Detective Story

I

Introduction

Detective Story, tale that features a mystery and/or the commission of a crime, emphasizing the search for a solution. The detective story is distinguished from other forms of fiction by the fact that it is a puzzle. Although a crime usually has been committed, the reader's attention is directed to baffling circumstances surrounding the crime rather than to the event itself. The tale's climax is the solution of the puzzle, and the bulk of the narrative concerns the logical process by which the investigator follows a series of clues to this solution. Very often the detective solves the mystery by means of deductive reasoning from facts known both to the character and the reader. In addition to detective stories, other types of crime fiction include spy thrillers, which are concerned primarily with international intrigue and politics, and crime novels, which are stories that deal with the roots and nature of criminal acts.

II

Detective Stories

The detective story, often called a whodunit, did not spring into being in its current form. Rather, it evolved over time, beginning with stories in which the reader is not a participant at all, but a witness, so to speak, looking over the detective’s shoulder.

A

Early Detective Fiction

The first true detective stories were written in the 1840s by American author Edgar Allan Poe, but many earlier works used some of the elements of detection. A famous example is a 16th-century Italian tale that was translated into French in 1719 by the Chevalier de Mailly. Le voyage et les aventures des trois princes de Sarendip (translated into English as The Travels and Adventures of Three Princes of Sarendip, 1722) concerns three princes who are asked how they know that a certain camel, which they have not seen, is blind in one eye, lame, and has lost a tooth. The blindness, they reply, is shown by the fact that the camel ate grass from only one side of a track, although the grass was growing more thickly on the other. The lameness is demonstrated by uneven hoofprints in the dust, which indicate a dragging leg. And the missing tooth is apparent from lumps of partly chewed food that were found in the animal's path. In Zadig (1747) by French writer Voltaire, the hero achieves similar deductive feats, describing a horse and a dog that he has never seen. There are further instances of analytical deduction in some of the Three Musketeers episodes by French author Alexandre Dumas père, and to a lesser extent in the series of books entitled La comédie humaine (The Human Comedy) by French writer Honoré de Balzac.

Yet these books only use elements of detection. Dumas's works are not true detective stories, any more than are the Gothic novels of terror written at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries. These books, produced by novelists such as Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Gregory Lewis, both of England, depend for effect more on their isolated, medieval-like settings and gloomy atmosphere than on a legitimate mystery, although occasionally ghostly occurrences are solved with material explanations.

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The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), written by English philosopher William Godwin, deserves an honorable place among the detective story's predecessors. Among its leading characters are an amateur investigator, who is motivated by curiosity, and an implacable police spy. Perhaps the most important stimulus to the development of detective fiction was the Mémoires of François Eugène Vidocq of France. In his early life Vidocq was a thief and imprisoned several times. He later turned police agent and became the first chief of the Sûreté, the famed Parisian detective bureau. The initial volume of his Mémoires appeared in 1828. In this and subsequent installments, Vidocq described his investigating methods in great detail. He also told, in an energetic though highly embroidered style, of his exciting exploits while catching criminals.

Edgar Allan Poe masterfully drew all these influences together. Among Poe's large output are five short narratives in which he originated almost every significant principle used by detective story writers for more than a century afterward. Poe called them tales of ratiocination (reasoning). These tales, which still make fascinating reading, begin with 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' (1841), which was the very first in a respected tradition of so-called locked-room cases, where the crime takes place in a seemingly impossible location; 'The Gold Bug' (1843), ancestor of hundreds of stories dependent on the solution of a coded message; and 'The Mystery of Marie Rogét' (1842-1843), an essay in armchair detection. They continue with 'Thou Art the Man' (1844), which reveals the most unlikely person as the murderer and is the first comic detective story; and 'The Purloined Letter' (1845), which successfully presents the theory that when all other possibilities have been discarded, the one remaining, however apparently improbable, must be correct. Poe’s writings also introduced C. Auguste Dupin, the first great detective of fiction. Dupin is abrupt, contemptuous of the police, and more like a reasoning machine than a human being.

B

Popular Success

Detective stories as a popular form of literature began to flourish after the establishment of regular, paid police forces and their accompanying detective departments. Detectives became protagonists in many cheap books such as Recollections of a Detective-Police Officer (1852), Diary of an Ex-Detective (1860), and The Lady Detective (1861?). These books, despite their titles, were thinly veiled fictions by anonymous writers with little police experience. On the other hand, English writer Charles Dickens was fascinated by the new detective force and went on investigations with them, resulting in his creation of the convincing character 'Inspector Bucket of the Detective' in Bleak House (1852-1853).

Dickens's longtime friend and occasional collaborator Wilkie Collins was similarly interested in the activities of the detective bureau. In his novel The Moonstone (1868), Collins patterned the rose-loving sleuth Sergeant Cuff after the real-life Inspector Wicher and showed him making surprising but logical deductions from the given facts. The Moonstone has been called the first and the best of English detective novels, although the investigation is part of a larger narrative, not the entire focus of the novel. The same qualification can be made about the use of detectives in the so-called sensation novels of Ellen Wood (better known as Mrs. Henry Wood) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon—especially Wood's The Trail of the Serpent (1861) and Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862).

The two most important crime-fiction authors before 1880 were the Frenchman Émile Gaboriau and the American Anna Katharine Green. Gaboriau's L'affaire Lerouge (1867), Monsieur Lecoq (1868), and other novels feature the professional detective Lecoq. Green's The Leavenworth Case (1878), the first significant detective novel written by a woman, follows Inspector Ebenezer Gryce's detailed investigation into a mysterious murder. By the mid-1880s many authors, including B. L. Farjeon and Thomas W. Speight, were writing genuine detective novels. The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886) by Fergus Hume sold more than 500,000 copies.

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