murder in jest: serial killing in the post-modern detective story

Murder in Jest: Serial Killing in the Post-Modern Detective StoryAuthor(s): David RichterSource: The Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Winter, 1989), pp. 106-115Published by: Journal of Narrative TheoryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30225238 .

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Murder in Jest: Serial Killing in

the Post-Modern Detective Story David Richter

Since Thomas de Quincey promoted murder to one of the fine arts, those who preferred writing about homicides to perpetrating them have aestheticized the human penchant for slaughter in the detective story. The murder mystery has par- ticipated in most of the vagaries of the history of fiction, expanding to three-volume complexity with Wilkie Collins, searching after psychological detail with Dorothy Sayers. But perhaps the closest literary alliance has been with post-modern fiction; at least many post-modern authors have cast their fiction as mysteries, defined as narratives centering on crime, the affective structure of whose plots depends upon anagnorisis rather than on peripeteia and pathos, discovery rather than rever- sal or tragic act.

What sort of genre is the post-modern mystery? For William V. Spanos, the mystery contains par excellence what the post-modern is rebelling against: ra- tionality, utilitarianism, Aristotelian form. For Michael Holquist, to the contrary, the mystery is attractive to post-modernists precisely because its kitsch sensibility stands in antithetical relation to the central tradition of modernist literature. Despite these differences, Spanos and Holquist agree that the essential unity of post-modern mystery is thematic, that the genre revolves around the use of labyrinths, mirrors, auto-referentiality, and other analogues to the self-conscious use of textuality.' But while I would like to come back to the thematic functions of post-modern mysteries, let us begin with a matter of plot rather than theme2: Is it merely a coincidence that so many of the classic examples of the post-modern mystery-including Friedrich Diirrenmatt's The Pledge, Alain Robbe-Grillet's The Erasers, Jorge Luis Borges's "Death and the Compass," and Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose- all feature plots centering on serial murder?

Serial murder has also been a feature of the classic mystery: aficionados will recall S.S. Van Dine's The Benson Murder Case, in which a series of murders was based on nursery rhymes, or Agatha Christie's The ABC Murders, with an alphabetical pattern, or Ellery Queen's Ten Days Wonder, where the crimes follow the Ten Commandments. In such classic mysteries the literary or textual pattern



Murder in Jest 107

is a way of outfoxing the reader: it conceals another, more significant pattern. In the anti-mystery, however, the function of serial murder is not merely to enhance the surprise of the denouement.

Our starting point is the notion that in post-modern fiction we are meant to be aware of the characters as literary constructs, and this awareness limits the extent to which we can respond to them as representations of real persons who act and suffer and whose suffering evokes a response in us. Now, to some degree, this is true of every mystery, and especially those of the so-called "golden age," when the primary object was to challenge the reader to duplicate from his or her armchair the deduc- tions of the detective. Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen could not provide a puzzle without providing a corpse, but we were not expected to react to the demise of the individual whose body provided the genesis of our entertainment with the lachry- mose sentiments of Dickens's audience at the death of Little Nell. A significant feature of mystery construction was creating a victim with as many actual or poten- tial enemies as possible, a fair field of folk for Hawkshaw the sleuth to interview, a shoal of red herrings to winnow down. Edmund Wilson, who didn't care who had killed Roger Ackroyd, was unwittingly allied with most of the cardboard characters populating that novel, most of whom either enjoyed or profited by his demise. Even Sayers, who usually attempted greater realism, created in her most classical novel, The Five Red Herrings, a victim whose personal obnoxiousness and professional spites made him the possible target of at least six possible murderers-an artist who, like so many, was valued higher dead than alive.3

To this extent, the murder mystery has always poisoned in jest; as Dr. Johnson said, "if we thought the murders and treasons real they would please no more." But the post-modern mystery goes considerably further in fostering the awareness of the fictionality of the situations, and one major difference is over whether the synthetic signals are internal or external.

As Umberto Eco has suggested in The Role of the Reader, a narrative that belongs to a series develops different expectations in its audience than one that stands alone.4 The child's distress at the suspense provoked by a half-hour segment of Lassie is more intense than the adult's, not so much because the adult is above being affected by the melodrama, but because with a stronger sense of time, the adult is more aware than the child can be that the next program will be broadcast tomorrow or next week, and that nothing permanently damaging can happen to the principal characters as a result of the drama.5 Many classic detective stories are in effect a serial, and (pace Conan Doyle and the Reichenbach Falls) successful authors seldom kill off the characters who have provided their meal tickets. But the audience's awarenss of this is not a part of the formal structure of suspense of the text itself: it belongs not to the narrative audience, nor even to the authorial audience as usually defined, but to a super-audience whose awareness extends not only to the fact that it is reading a book but to the usual practices of authors who create such books. In fact the most successful of the "golden age" detective novelists created series characters like Nero Wolfe and Lord Peter Wimsey, and their posited "super-audience" might have developed very well-defined expectations about what these texts were likely to contain.



