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.

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.

C.

Sherlock Holmes and His Followers

In the late 1880s English author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created the greatest of all fictional sleuths, Sherlock Holmes. The first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, appeared in 1887 and was followed by a series of short stories, published through the 1890s, that made Holmes and his assistant, Dr. Watson, household names. The most famous Holmes stories include The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892) and The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), and the popularity of the Holmes tales was such that Doyle's determined attempt to kill off his hero in the short story 'The Final Problem' (1893) had to be abandoned. With the explanation that the great detective had disappeared, not died, Doyle later resurrected Holmes and continued his adventures. The chief attractions of these stories nowadays are their period charm and the characterization of Holmes himself. Arrogant, omniscient, and self-absorbed, he comes through not only with wonderful clarity but also, surprisingly enough, as an extremely sympathetic character.

Conan Doyle thus set the pattern for the 'great detective' and was largely responsible for the subsequent popularity of the detective short story. Among his more distinguished followers in England were Arthur Morrison, who invented Investigator Martin Hewitt; Baroness Orczy, who created the nameless logician known as the Old Man in the Corner; R. Austin Freeman, who introduced the first genuine scientific detective, Dr. John Thorndyke, and originated the inverted story in which the reader knew every detail of the crime; Ernest Bramah, whose character Max Carrados was the first blind detective; and M. McDonnell Bodkin, who created the first detective family. Bodkin's Paul Beck (1897) was followed by Dora Myrl, The Lady Detective (1900); then The Capture of Paul Beck (1909), which concludes with the marriage of the two sleuths; and then Young Beck (1912), which recounts the cases of their son.

One of the most distinguished detective-fiction writers of the age was G. K. Chesterton of England. Chesterton's Father Brown stories, in particular the first two collections, The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) and The Wisdom of Father Brown (1914), contain some of the most ingenious detective puzzles ever devised. Chesterton’s premises are often fantastic, but once accepted, stories such as 'The Queer Feet,' 'The Hammer of God,' and 'The Dagger That Flew' are perfect examples of their kind.

Except for Anna Katharine Green, there were no notable American detective-story writers between Poe and the beginning of the 20th century. The last part of the 19th century was dominated by the fictionalized memoirs of Allan Pinkerton, beginning with The Expressman and the Detective (1874). In 1882, a steady stream of dime-novel detective adventures began appearing, featuring such characters as Old Sleuth, Old King Brady, and Nick Carter. After 1900 several significant series of short detective stories were written by Americans. Jacques Futrelle wrote two volumes about Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, better known as the Thinking Machine. These works, almost of Chestertonian ingenuity, also introduce the most uncompromisingly omniscient detective in fiction. Whether beating the world chess champion after only a few lessons or escaping from a prison death cell to win a bet, Professor Van Dusen finds all problems absurdly easy to solve. Melville Davisson Post's Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries (1918) is similar to Chesterton's stories, especially in its quasi-religious atmosphere. Uncle Abner, who lives in the western part of Virginia before the American Civil War (1861-1865), sees crime and detection in moral terms. Although rarely read today, the most popular American writer of this period was Arthur B. Reeve, whose stories are filled with an astonishing array of scientific or pseudoscientific gadgets.

Still within the Holmes tradition but somewhat removed from the field of detection are the adventures of Raffles, 'the amateur cracksman,' invented by E. W. Hornung, Doyle's brother-in-law. Hornung defied Doyle's stern observation that 'you must not make the criminal a hero.' The Arsène Lupin stories of Maurice Leblanc resemble the Raffles adventures but are without the snobbishness that gives Raffles his special flavor. The unintentionally hilarious stories about Hamilton Cleek (the 'Man of the Forty Faces'), by Thomas W. Hanshew, begin with Cleek as a burglar who, influenced by a pure woman's love, turns his talents to solving rather than committing crimes.

Many of the short stories written during the period ranging roughly from the appearance of Sherlock Holmes to the end of World War I (1914-1918) can be read with pleasure today. With very few exceptions this cannot be said of the novels. The stories of Mary Roberts Rinehart, Carolyn Wells, and Marie Belloc Lowndes, although best-sellers in their own day, look very old-fashioned now. Rinehart became known as the creator of the 'Had I But Known' school because at some point her narrator would usually say, 'Had I but known on that beautiful May morning of the horrors that….' Lowndes's The Lodger (1913), an interpretation of the Jack the Ripper murders, was also successful as a stage play and a motion picture.

Among the mystery novels of this period that continue to be notable are those of A. E. W. Mason featuring Inspector Hanaud, the bulky detective from the Sûreté. Mason's At the Villa Rose (1910) was a detective novel far ahead of its time, and the later Hanaud stories, in particular The House of the Arrow (1924), were even better. The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1909) by Gaston Leroux remains one of the most ingenious locked-room puzzlers ever devised. E. C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case (1913) was one of the first in which the detective was recognizable as a human being, rather than a reasoning machine. Indeed, Trent actually falls in love with the main suspect. The book is also notable for introducing the multiple-solutions theme that would become important during the next decade.

D.

