget them that produces the most memorably uncanny
e√ects. The corpse of the murder victim, surrounded by survivors
who cannot bring themselves to avert their fascinated gaze and
investigated by a detective who still believes, rather quaintly, that
the only way society can endure into the future is to come to terms
with the crimes of its past, is for Vargas the emblem of a fundamental anachronism that may be typical of all cultures but is
manifested most cruelly in the modern metropolis. ‘‘The old Paris
is no longer (a city’s form / Changes more quickly, alas!, than a
mortal’s heart)’’ (‘‘The Swan’’).
We may use the city dwellers’ panic and the confidant’s bewilderment as a pair of matching keys to help us unlock the mystery of
the fascination exerted by the big city on detective fiction, for
these are two complementary varieties – the one more desperate,
the other more intellectual – of the same basic anxiety provoked
by the metropolitan sublime. The fact that the crime is a murder
puts into the most extreme terms of death and life the obscure
threats to safety and prosperity that accompany and shadow the
big city’s opportunities for advancement; and its very inexplicability means that it could happen not only to Marie Roget or to
the engineer with (or without) a thumb but also, and next, to us.
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The city dwellers’ horrified fear at the crime that has been committed among them makes them revert to an extreme form of the
general malaise that had always characterized the city in its contrast with the pre-modern village – atomism, distrust, individualism, apprehension, anxiety, the weakening of all the bonds of
family and friendship – and that until then only a veneer of habit
had covered up.
For this nameless and hence insurmountable urban dread, the
detective story o√ers not only a radical heightening but also explanation, resolution, and solace. The author, like his or her stand-in,
the detective, reveals himself to be an unsurpassed expert in all
the tiniest details of the big city: he knows its streets and neighborhoods, its rules and exceptions, its language and customs; give
him an address, and he can tell you exactly where it is – but also
exactly what kind of people live there, how they earn their money,
and what their most secret dreams and vices are. The crime is not
only a disruption of urban patterns with which his experience and
intelligence, but above all his many years of life in the city, make
him intimately familiar; it is also itself part of a larger pattern of
violence and brutality of which he is a connoisseur.
We might say that the street map of the city is imprinted on the
neural network of the detective’s brain and is reproduced within
his consciousness as a form of expert local knowledge. Yet the city
is also a large and busy space, and the detective must move constantly through it in order to discover crimes, to visit locations, to
interview survivors and witnesses and suspects, to pursue and
arrest, and to kill. The detective’s incessant movement creates and
discovers relations among the far-flung parts of the city and establishes its unexpected unity in the form of a series of dynamic
vectors. That is why the detective almost always finds himself
walking (he is, precisely, a ‘‘gumshoe’’) or, in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries, driving: even a deliberate exception like
Rex Stout’s detective Nero Wolfe, immensely fat and much disinclined to leave his brownstone, has in his Archie Goodwin a
motorized secretary and investigator on whom he can depend. The
detective’s information is multiplied by numerous informants or
assistants but seems ultimately to come from his own virtual
ubiquity – after all, he is himself often a master of disguise, and
because he can see through all the stereotypes that make up the
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city he has no di≈culty in masquerading as one of them if he
wishes. We might find this idea disquieting, yet in the traditional
detective novel the detective is on the side of the angels or at least
is rather more so than the criminals are. Perhaps he is a secular
version of our guardian angel, protecting us not only from villains
but also from ourselves.
Classic European and American detective fiction tended to differ from each other in many regards, at least until the thoroughgoing Americanization of European culture that marked the second half of the twentieth century, and the di√erences are no less
evident in the role the big city plays in the two traditions.
The European detective is at home in his city: he admires the
order his knowledge of it reveals to him, and he is relieved to
restore it to that order by solving the crimes he regards as regrettable and remediable exceptions, however frequent they may become. We might say that he is first and foremost a city-lover and
only secondarily a detective; he happens to work as a detective, and
this is one way he declares his love for the city he lives in. Sherlock
Holmes’s London adventures tend to be entrusted above all to the
form of short stories: each one resolves satisfactorily an isolated
perturbation; the city is a necessary setting for the mortal incidents but is not complicitous in them or deeply altered by them,
and in ‘‘The Adventure of the Copper Beeches,’’ in a famously
paradoxical conversation in a train bound for the countryside,
Holmes can even correct the naive error of Watson (and no doubt
of many readers), who believes that the countryside is more peaceful than the city – Holmes sees the very press of the ubiquitous
urban crowd as a deterrent to crime and an aid for its solution, and
he shudders to think of the horrors committed in the uncontrolled,
isolated country house.
