Form as Ideology: The Agent of Detection in the Crime Fiction of Mary Fortune

Nicola Bowes
School of English, Media Studies and Art History
The University of Queensland

Mary Fortune is surely one of Australia 's most remarkable nineteenth-century writers. During her fifty-year writing career Fortune published poetry, memoir, journalism, several serialized novels, and at least one play. [1] But most remarkably, and of central interest to this paper, Fortune wrote nearly five hundred individual works of short crime fiction. Published in the Victorian family miscellany, the Australian Journal, this corpus includes one of the longest Australian crime series ever written: more than four hundred stories published under the by-line 'The Detective's Album' (1868-1908). [2] The series is framed as the 'casebook' of a detective, Mark Sinclair, each story corresponding to one photograph in Sinclair's album of apprehended criminals. However, although the series remains nominally the reminiscences of Sinclair, the stories within the casebook frequently employ other agents of detection, such as Sinclair's fellow police detectives, private detectives or amateur sleuths. Moreover, during the course of the casebook Sinclair is himself transformed from a member of the official police into a private inquiry agent. Stephen Knight contends that such changes in the agent of detection alter the 'underlying meaning of the story, especially its social meaning' (1993, p.109). This paper explores the different models of detecting agent employed by Fortune in 'The Detective's Album' casebook, and examines how a change in the form given to the detective alters the social meaning - the ideology - of the story.

To the modern reader the detective appears the natural centre of the crime story: thus Sherlock Holmes, Sam Spade and Perry Mason have achieved a degree of cultural recognition which far outstrips that of their creators. But it was only in the nineteenth century that crime fiction developed this emphasis on a central detecting figure. Knight has convincingly argued that popular crime fiction of earlier centuries, such as the Newgate Calendar tradition, [3] presents crime as a rare anomaly of an otherwise well-ordered society, the resolution of which required little other than the individual's own Christian guilt and the society's organic response in isolating and expelling the deviant (1980, p.12). By the early nineteenth century, however, an increasingly urbanised world made unsupportable such an idealised model of crime control even in fiction. As Heather Worthington notes, 'the industrial conurbations that were replacing the rural communities created the need for a disciplinary rather than exemplary system of containment' (2005, p.18). Within the later examples of the Newgate Calendar, in fact, a degree of ambiguity had emerged by the nineteenth-century, an evident desire for more certainty about guilt and innocence than could be provided within a world without professional detectives ( Worthington , p.19). While in real life the pressures of the nineteenth-century urban landscape resulted in the modern police force, in fiction these pressures stimulated a discursive space for a fictional character, 'a specialistic figure to read and decipher . . . penetrate and deconstruct the mysteries of crime and criminality' ( Worthington , p.19).

Certainly Fortune's crime fiction can be seen as the product of such a period of industrialisation and urban growth in Victorian history. Thus Fortune's crime fiction corresponds to an era which saw expansive capitalism take hold in the turbulent decades following the discovery of gold in the early 1850s and a resulting exponential growth of Melbourne . Knight has argued that during this period the crime fiction published in the Australian Journal was 'firmly orientated in favour of the forces of law and order'(1993, p.109). Within these stories the policeman or police detective is comfortably positioned as a positive character: perhaps not quite a hero, but certainly a sympathetic protagonist. Such a suggestion is particularly striking given that to the modern imagination the defining images of nineteenth-century Australia are figures like Ned Kelly, the diggers at Eureka , and the lone bushman of 'Waltzing Matilda', figures repeatedly defined in opposition to the colonial policeman. And yet, despite the dominance of these cultural images of the colonial policeman as persecutor, oppressor, and hapless tool of the squattocracy, Knight points out that the 'regular and evidently successful occurrence of police stories in the Australian Journal clearly indicates there was plenty of faith in positive policing in the goldfields period' (1993, p.111). [4]

These tales of positive policing, moreover, were not fantastic adventures but appear as realistic accounts of colonial policing (albeit accounts in which the continual success of the police is clearly unrealistic). Knight's description of Sinclair captures the essence of the detective as 'a self-reliant, wry character whose success comes from a highly credible mixture of patience, flexibility and good information' (1993, p.111). Mark Sinclair and his colleagues in the detective branch display no startling ratiocination or deductive powers in the manner of Dupin or Holmes, but rather solve crime through ordinary police procedures. Sinclair thus works undercover, undertakes stakeouts, employs disguise, interrogates witnesses, and collects circumstantial and physical evidence, before piecing together the truth of a crime. Unlike in the dénouement of the classic clue-puzzle, however, the solutions offered by Sinclair come as no surprise to the reader. In most cases, the reader has known the identity of the guilty individual from the first description of the character in the story, having benefited from the physiognomic powers of the detective's hyperactive gaze. The nineteenth-century reader of these police memoirs could read guilt onto the body along with the detective, noting the low forehead, the cunning expression, the furtive gaze and the close-set eyes. This lack of surprise is not a failing in the fiction but part of the underlying ideology of the stories. That the final solution is so self-evident only serves to reinforce the reassuring impression that identity is not - as feared - a fluid and threatening unknown in the urban space, but a physical reality which reveals itself to the professional gaze of the detective. Importantly, this revelation of the guilty party at the conclusion of the story is almost always accompanied by the extraction of a confession. Within these early police memoirs the emphasis on procedural policing and the gathering of evidence is thus always secondary to the importance of such a confession, which invests the story with an authority which the production of evidence alone could not confer.

