The genre that comprises post-apocalyptic and dystopian novels has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years. A few novels within that genre further interrogate these future and destroyed worlds by introducing crime investigators to pursue their work in among the ruins and survivors. These protagonists attempt to enforce laws drawn from the most basic of human moral codes. Many of them look to avenge or prevent murder in a new world order in which killing is no longer strictly banned, and is sometimes even encouraged as a means of survival, no matter the old ethical pillars.
These novels offer an alternative view of what remains of human society when all institutional means for enforcing rules have ostensibly disappeared. Regardless of the chaos of these dystopian worlds, humans are still expected to observe codes of conduct that will protect everyone. And those codes are enforced by the protagonists. Each of these characters — either because it was their previous job or because they deputized themselves—seize the tools of the rational intellect as a means of imposing order on a shambolic world. Underlying those choices is the deep grief each of them feel.
In The Last Policeman, which author Ben Winters followed up with two more books featuring Detective Hank Palace, Countdown City and World of Trouble, the world has not yet ended, although earth’s inhabitants are acting as if it already has. Astronomers have become aware that an asteroid larger than the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs is on a collision course with Earth. After a few months of feverish research by the scientific community, all speculation has stopped, and scientists determine beyond a shadow of a doubt that the asteroid will crash into Earth on October 3rd.
Most of the people in the United States have reacted to the news as if they’ve been given an execution date—which they have. People have quit their jobs in droves, most manufacturing has stopped, as has a lot of international trade, and food production has slowed to a trickle. Some are strung out on heroin, meth, cocaine, and pills in an effort to numb out the pain and the fear. Crops are rotting in fields. Many workers have decided that they don’t want to spend their last months continuing to do jobs they have always hated. People with “bucket lists” have left town to check off what they can. Many are choosing suicide as a means of asserting control over their own deaths, and Palace is called out to a suicide scene that he suspects is actually a murder.
Palace continues to believe in a rock-solid notion of “justice,” a concrete concept that can be applied to human affairs. Despite his colleagues’ attempts to convince him otherwise, Palace believes justice can be preserved, and that belief provides him with the ambit of his actions.
In The Last, Hanna Jameson ends civilization through the exchange of nuclear bombs, started by the new American president whom the rest of the world had worried was unfit for the job. It’s a clear allusion to America’s current White House occupant, and like many books in the current wave of feminist dystopian literature, Jameson channels current anxieties into a novel that imagines the worst possible outcome of this presidency.
It begins with a haunting image that has stayed with me, as Jon Keller, the protagonist, recalls something his wife said to him. “Nadia once told me that she was kept awake at night by the idea that she would read about the end of the world on a phone notification,” evoking an image of billions world-wide reaching for their phones as they died.
This small group survived because they were attending a conference being held at an isolated hotel in the Swiss Alps. Jameson, like Winters, imagines that some survivors will respond to catastrophe by killing themselves. Keller records each suicide among his group. He understands why they make the choice, but he still resents them “for the ordeal that we all went through cleaning them up and burying them.” He also notes that “ritual and humanity, or maybe just hygiene…” keeps the other survivors burying the dead.
His reasons for keeping a journal vary. At one point, he says he wants it to exist so that if his family has survived, they can read about his experiences, know that he grieved them. At the same time, he writes it down, especially the events of the nuclear holocaust day, because writing it down will allow him to distance himself from it. Only in constructing a narrative will he be able to impose order onto that day’s emotional chaos.
And so it is that readers learn that on day 50, in response to a “bad taste” in some of the water being collected in cisterns on the hotel’s roof, Keller and a few other men discover the body of a murdered little girl in one of the water tanks. The girl had been seen the morning of the nuclear attack. Despite everything that is going on around him, Keller decides that he must solve the crime, which he attempts to do by examining the hotel’s CCTV, guest records, and searching all of the rooms.
