(C)Overt Operations

Abstract

In ‘(C)Overt Operations: Detective disguise and the threat of deception,’ Isabel Stowell-Kaplan explores the productive tensions and contradictions rife in the theatrical performance of undercover operations. Beginning with the introduction of the New Police in the mid-nineteenth century, the article shows how the institution of a centralized police force in London laid bare anxieties about police power and the sort of state surveillance the British associated with revolutionary France. These concerns quite literally shaped the initial force. The ‘bobby’ was employed in conspicuous policing; he was to deter criminals and prevent crime by virtue of his very visible presence. What then do we make of his plainclothes counterpart? No longer badged or uniformed, how did the new detective visibly perform his police work in a country not always comfortable with his plainclothes presence? One answer to this question could be found in mid–late nineteenth-century detective drama, beginning with Jack Hawkshaw—the first English detective on the stage. ‘C(O)vert Operations’ explores how Hawkshaw’s showy performance fit within a melodramatic schema that valued clarity and moral legibility. In Detective Hawkshaw’s hands, and those of many of his successors, ‘undercover’ was a synonym for ‘disguise’, and dramatic disguise at that. It was, in other words, simultaneously clandestine and flashy, indicative of the contradiction at the heart of performing ‘undercover’. It was, moreover, a propensity shared by the detectives’ stage nemeses, and thereby threatened to bring the detectives uncomfortably close to those they pursued. Examining nineteenth-century plays such as The Ticket-of-Leave Man (1863), The Detective (1875), Handcuffs (1893) and Sherlock Holmes (1899), the article investigates the implications of this uneasy association between the detective and the criminal, showing how nineteenth-century detective drama explored the social and theatrical consequences of going ‘undercover’, where police work, criminality, and theatrical fraud and deception merged.