108 The Journal of Narrative Technique

In the traditional mystery, the sense of a pattern which undermines the mimetic functions of the plot thus comes from outside plot itself; in the post-modern mystery, it comes from within. We might say that the post-modern mystery uses the represen- tation of serial murder rather than representing murder in what is in effect a serial. In the former, serial murder serves to break up even more successfully the narrative's diegetic flow, the sense of linearity, of a movement between beginning and end. In the process, of course, the serial victims become even more anonymous than they are in the standard mystery written by Wolfe or Sayers: the corpses become random targets rather than individualized persons. That too subverts any mimetic function the deaths might have: we read the blood only as a code, an exercise in spatial form. In fact it may be that one of the primary attractions of the mystery for the post-modern writer possibly is that the mystery is essentially paratactic in form: the linear, causally plotted, hierarchical explanation comes at the end, when we learn who did what for the sake of what goal; but as the discourse moves forward it moves by additive elements, as one after another of the suspects, for instance, is interrogated, as the various leads are explored seriatim. In the post-modern mystery, however, the final explanation either never comes, as in The Erasers, or, when it does, it subverts the entire process of investigation, as in The Name of the Rose or The Pledge.

Having thrown theme out the door at the outset of this essay, I am now forced to let it back in through the window. For, as James Phelan has written in his recent book, Reading People, Reading Plots: Character, Progression and the Interpretation of Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), and as I myself suggested using different terms in Fable's End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), the foregrounding of the synthetic function usually is subordinated to the thematic function. In other words, calling attention to the fictionality of a story not only undermines its mimetic function and its affect, it correspondingly serves to make it illustrative of a theme or thesis. One universal theme within post-modern mystery is that of textuality itself. Everywhere the theme of post-modern mystery is the impossibility of solving mysteries, the inadequacy of the epistemology in- herent in the detective process, the nausea-provoking contrariness of objects and clues, the emotional dead-end of aporia.

But if post-modern detection seems inevitably to end in a mise en abyme, nonetheless no two abysses need be exactly alike, since there is no obvious restric- tion on what thematic function the alienation-effect of post-modernism can be used to support. In Robbe-Grillet, the aporia occurs as nearly as I can tell as an effect produced for its own sake, the post-modern equivalent of the catharsis of pity and fear. In Borges's "Death and the Compass," the issue is philosophical: the detective is an essentializing idealist who fatally presumes that he stands outside, rather than inside, the hermeneutic circle of his interpretations. In Friedrich Diirrenmatt's The Pledge a different philosophical issue is raised: the unsolved series of sex crimes whose investigation destroys both the detective and the innocent pawn whom his theories have placed en prise is designed to expound the role of chance- nauseating, inexplicable contingency-in lives we assume to be orderly and rule- governed. And in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, as I have elsewhere argued,



Murder in Jest 109

the thematic overlays are manifold: Eco's carnivalization of the Sherlock Holmes fictions combines a philosophical essay on Peirce's logic with an allegory of global politics, all within an essay in narratology.6 Instead of these well-worn tales, however, I would like to discuss a novel whose pattern of serial murder has aesthetic, political and philosophical axes to grind: Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor.7

Like the novels mentioned above, Hawksmoor turns on a sequence of serial murders that automatically split up the diegetic frame into a series of episodes. But in fact the fragmentation of the plot of Hawksmoor is even more extreme than this; in addition to the paratactic organization of the serial murders, the novel is struc- tured, like Pynchon's V, in chapters that alternate between the present and the past.

