Spies and Detectives

            Hi there, reader, wherever you are. I really do hope this life, this time, is a flourishing one for you. I wish you every good fortune, reader. This life can be so mysterious, so unfathomable, it can be overrun by the most insubstantial nightmares; but the nightmares can fall away at the mere drop of a curtain. I hope you don’t fall prey to the nightmares, reader, I hope you wake up and find the sun bright with kindness, and find even in the rain a kind of cleaning. I love you, reader; whoever you are, wherever you may be, whatever obstacles you face, I hope you find your way home.

            A few days ago, I wrote about mysteries, about the possibility of viewing life as a kind of supreme mystery. While I was on the subject, I made some passing remark about detective stories, the way detective stories mirror this way of looking at life, and I’ve got a few more thoughts along that line that I’d like to share with you. Now, the first question that comes up is this: just what is a detective story? I’d say all detective stories follow a fairly universal pattern: first off, and often from the very beginning of the story, we find some great evil in the world, some great wrong that’s been committed. Maybe it’s a murder, maybe it’s a kind of fraud, maybe it’s a terrible plague the gods have let loose on the city as punishment for some unthinkable crime. In any case, the engine that drives the plot is the overwhelming need to find out who is responsible, to restore the natural order to the universe, and the hero is the one who assumes—for whatever reason—the responsibility of putting things right.

The Name of the Rose: good movie, great book.

            But who is the detective? Why does the detective need to set things right? Well, let’s take a look at some representative cases and see what we find. In the most primordial detective story I know of, Oedipus takes on the responsibility because it’s his duty as King of Thebes; the people demand that he finds out what could have caused this terrible plague. Sherlock Holmes solves crimes because he’s bored, because he’s a kind of weirdo who requires a puzzle to solve in order to function in the world at all. William of Baskerville tries to solve the murders in The Name of the Rose because of his experience with the Inquisition, and because he is a relative outsider, a Franciscan monk in a Benedictine monastery. Doc Sportello in Inherent Vice is an investigator by trade, but he’s also a disillusioned longhair as the high tide of the sixties is ebbing off Gordita Beach. So it seems like the detective usually has some social position that makes investigating crimes his or her responsibility, but more importantly, the detective is something of an outsider figure, someone whose isolation places them inexorably at the upper or lower fringes of society.

            This isolation gives the detective an unusual perspective, and in some ways it is the very fact of isolation that allows the detective to see the solutions that those who are enmeshed in the mystery don’t have the detachment to spot. But the detective’s isolation is also a weakness, a source of vulnerability that gives rise to another detective story standby, the femme fatale. It’s an almost inevitable staple of the detective story that the detective can’t help but fall for the femme fatale, who often turns out to be implicated in the crime—and in the most complete form of the story also implicates the detective in the process. At the very least, the femme fatale will break the detective’s heart. But he can never bring himself to regret it.

            Now, there is a variation on the detective story that allows the hero a kind of immunity from the femme fatale: the spy story. Many of the features of the spy and detective genres are the same or similar—except the spy, being a spy, is inevitably an actor by nature. What’s a spy, after all, but the most high-stakes actor of all, the actor who gives up the audience’s applause for the sake of the most demanding performance imaginable? And what is an actor? An actor is someone who can’t be comfortable in their own skin without self-consciously playing a defined role. Actors often have a very limited sense of themselves as real individuals, and so the best actors are the ones who are able to pretend to be anyone, who find living far easier if they are playing their character, putting on a mask. So the spy, as a consummate actor, plays a highly dangerous role—in order to pretend to live like a normal person? No wonder James Bond is immune to the femme fatale—he was only playing the role of the suave man of action! His heart was never in it.

            So, although the detective may be vulnerable as a result of isolation, the spy’s lot—while it may be more glamorous, while it may even be in a way safer—is even worse. Doc Sportello may be vulnerable to Shasta Fay, but Mr. Bond only manages to avoid that vulnerability by alienating himself from himself, to the point that his world becomes one in which it’s impossible even to think of trusting another person.

            There’s probably a moral to this story, but I won’t insult you by drawing out any kind of ultimate meaning from all this mess. I’ll just wish you the best, reader, and hope that you don’t fall prey to too many nightmares during your time here.