3177058crime and the city solution crime fiction, urban knowledge, and radical geography

CRIME AND THE CITY SOLUTION:CRIME FICTION, URBAN KNOWLEDGE,AND RADICAL GEOGRAPHY1

Philip Howell*

PHILIP HOWELLTHE CRIMES OF URBAN GEOGRAPHY That city, which had been a weary labyrinth, was material thathe could subdue to his purposes now: his mind glancedthrough its affairs with flashing conjecture; he was once more aman who knew cities, whose sense of vision was instructedwith large experience, and who felt the keen delight of holdingall things in the grasp of language.

—George Eliot, Romola

People like Ernie Milligan are dangerous. He knows this city, hesays . . . . He’s like a lot of policemen here. He knows the namesof streets. He doesn’t know the city. Who does? Walk down aside-street on your own, you’re finding out again. Who everknew a city? It’s a crazy claim. And those who make impossibleclaims are always going to cause more trouble than they solve.

—William McIlvanney, The Papers of Tony Veitch (1983:236)

Academics of radical persuasion have long been both repelled and fasci-nated by crime fiction, and radical geography’s gaze has recently beendrawn to the genre by David Schmid (1995). Schmid highlights represen-tations of the city in detective novels in order to point out the instructiveshortcomings of such fiction for a radical urban agenda. While detectivefiction as a genre is ideologically compromised and politically reaction-ary, he suggests, it can nevertheless “provide radical geographers withimaginative methodological models of how the various spaces of a city

Antipode 30:4, 1998, pp. 357–378ISSN 0066-4812

*Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England; e-mail: [email protected]

© 1998 Editorial Board of AntipodePublished by Blackwell Publishers, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 108Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK.

Copyright © 2000. All rights reserved.

are connected through acts of violence, and how these connections indi-cate the spatializations of power within the city” (Schmid, 1995:243).These fictions open up connections between radical geography’s questfor the truths of how capitalism’s political economy structures urbanspace and the emphasis on the subjective evaluation of safe urban spacethat derives from locality or community studies. Radical geographerscan use detective fiction, therefore, not only as an exercise in the critiqueof ideology but also as a substantive guide to urban or suburban fearsthat require to be taken seriously and even incorporated into radicalgeography’s urban agenda.

In outlining his case Schmid makes the perceptive point that radicalgeography and detective fiction share a common premise, which is thatfor both, “the city is a problem that needs to be solved” (1995:243). Just asit does for fiction’s detectives, the city poses an epistemological challengeto geographers who in attempting to solve urban problems are led to tryto get to “know” the city, to bring its disorder under the sway of reason.Knowledge, the reading of the city’s signs, is the key to resolution. This isrecognised by Schmid as troubling, suggesting as it does that sharedshortcomings might disable a participatory and reformist urban agenda(1995:265), but he does not draw out the fullest implications of this obser-vation. For if there is truly a formulaic or even generic link between thetwo, then surely a more profound dissatisfaction with the account of radi-cal geography should be registered. Watching the detectives, policing ide-ology in fiction, is not enough: we also need to understand our ownepistemological and political claims to the city if a better agenda for urbanreform and regeneration is to be developed.

This paper takes up the argument presented by Schmid but attempts todevelop further the radical critique of crime fiction by thus turning radicalgeography’s interest in urban representation back on itself, arguing for amore (self-)critical analysis of literary representation and the claims toknowledge they contain. It is argued here that some forms of crime fictiondevelop what can be called “urban knowledges” that are as critical andcounterhegemonic, if not more so, than much of what passes for radicalurban geography. I will go on to focus on one recent series of crime novels,the police procedurals of the British author John Harvey, to make the pointthat crime fictions can be taken not as salutary misrepresentations, but asalternative epistemologies of the city, worthy of as much consideration asradical geography’s urban knowledge.

Crime Fiction and the Landscape of Detection

It is repeatedly claimed that crime fiction—or at the very least what mightbe considered its exemplars, detective or “mystery” fiction—is inherently,uniquely, conservative, a genre whose social function is perhaps the most

358 PHILIP HOWELL


readily identifiable as ideological in popular culture. The common ideol-ogy of the detective story, as Mandel (1984:47) has argued, is “quintessen-tially bourgeois,” “bourgeois ideology par excellence.” It is not hard to seewhy this charge is so frequently made. Historically, the genre coincidedwith the bourgeoisie’s need to conceptualise and defend social order(Mandel, 1984:10) and accompanied the apotheosis of the “policeman-state” (Gattrell, 1990) and the law (Foucault, 1979:56; Porter, 1981:123;Wiener, 1990). But understanding the production of ideological effects,and in particular the role of geographical description in this, is a morecomplex matter than pointing to, say, the fact that in such fiction crimesare typically committed and solved by individuals (Belsey, 1990;Ginzberg, 1990; Knight, 1980; Moretti, 1990), thus obscuring the functionof crime in the capitalist city (Schmid, 1995:248). More important I submitis the rationalist or realist epistemology (Prendergast, 1992:196; Rignall,1989:116) that characterises the majority of crime fictions, for even themost escapist of such fictions partake of the classic realist conceit that theworld is ultimately knowable, that it can be described and mimeticallyrepresented without calling attention to its own conventionality.2 It is thisepistemological claim that is of primary ideological importance, and it isalso here that the geography of the detective novel takes on its ideologicalsignificance.

Geographical description plays a central role in the epistemologicalclaims of most detective novels, as one of the most powerful constructionsof verisimilitude.3 If it is a basic convention that the novel will produce aworld (Culler, 1975:189; Porter, 1981:91), this is a special priority in crimefiction:

A crime always occurs and is solved in a place that, dependingon the tradition in which an author is working, will be evokedwith more or less precision, and writers of detective novels arein the realist tradition insofar as they have always tended toanchor crime in a specific location and in certain milieus andsocial strata. (Porter, 1981:73)

That the city has been the primary site for crime fiction is therefore some-what unremarkable. What is more important is that in the realist presenta-tion of attempts to make the city legible and comprehensible, crimefictions buy into conventions that are immediately suspect from a criticalpoint of view. As Prendergast (1992:2) reminds us, detective fiction “is notonly a distinctively urban form; it also proposes an increasingly complexand intractable urban reality can be successfully monitored and mas-tered.” Crime and detective fictions remain peculiarly dependent uponthis convention, continuing in their very structure to insist that their cre-ated fictional worlds can be apprehended through signs, science, anddetection.4

THE CRIMES OF URBAN GEOGRAPHY 359


This “landscape of detection” (Porter, 1981) therefore betrays the pro-foundly rationalist epistemological conceits of the discourse of realism inways that are critical for crime fiction’s generic production of ideology.Bourgeois ideological effects are embedded in this fictional description ofthe world, producing reassuring representations of urban space becausethese fictions exemplify the rationalist belief that the city is ultimatelyknowable. The force of the anxieties raised by the modern city is absorbedand repelled by the reassurance that the city can through description beknown and by knowledge be controlled.5 This ideological claim to knowthe city seems to enter into the formal structure of detective fiction.

