Detective Fiction and The African Scene: From The Whodunit? To The Whydunit?

Chapter III - The WHYDUNIT

45 Chapter III The WHYDUNIT In spite of the great lengths to which I have gone in the previous chapter to establish some measure of similarity between Petals of Blood, Perpétue, The Grass is Singing and Xala on the one hand, and detective novels on the other, it would be a sweeping generalization to call these works detective novels in the known and generally accepted sense of the word. As we have seen, they are not as a rule, preoccupied mainly with the dove-tailing of clues, place, time and other details as a means of resolving any particularly ingenious locked-room mystery. As for the chief investigator, here he is, in the strictest sense of the word, not the kind of professional or amateur whose methods of unraveling complicated webs of clues constitute the point of greatest interest in Edgar Allan Poe, Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie. None of them here has that peculiar endowment of which Sherlock Holmes told Doctor Watson that “by a man’s fingernails, by his coat-sleeve, by his boots, his trouser-knees, by his shirt-cuffs – by each of these things a man’s calling is plainly revealed.” None of them here is a thinking machine, and the books are not in any way designed primarily for mental gymnastics. This is, however, not to contradict the case which was earlier on built in defense of the resemblance of Inspector Godfrey and Sergeant Denham to the master detectives in the masterpieces of the genre. Inspector Godfrey and Sergeant Denham belong to the police department as did Wilkie Collins’s Sergeant Cuff, and Emile Gaboriau’s Monsieur Lecoq. Inspector Godfrey’s approach to his job, as already noted is not inferior to that of the best names in detective fiction. But the argument can hardly be legitimately carried 46 beyond this point without the danger of misunderstanding and misinterpreting the facts these African novels embody. The main difference between these works and pure detective novels is the extent of the emphasis the writers place on detection and the detective himself. In the classical detective fiction, he was the central character, the focus of all attention. He was the life of the story. But, compared to the amount of space taken up by other non detective matters, the proportion of space devoted to the detective and his investigation is very small indeed. Art from the fact that Inspector Godfrey’s expertise is described or reported rather than dramatized as is often the case in the great detective novels, he is physically present and exercising his knowledge of investigation in only six pages of the second chapter of the book, and later in not more than fifteen in the twelfth chapter. For a novel like Petals of Blood that contains three hundred and forty-five pages of dense materials, this must seem negligible enough to exclude the work from the class of detective novels. In the second novel, The Grass is Singing, we never hear of Sergeant Denham again after his initial appearance in the first chapter which occupies only thirty-five pages in a book of two hundred and fifty pages. Emphasis is distributed across the landscape of the various characters whose lives make up the story stuff. In their preoccupation with society, with corruption in high places, one is constantly reminded of the hard-boiled novel which, Somerset Maugham (1958:130) rightly says. ...lays little stress on the detection of crime. It is concerned with the people, crooks, gamblers, thieves, blackmailers, corrupt policemen, dishonest politicians, who commit crimes. Incidents occur, but incidents derive their interest from the individuals who are concerned in them …. they have had to make their people not only credible, but convincing. 47 The temptation then, to establish a case for them as belonging to the school of Dashiell hammett and Raymond Chandler is quite high. But the soul of the hard-boiled novel is the tough-guy hero. None of the central characters in these African novels bears even the slightest resemblance to a tough-guy. Neither Essola nor Inspector Godfrey, nor even Sergeant Denham is “a superman” who, as Charles Rolo puts it, “goes crashing through life beating hell out of the bad men and getting lustfully played by females who are Sex Appeal personified.” The Social Component From the above analysis, one could with much certainty assert that, although in the reading of these novels one...