• 1 For further examples of attitudes towards and conceptions of the police in the 1950s, see Geoffrey (...)

The idea of a policeman conjures up different impressions in different countries. In New York, it is of an Irishman, quick-tempered and somewhat threatening; in Paris, it is of a gesticulating figure, fussy about minor regulations; in London, it is of someone rather slow, very solid, but essentially good-humoured. There is no accident about these different national characteristics. They spring directly from the conception which each country has of what its police ought to be. In Britain, the basic conception is that police are civilians whose job is to protect and to help their fellow-citizens. (Martienssen [1951] 1953: 14)1

• 2 Andrew Spicer (2011: 51–55) provides a succinct summary of the police detective’s cinematic transit (...)

2Cinema historians Sue Harper and Vincent Porter (2003) have argued that the 1950s witnessed a “decline of deference” that emerged from the gradual breakdown of postwar social consensus. Although economic growth and the welfare state ensured that both middle and working classes enjoyed unprecedented security and consumer choice, material benefits were offset by the emergent instability of fundamental structures and values. The international authority of the nation—and long-cherished constructions of British imperial identity—would be severely damaged by the humiliation of the 1956 Suez crisis, while at home a generational transition was under way that would, by the 1960s, profoundly trouble conventional hierarchies and “family” values. From the juvenile delinquent to the angry young man, neither the working classes nor the younger generation could be relied upon entirely to know their place. This “decline of deference” would not fully impact on policing until the 1970s, but the gradual fracturing of consensus would undermine the concept of the policeman as “citizen in uniform,” a model dependent upon the “informal control processes of deference, family, stable employment, and social inclusion” (Reiner 2011: 132). In terms of policy, the 1950s are thus perceived nostalgically as the calm before the storm—a “golden age” of police legitimacy (Loader and Mulcahy 2003: 3)—and this has deflected attention from what was, paradoxically, a radically new moment in terms of the representation of the police in popular culture. In cinema, fiction and on television, the British bobby, long established as a figure of fun to be mocked by eccentric amateur detectives, became a new hero for the postwar world. The iconic figure of this era was PC George Dixon, first seen—and shockingly murdered—in Ealing Studio’s crime thriller The Blue Lamp (1950), and then miraculously resurrected to star in Dixon of Dock Green, the BBC television series that ran from 1955 to 1976. Dixon represented the ideal of the policeman as “citizen in uniform,” but while this reassuring manifestation of calm rational authority would continue to dominate cinema screens until the early 1960s, fictional mediations reveal a more unsettling range of cultural anxieties.2 John Creasey’s “Gideon” series, the most successful British police novels of the 1950s, present a frequently disturbing portrait of a changing society, alongside a recognition of the impossibility of containing crime more usually attributed to “hardboiled” fiction. The cases under investigation are marked by a mundane and disturbing brutality—violence is a norm rather than an exception—and the novels often leave much unresolved. In contrast to the cinema, then, Creasey’s police procedurals were less a source of reassurance than a textual space that recognised and negotiated the pressures of a changing society.

• 3 After Creasey’s death in 1973, a further five Gideon novels were written by William Vivian Butler.
• 4 For a fuller account of the national ideal in this period see Gill Plain (2006: 10–17). Of particul (...)
• 5 See, for example, They Made Me A Fugitive (dir. Cavalcanti, 1947) and Night and the City (dir. Jule (...)

