The Singular Affair of the Two Companions

Mystery stories are often set in academic milieus, and professors not only read them but may even write them. The news is that they may now be on the professor's list of required reading for students. Two signs of this development are serious reference books about crime fiction: The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing (1999) and Blackwell's A Companion to Crime Fiction (2010). The Oxford collection came first, followed by the Blackwell collection. They differ in format: the Oxford book is alphabetically organized, with asterisks used to indicate a cross-reference to another entry, while the Blackwell tome, heavy as a door-stopper, is topically organized, except for a section entitled "Artists at Work," which is in chronological order. Both books have many contributors. Their dust jackets are revealingly different.

The Oxford Companion shows a corpse in black clothes lying flat on the floor of a well-stocked library. The Blackwell Companion shows a couple in a fast-moving convertible; the woman is driving and her male companion is firing a pistol at some persons ahead whose bullets have cracked the windshield of the couple's car. Present violence is the active experience of the couple in the car. Past violence in the refined and quiet setting of a library provokes the classic questions of Who, How, and Why. This is also the difference between the detective story and the private-eye story. Somewhere between these types, and drawing on both genres, is the spy story, with its investigative protagonist and credible political context.

Detective stories have been for me a recreational pleasure and a change from my day job as an American intellectual historian. The connection between these interests was dramatized by Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time (1951) in which a hospitalized inspector enlists the help of a graduate student in critically examining the historical tradition that Richard iii murdered the princes in the Tower of London. Full disclosure: after I retired from teaching, I joined the conversation about mystery stories by writing the entry War in the Oxford book, commenting on a dozen stories linked to war and having a puzzle requiring an inquiry, both intellectual and dangerous. I hope to be fair-minded in this review, but it should be clear that, as the saying goes, I do have a dog in this hunt.

The Blackwell introduction hails the moment when "the detective plot made it so much more interesting to theorists of language, form, and representation—to narratologists, structuralists, and postmodernists—than crime fiction in general." In Blackwell there are pages on Derrida and Lacan; and while both the Oxford and Blackwell books recognize Poe as the inventor of the detective story, only in Blackwell is there an interest in crime narratives that "marginalize the figure of the detective or in which the investigative element disappears entirely." That may be true of the crime novel, as the entry sleuth in the Oxford book concedes, but for the detective novel "the presence of a sleuth as the central figure is obligatory."

A Blackwell essay on Conan Doyle warns against the politically correct trend of seeing him as upholding "imperialist, parochial, and orthodox values"; he was "both a man of his age and a critic of his age, not to be casually stereotyped or labeled." Rosemary Herbert in her Oxford introduction explains that the collection is not only designed for solid scholarship but also to celebrate the playful in a literature that is meant to be entertaining. A good example of the playful is Dorothy L. Sayers's The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928) with its satirical premise about a member who, apparently sleeping for days in his chair under a newspaper, is actually dead. Playfulness is missing from the Blackwell essay on Sayers, because it is mainly biographical, and the commentator reads her backwards—in the sense of seeing her in light of the theological concerns she wrote about, only after she had stopped writing detective stories. This strategy...