A DARK JUNGLE: NOIR AND THE (DE)COLONIAL LANDSCAPE
By
Elizabeth Floyd

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Literature in English—Master of Arts
2014

ABSTRACT
A DARK JUNGLE: NOIR AND THE DE (COLONIAL) LANDSCAPE
By
Elizabeth Floyd
Noir is typically considered a historicized, niche genre, in which specific works from roughly
1930-1950 are classified through their use of visual aesthetics of shadows and angles, a
disenfranchised and disillusioned detective, and a problem situated within the underworlds of
society. However, noir is much broader, working as a narrative ethos to reveal the alienation of
the detective as he or she attempts to answer questions of intrigue. This is particularly the case in
the moment of decolonization for the traditional British male subject; as various undergrounds,
or non-normative groups, attempt to rewrite society, the male “detective” then tries to seek an
answer to these problems. In the first half of the thesis, I discuss how J.G. Ballard’s The Crystal
World and Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter use both the visual stylizations and
narrative devices of noir to show the process of detection and marginalization of any individual
who cannot adapt. In the second half, I explore Ian Fleming’s Diamonds Are Forever and J.G.
Ballard’s The Drowned World to show how intrigue works to create a noir narrative. Intrigue
being a modernist problem showcases the fallacy of “all knowing” detective of 19th century
literature, especially in a decolonial moment. Any solution brings forth new problems and
alienation until the erasure of the disenfranchised individual is complete. These four texts then
work together to show that noir is the logic that underpins the displacement, alienation, and
ultimate death of the British male body within the (de)colonial world.

Copyright by
ELIZABETH FLOYD
2014

This thesis is dedicated to my parents, Gary Floyd and Anne Marie Dazé Floyd, who shared their
love of mysteries with me from an early age onward.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………….... 1
Noir, Colonialism, and the Femme Fatale…………………………………………………...….. 4
The Landscape of Intrigue…………………………………………………………………........ 26
Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………… 43
BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………. 45

v

Introduction

Often, noir is relegated to two categories: film noir and the novels that inspired those films.
While film noir is mostly classified as a major Hollywood genre extending from the 1940s until
the 1960s, noir novels have been relegated to a specific sub-genre within “Mystery”. These
“noir” novels, such as those by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, are seen as a
specifically American detective story, in which the disenfranchised and disillusioned male
detective wanders the American streets alone, dodging the underworlds of criminals and their
fringe counterparts, and yet, regardless of whatever success, this detective is never able to
completely re-establishing himself in the normative world. Aesthetically, film noir (and thus the
novels the films are based on) is typically composed of the following elements:
…noir characters and stories (drifters attracted to beautiful women, private eyes hired by
femmes fatales, criminal gangs attempting to pull off heists); noir plot structures
(flashbacks, subjective narration); noir sets (urban diners, shabby offices, swank
nightclubs); noir decorations (venetian blinds, neon lights, "modern" art); noir costumes
(snap-brim hats, trenchcoats, shoulder pads); and noir accessories (cigarettes, cocktails,
snub-nosed revolvers). (Naremore 1)
These hyper-specific narrative devices and material objects then relegate noir to the position of a
niche genre, rather than a broader category. However, this rigid definition seems problematic in
both determining the boundaries of the genre and as an aesthetically and historically defined
category. As James Naremore notes, it was not a term used by filmmakers or critics to describe
their style until after film noir’s major period of production (4). As Slavoj Žižek notes: “From the

1

beginning even film noir was not limited to hard-boiled detective stories: reverberations of film noir
motifs are easily discernible in comedies (Arsenic and Old Lace), in westerns (Pursued), in political (All
the King’s Men) and social dramas (Weekend’s End) etcetera” (199-200). As Žižek implies, film noir has
become a mechanism to historicize certain films as purporting to a specific genre and aesthetic stylization,
rather than an initial move by the directors to utilize various overlapping themes and motifs. One can then
suggest that the previous considerations of what constitutes a “noir novel” are even more drastic
mechanisms to historicize literature.

Noir then is something much broader than a specific aesthetic stylization of certain
mysteries written roughly from 1930-1950. As Fredric Jameson notes in his essay, “The
Synoptic Chandler”, noir participates “in the logic of modernism” (33), suggesting that noir is
part of the broader movement of modernist texts, rather than being a singular aesthetic
categorization to describe the visual. In this case, noir demands a questioning of how intrigue
perpetrates a further alienation of the individual, alienation being one of the crucial elements to
the foregrounding of a “modernist” text (Postmodernism 11). In this essay, I will argue that noir
is not just a specific genre, locked into certain prose styles and literary formulations, but rather
an ethos and logic that integrates itself into a wide variety of novels dealing with questions of
intrigue and the individual in the mid-20th century. This relationship then becomes integral to the
question of a de-colonizing landscape and how that then further alienates individuals. Works
such as The Crystal World and The Heart of The Matter use both the traditionally defined
elements of the noir (such as aesthetic stylizations, the detective, and intrigue) to question the
role of colonialism and the individual in a de-colonizing world; other novels such as Diamonds
Are Forever and The Drowned World then work more broadly, using noir’s philosophical
underpinnings of intrigue and detection, to expose similar issues in terms of how an individual

2

functions in a (de)colonial world.1 What then becomes crucial is how noir then becomes a
philosophic theme that reveals the clash between individuals, their place in society, and the
shifting landscape of the colonial world in the mid-20th century.

1

In using the term “(de)colonial”, I want to demonstrate this transitional moment within the space of the novels.
While the states are in the process of becoming de-colonized and shifting to a post-colonial moment, it is still in
transition. Various characters thus read the landscape as still being colonial or already transitioned to post-colonial,
depending on their own positionality within it.

3

Noir, Colonialism, and the Femme Fatale
The novels, The Crystal World and The Heart of the Matter, both describe the
experiences of two middle-aged, English men as they try to navigate African colonies in midtwentieth century, right before colonial independence. These two narratives, while considering
similar themes, are also extremely different stylistically: J.G. Ballard’s The Crystal World is a
science fiction parable, whereas Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter is a psychological
drama. What makes these two novels striking though is how they address their contemporary
moments and how the protagonists navigate their changing worlds. In both novels, the
protagonists, Dr. Sanders and Major Scobie, are presented with a problem that they must solve
and which is linked to the shady underworlds of colonial crime and intrigue. However, these
protagonists are not the heroic adventurers; in many ways, they are anti-heroes, ill-equipped to
deal with the changing world around them, whether though the isolation of the individual in
modernity, the shifting power structures of the post-colonial world, or the influence of the
powerful modern woman, they must confront these issues in order to solve the mysteries around
them. While each novel presents a veiled social commentary, they both rely on the hallmarks of
noir to create a compelling narrative and question the overarching problems of mid-twentieth
century modernity, whether it is through the characters’ understanding of the problems of
society, the increasing isolation of the individual, or through the positioning of the powerful
modern woman, the femme fatale.
While J.G. Ballard’s The Crystal World recounts the story of a bizarre series of events in
the African jungle that are often described as a science fiction parable, the novel is much more
than a fantastical story. At its heart, The Crystal World explores the underworld of the postcolonial African jungle lurking within a colonial framework and asserts a noir sensibility through
4

its shadowy descriptions; its “detective” protagonist, Sanders; and the femmes-fatales of Suzanne
Clair and Louise Peret. The novel continues the same concerns of the adventure/detective novel
of the early 20th century, found in the early noir novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond
Chandler.2 Like Dashiell Hammett, Ballard alters the setting of the late Victorian adventure
novel to address the problematic world of the decolonizing colony for the white bodies that
inhabit them (Orr 18). As Orr notes, “Late-Victorian adventure stories reflect and reinscribe
profound anxieties within the western cultural imagination, doubts not only about the failure of
the colonial enterprise but also about the integrity of the metropolis” (5). The Crystal World, as a
novel of the 1960s, must address what the lasting consequences of the failing colonial enterprise
are and how that alters both the physical landscape, the boundaries of law and empire, and what
this dissembling will mean for the subjects, especially the colonial women, both within and
adjacent to them.3
In order to understand The Crystal World as a noir novel, it is important to determine
which of its characteristics align with the distinct markers of the genre.4 While the noir novel
usually refers specifically to the hard-boil detective stories of Dashiell Hammett and various
pulps, film noir has a broader definition according to James Naremore (5); film noir relies on
chiaroscuro to create a visual night, a sense of alienation, and the struggling anti-hero on a quest.
The anti-hero (or hero) then becomes involved in a specific underworld:
The heroes of film noir repeatedly find themselves penetrating the dark world of
an urban war zone and venturing into a disorienting, fascinating, and at the same
2

Despite being written in 1966, this novel should not be considered in a postmodern framework as it does not create
nostalgia for the noir colonial world that Stanley Orr suggests is mandatory for the postmodern noir (138).
3
In the novel the process of crystallization of the jungle subsumes entire entities, whether they are part of the natural
world or human; because of the constant references to the jungle as a “dark” place and it being the native Africans’
home, it is clear that the crystals symbolize a form of Africanizing and the movement to a postcolonial world.
4
Orr also states that “noir represents a continuation and recuperation of the colonial discourses immanent in both the
late Victorian adventure and detective genres” (3), suggesting that there is an intrinsic relationship between the two.