3The Gideon series, originally written under the pseudonym J. J. Marric, comprises twenty-one novels published between 1955 and 1976.3 To understand what is at stake in these novels, and to recognise their status as examples of what might be termed “conservative modernity,” it is necessary to consider the postwar context and the emergence of the policeman as a new national ideal. The concept of “conservative modernity” emerges from the work of Alison Light, who uses it to delineate a specifically middle-class negotiation of cultural change in the interwar years. Conservative modernity permits a gradual reconfiguration of class and gender possibilities—innovation within an overall conformity, reform rather than revolution—that remains relevant to the immediate postwar context (Light 1991: 10–12). Indeed, Andrew Spicer, in his extensive typology of national masculinities, suggests that the war years saw the triumph of this muted national “ideal,” as the “hegemony of the debonair gentleman was challenged by the emergence of the ordinary man as hero” (Spicer 2001: 28). While conservative modernity is characteristically private, it is also emphatically competent, and the emergent hero of the postwar years was, typically, professional rather than amateur, a meritocratic figure of quiet assurance: good humoured, unostentatious, modest, occasionally eccentric, determinedly unromantic and comfortably homosocial.4 However, even as this modern meritocratic figure was emerging as a dominant heroic type, the end of the war exposed the contingent construction of this new ideal. The final years of the Second World War saw numerous incidences of what N.H. Reeve has termed “uneasy homecoming syndrome”: fictions that suggested the difficulties men would experience reintegrating into peacetime society after six years of service life (Reeve 2001: 162). Wounded, repatriated or demobilised, men returning to civilian status found themselves disorientated and alienated, uncertain of their place in a home-front world that had changed out of all recognition (Allport 2009: 9–12). The spectre of the damaged ex-soldier, frustrated, misunderstood, or simply bored, would in turn come to haunt the cinema of the late 1940s. This was particularly evident in the so-called “spiv” cycle, a series of films focusing on criminal masculinities and the black-market economy, that suggested men needed an element of risk in order to constitute themselves as men.5 In the films of the spiv cycle, irrespective of plot or backstory, men are understood as products of a war climate: they are part of a wounded generation. These representations were indicative of significant cultural anxiety, but beyond this lay a yet more disturbing spectre: the prospect of a new generation of damaged masculinity. What would become of the children whom the war had deprived of stable structures of authority—in particular of father figures? The “problem” of juvenile delinquency was equally a subject for 1950s cinema, which proposed solutions from corporal punishment (Cosh Boy, dir. Lewis Gilbert, 1952) to probationary counselling (I Believe in You, dir. Michael Relph and Basil Dearden, 1951), to the presentation of alternative, “healthy” masculine models, the most significant of which was the “cadet.”

• 6 The Blue Lamp was the most popular British film of 1950, and box office statistics provide useful s (...)
• 7 The pattern of reassurance established by The Blue Lamp continues throughout much of the decade. Se (...)

4In his influential study of British cinema, A Mirror for England, Raymond Durgnat notes the pervasiveness of the “cadet,” a young man being inculcated with the values of an experienced father figure ([1970] 2011: 174). According to Andrew Spicer, the cadet can be seen as an antidote to cinema’s surfeit of youthful, delinquent and actively criminal masculinities. Concerns about absent fathers were ameliorated by the cadet’s reassuring acquiescence with the values, priorities and beliefs of an older generation, and by the suggestion that institutions as well as individuals could function as effective parenting structures. These anxieties, and the solutions imagined for them, are illustrated by The Blue Lamp (Basil Dearden, 1950), which presents both cadet masculinity and its delinquent other, in the forms of young PC Andy Mitchell and the criminal Tom Riley, whose pathological masculinity is evident in his constant state of incipient hysteria.6 Riley exemplifies the fear that a new generation will grow up without structure or moral compass: he spurns the values of society, and is unwelcome even in the counter culture of established criminality. The criminal underworld has rules every bit as binding as those of legitimate society—not least of which is a prohibition against killing policemen. This is enlightened self-interest: no act could be more securely guaranteed to bring unwelcome attention down on regular criminal enterprise. Riley breaks this taboo, shooting the film’s father figure, venerable PC George Dixon, in a failed robbery. The attack jeopardizes both public and private father: Dixon not only represents the citizen policeman ideal, he is also mentor to the cadet, Andy, who he has welcomed into the family home in place of a son lost in the war. Yet from Dixon’s death comes reassurance: the full force of the police family is mobilised in pursuit of the isolated and alienated criminal. Significantly, the health of the police community is shown to extend to society as a whole. Riley, hoping to get lost in the crowd at the dog races, is instead marshalled by race-goers and bookies into the path of the advancing police. Society has rejected degeneracy, it has policed itself—as befits the principle of a civilian police force. Meanwhile, the context of policing has simultaneously shown itself a worthy site of man-making. The prospect of danger has contributed to the preservation of a homosocial community ethos disappearing from an increasingly atomised culture.7

• 8 Lawrence Treat’s V as in Victim (1945) and Hillary Waugh’s Last Seen Wearing… (1952) are usually ci (...)
• 9 John Creasey, Gideon’s Day ([1955] 1964); Ed McBain, Cop Hater ([1956] 2012).
• 10 In a career that began in 1932, Creasey is estimated to have written close to 600 novels. His previ (...)

