As followers of my Twitter know, I’ve been reading and tweeting about the Elvis Cole novels (plus others by Robert Crais) for some time now. I used to blow threw them, devouring and spitting out my opinions on the nitty-gritty details and the context and tone of scenes almost as fast as I could post. Lately, things have slowed down. Much of that is the demands of life—I work a non-clinical support job for the primary care side of a large medical group, and you might have heard that things are a bit busy in the healthcare field right now.
I also feel as though partway through The Last Detective I happened to bite into something massive, and I’ve been taking my time to closely read and then digest what’s in front of me, because it’s an idea much larger than any I’ve tried to share before and I want to make sure I still do it right. So, it’s been a few months since I made any meaningful content, but I return to you with this: a stupid number of words in a for-fun essay analyzing what The Last Detective (and all of the Elvis Cole books up to this point) tells us about Elvis’ attachment style, and how I reached those conclusions.
As a little bonus, I rabbit-trail into early childhood development for a moment—and yes, I did dig up my notes from college for that bit. I’ll post links to some informational sources at the end, but don’t expect any paywalled research papers. We’re all laymen here. Without further ado:
I'm specifically intrigued by Elvis’ healthy attachment style in consideration of his chaotic upbringing. There are four commonly referenced attachment styles, but for the sake of brevity I’ll give you a reductive binary: secure and insecure. We officially recognize one secure and three insecure classifications, but specifying insecure attachments isn’t relevant to my point and I’m already going to be long-winded.
Attachment is primarily formed in infancy and into early childhood, depending on whether or not a child’s primary caregiver (and yes, they only need one for this) is consistently sensitive and responsive to their needs. Attachment styles continue to change throughout our lives and are also impacted by a child’s natural temperament, but those first few years are, unsurprisingly, very formative. The less a primary caregiver is able to respond to a child’s needs, the more likely you’ll see a child develop insecure attachment. In adulthood, a person's attachment style dictates how they behave in social and romantic contexts and is a predictor of how successful those relationships will be.
The Elvis that we know and love, starting from The Monkey’s Raincoat, displays secure attachment behaviors: he holds trusting and lasting relationships, will reach out for social support and share his feelings with a partner or friend. How many relationships does he lean on in any given book for help with things he can’t do himself? Friends at phone companies, banks, on the police force, in journalism. These people are in general happy to hear from him, happy to help him, and invite him to social engagements. Not because he serves some functional purpose in their lives, but because he's developed genuine relationships with each of them.
Elvis’ relationship with Joe Pike is unarguably the strongest and most long-lived—they take vacations together, they work together, and they’ve found a balance of mutual self-disclosure that works for them. Maybe Elvis talks about his feelings more than Joe does, but their companionable silence goes miles in terms of relationship building and maintenance. Joe isn't the only significant figure in his life, of course. I have an entire thread about how much I like Elvis and Lucy’s relationship dynamics in Sunset Express: their shared trust, respect of boundaries, and clear communication. It doesn’t last forever, of course, but it’s good while it lasts.
All this to say: I think it’s fair to argue that Elvis truly has secure attachments. Not only do we see it represented in his behavior, but as the majority of the Elvis Cole series is from a first person point of view we can also see that his thoughts and actions align. He’s not perfect, of course; no one is and he certainly wouldn’t be. But he’s pretty darn good. I hadn’t questioned his attachment style until partway through The Last Detective—our insight into Elvis’ childhood reveals an origin story that is not immediately congruent with his current depiction.
Let’s take a break so I can remind you that I know this is fiction. I'm not finding issue with the writing, I'm finding interest in the writing. I don't believe that Elvis Cole was written with this specific information about attachment styles in mind, it's just good fortune that everything aligns in a way where I'm able to argue a "realistic" line from his childhood self to adult self.
Let’s set the scene: at six years old, Jimmie Cole is Jimmie Cole until the day his mother comes home and changes his name to Elvis. It’s sudden, undiscussed, and clearly upsetting to him even though she doesn't see that. We the reader can see it, and understand how hard that moment is on Jimmie, but it only gets worse when we zoom in on what’s happening in his developing brain at that time.
Follow me on a brief detour into Piaget’s stages of cognitive development, the theory that breaks human development into four periods: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. For this essay, we only need to care about preoperational (ages 2 to 6) and concrete operational (ages 7 to 11). These don’t have formal start and end ages: a child can show signs of more than one phase at once as they transition between, and may arrive at some developments faster or slower than those around them. Think about how a rainbow doesn’t have clearly defined lines between each color—it fades.
Preoperational kids are able to form stable concepts and engage in magical thinking (fantasy, especially during play) but are, for lack of a better word, self-centered. Their world is still about them. In a preoperational child’s brain, the way an adult treats them is only about that kid—whether that be a response to that child’s behavior or how the adult feels about them. At this point, kids aren’t really able to realize that other people think differently from them. This is also the beginning of the phase when children ask ‘why’ questions.
