"I followed ... with many other officers who were in the same situation as myself and succeeded in reaching Candahar in safety, where I found my regiment, and at once entered upon my new duties. The campaign brought honours and promotion to many, but for me it had nothing but misfortune and disaster."
With these words, we make the acquaintance of Dr. John H. Watson, a battle-weary surgeon who--after being wounded in the Battle of Maiwand on July27, 1880, during the British Empire's colonial wars in Afghanistan--has returnedto London, "that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of theempire are irresistibly drained." The doctor moves into a flat at 22B BakerStreet, where his roommate, whom we meet over the course of Watson's story, AStudy in Scarlet, is a consulting detective by the name of Sherlock Holmes.
Of course, the adventures of Sherlock Holmes were hardly the first to usecontemporary historical events as settings or background for popular fiction.The "penny dreadfuls" romanticized the outlaws of the Wild West in post-Civil WarAmerica; and long before that, Shakespeare drew on the Wars of the Roses for hisdramas. But Holmes's tales, written and published by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle atthe turn of the last century, helped establish popular culture--and inparticular, the mystery and thriller genres--as one of society's more effectivevenues for assimilating the eruptions and disruptions of history. By the end ofWorld War I, real-life wars had established themselves as the province of notonly high art and middlebrow culture (as in the poems of Wilfred Owen andSiegfried Sassoon and the novels of Ernest Hemingway and Erich Maria Remarque)but mysteries (featuring Dorothy L. Sayers's battle-scarred detective Lord PeterWimsey), spy novels (Erskine Childers's Riddle of the Sands), and potboilers (G-8 and His Battle Aces) of all types.
To read A Study in Scarlet is to be reminded both that the West's current foray into Central Asia is not its first and that the world-historical events of our own time will soon be woven into the products of our popular culture. September 11 and its immediate aftermath; the ongoing "war on terror"; our new wariness of clunky shoes; our changing relationship to Muslims and the Islamic world--all of this will bubble to the surface in genre novels, films, music, and comic books. A recent issue of Spider-Man had an all-black cover with the wall crawler confronting the horror of 9-11 in the story. Even before September was over, a profusion of analytical nonfiction works on terrorism, Islam, and Afghanistan had begun to appear in bookstores. But to learn in what ways the terrorist attacks have changed us, we do well to look to genre fiction. What will it say about how we as a culture have assimilated September 11?
At the 32d Annual Boucher-con World MysteryConvention (namedafter the late mystery critic and short-story writer Anthony Boucher), which tookplace in November at a hotel not far from the damaged Pentagon, there was all theusual stuff: the panel discussions; the writers bivouacked at the bar gripingabout miserly advances; the late-night poker games. Yet there was anundercurrent, too. Keith Snyder and S.J. Rozan, two mystery writers from New YorkCity, led a discussion among 60 or so people on how the events of September hadaffected their writing.
Rozan said that the difficulty of being a writer "is that, unlike the otherarts, writing of necessity involves narrative content. Painters, musicians,dancers can create art directly out of emotion without narrative, but writerscan't." And narrative, of course, has to be about something. "In the case of 9-11," she also observed, "the events are so much bigger than anything you can write that the question becomes, What can you write that approaches the emotions, some of which we've never felt before, without trivializing the events?"
Whether they become trivial or not, the events and meanings spinning out of9-11 have already become the stuff of media consumption and production. And whilethe underlying structures of the popular forms will be familiar--that's thecomfort genre fiction provides, and what allows it to reflect shifts in thelarger culture--some of the conventions will mutate or be turned upside down.
Consider the evolution of the spy novel in the past half-century. Theimmediate post-WWII era gave rise to a noir sensibility in which many films andbooks featured characters who had been through the Big One and were on unfinishedbusiness, displaced, or intent on cashing in and getting their share. Many ofthese characters, in a subversive nose-thumbing at the era's dominanttriumphalism, are embittered by their wartime experiences. For instance, in the1952 movie Kansas City Confidential, directed by B-filmmeister Phil Karlson, Joe Rolfe is an ex-GI and ex-con who is innocently caught up in a complex robbery. At one point, worked over by the cops, the district attorney on the case remarks that Rolfe earned both a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart in the war. "Try buying a cup of coffee with them," the bitter vet responds.
