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The contemporary fictional police detective as critical security analyst: Insecurity and immigration in the novels of Henning Mankell and Andrea Camilleri Alex Macleod Security Dialogue published online 22 September 2014 DOI: 10.1177/0967010614543584 The online version of this article can be found at: http://sdi.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/09/22/0967010614543584

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International Peace Research Institute, Oslo

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SDI0010.1177/0967010614543584Security DialogueMacleod:The contemporary fictional police detective as critical security analyst

Article

The contemporary fictional police detective as critical security analyst: Insecurity and immigration in the novels of Henning Mankell and Andrea Camilleri

Security Dialogue 1–15 © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0967010614543584 sdi.sagepub.com

Alex Macleod

Department of Political Science, Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada

Abstract This article argues that popular culture can make an important contribution to security studies, and especially critical security studies, either by offering alternative narratives that challenge the dominant view of security or by deconstructing the process of securitization. It then examines a genre of popular culture that until now has been largely ignored by security studies, noir police procedural novels, and shows how the contemporary police detective can no longer be viewed in the same way as the defender of the status quo depicted in the traditional police procedural. At the same time, he or she does not correspond to the portrait of the security professional, a member of those forces that contribute to the way security is officially defined. He or she has become, instead, a critic of prevailing security practices. To illustrate how this has happened, the article takes novels from two well-known authors of noir procedurals – Faceless Killers by Sweden’s Henning Mankell and Rounding the Mark by Italy’s Andrea Camilleri – and explores how their two very different police detectives, Kurt Wallander and Salvo Montalbano, treat the fears, anxieties and insecurities aroused by immigration in their respective societies and, in doing so, assume in their own way the role of critical security analyst.

Keywords critical theory, immigration, insecurity, securitization, security

Introduction Thanks to a spate of academic articles and books published over the last few years, popular culture has firmly established itself as a legitimate area for research for international relations scholars. Studies have dealt with international relations as seen through film (Weber, 2005, 2009; Shapiro, 2008; Prince, 2009; Drezner, 2011), television (Weldes, 1999, 2003a; Kiersey Corresponding author: Alex Macleod. Email: [email protected] Downloaded from sdi.sagepub.com at Universite du Quebec a Montreal - UQAM on September 23, 2014

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and Neumann, 2013) and novels (Neumann and Nexon, 2006a; Ruane and James, 2008). However, one form of popular culture has been generally overlooked, the contemporary noir police procedural, despite its close link with one of the main subfields of international relations, security studies. The classic police procedural, developed after World War II, offers homage to the work of police detectives and their teams as they painstakingly search for the person or persons who have committed the murders at the centre of the story. It reassures the reader that serious crimes do not go unpunished, and that society can count on the police to ensure its security. Since the 1980s, and especially since the end of the Cold War and the spread of globalization, another type of police detective novel has emerged, the noir procedural, which challenges the certainties of the classic model. As conceptions of security have evolved, these novels tell us, so has the traditional role of the police officer as an agent dedicated to preserving domestic security. The protagonists of the noir procedural see themselves as much more than mere defenders of law and order, or agents of repression. They do not limit themselves to the task of hunting the authors of the crimes around which their plots are structured, but also get caught up in the socio-economic conditions in which these crimes are committed. In doing so, this new generation of police detectives find themselves well placed to offer critical insights into the social and political issues of their day. The novel is a cultural form well suited to this exercise, since it allows the author to explore in greater depth the mind-set and thought processes of its protagonists than would be possible with other vehicles such as cinema and television. Since the overwhelming majority of these procedurals form part of a series, often stretching over several years, they allow for evolution both in their main protagonists and in the social conditions within which these novels take place. The contemporary police detective lives far away from the timeless, static world of the classic police procedural. This article will take up these arguments by analysing two novels written by two highly successful authors of the post-Cold War noir procedural: Faceless Killers (Mördare utan ansikte), written by Sweden’s Henning Mankell and published in 1991, and Rounding the Mark (Il giro di boa) by the Sicilian author Andrea Camilleri, published in 2003. Both authors have become popular well beyond their own countries’ borders, to the point where their detective stories have been turned into television series watched all over Europe1 and can be considered among the most read contemporary noir procedurals. The article will look at how these two books and their chief protagonists, Inspectors Kurt Wallander and Salvo Montalbano, react to the way their respective societies have securitized the issue of undocumented immigrants and asylum-seekers. In each case, the protagonists live in close-knit societies, with a strong sense of belonging, situated far from national centres of power, in two very different parts of Europe: Skåne in Southern Sweden and Sicily. At the same time, the books represent two different approaches to the police procedural. Mankell follows a well-established Scandinavian pattern, that of dwelling on the dark side of society. In doing so, he concentrates on the deep-seated fears shared by many ordinary citizens, often suggesting the existence of conspiracies involving not only criminals but also people occupying socially respected positions. Camilleri, on the other hand, adopts a much lighter, often humorous tone, as he satirizes Sicilians’ obsessions with tradition and their sense of difference from the rest of Italy, and reflects on popular attitudes to the outside world. The article begins with a brief reflection on how popular culture, and particularly the noir police procedural, can contribute to security studies. It then traces the emergence of this literary genre. The last section takes the examples of Camilleri and Mankell to show how the police detective can unwittingly become a critical security analyst.