Jimmie is moving from that part of cognitive development into the concrete operational phase, but he’s right in between the two, so it’s safe to guess he has almost all of the preoperational skills and is just beginning to dig in to concrete skills: recognizing that other people have differing viewpoints, even if he thinks (or knows) that different view is incorrect.
He’s also beginning to form a concept of identity—the idea that a thing remains itself, even if you change one aspect of it. However, as one might guess from the name of this stage, this primarily applies to concrete concepts like a glass of water, a cookie, or clay. Not so much abstracts, like the self. Jimmie is at risk of a major identity crisis when his mother changes his name. Is he still himself, if he isn’t Jimmie?
Atop this trauma, like getting a double scoop from the ice cream shop of horrors, we learn more about his home life. What kind of mother changes her child’s name from Jimmie to Elvis like that? The same mother who disappears without warning for days or weeks at a time, showing up again and thinking nothing of it. It’s not the profile of a consistent, responsive, or sensitive caregiver. It's the basis for lifelong issues under the best of circumstances.
I’m not making any moral judgement or accusing his mother of being malicious. It’s clear that she loves him as best as she can, but that love is filtered through the lense of a severe and persistent mental illness that causes him harm.
Elvis’ upbringing doesn’t lend itself to a secure attachment style and if you look only at that moment from his childhood in comparison to his adulthood behavior, it feels like something is missing in the big picture. That’s fair, because something is missing. Read just a bit further into The Last Detective, though, and all those pieces start to fall together.
It’s established that Elvis joined the Vietnam war at a young age after some trouble with the law, which is unsurprising for someone with a troubled childhood like his. But that’s not the end of development for him. Not long into deployment, Elvis is introduced to the man who is, in my opinion, primarily responsible for Elvis’ secure attachment today. This isn’t to discount Joe Pike or anyone else (some other relevant figures are introduced in The Forgotten Man), but this man built the strongest foundation of positive change in that part of Elvis’ life.
Roy Abbott came from a large, happy family, just like Elvis always wanted to have. Because Elvis wanted it and because Roy was able to share, their brief relationship helped Elvis take great strides in re-shaping his attachment style. Roy immediately puts up photos of his family when he’s deployed—they’re the thing that makes him feel safe. Elvis is fascinated; he asks questions and Roy answers all of them. Later Elvis looks at the photos again and thinks about what the other member’s of Roy’s family must be like, how they behave and interact. This line, in particular, is telling to me:
“Their family probably ate dinner together at a great long table. That’s the way it was in real families. That’s the way Cole had always imagined it.”
The key phrase here is "had always imagined it.” Elvis has been fantasizing about having a whole, happy family, and he’s been fantasizing about it for a long time. If Elvis didn’t actively, badly want to have that connection to others, he likely wouldn’t have changed so much over the next few months. Instead, Elvis is determined to learn and Roy is happy to teach him what relationships can be like. While Elvis taught Roy what he'd need to go to war, Roy was teaching Elvis what he'd need to come back from it.
Fortunately, the change didn’t stop after Roy’s death. In The Last Detective we see Elvis talk to Roy’s family, people he hadn't spoken to in ages, since just after their son's death. When he reconnects with them, they give him love and support immediately. Roy’s father listens to Elvis talk about Ben’s kidnapping and all of the fear he’s wrapped up in—he's responsive. Sensitive. We learn that the Abbott family has always loved and appreciated Elvis for bringing Roy home to them.
Dale Abbott gives us this beautiful line: ""What you wrote in your letter, that part about you not having a family, that's the only part that's not true. You've been part of our family since the day Mama opened the mail. We don't blame you. Son, we love you."
Elvis and Roy didn’t spend a long time as brothers, but that short time was deeply impactful. The change was successful both because Elvis actively desired it and because Roy was capable of sharing his experience.
From that jumping-off point, a determined Elvis would be able to continue making positive changes in his life and continue to shape a more secure attachment style for himself, reaffirmed by each healthy and positive relationship in his life: George Feider, who trained him, Joe Pike, Lou Poitras, even his time with Lucy. While I imagine each of those relationships would still have existed without the influence of Roy Abbott and his family, I believe they would have looked very different than what we see today.
Like all real people, Elvis is a composite of all the people he's ever come across, and Robert Crais does a beautiful job of revealing these layers in a way that feels natural and engaging. In the grand scheme of things I know that it doesn't matter whether Elvis' attachment style is a realistic reflection of his lived experiences, but he's so well-written that I love to dig in and hold a magnifying glass up to every piece. The same as all of you, I read these books because Robert Crais is a master at crafting believable, enjoyable protagonists that we can't get enough of.
We all enjoy reading about Elvis Cole… I just also enjoy reading too much into Elvis Cole.
You can learn more about attachment theory and Piaget's theory of cognitive development at the links below. They're Wikipedia links because this is a hobby blog, not a college essay, and I'm a firm believer in the good enough:
Piaget's theory of cognitive development.
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