Horace Dorrington, Criminal-Detective: Investigating the Re-Emergence of the Rogue in Arthur Morrison's The Dorrington Deed-Box (1897)

Abstract

Regarding The Dorrington Deed-Box (1897), Arthur Morrison’s critically neglected second contribution to the post–Sherlock Holmes detective short story genre, the author argues that as Dorrington is both a detective and a criminal, and the victim is the narrator, the stories subvert the usual reassuring moral and formal conventions of the late–Victorian detective genre. After Sherlock Holmes’s “death” in December 1893, many magazines were desperate to poach the readers who had developed an appetite for Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective fic tion. Arthur Morrison’s Martin Hewitt, the most well known and critically appreciated of the Holmes imitators, was the Strand Magazine’s swift replacement for Holmes, appearing in March 1894. Morrison, best known for his naturalistic material analyses of the monotonous poverty and criminality of East End London slum life—Tales of Mean Streets (1894) and A Child of the Jago (1896)—produced with Hewitt his first detective stories. However, his less well-known second foray into detective fiction, The Dorrington Deed-Box (1897), deserves further scrutiny. Horace Dorrington appeared in only six stories that were first published in the Windsor Magazine from January to June 1897 and then collected in an edition published later the same year by Ward, Lock. Morrison’s biographer, Peter Keating, describes the stories as an “unusual, if hardly successful” addition to the late–Victorian detective canon; and indeed, they have all but disappeared from critical accounts of the genre (33). Dorrington, a “private enquiry agent” from the firm Dorrington and Hicks, is both detective and criminal (Morrison, Dorrington 18). Dorrington’s detective work merely affords him the cover of respectability and the opportunity to exploit his clients. He is always on the lookout for an “...opening for any piece of rascality by which he might make more of the case than by serving his client loyally” and, throughout his adventures, is seen lying to, stealing from, blackmailing, and attempting to kill various clients and criminals (65). This article provides the first sustained analysis of the Dorrington stories. Dorrington is called here a criminal-detective, the oxymoron deliberately emphasizing the unusual and unsettling ways in which his character functions both as source of the stories’ crimes and as the supposed provider of solutions to the crimes. These terms and functions are, of course, essentially at odds with one another and emphasize one way that the Dorrington collection draws on, but transgresses, the usual political and narrative rules of the genre. This article argues that, despite the stories’ relative unpopularity and current obscurity, they deserve critical reconsideration because of the number of ways in which Dorrington’s character sub verts the usual moral, formal, and political conventions of the late–Victorian detective genre. It has become a commonplace in the study of crime fiction for critics to argue that the late–Victorian detective emerged as a new kind of hero invented to assuage the types of fears common to a predominantly middle-class urban readership. Ernest Mandel, for example, has claimed that “the detective story is the realm of the happy ending. The criminal is always caught. Justice is always done. Crime never pays. Bourgeois legality, bourgeois values and bourgeois society always triumph in the end. It is soothing, socially integrating literature despite its concern with crime, violence and murder” (47). It is also widely argued that both panoptic knowledge and a skilled deployment of technologies of sight allow the detective to read and decode both the physiognomy of the true criminal and the mysteries of the streets. Holmes’s skill, for instance, is to observe physical “data” and use his interpretive skill to transform it “into a coherent system of signs, a text identifying the malefactor” (Stowe 368). In other words, despite the Holmes stories’ preoccupation with crime and criminality, they present late–Victorian London as an ultimately “benevolent and knowable universe”—a world that may contain confusion or chaos but that can be rectified by the superior vision of the detective (Grella 101). The detective’s skill, however, is only partly responsible for the widespread critical argument that crime fiction is ultimately conservative and reassuring. Perhaps the most reassuring convention of the late–Victorian detective story is the fact that readers trust completely the detective’s moral code and conceptions of duty and justice. As Watson frequently remarks, and critics have agreed, Holmes is “a benefactor of the race” with a strong moral code (Conan Doyle, “RedHeaded League” 468). In the Dorrington collection, by contrast, the detective’s skills are put to malignant, self-serving uses; the detective/criminal binary becomes blurred; and the rule of law is almost totally absent, thus