![VAN DINE SS] WRIGHT WILLARD HUNTINGTON The Great Detective](https://catalogue.swanngalleries.com/full//571/779571.jpg)
There is a tendency among modern critics to gauge all novels by a
single literary standard — a standard, in fact, which should be applied
only to novels that patently seek a niche among the enduring works of
imaginative letters. That all novels do not aspire to such exalted
company is obvious; and it is manifestly unfair to judge them by a
standard their creators deliberately ignored. Novels of sheer
entertainment belong in a different category from those written for
purposes of intellectual and æsthetic stimulation; for they are
fabricated in a spirit of evanescent diversion, and avoid all the deeper
concerns of art.
The novel designed purely for entertainment and the literary novel
spring, in the main, from quite different impulses. Their objectives
have almost nothing in common. The mental attitudes underlying them are
antipathetic: one is frankly superficial, the other sedulously profound.
They achieve diametrically opposed results; and their appeals are
psychologically unrelated; in fact, they are unable to fulfil each
other's function; and the reader who, at different times, can enjoy both
without intellectual conflict, can never substitute the one for the
other. Any attempt to measure them by the same rules is as inconsistent
as to criticize a vaudeville performance and the plays of Shakespeare
from the same point of view, or to hold a musical comedy to the
standards by which we estimate the foremost grand opera. (...)
There are four distinct varieties of the "popular," or "light," novel
— to wit: the romantic novel (dealing with young love, and ending
generally either at the hymeneal altar or with a prenuptial embrace);
the novel of adventure (in which physical action and danger are the
chief constituents: sea stories, wild-west yarns, odysseys of the
African wilds, etc.); the mystery novel (wherein much of the dramatic
suspense is produced by hidden forces that are not revealed until the
denouement: novels of diplomatic intrigue, international plottings,
secret societies, crime, pseudoscience, specters, and the like); and the
detective novel. These types often overlap in content, and at times
become so intermingled in subject-matter that one is not quite sure in
which category they primarily belong. But though they may borrow devices
and appeals from one another, and usurp one another's distinctive
material, they follow, in the main, their own special subject, and
evolve within their own boundaries.
Of these four kinds of literary entertainment the detective novel is
the youngest, the most complicated, the most difficult of construction,
and the most distinct. It is, in fact, almost sui generis, and, except
in its more general structural characteristics, has little in common
with its fellows — the romantic, the adventurous, and the mystery novel.
In one sense, to be sure, it is a highly specialized offshoot of the
last named; but the relationship is far more distant than the average
reader imagines.
II
If we are to understand the unique place held in modern letters by
the detective novel, we must first endeavor to determine its peculiar
appeal: for this appeal is fundamentally unrelated to that of any other
variety of fictional entertainment. What, then, constitutes the hold
that the detective novel has on all classes of people — even those who
would not stoop to read any other kind of "popular" fiction? Why do we
find men of high cultural attainments — college professors, statesmen,
scientists, philosophers, and men concerned with the graver, more
advanced, more intellectual problems of life — passing by all other
varieties of bestseller novels, and going to the detective story for
diversion and relaxation?
The answer, I believe, is simply this: the detective novel does not
fall under the head of fiction in the ordinary sense, but belongs rather
in the category of riddles: it is, in fact, a complicated and extended
puzzle cast in fictional form. Its widespread popularity and interest
are due, at bottom and in essence, to the same factors that give
popularity and interest to the cross-word puzzle. Indeed, the structure
and mechanism of the cross-word puzzle and of the detective novel are
very similar. In each there is a problem to be solved; and the solution
depends wholly on mental processes — on analysis, on the fitting
together of apparently unrelated parts, on a knowledge of the
ingredients, and, in some measure, on guessing. Each is supplied with a
series of overlapping clues to guide the solver; and these clues, when
fitted into place, blaze the path for future progress. In each, when the
final solution is achieved, all the details are found to be woven into a
complete, interrelated, and closely knitted fabric.
There is confirmatory evidence of the mechanical impulse that
inspires the true detective novel when we consider what might almost be
called the dominant intellectual penchant of its inventor. Poe, the
originator of the modern detective story, was obsessed with the idea of
scientific experimentation. His faculty for analysis manifested itself
in his reviews and in the technicalities of his poetry; it produced Maelzel's Chess-Player; it led him into the speculative ramifications of handwriting idiosyncrasies in A Chapter on Autography; it brought forth his exposition of cryptograms and code-writing in Cryptography; and it gave birth to his acrostic verses. His four analytic stories — The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Mystery of Marie Rogêt, The Gold-Bug, and The Purloined Letter — were but a literary development, or application, of the ideas and problems which always fascinated him. The Gold-Bug, in fact, was merely a fictional presentation of Cryptography. (Incidentally, the number of detective stories since Poe's day that have hid their solutions in cipher messages is legion.)
There is no more stimulating activity than that of the mind; and
there is no more exciting adventure than that of the intellect. Mankind
has always received keen enjoyment from the mental gymnastics required
in solving a riddle; and puzzles have been its chief toy throughout the
ages. But there is a great difference between waiting placidly for the
solution of a problem, and the swift and exhilarating participation in
the succeeding steps that lead to the solution. In the average light
novel of romance, adventure, or mystery, the reader merely awaits the
author's unraveling of the tangled skein of events. True, during the
waiting period he is given emotion, wonder, suspense, sentiment and
description, with which to occupy himself; and the average novel depends
in large measure on these addenda to furnish his enjoyment. But in the
detective novel, as we shall see, these qualities are either
subordinated to ineffectuality, or else eliminated entirely. The reader
is immediately put to work, and kept busy in every chapter, at the task
of solving the book's mystery. He shares in the unfoldment of the
problem in precisely the same way he participates in the solution of any
riddle to which he applies himself.
Because of this singularity of appeal the detective novel has gone
its own way irrespective of the progressus of all other fictional types.
It has set its own standards, drawn up its own rules, adhered to its
own heritages, advanced along its own narrow-gage track, and created its
own ingredients as well as its own form and technic. And all these
considerations have had to do with its own isolated purpose, with its
own special destiny. In the process of this evolution it has withdrawn
farther and farther from its literary fellows, until to-day it has
practically reversed the principles on which the ordinary popular novel
is based.
