Is There a Real Inspector Hound?: Mousetraps, Deathtraps, and the Disappearing Detective

Is There a Real Inspector Hound? Mousetraps, Deathtraps, and the Disappearing Detective MARVIN CARLSON When Tom Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound opened at the London Criterion in 1968, the most obvious target for its parody was Agatha Christie 's The Mousetrap, playing at St. Martin's, at the other end of Shaftsbury Avenue. At that time The Mousetrap had been running at that theatre for thirteen years. Although The Mousetrap is still running (now in its thirty-sixth year) and seems unlikely to close anytime in the foreseeable future, it is taking on an increasingly anachronistic tone. The London theatre scene has changed a great deal since it opened, or for that matter since the. appearance of Stoppard's ingenious parody. When The Mousetrap began its monumental run in 1955, the mystery play, or thriller, was one of the most common genres on the London stage, and only slightly less popular in New York. An average of five or six new plays of this type opened in the West End every season during the '950S and '960s, and during the 1950S Chfistie herself produced almost one per season, so that often she had several plays running at the same time. The specific type of popular theatre represented by The Mousetrap and parodied by The Real Inspector Hound has almost totally disappeared today from the stages of London and New York. The mystery play itself has not lost its popularity. but a major generic change has taken place since '970 in this type of drama - a change anticipated in certain important ways by Stoppard 's work, which appeared immediately before the first important manifestations of the new approach. During the 1970S and 1980s the traditional whodunit of the MOllsetrap type and its closely related cousin the courtroom drama (Christie also provided a classic of this type in Witness for the Prosecution ) were essentially replaced by a new kind of mystery play. much more in tune with postmodem generic playfulness. most often characterized as a comedy thriller. The most famous examples of this new genre have been Anthony Shaffer's Sleuth in 1970 and Ira Levin's Deathtrap in 1978. Modern Dramo, 36 (1993) 431 432 MARVIN CARLSON The modem detective drama might at first thought seem hardly a promising site for the eruption of postmodern experimentation into mainstream theatre, but in fact two of the most distinctive features of this genre - its conventionality and its familiarity - make it particularly suitable for such a development. Linda Hutcheon has argued that what distinguishes postmodernism from the avant-garde is that the latter defines itself in opposition to the tradition while postmodemism simultaneously exalts and questions conventional procedures, "uses and abuses, installs and then subverts, the very concepts it challenges . ,,' A useful term to suggest the simultaneous celebration and subversion of conventional expectations that characterizes postrnodernism is double-coding, utilized by Charles Jencks in his analyses of postmodern architecture. According to Jencks, double-coding develops the play of paradox that seeks to encourage in the public an openness.in receptive strategies and a consciousness of the constructedness of the expression. In architecture this strategy is particularly apparent in structures that are half modernist, half conventional, with each half serving as a playful destabilization of the absolutist claims of the other.' The process outlined by Hutcheon and Jencks is very well suited to experimentation with a highly and clearly codified genre like detective fiction. Here extremely predictable rules of construction and expectations of setling, of characters, of character relationships, of dialogue, and so on are so strong as almost to amount to generic rules. Thc distinctly popular, not literary , background of the genre is by no means a disadvantage either, since the playing of the avant-garde dynamics of high culture against the conventionalized expectations of a popular ,ultural form is also a favoured postmodernist strategy. As early as the I940s, authors such as Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov were attracted to detective fiction as a basis for their subversive experiments, not only because the predictability of its form provided an attractive basis for the thwarting of conventional expectations, but perhaps even more because the positivistic basis of the genre provided so clear...