Chapter One – The Detective Novel
Typically, detective fiction tells the story of one man’s quest for truth, if not justice. Stereotypically, the fictional detective tells his own story, that of a lone wolf who lays down the law of the jungle as he roams the mean streets of an urban waste land in search of redemption for our sins, a good man who all too often does the wrong thing, but always for the right reason. Through the lens of this ‘private eye’ the author of such a novel lets us look at what goes on when the lights go out. He, for he too is typically a man, lets an outsider do what the police can or will not do when he looks into private indecencies of public interest. Not only does this furnish him with a narrative strategy, it also lets us see the public’s indifference to the private indignities which often attend the exposure of perceived indecencies, and that soon forms our shared resolve to find a way through the thicket of clues and conspiracies. Of course, time and again the alpha male investigator loses said way among loose women and looser plots. He will even lose consciousness, repeatedly, and at times he will risk losing the powers of both consecutive thought and plot continuity. And yet he loses neither his courage nor our confidence. On the contrary, he gradually wins our trust as a professional with principles, the last of the good guys, and in the end this knight errant finds his grail, often tarnished yet always transformative. So much for the stereotypical detective novel. Yet beyond this stereotype, detective fiction has long been notable for a number of serious literary merits, including the wide held belief that the first form of crime fiction was a detective story. Seeing as that would make detective fiction the starting point of a diverse literary heritage that has spanned some 180 years, a good starting point for this chapter may be 1833 and “Théorie de la Démarche”, “The Theory of the Walk”. According to its author, Honoré de Balzac, this essay paved the way for a new investigative technique by expanding ground-level sociological observation with wide-angled metaphysical insight. The first to use this technique in detective fiction was Edgar Allan Poe. In a short story of 1840, titled “The Man of the Crowd”, he presented the case of a curious Londoner who develops theories about criminal degeneracy as he looks at people through a crowd of strangers, and this story has since been seen as the X-ray of detective fiction. Shadowed by the Gothic tales of the 1830s, “The Man of the Crowd” outlined literary features that Poe soon consolidated in the shape of C. Auguste Dupin, amateur detective and serial protagonist of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1842), and “The Purloined Letter” (1844). These three short stories have since become known as the first tales of ‘ratiocination’, a term Poe introduced in the second of these tales, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt”,
where he used it three times to describe his detective’s extraordinary detection skills with reference to his ‘ratio’, the Latin word for reason and computation. Ever since, these tales have shown generations of crime writers how to integrate the classic genre conventions by heightening the tension between such counter concepts as brains and brawn, the hunter and the hunted, the bohemian but brilliant detective and the bureaucratic but bumbling constabulary. In the process, they have made Poe, as novelist and critic Julian Symons puts it, “the undisputed father of the detective story, although he would have been disconcerted by many of his children and grandchildren.”[i] Before moving on to some of those children and grandchildren, however, it is worth noting the implication of this last statement, just to get the record straight in a book on Scottish crime fiction. Sherlock Holmes was not the first of the fictional detectives. Poe’s fact-finding flâneur, lone wanderer of an alienating metropolis and grand inquisitor of an aggressive modernity, first found eminent proponents in Alexandre Dumas and Émile Gaboriau, who brought him to public attention in person of Messrs Jackal and Lecoq of Les Mohicans de Paris (1854-59) and L’Affaire Lerouge (1866). At the end of the 19th and the start of the 20th century, he was further popularised by the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and the philosophy of Walter Benjamin, and yet it is Holmes who has prevailed as the most eloquent byword of the fictional detective. By way of explaining this unique reputation, Holmes expert John Hodgson says Doyle “created a new kind of protagonist, a detective who, going beyond the mental acuteness of Poe’s Dupin and the dawning professionalism of Gaboriau’s Lecoq, would ‘reduce this fascinating but unorganized business to something nearer to an exact science’.” [ii] In other words, Doyle did more for the detective story than any of his predecessors. As Hodgson reminds us here by quoting from Doyle’s autobiography, Doyle reduced this fascinating but unorganized business to something nearer to an exact science by basing Holmes on his mentor in the medical faculty of Edinburgh University, Dr Joseph Bell. In doing so, he related storytelling to science. Perhaps this goes some way towards explaining why his stories, most of which are told in the first person by Holmes’s assistant Dr John H. Watson, read like descriptive accounts of experiments in detection, where the end of every adventure is followed by an explanation of every action. Yet whether or not this narrative effect was intended, Holmes’s move towards ‘an exact science’ certainly indicates his significance in the history of crime fiction. As Lee Horsley, a leading expert on this history, states, “The evolution of a genre depends on a combination of continuity and change, and Holmes is unquestionably the first key figure from whom other writers differentiated their protagonists, only rivalled by the composite hard-boiled protagonist created by Hammett and Chandler in the early twentieth century.”