Brian Johnson
Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation. (Ernest Renan 11)
Our greatest tragedy, of course, is the Indians. (Slade, Cutthroat 131)
The police procedural is one of the most ideologically slippery sub-genres of crime fiction, capable of inscribing both reactionary and subversive responses to the dominant social order, often simultaneously. As Robert P. Winston and Nancy C. Mellerski argue, police procedurals exemplify Fredric Jameson’s view that mass cultural artifacts act as “symbolic containment structures,” whose primary function is to elicit, reframe, repress, and thereby manage transgressive social desires through “the narrative construction of imaginary resolutions and by the projection of an optical illusion of social harmony” (qtd. in Winston and Mellerski 1–2). Thus, even as the police procedural’s representation of criminality elicits and vicariously satisfies the reader’s transgressive impulses, the genre’s overarching celebration of rationality, order, and disciplinarity characteristically reaffirms normative values by coding such impulses as “antisocial” and symbolically containing them (2). In this way, “the police procedural becomes a powerful weapon of reassurance in the arsenal of the dominant social order,” and even “as much a part of the ideological state apparatus of control as the thin blue line of the police force is” (Scaggs 98, 86).
Nonetheless, as Winston and Mellerski also acknowledge, the genre’s tendency toward ideological closure is not absolute; it is amenable to appropriation and disruption, particularly through narratives that “end on a note of barely controlled chaos rather than restored and validated social order” (2). In this regard, the police procedural discloses its affinity with Gothic fiction, the genre out of which modern crime fiction emerged and whose flimsy pedagogical frameworks often constitute, in Fred Botting’s words, “little more than perfunctory tokens, thin excuses for salacious excesses” (Todorov 49–51; Scaggs 15–18; Botting 8). Even Gothic novels whose endings “sustain a decorous and didactic balance of excitement and instruction” point up that genre’s profoundly ambivalent relation to the symbolic order, showing how “morality, in its enthusiasm to identify and exclude forms of evil, of culturally threatening elements, becomes entangled in the symbolic and social antagonisms it sets out to distinguish” (Botting 8). Gothic’s foregrounding of the conceptual interdependence of oppositions such as good and evil, reason and passion, and lawfulness and criminality, in other words, ultimately “undermine[s] the project of attaining and fixing secure boundaries and leave[s] Gothic texts open to a play of ambivalence, a dynamic of limit and transgression that both restores and contests boundaries” (8–9). Police procedurals that incorporate Gothic tropes and narrative devices thereby heighten their own potential for ambiguity, opening the procedural genre’s comparatively normative narrative pleasures to precisely such a “play of ambivalence.”
Such is the case with the Special X series of RCMP procedural “psycho-thrillers” by Canadian author Jay Clarke (b. 1947). A former Vancouver lawyer specializing in cases of criminal insanity, Clarke has written thirteen novels in the Special X series under the pen name “Michael Slade,” most of these in conjunction with one or more co-authors.1 Far more dramatically than any of the RCMP procedurals that have appeared in Canada before or since the publication of Slade’s first novel in 1984,2 Slade’s Special X novels foreground the process of generic hybridization, whereby the ideologically conservative police procedural form becomes thoroughly riddled with—if not actually consumed by—tropes of Gothic excess. The primary means by which Slade Gothicizes the police procedural is the series’ lurid and ultraviolent thematization of serial killing, a crime that functions as the generic hinge between detection and horror in all of the novels, comprising at once the motivation of the police investigation and a competing object of narrative interest. Thus, although the series provides the usual gratifications that one associates with the police procedural as a romance of disciplinarity and high-tech surveillance, the series is equally invested in specularizing murders and mutilations whose details are designed to shock, repulse, and titillate. The fact that these internationally bestselling novels are marketed as horror rather than detective fiction and that they have been enthusiastically embraced by horror fans reflects the force of their investment in contemporary Gothic, an investment whose literary debts are inscribed in the novels themselves through countless allusions to H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Louis Stevenson—particularly the latter’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), a text whose generic instability provides Slade with a paradigm for his own tales of Gothic detection.3
The ideological ambivalence produced by such a generic unsettling of the police procedural acquires a very specific significance in the Canadian context of Slade’s novels where the Royal Canadian Mounted Police function not merely as agents of the state, but as symbols of national identity. As Daniel Francis notes in his seminal study of Canadian cultural myths, “Canadians are the only people in the world who recognize a police force as their proudest national symbol” (29). This striking conflation of Canadian identity with the embodiment of British colonial discipline is rooted in what Eva Mackey aptly calls the “benevolent Mountie myth,” a historical metanarrative according to which “the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, representatives of British North American justice, are said to have managed the inevitable and glorious expansion of the nation (and the subjugation of Native peoples) with much less bloodshed and more benevolence and tolerance than the violent US expansion to the South” (1).
Slade’s Cutthroat evokes precisely this myth when one character recalls the historic “respect” shown by the Cree and Blackfoot for “Queen Victoria’s Redcoats” during the Great March West through “Indian territory” performed by the newly constituted North West Mounted Police in 1873 (20–21). The function of such episodes is ideological: the narrative’s account of “respectful” Indians who spontaneously capitulate to the rule of British law and to the advance of British civilization papers over the scandal of colonial history in a way that salves colonial guilt and imposes a false unity on what is in fact a highly conflictual and still-contested national space (Francis 33–34; Mackey 34–36). The myth of the benevolent Mountie thus constitutes a prime example of what Daniel Coleman calls “the elaboration of a symbolic history that masks its obscene supplement” in a dynamic of falsification and disavowal. As Coleman has shown, such a dynamic inheres in the paradoxical notion of colonial settlement itself, for “settlement” is a deceptive term “which suppresses, even as it depends upon, the violence that was deployed to expunge any claims which First Nations people had to the northern half of this continent” (28–29). Within this context, the ideological stakes of Slade’s representation of the RCMP are doubled; his novels’ structuring of a relation between policing and criminality bears not only upon “dominant values” (as all police procedurals do), but upon specifically post-colonial questions about the validity of Canada’s settler-invader metanarrative and the relation between territoriality, the state, and First Nations populations that this metanarrative and its symbolic histories seek to manage.
Slade’s novels engage extensively—and often critically—with these symbolic histories, demystifying them in at least two ways that echo the anti-racist critiques of Mackey, Francis, Coleman, and others. First, although the novels are set primarily in the period since 1982, nostalgic references to the Force as a living link to the history and values of the British Empire that appear in the narrative present are typically undercut by chapters of analeptic counterhistory that fictionalize the early decades of the Force’s existence, revisiting the benevolent Mountie myth and exposing its complicity with colonial violence. Second, supplementing and reinforcing such historical revisionism, the plots of several novels focus on the RCMP’s search for serial killers who turn out to have genealogical ties to the force’s beginnings and to its various “mythic Western heroes” (Cutthroat 21). This uncanny structure melodramatically reinserts the constitutive violence of colonialism that is dramatized in the novels’ historical flashbacks into the present, exposing this founding “secret” as an aporia within the national body and illustrating the way in which “the spectral, fantasmatic history” of settler-invader nationalism’s obscene supplement “continues to haunt contemporary Canadian life” (Coleman 29). If, as Gary Hausladen argues in Places for Dead Bodies, one significant feature of the police procedural is its tendency to make place “an essential ingredient in the commission, discovery, and resolution of the crime” (4), Slade’s Gothic RCMP procedurals provide an instructive example of the way that, in a Canadian context, the sub-genre may at times operate as a popular form of critical pedagogy that reimagines the nation as a place of violently overlapping histories, grafting onto the usual question of detective fiction—whodunnit?—the more culturally and politically significant question that has trenchantly been posed by Laura Moss: “Is Canada post-colonial?” (1).