Maigret’s relation with Paris is even closer and fonder than
Holmes’s with London. Simenon’s Paris is a city of atmosphere, of
habitats, and of habits: his novels are lovingly sensitive to the city’s
weather (its breathtaking springs, its torrid summers, its rainy
autumns), and evocative descriptions of the e√ect of light and
moisture on rivers and pavements compete with scenes of meals at
home and in restaurants and at the o≈ce to furnish set-pieces that
help determine their narrative rhythm. Madame Maigret anchors
her husband to a daily routine of shops and meals and cinemas
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that rubs against his obsessive dedication to his work but in fact
helps him to understand better the victims and the criminals he
must deal with:
The little black car from the Criminal Police crossed the
Place de la République and Maigret found himself in his
own district, a network of narrow streets, heavily populated,
bounded by the Boulevard Voltaire on one side and the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir on the other.
Madame Maigret and he walked along these little streets
each time they went to the Pardons’ for dinner, and Madame
Maigret often did her shopping on the Rue du Chemin-Vert.
It was at Gino’s, as it was called familiarly, that she bought
not only pasta but mortadella, prosciutto, and olive oil in
large, golden-colored cans. The shops were narrow, deep, and
badly lit. Today, because of the lowering sky, the street lights
were on almost everywhere, making a false daylight that
gave people’s faces a waxy appearance.
Lots of old women. Many old men, too, alone, a marketing
basket in their hands. Resignation on their faces. Some
stopped from time to time and put their hand to their heart,
waiting for a spasm to stop.
Women of all nationalities, carrying young children, a
slightly older boy or girl hanging on to their dresses. [Maigret and the Killer]
Where do Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe or Lew Archer buy
their groceries? We need only ask such a question to recognize
immediately that even if the American detective knows his way
around his city as expertly as his classic European counterparts do,
he is not at all integrated into it as seamlessly as they are. Can we
imagine the American detective going for a stroll through his
town for sheer pleasure, for curiosity’s sake? He uses his city, but he
distrusts and dislikes it. And he has good reason to feel this way:
for he has learned that the city is a tissue of guilty complicity that
links all its inhabitants in an inextricable web of crime, shame,
and concealment – and that he himself is no less intrinsic and
culpable an element of it than the victims he reluctantly avenges
and the criminals he unenthusiastically pursues (even supposing
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that he and we can tell the di√erence between them). The American detective’s automobile brings him from the darkest slums to
the glittering mansions and back: and the lesson he learns in his
circuitous travels is always the same one, that there is no wealth
except what has been stolen, no poverty except the result of theft,
no murder except to cover up some other crime, no victim wholly
innocent, and no murderer comfortingly distinguishable from the
police, the detective, from you and from me. Paris may be built on
sweat: Los Angeles is built on blood. In the end, the American city
is not only the scene of the crime: it is the very crime.
In both traditions of detective fiction, but especially in the
American one that has become increasingly dominant within the
past half-century in Europe too, the big city presents itself with
features characteristic of modernity as a whole. Urban dread is one
particularly acute form of a greater social and psychological malaise that one does not have to live in a big city to experience and is
typical of a culture that has lost its traditional anchoring in premodern religious and philosophical certainties and discovers itself
now with no more secure foundations than its own fragile sense of
infinitely contestable values. The big city is not only a specifically
modern product: it is also an emblem of modernity, cut o√ from its
traditional roots but haunted by their traces. For almost two centuries, the literary form in which the big city has most often
chosen to mirror itself has been that other typical product and
emblem of modernity, the detective story. In the crimes it salaciously describes we sense all the fascinated dread of modernity –
and in the solutions it almost never fails to supply, the sour nostalgia for a pre-modern security.
Perhaps the tension between these two contradictory temporalities helps explain why detective stories tend to generate
series, for they obsessively re-enact a compulsive Da-Fort alternation of the sort Freud identified in Beyond the Pleasure Principle:
the inevitable frustration produced by the game means that each
move in it is at least partially unsatisfactory, so that pleasure can
be sought nowhere except in an infinite repetition. Yet of the two
sides, dread and nostalgia, crime and solution, Fort and Da, there
can be no doubt that in each pair the latter alternative is truly
indispensable. For only the compensation provided by the latter
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terms redeems and makes tolerable, indeed pleasurable, the former one: so let there be evil, indeed, abundant, vicious, and
graphic – but only as flowers of evil.
Nostalgia is no less intrinsic a characteristic of modernity than
the drive toward innovation: the two impulses are not only inseparable but at the same time both mutually reinforcing and mutually undermining. That would explain not only why it is the
woman’s mourning that so fascinated the poet in Baudelaire’s
sonnet but also why even after two centuries the detective novel is
the one modern fashion that does not seem to have come even
close to reaching its limit.
Y
AND
BLUES:
THE
G
DETECTIVE
FICTION
M E T R O P O L I TA N
L
E
N
N
W .
M
O
S
SUBLIME
T
I begin with some numbers. In 1656 the largest city in western
Europe was Naples, with 360,000 inhabitants; but an outbreak of
plague that year devastated the city, reducing its population to
about half that number, and it did not regain the same level until a
century later. At that time, in the mid-eighteenth century, London
was approximately twice that size, with 700,000 inhabitants, and
by 1801 London had become the first European city to reach the
level of about 1 million inhabitants that Rome had attained in the
first and second centuries a.d., at the height of its power, before
dwindling to a twentieth of that size in the Middle Ages. Throughout the nineteenth century London’s population expanded rapidly:
by 1841 it had doubled to almost 2 million; forty years later, by
1881, it had doubled again to almost 4 million. Paris’s development
began from a smaller starting point but expanded no less rapidly.
