Saturday, December 12, 2020

End of the Golden Age

 I thought I might expound upon Ellery Queen and The Golden Age in America in this posting, but there's plenty about "Manny and Danny" elsewhere. I'd like to focus instead on why the Golden Age ended with World War II and how detective fiction changed after the war.

The chief assumption of the Golden Age was that human beings were ruled by reason. Crimes were committed by wayward individuals, tearing small holes in the fabric of civilized life. These aberrant individuals were exposed, the rips mended, and the detective -- representing order -- triumphed through the use of reason. This belief was applied to nations, too; wayward nations could be reasonably disciplined by a League of Nations and war could be avoided.

Fascism and WWII, however, showed that brute force could overwhelm reason. Irrational people and doctrines could rule over people and nations. Mass murder could be committed by madmen, political strongmen and the people who succumbed to their demagoguery. Suddenly, the comfy world of housemaids and white gloves gave way to a world of air raids, death camps, and The Bomb. Golden Age writers struggled to survive the war.

For one thing, the so-called "Great Detective," the eccentric independent, began to look absurd. Scientific and forensic advances aided police detection and crime-solving. The idea of the inept police coming to the quirky amateur to solve a baffling problem began to look silly. But Christie could not give up Poirot, Allingham could not abandon Campion, and Ellery Queen could not let go of--well, Ellery Queen.

There's a story that Dashiell Hammett, the hard-boiled detective writer, once introduced "Ellery Queen" to a lecture audience by asking, "Mr. Queen, would you be good enough to explain your famous character's sex life, if any?" Such a question was improper for the Golden Age. Holmes distrusted women (having been outwitted once by a beautiful woman), Poirot was an elderly bachelor, Wimsey a gentleman with Harriet Vane and then a faithful husband, Queen a friend to women but never emotionally involved (not even noticing the fluttering eyes of his assistant, Nikki Porter). "Mr. Queen's" answer was that writing about such a thing would upset loyal readers.

Queen's REAL answer was to remove Ellery Queen from the real world in 1942 and put him in the small town of Wrightsville, a place of "complacent elms, wandering cobbles, crooked side-streets nestled in the lap of a farmer's valley, and leaning against the motherly abdomen of one of New England's most matriarchal mountain ranges." Notice how non-sexual, how completely parental the setting is described as being. Queen returns to the safety of the womb, without his pinc-nez glasses and without his Dad in tow, but curiously out of place, an anachronism. Manny and Danny's plotting became more complex and improbable, and eventually Queen was left out of the story altogether. In "The Glass Village," 1954, the members of a small town capture a murder suspect and try him for murder themselves, in a comment on McCarthyism.

Poirot changed a little. He trimmed his mustaches, and, as Christie put it, he became "more of a private investigator and less an engaged enquiry agent." She did, however, remove Poirot as a character from all her plays. She finally tired of him and killed him off (something Doyle tried to do with Holmes and failed). Miss Marple, already in a small village, continued to knit her way through cases.

Dorothy Sayers stopped writing Lord Peter stories altogether, saying she "had tired of a literature without bowels," and turned to translating Dante. She insisted that she had always considered the Wimsey stories as tales of manners, not mysteries.

Margery Allingham changed her main character Campion from a Wimsey-like figure to a more serious man with a deeply lined face. Elements of brooding suspense and horror became more important in her stories. But Ngaio Marsh, another Golden-Ager, refused to change her recipe of taking three characters and adding a murder.

Along with the loss of the "Great Detective" was the abandonment of other Golden Age traits: sketches of the house and murder room, the body in the library, the use of strange poisons and bizarre weapons (such as an icicle). The new writers began to produce "WHYdunnits" rather than "whodunnits" by being more interested in the psychology and social background of the killer and victim. Police changed from being charmingly inept but honest to being corrupt and sometimes cruel, living on the hard edge of society. Some were portrayed as harried, hard-working men who didn't always resolve their cases, such as the I'm-glad-to-be-home-what's-for-dinner-where's-my-pipe Maigret (Georges Simenon, a lifelong student of psychology, was really interested in the mystery of  motives).

The same happened to private detectives, who became tough but adhered to a knightly code of honor. Rape, porn, and explicit violence became more common plot elements. Series detectives became less common, as the post-war public distrusted 'supermen' and publishers felt that the focus on a single, unchanging character hindered the exploration of important social ideas.

In the 1950s, then, there was talk about the detective story being dead. But it wasn't. As British writer Edmund Crispin noted in 1959, "Mrs Christie still has butter to put on her bread, Mr Carr seems confident of being able to support his wife and family. There is happily no hint from America that Mr Queen is feeling the pinch."

But he was. Carr and Queen lost their audiences, replaced by Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, and Mike Hammer. More about them next time. 


Wednesday, November 25, 2020

The Golden Age: "Fair Play"

 Earlier detective writers merely wished to astonish readers with revealed solutions and to impress them with genius, as with Holmes or The Thinking Machine. Golden Age writers, however, taking the 'puzzle' seriously, tried hard to pay fair with clues yet outsmart the reader. This duel of clever and classy detective versus clever and classy criminal in the British detective story paralleled the duel of clever writer versus careful reader. American writers, on the other hand, generally avoided the 'duel' altogether, preferring the 'brawl' and the shoot-out. Even readers feel mugged by the confused action and fast talk.

Some of the 'fair play' became quite complex. Christie, especially, played with the 'rules' as a way to outsmart readers. It was a matter of "You think that I think that you think I think this, so I won't -- or will -- in order to outwit you." (SPOILERS FOLLOW) She did things like exonerate a suspect in a trial only to prove he was guilty all along, employed double disguises, broke the convention of 'least likely suspect' in "Murder on the Orient Express" by having ALL the suspects committing the murder. She committed the unforgivable sin in "The Murder of Roger Akroyd" of making the first-person narrator the killer.

If English Golden Age writers were trying to widen the appeal of detective stories, American(s) Ellery Queen narrowed it. Instead of bending rules, Queen followed them, focused them, banishing every element but the detective and the crime puzzle. Despite a few innovations like a father cop/detective son and a secretary with a crush on her boss, Queen openly emphasized the fair play puzzle by issuing a 'challenge to the reader' near the end of each story, saying the reader now had the same clues as the detective. Queen, who began his (well, their) career by entering a contest, saw all detective stories as a contest between the reader and writer.

Queen's stories, like many Golden Age stories, fortified the puzzle element with things like maps, diagrams, lists of alibis, challenges to readers, narrative gaps that warned readers that something was missing, sealed last chapters, footnotes, lists of questions, lists of characters, and narrative warnings to pay attention (something Dickens did in Drood). The form developed into other puzzle products like "McKay's Baffle Book" and "Three Minute Mysteries", games with bits of evidence in cellophane wrappers such as hair, matches, fabrics. Parker Brothers' board game "Clue" appeared at this time and is still with us.

The Golden Age ended in 1939 with World War II. While some writers had simply stopped writing detective stories (Sayers, for example), the war changed everything. Real-life Master Criminals had loosed mass destruction on humanity. Murder had become industrialized in the Death Camps. Post-War detective fiction turned cynical (just as it had after World War I), and brutal. Christie continued writing British 'cozies' in the same way Doyle continued writing about Holmes well into the 1920s, as a kind of denial.

Golden Age stories still enjoy immense popularity, but they are nostalgic entertainments, seen as offering the stylish wit and cultured cleverness longed for by middle class readers. 

Next time, we'll look closer at the Golden Age in America and consider other changes in the genre following World War II.

Thursday, November 5, 2020

The Golden Age: expanded literary forms

 As earlier noted, the Golden Age can be characterized as having three outstanding features: purity of language while playing with it, expanded literary forms, and "fair play" -- sort of.

The last entry considered the treatment of language, especially in relation to the modernist writers. This entry looks at the expanded literary forms.

The dramatists and better educated writers of the Golden Age, indebted to Doyle but no longer in bondage to him, found ways to adapt the modernists' interest in the novel as a form. They did this in 4 ways:

a. An expanded point of view. Learning from Wilkie Collins' use of multiple point of view in "The Moonstone" and elsewhere, and reacting against the subjectivism of the modernists, Golden Age writers mostly abandoned the 'memoir' voice of Watson and used wry observation of a third person narrator who played fair but cleverly misled the reader (well, ok, except for Hastings, who narrates some of Poirot's adventures). 

b. In turn, the detective was also misled, and unlike Holmes, made errors which extended the length of the story, employing dead-ends and using the same clues to start over. From this 2-step pattern emerged a formula whereby much of the novel was the setting-forth of several solutions, by different characters or detectives, before arriving at the final, clever, correct one.

c.  A third technique used to expand the form was by using more detailed description of the scene of the crime: the room layout, the room's contents, the looks of people, the recalling of conversations, and interviews with suspects. Many stories included diagrams of the crime scene and blueprints of houses. This detail invited readers to play along, and enlarged the solution, with each fact from the beginning having a part at the end, where the detective explains everything cleverly.

d. Lastly, the writers brought in more characters, and all of them (ideally) were suspects. While Turn-of-the-Century stories did not use the technique of multiple suspects, Golden Age writers depended heavily on this approach whereby everyone (or NO ONE) had a good motive and opportunity to commit the crime. In the gathering of everybody at the end, the detective unmasks the real culprit and it is a surprise to all, especially the reader. If it is not a surprise, the story fails.

