PD James won the Anthony this year (2010) for Best Critical Non-fiction Work with her book TALKING ABOUT DETECTIVE FICTION. That book had stiff competition, including Otto Penzler (ed.)‘s, THE LINE UP, Lisa Rogak’s HAUNTED HEART, Elena Santangelo’s DAME AGATHA’S SHORTS, and Joan Schenkar’s THE TALENTED MISS HIGHSMITH. I’ve read James’s work, I’ve got Schenkar’s biography to read, and I’ll probably get Penzler’s work because I find it helpful to know how other authors see their own creations.
I started with TALKING ABOUT DETECTIVE FICTION not only because it was written by PD James, but because it seemed like a good idea to start with a concept of what it is I’m trying to do. What is detective fiction? Where did it start? Funny, I should be thinking along such line because I got my HISTORY TODAY magazine. I found an article on the “golden age” of detective fiction--”A Very British Crime Wave” by William D. Rubinstein.
Despite what readers may think, these two works don’t deal with the same thing.
James’s book is a highly idiosyncratic meditation on detective fiction. She begins by distinguishing between novels that enshrine a mystery, like Dicken’s BLEAK HOUSE or Charlotte Brontë’s JANE EYRE, and a mystery novel, and a detective novel like Dorothy L. Sayer’s NINE TAYLORS or Agatha Christie’s MURDER AT THE VICARAGE. Unlike crime novels that explore the world of crime as a culture as much as series of causes and effects, the detective novel has fairly strict conventions, including a highly organized structure:
1) central mysterious crime, usually a murder; 2) closed circle of suspects, each one with his/her own motive, opportunity, and means; 3) a detective, either amateur or professional (the detective works singularly, and not as part of a larger team, so it’s not technically a police procedural); 4) a rational solution that the reader may arrive at by careful reading of fairly presented clues. (James, locations 92-109 in Kindle edition).
To this end, James and Rubinstein are on the same page.
Rubinstein’s real argument, however, deals with the decline of the “golden age” detective novel. Yes, he mentions many of the same suspects as James does: Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter, Father Brown. Rubinstein argues “golden age” detective fiction says more about the middle-class Britons who read such detective fiction. They wanted order and security restored to its rightful place. He also makes the point there was no real corollary to these British detective novels--the middle to upper class milieu, the detective as the long arm of British law and order, little or no sex and/or violence (despite the fact murder is a violent crime), and the use of reason to solve the puzzle--outside of Great Britain.
Dame Ngaio Marsh leaps to mind here, but as PD James explains, much of Marsh’s work was written with colonial nostalgia overlaying it. James finds Marsh’s best work to involve New Zealand, not Britain, where Marsh had many long visits.
Rubinstein also wants to argue that the classic detective novel died because of changes in British society. That part of his argument is barely articulated and, as a result, carries little weight besides the obvious--Times change. Britain ended its empire (mostly) by 1960 and had declined from world power into middling European state largely excluded from the prosperity of the European Common Market. The middle classes had had their national pysche handed to them politically and economically.
Psychology had really begun to blow up the idea of the rational human being in the minds of most people.
Detective fiction had to evolve. Ingenious solutions aren’t infinite, and murder isn’t a simple eruption of irrationality on the village green. No, it’s violent emotion or cold-blooded ruthlessness. It’d desire and/or gain. As the Andorian ambassador told Spock: Look for passion or gain. Those are reasons for murder.
Here’s where both James and Rubinstein don’t go far enough. Both mention the American PI novel. James is willing to explicitly concede it has influenced British detective fiction. The PI novel is America’s contribution to detective fiction, but it changed the rules. These novels deal in the seedy, the sordid, the violent, and the utterly irrational. The killers, who can be from any background, suffer from any number of the deadly sins, particularly lust, avarice, pride, and gluttony.
I nearly fell off my sofa at Rubinstein’s description of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler as Marxists. Yeah, right. Rubinstein wrote that Hammett and Chandler’s novels of the 1930s “were often marked by an explicitly left-wing agenda that sought to expose the deep corruption and inequality they saw at the heart of American politics and capitalism.” (Rubinstein, HISTORY TODAY, 47). I don’t think so.
These novels deal in sin. They’re about good and evil, not rationality over irrationality. They're about confrontations and the revelation of (the lack of) character. Very Puritanical, very American. Mickey Spillane takes on more of the corruption of capitalism in an explicit sense since his target is Wall Street after World War II when the US became richer than Croesus--and more corrupt.
If detective fiction didn’t go toward the private cops, the private eyes, then it developed into the police procedural. This form is as much a French contribution as it is an American one. The French even have a distinctive term for it--le roman policier. All police procedurals say something fundamental about crime in general and murder in particular--it’s the State’s business, it’s what the Law’s for, it’s why we have cops.
Inspector Jules Maigret, the creation of Georges Simenon, is the great French police detective of the mid-20th century, and he’s as well known as Sherlock Holmes. While he has much of the rationality of the “golden age” British detectives, he works within a believable legal framework and with a team of police and forensic specialists to help him. Crime isn’t a parlor game; it’s a dirty business that runs the social gamut.
Rubinstein barely mentions Maigret, and James doesn’t address the procedural or Maigret at all. Neither touch Ed McBain, the father of the American police procedural. He attempted to make the cops all interchangeable--cops come, cops go, cops get killed. He tried to make the reality of the squad room come alive to the reader, and to a large extent, he succeeded. It’s like reading HILL STREET BLUES twenty-five years before Steven Boccho developed the show.
In total deviation from the classical norm, McBain used coincidence as a means to solve the crime. Cops do it all the time. Rational detectives never do.
Detective fiction hasn’t declined, especially if we stick to PD James's definition. The amateur detective, like Jessica Fletcher, has gone to the cozy. I don't read those because I can't believe an English teacher muscles in on a police investigation. If I find a body in my driveway, I'm calling the cops. I prefer my detective fiction with the professional. That type has evolved into more realistic, more credible forms.
The one thing that has declined, if not died, is the belief in human rationality. Psychology has taken care of that inheritance from the Enlightenment. Human beings make decisions irrationally and spend a lot of time rationalizing those decisions after the fact. The police procedural also brings home the fact that much of criminality derives from fundamental stupidity and lack of imagination. Humanity at its most humdrum. It's the detectives who are the most interesting; in that, Steve Carella is very like Sherlock Holmes.