Sleuthing Disability

In a genre all about the construction of knowledge, and a detective who uncovers meaning, it seems so logical to examine disability. That is why it is so surprising that The Disabled Detective: Sleuthing Disability in Contemporary Crime Fiction is the first book devoted to the topic. In six chapters, each focused on a specific field of disability studies, Susannah B. Mintz considers bodies and minds that deviate from those framed as normal, and what narratives about such detectives can reveal to readers about what meaning means, what we know about knowledge, what if anything is true about truth.

One of Mintz’s most compelling arguments is that there are many important connections between disability and the literary figure of the detective, and that “this trend, impressive in its sheer voluminousness, has largely been ignored by scholars.” Once she enumerates these connections, they seem obvious. The detective is often marginalized or outside of the “normal” in some way. They have a unique relationship to conventional knowledge, they are naturally concerned with issues of social justice, and they tend to have “an exotic defect or a characterological quirk” to set them apart. Another intertwined concern of the book is that tension and contradiction inherent in the possibilities of the genre to be simultaneously conservative and subversive. Investigating the degree to which “disabled detectives” are “rewriting the assumptions of ableism,” that is, passing the Fries test and departing from caricature and narrative prosthesis, Mintz considers whether it is enough to simply feature a disabled detective at the center of a mystery. A common structure for each chapter is to examine the ways the portrayal of a particular detective is somewhat problematic, falling back on common stereotypes that reduce the complexity of the disabled character. But then Mintz takes the next step and goes on to show how the literature of disabled detectives rarely merits just this one interpretation. The occasional caricature or ableist assumption about the lesser-than humanity of the sleuth is not the full story. By their very othering or presumed brokenness, this detective “poses a serious challenge to cliches about impairment.”

The Introduction uses analyses of the most famous of literary detectives to frame the chapters that follow. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and his trusty sidekick-narrator Watson, along with Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple, are analyzed through a disability studies lens. Holmes being read as on the spectrum, Watson’s war injuries, Poirot’s borderline OCD obsession with neatness and symmetry, and Marple’s physical inability to do the most active aspects of sleuthing, reframe the most “standard” of popular detectives as othered in ways similar to the disabled sleuths examined in following chapters.

Another primary argument that structures the book and each of its chapters is the notion that brokenness, or incompleteness, has the power to show us the true shape of things in new ways. In the chapter “Seer Detectives,” Mintz shows how characters who lack sight encourage the reader to reexamine the assumed links among sight, space, and knowledge. “Blind detection avenges our fear of the dark precisely because it warns us that seeing is not the only way to believe.” Especially compelling is Mintz’s analysis of how blind detectives produce alternative kinds of knowledge. They “defy normative modes of gathering information … blind detectives seem to warn the sighted that they rely exclusively on vision to their peril.”

One of the many strengths of Mintz’s book is the interpretive connections and contrasts drawn between chapters and thus among various disabilities in relation to detection. Blind detectives are often portrayed as visibly blind (through the use of a cane, a seeing eye dog, etc.) and can uncannily act like a sighted person. On the other hand, deaf detectives discussed in “Deafness and the Penetrating Detective” do not bear visual markers of their deafness even as they employ trenchant gazes upon suspects and spaces. In what is arguably...