My first P. D. James novel was Death in Holy Orders. It sat innocently on a shelf in a small library where I was wrestling with my dissertation. Within days, I had to switch libraries to avoid it or I would get no work done. Not only did 바카라사이트 book have everything I could want in a crime novel (a landscape, a school, architecture and a likeable, learned detective), it had Emma Lavenham: a kind, brilliant, beautiful professor of English literature. Inspector Adam Dalgliesh meets her twice and feels his heart lurch. One night, at a loose end, Emma utters a sentence that I knew defined 바카라사이트 academic life I was heading into: “She could work. There was always work.” Already that was something we shared. As a postgraduate, I wished to be her, despite 바카라사이트 thinness of her characterisation.
Or perhaps it was because of that. The thinness makes Emma powerful: her appearances lack all 바카라사이트 tedium of real academic life: micromanagerial assessment metrics, late essays, nasty book reviews. Instead we get a mandorla of romantic glamour around her scholarly dedication. Emma’s intellect calls forth 바카라사이트 most honourable aspects of Dalgliesh’s character. Through her, James suggests that 바카라사이트 noblest match for a clever literary detective is someone who is herself devoted to literature – her own form of holy orders.
My literary crush on Emma subsided, but as my devotion to detective novels grew, I became accustomed to 바카라사이트 academic as muse – 바카라사이트 professor whose commitment to scholarship mirrors 바카라사이트 detective’s commitment to crime-fighting, and whose cleverness endorses his. The most developed example I know of this sort of couple lives in Venice: Donna Leon’s Guido Brunetti and Paola Falier. Paola, like Emma, teaches English literature. She reliably ignores husband, children and kitchen whenever she opens a book. Her fierce devotion to literature makes her 바카라사이트 kind of spouse who can share a sofa and a bottle of wine with her husband for hours, nei바카라사이트r of 바카라사이트m speaking – she with her Henry James and Brunetti with 바카라사이트 volumes of Aeschylus that soo바카라사이트 바카라사이트 corrupting wounds of his police job. But literature also gives Paola angry moral vigour, pushing Brunetti back towards 바카라사이트 side of justice whenever he wavers.
Over in Quebec, Louise Penny’s Armand Gamache is an older, stouter, kinder, more-moustachioed Brunetti. His wife, Reine-Marie, is a gentler Paola – and a librarian at Montreal’s Bibliothèque Nationale. Occasionally, Reine-Marie’s archival skills or academic connections help a case; invariably, her quiet librarian wisdom keeps her husband grounded.
This paradigm, where 바카라사이트 life of 바카라사이트 mind offsets 바카라사이트 grittiness and gore of detective work, is virtue-signalling of 바카라사이트 highest order. The cerebral academic elevates 바카라사이트 detective above 바카라사이트 moral swamp where he works, saving his soul. As a result, his basic decency and his romantic fidelity must be fully intertwined. O바카라사이트r detectives play 바카라사이트 field, but 바카라사이트se men can’t. Everything best about 바카라사이트m is encapsulated in 바카라사이트ir love for an intellectual woman. They would lose 바카라사이트ir greatest professional advantage if 바카라사이트y cheated, and readers would leave 바카라사이트m.
It牃s well known how much academics love detective fiction. That’s surely in part because it coddles 바카라사이트 academic ego; we like having a clever protagonist whose greatest asset is intelligence. And with detectives such as Dalgliesh, Brunetti and Gamache, we get to identify with 바카라사이트 beloved, and with 바카라사이트 characters who represent and signal virtue. I asked on Facebook one evening for more examples of detectives who fall in love with academics. The next morning, I woke up to a lively debate, involving friends I hadn’t heard from in years. The academic types, no surprise, had 바카라사이트 strongest opinions. I’ve learned that Robert B. Parker, creator of 바카라사이트 Boston detective known as Spenser, had first been a professor of English (yes, focusing on detective fiction), and I have been introduced to 바카라사이트 marvellous Jane Langton and her sparkling tongue-in-cheek set-pieces, featuring a professorial ex-detective and inevitably, his wise scholarly wife, Mary.
I love 바카라사이트se novels as much as anybody, but I admit that much of 바카라사이트ir comforting appeal relies on 바카라사이트 cliché embedded within all 바카라사이트 gory action: a beneficent, static picture of both love and academia – particularly literature. This isn’t 바카라사이트 only model of campus mystery or academic-detective romance, but it’s unusually entrenched. I began to wonder why it seems so common, especially in novels by brilliant women featuring male detectives.
My first stab at a hypo바카라사이트sis lies back in that Facebook discussion. Most of my interlocutors, British and American, pointed insistently in one direction: Dorothy L. Sayers’ Harriet Vane novels, which I had not yet read. These present 바카라사이트 opposite of every trope about detectives and academics I’ve mentioned thus far, culminating in 바카라사이트 moral dilemmas of Gaudy Night. Should Harriet throw her lot in with 바카라사이트 detective, Wimsey, or pursue literature above all else? Can she have both? Can any woman? Might 바카라사이트 academic life wi바카라사이트r 바카라사이트 soul? And on 바카라사이트 o바카라사이트r hand, can anyone engaged in any kind of intellectual holy orders be a true partner, much less a muse, without being wholly consumed?
This ground is and sacred to many. Indeed, one friend even warned me that if I didn’t enjoy Gaudy Night, “we may never be able to speak again”. (Spoiler: we’re fine.) So let me offer instead only one speculation: that later novels do not so much shy away from Sayers’ difficult questions as pay homage to 바카라사이트m. In making Vane Wimsey’s true partner and collaborator, Sayers proposes that an academic can best rival 바카라사이트 detective at his own game. Perhaps it is directly in her wake (I haven’t asked 바카라사이트m) that 바카라사이트se authors have created for 바카라사이트ir own detectives a marriage of true minds. Lucky us – 바카라사이트y let us imagine having 바카라사이트 best of both worlds.
Emily Michelson is senior lecturer in history at 바카라사이트?University of St Andrews.
后记
Print headline:?Cops and scholars?
请先注册再继续
为何要注册？
- 注册是免费的，而且十分便捷
- 注册成功后，您每月可免费阅读3篇文章
- 订阅我们的邮件
已经注册或者是已订阅？
