The Foreign in International Crime Fiction

The Foreign in International
Crime Fiction
Related Titles
Adapting Detective Fiction, Neil McCaw

Crime Culture, Edited by Bran Nicol, Patricia Pulham and Eugene McNulty
The Foreign in International
Crime Fiction
Transcultural Representations
Edited by Jean Anderson,

Carolina Miranda and Barbara Pezzotti
Continuum International Publishing Group
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© Jean Anderson, Carolina Miranda, Barbara Pezzotti and Contributors, 2012
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-2817-1

e-ISBN: 978-1-4411-7703-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The foreign in international crime fiction : transcultural representations/edited by
Jean Anderson, Carolina Miranda and Barbara Pezzotti.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4411-2817-1 (hardcover) – ISBN 978-1-4411-7703-2 (pdf) –
ISBN 978-1-4411-8198-5 (ePub)
1. Detective and mystery stories–History and criticism. 2. Immigrants in literature.
3. Other (Philosophy) in literature. 4. Noir fiction–History and criticism. 5. Crime
writing. I. Anderson, Jean, 1951- II. Miranda, Carolina. III. Pezzotti, Barbara.
PN3448.D4F57 2012
809.3’872--dc23 2011051840
Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Contents
Acknowledgements viii
Contributors ix
Introduction 1
Part One: Inside Out or Outside In? The Scene of

the Crime as Exotic Décor
Chapter 1 Cannibalistic Māori Behead Rupert Murdoch:

(Mis)representations of Antipodean Otherness
in Caryl Férey’s ‘Māori Thrillers’ 9
Ellen Carter and Deborah Walker-Morrison
Chapter 2 ‘A Desk is a Dangerous Place from which to Watch

the World’: Britishness and Foreignness in Le
Carré’s Karla Trilogy 22
Sabine Vanacker
Chapter 3 Havana Noir: Time, Place and the Appropriation

of Cuba in Crime Fiction 35
Philip Swanson
Chapter 4 Shanghai, Shanghai: Placing Qiu Xiaolong’s Crime

Fiction in the Landscape of Globalized Literature 47
Luo Hui
Chapter 5 Seeing Double: Representing Otherness

in the Franco-Pacific Thriller 60
Jean Anderson
vi Contents
Part Two: Private Eyes, Hybrid Eyes: The In-Between Detective
Chapter 6 ‘Don’t Forget the Tejedor’: Community and

Identity in the Crime Fiction of Rosa Ribas 75
Stewart King
Chapter 7 An American in Paris or Opposites Attract: Dominique

Sylvain’s ‘In-Between’ Bicultural Detective Stories 87
France Grenaudier-Klijn
Chapter 8 Arthur Upfield and Philip McLaren: Pioneering

Partners in Australian Ethnographic Crime Fiction 99
John Ramsland and Marie Ramsland
Chapter 9 From Wolf to Wolf-Man: Foreignness and

Self-Alterity in Fred Vargas’s L’Homme à l’envers 112
Alistair Rolls
Chapter 10 Others Knowing Others: Stieg Larsson’s Millennium

Trilogy and Peter Høeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow 124
Andrew Nestingen and Paula Arvas
Chapter 11 Smog, Tweed and Foreign Bedevilment:

Bourland’s Twenty-First-Century Remake of
the Sherlock Holmes Crime Story 137
Keren Chiaroni
Part Three: When Evil Walks Abroad – Towards a Politics of Otherness
Chapter 12 ‘The Meanest Devil of the Pit’: British Representations

of the German Character in Edwardian Juvenile
Spy Fiction, 1900–14 153
Andrew Francis
Chapter 13 Reading Others: Foreigners and the Foreign

in Roberto Arlt’s Detective Fiction 165
Carolina Miranda
Chapter 14 Who is the Foreigner? The Representation of

the Migrant in Contemporary Italian Crime Fiction 176
Barbara Pezzotti
Contents vii
Chapter 15 Images of Turks in Recent German Crime Fiction:

A Comparative Case Study in Xenophobia 188
Margaret Sutherland
Chapter 16 The Representation of Chinese Characters in

Leonardo Padura’s La Cola de la Serpiente (2000):
Sinophobia or Sinophilia? 200
Carlos Uxó
Bibliography 213
Index 231
Acknowledgements
Editing a volume such as the present one is a demanding task, and the editors
would like to acknowledge here the efforts of the many people who assisted,
from contributing authors and administrative staff to editorial expert Heather
Elder. We are especially grateful to the Faculty of Humanities and Social
Sciences, and the School of Languages and Cultures, Victoria University of
Wellington, New Zealand, for support received.
Contributors
Jean Anderson is associate professor of French at Victoria University of

Wellington. She works mainly in the fields of French Pacific literature and
contemporary and fin-de-siècle women’s writing. She is also a literary translator:
her most recent publication is Ananda Devi’s Indian Tango (2011).
Paula Arvas received her PhD from the University of Helsinki in 2009. In her
dissertation, she analyses Finnish crime fiction of the 1940s. Together with
Andrew Nestingen, she has edited a collection of articles: Scandinavian Crime
Fiction (2010). She has written several articles about crime fiction and her non-
academic publications include a crime fiction cookbook.
Ellen Carter is a doctoral student at the University of Auckland and the École
des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Her interests lie in the fields of
French crime fiction, cultural studies and reader reception.
Keren Chiaroni is senior lecturer in French at Victoria University. Her specialties

include the history of design for performance and cultural links between France
and New Zealand. Her latest book is The Last of the Human Freedoms (2011).
Andrew Francis is a Wellington, New Zealand-based researcher. His interests

include the New Zealand home front during the First World War, the history of
British imperial advertising and British film propaganda of the Second World
War. He is currently writing a book on the treatment of enemy aliens in New
Zealand during the First World War.
France Grenaudier-Klijn is senior lecturer and French subject convenor at

Massey University, New Zealand. Her main research interests are in the fields of
post-Holocaust representation, French crime fiction and fin-de-siècle women’s
writing. She is also an academic and literary translator. She is currently working
on a book on the function of femininity in Patrick Modiano’s work.
Luo Hui teaches Chinese language and literature at Victoria University of

Wellington, New Zealand. His research focuses on the concept of ‘minor
x Contributors
discourse’ encompassing a diverse range of cultural practices such as the strange

tale, avant-garde poetry and independent film. His articles and translations
have appeared in Asian Theatre Journal, Monde chinois and The Literary Review.
Stewart King is senior lecturer in Spanish and Catalan Studies at Monash

University. He has published extensively on the topic of cultural identity and
Catalan and Castilian-language literature from Catalonia since the nineteenth
century, including Escribir la catalanidad (2005). He is currently completing a
book on crime fiction from Spain.
Carolina Miranda lectures at Victoria University, Wellington. Her research

interests include translation and twentieth-century Latin American literature.
She has written about Roberto Arlt’s theatre and narrative work and also on
Argentine, Spanish and New Zealand crime fiction. She is currently preparing
a monograph (Roberto Arlt: Reading and Writing within the Argentine Tradition) for
publication with Edwin Mellen Press.
Andrew Nestingen is associate professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University

of Washington. His books include Crime and Fantasy in Scandinavia (2008) and
the forthcoming The Cinema of Aki Kaurismäki. He co-edited Scandinavian Crime
Fiction (2010) with Paula Arvas and Transnational Cinema in a Global North (2005)
with Trevor G. Elkington. He teaches Finnish studies, film studies, literature
and cultural theory.
Barbara Pezzotti teaches Italian language and culture at Victoria University.

She has published several articles and book chapters on Italian crime fiction
and the figure of the serial killer in Italian and New Zealand crime fiction. Her
book The Importance of Place in Contemporary Italian Crime Fiction: A Bloody Journey
is soon to be published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
John Ramsland (OAM, FACE) is emeritus professor of History (Newcastle) and

has published widely on colonial and post-colonial Australia, including crime
and punishment, sport, war, Aboriginal and children’s history. His latest book,
From Antarctica to the Gold Rushes. In the wake of the Erebus (2011) is about the
James Clark Ross Antarctic Expedition 1839–43.
Marie Ramsland is a conjoint lecturer in French at the University of Newcastle,

Australia. Her main research interests are French/Australian literary and
cultural connections and translation. Marie was awarded the Chevalier des Palmes
Académiques by the French Government in 2003. Her latest translation is The
Great Australian Novel – A Panorama by J-F Vernay.
Contributors xi
Alistair Rolls is a senior lecturer at the University of Newcastle, Australia, where

he teaches French. He has published widely on the works of Boris Vian and
other twentieth-century French authors. More recently his work has focused on
French crime fiction, including French and American Noir: Dark Crossings (2009),
which he wrote with Deborah Walker, and the edited collection Mostly French:
French (in) Detective Fiction (2009).
Margaret Sutherland is a senior lecturer in the German Programme at Victoria

University of Wellington. Her research and teaching interests include German
literature from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, film, crime fiction
and the influence of German migrants in New Zealand life. Recent publications
include essays on Gerhart Hauptmann’s The Weavers and the life of painter
Elisabet Delbrück.
Philip Swanson is Hughes professor of Spanish at the University of Sheffield,

UK. He has published extensively on Latin American literature, including
books on the New Novel, José Donoso, Gabriel García Márquez and other
aspects of Latin American literature and culture. He has also published on
North American representations of Latin America in film and fiction.
Carlos Uxó is a lecturer in Spanish at La Trobe University, Australia. His main

area of research is the representation of black characters in Cuban narrative
fiction. He has edited The Detective Fiction of Leonardo Padura Fuentes (2006) and
is the author of Representaciones del personaje del negro en la narrativa cubana. Una
perspectiva desde los Estudios Subalternos (2010).
Sabine Vanacker lectures in English at the University of Hull. Her research

interests centre on twentieth-century women’s writing, crime fiction and the
literature of migration. She has published on Agatha Christie and is preparing
a monograph on P. D. James. With Dr. Catherine Wynne she is co-editing The
Cultural Afterlives of Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle: Representations across
the Media.
Deborah Walker-Morrison is senior lecturer and head of French at the

University of Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. Of European and Māori
descent, her principal research interests are in the fields of French cinema and
post-colonial, literary and audio-visual translation. She is co-author of French
and American Noir: Dark Crossings (2009, with Alistair Rolls).
xii
Introduction
The Foreign in International Crime Fiction:

Transcultural Representations
The exotic and the foreign are the quintessence of mystery. The ‘Other’ – and
the ‘Unknown’ – arouse feelings of curiosity and fear. They demand to be
encountered, investigated, decoded and, possibly, rejected. It comes as no sur-
prise, then, that foreign characters and foreign settings have had a privileged
space in crime fiction since its origins. From the ‘exotic’ Parisian setting of the
first crime story ever written, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders on the Rue Morgue
(1841), to the shadowy ‘foreign devils’ hiding in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Victorian
landscape and the complicated murders carried out in Agatha Christie’s colo-
nial Middle East, the Other in its many declinations has fascinated readers all
over the world. Even today, in an increasingly globalized world, where places,
goods and people look more and more similar, a large number of crime novels
and thrillers feature international and exotic elements. Does this unstoppable
trend mean such writing can readily be seen as a ‘transcultural contact zone’
(Pratt, 1992,) into which individual authors bring their preconceived ideas,
both positive and negative, about alterity? Indeed, foreign victims, foreign
sleuths, foreign settings or foreign criminals can provide a fertile ground for
tackling issues of belonging, difference and national and regional identities. In
Marieke Krajenbrink and Kate M. Quinn’s words, ‘the adaptability of the genre
is such that it can be used to affirm and also undermine all concepts of identity,
be these at the level of nation, ethnicity, and culture or at the level of gender
and genre’ (2009, p. 1). As Sonia Mattalia (2008) also puts it, crime fiction is
essentially a medium through which the relationship between literature and
the ideological apparatuses of the State is exposed. More generally, due to its
nature, crime writing as a genre is a space that lends itself to exposing, denounc-
ing, addressing and (as some of the essays in this volume conclude) construct-
ing Otherness. Equally, in the face of heightened multiculturalism which may
blur traditional distinctions, the genre is able to negotiate issues of belonging,
difference, hybridity and national and regional identities.
In its guise as a transcultural contact zone, then, we might ask ourselves
whether this genre is a new form of travel writing, allowing readers to embark
on ‘journeys’ (from the comfort of their armchairs) not so much to explore
new geographies or recently ‘discovered’ countries as to scrutinize different
2 The Foreign in International Crime Fiction
cultures and societies and, in so doing, to better define themselves. Is it the

case, as philosopher Adam Morton (2004) has suggested, that we need to proj-
ect evil onto Others, as Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and
Mr Hyde (1885) or Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) famously dem-
onstrated, in order to distance ourselves from it? Or do crime writers make use
of the trope of the Other in order to strengthen perceptions of shared values
within an exclusive community? Are there predominant narrative strategies
that allow such writers to perpetuate or, conversely, to challenge stereotypes of
Otherness?
This collection of essays on contemporary international crime fiction aims to
address a range of aspects of these differences which raise obvious issues related
to the representation of Otherness that are close to Edward Said’s (1978) con-
cept of Orientalism: how do the authors (and their readers) perceive the Other?
To what extent are such depictions anchored in apparently mimetic realism?
How far are they the reflection of preconceived ideas and prejudices? And to
what extent might they be seen as politically motivated constructions of differ-
ence, whereby the idea of community is enhanced or, conversely, interrogated?
Our contributors examine these questions by following multiple lines of inquiry,
focusing on a variety of entry points into the discussion: the figure of the detec-
tive, either as a representative of a minority group in a post-colonial society or
as belonging (or not) to a dominant group within a multicultural society; the
‘dystopian’ migrant, whether culprit or victim, both as an individual and as the
representative of his or her community; and the setting of the crime, often
exotic or, rather, exoticized, where writers can perhaps be seen to project a
manageable and enticing form of ‘brownness’, ‘blackness’ or simply ‘outsider-
ness’, often as a mirroring of concern over systemic failings of the cultures to
which they belong.
In particular, the detective can be seen to reflect the social, political or cul-
tural anxieties of the community where he or she works, by either conforming
to the rules or by subverting them (Binyon, 1990). His or her ability (or lack of
it) to mingle with high and low ends of the social spectrum, and to relate to dif-
ferent cultures and communities, highlights the renegotiation of national and
regional identities. Beyond the idea of the colonial and post-colonial detective
(Christian, 2001), we envisage the presence of a new specimen: the so-called
‘hybrid detective’, whose role acknowledges cultural multiplicity.
The figure of the foreigner as villain is equally important. The ‘inscrutable’,
unreadable stranger is the ideal perpetrator, whose true nature, hidden from
view precisely because of his or her foreignness, becomes visible only through
the efforts of the detective (Young, 1996). There are, however, many variants on
what constitutes this alterity: some of our essays highlight the dialectics between
‘national’ and ‘regional’ identities, while others consider the ethnogenetic
implications of ‘outsider’ crime in the relations between different ethnic com-
munities living in increasing proximity to one another. They also acknowledge
Introduction 3
the instrumental use of the foreign ‘baddie’ to shape public perceptions for
military and/or political purposes at crucial moments in history.
As for the exotic environment, the proliferation of detective novels with for-
eign settings brings the genre into close proximity to travel writing and may
have both entertainment and didactic value for readers. Whether they are able
to judge the accuracy of these representations remains, however, a moot point:
their choices – along with the authors’ – may reflect genuine interest in other
cultures or instead constitute a desire for a kind of cultural Disneyland in which
plot, setting and characters are subsidiary to overt or covert stereotypes.
Our volume consists of 16 contributions from American, European,
Australian and New Zealand scholars. It covers twentieth- and twenty-first-
century works with a wide range of settings, such as Argentina, Australia,
Britain, China, Cuba, Denmark, France and the French Pacific, Germany,
Italy, New Zealand, Spain and Sweden. Our contributors analyse, along with
lesser-known authors, a number of internationally reputed detective and spy
fiction writers, including Arthur Conan Doyle, John le Carré, Martin Cruz
Smith, Andrea Camilleri, Stieg Larsson, Peter Høeg, Arthur Upfield and Fred
Vargas. The essays are organized into three major categories, although we has-
ten to acknowledge that there is often a considerable overlap between these.
In Part 1, ‘Inside Out or Outside In? The Scene of the Crime as Exotic Décor’,
Ellen Carter and Deborah Walker-Morrison begin by examining the fundamen-
tal issue of point of view: whether a text is written by an insider or outsider
author is a factor which can impact deeply on the representation of both setting
and characters. In ‘Cannibalistic Māori Behead Rupert Murdoch: (Mis)repre-
sentations of Antipodean Otherness in Caryl Férey’s “Māori Thrillers” ’, drawing
their examples from two outsider narratives with New Zealand settings, award-
winning French author Caryl Férey’s Haka (1998) and Utu (2004), Carter and
Walker develop some key analytical concepts that underpin several of the essays
in this part. In particular, they demonstrate that Férey tries to disguise his
outsider status – as a French writer setting his story in a foreign country – and
bolsters the ethnographic credibility of his works by appropriating tropes
from post-colonial literature and travellers’ tales. Emerging from Sabine
Vanacker’s analysis, ‘“A Desk is a Dangerous Place from which to Watch the
World”: Britishness and Foreignness in Le Carré’s Karla Trilogy’, is an ambiva-
lent position expressed in a number of John le Carré’s novels. Vanacker consid-
ers the often shifting configuration of ‘abroad’ and ‘home’, ‘self’ and ‘foreign
Other’ within the nostalgic international environment in which the stories
are located. Philip Swanson’s ‘Havana Noir: Time, Place and the Appropriation
of Cuba in Crime Fiction’ looks at the ways in which a Cuban setting has
been exploited by American writers Charles Fleming (After Havana, 2004) and
Martin Cruz Smith (Havana Bay, 1999). In particular, in representing Havana
as a hybrid border space, these authors project onto Cuba certain anxieties
about the failings of American capitalist society. Luo Hui takes a closer
look in ‘Shanghai, Shanghai: Placing Qiu Xiaolong’s Crime Fiction in the Land-

scape of Globalized Literature’ at the ‘insider-outsider’ perspective of this US-
based expatriate writer in his use of the cosmopolitan metropolis and other
cultural icons, especially in the context of the works’ translation for Chinese
readers. The question of readership is also very much to the fore in Jean Ander-
son’s analysis of crime writing from Tahiti and New Caledonia, ‘Seeing Double:
Representing Otherness in the Franco-Pacific Thriller’. With a particular
emphasis on the types of concessions made to non-local readers and on the use
of stereotypes as a kind of shorthand, this study provides an introduction to
specific characteristics of the genre in the French Pacific, before focusing on
some key aspects of writer Daniel Zié-Mé’s contribution to the genre.
Part 2, ‘Private Eyes, Hybrid Eyes: The In-Between Detective’, groups studies
of crime fiction from opposite sides of the planet, which feature a sleuth of
dual, and divided, origin. Stewart King’s ‘“Don’t Forget the Tejedor”: Commu-
nity and Identity in the Crime Fiction of Rosa Ribas’ looks at the cultural hybrid-
ity resulting when a German policewoman is asked to remember her Spanishness,
highlighting the ways in which the investigation into the crime becomes an
interrogation of German and Spanish cultural identities and societies and the
assumptions that underwrite them. In ‘An American in Paris or Opposites
Attract: Dominique Sylvain’s “In-Between” Bicultural Detective Stories’, France
Grenaudier-Klijn explores the motives behind the French writer’s choice of a
detecting duo, retired commissaire Lola Jost and eccentric American masseuse
Ingrid Diesel, and concludes that this reflects an increasingly globalized per-
spective aimed at promoting a collaborative and cross-cultural way of living.
John and Marie Ramsland’s study ‘Arthur Upfield and Philip McLaren: Pio-
neering Partners in Australian Ethnographic Crime Fiction’ tackles the ques-
tion of whether pioneer Australian crime writer Arthur Upfield’s depictions of
indigenous landscapes and culture were ‘legitimate’, placing them for com-
parison alongside Aboriginal crime writer Philip McLaren’s more recent work.
In ‘From Wolf to Wolf-Man: Foreignness and Self-Alterity in Fred Vargas’s
L’Homme à l’envers’, Alistair Rolls considers the relative importance in textual
terms of internalized and externalized foreignness in Vargas’s 1999 novel, seen
as an exemplary case of the natural role of the foreign in detective fiction of any
national, but most particularly of French, crime fiction. Andrew Nestingen and
Paula Arvas take a close look at two unconventional, ‘outsider’ Northern sleuths,
Lisbeth Salander and Smilla Jespersen, who are involved in solving (and in
some instances themselves perpetrating) crimes committed by both foreigners
and locals in ‘Others Knowing Others: Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy and
Peter Høeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow’. Both heroines are ‘exceptional Others’ for
their superior intelligence and skills, and it is thanks to this ‘exceptionality’ that
they manage to solve complex crimes perpetrated when the State and foreign
entities play with innocent lives. Finally, Keren Chiaroni’s study of Fabrice
Bourland’s Le Diable du Crystal Palace (2010), ‘Smog, Tweed and Foreign
Introduction 5
edevilment: Bourland’s Twenty-First-Century Remake of the Sherlock Holmes

B
Crime Story’ takes the analysis of familiar and foreign a step further, consider-
ing the parodic inversion of these elements at the level of the writing itself, and
the creation of not merely a hybrid detective, but a hybrid detective novel.
Last, but not least, Part 3, ‘When Evil Walks Abroad – Towards a Politics of
Otherness’, focuses on the thorny issue of representations of the criminal
Other. Andrew Francis’s essay, ‘“The Meanest Devil of the Pit”: British Repre-
sentations of the German Character in Edwardian Juvenile Spy Fiction, 1900–14’,
takes a step back in time to set the parameters for analysing fiction with a clearly
nationalistic agenda. The decade prior to the outbreak of the First World War
in 1914, Francis claims, witnessed the efforts of authors and publishers to help
alter perceptions of the underhand, sinister foreigner previously represented as
French or Russian, to one displaying the cultural, linguistic and militaristic
attributes of a German. Carolina Miranda’s essay ‘Reading Others: Foreigners
and the Foreign in Roberto Arlt’s Detective Fiction’ selects three short stories
by the Argentine writer as illustrative of the increasingly complex ethnographic
phenomenon of 1920s and 1930s Buenos Aires where, after a second wave of
immigration, different nationalities, social classes and criminal behaviour
collide in the urban capital. In ‘Who is the Foreigner? The Representation of
the Migrant in Contemporary Italian Crime Fiction’, Barbara Pezzotti studies
the portrayal of foreign immigrants in Andrea Camilleri’s and Massimo Carlot-
to’s crime series. While the northerner Carlotto sees foreign immigration as
‘invasion’ or ‘siege’, the southerner Camilleri describes a less problematic
cohabitation between Italians and foreigners, highlighting a common history
and culture among the civilizations around the Mediterranean. Ultimately,
Pezzotti argues, these different representations reveal still-unresolved questions
about Italian national identity. Margaret Sutherland’s ‘Images of Turks in
Recent German Crime Fiction: A Comparative Case Study in Xenophobia’
explores the more mitigated representation of ethnic minorities through an
analysis of the ways in which racial tensions surface among the Alevi Commu-
nity in Germany, as seen in and around Tatort, a television series of contempo-
rary crime films. Finally, Carlos Uxó’s chapter, ‘The Representation of Chinese
Characters in Leonardo Padura’s La Cola de la Serpiente (2000): Sinophobia or
Sinophilia?’, focuses on the representation of the Cuban-Chinese community
in Padura’s novel. In the first of his Detective Mario Conde tetralogy, Padura
displays a deep knowledge of the Cuban-Chinese community, but his represen-
tation of Chinese characters is nonetheless problematic and controversial. Uxó
examines the presence or absence in the text of structures of Othering, such as
essentialization, sexualization or folklorization, and ascertains whether Padura
speaks on behalf of and about the Cuban-Chinese population and whether the
reader can hear the voices of this subaltern group.
As the examples examined here will certainly demonstrate, crime fiction
offers a wide-ranging forum in which to confront safely some of the tensions of
globalized living. From notions of Empire to the dangers of urban living, from
the not-so-tranquil exotic paradise to the stereotypical ‘mean streets’, from real-
ism to pastiche, the apparently limitless flexibility of this genre that is in fact
many genres allows writers and readers to explore the Evil that is Other, the
Other that is Evil (or Good). From the far-away exotic or exoticized which still
appeals to our imagination to the single foreign villain who still disturbs our
sleep, the focus seems now to have increasingly shifted to the exotic ‘just around
the corner’ in the shape of foreign communities that populate, influence and
change forever our (not so) familiar urban landscape. As an urban genre par
excellence, in which the exceptions prove the rule, crime fiction cannot but
reflect, and reflect upon, the new physiognomy of the contemporary multi-
ethnic city. Today, exotic décors and characters are still used in crime fiction as
an easy escamotage to please armchair travellers or to reinforce our political and
cultural prejudices. However, they also often act as a ‘litmus test’ for the failures
and ambiguities of the Western world or for our fragile national and personal
identities. In other words, the exotic setting and the foreign villain teach the
reader more about the society that observes than they do about the society that
is apparently observed or represented. In addition, more and more writers are
consciously using this genre to explore and investigate an increasingly multi-
cultural society, with its risks but also – and especially – its opportunities. In the
final analysis, if the crime in mystery fiction is a breaching of the established
order, then in the crime fiction of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we
apparently can, and do, still blame foreigners for that infraction. As strangers –
villains, victims, exotic figures or spectators in the background – these figures
question our precarious certainties, challenge our assumptions and prejudices
and, ultimately, invite us to investigate ourselves. As in the best crime fiction,
the status quo ante is not really restored. Instead, new orders and new Otherness
come into play, ready to be interrogated again and again.
Part One
Inside Out or Outside In?

The Scene of the Crime as
Exotic Décor
8
Chapter 1
Cannibalistic Māori Behead Rupert Murdoch:

(Mis)representations of Antipodean
Otherness in Caryl Férey’s ‘Māori Thrillers’
Ellen Carter and Deborah Walker-Morrison
Introduction
This chapter explores images of the exotic in French crime writer Caryl Férey’s
two polars (crime novels) set in Aotearoa, New Zealand: Haka (first published
in 1998) and Utu (2004). In Haka, when the Pākehā wife and baby daughter of
Māori Jack Fitzgerald vanish without trace, Jack joins the police in an obsessive
quest to find them or their killers. Twenty-five years on, as the story opens, the
solitary, cynical, yet incorruptible Auckland police detective is still looking.
Christmas Eve: the discovery of the sexually mutilated body of a young Polynesian
woman on an Auckland beach leads to suggestions that the killer might have
connections to a mysterious and violent Māori separatist sect. Armed with his
insider knowledge of local Māori communities and with the assistance of a
brilliant young criminologist, Ann Waitura, Jack leads the investigation to its
apocalyptic conclusion, one which will leave not only Ann, Jack and the killer,
but half the novel’s large cast scattered over the closing pages as bloody corpses.
In the second novel, Utu,1 Jack’s Pākehā right-hand man Paul Osborne is called
back from self-imposed exile in Australia to help tie up the remaining loose
ends. Paul, too, has his ghost: the unrequited love of his childhood, Hana,
whose search to recover her Māori identity will see her fall into the clutches of
the cannibal sect determined to foil plans by corrupt businessmen (one of
whom is a thinly disguised Australian media magnate named Ruppert Murdell)
and politicians to build a multimillion dollar tourist complex on the site of an
ancient tribal village.
We will here look at how Férey sought to disguise his outsider status and
bolster the ethnographic credibility of these works by appropriating tropes
from postcolonial literature and travellers’ tales, arguing that his ill-informed
bricolage of noir and postcolonial elements turns key moments of his text into
postmodern pastiche (Jameson, 1984), in which the author’s flawed represen
tations of Māori and Polynesians morph into exotic Antipodean Others, almost
unrecognizable to a New Zealand reader but problematically credible to his

French audience (if we are to go by popular acclaim and the three awards Utu
was given in 2005).
Insider versus Outsider Status: The Stakes
How is this author positioned in relation to his subject culture? According to

J. A. Banks:
The external-outsider is socialized within a community different from the

one about which he or she [writes]. The external-outsider has a partial
understanding of, and little appreciation for, the values, perspectives, and
knowledge of the community he or she [writes about] and consequently
often misunderstands and misinterprets the behaviours within the studied
community. (Banks, 1998, p. 8 [adapted])
Although Férey as author is an ‘external-outsider’ to Māori society – one,

indeed, who, as we will demonstrate, misinterprets key aspects of this studied
community – he narrates both novels from the perspective of New Zealand
‘indigenous-insiders’ with privileged Māori understanding: Haka’s main
character, Fitzgerald, is Māori through his father, while in Utu, the Pākehā
Osborne is billed as the Auckland Police Force’s Māori specialist. It is worth
noting here that Férey’s choice to present his investigator characters as New
Zealand insiders was not dictated by the rules of his genre. In two out of the
nine novels featuring his Oslo-based detective, Harry Hole, Norwegian crime
writer Jo Nesbø writes his detective as a foreigner navigating his way through
unfamiliar countries (Australia [1997] then Thailand [1998]). Nesbø’s outsider
investigator is therefore less subject to misrepresentation than Férey’s. More
over, and even more problematically, Férey’s third-person omniscient narrator
makes stronger intra- and extra-textual claims to authentic insider knowledge
than the author possessed, as we shall see.
The most obvious grounds for critiquing Férey’s choice to write as an insider
lie with his foreign status and consequent lack of personal investment in the
society about which he is writing. Born in Normandy in 1967 and raised in
Brittany, his connection with New Zealand is slight. He spent four months in
the country in 1989 as part of a round-the-world trip, returning to France to
write Haka. After two additional two-month-long stays in New Zealand, one of
which was financed by a French Foreign Ministry grant, he wrote Utu. Since
Férey is not a member of New Zealand’s national community, he has no place
in the struggle to define the country’s cultural production (Bourdieu, 1993).
However, if ‘external outsider’ Férey cannot build New Zealand’s cultural capital,
(Mis)representations of Antipodean Otherness 11
he nonetheless appropriates that of others. He does this partly by highlighting

exotic elements familiar to French readers, such as a scene featuring warrior-
like Māori who perform a threatening haka in a South Auckland pub (2003,
p. 295), an action which, to New Zealanders’ eyes, is extremely unlikely but may
not appear so outlandish to French audiences conditioned to associate Māori
with such spectacles of (real or symbolic) violence as All Black rugby games or
Once Were Warriors (Duff, 1990; Tamahori, 1994).2
Banks defines the indigenous insider as one who ‘endorses the unique values,
perspectives, behaviour, beliefs and knowledge of his or her indigenous
community and culture and is perceived by people within the community as a
legitimate community member who can speak with authority about it’ (1998,
p. 8). Given issues of authenticity – ‘who can know what, and who speaks for
whom’ (p. 7) – can successful fiction (however success be measured) be written
by anyone other than an indigenous insider? We argue that, while insider status
provides them with built-in authenticity, outsiders can still write credible novels.
Credibility depends more on following the rules codified for the type of work
being written (and read) than on ‘insiderness’. Having both credibility and
authenticity is more important for non-fiction – where the reader expects to be
informed about real situations – than for fiction. As a fiction writer, Férey is
helped by the fact that readers want to believe the storyteller (Bassnett, 2004)
and are used to suspending disbelief, especially in his chosen ‘polar noir’ genre,
a point to which we return below.
Whether a genre fiction reader also believes a credible author/narrator to
be authentic depends on that reader’s expectations, preconceptions and
lateral knowledge. Judging by French readers’ online comments, they bought
Haka and Utu because they desired an authentic portrayal of contemporary
New Zealand as well as a credible, entertaining polar set in an exotic
location.3
i) Un roman [Utu] très bien écrit, une histoire palpitante qui nous laisse au
passage de nombreuses informations sur la vie et les rituels des Maoris. Pas-
sionnant et comme toujours d’une réalité incroyable.4 [A very well written
novel [Utu], a thrilling story that incorporates lots of information on the
life and rituals of the Māori. Fascinating and, as always, of an incredible
realism.]
ii) l’indispensable éclairage ethnologique qu’apportent ce bouquin [Haka] et
sa suite (UTU) . . . HAKA vaut largement un guide touristique classique sur la
NZ.5 [Haka and its sequel Utu shed important ethnological light . . . Haka is
every bit as good as a classic tourist guide to New Zealand.]
iii) Férey . . . nous plonge avec bonheur chez les kiwis (il connaît bien la nou-
velle Zélande).6 Férey plunges us among the kiwis to great effect (he knows
New Zealand well)].
iv) ce livre [Haka] permet de découvrir la NOuvelle Zélande [sic], sa culture

et son histoire. Un polar ethnique passionnant.7 [This book [Haka] allows
you to discover New Zealand, its culture and history. A fascinating ethnic
thriller.]
In building a case for his readers to believe his lurid, noired depictions of New
Zealand in general, and Māori society and culture in particular, Férey implicitly
accepts the thesis that access to insider knowledge is privileged rather than
monopolistic (Merton, 1972); that outsiders can earn access to the cultural
capital of others through travel and study.8 This runs contrary to Spivak’s view
(2010), which we share, that one cannot really know a culture through literature;
that cultural knowledge will never be total and can only come from being in the
culture, by living within it. Nonetheless, Férey’s readers seem to assume that the
author has offered them privileged insider knowledge: in fact, much of it is
inaccurate, and therefore doubly problematic. In the following sections, we
demonstrate the principal means by which the author manages ‘authenticity’
by borrowing from three literary fields: (i) travellers’ tales, (ii) postcolonial
literature and (iii) crime noir.
Travellers’ Tales
Travellers’ tales are accounts of journeys to, and through, other countries and
cultures (Robertson et al., 1994) and include such works as Boswell’s account of
his and Johnson’s 1773 travels in the Hebrides. Simon During notes of this work
that the two men, ‘models of modernity and learning, are observing a society
governed by genealogy, revenge and clans, in the throes of poverty, superstition
and ignorance’ (During, 1989, p. 760). Fast-forwarding 230 years finds Férey as
the voyaging imperialist gleaning metaphorical scalps from New Zealand
culture, which he repackages in order to export them to, and translate them
for, his French audience. All During’s criteria are present: being French, Férey
is the very definition of enlightened ‘modernity and learning’ while genealogy
and revenge fuel the (half) Māori Fitzgerald’s fight for the truth about his wife’s
and daughter’s (his ‘clan’s’) disappearance in Haka, Osborne’s search for the
truth about Fitzgerald’s suicide in Utu and the Hauhau sect’s activities in both
novels. Finally, the action occurs against a background of poverty (notably,
through a stereotypical representation of South Auckland as New Zealand
banlieue), superstition (Māori villains as shaman figures) and ignorance (of
white New Zealand about how Māori live).
This notion of travellers’ tales is a useful aid to interpreting some of Férey’s
authenticity claims,9 especially since ‘travellers’ tales seek to authenticate
themselves by claiming to be ‘truthful’ accounts of firsthand experience [yet
they] depend on collusion between writer and reader in the creation of an
illusion of authenticity’(Bassnett, 2004, p. 66). Judging by the readers’ comments

cited above, Férey’s French audience seems eager to participate in this
collusion.
Férey bolstered his voyaging credentials by implying in interviews and via
peritextual material associated with both novels that he has local knowledge
gained through his travels and personal contacts. However, for New Zealand-
insider readers, Férey betrays his outsider author status through lack of local
insight. Place names and proper nouns are frequently misnamed and/or
misspelt10 and there are glaring geographical inaccuracies, such as the idea that
finding Bee’s hideout depends on the scarcity of pine trees on New Zealand’s
North Island (2003, pp. 226, 310) when, in fact, radiata pine plantations cover
about 10 per cent of the terrain. There are also many instances of recognizably
French cultural frames projected by Férey onto his New Zealand literary
landscape, including that number plates reveal where a car is registered (2003,
pp. 173, 357); that civil marriage ceremonies are presided over by the mayor
(2003, p. 127); that New Zealand’s judiciary is set up along the same lines as the
French (Hikock as Auckland’s ‘procureur’ in Haka) and that red squirrels
gambol through Auckland’s public parks (2008, p. 191).
But in the end, these are minor inaccuracies. Far more problematic, in our
opinion, are Férey’s numerous misrepresentations of Māori and Polynesian
cultures resulting from the author’s attempts to draw on postcolonial tropes.
From Postcolonial Ethnographic Thriller to

Postmodern Pastiche
Despite ongoing critical debate over what constitutes the postcolonial (Ashcroft
et al., 2002; Huggan, 2001; Moore-Gilbert, 1997; Said, 2003), it is generally
agreed that postcolonial literature, whose antecedents may be traced back to
traveller’s tales (During, 1989), is written by cultural insider members of
(ex-)colonized peoples but for an audience that extends beyond their own
community. Central to postcolonial literature is the relationship between
dominant and subordinate cultures displayed through unequal power relations
and concomitant struggle. In Utu, Férey compounds this racial power distance
by making the majority of his authority figures white: policemen (Osborne;
Gallaher), medical examiners (McCleary; Moorie), corrupt businessmen
(Melrose, Murdell) or politicians (the O’Brians). In postcolonial literature,
social struggle born of colonial injustice becomes embedded in resistance,
which spills over into violence (Huggan, 2001). Both novels’ Hauhau adepts
embody this process in their journey from revivifying ancient spiritual practices,
such as moko tattooing using chisels fashioned from human femurs (symbolizing
a return to pre-colonial practices and beliefs, and therefore to a time without
whites), to ritual beheadings and cannibalism. The novels’ physical and sexual
violence are extreme and their rituals have no factual basis in contemporary
Māori society; nonetheless, the novels’ ethnographic dimension, bolstered by
Férey’s traveller status and concomitant mobilization of postcolonial tropes of
poetic justice for colonized indigenous peoples, invite the French reader to
read them as fact.
But Férey’s primary motive for including such graphic scenes of ritualized
violence is not ethnographic but commercial. Indeed, the author has claimed
he had no choice: ‘Il y a une surenchère dans la littérature . . . Concernant les
« scènes chocs » . . . [e]lles ne sont pas là pour provoquer mais pour répondre
œil pour œil à la demande du marché’ (Bibliosurf, 2006, para. 61) [there is an
escalation going on in literature . . . with regard to the ‘shock scenes’ . . . they are
not there to provoke but to respond to market demand]. Huggan notes this
link between capitalism and the postcolonial, arguing that ‘in the overwhelm-
ingly commercial context of late twentieth-century commodity culture, post-
colonialism and its rhetoric of resistance have themselves become consumer
products’ (2001, p. 6), an observation that evokes Casanova’s competition for
difference in the global literary marketplace, which we discuss in our final
section. But where Férey differs from postcolonial writers – apart from his thinly
disguised outsider status – is that his prime motivation is not resistance, but
rather to produce a consumable product.
Another way in which postcolonial authors attract global audiences of cultural
outsiders is by constructing ‘glocal’ settings that play on the contrast between
the particular(ly exotic) and the universal, and the related continuum between
strangeness and familiarity. Huggan argues that including exotic elements
favours ‘a particular mode of aesthetic perception – one which renders people,
objects and places strange even as it domesticates them, and which effectively
manufactures otherness even as it claims to surrender to its immanent mystery’
(2001, p. 13, author’s italics). Writers shift their works between these two poles,
making the exotically strange familiar (domestication) and the familiar
exotically strange (foreignization). In Férey’s case, he does this by introducing
a bricolage of heterogeneous elements that his outsider French audience would
find attractively exotic, while resonating with preconceived images; for example,
well-worn anthropological stereotypes of savages. Thus in Haka, Fitzgerald and
Ann track the Māori villains to their pine forest lair where a primal sacrifice
scene unfolds involving gruesome, culturally heterogeneous elements: a sacred
pig killed by Māori warriors wearing ‘war paint’; a stinking sacrificial pit
containing decomposing animal and human remains; victims carried hanging
from a pole by their bound hands and feet; a presiding ‘priest’ wearing a white
loin cloth and painted with saffron, who drinks a drug-laced draft to inspire
visions; victims disembowelled and their entrails thrown onto a purifying fire
because Māori ate only the ‘noble’ parts’ (2003, p. 332).11 Férey’s choice of
exotic New Zealand, even more distant for his French audience than a Pacific
DOM-TOM would have been, helps create distance between the novel and his
target market of French readers – distance that cultural outsiders can find
reassuring because it promotes a sense of ‘this can’t happen here’.
On the other hand, postcolonial writers typically also seek to make the strange
familiar, including target-culture-specific frames of reference, as we have noted,
and adding linguistic and/or ethnographic glosses to borrowed source culture
terms. In Utu, Férey adds a number of short conversations in Te Reo Māori with
footnoted French translations. Another way of domesticating the exotic is to
tap into shared knowledge and/or universal human experience, thereby
reducing the distance between the text and outsider reader. Férey reminds his
readers that exotic New Zealand nonetheless has deep ties to France by
referencing a shared interest – rugby – both through mentioning it in the texts
(2003, pp. 29, 94, 132, 184, 383; 2008, pp. 32, 51, 124) and by giving most of his
characters surnames of former All Blacks. Finally, Férey seeks to appeal to left-
wing liberal sentiments in his audience by setting his (faux) Māori Hauhau
against the corrupt forces of white capitalism. After all the build-up around
ethnic, gender and social segregation, enlivened by the exotic, the intrigue
turns out to be motivated by money, power and/or sex: in Haka the white
Auckland ‘procureur’ is trying to protect his secret Samoan transvestite lover,
who happens to be a serial killer, while in Utu, corrupt politicians are in cahoots
with equally corrupt cops and business figures to exploit historical Māori lands
for profit.
While Férey’s use of these postcolonial tropes has boosted his insider
credentials – and hence his novels’ authenticity – in the eyes of his French
readers, for New Zealand-insider readers, his flawed representations expose a
profound lack of local knowledge, which undermines such an attribution. For
one thing, differences between Māori and Polynesian cultures are often
confused and/or elided, with several Māori characters being given Polynesian
names such as Tuigamala (Samoan) or Térii (Tahitian); linguistically impossible
names such as Witkaire (in Māori all syllables end in a vowel) or improbably
European ones, such as Malcom Kirk for the Samoan transvestite, while the
supposedly Pākehā Ann Waitura bears a Māori surname.
If, in Haka, the portrayal of ethnicity is perfunctory as well as flawed, by the
time Férey wrote Utu, he had gained a little knowledge: he had discovered the
notion of Māori tribes (or iwi) and tribal nuances become central to Utu’s plot.
However, Férey displays no real understanding of the organization of Māori
society or history. For example, the author confuses the relationship between
iwi and hapu,12 misreading the English translation ‘sub-tribe’ as implying that
hapu designates a social grouping lacking in prestige (2008, p. 273); he also fails
to accurately represent the geographical situatedness of iwi groups, erroneously
attributing Ngati Kahungunu membership to the historical Taranaki chief, Te
Ua, founder of the Hauhau movement; improbably situating Wira Witkaire’s
Tainui lands in the far north and moving South Island-based Ngai Tahu to West
Auckland.
Misrepresentation is also apparent in Férey’s depiction of how Māori

characters connect and identify with their culture. Certain cultural elements
are significant in self-identifying as Māori; ‘for example, whakapapa, iwi/hapu, te
reo, marae, kawa and tikanga’13 (McIntosh, 2007, p. 1). In his depiction of Hana’s
affirmation of her Māori identity, Férey captures these intrinsic values or
inherent beliefs on several occasions, all of which strengthen Utu’s implicit
claim to be read within a framework of postcolonial fiction. However, Férey’s
treatment is less convincing in his depiction of the sect that is supposedly
following the teachings of Hauhau. Here Férey emphasizes spectacular, violent,
physical manifestations,14 more readily identifiable to cultural outsiders and
which therefore play to the exotic.
Moreover, Férey’s eclectic postmodern bricolage slides into plagiarism in at
least two instances. In Utu, conversations in Te Reo Māori between Paul Osborne
and Hana may all be traced to the French translation of Keri Hulme’s the bone
people (1996), complete with transcription and translation errors. And in Haka,
the ritual killing scene alluded to above is partly lifted from the first chapter of
early twentieth-century French writer Victor Ségalen’s ‘ethnographic’ novel Les
Immémoriaux, which recounts the devastating effects of Christianity on Tahitian
culture. This explains why Férey’s scene contains elements that are recognizably
Tahitian, rather than New Zealand Māori, such as the presence of a character
named Térii, (a Tahitian name, also that of Ségalen’s main character), the term
tatu (Tahitian for tattoo) and an uncharacteristically war-like incarnation of
Tané (the Māori god of the forest), who appears in Férey as Ségalen’s ‘mangeur
de chairs mortes’ (Haka, 2003, p. 330; Ségalen, p. 19) [eater of dead flesh] and
‘guerrier furieux qui marche dans l’ombre’ (Haka, 2003, p. 324; Ségalen, p. 20)
[furious warrior who walks in the shadows].
Crime Noir
While Haka has travelogue tendencies, it is also a crime novel. When first
published by Éditions Baleine in1998, the book was straightforwardly marketed
as such, its cover displaying crime-genre-typical art of a woman’s bloody hand
lying on sand. A French reader picking up this novel would expect crime
writing; any link with New Zealand or Māori (or rugby) inferred from the title,
would be secondary. This crime genre marketing strategy is reinforced by the
back-cover text mentioning the police, a mysterious disappearance, a dead girl
with a scalped pubis, a series of bodies, an epileptic painter and a homosexual
dandy, some ninety-three words before ‘Māorie’ appears. Similarly, the opening
section of the novel could be set in any country; Haka was initially positioned as
a thriller that happened to be set in New Zealand rather than a New Zealand
story that happened to be a thriller. However, when Gallimard reissued Haka
in 2003 under its ‘Folio policier’ imprint, the cover art inverted the associations.
The ethnographic/postcolonial Māori angle became primary15 (‘Māorie’ is now
the second word in the back-cover text), with the polar genre indicated only
by the name of the imprint.16
Noir fiction (and film) often serves an ethical, ideological function in
critiquing capitalist society; revealing the dark underbelly political leaders wish
they had not inherited. For Férey, this is one factor behind his decision to write
his Māori novels in the ‘noir’ crime thriller sub-genre:
Le roman noir se permet d’explorer les recoins de l’histoire, des socié-

tés . . . D’un autre côté, la force du roman noir réside selon moi dans
l’exploration du présent social, économique et politique. C’est sans doute
pour ça que j’aime ce genre un peu fourre-tout, où l’on peut parler de poli-
tique et d’amour, tout en racontant une histoire. (Bibliosurf, 2006, p. 67)
[Noir fiction allows the exploration of recesses of history and of societ-
ies . . . on the other hand, the strength of noir fiction lies, in my opinion, in
exploring the current social, economic and political issues. It’s doubtless why
I love this catch-all genre where you can talk about politics and love while
telling a story.]
Férey thus uses the noir genre to combine a radical, left-wing socio-political
critique of capitalism with ostensibly postcolonial tropes, pleading the cause of
indigenous peoples. This he expresses (for example) through detailed exposés
of historical injustices done to Māori, and through the sympathetic treatment
of key Māori characters (Hana, Pita, Wira) versus a highly negative portrayal of
the racist, capitalist Melrose and his cronies. However, the demands of the noir
genre for escalating graphic depictions of violence and dark endings also derail
the postcolonial objective, as the grotesquely exotic depictions of the Hauhau
transform his novels into exoticizing, postmodern pastiches.
The treatment of place and gender in both novels is predictably inflected by
noir tropes. In ways not dissimilar to Tamahori’s opening shot in Once Were
Warriors (1994), Férey tears down the picture postcard image of New Zealand as
pastoral paradise, to reveal seamier cityscapes in downtown Auckland and, most
importantly, to construct a geographical locus of racialized poverty and crime
in New Zealand’s Māori and Polynesian equivalent of American noir’s Chinatown:
South Auckland.
Férey’s female characters also conform to now outdated, ‘classic’ noir genre
norms, becoming either victims and/or poorly developed, often over-sexualized
foils for male criminals and/or crime fighters. Moreover, Férey’s treatment of
gender fractures along racial lines. His white female characters in Utu are one-
dimensional: playthings for white men (Melanie Melrose, Rosemary Culhane)
or lowly functionaries (Amelia Prescott, Johann Griffith). Although he has one
strong Māori female character (Wira Witkaire, who feels the desecration of her
ancestral lands so deeply that she wastes away and dies), incidental Māori
females are treated less sympathetically. More interesting is his diptych of
mixed-race femininity: Ann Brook and Hana Witkaire. While both grow up
with one Māori parent in lower socio-economic areas of Auckland, as adults
their attitudes to white New Zealand are markedly different. Ann exploits her
beauty to gain acceptance into the white elite, using the money she makes
from modelling to lift her Māori mother’s standard of living above that of her
South Auckland neighbours. Meanwhile Hana, educated in a rural kōhanga
reo,17 identifies with her Māori side against dominant white attitudes, as she
explains to Paul: ‘Vous avez conquis les peuples premiers comme on mate un
animal sauvage: vos explorateurs, vos grands découvreurs, vos soi-disant héros
ont pillé non seulement nos ressources économiques mais aussi notre art,
notre culture même!’ (2008, p. 295) [You conquered indigenous peoples as if
we were wild animals: your explorers, your great discoverers, your so-called
heroes didn’t just pillage our economic resources, they pillaged our art, our
very culture!].
Férey accentuates these differences in the way he portrays each woman’s
interactions with Paul Osborne. With Hana, he is ‘Paul’, the white boy learning
Māori in order to gain the insider status he hopes will win her heart; whereas
with Ann, he is ‘Osborne’, the white cop tasting Auckland’s seedy nightlife in
the company of a beautiful but dangerous ‘métisse’. This duality could be
analysed as ‘Paul’ the subordinate Pākehā seeking entry to Māori mysteries
versus ‘Osborne’ the dominant Pākehā called back from Australian self-exile as
the Auckland police Māori expert. Simon During notes this equivocation in
the postcolonial paradigm, which ‘fails to account for the ways in which
postcolonial societies are internally divided . . . the heirs of the colonized (the
postcolonized) continue to live uneasily and unequally with the heirs of the
colonizers (the postcolonizers)’ (1992, p. 343). While Ann and Hana are,
strictly speaking, heirs of both the colonized and the colonizer, they experience
and express this cultural and biological mixing in different, opposing directions
and develop differently noired relationships with the postcolonizing Paul
Osborne. Moreover, their dangerous sexuality, exotic ethnicity and ultimate
inaccessibility to the hero place both under the sign of that most powerful
feminine figure in noir: the femme fatale. Not that either is assimilated to the
ruthless spider woman fatale of classic American noir fiction and film, that cold
manipulator who draws her hapless male victim into a web of sexual deceit and
violence before seeking to dispose of him and whose demise is presented as a
just punishment (Kaplan, 1998; Walker, 2007), for, despite their fierce energy,
Ann and Hana are ultimately victims. Ann is eliminated early in the text by a
corrupt police force while Hana, although she survives to the last line, is
prepared for almost certain death, having become the willing servant/slave of
the fanatical Hauhau.
Conclusion
Having examined the ways in which Férey managed to market himself as an

author with insider knowledge of New Zealand (at least in French readers’
eyes), we now return to the issue of why he would have wanted to do so. In
terms of individual rewards, whereas writers who are ‘indigenous-insiders’
increase their mana or prestige, the personal benefit accrued by ‘external-
outsiders’ remains less apparent until assessed against the changing nature of
the global literary marketplace. Casanova has identified an international
competition for recognition that drives authors to develop techniques to help
them stand out from the masses. She argues that whereas writers used to aspire
to assimilate into ‘an autonomous and international literary capital’ (2004,
p. 109), they now strive for local differentiation, ‘typically on the basis of a claim
to national identity’ (p. 179).
This process presents a problem for Férey, an ‘indigenous-insider’ assimilated
to Paris, one of Casanova’s international literary capitals. Traditionally, French
regional writers escape Paris’s orbit by differentiating themselves back into their
local subcultures; a trajectory Férey followed when he set two novels in his
native Brittany. Why then did he set Haka and Utu in London-centric (in literary
terms) New Zealand, when Tahiti or New Caledonia could have served as an
exotic Francophone Pacific backdrop? His choice to move between two different
literary regions seems particularly bold because ‘each of these linguistic-cultural
areas preserves a large measure of autonomy in relation to the others’ (Casanova,
2004, p. 117). We suspect that Férey felt his French readers would demand
higher standards of authenticity of a novel set in a French DOM-TOM than in
Anglophone New Zealand, meaning that his credibility-bolstering techniques
would need to work overtime. In other words, he chose New Zealand partly
because he assumed he could get away with it.
Casanova’s thesis helps explain why Western outsiders such as Férey might
want to write their way inside another tent. With thousands of freshly minted
novels annually clamouring for the reader’s wallet, authors cannot risk their
genius languishing in publishers’ rejection piles. By Casanova’s reasoning,
cross-cultural fiction currently occupies the Goldilocks spot: not too familiar,
not too outré, just saleable. For an author such as Férey, unlucky enough to be
an ‘indigenous-insider’ of an international literary capital, money and fame
come by translating local difference for mass consumption in the global
marketplace. If authors cannot be insiders, they can beg, borrow and steal
insiders’ cultural wealth by incorporating tropes from genres of insider literature
in order to bolster the credibility of their novels.
While Merton (1972) and Banks (1998) argue that outsider ethnographers
are at a disadvantage when studying indigenous communities, ‘external-
outsider’ authors may be commercially advantaged by their position. Their
perspective and implicit claims to objectivity, combined with innate and/or
acquired knowledge of both insider and outsider audiences, can allow them to
bridge two cultures. When deciding which aspects of New Zealand and Māori
society to translate for his Francophone audience, Férey privileged bankable,
exotic elements recognizable to a French audience likely to be familiar with the
All Blacks or with films such as The Piano (Campion, 1993) or Once Were Warriors
(Tamahori, 1994).
While as a white Frenchman Férey had to go a long way to escape the
gravitational pull of his metropolitan roots, his effort has been rewarded both
financially and critically. He first mined this niche with Haka but then published
three non-Māori novels before revisiting the shadows cast at its end. This return
reaped rewards: Utu won the Prix SNCF du polar 2005, voted for by readers.
Having twice plundered Aotearoa, his literary journey of (re)colonization
moved on to South Africa; the result of which, Zulu (2008), met with even
greater success, both at home in France and overseas in translation (2010).
Recognized as one of France’s rising stars of noir fiction, Férey is making a name
for himself on the global stage, as evidenced by an appearance on an
‘International Noir’ panel at the 2010 Brooklyn Book Festival. Misappropriating
insider exoticism by masquerading as a traveller-ethnographer has clearly
worked well for Férey and it appears that, having found his niche, he intends
continuing to peddle this exotic, postmodern commodity to the apparent
delight of French and global audiences who remain unaware of the stakes we
have pointed out here.
Notes
1
Utu is the Māori term for the general concept of payment, reciprocity and (here)
revenge.
2
Tamahori’s film screened for 9 weeks in France in 1996 as L’Ame des guerriers,
attracting almost a quarter of a million spectators, and was subsequently broad-
cast at least eight times on French TV channels. Two editions of Duff’s book,
translated by French author Pierre Furlan (1996; 2002) achieved total sales of
around 7,500 copies. Duff is mentioned in Utu (p. 146) as a controversial writer
for his criticism of Māori society and assimilationist views.
3
Of 64 reader’s comments about Férey’s Māori novels downloaded on 22 December
2010 from five French online sites (amazon.fr; bibliosurf.com; fnac.com; furet.
com; priceminister.com), 48 per cent mentioned ‘New Zealand’ or ‘Māori’. The
average rating from these readers (4.62/5) was higher than the overall average
(3.93/5). No comments indicated that any readers doubted Férey’s imagining of
New Zealand and/or Māori societies.
4
Comment posted on www.priceminister.com by ‘selinec’ on 23 July 2010; down-
loaded 22 December 2010. All translations are our own unless otherwise stated.
5
Comment posted on www.amazon.fr by ‘Cipolla Robin “robin”’ on 3 November
2004; downloaded 22 December 2010.
6
Comment posted on www.amazon.fr by ‘caupos Jerome “djé”’ on 10 March 2009;
downloaded 22 December 2010.
7
Comment posted on www.fnac.com by ‘CAD25’ on 5 April 2010; downloaded 22
December 2010.
8
As evidenced by the inclusion of a bibliography at the end of Utu.
9
The front matter of both novels describes Férey as a traveller-writer or ‘écrivain
voyageur’.
10
Misspellings often appear to reflect French pronunciation; for example, The
Hauraki Gulf becomes la Baie d’Auraki and Onetangi becomes Onetangui.
11
Férey takes this scene from Ségalen’s Immémoriaux, set in nineteenth-century
Tahiti, a point to which we will return later.
12
Hapu refers to the basic political unit of Māori society, the extended family trac-
ing its ancestry to a single founding ancestor. Generally speaking, a number of
hapu make up the iwi or tribal grouping.
13
Definitions: whakapapa (genealogy), te reo (Māori language), marae (communal
space where hapu and iwi meet) kawa (marae procedure) and tikanga (customary
values and practices).
14
Examples in Utu include the art and symbolism of moko (p. 363), chisels made
from human femurs (p. 433), shrunken heads (pp. 353, 421) and a ceremonial
axe used to behead enemies (p. 458).
15
This despite the fact that the image chosen shows Tahitian tattooing: perhaps a
former French colony was deemed more attractive for French readers . . . or per-
haps the error was unintentional.
16
By this time Férey had published six crime novels: perhaps Gallimard felt he was
sufficiently associated with the genre that it could use the exotic to broaden the
potential audience beyond the core polar readership.
17
Another example of Férey’s poor local knowledge: kōhanga reo are Māori-language
preschools, but he has Hana attend one as a secondary school student.
Chapter 2
‘A Desk is a Dangerous Place from which to

Watch the World’: Britishness and Foreignness
in Le Carré’s Karla Trilogy
Sabine Vanacker
The Karla Trilogy
Since their initial publication from the mid-70s onwards, the three novels of
John le Carré’s Karla trilogy – Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), The Honourable
Schoolboy (1977) and Smiley’s People (1979)1 – have been received as the ultimate
evocation of a period, the Cold War and of the fundamental schizophrenia that
dominated the contemporary world view. The trilogy pitches the paranoid
societies of Eastern and Western blocs against each other, condensed into the
struggle between two protagonists: the modest, unheroic British spy master
George Smiley and his Soviet alter ego, the shadowy head of Moscow Centre
codenamed ‘Karla’. Literary critics have rightly highlighted the moral dimension
that le Carré’s work has brought to the tradition of the spy novel. Myron J.
Aronoff calls this ‘[l]e Carré’s unique ethical critique, a kind of ambiguous
moralism’ (Aronoff, 2001, p. ix). Le Carré, it was felt by critics and readers
alike, evoked authenticity in his cynical portrait of the British spy system as an
under-funded and pedestrian bureaucracy, which he invested with an, at times,
biting satire. Moreover, le Carré’s detailed portrait of the secret service
emphasized its Britishness, ‘the relation between espionage and his national
culture’ (Seed, 2003, p. 126). As many critics have pointed out, the central
attraction of his Cold War novels stems from their myth-making function and
the force with which they disposed of an older British national identity (Cobbs,
1998, p. 92, p. 102). Undoubtedly this is because le Carré played upon the
humiliating British spy scandals of the fifties, sixties and seventies, with the
consecutive defections of Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and
eventually Sir Anthony Blunt. These betrayals by privileged members of society
seemed to confirm the rot at the heart of the British establishment in a post-war
era of perceived decline.
In her recent discussion of the trilogy, the crime novelist P. D. James has
pointed to the basic detective story structure of the Karla novels. In Talking
Britishness and Foreignness in Le Carré’s Karla Trilogy 23
about Detective Fiction, she designated Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy as ‘a perfectly
constructed detective story’, like the classical whodunit set within ‘a secret
esoteric and cloistered world’ involving a limited number of suspects and the
fair presentation of evidence (James, 2009a, p. 13). This first novel sees George
Smiley, le Carré’s series character, recalled from a premature retirement to
uncover a high-ranking mole planted at the very heart of the British spy
organization. Reunited with his old associates, likewise retired or sidelined,
Smiley manages to uncover the traitor, Bill Haydon, shockingly now the
organization’s head. Upon rereading the novel, one is indeed struck by its
detection plot, by the inevitability of Haydon’s guilt in the many clues dotted
throughout the text. Smiley even has his very own Watson in his assistant Peter
Guillam, who, like the good doctor, observes and ‘reads’ the detective, acting as
an intermediary between detective and readers.2
Likewise, despite ranging far and wide across Europe and Asia, The Honourable
Schoolboy ultimately narrows down to a convention beloved of the detective story,
the hidden family relationship, here between two orphaned Chinese brothers
separated in Hong Kong and Maoist China. In this novel, George Smiley master-
minds a double strategy, simultaneously sending out signals suggesting the
decline and ruin of the British secret service while secretly moving against his
opponents. Like Sherlock Holmes, he does this by pursuing clues, but the sig-
nificant traces prove to be those that are not there. Smiley here takes ‘backbear-
ings’, tracing the gaps and absences in the archives of the secret service, not to
establish what the Soviets knew, but to ascertain what they removed, what they
tried to discover by means of their mole (THS, p. 66). Early on in the novel he
directs the eponymous Jerry Westerby to follow a ‘Moscow Centre goldseam’ to
Hong Kong (THS, p. 71). This secret Soviet money deposit eventually leads him
to Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and to the novel’s denouement on a
small Hong Kong island. The Honourable Schoolboy explicitly links the fading Brit-
ish secret service with Britain’s crumbling empire and America’s dwindling pres-
ence in Asia in an atmosphere of nostalgia and Western decline.
Finally, Smiley’s People reverts to traditional Cold War locales, the greyness of
austerity Britain and the metaphorical duality embodied by the Berlin Wall.
Once again the struggle soon boils down to a conflict between two men, Smiley
and his antagonist Karla. Smiley unearths yet another hidden family relationship
and finds Karla’s Achilles’ heel – his schizophrenic daughter secretly cared for
in a Swiss sanatorium. Smiley uses this knowledge to force his opposite number
into defection to the West and the trilogy ends with the two arch-rivals
acknowledging each other in the shadow of the Berlin Wall. Unsurprisingly
perhaps, le Carré’s trilogy presents a jaded image of the spy business, depicting
two opposing camps obsessed with deception, illusion and falseness. By the
time Karla and Smiley meet, the reader has recognized the novel’s moral
relativism, as the two great opponents lose their ethical distinctiveness. At the
end of the trilogy, Smiley and Karla seem devastatingly similar and Baudrillard’s
description of the ‘unreality’ of the Cold War holds true for them too: ‘[W]hat
no longer exists is the adversity of the adversaries, the reality of antagonistic
causes, the ideological seriousness of war’. (Baudrillard, 2010, p. 38)
Simulation, Illusion, Unreality and National Identity

