The Male Mystery

...In her upcoming biography of Hammett, Diane Johnson quotes a critic as "beginning to wish that Mr...

...As one notes: "Popular culture is a skeleton in our academic closets...

...Most and Stowe and their authors have limited themselves to fictional murder as primal scene, a rewriting of Oedipus, and the acts of those who, in Alewyn's words, have no wife, no children, no profession, live in messy rooms, lead an irregular life, turn night into day, smoke opium, and so on...

...the third relies on psychoanalytic theory to illuminate the genre...

...Another anomaly of this collection is theapparent bemusement of theeditors and authors by the popularity of the genre they propose to explicate...

...Damn it, Winks is charming, and readable into the bargain...

...The problem in that sentence may be with the "we...

...He comments upon "an initial American separation of people from each other, their need to be linked by some external force (in this case the detective) if they are ever to be fitted together as parts of the same picture puzzle...

...Culler also looks askance at those who "read Freud without enquiring whether later psychological research may have disputed his formulations," a reproof that applies to the authors in The Poetics of Murder...

...the second is sociological, attempting to relate detective fiction to the society where fictional murder occurs...

...To understand their biases, this volume' s editors and authors should study Jonathan Culler's most recent work, On Deconstruction...

...Yet Jameson alone makes a point that sheds light on the fiction he is discussing, rather than on his own theories...

...Hammett and Mr...

...Their aims are set forth clearly enough: In a collection they hope will be used in college courses, they have presented essays written since World War II that can be arranged, they tell us in the Introduction, roughly into three groups...

...For in choosing material, the editors have confined themselves largely to articles that deal either with the tradition of the hard-boiled private eye, or with exclusively male-oriented authors...

...they are not interested in women at all...

...In the case of Most and Stowe the issue of sexual neutrality never comes up...

...Of Dashiell Hammett and his epigones, the Oedipal complex and Edgar Allan Poe, we are given a great deal, but there is hardly a word about women writers, despite the famous names one could list, nor about the treatment of women characters in the several schools of detective fiction, despite the insights such analysis could provide...

...No attempt is made to understand why...

...Culler defines feminist criticism, the effort to debunk phallocentrism (what I am engaged in here), as designed to "reverse the usual situation in which the perspective of a male critic is assumed to be sexually neutral, while a feminist reading is seen as a case of special pleading and an attempt to force the text into a predetermined mold...

...Reviewed by Carolyn Heilbrun Professor of English, Columbia University There is an extraordinary disparity between the intentions of the editors in compiling this book and what they have in fact produced...

...One supposes the editors decided that Alewyn was better than Sayers on this subject because he is foreign, male and academic...

...What biography does he have in mind...

...Moreover, though he admires many male novelists, including some from the last quarter century, he seems also to know that there are women in the world, and that some of them are protagonists in detective fiction, and that some females besides the popular and therefore often-scorned Agatha Christie even write detective fiction...

...Most describes "the" detective as having the following characteristics: He is fundamentally at odds with the society of all the other characters...

...Nor do the editors blanch at Steven Marcus' footnote in his piece on Hammett: "One of the few things that he could recall from his childhood past was his mother's repeated advice that a woman who wasn't good in the kitchen wasn't likely to be much good in any other room in the house...

...But they tell us nothing of the detectives of Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey, P.D...

...It is perhaps for this reason that the majority of detective writers are never taken up, and Steven Marcus is free to declare that one of Hammett's effects is "not the sort of thing we ordinarily expect in a detective story...

...What Glenn W. Most and William W. Stowe have actually done is to compile an anthology of phallocentric writing that could itself serve as the text to be examined critically in classes on poststructuralist theory...

...Most of these are mentioned in passing, or refer to the book's one entry by a woman, "Detective Stories and the Primal Scene" by Geraldine Pederson-Krag, who evokes other women analysts...

...He was a professor of philology in Germany, addressing a German audience, and probably never read Dorothy Sayers' historical introduction to her Omnibus of Crime...

...he is almost always single or divorced...

...Jane Austen and George Eliot are briefly noted, and Agatha Christie, the sole female subject of an essay, is discussed only to be condemned for superficiality, popularity and other sins...

...The first emphasizes "narrativity," or story telling...

...The table of contents reads like a directory to the latest in international literary theory: We have Jacques Lacan, UmbertoEco, Roland Barthes, Fredric Jameson, Frank Kermode...

...The late Richard Alewyn examines "The Origin of the Detective Novel...

...James, Michael Gilbert, Dick Francis, and many of the others widely read today...

...There is really little question here who's quirky...

...The 228 names in the index include only 26 women...

...Most further mentions "the striking proximity, in place and time, of the rise of the detective story and of that of modern biography," an excellent point that is never explored...

...Let us look at the essay by one of the editors...

...Now these observations illuminate well enough Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, Lew Archer, and perhaps even Sherlock Holmes and Auguste Dupin...

...his parents are never mentioned, and he is invariably childless...

...he derives his income case by case, not from a steady job...

...he is a marginal figure, his profession is not to have a profession...

...Chandler had never popularized the brutal beating and the cold killing and the kiss-'em-first-and-kill-'em-later method of dealing with dames, shameless hussies though they may be...

...Ironically, although they pride themselves on the modernity of their selections, scarcely a piece in The Poetics of Murder could not have been written 30 years ago...

...we do not know what he does between cases...

...Amen, say I. In their "Suggestions for Further Reading," the editors refer to Robin Winks' Modus Operandi as "a quirky personal essay that many readers will find charming...

...Their selections are by men, except for Pederson-Krag's, and her contribution was written in 1949 when women analysts could be trusted to be more male-centered than their male colleagues...