Keller is a political scientist, and his main motivation for the investigation (other than providing a break from boredom) seems to be a fear that a “serial killer” may be among the hotel’s survivors, one who represents danger to the rest of them. He wants to purify the hotel survivors as some form of guarantee that while danger may come from outside the hotel, inside, the hotel functions as a sanctuary. When that sense of sanctuary is later violated, the group will make a collective decision regarding the offender.
Novels that situate detectives in post-apocalyptic world finds a theoretical basis in part in a 1995 article written for the journal, Science Fiction Studies, in which Elana Gomel, an American Studies professor, argues that “the detective story is a narrative of restoration in which the temporary disturbance of social order is rectified through the disclosure of a secret.” She argues that all post-apocalyptic stories, regardless of whether they feature detectives, are a form of detective story in which the main mystery is the cause of the cataclysmic event. But her various assertions of the role of the detective also delineate what is at stake when an author inserts a detective into a post-apocalyptic tale. “[T]he supreme value afforded to rationality in the detective story functions as a displacement of the anxiety caused by precisely those aspects of social life that resist rational understanding,” she writes. The authors who are creating this new genre are replacing the survival-despite-mass-chaos theme of other post-apocalyptic tales with individuals who assert the human intellect over the omnishambles into which they have been thrust.
While Winters and Jameson’s characters already know the cause of the apocalypse, such a search combined with a detective story is contained in Tom Sweterlitsch’s The Gone World. His detective is Shannon Moss, an investigator with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) who, in order to solve the 1997 murder of the entire family of a Navy SEAL, travels through time to find an answer. But what Moss and other time travelers discover, however, is that the earth will face complete destruction in several centuries. What becomes gradually worse is that with each trip into the future, the date of earth’s destruction moves closer in time until in 1997, that destruction has become imminent. Moss must solve the murders while also solving the problem of the encroaching apocalypse.
Once again, the rational intellect of the detective is used as a tool, and in the 1997 depicted in The Gone World, law enforcement has already realized that the emotional chaos of murder can hinder an investigation. In Sweterlitsch’s formulation, investigators travel into the future in order to interview witnesses who are no longer traumatized by or emotionally invested in the evidence they hold. More evidence emerges in time, so why not solve a present-day crime by reading the files that will be held in NCIS offices decades in the future? But interfering with time has disastrous results. The detective must now “solve” the approaching destruction of earth.
Each of these writers also recognize an aspect of the apocalypse that gets lost in the enormity of loss: the grief of individuals. Detective Palace never loses sight of what a murderer takes away:
“It’s not just a person’s present that dies when they die, when they are murdered or drowned or a giant rock falls on their head. It’s the past, too, all the memories that belonged only to them, the things they thought and never said. And all those possible futures, all the ways that life might have turned out. Past and future and present all burn up together like a bundle of sticks.”
It was supposedly Josef Stalin who told a visitor that “one death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” Readers of post-apocalyptic fiction are rarely exposed to the debilitating grief that must be felt by those who are experiencing the fact that billions have died in a short span of time. Instead, the emphasis is on survival and determining how survivors might interact with one another. But in these novels, the detective emerges not only as the rational investigators of human behavior. They also emerge as the world’s chief mourners, self-appointed roles in which they attempt to speak for not only what survives, but for the enormity of what has been lost.
In these novels, the detective emerges not only as the rational investigators of human behavior. They also emerge as the world’s chief mourners.Buried within feelings about the mass extinction that has taken place are reminders of those who were close to the detective who did not make it. And by turning their attentions to solving particular crimes, they are able to transfer some of their feelings about their individual losses into a rational dissection of someone else’s individual loss.
Detective Palace has absorbed John Donne’s famous words, that “any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind …” Palace not only seeks to ease others’ grief, he seeks solace for his own. That same grief is acknowledged by Shannon Moss. Jon Keller somatizes his grief as nausea. Everyone they love is gone. One person’s death unmakes the world for those who grieve them. For the post-apocalyptic detective, unable to bring their own loved ones back to life, crime investigation restores order to a world in shambles. It’s not a cure for their grief, but it allows them to accept the gone world one corpse at a time.