‘To dissimulate is to feign not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to
have what one hasn’t. One implies a presence, the other an absence’.
(Baudrillard, 1993, p. 344).
Unsurprisingly, in a genre full of shadow play and make-believe, le Carré’s great

novels of the Cold War, like Baudrillard’s theoretical articles of the same period,
query the distinction between appearance and the real. Feigning weakness,
pretending to be who they are not, dissimulating their true intentions, these
secret agents exist in a world of ‘simulacra and simulations’, a shadow world of
illusion and pretence that appears to cover no reality of any substance. Even
more significantly, when Westerby and, later, Smiley finally set out on a foreign
mission, the real world is already shifting beneath their feet. In the context of a
declining British empire and the Western withdrawal from South-East Asia,
boundaries and borders are being redrawn. Within the framework of their
epistemological search for traces of betrayal, they are reduced to focusing on
what is not there. In their need to veil their strengths, they have to simulate
weakness to such an extent that what appears real and what is real become
hopelessly entwined.
As binaries implode in le Carré’s novels – Smiley resembling Karla, illusion
undermining reality – the novels’ interest also involves a queered representation
of self and other. Originally, le Carré’s description of national identity in the
trilogy, both British and foreign, appears dominated by the emphatic and
consistent use of national cliché and stereotype. The Italians are never more
gossipy and childish, the Americans never more naïve and badly dressed, the
Australians inevitably drunk and out of control, the Chinese at their most
inscrutable. However, after this mad, seemingly uncontrollable proliferation of
national clichés and stereotypes, both British and foreign identities are shown
increasingly to be labels devoid of real meaning. National identities and images
become unreal selves, masks lightly adopted by dissimulating spies. British
national qualities and clichés are easily parodied and mocked by the foreigners
encountered. Most worryingly of all, as le Carré’s anxious Cold War trilogy
underlines, as the empire slips away, Britishness too becomes only a set of
clichés, an empty masque, a sign dissimulating an absence. In a world where
illusion dominates, where there is only text and sign and the ‘real’ has
disappeared, the distinction of nationality also appears to become unreal, with
the result that a fundamental polarity of the spy novel, opposing British essence
to foreign difference, becomes unstable.
Travel or the Library Desk
Before analysing the status and representation of foreigners in the Karla trilogy,
it is essential to consider the British spies themselves and their peculiar
behaviour in these novels. Indeed, in defence of the realm le Carré’s spies
surprisingly prefer to deploy signs and sign systems – in the shape of their
archives and libraries – rather than engage with thick and dangerous reality.
For large sections of the trilogy, Smiley and his spies do not move; they do not
renew their passports; they do not seek out the foreign threat abroad. Rather
than investigating what has happened to all their agents in the USSR,
Czechoslovakia and Asia, they paradoxically turn in on themselves. Pages and
pages of all the three novels are devoted, not to dangerous and secret missions
beyond Britain’s borders, but to a stay-at-home Smiley patiently interviewing his
local witnesses, reconsidering the recent past – ‘plodding through the long
galleries of his professional memory’ (SP, p. 159) – and laboriously and lengthily
sifting through the version of history laid down in the secret service’s extensive
archives. Files, archives, reports, libraries and their inscribed traces of the world
prove more substantial and fascinating to them than the world itself. Intriguingly,
in connection with archives, the metaphor of foreign travel crops up, as when
Smiley asks Peter Guillam to slip secretly into the official Circus archives: ‘Think
of it as abroad, Smiley had said’ (TTSS, p. 102). Typically for this vacillating
attitude – taking on a threat from outside by disengaging from the outside
world – Smiley moves to a hotel to read his files, the decrepit Hotel Islay in
Sussex Gardens (TTSS, p. 133), where, ironically, his hotel room looks onto a
‘travel agency called the Wide World’ (TTSS, p. 135). It is here that the crux of
Smiley’s problems lies: in the opposition between the world and the text,
between ‘reality’ and its representation in his documents and libraries. In
Smiley’s People, the detective almost obsessively updates the files of those agents
and moles that he has lost: ‘For there was yet another part of Smiley, call it
pedant, call it scholar, for which the file was the only truth, and all the rest a
mere extravagance until it was matched and fitted to the record’ (SP, p. 299).
Opposed to the simple record and file, the ‘extravagance’ of reality is dangerous,
ambiguous and frightening. When he questions ex-agent Sam Collins and
notices a brief hesitation before Sam answers, he reminds himself that there
may be several potential reasons for this silence. Reality is far more complex
than the facts and dates in the files, Smiley warns himself: ‘A desk is a dangerous
place from which to watch the world’ (THS, p. 75). As the head of a secret
service obsessed by his own library, Smiley’s main problem, then, is semiotic: it
rests in the relationship between the world and the desk. What is the link, he
wonders, between ‘reality’ and the signs used to denote it?
Indeed, Smiley’s quandary is not dissimilar to the mapmakers of Borges’s 1946
story ‘On Exactitude in Science’, as described by Jean Baudrillard. Rather like
Smiley in his extensive, world-covering archive, ‘the cartographers of the
Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory’
(Baudrillard, 1993, p. 342). The world-covering map in Borges’s story,
intriguingly of an empire in decline, winds up taking the place of the world it
describes, more ‘real’ and fascinating than the reality it references. Similarly,
Smiley and his researchers favour the discreet charm of their archive over the
reality that it covers.
The Precedence of the Text: Foreigners and

the Discourse of Empire
Eventually, actual travel proves to be inevitable. In the second of the three
novels, le Carré’s plot emerges from interview rooms and libraries to go abroad.
In The Honourable Schoolboy, the aristocratic journalist and spy Jerry Westerby
returns to Hong Kong and South-East Asia to pursue an archival irregularity,
his ‘goldseam’, in the confusing, unsteady reality of Asia. Suddenly, as le Carré
seeks to convey the ‘reality’ of Hong Kong, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos and
Cambodia, and also of Germany, Switzerland, Italy and France, the text plunges
into a furious project of categorizations and definitions. Indeed, with the
hindsight of four decades, the portrayal of foreigners in the Karla trilogy seems
disturbingly clichéd and standardized, as if le Carré is using a kind of cultural
shorthand to sketch surroundings and atmosphere. In the early episodes of
The Honourable Schoolboy, for instance, Westerby’s Italian neighbours are
stereotypically and comically chaotic and gossipy. In Smiley’s People, the
archetypal Russian is evoked by Gregoriev when he describes Karla as ‘a man
from the very roots of his country’ (SP, p. 358). Smiley himself ponders and
resolves yet another national stereotype concerning the Scots: ‘Why are Scots
so attracted to the secret world? . . . Their heretical Scottish history drew them
to distant churches, he decided’ (SP, p. 50). Similarly, Smiley’s colleague
Esterhase refers to a Swiss national stereotype, that of bureaucratic, ruthless
clockwork efficiency: ‘I mean, thank God the Swiss are only neutral, know what
I mean?’ (SP, p. 338). More serious still are the Orientalist clichés employed
concerning the Asians that Jerry encounters: Jerry’s Cambodian taxi driver
suddenly seems alien and sinister (THS, p. 358); the mixed-race Charlie
Marshall is described as having ‘sleepy Chinese eyes and a big French mouth
which twisted all ways when he squawked’ (THS, p. 380). Or there is the
following glib and shocking opposition of the Chinese and the Indians: ‘The
Chinese get out early, but the Indians stay to pick the carcass’ (THS, p. 342). In
these and other scenes it would appear that le Carré introduces cliché after
cliché from the body of Orientalist Western travel literature. When Smiley’s
spies finally cross a foreign border, they still appear to be following a text, the
polarized discourse so revealingly diagnosed in Edward Said’s Orientalism
(1978). As le Carré’s empire spies travel abroad, they appear to be defining
and damning the foreign Other all the better to evoke the shining, resonant
British self.
Indeed, on his travels through the final spasms of the European empires in
South-East Asia – Vietnam, just about to fall to the Vietcong; Cambodia, just
about to be surrendered to the Khmer Rouge; Thailand, where the Americans
are also fighting a losing battle; and the dreamlike, faux war of Laos – Jerry
literally employs the empire scripts as a buffer against reality. Like a typical
tourist, he adjusts his reading to his location, savouring his nostalgia, consuming
the colonial past of the country he is visiting. In Cambodia he wields Joseph
Conrad as his master text: ‘He had brought Conrad because in Phnom Penh he
always read Conrad, it tickled him to remind himself he was sitting in the last of
the true Conrad river ports’ (THS, p. 340). More worryingly still, this journalist-
spy considers the opportunities for writing a novel, his own contribution to
British (post)colonial discourse. When he says his goodbyes in London, a
drunken fellow journalist issues him with both a warning and a quick anthology
of the literature of empire:
Nobody’s brought off the eastern novel recently, my view. Greene managed
it, if you can take Greene, which I can’t, too much popery. Malraux if you like
philosophy, which I don’t. Maugham you can have, and before that it’s back
to Conrad. Cheers. Mind my saying something?’ Jerry filled Ming’s glass. ‘Go
easy on the Hemingway stuff. All that grace under pressure, love with your
balls shot off. They don’t like it, my view. It’s been said. (THS, p. 107)
When Westerby finally starts to travel, the text again threatens to be more real
than the ‘natives’, Greene, Malraux and Hemingway more beguiling than the
reality that is hidden behind their Eurocentric world-covering maps. In its
evocation of a world in change, le Carré’s trilogy, it would appear, offers merely
a nostalgic review of a frayed British map of the world, its ‘foreign’ inhabitants
no more than the shadows of a British sense of self.
However, it soon becomes obvious that the Karla trilogy is not so simplistically
naïve. Indeed, le Carré appears to be engaging in a sly strategy, his faux-naïf
use of racial and national stereotypes masking a more sophisticated deception.
The clearest expression of this occurs during Westerby’s travels in Cambodia.
Here he encounters an old friend, the South African journalist Keller, who has
a naïve, attractive female photographer in tow. Together they drive out to the
battlefield, two battle-hardened male correspondents and a woman, a caricature
of eagerness, femaleness and blond Californian superficiality. Excitedly, she
rehearses yet another Western visual stereotype of the East: ‘I read somewhere
that when it rains Asian kids like to come out and play’ (THS, p. 356). When
their trip turns dangerous she remains blissfully unaware and lingers only once,
to take her clichéd picture of Cambodian children playing in the rain (THS,
p. 349). In this parody of a naïve American journalist, a sexist joke, of course, at
the expense of a woman, le Carré plays an intricate game around superficiality,

cliché and the deeper, more disturbing reality that it covers and masks. In
essence, he points to a radical invisibility in these discussions of the East, of
national identity and foreignness. The vapid Californian photographer cannot
photograph or ‘see’ the fullness of a radically different culture; she can only
recognize the patronizing Orientalist scenes of the Western discourse. Typically,
she is only able to record a text she has already read, a foreignness that she
already recognizes, the American ‘Cambodianness’, the exotic cliché of naked
brown children splashing in the water. As Menno Spiering suggests in an early
discussion of the limitations of foreign travel: ‘Consequently, phenomena the
traveler is not prepared for are not observed, and what is expected is
accentuated’ (Spiering, 1992, p. 16).
Britishness and Englishness
Similarly, le Carré’s foreign characters can only recognize as ‘British’ what they
know already. A long sequence at the start of The Honourable Schoolboy introduces
the reader to Jerry Westerby in his house in Tuscany from the perspective of his
Italian neighbours. Appearing to be an eccentric Englishman who is cheated by
his landlord, he is easily categorized. Inevitably, the villagers wind up misreading
Jerry, believing his performance of the English expat, as in the words of the
village postmistress: ‘[T]here is a kind of Englishman for whom only the East is
home. No doubt that was why he had come to Italy. Some men go dull without
the sun’ (THS, p. 44).Unquestioningly (and mistakenly), the Italians slot the
English inhabitants of the region into the framework of their national
stereotypes: the bungling English buffoon Jerry or the rich lady-lesbian living
further down the valley – echoes of Radclyffe Hall in this female spy.
Indeed, in le Carré’s trilogy, the extensive collection of clichés and stereotypes
that makes up national identity ultimately suggests a deeper unease. Significantly,
but not surprisingly, the basic thrust in the stereotypical representation of
foreignness in these novels is concerned with a central anxiety about Britishness.
As he goes about his business in Italy, Vietnam, Cambodia and Hong Kong,
Jerry too employs British national stereotypes. His Britishness is a mask worn
lightly, a performance, an illusion intended to dissimulate his true self. In this
way, Jerry frequently ‘acts’ the Englishman. At the Battambang airfield, for
instance, he infiltrates a prohibited area by performing Englishness, ‘wearing
the apologetic grin of an English stray’ (THS, p. 377). Likewise, Percy Alleline,
the bungling figurehead of the British secret service, has travelled the globe as
a signpost of Englishness, perpetually misread by foreigners who fail to see that
in his case the clichés are illusionary: ‘The Argentinians, liking his tennis and
the way he rode, took him for a gentleman . . . and assumed he was stupid, which
Percy never quite was.’ In India, ‘his agents seemed to regard him as the
reincarnation of the British Raj’ (TTSS, p. 140). A similar effect occurs with Bill
Haydon in the Near East, where his local agents mistake him for ‘a latter-day
Lawrence of Arabia’ (TTSS, p. 140). The ease with which this happens is
unsettling. Ultimately, even the British characters appear dominated by their
national clichés.
In the Karla trilogy, moreover, Britishness is a national identity worryingly
prone to imitation, mockery and mimicry, parody or pastiche. This parody is
expressed nowhere more clearly than in the hugely satirical scene at the British
Embassy in Phnom Penh, where the uncomfortable assembly of embassy staff,
European inhabitants and assorted spies enact a stiff-upper-lip Britishness
during dinner and the accompanying nocturnal bombardment. As the nearness
of the enemy is all too obvious and the pretence of normality barely holds, they
dine on ‘le roast beef à l’anglaise’ (THS, p. 361), demonstrating a phlegmatic
Britishness for the benefit of the servants and for one another. Britishness
becomes even more subject to pastiche and parody when the plot moves to
Hong Kong. In a boisterous café scene, the Australian Craw addresses the
international, drunken crowd of journalists in mock-medieval knightly language
(THS, p. 21), while the American Luke also mimics Englishness (THS, p. 19).
Investigating an apparently empty British secret service office in Hong Kong,
Craw bellows another parody of upper-class Englishness through the speaker
phone:
My name is Michael Hanbury-Steadly-Heamoor, and I’m personal bumboy

to Big Moo [the Governor]. I should like, pliss, to speak to Major Thesinger
on a matter of some urgency, pliss, there is a mushroom-shaped cloud the
Major may not have noticed, it appearce to be forming over the Pearl River and
it’s spoiling Big Moo’s golf. Thenk you. Will you kindly open the gate? (THS,
p. 27)
Even Smiley accidentally seems to parody himself in Hong Kong when, thinking
deeply, he is described as adopting ‘a Pickwickian posture of deliberation’
(THS, p. 482).
More tragic, alienating forms of pastiche Englishness – here defining
‘pastiche’ as an incongruous combination of disparate elements – can be
observed in connection with the orphaned Chinese boys taken in by a missionary
family who are, absurdly, named after the English admirals Drake and Nelson
because they belong to an ethnic tribe of boat people (THS, p. 249). In Hong
Kong Jerry observes the after-effects of this incongruous grafting of an English
name onto a Chinese boy: when Drake Ko’s son, also called Nelson, dies as a
young child, the alienating fake adoption of a pastiche British identity is
tragically obvious in the churchyard. With dismay, Jerry notes the sentimental
statue of ‘an entirely English child’ on little Nelson’s grave as the ultimate and
tragic misrepresentation of a dead Chinese boy (THS, p. 174).
In this world of spies, nationality, both British and foreign, is all about
unreality, imitation and pastiche. National identity or a national essence does
not exist. The many exiled Hungarians, Russians, Poles, Lithuanians and
Latvians displaced as a result of the Cold War are all assimilated – given
occupations and apartments – and enveloped in British society. There is no
foreign identity that cannot be easily erased and replaced. Similarly, there
appears to be no British identity that cannot be easily cast off and forgotten.
Smiley’s own national identity appears equally fluid. When he travels to
Switzerland in Smiley’s People, the narrator announces: ‘German was Smiley’s
second language, and sometimes his first’ (SP, p. 162). The result is a muted
unease around essence and reality, a submerged anxiety that the Britishness of
the spies and agents is only ever simulation, only ever a role to be performed,
parodied and pastiched but one that covers no true essence. At the heart of the
trilogy, in its depiction of a moribund British institution trying to survive, and
after all the simplistic depictions of foreigners and foreignness, le Carré’s novels
turn in on themselves and express a fear about Britishness. The nationalist
qualities, clichés and stereotypes, the text of Britishness may only be a
performance, a parody, a mask that covers no natural sense of self. Britishness
too may be a simulation, in order, as Baudrillard would have it, to ‘feign to have
what one hasn’t’. (Baudrillard, 1993, p. 344)
Unreal Cities
Le Carré’s world, as a result, is worryingly illusory. It is, in keeping with

Baudrillard, a simulation of the real that prevents us from seeing the absence of
the real. Concomitant with the fluid identities of the spies, there is a similar
sense of inauthenticity that pervades many of the locations visited in the Karla
series, a discomforting pastiche caused by locations pretending to be other
than they are. In Switzerland, Smiley stays in hotel rooms that reflect an
ambiguous Euro-culture, the décor of the rooms signalling at once both
Frenchness and Englishness, the room ‘a tiny Swiss Versailles’ with a print of
‘Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’ (SP, p. 309). More incongruous still is the pastiche
that is Hong Kong, an unholy collection of various national images and icons.
Thus, in Hong Kong Westerby reflects wryly on the mishmash of Britishness,
Scottishness, Italian and American culture he encounters:
The best jokes in Hong Kong, Craw had once written, are seldom laughed at
because they are too serious. That year there was the Tudor pub in the unfin-
ished high-rise building, for instance, where genuine, sour-faced English
wenches in period décolleté served genuine English beer at twenty degrees
below its English temperature. (THS, pp. 214–15)
A Scottish inn, an Italian taverna and a rooftop, pseudo-Noël Coward location

with Chinese waiters taking orders in ‘good Americanese’ (THS, p. 215) turn
Hong Kong into the inauthentic, insubstantial place that Jerry imagines will
disappear as soon as he leaves. Most outrageous in its blatant inauthenticity,
however, is the exotic African show put on by a French (or would-be French)
perfume manufacturer in an opulent Hong Kong hotel and attended by Lizzie
Worth and Jerry Westerby. In a society made up of bored English expat
neocolonials and the equally over-sophisticated Chinese rich, the advertising
company works hard at Othering the one continent that is still exotic here,
playing to racist stereotypes of African jungle drums, exotic animal wildness
and the titillating thrill of black slave girls:
In a wracked silence two black girls strode flank against flank down the
catwalk, wearing nothing but jewels. Their skulls were shaven and they
wore round ivory earrings and diamond collars like the iron rings of slave
girls. Their oiled limbs shone with clustered diamonds, pearls and rubies.
They were tall, and beautiful, and lithe, and utterly unexpected, and for a
moment they cast over the whole audience the spell of absolute sexuality.
(THS, p. 478)
However, the most canny and self-aware consumers of these unreal, inauthentic
locations and false foreign nationalities must surely be the Thai cinema
audience of The Honourable Schoolboy. In the absence of a soundtrack for their
American movie, Thai actors simply make up a storyline to fit the images with a
superior, parodic disdain for American culture: ‘He remembered John Wayne
with a squeaky Thai voice, and the audience ecstatic, and the interpreter
explaining to him that they were hearing an imitation of the local mayor who
was a famous queen’ (THS, p. 412). This sophisticated, cynical, political
audience enjoys a genuine pastiche, with Thai dialogue queering – simul
taneously – the local Thai authorities and a hegemonic icon of American
masculinity. In the Karla trilogy the reader encounters a surprisingly large
number of these unreal locations, inauthentic cities and scenes, leading to an
uncomfortable refusal of national identities and a persistent queering of
foreignness, Otherness, national difference and British identity. In the same
way that Smiley, in the hunt for Karla, loses his own sense of separateness and
self, representations of Englishness and foreignness in the trilogy become
indistinct, blurred and merged. Ultimately, Britishness here is perceived as yet
another unreal, inauthentic mask, yet another ever-receding set of signs that
represents neither national selfhood nor genuine difference. As he travels
through an Asia from which Europe and Britain are slowly but surely being
prised, Westerby faces the fact that this empire was never actually part of the
real. Driving away from Hong Kong, Westerby even fantasizes, in 1973, about
the fall of Britain’s last bastion to the ever-waiting Chinese: ‘For a moment it
was all one vanishing world – here, Phnom Penh, Saigon, London, a world on
loan, with the creditors standing at the door’ (THS, p. 499).
Rather than dealing with the East, le Carré self-consciously suggests, alongside
Edward Said, that these are anxious novels about the ambiguity of a Western
reality. All three novels share a sense of British diminishment: the abandoned
spy networks and the disappearance from the Great Game in Tinker Tailor Soldier
Spy and Smiley’s People are mirrored by the slow decline of any remaining vestiges
of colonialism and world power. In the European-based novels, however, the
atmosphere is one of measured responses and Smiley’s strategy is about
carefulness, containment and control. Westerby’s Asian tourism is tragedy on a
wider platform and a grander scale, an epic story of a Wagnerian, collapsing
Western world.
The British Spy and Foreign Laughter
More alienating and threatening still is the comic mode in which this tragic
British decline is perceived by the world abroad, the mocking foreign laughter
that greets the British journalists and spies. When the journalists of The
Honourable Schoolboy discover that the British secret service have secretly stolen
away, leaving their Hong Kong office empty, they have to do this in front of an
audience of Chinese witnesses all laughing madly.
Their taxi-driver was dancing about, clapping and laughing, his love song
forgotten. Stranger still, in view of the menacing weather, an entire Chinese
family appeared, pushing not one pram but two, and they began laughing
also, even the smallest child, holding their hands across their mouths to con-
ceal their teeth. (THS, p. 28)
The same thing happens when Jerry’s plane struggles to take off in Battambang:
‘A couple of hillsmen had come forward to see the fun and were laughing their
heads off’ (THS, p. 382). The spies appear to work in an atmosphere of sinister
mockery by a threatening, alien and dangerously out of control local population.
Or the laughter feels cynical and politically subversive, as in Cambodia where
Westerby asks the name of the adjoining village and ‘[t]he driver once more
collapsed with laugher’, mocking him for talking about a village that has been
completely destroyed (THS, p. 413). It often feels as if a bizarre, international
dramatic chorus appears wherever Smiley and his spies go, coolly observing and
cynically commenting on Western and British decline.
An extensive passage in Smiley’s People seems to symbolize the British position
in this new world order and again pitches an investigating British spy faced with
a mocking, foreign audience. On the trail of Karla’s big secret, Smiley travels to
Schleswig-Holstein to question an old double agent, only to find him dead
aboard his sailing boat, tortured and murdered. At the very edge of Europe,
Smiley meets a disparate group of caravan dwellers on the margin of society, a
ragtag of leftover people living among improvised vegetable patches, dilapidated
houseboats, old cars and ruined Second World War buildings. The aging spy
here encounters some of the people he is doing this for, but they form yet
another foreign chorus apathetically and coolly observing the spies in action:
‘They stared at Smiley without expression: the little fat stranger standing at the
end of the broken jetty’ (SP, p. 247). He soon becomes uncomfortably aware of
their cold, callous curiosity and lack of empathy, realizing that they must have
heard the tortured man’s screams yet did nothing (SP, p. 249). Their existential
status, their role in life, appears to be as watchers, a disenfranchised audience
of bystanders. But they are also frightening to him in their indifference, their
uncaring passivity. They know from the start that he will find a corpse and goad
him along. Yet again, this is an audience of derisive laughter, as when Smiley
pulls up a line in the water and hauls out a shoe (SP, pp. 250–1), although it
does in fact contain a coded message. Moreover, two boys attack Smiley’s car at
the same time: in front of this passive, aloof audience, they mime a silent
dialogue mocking him and it becomes a painfully awkward scene full of
alienation and an uncanny, threatening foreignness. This scene, towards the
end of the final novel, makes the reader aware of Smiley’s vulnerability, his
powerlessness against this curious, silent group of people. It is a very long
sequence, slowly developed by le Carré and focusing on the old spy’s discomfort
and his alienation as he is made to perform for the benefit of indifferent
watchers. Smiley here is an actor with an audience that rejects communication,
the British spy as clown, a ‘ring of faces staring after him with the old man at
their centre’ (SP, p. 253), compelled into a performance of impotence that
Smiley has to undertake again and again in these novels, as the British are
forced to pretend weakness in order to continue playing a role on the world
stage.
A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world, Smiley con-
cludes. When his agents finally venture out into the real world, they encoun-
ter a reality that is the opposite of the textual stability of their archives. Rather
than an indication of self or essence, the clichés and stereotypes of national
identity are only illusion and mask as the agents travel through unreal, global-
ized cities that no longer resemble themselves. Rather than a hegemonic ideal
of empire, Britishness has become an empty performance, a set of nostalgic
clichés to be acted out. While the many foreigners in le Carré’s trilogy – the
Chinese, the Cambodians, the Italians, the Thai, the Germans – serve a very
limited function, their role is repeated over and again and to devastating
effect. They are the unreceptive audience unmoved by the performance of
Britishness. They function as the international chorus of a classical tragedy,

the observers and commentators who force self-recognition on the spies,
reflecting back to them their own diminishment and the limitation of their
agency.
Notes
1
Quotations are not from the original editions: the books will therefore be referred
to by the following abbreviations, in the text, and page numbers: TTSS, THS
and SP.
2
For a good example of focalization through Guillam, see TTSS, pp. 203–4.
Chapter 3
Havana Noir: Time, Place and the

Appropriation of Cuba in Crime Fiction
Philip Swanson
Crime fiction is a repetitive genre, which nonetheless renews itself from one
generation to the next and from one country or region to another. There is
thus something habitual in the focus on static but evolving place and time. P. D.
James’s reflections on detective fiction emphasize the importance of ‘setting’
and ‘place’, seeing them as particularly crucial in stories located in ‘a foreign
country’ (James, 2009a, pp. 109–17). Indeed, a foreign setting has become an
increasingly prominent feature of crime fiction, both in terms of production
and consumption. For the reader or the implied author, the foreign must,
however, contain an element of familiarity: their relationship with the exotic is
not one of alienation, but, even in escapism, one of recognition, identification
or sublimation. Classical British adventure stories in Africa, India or Latin
America were always celebrations or anxious dislocations of imperial identity.
The ‘Greeneland’ of Graham Greene’s tales of adventure abroad has as much
to do with a questioning of Britishness or the ‘West’ as it does with the values of
the ‘host’ nation. North American thrillers that touch on Latin American
themes are often projections of US fears of contamination by or similarity to a
South perceived as filthy and corrupt. Fictional versions of the foreign also risk
freezing time as well as space. This is especially true of the Northern versions of
Latin America in general and of Cuba and its crumbling but resilient capital
Havana in particular. The ‘temporal anomaly’ that is Cuba ‘has become
associated with an “exotic” aesthetic that . . . is largely a construction of outsiders’
perceptions, desires and appropriations’ (Whitfield, 2008, pp. 31, 20).
Freedom of expression in literature was drastically limited in Revolutionary
Cuba, especially after Fidel Castro’s famous ‘Palabras a los intelectuales’ [‘Words
to the Intellectuals’] of 1961 and the notorious Padilla affair of 1971 (in which
the poet Heberto Padilla was denounced as a counter-Revolutionary). Moreover,
the Political Section of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, MININT, established,
in 1972, an annual prize for detective fiction, having picked up on the genre’s
potential for messages of social correction and revolutionary education. Cuba
soon became a leading centre for the production of crime fiction in Latin
America, but at the expense of churning out rather turgid lectures on the
struggle against manifestations of social inadequacy and the persistence of vices

from the past (Nogueras, 1982, p. 39). One later Cuban writer of detective
fiction, Leonardo Padura Fuentes, summed up such outputs as follows:
en la mayor parte de estas obras los personajes siguen siendo figuras de cartón-
tabla, endebles y planas, elaboradas con infantil maniqueísmo; las situaciones
simples; el idioma raquítico; las técnicas novelescas olvidadas, . . . salvándose
sólo en . . . su orientación ideológica, que responde sin eficacia artística a
los intereses del proletariado en el poder. (Navarro, 1986, p. 78; quoted in
Smith, 2001, p. 62)
[in most of these books the characters are still cardboard cut-out figures,
flat and feeble, and black-and-white to an infantile degree; their plots are
simple; their language stilted; their narrative technique forgettable, . . . their
only salvation being . . . their ideological orientation, which responds with no
artistic merit to the demands of the dictatorship of the proletariat].
Padura Fuentes would himself initiate in the 1990s, with his tetralogy of Mario
Conde novels, a new type of detective fiction. Set around the time of the misery
and extreme austerity of Cuba’s ‘Período especial en tiempos de paz’ [‘Special Period
in Peacetime’], Padura’s detective is rambling and disillusioned, as much an
observer of the shabby workings of society and its underbelly as an investigator.
Padura’s novels were hugely successful abroad, especially in Spain, and went on
to become hits in translation. Together with books like Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s
Trilogía sucia de La Habana, 1998 [Dirty Havana Trilogy], the Conde novels
helped put Cuba, and Havana in particular, back on the world cultural map.
And, of course, these literary developments coincided with the Castro regime’s
promotion of tourism in the wake of the collapse of Soviet subsidy. The 1997
album and 1999 film Buena Vista Social Club are probably the most obvious
manifestations in this period of new foreign interest in, and appropriation of,
Cuban culture. Cultural production within Cuba is now implicitly aimed at a
foreign audience and foreign manufacturers of cultural products are now
explicitly using notions of ‘Cubanity’ in their work. Whitfield talks about ‘the
trade in Cubanness that materialized during the special period’ and claims that
the decline of Cuba’s production economy as a result of the Soviet Union’s
demise meant that ‘Cuba became less a site of consumption . . . than a site for
consumption’ (Whitfield, 2008, pp. 8, 18). Moreover, the focus on the crumbling
city of Havana, which is now renewing its reputation as a pre-Revolutionary
playground for foreigners, creates an ideal arena for the fabrication of an
ambiguous, spatially and temporally imaginary world.
The imaginary nature of the city is important, as, in the context of detective
fiction, its cultivation could be seen to be, at root, an essentially foreign
invention. Latin American detective fiction is usually associated with the North
American hard-boiled model, with the detective as a reincarnation of the
Havana Noir 37
chivalric hero, now negotiating the urban jungle of the modern city. The Latin
American city is ‘the point where imperialism meets and exploits the periphery’,
and also the site of ‘fusion, interaction’ (Kapcia, 2005, p. 12). These unresolved
tensions are constitutive of the very nature of city life in Latin America, and
Havana, in particular. That tension or negotiation has to do with time as well as
place, a modern reworking of the clash between civilization and barbarism
originally played out as a conflict between the city and the countryside. The
ideal modernity of the city posited in the nineteenth century is now replaced by
a sense of pervasive anxiety, underlining the wide-ranging internalization of a
feeling of instability that has captured the internal and external imaginings of
Latin America since so-called Independence. If anything, in North American
takes on the Latin American city, the countryside is frequently projected as a
place of innocence and regenerative possibility. In the modern city, the yearning
for resolution characteristic of traditional ‘closed room’ mysteries may remain,
but the impossibly dizzy and unpredictable urban metropolis is profoundly
resistant to such a comfortingly explanatory urge.
It is probably the very mystery of a city which presents itself as available yet
ultimately elusive that accounts for the popularity of Havana in foreign writers
and readers of detective fiction. The sheer number of crime novels with the
word Havana in the title is staggering. Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana
(1958) deals with an Englishman abroad (the vacuum cleaner salesman
Wormold) who belongs fully neither to his home nor to his host culture and
who attempts to negotiate the attractive yet seedy, alluring yet dangerously
corrupt Havana of the 1950s. Many more contemporary novels return, at times
almost obsessively, to this pre-Revolutionary period with a peculiar mixture of
nostalgia and criticism. Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s Nuestro GG en La Habana (2004b)
[Our GG in Havana (2004)] is a witty re-reading of Greene and his novel. Here,
confusion reigns: a spy passes himself off as a vacuum cleaner salesman, Greene
and an impostor become submerged in shady dealings, and one character
describes the city as ‘una gran puta’ (Gutiérrez, 2004a, p. 87) [‘a big whore’,
2004b, p. 106]. Contemporary North American writers are also drawn to the
city of the 1950s, though they tend to focus on the heady yet incompatible mix
of the romance of decadent nightlife, and of revolution in the air. Stephen
Hunter’s Havana (2003) plays around with Greenery: it features a spy with
‘some indeterminate European accent’ who passes himself off as Vurmoldt of
Acme Vacuums and an American who, as Wormold pretends to, has to ‘troll for
sources at the country club’ (Hunter, 2003, pp. 81–2, 18). More accomplished,
perhaps, is Charles Fleming’s more subtle After Havana from 2004. Both of
these latter novels, incidentally, echo Sydney Pollack’s 1990 film, the romantic
thriller Havana.
Striking too is the amount of crime fiction since the 1990s that is located
in a more contemporary setting. The marketing abroad of Leonardo Padura
(the Fuentes is dropped for the English-language market) is an important
manifestation of this trend. The first four novels of the Conde series, all set
in 1989, were launched as a ‘Havana quartet’ and given the brand new titles
Havana Blue, Havana Gold, Havana Red and Havana Black (in Spanish: Pasado
perfecto [1991 and 1995], Vientos de cuaresma [1994], Máscaras [1997], and Paisaje
de otoño [1998]). Achy Obejas’s anthology of crime stories, Havana Noir, which
appeared in 2007, includes a Padura tale: each story is set in a specific area of
the city and they are written by a variety of Cuban and US-based authors. In the
meantime, Arnaldo Correa’s mystery Cold Havana Ground, which is based on
true events, appeared in 2003, while Robert Arellano’s Havana Lunar, a Cuban
novel in English published in 2009, is a gritty if literary piece of Special Period
noir. Cuban expatriate José Latour also publishes in English: the secretly stashed
diamonds caper Havana Best Friends (2002a)/Hidden in Havana (2008) is one of
a number of reasonable thrillers (his Havana World Series [2002b] takes the
reader back to 1958). The North American Margaret Truman released her
breathy corruption adventure featuring ex-CIA man Max Pauling, Murder in
Havana, in 2001. Much better was Martin Cruz Smith’s 1999 addition to his
Arkady Renko series, Havana Bay.
But why this fascination with Havana? It may be little more than a symptom
of ‘the postcolonial exotic’ (Huggan, 2001). If Cuban practitioners are engaged
in ‘a form of strategic exoticism that allows them to both appease and critically
undermine demands for clichéd representations of Cuba’ (Whitfield, 2008,
p. 20), then the uses made of Havana by North American writers are equally
ambiguous. There is a genuine interest in and engagement with Cuba’s politics
and culture, but their novels are often a projection of North American fantasies
and assumptions, which perhaps say as much about the North as they do the
South. Two examples will be used here as case studies, each focused on a
different period: Fleming’s After Havana, set in the dying days of Fulgencio
Batista’s pre-Revolutionary Cuba in the 1950s, and Cruz Smith’s Havana Bay,
set in the 1990s in the wake of Fidel Castro’s Special Period.
As always, the place is about time. Two key dates might be taken as a starting
point: 1959 and 1989. The first of January 1959 is the day of the ‘triumph of the
Revolution’, a major moment of transition, not only for Cuba but for the United
States too, in that it marks a dramatic new stage in the increasingly globalized
Cold War. In Cuba, the brutal Batista dictatorship was propped up by moral and
practical support from the United States. But the image of the island was even
more tied up with the role of the American mob which moved into Havana big
time and promoted a huge gambling industry that linked into the hotel and
entertainment business, tourism and the sex trade. The Havana nightlife scene
of the 1950s is at the core of the repertoire of images of pre-Revolutionary Cuba
available outside of the island and is hugely constitutive of Northern and
Western conceptions of it.
However, the long socialist experiment that began in 1959 would itself come
to face a dramatic turning point in 1989. Radical change in the Eastern Bloc
Havana Noir 39
and the fall of the Berlin Wall ushered in the inevitable disintegration of Cuba’s
ally and backer, the Soviet Union. Gorbachev announced in 1991 the end of the
Soviet Union’s annual subsidy for Cuba, as a result of which the Cuban economy
contracted sharply and a devastating deterioration of quality of life followed,
euphemistically pronounced by Fidel Castro as a ‘Special Period in Times of
Peace’. The government response was to cautiously begin to welcome foreign
investment initiatives, to legalize the dollar, to allow some small-scale private
enterprises and to promote tourism on a massive scale. This soon became the
country’s main money earner and the tourism industry thrived on the very
image of sun, cocktails, music, nightlife and sensuality which the regime had in
the past associated with the North American mob and sought to wipe out. The
black market boomed, jineterismo (or hustling) and prostitution became ram
pant and the old bars, clubs and hotels that survived from the 1950s were
dramatically re-packaged for the pleasure of visitors. Mob-linked hotels like the
Nacional, the haunts of Ernest Hemingway, nightclubs with exotic dancers
like the Tropicana and even the vintage cars, rickety buildings and the very
people of the city became must-see attractions. At the same time, though,
tourists would flock to Revolution Square and gaze at the huge image of Che
Guevara accompanied by the slogan ‘Hasta la victoria siempre’ (‘Forever Onwards
to Victory’), to Lenin Park, the Museum of the Revolution or the memorial to
Granma, the yacht that in 1956 transported 82 Cuban Revolutionary fighters
from Mexico to Cuba to overthrow Batista’s regime.
For the foreigner, then, a curious double nostalgia was beginning to emerge:
for the socialist paradise-that-never-was of the Revolution and for the hedonistic
yet sinister paradise of indulgence of the decade before the Revolution – a
strange and irrecuperable mix of imaginary versions of the past and the present.
The literal or literary tourist trip to Havana so often involves a search for ‘the
real thing’, but this is an authenticity that can never really be more than a myth,
and an ethically dubious myth at that. The fetishization of struggle, poverty,
ethnicity and female libidinousness is, after all, at the heart of this cultural
consumption of the island; hence perhaps the centrality of the ruined streets,
buildings and even human beings of Old Havana and Centro Habana in the
city’s romantic projection. As real or virtual visitors ogle the creaking patchwork
constructions, the ageing Cadillacs and perhaps, too, the weathered faces of the
seemingly ancient musicians of the Buena Vista Social Club or their less
renowned local equivalents, they are enjoying a slightly disturbing vicarious
frisson of Third World jouissance.
Or are they really thinking about home? The English-language novels
considered here unfailingly use Havana as a means of exploring North American
identities and anxieties. What such fiction expresses is a kind of liberal fantasy
of engagement through distance. These novels deal with individuals who are
drawn to change yet need also to identify with that which is familiar, who
appreciate the idea of the Other yet feel the allure of exoticism, who have a
political sensibility of sorts yet mimic the timeless values of some universal
notion of chivalry. This is the hallmark of many North American or European
revisionist representations of Latin America: a sympathetic and often even self-
critical re-evaluation, but one which almost always ends up displaying the limits
of the liberal imagination.
Cuba provides a particular test to the liberal imagination because of the hard
fact of Revolution. As Revolutionary leader Arturo Durán points out to jaded
roué Jack Weil in the film Havana: if you want to get rid of someone like Batista,
‘you cannot do that nicely’ (Pollack, 1990). Or, as the Russian agent Speshnev
says in Hunter’s Havana: ‘Progress is made by chaos and tragedy, not by polite
chatter’ (Hunter, 2003, p. 403). Western liberal reformism has a hard time with
the unavoidable violence of revolutionary change, hence the uncomfortable
ambiguity of the outsider-hero in Cuban-set crime fiction. Hunter’s improbable
American hero, legendary ex-Marine Earl Swagger, feels good killing the bad
guys, but laments the fate of those who suffer collateral damage (Hunter, 2003,
p. 403). There is an obvious attempt to render Swagger as an embodiment of
hard-boiled decency. When the elegant Jean-Marie Augustine, whom Swagger
has nobly rescued from an awkward situation, gestures towards Calle Virtudes
[Virtue Street], she tells the American: ‘It’s the street where you live. I can tell’
(Hunter, 2003, p. 204).
The film Havana and Fleming’s After Havana use a more amoral-seeming
hero. The charming but irresponsible Weil undergoes a moral conversion, does
the right thing and sacrifices everything to save the husband of the woman he
loves from certain execution, allowing the happy couple to stay and work for
the Revolution while he is forced to return to Florida. Hard-core Revolutionary
activity, meantime, is seen relatively rarely and on the one occasion when Weil’s
lover tries to explain its ideology, her character is only able to muster the line:
‘it isn’t an idea – it’s just a feeling inside’ (Pollack, 1990). Emotional sentiment
ality triumphs over political clarity, and in a way this is essential, for the motivation
of the American hero is grounded in the non-political values of love and decency.
The protagonist of After Havana, Peter Sloan (formerly Deacon) is also motivated
by the love of a woman, and through this love is drawn away from the world of
American gangsterism into the world of the Cuban revolutionaries.
Sloan is the assumed name of Deacon from Fleming’s previous novel, The
Ivory Coast (2002), set in mob-run Las Vegas in 1955. With the help of Chicago
mob buddy Mo Weiner, he has escaped trouble in Vegas for the anonymity of
Havana. Now in 1958, he works as a detached and lovelorn cornet player in
the band at the Tropicana. Around him a complex series of events unfolds.
Sloan meets again his mixed-race former lover Anita, who is now involved
with the rich American Nick Calloway (secretly bankrolling a revolutionary
cell in the hope that he will be in pole position to cash in on business deals
with the new regime when the old American interests crash after the impending
fall of Batista). When Anita is kidnapped by the rebels following a botched
Havana Noir 41
s urveillance job on Calloway, the subsequent ransom exchange goes horribly

wrong. Calloway is killed and Anita taken into the Sierra Maestra. Sloan, with
the aid of former Cuban policeman Luis Cardoso, travels to the rebels’ jungle
hideout to attempt another exchange (using money siphoned by Mo Weiner
from [real-life] mafia accountant Meyer Lansky). Here they come into contact
with Carlos Delgado, nicknamed El Gato or The Cat, whom Cardoso had been
tracking when working for the police. Following a gun battle between corrupt
Cuban authorities and the dedicated and honourable guerrillas, Sloan, Anita
and Cardoso manage to escape in an old Grumman airplane to Miami – with,
fortuitously, a bag of Calloway’s original ransom cash to help them on their
way with their new lives.
Sloan, though not a detective, is in many ways the classic flâneur figure of
Walter Benjamin, the ‘unknown man who arranges his walk through [the city]
in such a way that he always remains in the middle of the crowd’ (Benjamin,
1983, p. 48), usually seen as the prototype of the hard-boiled hero. Sloan,
associated with the purity of music, loyalty to friends and tragic love, is very
much an outsider. In Havana, he ‘played in the Tropicana band, and kept out
of trouble, and kept his eyes open’. Considering himself ‘a lover, not a fighter’,
he wonders: ‘If Sloan were Cuban, wouldn’t he be training with the rebels,
painting a bull’s-eye on Batista’s forehead? Maybe. Maybe not. He was only a
horn player’ (Fleming, 2004, pp. 11, 48, 13).
This is all rather mixed up, of course. Sloan does not care, yet he does. He is
cynical, yet principled and artistic. He is living in a neutral present in which
money does not matter, yet is inextricably bound to his past as he keeps ‘his
eyes open’ for his mobster pal Mo (though Sloan, he is still Deacon). And,
though money does not matter, he does not himself have to worry about it as
he ends up comfortably cushioned by Calloway’s stash. The ambiguity is neces-
sary, of course. The implicit anti-American criticism (focused on cultural
exploitation, mafia corruption and government backing of an unfair regime)
has to be tempered by a foregrounding of masculine American values: rugged
individualism, a sense of fair play, protection of women and the underdog and
a valuation of the dollar disguised behind indifference. The abstraction of
these values is necessary because they must be de-politicized to appear to work.
Cultural specificity and the reality of revolution are simply too much to bear for
the liberal imagination’s projection of universal decency as Americanness: and
so, Sloan, like Jack Weil, must return to America precisely at the moment the
Revolution begins.
The threat to the United States is held at bay by the island’s client police
force. There are numerous depictions of, or allusions to, corruption, torture,
rape and random killings involving the police – much of it focused synecdochi-
cally on the Security Chief Escalante and the venal underling Ponce. Escalante
is an echo of Greene’s Captain Segura of Our Man in Havana, though here the
brutality is much more exposed than in the British writer’s ‘entertainment’;
a stomach-churning, more explicitly violent version is Hunter’s Captain Ramon

Latavistada, nicknamed Ojos Bellos [Beautiful Eyes] because of his fondness for
breaking his victims by taking a scalpel to their eyes. Other Cubans, who are not
in hock to Batista or the mob, are in the meantime largely presented by Fleming
as innocents or brave idealists. Delgado’s mission to join Fidel in the mountains
is aided by unequivocal local community support and dogged courage from
ordinary people. Anita’s interlude in the interior with the rebels is described in
terms of a kind of rural idyll of solidarity despite the dangers and external
threats. It is fitting that the finale takes place in the countryside, ‘after Havana’,
in that it represents a kind of ideal primitivism or communism in opposition to
the monstrous network of corruption that is the city.
The notion of the primitive innocence of the interior is, nonetheless, a
fundamentally Northern/Western/Eurocentric fantasy with a long history
going back to Thomas More and Rousseau. It was also a fantasy taken up in
Latin America itself in a revisionary reaction against the philosophy of
Civilization and Barbarism, a recurring though ever-morphing constant in the
subcontinent’s literature and culture. The celebration of native innocence is all
very well when the North American protagonists get to escape to Miami with a
bag full of welcome cash. Even the decent cop Cardoso, though effectively
‘educated’ by his experiences and his encounter with the Revolutionary he had
once hunted, does not have to face the music in Cuba but instead gets a fresh,
and by implication redemptive, start in the United States. In any case, the
imagery of the interior cannot hide the semi-reluctant nostalgic glorification of
Havana nightlife that is at the heart of the book and its attraction to the reader.
The novel mesmerizes the reader with the seedy, sleazy, sensual glamour and
romance of the time and the place. The past (whether it be 1950s nightlife or
the start of the Revolution) is idealized. Havana and the emblematic Tropicana
are ‘out of time’, while Fidel is ‘mythical’ (Fleming, 2004, pp. 13, 40). The
author, in a web essay on his vacation-cum-research trip for his book, describes
the Revolution as ‘a colourful backdrop to the personal trouble Deacon finds
in Cuba’, and comments of the preservation of the old architecture of the city
due to the bad economy that: ‘For a novelist researching Havana in 1958, this
was paradise’ (Fleming, 2010). Moreover, despite obvious sympathy for ordinary
Cubans, the not infrequent linguistic jokes patronize them by turning them
into stereotypical Latins who ‘speak funny’ and have comical names. Real life
and real history are neutralized, then, because this is essentially a projection of
untenable North American desire: fundamentally, the liberal urge to reconcile
individualism with collective identification. And though the novel ends not with
Deacon but with Cardoso, the Cuban’s transition from Batista henchman to
someone who lets a rebel enemy go free is a kind of value-free education in
Cuban terms, since his real opportunity for redemption lies ahead of him in the
United States. The specificity of historical experience is transmuted into a
universal repetition of common human experience. Mo and Calloway are both
Havana Noir 43
in Havana in 1958 precisely to take advantage of the opportunity created by

crisis, while Delgado situates the current rebellion in the context of a Taíno
uprising against the Spanish conquistadors (Fleming, 2004, pp. 218–19): history
is always changing yet always the same. The winners and losers, it seems, are,
whatever the time or place, fundamentally the same.
While Fleming takes up no obvious political position, Martin Cruz Smith’s
established record may identify him more solidly in the reader’s mind with
American liberal values. The Arkady Renko series, beginning with the hugely
successful Gorky Park (1981), implicitly criticizes Western culture by introducing
a Russian hero and more explicitly does so by describing Renko’s struggles not
only with internal corruption, but also with the rapaciousness of North American
business and government agents. In Havana Bay, Renko finds himself in 1990s
Special Period Cuba, at a time when the Revolution is grappling with the effects
of the withdrawal of Soviet support, the boom in the black economy and
widespread jineterismo in the wake of the new turn to tourism, the very validity
of the Revolution itself and anxiety about what will follow after the eventual
departure of the ageing Fidel Castro. Renko has come to Havana to help out his
old sparring partner, former KGB agent Sergei Pribluda. When a badly
decomposed body is found floating in the bay in an old car tyre, Arkady is
pressed to identify the corpse as that of his former colleague. A suspicious
Renko, aided by National Revolutionary Police Force Detective Ofelia Osorio,
now becomes immersed in a complex unofficial investigation. Ultimately, the
entire case is a set-up, with the unpopular Russian being an ideal fall guy in
a plot to assassinate Castro concocted by Americans, and senior army and
MININT officers. The shady group at the heart of the conspiracy is poised to
cash in on the new business deals and casino opportunities that will arise from
the change of regime. The final twist is that Castro himself has been involved in
the plot all along, using it to smoke out disloyal elements in the military and
reassert his hold on power – but at the expense of creating new alliances with
foreign and local conspirators. The merry-go-round of history continues, then,
as ‘change’ and ‘no change’ are once again barely distinguishable. There is a
kind of conventional moral resolution in that the scheming Americans do get
their comeuppance, but the decent seekers of truth and new lovers, Arkady and
Ofelia, are separated, and, though returned to their normal environments, they
wind up fundamentally isolated and lonely.
Renko’s foreignness is a multiple foreignness of time as well as place. Not
merely is he out of place as a Russian in Cuba, he is also hated for it. His
translator (who will later try to kill him) alludes to a song with the lyrics ‘La
fiesta no es para los feos. . . . No puedes pasar aquí amigo’ (Cruz Smith, 1999,
p. 4) [This party is not for ugly people. Sorry, my friend, you can’t come]. In
case Arkady does not get the message, he says, more bluntly: ‘Cubans don’t like
Russians. It’s not you, it’s just not a good place for Russians’ (Cruz Smith, 1999,
p. 5). Acting as interpreter for the Cuban military’s viewpoint, he later adds
political-historical context: ‘in this Special Period the Cuban people cannot
afford to waste resources on people who have revealed themselves to be our
enemy’ (Cruz Smith, 1999, p. 12). Of course, Renko is no more comfortable
anywhere else. When he asks where is a good place for a Russian to be, Rufo can
only shrug (Cruz Smith, 1999, p. 5). As the other novels in the series show, as a
Russian he is not at home even in Russia since, being a man of honour, he does
not fit with the shifting power games of the Soviet and post-Soviet era. The
radical changes in his homeland and Cuba since 1989 reinforce the sense of
being outside the system. Old certainties have gone and corruption and hustling
pour in to fill the vacuum. The detective as modern chivalric hero is always out
of place and out of time, it seems.
Though he is a senior investigator in the Moscow Prosecutor’s Office in
Russia, Renko retains the character of the independent hard-boiled American.
Like Sloan, he is a romantic: motivated by love (for his lost love Irina and later
for Ofelia, who will also be lost to him), and, though not a musician, someone
who looks ‘like a poet’ (Cruz Smith, 1999, p. 26). His outsider status makes him
the perfect flâneur, wandering the unfamiliar streets of Havana, registering,
processing and trying to make sense of all that he sees. The city comes across as
an exotic ruin. There is ‘decay everywhere, heat everywhere, faded colors trying
to hold together disintegrating plaster and salt-eaten beams’ (Cruz Smith, 1999,
p. 67), though the houses are ‘transformed by the revolution into a far more
colorful backdrop of ruin and decay’ (Cruz Smith, 1999, p. 13) – the colours a
‘vibrant spectrum’ matched by the vintage cars, dazzling fruits, the ‘slow grace
and color’ of the people, the never-ending sound of music, and ‘dancers as
exotic as hothouse orchids’ (Cruz Smith, 1999, p. 122). The apprehension of
the ruined city represents a double nostalgia: for the 1950s Havana preserved
for tourists and visitors in the 1990s, and for the socialist utopia that limps on
anachronistically into the present. This is a perspective that Cubans internalize
themselves. Padura’s Mario Conde is ‘un incorregible recordador’, an observer
of ‘un desastre lamentable y para colmo ascendente’ (Padura Fuentes, 1997,
pp. 18, 19) [‘a sucker for nostalgia’, ‘a wretched decline entirely in the
ascendant’ (Padura, 2005, pp. 6, 7)]. But the Russian perspective suggests that
nostalgia is pervasive, as is a cyclical sense of history. The ‘whittled nostalgia’ of
Pribluda’s knick-knacks indicates a nostalgia not only for the homeland but also
for the clarity of Communism (Cruz Smith, 1999, p. 20). His companion Olga
Petrovna sighs that: ‘Even in her time in Havana the city had become another
Haiti. And Moscow was overrun by Chechens and gangs. Where could a person
go?’ (Cruz Smith, 1999, p. 67). And for Arkady, the new Russia of the post-
Soviet era has become a place of ‘demonic excess’ (Cruz Smith, 1999, p. 27),
where the Revolutionary slogans still visible in Cuba have been replaced by
signs for Nike and Absolut, and where ‘amateur affairs with steel pipes and
vodka bottles’ have been overtaken by professional organized crime (Cruz
Havana Noir 45
Smith, 1999, pp. 24–5). No matter the time or place, change only means
repetition. Hence, in Havana Bay’s final line, Renko is back in Moscow where
the snow ‘made each step a visible memory and then covered it over’ (Cruz
Smith, 1999, p. 329).
What this universalizing nostalgia means is that Renko, despite his double
foreignness, is essentially an embodiment of American (and Western) illusions
and disillusionments. The hyperbolic corruption of Cuba and Russia serves as a
contrast with the underlying decency of American liberal values, but also as a
mirroring of anxiety about systemic failings of the American nation. Hence it is
important that the detective both succeeds and fails. Corruption means that the
‘moral safety-net of detection’ (Priestman, 1990, p. 177) is fatally compromised,
but to an extent, behind Renko’s moral triumph, there is, albeit hugely diluted,
some sense of what P. D. James sees as the corrective value of detective fiction
(James, 2009a, p. 141). The abstract moral power of the chivalric detective goes
some way to salving the bitter taste of the lessons of history.
History and geography are also bound and splintered by the question of
ethnicity or race. The liberal imagination often seeks to dissolve racial or ethnic
difference in order to bolster the fantasy of shared universal values of decency.
Osorio’s experience of Russians’ reaction to black people is that they ‘recoiled
as if from a snake’ (Cruz Smith, 1999, p. 33). In After Havana, both Sloan and
Calloway compare the relative ease about race in Cuba with the effective
segregation at work in the United States. Yet, for Cubans, this is not necessarily
the case: Cardoso is well aware of the prejudice towards those who are techni
cally even part black (Fleming, 2004, pp. 22–3); in the 1990s, Ofelia makes it
clear that Cubans are still very conscious of skin colour (Cruz Smith, 1999,
p. 33). Moreover, the black North American shoeshine, nicknamed Havana
Brown, regularly appears in the novel in a series of costumbrist cameos.
Americans rub shoulders with him freely and enjoy the camaraderie, yet his
name and image turn him into a figure of domesticated exoticism almost on
display for the benefit of the white gaze.
If this shows the limitations of the liberal perspective, Cruz Smith’s novel
adopts a species of magical realist perspective in which a syncretic Caribbean or
‘Third World’ view is valorized alongside a Western or Northern one. The
‘Cuban method’ of detection, as it is repeatedly referred to, can be seen to
combine rational with what might usually be seen as non-rational elements. At
one stage a Cuban forensic pathologist tells Renko that ‘when we make a
psychological analysis of a person we use the Minnesota profile, of course, but
we also take into consideration whether a person is a devotee of Santería’ (Cruz
Smith, 1999, p. 53). Santería is a syncretic religious practice of West African and
Caribbean origin, and its ceremonies play a part in Renko’s and Osorio’s
investigation. Ofelia’s investigative process is extremely practical yet also guided
by her orishas or saints. An exchange between Ofelia and Arkady encapsulates
the essence of Magical Realism (that the Third World viewpoint is as valid as
that of the First):
Osorio narrowed her eyes on him. ‘We can believe in Santería, Palo Monte,
Abakua or Catholic. Or any combination. You think that’s impossible?’
‘No. It’s amazing the things I believe in: evolution, gamma rays, vitamins,
the poetry of Akhmatova, the speed of light. Most of which I take on faith.’
(Cruz Smith, 1999, p. 109)
This is an emotionally pleasing position for the foreign detective and the Anglo-
American implied reader to adopt, but hardly a sustainable one. It is another
fantasy based on the collapsing of differential time and space. The implied
reader is not expected to believe in Santería, and the mystery at the heart of the
novel has an all too logical and human explanation. The implied narrator and
reader may wish to transcend their Americanness or Eurocentricity but they are
ultimately trapped within it. The attraction of investigating foreignness may be
a well-meaning, sympathetic and welcome liberal urge, but the project will
almost always founder against its own limitations. The specificity of human
experience in time and place simply cannot be contained by the liberal
imagination. Just as there is always some form of resolution even in the darkest
mainstream detective fiction, so too will the pleasurable abstraction of emotional
identification always win out over real understanding and engagement with the
foreign.
Chapter 4
Shanghai, Shanghai: Placing Qiu Xiaolong’s

Crime Fiction in the Landscape of Globalized
Literature
Luo Hui
Qiu Xiaolong was an established literary translator in China, acclaimed for his
Chinese translation of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, before moving to the United
States in 1988. His pursuit of Eliot’s work eventually led him to St Louis,
Missouri, Eliot’s home town, where he settled and now makes his living writing
crime fiction in English. In a series of murder mysteries set in Shanghai, his own
home town, Qiu created the character Chief Inspector Chen, a police chief at
the Shanghai Police Bureau who is also a modernist poet. Inspector Chen, who
frequently quotes and draws inspiration from classical Chinese poets such as
Wang Wei, Li Bai, Du Fu and Li Shangyin, still manages to write poetry and
attend writers’ conferences in spite of his demanding police work. Qiu thus
manages to keep his poetic passion alive, though vicariously, through the
creation of his alter ego.
With six mystery titles to his name since his debut novel, Death of a Red Heroine,
in 2000, Qiu joins the roster of emigrant Chinese writers who have successfully
established literary careers in a non-native language. Where might we place Qiu
as a writer in an era when literary traffic between the English- and Chinese-
speaking worlds is increasing in volume, intensity and complexity? While critics
such as Alan Velie praise Qiu’s work as exemplary of a ‘new globalized literary
paradigm’ (Velie, 2009, p. 55), the creative impulse behind Qiu’s work, in my
view, is not a celebratory new-millennium cosmopolitanism, but the persistent
tension between the limitations and possibilities, both cultural and personal,
that confronts a writer who works in a foreign language, and in this case, a
writer of Chinese origin in a rapidly globalizing world. Despite an air of cosmo
politan suavity that accords with the current cultural climate of globalization,
much of the success of Qiu’s Inspector Chen series is still founded on the
reconstruction of difference, foreignness and exoticism, through the trope of
Shanghai and through the genre of the murder mystery.
Focusing on Qiu’s literary lineage, his creative use of genres and the politics
of ‘translating’ Chinese culture for different audiences, this essay will examine
some of the personal and cultural implications for a writer of Chinese origin
who chooses to write crime fiction in English. Michael Cohen has observed that
‘mystery fiction is very fond of cultural difference, and significantly, that
difference is very often viewed from the outside’ (Cohen, 1999, p. 150). While
the genre’s fascination with the foreign might have enabled Qiu’s writing to
cross national and linguistic borders, his unique ability to view cultural difference
from both the outside and inside has posed new questions for the perception of
foreignness in a given culture. Special attention will be given to Qiu’s reworking
of the trope of Shanghai as a way to launch a parody that both mimics and
critiques the conventions of exoticism.1 Equally illustrative of Qiu’s paradoxical
relationship with literary and cultural conventions is his portrayal of Chen, a
character who walks a fine line between fictional fantasy and literary self-
fashioning.
Shanghai to St Louis: Qiu’s Literary Lineage
In the author’s short biography found on the covers of his Inspector Chen
books, Qiu describes himself first as a poet and translator, and only then as a
writer of murder mysteries. When asked how he turned to the genre, Qiu
replied:
I have always liked mystery and read a lot of them. But my choice of the genre
came in an unexpected way. After my visit back home [China] in 1995, I tried
to write a novel about Chinese society in transition, but I had never written
fiction before, so I had a hard time putting my material together. So mystery
came to my help. For it provided a ready-made structure, so to speak, a frame-
work into which I put my social commentary. That’s how Death of a Red Heroine
was written; however, my editor said it was a good mystery novel, and wanted
me to write a second one. The series started just like that.2 (Qiu, 2010)
It would not be inaccurate to call Qiu Xiaolong an accidental mystery writer, an

aspiring writer of fiction who flirted with mystery and got hooked by forces
beyond his control. It started out as a literary strategy, one that has proven to be
highly successful.3
Yet one senses that Qiu is reluctant to be identified primarily as a mystery
writer. There is no denying that the genre has provided him with a ready-made
framework, and his literary success, at least initially, owes a great deal to the
tried-and-tested market and readership that come with the genre. However, it is
doubtful whether Qiu’s success should be ascribed chiefly to the appeal of his
books as murder mysteries. Reaction to the Inspector Chen series is mixed.
Chinese critics tend to judge his work by Western conventions of the murder
mystery, and consider the Inspector Chen books rather weak in suspense and
Shanghai, Shanghai: Qiu Xiaolong’s Crime Fiction 49
ratiocination (A, 2005; Ji, 2009). Western reviewers, intrigued by Qiu’s portrayal
of Chinese society in transition, are more accepting of his unusual approach to
mystery. Peter Gordon writes ‘one feels Qiu pushing the envelope of the
detective series genre’. (Gordon, 2004)
Is Qiu pushing the boundaries of crime fiction or is he a writer who uses the
genre merely as a strategy or a stepping-stone towards more ‘serious’ literature?
Qiu seems to be ambiguous about his relationship with the genre. In an
interview he said: ‘For me as well as for Inspector Chen, “whodunit” in itself
may not be enough; rather, in what social and political background the crimes
occur. So it is fair to say my books are marked with a sociological approach’
(Qiu, 2010). Here, Qiu suggests that he has indeed been trying to approach
mystery from a different angle, shifting his focus from the familiar ‘whodunit’
to what one might call whydunit. Elsewhere, Qiu is more dismissive of the genre:
‘Murder mystery is only a shell; contemporary China is the real protagonist of
my novels’ (Xiao, 2007). Even if Qiu uses the genre initially as a narrative
framework, he does try to do something different with it. His attempts at
‘pushing the boundaries’ might have been a moving away from the generic
conventions of mystery, or a way of distancing himself from the run-of-the-mill
‘whodunit’, yet his success has, accidentally, opened up new possibilities for the
genre. There is something else going on in Qiu’s books.
For commercial reasons, the Inspector Chen series has been classified and
marketed as murder mysteries, but Qiu’s literary lineage is far more complex
and not easily delineated. A poet and literary translator, with a PhD in
Comparative Literature, Qiu would have drawn inspiration from a diverse
range of literary traditions, from Chinese, English and American, to Chinese-
American. One comparison that readily springs to mind is Earl Derr Biggers’s
wildly successful American cult classic featuring the Hawaiian Chinese detective,
Charlie Chan. Those familiar with the Chan novels or movies from the 1920s
to the 1950s would be quick to point out the apparent similarities and
differences between the ponderous, conservative and wise Charlie Chan and
the modern, suave and poetic Chen. However, it would be erroneous to
presume that Qiu Xiaolong modelled his Inspector Chen with Chan in mind:
‘I read Charlie Chan, thanks to a Canadian fan who sent me the complete
works [of Biggers], but I did not read Charlie Chan until after I had already
written three or four Inspector Chen books’ (Qiu, 2010). While comparisons
between the two are inevitable, Chan and Chen belong to two different worlds.
To quote Yunte Huang, ‘Charlie Chan is an American stereotype of the
Chinaman’ and is actually ‘as American as Jack Kerouac’ (Huang, 2010, p. xix).
Inspector Chen, of course, is Chinese, but he is only as ‘Chinese’ as Qiu’s books
are Chinese.
Some of Qiu’s cultural references, such as frequent quotations of Chinese
sayings and folk wisdom, an obsession with Chinese food and the propensity to
exoticize it, are reminiscent of an earlier generation of Chinese-American
writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan. Qiu does acknowledge the
influence of Chinese-American fiction, considering Tan ‘wonderful in
presenting details’ (Qiu, 2010). Although Qiu’s own life story is very much part
of the Chinese-American experience, Qiu’s books, judging by their plots and
characters, do not belong to the same Chinese-American literary tradition as
Kingston’s and Tan’s. Qiu’s novels are distinctly Chinese stories set in China
(more specifically, Shanghai), with almost all Chinese characters who would be
speaking Mandarin or various Chinese dialects. Yet these are Chinese stories
told in English, primarily for a non-Chinese, English-speaking audience.
Through vigorous marketing, Qiu’s novels have now been translated into more
than 20 different languages, including Chinese, which dramatically complicates
the notions of the foreign, the native, the exotic and the cosmopolitan.
Qiu is not the only writer of Chinese origin who has ‘conquered’ the literary
world in a foreign language by telling stories from their native land. Ha Jin, and
more recently, Yiyun Li, are two other examples of this emergent literary
phenomenon.4 It is still debatable whether their writings should be considered
a new development in overseas ‘Chinese literature’ that is reflective of the rise
of China and its role in globalization, or whether they are indeed part of
American literature. Unlike Ha Jin’s and Yiyun Li’s ‘literary fiction’, Qiu writes
mainly murder mysteries, a long-established popular genre with a commercially
reliable market. Yet working within a genre does not necessarily make Qiu’s
work more easily classifiable, for his writing has been equally complicated by
the issues of language, home and displacement that confront all ‘migrant
writers’.5 Nor does the familiarity of the genre make his literary success any less
conditioned by his foreignness.
There is no doubt that Qiu is aware of these various literary traditions –
English and American crime fiction, modern and classical poetry, Asian-
American writing, contemporary Chinese diasporic literature – and is capable
of drawing from these literary modes and models to enrich his crime fiction,
often to his advantage commercially and artistically. Yet this hybridity gives
Qiu’s writing a quality of in-betweenness that betrays more of a struggle than
a reconciliation. However situated Qiu’s work is within America, whether it is
seen as an offshoot of Asian-American literature or as part of an evolving
Chinese diasporic literature, there is yet another important source of his
writing – Shanghai – which has enabled his identity as a Chinese writer in
Middle America, while at the same time pulling him away from it.
Shanghai Exotica: Poetry, Confucianism and Parody
Shanghai is the setting of all of Qiu’s murder mysteries as well as his latest non-
crime fiction, Years of Red Dust: Stories of Shanghai (2010). And much of the
impression of cosmopolitanism of Qiu’s fiction is owed to his depiction of
Shanghai, evoking a long lineage of Shanghai-based writers responsible for the

formation of a Shanghai modernity.6 Since the early twentieth century, several
generations of Chinese writers – from the ‘New Sensationists’ of the 1930s such
as Shi Zhicun and Mu Shiying, the legendary Eileen Chang of the 1940s, to the
more recent literary sensation, Wei Hui of Shanghai Baby (2001 [1999]) fame –
have used the colours, sounds, textures and moods of the great metropolis to
create a unique Shanghai glamour that is at once alluring and unsettling. To
Qiu as an individual and as a writer, Shanghai is alternately childhood memory,
home, cultural capital and myth, and, as he himself put it, ‘more than that’
(Qiu, 2010). While Qiu acknowledges the importance of Shanghai to his writing
and appreciates Shi Zhicun for his psychological depth, he considers many of
the celebrated ‘Shanghai writers’ ‘overrated in the city’s collective nostalgia –
or as a kitsch endorsement of the present by evoking such a non-existent
tradition’ (Qiu, 2010).
Yet nowhere is Qiu more self-conscious of the constructedness of exotic ‘non-
traditions’ than in his own depiction of Shanghai, the setting of all his novels,
and almost a fictional character in its own right. When Inspector Chen is
approached to translate a business proposal for the New World project, a huge
shopping, entertainment, office and residential complex that merges old
colonial Shanghai architecture with the new and ultra-modern, the developer
promises: ‘It will be an attraction for foreigners – exotic, strange, colonial, post-
colonial, what they do not have at home. It will attract Shanghainese too’ (Qiu,
2005, p. 11). Chen accepts the work, but is deeply aware that ‘the success of the
project would depend on a myth – a nostalgia for the glitter and glamour of the
thirties, or to be exact, on the recreation of that myth’ (Qiu, 2005, p. 43).
Indeed, it is this idea of cultural myth that Qiu manages to convert into cultural
capital in his fiction.
Qiu’s novels are peppered with references to traditional and popular Chinese
culture, especially food and proverbs, and often a combination of the two. For
example, unbelievable good luck, in Qiu’s language infused with folk wisdom,
becomes ‘a moon cake had fallen from the skies’ (Qiu, 2005, p. 12). And in
reverse, when a great opportunity is lost, ‘It was as if a roasted Beijing duck had
flown back into the sky’ (Qiu, 2005, p. 2). The author makes sure that these
folksy aphorisms do not come directly from Chen, but from an omniscient
narrator. These carefully placed cultural references lend the novel an old-
fashioned ‘Oriental’ flavour while allowing Inspector Chen to maintain his
decidedly modern persona.
As different as his Inspector Chen is from Hollywood’s Charlie Chan, Qiu
cannot resist the temptation of adorning Chen with characteristics that are
unmistakably ‘Chinese’, especially in the eyes of the non-Chinese reader. Yunte
Huang describes Charlie Chan as a crafty Chinese detective with his trademark
‘pseudo Confucian witticism’ and ‘fortune cookie aphorisms’: ‘Door of
opportunity swing both ways’, or ‘Action speak louder than French’ (Huang,
2010, p. 299). Inspector Chen exhibits a similar, though somewhat more

