Winks, Robin W (Editor) - Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays (1980)

 

Every so often intellectuals emerge, squinting, from the ivory tower and focus their attention on detective fiction, usually with a jaundiced eye. Seldom does mystery fiction meet with their approval; the literary theory de jour usually informs their opinions, and even a casual consumer of detective stories is sometimes moved to ask: "Are we reading the same thing?"

 

DETECTIVE FICTION: A COLLECTION OF CRITICAL ESSAYS (1980) gathers together one and a half dozen pieces written by professional fiction CRITICS, with only a small number by professional fiction WRITERS (Dorothy L. Sayers and Father Knox being most welcome in this respect).

 

While a few of the critics, in a tolerant spirit, seek to explore the appeal of detective fiction in popular culture, too many of them are on search and destroy missions. Rather than enlarging our knowledge by being helpfully DESCRIPTIVE, some choose to be PRESCRIPTIVE and, taking the next logical step, PROSCRIPTIVE.

 

NOTE: The pull quotes below are presented as is; no endorsement or rejection of the sentiments in them is to be inferred -- and if any of it seems outrageous or incomprehensible, don't blame me.

 

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DETECTIVE FICTION: A COLLECTION OF CRITICAL ESSAYS (1980)

Edited by Robin W. Winks

Prentice-Hall

Hardcover

Detective and Mystery Story Criticism: 17 Essays

246 Pages

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CONTENTS:

 

Introduction (14 pages) by Robin W. Winks:

 

-- "For every person who argues that detective fiction is the diet of the noblest minds, there is another who finds it wasteful of time and degrading to the intellect." (p. 1)

 

-- "Certainly detective fiction stands central to the variety of debates arising from the concept of 'popular culture.' Should the noblest minds study popular culture at all? If so, what is popular culture, how is it best made manifest, how might one who would stand outside it in order to examine it best penetrate it?" (p. 1)

 

-- "Maigret is honored with a statue in Delfzijl, Holland, and Holmes with a pub on Northumberland Avenue, London, while I am unaware of any statue of Captain Ahab." (p. 2)

 

-- "David I. Grossvogel prefers to think of detective fiction as a striptease (his word): '...the genre features a hero, the detective, whose existence is a mere function of the mystery he is solving, while that mystery is, in fact, a patent knowledge over which a veil has been drawn at the first page that cannot extend beyond the last.' A metaphor for life, in fact." (p. 3)

 

-- "The ideal detective story is one in which the detective hero discovers that he (or she) is the criminal." (p. 5)

 

-- "While detective fiction is often called 'sensational,' it is, in fact, the opposite of sensational, for though the action may be so, the process is to illuminate a special perspective on rationality." (p. 5)

 

-- "Death comes as the end in life, while in detective fiction death is the means to an end." (p. 5)

 

-- "Good mystery novelists are quite conscious of the quality of parody in their work....The problem is that many Serious Critics seem not to recognize that parody, like laughter, often is the best way to highlight the more fundamental truths." (p. 5)

 

-- In Busman's Honeymoon, Harriet Vane says: "'I do think it looks neater to have a comprehensible motive....Murder for the fun of it breaks all the rules of detective fiction.' Could Miss Sayers more directly have parodied those who do not believe in evil as such, who attempt to explain all evil acts in terms of society, childhood, class structure, or indigestion?" (p. 6)

 

-- "The line from Natty Bumppo to Marlowe and Archer is straight: there must be someone who can protect society against itself, someone who is not bound by the entrammeling bureaucracy of a society too complex to do simple (and quick) justice." (p. 7)

 

-- "The detective novel is created, with clear rhythms, in four movements." (p. 7)

 

-- "Detectives today, at least those in fiction, are less likely to use their little grey cells, as Hercule Poirot said he did, and are more likely to resolve problems of both personality and plot by having a man come through a door with a gun in his hand, as instructed to by Raymond Chandler." (p. 8)

 

-- "Once hero and villain alike played by the rules of the game, once one came to know those rules; now there are no rules, only the world-weary and the ravagers who betray all from within. Paranoia has replaced the catharsis of placing guilt clearly just THERE, 'where it belongs.' ....To change the style IS to change the subject." (p. 9)

 

-- "...detective fiction is what some of its disparagers say it is: conservative, almost compulsive in its belief (to which, of course, there are exceptions) that one may in truth trace cause and effect, may place responsibility just HERE, may pass judgment, may even assess blame, and in its determination not to let us forget that there is evil in the world and that men and women, individual men and women, do it." (p. 10)

 

-- "In short, efforts to state precisely what detective fiction may and may not do, while interesting cultural statements for their times, have proven quite fruitless." (p. 13)

 

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PART ONE: "The Genre Examined"

 

1. "The Guilty Vicarage" (collected 1948) by W. H. Auden:

 

-- "For me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol." (p. 15)

 

-- Auden is convinced that, "in my case at least, detective stories have nothing to do with works of art." (p. 15)

 

-- "Greek tragedy and the detective story have one characteristic in common in which they both differ from modern tragedy, namely, the characters are not changed in or by their actions...." (p. 16)

 

-- "Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest." (p. 17)

 

-- "Incidentally, is it an accident that the detective story has flourished most in predominantly Protestant countries?" (p. 18)

 

-- "Murder is negative creation, and every murderer is therefore the rebel who claims the right to be omnipotent. His pathos is his refusal to suffer." (p. 19)

 

-- "In real life I disapprove of capital punishment, but in a detective story the murderer must have no future...." (p. 20)

 

-- "Completely satisfactory detectives are extremely rare. Indeed, I only know of three...." (p. 20)

 

-- "...the detective must be the total stranger who cannot possibly be involved in the crime; this excludes the local police and should, I think, exclude the detective who is a friend of one of the suspects." (p. 21)

 

-- "(Sherlock) Holmes is the exceptional individual who is in a state of grace because he is a genius in whom scientific curiosity is raised to the status of a heroic passion." (p. 21)

 

-- Inspector French's "class and culture are those natural to a Scotland Yard inspector. (The old Oxonian Inspector is insufferable.)" (p. 22)

 