In 1801 it was half the size of London, with 500,000 inhabitants. By
1871 this figure had almost quadrupled to 1.8 million. Only eight
years later, in 1879, it had reached 2.2 million, and by the end of
the century Paris had more than 2.5 million inhabitants.
Numbers never speak for themselves – they must be subjected
to interpretation if they are to yield their secrets – but here the
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work of interpretation is easy and the numbers are readily loquacious. They indicate that one aspect of the process of modernization undergone by European societies since the beginning of
the nineteenth century has been a rapid and thorough urbanization. Within a few short generations, Europe was transformed
from a largely rural society in which most people lived in small
villages or towns into an increasingly industrial and metropolitan
society in which more and more people lived in a single capital
city. The increase in population in all major European cities during the nineteenth century is far too rapid and drastic to be explicable solely in terms of redistricting patterns or of local birth rates,
especially taking into account the frequency of infant dysentery
and the regular outbreaks of cholera, influenza, and other diseases
that killed millions of people well into the twentieth century.
Rather, it must have been due in large measure to the influx into
the city of young people and families in search of new economic
opportunities. Throughout Europe, beginning around 1800, millions abandoned the countryside in which their families had often
lived for centuries, pursuing the same or closely related occupations generation after generation, and they came to the big city.
What did they find there? Early descriptions, and not only early
ones, in novels, letters, diaries, and newspaper accounts, suggest the
mixture of astonishment and fear with which those who came to
the new cities experienced their enormous new dimensions, the
unheard-of numbers and speed and noise. In the traditional village, strangers had been an unusual phenomenon, immediately
recognizable as such and usually exposed to suspicion and interrogation; in the modern metropolis, people found themselves surrounded constantly by strangers, on the teeming streets and in the
crowded apartment houses, at work and in the shops and trams and
subways. In the village, life had been largely predictable, and surprises rarely strayed beyond a narrow range; in the metropolis, unexpected change became the only rule, and whole industries were
invented that devoted themselves to creating and marketing various forms of astonishment. In the village, employment patterns
had tended to be passed down within families and small groups of
families (many traditional European family names are derived
from hereditary occupations: Smith, Schmidt, Lefèvre, Fabbri); in
the metropolis, people were on their own, elbowing their way into
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new professions, trying to get ahead of their rivals by contacts,
shrewdness, and any other available means. Large, threatening,
seemingly incomprehensible, a source of danger at least as much as
of salvation, the nineteenth-century big city presented itself to its
fascinated and anxious spectator-participants as what we may term
the metropolitan sublime, no less disquieting than the natural
sublime that had so fascinated the eighteenth century.
Beyond the staggeringly inhuman vastness of the natural sublime, the Enlightenment had always sensed the mystery of God’s
power; and even through the artistic sublime that formed its civilized counterpart, the voice that seemed to speak was not merely
human but was inspired and hence authorized by a transcendent
instance. In this way the very awesomeness of the sublime could
come to seem consoling in the eighteenth century: we ourselves
might not fully understand the divine plan that it concealed, and
as individuals we might even end up being crushed by it, but we
could not doubt for a moment that there was indeed such a plan
and that what it intended was our good. But what were the citydwellers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to do with the
new Tower of Babel that confronted them as the metropolitan
sublime? The great cities were too secular, too human, too profane
in all ways for their inhabitants to be able to conceive of them on
the model of divine sublimity; yet to abandon the attempt to
understand them altogether would mean to succumb to a potentially devastating conceptual and ethical nihilism. So the search
for mystery continued: yet now the mysteries that could be sought
after were no longer divine, transcendent, and benevolent but
human, concealed – and therefore inevitably evil. And if the natural sublime could yield consolation even when it was not fully
understood (for are not the ways of God ultimately hidden even to
the pious soul?), the metropolitan sublime could console its anxious victims only if, and to the degree that, they could penetrate
and understand it.
Life in the city was an epistemological adventure, exciting but
risky – and it could become a matter of life and death.
The title of Eugène Sue’s Mysteries of Paris (1842–43), one of the
great publishing successes of the nineteenth century, already indiY
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cates as much. Under the surface of Paris lie hidden vast subterranean depths to which only the expert eye of the author has full
access. Sue’s Paris is a city not of one big divine mystery (his novel
is not entitled The Mystery of Paris) but of countless small and
all-too-human ones. Every character in it has a secret, a past he or
she is anxious to conceal, an identity based on either a falsehood or
a crime or, usually, both. Even Rodolphe, the humorlessly moralistic protagonist, has been driven into the role of judge and executioner by his guilty conscience for his youthful sins. All the characters are linked by webs of association, complicity, and passion of
which they themselves are often unaware. In the end the frustration of not only some of the most evil designs but also of almost all
of Rodolphe’s noble projects leaves the reader who stands outside
the fiction with a sense of the inescapable tragedy of the social
spiderweb in which all the figures are helplessly trapped and with
the impression that he and the author alone recognize clearly its
true nature – a consolation denied everyone within its fictional
world. The characters cannot escape the past and themselves, and
often the discovery of the hidden truth has lethal consequences.
