The Detective as Clown: a Taxonomy

Abstract

It might, on the face of it, seem an unpromising enterprise to propose a family resemblance between such diverse series detectives as Father Brown, Inspector Ghote, Albert Campion, Peter Duluth, Adam Dalgliesh, Deputy Superintendent Dalziel and Marcus Didius Falco. The word which may conjure up the right connective images is clown, provided that the reader will recall what a range it encompasses, from Marcel Marceau’s frail Bip to the robust fellow with the slapstick and the pail of paint who is the children’s circus notion of a clown; it may also be helpful to think of the distance between Charlie Chaplin, the little man with a bowler hat, stick and big boots, and Charles Chaplin, the melancholy protagonist of Limelight; or, again, that the term clown is applied in Shakespeare’s work to such diverse persons as Costard, Autolycus and Feste.