Representations of the City

Put this way, however, we are forced to note that the problem of “know-ing” the city is not restricted to fictional treatments, but bleeds unconfinedbetween scientific and literary representations of the city. And the diffi-culty with any critique is this: we cannot accept the truths taught by anunabashedly “realist” urban political economy as a knowledge of the citythat can act as security for the rooting out of ideology in other forms ofdiscourse, as I think critics like Schmid come close to arguing. Whatstands in the way of such an acceptance are the epistemological claimsraised by all discourse, and in this case the troubling claim to know thecity shared by novelists and geographers.

Raising problems of epistemology is an unavoidable issue here, for thekind of urban political economy that is taken as truth about (and solutionto) the city is predicated itself on a certain transparency about the processof knowing. It is not too hard to find examples in radical geography of aes-thetic representations being regarded as mimetically distorted throughthe privileging of “scientific” ways of knowing. In one register the work ofDavid Harvey is posited on just such an acceptance that scientific knowl-edge of and representations of the city are quite separate but readily relat-able, with scientific knowledge dominant and determinant. For allHarvey’s brilliance in discussing, say, Balzac or Baudelaire—and his writ-ing on the city and its representations is often dazzling—there is real jus-tice in Deutsche’s (1991:17) accusation that some of Harvey’s work ismarked by an “eclectic, indeed amateurish, treatment of culture,” and onebased on a “unitarian epistemology” (Deutsche, 1991:16) in which a singletheory is allowed to explain social relations of domination. This episte-mology embraces a reductionist understanding of culture and dependsupon the hoarily orthodox dualism of real and ideal, both of which ham-string his attack on the way in which advanced capitalism conceals thesocial reality of the contemporary city.

As a critique of ideology, the problems of such a standpoint are, in thelight of the accusations levelled against crime fiction above, rather glaring.

360 PHILIP HOWELL


The most obvious and literal sense in which this is so is Harvey’s adoptionof a transcendent, Archimedean point of view in his quest for a totalisedunderstanding of the city. Deutsche (1991) has rightly criticised this on thegrounds of its refusal of feminist theories of representation, but in itsembrace of a voyeuristic perspective it attests more generally to a compro-mised epistemology of the visible that has more in common with literaryconventions than with scientific objectivity. That this way of seeing in thecity is as subject to the epistemological production of ideology as are fic-tional texts ought to be apparent when we consider the affinities with lit-erary realism (Rignall, 1989). For just as classic realism laid claim toobjective knowledge by way of its “God’s Eye View” (Putnam, 1981), so itis with Harvey’s approach to knowing the city and his celebration of theview from on high.6 We should note the correspondence with the spec-tacular, scopic knowledge of the city that is the privilege of the urbandetective, who is really a kind of active flaneur able to conquer the physi-cal and epistemological anxieties of the city not merely through a voyeur-istic illusion of intelligibility, but also through the active creation of order,the mastering of the urban environment:

The viewpoint of the detective is, like that of the flaneur, pano-ramic. His powers allegedly derive from an ability to graspmore at any one time than any of the more limited individualshe observes. Like the flaneur, he removes and distances himselffrom what he observes in order to achieve his panoramic per-spective. . . . The control established by the detective over theurban text is, however, quite different from that of the tradi-tional flaneur. Rather than achieving a personal sense ofmastery by reducing the city to a harmless and legible model ofitself, the detective resolves a mystery that is emblematic ofurban experience itself. By resolving his emblematic mystery,the detective implies that he has the power to solve virtually allof the city’s mysteries. (Brand, 1990:237)

These epistemological correspondences are not coincidence, and thesequestions should not be sidestepped or lightly dismissed. Radical politicaleconomy often betrays an impatience with epistemological questions,sometimes in the theoretical form of philosophical realism, at others in theexasperated denunciation of postmodern politics, but the lack of directconfrontation disables it as critical theory. Here the question of ideology isof necessity a question of epistemology, concerned with our knowledge ofthe world. So while Eagleton (1991) has noted that not all of the many defi-nitions of ideology contain epistemological claims, in discussing suchliterary representations and conventions these are quite central. This willstrike some as odd, since the epistemological issue is typically taken toinvolve the concepts of “false consciousness” and its correlate, the



possibility of an unequivocally correct way of viewing the world, and toapply this to literature seems hardly useful. But epistemology does in facthave a much wider import than this: epistemology is much better taken as“an attempt to elucidate what is presupposed by claims to know”(Thompson, 1984:97) rather than an attempt to privilege one form of dis-course, some putative metalanguage able to measure the degree of fitbetween language and object. In this sense ideology enters into the claimto know itself and is not reducible to a question of false or distortedknowledge. What is at stake is not true knowledge or false consciousness,but the nature of the claims to knowledge that are raised—and not leastthose claims to know inherent in the practice of geographical description.

If we take the problem of knowing the city in this sense, then theattempt to critique detective fictions by reference to urban political econ-omy becomes thoroughly quixotic. It is a project that is predicated on theassumption that texts are able to mirror a real world (and therefore thatideology is simply a distorted version of the real), while we have seen thatit is precisely in the production of literary worlds—in the practice of geo-graphical description for instance—that ideology’s presence is mostdeeply entrenched. Using a realist epistemology to critique the fictionalpresentation of reality makes little sense in this context, and if anythingmay make the criticism of fictional representation less compelling. In factthe real worth of looking at aesthetic presentations of the city like those ofcrime fiction, as I want to suggest in the rest of this paper, lies in the factthat they lead to the examination of the conventions and epistemologicalfoundations of all forms of “urban knowledge,” including our own aca-demic writing.

Radical Political Economy and Mystery Fiction

If we emphasise the connections between radical political economy andurban (especially mystery) fiction, we can glimpse an epistemologicalgenealogy that throws doubt upon the privileges of the former and putsthe claim to know the city in its rightly central place. The distance, forinstance, between Marxist urban science and detective fiction is not asgreat as might be supposed. Marx’s own well-documented engagementswith literature and with literary treatments of the capitalist city ought toalert us immediately to the fact that the scientific status of Marxist theoryis inseparable from aesthetic considerations (Prawer, 1976). Marx’s dis-missal of Eugéne Sue’s reformist socialism through a critique of Sue’sgreat serial melodrama Mysteries of Paris has tended rightly to reinforcethe idea that Marx saw it as his duty to transcend the problems associatedwith literary treatments of urban problems and their causes, but his suc-cess in this is quite compromised—not least for instance by his reliance onEngels’ accomplished urban reportage (Blanchard, 1985; Marcus, 1974).