[iii] Yet prior to discussing their private detectives, Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, it is worth pausing to remove the possible confusion that can attend such a personality cult. Yes, Symons is right to conclude that “part of Holmes’s attraction was that, far more than any of his later rivals, he was so evidently a Nietzschean superior man. It was comforting to have such a man on one’s side,” if only because, “when the law cannot dispense justice, Holmes does so himself. He is a final court of appeal and the idea that such a court might exist, personified by an individual, was permanently comforting to his readers.”[iv] Yet literary history is full of incidents when Holmes’s admirers have
been a little too comfortable with the stereotype of the ‘Nietzschean superior man’, a stereotype which has little in common with Nietzsche’s amoral artist tyrant. This complex creature, after all, was not some cartoonish superhero but the product of a thought experiment based on the philosophy of the Italian Renaissance and perhaps best understood as a Machiavellian bogeyman of the Western middle class and its pseudo-Christian value system. As a result of removing this complexity, detectives working in the tradition of the eccentric Holmes have often had more in common with the epic Hercules. Others have gone all the way to caricature and come to resemble such camp clichés as Hercule Poirot and Lord Peter Wimsey. Yet there is a far more interesting – though far less appreciated – reason for Holmes’s historical significance and enduring appeal. As Martin Priestman, an authority on classic crime fiction, puts the case, “what is far more interesting about him is the way in which he encapsulates some of the qualities of the series form itself within a fairly loose envelope of potentially contradictory traits.” [v] Chief among those potentially contradictory traits is his quest for the singular cause, which repeatedly highlights his dual nature. Holmes, who first appeared in A Study in Scarlet (1887) as an instinctive anti-intellectual, returned in The Sign of Four (1890) as an intellectual aesthete. Yet throughout two more novels and 56 short stories, he integrated the tension between these two sides of his personality in his search for single causes. So, while Holmes has become a ‘Nietzschean superior man’, he has earned this epithet not just for comforting his readers as a final court of appeal but also for containing his inherent contradictions. In other words, while he has become ‘the first key figure from whom other writers differentiated their protagonists’, key to his difference is the fact that his creator differentiated him into more than a single, static figure. Doyle’s serialisation of Holmes’s adventures was, then, less the result of the character’s uniqueness than of his singularity, a difference about which Doyle was very pragmatic in his autobiography: “It had struck me that a single character running through a series, if it only engaged the attention of the reader, would bind that reader to that particular magazine.” [vi] Doyle has indeed bound generations of readers to his series, but he has done so by giving his readers more than an engaging single character. He has also given them closure by giving explanations for everything that seemed outré, and he has given continuing life to Holmes by giving him a life outside each story. His legacy therefore goes beyond the entertainment value of his tales of suspense. By dramatising Holmes’s dual nature over the course of a long-running series which is nominally held together by a single character, Doyle demonstrated the potential to create tension in serial crime fiction. He demonstrated that even the central character can change over the course of a series, and change several times in ways which might invite disbelief or indeed derision if dramatised in standalone stories. One way of reassuring readers that such character inconsistencies can be psychologically sound is to remind them that, while inconsistencies of any sort tend to indicate poor writing when they occur in the span of a single story, in this case the story is situated in an overarching series and thus allows for greater flexibility of characterisation. Doyle made a habit of offering such reminders by having his investigative team repeatedly talk about their previous cases and long partnership. Such intertextual links have since become popular genre conventions, as have Doyle’s habits of proselytising on behalf of the private investigator, prioritising mystic intuition and inference over bureaucratic
