[Reader-list] The Tiktiki or ruminations on the lonesome detective

[debjani sengupta]

The Tiktiki: or ruminations on the lonesome detective

The title may be a little misleading because it may cause some readers to think this is a piece on Bangla Detective Fiction. Let me quickly assure them it 'is' on detective fiction. The word Tiktiki, in common Bengali parlance is a lizard, a soubriquet given to detectives in Bengali because the lizard by nature is lonesome. It is a creature that hunts alone, is anti social yet has perseverance and a kind of doggedness that makes it an ideal icon for a detective, specially a lonesome one.  In the popular genre of the detective fiction, the figure of the lonesome detective is a familiar one but its genesis is very recent, if we go by historical time. In Erskine Childers’ ‘The Riddle of the Sand’ (1903), that may be considered the first detective/spy novel in English, the detectives are two amateurs who stumble upon a devious German plan to invade the British Isles while on a yatching holiday in the North Sea.  From there, the forking out of the detective fiction into spy
 thrillers and police procedurals are a subject familiar to most enthusiasts of the popular and I am not going to dwell on it. I would rather talk of a very interesting characteristic of detective fictions: the lonesome detective especially of the European branch (the French and Swedish) of this family simply because it is a prominent branch with illustrious family members. To begin at the beginning, the ever-popular Arthur Conan Doyle began this trend of the lonesome detective in the heart of the big city. Sherlock Holmes and his character is too familiar to all of us to merit any detailed discussion here but the English detective writers have all used this figure to a lesser or greater degree of felicitation for example Agatha Christie’s Poirot, P.D. James’ Adam Dalgleish, Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Wexford, Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse. 

Georges Simenon’s (1903-1989) Inspector Maigret novels turned the police procedural into an art because its detective dealt with human psychology as much as he dealt with crime. Born in Belgium, Simenon wrote over two hundred novels, some of them available in English. Maigret is a heavy thick-set man who wears a worn out overcoat and who is affected by the Paris heat. In the short fiction ‘Death of A Nobody’ Maigret hopes to spend a hot day in the shade of his office but is called out to investigate a murder. 
    ‘It was hot by nine o’ clock that August morning. Paris was on holiday. Headquarters was almost empty, all its windows wide open over the river, and Maigret had already taken off his jacket when he got the call from Judge Com`eliau. ‘You ought to go round to the Rue des Dames. There was a crime there last night
’
That’s how things are always sprung upon one. You’re expecting to spend a peaceful day in the shade, and then, before you know where you are
 ‘Coming Lucas?’
As usual, the Crime Squad’s little car was not available and the two men had taken the metro, which smelt of disinfectant and where Maigret had to put out his pipe.’ 
    Inspector Maigret solves the crime, the murder of a ‘man so neutral, so ordinary that one could have met him a hundred times without noticing him’, but his special qualities of head and heart also make him see the poignant human situation. The overworked wife who looks tired from housework and bearing children, the dingy rooms, the crowded landings. Maigret wonders ‘What kind of crime could have been committed in a house like this, inhabited by nobodies, who are usually decent people? A drama of love and jealousy? Even for that the setting was not right.’ Maigret is a policeman and he works with other policemen, but he is a loner. He has no children, he has no spectacular hobbies, he travels by public transport and his face is wooden. Yet his ordinariness and effacing presence belies his imagination and sharp intelligence. Maigret is the precursor of another lonesome detective, Martin Beck. Both are city cops, both have a deep sense of the violence endemic to city life
 and both blend well with the teeming anonymity of their cities. Beck is the creation of the Swedish writers Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo (all the o’s have umlauts but I don’t know how to do that in my computer). Maj Sjowall was born in 1935 in Stockholm and was a journalist and art director. She met her husband Per Wahloo (1926-1975) in 1961 and together they wrote ten Martin Beck novels that are considered some of the best in crime fiction. Their first two novel ‘Roseanna’ and ‘The Man Who went up in Smoke’ are set, like the others, in Sweden, a country they depict as collapsing, a victim of its own moral corruption. All the ten novels are set in the years 1965 to 1975, the years of high hippie culture that had wafted over Europe and Sweden, except that ‘it has transmogrified en route into a hideous nightmare, with its rose coloured cloud of incense now a gloomy miasma of drug addiction, petty crime and prostitution.’ (Richard Shepard) Martin Beck, to say the least, has an
 ambivalent attitude to the society he is paid to protect. In the novel ‘The Man on the Balcony’ he is accosted by a young girl selling pornographic pictures as he waits for his train perhaps because with his suitcase in hand and glum face many would probably take him ‘for a bewildered provincial who suddenly found himself in the rush and bustle of the big city.’ He goes to talk to two policeman on the beat and one of them recognizes him and salutes and the other does not. Beck is human enough to be annoyed and thinks, ‘twenty four years ago policemen saluted anyone who came up to them even if he were not a superintendent. Or had they? In those days girls of fourteen or fifteen had not photographed themselves
 and tried to sell the pictures to detective superintendents in order to get money for a fix.’ As a detective, Beck stumbles to solutions of crimes through sheer luck and hard work rather than brilliance. He is fallible and human, moved by the sad detritus of humanity
 that he encounters every day in the course of his work, the muggers, paedophiles, prostitutes, alcoholics and burglars. And in every case he solves, he is assailed by the sense that the crime, investigation and punishment are part of the society of which he too is a part. Martin Beck is a good detective not simply because he is a loner, but because he understands, in a unique way, how the individual and society are inextricably linked. In curious ways, both Maigret and Beck have a sense of how in the large cities, in its grim and dark crevices, ‘everyone in a sense is a victim.’
 


       
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