Detective fiction
 | The examples and perspective in this article may not represent a worldwide view of the subject. |
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.
A common feature of detective fiction is an investigator who is unmarried, with some source of income other than a regular job, and who generally has some pleasing eccentricities or striking characteristics. He or she frequently has a less intelligent assistant, or foil, who is asked to make apparently irrelevant inquiries and acts as an audience surrogate for the explanation of the mystery at the end of the story.
The Whodunit
The most widespread subgenre of the detective novel is 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.
Early archetypes of these stories were the three Auguste Dupin tales by Edgar Allan Poe: "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), "The Mystery of Marie Roget" (1843), and "The Purloined Letter" (1844). Poe's detective stories have been described as ratiocinative tales.[1]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. As a consequence, the crime itself sometimes becomes secondary to the efforts taken to solve it. "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, who in turn set the style for many others in later years, including Holmesian pastiches such as August Derleth's Solar Pons.
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).
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. In the 1930s, the private eye genre was adopted wholeheartedly by American writers. The tough, stylish detective fiction of Dashiell Hammett, Jonathan Latimer, and others exploried 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.
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 Phillip 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 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. The premier organization of PI authors is the Private Eye Writers of America.
English Golden Age detective novels
English readers, in their own Golden Age of Detective Fiction between the wars generally preferred a different, but equally implausible, type of detective story in which an outsider - sometimes a salaried investigator or a police officer, but more often a gifted amateur - investigates a murder committed in a closed environment by one of a limited number of suspects. These have become known as "cozies" to distinguish them from the "hard-boiled" type preferred in the USA[citation needed]. The most popular writer of cozies, 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. 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 'cozy' was adopted and extended by Rex Stout and Erle Stanley Gardner. The popularity of cozies has declined in the last four decades, perhaps partly due to the perceived unrealism of ordinary people solving crimes more proficiently than professional lawmen and detectives.
This emphasis on formal "rules" during the British Golden Age 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 "Golden Age" also displayed many elements typical of escapist writing and this was attributed to its popularity at the time as many wished to escape the depression of World War I and its aftermath.
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 go for a realistic depiction of a police officer's routine. A good deal are whodunits; in others the criminal is well known, and it is a case of getting enough evidence.
Some typical features of these are:
- The detective is rarely the first on the crime scene - it will be milling with uniform, paramedics and possibly members of the public.
- Forensic reports - and the wait for them.
- Rules and regulations to follow - or not.
- Suspects arrested and kept in custody - sometimes wrongly.
- Pressure from senior officers to show progress.
- A large investigating team - two, three or four main characters, plus other officers to order about.
- Pubs - places to discuss or think about the case - especially in the Inspector Morse mysteries.
- Informants - to lean on.
- Political pressure when the suspects are prominent figures
- Internal hostility from comrades when the suspects are fellow police officers
- Pressure from the media (tv, newspapers) to come up with an answer
- Interesting and unusual cars driven by the principal detective
Other subgenres
There is also a subgenre of historical detectives. See historical whodunnit for an overview.
Cozy mysteries are those which generally shy away from violence and suspense. Modern cozy mysteries are frequently, though not necessarily in either case, humorous and thematic (culinary mystery, animal mystery, quilting mystery, etc.) Following the link for cozy mysteries will pull up a list of authors and their series, organized by theme.
Suspense — the core tenet of detective fiction
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.
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 of 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, "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."
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:
- Father Brown — G. K. Chesterton
- Miss Marple — Agatha Christie
- Jessica Fletcher — Murder, She Wrote
- Lord Peter Wimsey — Dorothy L. Sayers
- C. Auguste Dupin — Edgar Allan Poe
- Sherlock Holmes — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
- Hercule Poirot — Agatha Christie
- Philip Marlowe — Raymond Chandler
- Inspector Morse — Colin Dexter
- Kojak — Kojak & Telly Savalas
- Adam Dalgliesh — P. D. James
- Inspector Clouseau — Pink Panther
- Dr. Kay Scarpetta — Patricia Cornwell
- Gil Grissom, Ph.D. — CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
- Dr. John Hamish Watson — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
- Batman, a.k.a. Bruce Wayne — Bob Kane & Bill Finger
- Karel "Carl" Kolchak — Jeffrey Grant Rice
- Ben Matlock — Dean Hargrove
- Encyclopedia Brown — Donald J. Sobol
- Nancy Drew — Carolyn Keene and others
- The Hardy Boys — Franklin W. Dixon and others
- Inspector Gadget
- Ginny Gordon
- Trixie Belden
- Judy Bolton
- Li Kao (7th Cen. CE China) — Barry Hughart
- Gordianus the Finder (1st Cen. BCE Roman Republic) — Steven Saylor
- Sister Fidelma (7th Cen. CE Ireland) — Peter Tremayne
Other notable authors
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
- Crime fiction
- List of Ace Mystery Double Titles
- List of Ace Mystery Letter-Series Single Titles
- List of Ace Mystery Numeric-Series Single Titles
- List of crime writers
- List of detective fiction authors
- Mystery fiction
- Whodunit
- Japanese detective fiction
Winter Collection--ISBN 1-932993-56-8 ISBN 13: 978-1-932993-56-1
References
- ^ 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.
External links
- Classic Crime Fiction Website
- Private Eye Writers of America website
- Most Honored Mystery Books
- The Golden Age of Detective Fiction Wiki
- The Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction
- All About Agatha Christie
- Sherlock Holmes Cases A compilation of some of the most famous Sherlock Holmes cases. Original stories adapted from the Gutenberg project
- Cozy Mysteries Organized by theme