Detecting Joy
by Nicholas Fuller

The detective story is, quite simply, the most interesting and enjoyable genre of fiction. Although it has the requirements of a problem to be solved and its solution offered in the final chapter, it is a very flexible form. It can be a novel of character, full of believable people and social commentary. It can be a straightforward mathematical problem of chemical formulae and railway timetables. It can be an elaborate flight of fancy with baroque plotting and eccentric characters, or a terrifying ghost story in which reason itself is threatened.

One of the chief attractions of the detective story is the intellectual problem it offers. A crime (nearly always murder, although robbery, forgery or general malice are also occasionally found) has been committed, by one of a certain number of people. The problem is to identify the culprit and how and why they committed the crime. At its best, this is almost impossible. The reader knows that he should be able to work it out for himself, but keeps hesitating between suspects and concocting the most elaborate theories from the false clues dangled beguilingly under his nose while the real clues pass unnoticed by – until the solution, when the reader kicks himself good and hard.

Although the “most unlikely person” is the best known gambit, it is often resorted to by weaker writers desperate to hoodwink the reader and feels anti-climactic. What is much more satisfying is when the murderer is a character whom we know well but whose guilt we never considered. Although the most famous examples are EC Bentley's Trent's Own Case and Agatha Christie's Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Hercule Poirot's Christmas , equally good examples are to be found in Ellery Queen's Greek Coffin Mystery and She Died a Lady by Carter Dickson, pseudonym of John Dickson Carr. (Carr is less successful in The Man Who Could Not Shudder , which adds a third solution to the problem apparently for no other reason than to hoodwink the reader, sacrificing plausibility to overingenuity.)

Equally praiseworthy is the double bluff gambit, in which the murderer should have been (or, at its most daring, even was) the first suspect but whom we failed to suspect or who was apparently cleared by the detective. Christie was famous for this, with The Mysterious Affair at Styles, The Murder at the Vicarage, Death on the Nile and Towards Zero . HC Bailey pulled off a brilliant triple, if not quadruple, bluff in The Sullen Sky Mystery , where the reader spotted the murderer and went about being extremely pleased with himself, until the odious lawyer detective, Joshua Clunk, revealed that the reader had merely fallen into the author's trap.

Most difficult to pull off is the closed circle, where the murderer has to be one of at most half a dozen people but we still fail to spot it. This is the forte of Christianna Brand, perhaps the only writer to match Carr's faculty for inventing clues and writing a really tight problem. Her best works include Green for Danger (a classic hospital mystery, filmed with Alastair Sim as Inspector Cockrill), Death of Jezebel (a superb impossible crime that ranks with the best of Carr and Chesterton) and London Particular (a domestic story with a fine solution).

Of course, the murderer's identity is not the only question to be posed by the detective story. In many stories, the method is unknown. The impossible murder is the best known type, often in the form of the locked room (in which the victim is found dead in a “hermetically-sealed chamber”, which the murderer could not have entered and could not have left) or the “no footprints” crime (in which the victim is strangled, stabbed or bludgeoned in the middle of snow, mud or wet sand without the murderer leaving a single footprint).

John Dickson Carr is the best known writer of this sort of story, having written more than three score books featuring impossible crimes, nearly all of which are brilliant. The Hollow Man (in the US, The Three Coffins ) is always brought out as his best work and the best impossible crime, containing as it does both a locked room murder and a “no footprints” crime, but The Crooked Hinge (dedicated to Dorothy L Sayers) , The Arabian Nights Murder, Problem of the Green Capsule and He Who Whispers are just as good. (The detective stories published as Carter Dickson are also brilliant, particularly The Plague Court Murders, set in a haunted prison, The Reader is Warned, about a man who can apparently kill with his mind, and Nine – and Death Makes Ten , set on a boat crossing the Atlantic in WWII).

Many of GK Chesterton's Father Brown stories (possibly the best detective short stories ever written) feature impossible crimes, such as “The Secret Garden” in which both murderer and victim vanish from an impenetrable garden, “The Hammer of God” in which an unpleasant squire is killed by a single blow from a tiny hammer, and, above all, “The Invisible Man”, in which the killer enters a building, commits a murder and leaves the flat with the corpse in his arms – without being seen. Other noteworthy writers of impossible crimes include Hake Talbot, whose frightening Rim of the Pit is justly celebrated and easily obtainable (unlike the earlier Hangman's Handyman , which is only in print in French as Le Bras droit du bourreau ); Clayton Rawson, whose magician sleuth, the Great Merlini, irritates as much as he entertains; and the Frenchman Paul Halter, who has been mentioned in the same breath as Carr.

The other sort of problem in which the method is as important as the identity of the criminal is the scientific detective story, with R Austin Freeman and Dorothy L Sayers as its best known writers. Freeman is famous not only for Dr John Evelyn Thorndyke, the lecturer in medical jurisprudence, but for introducing realistic science and technology to the detective story. His stories involve forged fingerprints (his debut novel, The Red Thumb Mark ), footprints ( Mr Pottermack's Oversight ), elaborate attempts to destroy the corpse and the detective's attempts to identify it, often with dentistry and study of the bones, and chemistry. Although Julian Symons thought that reading Freeman was like “chewing on straw”, Freeman's quiet style and knowledge of what he writes make him a very readable writer, and his underrated eye for character is evident in the superb As a Thief in the Night.

