Detective Story

I

Introduction

Detective Story, type of mystery story that features a detective or a police officer as the prime solver of a crime—usually a murder case. The detective is the main protagonist, through whom the story is told either as a first-person narrator or in the third person as portrayed by the author. The detective interrogates the suspects, ferrets out the clues, and tracks down the murderer. The detective shares all the clues with the reader but withholds their significance until the end.

The thrust of the detective’s investigation is based on motive, opportunity, and means, and he or she arrives at the solution by eliminating those suspects who do not fulfil these criteria. To make the case difficult for the detective and interesting to the reader, the author places complications in the detective’s way: several suspects, additional murders, red herrings, and, often, threats of violence. Only at the end does the detective unmask the culprit and explain how the case was solved. W. H. Auden described the plot of a typical detective story as “a murder occurs; many are suspected; all but one suspect, who is the murderer, are eliminated; the murderer is arrested or dies”.

The detective story, often called a “whodunit”, did not spring into being in this form. Rather, it evolved, early in the 20th century, from stories about detectives in which the reader was not a participant, but a witness, so to speak, looking over the detective’s shoulder.

II

Earliest Detective Stories

The originator of this early type was the American short-story writer Edgar Allan Poe, creator of the world’s first fictional detective, C. Auguste Dupin. Dupin’s methods of deduction and his eccentric personal habits provided the model that most detective-story writers have followed since. Dupin made his bow in April 1841, when Graham’s Magazine published Poe’s classic horror story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”. The detective appeared thereafter in “The Mystery of Marie Roget” (1842-1843) and “The Purloined Letter” (1845). The French setting of these stories is partly inspired by the 1828 memoirs of the first real-life detective, François Eugène Vidocq, chef de la Sûreté (head of the Criminal Investigation Department) in Paris. In turn, Vidocq and Poe both influenced the French writer Émile Gaboriau, whose two detectives, the amateur Tabaret and policeman Lecoq, feature in the first-ever series of detective novels, starting with L’Affaire Lerouge (1863).

Across the Channel, The Moonstone (1868) by Wilkie Collins, featuring the brilliant if not wholly successful Sergeant Cuff, was the first full-length English detective novel, although detective elements had appeared in such “sensation novels” as his earlier The Woman in White (1860) and Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and can be traced back to the gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe in the 1790s. Charles Dickens had included a sympathetic detective in Bleak House (1853) and seemed poised to become a full-blown detective novelist with The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), although he died before completing it, leaving the identity of his murderer unknown. In 1878 Anna Katherine Green’s The Leavenworth Case inaugurated the American detective novel.

III

The Influence of Sherlock Holmes

Stories about detectives did not become truly popular, however, until Beeton’s Christmas Annual in 1887 published A Study in Scarlet, introducing to Britain and the world the most famous detective—real or fictional—of all time, Sherlock Holmes. After a second novel, Holmes’s adventures truly became a national addiction when they appeared as monthly short stories in Strand magazine from 1891, one of the first examples of the single-hero series formula that has since become preponderant in popular fiction. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the British writer who created Holmes, was much influenced by Poe; he gave Holmes the essence of Dupin’s mental traits and equally eccentric, although different, habits, and he narrated his detective’s exploits, as did Poe, from the vantage point of a close companion, in this case the perpetually naive Dr Watson.

Despite his success with Holmes, Conan Doyle, more interested in “serious novels”, soon tired of his detective and tried to kill him off. The enormous popularity of the character, however, would not allow it, and Holmes outlived his creator, being the hero, even today, of adventures penned by other writers. Altogether, Conan Doyle’s production of what is called the “canon”, that is, the original Sherlock Holmes mysteries, consists of 4 novelettes and 56 short stories.

