cambridge-crime-fiction

martin priestman
bigwigs exploit the credulity of a witchcraft coven for sexual purposes under
satanic disguise, while Hopjoy Was Here (1962) deploys the absurdist
device – also used in Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana (1958) and John
le Carré’s The Tailor of Panama (1996)–of a spy who fabricates the sinister
activities he is meant to be spying on. As the title of his 1971 study Snobbery
With Violence suggests, Watson is critical of the class-elitism underlying the
Golden Age whodunit; nonetheless, the cocoon of provincial absurdity in
which Purbright and his comically galumphing Sergeant Love are wrapped
protects the reader from having to take them entirely seriously. 10 Distanced
in a different way is H. R. F. Keating’s Bombay-based Inspector Ghote, whom
his author intended to call ‘Ghosh’ – presumably to suggest comic bewilderment
– until informed that the name came from the wrong part of India. 11
Keating did not in fact visit India until 1974, making the Ghote series a
fascinating repository of current British ideas about it rather than a direct
representation. The Perfect Murder (1964) involves two apparently separate
cases: the near-murder of a rich businessman’s secretary, Mr Perfect, and the
theft of one rupee from a politician’s office. Both cases clearly embody the
kind of lovable ineptitude thought appropriate to the recently independent
ex-colony: the much-repeated phrase ‘Perfect Murder’ is belied by Perfect’s
eventual recovery, while the fact that Ghote is told to give the missing rupee
case equal ‘top priority’ gestures at the excessive kowtowing to authority
we might expect from a state only just learning to police itself. A certain
European paternalism towards the new republic is also conveyed in Ghote’s
touching reliance on a German-English textbook of policing methods, and
by the comparatively gigantic stature of a Watson-like Swede who rescues
the diminutive inspector from several scrapes. 12
Also from the early 1960s, Nicolas Freeling’s Netherlands-based Inspector
Van der Valk series uses Simenon’s Maigret as a model to explore rather more
serious issues, from the pornography racket of Love in Amsterdam (1962)
to the legacy of Nazi death-camps and the prehistory of the Vietnam War. 13
Perhaps because of his ‘foreignness’, rather than in spite of it, Van der Valk’s
adventures give a satisfying sense of moving into uncharted yet disturbingly
credible areas of modern life. The image of the outwardly placid and affluent
modern state as concealing various kinds of festering malaise, with a notalways
scrupulous career policeman as its necessary defender, may have been
easier to accept in a foreign rather than a British context, where various class
assumptions would still, in the 1960s, need to be negotiated. Also widely read
in Britain, the South African James McClure’s novels featuring the white
Inspector Kramer and loyal black Sergeant Zondi (starting with The Steam
Pig, 1971) effectively gestured at some of the horrors of the Apartheid system
without entirely divorcing themselves from it.
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