The work of novelist and filmmaker Samuel Fuller, himself a World War II vet,is representative of the early Cold War in that it combines pulp style with astrong anticommunist sentiment. In his film Pickup on South Street, which Fuller both directed and scripted, a pickpocket named Skip McCoy uses his skill on the wrong mark and swipes some microfilm from a temptress named Candy, the former mistress of a Soviet spy. Via a series of plot twists, a prostitute, a snitch, and a thief (McCoy) end up battling a miscreant more scurrilous to 1950sviewers than the three of them combined: a fifth columnist. Still, Fuller's patriotism remained appropriately hard-boiled, in deference to the dictates of the genre. When a fed asks McCoy, "Do you know what treason is?" he replies, "Who cares?"
The figure who brings the private-eye novel from the immediate postwar erainto the Cold War is Mike Hammer, Mickey Spillane's Neanderthal in a necktie. Thefirst Hammer novel, I, The Jury, was published in 1947 and has since sold more than six million copies. One can track the changing ideological ethos of the time by following Hammer's passage through the Spillane oeuvre, which has bled over the years into multiple film and television adaptations. In I, TheJury, Hammer snarls:
In there was my best friend lying on the floor dead. The body.Now I could call it that. Yesterday it was Jack Williams, the guy who shared thesame mud bed with me through two years of warfare in the stinking slime of thejungle. Jack, the guy who said he'd give his right arm for a friend when hestopped a bastard of a Jap from slitting me in two. He caught the bayonet in thebiceps and they amputated his arm.
By One Lonely Night, published several years later, Hammer has turned from Japs to Commies. In that book, he raves: "God, but it was fun! It was just the way I liked it. No arguing, no talking to the stupid peasants. I just walked into that room with a tommy gun and shot their guts out."
With overheated passages like these, Hammer viscerally expressed thecontempt and suspicion--of pantywaist intellectuals and "outside agitators"--thatwere brewing in the male psyche of postwar America, as well as the loosening ofprewar verities. Other novelists reflected different but no less representativeanxieties: The subtext of Richard Condon's classic thriller novel TheManchurian Candidate is that far left and far right have colluded in their quest to achieve absolute control of the masses.
So, it's not just specific events that genre novels contend with butthe resulting adjustments in the surrounding culture's attitudes anddemographics. Indeed, spy novels have been changing even within the constraintsof their genre formula for some years now, to reflect changes in the compositionof our society. In many ways, the most interesting new inflection on the P.I.novel has been racial, because it provides a kind of reverse-angle view of theclassic Sam Spade / Philip Marlowe perspective on the world. Aaron Gunner, forinstance, the reluctant private investigator who is the invention of writer GarAnthony Haywood, is the modern doppelgänger of Ross Macdonald'sFreudian-driven Lew Archer--except that Archer operated around Santa Teresa (athinly disguised Santa Barbara) and kept an apartment in West Los Angeles as aplace to change clothes, whereas Gunner is black and lives in South Central LosAngeles.
In The Blue Hammer (1976), Macdonald's final novel, Archer tries to find someone in Santa Teresa's black community but is forced to admit to himself that he doesn't know anyone black in town. Archer takes cases primarily from rich whites; Gunner takes them from all sorts of people. Both Archer and Gunner are war veterans. But Archer fought in World War II--with the still-segregated armed forces--in what he called the "green and bloody springtime of Okinawa," and Gunner fought in Vietnam.
