Conrad’s Popular Fictions

Secret Histories and Sensational Novels

Andrew Glazzard

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781349556939
  9781137559166
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137559173
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Detectives, police informers, spies and spymasters, anarchists and terrorists, swindlers: these are the character types explored in Conrad's Popular Fictions. This book shows how Joseph Conrad experimented creatively with genres such as crime and espionage fiction, and sheds new light on the sources and contexts of his work.

1

‘Armed with the defensive mandate of a menaced society’: Detectives, Professionalism and Liberty in The Secret Agent

Examining the remains of Stevie, killed in Greenwich Park by the premature detonation of the bomb he had been carrying, Chief Inspector Heat addresses the constable who has just collected the body parts and laid them on a waterproof sheet: ‘“You used a shovel,” he remarked, observing a sprinkling of small gravel, tiny brown bits of bark, and particles of splintered wood as fine as needles’ (SA 71). Observing the data – the gravel, bark and splinters in and around the body parts – Heat’s inference is immediately confirmed by the constable. The novel’s Edwardian readers might well have recognized Heat’s logical method here as ‘the science of deduction’, a process of inferential reasoning associated with the most famous fictional character in any genre at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.¹ The genre was detective fiction, and the character was Sherlock Holmes.

By 1906, when Conrad began the short story that became The Secret Agent, Sherlock Holmes was a phenomenon, a myth and a literary sensation. He had first appeared nearly 20 years previously in a short novel barely noticed in Britain, A Study in Scarlet (1887), followed in 1890 by The Sign of Four, but it was the saga of short stories published in the Strand Magazine from 1891 that made both Conan Doyle’s and the magazine’s reputations, driving the Strand’s circulation up to the half-million mark.² The Holmes saga was the most prominent manifestation of the dominance of detective fiction in the literary market at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with one commentator going so far as to claim in 1897 that 80 per cent of new fiction was crime-writing.³ After the success of The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1901–2, Conan Doyle agreed to bring Holmes back to the Strand in return for what were, at the time, astonishing sums: £100 per thousand words, as well as $5000 from the American magazine Collier’s Weekly. Financially, this put Conan Doyle in a different league from almost all other Edwardian writers, including his contemporary Conrad, whose £200 for Typhoon – hardly a paltry sum in 1902 – was less than a thirtieth of what Conan Doyle could have expected for a similar word-count.⁴ Conrad’s disgruntlement at the success of Sherlock Holmes is perhaps understandable – and is certainly evidence of his awareness of the magnitude of the phenomenon.

The Secret Agent’s first reviewers were aware of it too, but tended to emphasize that work’s differences from the genre as much as the similarities. The influential journalist R.A. Scott James reviewed the novel in the Daily News under the heading ‘A Great Detective Story’, writing: ‘Mr Conrad has written a detective story. Not such a detective story as we are accustomed to in England, but one in which the most fearful and, as a rule, unintelligible crimes, such as bomb-throwing, seem to be the only natural acts of people not very bad, not very clever; not, in fact, much different from other law-abiding citizens’ (CR2 335). The Daily Mail’s anonymous reviewer predicted that those readers expecting a detective story would be disappointed: ‘It is not interested in solving police secrets; they are bare from the first. There is never any mystery’ (CR2 346–7). Lloyd Williams, choosing the novel as the Weekly Sun’s ‘book of the week’ under the heading ‘A Real Detective Story’, elaborated on its relationship to popular equivalents: ‘Mr Conrad’s detective story must not be confused with the popularly accepted article. Indeed, it is possible that the people who gobble up the works of Sir Conan Doyle and Mr William Le Queux may find “The Secret Agent” too heavy for their digestive organs, for the only mystery in Mr Conrad’s book is the mystery of life itself; his detective is a glorified policeman’ (CR2 360). Only S. Squire Sprigge in The Academy (CR2 399–40) seemed to read the novel straightforwardly as a detective story, and was anxious not to give away the plot.

Reviewing the novel’s genesis in his 1920 ‘Author’s Note’, Conrad acknowledged – albeit with peculiarly opaque phrasing – that some of his characters had their origins in popular culture: ‘The suggestions for certain personages in the tale, both law-abiding and lawless, came from various sources which, perhaps, here and there, some reader may have recognized’ (SA 8). I have suggested elsewhere that Edgar Wallace’s The Four Just Men (1905) may be one such source, but I think it likely that Conrad also drew more widely on the detective genre, as his early reviewers clearly assumed.⁵ A more fundamental question remains: why would Conrad bother to draw material from what he and others seem to have considered an inferior type of writing? For some more recent critics, the answer appears to be to show off his superior technique and deeper insight. Cedric Watts, for example, argues that The Secret Agent ‘reverses the procedures and subverts the conventions of the detective novel’, revealing more about ‘urban life and the ironies of politics’ than would be possible in the ‘lesser enigmas of detective stories’.⁶ Watts’s assertion tells us little about why Conrad selected detective fiction as his raw material, how the themes and tropes of detective fiction actually function within Conrad’s novel, or how they may have been read by contemporary readers. In this chapter I argue that, far from being mere base metal, detective fiction was a natural vehicle for The Secret Agent’s examination of contemporary urban life. The period’s detective fiction had been shaped by the rise of professionalism in British society, by the spread into daily life of scientific and rationalist systems of thought, and by the implications of the state’s involvement in forms of covert policing for what today we call civil liberties. The utility of the genre was therefore not, as Watts implies, a way for Conrad to show that his interest in political, ethical and social developments was more serious and more searching. Rather, the themes and tropes of detective fiction were suited to examine such developments because those developments had shaped the genre.