5Alongside the context provided by popular cinema, the Gideon series also needs to be seen in relation to developments in crime fiction. The dominant forms of crime fiction had traditionally posited the detective as outsider. In hardboiled fiction, he is a blue-collar working man, set apart from the corrupt world of power and wealth he investigates; in classical or golden age fiction, the majority of detectives, male or female, are amateurs, solving crimes that have defeated a police force configured as unimaginative and plodding. These models leave little room for the construction of a police hero, and although examples of police novels can be found dating back to the nineteenth century, most of these fictions retain a more-or-less hardboiled detecting agent within the structures of a police force. The postwar period, though, witnessed an attempt to construct a procedural form that recognized the reality of criminal investigation. While America is usually credited with the first examples of the formula,8 Creasey’s Gideon novels were nonetheless in the vanguard of fictional representations of police work. Indeed, Gideon’s Day (1955) appeared a year before Cop Hater (1956), the first of Ed McBain’s long-running and influential 87^th Precinct series.9 Although the two series are divided by the national characteristics of crime and its policing, they share important features: the focus falls on a city and the diversity of its inhabitants; a team or organisation is central to the investigative process; the central detective figure largely functions within a group; crime is resolved as much through routine and chance as through inspiration; the detectives work to solve multiple cases that may or may not intersect, but in any case ensure competition for scarce investigative resources. These are major innovations and their centrality to the Gideon novels gives some indication of Creasey’s ability to adapt his writing to the contemporary moment.10

• 11 I am grateful to the anonymous reader for pointing out the irony of Lemaitre’s name, given his comp (...)

8Descriptions of Gideon figure him as imposing: a big man, “distinguished-looking,” with “iron-grey hair” and a “square chin” (Gideon’s Day: 9). He does nothing in haste, walking “with a steady rhythm which, given the right circumstances, held a kind of menace” (Gideon’s Week: 9). He is a massive, remorseless figure, a human battleship whose force and majesty is thrown into relief by repeated comparison with his second-in-command, Chief Inspector “Lem” Lemaitre, whose distinctly foreign name hints, to a British readership, at a stereotypically hysterical or over-excitable nature, a suspicion confirmed by his repeatedly criticised habit of jumping to conclusions (Gideon’s Day: 27, Gideon’s Week: 12). Lemaitre is far from being a bad policeman—the narratives praise his command of routine, his eye for detail and his capacity to “get things moving” (Gideon’s Day: 98; Gideon’s Week: 39)—but he lacks Gideon’s self-control and authority.11 The comparison between the two men extends into the private sphere. Lemaitre has made the mistake of marrying a “lush and sexy type,” whose repeated betrayals have, by the third book, driven him to the verge of breakdown (Gideon’s Night: 17). Gideon, by contrast, is a family man with six children. His marriage has not been without difficulty: a seventh child died while Gideon was working, evidence of a conflict of loyalties that lies behind an initially detached relationship with his wife, Kate. Yet, as the series progresses, Gideon and Kate gradually reanimate their marriage, as she shows renewed support for him, and he begins once more to talk to her about his work.

• 13 Read today, there is a disturbing irony to Martienssen’s conclusions about how best to safeguard th (...)

11In Crime and the Police, a largely laudatory survey of police structures and functions published in 1951, Anthony Martienssen articulates a specifically postwar fear: could Britain become a police state? The civilian status of the police officer is, he believes, the greatest defence against such a fate: the policeman “must live among, and be a member of, the community he serves” (15)—only then can he protect the “private person” and act as an “essential safeguard against possible excesses of State authority” (252). Yet Martienssen’s description of the socially-embedded police officer is equally an exemplary model of disciplinary power: known by his community—and thus himself subject to surveillance—the policeman sees a level of detail, and develops an understanding of deviance, beyond the grasp of any external coercive force.13

• 14 The extent to which women achieved “citizenship” in the course of the Second World War is open to d (...)

12In Martienssen’s theorizing, the police officer becomes a figure of social reassurance, protecting the law-abiding citizen from the worst excesses of both right and left: totalitarian authority and the micromanagement of the welfare state. The concept of the “citizen in uniform” can also be seen as an ideal staging post for negotiating social structures and obligations in the aftermath of a war that radically rewrote the social contract. Between 1939 and 1945, the war to preserve democracy was necessarily fought through the radical curtailment of individual liberty. Through conscription, rationing and a range of other compulsions, the citizen’s relationship to government underwent unprecedented change (Rose 2003: 14–16). In war’s aftermath, the “citizen in uniform,” as the epigraph suggests, represents a restoration of individual agency—choice and responsibility—to the processes of social regulation. The time was right, then, for the policeman to emerge as a model of exemplary citizenship and, by extension, masculinity.14 Seeming to encapsulate the ideal British virtues of control, restraint and tempered authority, he presented a legitimate agency to set against the unstable, degenerate forms of the demobbed soldier and the criminal spiv.

