Delphine Cingal is a Senior
Lecturer at the University of Paris II and at the Catholic Institute.
She has written her PhD dissertation on P.D. James. She is currently
working on bodies in British 19th and 20th century fiction. She is
also the godmother of the detective fiction festival in Neuilly Plaisance
in the Paris suburbs.
The administration of justice
has evolved over the centuries. Torturing a suspect into confessing
to a crime lost favour as sufficient evidence of guilt. Proof, preferably
irrefutable scientific proof, was required. As scientific knowledge
advanced during the 18 th , 19 th and 20 th centuries, it provided
a growing arsenal of equipment and methods for analysing both criminals
and crime scenes. Scientists began to focus their research efforts
on helping police-work.
In Detective
Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science (2000), Trinity (Hartford,
Conn) Professor of English Ronald R. Thomas examined the criminal
body as a place of interpretation and enforcement through several
fictional examples, such as Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Dashiell Hammett,
Raymond Chandler and Agatha Christie. This study is especially
concerned with the authority the literary detective manages to
secure through the “devices” - fingerprinting, photography, lie
detectors – with which he discovers the truth and establishes his
expertise, and the way in which those devices relate to broader
questions of cultural authority at decisive moments in the history
of the genre.
When studying the relationships
between science and detective fiction, one has to frame readings
of literary texts with analyses of developments in criminology as
time went by until nowadays. With the discovery of DNA, forensic
science has evolved greatly. It would therefore be interesting to
push Ronald Thomas's study one step further, with the contemporary
authors who have been writing since the discovery of DNA profiling
in 1984 by English geneticist Alec Jeffries or since the use of computer
engineering.
Detective fiction has always
kept in touch with the science of its time to keep providing interesting
clues to the readership. The body has become a clue, a piece of information
subject to the hermeneutics of the detective. Therefore, the scientist
became the focus point of detective fiction. Such writers as Patricia
Cornwell and Kathy Reichs use them as main characters for their detective
novels.
Skin as a readable surface
Contemporary detective fiction
displays bodies as a matter of course. Because they are much more
than just the beginning of a story. During the Golden Age of detective
fiction, corpses were generally mentioned in a few lines. They were
often the bodies of very unpleasant people, a starting point in the
detection process, and the writers did not feel a need to dwell on
them. However, nowadays writers spotlight the victim for several
reasons. Such writers as P.D. James or Ruth Rendell mention him/her
because of the human aspect of the investigation. The detective is
moved by the unnatural end of a life, and then his/her life is changed
by this death. Other writers, for instance Kathy Reichs or Patricia
Cornwell are interested in the scientific aspect of the investigation
as well as the human side. Temperance Brennan and Kay Scarpetta,
their main protagonists, are both forensic scientists. (Temperance
Brennan is a forensic anthropologist and Kay Scarpetta a coroner.)
John Harvey's novels would
be in the first category up to a point: Harvey's fiction remains
very demure concerning human remains. If John Harvey makes a constant
use of computer technology (with several references to the Home Office
computer system HOLMES) forensic science does not have a major role
in his novels. The main results of the autopsy are mentioned, but
the pathologist is not a main character, generally not even a character
at all. He is just at the origin of a report, but does not appear
in the novels.
Science is not infallible.
In itself alone, it does not solve crimes. Resnick and Elder have
to rely on their intuition and on their legwork. They are no Kay
Scarpetta. Science will not give them the answer to all their questions.
However, the body generally appearing at the beginning of the novel
and at very awkward moments of the narrative is not a trivial element
of the story. It is symbolic of the violence of society. The wounds
can be read as clues, but they are more likely to be symbolic of
a brutal society. The main transgressions are penetrations: rape,
knife wounds or scalpel wounds. The killer or the criminal nullifies
the wholeness of the self.
The skin is a protection,
a surface on which the criminal writes a story of vandalism. The
role of the police is to remove the criminal element. However, in
John Harvey's novels, Law and Order are never completely reinstated.
