Detecting Canada: Essays on Canadian Crime Fiction, Television, and Film

3. Canadian Psycho: Genre, Nation, and Colonial Violence in Michael Slade’s Gothic RCMP Procedurals

55 CHAPTER 3 CANADIAN PSYCHO: GENRE, NATION, AND COLONIAL VIOLENCE IN MICHAEL SLADE’S GOTHIC RCMP PROCEDURALS Brian Johnson Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation. (Ernest Renan 11) Our greatest tragedy, of course, is the Indians. (Slade, Cutthroat 131) t The police procedural is one of the most ideologically slippery sub-genres of crime fiction, capable of inscribing both reactionary and subversive responses to the dominant social order, often simultaneously. As Robert P. Winston and Nancy C. Mellerski argue, police procedurals exemplify Fredric Jameson’s view that mass cultural artifacts act as “symbolic containment structures,” whose primary function is to elicit, reframe, repress, and thereby manage transgressive social desires through “the narrative construction of imaginary resolutions and by the projection of an optical illusion of social harmony” (qtd. in Winston and Mellerski 1–2). Thus, even as the police procedural’s representation of criminality elicits and vicariously satisfies the reader’s transgressive impulses, the genre’s overarching celebration of rationality, order, and disciplinarity characteristically reaffirms normative values by coding such impulses as “antisocial” and symbolically containing them (2). In this way, “the police procedural becomes a powerful weapon of reassurance in the arsenal of the dominant social order,” and even “as much a part of the ideological state apparatus of control as the thin blue line of the police force is” (Scaggs 98, 86). CHAPTER 3 56 Nonetheless, as Winston and Mellerski also acknowledge, the genre’s tendency toward ideological closure is not absolute; it is amenable to appropriation and disruption, particularly through narratives that “end on a note of barely controlled chaos rather than restored and validated social order” (2). In this regard, the police procedural discloses its affinity with Gothic fiction, the genre out of which modern crime fiction emerged and whose flimsy pedagogical frameworks often constitute, in Fred Botting’s words, “little more than perfunctory tokens, thin excuses for salacious excesses” (Todorov 49–51; Scaggs 15–18; Botting 8). Even Gothic novels whose endings “sustain a decorous and didactic balance of excitement and instruction ” point up that genre’s profoundly ambivalent relation to the symbolic order, showing how “morality, in its enthusiasm to identify and exclude forms of evil, of culturally threatening elements, becomes entangled in the symbolic and social antagonisms it sets out to distinguish” (Botting 8). Gothic’s foregrounding of the conceptual interdependence of oppositions such as good and evil, reason and passion, and lawfulness and criminality, in other words, ultimately “undermine[s] the project of attaining and fixing secure boundaries and leave[s] Gothic texts open to a play of ambivalence , a dynamic of limit and transgression that both restores and contests boundaries” (8–9). Police procedurals that incorporate Gothic tropes and narrative devices thereby heighten their own potential for ambiguity, opening the procedural genre’s comparatively normative narrative pleasures to precisely such a “play of ambivalence.” Such is the case with the Special X series of RCMP procedural “psychothrillers ” by Canadian author Jay Clarke (b. 1947). A former Vancouver lawyer specializing in cases of criminal insanity, Clarke has written thirteen novels in the Special X series under the pen name “Michael Slade,” most of these in conjunction with one or more co-authors.1 Far more dramatically than any of the RCMP procedurals that have appeared in Canada before or since the publication of Slade’s first novel in 1984,2 Slade’s Special X novels foreground the process of generic hybridization, whereby the ideologically conservative police procedural form becomes thoroughly riddled with—if not actually consumed by—tropes of Gothic excess. The primary means by which Slade Gothicizes the police procedural is the series’ lurid and ultraviolent thematization of serial killing, a crime that functions as the generic hinge between detection and horror in all of the novels, comprising at once the motivation of the police investigation and a competing object of narrative interest. Thus, although the series provides the usual gratifications that one associates with the police procedural as a romance of disciplinarity and CANADIAN PSYCHO | BRIAN JOHNSON 57 high-tech surveillance, the series is equally invested in specularizing murders and mutilations whose details are designed to shock, repulse, and titillate . The fact that these internationally bestselling novels are marketed as horror rather than detective fiction and that they have been enthusiastically embraced by horror fans reflects the force of their investment in...