• 15 The Newgate Calendar was a popular series of late-eighteenth century broadsheets that provided acco (...)

13The emergence of the police officer as an heroic figure—or at least as a fitting subject for the protagonist’s role—represents a paradigm shift not only in the relationship between citizen and state, but also in the manner through which such relationships were narrativized. Michel Foucault suggests that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw an “aesthetic rewriting of crime” ([1975] 1991: 68). As modes of punishment and the power they symbolised underwent a transition from the public display of the sovereign to the containment of the disciplinary, so the quotidian criminal was textually displaced by a narrative of exceptionality. The raw accounts of mundane crime that comprised the Newgate Calendar gave way to an intellectual struggle between the murderer and the detective, a class transposition in which murder became “the quiet game of the well behaved” (Foucault [1975] 1991: 69).15 This model lasted well into the twentieth century, but the emergence of the police procedural at the end of Second World War can be seen to constitute a further aesthetic reconfiguration of crime. Foucault’s “modest, suspicious power” (170) finds a new imaginative outlet in routine detail. The brilliant—and discreetly spectacular—deductions of the detective, and his or her confrontation with a great criminal mind, are replaced by the procedural’s rigorous mapping of an ever more acutely differentiated criminality. In the “Information” rooms of Scotland Yard and elsewhere, the criminal individual is tabulated by distinguishing features, his (or less frequently, her) deviation from the respectably anonymous norm recorded to ensure the possibility of his capture and containment (Foucault [1975] 1991: 183–94). Gideon, then, does not need to detect anything. Instead, the systems of recording and the network of observers (beat policemen) ensure the identification and control of a criminality only reported to his central authority.

• 16 The phrase “unseen seer” comes from Dennis Porter’s influential analysis of crime fiction (1981: 12 (...)

16As well as anonymity, Martienssen suggests that good detectives are characterised by curiosity, acting ability and tact: “the sixth sense which gives them an intuitive knowledge of how best to deal with any particular individual” (66). Gideon excels at the last of these qualifications and frequently demonstrates both a healthy curiosity and an ability to disguise his actions and motivations as, for example, when he pretends to be looking after his own interests while discreetly investigating the handling of the “primrose girl” murder in Gideon’s Week (58). However, that he also spectacularly fails to demonstrate the first quality—anonymity—troubles the reading of his power as panoptical. Gideon, while undoubtedly at the centre of the system, can hardly be read as Foucault’s “unseen seer”: “Every late edition of the morning newspapers carried a photograph of Gideon, C.I.D. There were flamboyant accounts of what he had done during the night, as well as what he had done in the past” (Gideon’s Week: 132).16 While it might be argued that the sight of Gideon encourages a degree of self-policing, it is nonetheless the case that—for all the modernity of the procedural structure—his power is equally constituted as sovereign, and it is this residual insistence on spectacular visibility that speaks most persuasively to the anxieties surrounding masculinity in the 1950s. Gideon’s exceptionality suggests that neither detecting nor policing is his primary narrative function. Rather, his role is to embody exceptional leadership: he is designed as an exemplary man, a father figure and a mentor to a generation cast adrift by the aftermath of war.

• 17 This problem is equally applicable at a public structural level. Gideon’s Day bemoans the lack of n (...)

17Unfortunately, for the first three novels, Gideon is singularly bereft of anyone to mentor: he is a father in search of a son.17 Unlike the cinema, which provided experienced policemen with cadets eager to follow in their footsteps, Gideon finds most candidates for cadet masculinity cannot quite live up to his exacting standards. The problems of succession can be seen as a factor quietly destabilising the confident assertion of monumental masculinity. On the surface, in the combination of unseen panoptical power and spectacular sovereign visibility, Gideon emphasises the on-going power (and narrative necessity) of the heroic individual. Yet the more impressive his masculinity becomes, the more it throws into relief the failure of society to nurture or forge a generation of worthy inheritors. Gideon’s extreme competence protests too much and paradoxically signifies not stability but its absence.

• 18 Gideon’s Month, the fourth book in the series, continues the preoccupation with the fate of the you (...)