In what follows, I examine the answers that Slade’s novels provide to this question by tracing the ambiguous identification of the RCMP with the serial killers they pursue in three key novels in the series: the first novel, Headhunter (1984), and two of its sequels, Cutthroat (1992) and Primal Scream (1998).4 The blurring of the “thin red line” between order and chaos in the representation of the RCMP in these three novels, I argue, may be read—at least partially—as a revisionist national allegory that challenges settler-invader ideologies of nationhood and troubles the containment strategies that the novels manifestly and increasingly deploy as the series develops. More specifically, I will show how the degree to which any given novel in the series could be said to offer a productive demystification of settler-invader myths is contingent upon its generic hybridization of the police procedural form with the motifs and plot structures of Gothic fiction. The ultraviolence, horror trappings, epistemological ambiguities, and sometimes open-ended plots of Slade’s novels, as we shall see, all amplify the police procedural’s ability to disturb received values when it substitutes the suggestion of “barely controlled chaos” for an affirmation of “restored and validated social”—and national—“order.”
I don’t think it’s possible to leave your roots behind. (Slade, Headhunter 92)
In Headhunter, the first novel of the series, Slade rehearses the benevolent Mountie myth primarily in order to subvert it, embodying its precepts in the character of its chief investigator, noble but disgraced Superintendent Robert DeClercq. A legendary officer whose “name was up there with Steele and Walsh and Blake” (126), DeClercq’s life and career are shattered during the Quebec October Crisis of 1970 when his wife is murdered and his daughter kidnapped by “a group of Montreal thugs caught up in the groundswell of the Quebec independence movement” (126). Following an unsanctioned and unsuccessful attempt to rescue his daughter, DeClercq is reprimanded and compelled to retire from the Force. The series begins twelve years later as the RCMP commissioner reinstates an emotionally troubled DeClercq to lead the investigation into a series of gruesome “Headhunter” murders involving the decapitation of women throughout the Vancouver area. As the honorific linking of DeClercq’s reputation to heroic members of the North West Mounted Police such as Superintendent Sam Steele and Inspector James Walsh suggests, Slade presents his detective as the inheritor of their romantic legacy and the latter-day champion of what the commissioner calls “an organization with both a sacred duty and a mythical legend in trust” (61).
DeClercq’s custodianship of this “mythical legend” is telegraphed by his authorship of The Men Who Wore the Tunic, a history of the RCMP in the mode of imperialist nostalgia which celebrates the organization’s “evol[ution] from the British Imperial Army” and argues that “the sheer weight of experience handed down from officer to officer over the years remained the Force’s most powerful weapon, the feeling that they were a team” (94). The collapsing of past and present implied by DeClercq’s definition of “teamwork” typifies his championing of a modern-but-still-mythic Force, defined by an unbroken continuity with its origins. Thus, although DeClercq’s second wife worries that her husband’s obsession with history makes him “a throwback to another time” (196), the series does not dismiss DeClercq as a relic of the romanticized colonial past. On the contrary: his function in the text is dialectical. DeClercq is charged with the narrative task of working through contradictions between tradition and modernity that have appeared within the Force, conserving and modernizing what appears to be the detritus of arcane crime-solving techniques from the force’s history in a movement of reconciliation and synthesis.
Thus, for example, when DeClercq addresses his investigative team for the first time, he initiates a tactical return to tradition, moving to supplement modern policing procedures with a reintroduction of the “flying patrols” devised for the North West Mounted Police by Commissioner Lawrence Hershmer in 1890. In opposition to what DeClercq criticizes as “our modern desire for centralization,” these flying patrols once functioned as “the commando guerillas of the Northwest Mounted Police,” for they “did not follow the regular trails of the patrol system, but instead … functioned totally on their own, independent of the main centralized system” (116). DeClercq’s narrative justification for reintroducing the flying patrols is that their independence and eccentricity will combat investigative “tunnel vision” (116); within the novel’s symbolic economy, however, their role is more far-reaching. Their reintroduction not only constitutes a harmonious reconciliation of past and present procedural techniques but also marks the formal solution to the problem of sexual difference that has emerged within the Force “since DeClercq had retired” (112). Decreeing that “each [flying] patrol will consist of a male and female member” (116), DeClercq institutionalizes a “female perspective” on a killer “who has a perverted passion for women” (117). The gender parity inscribed in his creation of the literally decentred flying patrols rewrites the modern institutional structure of the Force in a way that recalls his complementary plan to amend the sexist title of his historical study, The Men Who Wore the Tunic (112). In this way, DeClercq’s flying patrols act as synecdoches for some future moment of ideal inclusivity within the Force’s unfolding history, when female officers will no longer be seen primarily as unsettling “modern” challenges to a male homosocial tradition.
DeClercq’s mobilization of gender difference to combat crime via revamped nineteenth-century flying patrols is less progressive than it appears, however, for it also illustrates the ambivalence that inheres in his role as nostalgic dialectician. To the extent that DeClercq functions as a mouthpiece for the novel’s ideological commitments and contradictions, such a retrofitting of colonial institutions to provide symbolic solutions to real conflicts around gender and policing is a microcosm of how the series itself “manages” challenges to tradition by symbolically “reconciling” minoritarian demands with the Force’s imperialist, racist, and masculinist history—a reactionary process I examine in more detail below. Before doing so, however, I will have to trace the novels’ immanent (but incomplete) critique of the imperialist nostalgia represented by DeClercq’s revision of his own celebratory colonial historiography, a critique that is articulated, symptomatically, in the language of imperial Gothicism.
Throughout Headhunter, DeClercq’s colonial nostalgia is focused through his identification with the legendary Inspector Wilfred Blake, Slade’s fictionalized version of imperial heroes such as Sam Steele and James Walsh—figures whose names often accompany Blake’s in the text to suggest their semantic equivalence. Reputedly an impetus behind the formation of the North West Mounted Police and an embodiment of benevolent but unflinching imperial rule (Cutthroat 20–21), Blake is mythologized by DeClercq’s history of the Force in terms that strikingly echo the imperial Mountie romances of Ralph Connor:
An officer instilled with rectitude, discipline, dedication, and self-reliance, the inspector embodied that gung-ho combination of patriotism and “muscular Christianity” that built the British Empire.… How Blake dealt with the fugitive Sioux who crossed into Canada during Custer’s Last Stand gave birth to the myth: “The Mounties always get their man.” (Cutthroat 42–43)
Incarnating, but also complicating, this tissue of Mountie clichés is Blake’s Enfield service revolver. This item, bequeathed to DeClercq by Blake’s son Albert (also an officer of the Mounted), provides the Superintendent with a point of cathexis for the tradition he reveres, functioning as a sort of clan totem of the RCMP. “What would Wilfred Blake do if he were here to take on the Headhunter?” DeClercq asks himself in a moment of professional crisis, the Enfield near at hand (214). The question at once affirms DeClercq’s identification with the imperial myth Blake represents and illustrates the novel’s tendency to invite a complementary identification of the “criminality” of “the fugitive Sioux” with whom Blake “dealt” after Custer’s Last Stand with that of the serial murderers DeClercq hunts in present-day Vancouver—murderers whose crimes are frequently marked by signifiers of indigenous cultures. Emblematically, in Headhunter, the decapitated body of the first female victim is found hung from a Dogfish Burial Pole outside UBC’s Museum of Anthropology in such a way that “the carved face of the Dogpole appeared to take [the] place” of the missing head (55). That this specularization of serial killing as a “savage” crime linked to Native “ritual” in the first modern crime scene of the first novel in the series is not accidental. Like DeClercq’s worship of Blake, intimations of a Native serial killer are one of the novel’s many strategies of misdirection that also set up its subsequent “subversion” of the Mountie myth.