A sense of reality is essential to the detective novel. The few
attempts that have been made to lift the detective-story plot out of its
naturalistic environment and confer on it an air of fancifulness have
been failures. A castles-in-Spain atmosphere, wherein the reader may
escape from the materiality of every day, often gives the average
popular novel its charm and readability; but the objective of a
detective novel — the mental reward attending its solution — would be
lost unless a sense of verisimilitude were consistently maintained, — a
feeling of triviality would attach to its problem, and the reader would
experience a sense of wasted effort. This is why in cross-word puzzles
the words are all genuine: their correct determination achieves a
certain educational, or at least serious, result. (...)
This rule of realism suggests the common literary practice of
endowing mises en scène with varying emotional pressures. And here again
the detective novel differs from its fictional confrères; for, aside
from the primary achievement of a sense of reality atmospheres, in the
descriptive and psychic sense, have no place in this type of story. Once
the reader has accepted the pseudo-actuality of the plot, his energies
are directed (like those of the detective himself) to the working out of
the puzzle; and his mood, being an intellectual one, is only distracted
by atmospheric invasions. Atmospheres belong to the romantic and the
adventurous tale, such as Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher and Scott's Ivanhoe, and to the novel of mystery — Henry James's The Turn of the Screw and Bram Stoker's Dracula, for instance.
The setting of a detective story, however, is of cardinal importance.
The plot must appear to be an actual record of events springing from
the terrain of its operations; and the plans and diagrams so often
encountered in detective stories aid considerably in the achievement of
this effect. A familiarity with the terrain and a belief in its
existence are what give the reader his feeling of ease and freedom in
manipulating the factors of the plot to his own (which are also the
author's) ends. Hampered by strange conditions and modes of action, his
personal participation in the story's solution becomes restricted and
his interest in its sequiturs wanes. A detective novel is nearly always
more popular in the country in which it is laid than in a foreign
country where the conditions, both human and topographic, are
unfamiliar. (...)
III
In the matter of character-drawing the detective novel also stands
outside the rules governing ordinary fiction. Characters in detective
stories may not be too neutral and colorless, nor yet too fully and
intimately delineated. They should merely fulfil the requirements of
plausibility, so that their actions will not appear to spring entirely
from the author's preconceived scheme. Any closely drawn character
analysis, any undue lingering over details of temperament, will act only
as a clog in the narrative machinery. The automaton of the cheap
detective thriller detracts from the reader's eagerness to rectify the
confusion of the plot; and the subtly limned personality of the
"literary" detective novel shunts the analytic operations of the
reader's mind to extraneous considerations. Think back over all the good
detective stories you may have read, and try to recall a single
memorable personality (aside from the detective himself). And yet these
characters were of sufficient color and rotundity to enlist your
sympathetic emotions at the time, and to drive you on to a solution of
their problems.
The style of a detective story must be direct, simple, smooth, and
unencumbered. A "literary" style, replete with descriptive passages,
metaphors, and word pictures, which might give viability and beauty to a
novel of romance or adventure, would, in a detective yarn, produce
sluggishness in the actional current by diverting the reader's mind from
the mere record of facts (which is what he is concerned with), and
focussing it on irrelevant æsthetic appeals. I do not mean that the
style of the detective novel must be bald and legalistic, or cast in the
stark language of commercia1 documentary exposition; but it must, like
the style of Defoe, subjugate itself to the function of producing
unadorned verisimilitude. (...)
The material for the plot of a detective novel must be commonplace.
Indeed, there are a dozen adequate plots for this kind of story on the
front page of almost any metropolitan daily paper. Unusualness,
bizarrerie, fantasy, or strangeness in subject-matter is rarely
desirable; and herein we find another striking reversal of the general
rules applying to popular fiction; for originality and eccentricity of
plot may give a novel of adventure or mystery its main interest. The
task confronting the writer of detective fiction is again the same
confronting the cross-word-puzzle manufacturer — namely, the working of
familiar materials into a difficult riddle. The skill of a detective
story's craftsmanship is revealed in the way these materials are fitted
together, the subtlety with which the clues are presented, and the
legitimate manner in which the final solution is withheld.
Furthermore, there is a strict ethical course of conduct imposed upon
the author. He must never once deliberately fool the reader: he must
succeed by ingenuity alone. The habit of inferior writers of bringing
forward false clues whose purpose is to mislead is as much a form of
cheating as if the cross-word-puzzle maker should print false
definitions to his words. The truth must at all times be in the printed
word, so that if the reader should go back over the book he would find
that the solution had been there all the time if he had had sufficient
shrewdness to grasp it. There was a time when all manner of tricks,
deceits, and far-fetched devices were employed for the reader's
befuddlement; but as the detective novel developed and the demand for
straightforward puzzle stories increased, all such methods were
abrogated, and to-day we find them only in the cheapest and most
inconsequential examples of this type of fiction.
In the central character of the detective novel — the detective
himself — we have, perhaps, the most important and original element of
the criminal-problem story. It is difficult to describe his exact
literary status, for he has no counterpart in any other fictional genre.
He is, at one and the same time, the outstanding personality of the
story (though he is concerned in it only in an ex-parte capacity), the
projection of the author, the embodiment of the reader, the deus ex
machina of the plot, the propounder ot the problem, the supplier of the
clues, and the eventual solver of the mystery. The life of the book
takes place in him, yet the life of the narrative has its being outside
of him. In a lesser sense, he is the Greek chorus of the drama. All good
detective novels have had for their protagonist a character of
attractiveness and interest, of high and fascinating attainments — a man
at once human and unusual, colorful and gifted. The buffoon, the
bungler, the prig, the automaton — all such have failed. And sometimes
in an endeavor to be original an otherwise competent writer, misjudging
the psychology of the situation, has presented us with a farcical
detective or a juvenile investigator, only to wonder, later on, why
these innovations failed. The more successful detective stories have
invariably given us such personalities as C. Auguste Dupin, Monsieur
Lecoq, Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Thorndyke, Rouletabille, Dr. Fortune,
Furneaux, Father Brown, Uncle Abner, Richard Hannay, Arsène Lupin,
Dawson, Martin Hewitt, Max Carrados and Hanaud — to name but a few that
come readily to mind. All the books in which these characters appear do
not fall unqualifiedly into the true detective-story category; but in
each tale there are sufficient elements to permit broadly of the
detective classification. Furthermore, these Œdipuses themselves are
not, in every instance, authentic sleuths: some are doctors of medicine,
some professors of astronomy, some soldiers, some journalists, some
lawyers, and some reformed crooks. But their vocations do not matter,
for in this style of book the designation "detective" is used
generically.