While there were many more characters, there was not much characterization. Self-imposed rules called for caricatures, not characters, in order to simplify motives. Christie said there were only four motives, anyway: gain, hatred, envy or fear.

The deeper exploration of human nature or moral problems is rarely done, and the ones who do this, such as Graham Greene, are generally lifted out of 'detective fiction' into 'crime fiction.' Sayers had strong theological interests as Chesterton did, and tried to introduce themes of justice and gender roles, but Lord Peter was too much of a dandy to do it credibly.

In fact, with the closed settings and socially privileged characters who inhabit them, the detective novel of this period became a 'novel of manners,' in which social rules, not merely moral ones, were important. The world of country estates, Dusenburg cars, white gloves, vested suits and Oxford educations baffled the working class bobbies and Scotland Yarders who intruded. Only an equally smug and fussy aristocrat like a Wimsey or a Poirot could enter this world and understand everyone's secrets with a measure of discretion. Poirot does this through his method, "The Little gray Cells", while his dim Watson-like companion Hastings look on in wonder. Lord Peter uses intuitive insight, that is, whim -- get it? Wimsey.

Next time, we'll examine the role of 'fair play' and the 'puzzle' aspect.


Saturday, October 17, 2020

The Golden Age: Fun with Words

 The serious writers of the so-called Golden Age between the wars worked hard to avoid the triteness and shoddiness of pulp fiction. At the same time, they disliked the highbrow fiction of the modernists which broke with the techniques of realism to emphasize inner states of mind, the unconscious, the subjective, and passion over reason (remember: detective fiction is largely a celebration of reason). Instead of using experimental language (as James Joyce did, for example), the Golden Agers strove for 'purity of language.'

They didn't quite mean what linguists call 'purism', since English is far from a 'pure' language, borrowing as it does from so many other languages. It had more to do with plain, realistic speaking. Members of The Detection Club of England, founded in 1930 with members such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Austin Freeman and EC Bentley, vowed with a hand upon Eric the Skull to 'honor the King's English', even while in America Dashiell Hammett was murdering it with clipped dialog and street slang.



(Pictured:  Sayers with Eric the Skull). While they disliked 'experimental' word use, Golden Agers became fascinated with word play. They offered clues in their titles, like Ellery Queen's "The French Powder Mystery" (1930). They gave their detectives a sense of wit in their words, especially Sayers' Lord Peter. Even Christie had linguistic fun with Poirot's fractured and French-ified English (he was Belgian, it should be noted).

Word play was a literary fad that found its way into detective fiction through puns, literary allusions, cultural slang (such as hunting terms), malapropisms, jokes and songs. Detective stories became very 'talky' and dialog dominated the page.

Another reason for this may be that detective novels operate like plays with small groups of actors under stress, set in a limited location, with dialog-driven scenes of interrogation. The characters are often stereotyped and easily identifiable: the ingenue, the vamp, the comic foreigner, the stiff-upper-lip butler, and such. As it turns out, most Golden Age writers were dramatists. AA Milne (despite Pooh) was a serious playwright whose work included mysteries. John Dickson Carr wrote radio plays for the BBC. Sayers' last novel was actually an adaptation of a play. Christie wrote plays her whole life and one of them, "The Mouse Trap," was a thriller that was the longest running play in history. Queen began his novels with a list of 'dramatis personae' like plays do. Going to plays was popular among the middle class in the 1920s, and detective stories brought plays into their homes.

In a sense, Golden Age detective stories follow Aristotle's rules for drama closely, as outlined in his "Poetics". They occur in a limited locale: the village, the country house, the train, the hotel. The closed setting eliminates the possibility that outsiders did the crime. They provide what Aristotle called 'unity of place'. In addition, Aristotle says 'unity of time' is important, so the detective story generally takes place within a matter of hours or days. This may also explain why the mystery is so well-suited to TV.

A second feature of the Golden Age writers was the way they expanded the short form successfully. More on this next time. 

 

Wednesday, September 23, 2020

The Golden Age, part 1

By the end of the 1920s, public libraries in Britain and the US were well established, paid for by wealthy railroad and steel tycoons such as Andrew Carnegie. So, publishers competed with libraries by issuing cheap editions of popular books and marketing them cleverly.

Book Clubs began: the Book Of The Month Club in 1926, The Detective Story Club, and The Unicorn Mystery Book Club in England, and in the US: Doubleday's Crime Club, Simon and Schuster's Inner Sanctum Novels, Lippencott's Mainline Mysteries, Dodd Mead's Red Badge Novels, Dutton's Mystery of the Month, and some others. Most had a trademark and a gimmick.

One gimmick was the 'sealed mystery', where the last chapter was sealed with an onionskin wrapper. If you returned the book with the wrapper uncut (presumably because you solved the mystery without needing to see it), you'd get a refund.

Another gimmick: contests. Publishers regularly held contests for stories, and Dodd Mead regularly advertised 'the 8 point test' for detective stories, a list of 'rules of the game' (some of which you may recall from the first entry in this blog series). The contests generated a lot of junk, and publishers published a lot of it, but it also generated Ellery Queen (more on Queen another day).

Serious writers of this "Golden Age" between the wars such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers worked hard to avoid the triteness and shoddiness of pulp fiction (that is, the cheap and hastily-written dime-novel fiction that appealed to barely-educated factory workers). Yet at the same time they had little patience for the so-called 'highbrow' literature that was in fashion: the experimental modernism of James Joyce, DH Lawrence, William Faulkner and the like who were gaining recognition with their interest in experimental language and symbolism and point-of-view and time-shifting.

The reaction against both 'popular' fiction and literary modernism  drove Golden Age writers to an emphasis on careful plot construction, avoiding the shallow plots of pop fiction, and the avoidance of plot altogether by modernists. This meant an emphasis on the puzzle aspect. This was coupled to the rising popularity of newspaper puzzles like acrostics and the new invention of the crossword. Dorothy Sayers, as early as 1928, believed people would tire of the puzzle-solving and become able to predict the outcome too easily. Even so, mysteries became a profitable form of middlebrow entertainment, the 'classic whodunnits' we still celebrate, with 3 distinguishing qualities: purity of language, an expanded form, and 'fair play' (where the detective is still more clever than the reader).

We'll consider these qualities next time.  


Saturday, September 12, 2020

Chesterton and Father Brown

An emerging science of the period was the science of human motives and behavior, psychology. And with GK Chesterton's Father Brown,  we meet someone who is intimately acquainted with the twists and turns of the human heart as heard in the Catholic confessional. For GK (pictured below), the detective story is a morality tale of good and evil, of sin and repentance and redemption. Fr. Brown owes nothing to the foot-ruler, magnifying glass, microscope or lab, but depends on intuitive insight into 'fallen' human nature.


It's difficult to imagine a greater contrast to Holmes than Fr Brown, a little priest with a round, dull face, "dull as a Norfolk dumpling," plain gray eyes and who keeps fumbling about for his umbrella. But he has unexpected vigilance and intelligence, seeing criminals not as enemies of society to be captured and put away, but as wayward souls to be rescued and restored. An evil-doer's sin must be brought to light for his own good. To Fr Brown, problems of crime are problems of character. Many stories end with a private confession, such as "The Invisible Man". 

To emphasize this, GK uses two characters who are exaggerated a bit from earlier French forms. First, Aristide Valentin is head of the Paris police, and the best investigator in the world, totally French and logical. His ambition in life is to arrest Flambeau, the other figure, a rogue-hero and gentleman-crook who is flamboyant (Flambeau, get it?), witty, daring, tall and strong. Between these two huge stock figures waddles the unassuming Fr Brown (even his name is plain). As Paul wrote in I Corinthians 1:27, "God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God was chosen the weak things of the world to confound the mighty."

Fr Brown's sympathies lie with the sinner, Flambeau. In "The Blue Cross," Fr B pulls the ol' switcheroo con game on Flambeau himself, who thought he was playing it on Fr. Brown by imitating a priest. Brown knows Flambeau is a fake because in their walk-along conversation, Flambeau praises 'the mysteries of heaven,' but dismisses reason, which sounds to Fr B like bad theology. That's because humans, made in the image and likeness of God, are endowed with reason and intellect. Fr B recovers the cross and allows Flambeau to go free, whereupon Flambeau repents and reforms, later becoming a pro detective who assists Brown in cases.

Brown has no such feelings toward Valentin. In one story, Valentin himself commits a murder he believes is cleverly covered up, but Fr B uncovers it and the proud and powerful Valentin commits suicide.

This exemplifies part of GK's overall message: the folly of mechanical, materialistic rationality, distinguished from true reason which recognizes that humans are made in the image of God with a mind and a will but are 'fallen.' So they are not basically 'good' nor wholly 'evil' but bent in nature from the inherited habit of sinning, and yet capable of finding restoration. GK intended his stories to convey such theological messages, and so he carries the genre to a higher level, considering issues of social justice and individual morality. The later stories can be high-handed in their teaching, but most of the 50 stories try to emphasize the criminal as a human being with both good and bad impulses, as someone not evil but fallen. And that, Fr Brown would say, is good theology.

So, unlike the 'scientific detective' testing stains and measuring prints, Fr B looks for complex psychological motives that led a person into wrongdoing. GK modeled Brown after Monsignor John O'Connor, whom he met in 1904 and who influenced him to become a Catholic Christian.