highbrow, Chinese characteristic – the ability to quote poetry, mainly classical
Chinese, but also Western and modern, to celebrate or reflect on almost every
occasion. Poetry to Inspector Chen is what fortune cookie sayings are to Charlie
Chan.
Qiu’s ample use of poetry in his murder mysteries might seem exotic at first
glance, but to those who are familiar with classical Chinese novels, this
idiosyncrasy is not that unusual. As Qiu explains:
In classical Chinese novels, there is more poetry in the narrative. So you

may say it is an attempt to incorporate the Chinese tradition into the
English books I’ve been writing. I don’t see poetry as necessarily ‘foreign’
or ‘other’ to fiction. [Lyrical] or emotional intensity justifies the introduc-
tion of poetry into the text, particularly with Chen himself being a poet.
(Qiu, 2010)
The incorporation of poetry into narrative, seen from this perspective, is not
gratuitous but grounded in Chinese literary tradition; this borrowing from
Chinese literature may also enable the author to make an innovative contribution
to English-language fiction. Unlike the world of classical Chinese fiction where
poetry is admired and revered, Qiu’s poet/detective lives in an environment
that is not particularly hospitable to poetry. The dogged insistence on poetry,
therefore, acquires poignancy as a reminder of the still-important function of
poetry in today’s increasingly materialistic society.
Yet a present-day Chinese police chief speaking fluent English and versed in
various poetic traditions is still something of a novelty, exuding mystique and
exoticism to both English and Chinese readers. Sometimes Chen, if not aware
of the improbable nature of his frequent quoting of poetry in police work, is
nonetheless cognizant of the ironic contrast between the literary allusions and
the real-life situations to which the poetry is applied. After consenting to
translate the business proposal referred to earlier for real-estate developer
Mr Gu, Chen accepts the money that comes in an envelope and contemplates
how he might spend it to fulfil his filial duty to his mother. He then drains a cup
of liquor and says:
‘Drinking with you, we talk to our hearts’ content, my horse tied to a willow tree, by a
high building.’
‘What is the allusion? You have to enlighten me, my poetic chief inspector.’
‘It’s just a quote from Wang Wei,’ Chen said without further explanation.
The couplet referred to a promise given by a gallant knight in the Tang
dynasty, but he and Gu had merely concluded a business deal, which was
anything but heroic. (Qiu, 2005, pp. 16–17)
This kind of self-irony permeates Qiu’s writing and gives the poetic quotations
a certain depth that goes beyond mere window-dressing. The gap between
poetic ideal and socio-economic reality creates occasions for social commentary
and personal reflection. When Inspector Chen is provided with a young female
assistant to help with his translation project, he romanticizes the relationship,
modelling it after the classic talent-and-beauty scenario from the Chinese literati
tradition: ‘The fragrance from her red sleeves accompanies your writing deep in the
night . . . a Tang dynasty line rose from the recess of his mind, but Chen pulled
himself back to the present’ (Qiu, 2005, p. 16). The present, Chen realizes,
offers only a very mundane version of the scene from the Tang poem – ‘a free
little secretary’ – with all its connotations of monetary and sexual transactions
in today’s China.
While fantasizing about the life of a writer in a tingzijian, the Shanghai
equivalent of an artist’s garret, Chen catches himself and reflects: ‘Not everything
could have been glamorous in times past, but nostalgia made it so’ (Qiu, 2005,
p. 176). He then elaborates on this point by quoting poetry, this time Russian:
‘Things are miraculously mellowed in memories. That was a line from a Russian poem
he had read, but failed to understand, in his high-school years. A subtle
transformation in comprehension had occurred with the lapse of years’ (Qiu,
2005, p. 176). Qiu does something quite extraordinary here. On the one hand,
he acknowledges that it is the passage of time that allows the things of the past
to acquire a mellow and glamorous aura; on the other hand, the passage of
time also allows him to comprehend this message from a Russian poem that he
could not understand in his younger days. Wisdom is gained over the years, yet
the same wisdom has made us distrustful of our own memory. When Qiu writes
passages with such nuance and subtlety, his use of poetry stops being mere
embellishment and becomes an integrated part of his prose.
Besides poetry, Chen’s ‘Chineseness’ is also marked by his Confucian
inclinations. He is a devoted son who is constantly worried about the welfare of
his widowed mother. A liberal-minded single man in his thirties, he nevertheless
feels the social pressure to marry and continue the family line. From his late
father, a neo-Confucian scholar who suffered during the Cultural Revolution,
he takes to heart the Confucian dictum: ‘There are things a man can do, and things
a man cannot do.’ This is a line that Chen quotes frequently in moments of crisis,
serving as a kind of moral compass in a corrupt, decidedly non-Confucian
world. Chen’s moral ambiguity lies in the fact that, while this Confucian teaching
provides him with moral guidelines, it also grants him the license to ‘get the job
done’ by breaking the guidelines, including those of Confucianism itself.
Like his ironic poetic musings, Chen’s application of Chinese traditions –
whether Confucian, Daoist or Buddhist – is pragmatic and tinged with a note
of irreverence. In A Case of Two Cities (2007), for example, Chen masquerades
as a monk at a temple in Los Angeles in order to gain information from the
main suspect, Xing Xing. Recognizing a strong filial tie between Xing and his
mother, Chen seeks to divine the future for Xing’s mother and then for Xing
himself, through ‘glyphomancy’, the process of interpreting written Chinese
characters.
Sure, I’ll read it for you. Chen responded with an air of utter confidence
When Chuangjie first created the system of Chinese written characters, every
archetypal stroke of a character came out of the cosmos in miraculous cor-
respondence to the omnipresent qi, and that in turn, in correspondence to
the microcosmos of an individual human being. So that’s called tianrenheyi –
heaven and human in one. For a virtuous woman like you, whatever character
you may write in a moment of faith, there will be elements recognizable from
the mysterious correspondence. (Qiu, 2007, pp. 175–82)
What we witness in this scenario is a hodgepodge of Chinese philosophies,

ethics and beliefs being evoked, appropriated and manipulated to serve the
utilitarian purpose of solving the case and restoring justice. Like Chan’s
‘pseudo-Confucianism’, Chen’s Oriental wisdom is by no means ‘authentic’
or faithful to its origin. Chen’s penchant for summoning knowledge of the
poetic, the exotic and the arcane can easily be faulted as the manifestation of
an inverted Orientalism, or the commodification of Chinese culture for global
consumption.7 Yet Chen’s poetic reflections are intelligent and self-aware,
lending his character a certain intellectual depth and making him a complex,
credible individual such as one might encounter in a sophisticated city like
today’s Shanghai. His eclectic mixture of the Chinese and the Western, the
ancient and the modern gives him a cosmopolitan and contemporary quality,
and his non-dogmatic, pragmatic approach to ancient Chinese culture (for
example, appropriating arcane knowledge for his police work) makes him
irreverently ‘post-modern’.
In a similar spirit, Qiu freely employs familiar cultural references in his
writing, such as witty Chinese proverbs and elaborate descriptions of exotic
food, yet he spares no effort in trying to break out of the Charlie Chan stereotype
of the old, wise but stodgy and asexual Chinese detective by creating a capable
young police chief who is charismatic, romantic and sensitive – a poet at heart.
Qiu’s mixture of knowing parody and searching self-fashioning makes his
portrayal of the poet/translator/gourmet/detective at once poignant and
ambiguous. Inspector Chen seems to be able to take advantage of a system
while keeping a critical distance from it. Qiu, while succeeding in both Western
and Chinese literary worlds, keeps an equally guarded distance from the cultural
politics between the East and the West:
I like the term inverted Orientalism, but I don’t think it applies to my book.
For that matter, nor does my paraphrase or parody of Western poets justify
the label of inverted Occidentalism (by the way, I would have quoted more of
them, especially T. S. Eliot, but for the opposition of my editor who declared
that it’s too expensive to quote [Eliot]). In a global age like today, I’m simply
writing about what comes up familiar and natural to myself. (Qiu, 2010)
Using crime fiction both as a career strategy to break into the English publishing
world and as serious-minded literary self-fashioning, Qiu does not shy away
from the constructs and artifices of difference, foreignness and exoticism while
at the same time trying to overcome these cultural clichés, often with a dose of
cynicism, through the mechanisms of deconstruction, simulation, parody and
self-parody. Compared with earlier literary and cinematic representations of
China that dwell on opium dens, pigtails and bound feet, Qiu’s exotic blend of
modern and classical poetry, gourmet food and Confucian adages is no doubt
more up-to-date, confident and sophisticated. It is, nonetheless, a type of
exoticism that can easily be seen as catering to Western tastes and feeding into
Western imaginations of China. Qiu’s work does not break free from the strong
hold of exoticism on the literary representation of Chinese culture, as exoticism
is still the hallmark that helps to sell the books. However, it is an exoticism that
re-maps the landscape of the foreign and the native, a landscape that will be
constantly shifting as the books reach different audiences through marketing
and translation, until the lines between myth, memory and reality become
blurred in Qiu’s Shanghai.
Returning to Shanghai: Translation, Reception, Audience
When Qiu decided to write his first Inspector Chen novel in English, he
nevertheless considered it a ‘China novel’:
I started writing in English not so much because of a clear readership in

mind, but because of the fact that I could not have my writing published in
Chinese at the time. But once I started in English, I could not help think-
ing, technically, of the possible problems in a China novel for the English-
speaking readers. And . . . the issue of readership becoming complicated
when the books began to appear in other languages. (Qiu, 2010)
The issue of translation and readership becomes particularly intricate when the
novels are translated into Chinese. Since 2003, the first three of the Chen series
have been published in China: Death of a Red Heroine, A Loyal Character Dancer
and When Red is Black.8
That Qiu’s books, essentially Chinese stories written in English, should be
translated back into Chinese is in itself an interesting cultural phenomenon.
One Chinese reviewer defines this phenomenon by using a term from
international trade – chukouzhuanneixiao, or ‘goods for export being imported

back for domestic consumption’ (Sun, 2003). In Chinese trade practice, goods
meant for export are usually produced with higher standards and are of higher
quality than goods meant for the domestic market; therefore to the Chinese
mind, chukouzhuanneixiao has a ring of superiority or exclusivity. However, these
products, though of good quality, are still Chinese-made and are generally
not held in the same high regard as imports from Western countries. So
chukouzhuanneixiao has the connotation of being second-best, and, as a some
what outmoded term from the more controlled economy of the 1980s and
1990s when Western imports were not readily available in China, it could be a
tongue-in-cheek, slightly derogatory way to describe Qiu’s work.
Chinese reactions to Qiu’s work (reminiscent of domestic response to the
international acclaim of Fifth Generation films)9 run the gamut from enthusiastic
praise to defamatory criticism, while both responses are suggestive of a mixture
of nationalistic pride and a Chinese inferiority complex. The positive reviews
generally laud Qiu’s books as a great Chinese success story and as proof that
‘Chinese people too can write first-rate crime fiction’, while ignoring the fact
that China has its own tradition of crime fiction in both classical and modern
periods.10 On the negative side, Qiu’s books have been criticized for being ‘too
eager to cater to the taste of Western readers and their ideological biases’ (Jin,
2009), and Qiu himself has been accused of being ‘a broker of Chinese culture’
(A, 2005).
One awkward feature of real-life exports-turned-imports, particularly clothing,
is that they are originally designed to fit larger Western body types, and when
imported back to China, may not fit Chinese people. Similarly, Qiu’s books will
have to encounter such inevitable awkwardness when they are translated back
into Chinese. His depiction of China, particularly the Qiu brand of Shanghai
exoticism and cosmopolitanism, will have to pass the test of chukouzhuanneixiao.
Chinese readers are picky and quick to point out the defects in their eyes:
The character Party Secretary Li is entirely superfluous; his only function is

to represent political interference in police work; his speech is full of politi-
cal slogans and clichés, which might sound novel to readers in the West, but
doesn’t do much to the narrative. Also out of consideration for the intended
audience, Qiu . . . goes into great length to introduce Chinese food and deli-
cacies. It occasionally works, but once it becomes formulaic, it detracts from
the artistic merit of the novel. And these cultural references do not translate
well into Chinese. (Jin, 2009)
Some are uncomfortable with the hybrid nature of Qiu’s work. After reading
A Loyal Character Dancer, one reviewer writes, ‘I thought I was reading detective
fiction, but then I realised that this book is also a poetry anthology, a tour guide,
and a modern version of the folktale “The Ox-herd and the Weaver Girl”.
Bewildered by Qiu Xiaolong’s genre blending and multiple cultural colours, I

lost interest in all of his cultural goods. I felt angry’ (A, 2005).
Still others take issue with Qiu’s depiction of Shanghai, which seems, to many
Shanghainese today, slightly out of date. As one critic points out, Qiu’s Shanghai
seems to be excavated from the 1980s or the early 1990s (Xiao, 2007). It was a
time when eating crab was a great luxury, a ritual worthy of pages of elaborate
description. Even Qiu admits that, in the gourmet department, ‘my Shanghai
friends declare I’m outdated there’ (Qiu, 2010). Perhaps his Shanghai is bound
to lose some of its appeal when brought back to China, especially in the eyes of
the true Shanghainese, that special breed of urbanites who take pride in their
sophistication and style.
The fact that at least some of Qiu’s books have been translated into Chinese
and published in China suggests that his representation of China met with
the approval of the Chinese authorities. The creation of a young and tal-
ented Inspector Chen, a member and rising star of the Party, might seem to be
in line with the government’s attempts to project a more dynamic, modern
and forward-thinking image. Most of Qiu’s exposé of China’s problems is
‘historical’ – Mao, the Cultural Revolution – from an era from which the
Chinese government is trying to distance itself. Qiu’s books are not necessarily
anti-Communist or politically provocative; however, he can be biting in his
social commentary and refreshingly candid when he describes rampant
corruption in official circles and the shenanigans of the business world in
contemporary China.
In a country where political sensitivity is high, Qiu had to make one major
compromise as a result of his ‘sociological approach’ in those early books that
managed to pass government censorship: Shanghai, in the Chinese trans
lations, became ‘H City’, for apparently the censors declared that ‘the story
could not have happened in today’s Shanghai’ (Qiu, 2010). The rationale
sounds weak, and makes one think that this might be a token intervention that
the censors had to make to cover themselves. However, the change of Shang-
hai to H City serves as a most ironic footnote on Qiu Xiaolong, a writer to
whom the city is not just childhood memory, hometown, cultural capital, myth,
but ‘more than that’.
David Geherin makes the distinction between geographical and literary space
in detective fiction, arguing that popular perception of certain locations (think
Conan Doyle’s London and Simenon’s Paris) have become permanently
transformed by their literary representation (Geherin, 2008, p. 8). Paul French
calls Qiu’s Shanghai ‘a hyper-real city’ comparable to Raymond Chandler’s Los
Angeles (French, 2007).What Qiu portrays is not Shanghai, but the idea of
Shanghai, with the associations of its glamorous past and its promise to be a
cosmopolitan city of the future.11 Like the Shanghai New World (as depicted in
Qiu, 2005) and the 2010 Shanghai Expo, Shanghai itself has become, in Qiu’s
writing, a product for domestic and global circulation, aspiring to be seductive
to both the Chinese and the non-Chinese. Even in the censored Chinese
translations, unmistakably Shanghai references – the Bund, the New World,
shikumen houses – still abound. Yet, floating in a ghostly H City, these names
become symbols and signs of exoticism whose connotations have become
unstable and difficult to maintain. Their meanings remain dormant, waiting to
be re-articulated at the next cultural crossroads.
Notes
1
See Demko.
2
In October-November 2010, I conducted an email interview with Qiu Xiaolong,
who graciously answered many of my questions. Unless otherwise noted, direct
quotes from Qiu are based on this interview. I thank Qiu for his input.
3
Qiu’s first novel, Death of a Red Heroine, was nominated for the Edgar Awards and
the Barry Award, and won the Anthony Award in 2001. So far, the Inspector Chen
books have been translated into 23 languages, including Chinese, and according
to the author, over a million copies have been sold worldwide (Qiu, 2010).
4
Ha Jin and Yiyun Li, both born and raised in China, began writing in their
adopted English after moving to the United States. Ha Jin, who counts Conrad
and Nabokov as his literary predecessors, has won some of the highest literary
honours in America with his novels and short stories about life in China. Yiyun
Li’s 2005 debut story collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, earned her com-
parisons with Chekhov and Alice Munro. Jin and Li, as well as Qiu, represent a
new generation of overseas Chinese writers whose works put into question the
definitions of ‘Chinese-American literature’ and American literature in general.
5
For a fascinating treatise on language, migration and the place of literature in a
globalizing world, see Jin (2008).
6
For a comprehensive account of Shanghai literary modernism in the 1920s and
1930s, see Shih (2001).
7
While referencing Said’s concept of Orientalism, particularly his critique of the
‘internalised Orientalism’ of the local elite, I use the term ‘inverted Orientalism’
to describe a more self-conscious, and perhaps cynical, form of self-representation
of Eastern cultures in the context of a contemporary global cultural market-
place.
8
Qiu’s Inspector Chen series seems to have reached an impasse in China after
the translation and publication of the first three titles. Qiu grudgingly accepted
censorship for his first three novels, but refused cuts for his fourth, A Case of Two
Cities (Ransom, 2008). His recent work outside the Inspector Chen series, Years
of Red Dust: Stories of Shanghai, adds another dimension to Qiu’s engagement with
‘globalized’ literature: a series of linked stories originally written in English while
Qiu was writer-in-residence at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2008,
it was simultaneously translated into French and serialized in Le Monde. It was
then translated into Chinese and published in Hong Kong in 2009; the original
English version was not published until 2010 by St Martin’s Press in the United
States.
9
This term refers to a group of directors whose films represent a particularly cre-
ative period of Chinese cinema, the 1980s and early 1990s. Chen Kaige, Zhang
Yimou and Tian Zhuangzhuang won international acclaim for their reflections on
Chinese history, spectacular visual imagery and cultural critique. In China, how-
ever, the ‘Fifth Generation’ has sometimes been accused of catering to Western
appetites for exoticism. Their films had limited domestic distribution and a few
more controversial works, such as Tian’s The Blue Kite, were banned in China.
10
In several Chinese newspaper reports, Qiu has been quoted as saying, ‘Who says
that Chinese people cannot write murder mysteries?’ (see You, 2005). The legal
cases of famous Chinese magistrates such as Judge Bao (Blader, 1998) and Judge
Dee (van Gulik, 1976) are among the world’s most ancient tales of detection. For
a discussion of Chinese crime fiction after the Cultural Revolution, see Kinkley
(2000).
11
Peter Gordon expresses a similar idea in his review of Death of a Red Heroine: ‘Qiu’s
China doesn’t really exist of course, but it is nevertheless revealing and interest-
ing’ (Gordon, 2001).
Chapter 5
Seeing Double: Representing Otherness

in the Franco-Pacific Thriller
Jean Anderson
Writers of Franco-Pacific thrillers can be seen to maintain a double perspective

on the settings and people they write about. As participants in the local life and
customs and at the same time removed from them by virtue of their external
origins, they have developed a number of strategies, both textual and para
textual, to work through the double-bind of writing out of this divided status for
a divided readership.
After situating this subgenre, this essay looks at the implications of the writers’
(and readers’) positioning, before moving on to observe some of the specific
strategies used to present the exotic Other (principally the use of stereotypes
and caricatures). I will conclude by examining the complex and dissonant
interaction between the writers’ express purpose of producing fiction and the
essentially didactic element in many of these works which seek to instruct the
reader; that is, to reveal truths about an environment assumed to be exotic and
unknown to the reader. In this respect, we may conclude, although with some
reservations, that the crime thriller is closely related to the genre of travel
writing, and constitutes a contact zone (Pratt, 1992, p. 4) in which greater space
is given to the European, outsider gaze.
The Franco-Pacific Thriller
Franco-Pacific writing across all genres is, as yet, a small corpus, written by a tiny
number of authors and sold into what is, locally, a very small market. One of the
most striking aspects of this literary community, highlighted by the theme of
the tenth Lire en Polynésie book fair, ‘le polar’,1 is the relatively large number of
crime novels produced recently: almost 20 titles since the late 1990s. There are
also a few earlier works, written by authors who, although largely positive in
their attitudes towards local culture, are quite clearly external to it, in the sense
that they are visiting métropolitains.2 Patrick Pécherot’s 1995 Tiuraï features
metro journalist Thomas Meckert investigating events around the Mururoa
Seeing Double: Representing Otherness in the Franco-Pacific Thriller 61
nuclear bomb tests, a book clearly inspired by Jean Meckert-Amila’s3 1971 novel,
La Vierge et le taureau, which shares this setting, but was so deeply anti-militaristic
that it was quickly withdrawn from sale. And Simenon, earlier still, had published
Touriste de bananes (1938), which also paints a harsh picture of French colonials,
alongside indigenous characters who are presented in an equally unflattering
light.
Even including these metro-based writers, little is known about Franco-Pacific
crime writing. Books are often self-published or appear in very limited print
runs, and are barely (if at all) mentioned in studies of French crime fiction.
However, this is clearly a burgeoning area of literary endeavour, and more
particularly for our purposes, it provides an excellent corpus for exploring
some of the issues raised in considering the place of the foreign in crime novels.
The inescapable question in this context quickly becomes one of establishing
who exactly the foreigner might be and what kind of relationship the outsider-
authored text seeks to establish between the reader and the indigenous elements
in the novel.
A relatively complete list of Franco-Pacific crime writers and titles would
consist of the following: from New Caledonia, Firmin Mussard, a doctor who
worked in the Indian Ocean and the Tuamotus before settling on the island
in 2002, and who has authored three titles – Le Retrait du percuteur (2001),4
Balthasar est en pétard (2004)5 and Fausse passe (2005)6 – set in the Paumotus;
Claudine Jacques, who arrived in New Caledonia in the late 1960s and has
published several novels and collections of short stories, including Nouméa
mangrove (2010, series ‘Noir Pacifique’); Françoise Sivade, author of Ricochets sur
Nouméa (2007); and Daniel Zié-Mé, who retired from a military career and came
to thrillers after a successful venture into television script-writing. The author of
several books set in other countries (France, Africa), he has also chosen the
Pacific as the setting for recent works: Meurtres sur le lagon (2005),7 Aimer n’est pas
jouer (2007a), Menaces sur Nouméa (2007b) and Nickel crimes (2009).
Examples from French Polynesia include Chantal Kerdilès, a radio journalist
living in Tahiti since 1982, whose Voyance sous les tropiques (1997) is, along with
Gilles de Montenars’s Atolls sanglants (1998), a founding text of the publisher’s
series ‘thriller polynésien’, which also features Opération TNT (2004) by Christian
Hyvernat, retired from a military career and living in Tahiti since 1993.
Newcomers to the crime fiction scene include psychoanalyst Irène Bertaud,
author of Rouge paradis (2008), who has been living in Tahiti since 2000;
Françoise Saint-Chabaud, a former university lecturer with a doctorate in
Australian literature, who has lived for over 20 years in the South Pacific and
who published her first thriller Sous l’emprise du tiki in 2009; and Patrice Guirao,
born in Mascara, Algeria in 1954, who has lived in Tahiti since 1968. An air
traffic controller by profession who has also written lyrics for some of France’s
leading popular singers and highly successful musicals, Guirao saw the first
volume of his Tahiti-based trilogy, Crois-le!, in the bookstores in 2009. The
second, Lyao-ly, was released in 2011.
These writers might be considered less outsiders than the first three (Simenon,
Meckert-Amila and Pécherot), in that they are incomers who have lived for
varying lengths of time in the Pacific and can reasonably be expected to have
better awareness and knowledge of the places and cultures they describe. Their
position can thus be labelled as that of an insider-outsider, on a sliding scale
depending on how long they have been away from mainland France and how
far they have adapted to the local situation. A third category might contain
those writers who are indigenous; but even if we broaden this interpretation to
include non-autochthonous but locally born writers, there are – as yet – no
published writers of this ilk.
The field we might broadly describe as the thriller/crime/detective novel in
the French Pacific is therefore currently restricted to outsider narratives, in
which indigenous elements are viewed not as local but as exotic, subjected to
observation by the relatively uninitiated. In other words, what is, to varying
degrees, normal within the novel’s setting becomes strange, and is presented as
such in large part because of the status of the incomer narrator(s) and external
potential readers. In this sense they have a commonality with travel narratives,
as described by Mary Louise Pratt in her study Imperial Eyes, drawing conclusions
similar to Said’s notions of the exoticizing, ‘orientalizing’ gaze. According to
Pratt, some texts are created in what she calls ‘contact zones’, ‘social spaces
where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in
highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination – like colo
nialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today’
(Pratt, 1992, p. 4).
Another concept used by Pratt which will interest us here is the idea of ‘anti-
conquest’ writing: she defines this as marked by ‘strategies of representation
whereby European bourgeois subjects seek to secure their innocence in the
same moment as they assert European hegemony’ (Pratt, 1992, p. 7). While the
term itself (anti-conquest) means the idea is ostensibly more suited to describing
nineteenth-century and earlier narratives, in the present study it will be
extended to cover the numerous instances where the narrator as ‘sympathetic’
non-recent arrival seeks to differentiate him- or herself from more strictly metro
characters. The idea of individual innocence in conflict with a hegemonic
position is in fact a key aspect of our thinking about these insider-outsider
narratives.
Depicting Crime in French Polynesia
The situation with regard to the French Pacific is indeed a complex one, and
rather than a straightforward binary opposition between indigene and metro,
many of these novels present degrees of local belonging: to focus initially only on
French Polynesian texts, Irène Bertaud’s Rouge paradis, for example, and Chantal
Kerdilès’s Voyance sous les tropiques, both contain criticisms of the bored and
spendthrift wives of men posted or retired to the islands: ‘fort occupées à
dépenser allègrement la retraite indexée de leurs maris anciens fonction
naires’(Kerdilès, p. 28) [Keeping themselves busy spending the inflation-adjusted
retirement pay of their husbands, retired civil servants].8 Both novels are nar-
rated by women characters originally from mainland France:9 in condemning
outsider behaviour (i.e. the behaviour of more recent arrivals), these narrators
position themselves closer to the indigene; but, at the same time, the authors
make use of certain stereotypes when including indigenous characters – clean-
ers, nannies and the like, employed by ‘French’ families. Bertaud’s narrator even
informs the reader that one nanny, ‘comme beaucoup de Polynésiens, . . . vivait
l’instant, avec une faible notion d’hier et de demain’(Bertaud, p. 161) [Like
many Polynesians, lived for the moment, with little understanding of yesterday
and tomorrow].
Evidently, however, the writers have non-local readers in mind: even a
cursory examination of these texts reveals proof of an exoticizing impulse at
work, this time perhaps more focused on audience and reception. All of these
texts by incomer writers contain footnotes,10 clearly intended to ease the
passage of the narrative past any potential barriers to comprehension, and no
doubt also to serve what must be an educational impulse. The opening pages
often contain a kind of florilège of exoticisms, from local flora and fauna to
social customs, such as the Tahitian practice of using the informal ‘tu’ form of
address even on first meeting. It should be noted in passing that these
footnotes are not, however, always objective or especially informative.11 In
fact, they can, for the most part, be read as Othering the local in favour of
creating a communion between metro writer and metro reader. The strategy
of bestowing the status of relative insider on the narrator is clearly limited by
the texts’ positioning vis-à-vis the potential outsider readership, and the
implications of Pratt’s ‘anti-conquest’ concept can be seen as constrained by
anticipated audience expectations.
The implied reader revealed by the various paratextual aspects of the books
is not, therefore, predominantly a resident of the country in which the story is
set. In the first 30 or so pages, Kerdilès focuses on both metro wives and
indigenous characters: but the latter feature alcoholics prone to domestic
violence (a very real social problem, and one that for local readers would not
need underlining); the unreliable barmaid Mohea who becomes ‘fiu’, a state of
mind attributed only to indigenous Tahitians (Kerdilès, p. 18);12 the local
custom of informally (by Western standards) adopting ‘fa‘a‘a‘mu’ babies
(Kerdilès, p. 43); and the inability of traditional healing (‘ra‘au’) to cure a child
of meningitis (Kerdilès, p. 44). While these attempts to represent local colour
may be inspired by a desire to show a certain reality, their overall negativity and
the fact that Tahitian characters are confined to the margins of the story means
indigenes are Othered into near silence as shadowy stereotypes reduced to
background roles.
In a sense, the two writers examined so far are trapped in a double-bind, in a
space between conflicting impulses: on the one hand, their evident desire to
de-exoticize the setting by revealing the negative aspects of the picture-postcard
paradise,13 and on the other, their inherent inability to represent Tahitian soci-
ety from a truly insider position. While the ‘popa‘a’ (Europeans) may well be
‘failed’ metros (Bertaud, p. 23), they are still overwhelmingly the lead charac-
ters, whether perpetrators, victims or savvy observers, in the dramatic events
that unfold. Indigenous characters exist only as sketchy outlines, defined pre-
dominantly by their ethnicity and their employment, typically in the service of
popa’a. Significantly, like the majority of crime novels set in French Polynesia to
date, in Kerdilès’s and Bertaud’s works both killers and victims are of external
origin.
What are the consequences of limiting the representation of indigenous
characters in this way? One of the chief functions of stereotypes is to feed into
what Abdul Jan Mohamed, following Homi Bhabha in discussing colonialist
discourse, has called the ‘Manichean allegory’. The use of commodified stock
figures relieves the writer of any need to examine individuality or intention in
the Other. Instead, writer and reader make a reflex reference to superficial and
generalized characteristics that serve as a kind of shorthand; for example, in
both writers’ novels, the native is repeatedly associated with alcohol, violence
and irrational (childish?) behaviour. This use of stereotypes as a shorthand is of
course reductive:
The fetichizing strategy and the allegorical mechanism not only permit a
rapid exchange of denigrating images which can be used to maintain a sense
of moral difference; they also allow the writer to transform social and histori-
cal dissimilarities into universal, metaphysical differences. (Jan Mohamed,
1985, p. 68)
The use of stereotypes may not apply only to the characterization of the
indigenous, however. For the anti-conquest narrator, intent on distancing him-
or herself from the dominant group to which he or she ostensibly belongs,
metro wives (and husbands) are characterized inevitably by boredom, sexual
immodesty and profligacy. The ideal reader of texts with this feature will thus
be either a local person in a similar position to the (supposedly ethically
superior) narrator, an insider-outsider, or someone completely removed from
either stereotyped group: in this instance, a reader from outside the country. In
other words, these texts are realizations of the differences between the authors’
own origins and norms of behaviour (autostereotypes) and both kinds of
juxtaposed Others (heterostereotypes) (Zacharasiewicz, 2010, p. 12). It could
even be argued here that the relatively established incomer is a hybrid

construction, defining him- or herself in opposition to two heterostereotypical
groupings, neither of which is allowed any kind of moral weight.
Beyond the Stereotype: Patrice Guirao
With his novel Crois-le!, Guirao approaches the insider-outsider dilemma from a
fresh angle. It could certainly be claimed that his narrator-hero, private
investigator Al Dorsey (real name Edouard Tudieu de la Vallière) perfectly
captures the insider-outsider position, since he is the son of a French noble and
a Marquesan princess, thus half indigene, half European. However, his real
allegiance is to the hard-boiled detective genre – hence his preferred American
name. Guirao does warn on the first page that the book is not to be mistaken
for a ‘guide touristique’ (Guirao, 2009, p. 7), and indeed the novel abounds in
characters whose traits are so exaggerated as to be unmistakably caricatures.
One might even suggest that the book is a parody of the hard-boiled (already
itself somewhat parodic) subgenre (Paravisini and Yorio, 1987). Apart from the
narrator-hero, whose name is reminiscent of the not-so-secret agent, Hubert
Bonisseur de la Bath, in Jean Bruce’s 91 OSS-117 novels,14 there is the detective’s
one-armed mannequin girlfriend Lyao-ly, his endlessly punning policeman
friend Sando, and, particularly, his landlord, the Chinese market-gardener
Paul-Arman-Lying, also known as Toti. In depicting this last character, Guirao
goes to even greater extremes: Toti speaks very fractured French, a kind of
pidgin with verbs chiefly confined to infinitives, the mispronounced ‘r’ and a
complete disregard for rules of syntax – ‘T’availler du’, Toti. Toujou’s, toujou’s’
(Guirao, 2009, p. 134) [approximate translation: Toti he work hard. All time, all
time]. He shows great cunning in his extortionate calculations of rent due, and
is presented overall as having the business acumen and parsimoniousness of a
Chinese market-gardener set on amassing a fortune. His general state of
filthiness becomes a kind of running gag through the early part of the book,
and culminates in a scene where he offers his visitor, the detective-narrator, a
bowl of rotten fruit swarming with flies, eating it himself with apparent
enjoyment. There is nothing politically correct in this characterization; instead,
it distils out a series of stereotypical elements and concentrates them into a
caricature.
And yet, perhaps unexpectedly, the notion of the Manichean us/them,
European/other, the insider/outsider division loses its potency here. Al Dorsey
watches in horror as Toti marks Ka San – the traditional Chinese memorial – for
his dead wife, by burning priceless documents about and by Paul Gauguin.
Dorsey then learns that this is no ignorant error, but an act of revenge on the
racist paedophile painter who mistreated his Chinese ‘boy’, Toti’s father. The
narrator’s (and the reader’s) sympathies shift noticeably at this point; Toti is
fully aware of the value of what he is destroying. His refusal to acknowledge the
importance of Gauguin is an assertion of local (and human) values over
Eurocentric ones.15
In this episode the power balance also, and surprisingly, shifts. From being a
figure of ridicule, a kind of ur-Chinaman, with all the attendant negativity such
a compilation of clichés entails, Toti suddenly takes on multiple positive
qualities, becoming an avenger of past wrongs and positioning himself outside
the same field of economic relations that has seemed, up to this point, to
determine his every action.
There are, however, few other such redeeming episodes, and while the book
is at least even-handed in rendering all its characters ridiculous to some degree,
it does little other than what we have already seen to challenge the truth-value
of the stereotypes it presents.16 In this sense, and especially with regard to
indigenes, Guirao’s writing strategies differ little from those of his predecessors,
repeating many of the images associated with Tahitians since the earliest days of
European contact. As imagologist Joep Leerssen has pointed out, textual
representations of Polynesians remain steadfastly external: ‘the indigenous
population (if represented at all) is depicted merely as part of the local colour,
without much specific characterization beyond the schematic evocation of
certain ethnographic clichés’ (Beller and Leerssen, 2007, p. 220).17 This is
certainly true of the majority of thrillers set in Tahiti, with the mitigated
exception, as indicated, of Guirao’s work.
New Caledonian Crime Fiction: Daniel Zié-Mé

As is the case for French Polynesia, New Caledonian crime novels are all
authored by outsiders, a factor that might lead us to expect a repetition of the
kinds of stereotyping observed among Tahitian works. For reasons of space, this
discussion will be limited to exploring two companion novels by the most
prolific of these writers, Daniel Zié-Mé, Meurtres sur le lagon (2005) and Nickel
crimes (2009). Both books were published in France with small print-runs, and
share the footnoting usage that clearly signals a preoccupation with a non-local
readership. However, there are also a number of other narrative strategies in
place that are of particular interest for our analysis.
The lead characters (first-person narrators) are once again incomers, in the
first instance, a commissaire of police, and in the second, a commandant of the
gendarmerie. As representatives of the law, they stand somewhat apart from
the rest of the island’s inhabitants, particularly since French practice in its still-
dependent former colonies has been to grant local autonomy in domains other
than law and order. In other words, both police and gendarmes are directed by
incomers.
Zié-Mé’s Commissaire in his first book, Meurtres sur le lagon, is a nearly nameless,18
but colourful and humorous, anchor point for the investigation of the deaths
of three men, a Kanak, Gaétan Ouahio, a Vietnamese from Vanuatu named
Nguyen Van Ho and Freddy, a metro, who have all been involved in people-
smuggling, bringing illegal Asian immigrants to New Caledonia. The
investigation is carried out by a team consisting of Commissaire Nadal, Henri the
Kanak officer and Monsieur Vu, a policeman of Vietnamese origin, along with
two métropolitains, the newly arrived Dufour and Lambert, who has five years’
local service under his belt. In selecting a recent incomer as part of the team,
Zié-Mé does make some room for the kind of ‘anti-conquest’ approach already
noted in the French Polynesian texts. However, the narrator is not presented as
ethically superior, remarking on Dufour’s misplaced sense of superiority but
underlining his own faults on arrival in the country: ‘J’étais comme ça quand je
suis arrivé . . . Je me suis rendu compte que les gens d’ici n’étaient pas aussi
bêtes que je ne le croyais et que j’avais beaucoup de choses à apprendre’ (Zié-
Mé, 2005, p. 78) [I was like that when I arrived. . . . I realized people here
weren’t as stupid as I thought and that I had a lot to learn].
Aside from being representative of the local ethnic mix, Zié-Mé’s multiracial
cast of characters allows him to present multiple facets of society. The narrator
mentions inter-ethnic conflicts and the general lack of mixing between groups
(indigenous Kanak people, Chinese and Vietnamese, Wallisians, Caldoches and
the recently arrived and sometimes arrogant ‘z’oreilles’19). There is certainly a
degree of stereotyping here – Monsieur Vu speaks a sometimes incomprehensibly
Asianized version of French;20 the Vietnamese victim and his family run a
grocery store; the Kanak characters frequent their local nakamal (kava bar); all
Asians are said to be ‘susceptibles’ (sensitive, touchy); and Théo from Wallis is,
like all his countrymen, of impressively massive stature. However, instead of
depending on readers’ recognition and/or acceptance of these ‘typical’ traits,
the author uses his central character’s cynicism to question this labelling. While
stereotypes generally are recognizably active within the text, they are also
undermined by individualization and open references to their resembling
stereotypes. Unlike the examples above taken from Kerdilès and Bertaud, the
majority of secondary figures in the narrative are given names, families and
backgrounds, with the result that they acquire depth and a (limited) degree of
individuality, factors which work against the reductive nature of the
heterostereotype. In their interviews with the investigating officers, they speak
for themselves, express their emotions and thus emerge as individuals even
though their social situation may conform to certain racial ‘norms’.
Zié-Mé’s strategy of using characters with differing degrees of knowledge and
experience of New Caledonia allows more experienced investigators to situate
aspects of local society and customs for the relative newcomer (and of course
for the reader at the same time), a technique that is more subtle and less
intrusive than footnotes (although he does still use these on occasion). More
pointedly, the villain of the piece, Monsieur Vu, has been hiding his true abilities
and objectives behind the reductive stereotype of the Asian immigrant. If there
is a lesson in the book it is, in fact, that it is essential to look behind the façade
of Otherness: that the murderer is a member of the investigative team is part of
his cover, but his most effective disguise is his assumption and exploitation of
the Othering behaviours that his heterostereotyped foreignness leads his
colleagues to expect.
Zié-Mé’s second text, Nickel crimes, again has an investigative force of mixed
racial origins, from young female Kanak recruits to officers of metro origin and
varying degrees of local knowledge. The first victim is a young Kanak woman,
Amandine Hyadjé, who is found on the building site of a massive new, Brazilian-
owned, nickel treatment plant. She was highly intoxicated and had had multiple-
partner intercourse before dying from a machete blow to the head; but whether
this was sexually motivated or because she was a laboratory technician for the
company with access to secret research remains unclear through much of
the book. Despite a certain amount of rivalry with the Commissaire of police,21
the deaths of Amandine, her fiancé Hilaire Gopoéa and her lover Jurgend
Baumgartner are eventually unravelled. The real villain is Amandine’s boss,
Nicolas Lemoigne, a Frenchman, under duress because the German ex-STASI
agent Baumgartner had arranged for his daughter to be kidnapped by FARC
(Revolutionary Forces of Colombia).
While these multiple twists and turns once again move the plot to an
international level, Zié-Mé maintains a focus on inter-ethnic relations in New
Caledonia. The building site, for example, has a workforce of some 25 different
nationalities, and ‘conflit social ’ is described as ‘le sport national de Nouvelle-
Calédonie’ (Zié-Mé, 2009, p. 31). Language diversity proves problematic for the
investigation, as do a certain number of local tribal practices, such as the
arranged marriage of Amandine and her fiancé. The Commandant’s adaptation
to his environment emerges, however, in a number of ethnically sensitive
comments:
Les rites coutumiers étaient encore vivaces dans bon nombre de tribus, avec
leurs qualités et leurs défauts. Je n’avais pas à en juger, mais je devais en tenir
compte pour essayer de comprendre certaines réactions qui n’auraient pas
été celle du ‘z’oreille’que je suis. (Zié-Mé, 2009, p. 59)
[Customary rites, with their good points and their bad, were still very much
alive in a good number of tribes. It wasn’t up to me to judge them, I just
needed to take them into account when trying to understand certain reac-
tions that were not like those of the ‘z’oreille’ that I am.]
By positioning his investigator as an incomer of sufficiently long service to

have learnt important elements of local indigenous culture, Zié-Mé creates a
relatively balanced postcolonial detective, although we should not forget that in

some senses this term cannot be applied to the French Pacific.22
Conclusion
Whether the label of postcolonial can be applied or not stricto sensu, it will be
clear from the preceding analyses that writers of Franco-Pacific crime novels
adopt a range of practices in representing the societies in which their fictional
crimes are committed. From heterostereotype to caricature, and drawing on a
variety of insider-outsider positions, authors seek to create suspenseful
entertainment via the somewhat formulaic structures of classic crime fiction,
while at the same time having clearly in mind the distant readership for which
the better part of the tropical décor, social structures and local customs are
foreign.
It is this awareness, no doubt, that gives rise to the paratextual usages we have
noted – footnotes, glossaries and the use of italics offering supplementary
information – while at the same time throwing into sharp relief the exotic
aspects of their work. At times, other strategies are used, such as more subtle
glosses within the text, or the introduction of a naïve new arrival requiring
precisely the same explanatory material as the unfamiliar reader. In these ways,
the differences between two (or more) societies can be worked through, in a
manner reminiscent of Pratt’s contact zone. And yet it could well be a mistake,
and potentially the end of this particular variation on a genre, if the exotic
environment were to lose its exoticism. As the titles of many of these works
make clear, the play between violence (murder, blood, threats) and settings
renowned for their paradisiac nature (lagoon, atoll, sea) lies at the very heart of
the Pacific thriller, just as the peaceful British village makes an unlikely
framework for untimely deaths:
Sous un soleil aussi perpétuel et dans un cadre aussi idyllique, le danger paraît
plus lointain, l’attention se relâche, la méfiance s’émousse et les mesures de
sécurité se font moins astreignantes . . . . (Zié-Mé, 2005, p. 209)
[Beneath the endlessly-shining sun and in such an idyllic setting, danger
seems more distant, we become less alert, less mistrustful, and security mea-
sures are slacker . . . .]
As we have seen, authors choose both to emphasize the exotic island setting of
their crime novels and to stress the differences that separate their narrators
from more recent incomers. Indigenous elements are thus presented in a kind
of double-bind perspective, both familiar and unfamiliar. Local audiences are
scarcely considered in the textual strategies employed by these writers. The best
we can probably say is that the caricatures of Guirao open the door for a shock
reversal of power relations, where the grotesque/non-European triumphs; and

that the multiple ethnicities of Zié-Mé at least give the reader some insight into
the complexity of the ethnic mix in New Caledonia. Neither writer, however,
nor any other currently in print, gives a truly insider’s view of indigenous
peoples in the Pacific.
Notes
1
Held in Pape’ete from 14 to 17 October 2010.
2
The French term ‘métropolitain’ is applied to people from continental France.
I will use the terms ‘metro’ or ‘mainland’ as equivalents.
3
Meckert (1910–1995) is a well-known crime novelist and author of some 20 thrill-
ers. Interestingly, his entry in The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French
(1995) makes no reference to the censored novel.
4
Described in publicity materials as a thriller set in Reunion, but included here as
a first step in ‘island’ crime writing.
5
According to publicity materials, a ‘polar jeunesse’ (young adult thriller).
6
Written in New Caledonia, published in France, and set in the Paumotu islands.
7
Short-listed for the Prix du Quai des Orfèvres in 2006, one of the very rare occasions
on which a Pacific thriller has received recognition.
8
All translations are my own.
9
Although it should be noted that Bertaud features several narrators (none of
them indigenous).
10
By all, here, I mean the entire corpus of current Franco-Pacific crime writing, not
just those works given particular focus in this study. Interestingly, neither Meckert
nor Simenon (nor their publishers) saw any need for footnotes, and Pécherot
limits himself to a glossary of 15 words and a brief pronunciation guide.
11
The relative superficiality of such comments can be seen in the absence of any
contextualization for this practice: unlike French, the Tahitian language does
not have a formal and an informal form in the singular. The underlying reason
for this cultural difference is not explained; instead, the usage is presented as
evidence of the social naïvety of the speaker (from a metro point of view).
12
As the use of a local term would indicate, to be ‘fiu’ is a characteristic of the
indigene, who becomes restless, dispirited, irritated and refuses to continue
working.
13
While the titles of most of these novels play overtly on the contrast between tropi-
cal paradise and lurking evil, it could also be argued that this merely sets up a new
variation on the original exoticism.
14
Probably better known to film-goers through Michel Hazanavicius’s movies
OSS 117: Cairo Nest of Spies (2006) and OSS 117: Lost in Rio (2009) starring Jean
Dujardin.
15
The figure of Gauguin in Pacific fiction carries a strong symbolic weight and can
arguably be seen as a measure of the degree of Eurocentricity or otherwise of a
given text.
16
Unless we take the position that caricatures, by their very nature, undermine the
truth-value that stereotypes appear to represent. See further discussion below.
17
Imagology, a largely Netherlands-based approach to the study of national stereo-
types, emphasizes the textuality of such representations, pointing out that literary
images ‘are a matter of hearsay and intertextuality, rather than empirical observa-
tion or statements of objective fact’ (Beller and Leerssen, 2007, p. 26).
18
Since part of Zié-Mé’s strategy seems to be to allow full focalization (other than in
footnotes) to his investigator-narrator, it is only late in the book that we learn his
surname, Nadal. His full name, Alex Nadal, is not revealed until the later novel,
Nickel crimes, whose narrator is the head of the gendarmerie named in the first book
as Jérôme Urwald. The two books differ markedly in tone as well, with Meurtres
adopting a lively and personal tone (and using the passé composé as its main narra-
tive tense, whereas Nickel features the more classic and sober passé simple).
19
Literally, ‘ears’: the origins of the term, also used in Martinique and Reunion, are
debated. Caldoches are generally held to be French people born in New Caledo-
nia, although again the use of the term is disputed.
20
This, however, turns out to be a deliberate ploy and a part of his cover as a
Vietnamese spy.
21
The clash of jurisdictions between police (city-based) and gendarmerie (a mili-
tary force responsible for law and order outside city limits) continues a minor
theme from the first novel. As this would be familiar to French readers, it is not
footnoted.
22
French political practice has been to see certain territories not as colonies but
as overseas parts of France. Hence the Commandant’s sharp reminder to a Kanak
union leader protesting about the murder of his compatriote: ‘Je vous rappelle que
nous sommes tous Français’ (Zié-Mé, 2009, p. 45) [I would remind you that we
are all French].
72
Part Two
Private Eyes, Hybrid Eyes:

The In-Between Detective
74
Chapter 6
‘Don’t Forget the Tejedor’: Community and

Identity in the Crime Fiction of Rosa Ribas
Stewart King
Crime fiction is fundamentally concerned with constructing community, as it

‘acts as a connective tissue within this world’ (Messent, 1997, p. 1). In the genre,
specific communities are established through the investigative process in which
individuals – usually suspects – are seen to be linked to one another through
their relationship with the victim and possibly the criminal. In the process of
establishing this community, crime fiction is furthermore concerned with
questions of identity, particularly the identities of the victim, the criminal and
often the detective him- or herself. The present chapter explores issues of
identity and community in two crime novels – Entre dos aguas (literally ‘Between
Two Waters’, Sitting on the Fence, 2007) and Con anuncio (As Advertised, 2009) by
Spanish-born writer, Rosa Ribas.1 As I shall argue, Ribas’s novels challenge the
usual definitions of Spanish crime fiction, given that they are set in Germany
and their protagonist – Cornelia Weber Tejedor, the daughter of a German
father and Spanish migrant mother – is a police commissioner in the Frankfurt
Polizeipräsidium. Through an examination of these two novels, I examine the
ways in which the investigation into the crimes becomes an interrogation of
German and Spanish cultural identities and of the assumptions that underwrite
them during a period of great social and cultural change.
Ribas’s novels mark a significant shift away from the standard crime novel in
modern Spain. Since the genre’s boom in the 1970s and 1980s – coinciding
with the demise of the Franco dictatorship and the restoration of democracy –
the works of Spanish crime writers such as Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Jorge
Martínez Reverte and, more recently, Lorenzo Silva and Alicia Giménez-Bartlett
have been closely associated with charting political and social change in Spanish
society (Buschmann, 1994; Colmeiro, 2008).
Entre dos aguas and Con anuncio could not be more different, as they are set
not in Spain, but in Germany’s financial capital, Frankfurt, and their detective
protagonist does not even identify as Spanish. Ribas’s crime novels, then,
challenge the usual definitions of what constitutes Spanish crime fiction.
Patricia Hart, for example, has provided an enduring definition of Spanish
detective fiction as novels ‘written by a Spaniard in which some or all of the
characters are Spanish, and which [are] usually set at least in part in Spain’
(Hart, 1987, p. 13). Ribas and her work only partially fulfil this definition, as the
writer was born and grew up in Prat de Llobregat, a working-class, industrial city
on Barcelona’s southern border, before moving to Germany, where she worked
for thirteen years as an academic Hispanist at Frankfurt’s Goethe Universität
and at the Hochschule Heilbronn before dedicating herself to writing full-time
in 2007. Although written in Spanish and published in Spain, Entre dos aguas
and Con anuncio are largely centred on Germany and contemporary German
society, and their connection to Spain, especially in the second novel, is tenuous
at best.
If it is unclear whether her novels can be considered Spanish crime fiction,
according to the usual definition, then, given that Ribas has resided in Germany
for many years, a question arises about whether they can be treated as works of
German crime fiction. It is true that Ribas writes in Spanish, but, as critics have
noted, not all immigrant or multicultural fiction has to be written in the
national language of the host country (Gunew, 1994, pp. 10, 21). Indeed, Eva
Erdmann maintains that in crime fiction the author’s nationality is not
important in defining the nationality of a work. She argues that ‘the
distinguishing feature of Scottish or Greek crime fiction is not that it is written
by a Scot or a Greek, but that it attempts to convey a Scottish or a Greek
atmosphere’ (Erdmann, 2009, p. 22). In this context, Ribas’s novels, despite
being written in Spanish, could be described as German crime fiction because
they are largely concerned with issues pertaining to contemporary Germany.
This is borne out by a comparison of the sales of Entre dos aguas in Spain and
in Germany, via the German translation, Kalter Main (‘The Cold Main’).
Whereas the Spanish original has sold between 3,000 and 4,000 copies, the
German translation is currently in its third print run and has sold between
15,000 and 17,000 copies, which suggests that her works have had a greater
resonance among German readers.2
Irrespective of whether German or Spanish nationality is attributed to the
novels, Entre dos aguas and Con anuncio could be considered part of a growing
trend of foreign language3 crime novels situated in exotic locales, such as Donna
Leon’s Commissioner Brunetti series set in Venice, and Alexander MacCall
Smith’s Number 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series featuring the Botswanan
Precious Ramotswe. These novels and Ribas’s two works considered here are
distinguished by their locus criminalis; that is, they are novels in which the ‘main
focus is not on the crime itself, but on the setting, the place where the detective
and the victims live and to which they are bound by ties of attachment’
(Erdmann, 2009, p. 12).
Research by criminologists has shown that the relationship between
community and crime is complex. While politicians and law enforcement
agencies would have us believe that communities must be protected from crime,
some argue that communities need crime in order to preserve a sense of
Community and Identity in the Crime Fiction of Rosa Ribas 77
cohesion. For example, drawing on Benedict Anderson’s seminal theory of

‘imagined communities’ (Anderson, 1991), Alison Young maintains that ‘[i]n
criminal justice policy, in criminological theory and in the practices of criminal
law can be found, first, an imagined community; second, an identifiable subject
which represents a threat to the community; third, a desire to inflict violence
upon that subject in the name of the community’ (Young, 1996, p. 9). For
Young, communities identify with the victim, as all members of the community
are potential victims at the hands of the criminal. This community, she argues,
is a fiction based on ‘a nostalgic desire for oneness and unity’ which structures
itself ‘around its dependence upon fear, alienation and separateness for its
elements to make sense (Young, 1996, p. 10).
The investigations at the centre of Entre dos aguas and Con anuncio take place
in contemporary Frankfurt and both novels seek to represent the diversity and
complexity of the city that is largely known as Germany’s financial capital.
Through multiple investigations into a variety of crimes, the novels aim to take
readers beyond the simplistic financial stereotype, and to expose the inner
functioning of the city itself.
The task of guiding readers through the complexities of modern Frankfurt is
assigned to Hauptkommissarin Cornelia Weber-Tejedor. Cornelia is in her late
thirties, married to a man who is going through a mid-life crisis and she does
not have or particularly want children. She is self-conscious about her nose and
has a weakness for doughnuts which rivals that of Homer from her favourite
television programme, The Simpsons. While it may be expected that, as a female
police officer, Cornelia would encounter and struggle against sexist attitudes,
this is not really an issue for her as, when the series begins, she is already an
established police officer who is largely respected by her colleagues. The only
exception is Hauptkommissar Sven Juncker, her racist and homophobic
colleague, who tries to undermine her by suggesting that her success is due only
to the force’s equal opportunity policies (Ribas, 2007, p. 84).
Cornelia is an unusual detective in German crime narratives in that the
representation of non-German Kommissare is relatively uncommon. Indeed, it
was only as late as April 2007 that Germany’s most popular television crime
show, Tatort, had a Turkish-German detective (‘Neuer’).4 As her surname sug-
gests, Cornelia is of German and Spanish parentage and although ‘a veces se
había definido a sí misma como mischling’ (Ribas, 2007, p. 41) [‘sometimes
she’d defined herself as a mischling (half-breed)], Cornelia’s mixed back-
ground is not a source of cultural conflict, as might be initially thought.
Rather, her surnames in German (Weber) and Spanish (Tejedor) have exactly
the same meaning: weaver, which, as her mother says, ‘es un nombre de
oficio, hija, que es muy digno’ (Ribas, 2007, p. 77) [it’s a craftsman’s name,
darling, it’s very respectable]. Instead, like the act of weaving itself, Cornelia’s
different German and Spanish threads are woven together to produce the
appearance of a coherent, single identity. Nevertheless, it is clear throughout
the series that Cornelia positions herself and is positioned by others as more
Spanish or more German according to the social and cultural context in
which she finds herself.
Dennis Porter argues that the detective in the North American tradition is a
social outsider who ‘stands between two cultures, that of respectable society, on
the one hand, and the criminal underworld, on the other’ (Porter, 1981,
p. 169), while David Geherin maintains that this marginality provides the
detective with a privileged vantage point from which he or she can comment
critically on society without necessarily becoming caught up within the value
systems or moral codes espoused by that society (Geherin, 1985, pp. 199–200).
Although her mixed background is not a source of conflict for Cornelia, it does
provide her with a culturally different perspective through which she can expose
some of the contradictions and assumptions that are evident in the Spanish
migrant and the German communities in which she lives.5
The Germany in which Cornelia tries to uphold the law is finally coming to
engage with the cultural diversity brought about by the arrival, since the 1960s,
of multiple immigrant communities from Spain, Italy, Turkey and, more
recently, from Latin America and Eastern Europe, the presence of which at the
beginning of the twenty-first century have challenged traditional understandings
of what it means to be German. Cornelia is – in the novels – the figure that most
obviously represents this change. The hyphen between her German and Spanish
surnames is significant in this regard. While the hyphen – and the Spanish title
of Entre dos aguas, meaning ‘sitting on the fence’ – can be interpreted as Cornelia
having two separate cultures and identities, it also connects the two names, thus
suggesting that it is not necessarily a matter of being between two identities.
Rather, Cornelia is an example of a new hybrid German identity, one that is
German while also acknowledging cultural multiplicity.
Nevertheless, while Cornelia is at ease with her identity, others have trouble
with her hybrid nature. This problem can be evidenced in the way in which
different characters position her as either Spanish or German. For Cornelia’s
mother, Celsa, it is important that her daughter is assigned the case of the dead
Spaniard in Entre dos aguas because ‘eres uno de los nuestros, nos entiendes’
(Ribas, 2007, p. 76) [‘you’re one of us, you understand us’]. On the other hand,
Regino Martínez, one of the community leaders, constantly distances Cornelia
from the Spanish community by highlighting her Germanness. On meeting
her, he comments ‘no la imaginaba tan . . . alemana’ (Ribas, 2007, p. 134)
[‘I didn’t imagine you’d be so . . . German’], and later he states ‘se nota que es
usted bien alemana’ (Ribas, 2007, p. 179) [‘it’s obvious you’re very German’].
Finally, when he refers to the Spanish Civil War, he describes it as ‘la nuestra’
[‘our war’] because ‘[n]o quería que pensara que hablaba de su guerra y se
confundiera’ (Ribas, 2007, p. 180) [‘I didn’t want you to think I was talking
about your war and confuse you’]. Martínez’s use of possessive pronouns, thus,
marks – in his eyes – their belonging to separate communities.6
Despite her mother’s belief in her daughter’s Spanishness, Cornelia’s

relationship with the Spanish community is anything but clear. When she was
eighteen years old she rejected Spanish citizenship in favour of being a German
citizen (Ribas, 2007, p. 91), and she describes herself pointedly as a ‘policía
alemana’ [‘German police office’] to her mother (Ribas, 2007, p. 75). This self-
description is significant because it highlights where Cornelia’s loyalties lie. Her
association with the German state is further reinforced by her decision to be a
representative of that state, responsible for safeguarding German society.
Cornelia’s identification with the German state is, perhaps, the reason why her
mother constantly reminds her to include her maternal surname – ‘Hija, no
olvides el Tejedor’ (Ribas, 2007, p. 279) [‘Don’t forget the Tejedor, darling’] –
when Cornelia answers the telephone, so that she acknowledges her Spanish
heritage.
Some of her police colleagues, likewise, do not allow her to forget her Spanish
background, although for different reasons from those which prompt her
mother to do so. In the police force, Cornelia lives in a world dominated by
national stereotypes and she has even attempted to modify her behaviour in
order to avoid them:
Cansada de escuchar los tópicos chistecitos sobre los españoles y la puntu-

alidad, se había obligado a mantener una estricta puntualidad. No se había
liberado por ello de los comentarios, sólo habían cambiado de texto. Ya
no era un ‘Qué típico español’, sino un ‘Qué poco español’. (Ribas, 2009,
p. 191)
[Tired of hearing the amusing stereotypes about Spaniards and punctual-
ity, she had made herself keep to a strict schedule, always arriving exactly on
time. But this hadn’t freed her of the comments; it had only served to change
their content. Now it wasn’t ‘What a typical Spaniard’, but ‘That’s not very
Spanish’.]
Whereas individual characters believe in cultural essentialism, the novels seek

to challenge such attitudes. For example, while Cornelia has become a poster
girl for the new, multicultural police force, she is aware that her experience as
the child of a Spanish mother does not necessarily mean that she automatically
understands the latest migrant groups. Indeed, at one point she reflects that ‘el
ser medio extranjero no le garantizaba, como había supuesto, poder entender
a estos muchachos [turcos]’, as ‘sus códigos de lengua y de conducta no eran
válidos en ese mundo’ (Ribas, 2007, p. 202) [‘being half foreign didn’t guarantee
her, as she had thought, the ability to understand these (Turkish) kids, as her
way of speaking and acting wasn’t worth anything in their world’]. While
Cornelia recognizes her difference from the Turkish-German community, for
members of this community there is also no doubt that Cornelia – as a police
officer – is German, different, and she is treated as such.
Entre dos aguas
The Spanish-German duality which follows Cornelia is central to Entre dos aguas.
Whereas the first sentence – ‘El Meno cruzaba furioso por Fráncfort’ (Ribas,
2007, p. 10) [The Main flowed furiously through Frankfurt] – makes clear the
foreign setting for Spanish readers, this foreignness is quickly domesticated by
the use of the national descriptor – ‘gallego’ (Galician) – to describe the cadaver
which is found floating next to one of the columns of the Alte Brücke. The
body is that of Marcelino Soto, a Galician who in the 1960s immigrated to
Germany, where he eventually became a successful businessman and owner of
two Spanish restaurants. Soto is a contradictory figure. Although well respected
in the Frankfurt Spanish community, for much of his life he scandalized that
same community by mocking religious observances, such as organizing parties
on Easter Friday (Ribas, 2007, p. 58). Despite his irreligious attitude, Soto
returned to the Church later in life, becoming, in the words of his daughter
Julia, a devout man (Ribas, 2007, p. 58). The reason for this conversion is – at
least initially – unclear, although his diary, filled with cryptic Biblical references,
seems to suggest that Soto was seeking absolution for an earlier crime, one
which may have its origins in his father’s actions during the Spanish Second
Republic (1931–1936) and Civil War (1936–1939).
Cornelia and her colleague, Reiner Fischer – a detective in his fifties who
wears a leather jacket similar to that worn by his television hero, Starsky – are
assigned to investigate the case. Joining them is Leopold Müller, a young police
officer who, despite showing great potential as a cadet, has had a less than
stellar rise through the ranks and who hopes this case will provide him with the
opportunity to further his career. In addition to the central case of Marcelino
Soto, Cornelia is involved in two other mysteries and has numerous other
dealings with criminals. The first, involving a wife who murders her husband
after she discovers that he has frittered away their savings on worthless items, is
resolved early in the novel (Ribas, 2007, pp. 11–20) and not referred to again.
The second case – a search for a missing Ecuadorian maid – is forced on
Cornelia and her team by her boss, the Head of Homicide Matthias Ockenfeld,
as a personal favour to a banker from one of Frankfurt’s illustrious financial
families.
Throughout the series, these cases and her dealings with various criminals
serve two main purposes. First, they create a greater sense of realism, which is
typical of the police procedural (Messent, 1997, p. 12) and, second, these back
stories, such as the immigrant experience of women from Latin America and
Eastern Europe and the failure to assimilate second-generation Turkish males,
combine to paint a more convincing portrait of contemporary German
society.
To resolve Soto’s murder, Cornelia must enter into the world of the Spanish
immigrant community in which she, in part, grew up. As Alison Young maintains,
this community is largely a fiction created through crime. Indeed, although it

