This article is based on the transcript of a talk, intended for a general audience, given by the author to the Thirkill Society of Clare College, Cambridge in April 1999.
Crime fiction, or mystery fiction, or detective fiction or whatever you choose to call it, is without a doubt one of the single most popular forms of fiction of this century, and Britain holds a unique position in influencing its development. There can be few people who haven't heard of Agatha Christie, whose novels, numbering over sixty, have been translated into over one hundred languages, and whose characters such as Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot are known to millions through novels, films and television. However, the view of crime fiction remains one of eccentric detectives in elegant country houses, while the reality is that crime fiction has changed and evolved out of recognition, and deserves a little more consideration. Although the contribution of American writers to the genre is immense and undoubted, I'd like to explore how things have changed in British crime fiction since the Golden Age of Christie and her contemporaries.
A little historical background is definitely in order, so that we can try to follow how crime fiction has changed over the years, and just why it remains so phenomenally popular. There is much debate as to when British crime fiction was really born, and although Wilkie Collins can perhaps lay claim to the first detective novel, in the shape of 'The Moonstone', one writer in particular stands as a pioneer. Arthur Conan Doyle first introduced Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective, to the world in 1887, with the publication of 'A Study In Scarlet', but it wasn't until his stories were serialised in the Strand magazine that the public's imagination was seized by his stories of the eccentric and supremely intelligent Holmes and his novel methods of scientific deduction. One could devote hours to discussing Holmes and his creator, but suffice it to say that popular crime fiction in Britain was born in No. 221B Baker Street.
This passion for crime didn't abate, and by the 1920s, crime fiction had really caught on as a popular genre, and the novels of the twenties and thirties are often referred to as belonging to 'The Golden Age'. By now, the bulk of crime novels tended to adhere rather strictly to a prescribed template, which is what remains as the popular image of the 'whodunnit', embodied by those writers whose work still remains immensely popular to this day. Of these, the most enduring are the Holy Trinity of Dorothy L. Sayers, with her aristocratic detective Lord Peter Wimsey, Margery Allingham and her mysterious Mr. Albert Campion and his manservant, Magersfontein Lugg, and of course, Agatha Christie, with her enduring protagonists, Hercule Poirot, retired Belgian policeman, and Miss Jane Marple, resident of the quiet country village of St. Mary Mead and thorn in the side of the local constablary.
Agatha Christie is a good example of the Golden Age writers, who infrequently strayed from a tried and tested template of an eccentric or unusual, but undoubtedly brilliant, detective, who merely happened to be on the scene of a dreadful (though usually remarkably gore-free) murder and then proceeded to pry into the investigation until a sequence of neatly laid clues led to the culprit. With a few exceptions, this was the age of the gifted amateur, who either happened to be on the scene at the time - this tendency for an otherwise blame-free person to attract corpses is sometimes referred to as the St. Mary Mead Syndrome - or was invited in by an acquaintance who happened to be involved, in order to try to clear up the mess and undo the bumbling work of the plodding local constabulary. The essence of this type of writing was that something had occurred to peturb an otherwise civilised section of society, and the job of the detective is restore order in as discreet a way as possible. This is reflected in the traditional settings of the Golden Age whodunnit - elegant country houses, gentlemen's clubs and of course, the Orient Express. However, this really doesn't explain half the attraction of the genre - the driving force behind their mass following was the idea of the novel as a literary crossword puzzle, culminating in the concept of the 'Locked Room', popular to this day, where a detective is presented with a seemingly impossible puzzle, such as a corpse found dead in a locked room with no means of entry or escape. Writers became obsessed with placing subtle yet perfectly logical clues within the novel so that the reader might be able to join the detective in chasing the criminal and have the occasional smug satisfaction of beating the detective to the answer. Of course, fair play was paramount, as the following rules, laid down as Father Knox's Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction:
I. The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.
II. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
III. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
IV. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
V. No Chinaman must figure in the story. To understand why, one should refer to the following section of the Detection Club's Oath: "Do you promise to observe a seemly moderation in the use of Gangs, Conspiracies, Death-Rays, Ghosts, Hypnotism, Trap-Doors, Chinamen, Super-Criminals and Lunatics; and utterly and for ever to forswear Mysterious Poisons unknown to Science?"
