Burial Plots in British Detective Fiction

Table of Contents

1. Frontmatter

2. Chapter 1. Introduction

   Lisa Hopkins

   Abstract

   Hopkins offers an overview of the ways in which the past is brought back to the surface and influences the present in British detective fiction written between 1920 and 2020. Her main premise is that both the literal and literary disinterment of the past perform the same cultural work, which is to use elements of the national past to interrogate the condition of the present. She argues that typically in these texts, uncovering the truth about an individual crime is also an uncovering of a more general connection between the present and the past, and that the underlying message is that you cannot understand the present unless you understand the past.

3. Chapter 2. The Deep Dead: Detective Fiction and Archaeology

   Lisa Hopkins

   Abstract

   This chapter argues that while all murder mysteries are about the dead, some are specifically about the deep dead, who died many years ago but whose bodies or possessions resurface in a way that affects or comments on the present. Any act of digging the ground in crime fiction is also a digging into someone’s life, and any disinterment of the dead also reveals something about the living. The first half of the chapter looks at the history of archaeological crime fiction and what it offers and enables; the second half focuses on Agatha Christie, whose second marriage to an archaeologist allowed her to produce the supreme examples of the genre.

4. Chapter 3. The Tongue Is a Fire: Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver Novels

   Lisa Hopkins

   Abstract

   Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver (who may have influenced Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple) appeared in books published over a span of thirty-three years, but never really changes: she continues to uphold Victorian values and to quote Tennyson at all opportunities. This is not only from nostalgia, however: the books consistently present talk—and especially women’s talk—as a terrifying force which poisons people’s lives and distorts their sense of what has actually happened. Even silence is portrayed as portentous and fraught with the possibility of suggestions which are unspoken but nevertheless wordlessly conveyed. In the Miss Silver books, quotation is the only safe way to communicate.

5. Chapter 4. The Body in the Library: Georgette Heyer, Dorothy Dunnett and Sarah Caudwell

   Lisa Hopkins

   Abstract

   This chapter discusses three writers whose work is fundamentally dependent on allusiveness, to the extent that metaphorically at least the body is always already in the library. It opens with the detective stories of Georgette Heyer, moves on to Dorothy Dunnett’s Johnson Johnson books and finally looks at the slim but delicious oeuvre of Sarah Caudwell. Each of these authors has a distinctive voice, and yet all (including Heyer herself) are influenced by Heyer’s historical novels, in ways which mean that for all the ostentatious contemporaneity of these three series of books, they are always anchored in the past. The chapter argues that the uses to which the three authors put that engagement with the past are, however, different, particularly in relation to gender roles.

6. Chapter 5. Cover Her Face: Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama

   Lisa Hopkins

   Abstract

   This chapter builds on the arguments of Hopkins’ earlier book about allusions to Shakespeare in detective fiction to consider what happens when more obscure dramatists of the period are referred to. On one level, quotations from Peele, Webster, Ben Jonson or Ford allow anyone who identifies them to feel clever. More subtly, the image of Jacobean drama as decadent means that reference to it might invite readers to speculate on what kind of society is being depicted, what kind of things might happen in it, and whether the novel will offer a full and satisfying conclusion or whether it might be left open-ended. Particular attention is paid to allusions to Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, which are offered by several writers of detective fiction.

7. Chapter 6. Historic Scotland: Val McDermid’s Cold Cases

   Lisa Hopkins

   Abstract

   This chapter begins by noting that Karen Pirie, who initially appears as a marginal character, becomes increasingly important to Val McDermid, and argues that the reason for this is because the cold cases unit which she comes to head up offers such a rich metaphor for the investigation of national pasts, presents and futures. By concentrating exclusively on cold cases, the Pirie books focus attention on what justice is actually for, whose interests are served, and what crime tells us about both the past and the present. The chapter also observes that Karen Pirie’s insistence of speaking for the dead informs the books’ narrative techniques, particularly in the use of flashback.

8. Chapter 7. Crime at Christmas

   Lisa Hopkins

   Abstract

   This chapter considers the popularity of murder mysteries set at Christmas, noting especially the use of Christmas-related items as murder weapons and the fact that the more enthusiasm a character displays for the season, the more likely they are to be murdered. The chapter suggests that as part of the inversion and suspension of normality associated with the twelve days of Christmas, the usual moral imperatives are relaxed and killing can become not only entertaining but therapeutic, and that this is especially the case when the murder victim is a father, who comes to seem almost like a winter king, ritually sacrificed so that everyone else can feel released and renewed.

9. Chapter 8. Detecting the Dead

   Lisa Hopkins

   Abstract

   This chapter argues that the most modern texts discussed in the book are also some of the most focused on the past. Both Jonathan Stroud’s Lockwood books and Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series are obsessed by English history, but both are also very interested in fate, destiny and whether events are inevitable or can be affected by individual action. The past threatens to swamp the present, but the determined efforts of the central characters hold off that menace. At the same time, the fact that both series are steeped in literary allusion reminds us that in one sense, you cannot really read any detective novel until you have read some other detective novels, and preferably Hamlet, Macbeth and The Duchess of Malfi to boot.

10. Chapter 9. Conclusion

    Lisa Hopkins

    Abstract

    The conclusion shows how each of the book’s chapters focuses on one major feature of detective stories about the past. Archaeology links detection to the systematic uncovering of the layers of the past. Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver books show stories being shaped by ‘talk’, while the detective novels of Georgette Heyer, Dorothy Dunnett and Sarah Caudwell explore crime fiction as a genre, whose cultural status of the form is also a concern for texts which allude to Jacobean drama. Val McDermid’s Karen Pirie books showcase questions of the narrative forms needed to recount the past. Crime stories set at Christmas connect the past to the present through ritual, and supernatural crime fiction asked what difference death makes.

11. Backmatter