The irony inherent in DeClercq’s veneration of the Enfield to symbolize a “benevolent” history of conquest foreshadows his eventual disenchantment with Blake’s myth. Even in Headhunter, DeClercq’s hero-worship is already unsettled by rumours that Blake’s commissioner “thought the Inspector’s methods were excessive”; although Blake “always came back with his man,” “so many came back dead” (213). The implications of these rumours are dramatically substantiated for DeClercq in a later novel when he comes into possession of Blake’s recently discovered trunk and finds beneath the “uniforms, medals, diaries, pipes, and photographs” a false bottom containing a tartan-wrapped “Trophy Collection” of items gathered, in Blake’s words, “from colored heathens I redeemed to God” (Cutthroat 94–95). The collection consists of “fetishes” from all corners of the British Empire: “an idol of the Hindu demon Kali Ma,” “a Chinese amulet engraved with a Cosmic Mirror,” “a Maori feeding funnel,” “an Ashanti kuduo box,” and “a Netsilik talisman box” (95). As Blake reveals in notes left in the trunk, he amassed these “trophies” through a series of grisly murders whose excessive violence is clearly meant to metonymize colonial domination. In light of this discovery, DeClercq formally repudiates his hero-worship of Blake in a sequel to The Men Who Wore the Tunic called Bagpipes, Blood, and Glory, a book that details the officer’s colonial atrocities, soberly concluding (in a chapter called “The Imperialist”) that “the time has come to reconsider Blake’s legacy” (92–93). As DeClercq puts it in a later novel: in Bagpipes, Blood and Glory, “I exposed him for the psycho he was” (Primal Scream 334).
Like the hidden passageways and secret rooms of Gothic fiction that disclose troubling historical revenants, Blake’s trunk is a narrative device for the production of uncanny effects. “History eerily seemed to seep from the trunk” (Cutthroat 46), DeClercq tells us; as such, his discovery of its abject colonial secrets generically relocates Blake’s history from the realm of imperial romance to that of imperial Gothic. This transition is a shock to DeClercq, but not to the reader, who has already been alerted to the dark underside of Blake’s “strange, strange legacy” (Headhunter 213) through a series of historical flashbacks that depict his psychosis in full flower. The first of these analeptic episodes shows Blake capturing and brutally killing the Cree renegade Iron-child while imparting a fatal lesson on the vicissitudes of imperial conquest: “You cannae stop th’ settlers from coming” (40). In flashback, Blake thus makes explicit the historical facts of violent dispossession and the suppression of Native resistance that are disguised by the benevolent Mountie myth he appeared, to DeClercq, to embody. In a remark that he delivers shortly before executing his prisoner, Blake suggests that, even in his day, the Force’s self-representations are essentially self-deceiving: “[Commissioner] Herchmer says I’m excessive, lad, but you’ll nae find a bad mark on my record.… The Mounted police need me much more than I need them” (41). In this way, Blake comes to embody not the myth of imperial benevolence or even the related myth of imperial romance, but the “excessive” history of violence these myths repress and by which they are necessarily haunted.
The novel’s judgment on Blake’s actions—and, by implication, its judgment on Canada’s colonial history—is indicated by its identification of Blake as a “psycho,” a “paranoid schizophrenic” whose violent obsessions anticipate those of the serial killers that DeClercq and his team track in the narrative present. The novels thus figure empire-building as a form of serial killing or mass murder, atrocities that are inadequately masked by an imperialist ideology of benevolent expansion and the extension of British “civilization.” The inadequacy of Canada’s symbolic history of peaceable “settlement” is writ large in Blake’s delirium, whose dramatization of imperialism’s “paranoid” bad conscience constitutes one of the novel’s most productively demystifying gestures. Already mentally unbalanced by “a spot of malaria” he picked up in “the tropics” during his participation in the Ashanti War (41), Blake is tormented by nightmares of uncanny invasion wherein he imagines himself the sole survivor of a Hudson’s Bay Company fort that is being overrun by the empire’s victims: “Indians [who] have come to bring the smallpox back” (45). In Blake’s nightmare, Natives with bodies ravaged by disease smear pus and saliva over of the windows and door handles of the fort, an act of Native vengeance that merges with a more general resurgence of imperial ghosts, like the “naked Ashanti warrior” who sits before Blake’s severed head and “beats upon [it] with a massive buffalo bone” (47). Meanwhile, Blake is tormented by a vision of his own headless corpse, which is dressed in “the bright scarlet tunic of the Northwest Mounted Police” and “h[ung] upside down from the ceiling by nails driven through both feet” (46). Such reversals, Blake’s Gothic delirium implies, are both imperialism’s worst nightmare and a kind of poetic justice—that is, a form of reciprocal violence that imperialism’s own brutality calls forth.
Significantly, the perspectival shift DeClercq experiences, when imperial Gothic replaces imperial romance as the lens through which to read the Force’s colonial history, recalls the similar shift experienced by Charlie Marlow in the ur-text of imperial Gothicism: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. It is not incidental that Headhunter begins with an epigraph from Conrad’s novella, for like Marlow in Heart of Darkness, DeClercq is unable to sustain his longing for imperial romance after encountering imperialism in its demonic form; and, like Kurtz (on whom he is obviously modelled), Blake is not only an atavistic colonizer prone to “excessive” and “unsound” methods such as the collecting of Native “trophies” but a violently split imperial subject as well. The mental breakdown recorded in Kurtz’s report to “the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs” that begins by championing the notion of “an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence” and concludes with the volte-face “Exterminate all the brutes!” (45–46) epitomizes the diagnosis of imperially inflected “paranoid schizophreni[a]” that DeClercq ultimately attaches to Blake and the myth of imperial benevolence he falsifies.
Moreover, Heart of Darkness informs the novels’ representation of colonial criminal psychopathy at a deep level, as the Conradian epigraph to Headhunter attests. In its original context, Marlow’s famous remark that “The mind of man is capable of anything—because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future” is prompted by his unsettling view of “prehistoric” Congolese natives on the shore, whose “black and incomprehensible frenzy” evokes for him “an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse,” “a thing monstrous and free,” “truth stripped of its cloak of time” (32). Such a conflation of European “madness” with African “frenzy” provides the basis for the novella’s fin-de-siècle frisson, as Marlow recoils from his “remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar” (32). In this way, Conrad reveals late-Victorian anxieties about a post-Darwinian universe in which a suddenly perceived “kinship” between the “civilized” ego of Europe and the “savage” id of Africa (the “past” that European minds contain) is regulated only by the “restraint” of the former—a restraint that, in imperialist discourse, is nearly impossible to maintain at the outposts of Empire, where it is perpetually menaced by the atavistic threat of “going native.”