Society never comes out unscathed. The detective seems to carry his
load of pain and guilt. At the end of Flesh and Blood, Joanne
accuses Elder of being responsible for the assault on their daughter
Katherine. This symbolic burden is represented by the image of the
nightmare. At the beginning of the novel, Elder dreams of wild cats,
then he finds his daughter naked in a hut on a beach, surrounded
by wild cats and subsequently Katherine is the one to dream about
cats. It seems that Elder is at the origin of a nightmare come true.
The body (which is sometimes
very much alive) does not need to be described at great lengths in
order to be ever present within the narrative thread. It is at the
same time the starting point of a cipher and the page on which the
criminal left his mark, his signature. This message has to be read
by the detective. However, the information is generally scarce – sometimes
even non-existent.
A body vanishes
The scene-of-crime
details are often not very elaborate. In Lonely
Hearts, the murder
of Shirley Peter is described in a police report, giving information
about the victim's life, then:
Scene-of-crime turned up
some hairs on the woman's sweater that weren't hers, scraping
of skin under the forefinger of the right hand, male pubic hair
around the pelvic… (31)
The report is interrupted
by one of the police officers and there are no more details,1 simply
speculations concerning the identity of the murderer. There are hardly
more details for Mary Sheppard, the second victim ; the author concentrating
on the reactions of the family and of the police, Lynn Kellogg feeling
faint. Charlie Resnick even stresses the imprecision of the report
and especially of the “numerous blows” (no precise figure being given.)
But more interesting
would be the discovery of Tim Fletcher's (still alive) body by
Karen Archer, his lover, in Cutting Edge. Indeed, the body has disappeared
and only the clothes and the stethoscope are left in the description.
… she found something
sprawled across the top of the metal steps which led up from the
university grounds to the pedestrian walkway; something dark, wedged
half-in, half-out of the first set of doors. An old bundle of discarded
clothing, bin-liners stuffed with rubbish and dumped. It wasn't
until she was almost at the head of the steps that she realized
what was lying there was a person and at first she took it to be
a drunk. What told her otherwise was the tubing of a stethoscope
protruding from beneath it. (18)
A few lines later, “wounds” are
mentioned, but the narrator concentrates more on Karen's reaction
than on the victim's body.
However, in Flesh
and Blood, the narrative thread is partly based on a quest
for a missing corpse, that of Susan Blacklock, who turns out to
be quite alive in New Zealand at the very end of the book. Susan
Blacklock is in fact a pretext for a descent into Shane Donald's
private Hell (Shane Donald is one of the two men suspected of Susan's
murder.) However, halfway through the novel, a murder is committed
by another man (and the body found at about a hundred pages from
the end.) The corpse of Emma Harrison is then submitted to a post-mortem,
which proves to be one of John Harvey's masterpieces of imprecision:
The post-mortem was inconclusive
as to the exact cause of death: the injuries to the body had received,
the time spent in warm weather in a shallow grave. At some point
in her ordeal, Emma's life had given out. The probability that she
had been already dead when she made her last journey to the coast
was high, but difficult to prove. (264)
As for the scene-of-crime
officers, there is not much more for them to discover.
If John Harvey is not very
thorough on the traces left by the criminal, he is much more precise
on the relationships between live bodies – meaning his protagonists.
Indeed, they are the real key to criminal behaviours. In Flesh
and Blood for instance, crime is not the main theme; it is
the triangular relationships between Alan McKevinan, Shane Donald
and Adam Keach. Otherwise the story of how Alan McKevinan managed
to inspire respect, maybe even love, in Donald and Adam and to urge
them into killing young girls. It is also how he created a competition
between the two of them to the point that Adam would try to be worse
than Donald and that Donald would end up injuring himself. Personal
relationships are mostly destructive in Harvey's works.
