The Centenary Caper: Casing Two Competing Schools of Detective Fiction

BOOK REVIEWS The Centenary Caper: Casing Two Competing Schools of Detective Fiction Robin Anne Reid University of Washington AgathaMaryClarissaMillerChristieMallowanwasborn September 15, 1890; Dorothy Leigh Sayers was born June 13, 1893; and Samuel Dashiell Hammett was born May 27, 1894. The centennial anniversaries ofthese three novelists are being celebrated, as are their contributions to two different schools of mystery writing, which tend to be set in opposition to each other as embodying two competing views of "reality": the "cozy" and "hard-boiled." Christie and Sayers, working within the cozy British tradition, created brilliant amateurs who solve crimes the police cannot or will not. In this tradition, solving the mystery makes the world of the novel rational again, recreating the sense ofa pastoral or pre-war innocence. Hammett, along with other writers publishing in the American pulps, created hard-boiled heroes who are professionals operating in an urban society that is politically, socially, and morally corrupt. All three ofthese writers were extremely popular while experimenting with and revising the conventions and structures ofthe genre; Sayers and Hammett especially are noted for creating novels that transcend the genre they are working in, and all three have influenced later writers. In the last few decades, a growing body of academic writing on Christie, Sayers, and Hammett has been published in periodical and book form; such scholarly work ranges from biography to bibliography, from research devoted to popular culture to the reassessment ofthe literary merit ofthe work itself. As Sinda Gregory notes, "A novel of merit, whether it be science fiction by Philip K. Dick or Ursula LeGuin, a western by William Eastlake or Larry McMurtry, or a sports novel by Don DeLiIIo or Robert Coover, has its own integrity and its own life" (xiv). The Agatha Christie Companion, by Dennis Sanders and Len Lovallo, is a comprehensive reference book, containing brief biographical abstracts and historical and critical information about her novels and plays. As the editors point out, Christie's work, starting with her first novel published in 1920, has been in continuous print; her work has been translated into more languages than Shakespeare, second only to the Bible. The Mousetrap has been running on the London stage since November 25, 1952, and her mysteries have been the basis for twenty-two films. With all the information about Christie's work, Sanders and Lovallo also note how little information has been available about this writer's life. A 1990 biography, Agatha Christie: The Woman and Her Mysteries by Gillian Gill, does an excellentjob ofdiscussing Christie's life and work, arguing 55 56Rocky Mountain Review that one reason biographers have not been interested in her as a subject was her failure "to go mad, have 'interesting' lovers, bear illegitimate children, commit suicide, or die in poverty" (x). Gill notes what she identifies as a denigration of Christie which denies her the intellectual stature "enjoyed by other detective fiction writers of her generation such as Chandler, Hammett, and Sayers" (1). In contrast to the lack of biographical information for Christie, there have been a number of biographies written about Sayers, and much critical analysis of her work has relied on the biographical view of her as an unattractive, unfeminine, and unhappy woman. Yet when critics look to a biographical explanation for fictional characters and events, they may read backwards in a strange way; as Carolyn Heilbrun points out, "one must be careful, as some writers on Sayers have not been, to recognize that she was not unattractive in her youth" (55). TAe Remarkable Case ofDorothy L. Sayers by Catherine Kenney goes against this tendency by focussing on Sayers' work, especially her popular mystery novels, all twelve of which have been continuously in print since 1923. In her text, Kenney shifts the discussion away from biography to assess "Sayers's meyor contributions to modern letters and culture" (xi), with special emphasis on the mystery novels as a dominant force in the mystery genre, and as fulfilling Sayers' declared intent to bring the mystery novel back into the mainstream of literature. Kenney also pays a good deal of attention to Sayers' essays about women and feminism, an aspect ofher work that is often ignored by earlier critics. The...