-- Father Brown: "Like Holmes, an amateur; yet, like French, not an individual genius....His prime motive is compassion, of which the guilty are in greater need than the innocent...." (p. 22)

 

-- "I suspect that the typical reader of detective stories is, like myself, a person who suffers from a sense of sin." (p. 23)

 

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2. "Aristotle on Detective Fiction" (collected 1946) by Dorothy L. Sayers:

 

-- "Indeed, we are not yet free from the influence of that school of thought for which the best kind of play or story is that in which nothing particular happens from beginning to end." (p. 25)

 

-- "But what, in his heart of hearts, he (Aristotle) desired was a good detective story; and it was not his fault, poor man, that he lived some twenty centuries too early to revel in the Peripeties of Trent's Last Case or the Discoveries of The Hound of the Baskervilles. He had a stout appetite for the gruesome....Yet he was no thriller fan." (p. 25)

 

-- "Of all the forms of modern fiction, the detective story alone makes virtue EX HYPOTHESI more interesting than vice, the detective more beloved than the criminal....few people can have been inspired to murder their uncles by the literary merits of HAMLET." (p. 27)

 

-- Sayers says that Aristotle correctly delineated "the three necessary parts of a detective plot -- peripety, or reversal of fortune, discovery, and suffering...." (p. 29)

 

-- Aristotle "puts the whole craft of the detective writer into one master-word: PARALOGISMOS. That word should be written in letters of gold on the walls of every mystery-monger's study -- at once the guiding star by which he sets his compass and the jack-o-lantern by which he leads his readers into the bog; paralogism -- the art of the false syllogism...." (p. 31)

 

-- "There you are, then; there is your recipe for detective fiction: the art of framing lies....The art of framing lies -- but mark! of framing lies in THE RIGHT WAY." (p. 31)

 

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3. "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?" (collected 1950) by Edmund Wilson:

 

-- At the urging of his readers, Wilson says he "set out to read The Nine Tailors in the hope of tasting some novel excitement, and I declare that it seems to me one of the dullest books I have ever encountered in any field." (p. 36) "There was also a dreadful stock English nobleman of the casual and debonair kind, with the embarrassing name of Lord Peter Wimsey, and, although he was the focal character of the novel, being Miss Dorothy Sayers's version of the inevitable Sherlock Holmes detective, I had to skip a good deal of him..." (p. 36)

 

-- "...really, she (Sayers) does not write very well: it is simply that she is more consciously literary than most of the other detective-story writers and that she thus attracts attention in a field which is mostly on a sub-literary level. In any serious department of fiction, her writing would not appear to have any distinction at all. Yet, commonplace in this respect though she is, she gives an impression of brilliant talent if we put her beside Miss Ngaio Marsh..." (p. 36)

 

-- "I do not see how it is possible for anyone with a feeling for words to describe the unappetizing sawdust which Miss Marsh has poured into her pages as 'excellent prose' (Bernard De Voto's appraisal) or as prose at all except in the sense that distinguishes prose from verse." (p. 37)

 

-- "This tale (Flowers for the Judge) I found completely unreadable. The story and the writing both showed a surface so wooden and dead that I could not keep my mind on the page....It was then I understood that a true connoisseur of this fiction must be able to suspend the demands of his imagination and literary taste and take the thing as an intellectual problem. But how you arrive at that state of mind is what I do not understand." (p. 37)

 

-- Wilson does say he enjoyed Carr's The Burning Court: "...the author has a virtuosity at playing with alternative hypotheses that makes this trick of detective fiction more amusing than it usually is." (p. 37)

 

-- "...my final conclusion is that the reading of detective stories is simply a kind of vice, that for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between smoking and crossword puzzles." (p. 39)

 

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4. "'Only a Detective Story'" (1944) (THE NATION: November 25, 1944) by Joseph Wood Krutch:

 

-- "'Only a detective story' is now an apologetic and depreciatory phrase which has taken the place of that 'only a novel' which once moved Jane Austen to unaccustomed indignation." (p. 41)

 

-- "But no one feels any compulsion to read a detective story. Few discuss what they have read with their neighbors. These books are read for pure pleasure, and there is certainly some significance in that fact." (p. 42)

 

-- "Perhaps instead of saying that the detective story follows a formula we should say that it has FORM, and perhaps we should go on from that to wonder whether this very fact may not be one of the reasons for its popularity at a time when the novel, always rather loose, so frequently has no shape at all." (p. 42)

 

-- "And while I am very far from suggesting that any of the detective stories that I have read are HAMLETs or EMMAs, I am suggesting that the fiction writer is in some ways better off and more successful when his public regards the reading of his works as a dubious self-indulgence than when the reading is regarded as a cultural duty." (p. 44)

 

-- "...the form of the detective story -- that is, progress from the discovery of the corpse to the arrest of the criminal -- insures that it shall have that self-determining beginning and that definite conclusion upon which Aristotle insisted. In other words, the detective story is the one clearly defined modern genre of prose fiction impeccably classical in form." (p. 45)

 

-- "...it should be pointed out that detective stories commonly provide that particular sort of happy ending which is the most perfect of all and which may be described as 'justice triumphant.'" (p. 45)

 

-- "...the fact remains that one source of the popularity of the detective story may be that in it poetic justice may be achieved without obvious artificiality or improbability." (p. 45)

 

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5. "The Dangerous Edge" (1975) by Gavin Lambert:

 

-- "Raymond Chandler has most accurately defined melodrama as 'an exaggeration of violence and fear beyond what one normally experiences in real life'....External mystery of plot -- flight and pursuit, riddle and warning -- creates a metaphor for the deeper mystery of the threat itself." (p. 47)

 

-- "Although he (Wilkie Collins) didn't invent the detective or the mystery novel, he was the first to grasp its expressive possibilities." (p. 47)

 

-- "When Wilkie Collins developed the idea of writing novels 'with a secret,' he was thinking not only of the puzzle element in detective stories but of something traumatically buried and seeking release. The ideal mystery, Chandler has written, is 'one you could read if the end was missing!' The crime-artist, as opposed to the technician of the genre, uses the devices of melodrama...." (p. 50)

 

-- "In Collins's best novels, and those of his successors, crimes lead like underground passages to a discovery about the foundations of the world above." (p. 50)