5

time threatening counterworld of corruption, intrigue, betrayal and decadence
from which they can escape only through death. (Bronfen 71)
There is a pervasive construct of “world” in the noir, whether in fiction or film as Bronfen notes
that perpetuates a dark and devious place operating under the surface of the normative world.
While other critics list specific traits that determine the genre, Slavoj Žižek believes that noir is a
logic, rather than a genre, in which “…the ‘proper,’ detective film noir as it were arrives at its
truth—in Hegelese: realizes its notion only by way of its fusion with another genre” (200;
emphasis in original). It is this logic in discourse with the theme of alienation and underworld
that then create the noir novel, which while typically located in the detective novel, but can be
found elsewhere. The Crystal World then fits into Žižek’s construction of noir: Sanders tries to
discover what happened to Suzanne Clair and her husband, Max, in the depths of the African
jungle, and along the way, he finds a “darker” and more fantastic world that exists under the
“normative” colonial outpost in which there is a rapid crystallization of the jungle and the people
within it. Sanders process of discovering what the crystal world is and the impossibility of
stopping it is how the novel arrives at its truth.
The first most obvious noir element of the novel is the description of the physical
landscape, which supposedly located somewhere in Gabon, is absent of color. The opening
image is of the river: “Above all, the darkness of the river was what impressed Dr. Sanders as he
looked out for the first time across the mouth of the Matarre estuary” (Crystal 3). However, what
is emphasized is not the actual place, but the darkness; this is what impresses Dr. Sanders and
goes on to infiltrate every other scenic moment of the novel. It creates a chiaroscuro effect akin
to the film noir, in which the contrast of light and dark create the ambience and stylistic
hallmarks of the genre. This initial image of darkness is not coincidental; the first reference in
6

the novel is to the Bocklin painting, Island of the Dead, (6), which sets up an interesting port of
entry – it literally mirrors the image of Sanders entering into Port Matarre, as the darkness of the
jungle encroaches upon the light of the world, and calls into question of how Sanders sees the
colonies. What the binary opposition of light and dark can mean in this transitioning landscape is
divorced from any knowledge he possesses; he “pondered on this cryptic introduction” (9)
because it is so foreign to him, despite his many years spent in the African colonies. He clearly
sees this world through a European colonial lens.
What becomes significant then in this application of the chiaroscuro in visual
descriptions is that everything is represented through manifestations of this light/dark binary,
which can be read as symbolic of the relationship between colonized and colonizer and the literal
white and black bodies found in 1960s Africa. Whatever Sanders’s ultimate reading of this world
is, the implication that things must be divided into distinct categories of light and dark is what
drives the novel. If a color is referenced, it is a “shadow” or an abstract referent to color (i.e.
“multi-colored dappling” (Crystal 78)) or approximation of these colors: leprosy is a “silver
scale” (70), “clear water” (134), “blackwood cabinet” (148). This lack of color and the clear
objective to avoid any sort of chromatic notion of a colorful palate helps to assert the novel as
noir. Ballard even tempts the reader to construct the imagery as filmic in referencing cameras
and the materials needed to create a film: “Everywhere the forest hung motionless in the warm
air, and the speed and spray of the motor-boat seemed to Dr. Sanders like an illusionist trick, the
flickering shutter of a defective cine-camera” (57). This focus on perception through the camera,
and a defective one at that, helps suggest that Sanders is an unstable, and perhaps untrustworthy,
narrator; the way he conceives of Port Matarre and the surrounding jungle is one that does not

7

quite work in terms of Sanders’ normative world, whether back in the West or in his colonial
leper colony.
If Sanders perceives of himself as the Dashiell Hammett detective, then he “must
confront unruly exotics and corrupted colonials who threaten the integrity of the metropolis”
(Orr 15). Sanders views his new location as another manifestation of the colonial: the light is a
perfect colonial outpost, like his leper colony or the old Port Matarre, whereas the dark is the
world that seeks to overturn these systems. As the Hammett detective, he must determine what
influences this darkness in order to protect the remnants of the light; but he must also participate
in this underworld in order to improve the surface. The African jungle, just like the criminal
world of 1920s America, has its own code of laws that operate within the world of the shadow.
As the novel progresses, this underworld becomes readily apparent through the character of
Ventress, who is embroiled in some kind of intrigue over the crystals. This is first revealed in the
scene at the harbor where the mulatto attempts to kill him (Crystal 45), and then through the later
scenes with the mulatto’s boss, Thorensen. Despite this initial mirroring to a gangster
underworld, Sanders quickly learns that the crystallized jungle does not follow the same rules as
the rest of the world; the crystals are not necessarily seen as negative. Sanders does not believe
this until after his attempt to save Radek who has become subsumed by crystals, and it is only
when he comes across the horror the man has now become, having been literally torn from the
crystal world and forced back into Sanders’ world, that he realizes his mistake (137). The crystal
world, while eventually killing any life that becomes a part of it, also elevates the mind to a
rapturous state. Even Sanders begins to experience this when looking at the crystalline jungle:
“The beauty of the spectacle had turned the keys of memory, and a thousand images of
childhood, forgotten nearly forty years, filled his mind, recalling the paradisal world when
8

everything seemed illuminated by prismatic light…” (77). Yet, despite this intense beauty, this
world is also full of darkness and death, rejecting the social operatives of colonial society and
thus being something that Sanders must reject as well.
The crystal world clearly cannot function according to the same social structure as
colonial Port Matarre or Sanders’ leper colony. Yet, the colonists who populate Port Matarre
have their own devious qualities that keep them from participating fully in the normative
European world and have been relegated to the colonies. Sanders keeps inferring to a devious
past that no one can know; Ventress is neither the hero nor the anti-hero, but the strangely attune
madman; Louise, the ingénue who while needing assistance in her quest (according to Sanders),
markedly defines her own path and makes her own assertions. While many of the men are
untrustworthy, so are the women; if The Crystal World is a noir novel, then these same women
must function as byproducts of a paranoid world evolving out of the socio-political moment of
the early 1960s (Bronfen 72). These women are the byproducts of a colonial system, the white
colonists who have come to “help” the natives whether through medicine or journalism, and yet,
they are still functioning within the same laws of white European society that Sanders or other
colonial white men advocate. They must uphold a certain image of femininity and yet their
physical location allows them to eschew some of the same social-norms and become selfsufficient and mobile. Suzanne Clair disappears into the jungle without her husband’s knowledge
and Louise wanders about on her own detective mission without Sanders. Unlike the men in the
novel, the women, being socially displaced in terms of colonial hierarchy, are better equipped to
participate in the newfound postcolonial crystal world. 5 It is through these two disparate social

5

As Stoler notes, “In the late colonial order, such interventions [of “how to live”] operated on European colonials in
gendered forms that were class-specific and racially coded. Management of home environments, childrearing
practices, and sexual arrangements of European colonials were based on the notion that the domestic domain

9

realms in which the white women participate that they become the strange intermediary between
the two worlds (without literally having to be split like Captain Radik).
If the noir is then the best means of accessing the eponymous crystal world, then it
becomes integral to how the female characters are constructed, two of which are the most
important to Sanders both in terms of his detective quest and sexual desire. The first is Dr.
Suzanne Clair, a former lover of Sanders, and the person he is trying to find at the beginning of
the novel. The second is the woman he meets upon his journey to the African outpost of Port
Matarre, the French journalist, Louise Peret, who was born in the French Congo. These two
women, products of the colonial world, then act as the femmes fatales of the noir.6 As Bronfen
notes, the femme fatale is both a product of and producer of anxiety for the male hero:
Indeed, one might say that, precisely because the narration of these stories is
focalized by men who want to be duped, the noir heroines not only mirror the
desire and anxieties of their deluded lovers. Their mysterious attraction also
corresponds to the unfathomability of the night itself…they function as the dark
vanishing-point of a narrative which they call forth, even while it never fully
contains them. (76)
These women not only echo the dangers of moving beyond the normalized European social
structures but they insist upon the degeneration of colonialism as a structure and devaluation of
the white male body in this system through their constant participation in the crystal world. Yet,
harbored potential threats both to the ‘defense of society’ and to the future ‘security’ of the [European] population
and the [colonial] state” (97). Any white woman in the colonial setting thus has a sanctioned “duty” to perpetuate
European social norms that continue the divide between races. Yet, the women in The Crystal World are seen as
dangerous because they not only do not follow these rules, they actively disavow them.
6
The femme fatale is typically structured as a figure, who is nationalistically American, but in opposition to
American optimism; it then becomes interesting that none of the female figures in The Crystal World are American.
They are Europeans, who while not “American pessimists”, still possess a world weariness attuned to the lingering
pessimism of post-WWII Britain and Europe.

