Plot and Theme: Susan Glaspell

I said earlier that I don't see the need for detective stories to have a theme, as brilliant plotting to me is an artistic achievement on itself. Some, however, do indeed have a theme which is essential to the plot even though it may not be obvious at first sight - Martin Edwards rightly pointed And Then They Were None as an example of this; one might also add John Dickson Carr's The Emperor's Snuff-Box which is basically about false appearances and not judging books on their covers. But the most perfect union of plot and theme in my view is to be found in Susan Glaspell's classic short-story A Jury of Her Peers.

 

I can see some of my readers cringe as this is not a detective story in the orthodox meaning of the term, and it's likely Glaspell didn't think of her work as such. Yet the two midwives indeed act as detectives, working the truth out of the clues, and the final (mis-)carriage of justice is one Sherlock Holmes wouldn't have frowned upon. So I think it qualifies, and so did the many editors who included the story in their anthologies.

 

A Jury of Her Peers is about the various degrees of female oppression, from mere condescension to downright abuse, but Gaspell - thanks heavens! - is no Sara Paretsky or Carolyn Heillbrun. She doesn't shove her message down the reader's throat or have her characters experiencing sudden and wordy "awakenings". She just let facts speak for themselves, and they do loud. Their shared experience of how it is to be a woman and a wife in that time and place allow Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters to understand what happened, who killed John Wright and most importantly, why - a truth that will forever escape their husbands and the D.A. for all their alleged superior minds. And their decision not to bring the murderer to justice is the logical outcome of that, even though it sounds more like temporary rebellion motivated by empathy than actual revolution. That is all: not a single useless word, no preach, no over-explanation and still the point is made. This is how all detective and mystery stories should be done - alas, all too often they're not.

 

Further reading:

 

The Susan Glaspell Society

 

Commentary by Karen Bernardo

 

L'Arsène

One of the most spectacular changes of minds I have experienced of late is about my fellow-compatriot Maurice Leblanc and his hero Arsène Lupin. For years I had nothing but contempt for them and their enduring popularity here in France left me puzzled: how in the world could grown-up people read and enjoy such infantile fluff? I had read, and immensely hated, The Hollow Needle and The Crystal Stopper when I was fifteen-sixteen. A strongly classic-minded reader with youthful enthusiasm and corrolary intolerance, I was not in the right mood to appreciate those wild, definetely non-holmesian stories and stuck to my initial reject for the next decade and a half.

Then, two years ago, I found at a yard sale a Lupin I didn't know, La Barre-Y-Va, which attracted my attention: it was about an impossible crime, one of my péchés mignons. I had to read it, no matter Leblanc and Lupin and even though I didn't expect anything carrian in terms of cleverness and innovation. The solution to the problem was unsurprisingly a let-down, though it may be have groundbreaking back then, but then it didn't really matter, for the book was loads of fun. I went on to read another Lupin, La Demeure Mystérieuse, and enjoyed it even more. I had to confront the awful truth: I was hooked. A Lupinian I had become.

Slowly, very slowly so as not to run out of books too soon, I made my way through the Geste of the unique son of Théophraste Lupin and Henriette d'Andrézy and the more I progressed the more I realized what a dogmatic fool I had been. Since then I feel a little - but only a little - more understanding for the late Julian Symons. I had been wrong on all counts and for no reason other than my adolescent refusal and condemnation of anything not in the Christie/Doyle/Carr tradition.

The stories are no infantile fluff. They are fresh, youthful, and fun, which doesn't preclude some gravity on occasion. Above all, they're extremely varied in tone and style. While most focus on Lupin's schemes, many of them have puzzles and the gentleman-thief often acts as a detective. Leblanc's plotting, though definetely not orthodox and some crude
at times, is usually very good and sometimes even brilliant (Victor de la Brigade Mondaine in particular is a masterpiece of bamboozlement)

Lupin is not the arrogant schmuck I remembered, but one of the few characters in mystery fiction that can genuinely be called a hero - someone you can root for and whose every appearance (or non-appearance, since he is most often in disguise, unknown to everyone but the reader) is an event in itself. He is also a real three-dimensional character with a distinctive presence and "voice", both magnificent and vulnerable, genius and fallible, outlandish and sentimental. Most of the time he wins, but sometimes he loses. Hard.

