Detective Fiction

BOOK REVIEWS instability of colonial discourses, but Foucault casts too long a shadow over Mills's best work here. The model of constraints on the production and reception of women's travel writing is made to seem more helpful and useful than it turns out to be, I think. Again, it is when Mills listens well that she turns into her own best native informant—in the passages where Mills realizes that women travelers and writers put to their own "feminized" uses the discourse and behaviors of "going native" we begin to see how the theoretical intersections of gender, colonialism, critique of ideology and imperialism can become a very active and productive crossroads in the marketplace of ideas. Mills acknowledges the "unwieldy " readings she has produced in search and in the name of a "gendered colonial discourse study" (195). She has done an excellent job of "gendering" earlier work by critics such as Dennis Porter, Percy Adams, Paul Russell and Peter Hulme, among others. In closing her book, Mills speaks to the hope that the potential disclosed by her work will produce new studies; I can only share that hope. Fran Bartkowski ______________ Rutgers University Detective Fiction Robert S. Paul. Whatever Happened to Sherlock Holmes? Detective Fiction, Popular Theology, and Society. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991. 320 pp. $24.95 INHIS INTRODUCTION, Paul explains that Whatever Happened to Sherlock Holmes? "is not specifically about Sherlock Holmes, but it is about the significance of the whole body of detective literature, because its subject matter is concerned with 'setting things right.' It is about characters like Conan Doyle's sage of Baker Street who were convinced that they had a vocation to engage in the enterprise. . . ." Arguing that detective stories reflect secular theology, Paul lists the ethical and moral principles which he finds present in detective fiction: Created Order, Providence, Justice and Truth, Value of Human Life, and Fallen Nature. He then proposes to consider how these may be applied to British and American detective stories and to examine the theological implications of the genre. British authors of the 1880-1920 period with whom Paul deals at any length are Doyle, Chesterton, and Baroness Orczy. He also discusses briefly H. F. Wood's The Passenger from Scotland Yard (1888) and Israel Zangwill's The Big Bow Mystery (1892), misdated 1895 by Paul, and 245 ELT 36:2 1993 makes passing reference to a few other minor Transition writers. Paul suggests that the Holmes stories show Doyle approving "many of the views found in the popular Protestant theology." Though an empirical rationalist who did not accept theological tenets that violated scientific principles, Holmes concurred with late nineteenth-century ideas of justice and punishment, abhorred suicide and sexual violence, and "regarded a system of rewards and punishments beyond this life as the only means by which human mortality could be considered rational." Paul finds ambivalent attitudes in G. K. Chesterton's stories. His detective Father Brown, a Roman Catholic priest, is more concerned with sin than with crime. Paradoxically he defends traditional British society, while simultaneously criticizing the establishment, especially those aspects influenced by strict Protestant thinking. And Paul finds little more to say about Baroness Orczy's Old Man in the Corner (whom he persistently refers to as the uncapitalized "man in the corner") than that he is "representative of the mundane and commonplace in human nature" with no theological implications. Paul's study of secular theology in detective fiction is disappointing. It contains errors that are disconcerting and irritating. To give just one more example, in a playful footnote contrasting the British term batman (servant of a British Army officer) with the nemesis of crime, Batman, Paul implies that the latter appeared in Marvel comics, though Batman is published by rival DC comics. More importantly, most of Paul's book is devoted to a survey of well-known facts about the evolution of detective fiction, not to the ideas he puts forth in his introduction. When he does point out how a particular novel or a particular writer's work reflects the thinking of the reading public about ethical values, too often he fails to provide a detailed analysis. Rather than...