 

-- On Poe's detective stories: "Thinly characterized essays in deductive logic, they contain puzzles too laboured to be dramatic." (p. 51)

 

-- "Having invented the puzzle story, Poe defines its limitations. Chandler echoes him when he describes the ideal mystery as a story without end....the writer is concerned with raising questions, not answering them. The crime-artist's solution is a stimulant, the technician's a sedative." (p. 51)

 

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PART TWO: "A History of the Type"

 

6. Introduction (edited) to THE OMNIBUS OF CRIME (1929) by Dorothy L. Sayers:

 

-- "The art of self-tormenting is an ancient one, with a long and honourable literary tradition." (p. 53)

 

-- "...whereas the tale of horror has flourished in practically every age and country, the detective-story has had a spasmodic history, appearing here and there in faint, tentative sketches and episodes, until it suddenly burst into magnificent flower in the middle of the last century." (p. 55)

 

-- "Between 1840 and 1845 the wayward genius of Edgar Allan Poe....achieved the fusion of the two distinct genres and created what we may call the story of mystery, as distinct from pure detection on the one hand and pure horror on the other. In this fused genre, the reader's blood is first curdled by some horrible and apparently inexplicable murder or portent; the machinery of detection is then brought in to solve the mystery and punish the murderer." (p. 54)

 

-- "It is hardly surprising...that the detective-story, with its insistence on footprints, bloodstains, dates, times, and places, and its reduction of character- drawing to bold, flat outline, should appeal far more strongly to Anglo-Saxon taste than to that of France or Germany." (p. 56)

 

-- "Sherlock Holmes modelled himself to a large extent upon (Poe's) Dupin, substituting cocaine for candlelight, with accompaniments of shag and fiddle-playing." (p. 58)

 

-- On women detectives: "In order to justify their choice of sex, they are obliged to be so irritatingly intuitive as to destroy that quiet enjoyment of the logical which we look for in our detective reading....the really brilliant woman detective has yet to be created." (pp. 58-59)

 

-- "...it is doubtful whether there are more than half a dozen deceptions in the mystery-monger's bag of tricks, and we shall find that Poe has got most of them, at any rate in embryo." (p. 60)

 

-- "On the whole...the tendency is for the modern educated public to demand fair play from the writer, and for the Sensational (Romantic) and Intellectual (Classic) branches of the (detective) story to move further apart." (p. 63)

 

-- "Taking everything into consideration, The Moonstone is probably the very finest detective story ever written. By comparison with its wide scope, its dove-tailed completeness and the marvellous variety and soundness of its characterisation, modern mystery fiction looks thin and mechanical. Nothing human is perfect, but The Moonstone comes about as near perfection as anything of its kind can be." (p. 67)

 

-- The works of Anna Katharine Green "are genuine detective-stories, often of considerable ingenuity, but marred by an uncritical sentimentality of style and treatment which makes them difficult reading for the modern student. They are, however, important by their volume and by their influence on other American writers." (p. 69, note)

 

-- Conan Doyle "brought into prominence what Poe had only lightly touched upon -- the deduction of staggering conclusions from trifling indications.... He was sparkling, surprising, and short. It was the triumph of the epigram." (p. 70)

 

-- "The uncritical are still catered for by the 'thriller,' in which nothing is explained, but connoisseurs have come, more and more, to call for a story which puts them on an equal footing with the detective himself, as regards all clues and discoveries." (p. 73)

 

-- To those who would cry "Foul!" upon finishing The Murder of Roger Ackroyd: "I fancy, however, that this opinion merely represents a natural resentment at having been ingeniously bamboozled. All the necessary data are given. The reader ought to be able to guess the criminal, if he is sharp enough, and nobody can ask for more than this. It is, after all, the reader's job to keep his wits about him, and, like the perfect detective, to suspect EVERYBODY." (p. 74, note)

 

-- "The modern evolution in the direction of 'fair play' is to a great extent a revolution. It is a recoil from the Holmes influence, and a turning back to THE MOONSTONE and its contemporaries." (p. 76)

 

-- "There is one respect, at least, in which the detective-story has an advantage over every other kind of novel. It possesses an Aristotelian perfection of beginning, middle, and end. A definite and single problem is set, worked out, and solved; its conclusion is not arbitrarily conditioned by marriage or death." (pp. 76-77)

 

-- The detective-story "does not, and by hypothesis never can, attain the loftiest level of literary achievement." (p. 77)

 

-- "One fettering convention, from which detective fiction is only very slowly freeing itself, is that of the 'love interest.'" (p. 78)

 

-- After offering examples of how love interest CAN contribute to the story (The Moonstone, Trent's Last Case, Mason's The House of the Arrow and No Other Tiger), Sayers cautions: "A casual and perfunctory love-story is worse than no love-story at all, and, since the mystery must, by hypothesis, take the first place, the love is better left out." (p. 79)

 

-- There is a large "difficulty about allowing real human beings into a detective-story. At some point or other, either their emotions make hay of the detective interest, or the detective interest gets hold of them and makes their emotions look like pasteboard." (p. 79)

 

-- "It is fortunate for the mystery-monger that, whereas, up to the present, there is only one known way of getting born, there are endless ways of getting killed." (p. 81)

 

-- "...make no mistake about it, the detective-story is part of the literature of escape, and not of expression. We read tales of domestic unhappiness because that is the kind of thing which happens to us; but when these things gall too close to the sore, we fly to mystery and adventure because they do not, as a rule, happen to us." (pp. 82-83)

 

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7. "The Formal Detective Novel" (1976) by George Grella:

 

-- "The formal detective novel, the so called 'pure puzzle' or 'whodunit,' is the most firmly established and easily recognized version of the thriller....(and) has enjoyed a long, though slightly illicit, relationship with serious literature....(A)lmost since its inception, critics have been denouncing the rise and announcing the demise of the whodunit....(and) though it attained its greatest heights of production and consumption in the 1920's and 1930's -- the so called Golden Age of the detective story -- the best examples of the type retain a remarkable longevity. The whodunit, in fact, has become a kind of classic in the field of popular fiction." (p. 84)