Similarly, evil, in Slade’s novels, is figured first as “madness” and secondarily as atavism—regression to some “prehistoric” developmental stage when mental life is dominated by id-like forces and compulsions. Slade’s fascination with the evolutionary dimensions of brain topography and the tripartite structure of the mind, which is divided into the survival-driven “reptile brain,” the socialized “rational brain,” and the emotionally volatile and violent “limbic system” in Cutthroat, makes the novels’ Conradian thesis explicit (132–35). That one detective glosses the relationship between the rational and limbic areas of the brain by evoking an internal struggle between “Dr. Jekyll” and “Mr. Hyde” confirms Slade’s investment in late-nineteenth-century models of psychopathy as regression, for, like Heart of Darkness, Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella about a civilized doctor who is also a bestial serial killer is also squarely located within the genre of imperial Gothic (Brantlinger 232).
As we have seen, Slade’s archetype for the “unchained” imperial monster—his Canadian answer to European atavists who have loosed the “restraints” of civilization like Kurtz and Dr. Jekyll—is Blake. Yet, Slade’s translation of imperial Gothic from Conrad’s Congo to late-nineteenth-century Canada results in a striking negation of Marlow’s consolations. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow famously accounts for Kurtz’s “madness” by contrasting the psychic dangers of the unpoliced imperial periphery with the security of the imperial centre where citizens live comfortably (albeit ignorantly) “between the butcher and the policeman” (44). For Marlow, the policeman functions both as a guarantor of civic order and as a symbolic watchdog for the ego. The symbolic role of the policeman in Heart of Darkness, as Scaggs points out, thus anticipates his heroic function as a guardian of the social order and his ideological function as a psychic disciplinarian in the police procedural (85–86). In Slade’s RCMP procedurals, however, such security is elusive because Slade’s relocation of Heart of Darkness to the New World shows how, in Canada’s imperial history, all contraries—policing and criminality, order and chaos, rationality and madness, civility and savagery—are inseparably, and uncomfortably, intertwined in Blake’s bloody deeds.
The series’ neo-Conradian critique of imperial romance and settler-invader nationalism that we have been tracing culminates in DeClercq’s investigation of Blake’s final case, “the unsolved mystery of the Lost Patrol” (Cutthroat 45). Centring on Blake’s disappearance in the Rocky Mountains in 1897 while on a mission to apprehend the fugitive Cree warrior Iron-child, the Lost Patrol mystery does more than simply undermine the benevolent Mountie myth; it constitutes a Gothic countermyth of haunted nationhood that parodies both indigenization and northern racialism, two of settler-invader nationalism’s oldest and most persistent strategies of self-legitimization. This double parody and the symbolic counterhistory of colonial violence it makes visible are inseparable from Blake’s atavism, which is spectacularly mythologized by Blake’s strange fate in the Rocky Mountains, and which, as we will see, articulates the white-supremacist assumptions of settler-invader history with its contradictory investment in a racialist fantasy of going native in order to feel “at home” on foreign ground.
The conflation and parody of these complementary discourses of national belonging centre on the revelation that Blake’s disappearance is linked to his private quest to acquire an unusual humanoid skull that has been unearthed in the Big Horn Mountains of Montana. Through a series of narrative convolutions, the fossilized “Yellow Skull” whose features “combine elements of both Man and the Ape” (99) comes to be associated both with the fabled missing link that decisively proves Darwin’s theory of evolution (96) and with indigenous myths of Windigo—the fearsome monster who haunts numerous Native mythologies, threatening humankind with cannibalism and spirit possession. To Blake, the skull is the ultimate colonial trophy (157), one that he eventually acquires from Iron-child, a Cree fugitive suffering from “Windigo psychosis” (222) who is trying to prevent the skull’s “medicine” from “becom[ing] a trophy of the whites” (157). After murdering Iron-child and taking possession of the trophy on his fateful “Lost Patrol,” however, Blake unexpectedly takes up his victim’s “dream-quest” and heads for Windigo Mountain, where he is apparently killed in an earthquake.
The discovery of Blake’s mummified body in a Mountain cave almost a hundred years later by DeClercq’s team of detectives crystallizes the novel’s national Gothic countermyth. From atop a crude throne carved in rock, Blake’s corpse presides over a Lascaux-like cave of pictographs that depict the exploits of “a red-chested man” (Blake) fighting, murdering, and raping representative members of the monstrous primate clan whose skulls now encircle his corpse in a gesture of worship and submission (355–56). On the one hand, this tableau’s depiction of Blake’s ascension (or degeneration) to “chief” of a lost “Windigo” tribe of Gigantopithecus hominids exposes the brutality of imperial conquest, which is figured in the pictographs as the murder and rape of a tribal society by a powerful foreign minority. The cave’s Gothic tableau thus provides the novel’s atavistic critique of imperial romance with a kind of phantasmatic primal scene, enshrining imperialism’s implication in “primitive” violence within the mythic non-space of Windigo Mountain, an adventure setting whose caves are sealed from the outside world by the 1897 earthquake that traps Blake and are sealed a second time by an avalanche, which DeClercq’s team barely escapes.
On the other hand, precisely because the imperial Windigo myth Blake embodies relies upon a Victorian theory of socio-cultural evolution that tends to conflate the non-Western and the prehistoric, Blake’s emblematic surrender to the “prehistoric” impulses of his limbic brain necessarily involves a curious identification with the very races he seeks to dominate. This is already evident in Blake’s previous trophy-taking, whose violent methods of collection position the cultural trophies as analogous to the scalps of Custer’s soldiers taken by the Native warriors at the battle of Little Bighorn (16–17). Rather than simply affirming an identification with imperialist racial supremacy, Blake’s trophy-collecting discloses his seemingly unconscious mimicry of Native cultural practices—a mimicry that is spectacularly represented in his surprising decision to complete Iron-child’s dream-quest and his subsequent going Windigo.
Such episodes exemplify but cannot be reduced to “atavism,” for in the New World context of settler-invader nation building, any identification with Native culture (however stereotyped, however violent) carries with it a charge of identification with place. Settler-invader “atavism,” in other words, is often difficult to distinguish from “indigenization”—the process whereby the New World immigrant secures a sense of belonging to the contested space at which he arrives belatedly. As Terry Goldie argues in his classic study of this process, indigenization is a multi-faceted cultural strategy whose means include the mimicry of Native practices and identities, the appropriation of Native signs, symbolic identification with the land, and the production of tropes like that of the “dying race,” which provides ideological justification for the settler’s seemingly inevitable displacement of the Native (12–16, 155–59). The fetishization of the graves of explorers and imperial heroes and the trope of the settler who simply disappears into the land provide related means of “indigenizing” Native space for the settler-invader by sanctifying the ground in the name of an imperial presence that seems to be always already here (Grace 43, 197).
The myth of Blake’s “Lost Patrol”—the mysterious disappearance that feeds his legend—epitomizes the indigenizing trope of the imperial hero who simply vanishes into the landscape to become a sort of national genius loci. Moreover, the conflation of this disappearance with his Windigo metamorphosis underscores the identification with Native culture that informs this process of indigenization. In fact, Blake’s identification with Native culture is doubly constituted: first, through his completion of Iron-child’s dream-quest and second, through his assumption of a Windigo identity that acts as a synecdoche for going native. At the same time that these details evoke the discourse of indigenization, however, the grotesque nature of Blake’s fate suggests a parody of indigenization, rather than an uncritical endorsement of its appropriating impulse. Its parodic effect is evident, for instance, in the pictographs’ depiction of Blake’s animalistic sexual domination of a female Windigo—a scenario that violently mocks the trope of the settler’s attraction to an Indian maiden whose enticing but ethereal sexuality mediates his relationship to the landscape she symbolizes (Goldie 68).
