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.