362 PHILIP HOWELL


Marx’s treatment of the capitalist city is shot through with rich seams ofmystery and melodrama, sensation and surprise—exactly those elementsin fact that marked out the nineteenth-century “mysteries of the city” pio-neered by Sue, a genre that figured the world of the capitalist city in termsof “criminal underworlds, urban squalor, and elite luxury and decadence”(Denning, 1987:85).7 Marx and the critics that have followed him havestressed the limitations of the genre, particularly its inability to assign thecause of crime and misery to the workings of capitalism, but its appealought not to be underestimated, nor the common modalities shared by lit-erary melodrama and “scientific” appraisal missed. There is much to sug-gest for instance that the melodramatic vision of the city gave tonineteenth-century politics a much more resonant refiguring of classstruggle than the class politics of Marxian socialism.8 And we can arguethat the Marxian alternative—the tracing of the cause of social misery ulti-mately to a single source—is generically related to these melodramaswithout necessarily being more convincing as explanation.

Continuing to argue that “the genre of urban writing is beginning torecognize its romance” (Wilson, 1995:160), for instance, Elizabeth Wilsonhas pointed to the recurring images in urban thought of the city as a mazeand the city as a labyrinth, which, while contradictory, should be seen asequally conventional. The labyrinthine city of the “mysteries” ought notto be seen as any more ideological, or less real, than the maze-like city ofMarxian political economy, with its secret centre and single meaning.Unravelling the urban maze, tracing all crimes, all social misery, all differ-ence, to the operations of the capitalist system amounts to “realism” onlyinsofar as we take that term to constitute a particular series of literary con-ventions and conceits. I do not think that it would be going too far even tosuggest that Marxian political economy is itself generically a nineteenth-century “mystery of the city,” driven as it is by the “narrative and rhetoricof exposure” (Denning, 1987:106) that distinguish the genre. Both notablyinvoke a kind of scientific flaneur-detective, of course, and it is not verysurprising that one of the characteristic rhetorical modes of Marxism isprecisely that of detection—with its reliance on scientific techniques, thedelayed narrative of uncovering and unmasking, the naming of the guilty,and the like.9 Part of the appeal of “progressive” crime novelists like SaraParetsky to a politically radical readership (Schmid, 1995) lies in just thistracing of crime to social actors and roles readily understandable as “per-sonifications of the capitalist/patriarchal social and economic order fromwhich they have literally and metaphorically profited” (Munt, 1994:48; seeJohnson, 1994; Schmid, 1995:263). To think of this as “realism” is unhelp-ful. At best this urban literature is wish-fulfilment (Munt 1994:42; Palmer,1978:64). At worst it presents a kind of paranoid conspiracy theory, inwhich all crime is explicated through its capitalist and/or patriarchal ori-gin. What is missing I think is that sense, inherent in the genre, that the



city’s mysteries and disorders are not always explicable or rightable, cer-tainly not traceable to a single systemic cause.

Crime fiction is in truth far less interested or successful in banishinganxieties about the city than is often supposed from a reduction of thegenre to detective or “mystery” fiction (Collins, 1989:34). For the possibil-ity of knowing the city, complete and whole, of solving all its mysteries, isnot in the wider genre synechdochically projected. Quite to the contrary,even when city solutions are offered, this seems often enough to be a nev-erending, sisyphean task, whose ultimate worth is thoroughly in doubt.Emblematic perhaps are the once immensely popular Fantômas serials(Allain and Silvestre, 1986) in which mysteries are solved at the same timeas the source of Mystery (the master criminal Fantômas himself) alwayseffects an escape. The city’s mysteries are ongoing, never conclusivelyconfronted, and victories always partial and often pyrrhic. We might takeas a recent popular variant serial-killer fictions such as Patricia Cornwell’sScarpetta novels that, with their emphasis on pathological criminality,remind us once more of the impenetrable mysteries of the city.10 In the cityas labyrinth, “in which one gropes like a blind person, without the help ofan Ariadne’s thread” (Prendergast, 1992:208), there is no centre but theMinotaur’s chamber (Wilson, 1991:2) and its attendant, appalling terrors.There is no secret order, no ready chains of capitalist/patriarchal causeand effect, only the physical and epistemological anxieties that crime nov-els have traded in at least as much as they have promoted resolution andcomfort. Here, knowledge of the ways of the city is always provisionaland tentative, and for all the reliance on forensic science the claims to aknowledge whole and entire are remarkably muted. The city not only pre-serves its mysteries but in a profound way we might say that it amounts tothem (Blanchard, 1985:8).

The problem of “knowing” the city is therefore in large part a matter ofunderstanding the qualifications involved in any claim to that knowledge.What the mysteries of the city enjoined, and detective and crime fictioncontinue to endorse, but what certain strains of radical urban social theorydisavow, is what we may call, following John Thompson, the epistemologi-cal gap in our knowledge of the city (1984:145). Our theories, provisionaland partial as they are, can in fact be confirmed or confuted only by herme-neutic practices of interpretation that are shared with the city’s subjectsthemselves. So that instead of equating knowledge with seeing, and espe-cially with that total view from on high, we do better to consider it gainedin and through the practice of everyday urban life. Realism and ideologyare better construed I think in relation to the representation or misrepresen-tation of these shared epistemological conditions and the kinds of claims toknowledge that are made in and through discourse. And it is crime fiction’sability to raise claims to know which accurately represent the epistemologi-cal foundations of life in the city that ought to make our criticism of literaryconventions at the same time muted and self-reflexive.

364 PHILIP HOWELL


Crime Novels and Ideology

This allows us directly to argue that crime novels are not generically carri-ers of hegemonic ideology. We ought to expect to find that novels carryheterogeneous and plural readings, and in fact we can readily find incrime novels implicit epistemological critiques.11 One fairly obvious possi-bility for critical or oppositional readings is what we might call the post-modern route, in which the analogical relationship between thedetective’s search for clues and the semiotician’s decoding of the empireof signs neatly collapses the distinctions between reality and representa-tions. In such knowing fictions, a kind of hermeneutical and epistemologi-cal sophistication acts to remind us of the limitations and provisionality ofour knowledge.12 Such fictions insist upon the impossibility of achievingcertain knowledge—represented so well by Paul Auster’s (1987) detectiveheroes and their desperate, disappointed attempts at cognitive mappingin the “city of glass.”

But as Prendergast (1992) points out, this rhetoric itself becomes a thor-oughly conventional position—so that to replace the legible with theillegible city becomes less strikingly critical than it appears at first to be. Amore genuinely critical form of crime fiction may be the police procedural,which can and does offer critical readings of contemporary urbanism,readings that are epistemologically and hermeneutically sophisticatedwithout being ideologically overdetermined or being driven to accept theself-referential and ludic semiotics of postmodern fictions. Police proce-durals offer quite distinctive opportunities for addressing the epistemo-logical conditions of urban experience.

