Glenn Alvarez

Glenn Alvarez

Engl fws 1147

Christina Black

The Progression of more average detectives and believable plots

            Are detectives presented across detective fiction really that far off from resembling average persons? Todorov once argued that as detective fiction further developed, the detective became more vulnerable and prone to danger. This could also be interpreted to mean that if each detective became more vulnerable then it presented a departure from what would be considered an ideal detective.  By departing more and more from this perfect detective, the later detectives were able to become more like average persons.  More average characters then led to more believable plots in detective literature. This project seeks to show such progression by providing illustrations of characters from readings covered throughout the semester such as Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (published in 1841), Doyle’s “ The Adventure of the Bruce Partington Plans” (published in 1908), Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (published in 1930), Greene’s Our Man in Havana (published in 1958), Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (published in 1963), and Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (published in 2007).

            My project shows the progression of detectives across detective literature by portraying them in a linear fashion. The linear fashion was intended to resemble the linear evolution from apes to humans. Since Dupin and Sherlock represent the earliest detectives covered during this semester, they are first in this line of detective evolution. A very striking realization of my illustrations for Dupin and Sherlock is that they are the exact same picture. However, when the pictures are looked at more closely, there is a slight different in their sizes. This is intended to show that Sherlock pretty much shared the exact same “ideal” qualities that Dupin possessed. The Sherlock drawing is a bit smaller than the Dupin drawing because in “ The Adventure of the Bruce Partington Plans”, Sherlock did go into the house of the criminal. Though he entered into what could be considered a zone of danger, he was invulnerable to it because the criminal wasn’t present at his home. I also intended to depict Dupin and Sherlock with the most amount of details in order to show that they were the most “perfect” detectives. By “perfect” I mean that they were the ones that exhibited the most analytical power and the most invulnerability from all the other detectives and spies that were discussed throughout the semester.

            Unlike Dupin or Sherlock, Samuel Spade carried out his job for a living rather than just a simple hobby.  Unlike my illustrations for Dupin and Sherlock, my Samuel Spade drawing shows a background. The background was intended to show that in Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, the detective isn’t that great and he’s not bigger than life. The building behind Spade is supposed to signify the place where he works at.

            The transition from Spade to Wormold shows a difference in careers and feelings.  Although both Wormold and Spade worked for a living, there is a clear difference in their careers and in their motivation to make a living. Unlike Spade, Wormold was not a detective but rather a “spy”. Inspired by his friend Hasselbacher to lie, Wormold carried out this huge lie of his “Caribbean spy network” just to make a higher income to be able to provide his daughter with a better life. Wormold’s daughter Lily is basically the main thing in Wormold’s life and that’s what my illustration seeks to portray. My illustration shows Wormold hugging Lily with the Caribbean spy network and the vacuum cleaners store behind them. This is intended to show that Wormold worked in everything that is sowed behind him just because he deeply loved his daughter.  

The transition from Wormold to Alec Leamas is the most shocking both in the texts and in the illustrations. In Le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Leamas participates in this huge master plan created by Control. The plan required the Circus to relieve Leamas of his duties and for him to live with barely any money at all, for him to meet a girl named Liz, and for him to serve as a defector. Unlike all the other protagonists that came before him, Leamas is the first to show major signs of weakness such as having “been ill, [with] some fever” ( Le Carre 186), getting arrested, and beaten up by “sods” ( 159).  He was also the first protagonist who truly fell in love. But most shockingly, Leamas was the first one to die. My illustration seeks to portray the last scene in Le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold where Leamas is shot. My illustration of the last scene in the novel has a little twist. For instance, Liz is not present and an injured Leamas is crawling towards the Berlin Wall. In my illustration, the blood that came from Leama’s wound actually forms the shape of a heart, which Leamas is partially covering. This is intended to emphasize the fact that Leamas fell in love and he died because of love. Had Leamas not “quite slowly climbed back down the same rungs, until he was standing beside her [Liz]  (225) and just jumped over the wall like Smiley on other spies told him, he would not have been shot. My illustration of Alec Leamas also shows that he was definitely not bigger than life, but was rather part a much bigger world, which he had no control over.

            Like the transition from Wormold to Leamas, the transition from Leamas to Changez was really conspicuous. With hamid’s The reluctant Fundamentalist, detective fiction takes on a whole new perspective. Changez is neither a detective nor a spy. He is just a Pakistani who had come to the US to study at Princeton, had a great job after college, had a love story with an American girl, and is now an university lecturer in his homeland of Pakistan. Throughout his time in New York, Changez experienced racial hatred following the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center.  Through his narration, Changez presented himself as a really average person who had witnessed some disparities in the world and was the victim of racial discrimination and stereotypes as can be implied from when he said, “ you should not imagine that we Pakistanis are all potential terrorists” (183). My illustration seeks to show Changez as a typical college student at Princeton. Although in my illustration Changez is being called an “Arab and a terrorist”, it does not mean that the name-calling happened at Princeton. I just thought that since “ Princeton made everything possible for me [him] that it should serve as Changez’ background.

After looking at the progression of more average characters, what impact does that have on the novels’ plots? If a novel is based on a detective who has god-like thinking abilities (like the case of Dupin) then there’s going to be an unbelievable mystery like that in Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue” where an orangutan was responsible for the murders of two well known ladies in Paris. If a novel is based on the life of a defector who is carrying out a mission during the Cold War, then the plot will most likely resemble something that might happen to an actual defector in real life. If there’s a novel where a protagonist attended college and, had a love story, and was a ictim of  modern day racial stereotypes, then the plot is going to be extremely believable because it’s touching on issues that an average individual might actually experience.

            To conclude, my project seeks to address the progression of more average detectives and believable plots by illustrating the detectives covered throughout the semester and then analyzing their overall impact on their novels’ plots’. By illustrating each detective with somewhat less detail I sought to show how each of them represented a bigger departure from the ideal Dupin and Sherlock.  Then. By analyzing three detectives from different time periods (early, middle, and modern) in detective literature I sought to show that more average detectives lead to more believable plots.

Works Cited

Todorov, Tzvetan “The Typology of Detective Fiction” 1966

Doyle, Arthur C. “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plan” , Dover Publications, 1997

  Hammett, Dashiell. The Maltese Falcon. New York: Vintage, 1992

Greene, Graham. Our Man in Havana. New York: Penguin, 2007.

Poe, Edgar A. “Murders in the Rue Morgue”, Dover Publications, 1991

 Hamid, Mohsin. The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Harcourt, 2007

Le Carré John.  The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Penguin Books, 2012