Having read my fair share of craft books, several of them devoted to the mystery genre, I wasn’t sure how much new advice P. D. James’ classic would offer. So I was surprised to find that in eight succinct and highly readable chapters James adumbrates the history of the genre and its challenges as well as forecasts its future.
- What Are We Talking about and How Did It All Begin?
First off, James tackles why we–specifically English-language readers–are so fascinated with murder. Death, in general, is not a unique feature of mystery novels, and she uses E. M. Forester to make her point, quoting his classic craft book, Aspects of the Novel: ” ‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot” (4). That being said, there are characteristics and conventions that set detective fiction apart from literary stories and from the gothic tales of horror it developed alongside. While the stories lambasted as sensational included paranormal horror, the terrors of this new genre were purely rational, as was their antidote. Not long after Wilkie Collins published Moonstone, a British physician brought together elements from numerous writers of the nascent genre to create an eccentric, cocain-abusing, violinist who quickly became an archetype for the detective hero.
2. The Tenant of 221B Baker Street and the Parish Priest from Cobhold in Essex
Though different in their methods, Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown stood as two archetypes for the detective hero. The magician-like deductive powers of Holmes are a quick signifier for any writer wanting to demonstrate the powers of their detective hero. His personality, too, is central. As James puts it in a later chapter, “Would anyone…create a fictional detective who enjoys his work, gets on well with his colleagues, [and] is happily married…I doubt whether readers would find him wholly credible” (191-92).
Just as Holmes uses his extensive knowledge of science, crime, and the world to deduce physical clues, Father Brown uses his knowledge of the human soul to deduce motive and understand the criminal’s psychology. “Has it never struck you that a man who does next to nothing but hear men’s real sins is not likely to be wholly unaware of human evil?” he asks master thief Flambeau in “The Blue Cross” (44). Thanks to his background, Father Brown is able to explore not just the scientific methods of crime detection but also the nature of evil, both in the hearts of the criminals he foils and the social conditions in England that help create them.
In “The Invisible Man,” Chesterton demonstrates the depths the genre can plumb when Father Browns walks for hours under the stars, one-on-one with a murderer. Chesterton doesn’t tells us what they discuss, but James states, “Whatever was spoken, it has little or nothing to do with the criminal justice system” (47).
3. The Golden Age
From Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple to Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Whimsey and Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion, the years between the first and second world war burgeoned with masterful puzzle solvers, but most didn’t survive long after the Golden Age.
Some authors strove to uphold the rules laid down by Ronald Knox. However, as “rules and restrictions do not produce original, or good, literature,” (57) the best didn’t follow them strictly or flouted them entirely. While these formulaic constructions plagued the genre as a whole, so did innovation. “Writers vied with each other in their search for an original method of murder and for clues of increasing ingenuity and complexity” (74). The mad rush for new methods had to burn itself out eventually. Luckily, this didn’t mean the death of the detective. Instead a new model for the detective hero arose in the works being penned across the Atlantic.
4. Soft-centered and Hard-boiled
While the Golden Age authors were imaging crimes in their studies, Dashiell Hammett was actively investigating them. After working as a Pinkerton detective and serving as a soldier in WWI, Hammett set to work writing stories for the American pulp magazines. “The editors demanded violent action, vividly portrayed characters and a prose style ruthlessly pruned of all inessentials; all this Hammett provided,” James writes. The hard-boiled detective story was the antithesis of the Golden Age one. What Christie left off stage (the body, the blood, the wrath) took center stage in Hammett’s work.
British author Raymond Chandler, though lacking the lived experience, took to the tradition with the enthusiasm of a convert. He abhorred the English school of crime, but in his detective, Philip Marlowe, we can’t help but see the influence of that school as he writes “in prose that is terse but richly descriptive and larded with wise cracks” (88). Though he adopts the persona of a west coast tough guy, behind the mask remains a highly educated English gentleman.
5. Four Formidable Women
While much of the Golden Age has receded to the shelves of used book stores and personal collections, four women remain relevant. Why?
Christie’s style “is neither original nor elegant” but her universal appeal and the fact that her books are “outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare” (95) reserves her a special status that transcends both the Golden Age and the genre as a whole. Dorothy L. Sayers can be “outrageously snobbish, intellectually arrogant, pretentious and occasionally dull” (106) but her literary instincts helped elevate the sub-literary puzzle into a “specialized branch of fiction.” Rather than focus on ingenuity, Sayers imbued her novels with realism and credibility. Margery Allingham continued this by “concentrating more on character and milieu than on mystery” (113). However, it is Ngaio Marsh who takes the cake, at least for James. Because of her elegant prose and rich characterization, “there was always a dichotomy between her talent and the genre she chose” (123). A reserved and private person, Marsh perhaps felt that “to extend the scope of her talent would be to betray aspects of her personality which she profoundly wished to remain secret” (124). If this is true, we can see the mystery genre as refuge for writers unwilling to bear their souls to world but still wishing the create something beautiful and entertaining. The world may never know.
6. Telling the Story: Setting, Viewpoint, People
As the poet W. H. Auden illustrates in his well-known essay “The Guilty Vicarage,” setting is of prime importance to the detective novel. “The corpse must shock not only because it is a corpse but also because even for a corpse, it is shockingly out of place, as when a dog makes a mess on a drawing-room carpet” (134). While it may seem arbitrary, choosing the right setting is essential. “We have only to think of Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, of the dark and sinister mansion set in the middle of the fog-shrouded moor, to appreciate how important setting can be to the establishment of atmosphere” (133). Too, it can reveal character. Think of the details revealed by the home of the victim–or of the detective. Over time 221B Baker Street became as essential to Holmes as his deerstalker hat, Poirot’s stark London flat as memorable as his little grey cells.
7. Critics and Aficionados
“Despite prognostications that the detective story…is already outworn and doomed to die, it remains obstinately alive,” James declares. While such critics as Edmund Wilson have blasted the genre since the early days, readers remain unconvinced. Whether it is as Auden suggests an escape from “the discomfort of an unrecognized guilt” (170) or as the Freudian critics argue an addiction brought on by “an unconscious hysteric-passive tension” (171), the fact remains that readers choose mystery ahead of all genres save romance. We are drawn to the “satisfaction [of] solving the mystery [although why] differs with the individual reader” (173). For some it is the puzzle, others the clues, but all find reassurance and relief from the cares of life in a well-crafted mystery.
8. Today and a Glimpse of Tomorrow
Some distinguishing factors of contemporary detective fiction include a reliance on forensics, the involvement of law enforcement, a preference for professional detectives, and a broader international relevance. Does the future just hold more of the same?
“I see the detective story becoming more firmly rooted in the reality and the uncertainties of the twenty-first century, while still providing that central certainty that even the most intractable problems will in the end be subject to reason” (193). In other words, while the new mystery novel will not assert the preeminence of its society’s moral code, which today is far from a monolith in any society, it will still champion reason’s ability to discover the unknown.
The world is an ever-changing landscape, its people and cultures morphing and adapting with each new generation, but the principles of detection, with their reliance on scientific methods and logical deductions, won’t be changing anytime soon. This means, too, that even though new methods of dispatching a victim may be exhausted, that does not mean the genre has become irrelevant, nor that it has run out of things to say about crime, human nature, or the societies that shape both.
Steven J Kolbe 