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2 Starting the Inquiry `But what happened then?' `I'll tell you what happened then,' said Fiennes with a grim emphasis. `When we got back into that garden the first thing we saw was Traill, the lawyer; I can see him now with his black hat and black whiskers relieved against the perspective of the blue flowers stretching down to the summer-house, with the sunset and the strange outline of the Rock of Fortune in the distance. His face and figure were in shadow against the sunset; but I swear the white teeth were showing in his head and he was smiling. `The moment Nox saw that man the dog dashed forward and stood in the middle of the path barking at him madly, murderously, volleying out curses that were almost verbal in their dreadful distinctness of hatred. And the man doubled up and fled along the path between the flowers.' The Oracle of the Dog Fiennes was a friend of Father Brown, G.K. Chesterton's famous priestdetective. Fiennes was recounting a story to Father Brown about the reaction of Nox, the dog, to a lawyer who represented Colonel Druce, a wealthy man who had only recently been murdered. The newspapers had reported that Druce had been murdered with a sharp knife in a garden with no outside entry. The witnesses saw no murderer and there was no knife. Fiennes thought that the dog's reaction to Traill the lawyer was a clear sign that the lawyer was the murderer. Father Brown, however, interrogates his friend further and discovers that Colonel Druce changed his will and left his money to his daughter, rather than to his son Harry Druce, who owed money from gambling. Harry Druce committed suicide after his father's death. Father Brown also found out that the dog had tried to retrieve something from the ocean on a walk with Fiennes at the time of the murder and came back empty handed. Father Brown comes to the conclusion that Colonel Druce, who wore a white coat, was visible through a hedge that surrounded the garden. A man with a walking-stick-knife had seen Druce through the hedge and stabbed him. The man had then thrown the walking-stick-knife into the ocean. The dog tried to retrieve the walking stick, but to no avail because it sank. Harry Druce was the man who killed Colonel Druce. Harry killed himself when he realized that his murder was in vain and that his severe debts would not be resolved. Fiennes is amazed that Father Brown can work out the crime from a distance. Father Brown replies, `You asked how I could guess things a hundred miles away but honestly it's mostly to your credit, for you S TA R T I N G T HE I NQ UI RY described people so well that I know the types.' Father Brown rejected Fiennes's interpretation of the dog's reaction to Traill and instead broadened the inquiry. `I had a sort of guess,' said Father Brown, `right at the beginning when you said that Druce wore a white coat.' Father Brown was not a Columbo or a Hercule Poirot, who often as not started their investigations knowing who the crook was. Father Brown started his inquiries into mysterious unsolved crimes by collecting a wide range of accounts and observations, no matter how zany or far fetched those accounts and observations might superficially look. Father Brown did not assume that the context of a crime was obvious and that knowledge of that context came from looking at only a few clues. Father Brown carefully weighs up what he has found (what he thinks is a clue) and the logical consequences of what he has found (what he thinks must rationally follow). In The Strange Crime of John Boulnois (Chesterton, 1987), Father Brown arrives at a scene where an American journalist has witnessed the death of Sir Claude Champion, dressed as Romeo and stabbed with a sword, saying with his last breath `Boulnois . . . with my own sword . . . he threw it . . .'. The journalist was on his way to interview John Boulnois, an `Oxford man' who had recently published a review on Darwinian evolution. Father Brown interviews the wife of John Boulnois. `Father Brown' she said. `Mrs. Boulnois?' he replied gravely. Then he looked at her and immediately said: `I see you know about Sir Claude.' `How do you know I know?' she asked steadily. [emphasis added] He did not answer the question, but asked another: `Have you seen your husband?' `My husband is at home,' she said. `He has nothing to do with this.' Again he did not answer; and the woman drew nearer to him, with a curiously intense expression on her face. `Shall I tell you something more?' she said, with a rather fearful smile. `I don't think he did it, and you don't either.' Father Brown returned her gaze with a long, grave stare, and then nodded, yet more gravely. `Father Brown,' said the lady, `I am going to tell you all I know, but I want you to do me a favour first. Will you tell me why you haven't jumped to the conclusion of poor John's guilt, as all the rest have done? Don't mind what you say: I±I know about the gossip and the appearances that are against him.' Father Brown looked honestly embarrassed and passed his hand across his forehead. `Two very little things,' he said. `At least one's very trivial and the other