"The Detective Story As We Know It Is a Modern Development and Its Technique Is Still in the Making"

"Detectives in Fiction."
The Living Age (September 18, 1926).
First appearance: The Times Literary Supplement, August 12, 1926.
Online HERE.

The Times writer manages to produce a brief but entertaining survey of detective fiction as it was in the mid-'20s, just before Van Dine and Philo Vance exploded onto the scene. A few random excerpts:

IT is, we are assured by the observant, to the complexity of modern life that we owe the increasing vogue of the detective story.  . . .

Vegetarian or carnivorous:

. . . The mature brain . . . has a palate for a fine bouquet of reasoning and deduction . . . It can be content with vegetarian fare . . . The mental Peter Pan, on the other hand, is inclined to be more carnivorous in his tastes. For him the corpse of a loathly and splenetic millionaire, venerated nobleman, or beauteous damsel should decorate the carpet in the first chapter, with horrifying adjuncts of hot lead, cold steel, or colder poison . . . .

Then and now:

. . . [With the reissuance of older mysteries by publishers] we can readily compare the technique of those who thrill us now with that of the men who kept our sires and grandsires awake till dawn with the prowess of heroes who landed each criminal fish . . . It is, indeed, remarkable what those giants of old were able to accomplish with their almost unaided eyes and brains.  . . .

Good cop, bad cop:

. . . It is chiefly in America nowadays that we find in fiction that antagonism which it was once fashionable to assume in England between the private practitioner and the police.  . . . [In England, in contrast] it is even possible plausibly to present a police hero in a detective story.  . . .

Mike Hammer wouldn't qualify:

. . . [There is an] opinion, now increasingly prevalent, that the modern detective should be provided with medical training . . . .

Holmes conferring with his fidus sed hebes Achates.

The advantages of having a "Watson":

. . . By allowing his reader to follow the working of his hero through the senses of a third party an author is able to give him something for his mind to chew upon. He thus keeps the reader more interested in the mechanism of detection than if he were to tell the story direct and run the risk of serving up a diet of predigested facts.  . . .

Edgar Wallace had his detectives "commit bigamy two or three times a year."

Then there's the ancient question of whether the sleuth should be married or, at worst, have a love interest:

 . . . In this matter of matrimony for detectives there is a difference of opinion; but, in deference to the older and, as many think, sounder tradition of celibacy, a detective benedick, although he may use up a whole book catching her, seldom obtrudes his wife in any following volume.  . . .

Detectives should watch what they say:

. . . If some authors clutter up their detectives with a love affair of their own when they ought to be busy elsewhere, more spoil their man's chances by saddling him with an impossible weight of irritating or clumsy dialogue which makes the poor fellow appear to be a prig, a vulgarian, or a propagandist.  . . .

The "under-dog" effect:

. . . it is a matter of only a few generations since readers could be persuaded to allow their sentiment to support law and order and those who labored to uphold them, instead of as a matter of course taking the side of the picturesque and outlawed under-dog fighting against odds. . . . Consequently the detective story as we know it is a modern development and its technique is still in the making.  . . .

Among the authors/characters/books mentioned in the article are a few that we frankly admit we've never heard of:

~ November Joe (". . . the 'Sherlock Holmes' of the Canadian wilderness, tracking down murderers and thieves and solving criminal puzzles, using his keen outdoors skills and his quick mind." — Amazon.com) (See also HERE.)
~ R. Austin Freeman/Dr. Thorndyke and Polton (For more go HERE.)
~ Sherlock Holmes/Dr. Watson (HERE)
~ H. C. Bailey/Mr. Fortune (HERE)
~ Arthur Morrison/Martin Hewitt (HERE)
~ Carolyn Wells/Fleming Stone (HERE)
~ Inspector French (HERE)
~ Trent's Last Case (HERE)
~ Edgar Wallace/Mr. Reeder (HERE)
~ Lynn Brock/Col. Gore (HERE)
~ Landon/The Grey Phantom (HERE and HERE)
~ Strong/Professor Criddle
~ Herbert Jenkins/Malcolm Sage (HERE)
~ Anthony Wynne/Dr. Hailey (HERE)
~ G. K. Chesterton/Father Brown (HERE)
~ Bennet Copplestone/Dawson (HERE)
~ Foster/Ravenhill.