The odd-numbered chapters, set from 1713 to 1715,8 are written in the first person from the perspective of Nicholas Dyer. Born in 1654, Dyer is eleven when both of his parents die horribly of bubonic plague; as an orphaned street urchin in the chaos of plague and fire, he is befriended by Mr. Mirabilis, who feeds, shelters, and introduces him to the conventicle of Satan-worshipers in Black Step Lane whose guide and priest he is. There Dyer learns in theory what life has already taught him in practice: that death and the devil rule the earth and must be pro- pitiated with blood. As a youth he becomes a mason, and a supervisor of construction, till his talents for design and mathematics are noted by Christopher Wren, then engaged in the great projects that rebuilt London after the great fire of 1666. By 1713, nearly fifty years later, Dyer is an independent architect commissioned by Parliament to create seven churches within the City of London, churches which he secretly plans to consecrate to his Satanic cult. Contrary to the sanitary intent of the commissioners, the churches are to be built near or over graveyards, though it is consistent with Parliament's sense of religion that they are to be formed "in Hieroglyph and Shaddow" to convey a sense of the "Solemn and Awfull" of "Terror and Magnificence." Each of the churches-Christ Church, Spitalfields; St. Ann's, Limehouse; St. George-in-the East, Wapping; St. Alfege, Greenwich; St. Mary Woolnoth; St. George, Bloomsbury; and Little St. Hugh's, Black Step Lane- must be consecrated to Satan by blood, a human sacrifice which Dyer either per- forms himself or arranges, burying the corpse within the foundation. The odd- numbered chapters thus each center on a homicide, from the death of the Chief Mason's son, Tommy Hill, who falls while laying the keystone of the pinnacle of Christ Church, to the strange end of Dyer himself inside Little St. Hugh's. These chapters take on a growing hysteria, as Dyer's ritual murders take him further and further afield, and as he realizes, with gathering certainty, that his Satanic plans have been detected by a rival.

If the odd-numbered chapters are set in Defoe's London, the parallel even- numbered chapters are set in Margaret Thatcher's. They recount the ritual strangula- tions of a series of pathetic children and child-like men in or nearby the same church by which the eighteenth-century murder was committed. The even chapters in the first half of the novel are recounted from the perspective of the victims themselves, as they meet and are drawn to their murderer. In Part II, the narrative voice shifts to Nicholas Hawksmoor, the Scotland Yard detective assigned to solve the serial murders. As the detached and affectless Hawksmoor investigates, he




becomes caught up by the pattern, noting that each of the London victims has been successively strangled in or near one of Dyer's churches by a tall elderly stranger ("The Architect") who thereafter apparently vanishes into thin air. Hawksmoor begins to investigate the connection between Dyer's churches and the crimes, until he too enters the final church of Little St. Hugh's, and is absorbed in the strange denouement.

The parallel events between the odd and the even numbered chapters are not limited to the homicides themselves; they go down into hundreds of the minor details of narrative texture. Tommy Hill, the narrator of Chapter 2, has the same name as the mason's son who is Dyer's first victim, but otherwise he resembles Dyer himself: like Dyer, he is an orphan whose father was a baker, has a friend named John Biscow, reads Doctor Faustus, knows you can call the Devil by say- ing the Lord's Prayer backwards, makes wooden models of labyrinthine structures, prays against the plague and fire, and so on. There are even verbal parallels: the last words of Chapter One ("at Noone") are the first of Chapter Two; the last of Chapter Two ("the face above him") are the first of Chapter Three. As these connections multiply, we find ourselves in a world that reverses that of the standard mystery, where the sleuth always has the advantage over the reader. Here the reader is always well ahead of Inspector Hawksmoor: we cannot help but observe how the details of eighteenth- and twentieth-century life repeat, parallel and mirror each other. The final stroke of the denouement, in which Dyer and Hawksmoor enter Little St. Hugh's two hundred fifty years apart, has the uncan- ny effect of parallel mirrors, repeating what they reflect into infinity. There the detective confronts "his own Image . . . sitting beside him . . . . [W]ho could say where one had ended and the other had begun? And when they spoke they spoke with one voice" (p. 289). Murderer and detective, hider and seeker, are absorbed into one self, "a child again, begging on the threshold of eternity."

To the informed reader, it is inevitable that Hawksmoor and Dyer should become one self, given the fact that they share, respectively, the name and the achievements of an actual eighteenth-century architect, Nicholas Hawksmoor, who, like the fictional Dyer, was the pupil of Wren and the colleague of Vanbrugh. In creating Dyer, Ackroyd has had to alter Hawksmoor's dates a bit-Hawksmoor's actual birth year of 1663 would make him too young to remember the plague and the fire that are the foundation of Dyer's diablerie. Ackroyd also ascribes to Dyer mystical motives that Hawksmoor is not known to have possessed. The notion that Hawksmoor was considerably more than a pupil of Wren's, that he was coding peculiar messages into the topography of his buildings, is not original with Ackroyd; it derives from a prose poem called Lud Heat, by Iain Sinclair, which maps out the mystic triangles and pentacles into which Hawksmoor's structures fall.9 Lud Heat is disturbed by the "unacknowledged magnetism & control-power, built-in code force" of the Hawksmoor churches, and attributes to their encoded influence rather than chance the proximity of these buildings to

the ritual slaying of Marie Jeanette Kelly in the ground floor room of Miller's Court, Dorset Street, directly opposite Christ Church ... the Ratcliffe High-



