WHEN IT COMES to thorough research, especially with regard to detective fiction, today's author has proven quite capable. Acting as a sort of literary archaeologist, he has unearthed information about detecfic that would otherwise have remained buried in history's catacombs. In this brief overview essay, Gruesser traces and explains why there was in the early 20th century a concerted push at . . .
"Codifying Detection — Collections of, Apologies for, and Criticism on Detective Fiction, 1900-1930."
By John Gruesser.
Sam Houston State University, Department Member.
Essay (7 pages).
Online at Academia.edu (HERE).
LIKE SCIENCE FICTION, which was to emerge as a distinctive genre a generation later, detective fiction had to work at gaining respectability. Detecfic had already achieved wide popularity with the public at large (unlike SF, which started out as a niche genre), and it only remained for the movers and shakers in the publishing world to secure it as a worthwhile pursuit.
BETWEEN 1900 and 1930, steps were taken on both sides of the Atlantic to delineate, defend, organize, and popularize detective fiction through the publication of articles, introductions, collections, and anthologies, resulting in the construction of a genealogy for the genre.
Scholars, editors, and collectors, including Brander Matthews, William Patten, Julian Hawthorne, and E. M. Wrong, were joined by writers, such as G. K. Chesterton, Arthur Reeve, Carolyn Wells, S. S. Van Dine, and Dorothy Sayers, in an effort to specify what detection was, when it arose, how it developed, who made significant contributions to it, and why it deserved to be read and studied.
Anthologies began to appear at the turn of the twentieth century, and Edgar Allan Poe received credit for founding the form and influencing French and English authors, and, through them, American detective and mystery writers.
The response to the appearance of hard-boiled writing in pulp magazines beginning in the early 1920s, however, subverted attempts to define detection narrowly, and by the end of the decade this upstart subgenre reached a significant peak with the publication of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon at roughly the same time that many of the key practitioners of what would come to be known as classic detection were promulgating a strict code for the writing of such stories and actively attempting to police the form.
The next generation, however, was waiting for its chance to introduce its own set of standards:
Assessing the genre of detective fiction at the middle of the twentieth century, Raymond Chandler celebrated its "fluid" and "various" nature, the form's inherent ability, as he saw it, to defy "easy classification."
No fan of what he called the "deductive" variety of detection, Chandler, in his statement, takes aim, at least in part, at the previous generation of detective and mystery writers, who, while participating in the effort to establish detective fiction as a literary genre with a traceable history, sought to limit it by means of a rigid set of rules of "fair play."
References and resources:
Our author covers a lot of territory, so we offer just a few items for further research:
- "CONAN DOYLE didn't invent the modern fictional detective; that honor goes to Edgar Allan Poe. Doyle took Poe's template, however, and expanded it into new literary dimensions that Poe didn't explore . . ." (HERE).
- "Generations of detective story readers and writers owe a great deal to Edgar Allan Poe." (HERE).
- ". . . given the culture which the Victorians evolved, mystery and detective fiction as we've come to know them were inevitable . . . " (HERE).
- ". . . if modern writers are going to ignore the existence of crime, as so many of them already ignore the existence of sin, then modern writing will get duller than ever." (HERE).
- "SUPERCILIOUS persons who profess to have a high regard for the dignity of 'literature' are loath to admit that detective stories belong to the category of serious writing." (HERE).
- The Long Arm and Other Detective Stories (HERE).
- Great Short Stories: A New Collection of Famous Examples from the Literatures of France, England and America (HERE).
- Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories (HERE).
- ". . . Poe's Dupin is the father of Sherlock Holmes; his 'analytical reasoning' is the forerunner of 'deduction.' If we re-imported Poe in the vastly inferior form of the dime novel from France, we re-imported him in a vastly better form as Sherlock Holmes from England." (HERE).
- "There is, however, between a good detective story and a bad detective story as much, or, rather more, difference than there is between a good epic and a bad one. Not only is a detective story a perfectly legitimate form of art, but it has certain definite and real advantages as an agent of the public weal." (HERE).
- "I am perfectly willing to admit that the pure detective story is extremely rare . . ." (HERE).
- "Brief comments about Brander Matthews's then-new article about Poe, and the rules of the game, if there are any, when it comes to detective fiction." (HERE).
- "We have read and enjoyed mystery and horror for years, and the faint air of apology with which people show the title of a detective story when asked what they are reading seems to us an affectation, and a confession of the most poisonous form of pseudo-intellectual snobbism." (HERE).
- Masterpieces of Mystery in Four Volumes: Detective Stories (HERE).
- "The argument that incredible situations and amazing coincidences are the commonplaces of everyday life will not avail. Truth is stranger than fiction; but fiction dare not be as strange as truth." (HERE).
- We've already considered John Gruesser's "Illustrating Poe's Detection" (HERE).
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