Such an unravelling of the indigenizing dimensions of Blake’s legend is supplemented by this episode’s symmetrical parody of the racialist discourse of northern nationhood. This discourse was inaugurated by the Confederation-era Canada First Movement to establish Canada as a “northern kingdom” destined for “northern races” (Berger 4) and continues to thrive in popular representations of the North as a setting for national romance and a proving ground for Canadian identity (Hulan 125, 177–78). Typically, northern nationalism complements classic forms of indigenization that emphasize the settler-invader’s psychic need to “become” Native by outmanoeuvring the question of indigeneity altogether and refashioning the “natural” relationship between place and ethnicity in terms of a Euro-Canadian “northern race” that is always already entitled to “its” northern home. The location of Blake’s mummy, enthroned within the icy tomb of Windigo Mountain and discovered by DeClercq’s team while “northern lights danced beneath an anemic moon” (350), clearly situates Blake’s atavism within this racially fraught discourse of a “northern kingdom.” As Margaret Atwood has shown, the very motif of going Windigo is itself a perennial feature of Canadian representations of North that explore environmentally constituted forms of psychosis, even as they exemplify a Gothic version of the indigenizing “Grey Owl Syndrome” (78–81).
Moreover, the discovery of Blake’s grave in Windigo Mountain by DeClercq’s team occurs while DeClercq himself searches through a series of abandoned cabins and is ambushed by a pack of Sasquatch-like “Windigos” on “Viking Peak”—an adjacent formation that used to be part of Windigo Mountain until it was split in two by the earthquake that trapped Blake in 1897 (350; 364). The peak’s name is significant, for although northern nationalism traditionally privileges Britishness in its racialization of Canadians as “Northmen of the New World” (in R. G. Haliburton’s famous phrase), the movement was deeply influenced by the nineteenth-century fascination with northern European antiquities and, as Renée Hulan points out, the supposed racial “purity” of the idealized Viking remains an important symbolic figure of national northern romance (120). DeClercq’s unlikely battle with an inbred, “degenerate” version of a surviving Neanderthal species called Gigantopithecus on Viking Peak is a striking example of such national northern romance which pits him in a symbolic struggle against a “white-haired,” “pink-eye[d],” “ivory fang[ed]” “albino Bigfoot” who is transparently meant to be Blake’s bestial descendant (368–69).
Yet, like the allusions to indigenization, these fantastic evocations of a national “northern kingdom” incline towards parody and irony. Despite its resonance with national discourses of nordicity, Slade’s version of North (which pervades the series) is characteristically the Gothic North of Robert Service, a place of madness and violence whose horrific dimension is enhanced though subtle allusions to H. P. Lovecraft’s Antarctic polar landscape in At the Mountains of Madness (354–55). The Gothic undercutting of the north’s association with racialized nationalism is particularly evident in the Viking Peak episode, for in place of symbols of white racial supremacy, DeClercq discovers only the abject horror of an “inbre[d]” “rotting Sasquatch,” “riddled with mutation” (364). Between Blake’s Gothic parody of the indigenized imperialist and this Gothic parody of northern nationalism’s Viking ideal, the novel seems to leave little historical ground upon which the cultural politics of settler-invader nationalism might stand.
The deeper I went into history, the more I forgot the past. (Slade Cutthroat 42)
The main plots of Slade’s “psycho-thrillers” are closely intertwined with the series’ analeptic challenges to the discourses of settler-invader nationalism and sometimes extend their power to disturb. Ultimately, however, DeClercq’s pursuit of serial killers in the narrative-present exerts a countervailing force that frames and manages the unsettling power of such “historical” Gothic ruptures while simultaneously updating the traditional image of the RCMP to allegorize late-twentieth-century multicultural nationhood. In fact, the former project of ideological management that enjoins us to remember the past only to assert that it is finally dead and buried is dependent on the latter project of multicultural symbolization, which constitutes at once a new liberal ideology of nationhood and a mechanism of repression.
Central to both of these projects is the series’ account of the formation of “Special X,” a fictional “External” unit of the RCMP under DeClercq’s command specializing in Canadian cases with international dimensions. This invention of a special unit to investigate cases “beyond our borders” (Cutthroat 41) is the global correlate of the series’ perennial interest in national issues of immigration and multiculturalism at home, and for this reason, like the RCMP, Special X remains rooted in the cultural project of national figuration. DeClercq’s new unit—it is “his Special X” (Cutthroat 48)—formalizes and expands the revisionist process exemplified by his retrofitting of the flying patrols to symbolically resolve the more general problem of gender inequity within the Force. As before, DeClercq pursues a liberal project of integration and synthesis, staffing his team with ethnic and sexual minorities who have traditionally been excluded or unwelcome within the ranks (Cutthroat 35–36; 48). His Special X thus implicitly seeks to correct the situation described by a fellow-detective who sees Canadians as “limbic xenophobes” and Canada as a “Miscellaneous Country,” internally riven by cultural and ethnic differences, “[a] nation of cannibals eating themselves” (Cutthroat 131).
In becoming the figurehead of a new RCMP, DeClercq thus contravenes Blake’s boast that “the legacy of this Force will be the legacy of me” (42)—a boast that is repeated several times throughout the series and which threatens to permanently stain the benevolent Mountie with the blood of colonial violence that Blake’s imperial Windigo exposes and mythologizes. The purgation of Blake’s imperialist legacy from the Force (and from the nation) that the formation of Special X implies is enacted in Headhunter and Primal Scream at the level of plot. In these novels, DeClercq’s investigation of a series of beheadings leads him to a serial killer who turns out to be not only a member of his own squad, but Blake’s granddaughter as well: a “homophobic psychotic transsexual” named Katherine Spann. Spann’s role as a proxy for Blake with whom DeClercq can match wits, and whose eventual symbolic expulsion from the Force completes the series’s articulation of a new multicultural, “post-colonial” metanarrative, is telegraphed by her blood tie to Blake, but also inheres in her symbolically freighted personal history and in the details of her psychotic identity.
Personally selected by DeClercq to be part of the Headhunter Squad and subsequently promoted to Special X, Spann initially appears to be an ideal officer in whom DeClercq recognizes “something special … that would drive her up the ranks,” a quality that “he had had … once himself” (254). As readers learn at the end of the first novel, however, Spann is secretly operating as Headhunter, a killer whose serial sexual murder and decapitation of women culminates in the shrinking of her victim’s heads in the manner of the Jivaro Indians of Ecuador, who “used to be headhunters not so long ago” and who perfected the art of creating tzantzas or shrunken heads (176, 387–88). Blake, too, had been preoccupied with headlessness, for he was tormented by the image of his decapitated corpse when in the grip of his own psychotic hallucinations. More importantly, Headhunter keeps her tzantzas in a silver box that echoes the imperialist Trophy Collection housed in Blake’s trunk. Further confirming her role as Blake’s proxy, she shrinks and photographs the heads in a remote cave-like bunker on “Stevenson Island” that is laid out in precisely the same manner as Blake’s skull-decorated tomb in Windigo Mountain (374).