becomes clear that over recent years the members of this community had seen
one another only sporadically, Soto’s murder brings them back together. As
Cornelia notes, following Soto’s death ‘[f]amilia española, médico español,
consulado [español]’ [‘Spanish family, Spanish doctor, (Spanish) consulate’]
and even a Spanish priest all come together in this moment of crisis (Ribas,
2007, p. 44).
Ribas’s objective, it seems, is to represent, however partially, the experiences
of the one and a half million Spaniards who, between 1955 and 1975, left the
country in search of work and greater freedom (Riquer i Permanyer, 1995,
p. 263). Throughout the book, Ribas provides snapshots – via several short
chapters – of the Spanish immigrant experience as represented through
Cornelia’s mother Celsa Tejedor, the victim Marcelino Soto, his widow
Magdalena Ríos and even Soto’s murderer Regino Martínez. While not
necessarily furthering the resolution of the mystery, these snapshots serve to
inject life into the black and white photographs of the time which stand for the
Spanish immigrant experience in the national imaginary. Nevertheless, it
becomes clear that there is little life left in the once vibrant Frankfurt Spanish
community. As Cornelia observes, the headquarters of the Asociación Cultural
Hispano-Alemana (ACHA) [Spanish-German Cultural Association] are largely
empty, the posters and photos represent activities from the 1960s and 1970s
(Ribas, 2007, p. 178), and the few current cultural events advertised at the
centre reflect not Spanish, but increasingly international recreational activities
typical of most Western nations, such as salsa and merengue classes, talks on
Islam and t’ai chi (Ribas, 2007, p. 176).
Furthermore, the Frankfurt Spanish community is ageing and dispersed;
some have returned to Spain upon retiring, and even the mainstays of the
community largely serve a symbolic role, like Recaredo Pueyo, the community’s
priest who no longer believes in God (Ribas, 2007, p. 147).7 Given the precarious
cohesion of the Spanish immigrant community, it is important for this group to
attribute blame for the crime to an outsider. As Young argues, the criminal is an
essential element which must be ‘sacrificed in order to maintain a fragile
community’ (Young, 1996, p. 10). This is why Celsa Tejedor is so pleased when
Cornelia lets slip that she suspects a crime gang made up of members from the
former Yugoslavia may be responsible for Soto’s death. Celsa exclaims ‘¡Ya sabía
yo que no podía haber sido ningún español!’ (Ribas, 2007, p. 215) [‘I knew it
couldn’t have been a Spaniard!’]; and despite Cornelia’s request that she keep
this information to herself, Celsa tells her compatriots, because ‘quería que se
supiera que no había sido uno de nosotros’ (Ribas, 2007, p. 280) [‘I wanted it
to be known that it wasn’t one of us.’]
Celsa’s attempts to shore up cohesion in the Spanish community fail, however,
and the illusion of unity is finally shattered when Cornelia uncovers the mystery
surrounding Soto’s death. Not only is the criminal not found outside the
Spanish community, as Celsa Tejedor hoped, but he is one of the leading and
most influential members of this group: Soto’s good friend from the Asociación
Cultural Hispano-Alemana, Regino Martínez. According to his confession,
Martínez murdered Soto when the latter, following his reconversion to
Catholicism, tried to convince Martínez to make a public confession about their
theft of funds from the ACHA during the association’s early days. Entre dos
aguas, then, demolishes the notion that there was a mythical time in which the
Spanish community was united, as the crime dates from its very foundation,
thus proving that it was never as united as was believed.
Con anuncio
In Ribas’s second crime novel, the Spanish connection – with the exception of
the heroine’s family – has entirely disappeared. Instead, the book focuses on
the challenges posed by multiculturalism and alternative sexual practices to
traditional concepts of German social and cultural identity. Con anuncio begins
with an explosion which showers confetti throughout the offices of Baumgard
and Holder, an agency which is one of the finalists in a tender for a lucrative
advertising contract to promote the new face of Frankfurt both within the city
and throughout Germany. The bomb is just the latest and most serious threat
that the company has received because its proposed campaign, centred on
‘ofrecer una imagen de Fráncfort como ciudad abierta y tolerante . . .,
multicultural sin dejar de ser muy alemana, pero orgullosa de sus tradiciones’
(Ribas, 2009, p. 33) [‘offering an image of Frankfurt as an open, tolerant
city . . ., multicultural but still very German, proud of its traditions’], has upset
some politically conservative citizens. Although a member of the Homicide
squad, Cornelia is assigned to the case and suspects that this is because her
boss, Ockenfeld, wants a politically correct face to the investigation (Ribas,
2009, p. 17).
Unlike Entre dos aguas, in which the body of the victim appears on the first
page, in Con anuncio the murder does not take place until page 128. The
murder victim is Johannes Sperber, the artistic director of Baumgard and
Holder, who is found dead in a car park, his face covered in white face-paint
with an enormous red smile drawn from ear to ear, like the clowns mentioned
in one of the anonymous threatening letters – ‘sois todos unos payasos’ (Ribas,
2009, p. 133) [‘you’re all a pack of clowns’] – which the company had received
earlier. Although the manner of his death – being beaten with a baseball bat
and stabbed – and the anonymous threats point to an extreme right-wing
group, in reality the murderer took advantage of the threats to enact his desire
for revenge. Like Entre dos aguas, in Con anuncio Cornelia is engaged in multiple
cases, the most significant of which involves the murder of Ilinca Constanti-
nescu, a Moldavian prostitute whose bloodstained clothes have been found,
but whose body has disappeared. These twin investigations provide Ribas with
the opportunity to reflect on the question of multiculturalism and the German
national imaginary.
Peter Messent argues that ‘it is the detective’s job to trace the hidden
relationships crime both indicates, yet conceals, to bring them to the surface,
and show the way the city works’ (Messent, 1997, p. 1). In the context of Con
anuncio, to do so is to undermine the positive image of Frankfurt that the
advertising agency and its good burghers wish to promote. And Cornelia does
just that. Following her initial briefing at the agency, she notes that the homeless
men she sees congregating on the street are absent from the image of the
tolerant, multicultural city of the agency’s advertising campaign, despite the
fact that the ‘vagabundos’ [‘tramps’], as she calls them, ‘eran el telón de fondo
de la ciudad que se preciaba de ser el motor financiero de Alemania’ (Ribas,
2009, p. 34) [‘were the backdrop to the city which prided itself on being
Germany’s financial engine’]. Cornelia thus not only questions whether the
projected image corresponds to reality, she also raises the issue of which groups
are excluded from this image. This leads Cornelia and her colleagues Reiner
and Leopold to investigate the murky area of racist and right-wing Germany.
One example of a group which feels itself excluded in contemporary Germany
is the Germania Floral association, which Cornelia and Reiner visit in order to
interview Manfred Breitner, the association’s president. Breitner is a suspect
because he had initially agreed to participate in the campaign, but later pulled
out because he did not want to appear with immigrants and ‘el representante
de los mariquitas’ (Ribas, 2009, p. 230) [‘the representative of the queers’].
This, then, is a rejection of the new Germany. While it is easy to dismiss Breit-
ner’s attitude and that of the organization as racist, Germania Floral is an exam-
ple of a certain sector of German society which feels excluded in contemporary
Germany. The association’s sense of alienation is underscored by their grounds,
which are far from ‘el Fránkfurt de los rascacielos, los bancos y la Bolsa’ (Ribas,
2009, p. 226) [‘the Frankfurt of skyscrapers, banks and the stock market’].
Indeed, their fence shuts out this world with which they are afraid to engage.
Instead, within the association’s grounds the members attempt to create a
mythical Germany. The organization’s nostalgia for a simpler time is evident in
the use of the archaic national descriptor – Germania – in its name, rather than
the more common term (in Spanish) ‘Alemania’, thus suggesting that they
hark back to an earlier period in which everything was clearly structured and
everyone knew their place. To this end, the association has strict organizational
rules, the objective of which is to maintain certain uniformity among the
members. For example, they are only allowed to plant ‘un tercio de flores, un
tercio de plantas útiles y un tercio de árboles frutales’ (Ribas, 2009, p. 224)
[‘one third flowers, one third useful plants and one third fruit trees’]. They
even have rules concerning the fabrication of the gnomes which appear in their
gardens. These must be German-made, not cheap Polish imitations, and must
not strike obscene poses (Ribas, 2009, p. 228). Their small-mindedness is thus
represented in their small garden plots with their stunted – gnome – citizens.
This link is made clear in the description of Breitner, who himself resembles
one of Snow White’s seven dwarves (Ribas, 2009, p. 227).
Throughout the investigation, Cornelia also gains a greater understanding of
the bigoted world of far-right groups, such as Alemania Limpia [Clean Germany],
whose leaders she interviews. While the members of Germania Floral have largely
retreated from the world, Alemania Limpia tackles Germany’s multiculturalism
and sexual tolerance head on. They organize music concerts where they
promote so-called German values and have recently been suspected of attacks
on gays in which they cover their victims’ clothes in pink triangles, just as the
Nazis did (Ribas, 2009, p. 258). Just as the Nazis were frightened of diversity, so
too are the members of Alemania Limpia, for whom Germany must be protected
from so-called unhealthy, foreign elements.
The investigation into Sperber’s death ultimately proves unsettling for
Cornelia, as she discovers that the racist and homophobic attitudes of Germania
Floral and Alemania Limpia are also present among members of the police
force. Rather than working exclusively with her usual team, Cornelia is forced
by Ockenfeld to collaborate with her police nemesis Sven Juncker and his
team. Upon discovering that Sperber was gay, Juncker automatically follows
what Cornelia sees as a prejudiced line of enquiry born out of his homophobia.
For Juncker, Sperber was murdered by a gay lover or by his jealous boyfriend,
and he follows this blinkered line ruthlessly, regardless of the facts or the
feelings of Sperber’s partner of many years, whom Juncker almost charges
with the murder. Juncker’s dislike for homosexuals is such that he even
violently assaults his close collaborator Gersternkorn when he discovers that
he is gay (Ribas, 2009, p. 374).
Although Sperber’s death was not ultimately due to homophobia or to the
actions of far right-wing political groups like Alemania Limpia or conservative
organizations like Germania Floral, Cornelia’s investigations do shed light on an
element of German society which the authorities wish to sweep under the
carpet. As Cornelia notes at the end of the novel:
En unos meses, los carteles de la campaña de Baumgard & Holder proc-

lamarían por la ciudad que ‘Todos somos Fráncfort.’ En el resto del país,
los grandes seminarios mostrarían las mismas imágenes con el eslogan ‘Así
somos en Fráncfort’, los cines y la televisión mostrarían los spots. Se barrería
bajo la alfombra que Alemania Limpia era un caso extremo, pero no aislado.
A falta de capitalidad, romanticismo o pantalones de cuero, se vendería lib-
eralidad, convivencia y tolerancia. Y no se iba a permitir que la realidad lo
estropeara. (Ribas, 2009, p. 396)
[In a few months the billboards for Baumgard & Holder’s campaign would
proclaim to the city ‘We’re all Frankfurt.’ In the rest of the country the same
images would be shown in large public lectures with the slogan ‘This is how
we are in Frankfurt’, commercials would appear on television and in cinemas.
Alemania Limpia would be swept under the carpet as an extreme, but not iso-
lated case. In the absence of capital-city status, Lederhosen and Romanticism,
they would sell open-mindedness, peaceful coexistence and tolerance. And
they weren’t going to allow reality to get in the way.]
If Frankfurt is a product, then it is one which is falsely advertised. Rather than

an accurate reflection of Frankfurt, it is a projection, an image that the town
councillors and the advertising team at Baumgard and Holder wish were real.
Nevertheless, all sectors of German society, as represented in the novel, contain
racist elements which, lying just below the surface, threaten to upset the fragile
image of a multicultural yet German community based on mutual respect and
tolerance.
Conclusion
The success at the 2010 Football World Cup of the German national team,
made up of Polish, Turkish, Tunisian and even Brazilian and Spanish immigrants,
as well as more familiar German names, demonstrated that Germany has gone
through a significant period of social and cultural change. As the Argentine
crime writer Juan Carlos Martini has argued, the crime novel is intimately
connected to the major social transformations of the twentieth century (Martini,
1979, p. 25). In Entre dos aguas and Con anuncio, particularly through the figure
of Cornelia, Ribas attempts to explore this change. While German fans may
celebrate the national team’s success, Ribas paints a more complex portrait of
contemporary Germany, one driven by deep divisions brought about by a
conflict between a traditional understanding of German society and the
increasing presence of different immigrant groups. Whereas Entre dos aguas
centres on immigrant communities – whether Spanish, Turkish or from Latin
America and the former Yugoslavia – trying to make their way in Germany, Con
anuncio focuses on the effect of this immigration on German citizens.
The fact that Ribas uses the crime genre to represent this is significant. Dead
bodies shatter communities, and despite the fact that Cornelia almost always
gets her man,8 the community cohesion that is ruptured by the multiple murders
is not restored. Nothing is the same afterwards. At the end of Entre dos aguas, the
Spanish community fades into insignificance, as though it were unable to cope
with Regino Martínez’s crime. Likewise, in Con anuncio the discovery that the
crime was personal, rather than a hate crime carried out by racist and
homophobic members of German society, and the subsequent arrest of the
murderer, provide little comfort. As represented in the novels, the cultural and
social divisions still exist; they are just papered over by a slick advertising
campaign and a re-affirmed belief in the power of the police to protect society
from criminals. Thus, despite the successful resolution of the crime, Ribas’s
mischling detective leaves readers with a deep sense of unease.
Notes
1
Ribas has since written a third instalment of the Cornelia Weber-Tejedor series,
En caída libre (2011), but it was unavailable at the time of writing and is thus not
discussed here.
2
Ribas’s German publishers have also realized that the German readership has
taken to her novels. The first German edition of Con anuncio – Tödliche Kampagne –
numbers 10,000 copies whereas the Spanish original was only 7,000. Email
correspondence with the author, July 2010.
3
By foreign language, I mean novels written in languages other than the usual lan-
guage of communication of the place in which the novels are set.
4
The first Turkish-German detective appeared in Jakob Arjouni’s Mehr Bier (1987),
but readers found it difficult to believe in a Turkish-German detective (Teraoka,
2009, p. 113).
5
For an analysis of culturally different detectives in recent Spanish crime fiction,
see King (2007).
6
The Spanish priest likewise underscores Cornelia’s German identity when he
reminds her that ‘ustedes ya no son esos nazis’ (Ribas, 2007, p. 275) [‘You’re no
longer Nazis’].
7
Although born and raised in Spain, Pueyo is a Germanophile who jumped at the
opportunity to abandon what he saw of the Spanish provincialism of the Franco
regime. Pueyo has become more German than Spanish in many ways, his cultural
integration consolidated by having published several books on the German lan-
guage. Furthermore, Pueyo is terrified by the possibility that, due to the dwindling
Spanish congregation, the Church will send him back to Spain (Ribas, 2007, p.
147).
8
The exception is Ockenfeld’s banker friend, who, Cornelia discovers, had repeat-
edly raped the Ecuadorian maid that Cornelia was ordered to find. This case falls
apart when she disappears to avoid being extradited.
Chapter 7
An American in Paris or Opposites Attract:

Dominique Sylvain’s ‘In-Between’ B
icultural
Detective Stories
France Grenaudier-Klijn
It could be said that the pre-modern (or realist) character typically possessed
an untroubled, anchored and clear sense of identity, while the postmodern
one, as seen by Aleid Fokkema, ‘has not become “whole” and totalized’
(Fokkema, 1991, p. 183) tending rather to be marked by fragmentation,
discontinuity and multiplicity. But what are we to make of the post-postmodern
character inhabiting the narratives of the early twenty-first century?1 This
question lies at the heart of the following examination of the place of the
foreigner in four novels by French thriller author Dominique Sylvain.
In attempting to explain Sylvain’s motivation with regards to her bicultural
detective stories, I will be guided initially by Colin Nettelbeck’s assertion that
France has entered a new era which he labels the ‘post-literary age’, seen as
correlating with the decentralization of literature in the French cultural arena,
and as working in favour of ‘marginal’ genres such as crime writing (Nettlebeck,
1994). The first part of this discussion will therefore establish a specific literary
context for Sylvain’s novels and position her work in relation to common topoi
of the ‘genre’. I will then turn to the concept of coexistence, taken here to
denote a specific interpersonal model, in order to analyse the representation of
the Franco-foreigner partnership in Sylvain’s fiction and its relevance in a post-
September 11 socio-political environment. Ultimately, I will argue that Sylvain
invites her readers into a marginal space where the potential discomfort of the
‘in-between’ gives way to a new ideology of togetherness.
Dominique Sylvain, Ingrid and Lola

September 11 marked a turning point in the writing of French noir novelist
Dominique Sylvain.2 Following the event, she wondered ‘comment écrire après
ça’ (Simon and Flamerion, 2007)3 [‘how to write after that’], and felt that a
new combination of traditional detective storytelling and humour would be
better suited to the times. As a result, in 2004, Sylvain imagined a formidable

duo of amateur investigators: buxom retired French superintendent Lola Jost
and statuesque American masseuse and occasional striptease artist Ingrid
Diesel. The two women, who meet for the first time in Passage du désir (2004,
Passage of Desire), become friends and together solve a succession of crimes
and mysteries in La Fille du samouraï (2005, The Samurai’s Daughter), Manta
Corridor (2006, Manta Corridor), and L’Absence de l’ogre (2007, The Missing
Ogre). In an interview, Sylvain explains how she got the idea for her two
protagonists:
Lola est quasiment arrivée, telle quelle, il fallait qu’elle soit plantureuse parce
que d’une certaine manière il fallait qu’elle soit réconfortante et vraiment
présente dans un monde qui devenait inquiétant. J’étais sûre qu’elle aurait
une comparse car une comédie passe par les dialogues, l’échange. . . . je me
suis dit que ça serait intéressant de faire d’Ingrid une Américaine afin de
faire ressortir nos différences d’avec ce pays, mais aussi les choses positives de
leur culture. (Simon and Flamerion, 2007)
[Lola came into being immediately, just as she is. She needed to be buxom
because in a way, she needed to be comforting and have a real presence in a
world which was becoming worrying. I was positive she would have a partner
because comedy requires dialogues and exchanges. . . . I thought it would
be more interesting to make Ingrid an American in order to highlight our
differences from that country, but also the positive elements of American
culture.]
Sylvain favours polyphony and multiple perspectives, not only in response to

purely narrative requirements – comedy is not a ‘solo’ genre – but also because
of the condition of our increasingly disquieting modern world. Her awareness
of the uneasy state of contemporary Western society is reflected in her narratives,
which aim at providing some form of solace to jaded and anxious readers. Yet
she is quick to rebuke what she calls the ‘polar dénonciateur’ [‘denunciatory
thriller’], whose tendency to limit creativity and readers’ interpretations is in
contradiction to her aesthetics as much as her ethics. Wary of hasty
categorizations, she also rejects the ‘feminist’ label ‘on the grounds that women
now have equal status and that feminism is therefore a thing of the past’
(Desnain, 2001, p. 185).
Sylvain’s defiance of generic labelling highlights the importance of freedom
in her work at the level of both stylistic inventiveness and characterization. Her
style is jocular, and she is particularly adept at playing with language, creating
jubilant and witty dialogues, peppered with aphorisms and original repartee.
Showing great inclusiveness in characterization, her narratives introduce
readers to a multiplicity of figures from diverse demographic, socio-cultural
and ethnic backgrounds – Black and North Africans, Jews, Muslims, Eastern
Dominique Sylvain’s ‘In-Between’ Bicultural Detective Stories 89
Europeans and Americans. Such a ‘melting-pot’ provides Sylvain with further

opportunity to stretch the language and distil a message of altruism and
tolerance.
In accordance with canonical crime fiction, Sylvain’s novels deal with issues
of integrity, truth and justice. They also place great emphasis on epicurean
pleasures, friendship and togetherness – tropes allowing for humour in the
narratives – while exploring questions of identity and place in an era dominated
by fear and anxiety. Indeed, great catastrophes serve as pretext to a number of
Sylvain’s novels. Hurricane Katrina provides a backdrop to L’Absence de l’ogre,
while in Passage du désir the attack on the Twin Towers in New York is used both
to justify Ingrid’s presence in Paris and to stress the omnipresent fear created
by ‘[t]errorisme, chômage, menace de guerre, marée noire, virus apocalyptique,
vache folle, maïs mutant, sectes cloneuses’ (Sylvain, 2004, p. 16) [‘terrorism,
unemployment, threats of war, oil spills, apocalyptic viruses, mad cow disease,
mutating corn, cloning sects’]. The quasi-biblical overtones of the term
‘apocalyptic’ hint at Sylvain’s defence and promotion of redemptive togetherness,
while her choice of the comedy-noir appears to echo Michel Le Bris’s4 observation
concerning the relevance of noir fiction as the only form of literature capable of
addressing the impact posed by international terrorism (Le Bris, 2002, p. 142).
In short, the textual strategies used in the Ingrid and Lola series can be
interpreted as an attempt to transcend the unease peculiar to the new, globalized
world. Drawing from the characteristics of Sylvain’s writing, I will argue that,
while retaining traditional features of detective fiction, her work is firmly
anchored in the post-postmodern/‘post-literary’ era, and speaks of the necessity
incumbent upon us to find a new means of human (co)participation in the
twenty-first century.
Sylvain and the ‘Post-Literary’ Era
Nettelbeck defines several features common to ‘post-literary’ French novelists:

a distancing from deconstruction and an attempt at reconstruction; ‘a conscious
break with the theoretical and hyperintellectual climate that dominated French
literary culture in the 1960s and 1970s’ (Nettelbeck, 1994, p. 137); the inter
mingling of aesthetics and ethics; the ‘juxtaposition of realism and fantasy’
(Nettelbeck, 1994, p. 137); and a genuinely ludic use of language. He also
stresses that such ‘decentralization’ of literature has enabled non-traditional
genres to attract more readers and to occupy a more prominent place in the
French publishing arena.
Following Nettelbeck’s analysis, it is clear that two factors have contributed to
the emergence of the new paradigm: virtual reality and the digitization of
information on the one hand, and economic globalization on the other. The
first has had a very real and palpable impact on literature, and particularly on
marginal genres. Indeed, due to the influence of television and, most of all, to
the democratization of images and information that the Internet allows – we
could refer to this as the ‘spectacularization’5 of information – increasing
importance has been granted to what is commonly denoted as ‘low literature’;
namely, works of fiction that do not fit easily within the respectable and
respected body of works produced by ‘serious’ authors. Perhaps in a slightly
more tangential manner, globalization too has impacted on ‘post-literary’
writing. Not only has it broadened readers’ access to literary works from many
cultures, it has also integrated multiculturalism in plot, characterization and
setting. For better or for worse, globalization and spectacularization entail a
greater awareness of what exchange and interrelation mean, on both a literal
and a metaphorical level. While traditional geographical, spatial, temporal,
and even linguistic and ideological limits seem to have been pushed back, and
despite a lingering sense of scepticism towards traditional values of order,
spirituality and truth, ‘post-literary’ authors appeal to our sense of belonging to
a common species engaged in a possible new mode of (co)existence. Sylvain’s
work, as well as that of some of her contemporaries, could therefore testify to
the emergence of a new worldview, whereby self-dissociation evolves into a form
of reaching out.
In addition, many writers at the beginning of the twenty-first century seem to
be seeking reconciliation between phenomenological observations and
idealization. This tendency is particularly visible in the work of novelists stressing
the importance of ‘family’,6 not in the patriarchal or traditional sense of kinship,
but rather as a reconstructed multicultural, multifaceted and mutable ‘tribe’
built on affinity, friendship and complementarities. For these authors, no (wo)
man is an island. Through her rejection of and resistance to monocultural
characterization, Sylvain actively promotes the notion of a truly global/glocal
world, while her choice of genre – the hybrid form of the comedy-thriller –
testifies to her ongoing exploration of the ‘in-between’.
Dominique Sylvain and Crime Writing
In a recent article, Claire Gorrara stresses the increasing visibility given to crime
fiction in contemporary France. She begins by reminding her readers that ‘one
book in five sold in France today is a polar’ (Gorrara, 2007b, p. 209), before
demonstrating how, beyond general mainstream popularity, crime fiction has
infiltrated French cultural life under the triple impetus of academic interest in
cultural studies, readers’ disaffection with abstract and self-reflexive narratives
and the emergence of new voices. As a result, Gorrara continues, crime fiction
is no longer considered to be a minor genre, with critics tending instead to
recognize the positive influence it exerts on other forms of writing and to
explore the ‘startling ways in which [it] has reinvigorated the literary sphere in
France and elsewhere’ (Gorrara, 2007b, p. 214).
Thanks to its versatility, crime fiction has also responded particularly well to
the decentralizing phenomenon highlighted by Nettelbeck. In what could
strike us as a contradiction, it is indeed the rigid structure the genre has to
adhere to which stimulates creativity, encourages inventiveness and incites
originality.7 The popularity of crime fiction in other media (e.g. cinema,
television) and the natural ability of the roman noir to blend an apparently
straightforward plot with more subtle and critical socio-political considerations
also work in its favour. When reading a contemporary crime novel, readers are
offered the opportunity both to travel through foreign (and therefore exotic)
lands,8 and also to penetrate more obscure regions of their own socio-cultural
environment; there is little doubt that, as a genre, crime fiction can be
simultaneously deeply entertaining and cathartic. Sylvain, an expatriate in
Japan, who ‘vi[t] entre deux et écri[t] entre deux’ (Colpaert, 2010) [‘lives and
writes in-between’], is able to create a world where the foreigner is intriguing,
attractive, supportive and ultimately needed, and where foreignness is implicitly
valued. Here, the confrontation of French and American cultures allows not
only for comic and playful observations, in accordance with the rules of the
comedy-thriller genre, but, more importantly, for a subtle message of solidarity
and optimism which bypasses a binary definition of otherness and mobilizes
coexistential relationships.
Reconstruction, Friendship and Coexistence
Nettelbeck interprets ‘post-literary’ authors’ reliance on the polar as ‘an

affirmation of story-telling as a problem-solving, rather than a problem-creating
activity, a re construction rather than a deconstruction’(Nettelbeck, 1994,
p. 137). This paradigm of ‘rebuilding’ (of family, order, truth) is central to
Sylvain’s writing. Not only is the act of reconstruction the seminal activity of the
sleuth, who looks for clues in order to retrace past events, it is also a palliative
to some of the issues faced by contemporary society. However, in Sylvain’s
novels, reconstruction is more an act of engagement with the world than an
end in itself. I shall illustrate this with the image of the jigsaw. Lola Jost is very
fond of jigsaw puzzles: alone in her apartment, rue de L’Échiquier – the word
means ‘chessboard’, a veiled allusion to Lola’s fondness for intellectual games
and possibly also to the keenness of Golden Age detectives for intellectual
puzzles – Lola drinks port, smokes and tackles complex jigsaws sent to her by
her only son. The ‘ephemeral’ (Nettelbeck’s term) nature of each puzzle,
hinted at by their constant replacement by a new jigsaw, is implicitly valued. In
effect, the act of puzzling reflects Lola’s philosophy of life as an ongoing process
of cohesion-in-the-making, further echoed in the relationships she entertains

with the various members of her neighbourhood: each contributes to a
harmonious and fluctuating whole, wherein none is a central piece.
Similarly, the occupation of American expatriate Ingrid Diesel – she is a
masseuse – not only aims at alleviating aches and pains, but, more symbolically,
is also seen as a means of creating deep-seated connections. For Ingrid, ‘[L]e
massage devrait être une matière obligatoire à l’école. Il jouerait le rôle de
l’épouillage chez les chimpanzés, une fonction de ciment social’ (Sylvain, 2004,
p. 232) [‘Massage should be a compulsory school subject. It would function
similarly to delousing among chimps, as social cement’]. The fact that Ingrid
moonlights her massages may illustrate the gently confrontational nature of
Sylvain’s writing, whose message of healing togetherness remains an oddly
subversive humanist agenda. Just as Ingrid’s massages are conducted ‘under the
table’, Sylvain’s altruistic discourse denounces the enduring egocentrism of
contemporary Western society.
Both Lola’s puzzles and Ingrid’s massages point to the centrality of coexistence
in the general narrative telos of Sylvain’s novels. To coexist traditionally entails
two broad meanings. On the one hand, it signifies the ability to ‘exist together,
at the same time, or in the same place’.9 On the other hand, it means ‘to live in
peace with another or others despite differences, especially as a matter of
policy’.10 The first definition suggests matter-of-factness, denoting a set of
specific circumstances whereby people are placed in a communal spatio-
temporal setting. The initial novels of the Lola and Ingrid series draw strongly
on this first meaning, allowing Sylvain to create an environment peopled by a
number of recurrent characters brought together by chance. The second
interpretation, however, underlines the willingness of participants to coexist in
harmony. It simultaneously implies difference and agency, given that coexisting
participants must be able and willing to overcome or bypass these differences.
Bringing together characters as culturally different as Lola Jost and Ingrid
Diesel allows Sylvain to insist on the positive and mutually enriching experience
of coexistence. The author’s insertion of a specifically foreign protagonist, an
American woman in a very French, quintessentially Parisian milieu, reflects an
ideology that not only challenges but indeed dismisses the hierarchical
construction of native over foreigner. Ultimately, the partnership of Sylvain’s
female protagonists is not simply an original take on the traditional figure of
the crime fiction heroine, but, more importantly, a call to support cultural
differences. Not only does Lola and Ingrid’s association allow for the resourceful
combination of youthful energy and wise experience, it also provides a conduit
for the merging of American and French perspectives unified in a common
goal. Sylvain justifies her choice of an American protagonist thus: ‘Ingrid Diesel
est le moyen d’évoquer une culture qui me passionne mais aussi de confronter,
sans manichéisme, les points de vue européens et américains dans une époque
où les différences se font cruellement sentir’ (Colpaert) [‘Ingrid Diesel allows
me to evoke a culture that I am passionate about and also to bring together

European and American viewpoints, while avoiding simple confrontation, at a
time when the differences between the two are increasingly felt’]. In so doing,
Sylvain’s novels critically engage with the divisiveness of the contemporary
world. Simultaneously, such characterization markedly distinguishes Sylvain’s
work from more traditional French crime fiction: where the pairing of a
detective and his sidekick is a common trope of noir fiction, Sylvain’s duo is far
less static and conventional both because of the gender of the protagonists,
and, more tellingly, because it does away with any semblance of hierarchy.
Throughout the novels, friendship is also very clearly depicted as the only
model of fruitful relationship, while marriages end in divorce, betrayal, adultery,
conflict and death. Even romantic love is rarely portrayed as successful. Only
friends seem to be able to ‘live happily ever after’. Thus, in La Fille du samouraï,
the reader is explicitly told that ‘Pour Ingrid la bourlingueuse, qui après des
années d’errance plantait enfin ses racines à Paris, les amis formaient une
famille d’adoption dont l’épicentre était le restaurant du passage Brady’
(Sylvain, 2005, p. 26) [‘for Ingrid, the globe-trotter, who, after years of
wandering, was finally putting down roots in Paris, friends were a family by
adoption, whose epicentre was the restaurant in Passage Brady’]. If we accept
the paradigm of reconstruction explored earlier, Sylvain seems to advocate
friendship as the best way to ‘move beyond national, cultural and ethnic
identities to create a cosmopolitan whole’ (Durham, 2003, p. 69). The act of
being friends with another person can also be seen as a key component of self-
construction and belonging, to the benefit not only of the individuals concerned,
but extending, indeed, to an entire community.
Sylvain’s emphasis on friendship and her implicit criticism of parental
inadequacies further feeds the opposition of traditional family structure versus
chosen family.11 Thus in Manta Corridor, Lady Mba, concerned about Louis
Manta’s fate, explains that ‘[i]l est plus que mon shampouineur, il est ma
famille’ (Sylvain, 2006, p. 89) [‘he’s more than my shampooing assistant, he’s
my family’]. In Passage du désir, Farid (an Arab), who has broken ties with his
own family, considers Noah (a Jew) as his blood brother, to the great dismay of
Frenchman Jean-Luc, who is unable to comprehend why the two ‘siamois de
Méditerranée’ (Sylvain, 2004, p. 12) [‘Siamese twins from the Mediterranean’]
never discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. More than any of the other Ingrid
and Lola novels, Passage du désir systematically points the finger at the impact
bad parenting has on the next generation and on the cathartic role of genuine
friendship. Thus a number of secondary protagonists – bulimic waitress Chloé;
young murderer Patrick; isolated and murdered Vanessa – are victims of their
parents’ past crimes and/or shortcomings. On a symbolic level, the vulnerability
of young Romanian boys driven to prostitution on the boulevards of Paris also
illustrates the culpability of Ceauşescu as ‘father of his nation’. Similarly,
friendship plays a key role in the plot of Passage du désir: it is through their
friendship with restaurant-owner Maxime Duchamp that Ingrid and Lola meet
and embark on their enquiry; it is because of their deep bond that Khadidja
and Chloé can confront adversity. However, it is also because of loyalty to a
former friend that the murder of Vanessa Ringer takes place at the beginning
of the novel. Indeed, due to the moral/ethical dimension associated with it,
friendship is often linked to culpability in Sylvain’s novels: in Manta Corridor,
young Louis Manta turns his back on diving, due to the sense of guilt he felt at
having been unable to prevent the death of a younger friend; in L’Absence de
l’ogre, Ingrid must intervene in order to exculpate her old friend Brad. This
ambivalent portrayal of the consequences of friendship reflects the ‘in-between’
in which Sylvain sees herself writing. By depicting not only the joys and pleasures
of friendship, but also the burden of responsibility it places on those involved,
Sylvain seems to suggest that friendship is not something to be taken for granted,
but rather a willing commitment to both give and receive.
Coexistence, Youth and Plurality
Two other elements of characterization further illustrate Sylvain’s ideology of

coexistence, refusal of strict boundaries and fondness for pluralistic
representation. The first is youth and its corollaries of freshness, spontaneity
and innocence, which are implicitly valued throughout the novels. The second
is the atypicality of almost all of Sylvain’s characters for their ability to lead
multiple lives, either in conjunction or in succession. Nowhere are the two traits
embodied more clearly than in the figure of Ingrid Diesel.
Despite her thirty-plus years, Ingrid is consistently portrayed as an eternal
adolescent: her crush on Maxime Duchamp resembles adolescent puppy love;
she giggles; has a rather devil-may-care dress-sense; listens to rap music; gets
scared at the movies; acts spontaneously. These traits are always received
positively by Lola, who finds Ingrid’s ability to marvel both refreshing and
touching. Not only do these qualities fit with Sylvain’s optimistic/altruistic
discourse, but such behaviour also evokes a number of qualities traditionally
linked to America: assertiveness, confidence, extroversion, physical energy and
generosity. However, rather than depicting a Europeanized American – Ingrid
maintains the habits of her native culture – and/or a French society submerged
under the weight of American influences and products, Sylvain is adept at
collating the respective cultural tendencies of her two heroines. In particular,
Ingrid’s obsession with body image – she is a ‘gym freak’, does not smoke, loves
running and only drinks late in the day – is contrasted with Lola’s lack of dress-
sense, smoking, eating and drinking habits and complete disregard for her
weight and lack of fitness. Indeed, when Ingrid suggests that Lola give up
smoking and start exercising, the retired police commissioner retorts to her
friend that she should ‘garde[r] [s]es conseils californiens pour [elle]’ (Sylvain,
2004, p. 205) [‘keep her Californian advice to herself’]. Here again, Sylvain
resists any hierarchical ordering; neither the French, nor the American public
sphere is presented as superior. Rather, the very coexistence of these two
cultures enables and fuels the relationship between Ingrid and Lola. Although
both women show cultural biases and pass on judgements regarding the
idiosyncrasies of the other’s cultural environment, it is always in a semi-comic,
tongue-in-cheek way. Fast-paced dialogue allows the two characters to exchange
repartee designed to chip at the other’s peculiarities: ‘Je me suis toujours
demandé pourquoi vous aviez tellement la trouille de la modernité en France’
(Sylvain, 2004, p. 206) [‘I’ve always wondered why you’re so damn scared of
modernity in France’] says Ingrid, to which Lola retorts: ‘Je me suis toujours
demandé pourquoi vous aviez tellement la trouille de réfléchir en
Amérique!’(Sylvain, 2004, p. 206) [‘I’ve always wondered why you’re so damn
scared to think in America!’]. The use of such hackneyed generalizations about
the two nations prevents the reader from taking any of it at face value.
The atypicality of many of Sylvain’s protagonists, which is conveyed through
their ability to embody more than one social role or career, and to challenge in
the process socio-cultural expectations and limitations, illustrates again the
positive dimension of the fluid and lively ‘in-betweenness’ promoted by the
author. An ex-journalist and expatriate herself, Sylvain tends to stress her
characters’ capacity for (re)invention and resistance to social norms. Here
again, it is primarily Ingrid, born in New York of a Russian mother and an Irish
father, who embodies this capacity for reconciliation of disparate selves and
resistance to normative categorization. Not only is she an expatriate who has
lived and worked in numerous places, she literally leads a double life: masseuse
by day and stripper – under the nickname Gabriella Tiger, La Flamboyante12 – by
night. Ingrid, however, is not unique in her ability to reconcile various facets of
one’s personality and to doubly contribute in the process to the community.
Lola, whose real name is in fact Marie-Thérèse, taught French literature prior
to entering the police force, while Maxime Duchamp, who met his Japanese-
born ex-wife Rinko in Buenos Aires, used to be a war photographer and is now
the owner and head chef at restaurant ‘Les Belles de jour comme de nuit’ [‘The
Ladies of the Night and Day’]. The stress placed on the capacity for self-
transformation not only illustrates the positive role given to foreigners and to
foreignness in Sylvain’s writing, where geographical and social mobility go hand
in hand and facilitate social encounters and mutual self-enrichment, but
suggests, in a wider sense, the porosity of all types of borders, if not their very
pointlessness.
There are, however, hints that the refusal of (self) limitations and the ensuing
positive representation of the ‘in-between’ remain more of a utopian project
than an accurate portrayal of contemporary social reality. Indeed, the
multilateral characters one meets in Sylvain’s fiction are frequently subjected to
ostracism and may trigger deep-seated anxieties among others less open or
tolerant, often with dramatic consequences. In Passage du désir, for instance,

bisexual Rinko Duchamp is killed by her lover’s husband, whose son will later
also commit murder. In the same novel, Muslim-born Khadidja Faris struggles
to locate her identity and to find a place in French society after being rejected
by her parents and blamed by her brother for her independence, defiance of
gendered limitations and her romantic involvement with older Frenchman
Maxime Duchamp.
However, if Sylvain often stresses the lack of tolerance of some members of
society – a necessary requirement for the promotion of her coexistential
ideology – she is never heavy-handed about it. Rather, most characters
demonstrate a desire for understanding, replacing final and abrupt judgements
with a willingness to comprehend. While retaining one of the classic tropes of
noir writing – namely, solving a crime and establishing the guilt of the
perpetrator(s) – the emphasis is firmly placed on the need to understand the
circumstances leading to the murder. Only when the culprits are motivated by
greed, as in Manta Corridor and L’Absence de l’ogre, are the narratives more aligned
with traditional fictions of crime-solving and punishment of the guilty.
Finally, a recurrent trait of Sylvain’s coexistential narratives can be located in
the altruistic nature of her characters’ occupations. In addition to Ingrid and
Lola themselves, hairdresser Lady Mba, restaurateur Maxime Duchamp and
psychoanalyst Antoine Léger are all presented as caring individuals. While their
jobs are not strictly dedicated to care in the traditional sense of the word (they
are not doctors or nurses, for example), these figures are nonetheless quite
explicitly depicted as providers of physical, emotional and psychological
comfort. Indeed, most of Sylvain’s characters could be seen as essentially
nurturing.
Conclusion
Dominique Sylvain does not seek to represent contemporary France. Despite

the many references to well-known cultural and political phenomena,13 she
consistently uses reality as a springboard from which to launch a message of
tolerance and altruism. Her atypical Franco-American duo allows her to
promote non-stereotypical female figures in the historically male-dominated
genre of French crime fiction, to challenge the paradigm of individuality and,
at the same time, to invest in a coexistential ideology better suited to address
the woes of contemporary life. An eclectic author, she chooses to promote new
ways in which to address questions of cultural and national identities in a post-
September 11 context. Emphasizing the ‘smaller’ pleasures of life – food, wine,
good company, the light in Paris in winter, the leaves of a tree, the song of a
bird, the completion of a difficult jigsaw puzzle – Dominique Sylvain’s Ingrid
and Lola remind readers of the value, usefulness and beauty of friendship.
Returning to the question which opened this study, I would therefore suggest
that these post-postmodern characters are less equivocal than the postmodern
figures described by Fokkema. While they have retained some element of
multiplicity, they also appear to embrace an ‘in-betweenness’ which successfully
bypasses fragmentation and discontinuity and allows for genuine and
constructive coexistence. Concomitantly self-assertive and self-ironic, sure of
themselves while never taking themselves too seriously, caring and detached,
realistic and prone to utopian musings, decidedly epicurean and aware of the
futility of life, Sylvain’s post-postmodern protagonists appear reconciled with
themselves and the world, thanks to a healthy dose of lucid scepticism, a genuine
concern for others and an ongoing validation of multiculturalism.
Notes
1
Assuming, of course, that we are already in a position to sketch out some of the
dominant literary features of the first ten years of the third millennium.
2
Born in 1957, and after a change in career, Dominique Sylvain started writing
in 1997 and quickly established herself as an author of crime fiction. All her nov-
els are published by Viviane Hamy in the Chemins nocturnes collection. Currently
living in Tokyo, Sylvain has written fifteen novels and received three literary
prizes: the Prix Sang d’Encre for Vox in 2000; the Prix Michel Lebrun in 2001 for
Strad; the Grand Prix des Lectrices d’Elle in 2005 for Passage du désir, the first of the
Lola and Ingrid series.
3
All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.
4
For Le Bris, noir is the future of fiction ‘parce que le future [sic] devenu notre
présent se révèle noir. Définitivement noir’ [‘because the future that has become
our present is shown to be noir. Conclusively noir’].
5
I am borrowing this term from Majorano: ‘On devrait reconnaître qu’on ne peut
pas ne pas tenir compte de deux “produits de la technique”: la “mondialisation”
et la “spectacularisation”’ (2008, p. xiii) [‘One is forced to admit that it is impos-
sible not to take into account two “products of technological advancement”:
“globalization” and “spectacularization”’].
6
One could think, in particular, of Daniel Pennac and his Malaussène series and
of Anna Gavalda (2004, 2007). See also Barnet and Welch (2007).
7
Reddy, 2003, p. 50: ‘Paradoxically, this [wide knowledge of the genre’s basic fea-
tures] also makes the genre ripe for innovation with authors delicately working
out the balance between what remains the same and what might conceivably be
different.’
8
In a brief overview of French crime fiction, Demko (2010) insists on the cru-
cial importance of the setting, which not only ‘helps to render the story more
believable, more realistic, [but also contributes to the fact that] one can virtually
explore different cities or countries via the genre’.
9
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/coexist . Accessed 10 August 2010.
10
Ibid.
11
For further discussion on the notion of ‘elected family’ in relation to the female
sleuth, see Gregory Klein (1995) and Gavin (2010).
12
Meaning ‘Blazing’, a possible reference to famous American stripper and bur-
lesque star Blaze Starr. Born Fanny Belle Fleming in 1932, Blaze Starr owes her
fame to her innovative burlesque acts. She is also famous for her long-term affair
with Louisiana Governor Earl Long, later adapted for the screen by Ron Shelton
(Blaze, 1989, Touchstone Pictures).
13
For example, Bratz dolls, the Da Vinci Code, Britney Spears and popular French
television programmes.
Chapter 8
Arthur Upfield and Philip McLaren:

Pioneering Partners in Australian
Ethnographic Crime Fiction
John Ramsland and Marie Ramsland
In the still-developing genre of Australian ethnographic crime fiction1 that goes

beyond mere thriller writing, two authors stand out on an international scale:
Arthur Upfield (1890–1964) and Philip McLaren (b. 1943). Such was the
success and huge popularity of his books in the United States, especially in the
1940s and 1950s, featuring his Aboriginal detective Napoleon Bonaparte, that
Upfield was the first foreign writer admitted as a member of the prestigious
Mystery Writers Guild of America. He was a pioneer in two interrelated ways:
first, he was the first Australian writer to place an Aboriginal character as hero
rather than victim;2 and second, he is regarded as the first writer of ‘ethnological
crime fiction’ (Ramsland and Ramsland, 2009, p. 113). After a thirty-year gap,
Philip McLaren, an indigenous contemporary writer, came to the fore with a
fresh voice, one that arose out of the Aboriginal cultural renaissance of recent
years. With a number of well-received novels, he has mapped out the route for
a militant postcolonial discourse based on an insider perspective.
Both Upfield and McLaren view Australian Aborigines in their suspense
fiction as being marginalized by the dominant white culture, but possessing
rich cultural values, knowledge and ideas that can lead to the solution of
criminal acts. Both writers draw sustenance from a sense of place and of
belonging to the land, and cultural tactics that demonstrate a deep understanding
that remains a mystery to the European Australian world. In spite of numerous
similarities, McLaren views Upfield’s writing as outdated, patronizing and
stereotypical and his characterization as thin and culturally unconvincing. This
article examines McLaren’s polemical position on Upfield to discover whether
it is justified. We will argue that Upfield’s stories, landscapes and the detective
are firmly anchored in a reality which they reflect accurately for their time, and
within the limits of the author’s preferred stylistic choices.
Upfield’s Outsider Perspective
American expert in crime writing Robin W. Winks has claimed that ethnic crime
fiction in Australia reached its greatest achievement with Upfield, a ‘transplanted
Englishman’. Winks underlines that Upfield’s writing was never recognized in
his adopted country. When he arrived in Australia as a remittance man (his
father saw him as a failure and gave him a one-way ticket to South Australia),
the country had a population of about four million. This act of expulsion cut
into Upfield’s personality, leaving enduring scars. He became an ‘abrupt,
enigmatic wanderer’, an Australian ‘in his own strange and alien [non-British]
world’ (Winks, 1998, p. 1919). Much of Upfield’s own life was experienced as
an outsider looking into the world of the bush that is far more conservative,
socially and culturally, than the metropolis. In his novels, Upfield captured the
tensions of black/white relationships with the eye of an outsider. He saw the
conflict played out in a drama between the two races, with the dangers of
disaster, but not without hope. He was, indeed, the earliest self-conscious author
of ethnic crime fiction in Australia, throwing his strength into defending
Aborigines, and choosing a protagonist detective from a disadvantaged ethnic
minority within a larger society.
The mystery in Upfield’s twenty-nine Napoleon Bonaparte detective novels is
solved through his protagonist’s innate abilities, intelligence and a close
examination of the landscape. While the action is usually set on cattle or sheep
stations and in small fictitious towns, these can generally be inferred as authentic
locations and plotted on the map of Australia. They are based on places the
author worked in as a rouseabout; places he lived in or visited in his extensive
period of drifting in the outback between 1911 and the early 1930s, with a break
in the AIF during the First World War.3 Frequently, the outback of the Australian
subcontinent is so compellingly described by Upfield that there is a sense of
human inadequacy of biblical proportions. His landscapes are highly visual in
character, making them suitable for film adaptation. The reader can easily
picture them and this is one of the reasons for their sustained popularity –
locally, from the early 1930s to the 1960s, and internationally, from the 1940s
through to the 1980s, and beyond.4
Apart from Tasmania and the Northern Territory, the settings are dispersed
across the entire continent. The Barrakee Mystery (1928) can be placed in the
Darling River basin of western New South Wales. The Bone is Pointed (1938) takes
the reader to Queensland; then South Australia with The Mountains Have a Secret
(1948); we visit Western Australia with Bony and the Mouse (1956a); and the
Nullarbor Plain, South Australia, with Man of Two Tribes (1956b). These
landscapes tend to be personified as essential characters integrated into the
narrative.
In Man of Two Tribes, landscape is interwoven with Aboriginal mythology. The
effect of the opening passage is mesmerizing:
Arthur Upfield and Philip McLaren 101
On a moonless night there is nothing to be seen of the Nullarbor Plain, or

the railway which crosses it for three hundred and thirty miles without an
angle Euclid could detect, nothing of all those square miles of table-flat tree-
less land beneath which the aborigines believe Ganba still lives and emerges
at night to hunt for a black fellow rash enough to leave his own camp fire
to lure a wench from her lawful owner. Now were hidden all the caves, the
caverns and blow-holes, and miles on miles of foot-high saltbush searched by
Senior Constable Easter and assistants for Myra Thomas, who disappeared
from the four-twenty train, five weeks and three days prior to this October.
(Upfield, 1972 [1956b], p. 1)
Thus Upfield steps neatly from his European-oriented evocation of landscape

prior to dawn to Aboriginal belief and on to establishing the mystery for
Detective Inspector Bonaparte, the ‘greatest crime investigator in all Australian
history’ (Upfield, 1972 [1956b], p. 6), according to Senior Constable Easter at
the Chifley police station (and many others in the various novels, including
Bony himself). Landscape and scenery, the visual aspects of the geophysical
qualities of the outback, are deftly blended with plot and characterization. They
are not static, but ever-changing.
Authenticity of character was important for Upfield. His creation of Napoleon
Bonaparte, according to him, was based on Tracker Leon, a workmate he spent
five months with repairing the dog (dingo) proof fence. A half-caste, Leon was
a delightful companion, an avid reader, intelligent and knowledgeable. Born in
North Queensland of a white father and an Aboriginal mother, after a good
education in a mission school, he became a police tracker. Leon and Upfield,
both enthusiastic readers, exchanged books before separating. Upfield decided
his intrepid detective would be black and named after the book Leon had given
him, a biography of Napoleon Bonaparte. In this way, the author was able to
create a believable character, at least for many devoted readers (Pederson,
1996, p. 996). But there is more to Bony than Leon. There are also echoes of
Sherlock Holmes and Sexton Blake, as well as actual policemen that Upfield
came to know, especially in the real Snowy Rowles case in Western Australia,5
and the Aboriginal scholar and inventor David Unaipon.6
Sexton Blake and Sherlock Holmes, in particular, were influential models for
Upfield’s shaping of his protagonist. Bony hardly ages over time. In each novel,
he provides a short autobiographical statement reminding readers of his
superior powers of detection:
I am the top of my chosen profession, despite all the handicaps of birth . . . with

never a failure to [my] record. I never knew my father. . . . I never knew my
mother either. She was found dead under a sandalwood tree with me on her
breast and three days old. . . . I have found my road in my own way, at my own
pace, and no one tells me to do this or that. (Upfield, 1972 [1956b], pp. 20–1)
Indeed, Upfield’s detective fiction follows many of the usual conventions: Bony
is a heroic superman of mysterious origins. He tends to prefer old crimes that
have happened before he arrives. Like Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes,
he likes to solve crimes that provide him with a challenging mental exercise. He
is the typical cerebral sleuth.
Bony repeats this story in almost every novel. In the twenty-sixth book, it is
noted for the first time that ‘his maternal ancestry had been powerfully
influenced by the impact of the Polynesian peoples’ (Upfield, 1972 [1956b],
p. 7). As a part-Aborigine, he views himself as a success rather than a victim. Like
Holmes, he does not like to be ordered around; he is a master of disguise with
extraordinary powers of detection. Bony’s incisive mind and superior deductive
logic mark him out. In December 1947, the book critic for the Daily Telegraph
enthused about Death of a Swagman: ‘The most important Sherlock, for the best
detective story of the year goes to an Australian writer, Mr. Arthur Upfield.’7
In his classification of Australian novels, Jean-François Vernay puts Upfield’s
work into the broader category of literature of rural Australia. Vernay’s iconic
themes of the Australian novel include marginality, isolation and solitude,
crime and punishment and the frontier – all present even in Upfield’s crime
fiction of the 1950s and early 1960s when other writers were concerned with
evoking the urban environment. Whether the action takes place in the city or
the bush, Upfield’s detective stories present a synthesis of Western and
Aboriginal cultures in the protagonist Napoleon Bonaparte (Vernay, 2010,
p. 86). Interestingly, in his thesis, Travis Lindsey stresses the ambivalence in
Upfield’s shaping of Bony and in the life experiences of his creator (Lindsey,
2005, chp. 9). They experience the same landscape. As an observer on the
outside, Upfield takes his sleuth to locations where he himself worked as a
sojourner. In disguise, Bony becomes a camel driver, a boundary rider, a horse
breaker and a rouseabout. In doing so, he modifies his educated accent to a
broad Australian drawl and exchanges a snappy suit for work clothes. Like his
creator and as a half-caste, Bony lives in an ‘in-between world’, but is also a
bridge between the Aboriginal and white worlds.
However, Upfield has been reproached for possessing an incomplete
knowledge of Aboriginal culture and placing token Aborigines in his stories.8
Some regard only works by indigenous writers as authentic. These writers are
considered to be the exclusive interpreters of Aboriginal culture, which is
believed to be inaccessible to foreigners.
How does McLaren Develop the ‘Insider’ Point of View?
More favourably received by this group of critics is the second Australian writer of
ethnographic crime fiction, Aboriginal author Philip McLaren. Like Upfield,
McLaren has undertaken a variety of interesting occupations, albeit of a more
contemporary kind: illustrator,9 designer, animator, producer, director, architect,
sculptor, lifeguard, copywriter and creative director in television, advertising and

film production. He was born in Sydney in 1943, a descendent of the Kamilaroi
people of north-western New South Wales, the setting for his first novel.
McLaren’s work is also based on geographic and historical fact, personal
experience and people he knows. When he became aware that he and other
Aboriginal people ‘had the most drastic ignorance of their own culture’, he
decided to become a writer (Byrne, 2003, p. 4). Like Upfield, he evokes the
natural and built environments in which the narrative unfolds in his six novels
to date: Sweet Water – Stolen Land (1993; revised 2001),10 Scream Black Murder
(1995; revised 2001), Lightning Mine (1999), There’ll be New Dreams (2001),
Murder in Utopia (2008) and West of Eden – The Real Man from Snowy River
(in press). Although they are not all detective novels, all these works contain
crime of various sorts. They are didactic and polemical in approach and
provide an insider voice, rather than that of the outsider or stranger, which
Zygmunt Bauman calls ‘the undecidable’ (Bauman, 1991, p. 55). McLaren
presents Aboriginal culture as a mysterious unknown, smoothly revealing
surviving fragments through the people, historical events and comments
made by observers, both Aboriginal and European. His characters ‘walk
through history’ (Byrne, 2003, p. 4) and the reader views life anew through
Aboriginal eyes. This is ‘militant post-colonial discourse’ (Ryan-Fazilleau,
2003, p. 46):
The whites were building fences everywhere. They had no regard for wild
life, no understanding or feeling for the land. All hunting would soon be
ruined. They had already cleared far too many plants and trees . . . to make
way for more grazing land for . . . animals whose cloven hooves destroyed the
delicate topsoil . . . .
White people actually wanted to own the land! She wondered secretly if
some day they would claim ownership of the sky, the stars, the clouds, the
rain, the rivers and the ocean. She suspected that if they could find a way to
do it, they would. (McLaren, 2001 [1995], p. 4)
Each novel has a short preamble in which the author specifies what is fact and
what is fiction. Such a technique tends to validate the imaginative elements of
the narratives and emphasizes the polemical/political issues.11
For Sue Ryan-Fazilleau, Scream Black Murder, a police procedural, presents the
three main characters as representative, ‘emblematic indigenous characters’
and ‘role models’ that are part of the ‘author’s educational project’ (Ryan-
Fazilleau, 2008, pp. 102, 43). Gary Leslie and Lisa Fuller are inexperienced
detectives placed in charge of a newly formed Aboriginal Homicide Unit sent
to investigate the deaths of Aborigines. They do not possess the extraordinary
skills of Upfield’s detective, but do bring to their job individual qualities. For
the most part, they are left to their own devices. Having been forced on the
others in the Department, they have little support until the Police Commissioner
takes charge of the investigation after a white woman is found murdered in the
same way as the Aboriginal victims. It is only when Gary suggests ‘criminal
dreaming’, a problem-solving method of the ‘collective consciousness style that
Aboriginal society had successfully applied for thousands of years’ (McLaren,
2001 [1995], pp. 141–2), that progress is made. Standard methods are then
employed to complete their investigation: identikit identification, television
interviews, medical records and DNA testing.
Although Lisa considers her colleague positively for having ‘manufactured a
space in modern society for himself’ (McLaren, 2001 [1995], p. 143), this
attitude is viewed negatively by some Aboriginal people in both fictional and
real Aboriginal communities.
The third character is Evelyn Bates, an Aboriginal dancer and a victim being
stalked by the rapist/murderer. McLaren’s technique of alternating scenes and
voices, including the criminal’s inner voice (which is italicized), gives depth to
his characters, heightens tension and brings out racial, social and political
issues in the country’s recent history. Although the crimes take place in the city,
the reader moves back in time with each character to rural settings and learns
about the complex nature of Aboriginal people.
As indicated by its title, Sweet Water – Stolen Land portrays the country as
usurped and despoiled. While there are fictional settings and characters placed
within real locations, they are composite in nature, based on the author’s
personal knowledge and thorough research. Included in the narrative are
Aboriginal legends. The reader learns more from diary entries that record
Aboriginal customs, beliefs and activities gleaned from the Kamilaroi women.
The connection between the land and the people is omnipresent.
The twenty-two chapters are divided between the past and the present and
feature different characters and incidents. The characters go beyond a two-
dimensional depiction as the reader gradually learns about their individual
backgrounds. McLaren uses this interweaving technique to gradually paint a
complex picture of the Australian racial divide. Set in the middle of the
nineteenth century, this novel uses and reinterprets the Myall Creek massacre –
metonymically representing the many massacres inflicted on the Aboriginal
people when the colony was established. White and black characters are
juxtaposed: the foreign ‘saviour of souls’ (McLaren, 2001 [1995], p. 6), German
Lutheran missioner Karl Maresch and his wife Gudrun stand in stark contrast
to the ‘marginal’ Wollumbuy, his wife Ginny and their two children, who are
present at the Myall Creek Massacre when:
. . . defenceless Aboriginal people were hacked and slashed to death. They

were beheaded and their headless bodies were left where they fell. The stock-
men then set up camp, drinking and bragging about their killings.
Two days after . . . the murderers returned and burned the bodies of
their victims. They then set out to find the ten Aboriginal people they had
missed.
Two beautiful young girls were allowed to live so that they could be raped.
(‘Massacre at Myall Creek’, in The Sydney Morning Herald, quoted in Creative
Spirits, 2010)
The lives of the two wives form parallel stories. Both women are married to
their own kind, but are also strongly attracted to the Other. Their experiences
authenticate the society McLaren depicts and emphasize the positive potential
for a reconciled Australian nation.
Government policy results in a ‘mission-prison’, slave labour, wrongful arrests
and deaths in custody. The novel ends with tribal justice being carried out as the
vicious murderer is killed and his assassin remains confident he can outwit the
purveyors of white law. Overall, the ending is positive with black and white
working their way ‘forward’ to a better future.
The topic of reconciliation is also present in following books. Murder in Utopia
is a crime thriller set in the Australian outback. The title is ironic as both the
fictionalized town and the central desert place named Utopia are ‘are anything
but utopian. The main narrative unfolds from a foreigner’s perspective: that of
an American doctor with a complicated past who accepts the position that no
Australian applied for’ (McLaren, 2009, p. 48). He is horrified at the
government’s neglect of Aboriginal health and living conditions.
Together with two white nurses at the health clinic and three policemen – two
white and one Aboriginal – the protagonist finds himself embroiled in a bizarre
and brutal ritual murder investigation. This is but one of the multiple threads
the author weaves into his socio-historical tapestry of an environment ‘in the
middle of nowhere’ (McLaren, 2009, p. 48). Isolation and the intense stress of
work result inevitably in close relationships developing.
Landscape is evoked by lyrical passages that speak to all the senses:
[Dr] Nugent was startled by the colours, or was it the quality of the light?
Everywhere the deep green foliage contrasted with the rust-red earth.
(McLaren, 2009, p. 51)
. . . the red earth (clay and loam) looked brittle and dry. Millions of grey-
green sage bushes clutched at the earth . . . little desert flowers were in
bloom — colourfully exhibiting the miracle of life in an extremely dry and
hostile environment. (McLaren, 2009, p. 53)
Soft breezes breathed into the grassy plain from the red sandy desert, creat-
ing symphonic sounds . . . To this, numerous bird species added a rhythmic
chorus with their fluctuating early morning arias. (McLaren, 2009, p. 86)
The author’s own artistic and cultural background is reflected in the character
of the Aboriginal artist:
Acrylic paint dried quickly in the desert – the hot air floated in an easterly
direction, crossing one of the widest, most acrid and desolate expanses
of land on earth. [The Aboriginal artist] sat cross-legged leaning over her
stretched canvas . . . .
Her approach was broad indeed: first she washed the entire canvas with
white mixed with a little yellow ochre wiped in the same direction of her
original strokes. On this she drew with a confident freehand holding a four-
inch wide brush loaded with glossy black paint, . . . she located the various
waterholes and bushtucker regions of her homelands. The black leapt off
the canvas, the warmth of the yellow broke past the breaks in the heavy black
lines, the white fell back into infinity. (McLaren, 2009, p. 179)
At the level of the plot, the dichotomy between black and white, traditional
customs, tribal duty and Western law plays a fundamental part in creating the
narrative tension. The spiritual aspect of the land, seen as a positive element,
becomes important for the doctor’s investigation. ‘It’s not in my people’s
culture’, he states. ‘We relate everything back through logic. It’s our
conditioning . . . much to our detriment. We aren’t open to such abilities’.
(McLaren, 2009, p. 185)
The complexity of modern society in Australia is highlighted by the hopes,
ambitions and experiences of a central female character of mixed ancestry,
Carla Kunaardi. ‘The moon has always featured prominently in my life’
(McLaren, 2009, p. 1), she states at the opening of the novel and, in keeping
with the concept of cyclical time held by Aboriginal peoples, the story ends with
her voice: ‘A full moon rose this morning, it was larger and more orange than I
could ever remember seeing’ (McLaren, 2009, p. 195). The moon for Carla is
symbolic. It embodies both Aboriginal spirituality and Western beliefs. In this
way, and through the other strategies we have described, McLaren successfully
interweaves white and Aboriginal perspectives in his writing, making both
parties, working together, capable of positive contributions to society.
How does Upfield Stand the Test of Time?
We now turn to a number of critical assessments of Upfield’s work. As mentioned,

many critics reproached him for possessing an incomplete knowledge of
Aboriginal culture. While such views can be depicted as being politically correct,
concerned with intellectual property and seeking to prevent racist positions
being expressed, they are, when criticizing Upfield, ahistorical. The argument
is difficult to sustain, but this does not prevent Upfield from being assessed for
his dated perspectives on the meaning of the racial divide. In his study of
Aboriginal literature, written at a time when detective fiction was not highly
regarded in academic circles, Canadian scholar Adam Schoemaker was
dismissive of Upfield’s work, describing his entire series as ‘popular but highly
stereotyped’ (Shoemaker, 1992 [1989], p. 9). He devotes a mere sentence to
Upfield’s twenty-nine novels, which in fact played a major part in the change of
direction in creative writing about Aborigines.
Philip McLaren believes that non-indigenous and indigenous fiction writers
alike are capable of handling the Aboriginal condition in a worthwhile manner.
This does not, however, prevent him from being critical of Upfield’s writing.
When he portrays Upfield as a ‘transplanted Englishman’, implying that he is
not truly Australian, he is in fact taking up an ahistorical and prejudiced
position. After all, a large proportion of the Australian population in 1911 were
British-born. Being Australian was a construct of an immigrant society. McLaren
has also claimed that Upfield failed to access existing anthropological articles
on his subject. However, he does concede that Upfield ‘tried to put an Aboriginal
person into a position that they hadn’t achieved in society, which you know I
tend to do quite a lot, to try to break down the stereotypes and erode some of
the barriers’ (Koval, 2002). McLaren’s admissions here do recognize Upfield’s
philosophical purpose.
When McLaren warns against Upfield’s ‘totally unconvincing and unaccept-
able characterisation of an Indigenous man’ (Koval, 2002), he is speaking
polemically. In fact, as we have shown, there is evidence in the novels that
Upfield partly based his character on real Aborigines, such as Unaipon who was
his contemporary, and Tracker Leon. McLaren may position himself to find
Unaipon polemically ‘unacceptable’ too, but he was, nevertheless, real enough.
Upfield makes his superhero a fully initiated Aboriginal man who is also Euro-
pean-educated with a Master’s degree that anticipates the first university-edu-
cated Aborigine several decades later. Was this not recognition on Upfield’s
part that an indigenous person could be successful in both worlds?
The claim by Sue Ryan-Fazilleau (2008) that Upfield was a typical assimila-
tionist and imperialist must, however, carry some weight. She concludes part of
her postcolonial analysis with this evaluation:
Man of Two Tribes narrates a struggle between white criminals and the white
law with each side using black trackers as pawns in their white battle. The
authorities are ultimately triumphant because they use a mixed-blood against
the law breakers’ full-bloods. (Ryan-Fazilleau, 2008, p. 106)
While this is a fair comment, it does not recognize the fact that Bony has little
time for bureaucracy and triumphs for his own satisfaction through his
painstaking investigation of the crime. The supposed ‘shifty glances’ from
Aboriginal workers at the station-owners (emphasized by Ryan-Fazilleau) are, in
fact, reasonably authentic (Ryan-Fazilleau, 2008, p. 93). They preferred not to
look directly into the white man’s eyes because of an approach/avoidance
custom and because of their servile position that had not changed in rural
Australia even as late as the 1950s. In failing to acknowledge these factors, the
connotation of ‘shifty’ is widely misapplied.
Upfield’s work is strong in bringing out the distinctive qualities of the

manners and morals of Aborigines, those in contact with whites as labourers
for them and having a lower status to them. In this regard, his Bony novels
are an expression of the author’s life and philosophy, and he was more than a
genre writer. His retentive mind had stored thousands of images during the
years he roamed the continent and he could draw them out one by one to
serve his purpose. He himself saw his reason for writing as being to try and
instil ‘compassion and communality amongst all Australians’. (Winks, 1998,
p. 1919)
Upfield, like McLaren after him, focuses on Australia’s ethnic dispossessed
and raises Aborigines to a ‘noble stature’. ‘In Bony, as in [James Fenimore]
Cooper’s Chingachgook and Hawkeye, we see the universal theme of the
frontier hero caught between civilization and nature’ (Winks, 1998, p. 1040).
Upfield, whose prose is heroically Melvillian but lacks the biblical sonority of
Moby Dick (1859), parallels Melville’s broad humanistic goals in his notion of
the brotherhood of all in both his, at times, stilted rhetoric, and his usual poetic
symbolism.
In Whodunit? A Guide to Crime, Suspense and Spy Fiction, H. R. F. Keating
recognized the qualities of Upfield’s Bony series. He acutely pointed out that
‘Upfield’s early antipodean background as trapper, miner, cook, and boundary
rider thoroughly Australianized him’ (Keating, 1982, p. 239). For this critic,
Napoleon Bonaparte is a fascinating character who holds the series together –
‘Bony is tenacious and boastful, and charming. But he boasted of never being
defeated’ – as an ethnic, mythical superhero. According to Keating, the novels
are ‘filled with beautifully observed pictures of the land and its people’ (Keating,
1982, pp. 254–5). Surveying the world scene of crime fiction, Keating rated
Upfield highly.
Ray Browne states that ‘Upfield stands as a jewel among Australian ethnic
writers and his Bony is one of the outstanding crime investigators of all time.’
To Browne, Upfield had demonstrated in his twenty-nine books how
‘ethnography and geography can be used in a plot and how they can enrich an
old literary form’ (Winks, 1998, pp. 1029, 1043). Upfield perceived nature as a
symbol. He frequently repeated that, for Bony, nature was a Bible to be read:
‘the print of the Book of the Bush doesn’t quickly vanish’. ‘With the patience of
his maternal forebears, he had hunted for signs imprinted on the page of the
Book of the Bush five months before’ (Upfield, 1952, p. 41).
Part of Upfield’s appeal was that he portrayed early twentieth-century Australia
in what appeared to be an authentic manner as he himself was absorbed into its
way of life and honoured his experience of becoming Australian in values, style
and manners. Mateship became, for better or worse, his Holy Grail. To the
modern reader, the Bony series is rather gentle, lacking the implausible speed
and bloodthirstiness of modern thrillers. Its attraction lies principally in the
evocation of landscape and the struggle between man and nature. Upfield’s
real time frame is 1911 to 1930 when he lived a nomadic life in isolated, outback
places that remained vivid in his memory. He constantly drew upon the rich
material from this period even though many of his novels, such as Man of Two
Tribes, have settings contemporary to the time of writing. They are predominantly
fictions of memory, of what it once was like in outback Australia filtered through
his recall of conditions in the early twentieth century. This is a picture that has
partly disappeared, making Upfield’s work even more significant historically – a
worldview that has faded, but remains iconic in nature. It is not surprising that
the author speaks the language of his time although he is repeatedly blamed for
it. In this sense, McLaren’s criticisms of his style and language are, as we have
argued, ahistorical. Nevertheless, it must be recognized that Upfield’s writing
occasionally does get ‘bogged down in the white-colonial vocabulary and
attitudes’ (Coe, 1999, p. 32). However, he never ignores the rights of the original
inhabitants in his narratives.
His novels are somewhat limited, it is true, and should perhaps be considered
as ‘entertainments’. They are fairly short; the characters, while frequently vivid
and real, are generally two-dimensional (Lane, 1939, p. 295). As a novelist,
Upfield was not pretentious. He did, however, hold ambiguous views about
Aborigines and Aboriginal culture, views which could be acute, but which were
sometimes those of the amateur anthropologist. Rather than an ethnographic
detective writer, we suggest he should be regarded as a cross-cultural detective
writer as, unlike McLaren, he does not belong ethnically to the culture he writes
about. As a cross-cultural writer, he is able to rise above conflicting differences
between cultures and act as a ‘cultural mediator’ (Rye, 2001, pp. 5–72), looking
across the racial divide as an outsider to the indigenous world. As a European,
he would have been regarded, and regarded himself, as a ‘foreigner’ or
‘outsider’ to Aboriginal society. He was looking in at what was to him an exotic
culture. He did not and could not experience it as an ethnic writer like McLaren,
from the inside looking out. As an amateur anthropologist, Upfield’s views are
sometimes flawed, but, as an observer, many of his Aboriginal characters are as
finely honed as his white ones.
It should be recognized that Upfield was dealing with Aborigines in the
fictional form when ‘this was an under-theorized area of critical knowledge’
(Lindsey, 2005, p. 1). He was writing at a time when the White Australia Policy
was dominant and there was a major difference between state legislation about
Aborigines and its application. What Upfield saw in various locations was the
result of this dichotomy and we would argue that he produced a ‘psychologically
accurate portrait’ (Rye, 2001, p. 56) of the contemporary socio-political
situation.
Throughout his wanderings, Upfield observed and understood the harsh
treatment of Aborigines by white society, although he saw them at a distance, as
part of the complex traditional hierarchy and interactions of homestead society.

