Detective Fiction and The African Scene: From The Whodunit? To The Whydunit?

Chapter I - The State of the Genre

1 Chapter I The State of the Genre Popular Misconceptions, Sources of Error in Judgment “Critics, the makers and breakers of men of letters,” says N. J. Tremblay (1954: 217), “are always wary of mass production and the esteem of the multitude; this, they judge, smacks of a certain cheapness.” True to fact, judged by sheer output alone, the rate of production of writers of detective fiction gives sufficient cause for doubts as to the precise quality of the products. During a lifetime of eighty-six years, Agatha Christie produced well over a hundred novels, dozens of which have been made into movies, not counting her numerous short stories and a few plays. In France, George Simenon is now known to have published about three hundred and fifty full-length works of fiction, many of which have been translated into twenty different languages, forty motion pictures have been made from them, and, as Tremblay (1954: 242) points out, each day, somewhere around the world, his stories are heard on the radio. It is further said of his talents that he would write a “whodunit” in a month and a straight novel in three months. In America, Erle Stanley Gardner has achieved just as much greatness and popularity. Between the publication of his first Perry Mason novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws (1933), and the last, The Case of the Postponed Murder (1973), he is known to have produced well over a hundred novels, several of which have been made into crowd-pulling movies. These novels, in all conscience, cannot be reasonably said to be the exclusive monopoly of the masses, or the uncultured. Among their most avid consumers are always to be mentioned heads of states of great renown such as Woodrow Wilson and J.F. Kennedy; and in the literary sphere, they include such highly respected figures as W.B. 2 Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and André Gide. To these can also be added other personages which Charles Rolo says include college presidents, renowned generals and scientific geniuses. The mention of André Gide is particularly important in the study of the changing fortunes of the genre, for it was he who, as Tremblay (1954: 217) says, helped “rescue Simenon from the limbo of relative literary insignificance to which he seemed relegated.” He wrote down in his Journal (1954:319): “… (je) viens de dévorer d’affilée huit livres de Simenon à raison d’un par jour (en seconde lecture pour long cours, Les Inconnus dans la Maison et Le Pendu de Saint-Pholien).” In January 1948 he again noted down: “Nouvelle plongée dans Simenon; je viens d’en relire six d’affilée.” One cannot press the point so far as to insist that there is, or there ought to exist a direct and immutable ratio between literary merit and phenomenal popularity, or between prolificity and literary excellence. But to ignore the fact is to ignore a fundamental element in Literary Evaluation. “Copious productivity,” says J.W. Kruth (1985:230), “has often been one of the most striking characteristics of the great writers of fiction.” This is a literary fact because it is this factor inter alia which constitutes the basis for assigning to Charles Dickens, Lope de Vega, Goethe, Honoré de Balzac and Anthony Trollope, the positions of such eminence which they occupy in the world of fiction to this day. For some critics, the genre of detective fiction is nothing more than an endlessly reduplicated form, employing sterile formulas, stock characters, and innumerable clichés of method and construction a hackneyed and formula-ridden fiction devoid of sensation and titillation. An assertion of this nature seems to reflect not so much the shallowness of the quality of the work under scrutiny as that of 3 the mind of the reader or critic who deliberately chooses to examine the work from that particular angle alone. For one thing, formulaic literature as a literary phenomenon, did not enter discourse with the publication in April, 1841 of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” which connoisseurs of the genre regard as the precise beginning of the detective story. Such labels as the Gothic Novel, The Classical Epic, The Petrarchan Sonnet, Restoration Comedy, The Romance, and the like, are all too familiar to students of literature, as formulas or literary conventions which the writers under the various labels followed almost as closely as the...