I.
DETECTIVE STORY
Detective story, type of popular literature in which a crime is
introduced and investigated and the culprit is revealed.
The traditional elements of the detective story are:
(1) the seemingly perfect crime;
(2) the wrongly accused suspect at whom circumstantial evidence points;
(3) the bungling of dim-witted police;
(4) the greater powers of observation and superior mind of the detective;
and (5) the startling and unexpected denouement, in which the detective
reveals how the identity of the culprit was ascertained.
Detective stories frequently operate on the principle that superficially
convincing evidence is ultimately irrelevant. Usually it is also axiomatic that
the clues from which a logical solution to the problem can be reached be
fairly presented to the reader at exactly the same time that the sleuth
receives them and that the sleuth deduce the solution to the puzzle from a
logical interpretation of these clues.
The first detective story was “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” by
Edgar Allan Poe, published in April 1841. The profession of detective had
come into being only a few decades earlier, and Poe is generally thought to
have been influenced by the Mé moires (1828–29) of François-Eugè ne
Vidocq, who in 1817 founded the world’s first detective bureau, in Paris.
Poe’s fictional French detective, C. Auguste Dupin, appeared in two other
stories, “The Mystery of Marie Roget” (1845) and “The Purloined Letter”
(1845). The detective story soon expanded to novel length.
The French author É mile Gaboriau’s L’Affaire Lerouge (1866) was an
enormously successful novel that had several sequels. Wilkie Collins’ The
Moonstone (1868) remains one of the finest English detective novels. Anna
Katharine Green became one of the first American detective novelists with
The Leavenworth Case (1878). The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886) by the
Australian Fergus Hume was a phenomenal commercial success.
The greatest of all fictional detectives, Sherlock Holmes, along with
his loyal, somewhat obtuse companion Dr. Watson, made his first
appearance in Arthur (later Sir Arthur) Conan Doyle’s novel A Study in
Scarlet (1887) and continued into the 20th century in such collections of
stories as The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894) and the longer Hound of
the Baskervilles (1902). So great was the appeal of Sherlock Holmes’s
detecting style that the death of Conan Doyle did little to end Holmes’s
career; several writers, often expanding upon circumstances mentioned in
the original works, have attempted to carry on the Holmesian tradition.
Sherlock Holmes and Dr.
Watson
Sherlock Holmes (right) explaining
to Dr. Watson what he has
deduced from a pipe left behind by
a visitor; illustration by Sidney
Paget for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's
“The Adventure of the Yellow
Face,” The Strand Magazine, 1893.
[Link]/Jupiterimages
The early years of the 20th
century produced a number of distinguished detective novels, among them
Mary Roberts Rinehart’s The Circular Staircase (1908) and G.K. Chesterton’s
The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) and other novels with the clerical
detective. From 1920 on, the names of many fictional detectives became
household words: Inspector French, introduced in Freeman Wills Crofts’s The
Cask (1920); Hercule Poirot, in Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at
Styles (1920), and Miss Marple, in Murder at the Vicarage (1930); Lord Peter
Wimsey, in Dorothy L. Sayers’ Whose Body? (1923); Philo Vance, in S.S. Van
Dine’s The Benson Murder Case (1926); Albert Campion, in Margery
Allingham’s The Crime at Black Dudley (1929; also published as The Black
Dudley Murder); and Ellery Queen, conceived by Frederic Dannay and
Manfred B. Lee, in The Roman Hat Mystery (1929).
In a sense, the 1930s was the golden age of the detective story, with the
detectives named above continuing in new novels. The decade was also
marked by the books of Dashiell Hammett, who drew upon his own
experience as a private detective to produce both stories and novels,
notably The Maltese Falcon (1930) featuring Sam Spade. In Hammett’s
work, the character of the detective became as important as the “whodunit”
aspect of ratiocination was earlier. The Thin Man (1934), with Nick and
Nora Charles, was more in the conventional vein, with the added fillip
of detection by a witty married couple. Successors to Hammett included
Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, who also emphasized the
characters of their tough but humane detectives Philip Marlowe and Lew
Archer, respectively. At the end of the 1940s, Mickey Spillane preserved
the hard-boiled crime fiction approach of Hammett and others, but his
emphasis on sex and sadism became a formula that brought him
amazing commercial success beginning with I, the Jury (1947).
The Maltese Falcon
(From left) Humphrey Bogart, Peter
Lorre, Mary Astor, and Sydney
Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon
(1941), directed by John Huston.
© 1941 Warner Brothers, Inc.
The introduction of the mass-
produced paperback book in the late
1930s made detective-story writers
wealthy, among them the Americans
Erle Stanley Gardner, whose criminal
lawyer Perry Mason unraveled crimes
in court; Rex Stout, with his fat,
orchid-raising detective Nero
Wolfe and his urbane assistant Archie Goodwin; and Frances and
Richard Lockridge, with another bright married couple, Mr. and Mrs.
North. In France, Georges Simenon produced novel after novel at a
rapid-fire pace, making his hero, Inspector Maigret, one of the best-
known detectives since Sherlock Holmes. Other writers who carried out
the tradition of Holmes or broke new ground included Nicholas Blake
(pseudonym of the poet C. Day-Lewis), Michael Innes, Ngaio Marsh,
Josephine Tey, Carter Dickson (John Dickson Carr), and P.D. James. After
1945, writers such as John le Carré adapted the detective-story format
to the spy novel, in which he addressed the mysteries and character of
the Cold War.
The Mystery Writers of America, a professional organization founded in
1945 to elevate the standards of mystery writing, including the
detective story, has exerted an important influence through its annual
Edgar Allan Poe Awards for excellence.