When a body meets a body
coming through the rye
In John Harvey's novels,
bodies meet, briefly touch and then go back to their lonely selves
again. Loneliness is at the centre of Harvey's first novel Lonely
Hearts where the victims are chosen among the women who advertised
in the Lonely Hearts columns. Psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu's Le
Moi-peau (The Skin Ego) offers a versatile explanation for
the construction of the self through the skin. He says that “the
ego is the projection of the psyche of the surface of the body”2 and
defines skin ego as “a mental image of which the ego of the child
makes use during the early phases of its development to represent
itself as an ego containing psychological contents, on the basis
of the experience of the surface of the body”3 It
means that objects are experienced both inside and outside oneself
and one's identity.
The child builds himself
by keeping his mother at a distance but at an accessible distance.
He is lost if she remains away for too long. The construction of
the self is therefore built around a double movement of touching
and feeling the absence. Skin is the final border both into and out
of the body. It is a physical colander, which allows and denies
access to the interior of the body and unwittingly collects the residues
of psychological and environmental weathering. Our skin displays
the history of a lifetime of mistakes, bruises, stretch marks, and
scars. There is a crucial link between the spatial aspects of psychic
separation and the material space or environment in which that separation
takes place - what Didier Anzieu calls the 'mothering environment.'
This double movement
is at the centre of John Harvey's novels. At the beginning of Rough
Treatment, Maria Roy considers her body as wasted because
her husband does not seem to pay any attention to her breasts. She
then tells them:
Never mind, my sad little
sacks, somebody loves you. Somewhere. (3)
Her body only seems to exist,
when it is touched by a man. Otherwise, her breasts are only “sacks”… empty
and unloved. Until she meets Jerzi Grabianski, Maria thinks herself
as incomplete. It is also true of Shane Donald in Flesh
and Blood who has to learn how to make love because he cannot help
being violent towards women, including with Angel. He has to learn
not to hurt. Tenderness does not come naturally when one has never
been given love by others. Alan McKeirnan has abused Shane Donald
before making him rape and kill Lucy Padmore aged sixteen.
In the first edition
(1985) of The Skin Ego, Anzieu distinguishes
nine functions linking skin to ego: supporting, containing, shielding,
individualising, connecting, sexualising, recharging, signifying
and assaulting or destroying. These functions do not smoothly interconnect.
They form various types of metaphorical enactment of skin functions.
Harvey's novels deal with several of these functions, the main
ones being individualising, connecting, sexualising and both assaulting
and destroying. The ninth function (destroying) was removed from
Le Moi peau in its second edition (1995) as being only a name
for the work of the negative, of the destruction as opposed to the
construction of the self. This anti-skin role destroys the consistency
of the body. In the case of detective fiction, the annihilation of
a human body corresponds however to the construction – even if in
a negative way – of another: the detective. I will therefore refer
to this ninth function as being the main one in Harvey's novels.
Charlie Resnick and
Franck Elder grow through scar tissue, through the misery of the
others they have to confront and act upon. As defined by Steven
Connor in The Book of Skin, this scar means that the skin has been “broken”,
penetrated through the surface. The scab is the mark of the injury,
a way for the child of re-living this injury. Scar tissue, whether
referring to moral scar tissue or real scars, in the case of the
detective means that the protagonist re-lives the flaws of mankind,
their violence and their capacity for hatred.
The detectives in John Harvey's
novels are professionals, but this does not protect them against
pain. It does not put them out of harm's way. On the contrary, by
making the body less technically present, John Harvey makes the dead
pervade the narrative and intrude upon the lives of the suspects
and investigating officers or detectives. Their deaths seem less
omnipresent and their impacts on the lives of others more present.
The secondary plots are also
important in the construction of the selves of the living. John Harvey
does not go into gory details. He simply mentions the technical terms
for each case: “child abuse”, “rape”, “assault” “queer-bashing”, “Paki-bashing”,
etc. No names. No places. No details, simply the shadow presence
of the victim and perpetrator behind these simple words. Contrarily
to what is the case in Kathy Reichs and Patricia Cornwell's novels,
the body does not loom in its terrible mortality. As Jean-Thierry
Maertens explains in the fifth tome of Ritologiques (Le
Jeu du mort), there are several ways of dealing with the corpse
in human societies. There are also several ways of dealing with literary
corpses. Maertens explains that bodies can be abandoned, exposed,
eaten, embalmed, cremated or buried. Literary bodies can be exposed
with scientific precision (Kathy Reichs, Patricia Cornwell) or ghoulish
details (contemporary Gothic fiction), abandoned (Agatha Christie)
or incorporated into the evolution of the protagonists. This would
correspond to the ritual of cannibalism in some human societies and
to the type of detective fiction John Harvey belongs to. As Jean-Thierry
Maertens explains it, endocannibalism does not mean the destruction
of the cadaver but its intellectual appropriation. Eating is a means
of knowing, of discovering. This cannibalism can be transubstantiated
in such rituals as the Christian Eucharist, linking language to power.
