WHO- OR HOW-DUNNIT?:

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN

THE BRITISH AND AMERICAN GENRES

 

When we think of the ‘Golden Age' detective story, we tend to think of a country house party sometime in the 1920s, with Lord Elpus hit on the head with the proverbial blunt instrument in his library, Hawkeye the detective prowling around the bushes, the suspects (those of them who hadn't been killed) gathered in the drawing-room, and the murderer turning out to be the butler.

It is arguable, however, that, although the country house party was popular in the very early days of the genre, and there were earlier whodunnit writers such as A.E.W. Mason and, in the short form, G.K. Chesterton, the formal detective problem was not developed until the late 1920s.

Many of the writers whom we remember best today—Ellery Queen, John Dickson Carr, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Nicholas Blake, and Michael Innes—appeared in the 1930s.

It is true that Agatha Christie, for instance, had been writing books since 1917 (although The Mysterious Affair at Styles , her first book and her first Poirot novel, was not published until 1920). Yet many of these books are light-hearted thrillers rather than detective stories, and those few detective stories are notably more old-fashioned than what is to come, showing the clear influence of Anna Katharine Green and Mason. She continued to alternate thrillers with detective stories until 1934, from which point forward formal detective stories dominate her work.

What was the catalyst that changed the face of the detective story?

Let us turn our attention to 1926. That year was an annus mirabilis : the publication of Christie's notorious Murder of Roger Ackroyd ; her famous disappearance, which crowned her brilliant fictional mystery with an even more mysterious real life one—and, on the other side of the pond, the publication of The Benson Murder Case by one S.S. Van Dine, the mask behind which an aesthete and critic named Willard Huntington Wright concealed himself.

Before producing his own detective story, Van Dine had turned his critical attention to the genre as a whole. His findings were summarised in “The Great Detective Stories” (1927), as influential an essay as Dorothy L. Sayers's introductions to the Detection, Mystery and Horror series.

Van Dine believed that the detective story was a sort of glorified cross-word puzzle.

In each there is a problem to be solved; and the solution depends wholly on mental processes—on analysis, on the fitting together of apparently unrelated parts, on a knowledge of the ingredients, and, in some measure, on guessing. Each is supplied with a series of overlapping clues to guide the solver; and these clues, when fitted into place, blaze the path for future progress. In each, when the final solution is achieved, all the details are found to be woven into a complete, interrelated, and closely knitted fabric.

In a series of twelve enormously popular and influential books published between 1926 and 1939, Van Dine formalised the detective problem, with its closed circle of half-dozen suspects, deductions by a genius sleuth (with the clues shared with the reader), and surprising but inevitable solution, followed by an explanation of how the detective solved the crime.

This was the pattern followed by Van Dine's disciples, among them such towering figures as John Dickson Carr and Ellery Queen, and that was to be seen as the definitive detective story—or “murder mystery”, as the genre came to be known in America.

The phrase is significant. The “murder mystery” emphasises mystery : the murderer is (hopefully) kept a secret from the reader until the end, even if there is not much actual detection. (The Americans tended to prefer suspense and atmosphere, and, indeed, many of Carr's late novels are fair play Gothic mysteries, in which the hero has adventures and falls in love, while the series detective remains in the background.) The “detective story”, on the other hand, emphasises detection , with the murderer's identity often fairly obvious.

This was the dominant form in Britain until WWII, and had been ever since the days of Sherlock Holmes, when the Victorian readers of the Strand were invited to marvel at Holmes's miraculous deductions from footprints and bicycle tyre-tracks, rather than working out which of the suspects did it—rather pointless, as the criminal (seldom a murderer) was often obvious or introduced only at the very end. The Sherlock Holmes stories simply don't work as formal detective problems.

R. Austin Freeman, who did more than any other writer to make the genre intellectually respectable, and whose lecturer in medical jurisprudence Dr. Thorndyke demonstrated the wonders of the microscope and genuine scientific procedure (now the routine technique of the pathologist, thanks largely to Freeman's example), stated in his Art of the Detective Story (1924) that the detective story was not about mystery, but about the construction and testing of an intellectual argument:

The distinctive quality of a detective story … is that the satisfaction that it offers to the reader is primarily an intellectual satisfaction… The entertainment that the connoisseur looks for is an exhibition of mental gymnastics in which he is invited to take part…

The real connoisseurs, who avowedly prefer this type of fiction to all others, and who read it with close and critical attention, are to be found among men of the definitely intellectual class: theologians, scholars, lawyers, and to a less extent, perhaps, doctors and men of science…