Rodolphe’s attempt to undo the past goes aground on the inability of his rediscovered daughter, Fleur-de-Marie, to forget that
she was once a prostitute, for her guilty conscience drives her
first into a cloister and then to her death. But we as readers
thereby learn a cautionary wisdom: that in Sue’s Paris as in our
own there is a mortal secret concealed at the heart of everyone and
that every concealment is inexorably punished by an eventual
revelation.
In Sue, that secret almost always involves a death or a falsehood
or both, and it exerts a fascination which under certain circumstances can take on an irresistibly erotic dimension. This is also
one of the lessons of Charles Baudelaire’s great sonnet ‘‘À une
passante’’ (‘‘To a Woman Passing By’’) published just fifteen years
after Sue’s novel:
La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait.
Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse,
Une femme passa, d’une main fastueuse
Soulevant, balançant le feston et l’ourlet;
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Agile et noble, avec sa jambe de statue.
Moi, je buvais, crispé comme un extravagant,
Dans son œil, ciel livide où germe l’ouragan,
La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue.
Un éclair . . . puis la nuit! – Fugitive beauté
Dont le regard m’a fait soudainement renaître,
Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l’éternité?
Ailleurs, bien loin d’ici! trop tard! jamais peut-être!
Car j’ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais,
O toi que j’eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais!
[The deafening street around me roared.
Long, slender, in full mourning, majestic grief,
A woman passed by, with an ostentatious hand
Raising, swinging her festoon and hem;
Agile and noble, with a statue’s leg.
As for me, contorted like someone extravagant, I drank
In her eye, a livid sky where the hurricane germinates,
The sweetness that fascinates and the pleasure that kills.
A lightning flash . . . then the night! – Fleeting beauty
Whose glance made me suddenly be reborn,
Will I never see you again except in eternity?
Somewhere else, very far from here! Too late! Perhaps never!
For I do not know where you fled, you do not know where I
am going,
O you whom I would have loved, o you who knew it!]
An encounter of this sort, between a man and a woman apparently linked only by the merest chance that both happen to be
walking on the same sidewalk at the same moment, is inconceivable in a traditional village – where, to begin, it would be out of
the question that the speaker could have no idea who the woman
was and whether they would meet again. Only in the teeming
metropolis can two strangers encounter, or almost encounter, each
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other in this way. Against the loud and undi√erentiated background of the crowded street, the woman appears in isolated
splendor almost as a divine epiphany: her own Apollonian grace
and solemnity turn the poet who encounters her into the opposite,
a Dionysian maenad, a bacchant who drinks a superhuman and
deadly inspiration from her celestial eyes. She is certainly a figure
of the poetic Muse who inspires literary fictions (romantic and
Romantic ones), such as, for example, this very poem, a carefully
constructed and memorable verbal artifact that opposes yet also
captures the inarticulate and ephemeral screams of the modern
urban street. Unsurprisingly, Baudelaire interprets her in radically
erotic terms as well, in a tradition of male poets and their female
Muses that goes back at least to the Latin elegists – ‘‘You ask me
whence I write so many love poems, / Whence my book comes
softly to the lips. / It is not Calliope, not Apollo who sings them for
me. / My girlfriend herself creates my poetic talent’’ (Propertius
2.1.1–4).
But most striking in the present connection is that the poet is
above all fascinated by the fact that the unknown woman is in
mourning: we hear that she is tall and thin, that she has eyes and
hands and legs, but otherwise we learn nothing about her except
that she is ‘‘in full mourning, majestic grief.’’ Whom is she mourning? Who has died? What was their relation? What happened to
the dead woman or (far likelier, we presume) man? Was the death
entirely natural? Indeed, can we be quite certain that she does not
have the dead person on her conscience? Might she have killed
him herself? If so, how and why? Was it with pleasure, as the poet
hopes she will do for him? We shall never solve these mysteries.
But that does not matter. What counts is that this woman is completely oriented toward a mortal past that she can never forget and
we can never learn, that she conceals a dark secret within her that
poisons her present: for this not only opens up a space in her
imagined life for the poet but also makes her the perfect match for
him. Her tall, dark, and anonymous shape and her slow and statuary grace turn her into a sublime figure, and also into a figure for
the sublime, an embodiment of the imagination turned away in
mourning from present realities and an emblem for a past that has
been irremediably lost and that nothing in the present can compensate. She is one of those figures of exile and loss that popuR
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late Baudelaire’s melancholy imagination: ‘‘I think of my great
swan . . . / . . . and then of you, / Andromache . . . / I think of the
Negress . . . / Of whoever has lost what cannot be found again, /
Never, never! . . . / . . . of many, many others!’’ (‘‘The Swan’’). What
could possibly be more seductive for the poet of the metropolitan
sublime?
