Talking About Detective Fiction (2 page)

One of the criticisms of the detective story is that this imposed pattern is mere formula writing, that it binds the novelist in a straitjacket which is inimical to the artistic freedom which is essential to creativity, and that subtlety of characterisation, a setting which comes alive for the reader and even credibility are sacrificed to the dominance of structure and plot. But what I find fascinating is the extraordinary variety of books and writers which this so-called formula has been able to accommodate, and how many authors have found the constraints and conventions of the detective story liberating rather than inhibiting of their creative imagination. To say that one cannot produce a good novel within the discipline of a formal structure is as foolish as to say
that no sonnet can be great poetry since a sonnet is restricted to fourteen lines—an octave and a sestet—and a strict rhyming sequence. And detective stories are not the only novels which conform to a recognised convention and structure. All Jane Austen’s novels have a common storyline: an attractive and virtuous young woman surmounts difficulties to achieve marriage to the man of her choice. This is the age-long convention of the romantic novel, but with Jane Austen what we have is Mills & Boon written by a genius.

And why murder? The central mystery of a detective story need not indeed involve a violent death, but murder remains the unique crime and it carries an atavistic weight of repugnance, fascination and fear. Readers are likely to remain more interested in which of Aunt Ellie’s heirs laced her nightly cocoa with arsenic than in who stole her diamond necklace while she was safely holidaying in Bournemouth. Dorothy L. Sayers’s
Gaudy Night
doesn’t contain a murder, although there is an attempt at one, and the death at the heart of Frances Fyfield’s
Blood from Stone
is a spectacular and mysterious suicide. But, except in those novels of espionage which are primarily concerned with treachery, it remains rare for the central crime in an orthodox mystery to be other than
the ultimate crime for which no human reparation can ever be made.

So how and when did detective fiction become an accepted genre of popular fiction? To this there is no easy or generally accepted answer. The novel itself is a comparatively recent product of the human imagination, hence its name. It cannot, for example, match the ancient lineage of drama and, unlike drama and verbal storytelling, it can appeal to only a privileged minority until a community achieves a high level of literacy. Storytelling is, of course, an ancient art. Tales which combine excitement with mystery, which offer a puzzle and a solution, can be found in ancient literature and legend and were probably told even earlier by the tribal storyteller round the camp fires of our remote ancestors. Their tales were surely more likely to have dealt with heroic action, revenge and mystery than with subtle ambiguities of character and the domestic problems of the warring couple in the next cave. And novels were being written and read for decades before readers, publishers, critics and booksellers thought of defining them in such categories as Mystery, Thriller, Romantic Fiction, Fantasy or Science Fiction, divisions which are often more a matter of convenience, marketing strategy, taste
or prejudice than of fact, and which can be unhelpful to both the novels and their writers.

Some historians of the genre claim that the detective story proper, which fundamentally is concerned with the bringing of order out of disorder and the restoration of peace after the destructive eruption of murder, could not exist until society had an official detective force, which in England would be in 1842, when the detective department of the Metropolitan Police came into being. A distinguished detective novelist, Reginald Hill, creator of the Yorkshire duo Andrew Dalziel and Peter Pascoe, wrote in 1978, “Let me be clear. Without a police force there can be no detective fiction although several modern writers have, with varying degrees of success, tried to write detective stories set in pre-police days.” This opinion seems rational: detective fiction is unlikely to flourish in societies without an organised system of law enforcement or in which murder is commonplace. Mystery novelists, particularly in the Golden Age, were generally strong supporters of institutional law and order, and of the police. Individual officers might be portrayed as ineffective, plodding, slow-witted and ill-educated, but never as corrupt. Detective fiction is in the tradition of the English novel, which sees
crime, violence and social chaos as an aberration, virtue and good order as the norm for which all reasonable people strive, and which confirms our belief, despite some evidence to the contrary, that we live in a rational, comprehensible and moral universe. And in doing this it provides not only the satisfaction of all popular literature, the mild intellectual challenge of a puzzle, excitement, confirmation of our cherished beliefs in goodness and order, but also entry to a familiar and reassuring world in which we are both involved in violent death and yet remain personally inviolate both from responsibility and from its terrors. Whether we should expect this detachment from vicarious responsibility is, of course, another question and one which bears on the difference between the books of the years between the wars and the detective novels of today.

One strand of the tangled skein of detective fiction goes back to the eighteenth century and includes the gothic tales of horror written by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew “Monk” Lewis. Those gothic novelists were chiefly concerned to enthral readers with tales of terror and the horrific plight of the heroine, and although these books embodied puzzles and riddles, they were concerned far more with horror than with mystery. We
recall the scene in Jane Austen’s
Northanger Abbey
where the heroine, Catherine Morland, and her friend Isabella meet to discuss their current reading. Isabella says:

They were indeed, but since the detective story deals with rational terror, their influence on the later development of the genre has been limited, although there are echoes of half-supernatural terror in some of Conan Doyle’s stories. Some critics might argue that horror plays a far greater part than ratiocination in the modern psychological mysteries which deal primarily with atrocious serial murders by psychopaths. The most effective are those by writers with personal involvement in the investigation of serial murder, the Americans Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs and, in this
country, Val McDermid, whose central character, Tony Hill, is a psychological profiler, and whose novels show evidence of the careful research necessary both for mood and for credibility. These novels, which are becoming increasingly popular, could be said to constitute a separate genre in crime fiction as they do in films.

