Stolen Goods in British Detective Fiction

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. Frontmatter

2. Chapter 1. Introduction: Burglarious Backwaters

   Lisa Hopkins

   Abstract

   In one of E. W. Hornung’s Raffles stories, ‘The Criminologists’ Club’ (1905), it is suggested to Lord Thornaby that his rooms might be burgled while he is out presiding over a meeting about crime. Lord Thornaby brushes away both the possibility that he himself might be a victim of burglary and the topic in general, observing dismissively ‘I don’t know which of us it was … who seduced the rest from the main stream of blood into this burglarious backwater’ (Hornung 1996: 315). Blood is indeed the main stream of British detective fiction, but it has not always been so. Most real-life crimes centred on property were considered heinous, especially burglary (entering premises by night, as opposed to house-breaking, which took place by day). A conviction for burglary could carry a life sentence in British courts, and fear of burglary and theft was reflected in early detective fiction from Sherlock Holmes onwards. Investigating such stories allows this chapter to move away from women as dead bodies, so often a staple of crime fiction, to women as possessors of desirable objects and as actively engaged in crafting images and identities for themselves. Stories about theft also raise questions of justice, entitlement, and distribution of wealth; moreover, since there is typically an intimate connection between both the person who owns the object and the person who steals it, the nature and history of the object stolen can comment on both owner and thief. In this sense, objects detect people.

3. Chapter 2. Girls in Pearls

   Lisa Hopkins

   Abstract

   In Golden Age detective fiction few things are stolen so often as pearls, which are portable, valuable, difficult to identify and easy to sell or pawn. The theft of pearls is in fact so common as to be a cliché, to the point where a ‘string of pearls’ comes to stand for nothing more than a conventional clue which in itself means nothing and suggests nothing. And yet pearls do mean and suggest many things. Moonlike, mysterious, feminine (as underlined by the term mother of pearl), and born from the ocean like Venus, pearls have historically been objects of desire for many if not most women, but one of the questions implicitly raised in a number of works of Golden Age detective fiction is whether some women have more right to them than others. Sometimes a judgement about this may be made on purely aesthetic grounds, but usually the question is more value-laden, because pearls are both a reward for and a symbol of sexuality. A simple pearl necklace may be a suitable adornment for a virginal young girl but a profusion of pearls is a clear danger sign, and pearl necklaces can also draw unwelcome attention to the ageing necks of dowagers. In this sense, pearls are not objects of detection but subjects, hunting out and exposing who does deserve to wear them and who does not. Particular tensions attach to black pearls, partly because of their colour and partly because arguably the most famous black pearls on record were owned by Mary, Queen of Scots, a figure of considerable interest to Golden Age detective fiction. Other pearls may also have pasts which are both exotic and problematic, and pearls in general could suggest sorrow through a supposed connection with tears which led them to be considered unlucky for weddings; it was also often stressed that they could deteriorate and even ‘die’, investing them with a sense of organic life which enabled them to be troped as symbiotic with the women who wore them. While the theft of a pearl necklace kills neither the pearls nor their owner it shines a spotlight on the use of pearls to signal the social and sexual status of women and suggests that pearls’ vulnerability to theft implicitly comments on the potential of marriages to disintegrate or be disrupted by a rising divorce rate.

4. Chapter 3. Gemstones and Paste

   Lisa Hopkins

   Abstract

   Stories about emeralds, diamonds, rubies, and other gemstones also do different cultural work from stories about pearls. For Agatha Christie in particular, it is coloured stones which matter rather than the pearls in which Patricia Wentworth is so invested. Partly this may be because the price of gemstones was perceived to have risen after the Second World War while the value of pearls had fallen; mainly however it is because Christie has a more complex and ambivalent view of femininity than Wentworth’s and coloured stones convey complexity and nuance better than the supposed purity and simplicity of pearls. Although the Bible may say that the price of a good woman is above rubies, in Christie the price of a bad woman often is a ruby, and the same suspicion could apply to diamonds. If stories about pearls are typically about marriage, stories about gemstones are more often about sex, and while pearls must be dived for, the mining of gemstones was even more hazardous and exploitative and the mechanics of trading and selling them even more transactional. The theft of gemstones is still almost always a crime against women, but stories about stolen emeralds, rubies, sapphires and diamonds show us a darker world and more dubious characters than stories about stolen pearl necklaces, and leave us wondering not only about the value of the stones themselves but also about what their owners are worth. Mention of stolen jewels is also a way of paying homage to arguably the foundational text of all detective fiction, Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, and we are thus implicitly invited to understand these texts as considered interventions in the history of a genre.

