Tag: detection (page 1 of 1)

July 15, 2025

the original of Wimsey

Roy ridley 9fb1d2cb 5fce 4f9f 9af4 b930c69b7e6 resize 750. In 1935, when Dorothy L. Sayers was working wit her friend Muriel St. Clare Byrne on the play Busman’s Honeymoon, she wrote from Oxford:

I have seen the perfect Peter Wimsey. Height, voice, charm, smile, manner, outline of features, everything — and he is — THE CHAPLAIN OF BALLIOL. What is the use of anything? … Such waste — why couldn’t he have been an actor?

Though Sayers did not remember it, she had seen this man — whose name was Maurice Roy Ridley — many years before, and had swooned then also. In July 1913, at the end of her first year at Oxford, she reported to her friend Catherine Godfrey about what she saw at the Encaenia:

But the Newdigate [i.e., the winner of the Newdigate Prize] was a darling. His poem was on ‘Oxford’, and he recited it so nicely. He had a very clear, pleasant voice, and spoke as if he meant it. He read from the rostrum close to us, so we saw and heard splendidly. His poem was not frightfully full of genius, and was very academic in tone and form (though it was in blank verse) but there was an appealing sort of youthfulness and pathos and Oxford feeling about it that made it quite charming.… He was very nervous, and he quivered all over all the time he was reciting. Charis and I fell head over heels in love with him on the spot. His name is Maurice Roy Ridley – isn’t it a killing name, like the hero of a six-penny novelette? He has just gone down from Balliol, so I shall see him no more – my loves are always unsatisfactory, as you know….

Surprisingly, this passionate love was altogether forgotten 22 years later.

The news that he was “the perfect Peter Wimsey” reached Ridley, who subsequently acquired all of the Wimsey novels and placed them prominently on a shelf in his Balliol rooms. (Whether he read them is not known.) Vanity was certainly one of Ridley’s most prominent traits — one of his pupils reported that he had a bust of Dante on the mantel over his fireplace and would stand next to it, posing in such a way that the resemblance between him and the great Florentine poet was clear to all observers — and the Wimsey connection gave that vanity more fuel. For instance, he already had a monocle, and began wearing it more regularly.

But Ridley was not content with mere appearance. In 1936 a Balliol student named Pat Moss died in a fire, in peculiar circumstances, and when the police arrived they found Ridley hopping around the scene of death with a magnifying glass. They ordered him to depart. Whether he continued to investigate crimes, or potential crimes, I do not know.

But because Pat Moss was Canadian and naturally friendly with other Canadians at Oxford, one of them who had seen him earlier on the evening before his death — as it happens, a pupil of Ridley’s — was thoroughly questioned. His name? Robertson Davies. (I get this information from Judith Skelton Grant’s biography of Davies, from which I’ve also taken the photos below.) No arrests were ever made, and Moss’s death could have been accidental, but in later years Davies said he thought Moss had gotten involved with gamblers and had been killed by them.

Another of Ridley’s pupils of the era said that he was not a good tutor, but was a great influence, and certainly he would have encouraged Davies — already quite inclined to flamboyance — to make a name for himself at Oxford. This Davies did largely through his participation in OUDS, the Oxford University Dramatic Society, where he served as sometime dramaturg, sometime stage manager, and sometime actor.

Something else Davies learned from Ridley was the usefulness of a monocle:

And a brief P.S.: Many of you will know that Sayers had a son out of wedlock, had him raised by her cousin, and only later told him that she was his mother. When John Anthony, after serving in the military during the Second World War, decided to attend university in 1946, what university did he choose? Oxford. And what was his college? Balliol. And who was his tutor? Why, Roy Ridley, of course.

June 6, 2025

Swing Street

As I’ve often said, I am a devoted fan of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe stories, of which there could never be enough. So I thought I would share, below, the first chapter of an otherwise lost Stout novel called Swing Street, set in the Year of Our Lord 1939. Regarding some of the places and characters here: IYKYK.

Anyone treated to one of Fritz Brenner’s dinners wants to savor it for as long as possible, but I had work to do. After coffee — in Nero Wolfe’s house, coffee after dinner is not optional — I trotted upstairs to change clothes. Once I had the old frame suitably draped I trotted back down to the office and ducked in to give my regards to the boss. Wolfe was sitting at his desk with a several maps laid out before him, at which he stared angrily.

“I’m off,” I said. “And for the record, this shirt isn’t purple, it’s mauve.” Wolfe hates the color purple, which I think is pretty rich, considering his fondness for bright yellow shirts and pajamas.

“Pedantry doesn’t suit you, Archie,” he said. “and in any case today is not the day for it.”

I couldn’t disagree with him there. I turned and went out the front door, and standing there on the stoop I decided that I wouldn’t get the roadster after all. It was a good evening for a walk: not fall yet by any means, but the the edge of the heat had been sanded down, and in my lightweight suit I was unlikely to sweat. Not that it mattered, since where I was going if I sweated I’d be just one of the party.

I headed uptown. It was going to be a musical evening.

I’m a Flamingo Club guy myself. The big band dance music suits me fine, especially when I’m gliding around the dance floor with a suitable companion. Lily Rowan, for instance. But other people like other kinds of music, and I was going to be spending the evening with them. I needed to talk to one among their number.

I was headed for Swing Street — 52nd Street, as the maps call it — and one of its many jazz clubs. The problem was, I wasn’t sure which one. It was a jazzman I needed to talk to, or a man involved somehow with the jazz scene, and those guys floated from club to club like fireflies.

It was Friday night, and I knew that Swing Street would be jumping, and that not one person on the whole street would be thinking about the fact that Germany had invaded Poland today. Wolfe was thinking about it, of course; that’s why he had those maps on his desk. He had fought against the Germans in the previous European war; it wasn’t easy to figure who he had been fighting for, but more than once I had heard him say that he wished he had killed more Germans when he had the chance. How many he did kill, and how many would have been enough, I’ve never figured out. Anyway, as he looked at those maps he was thinking about what he personally could do to damage Germans, that I was sure of.

What it all might mean for me, and for other Americans, I couldn’t guess. That didn’t stop me from guessing as I walked. It took me less than half an hour, because I walk fast.

When I got to 52nd Street I heaved a big sigh, because I could see more jazz clubs than I could count. I could be hunting for hours. I stood for a minute outside a place called Dizzy’s Club — I had heard that one of the hot new jazz musicians was named Dizzy. This place looked like it needed a thorough hosing-down, but didn’t they all, more or less?

As I was deciding whether to duck in, a man passed me heading for the door. Tallish fellow with blond hair in a suit so wrinkled and speckled with cigarette ash that I couldn’t stop myself from tsk-tsking, though because I was raised to be polite I did did my tsking quietly. He looked something like a Viking, if Vikings had had librarians. Or maybe he was a poet. The Vikings had a few of those, as I recall.

His hair needed combing and his shoelaces needed tying, and with a cigarette in one hand and a bundle of books and a notebook tucked under his other arm, he was hard-pressed to find a way to open the door. So I opened it for him. He thanked me in a pretty fancy British accent, which he probably wasn’t faking, and went in.

He found a seat in a corner and started spreading out his papers. He looked to be preparing for a lengthy stay, which I was not. The room was very full and very hot and very loud, and there wasn’t a dame in the place, just sailors and guys who dressed like sailors and guys who looked like they would be very interested in sailors. I was definitely not dressed for the environment, though I did get some approving looks I didn’t want, and since there was no live music — the noise came from a jukebox — I quickly decided that this wasn’t the joint for me and backed slowly out the door. I caught a slight grin from the Viking librarian on my way out and tipped my fedora to him.