In the first place, the police procedural subverts the ideological presup-position of an individual detective around whom the production of mean-ing and therefore order revolves. Unlike most detective stories,procedurals do not privilege a hero “who is always a unitary figurethrough whom all meaning in the text is distributed” (Munt, 1994:4). Sec-ond, procedurals are unlike detective stories in being properly urban fic-tions. There is a strong case to be made that detective fictions are no moreurban, and certainly no more “realistic,” than the country-house mysteriesthey often deride. The figure of the detective evolved from the westernfrontier hero and was transplanted somewhat clumsily from the openrange (Slotkin, 1988; Stowe, 1988), and that pioneer frontier mentality ispresent even in the liberal feminist heroines of Sara Paretsky and SueGrafton (Munt, 1994:41). Logan (1992) has moreover argued that hard-boiled detective fiction of this kind betrays a traditional Americanambivalence concerning the city, one that emphasises its corruption andartifice over any more generous appreciation. Given this genealogy theclaim to representing urban life is pretty tenuous. With few exceptions, thehard-boiled tradition from Hammett and Chandler down to Paretsky andbeyond is notably uncompelling as a portrayal of the city.



Police procedurals are not in principle more accurate representations ofurban life. While the long history of the police procedural (Binyon, 1989) islinked to a commitment to increased naturalism and realism, there is noreason to suppose that the form is necessarily either more reactionary orprogressive than mainstream detective fiction. In fact it is notable thatthere was an early and marked reluctance to name actual cities as settingsfor procedurals, Simenon’s Paris being the one great exception. But thepossibility of researching and writing about specific cities, and describingthem in detail, offers the police procedural the ability to write about urbancrime in a much more compelling way than the detective novels with theirexplicitly fantastic detections could do.

Consider the way in which attention to details of site and setting worksto interpellate the reader by locating her or him with respect to the placesand people of the story. Describing the particularities of specific cities isespecially successful in this regard, as Simon Dentith has demonstrated inrelation to the Laidlaw novels of William McIlvanney, set in Glasgow:

When travelling from one side of the city to the other, the char-acters go down named streets and pass real public buildings . . .[It is] a question of offering the reader a very particular kind ofknowledge. Evidently this will alter if you actually know thecity or not, and that is important for a writer like McIlvanneywith his specifically West of Scotland and Glaswegian loyaltiesand affiliations. But even if the towns and street-names areunfamiliar, these allusions do give you a kind of ad hoc orinstrumental knowledge. Granted, street maps do not providethe kind of scientific knowledge of political economy, or a Venndiagram of unemployment ratios; but then street maps havetheir uses too, as any stranger to a city knows. At its best, thiskind of writing too can be used as a way of providing a sociallandscape. (Dentith, 1990:24–25)

McIlvanney is not unique in this regard—one could refer to the InspectorRebus novels of Ian Rankin set in Edinburgh, John Harvey’s Nottingham-based Resnick novels, John Brady’s Inspector Minogue books in Dublin,or indeed (outside the procedural genre) the Manchester of Val McDer-mid’s private eye Kate Brannigan and the Liverpool of Martin Edwards’Harry Devlin.13 All these novels in fact owe a special debt to Simenon,whose geography—or rather the geography of Maigret’s enquêtes—is sovery precise and particular (Cobb, 1976). In common with Maigret’s Paris,these provincial British and Irish cities are minutely and accuratelydescribed, and a great deal of their force comes from this realist produc-tion of place.14 This has the same ideological potential as every other formof realist world-making of course—more so perhaps in that “it encouragesthe reader to negotiate the realities of the city, puts him or her in a position

366 PHILIP HOWELL


of confident knowledge with respect to the city” (Dentith, 1990:26), tam-ing the city by granting a privileged knowledge—but the point is that itdoes not stand in the way of pushing the crime novel in the direction of aradical, oppositional urban politics. It allows the novel to be deployed indemocratic or socialist ways, for instance, as McIlvanney has demon-strated. Moreover, it makes clear that “to represent the city as a ‘labyrinth’is not necessarily to abandon the belief in being able to find one’s wayaround it or to understand the principles on which it has been con-structed” (Prendergast, 1992:212).

This links up with a third advantage of the police procedural, which isits ability not only to describe the workings of the police in a more or lessaccurate way, but also to do justice to the city itself as a phenomenon thatcan be known only partially, from the vantage point of the street. As Den-tith observes, “The urban crime novel draws on, recycles and represents ashared set of attitudes, responses and scattered shards of knowledge,together constituting a way of negotiating city life” (1990:26). The know-ingness granted to the reader is indeed privileged, but it is based on theshared references of the everyday world—the street map and the streetsigns, for instance—that are not themselves exclusive. And in the sensethat the urban references construct a sense of place, it is a construction ofa truly shared place. This kind of mapping is not the equivalent of thesemiotic skill of a Sherlock Holmes and his unique ability to read the city,but is rather an epistemological device that gestures at the nature of thecity itself, its intersubjectivity, its narratability, and its negotiability. Thisis bolstered by the device, common to procedurals like Harvey’s or Bra-dy’s, of sharing the narrative point of view so that there is no single narra-tive or narration. Instead of the detective acting as Virgil to the reader’sDante, the reader is often presented with a formal analogue of the multi-ple stories, overlapping narratives, partial truths, and sheer contingencyof city life. This is not the fantasy of the known and safe city; nor theillegible city of the postmoderns. And if mystery stories are paradigmaticof narrative itself, there is a real epistemological value in recognising theplural narratives of the city, the shared and competitive struggle toproduce order through representation. Insistence on the shared knowl-edge of place constructed in the everyday life of the city’s inhabitants is toimplicitly abandon the totalised view of the city without giving up on thepossibility of any kind of knowledge constructed out of the city’s semi-otic noise.

John Harvey’s Resnick Novels

One series of police procedurals, those of John Harvey and his DetectiveInspector Charlie Resnick, can serve to sum up these points.15 The Resnicknovels have all the features that I have identified above, and we can best



appreciate this by reading them with an eye to Michel de Certeau’s under-standing of the problem of the city as an object of knowledge. Harvey’snovels in fact exemplify de Certeau’s (1984) critique of social theories thatprivilege the scopic and panoramic knowledge obtained from the elevatedvantage point of the theorist-voyeur. Where de Certeau championsinstead a form of knowledge of the city that is linked to everyday spatialpractices like walking the city’s streets, so in Harvey’s work do we find agenuinely urban epistemology. In the Resnick novels knowledge of thecity is never the detective’s privilege; nor, as in the hard-boiled genre, isthe detective the sole creator of meaning, the pivot around which knowl-edge of the city revolves. Instead we have a portrait of a real British pro-vincial city seen from the perspective not just of Resnick and his team ofdetectives, but also of the ordinary people who inhabit that city. As in deCerteau’s Practice of Everyday Life, what is presented in place of an episte-mology of the visible is a kind of “epistemology of the lived” (Prender-gast, 1992:209), a rhetoric of living in the city that writes the city throughthe practices of its inhabitants rather than reads it through the figure of theflaneur-detective.