These powers of the new detective character to resolve crime offered the nineteenth-century reading public a consoling fable of control. And yet, even in tales that celebrate his powers, the nineteenth-century policeman is still an ambiguous figure. Thus Anthea Trodd, in her study Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel, describes the police detective of mid-nineteenth century crime fiction as 'a character still in search of a genre' (1989, p.13). The historical background to the detective role certainly contributed to uncertainty about that character, particularly the fact that thief-takers had notoriously been little more than thieves who informed on their confederates. The methods of continental policing in particular, in which detectives acted as provocateurs and state spies against private citizens, had further contributed to suspicion of the police. The popular crime fiction of the mid-nineteenth century reflects this uncertainty. Even Fortune's Mark Sinclair, as Lucy Sussex has pointed out, is often 'not over-scrupulous in his pursuit of crime' (1988, p.124). This ambiguity was evident to at least one contemporary commentator. In 1880 Henry Mitchell commented in an article published in the Australian Journal that Fortune revealed the methods actually employed by contemporary Victorian detectives. ' She exposes all the nefarious arts, tricks and dodges adopted by [these detectives]', Mitchell wrote, adding that detectives were 'undoubtedly the authors of more crime than they prevent' (pp.487-8) .

In the mid-nineteenth century these concerns did not prevent writers like Fortune offering the Victorian reading public tales of positive policing featuring policemen and police detectives as agents of detection. However, historical events in Victoria in the 1880s crystallized these earlier uncertainties into a general public disillusionment regarding police detectives. The 1883 Victoria Royal Commission Special Report on the Detective Branch revealed such a myriad of abuses and failings that the chairman, Francis Longmore, described the detective branch as 'a nursery of crime'. The predominantly bourgeois reading public sought instead a detective figure who could resolve crime but while doing so remain consistent with the values of bourgeois hegemony. Consequently, although detectives still regularly feature as agents of detection in 'The Detective's Album' after the revelations of the Royal Commission, they are now often supplemented by either private inquiry agents or, more commonly, surrogate detectives, interested parties whose close connection to the crime lend relevance and integrity to their investigations, particularly in crimes or mysteries which are complex or occur within the bourgeois home itself. A similar change, as Ian Ousby notes, occurred in British crime fiction, promoting the 'view that the police detective, though capable of dealing with the small beer of crime and mystery, proves inadequate to the unusual or unprecedented situation' (1976, p.131).

The private inquiry agent is in fact not a statistically dominant form of agent of detection in Mary Fortune's crime fiction. It is highly significant, however, that Fortune's favoured detecting agent, Mark Sinclair, is transformed from a police detective into a private inquiry agent, an event that occurs in a tale published the year after the Royal Commission ('My Story of the Manse', Sept. 1884). Fortune's incorporation of private policing into her corpus reflects more than a loss of public confidence in the police detective; it also indicates the rising consciousness in the nineteenth century of the 'new' professionals as powerful figures in the maintenance of bourgeois hegemony. Arthur Griffith, in his influential textbook on crime in nineteenth-century Europe, points out that the private inquiry agent was an established part of urban life, one of the multitude of new occupations which developed in the nineteenth century to service the expanding interests of the bourgeoisie: 'A special product of modern times is the private enquiry agent, so much employed nowadays, whose ingenuity, patient pertinacity, and determination to succeed have been usefully engaged in unraveling intricate problems, verging upon, if not actually included within, the realm of crime' (1901). Moreover, late nineteenth-century Melbourne was a city in which, according to Graeme Davison, 'the complexity and sophistication of the emerging metropolis . . . summoned up a new breed of specialists and expert' (1981, p.95). Evidence for this can be found in the city's business directories, which 'registered the appearance of a new range of sophisticated services, from express messengers and advertising agents to arbitrators and investigation agencies, concerned essentially to ease the problem of communication within a rapidly growing urban economy' (Davison, p.9).