GK is the first 'man of letters' to write in the genre. He defended it in critical essays such as "On Detective Stories" found here: https://www.chesterton.org/a-defence-of-detective-stories/

And he offered advice on how to write such stories, here: https://www.chesterton.org/how-to-write-detective/ as well as here: https://www.chesterton.org/errors-about-detective-stories/

Even while offering such erudite advice, GK the 'intuitive detective' writer and the other 'scientific detective' writers did not allow for much 'fair play.' The detective simply announced at the end 'whodunnit'. Some detectives even remain unnamed, such as Baroness Orczy's "Old Man in the Corner" who played with a piece of string and announced a solution at the end. 

Perhaps as a reaction to this after Word War I, and the loss of faith in pure reason which accompanied the senseless war, the rules of 'fair play' formed somewhat rigidly, and the gentleman of leisure who undertakes an occasional investigation for the pleasure of solving a puzzle (and often defending a wrongly-accused woman) came to the fore, for what most call "The Golden Age" of the 1920s-30s--the age of Hercule Poirot, Lord Peter Wimsey, and Ellery Queen.

 

Monday, September 7, 2020

The Scientific Detectives: Van Dusen, Thorndyke

Watson once said of Holmes, "He was the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has ever seen." This is what American writer Jacques Futrelle -- an admirer of Doyle -- had in mind when he created Professor S.F.X. Van Dusen, "The Thinking Machine." Van Dusen is brilliant but brusque and unfriendly toward associates, and toward the reader. All his cases are short stories. The first collection appeared in 1907, named for the title story that first appeared in 1905, "The Problem of Cell 13," his best known work. You can read it here: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0603601h.html

Talk about a 'locked room" mystery--the title story challenges the prof to escape from a prison that is inescapable. Like other examples of the period, an admiring journalist is the narrator.

Futrelle was a journalist himself, in Atlanta, New York and Boston, before he left to write fiction full time. He perished in the sinking of the Titanic, after forcing his wife into a lifeboat and staying behind, smoking a cigarette on deck.

The best example of the 'scientific' detective is Austin Freeman's Dr. John Thorndyke. Like Doyle, Freeman modeled Thorndyke after a medical school instructor. Unlike Holmes, who has a veneer of scientific inquiry, Thorndyke carries a portable lab with him and conducts tests, explained in detail. Freeman tried all the experiments himself to make sure they would work. The police actually adopted some of his experiments and tests. Thorndyke extends the detective's senses, enhancing human observation with microscopes.

Thorndyke has lab assistants -- Watsons, sort of -- named Jervis and Polton, who are devoted and smart but, like Watson, not as smart as the main man. 

Freeman attempted to solve one of mystery writing's mysteries: how to get beyond the tiresome technique of plot construction whereby the story stops dead (ha!) to explain the events leading up to the crime. Doyle stumbled terribly on this annoying point, spending large chunks of his novels providing the 'backstory', especially in 'A Study in Scarlet' and 'Sign of Four'. Gaboriau tried to avoid the break in continuity without success.

So Freeman started the story earlier, with the criminal-to-be contemplating his crime. Then we follow the events leading up to the murder. Finally, Thorndyke joins the case, but now the reader knows more than the detective and the attention is focused on the process of detection, not what is detected. "Columbo" followed this inverted formula in the 1970s, where we see a cultured, intelligent upper-class person commit murder, and then we wait to see how a rumpled middle-class cop will solve it and humble the haughty, much to the delight of middle-class viewers.

But Thorndyke is not a cop. He is a cultured amateur and so are the other characters, including the criminals. Thus, detective fiction moved completely away from 'sensation.' In a way, Freeman married the gentleman-crook tradition to the emerging 'scientific amateur detective' form.

This emphasis on science tied into the public's fascination with the new age of invention: radio waves, electricity, aeroplanes, and transAtlantic airships. Strides were made in scientific criminology, too: chemical tests to distinguish animal bloodstains from human stains were developed (would Holmes leap for joy, as at the beginning of "Scarlet"?). Fingerprinting became accepted (Holmes dismissed this). But villains, too, kept up, killing victims with electricity, exotic poisons, and x-rays.

Science fiction was also popular, but it tended to be gloomy (consider HG Wells' "Time Machine" where the earth becomes barren and populated by primitive crabs. The George Pal-directed movie in the 1960s had a Kennedy-era hopeful end). Scientific detectives, on the other hand, put an optimistic spin on science and progress. But it is not surprising that 'scientific' detectives disappeared after World War I, which showed everyone what science and modern technology could do: murder people in horribly large numbers impersonally.

Saturday, August 22, 2020

In the shadow of Holmes

Through the 1890s and up to the 19-teens nearly all detection stories lived in the shadow of Holmes and Baker Street. Nearly everyone used a "Watson" character as a sidekick and narrator, such as Arthur Morrison's "Martin Hewitt" who had a newspaper reporter tell of his exploits.

While there were variations, including female detectives to recapture the female reading public and occult detectives (ghost stories being a close cousin to the genre, valuing 'mystery' yet de-valuing reason), writers stuck to Doyle's formulas.

Perhaps the only distinctive character to rival Holmes was "Raffles." the gentleman-burglar created by Doyle's brother-in-law Ed Hornung. He intended Raffles as a reverse Holmes, having spent years writing about the convict culture of Australia. Doyle urged him not to make a criminal a hero, but Vidocq still cast a long shadow, and Raffles was born.


To Holmes, success meant solving a crime contrived by others, but for Raffles, success meant carrying off a perfect crime. Beginning with "Raffles, The Amateur Cracksman," in 1898, Hornung produced three story collections about his wealthy adventurer before getting himself killed in the Boer War in 1905, the war that Doyle championed and got knighted for.

Meanwhile, the French were busy producing detectives.

Maurice LeBlanc, a journalist, developed "Arsene Lupin," a flamboyant thief (a la Raffles), daring and witty, with a flair for disguising himself as a prince or a duke. In one story, he captures an English detective and poses as him in Scotland Yard.

Gaston LeRoux, also a journalist, wrote about sensational trials. When he turned to fiction, he employed surprises, such as having the detective in the case turn out to be the sought-after criminal in disguise unmasked by -- who else -- the reporter covering the story.

Back in England, a French detective created by Englishman Robert Barr also became popular. In "The Trials of Eugene Valmont," we meet a natty little Frenchman with sublime self-assurance, a quick wit, and a poor opinion of the police. He is sometimes a comic figure, and perhaps an inspiration for Christie's Hercule Poirot.

While it may appear that all fiction in this period was derivative by imitating Doyle, Dupin or Vidocq, the period saw three developments in the genre:

a. the scientific detective (Futrelle, for example)

b. the intuitive detective (such as Chesterton and Bentley)

c. the master criminal (Sax Rohmer). 

I'll consider a. and b. in the next postings; c. pulls us toward 'superhero' and 'spy' tales.

I really don't know if anyone is reading this short course in Detective Fiction. I'm certainly not as complex or complete as a site such as Crimereads.com, but, hey, it's free, and I hope this little overview increases your appreciation of the genre. 

 

Monday, August 17, 2020

Gaboriau and Lecoq

 Arthur Conan Doyle, commenting on his own reading, once remarked, "I have read Gaboriau's 'Lecoq the Detective', 'The Gilded Clique', and a story concerning the murder of an old woman, the name of which I forget [it was 'The Widow LeRouge']. All very good. Wilkie Collins, but more so."

So before we leave the 19th Century for good, I'd like to reflect briefly on Emile Gaboriau (pictured below).


Police memoirs became popular reading from the 1820s onwards. I previously discussed Vidocq's self-congratulatory and embellished (well, fictionalized) memoirs. These had a strong influence on the fictional work of Gaboriau.

Gaboriau began by serializing 'sensation' fiction for daily newspapers. Each episode was written to a specified length, and calculated to end in a way to lure the reader into buying the next day's paper. His most famous character is Monsieur Lecoq, a convict-turned-Surete-agent (in imitation of Vidocq), who first appeared in a serial story in 1865. Lecoq works with an amateur investigator named Pere Tabaret, "who has taken up the business of the police, as others do painting or music, for entertainment." An older mentor, Tabaret offers advice from his bed and does not get directly involved, which brings to mind Nero Wolfe and his man-of-action Archie Goodwin. 

In keeping with an Industrial Age mentality, detective Lecoq's power of reason is likened to a machine: if one can vacuum up the right evidence, logic alone will produce the criminal. But Gaboriau also humanizes his detective in a couple of ways. He makes him comically absent-minded, and when his relentless reason exposes as a criminal a man he loved as a son, he becomes depressed. And he holds conversations with the picture of a woman on his snuff box.

Lecoq--who has a proud rooster as a symbol--is a dashing master of disguise like Vidocq (and as Holmes would be). He rises to a prominent position with the Paris police force (again, like Vidocq) and Gaboriau spends much time describing the routines of honest, hardworking policemen in stations, partly to calm public fears of the police. It is because of these descriptions, along with his hero's methodical and scientific approach, that he is often called the father of the police procedural.

Whereas Dickens showed proper Victorian outrage in presenting his villains, with the heavens exacting revenge and the offender repenting in anguish, Gaboriau's villains do not struggle with their conscience. That's because Gaboriau, a Frenchman, presents his bad guys as aristocrats gone wrong, full of self importance and arrogance and greed, committing their crimes without regret against the weak, often geniuses who nearly outwit the brilliant detective. This is the beginning of the "Master Criminal" motif (something Doyle might be imitating with his use of Professor Moriarty?).