The paradox of professionalism

The relationship between fictional detectives and their real-life counterparts was a close but complex one. It began auspiciously. Dickens’s journalism included admiring accounts in Household Words in 1850–51 of Metropolitan Police Inspector Charles Field, a model for Inspector Bucket in Bleak House (1852–53).⁷ Another real detective, Jonathan Whicher, probably also inspired Wilkie Collins’s eccentric but likeable Sergeant Cuff in The Moonstone (1868) – a connection that Conrad may have read about.⁸ However, the case of Whicher, who was publicly vilified for (correctly) identifying Constance Kent as the murderer of her half-brother, demonstrates that the detective could be controversial. As their public prominence increased, so did criticism and mockery, as when Punch magazine responded to the Metropolitan Police’s response to Fenian terrorism on the British mainland by coining the soubriquet ‘Defective Department’ in the 1860s. In the 1870s, a national scandal erupted when officers in the Detective Department were found to be in corrupt relationships with illegal betting gangs, leading to its reformation as the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) and the introduction, by the CID’s first head Howard Vincent, of the Police Code (1881). This did not, however, stop the criticism, which became particularly acute in the late 1880s when the Whitechapel Murders excited fears of lawlessness in London’s East End, prompting concerns from Queen Victoria and a campaign for reform spearheaded by the crusading journalist W.T. Stead.⁹ The detective fiction of the late nineteenth century therefore emerged at a time when detectives were in the news, sometimes lauded but often criticized, and when demands for the highest standards of professional competence had never been greater.

This helps to explain one of the characteristic features of late-Victorian and Edwardian detective fiction: the separation of detectives into amateurs and officials. Inspectors Bucket and Heat and Sergeant Cuff are all, presumably, employees of the Metropolitan Police, but Sherlock Holmes is, like his predecessor Dupin, in private practice, and describes himself in The Sign of Four as the world’s only ‘unofficial consulting detective’.¹⁰ Holmes resembles, as Douglas Kerr has pointed out, the medical consultant: he is a specialist called on by the general practitioners at Scotland Yard when an unusual or difficult case presents itself, while Holmes’s foil and narrator, Dr Watson, is of course a general practitioner in actual fact.¹¹ The Scotland Yard detective, meanwhile, vulnerable (no matter how competent) to public criticism in reality, was never likely to retain the gloss of Dickens’s praise for long, so the amateur/professional division in fiction comes to be an almost inevitable consequence of the growing importance of, and demands on, the detective cadre in fact. By the 1880s, real detectives were too easy to blame for failing to prevent or solve crimes – or, as in Whicher’s case, for solving crimes in the wrong way – for them to be reliable heroes in fiction. Holmes and his lookalikes, unconstrained by official roles, avoid being tarred with the brush of criticism that the real Scotland Yard had to withstand almost as a matter of course.

To add insult to injury, journalistic criticism of police detectives was not simply reproduced but emphasized and exaggerated by detective fiction. Conan Doyle set the lead in A Study in Scarlet with Lestrade and Gregson, who are obtuse, unimaginative and self-serving, and yet are ‘the pick of the bad lot’ at Scotland Yard.¹² This official–amateur rivalry was so prominent in Holmes’s fictional world that it became one of the best jokes in Robert Barr’s parody ‘The Adventures of Sherlaw Kombs’ published in The Idler in 1892: ‘So great was Sherlaw Kombs’s contempt for Scotland Yard that he never would visit Scotland during his vacations, nor would ever admit that a Scotchman was fit for anything but export.’¹³ While Conan Doyle’s presentation of the Scotland Yarders softened in the Strand stories, the magazine’s readers were nonetheless treated to a succession of semi-comic portraits of official haplessness, such as Peter Jones in ‘The Red-Headed League’ (1891) whom Holmes declares to be ‘an absolute imbecile in his profession’.¹⁴ Police detectives are necessary and useful, but are often little more than senior versions of police constables, mere props of law and order. Holmes usually hands the case back to them when it has been solved but requires processing through the criminal justice system. It is significant that Holmes uses ‘profession’ as a yardstick with which to judge Jones’s competence, and uses the same word to describe his own status and code: in ‘The Speckled Band’ (1892), he disdains payment, claiming that ‘my profession is its reward’.¹⁵ The distinction is not so much between amateur and professional as between different definitions of the professional as specialist or as official. It is Holmes who is the professional, despite his amateur status; the Scotland Yard contingent, notwithstanding a few promising newcomers, are amateurs because they lack the attributes of a professional elite – standards, training and methods. Holmes, by contrast, has a developed methodology (‘the science of deduction’), skills that have been honed by training as well as experience, a handsome publication record including monographs on highly specialized topics, and a comprehensive archive of records of his cases and observations. He has also, as Franco Moretti has observed, sacrificed his individuality to his work; although Moretti labels Holmes’s ‘work done for the pleasure of work’ as ‘dilettantism’, the incorporation of the self into a larger body defined by the ethics and methods of service may better be labelled as professionalism.¹⁶ Holmes’s unofficial status is not an attack on professionalism but the opposite: he shows the Scotland Yard detectives to be professional in name only.

