My grandfather loved to read detective stories. Everyone did back then.
Not so much anymore.
Maybe it’s because we don’t have the time anymore, what with jobs being so 24-hourish nowadays. But the detective story is still unbelievably popular – on television. There, police procedurals like CSI: Everywhere are gobbled up like a “turkey” at a Hannibal Lector Thanksgiving.
Why are these often-macabre stories so engrossing? The great writer Jorge Luis Borges said: "The police story’s relevance is that it maintains classic virtues in the midst of chaos – it is saving order in an epoch of disaster.”
Perhaps that’s true. After all, the detective genre is a symptom of the disruptive effects of the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution was a temporal meteor that left people in a state of unresolvedness, struggling to come to terms with life’s new uncertainties and the suddenly quickened pace in which they had to deal with them.
The two terrific/terrible results of the Revolution – innovation and urbanisation – intersected monstrously at the 1893 Chicago’s World’s Fair, which was the backdrop for one of America’s earliest and more successful killing sprees. Erik Larson’s 2003 true crime novel The Devil in the White City describes chillingly how Dr HH Holmes lured victims from the World’s Fair to a nearby hotel he’d specially designed to conceal dozens of murders with the help of new technologies, such as soundproof bedrooms fixed with gas lines able to asphyxiate its occupants at any time, and a secret chute to the basement where bodies were stripped to their skeletons and later sold to medical schools.
This type of homicide, says scholar Peter Vronsky, requires leisure time: both to contemplate the pleasure of and then to carry out the minutiae of the crimes. Leisure time in past centuries was the preserve of privilege, granted to those like 17th-century Countess Elizabeth Bathory, who bathed in the blood of virgins to preserve her beauty, or the 18th-century aristocratic killer of children, Giles de Rais.
But with the Industrial Revolution’s gift of wealth and time to all who worked for it, anyone could be a serial killer.
The new crime of the new cities gave rise to the world’s first established police forces, like London’s Scotland Yard in 1829. Inevitably, the rise of the official police detective gave birth to the genre of detective fiction as we know it, in which the reader follows the thinking of these detectives.
A detective’s trains of thought are invariably linear and sturdy, even as he combats what is perhaps his (and our) greatest enemy – time. A hero who performs so stoically in the face of that enemy is certainly a comfort to the modern audience.
The notion of time as we think of it today, as a commodity, as something constricting, is a subtle but nonetheless true identifying mark of an industrialised society. Workers in agrarian economies were not paid wages. They did not hold jobs. Their lives and deaths were up to nature’s whims and their own physical abilities. If they had a good harvest, they lived to the next one; if they did not, they did not.
‘The industrial revolution changed all that,” said futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler, who wrote: “Clocks and watches made it possible to monitor and measure time more accurately. And how long or fast you worked did make a difference.”
Certainly, the Industrial world was magical and wondrous, filled with fantastic new technologies like steel and electricity, which fuelled the creation of staggering wealth and allowed people of all types to move more quickly and broadly throughout the world, enabling the sort of truly global event that was Chicago’s World’s Fair. But it also created a world that was much darker and much scarier, evinced by that same Fair and the nocturnal activities of Dr Holmes it facilitated.
In this kind of world, it’s easy to see why the detective story – a bastion of goodness and order prevailing in world of evil and chaos – offers a salve to the modern individual, unintentionally upended by the very world he created, struggling forever against the tyranny of his on-again/never-off relationship with his Blackberry.
All of us feel out of place here, in this new, forever-altered world of infinite ability but never-enough time. Maybe that’s why my grandfather and I both love detective stories. Maybe it’s also why I don’t read enough of them. I probably should, though. After all, I’ve got time to kill.