There’s never a great deal of fresh air on Swing Street, but it smelled like springtime in the Catskills in comparison to the hothouse of Dizzy’s. But I had to keep trying until I found the right club.

The person I wanted wasn’t in the Three Deuces, but I found myself wishing that that had been the place for me because they had a guy playing piano there like nothing I’ve ever heard. He was a hefty guy — not quite Wolfe-sized but not far from it — who appeared to be blind or at least hard of seeing, and he was doing things to those ivories that I can’t even describe. It wasn’t really my kind of thing, or so I would’ve said before I heard it. On the way out I asked one of the waiters and he said the guy was a regular, played there several times a week. His name was Tatum. I made a note of it. Wolfe gives me the occaional off-night and I’m not afraid to use it to try something new. I felt a long way from the Flamingo Club, though, I don’t mind admitting.

A few stops down the street I finally found what I was looking for, though not without geeting a little more musical distraction that I hadn’t been expecting. On stage at a place called the Famous Door a small combo were doing their thing, and I had to listen to for a few minutes before getting back to work. The singer was a fair-skinned colored girl who had a lousy voice — reedy and thin — but you couldn’t not listen to her. She just had a way. I can’t explain it better than that, which I guess means that I can’t explain it. She seemed to have a particular connection with the tenor saxophone player, a big guy in a pork-pie hat, and man, he could play that sax something beautiful. Again I was hearing something that wasn’t my thing, wasn’t my thing at all, but could somehow become my thing if I didn’t watch out. Swing Street was starting to make sense to me.

Behind the bar a tall thin man was whispering in the ear of the bartender, a slight colored guy with alert eyes who seemed to be mixing three or four drinks at once but was also paying close attention to the message. The whisperer looked Italian, which from my perspective was a good thing because the man I was looking for was named Mariano. He had on a suit that cost about five times as much as mine and cut to specifications. He lifted his hand to shield his mouth and his diamond cufflinks came out like the sunrise. As I approached the bar he looked up, saw me coming, and slipped into a back room as smoothly and as quickly as humanly possible, or maybe a little more so.

The colored girl kept singing in that strangely fascinating way as I thought about whether to chase Mister Cufflinks to find out if his name was Mariano. The bartender finished making his drinks, put them on a tray for a waiter, turned to me, gave me a winning smile, and said, “What can I make for you, Mister Goodwin? And whatever you want, it’s on the house. Any friend of Nero Wolfe’s is a friend of ours.”

June 4, 2025

total action

In his Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye argues that the epic as a genre is characterized by what he calls “total action” (318). The total action of a story begins with the initiation of the conflict and ends with its resolution — but the epic poem does not straightforwardly tell this whole story.

For instance, the total action of the Iliad begins with the Judgment of Paris, and it ends … well, it’s a bit difficult to say exactly where it ends. In one view of the matter, it ends when Troy falls; in another, it ends when when the major participants in the story have concluded their part in it. You could argue that the total action of the Iliad is not complete — and certainly the total action of the Odyssey is not complete — until Odysseus has performed penance assigned to him by Athena (building an altar to Poseidon in a place where that god had previously been unknown) and returned to Ithaca — his final homecoming. But in any case, the concept as Frye develops it, suggests that no epic will narrate its total action. It will zero in on something essential, perhaps the pivotal moment in the whole tale. So however you would describe the total action of the Iliad, the poem itself narrates just a few days in the long Trojan War: the days in which Achilles withdraws from the fighting, which leads to the death of Patroclus, which leads to Achilles’s re-entry into the battle, which leads to the death of Hector, which leads to the fall of Troy, since the city has now lost its great champion and the inspiration of its warriors.

The total action of the Aeneid is something vaster. You could argue, if you wanted to see things from Virgil’s point of view, that it extends from the Judgment of Paris ever onward, because the Pax Romana is the culmination of all history. (No, Virgil, no.) But the action of the poem itself begins with Aeneas’s escape from a burning Troy and ends in Italy with his killing of Turnus in battle.

In short: “total action” is a useful concept, and it seems to me that it is not relevant only to epics. Of the other genres of narrative, the one to which the concept of total action is most relevant is, it seems to me, the detective story, and more particularly the murder mystery. The total action of any murder mystery begins when the conflict that leads to the murder begins. When was that first seed planted? Perhaps it was when Aunt Mabel chose to give all of her money to your cousin instead of you; or the first time that Walter flirted with his married neighbor, Isobel. And it ends — well, again, that can be hard to say, but in societies that have the death penalty, the terminus ad quem of the total action is the execution of the convicted criminal. (Matters are less fully resolved when a murderer might eventually be released from prison.)

But however you think about it, murder mysteries, like epics, rarely seek to encompass the total action of the story. Often we do get the the terminus a quo, the initiation of the conflict, typically through backstory: it’s the kind of thing discovered along the way by the investigators, whoever they happen to be. But the terminus ad quem may be anticipated without being narrated. So, for instance, it’s quite common for a a murder mystery to end with the arrest of the murderer. We imagine the conviction and imprisonment and possibly the execution of the criminal as things that will happen as a matter of course. We don’t need to read all the details.

But if W. H. Auden’s view of what the murder mystery is all about — articulated in his famous but very bad 1948 essay “The Guilty Vicarage” — is correct even in broad outlines, then the novel can’t really stop before the arrest of the criminal. And that’s because in Auden’s view, the murder mystery is fundamentally a consoling revision of the story of Eden. It begins with a healthy (Auden would, wrongly, say “innocent”) community; that community is then profoundly disrupted by a killing; and what must happen in the course of the story is a restoration of the community’s orderly health. And that restoration of order is something that only happens if the criminal is captured, is identified, arrested, and convicted. “The phantasy, then, which the detective story addict indulges is the phantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden, to a state of innocence, where he may know love as love and not as the law.”

A small note en passant: In G. K. Chesterton’s stories we only sometimes see the arrest of the criminal Father Brown has identified, but that’s not because Chesterton is uninterested in the restoration of innocence. However, the innocence Father Brown wants to see restored is that in the conscience of the criminal. He doesn’t especially care about whether a criminal goes to jail, but he is passionately concerned to prevent the criminal from going to Hell. Confession and absolution restore a sinner to right relation with God, which is arguably more important that the kinds of restoration that many murder mysteries are concerned with. Arguably. Auden seems to accept the point, because he finds Father Brown to be one of the few wholly successful detectives.

In any case, if the restorative arc Auden describes is necessary to the murder mystery, then something funny is going on in the later mysteries of Dorothy L. Sayers — the exception being her final one, Busman’s Honeymoon, which for certain specific reasons, perhaps to be discussed in another post, takes the story all the way to the execution of the criminal. That makes it very different than the other late novels, which I will have to describe in some detail. So if you haven’t read those stories, stop reading this post and go read them instead. They’re very much worth reading, and I wouldn’t want you to miss them. I’ll say as little as I can about the details, but

⚠️ SO MANY SPOILERS COMING ⚠️

Consider Have His Carcase (1932), her eighth Lord Peter Wimsey novel and the second in which Harriet Vane appears. It’s quite a long novel, the longest that Sayers had written up until that point. It begins with Harriet, holidaying on England’s South Coast, discovering a dead man lying on a large rock at the seaside; we don’t see Lord Peter until the fourth chapter. In the final chapter, Lord Peter — working with Harriet, but he’s the one who stitches together the evidence — discovers who murdered the man, and also how, why, and when they did it. The whole shebang. But he and Harriet are then told by the local police inspector that if he tells the story to the Chief Constable, the Chief Constable may very well not believe it, or, even if he does believe it, may think a conviction sufficiently unlikely that prosecution is not worth seeking. In response, Peter and Harriet give up the whole situation as hopeless and return to London. The End.

