The Oxford Book of American Det (2 page)

‘cozies,’ and Julian Symons, British crime writer and long-time literary critic for the
Times of London,
called them ‘humdrums.’ Fans bought them by the millions, and still do.

In his introduction to
A Catalog of Crime,
Barzun explained what the detective story should give those readers and what it should avoid. First, he stressed that the detective story is a tale, not a novel. “The tale does not pretend to social significance nor does it probe the depth of the soul,” he wrote. “The characters it presents are not persons but types, as in the Gospels: the servant, the rich man, the camel driver (now a chauffeur).” Properly done, detective fiction is a high-brow form, according to Barzun. It is escape literature for the intellectual. It should deal with the workings of human reason, not with human emotion. “To put our creed positively,” said Barzun (speaking for co-author Wendell Hertig Taylor as well), “we hold with the best philosophers that a detective story should be mainly occupied with detection, and not (say) with the forgivable nervousness of a man planning to murder his wife.” That great essay was published in 1971. But three years earlier, Raymond Chandler’s
The Simple Art of Murder
had been republished, including the famous introductory essay, which served as a sort of writer’s declaration of independence from the strictures of the classic form. I suspect that Barzun’s essay was intended, at least in part, as a counterattack against the case that Chandler made for the detective story as novel and for the myriad modifications the genre had been undergoing, particularly in America.

Fortunately for me, and for hundreds of other mystery writers attracted into the genre for the other creative possibilities it offers, an increasing number of readers came to care less about whodunit and more about character development, social problems, settings, mood, culture, and all those aspects that involve emotion and not just the intellect. With the so-called mainstream of American literature polluted by the notions of the minimalists, and literary criticism entangled in the various fads of the mid-century, writers who thought they had something to say or a story to tell discovered detective fiction as Hammett and Chandler had been writing it. The mainstream novel, lying moribund under mid-century faddism, was being crowded off the best-seller lists by crime novels and mysteries.

Many of detective fiction’s new practitioners leaped into the game, as did I, happily ignorant of Knox’s ‘Ten Commandments’ or the genre’s purpose as escapism for the intellectual. Instead of turning on whodunit, the focus shifted elsewhere. Sometimes, as in Ed McBain’s story
Small Homicide,
the writers were chiefly interested in why the crime had been committed, or perhaps they merely used the sleuthing to draw the reader into a world they wanted to explore.

As the stories in this volume illustrate, Americans who wrote in the detective form had been branching out in all directions. The tale had been moved out of the isolation of the privileged class and into work-a-day America, and was often drawn with an excellent eye for regional settings and a keen ear for local voices. A bit of social purpose and realism had seeped in. In the United States, the sleuthing game had never been the exclusive domain of well-bred male amateurs; more and more of the popular writers—and their sleuths—were women. An early female detective found in these pages is Violet Strange, in Anna Katharine Green’s
Missing: Page Thirteen.
But until the work of Hammett in the 1930’s and Raymond Chandler in the 1940’s began to have its effect, the puzzle generally remained at the heart of the work. Certainly in the minds of the publishing fraternity, that was what the public wanted. But even Chandler encountered editing that sought to trim his appeal to readers’ emotions. In a letter to a friend written in 1947, Chandler noted that when he was writing short stories for the pulp-magazine market, editors cut out the language he used to establish mood and emotion on the grounds that their readers wanted action, not description: “My theory was that the readers just thought they cared about nothing but the action, that really, although they didn’t know it, the thing they cared about, was the creation of emotion through dialogue and description.” As our selection
I’ll Be Waiting
shows, Chandler was not interested in producing the classic form as outlined by Knox’s rules. He was interested in using crime as the centre around which he could spin a novel that illuminates social decadence and the human condition.

In this volume, Rosemary Herbert and I have assembled thirty-three stories that represent the evolution of the American detective story. Because the wealth of talent over the past century and a half was so great, we found ourselves in a position reminiscent of that of professional football coaches facing the deadline for cutting their teams down to the legal limit with too many outstanding players to chose among. Just as coaches sometimes keep a player because he can serve in more than one position, we chose our stories to illustrate more than one development in the field. Rex Stout’s
Christmas Party,
for example, shows Nero Wolfe unusually active for an ‘armchair detective’—but it beautifully illuminates how the ‘Holmes and Watson’ relationship had been modified. In making another selection, we evaluated several journalist sleuths, including George Harmon Coxe’s photojournalist Flashgun Casey, but we picked Joe ‘Daffy’ Dill for this volume because we found Richard Sale’s story
A Nose
for News
irresistibly entertaining.

