Talking About Detective Fiction (7 page)

Not surprisingly, given the talents of many of the writers, the Golden Age detective stories were competently and sometimes very well written, and some of the best will endure. Nevertheless, subtlety of characterisation, a setting which came alive for the reader and credibility of motive were often subjugated, particularly in the humdrums, to the demand to provide an intriguing and mysterious
plot. Writers vied with each other in their search for an original method of murder and for clues of increasing ingenuity and complexity. Webster has written that death has ten thousand doors to let out life, and it seems that most of them have at one time or another been used. Unfortunate victims were despatched by licking poisoned stamps, being battered to death by church bells, stunned by a falling pot, stabbed with an icicle, poisoned by cat claws and not infrequently found dead in locked and barred rooms with looks of appalling terror on their faces. This world was summed up by William Trevor, the Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer, when he spoke of reading detective stories as a child in his acceptance speech on winning a literary award in 1999.

Nor in West Kensington either.

These novels are, of course, paradoxical. They deal with violent death and violent emotions, but they are novels of escape. We are required to feel no real pity for the victim, no empathy for the murderer, no sympathy for the falsely accused. For whomever the bell tolls, it doesn’t toll for us. Whatever our secret terrors, we are not the body on the library floor. And in the end, by the grace of Poirot’s little grey cells, all will be well—except of course with the murderer, but he deserves all that’s coming to him. All the mysteries will be explained, all the problems solved, and peace and order will return to that mythical village which, despite its above-average homicide rate, never really loses its tranquillity or its innocence. Rereading the Golden Age novels with their confident morality, their lack of any empathy with the murderer and the popularity of their rural settings, readers can still enter nostalgically this settled and comfortable world. “Stands the church clock at ten to three?” And is there arsenic still for tea?

It was a tough case. Plenty of witnesses, but no one was talking.

W
HILE THE
well-born and impeccably correct detectives of the Golden Age were courteously interviewing their suspects in the drawing rooms of country houses, the studies of rural clergymen and the rooms of Oxford academics, across the Atlantic crime writers were finding their material and inspiration in a very different society and writing about it in prose that was colloquial, vivid and memorable. Although this book is primarily about British detective novelists, the commonly described hard-boiled school of American fiction,
rooted in a different continent and in a different literary tradition, has made such an important contribution to crime writing that to ignore its achievements would be seriously misleading. The two most famous innovators, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, have had a lasting influence beyond the crime genre, both in their own country and abroad.

No writer, whatever form his fiction takes, can distance himself entirely from the country, civilisation and century of which he is a part. A reader coming from Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler to Agatha Christie or Dorothy L. Sayers could reasonably feel that these writers were living not only on different continents but in different centuries. So what England were these predominantly middle-class, well-educated novelists and their devoted readers portraying, what traditions, beliefs and prejudices were the purveyors of popular literature consciously or unconsciously reflecting?

As I was born in 1920 it was an England I knew, a cohesive world, overwhelmingly white and united by a common belief in a religious and moral code based on the Judeo-Christian inheritance—even if this belief was not invariably reflected in practice—and buttressed by social
and political institutions which, although they might be criticised, attracted general allegiance, and were accepted as necessary to the well-being of the state: the monarchy, the Empire, the Church, the criminal justice system, the City, the ancient universities. It was an ordered society in which virtue was regarded as normal, crime an aberration, and in which there was small sympathy for the criminal; it was generally accepted that murderers, when convicted, would hang—although Agatha Christie, arch-purveyor of cosy reassurance, is careful not to emphasise this disagreeable fact or allow the dark shadow of the public hangman to fall upon her essentially comfortable pages. The death penalty is mentioned by Margery Allingham, and Dorothy L. Sayers in
Busman’s Honeymoon
actually has the temerity to confront Lord Peter Wimsey with the logical end to his detective activities, when he crouches weeping in his wife’s arms on the morning when Frank Crutchley hangs. Some readers may feel that, if he couldn’t face the inevitable outcome of his detective hobby, he should have confined himself to collecting first editions.

Despite the turbulent antagonisms of postwar Europe and the growth of fascism, the 1930s were years of remarkable freedom from domestic
crime, and although there must have been areas, particularly of the inner cities, which were at least as violent as they are today, pictures of this disruption were not being brought daily into people’s sitting-rooms by television and the Internet. It was therefore possible to live in a country town or in a village and feel almost entirely secure. We can read an Agatha Christie novel set in what seems a mythical village, in which the inhabitants are happily reconciled to their allotted rank and station, and we feel that this is an exaggerated, romanticised or idealised world. It isn’t, not altogether. Dorothy L. Sayers describes it in
Busman’s Honeymoon
. Harriet is speaking of her husband, Lord Peter:

It is precisely this view of England that in general the 1930s’ detective writers, particularly women, were portraying: middle-class, hierarchical, rural, peaceable. But it was an age of underlying anxiety. Before the institution of the welfare state, the dread of unemployment, of sickness, of economic failure was very real, and the growing power of the fascist dictators abroad threatened the possibility of a further war before the country had recovered from the appalling carnage, social upheaval and personal tragedies of the 1914–18 conflict. Already the posturing of home-grown fascism was provoking violent clashes, particularly in London’s East End. It was small wonder that people longed for that “permanent atmosphere of security” and were able to find it, at least temporarily, in a popular form which was both ordered and reassuring.