So we never learn whether the murderers are convicted. We don’t even learn whether they’re arrested. And what makes that a little more disconcerting is that the circumstances which led them to commit murder are still in place. The story centers on a man who feels that he will be cheated out of his inheritance, and drafts two others to help him kill the man he fears will get the money that’s rightfully his. But by the end of the story it’s strongly hinted that that another person could get the inheritance the murderer wants. So his motive for murder remains: if he’s not arrested and convicted we have no reason to believe that he won’t try again. If what readers want from a story is the restoration of a pre-murder innocence, or even some sense of justice imperfectly done, they’re not getting any of that from this novel.

Things are a little more complicated in The Nine Tailors (1934), because the great revelation in this case is that, while there is a dead man who gives every appearance of having been murdered, in fact he has not been. It is just possible that another man could have been accused of manslaughter in the case, or some other crime less serious than murder; but that man dies and therefore there’s nowhere for the story to go for resolution, at least the kind of resolution that Auden finds necessary. We are left with a feeling that the wheels of Justice have turned, that Nemesis has acted, and that the image or form of Nemesis is the bells of Fenchurch St. Paul; but all such matters are left to the imagination and the meditation of the reader. So we do, in a way, have the thing that Auden asked for, which is a restoration of of the moral order of the community. But it turns out that the moral order of this particular community was never actually disrupted in the way that it is when a member of a community is murdered by another member of the community.

And then in Gaudy Night (1935), once again, there is no murder. What we have at the end is the exposure of the person who is responsible for a good deal of illegal activity: vandalism, destruction of property, and at one point an attempted murder. (Also poison-pen letters, but while destructive of people’e peace of mind those may not be illegal — I’m not sure what British law was at that time.) When exposed, this person, far from regretting the attempted murder, declares that she wishes she could have murdered many people. But once more, Peter and Harriet at the end of a novel turn to their own personal interests, resolve the conflict that has kept them apart from each other. And what happens to the criminal is unknown: we are only told in the last chapter that “the problem is being medically dealt with,” which is frustratingly vague.

It’s frustrating primarily because, again, this person tried to commit murder and is only sorry that she failed. (The person she strangled was not the person she planned to strangle, but is among those she wishes to see dead.) So why is Sayers so reticent, or even evasive, on this key point?

One reason, I think is that the criminal is the mother of two young children, and it’s not at all clear what would become of those children if their mother were arrested and convicted of attempted murder. Saying that “the problem is being medically dealt with” is a way of preventing us from worrying too much about the kids. Sayers has other things she’s like for us to be thinking about, primarily the resolution of the complicated relationship between Peter and Harriet.

All this points to what I think is a serious problem with the construction of the plot. The criminal is obsessively concerned with the upbringing of her children — she thinks and talks constantly about them — but acts in ways that threaten to separate her from those children. She doesn’t think she’s going to be caught — criminals never think they’re going to be caught — but she knows that she could be caught, and if that happens then there’s a very good chance that she’ll never see her children again. She is to some extent irrational, but she’s not that irrational: for instance, she takes great pains to avoid being captured or identified. But she never ceases her campaign of hatred and violence; indeed she regularly escalates that campaign. Sayers never attempts to explain this radical incongruity. As I say, she’s interested in other things.

Sayers in her detective fiction is always interested in things other than the solution of the mystery. She often commented that her goal was to reconnect the tale of detection with the social novel, as she felt some of her 19th-century predecessors (especially Wilkie Colins) had done. In her novels she demonstrates a serious interest in the aftereffects of the Great War on returning soldiers, in the moral disorders of the aesthetic avant-garde, in the plight of the Superfluous Woman, in the sociology of women’s colleges, in the nature of good work, in the social consequences of modern advertising, in campanology and cryptography and cricket. And, of course, she was also interested in whether a highly intelligent and thoroughly independent woman can find happiness in marriage, and, if so, what a successful union might feel like, to both parties. The range of her curiosity is truly remarkable.

Now, those wide interests do not prevent her from working out her plots with great care. Except for The Five Red Herrings she didn’t do puzzle-novels in the vein of Freeman Wills Crofts and John Dickson Carr, but the details could be intricate, and she took pride in following, seriously if not always meticulously, the rules of the Detection Club, of which she was a founding member. It was just that her accountability to her fictional world ended, she thought, when she had provided a satisfactory solution to an appropriately challenging mystery. In writing Have His Carcase Sayers thought it necessary to have Lord Peter figure out whodunnit — who and how and why. But that’s where her responsibilities as a writer of mysteries ended.

It’s interesting, I believe, that this was also Harriet Vane’s view. In Busman’s Honeymoon we’re told that Harriet’s detective novels proceed thus:

Miss Harriet Vane, in those admirable detective novels with which she was accustomed to delight the hearts of murder-fans, usually made a point of finishing off on the top-note. Mr. Robert Templeton, that famous though eccentric sleuth, would unmask his murderer with a flourish of panache in the last chapter and retire promptly from the stage amid a thunder of applause, leaving somebody else to cope with the trivial details of putting the case together.

That very novel, Busman’s Honeymoon, though, carries the story right to the end of the total action: the execution of the murderer — as though to compensate for the abrupt conclusions of the other late novels. But if the community itself is in any way healed, we don’t learn about it. In its different way, this novel is as irresolute as its predecessors.

Sayers did not seem to think that she owed it to the society imagined her her books to provide the kind of restoration of moral order that Auden felt necessary. As her career as a novelist went on, she was less and less concerned to provide comfort and reassurance, and more and more eager to see the incursion of crime into a community as a kind of apocalypse, that is, an unveiling or revelation of the conflicts — social, psychological, moral, spiritual — that we generally do a good job of not seeing. Auden did not think that this was the kind of thing the true detective novel does well, or should even attempt to do, which is probably why he did not like her books. Your mileage, however, may vary. Mine certainly does.

May 26, 2025

when Auden was wrong

Anyone who has read much of my work knows how important W. H. Auden is to me, how much I love his poetry and revere him as a thinker. But as I am working on a biography of Dorothy L. Sayers I am reminded of something that I have often thought but never, until now, written: his famous essay on detective fiction, “The Guilty Vicarage,” is one of the worst things he ever wrote, and certainly the worst prominent essay he ever published. Let me count just some of the many ways.

One:

Greek tragedy and the detective story have one characteristic in common, in which they both differ from modern tragedy, namely, the characters are not changed in or by their actions: in Greek tragedy because their actions are fated, in the detective story because the decisive event, the murder, has already occurred.

How, exactly, does the occurence of the “decisive event” render it impossible for characters to be changed by their actions? The claim is evidently untrue: I can think of any number of detective novels in which one potentially defensible, or even accidental, killing leads to others, the killer becoming inured to murder or simply desperate.

Two:

The detective story requires … a closed society so that the possibility of an outside murderer (and hence of the society being totally innocent) is excluded; and a closely related society so that all its members are potentially suspect (cf. the thriller, which requires an open society in which any stranger may be a friend or enemy in disguise).

