Detective Story

DETECTIVE STORY, type of mystery story that features a private detective or a police officer as the prime solver of a crime—usually a murder case. The detective is the main protagonist, through whom the story is told either as a first-person narrator or in the third person as portrayed by the author. The detective interrogates the suspects, ferrets out the clues, and tracks down the murderer. To play fair, the detective shares all the clues with the reader but withholds their significance until the end.

The thrust of the detective’s investigation is based on motive, opportunity, and means, and he or she arrives at the solution by eliminating those suspects who do not fulfill these criteria. To make the case difficult for the detective and interesting to the reader, the author puts complications in the detective’s way: several suspects, additional murders, red herrings, and, often, threats of violence. Only at the end does the detective unmask the culprit, explain the plot, and present the deductive reasoning that he used in solving the case.

The detective story, often called a whodunit, did not spring into being in this form. Rather, it evolved, early in the 20th century, from stories about detectives in which the reader was not a participant, but a witness, so to speak, looking over the detective’s shoulder.
Earliest Detective Stories.

The originator of this early type of story of detection was the American poet and short-story master EDGAR Allen Poe, creator of the world’s first fictional detective, C. Auguste Dupin. Dupin’s methods of deduction and his bizarre personal habits provided the model that most detective story writers have followed since. Dupin made his bow in April 1841, when Graham’s Magazine published Poe’s classic horror story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” The detective appeared thereafter in “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1842–43), “The Purloined Letter” (1845), and three other stories. During this period the first real-life detective, François Eugène Vidocq (1775–1857), was making history as chef de la Sûreté (head of the Criminal Investigation Department) in Paris, and Poe’s hero, Dupin, was no doubt modeled on Vidocq.

During the next 45 years the genre was largely neglected. CHARLES Dickens ventured into the writing of detective fiction with The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), but he died before completing it, leaving the identity of his murderer unknown. Another English novelist, WILKIE Collins, contributed The Moonstone (1868) and The Woman in White (1860) and created the detective Sergeant Cuff.
Sherlock Holmes and His Followers.

Stories about detectives did not become truly popular, however, until Beeton’s Christmas Annual in 1887 published A Study in Scarlet, introducing to England and the world the most famous detective—real or fictional—of all time, Sherlock Holmes. Sir ARTHUR Conan Doyle, the British writer who created Holmes, was much influenced by Poe; he gave Holmes the essence of Dupin’s mental traits and equally bizarre, although different, habits, and he narrated his detective’s exploits, as did Poe, from the vantage point of a close companion, in this case the good-natured and perpetually naive Dr. Watson.

Despite his success with Holmes, Conan Doyle, more interested in “serious novels,” soon tired of his detective and tried to kill him off. The enormous popularity of this character, however, would not allow it. The author produced The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1904) and Holmes outlived his creator, being the hero, even today, of adventures penned by other writers. Altogether, Conan Doyle’s production of what is called the “canon,” that is, the original Sherlock Holmes mysteries, consists of 4 novelettes and 56 short stories.

The impact of Sherlock Holmes popularized the detective story and brought it to its present form. From the time of Conan Doyle on, writers have sought to develop detective heroes who echoed both Holmes’s unique character and his omniscience. The English writer G. K. Chesterton, in the early years of the 20th century, developed the character of Father Brown, a priest-detective. In 1920, with the advent of what may be called the golden age of the detective story, the English writer AGATHA Christie introduced her hero, Hercule Poirot, a dapper Belgian detective who actively employed the “little gray [brain] cells” in the solution of crimes. In the U.S., the ELLERY Queen series was begun, and S. S. Van Dine (pseudonym of Willard Huntington Wright, 1888–1939) wrote about the dilettante detective Philo Vance. Meanwhile, another American writer, Earl Derr Biggers (1884–1933), was creating his famed Chinese detective, Charlie Chan. Other authors who emerged in the 1930s are the American Rex Stout (1886–1975) with his famous gourmet detective, Nero Wolfe, and the scholarly English writer DOROTHY Sayers, whose detective hero was an aristocrat, Lord Peter Wimsey.

During the 1930s authors, in their efforts to outwit the reader, began to concoct elaborate, highly ingenious puzzles, such as the locked-room mysteries of the American writer John Dickson Carr (1906–77). The aim was to produce as the murderer the least likely of all suspects—a game in which Agatha Christie excelled.
Private-Eye Tales.

Meanwhile, in the U.S. during the 1920s, another kind of detective story was emerging. This was shaped by the pulp magazines of the time (notably Black Mask), which wanted hard-hitting detective heroes and clipped, tough prose. Authors of this school include ERLE Stanley Gardner, creator of Perry Mason, the most famous lawyer-detective of them all; DASHIELL Hammett, creator of Nick Charles and Sam Spade; and RAYMOND Chandler, whose Philip Marlowe is another all-time great. In these hard-boiled private-eye novels, sleuths worked for money instead of intellectual fun, and murder took place in gutters rather than in drawing rooms. Although these detective stories obeyed all the rules of the genre, the accent was on action, and the puzzle was underplayed. The story’s physical activity (which ultimately degenerated, in many cases, into raw sex and sadism), rather than the puzzle, held the reader.
The Police Procedural.

Then, in the early 1950s, a trend away from the sex-and-sadism school, and away from the private-eye tale in general, developed. The “police procedural” was born—stories about how real police detectives go about solving real crimes.

As did its predecessors, the “procedural” obeys the rules of the detective story. The difference is that the reader consorts, not with geniuses, but with fallible, ordinary people, specially trained in detection, operating out of police stations. The most prominent writers in this field are John Creasey (1908–73), writing under the pseudonym J. J. Marric, with his tales of Gideon of Scotland Yard; Evan Hunter (1926–2005), using Ed McBain as his pseudonym for his 87th Precinct series; and Dorothy Uhnak (1933– ), once a New York City transit policewoman herself, who has broken through the male bastion with her series featuring a policewoman, Christie Opara.
The Future of the Detective Story.

Although the detective story undergoes pendulum swings in popularity, it seems likely to endure as staple reading fare. Its strength is that it provides pleasurable excitement and satisfaction. It deals with evil, which is always fascinating, at the same time promising that good will triumph, that all loose threads will be tied, and that the ending will be at least relatively happy and complete. It is an entity in the same way that the fairy tale, for example, is an entity.

American detective- and mystery-story writers banded together in 1945 to form the Mystery Writers of America (MWA), adopting as their slogan, “Crime Does Not Pay—Enough!” MWA has some 1500 members; its purpose is to fight for authors’ rights, promote the mystery story, help new writers, and generally serve as a forum for members. In Great Britain a comparable organization, Crime Writers Association, was started by John Creasey in 1952. In Canada, a similar group, Crime Writers of Canada, was formed in Toronto in 1982.

HILLARY WAUGH, B.A.