Detective fiction is a branch of crime fiction that centers upon the
investigation of a crime, usually murder, by a detective,
either professional or amateur. Detective fiction is the most popular form of both mystery
fiction and hardboiled crime fiction.
Commonly in detective fiction, the investigator has some source of income other than detective work and some undesirable
eccentricities or striking characteristics. He or she frequently has a less able assistant, or foil, who acts as an audience surrogate for the
explanation of the mystery at the end of the story.
The beginnings of detective fiction
Detective fiction began in 1841 with the publication of "The Murders in the
Rue Morgue", a short story by Edgar Allan Poe featuring "the first fictional
detective, the eccentric and brilliant C. Auguste Dupin. Poe set up a plot formula that's been successful ever since, give or
take a few shifting variables."[1] Poe soon
followed with two further Auguste Dupin tales: "The Mystery of Marie Roget"
in 1843, and "The Purloined Letter" in 1844. Poe's detective stories have been
described as ratiocinative tales.[2]In stories such as
these, the primary concern of the plot is ascertaining truth, and the usual means of obtaining the truth is through a complex and
mysterious process combining intuitive logic, astute observation, and perspicacious inference. "Early detective stories tended to
follow an investigating protagonist from the first scene to the last, making the unraveling a practical rather than emotional
matter, a gratifying read that was also an intellectual jigsaw puzzle for its audience to solve."[1]
"The Mystery of Marie Roget" is particularly interesting because it is a barely fictionalized account that describes Poe's
theory of what really happened to the real-life Mary Cecilia Rogers. The style of the analysis,
with its attention to forensic detail, makes it a precursor and perhaps inspiration
for the stories about the most famous of all fictional detectives, Arthur Conan
Doyle's Sherlock Holmes
Another early archetype of the whodunit is found as a sub-plot in the vast novel Bleak
House (1853) by Charles Dickens. The conniving lawyer Tulkinghorn is killed
in his office late one night, and the crime is investigated by Inspector Bucket of the Metropolitan force. Numerous characters
appeared on the staircase leading to Tulkinghorn's office that night, some of them in disguise, and Inspector Bucket must
penetrate these mysteries to identify the culprit.
Dickens's protégé, Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) — sometimes referred to as the
"grandfather of English detective fiction" — is credited with the first great mystery novel, The Woman in White. His novel The Moonstone
(1868) was described by T. S. Eliot as "the first and greatest of English detective novels"
and by Dorothy L. Sayers as "probably the very finest detective story ever written".
Although technically preceded by Charles Felix's The Notting Hill
Mystery (1865), The Moonstone can claim to have established the genre with several classic features of the
twentieth-century detective story:
- A country house robbery
- An "inside job"
- A celebrated investigator
- Bungling local constabulary
- Detective enquiries
- False suspects
- The "least likely suspect"
- A rudimentary "locked room" murder
- A reconstruction of the crime
- A final twist in the plot
Some readers have suggested even earlier prototypes for the whodunit, most notably the Old Testament story of Susanna and the Elders (Daniel 13; in the Protestant
Bible this story is found in the apocrypha) and the story of
the dog and the horse related in the third chapter of Voltaire's Zadig (1747).
Ancient chinese detective fiction
Another strand of detective fiction is the ancient Chinese detective fiction such as Bao Gong
An (chinese:包公案) and the 18th century novel Di Gong An
(chinese:狄公案). The latter was translated into English as Dee Goong An (Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee) by Dutch sinologist
Robert Van Gulik, who then used the style and characters to write an original
Judge Dee series.
The hero of these novels is typically a traditional judge or similar official based on historical personages such as Judge Bao
(Bao Qingtian) or Judge Dee (Di Renjie). Although the
historical characters may have lived in an earlier period (such as the Song or
Tang dynasty) the novels are often set in the later Ming or Manchu period.
These novels differ from the Western tradition in several points as described by van Gulik:
- the detective is the local magistrate who is usually involved in several unrelated cases simultaneously;
- the criminal is introduced at the very start of the story and his crime and reasons are carefully explained, thus
constituting an inverted detective story rather than a "puzzle";
- the stories have a supernatural element with ghosts telling people about their death and even accusing the criminal;
- the stories were filled with digressions into philosophy, the complete texts of official documents, and much more, making for
very long books;
- the novels tended to have a huge cast of characters, typically in the hundreds, all described as to their relation to the
various main actors in the story;
- little time is spent on the details of how the crime was committed but a great deal on the torture and execution of the
criminals, even including their further torments in one of the various hells for the damned.