The lesson of Sue and of Baudelaire is that in the end, whatever
else it may also conceal, every urban mystery also contains at least
one death or at least one lie or, more likely, both. This also happens
to be one of the rules of the game of the detective novel, the
literary genre that has most completely dedicated itself to exploring the modern experience of the great city. When I suggest that a
fundamental connection links crime fiction and the metropolis, I
do not in the least mean to imply (1) that all readers of detective
novels live in big cities or (2) that only detective novels are set in
big cities or (3) that all are. For (1) anectodal evidence and the
sales figures of contemporary detective novels certainly suggest
that they are not being read only by big-city readers; after all, one
does not have to live in the metropolis to sense some of the icy
currents of modernization and to feel both dread and fascination
for what one is told about life in the big city. And (2) there is a
strong historical link between the novel and the big city going
back at least to the early nineteenth century – think of Honoré de
Balzac, of Charles Dickens, of James Joyce and Marcel Proust and
Alfred Döblin. But the big city is so complex a phenomenon that it
o√ers ample material to a variety of artistic forms, allowing detective fiction to focus on certain aspects of the modern urban experience and other subgenres of the novel on others. Last, (3) the
example of Agatha Christie should be enough to prove that detective fiction does not depend essentially on the big city. For she
became one of the world’s most popular authors on the basis of
numerous mystery stories in which by preference she isolated a
small set of characters from the world – in a train, on an island, in
a country house – and then assigned to the detective’s and the
reader’s ingenuity the task of identifying which of the least likely
culprits was really the guilty one. Christie’s model proves that
detective novels can be set on the Orient Express and on a Nile
steamer and in Mesopotamia or even in an English country house
no less successfully than in the arrondissements of Paris or in the
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slums of Detroit. And yet, for all their crime and detection, her
novels seem to be exercises in ratiocination and ingenuity, and to
belong more to the category of riddles or crossword puzzles rather
than providing the kinds of deeper anxieties and satisfactions that
many readers of detective fiction seem to crave. We may consider
her an eloquent counter-example, an important exception who
proves the general rule that detective novels tend instead to favor
the metropolis.
For Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin is inseparable from Paris, Arthur
Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes from London, Georges Simenon’s
Maigret from Paris again, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe or
Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer from Los Angeles – to name only
these. Or to reverse the direction of inference: for many of us, the
image of these cities is deeply influenced by the detective fictions
set in them that we have read. Indeed, one sure sign of a town’s
graduation to the status of a world-class city is that detective fictions can finally come to be set in it – think in recent years of Patricia Cornwell’s Richmond, Virginia, of Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh,
or of Alexander McCall Smith’s Gaborone, Botswana. Some recent
crime novels, which regard the deceptions and duplicity of urban
political and economic power structures with such fashionably
deep suspicion that they must abandon the city at some point in
their plots in order to seek out a hidden truth that can be uncovered
only in the wilderness, furnish only a partial counter-example –
partial for here, too, the metropolis is an indispensable starting
point and ultimate frame of reference. Thus in Martin Cruz
Smith’s Gorky Park (1981), Arkady Renko’s dogged investigation
of a brutal triple murder in an amusement park in Russia’s largest
city leads him through the blazing peat-bogs of Shatura to a bloody
climax in the desolate wastelands of northern New Jersey; while in
Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (1992), Smilla’s obstinate refusal to accept an easy explanation for the death of a young
boy in Denmark’s capital eventually obliges her to embark on a
dangerous voyage through the North Atlantic that culminates (or,
alas, unravels) on an island o√ the coast of Greenland.
Indeed, the big city o√ers the writer and reader of detective
fiction so many advantages that it is not hard to understand why
these two phenomena have so often coincided.
To begin with the practical benefits for the novelist: a large city
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provides an inexhaustible supply of colorful persons and striking
incidents and thereby permits the novelist to explore his or her
characters and their society not only in a single story but in a series
of novels and tales. Conan Doyle’s or Simenon’s lengthy series of
stories could only have been set in a small village if a series of
murders, each the object of a single tale, had bit by bit decimated
it, indeed annihilated it – which would have been intrinsically
implausible and would have had the added inconvenience of awkwardly reducing the number of possible suspects. That is, detective
fiction requires not only a detective, a criminal, and one or more
victims but also and above all lots of survivors (who in certain
regards represent us readers), and obviously the big city has far
more of these to o√er than any small town can. A series of stories
like those about Holmes or Maigret gives its readers as a whole a
rounded and fascinating portrait of the detective and his associates, a catalogue of a large range of more or less criminal, more or
less innocent characters, and a gradually evolving depiction of the
London or Paris in which they have all been engaged for so many
years. And yet various alternatives to the big city or the small
village as the scene for crime fiction can easily be conceived. The
simplest is the constantly varied locale, as in Christie’s Hercule
Poirot series – though in this case the striking character of the
detective must bear the burden of supplying the unity and continuity of interest that variety of locale cannot. All in all, the
detective does indeed seem to work best in a big city – especially
when he figures in a series of stories and not just in one. But we do
not yet seem quite to have understood either why the detective
prefers the metropolis, nor why detective stories tend to come in
series rather than individually.
