Crime compendium
Anthony Shaffer's ingenious Sleuth (Calder and Boyars Playscripts 85p) is dedicated to a number of fictional detectives, including Father Brown and Gideon Fell. They are all detectives in the high tradition — "great" detectives, not just ordinary coppers. Shaffer himself has said, however, that the contribution the play makes to the detective tradition lies essentially in its introduction of a' working class character, Milo Tindle, on equal terms with the other main, upper-class, character, Andrew Wyke, the detective story writer. That cross class fertilisation. Shaffer says, was necessary to save the English detective story from becoming a country house set, one class-ridden, variety of'. crossword puzzle.
There is a lot in this, but the development, Shaffer describes is by no means the most important thing that has been happening. Certainly, it is true that one can scarcely imagine Ngaio Marsh's Sir Roderick Alleyn, or Michael Innes's Sir John Appleby having a conversation with, let alone working with, any of John Wainwright's top coppers. But the central inspirati-m of novels like Wainwright's is not class, but the urge to document, to tell it like it is for the coppers and the villains, where as the Marsh-Innes impulse is to puzzle. Cross fertilisation is necessary for the health of both traditions; and the best cross fertiliser is Wainwright himself, who brought a locked room problem into his last book High Class Kill (Macmillan £1.95), as I noted when it appeared last June. Wainwright is himself an ex-policeman, and amazingly
productive: his new book The Devil You Don't (Macmillan
£1.85) appears this week. In his astonishing variety and achievement, and his willingness to experiment, lies, in my view, the main hope pf the detective novel. Wainwright must be read by every student of the form.
For this week, however, I want to concentrate on the documentary school, Some years ago John Bingham published My Name is Michael Sibley which was the first, as it still is one of the best,' of the documentary romans policier, thus spawning Z Cars, Softly,. Softly and all the others. Once, however, you start telling it like it is in fiction the urge to go one better, and recount real life crime stories, is hard to resist. Bingham (who is, Mr Shaffer should note, Lord Clanmorris) has not resisted it and has now, with the aid of the investigating detective, Superintendent William Muncie, written The Hunting Down of Peter Manuel (Macmillan £2.75), the story of the Lanarkshire mass murderer who was hanged in 1958. This is a plain, terse, gripping book recounting Muncie's hunt for the polite, handsome, wellbrought up boy who enjoyed killing, Murdered nine people for, the fun of it, and beguiled himself at other points in his career with rape and assault. Because, moreover, Bingham is such a distinguished detective novelist the atmosphere and the drama as well as the scientific detail of an investigation are admirably conveyed: I liked particularly the description of Muncie halfasleep in his car suddenly spotting Manuel and realising he was the villain, "a classic example," as Bingham says, "of how a good detective's mind works, almost subconsciously, when he is literally half-asleep."
Manuel was, in Muncie's and Bingham's view, evil: not ill, or mad. But bad. Chases after such motiveless killers form an important part of the detective story tradition — one of the best examples being Philip Macdonald's X v Rex. Wainwright's coppers have yet to meet such a character: his villains, however violent and desperate. are mundane, and his description is of the half-world inhabited by professional crooks and professional coppers, almost to the exclusion of the rest of us. Relax on Sunday, says Wainwright, "But not if you're a villain, and not if you're a cop." The villain in The Devil You Don't is an ex-cop, gang boss of a Northern town. Three killers from London are coming to get him, and Chief Superintendent Sugden and his rrifti stake out the gang boss in order to nab everybody. Rawlings, Sugden's assistant, is desperate to get Davis, and is impatient with Sugden's only half-revealed plan. He wants Davis because Davis was once a cop. Sugden asks him if he is envious: "Not," says Rawlings "if he's made to pay." "I hate him," he says at another point, "... Because of what he once was ... because of what he is now." He would let Davis die but Sugden says, "I'm a copper . It means — among other things — that I can't sit in the wings, and watch a man being murdered." Rawlings will not risk his life for Davis and leaves Sugden alone. Later the Chief Constable refers to Sergeant Rawlings — sergeant, according to Sugden "Forever and ever — amen ... if I've owt to do with it." One of the most important china Wainwright is doing is redefining the ethic's of police work: sometimes the line of evil is blurred, coppers and villains are terribly alike, the sanctions and principles that work for Appleby and Alleyn vanish, and are being only haltingly replaed by a code derived from the pure • practice of bobbying, not from society as a whole which Wainwright's heroes, as in High Class Kill, loathe.
The importance of what Wainwright is doing can scar cely be over-rated. The autobiography of Chester Nimes, creator of the black Harlem coppers Coffin Ed Smith and Gravedigger Jones, The Quality of Hurt (Michael Joseph £3.00) shows that the same problems of verity, identification and ethics are being faced on the other side of the Atlantic as well. "America hurt me terribly," says Himes, "whether rightly or wrongly is riot the point. He does not pule or rage like, say, James Baldwin, but a society which hurts the characters, as Wainwtight's characters are hurt, is one in which it is impossible to write — or impossible for an author who feels the hurt to write — detec tive novels in the Marsh-lnnes manner: his coppers must redefine what being a copper is.
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