813 is his greatest recorded fiasco, his own Scandal in Bohemia - and Leblanc's probable masterpiece as well as one of the few undisputable summits of the genre. Apparently bored with "just" being a thief, Lupin dabbles into geopolitics, which gets him into serious trouble. To give a full summary of this long, apparently rambling yet fully controled book would take as many pages as it takes Leblanc to tell his story. Let us just say that Lupin meets one of his most dangerous enemies, finds love once again, gets charged for a murder he didn't commit and goes to jail, owing his final release only to the personal intervention of the Kaiser, and loses everything in the end. Quite modern for a book written in 1910 - but then, as I said in a previous post, our favorite genre has changed very little ever since.

I still have some Lupins left on my shelves, including the weirdest of them all, L'Ile aux Trente Cercueils, and when done with them I'll re-read Needle and Stopper. As the old French proverb has it, only the fools never change their minds.

What Makes a Good Detective Story Good?

Nicholas Fuller, in a typically thoughtful post, outlines his own definition of a good detective story:

For me, a good detective story is also a good story in its own right. Story-telling, atmosphere, characterisation, and theme are as important as, if not more important than, the problem. The problem is crucial, but ideally, it should be the result of the theme and the characterisation.


I agree - to an extent.

As a firm believer in art for its own sake, I don't see the need for detective stories or any other kind of fiction to be "about" something. The masterful plotting of And Then They Were None and the haunting atmosphere of The Hound of the Baskervilles are sufficient justifications for the existence of the books. So "theme" to me is an irrelevant notion.

Also, while I value story-telling, atmosphere and characterization as much as anyone else, I don't think they should be given as much importance as the problem when it comes to assess the quality of a detective story, for the problem is the core, the identity of the genre. Vivid characters, convincing atmosphere and good story-telling are very rare things indeed but can be found in other genres, while the puzzle plot is a trademark of detective fiction and real mystery fiction. Call me a genre nationalist, but I think it's worth preserving and defending.

Now, as I said above, I basically agree with Nick that a detective story with not only a brilliant plot but also good story-telling, atmosphere and characterization is certainly better than one which is abysmal on all counts but the problem - and is much more frequent than critics of the genre would have us to believe. That's indeed why I like R.A. Freeman better than, say, S.S. Van Dine. But I also believe a loosely-plotted detective story cannot be quite redeemed by fine writing or sense of character. It may be good as general fiction, but as mystery fiction it's just bad.

On Martin Edwards's Latest Article

Fellow blogger Martin Edwards has a brand new article on "The Detective in British Crime Fiction" which, as everything he writes, is well-worth a read.

 

Some remarks:

 

"Originally, Martin writes, detectives tended to be memorable for their eccentricities; now the emphasis is on in-depth characterisation."

 

This is way too sharply drawn a divide in my opinion.

1°) Early detectives were not defined only by their eccentricities - actually, most of them had none to speak of: neither Thorndyke or Father Brown or Gabriel Hanaud can be called eccentrics; what set them apart from the rest of mankind is their deductive abilities. Only when the Golden Age began did the Sherlock Holmes model of the detective as a quirky genius become prevalent.

2°) I don't believe things have changed as much as Martin claims. Sure, we know more about the private, inner lives of modern detectives than about those of, say, Dr. Fell or S.F.X. Van Dusen. They appear to be three-dimensional characters insofar as they are allowed to exist on a greater scale - they are not meant just to investigate a case, solve it and go back in the box until next time - but they too have eccentricities of their own, though of a different nature. One of the most overlooked features of the genre is its almost complete unability to deal with ordinary people. Mystery, even at its most "realistic", needs protagonists bigger than life in one way or another. Contemporary detectives with their complicated backgrounds, difficult lives and sometimes outlandish personalities, are as statistically improbable as their elders and betters. There are as few Dalglieshes and Rebuses in real life as there are Holmeses or Poirots.

 

"Anthony Berkeley's vain, erratic yet irrepressible writer-sleuth Roger Sheringham, Nicholas Blake's Nigel Strangeways, and Edmund Crispin's breezy don Gervase Fen are notable for the ingenuity which they bring to solving a string of elaborately contrived murders."

