Political Correctness and GAD

(This page might be considered offensive to many people, so do not continue if you have certain sensitivities as to race and sex)

Well, by modern standards (such as they are with all their faults) we will encounter Political Incorrectness in detective stories of the Golden Age of Detection, indeed will still find it in more recent books -- but hardly to any great extent, which is why most of the popular current mystery novels are so full of boring stuff. Boring in the GAD meant railway timetables, endless interviews with suspects, and trivial love stories where nothing really happens. Boring now means strict police procedure, endless confrontations with suspects, and trivial love stories with hot sex in them, but also healthful diets, exercise programs, and social involvement in sensitive issues. And too much soul-searching among the major characters on the 'good' side. Holmes had his down days and took solace in cocaine (not crack, mind you), but modern detectives seem to be suffering the Sorrows of Young Werther half of the time.

Anyway, the issues:

1. Racism. This is the major sticking point now. Your Greedy Jew or Lazy Nigger or Sinister Chink was just a throwaway character inserted into the book to add some spice to the stew of the plot. This was not meant to insult; it was just expected and accepted. "They did not know any better." (Nor did their readers.) When they used a racial type as a main character, they usually did that with purpose and with true respect to personality, motive, and attitude. [Shakespeare carrying on the medieval attitude to Jews at least gave Shylock motives anybody can empathize with.]
   
   There are very few GAD writers who had serious racial prejudices to the extent that you could call them Nazi or anything sinister of that sort, although some might have sympathized with the 'white-supremacy' attitude. Religion falls under this category in a much more insignificant way, but there was always an assumption that Christianity is superior to any other religion. (Usually, in British mysteries, Church of England, but in some really hard cases Roman Catholicism was the only supreme religion. In the USA, it tends to be a sort of bland Jeffersonian deism, but it's still Christian.)
   
   One exception these days: Any Muslim or Arab is fair game for instant vilification. But to criticize Russians or Chinese is non-PC now (so much for James Bond, etc.).
   
   
2. Drinking and Smoking. These antisocial but pleasurable habits come and go in acceptance over time periods. Right now, they are out (especially the latter). However, they were rarely made an issue of in GAD stories, apart from out-and-out alcoholism as a factor in the crime. A drunk was either funny or pathetic, but not a villain. And practically everybody smoked. In many modern stories these 'vices' are regarded as some sort of leprosy. (Even your modern female descendants of Phillip Marlow do not sanction the vile weed, and drink only an occasional glass of white wine, tough as they are as PI's -- they will never miss their 6 AM jogging session on the beach.)
   
   
3. Social Status. Servants became real people after Dickens, but they still remained servants. That kow-tow attitude lingered, somewhat diluted, until World War Two. A moniker such as 'Sir' remained one despite the circumstances, and a Lord was still a m'Lud no matter what he did incurring debts, behaving brutally, or gibbering like an idiot. A Lady just didn't do 'that sort of thing' (or if she did, it was just called high spirits -- if the chambermaid did it, that was instant dismissal or some sort of purgatory). Your feckless heirs and other hangers-on behaved like drones round the ancestral hive, but still had their gentlemen's clubs to go to. But even as early as "Trent's Last Case" (1913) you had your classless tycoon sorts who made up with money what they couldn't do with background or cultivation. Unfortunately, wealth of any kind is the only 'class' presented in the mysteries these days (apart from aristocrats, who are now impoverished but still cultured). Perhaps with the 'Fall of the CEO's', respect for the rich and powerful will diminish -- but I doubt it -- power just changes hands, as we saw with the commissars. There is nothing in GAD that is any more obnoxious than one's obeisance to the politicians who control your tax rates nowadays and expect you to be grateful.
   
   
4. Sex. Agatha Christie never wrote about cunnilingus, probably didn't know the word, or if she did, did not know of any instances among her acquaintance. That makes her books non-PC, because no book will sell now in PC-acceptable terms without some of that thrown in, and also buggery (excuse me, 'anal intercourse'). Wives who defend husbands against all odds (and vice versa) were common in GAD -- even though often it was a case of one murdering the other, as it always has been. Men had affairs, women didn't (or if they did, it was regarded the way the 'French' do). What is non-PC about GAD is that people didn't RELATE, they just lived their roles. There was no 'Communication' between them, hence many misunderstood reactions, and the plots became needlessly (and necessarily) complicated by people's behavior. Now, of course, you get PC buzz phrases to clue you in. How can the old presentation be described as unwordly and passé, since that is the way people have always been?
   
   
5. Five. As a compulsive list-maker, I have to have 5 (or 10, or 15) points. So what shall it be? Better transportation systems in GAD? No, that's true, but not a PC issue. More responsive police force? No, they were pigs then and are swine now, the grunting just sounds different. (Dickens's Inspector Bucket would feel well at home in the NYPD.) And PC right now after the 9/11 thing is to say they are all heroes, not bumblers. So again, not a PC issue. So what is?
   
   Women? Possibly a point worth developing. Many GAD writers (not all, of course) stuck with the Victorian formula that women were housewives, flibbertigibbets (aka bimbos), whores, great aunts, or mothers-in-law, not to mention spinsters, ugly nonentities, kitchen maids, and bar maids. Not lawyers, doctors, or anything professional beyond nurse, nannie, or housekeeper. Men, too, are often presented as sex creeps, assholes, and congenitally crooked. These types (who we all know exist, all too commonly) will reappear as long as novels are written, but it is still POLITICALLY INCORRECT to present them without some sort of psychological or sociological excuse for their character in modern mysteries. It made more sense in GAD just to reveal the hyprocrite, which after all is what most of the culprits are. Achieved the same moral lesson, if that was intended, rather than trying to make some political or social point. Murderers are mostly thugs or selfish hypocrites at any time in history, with a few exceptions; GAD doesn't present the thugs in any major role, thank God. The main point is the discovery of the hypocrite. GAD is a comedy of manners, above all.