An
Indian butler is shot on a moonlit island filled with radiant Chinars at the
centre of Kashmir’s dal lake. A German housemaid is clubbed to death on a
Berlin street lined with families of British officers occupying former homes of
wealthy Nazis. An English secretary is strangled in a charming white washed cottage
“amid the scent of roses and jasmine” in sunny Cyprus. A leftwing Arab
Zanzibari is poisoned on a flight from Mombasa throwing suspicion on a small group
of English and American tourists. A picnicking party finds itself stranded on
an Andaman island, amid a raging hurricane, as a killer picks off the guests
one by one. Pirate treasures, Nazi diamonds, Russian spies, gun runners and
Mau-Mau fighters are thrown into alongside love, hate, lust, greed, fear and
revenge in the mix of motives.
As
I moved on from Nairobi following research leads to London and then Delhi, I
found my research sites mirrored in the work of M.M Kaye. I was looking at histories
of civil liberty lawyering across territories that had been part of the British
empire, most of my lawyers were engaged in resisting the powers of a variety of
Emergency regimes, be it during anti-colonial wars of independence (Kenya,
Malaysia, Cyprus); struggles of postcolonial state formation (India, Pakistan,
Sri Lanka), or during military occupation (postwar Europe). These mobile
lawyers moved across colonial/postcolonial jurisdictions in the course of their
practice, and using their lives as an archive helped think across fields that
are usually historiographicaly distinct. The independence and partitions in
South Asia are seen as distinct from the long drawn out wars of decolonization in
Kenya, Malaysia, Cyprus and Palestine, while the British occupation in post-war
Europe is rarely put together with events in Asia and Africa. Yet they come
together in concert in Kaye’s mystery volumes, as places deeply interconnected.
Lt. Colonel Robert Melville in Death inBerlin for instance has served in Egypt and is headed to Malaya after
Berlin (Berlin counts as a home posting, according to his horrified wife). The
murder of Monica Ford’s brother in a Mau Mau in Kenya is a turning point in the
plot of Death in Cyprus.
These
interconnections are not a coincidence, Kaye’s murder mysteries are based on
notes she had taken while following countries where her husband served as a
British military officer during the 2nd World War and after. Death in Berlin (1955) is dedicated to
“army wives like (herself) who have followed the drum”. Mary Margaret (Mollie)
Kaye was very much a child of the Raj. Born to an intelligence officer in the
British Indian Army, M.M Kaye returned to Simla in 1941 after a decade of
living in London and earning a living as a writer and children’s book
illustrator. Like many of her heroines, she got engaged a British Indian army
officer in a whirlwind romance, having two children before his divorce with his
wife in Ireland got finalized. As she would later explain, “We just couldn't wait. Had it been
peacetime, I wouldn't have done it because of the way I had been brought up.
But these were the pressures of war." Kaye’s considerable fame came from
her hugely popular Indian historical novels, The Far Pavilions and the Shadow of the Moon which are both
set in the aftermath of the Indian Rebellion of 1857 (Kaye’s great uncle Sir
John Kaye was a leading historian of the Revolt of 1857 and the First Afghan
War). However, her lesser known works include a set of six murder mysteries set
in India (Andamans and Kashmir), Kenya, Germany, Cyprus and Zanzibar.
Read
together they tell a story of an Empire in retreat, carrying it’s flotsam and
jetsam with it. Discussing their contemporaries in a Srinagar ball on the eve
of Indian independence, Major Hugo Creed, dispassionately notes that the
eccentric Lady Candera, was a “special brand
in the Indian Empire. Next year there will be no Indian Empire, so that brand
will become extinct- along with Johnnies and Helens and their ilk. They won’t
go to ground in England, because it will not be able to give them what they
want, so the Lady Candera’s will retire to infest places like Cyprus and
Maderia and the Johnnies and Helens will probably get themselves to Kenya”.
As recent scholarship has shown, tools of colonial governance including the
managing of anti-colonial emergencies were exported from region to region.
Binyamin Blum for instance shows how Palestinian policemen and forensic practices
were exported to Kenya, and as were counter-insurgency tactics from Malaya. The
legal infrastructure in place in East Africa and South-east Asia, were often
transplants of law codes developed in colonial India.
Kaye’s
cast of characters is always led by a plucky damsel (often in distress and a
silent, strong, sardonic hero, usually with a job in military intelligence.