Macleod: The contemporary fictional police detective as critical security analyst

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Popular culture and security studies National and international security has occupied an important place in popular culture at least since the 19th century. Even Sherlock Holmes could be called upon to save Britain’s national security (particularly in ‘The Adventure of the Naval Treaty’ and ‘The Adventures of the Stain’), and spy stories have continuously acted as defenders of the national interest or a well-defined ideological view of the world, first in novels, then in films, and more recently in TV series (Stafford, 1991; Wark, 1991). Since 9/11, rarely a week goes by without a film or a TV series appearing somewhere in the Western world to remind viewers of the constant existence of internal and external threats to their security (Prince, 2009; Hammond, 2011). In their essay on popular culture and international relations, Neumann and Nexon (2006b: 13– 20) suggest two approaches to their topic that are particularly relevant to security studies. The first concerns treating popular culture as data, which refers to what it tells us about prevailing social and political norms, collective beliefs, and identities of the societies in which an item of popular culture is located. For example, the emblematic genre of Hollywood, the Western, especially the films of the golden era of the 1940s and the 1950s, tells us much about the idea of national identity and the stories that have become historical facts for most Americans, such as the fulfilment of the country’s ‘manifest destiny’, the myth of the frontier, justification of the war against the land’s indigenous peoples, and the imposition of law and order by the gun. Relatively few films, such as Broken Arrow (1950), The Searchers (1955) or Little Big Man (1970), propose an alternative, critical view of what tends to be accepted as the official story of how the United States colonized the west. Second, popular culture can also intervene in the process of constituting such norms, beliefs and conceptions of national identity – what Neumann and Nexon (2006b: 19) call ‘naturalizing importance’, which ‘makes a particular way of looking at the world appear to be part of the natural order, “just the way things are,” and hence difficult to argue against’. In this case, we can say it belongs to the general process of political socialization. A recent instance of this naturalizing process is the increasing use of surveillance cameras in police procedurals on television, not only to identify possible suspects, but also to follow their every move. Given the obvious ‘positive’ benefits of this technological device, how could any reasonable person with nothing to hide possibly consider its presence an intrusion into everyday life? As Jutta Weldes (2003b: 7–8) points out, however, popular culture can also assume a critical stance towards international relations, and by extension towards security. It ‘provides alternatives that challenge the status quo; we can examine it for modes of thinking that resist dominant constructions of world politics, that provide alternative visions of world politics, and that offer possibilities for transformation’. Noir police procedurals also offer a second type of critical thinking that Weldes does not explore, and that is more prevalent. Instead of challenging the status quo with ‘alternative visions’ of security, the protagonists of most noir procedurals criticize these views of security without suggesting any such alternatives. Often this critique takes the form of raising relevant questions about the real nature of the case at hand, but sometimes police detectives may go further and actually deconstruct a situation already defined in terms of security. They do this, for example, by resisting attempts to transform breaches of the law into security issues, or by following their own unorthodox lines of enquiry. In both cases, they challenge those seeking to define and expand the societal security agenda. Didier Bigo (1995: 17) refers to the officials involved in ensuring a society’s security as ‘security professionals’ who ‘tend to read any event in the social world as a potential source of insecurity’. This is a category of people that, ‘despite many differences’, brings together policemen, gendarmes, intelligence services, military people, providers of technology of surveillance and experts on risk assessment (Bigo, 2002: 65). The problem is to know where exactly to locate these


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security professionals. The noir procedural suggests that, at least as far as the police are concerned, their agents on the ground, those who come most into direct contact with society, should not be automatically counted among such professionals. Though some of these police detectives may simply act as executants of orders given by those further up the hierarchy, others do not accept so easily these orders without question. These are the police detectives who, by their very actions, assume implicitly the role of the critical security analyst.

Rise of the noir police procedural At first glance, classic crime fiction would seem to have little of interest to tell us about security. Its sociopolitical premise is simple: the prevailing order has been temporarily upset by a serious criminal act, usually a murder or a series of murders, but a police detective, a private investigator or an amateur sleuth will find the perpetrator(s) and solve the case, and order will be restored. Law-abiding citizens will once again feel safe. In opposition to this sedate or ordered world, the hardboiled tradition of authors like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler concentrates not so much on the crime itself as on the sociopolitical ethos in which it takes place. Readers are introduced into a dark, corrupt urban world, far removed from their everyday experience, where individual motives for committing crimes may be important, but their social environment is what really counts. In this way, hardboiled novels provide a social critique of the existing order. This type of novel presents a dismal view of society, and usually chooses to see it through the eyes of an individual not associated with the police – a private investigator or a journalist – willing to work in this underworld and to expose it. Thus it tends to privatize crime investigation, and to suggest that the police are incompetent, obtuse, corrupt or simply uninterested in solving the crime committed. The classic hardboiled novel is therefore deliberately unsettling, and offers little hope or reassurance. After World War II, a politicized and more socially aware form of crime fiction, the roman noir,2 appeared in continental Europe, especially in France and Italy, with authors like Léo Malet and Giorgio Scerbanenco. Comparing this new genre to the traditional detective novel, Nadège Compard (2009: 1) explains that, whereas the latter ‘puts intrigue and suspense at the heart of the story’, ‘the roman noir uses them as a pretext to plunge into a socially violent, dismal, black universe’, constructing its plot ‘around characters who are often on the fringes of society, in revolt, perhaps rejected’. She then goes on to single out those elements that characterize the roman noir: ‘the notion of “social violence”’, which leads to new themes such as racism, unemployment, exclusion, segregation. Finally, the roman noir offers a constant critique of society which is linked to an ‘everincreasing politicization of this genre’. Since the early 1980s, the hardboiled novel and the roman noir have become much more hardhitting in their analysis of the prevailing sociopolitical order, with the rise of authors like Manuel Vásquez Montalbán in Spain, Jean-Patrick Manchette in France, Paco Ignacio Taibo in Mexico, and James Ellroy and Dennis Lehane in the USA. As it continues the hardboiled/noir tradition, this new generation of detective fiction, the neo-noir, often refers directly to specific political and social issues or events of the day, focusing on corruption at all levels within the system. The neo-noir tends to express profound pessimism about the possibilities of any real social or political change.

