8. Detective fiction

Detective fiction A sub-genre of fiction which presents a mysterious event or crime, usually but not necessarily murder, at first concealing the solution from the reader but finally revealing it through the successful investigations of the detective. W. H. Auden summarizes a typical plot: 'a murder occurs; many are suspected; all but one suspect, who is the murderer, are eliminated; the murderer is arrested or dies'.

Historians of the form have tried to trace its origin to the puzzle tales of the Enlightenment (Voltaire's Zadig) or even to the Bible (Daniel, Susanna and the elders), but there is a general agreement that its real history starts in the 19th century. Edgar Allan Рое brought all the basic ingredients together in his 'tales of ratiocination' of the 1840s. His detective, the brilliant and eccentric Dupin, is accompanied by an obligingly imperceptive friend who narrates the story; he confronts mystery with a coherent, though not exclusively scientific, methodology of detection; and he produces the solution with a triumphant flourish that both surprises and satisfies the reader. Without providing either a murder or an infallible detective, Wilkie Collins showed in The Moonstone (1868) how the formula could be expanded to fit the requirements of the full-length novel. In his Sherlock Holmes stories, begun in the late 1880s, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle masterfully orchestrated the hints Рое had sketched out.

The success of Sherlock Holmes rapidly bred imitation, ranging from distinguished contributions like G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories and E. C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case (1913) to forgotten works like Arthur Morrison's Martin Hewitt stories and M. P. Shiel's tales of Prince Zaleski. It also bred new awareness of the form, a new attempt to distinguish detective fiction from all the other types of popular fiction which dabble in crime and mystery. According to Monsignor Ronald Knox (1888-1957) and his followers in the Detection Club, detective fiction should be concerned with puzzles rather than crime as such, and it should elaborate its puzzles in strict obedience to the rules of logic and fair play. From such prescrip- tions arose the so-called Golden Age of the detective novel in the 1920s and 1930s. Writers became known for their expert refinements of the puzzle: R. Austin Freeman (1862-1943) for his scientific expertise; Freeman Wills Crofts (1879-1957) for his juggling with timetables and alibis; John Dickson Carr (1905-77) for his variations on the locked-room mystery; and, most famous of all, Agatha Christie for her ingenuity in making the least likely suspect turn out to be the murderer.

Setting and characterization inevitably took second place, but they, too, followed well-worn paths. Detectives tended to be gentleman amateurs rather than policemen or private enquiry agents. H. C. Bailey (1878-1961) was perhaps the first, in his Reggie Fortune stories, to make his gentleman amateur a facetious dandy, but Fortune was soon joined by a lengthening list of detectives who owed as much to Saki and P. G. Wodehouse as they did to Conan Doyle: Lord Peter Wimsey (Dorothy L. Sayers), Albert Campion (Margery Allingham) and even Nigel Strangeways (Nicholas Blake, the pseudonym of Cecil Day-Lewis). Settings were equally genteel, with country houses and Oxbridge colleges among the favourites, and with the work of Michael Innes (J. I. M.Stewart) offering perhaps the best representative se- lection.

Detective stories in this classic mould were not confined to England, as the popularity of S. S. Van Dine (Willard Huntington Wright, 1880-1939), Ellery Queen (Frederic Dannay, 1905-82, and Manfred B. Lee, 1905-71) and Rex Stout (1886-1975) in America showed. Nor did they entirely disappear after the 1930s. Christie, Allingham, Blake, Innes and Ngaio Marsh all continued their careers after the war, with some adjustment to the change in public taste, and were joined by Edmund Crispin (Robert Bruce Montgomery, 1921-78) and Michael Gilbert (1912- ). Contemporaries like P. D. James in England and Emma Lathen (Mary J. Latsis and Martha Henissart) in America can still follow the classic formula. But it came increasingly under challenge from writers who, whatever else they may not have shared, were agreed in finding it restrictive and in wishing to break down the barriers that separated detective fiction from other popular forms like the thriller, adventure story, chase novel and spy story, or from the concerns of serious literature.

By far the most significant challenge came from America, where Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and other contributors to The Black Mask pioneered 'hard-boiled' detective fiction. Its aims were succinctly indicated by Chandler when he praised Hammett for putting murder back in the hands of people who commit it with real weapons for real reasons, not just to provide the reader with a puzzle. With its tough, down-at-heel private eyes and its sleazy urban world of vice and hoodlums, hard-boiled detective fiction quickly rooted itself in American popular culture, not least because of its strong links with Hollywood and the film noir, and has attracted distinguished practitioners from Ross MacDonald (the most important of several pseudonyms used by Kenneth Millar, 1915-83) to Robert B. Parker (1932- ). Though struggling, and not always succeeding, to adapt to new cultural phenomena like feminism and gay rights, its formulas still dominate the American approach as thoroughly as Conan Doyle once did the English.

In England itself the form has never properly taken root, but two other tendencies - both with international ramifications - are worth noting. The first is the 'crime novel', so called because an interest in the criminal and criminal psychology can overshadow or even replace the element of mystery. Pioneered by Anthony Berkeley Cox (1893-1971), writing as Francis lies in the 1930s, it has since attracted distinguished adherents in the American Patricia Highsmith, Julian Symons (1912-) and Ruth Rendell. The second is the 'police novel', in which a determination to make good the genre's earlier neglect of the police can produce works ranging from strictly procedural novels like those of John Creasey (1908-73) or the American Ed McBain (Evan Hunter), to the atmospheric fiction of Nicolas Freeling. Indeed, Freeling's work, with its policemen-heroes at odds with the bureaucracy that gives them authority, its enquiry into the social and personal origins of crime and its ability to propound a neat puzzle when the occasion requires, comes as close as any to epitomizing the eclectic variety open to the contemporary detective novelist.