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.

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. 

 

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.

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.