 

I am not a maven on either Blake or Crispin, so I won't comment as far as they're concerned, but Martin is some reductive with regards to Sheringham whose personality seems to me just as notable, and maybe even more so, than his ingenuity. Berkeley, like Sayers, quickly became frustrated with what he perceived as the limitations of the detective novel but, unlike Sayers, chose to go subversive rather than attempt to "transcend" the genre. Sheringham thus is both an embodiment and a scathing satire of the Golden Age detective, as evidenced by the wonderful Jumping Jenny where he gets everything wrong from the start and, thinking the victim had what she deserved, spends the whole book trying to clear the man he wrongfully identified as the murderer. That sets him apart from most other Golden Age detectives whose creators "played straight".

 

 

Die Hard: an exchange

As a follow to my "Die Hard" article I received this e-mail from Mike Grost:

 

Between Poe in the 1840's and Gaboriau starting in 1865, there were a whole host of crime writers.
In Britain, the Casebook writers created numerous short stories about sleuths:

http://members.aol.com/MG4273/casebook.htm

The British also developed a branch of suspense fiction (not true mystery) called Sensation Fiction:

http://members.aol.com/MG4273/sensatio.htm

And some American writers wrote tales about puzzling mysteries - not always with detectives, or in the pure mystery format (notably Melville and Spofford):

http://members.aol.com/MG4273/melville.htm

Also, while British mystery writers seemed to vanish during World War I, some Americans such as Reeve and Rinehart produced some mystery fiction.

Admittedly, Poe and Gaboriau produced works totally in the mystery paradigm: books that are direct ancestors of all later mystery fiction. But the Casebook writers also contributed to the genre.

 

As I wrote back to him, I am well-aware of the casebook and sensation writers and their influence on the genre discussed on this blog, but my focus being on proper mystery fiction, they didn't make the final cut. There were undoubtedly stories about crimes and detectives written in the time between Poe and Gaboriau but there weren't any actual mystery stories. On the other hand I admit not having paid enough attention to the situation of American mystery fiction during World War 1 and asked Mr. Grost for some further information he kindly provided:

 

The two best US mysteries from 1915-1918 (that I know of), were published as magazine serials during that period - and only appeared in book form many years later. These are Mary Roberts Rinehart's "The Curve of the Catenary" (1915, I think!) and Johnston McCulley's "Who Killed William Drew?" (1917). Until your post, I never noticed anything about this. But now one wonders if the War delayed book publication in the United States, too.
Arthur B. Reeve kept publishing volumes of shorts throughout the war. Each volume usually has a few gems, and a lot of not so good material.

 

I thus stand corrected: mystery fiction didn't completely die during World War I, even though it admittedly went near extinguished in Britain and Continental Europe. The United States' late entry into the War more than probably accounts for the survival of the genre there; it would be interesting to know how the situation evolved after 1917. I'm also curious as to how mystery fared in other countries, most particularly Australia which already had a well-established tradition of crime and mystery fiction at the time. If you have any imput don't hesitate to send a mail or a comment.

 

It remains however unsolved why it took twenty years for mystery fiction to finally kick off, and why World War I almost killed it while World War II on the other hand was one of its peaks in terms of both quality and quantity. I keep thinking about it and more on the topic is sure to come.

 

 

Die Hard

mNo, this post is not about John McClane - though it's about sequels of sorts.

Mystery fiction is so part of our landscape, so taken for granted, so popular, that it's hard for fans and non-fans alike to imagine a world without it. The genre, we think, is a "natural" thing and is here to stay. Crime being the real world's oldest profession and fascination for it being apparently encrypted in our genome, murder and mayhem will always be welcome on print and onscreen and purveyors of fictional felonies don't have to worry about the future. But a glance at the rocky history of our favorite genre shows that it has not always been so robust. Not only did it make several false starts but it actually died, the only kind of fiction in my knowledge to have ever been risen from the dead not just once but twice, hence the title of the present essay.