We come now to what is perhaps the outstanding characteristic of the
detective novel: its unity of mood. To be sure, this is a desideratum of
all fiction; but the various moods of the ordinary novel — such as
love, romance, adventure, wonder, mystery — are so closely related that
they may be intermingled or alternated without breaking the thread of
interest; whereas, in the detective novel, the chief interest being that
of mental analysis and the overcoming of difficulties, any
interpolation of purely emotional moods produces the effect of
irrelevancy — unless, of course, they are integers of the equation and
are subordinated to the main theme. For instance, in none of the best
detective novels will you find a love interest, — Sherlock Holmes in
mellow mood, holding a lady's hand and murmuring amorous platitudes,
would be unthinkable. And when a detective is sent scurrying on a
long-drawn-out adventure beset with physical dangers, the reader fumes
and frets until his hero is again in his armchair analyzing clues and
inquiring into motives.
In this connection it is significant that the cinematograph has never
been able to project a detective story. The detective story, in fact,
is the only type of fiction that cannot be filmed. The test of popular
fiction — namely, its presentation in visual pictures, or let us say,
the visualizing of its word-pictures — goes to pieces when applied to
detective stories. The difficulties confronting a motion-picture
director in the screening of a detective tale are very much the same as
those he would encounter if he strove to film a crossword puzzle. The
only serious attempt to transcribe a detective story onto the screen was
the case of Sherlock Holmes; and the effort was made possible only by
reducing the actual detective elements to a minimum, and emphasizing all
manner of irrelevant dramatic and adventurous factors; for there is
neither drama nor adventure, in the conventional sense, in a good
detective novel.
(...)
Not until the appearance of
A Study in Scarlet in 1887 (which, incidentally, was the same year in which
The Mystery of a Hansom Cab appeared), and
The Sign of Four
in 1890, did the detective novel take any definite forward step over
Gaboriau. In these books and the later Sherlock Holmes vehicles Conan
Doyle brought detective fiction into full-blown maturity. He adhered to
the documentary and psychological scaffolding that had been erected by
Poe and strengthened by Gaboriau, but clothed it in a new exterior,
eliminating much of the old decoration, and designing various new
architectural devices. In Doyle the detective story reached what might
be termed a purified fruition; and the numerous changes and developments
during the past two decades have had to do largely with detail, with
the substitution of methods, and with variations in documentary
treatment — in short, with current modes.
But in as vital, intimate, and exigent a type of entertainment as
detective fiction, these modes are of great importance: they mark the
distinction between that which is modern and up-to-date and that which
is old-fashioned, just as do the short skirt and the long skirt in
sartorial styles. The Sherlock Holmes stories are now obsolescent: they
have been superseded by more advanced and contemporaneously alive
productions in their own realm. (...)
The first detective of conspicuous note to follow in the footsteps of
Sherlock Holmes was Martin Hewitt, the creation of Arthur Morrison.
Hewitt is less colorful than Holmes, less omnipotent, and far more
commonplace. He was once, Mr. Morrison tells us, a lawyer's clerk, and
some of the dust of his legal surroundings seems always to cling to him.
But what he loses in perspicacity and incredible gifts, he makes up
for, in large measure, by verisimilitude. His problems as a whole are
less melodramatic and bizarre than those of Holmes, except perhaps those
in The Red Triangle;
and his methods are not as spectacular as those of his Baker Street
predecessor. An obvious attempt has been made by Mr. Morrison to give to
detective fiction an air of convincing reality; and by his painstaking
and even scholarly style he has sought to appeal to a class of readers
that might ordinarily repudiate all interest in so inherently artificial
a type of entertainment.
In R. Austin Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke the purely scientific detective
made his appearance. Test tubes, microscopes, Bunsen burners, retorts,
and all the obscure paraphernalia of the chemist's and physicist's
laboratories are his stock in trade. In fact, Dr. Thorndyke rarely
attends an investigation without his case of implements and his array of
chemicals. Without his laboratory assistant and jack-of-all-trades,
Polson, — coupled, of course, with his ponderous but inevitable
medico-legal logic — he would be helpless in the face of mysteries which
Sherlock Holmes and Monsieur Lecoq might easily have clarified by a
combination of observation, mental analysis, and intuitive genius. Dr.
Thorndyke is an elderly, plodding, painstaking, humorless and amazingly
dry sleuth, but so original are his problems, so cleverly and clearly
does he reach his solutions, and so well written are Dr. Freeman's
records, that the Thorndyke books rank among the very best of modern
detective fiction. The amatory susceptibilities of his recording
coadjutors are constantly intruding upon the doctor's scientific
investigations and the reader's patience; but even with these irrelevant
impediments most of the stories march briskly and competently to their
inevitable conclusions. Of all the scientific detectives Dr. Thorndyke
is unquestionably the most convincing. His science, though at times
obscure, is always sound: Dr. Freeman writes authoritatively, and the
reader is both instructed and delighted.
Craig Kennedy, the scientific detective of Arthur B. Reeve, on the
other hand, is far less profound: he is, in fact, a pseudo-scientist,
utilizing all manner of strange divining machines and speculative
systems, and employing all the latest "discoveries" in the realm of
fantastic and theoretic physical research. He is not unlike a composite
of all the inventors and ballyhoo doctors of science who regularly
supply sensational research copy for the Sunday Supplement magazines.