My specific claim here is that Harvey’s fictions closely correspond tothree key and interrelated elements of Michel de Certeau’s theoreticalargument about the practice of everyday life: names, walks, and stories. Ihave already stressed with Dentith how the attention to particularity—akey realist effect—offers a form of instrumental knowledge, a street map,to the reader. This may well be of course the most ideologically troublingaspect of realist discourse. But the significance of proper and particularnames, as de Certeau points out, goes beyond this, for naming the streetsof a city, identifying its public buildings, shops, and the like, is not in factsolely to reproduce the kind of systematic and designatory authority weassociate with the map. This is because names are incorporated into move-ment, into the act of passing by, and this kind of movement insinuatescreative spatial practice into ordered public space:

These names make themselves available to the diverse mean-ing given them by passers-by; they detach themselves from theplaces they were supposed to define and serve as imaginarymeeting-points on itineraries which, as metaphors, they deter-mine for reasons that are foreign to their original value but maybe recognized or not by passers-by. A strange toponymy that isdetached from actual places and flies high over the city like afoggy geography of “meanings” held in suspension, directingthe physical deambulations below: Place de l’Étoile, Concorde,Poissonnière . . . These constellations of names provide trafficpatterns: they are stars directing itineraries . . . (de Certeau,1984:104–105)

368 PHILIP HOWELL


Naming, therefore, and the attention to details of place and setting,should not be confused with the ideologically constricting epistemologywe associate with classic realism, with its empiricism and privileging ofthe visual. For this analysis of poeisis has to be understood within de Cer-teau’s insistence on the ability of everyday urban practice to subvert anddeny the panoptic knowledge of the city. “In this respect,” as Ahearnepoints out, “the manifest existence of the city’s landmarks and streetsceases to figure as a self-evident given . . . [T]he meaning they hold for oth-ers is withdrawn from the onlooker’s gaze” (1995:181–182). Proper namesact rather as “local authorities,” carving out pockets of meaning that com-promise the univocal and systematic order of the city (de Certeau, 1984:104–106), and in so doing making places credible, memorable, and aboveall habitable.

When John Harvey uses proper names they are often linked in this wayto the movement of characters in the story, not becoming a privileged mapfor the reader, a view from above as it were, but nodding to that kind ofeveryday urban knowledge generated by its inhabitants:

The queue just to get into Next was right across the pavementoutside Yates’s and curled, four-deep, around the corner andup Market Street as high as Guava Records. Warehouse was hipto hip with customers eager for the twenty-five to fifty per centmarkdowns and Monsoon was crammed with well-bredwomen over thirty-five wearing what they’d bought at lastyear’s sale.

Dana walked up past the futon shop into Hockley and con-sidered treating herself to lunch in Sonny’s; discretion sent herdown Goose Gate to Browne’s Wine Bar, a glass of dry housewhite and a chicken salad baguette. One glass became two andthen three and from there it was a short, less than steady walkto the architects’ office where she worked. (Harvey, 1994:125–126)

This kind of knowledge is inseparable from the experience of being in thecity, and in particular to the habitual, circulatory itineraries traced by itsinhabitants. Where for de Certeau the very act of walking subverts theauthority of the map by turning voyeuristic knowledge into a practical oroperational knowledge, so with the Resnick novels are movement and cir-culation foregrounded in exactly this way:

They had stood several moments before the phone boxes acrossfrom Yates Wine Lodge, across from Next. Others jostled roundthem, heading out for the clubs, Zhivago’s, Madison. Enginerunning, a police-dog van idled at the curb. Raymond knew shewas waiting for him to say something, not knowing what . . .



Her face brightened. “Why don’t we just walk? You know,for a bit.”

They went up Market Street, midway down Queen Streetbefore doubling back up King: on Clumber Street they joinedthe crowd in McDonald’s, stood in a line twelve or fourteendeep, six lanes working, Raymond couldn’t believe the moneythey must be taking; finally he came away with a quarterpounder and fries, Coke and apple pie. Sara’s was a chocolatemilk shake. Benches all taken, they leaned up against the wallthat led down to Littlewoods’s side entrance, Raymond chew-ing on his burger, watching Sara prise the lid from the con-tainer, tip the shake right into her mouth, too thick to suck upwith the straw. (Harvey, 1992:20)

It is not just the abiding attention paid to the street life of the city andthe view from below, however. Harvey’s books are constructed aroundthe movements of ordinary people, caught up in crimes and their after-math. This is not the kind of movement we associate with the private-eyenovels of Chandler, with their dreamlike translations, or the wanderingsof the flaneur, but rather a series of quite specific itineraries. De Certeauargues that this tactile epistemology of mobility, detour, and displacementis distinguished by two rhetorics of walking, two types of spatial practiceanalogous to linguistic figures, synechdoche and asyndeton, and both areexemplified in Harvey’s writing. Synechdoche, on the one hand, is the fig-ure of displacement, the taking of a part to stand in for the whole thatincludes it, allowing totalities to be replaced (rather than simply dis-placed) by fragments, enlarging details, and condensing reference. This isimportant for de Certeau in that it corresponds to that element ofpedestrian rhetoric that retains a relationship to the principle of the total-ity of the city while coming to a knowledge of the city through particularfragments. Walkers make sense of the city, indeed know the city, not as acohesive whole but through selected elements that stand in for buildings,streets, or districts. In the Resnick novels this is exactly how charactersknow the city, as in this instance where a street is replaced by a favouritepub, and goods for shops that sell them:

The pub was round a couple of corners from Central Police Sta-tion and Resnick had sometimes used it when he was stationedthere. The road that led away from it, up the hill towards thecemetery, was a mixture of pork butchers and Chinese res-taurants, second-hand shops with rusting refrigerators andBaby Bellings in the window and a dozen paperbacks outsidein an apple box, ten pence each. Its clientele was a mixture oflocals who lived in the narrow terraced streets that spawned offto either side and students stretching out their Polytechnic

370 PHILIP HOWELL


grants or in for a quick half before or after their adult educationclasses opposite. (Harvey, 1989:58)

Asyndeton, the figure of disconnection, is the corollary of synechdoche,eliminating the linking words in sentences and standing for that practiceof walking that “selects and fragments the spaces traversed; it skips overlinks and whole parts that it omits” (de Certeau, 1984:101). Thus whereassynechdoche enlarges and amplifies spatial elements, asyndeton undoescontinuity and fragments places into separate islands, again as charactersin Harvey’s crime fiction do:

Stumbling along the broken white line at the centre of the road,he passed the boarded-up branch of Barclays Bank, Tony’s Bar-ber Shop, the Bismilla Tandoori, the Regency Bridal Salon andthe Running Horse pub, before finally, outside the vivid greenfront of Il Padrono Ristorante Italiano, balance all but gone,arms flailing, he collided with a car parked near the kerb andcannoned sideways, falling heavily to his knees. (Harvey,1995b:1–2)

The importance of this kind of description lies in the way that it under-writes the spatial practices by which the city’s inhabitants make sense oftheir environment, not just in its attention to the ordinary and the every-day but in the way in which the knowledge of the city is constructed.Space is fragmented, distorted, its cohesion and coherence undercut.Knowledge of the city is never total or whole. Even the detective’s knowl-edge of the city is based on fragments, incomplete and unsure.16

And yet these fragments of the city are indeed concatenated to producewhat de Certeau calls “spatial stories,” not just by the figure of the detec-tive but by ordinary people in everyday lives.17 In the “practical” or poeticgeography in which people constantly reconfigure their environments,these fragments are recombined in the form of itineraries. Places becomefamiliar and habitable, memorable and meaningful through the storiedcharacter of urban experience. The practice of place subverts the order ofthe map, replacing it with “heterological” tours. Where the map for deCerteau colonizes space by creating a totalizing knowledge of place, thetour represents the preferred orienting practice of the city’s people,describing space in terms of spatializing actions, using everyday narra-tions to organise itineraries, stories, or connecting histories that tell ofwhat one can do in the city and make out of it.