Category: Detective fiction criticism

"He Was Solely an Expression of the Analytical Capacity of the Intellect—A Ratiocinative Device"

"Edgar Allan Poe and the Origins of Mystery Fiction."
By Steven Rachman.
The Strand Magazine (June-September 2004).
Online HERE.

In just three short stories, the brilliant but erratic Poe gave the world the template that detective fiction writers have followed—or eschewed—for the past two centuries. 

Excerpts:

. . .  In "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," Poe introduced readers to a Parisian polymath, C. Auguste Dupin, a man endowed with preternatural analytical faculties, a man for whom ordinary men "wore windows in their bosoms." The unnamed narrator of these stories is one of these ordinary men. Dupin's powers are such that not only can he seemingly read the narrator's very thoughts at the instant he is thinking them, but he can explain the whole chain of reasoning that led to his thoughts merely by observing the sequence of expressions on his face.

 . . . Even in outline, readers will recognize [in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"] many of the features of the detective genre in its classic form—the metropolitan setting, a violent crime taking place in an apparently locked room, the vain, befuddled law enforcement official, the wronged suspect, the confession, the cleverly convoluted solution (in which murder turns out not to be murder), and the masculine camaraderie of a supercilious gentleman mastermind and his credulous companion/narrator. (By the third tale, pipe-smoking would make its appearance.)

. . . In fact, Poe was slightly annoyed at the attention paid to the Dupin stories at the expense of his other literary works. "I do not mean to say that they are not ingenious," he explained, "but people think them more ingenious than they are—on account of their method and air of method. In 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue,' for instance, where is the ingenuity of unravelling a web which you yourself (the author) have woven for the express purpose of unravelling? The reader is made to confound the ingenuity of the supposititious Dupin with that of the writer of the story."

. . . But even more importantly, Poe never conceived of the Dupin stories as belonging to the genre of detective fiction; he never referred to them as such. Rather he used the term "tales of ratiocination" in order to emphasize the delineation of a chain of logical reasoning and analysis. For him, the detective was not the central focus of the story, but a vehicle for tracing a train of thought, and the tale itself a way to analyze "that moral activity which disentangles" as he writes in his prefatory comments to "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." It was an interest in logic and not in the personality of the fictional detective that led Poe to write his detective fiction. He left it to others, notably Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, to explore the character of the detective, of which his deductive methods would be but one facet.

. . . The supposititious Dupin would never become the phenomenon that Sherlock Holmes became, because he was solely an expression of the analytical capacity of the intellect—a ratiocinative device.

"Supposititious" . . . me?

Rachman's article includes an admirably concise history of Poe's life and development as both a man and artist.

Resources:
- We've touched base with "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter" HERE and "The Mystery of Marie Roget" HERE.
- An unsuccessful attempt to psychoanalyze Edgar Poe is discussed HERE.

Category: Detective fiction

Sherlockian Miscellania

(1) "Sherlock Holmes Among the Illustrators."
By Edmund Pearson (1880-1937).
First appeared in The Bookman (August 1932).
With 7 illustrations.
Online HERE.

Sherlock was destined to become a legend in his own time, so to speak; so how does one depict a legend? Edmund Pearson looked into what could be called "A Case of Diversity" when it came to how artists chose to illustrate the Holmes stories, finding that the Great Detective's initial appearance (in A Study in Scarlet, 1887) was accompanied by artwork by D. H. Friston, whose "first picture of Holmes would distress the devotees":

. . . Friston's Sherlock is neither handsome nor intellectual; he wears undertaker's side-whiskers, an ulster with a cape, and a hat like nothing on sea or land—a sort of bastard child of a bowler out of a sombrero. With a magnifying glass as big as a sunflower, he is examining the word RACHE written in blood upon the wall. About him, in grotesque attitudes, stand Watson—with a walrus's moustache—and the Scotland Yarders, Gregson and Lestrade. Mr. Friston seems to have thought that the scene was macabre, and that the characters should look like gargoyles.