But Mr. Reeve's stories, despite their failure to adhere to probability
and to the accepted knowledge of recognized experimenters in the
scientific fields, are at times ingenious and interesting, and there is
little doubt that they have had a marked influence on modern detective
fiction. They are unfortunately marred by a careless journalistic style.
Among the many Craig Kennedy volumes may be mentioned The Poisoned Pen, The Dream Doctor, The Silent Bullet and The Treasure-Train as containing the best of Mr. Reeve's work.
Better written, conceived with greater moderation, and clinging more
closely to human probabilities, are John Rhode's novels dealing with Dr.
Priestley's adventures — Dr Priestley's Quest, The Paddington Mystery, and The Ellerby Case.
Dr. — or, as he is generally referred to in Mr. Rhode's text, Professor
— Priestley has many characteristics in common with Dr. Thorndyke. He
is a schoolman, fairly well along in years, without a sense of humor,
and inclined to dryness; but he is more of the intellectual scientist,
or scientific thinker, than Dr. Freeman's hero. ("Priestley, cursed with
a restless brain and an almost immoral passion for the highest branches
of mathematics, occupied himself in skirmishing round the portals of
the universities, occasionally flinging a bomb in the shape of a highly
controversial thesis in some ultra-scientific journal.") His detective
cases to date have been few, and he suffers by comparison with the
superior Dr. Thorndyke.
VII
The purely intellectual detective — the professor with numerous
scholastic degrees, who depends on scientific reasoning and rarefied
logic for the answer to his problems — has become a popular figure in
the fiction of crime detection. His most extravagant personification —
what might almost be termed the reductio ad absurdum of this type of
super-sleuth — is to be found in Jacques Futrelle's Professor Augustus
S.F.X. Van Dusen, PH.D., LL.D., F.R.S., M.D., etc. The first book to
recount the criminal mysteries that came under Professor Van Dusen's
observation was The Thinking Machine, later republished as The Problem of Cell 13; and this was followed by another volume of stories entitled The Thinking Machine on the Case.
These tales, despite their improbability — and often impossibility —
nevertheless constitute attractive diversion of the lighter sort.
G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown — a quiet, plain little priest who is
now definitely established as one of the great probers of mysteries in
modern detective fiction — is also what might be called an intellectual
sleuth, although the subtleties of his analyses depend, in large
measure, on a kind of spiritual intuition — the result of his deep
knowledge of human frailties. Although Father Brown does not spurn
material clues as aids to his conclusions, he depends far more on his
analyses of the human heart and his wide experience with sin. At times
he is obscure and symbolic, even mystical; and too often the problems
which Mr. Chesterton poses for him are based on crimes that are
metaphysical and unconvincing in their implications; but Father Brown's
conversational gifts — his commentaries, parables and observations — are
adequate compensation for the reader's dubiety. The fact that Father
Brown is concerned with the moral, or religious, aspect, rather than the
legal status, of the criminals he runs to earth, gives Mr. Chesterton's
stories an interesting distinction.
Similar in methods, but quite different in results, are the excellent
stories by H. C. Bailey setting forth the cases of Dr. Reginald
Fortune. Dr. Fortune is an adjunct of Scotland Yard, a friend and
constant companion of Stanley Lomas who is a chief of the Criminal
Investigation Department. Like Father Brown, Dr. Fortune is highly
intuitional; and his final results depend on logic and his knowledge of
men rather than on the evidential and circumstantial indications of the
average official police investigation. And like Father Brown he has a
gift for conversation and repartee that makes even the most sordid and
unconvincing of his cases interesting, if not indeed fascinating. In
addition, he is a man of amazing gifts, with a wide range of almost
incredible knowledge; but so competent is Mr. Bailey's craftsmanship
that Dr. Fortune rarely exceeds the bounds of probability. He has, in
fact, in a very short time (the first Fortune book, [Call Mr. Fortune],
appeared in 19l9) made a permanent and unquestioned place for himself
among the first half-dozen protagonists of detective fiction.
Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie's pompous little Belgian sleuth,
falls in the category of detectival logicians, and though his methods
are also intuitional to the point of clairvoyance, he constantly insists
that his surprisingly accurate and often miraculous deductions are the
inevitable results of the intensive operation of "the little gray
cells." Poirot is more fantastic and far less credible than his brother
criminologists of the syllogistic fraternity, Dr. Priestley, Father
Brown and Reginald Fortune; and the stories in which he figures are
often so artificial, and their problems so far fetched, that all sense
of reality is lost, and consequently the interest in the solution is
vitiated. This is particularly true of the short stories gathered into
the volume Poirot Investigates. Poirot is to be seen at his best in The Mysterious Affair at Styles and The Murder on the Links. The trick played on the reader in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
is hardly a legitimate device of the detective-story writer; and while
Poirot's work in this book is at times capable, the effect is nullified
by the dénouement.
Of an entirely different personality, yet with dialectic methods
broadly akin to Father Brown's and Dr. Priestley's, is Colonel Gore in
Lynn Brock's The Deductions of Colonel Gore and Colonel Gore's Second Case.
Colonel Gore, though ponderous and verbose, is well projected, and the
crimes he investigates are well worked-out and admirably, if a bit too
leisurely, presented. The various characterizations of the minor as well
as the major personages of the plots, and the long descriptions of
social and topographical details, tend to detract from the problems
involved; but the competency of Mr. Brock's writing carries one along
despite one's occasional impatience. This fault is not to be found in
Ernest M. Poate's Behind Locked Doors and The Trouble at Pinelands. But Mr. Poate errs on the side of amatory romance, and in Behind Locked Doors
he introduces a puppy love affair which both mars and retards what
otherwise might have been one of the outstanding modern detective
novels. Even as it stands it must be given high rank; and the figure of
Dr. Bentiron — an eccentric but lovable psychopathologist — will long
remain in the memory of those who make his acquaintance.