Obviously, only some detective stories meet this criterion, so he cannot mean what he says. Probably, then, he means that any truly excellent detective story must meet this criterion. But he then goes on to praise Sherlock Holmes as one of three and only three “completely satisfying detectives,” and the Holmes stories rarely meet the criterion announced. Indeed, the bustle and anonymity of London’s “open society” are often essential to the development of Conan Doyle’s plots. Are we to think that Holmes remains an ideal detective but maintains his ideality in stories that do not even meet Auden’s first requirement?

Three:

[The closed society] must appear to be an innocent society in a state of grace, i.e., a society where there is no need of the law, no contradiction between the aesthetic individual and the ethical universal, and where murder, therefore, is the unheard-of act which precipitates a crisis (for it reveals that some member has fallen and is no longer in a state of grace). The law becomes a reality and for a time all must live in its shadow, till the fallen one is identified. With his arrest, innocence is restored, and the law retires forever.

This too is absolute nonsense. In almost every detective story I can think of the society of the book, however peaceable it may appear, proves to be full of sins and crimes, jealousies and resentments, hatreds both rational and irrational. Indeed, if this were not the case then the story would lack multiple suspects: readers would be deprived of the pleasure of making their own guesses and the narrative would grow slack. Moreover, is there any imaginable society, no matter how small, in which the solving of one murder mystery would ensure the permanent retirement of the law? What is Auden even talking about here?

Four:

The characters in a detective story should, therefore, be eccentric (aesthetically interesting individuals) and good (instinctively ethical) — good, that is, either in appearance, later shown to be false, or in reality, first concealed by an appearance of bad.

Well, if they’re good only “in appearance” then they’re not good. They’re not ethical at all, much less “instinctively ethical,” whatever that means. (Is anyone since Adam and Eve, and maybe not even them, ever “instinctively ethical”? Must we not all learn?)

Five:

It is a sound instinct that has made so many detective-story writers choose a college as a setting. The ruling passion of the ideal professor is the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake so that he is related to other human beings only indirectly through their common relation to the truth; and those passions, like lust and avarice and envy, which relate individuals directly and may lead to murder are, in his case, ideally excluded. If a murder occurs in a college, therefore, it is a sign that some colleague is not only a bad man but also a bad professor. Further, as the basic premise of academic life is that truth is universal and to be shared with all, the gnosis of a concrete crime and the gnosis of abstract ideas nicely parallel and parody each other.

I have no idea what that last sentence means, but the previous ones are poppycock. There is absolutely no reason why a bad man must also be a bad professor. Indeed, in some university-based mysteries it is precisely the good professor — the one who not only knows his stuff but loves his students — who turns out to be the murderer. It would almost be malpractice on the part of the novelist not to make such a person the killer. And whatever passions are “ideally excluded” from Auden’s imagined college, none of them ever are in real life or in any collegiate mystery I know of. (This goes back to my earlier comment on Auden’s criteria for an ideal closed society.)

I could go on, but I think I’ve said enough. The essay is not wholly without merit — his comment on Raymond Chandler is a shrewd one: “whatever he may say, I think Mr. Chandler is interested in writing, not detective stories, but serious studies of a criminal milieu, the Great Wrong Place, and his powerful but extremely depressing books should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art” — but its merits are few and small, and its crimes against logic and evidence very great.

A reasonable question at this point is: Why? Why did Auden, who wrote so brilliantly about many things, write so badly here?

My answer is that when he wrote it he was not really thinking about detective stories, but about his own poem-in-progress, The Age of Anxiety — a poem in which our universal anxiety arises from unacknowledged guilt, the murder we cannot allow ourselves to realize that we have committed. (Who is the victim? Perhaps the very one whose loss we grieve: “Mourn for him now, / Our lost dad, / Our colossal father.”) It is noteworthy that Auden writes this about Rosetta, the only woman in the poem and the character most closely connected to him:

So she returned now to her favorite day-dream in which she indulged whenever she got a little high — which was rather too often — and conjured up, detail by detail, one of those landscapes familiar to all readers of English detective stories, those lovely innocent countrysides inhabited by charming eccentrics with independent means and amusing hobbies to whom, until the sudden intrusion of a horrid corpse onto the tennis court or into the greenhouse, work and law and guilt are just literary words.

“The Guilty Vicarage” was published in the May 1948 issue of Harper’s but had probably been written more than two years earlier: in a letter to T. S. Eliot on 30 January 1946 he said that he had just written a paper on detective fiction that he was going to read at a theological seminary. (I wish I knew which seminary, but I am guessing that it was Union.) At that time he was doing little else aside from his work on The Age of Anxiety — in the more than two years he devoted to it he wrote only one other poem — and my strong suspicion is that he wrote this essay only nominally about detective fiction: its real purpose was to analyze an existential condition that he believed was afflicting the entire Western world, and could be described analogically through a highly stylized picture of the typical Golden Age English murder mystery.

P.S.: Here is my introduction to The Age of Anxiety.

March 20, 2025

spirits of discouragement

N.B.: Spoilers for Gaudy Night ahead.

As legal obstacles to women’s full participation in British society were gradually removed in the latter third of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth — starting with the Married Women’s Property Act in 1870 (with subsequent revisions) and culminating in the Representation of the People Act in 1918 (with subsequent revisions) — certain forms of resistance remained, and primarily took the form of interruptions and discouragements.

So in the opening pages of A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf is thinking about her upcoming lectures on “women and fiction” while walking across the lawn of an ancient Cambridge college; her thinking is promising; she is drawing in a little fish of an idea; but then:

However small it was, it had, nevertheless, the mysterious property of its kind—put back into the mind, it became at once very exciting, and important; and as it darted and sank, and flashed hither and thither, set up such a wash and tumult of ideas that it was impossible to sit still. It was thus that I found myself walking with extreme rapidity across a grass plot. Instantly a man’s figure rose to intercept me. Nor did I at first understand that the gesticulations of a curious-looking object, in a cut-away coat and evening shirt, were aimed at me. His face expressed horror and indignation. Instinct rather than reason came to my help, he was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path. Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me. Such thoughts were the work of a moment. As I regained the path the arms of the Beadle sank, his face assumed its usual repose, and though turf is better walking than gravel, no very great harm was done. The only charge I could bring against the Fellows and Scholars of whatever the college might happen to be was that in protection of their turf, which has been rolled for 300 years in succession, they had sent my little fish into hiding.

One may consider the Beadle as a kind of personification of Resistance to women’s full freedom to participate in society as they wish.

Another such personification is Charles Tansley in To the Lighthouse, whose insistance that “Women can’t write, women can’t paint” is often in the mind of Lily Briscoe when she picks up her paintbrush. And in Woolf’s essay “Professions for Women” we get a voice from the other side of the division between the sexes, the Angel in the House — via Coventry Patmore — who is always telling Woolf to subordinate her own interests and energies to the service of the men in her life:

I will describe her as shortly as I can. She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it — in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all — I need not say it — she was pure. Her purity was supposed to be her chief beauty — her blushes, her great grace. In those days — the last of Queen Victoria — every house had its Angel. And when I came to write I encountered her with the very first words. The shadow of her wings fell on my page; I heard the rustling of her skirts in the room. Directly, that is to say, I took my pen in my hand to review that novel by a famous man, she slipped behind me and whispered: ‘My dear, you are a young woman. You are writing about a book that has been written by a man. Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure.’ And she made as if to guide my pen. I now record the one act for which I take some credit to myself, though the credit rightly belongs to some excellent ancestors of mine who left me a certain sum of money — shall we say five hundred pounds a year? — so that it was not necessary for me to depend solely on charm for my living. I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defence. Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing. For, as I found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot review even a novel without having a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex. And all these questions, according to the Angel of the House, cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women; they must charm, they must conciliate, they must — to put it bluntly — tell lies if they are to succeed. Thus, whenever I felt the shadow of her wing or the radiance of her halo upon my page, I took up the inkpot and flung it at her. She died hard. Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. She was always creeping back when I thought I had despatched her. Though I flatter myself that I killed her in the end, the struggle was severe; it took much time that had better have been spent upon learning Greek grammar; or in roaming the world in search of adventures. But it was a real experience; it was an experience that was bound to befall all women writers at that time. Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.