Their frequent clashes animate the investigation, with slaps, rough kissing and
making sounds like “infuriated and frightened kitten’. Military men (bluff and
genial, old and doddery, young and resentful); military wives, ranging from Mrs
Leslie in Berlin , “the model of an army wife (“one knew instinctively that she
referred to her husband’s regiment as “My regiment”, to the regimental wives as
“my wives”, did her duty as to Welfare, and all that concerned the good of the
battalion, played an excellent game of bridge, and adequate game of tennis and
gold, read all the bestsellers, and was sincerely convinced that there was only
one regiment in the British army that counted”) to those that absolutely hated
army life, Stella Melville for whom the East was “uncivilized and frightening).
There are several predatory women on the lookout for other men’s husbands
(Death in Cyprus actually has four); eccentric spinsters like Miss Pond in
Death in Kashmir who wore in “addition to an anxious expression, a haphazard
collection of garments that gave the impression of being flung together in a
hurry…including short buttoned boots, a batik scarf, mustard yellow gloves and
several assorted beads”; middle aged secretaries in love with their
bosses, an occasional loud American or an extremely Anglicized “native” who can
mix with the English such as Sayyide Zuhra-binti-Salem, who the heroines
discovers with some shock, speaks seven languages, has a BA degree and was “considerably
better educated than herself or for that matter the majority of European women”.
While superficially similar to say Orwell’s cast of colonials in Burmese Days, written several decades
later, Kaye’s gaze is sympathetic of the dying breed. Reviewing Johnny and
Helen Warrender, the hardrinking polo playing office of the Lunjore Lancers and
his social climbing wife in Death in
Kashmir as “their world crumbled around them” with the mechanization of the
cavalry, the “makrs of dissipation and weakness” and “discontented middle age
settled upon them”. India was to be
given her freedom and there was “nothing left for the Johnnies and Helens
except memories and debts”. Kaye’s heroine notes, “there is always something
more pitiful in the destruction of petty but prized possessions than in the crash
of dynasties, for the latter is at least spectacular and dramatic, while the former
is of no more account in the eye of history than the breaking of the child’s
toy”. Trapped into an army routine, Stella Melville draws a quivering breath
and says “I hate the army! I hate it, Oh why did Robert have to be a soldier?
Why couldn’t he have been a farmer or a pig-breeder or a stockbroker or
anything but a solider?.....the dirt, the dust, the flies, the dark secret
faces, the horrible heat and the awful club life?..the awfulness of brassy
sunshine?
The
advantage of a detective novel, is no one needs to be what they seem, and the
easy stereotypes could actually be an effective disguise. So the rosy cheeked
Bonzo and Alec, 18 year old twin military officers in Kashmir who spend most of
their time skiing and wooing the heroine, are Boris and Alexis with a White
Russian mother, and possible communist sympathies? Why passions seeth under the
regimental Memsahib’s sensible tweeds. Is the bluff and hearty colonel, looking
forward to his retirement on an pension in an converted “worker’s flat” or can
his loyalties be tempted by financial game? If the crime in the detective novel
arises out of social conditions, the “malice domestic” in Kaye’s novels arise
out of the temptations of Empire.
The Occupation Detective Novel: Berlin
as a Space of Emergency
Written
during the travels of an army wife, it is no surprise that every site is one of
a legal exception/Emergency. Her two Indian novels are set in Kashmir and the Andaman
Islands. Kashmir, was a semi-autonomous princely state in 1947 operating
outside of colonial law, soon to be drawn into a long drawn out international
conflict between India and Pakistan with successive emergency regimes in both
Indian and Pakistani administered Kashmir. The Andamans, a penal colony in the
Indian Ocean, as Uditi Sen argues, was imagined as “terra nullius” open to
colonial/postcolonial authority and transformation. Cyprus and Kenya are both
sites of violence wars of decolonization and draconian laws, while Zanzibar
(though semi-autonomous) is on the brink of revolution.
Novels written in the wake of an occupying
army adds Berlin and postwar Germany to the mix of sites of decolonization in
interesting ways. Postwar Berlin was divided into sectors run by different
allied powers and was a site of jurisdictional conflict. While military authorities
exercised jurisdiction over uniformed servicemen, their authority over
civilians remained ambiguous. These tensions played out in the real life case
of Madsen v Kinsella, where the glamorous Brooklyn born wife of an American
serviceman was convicted of murdering her pilot husband in occupied Germany.
Mrs Madsen’s filed a habeas corpus petition arguing that the US Court for the
Allied High Commission in Germany did not have the jurisdiction to try her. A
suspect, like Madmoiselle Beljame in Death
in Berlin might easily disappear into the Soviet sector, never to reappear.
