Ocular Proof and the Spectacled Detective in British Crime Fiction

From Sherlock Holmes onwards, fictional detectives use lenses: a magnifying glass for Holmes, a monocle for Lord Peter Wimsey, horn-rimmed spectacles for Albert Campion, a pocket lens for Inspector Alleyn, pince-nez for two onscreen Poirots. This book argues that these visual aids are metaphors for ways of seeing, and that they help us to understand not only individual detectives’ methods but also the kinds of cultural work detective fiction may do. It is sometimes regarded as a socially conservative form, but the emphasis on visual aids suggests that solving crime is not a simple matter of uncovering truth but a complex, sophisticated, and inherently subjective process in which the act of seeing comes to seem ideological and provisional. I argue that the kind of visual aid selected by each detective is an index of their particular propensities and biases, and that a focus on sight as a sense also taps into the concern of evolutionary theory about the relationship of humans to animals, a concern further emphasised by imagery drawn from hunting which fuels anxiety about what licenses the detective to hunt down the villain. This introduction sets out this thesis and gives an overview of the book’s contents.

Although both Peter Ustinov and David Suchet wore pince-nez in their screen portrayals of Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie’s original character uses no visual aids. In six of the Poirot books, however, he has a sidekick who does: Mrs Ariadne Oliver, Christie’s playful metafictional projection of her own authorial persona, whose irritated impatience with her Finnish detective Sven Hjerson parodies Christie’s own attitude to Poirot. Mrs Oliver wears glasses mainly for reading, but they form an important part of both her own approach to solving mysteries and the books’ wider extradiegetic interest in methods of detection more generally. Cards on the Table, the book which introduces her, is in a sense Christie putting her own cards on the table and using her proxy self to give an insight into the tricks of the trade employed by her real self. A combination of an external failure to focus with a sharply defined internal vision energises and enlivens the Mrs Oliver books and enables them to undertake a sustained investigation into the use and value of ocular proof which sheds light on the deceptive simplicity of Christie’s technique.

Sherlock Holmes reaches his conclusions primarily by visual observation, sometimes using a lens to supplement what he sees with the naked eye. But Holmes also has affinities with more basic instincts. Although one would never think of associating him with any form of outdoor exercise, in both ‘The Red-Headed League’ and ‘A Case of Identity’ he has a hunting-crop to hand, and on a number of occasions he demonstrates the kind of savage skills which degeneration theorists were increasingly recommending as an antidote to the supposedly emasculating effects of over-civilisation. Ideas about evolution and atavism also inform Ernest Bramah’s series of short stories about the blind detective Max Carrados. Carrados’ blindness might seem a classic instance of a deviation from the norm which confers no advantage but is in fact a positive disadvantage, and yet Carrados himself regards his blindness as his superpower in the same way as sight is Sherlock Holmes’, for since he cannot see he detects by the use of other senses, and his blindness also gives him greater spiritual insight. This chapter argues that Bramah’s stories acknowledge the primacy of the Holmesian method of visual detection but also draw attention to its underlying assumptions and implications.

G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown is persistently figured as visually handicapped. Sometimes he cannot see what is happening because he is so short; he blinks excessively; he wears glasses. However, the fundamental condition of a Father Brown story is the importance of the unseen. The stories are obsessed with Celts and Gaels who apprehend things through a second sight which defies rational explanation, and in ‘The Mourner of Marne’ Father Brown is even prepared to believe that God has miraculously intervened to stop someone seeing. There is also a recurrent central device on which many of the Father Brown stories depend: people are lured to look in one direction to distract their gaze from somewhere else. It is in his ability to ignore surface evidence and detect visual misdirection that Father Brown’s method really lies, and he uses a lens of faith to do it.

Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey books are obsessed with visual aids. Whose Body, the first of the books, was originally intended to be called The Singular Adventure of the Man with the Golden Pince-Nez because the body in the bath is wearing only a pair of pince-nez, and many characters in the books are introduced to the reader with descriptions of what they wear on their eyes (the first thing that anyone notices about Lord Peter himself is his monocle). Detection is always a visual act for Wimsey, who sees everything, even things which are behind him, and often deliberately manipulates how other people see. This chapter argues that Sayers’ interest in the physical facts and appurtenances of vision is a metaphor for focus of a more mental and spiritual kind, and that ways of seeing offer an opportunity for thinking about ways of writing, because Sayers used the metaphor of the single eye in connection with her yearning to write a ‘straight’ novel and also bestowed the same image on Harriet Vane, who wonders ‘was it physically possible to have the singe eye?’ By investing Wimsey with a monocle, Sayers comes as close to it as she can.

Ngaio Marsh’s Chief Detective Inspector Roderick Alleyn does not wear any form of eyeglass. He does however make frequent use of a lens, to the point where it becomes identified with his role as a detective. In Tied Up in Tinsel, Alleyn, arriving as a guest at a country house at Christmas without any of his usual kit, finds himself unwillingly trapped in the role of investigating officer and asks his host, ‘Have you got a lens?’ In Grave Mistake, too, a lens is understood as the signature item of a real detective: when Alleyn ‘finally took out a pocket lens’, ‘Mr Markos crowed delightedly. “At last!” he cried, “we can believe you are the genuine article.”’ The use of a lens echoes two other aspects of Alleyn’s technique: his fondness for reconstructions of the crime and the visual sensibility which first attracts him to Agatha Troy. But a lens also enlarges, and the Alleyn books as a whole, with their recurrent interest in superstitions, strange beliefs and quirky esoteric religions, are drawn to primal, archetypal motifs such as the hunt, quasi-Gothic forms of monstrosity, and the death of the winter king.

Dornford Yates wrote in two apparently quite distinct genres, Ruritanian thrillers and Wodehousian comedy. Neither is detective fiction, but between them Yates’ two series of books investigate English nationalities and identities, with Ruritania commenting on England and both series foregrounding the extent to which the affairs of a nation can be affected by the action of individuals. This chapter compares Yates to John Buchan and Eric Ambler in order to argue that Yates has an obsessive concern with vision: two of the titles of Chandos books, An Eye for a Tooth and Blind Corner, foreground the idea of sight, and one of those has a villain whose name, Saul, recalls the story of Saul/Paul being struck blind on the road to Damascus. He is particularly interested in the use of binoculars, and the Berry and Chandos series could well be figured as looking at the world through different eyes. Bringing them together achieves a binocular vision in which England and Ruritania are revealed as two sides of a diptych and which brings into focus a number of questions about England’s possible futures and the ways in which they might be made.

The conclusion argues that the visual aids employed by detectives trope not only their own personal methods of detection but also the aesthetics and philosophies of the books in which they appear. Crime fiction is typically an insecure genre, nervous about its cultural status, its readers, and its moral purpose. Ariadne Oliver’s unfocused gaze, the blindness of Max Carrados, Father Brown’s sensitivity to the invisible, Wimsey’s monocle, Campion’s horn-rims, Alleyn’s lens, and the binoculars of Yates’ characters all afford the genre a way of sharpening and adjusting its perspective and allow it to focus on aspects and implications of crime rather than just on crime itself.