10

these women also elicit a strange new power as independent and dangerous objects straddling the
two worlds of the past and the unknown. Ann Laura Stoler writes:
If colonialism was indeed a class leveling project that produced a clear consensus
about European superiority—a consoling narrative that novels, newspapers, and
official documents were wont to rehearse—we are still left to explain the
pervasive anxiety about white degeneration in the colonies, the insistent policing
of those Europeans who fell from middle-class grace, the vast compendium of
health manuals and housekeeping guides that threatened ill-health, ruin and even
death if certain moral prescriptions and modes of conduct were not met. (102)
While Stoler describes the Victorian insistence upon the boundaries between colonizer and
colonist, what is important is the anxiety that was pervasive among modern Europeans in regards
to what happened to “whiteness” in the colonies. It is why the colonizers must stop the crystal
world from overtaking everything, because as Captain Radek says to Sanders, “Outside this
forest everything seems polarized, does it not, divided into black and white? Wait until you reach
the trees, Doctor—there, perhaps, these things will be reconciled for you” (Crystal 79). If
Sanders falls into this place where things are “reconciled”, his known binaries cease to exist and
threaten his own position as “the good doctor”.
What makes the figures of Suzanne and Louise so dangerous is that they have in some
manner succumbed to this erasure of this binary, and yet, they wield an intense sexual
attractiveness for the men who are interested in them. They are both the referees for Western
values and upholders of the “wild” colony; what makes them so enticing to Sanders is that these

11

women participate in this deviant world.7 Not only has Sanders had an affair with the married
Suzanne prior to the novel’s start, but every aspect of her is rewritten as sexual; even her smile
“beckons” to him (Crystal 149). Sanders acknowledges Louise’s sexual power as being deviant
because she both has a striking resemblance to Suzanne and because she helps him to evade
sexual norms: he “…looked down at her, aware that for once all the inertia of sexual
conventions, and his own reluctance to involve himself intimately with others, had slipped away”
(37). In becoming the femme fatale, Suzanne and Louise can rework the same power that has
been lost to them in becoming colonial women in order to uphold the boundaries of empire, as
Anne McClintock notes (6). They can use their position as marginalized colonial women to
repossess their sexuality, manipulate the men surrounding them, and rewrite their power to better
fit the postcolonial world.
Suzanne then is the ultimate femme fatale of the novel because not only does she
disappear into the dark of the forest, but she purports a dangerous sexuality for Sanders.
Although Suzanne and Sanders had an affair two years prior to the beginning of the novel, every
detail is focalized through Sanders and his interiority: “Suzanne’s somber beauty had become
identified in his mind with this dark side of the psyche, and their affair was an attempt to come to
terms with himself and his own ambiguous motives” (Crystal 14). When Sanders finally finds
Suzanne halfway through the novel, he notices something has changed; Suzanne is no longer the
lighthearted person he has imagined. When Suzanne then refuses to participate in Sanders’
definitions of her and runs off into the crystal jungle, he assumes she is mad and refers to her as a
“poor woman” (73). Sanders clearly feels he must save Suzanne from the dangers of whatever
7

Ann Laura Stoler writes “…what sustained racial membership was a middle-class morality, nationalist sentiments,
bourgeois sensibilities, normalized sexuality, and a carefully circumscribed ‘milieu’ in school and home” (105).
Because Suzanne uses crystals and prefers the darkness of the crystallized jungle, she is rejecting all the normative
practices that Sanders believes in, socially and sexually. This makes her deviant and in Sanders’ eyes, more mentally
unstable.

12

the crystals possess, in addition to his own guilt over giving her leprosy. Later when she cannot
be found and he admits to Max Clair about knowing she is somewhere within the crystalline
jungle, he says, “Each of us has something we can’t bear to be reminded of,” (173), thinking it
must be Suzanne’s leprosy. Yet, this masking and unfathomability is crucial to the dark, nightlike qualities a femme fatale needs in order to maintain any power over the detective figure.
When Sanders attempts to analyze Suzanne’s motives (“Who could blame you for trying to
escape to the dark side of the sun?” he asks (149)), he fails to truly understand anything about
Suzanne, and yet, this is attractive to Sanders as the detective who must seek out an answer. It is
not surprising then that Sanders has sex with Suzanne once again because her mysterious state is
desirable, exotic even, despite it also being morally deviant to sleep with a married and
“diseased” woman.8 Yet, this same attempt to understand Suzanne’s interiority robs him of any
power because he is wrong about her motivations; as much as he may want to, it is impossible to
relegate her to her previous position in society as the colonial do-gooder.
Louise, on the other hand, is the antithesis to Suzanne: she is young, French, and retains a
critical distance from Sanders’ search for Suzanne. However, she is not uninvolved from trying
to dissect the crystal world, and yet, she also does not need to accompany Sanders to do so. Like
Suzanne, she relies on the characteristic femme fatale element of obscuring, although Louise
prefers the trademark sunglasses to obscure her expressions and thoughts (Ballard 26).
Compared to Suzanne, she is the divergent femme fatale, a woman who does not need to be
confined to existing in the feminine no-man’s-land of a rapidly disappearing colonial setting in
order to restructure it; her world functions outside of this, and she, in her physical self-removal at
the end of the narrative, structures a different identity and relationship to the crystal world. She

8

Saunders sees Suzanne as “diseased” because she has Leprosy and he views her as mentally unstable.

13

becomes the female investigator version of the femme fatale that “seek[s] to light out the dark net
of intrigue they find themselves embroiled in” (Bronfen 85) and yet the narrative focus on
Sanders eliminates any possibility of her possessing the same kind of narrative agency as he
does.
Further distancing herself from Suzanne, she possesses her own intrigue and power:
“Louise had withdrawn into herself. As she smoked her cigarette after the meal she avoided
Sanders eyes” (Crystal 60). When Sanders finds her next, it is to his surprise in the ruined
plantation after she has appeared as a ghostly apparition in the window. “Did I frighten you?—
I’m sorry,” (61) Louise states, allowing us to glimpse her independence from Sanders in the
surprise appearance. She does not need Sanders any more than he her and she makes it clear that
Sanders is merely a convenience to her, perhaps even a joke. Louise clearly is a specific version
of the femme fatale: “She [the femme fatale] does not think of herself as an innocent victim of
dark circumstances, but rather shamelessly manipulates her lover, even while recognizing the
fatality of her actions” (Bronfen 78). After Sanders reprimands her for scaring him, Louise
“saunters” around the room while her “eyes sharpen” (Crystal 61). This is a woman who refuses
to be the victim, even though by the end of the novel, she could easily claim to be one. Louise
allows Sanders to continue his relationship with Suzanne, never commenting or suggesting much
interest, and yet this is the same reaction she gives him when he first asks her to dinner: “her face
motionless and without expression” (30); in fact, as the novel is a filtering of Sanders’
perceptions as the detective/explorer, what we see of Louise is what he sees. While she stays
with him at the hotel after Suzanne’s disappearance, it is not entirely clear why, until it is
revealed that she is still looking for her lost colleague Anderson, a detail obscured in the novel
because it is not relevant to Sanders (204-205). It is then that it is revealed that Louise is nothing
14

but a female detective, and a dangerously independent woman: “Sanders noticed she had begun
to wear her sunglasses again, unconsciously revealing her own private decision about Sanders
and his future, and their own inevitable separation” (204). Louise understands that Sanders will
not fail to disappoint her and yet, she still is there with him at the end of the novel; whether this
is because she is using Sanders as much he her is unclear. Nevertheless, she finally retreats back
into the world she came from, sunglasses preventing Sanders and thus us from ever knowing her
motivations.
In discussing the questions of noir, the political world, and the women who navigate it, it
is worth considering Graham Greene’s novel, The Heart of the Matter.9 Like The Crystal World
in which a narrative quest unfolds, The Heart of the Matter attempts to solve the mystery
surrounding diamond smuggling; however, it is also a process of self-detecting by Major Scobie,
the deputy commissioner of police and the anti-hero of the novel. The literal quest Scobie
undertakes to find the diamond smugglers eventually is solved, but unlike the typical detective
story in which the narrative arrives at closure and a solution, any attempt at a solution reveals the
fragmentation of the individual detective. As Orr notes, “In contrast to the classical detective
story,…[the noir novel] features a hero dependent upon the antagonistic confrontation of rational
consciousness and an irrational world distilled in the colonial periphery” (25).10 Like Sanders,
Scobie finds himself as the intermediary between two worlds – that of the ruling English colonial
9

The relationship between J.G. Ballard and Graham Greene is an interesting one artistically: Ballard cited Graham
Greene as being an early influence in his 1997 book A User’s Guide to the Millennium, whereas Greene stated that
Ballard’s work was some of the best new writing in Conversations with Graham Greene (1992).
10
Fredric Jameson also notes similar themes of a thwarting of closure in the narrative structure of Raymond
Chandler, “…these lines of inquiry converge on the ultimate matter of narrative closure, which, whatever its fate in
the modern and postmodern novel, continues to reign supreme in the mass culture of this period, and is if anything
exacerbated by the peculiar nature of the detective story… Yet Chandler liked to argue that in matters of style he
tricked his audience into by giving them something other (and better) than what they wanted, thereby satisfying
them in spite of themselves. Perhaps in the matter of closure something similar is going on, so that the satisfaction of
the detective-story puzzle has in reality been assuaged by something else…” (“Synoptic Chandler” 35). In the case
of The Heart of the Matter any solution Scobie arrives at only further undermines his own self and destroys the
illusion he has created for himself.