No list of what we may call the deductive detectives would be
complete without the name of A.E.W. Mason's admirable Hanaud of the
French Sûreté. Hanaud may almost be regarded as the Gallic counterpart
of Sherlock Holmes. The methods of these two sleuths are similar: each
depends on a combination of material clues and spontaneous thinking;
each is logical and painstaking; and each has his own little tricks and
deceptions and vanities. The two Hanaud vehicles, At the Villa Rose and The House of the Arrow,
are excellent examples of detective fiction, carefully constructed,
consistently worked out, and pleasingly written. They represent —
especially the latter — the purest expression of this type of literary
divertissement; and Hanaud himself is a memorable and engaging addition
to the great growing army of fictional sleuths. The psychological
methods of crime detection, combined with an adherence to the evidences
of reality, are also followed in S.S. Van Dine's The Benson Murder Case
and [The "Canary" Murder Case], wherein Philo Vance, a young social
aristocrat and art connoisseur, enacts the role of criminologist and
investigator.
Although the blind detective is a comparatively recent innovation in
crime-mystery fiction, his methods belong necessarily to the
logic-cum-intuition school, despite the fact that all his processes and
conclusions are accounted for on strictly material and scientific
grounds. In the various attempts at novelty made by recent
detective-story writers the sightless crime specialist has been
frequently introduced, so that now he has become a recognized and
accepted type. The most engaging and the most easily accepted of these
unique detectives is Ernest Bramah's Max Carrados,
who made his appearance in a volume bearing his name for title in 1914.
To be sure, he was endowed with gifts which recalled the strange powers
of the citizens of H.G. Wells's The Country of the Blind, but
so accurately and carefully has Mr. Bramah projected him that he must be
given a place in the forefront of famous fictional sleuths. Far more
miraculous, and hence less convincing, is the blind detective, Thornley Colton, who appears in a book which also bears his name for title, by Clinton H. Stagg.
As soon as the detective story became popular it was inevitable that
the woman detective would make her appearance; and today there are a
score or more of female rivals of Sherlock Holmes. The most charming and
capable, as well as the most competently conceived, is Violet Strange,
who solves eight criminal problems in Anna Katharine Green's The Golden Slipper. Lady Molly, in Lady Molly of Scotland Yard
by the Baroness Orczy, is somewhat more conventional in conception but
sufficiently entertaining to be regarded as a worthy deductive sister of
Violet Strange. George R. Sims, in Dorcas Dene, Detective,
has given us a feminine investigator of considerable quality; and
Arthur B. Reeve's Constance Dunlap has resources and capabilities of a
high, even if a too melodramatic, order. Millicent Newberry, in Jeanette
Lee's The Green Jacket,
is an unusual and appealing figure — more a corrector of destinies,
perhaps, than a detective. And Richard Marsh's Judith Lee, in a book
called simply Judith Lee, while not technically a sleuth, happens upon the secret of many crimes through her ability as a lip-reader.
VIII
So individual and diverse has become the latter-day fictional
detective that even a general classification is well-nigh impossible. In
Robert Barr's The Triumphs of Eugène Valmont
we have an Anglicized Frenchman of the old school who undertakes
private investigations of a too liberal latitude to qualify him at all
times as a crime specialist; but, despite his romantic adventurings and
his glaring failures, he unquestionably belongs in our category of
famous sleuths if only for the care and excellence with which Mr. Barr
has presented his experiences. Then there is the fat, commonplace,
unlovely and semi-illiterate, but withal sympathetic and entertaining,
Jim Hanvey of Octavus Roy Cohen's book, Jim Hanvey, Detective, who knows all the crooks in Christendom and is their friend; the nameless logician in the Baroness Orczy's The Old Man in the Corner and The Case of Miss Elliott,
who sits, shabby and indifferent, at his cafe table and holds
penetrating post mortems on the crimes of the day; Malcolm Sage, of
Herbert H. Jenkins's Malcolm Sage, Detective,
a fussy, bespectacled bachelor who runs a detective agency and uses
methods as eccentric as they are efficient; Lord Peter Wimsey, the
debonair and deceptive amateur of Dorothy L. Sayers's Whose Body?;
Jefferson Hastings, the pathetic, ungainly old-timer of the Washington
Police, whose mellow insight and shrewd deductions make first-rate
reading in The Bellamy Case, The Melrose Mystery and No Clue!
by James Hay, Jr.; and Inspectors Winter and Furneaux — that amusing
and capable brace of co-sleuths in Louis Tracy's long list of detective
novels.
The alienist detective is not a far cry from the pathologist
detective, and though there have been several doctors with a flair for
abnormal psychology who have enacted the role of criminal investigator,
it has remained for Anthony Wynne to give the psychiatrist a permanent
place in the annals of detection. In his Dr. Hailey, the Harley Street
specialist, (the best of whose cases is related in The Sign of Evil,)
we have an admirable detective character who mingles neurology with
psychoanalysis and solves many crimes which prove somewhat beyond the
ken of the Scotland Yard police. It was Henry James Forman, however, I
believe, who gave us the first strictly psychoanalytical detective novel
in Guilt — a story which, despite its unconventional ending and its singularity of material, makes absorbing reading.
The reporter sleuth — or "journalistic crime expert" — has become a
popular figure in detective fiction on both sides of the Atlantic, and
to enumerate his various personalities and adventures would be to fill
several small type pages with tabulations. Most famous of this clan is
Rouletabille of Gaston Leroux's excellent detective novels, although J.
S. Fletcher has created an engaging rival to the little French reporter
in the figure of Frank Spargo who solves the gruesome mystery in The Middle Temple Murder. Another reporter detective of memorable qualities and personality is Robert Estabrook in Louis Dodge's Whispers; and very recently there has appeared a book by Harry Stephen Keeler — Find the Clock
— in which a Chicago reporter named Jeff Darrell acquires the right to
sit among the select company of his fellow detective-journalists.