VI. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
VII. The detective must not himself commit the crime.
VIII.The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader.
IX. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
X. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.
In a way, its rather heartening to note that many more recent luminaries of the crime fiction scene have spent a great deal of effort trying to break these rules, but although its easy to laugh at such the obsession of many such writers with fair play, and minutae such as railway timetables, mysterious footprints and obscure riddles, but the fact remains that in the hands of a writer like Christie or the equally talented John Dickson Carr (an American, responsible for possibly the finest 'locked room' mysteries), this type of puzzle novel can be extremely diverting.
However, a Golden Age never lasts forever, and although society in Britain began to change radically post-war, culminating in the social upheaval of the sixties, crime fiction really never left the thirties. Eccentric detectives and aristocratic police inspectors still investigated murders with silver letter openers in the drawing rooms of country houses, and writers like Agatha Christie still kept putting out more of the same, as readers deserted for the excitement of thrillers and spy novels. It took a long time for the genre to adapt and embrace the modern world, but the influence of America was needed to inspire a new generation of crime writers. With the exception of talented writers like John Dickson Carr and Rex Stout, the US had never really taken to crime fiction in the British mould, but within the covers of 'pulp' magazines like the legendary Black Mask, a new type of fiction was being born - the hard-boiled novel. Thanks to innovative writers like Dashiell Hammett, who in the words of his comtemporary Raymond Chandler 'took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley', crime writing became invested with a much greater degree of realism and less of an obsession with 'clues' and more with the moral and psychological aspects of a criminal act. With this writing a new type of detective was born, and Raymond Chandler in his terrific essay on the detective novel, 'The Simple Art of Murder', describes such a man:
"Yet down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He must be a complete man, and a common man and yet an unusual man."
Significantly, Chandler and his contemporaries began subtly changing the emphasis of the crime novel from the crime itself, to the character of the detective. Another ground-breaking novelist, Ed McBain, had a dramatic effect on the British crime novel. McBain was a pioneer in the type of novel that has become known as the police procedural, which follows the efforts of a group of police officers to deal with the crimes committed in their area, and in doing so tries to describe accurately the methods used by a modern police force to solve a crime. Lastly, and perhaps most disturbingly, the advent of the modern serial murderer in the United States gave rise to a whole new genre dealing with the hunt for a brutal, intelligent serial killer by police officers and psychologists, perhaps most famously described by Thomas Harris in his novels 'Red Dragon' and 'Silence of the Lambs'. The influential of these sub-genres is unmistakable, but its strength was when combined with homegrown attitudes and settings. Although amusing, the spectre of Philip Marlowe stalking the mean streets of South London isn't ultimately any more real than a balding Belgian strolling the grounds of a country house, but modern British crime has taken the best elements of both genres and fitted them into the setting of our changed and changing society to create something new.
If you go into the crime section of a bookshop here in Cambridge, I think you'll be struck by the immense diversity and quality of the writing available. Besides classics by Christie, Sayers et al., which rightly remain classic examples of crime writing, you'll find just about every type of novel and setting available. From modern 'cosy' country village whodunnits by writers like Caroline Graham's Midsomer Murder series, to the Glaswegian police procedurals of Peter Turnbull, to the violent, gun-infested underworld of Mark Timlin's Nick Sharman. The character of the detective has become equally diverse, now encompassing the new wave of female private eyes and police detectives, the frustrated, complex detective inspector, the private eyes who operate barely on the side of law and order. Murder has even become amusing, with novels by Mike Ripley and Peter Guttridge, and a new form of crime writing, pioneered by Ellis Peter's Brother Cadfael novels has been born - the historical crime novel, with settings as diverse as ancient Rome, 14th century Cambridge and Second World War London London. I'd just like to finish by saying that with writers like Ian Rankin, John Harvey and Reginald Hill, the best of modern British crime novels are finally beginning to be recognised as genuinely fine works of literature.
Legal Stuff: All material on this page copyright Daniel M. Staines 1998.
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