To those who acknowledge this, 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. Far from “maturing“ detection and giving us genuine novels with “real“ characters, the so-called stories of suspense have only obscured a true genre and further muddled the criticism of it. The name itself is meaningless. Any good tale is a “story of suspense“. What we are in fact given in the new mongrel form is “stories of anxiety,“ which cater for the contemporary wish to feel vaguely disturbed. I do not question the pleasure derived from this sort of self-abuse. I merely decline to call it superior to another pleasure which is totally different. And I hope I need not add that I enjoy and admire, each in its own kind, a great many of the tales now confused with detection, from Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest to Stanley Ellin’s “Broker’s Special“ and from Agatha Christie’s “Witness for the Prosecution“ to Anthony Boucher’s “Elsewhen“ ...
Meanwhile, from the modern deviations one can reason backward to certain critical conclusions. If you ask the ordinary reader which of the Sherlock Holmes short stories he likes best, the chances are that he will say, “The Speckled Band“. The vision of the snake coming down the bell pull is the utmost thrill he expects from detection. To the connoisseur, however, the tale is one of Doyle’s weaker efforts. It stands far below, say, “The Six Napoleons.“ The point of the contrast is not that “sensationalism“ is out of place because detection is “intellectual“. Think of Ernest Bramah’s “Brookbend Cottage“ and you will see how compatible detection can be with thrills and fireworks. The point is rather that in any combination of the detective interest with anything else, the something else must remain the junior partner.
By this principle we can see why it is so rare that a detective tale of French or German authorship is true to its name. The old roman policier tradition hangs over it and makes one groan. Fanciful “reconstructions“ of the crime, inane accusations, a vicious love of coincidence, a smug acceptance of chance solutions — all this, saturated with the unhealthy flavor of the secret police, generally spoils the dish. Simenon’s long-winded irrelevancies are the same thing modern style, that is, with morbid coloring added. What shall one say of the Oriental adaptation of our genre? To believe, among other things, that a criminal can for professional purposes conceal himself inside the upholstery of an armchair demands an effort of nonvisualization that few Western readers will be willing to make. The fact that the author of such inventions has taken the pseudonym of Edogawa Rampo only adds a touch of resentment to our dismay [Edogawa Rampo is a phonetic rendering of Edgar Allan Poe; it was thus the rather clever, not dismaying, pseudonym of Taro Hirai, the “father of the Japanese mystery“. See Ellery Queen, ed., Ellery Queen's japanese Golden Dozen: The Detective Story World in Japan (Rutland, Vt., 1978), Queen in this case is Frederic Dannay. -Editor’s note].
Yet strict naturalism is not enough, either, 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. I repeat: nothing less than the play of the detective intelligence upon the physical world will give us a detective tale. It might seem at first sight as if Mr. [Harry] Kemelman’s admirable “Nine-Mile Walk“ destroyed the rule: what is his story but a few words overheard and analyzed? This is mere appearance. The detection is genuinely of the physical conditions surrounding the deed and implied by the one short sentence — an exemplary work as well as a tour de force.
III
But am I not still a good way from showing that detective fiction is a branch of literature in the honorific sense of belles-lettres? Is not detection perhaps a frivolous by-product of legal and scientific writing, a jeu d’esprit for tired professional men who lack the energy to tackle poetry? Behind these questions lurks a general suspicion about style. The literary conscience demands that anything called literature show mastery not only of structure but also of tone and diction. The manner of these is not prescribed, but the commonplace will degrade a narrative, however ingenious, to the rank of popular journalism.
Detective stories have been written, certainly, which show complete indifference to the felicities of feeling and expression. But this is true in equal measure of every type of story. Nick Carter has his counterparts in all genres, and we must judge detective fiction as we do other kinds, by the best examples. It is no concession to admit that there would be no genre to speak of and no art to criticize if detective stories gave us but stock situations interlarded with footprints and tobacco ash. It is the shuttling between the infinity of possible human actions and their equally varied physical setting that gives the detective story-teller the chance to be original, adroit, revelatory. And success here as elsewhere calls for the fundamental literary powers.
