It’s a Crime: The Cons and Pros of Stereotypes
Stereotypes = bias = prejudice. So what on earth is their literary merit?
I put the ‘cons’ first because that is how stereotypes are most often depicted these days. If your thinking is stereotypical, that’s not good. It’s typically seen as shallow and misleading. Most companies will give employees, especially those involved in recruitment and appraisal, explicit training on how to avoid the bias embedded in stereotypes. Yet, it is in the very nature of words to acquire connotations and if these are widely shared and combined, they become stereotypes. Say the word professor and it conjures up an image in most people’s minds.
As a result, when a writer introduces a character, she has to know that the descriptors will predispose the reader to think about them in certain ways. If you identify them as a doctor or a drug dealer, assumptions flow. They may be wrong, but they are there. Despite the opioid crisis and the role of prescription drugs, they remain strong.
I love crime fiction, and judging by the bulging shelves in the bookstore, I am not alone. It appeals to me in the same way as the blues. Both show that something intricate and beautiful can flow from what looks like a simple formula. Crime novels are also known as ‘whodunnits.’ At each story’s heart therefore are questions of identity. You just need to look closely enough.
The detective usually proceeds by establishing what is known about the victim and their associates, or other people who can be placed at the scene. Of course, crime fiction is also famed for having serial characters with a succession of stories featuring the same detective and often a ‘sidekick:’ Holmes and Watson, Poirot and Hastings; Morse and Lewis (to cite three from the English tradition). Crime fiction’s commercial success, as well as some of its pleasure, comes from the readers’ getting to know the detective and his/her style of working. Thus, the writer needs to create a character, and ideally do it quickly. Stereotypes can be part of that process, but sometimes they work best by subversion.
Over time, certain stereotypes of the detective have established themselves. Probably, the most common is that the detective is a troubled soul. This is often most visible in their personal lives. Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe has a liking for liquor that is equally displayed by his hard-boiled successors, although in the case of Ian Rankin’s Rebus or Colin Dexter’s Morse (more par-boiled than hard-boiled, some would say), beer probably takes pride of place. Another feature of the detective stereotype is his or her attitude to clothing. Agatha Christie’s Poirot is notoriously particular about his dress and the careful maintenance of his moustache.
Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta is a snappy dresser with an eye for designer gowns. But many fictional investigators are slovenly. Besides Morse and Rebus, one could add R.D. Wingfield’s ‘Jack’ Frost and equally, Ann Cleaves’ Vera Stanhope and Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone. In Vera’s case, she is usually to be seen wearing the same baggy coat and floppy hat, and Milhone has been known to trim her own hair with nail scissors.
This brings me back to my main point. Each element of description conveys additional meaning through stereotypical framing. This is particularly revealing in terms of gender. When Chandler and Dashiell Hammett were pioneering the hard-boiled detective style, tough guys were badged by their dedication to solving the crime, and fashion was no concern of theirs. Half a century later, female detectives tended to have a story to tell about proving they could do the job as well as any man, and caring more about the case than anything else (including gourmet food and chic clothes). This was one of their ways of claiming the role. Of course, it depends on how you wear your trench-coat.
A very different brand of detective fiction tied to stereotypical views of women is anchored in Agatha Christie’s Jane Marple: the conspicuously unremarkable spinster from the small village of St Mary Mead, who notices everything. Not only is this amateur more capable of solving the mystery than the professionals, but she draws her insights from village life. At the same time, Christie is often cited as a prime example of the English crime writer who uses the following formula. A crime has occurred that violates the overriding sense of order and harmony within a community and the perpetrator is either an outsider or someone who can no longer find a place within that community. Within this framework, she was apt to use ethnic as well as gender stereotyping.
Her contemporary, Dorothy L. Sayers, in contrast, is praised for her creation of the female sleuth, Harriet Vane, and several elements of her novel Gaudy Night (1935) take aim at the then popular, Nazi doctrines. Nevertheless, even in the more recent vogue for female forensic pathologists such as Scarpetta, who use science to enable the dead to testify against their attacker, the motif of giving women jobs that challenge stereotypical femininity continues.
Another key facet of crime writing is pacing; you need the plot to keep moving. And this is a key way stereotyping works for the writer. Stereotype is the ideal red herring. It leads the reader to jump to a whole set of conclusions that subsequent pages can prove false. The troubled, socially inept loner, who works in a veterinary pharmacy and has access to powerful tranquillisers, is an ideal early suspect precisely because stereotyping makes you suspect. It’s always more chilling to discover that the person doing truly bad things is the one who appears so good.
I recently read one of Mark Billingham’s novels featuring the London detective Tom Thorne. Cry Baby (2020) was interesting in several ways because while it is the seventeenth in the series, it takes readers back to an earlier phase of Thorne’s career, and sets its action at the time of the 1996 European soccer championship finals. There are lots of references to the games and the clash between England and Scotland parallels the feud between Thorne and his Scottish superior officer. But most importantly, the entire novel hinges on gender stereotypes. As its title suggests, masculinity is one of the crimes under investigation, the chief being the abduction of a young boy.
As a topic, children tend to raise the emotional temperature. Parents are rarely fully rational about their own kids. When our feelings run high, we are drawn more readily to stereotypes. In this case, the abduction occurs in a park when the two boys are allowed to run off and play ‘hide-and-seek’ in a wooded area, and only one returns. Each boy is the only child of a harassed single mother and it’s the boys’ relationship that has brought the two, very different, women together. Seven-year-old Kieron is the child of a working-class woman, Cat, who was already pregnant by another man when she married a volatile, petty criminal, currently in jail. Kieron’s playmate, Josh, comes from a more affluent background, although his mother, Maria, has split from his father, and Josh has become increasingly troubled since the separation. Cat has entrusted Kieron to Maria while she goes to the nearby public toilets, but Maria is momentarily distracted by her need for a cigarette. She has been trying to quit. Thus, when Kieron is taken, there is recrimination, and the question — ‘what makes a good mother?’ looms with all its gender (and racial and class) stereotypes.
Billingham is also prepared to address issues of sexuality. Early in the investigation, Thorne’s Scottish superior pushes for the arrest of Cat’s neighbour, largely because he is gay, and even ensures that news of the arrest is leaked to the press to increase the pressure on the suspect. Thus, Billingham uses the false stereotypical assumption that homosexual men are more likely to be paedophiles, but deploys it as the belief of a bigoted and negatively presented character. Thorne opposes the arrest and when the suspect is murdered, he feels justified in complaining about his boss’s to the divisional commander. At the same time, playing upon the fact that many readers will have read other novels in the series (and thus know how the relationship between Thorne and the forensic scientist Hendricks develops), he offers a chance for his audience to observe their first meeting and to enjoy the dramatic irony of Thorne’s obliviousness to Henricks’ gay persona. Here, too, stereotype is both invoked and debunked.
Ultimately, however, Cry Baby is about the damage done by masculinity in all its stereotypical dimensions, be it emotional repression or the use of violence. Thorne himself is a flawed man, as he struggles to come to terms with his failed marriage. The Metropolitan Police is riddled with sexism (football, beer, and male banter are amply displayed), although Billingham’s depiction is less disturbing than recent revelations of police misconduct have been following the abduction, rape, and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer on March 3rd this year. The two young boys in the novel are in the process of being damaged by the gender expectations placed upon them. In captivity, Kieron tells himself that big boys don’t cry, and plots his escape through fantasies of the powerful male superheroes he loves. And of course, there is the damage done to women by masculinity. As with so many good crime novels, the crime solved is smaller than the crime revealed.
