The Social Anxieties of Crime and Detective Fiction

As discussed elsewhere in this blog, fiction is thematic. This is particularly true when dealing with detective and crime fiction because it deals with physical, emotional, and social anxieties. We'd rather see the world, our homes, and our lives as safe, and place the dangers of the modern world at a distance. News does this for us: all the bad things happen somewhere else and to someone else. Detective and crime fiction is a safe way to invite these ideas into our homes and see a safe resolution.

The expectation in crime and detective fiction is simple: something has gone wrong and must be set right. Whether it be theft, violence, scandal, blackmail, or murder, the truth is sought, the wrong party brought to justice and amends made to the victims to return the world to a pre-crisis balance. Each possible crime represents more than itself: murder is a threat to the sanctity of life, theft to property, blackmail to privacy. When we see these crimes in fiction it’s an opportunity to explore the significance of these social ills. Even if it is just a little bit, we get to feel anxious about our own life, property, privacy, etc. Thankfully, the detective represents the social order, through their efforts to discover the evil and set it right.

Take the Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Speckled Band.” This story focuses on a young woman, Helen Stoner, who fears her life is being threatened by her stepfather, Sir Grimsby Roylott, because her sister died shortly before the sister’s marriage. Roylott is a violent man who keeps a menagerie of exotic animals, and keeps his stepdaughter's bed mounted in a room, so it cannot be moved. Holmes and Watson hide in Helen's room and discover a poisonous snake let into her room. They beat it back, and the snake attacks and kills Roylott himself, giving the story some poetic justice.

Roylott represents a threat to Victorian standards with his violent temper and exotic menagerie: hardly a respectable British gentleman. His step-daughter, not of his historically hot-tempered aristocracy, represents Victorian ideals of womanhood: she is innocent and needs protection, which appears in the form of Holmes. The violent, exotic Roylott not only poses a threat to his daughter but to Victorian decorum, womanhood, and fatherhood, in the name of claiming her inheritance. Holmes comes and fulfills the role of paternal protector, performing the social roles Roylott has abandoned. So this is not simply a crime story about violent men, damsels in distress, and exotic animals, but it's a story about foreign threats and influences, and familial duty, with Holmes to fill the gaps.

The villain represents threats to the social order while the victims represent what is good and wholesome and the detective returns the world to a positive situation.

This means when looking at crime and detective fiction, it is important to consider what the crime and villain represent thematically. To explore this idea, I'm going to take a few blog posts looking at how the classic, archetypal detective Sherlock Holmes deals with some of the major crimes and villains he faces, and, perhaps a few other pieces of crime fiction.

To begin, I will look at the three most famous of Holmes villains: Irene Adler, Professor Moriarty, and Charles Augustus Milverton. Adler is famous because she is the woman who beat him, Moriarty because he is “the Napoleon of crime” Holmes' arch-nemesis, and Milverton with the use of information for personal gain.

Framing Frankentsein Part 3: Developing and Questioning Reliability

Near the end of Frankenstein, Victor admonishes Walton to beware the monster's eloquence. However, in the following pages, Walton describes how Victor's own eloquence buoyed the men of his ship. This creates an inconsistency: if the Monster is not to be trusted because of his eloquence, why should Victor be trusted for possessing the same talent? And from there, if Victor is eloquent and persuasive, can we really believe his fantastic tale? (For what it's worth, while Victor cheered them, he could not convince them to continue on their dangerous voyage.)

This highlights one of the great issues with a frame narrative, especially Frankenstein: reliability. Reliability is a surprisingly complex issue, one literature scholars continually address and reevaluate. It forces us to stop and think about how and why we trust or distrust, narrators, characters and their stories; and because Frankenstein is focalized through Walton, it is necessary to consider his reliability first.

Walton's narration begins with the letters to his sister. Letters are a unique form of writing: they are personal and intimate, which makes it different from novel writing meant to be public. By using letters to initiate the story, Shelley makes it seem more reliable, more realistic because while a narrator may be unreliable, we expect a brother writing to his sister to be honest and sincere. These opening letters establish Walton's reliability so we will trust him when he takes Victor Frankenstein at his word. This is compounded, at the end of the novel, after Victor has completed his narrative, the monster appears to Walton, removing the Monster from Victor's narrative, and putting him in Walton's.

Why have the monster appear? Because we trust Walton more than we do Frankenstein. Reliable narrators need to do more than accurately tell what happened, but also be able to accurately interpret and understand it. This means Walton is necessary to make the narrative reliable because Victor is harder to trust. Victor, in the course of his narrative, is incapacitated several times and experiences deliriums. He is also unsteady: he switches from one perspective to another, eagerly creating the monster, then shunning it and fearing it, and most importantly, misinterpreting what is around him.

The most prominent example of Victor's failure to interpret is when the monster declares he will be with Victor on his wedding night. Victor takes this as a sign that the monster will try to kill him on his wedding night. However, this is not the monster's goal, and there is actually little evidence to suggest it: the monster elsewhere suggests he wants to make Victor miserable as he has made the monster himself miserable, and has already done this by killing and framing for murder friends of the Frankenstein family and the monster's threats come after Victor has destroyed the woman companion the monster commissioned him to make. The evidence is there: a miserable life, murdered friends and family, the abandoned monster-bride, and yet Victor insists the monster targets him despite all evidence to the contrary.

Between Victor's deliriums, his changing perspective, and his inability to interpret, he becomes an unreliable narrator. However, it is only his ability to interpret we can readily call into question. Walton, conveniently stranded in the arctic, has no means to confirm any of Victor Frankenstein's story, and because Walton believes Victor, and we are intended to believe Walton, we therefore believe Victor. The monster doesn't appear to confirm Walton's narration, but to confirm Victor's and his own narration. His few statements align with Victor's narration, which the monster was absent from, so had Victor contorted the story, the monster could not have known.

Ironically, then, all of the reliability hinges on Walton: is this the fantastic story of a man who was in the right place at the right time, or could he be fabricating this story? It's hard to tell: we have Victor and the monster to confirm one another's stories, but Walton has to rely on narrative devices and techniques: the letters, his station as captain, his dire situation, to affect his own reliability.

But this leads to a perhaps unanswerable question: is Walton's frame a narrative device to make himself reliable, or was he really in the right place at the right time?