Whereas Dickens embedded a crime story within a larger family saga, Gaboriau did the opposite: he began with the discovery of the crime and the detection (Part 1: The Inquiry) and lengthened it by inventing conspiracies to obstruct the detective. Then he connected it to a long and labored tale (Part 2: The Honor of the Name) that exposed the extensive backstory of the youthful indiscretions of an aristocrat that lead up to the crime. So, despite surprises and dangers at the end, the belabored and sentimental Part 2 makes his work slow and boring (this, too, might be something Doyle imitates in "A Study in Scarlet" with that long Mormon section. Incidentally, in "Scarlet", Holmes calls Lecoq 'a miserable bungler'). Even so, Gaboriau's structure in his 4 police novels proved that "the detective story" could become a book-length form, just as the "sensation novel" was dying out.



Tuesday, August 11, 2020

Holmes: To conclude...

One other thought about Holmes and science: If Holmes studied footprints so carefully, it is odd that he did not study fingerprints at all. Sir Francis Galton published articles in England on the importance of fingerprints as a means of identification between 1892 and 1895, the years of Holmes greatest popularity. In 1896, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, meeting in Chicago, set up a Bureau of Investigation to study the possible use of fingerprinting as a way to augment or to replace the "Bertillon" method of bodily measurement as a way to identify criminals. But Holmes has no use for fingerprinting. In one case where prints are an issue, "The Norwood Builder," he shows it is a planted false clue. He had no use for Bertillon either, as he says at the end of "The Empty House." It was America's Mark Twain who first used fingerprints in a story to solve a mystery, in "Puddnhead Wilson."

Speaking of cops: While the English police value Holmes' advice, he snootily treats them like bunglers lacking in imagination, as Dupin did. Still, we should remember that Inspector Lestrade found the wedding band and other clues in "Scarlet," not Holmes.

The police begin by distrusting his far-fetched theories but come to value his cooperation. He never identifies a criminal without also supplying enough evidence for conviction. Sometimes he sets things up so that it looks like the police solved the crime and he leaves it up to Watson to set the record straight later in a story. Sometimes he withholds info until he can solve it himself. But he never misleads or hampers the police. And he never stays around for the trial. Earlier detective fiction loved courtroom scenes, but Holmes never testifies in court.

To conclude: Holmes embodied the characteristics of his predecessors and became the ancestor of so many detectives to follow: Father Brown with his intuition, the fussy Belgian Hercule Poirot and his dim sidekick Hastings, Lord Peter Wimsey and his sidekick Bunter, and others. The middle-class police detectives of Dickens and Collins were replaced by private, consulting amateurs of independent means (obviously, middle-class cops make a comeback much later, around the 1950s, with the arrival of the police procedural).

Doyle only flirted with the 'fair play' idea. When Holmes says, "The game's afoot," it is not a game with the reader. That is left to S.S. Van Dine, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy Sayers, who begin to write just as Doyle is ending his last series in the mid 1920s and turning his energy and devotion to--of all things--seances, spiritualism, and the defense of the existence of Faeries. 

Thursday, August 6, 2020

Holmes part 4: a scientific hero?

What made Holmes the perfect hero for his times?


He exemplified all that the British admired. He was mentally brilliant, but pragmatically so. He had good taste, a good social and cultural background, the status of a scientist, with a love for good music--especially the violin--and fine tobacco (he can easily identify dozens of types of ashes). He has family connections in Europe, but is completely English, whereas most other detectives of the previous 50 years, such as Dupin, Tabaret, Lecoq and Vidocq, had been French.

In keeping with the European fascination with James Fennimore Cooper's Indian trackers, Holmes was a fine reader of footprints, hoof marks, and wheel tracks. Tracking constitutes a great deal of his stories, hence the deerstalker cap. Holmes has little use for modern criminology and often whines about a trail being ruined. In one case, he uses plaster to preserve footprints. He is often compared to a dog such as a foxhound or retriever. Watson has a bull pup (who we never see), and some suggest it is a figure of speech for a bad temper or an illegitimate son. Anyway -- like Cooper's Indians, Holmes goes tracking without food or water for days, and enters a trance-like concentration when working out a case.

Like Vidocq, he is a master of disguise and an actor, fooling Watson into believing he is an old man or an Italian priest. Also like Vidocq, he has remarkable physical strength and endurance, though he never works out. He prefers to lounge about in his famous robe, and he tends to smoke heavily: cigarettes, cigars, and his trademark calabash pipe.

Like Dupin, he has encyclopedic knowledge of criminal history. He is full of technical information, regards detection as a science, uses newspaper ads to bring suspects out into the open, breaks into people's thoughts, and believes that the more grotesque a mystery appears, the simpler the answer is. They both smoke, take long walks in the city at night, avoid women, and have eccentric interests.

For example, Holmes plays the violin while he's thinking. He studies philology, ancient manuscripts, and music of the Middle Ages. In "Scarlet", he says he has no use for the humanities and other impractical intellectual pursuits, and in "Hound" Watson recalls he is even uninterested in astronomy. But in later stories he quotes Shakespeare and Carlyle, and retires to bee-keeping and the study of Buddhism. He is a fine boxer, but we never see him exercise or practice. Instead, we see him struggle with a cocaine habit in "Sign of Four" and Watson, the good doctor, persuades him later in the canon to give it up. This would not strike Victorian readers as harshly as us, since cocaine at the time was openly marketed as a painkiller and was even advertised as a nerve-calming ingredient in Coca-Cola.

Poe has a Romantic notion of the bi-part soul, which Doyle adapted for Holmes. He is a rational drug addict, a lazy athlete, and he works with sloppy precision. He does not practice Japanese judo, yet he is an expert. He embodies men's fantasies of being an expert in things without working on it.

Both Dupin and Holmes have admiring, faithful chroniclers. Dupin's narrator reveals little about himself, but over 4 novels and 56 stories we learn much about Watson. Contrary to the bumbling Oliver Hardy image given to him in earlier movies, he is a handsome and strong (though injured) man, not as quick-minded as Holmes but not as dim-witted as some presume. He is always ready for an adventure (he went to Afghanistan, after all), and shows good humor and an eye for the ladies. Watson is perhaps Doyle's most pleasing innovation. 

The contrasts to Poe are dramatic, too. Poe uses the tales to illustrate a point about the power of pure analysis, using a near mathematical approach with little narrative detail or action. The characters are lightly drawn, and they do not converse or act normally. Dupin is never wrong, never misled. But Doyle's stories are full of movement. People of all classes bring their problems to Holmes. Much of the action takes place before our eyes: chasing hansom cabs in the streets, running over fields, inspecting rooms. Holmes is, on occasion, baffled. In one story he is wrong.

Poe was unfamiliar with Paris and it is used merely as a backdrop. But Doyle knew Victorian London and made it part of his plots, with its fog, cabs, gaslights, docks and train stations, cathedrals and opium dens (hmmm--shades of Dickens).

Doyle managed to restrain sensation to acceptable limits and explain Holmes' deductions in an entertaining way. By doing this, he appealed to two kinds of mystery readers: the uncritical public interested in crime stories for their own sensational sake to forget about their miserable factory jobs for a while, and intellectual readers who found satisfaction in the closely reasoned puzzles.

At first, it appears that Doyle, himself a doctor, is creating the first 'scientific' detective in an age enamored with scientific progress. We meet him in a chemistry lab at Bart's Hospital, elated about a test for detecting hemoglobin in stains. However, he does not reason as a scientist or use scientific experiments to solve cases (one one occasion he uses test tubes and litmus paper). Yet readers of the 1890s were not ready for Quincy M.E. or Scarpetta or CSI or NCIS and all the shows that have forensic labs. In "Scarlet", Holmes believes Drebber was poisoned but he does not analyze the pills. He gives them to the landlady's dog, and the terrier's instant death proves the drug is lethal. In "The Devil's Foot" he suspects a burning brown powder has killed Brenda Tregennis and driven her brothers insane, but does he send it to a lab? Nope. He tests it on himself and Watson with nearly fatal results!

Early on, we see Holmes beating corpses to test for bruises, but he never uses post-mortem tests in a case. The public was not ready for a detective with a scalpel. They could understand one with a magnifying glass.

So, Holmes' use of 'science' is a veneer pasted over romanticized plots that exalt Watson's common sense and Holmes' intuitive genius. Like his heroes in the historical novels that flopped, Holmes is a chivalrous man who is fearless before the strong and humble to the weak, Victorian qualities found most often in schoolboy stories of the period. Doyle successfully applied the morality of schoolboy stories like "Tom Brown's Schooldays" and "Boy's Own Paper" that show a strong upperclassman and an awestruck tag-along underclassman. It is no wonder that Lord Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, found Holmes to be a perfect role model of self-reliance, loyalty, and moral fitness for English boys responsible for the future of an empire. In these schoolboy stories we learn that public schools are for the moral training and character-building of 'gentlemen' who will 'quit themselves like men', 'do their duty', and influence generations yet unborn by a deportment that will 'strike out if necessary for whatever is true and manly'. Boys were taught to oppose bullies and take one's licks with a proper stiff upper lip when he feels he is in the right.

So Holmes stories are not innocent entertainment. They are, like other schoolboy stories of the period, filled with an imperial ideology meant to uphold and justify the values of Victoria's Empire. Like other detective stories in general, they declare that good wins over evil and order over chaos, but more than that, these declare that British order and efficiency will win over the chaos of the world. Not even World War I shattered this artifice.