New Faces, New Approaches

World War I brought a marked change in the nature of the detective story. Magazines, such as the famous Strand that had printed so many of the Holmes stories, declined in popularity. The short story was no longer the predominant form and had few specialist practitioners, although H. C. Bailey's character Reggie Fortune was a skillful newcomer. The novel was thought to give more scope for plot development and surprise, and in what is often called the Golden Age—lasting from 1918 to 1939—dozens of new great detectives arose, several of whom were created by women.

In 1920 the first book by English novelist Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, introduced the masterful detective Hercule Poirot. Three years later Lord Peter Wimsey, created by Dorothy Sayers, appeared on the scene. And three years after that S. S. Van Dine's immensely erudite and wonderfully languid Philo Vance began to delight and infuriate readers. ('Philo Vance / Needs a kick in the pance,' wrote American humorist Ogden Nash.) The honors list is a long one and includes in the 1920s Freeman Wills Crofts (who created the character Inspector French), Ellery Queen (detective Ellery Queen), Anthony Berkeley (Roger Sheringham), and Philip Macdonald (Anthony Gethryn). A second wave during the 1930s includes John Dickson Carr (Dr. Gideon Fell) and Carr's pseudonym Carter Dickson (Sir Henry Merivale), Erle Stanley Gardner (Perry Mason), Margery Allingham (Albert Campion), Ngaio Marsh (Roderick Alleyn), Michael Innes (John Appleby), Nicholas Blake (Nigel Strangeways), and Rex Stout (Nero Wolfe). Other writers wrote detective fiction but did not create lasting characters, including Englishman A. A. Milne (The Red House Mystery, 1922), Frances Noyes Hart (The Bellamy Trial, 1927), and Englishman C. P. Snow (Death Under Sail, 1932). All were British or American writers, for on the European continent the detective story had not fulfilled the promise of Gaboriau and Leroux. The only notable European detective story writer of the post-World War I era was Georges Simenon, whose Inspector Maigret stories began to appear in the late 1920s. Simenon's work is remarkable for the skill with which he renders places and people and for the air of verisimilitude in Maigret's investigations.

In this deluge of detective stories all kinds of tricks were played. Books were filled with maps of the murder scene, timetables, and lists of clues. Some writers concentrated on showing how unbreakable alibis could be broken; others, on locked-room murders; and still others, on devices aimed at deceiving the reader. The most ingenious of these deceptions, as practiced by Christie in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), provoked a storm of protest among her fellow practitioners. They accused the author of not playing fair with the reader when Dr. Sheppard, the story's Watson-like narrator, turned out to be the murderer. Detective-story writers were now taking the rules of their craft very seriously, and two of them, Monsignor Ronald Knox and S. S. Van Dine, wrote rules to be obeyed by detective-story writers. The most important of these was that, as soon as the sleuth discovers a clue, it must be revealed to the reader. This became the guiding principle of the Detection Club, founded in 1930 in London by Anthony Berkeley. Chesterton was the club’s first president.

As the years passed, the great detective, that egocentric amateur, became slightly more human, and the attendant Watson-like character almost vanished. But it was firmly believed that, in the words of Dorothy Sayers, there was 'a great difficulty about letting real human beings into a detective story' and 'the less love in a detective story, the better.' Thus, although the classical detective story, seen at its purest in the early books of John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen, and S. S. Van Dine, produced masterpieces of watertight plotting, its rigid exclusion of realistic characterization became in the end unsatisfying to many readers. Sayers foresaw that the form might come to an end 'simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks,' and her own last book about Lord Peter, Busman's Honeymoon (1937), is called 'a love story with detective interruptions.' Anthony Berkeley also abandoned the strict puzzle, declaring that the detective story would develop into a novel, 'holding its readers less by mathematical than by psychological ties.' He demonstrated what he meant in two brilliant murder stories written under the pseudonym of Francis Iles, Malice Aforethought (1931) and Before the Fact (1932).

Finally, the convention of the great detective, the supreme amateur who knew much more than the foolish police, was shattered by the advent of the American hard-boiled school, founded in the pages of the pulp magazine Black Mask. The first hard-boiled writer was Carroll John Daly, whose most important detective was Race Williams, but the outstanding figures in this genre were Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Hammett's Sam Spade and Chandler's Philip Marlowe are both private investigators doing a job for money—and not much money at that. They are honest but have a strong streak of ruthlessness. In The Maltese Falcon (1930), Spade refuses to allow his love for a murderess to interfere with the course of justice. Although a gentler character, Marlowe is almost equally implacable in his pursuit of social good. Both Hammett and Chandler began by writing for the magazine Black Mask, but their stories far surpass the ordinary pulp magazine bang-on-the-head level of fiction. In Europe, and somewhat less in the United States, both were recognized as serious novelists possessing great narrative skill.

Although Hammett and Chandler have had hundreds of imitators, only two showed anything like their perceptiveness of the social scene or possessed more than a fragment of their sharp intelligence. One was Jonathan Latimer, whose early Bill Crane stories are filled with sardonically funny dialogue, and the other and more notable was Ross Macdonald, Chandler's true successor, whose work radiates human sympathy and understanding.

After Hammett and Chandler, it was impossible that any more great detectives, arrogant and omniscient, should be born. Christie, Allingham, and Queen greatly modified their central characters while retaining them in far more loosely constructed tales than the classical detective stories of the 1930s and 1940s. Indeed, few classic puzzlers are now written. The spy thriller and the crime novel have taken their place.