The supreme quality in our special genre is of course invention, which is to say imagination. Because the light shines on all the material circumstances, these must seem fresh, at least in function, and yet sufficiently common to be plausible — streets and moors and stairs and potting sheds must be recognizable and in no way fanciful. Incidents, likewise, must show a studious regard for the norms and conventions of life and yet avoid that predictability which is the mark of journalism in the derogatory sense. Only art, the art of words, will support a writer who tries to walk this narrow path. It is style that in the fictions of Dorothy Sayers or Rex Stout, of E.C.Bentley or G.K.Chesterton, makes their works at once worthy of belief and pleasurable to read. Here again, as in classical tragedy, the illusion works, artificiality disappears, thanks to a scrupulous attention to language. And as in Racine, a few cliches must be accepted as part of the convention: when “tangled skeins” are out of date we must tolerate the detective’s happy thought that his work resembles “the fitting together of a jigsaw puzzle”.
Nor is literature in abeyance because we consent to character drawing being in detective fiction a secondary concern. For in these tales characters must none the less move and talk agreeably to their role — and to ourselves. We must know them at least as well as we know the many people, not our intimates, with whom we deal in daily life. By a right use of the Jamesian “point of view” the writer of detection allows us to see into his actors far enough to recognize their type and judge their ostensible motives. Were we to go further we would see too much: the writer would have given away what it is his business to keep hidden until circumstances speak. In this half-concealment lies an art which is none other than literary.
The one exception to this deliberate superficiality is the portrait of the detective, and here too the literature can show some triumphs. Sherlock Holmes is as fully a character as Mr. Pickwick. And by virtue of Doyle’s almost unique success in giving a soul to the detective’s partner — the common man — we have in the two a companion pair to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, a contrast and concert capable of occupying our imaginations apart from the tales in which the two figure. Similarly in Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin this old pattern of the knight and his squire, which is as old as the Iliad, is repeated with conspicuous success in the American idiom.
It does not of course take such a partnership to prove that writers of detective tales can animate their heroes with a picturesque variety. From Father Brown to Peter Wimsey the range is wide. 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 belonging and nursing a head cold, yet manage to track down desperate murderers [The reference here is to Simenon’s Maigret. - Editor’s note]. An all-embracing awareness of physical surroundings and great powers of ratiocination being the spectacle we look for, we are cheated when amiable bumblers hold the stage and succeed by accident at the last minute. They are as unconstitutional in their way as the “poison unknown to science” which kills before the cork is out of the bottle. And my objection to ineffectuality goes for the same paradox in any other form — the great Cointreau, let us say, who is always drinking and hiccuping, and who ends his cases snoring face down on the table while the prisoner is led away in a whiskey-scented haze. 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. It follows that to produce him the author must be at least his equal in observation and vocabulary: wit, learning, and repartee constitute the hallmark of detective literature.
The final grace of the perfect tale is its ornamentation. I mean by this the small touches which, while they fit the working parts of the plot, give them a characteristic coloring. Beyond this, an exact measure of levity in detection shows the master’s hand, for as Arthur Machen pointed out long ago, the true tone of the genre springs from the alliance of murder and mirth. The laughter is a touch sardonic and must never degenerate into hilarity. The joke of death is on us. Conan Doyle and Dorothy Sayers, among the classics, understood this better than anyone else. What finer-humored critique of detection itself, and at the same time what more brilliant invention, than the casual reference in the Holmes story to the case which hinged on “how far the parsley had sunk into the butter upon a hot day”?
A muffled irony is perhaps as much as our later sensibility will stand, but some such injection of butter and parsley is needed if we are to preserve our proper distance from what is after all ugly business. Murder and detection in real life can give pleasure to very few. The one evokes anger and misery, the other boredom. Only when transmuted into literature by the artificial light of reason and the arbitrary rearrangement of parts do these social and anti-social realities begin to afford delight: after a time, the horrors perpetrated by Burke and Hare become the stuff of DeQuincey’s Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts — the first model of still another genre. But since Poe’s great feat, we need no longer depend on Burke and Hare and DeQuincey, nor on the four or live disciples of the last-named who have reshaped for us the incidents of actual crime. We have for our solace and edification the literary genre I have tried to describe ...abundant, variegated, illustrious, classical — the detective story.
Текст дается по изданию:
Detective Fiction. A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. R.I.Winks. Prentice-Hall, Ink., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980, 144-153
Данный текст предоставлен А.А.Брусовым