One of the truly outstanding figures in detective fiction is Uncle
Abner, whose criminal adventures are recounted by Melville Davisson Post
in Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries,
and in a couple of short stories included in the volume, The Sleuth of
[St. James's Square]. Uncle Abner, indeed, is one of the very few
detectives deserving to be ranked with that immortal triumverate, Dupin,
Lecoq and Holmes; and I have often marveled at the omission of his name
from the various articles and criticisms I have seen dealing with
detective fiction. In conception, execution, device and general literary
quality these stories of early Virginia, written by a man who
thoroughly knows his métier and is also an expert in law and
criminology, are among the very best we possess. The grim and lovable
Uncle Abner is a vivid and convincing character, and the plots of his
experiences with crime are as unusual as they are convincing. Mr. Post
is the first author who, to my knowledge, has used the phonetic
misspelling in a document supposedly written by a deaf and dumb man as a
proof of its having been forged. (The device is found in the story
called An Act of God.) If Mr. Post had written only Uncle Abner
he would be deserving of inclusion among the foremost of
detective-fiction writers, but in The Sleuth of St. James's Square, and especially in Monsieur Jonquelle, he has achieved a type of highly capable and engrossing crime-mystery tale. The story called The Great Cipher in the latter book is, with the possible exception of Poe's The Gold-Bug, the best cipher story in English.
Another distinctive detective, but one of an entirely different
character, is Chief Inspector William Dawson of Bennett Copplestone's The Diversions of Dawson and The Lost Naval Papers
— the latter a series of secret-service stories. There is humor in Mr.
Copplestone's delineation of Dawson, but the humor is never flippant and
does not, in any sense, detract from the interest of the cases in which
this rather commonplace, but none the less remarkable, Scotland Yard
master of disguise plays the leading rôle. In fact, the humor is so
skilfully interwoven in the plots, and is presented with such consummate
naturalness, that it heightens both the character drawing of Dawson and
the fascination of the problems he is set to solve. The literary
quality of Mr. Copplestone's books is of a high order, and goes far
toward placing them among the best of their genre that England has
produced. Dawson, for all his shortcomings and conventional devices, is a
figure of actuality, with the artificial mechanics of his craft reduced
to a minimum.
(...)
X
Fashions in detectives have changed greatly during the past decade or
so. Of late the inspired, intuitive, brilliantly logical super-sleuth
of the late nineteenth century has given place to the conservative,
plodding, hard working, routine investigator of the official police —
the genius of Carlyle's definition, whose procedure is based largely on a
transcendent capacity of taking trouble. And it must be said that this
new thoroughgoing and unimaginative detective often has a distinct
advantage, from the standpoint of literary interest, over the flashy
intellectual detective of yore. He is more human, more plausible, and
often achieves a more satisfactory solution of the criminal mysteries to
which he is assigned. The reader may follow him as an equal, and share
in his discoveries; and at all times a sense of reality, even of
commonplace familiarity, may be maintained by the author — a sense which
is too often vitiated by the inspirational methods of the older
detective.
The most skilful exponent of this style of detective story is Freeman Wills Crofts. His The Cask and The Ponson Case are masterpieces of closely-wrought construction, and, with The Groote Park Murder, Inspector French's Greatest Case and The Starvel Hollow Tragedy,
stand as the foremost representatives of their kind — as much as do the
novels of Gaboriau and the Holmes series of Conan Doyle. Indeed, for
sheer dexterity of plot Mr. Crofts has no peer among the contemporary
writers of detective fiction. His chief device is the prepared alibi,
and this he has explored with almost inexhaustible care, weaving it into
his problem with an industry matched only by the amazing industry of
his sleuths.
A. Fielding has devoted his talents to this new mode of detective fiction with a success but little less than Mr. Crofts'. In The Footsteps that Stopped
he has worked out an intricate problem along the painstaking lines of
investigation characteristic of the actual methods of Scotland Yard; and
in both The Eames-Erskine Case and The Charteris Mystery he has successfully followed these same methods. The Detective's Holiday,
by Charles Barry, is another good example of the plodding, naturalistic
detective technic, enlivened by a foil in the presence of a typical
French detective of contrasting subtlety and emotionalism. And Henry
Wade's The Verdict of You All
is a first-rate story conceived along the same lines; but it breaks
away from all tradition in the climax, and turns its dénouement into an
ironical criticism of legal procedure — a device which had a famous
precedent in The Ware Case by Gordon Pleydell. Two earlier capable examples of the detective novel of industrious routine are A.W. Marchmont's The Eagrave Square Mystery and Mark Allerton's The Mystery of Beaton Craig.
In the same classification with Crofts, Fielding and Wade belongs J.
S. Fletcher, the most prolific and popular of all the current writers of
detective fiction. Mr. Fletcher, however, carries his naturalism so far
in the projection of his plots that his detectives are too often banal
and colorless; and in many of his books the solution of the crime is
reached through a series of fortuitous incidents rather than through any
inherent ability on the part of his investigators. Mr. Fletcher writes
smoothly, and his antiquarian researches — which he habitually weaves
into the fabric of his plots — give an air of scholarship to his
stories. But his problems and their solutions are too frequently
deficient in drama and sequence, and his paucity of invention is too
consistently glaring to be entirely satisfactory. This may be due to the
frequency with which his books appear: I believe he has published
something like four a year for the past eight or ten years; and such
mass production is hardly conducive of conceptional care and structural
ingenuity. But Mr. Fletcher has none the less played an important part
in the development of the detective novel, if for no other reason than
that he has, by his fluent style and authoritative realism, given an
impetus to the reading of this type of novel among a large class of
persons who, but a few years ago, were unfamiliar with the literature of
crime detection. Mr. Fletcher s earlier books are his best; and I have
yet to read one of his more recent novels that equals his The Middle Temple Murder published ten years ago.
It will be noted that the great majority of detective stories I have
selected for mention are by English authors. The reason for the decided
superiority of English detective stories over American detective stories
lies in the fact that the English novelist takes this type of fiction
more seriously than we do. The best of the current writers in England
will turn their hand occasionally to this genre, and perform their task
with the same conscientious care that they confer on their more serious
books. The American novelist, when he essays to write this kind of
story, does so with contempt and carelessness, and rarely takes the time
to acquaint himself with his subject. He labors under the delusion that
a detective novel is an easy and casual kind of literary composition;
and the result is a complete failure. In this country we have few
detective novels of the superior order of such books as Bentley's Trent's Last Case, Mason's The House of the Arrow, Crofts' The Cask, Hext's Who Killed Cock Robin?, Phillpotts's The Red Redmaynes, Freeman's The Eye of Osiris, Knox's The Viaduct Murder, Fielding's The Footsteps That Stopped, Milne's The Red House Mystery,
Bailey's Mr. Fortune series, and Chesterton's Father Brown stories, to
mention but a scant dozen of the more noteworthy additions to England's
rapidly increasing detective library.