The impact of Sherlock Holmes popularized the detective story and brought it to its present form. From the time of Conan Doyle onwards, writers have sought to develop detective heroes who echoed both Holmes’s unique character and his omniscience. The English writer G. K. Chesterton, in the early years of the 20th century, developed the character of Father Brown, a priest-detective. In 1920, with the advent of what may be called the golden age of the detective story, the English writer Agatha Christie introduced Hercule Poirot, a dapper Belgian detective who first employed his “little grey [brain] cells” in The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920); to be followed in 1930 by the deceptively innocent-seeming Miss Marple. In shifting the prime focus of the genre back from the short story to the novel, Christie also redefined its chief setting as the kind of domestic social gathering whose minutiae were of special interest to women at the time, as witness a galaxy of other “queens of crime” whose heroes were, however, still generally men: Dorothy L. Sayers (Lord Peter Wimsey), Margery Allingham (Albert Campion), and Ngaio Marsh (Roderick Alleyn).

In the United States, S. S. Van Dine (pseudonym of Willard Huntington Wright) introduced the dilettante detective Philo Vance in 1927, and two writers calling themselves Ellery Queen created a detective of the same name in 1929. Other heroes of the American “golden age” include Earl Derr Biggers’ Chinese detective, Charlie Chan, and Rex Stout’s orchid-fancying gourmet detective, Nero Wolfe.

Conan Doyle’s work also bred a new self-consciousness among writers of the genre and a determination to distinguish it from other crime and mystery writing; it was felt that the emphasis of detective fiction should be placed on puzzles rather than crime. In their efforts to outwit the reader, authors began to concoct elaborate, highly ingenious puzzles, such as the locked-room mysteries of the American writer John Dickson Carr. The aim was to produce as the murderer the least likely of all suspects—a game in which Agatha Christie excelled. Writers of stories in this classic mould did not disappear after the 1930s. Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Michael Innes, Nicholas Blake (pseudonym of Cecil Day-Lewis), and Ngaio Marsh all continued their careers after World War II.

IV

Private-Eye Fiction

Meanwhile, in the United States during the 1920s, another kind of detective story was emerging. This was shaped by the pulp magazines of the time (notably Black Mask), which wanted hard-hitting detective heroes and clipped, tough prose. It also sought to break down the barriers separating detective fiction from popular forms like the thriller and spy story. Authors of this school include Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of Perry Mason, the most famous lawyer-detective of them all; Dashiell Hammett, creator of the Continental Op (in Red Harvest, 1929) and Sam Spade; and Raymond Chandler, whose Philip Marlowe—introduced in The Big Sleep (1939)—is another classic fictional character. In these “hard-boiled” private-eye novels, sleuths worked for money instead of intellectual fun, and murder took place in gutters rather than in drawing rooms. Although these detective stories obeyed all the rules of the genre, the accent was on action, and the puzzle was underplayed. The story’s physical activity (which in some cases degenerated into raw sex and sadism), rather than the puzzle, held the reader’s attention.

Despite the thoughtful work of Ross Macdonald, whose Lew Archer novels ran from the 1940s to the 1970s, private-eye fiction seemed to yield diminishing returns after World War II, until the second-wave feminism of the 1970s produced a significant new offshoot in the figure of the female private eye. Arguably initiated in Britain by P. D. James with An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972), the form emerged at its strongest in the United States in the 1980s, when protagonists such as Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone, Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski, and Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone took on the alienated, anti-system traits of the private eye to convey women’s need to confront their exclusion from power with toughness and independence. In a somewhat parallel move, from the 1990s the experience of racism has been powerfully explored through Walter Mosley’s black private eye Easy Rawlins, and Barbara Neely’s quasi-invisible black amateur detective Blanche White. Gay private eyes of both sexes have also been created by Joseph Hansen, Barbara Wilson, Mary Wings, and others.

The figure of the private eye or otherwise embattled detective has attracted the attention of many “serious” postmodernist writers, as a potent image of the quest for meaning in a possibly meaningless universe. Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jorge Luis Borges, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Thomas Pynchon, Umberto Eco, and Paul Auster have all played with such ideas—a list indicating that detective fiction’s impact is by no means confined to the Anglo-American axis.