This is the general form in which the Resnick novels present the city—not as a place knowable through science and detection but as a series oftours or spatial stories by which the city’s inhabitants “thread their com-plex and makeshift ways through the places which others have con-structed” (Ahearne, 1995:183).18 The city is constituted by these disparate



spatial stories, silent street-level knowledges (de Certeau, 1984:108) whosedependence on effect and memory constitutes the city’s habitability:

The Italian coffee stall was located among the market stalls onthe upper level of one of the city’s two shopping centres. Vege-tables, fruit and flowers, fish and meat and bread, Afro-Caribbean and Asian specialities; the two Polish delicatessenstalls where Resnick did much of his shopping, replying togreetings offered in his family’s language with the flattenedvowels of the English Midlands. His stubborn use of Englishwas not a slight; merely a way of saying I was born here, this city,this is where I was brought up. These streets. (Harvey, 1993:13–14;emphasis in original)

Or again, to return to McIlvanney’s Laidlaw, there’s no place like home,not even home, but that “this was as near to home as he was going to get,the streets of this place” (McIlvanney, 1983:253).

The Problem of Knowing the City

Reading Harvey’s work as exemplifying de Certeau’s critique of the prob-lem of knowing the city demonstrates that the criticism of both theflaneur-detective and his panoramic knowledge cannot be taken as amodel for all crime fiction; indeed, in its formal ability to step beyond suchclearly ideological elements, this kind of fiction allows for more genuinelycritical representations of the city. Rather than dismissing this kind ofgenre fiction as inherently ideological, we ought thus to consider that itscritical potential includes both realism and epistemological sophistication(indeed these are conjoined). Although the conventions of literary realismin geographical description are among the most potent ideological ele-ments in fiction, I have argued that this kind of attention to urban episte-mology preserves critical readings. Realism in this sense has nothing to dowith correspondence to truths situated beyond discourse, but is rather amatter of accurately representing the shared experiential conditions of thecity’s inhabitants and their ability to construct a poetic geography out ofthe city’s “neighbouring but never quite connecting stories” (Denning,1987:90). Likewise, the critique of ideology can be extended from identify-ing false urban knowledge to the spurious claims to knowledge made byboth literary and scientific discourses. There is no reason why crime fic-tion should not be as critical as radical geography, in this sense. On thebasis of the above, it is quite possible in fact to regard crime fiction asexemplifying a self-reflexive critique of the epistemological “will to truth”that such fictions only superficially seem to endorse (Collins, 1989; Munt,1994:173).

372 PHILIP HOWELL


Instead of calibrating the political economic accuracy of detective fic-tion, therefore, we can and should turn this critique back on radical geog-raphy, to examine the literary conventions, epistemological claims, andproduction of ideology in our own texts. That it is possible to do this andmaintain a commitment to realism (and thus to ideology critique) rests—for both crime fiction and radical geography—on an understanding ofrealism that is more generous than can be gleaned from some commen-taries, one that is inseparable from an understanding of the ways inwhich epistemological practices are represented. One can, of course, sayof literary fictions that their form and content, simply by virtue of theirdependence on cultural codes linked to embodied practices and struc-tures of social relations, are amenable to a critical social theory and thusoffer more than the opportunity for deconstruction or pastiche. The (var-ied) conventions that define what are counted as realist novels do offer anopportunity to understand how societies represent truth, so that while itis well known that what counts as realism for one generation easilybecome false or fantastic to another, this in itself carries valuable socialmeaning. But I hope to have suggested that the opportunity is also thereto argue that fictional conventions of realism can be linked to the kinds ofnarrative and hermeneutic self-understanding that people share andstruggle over (Gasiorek, 1995), knowledges that are tactile and activerather than visual and voyeuristic, and inseparable from spatial practicesthat are enacted in everyday life, in our streets and cities. These kinds of“urban knowledge” are not the privilege of the scientific observer or theliterary narrator; they are not measured by reference to truths withheldfrom everyday access. They are, rather, the partial, practical, and provi-sional epistemologies by which we all make sense of the city. And we canjudge our own “scientific” writings in exactly the same way: our repre-sentations of the city, our urban knowledges, are subject to the same pres-sures and opportunities.

The specific advantage here comes in the form of a reflexive approachto the kinds of knowledge of the city constructed by both crime fictionsand social theories. That people do confer order on their worlds, throughinterpretative strategies and spatial practices, is a truth that both herme-neutic social theories and literary fictions readily acknowledge. Indeed,mystery stories may be the very exemplar of the role that interpretationplays in conferring stability on social life (Culler, 1975:212). I would onlyadd that the relationship between mystery and knowledge is even betterexemplified in such fiction: the presence of mystery confers order, just aswe might argue that the modern world is constituted by the interplay oforthodoxy and heterodoxy, identity and difference (Calhoun, 1995). Themysteries of the city constitute its order, for its coherence is a function ofthe fact that it cannot be fully understood and known. This paradox is atthe heart of modern realist fiction (Rignall, 1989:114), but nowhere moreso than in crime stories: “the mysterious realities of urban life are made



paradoxically more comprehensible by unlocking them through aberrantnarratives of crime” (Dentith, 1990:20). Knowing the city? As WilliamMcIlvanney says, that’s a crazy claim.

Notes

1. My apologies to Mick Harvey’s band Crime and the City Solution for the title ofthis essay. I would like to record my thanks to Kim Howell, to Linda McDow-ell, and to three referees for their fair and constructive criticisms.

2. For overviews of realism, see the classic texts selected in Furst (1992) and Wal-den (1995). On geography and realism, see Robinson (1988:183).

3. “Crime fiction texts constantly assure the reader of their mimetic functionthrough continued reference to actual places, dates, people, and organiza-tions. Part of the pleasure of reading depends on this sense of authenticity,allowing the reader to experience normally inaccessible or forbidden activi-ties” (Porter, 1981:140).