Van Gulik chose Di Gong An to translate because it was in his view closer to the Western tradition and more likely to
appeal to non-Chinese readers.
Golden Age detective novels
Many English and some North American readers, in what became known as the Golden Age of Detective Fiction between the wars, generally preferred a type of
detective story in which an outsider -- sometimes a salaried investigator or a police officer, but often a gifted amateur --
investigates a murder committed in a closed environment by one of a limited number of suspects. The most widespread subgenre of
the detective novel became the whodunit (or whodunnit), where great ingenuity may be
exercised in narrating the events of the crime, usually a homicide, and of
the subsequent investigation in such a manner as to conceal the identity of the criminal from the reader until the end of the
book, when the method and culprit are revealed. "The golden age of detective fiction began with high-class amateur detectives
sniffing out murderers lurking in rose gardens, down country lanes, and in picturesque villages. Many conventions of the
detective-fiction genre evolved in this era, as numerous writers -- from populist entertainers to respected poets -- tried their
hands at mystery stories."[1]
The four original Queens of Crime were Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham. Apart from Ngaio Marsh (New Zealand) they were all female British writers; perhaps
Josephine Tey could be added.
The most popular writer of the Golden Age whodunnit, and one of the most popular writers of all time, was Agatha Christie, who produced a long series of books featuring her detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, amongst others, and usually
including a complex puzzle for the baffled and misdirected reader to try and unravel. Also popular were the stories featuring
Dorothy L. Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey and
S. S. Van Dine's Philo Vance.
The 'puzzle' approach was carried even further into ingenious and seemingly impossible plots by John Dickson Carr - also writing as Carter Dickson - who is regarded as the master of the
"locked room mystery" and Cecil Street, who
also wrote as John Rhode, whose detective Dr. Priestley specialised in elaborate technical
devices, while in the US the whodunnit was adopted and extended by Rex Stout and
Ellery Queen, among others. The emphasis on formal "rules" during the Golden Age (as
codified in 1929 by Ronald Knox) produced a variety of reactions. Most writers were content
to follow the rules slavishly, some flouted some or all of the conventions, and some exploited the conventions with genius to
produce new and startling results.
The private eye novel
Private eye Martin Hewitt, created by British author Arthur Morrison, is perhaps the
first example of the modern style of fictional private detective. By the late
1920s, Al Capone and the Mob were inspiring not only fear, but piquing genuine mainstream
curiosity about the American underworld. Popular pulp fiction magazines like
Black Mask capitalized on this, as authors such as Carrol John Daly published violent stories that focused on the mayhem and injustice surrounding the
criminals, not the circumstances behind the crime. Very often, no actual mystery even existed: the books simply revolved around
justice being served to those who deserved harsh treatment, which was described in explicit detail."[1] In the 1930s, the private eye genre was adopted wholeheartedly by
American writers. The tough, stylish detective fiction of Dashiell Hammett,
Jonathan Latimer, Erle Stanley Gardner
and others explored the "mean streets" and corrupt underbelly of the United States. Their style of crime fiction came to known as
"hardboiled," which encompasses stories with similar attitudes concentrating not on
detectives but gangsters, crooks, and other committers or victims of crimes. "Told in stark and sometimes elegant language
through the unemotional eyes of new hero-detectives, these stories were an American phenomenon."[1]
In the late 1930s, Raymond Chandler updated the form with his private detective
Philip Marlowe, who brought a more intimate voice to the detective than Hammett's
distant, third-person viewpoint. His cadenced dialogue and cryptic narrations were musical, evoking the dark alleys and tough
thugs, rich women and powerful men about whom he wrote. Several feature and television movies have been made about the Philip
Marlowe character. James Hadley Chase wrote a few novels with private eyes as the
main hero, including "Blonde's Requiem" (1945), "Lay Her Among the Lilies" (1950), and "Figure It Out for Yourself" (1950).
Heroes of these novels are typical private eyes which are very similar to Philip Marlowe.