The differences between the hard-boiled school and such Golden Age writers as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Michael Innes, are so profound that it seems stretching a definition to describe both groups under the same category.
If the British detective story is concerned with bringing order out of disorder, a genre of reconciliation and social healing, restoring the mythical village of Mayhem Parva to prelapsarian tranquillity, in the United States Hammett and Chandler were depicting and exploring the great social upheavals of the 1920s—lawlessness, prohibition, corruption, the power and violence of notorious gangsters who were close to becoming folk heroes, the cycle of boom and depression—and creating detectives who were inured to this world and could confront it on their own terms.

Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961) had a tough and under privileged youth working on the railway, then as a Pinkerton detective, and as a soldier in the First World War. He was discharged as tubercular, married his hospital nurse and had two children, supporting his family by writing short stories for the pulp magazines that were extremely popular during the 1920s. The editors demanded violent action, vividly portrayed characters and a prose style ruthlessly pruned of all inessentials; all this Hammett provided.

Hammett’s stories are not about restoring the moral order, nor are they set in a world in which the problem of evil can be solved by Poirot’s little grey cells or Miss Marple’s cosy homilies, a world
as innocuous as flower-arranging. Hammett knew from traumatic personal experience how precarious is the moral tightrope which the private investigator daily walks in his battle with the criminal. The first of his detectives has worked for fifteen years as an operative for the Continental Detective Agency and is known only as “Continental Op.” It is appropriate that the Op is unnamed. There is nothing subtle about him and little we expect to know—except his age, thirty-five, that he is short and fat, and that his only loyalty is to the Continental Detective Agency and his job. But there is an honesty and directness about this personal code, limited as it may be.

The Op tells his own story, but flatly, without explanations, excuses or embellishments. He is as ruthless as the world in which he operates, a violent gun-carrying dispenser of the only justice he recognises. Short and fat he may be, but in
Red Harvest
(1929) he takes on the combined strength of the police, corrupt politicians and gangsters to
cleanse the city of Personville, meeting violence with violence. His loyalty to the job means that he doesn’t take bribes; indeed he seems impervious to the lure of money—in this, at least, he is superior to the company he keeps. He is naturally solitary, and how could he be otherwise with such a job in a corrupt and lawless world? When a woman attempts to seduce him, his response is a brutal rejection; later, to get rid of her, he shoots her in the leg, but not without a certain compunction: “I had never shot a woman before. I felt queer about it.” There is not much that the Op feels queer about.

Hammett’s most famous detective, Sam Spade, whose hunting-ground is San Francisco, appears only in one full-length novel,
The Maltese Falcon
(1930), but this book, his best known, and the film in which Humphrey Bogart portrayed the detective, have ensured that Spade has become the archetypical hard-boiled private eye. Like the Op, Spade’s only loyalty is to his work and to his colleagues. He is classless, younger and more physically attractive than the Op, but there is a cruelty in his ruthlessness and he is the more immoral of the two, capable of falling in love with a woman but never putting love above the demands of the job.

After the success of
The Maltese Falcon
, Hammett was offered a job as a screenwriter in Hollywood. There he met the playwright Lillian Hellman and began a love affair which lasted until his death. After this move to the highly lucrative and hedonistic world of Hollywood, he began drinking heavily and lived in a way which a friend described as making sense “only if he had no expectations of being alive much beyond Thursday.” During the Hollywood years he became involved with left-wing political causes and in 1951 was sentenced to six months in prison because he would not give evidence against Communists who had jumped bail. After his release his books were proscribed, and during his final ten years he lived on the charity of others. He would not be the only writer whose talent was destroyed by money, self-indulgence and the egregious temptations of fame, but perhaps for him the temptations were the more irresistible because of the penury and struggles of those early years.

Might Hammett have written another novel as good as
The Maltese Falcon
if he had resisted that invitation to move to Hollywood? I think it doubtful. It may be that by then he had said all he wanted to and that his talent was exhausted. Nevertheless, his achievement remains remarkable. In
a writing career of little more than a decade he raised a commonly despised genre into writing which had a valid claim to be taken seriously as literature. He showed crime writers that what is important goes beyond an ingenious plot, mystery and suspense. More important are the novelist’s individual voice, the reality of the world he creates and the strength and originality of the writing.