Murders in pastiche

Arguably one of the most important inventions of modern times, the detective story has shown a remarkable resilience. Its capacity to satisfy genre expectations and yet present startling novelties, to remain old and new at the same time, is a major reason for its appeal, says SUPRIYA CHAUDHURI.

ON October 6, 1930, Antonio Gramsci wrote a letter from prison, saying he was looking forward to reading the second series of G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories, not simply as detective fiction, but as an "extremely subtle caricature" of the form. An alert and knowledgeable reader, Gramsci took pleasure (even in prison) in Chesterton's playing the detective story against itself, recognising the tendency to self-parody that is characteristic of the genre. Thus the hero of Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel, When We Were Orphans, is presented on his fourteenth birthday with a magnifying glass. The gift is intended as a joke, because the protagonist has revealed to his friends at school that he intends to be a great detective. But the joke falls a little flat: not only is our hero genuinely pleased and excited by the gift, he does use the magnifying glass in his later career as a Great English Detective.

The episode illustrates, in the slightly disquieting way characteristic of Ishiguro's work, certain features of the detective story as a form of popular fiction. It is a form built on repetition and parody, on the conscious and adroit manipulation of recurrent elements of the genre. Like all types of popular literature, it is a slave to habit. Yet - and this is an element in Ishiguro's novel too - the form as a whole has to satisfy a ceaseless hunger for novelty. Every book must offer us something new - a new kind of murder, an unexpected motive, an unconventional detective, a twist in the tail, a turn of the screw. Why, otherwise, would we buy it at all?

It seems to me that this offers a good rule of thumb for popular literature in general. Like the detective story, so too the romantic novel, the thriller, the family saga, the Batman comic - each must be new and old at the same time. Genre is all important in the cultures of the people. You are recognised by your insignia; the club you follow, the badges you wear, the style you flaunt. Plot alone is insufficient. "Oedipus Rex", "Hamlet", and "The Family Reunion" all present us a murder, a mystery, a search, a solution, but none of the classic and immediately recognisable trappings of the genre. And yet you can set a detective story amidst the pyramids of Egypt, choose as protagonist a female wrestler (Liza Cody), have the murder take place in Buckingham Palace (Peter Dickinson) or make the murderer a large fulvous Ourang-Outang of the East Indian Islands (Edgar Allan Poe), without creating the slightest ripple in the steady current of the form.

Watching the Indian cricket team's distressing international performances over the past few months, it struck me that the serial format of organised sport was ideal for a series of murders. Killer Strikes Again, the headlines would scream. Tragedy in the Dressing-room. Foul Play at Lords. Or, to take a theme from the last football World Cup, Who Nobbled Ronaldo? The detective could be an unsympathetic, vegetarian female chess- player with an aversion to all outdoor sports. Perhaps I could give up being an underpaid academic and cash in on a get-rich- quick series while cricket is still the opium of the people, before Cronje reveals that he was simply the front man for the entire Indian cricket side.

But whatever I do, I will not really be doing anything new. The history of the detective story, which must surely be one of the most important inventions of modern times, shows that the form's remarkable resilience is owing to its ability to exploit the shared knowledge of writer and reader, united in their understanding of the rules of the game. The game itself can be played with different degrees of creative flair: the genius of Conan Doyle, the workaday ethic of Agatha Christie, the sullen panache of Raymond Chandler, the Gallic gloom of Simenon, the ironic charm of Allingham or Crispin, the postmodern anarchism of Elmore Leonard or Liza Cody. As in a game of football, everything depends on who is playing. You don't watch Italy expecting to see Colombia; you don't expect Tendulkar to be bowled by Shane Warne.

It is a great mistake to think that we read detective stories because we enjoy the intellectual challenge of solving a puzzle. Many critics take this rather lofty attitude, asserting that the "rules of the game" are the laws of possibility and verisimilitude: the reader is the detective. But watching a game of football is not the same thing as playing it. The pleasure of reading detective fiction is in the recognition of the familiar against the shock of the new; the thrill of concealment against the satisfaction of disclosure; the interrogation of suspects, the set-piece argument, against the revelation of personality, the alien in the sitting-room. The detective is not you or me: he - or nowadays, quite often, she - is a figure on display, a virtuoso whose skills must be savoured as we would savour those of a Pele or a Maradona. It is only because of the littleness of our times that there are no Peles or Maradonas on the field, no Holmes to cry "Watson, the game is afoot!" Instead, we must be content with the equivalents of Zidane and Beckham.

Where would this leave the first-time reader of a detective novel? How can one talk about shared knowledge before there is any knowledge to be shared? This is an awkward question. The answer, I think, would be that detective fiction, like other forms of cult or ritual, depends for its effects on the ability to indoctrinate its aficionadi. To read is to participate; interest is investment. Before you know where you are, you are listening for the familiar tapping of Miss Smilla's cane. Like the untravelled teetotaller who can nevertheless tell the difference between a Foster's and a Budweiser's ad, the reader of detective fiction swiftly becomes adept in the ways of Oxford common rooms and New York police stations, in the peculiarities of a Nero Wolfe or a Hercule Poirot, an Inspector Ghote or a V. I. Warshawski.

Perhaps this is why a note of hilarity - even, at times, hysteria - enters the work of intelligent and self-conscious writers. John Heath-Stubbs's poem "Send for Lord Timothy," concludes: "Now read on. The murderer will be unmasked,/ The cloud of guilt dispersed, the church clock stuck at three,/ And the year always/ Nineteen twenty or thirty something,/ Honey for tea, and nothing/ Will ever really happen again". Kazuo Ishiguro's novel begins in precisely this generic ambience. Ishiguro's hero would have liked to have colonised this imperial heartland of the detective novel, but he cannot. Instead, his past leads him to the Shanghai of his youth, where quite a different kind of colonial fiction needs to be re-enacted. Pastiche merges with parody, imitation becomes irony. For the reader of detective fiction, this is an unsettling experience, but one that we and the form can survive. Adroitly, the detective story has already moved away. It is no longer stuck in the Grantchester evoked by Heath-Stubbs, the London described by Ishiguro. It has reinvented itself, but (and this is the point) it is still the same.

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