Another reason for the preference for metropolitan settings
might well be thought to lie in the notion that the complexity of
the problem represented by the crime is thereby radically increased, so that the detective’s intellectual labors in solving it
become all the more di≈cult and interesting. And yet this cannot
be the whole explanation either. For although it is true that the
genre founded by E. T. A. Ho√mann and Edgar Allan Poe located
its essence precisely in the combination of the detective’s extraordinary ratiocinative capabilities with the complex and unpredictY
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able urban setting that posed his talents such a challenge, it did
not take long for the tradition represented above all by Agatha
Christie and her followers (like Ruth Rendell in the Inspector
Wexford series) to recognize that the degree of di≈culty of the
puzzle was largely independent of the number of possible suspects
or could even vary inversely to it. Already the cast of ten in
Christie’s And Then There Were None (first published as Ten
Little Niggers, 1939) was more than complicated enough for most
readers – and in that example the characters were sequestered in a
mansion on an otherwise uninhabited island, like especially remarkable laboratory specimens whose purity must be preserved
from contamination. Even in the lengths to which their host, the
mysterious U. N. Owen, must go in that novel in order to isolate his
victims from contact with the outside world, we can sense the
pressures of the big city from which they are being surgically
separated.
A hint toward explaining more satisfactorily the link between
the big city and detective fiction is provided by the fact that it is
this setting that most sharply separates modern detective stories
from their pre-modern predecessors. Of course, murders are committed and murderers are apprehended throughout world literature, in Oedipus the King, in Hamlet, in many other pre-modern
texts: yet in these older cases the city plays no role, or only a
marginal one, and in essence what we find is a family or court
intrigue working its way to a catastrophic conclusion. At the beginning of Sophocles’ play, the chorus of citizens does indeed ask
Oedipus for help against the plague, but the crime he investigates
turns out to involve only himself and his immediate family (and,
of course, in a certain sense, all of us). By contrast, in the first
modern detective story, E. T. A. Ho√mann’s Mlle de Scudéri
(1820), the Parisian setting is indicated in the first sentence by the
generic marker typical of the detective story, the street name that
exactly specifies not only a geographical location but also a social,
economic, and cultural one: ‘‘In the rue St. Honoré lay the little
house in which Madeleine de Scudéri, well known for her gracious
poetry, resided by the favor of Louis XIV and the Marquise de
Maintenon.’’ And the series of murders the story recounts could
not be conceived of anywhere but in a large city – indeed, Ho√R
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mann lingers with relish on the details of the terrifying e√ects of
these crimes on the city’s numberless and nameless inhabitants:
The Parisians breathed a sign of relief at being rescued from
the monster that had been able to direct its secret, murderous
weapons with impunity against friend and foe. But soon it
was reported that the terrifying arts of the accursed La Croix
had found a new heir. Like an invisible, malevolent spirit,
murder sneaked into the most intimate circles that family –
love – friendship were capable of forming, and rapidly and
infallibly it seized the unhappy victims. The man who was
seen today in blooming health tottered around the next day
sick and frail, and the doctors’ greatest skill could not save
him from death. Wealth – a lucrative position – a beautiful,
perhaps too young wife – that was enough to be hounded to
death. The most terrible distrust sundered the holiest bonds.
The husband trembled at his wife – the father at his son –
the sister at her brother. – The food, the wine remained
untasted at the meal which one friend gave to others, and
where once pleasure and games had ruled, wild glances spied
after the concealed murderer. Fathers of families were seen
fearfully buying groceries in distant locations and cooking
them themselves in some filthy rented kitchen, fearing diabolical treachery in their own home. And yet the greatest,
most watchful caution was often fruitless.
The same emphasis on the city of Paris and the terror that
bizarre and inexplicable crimes cause among its inhabitants recurs
in Poe’s stories of Auguste Dupin, with the addition of other
elements that have since become standard features: the bloodcurdling detail of the horrific e√ects of the application of extreme
violence to human flesh; the newspaper as the almost always misled and misleading voice of public opinion; the police as a state
institution that is supposed to solve such crimes but is obliged, by
custom and inclination, to follow established rules and for that
very reason is capable only rarely, if ever, of dealing satisfactorily
with ingenious and eccentric criminals; the detective’s confidant, a
stand-in for the ba∆ed and admiring reader. These will be the
very elements upon which Arthur Conan Doyle will seize and pass
on as canonical to the whole of the later tradition.