15

society and that of the pedestrian world of policing and crime, which then elicit this rational
confrontation for the individual.
This distinction between the rational and irrational, truth and fiction then frame the
aesthetic and narrative structure within The Heart of the Matter. While the novel does not use the
literal shadowing of black and white and angular perspectives typical of the film noir (as The
Crystal World does through a narrative chiaroscuro), it uses political plots and intrigue to create
the same sense of “shadowing”. These devices, such as criminal gangs, illicit underworld
activities (diamond smuggling in this case), and disenfranchised urban spaces (the docks or other
“shady” locales under the guise of night), in addition to the more typical “modernist” urban
buildings (offices and individual homes), 11 to help structure a noir “aesthetic” and encode a
discourse of normative versus underground systems and places. To heighten this precarious and
“dangerous” landscape, Greene then inserts a constant discourse of trust and distrust in order to
create a sense of instability and moral binaries. Scobie’s detective work is dull, but also
highlights elements of distrust within the colony: “From eight-thirty in the morning until eleven
he dealt with a case of petty larceny: there were six witnesses to examine, and he didn’t believe a
word that any of them said” (148). Of all six witnesses, Scobie does not believe a single one,
revealing his inherent lack of trust in any native subject and the colonial discourse between the
police and natives. This scene exposes the idea that this is the very world of “unruly exotics and
corrupted colonials who threaten the integrity of the metropolis” (Orr 15). Scobie’s general
policing also illuminates the constant questioning within the narrative of what is “fact”, rather

11

In fact, the office seems to be a crucial component for any noir novel as it asserts both the move to a modern
cityscape in which various forms of work, whether blue or white color, need an office to function. As Jameson notes
in Raymond Chandler’s novels: “I am tempted to say that in Chandler the office – if not a well-nigh ontological
category – then at least one that subsumes a much wider variety of social activity than it is normally understood to
do” (39). As later described in this essay, the office also becomes the space in which work also demands a colonial
component. For Scobie, as a colonial police officer, the colonial world infiltrates the British concepts of work.

16

than impression, at a more abstract level, and Scobie’s personal inability to find the “truth”.
Because the very nature of Scobie’s work (and the plot of the novel) depends on his determining
how involved the local Syrian merchants are with diamond smuggling, he is always questioning
the visible versus the actual.12 This search for a higher “truth” begins to undermine Scobie and
everything he considers, penetrating all levels of his conscious and interior space, including his
religion and faith, and eventually reveals his displacement and unstableness in a colonial world.
This sense of displacement and unstableness can be seen in Lisa Fluet’s essay, “Hit-Man
Modernism”, in which the figure of the hit-man becomes the upholder of what she calls “bad
modernism”: “He [the contract killer] shares both modernism’s and cultural studies’ ambivalence
about the utilization of culture” (274).13 As the detective, Scobie also purports this same
ambivalence in working through the various problems of crime and violence (although from the
opposite position of the hit-man). Scobie then internalizes this ambivalence and uses it to
question everything around him: “Turning this way and that down the avenues of tarpaulin and
wood, he was aware of a nerve in his forehead that beat out the whereabouts of Ali” (Greene
276). The warehouse is reduced to its contents (tarpaulin and wood) rather than being a
“modern” building or piece of the city. This constant reduction of place and situation only
foregrounds Scobie’s interiority; it is as if the nerve in Scobie’s forehead, alluding to his
interiority, is his compass and the mechanism to determine the fate of his world. Scobie’s only
12

This exploration of corruption is central to what Bronfen sees working in the thematics of noir: “The heroes of
film noir repeatedly find themselves penetrating the dark world of an urban war zone and venturing into a
disorienting, fascinating, and at the same time threatening world of corruption, intrigue, betrayal, and decadence
from which they can escape only through death” (71). Scobie’s normal police work is boring, whereas the overt
criminality of the diamond smuggling industry is what compels him to find some sort of coherence and truth since it
is “disorienting” and “fascinating” and an immediate threat to the colonial society.
13
This, as Fluet notes, is readily apparent in Greene’s earlier novel, A Gun for Sale, which explores the relationship
between modernism and those who have been rejected from society: “The class ‘no-place’ where Hoggart’s
scholarship boy awkwardly finds himself bears critical resemblance to the contract killer’s perennially
cosmopolitan, border-crossing ‘no place’. The killer, however, turns both class and national alienation into
advantages, compensating for a felt lack of poise with a combination of outward coolness and metropolitan mobility
characteristic with some literary moderns” (274).

17

way to moderate his anxiety regarding modernity is to maintain some kind of constancy through
his police work. When this begins to fail with the arrival of Wilson and pressure to stop the
illegal diamond trade, modernity overtakes Scobie. Any thoughts of the future reveal his anxiety:
“I’ve landed her here, he thought, with the odd premonitory sense of guilt he always felt, as
though he were responsible for something in the future he couldn’t even forsee” (10). This
premonition echoes the modern world Scobie is trying to moderate and cannot quite fit into;
before the start of the novel, he was able to modulate this with the rules of colonial world and
temporary solutions. As his landscape evolves, though, he experiences the “disorienting,
fascinating, and at the same time threatening counterworld of corruption, intrigue, betrayal and
decadence” that is crucial to the figure of the noir detective (Bronfen 76). While the detective
must engage with intrigue and corruption as his personal task, it also undermines the detective’s
authority within society; although Scobie eventually “solves” who is key to the diamond
smuggling ring, this process augments his inability to adapt to a changing society during World
War II and the rapidly disappearing British colonial system. As in the typical noir structure, the
more Scobie becomes alienated from society and pushed to the margins, the closer he moves to
his own death.
The question of detection and truth, if not already present, then comes to the forefront of
the novel as Scobie pursues his quest; Scobie, as the uncorrupt policeman, is a model of honesty
compared to the corrupt officials around him. With the arrival of the war, it becomes more
difficult for him to navigate the morally ambiguous society; for example, he destroys the
Portuguese captain’s letter to his daughter in Leipzig, rather than report it as pro-German
material (Greene 53-56). This one incident triggers his so-called moral downfall and the
intensification of his interior questioning. Because the novel is usually structured through
18

Scobie’s perspective, the idea of detection filters through him constantly, indicating the noir
logic that Žižek sees as crucial for the arrival at a truth, and becomes a meta-narrative for these
thoughts: he starts imagining detective stories—the missionary book, A Bishop Among the
Bantus, becomes a detective story revolving around British secret agents (134-135)) and Wilson
is seen as the spy sent to report on him. This filtering of the narrative through Scobie is akin to
the same sort of voice-over narration that Jameson identifies as crucial part of earlier radio and
film noir (“Synoptic Chandler” 36).14 However, Scobie seems ill-equipped to navigate the
changing world of intrigue as the old colonial detective moving into a post-colonial world: “It
seemed to Wilson that Scobie was still a novice in the world of deceit: he hadn’t lived in it since
childhood, and he felt an odd elderly envy for Scobie, much as an old lag might envy the young
crook serving his first sentence to whom all this was new” (Greene 182). If Wilson, the spy, sees
Scobie as unable to fully adjust to the present world of intrigue and losing the past, it then
becomes unclear whether he will be able to resolve the questions and turmoil around and within
him.
Although Scobie clearly fits into the model of noir detective, the women surrounding him
both subsume and reject the traditional figures of the femme fatale, working to undermine his
stability and illusions of the past.15 His wife, Louise Scobie, and the young woman refugee,
Helen Rolt, act as embodiments of the colony of Sierra Leone and of England. Louise has been

14

“It is at any rate clear that the voice-over of a hard-boiled detective in general, and of Marlowe in particular, offers
a specifically radio pleasure which must be paid for by a kind of closure that allows the novel’s past tenses to
resonate with doom and foreboding and marks the detective’s daily life with the promise of adventure” (“Synoptic
Chandler” 35-36).
15
While there are several African women mentioned in the text, they are used more as details to flesh out the
landscape and to suggest a “realistic” backdrop for the narrative rather than as developed characters. These women
are seen as desirable, both in Scobie’s analysis of Miss Wilberforce’s physical beauty and Wilson’s visit to the
brothel, but just as bell hooks mentions in her essay, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectatorship”, these
women fit into the stereotypes of the stylized world of the colonial male perspective (and thus the noir) as “bodies
and beings [that] were there to serve” (96), rather than as protagonists or femmes fatales.

19

with Scobie since he arrived in Sierra Leone; she is first introduced in the initial pages of the
novel as a sick and insecure woman. “His wife was sitting up under the mosquito net, and for a
moment he had the impression of a joint under a meat cover. But pity trod on the heels of the
cruel image and hustled it away” (Greene 17). However, these images of Louise as sick,
insecure, and a joint of meat are filtered through Scobie and his own dissatisfaction: “He gave
her a bright fake smile; so much of life was a putting off of unhappiness for another time” (17).
This unhappiness and internal questioning are emblematic of his entire life: his wife, his lack of
advancement in the police force, and his overwhelming need to avoid the corruption around him
work to this end. Clearly, Scobie sees his wife as a hindrance and a burden; her “hysteria” is
another mechanism in which he is unfulfilled and feels the world bearing down upon him.
This unhappiness shades the character of Louise and it not until Wilson, the spy sent to
uncover the diamond smuggling ring, declares his love to her that her double nature is revealed.
Wilson may be somewhat of a fool,16 but he also sees value in Louise that Scobie and the old
colonial world has rejected. Instead of thinking of her as simply a “joint of meat” or as “Literary
Louise” (Greene 27), Wilson desires and romanticizes her: “There was a faint smell of face
powder in the room—it seemed to him the most memorable scent he had ever known” (81). In
this moment, Louise becomes the femme fatale for Wilson and a conflation of “the savage and
exotic” (Orr 32). She asserts a dangerous sexuality that he cannot control, walking between the
two worlds of the married colonial woman and that of the independent modern woman; this
liminal space is what Stoler and McClintock imply leave the white woman without a place in the
English colonial world. Louise, in her discomfort among the officers and colonial society
16

This is somewhat filtered by Scobie’s perspective. Wilson “pants after Louise” as Scobie watches (Greene 79),
but he also hunts cockroaches for entertainment with Harris (73-76) and publishes his poem in his secondary school,
Old Downham’s, alumni publication (180) without Scobie’s spectatorship. Whether or not this actually proves
Wilson a “fool”, it does emphasize his youth in contrast to Scobie.

