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.

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.