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

Holmes, part 3

His friend's mention of a legend about a demonic hound in the misty bogs of Dartmoor prompted Doyle to explore the moor. The story that came to him at first was not a Holmes story. But the plot began to demand a prominent figure, and Holmes stepped forward. Thus, Doyle wrote "The Hound of the Baskervilles" starring Holmes and Watson, set in a time earlier than The Final Problem.


The story appeared in serial form in The Strand in late 1901 through Spring 1902. Then in 1903 Doyle gave in and agreed to resurrect Holmes. The newspapers went wild with joy, and printed stories about Doyle possibly going to New York to write about Holmes in American cases (a premise for the CBS show "Elementary" that ran 2012-19, a contemporary treatment with a disgraced Holmes going to New York following drug rehab and under the supervision of a surgeon, Joan Watson, played by Lucy Liu).

But Doyle never did this. The cesspool of London held plenty of possibilities.

When "The Adventure of the Empty House" appeared in the October 1903 Strand, the company could not print copies fast enough. Long lines of people waited for them, not at newsstands, but at the printer's.

Doyle produced 33 more stories and another novel, "The Valley of Fear." The last story appeared in 1927, just three years before his death in 1930. Holmes' career lasted 40 years, from the height of British power in the gaslight era to the age of the automobile. Curiously, Doyle gave Holmes little interest in the scientific progress of the period. The Russian Revolution, World War I, flight, movies, radio, and so on, never happened in Holmes' world. He stayed in the 1890s, and detective fiction for a long while remained in this idealized, make-believe world of country estates, compliant servants, elegant trains and foggy streets. The time had been right in the 1890s for a British hero who exemplified all that the British admired. More on that next time.

Wednesday, July 22, 2020

Holmes, part 2

We should remember that the short story made a slow appearance as a distinct literary form in England, where the 3-volume novel had been the only type of fiction from the beginning of the 19th Century. However, with the rise of successful magazines for the newly-literate middle class, short stories found favor with the public.

The short story, Poe had said, had to be read in one sitting and achieve a 'unity of effect.' The detective story was the perfect form for the short story, as it strove to proceed inevitably to a pre-determined denoument with the added effect of celebrating reason and science in the Victorian age of progress.



Still, Arthur Conan Doyle (pictured above) was committed to the novel form, and to keep himself busy during a slow medical practice, he cranked out a historical novel that never found a publisher. Then, in imitation of Poe (who he admired), he wrote "A Study in Scarlet." It's a long short story, really, with a bloated historical section in the middle about the Mormons -- just what you'd expect of a historical novelist trying to write in a new genre. This appeared in a Christmas Annual in 1887 and was dismissed.

Then an American firm, Lippencott Magazine, noticed it and asked Doyle for another. "The Sign of Four" was published in 1889.

English reviewers were unimpressed.

Doyle believed Holmes obscured his higher work, that is, his historical novels. But his so-called higher work wasn't bringing in money. So he offered The Strand Magazine a series of detective stories which would be based on his childhood hero, Dupin, and his medical school hero, Dr. Bell, a diagnostician who could tell much about a person by carefully observing details (as in Holmes saying to Watson, "I perceive you have been in Afghanistan.").

Doyle conceived of a series of self-contained episodes, not a continuing serial. This was a breakthrough in itself, something Poe had attempted but not quite carried off. Like Poe, Doyle found newspaper reports helpful for plot ideas, as well as brief news items in The Strand where his Holmes stories appeared. At first he wrote only 6 stories for The Strand, hoping to return to his 'serious' fiction. The editors and the public insisted on more tales so strongly by the time the 4th story appeared that Doyle set a price so high that he expected it to be refused. But The Strand agreed immediately, to Doyle's consternation, and he was obliged to produce 6 more 'adventures.' At this point he thought of killing off Holmes. He told his mom, and she wrote back: "You won't! You can't! You mustn't!"

Doyle believed 12 stories were plenty and he tried again to return to his 'serious' work. But The Strand begged him for more. In 1892 he offered to do a dozen more for L 1,000, a price so high he figured they would turn him down. The Strand accepted, and "The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes" was produced. This time, though, Doyle carried out his earlier threat, and in "The Final Problem," a heavy-hearted Watson tells of Holmes' death in Switzerland's Reichenbach Falls with his arch-enemy, master criminal Professor Moriarty.

Doyle was deluged with letters from grief-stricken readers. People wept openly in the streets. Women wore veils and men wore black armbands in public. The Strand lost 20,000 subscribers. No wonder they said to readers: "There will be a temporary interval in the Sherlock Holmes stories. A new series will commence in an early number. Meanwhile, powerful detective stories will be contributed by other eminent writers."

Despite an international protest, Doyle refused to change his mind for ten years. He worked on dismal historical novels, visited America, and served in a British hospital during the Boer War (his book about this experience got him knighted in 1902).

Then, in 1901, a friend mentioned a legend about a demonic hound in the misty bogs of Dartmoor. And a story took shape.

Wednesday, July 15, 2020

Doyle and Holmes, Part 1

The following was voted by a group of scholars to be 'the funniest joke ever':

Sherlock Holmes and Watson go on a fishing trip. As they bed down for the night, Holmes says, "Watson, look up into the sky and tell me what you see." Watson replies, "I see millions of stars." Holmes asks, "And what does that tell you?" Watson: "Astronomically, it tells me there are millions of galaxies and potentially billions of planets. Theologically, it tells me that God is great and that we are small and insignificant. Meteorologically it tells me that we will have a beautiful day tomorrow. What does it tell you?"

"Watson, you idiot," Holmes says. "Somebody stole our tent."

* * *

In 1888, a series of gruesome murders rocked the Whitechapel District of London. At least 7 killings were attributed to the unknown assailant who was called "Jack the Ripper." All of the victims were prostitutes, and all except one killed while plying their trade on public streets. The methods of killing were not in every case identical, but in each case the throat was slit and in most the bodies were mutilated by someone possessing considerable knowledge of human anatomy. Unusual -- though futile -- efforts were made to trap the killer. Hundreds of suspects were interviewed. Bloodhounds were put into service. Even the eyes of one of the victims were photographed on the theory (not yet discredited) that the image of the murderer might be recorded on the retinas of the murdered woman.

Throughout the investigation, the authorities received taunting notes from someone purporting to be the murderer. On one occasion, half a human kidney, which may have been removed from the body of a victim, was mailed to the police. Few cases have so captured the attention and imagination of the public both in England and America. "Jack the Ripper" has provided themes for many literary and theatrical productions.

The identity of "Jack" and the motivation for his (her?) crimes have proved tempting subjects for speculation. Many hypotheses have been advanced but none generally accepted. Mystery writer Patricia Cornwell famously attempted it in 2002, accusing Walter Sickert, a painter, something Jean Overton Fuller also did in 1990. But these conclusions were criticized, and other theories emerged that a crazy midwife and abortionist -- Jill the Ripper -- was responsible. But I digress.

With Jack the Ripper painting Whitechapel red, and Irish nationalists planting bombs in Scotland Yard, the public no longer asked "why do we need cops?" but "Why aren't the cops doing anything?" The public was ready for a new detective hero, someone who would stand for justice and reason in an age of incompetence and chaos, and someone who would do it with pluck and flair.

The public was ready for Sherlock Holmes.




Sunday, July 12, 2020

One Singular Sensation

Wilkie Collins, Dickens' friend and travel pal for 15 years, was a "sensation" novelist, specializing in that form of emotional, melodramatic fiction that liked startling surprises, sudden reversals, and sentimental revelations. Like Dickens, Collins condemned social evils, showed concern for the poor, and developed an interest in police work made necessary by the urban realities of late Victorian society.

Unlike Dickens, Collins -- like Poe -- owed much to French sources. He read reference books about French criminal trials of the 18th Century and wrote articles about them for Dickens' magazines. Some are just lurid crime stories, while others feature police who make deductions based on observations to clear the wrongly accused and to identify the real criminal, in a pattern set by Vidocq.

In one story, "A Terribly Strange Bed," a Vidocq tale is re-told in which a lodging house is reputed to be a 'murder inn.' A lodger tries to find out how this happens, and lying awake one night from restlessness (and the wrong dose of a narcotic), he sees the canopy of the bed descending silently to suffocate the sleeper. He escapes, and helps a conveniently-placed cop arrest the bad guys. Thus, Collins' first 'detective' story is told from the point-of-view of the (near) victim, with mounting terror and suspense, not unlike Poe's horror stories.

Collins' second detective story is "The Stolen Letter" which sounds like?? Yup, Poe's "Purloined Letter." A rich young man who is being blackmailed by a compromising letter on the eve of his wedding hires a lawyer (the narrator) who recovers the letter and replaces it with another to postpone the blackmailer's discovery of his loss, and to insult him. The letter is cleverly hidden, though not out in the open as in Poe's story.

Collins' real skill was in long, complex novels, some of which had detective themes. They involve favorite Victorian subjects of rival brothers and sisters, relatives presumed dead but who show up later, relatives drugged and put into insane asylums against their will, detectives helping to establish the legal identities of those presumed dead or exposing false doubles, last minute rescues, and of course, terrible consequences for the villains.

Crowds of people waited outside stores to buy the magazines containing the latest installment of Collins' work, and possible solutions were discussed at work and over dinner. Bets were made.