Now, the theologian, the scholar and the lawyer have a common characteristic: they are all men of a subtle type of mind. They find a pleasure in intricate arguments, in dialectical contests, in which the matter to be proved is usually of less consideration than the method of proving it . The pleasure is yielded by the argument itself and tends to be proportionate to the intricacy of the proof. The disputant enjoys the mental exercise, just as a muscular man enjoys particular kinds of physical exertion. But the satisfaction yielded by an argument is dependent upon a strict conformity with logical methods, upon freedom from fallacies of reasoning, and especially upon freedom from any ambiguities as to the data…

The plot of a detective novel is, in effect, an argument conducted under the guise of fiction. But it is a peculiar form of argument. The problem having been stated, the data for its solution are presented inconspicuously and in a sequence purposely dislocated so as to conceal their connexion; and the reader's task is to collect the data, to rearrange them in their correct logical sequence and ascertain their relations, when the solution of the problem should at once become obvious. The construction thus tends to fall into four stages: (1) statement of the problem; (2) production of the data for its solution (“clues”); (3) the discovery, i.e., completion of the inquiry by investigator and declaration by him of the solution; (4) proof of the solution by an exposition of the evidence.

British writers such as Freeman, Freeman Wills Crofts and John Rhode (alias Miles Burton) placed far more emphasis on how than on whom : how the detective solves the crime and constructs his case against the criminal (Dr. Thorndyke's scientific approach, realistic police work in Crofts and Wade), and how the criminal devises an ingenious scheme (unbreakable alibi; scientific murder method; exploitation of a legal point such as autrefois acquit) to evade punishment or, preferably, punishment (hence the popularity of the inverted detective story, a form pioneered by Freeman in which the first half of the story shows the criminal committing the crime, and the second shows the detective proving his guilt).

This was also the approach of two of the most literary and imaginative writers. Dorothy L. Sayers believed that howdunnit was a far more interesting question than whodunnit , and only two of her books— The Five Red Herrings and Gaudy Night —conceal the culprit's identity until the end. Gladys Mitchell—not, it must be admitted, the first name one associates with logic—also used a similar technique. In many of her books, Mrs. Bradley solves the crime gradually, sharing her deductions with the reader, rather than surprising him at the end; and the murderer is known from halfway through in such books as My Father Sleeps , Here Comes a Chopper , Death and the Maiden , Groaning Spinney , and The Echoing Strangers .

Those British authors who wrote puzzle plot mysteries tended to be a generation or two younger than Freeman. One thinks of Nicholas Blake, of Ngaio Marsh, of Leo Bruce, of Rupert Penny (who borrowed Queen's “Challenge to the Reader”), of Christianna Brand (a sort of British Carr), of Michael Innes, and of Edmund Crispin.

It was two of these writers, Julian Symons and H.R.F. Keating, both of whom began as disciples of Michael Innes before turning their attention to psychology and philosophy respectively, who labelled the practitioners of the traditional British detective story as inartistic “Humdrums”.

Since that time—when Keating treated his forebears with, as Curt Evans put it, ‘affectionate contempt; in Symons's case, just contempt'—the traditional British detective story has fallen into decline, with many of the great writers now unfairly neglected. (This was shown by Keating's own efforts to introduce modern readers to such writers as John Rhode, G.D.H. and M. Cole, and E.C.R. Lorac in his Disappearing Detectives series, published by Collins back in the 1980s.) Those few detective stories that are produced are influenced by the literary style of Innes and Sayers rather than the intellectual approach of Freeman.

And so we must return to the 1920s and the 1930s for the detective story—whether the brilliantly ingenious works of John Dickson Carr, with their jaw-droppingly astounding solutions, or the formal problems in deduction of Ellery Queen; or the well-crafted, intellectually satisfying work of Freeman or Rhode. Yet how we can we find them?

The problem is that the American writers and those of the 1930s are very easy to find; they have all been consistently reprinted in paperback form since the 1940s. It is very easy to find a complete set of Carr or Queen in second-hand bookshops, and almost every first-hand bookshop stocks the complete works of Agatha Christie.

Try looking for many of the traditional British writers, and it's a different story. Although libraries are a good way of finding many of the works of these writers—I've just tracked down E.C.R. Lorac's Murder in Chelsea , Organ Speaks , Sixteenth Stair , Murder by Matchlight , and Fire in the Thatch , and Miles Burton's Mr. Babbacombe Dies, Murder in the Coal-hole , and Death Takes a Flat —many of their works remain tantalisingly elusive. The 1930s novels of Lorac and Burton , said by those lucky enough to have read them to be their best work, are notoriously difficult to find. When was the last time a copy of Burton 's Where is Barbara Prentice? or Death at Low Tide , or Lorac's Murder in St. John's Wood , Post After Post-mortem, or Pall for a Painter was for sale—let alone at a reasonable price? Let us hope some benevolent and far-sighted publisher will have the courage to reprint these works. Only when these books are widely available can a full understanding of the development of the detective story be gained—and the frustration of hundreds of detective readers be eased!

My emphasis.