While
Kaye’s gaze on Asia and Africa is appreciative of the colour and natural
beauty, the “shattered ruins” of Berlin remind her of the “stupidity of it all!
The waste and horror of man’s inhumanity to man”. The devastation is there to
see, unlike in the British colony, where the devastation is imagined in the
future. The naïve heroine in Death in
Zanzibar is reminded that of the romanticism of the colony, “It is the only
place I have yet hit upon where black and white and every shade in between’em
appear to be able to live together in complete friendliness and harmony with no
color bar. It is a living proof and practical demonstration that it can be
done, They are all, whatever their race or caste or religion, loyal subjects of
His Highness the Sultan..but it won’t last, In the end one …of them will manage
to destroy it…Progress is a Lout”. In Berlin, Britain’s changing role in the
world is underlined, as Norah Leslie, the Brigadier’s wife confesses that
German’s terrified her, not because of their politics, but their industry. In
contrast to postwar Britain with its welfare state, a country “too intent on its
tea breaks, five day week and next pay rise”, the German workmen were willing
and eager to work flat out, they are finding their feet and bursting with
confidence. The changing world stage would requires special measures that might
seem “un British”, a young schoolboy told off for snooping as “not British”
austerely replies, “ “the secret service has to snoop. Where’d us British be if
we didn’t? Beat by the Russians and the Japanese, and the FBI, that’s what”. As AWB Brian Simpson charts, the 1950s, saw Britain trying to simultaneously build a postwar order with lipservice
to human rights and the rule of law, while trying to keep it’s colonial
territories and counter-insurgencies outside their jurisdiction.
Crime in the Colony: Empire and the
Golden Age Detective Novel
"Take
all this business about Kenya," said Major Palgrave. "Lots of chaps
gabbing away who know nothing about the place! Now I spent fourteen years of my
life there. Some of the best years of my life, too."
Despite Major Palgrave’s central role in the
plot of Agatha Christie’s A CaribbeanMystery, the readers never do get to know much about the “business in
Kenya” or apart from the convenience of drowning, a chance remark by a Venezuelan
tourist and a blackmailing housekeeper, do we know much of the Caribbean
either.
In contrast, empire, in all its
forms, courses through early English detective fiction. Wilkie Collin’s The Moonstone, which set the rules for the early genre, centered on a diamond
(named after the Hindu god Chandra) that was stolen during the Siege of
Seringapatnam and a troupe of Indian jugglers. Dr Watson meets Holmes after
being injured in service in the 2nd Afghan War. The Indian Rebellion
of 1857 drives the plot in the Sign of Four. Sumatran bacteria, Lime house
Opium dens, comrades from the Boer Wars, mysterious Malays and Calcutta trained
snake charmers menace who young women with swamp adders . It existed as part of
the landscape, as a racial stereotypes, as a signifier of criminality, of
oriental exoticism and shaping the political economy. An Indian student, Daulat
Ras (“quiet and methodical”) is one of the key suspects in the Adventure of the
Three Students, while the key antagonist in the Sign of Four is a blow dart
wielding Tonga, from the Andaman Islands. Laura Otis even suggests that Holmes
is the creation of a physician, who see’s the detective as protecting the
“British nation” from the ills of contamination of the empire. Holmes’s himself declares that he spent two
years in Tibet after his “death” at the Reichenbach Falls (an episode
delightfully reimagined by Jamyang Norbu in the Mandala of Sherlock Homes).
In
contrast, the Empire recedes from view in the Golden Age Detective Novel. Take
for example, the work of Agatha Christie (whose first husband was born in
Peshawar and the second worked as an archeologist in Iraq and Syria), the
empire functions largely as a backstage to remove characters from the scene.
Never doe’ll sons are sent off to Australia (Dumb Witness), mining prospects in
Africa are occasionally "motives for murder (A Pocketful of Rye),
grandchildren in Ceylon remove an eyewitness from the scene (4:50 fromPaddington) returning memsahibs struggle with the absence of a fleet of
servants (Mrs McGinty’s Dead) and a policeman retiring from Malaysia (perhaps
service during the insurgency) investigates a serial killer in an English
Village (Murder in Easy). Earnest archaeologists (Murder in Mesopotamia), women
politicians (Appointment with Death) and writers of salacious novels (Death on the Nile) may voyage to the east, but travel with a self-contained world of
Home Counties Englishman and a smattering of temperamental Europeans. Historian Christopher Prior contrasting Christie’s pre-war and postwar fiction
notes a general trend where the postwar books showed a spike in the number of
murderers who had connections to or were born in the colonies. The
“natives” are clearly ruled out as suspects, though occasionally a clever
murderer might disguise themselves with a turban. I
pick Christie as the key example, because she is the third most published
writer in the English language, outsold
only by William Shakespeare (and the Bible!) and sells more in India than in
the UK at present. In contrast, her contemporaries with the exception of the
New Zealand settings of Ngaio Marsh (a New Zealander herself) limit themselves
to London squares and English country houses.
