Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Venture (review)

This is a real little gem of a book—concise and yet remarkable in its breadth. Caroline Reitz makes a compelling, original argument for the imperial origins of detective fiction through readings of a range of texts written throughout the long nineteenth century. Setting out to show how the detective narrative "turned national concerns about the abuses of authority into a popular story about British authority in the contact zone of Victorian culture" (xiii), Reitz begins with early-nineteenth-century debates about the police and about empire (in writing by Edmund Burke, William Godwin, and James Mill) and the actual and fictional phenomenon of the Thug police in India during the 1820s and 1830s. Reitz also addresses the mid-century texts classically associated with the rise of detective fiction—Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1852–53) and Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868)—and fin-de- siècle spy and detective stories by Arthur Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling. In the broad scope—historically and generically—of this project, Reitz gives us not merely a new context for reading Doyle and detective fiction, but also a new way of reading and thinking about empire and identity in the nineteenth century. The argument makes a significant contribution to ongoing discussions about Victorian imperialism. The book, overall, is written with exemplary clarity and great argumentative verve.

The introduction lays out the argument: that detective narratives—whether found in canonical detective fiction or in a range of extra-literary texts—play a central role in changing the attitude of the English public toward the police and imperial expansion from suspicion, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to enthusiastic identification at its end. The figure of the detective, whose authority stems from knowledge rather than force and who exercises this authority in an imperial world, allows authority to be conceived in a way compatible with liberty. In order to make this argument, Reitz begins in the last decade of the eighteenth century, with writing about police, laws, colonization, and the abuse of imperial authority. She convincingly demonstrates how difficult the problem of force makes imagining the police in an English context; she then shows how emerging narratives about crime in the colonies act to relocate violence in the criminal, and state authority in the self-defensive response against criminality. In the next chapter she shows how, in addressing the character of English authority in the colonies, Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794) and Mill's History of British India (1817) produce the detective as a figure of good authority that can then be used to sell a skeptical English public on the police at home. The first part of the book culminates in a chapter on mid-nineteenth- century Thuggee narratives, which tell the story of how the English Thug police detect and suppress the activities of criminal gangs in India. Here, Reitz sees the detective narrative emerging to organize contesting stories about the credibility of state power: the Thug police come to signify a form of state power that works through knowledge and understanding, rather than force, and to make that power a peculiarly English virtue.

The texts discussed in the first half of the book are thus not what most Victorianists would call detective fiction. Reitz's methodology redefines the category of detective fiction as a complex of ideas, language, and structure, originating in places, times, and genres far removed from the mid-century novels commonly cited as the birthplace of the fictional detective. Her readings of these texts allow her to see detective fiction not merely as a minor literary genre, but as a central organizing force in the way an imperial Britain imagined itself.

The second half of the book deals with writers classically associated with the genre—Dickens, Collins, Doyle—as well as those usually associated with the literature of empire&#x02014...