police procedures, and patterning serial detective fiction in harmony with a theme borrowed from baroque music: repetition with variation. It was not until these conventions started playing in concert that detective fiction took on its now familiar format and, as Priestman puts it, “it was not until the 1890s, with Sherlock Holmes, that its endless re-enactment became a fully addictive event.”[vii] So, Doyle did not just prove serial detective fiction to be sustainable. He also provided a model for others to repeat his success, and in the genre’s long history one innovation alone shares this model’s immense significance: the motto ‘We Never Sleep’. Taken from the emblem of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, which had been founded in the US in 1850 by Scotsman Allan Pinkerton, this motto forever changed the way we see the Private Investigator, or PI for short. The emblem was a wide open eye, which suggested not only deep insight but also an iconic pun on the PI: ‘private eye’. After World War One, this private I/eye became a regular in the pages of detective fiction, and around the same time he became ‘hard-boiled’, which is to say he distanced himself from the rationale of the classic detective story: that human affairs are ruled by Reason and that Reason is represented by a detective who dispassionately rights all wrongs. Developed in counterpoint to this somewhat outdated British concept, the ‘hard-boiled’ private detective became an American sentimentalist who differs significantly from his ‘soft-boiled’ ancestors. To put it in the words of Peter Messent, an expert in 20th-century American literature, the hardboiled PI differs “in the personal vulnerability that comes from an immersion within the violent world being investigated, in the recognition that corruption is not just confined to the criminal underclass but pervades the entire social fabric, and in the (romantic) sense of alienation and isolation from the social body that accompanies that recognition.”[viii] Dealing with this new set of challenges, he came to depend on qualities which set him far part from the dispassionate amateurs of Poe and Doyle, qualities which Ralph Willett, author of Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction, summarises as “professional skills, physical courage affirmed as masculine potency, fortitude, moral strength, a fierce desire for justice, social marginality and a degree of antiintellectualism.”[ix] Yet it was a more subtle change that was to mark the generational gap and mature these frontier characteristics into genre conventions. The hard-boiled private eye came to rely on reason only in concert with emotion, and this departure from the cold rationalism of his predecessor’s puzzlesolving mentality culminated in his declaration of independence from its logical and ideological constraints. Demonstrating this emancipation, he dispensed with the consulting detective and decided to be his own narrator and thus define himself in his own voice from a first-person point of view. This let hard-boiled writers emphasise the ‘private’ identity of their private eye, so much so that he became significantly more identifiable with the private ‘I’ of the reader. As a result of this shift in focus, the detective could now emphasise his central role in the story along with his far more complex sensibility, and this has become a popular genre convention known as the ‘hardboiled conceit’.
Having pioneered this narrative aesthetic, Dashiell Hammett is habitually cited as the founder of the hard-boiled school. Yet his contribution to said school of writing is often confused by those who mention him in the same breath as his co-founder, Raymond Chandler, the man who popularised two of the literature’s most recognisable genre conventions: lengthy passages of deep introspection and a highly wrought prose style. Hammett, on the other hand, focused on action, description, and dialogue. Thoughts and feelings he avoided almost entirely. To be clear, Hammett wrote in a spare, third-person objective style that has very little in common with Chandler’s flair for poetic selfreflection and purple one-liners, and it has done far less for the development of the hard-boiled school. So it is not his style that has earned Hammett the honour of becoming known as the founder of the hard-boiled school. It is his subject. As a former operative of the Pinkerton Agency, Hammett drew on lived experience when he selected as his central protagonist – and as that of most hard-boiled literature to come – a laconic loner. Hammett replaced the outdated bohemian dilettante of classic detective fiction with a very private investigator who lives by his own code of conduct to be tough yet true in a world that has become as confusing as it is corrupt. Admittedly, Hammett did not invent the type. A few years earlier, in 1923, Carroll John Daly had provided a prototype for this new protagonist when he introduced his PI Race Williams in the short story “Knights of the Open Palm”, yet this prototype did not go into mass-production until after 1930, when Hammett published The Maltese Falcon. In this modern classic, a serialised novel famously adapted to film in 1941 with Humphrey Bogart in the role of PI Sam Spade, Hammett did more than refine Daly’s model. He defined the hard-boiled protagonist for generations to come, so Horsley is right to conclude that, “It is Spade, of course, who has come to be seen as the archetypal hard-boiled private eye, a loner whose audacity and individualism are products of a thoroughgoing distrust of conventional social arrangements and familiar pieties.”