The
central conceit of picking a Belgian detective, was Christie’s (and Poirot’s)
self-awareness of how contemptuously the English viewed foreigners. Poirot
self-consciously becomes more foreign, when he wants suspects to under-estimate
him. Christie’s pre-war works are full of casual anti-Semitic and racist
observances, made bearable only by the ruthless decimation of European
nationalities, the French are mendacious, the Italians and Spaniards
temperamental, the Americans are flashy and tasteless, and one character is
gently dismissed with the words “Poor creature, she’s a Swede”. Significantly, unlike say Holmes, race and
nationality are never correlated to criminality. It was usually the “Old School
Tie” wearing establishment Englishman or the gentle paragon of the Women’s
Institute who was pouring strychnine into the soup.
The one stock character is the
retired colonial army officer/official, neatly summed up as Miss Marple listens
to Major Palgrave drone on “somewhat
uninteresting recollections of a lifetime”,
“
It was a routine with which she was well
acquainted. The locale varied. In the past, it had been predominantly India.
Majors, Colonels, Lieutenant-Generals - and a familiar series of words: Simla.
Bearers. Tigers. Chota Hazri - Tiffin. Khitmagars, and so on. With Major
Palgrave the terms were slightly different. Safari. Kikuyu. Elephants. Swahili.
But the pattern was essentially the same. An elderly man who needed a listener
so that he could, in memory, relive days in which he had been happy. Days when
his back had been straight, his eyesight keen, his hearing acute. Some of these
talkers had been handsome soldierly old boys, some again had been regrettably
unattractive, and Major Palgrave, purple of face, with a glass eye, and the
general appearance of a stuffed frog, belonged in the latter category.”
Indeed, the stock character is so familiar, it
allows a villain to disguise themselves as an Anglo Indian colonel with a
turbaned Indian butler, choleric temper, gout and tables laden with Benares
brass. But as Poirot points out, the “retired Anglo Indian army officer, a
well-known comic figure with a liver and choleric temper” is “bogus, very bogus”. Empire is both an exit and a disguise.
Hickory
Dickory Death: Decolonizing London
I
want to briefly turn to Hickory DickoryDock (1955), the one Christie novel that has a sizable
number of non-White characters (apart
from Death Comes as the End, which is set in Thebes in 2000 BC). An
international student’s boarding house in London (built by knocking down
through two Victorian townhouses) is disturbed by a series of mysterious thefts
of items ranging from a diamond ring, a stethoscope, lightbulbs and bath salts.
Set in the 1950s, it’s one of the few to reflect the changing composition of
University of London students, it’s inhabitants include two Indians studying
political science, a Jamaican law student, a West African, an Egyptian, an
American Fulbright scholar, several Frenchwomen, a stolid Dutchman and two
unnamed Turks and an Iraqi. Owned by a Greek proprietress (often drunk) and excitable
Italian staff, it’s managed by a cheerful Englishwoman just returned from
Singapore, which meant she “understood racial differences and people’s
susceptibilities”. Scholarly appreciation of Christie, gingerly steps around Hickory Dickory Dock, embarrassed by the
racial stereotypes and the extremely improbably plot that leads to 3 murders
within 48 hours and the plausibility of three-way switch between a bottle of
morphine, a bottle of bicarbonate of soda and a bottle of boracic acid. The TV adaptation changes the settings to the
1930s and erases all the non-White characters from the script.