20

constantly, straddles the borders of the colonial hierarchy, and throughout the novel, the “good”
colonists feel uncomfortable with her inability to fit in their society. Her decision to go to South
Africa only emphasizes this duality further; she still loves Scobie, insists on leaving him, writes
him letters frequently, and yet, returns. When Wilson tries to undermine Louise’s affection for
Scobie by revealing his (Scobie’s) affair with Helen Rolt, Louise’s reaction is unexpected and
“savage”: “Louise struck at his cheek, and, missing, got his nose, which began to bleed
copiously. She said, ‘That’s for calling him Ticki. Nobody’s going to do that expect me. You
know he hates it” (Greene 238). She does not strike Wilson because he accuses her husband of
infidelity; instead, Louise hits Wilson because he has appropriated one of her modes of power
over Scobie. In this moment, it becomes clear that Louise is not just the simpering wife, but
rather a powerful woman with agency. Just as Bronfen notes about the femme fatale, Louise
mirrors the desire and anxiety of Scobie and Wilson, and it is clear that the narrative cannot fully
hold her (76). For Scobie, she is tired, bored, and sickly, and in need of an escape, whereas for
Wilson she is intelligent, youthful, and passionate. Early in the novel, Scobie notes, “This was
what he always left out of account—the accuracy of her observation” (Greene 60); this idea of
leaving out portions of the story only emphasizes how unreliable Scobie’s (and Wilson’s)
accounts of Louise are and it is in this omission, they can try to subsume some of her power as
the femme fatale.
Helen Rolt, on the other hand, is clearly an emblem of past England and the good
colonial subject that McClintock describes as “the atavistic and authentic body of national
tradition (inert, backward-looking and natural)” (359). Her recollections of school and her stamp
collecting help Scobie structure a woman untouched by the colonies; Helen Rolt cannot be the
femme fatale because she does not know how to mediate boundaries and borders. Everything
21

about her becomes a model for a romanticized England and it is then easy for Scobie to see her
as a replacement for his dead child: “Again he had that vision of someone who didn’t know her
way around: no wonder Bagster was scared of her. Bagster was not a man to accept
responsibility, and how could anyone lay the responsibility for any action, he thought, on this
stupid bewildered child?” (Greene 170). Unlike Louise, Scobie can direct and fashion Helen; she
has been untainted by knowledge of any kind. “He had no sense of responsibility towards the
beautiful and the graceful and the intelligent. They could find their own way” (172) and it is in
this juxtaposition that one can see that Louise is dangerous because of her intelligence, beauty,
and her inability to be molded. This is only confirmed with the end of the novel, in which Helen
Rolt completely falls apart without the guidance of Scobie. Wilson states, “I saw her on the
beach this afternoon with Bagster. And I hear she was a bit pickled last night at the Club” (300).
The final section leaves it unclear to whether or not she will survive in this new world:
“…perhaps after all there was one chance in a thousand she was not alone, and if she were not
alone now she would never be alone again” (304). As the emblem for the old England, Helen’s
future is just as unknown in this moment as colonialism begins to end and there are no clear
consequences for the aftermath of World War II.
Both The Crystal World and The Heart of the Matter consider whether an individual can
navigate the changing landscapes of the (de)colonial world and ultimately, those who fail to
adapt are reminded of their mortality. However, in utilizing the structure of the noir, there is a
possibility for a world that works outside of the normative expectations of colonialism and it is
with the rewriting of this system that there is a possibility for happiness. By using noir, though,
both novels leave unanswered questions in their process of detection and suggest that any
attempt to find an answer only brings forth more questions and instability. In The Crystal World,
22

this instability then is foregrounded by a landscape that is literally shades of white and black,
with the question of bodies ever-present. What is the crystal world? It could be the new postcolonial African society, a foreign place to Europeans and literally their “death” in Africa. These
possibilities are never completely revealed except to suggest different forms of alienation; by
focusing on the female characters, it becomes clear that these women function as the femmes
fatales of the noir and through this role they can offer a new entryway into the decolonizing
world. They are marginalized as women in the colonial world and yet as white Europeans, they
do not belong to the African world. However, it is in the underworld of the crystal jungle that
they can find a new power structure and bridge their past identities with a new future. Instead of
relying on the roles prescribed to them as colonists, they rewrite their positions in society by
using the crystal world: Suzanne literally runs off into the jungle to join the native tribe, while
Louise uses it as the source of her inspiration as the unknowable detective. This rewriting of
social position in a colonial landscape then makes them very dangerous for Sanders and those
who are leftovers from a colonial era; not only are these women sexually attractive but refuse to
grant access to their interiority. Thus they are unknown entities, the dangerous women of an
emerging and future world.
In The Heart of the Matter, the women are the survivors; they are the ones who can
transition to a future world as they have continually mediated the borders of society and adapted
to a modern world. When Scobie dies, Louise is left with more options than before in terms of
her own autonomy. It is as if she foreshadows her own future when she suggests that Scobie will
be happier without her when she leaves for South Africa (Greene 60); he can only truly be happy
in death and then she can be happy without him. Scobie’s denial of Louise’s desirability is
rejected by the end of the novel and she becomes the master femme fatale as her interiority is
23

never revealed. Helen Rolt’s position in this burgeoning world is more complicated; Scobie
made it clear she is a naïf in terms of colonialism, and her reliance on English romanticism
makes her unsuited for colonial life. However, the ambiguous end of the novel leaves her future
open to speculation, just as the future for a post-colonial England is up in the air. Greene does
not seem as preoccupied as Ballard in regards to the future of Sierra Leone as a postcolonial
society; throughout the novel he seems to suggest the country has always had modes of
independence from colonial domination, whether through profiteering, rejection of colonial
customs by the Africans, and the subterfuge of an oppressed society. However, the question of
intrigue still remains at the end of the novel. How much of this is a function of a burgeoning
modernity? Clearly, someone like Louise Scobie, who is constantly rejected by the colonial
society, works within the cosmopolitan modernities that all femmes fatales operate, and through
autonomy and sophistication becomes the victor of the novel. Perhaps the most dangerous
element for these detective men, like Scobie, is their failure to recognize a society, in which
women, regardless of their race, refuse access to their interiority. This then becomes the
dangerous space, the underground that is lurking for the male detective.
As Bronfen states, the ultimate escape for the disassociated male detective in noir is death
(71) and in both novels, death is the final solution for the men: Scobie dies in the final pages of
The Heart of the Matter, and it is clear that Dr. Sanders will eventually be taken over by the
crystal world wherever he goes. However, the survivors of the final pages are the women; both
Louises, the French Louise of The Crystal World and the English Louise of The Heart of the
Matter, have an undetermined and hopeful future. As femmes fatales, they are allowed to write
their own stories, literally in their professions as reporter and literary cultivator. They do not
possess the same anxiety as the displaced men, and perhaps having never had a role in the
24

colonial world, can write a new one in the post-colonial world. However, both novels end in
darkness. It is unclear whether the bounds of the noir go beyond the men’s disillusionment and
will affect future constructs of modernity, as isolation and alienation simply moving to new
areas, just as the crystals continue spreading throughout the pages of the novel.

25

The Landscape of Intrigue
While the detective’s quest affects him or her individually, solving a “mystery” and the
process of detection reflects broader social and political issues. However, the way noir has been
typically read as a formulaic genre with specific motifs and as a response to the historical events
surrounding World War II rather than a literary style thus ignores the position of intrigue within
multiple texts and as a broader literary trope. As Fredric Jameson notes in The Political
Unconscious, this kind of periodization and the creating of a historical totality within literature is
reductive, demonstrating:
…the way in which the construction of a historical totality necessarily involves the
isolation and the privileging of one of the elements within that totality (a kind of thought
habit, a predilection for specific forms, a certain type of belief, a “characteristic” political
structure or form of domination) such that the element in question becomes a master code
or “inner essence” capable of explicating the other elements or features of the “whole” in
question. (27-28)
The previous conceptions of noir rely specifically on two things to demonstrate “inner essence”:
the aesthetics of black and white angularities and the alienated detective within the American
city to show the liminality of individuals within the modernist city. While these stylistic elements
and narrative themes are present in many works as noted by the critics of noir, they are not the
only markers of noir, or even the means to explicate the “the whole”. What then becomes
integral to noir as a genre is its discourse around intrigue and the individual; the noir ethos is thus
the attempts of an individual in navigating intrigue, as that intrigue reveals alternative structures,
through underground or non-normative worlds in the (de)colonial space. Novels like The Crystal

26

World and The Heart of the Matter draw specifically upon noir aesthetics in addition to a noir
ethos; other texts, like Diamonds Are Forever and The Drowned World are less clearly a typical
noir in their stylizations. However, despite the seeming lack of chiaroscuro, angles, and
trenchcoats, these novels still fit within the overall genre. By developing a plot around an
individual attempting to solve some kind of intrigue located within the (de)colonial space, they
purport a noir ethos and offer a new reading for the position of the British man within that same
(de)colonial space.
Just as Orr sees the Victorian adventure novel promoting a certain anxiety about the
colonies, noir continues this anxiety in trying to determine where the individual fits within the
(de)colonial landscape in the 20th century. This anxiety then is enacted through intrigue and the
attempts to discover some sort of “truth”; 17 as Allan Hepburn notes in his book, Intrigue: “The
policing of boundaries became a means of calculating differences between natives and
aliens…Intrigue plots create and manage a crisis of belonging” (11). These plots focused on the
question of invasion by foreign bodies in terms of British identity and how this then affects the
overarching question of “belonging”. While Hepburn is working with the concept of spies as
seen in early intrigue novels like Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, the noir detective can be
seen as a further extension of this alienation. Hepburn defines intrigue using Lukács’ structuring
of inner worlds, outer worlds, and the gap in between (6); intrigue then becomes the decisive
thread that allows the individual to undergo a process of mediation between boundaries as he or
she “detects” an answer.

