Detective Fiction (review)

Why are there seashells on the tops of mountains? Did God put them there? Did some climber leave them there? Could the mountains, at one time many years ago, have actually been under a great sea? This is a puzzling mystery and one, Charles Rzepka argues, that is fraught with relevance for the detective story. Not until the late eighteenth century did thinkers begin to consider the third possibility. Their growing belief that these seashells were potential evidence about the earth's evolution involved a new type of scientific analysis and inductive reasoning that gained greater authority over the nineteenth century and contributed to the emergence and popularity of detective stories.

Although seashells and the history of science are hardly commonplace background for detective stories, Detective Fiction is advancing neither a new nor a radical interpretation. On the contrary, Rzepka intends his book to be a stimulating overview of this genre from its origins up to present day and to be read by college undergraduates. While he provides more conventional, case-study chapters on Edgar Allen Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Dorothy Sayers as seminal forces, he wants his reader to understand that the appearance and rapid popularity of this new genre owed as much to complex social and cultural developments as to these well-known authors. Moreover, seashells, Lyell, and Darwin are only one of many background factors. Rzepka delves into the establishment of an official police force in London, the accounts of criminals in The Newgate Calendar, and the expanded coverage of crime in journals ranging from the elite Blackwoods to the lower class Penny Magazine. He also investigates important precursors like Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, Charles Dickens's Bleak House, and the Memoirs of Eugene Francois Vidocq, a former crook who convinced the Parisian Perfecture of Police to hire him to locate and capture other criminals.

This material involves few fresh discoveries and readers steeped in the vast scholarship on detective stories may even find it a bit too familiar. However, Rzepka redeems his reliance upon the work of others by convincing his reader that his wide ranging background material is pertinent, even crucial, to the development of the detective story and our understanding of it. He is quick to mention the many scholars who have furnished him with useful ideas and information, and his substantial bibliography amply attests to how well informed he is, even though this bibliography is obviously meant to be an additional aid for his novice readers. He also displays a balanced understanding of this material and cites numerous instances where worthwhile observations or meritorious judgments have been undone by overstatement or lack of qualification.

Though certainly well-informed, Rzepka's real strength is his clear, graceful writing which sets his overview apart from its many competitors. In his discussion of the unique sensibility of Sherlock Holmes, the baffling morality of Sam Spade, or the sullied romanticism of Philip Marlowe, Rzepka is as skillful as these accomplished detectives—rightly perceiving a depth of complexity, shrewdly identifying their key elements, and clearly tracing their inherent logic.

Unfortunately, these flourished explanations, like those which conclude so many detective stories, are not always as persuasive as they presume to be. There is the famous example of Howard Hawks's question to Raymond Chandler about who killed the chauffeur in The Big Sleep, to which Chandler responded that he did not know—or more accurately, that he did not want to address this wrinkle which he had hoped to finesse. Rzepka is likewise stumped when he forthrightly admits that all the crucial preconditions for the detective story were already in place a full twenty years before Doyle invented Holmes. So why the delay? Behind Hammett and his hard-boiled Sam Spade lurks a similar question. Why did his innovative stories appear when they did? As Rzepka acknowledges, muckrakers from the early twentieth century wrote plenty of books about the criminality inherent to American life, but there were no detective stories about it. Despite rare examples like Anna Katherine...