destabilizing the genre’s reassuring nature and readers’ conception of trust, morality, justice, and the way that society operates. This article examines the effects of these generic inversions on late–Victorian readers. A number of ideas and questions guide the following analysis of the Dorrington stories. First, given that the Dorrington stories have all but dropped out of critical accounts of crime writing, the extent to which an amoral detective in fiction fundamentally upsets various narrative and ideological conventions of the genre is interrogated, and the extent to which this makes such stories difficult or unpalatable for readers and critics is probed. Also examined are the ways in which the Dorrington stories interact with, and at times invert, various theories and ideas concerning the moral character of London’s neighborhoods, fears about appearance and disguise in the late–Victorian city, and the mythology of the detective hero as popularized by Holmes. A number of methodological concepts frame the analysis of these issues. By unconventionally attributing duplicity and criminality to the figure of the detective rather than simply to a separate and containable criminal, 8 CLUES • Volume 28, Number 2 Morrison speaks to, but also plays with and forcibly subverts, the conventions and politics of the detective genre. These stories unsettle Foucault’s contention that “from [Emile] Gaboriau onwards” crime writing concentrated upon “the struggle between two pure minds—the murderer and the detective” as the signifiers detective and criminal begin to lose register (69). Similarly, Mandel’s claim for a “dialectical somersault” in which, in the nineteenth century, the picaresque rogue of early British crime writing is replaced as hero by “yesterday’s villainous representative of authority,” the detective—clearly does not work in relation to these stories (46 –48). In the Dorrington stories, where the law is almost totally absent, and terms such as hero and villain, guilt and innocence are blurred, readers are projected into a morally confusing position of complicity. The Dorrington stories operate in ways that also challenge Tzvetan Todorov’s ideas about the formal and narrative rules of the genre. Todorov famously characterizes detective fiction in terms of the use and occurrence of two competing and opposing narrative points of view— the story of the crime and the story of the investigation. These two separate yet over lapping narrative strands are further characterized by Todorov as the story of “what really happened” and the story of “how the reader (or the narrator) has come to know about it” (45). The detective story “in its purest form,” Todorov argues, begins in a temporal place after the crime has occurred but before the investigation has begun (44). The pages that separate the discovery of the crime from the revelation of the criminal, Todorov explains, “are devoted to a slow apprenticeship: we examine clue after clue, lead after lead” (45). This second story, the story of the investigation, “is often told by a friend of the detective who explicitly acknowledges that he is writing a book” (45). Because the crime has already occurred, the characters in the story of the investigation are insulated from dangerous narrative space containing the actual crime. As Todorov puts it : “Nothing can happen to them” (44). The Holmes stories established a typical narrative formula for many detective stories: A client comes to 221B Baker Street and tells Holmes and Watson the story of the crime or the aftereffects of the crime. Watson then narrates the story of the investigation, which, in its course, explains the ways in which the detective discovered how and why the crime occurred. The criminal is usually admonished; the client is informed of the outcome; and, by the story’s close, normal social and moral order is restored. Space in the stories works to reinforce the sense of restoration, as many of the stories close with Holmes and Watson once again safely ensconced in the comfort of Holmes’s parlor, sitting by the fireside and musing about the implications of the case. The Dorrington stories immediately break with the conventional safety of this structure, as a Dorrington victim, James Rigby, narrates them. As Morrison was a reticent and private figure who gave very few interviews and left instructions for his personal papers to be destroyed after his death, one can only speculate about exactly why he may have chosen to experiment with the ideological boundaries of genre. However, because of the originality and complexity of the Dorrington stories’ political, ideological, and formal effects, their inclusion into the canon of late–Victorian crime writing could play an important role in a necessary critical re-evaluation of schematic or reductive interpretations of the politics of detective fiction produced at this time. 1. VICTIM-AS-NARRATOR, “CRIMINAL-DETECTIVE” AS HERO When he was writing the Sherlock Holmes stories, Conan Doyle famously adhered to a set of self-imposed rules, such as keeping