What is morally worse — for it prevents the public from developing its own judgment — anthologists who understand the distinctions and who define the detective genre in their prefaces go on to fill their books with stories of crime and mystery absolutely devoid of detection. In the best of such books one is lucky to find four or five pieces out of fifteen or twenty that answer to the given description. No such insouciance would be tolerated elsewhere. An anthology of ghost stories is full of ghosts. A book labeled “westerns“ does not include narratives of the mysterious East. A tale of love on Jones Beach would be deemed astray among sea stories.
You naturally ask, “What are the distinguishing marks of the true genre and what peculiar delights does it afford the person of literary tastes?“ It is not enough that one of the characters in the story should be called a detective — nor is it necessary. What is required is that the main interest of the story should consist in finding out, from circumstances largely physical, the true order and meaning of events that have been part disclosed and part concealed. Crime is attractive but incidental. An excellent detective story could be written about the identification of an amnesia victim. 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.
Certain readers, of course, are impatient with any detection that busies itself with physical clues. They mutter against “mechanical puzzles“ and say that they cannot be bothered with material facts: the mysteries of the soul are so much more—mysterious. And they conclude that detective fiction, being of the order of riddles, can have no connection with literature. They may be right in their judgment of particular works that are dull through being mechanical, but the condemnation of riddles is unjust. Tradition itself speaks for the riddle as a compelling literary device. From the Bible and the Greek dramatists to Dickens and Henry James, the discovery of who is who and what his actions mean has been the mainspring of great narratives, The stories of Joseph and Oedipus, the plots of Bleak House and “In the Cage,“ pose questions of identification and work out puzzles in the most exact sense of these terms.
In the ancient stories a single physical fact — a ring or other object, a footprint, a lock of hair — usually suffices to disclose identity and set off the denouement. The object is symbolic and conventional rather than rationally convincing. What happens in modern detective fiction is that objects — and more than one in each tale — are taken literally and seriously. They are scanned for what they imply, studied as signs of past action and dark purpose. This search for history in things is anything but trivial. It reflects the way our civilization thinks about law and evidence, nature and knowledge. Our curiosity about objects has grown since the Greeks; we call the results science. By a parallel evolution of literature, the dominant kind of fiction is the prose narrative stuffed with material fact which we call the realistic novel. It blossomed a century and a half ago, with Scott and Balzac, and we are not surprised to find that the detective interest on the part of literary men dates from the same period of balanced rationalism and romanticism: detection is par excellence the romance of reason.
We see this new taste burgeoning in the eighteenth century in Voltaire’s charming story of Zadig. We find it carried forward in a sketch by Beaumarchais about the identity of a lady at a ball. And when Balzac follows this fictional tradition he attaches to it more than passing importance, for in an actual murder case we see him attempting to defend the accused by a memoir in which he pleads that: “Criminal investigation must retrace the dead morally and physically, for the proofs for and against are everywhere — in people, places, and things“. The emphatic italicizing is Balzac’s own. A few years earlier, across the Channel, Sydney Smith had attacked the custom of denying legal advice to those charged with felony, by arguing that if “a footmark, a word, a sound, a tool dropped… are all essential to the detection of guilt“, then the “same closeness of reasoning is necessary for the establishment of innocence.“
From these and other examples it could be shown that the literary imagination of the first half of the nineteenth century was caught by what it understood of method in the new sciences (especially fossil reconstruction in geology) and by its sympathy with the new criminology, which called for the accurate use of physical evidence. At a time when [James] Marsh’s test for arsenic was hailed as a triumph which would eliminate the Borgias from our midst while saving those falsely accused, Europe and America thrilled to the descriptions of Leathertocking’s primitive way of tracking down friends and enemies with the aid of physical clues. [William] Leggett’s “The Rifle,“ published in 1830, shows how, in American fiction, crime was first brought home to a culprit by ballistics.
It remained for a genius to take this entrancing idea of detection and make it breed a distinctive literature by displaying it in an appropriate form. That genius was Edgar Allan Poe and the form was the short story of which he was also the original theorist. “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.