If we are looking for the origins of detective fiction, most critics are agreed that the two novelists who vie for the distinction of writing the first full-length classical detective story are William Godwin, Shelley’s father-in-law, who in 1794 published
Caleb Williams
, and Wilkie Collins, whose best-known novel,
The Moonstone
, appeared in 1868. Neither writer would have been gratified at this posthumous distinction. Wilkie Collins in particular saw himself as a mainstream novelist, albeit one who worked within the category which Victorians described as sensational. These works of mystery, suspense and danger with an overlay of horror had an increasingly strong hold on the popular imagination, and there was much argument among critics, both about their literary merit and about their social desirability. Did these sensational outpourings even deserve the name of novel, or were they a new and inferior form of fiction provided to meet a rapacious
public demand focused on W. H. Smith railway station bookstalls? This debate has, of course, continued, but in the mid-nineteenth century it was a new and particular concern. In 1851
The Times
complained:

In 1863 a leading review in the
Quarterly Review
stated:

By 1880 Matthew Arnold was describing these novels as “cheap … hideous and ignoble of aspect… tawdry novels which flare in the bookshelves of our railway stations, and which seem designed, as so much else that is produced for the use of our middle-class, for people with a low standard of life.” The unfortunate Mr. W. H. Smith, whose bookstalls did so much to promote reading, had apparently much to answer for.

But in my view the final and accurate words about the controversy were written by Anthony Trollope in his
Autobiography
, published posthumously in 1883.

Trollope was undoubtedly categorised by his contemporaries as a sensational novelist and was here
defending his own work, but these words are as true of the sensational novel of today as they were when they were written.

Both
Caleb Williams
and
The Moonstone
could be described as sensational. Hazlitt, the theatre critic and essayist (1778-1830), thought that nobody who began
Caleb Williams
could fail to finish it and that nobody who read it could possibly forget it, yet I have to admit that in adolescence I found it difficult to get through and now have only the vaguest memory of its long and complicated plot. Certainly the novel has at its heart a murder, an amateur detective—Caleb Williams—who tells the story, a pursuit, disguise, clues to the truth of the murder for which two innocent men were hanged, and at the end a deathbed confession. But Godwin was using this dramatic and complicated adventure story to promote his belief in an ideal anarchism and, so far from justifying the rule of law,
Caleb Williams
was intended to show that to trust in social institutions is to invite betrayal. The novel is important both to English fiction generally and to the history of the detective story because Godwin was the first writer to use what he hoped would be a popular form as propaganda on behalf of the poor and exploited, and in particular to expose the injustice of the legal system. This was not a
path followed by writers of the interwar years, who were more interested in puzzling and entertaining their readers than in the defects of contemporary society, and I would argue that, with a very few exceptions, it is mainly the modern detective writers who have set out not only to provide an exciting and credible mystery, but to examine and criticise the world which their characters inhabit. Today, however, this is done with less didacticism and more detachment and subtlety than was shown by William Godwin, and arises from the reality of the characters and their world rather than from any ostensible desire to promote a particular social doctrine.

But if one is to award the distinction of being the first detective story to one single novel, my choice—and I think the choice of many others—would be
The Moonstone
, which T. S. Eliot described as “the first, the longest and the best” of modern English detective novels. In my view no other single novel of its type more clearly adumbrates what were to become the main characteristics of the genre. The Moonstone is a diamond stolen from an Indian shrine by Colonel John Herncastle, left to his niece Rachel Verrinder and brought to her Yorkshire home to be handed over on her eighteenth birthday by a young solicitor,
Franklin Blake. During the night it is stolen, obviously by a member of the household. A London detective, Sergeant Cuff, is called in, but later Franklin Blake takes over the investigation, although he himself is among the suspects.
The Moonstone
is a complex and brilliantly structured story told in narrative by the different characters involved directly or indirectly in the story. The varied styles, voices and viewpoints not only add variety and interest to the narrative, but are a powerful revelation of character.

Collins is meticulously accurate in his treatment of medical and forensic details. There is an emphasis on the importance of physical clues—a bloodstained nightdress, a smeared door, a metal chain—and all the clues are made available to the reader, foreshadowing the tradition of the fair-play rule whereby the detective must never be in possession of more information than the reader. The clever shifting of suspicion from one character to another is done with great adroitness, and this emphasis on physical evidence and the cunning manipulation of the reader were both to become common in succeeding mysteries. But the novel has other and more important virtues as a detective story. Wilkie Collins is excellent at describing the physical appearance and the
atmosphere of the setting, particularly the contrast between the secure and prosperous Victorian Verrinder household and the eerie loneliness of the shivering sands; between the exotic and accursed jewel that has been stolen and the outwardly respectable privileged lives of upper-class Victorians. The novel provides an interesting insight into many aspects of its age, particularly through the truth and variety of its characterisation, and since clue-making is largely concerned with the minutiae of everyday life, this reflection of contemporary social mores was to become one of the most interesting features of the detective story. The innovative importance of
The Moonstone
was recognised at the time. Henry James acknowledged its influence in an article in
The Nation
.