The origin of Spann’s “double personality” is, significantly, a convoluted Oedipal drama typical of serial killer thrillers that reflects the uncanny structure of romantic idealization and Gothic demystification that Blake’s own symbolic legacy enshrines. As an adult, Spann is tormented by the voice of her mother Suzannah—a hallucination produced by the breakdown of Spann’s mental attempts at “dissociation” from the incestuous childhood sexual abuse she suffers in Suzannah’s New Orleans dungeon—a literal chamber of horrors where she also witnesses an elaborate sexual murder stage-managed by her psychopathic dominatrix mother. The persecuting auditory hallucination of her mother’s voice originates during Spann’s adolescence when she experiences a psychotic break with reality while in Ecuador volunteering for the Peace Corps following Suzannah’s death. In this “huge equatorial forest … set in an eternity of somber gloom” (176)—yet another Conradian heart of darkness—she encounters a female hippie who gives her acid and tries to seduce her with a “dual phallus” that “looked like some two-faced Janus-head, like tongues of the Devil curving up to lick the jungle air” (Primal Scream 333; Headhunter 182). The episode, whose symbolic resonance is grotesquely exaggerated by Spann’s paranoid acid trip, culminates in the birth of the multiple personalities that transform her into Headhunter. Unable to distinguish the hippie’s sexual advances from the experience of maternal molestation, Spann murders the woman, enacting a symbolic revenge on her mother that is made possible only by her simultaneous identification with her father, Alfred—Blake’s illegitimate Mountie son who is murdered by Suzannah during the family’s time in the Far North when Spann is just a baby. Spann’s “psychotic transsexual” identification with her father is triggered by the hippie’s gender-confusing “Horns of Venus,” an object that Spann (as Headhunter) subsequently employs as an instrument of rape in a compulsive enactment of her “father’s” revenge upon her monstrous mother (Primal Scream 332–33). “Sparky” (her father’s nickname for her) thus becomes the nucleus of the Headhunter identity, making possible the decapitation and head-shrinking Spann performs to create “the fetish of a female homophobe used to sew shut the menacing maw of the Mother’s sex,” thereby “revers[ing] th[e] sexual abuse” (332).
Spann’s abject private history amounts to more than a psychotic family romance; it also constitutes a psychic allegory of the novel’s Gothic demystification of settler-invader nationalism, with Spann’s parental projections each playing one of the roles in the Mountie myth. Spann’s idealization of her father, an RCMP Corporal who polices the North, repeats DeClercq’s initial idealization of Blake as an embodiment of the Benevolent Mountie. Similarly, anticipating DeClercq’s discovery that Blake is more imperial Windigo than benevolent Mountie and adopting her father-in-law’s murderous lack of restraint (70), Suzannah is a female doppelgänger of Blake, a northern femme fatale in the tradition of the deadly northern women who populate the Yukon ballads of Robert Service. In this way, Spann’s idealization of and identification with Alfred to escape from her threatening mother significantly parallels the way the benevolent Mountie myth functions as a form of psychic disavowal for the threatening knowledge of colonial violence within settler-invader culture more generally, especially since Suzannah repeats Blake’s role as demystifier of Mountie clichés when she taunts her daughter for emulating Alfred: “Thin red line and ‘get your man’ and all that Mountie crap. Do you think [Alfred’s] father, if alive, would have given a fuck?” (Headhunter 385). The further revelation, in Primal Scream, that Alfred is not the ideal Mountie that Spann imagines (or that DeClercq believes him to be), but “a sexual bully, abusing his wife, and returning runaway native boys to a pedophile at the residential school” (334) reinforces precisely the Gothic critique of “post-colonial” nationhood that Spann’s double personality implies. As Headhunter, Spann’s uncanny sartorial fetish of attacking her victims while wearing her father’s “tattered Scarlet Tunic” (383) completes this sequence of unsettling colonial resurrections.
Such a reappearance of imperial Gothic discourse within the present action of the plot gives Headhunter a subversive charge that diminishes in later instalments of the series. This is not only because the serial killer’s psychopathy extends Blake’s demystifying reach into the present, but also because, unlike the other novels considered here, Headhunter concludes with a Gothic inversion that resists the ideological closure and symbolic management that police procedurals typically afford. Rather than dramatizing the triumph of the institutional rationality represented by Special X over the irrational forces that emanate from Blake’s imperial legacy, the ending of Headhunter sets this generic expectation on its head, subversively dramatizing Spann’s sly avoidance of detection when DeClercq mistakenly attributes the Headhunter’s crimes to a suspect that she has framed. To underline the significance of Spann’s guile, Slade has DeClercq—in a scene laden with dramatic irony—bequeath Blake’s talismanic Enfield revolver to Spann, praise her promise as an officer (predicting that one day she might “outdo even Wilfred Blake,” whom DeClercq still idolizes at this point), and tell her, “I’d like to be your mentor. I’d like to think that in a way you are the replacement for my stolen child” (411). DeClercq’s unwitting parody of the benevolent RCMP “tradition” he reveres, while the victorious Spann listens silently and gloats, foregrounds the way in which Spann’s success at concealing her murderous identity enacts the ideological concealments already at play in the RCMP traditions and symbols that define the symbolic history of settler-invader nationalism.
This unnerving conclusion is underscored by an epilogue in which several sanitation workers find and unwittingly destroy a crucial piece of missing evidence in a garbage can—the “Horns of Venus” that Spann hastily disposed of to conceal her Headhunter identity during a shootout that left her wounded. The narrative significance of this grotesque artifact is contextualized by a lesson that one of the men—a university student studying history and archaeology—receives from an older sanitation worker known as “The Perfesser,” a demotic philosopher of waste whose theory of abjection articulates precisely how the ideological effects of symbolic history are constituted through processes of exclusion that yield categories analogous to cleanliness and filth, “mask” and “reality” (417–18). The Perfesser’s lesson thus frames the meaning of the novel’s most suggestive symbol of doubleness and violence with a demystifying analysis of history as myth that echoes the novel’s Gothic critique of settler-invader ideology.
In this context of history and its repressions, the “Horns of Venus” are perhaps better described by their other name, the “Devil’s Tongue” (411), for this “Janus-faced” dual phallus suggests not only the doubleness of the symbolic order and its hidden abjections, but the eminently discursive process of articulation and disavowal that characterizes the production of what Coleman, following Slavoj Žižek, calls “the elaboration of a symbolic history that masks its obscene supplement … its spectral, fantasmatic history” (28). As Žižek argues, “One should distinguish between symbolic history (the set of explicit mythical narratives and ideologico-ethical prescriptions that constitute the tradition of a community …) and its obscene Other; the unacknowledgeable ‘spectral,’ fantasmatic history that effectively sustains the explicit symbolic tradition, but has to remain foreclosed if it is to be operative … the spectral fantasmatic history tells the story of a traumatic event that ‘continues not to take place,’ that cannot be inscribed into the very symbolic space it brought about by its intervention” (Žižek qtd. in Coleman 28). That the literally “obscene supplement” of the “Devil’s Tongue” functions in the text as a brutal weapon reminds us that the symbolizations and foreclosures of settler-invader symbolic history are, moreover, not simply “spectral” but forms of epistemic violence whose status, like that of the missing evidence, seems permanently irrecoverable within the “symbolic space it brought about by its intervention.” What makes Headhunter the most radical of Slade’s novels, then, is the precision with which it anatomizes and lays bare the operation of national ideologies, without attempting to contain or manage their Gothic exposure with the narrative strategies of the police procedural genre. Instead, Headhunter lets the falsifications of settler-invader symbolic history stand as “error” and, in the process, ensures that the scarlet-clad symbols of “post-colonial” nationhood find themselves haunted, within their own ranks, by the same spectral history their presence disavows.