From Dr. Watson and John Rambo (in the movie Rambo III, the steely stud muffin and Vietnam vet helps the mujahideen in Afghanistan fight the Soviets) to Lew Archer and Aaron Gunner, the hardbitten war veteran is a fixture of the genre. Sometimes it seems that only the wars and the race of the veteran have changed over the years. "I was surprised to see a white man walk into Joppy's bar," says Easy Rawlins, the African-American protagonist of Walter Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress (1990). "When he looked at me I felt a thrill of fear, but that went away quickly... . I had spent five years with white men, and women, from Africa to Italy, through Paris, and into the Fatherland itself. I ate with them and slept with them, and I killed enough blue-eyed young men to know that they were just as afraid to die as I was."
Easy's geography of crime, like Haywood's, encompasses a separate and unequalLos Angeles, yet it also highlights the human ties that bind. This is not howRaymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe moved through Los Angeles. "It was one of themixed blocks over on Central Avenue, the blocks that are not yet all Negro,"Marlowe says at the beginning of Farewell, My Lovely. Marlowe is just visiting; Mosley's characters live there. Ethnic divisions are even more essential to recent American spy fiction set in the former Yugoslavia. John Fullerton's novel The Monkey House and Dan Fesperman's Lie in theDark capture the ethnic madness that until recently gripped Sarajevo as well as any Robert Kaplan treatise.
How will today's novelists handle race in their rendering of terrorists and of heroes--and how much, as Americans grow more familiar with another "other," willthe distinction between us and them intensify or blur?
They say that life imitates art. As the spy genre has changedwith the times--expanding its purview beyond the hard-boiled white detective ofthe 1950s--it has occasionally anticipated life. Edward Zwick's pulpy 1998 movieThe Siege featured Muslim terrorists crashing an airplane into a skyscraper. More recently, Salar Abdoh's 2000 novel The Poet Game, which featured an Iranian secret agent as its hero, provides a foretaste of what is likely to come in post-September 11 genre fiction.
Owing more to the George Smiley of John Le Carré; than to the JamesBond of Ian Fleming, Abdoh's Sami Amir has been sent by "The Office" in Tehranto New York City to prevent an act similar to the 1993 bombing of the World TradeCenter. His mission is to infiltrate a cell of Muslim extremists of varyingnationalities who are commanded by right-wingers in his country. Amir retains hisP.I.-ish hard-boiledness even after he has infiltrated the multicultural cell."It's Ramadan. You don't eat," a cell member tells him. Amir ruminates about thisand then taps the man, who responds,
"What?"
"You speak my language?"
"What, Persian? That's not funny."
"Then I'll say it in English: fuck you. I'm going to eat anyway."
Clearly, this is not your mama's spy novel. The evolution of the form issignificant not just for what it reflects about changes in the culture butbecause our political leaders often draw their tropes and metaphors from popularculture. President Bush's mantra that we are locked in a battle of good versusevil makes him sound like a character from Star Wars. This connects him to his political forefather Ronald Reagan, who consciously gave his missile-defense initiative the nickname Star Wars in order to lend it a grandiosity people would respond to. The Star Wars saga borrows heavily not only from myth but from post-World War II potboiler novels. The screenplay for The Empire Strikes Backwas written by Leigh Brackett, an early pulp novelist. It's got the iconic imagery, the Nazi-storm-trooper attire of the Empire's soldiers, the grizzled, seen-it-all vet as embodied by Han Solo, and the overall good-versus-evil theme. No wonder President Bush has gravitated so readily to Star Wars language. (Or did you think his declaration that countries are either with us in our fight against terrorism or aiding the terrorists was his way of sampling the Black Panthers' "You're either part of the solution or you're part of the problem"?)
If it is journalism's duty to serve as watchdog, popular fiction's role can beto excavate beneath the surface of the official story line for motivation and,subsequently, richer insight. Yes, there are maniacs such as Osama bin Laden; incertain lights, the Taliban really was an evil empire, albeit a petty one. But it is also true that one person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter--and which is which can shift depending on prevailing political winds. Before September 11, Chechnyan fighters were rebels; since then, they have become al-Qaeda's running buddies.
Writers who embrace such complexities--and whose formulas are accordinglytweaked--will go beyond recording our reality and actually shape it. Or as theContinental Op says in Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, "Sometimes just stirring things up is all right--if you're tough enough to survive."