XI
In the foregoing brief resumé of the detective fiction which followed
upon the appearance of the Sherlock Holmes stories I have confined
myself to English and American efforts. We must not, however, overlook
the many excellent detective stories that have come out of France since
the advent of Monsieur Lecoq. The Gallic temperament seems particularly
well adapted to the subtle ties and intricacies of the detective novel;
and a large number of books of the roman policier type have been
published in France during the past half century, most of them as yet
untranslated into English. The foremost of the modern French writers of
detective fiction is Gaston Leroux; in fact, the half dozen or so novels
comprising the Aventures Extraordinaires de Joseph Rouletabille,
Reporter are among the finest examples of detective stories we possess.
Le Mystère de la Chambre Jaune (The Mystery of the Yellow Room), Le Parfum de la Dame en Noir (The Perfume of the Lady in Black), Rouletabille chez le Tsar (The Secret of the Night), Le Chateau Noir, Les Étranges Noces de Rouletabille, Rouletabille chez Krupp and Le Crime de Rouletabille (The Phantom Clue)
represent the highest standard reached by the detective novel in France
since the literary demise of Lecoq, and contain a variety of ideas and
settings which gives them a diversity of appeal. Rouletabille is
engagingly drawn, and his personality holds the reader throughout.
More popular, and certainly more ingenious, though neither as
scholarly nor as strictly orthodox, are the famous Arsène Lupin stories
of Maurice Leblanc. Lupin in the records of his earlier adventures is a
shrewd and dashing criminal — "un gentleman-cambrioleur" — and therefore
quite the reverse of the regulation detective; but he indulges in
detective work — in deductions, in the following of clues, in the
subtleties of logic, and in the solution of criminal problems — which is
as brilliant and traditional as that of any fictional officer of the
Sûreté. In his more recent escapades he gives over his anti-legal
propensities, and becomes a sleuth wholly allied with the powers of
righteousness. Some of the best and most characteristic examples of
conventional modern detective stories are to be found in Les Huit Coups de l'Horloge.
To the solution of the criminal problems involved in this book Lupin
brings not only a keen and penetrating mind, but the fruits of a vast
first-hand experience with crime.
XII
So much confusion exists regarding the limits and true nature of the
detective story, and so often is this genre erroneously classified with
the secret-service story and the crime story, that a word may properly
be said about the very definite distinctions that exist between the
latter type and the specialized detective type. While the secret-service
story very often depends on an analysis of clues and on deductive
reasoning, and while it also possesses a protagonist whose task is the
unearthing of secrets and the thwarting of plots, these conditions are
not essential to it; and herein lies a fundamental difference between
the secret-service agent and the regulation detective. The one is, in
the essence of his profession, an adventurer, whereas the other is a
deus ex machina whose object it is to solve a given problem and thereby
bring a criminal to book. No matter how liberally the secret-service
story may have borrowed from the methods of detective fiction, its
growth has been along fundamentally different lines from those of
detective fiction; and during the past few decades it has developed a
distinctive technic and evolved a structure characteristically its own.
It is true that famous fictional detectives have, on occasion, been
shunted successfully to secret-service work (like Dawson in The Lost Naval Papers, Hannay in Greenmantle and The Thirty-Nine Steps, Max Carrados in The Coin of Dionysius,
and even Sherlock Holmes in an occasional adventure); but these
variations have, in no wise, brought the secret-service story into the
strict category of detective fiction. That the appeals in these two
literary types are often closely related, is granted; but this fact is
incidental rather than necessary.
(....)
This is likewise true of the crime story wherein the criminal is the
hero — for example, the stories of Raffles by E.W. Hornung, and the
early adventures of Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin. Both in appeal and
technic the detective tale and the criminal-hero tale are basically
unlike. The author of the latter must, first of all, arouse the reader's
sympathy by endowing his hero with humanitarian qualities (the
picturesque Robin Hood is almost as well known to-day for his
philanthropy as for his brigandage); and, even when this lenient
attitude has been evoked, the intellectual activity exerted by the
reader in an effort to solve the book's problem is minimized by the fact
that all the knots in the tangled skein have been tied before his eyes
by the central character. Moreover, there is absent from his quest that
ethical enthusiasm which is always a stimulus to the follower of an
upright detective tracking down an enemy of society — a society of which
the reader is a member and therefore exposed to the dangers of
anti-social plottings on the part of the criminal. The projection of
oneself into the machinations of a super-criminal (such as Wyndham
Martin's Anthony Trent) is a physical and adventurous emotion, whereas
the cooperation extended by the reader to his favorite detective is
wholly a mental process. Even Vautrin, Balzac's great criminal hero,
does not inspire the reader with emotions or reactions in any sense
similar to those produced by Dupin, Monsieur Lecoq, Holmes, Father
Brown, or Uncle Abner. And for all the moral platitudes of Barry Pain's
Constantine Dix and the inherently decent qualities of Louis Joseph
Vance's Lone Wolf — both of whom had the courage to war upon society
single-handed — we cannot accept them in the same spirit, or with the
same sense of partnership, that we extend to the great sleuths of
fiction, who have the organized police of the world at their back. The
hero of detective fiction must stand outside of the plot, so to speak:
his task is one of ferreting out impersonal mysteries; and he must come
to his work with no more intimate relationship to the problem than is
possessed by the reader himself.