Ross Macdonald, pseudonym of Kenneth Millar,
updated the form again with his detective Lew Archer, while still writing in what is
considered the PI's Golden Age of Detective Fiction, begun by Hammett.
Archer, like Hammett's fictional heroes, was a camera eye, with hardly any known past. "Turn Archer sideways, and he disappears,"
one reviewer wrote. Two of Macdonald's strengths were his use of psychology and his beautiful prose, which was full of imagery.
Like other 'hardboiled' writers, Macdonald aimed to give an impression of realism in his work
through violence, sex and confrontation; this is illusory, however, and any real private eye undergoing a typical fictional
investigation would soon be dead or incapacitated. The movie Harper starring
Paul Newman was based on the Lew Archer character.
Michael Collins, pseudonym of Dennis Lynds, is generally considered the author who led the form into the Modern Age. His PI,
Dan Fortune, was consistently involved in the same sort of David-and-Goliath stories that
Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald wrote, but he took a sociological bent, exploring the meaning of his characters' places in
society and the impact society had on people. Full of commentary and clipped prose, his books were more intimate than his
predecessors, dramatizing that crime can happen in one's own living room.
The PI novel was a male-dominated field in which female authors seldom found publication until Marcia
Muller, Sara Paretsky, and Sue Grafton were
finally published in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Each author's detective was brainy, physical, and could hold her own. Their
acceptance, then success, caused publishers to seek out other fine female authors.
The PI novel today is rich in variety. The strongest characteristic that binds them is that the detective now has a past and a
life, while solving cases.
Police procedural
-
Many detective stories have police officers as the main characters. Of course these stories
may take a variety of forms, but many authors try to realistically depict the routine activities of a group of police officers
who are frequently working on more than one case simultaneously. Some of these stories are whodunits; in others the criminal is
well known, and it is a case of getting enough evidence.
Other subgenres
There is also a subgenre of historical detectives. See historical whodunnit for
an overview.
The first amateur railway detective, Thorpe Hazell, was created by Victor Whitechurch and his stories impressed Ellery Queen and Dorothy L. Sayers[3].
"Cozy mysteries" began in the late 20th century as a reinvention of the Golden Age whodunnit; these novels generally shy away
from violence and suspense and frequently feature female amateur detectives. Modern cozy mysteries are frequently, though not
necessarily in either case, humorous and thematic (culinary mystery, animal mystery, quilting mystery, etc.)
Another subgenre of detective fiction is the serial killer mystery, which might be
thought of as an outcropping of the police procedural. There are early mystery novels in which a police force attempts to contend
with the type of criminal known in the 1920s as a homicidal maniac, such as a few of the early
novels of Philip Macdonald and Ellery Queen's
Cat of Many Tails. However, this sort of story became much more popular after the
coining of the phrase "serial killer" in the 1970s and the publication of The Silence
of the Lambs in 1988. These stories frequently show the activities of many members of a police force or government agency
in their efforts to apprehend a killer who is selecting victims on some obscure basis.
Suspense — the core tenet of detective fiction
Mickey Spillane's
My Gun Is Quick
A beginner to detective fiction would generally be advised against reading anything about a piece of detective fiction (such
as a blurb or an introduction) before reading the text itself. Even if they do not mean to, advertisers, reviewers, scholars and
aficionados usually have a habit of giving away details or parts of the plot, and sometimes -- for example in the case of
Mickey Spillane's novel I, the Jury -- even
the solution. (After the credits of Billy Wilder's film Witness for the Prosecution, the cinemagoers are asked not to talk to anyone about
the plot so that future viewers will also be able to fully enjoy the unravelling of the mystery.)
- The unresolved problem of plausibility and coincidence
Up to the present, some of the problems inherent in crime fiction have remained unsolved (and possibly also insoluble). Some
of them can be dismissed with a shrug: Why bother at all, even if it is obvious to everyone that an ordinary person is not likely
to keep stumbling across corpses? After all, this is just part of the game of crime fiction. Still the fact that an old spinster
like Miss Marple meets with an estimated two bodies per year does raise a few doubts as to
the plausibility of the Miss Marple mysteries.