[x] Hammett’s heritage, then, is that he shaped the hard-boiled subject, the private eye. In doing so, he pushed so hard against the boundaries of a formerly rather conservative genre that they have come to accommodate a wide range of attacks on social and political establishments. Ever since, the history of crime fiction has shown that even a literature which has often derogatively been called ‘pulp fiction’ can take life and death seriously and can thus, in turn, be taken seriously itself. Hammett was the first to demonstrate this, and it was his way of doing so that his co-founder of the hard-boiled school recognised as an historic service to literature. As Chandler put it, “Hammett was the ace performer… Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish.”[xi] This achievement, however, should not distract from the fact that the shaping of the murder mystery – even the realistic type that has focused on the hard-boiled private eye – has been a team effort. Sure, until Chandler himself came along and changed the way the literature was written and read, Hammett was the only one to receive serious critical recognition, which explains why he was picked out of a sizeable literary movement to represent the hard-boiled school, but as class-rep he could only do so much for the private eye. After all, as T.J. Binyon reminds us in his seminal book on the history of detective fiction, Murder Will Out, “if the era of Prohibition, with its lawlessness,
gangsters, and corrupt police, provided the reality from which the private eye sprang, it was the pulp magazines which made him popular.”[xii] According to Horsley, it was one magazine in particular that not only popularised the private eye but produced the tradition of hard-boiled writing, for “its development as a subgeneric form of crime fiction is indissolubly linked with the founding of Black Mask magazine in 1920… with its growing reputation for publishing fast-paced, colloquial stories, and promoting ‘economy of expression’ and ‘authenticity in character and action’.”[xiii] Hammett was first published in the magazine in the early 1920s, Chandler a decade later, and within no time each had made a name for himself for having conceived the true spirit of the hard-boiled private eye tradition. Now, whichever one of these two radically different writers may have had more to do with the conception of the literature’s true spirit, an ironic consequence of their collaborative parentage has been the conventional disregard for their differences. As LeRoy Panek, a leading expert in popular literature, points out, “for Chandler the concept of being hard-boiled grew to become more complex and nuanced than it had been in the hands of his predecessors… less to do with callous relationships with people and more to do with attitude. And it was decidedly more psychological than physical… their hardness comes from their ability to take punishment and bounce back, persist, and finish what they started.”[xiv] Yet their psychological hardness also makes them strangers – even to themselves – and by granting his readers access to these internal developments, Chandler set himself far apart from Hammett and his famous avoidance of introspection. Writing at such considerable psychological depth, and indeed at such considerable aesthetic distance from his predecessors, Chandler famously made alienation a central genre convention of the hard-boiled detective story, a characteristic which has so often been mimicked that it has become something of a cliché to make one’s protagonists as alienated as Chandler’s are on their lonely struggles through stories of exploitation, fragmentation, and marginalisation. Perhaps more importantly, however, Chandler established what for many, including Panek, have become essentials of the hard-boiled prose style: “non-standard diction, short declarative sentences relying on active verbs, first person narration with asides to the listener/reader, and occasional wisecracks… Most importantly Chandler made the simile a standard feature of hard-boiled style… to characterize the narrator by his range of reference and his original, shocking, or at least novel juxtapositions.”[xv] It is worth noting that Chandler’s popularisation of this technical device went hand in hand with a topical development in the literature at large. Around the same time as PIs started using similes to make sense of an estranging world because similes allowed them to make connections through likeness, they also started taking on cases and persevering with their investigations because of their newly formed personal connections with the people involved. To give just one example of this seismic shift in both style and psychology, Chandler’s seven novel series about PI Philip Marlowe, starting with The Big Sleep (1939) and concluding with Playback (1958), charts the differences between the two types in one character. While the pre-war Marlowe typically tried to keep his distance from his case and its principals, even though he cared about both, the post-war Marlowe and the tough guys following in his footsteps typically tried to keep their distance from themselves, even as they got close to others. Yet despite such categorical differences, their dramas heighten for the same reason, namely as their professional detachment collapses into personal entanglement, for their cases have the same emotional structure. As Leonard Cassuto puts it in Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories, “Chandler drew the modern blueprint for one of the ur-plots of hard-boiled crime fiction, in which the detective arrives