These varying personifications of dark forces, these imps of interruption and discouragement, seem less like human beings than … well, than like demons, that is, concentrations of malign power into individual form. The Beadle, for instance, is not a simple human being but rather an apparition: “a man’s figure rose to intercept me” — like a zombie rising from an open grave. It is Charles Tansley’s disembodied voice that whispers to Lily as she paints. The Angel in the House is a “phantom.” These personifications of resistance are not just bad but also eerie, spooky, uncanny.

Which brings us to Sayers’s Gaudy Night. Harriet Vane returns to her alma mater, Shrewsbury College, Oxford — an alternate-universe version of Sayers’ own college, Somerville — for a Gaudy, during which she reconnects with some old friends and former teachers. But something goes wrong.

Someone is pursuing an unpleasant campaign of insult, mockery, and threat — the threats being implicit at first, but later increasingly explicit. The overall message is this: Shrewsbury College is comprised of a bunch of dessicated old maids who hate men and (perhaps more to the point) are usurping the social place of men. Only the women who are married or engaged are spared the vitriol of the campaign, which escalates into vandalism and, eventually, attempted murder.

It is only at the novel’s end, of course, that we discover who’s behind the campaign of hate, and even though I noted above that there would be spoilers here, I am reluctant to say more. (Just go read the book, for heaven’s sake! It’s quite fascinating.) In any case, the point I want to emphasize here is that the women of the College come to call the perpetrator the Poltergeist. They don’t mean it literally, they know that it’s all being done by a person, but it’s noteworthy that they fall back on the language of supernatural agency — as though this is one more in a series of Interrupters and Discouragers who personify misogynistic forces. (“Poltergeist” is also a less threatening word than “Demon,” but that’s fitting in that it takes a very long time for the depth of the Poltergeist’s malice to be revealed.) In each case the enmity feels not like something human but rather something precipitated from the ambient hostility to women’s equality.

And I think that’s true in an especially uncanny way in Gaudy Night because the person responsible seems to know some odd things. For instance, the Poltergeist tears some pages out of a novel — this novel — and once we know the identity of the culprit … well, a knowledge of those pages in that book seems highly unlikely in this person. It’s as though the Poltergeist is absorbing and then emitting information from that ambient hostility. It’s a kind of ideological respiration perhaps.

It strikes me that this is a pretty accurate way of describing how feelings, especially hatreds, circulate in society. It was to try to describe that phenomenon that I wrote this essay.

March 5, 2025

words, words, words

I’ve read several detective novels by Freeman Wills Crofts, and my one most constant thought is: He is an utterly inept writer. His style only occasionally rises to the level of woodenness, and is usually sub-wooden. Like charcoal, maybe: dry and brittle, no longer alive, an ex-style.

Here’s a typical passage, from Antidote to Venom (1936):

His thoughts swung round into a familiar channel. If only his old aunt would die and leave him her money! She was well-to do, was Miss Lucy Pentland, not exactly wealthy, but obviously with a comfortable little fortune enough, and she had on more than one occasion told him that he would be her heir. Moreover, she was in poor health. In the nature of things she could not last very much longer. If only she would die!

Surridge pulled himself up, slightly ashamed of himself. He did not of course wish the old lady any harm. Quite the reverse. But really, when people reached a certain age their usefulness was over. And in his opinion she had reached and passed that stage. She could not enjoy her life. If she were to die, what a difference it would make to him!

Next chapter:

Then there was his aunt’s legacy. He did not know what she was worth, but it must be several thousand: say seven or eight thousand at the most moderate estimate. And at her death he would get most of it — she had told him so. What, he wondered, would his share amount to? After death duties were deducted and one or two small legacies to servants were paid, there should be at least five thousand over. Five thousand! What could he not do with five thousand? Not only would it clear him of debt, but he could get that blessed car for Clarissa as well as several other things she wanted. They could take a really decent holiday; she had friends in California whom she wished to see, and for professional reasons he had always wanted to visit South Africa. In countless ways the friction and strain would be taken from his home life. And all this he would get if only the old lady were to die! Last night she had looked particularly ill; pale like parchment and more feeble and depressed than he ever remembered having seen her. Again he told himself that he didn’t wish her harm, but it was folly not to recognise facts. Her death was the one thing that would set him on his feet.

Later:

With growing frequency his thoughts turned towards his aunt, Lucy Pentland. If only he could get that money that was coming to him, not at some time in the distant future, but now! Not only would it remove this ghastly financial worry, but it would mean greater safety in every way. With more money he and Nancy could take better precautions.

She could give up that wretched job of hers and go and live in decent surroundings in some place in which he could visit her. A tiny cottage somewhere with a garden and roses on the porch! He grew almost sick with desire as he thought of it. And it might become a possibility — if Lucy Pentland were to die.

We get it! He wants his aunt to die! Enough already! And there are five or six more passages just like this. You can almost see Crofts bent over his desk, gripping his pen fiercely, muttering to himself Must … make .. motivation … clear. And he does, with one calcified stock phrase after another.

But of course what Crofts is famous for is the mechanics of plot — and in this novel the means of one death is so arcane and intricate that we need not only a map (of a zoo, as it happens) but also a detailed diagram of the device employed:

In other news, Fang Apparatus is the name of my new band.

Speaking of bands, and bear with me as I develop this comparison, but in a way Crofts reminds me of Roger Waters. Waters has said that in Pink Floyd he and Nick Mason were the group’s architects while David Gilmour and Richard Wright were the musicians. Sometimes when he tells this story he complains that Gilmour and Wright looked down on him; other times he insists that the architects are the real bosses because you can always hire musicians — they lie thick on the ground, but an architect is a rara avis. (Waters actually studied architecture before turning to music.)

Crofts too is an architect, and puts all his best energies into construction. He couldn’t be bothered with the music of language, with wit, with nuances of character; he didn’t see those as essential to success in writing a detective story. Even though Crofts was a religious man, when he brings a religious theme into Antidote to Venom he treats it as quickly and cursorily as possible; he seems embarrassed to have brought it up.

Me, I’m a music guy, in fiction and actual music alike. If I had to choose between Waters/Mason and Gilmour/Wright, I’m taking the latter pair every time: their contributions to the Floyd seem to me to dwarf those of Waters, who, given his freedom, inevitably sank into dreary pretentiousness and tub-thumping. If he had been a novelist, he’d have written over and over and over, “If only she would die!”

February 17, 2025

Miss Climpson

One of the more interesting secondary characters in the Wimsey novels of Dorothy L. Sayers is Miss Climpson — more fully, Alexandra Katherine Climpson, as she is called when we first meet her in Unnatural Death (1927). By Strong Poison (1930) she is known as Katharine Climpson (note the altered spelling as well as the absence of Alexandra). The change is a mystery I cannot solve, but Sayers — who wrote a whole essay explaining why Dr. Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories is usually called John but sometimes James — would probably like to see me try.