Our goal was to illustrate as many aspects of the American detective short story as we could. Thus we present examples of sleuth types, including amateurs like Poe’s Dupin,

‘scientific sleuths’ like Futrelle’s Professor S. F. X. Van Dusen and Arthur B. Reeve’s Professor Craig Kennedy, hard-boiled dicks like Robert Leslie Bellem’s Dan Turner, and police characters like Ed McBain’s Eighty-seventh Precinct cop Dave Levine and my own Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn. We also feature ‘accidental sleuths’—characters who happen upon a crime and manage to discover the truth—as do the characters in Glaspell’s
A Jury of Her Peers
and Mary Roberts Rinehart’s
The Lipstick.
And Mignon G. Eberhart’s Susan Dare, Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone, and Linda Barnes’s Carlotta Carlyle join Green’s Violet Strange as female private investigators. Melville Davisson Post’s Uncle Abner and William Faulkner’s Uncle Gavin Stevens are sermonising sleuths who grind moral axes until they shine, while Clayton Rawson’s The Great Merlini adds sparkle to his sleuthing by means of his practical expertise in magic.

Stories that succeed in presenting examples of sleuth types also demonstrate regionalism, for which American detective fiction has become known. The works of Glaspell, Post, Bellem, and Faulkner portray distinctly American scenes, as does my own short story
Chee’s Witch,
which illustrates the move into the use of ethnic detectives.

Although our table of contents includes the names of a good number of famous authors, we were more concerned to find the best story to represent a trend in the genre. Some of our selections are classics; some represent little-known writers whom we consider ‘good finds’ for readers. For example, we considered Clinton H. Stagg’s
The Keyboard of Silence
delightful and included it as a gem that deserves to be better known, and not only because Stagg’s blind sleuth demonstrates how disabled detectives can function efficiently.

While we represent as many decades as possible, and male and female sleuths and authors, we also chose our selections to show emotional range. We cover humour with Harte and Barnes, pathos with Glaspell and McBain. And we are sure that readers will have fun with Reeve’s
The Beauty Mask,
in which the scientific jiggery-pokery is so dated that readers will find themselves chuckling even while being taken in by the earnestness with which it was written.

I join with Rosemary Herbert in the belief that we have fairly represented the evolution of the detective story in America. But our mission was to entertain as well as to educate. We trust that you will find this volume just plain fun to read.

Tony Hillerman, with Rosemary Herbert

EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809-1849)

Although his life was short and tragic, Edgar Allan Poe is considered by a few to be the founder of American letters, by many to be the inventor of horror stories and fantasy novels, and by one and all to be the father of detective fiction. He was the child of two actors, orphaned as a tot, expelled from West Point, and rejected by his fiancée.

He married his cousin and, after she died of tuberculosis, wed the original fiancée.

Through much of his forty years, his health was poor.

Despite—or perhaps inspired by—his circumstances, Poe became a published poet at age twenty, and he served as editor of the
Southern Literary Messenger
until he was fired at age twenty-eight for drunkenness. By the time Poe wrote
The Murders in the
Rue Morgue
, when he was thirty-two, he was already well established with his literary criticism, magazine articles, short stories, and poetry.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue
is considered to be the single most, important piece in the literary history of detective fiction. While some elements that are now common to the genre, like the locked-room scenario, had been used previous to the publication of Poe’s masterpiece, Poe was the first to play with what were to become conventions of the genre. These include the introduction of an eccentric detective who relies on ratiocination to solve crimes and the use of a narrator who, while awestruck at the sleuth’s powers, nonetheless lays out a clearly described problem and details the steps toward its solution.

The purpose of literature, Poe said, “is to amuse by arousing thought.” He also said that “tales of ratiocination” should stick to the puzzle and not wander off into novelistic digressions of mood and character. Thus he not only invented the detective form but also provided its credo.

Despite its atmosphere of horror,
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
shows Poe practicing what he preached. The focus remains on the puzzle and the process of solving it. His sleuth, Chevalier Auguste Dupin, is a private person, a ‘thinking machine’, with his ratiocination narrated by a faceless friend. The police are depicted as inept and looked on with disdain; clues are presented fairly, and the reader is invited to interpret them.

