Detective Fiction

The appearance of the literary detective in the nineteenth century is generally accounted for by its relation to a middle-class desire for social regularity, yet little has been said of the relationship between the ordering of criminal transgression by aesthetic form and the aesthetic theories proliferating during the period. The essays here provide an exploration of how writers in the genre actively engaged with the intellectual and aesthetic currents of the day. They show how interests such as French naturalism, psychical research, aestheticism, geology, degeneration theory, and even the Arts and Crafts movement affected the literary resolution of social chaos.

Paul Fox’s introduction analyses the Punch illustration, “Horrible London: Or The Pandemonium of Posters” (13 October 1888). Victorian anxiety about urban expansion and an attendant explosion in crime was equaled by anxiety about the burgeoning popularity of crime writing. Punch’s bill-sticking demon (adding the latest to a collage of posters for penny dreadfuls, murder mysteries and crime headlines) satirizes public avidity for the Ripper atrocities. The accompanying verse bemoans the effect of these “mural monstrosities” on the “toiling” classes yet, Fox points out, Punch participates in just such attention-grabbing sensationalism, implicitly acknowledging the broad appeal of crime writing that encompassed its own readership. It is Punch’s familiar structuring aesthetic that “orders” this sensation for them, “making it amenable to the intellect if still titillating the lower instincts.”

As dubious moral and literary merit adhered to the mass-market, the designations of “high” and “low” that emerged have tended to obscure the complexities of the genre’s initial dialectical relation to literary realism. Rudolph Glitz’s essay illustrates this, showing how Conan Doyle’s preoccupation with “serious” versus commercial art is played out in Holmes’s and Watson’s metafictional dialogues. When Holmes surprises Watson with the observation that the scattered houses of the Hampshire countryside fill him “with a certain horror,” he upends the convention that associates urban density with squalid crime. Glitz reads Holmes’s response to the isolated domestic as rooted in the principles of French naturalism. He discusses a range of stories that have a setting of familial domesticity (key to the programmatics of Balzac and Zola), noting a concurrence of dialogue that deals with questions of genre and aesthetics. Whilst Holmes is “the criminological purist” committed to the “principles of contemporary avant garde realism,” Watson, “the populariser,” juxtaposes Holmes’s accounts, drawing on the conventions of sensation fiction and the gothic. Significantly it is Holmes’s rationalist accounts that are conclusive: the source of criminal horror is always located in the material conditions of the family system.

The relative obscurity of Algernon Blackwood’s psychic detective, Dr. John Silence (1906–1907), is down to generic stricture, argues George M. Johnson. He suggests that Blackwood’s detective fiction might usefully be reread as a protomodernist investigation into “the imaginative potential of the new psychology, psychical research and more esoteric mystical ideas.” Blackwood’s engagement with Frederick Myers and the Society for Psychical Research case studies directly informs the stories not only in content but form, modernist in their “profound gaps” and “blossoming with possibilities at [their] close.” The generality of Johnson’s argument for a shared project with “many … modernist contemporaries, including D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf” is less convincing than a comparison with the equally esoteric Mary Butts might prove, on whose high modernist works Blackwood’s tales were indeed a profound influence.

Omissions and “refusal to name” are characteristic too of Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894), as Paul Fox’s excellent essay discusses. Critically questioned for stylistic and structural fragmentation since its publication, the story is not what the reader expects from a narrative of detection. Fox resolves this by revealing the text’s purposeful patterning through the prism of Pater’s aestheticism. The structuring tendency of art outlined by Pater hides the horror of undifferentiated chaos, and what Pan truly represents here is the disintegration of unified...