Peter Ackroyd's 'Hawksmoor' (1985) and the Case of the Lost Detective

2006

Working with Fredric Jameson's understanding of genre as a "formal sedimentation" of an ideology, this study investigates the historicity of the detective narrative, what role it plays in bourgeois, capitalist culture, what ways it mediates historical processes, and what knowledge of these processes it preserves. I begin with the problem of the detective narrative's origins. This is a complex and ultimately insoluble problem linked to the limits of historical perspective and compounded by the tendency of genres to erase their own origins. I argue that any critical reading of the detective story beginning with the notion that real crime and working class unrest are the specters that the detective story seeks to exorcise misapprehends the real class struggle that is evidenced in, but also disguised by, the detective story: the struggle between the ascendant (though never assuredly so) bourgeoisie and the receding (though, again, never assuredly so) aristocratic and post-feudal ruling classes. Instead, I argue that it is this class struggle that is apparent in the detective narrative's special structure-the double structure by which it can pose any-origin-whatever as a moment of history and construct that history forward while appearing to uncover it backward. The detective narrative erases precisely the problem of the bourgeoisie's lack of origins (from a feudal perspective) and counterfeits history. For this reason, I locate the detective narrative's beginnings in specific sites where the transfer of power from traditional institutions to bourgeois institutions or institutions reformed by the bourgeoisie, including the Chancery court (in Charles Dickens' Bleak House), the construction of the New Poor Laws of 1834 (in Wilkie Collins' The Dead Secret), and marriage and inheritance in Bleak House and Collins' The Moonstone. Ending with a study of the commonly acknowledged first detective novel, The Moonstone, I conclude that this novel and the generic paradigm of the detective narrative it exemplifies succeed in encrypting the historical discontinuity between post-feudal modes of production and capitalism and that, ultimately, crime is just an alibi for the work of historical reconstruction that the detective narrative carries out.

Contemporary Literature, 2004

T repression of this materiality by a complex of political and scientific strategic powers extending from the Enlightenment's Christopher Wren to the Thatcher administration of the 1980s. Peter Ackroyd's critical significance to late twentieth-century English literature seems only to have increased over time. Recent years have seen the production of many articles on his work, as well as several book-length studies. Hawksmoor won Guardian and Whitbread fiction awards, and it won Ackroyd's work significant popular and critical attention. The novel has spawned numerous articles and appears frequently in studies of postmodern historiographic metafiction and of the gothic. Roger Salomon even quotes Nicholas Dyer, the novel's eighteenth-century narrator, for the title of his recent typological study of the gothic, Mazes of the Serpent (Hawksmoor 56). Hawksmoor tells Dyer's story. He is a fictitious alternative to Nicholas Hawksmoor, the eighteenth-century architect who designed several London churches after the Great Fire. Dyer designs the six that the historical Hawksmoor designed and that one can still see in London today, as well as a seventh church, Little St. Hugh, that is entirely fictitious. Entrusted with building these churches for the good of the city, Dyer, a secret Satanist at war with Enlightenment reason emblematized in his employer, Christopher Wren, works into the design, construction, and location of his churches a secret occult code and dedicates each church with the sacrifice of a "virgin" boy. The chapters detailing Dyer's exploits alternate with chapters that take place in twentieth-century London where corpses start to appear on the grounds of Dyer's churches. A detective named Hawksmoor tries to unravel the mystery. The novel closes with no resolution to the mystery, Hawksmoor rushing to Little St. Hugh to prevent, witness-or perhaps even commit-the final murder. 1 Once there, he merges enigmatically with another, mysterious being. Hawksmoor registers an anxiety that the plurality of possible modes of existence in the London ecology is growing increasingly endangered. Indeed, many of Ackroyd's essays and lectures make L I N K • 517 1. Del Ivan Janik speculates that Hawksmoor might be the novel's twentieth-century murderer. Although he admits that it is hardly " 'solid' evidence," Janik points to what he feels is Hawksmoor's increasing sympathy with "Dyer's dark mysticism" as the source of his suspicion (173).