Readers of this anthology will notice that the form Poe created in the 1840’s has been followed, with modifications, throughout the literary history of the genre. Variations on the form continue to challenge writers and excite readers today.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue

What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid
himself among women, although puzzling questions, are not beyond all
conjecture.

SIR THOMAS BROWNE

The mental features discoursed of as the analytical are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis. We appreciate them only in their effects. We know of them, among other things, that they are always to their possessor, when inordinately possessed, a source of the liveliest enjoyment. As the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which
disentangles.
He derives pleasure from even the most trivial occupations bringing his talent into play. He is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, of hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of
acumen
which appears to the ordinary apprehension preternatural. His results, brought about by the very soul and essence of method, have, in truth, the whole air of intuition.

The faculty of re-solution is possibly much invigorated by mathematical study, and especially by that highest branch of it which, unjustly, and merely on account of its retrograde operations, has been called, as if
par excellence,
analysis. Yet to calculate is not in itself to analyse. A chess-player, for example, does the one without effort at the other. It follows that the game of chess, in its effects upon mental character, is greatly misunderstood. I am not now writing a treatise, but simply prefacing a somewhat peculiar narrative by observations very much at random; I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the elaborate frivolity of chess. In this latter, where the pieces have different and
bizarre
motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound. The
attention
is here called powerfully into play.

If it flag for an instant, an oversight is committed, resulting in injury or defeat. The possible moves being not only manifold but involute, the chances of such oversights are multiplied; and in nine cases out of ten it is the more concentrative rather than the more acute player who conquers. In draughts, on the contrary, where the moves are
unique
and have but little variation, the probabilities of inadvertence are diminished, and the mere attention being left comparatively unemployed, what advantages are obtained by either party are obtained by superior acumen. To be less abstract—let us suppose a game of draughts where the pieces are reduced to four kings, and where, of course, no oversight is to be expected. It is obvious that here the victory can be decided (the players being at all equal) only by some
recherché
movement, the result of some strong exertion of the intellect. Deprived of ordinary resources, the analyst throws himself into the spirit of his opponent, identifies himself therewith, and not unfrequently sees thus, at a glance, the sole methods (sometimes indeed absurdly simple ores) by which he may seduce into error or hurry into miscalculation.

Whist has long been noted for its influence upon what is termed the calculating power; and men of the highest order of intellect have been known to take an apparently unaccountable delight in it, while eschewing chess as frivolous. Beyond doubt there is nothing of a similar nature so greatly tasking the faculty of analysis. The best chess-player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess; but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all those more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind. When I say proficiency, I mean that perfection in the game which includes a comprehension of all the sources whence legitimate advantage may be derived. These are not only manifold but multiform, and lie frequently among recesses of thought altogether inaccessible to the ordinary understanding. To observe attentively is to remember distinctly; and, so far, the concentrative chess-player will do very well at whist; while the rules of Hoyle (themselves based upon the mere mechanism of the game) are sufficiently and generally comprehensible. Thus to have a retentive memory, and to proceed by ‘the book,’ are points commonly regarded as the sum total of good playing. But it is in matters beyond the limits of mere rule that the skill of the analyst is evinced. He makes, in silence, a host of observations and inferences. So, perhaps, do his companions; and the difference in the extent of the information obtained lies not so much in the validity of the inference as in the quality of the observation. The necessary knowledge is that of what to observe. Our player confines himself not at all; nor, because the game is the object, does he reject deductions from things external to the game. He examines the countenance of his partner, comparing it carefully with that of each of his opponents. He considers the mode of assorting the cards in each hand; often counting trump by trump, and honor by honour, through the glances bestowed by their holders upon each. He notes every variation of face as the play progresses, gathering a fund of thought from the differences in the expression of certainty, of surprise, of triumph, or of chagrin. From the manner of gathering up a trick he judges whether the person taking it can make another in the suit. He recognises what is played through feint, by the air with which it is thrown upon the table. A casual or inadvertent word; the accidental dropping or turning of a card, with the accompanying anxiety or carelessness in regard to its concealment; the counting of the tricks, with the order of their arrangement; embarrassment, hesitation, eagerness or trepidation—all afford, to his apparently intuitive perception, indications of the true state of affairs. The first two or three rounds having been played, he is in full possession of the contents of each hand, and thenceforward puts down his cards with as absolute a precision of purpose as if the rest of the party had turned outward the faces of their own.