From Puzzles to People: The Development of the American Detective Novel

FROM PUZZLES TO PEOPLE: THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE AMERICAN DETECTIVE NOVEL Bernard A. Schopen* In three rather contentious essays, Edmund Wilson once said about detective stories what F. R. Leavis said about the novels of Charles Dickens: they do not seriously engage the adult mind.1 While it is difficult to agree with Leavis on Dickens (as, judging from his recent book on that novelist, Leavis himself discovered), it is not difficult to agree with Wilson—at least insofar as he describes the "formal" detective story as it evolved from Poe. But when Wilson proposes that Dashiell Hammett, in The Maltese Falcon, simply "infused the old formula of Sherlock Holmes with a certain cold underworld brutality,"2 he demonstrates the curious critical myopia which prevents many readers of "hardboiled" detective novels from perceiving the formal singularity of these fictions. Works like The Dain Curse and The Maltese Falcon, Farewell, My Lovely and The Long Goodbye, The Chill, and The Underground Man are not detective stories: they are novels whose central characters are detectives and which employ the detective format for serious aesthetic and moral purposes. More precisely, they are American novels. They derive not from the tradition of fictional intellectual puzzles but from the novels of Cooper and Twain, Crane and Hemingway and Fitzgerald. They reside securely within the tradition of the American novel for they concern one of its central fictional figures, express its darkly enigmatic vision, and ask a question which thematically informs much of American literature. No serious student of prose fiction has ever suggested that the detective story manifests the qualities and characteristics which constitute the generic requirements of the novel. Perhaps the most that might be insisted upon is that Conan Doyle, Dorothy Sayers, and Agatha Christie wrote "fictions in prose of a certain extent;" but E. M. Förster did not wish anyone to believe that in this ambiguous little phrase he had defined the novel. Actually, most aficionados of detective stories have taken considerable pains to distinguish the object of 'Professor Schopen teaches in the English Department at Western Nevada Community College. He is currently at work on a study of the first-person narrator in modern American tragedy. 176BernardA. Schopen their affections from those prose fictions—novels—which transform the flux of human experience into meaningful moral and aesthetic structures. In two frequently cited remarks, Dorothy Sayers, surely the most sophisticated literary mind among the detective writers of the "Golden Age," focused on the essential differences. The first is general and descriptive: "For, make no mistake about it, the detective-story is part of the literature of escape, and not of expression."3 The second is specific and proscriptive: "There is the whole difficulty of allowing real human beings into a detective story. At some point or another, either their emotions make hay of the detective interest, or the detective interest gets hold of them and makes their emotions look like pasteboard."4 The choice must be made, that is , between people and puzzles. And the writer of detective stories must opt for the latter. In doing so, however, he must also abjure all serious moral and aesthetic considerations; since the theme of his work is simply "detection," he must abandon the attempt to create a coherent and structured narrative which develops a significant theme by presenting recognizable human characters in a thoroughly human action. This implicit invocation of Aristotle is not gratuitous. Even a cursory review of the crucial literature on detective fiction indicates that while everyone understands that these stories cannot be classified as novels, no one seems able to construct a formal theory congenial to and descriptive of the essential characteristics of this fiction. In their attempts to create a generic foundation for their discussions, critics invariably find themselves playing Polonius. While they begin by examining detective stories, they quickly bring under their purview any fictional narrative containing a serious crime, an unsolved mystery, or a strong element of suspense; they then must attempt at once to lump together and differentiate among detective, mystery, adventure, suspense, or spy stories; they fashion complex categories like detectivethriller , gothic-suspense-mystery, and crime-adventure-romance; and ultimately they follow their own generic...