Murder in Jest 111

way slaughter of 1811... the battering to death of Mr. Abraham Cohen, summer 1974, on Cannon Street Road ... three ritualistic coins laid at his feet, just as they were at the feet of Mary Ann Nicholls, the first Ripper victim." (p. 11)10

In Hawksmoor Ackroyd conveys the baleful influence of these baroque monstrosities, but for him it is a theme, not a personal obsession, and one inex- tricably connected with the novel's structure, the alternating chapters that jux- tapose the present and the past. The two eras mirror each other in countless minor ways. But in some of the most important ways, the two periods are irreconcilable- and this is Ackroyd's central thrust.

To get at his point we could start by noting that at least three of Ackroyd's reviewers felt that his novel was uneven in exactly the same way: that the eighteenth- century chapters had "irresistible propulsion," "the force of a revelation," were "more energetic," while on the other hand Ackroyd "does not write nearly so well" in the contemporary chapters, which were "less inspired" or "lack color and self-assurance."" When three professional readers agree that the contemporary chapters are drab compared with the eighteenth-century ones, they are poin- ting at something real about the novel,'2 but to me it seems implausible that Ackroyd became uninspired whenever he wrote an even-riumbered chapter. Let me suggest as an alternative that the major shift of vitality and affect between the eighteenth-century and the contemporary chapters is thematic and intentional: that Ackroyd used the mystery form as Diirrenmatt and Eco did before him to say something about the culture of his own time. And his message is consistent with the point of view in "Notes for a New Culture" some ten years before.

Ackroyd's basic thesis there is that England has become mired in what he calls "modernism," by which he means the empiricist rationalism which she herself pioneered in the late seventeenth century, and the humanist philosophy and psychology erected on that rationalism. For Ackroyd, "modernism" starts with the Royal Society, and the Augustan age is essentially continuous with that of op- timistic romantics like Rousseau and Victor Hugo, whom Ackroyd views as "the last rationalists." The significant alternative to this perspective first appears in the nihilistic works of the Marquis de Sade, who, he says, "systematizes what is, precisely, irrational." The new line ascending from de Sade goes through Lautr6amont, Baudelaire, Mallarm6, Nietzsche, and the Dadaists, up to Lacan and Derrida. Ackroyd finds this intellectual line emancipating primarily because it frees language from the burden of mimesis, from the service of humanism, to be what it truly is: a code. But this new line from Sade bypasses England altogether.

For Ackroyd, the result of this isolation from the post-modern is that England has become

a dispirited nation. The social weakness runs very deep, and does not yet seem close to any definition let alone resolution . . . . I have attempted to describe the impoverishment of our national culture and I hope to have demonstrated that, from the beginning of this century, it has rested upon a false base. The "humanism" which the universities sustain, and which our realistic literature embodies, is the product of historical blindness The




humanism which was the inheritance and our foundation-apparently unaware of its origin in the late seventeenth century-has turned out to be an empty strategy, without philosophical content or definitive form. It is a paucity that . . . manifests itself in English creative writing . . . . Our writing has acquiesced in that orthodoxy which [rests] on a false aesthetic of subjectivity and a false context of realism. And it is this conventional aesthetic which has been reified into the English "tradition." (pp. 146-7)

Whether Ackroyd is right or wrong about all this matters less than the fact that he believes it, since he created the fiction of Hawksmoor as a more effective way of ex- pounding it. For when Dyer is not murdering innocents to lay their corpses in the foundations of his Satanic churches, he is engaging in a running debate, a querelle des anciens et des modemes-against a series of rationalistic opponents, who include fictional characters along with real ones like John Vanbrugh and Christopher Wren.