17

Intrigue is also different from espionage; espionage denotes the process of watching by the state and its parties,
whereas intrigue is a question of a deficiency in knowledge, which often leads to a sinister confrontation. Often a
spy is addressing a question of intrigue through the process of espionage. A detective on the other hand is usually
attempting to navigate intrigue and occasionally using the tools of espionage, although by unsanctioned and illicit
means.

27

In both The Crystal World and The Heart of the Matter, the pro-colonial, pro-imperial
discourse is underscored as destructive for the male detective; however, both novels offer a sense
that there can be a hopeful outcome for certain characters as they transition to a post-colonial
British space. However, not all novels that utilize the noir are so moderate in their interpretation
of the process of decolonization. What then becomes important in other novels is how the
process of intrigue than asserts a specific position about decolonization and the mechanisms to
survive the transition. The noir detective, who as previously defined is satisfying some sort of
quest, whether physical or psychological, has a commitment to a certain agenda. At times, this
might be a personal code or philosophy, and in other moments becomes a way of perpetuating
the colonial system. While Ian Fleming’s Diamonds Are Forever would not be considered a
typical noir, it works within the broader ethos of noir, in which the (de)colonial discourse
becomes a mode of intrigue, asking who belongs to these new societies and what that then means
for the individual seeking an answer. The novel begins in Africa, as diamonds are being
smuggled from British held mines; the Secret Service investigates because the smuggling
operation is affecting British interests. James Bond is brought in as an undercover agent and
asked to infiltrate the Spangler gang that is supposedly running the smuggling operation. The
gang, while operating internationally, is mostly based in the United States, running a variety of
typical mafia related “businesses”. James Bond then must go to the United States, first New
York and then Las Vegas, in order to determine who is involved in this operation and find some
kind of evidence to connect the criminals to the smuggling operation.
While America is far from existing colonies of Britain in 1956, the year of the novel’s
publication, the plot around the novel treats the landscape as being decisively different from the
rational world of Europe. Like The Heart of the Matter in which colonial police forces are still
28

dictating systems of law and justice, Diamonds Are Forever demonstrates how the British
government still inserts itself in “solving crime” and intrigue. James Bond as a government agent
moves through America autonomously from the American government in order to hunt down
American gangsters. In describing the setting of America, the novel uses language that issues a
tone of exploration and exoticism:
The magnificent six-lane highway stretched on through a forest of multi-coloured signs
and frontages until it lost itself downtown in a dancing lake of heat waves. The day was
as hot and sultry as an opal. The swollen sun burned straight down the middle of the
frying concrete, and there was no shade anywhere except under the few scattered palms
in the forecourts of the motels. A glittering spray of light-splinters pierced Bond’s eyes
from the windshields and the chrome of oncoming cars, and he felt his shirt clinging
stickily to his skin. (Fleming 123)
This landscape is a far cry from the tempered scenes in Britain, in which the streets do not glitter
or heat dances. There is a constant physical oppression in this scene, with the heat making Bond
sweating and the light “piercing” his eyes. This brutality demands conquering and what is
striking is that with no reference to the actual location of Las Vegas, this scene could be
mistaken for any hot colonial landscape. In fact, in the two chapters situated in Africa, the
landscape is decidedly similar:
The moonlight, glittering down through the great thornbush, threw sapphire highlights off
the hard block polish of the six-inch body and glinted palely on the moist white sting
which protruded from the last segment of the tail, now curved over parallel with the
scorpion’s flat back (1).

29

Both scenes “glitter” regardless of day or night, and French Guinea, where the mines are
situated, is also “hot and sticky” (206). The two continents appear to be interchangeable and yet
still foreign to the English individual; they echo a brutality unlike the rationalized world of cool
London as the “knowable community” in which social relationships, characters, and setting are
static (Thompson 101). In describing the American landscape as interchangeable from that of
Britain’s African colonies, it is clear that the novel treats America as a colonial space. James
Bond sees the land as something that needs to be conquered, just as the smuggling operation
uncovered.
Even more noteworthy is Bond’s view of the criminals he finds in the United States. The
people who inhabit the landscape are equal to any other colonial counterparts in the mind of
Bond. He describes the gangsters:
What did these people amount to? Bond remembered cold, dedicated, chess-playing
Russians; brilliant neurotic Germans; silent, deadly, anonymous men from Central
Europe…Compared to such men, Bond decided, these people were just teen-age pillow
fantasies. (91)
The American criminals have none of the sophistication of the European ones; they are simple
and childish in Bond’s mind. It is no different from the colonist’s perspective in other colonies;
both Dr. Sanders and Major Scobie view the Africans as simplistic and brutal and Americans are
simply the same in Diamonds are Forever. This is a matter of Bond’s “knowing” his enemy and
despite almost being outsmarted by the Las Vegas mafia machine, Bond is still reluctant to admit
their sophistication, stating:

30

I used to think your gangsters were just a bunch of Italian greaseballs who filled
themselves up with pizza pie and beer all week and on Saturday knocked off a garage or
a drugstore so as to pay their way at the races. But they’ve certainly got plenty of
violence on the payroll. (173)
American criminals, he concedes are just as violent as any other group, but there is a reticence to
allow them any autonomy or ability to dictate their own system and are the same “unruly exotics
and corrupt colonials” who threaten the imperial order and the integrity of the metropolis (Orr
15) in their attempts to thwart the British systems.
However, while James Bond is not the typical noir detective, Diamonds are Forever
works within the same framework as the novels previously discussed. In returning to Žižek’s
definition of noir as logic, in which there is a fusion between genres to arrive at its truth,
Diamonds are Forever then combines the world of intrigue and spies with that of the process of
detection and underworlds. Bond is the clear protagonist, but rather than being the alienated
figure, he is strangely static, never demonstrating an anxiety about modernity. The novel then
shifts to Bond’s former CIA counterpart, Felix Leiter, to expose this anxiety about the position of
the individual in a changing world. As a former government agent, he previously had access to
the same world as Bond, and yet was rejected due to the loss of his arm; now, in being the “hired
gun” as a Pinkerton detective, Leiter is akin to the classic film noir detective, moving among the
shady underground working between two different worlds and never fully being taken up by
either. In fact, Leiter positions himself differently from Bond; he tells Bond at one point, “Maybe
you can strike a blow for Freedom, Home and Beauty with that rusty old equalizer of yours”
(Fleming 118), suggesting that he, Leiter, no longer has faith that his actions led to any kind of
“greater good” and an overall distrust of modern society. However, as a former intelligence
31

officer, he also shows that Bond should be anxious about the modern world; Leiter is an example
of someone who has been failed by the system and pushed to the margins.
Another anxiety Leiter helps expose is the problem surrounding an individual’s
corporality and the imminence of death. In losing his hand and becoming a mutilated body, he is
rejected by the CIA and relegated to a space that must operate in the periphery (Fleming 61).
This bodily loss then becomes integral to the structuring of the noir; Leiter is neither the master
of the underworld as perpetrated by the Spangled gang nor the upholder of the normative world,
who in this case, is James Bond restoring equilibrium between the government and criminals.
This marginality is because of Leiter’s corporeality: he is rejected by the CIA because he is
damaged, missing his gun hand. This does not prevent him from working as a detective and
navigating the criminal worlds however. Yet, this highlights the tenuous status the individual has
in terms of normative society; there is a constant anxiety (and rightly so for Leiter) that any flaw
or deviation from the norm pushes the individual closer to a liminal space, and ultimately, to
death. One of the reasons James Bond ignores his physicality and bodily limits is that they will
move him outside of the normative world. In fact, in the moments that James Bond is injured,
often verging on fatally, he ignores his own physical suffering to continue the mission, rather
than fail at his task and thus leave the question of intrigue unanswered. When he is beaten up by
Mr. Spang’s goons, he still tries to rescue Tiffany Case: “Bond gritted his teeth and crawled onto
the moonlit platform, and when he saw the dark path on the ground, rage gave him strength and
he got clumsily to his feet…” (Fleming 160). Bond has recognized the effects and marginal
position Leiter is in and is reluctant to let go of his position. The other Pinkerton employee in the
novel, Ernie Cureo, almost dies in the process of aiding Bond, and is fully incapacitated for the
rest of the novel; he is not the machine that Bond is, able to ignore his own corporeality. Rather,
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like Dr. Sanders and Major Scobie, as middle-aged men, the world of colonial intrigue is slowly
eradicating figures that exist in-between or outside of the binary of normative/underworld,
furthering their alienation from a “modern” society.
This noir ethos, the attempt of individuals to navigate an answer to intrigue in a changing
society, also appears in J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World. Like The Crystal World, the novel
describes an apocalyptic tale, in which the majority of the world’s land has been overtaken by
water; the continents and inhabitable land are increasingly disappearing, as water slowly
overtakes everything. The novel suggests that the setting is several centuries past the initial
moment of writing in 1962, although it is clear that there is still a “British” system of rule and of
class hierarchies. These hierarchies are composed of a team of biologists, studying the effects of
the rising temperatures upon the human body and its drastic evolution in the foreboding climate;
the military issuing a kind of martial law of these “territories”; and the anarchic “mobster”,
Strangman, who raids the various underwater worlds with his entourage of dark sailors. The
novel’s protagonist, Kerans, a biologist, is attempting to understand what is happening in this
decaying landscape and the radically evolving ecosystem, in cooperation with the military.
Meanwhile, with the water levels increasing and the quick overtaking of the inhabitable land, the
military led by Colonel Riggs is preparing an evacuation. However, Kerans is unwilling to go,
partially due to his attempts to maintain autonomous, and partially due to his allegiance to
Beatrice Dahl, the sole woman left on this section of land who adamantly refuses to leave. Like
The Crystal World, this novel is considered one of J.G. Ballard’s science fiction disaster novels,
and yet, it works with the same themes of a protagonist who must “detect” an answer to his
problem, the disappearing “familiar” world, and the constant anxiety of trying to navigate both
the normative and the underworld in a landscape that is quickly unraveling.
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The defining stylistic element of The Drowned World is its science fiction setting in a
future world.18 Unlike the other novels, it does not offer a scenario that is directly connected to
the political moment that surrounds the novel’s construction. However, although this scenario
can be read as “futuristic”, “dystopian”, or “science fiction”, the novel still possesses an inherent
link to the questions of national boundaries, intrigue, and the positioning of alienated figures in a
decolonizing moment. Like Dr. Sanders in The Crystal World, Kerans is trying to maintain some
of the hallmarks of “normativity” in a landscape that absolutely forbids it. At first it seems that
Kerans’ quest is to protect Beatrice Dahl from the natural ravages of nature as well as protect the
“land”. He even tells Riggs, “I’ve always understood that our duty was to stay on here as long as
possible and make every sacrifice necessary to that end…that was the reason my grandfather was
given when the Government confiscated most of his property” (Drowned 27). His rhetoric takes
up one of duty and honor, akin to the typical British colonial notion that tied within the land is a
specific responsibility to maintain it for greater nationalistic purposes. Like either Dr. Sanders or
Major Scobie, Kerans perpetuates the old system of colonialism in his actions and behavior. Of
course, this is a problem in The Drowned World where not only is the land being physically
erased through the process of “drowning”, but there are no coherent boundaries or order.
Yet, this also seems to echo a nostalgia for an old system of rule (i.e. colonial rule) and
while Kerans may not be personally aware of this rule, it trickles down into his psyche. What
makes this particularly interesting is that the majority of the novel is set in what was once
London. Only Dr. Bodkin, as the oldest character, has any recollection of the city and it is his