 

-- The detective story "subscribes to a rigidly uniform, virtually changeless combination of characters, setting, and events familiar to every reader in the English speaking world. The typical detective story presents a group of people assembled at an isolated place -- usually an English country house -- who discover that one of their number has been murdered. They summon the local constabulary, who are completely baffled; they find either no clues or entirely too many, everyone or no one has had the means, motive, and opportunity to commit the crime, and nobody seems to be telling the truth. To the rescue comes an eccentric, intelligent, unofficial investigator who reviews the evidence, questions the suspects, constructs a fabric of proof, and in a final dramatic scene, names the culprit. This sequence describes almost every formal detective novel, the best as well as the worst...." (pp. 84-85)

 

-- An "obvious question" arises in Grella's mind: "...why should both ordinary and sophisticated readers enjoy a hackneyed formula-ridden fiction devoid of sensation or titillation, and frequently without significant literary distinction?" (p. 85)

 

-- Grella rejects the idea "that the central puzzle provides the form's chief appeal" (p. 85); he likewise finds both Edmund Wilson's psychological theory ("guilt and a fear of impending disaster" -- p. 87) and W. H. Auden's theory (of the detective novel being rooted in Greek tragedy -- p. 87) unconvincing: "Neither a picture of actual crime, a pure game of wits, nor a popular but degenerate version of tragedy, it is a comedy. More specifically, it remains one of the last outposts of the comedy of manners in fiction. Once the comic nature of the detective story is revealed, then all of its most important characteristics betray a comic function." (p. 88)

 

-- "...although the most frequent types of detective hero derive superficially from the brilliant eccentrics of nineteenth century detective stories, in reality they owe more to the archetypal heroes of comedy. There is more of Shakespeare, Congreve, and Sheridan than Poe, Conan Doyle, and Chesterton in their creation." (p. 89)

 

-- "Whatever their individual differences, all other fictional detectives derive from the Dupin-Holmes tradition. Though many later sleuths may seem eminently un-Sherlockian in appearance, methods, and personality, they all exhibit the primary qualities of the Great Detective." (p. 90)

 

-- "It (Trent's Last Case) is probably the most important work of detective fiction since Conan Doyle began writing in 1887, and has been much praised by critics and practitioners as a nearly perfect example of its type." (p. 91)

 

-- In detective fiction that followed Trent's Last Case, "The Great Detective became a comic hero, as well as a transcendent and infallible sleuth; his solution of a difficult problem became the task of releasing a whole world from the bondage of suspicion and distrust. His task allied him with the archetypal problem-solvers of comedy -- the tricky slave, the benevolent elf, the Prospero figure." (p. 92)

 

-- Lord Peter Wimsey is "partly a version of Jung's archetypal Wonderful Boy (or, as Auden calls him, 'the priggish superman'), partly the 'tricky slave' of Roman comedy (as Northrop Frye points out), partly the fop of Restoration comedy" (p. 93); furthermore, "some important sleuths derive from other comic archetypes....Lacking the formidable personality of the Sherlockian genius and the airy manner of the GRACIOSO (or dandy figure of comedy), (Hercule) Poirot is an elf...His short stature, pomposity, avuncular goodness, and his foreign, otherworldly air, place him with the kindly elves of the fairy-tale, as well as with Puck and Ariel....Other elf types, of whom Poirot is the major representative, are G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown and Anthony Gilbert's Arthur Crook." (p. 93)

 

-- "Neither a dandy nor an elf, the third major problem-solver is the wizard." (p. 93) Among the wizards, Grella would place "Rex Stout's curmudgeonly genius, Nero Wolfe, and John Dickson Carr's Sir Henry Merrivale and, above all, Dr. Gideon Fell, (as) the most successful examples and closest to the Great Detective." (p. 93) "His (Fell's) joviality, his resemblance to the kindly father figures of legend, and his expertise in the supernatural ally him with an archetypal wizard, Jung's Wise Old Man, the good magician or Prospero figure." (p. 94)

 

-- "Though the (detective) novelist often creates mere puppets, he errs in good company: his characters generally are modern versions of the humors characters of Roman, Renaissance, and Restoration comedy, people governed by an emblematic function, a single trait, or a necessity of plot." (p. 95)

 

-- "The comedy of manners generally contains an expulsion of the socially undesirable which insures the continued happiness of those remaining. Similarly, the detective novel features two expulsions of 'bad' or socially unfit characters: the victim and the murderer. Because only unlikeable characters are made to suffer permanently in comedy, pains are taken to make the victim worthy of his fate: he must be an exceptionally murderable man." (p. 96) Grella's examples: the victim in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Old General Fentimen in Trent's Last Case, Mrs. Boynton in Appointment with Death, and Mrs. Cavendish in The Mysterious Affair at Styles. "All of these victims have hindered the natural course of events, chiefly by obstructing the path of true love. Such obstruction in any form of comedy means eventual defeat of exclusion: and in the exacting code of the detective novel, that exclusion means murder." (p. 96)

 

-- "The Mediterraneans of the detective novel never seem true (English style) gentlemen, perhaps as a result of the Italian villainy of Elizabethan revenge tragedies and Gothic fiction....(Hercule Poirot is a rare foreigner, tolerated by his society because he is faintly laughable and -- like all detectives -- represents no sexual threat.)" (p. 97)

 

-- "Murder initiates the action of the detective novel, but its real purpose is to indicate the nature of the society in which it occurs, to provide a complication which requires the abilities of a comic hero (the detective), and to exclude a social undesirable (the victim)." (p. 98)

 

-- At the story's conclusion, the detective employs his "power to recreate a new society from the ruins of the old....As the tricky slave, the benevolent elf, or the Prospero of a particular world, the detective has rearranged human relationships to insure the reintegration and harmony of the entire social order. This conventional ending re-emphasizes the comic structure and function of the formal detective novel." (p. 99)

 

-- "...the whodunit assumes a benevolent and knowable universe....(it) implies a world that can be interpreted by human reason, embodied in the superior intellect of the detective....Finding a meaning in the tiniest clue enables the detective to know the truth; thus, his universe seems explainable, the typical cosmos of English fiction, unlike the extravagant and grotesque realities of the American novel." (p. 101)

