detective fiction

detective fiction. Crime has been a staple of storytelling since its beginnings, and misdirection of the reader, for example about facts (Tom Jones's parentage) or emotions (in Emma or Much Ado about Nothing), has equally had its special position, leading to striking revelations at a late crisis point. The classic English detective novel marries the two elements. Its particular form owes its greatest debt to Poe, whose three or four detective stories written in the 1840s strikingly anticipate many of the genre's main features. In particular, English writers followed him in creating detectives who were remote from the common herd, creatures of pure ratiocination, emotional hermits who observed but did not participate in the hurly-burly of life around them. The fact that the steely logic of Poe's detective Dupin often leads him to conclusions that border on the absurd does not seem to have worried most readers.

Around mid-century there were other detectives, such as Dickens's Inspector Bucket (Bleak House, 1853) and W. Collins's Sergeant Cuff (The Moonstone, 1868), who were apparently more homely and engaging. But after the triumphant debut of Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet (1887) it was Poe's model which won the day, and traces of the stereotype can be found in figures such as Baroness Orczy's Old Man in the Corner, Agatha Christie's Poirot, P. D. James's Dalgliesh, and Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse.

Conan Doyle was the master of the short story, packing each one with observation, conflict, and sharply dramatized character types. His success attracted hordes of followers and imitators, of whom Arthur Morrison and G. K. Chesterton were notable. The most engaging of the figures produced in reaction to Holmes's intellectuality and near-inhumanity was E. W. Hornung's gentleman burglar Raffles.

Holmes and Raffles, both quintessential late Victorian figures, contrast oddly: Raffles, nominally the social outcast, has for the most part perfectly conventional social attitudes, whereas Holmes, who in most cases acts for and reinforces the existing social order, is an outsider who is frequently downright contemptuous of the people he represents.

After the First World War, public taste shifted away from the short story to the novel-length tale. The so-called Golden Age is often said to have been inaugurated by Trent's Last Case (1913) by E. C. Bentley, but it was led by Agatha Christie, D. Sayers, M. Allingham, and N. Marsh, supported by numerous figures such as R. Austin Freeman (1862–1943) and John Dickson Carr (1906–77). Christie in particular produced a stream of ingenious puzzles whose solutions left her readers feeling agreeably fooled. The genre as she moulded it is a highly artificial one, elegant in form and construction if not always in style; its social attitudes were surprisingly conventional, and its characters drawn largely from the gentry and professional classes.

The ‘silly ass’ detective was a phenomenon of the period, initiated by Sayers's Wimsey. It even crossed the Atlantic in the form of the outrageous Philo Vance, the detective of S. S. Van Dine (1888–1939). In time, though, the echoes of Bertie Wooster had to be softened or forgotten, since they harmed these figures' credibility as detectives.

After the Second World War the artifice of the Golden Age writers, their insistence on murder as game, seemed increasingly irrelevant, though Edmund Crispin (1921–78) gained a following for his jokey books, and Christianna Brand (1907–88), in bravura performances such as Tour de Force (1955), proved there was still sap in the old branch. Most of the writers preferred to aim for greater realism, specializing in believable studies of the murderous mind or of everyday situations into which murder erupts. This generation, which included Julian Symons and Michael Gilbert, produced many fine novels, but never rivalled in popularity the older generation.

It was left to P. D. James and Ruth Rendell, who emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, to re-establish the English detective novel as a popular force. They both wrote novels in the whodunit tradition. Neither would have anything to do with the Never-never-shire settings of some of the Golden Age writers. The realistic and contemporary feel to both writers' novels has aided their transfer to television, and the success of these series, and of Dexter's Morse, has boosted the popularity of modern crime fiction as a whole.

The whodunit tradition may not seem the easiest to marry with a realistic surface and treatment, but several modern writes have done it successfully. Reginald Hill does so in Under World (1988), a study of a mining community as the industry disintegrates. His detective duo, Pascoe and Dalziel, university-educated cop allied to heavy traditional cop, allows a variety of treatments, depending on which of the team is in the ascendant. Many writers have pushed their British policemen in the direction of the tougher American police procedural, but in such novels as Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus series the British whodunit seems just as close as the American model. Private detectives are now the exception, and though the policemen who have taken over may be vivid individuals like Hill's thuggish Dalziel, they are more everyday figures (Dorothy Simpson's Thanet and Catherine Aird's Sloane spring to mind).

At the end of the 20th cent. the vigour and variety of British crime-writing are more impressive than ever. Studies of the mind of a criminal (going back to Godwin and the Newgate novelists in the 1830s) are frequent, led by Ruth Rendell (Master of the Moor, 1982) and her alter ego, Barbara Vine (A Dark-Adapted Eye, 1986). Margaret Yorke is mistress of low-key studies of situations in which ordinary people get entangled, with murderous consequences. Sheila Radley's A Talent for Destruction (1982) is in this tradition. Comedy has not been buried with the Golden Age, and a more modern vein has been exploited by Simon Brett, Peter Lovesey (The False Inspector Dew, 1982), and Caroline Graham (The Killings at Badger's Drift, 1987). Historical crime has made a strong comeback, with the Brother Cadfael novels of Ellis Peters (1913–95), Edward Marston's Elizabethan theatre series, and Lindsey Davis's Falco novels, which transplant the atmosphere of American private-eye fiction to ancient Rome.

Regionalism, too, has made a strong showing in recent years. Scotland is the setting in the novels of Rankin and Peter Turnbull, Yorkshire in those of Hill and Peter Robinson, Nottingham in those of Ian Harvey, and the West Country in those of W. J. Burley and in many of Andrew Taylor's. Michael Dibdin, more exotically, has set his novels in Venice.

The continuing popularity of the detective novel is undoubted. The fact that it is a popular form that engages the mind rather than the emotions has always given it a degree of respectability. Though murder has been almost a sine qua non of detective fiction since the 1920s, the shock or frisson that murder might be expected to produce is almost always lacking: the body is merely the means to a detection process. Though in the last twenty or thirty years crime novels have become more realistic, delight in gore and exploitation of horror and pain are still largely absent from the British product. When hanging was abolished, the demise of the detective novel was predicted as a consequence, but this was to misunderstand its whole nature. The point of a mystery is that the culprit is revealed to general surprise, not that vengeance is exacted for his crime.