Choice 评论

Most of the British "tec" yarns descending from Sherlock Holmes pair the stopping of the criminal with the restoration of a benevolent moral order--a process that not only reaffirms traditional male hierarchies, but also links social justice to divine justice, with the sleuth serving as god figure. Rowland (Univ. of Greenwich, UK) points out that this formula was too arbitrary, conservative, and phallocentric for the four Golden Age crime writers Agatha Christie, D.L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh and the later P.D. James and Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine, all of whom subvert the continuities in English life. The author argues that instead of weighing material evidence to uphold or promote the status quo, these women used occultism, obsessive family ties, and conceits from literary gothic to build a mood of conflict and collapse. She goes on to point out that the received paradigm, or formula, undergoes still other shocks. Belying its tradition of respectability, the mascu line establishment may promote crime; Ailingham's villains are usually men. Rowland concludes by demonstrating that the regendering can even alter the detective hero: the elderly Hercule Poirot is both foreign and effeminate when introduced; Lord Peter Wimsey first comes before the reader as a shell-shock victim. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. P. Wolfe University of Missouri--St. Louis