 

-- "...the whodunit lacks verisimilitude...: The detective novels of the Golden Age never mention the tensions and dangers that threatened the precarious stability of the Twenties and Thirties. They say nothing of the Depression, the social, economic, and political unrest of that time, but choose to remain within the genteel luxury of an aristocratic world...." (p. 101)

 

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8. "The Hard-Boiled Detective Novel" (reprinted 1974) (CONTEMPORA: March 1970) by George Grella:

 

-- "In America the formal detective novel has never found a proper home. Though read widely, and practiced by such authors as S. S. Van Dine, Rex Stout, and Ellery Queen, the form has never really flourished here. Conditions do not favor the comedy of manners....The gentleman amateur is even more incongruous in a society where 'gentleman' connotes far less than in England, and where languid, airy-mannered young men seldom play heroic roles. Ellery Queen and Philo Vance appear prissy, unmasculine, and at times, insufferable. (Ogden Nash's comment, 'Philo Vance needs a kick in the pance,' is a typical, healthy American reaction.)" (p. 103)

 

-- "The hard-boiled detective novel...employs a characteristically American hero and world view, which it translates into the framework of a twentieth century mystery story. Its central problem is a version of the quest, both a search for truth and an attempt to eradicate evil." (p. 104) This conforms to Grella's characterization of the American novel in general: "Influenced by the Puritan imagination, it tends to see life as a Manichean struggle between good and evil; its vision, moreover, is usually obsessed with sin." (p. 104)

 

-- "Only one member of the original BLACK MASK group survived the transition from the pulp story to the novel and outlived his era -- Dashiell Hammett, the most important American detective story writer since Poe." (p. 105)

 

-- "...Mickey Spillane grows out of the hard-boiled tradition but represents the perversion it has undergone in the hands of the inept and unthinking." (p. 106)

 

-- "Though superficially an altogether new kind of folk hero, the private detective is actually another avatar of that prototypical American hero, Natty Bumppo, also called Leatherstocking, Hawkeye, Deerslayer, and Pathfinder." (p. 106)

 

-- "Living in a lawless world, the private eye, like the frontier hero, requires physical rather than intellectual ability." (p. 107)

 

-- "From the (Continental) Op through (Lew) Archer, the detective's moral code develops from the simple notion of professionalism to the complex realization of the depth of human need." (p. 109) An example (Archer): "The problem was to love people, to serve them, without wanting anything from them. I was a long way from solving that one." (p. 108)

 

-- "The conception of a detective surrounded by pliant females is a latter-day perversion of a major motif in the hard-boiled novel." (p. 109)

 

-- "Nothing, not even love, must prevent the detective from finishing his quest. Without antecedents, unmarried, childless, he is totally alone." (p. 110)

 

-- "The private eye observes a moral wasteland and, with no 'territory' to flee to (unlike Huck Finn), he retreats into himself." (p. 111)

 

-- "All hard-boiled novels depict a tawdry world which conceals a shabby and depressing reality beneath its painted facade." (p. 112)

 

-- "It (the American thriller) generally is more preoccupied with the character of its hero, the society he investigates, and the adventures he encounters, than with the central mystery, which gets pushed aside by individual scenes and situations. The detective of the hard-boiled novel generally solves his mystery in a hurried, disordered fashion in the last few pages of his book, with little effort to clear up all points or tie up all loose threads," because "the progress of the quest is more interesting than its completion" -- something that "further distinguishes the hard-boiled thriller from the formal detective novel." (p. 115)

 

-- "In the chaotic world of the hard-boiled novel...society is too coarse and violent for a languid dilettante of crime; and Prospero's magic is valueless in a civilization governed by Caliban." (pp. 115-116)

 

-- "The hard-boiled novel inverts the conventions of both whodunit and romance....the closer the detective approaches to the Grail, the further away it recedes." (p. 116)

 

-- On Mickey Spillane and Mike Hammer: "A thug and a brute, Hammer would have been the villain of most mysteries, but in Spillane he is the new superman, a plainclothes Nazi." (p. 117) "The private detective has had his day -- the shamus, the dick, the peeper, the snooper, who became a powerful American hero in Hammett and Chandler, has descended to the bully, the sadist, the voyeur, no longer a hero at all, but merely a villain who claims the right always to be right." (p. 118)

 

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PART THREE: "Literary Analysis"

 

9. "The Study of Literary Formulas" (1976) by John G. Cawelti:

 

-- "In making cultural interpretations of literary patterns, we should consider them not as simple reflections of social ideologies or psychological needs but as instances of a relatively autonomous mode of behavior that is involved in a complex dialectic with other aspects of human life." (p. 135)

 

(If you wish to travel further with Mr. Cawelti as he attempts to explicate his central thesis, be sure to pack a lunch.)

 

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

 

10. "Detection and the Literary Art" (1961) by Jacques Barzun:

 

-- "The reason why murder animates most detective story-telling is that the gravity of the deed gives assured momentum. Crime, moreover, makes plausible the concealment that arouses curiosity." (p. 145)

 

-- "'The Murders in the Rue Morgue,' published in 1841, put an end to the episodic and casual use of detection. And when four years later Poe had written his three other detective tales, all the elements of the genre were in hand. What was to follow could only be elaboration, embellishment, and complication -- most of it agreeable, some of it superior to the original in polish, but none of it transcending the first creation." (p. 146)

 

-- "... I continue to think the short story the true medium of detection. Pleasant as it is to begin a novel that promises a crowd of actors and incidents, of clues and disquisitions upon clues, the pleasure is soon marred by the apparently unavoidable drawback of a subplot and its false leads." (p. 146)

 

-- "Conan Doyle himself went against sound instinct ... and concocted those intolerable middle sections which potbelly three out of four of his longer tales. The astute reader reads them once, at the age of twelve, and skips them forever after." (pp. 146-147)

 

-- "Ideally, the short detective story is a sequence of five parts, for which it is a pity that Greek names cannot at this late date be invented." (p. 147)

 