Primal Scream, the sixth installment in the series and the inevitable sequel to the first novel, systematically “rights” the generic inversions of Headhunter, tying up the loose ends of Spann’s disturbing challenge to settler-invader metanarratives and moving towards a symbolic resolution of the national conflicts explored in Headhunter and Cutthroat. The series’ containment of Spann’s uncanny challenge is already evident in her absence from the intervening novels, an absence explained by her postings outside of Canada—in Thailand, India, Columbia, and Haiti—where she has apparently resumed murdering women as Headhunter, amassing a new collection of tzantzas that is even more reminiscent of her grandfather’s touristic imperial Trophy Collection than her first one (22, 308). Her reappearance in Canada in Primal Scream, however, heralds not so much a Gothic return of the repressed as an opportunity for the series to finally settle unfinished business. This symbolic settling of accounts is played out in the context of the emergence of a new serial killer named “Shrink,” who rapes, murders, and decapitates male victims, shrinking their heads in the Headhunter’s signature style. “Shrink” is indeed Spann, who has been mentally “reprogrammed” by her psychiatrist, Dr. Anda Carlisle—another sort of “headshrinker”—who uses Spann as a murderous puppet to exact vengeance on a pedophile who raped her as a child. Expertly tweaking Spann’s psychotic complexes to place “Suzannah” in control and make Spann target men as stand-ins for her father, Alfred, Dr. Carlisle then protects herself from implication in the murder by disguising her personal revenge on the pedophile as but one of a string of “random” serial killings that Shrink performs. The similarities between the Shrink murders and the Headhunter slayings prompt DeClercq to revisit the long-closed case and ultimately lead him to the bunker on Stevenson island, where he discovers Headhunter/Shrink’s true identity and kills Spann in a shootout, thereby symbolically dispatching Blake’s legacy from the RCMP and providing the series’ founding mythic conflict with the kind of ideological closure that Headhunter deferred.
Complementing the symbolic abjection of Blake’s imperial Windigo myth is the novel’s sympathetic treatment of First Nations land claims and its symbolic integration of a Native officer into Blake’s Special X division of the RCMP—narrative elements that attempt to redress Blake’s historic role in enforcing the appropriation of Native land and the Canadian government’s related policies of cultural genocide in two parallel plots. The first of these focuses on a standoff between the RCMP and members of an internally divided Native blockade at “Totem Lake, BC,” the site of a Gitxsan Nation land claim. This plot, which makes the history of First Nations dispossession explicit, is framed by numerous settler-invader mea culpas and in many ways constitutes the series’ most significant intervention into national ideologies of forgetting by bluntly stating that “Domination continues. Over their land” (219). About the culturally catastrophic banning of the “heathen” potlatch from 1885 to 1951, for instance, DeClercq’s foster daughter Katt concludes, “We’re the bad guys” (347), and subsequently wonders how white Canadians can fail to accept the validity of the Gitxsan land claim at Totem Lake, “knowing what we did to them” (347). DeClercq’s answer—“It’s called dissociation. It’s a mental illness, Katt” (348)—powerfully extends the series’ earlier psychoanalytical diagnosis of imperialism as a form of serial killing to the disavowal of settler-invader nationalism. Similarly, the Gitxsan Chief, who catachrestically subverts the national anthem’s lyrics—“O Canada, Our home and native land”—by proclaiming, “Native land it is, and we want it back,” is accorded the ultimate narrative endorsement: “This guy pulled no punches. DeClercq respected him” (355).
This sympathetic treatment of Native land claims is shadowed in the novel by a second Native-themed plot that follows Special X’s pursuit of a serial killer who, like Shrink, rapes and decapitates male victims. “The Decapitator,” as he is called by police, operates in the symbolically charged territory of the North and is identified throughout the novel as “Winterman Snow,” a man believed to be an albino Native trapper who once attended a residential school where he was sexually abused by a Catholic priest named Reverend Noel. Snow’s crimes theatrically repeat and avenge the rapes he suffered in Noel’s office while being forced to gaze at two images hung behind the reverend’s desk: a photograph of a previous school Rector draped in a Native Headhunting Blanket and a painting of arrow-pierced Christian martyr St. Sebastian (156–57). Drawing on the iconography of these images, his crimes culminate in his hunting of white male victims through snowy northern landscapes with “Saint Sebastian’s crossbow” and his skinning of their faces to create a profane sweat lodge adorned by a grisly human totem pole (88–89). Believing himself to be an incarnation of the Gitxsan culture-hero Nekt, “the last great warrior of his people” who was felled by “a white man’s bullet” (271), Snow is thus the agent of a kind of indigenous counterviolence—a return of the repressed that answers the physical, sexual, psychological, and cultural violence of the residential schools in the name of its victims, his albino coloring vividly suggesting the effects of cultural genocide that DeClercq likens to “the bleaching of the Gitxsan people” (219). Ultimately, the Decapitator turns out not to be Snow, but a white man named Dodd who attended the same residential school, suffered the same sexual abuse as Snow, and assumed the latter’s identity after the Native boy committed suicide—identifying with Native culture as a way of dissociating himself from the trauma of the rapes. This plot twist, however, does not entirely negate the novel’s treatment of the Decapitator as an anti-hero in the early parts of the narrative, for the revelation that he is actually a white man provides the novel with an alibi for its sensationalistic mobilization of the “standard commodities” and stereotypes of Native “savagery” (Goldie 15) and allows Slade to symbolize Native revenge without actually pathologizing Native resistance.
Significantly, however, Dodd’s Gothic revenge on behalf of the Native cultures decimated by colonial history is not allowed to stand, for despite some ambivalence, the novel ultimately condemns Winterman Snow as a “psycho,” opposing his pathological revenge on the white man with the “rational,” non-violent negotiating tactics of the novel’s main Native detective, Plains Cree RCMP Staff Sergeant Bob George, who hails from the same reserve at Duck Lake where Blake’s historic victim Iron-child once sought refuge. George settles the Totem Lake standoff in favor of the Gitxsan and even has a moral crisis about “Maintain[ing] the Right” in the case of the serial killer produced by the residential schools system: “The way he viewed it, there was no ‘right’ in the case of Winterman Snow. Just a vicious circle” (159). Ultimately, however, his ideological function in the novel is to settle the standoff without bloodshed and thus pedagogically to demonstrate the novel’s preferred liberal alternative to militant and violent forms of indigenous resistance. In the process, George instantiates the integration of First Nations into the metanarrative of multicultural nationhood represented by Special X.
George’s special symbolic role in the novel’s national allegory is announced by his Cree name, “Ghost Keeper,” which suggests his embodiment of a collective Native past that can be incorporated into the “inclusive” national metanarrative represented by DeClercq’s Mounties. Similarly, his promotion within Special X as a replacement for Spann at the novel’s conclusion is tellingly presented as a symbolic redress for “how Canada has treated its First Nations” (412; my emphasis), an incorporative solution he symbolically endorses when “DeClercq clasp[s] the Cree’s shoulder” and Inspector Bob Ghost Keeper George honours his RCMP colleagues with the phrase, “All my relations” (412). The uncanny resonance between this scene of contemporary reconciliation and the iconic postcard image of “the red-coated Mountie [who] smiles warmly as he reaches out to shake hands with Chief Sitting Eagle” that epitomizes the ideology of the benevolent Mountie myth in Mackey’s analysis (1) shows precisely how even such well-intentioned and seemingly progressive incorporations of Natives into national symbols “draw on earlier versions of nationalist mythology,” which always incorporated Natives as moving parts within a subsuming national story, and thus risk merely “reshaping the older ‘Mountie myth’ … [by] reaffirm[ing] the notion that Canada has a long history of benevolent forms of justice and tolerance” (76–77). The novel’s domestication and management of First Nations politics through such images of reconciliation might thus be said to reinvent the benevolent Mountie myth for the project of liberal multicultural nationalism.