to fix the broken family.”[xvi] What is more, Chandler mirrored this sentimentalism in his narrative structure, in which the detective attempts to fix or at least tie up the loose plot as he gets drawn into his client’s sob story. Along the way, this cross between a family fixer and a knight-errant has become a measure of masculinity for generations of hard-boiled protagonists, an archetype monumentalised in Chandler’s exhortation that “down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man… a man of honour… He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world…” [xvii] Yet since these oft-quoted words have led countless imitators down the cul-de-sac of cliché, the critic and crime writer John Harvey may be right to remind you, dear reader, that you “follow old Ray down those mean streets and sumptuous sub-clauses at your peril!”[xviii] What is certain is that, if you do not face this peril with sufficient attention to the complexities of the hard-boiled character, you are likely to make the same mistake as those who set Chandler’s supposedly cynical tough guy in clear-cut opposition to Doyle’s supposedly cerebral detection robot. That such a simplistic dialectic is indeed a mistake becomes obvious when you consider, as does John Scaggs in Crime Fiction, a handbook on the genre’s literary history, that “the shift from the analytical certainties and reassuringly stable social order of classical detective fiction to the gritty realism of the ‘mean streets’ of hard-boiled fiction disguised a certain continuity, in Chandler, at any rate, with the idealistic quest for truth and justice characteristic of romance.”[xix] This idealistic quest first found its way to detective fiction through the afore-mentioned tales of Poe and Doyle, and via the heraldic work of Chandler its traces have run through most of the stories that have been written in the genre since. In view of this continuity, the pop culture critic Philip Simpson notes that, long after Marlowe led the way down those mean streets, most of today’s fictional detectives still “embark upon quests through nightmarish worlds to solve problems of archetypal significance – in a sense, knight-errants with only their own codes of justice to guide them through a fallen world.”[xx] In the hope of demonstrating how they differ in said codes of justice, and in the hope of assessing their authors’ contributions to the genre, I will, in the following pages, follow a few of these errant knights as they embark upon quests through the country which, since the days of Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, may be considered the home of detective fiction, Scotland.
Symons, Julian. Bloody Murder, From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel. 3rd rev. ed. New York: The Mysterious Press, 1993, p. 29. [i]
Hodgson, John A. “Arthur Conan Doyle.” A Companion to Crime Fiction. Ed. Charles J. Rzepka and Lee Horsley. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2010, p. 390. [ii]
Horsley, Lee. “From Sherlock Holmes to Present.” A Companion to Crime Fiction. Ed. Charles J. Rzepka and Lee Horsley. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2010, p. 29. [iii]
Symons, Julian. Bloody Murder, From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel. 3rd rev. ed. New York: The Mysterious Press, 1993, pp. 68/9. [iv]
Priestman, Martin. Crime Fiction: From Poe to the Present. Plymouth: Northcote House Publishers, 1998, p. 14. [v]
[vi]
Doyle, Arthur Conan. Memories and Adventures. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1924, p. 95.
Priestman, Martin. Crime Fiction: From Poe to the Present. Plymouth: Northcote House Publishers, 1998, p. 10. [vii]
Messent, Peter. “Introduction: From Private Eye to Police Procedural – The Logic of Contemporary Crime Fiction.” Criminal Proceedings: The Contemporary American Crime Novel. Ed. Peter Messent. London: Pluto Press, 1997, p. 7. [viii]
Willet, Ralph. Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction. Staffordshire: British Association for American Studies, 1992, p. 6. [ix]
Horsley, Lee. “From Sherlock Holmes to Present.” A Companion to Crime Fiction. Ed. Charles J. Rzepka and Lee Horsley. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2010, pp. 32-33. [x]
Chandler, Raymond. The Simple Art of Murder (1950). 1st Vintage Books Edition. New York: Random House, 1988, p. 14. [xi]
Binyon, T.J. Murder Will Out: The Detective in Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 38. [xii]
Horsley, Lee. “From Sherlock Holmes to Present.” A Companion to Crime Fiction. Ed. Charles J. Rzepka and Lee Horsley. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2010, p. 32 . [xiii]
Panek, LeRoy Lad. “Raymond Chandler.” A Companion to Crime Fiction. Ed. Charles J. Rzepka and Lee Horsley. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2010, pp. 407/408. [xiv]
[xv]
Ibid, p. 410.
Cassuto, Leonard. Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009, p. 82. [xvi]
Chandler, Raymond. The Simple Art of Murder (1950). 1st Vintage Books Edition. New York: Random House, 1988, p. 18. [xvii]
Harvey, John. “The Last Good Place; James Crumley, the West and the Detective Novel.” Criminal Proceedings: The Contemporary American Crime Novel. Ed. Peter Messent. London: Pluto Press, 1997, p. 150. [xviii]
[xix]
Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction. Abingdon: Routledge, 2005, p. 58.
Simpson, Philip. “Noir and the Psycho Thriller.” A Companion to Crime Fiction. Ed. Charles J. Rzepka and Lee Horsley. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2010, p. 190. [xx]