The noir police procedural The police procedural emerged after World War II and shows how ordinary policemen successfully investigate and solve crimes through teamwork and the use of normal police methods, working within the legal limits of the system. What characterizes this type of police procedural is the nature Downloaded from sdi.sagepub.com at Universite du Quebec a Montreal - UQAM on September 23, 2014


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of police work, ‘not the atmosphere of the story or the form of the crime’ (Dove, 1982: 53). By portraying the positive social role of the police, the ‘utopian vision of cooperation between the police and society’ (Winston and Mellerski, 1992: 7), it follows a similar pattern to that of the classic detective story and ultimately performs much the same function of reassurance, though usually in more urban surroundings than the English villages of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple or the conservatory of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe. To the extent that such a novel expresses any ideological concerns, they are those of the ‘anti-intellectual conservative’ policeman, preoccupied with ‘the decline of morality and social standards in general’ (Dove, 1982: 86–87). With the rise in popularity of authors like the USA’s James Lee Burke, Scotland’s Ian Rankin, England’s Graham Hurley, France’s Jean-Claude Izzo,3 Sweden’s Henning Mankell, Spain’s José Javier Abasolo, Greece’s Petros Markaris, Italy’s Carlo Lucarelli, South Africa’s Deon Meyer and Iceland’s Arnaldur Indridason, a new type of crime fiction, the noir procedural, has challenged its predecessor’s moral certainties. Noir procedurals, as Andrew Nestingen (2008: 246) says of Mankell’s novels, ‘disavow reassurance by revising the syntax of the police procedural’. The protagonist is almost invariably a middle-aged loner who cares little about respecting the chain of command. Instead of just hunting for clues and putting together the various pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, the noir investigator insists on putting the crime in a wider sociopolitical framework, asking probing questions that go beyond the actual crime, often to the annoyance of his or her superiors, who usually just want the crime solved with the least social or political impact possible. These detective stories often take place outside the usual power centres – for example, Burke’s David Robicheaux novels take place in New Iberia, Louisiana and New Orleans; Rankin’s in Edinburgh; Hurley’s in Portsmouth, in the south of England; Abasolo’s in Bilbao; Izzo’s in Marseilles; Meyer’s in Cape Town – reminding us that the conditions favouring the development of crime are not restricted to the metropolis. They emphasize the fact that the social and political transformations brought about by the end of the Cold War and globalization affect everyone. As Slavoj Žižek (n.d.) puts it, the main effect of globalization on the detective fiction is discernible in its dialectical counterpart: the powerful reemergence of a specific locale as the story’s setting – a particular provincial environment. In a global world, a detective story can take place almost literally ANYWHERE.

Žižek then adds that a true global citizen is today precisely the one who (re)discovers or returns to (or identifies) with some particular roots, some specific substantial communal identity – the “global order” is ultimately nothing but the very frame and container of this mixing and shifting multitude of particular identities.

Žižek’s point is an excellent one, as long as it is remembered that it is not simply the fact that such a story can take place anywhere that matters most, but rather that it is actually happening in a specific place that has its own set of problems and its own circumstances, and that this place is being affected by these global forces and reacting to them in its own particular way, even if similarities can be found with situations elsewhere. Noir procedural authors can also use their novels to analyse security as practised in other, non-Western, societies, as in the case of Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko novels, set in the dying days of the Soviet Union and post-Cold War Russia; Leighton Gage’s Mario Silva investigating the dark side of contemporary Brazil; and GhanianAmerican writer Kwei Quartey’s Inspector Darko Dawson fighting crime in today’s Ghana. They can also imagine the security–society nexus in other times, as in Maurizio de Giovanni’s portrait of Fascist-era Naples as seen through the eyes of his eccentric Commissario Ricciardi; Philip Kerr’s stories of insecurity in Nazi Germany as told by his incorruptible anti-Nazi police detective Downloaded from sdi.sagepub.com at Universite du Quebec a Montreal - UQAM on September 23, 2014

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Bernie Gunther; or Ernesto Mallo’s depiction of Argentina during the ‘Dirty War’ in his Inspector Lascano trilogy. One finds clear shades of the noir procedural in Chester Himes’s Coffin Ed Johnson-Gravedigger Jones series about Harlem, published in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but the contemporary era really finds its roots in the 10 Inspector Beck novels written by the Swedish couple Maj Sjöwal and Per Wahlöö, published between 1965 and 1975. In Sjöwal’s own words, these two authors consciously used the crime novel ‘as a scalpel cutting open the belly of the ideological pauperized and morally debatable so-called welfare state of the bourgeois type’ (cited in Liukkonen, 2008). They have left an indelible mark on the Scandinavian noir procedural. By choosing to analyse society and its ills through the eyes of a detective who clearly does not hold conventional views of the world, the noir procedural becomes doubly subversive. Not only does it adopt the critical stance of the roman noir towards the sociopolitical status quo, but it also calls upon one of the traditional defenders of the established order, the police inspector, to deconstruct it, thus inviting the reader to question the very essence of the structures supporting it. Though the noir police procedural is a literary form associated above all with Europe and North America, it can also provide a vehicle for making critical comments on authoritarian societies, from within. Jonathan Smolin (2007) has shown, for example, how the noir procedural has emerged in Morocco, though the critical aspect remains fairly timid. Perhaps the most interesting case is that of Cuban author Leonardo Padura, who uses the ironic, irreverent musings of his disillusioned police lieutenant Mario Conde to criticize Cuban society and corruption within the political system in his Havana tetralogy, published in Cuba during the 1990s.