(Religious power transforming bread and wine into Christ's body and
blood.)
This is also a literary power,
which allows the writer to create round characters out of words.
Charlie Resnick and Franck Elder, as well as the men and women Resnick
works with, grow as they meet new characters and work on new cases.
Resnick and Elder go through one unsuccessful relationship after
another: they are both either divorced or separated from wives who
have run away with another man before trying to come back to their
husbands4, both detectives have
short-lived relationships afterwards and then move on with their
lives. The protagonists in John Harvey's novels are at the centre
of a web of relationships but do not remain close to anyone for very
long.
Conclusion
John Harvey transforms literary
corpses into substance for literary protagonists. This form of cannibalism
is also that of the reader who sees a flesh-and-blood character where
there is only paper. It accounts for the growing demand of both publishers
and readers for detective fiction series with recurring characters.
The authors have to add more and more substance to their heroes for
their readers to be constantly satisfied. Their psychology has to
evolve. Their past and their motivations have to be exposed as the
protagonists go on in time.
Bibliography
Primary sources
John Harvey. Lonely Hearts. London:
Arrow, 2002.
John Harvey. Rough Treatment. London:
Arrow, 2002.
John Harvey. Off Minor. London:
Arrow, 2001.
John Harvey. Wasted Years. London:
Arrow, 2002.
John Harvey. Cold Light. London:
Arrow, 2005.
John Harvey. Easy Meat. London:
Arrow, 1996.
John Harvey. Still Water. London:
Arrow, 1998.
John Harvey. Last Rites. London:
Arrow, 2002.
John Harvey. In a True
Light. London: Arrow, 2002.
John Harvey. Now's The
Time. London: Heinemann, 2002.
John Harvey. Flesh and
Blood. London: Heinemann, 2004.
John Harvey. Ash and
Bones. London: Heinemann, 2005.
Didier Anzieu. Le Moi-peau. Paris:
Dunod, 1995.
Delphine Cingal, « Traces,
indices et empreintes : la naissance de la police scientifique
et l'émergence du roman policier au XIX° siècle » et « Patricia
Cornwell : Kay Scarpetta ou les sciences médico-légales
modernes appliquées à la fiction » dans Empreintes (Yannick
Beaubatie ed.) Tulle: Mille Sources, 2004. P. 95-101 et 111-118
Steven Connor. The Book
of Skin. London: Reaktion Books, 2004.
Jean-Thierry Maertens. Ritologiques
5: Le Jeu du mort. Paris: Aubier, 1979.
Ronald R. Thomas. Detective
Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science. Cambridge University
Press, 2000.
1 The
pathologist's report would have to confirm it, but cause of death
appeared to be numerous blows with a heavy instrument to the skull.
There were also signs of bruising on the neck, around the windpipe
and immediately below the jaw. Bruising to the tummy area and above
the hips. (130) back
2 Didier
Anzieu, A Skin for Thought : Interviews with Gilbert Tarrab
on Psychology and Psychoanalysis. Transcription Daphne Nash
Briggs (London, 1990) p. 63 back
3 Didier
Anzieu. Le Moi-peau. Paris: Dunod, 1995. P. 61. [ The
Skin Ego , trans. Chris Turner (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1989)] back
4 For
Charlie Resnick, see his relationships with Elaine in Cutting
Edge (280) and for Franck Elder see Flesh and Blood for
his relationship with Joanne and their daughter Katherine. back