Back to Unnatural Death: we meet Miss Climpson when Lord Peter brings his policeman friend Charles Parker to her apartment, slyly encouraging Charles to think that he’s paying a visit to a kept woman of his:

The door was opened by a thin, middle-aged woman, with a sharp, sallow face and very vivacious manner. She wore a neat, dark coat and skirt, a high-necked blouse and a long gold neck-chain with a variety of small ornaments dangling from it at intervals, and her iron-grey hair was dressed under a net, in the style fashionable in the reign of the late King Edward.

Let’s pause for a moment to organize time. The novel’s setting is contemporary: we can be certain of this because it ends with a glimpse of the total solar eclipse of 29 June 1927. We know from other books in the series that Lord Peter was born in 1890, so that makes him 37. The “reign of the late King Edward” was 1901–1910. People who stop updating their style of dress usually do so (in my experience) when they’re around thirty, so while the adjective “middle-aged” is a vague one, I think with this hint about clothing and the presence of the “iron-grey hair” we can safely place Miss Climpson in her mid-fifties. (No younger, I think: in Strong Poison she’s referred to as “elderly.”)

Let us also add — this information will soon be useful — that when this novel was published Sayers herself was 34, and Harriet Vane — her most important female character, whom we will not meet for a while — is 24, and fairly recently graduated from Oxford University.

Now, back to Miss Climpson. After Lord Peter enjoys his joke on Inspector Parker and they depart, Parker wants a proper explanation and gets one:

“Miss Climpson,” said Lord Peter, “is a manifestation of the wasteful way in which this country is run. Look at electricity. Look at water-power. Look at the tides. Look at the sun. Millions of power units being given off into space every minute. Thousands of old maids, simply bursting with useful energy, forced by our stupid social system into hydros and hotels and communities and hostels and posts as companions, where their magnificent gossip-powers and units of inquisitiveness are allowed to dissipate themselves or even become harmful to the community, while the ratepayers’ money is spent on getting work for which these women are providentially fitted, inefficiently carried out by ill-equipped policemen like you….

“She is my ears and tongue,” said Lord Peter, dramatically, “and especially my nose. She asks questions which a young man could not put without a blush. She is the angel that rushes in where fools get a clump on the head. She can smell a rat in the dark. In fact, she is the cat’s whiskers…. People want questions asked. Whom do they send? A man with large flat feet and a note-book — the sort of man whose private life is conducted in a series of inarticulate grunts. I send a lady with a long, woolly jumper on knitting-needles and jingly things round her neck. Of course she asks questions — everyone expects it. Nobody is surprised. Nobody is alarmed.

Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple — many readers will already have her in mind — makes much the same point in A Murder Is Announced (1951):

“We old women always do snoop. It would be very odd and much more noticeable if I didn’t. Questions about mutual friends in different parts of the world and whether they remember so and so, and do they remember who it was that Lady Somebody’s daughter married? All that helps, doesn’t it?”

“Helps?” said the Inspector, rather stupidly.

“Helps to find out if people are who they say they are,” said Miss Marple.

People have often assumed that Miss Climpson is a Marple knock-off, but she isn’t: Unnatural Death appeared in October 1927, and Miss Marple first appeared in December of that year, in a story called “The Tuesday Night Club.” The first Marple novel is The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930. Neither writer copied the other, I am sure. But I don’t think that the appearance of the two characters at the same time is an accident. The emergence of the Modern Girl in the 1920s (successor to the New Woman) must have set people of Christie’s and Sayers’ generation — Christie was three years older than Sayers — thinking about how dramatically the potential roles for women had changed in their lifetime. They were too old to be Modern Girls, though they had been in some sense New Women, and as such had had opportunities that were unthinkable for women of the generation before them — except in the rare cases of heroic trailblazers like Jane Harrison and Mildred Pope, who simply created opportunities that had previously been nonexistent and thereby changed the world for the generations of women to come after them.

Moreover, the horrific death-toll of the Great War left several European societies with more marriageable women than men to marry them — thus creating the phenomenon of the “Superfluous Woman,” about whom Vera Brittain — someone I think of as a kind of double or mirror image of Sayers — wrote a moving poem. (Brittain did end up marrying and having children, one of whom was Shirley Williams, a co-founder of the Social Democratic Party.)

You get the sense that Miss Climpson — who is, generally speaking, of Mildred Pope’s generation — did not have that scholar’s great gifts, including the gift of an almost supernatural determination. Writing about a woman who had been born in the 1850s, around the time of Jane Harrison, Miss Climpson is full of admiration. (I pause here to note that Miss Climpson’s writing style is modeled on that of Queen Victoria, with so many underlinings and other instruments of emphasis that, as Lord Peter says, it looks like musical notation.)

It seems that, until five years ago, Miss Dawson lived in Warwickshire with her cousin, a Miss Clara Whittaker, Mary Whittaker’s great-aunt on the father’s side. This Miss Clara was evidently rather a ’character,’ as my dear father used to call it. In her day she was considered very ‘advanced’ and not quite nice(!) because she refused several good offers, cut her hair SHORT(!!) and set up in business for herself as a HORSE-BREEDER!!! Of course, nowadays, nobody would think anything of it, but then the old lady — or young lady as she was when she embarked on this revolutionary proceeding, was quite a PIONEER.

Miss Clara refuses to marry and instead lives with her closest friend, perhaps because she is a lesbian — “Lesbianism in Sayers” is a topic for another post — but it’s equally possible, I think, that her romantic feelings simply are not as strong as her desire for independence. When Miss Clara (born in 1850) was a young woman the first Married Women’s Property Act had been passed, but that would not have been enough to protect her from a husband who insisted on domination and control. And though Miss Climpson does not share this strong independent streak, and would herself have wanted to marry — Sayers says of her that she is “a spinster made and not born” — she nevertheless clearly admires the willpower and resourcefulness of Miss Clara.

It seems likely to me that Sayers in creating Miss Climpson and Christie in creating Miss Marple were, among many other things, thinking about what they might have been had they been born fifteen or twenty years earlier. Sayers in particular might not have been a “pioneer,” but was quick to claim the benefits that her academic pioneers had been able to secure for her. Perhaps, though, I shouldn’t say “secure”: because of the pioneers, Sayers was able to attend Somerville College, but Oxford was yet to grant degrees to Somervillians. She finished her studies in 1915 — with a First of course: she was quite a brilliant scholar, something too often forgotten — but could not receive her degree until five years later, when Oxford finally began recognizing the validity of its female students’ academic work. Harriet Vane, Sayers’s second-most-famous fictional creation, ten years younger than the author, would have finished at Shrewsbury College (a thinly fictionalized version of Somerville) around 1925 and taken her B.A. as a matter of course.

She would not, however, have been eligible to vote, nor would Sayers, though Miss Climpson and Mildred Pope would have had that right. Not until 1928 would all of them have had the franchise.

Had Sayers been the age of Miss Climpson, she almost certainly would not have attended university, would not have become a scholar and writer; had she been the age of Harriet Vane, she would have been faced with the opportunity to become a Modern Girl — something Harriet definitely isn’t, by the way. (Lord Peter’s um-friend Marjorie Phelps, whom we also see in multiple novels, is much closer to that type — which I think is why Lord Peter doesn’t marry her.) Decade by decade the status of women in British society was changing, and changing in multiple ways; the experience had to have been dizzying. We can see Sayers constantly reckoning with it in her fiction, and Christie too, though (I think) in less forthright and dramatic ways. Christie usually keeps the social commentary well in the background, except in her Mary Westmacott novels — Sayers firmly plants it front and center.