Other tidbits:

There is an impression that Mr. William Gillette, in his play, first put Holmes in a deer-stalker's cap with visors fore and aft. In one of the early Strand stories, however, The Boscombe Valley Mystery, Dr. Doyle says that Holmes wore a "close-fitting cloth cap", and [Sidney] Paget shows him with a fore-and-after.

American editors, in 1893, began to be interested in Holmes, and the second series, the Memoirs, ran in Harper's Weekly, in addition to their English publication in the Strand. The American artist, Mr. W. H. Hyde, adorned the stories in Harper's with some striking pictures, but preferred to draw the actors in the criminal events rather than Holmes and Watson. The detective seldom appears, and when he does he is Mr. Hyde's own conception.

[When Holmes returned from the grave in 1903] . . . On both sides of the ocean he reappeared in the series called The Return of Sherlock Holmes, and in America, in Collier's Weekly, with the most interesting decorations of all time. Old Sherlockians will always be fond of the Paget drawings, but they must admit that the pictures made for this new series, by Frederic Dorr Steele, were not only satisfactory as portraits, but extremely attractive in detail.  . . . [In addition] Mr. Steele was the first illustrator to suggest that Dr. Watson was a simple Simon. 

(2) "The Holmes Legend."
Appeared in The Bookman (January 1933).
Online HERE.

This one relates to one author's opinion about a vexed question that has long circulated among Sherlockians:

Was the Christian name of Dr. Watson ever revealed?

(3) "Sherlock Holmes: Addendum."
Appeared in The Bookman (March 1933).
Online HERE.

"Here," we're told, "are new questions for the faithful" about "the most beloved character in fiction since Pickwick": How to account for Holmes's remarkable mimicry of Dupin. Or Watson's being wounded "in but one place, and yet in two parts of his body." Or Holmes's confusion of shall and will, "the one grammatical error that no genuine Londoner ever makes" and which are "precisely the errors we might expect if Holmes had been a native of Northern Ireland." Or how Holmes, a university man, could "be so completely taken in by what is obviously an undergraduate hoax" in "The Adventure of the Three Students."

Category: Detective fiction (Sherlockian scholarship)

"The Writing Is Better Than Hemingway, Since It Conceals not Softness but Hardness"

"Ex-Detective Hammett."
By Elizabeth Sanderson.
Appeared in The Bookman, January 1932.
Online HERE.

A brief interview with a hard-boiled detective writer at the apex of his career. A few excerpts:

. . . If hardness consists of writing about criminals as though they were human, of looking on detectives with an unbiased eye and setting them down as less than paragons of shrewdness and integrity, of admitting corruption, human frailty and occasional pleasant qualities in both his man-hunters and their quarry, Dashiell Hammett's hardness is the main reason for his success.  . . .

. . . He is, in addition, a master of terse, abrupt prose, and he can tell more in one sentence of it than many an earlier mystery novel writer managed to convey in a chapter.  . . .

. . . A detective is not actually a romantic figure, and few thieves or murderers are ever pure "criminal types." So Dashiell Hammett left the Philo Vances to Mr. Van Dine and wrote of what he had seen as a hard-working man among men of very little culture or nobility.  . . .

. . . With all his experience to draw on, and in spite of the remarkable success that has come to him from his detective stories, Mr. Hammett does not want to go on writing them.  . . .

. . . He considers The Dain Curse a silly story, The Maltese Falcon "too manufactured," and The Glass Key not so bad—that the clews were nicely placed there, although nobody seemed to see them.  . . .

Resources:
- The GAD Wiki entry for Hammett is HERE.
- The Thrilling Detective website has a Hammett page HERE.

Category: Detective fiction

"High-Brow Horror"

"On Intellectual Thrillers."
Short article.
Appeared in The Bookman (March 1933), pages 253-254.
Online HERE.

If mere murder isn't stimulating enough for you, this anonymous writer has his own prescription: the intellectual shocker, which, he insists, is "none too easy to find." (It's obvious, by the way, that he holds a very low opinion of detective fiction.)