Ghost Keeper’s absence from the climactic showdown between the RCMP and Winterman Snow is, in this sense, symptomatic of the novel’s ideology. In fact, the climax of Primal Scream dramatically reveals the stranglehold that more traditional forms of imperial romance still have on the series’ progressive impulses to recognize and even (conditionally and managerially) to promote Native demands for self-determination and historical redress. This is precisely the implication of a narrative that concludes by symbolically restaging the colonial encounter between First Nations and residential schools as a Jack London/Robert Service–inspired game of cat and mouse between two white men in the Far North that reads like a catalogue of northern adventure clichés—from Mad Trappers to battles with giant wolves and a grizzly. This return to the archetypal settings and symbols of imperial northern romance implicitly undoes the Gothic critique of such tropes performed by Blake’s imperial Windigo myth in Cutthroat. DeClercq’s northern romance thus reconstitutes the very myth that Blake’s saga demolished, claiming and modifying it as a consolidating myth for his new indigenized and multicultural version of the RCMP.
In Primal Scream’s reinvention of northern romance, DeClercq is deposited in the remote North and stalked by Winterman Snow, who has kidnapped DeClercq’s foster daughter Katt—a scenario that forces DeClercq to replay the kidnapping and murder of his first daughter, Janie, in a cabin in northern woods by “thugs” associated with the Quebec October Crisis. To Winterman Snow, who holds both Reverend Noel and the corrupt Corporal Alfred Spann responsible for his abuse, DeClercq represents the ultimate prey—“a stand-in for both the reverend and the corporal. A white man. A Mountie. And Alfred’s friend” (409). But the narrative’s personal significance for DeClercq also makes it an opportunity for him to redeem his past by saving his foster daughter, herself a stand-in for both his first daughter and his false “daughter,” Katherine Spann. Significantly, DeClercq is ultimately assisted in saving Katt from the psycho by the indigenized, ethnic minority Special X operative Ed “Mad Dog” Rabidowski, “the son of a Yukon trapper raised in the woods” (400) and the symbolic “blood brother” of Ghost Keeper (325). In national terms, this showdown with Winterman Snow thus allegorizes the indigenized multicultural nation’s triumph over the forces of national disunity (represented by the October Crisis and the murder of Janie DeClercq) as well as its symbolic management of “psychotic” Native militancy (Winterman Snow)—a narrative that pointedly consolidates the formation of a corporate national family based on affiliation (DeClercq, Rabidowski, Ghost Keeper) and adoption (Katt) rather than blood (the murderous Spann family, represented here by Alfred, whose role in returning runaway children to the residential school haunts the entire scene).
Despite their numerous Gothic subversions of traditional Canadian symbols, then, Slade’s Gothic RCMP procedurals ultimately articulate a new northern myth of multicultural nationhood that ritualistically exorcises the ghosts of settler-invader “post-colonial” nationalism and exploits the ideological structure of the police procedural to managerially assert “a restored and validated social order.” In this context, the novels’ Gothic interventions into national myths like that of the benevolent Mountie might merely do for the settler-invader’s conscience what Suzannah’s sadistic theatre of pain does for the tyrannical boardroom imperialists and ex-Nazi doctors she services. In both cases, it is a matter of mobilizing the right settings and the right props to perform “the work of relieving guilt” (Headhunter 77). A crime fiction series centred on Canada—particularly one that focuses on serial killing as the ultimate manifestation of criminality—is a form ideally suited to such symbolic exorcisms of “post-colonial” guilt, for as the narrator of Primal Scream explains,
Serial crimes always have a ritual aspect in which the attacker plays out a secret fantasy. Though we all have fantasies, the difference is serial predators need to make reality fit theirs. In such a fantasy everything unfolds the way the psycho wants it to. But when he does a killing, reality never does live up to fantasy, so he’s driven to repeat the murder to get it right. (94)
By this definition, the symbolic histories of settler-invader culture are disturbingly similar to the psychotic fantasies of serial criminals in which “everything unfolds the way the psycho wants it to” and which produce endless repetitions in a futile quest to make reality fit the fantasy, to “get it right.” In this popular genre of “psychopathic” national fantasy, Slade’s Gothic police procedurals are exemplary, as much for their serialized management of the “obscene supplement” of settler post-colonial nationalism as for their often harrowing exploration of the dark passage from which Blake’s scandalous trunk was belatedly unearthed.
1 Clarke’s co-authors include fellow criminal attorneys John Banks and Richard Covell, his wife Lee Clarke, and most recently his daughter Rebecca Clarke. There are currently thirteen novels in Slade’s Special X series: Headhunter (1984); Ghoul (1987); Cutthroat (1992); Ripper (1994); Evil Eye (1996); Primal Scream (1998); Burnt Bones (1999); Hangman (2000); Death’s Door (2001); Bed of Nails (2003); Swastika (2005); Kamikaze (2006); and Red Snow (2010). Headhunter and Cutthroat were written by Clarke, Banks, and Covell. Primal Scream (also released under the title Shrink) was written by Clarke and Banks only. The series’ official website (http://www.SpecialX.net) identifies Clarke as the primary writer of the series; because of the collaborative nature of many of the novels, however, I attribute their authorship here to author-function “Michael Slade.”
2 Some of the most notable of these include L. R. Wright’s Karl Alberg (and later, Edwina Henderson) RCMP procedurals, The Suspect (1985), Sleep While I Sing (1986), A Chill Rain in January (1990), Fall From Grace (1991), Prized Possessions (1993), A Touch of Panic (1994), Mother Love (1995), Strangers Among Us (1996), Acts of Murder (1997), Kidnap (2000), and Menace (2001); Roy Innes’s Blakemore and Coswell series, Murder in the Monashees (2005), West End Murders (2008), and Murder in Chilcotin (2010); Lou Allin’s Holly Martin series, And on the Surface Die (2008) and She Felt No Pain (2010); Kay Stewart’s Danutia Dranchuk series, A Deadly Little List (2006; co-authored with Chris Bullock) and Sitting Lady Sutra (2011); Sandra Ruttan’s Canadian Constables series, What Burns Within (2008); The Frailty of the Flesh (2008); and Lullaby for the Nameless (2009); Stephen Legault’s historical North West Mounted Police procedurals, The End of the Line (2010) and The Third Riel Conspiracy (2013); and Don Easton’s Jack Taggart hard-boiled detective thrillers that draw from Easton’s own experiences as an undercover operative for the RCMP, Loose Ends (2005), Above Ground (2006), Angel in the Full Moon (2008), Samurai Code (2010), Dead Ends (2011), and Birds of a Feather (2012).
3 Slade’s second novel, Ghoul, is one of only forty novels to appear on the Horror Writers’ Association Horror Reading List (Deja and Kauffman), rubbing shoulders with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Despite the appeal his series exerts for horror fans, however, the novels remain equally rooted in the generic traditions of both the classic whodunit and procedural detective fiction. Slade’s website aptly likens his novels’ structure to “a three-ringed bull’s-eye”: “tricks and puzzles at the center (whodunit, locked room, dying message, etc.), ringed by psychological horror, ringed by police and legal procedure” (Slade, Special X, www.specialx.net/specialdotnet/bio.html).
4 Primal Scream is a sequel to the original Headhunter investigation that corrects the false conclusions of the detectives at the end of the first novel. Although Cutthroat is not an official sequel to Headhunter in this sense, its extensive historical flashbacks—which form the basis for the main plot set in the present—continue and conclude the story of Wilfred Blake that forms the historical background of the first novel.
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