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An extraordinary recent novel by Fred Vargas, Pars vite et reviens tard (2001; Have Mercy on Us All, 2003), re-activates all
these elements in the same setting of metropolitan Paris – ‘‘the
capital of the nineteenth century’’ (Walter Benjamin) – of which
the detective novel has always been especially fond. Vargas recreates persuasively the capricious, intuitive, and charismatic investigator, his sturdy, systematic, loyal, and rather obtuse assistant,
the inexplicable series of murders, and above all the gradually
gathering storm clouds of hysterical terror that convulse the baffled urban population. But she contributes to the traditional formula, not only an astonishing humor and a poetic sensitivity to the
nuances of the French language and the tremors of the human
heart, but above all an archaeologist’s sense of the temporal stratification of any culture, its ironic sedimentation of very di√erent
historical experiences in immediate and troubling juxtaposition to
one another. In most of Vargas’s detective novels, it is the very
survival of antiquated modes of life into a modernity that has tried
in vain to forget them that produces the most memorably uncanny
e√ects. The corpse of the murder victim, surrounded by survivors
who cannot bring themselves to avert their fascinated gaze and
investigated by a detective who still believes, rather quaintly, that
the only way society can endure into the future is to come to terms
with the crimes of its past, is for Vargas the emblem of a fundamental anachronism that may be typical of all cultures but is
manifested most cruelly in the modern metropolis. ‘‘The old Paris
is no longer (a city’s form / Changes more quickly, alas!, than a
mortal’s heart)’’ (‘‘The Swan’’).
We may use the city dwellers’ panic and the confidant’s bewilderment as a pair of matching keys to help us unlock the mystery of
the fascination exerted by the big city on detective fiction, for
these are two complementary varieties – the one more desperate,
the other more intellectual – of the same basic anxiety provoked
by the metropolitan sublime. The fact that the crime is a murder
puts into the most extreme terms of death and life the obscure
threats to safety and prosperity that accompany and shadow the
big city’s opportunities for advancement; and its very inexplicability means that it could happen not only to Marie Roget or to
the engineer with (or without) a thumb but also, and next, to us.
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The city dwellers’ horrified fear at the crime that has been committed among them makes them revert to an extreme form of the
general malaise that had always characterized the city in its contrast with the pre-modern village – atomism, distrust, individualism, apprehension, anxiety, the weakening of all the bonds of
family and friendship – and that until then only a veneer of habit
had covered up.
For this nameless and hence insurmountable urban dread, the
detective story o√ers not only a radical heightening but also explanation, resolution, and solace. The author, like his or her stand-in,
the detective, reveals himself to be an unsurpassed expert in all
the tiniest details of the big city: he knows its streets and neighborhoods, its rules and exceptions, its language and customs; give
him an address, and he can tell you exactly where it is – but also
exactly what kind of people live there, how they earn their money,
and what their most secret dreams and vices are. The crime is not
only a disruption of urban patterns with which his experience and
intelligence, but above all his many years of life in the city, make
him intimately familiar; it is also itself part of a larger pattern of
violence and brutality of which he is a connoisseur.
We might say that the street map of the city is imprinted on the
neural network of the detective’s brain and is reproduced within
his consciousness as a form of expert local knowledge. Yet the city
is also a large and busy space, and the detective must move constantly through it in order to discover crimes, to visit locations, to
interview survivors and witnesses and suspects, to pursue and
arrest, and to kill. The detective’s incessant movement creates and
discovers relations among the far-flung parts of the city and establishes its unexpected unity in the form of a series of dynamic
vectors. That is why the detective almost always finds himself
walking (he is, precisely, a ‘‘gumshoe’’) or, in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries, driving: even a deliberate exception like
Rex Stout’s detective Nero Wolfe, immensely fat and much disinclined to leave his brownstone, has in his Archie Goodwin a
motorized secretary and investigator on whom he can depend. The
detective’s information is multiplied by numerous informants or
assistants but seems ultimately to come from his own virtual
ubiquity – after all, he is himself often a master of disguise, and
because he can see through all the stereotypes that make up the
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city he has no di≈culty in masquerading as one of them if he
wishes. We might find this idea disquieting, yet in the traditional
detective novel the detective is on the side of the angels or at least
is rather more so than the criminals are. Perhaps he is a secular
version of our guardian angel, protecting us not only from villains
but also from ourselves.
Classic European and American detective fiction tended to differ from each other in many regards, at least until the thoroughgoing Americanization of European culture that marked the second half of the twentieth century, and the di√erences are no less
evident in the role the big city plays in the two traditions.
The European detective is at home in his city: he admires the
order his knowledge of it reveals to him, and he is relieved to
restore it to that order by solving the crimes he regards as regrettable and remediable exceptions, however frequent they may become. We might say that he is first and foremost a city-lover and
only secondarily a detective; he happens to work as a detective, and
this is one way he declares his love for the city he lives in. Sherlock
Holmes’s London adventures tend to be entrusted above all to the
form of short stories: each one resolves satisfactorily an isolated
perturbation; the city is a necessary setting for the mortal incidents but is not complicitous in them or deeply altered by them,
and in ‘‘The Adventure of the Copper Beeches,’’ in a famously
paradoxical conversation in a train bound for the countryside,
Holmes can even correct the naive error of Watson (and no doubt
of many readers), who believes that the countryside is more peaceful than the city – Holmes sees the very press of the ubiquitous
urban crowd as a deterrent to crime and an aid for its solution, and
he shudders to think of the horrors committed in the uncontrolled,
isolated country house.