4. Of course, it is difficult to see why crime fiction should be so severely chas-tised, when on these terms all fiction can be regarded as ideological. Such fic-tions may simply exemplify the ideological work of fiction as a whole(Brooks, 1984). More specifically, all fictional creations of place, all geo-graphical description, can be said to serve plainly ideological functions:“These places, that pretend to be open spaces of the real, are actually claustro-phobic encampments of the ideological” (Davis, 1987:101). On the fictionaltreatment of space, see also Miller (1995).

5. There is a “temporal” sense in which this is true as well, traceable to the forceof the “proiaretic” code of action and activity organised temporally by narra-tive, which serves to complement the spatialised “hermeneutic” code bywhich we make sense of the environment of the detective novel, the scene ofthe crime, the mysteries of the city (for these terms see Barthes, 1974; Porter,1981). The dependence upon narrative conventions overlays the realist repre-sentation of the world with the problem-solving and re-equilibriating struc-ture so conventional to the genre (Hill, 1986:54; Jameson, 1983:193).

6. On the ideological limits of “the high view” see also the discussion of Parisianpanoramas in Prendergast (1992), chapter 3. I am conscious that the opposi-tion of high view and street level is rather crude and that they need not be sooppositional—and even Harvey’s Resnick occasionally resorts to the highview of Nottingham Castle. But they do point to different types of geographi-cal imagination: Resnick’s high view is bound up with his own critique of theway the film Saturday Night and Sunday Morning used that location as part of arealist commentary on working-class Nottingham life (Harvey, 1990:267).This is rather suggestive of the ways in which every high view is bound upwith some kind of distanced distortion.

7. Judith Walkowitz’s brilliant work on the City of Dreadful Delight has shownjust how fruitful attention to the materiality of urban narratives can be. Narra-tives are critical to the way in which people represent and understand theirworld and are often melodramatic (Joyce, 1994; Walkowitz, 1992). The factthat they use realist techniques, without being remotely “realistic,” alerts usto the necessity of considering literary presentations alongside scientificknowledges.

8. Consider the importance of melodramatic narratives in nineteenth-centurypolitics: see for instance Joyce, 1994; Rancière, 1989. The role of Sue’s disciple,

374 PHILIP HOWELL


G. W. M. Reynolds, author of The Mysteries of London (1844–1848) and Chartistpolitician in the 1840s and 1850s, is a case in point.

9. Consider the paperback dustjacket blurb for Mandel’s Delightful Murder(1984). Even Mike Davis’ brilliant City of Quartz, and his search for “authenticepistemologies” (1990:23), is caught up in literary tropes of this kind. If aschool of “hard-boiled” political economy exists, this is it.

10. These are terrors for women more than men of course: as Wolff (1989:152)notes, women have often entered the public sphere only as murder victims.

11. The very complexity of literary production counts against any suggestionthat the ideological functions of literature are uncontestable. It may be forinstance that there are alternative ways of reading that preserve forms ofresistance to bourgeois ideology (Collins, 1989; Denning, 1987). This appearsto be a distinct possibility with genre fiction like detective and crime novels.Sally Munt (1994) is surely right to point out that the masculine critical tradi-tion has referred to the primacy of the formal rules of detective fiction pre-cisely in order to play down the longevity of uncomfortably politicalreadings, especially those produced by women writers (Coward and Semple,1989; Klein, 1988; Munt, 1994). Even Agatha Christie may be seen to be morepolitically radical, less middle-class and conservative, than she appears inaccepted histories of the genre (Light, 1991). For another example of appro-priation, of television’s Inspector Morse, see Thomas (1995).

12. In rather a grab-bag of fictions, consider Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy(1995), Jorge Luis Borges’s Labyrinths (1970), Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose(1984), Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini’s An Enigma by the Sea (1994), IainSinclair’s Downriver (1991). Added to this could be Emma Tennant’s The Lastof the Country House Murders (1974), or any of several examples of MartinAmis’s repeated flirtations with the form.

13. See the references for examples of the work of these authors. I have concen-trated on British and Irish authors, partly because there is some truth toLogan’s (1992) observation that crime fiction on this side of the Atlantic ismarkedly more sympathetic to the city.

14. Note though that Cobb (1976) identifies Maigret’s Paris as being comfortinglydated; its unchanging geography is part of its appeal.

15. One advantage of this is the ability to concentrate on a specific city, Notting-ham, rather than on the abstract category “urban.” Just as it is important tounderline the differences between American and British/Irish writing, somust the differences between individual cities be considered. Willett (1996)usefully takes this approach, for instance.

16. As with Resnick, so with McIlvanney’s detective Laidlaw: “He knew Laid-law’s belief in what he sometimes called “absorbing the streets,” as if youcould solve crime by osmosis. Apart from being of dubious effectiveness, itwas sore on the feet” (McIlvanney, 1983:48).

17. De Certeau (1984:118) notes in fact that detective stories are characterised by a“spatializing frenzy” based on “the accelerated succession of actions,” yetstill circumscribed by the textual place. This captures some of the priority ofspace over place, without denying the ideological ambiguity of much detec-tive fiction.

18. This is the substance, too, of Munt’s discussion of Sarah Schulman’s NewYork detective novels set in the Lower East Side, where protagonists walk thestreets, marking out the geography of an urban landscape and punctuatingthe map of the city with emotional happenings (Munt, 1994:178–179).



References

Ahearne, J. (1995) Michel de Certeau: Interpretation and Its Other. Cambridge: PolityPress.

Allain, M., and P. Silvestre (1986) Fantômas. London: Picador.Auster, P. (1987) The New York Trilogy. London: Faber.Barthes, R. (1974) S/Z. New York: Hill and Wang.Belsey, C. (1990) Deconstructing the text: Sherlock Holmes. In T. Bennett (Ed.) Popu-

lar Fiction: Technology, Ideology, Production, Reading. London: Routledge, pp.277–285.

Binyon, T.J. (1989) “Murder Will Out”: The Detective in Fiction. Oxford: Oxford Uni-versity Press.

Blanchard, M.E. (1985) In Search of the City: Engels, Baudelaire, Rimbaud. Saratoga:ANMA Libri.

Borges, J.L. (1970) Labyrinths. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Brady, J. (1990a) A Stone of the Heart. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Brady, J. (1990b) Unholy Ground. London: Arrow.Brady, J. (1991) Kaddish in Dublin. London: Arrow.Brand, D. (1990) From the flaneur to the detective: interpreting the city of Poe. In T.

Bennett (Ed.) Popular Fiction: Technology, Ideology, Production, Reading. London:Routledge, pp. 220–237.

Brooks, P. (1984) Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Oxford: Ox-ford University Press.

Calhoun, C. (1995) Critical Social Theory: Culture, History, and the Challenge of Differ-ence. Oxford: Blackwell.

Cobb, R. (1976) Maigret’s Paris, and the geography of Simenon. In Tour de France.London: Duckworth, pp. 179–184, 185–189.

Collins, J. (1989) Uncommon Cultures: Popular Culture and Post-Modernism. London:Routledge.

