Mysteries and Conspiracies: Detective Stories, Spy Novels and the Making of Modern Societies

[Dave Monroe]

Mysteries and Conspiracies: Detective Stories, Spy Novels and the
Making of Modern Societies

By: Luc Boltanski

The detective story, focused on inquiries, and in its wake the spy
novel, built around conspiracies, developed as genres in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During the same period,
psychiatry was inventing paranoia, sociology was devising new forms of
causality to explain the social lives of individuals and groups and
political science was shifting the problematics of paranoia from the
psychic to the social realm and seeking to explain historical events
in terms of conspiracy theories. In each instance, social reality was
cast into doubt. We owe the project of organizing and unifying this
reality for a particular population and territory to the nation-state
as it took shape at the end of the nineteenth century.

Thus the figure of conspiracy became the focal point for suspicions
concerning the exercise of power. Where does power really lie, and who
actually holds it? The national authorities that are presumed to be
responsible for it, or other agencies acting in the shadows - bankers,
anarchists, secret societies, the ruling class? Questions of this kind
provided the scaffolding for political ontologies that banked on a
doubly distributed reality: an official but superficial reality and
its opposite, a deeper, hidden, threatening reality that was
unofficial but much more real. Crime fiction and spy fiction, paranoia
and sociology - more or less concomitant inventions - had in common a
new way of problematizing reality and of working through the
contradictions inherit in it.

The adventures of the conflict between these two realities -
superficial versus real - provide the framework for this highly
original book. Through an exploration of the work of the great masters
of detective stories and spy novels - G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan
Doyle, John Le Carré and Graham Greene among others - Boltanski shows
that these works of fiction and imagination tell us something
fundamental about the nature of modern societies and the modern state.

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