Sayers believed that the detective story was more interesting if the reader knew from the beginning who the murderer was, but not how – an approach she used in Unnatural Death (in which the fiendish Mary Whitaker kills her aunt and a couple of young women apparently from natural causes; the murder method is truly great, although its practicability has been questioned) and Strong Poison (where it is clear from the start that Norman Urquhart must have poisoned his cousin Philip Boyes at dinner although the two men shared every dish). With this novel, in which her aristocratic sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, begins courting the novelist Harriet Vane, on trial for Boyes's murder, Sayers began writing much more character-driven stories. Among the best are Murder Must Advertise , in which Wimsey goes undercover in an advertising firm, and The Nine Tailors , a long and powerful novel set in an East Anglian church.

Although not in the first rank of detective writers, mainly because his murderers are obvious, John Rhode (alias Miles Burton) wrote a great number of detective stories in which murder is seemingly impossible or is disguised as natural causes ( The Claverton Mystery ). Death on the Board has half a dozen really ingenious murders by chemical means, although his most fantastically ingenious methods are in Vegetable Duck (death by poisoned vegetable marrow) and Death in Harley Street (neither accident, suicide nor murder).

Apart from the attraction of the problem, one of the great strengths of the detective story is its versatility. Although it is a genre which involves a mystery (since crime in its legal sense is not always the issue, particularly in the works of Josephine Tey) and its solution, how that problem is posed varies from author to author. The school of writers which Julian Symons and HRF Keating rather unfairly dismissed as “humdrum” – Freeman, Crofts, Rhode, GDH and M Cole, Henry Wade and JJ Connington – had realistic policemen (foremost among them Inspectors French and Poole and Superintendent Wilson) investigating down-to-earth crimes, often involving unbreakable alibis and career crime. For these writers, the crime and its detection were the important things. Although much of Crofts is now almost unreadably dull, unless one happens to like passages which come straight out of an algebra textbook and has an absolute fetish for railway timetables (if the 7.43 from Diddlecombe Junction was 10 minutes early, then it could have made the connection at Puddleborough at 8.32, giving the murderer time to reach Westford at 9.16, rather than having to wait at Puddleborough until 8.50, which would get him to Westford at 9.40), there is much in these writers that still stands up well today. Connington had a keen eye for the social niceties and problems of county life, and there is a good deal of social comedy in his works; and the Coles were famous Socialists whose political views informed much of their work, particularly the brilliant Death of a Millionaire , which involves crooked business deals, a dubious Home Secretary and Bolshevik Russia. The best of the “humdrums” is almost certainly Henry Wade, whose detective stories managed to combine ingenuity with detailed characterisation. No Friendly Drop (about the poisoning of an elderly aristocrat), Constable, Guard Thyself! (in which a Chief Constable is shot dead in his office) and Heir Presumptive (seen from the perspective of the murderer) are among Wade's best books.

In contrast to these writers are the artier, more intellectual writers like Nicholas Blake, Gladys Mitchell, Edmund Crispin, Michael Innes, Margery Allingham et al, and which continues to this day in the form of Peter Dickinson and Reginald Hill. Much as I like the more traditional detective writers, it is these writers whom I particularly enjoy. Their writing style sparkles with wit and good humour; their characters are sharply observed, either the tragic figures of Blake's work or the brilliantly funny Waughian archetypes of Crispin and Innes; and the plots are more inspired and more imaginative. Nicholas Blake (pseudonym of Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis) was one of the few writers to successfully combine the detective story and the novel of character. His best works include Thou Shell of Death , a modern adaptation of Tourneur's Revenger's Tragedy ; There's Trouble Brewing , set in a Devon brewery; The Case of the Abominable Snowman , a classic country house problem involving both snow and drugs; and Head of a Traveller , both a study of the poet as creator and a domestic tragedy which ends with the detective, Nigel Strangeways, in an anguish of indecision. Michael Innes's first four novels, Death at the President's Lodging, Hamlet, Revenge!, Lament for a Maker and Stop Press , are four of the richest and most complex detective stories ever written, taking place in an obscure university, a private performance of Hamlet at one of the nation's stately homes, a miser's tower in Scotland, and the home of a writer whose fictional creations are coming to life. Gladys Mitchell epitomises these writers' imagination, wit and occasional lapses in plotting – but when her ideas include a backward and primitive village where superstition and diabolism run rife ( The Devil at Saxon Wall ), an expedition to Greece to re-enact the Mysteries of Eleusis ( Come Away, Death ), the attempts of two boys to capture a serial killer in a small town ( The Rising of the Moon ), a naiad in Winchester ( Death and the Maiden ), and a Cornish boarding house infested by witches ( Nest of Vipers ), and her series detective is the indomitable witch-like psychologist Mrs Beatrice Bradley, of “the jaws that bite, the claws that catch”, one is willing to forgive the odd wobbly plot. Margery Allingham's eye for character and atmosphere are superb, and is seen at its best in Police at the Funeral, involving a series of murders in a Cambridge family home; Dancers in Mourning , which looks at the back-stage life of the dancer Jimmy Sutane; The Fashion in Shrouds , a rich work about haute mode and the demimonde; and More Work for the Undertaker, a Dickensian tale about a family of eccentrics living in a forgotten part of London, the undertakers next-door, and an elaborate criminal network that specialises in sending people “up Apron Street” and running the detective down in hearses. It also contains one of the best quotes in the genre, and one which can serve as a maxim for those to whom sudden and mysterious death (in fiction!) is welcome:

“If you hear any thumping, it's just the undertaker.”

“The ultimate reassurance,” said Campion.