very vague. But such as they are, they don't fit in with Mr. Boulnois being the murderer.' He turned his blank, round face up to the stars and continued absent mindedly: `To take the vague idea first. I attach a good deal of importance to vague ideas. All those things that `aren't evidence' are what convince me. [emphasis added] I think a moral impossibility the biggest of all impossibilities. I know your husband only slightly, but I think this crime of his, as generally conceived, something very like a moral impossibility. Please do not think I mean that Boulnois could not be so 11 B A L N AV E S A N D C A P U T I wicked. Anybody can be wicked ± as wicked as he chooses. We can direct our moral wills; but we can't generally change our instinctive tastes and ways of doing things. Boulnois might commit a murder, but not this murder. He would not snatch Romeo's sword from its romantic scabbard; or slay his foe on the sundial as on a kind of altar; or leave his body among the roses; or fling the sword away among the pines. If Boulnois killed anyone he'd do it quietly and heavily, as he'd do any other doubtful thing ± take a tenth glass of port, or read a loose Greek poet. No, the romantic setting is not like Boulnois. It's more like Champion.' `Ah!' she said, and looked at him with eyes like diamonds. `And the trivial thing was this,' said Brown. `There were fingerprints on that sword; fingerprints can be detected quite a time after they are made if they're on some polished surface like glass or steel. These were on a polished surface. They were half-way down the blade of the sword. Whose prints they were I have no earthly clue; but why should anybody hold a sword half-way down? It was a long sword, but length is an advantage in lunging at an enemy. At least, at most enemies. At all enemies except one.' `Except one!' she repeated. `There is only one enemy,' said Father Brown, `whom it is easier to kill with a dagger than a sword.' `I know,' said the woman. `Oneself.' There was a long silence, and then the priest said quietly but abruptly: `Am I right, then? Did Sir Claude kill himself?' `Yes,' she said, with a face like marble. `I saw him do it.' `He died,' said Father Brown, `for love of you?' An extraordinary expression flashed across her face, very different from pity, modesty, remorse, or anything her companion had expected: her voice became suddenly strong and full. `I don't believe,' she said, `he ever cared about me a rap. He hated my husband.' `Why?' asked the other, and turned his round face from the sky to the lady. `He hated my husband because . . . it is so strange I hardly know how to say it . . . because . . .' `Yes?' said Brown patiently. `Because my husband wouldn't hate him.' Father Brown only nodded, and seemed still to be listening; he differed from most detectives in fact and fiction in a small point ± he never pretended not to understand when he understood perfectly well. Mrs. Boulnois drew near once more with the same contained glow of certainty. `My husband,' she said, `is a great man. Sir Claude Champion was not a great man: he was a celebrated and successful man. My husband has never been celebrated or successful; and it is the solemn truth that he has never dreamed of being so. He no more expected to be famous for thinking than for smoking cigars. On all that side he has a sort of splendid stupidity. He has never grown up. He still liked Champion exactly as he liked him at school; he admired him as he would admire a conjuring trick done at the dinner-table. But he couldn't be got to conceive the notion of envying Champion. And Champion wanted to be envied. He went mad and killed himself for that.' (Used by permission) Father Brown's detection style is summarized in his enigmatic comment `All those things that ``aren't evidence'' are what convince me'. Father 12 S TA R T I N G T HE I NQ UI RY Brown tries to avoid preconceived hypotheses and preconceived ideas about the relevance of the things that he observes. Father Brown works from `inside out', carefully analysing all the events and clues (including witness accounts) and then drawing conclusions based on the evidence. In many of the Father Brown stories, of course, there is something Father Brown knows that we do not know. We only find out at the end of the story how Father Brown reached his conclusions and why. The detective's knowledge and the reader's knowledge are not always the same during a story. For Father Brown and the reader, however, there are only a finite number of interpretations of accounts available to explain the crime mystery. Indeed, we would not want to read detective fiction if we thought that any story accounted for what had happened. If Father Brown works from the `inside out' in his collection and analysis of evidence, then Sherlock Holmes is perhaps the perfect example of the detective who works from the `outside in'. Father Brown, like Holmes, always held that there is a rational explanation for all things. Father Brown, though, is seen as the inquisitive interviewer, collecting individual facts and then solving the crime. Sherlock Holmes, in contrast, argued that he could deduce the solution to