The police detective as critical security analyst Both the classic detective novel and the traditional police procedural assume the form of a narrative that is broadly structured around three features – motive, means and opportunity – and that proposes a particular ‘reading’ where the detective must separate the relevant from the irrelevant ‘until he is finally able to reduce the polyvalence to one true meaning. For it is an essential premise of the classical formula that there ultimately exists such a distinct reading’ (Hühn, 1987: 455, emphasis in original). Luc Boltanski (2012: 19–70) calls this distinct reading the ‘reality of reality’. According to Boltanski, in modern industrialized societies the notion of reality is presented as something extremely fragile. This situation arouses unprecedented anxiety about the reality lying behind apparent social reality. And it is in the art with which the detective novel ‘translates this anxiety concerning the reality of reality that we should seek the main reason for its success’ (Boltanski, 2012: 38, emphasis added). This is where the noir procedural differs from its classical predecessors, since it eschews the whole idea of a possible ‘true meaning’ or the existence of a ‘distinct reading’ of a crime. Of course, the police detectives of the noir procedural also seek to reveal the reality of reality, but they are never sure they can reveal its full meaning. They can never offer any more than temporary relief for the anxiety referred to by Boltanski. There can never be a neat and unequivocal solution to the crime(s) they have been investigating. This acceptance of uncertainty offers a lot of scope for the noir procedural to adopt a critical stance towards the aim, conduct and results of police investigations. Given the subordinate position occupied by the protagonists of the noir procedural, their nonchalant, often impertinent, attitude towards their superiors, and their idiosyncratic approach towards their work, they do not fit easily into Bigo’s definition of security professionals. They rarely simply accept the ways in which the police hierarchy, intelligence agencies and their political masters attempt to frame and restrict their mission. These police detectives, who often express conservative views of the world, come to play, despite themselves, the role of critical analyst as their investigations progress. Downloaded from sdi.sagepub.com at Universite du Quebec a Montreal - UQAM on September 23, 2014


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The noir procedural presents the possibility for critical analysis at several levels. To begin with, it insists on putting every event or situation under examination in its social, political and historical context. Second, its protagonists tend towards a form of epistemological scepticism, as exemplified by a distrust of obvious or clearcut solutions. Of course, the investigator is searching for the ‘truth’, but knows that it is rarely an absolute and that the ‘facts’ of a case can be subject to several conflicting interpretations. Knowledge in the noir procedural is never limited to establishing the identity of the author of the crime. It cannot simply be a matter of applying sound deductive reasoning, of explaining the singular events that led to the crime taking place and the individual motives behind it. The noir procedural seeks rather to uncover the conditions that made the crime possible, to understand how such an event could happen. Third, the investigator is keenly aware of the dangers of the politics of security, and how it can be manipulated by those in power. Fourth, he or she will constantly challenge the motives of those in authority who might want to impede an investigation or to push it in a direction aimed at avoiding any embarrassment to influential people in society. Fifth, like all critical analysts, the investigator is constantly questioning the foundations of his or her own actions and thought processes. In other words, the investigator is acting reflexively. Finally, the protagonist of the noir procedural overtly assumes his or her normative positions, of which the overriding one is a sense of justice, not just about discovering who committed the crime, though this is obviously important, but, above all, about social justice and its relationship to security. This sense of social justice comes under several guises. In some cases, it involves expressing disgust with the investigator’s superiors for attempting to cover up or refusing to pursue crimes that might inconvenience socially important individuals or groups. This means protagonists will often continue an investigation despite lack of official support or after having been ordered to cease and desist. In others, it entails ignoring and sometimes forgiving relatively minor crimes committed by the socially underprivileged. In both cases, the contemporary noir detective is clearly expressing his or her resistance to higher authority. As was suggested earlier, popular culture provides security studies with two broad types of critical analysis. The first not only challenges the status quo but, in the words of Weldes, also proposes ‘alternative visions’ with which to do that. In other words, this form of critique presents the possibility of something better. Despite periods of pessimism and even despair, Camilleri’s Montalbano tends to combine this positive, optimistic approach with harsh criticism of those who would turn what he views as social and human problems into security issues. Mankell’s Wallander, on the other hand, represents the majority position of police detectives leading investigations in the noir procedural, one that is dominated by scepticism and pessimism. He clearly sees how the fears and anxieties of his compatriots are easily exploited, but holds out little hope for any meaningful change.

Montalbano versus Wallander Firmly rooted in their respective communities, both Montalbano and Wallander have strong and opposing opinions not only about the political and social issues that most concern their compatriots, but also more generally about life. Montalbano4 does not disguise his disgust with the corruption rife in Sicilian politics and never loses an opportunity to denounce the policies and the practices of one of Italy’s most prominent populist politicians, Silvio Berlusconi. A man caught up in the ‘permanent confusion between modernity and tradition’ (Lombard, 2001: 65), Montalbano has a profound sense of what it means to be a Sicilian. He expresses this feeling in his language – a mixture of standard Italian, Sicilian dialect, and Camilleri’s own invented mixture of Sicilian and Italian – in his predilection for taking secondary roads to keep in touch with the local countryside wherever he can, and, above all, in his obsessive preoccupation with good, local food. He is a bon vivant who loves to eat to excess, though he is very choosy about his food, and to drink fine wine Downloaded from sdi.sagepub.com at Universite du Quebec a Montreal - UQAM on September 23, 2014