...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. The poet C. Day Lewis, writing as Nicholas Blake the excellent Minute for Murder, apologizes for this fault by having his detective refer to “the monstrous red herring“ that delayed the solution. Looking back over many a novel that is monster-ridden in this way, one cannot help thinking of the story as it was first conceived, without this artificial bustle and bulge which exists only to be deflated by a sentence or two near the end.
If this is true today, when a detective novel is also a slim volume, what are we to say of the earlier phase of expansion after Poe’s sober contribution? When his idea was first stretched out to fill the dominant form, the novel meant a “tangled skein“ of 150,000 words. The French romane policiers a la Gaboriau, the milder melodramas of Anna Katherine Green, and even the best novels of the 1920’s from the hand of Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers were massive constructions in which a great many innocent people had to behave suspiciously if the main business was to be kept long enough out of the reader’s sight. Conan Doyle himself went against sound instinct, though by another route, 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.
I grant that the short story also has its perils and defects, especially if for lack of invention it returns to the state of anecdote, that is, makes the denouement hinge on one small point instead of on a chain of inferences drawn from several facts. Nothing is duller than the tale of the criminal who, having endured long questioning with aristocratic aplomb, turns green and claws the air because he is caught in a lie. The same holds true of the lost button, the spent match, the missing envelope — no matter how ingenious the situation or how skillfully built up the suspense, no solitary due is good enough to satisfy the reader who knows what detection is and insists on getting it.
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. First comes the preamble, philosophic in tone, and if possible paradoxical or otherwise arresting. It sets the mood by providing a sample of what Poe called ratiocination. However you pronounce it, ratiocination is a heart-warming prospect. The detective theorizes upon some aspect of life which the story will bear out, though he himself does not as yet know this. Next comes the predicament — mysterious, horrible, grotesque, or merely puzzling — the variation from the norm which invites inquiry. The commonplace mind, represented by the client or by some other embodiment of the ewig-Watsonisches, tries to assimilate the unusual and fails. But the superior mind, the detective intellect, seen through a cloud of smoke, discerns the true question and feels immortal inklings upon him — as may be gathered from the irritating silence which follows his voluble beginning.
Further events soon disconcert both the common and the superior minds, but, again, only the latter recovers. This is the signal for a little discourse on method, possibly given socratically, by questions and answers that dispose of the obvious hypothesis and leave everything in an engaging confusion. It is time for the detective to act on his still-hidden “deductions“. He tests “places, people, and things.“ The sheep separate themselves from the goat, and the ensuing violence — confession, arrest, suicide — prepares the way for explanations.
These may of course be artfully distilled through the two or three closing sections of the tale, but if the end is not to be a wordy anticlimax, some provocation of sharp surprise must be kept to the last. We know that the culprit is the smooth solicitor with the pince-nez, but we still cannot see how he could have been in London and Buenos Aires at the same time. The final lecturette which leads up to this disclosure, far from being a rehash, is an illumination which is also an emotional peak, because it releases the tension of intelligent curiosity we have labored under from the beginning.
To be sure, “form“ in narrative is rather a metaphorical guide than a commandment, and the combining of incident and ratiocination in the detective short story can be widely varied, as R. Austin Freeman proved in The Singing Bone. In that volume he created the two-part invention, telling first the events in forward motion, as they occurred, then once again in reverse, as the detective reconstructs their sequence and meaning. To sustain interest in such a twice-told tale requires great generalship and a faultless choice of facts, for the repetition bares the machinery to the author’s own practical criticism as well as the reader’s. Unless the parts are solid and well-knit, what we accepted readily on a first recital will sound feeble or improbable when served up again to match a new pattern and a diminished suspense.
All that I have been saying about the genre could be summed up in one word: the detective story is a tale. The pleasure it affords is that of any narrative in which the ancient riddle of who is who unravels itself to an accompaniment of worldly wisdom. In the detective tale proper there is double satisfaction answering a double curiosity — what can the solution be? and how was the solution arrived at? But to recapture this innocent pleasure one must be sophisticated enough to abdicate other sophistications.