5. Chapter 4. Silver Cow Creamers and Other Obscure Objects of Desire

   Lisa Hopkins

   Abstract

   The most famous objet d’art in American hard-boiled fiction, the Maltese falcon, is a fake. Gutman assures Sam Spade that ‘enormous as its intrinsic value was—a far higher, a terrific, price could be obtained for it once its authenticity was established beyond doubt’, but if there is one thing that detective novels about objets d’art teach their readers, it is that both value and authenticity are deeply problematic concepts; however precious and rare an object may be its monetary value is never intrinsic, because there has to be a market. Stories about objets d’art do more than this, however: they also trouble the very idea of ownership, because whereas pearls, rubies and diamonds typically tell us something about their owner’s personality, objets d’art often turn out to have been acquired by accident or inheritance and have merely an arbitrary and provisional relationship with their current owners. PG Wodehouse in particular is fond of basing his plots around a thing which is both horrible and coveted, and there is also a prevailing concern with artistry and auteurship which can be related to a concern often found in Golden Age fiction, the importance of the artisanal and the idea that it is under threat from mass production. Alongside this runs a fetishisation of originality and authenticity and also a pervading sense that silver cow-creamers, Fabergé eggs and historic chalices are desirable principally because somebody else desires them; the emotion aroused by acquiring them is pride of possession spiced by the knowledge that they cannot be owned by anyone else. The theft of such an object is thus morally if not actually a crime against the person, since although it does not involve physical violence it is designed to diminish the consequence and self-esteem of the person from whom the object is taken or withheld, the act of withholding being in this case psychologically equivalent to the act of theft.

6. Chapter 5. Naval Treaties, Dress Designs and Secret Recipes

   Lisa Hopkins

   Abstract

   Stories about purloined letters, lost naval treaties and stolen secrets can be of various kinds and raise a range of issues. Methods of investigating the theft or disappearance of documents may differ from those employed when searching for other sorts of valuables, since the person who has lost them needs to worry about both what is in the papers and also about the papers themselves; they are simultaneously material objects and indices of information. There are also many instances in which a public, government or commercial document is placed in a structural or thematic equivalence with a private and personal one (often a recipe) in ways which encode an implicit invitation to readers to compare the relative value of the two and to ask whether the substitute is really as negligible as it appears. In a nation at war and thus likely to be subject to rationing it might be no bad thing to know how to cook, and Patricia Wentworth in particular develops the suggestiveness of swapping formulae for making things for formulae for breaking things. Recipes and other documents liable to be stolen such as dress designs, scripts of mummers’ plays and drawing paper for children can also remind us that while some forms of knowledge may be universal, others may be gendered. Finally the chapter considers bibliomysteries and argues that books about the theft of books and documents implicitly assert that they themselves matter, and also assure their readers that they and their concerns matter too.

7. Chapter 6. Identity Theft

   Lisa Hopkins

   Abstract

   This chapter considers the large group of books in which someone appropriates another person’s identity and traces a number of influences on such representations, including two famous historical cases of impersonation, those of the Tichborne claimant and of Anna Anderson, who claimed to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia. In some cases the detective is not who they seem to be (Albert Campion is not the real name of Margery Allingham’s detective, and nor is it the only one he uses); sometimes it is the villain who has assumed either a false name or a false nationality; sometimes it is a more sympathetic character who uses a name which is not their own, as when Raffles hides his real identity after his supposed death. Sometimes characters have allegorical identities, even if these are only temporary: Brat Farrar announces himself to Simon Ashby as ‘Retribution’, Miss Marple is labelled ‘Nemesis’ by Jason Rafiel. Sometimes there is double imposture, as in Julian Symons’ The Belting Inheritance, and it is not only the living who may be impostors; a recurrent question in Golden Age detective fiction is who is in the coffin. These books underline the difficult, contingent, and complex nature of the social ties which make us who we are.

8. Chapter 7. Conclusion

   Lisa Hopkins

   Abstract

   Stolen goods may always have been intrinsically valuable, but it is only when they are stolen that they become objects of detection. At the same time they may also be subjects of detection, in that an object which is stolen can tell us much both about its original possessor and about the motives and circumstances of the person who steals it. Pearls which are passed from mother-in-law to daughter-in-law are signals of fecundity which pass judgement on ageing skin and sagging bodies. Jewellery detects women in other ways too: pearls mean purity so are given for weddings, but they may also mean tears; rubies and emeralds are rewards for sexual favours, so they adorn but also condemn, and they may be accompanied by startling histories of crime which both enhance and taint them. There is a sense in which all valuables potentially lessen the value of those who own them. Almost no stolen object is desired for its own sake; Uncle Tom really wants the silver cow creamer and Raffles loves the St Agnes cup, but in the vast majority of cases jewellery, rare books and objets d’art are taken either to be turned into money or to score off another person such as a rival collector. In this sense stolen goods are not a good in themselves but a sign of lack or inadequacy, and the stolen object belittles and exposes the person who steals it as much as it enriches them.

9. Backmatter