For some people, then, Upfield remains controversial, while McLaren is, as yet,
relatively unknown. Nevertheless, both authors, with their own distinctive
visions, have played significant roles in the development of ethnographic crime
fiction in Australia.
Notes
1
The term ‘ethnographic crime fiction’, for this study, is preferred to ‘ethnologi-
cal’ (with which it is closely synonymous) as it evokes the visual aspects of the
writing. The term refers to crime fiction located primarily in a cultural environ-
ment of ethnicity, of a culture that is distinct from the dominant culture. We shall
address the question of whether the two writers are equally ‘ethnographic’.
2
Aboriginal protagonists written by non-indigenous authors began to make their
occasional appearance in the 1960s after Upfield had died. Leonard Mann’s
Venus Half-Caste was released in 1963 and Nancy Cato’s Brown Sugar in 1974.
Mann’s heroine Beatrice Leddin is a so-called half-caste, as the title of his book
announces. It is a saga about a beautiful, intelligent Aboriginal woman and her
struggle to become accepted in white society. It ends up as a murder mystery and
a police investigation. Mann’s style tends not to be politically correct. Brown Sugar,
dedicated to Aboriginal poet Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal), is Cato’s epic
historical novel of the sugar cane industry in Queensland.
3
His first successful publication was a short story (Upfield, 1917a), followed by a
second story the same year (Upfield, 1917b).
4
In the 1950s, a radio serial on Napoleon Bonaparte went to air that helped
expand public interest in ethnographic crime fiction. In the early 1970s, a televi-
sion series was developed based on the novels. In addition, a forty-five-minute
‘making of’ quasi-documentary, A Man called Boney (1972), stimulated interest in
the sleuth.
5
John Thomas Smith, alias Snowy Rowles, was hanged on 18 June 1932 in Freman-
tle, Western Australia, for the murder of Louis Carron, a rural itinerant labourer,
on 12 March 1932. Upfield and several others took the witness box. On 6 October
1929, Rowles was present when Upfield was discussing the perfect murder for a
proposed novel with a group of men drinking beer around a campfire – after
cremating the body in an intense fire, sift the ashes to separate bone fragments
and other objects, then pulverize them in a dolly pot before carefully disposing of
the remains. Rowles was later suspected of at least three murders using the same
technique. Detective Sergeant Harry Manning, whose thorough investigation
found the evidence that finally convicted Rowles of Carron’s murder, was used by
Upfield as a model for his fictional Aboriginal detective hero. When he worked
on the rabbit-proof fence in outback Western Australia, Upfield knew Rowles, but
was not aware of his criminal record (see Walker, 1993).
6
Unaipon surprised everyone he met with his educated English accent and his
knowledge of Shakespeare, Milton and the Bible. See Ramsland and Mooney,
2006, pp. 15–26.
7
Press clipping, marked December 1947, in Upfield, A. W., mss 3269, vol. 758,
Angus & Robertson Collection, Mitchell Library, Sydney.
8
In general, his critics are European-educated, uninitiated Aborigines who also
possess an incomplete knowledge of their own culture. See further discussion on
this issue in Michael Powell and Rex Hesline (2010, pp. 115–48), ‘Making tribes?
Constructing Aboriginal tribal entities in Sydney and coastal NSW from the early
colonial period to the present’.
9
The covers of Sweet Water – Stolen Land (1993) and Murder in Utopia (2009) are
designed by the author.
10
Winner of the 1992 David Unaipon Award.
11
As an example of McLaren’s support for political change, see his submission
paper to the Senate Select Committee on the Administration of Indigenous
Affairs, 6 July 2004, in which he points out the continued masking of government
policies that he calls ‘le fil indigène invisible’. (‘Indigenous Representations and
the delivery of Indigenous Programs’, p. 2).
Chapter 9
From Wolf to Wolf-Man: F oreignness

and Self-Alterity in Fred Vargas’s
L’Homme à l’envers
Alistair Rolls
This study will combine a number of approaches to read the ways in which
foreignness characterizes Fred Vargas’s self-styled rompols (from roman policier,
or crime novel). By mapping the plotline of L’Homme à l’envers (1999) [Seeking
Whom He May Devour, (2006)]1 onto Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles
(1902), I will show that in both works a metropolitan (outsider) detective
investigates a murder by a large canid in the depths of the countryside. Then,
in line with Pierre Bayard’s famous rewriting of Conan Doyle’s novel, the
innocence of the convicted party will be shown to be the other side of guilt, a
foreignness that lurks within but which careful reading can bring to the surface.
I will also argue that, along with deconstructive and Freudian readings, the
modernist figure of the Baudelairean flâneur highlights the Otherness of the
investigation. By questioning the guilt of Vargas’s other Other, I will take self-
alterity to its logical (and logically nihilistic) end-point, opening up possibilities,
here both criminal and textual, and reconsidering the culpability of the
supposed murderer.
Foreignness is perverse in Fred Vargas’s novels, and nowhere more so than in
L’Homme à l’envers, where it expresses simultaneously a relationship with an
outside and an inside. Most of Vargas’s Adamsberg novels oscillate between
Paris and the outlying French provinces, or other countries beyond them, in a
manner that reflects the deep-seated and exemplary auto-differentiation of the
national capital. L’Homme à l’envers, however, lends itself particularly well to an
investigation of the Otherness contained within self. The French title refers
ostensibly to the inside-out nature of the werewolf of legend, whose fur is folded
inside his skin and turns out as man transforms into beast, hence the back-to-
front or inside-out man of Vargas’s French title. Metaphorically, this title points to
a more polysemous wearing of difference just beneath the skin. Murderous
intent lurks underneath, and functions as the other side of, beauty; but the
whole text is about auto-differentiation, the way in which one ostensible truth
masks another less prominent one.
Foreignness and Self-Alterity in Fred Vargas’s L’Homme à l’envers 113
Adamsberg is drawn from his Parisian lair into the wilds of provincial France,
that space which is ‘deeply’ French but whose right to Frenchness is always
already opposed to the capital, the centre of meaning-making and identity, to
investigate a spate of sheep killings initially attributed to wolves but which
rekindles the legend of the werewolf. A pursuit of the chief suspect offers one
layer of investigation while Adamsberg, more discreetly, opens up other paths.
The search concludes with the arrest of a man whose weapon is a wolf’s claw.
Adamsberg’s detective practice can be overlaid onto the paradoxically double
(both objective and subjective), and thus fetishistic, behaviour of Charles
Baudelaire’s famous trope of nineteenth-century modernity, the flâneur.2 His
prose-poetic detection, which sees him, like Baudelaire’s own prose poems,
oscillate between an exaggeratedly abstracted musing and a stark contemplation
of hard facts, is thus both allegorical, of Paris as auto-antonymic space that is at
the same time itself and Other, and critical, in much the same way as Baudelaire’s
poetics offers a new template for reading text, as well as a new way of reading
the existential reality of the modern metropolis. Adamsberg thus operates at
the epicentre of the novel’s foreignness: he functions as a metonym for Paris,
and is, to adapt Julia Kristeva’s term, a ‘stranger to himself’ (Kristeva, 1988,
1991); he problematizes the relationship between Paris and the provinces,
which stand as both internal and foreign within France itself. Finally, by both
producing and reading the evidence of the case, he also casts light and doubt
on the possibility of solving crimes.
In this particular case, he is also accompanied by others, including Danglard,
his sidekick; Camille, his female Other, who both travels with him and remains
ever apart from him; Massart, the scapegoat (and natural-born Other);
Lawrence, who flows into the text like the Saint Lawrence and the Seine,
presenting both the Otherness of the foreigner and the linguistic near-
naturalness of a French-born North American,3 and whose murders recall the
migration of wolves across borders both geographical and temporal; and
Soliman, the adopted son of the first victim, who is of African origin and thus
incorporates the foreign into the national body.
Paris, Capital of Crime and Self-Alterity
Perhaps more completely than any other novel of Vargas’s Adamsberg series,
L’Homme à l’envers externalizes the detective’s Parisian gaze. Adamsberg’s flânerie
ceases to play out as a concrete oscillation between Paris and another pole;
instead, the text is moved from Paris to the provinces, where the action is set
and the crime solved. Adamsberg’s Parisianness is arguably set off more
colourfully here in this novel with its full cast of culturally diverse and hybrid
‘locals’ than it is in such transcultural texts as Sous les vents de Neptune (Vargas,
2004), where there is repeated movement between Paris and Quebec, or Un lieu
incertain (Vargas, 2008a), which travels to and returns from London and Serbia.
Removed from itself, Adamsberg’s embodiment of Paris’s fundamental tension
is at its most powerful. Here more than anywhere else, Sue Neale’s description
of Vargas’s settings as offering ‘an imaginary version of contemporary France’
is telling, since it is the interpenetration of Paris and the provinces that has
most exercised the French popular imaginary (Neale, 2005, p. 8).
The Paris of Baudelaire’s prose poems offers the perfect map of what
Guillaume Lebeau (2009) has termed ‘Vargassie’ insofar as it is the meeting
point of existentially real Paris, the city as present to the poet-flâneur and the
reader in the street, and mythological Paris, the city as it is re-presented by the
objective poet and imagined by the reader.4 In Baudelaire’s Paris, as in
‘Vargassie’, the inexplicable, or foreign, is therefore always already internalized
into Parisian reality even as it is externalized as Other.
Intertextuality: The Case of The Hound of the Baskervilles
In recent years, Pierre Bayard has specialized in rewriting the authorially sanc-
tioned solutions to crime classics (Bayard, 1998 and 2008). I will use his work on
Conan Doyle’s Baskerville story to shed new light on Vargas’s L’Homme à l’envers.
In L’Affaire du chien des Baskerville (2008), Bayard argues that two major reloca-
tions take place in Conan Doyle’s novel: first, Holmes himself is uprooted from
the centre of his rational universe, London, and this appears to destabilize the
scientific basis of his method; second, the locus of culpability also shifts, with
Holmes’s solution representing a significant shortcoming. According to Bayard’s
thesis, Holmes’s inability to convict the true killer is the direct result of his fail-
ure to defeat another, more sinister set of adversaries. Returning by popular
demand from the death that his own author wrote for him, Holmes’s role in The
Hound of the Baskervilles is designed not only to give his readers what they want,
in the form of a new case to be solved, but also to assuage his author’s desire for
revenge. If he cannot put an end to Holmes’s hegemony over his own writing
career, Conan Doyle can at least achieve what Professor Moriarty could not –
defeat him. To do this, it appears, he falls back not on professors but on doc-
tors. And yet, while this aspect of Bayard’s argument is convincing, his preferred
new solution seems to undermine his reading of the exchange between the real
and literary worlds. His location of another killer in the literary cast of the novel
takes the edge off Conan Doyle’s murderous re-appropriation of authorial
power. And it is in this concept of a re-appropriation of authorship, aligned
with both transnational and regional relocations, that a link can be seen between
Bayard’s re-reading of Conan Doyle and Vargas’s figure of the wolf-man, or of a
man killing with a wolf. But before considering whether there is a more power-
ful force behind the man who is ‘a wolf for man’, as Vargas puts it,5 let us begin
by casting some doubt on the importance of culpability in Vargassie.
Josiane Grinfas, in her annotated edition of L’Homme à l’envers, includes two

documents of interest here. The first contextualizes a statement made by Vargas
in an interview, according to which one of her influences was Raymond
Chandler. Grinfas infers from this, seemingly, that Chandler’s own guidelines
for writing a murder mystery have had a formative effect on Vargas. The last two
of these famously advise that the author be honest vis-à-vis the reader and that
the criminal be punished, either by a court of law or by some other means.
There is evidence, however, that counters Vargas’s implied interest in punishing
her criminals. She has stated that, like the fairy tale, the roman policier is not
about punishment and that the unmasking marks the end of the reader’s
interest in the criminal (Vargas, 2008b, p. 8). Indeed, Adamsberg is always
careful to allow the killers a degree of catharsis at the time of their unmasking;
in this way, the victory in which the crime text culminates is shared by detective
and criminal, thereby mimicking the complicity between reader and author
that is necessary for Chandler’s ‘honest’ mystery.
The second important document in Grinfas’s dossier is an extract from The
Hound of the Baskervilles. Its inclusion offers proof of the universality of the myth
of the werewolf in the human psyche, and thus in literature, where it is the very
‘embodiment of Evil’ (Vargas, 2001, p. 385), the evil resident in man, and thus
an internalized form of Otherness. In this light, lycanthropy can be seen to be
symptomatic of the alienation of modernity itself. It is my aim here, however, to
negotiate a path between potentially dismissive readings of this kind and more
(inter)textually specific analyses. The role of Conan Doyle’s novel in L’Homme à
l’envers, for example, provides an interesting bridge between the specifics of the
killer’s modus operandi and the more general theme of dominant father figures,
to which we shall return.
The key to Bayard’s reading of The Hound of the Baskervilles is the multilayered
relocation that occurs between London and the Devonshire moors:
Or l’ensemble de cette construction est pris dans un imaginaire. . . qui, bien

que le détective s’en défende – Holmes ne croit pas à la légende du chien
chargé d’appliquer la malédiction – reste étroitement dépendant d’une
vision fantastique de la réalité, simplement déplacée du chien vers l’assassin au
chien.(Bayard, 2008, p. 57 – my emphasis)
[Now this construction [of the motive] is wholly born of an imagi-
nary . . . which, even though the detective forbids himself this tendency (Hol-
mes does not believe in the legend of the hound tasked with carrying out
the curse), remains entirely dependent on a fantastic vision of reality, simply
displaced from the dog onto the murderer with a dog.]
For Bayard, there is something of a paradoxical double translation at work: on

the one hand, the trajectory of the case shifts from the consideration of a
supernatural killer to the hypothesis of a man killing with a dog; on the other
hand (and, perversely, as a consequence of this), Holmes is infected by the new

provincial landscape, which he describes in unscientific terms as sinister and
desolate. In other words, a tensely charged movement between myth and modern
science replaces a mediating space; or rather, we might posit that this is an
interpenetration of the two opposed spaces that is productive of discourse. As
Bayard suggests, he rejects the hypothesis of the ancient, phantasmatic hound
in favour of a more modern version of the legend, in which the hound is a
weapon used by a mortal murderer (Bayard, 2008, p. 85). My understanding of
this reading hinges upon a critical conception of the urban locus of modernity
as auto-antonymic space, where Holmes, as Baudelairean flâneur-detective,
clashes these two antithetical terms – the mythical hound and the murder on
the moor – to create that very particular discourse of murder with a hound that
the ‘true murderer’ wishes him to produce. In other words, Holmes gives a
writerly reading of a murder that did not ‘really’ take place. Yet, where Bayard
accuses Holmes of influencing Watson’s accounts of the events of the moor,
with their numerous references to prehistoric landmarks (Bayard, 2008, p. 87),
we should see instead the possibility of Watson’s key role in Holmes’s defeat. It
is thus Watson who fuels the legend that Holmes cannot, by his very nature,
dismiss, but which instead he must counter and mitigate with science.
In L’Homme à l’envers, too, a doctor has a hand in convincing Adamsberg to
leave the capital for the provinces, at which point the text shifts from an interest
in the killing of livestock by wolves to homicides by a man with a wolf. Adamsberg
is first seen in the novel in his Paris apartment, where the television news
captures his attention. A veterinarian is called on to assess wounds found on a
number of sheep carcasses. Asked to expand his statement that they are from
‘la mâchoire d’un grand canidé’ (Vargas, 2002, p. 15) [‘the jaws of a very large
canine’ (Vargas, 2006, p. 7)], he agrees that it may have been a wolf, or a very
large dog. Holmes’s attraction to the strange in the mundane, which typically
leads to his reduction of the former to the latter (Highmore, 2002, p. 16), here
exerts a powerful intertextual force. The source of the information that captures
the attention of our respective detectives is, in each case, an atypical doctor. In
Vargas’s story, the doctor is not the medical man one might more readily
associate with the title; in Conan Doyle’s case, Dr Mortimer, who comes to
Holmes’s rooms with his tale of supernatural menace, turns out not to be fully
qualified. It is telling that this fact is brought to the reader’s attention in the first
chapter of the novel, especially given that the second chapter begins by
endorsing Holmes’s mistake: Dr James Mortimer, we now know, is Mr James
Mortimer, but the erroneous title is retained. The case that follows is predicated
on this and a series of other uncharacteristic errors on Holmes’s part (Conan
Doyle, 1981, p. 14).6 A reading that highlights Dr Mortimer’s role in the
ensnaring of Sherlock Holmes also makes room in the text for a conniving Dr
Watson. Accordingly, it is my contention here that both doctors conspire to lead
Holmes to produce a writerly reading that does not accord with their version of
authorial truth. In deconstructionist terms, they represent a perverse
metaphysical reading, one that is, for once, not presented to the reader in the
form of the manifest solution but which insinuates itself alongside other
nihilistic readings, including Bayard’s own solution. Similarly, in L’Homme à
l’envers, Adamsberg is enticed by the doctor’s mention of a very large dog and is
thereby embroiled in an intertextual plot to deceive detective and reader
alike.
In a previous study of L’Homme à l’envers, I focused on a key instance of
fetishism in order to demonstrate how Vargas’s killer, Lawrence, is able to
appear simultaneously guilty and innocent, and how Adamsberg must also act
as a fetishistic, writerly reader to produce a reading of ‘truth’ (Rolls, 2009a,
p. 155). According to that reading, the last lines of Chapter 2 and the first lines
of Chapter 3 (Vargas, 2002, pp. 16–17; 2006, pp. 8–9) serve both to veil and to
symbolize Lawrence’s association with the myth of the murderous wolf, and
thus to foreshadow his guilt. In the present analysis, influenced by Bayard’s
reinvestigation of Holmes’s famous case, I will revisit not only the primal scene
that puts Adamsberg onto the scent, but also the very first chapter of the novel.
Here, it is not only Lawrence’s guilt that becomes clear (in hindsight), but also
the possibility of his innocence.
The second chapter of L’Homme à l’envers, in which Adamsberg makes his
entrance, resembles an opening chapter, in contrast to the novel’s actual
opening scene, which shows Lawrence gazing at the wolves of Le Mercantour,
and has all the trappings of a preamble. The two scenes together offer the
possibility of redeploying Freudian dream analysis, and especially wolf-man-
style inversion (Freud, 1979, pp. 225–66).7 Rather than prompting the reader
to imagine extra-textual primal scenes of both killer’s and detective’s traumatic,
love-hate relationships with their respective fathers, it seems legitimate to use
the image of the detective-as-child’s fear of the gazing wolf to re-read the
preceding chapter in the novel itself, in which the inversion of key lines offers
an inoculation against later textual proofs of Lawrence’s guilt. For example, the
concluding lines of the chapter in which the two experienced wolf-watchers,
one French, one (problematically) foreign, discuss the possible existence of
young cubs while looking on beneath the hot sun:
– Trois louveteaux au moins, murmura Jean.

– Je cuis, dit Lawrence avec une grimace, en passant la main sur son dos.
– Attends. T’as pas tout vu. (Vargas, 2002, p. 12)
[‘Three cubs at least,’ Mercier mumbled.
‘I’m being fried alive,’ Johnstone said, grimacing as he passed a hand over
his shoulder.
‘Just you wait. You haven’t seen the half of it.’ (Vargas, 2006, p. 4)]
Over the course of the novel, Adamsberg, like Freud’s wolf-man, will have to
battle with the somewhat oneiric memory of his childhood fear of being the
passive victim of the gaze of wolves in order to actively see the truth of the wolf-
man killer. If we operate this same inversion, along the lines of activity-passivity,
on the last line of the previous chapter, as quoted above, then the remark about
Lawrence’s not having as yet seen everything can be re-read as his not as yet
having been seen (in his entirety). This Freudian encoding can certainly be read
as a proleptic revelation of his guilt; it is more interesting, however, to read it as
an inversion of the novel’s central truth, which is to say that identity can only
ever be seen partially. The preceding line, which ostensibly describes Lawrence’s
discomfort in the hot climate of southern France, also has potential to be read
interestingly in its inverted form. The original French je cuis, or literally ‘I’m
cooking’, when made passive, gives an expression redolent of the detective
genre: je suis cuit, literally ‘I’m done for’. This would suggest that his fate is
indeed sealed, not this time as killer, but as scapegoat.
In her interview for L’Express, Vargas expands on her interest in the figure of
the scapegoat (Vargas, 2008b, p. 11). Massart’s status as ostensible scapegoat
(he is named and pursued as the werewolf, and apparently killed by the real
wolf-man killer), in fact masks another, fundamental part in this role, this one
played by Lawrence himself. The first of the three lines quoted above suggests
the involvement of a third party, a third cub born of some original, lupine
sin. There are, of course, various triadic permutations in the novel, of which
Adamsberg-Lawrence-Massart is one. Another, more compelling one, I would
argue, is detective-killer-Other-killer, where the ‘killer’ is the one who is always
already convicted in the novel and the ‘Other-killer’ the one who gets away with
it. A Freudian wolf-man reading may not provide sufficient evidence to have
Lawrence pardoned, but it does suggest other possibilities. And the possible
existence of nihilistic readings of the murder-text, which are of course inevitable,
should be enough to bring in a verdict of ‘not guilty’ on the basis of reasonable
doubt.
As for the father of the wolf cubs – the originator of the murder spree which
sees a werewolf exchanged first for a man killing with a (native) wolf and finally
for a man killing with a weapon incorporating a (foreign) wolf’s claw – there is
a hint of mistaken identity in this first chapter. Again, a prolepsis is one possible
reading: when Lawrence wins the argument as to the identity of the wolf they
are watching (Mercier believes it is Sibellius but grudgingly admits it is, as
Lawrence maintains, Marcus), it appears to set up the revelation that his own
identity is false. Adamsberg will discover that he is the son of an American killer,
John Neil Padwell. If we extend our inverted reading of Adamsberg’s revelation
of truth onto this paternal inheritance, however, we can suggest that Lawrence
may not be Stuart Donald Padwell. Perhaps he is who he says he is. Or perhaps
his identity is merely non-fixed. Whether or not the third wolf cub symbolizes
the real Stuart Donald Padwell, or a killer by another name, Lawrence’s fatalistic
statement that he is cooked serves to make subsequent pointers to his guilt

appear all too obvious. When, for example, Camille talks of the enduring spirit
of the old wolf Augustus, which Lawrence venerates (Vargas, 2002, p. 21; 2006,
p. 12), this may not be an (unconscious) indication that the father’s murderous
works live on in the son (Stuart Donald as Lawrence). Instead, it may simply
point to a virtual identity, to the murderer as an infinity (Camille’s words in
French suggest that Augustus is not fini, which means ‘finite’ as well as ‘finished’),
a line of flight into the endless possibilities of the intertext. This is also, of
course, one clear meaning of the title of L’Homme à l’envers: when read inside-
out the killer in the text is also outside the text; he is exemplary of self-alterity
and will always fail to coincide with himself even as his guilt is proven.
As in The Hound of the Baskervilles, it is not the strange story of murderous
oversized canids alone that draws the detective out of his metropolitan lair; in
both novels the detective finally commits himself to the provincial case on the
basis of a pair of boots. In Conan Doyle’s story, Henry Baskerville twice reports
losing a boot, which to Holmes’s mind lends a touch of human method to the
supernatural legend; in L’Homme à l’envers, Adamsberg’s second encounter with
the story (on the late night television news) shows a glimpse of a young woman
wearing cowboy boots (Vargas, 2002, pp. 48–50; 2006, pp. 34–5).8 Despite his
attempts to convince himself that his motivation is to re-uproot his partner
Camille, whose feet he suspects are in the boots, and to reconnect her with
Paris, his reflections on the man standing next to her, Lawrence, speak
volumes:
Un grand homme blond aux cheveux longs, une espèce de jeune type taillé
pour l’aventure, souple, séduisant, cette sorte de type qui met la main sur
l’épaule des femmes comme si la terre entière lui obéissait. . . . Lui n’était pas
grand, il n’était pas jeune. Il n’était pas blond. Il ne croyait pas que la terre
tout entière lui obéissait. Ce type était des tas de trucs qu’il n’était pas. Son
opposé, peut-être. (Vargas, 2002, p. 50)
[A broad-shouldered, strapping young fellow with longish hair and an agile
and seductive air, the sort of man who can put his hand on a girl’s shoulder
and expect the whole world to do his bidding. . . . He [Adamsberg] was not
a strapping young fellow. He was not young. His shoulders weren’t broad.
His hair wasn’t fair. He entertained not the faintest expectation of being
obeyed. That fellow was a whole heap of things that he was not. Maybe his
polar o pposite. (Vargas, 2006, pp. 34–5)]
For ‘opposite’ here it is, of course, also possible to read ‘enemy’ (opposé has this
sense in French). And yet, to read Lawrence as Adamsberg’s Other – the villain
to his detective, the author (of the crime text) to his writerly reader – is to
follow a trajectory predicated on the simple opposition of Paris and the
provinces (and/or Paris and the foreign). If we allow that Adamsberg’s
Parisianness is of the modern variety that incorporates its own Otherness, then
Lawrence is his alter ego (both love the same woman), the expression of his
own self-alterity. For Adamsberg, too, Lawrence is a reason to act; he is a
scapegoat.
When Adamsberg comes into the novel in the second chapter, it is late and
he is tired. This scene offers, at once, a striking contrast and an uncanny
similarity to the opening of The Hound of the Baskervilles, which is itself based on
an inversion of the typical Holmes story. The scene in which we first see Holmes
offers a number of reversals (Conan Doyle, 1981, p. 7). First, the detective is
seated for breakfast when Watson enters, which we are told is not usual practice
for this late riser. Second, he is seated with his back to Watson and sees him, in
reverse, in the silver coffee pot before him. The opposition through mirror-
imaging in this case is not of the detective and his ostensible opponent, whether
as lover or murderer, but of detective and sidekick. This important difference
notwithstanding, Watson functions as Holmes’s Other in the stories, and that
their roles should be predicated on such an initial inversion is important. It is,
however, not the only point that sets this story apart from the others. The initial
scene follows the usual sequence, with Holmes keen to show off his method by
putting Watson to the test. In this case, the examination of Dr Mortimer’s
walking stick opens up an opposition between city and country, which sets up
the foundational opposition of the novel (Conan Doyle, 1981, pp. 7–8). It also
exposes Holmes’s weaknesses, as he is wrong, not only about the gift having
been presented on the occasion of the doctor’s departure for a country practice,
but also about his lack of ambition (Conan Doyle, 1981, p. 12). In the course of
the interview with Dr Mortimer, the latter expresses his coveting of Holmes’s
skull, leading him to admit he would like Holmes to be dead. This quasi-jocular
admiration of Holmes’s mental capacity is at once offset when Mortimer weighs
this against that of a foreign rival: Holmes is acknowledged as the ‘second
highest expert in Europe’ after the Frenchman Monsieur Bertillon (Conan
Doyle, 1981, p. 13). This painful comparison continues for Holmes when
Mortimer explains that he is the first choice in this case because he is not
someone ‘with a precisely scientific mind’ but ‘a practical man of affairs’ (Conan
Doyle, 1981, p. 13). In this way, in line with Bayard’s suggestion concerning
Conan Doyle’s animosity towards his creation, the whole book is designed to
overthrow Holmes as a man of science and reveal him as a tool in the hands of
his employers and adversaries.
Conclusion: Between Languages and Traditions
If Adamsberg is thrown into the case in L’Homme à l’envers in a tired state,

longing to reconnect with his absent Other, Camille, and taunted by the ghosts
of childhood trauma, it is arguably because he himself is another of Vargas’s
scapegoats. And yet, if Vargas’s fetish detective is a tool in her hands, a man on
a mission designed to fail, it is surely not, as in Conan Doyle’s case, because of
a jaded author’s deep hatred for an overly popular protagonist. A clue to the
tense relationship between Adamsberg and Lawrence can perhaps be found in
the latter’s lineage. Apparently the son of a murderer, Lawrence, also known as
Stuart Donald Padwell, is an American by birth and comes to France via Canada.
According to Adamsberg’s thesis, all that remains of his American past is his
desire to avenge his father. As I have indicated elsewhere (Rolls, 2009a, p. 161),
this troubled history can be read allegorically as that of the genre in which
Vargas is herself operating: Lawrence’s is the history of the French roman policier
in the second half of the twentieth century and especially in that period
immediately after the end of the Second World War. This is a history which
Vargas seems to disavow. For her, the success of her novels is predicated on a
generalized reconnection with ‘good stories’, of which crime novels are
exemplary, after a period of literary drought that marked the period from the
end of the Second World War to the 1970s (Vargas, 2008b, p. 10). The literary
context that Vargas outlines here, and which she claims as her own, is most
interesting for what it omits. Indeed, the gap is quite startling, too startling to
be an unconscious lapse. The period of literary absence is, of course, precisely
the timeframe that saw the emergence in Paris of Marcel Duhamel’s Série Noire
(from 1945), one that is arguably also the golden age of the French noir
thriller.
In terms of the present argument, it is engagement with the foreign that
makes this golden age of the great Parisian literary crime wave so compelling.
Indeed, it is the reflexive celebration of its foreignness that makes the post-war
noir thriller so problematically French. For the first three years of its existence,
the Série Noire was made up entirely of titles translated from the English.9 Their
huge popularity played on this translation, particularly on the way it allowed
for French (re-)appropriation of recent history via allegorical representations
of French iconography. Perversely, the hybridity of the Série Noire was tradition-
ally French, insofar as it embodied the alienation of the mean streets of
modernity,10 and particularly Parisian. In L’Homme à l’envers, Lawrence, as an
allegorical embodiment of the emergence of the noir thriller in post-war
France, is thus every bit as Parisian as Adamsberg; and his marked opposition
to the French capital only serves to highlight the self-alterity that is the stuff,
both the essence and existence, of (Parisian) modernity, with all that this
brings with it in terms of existential problems for the author.
In fact, Lawrence’s lineage is doubly noir. On his mother’s side, too, his history
coincides with Vargas’s missing literary link: first leaving France for the United
States (like the term noir itself) with her American lover, she is incorporated
into America (like this new label for the post-war mood); she then has an affair
with a Frenchman and returns with him to her homeland (in the form of French
noir), where she is reintegrated as an American-looking native. Lawrence, like
his mother and father, and like the roman policier itself, is both French and
foreign. The existence in the text of an escape mechanism, a chance to read his
innocence into and out of the story of his guilt, is exemplary of the techniques
of the post-war French noir thriller, which uses the filter of translation to allow
the French reader to glimpse, in the glaring trauma of Nazi Occupation and
Liberation at the hands of the Allies, a home-grown victory in the recent war
(Rolls, 2006, pp. 35–47). It also says a great deal about the writerly reading
strategy adopted by Adamsberg. It is as if Vargas is self-reflexively building the
Otherness of the nihilistic reading into her own novel. The literary void
mentioned in her interview is another line of flight; it prompts the reader to
read presence in absence, to reverse the facts and infer the opposite. It is in this
failure of Vargas to coincide with herself that her texts lend themselves to
Bayardian re-readings. And through Sherlock Holmes’s spectacular, and
spectacularly disavowed, defeat in the legendary wilds of the provinces, L’Homme
à l’envers can be seen to assume its Parisian identity.
What we can say with some certainty is that foreignness is not tamed in
Vargas’s texts. Provincial or foreign crimes are not necessarily civilized when
repatriated to the capital and ‘solved’; instead, the dispersing of crime across
the Paris-provinces divide reinforces the fundamental dichotomy of the capital
itself. As both itself and Other, Paris is truly the capital of crime, a stranger to
itself and, like the detective story, a polysemous site in which criminality still
goes unpunished beneath the straight lines, the state-sanctioned boulevards, of
the urban text.
Notes
1
Note that the text consulted here, and to which page numbers refer, is the
Magnard collège edition (2002); the English text here is from David Bellos’s trans-
lation (2006). All other translations are my own.
2
See Rolls, 2009a, a study of L’Homme à l’envers along fetishistic lines, and 2009b.
3
I thank Jean Anderson for pointing out the appropriateness here of Lawrence’s
not being a ‘French Canadian’. As a Francophone from Canada, he combines
a near-Hexagonal Frenchness, albeit altered by temporal and spatial distance
from metropolitan France, and a ‘natural’ surliness, with the foreignness of the
North American expatriate. He is thus French and not French. As we shall see,
this underlines the problematic status not only of Vargas’s Parisian/non-Parisian
thrillers, but also of French crime fiction itself, which so often finds its identity in
the internalization of translated novels.
4
For a detailed reading of presentation versus representation or ‘re-presentation’
in Baudelaire’s prose poetry, see Covin, 2000.
5
In the 2001 Magnard edition designed for French school students, Vargas grants
an interview to the editor Josiane Grinfas, in which she describes how the only
categorization of people that she finds useful is the following: ‘si l’on est, ou non,
“un loup pour l’homme”’ (Vargas, 2001, p. 385) [‘whether one is or is not “a wolf
for man”’].
6
Holmes’s inferiority vis-à-vis both the legitimate Dr Watson and ‘Dr’ Mortimer is
further endorsed by the title of the first chapter, “Mr Sherlock Holmes”.
7
In Freud’s account of the case of the wolf-man, the dream of being watched by
still, silent wolves is shown to mask a repressed scene in which the patient had, as
a young boy, observed the primal scene of his parents having sex.
8
Given Bayard’s predilection for female culprits in his re-reading of old cases, I
suggest that these boots would be sufficient proof for him to convict Camille of
the crimes. As already hinted, his candidate for the ‘true murderer’ in The Hound
of the Baskervilles seems to run against the case he builds implicitly against Conan
Doyle himself. I would argue that it would be more logical for Conan Doyle to
punish his creation by having him outwitted by his foil and writer-in-the-text (and
thus Conan Doyle’s own textual counterpart), Dr Watson, and his accomplice
Dr Mortimer. An association between the two men would explain Holmes’s failure
to defeat Watson categorically in the traditional game of judging a man, in this
case Mortimer, by his belongings. We should further note that Bayard’s choice
of killer is based on the sparkling nature of her eyes, which is one of Mortimer’s
characteristics. He is also described as being tall, suggesting he could even be the
figure on the moor seen by Watson but who we later learn (from Watson) must
have been Holmes.
9
The label traduit de l’américain [translated from the American] was misleading
even for texts translated from the ‘original’ English, as authors were just as often
British, which is especially true of those authors chosen to inaugurate the series
in 1945. This (mis-/ab-)use of the ‘translation’ label is all the more intriguing,
strategically and psychologically, when used to mask French authors. In 1948 the
first of these began to appear in the Série Noire, under pseudonyms (for example,
Serge Arcouët writing as Terry Stewart), which allowed them to benefit from the
prestige of translation. French noir thus became its most angst-ridden – or sold its
own trauma to maximum potential – when masquerading as a translation of itself
as foreign.
10
Which was just as prominent in the 1850s, in such de-poeticized, or noired, poetic
forms as Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris, as in the years following the Second World
War.
Chapter 10
Others Knowing Others: Stieg L arsson’s

Millennium Trilogy and Peter Høeg’s
Smilla’s Sense of Snow
Andrew Nestingen and Paula Arvas
Others
A brilliant, rebellious Other in Scandinavian society remarks in a blockbuster

crime novel about the salience of mathematics in her life and in human
society:
Véd du, vad der liger under matematikken, siger jag. – Neden under matemai-
kken ligger tallene. Hvis nogen spurgte mig, hvad der gør mig rigtig lykkelig,
så ville jag svare: Det gør tallene . . . Og véd du hvorfor? – Fordi talsystemet er
ligesom menneskelivet. (Høeg, 1992, p. 112)
[‘Do you know what the foundation of mathematics is?’ I ask. ‘The foun-
dation of mathematics is numbers. If anyone asked me what makes me truly
happy, I would say: numbers . . . And do you know why? – Because the num-
ber system is like human life.’] (Høeg, 1993, p. 114; qtd. in Persson, 2011,
p. 153)
The speaker elaborates the idea that numbers correlate with human
consciousness – complex, infinitely variable and expansive. Surprisingly,
perhaps, the speaker in this passage is not Lisbeth Salander, of Stieg Larsson’s
Millennium trilogy, but her intertextual and commercial predecessor, Peter
Høeg’s Smilla Jaspersen, the protagonist of Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne
(1992) [Smilla’s Sense of Snow (1993)]. Among many widely read Scandinavian
crime novels, Høeg’s Smilla is the only one to have secured commercial success
comparable to Larsson’s in North America, selling millions of copies and
reaching a broad popular audience. It made the New York Times bestseller list
and was chosen as book of the year by People, Entertainment Weekly and Time
magazines. Høeg’s and Larsson’s novels both feature protagonists who are
Others, hybrid women in Scandinavian welfare states, which are premised on
assumptions about ethnic, social and cultural homogeneity. A comparison of
Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy and Høeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow 125
Smilla and Salander, as well as analysis of these characters’ construction of

Otherness, helps put Larsson’s novels into a richer cultural context. In this
study, we ask how Larsson’s Millennium trilogy represents Otherness. The
comparison of Smilla and Larsson’s Millennium trilogy suggests that although
Otherness appears to be a key concern in the Millennium trilogy, the novels are
premised on a notion of knowledge that imagines all Otherness as
understandable.
Lisbeth Salander resembles Smilla Jaspersen so closely that it is impossible to
overlook their similarity.1 They are both positioned as outsiders by their
communities, and they both position themselves as outsiders. Smilla is half
Danish and half Greenlandic, a stigmatized ethnic Other. Lisbeth is half Swedish
and half Russian, and she too has a traumatic childhood. Smilla’s trauma lies in
her mother’s disappearance when she was a child, and her subsequent removal
to Denmark with her father. Lisbeth Salander’s trauma lies in the domestic
violence she experienced as a child, and her consequent estrangement from
her father. Both are romantic Others, solitary characters who avoid conventional
relationships, and Lisbeth is also bisexual. Both are dissident young women
who have run away from institutions, and continually struggled with school and
state authorities, Lisbeth having been institutionalized as an adolescent. Both
are also preternaturally brilliant in maths and science: Smilla is a mathematician
and hydrologist, and Lisbeth is an independent contractor whose knowledge of
network computing allows her to attain valuable information. And, of course,
both become involved in sprawling investigations that reveal treasonous actions
by the Scandinavian states of Denmark and Sweden. Salander is arguably
Larsson’s reinvention of Smilla Jaspersen. To be sure, there are numerous other
intertextual connections: Pippi Longstocking, for example, is a recurrent
allusion in the Millennium novels, while Smilla draws on the feminist hard-boiled
tradition and such prominent characters as Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski and
Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone.
An especially telling similarity between the characters is Salander’s and
Jaspersen’s love of maths, but although they both love numbers and mathe-
matical reasoning, they hold distinct epistemological views. Lisbeth regards
maths as a predictable system, which presents problems that are discrete and
soluble. In contrast, Smilla considers maths to be a method, which can be
used to manipulate numbers, but which produces dilemmas as often as it
produces clear and concise solutions. These differing views of maths corre-
late with the representation of Otherness in the novels. In Larsson’s novel,
there is ultimately no Otherness, for its appearance can ultimately be under-
stood as a soluble problem rooted in a closed and predictable system of
knowledge. By contrast, in Høeg’s novel, maths is a method of inquiry that
can be powerful in its capacity to answer questions about objects of know
ledge, but, in so doing, can also inculcate misguided certainty and hubris in
attitudes towards those objects. Otherness is recurrently present in the
ovels, for it recurs in their protagonists’ lives, and also troubles the investi-
n
gations that both novels narrate.
At the beginning of the second novel in Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, Flickan
some lekte med elden (2006) [The Girl Who Played with Fire (2009b)], Lisbeth devotes
herself to Dimensions in Mathematics, published by a certain ‘Harvard UP’, at
which time she also becomes fixated on deriving a proof for Fermat’s Last
theorem. By the second novel, the reader has learnt about Salander’s obsession
with maths, and can also see her mathematical inclination in her embrace of
‘consequence analysis’ to control her impulses, which she has learnt from
Holger Palmgren, her erstwhile guardian. In The Girl Who Played With Fire, maths
becomes more significant, serving as a metonymy of Lisbeth Salander’s method
of investigation and epistemological view: the logic that Salander uses to puzzle
out problems is contiguous with the thinking she uses in her research and her
battles with her enemies. Salander’s method and her brilliance make it possible
for her to learn facts that remain unattainable to others, which implies that the
facts she uncovers about past actions, relationships and motives are true and
can be known by Salander.
The salience of the mathematical metonymy is evident in the structure of
The Girl Who Played with Fire in which mathematical definitions furnish the
epigraph for each of the book’s four sections. Part One and Part Three are
even given mathematical titles, ‘Irreguljära ekvationer’ (‘Irregular Equations’)
and ‘Absurda ekvationer’ (‘Absurd Equations’), respectively. Larsson breaks
his sprawling novels into sections, which hammer home the novels’ themes.
One prominent theme is Larsson’s feminism and condemnation of crime
against women, as Joan Acocella noted in The New Yorker (2011), which is made
evident with epigraphs citing statistics about violence against women in Män
som hatar kvinnor (2005) [The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Larsson, [2009a],
pp. 73–4)]. But what, then, are the mathematical definitions doing in the The
Girl Who Played With Fire?
The epigraph for Part One typifies Larsson’s use of the mathematical
epigraphs, defining as it does an ‘irregular equation’. We should note that
there is no such equation type. In fact, Larsson’s epigraph describes a polynomial
equation, which is a common equation type familiar from secondary-school
algebra.2 Furthermore, the ‘absurd equation’ of Part Three is also an equation
type invented by Larsson. The point of these inventions is suggested by the
epigraphs’ texts: these mathematical definitions serve as metaphors thematizing
the phase of the investigation Salander and investigative journalist Mikael
Blomkvist undertake in the part of the novel in question. In Part Two, for
example, the epigraph refers to ‘unknown values’, which require determina-
tion for an equation to be solved (Larsson, 2009b, p. 73); sure enough, the
main theme in the section concerns Salander’s and Blomkvist’s attempts to
determine the identities of members of a human trafficking criminal opera-
tion, in particular the elusive, mysterious ‘Zala’.
Again, Part Four speaks about the roots for an equation, which when
determined solve the equation, and in this final section Salander tracks down
and does battle with her father, who turns out to be Zala. Root identities and
the roots of Salander’s problems are made clear, while Blomkvist chases at a
distance. What we have in the mathematical epigraphs, then, are thematic
metaphors which are embroidered with mathematical jargon in order to look
like mathematical definitions.
Numbers and mathematics are also key metaphors in Smilla’s Sense of Snow,
but they are figures of epistemological uncertainty rather than figures in a
narrative of development within a mathematical system understood to be finite,
closed, knowable. This is evident in Smilla’s reflections on numbers. Not
satisfied with whole numbers, childish numbers, the child ‘discovers a sense of
longing’, which is expressed as negative numbers:
Og bevistheden udvider sig stadigvæk, og vokser, og barnet opdager mel-

lemrummene. Mellem stenene, mellem mosserne på stenene, mellem men-
neskene. Og mellem atallen . . . Det fører til brøkerne . . . Det stopper ikke.
Det stopper aldrig. Før nu, på stedet, udvider vi de reelle tal med de imag-
inære, kvadratrødder af negative tal. Det er tal, vi ikken kan forestilles os, tal
som normal bevidsheden ikke kan rumme . . . Det er som et stort, åbent land-
skab. Horisonterne . . . Det er Grønland, det er det jeg ikke kan undvære! Det
er defor jeg ikke vil spærres inde. (Høeg, 1992, p. 113)
[And human consciousness grows and expands even more, and the child
discovers the in-between spaces. Between stones, between pieces of moss
on the stones, between people. And between numbers . . . It leads to frac-
tions . . . It doesn’t stop. It never stops . . . we expand the real numbers with
imaginary square roots of negative numbers. These are numbers we can’t pic-
ture, numbers that normal human consciousness can’t comprehend . . . It’s
like a vast open landscape. The horizons . . . That is Greenland, and that’s
what I can’t live without. (Høeg, 1993, p. 115)]
In Smilla’s account, numbers are infinite, and the mathematical thinking by

which people work is circumscribed. Indeed, even the polynomial equation
that is the basis for Larsson’s mathematical figures is far more limited than he
implies. Høeg’s novel emphasizes these limitations and the dilemmas that
follow from them.
For Smilla, numbers are also an object of institutional power, for mathemat-
ical and scientific method and practice afford the means of control and pre-
dictability on which institutions depend. Smilla observes that human
consciousness wants to go beyond reason. This is a dialectical expansion; it is
an expression of profound intellectual curiosity, but also an instance of the
will to power, to predictability, to mastery. So while numbers and mathematics
are romanticized in Høeg’s novel, maths and scientific knowledge are also
characterized in dystopian terms, as a means of establishing and maintaining

domination. The novel continually associates this dystopian dimension with
Denmark’s colonial history.
A good example of this association is the Cryolite Corporation, a fictional
mercantilist corporation, which in the novel stands as a symbol of Denmark’s
colonization of Greenland. This colonial relationship began in the fifteenth
century, with Greenland becoming an administered colony of Denmark in the
early nineteenth century. The rationale for Danish colonization was based on
territorial and waterway rights, as well as mineral deposits, and cryolite was one of
the minerals mined by Denmark. Since the mid-twentieth century, and in line
with decolonization in other parts of the world, governance has gradually devolved
to the indigenous Inuit people of Greenland. Today, the territory’s name has
been changed to Kalaalitnunat, and it is an autonomous nation within Denmark.
This colonial history, and its scientific dimensions, are materialized in the novel
through the Cryolite Corporation’s archives, which are a repository for the
scientific and mining records. Smilla finds scientific reports on Cryolite’s explora
tions. Reports are part of the colonial enterprise; maths and science undergird
that colonial enterprise and institutionally mediate the ‘will to power’.
Larsson’s Millennium trilogy also places emphasis on the way in which
institutions’ concealment of information serves their efforts at domination.
Indeed, this emphasis is the premise for Larsson’s novels’ sympathy towards
conspiracy theory. The difference between Millennium and Smilla lies in their
disparate epistemological premises. For Larsson, maths are a means of gaining
certain answers to problems, and this certainty can help explain crime and
deliver justice. For Høeg, we have a will towards certainty, which mathematical
and scientific reasoning can support by helping to eliminate wrong answers; yet
such reasoning can also foster hubris and facilitate domination.
In presenting numbers and mathematics as a closed system, Larsson’s novels
are far less concerned with the dialectical entanglements that figure throughout
Høeg’s novel. While Larsson’s books share much of the critical ambition we
find in Smilla, they differ in their representation of their object of critique,
distinguishing as they do between oppressor and oppressed, domination and
liberation, progress and reaction good and bad. The comparison establishes
some provisional observations about the Millennium trilogy, which undergird a
critical reading of the representation of Otherness in Larsson’s novels.
Investigative Technique
The contrasting epistemological premises sketched above underpin the

representation of Others in the Millennium novels and in Smilla. The novels also
differ in the way they represent investigations: the different pictures of
investigation are related to the epistemology. In Larsson’s novels, the master
trope in depicting Lisbeth Salander is the detached investigator. Salander is able

to operate rationally and exercise control from a distance by way of technological
intervention, but she is rarely physically present in the novels. Her supremacy
as a hacker allows her to use computer networks to act remotely. In the first
novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, she continually frustrates her employer
and Blomkvist with her absence and unavailability. She spends much of the
second novel hiding out to avoid arrest, and for most of the third novel she is
held in isolation in the Salbergska Hospital in Gothenburg. Despite her absence,
Salander is able to use computer networks to acquire and organize a complete
set of information about the crime and conspiracy under investigation. This
makes it possible for her to form a full understanding of the objects of
investigation, the novel suggests, and consequently to take informed, rapid and
decisive action.
In contrast, Smilla provides no space to the protagonist outside the unfolding
investigation. Smilla finds herself continually under the observation of state
authorities and vulnerable to their actions. In the early part of the novel, after
the death of Isaiah, she is observed at his funeral by agents of the state. As she
begins to acquire evidence about the conspiracy she is investigating, she nar-
rowly escapes an attempt to murder her while aboard a sailboat in Copenha-
gen’s South Harbour. Onboard the ship Kronos, she is continually observed by
various members of the crew and the mysterious team who hired the ship.
Finally, her romantic partner in the novel, the mechanic Peter Følj, is revealed
to be working for the man Smilla ultimately finds herself investigating, Tørk
Hvid, which suggests that Følj may have kept Smilla under surveillance all along.
Smilla never finds a place of isolation or detachment, but is immersed in the
investigation of which she is a part. As a result, she cannot form a full picture of
her objects of investigation, and their identity and status are often open to ques-
tion; Smilla can only act provisionally, balancing knowledge and uncertainty.
The tropes of detachment and immersion in Larsson’s and Høeg’s novels
also inflect their representation of Otherness. Because Salander can know, see
and act, and it is her production of knowledge that drives the investigations,
Otherness is not a relevant concept in Larsson’s novels. In Høeg’s novel, because
Smilla cannot form a complete picture of anything, there is pervasive Otherness,
as characters continually undergo encounters and experiences which they
cannot understand or master intellectually. The connection between
unknowability and investigation is figured in many ways, but is nowhere clearer
than in the conclusion of Smilla, which ends in Tørk Hvid fleeing Smilla across
an ice floe in the frigid waters near Greenland, and into darkness. The open-
ended conclusion thematizes for the reader the uncertainty of Smilla’s
knowledge throughout the text.
While this aspect of Smilla affirms postmodern anti-epistemology, the
Millennium’s deep certainty about what can be known might better be seen as
an iteration of the Victorian crime novel (and not least the Sherlock Holmes
stories of Arthur Conan Doyle), in which superhuman rationality, exercised

within an isolated space, is offered as a fantasy of the possibility of universal
knowledge and seamless predictability. Holmes has his study, and Salander has
her apartment on Fiskargatan, from which they are able to master at a distance
the criminal world they study.
This fantasy plays out in other parts of the Millennium novels as well, perhaps
most interestingly, for our purposes, in Lisbeth Salander’s encounters with
Otherness in the postcolonial episode of the Millennium novels – Salander’s visit
to Grenada, an island famous for being invaded by American forces in 1983.
Grenada is presented as the final destination of Salander’s island-hopping
through the Caribbean. While in Grenada, she studies mathematics, has a
relationship with a figuratively named local adolescent, George Bland, and
observes with growing aggravation a case of domestic violence in the hotel room
next to hers.
Puzzled and angered by the abuse she overhears from the Forbeses’ room,
Salander commences an investigation from a distance. Rather than asking the
couple questions, observing them in any systematic way, or intervening overtly,
Salander works by way of computer networks. She arranges for her hacker
colleague ‘Plague’ to subcontract out a typically exhaustive background check
on Mr Forbes, to be delivered to Salander by email. Later, she receives a message
with attached documents, revealing an opportunistic career history, criminal
allegations, financial irregularities, and Mrs Forbes’s recent receipt of a forty
million dollar inheritance from her father. The colonial past and the neo-
colonial, globalized present coalesce in the couple next door, Texan evangelists
who are in Grenada to help build an educational foundation. Their ostensible
moral goodness conceals Mr Forbes’s treacherous self-interest, misogyny and
greed. The information revels to Salander that Mr Forbes probably plans to
murder his wife. Salander rescues Mrs Forbes in the middle of a hurricane that
hits Grenada, clubbing Mr Forbes to death on the beach. Salander relies on
hacked information to form a judgement of the Forbeses, which is represented
as free from confusion. This knowledge bestows on her an immediate relation
ship to her object of research, for there is no institutional, cultural or bodily
mediation of her knowledge. Indeed it could be seen as divine, insofar as it is
perfect and independent of all factors but Salander’s own thinking about it.
The immediacy of Salander’s action contrasts with the institutional inflection
of knowledge that is part of Smilla. Whereas Salander is able to access any
information she likes without time appearing to pass, Smilla Jaspersen’s
investigations continually encounter information that is mediated in institu
tional structures that conceal it and obscure its character. As a result, her
inquiries continually struggle with institutionally controlled knowledge, even
when they can draw on mathematical and scientific reasoning. A clear figuration
of the problems created by mediated knowledge is evident in Smilla’s encounter
with the Cryolite Corporation’s archives. She discovers through an informant
that the archives are not what they appear to be: ‘Der er et dobbelt arkiv, I kæ
lderen, under villaen på Strandboulevarden’ (Høeg, 1992, p. 74) [‘There’s a
double archive, in the basement, in the building on Strand Boulevard’(Høeg,
1993, p. 73)]. The colonial archives are a familiar figuration of the employment
of modern rationality as part of the colonial enterprise, and in their role in
Smilla’s investigation, they push aspects of her colonial experience into the
foreground. Yet, at the same time, the archives are illegible and ‘double’, hiding
away and concealing as much as they divulge.
The power of the institution lies in its capacity to build apparently transparent
structures such as archives, which in the name of transparency actually work to
hide and conceal. The computer networks in the Millennium trilogy are
presented as universally transparent systems, available to anyone with the
knowledge to access them. Even at their most Byzantine, they are rationally
organized and instantly legible. Salander does not even need to do the research
on the Forbes couple herself, for the system is so trustworthy that a surrogate
can do it for her, deliver the results and provide her evidence sufficiently
trustworthy to motivate a pre-emptive murder.
In depicting Smilla as enfolded in a criminal intrigue that has its source in
Denmark’s colonial relationship to Greenland, the novel suggests that for
Smilla, for Denmark and for Greenland, the colonial system and its intellectual
and institutional apparatus have no outside space. These systems mediate the
knowledge, logic and methods through which Otherness is constructed.
Otherness is a hybrid product of these systems, not an alternative position
outside from which to approach them. There is no exterior or transcendent
position from which to survey, understand and master the system in Smilla,
whereas there are numerous such places in the Millennium trilogy.
Others Knowing Others
One of the striking differences between Smilla and the Millennium novels is the
way in which Otherness is a historical and epistemological problem in the
former, whereas it is an ontological problem in the latter. In Smilla, Otherness
comes from complicated historical relationships and the impossibility of fully
knowing them. In the Millennium novels, Otherness is a question of character
identity. When characters are defined ontologically as Others, trauma,
psychopathology and national identity become means of identifying Other
ness. The contrast between epistemology and ontology helps bring the represen
tation of Othernesss in the Millennium novels into clearer focus.
Salander’s Otherness is frequently represented as a consequence of trauma
and pathology, from which she seeks to free herself through her own notion of
therapy. Her intense interest in mathematics and computers distances her
intellectually and emotionally from the world around her, making her an
exceptional character. Scribbling numbers in her attempt to solve Fermat’s Last

Theorem for her own pleasure while in Grenada, Salander’s apparently autistic
behaviour makes evident her Otherness. Salander is also a trauma victim, whose
relationship to her past seems to bring about recurrent patterns of violence in
her life. Her intellectual habits and the traumatic past come together to
underscore her identity as Other, detaching her and situating her as isolated.
Furthermore, her biological father’s nationality and psychopathy also mark his
daughter as Other. In a touch of Naturalism, Lisbeth struggles with her
hereditary doom. Fighting against it and the other aspects of her identity, she
also wishes to be, and to be seen, as ‘normal’. She seeks to mimic normalcy by
changing herself and her habits, changing her appearance, reaching out to
others and gradually accepting institutional authority over the course of the
trilogy. In this way, a tension runs through the novels, built on Salander’s
Otherness, as she simultaneously is an Other but wishes to integrate into
Swedish society.
The notion of trauma here comes from Cathy Caruth’s reading of Freud in
her influential book Unclaimed Experience (1996). Caruth argues that trauma is a
double wound, one that the mind cannot register, process or heal, and which
creates a recurrent wounding, as the mind returns over and again to the original
wound, seeking to overcome it. This process results in repetition, a pattern that
seeks healing, but continually re-inscribes the wound in the subject (Caruth,
1996, p. 4). ‘Traumatic experience . . . is an experience that is not fully
assimilated as it occurs’ (Caruth, 1996, p. 5), but remains unclaimed, indeed
unclaimable, as the title of the book indicates. Salander’s wounds have been
inflicted by her father and state authorities, and recurrently return in her life,
culminating in duels with her father and a covert state agency, both of which
nearly kill her.
Salander’s trauma is most obviously depicted in her rape by her guardian Nils
Bjurman early in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. This is a traumatic event, which
motivates her subsequent actions, and is also a repetition of earlier trauma.
Bjurman has taken over the role of guardian from Holger Palmgren, an
avuncular figure in Salander’s life for eleven years, during which time he had
been her guardian while she lived in various institutions, halfway houses and on
her own. Past trauma is suggested by Salander’s requirement of a guardian, but
also by her disabled mother, who suffers from debilitating brain damage and
lives in a home for adults.
Salander’s vulnerability is rooted in part in the recurrent abuses she has
suffered, which also help explain her swift response to Bjurman. While casting
her as a victim, the text simultaneously qualifies her victimhood by emphasizing
her vengeance upon her rapist and others who have victimized, or seek to
victimize, her. When Bjurman preys on Salander, she responds by secretly
videotaping the rape, entrapping Bjurman, torturing him and figuratively
raping him back with a tattoo gun, after which she blackmails him to prevent
further assault. Salander has obviously dealt with sociopaths like Bjurman in the
past, and is ready to dispatch rough justice to deal with him.
As we learn at the beginning of The Girl Who Played With Fire, and later in
Luftslottet som sprängdes (2007) [The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (2009c)],
Salander has indeed experienced past trauma. The prologue to the second
novel in the trilogy begins with Salander cinched to a gurney in the dark, in an
institution. As she lies there, she fantasizes about dousing a man in a car with
gasoline, and setting him on fire. The attending doctor speaks to her; she tries
to kick him, but cannot: ‘Han hade säkert erektion’ (Larsson, 2006, p. 8) [‘He
had an erection for sure’ (Larsson, 2009b, p. 8)]. Salander’s torture is sexualized
by such details. Her abuse by oppressive men is coded as a systemic corruption
acted out sexually. Bjurman’s rape is thus a parallel of the institutional ‘rape’
Salander underwent as an adolescent, making her traumatized Otherness a
consequence of her treatment by the state. It also connects her to the rape and
murder victims of Henrik Vanger and his father.
Lisbeth’s status as a trauma victim also distinguishes her from Smilla. While
we may wish to speak of the figurative trauma in Smilla Jaspersen’s life, her
mother’s death, her childhood experiences and her homelessness in the world,
she has not suffered the wounds visited upon Salander. Smilla is defined by her
lack of a stable identity, which is reflected in her style of thought and her
incessant questions. She remarks that she has sought to affirm the only attitude
worth learning: ‘på at give afkald’ (Høeg, 1992, p. 178 ) [‘how to renounce’
(Høeg, 1993, p. 187)]. Her Danish father and Inuit mother make her a split
subject, torn between pasts that pull her in different directions, torn between
Greenland and Denmark. Through renunciation, she seeks to control the ties
that ambivalently hold her. At the same time, Smilla would seem to have good
reason to be certain. She is a gifted mathematician and hydrologist, with an
impressive work record. Yet just as she embraces maths and science, she
recognizes that they are also instruments of power. Upon reaching a massive
offshore pier in Baffin Bay in the waters of Greenland while sailing on the
Kronos, she reflects: ‘Det de vill tvigne, er det næste, det større, det der er uden
om menneske. Det er havet, jorden, isen. Konstruktionen der strækker sig for
vores fodder, er et sådant forsøk.’ (Høeg, 1992, p. 338) [‘What they want is to
coerce the Other, the vastness, that which surrounds human beings. The sea,
the earth, the ice. The complex stretched out in front of us in an attempt to do
this.’ (Høeg, 1993, p. 361)]
Smilla’s own experience of maths and science, of elegant understanding of
snow and ice, cannot be separated from the shipping pier, through which
humans seek to dominate and control nature. She reflects on these
contradictions: ‘Inderst inde véd jeg, at ville begribe fører til blindehed, at
ønsket om at förstå har en indbygget brutalitet, der udvisker det som förståelsen
rækker efter’ (Høeg, 1992, pp. 233–4) [‘Deep inside, I know that trying to
figure things out leads to blindness, that the desire to understand has a built-in
brutality that erases what you seek to comprehend’ (Høeg, 1993, p. 247)].
Pulled in different directions, she seeks to understand the way in which
knowledge is also pulled in different directions by competing theories, histories
and uses. Comparing Smilla and Lisbeth, we see that the latter’s identity is
comparatively static, her traumatic background and her familial relationships
bestowing on her an ontological identity. Smilla’s renunciation of epistemo
logical certainty causes her own identity to flow and change.
Mikael Blomkvist realizes the definitive character of the trauma for Salander.
At the beginning of the third novel, when she has been hospitalized in police
custody as the subject of a nationwide manhunt, he tries to explain who she is,
arguing she is vulnerable and a victim. In spite of this, Lisbeth continually resists
victimization. When she is tied to a gurney in an institution, she decides not to
speak at all to Dr Teleborian, and subsequently does not do so. Similarly, she
does not speak to police when taken into custody. When other people put her
in the position of victim, she fights back with righteous violence.
Salander’s trauma is also key to the way Larsson uses the Other in his account
of the state of the Swedish welfare state. The cause of trauma is Salander’s
Russian father, Aleksander Zalatšenko, a Soviet defector of the 1970s who enjoys
a special status in Sweden, having made a deal with a covert intelligence unit
that is a clandestine actor within the state. He is untouchable. He beats Lisbeth’s
Swedish mother without fear of repercussions, because he is outside the law. At
the age of twelve, Lisbeth seeks to end the traumatic abuse by attempting to
burn him alive with a homemade petrol bomb she throws at him. Following this
action, Zalatšenko’s intelligence service sponsors see Salander as a threat to the
valuable intelligence her father can offer, arranging her confinement to the
mental institution and treatment by Teleborian.
Zalatšenko is the most stereotypical expression of Otherness in Larsson’s
trilogy, defined by his Soviet training and his Russian nationality. He figures in
Part Two and has a small role in the beginning of the Part Three. At first he is
just a shadow, a name that journalist Dag Svensson and his criminologist
romantic partner Mia Bergman run into when they do research concerning
human trafficking and prostitution. Most of the second novel is devoted to this
supergangster. He is an agent of death who looms in the shadows. Nobody
seems to know who he is and everybody seems to be afraid of him. This status is
due in part to the legal protection he enjoys from the Swedish intelligence
service, which provides the shelter under which he can operate. Like other
criminals from Eastern European countries portrayed in contemporary
Scandinavian crime fiction, Zalatšenko is one more military professional trained
by the Red Army: he is ruthless, violent, intelligent and a skilful manipulator
(Arvas, 2011, pp. 115–30). In this respect, it is ontological identity that defines
Zalatšenko and others like him.
Larsson emphasizes and heightens Zalatšenko’s role as the evil Other by
making his accomplice Ronald Niedermann, Zalatšenko’s son by a German
woman. Niedermann is a grotesque figure: he is physically huge and possesses

superhuman powers. To underline his exceptional identity, the character suffers
from a rare disease called congenital analgesia: he cannot feel any physical pain.
This incapacity is echoed in his imperviousness to emotional pain or conscience.
Niedermann has inherited his father’s psychopathy, and the same determined
identity. He is Salander’s double, inasmuch as they share a father, have inherited
his sociopathy and bear the consequences of inherited and socially consequen
tial disabilities, whether autism-Aspergers or congenital analgesia.
The other figures in the trilogy who are connected to Eastern Europe are
young women, victims of human trafficking who are coerced to act as prostitutes.
Like Zalatšenko, they are also signifiers of Otherness, sexualized, abused women
who have been reduced to objects. By associating Zalatšenko and these women
with Salander, the novels underline Lisbeth’s position as a victim. Although
Lisbeth is half Russian, she does not ponder this blood heritage in the same
manner as Smilla, who is continually aware of her mixed roots. Lisbeth’s roots
do not carry a significant meaning to her.
By heightening and exaggerating the qualities of Otherness in Zalatšenko, the
novel exoticizes Otherness while at the same time making it easily comprehen-
sible as a fixed identity. Zalatšenko is such an extreme figure that he cannot be
fitted into the cultural framework of contemporary Sweden on which the novel
is otherwise premised. Such a trope of Otherness stands in contrast to the ambiv-
alent Otherness we saw in Smilla. While the novels’ protagonists are in spirit the
same kind of fighters, independent women who refuse to hold back (both,
interestingly, created by male authors) and share an enormous amount that
makes them clear intertextual cousins, not least in their mixed cultural heritage,
Smilla seeks to divulge conflicted Otherness in everyday Danish life by continu-
ously revealing to the reader the peculiarities of Europeans from the perspective
of the Greenlander. Larsson’s novels, however, exoticize and heighten Other-
ness, making it impossible to fit into an everyday framework in any plausible way.
One of the consequences of Larsson’s representation of the Other is that it
legitimates an equally exaggerated violence which needs to be deployed in
order to do battle with the freakish Others Larsson has cast in the novels.
Whether it is Salander in Grenada collecting intelligence information on
Mr Forbes or Salander in her hospital cell using her handheld computer to
hack the intelligence infrastructure, extreme figures and actions require a
space of total alterity. The epistemological questions that permeate Høeg’s
novel, on the other hand, disallow such a space of isolated total knowledge and
power. Smilla is concerned with challenging and questioning the fantasies by
which such transcendent spaces and categories are constructed. The novel
shows us that what we think is familiar is often Other, and how, as a result, we
fail to understand it. In Larsson, there is no mistake about exoticized Others,
and when sufficient information about them has been acquired, action,
sometimes lethal, may be taken.
Fermat’s Last Theorem
For Smilla Jaspersen, Fermat’s Last Theorem, scribbled in the margin of the
paper, works as a clue in her investigation. ‘Man kan lære sig lidt om sine
medmennesker af vad de skiver i margenen’ (Høeg, 1992, p. 30) [‘You can
learn something about people from what they write in the margin’ (1993,
p. 26)]. For Smilla, the fact that Fermat wrote in the margin at all tells us
something about him. For Lisbeth, at the conclusion of The Girl Who Played with
Fire, Fermat’s note in the margin is a riddle. On her way to her father’s secret
hideout in the forest near Gothenburg, she creeps towards his unremarkable
cabin and stakes it out, lying in wait to attack her father. During the stakeout,
she returns to Fermat’s Last Theorem: ‘I marginalen på sitt exemplar mot
Arithmetica hade Pierre de Fermat krafsat ordet “Jag har ett I sanning underbart
bevis för detta påstående, men marginalen är alltför trång för att rymma
detsamma . . . ”. Och helt plötsligt förstod hon’ (Larsson, 2006, pp. 595–9) [‘In
the margin of Arithmetica, Pierre de Fermat had jotted the words, “have a truly
marvelous demonstration of this proposition, which this margin is to small to
contain . . . ”. And all of a sudden she understood’ (Larsson, 2009b, p. 474)].
Her mathematical genius shines for the reader to see, just before she descends
into the darkness with her father.
The extremes of her journey from abused child to vengeful hacker make
Salander an outsider in her own home, both literally within her broken family,
and figuratively in her homeland, which has turned against her. Larsson’s novels
mine these extremes to create a compelling character, but one whose
exceptionality involves an ontological Otherness that can make us less aware of
the more subtle forms of gender, sexual and ethnic Otherness that pervade
everyday life. We are invited to be certain about the answers, rather than asking
questions, as Smilla encourages us to do. Lisbeth’s Otherness is displaced from
trauma to genius. Her mysterious family background is made comprehensible,
and tractable, just as she can solve even the most challenging of mathematical
problems as though they were simple puzzles in closed sets of information. By
contrasting Høeg’s novel and Larsson’s trilogy, we have sought to lay stress on
the excessiveness of Larsson’s texts in a way that makes evident their lack of
subtlety and its consequences. Any dabbler who can work out a solution to
Fermat’s Last Theorem is special, but such a special identity recasts a challenging
Otherness as all too easily understood.
Notes
1
The Scandinavianist scholar Ross Shideler has made the same point in a recent
paper on Lizbeth Salander (2011).
2
‘Polynomial equation’ in Swedish is ‘polynomekvation’.
Chapter 11
Smog, Tweed and Foreign Bedevilment:

