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Bodies of Evidence: Post-War Detective Fiction and the Monstrous Origins of the Sexual Psychopath

Eco’s remark is an invitation to consider the relationship between two discrete meanings of guilt—psychopathological and legal—as well as two explanatory narratives—psychoanalysis and detective fiction— that have traditionally helped to generate and sustain them. Intense interest in the relation between psychopathology and criminality arose in the United States in the years immediately after World War II, at the same time that the narratives of psychoanalysis and detective fiction enjoyed unprecedented attention in the popular imagination. For a nation concerned to stabilize the consensus account of its ideals and institutions in the face of an uncertain new world order, both psychoanalysis and detective fiction provided narratives by which to explain the relays between psychological disturbances and criminal deviance. Alongside, and in part owing to, its rapid institutional consolidation within the American psychiatric community, psychoanalysis achieved a popular explanatory eminence that was unparalleled in the postwar period. As a discourse of normative individual development, popularized Freudian explanations shed ostensibly apolitical light on social problems of all stripes, most notably in connection with criminal deviance.3 Likewise, detective fiction, as a narrative of legal transgression cum popular entertainment, came to provide not only criminal containment, but also psychological explanations of criminal behavior.Thus, by mid-century an interpenetration of these narratives was in progress. Psychoanalysis was invoked across a spectrum of institutional and, more significantly, popular discourses to investigate the kind of criminal deviance that had long been a staple element of detective fiction.4 For its part, detective fiction during the period increasingly incorporated—even if in some cases to dismiss—psychoanalysis into its mechanics and thematics. What