the whole crime from only a few facts. Holmes always enjoyed demonstrating his `powers of deduction' with Dr Watson. Dr Watson recounts this scene from A Scandal in Bohemia. One night ± it was on the twentieth of March, 1888ÐI was returning from a journey to a patient (for I had now returned to civil practice), when my way led me through Baker Street. As I passed the well-remembered door, which must always be associated in my mind with my wooing, and with the dark incidents of The Study in Scarlet, I was seized with a keen desire to see Holmes again, and to know how he was employing his extraordinary powers. His rooms were brilliantly lit, and, even as I looked up, I saw his tall, spare figure pass twice in a dark silhouette against the blind. He was pacing the room swiftly, eagerly, with his head sunk upon his chest and his hands clasped behind him. To me, who knew his every mood and habit, his attitude and manner told their own story. He was at work again. He had risen out of his drug-created dreams and was hot upon the scent of some new problem. I rang the bell and was shown up to the chamber which had formerly been in part my own. His manner was not effusive. It seldom was; but he was glad, I think, to see me. With hardly a word spoken, but with a kindly eye, he waved me to an armchair, threw across his case of cigars, and indicated a spirit case and a gasogene in the corner. Then he stood before the fire and looked me over in his singular introspective fashion. `Wedlock suits you,' he remarked. `I think, Watson, that you have put on seven and a half pounds since I saw you.' `Seven!' I answered. `Indeed, I should have thought a little more. Just a trifle more, I fancy, Watson. And in practice again, I observe. You did not tell me that you intended to go into harness.' `Then, how do you know?' 13 B A L N AV E S A N D C A P U T I `I see it, I deduce it. [emphasis added] How do I know that you have been getting yourself very wet lately, and that you have a most clumsy and careless servant girl?' `My dear Holmes,' said I, `this is too much. You would certainly have been burned, had you lived a few centuries ago. It is true that I had a country walk on Thursday and came home in a dreadful mess, but as I have changed my clothes I can't imagine how you deduce it. As to Mary Jane, she is incorrigible, and my wife has given her notice, but there, again, I fail to see how you work it out.' He chuckled to himself and rubbed his long, nervous hands together. `It is simplicity itself,' said he; `my eyes tell me that on the inside of your left shoe, just where the firelight strikes it, the leather is scored by six almost parallel cuts. Obviously they have been caused by someone who has very carelessly scraped round the edges of the sole in order to remove crusted mud from it. Hence, you see, my double deduction that you had been out in vile weather, and that you had a particularly malignant bootslitting specimen of the London slavey. As to your practice, if a gentleman walks into my rooms smelling of iodoform, with a black mark of nitrate of silver upon his right forefinger, and a bulge on the right side of his top-hat to show where he has secreted his stethoscope, I must be dull, indeed, if I do not pronounce him to be an active member of the medical profession.' I could not help laughing at the ease with which he explained his process of deduction. `When I hear you give your reasons,' I remarked, `the thing always appears to me to be so ridiculously simple that I could easily do it myself, though at each successive instance of your reasoning I am baffled until you explain your process. And yet I believe that my eyes are as good as yours.' [emphasis added] `Then how do you know?', Watson asks Holmes. `I see it, I deduce it', says Holmes in reply. What made Holmes's explanations the superior ones, in Watson's eyes, was the fact that Holmes could, in an apparently scientific and law-like way, deduce so much about events from so few clues. Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown differ in their detection styles but both have to `give reasons' for their explanations. `Then how did you know?' is a common refrain in detective fiction. Readers of detective fiction would not be happy if their favourite detective gave conclusions without reasons ± without justifications for what constituted evidence and how evidence and conclusions fitted together. But are there other styles of detection ± Flashes of insight? Sudden guesses? Intuition? With no link to evidence at all? Dirk Gently from Douglas Adams's Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency is a good example of a detective who is not interested in the accounts people give him or in logical causal explanations of events. Dirk Gently's primary concern is with the `fundamental interconnectedness of all things' ± thus the `holistic' in the title of Gently's detective agency: `We solve the whole crime. We find the whole person' (Adams, 1987: 111). Dirk Gently tries to solve crimes with no reference to the logical connection between events, as in this scene with his secretary Miss Pearce. He thrust a piece of paper across the desk. She picked it up and looked at it. Then she turned it round and looked at it again. 