A Detective's Expertise
To see someone perfect a craft or demonstrate a prowess for anything that’s difficult prods you to get closer, to see it better, to simply keep watching.
New York, 2015
In what must be the most peculiar novel of Georges Simenon’s entire Inspector Maigret series, we find a plotless tale, but one that is filled with haphazard thoughts about life and crime and the catching of criminals:
When people talk about a policeman’s nose, his sixth sense, his intuition, I always feel like retorting, ‘What about your cobbler’s intuition, or your pastry maker’s?’
For a novel set in Paris and written in French, I do imagine that the pastry maker has quite the intuition, but this is an intuition for flavor and ingredients and an utter indifference to service, rather than, as implied with the policeman, a sensitivity for character. Although the rhetorical question in that quote comes directly from Inspector Maigret, writing in the first person in Maigret’s Memoirs, which is a strange little novel that occurs after the inspector retires. As a premise we have the Inspector wanting to correct the fallacies breathed into the public by the writer Georges Simenon—fashioning Simenon the real writer as a fictional writer inside the novel. Perhaps it is an idea that triggers a smirk, or a raised eyebrow, but there’s not quite enough underneath that premise to fill a novel, so Maigret’s Memoirs demands a little determination to finish, even though it is, thankfully, rather short.
What Inspector Maigret does convey in his diatribe about life, however, is that there’s nothing particularly special about his intuition, as his knack for understanding the streets is the mere result of decades of observation, that the consequence of labor and time is what’s called expertise. We may admire his abilities to spot liars, or find his adroitness in a tricky interrogation impressive, but he wants to reassure us that there’s nothing special in his expertise: these are learned skills, fully available to anyone willing to put in the effort.
But expertise, a reader can’t quite forget, usually comes with a glow. To see someone perfect a craft or demonstrate a prowess for anything that’s difficult prods you to get closer, to see it better, to simply keep watching. And nearly all fictional detectives have at least one trait that defines their capabilities and sets them apart. Unfortunately for readers who wish to stay awake, Maigret takes us through the early years before he’s gained his expertise, as he navigates the drudgery and slog and tedious days that are needed for an officer to learn the nuances of observation.
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What typically makes the Inspector Maigret series succeed is the same element that makes any detective series succeed—the mystery of the crime is secondary to the mystery of the detective. The story is always about how much insight Maigret brings to navigate a world that’s confused and contradictory and dangerous. But it is curious to notice how the persona of fictional detectives, and the nature of their insight, keeps changing over the centuries, despite the consistency and even predictability of plots—there’s usually a murder, maybe a betrayal, or the occasional blackmail, yet every era has its own expectations on what manner of expertise is needed to confront those mysteries.
It is difficult to miss, for instance, how 19th Century detectives brought logic and analysis to fictional worlds defined by superstition or slapdash investigations. Beginning with Edgar Allen Poe and continuing with Arthur Conan Doyle and then, in the 20th Century, in some Agatha Christie novels, there’s a focus on what might be called the scientific mind in an unscientific world, where the ability to decode a series of haphazard clues into a conclusion is what’s prized. Yet there’s a rupture in the mentality of fictional detectives with the sudden appearance in the 1930s of brute force and hard heads and clenched fists—from Philip Marlow to Sam Spade and even into the much later example of Lew Archer. Given roughly the same intelligence as their predecessors, these characters also came with an extra dose of indignation—a touch of stoicism, a little alcoholism, and a potential for violence. Because now we’re postwar and the world has gone mad so everyone needs a target for their resentment—a little muscle and a few wisecracks serve just fine as expertise.
Perhaps the logical conclusion of all these iterations is the late 20th Century accidental detective, the indifferent and bumbling and amateur investigator—such as James Sallis’ Lew Griffin. Because nobody really knows how the world works anymore once the computers take over, so every detective, in the end, is an amateur. With a squint I can even slide that tendency into the recent explosion of more cerebral detectives—especially all the data analysts and forensic scientists that form the expert class in contemporary crime dramas. These are the characters who wouldn’t even think of visiting the weight room if there’s an unread book around, which seems just about right when you consider that intelligence and data and algorithms are the main currency of expertise in the 21st Century.
Of course these are generalizations, and there are countless examples against the trend, but the changing nature of what’s considered expertise in fictional detectives provides at least a hint about what’s valued over time. Regardless of the period there’s always a heightened ability—a knack for body language, a fluidity on the streets, pure intelligence, even a more primal strength. Obviously that must come packaged with a wound for our poor detective—a weakness of character or backstory that involves tragedy. And there’s the basic Shakespearean form: with character driving plot the detective needs to confront their weakness to solve the crime. To project outward and forecast what will be considered expertise in the future is almost certainly foolhardy, but there’s a reasonable chance that crime will always remain the scaffolding that holds the real story structure—the investigation of the detective.
At my neighborhood café a few years ago I used to speak occasionally with a retired New York City Police Detective, a man who had worked in the Homicide Department in the 1980s, which must have been nothing less than, well, a rather busy job. Although he had retired decades earlier, he looked spry, even with his barrel-chest and large frame; he somehow gave the impression of a man who hadn’t sprinted in years but was still perfectly capable of sprinting.
And I remember how he only talked in whispers, as if everything he told me was a secret. I would have to lean forward to fully comprehend all the sounds in a simple ‘good morning’ greeting, and it ended up giving all his words—slow, thoughtful, never excessive—a bit of extra importance, as if the effort I expended to listen also forced me to concentrate. Now he was friendly, I usually made him laugh, but I still felt that there was always a slight edge underneath his mannerisms. It was easy to miss, but he had a way of watching, of looking through you rather than at you, that gave even our most forgettable conversations a little more weight.
Perhaps that’s one result of spending much of your life talking with and assessing and trying to influence people in their worst moments. You end up meeting a lot of people, and you also end up being lied to nearly every day—something that he told me once. Though he did convey that history with a slight understanding and even compassion for the liar, as those lies came from people with absolutely everything to lose. And it does seem that if you pay sufficient attention during all those conversations, the result just might be an instinct for spotting the clues of body language.
During one morning when our subject was a mix of politics and economics—the financial crisis, if I remember correctly—a man interrupted our conversation to add a curt, indignant comment about the subject. Then he stood from his table, clearly flustered, and left the café. As I think back to those moments, I can still recall the man’s appearance, though there wasn’t anything noteworthy—not in his plain suit, not in his briefcase, nothing at all memorable about his demeanor.
My friend the retired detective, however, leaned closer to me right as the door closed, and spoke under his breath: He’s had a hard life. It was a compassionate sentence, which didn’t contain the slightest bit of irony, and it was a conclusion that, immediately upon hearing, snapped into place—it was a perfect and succinct description for the man with just a slightly hunched back and what I only then noticed was weathered skin and almost imperceptible lines across his face. His suit had been forgettable or even misleading, but now I noticed how old that suit had been; his walk across the room had been perfectly fine, the belabored nature of his gait hidden if you hadn’t paid attention.
To describe that one remark as evidence of a particular type of expertise might be a stretch, but it is difficult to not see in such offhand yet still incisive words the fingerprints of a career where reading people is valued. In its terseness, in its ability to encompass a landscape of meaning with just a few words, it seemed almost literary.
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