The employment of these private services allowed the bourgeoisie to avoid direct contact with the public police. The public police were necessary and desirable, of course, but only within a certain sphere, especially in the public street as watchdogs of the so-called 'criminal' classes. This division of labour, with private police for private concerns and public police for social control, is made explicit in Fortune's story, ' Brandon 's Boy, Bill' (Oct. 1878). In this story Sinclair is still a member of the official police and he ruminates on the difference between his official cases and those undertaken by his friend, Ben Parnell, who has begun a private inquiry office:

These private detective chaps get much further into the secrets of a certain class of people than we Government fellows do; our business lying more among those whom poverty or bad blood and low parentage bring under the lash of the law, and theirs often gaining them an intimate acquaintance with the family affairs of the 'upper ten'; and, as the result of this fact, Parnel l h as prospered and has always more cases on hand than he and his assistants can manage. (p.82)

Fortune's private inquiry agents reflect this division of public and private labour. Her private detectives are specifically hired to investigate areas of threat which are either not strictly criminal or crimes which are by their nature acts that the bourgeoisie would wish to conceal from the police. Thus in the first story in which Sinclair himself acts as a private inquiry agent he is hired by a genteel young woman to investigate 'the secret of our family - the mystery which is troubling us' ( 'My Story of the Manse', p.12), which concerns the way the young lady's mother has become 'very strange' and taken to making mysterious visits to Melbourne, from which 'she returns stranger than ever' (p.12). In Fortune's crime fiction, private inquiry agents are hired variously to investigate if someone is, as he suspects, going mad ('Mrs. Larner's Revenge', Aug. 1890); to find runaway children of the bourgeoisie ( 'Brandon's Boy, Bill', Oct. 1878) ; by a rich, elderly man to investigate his mistress and, simultaneously, by the mistress to discover the man's marital status ('Four Graves', Mar. 1904); to investigate respondents to a 'Matrimonial Advertisement' (Feb. 1896); by a father who suspects his son of defrauding him ('Private Inquiry Offices, P- Buildings, City', Jan. 1898); and by husbands whose wives are suddenly 'different' or behaving 'mysteriously' ('My Story of the Manse'; 'Royal Berger's Daughter', Oct. 1890). In fact, in the tale 'Royal Berger's Daughter' the private detective is hired to investigate a wife on the scanty evidence that her husband feels there is something different about her: '"But there is some mystery about her - she is totally changed in every way!"' (p.104). he other - the it unconsciously draws attention to teh nsists, sustaining the para As Fortune's private inquiry agent Dunstan reminds the reader, 'of all private and particular businesses, mine is the most private and particular' ('Private Inquiry Offices, P- Buildings, City', p.111).

Such private inquiry agents offered the nineteenth-century reader a model of crime control more in keeping with bourgeois values than that of the police detective or policeman. However, the nineteenth-century private inquiry agent was also irredeemably marked by scandals, particularly as a result of his role in gathering evidence for divorce proceedings. Moreover, the police detective and the private detective were alike marked by the exchange of money for information, rather than the noble pursuit of truth or justice. The surrogate detective in fiction solves crime through the specific skills they bring to a situation, such as knowledge of the family, medical expertise, scientific knowledge or domestic skills: these skills are usually precisely those that reflect and constitute bourgeois hegemony. These agents are 'surrogates' in that they act only temporarily in place of the official detectives, supplementing the official disciplinary order in those environments to which official investigations are not suited: the private, bourgeois domestic interior. A s urrogate such as a young lover, family friend, lawyer or doctor, in contrast to the police detective or the private inquiry agent, is not an outsider violating the sanctity of the interior space of the bourgeois family.

Fortune's story 'Mrs. Larner's Revenge' may be seen as a hybrid between the private eye and the surrogate detective categories. The story begins with an advertisement placed by a Mrs Nemo, offering herself as 'a prudent, healthy and active woman who is yet young enough for either hand or head work, [who] wants employment in some quiet, respectable way, for which a disappointed life may not have proved a bad training'(p.683). Mrs Nemo is hired by a genteel doctor to investigate the 'atmosphere of mystery gradually closing around everybody and everything in my house', and instructed to discover whether the doctor is the 'victim of some plot which had for its object making me mad' (p.683). The doctor's house is haunted in the tradition of the gothic by 'whispering, and steps and laughs, that seem close to me when I am alone' (p.682). But, in an inversion of the usual sensation pattern, it is the hero haunted by a spectre, and the heroine acting as temporary private investigator who brings the light of reason to resolve the mystery. Mrs. Nemo solves the mystery through her superior reading of inconspicuous domestic clues, such as a badly-fitted carpet and an inappropriately dressed servant (the nurse's clothes, 'too dressy for her position', including an elaborate hat with a dipped brim, give her away as an imposter, p.685). In return for her domestic and detective skills, Mrs Nemo is rewarded with marriage to the doctor, and appears to have happily given up detective work altogether at the successful conclusion of her first case.