14 S TA R T I N G T HE I NQ UI RY She looked at the other side and then she put it down. `Well?' demanded Dirk. `What do you make of it? Tell me!' Miss Pearce sighed. `It's a lot of meaningless squiggles done in blue felt tip on a piece of typing paper,' she said. `It looks like you did them yourself.' `No!' barked Dirk, `Well, yes,' he admitted, `but only because I believe that is the answer to the problem!' `What problem?' `The problem,' insisted Dirk, slapping the table, `of the conjuring trick! I told you!' `Yes, Mr Gently, several times. I think it was just a conjuring trick. You see them on the telly.' `With this difference ± that this one was completely impossible!' `Couldn't have been impossible or he wouldn't have done it. Stands to reason.' `Exactly!' said Dirk excitedly. `Exactly! Miss Pearce, you are a lady of rare perception and insight.' `Thank you, sir, can I go now?' `Wait! I haven't finished yet! Not by a long way, not by a bucketful! You have demonstrated to me the depth of your perception and insight, allow me to demonstrate mine!' Miss Pearce slumped patiently in her seat. `I think,' said Dirk, `you will be impressed. Consider this. An intractable problem. In trying to find the solution to it I was going round and round in little circles in my mind, over and over the same maddening things. Clearly I wasn't going to be able to think of anything else until I had the answer, but equally clearly I would have to think of something else if I was ever going to get the answer. How to break this circle? Ask me how.' `How?' said Miss Pearce obediently, but without enthusiasm. `By writing down what the answer is!' exclaimed Dirk. `And here it is!' he slapped the piece of paper triumphantly and sat back with a satisfied smile. Miss Pearce looked at it dumbly. `With the result,' continued Dirk, `that I am now able to turn my mind to fresh and intriguing problems, like, for instance . . .' He took the piece of paper, covered with its aimless squiggles and doodlings, and held it up to her. `What language,' he said in a low, dark voice, `is this written in?' Miss Pearce continued to look at it dumbly. Dirk flung the piece of paper down, put his feet up on the table, and threw his head back with his hands behind it. `You see what I have done?' he asked the ceiling, which seemed to flinch slightly at being yanked so suddenly into the conversation. `I have transformed the problem from an intractably difficult and possibly quite insoluble conundrum into a mere linguistic puzzle. `Albeit', he muttered, after a long moment of silent pondering, `an intractably difficult and possibly insoluble one.' He swung back to gaze intently at Janice Pearce. `Go on,' he urged, `say that it's insane ± but it might just work!' Janice Pearce cleared her throat. `It's insane,' she said, `trust me.' (Used by permission) 15 B A L N AV E S A N D C A P U T I Dirk Gently sees a mystery where others do not. He provides meaningless answers to that mystery. His secretary does not accept that there is a mystery or the need for a solution. `It's insane', says Miss Pearce. This is of course a part of the humour of this novel. Gently is an exaggerated example of the role that `gut feelings', `guessing' and `lateral thinking' play in detective fiction. Guessing plays an important part in social science research, as we will see later. Dirk Gently, like Sherlock Holmes, believes that it is possible to explain events by reference to `wholes' ± to interconnected laws that govern ± on the surface ± seemingly unrelated events. Gently, like Holmes, held that if you knew one link in the causal chain then you could find the `whole'. This model of detection is similar to the `nomothetic' model in social science research. A nomothetic model is a macro, probabilistic, approach to analysing what happens in society. The aim in the nomothetic model is to identify general classes of actions or events in society and not to show all the individual unique events that may lie behind them. The nomothetic model of research is often contrasted with idiographic models in social science, which analyse all the micro events behind a social phenomenon (Babbie, 1986: 53±55). Father Brown's inquiries are idiographic in nature. He looks at all the micro events associated with a murder mystery. Both models of inquiry ± nomothetic and idiographic ± seek to explain what is happening. Both models must be grounded in `everyday life'. The art of the detective and the social scientist, of course, is in the ability to identify important events and to explain the relationships between them. Father Brown's question `But what happened then?' is the sign that an inquiry ± an investigation ± has started. A good detective and a good social scientist needs to know what, who, how and when to investigate. A good social scientist needs a research design. KNOWING WHAT TO RESEARCH Exploration, Description and Explanation In the murder mystery Cause of Death Dr Kay Scarpetta, a medical examiner `detective', is called out to a strange drowning in a naval shipyard for decommissioned naval ships and