XIII
The subject-matter of a detective story — that is, the devices used
by the criminal and the methods of deduction resorted to by the
detective — is a matter of cardinal importance. The habitual reader of
the detective novel has, during the past quarter of a century, become a
shrewd critic of its technic and means. He is something of an expert,
and, like the motion-picture enthusiast, is thoroughly familiar with all
the devices and methods of his favorite craft. He knows immediately if a
story is old-fashioned, if its tricks are hackneyed, or if its approach
to its problem contains elements of originality. And he judges it by
its ever shifting and developing rules. Because of this perspicacious
attitude on his part a stricter form and a greater ingenuity have been
imposed on the writer; and the fashions and inventions of yesterday are
no longer used except by the inept and uninformed author.
For example, such devices as the dog that does not bark and thereby
reveals the fact that the intruder is a familiar personage (Doyle's Silver Blaze and the Baronness Orczy's The York Mystery); the establishing of the culprit's identity by dental irregularities (Freeman's The Funeral Pyre, Leblanc's Les Dents de Tigre, and Morrison's The Case of Mr. Foggatt);
the finding of a distinctive cigarette or cigar at the scene of the
crime (used several times in the Raffles stories, in Knox's The Three Taps, Groller's Die feinen Zigarren, and Doyle's The Boscombe Valley Mystery); the cipher message containing the crime's solution (Wynn's The Double Thirteen, Freeman's The Moabite Cipher and The Blue Scarab, and Doyle's The Adventure of the Dancing Men); the murdering — generally stabbing — of a man in a locked room after the police have broken in (Chesterton's The Wrong Shape, Zangwill's The Big Bow Mystery, and Caroline Wells's Spooky Hollow); the commission of the murder by an animal (Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Doyle's The Speckled Band and The Hound of the Baskervilles); the phonograph alibi (Freeman's Mr. Pointing's Alibi and Doyle's The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone); the shooting of a dagger from a gun or other projecting machine to avoid proximity (Freeman's The Aluminium Dagger and Phillpotts's Jig-Saw); the spiritualistic séance or ghostly apparition to frighten the culprit into a confession (McFarland's Behind the Bolted Door? and Phillpotts's A Voice from the Dark); the "psychological" word-association test for guilt (Kennedy's The Scientific Cracksman and Poate's Behind Locked Doors); the dummy figure to establish a false alibi (MacDonald's The Rasp and Doyle's The Empty House); the forged fingerprints (Freeman's The Red Thumb Mark and The Cat's Eye, and Stevenson's The Gloved Hand),
— these, and a score of other devices, have now been relegated to the
discard; and the author who would again employ them would nave no just
claim to the affections or even the respect of his readers.
G.K. Chesterton, in his introduction to a detective story by Walter
S. Masterman, gives a list of many of the devices that have now come to
be regarded as antiquated. He says: "The things he [Mr. Masterman] does
not do are the things being done everywhere to-day to the destruction of
true detective fiction and the loss of this legitimate and delightful
form of art. He does not introduce into the story a vast but invisible
secret society with branches in every part of the world, with ruffians
who can be brought in to do anything or underground cellars that can be
used to hide anybody. He does not mar the pure and lovely outlines of a
classical murder or burglary by wreathing it round and round with the
dirty and dingy red tape of international diplomacy; he does not lower
our lofty ideas of crime to the level of foreign politics. He does not
introduce suddenly at the end somebody's brother from New Zealand, who
is exactly like him. He does not trace the crime hurriedly in the last
page or two to some totally insignificant character, whom we never
suspected because we never remembered. He does not act over the
difficulty of choosing between the hero and the villain by falling back
on the hero's cabman or the villain's valet. He does not introduce a
professional criminal to take the blame of a private crime; a thoroughly
unsportsmanlike course of action, and another proof of how
professionalism is ruining our national sense of sport. He does not
introduce about six people in succession to do little bits of the same
small murder, one man to bring the dagger, and another to point it, and
another to stick it in properly. He does not say it was all a mistake,
and that nobody ever meant to murder anybody at all, to the serious
disappointment of all humane and sympathetic readers. . . ."
But, strangely enough, Mr. Masterman does something much worse and
more inexcusable than any of the things Mr. Chesterton enumerates, — he
traces the crime to the detective himself! Such a trick is neither new
nor legitimate, and the reader feels not that he has been deceived
fairly by a more skilful mind than his own, but deliberately lied to by
an inferior. To a certain extent Gaston Leroux is guilty of this
subterfuge in The Mystery of the Yellow Room;
but here Rouletabille, and not the guilty detective, is the central
nemesis; and it is the former's ingenious probing and reasoning that
unmasks the culprit. A similar situation is to be found in the story
called The Cat Burglar in H. C. Bailey's [Mr. Fortune, Please], and also in The Winning Clue by James Hay, Jr. In Israel Zangwill's The Big Bow Mystery
the device is again used; but here it is entirely legitimate, for the
situation consists of a specified and recognized battle of wits. A
variation of this trick is resorted to in one of Agatha Christie's
Poirot books — The Murder of Roger Ackroyd — but without any extenuating circumstances.
In this connection it should be pointed out that a certain
"gentleman's agreement" has grown up between the detective-story writer
and the public — the outcome of a definite development in the
relationship necessary for the projection of this type of fiction. And
not only has the reader a right to expect and demand fair treatment from
an author along the lines tacitly laid down and according to the
principles involved, but an author who uses this trust for the purpose
of tricking his co-solver of a criminal problem immediately forfeits all
claim to the reading public's consideration.
A word in parting should be said in regard to the primary theme of
the detective novel, for herein lies one of its most important elements
of interest. Crime has always exerted a profound fascination over
humanity, and the more serious the crime the greater has been that
appeal. Murder, therefore, has always been an absorbing public topic.
The psychological reasons for this morbid and elemental curiosity need
not be gone into here; but the fact itself supplies us with the
explanation of why a murder mystery furnishes a far more fascinating
raison d'être in a detective novel than does any lesser crime. All the
best and most popular books of this type deal with mysteries involving
human life. Murder would appear to give added zest to the solution of
the problem, and to render the satisfaction of the solution just so much
greater. The reader feels, no doubt, that his efforts have achieved
something worth while — something commensurate with the amount of mental
energy which a good detective novel compels him to expend.
Willard Huntington Wright (Ps. S. S. Van Dine), Great Detective Stories (1927)