Bourland’s Twenty-First-Century Remake
of the Sherlock Holmes Crime Story
Keren Chiaroni
The Mixture: Take One at Bedtime
Detective fiction depends on a nicely judged blend of entertainment with

horror, order with violence and, in the case of its golden age exponents, of
comfortable domesticity with the treacherous and elemental. In short, it
reassures through its evocation of the familiar, while scarifying with the foreign,
which usually refers to the abnormal, the defective and, ultimately, the
undesirable. Fabrice Bourland’s Le Diable du Crystal Palace (2010) achieves a
series of double-twists in its interpretation of these two related paradigms.
Taking as its chief point of reference the stories of nineteenth-century crime-
writer Arthur Conan Doyle, Bourland’s tale often reverses the opposition
between familiar and foreign upheld by Conan Doyle. Translating into curiosities
features that would have been familiar to the original Victorian readers,
Bourland’s narrative equally re-construes the foreign through irony and
pastiche. As a result, characters that would have appeared as ghoulish villains in
Doyle are invested in Bourland with all the charm of a pair of old slippers:
shabby and comfortable, but not really suitable for wearing in public. In this
respect, his text raises questions about the (dis)continuity in cultural definitions
of strangeness and Otherness in the roman policier while playing with the
strangeness inherent in the phenomenon of cult fiction itself: its groupie
innuendos, its enduring, crowd-pleasing charm. Smog may long have been
outlawed by the Clean Air Act, but it seems we still crave its atmospheric
suggestiveness, and while Alexander McQueen has revolutionized forever the
way we see tweed and tartan, these fabrics remain invested with the symbolism
of homely warmth both in the English imagination and across the Channel.
Of the two interrelated terms in question, it is clear that, in the manner of a
textbook demonstration of binary opposition, one of them is privileged.
Whatever the interrelationship of familiar/foreign in the thrill of the chase
along the chain of signifiers, this chase ends in the assertion of a hierarchy:
enigmas, false identities and lawlessness are made subservient to explanation,
revelation and justice. The restoration of order is offered in the final pages as a
soothing antidote to the accumulated tensions of all that has gone on before,
and this is one of the things that make the genre, however adrenalin-fuelled,
calming, even in some cases soporific, in its effects on the reader. It is no surprise
that Agatha Christie was one of the favourite bedtime reads of that most
un-reassuring of writers, Samuel Beckett, whose own created landscape was
‘maggoty with insecurities’ and angst.1 In Christie there is ultimately an
explanation for everything, a strong moral code and some appealing characters
whose capacity for crime does not detract from their air of normality, or even
their ‘niceness’. The literary formalities are punctuated by social rituals that are
comforting in the extreme: tea and toast, domestic staff who bring the characters
sustenance as well as turning down their beds at night, village greens and well-
sprung motorcars.
Conan Doyle belonged to a different age and cultural landscape from the
ones Christie knew, and his predilection for sensationalism and the super-
natural seems lurid when compared with Miss Marple’s knitting and Poirot’s
embroidered slippers. But the tendency to group these writers together has to
do with their common perception of what was foreign, and what was familiar.
They shared a belief in what P. D. James calls ‘a united and cohesive’ world,
‘buttressed by social and political institutions which . . . attracted general alle-
giance, and were accepted as necessary to the well-being of the state: the
monarchy, the Empire, the Church, the criminal justice system, the City, the
ancient universities’ (James, 2009b, p. 70). The balance of terror achieved
between crime and justice, strangeness and security, is thus comparable in
each case. Both Christie and Conan Doyle achieve equilibrium through
powerfully evoking the everyday décor and currency of their readers’ worlds,
while conjuring the real, or imagined, threats to that world and then soundly
defeating them. The two world wars of the twentieth century would cast
doubts on the meaning of Western civilization in the minds of many of Chris-
tie’s readers. But in Conan Doyle the surreal and even monstrous depiction of
the foreign is thrown into relief by an untroubled sense of heroism linked to
the Victorian vision of empire. Arthur Conan Doyle’s England was still confi-
dent of its right and responsibility to dominate, domesticate and subdue the
foreign. Holmes was a cocaine-smoking nonconformist whose penchant for
shooting practice would have upset the antimacassar in a Victorian parlour.
But the eccentric yet masterful Holmes, like the inhabitants of the said par-
lour, would have found nothing amiss in the association of ‘alien’ elements
with dreadful crimes. In Conan Doyle’s thrilling tales, non-white characters
do not dominate the story, but they represent vital ingredients in a cocktail
judiciously mixed for his white, middle-class readers. Identifying, and eventu-
ally exterminating, the foreign (as occurs in The Sign of Four, for instance),
confirms the rights and beliefs of those readers, while allowing them a titillat-
ing encounter with the exotic.
Smog, Tweed and Foreign Bedevilment 139
Fabrice Bourland: Tweed À L’anglaise
Contemporary readers of Sherlock remakes, in which a similar cocktail is

prepared with a ‘modern’ twist, can enjoy the writing of Anthony Boucher (two
of his better-known works, The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars, and Nine Times
Nine with its locked room puzzle, were published in 1940), or any from the
variety of authors associated with The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes series
by Titan Books (one of their latest titles published in 2010, and written by Loren
Estleman, has the queen solicit the aid of Sherlock Holmes in person). These
writers all employ various features of the Conan Doyle formula, and their stories
accordingly rely on identification of a set of known literary devices as well as on
the springing of their own particular narrative traps.
French-speaking purveyors of the genre have recently been joined by Fabrice
Bourland. Bourland’s tales, published by 10/18 editions, include Le Fantôme de
Baker Street (2008), Les Portes du sommeil (2008), La dernière enquête du chevalier
Dupin (2009 – the title references Poe’s famous detective), and, most recently,
Le Diable du Crystal Palace. All feature the same pair of bachelor sleuths who
operate in a world run very much along Conan Doyle lines. In the first volume,
the spectre of Holmes himself appears in a séance, as if to bestow his blessing,
post-mortem, on the pair. In Bourland’s series, however, everything that reads
as familiar in Doyle now appears ‘foreign’ due to its anachronism within a
twenty-first-century context, and by virtue of its being described in French for
implied readers with a tourist’s knowledge of London. References to the
pleasures of ‘son home’ (the English term, used on the very first page, is
maintained in the French) no longer function as culturally redundant elements
so much as components of a cultural exhibit, as curious in their way as the
maniacal schemes of the villain.
As in the Conan Doyle originals, the adventures feature two sleuths who share
their bachelor digs in London, and whose personalities are complementary:
Andrew Singleton is the one who, like Holmes, is prone to brilliant flashes of
intuition as well as being a dreamer and a reader. Like Watson, he is chivalrous
in his response to delicately nurtured females. His companion, James Trelawney,
is a man of action, who prefers, like Holmes himself, to keep himself free of
sentimental entanglements. Together, Singleton and Trelawney are a more
formidable team than the local policemen who are obligingly bumbling and
easily distracted by false trails. The criminal, against whom Singleton, in
particular, is pitted, is brilliant and depraved, ‘un sinistre personnage aux
intentions plus que malveillantes’ (Bourland, 2010, p. 178) [‘a sinister character
with the most evil intentions’], and his evil plans have implications for national
security (p. 186). His devoted servant is a giant of a man, a Chinese with hatchet-
like features who has reputedly had his tongue cut out in dire circumstances
when only eight years old. There is also a damsel in distress whose gentility and
despair recall the demeanour of the damsel who seeks out Holmes and Watson
at the beginning of The Sign of Four. Compare Trelawney’s account of Miss Alice
Grey’s initial appeal for their help: ‘Son visage, très blanc, aux traits d’une
pureté parfaite . . . était encadré d’une chevelure à la blondeur vénitienne . . . .
Elle s’assit sur le bord du sofa et nous considéra tous deux en joignant les mains
comme pour entamer une prière, avant d’éclater en sanglots (p. 24) [‘Her face
was very pale, and the perfect purity of her features . . . was framed by Venetian
blond hair . . . . She sat on the edge of the sofa, regarding us, her hands clasped
as if in prayer, and then burst into sobs’]2 with Watson’s view of Miss Morstan in
the early pages of the Victorian original: ‘I have never looked upon a face which
gave a clearer promise of a refined and sensitive nature. . . . as she took the seat
which Sherlock Holmes placed for her, her lip trembled, her hand quivered,
and she showed every sign of intense agitation’ (Conan Doyle, 1987, p. 117).3
The ideals of femininity expressed in the stories are almost identical. The
appearance of Miss Mary Morstan in The Sign of Four actually precedes her
engagement to Watson at the end of the novel – an exception in the usual
pattern in Conan Doyle whereby promising love-leads are snuffed out so they
do not interfere with the progress of the investigation. Bourland’s narrative
follows this normative rule, and the life of the gentle damsel described here is
extinguished along with that of the criminal in the final pages.4
Bourland, like Conan Doyle, also makes the genius of place a vital factor in
framing and following the crime. Urban London is granted a mysterious
ambient life of its own, its dark alleyways, fog and oppressive damp functioning
like an attendant spirit, obscuring identity and aiding in the creation of uneasy
frissons in the sleuths and, by implication, in the reader. The lugubrious effects
of rain and fog (‘un cortège de nuages gorgés d’eau’, p. 104) [‘a funeral
procession of rain-swollen clouds’]) are intermingled with coiling smoke from
James’s cigarette, and this evocation of the London of Conan Doyle and its
‘enveloping miasma of mystery and terror’ (James, 2009, p. 40) is confirmed by
direct references in the narrative to Arthur Conan Doyle, his wife Jean, and
their daughter Mary, whose bookshop on Victoria Street featured in an earlier
Bourland novel, Le Fantôme de Baker Street. Through reference to the two sleuths’
reputed friendships with the Doyle family, extra layers of grime are, as it were,
superimposed on the atmosphere in which Bourland’s sleuths operate, as
shadows from the Conan Doyle originals are allowed to seep into the murk
attendant on their own adventures. If these atmospheric hints are not broad
enough, the importance of place, specifically the place that was Conan Doyle’s
London, is confirmed beyond all doubt in the reference to the map of Victorian
London adorning Singleton and Trelawney’s walls. The pointed emphasis on
period is particularly significant given that the main action of the tale is said to
take place in 1930s London. The map, however, like the references in the story
to hansom cabs (outmoded by the 1930s), clarifies the space/time priorities of
the writer. We know, literally, where we are, or where we are supposed to be, as
readers and secondary sleuths.
Conan Doyle’s transformation of the familiar world into something mysterious

and even macabre was assured, however, by allusions not so much to damp
weather as to the strange and surreal beings he used to conjure out of the
English mist – beings with the potential to overwhelm the rational daylight
world of his readers forever. Conan Doyle’s predilection for supernatural
moments is easily allied to the Victorian taste for sensationalism, and it must
also be remembered that the discoveries of science still had something of the
marvellous about them in the nineteenth century: poetry and reason were not
always considered uneasy bedfellows. Equally, the perception that science was
threatening to social conventions rooted in a narrow religiosity meant that
Darwin’s monkeys could appear to some as thrillingly monstrous as the serpent
of Loch Ness.
Bourland tunes in to all of these socio-cultural strains in his own narrative
score, anticipating their role in Le Diable du Crystal Palace by citing Arthur
Machen in the frontispiece: ‘L’univers est en réalité plus splendide et plus
terrible que nous ne le rêvions. Pris dans son ensemble, mon ami, c’est un
sacrement terrifiant: une force, une énergie mystiques, ineffables, voilées par
une apparence matérielle extérieure.’ (n.p.) [The universe is in fact more
splendid and more terrible than we even imagine. All in all, my friend, it’s
damned terrifying: an indescribable mystical power and energy, veiled by the
appearance of an outer materiality].
Splendid, terrifying, sacred, powerful. As surely as the introduction to a
medieval bestiary, or to Jorges Luis Borges’s Book of Imaginary Beings in more
recent times, Bourland’s readers are primed to expect dragons. And they are
not disappointed. The collective fear that prehistoric beasts, long since assumed
to have been extinct, can be brought to life again through some insane scientific
experiment (a fear, incidentally that acquired force in recent years with reports
of dinosaur DNA samples)5 flowers in the story like a carnivorous plant in a
hothouse. This ties in perfectly with Conan Doyle’s speculative interest in the
theories of Charles Darwin and in the reputed discovery in his own era of lost
worlds. The title of Bourland’s novel refers us directly to the Crystal Palace of
Victorian London, a glass and metal building which, along with its surrounding
park, was a lasting testimony to the Victorian passion for both scientific discovery
and the ‘monsters’ of human pre-history. In the grounds of the palace in
Sydenham Park (where the palace was relocated in 1854) is a series of statues
by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, all representing prehistoric animals, ‘les
plus redoutables créatures des anciens âges’ (p. 52) [‘the most formidable
creatures from ancient times’]. Appropriately, the action of Bourland’s novel
reaches its climax in this park, as heroes and villains all take part in a last mad
chase among the ancient creatures – some of which are in stone, while others
have been brought to life through the unscrupulous genetic experiments of
Bourland’s villain: Thaddeus Babel. His experiments have called up a sabre-
toothed feline, a species of primitive man and a bird like a pterodactyl to which
Trelawney is offered as a live sacrifice before being rescued by his faithful

sidekick and the police:
Son corps hideux . . . était recouvert d’une peau nue et lisse dont la
couleur . . . virait au rouge-brun . . . Le visage convulsionné par la terreur,
j’observai, pétrifié, l’animal qui, m’ayant repéré, avançait vers moi d’une
démarche maladroite, légèrement voûté, ses deux bras ailés repliés contre
le corps, en me fixant de ses yeux incandescents. Il émit alors un hurlement
aigu . . . comme un dernier écho de tous les romans que j’avais aimés et
que je ne serais plus jamais en mesure de lire, une phrase d’Arthur Conan
Doyle . . . se rappela à moi: ‘C’était le diable en personne, tel que nous le
figurons dans notre enfance.’ (2010, pp. 245–6)
[Its hideous body . . . was covered in smooth hairless skin, reddish-brown in
colour . . . My face distorted by terror, I watched, petrified, while the animal,
after locating me, began to lurch clumsily in my direction, crouching slightly,
its two winged arms folded against its body, its incandescent eyes fixed upon
me. It uttered a piercing cry . . . like an echo from all the books I had once
loved and which I would no longer be able to bear to read, a single phrase of
Arthur Conan Doyle’s came to my mind: ‘It was the devil incarnate, such as
we imagine him from childhood.’]
Repeat patterns in characterization, setting and in the taste for the macabre as
reflected in this ghoulish scene all establish a sense of continuity between the
literary DNA of Bourland’s novel and the world of Arthur Conan Doyle. Certain
elements in Bourland’s literary recyclage of the Holmes formula are different,
however, both in relation to other examples of ‘The further adventures of’ and
in relation to the original adventures these all reference. The originality of
Bourland’s compound derives from the uniqueness of the plot’s details, and
from the spatial and linguistic disjunction between his narrative (a twentieth-
century plot set in London, written in French and featuring two hyper-English
sleuths who also, rather oddly, are of Canadian origin) and Conan Doyle’s (the
product of an unselfconsciously imperial mindset familiar with both England
and the English).
First, Bourland, as has already been observed, is French, writes in French and
his conception of the London décor is more than ordinarily contrived and self-
conscious. While a poststructuralist age has been accustomed to think of cultural
differences as more textual than innate, and therefore, presumably, as being
accessible to word-perfect imitations, Bourland’s text betrays the ‘foreignness’
of the author in relation to the socio-cultural décor he is attempting to
reproduce. The time and genre-travel of this Holmesian narrative is thus
rendered more noticeable by touristic asides, whereby famous London
landmarks, which blend indiscernibly into the narrative wallpaper of the
original stories, here receive a monopolistic treatment irrelevant to their
immediate context. These asides do not appear frequently enough, nor are
they given the kind of emphasis that would enable them to function successfully
as indicators of ironic pastiche. They are just amusing, but random, cultural
cameos. Singleton and Trelawney’s visit to Fleet Street thus becomes the
springboard for a little potted history for the benefit of the tourist-browser: ‘Les
bureaux du Star se trouvaient dans Fleet Street, la célèbre artère dévouée aux
journaux de la presse britannique, non loin de la Mitre Tavern où Shakespeare
venait jadis se rincer le gosier’ (p. 36) [‘The offices of the Star were in Fleet
Street, that famous artery devoted to the newspapers of the British Press, and
not far from the Mitre Tavern where Shakespeare used to wet his whistle’].
A car chase is also punctuated by some sightseeing: ‘Cinq minutes après, nous
franchîmes la Tamise sur Tower Bridge, puis, abandonnant derrière nous les
contreforts moyenâgeux de la Tour de Londres, nous dépassâmes Liverpool
Station pour emprunter City Road’ (p. 129) [‘Five minutes later, we crossed the
Thames on Tower Bridge, and then, leaving behind us the medieval ramparts
of the Tower of London, we passed Liverpool Station before taking City
Road’].
The potent romance of place is a compelling feature in many detective novels
and some series owe at least a portion of their success to the novelist’s recreation
of a topos informed by geographic, architectural and culturally specific detail.
The more closely these details are meshed with the threads of plot and
characterization, the more engrossing the armchair travelling experience.
Some of the London references in Bourland are well integrated into the
atmosphere of the tale and its basic action – the prehistoric statuary of Sydenham
Park and the monumental architecture of the Crystal Palace are examples of
this. But other references, such as those to Shakespeare’s favourite tavern or to
the Tower of London, jar – especially by comparison with Conan Doyle’s original
series, where references to London are as vague as they are pervasive.
Similar kicks in the stylistic gallop appear in Bourland’s references to English
gentlemen’s suiting and, occasionally, also to food. The original Conan Doyle
was not interested in clothes (or food, for that matter). The deerstalker hat,
cloak and pipe that have become iconic costuming for Holmes are relics from
Basil Rathbone’s earliest rendition of the Holmes character on film. The latter
were, nonetheless, interpretations of period costume that were distinctive in
relation to character without being obtrusive in relation to the narrative. As
with Bourland’s touristic rendition of London, however, references to costuming
in his novel are quaintly italicized – literally. We first meet Singleton stretched
out on a sofa ‘en complet de tweed’ (p. 17) (in a tweed suit), while his companion,
James, is wearing ‘une vraie mise de sportsman’ (p. 18) (a proper sportsman’s
outfit). The tweediness of Singleton’s attire is again commented on as he faces
the damsel in distress, and tweaks at his waistcoat: the same ‘gilet de tweed’.
References to food are mostly conventional and unsurprising, with the
occasional touch of eccentricity in keeping with two free-wheeling bachelors.
On occasion, however, the author appears to have struggled to find a French

equivalent for an English dish or has partnered it oddly with other ingredients,
especially at breakfast time. What are at one point referred to as oatcakes (‘pain
d’avoine’), a suitably tweedy kind of breakfast, are partnered with honey
pudding (‘pudding au miel’) (p. 58), and cold pork sausages and eggs are
accompanied by sandwiches (p. 133). The author has obviously struggled to
find some helpful French equivalent of the English sausage roll, a culinary as
well as linguistic anomaly, and he comes up with ‘un mille-feuilles d’aubergines
à la viande’ (p. 96) [a flaky pastry of eggplant and meat].
Granted, Bourland is not writing an authentic culinary guide to Victorian
England, and these minor discrepancies perhaps betray authorial inattention
rather than a conscious play with originals and copies. But as Holmes, with his
‘extraordinary genius for minutiae’ reminds us, details are important (Conan
Doyle, 1987, p. 113). The effect of these quirks is to make breakfast, that most
ordinary of meals, seem not just foreign, but positively outlandish. It is tempting
to wonder whether the Canadian parentage of the sleuths, which is rarely
referred to after the first novel, is not a ‘cover’ for precisely this kind of cultural
bubble-and-squeak.
This is not to say, by any means, that departures from stock conventions in the
novel are always uncontrived, stylistic ‘slippages’ such as these. On the contrary:
Bourland’s reformulations of the Conan Doyle text are often associated with
the kind of conscious, yet playful, cross-referencing typical of pastiche. The
author’s familiarity with the genre(s) he is borrowing from is extensive and
wide-ranging. Le Diable du Crystal Palace refers to the works of Poe and Christie,
as well as those of Conan Doyle. Some of his literary in-jokes recall the fashion
for self-reference associated with structuralist and poststructuralist writing.
Ludic cross-referencing thus gives away the late twentieth-century origins of this
author’s mindset as surely as nicotine on the fingers betrays a smoker. In this
respect Bourland’s text, with its parodies and generic play, harks back to the
later nouveau roman brand of mystery novel, dating from the seventies and
eighties, and perhaps best represented by Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Djinn (1981).
Conceived as a play with the conventions of the French language, the novel also
toyed with the some of the conventions of detective fiction: double identities,
an obsession with precise detail and/or dead or deflowered bodies. The result
is, as Jacqueline Piatier writes in her article appended to the Minuit edition,
a purely ludic creation, strategic and (self)referential. (Robbe-Grillet, 1981,
pp. 147–50)
On the whole, however, strategy is secondary to story in Bourland, and the
networks of infratextual and intertextual references in Le Diable du Crystal Palace
tend to be amusing rather than consciously clever. A wholehearted enjoyment
of the human capacity to misconstrue evidence is revealed in Bourland’s
reference in the story to a famous piece of scientific fraud in which Conan
Doyle was thought to have been involved: the ‘discovery’ of the Piltdown man,
or the prehistoric skull that turned out to be an assemblage of human bones

with a monkey’s (Bourland, 2010, p. 69). Such ‘mistakes’ and the stories that
grow up around them are the stuff of fiction, a novelist’s dream rather than a
scientific embarrassment. It is hard not to imagine Conan Doyle equally
enjoying some of the narrative tricks employed by Bourland. Intriguingly, both
men had scientific training, and both appear to be writing for the frank
enjoyment of a ‘club’ of readers eager to put their feet up and speculate on the
intriguing narrative possibilities sometimes generated as much by human
blunders as by ‘genuine’ scientific discovery.
Humour, as it turns out, is also a key to one of the more significant differences
between Bourland and his nineteenth-century predecessor. If there is not a lot
of humour in the Victorian tales, there was none at all in their representation
of the villain and his assistants, whose flawed morals are often associated with
their un-English origins (Moriarty being one very important exception). The
dark-complexioned American Enoch Drebber, in A Study in Scarlet, has a
‘baboon-like countenance’, and his features ‘bespoke vice of the most malignant
type’ (Conan Doyle, 1987, p. 34). The ‘savage’ foreigner who kills Batholomew
Sholto in The Sign of Four is not the dubious Jonathan Small, but the native
Andaman Islander who had ‘a great, misshapen head and a shock of tangled
dishevelled hair’. ‘Never’, Watson observes, ‘have I seen features so deeply
marked with all bestiality and cruelty . . . and his lips were writhed back from his
teeth, which grinned and chattered at us with half-animal fury’ (Conan Doyle,
1987, p. 173).
The foreign in Conan Doyle was thus made fearful in a manner that seems
both facile and insulting to a contemporary reader: heavy-handed political
correctness, however, as a response, is deadly to entertaining fiction. Ironic
pastiche, or flagrant and conscious silliness, on the other hand, provide
alternative approaches to the foreign-familiar tensions feeding the intrigue in
conventional detective fiction. In many ways, Bourland adopts the strategy of
the contemporary James Bond thriller movie. The villains and their
megalomaniacal plots from earlier 007 movies were always exaggerated
caricatures; but they were also bolstered by widespread imperialist assumptions
about the untrustworthiness of the Russians, the East Europeans and the
Chinese. Those assumptions no longer have the same currency, although the
characters they inspired continue to provoke amused, even nostalgic affection.
Jokes from ‘M’ (played by Judi Dench) about toys for boys, and petty chauvinism
along with the casting of both English and ‘foreign’ gentlemen in the villains
roles are ways of ‘dealing’ with ideological sensitivities, without denuding the
stories of their usual ludicrous violence, tongue-in-cheek sexism and car
chases.
In a similar manner, Bourland makes his villain and several of his chief thugs
as English as the pair who are hot on their trail. One of the hitmen, called Roy,
has bulging muscular arms like ‘York hams’ (Bourland, 2010, p. 145). At the
same time, Bourland allows himself a classic ‘Bond’ gesture when he has
Thaddeus Babel, the criminal mastermind, wheeled into the room in an
invalid’s chair that is guided by an intimidating Chinese giant – a racist
throwback to Empire thriller fiction. Bourland adds a cat to the mix, recalling
the wheelchair-bound villain from at least two Bond movies. Babel feeds the
hapless creature, with Singleton, to the monster he keeps in his greenhouse.
His speech to the hero before leaving him to his fate is typical of contemporary
thriller pastiche: an acknowledgement of the hero’s intelligence and status as a
worthy opponent, allied with the anticipated pleasure of seeing him sacrificed:
‘Votre intelligence et votre sagacité sont d’un specimen très rare . . . J’ai décidé
plutôt de les offrir en sacrifice aux puissances sauvages et primitives . . . une
mort prestigieuse . . . vous attend’ (2010, p. 229) [‘Your intelligence and
perception are of a very rare kind . . . I have decided therefore to offer them as
a sacrifice to [those same] primitive and savage powers . . . a prestigious
death . . . awaits you’].
Le Diable du Crystal Palace ends with a most satisfactory flourish. After an
encounter with the prehistoric flesh-eating monster that draws blood, Singleton
is rescued by his faithful friend accompanied by the police, and they all join in
the final chase through the park grounds. A horrific scene follows where the
mad scientist is savagely mauled by the pterodactyl, which then flies off, crashing
spectacularly into the glass roof of the Crystal Palace. With the death of Babel’s
monster and the scientist’s own arrest by the police, both the monstrous and
the diseased have been satisfactorily excised from society in the conventional
manner.
As he leaves the scene, however, Babel threatens Singleton with revenge. The
novel anticipates a sequel, and we discover in the epilogue that Babel has
managed to escape. In a clear allusion to the ambiguity surrounding Moriarty’s
death in the Holmes saga, the French narrative leaves itself open to future
stand-offs between the villain and his heroic opponent, Andrew Singleton. Le
Diable du Crystal Palace thereby confirms its allegiance to the conventions of the
Holmesian universe, while strengthening a sense of continuity with other
volumes in the Bourland series.
The transformation of Babel into a Moriarty-type figure, who will become like
a shadowy alter-ego of Holmes, reads as a final nod in the direction of Arthur
Conan Doyle. In fact, the gesture is more significant as an indicator of the
powerful role played by sequels and prequels in influencing our understanding
of writers such as Conan Doyle than it is reflective of Conan Doyle’s own tastes
and views. For, as John Cawelti points out, the ‘doubling of Sherlock Holmes
and Professor Moriarty’ was in fact a ‘very minor part in the original Holmes
saga’ (Cawelti, 2004, p. 343). Moriarty has, in a sense, been amplified, and even
largely generated by Sherlock Holmes mythology rather than by the characters
first conceived by Conan Doyle. A number of latter-day cinematic interpretations
of the saga also give Moriarty a major role and considerable psychological
complexity in relation to the hero.6 In this respect, the phenomenon of cult

fiction can be seen as both ensuring the continued influence of a genre with
recognizable narrative structures and stylistic devices, while facilitating the
constant renewal of those basic characteristics, in response to the dynamic of
popular culture itself.
Cawelti’s understanding of the Moriarty phenomenon in particular is relevant
here:
The history of adaptations and interpretations of Sherlock Holmes shows

how . . . mystery texts that remain important tend to be reinterpreted in such
a way as to maximize the complexity of doubling and self-other relationships.
In the most successful recreations of Sherlock Holmes, such as the Holmes
pastiches of Nicholas Meyer, the Holmes films starring Basil Rathbone and
Nigel Bruce, and the television adaptation by Jeremy Brett as Holmes, the
figure of Professor Moriarty typically assumes a much larger role. In Meyers’
Seven-per-Cent Solution the whole ideal of Moriarty as a master criminal and
Holmes’ opponent is presented as an obsessive projection on the part of
Holmes while the actual Moriarty turns out to be an innocent mathematics
professor. . . . In the film and television adaptations, Moriarty is implicated
in a number of Holmes cases from which he is totally absent in the original
Doyle stories. (Cawelti, 2004, p. 349)
The different treatment given to the Moriarty figure, to which Cawelti refers,
serves as an example of why recreations can never be duplications. In changing
tastes and assumptions in the culture of readers, whether these be political/
ethical (affecting interpretations of the foreign/familiar paradigm) or social/
psychological ones (as seen in perceptions of the self/other relation), recre-
ations must also renew and adapt the original model that has inspired them.
But ‘plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’. It seems to me that a consideration
of the things that change, as well as of the things that stay the same in Holmes
reinterpretations, reveals both continuity and discontinuity in readerly values
and needs. The familiar décor of Holmesian London, which is to us charming
and exotic, was all too familiar to Victorian readers. They knew the taste and
smell of the conjuring mist, the signs of starvation and violence on the streets
and the restricting influence of tight collars and drawing-room etiquette.
Dangerous brushes with exotic and savage foreigners, on the other hand, were
things which provided both thrills up the spine, and, indirectly, the reassurance
that a stuffy drawing-room was not a bad place to be on a cold night. The exotic
in Holmes is thus the paradoxical means by which the familiar is reinforced, as
reason, good manners, the strong arm of the law and a sense of middle-class
entitlement vanquish the ‘foreign’ trouble. To quote the great detective himself:
‘There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of
life, [but] our duty is to unravel it’ (Conan Doyle, 1987, p. 34).
Today we are less likely to associate crime with exotic influences, as these
were understood in Victorian England, being more inclined to the view that
violence in society is evidence of a failure in society itself. Crime may inspire
fear and pity, but this is an intimate fear, deriving from the sense that dis-ease is
born of common failings and obsessions. The influence of Freudian theories of
the id and the unconscious has contributed to this altered perception of
Otherness. The contradictory tensions between familiar and foreign in Conan
Doyle collapse neatly into each other, achieving a stable equilibrium as the
familiar, qualified by its brush with the foreign, provides resolution. Latter-day
interpretations tend to be based on a less stable tension where both terms, like
the strategy most famously adopted by Derrida in his essay on différance,
‘contaminate’ each other, become each other, and lose their sense of integrity.
Our fantasy, therefore, is the envisaging of a world where comforting distinctions
can be maintained. And if Conan Doyle’s depiction of the foreign no longer has
credibility, the drab but rational world of Victorian London seems to us as
delightful as a plate of buttered toast.
There is every reason to believe that Bourland’s French readership contem-
plates the plate of buttered toast arranged invitingly on a fireside table with the
same enjoyment as English readers of the genre. Evidence for this assumption
may be found in one of the most alluring fireside books on the world of Agatha
Christie currently in print. In the Footsteps of Agatha Christie (1997)7 is by French-
man, François Rivière, himself a crime writer, and a great admirer of Christie’s
works. The work is an unashamed wallowing in the gentle prettiness of the
English landscape that so often featured in her novels, and of those comfort-
able domestic interiors which, as in Conan Doyle, provide the perfect foil to
the (grisly and mysterious) corpse. Rivière’s text about her life and works is lav-
ishly illustrated: two of the full-page photographs by Jean-Bernard Naudin are
particularly exemplary of the comforting qualities of the classic English detec-
tive tale that Bourland has attempted to imitate for his French readers, as
exemplified by a photograph of a breakfast tray on an elegant escritoire at the
Osborne Hotel (Rivière, 1997, p. 37). The view outside is of the vast blue sea.
The view inside settles on the prospect of tea in a fine china cup, a plate of
biscuits, a carelessly folded linen napkin and impeccably polished silver.
Harking back once more to Derrida, it would appear that we are very far from
thinking postmodern difference ‘without nostalgia’, as Derrida puts it at the
end of his essay. The form of detective fiction examined here is nostalgic to the
core. The use of pastiche rather than parody, and so of laughter rather than
moral lessons, entertaining mimicry rather than satire, suggests that we have
not lost our sense of humour when faced with our own less stable views of
foreign and familiar. Comfortable apparitions of the familiar, however, such as
those which underwrite the fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle, are as addictive as
the white powder Holmes reaches for at the close of a case. We, like the readers
of Sherlock Holmes, need our literary escapes.
Notes
1
James Knowlson notes in his biography of Beckett, Damned to Fame, that Beckett
liked to relax after rehearsals of his works or long hours of arduous translation,
by reading ‘thrillers by Agatha Christie, Edgar Wallace, Erle Stanley Gardner and
Rex Stout’, and that he ‘devoured’ all Christie’s works, reading them in French
and in English (Knowlson, 1996, p. 553, p. 390). The term ‘maggoty with insecuri-
ties’ comes from Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces ([1996], 2009, p. 132). It applies
perfectly to Beckett’s characters and his narrative landscape.
2
All translations are mine, unless otherwise indicated.
3
The Sign of Four was first published in 1890 in Lippincott’s Magazine.
4
The difficulty with love interests is that if they are consummated and become at all
settled, they create a form of closure that is often detrimental to the development
of the plot as mystery (and the kind of closure usually, but not always, reserved for
the final pages). Dorothy Sayers and Margery Allingham were said, by Allingham,
to have had their first really friendly conversation when comparing notes about
the irritating problems attendant on a serial sleuth’s falling in love. Sayers sub-
titled her Busman’s Honeymoon (1937), in which her Lord Peter Wimsey is finally
married to Harriet Vane, a ‘Love story with Detective Interruptions’. Spielberg
toyed with the idea of an enamoured youthful Sherlock Holmes in his 1985 film
Young Sherlock Holmes, as a way of ‘explaining’ the character’s adult distaste for
intimate involvement with the female sex. The long and short of it would appear
to be, quite simply, that marriage interferes with neat plotting – unless you can
conjure up a nice, comfortable spouse (like Maigret’s wife in Simenon) who never
interrupts, and never interferes in plots.
5
In 2005, what were said to be tissue fragments from a Tyrannosaurus rex were found
in sandstone in Montana, USA. See http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7285683/
ns/technology_and_science-science/ .
6
See the aforementioned Young Sherlock Holmes and, more recently, Guy Ritchie’s
2008 Holmes movie and its 2011 sequel Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.
7
The French original, Les Promenades d’Agatha Christie, was first published in 1995 by
the Société Nouvelle des Éditions du Chêne, Hachette Livre.
150
Part Three
When Evil Walks Abroad –

Towards a Politics of Otherness
152
Chapter 12
‘The Meanest Devil of the Pit’: British

Representations of the German Character in
Edwardian Juvenile Spy Fiction, 1900–14
Andrew Francis
The decade and a half prior to the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 witnessed
one of the most fascinating eras in British crime fiction. In this period, authors
and publishers helped alter the perception of the underhand, sinister foreigner
traditionally considered French or Russian, to one who displayed the cultural,
linguistic and militaristic attributes of a German. In much the same way that
newspapers informed and educated the wider reading public on European
developments, and their implications for the British people prior to 1914, so
books, short stories and juvenile magazines targeted British and imperial youth
across the socio-economic spectrum. In keeping with the deterioration in
Anglo-German relations, particularly in the latter years of King Edward VII’s
reign (1901–10), stories focusing on Germans as despicable, perfidious spies,
plotting Britain’s downfall, became more prevalent.
Along with newspapers and adult fiction, juvenile books and periodicals
contributed to a growing Edwardian literature promoting military preparedness
on the one hand, and a developing suspicion of the German character on the
other. As many stories were published in a weekly format, they were able to
respond to, and comment on, a rapidly changing international situation. The
reception of this literature in the years before the war was widespread. Not only
did it sell well in Britain, but publishers issued editions specifically for the
dominions with the intention of fostering an imperial brotherhood of readers
who would come together in a wider appreciation of British racial and cultural
superiority, and a mutual suspicion of all things ‘foreign’. As tensions between
Britain and Germany increased and war became more likely, military
preparedness among the Empire’s youth became a rallying call within juvenile
magazines.
Literature of this period demonstrated a fundamental shift not only in the
traditions of juvenile literature, but also in the attitudes of Britons towards their
continental neighbours. France, Britain’s traditional foe, had been replaced
with a new, more dynamic and dangerous threat – Germany. (Eby, 1988, 11)1
German characters in stories were portrayed as humourless, militaristic and

bullying, in direct contrast to Britons who were viewed as honourable and just
(Pulbrook, 27 January 1906, pp. 266–7). Germans were often portrayed as spies
posing as bakers, butchers and waiters seeking to overthrow the British state
from within. It was such deceitful tactics that set them apart from their British
counterparts. Interestingly, these professions became synonymous with Germans
in the Edwardian era, so much so, that upon the outbreak of the Great War,
Germans working in these industries became targets of anti-alien riots within
Britain and the dominions (Francis, 2006, pp. 256–7).2
The Background
The South African War provided the catalyst for the rise of Anglo-German
antagonism in the twentieth century. German protests against British action in
Southern Africa, combined with Kaiser Wilhelm II’s tacit support of Paul
Kruger’s Republican government, led the British government to view Germany
as a dangerous European and imperial threat. The war, fought between 1899
and 1902, exposed Britain’s unpreparedness for combat and its military
weaknesses. Politicians, military commanders and social commentators
regarded this as symptomatic of a wider malaise evident in British political,
economic, social and cultural life throughout the late Victorian and Edwardian
periods.
Politically, British governments were facing greater domestic threats posed
by the rapid growth of the labour movement. Suffrage campaigners also
adopted more radical methods in pushing for women’s electoral rights. In 1911,
European anarchism was brought to London’s streets with the Sidney Street
siege in the East End borough of Stepney. The siege, which was personally
overseen by the Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, ended with the deaths of
three suspected Latvian revolutionary jewel thieves and three policemen,
gunned down in the preceding raid (Wilson, 2006, p. 122). The case also
reignited public debate on Britain’s immigration laws: the late Victorian and
Edwardian periods witnessed a significant increase in the numbers of Germans
and Russians arriving in Britain. The 1905 Aliens Act, which had been intro
duced almost certainly in response to the huge influx of Jewish immigrants
fleeing Czarist Russia, granted the government powers to prevent ‘undesirables’
from entering Britain. Their presence, as we shall see, was the cause of
considerable tension in London and formed the basis for many spy fiction
novels.
Fear and suspicion of foreigners – in particular, Germans – thus became
increasingly common features of stories appearing in the early 1900s (Stafford,
1981, p. 495). In 1903, Erskine Childers wrote The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of
Secret Service, considered Britain’s most popular spy story of the pre-war era.
‘The Meanest Devil of the Pit’ 155
The story involves a Foreign Office employee and a friend uncovering a

German naval plan to invade Britain. They manage to expose the plot and, with
the assistance of a heavy fog and some smart manoeuvring through the coastal
sandbanks, make good their escape back to Britain.
David Stafford has argued that Riddle of the Sands marked the start of the
Edwardian spy story:
From then on, Germanophobia was a central feature of the British spy novel,
feeding upon and fuelling popular hatred of Germany in particular and
foreigners resident in Britain (‘aliens’) in general; the most conspicuous
of those happened also to be Germans, both Gentiles and Jews. (Stafford,
p. 498)
Riddle of the Sands also contributed to the growing political and public debate
that Britain was ill-prepared for an invasion from the continent. The book,
which contained maps and charts of the North Sea coastline, allowing the
reader to track the action, sparked keen public debate and led to a reassessment
of Britain’s naval defences (Childers, 1903).
Britain’s most influential agitator for military preparedness was Alfred
Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe. Not only did he count The Times and the Daily
Mail among the newspapers he owned, but he was also the proprietor of the
Amalgamated Press, which published a number of Edwardian boys’ and girls’
story papers. Throughout the Edwardian period, regular editorials in The Times
pushed for increased naval expenditure while also warning of advances made
by Germany in its naval programme (29 January 1910, p. 9; 22 January 1914,
p. 7). In 1906, the Daily Mail serialized William Le Queux’s The Invasion of 1910,
a fictional account of an invasion of England’s south coast. Though Northcliffe
agreed with the tenor of the story, he also had an eye on profits and insisted the
invasion route be changed to incorporate towns in which his newspaper sales
needed boosting. That Lord Roberts, president of the National Service League
and a former senior military commander, was involved in the book’s structure,
is testament to how much importance Northcliffe placed on the supposed
enemy threat (Parker, 1987, p. 126).
Aside from external invasion plans, the other key theme of the time was the
threat posed by foreign immigrants. Walter Wood’s The Enemy in Our Midst,
published in 1906, describes a conspiracy by bogus German immigrants to take
over London. Giving full vent to the anti-alien tenor of the story, Wood claimed
that: ‘Soho was riddled with them. There, as in Stepney, entire streets were held
by aliens’ (Seed, 2003, p. 117). In E. Phillips Oppenheim’s The Secret (also
known as The Great Secret), published in 1908, the hero observes a crowd of East
End aliens: ‘This is what comes of making London the asylum of all the foreign
scum of the earth . . . half a million and more of scum eating their way into the
entrails of this great city of ours’ (Stafford, p. 499). Stafford notes that The Secret
presents the reader ‘with the spectre of a German invasion plan central to
whose success was the operation of a German espionage ring in Britain. German
waiters in London forms its core, and its headquarters are a German restaurant
in Soho’ (pp. 502–3).
Juvenile Literature Against the Enemy

Juvenile literature, especially in the forms of story papers and short novels was,
in the main, less direct in expressing its attitudes towards foreigners. It was,
however, equally important in establishing in readers’ minds the belief that
British racial, social and cultural superiority was under threat. Foreign powers,
with the use of sinister tactics and methods, were plotting the downfall of the
British state, both from within and from across the North Sea. To cement this
image, authors and publishers created ambiguous foreign agents who, as war
drew ever closer, developed increasingly Germanic traits, such as style of speech,
military dress, Kaiser-like facial hair and a tendency to frequent demonic
outbursts denouncing the British government, military and people.
Story papers were the principal source of entertainment for boys between the
mid-Victorian era and the Second World War. ‘Penny dreadfuls’ traditionally
provided the main repository for foreigner and invasion-scare stories. However,
these staples of the literate working class came under pressure from a raft of
magazines and journals aimed specifically at children, with the intention of
providing reading material of greater literary worth. For example, among the
many ‘penny weeklies’ established for the youth market, were Union Jack (1880),
Comic Cuts (1890), Chums (1892), Captain (1899), Boys’ Herald (1903), Gem
(1907) and Dreadnought (1912) (MacKenzie, 1984, p. 204).
Boys’ story papers managed to attract the talents of some of the foremost
writers of their day: Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne and George Alfred Henty
all wrote for Boy’s Own Paper, while Henty, Fenimore Cooper and Sax Rohmer –
the creator of Fu Manchu – were regular contributors to Chums. Given the high
quality of authorship, it is unsurprising that great importance was placed on
their ability to inform and educate their devoted readers. John MacKenzie has
noted that juvenile magazines ‘acted as a barometer of international affairs,
responding at once to the high pressure of war and invasion scares’. He
continued: ‘Fantasies of invasions by the French, Russians or Germans haunted
their pages’ (pp. 204–5). As a result, MacKenzie observes that:
[a] strongly xenophobic strain infected the detective story craze which bur-
geoned in the same period. The villains thwarted by Sexton Blake, Nelson
Lee, and others, were invariably foreign, their villainy underlined by evil
sounding names, strange accents, and implied racial disabilities. (MacKenzie,
p. 205)
There was in the Edwardian period a discernible shift in the tone of many
juvenile magazines within Britain and the dominions. The staples of travel,
quest and adventure remained, but they were equalled by tales of male
comradeship, heroism and courage in the face of danger. Plots in these stories
followed a profoundly moral pattern: evil, well-armed Germans, intent on the
subjugation of Britain and her dominions by foul means, were defeated at the
eleventh hour by a brave but ill-prepared Briton who employed all the virtues
of amateurism instilled during his days at public school.
This more urgent tone, as displayed in Boy’s Own Paper and Chums, came at a
time when Anglo-German relations were deteriorating, and discussions at
parliamentary level were considering Britain’s susceptibility, raised by French
aviator Louis Blériot’s flight across the English Channel in July 1909. The
Religious Tract Society, like Northcliffe’s Amalgamated Press, became
increasingly aware that Britain and the Empire’s youth needed to be kept
informed of geo-political developments. Norman Leigh’s ’Aeroplanes and how
they fly’, clearly set out the Boy’s Own Paper’s stance regarding powered flight
and the government’s perceived inertia on the matter:
It is humiliating to us as a nation that apparently so little has been done in

England. It is difficult to believe that we have no men equal to the French and
American aviators who have drawn the attention of the whole world; rather
would we have it that the English are averse to spending money on undertak-
ings which show no sign of profit. When the production of aeroplanes becomes
a commercial proposition, then we may expect to see the British machines in
the forefront. That time is not yet. (Leigh, 26 February 1910, pp. 346–7)
This belief in informing Britain’s youth of significant technological develop

ments and the movements of foreign nations had already been established in
Jack Maitland’s 1906 article, ‘Facts about the German Navy’. Maitland’s article,
published in the Boy’s Own Paper, stated that each man in the navy ‘must wear a
moustache (trimmed like the Kaiser’s)’. Maitland maintained that the German
navy was not yet half the size it intended to be and that German officers, ‘once
attaining a proficiency in English, were allowed a leave of absence of several
months and additional pay to spend time in England’, with the intention of
collecting ‘any information they can’. ‘Of course’, it continued, ‘every facility is
given these gentlemen to study our dockyards’ (6 October 1906, p. 14). The
clear moral of this piece was that Germans could not be trusted and had ulterior
motives while in England.
Harry Collingwood’s ‘The New Torpedo: A Story of Up-to-Date Piracy’, builds
on Maitland’s theory that Germans were occupying important posts within
British military installations (Australian Boys’ Annual, 1911, pp. 26–36). James
Mountford, otherwise known as Kropp, is a German agent who, upon leaving
service at the Woolwich Arsenal, attempts to find a position at a torpedo depot
in Weymouth, on England’s south coast. Kropp, handled in England by Captain

Hermann Schulz – a German spymaster with impeccable English – and Baron
von Bergmann – head of the German naval department – sets about his task to
steal a new type of torpedo designed by Engineer-Commander, George Seymour
Huntley (p. 26).
What follows is a story of German underhandedness on the high seas.
Huntley’s torpedo is undergoing final tests before being utilized by the navy
when it mysteriously disappears. He deduces that the torpedo has been
magnetized to the hull of a British vessel lying out in open water. Believing that
the vessel provides no danger to secrecy – despite naval testing going on –
Huntley boards the craft and discovers it is indeed a British vessel, but one that
has been seized by a German crew. When the crew realize their plan has been
foiled, they release the torpedo back into British hands and prepare to suffer
the consequences. Watching these proceedings from a submarine at safe
distance is a shadowy figure, possibly the Baron, who, realizing that Schulz has
been arrested, submerges and sets course to return to Kiel in Germany, no
doubt to plot his next attack on Britain (p. 36).
Collingwood’s tale built upon increasingly common fears and anxieties that
Germans were ready to invade Britain at any moment, adding to the distrust
already felt towards Germans resident in Britain (Panayi, 1991, pp. 32–41). In
terms of its martial implications, it reinforced the idea that naval defences were
crucial to British security, especially in light of Blériot’s successful crossing of
the Channel, which showed the potential to undermine Britain’s coastal
defences and her naval supremacy (Owen, 1986, p. 127).3 These stories were a
way of justifying what was spent and where, and kept the threat enemy powers
were likely to pose in the public arena.
Stories located in schools presented opportunities for authors to introduce
military themes that involved youngsters, while also accentuating the differences
between British and German boys. In ‘The German Schoolboy’ (1906), Ernest
Pulbrook argued that British boys were mischievous yet honest, while German
boys were regarded as humourless and sly; a result, so Pulbrook suggested, of a
militaristic dominance over German society:
As soon as he enters school he comes under the almost military discipline

which hedges round the inhabitant of the Fatherland throughout his life.
There is very little esprit de corps among German boys and they are apt to
be sneaks. In fact in many ways their conduct would meet with the scorn of a
healthy British boy. There is practically none of that hearty, healthy mischief
which so plagues the life of the schoolmaster at home. (Pulbrook, pp. 266–7)
This all-consuming militarism was a key feature in the telling of many children’s
stories. While Pulbrook’s observations grossly exaggerated the martial
propensities of the German state and the dominance it had over Germany’s
youth, stories such as this nevertheless attempted to establish in the minds of

British readers the German potential for underhand activities in order to steal
a march on Britain, especially in the event of conflict between the two states.
The 3d Library Series
An equally important source for anti-German literature is the Boys’ Friend 3d

Library series, published by Northcliffe’s Amalgamated Press. Appearing
generally on a weekly basis, each issue was dedicated to one story, ranging from
historical melodrama to espionage novels. Germany’s quest for territorial
expansion, a need for a technological, tactical and strategic advantage over
Britain, and the plotting of Britain’s downfall from within, featured regularly.
David Goodwin’s ‘A Lancashire Lad’, published at the end of 1908, focuses
on the sabotage of a number of Lancashire cotton mills. John Barton, the owner
of one in the fictional city of Dunchester, receives a handwritten note informing
him that his mill is doomed. On learning more of the alleged culprit, Barton
states:
It is he who is wrecking British trade, ruining owners, and maiming

workmen. He is thought to be a German, who trades under the name of
Schneider . . . He has money, and wants more. He has power and wants more.
Any human being who stands in his light, from the wealthiest mill-owner to
the poorest working-boy, disappears out of his path by some strange means,
never to be seen again. (Goodwin, p. 11)
Dick Stearns and Tom Compton are the central characters of the tale. Discussing
the economic situation, Dick informs Tom that it is:
Germany that has got her knife into British commerce and one of the ugliest
shadows she has ever thrown across England is this man Schneider. He sits in
a room in that big building and throws out a web that spreads far and wide,
wrecking firms [so] that his own may take their place, entangling men’s lives
and goods, and he sits there brooding, his telephones and his secret agents
ready to his hand, and his great brain working silently. That web is beginning
to cover all Lancashire and Yorkshire. Soon, if not checked, it will cover all
Britain. That is why we call him the Spider. (p. 12)
The story concludes with Schneider taking his own life and Stearns and Comp-
ton hailed as heroes for averting a major national crisis. They are told that:
the shadow is lifted, Dunchester is a free city once more . . . Crime and treach-
ery and darkness are no longer masters, and the greatest criminal of the
c entury is dead . . . What a thousand pities a mighty brain like his should be

turned the wrong way! There was a kink in him that made him a devil when
he might have been an angel. (pp. 118–19)
Presumably, the ‘kink’ in Schneider’s character was that he was a German. A

number of Sexton Blake stories featured in the Boys’ Friend Library series which,
more often than not, adopted an anti-German bias. Blake was, alongside
Sherlock Holmes, Britain’s foremost fictional detective of the time. He first
appeared in the Halfpenny Marvel in December 1893, the same month that
Doyle, in The Strand magazine, killed off Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach
Falls. Blake, who, as Jeffrey Richards (1998) noted, has been disparagingly
referred to as the ‘poor-man’s Sherlock Holmes’, had an illustrious career
which lasted from the 1890s through to the late 1970s, with over 200 different
authors contributing Blake plotlines.4 Many of Blake’s Boys’ Friend Library stories
are set within Britain’s military installations or at the heart of government in
Whitehall, and they feature many instances where the professional criminal
activities of German agents are thwarted by Blake’s blend of elite school
amateurism and British resolve.
In E. J. Gannon’s ‘A Woolwich Arsenal Mystery: a Tale of Sexton Blake’ (1907),
a representative of a ‘foreign’ armaments manufacturer, Schwab, Rucker and
Guelch, calls on Alf Beaumont, a dependable employee of the Woolwich
Arsenal. It transpires that in his work, Alf has made modifications to the Gatling
gun, turning it into a more versatile weapon. The foreign representative offers
to pay Alf handsomely for his services, to which the loyal employee replies:
You must have reckoned that I’m a Britisher, or I wouldn’t be employed in

the Royal Arsenal. And any invention that I made was bound to be in connec-
tion with munitions of war. To sell it, therefore, to any other country before
offering it to my own War Office would be a dastard trick. Any nipper at
school knows that much. (Gannon, 27 October 1907, p. 5)5
At this the representative is thrown out of Alf’s house. A witness to this

remarkable scene is Sexton Blake himself, en route to visit a friend. When he
mentions the event to his friend Dr Phelps, he is told that Beaumont is ‘a
tremendously clever fellow with lots of character and a fine disposition. And if
he had got a good opening and a first-class education as a lad, he would make
a great name for himself’ ( p. 8). The point here is clear: Alf, despite a lack of
education – which presumably renders him free of ambition – is still imbued
with a British sense of loyalty and dignity; selling his product would undoubtedly
improve the lot of his family, but the notion of selling to Germany, a potential
enemy, is unthinkable.
The story concludes with Blake travelling to Berlin and revealing the fiendish
plot commissioned by German Foreign Ministry officials. In a theme played out
in other stories, Blake meets with Kaiser Wilhelm to explain these deceitful
actions, which are in contrast, of course, to Alf’s sense of loyalty and duty. The
Kaiser, a regular actor in Boys’ Friend Library stories, is suitably admonished and
apologizes on behalf of his nation before Blake sets sail for Blighty (p. 120).
E. S. Turner has noted that Blake enjoyed a curious relationship with Wilhelm:
Blake carried out secret work for the Kaiser and was so trusted that he was even
offered the post of Head of the German Secret Service (Turner, 1948, p. 130).
The Kaiser also features in another of the Boys’ Friend Library series, ‘The War-
Lord’, written by Detective Inspector Coles, a pseudonym of Ernest Sempill.
‘The War-Lord’ (1909), like so many other stories, is set against the backdrop of
deteriorating diplomatic relations between Britain and Germany. Two boy
detectives, Bob Dawson and Harry Fairfax, become suspicious of the activities
of Sir Hamil Brender, millionaire ship-owner and Member of Parliament. That
Brender is a German-born naturalized Briton is of interest to the boys, even
more so after he is seen associating with German Foreign Ministry officials. In a
war between Britain and Germany, his loyalty, they argue, would be open to
question and the land of his birth would take precedence.
While promoting himself as ‘the friend of labour, the upholder and the
champion of the working man, the staunch supporter of Radicalism’, Brender
plots Britain’s overthrow from within (Coles, p. 72). Being at the heart of
Government, Brender is in a position to act on behalf of Germany, and this he
does. His task is to lead the Cabinet in mobilizing the fleet towards Dover and
Portsmouth; once there it would provide targets for Zeppelins which would
destroy the Royal Navy in one well-executed raid. That the Kaiser is aware of
this fiendish plot is crucial to the account.
The story focuses on Brender’s devious character – that of a man who, despite
being granted the honour of British citizenship, in the light of war remains a
German. ‘Perhaps his chief claim to public notice’, the narrator argues:
was his fervent zeal in singing the praise of England’s might. According
to him, England was so great that she had no need of armies or fleets. All
she had to do was sit in the middle of an admiring world and twiddle her
thumbs. If people argued that Germany was arming and building ships for
war, Sir Hamil Brender, would smile expansively and exclaim, ‘Germany!
Why Germany loves England!’ and would speak unctuously on the text by the
hour. (Coles, p. 71)
After meeting personally with the Kaiser, the narrator notes:
Sir Hamil’s pale face flushed with pleasure. The man was consumed with
that kind of vanity that feeds on the smiles of the great. To be the friend of
princes, the confidant and counsellor of kings, he would have sold his soul
to the meanest devil of the pit. The atmosphere of royalty intoxicated him as
completely, enthrallingly, and maliciously as absinthe blinds its devotees, or

morphia enslaves its victims. (Coles, p. 103)
One of Brender’s sinister London-based allies, Count Furstog, a German

Embassy official, had already expressed his own delight on receiving confidential
British naval plans:
What a heavenly day! You have given us England! We will blow these pig-
headed islanders out of the seas, and make them soldiers on the Prussian
marches . . . what a glorious day! The Pax Britannica will go – be dead as the
Pax Romana. We will annex her – her and her colonies! What an empire!
Hail, Pax Germanica! Hail! (Coles, p. 52)
The abundance of exclamation marks in the text suggests an excitable, volatile

and emotional character at work, which contrasts with the British disposition:
calm, sanguine and not given to fanatical ranting. The moral of the tale is the
need for vigilance against all foreigners, regardless of naturalization and status
within society. The story makes clear that German plans to defeat Britain are
the result of a determined and lengthy campaign to establish in Britain spy
networks ready to seize power in an instant. It is noted that there are already
scores of German agents in London: ‘They have a central committee that meets
off the Tottenham Court Road, and a little army of waiters, hairdressers,
bandsmen, and all the scum that the German Ocean casts upon these shores’
(p. 34). As a consequence, the role of loyal Britons is to be vigilant at all times
and to report suspicious activities to the authorities. If it is possible for a German
agent to infiltrate the corridors of power, then it is certainly possible to establish
spy rings up and down the country.
In determining Brender’s character, the narrator argues that:
He was, in fact, a man prepared from a long date to achieve a certain task at a
certain hour . . . he had been picked out as a child, educated, equipped, and
launched by a scientific, patient, vigilant, Government to play just the part
he was playing, to cozen a weak, vacillating Government into the belief in
Germany’s friendship; to work himself into the councils of that Government;
and to provide to Germany at the destined hour the inside information that
would enable the country of his birth to strike out one swift, sure, fatal blow
at the very heart of the country of his adoption. (Coles, p. 72)
This passage also highlights an opinion that in the years prior to the war the
British government was indecisive concerning its attitude towards Germany.6
The reader is provided not only with a figure to despise for his treachery, but
also has brought to his or her attention the intransigence of the British state to
prepare itself and its people for a conflict which seemed imminent.
The story concludes with Brender’s suicide, the averting of war – for the time
being – and a highly moralistic epilogue. The necessary ingredients of British
amateurism and sense of fair play defeating a sophisticated, organized and
deceitful Germany are present; the Kaiser’s culpability merely adds to the weight
of condemnation the reader must feel:
Those in the know are aware that if there is one thing more than another cal-
culated to calm the martial and naval pretensions of certain impulsive spirits
at Potsdam [the Kaiser’s residence], it is the recollection that certain secret
archives in the British Foreign Office contain a remarkable plan of invasion
in the Kaiser’s own hand addressed to and endorsed by a felon and a suicide.
(Coles, p. 120)
Having the Kaiser as a central actor in these stories established in readers’

minds the pervasiveness of German underhandedness, from the lowly naval
rating to the nation’s monarch. No other German figure better encapsulated
the martial traditions of Germany than the Kaiser. He was never depicted, either
in photograph or cartoon, in civilian dress, but always resplendent in full
military regalia. To this degree, he personified the image of Prussian militarism
required by propagandists before and during the war through which the people
could vent their disdain.
Conclusion
The advent of the spy novel coincided with an increasing belief, in particular
within political and military circles, that Britain was experiencing a profound
spiritual, moral, economic, martial and social degeneration. Edwardian society
was characterized by debates on the decline of the national character, the rise
of militarism overseas and, as a consequence, strong lobbying for military
preparedness in the event of invasion. Britain’s alliances with Japan, France and
Russia brought her unavoidably closer to European affairs. The late Victorian
influx of Germans and Russians, predominantly to Britain’s large cities, created
an unjustified fear and suspicion that foreigners posing as waiters, bakers and
butchers were the advance guard of a foreign invasion plan. A perceived
national malaise, fear of invasion and rising immigration created the perfect
conditions for spy fiction and anti-foreign literature – both adult and juvenile –
to flourish. Increased calls for military preparedness and vigilance against
foreigners became common themes in novels, magazines and newspapers,
more so in those owned by Lord Northcliffe. His involvement in the editorial
direction of his newspaper titles suggests Northcliffe attempted to influence
British public opinion against Germany as much as his juvenile literature outlets
strove to reflect the same trend.
British secret agents were portrayed as gentlemanly amateurs, sparked into

action because of the insidious behaviour of foreign spies, who themselves were
often depicted as mercenaries, with no love of their own country, in the pay of
some foreign power intent on attacking Britain. In this alone there was a conflict
of values, something which, for the reader, immediately set apart Britons from
those on the continent. Spy fiction, for all ages, reflected British society’s
concerns, and therefore provides modern-day readers with an intriguing source
through which to examine the pre-Great War era.
While it is impossible to gauge the influence juvenile spy fiction had on
Britain’s youth, assumptions can be made. For almost a century, boys’ story
papers, in particular, were the established form of entertainment for millions of
children within Britain and the Empire. The vast array of titles meant that all
tastes were covered. Their ability to respond immediately to a deteriorating
European situation meant that such literature was a useful tool in informing
and preparing young minds for future conflict. Likewise, their increasingly
negative portrayal of Germans provides a unique source in understanding the
speed with which imperial societies mobilized against Germany in August 1914
and, to some degree, how anti-German sentiment was maintained throughout
four years of fighting.
Notes
1
Eby noted that between 1871 and 1914, British authors produced over sixty ‘inva-
sion of Britain’ narratives. Of these, Germany appeared as the chief protagonist
forty-one times, France eighteen, and Russia eight.
2
Also see Panayi (1991, pp. 223–58).
3
Also see Major B. Baden-Powell (27 February 1913, p. 6).
4
Jeffrey Richards, BBC radio talk, 1998 http://www.sextonblake.co.uk/
blakestory1.html.
5
The author is anonymous though ‘Blakiana: The Sexton Blake Resource’ cites
E. J. Gannon as the author. The Blakiana site also provides the date of publication
as this is not printed on any Boys’ Friend Library issues. http://www.sextonblake.
co.uk/index.html.
6
For an in-depth analysis of Victorian and Edwardian diplomatic relations between
these two states see Kennedy (1980) and Ramsden (2006).
Chapter 13
Reading Others: Foreigners and the Foreign

in Roberto Arlt’s Detective Fiction
Carolina Miranda
Roberto Arlt was born in Buenos Aires in 1900 and died in 1942. The son of
immigrants (German father and Italian mother), Arlt was to become a leading
and uniquely different novelist, dramatist and journalist not only in Argentina,
but also in all of Latin America. Critics such as Carlos Fuentes have considered
him one of the forerunners of the Latin American ‘boom’ (Fuentes, 1969,
p. 24). Nowadays, Arltian scholars and critics regard his work as presenting an
incisive portrait of his epoch, a widely admired œuvre that has secured the
author an undeniable place in Argentine literature.
Arlt’s first novel was the 1926 El juguete rabioso [Mad Toy]. In 1928, he began
writing his ‘Aguafuertes’ column, a series of newspaper articles on current
issues which appeared in El Mundo newspaper. His reputation was made with his
second novel, the 1929 Los siete locos [Seven Madmen], which was followed in
1931 by Los lanzallamas [The Flamethrowers], and in 1932 by El amor brujo [Love
Bewitched]. Arlt contributed to three of the most popular publications of his
time, El Mundo, El Hogar and Mundo Argentino, where his shorter fiction
appeared, and from 1932 he was also associated with an independent theatre
movement, Leónidas Barletta’s Teatro del Pueblo (1931–1943).
Arlt’s case is certainly an unusual one: he is primarily associated with
newspaper journalism, narrative prose and the theatre (particularly after the
1930s), while his short story production (mainly published in magazines) has
received little critical attention. At the beginning of the 1950s, when Raúl Larra
provided a useful reappraisal of the author in Roberto Arlt, el torturado (1950),
other critics began linking Arlt with other popular genres, particularly on the
basis of his ‘Aguafuertes’ series run in El Mundo newspaper from 1928 to 1942.
The popular genre of detective fiction has traditionally been associated with
England, France and the United States. Amelia Simpson has pointed out that
with only sporadic local production, the River Plate readership was consistently
exposed to foreign detective fiction in translation from the late nineteenth
century well into the 1930s (Simpson, 1990, p. 29). In Argentina, this continuing
influence could also be clearly observed in the 1940s when, with the endorsement
of Argentina’s intellectual elite, especially Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy
Casares, co-editors of the Séptimo Círculo collection,1 and Victoria Ocampo