18

We could also say that The Crystal World is a science fiction novel because it is set in an imaginary location and
based on a scientific “impossibility” of the natural world mutating in “improbable” ways (although our current
moment in which climatology is front and center seems to suggest this is ever-likely scenario). What makes The
Drowned World stand apart novelistically is that it thinks through a disaster situation that is located in a future time;
The Crystal World is located in a present moment and offers stylistic elements that make it more “realistic” in
setting: the African country as it decolonizes.

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memories that inscribe the greatest sense of nostalgia for the once great empire (Drowned 7576). Yet, the characters still try to perpetuate the cultural elements of the British Empire as a
mechanism of preservation. Beatrice’s home has a swimming pool “with a covered patio, bright
deck-chairs drawn up in the shade by the diving board. Yellow venetian blinds masked the
windows…they could see the cool shadows of the interior lounge, the cut-glass and silver on the
occasional table” (24). This is a far cry from the actual decay of the city or the brutal jungle
landscape as “Everything in this private haven seemed clean and discreet, thousands of miles
away from the fly-blown vegetation and tepid jungle water twenty storeys below” (24-25). This
clearly is part of Stanley Orr’s argument that the noir is a rewriting of the colonial adventure
novel, in which a major element of a detective’s quest is the battle against the “oppressive”
landscape. Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, a prototypical noir fiction describes a
similar landscape: “The island of California has not been conquered by adventurous men and
civilized by angelic metropolitan women, as Truman had predicted; conversely, these figures
have been assimilated into savagery” (72). What induces fear then is this how the landscape
moves the “sophisticated Englishman” into the “jungle man”, whether in the American goons of
Diamonds Are Forever or Strangman’s black henchmen. Kerans then purports a belief in
maintaining land and protecting hierarchies as a rational measure and yet, as the novel progresses
and more questions arise, these beliefs unravel.
Kerans, like Bond, is then the noir protagonist attempting to solve a problem; the anxiety
moving to the very actions within the narrative, rather than being positioned within his
interiority. Kerans is wary of subscribing to one system of control though and physically exists
between two states of mind: that of the rational and that of the dream-world of the “evolving”

35

human. It becomes apparent that the military only operates according to rationality and logic,
failing to see the benefit of the dream world and the non-normative human:
What completely separated them now was the single fact that Riggs had not seen the
dream, not felt its immense hallucinatory power. He was still obeying reason and logic,
buzzing around his diminished, unimportant world with his little parcels of instructions
like a worker bee about to return to the home nest. (75)
This inability to see dreams allows the army to be cool and calculating, constantly exerting a
calculated moral code, whether it is in their attempts to extract Hardman or their operation to
regain territorial control from Strangman. Kerans begins to feel alienated, existing between these
two planes: that of the normative world and the dream-state. Yet, he still tries to maintain some
control and order in his life. This focus on the tension between rationality, empiricism, and other
systems is also important in Raymond Chandler’s works and the traditional noir novel: “Here the
older logic of cause and effect (or deduction) will evidently be replaced by some new criterion
for dealing out a handful of episodes…” (“Synoptic Chandler” 35). Part of the overarching
alienation within the noir then is a move away from an Enlightenment code of deduction. In all
of the novels previously considered, including The Drowned World, any deduction or rational
solution to a problem underscores the individual’s own mortality in a (de)colonial setting. This
then is the quest or problem of intrigue the novel purports throughout: how to maintain control
over the mind and body in an ever-changing landscape.
The Drowned World is then occupied with the constant states of human physicality and
corporeal decay. In a landscape that tortures the human body through the impossible extremes of
temperature and the Earth’s return to a Mesozoic-like state, each character’s behavior and actions

36

depend on their conscious recognition of an ever-likely death. Unlike the other novels, The
Drowned World demonstrates an already rapid decay of bodies through the descriptions of
various characters physical appearance. Kerans is described in the opening scenes as decaying:
“A chronic lack of appetite, and the new malarias, had shrunk the dry leathery skin under his
cheekbones, emphasizing the ascetic cast of his face” (Drowned 11). Unlike the empirical
detective like Sherlock Holmes, the noir figure purports a level of decay and disgust. 19 However,
this constant focus on the body, its decay, and psychological and physical alienation all then play
into the overarching anxiety within the narrative. Kerans attempts to assert some semblance of
control as he manages Beatrice’s body: “Kerans scrutinized her closely, smiling to himself in a
mixture of affection and despair. ‘I’ll see if I can repair the motor. This bedroom smells as if
you’ve had an entire penal battalion billeted with you. Take a shower, Bea, and try to pull
yourself together” (50). Kerans, as the scientist-explorer, exerts the rational and empirical in
these early moments. Bathing is a mechanism of bodily control in a landscape constantly trying
to erase bodies; but it also reinforces what Stoler sees as the enacting of “colonial gendered
forms” in order to defend society and secure the future of the population (97) by demanding that
Beatrice regulate her body through the social mechanisms once deemed “appropriate”. This
echoes the lasting cultural elements that have carried over, robbed of context, like the poolside
patio and “dressing for dinner” in a jungle (Drowned 42) as a way to maintain a “normal” and
“rational” colonial society.
Yet, Kerans’ attempts to maintain some kind of order quickly become overtaken by
dreams, showcasing the rapid loss of “rationality” and mental order in this drowning world.
19

“Typical” detectives and spies are similar to the noir detective as they are all “deconstructing the mystery…as a
logical sequence of causes and effects” (Sweeney 4) and perpetuate a tension between organized crime solvers (the
police) and their own investigation; what makes the noir detective decidedly different though is that in the process of
gathering knowledge to solve the crime, he or she fails to be “all-knowing” like Sherlock Homes or other the other
classic detectives Sweeney describes (1). The process of gathering knowledge only alienates him or her further.