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and malt whisky. He has no desire to leave his home base of the small fictional provincial seaside town of Vigàta, based on Camilleri’s home town of Porto Empedocle in southwestern Sicily (population of just over 17,000),5 and refuses all attempts to promote him, which would mean moving elsewhere. Montalbano opposes these good Sicilian traditions to the bad ones of machismo, the Mafia, omertà, distrust of outsiders and political corruption. In other words, he sets out to dereify the stereotyped image of Sicilian identity to which so many Sicilians and non-Sicilians cling and that he sees as a barrier the island’s road to modernity. Whereas Camilleri has chosen to express his own views directly through Montalbano, his alter ego, Mankell has decided to depict his protagonist, Kurt Wallander, as the Swedish Everyman, reflecting positions widely held in Sweden. Like Montalbano, he is a troubled witness to the changes in Swedish society, but as seen through the eyes of a man who positions himself well to the right of centre. As public prosecutor Anette Brolin tells him, his views sound like those of her father, a retired judge: ‘a true old-fashioned, reactionary civil servant’. Wallander does not disagree (Mankell, [1991] 1997: 213). At the same time, he is constantly questioning his own attitudes and prejudices, without necessarily coming to any firm conclusions about them. Mankell invites the reader to experience social change through the eyes of Wallander and to share the latter’s doubts and uncertainties. Wallander is much more reflexive than his Sicilian counterpart, who may often acknowledge his errors of judgement and question his behaviour, but never doubts his own sociopolitical positions. Wallander reflects Mankell’s own pessimism about the future of Swedish society, as expressed in an interview published in the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur: I continue to think that Sweden is a just society, compared to others. But I am aware that it’s facing problems that didn’t exist 15 years ago. We’re witnessing a dangerous evolution of the welfare state. True, we need to enact reforms, but many of these are having a negative impact. So I’m worried about the future… . And, of course, [Sweden] has its share of problems, notably those I mention in my books: the relationship between democracy and the judicial system. If justice is dysfunctional, democracy cannot function. Sweden has had numerous scandals, which suggest that corruption and organized crime are growing. We even see racist tendencies, though much less pronounced than in other countries. (Anquetil and Armanet, 2008)

Like Montalbano, Wallander, ‘the burned-out policeman’ (see Nestingen, 2008: 223–254), lives in a small provincial port, Ystad (also with a population of just over 17,000), located in the province of Skåne in southeastern Sweden, not far from Malmö, Sweden’s third-largest city. He is psychologically and physically exhausted. He is overweight, eats irregularly and badly, drinks heavily, suffers from insomnia and has absolutely no inclination to exercise. In later volumes in the series, we learn that negligence of his body has led to diabetes. He is cantankerous towards his fellow officers, preferring to lead his own investigations and to act on his own intuitions. He has no real friends, and his family relationships are extremely difficult, both with his father and with his daughter, Linda.

Fighting the politics of inseurity Mankell’s Faceless Killers opens in January 1990, just two months after the fall of the Berlin Wall and less than two years after the population of the small Skåne town of Sjöbo had voted 67% in favour of a referendum declaring that it would no longer accept asylum-seekers on its territory. Wallander refers obliquely to this event,6 and every Swede reading the book when it was first published in 1991 would have immediately recognized the allusion.7 The story begins with a particularly brutal murder of a couple in their seventies, Johannes and Maria Lövgren, on their farm near Ystad. Johannes is killed outright, but his wife lives long enough to utter the word ‘foreign’ to the



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police before she dies. Wallander quickly realizes how the news of possible foreign involvement in this vicious murder could further enflame local passions against immigrants and tries to keep it quiet. But the news soon gets out, and Wallander’s fears soon prove only too right. A local refugee camp is set on fire. A Somali refugee from one of these camps is shot point-blank with a shotgun by a Swedish man, who declares that this is revenge for the death of Johannes Lövgren and that a woman refugee will also be killed to avenge the death of Maria. The murderer turns out to be a former policeman with links to a far-right organization. As the investigation of the murder of the Lövgrens follows one false trail after another, it begins to peter out until Wallander discovers that, on the day of his death, Johannes Lövgren withdrew a large sum of money from a local bank. This new lead reveals that the murderers, the faceless killers, are in fact two Czechs falsely claiming political asylum and who had already served time for assault in their home country. Thus the affair had nothing to do either with genuine refugees or with immigrants. Camilleri’s story of immigration takes place more than 10 years later and in very different circumstances. In the background of Rounding the Mark lies the problem of a society that has traditionally been itself a region of emigration, both within Italy and Northern Europe and to the new world of North and South America and Australia. At the same time, Sicilian society has remained tightly knit, with its own traditions and customs and a very distinct dialect, and the island has enjoyed a high degree of autonomy within the Italian state. In the 1990s and 2000s, it has had to deal with integrating a growing immigrant population, the ‘new Sicilians’ (Romano, 2005), who have often shown much more ambition and dynamism than the local inhabitants, a process that, as Jeffrey Cole (2007) suggests, has not proven to be an easy one. Rounding the Mark opens with Montalbano expressing his feelings of anger and disgust with more cases of police misconduct, particularly fabrication of evidence against anti-globalization demonstrators at the Genoa meeting of the G-8 in July 2001. He feels it is time to resign. He then takes a long swim to calm down, during which he comes across the corpse of a person who has clearly not died from drowning. In another, seemingly unrelated incident, Montalbano witnesses a roundup of clandestine African immigrants brought ashore in Vigàta, sees one of them, a young boy, apparently running away from his mother, catches him and hands him back. Later he discovers, much to his chagrin, that this woman was not the boy’s mother and that the boy has been deliberately run over as he was trying to escape from the nearby illegally built village of Spigonella.8 As the story develops, Montalbano finds the connection between the two cases and their link to a well-organized network of trafficking in immigrant children run by a Tunisian gangster, Baddar Gafsa, with a ‘sorting centre’ for new arrivals in Spigonella. In the final pages, Montalbano leads an operation against the house in Spigonella, frees a new batch of immigrant children and kills Gafsa’s lieutenant, also a Tunisian. According to Wallander, the Swedish feeling that an ‘immigrant threat’ exists can be easily explained. The country is suffering from a general sense of insecurity and fear: ‘The insecurity in this country is enormous. People are afraid. Especially in farming communities like this one’ (Mankell, [1991] 1997: 213). This fear is based not so much on a sense of loss of identity, as on a feeling of uncertainty about the future of their world. In particular, Swedes feel they are in danger of losing their values as they experience a general erosion of law and order (Mankell, [1991] 1997: 213) and the breakdown of the welfare state: ‘Sweden had turned into a country where people seemed to be afraid of being bothered more than anything else. Nothing was more sacred than ingrained routine’ (Mankell, [1991] 1997: 92). Swedes of Wallander’s generation are finding it difficult to adjust to what he sees as an emerging new world, while ‘he still lived in another, older world. How was he going to live in the new? How would he deal with the great uneasiness he felt at these changes, at so much happening so fast?’ (Mankell, [1991] 1997: 231). He can only see a