Surrogate detectives throughout 'The Detective's Album' casebook are most likely to be called upon to investigate a single mystery, the resolution of which is necessary to their own persona l h appiness or is an extension of their professional duty. Thus, a family lawyer might investigate a missing heir or will, an accused individual might work to uncover the true criminal, or a suitor attempt to clear his lover's name. The surrogate is both dedicated and relentless: the reader is assured that someone followed by a surrogate detective is 'more faithfully shadowed than if the best brace of private-clothes men had been entrusted with that duty' ('Long Lead', April 1894, p.455). Moreover, the surrogate's interest in the outcome of the mystery is singular and not merely a function of his or her occupation, for, as a character in one of Fortune's stories comments: 'Who is so grand a detective as a young lover after all?' ('On the Gascoigne', Nov. 1883, p.149). At the close of each mystery surrogates return to their former respectable lives: thus we would not expect Walter Hartright to become the detective of a series of future mysteries after the domestic happiness of the conclusion to The Woman in White, any more than we would expect to have Mrs Nemo, happily settled with her doctor, appear the following week in another mystery.

Georg Lukacs wrote that literary genres 'grow out of the concrete determinacy of the particular social and historical conditions in which they are published' (1969, p.18). This observation is particularly well-illustrated by the genre of crime fiction which has continually evolved to reflect changes in society. This paper has argued that alterations in the form given to the agent of detection in 'The Detective's Album' can be traced to changes in the social and historical conditions of Victoria . If this is so and Fortune did reinvent her detecting figures throughout her long writing career to remain responsive to the fears and fantasies of her readership, then her crime corpus is an invaluable map of fifty years of Victorian history, a map on which the detours and byways of Victoria 's evolving ideology may be read.

[1] Fortune, despite these achievements, had been all but forgotten by literary history until Stephen Knight's pioneering thematic history of Australian crime fiction, Continent of Mystery (1997). Another major contributor to a resurgence of interest in Fortune's work has been Lucy Sussex. Sussex has not only worked to assign authorship of previously anonymous fiction to Fortune (1997), but has also established nearly all the biographical information currently known about this writer (1988, 1989)

[2] 'The Detective's Album' is composed of 411 stories in total. In addition to this long series Fortune created a second, shorter crime series under the by-line 'Navvies' Tales: Retold by the Boss', consisting of twenty-four stories published 1873-1875. Fortune also published thirty-six other crime stories in the Australian Journal which were not part of a series.

[3] The 'Newgate Calendar' tradition refers to certain highly formulaic accounts of the crimes and last confessions of condemned prisoners (not all of whom passed through Newgate Prison). Keith Hollingsworth credits primary rights to the name 'Newgate Calendar' to the 1773 edition, The Newgate Calendar, or, Malefactors Bloody Register (1963, p.6).

[4] With the notable exception of Knight's fascinating glimpse 'The Vanishing Policeman: Patterns of Control in Australian Crime Fiction' , there has been a general lack of critical attention addressed to the development of the agent of detection in Australian crime fiction. Moreover, almost no critical attention has been paid to the relationship between the presentation of the agent in Australian fiction and the evolution of policing and detection in Australian social history.

References

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?— Nov. 1883, 'The Detective's Album: On the Gascoigne', Australian Journal,Clarson, Massina & Co., Melbourne, pp.149-58.

?— Sept. 1884, 'The Detective's Album: My Story of the Manse', AustralianJournal, Clarson, Massina & Co., Melbourne, pp.12-9.

?— Aug. 1890, 'The Detective's Album: Mrs. Larner's Revenge', Australian Journal,Clarson, Massina & Co., Melbourne, pp.682-90.

?— Oct. 1890, 'The Detective's Album: Royal Berger's Daughter', AustralianJournal, Clarson, Massina & Co., Melbourne, pp.102-9.

?— April 1894, 'The Detective's Album: Long Lead', Australian Journal, Clarson,Massina & Co., Melbourne, pp.453-7.

?— Feb 1896, 'The Detective's Album: A Matrimonial Advertisement', AustralianJournal, Clarson, Massina & Co., Melbourne, pp.277-82.

?— Jan. 1898, 'The Detective's Album: Private Inquiry Offices, P---- Buildings, City',Australian Journal, Clarson, Massina & Co., Melbourne, pp.111-7.

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