Alibis of the Police

Alibis of the Police D. A. Miller M URDER GETS PRIORITY,’’says a criminologist in a novel by P. D. James,1and indeed, whatever might be implied in the name of the genre, the so-called detective story (or, in French, “roman policier”) gives structural precedence not to the police (by which I mean here either official agents or the private detectives who often take their place), but to the crime whose violent yet mysterious commission authorizes their appearance. The activities of the police, however much in evidence, are strictly secondary, derived from the first, original fact of crime. The structure of detective fiction—act one, the crime; act two, the police—thus provides the police with a justification: that they “go after” a criminal most importantly signifies that they come afterwards, in response to an already demonstrated need for them. And if crime is the first fact in the structure of detective fiction, it is also in a sense the last. For it is with the full predication of crime, with all that is encompassed in the “apprehension” of its agent, that the detective story —along with, of course, the activities of the detective—comes to conclu­ sion. Having called for the police, crime as it were remains on hand to supervise their activities, orienting and limiting their intervention to a specific task that lasts only so long as its object goes unmet. Capable of conferring on the police their raison d’être, crime also grants them a raison de ne plus être, bringing them forth no more magically than it eventually arranges for them to disappear. A theory of detective fiction that is content to respect this structure finds no trouble in confirming both the priority of crime and the conse­ quent secondariness of the police. To take a single, but prominent exam­ ple, Tzvetan Todorov locates the structure of detective fiction in the asymmetrical interplay of two stories: “l’histoire du crime,” which is primary and essential, but unhappily missing or lacunary; and “l’histoire de l’enquête,” which is secondary and inessential, but fully in evidence.2 1. P. D. James, Death of an Expert Witness (New York: Fawcett Popular Library, 1977), p. 29. 2. Tzvetan Todorov, “Typologie du roman policier,” in Poétique de la Prose (Paris: Seuil, 1971), pp. 57-59. Vol.XXVI, No. 2 37 L ’E sprit C réateur The “plot” of the narrative (“l’histoire de l’enquête”) would consist in the pursuit of its own “story” (“l’histoire du crime”). Theoretically, too, the police are thus reduced to a mere instrumentality, what Propp would call a donor or Henry James a ficelle, whose function is exhausted in securing the full articulation of crime. In what follows, it will not be a question of denying the priority of crime in detective fiction, but rather of seeing this incontestable structural effect in terms of its strategic func­ tioning, as the keystone of a popular mythology, within the modern organization of social power. “Murder gets priority,” says the crim­ inologist in P. D. James; to which someone replies with relief, “Thank God something does.” It has always been a paradox that a genre con­ cerned with violent crime speaks so convincingly a rhetoric of reassur­ ance that few things in life are felt to be as comforting as settling down with “a good murder mystery.” From the perspective of the “strategic” reading of the genre undertaken here, this comfort will not be derived (as is usual) from the triumph of rationality, but instead from the successful occultation of power. And if comfort always also implies an anxiety that it allays, then the anxiety inspiring the genre will have its source less in the discrete moments of crime than in the continuous filiations of a general social discipline. To elaborate these issues, we take them up where detective fiction best raises them; in its notoriously, suspiciously secondary theme of the police. Regularly, of course, the theme of the police comes announced in detective fiction as the scandal of the police, their violent, violating presence there where they are not ordinarily supposed to be. “The police in the house!” The maids scream...