submarines. The first reaction of those investigating the incident was that it was simply a drowning: `He probably just drowned,' Green was saying. `Almost every diving death I've seen was a drowning. You die in water as shallow as this, that's what it's going to be' (Cornwell, 1997: 14). Scarpetta, however, avoids `closure' ± premature finishing of the case. She takes the unusual step of diving to the body to investigate what has happened ± to satisfy her own curiosity about what happened. She finds the air hose tangled on the side of an old ship but decides that the diver could have rectified this problem relatively easily. Scarpetta, after conducting the 16 S TA R T I N G T HE I NQ UI RY postmortem, finds that there is also cyanide in the body. The murder mystery gets more and more complex as the novel progresses, leading ultimately to a major conspiracy to take over a nuclear power plant. Scarpetta explores, describes and then explains what is happening. Social science research sometimes involves all three kinds of research and sometimes only one. Exploratory research in social science is valuable when a researcher wants to study a new area and/or to test methods, such as surveys and survey questions, for investigating that area. Descriptive research is one of the most common forms of research in social science research. The census and surveys of public opinion are examples of descriptive research. The census, for example, provides an overview of demographics (e.g. gender, income) of a whole population. Public opinion polls show what people's voting intentions might be. A descriptive study may raise issues that need explaining. Explanatory research, however, reports not just `what is happening' but `why'. Let's look briefly at some descriptive and explanatory studies on the sociology of news and the journalism profession. In January 1993 John Henningham published preliminary findings from a national survey of 1,068 Australian journalists, The Hack's Progress (1993: 45). The composite picture of a journalist, he said, is very different from the stereotype of middle-aged dissipation. The closer image is a 1990s yuppie. The survey shows that the typical journalist is male, young, and ambitious, with a middle-class, Anglo-Saxon background. There is an increasing chance that the journalist had a tertiary education and is likely to be well paid, content, committed to the career and optimistic about the future of the media. . . . About 37 per cent say they are more likely to vote Labor, with 29 per cent Liberal and 2 per cent National. The lean to the left is not a matter of background: most journalists come from middle-class families, with fewer than three out of 10 from blue-collar homes. Only one in 10 had parents in primary industry ± cause for rural people to continue their complaints of limited and supposedly unsympathetic coverage of their problems. The churches might also argue under representation, with 74 per cent of journalists uninvolved in religion. Only 19 per cent of journalists were born overseas and almost all of them came from an AngloCeltic background. Fewer than 3 per cent of journalists are non-Caucasian. Women hold one in three jobs, but this is an advance on the early 1970s, when the ratio was one-in-10. Predictably, while 72 per cent of women say it is harder for females to advance their careers, only 39 per cent of male journalists agree. Women have an average of 27, against 37 for men. The combined median is 32, young enough to explain some of the optimism found in the survey. The most extensive national survey of journalists ever undertaken is that done by Johnstone, Slawski and Bowman in the United States in 1971 and published in 1976. They surveyed 1,313 journalists by telephone from a national sample of 1,550. The authors estimate that fewer than half (45.7 per cent) of the 153,000 persons who reported themselves as `editors or 17 B A L N AV E S A N D C A P U T I reporters' in the 1970 census were employed full-time in the American news media. They estimated the total full-time editorial manpower in Englishlanguage news media in the United States at 69,500 and said that threequarters of them were employed in print media, about 20 per cent in broadcast media and about 5 per cent in wire services at the time of their survey. More than half were employed by daily newspapers. Although they estimated that freelancers might contribute up to 100,000 stories a week to the news media, they did not include freelancers. Johnstone, Slawski and Bowman found their 70,000 US journalists to be overwhelmingly young, urban, mobile and male ± just as in Australia. They also found that their journalists did not conform to the stereotype of harddrinking, callous and isolated creeps. In fact, they came from the same social strata as those in charge of the economic and political systems. There were few recruits from the working class. Journalists did not have to have a degree to be a journalist but in fact 86 per cent of US journalists had attended college for one or more years, about 60 per cent were graduates and more than 18 per cent had done postgraduate work. Although most studied