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bleak future for his country, with people being prepared to go to extremes: ‘We’re living in the age of the noose, he thought. Fear will be on the rise’ (Mankell, [1991] 1997: 280). Wallander finds that his country’s immigration policy is too lax and ‘allows anyone at all, for any reason at all, to cross the border into Sweden’ (Mankell, [1991] 1997: 44). He is particularly incensed by the inefficiency of the immigration service: Did the government and the immigration service have any real control over which individuals sought asylum? Over who was a refugee and who was an opportunist? Was it possible to differentiate at all? How long could the current refugee policy operate without leading to chaos? Was there an upper limit? (Mankell, [1991] 1997: 252)

As a member of the police, it is no surprise that Wallander is particularly disturbed by Sweden’s incapacity to control its own borders, a situation that has increased the potential for crime, especially organized crime: ‘The open borders and all the ferries coming in are like candy for the underworld’ (Mankell, [1991] 1997: 131). He elaborates on his views on the dangers of an open border policy to public prosecutor Brolin: It’s precisely the absence of a clear policy on refugees that creates chaos. Right now we’re living in a country where anyone for any reason can come across the border in any manner. Control has been eliminated. The customs service is paralysed. There are plenty of unsupervised airfields where the dope and the illegal immigrants are unloaded every night. (Mankell, [1991] 1997: 214)9

For Wallander, Swedish society is in serious danger if it continues to ignore the immigration question. The investigation of the murder of the Somali refugee and the subsequent trial of the major suspect reveal the existence of a ‘racist underground network in which political views similar to those of the Ku-Klux-Klan predominated’ (Mankell, [1991] 1997: 252). In Wallander’s mind, such a network exists as a direct result of the changes that Sweden is going through. Though Mankell himself clearly does not personally share the reactionary political and social views of his protagonist, he does not underestimate the strength of the anxieties analysed by Wallander. In the latter’s view, Swedish society runs a high risk of turning further to the right, including increasing support for the extreme right and populist anti-immigrant parties, if it continues to refuse to face these challenges. While Wallander squarely traces the ‘immigration threat’ back to the general unease experienced by Swedish society, Montalbano sees this so-called threat as nothing more than a social construction manipulated by politicians of the right and their supporters in the media for their own political gain, which he sets out to fight by deconstructing it and offering an alternative. He begins the process by arguing that the anti-immigration forces delude themselves if they think they ‘could stop a historic migration with police measures and laws’ (Camilleri, [2003] 2006: 58, emphasis added). Since the ‘immigration threat’ is nothing more than a social construction, securitizing immigration becomes nothing more than a dangerous ploy to exploit feelings of unease and insecurity in a time of rapid change, of which immigration constitutes a visible and easily targeted part. Montalbano supports his position with typical quotes from anti-immigrant speeches that mix the fear of immigrant crime and apprehended assaults on Sicily’s traditional identity, such as the following extract from an editorial from a local pro-Berlusconi TV station: Our Christian civilization cannot allow itself to be altered at its very foundation by the uncontrollable hordes of desperate, lawless people who daily land on our shores. These people represent a genuine threat to us, to Italy, and to the entire Western world. (Camilleri, [2003] 2006: 57)



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Montalbano then continues his exercise in deconstruction by showing exactly where securitizing immigration can lead. He claims that people making such attacks on immigrants are ‘both the cause and the effect of a world filled with terrorists who could kill three thousand Americans in a single blow, with Americans who considered the thousands of civilians killed by their bombs “collateral damage”’ (Camilleri, [2003] 2006: 58–59). In particular, he attacks repressive antiimmigration legislation as represented by the Cozzi–Pini law.10 As his enquiry into the young African immigrant’s death progresses, he meets an investigative journalist who reveals to him that some 15,000 unaccompanied minors from Eastern Europe and developing countries were brought into Italy in the previous year, and probably many more that were never accounted for.11 These children are brought to the country by criminal organizations, which sell them to organ recipients or paedophiles, or use them as part of a begging racket. Though such activities could not possibly happen without clandestine immigration, Camilleri invites the reader to come to the obvious conclusion that securitization/criminalization of immigration makes it much easier for such criminal organizations to act, and that the Italian state in its anti-immigration zeal has become their unwitting accomplice.

Conclusion In an age when so many media stories, TV series and detective novels tend to present stereotypical portraits of the police either as brutal, often corrupt, peace-enforcers or simply as institutional protectors of the status quo, the idea of the leader of a police investigation as a critical analyst would seem tenuous at best. However, in the noir procedural, crimes are put in their sociopolitical context and the main protagonist is as much concerned with understanding how the crime could be committed as with actually solving it. Both of the novels analysed here have used their investigators in ways that correspond to the conception of critical theory proposed earlier in this article. In the first place, Montalbano and Wallander remain highly sceptical of official accounts of the crimes they are called upon to investigate and resist any pressure from above to come to quick and convenient solutions. Second, they are only too conscious of how many perceived security threats, especially those associated with societal security, are purely social constructions. As they proceed, their investigations become an exercise in deconstruction, as they reveal how widespread fears and anxieties about the unknown, about the Other, and about change are manipulated by the powerful to camouflage their own interests and to enforce social control. Third, their search for perpetrators soon involves examining the conditions surrounding the crimes that have been committed, so that their inquiries do not stop at unmasking the guilty parties. Despite their own different approaches to the question of how society should treat immigrants – both documented and undocumented – and asylum-seekers, the progressive Montalbano and the conservative Wallander come to similar conclusions. Montalbano himself assumes the role of critical analyst, echoing his author’s own positions, and, in the manner of the traditional roman noir, exposes the underside of immigration. He does so by challenging those who would exploit the feeling of insecurity of a society whose strong sense of identity has been shaken by the arrival of so many immigrants and asylum-seekers from the South. For him, there can be no going back to the time before globalization and the end of the Cold War. We are living in a period of ‘historic migration’. This is the future, and Sicilians must learn to accept it without abandoning the best elements of their traditions and culture. At times, through his description of Montalbano’s foibles and obsessions, Camilleri seems to be celebrating a stereotyped view of Sicilian identity, but in reality he is simply humanizing his protagonist, who is, after all, a product of a society to which he is profoundly attached. At the same time, the author makes it clear that he has no time for the old Sicily, as Montalbano constantly pokes fun at outdated Downloaded from sdi.sagepub.com at Universite du Quebec a Montreal - UQAM on September 23, 2014