February 13, 2025

true crime

In a recent post, I offered one reason why the detective story exploded into prominence when it did. But there are others.

Let’s set the stage first. In their witty, sardonic, and often insightful history of the years between the wars, The Long Week-End, Robert Graves and Alan Hodge say that when the Great War ended “Sherlock Holmes stood alone,” that is, there were no other prominent detective series — an exaggeration, but a pardonable one. Sexton Blake stories were being cranked out at a fearsome rate; Austin Freeman was making a name for himself; and Chesterton’s Father Brown was loved by a significant subset of readers. (One could add the shockingly prolific Edgar Wallace to this list, but most of his novels were thrillers of one kind or another rather than tales of detection as such.) But no detective commanded the universal public attention like Holmes, and there was no sign of the Boom that was quickly to come.

A decade later, Graves and Hodge note, popular reading was utterly dominated by the detective story. The addictiveness of the genre was widely noted, never more wittily than in Wodehouse’s 1931 story “Strychnine in the Soup,” which introduces us to such famous novels as Gore By the Gallon, Blood on the Banisters, and Severed Throats. Not only did it seem that everyone was reading detective stories, everyone was writing them. Poets like C. Day-Lewis (writing as Nicholas Blake) and academics like J. I. M. Stewart (writing as Michael Innes) got in on the game, and T. S. Eliot regularly reviewed detective stories in the Criterion. When Graves started work on I, Claudius he reflected that the British public loved “reading about murders, so I was careful not to leave out any of the six or seven I could tell about.”

Things moved quickly: Agatha Christie had written The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1916, but it was not published until 1920, the date usually fixed for the beginning of the Boom. In the same year Freeman Wills Crofts published The Cask; then came A. A. Milne’s The Red House (1922), Dorothy L. Sayers’s Whose Body (written in 1921, published in 1923), and an ever-growing host of others.

How, and why, did this happen? In that recent post I described what I thought was one essential precondition, but the precondition was in place long before the boom occurred. It’s impossible to prove this point, but it seems to me likely that in the aftermath of the bloodiest war in human history, it was psychologically useful to make violent death ordinary again: to reduce its scope to the comprehensible. Killing could not be denied, but perhaps it could be to some extent controlled, or anyway retributed, through the workings of a generally honest and occasionally competent system of criminal investigation and punishment.

So we have in place a general social precondition for the rising popularity of the genre of detective fiction, and a widely shared psychological need that it fulfilled. But there was, I think, one more factor. If the British public liked reading about murders, as Graves said, that didn’t necessarily mean fictional murders. And I don’t think that the great Golden Age writers of detective fiction got their inspiration primarily from Conan Doyle or Chesterton, but rather from true crime stories they read about in the newspapers.

In her fine book The Invention of Murder, Judith Flanders writes about how modern police procedures arose in tandem with a series of highly-publicized Victorian murderers: Jack the Ripper of course, but also Dr. Pritchard, Henry Wainwright, and, early in the century but famous throughout it, Burke and Hare. It’s hard to overstate how compelling these criminals and their foul deeds continued to be well into the twentieth century: in Dorothy L. Sayers’s first novel, Whose Body? (1923), there’s a significant mention of the Adolf Beck case, and her third, Unnatural Death (1927), begins with Lord Peter Wimsey offering his opinion on why Pritchard got caught.

And of course these cases continued past the Victorian era: at the time that the Boom began, the most talked-about case for the previous decade had been that of Dr. Crippen. But a new one would come to dominate the news just as the Boom was really getting under way: the Thompson-Bywaters case of 1922 — the execution of Edith Thompson in January 1923 being perhaps the most controversial event in the history of British murders. And as the genre grew, the murders kept coming: in 1931 the murder of Julia Wallace, in 1934 the Brighton Trunk Murders. The Wallace killing alone has prompted dozens of fictional retellings and even more attempts at guessing the identity of the murderer, and there has never been a more brilliantly written true-crime story than Sayers’s essay on the many puzzles surrounding that murder — it should be much more widely read than it is, but it’s not easy to find.

Indeed, as Martin Edwards has pointed out, Sayers is the Golden Age writer most openly influenced by real-life murder cases — but then, she was always one to show her work, that is, to wear her influences proudly on her sleeve. Many other stories of detection, or crime novels more generally, are strongly based on real cases — one of the most famous, and effective, of these being Ernest Raymond’s revisiting of the Crippen case from the perspective of the murderer(s), We, the Accused (1935).

These famous crimes kept getting re-described by novelists quite closely, or more loosely, because people just couldn’t commit interesting and puzzling murders fast enough to sate the public’s appetite for tales of violence; and that, I think, is the single most important cause of the Boom in tales of detection.

N.B. Just after posting this I realized that I have already done a version of it. Duh. But I’m working through these issues now in more detail.

February 10, 2025

the integrity of the system

Dorothy L. Sayers, once she had established herself as a writer of detection, was asked to edit an anthology of, roughly, her kind of fiction. In the end she edited several such volumes, but the first, largest, and best of them was published in 1928 as Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror. (The following year it was published in the U.S. with the much less accurate title The Omnibus of Crime.)

In her highly illuminating introduction to the anthology, Sayers argues that in one form or another tales of detection and tales of horror are quite ancient. The latter point might seem more obviously true, but Sayers makes a strong case that we see the essential lineaments of the tale of detection in, for example, the addition to the biblical book of Daniel in which the young prophet-to-be conducts a shrewd examination of the old men who have accused beautiful Susannah of illicit sex, revealing that their testimonies are inconsistent with each other and utterly false. (Daniel does what later became standard police procedure: he interviews the two likely conspirators separately, so neither can know what the other says.) Similarly, about Aesop’s fable in which the fox refuses to enter the lion’s cave to pay respects to the King of the Beasts because he sees many hoof-prints going into the cave but none coming back out, Sayers says: “Sherlock Holmes could not have reasoned more lucidly from the premises.”

People often use the terms “detective” story and “mystery” interchangeably, but Sayers prefers to distinguish the two; and the kind of story she calls a “mystery” is one that fuses horror and detection. This fusion, she claims, begins with Poe, most obviously in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” She finds especially appealing stories that begin in an atmosphere of supernatural horror but end with that horror dispelled by the light of reason: e.g. Conan Dolye’s “Adventure of the Specked Band” or Chesterton’s “The Hammer of God.” (N.B.: Full enjoyment of the latter story might be available only to those whose ignorance of the laws of physics equals that of GKC.) She herself wrote no novels that fit this description, though The Nine Tailors verges on it: we are left with a completely material, this-worldly solution to the key mystery, but the possibility remains that there were other forces at work. “Bells are like cats and mirrors,” Lord Peter says, “ — they’re always queer, and it doesn’t do to think too much about them.”

Concerning the tale of detection proper, Sayers muses on a curious fact: Why, if there are such ancient examples of such tales, did the genre not really take root and grow expansively until the second half of the nineteenth century? Drawing on the work of what she rightly calls “a brilliant little study” by a scholar rejoicing in the name of E. M. Wrong, she makes a fascinating suggestion: that while stories about crime always have flourished and always will flourish, stories of detection depend on the reader’s confidence in the basic integrity of the forces of law and order. That is, detective stories depend on the reader’s essential sympathy with the Law rather than the criminal — the reader must want the criminal to be caught.