-- "To be sure, the great novels of the realistic school portray character even more painstakingly than things, whereas detection rightly keeps character subordinate. But detection makes up for this neglect by giving intelligence a place which it has in no other literary form. Only in the detective tale is the hero demonstrably as bright as the author says he is." (p. 149)

 

-- "... the attempt to 'improve' the detective story and make it 'a real novel' seems a sign of bad judgment. Replacing clues with 'psychology' and intelligible plot with dubious suspense is childish tinkering." .... "The point is ... that in any combination of the detective interest with anything else, the something else must remain the junior partner." (p. 150)

 

-- "Yet strict naturalism is not enough (to elevate the detective story to the mainstream level), as we see in the so-called novels of police routine. These works are a little too conscientiously instructive and sociological. They should be taken in moderation, unless one is a salesman and able to find a narcissistic pleasure in seeing other patient men ring doorbells." (p. 151)

 

-- "Nick Carter has his counterparts in all genres, and we must judge detective fiction as we do other kinds, by the best examples." (p. 151)

 

-- "There is in fact but one limit that must not be transgressed; the detective cannot be a fool. I have no use for those ineffectual little men who are always mislaying their belongings and nursing a head cold, yet manage to track down desperate murderers." (p. 153) (Editor Winks writes: "The reference here is to Simenon's Maigret." -- p. 153, note.)

 

-- "Poe decided once for all that the detective should be a man of independent mind, an eccentric possibly, something of an artist even in his 'scientific' work, and in any case a creature of will and scope superior to the crowd. He is, in short, the last of the heroes." (p. 153)

 

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11. "The Short Story's Mutations" (1972) (from BLOODY MURDER: 1972) by Julian Symons:

 

-- "The Golden Age showed an immediate decline in the quality of short stories, and eventually in their number." (p. 154)

 

-- "The writers of short stories between the Wars attempted no more than the statement of a puzzle and its solution by decent detective work. Within these limits the short stories particularly of Queen, Sayers and Carr, give a great deal of pleasure." (p. 155)

 

-- "Indeed, in some ways the short story is better suited than the novel to this kind of writing. That final snap of surprise can bring just as genuine a gasp of pleasure after a short period of suspense as after a long one." (p. 156)

 

-- "Here (in ELLERY QUEEN'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE) was a periodical which printed only short stories about crime and detection, and its influence upon the crime short story's development has been at least as great as that of the early STRAND." (p. 157)

 

-- "(Stanley) Ellin has written several excellent novels ... but his talent shows at its finest in his short stories. The great quality he has brought back to the crime short story is that of imagination." (p. 158)

 

-- "(Roy) Vickers's method (in his Department of Dead Ends stories) is generally to provide the setting for the crime, show it being carried out, and then go on to the accidental discovery that lays a trail to the criminal. He follows in this the pattern of the inverted story, but uses it with more flexibility and sophistication than its inventor (Freeman)." (p. 159)

 

-- William Faulkner wrote a few crime short stories: "One of them, 'An Error in Chemistry,' was submitted for the first Ellery Queen Detective Short Story contest, and won second prize." (pp. 159-160)

 

-- "The detective stories about (Samuel) Johnson and Boswell of Lillian Bueno McCue (1902- ), who used the name of Lillian de la Torre, collected in Dr. Sam: Johnson, Detector (1946), are perhaps the most successful pastiches in detective fiction. .... Miss de la Torre caught most happily the tone and weight of Johnson's conversation, and rightly made the puzzles almost incidental to the relationship between biographer and subject. One may dislike pastiche of any kind, but here it is certainly done on a high level." (p. 160)

 

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12. "The Case Against the Detective Story" (1972) and "On Being Serious-Minded" (1972) by Erik Routley:

 

-- "There are many kinds of people who have no use for detective stories, and there are several routes by which one can argue towards the conclusion that they, and the people who read them, are trivial. I am prepared here to examine three lines of argument -- a moral line, a social line, and a philosophical line." (p. 161)

 

-- "... the detective story which conforms to the basic design of the form is the most moral kind of literature there is." (p. 162)

 

-- "The object of detection is to detect, not to document failure. This brings the detective author into conflict with those who hold that the greatest of all literature is tragic." (p. 167)

 

-- "It could ... be said that the detective novel could not have emerged otherwise than from an age which was to a quite unusual extent explicitly religious.... " (p. 168)

 

-- "When (T. S.) Eliot gave it (The Moonstone) that accolade which has become so famous he did it no service and confused the whole issue. The Moonstone isn't a detective story: it is a love story. (By the same token The Woman in White isn't a detective story but a romantic thriller.)" (p. 173)

 

-- "Nobody will turn to a detective story if he is really in deep trouble. I can't believe that detective stories are read in concentration camps, or in countries subject to natural disasters just after earthquakes, or volcanic eruptions, or in times of violent political revolution .... and I should be surprised to learn that they formed any considerable part of the luggage of a pioneering missionary." (p. 174)

 

-- "I think, then, that detective stories are strictly literature for amusement, accidentally swerving now and again towards more serious fields, and accidentally slipping on other occasions towards the underworld." (p. 175)

 

-- "The detective story reader is not a lover of violence but a lover of order." (p. 176)

 

-- "It's not a matter of fear or guilt, but of assurance: it's not being held over hell and drawn back at the last moment, but being allowed for a space to go in out of the draught of doubt -- that's what the detective story reader thanks his author for." (p. 176)

 

-- "... detective literature is a puritan form of fiction." (p. 176)

 

-- "Detective fiction, then, I repeat, is entertainment for puritans. It cannot withstand the assaults of 'respectable' critics nowadays simply because it does not attempt, in the style of serious novels, to react to life. Here again it is conservative -- so conservative, say its detractors, as to be infantile." (p. 177)

 

-- "In a perfect world there will be no need for detective stories: but then there will be nothing to detect." (p. 177)

 

-- "Indeed, I don't mind too much if I am wrong about my modestly serious deductions concerning the social standing of the detective story. What means much more to me is to be able to say that without it I should have found the world a less agreeable place." (p. 178)

 

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PART FOUR: "A Closer Look at Specific Authors"

 

13. "The Writer As Detective Hero" (1973) plus an excerpt from "Down These Streets a Mean Man Must Go" (1977) by Ross Macdonald:

