Bodies of Evidence: Post-War Detective Fiction and the Monstrous Origins of the Sexual Psychopath

[The] fundamental question of philosophy (like that of psychoanalysis) is the same as the question of the detective novel: who is guilty?

—Umberto Eco, Postscript to the Name of the Rose¹

Monsters are not unforgiveable, and not forgiveable. We do not bear the right internal relation to them for forgiveness to apply.

—Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason²

Eco's remark is an invitation to consider the relationship between two discrete meanings of guilt—psychopathological and legal—as well as two explanatory narratives—psychoanalysis and detective fiction—that have traditionally helped to generate and sustain them. Intense interest in the relation between psychopathology and criminality arose in the United States in the years immediately after World War II, at the same time that the narratives of psychoanalysis and detective fiction enjoyed unprecedented attention in the popular imagination. For a nation concerned to stabilize the consensus account of its ideals and institutions in the face of an uncertain new world order, both psychoanalysis and detective fiction provided narratives by which to explain the relays between psychological disturbances and criminal deviance. Alongside, and in part owing to, its rapid institutional consolidation within the American psychiatric community, psychoanalysis achieved a popular explanatory eminence that was unparalleled in the postwar period. As a discourse of normative individual development, popularized Freudian explanations shed ostensibly apolitical light on social problems of all stripes, most notably in connection with criminal deviance.³ Likewise, detective fiction, as a narrative of legal transgression cum popular entertainment, came to provide not only criminal containment, but also psychological explanations of criminal behavior. Thus, by mid-century an interpenetration of these narratives was in progress. Psychoanalysis was invoked across a spectrum of institutional and, more significantly, popular discourses to investigate the kind of criminal deviance that had long been a staple element of detective fiction.⁴ For its part, detective fiction during the period increasingly incorporated—even if in some cases to dismiss—psychoanalysis into its mechanics and thematics. What emerged from this interanimating conversation was both a revision of popular conceptions of criminal motivation and a redrawing of what were taken to be boundaries of normal human identity.⁵

In light of this contextualization, the principal question mobilized by Eco's associative logic becomes, what revision of the popular conceptions of criminal guilt and identity did the appearance of Freudian explanations in U.S. detective fiction entail. Within the traditional juridical framework of the detective genre—a discursive practice whose epistemological assumptions were, at least until the advent of hardboiled crime fiction in the early 1920s,⁶ coextensive with the tenets of classical liberalism—the question of criminal guilt amounted, in its most basic form, to a question of identity with respect to the legal code. Within that framework we might read the emphasis of the question thus: "who is guilty?" where the epistemological summons could be satisfied by producing the proper name of the culprit in order to attach it (as both origin and telos) to the sequence of events that constituted the crime. Revised according to the popularized psychoanalytic narrative of the post-war period, the detective inquiry was recast: "who is guilty?" where the question of identity hinged on an examination of the sources of criminal guilt, of its contributing factors and relays. According to this revision, these factors and relays ultimately constituted the identity of the subject who "possessed" them. Or, one had better say, subjects. In effect, the revision displaced, at least in part, responsibility⁷ from the criminal to the parties responsible for his psychic formation. It was, as it were, a revision of the list of usual suspects. Formerly an atomic individual motivated by a psychology that was essentially Cartesian⁸ in its unimpeded access to its own motives, according to this revision the criminal now brought with him a private entourage of co-conspirators, players in a domestic drama that constituted the mystery behind the mystery and of whose dynamics and effects he himself was often unaware. Crucial to this revision and the domestic drama at its center was...