journalism more than any other specific subject, journalism majors were outnumbered by about 2 to 1 by persons with other kinds of college training. The other subjects most in demand were political science and government. Johnstone, Slawski and Bowman's national survey of 1971 was replicated in 1982±3 by David Weaver and Cleveland Wilhoit (1986). In the years between 1971 and 1983 the USA had been involved in the Vietnam War, All The President's Men had exposed the criminal behaviour of Nixon and his aides in the White House, films such as Absence of Malice had questioned the ethics of journalists, the American media had been faced with a series of astronomical libel judgements, Janet Cooke had been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for a Washington Post story which she had faked and public confidence in the press had been eroded. Nevertheless, there was a 125 per cent increase in journalism and mass communication enrolments between 1971 and 1985. By 1983 there were an estimated 112,072 journalists in the United States. Weaver and Wilhoit surveyed 1,001 of them. They found the typical journalist to be a politically moderate, 32-year-old, college-educated, white Protestant who earned $19,000 a year. The proportion of women had increased from 20 per cent in 1971 to 34 per cent in 1983. Two out of three journalists saw themselves as middle-of-the-road politically, 22 per cent saw themselves as left of centre and 18 per cent to the right. This was interesting because shortly before the Weaver and Wilhoit study was published, Lichter, Rothman and Lichter published their survey of `elite' journalists ± those working on 10 major news outlets ± and said one out of two were left-of-centre, if the centre is defined as American businessmen. Their journalists were more likely than the national sample to see their role as challenging government. The Weaver and Wilhoit national sample were 18 S TA R T I N G T HE I NQ UI RY more moderate: most saw their role as being `interpretive'. The next biggest proportion saw their role as disseminating information. Only a small proportion espoused the adversary role. In 1971, 58 per cent were college graduates whereas in 1983, 70 per cent were and more than half of those majored in journalism or communications. Generally, journalists earned less in real dollars than they did in 1971. Most said they heard more about their work from readers and viewers than from colleagues. When they studied another sample of 1,400 journalists in the 1990s they found that journalists had less autonomy than reported in the earlier studies and less job satisfaction. The proportion of journalists planning to leave the profession was double that of the 1983 studies. But the typical American journalist remained a married white male in his thirties, with a bachelor's degree (Weaver and Wilhoit, 1996). Similar findings emerge from the British studies. In his Journalism Recruitment and Training: Problems in Professionalization Oliver Boyd-Barrett reports a 1969 survey of 99 trainee journalists in the two largest training centres (1970: 181±201). More than half of them came from lower-middle and upper-middle white-collar backgrounds and nine came from senior executive±managerial±professional backgrounds. About half could qualify for entrance to a university and he cites estimates that graduates comprise from 6 to 15 per cent of the total intake of recruits to journalism each year. Most (62 per cent) of those in his sample who were employed by newspapers obtained their first job by writing letters on their own initiative to one or several newspapers and another 25 per cent answered press advertisements. Boyd-Barrett's work also had an explanatory element. He investigated the reasons for choosing journalism as a career: it was seen as a non-routine, non-conventional, sociable occupation by 35 per cent of respondents; it was the most desirable occupation available to 29 per cent; it was seen as creative by 16 per cent and more than 75 per cent wanted to write a book (a novel in most cases); it was seen as self-educational by 5 per cent; as a `bridging occupation' to a better job by 3 per cent; and as a public service occupation by 1 per cent. In spite of the aspirations for the non-routine, nonconventional and the creative, in practice the young journalists spent a quarter or more of their work time at desk work or office work and most of their outside work on covering routine, predictable events. Feature writing accounted for only 10 per cent of total time. Nevertheless, they felt little dissatisfaction with the organization of their work or its opportunities. Most of them wanted to go into feature writing, general reporting or special writing which they saw as offering more opportunities for self-expression and initiative. Boyd-Barrett (1970: 60±4) says that most British recruits to journalism begin on weekly provincial newspapers and that juniors made up about two-fifths of the journalists on these papers in each of the years 1964±7. Almost all start as general reporters and their first chance to specialize is usually in sport. Although more than 60 per cent of national newspaper 19