20The book, then, constructs a conflict between fathers for the possession of the son. Gideon, the legitimate “father,” attempts to break the child’s loyalty to his criminal father by explaining the rules: “This was a challenge which couldn’t be set aside. If Gideon said nothing to the boy, then the hatred would only fester and there would be a new element; birth of contempt for the police” (Gideon’s Week: 68). Gideon stands, very literally, as the law-of-the-father: stepping into the family structure and attempting to impose his authority. But as the novel progresses, everything points towards Syd’s physical and emotional proximity to his biological father. Much to the delight of Benson senior, the boy is a “chip of [sic] the old block” (160), so in thrall to his father’s authority that he will do anything to gain his approval. As the plot unfolds, Benson proves himself the ultimate in perverse parenting by using young Syd to facilitate the attempted murder of Ruby: he gives the boy poison in the guise of aspirins. The plan is foiled, but while the reader knows that young Syd did not know about the poison, neither his mother nor Gideon can be certain of this. His actions—and his unyielding hostility towards Gideon (169)—have inscribed him as delinquent. In a series of novels that figures a never-ending cycle of conflict between culture and counter culture, crime and the law, a significant battle has been lost. The novel ends with uncertainty concerning the fate of young Syd, and the ominous pronouncement that “we’ll have to work on him” (187). Gideon’s failure to parent or persuade the boy—his failure to shape a viable future citizen—undermines the reassurance of the procedural form.18

• 19 For example, see Agatha Christie’s The Moving Finger, which writes off two corpses with the cheery (...)

25However, while films such as The Blue Lamp offer a reasonably stable balance between threat and containment, it cannot be said that the Gideon novels achieve the same equilibrium. In another instance of the books’ modernity, many of the novels end with a form of montage: the text moving through the characters—criminal and law-abiding—taking stock of their positions, and giving the reader a series of snapshot glimpses into the ecosystem of Gideon’s London. The effect is to reiterate police power and simultaneously to undermine it. The novels do not end with complete closure, and while this might be read as resistance to hyperbole and triumphalism—a mode of appropriately British modesty—it is also a textual manifestation of uncertainty and doubt. These tensions are marked in the anxious final two chapters of Gideon’s Day. In the first, Gideon is left literally and metaphorically bruised after failing to capture an armed robber. This is followed by his worried contemplation of the threat posed by the “amateur” criminal—these are men ironically trained in delinquency by their army service (service to the state) and they epitomise the spectre of the ex-combatant that had haunted postwar society. After this comes his most significant doubt, returning us to the confrontation with a corrupt officer with which the book began: “If he’d handled Foster differently, Foster might be alive now, and willingly co-operating” (Gideon’s Day: 184). After these not inconsiderable challenges to Gideon’s omnipotence, paternalism and judgement, the narrative attempts an abrupt volte-face. In scarcely two pages, B division capture one of the books’ murderers; Lemaitre recovers the mail van robbery proceeds, and Gideon has a detective epiphany, identifying crime boss Chang’s financial deceptions and putting a dent in London’s drug distribution network. Suddenly, all is transformed, “it had been a wonderful day” (190). This reversal cannot stand without comment, and here the book offers an astonishingly glib piece of textual accounting, reminiscent of earlier crime fiction in which the solution of the puzzle and a symbolic happy ending mattered more than any collateral damage.19 Earlier in the book, Gideon had been devastated by the murder of the child Lucy Saparelli; now the text offers this: “Thoughts of the Saparelli family, especially the mother, quietened his jubilation, but the police had done all that anyone could, and time would help, wouldn’t it?” (190). The novel ends, then, in the spirit of Agatha Christie, and with a newly modern manifestation of her comedy ending. If a major convention of the golden age is the symbolic restoration of law and social stability through marriage, then in Gideon’s Day we get a revised version of this for the postwar age. Gideon comes home to a wife who, after several years of semi-estrangement, suddenly does understand him. Kate is waiting for him, with tea and sandwiches and a welcoming ear: “it was good to be home” (191). The series then walks a tightrope between comfort and doubt. We have a father, but no reliable cadet; we have authority, but crime is exponentially increasing, becoming an industry beyond the control of one man, even a man as mighty as Gideon. Creasey’s series thus demonstrates a superficial modernity—it attempts “an aesthetic rewriting of crime” (Foucault [1975] 1991: 68)—but this is underpinned by what is in fact an exemplary instance of Alison Light’s conservative modernity, in which the character of Gideon functions as a rallying call to the youth of the nation, attempting to assert a postwar masculinity that is nowhere near as stable and confident as Gideon’s monumentality would have us believe. This is reform rather than revolution. The novels acknowledge the disciplinary realities of social construction and policing, and they exhibit a range of contemporary concerns about appropriate masculinities, but in the final instance, they resort to the comforts of generic habit. The manner in which the procedural novel ultimately resolves its tensions and anxieties is a regression to the conventions of the interwar golden age detective novel.