II
The case for the detective story cannot of course stop on this dogmatic note, for certain merits of the genre and certain objections to it are yet to be named. Among the objections is that of sameness — “read one and you have read them all“. My description of the form could even be cited in support of the charge; it would be foolish to deny that detection in literature submits to very rigid canons. It is an art of symmetry, it seeks the appearance of logical necessity, like classical tragedy, and like tragedy it cherishes the unity of place — the locked room, the ship or train in motion. Its successes thus partake always of the tour de force. As Yeats rightly remarked, “The technique is supairb“.
But these very limitations, when appreciated, draw our eyes to the points of difference between one tale and another. Indeed, superficial sameness is a common attribute of tales, in contrast with the surface variety we expect of novels and novelistic short stories. If you read Boccaccio and Margaret of Navarre and Bandello and the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles and the Contes Drolatiques, you will find these tales as alike among themselves as any comparable number of detective stories. In the one group, lovers plot against husbands and are either successful or ridiculous. In the other, the detective is confronted by the inexplicable and he reasons his way to the explanation, with or without apprehending a culprit. Fairy tales also betray a strong family likeness. There is a task set and an ogre to be conquered before the princess’ hand is available; and generally everything comes in threes. Still, one can distinguish the masterpieces from the dull imitations, whatever the genre, by the art with which the formula has been vivified.
What one seems to miss in the tale is the novel’s lifelike looseness, the illusion of uncontrived actuality. One is conscious of listening to a tale, which is why I suggest that the enjoyment of detective stories requires a superior sophistication. Again, I concede that the reader who goes to novels in order to learn something new about human character will be disappointed in detection. The tale may teach nothing but its own neatness, and its effect then is to bring a smile to the lips rather than a commotion to the soul. These are two orders of pleasure, not necessarily two degrees of it.
But if what I say is true, what becomes of the connection we observed, al least historically, between detective fiction and the realistic novel? To perceive the connection one must turn from form to substance. The raw material of detection consists of the physical objects that surround action. These become literary substance when the detective imagination has chosen and arranged them so that some are clues while others produce atmosphere, verisimilitude, suspense. In detection details are numerous and must be instantly convincing. We are ready to swallow long descriptions of houses and their furnishings, we are greedy for the contents of posthumous pockets, we long to master time tables, speeds of vehicles, and procedures for collecting evidence, provided always that these records of matter moving through time and space conform to the common standards of credibility. That is the reason why many years ago Father Ronald Knox laid down as one of the laws of detective fiction: “There must be no Chinamen“. For this cryptic rule, which its author said he could not explain, is in fact the principle of the realistic novel; the world of magic and mystery yields to a sense of reality based on the persuasiveness of things. 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.
Some readers of course are by temperament impatient with small details. Trollope tells us that he did not like stories in which he had to remember what happened at a given hour on the Tuesday, or how many yards from the milestone the lady was abducted. But in so saying he is telling us about himself rather than criticizing the genre. His own work is full of little points to remember about people, church politics, and county snobbery. We follow him because, as we say, we gain an understanding of English life as well as of humankind. What do we gain from the details of detection? An understanding, first, of the silent life of things, and next, of the spectacle of mind at work. This is no doubt why detective feats have been, since Voltaire ad Poe, the delight of intellectuals. The emotion called forth is that of seeing order grow out of confusion. This is no mean or despicable emotion: it can match in intensity the light of recognition which Aristotle declared the strongest effect of tragedy.
To experience this pleasure of discovery one must he willing to explore, as minutely and lovingly as the author desires, the nature and connections of the inanimate — including the corpse. One must be attentive to the interlinked traces of human action upon the material world. No doubt this is an acquired taste, like the taste for reading the history of the earth in rocks and rivers. But a generation reared on Proust’s crumb of cake in the teacup should readily concede that bits of matter matter.