In "The Woman in White" (1860), a plot of detection is set against a gothic background of romance and horror. The novel consists of reports by witnesses to a case, drawn from Mejan's "Recuiel des Causes Celebres" ("A Collection of Famous Cases"), a book he picked up on a trip to Paris with Dickens. The importance of the novel is in the way it investigates criminal and family mysteries in detail right up to a conclusion of the case in which everything is explained. The villain emerges not a true gentleman but an illegitimate son of a noble family, which further exposes other family secrets, and he dies in a church fire just as he is about to destroy an old birth register. This act of God's justice, combined with the detective's logical solution of the riddles, satisfied Victorian values of reason and moral order.

Collins' most famous novel, "The Moonstone" (1868), first serialized in Dickens' magazine 'All the Year Round,' is arguably the first true detective novel. Dorothy Sayers praised it, saying, "Taking everything into consideration, 'The Moonstone' is probably the finest detective story ever written." In the book, readers know all the facts from the start, narrated in parts by the plot's protagonists in turn. Each character gives a separate account from his or her point of view. The reader must be attentive and decide what the facts are, and whether anyone is embellishing or withholding the truth.

In the novel, Collins introduces a police detective, Sgt. Cuff. Cuff is based on Inspector Whicher of Scotland Yard, who Dickens had also written about. Whicher's career had taken a dive in 1860 when his evidence in a murder case was rejected by a court. But 5 years later, in 1865, a confession vindicated his deductions. He was suddenly a celebrity. When 'The Moonstone' appeared in 1868, everyone recognized Whicher in Sgt. Cuff. Like Inspector Bucket, Cuff takes calm control of situations, interviews people in turn, and examines places carefully. He is an older man, gray and hatchet-faced, and he looks a bit like a stereotypical undertaker. Collins gives him a sense of humor and the charming hobby of growing roses.

Other features in the novel continued in the genre: the country house by the sea, red herrings (misleading clues), and lots, I mean lots, of dialog as part of the investigation. Nearly all detective novels since have been 'talky.' Mine surely are.

Above all those features, however, is the devising of the plot as a game between reader and writer. Different characters relate various episodes in turn, and some of them, of course, lie and mislead. But all the clues are there, and this convention of 'fair play' -- inviting the reader to guess the puzzle and providing the means to do so -- carried well into the next century.

Collins had already experimented with a story told through the eyes of several characters. Ten years earlier, his story "Who Is The Thief?" appeared in 'The Atlantic Monthly' (and as 'The Biter Bit' in 'Queen of Hearts' magazine). The story consists of a series of letters between Inspector Theakstone, Sgt. Bulmer, and a cocky novice named Matthew Sharpin (who is dull-witted and not 'sharp' at all). Collins used humor, false clues, and a 'most unlikely suspect' formula which would become common later.

Collins tried other detectives, including an elderly man fond of pipes, smoking jackets and French novels. But Sgt. Cuff (along with Bucket) form the prototype for the English police detective. They are sound, dependable, loyal, hard-working middle class men who pay attention to detail and who are persistent. They have good home lives, pursue hobbies, and are like-able.

In other words, they identify with, idealize, and affirm the values and beliefs of the readers, the English middle class. They offered comfort and assurance for those who had the most to lose by any disturbance of the established social order. In the later Victorian period, public sympathy (that is, middle class sympathy), turned to support the police, since the middle class needed them -- men like themselves-- to protect them personally and to preserve the class structure and social order of Victorian society.


Tuesday, June 23, 2020

Charles Dickens: Crime Writer?

In the mid-19th Century, the 3-volume novel, which only the rich could afford, gave way to weekly and monthly magazines for the growing middle class in England, a middle class made possible by the industrial revolution.

Charles Dickens owned a couple of magazines in his day, "Household Words" and "All the Year Round." Serialized stories were a regular feature, as they had been in newspapers earlier. The stories were released as books after the series had run.

Dickens, like other Victorian writers, was sensitive to the Victorian taste for sentimentality, sensation, surprises, coincidences, reversals, and melodrama. Thus, many of their stories dealt with mysterious crimes that are at last explained, criminals who are at last punished, and family secrets at last revealed. "Sensation" fiction, like "Gothic" fiction, stirred up emotions with sentimental portraits of virtue, victims, and villains, featuring characters with names like Miss Fairly and Mr. Heartright.

"Oliver Twist" (1837) presents a whole community of criminals, including Fagin the gang leader and Bill Sikes, a pro burglar. Dickens' re-enactment of Sikes' brutal murder of Nancy in his public readings caused a sensation with his energetic realism. But Dickens did not really have a strong interest in police work, pretty much ignoring the Bow Street Runners, a security force formed in the late 18th Century, and the more recently formed "metropolitan police force" called "the bobbies", begun by the passing of Sir Robert Peel's Metro Police Act of 1829, which led to Scotland Yard's investigative department in 1842.

 In "Martin Chuzzlewit" (1844), Dickens attempts a detective plot, sort of. Through most of the story, Dickens leads us to believe that Jonas Chuzzlewit murdered his father. He behaves guiltily, is being blackmailed, and has access to poison. We expect -- as good Victorians -- an exposure of the villain and his getting his just desserts. But Dickens pulls a fast one and reveals that the father died of a broken heart when he realized Jonas intended to poison him. Jonas is still guilty -- but he did not kill his father.

In the 1840s, Dickens took a boyish interest in England's policemen and wrote police 'anecdotes' for Household Words. These sketches respected cops and emphasized observation, deductive reasoning, and detection techniques. Dickens, the former Parliamentary journalist and court reporter (discouraged by the miscarriage of justice there), had begun to hang out at police stations for stories (and maybe for his safety as he walked restlessly through London at night).

Dickens came to realize that readers were becoming more interested in police than in convict-heroes like Vidocq. The growing middle class, it seems, had turned its support toward the police, wanting personal protection and the preservation of an ordered and stratified society.

In "Barnaby Rudge", serialized in 1841, he had the plot revolve loosely around a crime. As noted in the previous posting, Poe studied the first two installments and figure out the end, to Dickens' great consternation ("He must be the very devil!" Dickens exclaimed). Poe criticized the novel for not focusing on the murder itself as the main driving force of the plot. But Dickens hadn't yet learned to tightly control his plots to a pre-determined outcome. His stories wandered and followed multiple dramas like soap operas do. And Dickens never wrote a tale solely to solve a crime -- not even "Our Mutual Friend", his last full novel, which begins with the discovery of a dead body in the Thames, or "Drood," with the mysterious disappearance of Edwin. Even with Dickens' sympathetic portrayal of cops in his magazine anecdotes, police are absent from "Drood".

However, in "Bleak House" (1853), Dickens may have created the first police detective hero, Inspector Bucket of the Detective Force, who solves a murder mystery after an innocent suspect has been arrested based on circumstantial evidence. Bucket comes across as efficient and authoritative. He quietly goes about his business until he reveals the solution in the presence of all concerned who have been gathered to hear it. This 'clearing up' chapter sets a precedent for all drawing-room mysteries to follow.

Bucket is almost surely inspired by a real London detective, Charles Frederick Field, who he profiled in a Household Words sketch two years earlier in 1851, "On Duty with Inspector Field". Dickens, already given to long walks in the city by night, goes on a walk-around with Field into some of the most gritty parts of town where the detective confronts tough customers with equal toughness and some humor.

Another item of note in "Bleak House" is the way Bucket's beloved wife fearlessly assists him, who finds a pad of paper on which threatening notes are written and who follows a suspect to a lake and sees the person throw the murder weapon into the water, which Bucket later recovers. So here is a precedent for the husband-wife partnerships evident later in Dash Hammett's "The Thin Man" and Christie's Tommy and Tuppence stories.

So: Bucket is calm, confident, tenacious, and proud to be a policeman. He is a thick-set man of tact and sensitivity dressed in respectable clothes, not unlike PD James' Adam Dalgliesh. Bucket makes a big impression on the Victorians, who pride themselves on their efficiency, organization, neatness, and good taste. It is, after all, an age of Empire and order.

But it is important to say that Bleak House is not a detective story. Once the murder is cleared up, there are many pages devoted to pleasant descriptions of family events. Like in his other books, the most important question concerns the parentage of the heroine.

Finally, Drood.

Dickens had adapted stories of murders and criminal trials for articles in his magazines in the 1850s, and in his second visit to America in 1868 he made a special trip to a murder scene at Harvard where a professor had killed a rival and disposed of the body in a lab furnace. When he returned to England, Dickens began "Drood".

Dickens died in the middle of it. It was to be 12 installments in "All The Year Round" beginning in April 1870. Three parts appeared before Dickens' death in June 1870. Three more were published after his death. So we know that Drood is half-finished, not even close to the end. The cover design has limited value as evidence of Dickens' intentions; he often changed his mind in the course of drafting.

Four attempts to end it appeared before the end of 1870, and a stage play purporting to finish it appeared in 1871. Dickens' friend, Wilkie Collins, also known for his mystery writing, was asked to complete it. He refused.

Many others have tried, or at least offered explanations. The unfinished mystery is still one of literature's great mysteries.

Was Ed murdered? If so, by whom? How? Where's the body? Was he kidnapped? Did he run away? Why? Where? Is the perp really Jasper, as many suppose? Is it actually obvious, and Dickens' intention was not to write a whodunnit but to explore the great mystery of the human heart, namely Jasper's? And who is Dick Datchery, that curious (disguised?) figure who spies on Jasper? And what about that opium lady?

