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

5. Revisioning the Dick: Reading Thomas King’s Thumps DreadfulWater Mysteries

101 CHAPTER 5 REVISIONING THE DICK: READING THOMAS KING’S THUMPS DREADFULWATER MYSTERIES Jennifer Andrews and Priscilla L. Walton In an interview conducted in the fall of 2002, just as he released his first detective novel, DreadfulWater Shows Up, Native writer Thomas King explained his shift to writing detective fiction in pragmatic terms: “This book will get to more Native readers than Green Grass, Running Water [his acr claimed second novel]” (Davies). King astutely notes the popularity and accessibility of detective fiction even as he laments the very limited publishing opportunities for “Native writers” whose books “deal with Native issues” in particular, because racist stereotypes continue to prevail: “You still see that cliché Indian character pop up in books” (Davies). While King focuses here on the sustained dominance of narrow cultural representations of Nativeness and the challenges of finding publishers that will support the production and circulation of Aboriginal-authored narratives, his own decision to write a series of detective novels raises interesting questions about the strategic benefits of turning to such a familiar genre, that of the hard-boiled detective series first made famous by white American writers Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and more recently refashioned by another non-Aboriginal American author, Tony Hillerman, who has garnered much commercial and critical success for his depictions of two Southwestern Navajo police detectives, Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. King, who is himself an American-born Canadian citizen of Cherokee descent, is not the first or only racial or ethnic minority writer to exploit the CHAPTER 5 102 genre of detective fiction and specifically the figure of the hard-boiled detective . As Gina and Andrew MacDonald note, there has been a “recent explosion of cross-cultural detectives [in the United States]” (60), whose nonmainstream status—because of their racial or ethnic identity—allows them to act as emissaries or intermediaries between groups of otherwise disparate peoples. There are several series that star Native detectives and/or protagonists yet these series’ authors tend to tend to treat the racial and cultural identity of their characters as marginal to the story (e.g., Dana Stabenow’s Kate Sugak, and Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone).1 But King’s two detective novels, DreadfulWater Shows Up and The Red Power Murders (2006), we will argue, complicate such arguments by not only parodying the central tenets of the hard-boiled detective genre, including Hillerman’s alterations, from a distinctly Native perspective but also exploring American imperialism from an Aboriginal and a Canadian viewpoint, thus exploiting the d expanded readership of detective fiction to examine issues of nation and cross-border identities through this popular genre. The detective novel has a long history, dating back to the Victorian period in England where these narratives, according to Caroline Reitz, became a means of changing “public perception of domestic criminal justice and imperial expansion” by providing a figure of knowledge and authority in the form of the detective (xiv). In Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Venture, Reitz convincingly argues for the close links between the rise of a domestic police power and the expansion of the British Empire, in particular through explorations of English authority figures in the colonies; in other words, the “moral force” of the detective story could be used to justify England’s imperial ambitions (45). While the hardboiled detective story, which originated in the United States, began as a response to the growth of cities and the increase in organized crime in the 1920s, it also can be read as challenging British imperialism by focusing on realism and emphasizing the need for social engagement, qualities that differentiate it from the highly intellectualized problem solving of traditional English mysteries. Drawing on the “enduring American myth of the cowboy or outlaw hero” (Walton 190), the hard-boiled detective offered an alternate form of justice for those living in U.S. cities who lacked confidence in their local cops, due to fears of corruption or merely because they knew the restrictions imposed on officers of the law. While nineteenth-century American writers such as James Fenimore Cooper had used the settlerIndian conflict as an allegory for all conflicts within American society, the explosion of urban populations in the United States led to the development REVISIONING THE DICK | JENNIFER ANDREWS AND PRISCILLA L. WALTON 103 of class-based tensions. Not surprisingly then, the modern American hardboiled detective combined the notion that “society is...