De Andrea has described the quiet little village of St. Mary Mead as having "put on a pageant of human depravity rivaled only
by that of Sodom and Gomorrah". Similarly, TV heroine Jessica Fletcher is confronted with bodies wherever she goes, but over the
years people who have met violent deaths have also piled up in the streets of Cabot Cove, Maine,
the cozy little village where she lives. Generally, therefore, it is much more convincing if a policeman, private eye,
forensic expert or similar professional is made the hero or heroine of a series of
crime novels.
This implausibility is satirized frequently on the TV show Monk, in which the main character, Adrian Monk, is frequently
accused of being a "bad luck charm" and a "murder magnet" as the result of the frequency with which otherwise normal people
attempt to pull off elaborate schemes for perfect murders when he is in the vicinity.
Also, the role and legitimacy of coincidence has frequently been the topic of heated arguments ever since Ronald A. Knox
categorically stated that "no accident must ever help the detective" (Commandment No.6).
- The Effects of Technology
Technological progress has also rendered many plots implausible and antiquated. For example, the predominance of
mobile phones, pagers, and PDAs has significantly altered the previously dangerous situations in which investigators
traditionally might have found themselves. Some authors have not succeeded in adapting to the changes brought about by modern
technology; others, such as Carl Hiaasen, have.
One tactic that avoids the issue of technology altogether is the historical detective
genre. As global interconnectedness makes legitimate suspense more difficult to achieve, several writers -- including
Elizabeth Peters, P. C. Doherty,
Steven Saylor, and Lindsey Davis -- have eschewed
fabricating convoluted plots in order to manufacture tension, instead opting to set their characters in some former period. Such
a strategy forces the protagonist to rely on more inventive means of investigation, lacking as they do the scientific tools
available to modern detectives.
Proposed rules
Several authors have attempted to set forth a sort of list of “Detective Commandments” for prospective authors of the genre.
According to "Twenty rules for writing detective stories," by Van Dine in 1928:
"The detective story is a kind of intellectual game. It is more--it is a sporting event. And for the writing of detective stories
there are very definite laws--unwritten, perhaps, but none the less binding; and every respectable and self-respecting concocter
of literary mysteries lives up to them. Herewith, then, is a sort Credo, based partly on the practice of all the great writers of
detective stories, and partly on the promptings of the honest author's inner conscience." Ronald
Knox wrote a set of Ten Commandments or Decalogue in 1929, see article on the Golden Age of Detective Fiction.
Famous fictional detectives
The full list of fictional detectives would be immense. The format is well suited to dramatic presentation, and so there are
also many television and film detectives, besides those appearing in adaptations of novels in this genre. Fictional detectives
generally fall within one of four domains:
- the amateur detective (Marple, Jessica Fletcher);
- the private investigator (Holmes, Marlowe, Spade, Poirot);
- the police detective (Dalgliesh, Kojak, Morse);
- the forensic specialists (Scarpetta, Quincy, Cracker, CSI).
Notable fictional detectives and their creators include:
Amateur detectives
Private Investigators
Police detectives
Forensic specialists
List of Fictional Catholic Church Detectives
Government agents
Others
For younger readers
Historical
Science-fiction and Fantasy
Detective debuts and swansongs
Many detectives appear in more than one novel or story. Here is a list of a few debut and swansong stories:
Books
- Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel - A History by Julian Symons ISBN 0-571-09465-1
- Stacy Gillis and Philippa Gates (Editors), The Devil Himself: Villainy in Detective Fiction and Film, Greenwood, 2001.
ISBN 0-313-31655-4
See also
References
- ^ a b c d e Kismaric, Carole and
Heiferman, Marvin. The Mysterious Case of Nancy Drew & The Hardy Boys. New York: Simon & Shuster, 1998. p. 56.
ISBN 0-684-84689-6
- ^ See, for example, Charles Paul Freund, "Puzzling Over Poe - 160-year-old
puzzle attributed to Edgar Allan Poe - Brief Article", Reason, February 2001; and Somaye Nouri Zenoz, "Application of the Statements Made by Poe and Maupassant to their Short Stories", January
2005, among many others.
- ^ Stories of the Railway, reprinted Routledge & Kegan Paul,
London, 1977, ISBN 0710086350: Foreword by Bryan Morgan
External links
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