This is one of the few Christie’s
that gives a sense of a changing United Kingdom, and there are ways of reading
her stereotypical representations against the grain . As Poirot’s secretary Miss Lemon remarks, “half
our nurses in our hospitals seem to be black nowadays….and I understand much
pleasanter and more attentive than the English ones”. The expansion of the
National Health Service at the end of the Second World War had led to a severe
shortage in medical personnel, which was met by increased recruitment of nurses
from Jamaica and the Bahamas. Beginning with arrivals on Windrush, the Carribeannurses and medical professionals were integral to building the NHS and faced
both arduous working conditions and racism. The passing acknowledgement in
Christie’s murder mystery, comes up sharply in contrast with say the absence of
Caribbean nurses in Call the Midwife,
a contemporary TV show depicting the lives of midwives in East London in the
1950s (the first West Indian nurse joins the cast in Series Seven). With
increasing numbers of students from the colonies/former colonies coming to the
UK to study, London increasingly became a hub of anti-colonial activism in the
1950s, allowing the creation of networks across regions and colonies. Mitra
Sharafi’s new work shows, several were studying law in the Inns of Court and
would return to lead movements for political and social change in their homes. While colonial law students had been coming to London since the late 19th century, the second world war widened the demographics and politics. Wartime travel restrictions changed the requirements for legal training
in London. Instead of spending two years in London to train at the Inns of
Court, prospective students could do the first year of coursework in their own countries and
only spend nine months in the UK keeping their dinners and giving the
qualifying exams. These changes opened up the profession to wider demographic, including women and students from working class backgrounds, including several lawyers who I follow in my current research. Unlike the sons of merchants, colonial officials and landed gentry who came to study in the late 19th and early 20th century, the 1940s saw children of schoolteachers, railway engine drivers and small shopkeepers making their way to LOndon. It is not surprising that Elizabeth Johnston, the
Jamaican lawyer is described by Poirot as the most intelligent person in the
hostel, is both studying law and is found to be card carrying member of the
Communist Party. This also makes student hostels, like the one on Hickory Road, a site for police surveillance
Christopher Prior classifies thenon-white cast into one of three stereotypes: arrogant and condescending;
simple and credulous and excitable and temperamental. Yet, each of Christie’s
stereotypes can be inverted to reveal something about the politics of the time.
Take Elizabeth Johnstone, the Jamaican law student dismisses her American
housemate’s feeling that something is wrong, as “her American way of thought.
They are all the same, these Americans, nervous, apprehensive, suspecting every
kind of foolish thing! Look at the fools they have made of themselves with
their witch hunts, their hysterical spy mania and their obsession over
communism”. As a left wing Carribean student, Johnstone is acutely aware of the
McCarthy era witch hunts which were actively criticized for their departure
from ordinary legal norms in London’s leftists circles. Pamplets were written
on the Rosenberg prosecution and the Smith Act cases, and student groups debated
and followed the American “Red Scare”.
The West African student, Akibombo, discomfits
his housemates by suggesting the murder is the result of a blood feud or an
honor killing. While much of his description is a crude caricature, the actual
solution involves convoluted family relationships, dressed up in modern
scientific language. Finally, the Indian
medical student, Chandra Lal is dismissed as a suspect by Poirot, given that
his mind is entirely occupied by “politics and persecution mania”, and indeed
Lal is in full form, threatening to cause an international incident when his
room is searched as part of the murder investigation and calling out his
housemates for borderline racist humor. When the housemates express surprise at
a “seemingly senseless” damage to Elizabeth Johnstone’s notes, Lal becomes “excited
and voluble” pointing out this is “oppression, deliberate oppression of native
races, contempt and prejudice, colour prejudice”. Christie intends Lal to be a
figure of caricature, but reading him in the 21st century, shows him
to be astute, analogizing the narrative of “senseless violence” with the
British who claim to not know, “Why the Mau Mau? Why does Egypt resent the Suez
Canal”. The answers, he suggests are clear, well authenticated examples of
racial oppression. With Indian independence, the postcolonial Indian state had
emerged as a powerful voice in international affairs pointing out racial discrimination
and arguing for decolonization. It successfully passed a General Assemblyresolution condemning the anti-Indian legislation in South Africa, was engaged in drafting the UDHR, drew
attention to atrocities carried out by colonial authorities in Malaysia and
East Africa and sharply responded to racial discrimination against it’s
citizens in the UK. The British state was both embarrassed and exasperated by
Indian use of the international institutions and media, and believed them to by
hypocritical given its military action in Hyderabad, Goa and Kashmir, and
limiting of rights of its own citizens through constitutional amendments. As
mysterious thefts plague the hostel, the other Indian student Gopal Ram just “smiles
and says material possessions do not matter” but only because nothing has yet
been stolen from him.
My posts so far have largely looked at murder mysteries written by British authors with colonial settings, in my last post I will turn to a set of detective stories written by Indians, Singaporeans and Kenyans set in the same period.