37

However, it is not his attempts to maintain a certain order that assert his mortality; it is his
inability to maintain any kind of system, whether it is the old colonial, militaristic hierarchy or
the anarchy of Strangman. In attempting to resist both, Kerans ensures his death, just like
Hardman does; at the end of the novel, he finds Hardman who “was no more than a resurrected
corpse” (Drowned 171), having gone blind and losing any kind of rationality, his “real
personality [being] now submerged deep within his mind” (173). It has only been a few months
since Hardman’s disappearance, and yet Kerans falsely believes that he has more of a chance in
surviving the brutal jungle. Hardman’s reappearance only seems to echo how that anyone who
tries to become autonomous, a rogue survivalist or simply, the figure pushed into the margins,
ensures that their own decay and death is imminent.
The Drowned World is similar to Diamonds Are Forever in how it works through the
layers of intrigue and the individual. The plot of The Drowned World issues a sense of imminent
danger and fear: “Narratives of intrigue play up and play on the fears of individuals who are at a
loss about their place in the social order” (Hepburn 23). The initial question of the physical
landscape presents Kerans with a sense of fear, but he quickly overcomes that anxiety; however,
the arrival of Strangman issues a new fear and new problem:
The white-suited man was standing in the open hatchway, hands on his hips, gazing
exultantly at this reptilian brood…As his Negro lieutenants restarted their engines and
drifted off towards the band, he surveyed the buildings with a critical eye, his strong face
raised almost jauntily to one side. The alligators congregated like hounds around their
master, the wheeling cries of the dense cloud of sentinel birds overhead, Nile plover and
stone curlew, piercing the morning air. More and more of the alligators joined the pack,

38

cruising should to should in a clock-wise spiral, until at least two thousand were present,
a massive group of incarnation of reptilian evil. (86-87).
What unnerves Kerans is not the arrival of other humans, but the uncanny pack of alligators that
Strangman holds power over. These “incarnation(s) of reptilian evil” heighten the unnaturalness
of Strangman and his already “disturbing” physical appearance, in which “the skin of his face
and hands was uncannily white, devoid altogether of any pigmentation…the effect emphasized
by the white suit he had chosen” (92). Of course, as the anarchist bent on finding treasures and
ransacking whatever cities he can find, Strangman also creates a level of chaos that Kerans, who
is used to the normal boundaries of rationalism and empiricism, cannot address. According to
Kerans, Strangman is the force that should not be allowed in the normative world because of the
havoc he wrecks “with violence and cruelty… [being] half-buccaneer, half-devil”; yet, as Riggs
notes, there is no punitive measures enacted against Strangman, because he knows how to
manipulate the laws to his benefit:
…there’s absolutely nothing I can hold him on. Legally, as he full well knows, he was
absolutely entitled to defend himself against Bodkin…Don’t you remember the
Reclaimed Lands Act and the Dykes Maintenance Regulations? They still are very much
in force. I know Strangman’s a nasty piece of work—with that white skin and his
alligators—but strictly speaking he deserves a medal for pumping out the lagoon (157).
Despite Strangman emptying the lagoon in order to raid the old museums and shops, he
technically is still within the law, and that horrifies Kerans. Yet Kerans himself neither identifies
with Riggs nor Strangman, socially or legally, furthering his sense of alienation. He does not

39

have the power to utilize the laws to his favor as Strangman does, nor can he choose how to
enforce them like Riggs.
Strangman is not just a fear-inducing character because of his ability to manipulate law
but his very presence as the “other” exerts a level of fear. The novel echoes a colonial discourse
similar to that of The Crystal World, in which only those who exist in the shadows will survive
the changing world. It is clear that any attempt someone like Hardman (or Kerans for that matter)
makes to eke it out in the oppressive landscape will lead to death. The military’s mechanism for
survival is to continuously withdraw from the uninhabitable locales, shuttling their people to still
inhabitable places. It is as if those who enacted colonial rule are retreating, while the figures who
counter that system, or the “colonials” like Strangman, are slowly retaking their places. While
there is no doubt of Strangman’s sinister motives and behavior, especially in regards to his
attempts to lure Beatrice, he is also seen by Kerans as being “inhuman” and devil-like. Partially,
this is due to his uncanny ability to control animals, which Kerans reads as being devious and
somehow inhuman: “He had seen a large number of albino snakes and lizards since Strangman’s
arrival, appearing from the jungle as if attracted by his presence” (Drowned 99). Although
Strangman is a physically bizarre character with his monochromatic style of dress and posse of
albino reptiles, what ultimately makes him “devilish” is his pure disregard for rationality and the
systems in place; he drains the streets of London to reveal the old city (Beatrice refers to the
uncovered city as “some imaginary city of Hell” (123)). However, Kerans cannot escape
Strangman’s magnetic hold, despite knowing he is “insane and dangerous” (130); Kerans’ quest
then moves being subsistence in the drowning world to uncovering the motivation of Strangman,
the ultimate Other. His physical attributes do not allow him to burn in the climate, despite
everyone else’s constant sunburns; his henchmen are black men, who Strangman clearly aligns
40

with culturally, and reptiles. He dances to the crew’s drumming, “inciting the drummers to ever
faster rhythms” (131-132) and treats Beatrice as a “if she were a tribal totem, a deity whose
power was responsible for their continued good fortune” (131), further emphasizing the
difference between Kerans’ imperial culture and setting and Strangman as a “jungleman”. When
Kerans’ finally learns of why Strangman has amassed so much power and fear (“‘Because they
think I’m dead’” he states with laughter (132)), it is under the “spell” of the exotic Mr. Bones
ritual, in which Big Caesar, one of the henchmen dons a dried alligator head as a costume and
sings the minstrel, The Ballad of Mistah Bones. Clearly playing into the racial fear surrounding
African culture in the colonies as seen in The Crystal World, these mechanisms elicit fear for
Kerans; Strangman purposely employs his henchmen to terrorize and control those who are left
in the new London and uses his own manipulated ritual of the bone chair to almost kill Kerans.
This scene reveals the answer Kerans was looking for: Strangman is an other-worldly character
and the ruler of an underworld. In solving the intrigue, Kerans also demonstrates the anxiety
around the fear of the Other. For Kerans, this then reinforces the necessity of order and
rationality and when he is rescued by Riggs, he can only hope for some alleviation from anxiety,
however brief that is.
Like The Crystal World, the individual as the noir detective exists outside of the evolving
landscape found with the drowning world. It is clear that with Riggs’s dismissal and refusal to
prosecute Strangman that a new order may be arising; Strangman, despite his albinism, thrives in
the brutal landscape and reinscribes new codes of law that move beyond the cultural remnants of
a colonial order. However, in the end of the novel, Kerans refuses to allow the city of London to
remain drained by bombing the retaining walls. This allows two different readings: that Kerans
does not believe in a new order by those subjugated or in the “underworld”, or conversely, that
41

there needs to be a complete rewriting of the world, with no remnants of any culture, colonial or
postcolonial. Yet, neither of these matter in terms of the individual and the question of intrigue.
The process of attempting to find an answer for intrigue makes Kerans’ fate is clear. As the noir
detective, his individualism and inability to reconcile with either system leads to his already
encroaching sense of mortality. Although he may disappear into the jungle alive, his death is
imminent. The Crystal World and The Heart of the Matter both suggest the ever-encroaching
death for the male colonist, but allow for the possibility of the survival of those who perpetuated
the colonial hierarchy. The Drowned World offers a much bleaker conclusion: regardless of
changing systems or order, rational, anarchic, or other, the world will cover itself over, erasing
everything and everyone with it. The only question is how fast individuals will succumb to their
death.

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Conclusion
In the four novels considered here, it is clear that noir aesthetics reveal a decaying or
changing landscape, imaginary or historical in the moment of (de)colonizing. However, as a
genre, noir works in terms of defining a logic surrounding the individual and questions of
intrigue. The Crystal World and The Heart of the Matter draw directly upon the visual and
narrative elements of typical noir, whereas Diamonds Are Forever and The Drowned World use
a broader range of stylistic elements to detail the unfolding of “detection” and intrigue. Most
importantly, the novels purport a noir ethos in which intrigue demonstrates the anxiety of
individuals within a modernist landscape. In these novels, the landscape centers around the
(de)colonial and reveals a detective figure caught between the two worlds, that of the colonial
and the postcolonial. Each novel thinks through this division in different ways, trying to
understand how the underworld re-inscribes itself upon society in order to issue a new dynamic.
In The Crystal World and The Drowned World, the underworlds are that of the subjugated
cultures of Africa and diasporic peoples, attempting to rewrite control and power. The
underworld in The Heart of the Matter proves to be the commercialization of colonial resources
and goods, the native peoples clearly moving outside the British hierarchies, often unbeknownst
to the colonial law givers. Diamonds Are Forever sees the underworld as also being one of
criminals stealing British owned goods and resources, disrupting imperial systems. These
disruptions of normative society then bring forth a certain problem or question of intrigue within
the novel. The detective then must attempt to solve these problems and get to the truth of the
situation.
However, the intrigue then pushes each man to try to navigate both the normative and
underworld in order to find an answer and thus become the knowledgeable detective. Each
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“solution” reveals another level of intrigue or a new anxiety related to modernity, which then
eats away at the detective, mentally or physically. Ultimately, the novels suggest the process of
detection in modernity leads to death, rather than a newfound empirical rationalism as the 19th
century detective suggests. Dr. Sanders, Major Scobie, and Kerans die within the pages of the
novel or demonstrate that their death is imminent. In Diamonds Are Forever, James Bond does
not have any of the same individual sense of mortality, but the characters around him
demonstrate the anxiety in a changing world; the novel takes a more conservative position
suggesting that those who reassert imperialism can avoid death, at least temporarily. However,
there are still those in the novel who are unable to reconcile with society. Even when James
Bond is victorious, the question of intrigue brings forth a narrative anxiety. People like Frank
Leiter and Ernie Cureo are constantly reminded of their inability to reconcile with society, and as
individuals, they demonstrate how modernity fragments and marginalizes anyone caught
between the two worlds. Eventually, even James Bond will face this same marginalization.
As a more broadly defined, noir showcases how intrigue underscores the alienation and
fragmentation of modernity for an individual. While not all the novels are completely hopeless,
especially for the femmes fatales and those who are attempting to rewrite society, noir
demonstrates that the knowledgeable detective who always arrives at closure is a fallacy. Within
the modern landscape, especially the colonial world, this position is archaic and perhaps even
mythological. Figures like Sherlock Holmes are remnants of an imperial Britain that has all but
disappeared. Instead, death eventually finds the individual seeking an answer to the anxieties of
modernity and a changing landscape.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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