70 pages • 2 hours read
Stuart TurtonThe Devil and the Dark Water
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Genre Context: The Hard-Boiled Detective
The hard-boiled detective novel is one that features a detective who is hired privately to investigate crimes, often by eccentrically wealthy people. They are considered “hard-boiled” because they typically do not follow conventional means of solving crimes, instead following their gut instinct and employing whatever methods they need. They often have what is referred to as their own “code of ethics,” breaking certain laws but refusing to break their own moral code. An author will often feature the same detective in several novels or stories, creating a history of their work in solving dozens of cases. While the most famous detective is Sherlock Holmes, first featured in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (1887), Dashiell Hammett is credited with popularizing the “hard-boiled” aspect of detective fiction with his 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon (1930) and his character Sam Spade, who is featured in several other stories.
In The Devil and the Dark Water, Turton takes elements of the typical hard-boiled detective novel as the basis for his main characters, Sammy and Arent. They have worked together for years, solving dozens of cases for wealthy clients, with Arent awed by Sammy’s instincts and deductive reasoning. In many ways, their relationship mirrors that of Holmes and his partner, Watson: Sammy solves the mysteries but does not seek fame, while Arent publishes much of Sammy’s work so that he can gain notoriety for the help he gives people—just as Watson became known as Holmes’s biographer. Additionally, as revealed in the final pages of the novel, Sammy exemplifies the “hard-boiled” detective when he explains that he is responsible for the chaos on the ship. Like many detectives in the genre, he follows his own moral code, believing that what he did was justified as a form of revenge against all the people Haan had harmed. This idea is reinforced when Sara suggests—and Sammy eagerly agrees—that they continue to propagate the rumor to exact revenge on other powerful, evil men.
Historical Context: The United East India Company and the Dutch Golden Age
Founded in 1602, the United East India Company (VOC) was one of the first publicly traded corporations in the world. The enormous company—created by the Dutch legislature through the merger of several smaller companies—carried out trade across the colonial world, bringing wood and other raw materials from the Baltic states and spices from as far away as Indonesia and Sumatra to the increasingly prosperous Dutch republic. Because of its enormous economic power, and because it was backed by the Dutch government, the VOC had powers normally associated with the state: It could establish colonies, punish criminals, print its own money, and even wage war.
In the novel, the Saardam departs from a VOC outpost in Batavia, a colonial capital in what is now Jakarta, Indonesia. In the early 17th century, Batavia was the capital of the Dutch East Indies, a colony that corresponds roughly to present-day Indonesia. Dutch colonists forcibly displaced or killed local populations to make way for plantations, and they relied on enslaved labor to run these plantations. The state-like authority that had been granted to the company by the Dutch republic meant that they could operate in the colonies with impunity—all that mattered to the republic was profit. This same attitude can be seen in Jan Haan’s administration of the Saardam. As a representative of the VOC, he cares little for the safety of his crew—all that matters is that the ship returns to port laden with valuable goods. Throughout the novel, profit is revealed to be the sole motivating force before which all other values melt away.
This profoundly exploitative system produced immense wealth for the Dutch ruling class. Historians refer to the period from 1588 to 1672 as the Dutch Golden Age. Wealth from the colonies made the Netherlands one of the most powerful nations in Europe, and the emerging urban bourgeoisie became so wealthy that they began to rival the power and status of the traditional aristocracy. Fortunes could be lost as swiftly as they were made, and the murderous schemes of The Devil and the Dark Water reflect the social tumult of this period, when money was everything and the borders between classes—at least within the upper echelons of Dutch society—seemed tantalizingly porous. In part because of this instability of household status, social roles within households became more rigid and restrictive than ever. In the novel, Sara’s long struggle to free herself from her abusive marriage to Haan reflects the degree to which wealthy and aristocratic Dutch women were confined by social expectations.
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By Stuart Turton