Maigret’s relation with Paris is even closer and fonder than
Holmes’s with London. Simenon’s Paris is a city of atmosphere, of
habitats, and of habits: his novels are lovingly sensitive to the city’s
weather (its breathtaking springs, its torrid summers, its rainy
autumns), and evocative descriptions of the e√ect of light and
moisture on rivers and pavements compete with scenes of meals at
home and in restaurants and at the o≈ce to furnish set-pieces that
help determine their narrative rhythm. Madame Maigret anchors
her husband to a daily routine of shops and meals and cinemas
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that rubs against his obsessive dedication to his work but in fact
helps him to understand better the victims and the criminals he
must deal with:
The little black car from the Criminal Police crossed the
Place de la République and Maigret found himself in his
own district, a network of narrow streets, heavily populated,
bounded by the Boulevard Voltaire on one side and the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir on the other.
Madame Maigret and he walked along these little streets
each time they went to the Pardons’ for dinner, and Madame
Maigret often did her shopping on the Rue du Chemin-Vert.
It was at Gino’s, as it was called familiarly, that she bought
not only pasta but mortadella, prosciutto, and olive oil in
large, golden-colored cans. The shops were narrow, deep, and
badly lit. Today, because of the lowering sky, the street lights
were on almost everywhere, making a false daylight that
gave people’s faces a waxy appearance.
Lots of old women. Many old men, too, alone, a marketing
basket in their hands. Resignation on their faces. Some
stopped from time to time and put their hand to their heart,
waiting for a spasm to stop.
Women of all nationalities, carrying young children, a
slightly older boy or girl hanging on to their dresses. [Maigret and the Killer]
Where do Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe or Lew Archer buy
their groceries? We need only ask such a question to recognize
immediately that even if the American detective knows his way
around his city as expertly as his classic European counterparts do,
he is not at all integrated into it as seamlessly as they are. Can we
imagine the American detective going for a stroll through his
town for sheer pleasure, for curiosity’s sake? He uses his city, but he
distrusts and dislikes it. And he has good reason to feel this way:
for he has learned that the city is a tissue of guilty complicity that
links all its inhabitants in an inextricable web of crime, shame,
and concealment – and that he himself is no less intrinsic and
culpable an element of it than the victims he reluctantly avenges
and the criminals he unenthusiastically pursues (even supposing
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that he and we can tell the di√erence between them). The American detective’s automobile brings him from the darkest slums to
the glittering mansions and back: and the lesson he learns in his
circuitous travels is always the same one, that there is no wealth
except what has been stolen, no poverty except the result of theft,
no murder except to cover up some other crime, no victim wholly
innocent, and no murderer comfortingly distinguishable from the
police, the detective, from you and from me. Paris may be built on
sweat: Los Angeles is built on blood. In the end, the American city
is not only the scene of the crime: it is the very crime.
In both traditions of detective fiction, but especially in the
American one that has become increasingly dominant within the
past half-century in Europe too, the big city presents itself with
features characteristic of modernity as a whole. Urban dread is one
particularly acute form of a greater social and psychological malaise that one does not have to live in a big city to experience and is
typical of a culture that has lost its traditional anchoring in premodern religious and philosophical certainties and discovers itself
now with no more secure foundations than its own fragile sense of
infinitely contestable values. The big city is not only a specifically
modern product: it is also an emblem of modernity, cut o√ from its
traditional roots but haunted by their traces. For almost two centuries, the literary form in which the big city has most often
chosen to mirror itself has been that other typical product and
emblem of modernity, the detective story. In the crimes it salaciously describes we sense all the fascinated dread of modernity –
and in the solutions it almost never fails to supply, the sour nostalgia for a pre-modern security.
Perhaps the tension between these two contradictory temporalities helps explain why detective stories tend to generate
series, for they obsessively re-enact a compulsive Da-Fort alternation of the sort Freud identified in Beyond the Pleasure Principle:
the inevitable frustration produced by the game means that each
move in it is at least partially unsatisfactory, so that pleasure can
be sought nowhere except in an infinite repetition. Yet of the two
sides, dread and nostalgia, crime and solution, Fort and Da, there
can be no doubt that in each pair the latter alternative is truly
indispensable. For only the compensation provided by the latter
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terms redeems and makes tolerable, indeed pleasurable, the former one: so let there be evil, indeed, abundant, vicious, and
graphic – but only as flowers of evil.
Nostalgia is no less intrinsic a characteristic of modernity than
the drive toward innovation: the two impulses are not only inseparable but at the same time both mutually reinforcing and mutually undermining. That would explain not only why it is the
woman’s mourning that so fascinated the poet in Baudelaire’s
sonnet but also why even after two centuries the detective novel is
the one modern fashion that does not seem to have come even
close to reaching its limit.
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