Coward, R., and L. Semple (1989) Tracking down the past: women and detective fic-tion. In H. Carr (Ed.) From My Guy to Sci-Fi: Genre and Women’s Writings in thePostmodern World. London: Pandora Press, pp. 39–57.

Culler, J. (1975) Structuralist Poetics. London: Routledge.Davis, L.J. (1987) Resisting Novels. London: Methuen.Davis, M. (1990) City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. London: Verso.de Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life. London: University of California

Press.Denning, M. (1987) Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in

America. London: Verso.Dentith, S. (1990) “This shitty urban machine humanised”: the urban crime novel

and the novels of William McIlvanney. In I.A. Bell and G. Daldry (Eds.) Watchingthe Detectives: Essays on Crime Fiction. London: Macmillan, pp. 18–36.

Deutsche, R. (1991) Boys town. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 9:5–30.Eagleton, T. (1991) Ideology: An Introduction. London: Verso.Eco, U. (1984) The Name of the Rose. London: Picador.Edwards, M. (1991) All the Lonely People. London: Judy Piatkus.Evans, C.A. (1994) On the valuation of detective fiction: a study in the ethics of con-

solation. Journal of Popular Culture 28:159–167.Ewart, J.C. (1990) Lost in the hermeneutic funhouse: Patrick Modiano’s postmodern

detective. In R.G. Walker and J.M. Frazer (Eds.) The Cunning Craft. Macomb:Western Illinois University Press, pp. 166–173.

Foucault, M. (1979) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage.

376 PHILIP HOWELL


Fruttero, C., and F. Lucentini (1994) An Enigma by the Sea. London: Chatto andWindus.

Furst, L.R. (Ed.) (1992) Realism. London: Longman.Gasiorek, A. (1995) Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After. London: Edward

Arnold.Gattrell, V. (1990) Crime, authority and the policeman-state. In F.M.L. Thompson

(Ed.) The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750–1950, Volume III: Social Agenciesand Institutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 243–310.

Ginzberg, C. (1990) Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: clues and scientificmethod. In T. Bennett (Ed.) Popular Fiction: Technology, Ideology, Production, Read-ing. London: Routledge, pp. 252–276.

Harvey, D. (1985) Consciousness and the Urban Experience. Oxford: Blackwell.Harvey, J. (1989) Lonely Hearts. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Harvey, J. (1990) Rough Treatment. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Harvey, J. (1991) Cutting Edge. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Harvey, J. (1992) Off Minor. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Harvey, J. (1993) Wasted Years. London: Mandarin.Harvey, J. (1994) Cold Light. London: Heinemann.Harvey, J. (1995a) Dexterity. In M. Jakubowski (Ed.) No Alibi: The Best New Crime Fic-

tion. Manchester: Ringpull, pp. 35–48.Harvey, J. (1995b) Living Proof. London: Mandarin.Hill, J. (1986) Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema, 1956–1963. London: BFI

Publishing.Jameson, F. (1983) The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Lon-

don: Methuen.Johnson, P.E. (1994) Sex and betrayal in the detective fiction of Sue Grafton and Sara

Paretsky. Journal of Popular Culture 27:97–106.Joyce, P. (1994) Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century Eng-

land. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Klein, K.G. (1988) The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre. Urbana: University of Illi-

nois Press.Knight, S. (1980) Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University

Press.Light, A. (1991) Forever England: Femininity, Literature, and Conservatism between the

Wars. London: Routledge.Logan, M.F. (1992) Detective fiction as urban critique: changing perspectives of a

genre. Journal of American Culture 15:89–94.Mandel, E. (1984) Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story. London: Pluto

Press.Marcus, S. (1974) Engels, Manchester and the Working Class. London: Weidenfeld and

Nicolson.McDermid, V. (1995) Crackdown. London: HarperCollins.McIlvanney, W. (1983) The Papers of Tony Veitch. London: Hodder and Stoughton.Miller, J.H. (1995) Topographies. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Moretti, F. (1990) Clues. In T. Bennett (Ed.) Popular Fiction: Technology, Ideology, Pro-

duction, Reading. London: Routledge, pp. 238–251.Munt, S.R. (1994) Murder by the Book?: Feminism and the Crime Novel. London:

Routledge.Palmer, J. (1978) Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre. London: Edward

Arnold.Porter, D. (1981) The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction. London:

Yale University Press.Prawer, S.S. (1976) Karl Marx and World Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Prendergast, C. (1992) Paris and the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Blackwell.



Putnam, H. (1981) Reason, Truth and History. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.

Rancière, J. (1989) The Nights of Labour: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-CenturyFrance. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Rankin, I. (1992) Strip Jack. London: Orion.Rankin, I. (1993) The Black Book. London: Orion.Rankin, I. (1994) Mortal Causes. London: Orion.Rignall, J. (1989) Benjamin’s flâneur and the problem of realism. In A. Benjamin (Ed.)

The Problems of Modernity. London: Routledge, pp. 112–121.Robinson, B. (1988) Literature and everyday life. Antipode 20:180–206.Schmid, D. (1995) Imagining safe urban space: the contribution of detective fiction

to radical geography. Antipode 27:242–269.Sinclair, I. (1991) Downriver. London: Paladin.Slotkin, R. (1988) The hard-boiled detective story: from the open range to the mean

streets. In B.A. Rader and H.G. Zettler (Eds.) The Sleuth and the Scholar: Origins,Evolution and Current Trends in Detective Fiction. New York: Greenwood Press,pp. 91–100.

Stowe, W.W. (1988) Hard-boiled Virgil: early nineteenth-century beginnings of apopular literary formula. In B.A. Rader and H.G. Zettler (Eds.) The Sleuth and theScholar: Origins Evolution and Current Trends in Detective Fiction. New York:Greenwood Press, pp. 79–90.

Tennant, E. (1974) The Last of the Country House Murders. London: Faber.Thomas, L. (1995) In love with Inspector Morse: feminist subculture and quality

television. Feminist Review 51:1–25.Thompson, J.B. (1984) Studies in the Theory of Ideology. Cambridge: Polity Press.Walden, D. (Ed.) (1995) The Realist Novel. London: Routledge.Walkowitz, J.R. (1992) City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-

Victorian London. London: Virago.Wiener, M.J. (1990) Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law and Policy in England,

1830–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Willett, R. (1996) The Naked City: Urban Crime Fiction in the USA. Manchester: Man-

chester University Press.Wilson, E. (1991) The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women.

London: Virago Press.Wilson, E. (1995) The rhetoric of urban space. New Left Review 209:146–160.Wolff, J. (1989) The invisible flâneuse: women and the literature of modernity. In A.

Benjamin (Ed.) The Problems of Modernity. London: Routledge, pp. 141–156.

378 PHILIP HOWELL


3177058crime and the city solution crime fiction, urban knowledge, and radical geography

Documents

city schmid

radical urban agenda

city solution

urban knowledge

urban problems

crime fiction

radicalgeographys urban

radical geographys questfor