ABSTRACT
Another Marlowe, in this case Charlie Marlow, the narrator of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), observes that Western civilisation controls its criminal and asocial impulses only by ‘stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums’ (Conrad 1974: 70). Marlow’s narration of Kurtz’s story of moral decay, and his own engagement with it, suggest that it is only the twin regulatory powers of the butcher and the policeman, rather than any inherent restraint or moral sense, which keep ‘civilised’ man on the straight and narrow. Specifically, the police procedural, as it began to develop in the second half of the twentieth century, foregrounds and is structured around ‘a dominant Western symbol of social control: the policeman’ (Winston and Mellerski 1992: 2).