Detective fiction was shaped directly by public interest in and criticism of policing, and implicitly by fundamental social changes that came to a head when Conan Doyle and Conrad were writing. As Harold Perkin has shown, the Industrial Revolution initiated a ‘social revolution’ which both expanded the middle class and divided it into the old mercantile class and a new class of specialists working to an ideal ‘based on trained expertise and selection by merit [...] made not by the open market but by the judgment of similarly educated experts’.¹⁷ This professional class grew in size and in organization, as shown by the proliferation of ‘qualifying associations’ – bodies which codified practices, oversaw training and examinations, and excluded the unqualified – from a mere seven in 1800 to 27 by 1880, and 66 by 1914.¹⁸ The results included increasing division of labour, division of knowledge and a growth of regulation so that the representatives of the traditional professions of Church, Law and Army had, by the end of the nineteenth century, been joined by a vast array of specialists, from actuaries to zoologists. By the time Conrad picked up the pen, even authors were not immune, and had a professional body in the Society of Authors, founded by the novelist Walter Besant in 1883, which campaigned for better terms for writers and greater protection for their work. Against this background, the detective’s status would have appeared anomalous: Vincent’s attempt to professionalize policing with the Police Code was not followed up by other professionalizing reforms.

The rise of the professionals expanded rather than replaced the middle class, but social class was nonetheless a factor in how detectives were perceived. British detectives then as now were recruited from the cadre of constables – uniformed police officers – and this was an overwhelmingly working-class group.¹⁹ Unlike members of professional associations, detectives remained blue-collar workers underneath their suits, bowler hats and ties. And fiction generally followed this lead: even where it is not stated explicitly, fictional police detectives are often marked with tropes or speech patterns to suggest a working-class origin. Robert Barr’s dense police detective Spenser Hale in The Triumphs of Eugène Valmont (1906) is ‘prone to strong and even slangy expressions when puzzled’ such as ‘stow that!’, ‘natty’ and ‘swag’, while R. Austin Freeman’s Inspector Badger in ‘The Moabite Cipher’ (1909) remarks of a suspect under observation, ‘He don’t look like a foreigner.’²⁰ Badger is one of several police detectives whose class is also indicated through demeaning animal tropes: Lestrade in ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’ (1891), for example, is a ‘lean, ferret-like man, furtive and sly-looking’, while Forbes in ‘The Naval Treaty’ (1893) is ‘a small, foxy man, with a sharp but by no means amiable expression’.²¹ The lowly status of the police in detective fiction was not simply an effect of real reputational concerns that were promulgated by campaigners such as Stead: it reflected both a new ideology of professionalism and older and deeper class antagonisms.

Real detectives responded by trying to influence public opinion in their favour. Police officers had been forbidden by the Police Code to share information with the press without authorization: ‘officers who without authority give publicity to discoveries, tending to produce sensation and alarm, show themselves wholly unworthy of their posts’.²² Nevertheless, at least one senior detective in the 1890s, Chief Inspector William Melville, managed relations with the press with sufficient astuteness to become a minor celebrity, enjoying flattering newspaper profiles, prominence in reports of arrests and trials, and attracting a contribution to his retirement fund from Conan Doyle.²³ Melville, head of the Special Branch at the time of the Greenwich Park bombing in 1894 – the event which, of course, inspired The Secret Agent – was described by the journalist and prisons’ inspector Arthur Griffiths as ‘our chief mainstay and defence’ against Fenianism, and he is of interest in Conrad studies as a probable model for Chief Inspector Heat.²⁴ But he was not the only detective to court the public: other experienced and senior Scotland Yard detectives broke their silence after retirement to write memoirs which defended their cadre against the calumnies of journalists and novelists. These included Andrew Lansdowne’s A Life’s Reminiscences of Scotland Yard (1890), Inspector [Maurice] Moser’s Stories from Scotland Yard (1890), Chief Inspector J.G. Littlechild’s Reminiscences (1894), published just prior to its author’s post-retirement employment by the Marquess of Queensbury to gather evidence against Oscar Wilde, and the appropri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: The All-Powerful Masses and the Limited Coterie: Problems of Popularity
• 1 ‘Armed with the defensive mandate of a menaced society’: Detectives, Professionalism and Liberty in The Secret Agent
• 2 ‘An actor in desperate earnest’: Informers and Secret Agency
• 3 ‘The inciter behind’: Spymasters and the Eastern Logic of Russia
• 4 ‘The cowardly bomb-throwing brutes’: The Many Types of Conrad’s ‘Terrorists’
• 5 ‘The perpetrator of the most heartless frauds’: Swindlers, the New Economy and the Limits of Narrative
• Conclusion: Cooking the Books
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index