It is Wren, for instance, who preaches "the New Science which springs from Observation and Demonstration and Reason and Method, to shake off the Shad- dowes and to scatter the Mists which fill the Minds of Men with a vain Conster- nation." To this Dyer replies:

"Mankind walks in a Mist; that Reason itself . .. is a Mist .... May it not be that Experience is inconsistent with Reason: the Gulphe in which Truth lies is bottomless and it will wash over whatever is thrown into it . . . . I know this is an Age of Systems . . . but there is no System to be made of those Truths which we learn by Faith and Terrour: you may make your Planns to explain the effects of the Lodestone, the Ebbing and Flowing of the Sea, or the Motion of the Planets, but you cannot lead to any Cause that satisfies the Truths of those who have looked into the Abyss . . . . What of your Microscopical Glasses: for what do we see with their Aid but frightful Shapes and Figures. When the Breath is condens'd on a Glass does not the Microscope show us Snakes and Dragons withinne it? There is no Mathematical Beauty or Geometrical Order here-nothing but Mortality and Contagion on this Ordure Earth."

And he attacks Wren:

While you pursew your Rationall philosophy, the general Practice of the World shows that we are a state of Rapine-like people on a full Career on the Ice, all slide directly into the same Hole they saw their Companions sink into just before them . . . There is a Hell, sir, there are Gods and Daemons and Pro- digies: your reason is but a Toy, your Fortitude downright Madnesse against such Terrours." (pp. 191-3)

If Dyer is a holdout, in 1713, against the increasingly fashionable cult of science and the modern, so is his double, the detective Hawksmoor. While his colleagues persistently work at the scientific analysis of clues, which in the case of the serial stranglings leads only to baffling contradictions, Hawksmoor ironically resists reason as he probes the intuitive aspects of crime. For the others, crime is a sim- ple narrative; for Hawksmoor, narratology is a mine field. "We have to assume



Murder in Jest 113

there is a story," he twits his assistant, "otherwise we won't find him will we? ... The beginning is the tricky part. But perhaps there is no beginning, perhaps we can't look that far back." Irony is a two-edged sword: because of his skepticism, Hawksmoor is subverted, attacked, pitied, thought to be in danger of mental breakdown, and ultimately relieved of his authority just as he begins to solve the case.

But Ackroyd's revelation of the end-products of empiricism rests less on the fate of the detective than on his portrait of the London of the 1980s, a barren land of decay whose only uplifting vision comes from the architecture of the pre-modern past.14 The exhausted, listless rhythms of Ackroyd's prose convey the vacuity of spirit, not merely of the derelict whose thoughts they are, but of the culture that produced and destroyed him.

The years have passed and he has remained in the city, so that now he has become tired and grey; and when he roamed through its streets, he was bent forward as if searching the dust for lost objects. He knew the city's forgotten areas, and the shadows which they cast: the cellars of ruined buildings, the small patches of grass or rough ground which are to be found between two large thorough- fares, the alleys in which Ned sought silence, and even the building sites where he might for one night creep into the foundations out of the rain and wind. Sometimes dogs would follow him: they liked his smell, which was of lost or forgotten things, and when he slept in a corner they licked his face or bur- rowed their noses into his ragged clothes; he no longer beat them off, as once he had, but accepted their presence as natural. For the dogs' city was very like his own: he was close to it always, following its smells . . . . (p. 108)

The gently etiolated language is surely one more way of conveying Ackroyd's con- viction that the twentieth century in England has become a waste land not worth living in, whose corpses have nearly as much genuine life as the characters. By comparison, the late Renaissance London which the fictional Dyer and the real Hawksmoor inhabited is a vivid place of gods and daemons, strong lights and deep shaddowes, a world well worth dying in. Within this rhetorical fiction, the corpses with which Ackroyd populates his landscape, where they do not serve as emblems of our contemporary squeamishness about death and dying, function primarily to punctuate the stages of the author's historical argument. For in the post-modern mystery, as in the players' dumbshow, we do but murder in jest, poison in jest, no offense in the world.

Queens College, CUNY Flushing, New York




NOTES

1. See William V. Spanos, "The Detective and the Boundary: Some Notes on the Post- Modern Literary Imagination," Boundary2, 1 (1972), 147-168, and Michael Holquist, "Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Post-War Fiction," New Literary History, 3, No. 1 (1971/2), 135-36.