 

-- "A close paternal or fraternal relationship between writer and detective is a marked peculiarity of the form. Throughout its history, from Poe to Chandler and beyond, the detective hero has represented his creator and carried his values into action in society." (p. 179)

 

-- "In his creation of Dupin, Poe was surely compensating for his failure to become what his extraordinary mental powers seemed to fit him for. He had dreamed of an intellectual hierarchy governing the cultural life of the nation, himself at its head." (p. 179)

 

-- "An unstable balance between reason and more primitive human qualities is characteristic of the detective story. For both writer and reader it is an imaginative arena where such conflicts can be worked out safely, under artistic controls." (p. 180)

 

-- "Behind (Sherlock) Holmes lurk the figures of nineteenth-century poets, Byron certainly, probably Baudelaire, who translated Poe and pressed Poe's guilty knowledge to new limits." (p. 181)

 

-- "Permeating the thought and language of Conan Doyle's stories is an air of blithe satisfaction with a social system based on privilege." (p. 181)

 

-- "... the BLACK MASK revolution was a real one. From it emerged a new kind of detective hero, the classless, restless man of American democracy, who spoke the language of the street." (p. 182)

 

-- "... (Sam) Spade marks a sharp break with the Holmes tradition. He possesses the virtues and follows the code of a frontier male." (p. 182)

 

-- "(Dashiell) Hammett was the first American writer to use the detective-story for the purposes of a major novelist, to present a vision, blazing if disenchanted, of our lives." (p. 182)

 

-- "The detective-as-redeemer (Raymond Chandler's notion) is a backward step in the direction of sentimental romance, and an over- simplified world of good guys and bad guys." (p. 183)

 

-- "The Chandler-Marlowe prose is a highly charged blend of laconic wit and imagistic poetry set to breakneck rhythms." (p. 183)

 

-- "I had learned a great deal from Chandler -- any writer can -- but there had always been basic differences between us." (p. 185)

 

-- "He (Chandler) was trapped like the late Hemingway in an unnecessarily limiting idea of self, hero, and language." (p. 185)

 

-- "An author's heavy emotional investment in a narrator-hero can get in the way of the story and blur its meanings, as some of Chandler's books demonstrate." (p. 185)

 

-- "I believe that popular culture is not and need not be at odds with high culture, any more than the rhythms of walking are at odds with the dance." (p. 186)

 

-- "The skeleton of (F. Scott) Fitzgerald's great work (THE GREAT GATSBY), if not its nervous system, is that of a mystery novel." (p. 186)

 

-- "Popular art is the form in which a culture comes to be known by most of its members. It is the carrier and guardian of the spoken language. A book which can be read by everyone, a convention which is widely used and understood in all its variations, holds a civilization together as nothing else can." (p. 186)

 

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14. "Artistic Failures and Successes: Christie and Sayers" (1976) by John G. Cawelti:

 

-- (SPOILER ALERT: Cawelti's essay reveals solutions to two classic detective novels, An Overdose of Death and The Nine Tailors; however, this short review does not.)

 

-- "Agatha Christie has deservedly earned the title of Queen of the Detective Story, not only through her sustained productivity over six decades, but through the remarkable ingenuity of her structures of detection and mystification." (p. 188)

 

-- "... she (Christie) employed the same structure of detection and mystification in two works, one of which is her finest and the other one of her biggest failures. The novels I refer to are An Overdose of Death (originally The Patriotic Murders -- 1940) and Third Girl (1967)." (p. 189) (Cawelti's discussion of Third Girl is not reprinted in this book.)

 

-- In OVERDOSE "Christie makes the deeper emotional structure of the classical formula, with its emphasis on the restoration of order, function as a means of distracting the reader's attention from the true culprit." (p. 191)

 

-- "In general, there seem to be six main ways in which a reader can be effectively misled about a fictional crime: he can be deceived as to the person, the motive, the means of the crime, the time at which it is committed, the place where it occurs, and, finally, whether it is a crime or not. In this case (OVERDOSE), Christie manages to work all these modes of mystification into her pattern." (p. 191)

 

-- "As she often does, Christie plays one of the unwritten conventions of the detective story against what appears to be a palpable fact." (p. 193)

 

-- "An Overdose of Death illustrates the classical detective formula in its most concentrated and purest form. Character and atmosphere are reduced to the barest minimum and function only as necessary embodiments to the structure of detection and mystification. Actions have little interest in their own right; they exist solely to enable the introduction of a new line of inquiry. ...." (p. 193)

 

-- Turning to Dorothy L. Sayers: "(She) is not as skillful as Christie in constructing a cast of characters and a situation that will effectively dramatize the twists and turns of the detection- mystification structure." .... However, "When Sayers involves the presentation of mystery with the evocation of a set of characters and a social atmosphere, she is in my opinion a far richer and more complex artist than Christie." .... "Sayers's best work, The Nine Tailors, uses the classical detective story structure to embody a vision of the mysteries of divine providence. This moral and religious aspect of the story by no means prevents it from having an effective and complex structure of detection and mystification, but this structure relates to the other interests of character, atmosphere, and theme in a very different way than is typical of Christie." (pp. 193-194)

 

-- "The process of the inquiry in The Nine Tailors is carefully organized in such a way that human reason resolves minor mysteries, but only realization of the hand of God can solve the ultimate mystery of life and death." (p. 197)

 

-- "To enjoy fully and be moved by The Nine Tailors one must be able temporarily to accept the snobbish, class-ridden, provincial world of Fenchurch St. Paul as a microcosm of the world; otherwise one will inevitably agree with those readers who find the religious symbolism of the book pretentious and inappropriate. Whether these limitations of vision represent the attitudes of Miss Sayers or the formulaic boundaries of the classical detective story -- and they are probably a combination of both -- does not greatly matter." (p. 199)

 

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15. "A Detective Story Decalogue" (1929) by Ronald A. Knox:

 

(The Decalogue is readily available on the GADetection Wiki.)