In the present scenario where, English Literature stands as a pivotal area of research and development, offbeat genres have taken a step ahead as areas of interest among scholars. Detective fiction which came into the literary scene in the second half of the Victorian Age, found its first prominent clues in the novels of Wilkie Collins. Though the chronology of detective fiction is short, it bloomed in the early years of the twentieth century through the works of great writers such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; who gave the world the most fascinating fictional detective figure i.e. Sherlock Holmes. The expanse of the genre, then, became inclusive of scientific understanding and techniques. As interdisciplinarity swept in detective fiction, kaleidoscopic views and analysis were generated regarding the works of detection. The genre became more prominent with writers like Agatha Christie and later J.K Rowling, Joe Pickett, etc. Detective fiction continues to flourish as a genre in the twentieth first century and is also welcomed in the form of adaptations on the digital screen and television. The paper aims to highlight the origin of Detective fiction and the journey of its development to one of the most eminent genres in the present time. The paper briefly throws light on oeuvre of Wilkie Collins and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who were the pioneers in the progress of the genre. The paper seeks to establish the significance and relevance of detective fiction and the various factors that led to its rise in the field of English Literature.According to Charles J. Rzepka: A Mystery detective story usually contains a detective of some kind, an unsolved mystery (not always technically crime), and an investigation by which the mystery is eventually solved, there is another component, however, that may be present in varying degrees, or may not be present at all. This is the so-called ‗puzzle element': the presentation of the mystery as an ongoing problem for the reader to solve, and its power to engage the reader's own reasoning abilities. The first elements of detective fiction-detective, mystery, investigation-make a conjoint appearance quite early in the history of the genre. However, the fourth, the ‗puzzle element', is conspicuous by its absence during most of this period. (Rzepka,p. 10) In his book Detective Fiction : Cultural history of Literature, Charles J. Rzepka defines four major components which contribute in building up a detective story-the first being the self-proclaimed detective who carries out the investigation throughout the plot; the second constituent i.e. an ‗unsolved mystery' or a baffling problem which governs the storyline and the behaviors of the characters. This problem should not necessarily be a crime. Lastly, an investigation should take place with the motive to solve the mystery or the problem. Rzepka adds that in later works of detective fiction a fourth element also emerged to prominence in detective story i.e. the ‗Puzzle element'. This ‗Puzzle element' introduced in modern detective fiction, added to the thrill and intensity in the work by involving and engaging the reader's reason and logic to figure out the solution to the ongoing problem. Giving the reader access to information important for solving mystery is considered significant by many critics in today's time for the stories of detection. These elements are quite consistent in the detective story. The detectives in question can be officials, privates, professionals, or amateurs. The problem may not always be a mystery but rather a difficulty that needs to be overcome-for example arrest and escape of someone, theft of something and retrieval, etc.These detective suspense tales had a history that dated back to several centuries before. Despite the fact that the most significant works of detective fiction were written in the nineteenth and twentieth century, the origin of the detective novels can be traced several years back in the history of literary writing. Both the detective-story proper and the pure tale of horror are very ancient in origin. All native folklore has its ghost tales, while the first four detective stories…hail respectively from the Jewish Apocrypha,

2017

Peter Ackroyd (London, 1949–) is considered to be one of the most productive and inventive writers of the 1980s and a leading figure in contemporary English fiction. He occupies a central position in the generation of English writers of historiographic metafiction, the trend Linda Hutcheon considers to be the best literary expression of postmodernism. In keeping with the contradictory nature of postmodernist art, historiographic metafiction expresses incredulity toward grand narratives by levelling history and literature to the same status of human discourse. Echoing this, in Hawksmoor, Ackroyd defends not only the historical coexistence of the two basic forms of human knowledge: reason and intuition, represented in the novel by empiricism and the Scientia Umbrarum, but also their complementarity, through the juxtaposition of two plot lines. Thus, he alternates the story of the mysterious murders committed near the churches built by the early eighteenth-century architect, Nicholas D...

Educational Administration: Theory and Practice, 2024

Detective fiction, nowadays, is considered to be a subject of academic research. Detective Fiction has always maintained immense popularity among the readers. Despite its popular status, the genre never encouraged academic research during the eighteenth and nineteenth century. This paper tries to attempt a study on the birth of detective fiction ; its growth and rise.

Humans are inherently inquisitive and intrepid. We all dream of the mysterious, of the impenetrable truth and of delving deep into the abyss of the unknown to reveal profound truths about everything. 19th Century Britain was no exception – it saw many great discoveries about the world, from its extensive imperialist explorations to scientific and philosophical breakthroughs, providing answers to previously unanswered questions and giving birth to numerous new questions. Thus this era inspired Modernist writers such as H. G. Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle to not only explore and unmask the truth in their writing, but to also innovate new versions of the truth through exploring the depths of the human mind in its ability and potential in reasoning systematically to solve profound mysteries in different situations and settings. H. G. Wells’ method of doing so was to create scientific romances, such as the Time Machine, whilst Arthur Conan Doyle’s was to create detective fiction, therefore producing the iconic detective Sherlock Holmes. The Time Traveller from H. G. Wells’ Time Machine is a detective in that he concerns himself with the profound mystery of the future and ultimately of mankind, whilst Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes concerns himself with the mysteries of less significant ‘trifles’ that occur around him. Although these two characters dealt with very different mysteries, they are both detectives of Modernist fiction to a far extent through their approaches to reasoning, imaginative thinking processes, and hypotheses.

Subject Cultures: The English Novel from the 18th to the 21st Century. Eds. Nora Kuster, Stella Butter, and Sarah Heinz, 2016

The article uses detective fiction and Arthur Conan Doyle’s protagonists Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson to analyze the crisis of late-bourgeois subject culture towards the end of the 19th century. It shows that the shift from the early bourgeois code of morality to the later code of respectability leads to a deeply felt ambivalence within middle-class subjectivity. In the analysis of A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, and of short stories from the first collection The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the article analyse how Holmes and Watson embody bourgeois culture while at the same time also transgressing its boundaries. In the discussion of detective fiction, the article then relates the ambivalences of late-bourgeois subject culture to the genre’s conventions and to the specific reception process that it trains the reader in.

Modernism/modernity, 2001

2017

In contrast to the main body of current Victorian detective criticism, which tends to concentrate on Conan Doyle’s creation and only uses other detectives as a backdrop, the texts gathered in this volume examine various contemporary ways of (re)presenting real and fictional detectives that originated in or are otherwise associated with that era: Inspector Bucket, Sergeant Cuff, Inspector Reid, Tobias Gregson, Flaxman Low, and psychiatrists as detectives. Such a collection allows for a critical re-assessment of both the detectives’ importance to the Victorian literature and culture and provides a better basis for understanding the reasons behind their contemporary returns, re-imaginings and re-creations, contributing to the creation of a base for further cultural and critical works dealing with reworkings of the Victorian era.