Armadale Read Free Page A

on the production of the necessary ‘evidence’ (for which an army of private detectives was recruited); and the growing sophistication of criminals which in turn demanded a cleverer police force. Criminals, as Collins declared through the grandiose conception of Count Fosco in
The Woman in White
, were becoming very clever indeed – so clever that the old Dogberries and flatfoots of the traditional British law had no hope of catching them. What was needed was a new brand of criminal investigator – as resourceful and intelligent as the new artists in crime.
    There are three kinds of detective encountered in Collins’s fiction. First (and most prominent in the novels from
The Woman in White
to
Armadale)
are the amateur sleuths – intrepid individuals like Walter Hartright, Marian Halcombe, or the Reverend Decimus Brock who dedicate themselves to uncovering crime (Brock, even at death’s door, is prepared to risk his professional reputation by trailing beautiful women round the streets of London). A second category – which only makes its appearance with Sergeant Cuff in
The Moonstone
– is the CID officer, the professional detective (oddly, not a single police officer, of any kind, appears at any point in
Armadale)
. The last category is the private investigator (or ‘confidential agent’). These ‘spies’ nauseated Collins, particularly at the time of writing
Armadale
– where the ‘private eye’ is represented by the obnoxious James Bashwood, with his army of hired snoopers. In the seventeenth number there is a denunciation of the private detective, whose rhetoric casts the genus into an even deeper pit of moral distaste than husband-poisoners like Miss Gwilt:
    No ordinary observation, applying the ordinary rules of analysis, would have detected the character of Bashwood the younger in his face. His youthful look, aided by his light hair, and his plump beardless cheeks; his easy manner, and his ever ready smile; his eyes which met unshrinkingly the eyes of every one whom he addressed, all combined to make the impression of him a favourable impression in the general mind. No eye for reading character, but such an eye as belongs to one person, perhaps, in ten thousand, could have penetrated the smoothly-deceptive surface of this man, and have seen him for what he really was – the vile creature whom the viler need of Society has fashioned for its own use.There he sat – the Confidential Spy of modern times, whose business is steadily enlarging, whose Private Inquiry Offices are steadily on the increase. There he sat – the necessary Detective attendant on the progress of our national civilization; a man who was in this instance at least, the legitimate and intelligible product of the vocation that employed him; a man professionally ready on the merest suspicion (if the merest suspicion paid him) to get under our beds, and to look through gimlet-holes in our doors, (pp. 516–17)
    So much for Sherlock Holmes, Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe and Magnum PI. Why is Collins so angry? Because he despised the divorce work which had brought these professional Peeping Toms into being after 1857. Collins’s distaste was not impersonal: his own sexual life was highly irregular (he had two live-in mistresses in the 1860s, one of whom had a husband in the background). He was a fornicator, an adulterer and (probably) a consorter with ladies of the night. He was certainly sympathetic with Dickens who, in his fifties, had abandoned his wife and taken up with a young actress in her twenties, Ellen Ternan. Both novelists were probably targets of gimlet-boring peepers like James Bashwood – or feared they might be with all the hideous publicity that would ensue. In the event, Collins covered his tracks remarkably efficiently (as did Dickens) and – despite a huge expenditure of biographical effort – little is known of his secret life. But there certainly