 

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PART FIVE: "Epilogue: An Eye to the Future"

 

16. "The Criticism of Detective Fiction" (1977) by George N. Dove:

 

-- "Although it has been in existence for less than a century and a half, the detective story has already generated a body of criticism that is quite remarkable in quantity, quality, and diversity." (p. 203)

 

-- Here are the five critical modes of detective fiction as Dove schematizes them:

... apologia (e.g., Chesterton's "A Defence of Detective Stories")

... legitimization (e.g., Carolyn Wells, Knox's "Decalogue," Van Dine's "Twenty Rules")

... form-and-function or means-and-ends (e.g., Sayers's OMNIBUS OF CRIME introduction, Chandler's "Simple Art")

... mythic criticism (e.g., Auden's "Guilty Vicarage")

... and formula (Cawelti's ADVENTURE, MYSTERY, AND ROMANCE).

 

-- "Most of the old critical issues regarding the detective story are by now pretty well settled. I doubt if it is now necessary to apologize for detective fiction, although Jacques Barzun seemed compelled to do so as late as 1961." (p. 205)

 

-- "The writer's role is ... to lead the reader through a mythos of life and death, violence and redemption, without the reader's suffering hurt or distress." (p. 206)

 

-- In one of his essays "(Ross) Macdonald compares the writer's use of a literary detective to 'a kind of welder's mask enabling us to handle dangerously hot material.'" (p. 207)

 

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17. "The Sordid Truth: Four Cases" (1975-78) by Robin W. Winks:

 

-- These are four short essays Winks wrote for THE NEW REPUBLIC that describe "the work of four major writers in the genre (thrillers included) who, I argue, will have proven to be influential when historians of detective fiction come to look back on the 1970s." (p. 14) These writers are Donald Hamilton, P. D. James, William Haggard, and Robert L. Duncan/James Hall Roberts.

 

-- "Matt Helm is Donald Hamilton's series figure -- for the loyal audiences are best kept on the string by a series hero, as Conan Doyle discovered long ago with Sherlock Holmes -- and he is so credible a character and so busy keeping himself alive while defending his country's interests, he hasn't time to insist that his Martini be shaken and not stirred." (p. 209)

 

-- "(Anthony) Boucher never let a Helm book pass without comment, usually highly favorable; he found Hamilton a master of indirect exposition, a 'harsh and sometimes shocking' writer ..., 'sternly logical,' 'the Hammett of espionage,' filled with 'resolute hardness,' 'hard-bitten objectivity,' and 'sheer storytelling compulsion.' High praise this." (p. 210)

 

-- "For so many years we were given a new Christie for Christmas, and for so many years Dame Agatha was called 'The Queen of Detective Fiction,' that we have all come to think that her reign was to be as long as that other British monarch, Victoria. Truth to tell, from Passenger to Frankfort (sic) onward it was apparent that Agatha Christie had (as surely so long a productive career entitled her to do) lost her touch, and the mantle was ready to be passed on. Now is the time to do so. My candidate is P. D. James .... Adam Dalgliesh is a more interesting person than Albert Campion, Lord Peter Wimsey or Roderick Alleyn .... James shows far more awareness of the complex nature of human beings than Dorothy Sayers did, writes with a more civilized style than Margery Allingham does, and provides plots with more realistic and puzzling turns than Dame Ngaio has done in recent years." (p. 215)

 

-- "Between the amateur and the professional falls a shadow. It isn't the one Eliot had in mind nor yet Yeats; rather, it is the difference between being in control and being merely self-possessed. One is reality and one is appearance. And this is what William Haggard's books are all about: professionalism, style, nuance; the difference between what appears to happen and what does happen. Haggard remarks more than once on how easily people might be made to think as some grey eminence wishes them to think. In the fullest sense of the word, he writes of the thinking man's spy." (pp. 218-219)

 

-- "(Robert L.) Duncan is interested in the clash of cultures. His heroes, if one may call them that, are all of the West, rational, convinced that determination, planning, and logic bring victory; all are set against villains, if one can call them that, who use instinct, cunning, emotion, to achieve their ends. .... Duncan is fond of holocaust, of fire storm, as a metaphor for technology out of control." (pp. 225-226)

 

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APPENDIX:

 

"Two Sample University Courses on Detective Fiction" (1977/1979)

 

-- It might be instructive to read the introduction to the syllabus of a course -- "The Detective Story" -- taught at Yale University in the late '70s:

 

"Detective stories are commonly considered a derivative, parasitical, or inferior form of literature. This course will undertake to study them seriously by placing them in three contexts: an historical context, in which the rise and decline of the detective story and its transformation into the novel of mystery or suspense will be considered; a morphological context, which will focus on the ludic structure common to all detective stories; and a critical context, in which several attempts to treat the detective story with self- conscious artistry will be analyzed and judged. The thrust of the course is designed to raise ever more persistent questions about what does and does not constitute seriousness in literary fiction by considering the detective story functionally, in terms of the human desires it satisfies. The course is therefore as much about problems of judgment and value in literature as it is about detective stories, but I assume that only people who have read a considerable number of detective stories would be interested in approaching these problems (or any other problems) by studying more detective stories." (p. 229)

 

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"Where To Obtain Current and Out-of-Print Detective Stories"

 

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BIBLIOGRAPHY:

 

"Critical and Historical Literature"

--"There is a substantial body of descriptive, and a thin corpus of critical, literature on detective and thriller fiction." (p. 234)

 

"A Personal List of 200 Favorites"

 

*****************************

 

CODA:

 

-- As usual with too many intellectuals, the declarations made in these essays are put forth with such positive force the reader is coerced into thinking that these are the only interpretations possible. What appear to be indisputable facts are, on reflection, actually opinions; a few are really disreputable sweeping generalizations that can't be universally applied in every instance. Only a relatively small number of these authors seem willing to admit their limitations. The story of the blind men and the elephant is useful in this context; by feeling only a single part of the creature -- trunk, ears, etc. -- each blind man erroneously concludes he understands the true nature of the beast (e.g., the elephant must look like a tree because his legs are like tree trunks). Only a synthesis of all their impressions would produce a true picture of an elephant. This story should serve as a warning to anyone, but especially the literary critic, who thinks he knows it all.

 

And besides: so what if Dr. Fell is a wizard and Poirot an elf. I can live with that.

 

 

--Michael