Victims or Villains: Jewish Images in Classic English Detective Fiction (review)

148 SHOFAR Fa112000 Vol. 19, No. I Victims or Villains: Jewish Images in Classic English Detective Fiction, by Malcolm J. Turnbull. Bowling Green, OH: The Popular Press, 1999. 200 pp. $22.00. At the tum ofthe twentieth century literature changed. Hitherto chiefly the province of the upper-middle class, the introduction ofuniversal education along with the invention ofthe rotarypress, linotype, half-tone engraving, advertising, incandescentillumination, and the vacation combined to make reading a form of"popular" entertainment for the first time. Beginning with Doyle's "A Scandal in Bohemia" (1891), the detective story became the mostprominentform ofpopular fiction in England. Conventionally viewed, the history ofthe detective story proceeds from Doyle, through a number ofturn-of-thecentury imitators, to its Golden Age: the period between the wars when all of the big names-Christie, Sayers, Marsh, Cox, Allingham, et al.-began to write. And Malcolm Turnbull has read them all. He has read them, moreover, with an eye toward the ways in which detective st9ries from about the tum of the century through about the end of World War II treat Jewish characters. They mostly treat them badly. Scarcely a surprise. Turnbull chronologically pursues the ways in the English detective writers use and describe Jewish characters. His chapters cover the periods of 1887 to 1918, 1919 to 1939, 1939 to 1945, and 1945 to the present. In the middle ofthe book he also takes a look at the ways in which three influential writers-Christie, Sayers, and Cox-treat Jews. In this survey Turnbull follows the rise and fall ofstereotypes imposed on Jewish characters. These begin with the image of"influentialwealthholder" and "cunning immigrantpauper" inheritedfrom older English fiction and proceed after World War I to the Jew as parvenu, as revolutionary, and as war-profiteer. Throughout each of the periods persists the stereotype of the Jew as alien, as someone whose appearance (swarthy complexion, hooked nose, thick lips, dark hair), dress (rags or exhibitionistic clothes), speech (lisping), morals (sexually aggressive), and mannerisms differ from those of the other characters in the world ofthe fiction. Turnbull touches on events which coincide with the creation and adoption ofantisemitic images from the Dreyfus case, to the emigration ofRussian Jews in the 1890s, to the publication of The Protocols ofthe Elders ofZion, to the role of two Jewish M.P.s in the Marconi and Indian Silver Scandals, as well as the association of several Jewish activists with the causes of communism and the Russian Revolution. Turnbull, however, shows both that in each period some detective story writers express philoserrutic attitudes and that after 1933 antisemitism largely disappears from British detective fiction. In 1899, for instance, while E. M. Hornung presented Reuben Rosenthall in The Amateur Cracksman as the most astonishing brute to look at, well over six feet, with a chest like a barrel and a great hook-nose, and the reddest hair and whiskers you ever saw.... He boasted of his race, he bragged ofhis riches, and he blackguarded society for taking him up for his money and dropping him out ofsheer pique and jealousy because he had so much[,] Book Reviews 149 his brother-in-law, Arthur Conan Doyle, can and should be seen as philosemitic in his writing and private life. While Doyle was ready enough to express religious prejudice (consider Mormons in A Study in Scarlet), and generally creates villains who are either foreign or have been taintedby other cultures, Turnbull fmds no evidence in the Holmes canon of prejudice against Jews and mentions Doyle's campaign to free the wrongly accused Oscar Slater in 1927. This is not to say that there were not a lot of pinheads writing books that can broadly be construed as detective fiction. Turnbull has done the rest ofus a service by plowing through forgotten writers like "Sapper" (McNeile), E. Phillips Oppenheim, Sidney Horler, Dornford Yates, and Edgar Wallace and highlighting their overt and persistent antisemitism. A catalogue of their offensive passages is as much as they merit. Turnbull, however, treats major writers more extensively. He devotes a chapter each to Christie, Sayers, and Anthony Berkley Cox. In it he traces the progress of Christie from "slurs, cheap laughs and unnecessary insults" to "sensitive...