Thursday, June 18, 2020

Poe: Part 2

There is so much material on Poe elsewhere online and I don't propose to add much here. I did, however, want to summarize some of Poe's contributions to the detective genre which prefigured much of this category thereafter.

THE PURLOINED LETTER

In case you forgot the story: an unscrupulous and powerful politician, Minister D, has by trick gained possession of a compromising letter and is blackmailing the owner, a charming member of the royal family, who has brought her problem to the police. Their search is fruitless, and Dupin is unhelpful to Prefect G. A month later, the Prefect is more depressed than ever, and Dupin asks if he'd truly pay 50,000 francs to anyone who could get the letter. G says yes; Dupin asks for the check, and hands him the letter! The Prefect, overcome with joy, departs. The rest of the story is Dupin's explanation to his companion. The letter had been left in full view in a letter rack, turned inside out and torn, as though of no importance. The obvious was overlooked, a truism often employed in later detective fiction.

Dupin is no longer an abstract logician. He is more rounded. He is capable of humor. No longer the odd recluse of the Rue Morgue, he now has the stature to know Minister D, and is rich enough to own a gold snuff box and fill it. This is all adding to Dupin's development as a character. But this is the last Dupin story from Poe.

THE MYSTERY OF MARIE ROGET

This was the real 'sequel' to 'Rue Morgue' and far less successful. The outstanding feature of this tale is that it was based on a real crime, the 1841 killing of Mary Rogers, a popular and pretty cigar girl in New York, who disappeared only to return a few days later after a secret elopement with a naval officer. But three years later, she disappeared again, and her body was found in the Hudson. The sensational story lingered in the newspapers for a long time, until a few months later her lover was found dead with a sad note and a bottle of poison by his side, an apparent suicide.

Poe transfers the details to Paris. Thus, Dupin and his narrating sidekick take interest in the murder of a perfume shop clerk, Marie Roget, whose body is found in the Seine. The newspapers are full of juicy details and speculation; Dupin says the papers want to "create a sensation instead of furthering the cause of truth." Even so, he uses the newspaper reports alone to solve the crime from his armchair in a very long and, frankly, tedious narrative where he employs his 'calculus of probabilities'.

Dupin takes pains to disprove the common theory that a gang did it, deciding that a single person involved with Roget in a forbidden romance did it, probably an upper-rank sailor of color with knowledge of ropes and boats -- a boat with a particular feature, which, when found, would find the killer. The narrator abruptly says that this is what happened.

Critics say it's more of an essay than a story. One might say it's all telling, with no showing. But in Dupin's long monologue, we get a summarized view of the details of much future detective fiction. We have the confirmation of the body's ID in the morgue based on clothing and the forensics of 'floaters', the establishment of a timeline (based partly on witnesses and partly on the science of bodily decomposition in water), the testing of theories and disposal of illogical ones, retracing the movements of the victim, the interpretation of clues, and the reconstruction of the crime. Still, while short, it's a laborious read.

THE GOLD BUG

The year before he wrote "Rue Morgue," Poe had a contest in a New York newspaper, "Alexander's Messenger," promising to decipher any code readers could invent. Four months after "Rue Morgue" was published, Poe wrote an article on codes and ciphers for "Graham's Magazine." This story reveals his interest in deductive reasoning, or 'ratiocination,' as he called it, and recalls a time in 1829 when Poe served in the army at Fort Moultrie on Sullivan's Island off the South Carolina coast. Again, the hero is French. LeGrand is like Dupin: from a noble family, but poor and a recluse. In the story, Poe continues some features of detective stories: detection based on observation and the use of analysis, a puzzling title (the bug is incidental), an assistant kept in the dark until the end, an admiring narrator.

IN CLOSING...

Not only did Poe establish the basic rules for the detective story, he also set patterns for the different types of detective stories we have today: "Rue Morgue" is a sensational crime story with a brilliant and quirky amateur who out-thinks the cops. "Marie Roget" is an armchair-detective story and based on a true crime, a 'ripped-from-the-headlines' story. "Letter" is a kind of secret agent story, with a theft in diplomatic circles, a missing document, a blackmail, a beautiful woman in trouble, and police trying to avoid a politically dangerous scandal. "Gold Bug" is the prototype cryptogram story.

Poe once acted a a detective himself -- sort of -- when he wrote an essay on Charles Dickens. In it, he revealed that from the first 2 installments of "Barnaby Rudge" he had accurately deduced the rest of the plot. When Dickens saw this, he said, "He must be the very devil!"

Poe's horror stories, with their portrayal of psychological states of mind, contrast strongly with the logic and rationality of his detective tales. The first Dupin story, really, is a long illustration of Poe's principles of ratiocination (analytical reasoning), which serves as a prologue to the story (a part which many editors cut off). Critic Joesph Wood Crutch once said, "Poe invented the detective story in order that he might not go mad."

Do you agree?

Tuesday, June 16, 2020

Poe: Inventor of the Detective Story? Part 1

Many readers become familiar with Edgar Allan Poe's tales of the macabre as teenagers. But Poe also produced science-fiction stories and the first recognizable detective stories that introduced features of the genre for everyone who followed.

MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE

Gotta love the tongue-in-cheek title. Anyway, the outstanding feature of Poe's first detective story is his mysterious hero, Auguste Dupin, who is shadowy, eccentric, larger-than-life, brilliant -- and, of course, French. Dupin, from a noble French family, has a good address in Paris, and he discusses intellectual topics like the theater with his journalist sidekick -- the narrator -- with ease. He reads the reviews in "Musee" and he knows the gossip about the ambition and handicaps of a failed actor (like Poe's own father). He consumes the daily newspapers "Gazette Des Tribuneaux" and "Le Monde". He rounds off his little lectures with quotes from French authors. Dupin is a man of culture, familiar with the classics and mathematics. The sidekick narrator is awed by Dupin's huge intellect and serves him a bit dim-wittedly, like Holmes' Watson and Poirot's Hastings.

Dupin investigates by observing details, as Vidocq did. He takes tufts of hair from the rigid fingers of Madame L'Espanaye, unobserved by the cops. Some may argue this is not 'fair play' since later detective fiction said a detective may not remove evidence which is not provided the reader until the end. But hey -- Poe is practically inventing the genre as he goes along; give the man a break.

The hair and finger impressions on the strangled woman convince Dupin (SPOILER ALERT) that an ape did it. He happens to have a volume of Cuvier (a French naturalist) on his shelves to consult about ourang-outangs. The reconstruction of the event is merely confirmed by the sailor who responds to a newspaper ad (EVERYONE read newspapers in those days).

The prefect's jealousy, and Dupin's low opinion of gendarmes, reflects the rivalry between Vidocq and the French police. At the time of the story's publication, the police had taken Vidocq to court, saying his work jeopardized real police work. The court ruled in Vidocq's favor, greatly enhancing his reputation.

Poe's principles became important for the genre. He wrote separate, self-contained stories around the same detective, that is, a series, with an admiring and dim-witted narrator-companion, and a rival cop. The story is conceived backwards: Poe thought of the ape and murder before the clues. They seem obvious to us now: orange hair, non-human fingermarks, brute strength, a sailor ribbon, a broken window nail. But he arranges it is a way to heighten our impression of Dupin's genius. Like most detective stories, it does not proceed as Aristotle said - beginning, middle, end. It proceeds from the middle -- finding the bodies -- to the end (the ape did it), to the beginning. And all in one sitting. Poe, practically the inventor of the short story as a literary form, noted this was important, to create a unified, singe 'effect', in his famous essay on short story writing called 'The Laws of Composition."

In Part 2, I'll offer a few reflections on Poe's other tales of detection (or, as he called it, 'ratiocination'), "The Purloined Letter," "The Gold Bug," and "The Mystery of Marie Roget."

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

Vidocq, the first detective

The first real-life professional detective emerged in the early 1800s: Eugene Francois Vidocq. In his memoirs, published in France in 1828, his stories of hunting down criminals single-handedly excited the public (you can find them online here https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Memoirs_of_Vidocq). An ex-convict, he founded the Surete, a plain-clothes security and investigation unit in Paris. The French had no love for their police force, but they loved Vidocq's flamboyant style of detection. It was likened to hunting, like American Indians stalking foes in James Fennimore Cooper's "Last of the Mohicans" which was popular in France at the time. It was just a matter of changing scenes, from the wild woods of the New World to the wild streets of urban Europe.

Vidocq is a real person, not a fictional character. After a decadent youth and poor army career, he was sent to prison at age 21. He often escaped but was captured each time. As a result, he became familiar with the ways of convicts and police. Vidocq offered his services to the head of the Paris police and was accepted.

At the time, in 1810, Paris was divided into districts, each with its own police chief. Since there was no central control, criminals moved among districts easily.

But Vidocq organized and led a group of agents, The Surete (The Security Force), to track down escaped convicts and to investigate robberies and other crimes. The regular police were resentful and suspicious about his power to make arrests, and jealous of his relationship to the chief.

His memoirs give details about how he investigated crimes. He was an acute observer of details. He understood how criminals think and talk, and he was able to masterfully disguise himself as a criminal, infiltrate their organizations and hide-outs and win their confidence. He often went weeks living with cons until he could make an arrest, recover the loot, and present enough evidence for trial. Many of his cases were later embellished by admirers and editors who explained all the steps of deduction.

He had a flair for publicity, built a strong reputation internationally for efficiency and elegance (well, he was French), and kept an opulent office nicer than any police station.