This does not mean that the reader is expected to have any real confidence in the competence of the police — unless, of course, the protagonist is himself or herself a police officer, in which case we typically see an honest and skillful investigator thwarted or at least impeded by corruption or incompetence in the higher ranks. (This is a problem often faced by Maigret and Morse, and sometimes Dalgleish.) When the detective-protagonist is not a police officer, most famously in the case of Sherlock Holmes, we expect that the police will be none too intelligent and, whether they realize it or not, in desperate need of Holmes’s help. But we never for a moment imagine that Lestrade or Athelney Jones is corrupt. The police often make mistakes: they obsess over meaningless clues, overlook essential clues, misinterpret all the clues, grow irrationally stubborn, and arrest the wrong people (Harriet Vane, for instance, in Sayers’s Strong Poison) — but their mistakes are typically honest mistakes and we do not feel that, in Sayers’s words, “the law is arbitrary, oppressive, and brutally administered.” Otherwise we might prefer that a criminal, even a serious criminal, get away with it.

A basic trust in the integrity of the legal system arises, it seems to me, in Great Britain before it arises anywhere else. Again: integrity, not competence. I think George Orwell made a shrewd point when he wrote, in 1941, during the Blitz,

In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions. The belief in them influences conduct, national life is different because of them. In proof of which, look about you. Where are the rubber truncheons, where is the castor oil? The sword is still in the scabbard, and while it stays there corruption cannot go beyond a certain point. The English electoral system, for instance, is an all but open fraud. In a dozen obvious ways it is gerrymandered in the interest of the moneyed class. But until some deep change has occurred in the public mind, it cannot become completely corrupt. You do not arrive at the polling booth to find men with revolvers telling you which way to vote, nor are the votes miscounted, nor is there any direct bribery. Even hypocrisy is a powerful safeguard. The hanging judge, that evil old man in scarlet robe and horse-hair wig, whom nothing short of dynamite will ever teach what century he is living in, but who will at any rate interpret the law according to the books and will in no circumstances take a money bribe, is one of the symbolic figures of England. He is a symbol of the strange mixture of reality and illusion, democracy and privilege, humbug and decency, the subtle network of compromises, by which the nation keeps itself in its familiar shape.

There are many powerful critiques to be made of the British political and legal system, and at one time or another Orwell makes most of them, but his own scrupulous honesty prevents him from making the cheapest ones. (The process by which those cheapest critiques could eventually prove to be correct is, of course, the great theme of both Animal Farm and 1984.)

This point leads us back to Sayers, who writes: “The detective-story had to wait for its full development for the establishment of an effective police organisation in the Anglo-Saxon countries.” This is generally true, but American detective fiction does not always fit the bill: the melancholy mood that often dominates Raymond Chandler’s stories — Farewell, My Lovely is perhaps the best example — arises from Philip Marlowe’s determination to be an honest private investigator when the police are commonly, if not universally, corrupt. (And the ones who are honest have to turn a blind eye to their colleagues’ behavior if they want to keep their jobs. In Farewell, My Lovely we see two cops who go along to get along and one who confronts corruption and gets himself fired. Chandler probably thought that the actual proportion was closer to ten-to-one than two-to-one, but you can only introduce so many character in one novel.) This is a theme in Ross Macdonald’s novels as well, and we all know the sentence that best encapsulates the defeated acknowledgement of How Things Are: “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”

So if the detective story depended on the readers’ confidence in the integrity of the System, what happens when that confidence evaporates? Obviously a return to crime fiction: from the uprightness of Poirot and Lord Peter and even Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade, we move to the morally sloppy, thoroughly compromised, just barely more-slimed-than-sliming porotagonists of Elmore Leonard’s novels; or Danny Ocean and his crew. Perhaps that’s why the most popular detective stories are those of the Golden Age, which provide an opportunity for us to enter a more innocent time than ours, more innocent in multiple respects, one in which we’re not openly rooting for thieves and murderers.

July 19, 2024

the rise of detective fiction

In The Long Week-End, their entertaining, sardonic, and often insightful social history of England between the two world wars, Robert Graves and Alan Hodge assert that in the years immediately following the Great War, “Detective-novel writing was not yet an industry; Sherlock Holmes stood alone.” (That comment, like this post, refers only to the British situation; the American situation was quite different.)

This is perhaps a bit of an exaggeration. Historians like Graves and Hodge tend to ignore the Sexton Blake stories, presumably on the grounds that they were mass-produced, by multiple authors who worked from simplistic templates, and were aimed primarily at younger audiences. But they were extraordinarily popular and it seems that almost everyone read at least some of them. (When Dorothy L. Sayers was ill at school — the Godolphin School in Salisbury — she wrote to her parents to ask them to send her some Sexton Blakes.) And then, on what one presumes G&H would have thought a higher level of literary ambition, there were the Father Brown stories — but Chesterton, having written a pile of them between 1910 and 1914, did not write another until 1923.

Meanwhile, the Sherlock Holmes wagon continued to roll, though with a pause (as many things paused) in the war years, during which Conan Doyle published only one Holmes story, “His Last Bow,” which was an exercise in patriotism and, moreover, a spy story rather than a tale of detection. But Conan Doyle would, with great reluctance and annoyance, resume Dr. Watson’s accounts of Holmes’s adventures in 1921.

Two other data points should be introduced here. First, the publication in 1913 of what would become one of the most influential novels of detection ever written, E. C. Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case. And second, the 1910 trial and conviction of Dr. Crippen, which renewed interest in what we now call True Crime.

If you look at these matters from the perspective of the year 1914, here’s what I think you see:

the Sexton Blake stories rolling ever onward, but according to a fixed formula;
the Holmes stories continuing but more slowly, and at a far lower standard than Conan Doyle had established in the 1880s and 1890s;
an interesting experiment in a type of detective radically different than Holmes (Father Brown), which appeared to be complete;
another interesting experiment, this one a playful questioning of the plot conventions of the tale of detection (Trent’s Last Case);
a renewal of interest in True Crime.

So the future of tales of detection did not appear to be bright, and there was no reason to think that it would become a central genre of fiction.

Then the War came, and such topics were placed, not on the back burner but off the stove altogether. It was difficult, or embarrassing, or just plain shameful to think about a domestic murder or a crime of passion or a killing for money when the greatest slaughter in the history of humanity was ongoing. One could easily imagine that period marking the end of the detective story as a popular genre of fiction.

When the War ended, though, it became possible and indeed desirable to think about such matters again. It was presumably a kind of relief to be able, once more, to consider malice and death on a human scale — death as a tragedy and a misery but not an unimaginably vast horror. So Conan Doyle resumed his Holmes stories with “The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone” in 1921, and Chesterton his tales of Father Brown with (I think) “The Resurrection of Father Brown” in 1923. But even more to the point:

Agatha Christie published her first mystery novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, in 1920;
Freeman Wills Crofts published his first, and by far most influential, mystery novel, The Cask, also in 1920;
Dorothy L. Sayers wrote her first detective novel, Whose Body?, in 1921, though it was not published until 1923;
The Thompson-Bywaters trial was held in 1922, and after the execution of the convicted murderers in January of 1923, their story became a matter of extravagant public fascination for a very long time.

And so we were off to the races. The Golden Age of detective fiction — influenced at least as much by True Crime as by previous stories and novels — had begun. And I cannot help thinking that it was shaped, then and later, by the great shadow of Death hanging over Europe in the aftermath of the Great War.

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