When coroners and medical examiners decide that the corpse before them is the victim of homicide, they announce their findings with a ringing locution: “by a person or persons unknown.” And while the identity of the killer may truly be a cipher in the real world, within the confines of a detective novel, the perpetrator is known to us. He or she is hiding in plain sight among the array of characters in the book. What we do not know is who it is, which other characters are involved, why they did what they did, and how they pulled it off. Resolving all these questions – questions whose answers are somewhere in the text – becomes, for readers, a mental itch that we cannot scratch. We just have to know the answers. Looking for clues in a detective story is like searching for a mislaid housekey; we soon become more fixated on the fact that we cannot find it than on the necessity of the thing itself. When the author of a detective story hooks us in this way, our inflamed curiosity drives us to read with fierce attention and all due speed.
The enormous popularity of mystery and crime writing can be attributed largely to the way it structures our reading experience. There is a serious problem (a dead body, a missing child, stolen money) and there is a serious and talented person who takes up its investigation. We readers can be participants in the puzzle-solving, or we can be mere observers, but in any case we know that there will be a solution to the mystery by the end. (Certain postmodern texts play with these expectations, as Susan Elizabeth Sweeney’s chapter in this volume points out.) A mystery story makes a very clear pact with its reader: “If you will endure confusion, obfuscation and false leads, I will reveal all in the end. Read me, and you will be enlightened.”
So important is this pact that, in the early decades of the twentieth century, several different writers wrote essays outlining the regulations of “fair play” for authors of detective fiction. In one of the most famous, “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories,” S. S. Van Dine laid down laws such as, “if the reader, after learning of the explanation for the crime, should reread the book, he [should] see that the solution had, in a sense, been staring him in
Sayers’s assertion was just as famously rebutted by Raymond Chandler in his essay “The Simple Art of Murder.” Usually appreciated as a manifesto of the hard-boiled school and a tribute to Dashiell Hammett, the essay also makes the case that good detective fiction can be as rich and significant as any kind of writing. In the hands of a “realist in murder” a detective story is a literature of expression, giving “an effect of movement, intrigue, cross-purposes, and the gradual elucidation of character.” It is also a literature of social critique, one that exposes “a world where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket, where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of money-making.” Chandler instructs: “It is not a fragrant world, but it is the world you live in.”3
One of the most often quoted passages from “The Simple Art of Murder” is this: “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.” Scholars like those in this volume might thank Chandler for doing something similar: giving us reasons, and “the reasons for the reasons,” to take detective fiction seriously.4 It is only fairly recently that the multiple genres of crime writing have been taken up as subjects of academic study; before that, they were entirely in the hands of connoisseurs and collectors, with their endless taxonomies, lists and value judgments. What Chandler opened up was a new way of looking at crime narratives, or rather looking through them, as lenses on the culture and history of the United States.
The collection of essays assembled here gives a sense of the long trajectory of crime writing in America, from Sara Crosby’s essay on the earliest forms, the execution sermon and the penny press, to Eddy Von Mueller’s study of the police procedural and its proliferation on television. The advent of the fictional detective is described in Stephen Rachman’s essay on Edgar Allan Poe, and essays by myself, Sean McCann, Margaret Kinsman, and Maureen
While there is a great deal of information here about the history of each sub-genre, there is also attention to the way crime fiction documents the social structures and manners of any moment. Crime fiction is famous for its specialized slang and patois; McCann, Pepper, Reddy and Sweeney examine what that language might actually be expressing, as does Mueller in his discussion of “copspeak.” We can learn much about the dress and domestic duties of women in the late nineteenth century from the women writers in my essay, but what is ultimately more interesting is what their work reveals about a gap that opened between generations of women during the transition from the Victorian era to the Modern. Crosby shows the link between the rise of a literature about sinners and changing aspirations for national identity.
When we study detective fiction, we can think broadly and deeply about American history and culture. When we are looking at stories about deviants in conflict with the agents of law and order, we are looking straight into the workings of society. The villains and heroes of popular literature are very instructive; they tell us about what we fear and who we would conjure up to contain what threatens us. They reveal our racial and religious prejudices and our gender biases. The literary figure of the detective, for example, developed in response to the emergence of actual detectives in the middle of the nineteenth century, a period shaped by the tumultuous forces of urbanization, social stratification, geographical mobility and changing gender roles. And fictional detectives have continued to develop in response to the needs of their audience, from the erudite consultant to the police we see in early American detective stories to the morally ambiguous hard-boiled private eyes of the middle of the twentieth century to the industrious and unstoppable feminist detectives of the last three decades. Cold War spy thrillers arose, in part, out of misgivings that perhaps the “American century” was not going as well as it might. Gangsters of the early film era expressed a fear of social anomie, while the mafia stories that arose in the 1960s have served as a discourse on our fear of powerful conspiracies and entrenched subcultures, an America dis-united.
Crime fiction also allows us to look straight into the workings of narrative itself. Because mystery stories in general and detective fiction in particular are about gathering up the necessary clues and weaving them into a coherent narrative, they are interesting to consult on questions of narrative authority. All narratives claim to be presenting events as they happened in the past; detective fiction simply raises the stakes for authors, characters and readers. The story that the detective reconstructs and presents has to be wholly convincing and beautifully shaped. American crime fiction has long appealed to “highbrow” writers from many nations and writing traditions; they find the tropes of mystery, conspiracy, fragmentation and investigation to be well matched to the interrogation of received wisdom and surface truths that is at the heart of the modern and postmodern modes. Crime narrative can also be a place to examine the ethics of storytelling, especially in the true crime subgenre.
It is evident from the intellectual energy displayed in the following chapters that these scholars find the study of crime writing to be exciting and richly rewarding. It is my hope that the work presented here will inspire others to explore the satisfactions of the field.
A generous grant from the Woodruff Research Fund of Emory College made possible the dedicated editorial assistance of Kira Walsh and Haipeng Zhou. Megan Friddle was also a tireless assistant in the editing process; all three went far above and beyond the call of duty, and I am deeply grateful to them.
1.
S. S. Van Dine [pseud. for Willard Huntington Wright], “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories,” American Magazine, 106 (September, 1928): 129–31
. See alsoCarolyn Wells’s textbook, The Technique of the Mystery Story (Springfield, MA: Home Correspondence School, 1913).
2. Quoted in
Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder” (1944; repr. in The Simple Art of Murder, New York: Ballantine, 1972), p. 13.
3. Ibid., pp. 19, 20.
4. Ibid., pp. 16, 5.