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traditions such as the machismo of his lieutenant, Mimí Augello, or the Mafia bosses’ sense of ‘honour’, as well as at the homage ordinary citizens seem too readily inclined to pay them. In Wallander’s case, the author uses his police detective to reflect the fears and anxieties of Swedish society as it seeks to come to terms with a fairly new situation. To a large degree, Wallander is a critical analyst despite himself. He may profess conservative opinions and sympathize with popular attitudes towards immigration, but he is also capable of reflecting on his own prejudices and realizing just how dangerous they can be if left unchecked. Unlike Rounding the Mark, Faceless Killers is concerned not with threats to local identity, but with the feelings of fear and anxiety aroused in many local inhabitants by the arrival of asylum-seekers and clandestine immigrants. In Mankell’s view, these fears and anxieties cannot simply be ignored or ridiculed. Rather, he invites Swedish readers to witness how these fears and anxieties occult something much deeper in their own society, the sense of loss – loss of sovereignty, loss of certainty, loss of a way of life: in a word, a general loss of control over so many things that had always been taken for granted – and the inevitable insecurities this loss brings. To many local inhabitants, securitizing immigration would seem to be a way of reasserting some of that control. But, through Wallander, Mankell tells his Swedish audience that this is no solution. Whereas Montalbano offers some hope for a society prepared to adjust to the conditions of late modernity, Wallander remains profoundly pessimistic about his society’s capacity to cope with some of the consequences of social and political change. The noir police procedural provides security studies with a critical dimension that is completely missing from the traditional police procedural. Unlike the latter, the noir procedural does not set out to assure the reader that his or her personal security and that of society are in safe hands. On the contrary, whereas in the classic version any worries about security end when the culprit is caught, the noir procedural can only offer temporary closure at best, and usually implies that there will probably be none. The traditional world of the police procedural tends to be timeless, whereas the police detectives of the noir procedural move with the times. Their authors stick close to contemporary events and situations and, consciously or not, reflect changes in social and moral attitudes. These stories are usually also located in a particular time and space, and refute any claim to timelessness, which is essential for any serious critical study. Since most of these novels become series spread over several years, they show how attitudes towards security can evolve over time. For example, the Wallander series stretches from 1990 to 2009, and one would presume that a version of Faceless Killers written and published in the late 2000s would tell a story far different from the one analysed here. Noir procedurals offer a rich array of case studies about the struggles to fix and deconstruct prevailing conceptions of security. Clearly these attributes do not transform the noir procedural into a critical account of security and securitization in themselves, though they constitute a necessary ingredient by providing a link between the theoretical and the empirical. The police detectives in these books act both as analysts and practitioners. None of them correspond to the upright model of the classic detective story. They are all flawed and constantly struggle with their own demons, which humanizes them. They have long realized that the distinction between the legal and the illegal, the moral and the amoral, is a fine one that they themselves do not always respect, or rather interpret in their own way. This situation puts them in a position to make a valuable contribution to critical security studies in some tangible ways. First, by refusing to kowtow to the demands of their superiors for the sake of protecting a social or political status quo in which they do not believe, they are well aware of how security and insecurity are socially constructed, and for whom. Second, as they investigate their cases, these detectives often reveal the fears and anxieties shared by many in the population and the prejudices they generate. Third, as has already been suggested, noir procedural authors are keen observers of their times and, through their protagonists, manage to catch changes in public attitudes. Fourth, these authors are often able to go where the average security studies scholar cannot Downloaded from sdi.sagepub.com at Universite du Quebec a Montreal - UQAM on September 23, 2014


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go, either physically, thanks to these authors’ own careful research and their contacts with the police and the underworld, or in his or her imagination. Lastly, and this is an extremely important point, the noir procedural, which has become one of the mainstays of contemporary television entertainment, constitutes the tool that shapes the way most of the public perceives at close range production of the forms of security that have the most immediate effect on their daily lives. Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Dan O’Meara of the Department of Political Science at Université du Québec à Montréal and Roberto Bigazzi of the Department of Italian Literature at University of Siena in Arezzo for their encouraging comments on the preliminary version of this article, and the three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful criticisms and helpful suggestions for improvement.

Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes 1. There have been three different TV series featuring Mankell’s Inspector Kurt Wallander, two Swedish (though only one episode of the second series was actually based directly on a Wallander novel) and one British. Faceless Killers has appeared in two of them: the original Swedish one, first broadcast in four episodes in September 1995 (lasting 209 minutes), and the British one, first played in January 2010 (89 minutes). Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano has been the main protagonist in a very successful Italian TV series, which, by May 2013, had run into 26 two-hour episodes. It has been broadcast in 65 countries (Palestini, 2013). The Rounding the Mark episode was first seen in Italy in September 2005. 2. A clear distinction exists between the hardboiled novel and the roman noir. The latter, which appeared in the United States between the 1920s and the 1950s, features an ‘unknowable, morally compromised protagonist who is implicated in the sordid world he inhabits, an overwhelming sense of fatalism and bleakness, and a socio-political critique that yields nothing and goes nowhere’ (Pepper, 2010: 58). Probably the most famous example of this type of roman noir is James M. Cain’s (1934) The Postman Always Rings Twice. The European roman noir has never drawn any firm line between the two, and the distinction no longer holds in US crime fiction. 3. Izzo’s Marseilles trilogy illustrates the thin line often separating roman noir from the noir procedural. In the first volume, Total Chaos, the main character, Fabio Montale, is a disillusioned, socially conscious cop who resigns. In the following two, he acts on his own, outside the police. 4. Camilleri deliberately chose this name in homage to the great Spanish author of roman noir, Manuel Vásquez Montalbán, who died in 2003 (see Camilleri, 2005). 5. In 2003, Porto Empedocle changed its name to Porto Empedocle Vigàta in honor of Camilleri and his Montalbano novels. 6. ‘You’ll soon find out that there’s a big hero right now at this end of the country. A man who is applauded behind curtains. The man who saw to it that there was a municipal vote that said no to refugees’ (Mankell, [1991] 1997: 214). 7. This was a time when anti-immigrant feeling was running high in Sweden. In a 1991 poll, 56% of the respondents said it would be a good idea to reduce the number of refugees allowed to enter Sweden (Rydgren, 2002: 37). In the parliamentary elections held in the same year, the anti-immigrant New Democracy party managed to win 6.7% of the vote (Rydgren, 2002: 33–34). 8. Spigonella symbolizes the complicity between the Italian/Sicilian state, local elites and criminality. It is a group of luxurious houses with high walls, built by rich people, without permits, that appear in no register, in a village that exists on no map, all mysteriously supplied with municipal services and electricity. Such buildings usually benefit from periodical amnesty laws that then legalize the whole operation.


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9. Wallander’s analysis echoes that of another critical security analyst, writing only a few years later: ‘The theme of the security deficit linked to the opening of borders that has structured our imaginary by changes in vocabulary (hordes, invasion, bogus refugees …) has finished by imposing itself as truth’ (Bigo, 1996: 260). 10. This is a thinly veiled reference to the Bossi–Fini law adopted in 2002, named for its two sponsors: Umberto Bossi, then leader of the anti-immigration, xenophobic Northern League, and Gianfranco Fini, then head of the National Alliance party, a direct descendant of the neofascist Italian Social Movement (MSI). The law includes putting annual quotas on the number of non-EU workers admitted into the country, restricting time limits on residency permits, immediate deportation of all ‘irregular immigrants’, and holding all suspected illegal immigrants in detention centres (see Paparella and Rinolfi, 2002). 11. In an author’s note, Camilleri ([2003] 2006: 258) indicates that these are actual official figures published in 2002 that he took from the weekly journal Panorama and that all his information on human trafficking came from an article published in the daily La Repubblica.

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Neumann IB and Nexon D (2006b) Introduction: Harry Potter and the study of world politics. In: Neumann I and Nexon D (eds) Harry Potter and International Relations. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 1–23. Palestini L (2013) Camilleri spiega Montalbano – video-prefazione ai nuovi episodi [Camilleri explains Montalbano – video preface to the new episodes]. La Repubblica, 12 April. Available at: http://ricerca. repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2013/04/12/camilleri-spiega-montalbano-video-prefazioneai-nuovi-episodi.html (accessed 2 May 2013). Paparella D and Rinolfi V (2002) New legislation regulates immigration. Euroline, 26 September. Available at: http://www.eurofound.europa.eu/eiro/2002/09/feature/it0209103f.htm (accessed 24 May 2013). Pepper A (2010) The American roman noir. In Nickerson CR (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 58–70. Prince S (2009) Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism. New York: Columbia University Press. Romano ML (2005) The new Sicilians. Best of Sicily Online Magazine. Available at: http://www.bestofsicily. com/mag/art181.htm (accessed 24 May 2013). Ruane AE and James P (2008) The international relations of Middle-earth: Learning from The Lord of the Rings. International Perspectives 9(4): 377–394. Rydgren J (2002) Radical right populism in Sweden: Still a failure, but for how long? Scandinavian Political Studies Review 25(1): 27–56. Shapiro MJ (2008) Cinematic Geopolitics. London: Routledge. Smolin J (2007) Moroccan Noir: Genesis of the Arab Police Procedural. PhD dissertation, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University. Stafford D (1991) The Silent Game: The Real World of Imaginary Spies. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Wark WK (ed.) (1991) Spy Fiction, Spy Films and Real Intelligence. London: Routledge. Weber C (2005) Imagining America at War: Morality, Politics and Film. London: Routledge. Weber C (2009) International Relations Theory: A Critical Introduction, 3rd edn. London: Routledge. Weldes J (1999) Going cultural: Star Trek, state action, and popular culture. Millennium 28(1): 117–134. Weldes J (ed.) (2003a) To Seek Out New Worlds: Exploring Links Between Science Fiction and World Politics. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Weldes J (2003b) Popular culture, science fiction, and world politics: Exploring intertextual relations. In Weldes J (ed.) To Seek Out New Worlds: Exploring Links Between Science Fiction and World Politics. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–27. Winston RP and Mellerski NC (1992) The Public Eye: Ideology and the Police Procedural. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan. Žižek S (n.d.) Henning Mankell, the artist of the parallax view. Available at: http://www.lacan.com/zizekmankell.htm (accessed 18 February 2013). Alex Macleod teaches international relations at the Université du Québec à Montréal. He has recently published ‘La théorie des relations internationales’ in Thierry Balzacq and Frédéric Ramel (eds) Traité de relations internationals (Les Presses de Sciences Po, 2013), and ‘Les relations internationales, un champ scientifique?’ in Dario Batistella (ed.) Relations internationales. Bilan et perspectives ( Ellipses Marketing, 2013). He is now working on popular culture and security, having just completed a book on Hollywood and the national security state, written with Dan O’Meara and Frédérick Gagnon of the Université du Québec à Montréal and David Grondin of the University of Ottawa.


Security Dialogue

Security Dialogue

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