At age 50, he left the Surete to form his own agency, taking business clients for an annual fee. He was a frequent guest at fancy dinners, and famous people like Balzac came to call on him. The fact that the police disliked him and attacked him merely increased his popularity, for the public had disliked the police for generations.

He was popular in England, too. A play based on his life appeared in London in 1829, "Vidocq: The French Police Spy." In 1849, Vidocq opened a museum in London celebrating himself, with many items from his famous 'cases' on display. He would often appear in disguise to entertain visitors, then reveal himself, stripping away his masks, crying out, "I am Vidocq!" just like in his memoirs.

Vidocq established in the public mind the 'ideal detective' who was patient, enduring, skilled in disguise, with insight into the criminal mind, a unique intelligence, a devotion to detection as his sole occupation, a reputation for inevitable success with apparently un-solvable problems, and having grand moments of triumph over foes (and over the inept police, who resent a gifted amateur without whose aid they would not otherwise solve the case). These ideal qualities persisted in detective fiction even to the day when PIs and cops had a better working partnership in fiction, such as Ellery Queen and Lord Peter Whimsey.

Vidocq's writings also exposed terrible conditions in French prisons, giving the public added sympathy for him as a former convict, and high regard for him as the champion of the falsely accused.

Poe, a lover of all things French, read Vidocq. So it is no surprise that his character Auguste Dupin is inspired by Vidocq. Not surprisingly, a view persisted for a long time that 'detective fiction' was a French form. After all, crime and detection 'serial novels' had appeared in French newspapers through the 1840s, and Balzac had detectives in several of his novels. Even Alexander Dumas had D'Artagnan the Musketeer conduct a ballistics investigation to reconstruct a shooting.

Thus it is that the alleged father of the form, Edgar A. Poe,

gave his hero a strong French background. More on him another day.

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

Two Ancient Mysteries

"The Mystery Story" or "Tale of Detection" is a somewhat modern idea, and most fans and some scholars credit Edgar Allen Poe with its genesis. But mysteries go back to -- hmm - Genesis, with a crime and missing persons case in the Garden, and a sibling murder case in Genesis chapter 4 where God interrogates the surly chief suspect who is uncooperative.

OK, that's somewhat facetious. But there are two stories of mysteries being solved by a smart investigator in the "Apocrypha," books of the Bible accepted as authoritative by some groups and not others, but still instructive. I'm talking about two brief additions to the Book of Daniel called "Susanna and the Two Elders" and "Bel and the Dragon." "Susanna" is a courtroom drama and "Bel" is a locked room mystery, each featuring the young Daniel as the solver of a puzzle. The stories date to around 150 BC.

In "Susanna," the graceful and beautiful wife of a wealthy man bathes in the family's walled outdoor garden on one hot day and sends her maidservants to fetch aromatic soaps. Once they leave, two corrupt judges (known for freeing the guilty, and who have had their lustful eye on her for a while) emerge from their voyeurs hiding spot and demand certain favors. If she refuses, they warn, they'll say they showed up in time to catch her with a young guy who got away 'and that's why you sent away the servants.' Such adulterous behavior has a death penalty. Susanna virtuously refuses and is dragged before an assembly for a trial. The elders' testimony is enough to convict her and she is led off to be executed. "Not so fast," pipes up Daniel. "I have a couple of questions for these guys." The crowd agrees, and Daniel asks them a question -- separately. "What tree was she under with the young man?" They give different answers; Susanna is exonerated and the elders are executed instead. Justice wins.

In "Bel," the Persian king asks his trusted adviser Daniel what he thinks about his god Bel and Daniel boldly says 'he's a hunk of clay that can't eat.' The king angrily disagrees, because the large food offerings put in Bel's temple disappear every night. He orders the 70 priests of Bel to prove Bel eats the nightly buffet. Sure, they reply. We'll put the usual menu out and lock the door. If the food disappears, kill Daniel for his blasphemy. If not, kill us. OK, the king says, and the priests depart, chuckling. Once they leave, Daniel says: let me leave a little offering, too -- and he scatters flour on the floor. The next day the food is gone. But the floor is covered with the footprints of the priests and their families who come each night through a secret door to consume the goodies. Enraged by being fooled, the king orders the priests executed. Truth wins. Falsehood -- ie, idolatry -- loses.

In "Susanna, there are a few things to notice. Even though the Bible says 'the testimony of two men is true,' the testimony of corrupt men isn't, and the commandment 'you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor' is upheld. Unfortunately, the witness of a woman is worthless, so it's notable that Daniel risks himself to speak up for her -- even risking being accused of being the 'young man' she was lying with in the garden. But the two unjust judges don't have an opportunity to collude on that detail. Daniel, then, becomes the independent investigator who sees something no one else does, like the 'amateur sleuth of independent means' later in the genre. Questioning people apart is often the tactic of later detectives, like Poirot in "Murder on the Orient Express." Reason wins over passion, another mystery theme. And clearly, the God of Justice and Truth is the real winner here. Fidelity is rewarded: to Susanna's husband, to God, to The Law.

This reminds me of the teachers' story of the two slackers who miss the Final Exam on purpose and ask fellow students 'what questions were on the exam?', and then ask for an immediate makeup (note: I always had an alternative exam for makeups). They claim they had a flat tire on the way to school. OK, the prof agrees, and separates them, giving each an exam with one question: which tire was flat?

As for "Bel," it's clear that this can be cited as an early locked room mystery. There is also the setting of a trap, a device used much in later detective fiction.

Both stories, like mystery stories in general, have a decidedly moral purpose: to show the triumph of good over evil, reason over chaos, and truth over deceit.

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

Detective Fiction: rules of the game



Before I begin posting about the history of the detective genre (not exhaustively; other websites do that), I figured it would be good to review the 'rules of the game' that have largely guided writers and readers in the field since the 1840s.

Beginning with Poe, detective fiction developed ‘rules of the game’ so that writers would ‘play fair’ with readers who wanted a shot at solving the puzzle (but still in their hearts wanted to be misled). Some of these ‘rules’ developed into fairly rigid codes for other writers to follow. Monsignor Knox of Britain had his “Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction” found here (among many other places online): https://www.writingclasses.com/toolbox/tips-masters/ronald-knox-10-commandments-of-detective-fiction . American author S. S. Van Dine offered 20, found here (and other places, of course): https://www.wired.com/beyond-the-beyond/2019/01/s-s-van-dines-twenty-rules-writing-detective-stories/

The British “Detective Club” had a list; even Raymond Chandler chimed in: https://www.mysterytribune.com/raymond-chandler-10-tips-writing-detective-novel/

The rules boil down to these 5:
1.       In its basic structure, the detective story must never vary from being completely logical.
2.       An unpardonable sin is the substitution of accident, chance, or coincidence for logical deduction.
3.       The story must always play fair: clues must be fairly presented; no evidence can be known to the reader which remains unknown to the detective, and vice-versa.
4.       All action must proceed from the central theme of the crime and the pursuit of the criminal.
5.       No human frailties, like stupidity or a poor memory, can change or prolong the plot in any way.

There are some secondary rules:
1.       The crime must be murder (robberies, heists, cons and such are ‘capers’, not detective stories)
2.       The killer’s motive must be strong enough to induce even an amateur to commit murder
3.       All suspects must be real suspects, the killer must be one of the suspects (ie, don’t bring in a new character at the end)
4.       The killer should be an intelligent, competent amateur, the crime elegantly planned which, except for the brilliant detective, would go unsolved
5.        The murder must be premeditated, or if it is a crime of passion, or unintended, it must be ingeniously covered up
6.       The detective is not superhuman but uses reasoning to fit the clues together

These are not rules, but nice to have:
1.       The detective is fun if unusual, fallible, and has personal problems (Monk, anyone?)
2.       Lead characters should grow and change (some never change and readers don't want them to change: Holmes, for example, whose last story is in 1926, refuses to acknowledge radio, planes, automobiles, fingerprinting and WWI and remains his eccentric, gaslighted, Hansom Cab driven self).
3.       The detective should have a profession that allows him or her to spend time, money, and energy on the crime (homicide cops, obviously, are paid to do this and have cases routinely come their way; retirees take it on as a hobby of sort, like Hercule Poirot; Brother Cadfael is a non-cloistered monk; Jessica Fletcher writes mysteries for a living).
4.        Don’t treat police as idiots (like Dupin and Holmes do; by the 1940s/50s, with advances in lab forensics, this disdain became an anachronism)
5.       Don’t make the victim an angel or the killer thoroughly evil (even Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the James Bond master villain, loves his cat)
6.       The killer must be an amateur who hasn’t killed before and does not plan to kill again (well: this was a guideline in the genteel Golden Age but the genre more recently has had its fill of serial killers, gangsters and psychos).
7.       The story moral must be BAD is punished, GOOD rewarded, and the universe is restored to balance (well: ‘Law and Order’ made us all comfortable with ambiguity).
8.       In the classic whodunnit, the killer must be near the victim and use an ordinary means
9.       It is desired for the murder to happen early in the story so that the puzzle is ‘whodunnit’ and not ‘when will the writer get down to business’

      It helps if there’s a ticking clock, a deadline to beat, although this is a hallmark of the 'thriller,' mystery's cousin.

OK, so these ‘rules’ are bent all the time and some of them famously (as Agatha Christie did) but they remind us that readers/fans have certain expectations and writers ought to deliver – or surprise delightfully.

The reader only has 2 rules:
1.       Don’t read the end
2.       Don’t tell anyone whodunnit
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