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.
The best and truest type of secret-service story may be found in the writings of William Le Queux — in The Invasion, Donovan of Whitehall, The Czar’s Spy, and The Mystery of the Green Ray, for instance. And the novels of E. Phillips Oppenheim contain many of the most capable and diverting stories of this type to be found in English. Lord Frederick Hamilton has introduced a welcome element of novelty into the secret-service formula by way of his P.J.Davenant series — Nine Holiday Adventures of Mr. P.J.Davenant, Some Further Adventures of Mr. P.J.Davenant, The Education of Mr. P.J.Davenant, and The Beginnings of Mr. P.J.Davenant. Robert Allen, in Captain Gardiner of the International Police, has given us a first-rate secret-service-adventure book; and J.A.Ferguson, in The Stealthy Terror, has created noteworthy entertainment in this field. One of the best of recent secret-service romances is J. Aubrey Tyson’s The Scarlet Tanager; and in The Unseen Hand Clarence Herbert New has written a series of diplomatic adventures which rank high as fictional secret-service documents. But for all the superficial similarity between these books and the detective adventures of the official and unofficial peace-time sleuths, the secret-service narrative has played no part in the narrow and intensive process of the detective story’s evolution; and in its more rigid projections it differs radically from the definite and highly specialized form of detective fiction.
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 Arséne 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.
** GASLIGHT WARNING **
The following chapter contains many spoilers. You may be disappointed to find the solution to several excellent mysteries which you have not yet read. --- sld
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.
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