. . . The requirements for the pure type of intellectual thriller are hard to meet: there should be a good, tight plot, an author for a taste for the occult and the supernatural, a conclusion which refuses to beg any questions.  . . .

He believes those

. . . maddening stories which turn out to have a prosaic explanation for mysterious occurrences [should] go into the deepest limbo.

and he dismisses

. . . mere Gothic tales which get nowhere . . . Stories of the supernatural alone will not serve the purpose we have in mind . . .

He points to Englishman Charles Williams as

 . . . the modern master of high-brow horror . . .

Charles Williams

but

. . . for those who are new to the taste, there is an American writer who turns out very good ones: A. Merritt [who] is well worth looking up when the Hemingways, the Faulkners, the Dos Passos and the Dreisers begin to pall.

A. Merritt

He complains, though, that

. . . the cerebral shocker is seldom written by an American; perhaps that is the reason why it is lumped indiscriminately with the detective stories for review, or overlooked entirely.

Among the books and authors our critic mentions:

~ Rider Haggard: She (online HERE).
~ Bulwer-Lytton: Zanoni (online HERE), Phra the Phoenician.
~ Charles Williams: The Place of the Lion, War in Heaven, The Greater Trumps, Many Dimensions, Shadows of Ecstasy.
~ A. Merritt: The Moon Pool (online HERE), Burn, Witch, Burn! (online HERE).
~ Guy Endore: The Man from Limbo, The Werewolf of Paris.

Category: Horror and supernatural fiction

Robophobia!

DOCTOR WHO.
TV series: 1963-89, 695 episodes.
"The Robots of Death" (1977) (script HERE).
IMDb data (with SPOILERS): Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

"I have an uncomfortable feeling that if the murderer doesn't kill us, the commander will. That is assuming they're not one and the same person."

A science fiction series has a go at combining a couple of Agatha Christie plots (can you tell which ones?) and succeeds. By the third part you'll know whodunit but you won't have a clue about how the Doctor intends to cure the problem:

The TARDIS materializes aboard a sandminer, a mining ship on a desert planet run by a robot labor force headed by a fairly small but sniping human crew. As one crewman is discovered strangled to death, the Doctor and Leela arrive just in time to become the prime suspects. — Written by statmanjeff on IMDb

Other memorable quotes:

"Yes, I suppose it's also a coincidence that, as soon as you two arrive, three of our people are killed. Well?"
"Oh, sorry, I thought it was a rhetorical qu... Yes, it's just a coincidence."

"You're a stowaway. What could be more suspicious than a stowaway?"
"A dead stowaway."

"He was murdered!"
"How do you know?"
"Because people don't strangle themselves."

"I don’t suppose there are any weapons aboard this mine."
"They aren’t necessary."
"They are now.”

"Have you never heard of the double bluff?"

"There are three types of robots aboard this mine: Dumbs, Vocs, a Super-Voc, and then there's you. Would you care to explain that?"

"Please do not throw hands at me."

Resource:
- The most detailed description of "The Robots of Death" (a complete SPOILER, of course) is on the amazing DOCTOR WHO REFERENCE GUIDE HERE.

Category: Science fiction mysteries

Serial Murders

THE "CANARY" MURDER CASE.
By S. S. Van Dine [Willard Huntington Wright, 1888-1939].
Scribner's.
1927. 343 pages.
Filmed in 1929 (IMDb).

THE GREENE MURDER CASE.
By S. S. Van Dine [Willard Huntington Wright, 1888-1939].
Scribner's.
1928. 388 pages.
Filmed in 1929 (IMDb).

Both of these novels were serialized in Scribner's magazine before seeing hardcover publication. To save you a few bucks, we're linking to those serial installments below. You can thank us later.

~ THE "CANARY" MURDER CASE:
Part 1 HERE.
Part 2 HERE.
Part 3 HERE.
Part 4 HERE.

~ THE GREENE MURDER CASE:
Part 1 HERE.
Part 2 HERE.
Part 3 HERE.
Part 4 HERE.

Resource:
- We last encountered Van Dine about a year ago HERE.

Category: Detective fiction (pure variety)