(through her literary magazine Sur), the genre was transformed not only in
terms of popularity, but also, and perhaps more importantly, in terms of prestige.
After the Séptimo Círculo phenomenon, detective fiction in Argentina would no
longer be classed as literatura de kiosco [kiosk literature]. Throughout that
decade, and with the further support of the same people, the genre gained
respectability and acceptance, while promoting ‘truly foreign’ (mainly British)
detection methods, authors, locations, crimes, victims and criminals.
As the imported form promoted by the cultural elite, Argentine policial
[detective fiction] should thus bear clear marks of those ‘foreign’ historical and
cultural realities. But what happens when the socio-cultural setting against
which the genre is written is made up of a melting-pot of immigrants who, only
a few decades earlier, had transformed the identity of the country? This chapter
examines three stories by Roberto Arlt, taking particular account of their
contribution to a new Argentine policial literary tradition, against the backdrop
of the ethnographic phenomenon that the big wave of immigration had brought
about at the turn of the century.
With the exceptions of the short story collection El criador de gorilas [The
Gorilla Handler],2 and Adolfo Prieto’s prologue to Viaje terrible (Arlt’s 1941
novella [Terrible Voyage]), in which Prieto links Arlt to the fantastic, crime
writing and science fiction, very few critics seem to have paid any attention to
Arlt’s association with genres normally connected, in Argentina at least, with
ephemeral periodicals (Lafforgue and Rivera, 1997, p. 137). Most critics who
do, however, also mention that these are atypical stories. More recently, Sonia
Mattalia has discussed Arlt’s production in relation to his recurrent topoi of
misdemeanours, crime and criminals (Mattalia, 2008). But before we assess
Arlt’s place in relation to detective fiction, let us briefly outline the structural
changes Buenos Aires underwent as a result of the big influx of immigration in
the early 1900s. This is important because it is against the framework of a new
Buenos Aires, a new heteroglossic city, that Arlt was to forge his trenchant
style.
The Modern City: Urbanization, Immigrants,

Crime and Criminals
The idea that Argentina was an immense, unexplored, under-populated country
was a concept that had shaped national politics since at least the 1880s.
Ex-president, political philosopher and educator Domingo Faustino Sarmiento
(1811–1888) wrote in his 1845 autobiographical novel Facundo: civilización y
barbarie [Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism] that ‘el mal que aqueja a la
Argentina es la extensión’ [‘Argentina’s affliction is its size’].3 Likewise, in
Foreigners and the Foreign in Roberto Arlt’s Detective Fiction 167
Radiografía de la Pampa (1933) [A Radiography of the Pampas], Ezequiel

Martínez Estrada described Buenos Aires as ‘la cabeza de Goliat’ [‘the head of
Goliath’];4 the capital city where rich and poor crowded together represented
the head of a weak giant whose blood coagulated, unable to flow to the rest of
the immense and distant body. According to Horacio Vázquez-Rial, the idea
that the country was rather under-populated turned Argentina into one of the
major immigration destinations in the West, a situation that lasted at least half
a century and that led to the embracing of huge currents of migration, mainly
from Spain and Italy, but also from a considerable number of Eastern European
countries (Vázquez-Rial, 1996, pp. 21–8).5
With the advent of mass immigration the physiognomy of the country was
altered. Despite the intention of promoting rural residency levels, what
increased was urban habitation, especially in Buenos Aires and its conurbation.
In 1869, the population of Argentina was 1.7 million; by 1930, 6 million people
had entered the county (70 per cent of whom were men). Ernesto Goldar has
pointed out that the phenomenon of accelerated urbanization, combined with
the higher proportion of men, transformed not only the Argentine man into an
immigrant in his own country, but also the foreign immigrant into a character
disillusioned with his project of ‘hacerse la América’ [‘making it big in the
Americas’] (Goldar, 1996, p. 229). After the division created in the city by the
Argentine-born exodus towards the suburbs and the immigrants’ move to the
centre of Buenos Aires, prostitutes were recruited from Europe and the brothel
market was organized. It was in that context of destitution and prostitution,
petty crime and mafia networks that the popular archetypes of el malevo [the
ruffian] and la mina [the prostitute] proliferated. Established as stock figures in
Argentine popular culture, these archetypes of petty crooks were celebrated by
tango lyrics and in Borges’s writings. I agree with Mattalia’s claim that it was
Roberto Arlt who best staged misery and crime in his ‘Aguafuertes’ and short
stories of the 1920s and 1930s (Mattalia, 2008, p. 41).
It was not only in his ‘Aguafuertes’ that Arlt addressed topics dealing with the
consequences of urbanization, the cultural alienation of immigrants and the
crimes and criminals of the modern city. The recurrent themes of delinquency,
marginality, social misbehaviour and wrongdoing governed all of Arlt’s literary
production: from the illicit appropriation of cultural capital by Silvio Astier, the
protagonist of El juguete rabioso, and his gang (whose greatest crime was breaking
into the local library to steal books and sell them for profit), to political
conspiracy and a delirious plan to finance a revolution with a network of
brothels, as Erdosain and his accomplices plot in Los siete locos, the underworld
of the modern capital is always central to his preoccupations. Moral delinquency
is also recurrent in his work: characters in El amor brujo engage in betrayal and
duplicity in a novel that constitutes a critique of both the moral universe of the
middle class and its sentimental mythology.
Arlt and the Policial
To understand the phenomenon of detective fiction it is essential to bear in

mind that the rise of a newspaper (and magazine) industry is, together with the
emergence of a democratic state, the most crucial element in the development
of the genre. At the very least, such a genre could not have proliferated as it did
without such widespread and constant circulation. In fact, as Terry Hale has
highlighted, it is difficult to find an example of a culture in which subgenres
develop without the encouragement of the popular press: the English Gothic
novel, the sensation novel, the western and American science fiction were all
dependent on vast new markets which were ruthlessly exploited by innovative
publishing practices (Hale, 2006, pp. 371–81). Demographic changes are also
essential to this process since it is only when a new readership is economically
viable that publishers are offered the incentive to encourage, first of all, the
translation and then, later, the consumption of locally produced writing.
Argentina was not exempt from such phenomena. The massive demographic
changes brought about by the second big wave of immigration in the 1900s
completely transformed the whole country, including its capital. As regards the
popular press, as early as the mid-1910s, collections following the ‘dime novel’
style began flourishing in Argentina. Though appearing at irregular intervals,
mainly in the shape of juvenile publications in the style of Nick Carter and Buffalo
Bill (both US imports), these American-style magazines, which quickly became
popular with writers and readers, prefigured North American cultural
hegemony. But it was not until the 1930s, when a range of publishing houses
launched series inspired by the American ‘pulps’, that the genre began to really
establish itself.
In that respect, Arlt is a product of his epoch since, like most of his national
and international contemporaries in the field of detective fiction, he was
dependent for his livelihood on a flourishing popular press.6 As Beatriz Sarlo
has commented, Arlt is a modern writer who is at the very core of the
heterogeneous discourse of Buenos Aires (Sarlo, 1989, pp. 183–96). In fact, for
a writer such as Arlt to make a living, the periodical press provided a perfect
medium for his work. Indeed, it is crucial to remember that his career was really
forged through his relationship with various newspapers; but what was Arlt’s
contribution to Argentine detective fiction? (Miranda, 2010)
It is generally said that good crime writers are best remembered for their
detectives. As T. J. Binyon has pointed out ‘the character often overshadows and
becomes detached from the author’ (Binyon, 1990, p. 1). Unlike other
Argentine authors, Arlt did not develop a sleuth who appeared regularly in his
tales.7 Despite Arlt’s lack of a trademark detective, however, what we do find is
that he achieves a recurrent tone, attitude, set of values and class consciousness
that could be aligned, at different moments, with either of the two major
detective fiction schools.8
Arlt’s detective stories range, in fact, from texts which approximate to the
whodunit, at one end of the spectrum, to the hard-boiled school at the other.
Indeed, some of his detectives, or those acting in the capacity of volunteer
detectives (i.e. accidental or self-appointed), duplicate the roles of the more
renowned figures of the genre: Poe’s Chevalier C. August Dupin is emulated in
‘El resorte secreto’ [‘The Secret Spring’], ‘La venganza del mono’ [The Revenge
of the Monkey] or ‘El jorobadito’ [‘The Little Hunchback’]);9 Conan Doyle’s
Sherlock Holmes could be identified in ‘La pista de los dientes de oro’ [‘The
Clue of the Gold Teeth’] or ‘El incendiario’ [‘The Arsonist’]; Chandler’s private
eye Philip Marlowe is an influence in ‘Un argentino entre gangsters’ [‘An
Argentine among Gangsters’]; and even the modus operandi of Simenon’s
Commissaire Maigret is recreated in ‘El crimen casi perfecto’ [‘An Almost Perfect
Crime’]. Arlt’s detective stories, however, represent not only the innocuous
form of entertainment and the kind of intellectual puzzle that authors such as
Borges and Bioy Casares assemble in their Séptimo Círculo crime fiction collection,
but are also a vehicle for social protest, an instrument of ideological persuasion
and a framework within which to debate social and ethical problems.
Three stories will be analysed here: ‘Un argentino entre gangsters’ [‘An
Argentine among Gangsters’], ‘La pista de los dientes de oro’ [‘The Clue of the
Gold Teeth’] and ‘El misterio de los tres sobretodos’ [‘The Mystery of the Three
Coats’]. These stories present different types of foreigners and foreignness, but,
at the same time, each of them exposes and problematizes common Argentine
archetypes of the time.
‘Un argentino entre gangsters’, which could be subtitled ‘the porteño smart
aleck’s ingenuity triumphs abroad’,10 is a hard-boiled-inspired tale not only
because of the gangsters featured and the American setting, but also for the
way, à la Chandler, in which the atmosphere is created from the opening line:
‘Tony Berman descargó la ceniza de sucigarro en el piso encerado y
prosiguió . . . ’ (Arlt, 1996, p. 250)11 [‘The ashes of Tony Berman’s cigar landed
on the polished floor, and he continued . . . ’]. In this story, a gang of American
crooks (Tony Berman, a killer with a limp; Eddie Rosenthal, from Kentucky, the
black son of an excommunicated rabbi; and Frank Lombardo, whose violence
is notorious), kidnap Argentinian engineer Humberto Lacava (the top student
at the Engineering School of Wisconsin University). They want him to design a
roulette wheel to cheat in a casino; if Lacava refuses, they will have his family in
Argentina killed. If the roulette wheel passes as authentic, Lacava will receive
US$20,000. The gang locks him up in a room, where he assesses his chances of
surviving the ordeal. For him, the technical problem is essentially very easy to
solve, so he decides to cooperate and even toys with the idea of making money
with his invention.12 After describing the technicalities in great detail, Lacava
gets to work. We can see how Hollywood film noir has impacted on Arlt: the
setting, an American motel, is clearly foreign, the modus operandi and the
etiquette of the gang – they cook good food and have good manners but do not
hesitate to threaten or kill if circumstances demand it – emulates the stereotypical

mafia depicted in movies.13 A fortnight later, the rigged roulette wheel is ready
and the men bend over the table ready to test their scheme. They gaze in
admiration and greedy anticipation at the cheating machine as time and again
the ball falls into the number they call. Then, while all the men are still around
the table, all eyes still fixed in awe on the obedient ball, Lacava presses a hidden
switch and they are all electrocuted; needless to say, he seizes the money and
runs off.
As in most of his tales, Arlt’s own reading habits are reproduced, sometimes
almost forced into his narrative. Here, his self-taught background in mechanics,
learnt from DIY manuals, is shown, as the technical details for the assembly of
the manipulated roulette wheel are thoroughly explained.14 The fact that this
knowledge is self-taught suggests an Argentine, lower-middle class attitude;
indeed, a first generation of immigrants, wanting to be educated in order to
advance themselves. The twist in the story lies in the fact that, first, Arlt does not
reveal Lacava’s intention to cheat the gang, maintaining the suspense. Second,
we see a clever porteño headhunted by American gangsters. This is a reminder of
a national model of intelligence ‘for export’. Thus, in this story the formula
‘national hero outwits American crook’ celebrates the triumph of el ingenio
criollo [porteño ingenuity] over the foreign (American) oppressor.
‘La pista de los dientes de oro’, which could also be called ‘foreign-baddy-for-
a-good-cause meets sympathetic local’, begins with another hard-boiled, film-
noir-inspired account:
Lauro Spronzini se detiene frente al espejo. Con los dedos de la mano

izquierda mantiene levantado el labio superior, dejando al descubierto dos
dientes de oro. Entonces ejecuta una acción extraña; introduce en la boca los
dedos pulgar e índice de la mano derecha, aprieta la superficie de los dientes
metálicos y retira una película de oro. (Arlt, 1996, p. 234)
[Lauro Spronzini halts in front of the mirror. With the fingers of his left
hand he lifts his top lip, uncovering two gold teeth. And then he performs an
odd action; he puts his right hand thumb and index fingers into his mouth,
presses them against the surface of the teeth and removes a gold film.]
In another part of the city, and at the same moment, Ernesto Loggy, a Hotel
Planeta bellboy, knocks at the door of Doménico Salvato’s room. Ernesto has a
telegram for him, and as the Italian visitor has been seen going upstairs in the
company of another foreigner with a gold tooth, the bellboy is confident he will
be found there. Mr Salvato is indeed in his room: he has been tied to a chair
and hanged. The following morning, newspapers discuss ‘El enigma del bárbaro
crimen del diente de oro’ (Arlt, 1996, p. 235) [‘The mystery of the barbaric
gold tooth crime’] perpetrated by a foreigner with a gold tooth. Soon, the
police are overwhelmed by the many men with gold teeth who flock in voluntarily
to declare themselves innocent and confirm their alibis, while dentists’ reports
flood in. Everybody is confident that the ‘barbaric criminal’ will soon be caught.
Nevertheless, a month later the police are no nearer to finding the culprit than
they were the first day. ‘Sin embargo, una persona pudo haber hecho encarcelar
a Lauro Spronzini’ (Arlt, 1996, p. 237) [‘Yet, one person could have sent Lauro
Spronzini to jail’].
The following paragraph takes us back to Lauro Spronzini later on the day of
the crime, when he is suddenly struck by an acute toothache. Dentist Diana
Lucerna finds a sliver of gold touching the nerve of one of his teeth. Spronzini
is told to come back the following day to continue the treatment but he fails to
do so. Lucerna is sure Spronzini is the murderer, but for some reason she
cannot turn him in; instead, she pays him a visit. Contrasting with the picture of
the brutal foreigner painted in the newspapers, a calm Spronzini (we now know
he is from Brindisi, Italy) tells his dramatic story: he was avenging his sister,
whose negligent former husband, having left her to die of tuberculosis, later
escaped to Argentina. Moved by the need to retaliate (‘porque la ley no castiga
ciertos crímenes’ (Arlt, 1996, p. 240) [‘because certain crimes are never
punished by law’]), Spronzini has followed his ex-brother-in-law to Buenos
Aires to settle matters with ‘el único culpable de aquel tremendo desastre’ (Arlt,
1996, p. 340) [‘the sole culprit of that dreadful tragedy’]. Possibly driven by
desire (Spronzini promises to return to her surgery), but perhaps also partly
convinced that it was an act of justice, Lucerna is persuaded by Spronzini’s
account and does not turn him in.
‘El misterio de los tres sobretodos’, or ‘the immigrant-turned-Scrooge
against an industrious working class’, takes us back to Buenos Aires.15 The story
is set in Casa Xenius, a small department store, where a number of items start
disappearing inexplicably. First, a belt, a few pesos from a drawer and some
fabric vanish into thin air. Then, it is twenty hats and later three coats, all of
which brings tension to the whole shop as every member of staff becomes a
suspect in the eyes of the penny-pinching boss. The fact that the staff must
collectively pay for the cost of whatever items are stolen reflects a stereotypical
miserliness associated, as will be discussed later, with certain foreign shop-
owners in particular. Exploiting once again the formula of the locked-room
mystery patented by Poe, this case defies logic: all windows are high enough to
prevent anybody climbing in, and they also have iron bars; the shop has good
security all night long; and, as all employees are searched on their way out,
nobody could have left the building with something the size of three coats
without being found out. The suspicious boss applies this search procedure
routinely, demonstrating his meanness. Ernestina, a conscientious young
woman whose twelve pesos the mysterious thief has taken, is the model worker
who studies English, French and stenography after work (again the idea of self-
improvement through education). What triggers Ernestina’s urge to solve
these ‘crimes’ is, on the one hand, the degradation they are exposed to, for as
long as the mysterious thief keeps stealing they will all be suspects. They also
have to pay for the stolen items, which is unfair as they are all very honest
people. On the other hand, and perhaps more importantly, what really bothers
Ernestina is the fact that the thief is immoral enough to steal from his or her
co-workers: Ernestina has noticed that the pastries she leaves in her drawer
overnight also disappear. Industrious as she is, she sets out to catch the thief
and clear her name, along with those of her peers. Thus, she leaves a poisoned
croissant in her drawer overnight (taking the potassium cyanide from her
brother’s home darkroom). The following day she hears the news: it was the
night watchman, who, people believe, committed suicide. Some ties were found
in his hollow wooden leg and the rest of the stolen items were in his pensión
room.16 That is why the police do not investigate how the poisoned croissant
ended up in his hands. Peace is finally restored in the shop and Ernestina
celebrates the news with the rest of the employees.
In this story both foreigners and the foreign are exposed. First, the name of
the small department store is ‘Xenius’, which evokes the Greek word ‘xenos’
meaning ‘stranger’, ‘foreign’ or ‘guest’: thus the most overt sign of Otherness
is embodied in the shop-owner. Although ethnicity is not directly mentioned,
an Argentine reader will most likely identify him as a Jew, because the textile
trade is historically associated with the porteño Jew. Nowadays, the great majority
of the textile wholesale and retail shops concentrated in Buenos Aires’ barrio
Once [Once Quarter] are still run by Jews. Furthermore, Arlt’s readers would be
quick to relate the cruel meanness of this boss to that of the Italian couple who
own the second-hand bookshop where Silvio Astier, protagonist of El jueguete
rabioso, briefly works. In that novel, the alienated protagonist also takes social
justice into his own hands after months of mistreatment and exploitation by his
miserly masters when he sets fire to the shop and vanishes into the metropolis.
Not surprisingly, since both are, after all, exercising social justice, neither
Ernestina nor Silvio is ever caught.
The other more covert, albeit more incisive, comment made here by Arlt is
marked by the fact that the perpetrator of these petty crimes is physically
different.17 In this respect, Christina Civantos has pointed out that:
[n]ot only was Arlt himself marked by a surname that is virtually unpro-
nounceable in Spanish and the linguistic effects of having been raised in
a non-Spanish-speaking household, but in the period of most concentrated
anti-immigrant sentiment, la Década Infame, the question of how the immi-
grant body was marked – how positivist biology could help in ferreting out
the foreign or try to meld it into a homogenous whole – was a major concern
in Argentina. (Civantos, 2006, p. 99)
Thus, the hollow wooden leg here not only serves as a clever trick for defying
the locked-room mystery, but is also as a mark of Otherness. Indeed, as Ana
Maria Zubieta has suggested, Arlt made many of his characters strange, or
deformed, their physical irregularity a way of commenting upon the failed
liberal project of immigration (Zubieta, 1987, p. 113).
While respecting general conventions of detective fiction, Arlt fine-tunes
these rules in order to fit his stories to the reality of his readership, moving away
particularly from the whodunit genre’s association with the English upper class,
its affluent rural locations, fine clothes and the scope of its criminal activities.
Accordingly, instead of dealing with inheritances of thousands of pesos,
millionaire plots set in country houses or the double-barrelled surnames,
reputations and fortunes of men and women with great social prestige, Arlt
introduces everyday petty thefts, misdemeanours and provincial delinquency
which, although they take place in another social universe, are just as devastating
to the common people. At the same time, Arlt’s exploitation of detective
fiction’s conventions also makes use of stereotypes of class, nationality and
trade, codified in a way that the reader of the time would, without a doubt, have
deciphered. In a way, Arlt deglamourizes a foreign model in favour of a ‘more
immigrant’, ‘more working class’ set of values.
Conclusion
A close reading of Arlt’s stories, I argue, provides the basis of a social history of
the period as Arlt further ‘domesticates’18 the conventions of a genre which
authoritative writers such as Borges and Bioy Casares had previously turned
into intellectual games for the diletanti. Part of Arlt’s mechanism of domesticating
a popular genre for local consumption lies in his ability to mirror the reality of
his readership by reflecting the cultural heteroglossia of the city of Buenos
Aires. This is so not only because the universe of Arlt’s characters replicates the
mixture of nationalities, backgrounds and trades of the epoch, but also, and
particularly, because ‘[l]as lecturas arltianas, que van desde el folletín hasta la
literatura “alta”, reflejan la situación literaria de Buenos Aires en los años veinte’
(Gnutzmann, 2004, p. 147) [‘Arlt’s reading habits, which ranged from serial
novels to “highbrow” literature, mirror the literary condition of Buenos Aires in
the 1930s’]. In this respect, we see Arlt’s as a double appropriation of cultural
capital. On the one hand, he makes use of foreign literatures; on the other, he
also brings about a domestication of national literatures for social consumption.
Arlt’s personal twist is the domestication of the models to accommodate his
readership not only geographically but also, and mainly, socio-culturally.
The cultural power of his stories resides in the fact that they reflect the
ideology, values and mores of the lower middle class without patronizing his
readership, the newly literate – a readership to which he himself belonged. In
this respect, the author replicates the heterogeneous society of 1920s and 1930s
Buenos Aires, and the anxieties the liberal project of immigration posed. Read
against this background of intense awareness of what is foreign and what is

Argentinean, Arlt’s physically, socially and linguistically marginal characters can
be read as ‘an absurdly grotesque rendering of the immigrant’. (Ciavantos,
2006, p. 99)
Finally, Arlt’s particular sensitivity to his social and historical setting allows
him, perhaps unconsciously, but better than any other writer of his generation,
to mediate between the historical then-and-there and his natural audience
(González, 1996, pp. 13–14). His contribution to Argentine detective fiction
lies in the fact that his stories not only manage to translate ‘esa cara miserable
de la próspera Buenos Aires’ (Mattalia, p. 98), [‘that miserable side of the
prosperous Buenos Aires’], but that they also advocate the social ethics of a
rising working class, indeed presenting Buenos Aires’s crimes, foreignness and
foreigners to his readers as no other author of his era did.
Notes
1
The first issue of the Séptimo Círculo collection came out in 1945: it was Nicholas
Blake’s The Beast Must Die (1938), translated as La bestia debe morir by J. R. Wilcock.
The collection published 366 novels (reissued by Planeta in 2003); the last title
came out in April 1983.
2
El criador de gorilas is a compilation of short stories published in various magazines
towards the end of the 1930s.
3
All translations, unless noted, are my own. In Facundo (named after the protago-
nist-narrator Juan Facundo Quiroga), Sarmiento describes the physical and cul-
tural aspects of Argentina in a manner resembling a factual study, examining
political, historical and educational ideologies.
4
In his essay Martínez Estrada discusses the ‘monstrosity’ that modernization
brought about in Buenos Aires, something the author believes did not happen in
other European cities undergoing the same process.
5
See also Sagrera, 1976.
6
This was also the case for Gaston Leroux and Georges Simenon.
7
Borges’s and Bioy Casares’s socio-politically charged version of the armchair
detective, Isidro Parodi, is one example of a recognizable Argentine sleuth (Seis
problemas para don Isidro Parodi (1942) [Six Problems for Isidro Parodi], and Cróni-
cas de Bustos Domecq (1967) [Chronicles of Bustos Domecq]. Another example is
Eduardo Castellani (1899–1981), who follows in the tradition of G. K. Chester-
ton’s series featuring Father Brown. Castellani’s Father Metri (1938) and Father
Ducadelia stories (1959) concern maverick priest-detectives, both operating
mainly in the province of Chaco in the North of Argentina.
8
I refer here to the subgenres of the British whodunit and the American hard-
boiled, which in broad terms sit at opposite sides of the spectrum. The whodunit
is mainly associated with rural England in the 1920s. The hard-boiled tradition,
on the other hand, features a strong element of urban realism (in cities like Los
Angeles, Chicago, New York) and middle-class voyeurism of the ‘low life’. For
a thorough history of the genre, particularly strong on British and American

perspectives, see Simons (1995) and Watson (1971).
9
All published in the magazine El Hogar in 1937.
10
Literally, porteño means ‘from the port’. Nowadays it is used to refer to people
from Buenos Aires (depending on the tone, it can be used pejoratively). The
figure of the avivado porteño, a petty delinquent who suddenly moves out of his
barrio (neighbourhood) leaving behind his unpaid debts (or muertos [corpses]),
became a typical character in popular literature.
11
All quotes are from Arlt (1996).
12
The topos of making a living as an inventor is also recurrent in Arlt’œuvre. Virtu-
ally all his main characters have a frustrated inventor inside, mainly frustrated by
economic reasons. In Los siete locos, for instance, the protagonist works exhaus-
tively to master a copper rose that will never wither. (Arlt himself worked on a
formula for tights that, treated with rubber, would never run). See Piglia (1974)
and Saítta (1992).
13
As a popular phenomenon, the cinema becomes one of Arlt’s latest preoccu-
pations in his columns published under the ‘Espectáculos’ [‘Entertainment’]
section of El Mundo newspaper. See Gallo (1997).
14
See also Sarlo (1992).
15
Although not specifically mentioned, as will be explained later, this story is
unequivocally set in Buenos Aires.
16
The fact that the night watchman lives in a cheap, rented room in a pension
(boarding-house with no meals provided), reinforces his low socio-economic
status. Interestingly, Vázquez-Rial (1996b) has pointed out that it was not uncom-
mon for pensiones to be owned by richer immigrants who did not hesitate to take
advantage of their fellow countrymen.
17
Grotesqueness and physical deformity abound in Arlt’s work, particularly in
the stories collected in El criador de gorilas. See Gnutzmann (1984), and Zubieta
(1987).
18
Venuti (1995, pp. 12–27) divides translation strategies into two opposing poles,
which he calls ‘foreignization’ and ‘domestication’, according to the degree of
proximity between ST and TT (source and target text). Here, the term is used in
the sense of ‘appropriation of conventions of the genre’ to fit Arlt’s aesthetics and
readership.
Chapter 14
Who is the Foreigner? The Representation

of the Migrant in Contemporary Italian
Crime Fiction
Barbara Pezzotti
The urge to define a national identity in the face of the growing presence of
foreign migrants is a highly topical subject in Italy. The reason is twofold: first,
Italy is a country where the phenomenon of foreign migration is recent; and
second, and more importantly, over the course of Italy’s troubled history, the
debate on so-called ‘Italianness’ has never been satisfactorily addressed
(Cento Bull, 2000, pp. 259–76). Mainstream contemporary literature written
by native Italians has very seldom tackled the topic of foreign immigration
(Luperini, 1999, p. 173). By contrast, a new and very successful wave of crime
fiction published in the 1990s has addressed this important issue, reflecting
the political and social nature of much Italian crime writing (Petronio, 2000,
p. 118).
In this chapter, I argue that in the genre the encounter with the Other
brings out the still divided fabric of Italian society. This is evident in a general
trend that separates writers who set their stories in the North of Italy and those
who set them in the South: the former tend to see foreign immigration as
‘invasion’ or ‘siege’, while the latter see a less problematic cohabitation between
Italians and foreigners, highlighting a common history and culture among
Mediterranean countries. Thus the investigation into the physiognomy of
contemporary multi-ethnic Italy mirrors the ambiguities of an imposed national
identity and exposes the weaknesses of the controversial unification of the
country.1 This chapter will concentrate on two crime writers, Massimo Carlotto
(b. 1956) and Andrea Camilleri (b. 1925), as they are the most popular among
contemporary Italian crime writers and particularly illustrate these different
attitudes.
Before analysing the works of these authors, it is important to briefly discuss
the history of Italian migration. Italy became an inward immigration society at
a later stage than most of its other European neighbours. A chronic surplus of
labour had made Italy a nation of migrants for more than two centuries (Mauceri
and Negro, 2009, p. 9). Only in the late 1970s did Italy become a destination
Who is the Foreigner? 177
country, thanks to improved economic conditions and its strategic position in

the Mediterranean. Today, one inhabitant in fourteen is a foreign national
(Caritas and Fondazione Migrantes, 2009, p. 7). Recent data show that the vast
majority of migrants are legal and that they contribute in important ways to the
Italian economy (ibid., p. 4). However, in public opinion the association of the
‘migrant’ with ‘illegal’ seems to prevail. Many Italians blame foreigners for an
alleged increase in criminality and, ultimately, fear an immigrant ‘invasion’.
This fear is reinforced by recurrent TV images of boat people coming from the
sea, even though this illegal practice involves only small numbers of migrants
(Giustiniani 2003, pp. 78–106; Dal Lago, 2004, p. 25). The Italian media have
recorded an increasing politicization of the discourse on migration, especially
following a growing influx of migrants in the 1990s (Sciortino and Colombo,
2004, pp. 94–113). The rise and growth of xenophobic political parties, such as
the Northern League, have set the tone of the debate.2 For the first time in the
history of the Italian Republic, media and politicians have raised the issue of
‘Italianness’ and ‘national identity’ being threatened by different and foreign
cultures. Some critics have pointed out the peculiarity of this issue in a nation
where the divide between North and South is still very deep, with Italy’s
unification having failed to bring with it a sense of belonging to one nation.
As mentioned, after a period of stagnation, local crime fiction has become
very successful among readers since the 1990s. Interestingly, those were the
years when the phenomenon of immigration also became notable and much
Italian crime fiction dealt with this hot topic. The representation of the foreigner
seems to have followed a geographical pattern: the perception of Otherness
and dangerousness shown in books written by Northern writers contrasts with a
sense of acceptance and inclusiveness underlined by authors of the South.
Massimo Carlotto’s Dystopian Migrant
In many stories set in the north of Italy, the Other has typically been represented
as ‘dystopian migrant’, as coined by Shohat and Stam (1994, pp. 178–219). The
representation of the migrant as perpetrators of crimes prevails,3 but some
books also portray the foreigner as a victim unable to fit into Italian society or
to defend themselves without the help of the detective who is invariably Italian.4
Particularly emblematic of this attitude is Massimo Carlotto’s series set in the
north-east of Italy.
Massimo Carlotto was born in Padua. A former convict, he was the victim of
one of the most serious cases of miscarriage of justice in Italian history.5 In 1995,
he published La verità dell’Alligatore [The Alligator’s Truth], the first book of a
subsequently successful series with Alligator as its main protagonist.6 Alligator is
one of the few private investigators in the Italian detective fiction tradition,
which usually features a police investigator. Alligator’s real name is Marco
Buratti, a former blues singer unfairly imprisoned on terrorism charges.

Traumatized by his experience in prison, he does not believe in official justice
and solves his cases through violence, blackmail and even torture and murder.
This widespread description of graphic violence and risqué situations has led
Gisella Padovani to compare Carlotto’s books to James Elroy’s novels (2007,
p. 86). Because of his ‘protestant’ ethics, which make him finish the job in spite
of any potential consequences, he can also be likened to Dashiell Hammett’s
Continental Op.
Carlotto’s books are the first crime stories to be set in the north-east of Italy,
a huge, indistinct area that covers the regions of Veneto, Trentino-Alto Adige
and Friuli-Venezia Giulia. Formerly a vast expanse of countryside, over the last
twenty years the area has seen rapid industrialization and an impressive increase
in the standard of living. The huge, new industrial area has attracted the
attention of mafia organizations, while its strategic position, at a crossroads
between Western and Eastern Europe, has encouraged the development of
drug and arms trafficking. Carlotto describes the north-east of Italy as an
unknowable area that has resulted from uncontrolled urban sprawl. This image
corresponds to his crime stories where the distinction between evil and good
blurs, and where criminal justice is impossible. The author uncovers hypocrisy
and illegality in the land of the new Italian miracle, and, stretching to the
extreme the golden rules of classic detective fiction, he gives a portrait of the
north-east which is very different from the official image of the economic
‘engine’ of Italy so over-used in the press and in politicians’ speeches.
The tragic destiny of the north-east as a no-man’s land is described in Nessuna
cortesia all’uscita (1999) [No kindness on the way out]. In this novel, a mafia
boss, Tristano Castelli, explains to the Alligator the reason why he has decided
to retire and become a witness for the State:
I bei tempi della malavita organizzata sono finiti per sempre. Una volta, se
qualcuno invadeva la tua zona, lo ammazzavi con discrezione, lo ficcavi due
metri sotto terra e tutto continuava come prima. Adesso nessuno è più in
grado di controllare il territorio per colpa di quei merdosi degli extracomu-
nitari. . . . [I] nigeriani vogliono una fetta del mercato della prostituzione e
dell’eroina, che hanno già cominciato a vendere a prezzi stracciati. I croati
vogliono la gestione di tutte le attività in Friuli e i serbi un paio di strade in
ogni città del Veneto dove piazzare le loro puttane puzzolenti. Rumeni, bul-
gari, polacchi e macedoni vogliono anche loro strade in esclusiva. Algerini
e marocchini hanno già messo le mani sul piccolo spaccio e i nostri tossici
sono diventati i loro schiavi. . . . Persino i bielorussi sono arrivati a rompere
i coglioni e io non so nemmeno dove cazzo stiano di casa. E per finire ci
sono gli albanesi che vogliono prendersi tutto. Per difendere gli interessi
della banda avrei dovuto cominciare ad ammazzarne dieci al giorno, ma non
sarebbe servito a un cazzo, perché questi sono come le cavallette. Arrivano a
ondate continue e non hanno paura di niente: né di morire né della galera.

È la fame che li spinge, e il Veneto è ricco, è un boccone prelibato. (Nessuna
cortesia all’uscita, 1999, pp. 193–4)
The old good times of the Mafia are forever gone. Once, if someone
invaded your area, you killed him discretely, buried the body six feet under,
and life would go on as usual. Nowadays nobody is able to control the terri-
tory. . . . The Nigerians want a slice of the prostitution and heroin market.
They’ve already started to sell drugs at giveaway prices. The Croatians want to
run all the business in Friuli, and the Serbs want a couple of streets in every
city of the Veneto to place their stinking whores. The Rumanians, Bulgar-
ians, Poles and Macedonians also want exclusive streets. The Algerians and
Moroccans have already got their hands on the drug dealing and our addicts
have become their slaves. . . . even the Belarusians are a pain in the arse and
I don’t know where they come from; finally there are the Albanians who want
it all. To defend my gang’s interests I would have had to kill ten people a day,
but it would have been useless anyway, they’re like grasshoppers. They come
in waves and don’t fear anything: they don’t care if they die or go to prison.
Hunger drives them and the rich Veneto is a delicacy.7
This passage typically portrays ‘dystopian’ foreigners who bring criminality and
chaos to the rich and vulnerable north-east. Moreover, Carlotto does not depict
migrants as individuals but as a part of an undistinguished, animal-like criminal
horde (‘they are like grasshoppers’).They do not even merit the role of the
lone, brilliant ‘baddie’ of classic detective fiction who performs clever crimes
that are difficult to solve, as they are, instead, confined to the role of brutal and
irrational criminals (‘they don’t care if they die or go to prison’). This distressing
picture is also evocative of the barbaric hordes that invaded a decadent and
weakened Roman Empire (a recurrent image in northerner crime fiction) as
opposed to the ‘old good times of the [Italian] Mafia’.
The idea of a violated north-east is present in all the books of the series where
migrants are described as criminals and their crimes are always mafia or gang-
related. Many Italians are also criminals in Carlotto’s novel, but even in the
underworld the contraposition between Italians and foreigners is clearly stated:
while Italian mafias are rationally structured, foreign gangs lack in organization
or are extremely violent, replicating the stereotypical dichotomy between a
rational Western civilization and Oriental perversion first denounced by Edward
Said (1978). This representation is reiterated in the latest of Alligator’s
adventures, L’amore del bandito (2009) [The Outlaw’s Love]. In this book,
Alligator faces a new enemy: the fearsome mafia from Kosovo that is slowly
penetrating Europe through Italy. Ten years after Nessuna cortesia all’uscita,
Carlotto still describes a north-east attacked by foreign mafias which have wiped
out the old local criminal organizations. Alligator still faces merciless Serbian
and Kosovo gang members described as people ‘senza un briciolo di cervello’
(p. 169) [‘without a brain’] or ‘besti[e] depravate[e]’ (p. 172) [‘depraved

beasts ‘] who enjoy torturing and gang-raping.
Carlotto may not be intentionally racist. He often highlights the poor
conditions of foreign migrants in Italy as he also intends to tackle real issues
such as racism or indifference among the Italian population. He also undermines
explicitly racist discourse when he delivers harsh images through a negative
character, such as a mafia boss in Nessuna cortesia all’uscita. Nevertheless, by
emphasizing a phenomenon which is certainly present in the Italian territory –
the illegal activities of foreign criminal organizations – he ends up delivering a
stereotypical image of the foreigner in Italy. Moreover, in representing foreign
migrants also as misfits or victims, and therefore people who need to be helped,
he reiterates the image of the dystopian migrant.
Andrea Camilleri’s Return Migrants
Crime stories set in the South depict a completely different environment. In

these novels the detective mainly investigates bourgeois murders that may
intertwine with ‘all Italian’ mafia wars. Sometimes these authors also tackle the
topic of foreign mafias, especially in connection with the drug trade and illegal
migrant trafficking, but these mafias are not responsible for defacing the
territory, as local criminal organizations have already created these problems.
Among the various authors of the 1990s, Andrea Camilleri, in particular,
tackles the topic of illegal immigration. Camilleri is beyond doubt the most
famous contemporary Italian crime writer of the 1990s. Born in Porto
Empedocle, Sicily in 1925, Camilleri did not make his debut until 1994 when
he published a detective story set in contemporary Italy, La forma dell’acqua8
[The Shape of Water (first translated in 2002)]. In this book, Inspector Salvo
Montalbano, an argumentative policeman working in the fictional village of
Vigàta, makes his first appearance. Camilleri followed this with sixteen other
novels and five collections of short stories. The success of Montalbano among
readers and, later, among television viewers9 was unprecedented: in 1999, seven
out of ten books on the Italian bestseller list were by Camilleri. By 2002 he had
sold 6.5 million books in Italy and more than 1 million in Germany. In the
meantime, more than 120 translations of his books were published, making
him one of the most popular contemporary writers in the world (Novelli, 2002,
pp. 1650–1).10 Part of the incredible success of this highly entertaining series is
due to the main character, Inspector Montalbano, who is modelled on the
figure of Simenon’s Inspector Maigret. In his first adventure, he is aged forty-
four, and as he ages over the course of the series he becomes more tired,
melancholic and disillusioned about the meaning and usefulness of his job.
Surrounded by a kaleidoscope of characters and with a Sicilian Mafia war in the
background, Inspector Montalbano investigates bourgeois crimes and deaths

ordered by the Mafia. Moreover, private crimes often intertwine with organized
crime and political plots, or are mistaken for Mafia deaths.
As mentioned, in Camilleri’s books the topic of immigration is widely
represented. It constitutes the main theme of Il ladro di merendine (1996, The
Snack Thief, 2003) and Il giro di boa (2003, Rounding the Mark, 2006) and it is
often cited in other novels. For example, on various occasions, either the
narrator or Montalbano himself refers to refugee camps along the Sicilian coast
as ‘concentration camps’ and describes sympathetically the anguish and
sufferings of those who face a long and dangerous trip in order to make a better
future for their families. More importantly, in Camilleri’s novels migrants who
come from Northern Africa are not seen as foreigners, but as exiles or expatriates
returning home. This perspective is evident in Il ladro di merendine when the
narrator describes a suburb of Montelusa, a town which, in Camilleri’s invented
geography, corresponds to Agrigento:
All’èbica dei musulmani in Sicilia, quando Montelusa si chiamava Kerkent,

gli arabi avevano fabbricato alla periferia del paisi un quartiere dove stavano
tra di loro. Quando i musulmani se n’erano scappati sconfitti, nelle loro case
c’erano andati ad abitare i montelusani e il nome del quartiere era stato
sicilianizzato in Rabàtu. Nella seconda metà di questo secolo una gigante
sca frana l’aveva inghiottito. Le poche case rimaste in piedi erano lesionate,
sbilenche, si tenevano in equilibri assurdi. Gli arabi, tornati questa volta in
veste di povirazzi, ci avevano ripreso ad abitare, mettendo al posto delle
tegole pezzi di lamiera e in luogo delle pareti tramezzi di cartone. (Il ladro di
merendine, p. 495)
At the time of the Muslim domination of Sicily, when Montelusa was called
Kerkent, the Arabs built a district on the outskirts of town, where they lived
amongst themselves. When the Muslims later fled in defeat, the Montelusians
moved into their homes and the names of the street was Sicilianized into
Rabàtu. In the second half of the twentieth century, a tremendous landslide
swallowed it up. The few houses left standing were damaged and lopsided,
remaining upright by absurd feats of equilibrium. When they returned, this
time as paupers, the Arabs moved back into that part of town, replacing the
roof tiles with sheet metal and using partitions of heavy cardboard for walls.
(The Snack Thief, p. 107)
In this passage, Arab immigrants are not described as foreigners who despoil
Italians of their goods and terrorize them, but as people who simply come back
home (‘they returned’) after hundreds of years and accept miserable living
conditions. This concept is present in other books written by southern writers.11
However, Camilleri’s books are particularly notable as foreign characters often
play important roles in the plot. For example, investigating an international

terrorism case, Montalbano meets Master Rahman, a teacher from Tunisia who
lives in the real town of Mazara del Vallo. He is described as ‘an elementary-
school teacher who looked like a pure Sicilian’ (The Snack Thief, p. 148). Again,
Master Rahman is not seen as the Other. First of all, his physical traits reveal a
similarity with Sicilians. Moreover, he has a regular job, he is integrated into
society and his knowledge of Mazara’s community helps Montalbano in his
investigation. The first time the policeman and the teacher meet is in Il cane di
terracotta (1996). In this novel, Rahman explains to Montalbano the reasons for
the pacific coexistence of Sicilians from Mazara and Arabs:
Sì, credo che noi siamo per i mazaresi come una memoria storica, un fatto
quasi genetico. Siamo di casa. Al-Imam al-Mazari, il fondatore della scuola
giuridica maghrebina, è nato a Mazara, così come il filologo Ibn al-Birr che
venne espulso dalla città nel 1068 perché gli piaceva troppo il vino. Il fatto
sostanziale è però che i mazaresi sono gente di mare. E l’uomo di mare ha
molto buonsenso, capisce cosa significa tenere i piedi per terra. A proposito
di mare: lo sa che i motopescherecci di qua hanno equipaggio misto, siciliani
e tunisini? (Il cane di terracotta, pp. 359–60)
I think we’re sort of a historical memory for the Mazarese, almost a genetic
fact. We’re family. Al-Imam al-Mazari, the founder of the Maghrebin juridi-
cal school, was born in Mazara, as was the philologist Ibn al-Birr, who was
expelled from the city in 1068 because he liked wine too much. But the basic
fact is that the Mazarese are seafaring people. And the man of the sea has
a great deal of common sense; he understands what it means to have one’s
feet on the ground. And speaking of the sea – did you know that the motor
trawlers around here have mixed crews, half Sicilians, half Tunisians? (The
Terracotta Dog, p. 268)
Here, it is clearly stated that Tunisians and Sicilians are ‘family’, with strong
historical and even genetic ties. The reference to the sea also evokes a common
cultural and historical background for countries and regions bordering the
Mediterranean. In Il cane di terracotta, the solution of a cold case, which happened
during the Second World War, is found when Montalbano is finally able to put
together elements from Greek, Jewish, Christian and Muslim cultures, evoking
a past of peace and fruitful exchanges between different cultures and religions,
thus mirroring Sicilian history and geography over many centuries. Finally, a
feeling of deep empathy is described in Il ladro di merendine where the Sicilian
inspector meets and befriends François, a distressed Tunisian boy whose mother
has mysteriously disappeared. One night they ‘iniziarono a parlare, il com
missario in siciliano e François in arabo, capendosi perfettamente’ (Il ladro di
merendine, p. 551) [‘started talking, the inspector in Sicilian and the boy in
Arabic, and they understood each other perfectly. (The Snack Thief, p. 177)]
In this case, too, an Italian man and a Tunisian child manage to communicate
perfectly, overcoming any language barriers.
This perspective is particularly interesting as Camilleri’s novels reflect a
relation between the north and the south of Italy in terms of alienation and
lack of understanding. The contraposition can be seen particularly at the very
start of the series, in La forma dell’acqua, where two garbage collectors find a
dead body and decide to call the police and not the carabinieri (the other
Italian police force), because they do not want to have anything to do with a
lieutenant who comes from Milan. The idea that a northern Italian cannot
understand Sicily and its people is shared by the narrator and reinforced by
this extract:
In seguito a questa bella pensata dei due eminenti statisti, figli di mamma
piemontesi, imberbi friulani di leva che fino al giorno avanti si erano arric-
reati a respirare l’aria fresca e pungente delle loro montagne, si erano venuti
a trovare di colpo ad ansimare penosamente, ad arrisaccare nei loro prov-
visori alloggi, in paesi che stavano sì e no a un metro di altezza sul livello del
mare, tra gente che parlava un dialetto incomprensibile, fatto più di silenzi
che di parole, d’indecifrabili movimenti delle sopracciglia, d’impercettibili
increspature delle rughe. Si erano adattati come meglio potevano, grazie
alla loro giovane età, e una mano consistente gli era stata data dai vigatesi
stessi, inteneriti da quell’aria sprovveduta e spaesata che i picciotti forasteri
avevano. (La forma dell’acqua, pp. 6–7)
Thanks to the brilliant idea of these two eminent statesman, all the Pied-
montese mama’s boys and beardless Friulian conscripts who just the night
before had enjoyed the crisp, fresh air of their mountains suddenly found
themselves painfully short of breath, huffing in their temporary lodging, in
towns that stood barely a yard above the sea level, among people who spoke
an incomprehensible dialect consisting not so much of words as of silences,
indecipherable movements of the eyebrows, imperceptible puckerings of the
facial wrinkles. They adapted as best they could, thanks to their young age,
and were given a helping hand by the residents of Vigàta themselves, who
were moved to pity by the foreign boys’ lost, bewildered looks. (The Shape of
Water, pp. 3–4)
Camilleri ironically describes a military operation in Sicily for the purpose of

controlling the territory against the Mafia. In contrast with the representation
of migrants from Northern Africa, northern Italians are labelled as ‘foreign
boys’, unable to cope with a different climate and to penetrate a completely
different culture. This incommunicability even at the linguistic level
(‘incomprehensible dialect’), is a topic which can be found throughout the
Montalbano series. Moreover, confrontations occur with several of Montalbano’s
colleagues from the north. These are characters with negative connotations
that represent the idiocy of bureaucracy, and the stupidity of a State that wants
to subjugate a reality it does not understand. This lack of understanding is in
striking contrast with the harmonious relation between southerners and Arabic
migrants that is often highlighted in the series.
A Different Perspective and a Divided Identity
These different representations may have several explanations. First of all,

Carlotto’s books and, more generally, the stories from the north of Italy are set
in areas where the presence of foreigners has dramatically increased in the last
twenty years.12 They support the perception of the foreigner as ‘anonymous
invader’ or defenceless victim by amplifying (and even distorting) reality, as the
north of Italy hosts the majority of legal and illegal foreigners living in the
country. However, this bias can also be seen as the result of the literary influence
of Giorgio Scerbanenco (1911–69), who is considered one of the masters of
Italian crime fiction. Writing in the 1960s, the period of the Italian economic
miracle, Scerbanenco was one of the first writers to tackle the topic of the
defacement of Milan and its suburbs as a consequence of crime and violence
perpetrated by criminals from all over the world. Duca Lamberti, Scerbanenco’s
private eye, describes an unprecedented Milan:
Se uno dice Marsiglia, Chicago, Parigi, quelle sì che sono metropoli, con
tanti delinquenti, ma Milano no, a qualche stupido non dà la sensazione
della grande città, cercano ancora quello che chiamano il colore locale, la
brasera, la pesa e magari il gamba de legn. Si dimenticano che una città
vicina ai due milioni di abitanti ha un tono internazionale, non locale, in
una città grande come Milano arrivano sporcaccioni da tutte le parti del
mondo, e pazzi, alcolizzati, drogati o semplicemente disperati in cerca di
soldi. (Scerbanenco, Traditori di tutti, [1966] 1990, pp. 118–19)
Mention Marseilles, Chicago or Paris, and everyone knows you’re talking of
a wicked metropolis, but with Milan it’s different. Surrounded as they are by
the unmistakable atmosphere of a great city, there are still idiots who think
of it in terms of local colour; looking for la brasera, la pesa, and perhaps il
gamba del legn. They forget that a city of two million inhabitants is bound to
acquire an international flavour. There’s precious little left nowadays of the
old local colour. From all over the world, spivs and layabouts are converging
on Milan in search of money. They all come, madmen, drunks, drug-addicts,
even those who are simply without hope. (Duca and the Milan Murders, 1970,
pp. 108–9)
In this passage, Milan is prey to foreign ‘spivs and layabouts.’ This image is a
clear precursor of the Milan, Turin and the north-east described by the writers
of the 1990s, torn apart by the wars between South American, Eastern European
and Northern African mafias. However, the northern writers’ perspective also
reflects the perception of the ‘dangerous’ foreigner fuelled by xenophobic
political parties that flourish in the north of Italy and by a part of the press.
Interestingly, these political parties, which are very successful in the north of
Italy, combine a xenophobic agenda with an anti-southern one, disputing the
value of the Risorgimento and advocating for a separation between the north
and south of Italy.
As for the South, a smaller presence of immigrants in Sicily and the southern
regions of Italy can only partially explain this less problematic perspective on
foreign immigration. The origin of this attitude may reside in the fact that the
southern regions have long been a land of migrants. Southerners first migrated
to richer European countries and then to North and South America and
Australia. Then, following the economic boom of the 1960s, they began an
internal migration towards the more industrialized north of Italy. In both cases,
they experienced discrimination and racism, and found it very hard to fit into
the recipient societies. This historical experience may have made southerners
more sympathetic towards foreign migrants. I would also read this perspective
as part of a ‘positive orientalism’ which sees the South as bearer of sympathy
and civilization in juxtaposition with a capitalistic and business-oriented north.
In other words, far from considering other cultures as barbaric and corrupt
(Said, 1978), southern writers claim a brotherhood with other nations of the
Mediterranean. This attitude is mirrored in mainstream southern literary
fiction and history. Several authors seem to possess what Erri De Luca defines
as ‘un’anima esposta a sud’ [‘a soul facing south’] and acknowledge the
contribution of ancient Mediterranean civilizations to southern Italian culture
and history (De Luca 1995, pp. 23–5). Among others, Sicilian writers Vincenzo
Consolo (b. 1933) and Gesualdo Bufalino (1920–96) see in the chaos of the
different races and cultures that constitute Sicily the real essence of the island
and a fertile ground, in Bufalino’s words, for ‘la contraddittoria pluralità
siciliana’ (Bufalino, 1993, pp. v–vii) [‘Sicilian contradictory plurality’]. This
geographical and cultural proximity, along with the still unresolved issues of
national unity, make many Sicilians feel more Mediterranean than Italian.
In conclusion, the twofold representation of the ‘Other’ in recent Italian
crime fiction reflects the political and cultural anxieties of contemporary Italian
society which interrogates the meaning and value of a still elusive ‘Italianness’.
One hundred and fifty years after a controversial unification of the country, the
encounter with the foreign migrant uncovers an internal Other, evocative of
an unresolved separation between the North and the South that new separatist
and xenophobic parties have dramatically brought to the surface. Ultimately,
the different representations of foreigners from Eastern Europe and Northern
Africa and the representation of northern Italians as the real foreigners in the
south of Italy expose the emptiness of a fictitious Italian identity.
Notes
1
The new Italian Kingdom, established in 1861 and ruled by the Savoy family,
brought with it a centralization of power that disregarded regional, cultural and
economic differences. This generated deep resentments especially in the south
of Italy and on the Italian islands. Many patriots, who fought for a unified Italy,
felt betrayed in their ideals of freedom and social justice. For a detailed history of
the Risorgimento and the relation between the north and the south of Italy, see
Mack Smith (1997), Salomone (ed.) (1971) and Schneider (ed.) (1998).
2
Lega Nord per l’indipendenza della Padania [North League for the Indipendence
of Padania], is a federalist and regional political party in Italy founded in 1991 as a
federation of several regional parties of northern and central Italy, most of which
had arisen and expanded their share of the electorate over the 1980s. Its political
programme advocates the transformation of Italy into a federal state, fiscal fed-
eralism and greater regional autonomy. Its original political agenda advocated
secession of the North, which it calls Padania, while, more recently, it has assumed
a very strong anti-immigration stance. In alliance with Silvio Belusconi’s People
of Freedom, Lega Nord has been in power in 1994, 2001–6 and 2008–11. See
Signore and Trocino (2008, pp. 224–41).
3
For example, in Piero Colaprico’s (b. 1957) La quinta stagione (2006), [The Fifth
Season], the narrator describes Albanian immigrants in Milan as barbarians arriv-
ing at the gates of the empire (p. 187). In Bruno Ventavoli’s (b. 1961) Amaro colf
(1997), [Bitter Help], the narrator describes the suburb of San Salvario in Turin
as a Savoy Kasbah (p. 136). Piedmont’s capital is also seen as an interracial slaugh-
terhouse (p. 136).
4
For example, this is the case with Sandrone Dazieri’s La cura del Gorilla (2001),
[The Gorilla’s Cure] and Andrea G. Pinketts’s Il conto dell’ultima cena (1998), [The
Bill of the Last Supper].
5
In 1976, he was wrongly accused of a murder. Following trials, mistakes and
changes in the penal code, he was sentenced to prison, before being pardoned
in 1993.
6
The series consists of La verità dell’Alligatore (1995), Il mistero di Mangiabarche
(1997), Nessuna cortesia all’uscita (1999), Il corriere colombiano (2000), Il maestro di
nodi (2002) and L’amore del bandito (2009). Two books of the series have been trans-
lated into English: The Colombian Mule (2003) and The Master of Knots (2004).
7
All translations are mine, unless otherwise stated.
8
The three novels studied here, La forma dell’acqua, Il ladro di merendine, Il cane di
terracotta were published by Sellerio in 1994, 1996 and 1996 respectively. All ref-
erences given here to the original Italian texts are to the prestigious Mondadori
edition of Storie di Montalbano of 2002.
9
A TV series, inspired by Montalbano’s books and produced by RAI, started in 1998
with an episode based on Il ladro di merendine. The popular actor Luca Zingaretti
played the role of Inspector Montalbano. The series director was Alberto Sironi.
10
Several Montalbano adventures have been translated into English and published
by Penguin Putnam and Picador. They are: The Shape of Water (2002), The Terra-
cotta Dog (2002), The Snack Thief (2003), The Voice of the Violin (2003), The Excursion
to Tindari (2004), The Smell of the Night (2005), Rounding the Mark (2006), The
Patience of the Spider (2007), The Paper Moon (2007), August Heat (2008), The Wings
of the Sphinx (2009), The Track of Sand (2010) and The Potter’s Field (2011).
11
The idea of a brotherhood with migrants from Northern Africa is present in
other series set in southern Italy. Palermo, as described in Santo Piazzese’s
(b. 1948) series, is often associated with the Mediterranean and Africa, and
the protagonist of the series, the amateur detective Lorenzo La Marca, proudly
argues that Sicilians are not Italian, but Northern Africans (La doppia vita di
M. Laurent, 2007, p. 38 [The Double Life of M. Laurent]). In I delitti di via
Medina-Sidonia (1996) [The Murders on Via Medina-Sidonia], the presence of
immigrants in Palermo is not described as threatening. In this case also, as in
Camilleri’s novels, they are explicitly called ‘return migrants’ (p. 41). Another
interesting example is Massimo Siviero’s (b. 1942) series set in Naples. In these
stories, Naples is an oriental-style city where a substantial Arab community lives
peacefully and Catholic churches look like Muslim mosques (Un mistero occi-
tano per il commissario Abruzzese, 2001, p. 104, [An Occitan Mystery for Inspector
Abruzzese]).
12
See in particular Laura Mauritano on foreign immigration to Turin (1994,
pp. 61–74).
Chapter 15
Images of Turks in Recent German

Crime Fiction: A Comparative Case Study
in Xenophobia
Margaret Sutherland
The film ‘Wem Ehre gebührt’ [‘To Whom Honour is Due’]1, episode 684 of the
television crime series Tatort [Crime Scene], was screened on 23 December
2007 to an estimated 6.6 million viewers.2 This episode gained notoriety for the
reaction of not just the German press, but also the people on whom the story
focused. Protests by German-based Turks from the Islamic denomination of the
Alevis prior to transmission had already prompted the Consortium of Public-
law Broadcasting Institutions of the Federal Republic of Germany (ARD) to
take the unusual step of including a statement in the opening credits stressing
the fictional nature of the story and refuting any intentional discrimination
against Alevis.3 Following the broadcast, however, Die Alevitische Gemeinde
Deutschland [The Alevi Community of Germany] organized a demonstration of
30,000 people in Cologne for 30 December, as a result of which the ARD
announced that the episode would not be screened on television again.
Furthermore, the publisher under contract to print the script written by the
film’s director Angelina Maccarone pulled out of the agreement.
According to media reports, the ARD and the publisher had bowed to
pressure from Alevi protestors because in the episode an Alevi-Turkish father is
guilty of incest with his younger daughter. This storyline laid the episode open
to accusations that it reinforced a centuries-old prejudice spread by other
Muslim groups that father-daughter incest is common in Alevi families. Two
days after the broadcast, the online newspaper Netzeitung reported that Ali Ertan
Toprak, the general secretary of the Alevi umbrella organization, had even
questioned whether Maccarone’s research into Alevi beliefs might have been
influenced by fanatical Sunni advisors (Toprak, 2007). The timing of the
episode’s broadcast was also viewed as remarkably insensitive: that same
weekend, Alevis worldwide were commemorating the pogrom of 21 December
1978 in Maras (South-Eastern Anatolia), where Sunni and nationalist Turks had
attacked an Alevi residential area, killing thirty and injuring over one hundred
and fifty men, women and children.
Images of Turks in Recent German Crime Fiction 189
Toprak’s accusations insinuated that the episode propagated xenophobia, a

form of cultural racism characterized by fear of, and contempt for, foreigners,
and had the potential to exacerbate tensions within immigrant groups in
Germany.4 But what were the director’s intentions? According to an article in
Spiegel Online, the furore the film unleashed came as a shock to Maccarone, who
had carefully researched Alevi customs within her circle of Alevi friends without
ever having encountered the prejudice regarding incest.5 She expressed great
regret for the distress the story had caused Alevis (Spiegel Online, 2007), but
pointed out that in her film incest was not based in any way on their religious
practices. On the contrary, as she explained in an interview with the newspaper
Süddeutsche Zeitung of 29 December 2007, her intention had been to present
incest as an offence that could occur in any family regardless of ethnic origin
(Zips, 2007). While she admitted that she had not shown her script to Alevi
readers before filming began, she also believed that the Alevis were using her
film as a welcome opportunity to banish ‘old stigmas’ and to encourage people
to listen to their concerns.
I propose to investigate Maccarone’s claim that her film is an unbiased
attempt to present Turkish immigrants in Germany (first invited to the Federal
Republic in the 1960s as ‘guest-workers’ to carry out the less desirable jobs) as
a far from homogeneous group.6 My investigation will address the question of
whether the film contains scenes of cultural racism as a sustained feature, or
attempts to challenge and dispel racism.
To provide a context for the film’s treatment of its characters and any
suggestion of xenophobia, it will be useful to compare it with a 2009 crime
novel by Gabriele Brinkmann bearing the strikingly similar title Ehre, wem
Ehre . . . [Honour to whom Honour . . . ]. Focusing on non-Alevi Turkish
criminals using Mafia-style tactics, the novel was initially planned with the same
title as the television episode, but Felix Droste, Brinkmann’s long-time publisher,
withdrew from the contract, fearing reprisals because of the book’s contents.
Leda eventually published the novel in October 2009. Like the Tatort episode,
Brinkmann’s novel depicts members of the Turkish minority in Germany and
the ramifications of a crime perpetrated by one of them. This comparison will
allow us to evaluate a number of markers of xenophobia or tolerance; for
example, respect for cultural practices, credibility of the protagonist-investigator
and flexibility of attitudes.
Wem Ehre Gebührt
The female police inspector, Charlotte Lindholm, in the television story is

already known to series viewers as a capable officer working in rural towns in
the state of Lower Saxony. Now in her fifth month of pregnancy, she has been
confined to a desk job in an open-plan office of the State Bureau of Criminal
Investigation of Lower Saxony in Hanover. In a moment of distraction while

driving she hits a young woman. Although her victim is unharmed, Lindholm is
bemused when a young man argues with the woman in Turkish before dragging
her away. The next day, the death of Turkish woman Afife Kara is reported to
the police. According to her father, she has committed suicide by hanging
herself. Defying orders to remain in the office, Lindholm discovers that the
dead woman is the person involved in the accident, and that the young man
who argued with Afife is her brother Galip Özdan. A packed suitcase in Afife’s
apartment makes Lindholm suspect that she is dealing with an honour killing
rather than a suicide. Her suspicion appears to be confirmed when she is
informed by Afife’s younger sister Selda that Afife has actually been murdered.
Because Selda is too afraid to reveal the killer’s name but mentions that she
herself is pregnant, the inspector believes she is also in danger. However, both
her assumptions are incorrect: at the end of the film, after Selda’s father Ata
Özdan, has rescued her from hanging herself, he admits to Lindholm that he
murdered Afife to prevent her from reporting his incestuous relationship with
Selda to the authorities. To punish her father, Selda intended to make her own
suicide look as though he had killed her.
Lindholm’s initial assessment of Afife’s death is rejected by her police
colleagues who do not share this particular prejudice. It reveals Lindholm to be
guilty of one of the most commonly held prejudices against Turks. This is clearly
a view based solely on ideas about race, not evidence. However, the policewoman
is flexible enough to replace her hypothesis of the murderer and its motives
with new ones as fresh clues present themselves, and her stereotypical view of
Turkish culture is slowly challenged in the process. Her removal of her shoes at
Afife’s father’s request before she enters his apartment can be seen as symbolizing
the beginning of this development.
During her investigation, Lindholm also works with a German-Turkish
colleague, Cem Aslan, with whom she has a troubled relationship. When she
requests that forensic experts examine Afife’s body, Aslan, who is himself an
Alevi, crisply accuses her of xenophobia, while her superior Stefan Bitomsky,
ordering the procedure’s cancellation, insists that Turkish custom demands
the body be buried as soon as possible after death. Inside knowledge of
Turkish culture, however, does not guarantee an appropriate approach to a
murder case with a Muslim victim. Aslan initially proves a hindrance rather
than a help in the investigation of Afife’s death, because he does not want to
be distracted from another case which he considers to be more important.
As a result, irritation on both sides unleashes mutual accusations based on
cultural stereotyping, which become increasingly fierce once Bitomsky hands
over Afife’s case to Aslan on the grounds that Lindholm has disobeyed his
orders. When Aslan discovers that Lindholm is hiding Selda in her apart-
ment, he insists she be taken to a Women’s Refuge. The accusation Lind-
holm then hurls at him of being uninterested in Afife’s death simply because
she is a woman brings their animosity to a climax: Aslan asks whether she is
insinuating that his Turkish ethnicity makes him sexist, while Lindholm
replies that, on the contrary, she finds him rather German in his indecent
haste to advance his position (‘ziemlich deutsch in Ihrer Karrieregeilheit’)
(Maccarone, 2007).
Maccarone’s introduction of a foil for her protagonist in the character of her
German-Turkish colleague Cem Aslan adds a layer of depth to the story: it
reflects the multicultural composition of the modern German police force and,
more importantly, shows that discrimination is a human failing which is not
limited to any one culture. Aslan is a man struggling with his own prejudices:7
finding it difficult to work with his new female colleague, he makes a racist
comment about German culture to get back at her, accusing her of ‘typisch
deutsche[s] Einzelkämpfersyndrom’ (Maccarone, 2007) [‘typically German
lone-fighter syndrome’]. Closer personal association with Lindholm will lead
him to revise his racially based criticism, just as Lindholm slowly acquires a
more textured, differentiated and enlightened view of the Alevis from direct
contact with them and from others with a knowledge of Islamic customs. We
can thus see that the episode shows racist attitudes as both widespread and
subject to modification by more open-minded characters learning from
experience.
Indeed, Lindholm, far from being xenophobic, is open to learning from her
investigation. Her lack of prejudice is corroborated by her decision to allow
Selda to live with her when the girl finds life at home unbearable. Their
deepening friendship is explained by what they have in common, the most
important thing being their pregnancy, Selda in her fourth month and
Lindholm in her fifth. But there is also a similarity of character: neither is
willing to disclose the father’s identity, and, at the doctor’s, neither wishes to be
told the baby’s sex. These small details indicating shared character traits work
against racially based divisions.
Indirectly, the end of Lindholm’s story also contributes to the positive picture
the episode provides of Alevis. Although she will not apologize for her factual
errors and her animosity towards her colleagues, her encounter with Selda has
exerted a beneficial effect on her. Her new friend’s miscarriage makes her
aware that she wants to carry her own child to term, and her now positive
attitude towards her pregnancy brings with it improved social adaptability. This
impacts on her professionally as well. Her superior’s accusation, at the beginning
of the story, that she lacks team spirit is no longer valid. Given Lindholm’s
journey from ignorance to enlightenment about Turks in general, and Alevis in
particular, and her improved relationship with her colleagues, directly
attributable to Selda’s influence, it seems ironic that the film should have been
accused of inciting xenophobic sentiments against Alevis. On the contrary, as
we have seen, the changes in the characters’ attitudes can be seen as promoting
increased understanding and tolerance.
Ehre, wem Ehre . . .
Our second example, while superficially similar, has several important

differences. In the crime novel with the similar title by Gabriele Brinkmann,
writing under the pseudonym W. W. Domsky, there is no incest, and there are
no Alevis to provoke a critical community response. Nor is there any mention
of Sunnis or Shiites, but only of Muslims as an undifferentiated entity, committing
honour killings along the lines of Lindholm’s initial working hypothesis.
In Ehre, wem Ehre . . . the police investigate a drive-by shooting outside a
Turkish butchery in Bochum, in the course of which a German woman, the
butcher’s assistant, and a young Turkish woman called Yasemin Cetin, are shot,
and the child Yasemin has been holding is passed to a male customer, who
manages to escape.
The novel differs from the film in having an outspokenly racist protagonist,
Thea Zinck, who behaves like an exaggerated version of British detective turned
alcoholic, Jane Tennyson, in the final series of Prime Suspect (ITV, UK, 2007), and
has features in common with other female detectives like V. I.Warshawski in the
work of Polish-American writer Sara Paretsky. In this sense Ehre, wem Ehre . . .
seems to be employing the grammar of the hard-boiled genre and its protagonist
is made to behave like a female version of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe.
From the start, Inspector Zinck is correct about this being an honour killing,
making wrong assumptions merely with regard to detail. At first she believes
Yasemin to have been the only person specifically targeted. She subsequently
learns that the victim, who dies in hospital soon afterwards, was the aunt of the
small boy she was carrying when she sheltered in the butcher’s shop. She also
discovers the killers were Yasemin’s two older brothers, punishing her for
helping her sister-in-law Leyla, the boy’s mother, to escape from her violently
abusive husband, Tayfun Cetin. The brothers later murder Yasemin’s German
boyfriend for refusing to reveal Leyla’s whereabouts. The last victim is Leyla
herself, stabbed as the novel ends, by her teenage brother who has flown from
Turkey specifically to kill her.
Zinck, an alcoholic, has as her assistant Kai Stettner, a new policeman whom
she has taken under her wing in a way reminiscent of Lindholm’s relationship
with Selda. Stettner has been given Lindholm’s role of a newcomer harassed by
colleagues and lacking any personal knowledge of Turkish customs. Like her, he
has come to a bustling, multicultural city (Bochum) from a quiet, largely
monocultural area (south of Essen), and, like her, he has met one of the victims
before her murder. Because Zinck had told him to seek her help at any time, he
has taken her literally, bringing the little boy from the butcher’s shop. Once
sobered up with strong coffee, she advises him to place the boy with Child
Welfare and takes over the investigation herself.
Though Zinck’s addiction means she sometimes comes to work intoxicated,
she observes things in a cool, detached manner, drawing her conclusions
accordingly. Having worked with the homicide squad for thirty years, she
believes she knows everything, not only about murder, rape and abductions, but
also about Turkish immigrants, and she is proud of her success rate in solving
criminal cases. This is confirmed by her superior, Dr Abels, who admits that she
has a better record than anyone else on his homicide team. Thus the narrator
attributes to her a degree of power and authority. Significantly, her opinions
about the Turkish community are validated in several ways. Most of her
statements to Stettner regarding arranged marriages and the relationship
between Turkish men and women match what he hears from his German-
Turkish colleague, Lothar Özgü, employed by Abels for the same reason as Cem
Aslan in Maccarone’s film, or from Renate Koch, who works at the Women’s
Refuge, where he suspects Leyla is hiding.
Zinck is also given some insider knowledge. Early in the novel she appears to
understand Turkish. When the little boy cries: ‘aneh, aneh’, she explains that
he is calling for his mother, and when she hears Hakan Cetin speaking on the
phone and then trying to persuade her that he was talking to a customer, she
informs him that it sounded as though it was to his brother, Tayfun (Domsky,
2009, p. 112). She also understands what Abdul Cetin is muttering in Turkish
behind her back (Domsky, 2009, p. 119), so that the reader is inclined to believe
her earlier comment that she was able to identify the lies she had heard
previously (Domsky, 2009, p. 83). However, Zinck differs from Özgü and Koch
in that she invariably blames the Islamic faith for anything she dislikes about
the Turkish way of life, and she points out the discrepancy between the Koran
and the way its teachings are interpreted by those whom she regards as having
been indoctrinated by their mullahs regarding their practice of Turkish
customs. She prides herself on knowing exactly what is in the Koran and
recognizes a mullah immediately by his clothes, as is the case when she first sees
Osman Cetin, an uncle of the young men involved in the inquiry (Domsky,
2009, p. 80).
Almost all of Zinck’s statements regarding Turks assume a racist overtone, a
fact she herself acknowledges with blatant irony to Stettner: ‘Thea Zinck, die
Rassistin – noch sympathischer als Thea Zinck, die Säuferin, möchte ich wetten’
(Domsky, 2009, p. 53) [‘Thea Zinck, the racist, even nicer than the alcoholic,
eh!’]. Her racism becomes increasingly obvious in her direct dealings with the
Turks. For example, when she interrogates the Cetins at their home, she
disregards Tayfun Cetin’s hint that in Turkish flats it is customary for visitors to
remove their shoes. Taken to task about this by her superior, she tells him to
stop mentioning those ‘Scheißschuhe’ [‘bloody shoes’], as the Turks always
play the race card when something is not to their liking (Domsky, 2009, p. 87).
Another, even crasser, example is her decision to pursue her investigations at
the funeral of the Turkish shop assistant killed at the beginning of the novel,
despite being reminded by her colleague Özgü that women are not permitted
to attend Turkish funerals.
While Zinck insists that Özgü accompany her to the funeral as her interpreter
(Domsky, 2009, p. 135), once there she does not use him for this purpose at all:
it appears that she has only wanted to demonstrate to him how little she cares
about Turks’ sensibilities, because she not only understands Turkish, but to
some extent also speaks it. Zinck never mentions why she went to Turkey or how
she learnt Turkish. Her visit to Istanbul may remind us of Barbara Frischmuth’s
novel Das Verschwinden des Schattens in der Sonne [The Disappearance of the
Shadow in the Sun], one of the first post-Second World War novels about
Turkey. Unlike Brinkmann, Frischmuth’s story demonstrates that her
protagonist’s language skills do not prevent her from forming a totally incorrect
image of the Other (Karakuş, 2007, pp. 121–2). Indeed, it is in Thea Zinck’s
verbal communications with Turks in both German and Turkish that her
aggressive xenophobic behaviour reaches its climax. The further the story
progresses, the more contemptuous the language she uses to address Turks
becomes, and she deliberately chooses Turkish words to ensure that her message
hits home. On her way to the apartment of Tayfun, to whom Leyla has returned
to be reunited with her son, Zinck shouts at three veiled women blocking the
street with their prams: ‘Defol! Straße frei oder ich mach euch Beine,
verstanden?’ (Domsky, 2009, p. 237) [‘Defol! Get out of the way or I’ll make you
get a move on, got it?’]. With the Turkish word ‘defol’ meaning anything from
‘scram’ to ‘bugger off’, it is understandable that the women shake their fists at
her. At Hakan Cetin’s arrest for Yasemin’s murder, Zinck whispers something to
him in Turkish which is not spelt out to the reader but is clearly so offensive that
he responds by spitting at her and shouting that Yasemin was a whore who
should be grateful that he only shot her when she deserved to be stoned to
death (Domsky, 2009, p. 240). A laughing Zinck responds by describing him as
‘ein Mörder, der sich hinter Allah und einer nicht näher definierten Scheißehre
versteckt’ (Domsky, 2009, p. 240) [‘a murderer hiding behind Allah and some
vague idea of bloody honour’], adding in Turkish that he is a ‘namussuz adam’,
[‘a dishonourable man’]. As Tayfun and Hakan Cetin are escorted away, she
shouts after them the words that caused Felix Droste to cancel his contract with
Brinkmann: ‘Feiges Gesocks . . . schiebt euch euren Koran doch . . . ’ (p. 240)
[‘Cowardly riff-raff . . . you can shove your Koran up . . . ’].8
Early in the novel, Zinck asks Stettner whether he has noticed the number of
women wearing headscarves, explaining to him this indicates that even after
thirty years in Germany many Turkish women are still unable to speak German
because their husbands have denied them access to education, careers and
women’s rights (Domsky, 2009, p. 70). By the end of the story the mere sight of
a headscarf enrages her. It is also obvious that in her view Turkish honour
killings and, more generally, the Turks’ lack of integration into German society
are caused by their devotion to their religion: ‘Für die meisten von uns ist
unser lieber Gott mit seinen zehn Geboten auch schon lange tot. Das gilt für
den muslimischen Kulturkreis und seinen Allah aber ganz und gar nicht’
(Domsky, 2009, p. 72) [‘For most of us our good Lord with his Ten Command
ments has been dead for ages. That does not apply to Muslim culture and its
Allah at all’].
Drawing Conclusions: Novel vs Film