When reading the Dupin stories we tend to infuse them with our knowledge of what followed and re-interpret them as the beginning of a wonderful success-story. This is the finalist view I evoked some time ago: Poe influenced Gaboriau who influenced Doyle who in turn influenced Christie, etc. That rosy picture takes a different colour when you check the dates, as more than two decades separate The Murders in the Rue Morgue and L'Affaire Lerouge. Two decades during which nothing happened. A marginal author in his lifetime, Poe remained so in the years following his death, "thanks" mostly to Rufus Griswold's portrayal, and had little influence except for his horror stories. The ratiocination tales may have been a novelty hit on their first publication but they didn't catch on, which is not that surprising given that Poe himself didn't believe in their lasting power. His bet on posterity relied more on his poetry and criticism; it is much ironic that what he regarded as alimentary, secondary work is now wider-known than A Dream Within A Dream or the Marginalias. Mystery fiction might be labelled a stillborn or a child in so bad a condition that it spent twenty years in coma with a flatline EEG until a French writer brought it back to life.

It's unclear whether the new incarnation was best-suited to the times or reverse but nonetheless it caught on. The next fifty years saw the genre getting an increasingly high profile as it got rid of melodrama, refined its ways and, most important, proved commercially valid. Magazines opened their pages to the newcomer and intellectuals started taking notice; some prestigious mainstream writers thought they might give it a try. By the early 1910s, mystery was one of the dominant genres in popular fiction and most people agreed it was only the beginning.

Then the rapidly expanding genre went into near complete extinction as the world entered its first mass slaughtering. Well-established authors either enlisted (Freeman, Mason) or turned to patriotic fluff (Leblanc) and were not replaced. As a result, mystery's record during first world war amounts to nil. This comes as stark contrast to the frenetic activity it would display twenty years later; maybe Hitler was more inspiring than the Kaiser. The genre long kept an uneasy relation to that period, beginning to engage it in a serious way only in the last third of the century.

This second "death" was shorter than the first - only five years - and also resulted into a new flowering - the Golden Age. As of today it is the last time mystery "died". The spy-craze of the sixties doesn't count as mysteries kept being written - they were just not as popular as they had once been. Hopefully we won't see any other extinction soon but the phenomenon and its consequences are interesting to study if only because they exemplify why we like our genre so much: like its heroes, it falls sometimes, stumbles often but it never quits.

August Derleth on R. Austin Freeman

The concept behind MWA anthology Murder by Experts (1947) may sound rather trivial for modern readers as it has been done to death ever since, but it was quite original at the time: editor Ellery Queen asked twenty major mystery writers to select their favorite short stories by someone else and write a foreward detailing the reasons for their choices. August Derleth picked Freeman's Mr. Ponting's Alibi and his brief introduction is well worth reading, as it perfectly encapsulates the appeal of the Thorndyke stories:

 

"Mr. Ponting's Alibi is surely one of the best examples of the straightforward detective story, free of atmospheric high-jinks and ornamental furbelows. It is therefore in the best tradition of the detective story which, I must confess, has always taken and will always take first place in my affections. The story makes a steady, uninterrupted progression from the setting-forth of the case to the solution of the mystery; there are no forays into blind alleys, no pretentious essays into obscure knowledge properly confined to works of reference, no tricks upon the reader, and finally no trying of his patience.

 

 Above all, it is throughout an entirely plausible story. Stories even less plausible have taken place in real life, but it is particularly noteworthy that Mr. Ponting's Alibi, making no attempt to confuse the reader, nevertheless holds him. In plain fact, there is little actual mystery about Mr. Freeman's plot; it is all rather obvious from the beginning, the gambit is a familiar one, and it is evident that the patent suspect is not guilty at all, leaving but one avenue of detection, and Dr. John Thorndyke carries the reader down it without a single deviation.

 

 All the trappings of the Thorndyke stories are evident in Mr. Ponting's Alibi but none is obstructive. This is all to the good; a first-rate detective story ought not to emphasize the mechanics of detection at the expense of character or plot, and this story admirably fulfils that condition. Moreover, it offers a satisfying picture of one of the great detectives in action and, for my part, there are few sleuths, apart from Holmes, to whose performance I would rather be a party than Dr. John Thorndyke."