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.  

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.

 

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.