Ultimately, Zinck appears to find this foreign culture so disgusting that it is a
major cause of her alcoholism. While drying out in hospital, she attributes her
addiction to her repeated encounters with the worst manifestations of human
nature, leading her to prefer alcohol to people (Domsky, 2009, p. 190). Later,
though, she alludes specifically to days, like the one on which she is confronted
with the Cetin family’s crimes, when ‘Es gibt Tage, da kann ich gar nicht so viel
saufen, wie ich kotzen möchte’ (Domsky, 2009, p. 242) [‘there are days when I
cannot drink as much as I would like to throw up’]. Although these are her last
words in the book, she remains present in another way. The story does not end
with Leyla’s murder by her brother, Emrah, but with a bullet fired at Emrah by
Stettner, the only member of the police force present. The bullet, fired from
behind at a person on the run, blatantly contravenes police rules: unable to
cope with the boy’s honour killing of his sister, Stettner displays the same lack
of self-control with his gun as Thea Zinck does with alcohol.
Stettner’s irrational, cowardly and dishonourable act is reported in the novel’s
closing sentence, without any comment about whether the boy is killed, what
the police response is or how Stettner later reacts. In this sense the novel is
open-ended, but it leaves the reader in no doubt that Stettner, previously a
paragon of compassion, becomes as much the victim of honour killing practices
as his racist boss: it is clear that Leyla’s murder has perverted his sense of
compassion, transforming him into a murderer himself. He was exposed to the
voice of caution of his German-Turkish colleague Özgü, who told him that
dogmatism and fanaticism are present in any religion and not every Turk is a
Muslim hard-liner (Domsky, 2009, p. 193). But how could Özgü’s voice of
reason be an effective antidote to Zinck’s anti-Muslim sentiments when even
Leyla’s ‘kleiner Bruder’ (Domsky, 2009, p. 52) [‘little brother’] proves to be a
Muslim extremist?
Zinck is not only opposed to Muslim fundamentalists but to any Muslim who
believes the Koran to be above the law (Domsky, 2009, p. 69). This makes the
reader suspect that Zinck’s anti-Muslim sentiments are part of a general anti-
religious viewpoint, along the lines of the motto prefacing Brinkmann’s book:
‘Der Traum von einer multikulturellen Gesellschaft/war schon ausgeträumt,/
als der erste aufrecht gehende Affe von sich behauptete:/Ich sehe was, was du
nicht siehst,/und das ist Gott’ (Domsky, 2009, p. 5) [‘The dream of a multi-
cultural society/ was already over/ when the first bipedal monkey boasted to his
fellow monkeys:/ “I see something that you don’t see,/ and that is God”’].9 The
motto implies that man’s belief in a God is based on hallucinations evolved

from, and belonging to, the pre-human monkey state, and that any religion
hinders the development of a truly multicultural society. The author, therefore,
appears to be intending to convey the impression that Zinck is anti-religious
rather than xenophobic.
This seems to be supported by the fact that her main drinking companion is
the head of the city’s Russian mafia. Zinck has no difficulty confiding in him,
because the mafia’s actions outside the law are not motivated by religion, unlike
those of the Turkish criminals. But this does not detract from the fact that the
protagonist’s anti-Muslim and anti-religious stance contains the hallmark of
xenophobia:10 generalization and exaggeration of the Otherness of Turks who,
because of their religion, are perceived as a threat to German society, which is
predominantly secular, unlike the Turkish ‘orientalisches Parallel universum’
(Domsky, 2009, p. 70) [‘oriental parallel universe’]. Brinkmann’s book shows
no hint of any tolerance towards devout Muslims. Even Yasemin’s younger
brother, Bekir, who helps arrest Tayfun and Hakan, then tries to persuade the
police that he shot Yasemin himself, meets with Zinck’s derision, as she
immediately sees through his game of wanting to cover for his older brothers.11
The only example of a Turk adapting to German society in a way acceptable to
Zinck is Özgü. This German-Turkish policeman with a German mother and
Turkish father, who died when the boy was thirteen, informs Stettner that his
Turkish wife is, like him, not a devout Muslim (Domsky, 2009, p. 194). By contrast,
Yasemin’s murder by her older brothers and Leyla’s by her younger brother
suggest to the reader that devout Turks are all potential honour killers,
regardless of whether they are highly successful third-generation businessmen
or teenagers just off the plane from Turkey.
Zinck’s racism brings to mind the term ‘xeno-racism’, coined to describe a
‘mixture of racism and xenophobia’ that stresses, among other things, ‘cultural
incompatibilities or differences (migrants lack ‘cultural competencies’, ‘they
do not want to integrate’, they are not ‘tolerant’)’. However, this ‘new’ racism
‘differs from the older kinds in that it is not expressed in overtly racist terms’,
‘thus domesticating and diffusing critique’ (Delanty et al., 2008, p. 2). Such
precautions do not concern Zinck. Thus, the novel, with its glaringly xeno
phobic overtones, clearly fits Ruth Mandel’s description of many books she saw
for sale in Berlin book shops in 2006 and 2007, which ‘[i]n light of the highly
publicized “honor killing” of a young Berlin woman by her brothers and the
subsequent court case . . . reinforce stereotypical images. In an environment
marked by escalating distrust of minorities and Muslims in the midst of society,
such treatises fan the flames of the antiforeigner sentiment’ (Mandel, 2008,
p. 258). Mandel accuses such books of ‘distort[ing] the many and complex
reasons and manners girls and women choose to don the headscarf – or, for
that matter, remove it’ (Mandel, 2008, p. 258). None of these accusations
applies to Maccarone’s film. Through Lindholm’s learning process, as she
observes Selda first donning and then removing her headscarf, the film alerts
the audience to some of the reasons women may have for wearing one. In the
film these include, as Maccarone put it in her interview with Der Spiegel cited
earlier, the fact that Turkish immigrants in Germany are very much a
heterogeneous group.12
The publication of the novel resulted in no threats against either the author
or the new publisher. On the contrary, both were commended for having
ignored the threats which, along with the novel’s xenophobic elements and
artistic deficiencies, had caused the cancellation of the initial publisher’s
contract (Akyol, 2009). The book even profited from the controversy
surrounding its publication and continues to be available in bookshops and
from Amazon.13 One reason for its failure to generate the anticipated public
controversy may be its adherence to the generic tendencies of the hard-boiled
which is characterized by its use of slang, foul language and often presents
assertive and not particularly ‘politically correct’ detectives. In contrast to a
book, a television programme is more accessible to a far wider audience, and
this may also explain why the Tatort episode came under such attack, despite the
fact that Maccarone’s film set out to break down xenophobia and was praised
for its artistic merits (Gräßler, 2007) before the Alevis accused it of
‘Volksverhetzung’ [‘incitement of the people’].14
‘Wem Ehre gebührt’ is still banned from further screenings on television.15
The ARD’s ban, however, applies only to ‘the near future’, and it is therefore
possible that the episode might be re-released once its potential for provoking
protests among the Alevis is considered to have subsided. In this respect the
ARD would be following the procedure it adopted for its 1989 Tatort episode
‘Blutspur’ [‘Trail of Blood’], whose protagonist was Inspector Schimanski.
Originally unable to be re-screened because of its violence and inhumane
treatment of minorities, including Shiites, it was re-released ten years later.16
The fact that the publication of Brinkmann’s book did not provoke protests
from any members of the Turkish community in Germany is unlikely to
influence the ARD’s decision in Maccarone’s case, since the Alevis, in their
protests of 2007, insisted they wanted to protect their moral reputation rather
than their religious beliefs.17 Further investigation would be required to
ascertain whether the ARD’s decision against re-screening the film was
influenced not only by the reasons behind the Alevis’ opposition, but also by
the sheer numbers of protestors.18
Notes
1
Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine
2
The series Tatort has been produced by German, Austrian and initially Swiss
television for German-speaking audiences since November 1970.
3
The second largest religious group in Turkey, the Alevis comprise about 25 per
cent of the population. In Germany they form a sizeable part of the 1.7 million
Turks and 700,000 Germans of Turkish origin and are regarded there as the most
democratically minded of all Muslims. They practise sexual equality, both sexes
pray together and women do not wear headscarves.
4
While we have no commonly accepted definition of racism, the word may be used
in a narrow sense as biological racism and in a wider sense as cultural racism. See
Fredrickson (2002), pp. 4–9.
5
Mandel (2008, p. 254) starts her list of immoral accusations levelled by Sunnis
against Alevis with ‘the Alevi communal ritual of ayin-i-cem, during which Sunnis
believe Alevis engage in incestuous sexual orgies in the dark’.
6
Maccarone repeated this claim in the Frankfurter Rundschau on 22 December
2007 (Staude, 2007).
7
Maccarone, interviewed before the screening, pointed this out (Tatort Funds,
2007).
8
Zinck treats Islam and the Koran with a contempt that might have been expected
to provoke a reaction from Muslims similar to that provoked by Salman Rushdie’s
Satanic Verses or the Danish caricatures of the prophet Mohammed. According
to the Spiegel Online article of 3 October 2009 (‘Verlag nimmt Ehrenmord-Krimi
aus Programm’ [‘Publisher removes honour-killing thriller from programme’],
which sparked media interest in the disagreement between author and pub-
lisher, Droste would have published the novel had Brinkmann agreed to alter the
sentence as follows: ‘You can shove your honour up . . . ’.
9
As critics acknowledge, Brinkmann’s own sentiments towards Turks seem the
same as Zinck’s. See Sembten (2009).
10
Sembten (2009) calls Zinck ‘the incarnation of political incorrectness’ [‘die
Inkarnation politischer Unkorrektheit’].
11
Along with Leyla’s murder by her ‘little brother’, Zinck’s derisive response to
Bekir Celin’s self-accusation of his sister’s murder suggests Brinkmann’s familiar-
ity with findings of researchers like Tellenbach, according to whom most honour
killings are committed by brothers rather than fathers or husbands. The family
often chooses a minor to do the killing; if convicted, he will receive a lesser
penalty (Tellenbach, 2003, 74–89).
12
The film’s double storyline of Selda and Lindholm almost looks as if it had been
written to take account of Mandel’s points. However, Mandel’s book appeared
one year after Maccarone had made the film.
13
See reviews of Ehre, wem Ehre . . . by Amazon customers (http://www.amazon.
de/Ehre-wem-Kriminalroman-W-Domsky/dp/3939689335, accessed on 25 May
2010) and Welt (2009).
14
This was the charge laid by the German Alevis against the ARD to stop the pro-
gramme’s screening. See ‘Inzest-“Tatort”. Aleviten protestieren bei Schäuble’
[‘Incest-“Crime Scene”. Alevis protest to Schäuble’] (Spiegel Online, 2007).
15
The film is accessible on: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid8113620
791232348868#.
16
See ‘Skandalöse Tatort-Folgen. Blutspur’ (WDR, 20 August 1989) [‘Scandalous
Crime Scene Series. Trail of Blood’ (West German Radio, 20 August 1989)].
17
In a letter of 28 December 2007 to the Minister of Internal Affairs, Wolfgang
Schäuble, from the general secretary of the Alevi Community, the latter insisted
that Alevi protests against Maccarone’s film had nothing in common with protests
against the Mohammed cartoons, even though the Alevis were very distressed by
the film (Spiegel Online, 2007).
18
This assumption suggests itself if one considers two other films from the Tatort
series (‘Brandmal’ [‘Stigma’] and ‘Der Kormorankrieg’ [‘The Cormorant War’].
Before their release, both films caused public protests: the former by the Central
Council of German Sinti and Roma (Zentralrat deutscher Sinti und Roma), the
latter by the Baden State Fishery Association (Landesfischereiverband Baden),
but neither was banned by the ARD from further broadcasts.
Chapter 16
The Representation of Chinese Characters

in Leonardo Padura’s La Cola de la Serpiente
(2000): Sinophobia or Sinophilia?
Carlos Uxó
In the year 2000, Cuban writer Leonardo Padura Fuentes (also known as
Leonardo Padura) published La cola de la serpiente, the first novel of the
Lieutenant Mario Conde series after the much-acclaimed tetralogy Las cuatro
estaciones [The Four Seasons].1 As was the case with the four previous novels, the
plot in La cola de la serpiente is mainly a platform to allow the exploration of issues
of interest for the writer, who has made of this feature one of the hallmarks of
what he has termed his ‘falso policial’ (Matos, 2000) [‘false detective fiction’].
Here, Padura turns his attention to the arrival of Chinese migrants to Cuba and
to the living conditions of the few remaining Chinese nationals living in Havana’s
barrio chino (Chinese quarter). The action, as in all the novels in the Las cuatro
estaciones series, is set in 1989, predating the late 1990s reactivation of commercial
and political links between Cuba and China, and allowing Padura to paint a very
bleak picture of a community ‘nearing extinction’ (Padura, 1994b, p. 17).2
The plot of the novel is simple: Lieutenant Mario Conde is commissioned to
investigate the murder of Pedro Cuang, an elderly man of Chinese origin, who
has been found hanged in his room in the Havana Chinese quarter:
Le habían cortado el dedo índice de la mano izquierda y en el pecho, con

una cuchilla o con una navaja le habían hecho un círculo con dos flechas que
formaban una cruz y en cada cuadrícula le habían puesto unas cruces más
pequeñas, como signos de sumar. (Padura, 2001, p. 147)
[They had cut off the index finger on [Cuang’s] left hand, and on his
chest, with a blade or knife, they had cut a circle with two arrows forming a
cross, and in each quarter they had made some very small crosses, like tiny
plus signs.]
Aware of his lack of knowledge of the Chinese community, Mario Conde asks
his friend (and father of Lieutenant Patricia Chion) Juan Chion for help.
Reluctantly, Juan accepts, and the ensuing investigation ends with the arrest of
the murderer.
The novel’s interest, however, is not the police investigation, but the prob-
lematic representation of its Chinese characters, and it is on this issue that the
few critics who have reviewed the novel have focused. Adopting a very critical
stance, Ignacio López-Calvo considers that while ‘Padura Fuentes . . . acknow
ledges Westerners’ limitations in understanding the Far East’, he also makes
‘no attempt to understand the Chinese Weltanschauung’ (López-Calvo, 2009,
p. 56). As a result, López-Calvo analyses La cola de la serpiente as an example of
Cuban Sinophobia. In a more complimentary vein, Dennis Seager, in a piece
that addresses López-Calvo’s book directly, considers that Padura does show a
clear effort to understand Chinese-Cubans and that in his novel he avoids
stereotypical images of Chinese migrants to Cuba (Seager, 2009).
My reading of the novel sits between López-Calvo’s censorious and Seager’s
laudatory tones. While I agree that Mario Conde’s acknowledgement of his
(and, in general, Cubans’) ignorance of the Chinese community is important,
I also believe that this does not necessarily signify a ‘clear effort to understand
the Chinese-Cubans’, as Seager understands it (2009, p. 2). Similarly, even if
Padura seems to be aware of the stereotypical representation that Cuban
discourse (literary and otherwise) had associated for centuries with Chinese-
Cubans, his representation of Chinese characters in the novel coincides, in the
main, with the stereotypical image he is trying to overcome. Thus, his Chinese
quarter appears inhabited by peaceful, reserved, lonely, cunning characters,
not dissimilar to the ones that had populated previous Cuban novels. Most
importantly, Padura’s representation of Chinese migrants appears tainted by an
obvious essentialization that replaces individuals with fixed, homogeneous
beings. Focusing on the main aim of his novel (to call attention to the living
conditions of the few remaining Chinese nationals in Havana), and, it would
seem, avoiding subtleties or subplots that could distract the reader, Padura
paints a reductionist picture that unifies the Chinese migrants’ experiences and
turns each of los chinos, ‘the Chinese people’, into lo chino, ‘Chineseness’.
Before I discuss La cola de la serpiente in more depth, I will provide a brief
overview of the arrival of Chinese migrants to Cuba, paying particular attention
to the creation of the traditional representation of Chinese migrants in Cuban
discourse.
Throughout the nineteenth century, sugar plantations had increasingly
become the main economic activity in Cuba, the world’s largest producer after
the Haiti Revolution (1791–1804). The plantation system demanded a large
number of labourers, a demand that for decades was satisfied by the importation
of black slaves from Africa. However, mounting international pressure forced
Spain to abolish slavery, and made it necessary for Cuban landowners to look
for workers elsewhere.3 Having tried other options with little success (migrants
from other Caribbean islands or even Europe), in 1845, Julián Zulueta suggested
a Chinese solution, with the first cargo ship loaded with Chinese workers
arriving in Havana on 3 June 1847. The speed with which the process was set in
motion was the result of what López-Calvo has called ‘push and pull factors’
(López-Calvo, 2009, p. 4), the combination of extreme poverty, violence and
overpopulation in Guangdong, from where most Chinese migration originated,
with the end of slavery and immediate need for workers in Cuba.4
These ‘push and pull factors’ simplified the work of the infamous enganchadores,
whose job was to convince young, destitute Chinese men to migrate to Cuba
through a process known as enganche.5 Typically, unscrupulous enganchadores,
who worked on commission for shipping companies, would find a way to come
into contact with strong, young, gullible men used to working in rice fields and
desperate to leave behind a life of extreme poverty. More often than not,
enganchadores would take their prey to a teahouse, where they would be told
countless stories about the abundant riches awaiting them in Cuba. Free drinks
and sweets were pressed upon them, they were paid eight Mexican pesos as
their first salary, and, most importantly, they were persuaded to sign an eight-
year contract (known as contrata). As soon as the document was signed, the
young men were taken to a warehouse, where they would remain until embarking
for Cuba (Jiménez Pastrana, 1983, p. 32). When flattery and false promises
failed, and enganchadores could not reach their quota of expected emigrants,
they would resort to threats, outright kidnapping or even to purchasing political
prisoners incarcerated by mandarins (Pérez de la Riva, 1974, p. 195).
Enganchadores certainly excelled in their work, and the 206 coolies (as they came
to be known) who arrived on board the Oquendo in 1847 were followed by at
least 150,000 compatriots over the next hundred years.6
The arrival of Chinese migrants immediately provoked a heated debate
between those who supported the new migration policy (mainly for economic
reasons) and those who opposed it (mainly for cultural or xenophobic reasons,
with clearly racist overtones). Among those who supported it were well-known
and powerful figures like Ramón de la Sagra, who in 1861 saw the Chinese as a
‘docile labor force for the insatiable needs of sugar mills’ (Scherer, 2001,
p. 159), and Urbano Feijoo de Sotomayor, who wrote: ‘We need men to work
side by side with the slaves, and for this only the sons of a country governed with
the rod will serve. This quality is found in the Chinese’ (Quoted in Corbitt,
1971, p. 10). Conversely, José Antonio Saco, who had written extensively on
what he felt were the pernicious effects of the increasingly black population in
Cuba, stated:
I agree that the introduction of Asiatics into Cuba would be useful to her
agriculture – but the nauseous corruption of their customs, the religious
indifference of many of them, as with the Chinese, the anti-Christian beliefs
of almost all of them, as well as the additional complication they would add
to races so heterogeneous as already exist in that island, are evils so large in
the moral and political order, that they must be a cause of concern to every
good Cuban. (quoted in Lewis, 2004, p. 154)
It is certainly striking that the arguments used by both sides were very similar to
those used in long-held discussions about the arrival of black slaves in Cuba, to
the point that the Chinese migration debate can be understood as a mere
continuation of the slavery debate. More importantly, such a similarity shows
the extent to which Chinese migrants were perceived by the white elite to be the
new blacks, and their status upon arrival in Cuba (both as workers and as
racialized citizens) was equated to that of black slaves.7 As Dorsey states, ‘cosas de
chinos reflected cosas de negros’ (Dorsey, 2004, p. 29): in other words, the Chinese
situation mirrored the Afro-Cuban situation.
In this regard, Kathleen López notes that the social positioning of Chinese
migrants is a consequence of the overlapping of two labour systems (slavery and
contract work) that coexisted for decades and that many perceived as variations
of the same situation:
The use of Asian indentured labor in the Americas was directly linked to the
decline of slavery. In Cuba, however, Chinese coolies were imported between
1847 and 1874, while slavery was still in full force on the island. It is no sur-
prise, therefore, that in practice Chinese contract workers were treated like
slaves. Indeed, the atrocities of the system so closely resembled the Atlantic
slave trade that Cuban historians have called it the ‘trata amarilla’. (López,
2008, p. 60)
The positioning of Chinese migrants as the new blacks resulted in a de facto

racial status at odds with the official one. Legally, coolies were to be recorded as
white, and they appeared as such in censuses carried out in the nineteenth
century, ‘while the category for blacks included both free and slave’. However,
‘local parishes usually recorded them in the libro de bautismo de color’ (Hu-DeHart,
2007, pp. 108–9), the baptism registry for black Cubans. As a result, ‘popular
and state-based discourses’ ended up challenging and nullifying ‘the legal
taxonomy of coolies as free white men’ (Dorsey, 2004, p. 20), and categorizing
them as pseudo-slaves. This had a number of consequences.
First, the coolies’ working and living conditions were modelled on the slaves’,
with clearly dreadful results. In fact, it was not uncommon for slaves (a property
of the landowner) to be treated better than coolies (on an eight-year contract),
as there had been no previous investment that needed to be capitalized. As a
result, it has been estimated that a staggering 50 to 75 per cent of coolies died
before the end of their contract (Cuba Commission Report, 1993, p. 24).8
Second, coolies lived in a very restricted social environment that included
mainly (where not exclusively) Afro-Cubans, from whom they learnt their
Spanish. Such contact also resulted in some religious syncretism, with the most
notorious example being San Fankong.
Third, discursive representation of Chinese coolies was modelled on
representations of black slaves, which presented them as submissive servants.
These representations originated in abolitionists’ documents that aimed to

demonstrate the non-violent character of slaves and to dispel the fear of the
black slave that had plagued Cuban society since the beginning of slavery. Many
white Cubans feared that losing control over an increasing black population
could lead to riots and, ultimately, to a generalized slave revolt similar to the
one that had taken place in neighbouring Haiti. While those in favour of the
slavery system harnessed this fear to impose very strict controls over the black
population, abolitionists countered it by maintaining that neither slaves nor
free Afro-Cubans posed any risk to Cuban society due to their non-violent
nature. This led to ubiquitous representations of subservient individuals happy
to accept their subaltern social role as long as they were treated ‘fairly’.
Similarly, with the arrival of Chinese coolies, the by then white minority once
more feared it was losing control of the country, especially after the first coolie
revolts.9 As a consequence, an ever-increasing control over the coolies was
imposed, resulting in the worsening of their working and living conditions. In
turn, coolie advocates wrote numerous texts emphasizing both these appalling
conditions and the peaceful nature of the newly arrived. These texts, aimed at
‘a readership whose sympathy they [coolie advocates] hoped to gain’ avoided
‘too many references to militant behaviour’ (Dorsey, 2004, p. 27), just as
abolitionists had done for decades, in order to counter the depiction of coolies
as a dangerous group, a common feature in the texts that favoured the tightest
of controls.
Such avoidance, which Joseph Dorsey has termed ‘textual subversions of
subaltern resistance’ (Dorsey, 2004, p. 27), was in the first place ahistorical,
since Chinese coolies were not the submissive workers landowners expected,
‘especially since unlike African slaves, many Chinese had actually been recruited
with promises of high wages and favourable working conditions’ (Lipski, 1999,
p. 217). From the very first year of their arrival, when the first coolie revolt took
place, Chinese immigrants ‘resisted the deception and coercion of the
recruitment system and the harsh conditions on Cuban sugar plantations
through suicide, fight, rebellion, and legal challenge’ (López, 2009, p. 178),
eventually joining the fight for independence against Spain (1868–98).
But these texts were not only historically inaccurate; they also contributed to
the creation of the myth of the coolies as subservient, de-subjectified beings,
devoid of any agency. By depicting the coolie as obedient, passive members of
society, happy to accept a fate determined by others, the authors of these texts
confined the coolies to a subaltern role. As I shall demonstrate later, it is my
contention that Padura’s novel continues the tradition established by these
texts, thereby perpetuating the subalternization process of the Chinese
immigrants.10
In spite of the heated debate, and the initial reluctance to continue with the
Chinese migration policy, by 1870 approximately 150,000 Chinese nationals
lived in Cuba, an extraordinary 12 per cent of the population, compared to a

mere 0.4 per cent at the same time in the United States (López-Calvo, 2009,
p. 13). In 1873, however, and as result of the international outcry over the
treatment of coolies, importation of Chinese labourers ceased; four years later,
the contract work system was abolished and a Chinese consulate opened in
Havana (Padura, 1994a, p. 20). As a consequence, the number of Chinese
nationals dwindled rapidly, amounting to less than one percent of the population
in 1899. The improved image of the community thanks to the part they played
in the Cuban fight for independence (1868–98), coupled with the rapid
economic development in Cuba in the first two decades of the century provoked
a new wave of Chinese immigrants, and:
by the 1920s food stands, restaurants, bodegas (grocery stores), tailors, shoe
and watch repair shops, and photography studios lined the streets of Havana’s
Chinatown, one of the best known in the Americas. Dozens of regional and
clan associations were established in Havana and other provincial towns in
Cuba. (López, 2009, p. 179)11
However, this fruitful period proved to be short-lived, as the 1930s depression

and related anti-immigrant wave had a very negative impact on the Chinese
community. Thus, even if the 1940 Constitution ‘liberalized entry procedures
for families of immigrants already in Cuba’ (López, 2009, pp. 180–1), census
numbers show a community clearly in decline: 15,822 in 1943, and 11,834
in 1953, when they were less than 0.3 per cent of the population (Baltar
Rodríguez, 1997, p. 90).
After the Revolution, the Chinese community suffered the consequences of
the nationalization of private commerce (which had a devastating effect in a com-
munity where small, private companies were the norm), and the immediate
departure into exile of numerous anti-Communist Chinese nationals. Shortly
afterwards, the introduction in Cuba of a process of identity homogenization,
with its celebration of ‘cultural mixture as the basis for conceiving a homo
geneous national identity out of a heterogeneous population’ (de Castro, 2002,
p. 9) made it almost impossible for individuals to describe themselves in terms
other than revolutionary and Cuban, thus rendering the Chinese community
(like many others) virtually invisible. This, combined with the widening of Sino-
Cuban political differences in the mid-1960s and 1970s, dealt another blow to
Chinese community members, who began to be perceived by many as political
enemies. As a result, there was barely any Chinese immigration for decades
(Fernández Núñez, 2001, p. 61), and the 11,000 Chinese nationals in the 1953
census were reduced to 5,892 in 1970 (Baltar Rodríguez, 1997, p. 90).12 By 1989,
when La cola de la serpiente takes place, Havana’s barrio chino was an overcrowded,
derelict area where the Chinese presence was little more than a memory.
The decrease of Chinese nationals has continued since, and was estimated to
be merely 430 in 1998 and a paltry 143 in 2008. (MacSwan, 1998; López-Calvo,
2009, p. 15)
In La cola de la serpiente coolie miseries are witnessed mainly through the
experiences of three characters: Pedro Cuang, the murdered elderly man; Juan
Chion, Mario Conde’s friend and helper; and Francisco Chiu, friend of Juan
Chion, all of them Chinese nationals from Guangdong.
Juan Chion, or Li Chion Tai,13 for example, arrives in Cuba at the age of
eighteen from a Guangdong village where his family barely survived by fishing
and sowing rice. In Guandong he had heard stories about ‘un mundo nuevo
donde los pesos corrían como agua cristalina por los arroyos míticos de su país’
(Padura, 2001, p. 151) [‘a new world where pesos run like the crystal-clear water
did in the mythical rivers of his country’], a place where gold and silver were so
abundant that he could amass a fortune in the eight years of his contract. Juan
dreamt of being able to buy his own land, of being famous and loved, ‘como un
dios que baja de la montaña más alta y más nevada, para cambiar con un solo
gesto omnipotente el destino de los suyos’(Padura, 2001, p. 151) [‘like a god
that comes from the highest and most snow-covered mountain, to change the
fate of his people with the flick of a wrist’]. But life in Cuba had only brought
him misery, sixteen-hour working days and the impossibility of either returning
to China or seeing his family again.
Both Juan and Francisco Chiu form families in Cuba, however, something
extremely rare in a community where exogamy was limited to rare marriages
with Afro-Cuban women, and endogamy almost impossible: the 1861 and 1870
censuses indicate that 95 per cent of Chinese immigrants were male. By 1872,
about 58,000 men of Chinese origin were registered in Cuba, with only 32
women, some of them prostitutes (Pérez de la Riva, 1978, pp. 70–1).14 Their
marriages make Juan and Francisco atypical immigrants (Juan describes himself
as ‘un chino un poquito distinto’ (Padura, 2001, p. 154) [‘a slightly different
Chinese man’], with Pedro Cuang, who arrived in Cuba at age thirteen, lived by
himself, never married and did not have a family (Padura, 2001, p. 146), playing
the role of the average Chinese immigrant.
The novel opens with Mario Conde’s candid musings on his lack of knowledge
about the Chinese community. Only two paragraphs into the novel, the Lieuten-
ant acknowledges that his image of the Chinese immigrant is that of a standard
Chinese, ‘un personaje fabricado . . . construido por una esquemática vision Occi-
dental’ (Padura, 2001, p. 140) [‘a fabricated character . . . built by a schematic
Western understanding’] who would have never been able to build the Great
Wall, or be part of the Cultural Revolution, or the Long March. Only stereotypes,
he adds later, are known about Havana’s Chinese community (Padura, 2001,
p. 150). Dennis Seager argues that what follows is an education process through
which Mario Conde overcomes ‘the stereotypes that he has of his Chinese-Cuban
fellow citizens’ (2009, p. 1). The novel therefore, according to Seager, cannot be
considered an example of Sinophobia (as Álvarez-Calvo states), but of Sinophilia,

as it leads to a better understanding of the Chinese community.
It is my contention, however, that the education process the novel tries to
reflect is marred by Padura’s inability to escape the very representation he is
trying to overcome. Even if the novel’s protagonist is aware of his schematic
view, Padura, as López-Calvo notes about other texts, cannot avoid ‘the
temptation to homogenize them [the Chinese immigrants] or to simplify their
experience through historical reductionism’ (López-Calvo, 2009, p. 19), resort
ing to an essentialism that he tries to avoid but cannot escape. By the end of the
novel, stereotypes that plagued literary representations of Chinese characters
in Cuban literature have not been subverted but reinforced. Juan Chion’s
characterization provides a good example of this.
As I have mentioned, Mario Conde’s friend and helper describes himself as
an uncommon Chinese person. This statement reflects a tension evident
throughout the novel: an attempt to avoid and overcome the traditional
essentialization of the Chinese experience in Cuba, which is undercut by
Padura’s constant returning to that essentialist view. Although Juan’s self-
definition as ‘different’ would seem to subvert the reductionist view of the
Chinese community (by showing that some of its members do not conform to
the expected norm), it can be argued that, in fact, this reinforces the existence
of such a norm: Juan Chion’s difference does not deny the existence of the
standard Chinese mentioned on the second page of the novel (2001, p. 140),
but simply places him apart from a commonality in which he believes (and
which the text reinforces). Juan’s essentialist view is indeed confirmed later in
the novel when he states ‘los chinos son chinos’ (Padura, 2001, p. 163) [‘the
Chinese are Chinese’].
One of the most visible ways in which this essentialism is marked is by having
Chinese characters speak ‘Chinese’ Spanish: /r/ becomes /l/, prepositions
and articles are dropped, verb conjugation is erratic and lexical choices are
often somehow idiosyncratic or simply mistaken. Such a way of representing
Chinese pronunciation of Spanish mirrors traditional literary representations
of Afro-Cubans.
The inclusion of Afro-Cuban characters in Cuban literature became common
in the cuadros de costumbres, short descriptive texts published in Havana
newspapers from 1790. Each cuadro tackled an aspect of contemporary Cuban
society with the aim of criticizing it, while at the same time entertaining the
(white) reader. Black characters frequently appeared, more often than not as
stereotypical characters loaded with negative connotations, such as mulatas de
rumbo (lazy, overtly sexual mulatas), catedráticos (semiliterate black men trying
to pass as cultured), curros del manglar (cocky men always ready for a fight), and
so on. Specific to these characters was a supposedly funny (as in peculiar and
laughable) way of speaking Spanish that would be maintained in nineteenth-
century teatro bufo (comic theatre).
It is also in these plays (again, mainly aimed at a white audience) that Chinese
characters enter Cuban literature, with the main role of creating hilarity, since
their way of speaking Spanish was considered laughable by many (Valdés
Bernal, 2000, p. 63).
While some features of this representation of the habla de chino (the way
Chinese immigrants spoke) were linguistically factual, it was in the whole far
from accurate, to the point of being described by linguist John Lipski as a mere
‘literary stereotype’ (Lipski, 1999, pp. 218–19). Since Cantonese Chinese has
only one liquid consonant, /l/, fiction writers assumed than in all positions /r/
would turn into /l/. This is not correct as it would produce non-existent
combinations of consonants such as /tl/ (with numerous instances in La cola de
la serpiente: ‘estlaño’ [p. 148], ‘entle’ [p. 150], ‘tlabajamos’ [p. 155], ‘otla’
[p. 181], ‘otlo’ [p. 199], Patlicita, [p. 199]), and sound combinations impossible
in Cantonese as ‘bl’ (‘bluto’ [p. 148 and p. 203], ‘homble’, [p. 204]) or ‘fl’ (no
instances in La cola de la serpiente). In some cases, authors also assumed that
intervocalic /d/ turned into /l/ (‘joliendo’ [p. 164]), an impossibility according
to Chinese phonotactics. Taking all that into account, and after discussing a
large number of literary instances of habla de chino, Lipski concludes that one
cannot but distrust these literary imitations of the Chinese way of speaking
Spanish (Lipski, 1998, p. 111).
More important than the linguistic argument, however, are the social effects
of this type of representation. By having Chinese characters speak what the
audience perceived as laughable Spanish, bufo playwrights used language,
sacralized by the lettered city as an instrument of power, to establish an evident
social hierarchy. Their many lexical and grammatical mistakes, a pronunciation
that deviated from the cultured norm or their imperfect syntax not only made
the reader smile, but also forced the Chinese coolies into a linguistic subalternity
that mirrored and reinforced their social position.15 A century and a half later,
Leonardo Padura’s inclusion of the same ‘laughing stock’ returns to the same
pattern, with identical results.
Equally, by marking only the Spanish spoken by the Chinese characters,
Padura underlines their deviation from the norm, their foreignness (even if
some of them have been in Cuba for over sixty years), a point that Dennis
Seager touches on in his essay on La cola de la serpiente. For Seager, Juan
Chion’s pronunciation of /l/ instead of /r/ cannot be simply put down to the
‘humorous tone’ for which Álvarez-Calvo criticizes Padura. Instead, Seager
contends, such pronunciation can be read as an active decision on Chion’s
part, a public reaffirmation of his Chineseness in a society that expects him to
become a normalized Cuban (Seager, 2009, p. 6). While this interpretation
could have some merit, it does not take into account that Juan’s explanation
of his pronunciation conforms to the traditional literary representation:
‘Conde, la rrreee no existe en Chino’ (Padura, 2001, p. 148) [‘Conde, the
sound erre does not exist in Chinese’]. Also, Seager’s argument cannot
explain why other Chinese characters follow the same pronunciation

pattern.
Together with this stereotyped habla de chino, Padura’s essentialist repre
sentation of the Chinese immigrants is marked by the presence of a limited
number of descriptors that replicate the traditional Cuban discourse described
earlier and reinforce the homogeneous perception of the Chinese community.
Chinese characters are repeatedly associated with silence (pp. 145, 153, 154,
166 and 178) and mystery (ubiquitous in the description of the mutual aid
society, p. 155, and referred to on pp. 158, 145, 164, 178 and 182). The behaviour
of the Chinese characters around Mario Conde is reminiscent of the submissive
model that first appeared in the texts written by coolie advocates, as are the
nostalgic tone and the mystical aura surrounding even the description of their
cooking.
The recurrence of these markers (coupled with the linguistic representation
already described) produce a semantic isotopy, a term used in linguistics to
refer to the repetition of one semantic unit through different forms, resulting
in the creation of a homogeneous meaning in a text. Thus, even if this may not
have been Padura’s intention, the novel refers continuously to a well-known
semantic pattern from which the author cannot escape, the stereotyped
representation of the Chinese, which, far from subverting, it reinforces.
As I stated earlier, my reading of the novel sits between López-Calvo’s critical
and Seager’s complimentary positions. I disagree with López-Calvo’s description
of the novel as an example of Sinophobia, since it is evident from the outset
that the author recognizes Cubans’ lack of knowledge of the Chinese community
and questions the traditional representation of Chinese characters. However,
while I have no reason to doubt what Seager calls the ‘affection and sympathy
that Padura Fuentes has for the Chinese-Cubans’ (Seager, 2009, p. 3), I also
disagree with his understanding of the novel as Sinophilic, as it ultimately
reinforces the stereotypes it tries to expose.
Notes
1
Las cuatro estaciones includes Pasado perfecto (1991), Vientos de cuaresma (1994b),
Máscaras (1997) and Paisaje de otoño (1998). The first edition of La cola de la serpi-
ente was published in Italian (Padura et al., 2000); I use and quote from the first
edition in Spanish, published in 2001. All translations of the novel in this article
are mine.
2
While the novel was published in 2000, when, thanks to the improvement of
Sino-Cuban relations, the revitalization of the barrio chino was already underway,
Padura’s interest in the Chinese community can be traced back to the bleak times
captured in his novel. In 1987, Padura published ‘El viaje más largo’(1994b) in
Juventud Rebelde, a piece about Havana’s Chinese community included later in a
collection of articles, also entitled El viaje más largo.
3
The slave trade was abolished in Spain (and its colonies) in 1820; slavery was
abolished in 1886. This protracted process allowed Cuban landowners to look for
solutions to the end of slavery, and resulted in the coexistence of the two systems
(slavery and contract work) for decades.
4
Referred to in the novel as Cantón, I use the now-preferred terms Guangdong for
the South-Eastern Chinese province, and Guangzhou for its capital.
5
From the Spanish enganchar, ‘to hook’.
6
Le Riverend arrived at this figure by adding to the official arrival figures (125,000)
an estimate of those arriving illegally, plus those coming from the United States
(‘chinos californianos’) (Pérez de la Riva, 1978, p. 57). Le Riverend’s estimate
seems quite conservative, and the final figure is probably much higher.
7
With the term ‘racialized’ I wish to emphasize the important role perceptions
of race played in the lives of Chinese migrants (and black slaves). White Cubans
were not ‘racialized’ since their ethnic origin was perceived to be transparent, in
as much as it was considered the norm from which ‘racialized’ groups distanced
themselves.
8
Equally telling is the 12 per cent of coolies who died while being transported to
Cuba between 1848 and 1874 (Pérez de la Riva, 1974, pp. 191 and 194).
9
Six years before the arrival of the Oquendo, the 1841 census had caused great
concern amid the white population, which for the first time was shown to be a
minority in colonial Cuba. The 1861 census again shows a white majority (de la
Fuente, 1995, p. 135). The first Coolie Revolt took place in 1847, the same year
they arrived.
10
It is worth noting that Padura’s is not the only recent Cuban text that continues
this tradition. In 2006, Cuban newspaper La Jiribilla included an article on
Cuban-Chinese nationals living in Havana, describing them as ‘reserved,
cautious, not very communicative, . . . introverted, suspicious and peaceful’
(Álvarez Ríos, 2006). Only recently has an awareness of the effects of this
representation begun to develop in Cuba. Herrera and Castillo, for example,
include as one of the aims of their 2003 book to put an end to the what they
called image of the Chinese as a ‘passive, docile, obedient being’ (Herrera and
Castillo, 2003, p. 12).
11
The 1907 census registers 11,217 Chinese nationals. The 1931 census, 24,647
(Baltar Rodríguez, 1997, p. 90). Juan Chion, one of the main characters in La cola
de la serpiente, arrives in Cuba as part of the second of these migratory waves.
12
The two censuses taken after 1970 do not have data on Chinese population: in the
1981 census, racial classification data was not recorded (although it was entered
by census takers); the 2002 census classified population in three groups: white,
black and racially mixed (mestizos).
13
Most Chinese immigrants changed their name upon arrival in Cuba, with ‘Juan’
being among the most popular choices. The naming of this character shows both
Padura’s wish to present him as a prototypical migrant, and the lack of politiciza-
tion of the text (where there is no commentary on the obvious imposition of a
new persona derived from the renaming of the newly arrived).
14
The immigration of Chinese women was discouraged, as the white elites consid-
ered that, unlike in the case of slaves (whose offspring was the property of the
mother’s owner) there was no economic benefit attached to it. It was also consid-
ered that descendents of white men and Chinese women would only bring racial
contamination, and descendents of Chinese women with Afro-Cuban men would
result in an unwanted increase of socially and biologically inferior individuals
(Dorsey, 2004, p. 41).
15
The term ‘ciudad letrada’ [‘lettered city’] was coined by Ángel Rama to refer to the
active role literate circles played in maintaining the colonial status of the elites
in postcolonial Latin America. Rama also notes the existence in Latin America
of two concentric, linguistically and socially opposed power circles, with indig-
enous and African languages placed in the second one (Rama, 1998, p. 45). In
Cuba, where speakers of indigenous languages disappeared quickly after coloni-
zation, it could be argued that the social and linguistic periphery was inhabited
by A
fro-Cubans and Chinese immigrants.
212
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Zacharasiewicz, W. (2010), Imagology Revisited. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Zié-Mé, D. (2005), Meurtres sur le lagon. n. l.: Atelier de presse.
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230
Index
Arellano, Robert, La forma dell’acqua 180–1, 183–4,

Havana Lunar 38 186n. 8
Arlt, Roberto 5, 165–75 Campion, Jane,
El amor brujo 165, 167 The Piano film 20
El juguete rabioso 165, 167 Carlotto, Massimo 5, 176–80, 184
El misterio de los tres sobreto- L’amore del bandito 179–80,
dos 169, 171–2 186n. 6
El Mundo newspaper articles 165 La verità dell’Alligatore 177–8,
La pista de los dientes de oro 169– 186n. 6
71 Nessuna cortesia all’uscita 178–80,
Los lanzallamas 165 186n. 6
Los siete locos 165, 167, 175n. 12 Casanova, Pascale 14, 19
Un argentino entre gangsters 169–70 Christie, Agatha 138, 144, 148,
149n. 1, 149n. 7
Bayard, Pierre, Conan Doyle, Arthur 1, 3, 57, 112,
L’Affaire du chien des Baskerville 114 114–16, 119–21, 123n. 8,
Bertaud, Irène, 137–48, 156, 169
Rouge paradis 61, 63 The Hound of the Baskervilles 112,
Blake, Sexton 101, 160 114–20, 123n. 8
Borges, Jorge Luis, The Sign of Four 138, 140, 145,
Book of Imaginary Beings 141 149n. 3
Bourland, Fabrice 4–5, 137–49 Correa, Arnaldo,
La dernière enquête du chevalier Cold Havana Ground 38
Dupin 139 Cruz Smith, Martin 3, 38, 43, 45
Le Diable du Crystal Palace 4, 137, Gorky Park 43
139, 141, 144, 146 Havana Bay 3, 38, 43, 45
Le Fantôme de Baker Street 139–40
Les Portes du sommeil 139 detective,
Brinkmann, Gabriele 189, 192, 194–7 amateur 88, 187n. 11
Ehre, wem Ehre . . . 189, 192–5 cerebral-intellectual 54, 91, 102,
Buena Vista Social Club film see 165, 169
Wenders, Wim chevalier Auguste Dupin 139, 169
commissaire Maigret 169
Camilleri, Andrea 3, 5, 176, 180–4, female 75–89, 124–36, 188–99
187n. 11 flâneur 41, 113, 116
Il cane di terracotta 182, 186n. 8 Golden Age 91, 121, 137,
Il giro di boa 181 174n. 8, 178
Il ladro di merendine 181–2, 186n. 8–9 hardboiled 37, 44–5, 93, 170, 174n. 8
232 Index
in-between 49, 75–86 Fleming, Charles 3, 37–8, 40, 42–3

outsider 112, 125 After Havana 3, 37–8, 40, 45
Philip Marlowe 192 The Ivory Coast 40
police investigator 177, 200–12 Fuentes, Leonardo see Padura
postcolonial 69 Fuentes, Leonardo
postmodern 89
and reader 23, 34n. 2 Great War 153–4
Sherlock Holmes 116–17, 119–22, Greene, Graham 35, 41
129–30, 149n. 6, 161 Our Man in Havana 37, 41
as travel/tourist guide 56–7, 65, Guirao, Patrice 61, 65–6, 69
87, 98 Crois-le! 62, 65
whodunit 23, 49, 108, 169, 173, Lyao-ly 62, 65
174n. 8 Gutiérrez, Pedro Juan,
Nuestro GG en La Habana 37
Empire 6, 26–7, 31, 33, 138, 146, 153, Trilogía sucia de La Habana 36
157, 164, 186n. 3
Danish colonization of Hart, Patricia,
Greenland 128 Spanish crime fiction, definitions
exoticism, exotic 1–3, 6–7, 11, of 75–6
14–20, 21n. 16, 28, 31, 35, Høeg, Peter 124–36
38–9, 44–5, 47–8, 50–2, 54–6, Smilla’s Sense of Snow 124, 127
58, 59n. 9, 60, 62–4, 69, 70n. 13, Hunter, Stephen,
76, 91, 109, 135, 138, 147–8 Havana 37, 40
ancient spiritual practices 13
Baudrillard, Jean 23–6, 30 identity, divided 184
colonial past 27, 130 identity, national 24, 29, 33, 131,
cosmopolitanism 47, 50, 56 176–7, 183
ethnological crime fiction 99, Britishness 22, 24, 28–31, 33–5
110n. 1 Cubanness 36
eurocentric fantasy 42 Englishness 28–31
exoticized Other 135 Frenchness 30, 113, 122n. 3
globalization 47, 50, 89–90, 97n. 5 Germanness 78
glocal settings 14–15 Italianness 176–7, 185
inauthentic locations 31, 57 Spanishness 4, 79
Havana, fascination with 37–8 identity, regional,
Shanghai, fascination Parisianness 113, 120
with 51, 55 Southern Italians 183–5
landscape 1, 4, 6, 13, 55, 99–102, immigration,
105, 109, 116, 127, 138, 148, Alien Act 154
149n. 1 Anderson, Benedict 77
community, immigrant 75, 93, 95,
Férey, Caryl 3, 9–21, 21n. 11, 17 182, 187n. 11, 188, 193, 197,
Haka 3, 9–12, 14–16, 19–20 199n. 17
Utu 3, 9–13, 15–17, 19–20, Alevi, in Germany 188–99
20n. 1–2, 21n. 14 ARD 188–97
Zulu 20 Chinese 200–11
Index 233
and crime 76–7 Latour, José,

habla de chino 88–9, 208–9 Havana Best Friends 38
imagined community 77 Hidden in Havana 38
dystopian foreigner 177, 179 Le Carré, John 3, 22–34
history of immigration to, Karla trilogy,
Argentina 166–8, 173 The Honourable Schoolboy 22–3,
Britain 154, 163 26, 28, 31–2
China 205, 210n. 14 Smiley’s People 22–6, 30, 32
Cuba 201–6 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy 22–3, 32
Germany 78, 85 López, Kathleen 203
Italy 176–7, 181, 185, 186n. 2 López-Calvo, Ignacio 201–2, 207, 209
return migrants 180–2
sinophobia 200, 207, 209 Maccarone, Angelina 188–9, 196–7,
xenophobia 5, 188–9, 191, 196 198nn. 6–7, 12, 199n. 17
Young, Alison 77, 80–1 Tatort episode Wem Ehre Gebührt 77,
indigenous 4, 10–11, 14, 17–19, 61–4, 188–91, 197, 197n. 2, 199n. 18
66–7, 70n. 9, 99–109, 110n. 2, MacKenzie, John 156–7
111n. 11, 128, 211n. 15 McLaren, Philip 4, 99–111
characters 27–8, 61, 63–4, 103 Lightning Mine 103
community 11, 19 Murder in Utopia 103, 105–6
and liberal imagination 40–1, 45–6 Scream Black Murder 103–4
Maori and Polynesian cultures 15 Sweet Water – Stolen Land 103–5
ritualized violence 14 There’ll be New Dreams 103
stereotypes 28, 60, 63–4, 67–8, West of Eden – The Real Man from
79, 206 Snowy River 103
insider-outsider 10, 78, 99–111 Meckert-Amila, Jean 62
La Vierge et le taureau 61
Jacques, Claudine,
Nouméa mangrove 61 Nettelbeck, Colin 89, 91
James, P. D. 22–3, 35, 45, 138, 140 post-literary age 87
juvenile literature see popular press
Obejas, Achy,
Keating, H. R. F., Havana Noir 38
Whodunit? A Guide to Crime, Suspense Once Were Warriors film see
and Spy Fiction 108 Tamahori, Lee
Kerdilès, Chantal 64, 67
Voyance sous les tropiques 61, 63 Padura Fuentes, Leonardo 36, 44,
200, 209
Larsson, Stieg 3–4, 124–9, 133–6 La cola de la serpiente 5, 200–11
Millennium trilogy, Pécherot, Patrick,
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Tiuraï 60
Nest 133 The Piano film see Campion, Jane
The Girl Who Played With Fire 126, popular press 165, 168
133, 136 dime novel 168
The Girl With the Dragon juvenile literature 156
Tattoo 126, 129, 132 literature de kiosco 166
234 Index
penny dreadful 156 trauma, traumatic 117, 120, 122,

serial novels 173 123n. 9, 125, 131–6, 178
postcolonial literature 13 Truman, Margaret,
Pratt, Mary Louise 1, 60, 62–3, 69 Murder in Havana 38
Imperial Eyes 62
Upfield, Arthur 3–4, 99–103,
Qiu, Xiaolong 4, 47–59 106–10
A Case of Two Cities 53, 58n. 8 The Barrakee Mystery 100
Death of a Red Heroine 47–8, 55, The Bone is Pointed 100
58n. 3, 59n. 11 Bony and the Mouse 100
A Loyal Character Dancer 55–6 Man of Two Tribes 100–2,
A Thousand Years of Good 107, 109
Prayers 58n. 4 The Mountains Have a Secret 100
Years of Red Dust: Stories of Sands of Windee 100
Shanghai 49–50, 58n. 8
Vargas, Fred 3–4, 112–23
Ribas, Rosa 4, 75–86 L’Homme à l’envers 4, 112–23
Con anuncio 75–7, 82–5, 86n. 2 villain,
Entre dos aguas 75–8, 80–2, 85 foreign 134–5, 145, 153, 172
Rivière, François, gangster 40, 169–70
In the Footsteps of Agatha Christie 148 super gangster 134
Robbe-Grillet, Alain 144 German 153–64
Djinn 144 Germanophobia 155
Turkish-German 86n. 4
Said, Edward 2, 13, 26, 32, 58n. 7, Mafia 38–41, 167, 178–85
62, 179, 185 Moriarty, Professor 114, 145–7
internalized Orientalism 58n. 7 Wolf-man 112–23
inverted Orientalism 54
Orientalism 26, 54, 62, 179 Wei, Hui,
positive Orientalism 185 Shanghai Baby 51
Santería 45–6 Wem Ehre Gebührt film see
Scerbanenco, Giorgio 184 Maccarone, Angelina
Simenon, Georges 57, 61–2, 70n. 10, Wenders, Wim,
149, 169, 174n. 6, 180 Buena Vista Social Club
Touriste de bananes 61 film 36, 39
Sylvain, Dominique 4, 87–98 Winks, Robin W.,
L’Absence de l’ogre 88–9, 94, 96 Mystery and Suspence Writers 100, 108
La Fille du samouraï 88, 93 Wood, Walter,
Manta Corridor 88, 93–4, 96 The Enemy in Our Midst 155
Passage du désir 88–9, 93, 96, 97n. 2
Zié -Mé, Daniel 66–9
Tamahori, Lee, Menaces sur Nouméa 61
Once Were Warriors film 11, 17, Meurtres sur le lagon 61, 66–7
20, 20n. 2 Nickel crimes 61, 66, 68, 71n. 18
Tatort episode see Maccarone, Angelina
235
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The Foreign in International

Adapting Detective Fiction, Neil McCaw

Edited by Jean Anderson,

© Jean Anderson, Carolina Miranda, Barbara Pezzotti and Contributors, 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-2817-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Part One: Inside Out or Outside In? The Scene of

Chapter 1 Cannibalistic Māori Behead Rupert Murdoch:

Chapter 2 ‘A Desk is a Dangerous Place from which to Watch

Chapter 3 Havana Noir: Time, Place and the Appropriation

Chapter 4 Shanghai, Shanghai: Placing Qiu Xiaolong’s Crime

Chapter 5 Seeing Double: Representing Otherness

Part Two: Private Eyes, Hybrid Eyes: The In-Between Detective

Chapter 6 ‘Don’t Forget the Tejedor’: Community and

Chapter 7 An American in Paris or Opposites Attract: Dominique

Chapter 8 Arthur Upfield and Philip McLaren: Pioneering

Chapter 9 From Wolf to Wolf-Man: Foreignness and

Chapter 10 Others Knowing Others: Stieg Larsson’s Millennium

Chapter 11 Smog, Tweed and Foreign Bedevilment:

Part Three: When Evil Walks Abroad – Towards a Politics of Otherness

Chapter 12 ‘The Meanest Devil of the Pit’: British Representations

Chapter 13 Reading Others: Foreigners and the Foreign

Chapter 14 Who is the Foreigner? The Representation of

Chapter 15 Images of Turks in Recent German Crime Fiction:

Chapter 16 The Representation of Chinese Characters in

Jean Anderson is associate professor of French at Victoria University of

Keren Chiaroni is senior lecturer in French at Victoria University. Her special­ties

Andrew Francis is a Wellington, New Zealand-based researcher. His interests

France Grenaudier-Klijn is senior lecturer and French subject convenor at

Luo Hui teaches Chinese language and literature at Victoria University of

discourse’ encompassing a diverse range of cultural practices such as the strange

Stewart King is senior lecturer in Spanish and Catalan Studies at Monash

Carolina Miranda lectures at Victoria University, Wellington. Her research

Andrew Nestingen is associate professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University

Barbara Pezzotti teaches Italian language and culture at Victoria University.

John Ramsland (OAM, FACE) is emeritus professor of History (Newcastle) and

Marie Ramsland is a conjoint lecturer in French at the University of Newcastle,

Alistair Rolls is a senior lecturer at the University of Newcastle, Australia, where

Margaret Sutherland is a senior lecturer in the German Programme at Victoria

Philip Swanson is Hughes professor of Spanish at the University of Sheffield,

Carlos Uxó is a lecturer in Spanish at La Trobe University, Australia. His main

Sabine Vanacker lectures in English at the University of Hull. Her research

Deborah Walker-Morrison is senior lecturer and head of French at the

The Foreign in International Crime Fiction:

cultures and societies and, in so doing, to better define themselves. Is it the

look in ­‘Shanghai, Shanghai: Placing Qiu Xiaolong’s Crime Fiction in the Land-

­ edevilment: Bourland’s Twenty-First-Century Remake of the Sherlock Holmes

Inside Out or Outside In?

Cannibalistic Māori Behead Rupert ­Murdoch:

unrecognizable to a New Zealand reader but problematically credible to his

Insider versus Outsider Status: The Stakes

How is this author positioned in relation to his subject culture? According to

The external-outsider is socialized within a community different from the

Although Férey as author is an ‘external-outsider’ to Māori society – one,

he nonetheless appropriates that of others. He does this partly by highlighting

iv) ce livre [Haka] permet de découvrir la NOuvelle Zélande [sic], sa culture

illusion of authenticity’(Bassnett, 2004, p. 66). Judging by the readers’ comments

From Postcolonial Ethnographic Thriller to

Misrepresentation is also apparent in Férey’s depiction of how Māori

Le roman noir se permet d’explorer les recoins de l’histoire, des socié-

Having examined the ways in which Férey managed to market himself as an

Chapter 1 Cannibalistic Māori Behead Rupert Murdoch:

Chapter 2 ‘A Desk is a Dangerous Place from which to Watch

Chapter 3 Havana Noir: Time, Place and the Appropriation

Chapter 4 Shanghai, Shanghai: Placing Qiu Xiaolong’s Crime

Chapter 5 Seeing Double: Representing Otherness

Chapter 6 ‘Don’t Forget the Tejedor’: Community and

Chapter 7 An American in Paris or Opposites Attract: Dominique

Chapter 8 Arthur Upfield and Philip McLaren: Pioneering

Chapter 9 From Wolf to Wolf-Man: Foreignness and

Chapter 10 Others Knowing Others: Stieg Larsson’s Millennium

Chapter 11 Smog, Tweed and Foreign Bedevilment:

Chapter 12 ‘The Meanest Devil of the Pit’: British Representations

Chapter 13 Reading Others: Foreigners and the Foreign

Chapter 14 Who is the Foreigner? The Representation of

Chapter 15 Images of Turks in Recent German Crime Fiction:

Chapter 16 The Representation of Chinese Characters in

Keren Chiaroni is senior lecturer in French at Victoria University. Her specialties

look in ‘Shanghai, Shanghai: Placing Qiu Xiaolong’s Crime Fiction in the Land-

edevilment: Bourland’s Twenty-First-Century Remake of the Sherlock Holmes

Cannibalistic Māori Behead Rupert Murdoch:

s urveillance job on Calloway, the subsequent ransom exchange goes horribly

An American in Paris or Opposites Attract:

Arthur Upfield and Philip McLaren: