SOURCE: Thomas, Ronald R. “Victorian Detective Fiction and Legitimate Literature: Recent Directions in the Criticism.” Victorian Literature and Culture 24 (1996): 367-79.

[In the following essay, Thomas asserts that Victorian attitudes toward crime fiction persist in twentieth-century criticism.]

From its first appearance—usually traced to Edgar Allan Poe in America and to Charles Dickens in England—critics have viewed detective fiction with a suspicious eye. Anthony Trollope condemned its unrealistic preoccupation with plots that were too complex and characters that were too simple. Mrs. Oliphant warned about the dangers of its implicit celebration of criminality and rebelliousness. Henry James regarded it and its twin, the sensation novel, as “not so much works of art as works of science.” Indeed, some of the most ardent articulations of the aesthetic and moral attributes of high Victorian realism were occasioned by anxiety over the cheap effects and immense popularity of nineteenth-century detective and sensation fiction. Modern defenders as diverse as T. S. Eliot, Raymond Chandler, and Edmund Wilson countered such sentiments with their variously-pointed admirations for the form, while more recent critics have continued the debate over the moral and literary merit of detective fiction, its status as a literary genre, its ideological affiliations, and its evolution as a form of popular culture.

In spite of this cloud of contention—or perhaps in part because of it—contemporary critics repeatedly return to detective literature to illustrate new waves of critical methodology as they begin to come into fashion and establish themselves. In recent decades, detective stories have provided the demonstration pieces of choice for critics of popular culture, narrative theory, gender studies, Marxism, psychoanalysis, the new historicism, and cultural studies, to name a few. As Peter Brooks sees in the Holmes stories an allegory of plot revealing the double logic that drives all narratives, so Jacques Lacan sees in “The Purloined Letter” an allegory of the signifier that reveals the paradoxical logic of the text of the unconscious. Franco Moretti views the detective story as a contest between the individual and the social organism in which the ethic of bourgeois culture is erased from the consciousness of the masses. Michael Holquist reads it as the preeminent literary model for postmodernism's exposure of the subterfuge of order and the fundamental truth of chaos.

One positive outcome of all this critical attention has been to complicate what we mean by the term “detective fiction” and to release it from the exclusive domain of cultists and popular culturists. Without question, we owe a considerable debt to the pioneering criticism on detective fiction written from the perspective of popular culture and formula literature by figures like John G. Cawelti. This important work kept alive a tradition of taking detective fiction seriously and generated in its wake illuminating surveys of the genre by critics like Dennis Porter and Stephen Knight, both of whom offered impressive investigations of the relationship between the genre's broad ideological implications and its formal properties. In the 1980s, scholars went on to focus with more precision and specificity on the genre from other points of view, as manifested in the excellent collection of theoretically-oriented essays edited by Glenn W. Most and William W. Stowe in The Poetics of Murder and the distinguished group of essays collected by Umberto Eco and Thomas Sebeok that considered the genre in the light of the history of semiotics and logic.

Together with the rise of cultural studies, critical legal studies, law and literature programs, and the critique and expansion of the canon, work like this has accorded to detective and sensation fiction a more prestigious place in the house of “legitimate” literature. As a result, some of the most provocative current criticism on (especially) nineteenth-century detective fiction is appearing in work that is not concerned with offering another narrative of the genre's history, making a case for its distinctions as an identifiable form, or even setting it aside as a special category of literature. For the purposes of this review, I will examine a selection of these books and individual essays that unapologetically read detective texts alongside and in light of “legitimate” literary and cultural materials, treating them as equal participants in an emerging culture of knowledge and power in the nineteenth century. My survey of the subject is necessarily selective and largely appreciative in nature, therefore, focusing primarily on work that is not specifically “about” detective fiction and would not likely appear in a computer search run on the topic. One of the crucial underlying assumptions of this scholarship and my review of it, in fact, is that the classification and marginalization of popular forms like the detective story are effects of the culture of knowledge and power that produced them.

A logical point of departure from which to trace this trend is D. A. Miller's The Novel and the Police, a book that argues for the central importance of the detective's invisibility in the Victorian novel rather than his appearance in it. It is not that the detective isn't present in the novel, but that he is most present where he is least seen. In making a case for the “radical entanglement between the nature of the novel and the practice of the police” (2), Miller juxtaposes readings of what have come to be considered standard detective texts (like The Moonstone or Bleak House) with a classic work of Victorian realism (Barchester Towers) and a central Victorian autobiographical novel (David Copperfield). Without dismissing the differences between such texts, Miller makes a compelling argument for their essential equivalence in deploying “representational technologies” that internalize in the novel-reading public (and more broadly in the nineteenth-century bourgeois self) the social practices of surveillance and regulation we associate with the detective police. In its form and its argument, Miller's book redefined the terms in which the Victorian novel was considered. It shifted the critical focus from analyzing the opposition between “high” Victorian realism on the one hand and the subversive “other Victorian” literary underworlds of gothic, detective, and sensation fiction on the other, to recognizing all these manifestations of the novel as continuous expressions—even agents—of a pervasive culture of social discipline.

If anything, detective novels like Bleak House and The Moonstone are given a privileged place in this analysis since they most conspicuously document the very process Miller investigates. The dual narrative structure and multi-plottedness of Bleak House, for example, dramatize the engendering of the desire for a detective plot to “make legible” the insoluble societal riddle of the Chancery plot and the unreadable personal identity of Esther Summerson's autobiography. Similarly, Miller reads the dismissal of Inspector Cuff in The Moonstone and his replacement by the improvised detective and narrative collaboration among Franklin Blake, Ezra Jennings, Gabriel Betteredge, and a host of others as demonstrating the appropriation by and distribution of policing power across the society and within the individual. As the title for Miller's Moonstone chapter suggests (“From roman police to roman policier”), this novel enacts in miniature the genre's general transformation from being something about detective work to being something that works like a detective. Rather than declaring detective fiction the illegitimate child of the realistic and the biographical novel, this analysis confers upon it the status of a dominant literary and cultural force that informs and secretly occupies those more traditionally revered forms.

In addition to reframing questions about the proper place of detective fiction in discussion of generic priority and influence in the nineteenth-century novel, Miller's book also furnished the genre with one of its most ambitious and productive applications of Foucauldian analysis. Virtually every subsequent critic of detective fiction has either elaborated on or taken issue with Miller's use of Discipline and Punish and his interpretation of the novel as an agent of essentially undifferentiated, monolithic, and irresistible normalizing power in the period. By shifting the terms of the debate about detective fiction and challenging its ghettoization as a subliterary genre, The Novel and the Police also succeeded in provoking considerable controversy on this point. Beyond that, the book helped to establish the detective novel as an important factor in the evolution of a repressive liberal culture in the nineteenth century and the modern bureaucratic state to which it gave rise—both of which were based on the invisible but pervasive deployment of discourses and practices of knowledge and control in such unexpected places as the novel.

One of the most impressive recent models for continuing and refining this project is Marie-Christine Leps's Apprehending the Criminal: The Production of Deviance in Nineteenth-Century Discourse. While Leps believes Miller's analysis of discursive networks posits too singular and monolithic an ideological force, and that he is too quick to dismiss the novel's capacities for resistance and transgression, she clearly is indebted to his work. Expanding what is essentially literary analysis in Miller, Leps examines the relation between the fictional and the factual discourses of detection and criminality in several other nineteenth-century disciplines. Leps brings together the Sherlock Holmes stories with works by Stevenson, Zola, and Bourget, and explains how such literary materials participated in the production and circulation of the “truth” about criminality that was being propounded in scientific research (such as Lombroso's Criminal Man or Charles Goring's The English Convict) and the popular press (such as the journalistic coverage of the Jack the Ripper murders). Leps takes up each of these discursive fields independently, investigating the cultural conditions that gave rise to them and their relation to the textual forms in which they became manifested.

What Leps discovers in combining these various fields of discourse is that the representation of the criminal in nineteenth-century culture demonstrates particularly well the way in which “power is both the result and the support of a complex system of production and distribution of knowledge” in a range of cultural institutions (such as literary entertainment, scientific theory, the operation and reform of the legal system, and the practice of the popular press). Within this process, detective fiction functions differently for Leps than it does for Miller since she allows literary discourse the capacity to critique the system in which it functions—at least to a limited degree. To illustrate, she interprets the ongoing debate about science and literature between Holmes and Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories as at once an affirmation and a subversion of the absolute claims about the “nature” and “truth” of the criminal made by the other discursive regimes with which she is concerned.

The exploration of literary texts as transformative agents in the social “production” of truth continuous with a widespread culture of discipline is extended into a cogent cultural and narrative critique in Alexander Welsh's Strong Representations: Narrative and Circumstantial Evidence in England. Strong Representations is no more a book about detective fiction per se than Apprehending the Criminal is; indeed it is less so. But it shares the virtue of joining analysis of literary texts with other cultural materials—in this case, legal history and theory, scientific writing, texts on natural religion, and even nineteenth-century criticism of Shakespeare—to show how truth was being created and sustained for Victorians in a particular narrative form that included but was not restricted to detective stories.

Welsh argues persuasively that in the very decades when theorists and practitioners of the law were replacing the authority of verbal testimony with the more telling “probative force” of circumstantial evidence, a corresponding shift was taking place in the English novel. That shift can be detected in the ways in which “the claim to represent reality in novels was expressed by their internal connectedness of circumstances” rather than by the personal testimony of the fictional author or an elaborate frame of pretended documentation (like letters, memoirs, lost papers, and so forth, purporting to account for the real-life existence of the narrative they contained). When Welsh explains that by “strong representations” he refers to narratives of growing cultural authority across a range of disciplines “that openly distrust direct testimony, insist on submitting witnesses to the test of corroborating circumstances, and claim to know many things without anyone's having seen them at all,” he describes perfectly the role of the literary detective in the nineteenth century. Aptly, therefore, he incorporates compelling readings of the narrative structure of The Moonstone and the composition of The Ring and the Book in his analysis of a general transformation of the principles of evidence in the period. Like Miller and like Leps, without writing a book about detective fiction or even about “literature” narrowly defined, Welsh has offered a powerful argument for the centrality of the kind of writing we associate with the literary detective in the ordering and maintaining of Victorian culture.

John Kucich has provided an ingenious variation on this theme in another important book on Victorian culture. In The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction, Kucich is not so much interested in investigating how truth was produced for the Victorians as he is in determining who possessed the privilege of manipulating it. He is not concerned with the transgressions of criminals but with those of professionals, social initiates, aesthetes, and others who, through their “dexterity with the truth,” establish a position of social privilege within the ranks of the middle class. In a series of dazzling readings of Victorian novels informed by a nuanced understanding of the history of professionalism in the period, Kucich focuses on the intense power struggle that raged at the boundary between truth and deceit in the nineteenth century. His subtle readings of literary texts makes irresistible his argument that the much-vaunted valorization Victorians placed upon earnestness, truth-telling, and confession was complicated by an elaborately shifting and intensely contested terrain of justified lying.

Pairing writers of detective and sensation novels like Wilkie Collins and Ellen Wood with “realistic” novelists like Trollope and Gaskell, Kucich demonstrates how all these texts took part in the endorsement of a moral and epistemological sophistication that redefined stable moral categories without overthrowing the categories of truth and deceit—in acts like Walter Hartright's manipulation of the law and legal documents to establish the identity of Laura Fairlie and himself as her husband, for example. But this much sought-after “transgressive authority” was a privilege that could be earned only by some; it was valued as a form of social resistance for certain emerging classes and “ultimately laid a new foundation for middle-class aesthetic sophistication that would later support modernism's delicate appropriations of scientific and technical authority.” To speak of the appropriations of scientific and technical authority, of course, is to invoke the authority best displayed by the literary detective in the nineteenth century; and while this figure is not the express subject of The Power of Lies, his presence haunts the argument throughout. In his nineteenth-century incarnation especially, the literary detective polices this transitional space between professional and non-professional discourses, and is specifically empowered to use whatever deceit and disguise might be necessary to deprive others of the power of their lies.

By recognizing detective fiction as one of several legitimate nineteenth-century novelistic forms, scholarship of this kind has fostered the integration of the literary detective into broad interdisciplinary discussions of the Victorian novel and the construction of Victorian culture. It reconfigures our understanding of Victorian realism as well as Victorian detection. This realignment is the subject of Martin Priestman's Detective Fiction and Literature, as the book's title suggests. In his consideration of classic detective texts from Poe, Collins, Doyle, and Chandler alongside work by the likes of Aristotle, Sophocles, and Henry James, Priestman explores the shifting boundary between popular and serious literature, arguing that a dialectical relation exists between the two in which each alternately scandalizes, appropriates, and domesticates the energies and techniques of the other. Together with studies like Richard Maxwell's The Mysteries of Paris and London and Anne Humpherys's “Generic Strands and Urban Twists: The Victorian Mysteries Novel,” Detective Fiction and Literature reminds us that generic distinctions and cross-contaminations cannot be regarded as purely formal matters, but are themselves complex historical and sociological events.

This reinvigorated historicist approach to the genealogy of popular genres has been taken up by critics who have moved in new and more complex directions the treatment of detective fiction as an exceptional force in nineteenth-century literary and cultural history. Lawrence Rothfield's Vital Signs: Medical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction is a good case in point. By linking a set of intelligent readings of classic texts in nineteenth-century realism (like Middlemarch and Madame Bovary) with an account of the history of professional medicine, Rothfield demonstrates the ways in which the epistemological orientation, discursive techniques, and professional exactitude of clinical medicine in the period gave rise to the narrative strategies and special authority of the realistic novel. He goes on to claim, however, that as clinical medicine came under attack from other sciences (such as microbiology, cell theory, and embryology), the accompanying epistemic shift was manifested in the development of quasi-realistic genres like detective fiction and naturalism, which staged their own critique of realism and led the way to modernism.

To make this point, Rothfield's chapter on Sherlock Holmes (“From Diagnosis to Deduction: Sherlock Holmes and the Perversion of Realism”) argues that detective fiction diverges from realism's “medical” emphasis on the finality of the material self as a pathological “embodied person” in favor of a more “specialized” view of the subject as a collection of physiological material facts—what one might call the individuated body. While the style of Watson's narratives may resemble George Eliot's seeking out the truth about the embodied “person,” Rothfield maintains, the methodology of Holmes's investigations has more in common with cubism's piecemeal decomposition and reconstruction of the individuated body's “identity.” Detective fiction does not represent a complete break with realism, then, but a distortion or perversion of realistic modes, a shift that is made possible by the reconfiguration of the human sciences and the attendant subordination of the clinician's authority in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

The claim for detective fiction as a transitional narrative mode between nineteenth-century realism and high modernism is also posited in a pair of new books on detective fiction by Martin A. Kayman and Jon Thompson, respectively. Unlike the other work we have considered thus far, these books explicitly engage detective fiction as their primary subject. Like the others, however, they cannot accurately be regarded as “surveys” of the genre but are more properly understood as cultural criticism, distinctly interdisciplinary in their aims and methods. In From Bow Street to Baker Street: Mystery, Detection and Narrative, Kayman makes the case that detective narratives are properly read neither as mere puzzles nor as contributions to a repressive system of control. Rather, they are “symbolic and formal explorations in the representation of the mysterious territories of society and of the psyche which cannot be captured within the narrative strategies of literary realism, scientific positivism and contemporary legal structures.” While Kayman concludes that detective fiction opposes rather than collaborates with the dominant discourses of the realist novel, science, and the law, he reaches this conclusion by first investigating the rise of the detective as a figure in legal history and then evaluates the cultural appropriation of the detective in the form of “detective literature.”

Kayman argues that the classification of certain kinds of writing as detective literature in the nineteenth century emerged as a reaction on the part of the hegemonic force of nineteenth-century reformism. As the novel's claims to the status of serious literature began to depend more and more on the disavowal of its monstrous literary predecessors and the suppression of sensational subjects like monstrosity, insanity, and crime, writing that took up these subjects was subordinated and disregarded. Kayman maintains that these topics survive in what was condescendingly called “detective literature” as the residue of deep cultural “mysteries” that could not be assimilated by the reformist codes of moral management (law and medicine) and stood as a threat to those codes. Kayman reads Lady Audley's secret, for example—as he does Poe's purloined letter or Collins's moonstone—as a sensational signifier, an absence that generates nervous and discursive reactions in characters and readers alike, fracturing the cultural codes that sought to maintain order in the society. Running counter to conventional wisdom on the subject, Kayman argues that Sherlock Holmes cannot be regarded as the embodiment of these unsettling energies in nineteenth-century detection, but is their chief revisionist—a nostalgic and conservative figure rather than a forwarding-looking and subversive one. For Kayman, Holmes represents the final victory of a repressive model of mastery (represented by the dominant reformist discourses of realism, science, and the law against which the literary detective was established), just as Freud looks toward “a new, albeit persistently problematic, articulation of the subject in history and language.”

Jon Thompson's Fiction, Crime, and Empire: Clues to Modernity and Postmodernism approaches the historical role of detective fiction from a different vantage point and arrives at rather different conclusions. Thompson considers British and American detective fiction—from Poe and Doyle to the present—as the “intrinsically” modernist literary expression of a capitalist and imperial culture dominated by the contradictory forces of constant renewal and disintegration. Defining modernism as “the institutionally and culturally dominant field of literary practices containing residual (realist) as well as emergent (postmodern) elements,” Thompson traces out structural and empistemological similarities between detective literature, the modernist movement, and imperialist ideology. In each area, he finds some expression of the struggle between the oppressive hegemony of an elite culture against a suspect, subversive Other that threatens the dominant order either from within or from without. While Thompson's valiant effort to rescue detective fiction from disappearing into representation sometimes presents rather strained analogies between the detective story and modernity, he makes a strong case for the power of these narratives to intervene in history in ways that remain socially significant.

For all the accomplishment and range displayed in much of this scholarship, with one or two exceptions it deals only in glancing ways with the very complicated role of gender in “detective literature.” That the authors considered so far are overwhelmingly men may or may not be significant; but the fact remains that women critics are still doing the best work on the genre from this perspective. One example is Virginia Morris's Double Jeopardy: Women Who Kill in Victorian Fiction, which offers a compelling historicist and interdisciplinary feminist critique of the characterization of a striking literary figure in Victorian fiction: the woman who kills. In her reading of central works by Dickens, Collins, Eliot, Hardy, and Doyle against a background of nineteenth-century legal history and social attitudes toward women criminals, Morris examines the double bind of a certain class of Victorian women who were caught in the contradiction of being considered morally superior to men and yet inferior to them in every other way. Her study brings to light the dissonance between what was rather common in Victorian life but relatively rare in Victorian fiction—the woman driven to violence by systematic social oppression, offering that figure as a particularly productive site to explore the invention and enforcement of Victorian sexuality in literary texts.

These concerns are explored in more politically and theoretically sophisticated ways in two recent books on Victorian sensation fiction, one written by Ann Cvetkovich and the other by Tamar Heller. Since these works concern themselves directly with the relation between detective and sensation fiction, they contribute equally to the scholarship in both genres. Cvetkovich's Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism analyzes the history of sensation, arguing that the link between sensational literature and bodily sensations is (like Victorian sexuality) a politically interested construction—a disciplinary apparatus with a traceable history. In her astute readings of the acts of detection in Lady Audley's Secret and The Woman in White, for example, Cvetkovich shows that the mad or hysterical woman is offered up in these texts as a scapegoat for the more general insanity manifested broadly across gender lines by middle-class consumer society. In like manner, the successful “detection” and identification of otherwise indistinguishable women in these plots turns out to rely upon the imposition of specific social determinations rather than the discovery of inherent or inborn qualities in them. In the brilliant conclusion to the book, Cvetkovich goes on to argue that the techniques of sensationalism were appropriated by writers of high culture like George Eliot to replicate rather than alter the structures of confinement for middle-class women, while Marx's critique of commodity fetishism in Capital may be read as appropriating these same techniques progressively, applying them to masculine subjects and domains as well as feminine.

Tamar Heller's Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic considers the career of the single author most often identified with sensation fiction to explore the volatile boundaries of Victorian sexuality in light of the analogously unstable outlines of literary genres, social classes, and political ideologies in the period. Like the work of Cvetkovich, Heller's demonstrates that the terms of the ongoing debate over the distinctions between detective fiction, sensation fiction, Gothic, and realism are grounded in a network of social and political conditions, and that the gender affiliations commonly attributed to the readers and writers of these genres are consistent with the policing function of the novel in the nineteenth century, and with its often co-opted manifestations of resistance.

The field of vision for Victorian surveillance extended beyond the boundaries of England itself, of course. Aided by post-colonialist theory and new historicist methodologies, a number of recent journal articles on nineteenth-century detective texts have explored the dialectical relationship between narratives of policing at home and the policies of imperialism abroad. This is the subject of my own “Minding the Body Politic: The Romance of Science and the Revision of History in Victorian Detective Fiction,” which takes as its point of departure the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and its reinscription in the detective plots of The Moonstone and The Sign of Four. I argue that England's imperial crimes and their attendant ideological embarrassments are displaced and transformed in these texts by the “scientific romance” of the detective, a romance that takes over the plots to relocate the signs and even the causes of political crimes in the criminal body. Ashish Roy's “The Fabulous Imperialist Semiotic of Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone” also reads Collins's novel as a fictionalization and justification of imperial history. Roy offers an intricate analysis of the text's narrative economy and its complex “semiotic repertoire,” both of which entertain and then romance away the possibility of an imperial critique. Ian Duncan's ingenious “The Moonstone, the Victorian Novel, and Imperial Panic” provides the most sophisticated treatment of the issue. Duncan argues that by representing India as a kind of sublime, positive alterity which conquers English police skill in the plot, The Moonstone resists epistemological totalization or ideological closure on the imperial question. Neither a justification nor a critique of imperialism, as Duncan demonstrates, this detective novel offers instead a nightmare glimpse of the world economy of modernity, where the British themselves turn out to be the colonized subjects of empire, alienated from their own history and dominion.

The colonization of the English subject back home has been the subject of a number of recent essays centering on an analysis of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Since the present decade marks the centennial of the appearance of the best writing in the Holmes canon, it is to be expected that a great deal of scholarship will be generated around him and the literary genre often associated with him. Along with new editions of the “complete” Sherlock Holmes that continue to be produced (by Oxford in 1993, for example), accounts of the “real life” detecting of Arthur Conan Doyle, and photographic essays on Sherlock Holmes's London, some valuable collections of old and new critical essays on Doyle demonstrate the trends in approaching the genre we have been tracing out here (notably, John A. Hodgson's edition of Sherlock Holmes: The Major Stories with Contemporary Critical Essays and Harold Orel's Critical Essays on Arthur Conan Doyle).

Many of the most provocative recent articles on Holmes (some of which are reprinted in these volumes) reflect the enrichment by interdisciplinary approaches and extra-literary materials we have seen in the other critical work we have examined here. For example, Rosemary Jann's “Sherlock Holmes Codes the Social Body” offers a sweeping survey of Holmes's deployment of nineteenth-century scientific typologies of the body to argue that the great detective's preference for physiological analysis was a manifestation of concerns over growing instabilities in the classification of class and gender at the turn of the century and was aimed at securing the conservative ideology in which Doyle was deeply invested. My essay, “The Fingerprint of the Foreigner: Colonizing the Criminal Body in 1890s Detective Fiction and Criminal Anthropology,” develops this line of argument by reading two Holmes stories together with Havelock Ellis's The Criminal and Francis Galton's Finger Prints to demonstrate how new scientific technologies for establishing personal identity were related to alterations in British national identity during the same period. An analogous case is made in even more specified terms by Audrey Jaffe in “Detecting the Beggar: Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry Mayhew, and ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip.’” Jaffe reads this important Holmes story as the quintessential expression of capitalist society's paradoxical insistence upon the truth and the fiction of a singular and essential self. In a model for new historicist analysis, Jaffe argues that just as Mayhew's sociological project necessarily failed at reaching its goal of protecting middle-class identity by establishing and defining that of the poor beggar, Holmes's detective project at once assures his readers that false identities can be exposed and eliminated even as he implicates himself and us in the process of exchange that invents those alternate selves.

Since detective fiction itself—especially Victorian detective fiction—has gained a more legitimate literary status inside and outside the academy, some of the best scholarship in this area has, like D. A. Miller's police, been dispersed and disseminated in less visible ways into more rigorously interdisciplinary criticism of Victorian fiction and culture. Much of this work has deepened and complicated our understanding of the social and epistemological revolutions that shaped the nineteenth-century. It has also helped to explain how a world of DNA fingerprinting, satellite surveillance, and crime-scene computer simulation could become imaginable to us—and how important such representational technologies are to how we conceive of ourselves and how we are conceived by our society. The recent appearance of an interactive computer game called “Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective” (Macworld 1992) and an article on the great detective as the model successful business consultant published in the Journal of Management Consulting (1995) should clue us in to the fact that Victorian detection is still, indeed, an industry, and that it survives inside and outside the world of the text. These instances remind us as well that even in the computer age, we are still inclined to apprehend the literary detective—in whatever form he appears—in strictly Victorian terms.

Works Considered

Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976.

Cvetkovich, Ann. Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism. New Brunswick: Rutgers U P, 1992.

Doyle, Arthur Conan. Sherlock Holmes: The Major Stories with Contemporary Critical Essays. Ed. John A. Hodgson. New York: St. Martin's, 1994.

Duncan, Ian. “The Moonstone, the Victorian Novel, and Imperial Panic,” MLQ 55:3 (September 1994): 297-319.

Eco, Umberto and Thomas Sebeok, eds. The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1983.

Heller, Tamar. Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic. New Haven: Yale U P, 1992.

Humpherys, Anne. “Generic Strands and Urban Twists: The Victorian Mysteries Novel.” Victorian Studies 34 (Summer 1991): 455-72.

Jaffe, Audrey. “Detecting the Beggar: Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry Mayhew, and ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip,’” Representations 31 (Summer 1990): 96-117.

Jann, Rosemary. “Sherlock Holmes Codes the Social Body.” ELH 57 (1990): 685-70.

Kayman, Martin A. From Bow Street to Baker Street: Mystery, Detection, and Narrative. New York: St. Martin's, 1992.

Knight, Stephen. Form and Ideology in Detective Fiction. London: Macmillan, 1980.

Kucich, John. The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction. Ithaca and London: Cornell U P, 1995.

Leps, Marie-Christine. Apprehending the Criminal: The Production of Deviance in Nineteenth-Century Discourse. Durham and London: Duke U P, 1992.

Maxwell, Richard. The Mysteries of Paris and London. Charlottesville and London: U P of Virginia, 1992.

Miller, D. A. The Novel and the Police. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.

Morris, Virginia B. Double Jeopardy: Women Who Kill in Victorian Fiction. Lexington: U P of Kentucky, 1990.

Most, Glenn and William Stowe, eds. The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1983.

Orel, Harold, ed. Critical Essays on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. New York: G. K. Hall, 1992.

Porter, Dennis. The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction. New Haven: Yale UP, 1991.

Rothfield, Lawrence. Vital Signs: Medical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Princeton: Princeton U P, 1992.

Roy, Ashish. “The Fabulous Imperialist Semiotic of Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone,” New Literary History 24 (Summer 1993): 657-81.

“Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective.” Macworld: The Macintosh Magazine 9:8 (August 1992): 173.

Thomas, Ronald R. “The Fingerprint of the Foreigner: Colonizing the Criminal in 1890s Detective Fiction and Criminal Anthropology,” ELH 61 (Fall, 1994): 653-81.

———. “Minding the Body Politic: The Romance of Science and the Revision of History in Victorian Detective Fiction,” Victorian Literature and Culture 19 (1991): 233-54.

Thompson, Jon. Fiction, Crime, and Empire: Clues to Modernity and Postmodernism. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1993.

Webb, James R. “Sherlock Holmes on Consulting.” Journal of Management Consulting 8:3 (1995): 34.

Welsh, Alexander. Strong Representations: Narrative and Circumstantial Evidence in England. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins U P, 1992.