2. The other interesting correlation is between the conventions of notice in the detective story and the post-modern novel. The way foreshadowing functions in fiction depends on our having noticed (because we were signaled to notice) relationships that will be important later (as the reddleman in Return of the Native is described with a particularity that would be misleading if he were not to have a crucial role in the plot, as he in fact does). But mysteries-conventional ones, designed to fox the reader-depend for their ability to do this on overloading the stack of items the reader is expected to notice. We can keep track of three alibis, say, but not seven. (I suspect that real police detec- tives, accustomed to putting minute factual matters down on paper and shuffling facts for connections, may find mysteries less mysterious than most of the rest of us do.) The trick is done by observing facts without establishing their relevance: the facts hang there, attached to a person but not to an explanation. Often half a dozen suspects have behaved suspiciously-sometimes lying about their whereabouts. The point is that not only is the stack overloaded, but that the stack contains a baffling combination of significant and misleading facts whose hierarchy is not to be made clear until the end; the difficulty is that there is no distinction made between the facts we can afford to forget and the ones that will be important later. What the post-modem novel often does (think of Robbe-Grillet, of Butor) is to concentrate on the nausea of facts; hence the attrac- tion of the detective story, with its fascination with them, its semantic overload. The difference between post-modern fiction and the detective story is that no hierarchy is eventually established-the geometric arrangement of the narrator's banana-trees [in La Jalousie] is as significant as the geometric arrangement of A., Franck, and the effaced narrator at the cocktail table.

3. On the other side, a balance had to be struck, since if the victim were too odious, the reader sould sympathize with the murderer and hope that the detective would fail to penetrate the mystery.

4. Umberto Eco, "The Myth of Superman" in The Role of the Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979).

5. The limits of this were tested on the television show MASH when Colonel Henry Blake-whose actor was being written out of the show-was reported killed in an airplane crash. The particular form of black comedy generated by MASH was capable of absorb- ing this episode, as a series like The Mary Tyler Moore Show would not have been; on the other hand, if the death had been that of one of the two or three principals rather than a featured actor, even that might not have been enough.

6. David Richter, "Eco's Echoes: Semiotic Theory and Detective Practice in The Name of the Rose," Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature, 10: 2 (Spring, 1986), 213-26.

7. Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor (New York: Harper and Row, 1986). All quotations from this edition.



Murder in Jest 115

8. Dyer's dating of a letter January 12, 1712 puts it into what we would call 1713: the year changed over on Lady Day, March 25.

9. lain Sinclair, Lud Heat: A Book of the Dead Hamlets (London: Albion Village Press, 1975). Quotations from this edition.

10. Ackroyd mentions all these and more on pp. 152-53, as the detective Hawksmoor begins to sense the proximity of the murders to the fictional Dyer's churches. The photographs of Hawksmoor's city churches in Kerry Downes's Hawksmoor (New York: Praeger, 1970) convey some of the strange alliance between Gothic and Egyptian architecture and Wren's baroque-for instance, some of the details are similar to the peculiar, masonic-influenced pyramid and mausoleum he constructed in collaboration with Van- brugh for the magnificent Castle Howard in Norfolk-but the few photos inset into Lud Heat make clearer than anything in Downes the art of shadows that Hawksmoor may have practiced.

11. These quotations are from Alan Hollinghurst, "In Hieroglyph and Shadow," TLS (September 27, 1985), 1049; Joyce Carol Oates, "The Highest Passion is Terrour," New York Times Book Review, 19 January 1986, p. 3; and Brad Leithauser, "Thrown Voices," New Yorker, February 8, 1988, 101. One should mention, for the record, that much of Ackroyd's Augustan "energy" and "irresistible propulsion" is gleefully bor- rowed from the era's most energetic and propulsive authors: Dyer speaks his own words, most of the time, or parodies and inverts Christopher Wren's writings, but he also quotes Defoe, Swift, and more minor worthies such as Edward Ward, whose London Spy contains much of the Bedlam episode.

12. Perhaps Ackroyd is guilty of the fallacy of imitative form here: one need not write about chaos chaotically, or boringly about ennui. But since the contemporary chapters, like the eighteenth-century ones, are from a limited first or third person point of view, the usual convention of reading is that the style reflects the subjective consciousness of the character rather than the author's own. Possibly a better diagnosis is that-like Richardson in Pamela, Ackroyd is skewered by the unintended consequence of his chosen narrative form. For a discussion of the unintended affective consequences of formal choices, see Ralph Rader, "Defoe, Richardson, Joyce and the Concept of Form in the Novel," Autobiography, Biography and the Novel (Los Angeles: William Clark Memorial Library, 1972).

13. Peter Ackroyd, Notes for a New Culture (London: Vision Press, 1976). Quotations are from this edition.

14. It is possibly significant that the present Prince of Wales has aroused controversy by his virulent attacks on the mediocre modern and post-modern structures built in Lon- don recently, as not only being ugly in themselves but also having spoiled the views of the monuments of the baroque-the churches of Wren and Hawksmoor.



murder in jest: serial killing in the post-modern detective story

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